Latest Features
The Lowlist: Primus' Sailing The Seas Of Cheese – a weird mix of twisted basslines, warped lyrics and general weirdness
For the second Primus album, Les Claypool decided that he was bored with the 4-string and his playing needed something to "blow it wide open". Cue 6 string fretless mania…
“Reggae carries that heavy message of roots, culture, and reality. So the bass has to be heavy and the drums have to be steady”: An interview with Aston “Family Man” Barrett
How Aston “Family Man” Barrett brought reggae bass playing to the world with Bob Marley & The Wailers
The 5 Nirvana basslines you need to hear
From Smells Like Teen Spirit to About a Girl, here are Krist Novoselic’s five greatest basslines
John Primer: "When I played with Muddy Waters, he set my amp tone up for me. I use the same settings he gave me back in the mid-'70s"
The blues veteran discusses his love of Epiphones (and why he never clicked with Strats), what he learned as a sideman to Muddy Waters and Magic Slim, and the secret to his enviable tone
Metallica’s Kirk Hammett: “With 72 Seasons, I improvised 20, 30 solos, gave them all to Lars and Greg Fidelman, and went, ‘You guys edit them!’”
Kirk Hammett and Robert Trujillo draw back the curtain on the metal album of the year: the gear shakeups, the Angus Young and Ritchie Blackmore-inspired guitar approach, and the response to critics of Kirk’s improvisational soloing approach
Lee Sklar: “If the drummer doesn’t swing – let him serve French fries in McDonald’s"
Session legend Lee Sklar was asked to name his studio pet hates: sequenced basslines, Pro-Tools and lacklustre drummers came out on top
Mike Dirnt: “Even Flea told me he wanted to play a P-Bass live”
Green Day’s Mike Dirnt reveals why so many top bass players switch back to Fender
In praise of the EBow, one of the most under-appreciated yet influential guitar tools of all time
An enduring niche product that still feels like a hidden secret after all these years, the EBow has been used on countless iconic recordings
Eric Bibb: “I find the most effective songs, the ones that resonate most with the people who hear my music, are songs that come fairly quickly”
With his new album, Ridin', Bibb paints moving, historical portraits of people on the road to a better life – with help from a six-string banjo and a host of acoustic possibilities
The British Invasion that failed: why Slade, Status Quo, the Sweet and Dr. Feelgood never conquered the USA
Slade’s Noddy Holder and Jim Lea join Status Quo’s Francis Rossi, the Sweet’s Andy Scott and Dr. Feelgood’s Wilko Johnson (in one of his final interviews) to explain what did – and didn’t – go down in the ’70s
