Polarising Boss pedals, brilliant Martins and a relic Fender: these are my favourite new guitar products of 2025
2025 marked my 16th year working as a guitar journalist. And before you ask, yes – the very act of writing that sentence made me feel so old that it receded my hairline by an extra half a centimetre and my knees started to ache. It’ll come for you too, younglings.
Anyway, it’s safe to say that in that decade and a half, I’ve played, reviewed and written about a LOT of guitars, amps and effects. Some of them were inspirational enough that I still use or think fondly of them today. Others, well… let’s not dwell too much on the Peavey AT-200, lest we frighten the children.
With the benefit of hindsight, the thing that I always find remarkable looking back is that somehow I’ve not run out of stuff to say about these things – no matter how many hundreds of thousands of words I’ve scribbled down about them over the years.
I don’t think it has much to do with me, or my gift for prose for that matter. It’s more to do with the fact that every year – every month really – the guitar industry continues to delight and surprise me with its creativity. Given that we often joke about how the fundamentals of this whole thing haven’t really changed in 70-plus years, it’s amazing how often I come away from someone’s NAMM booth, or a product demo thinking that I’ve played or experienced something I’ve never seen before.
2025 was no different in this regard – we saw innovation and exploration in every part of the guitar world, with a special focus on the more affordable end of the market. As someone who still winces at the thought of spending over a grand on a new guitar, it’s something that’s always hugely encouraging to see.
Read on then, to get my personal picks of the best guitar gear for 2025:
My favourite electric guitar of 2025: Fender Vintera II Road Worn ‘50s Jazzmaster
Okay, I’m going to cheat slightly here because, frankly, this is my article and you can’t tell me what to do. Yes, you will probably have noticed that Guitar.com hasn’t quite got round to publishing our review of Fender’s latest Road Worn return… but I’ll let you in on a little secret: I’ve had one in my house for the last month and it is K-I-L-L-E-R killer.
That might be somewhat spoiling the review when it comes out early next year, but time is a construct and I will not be constrained by such trivialities. I love a Jazzmaster at the best of times, but the Fender Road Worn Vintera II is such a wonderfully bang on version for the money.
The original Vintera II guitar was already great, but adding a properly worn-in finish to the whole thing just really makes you feel like you’re slipping into an old pair of well-loved Chuck Taylors.
It’s also a real exercise in restraint – I remember the first RW Jazzmaster they did over a decade ago, and while it was cool, it did very much look like a factory-aged guitar. The subtle ageing and lacquer checking on the 2025 variant is so much more believable. The only thing that’s lacking is the colour options – Fiesta Red and Sunburst? Come on guys, give us some custom colour options – Sonic Blue, Seafoam Green, Shoreline Gold… who cares if it’s vintage-correct, live a little!
My favourite acoustic guitar of 2025: Martin 000-Jr Sapele
I am not a small person. I am big and broad enough that I will begrudgingly accept that I do look rather silly playing any kind of student or parlor guitar. And yet… I bloody love a small-bodied acoustic. Especially as the entirety of my acoustic playing life is now at home, I don’t really care about the power and projection of a big-bodied guitar at this point. I just want something that’s comfortable, plays well and sounds good.
That said, I was not expecting to get on with the Martin 000 Jr quite as much as I did – but something about the whole recipe really did just click with me in a way that made it a very, very hard guitar to say goodbye too.
That scaled-down 000 body shape doesn’t feel as dainty as a parlor-sized instrument, and the full-size scale length certainly combines with that to make it feel every inch a ‘proper’ guitar, but just a big more ergonomic and compact.
It also sounds and looks great too, and with its stained sapele finish, it just looks at home in any space you put it in – a killer instrument and a killer price too.
Read the full review.
My favourite amp of 2025: Orange O Tone 40
I didn’t actually review this one in the end, Richard did, but the Orange O Tone 40 spent a few weeks in my house while it was waiting to be photographed and man, did I have a good – and extremely loud – time with it sitting in for my trusty Princeton over that time.
We film quite a lot of our Guitar.com Originals videos on London’s iconic Denmark Street. As a result, I often find myself on the street, glancing up to the nondescript workshop Orange Amps design guru Ade Emsley keeps above the guitar shops there, wondering what one of the true geniuses of modern amp design is cooking up there.
Because, as the O Tone 40 proves, nobody really designs amps like Adrian. Here’s a solid-state, non-modelling amp that sounds absolutely fantastic, responds like a tube amp in all the best ways and is unapologetically and unreasonable loud with it.
I am a paid up member of the ‘most people play at home we need amps that sound great at bedroom levels’ club, but I love that there are people out there like Orange building these uncompromising machines in 2025 – it’s a dying art and we should appreciate it.
My favourite pedal of 2025: Boss PX-1
A confession, before we start: I think we might have reached something of a saturation point in terms of pedal innovation in 2025. That’s not a particularly original thought I know – my esteemed colleague Cillian said much the same last year – but it’s something I’ve been coming back to a lot this year.
It’s not that there aren’t still good and interesting pedals being made all the time of course. But I think we’ve reached the point in the curve where the ‘surprise and delight’ aspect has started to wear off. Pedals are a bit like iPhones now – what would have blown your mind a decade ago is kinda normal now, and it takes a lot to really inspire much strong emotion.
Which is why I found the reaction – and dare I say the backlash – to the Boss PX-1 so interesting. There’s no doubt that what Boss is trying here is quite different – creating a pay-as-you-go archive of classic and rare stompboxes from the brand’s illustrious past is not what anyone had on their bingo cards I don’t think.
And while I think that the discussion and debate it provoked was actually quite useful and important – I’ll be very surprised if anyone tries a subscription-based pedal thing any time soon on the back of it, for example – it did rather obscure what the pedal itself was about.
And taken on its own merits, the PX-1 is a very fun thing to have around – a living library of Boss rarities to pull out as and when the mood strikes. And judging by how quickly they flew off the shelves, a lot of you agreed with that sentiment.
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