World Guitar Day 2019: The Guitars That Built Rock'n'Roll

Jimmy Page may have played a Fender Telecaster on Stairway To Heaven's famous solo, but it's difficult to imagine the Led Zeppelin man with anything but that iconic, low-slung Les Paul, just as it's impossible to imagine Jimi Hendrix gracefully wrangling anything but a Strat.

These are just two of the players who've helped build rock'n'roll, and while it's the songs that get passed down the years, those instruments are just as an important part of the tale.

The Fenders. The Gibsons. The Rickenbackers. The Jacksons. The Gretsches.

For World Guitar Day 2019, we’ve gathered together our Guitars That Built Rock’n’Roll series into one handy page. It’s the stories of the world’s great guitars, the companies that made them, and those who played them.

Ed Mitchell was the Editor of The Blues Magazine from 2012-16, and a contributor to Classic Rock and Louder. He died in October 2022, aged 52. A one-time Reviews Editor on Total Guitar magazine from 2003, his guitar-modding column, Ed’s Shed, appeared in print on both sides of the Atlantic (in both Total Guitar and Guitar World magazines), and he wrote stories for Classic Rock and Guitarist. Between them, the websites Louder, MusicRadar and Guitar World host over 400 of his articles – among them interviews with Billy Gibbons, Paul Weller, Brian Setzer, profiles on Roy Buchanan, Duane Allman and Peter Green, a joint interview with Jimmy Page and Jack White, and dozens of guitar reviews – and that’s just the ones that made it online.