“Every modern guitarist from Joe Bonamassa to Jared James Nichols gets the same haters who say, ‘Everything you play is pentatonic’”: Meet Eric Steckel, the high-gain firebrand painting a new shade of blues guitar

If you’ve seen recent footage of Eric Steckel in action, you’ll probably have noticed that his take on the blues is an aggressive one. It’s a new thing for him, he tells GW, having started his live career two-and-a-half decades ago at just 11 years old.

Months later, he was invited on stage to join John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, who ended up asking him to guest on their next album. It’s the more fiery fretwork on Steckel’s newest recordings, however, that have seen him build a formidable fanbase as a solo artist.

“Getting heavier brought a ton of people into my realm,” he says. “It started well because my dad convinced me to do a live album when I was 11, which was a great idea because you can’t fake something like that. Things slowed down for a while, but since the pandemic, I’ve seen a lot of growth with some of my videos going viral.”

It was the music of Gary Moore that convinced Steckel to play harder and with more gain. Given the Belfast titan’s background in Skid Row and Thin Lizzy, he certainly had a way of intensifying the blues with a surplus of potency and authority.

“Gary sits at the top of the pyramid,” Steckel says. “His style was like, ‘Fuck the rules, I’m going to play what I like!’ If people didn’t care for it, too bad for them. I wasn’t always like that myself.

“My Polyphonic Prayer album from 2018 is when I decided to go high gain. I remember the engineer asking me, ‘Are you really going to use that Diezel Herbert overdrive on your blues record?’”

It was around this time that Steckel invested in his first Knaggs six-string. The company was so impressed by online footage of his playing that he was soon approached to collaborate on a signature model, which also led to the manufacture of his own amp by Italian specialists Mezzabara.

Steckel, who has a new label deal for an album due later this year, is the first to admit that it all played out like any guitarist’s dream scenario.

“My signatures have that Tele/Paul singlecut thing going on,” he says. “My pedalboard is just a Boss DD-200, CAE wah and ISP Decimator. That’s all I need. I’m just playing blues, but I throw in extra notes to spice it up.

“Every modern guitarist from Joe Bonamassa to Jared James Nichols gets the same kind of haters who say, ‘Everything you play is pentatonic.’ But in reality we aren’t just playing five notes. People are so used to hearing Dorian and Mixolydian in blues; they’ve become the new pentatonic.”

• Eric Steckel tours Europe in April. See Eric Steckel Tour for dates and ticket details.
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.