The Guitar Sounds New Again

Every now and then, music gets a guitar hero—a player who makes the instrument sound like something other than itself. Jeff Beck transformed it into something like the human voice singing; Jimi Hendrix, a psychedelic swirl. Fans are always looking for the next player who will make the same six-string instrument sound new again. And now Mk.gee has hit the scene.

A 29-year-old from New Jersey whose real name is Michael Gordon, Mk.gee released his debut album, Two Star & the Dream Police, in 2024. On it, his guitar sounds at various points like an orchestra, a snarling animal, a wildfire, a person shouting, and a radio playing at the bottom of the ocean. Critics declared Mk.gee a guitar hero; he played on a Bon Iver album and worked on two Justin Bieber records. This past weekend, he performed with Bieber at Coachella. Listen long enough, and you’ll realize that Mk.gee’s grungy extraterrestrial sound is everywhere.

The quest to achieve the “Mk.gee tone” spawned a series of “How Does He Make His Guitar Sound Like That?” YouTube videos; musicians compared notes on Discord servers and Reddit threads. They also did what they’ve always done—gone to concerts and looked at the stage floor to see what gear the other guy’s got—and eventually, someone posted a photo of Mk.gee’s stage setup. There on the ground, surrounded by cables, was a large black box adorned with knobs and sliders and, in a cheesy futuristic font straight out of a ’90s bowling alley, the name: VG-8.

That Reddit post was probably the most fame the Roland VG-8 (short for virtual guitar) had gotten since the ’90s. Released in 1995, the VG-8 was designed to be a toolbox filled with essentially every existing guitar sound, Chris Bristol, the former chair and CEO of Roland U.S., told me. Players could make their guitar sound like a different model, and electronically switch amplifiers, microphones, and even the acoustic environment. Push some buttons, and the guitar might sound like an Eric Clapton–style Fender Stratocaster played in a small club; push some others, and get a Jimi Hendrix–esque fuzz distortion in a stadium. The VG-8 also comes with dozens of synthy sounds and guitar effects—which, if Reddit and my ears are correct, are a big part of Mk.gee’s tone.

They were for Joni Mitchell’s too. My father, Fred Walecki, owned a musical-instrument shop, Westwood Music, where Mitchell was a customer, and he procured a VG-8 for her in 1995, when she told him that she was going to quit music. Her songbook uses more than 50 tunings, and she was tired of constantly retuning dozens of guitars on tour. Dad got her a VG-8 because with it, she could keep her guitar in standard tuning and let the device produce her more unusual ones. Because of the device, she kept touring, and the sounds of the VG-8 itself brought to her music “a freshness and distinctiveness that’s almost orchestral, it’s so rich,” she told a Billboard reporter at the time. “I wanted to blow chords up in size the way Georgia O’Keeffe blew up the flowers in her paintings, and now that’s possible.”

[Read: My father, guitar guru to the rock gods]

Other musicians followed: Reeves Gabrels used the VG-8 extensively in his work with David Bowie; Sting wrote most of his 1998 album, Brand New Day, on it. He told Revolver magazine that the device “gave me a shot in the arm about being creative on guitar.” But the VG-8 retailed for about $3,000, and “because of the price, it was a very elitist, expensive technological product,” Paul Youngblood, the former president of Roland’s U.S. BOSS division who helped develop the VG-8, told me. It also came with a 118-page document closer to a textbook than a user manual. A few influential musicians loved it for a while; then, for about 30 years, VG-8s collected dust.

Now they’re making a comeback. VG-8s were selling only occasionally, and for $200 or so, before Mk.gee released Two Star & the Dream Police, according to data provided to me by the music-gear marketplace Reverb. In the months following his debut, demand for the VG-8 rose—and so did its prices, reaching $1,200 in early 2025. Kevin Murrell, a musician who performs under the name kevm, has seen them for $2,000 and sometimes $3,000. (Accounting for inflation, that’s still roughly half the price it was in 1995.) The competition for VG-8s is steep enough that Murrell set up alerts on his phone for new listings—“Pray for me yall,” he wrote on the VG-8 channel of a Mk.gee Discord server. A caption on a Mk.gee-fan Instagram account reads, “Men want one thing and it’s a vg8.”

The VG-8’s appeal is as much about what it can’t do as what it can. Music technology in 1995 “wasn’t anywhere near what it is today,” Youngblood said. Play too hard or too loud, and the VG-8 will spit out something choppy and explosive; even though the device was advanced for the time, it still “had a lo-fi kind of sound to it.” The noise that the VG-8 makes, simply because it’s old, has become a genre in itself thanks to Mk.gee. The guitar track on Lorde’s 2025 song “Shapeshifter” sounds more like a gritty string quartet than it does a guitar—that’s Mk.gee’s touring band member Andrew Aged on the VG-8. (Mk.gee declined to comment for this article.)

Mk.gee himself plays a Fender Jaguar, which had a similar resurgence in the ’90s among players in the grunge scene, because “you could find one at a pawn shop for dirt cheap,” Cyril Nigg, the senior director of analytics at Reverb, told me. Gear revivals are part of the life cycle of music: A soon-to-be-famous player comes across forgotten equipment “and picks it up because it’s cool and inexpensive, and it ends up having a huge influence on their sound and then the culture at large,” Nigg said. In one way, though, the VG-8’s current popularity is a slightly newer phenomenon. Vintage-gear crazes are usually around analog devices, as a kind of rebellion against digitization and technology, Steve Waksman, a rock musicologist at the University of Huddersfield, told me. But the VG-8’s recent rise represents “nostalgia for a time when digital was still new.” Music sounds so digitized now that even just an earlier digital device feels like it has more character.

Roland recently came out with the VG-800, a modernized version of the VG-8. Marcus Hidalgo, a guitar player in Nashville who performs under the name toast, told me he’ll take it on tour because it’s more portable. The newer model, though, is a little too clean, a little too digital. When he saw a VG-8 for sale on Facebook Marketplace in Tampa, Florida, he texted his friend in Orlando, “Dude, I will give you all the gas money, I will give you lunch, whatever you need, if you just drive to Tampa for me and pick up this random old 90s unit from this random guy.” He prefers the VG-8 and the “weird noises” it makes. “I feel like I just started to learn how to play the guitar again,” he said. Like any tool, the VG-8 is only as good as the musician using it, but it holds the promise that there are still new sounds out there to find—even if they’re in a device from 1995.