The Week In Guitar: cancelled sales, advertising standards complaints and custom colours
What’s been happening across the guitar world over the last week?
Time for The Week In Guitar, the best way of keeping up do date with all things guitar culture. Don’t have time to read every news story, interview, forum thread and Instagram post? We’ve got you covered!
Fender had $100 million of cancelled sales in 2022
Fender’s CFO Matt Janopaul has hinted at a drastic slump in demand for guitars, at least compared to the pandemic-led boom. While $100 million is a lot of money, it’s important to understand the context within which that number exists. Rather than that dollar amount worth of guitars reaching customers’ hands and then returning to Fender, it’s more that retailers would have spent that much on new instruments, if that pandemic demand kept increasing at the same rate – which it no longer is.
Lee Anderton answers some questions about Victory Amps
Lee Anderton has clarified a few things since YouTuber KDH raised some questions about his part-ownership of Victory Amplification, and the potential conflict of interest between that and the Andertons YouTube channel. Since our coverage of Lee’s response, the UK Advertising Standards Agency has notified Lee of several complaints, and asked that he add a clarifying line in the description of future Andertons videos.
Gibson goes a bit… Fender?
With new custom colours for its 50s and 60s Les Paul standards, your Les Paul is no longer shackled to variations on sunburst, and instead can be anything from Ocean Blue to Honey Amber. Our favourite is the Translucent Fuchsia, because look at it.
Quick riffs:
- It’s revealed that Bob Dylan wrote Post Malone some lyrics for a song, however, Post Malone took too long to actually use them, so now he can’t. So there.
- Guitarist Jordi Mestre Lopez has added another entry to the Soul Mountain project, resulting in some truly breathtaking imagery of him playing a guitar atop a snowy mountain peak.
- Carlos Santana quickly retracts some transphobic comments he made at a concert, giving a statement to Billboard that he wants to “honour and respect all person’s ideals and beliefs whether they are LGBTQ or not.”
Quote of the week:
“All the pedals should be put in a big pile and we should light ‘em on fire.”
Mac DeMarco hates guitar pedals, because they’re all exclusively shitty little boxes with terrible wiring, apparently. Sorry to any pedal fans out there – they’re all destined for the flames. Please send all your pedals in to Guitar.com and we’ll take care of burning them – promise.
The Encore
Chorus-ception: our friends over at Reverb have been indulging in some superfluous doubling-up. A 12-string with each side of its stereo output going into a stereo chorus pedal for a total of four amplifiers? That’s a whole lot of jangle. The end result has to be heard to be believed.