Gear Of The Year

Welcome to another grand reckoning of the great and the good in gear that Guitarist has tested over the past year. Some years are more replete with interesting guitars than others and, happily, 2018 has been a vintage year.

As always, our finalists were drawn from a longlist of gear that either won a Guitarist Choice or coveted Gold Award when first reviewed. One or two wildcard entries that just missed out on a Choice award first time round also made the cut in cases where the whole panel of editors and reviewers felt that, looked afresh at the end of the year, they deserved promotion to the big league. So all of the gear you’ll find in the following pages has something special going for it, from original thinking that brings new tonal benefits, to deft updates on classic designs. We hope you enjoy trying some of these brilliant bits of kit next time you feel like expanding your musical horizons.

Inevitably, the judging process also provoked many interesting conversations about the state of guitar today and we want to bring you in on that debate. So, inside this feature, you’ll also find extra analysis on gear that became a talking point in 2018: the debate-sparking, innovative or plain controversial designs that elevated guitar’s state of the art.