STEEL AWAY

IT REALLY DOESN’T matter how much of an electric player you consider yourself to be. Having an acoustic lying around is always a good conduit for creativity. Even some of the world’s heaviest metal bands — including those who’ve never been seen in the wild with anything but a black, pointy-headstocked war machine — will admit to using Martins, Taylors, Gibsons and their ilk at home for songwriting or in the studio for layering.

There’s a certain naked honesty to acoustic sounds that’s uncorrupted by other tools of the trade — and they’re a great way of seeing if your ideas hold up on their own before being “effected” and amplified or introduced into a band setting. The sound they produce is as pure as it gets: strings vibrating through a soundboard, echoing through a hole, which then projects waves through the air and into the ear.

If that sounds a bit primitive, that’s perhaps because it is; the modern acoustic comes from a long