guitars
To achieve the bright sound in his famous 1965 solo for The Who‘s “My Generation,” John Entwistle bought a cheap Danelectro bass, removed the strings designed by John D’Addario Sr., and transferred them to his Fender. The plan worked until one of the strings broke — and Entwistle had to buy two more Danelectros just for the strings.
Jim D’Addario, who built a multimillion-dollar guitar-strings empire on the foundation of his late father John’s early innovations, tells this story in a 50th-anniversary video series called Jim’s Corner. D’Addario, which sells drumheads, saxophone reeds, pedalboards, earplugs and other musicians’ gear in addition to its signature guitar strings at 3,300 retail outlets, earned $220 million in global revenue last year and employs 1,100 people, has taken a corporate victory lap throughout, combining history with “When You Know You Know” ads starring younger players like Chris Stapleton, Herman Li of DragonForce and Yvette Young of Covet.
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“Most people are very apathetic about their strings, and they usually listen to their teacher, or an artist that’s endorsing the product, to get them to try our strings,” says D’Addario, now chairman of the board of the company he named after his family in 1974. “The ones that know really know ours are better — and consistent.”
In addition to the video series, the company that started with teenaged Jim accompanying his guitar-playing father to music-business trade conventions in the ’60s launched a beer, Eddie Ate Dynamite (GoodBye Eddie), in early December; held a beer-launch party at the time starring a member of the Infamous Stringdusters; and spent much of 2024 releasing limited-edition merch and packages of strings in retro containers.
D’Addario acknowledges the company faces industry headwinds — the musical-instrument business, he says, is declining 2%-3% per year, which affects a company whose guitar strings make up 45% of its business. “People buy a guitar for their kid, and if he doesn’t play, they don’t put it in the attic or the basement anymore. They put it on eBay,” D’Addario says. “Everything a dealer sells, he’s going to compete with that instrument. That has had a very serious effect on the instruments bought at retail.”
But mostly, D’Addario is upbeat, describing the guitar pedalboards his company has spent two years designing, pedalboard power supplies containing USB batteries and coated strings that resist “moisture, perspiration, skin, debris.” Says D’Addario, “We keep an ideation list for each brand. We’ll have crazy things on there. When we have bandwidth, we’ll throw one on the active-project list.” Here, he discusses the company’s past and present in an hourlong Zoom from his home workshop in Farmingdale, N.Y.
What do you hope people learn about D’Addario from the 50th-anniversary campaign events?
It’s not the 50th anniversary of the family making strings, it’s the 50th anniversary of the brand name D’Addario. My dad and my grandfather were afraid to put their name on products. Italians would be discriminated against and it was a difficult name to pronounce. They felt like, in certain markets, it might not be accepted. In August of ’74, I said, “Nah, we’re going to get credit for making certain stuff, and our name’s going to be on it.”
Can you hear when a guitar player on the radio uses your strings?
No, that’s impossible. There are a lot of good strings out there that sound good. It’s very hard to discern that just from listening to it on the radio.
In the early 1990s, a package of strings had an envelope for each of the six strings — a paper envelope for each one, identified for each note, in a vinyl pouch with a fancy label. So there was a minimum of eight pieces of packaging; sometimes there was a little advertisement as well. My daughter Amy was in high school, and they were studying environmental friendliness and recycling and packaging, and I was changing my strings on the bed and I had all this garbage when I was done. She said, “You should really do something about that, that’s really criminal, you’re putting so much junk in the waste-stream just to change a set of strings.”
So it got me thinking. I came up with a system of color-coding the ball end on the string a different color, then coiling those together in one corrosion-resistant plastic bag and having them color-coded, so the silver one is this note and the brass one is this note. It eliminated 75% of the packaging. Since that time, we’ve saved billions of trees and millions of pounds of carbon not released into the atmosphere. That was one of the things that distinguished our strings. That’s one way we can tell onstage if our strings are being used. Otherwise, it’s very difficult. You can put branding on the package but when they’re playing on stage you can’t see it.
What music stars are your most loyal customers?
A lot of jazz guys, like Pat Metheny, who’s a good buddy, and Julian Loge. But there’s also a whole contingent of new people that I might not know. John McLaughlin, Blake Mills, Molly Tuttle, Billy Strings, Chris Thile of Nickel Creek, Sierra Ferrell, a mandolinist [who’s] going to be a superstar — those are the artists that really gravitate to our brand because they know they’re going to get the very best product.
How has the musical instrument market changed since you started?
It’s quite different. We also make drumheads and drumsticks and snare wires and guitar straps and cables. We make drumheads for acoustic drums and drumsticks and other accessories for drummers. The acoustic-drum market is 40-60% of what it was in 2004. Drums have been digitized. Instead of 20,000 drumheads a day, we’re only making 10,000. The other thing is the guitar was really the solo instrument, but it’s not anymore. You don’t hear a guitar solo in every hit; you hear repetitive rhythms and electronic sounds and synthesized sounds.
How much does this worry you?
We’ve seen this so many times — in the early ’90s, it was video games, and for three or four years, the guitar market didn’t have much growth. But then it came back. The acoustic guitar market was in the tank for the whole decade of the 1980s, and “MTV Unplugged” happened, then bingo, the acoustic guitar took off again. It always comes back.
What are your retirement plans, if any?
We don’t want to sell our business. Our family name is on the product. D’Addario strings are like the Titleist of golf balls, like Scotch Tape. When you walk into a music store, 40% to 50% of the strings on the wall are our brand, and that’s in almost every country around the world. I’d have trouble walking into a store and seeing my packaging screwed up or listening to people complaining about the quality.
In a TikTok video from June, Charlene Kaye, an excellent guitarist and bass player, sits on a stool with an electric bass at a Guitar Center and plays Paul McCartney’s iconic riff from The Beatles’ “Come Together” — incorrectly. On purpose. Two men in flannel and sweatshirts quickly rush over to guitarsplain: “No, it’s bum, bum, ba, ba, DOO, bum.” “Yeah, there’s one other note.” “Higher.”
In this one-minute experiment, the artist and comedian demonstrated to her 71,400 followers how male guitarists often treat female guitarists, how music stores can be unexpected snake pits and why men have dominated the guitar market for decades. “I’m a millennial, so my haven after school was going to Guitar Center and playing all the guitars there for hours,” Kaye says. “I was a much worse guitar player back then, and I would always get looks from these dude-bros who were the gatekeepers of Blink-182 and John Mayer. I couldn’t be a girl in there without getting hit on or corrected.”
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But the guitar patriarchy is changing, Kaye says, and sales metrics in recent years bear her out. Guitar Center itself has been working, as the company’s vp of guitar merchandising Matthew Schneider puts it, to “make sure everybody’s treated nice.” During the pandemic, homebound would-be players shifted to purchasing new axes online, boosting industry sales and freeing women from having to interact with the so-called dude-bros in stores. According to the Fender Play app, 45% of new players in 2020 were female, a 15% increase from 2019. Last year, the number increased to 49%. “The growth is palpable and active,” says John Dolak of the National Association of Music Merchants.
Kaye acknowledges the 300-store Guitar Center, which she calls the “epicenter of white dude riffs,” has been improving its culture, including by spotlighting women players in catalogs and store windows. The retailer’s Hollywood store put on a splashy event in June to introduce Orianthi’s new Gibson SJ-200 and featured Joan Jett in TV ads and YouTube videos as a partner for the chain’s fall 2021 Guitar-A-Thon, among many other female-fronted events. In November, two months after singer Blu DeTiger became the first woman to collaborate with Fender on a signature bass, she posted a TikTok of an employee at Guitar Center, where she bought her first bass at age 7, helping her pull the instrument from the wall. “The store is for everybody, regardless of your skill level, regardless of your gender,” says Maria Brown, Guitar Center’s director of content, artists, events and social media. “It needs to be an open environment where it’s supportive for whatever you’re trying to check out and buy.”
For decades, the male-dominated guitar industry was much less inviting, female players say. Lzzy Hale, guitarist for hard-rock band Halestorm, recalls taking lessons at 16 from a male teacher, who told her mom afterwards, “I would love to teach your daughter, but traditionally, women don’t stick with it, so I don’t want to waste my time.” (Hale says her mom recalled years later that she dutifully “told him off.”) In the ’80s, when Sue Foley was starting her career playing biker bars, she says, “You’d just get dudes saying, ‘Show us your tits!’” But the veteran blues guitarist has older guitar-playing brothers and has never let such crude commentary bother her: “I always say, you’re going to get in the ring, you have to be ready for it. Don’t expect to get an easy ride. This is guitar. This is tough. It’s hard to play guitar, it hurts your fingers, there’s a lot of things about guitar that might trip up a girl who’s not used to that more rugged approach. You’ve got to be tough.”
The guitar industry, in general, has spent the last few years honoring women — and trying to attract them as customers. H.E.R. and Susan Tedeschi (Fender), St. Vincent (Ernie Ball) and Miranda Lambert (Gibson) are among the guitar heroines who’ve released signature models in recent years, and Gibson named Hale its first-ever brand ambassador in 2022. Dominating everything, as always, is guitarist Taylor Swift, whose “effect on society,” says Jim D’Addario, founder/board chairman of guitar strings company D’Addario, has been to see to it that “many more young ladies are picking up the guitar.”
According to Brian T. Majeski, principal at The Music Trades, which analyzes musical-instrument sales data, Swift-inspired female guitarists are part of a “wealth of anecdotal evidence indicating that numbers have been trending up the past decade.” NAMM’s Dolak adds, “Historically, the guitar-playing universe used to be dominated by men. However, these numbers have changed at a breakneck speed since the pandemic.”
Although the Music Trades Association projects 2025 global guitar sales to hit $19.9 billion, which would be an increase of 15.7% since the pandemic-boosted $17.2 billion in 2020, many in the industry fear revenue declines. “The industry is really kind of dormant, or actually declining 2% to 3% a year,” D’Addario says of musical instruments in general, explaining that guitar players who lose interest sell their instruments on eBay, where they compete with Fender and Gibson, rather than storing them forever in their basements and attics. Regarding guitars, Majeski adds, “The business is soft right now.”
So companies that make and sell guitars have emphasized women, in part for cultural and gender-equity reasons, but also in part to expand their business to a broader demographic. In 2022, Andy Mooney, Fender’s CEO, told Entrepreneur that the company experienced an uptick in guitar sales to women during the pandemic. “Women were buying guitars online because in the brick-and-mortar stores there was nobody to relate to, and they weren’t getting treated well,” he said at the time. Fender did not respond to interview requests for Mooney or other representatives, but the company has taken small steps to acknowledge women guitar players in recent years — like adding Tedeschi’s green model to its male-dominated signature collection in June.
Gibson, too, has featured women in recent campaigns, including its G3 mentorship and scholarship program, whose participants include many women. On a broad level, the iconic company known for masculine players such as Led Zeppelin‘s Jimmy Page and The Who‘s Pete Townshend has been spelunking its history, focusing on unsung female Gibson players such as Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Mary Ford, guitarist in a legendary ’40s duo with husband Les Paul. “When it comes to the guitar, men are expected to be good, and women aren’t expected to be good. That’s just been the way it is, for a long time,” says Emily Wolfe, a singer and guitarist who narrates an official Gibson video for the recent launch of Ford’s Les Paul Standard. “When you have a woman who’s really good at it, it’s like, ‘Yeah, we’ve been here for a long time — look at Mary Ford.’”
The concept of a pop superstar like Swift encouraging young women to pick up guitar is by no means new. Bonnie Raitt had this effect twice — first when she emerged as a folkie singer-guitarist in the early ’70s, then when she scored hits in the late ’80s. (Foley cites Jennifer Batten, Michael Jackson‘s lead guitarist, as a similar influencer for female players.) “The environment was always, ‘Men excel and women are stumbling along behind,’ but Bonnie Raitt was disproving every stereotype from day one,” says longtime blues guitarist Rory Block. “She was so dynamic and so strong, and I immediately said, ‘This is good, this is possible, women can do this.’ She paved the pathway for women — for me.”
But despite the influence of artists like Swift and the guitar industry’s appeals to female customers, social media has perhaps had the biggest impact on this sales demographic. Mallory Nees, senior social media manager for online musical-instrument retailer Reverb, says she took up guitar at age 11 in Whitewater, Wisc., where the local music store displayed posters exclusively of male stars.
It took a move to Chicago, as an adult, for Nees to learn about female players like St. Vincent and Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker. Today, she says, girls and women everywhere can purchase instruments on Reverb and “improve their technique through YouTube videos and TikTok videos and creators that they trust and this whole ecosystem exists online anonymously and is fundamentally judgment-free, which was definitively not the case when I was learning to play.”
Elizabeth Heidt, Gibson’s chief marketing officer, adds that many women see YouTube and Instagram as a “safe space” for guitar playing, compared to music stores, which carry an “intimidation factor.”
“Those other spaces allow people the freedom to play, to share, to grow and see themselves,” she says. “That was a big shift.”
Hale explains the changing guitar culture a different way. “It was only a few short years ago I was playing festivals overseas, and I was the only woman on the bill,” she says. “We’re still losing some battles on the way, but there’s light at the end of the tunnel.”
“This is our music,” Hale adds. “We’re not playing rock music [and] we’re not playing guitar because our boyfriends think it’s hot. We’re not doing it because we’re trying to prove something that girls can do. We’re doing it because we want to have ownership over the music that we love. We want to rage.”
Just two years shy of its 60th birthday, Guitar Player magazine will cease publication of its print version and go digital only, its editor has announced. The 58-year-old magazine dedicated to guitars, gear and the musicians who play and love them, publishes its final print issue this week with Jimmy Page on the cover. “What better way to wrap up our history than to have [the rock legend] help us do what we’ve always done best — bring you the finest interviews with your favorite players,” wrote Christopher Scapelliti, who’ll stay on as digital editor.
Founded in 1967 by Bud Eastman, Guitar Player was the first publication dedicated solely to all things guitars. It went on to inspire other singularly-focused magazines like Bass Player and Keyboard, as well as axe-specific competitors like Guitar World, Premier Guitar, Guitarist and Guitar for the Practicing Musician (RIP). The magazine is owned by Future US, an NYC-based publisher with other titles including PC Gamer, Electronic Musician and Guitar World.
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In his final editorial for the magazine, Scapelliti acknowledged the challenges faced by the print edition, citing the seismic shift of advertisers to preferring online platforms as a key factor.
“The ‘why’ will be obvious even if you don’t keep each issue tucked away chronologically on shelves,” he wrote. “These increasingly slim volumes demonstrate our almost heroic efforts to persist in an era where advertisers find greater opportunities online. Throughout the ups and downs of these years, we’ve appreciated the support of those readers and advertisers who have kept Guitar Player’s print edition a going concern.”
He also expressed gratitude to readers and advertisers who supported the magazine through its ups and downs, and said subscriptions would automatically be transferred to Guitar World unless a refund is requested.
Scapelliti also thanked colleagues, including managing director Stuart Williams, content director Scott Rowley, and head of design Brad Merrett, as well as art editor Philip Cheesbrough and music editor Jimmy Brown, and expressed deep appreciation for the writers and editors who contributed to the print magazine’s longevity.
“While longtime readers will lament this change, there’s much more to come in Guitar Player’s future,” Scapelliti said. “As for this final issue, what better way to wrap up our history than to have Jimmy Page help us do what we’ve always done best — bring you the finest interviews with your favorite players.”
From the blues to jazz to rock to folk to country, the guitar is probably the most pivotal instrument of the 20th century, serving as a centerpiece for a variety of genres that changed the course of culture in America and around the world.
In honor of the stringed instrument that has amped up audiences for centuries, we present Billboard’s list of the 100 Greatest Guitars of All Time.
No, that’s not a typo. This is not a list of 100 guitarists – though each item on this list is associated with a particular guitar slinger. And it’s not a list of guitar brands or companies. This is a list of actual guitars, played by great guitarists. It puts the shine on guitars throughout modern history that have been a part of the evolution of popular music. Instead of focusing on guitar playing style, we’re looking at the instrument itself as handled by various luminaries across everything from bluegrass to heavy metal.
What is “the greatest”? Iconic, influential, inventive, famous, game changing? Unusual, oddball, beautiful, even whimsical? Just plain cool? It’s all of that and more. Some of the guitars that follow are standard models with minimal modifications; others are one-of-a-kind pieces that have been endlessly tinkered with. Some are technical and auditory wonders; others have been beaten to hell over the years by overzealous owners. But all are important to the guitar’s history and ongoing evolution.
This was a big undertaking that we didn’t want to do alone. We invited a panel of ace guitarists across a variety of genres, as well as journalists and experts, to peruse a lengthy list of guitars, compiled by Billboard, and vote on them. We invited our voters to submit their own picks. After tallying their responses, we sent it back to the voting panel, solicited additional feedback and incorporated that into a final list of the 100 Greatest Guitars of All Time.
In addition to a few voters who wished to remain anonymous, the voting panel included: Duane Betts, Nick Bowcott of Sweetwater, Carl Broemel of My Morning Jacket, Larry Campbell, Joanna Connor, Michael Doyle of Guitar Center, Alejandro Escovedo, Pete Evick of Bret Michaels Band, Damian Fanelli of Guitar World, Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top, Slim Gambill of Lady A, Kirk Hammett of Metallica, Jim James of My Morning Jacket, Myles Kennedy of Alter Bridge and Slash featuring Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators, J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr, Dave Mason, Scott Metzger, Bob Mould, Rick Nielsen of Cheap Trick, Orianthi, Joe Perry of Aerosmith, Joe Satriani, Chris Scapelliti of Guitar Player, Peter Stroud of Sheryl Crow’s band, Matthew Sweet, Mark Tremonti of Creed and Alter Bridge, Seth Walker, Erika Wennerstrom of Heartless Bastards, Jack White, Andy Wood and Oliver Wood.
This week, we’re rolling out the first half of the list (guitars 100-51), and next week, we’ll unveil the full 100 (for now, the image above will serve as a hint).
This list is far from exhaustive. There are so many legendary guitars that even a list of 100 fails to encompass all of them. Regardless, we hope what follows spurs some excitement, debate, discovery and even, perhaps, someone to pick up a guitar and start playing.
100. Johnny Thunders – ca. 1959 Les Paul Junior TV Model
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