As a guitarist, producer, composer and arranger, his sales have topped more than 100 million albums over a career now in its sixth decade, and hardly a day goes by when you don’t hear music to which he has contributed in some invaluable way, very often with the Hitmaker in hand.” As it says on Rodgers’ official website, “Many might not recognize the name, but make no mistake-the sounds of Nile Rodgers and the Hitmaker are virtually inescapable.

This is how its ubiquitous presence in pop has remained mysterious. With this guitar, Rodgers has managed to create a sound that could be called Rodgers-esque if it wasn’t for the fact that it has featured on hits for so many other people that its singular identity proves hard to trace. As Big Bill Broonzy said about the blues, “you’ve got to have it to play it,” well, maybe the same can be said when you want to make a fun record: when Nile’s playing his hitmaker, he always seems to be having fun. It’s really, really, light which allows him to play it like a toy, and maybe that’s the most important factor in its inherently fun sound. The guitar has a thin body, a thin C shaped neck, a chrome-plated pickguard which brings the whole tone down (in a purely musical sense) the neck pick up is weak, which brightens it all up.

The guitar’s particulars allowed him to develop a playing style called ‘chucking’ (which is essentially a mandolin technique transposed onto the guitar that involves muting certain chords).

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