2024 Guitars For Idiots Year In Electric Guitar Reviews

We didn’t do many guitar reviews this year as we focused on pedals, punk rock, and just got busy with life.

While Guitars For Idiot got to celebrate the 5 year mark in 2024, one major bummer was the lack of guitar reviews. The truth is, I tried to really make sure that I didn’t double-review this year, which had been a mainstay these last few years. What’s a double-review? It’s when I would get a guitar in to review on Ultimate Guitar, and then also post a totally different review here. As great as that was, it made a lot of content very redundant, even if I was reviewing using totally different scales, processes, and formats.

I really wanted 2024 to be the year that this site operated almost entirely independent from my job as tech editor at Ultimate Guitar. That goal was a success, as this year we had awesome pedal reviews from independent builders, a big interview with SWMRS, and lots of articles about punk rock. But without doing a steady stream of reviews that duplicated all the great gear I covered for Ultimate Guitar, I used this blog to highlight fun guitars that came into my life in 2024. As such, there’s no true “guitar review ranking” article for the website this year. Instead, let’s just take a quick look back at all the awesome guitars we did talk about .

In 2024 I fell in love with this cheap Squier Paranormal Esquire Deluxe, as it was a great combo between a Les Paul Junior and a Tele for a hell of a deal.

I also tried the new Fender Player Series II Telecaster and was impressed at the refinements they made to the always fun Tele formula.

My Moon Guitars Asteroid finally arrived and wowed me, ending my pursuit of a true Les Paul Junior guitar after a decade. This thing is seriously gorgeous and has been a breeze to play, great work from Kyle over at Moon Guitars and best wishes to him as he continues to build guitars but does so from a new home out West.

Jade Works Instruments launched the MD96, and I got the first one, which is sort of a prototype but still an absolutely brilliant guitar that I find myself playing a lot!

I also tried their Butterfly guitar, which was built and listed for sale to raise money for an absolutely great cause. The guitar itself was also stunning, with incredibly chime and body.

It may not have matched the output of 2023, 2022, 2021, or 2020 but it was awesome to cover all of these guitars this year. There were a few more guitars that were supposed to make the cut, but for a huge variety of reasons we had to slim down the list this year. There’s always 2025 to try again, and we’ll certainly see how the year goes and what opportunities lay ahead.

Thanks for sticking with us for another year, let me know what you want to see more of or less of next year, and always feel free to reach out and chat in the comments, over email, or on social media!