About Fretboard Journal

There’s no other magazine quite like this. The Fretboard Journal is an archival-quality, quarterly publication celebrating the culture of fretted musical instruments. With its classy layout, smart articles and tasteful ads, it’s been called a “guitar magazine for grown-ups.” And, in each issue you’ll learn about today’s most innovative musicians and discover the people behind your favorite gear.

Our stories are comprehensive, witty, well-researched and feature exclusive photography (and a lot of “guitar porn”). We cover acoustic and electric instruments in each issue. Ad space is limited to around 20% per issue. Many of our readers collect and save every issue of the Journal. This is not a rag you’ll want to throw away.

In addition to a stable of freelance writers, historians and photographers from around the world, our small staff consists of the following: Publisher Jason Verlinde most recently served as Managing Editor of Amazon.com’s music. Before his seven-year stint in the world of e-commerce, Verlinde was an Associate Editor at Tower Records’ Pulse! magazine. He’s written about music for numerous dailies, weeklies and national magazines, including the Seattle Times, the Seattle Weekly, Option, Raygun and others.

Editor Marc Greilsamer has been playing the guitar since the age of 6, when he first learned the chords to John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads." His first electric guitar was an Ibanez Destroyer, jet black, with three humbuckers, although he has since moved on to a 17-inch Heritage archtop. He served a long tenure as Senior Editor at Amazon.com Music, and his writing has appeared in Down Beat, Acoustic Guitar, No Depression, Blues Revue, Jazz Now, iTunes, and Stanford Magazine, among other publications.

Editor-at-Large Michael John Simmons started playing electric guitar in punk bands as a teenager before being converted to acoustic music by a rabid Django Reinhardt fan. He spent 15 years working at Gryphon Stringed Instruments in Palo Alto, Calif., where he learned more about the construction and history of ukuleles, guitars, mandolins and banjos than was good for him. Simmons was the review editor at Fiddler Magazine and a contributing editor at Acoustic Guitar. He’s the author of Taylor Guitars: 30 Years of a New American Classic; the co-author of Acoustic Guitar: An Historical Look at the Composition, Construction, and Evolution of One of the World’s Most Beloved Instruments; and the co-founder of the Ukulele Occasional. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Art director Patrick David Barber served as both Assistant Art Director and Senior Editor for legendary Seattle music magazine The Rocket in the mid-’90s. He’s since designed various printed objects for Chronicle Books, Seal Press, Northwestern University Press, the Experience Music Project, Sub Pop Records, Summershine Records, City CarShare and other fine organizations. In his former life as an experimental musician, Patrick once played a guitar with a rotary power tool, but he swears it wasn’t a collectible instrument. And he claims it sounded pretty cool.