Mike Alleyne is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Recording Industry at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) and a visiting professor at the Pop Akademie in Germany. His work focuses on aspects of popular music history and music production, with publications including Popular Music & Society, Rock Music Studies, Ethnomusicology Forum, American Music Perspectives, and Billboard magazine. His books include the coedited award-nominated anthology, Analyzing Recorded Music: Collected Perspectives on Popular Music Tracks (2023), The Essential Hendrix (2020), the coedited Prince and Popular Music (2020), and The Encyclopedia of Reggae (2012). He also contributed liner notes to the Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap (2021). His book chapters are included in Sound and Music in Film and Visual Media: An Overview (2009), The Bloomsbury Handbook of Music Production (2020), The Beatles and Humour (2023), and Popular Music Autobiographies: Rereading Musicians and Their Audiences (2024).

Michael Astley-Brown is Editor-in-Chief of GuitarWorld.com. He has a master’s degree in journalism from Cardiff University, and over a decade’s experience writing and editing for guitar publications including MusicRadar, Total Guitar, and Guitarist, as well as twenty years of recording and live experience in original and function bands. During his career, he has interviewed the likes of John Frusciante, Chris Cornell, Tom Morello, Matt Bellamy, Kirk Hammett, Jerry Cantrell, Joe Satriani, Tom DeLonge, Ed O’Brien, Polyphia, Tosin Abasi, Yvette Young, and many more. In his free time, you’ll find him making progressive instrumental rock under the nom de plume Maebe.

Samantha Bennett is a sound recordist, guitarist, and academic from London, UK, Chair of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM), and Professor of Music at the Australian National University. She is currently working as a research assistant for Muruwari man Roy Barker Jr. on his Indigenous Languages and Arts funded project “Muruwari Ngulli Yaandibu” (Muruwari We Speak). Her coauthored book with Eliot Bates (CUNY), Gear: Cultures of Audio and Music Technologies, is forthcoming from The MIT Press (2024), and a short-form monograph, Secrets and Revelation in Music and Audio Technology Culture, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press (2024). She is the author of two further monographs, Modern Records, Maverick Methods and Peepshow (both Bloomsbury Academic). Prior to her work in academia, Samantha worked extensively as an audio engineer in multiple London recording studios and is a former Director of the UK’s Music Producer’s Guild.

Nathaniel Braddock received an MA from Tufts University and is a PhD candidate at Boston University. His work focuses on guitars and guitar musics in Africa and elsewhere. He leads the Occidental Brothers Dance Band Int’l and Trio Mokili and tours internationally, performing at the Montreal Jazz Festival, Pitchfork Festival, Lincoln Center, and many other festivals. He was on faculty at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music for ten years and has collaborated in teaching and performance with musicians from Congo, Ghana, Mali, Mozambique, Senegal, Uganda, Zambia, and elsewhere.

Erik Broess is a guitarist and musicologist whose research in popular music studies encompasses music technology, material culture, and sound studies. He is currently working on a book project about electric guitar gear and tone. He earned his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania with a dissertation entitled, “Unobtainable: Electric Guitar Gear & The Mythology of Tone,” which follows the various instruments, building materials, and scenes of making which electric guitarists understand to be sources of “good tone.” For the 2023–2024 academic year, he is Visiting Assistant Professor in the School of Music at Boston University.

Matt Brounley is a musicologist who specializes in American popular music studies. He received his PhD in 2022 from Stony Brook University and is currently an adjunct associate professor at The Roc Nation School of Music, Sports, and Entertainment at Long Island University, Brooklyn. His dissertation work is based on ethnographic projects at guitar shops to critically examine how musicians ascribe marketplace value to timbre. His newest project engages with Jimmy Buffett’s billion-dollar brand to explore the monetization of escapism and memory in rock music economies. He lives in Brooklyn, NY, with his wife Jessica.

Pamela Cole is the co-owner of Fanny’s House of Music in Nashville, TN. After graduating from Belmont University in 1986 with a degree in music business, she held positions across the music industry including in publishing, A&R, and artist management. In 2009, alongside accomplished professional bassist Leigh Maples, she started Fanny’s with the goal of creating a music store where everyone could be comfortable purchasing or learning an instrument, regardless of gender, age, or experience level.

John Covach is Director of the University of Rochester Institute for Popular Music and Professor of Theory at the Eastman School of Music. He has published dozens of articles on topics dealing with popular music, twelve-tone music, and the philosophy and aesthetics of music. He is the principal author of the college textbook What’s That Sound? An Introduction to Rock Music (W.W. Norton) and has coedited Understanding Rock (Oxford University Press), American Rock and the Classical Tradition (Routledge), Traditions, Institution, and American Popular Music (Routledge), Sounding Out Pop (University of Michigan Press), and The Cambridge Companion to the Rolling Stones (Cambridge University Press). He is editor of the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Prog (Cambridge University Press).

Kyle Devine works in the Department of Musicology and the Center for Environmental Humanities at the University of Oslo, Norway. His publications include Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music and Audible Infrastructures: Music, Sound, Media, which have received awards from the International Association for the Study of Popular Music and the Society for Ethnomusicology. His next book is about how the musical world is responding to the climate crisis. It will be published by Verso in 2025.

Sue Foley spent her early childhood in Canada, mesmerized by her father’s guitar, and started her professional career at sixteen. By twenty-one, she was living in Austin, TX, and recording for Antone’s—the esteemed blues label and historic nightclub that helped launch the career of Stevie Ray Vaughan. Foley has recorded fourteen albums and has worked alongside legends such as B.B. King, Buddy Guy, and Jimmie Vaughan. Her achievements include a Juno Award (Canadian Grammy), Three Blues Music Awards, and numerous other accolades. In 2001, Foley began working on Guitar Woman, a book inspired by her extensive interviews with leading female guitarists from around the world. The book will be complemented by her album, One Guitar Woman, paying tribute to pioneering female guitarists. She holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from York University in Toronto, Canada.

Chris Gibson is a Sydney-based musician, author, and professor of geography at the University of Wollongong, Australia. His book with Andrew Warren, The Guitar: Tracing the Grain Back to the Tree (University of Chicago Press, 2021), won the International Association for the Study of Popular Music’s Woody Guthrie Award for outstanding book.

Philippe Gonin is a senior lecturer at the University of Burgundy, France. His research focuses on the creative process, analysis, and reception of rock, jazz, and film music. He has written books and papers on artists such as Magma, Robert Wyatt, The Cure, Pink Floyd, John Williams, Antoine Duhamel, the Cartoons. He is also a guitarist and composer. His latest work, entitled “A Floyd Chamber Concerto,” is available at https://philippegonin.bandcamp.com/releases.

Jan-Peter Herbst is Reader (Associate Professor) in Music Production at the University of Huddersfield. His background as a guitarist and producer of rock and metal music has led him to specialize in the study of electric guitar playing and rock/metal music production, on which he has published widely. Some of his major guitar-related publications include the books The Guitar Distortion in Rock Music: A Study on Playability and Aesthetics (LIT, 2016, in German), Gear Acquisition Syndrome: Consumption of Instruments and Technology in Popular Music (University of Huddersfield Press, 2021, with Jonas Menze), and Rock Guitar Virtuosos: Advances in Electric Guitar Playing, Technology and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2023, with Alexander Paul Vallejo). He leads several large research projects, including “Heaviness in Metal Music Production” (HiMMP) and “Songwriting Camps in the 21st Century” (SC21). Herbst is also the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Metal Music (2023).

Matthew W. Hill is the Gretsch curator of the Fred and Dinah Gretsch Collection of Musical Instruments at Georgia Southern University. He holds a BMus (Hons, 1st class) in composition from Edinburgh Napier University and a MMus and PhD in organology (the study of musical instruments) from the University of Edinburgh. A founding curator of the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix (Arizona), he is also curator of the John C. Hall collection of musical instruments in Santa Ana, California, and a former curator at the Bluegrass Hall of Fame and Museum. Besides academic pursuits, he has enjoyed a varied musical life that includes being a Nashville session player, art music composer, double bassist, guitarist, and enthusiastic advocate of the ukulele.

Daniel Lee discovered, after years of miserable piano lessons, his passion when he first heard jazz guitarists Emily Remler and George Benson playing the blues. He studied at Adelaide University’s Elder Conservatorium and has since performed in a wide variety of jazz, rock, and blues ensembles in all manners of settings. A keen educator, he earned a master’s degree in international education and followed with a doctorate in music education where his research examined cultural consequences of twenty-first-century music education practices. He is now serving as a post-doctoral researcher in the University of Adelaide’s Unit for Digitial Learning and Society, and continues to perform as a professional guitarist.

Kate Lewis is a multi-genre guitarist, educator, and researcher. She currently holds the position of Senior Lecturer and Head of Music at Brunel University, London. In addition to being an award-winning classical guitarist, Kate has performed throughout the United States and Europe with multiple pop-rock groups. Her research interests include the history and analysis of the guitar in popular music and issues of gender surrounding the instrument.

Mashadi Matabane is an independent scholar. Currently, she is writing Axe to Grind: A Brazen History of Black Women on Guitar, a book-length manuscript. Matabane earned a PhD in American Studies from Emory University, holds a master’s degree from New York University and a bachelor’s degree from Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. She teaches US history at The Paideia School in Atlanta.

Rebekah E. Moore is Assistant Professor of Music and Faculty Scholar for the Institute for Health Equity and Social Justice Research at Northeastern University. She has published articles in Asian Music, Asian Journal of Communication, Collaborative Anthropologies, and Inside Indonesia, and her work appears in the 2023 anthologies At the Crossroads of Music and Social Justice and Sounding Out the State of Indonesian Music. Her current monograph traces Indonesia’s long history of cultural and environmental extractivism through the music and activism of a Balinese rock band called Navicula. Her current research focuses on how engaging Black artists in public health research and interventions can reduce the negative health impacts of anti-Black racism in intensely segregated cities, and she is also investigating pathways toward expanding high school music education access in disinvested urban neighborhoods.

Ulrich Teuffel has been building guitars since 1988. His models birdfish, tesla, niwa, and antonio can be found in various museums and collections, as well as in the hands of musicians such as David Torn, Kirk Hammett, Billy Gibbons, Ludwig Göransson, and Hans Zimmer.

Alexander Paul Vallejo graduated from the University of Huddersfield with a BMus in Popular Music and an MA by Research in Music with the thesis “Development, Mechanics and Compositional Uses of Virtuosic Electric Guitar Techniques.” He is in the final year of his PhD research at the University of Huddersfield’s music department, studying genre, division, and elitism in contemporary guitar culture. Vallejo is currently developing his career as a guitarist and composer in the virtuosic guitar scene. As an active observer of the guitar scene who has immersed himself in the culture for the past few years, he is researching how current guitarists gain a following through social media and achieve a livable income through this line of work.

Steve Waksman is Elsie Irwin Sweeney Professor of Music at Smith College. His publications include the books Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience (Harvard University Press, 1999), and This Ain’t the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk (University of California Press, 2009), which was awarded the Woody Guthrie Prize by the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, US Chapter. With Reebee Garofalo, he is the coauthor of the sixth edition of the rock history textbook, Rockin’ Out: Popular Music in the U.S.A. (2014), and with Andy Bennett, he coedited the SAGE Handbook of Popular Music (2015). His essays have appeared in such collections as Guitar Cultures, The Cambridge Companion to the Guitar, and The Relentless Pursuit of Tone: Timbre and Popular Music. His latest book is Live Music in America: A History from Jenny Lind to Beyoncé (Oxford University Press, 2022).

Andrew Warren is Senior Lecturer in Geography at the University of Wollongong, Australia. His books include The Guitar: Tracing the Grain Back to the Tree (University of Chicago Press) and Surfing Places, Surfboard Makers: Craft, Creativity and Cultural Heritage in Hawai’i, California and Australia (2014, University of Hawai’i Press), both of which were cowritten with Chris Gibson.

Brian F. Wright is Assistant Professor of Music History at the University of North Texas, where he teaches courses on American popular music. He holds a PhD in Historical Musicology from Case Western Reserve University and is a former research assistant for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Library and Archive. He is the author of The Bastard Instrument: A Cultural History of the Electric Bass. His work has also appeared in the Journal of the Society for American Music, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and Jazz Perspectives, as well as in Bass Player and Vintage Guitar Magazine.

Azmyl Yunor is a Malaysian singer-songwriter who adheres to the ‘three chords & the truth’ school of songwriting. A founding member of several seminal underground bands since the late 1990s, he prefers to navigate along the outer margins of the arts scene and hone his craft on his own terms with a very distinctive singular vision and wit based on principles he believes in. His most recent bilingual album, John Bangi Blues (2020), has been praised by fans and critics alike for “its raw power and lyrics that shuffle between satirical humor and a stiff middle finger” (NME 2020).