Just got married few months ago and my wife and I decided to go on a U.S road trip as our honeymoon. For me it was really an excuse to buy myself another acoustic guitar (honey, I hope you don’t read this). I already had two Martins and was determined to buy a vintage [...]

I heard that the old timers used to call capos “cheaters”, because they enable you to play keys with difficult chords using the simpler chord figuration. Well, I beg to differ. I am a fan of the capo, and I’m not alone– great singer / songwriters and acoustic guitar players like Paul Simon and [...]

In his early career with Simon & Garfunkel Paul used a Martin D-18 Dreadnought which is considered to be the standard of the Mahogany Dreadnoughts. Simon mostly plays finger picking style using thumb picks for his thumb and for other fingers too. This provided him enough “power” to play a Dreadnought which is not so [...]

Joni Mitchell is my favorite female singer song writers and her Record Blue is in my 10 top albums for sure.
In her early career Joni used the venerable Martin D-28: The mother and standard of all dreadnaughts. During the 50’s Martin made the guitars with straight braces rather than the desirable scalloped braces of the [...]

Cat Stevens has a lot of great acoustic songs and I just love his arrangements along side with his other guitarist, Alun Davis.
They both played Gibson guitars. A lot of Cat’s songs have a very tight rhythm patterns and having Alun Davis taking care of the arpeggios and licks, cats usually strummed whole chords with [...]

Nick drake was a par-excellence finger picker, with most of his recordings don’t have a full rhythm section. Therefore, he had no need for a large bodied guitar. He used a Guild M-20, which is all Mahogany (not only back and sides but the top too)– a small, auditorium body guitar.
Small bodied guitar are very [...]

Their main guitar for their first albums was a Gibson J-50. This guitar is similar to Gibson’s most classic model– the J-45, but with a natural blond finish rather than sunburst. It’s a basic Mahogany Jumbo guitar with rounded shoulders (later Gibson change their J models to a dreadnought design with square shoulders).
These old Gibsons [...]