Guitar Center and Joe Bonamassa have launched Guitar Center’s Blues Masters Featuring Joe Bonamassa. The program will offer 10 musicians the chance to perform in Los Angeles backed by Bonamassa’s band; it also will provide one undiscovered blues guitarist with career-altering opportunities for development and exposure under the mentorship of one of the biggest names in blues rock.

Effects are like jellybeans. You can’t have just one — and is there really a flavor you don’t like? They’re all good. But since I must, I have to give you a list of the best flavors of effects this year. Keep in mind, if I could, I’d give you a top 20 list of my favorite stomp boxes of 2012, but I’ll limit it to five because I need to hold your attention and honestly, I’d be splitting hairs with some because there were so many good ones to pick from.

This year, with no Allmans-related albums filling up the new-releases bin, the blues, blues-rock and roots-rock vacuum has been filled — rather handily — by top Texans ZZ Top and Gary Clark Jr., habitual favorites Robert Cray and Bonnie Raitt and and the powerful, exciting trad blues of the late Michael "Iron Man" Burks, who died of a heart attack earlier this year at age 54.

Black Country Communion — the retro-rocking supergroup featuring Glenn Hughes, Joe Bonamassa, Jason Bonham and Derek Sherinian — will release their third studio album in as many years, Afterglow, October 30 via J&R Records. The powerful, riff-heavy album was predominantly written by bassist/vocalist Hughes, the band's self-declared "keeper of the keys."