Kate Tremaine

Boring part out of the way first: The Fender Stratocaster, blah blah blah, three single coils, blah blah, snappy, blah, alder, blah blah, we all know what the instrument is and what it's history is, right? The Affinity Strat is the guitar most of us cut our teeth on. It's like you're born into the RPG called "guitar" and you're asked to choose your class from Strat, Tele, or Les Paul, and you decided to choose Strat. The SSS Affinity's single coils are nice, bright and snappy, the neck is thin and nicely smooth. It's an excellent guitar at a very reasonable price, even more so if you got your Affinity Strat used. If there's a down side, it's that the trem is intensely terrible; because the block is made of relatively thin pot metal, it doesn't hold tune very well.

About the best thing I can say about the Honeytone N-10 is that when you want to play a guitar and don't care about tone or any of that nonsense, it's there. The 2" speaker is junky, the build quality is too light not to get thrashed around on your desk, by the cable, and the promised leather handle disappeared somewhere along the line, leaving a painfully disappointing and obvious soft plastic handle in its stead (leather does not have injection dots on the back of the handle). But it makes a sound and when you play it through a pair of headphones it sounds good enough. And it makes a cute little desk toy at work.

I mean, who doesn't have this little orange guy? I don't have to introduce it to you because you almost certainly already have it on your pedal board. It's the DS-1 Distortion pedal from Boss and it does exactly what it says on the box: Gives you a distorted guitar tone. For not a lot of money. And the orange paint is a nice color complement to your amp, if you're also rocking Orange amplifiers.