Ethan Walker

If you only buy one respirator for spray painting, get the 3M 65021 half mask with combined P100 particulate and organic vapor cartridges. It is the single most-requested model in our roundup, it carries the highest sales rank of anything we tested, and it pairs both hazard types you face with a spray gun. Before … Read more

The best keyboard benches for digital pianos are the ones that publish a real height range in inches, use a load rating above 250 pounds, and give you a cushion that does not fight your forearms. Digital pianos have a fixed key height, so the bench supplies all of the vertical adjustment. That single fact … Read more

There is a specific moment in every beginner guitarist’s life: the case comes open, the instrument sits on the sofa, and you realise the thing you have been saving for looks less like a guitar and more like a small wooden boat. Choosing well matters more than almost anything else you do in year one, … Read more

Finding the best hollow body electric guitars for jazz usually starts with a confusing wall of shapes. Archtops, semi-hollows, thinlines, offset bodies and 335-style slabs all look like they should play the same role, yet they behave very differently under flatwound strings and a clean tube amp. We spent weeks comparing twelve of the most … Read more

Finding the best short scale bass guitars for small hands is less about finding a small guitar and more about finding the right number of inches between your nut and your bridge. A standard bass stretches that distance to 34 inches, and the frets end up packed tight enough that your fingers have to shift … Read more

The best guitar amps for home practice are the ones that still sound convincing when the master volume is at two o’clock, and the winner in our roundup is the Fender Frontman 10G, backed by more than 13,000 verified owner ratings. We put ten of the most-reviewed practice amps through the same routine: clean chords, … Read more

If you want the short answer, the best guitar amp heads for metal right now split into three very different camps. The JOYO Zombie-II is the one most players should start with because it puts a 20-watt hybrid high-gain platform and a real 12AX7 preamp in a box small enough to carry with one hand. … Read more

A practice room fails in one specific way: the guitar disappears the moment you turn up. The problem is almost never the amp head. The head sets how much clean headroom you have, but the cabinet decides how much of that output actually reaches your ears, how much bass fits in a small room before … Read more

The best overdrive pedals for blues in are the Boss SD-1 for overall use, the Boss BD-2 for the most touch-sensitive blues crunch, and the Ibanez TS9 for a midrange push that cuts through a band. All three take a clean or barely-broken-up tube amp and give it the warm, dynamic edge that blues tone … Read more

The best guitar pedalboards for gigging are the Donner DB-3 for overall use, the Ghost Fire SPL-04 when every pound matters at the load-in, and the STRICH STANDARD 18 for players who want an angled deck and tidy cable routing. All three ship with a carry bag, hold a working chain of pedals, and stay … Read more