Jeff Beck's Guitar Shop

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His last project was an album he released with Johnny Depp, a move that catapulted him into the news: 18 appeared in the wake of Depp’s defamation case against his former wife, Amber Heard. The guitar originally had a cherry sunburst finish, but sometime around late 1967 or early 1968 he stripped off the finish and left the top in its natural, unfinished state. While the sound of this Duo Jet was close to Gallup’s, shortly after completing the album in 1992 Jeff found another ’56 Duo Jet (pictured above) with the missing link – a factory-installed fixed-arm Bigsby identical to the one on Gallup’s guitar. When Jimmy Page joined, briefly creating a lineup with two lead guitarists, their sound got more extreme still.

Like Jimi Hendrix, he played with imagination and invention, harnessing the power of feedback and effects in a way that shaped the sound of modern rock.

There was a hint of Who-ish feedback about his aggressive playing on its follow-up, Evil Hearted You: if you flipped the single over, you were confronted with the droning Still I’m Sad, with its Gregorian chant-inspired vocals, a signpost en route to the experimentation of psychedelia. The result was a succession of tracks that propelled the Yardbirds to the forefront of pop’s avant garde: Over Under Sideways Down, Lost Woman, Hot House of Omagararshid, He’s Always There.

But Jeff Beck, who had been recommended for the job by his friend Jimmy Page, didn’t just replace Clapton. Despite its success, Beck didn’t care for either the song or his own lead vocal, his disdain propelling him to find places where he could concentrate on playing guitar.

His family statement announcing his death, posted to Twitter and Instagram on Wednesday, read: "On behalf of his family, it is with deep and profound sadness that we share the news of Jeff Beck's passing.

Like his childhood friend Jimmy Page, he was grounded in blues but not beholden to it, an aesthetic choice that separated him from Eric Clapton, the guitarist he replaced in the trail-blazing British Invasion group the Yardbirds. The guitar shown here was Jeff’s main Stratocaster from the mid-2010s through his final shows with Johnny Depp in late 2022. Jeff’s personal custom Strats also feature Wilkinson roller nuts, whereas current Fender Jeff Beck Signature models are equipped with LSR roller nuts. Take his final album “18” and its accompanying tour, a collaboration with Johnny Depp launched during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.It’s fitting that the concept of the hot-rodded guitar originated in Southern California as that locale was also the birthplace of the hot rod car phenomenon. Fender master builder Chris Fleming painstakingly replicated the V-shaped profile of the neck, the contours that John Walker carved in the body and every scrape, scratch and ding on the body, neck and pickguard. By then, Beck had recruited singer Rod Stewart: with his bluesy vocals playing off Beck’s incendiary distorted guitar, Truth’s eclectic set of material – a reworking of Shapes of Things, plus versions of Greensleeves, Ol’ Man River and Willie Dixon’s I Ain’t Superstitous – presaged the sound of Led Zeppelin, the band Jimmy Page formed from the wreckage of the now defunct Yardbirds. Tellingly, the song that had first piqued his interest in playing guitar was Les Paul and Mary Ford’s groundbreaking 1951 hit How High the Moon, a single that was as much about Paul’s electronic manipulation of sound through multitracking as it was about his guitar playing. Notable features of this guitar include its neck-through-body construction, 24-fret neck and Kahler double-locking tremolo.

He sought serious players with a penchant for improvisation, a quest that could point him toward such heavy, almost leaden collaborators as bassist Tim Bogert and drummer Carmine Appice of Vanilla Fudge, players who pushed him in the direction toward anonymous hard rock. He found that with “Blow by Blow,” a record where he turned the exploratory fusion of John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra into something digestible to a broad audience — something smooth, melodic and funky. In 1970, after recovering from his skull fracture, Beck formed a new incarnation of the Jeff Beck Group, and released two records – 1971’s Rough and Ready and 1972’s Jeff Beck Group – which displayed his earliest forays into the jazz fusion sound he would become known for. These records are often stronger than the albums he released in the 1970s and 1980s, where he alternated between moments of inspiration and grudging attempts at following fashion, such as “Flash,” a weird 1985 LP where producer Nile Rodgers pushed Beck to play synthesized funk and Arthur Baker sneaked a few claustrophobic collages into the mix. By the time of February 1966’s Shapes of Things – howling feedback, a guitar solo audibly influenced by Indian raga, or, as Beck put it, “some weird mist coming from the east out of [my] amp” – the Yardbirds sounded like a completely different band from the one who had powered their way through covers of Smokestack Lightning and Good Morning Little Schoolgirl on 1964’s Five Live Yardbirds.Then again, Beck always seemed separate from the rock’s ruling class, chasing a muse that brought him to places that were slightly outside of the mainstream. Beck played this guitar in the studio and frequently on stage with the Jeff Beck Group during the late ’60s, but after the neck suffered damage in late 1968 he acquired another late-’50s sunburst Les Paul with exquisite curly maple figuring as a replacement while this guitar was repaired (that sunburst Les Paul was later stolen). Beck01 features large, detailed photos of each instrument, but unfortunately for readers who would like a closer look, the limited-edition book is long sold out and plans for a general release have not been announced.