Authors

I'm Daz and I play LOUD. Spent years on the road playing modern metal — drop tunings, seven and eight strings, the works — so high-gain tone is genuinely my whole life. Honestly, I came up worshipping tube heads and 4x12s, then digital modellers got good enough to change my mind completely, and now I run a profiler at every gig. I care about two things: does it djent, and does it hold together when you stack the gain? I'll measure the noise floor so you don't have to.

Hey, I'm Doug. I've played the folk circuit for the better part of my life, mostly fingerstyle, and somewhere along the way I started building and repairing acoustics in a little workshop out back. Spend enough time with a sound that comes from wood, air and your bare fingers and you start to hear instruments the way you hear a forest in the morning — alive and full of small details. I'll tell you how a guitar feels under the fingers and how it ages, not just how it photographs.

Right then — I'm Jez, and I've spent the best part of 25 years chasing the same thing: a cranked British valve amp on the edge of breakup. Cut my teeth in smoky blues clubs around the North West, then spent a decade on the bench fixing other people's amps, which taught me more about tone than any pedal ever did. I'm a sucker for an EL34 power section and a bit of natural sag. I'll always tell you straight whether an amp's worth the money or whether you're paying for a badge.

I'm Marc. My background is jazz — conservatory training, years of session work, and a long-standing love affair with hollowbody archtops and a clean, articulate tone. I think about gear the way I think about voicings: every component shifts the colour of the whole. I'm drawn to instruments that reward a light touch and reveal what your hands are actually doing. You won't find hyperbole in my reviews; you'll find careful listening, and an honest account of how a guitar or amp behaves when you ask something musical of it.

I'm Martin, and I have a problem (it's pedals). I play ambient and post-rock — big washes of reverb, delays into delays, the kind of pedalboard that needs its own roadie — so effects are where I live. I love going down the rabbit hole on a circuit: what's the buffer doing, how does it stack, what happens at the extremes of the knobs nobody dares turn? My reviews tend to wander, because that's how you actually find the magic in a box. I'll always show you the weird, useful corners.

I'm Rob, and I've taught guitar for over fifteen years — which means I've watched hundreds of beginners buy the wrong thing because someone baffled them with jargon. So that's my job here: cut through it. I genuinely love good budget gear, the kind that punches way above its price and actually keeps a new player playing. I'll tell you in plain English what matters, what doesn't, and what's a waste of your first hundred quid. No snobbery, no gatekeeping — just honest help getting started right.

Sheildon here. I'm a bass player, funk and soul mostly, so for me it always comes back to one thing: the pocket. I've spent years in session rooms learning that the best low-end isn't the loudest — it's the note that lands in exactly the right place and just sits there, fat and easy. I get geeky about pickups, string tension and how an amp reproduces the fundamental, but I never lose the groove. Give me something that makes me want to lock in with the kick drum and I'm a happy man.