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What guitar gear I’d buy this week, including the cool-as-hell Nebula Noir Player Strat
The last week has seen some really cool gear arrive – here’s a guitarists guide to the essentials, if you’ve got cash to spend.
Image: 70th Anniversary Player Stratocaster / Fender
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Another week has passed, which means another week of guitar gear! Got some cash to spend? Well, if I did, here’s how I’d spend it this very week, given the abundance of cool gear that has arrived on our doorstep.
- READ MORE: What guitar gear I’d buy this week: a guitarist’s guide to the post-Black Friday comedown
Why should you care what I’d buy? Well, as a reviewer here at Guitar.com I get to test out a wide variety of new gear every month – plus, I also play in a band on the regular, and, like you, I just genuinely love guitars, amps and pedals!
70th Anniversary Player Stratocaster – $999.99
Can you put a price on that Nebula Noir finish? Probably not – it’s one of the coolest colours I’ve ever seen on a guitar. But luckily, despite this being a limited-edition guitar, it’s still going for just regular player money. Plus, Fender’s Player Range has proved itself as a good, reliable set of guitars, price aside!
Manson MA Junior – £1,399
I love single-pickup guitars. Arguments about decreased magnetic drag aside, there’s something inspiring about the tonal simplicity, especially if you tend to mainly like screwing around with pedals and amp settings rather than on-the-guitar knob twiddling. Manson’s new MA Junior guitars are a cool combo between a modern Tele-like thing and a Les Paul Junior, featuring just a single Dirty Rascal humbucker, although you can run it in either series or parallel for some tweakability on the guitar. Plus, it’s a UK-made guitar for the very reasonable price of £1,399!
Check it out at Manson Guitars.
GFI Enieqma – $399
Yes, the general sentiment of “this could be the last compressor/EQ/sandwich toaster you ever buy!” is a well-worn trope at this point, but it does apply here. The GFI System Enieqma is an EQ pedal with an absolutely no-holds barred design approach. The actual EQing on offer covers every possible type of frequency adjustment you could ever think of: parametric, baxandall, low-pass sweeps, even recreations of amp EQ sections and the curves of various speakers are present. Connectivity-wise there’s basically everything, MIDI included. EQ pedals like this are a far cry from a cheap graphic EQ plonked before an overdrive to give it more bass: they’re a way to take what you’d normally need a DAW for and put it on your board. For a direct, home-recording rig, that’s pretty powerful!