Jimmy

Short-scale guitars and slim-neck full-size models make learning easier when your hands are small, your fingers are short, or you’re buying for a child. We spent six weeks testing ten beginner electric guitars for small hands with three petite adult testers and two kids (ages 8 and 11), measuring scale length, nut width, neck profile, … Read more

Shopping for the best cheap DJ controllers under 100 dollars in feels like hunting for treasure in a bargain bin. After three months of testing 8 controllers side by side in our home studio, I can tell you the budget tier in is better than it has ever been. We ran mix sessions, scratched vinyl … Read more

Two summers ago, I watched a friend crack the top of his Martin dreadnought after gate-checking a thin plywood hardshell on a regional jet. The latch had popped open, the TSA agents had forced it shut, and the impact from the cargo hold did the rest. That single flight cost him a repair bill and … Read more

Finding the best acoustic guitar cases for travel in comes down to one decision: will your guitar survive a checked cargo hold or a hard-fall overhead bin slam? I have flown with acoustics across six continents and learned the hard way that a padded gig bag simply will not absorb a 30 kg suitcase landing … Read more

I’ll never forget the day my friend Sarah – a 5’2″ guitar teacher with hands small enough to palm a basketball – tried my Stratocaster and winced at the 7th fret. Her fingers cramped before she finished a barre chord. That moment stuck with me, because it illustrates exactly what makes a great electric guitar … Read more

Picking up electric guitar as an adult is one of the best decisions I’ve made in the last decade, and I’ve spent the past several months testing beginner kits side by side to find the ones that actually deliver for grown-up learners. The best beginner electric guitar kits for adults bundle everything you need on … Read more

After three months of testing 22 beginner keyboards side by side, our team narrowed it down to the eight best musical keyboards for beginners you can buy in . The Donner DEP-20 earned our Editor’s Choice because it delivers a full 88-key weighted hammer-action keybed, 128-note polyphony, and a sustain pedal in the box at … Read more

Poor lighting is the single biggest obstacle to enjoyable upright piano practice. When you sit down at an acoustic upright, your own body blocks the overhead room light, casting bass keys into shadow and turning dense orchestral scores into squinting exercises. After spending eight weeks testing ten LED piano lamps on a real studio upright, … Read more

If you have ever tried to play electric guitar through a pair of Airpods, you already know the problem. The crackle in your picking hand lands a fraction of a second after the note. Your timing drifts. The music feels disconnected from your fingers. Standard Bluetooth headphones introduce around 200 milliseconds of latency, and for … Read more

The best guitar pedals under $50 are affordable stompbox effects from trusted brands like Boss, Donner, JOYO, Caline, Behringer, TC Electronic, NUX, and MXR that deliver pro-quality tone at budget prices. They work the same way as any other stompbox: they sit between your guitar and amp, shape your signal with overdrive, distortion, delay, reverb, … Read more