The Week In Guitar: Rosewood’s back, new Pico range from EHX and some Noble Screaming

Welcome to the week in guitar! Your weekly rundown of everything that’s happened in the last seven days. This week – a lot of cool new gear is here. Let’s dive into that

Fender blends vintage specs with forward-thinking appointments with new Vintera II series

Yes, you know guitar players are well adjusted when we’re this excited about a change from one kind of fretboard wood to another – but hey, rosewood’s back! Get outta here, Pau Ferro, with your vintage-inaccurate hue, and don’t come back. The new Vintera II series includes everything from classic Strats and Teles to some slightly more obscure models like the Bass VI and the Mustang, which are less represented in Fender’s overall lineup.

Electro-Harmonix unveils the NYC DSP Series: 9 ultra-compact stompboxes for your ‘board

It’s been long enough since the release of pedals like the Freeze and the Oceans 11 to call them – maybe – modern classics. And so it’s great to see them get a revamp as a total of nine (!) new small-form-factor pedals from EHX, all of them of the more digital persuasion. Excitingly, the Freeze is one of the pedals that’s gotten more feature-packed with the downsizing, showing that EHX isn’t just chucking old DSPs into smaller packages. The lineup also includes the Pico Attack Decay, Pico POG, and the Pico Canyon. Missed an opportunity for the ‘EHX Ditch’ on that last one there, but nevermind…

Keeley fuses two classic overdrives with the 4-in-1 Noble Screamer

Everyone – with the notable exception of the UK Prime Minister – is talking about going green these days. So how can you make your pedalboard more green? Well, try the Noble Screamer, a fusion of both the Nobels ODR-1 and the Ibanez TS-9: two legendary green overdrives. The cool thing here, is that it’s not an either-or situation – you can select between each pedal’s tonestack, and each pedal’s gain section to truly mix and match your preferred green OD flavours.

Quick Riffs

• The guitar world got its own Vantablack/PINK event when Poison Noises released a pedal that’s specifically not allowed to be purchased or given to Josh Scott, just so that there’s at least one pedal that guy can’t have in his collection
• Blink 182 returned with a new single, One More Time, complete with a rather emotional music video.
• Rock’s preeminent capitalist and/or lovemaker Gene Simmons was provocative in the press once again. Shocker, right? This time, he was claiming that age is just a number, depending on your member, saying: “as long as your schmeckle works, you feel immortal.” Rockstars, eh?

Quote Of The Week

“That’s the vintage market in a nutshell – It’s become so elitist” – Joe Bonamassa

We don’t really need to dive into why this particular quote from Joe Bonamassa raised a few eyebrows, given that he owns several six-figure guitars. But, given that, he’s still going to have more insight on the vintage guitar market than most, and hey – at least he plays his guitars. Here he was specifically referring to both people who view them solely as investment opportunities, or just clout-chasers who like to show off what they have.

The Encore

No, this isn’t some 100-inch scale-length beast, but instead, three guitar necks in series, being played by three of the same guy. The result gives that one Walk Off The Earth viral clip from a billion years ago a run for its money – mainly by actually being good. Nice work, Bernth!