Including links to other sites! American Master Les Paul Leo Fender a Bio

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Offering tone variations unavailable on any other Les Paul, the '57 Black Beauty is equipped with three BurstBucker pickups to offer a unique palette of vintage sound. Other features include a carved mahogany top and solid mahogany body, a one-piece mahogany neck with 22-fret ebony fingerboard. The classic Fender American Vintage '62 Stratocaster Electric Guitar updates the '57 Strat with a fresh look and faster action. It has all the vintage features of the '57 (alder body, maple neck, vintage pickups), plus a rosewood fretboard and a slimmer, quicker neck shape that allowed surf-era rockers to push the envelope. These are you top choice for Hard Rock, and Rock and Roll.

Tone, tradition and innovation. Fender’s new American Deluxe Telecaster® is the 21st century way to rock with a Telecaster, graced by the added distinction of a traditional ash body. The compound radius fretboard allows effortless string bending anywhere along the neck, and staggered locking tuners improve tuning stability for stunt guitarists who like to bend behind the nut. From driving rhythm to ripping leads, the classic double-cutaway G Country Gentleman Classic has it all! Guitar features include dual High Sensitive Filter'Tron™ pickups, tone switch circuitry, action-flow neck, double mutes, back pad and Bigsby® B6G vibrato tailpiece. These two guitars represent the Best of country, and bluegrass music.

History speaks for itself. The Gibson ES-335 is one of the most important electric guitars of all time. Right from its introduction in 1958 as the world's first semi-hollow body electric guitar the ES-335 was an immediate success. It was taken up quickly by adventurous jazz and country players who recognized its advantages, rapidly proving itself equally at home in the hands of blues, pop, and rock players too. The '57 Les Paul Goldtop Reissue Electric Guitar is the quintessential Les Paul at its finest. It's Custom Shop crafted to be accurate to '57 specifications in every detail including the CTS pots and bumblebee capacitors. It was the first Paul to feature humbucking pickups, and this one comes equipped with BurstBuckers. Carved maple top, mahogany back, and one-piece mahogany neck with the '57 profile and the original extended tenon joint.

The Gibson ES-175 Electric Guitar debuted in With a comfortable body size and stylish pointed cutaway, it quickly became the most popular guitar of the jazz world. The transparent finishes (sunburst with gold hardware or antique natural with nickel) on the laminated maple body of this reissue electric guitar always remind you that you're touching wood. Binding on the top, back, and fretboard, combined with a trapeze tailpiece and parallelogram fretboard inlays, provides a big touch of class, and 2 '57 Classic humbuckers dish out huge helpings of tone. The Gibson eds1275 is perhaps the HOLLY GRAIL of all guitars ever made. Performing well in rock, jazz, country, blues this guitar is a players dream. Also to the likes of Jimmy Page, and John McLaughlin.

American Luthiers Rauen Guitars

The tone of the Martin D-28 Acoustic Guitar is what separates it from all other guitars. It has a solid Sitka spruce top with glossy finish, special East Indian rosewood for the polished back and sides, and genuine ebony fingerboard and bridge. With its rich, resonant warmth and punchy volume, the D- 28 is particularly well-suited to music styles requiring loud, powerful rhythm accompaniment. On The Taylor, Indian rosewood seems as if it was created to be on a guitar. The clarity, balance, sustain, excellent bass response, and wonderful coloration and figure are without equal. Paired with Sitka spruce, it is an unstoppable combination.

Featuring the round, warm tone of a AAA Sitka spruce top with Ovation A bracing and the OP Pro preamp developed with Al Di Meola himself, this Ovation Signature Series acoustic-electric guitar is one of Ovation's finest accomplishments. Gorgeous bound ebony fretboard with diamond abalone inlays, abalone body binding and rosette, engraved ebony bridge, and pearloid buttons on 24k die-cast gold-plated tuners provide peerless luxury. Deep cutaway provides free access to the Al Di Meola signature guitar's highest frets. The Gibson Humming bird is a rare classic with punchy powerful tone, crisp tone, and a fast neck with a great grip. Excellent for Jazz.

There are many fine woods used today to build quality instruments. It is important to remember that one wood is not necessarily "better" than another; the suitability of woods for any given instrument depends on a number of factors, such as personal tastes and the type of music you will be playing. For example, a bluegrass player will need woods with a "quicker" response and louder tone than will a player of country music, who would probably opt for a warmer, more mellow tone.

Sitka Spruce is the most popular wood for guitar tops today. A native of the Pacific coast from Alaska to northern California, Sitka Spruce is a strong, straight- grained, even textured softwood. Sitka Spruce is sometimes called Silver Spruce. Because of its large size (trees grow to nearly 300 feet in height), straight grain, and elasticity, Sitka Spruce is valued for many applications requiring strong, light weight lumber. Color is creamy white to light pink or brown heartwood. Weight is about 27 pounds per cubic foot. Sitka Spruce has the highest strength to weight ratio of any wood available today, and is a very tough wood that resists minor dings and scratches very well. Sitka has a longer break-in time than Engelmann Spruce, and a somewhat more mellow tone with a slower response.

Often called Honduras Mahogany, Brazilian Mahogany, etc., depending on the country of origin, Mahogany is native to Southern Mexico southward to Colombia, Venezuela, and parts of the upper Amazon and its tributaries in Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil. Plantations have been established within its natural range and elsewhere. Mahogany varies in color from light to dark reddish-brown, to deep rich red. Dark colored gum or white deposits commonly occur in the pores; sometimes rippled grain figure is present. Weight is 34 to 40 pounds per cubic foot. Mahogany has often gotten a "bad rap" because of its use on certain makers' more inexpensive instruments. Many players, such as Doc Watson and Norman Blake (and Chris Bozung) prefer Mahogany over Indian Rosewood because of its great clarity of tone and cutting ability for lead guitar playing

Curly Maple has long been a favorite of Country musicians, and Electric Guitarist’s for its beauty and mellow tone. Curly Maple grows throughout most of North America, with commercial species in the eastern United States and Canada and the western coast of the United States. Curly Maple yields slightly less bass response and volume than either Mahogany or Rosewood, but with greater "punch" and "bite" to the note. Careful construction maximizes this wood's bass and volume, and enhances Curly Maple's warm, mellow tone. A strong, heavy wood (44+ pounds per cubic foot) with cream to reddish- brown heartwood, Curly Maple is often found with Bird's-Eye, Burl, Fiddleback, Quilted and other figured grain patterns. Curly Maple also takes a finish beautifully, and can be quite stunning visually.

Often considered to be the "ultimate" in tone wood, Brazilian Rosewood was used for the finest pre-war instruments by the major manufacturers. Its balance, clarity of tone, quick response, and beauty of color and figure are legendary. Hype aside, Brazilian Rosewood really is an amazing tone wood for all these reasons; unfortunately, an embargo was placed on this fine wood in the late 1960s, and since then Brazilian Rosewood has not been imported into the United States. Because of this, the quality of available Brazilian Rosewood has deteriorated to the point that slab-sawn, knotty wood, which would have been scrapped for kindling in the '40s, is today being touted as "high grade" wood. Even the currently-available inferior grades of Brazilian Rosewood are much more expensive than other tone woods, and can add thousands of dollars to the cost of an instrument. Of scattered occurrence in the eastern forests of the State of Bahia and southward to Espirito Santo and Rio de Janeiro and inland to include Minas Gerais, Brazilian Rosewood, due to its rarity, is an expensive tone wood. Because of long-time exploitation, the tree has become very scarce in the more accessible regions. Brazilian Rosewood is harder than the commonly-used Indian Rosewood, but is about the same density and weighs the same (53 pounds per cubic foot).