This is my third feature on headstock ergonomics - following on from my 2016 original, and 2018 follow-up. On this occasion the catalyst for this article was the recent Birmingham Guitar Show - where I liked a lot of the body shapes I saw on display, but was put off by their unergonomic or in fact actually rather ugly headstocks.

Creating an aesthetically beautiful but distinct headstock shape is an incredible difficult task these days - and lots of brands essentially ’fail’ in that area - ...

The last time I covered this subject - ’The Shape of a Guitar’s Headstock has a significant impact on Tuning Stability’ I focused more on what the issues were rather than the solutions. Here I will go into slightly more detail about the science of guitar tuning fidelity and all the little gains that can be made by doing things properly! This article was sparked in part by my recent article on 9 ’SG’-style guitars, where I really decided for once and for all that I would never buy a guitar with ...

It should be evident by now that my preferred style of guitar is the doublecut S-type, with relatively few exceptions. My preferred pickups are humbuckers - ideally with some well-defined grunt, and I am very fussy about fretboards (Rosewood / Ebony) and headstock shape. As any guitar aficionado does, I have a rolling wishlist of guitars I desire to acquire - I’m not setting up shop, so the chance of me getting all, or even a significant number of these are slim to none. This is more of a...

A while back I did a post about 10 cool guitars that were very much to my liking. This follow-up post is kind of more of the same, but focuses on mainly smaller / less well known makers. Most of these are custom shops in the truest sense of the word - building guitars to order, possibly with the exception of Mayones which is Poland’s leading guitar manufacturer and more mainstream really. For most of these there is only the occasional instrument found in the wild - on specialist retailer&...