“it sounded perfect… like a gift from on high!”

Blackberry Smoke’s guitarist reveals his greatest guitar triumphs, the pitfalls and blessings of his Les Paul Junior addiction, and his outright disdain of “bad amps”

So says Kirk Hammett, guitarist with, er, Metallica. What does he do instead? Well, there’s a new book about guitars on the shelves and a solo album on the horizon

With a raft of recent high-spec reissue launches, is Epiphone now the home of affordable ‘vintage’ Gibsons? On paper, yes. But what about in the flesh?

From his early days in the repair shop to heading up one of the world’s leading pickup brands, the master pickup maker tells us how his problem-solving mindset led to him working with some of the biggest names in the biz, and why he humbly still seems himself as “crew”

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When the Irish band were a folksy blues three-piece, it was Eric Bell who defined Thin Lizzy on their 1971 self-titled debut and early 70s follow-ups, Shades Of A Blue Orphanage and Vagabonds Of The Western World