If you've followed Shoreline Music for a while, you know that my main guitar for nearly 20 years was a Renaissance RS6, purpose-built for stage playing:  Like the Gibson Chet Atkins before it, this guitar was designed to sound as close as possible to a regular acoustic guitar, but without any of the usual liabilities—and here I mostly mean feedback—that make amplifying an acoustic so challenging.

So you can imagine my excitement when I heard that the master of acoustic amplification, Lloyd Baggs himself, had returned to his guitar-building roots to come up with the next iteration of the stage guitar. That guitar, the AEG-1 you see here, really knocks it out of the park. This takes the best Baggs pickup (the new Hi-Fi Duet) and wraps them in a gorgeous package that's easy to play, and surprisingly affordable (as in, roughly 3x the cost of the pickups alone; not too bad).