Features archive
June 2025
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32 articles
- June 14
- June 13
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- “I had three days to learn the entire set… One rehearsal. I met Pink at soundcheck right before the first show then I’m playing in front of thousands and thousands of people”: Eva Gardner on trial by fire with pop megastars and returning to the Mars Volta
- "I don’t care what anyone says, what Paul Reed Smith builds today is what Doug and I made back then”: From the Tiger to the Wolf, meet the guitar maker who bought Jerry Garcia’s wildest designs to life
- “Revelator is chock full of riffs. The chorus is just like, ‘What if a war metal band had Portishead chords?’”: Deafheaven’s Shiv Mehra and Kerry McCoy on atonality vs the ethereal, pedalboard thrill-seeking and their return to super-heavy guitars
- June 12
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- “I have the first guitar I ever owned – my parents bought it for me in 1967 for $57. It’s a cheap Japanese guitar that I had refinished”: Alex Lifeson on Envy of None’s evolution, moving on post-Rush, and jams and coffee with Geddy Lee
- “When the Ozzy thing came around I was so excited, but also doubting myself. Duff McKagan and Chad Smith were like, ‘You can do it. It's everything you love’”: From Pearl Jam to the Stones, the stars have aligned for Andrew Watt – but he owes it to Ozzy
- June 11
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- “The catalog proclaimed the instrument to be: ‘For the young artist with a flair for showmanship!’”: Guild Starfires appeared in the hands of The Kinks’ Dave Davies and Jerry Garcia, and shook up the electric guitar scene in the early '60s
- “Can you imagine Kramer being more successful than Fender and Gibson? It sounds crazy, but Eddie Van Halen made that happen”: H.E.A.T’s Dave Dalone on taking rock back to the future, learning from Gary Moore, and why he's a Kramer man through and through
- “I went to Chuck Schuldiner’s house and auditioned. I’m sure I played some of it wrong, but I guess it was close enough!” How Bobby Koelble brought his jazz chops to Death – and made one of the greatest metal albums of all time
- June 10
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- “A lot of people don’t give these guitars any credit because of the short scale and narrow neck... It’s one of the nicest-sounding guitars for jazz”: Debuting in 1955, the Gibson Byrdland was the user-friendly archtop players were waiting for
- “There is a lot of jargon, much of it in Spanish, and an entire vocabulary of new techniques to learn”: Interested in nylon-string guitar but don’t know where to start? Three experts give an introductory guide for the perplexed
- “We worked at Guitar Center – There’s an air about people who tell you about their glory days. They’ll play the most expensive guitar for hours, then leave without buying anything!”: The Callous Daoboys on calculated chaos, and their secret “horrid” pedal
- June 9
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- “Rory Gallagher and many more legends have relied on this useful effect for just this reason – so don’t be put off by the name”: 20 ways to get more from your pedals
- “To my utter horror I heard myself noodling all the way through our chat. On Brian’s own guitar!”: The first time I met Brian May – and we were both wearing clogs
- “When I saw Meat Loaf, I said, ‘This is a spoof of Bruce Springsteen, and that’s why I’m doing it’”: Todd Rundgren produced The Band, Grand Funk Railroad and The New York Dolls – but his most successful collaboration was born to poke fun
- June 8
- June 7
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- Their ranks have included blues-rock luminary Bernie Marsden, shred god Steve Vai, and journeyman virtuoso Reb Beach – here's the ultimate guide to the A-team guitarists that have shaped Whitesnake's blockbuster, stadium-conquering sound
- “With The Beatles there are two periods: the early albums, where they would recreate what they did live – and the post-’65 overdub era”: Was Paul McCartney singing while he recorded this bass track? There are audible cues in the final mix
- June 6
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- “I believe Tommy had lots of songs which were exactly what the band needed. And his style was more akin to Ritchie’s than mine”: Clem Clempson on the return of Colosseum, jamming with Jack Bruce, and that time he auditioned for Deep Purple
- “Freddie is always with me. He was like a brother, and now I have a Mercury on my guitar, too, which makes me very happy”: Brian May on how astronomy, the Everly Brothers and Freddie Mercury influenced the design of his Gibson SJ-200 12-string
- June 5
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- “It took me a few years to figure out that if you’re going to play Fender guitars, you play with Fender amps”: Ryan Hedgecock stuck to his own creative path, even when Lone Justice were torn apart
- “We had four guitarists, which was unheard of at that point”: Johnny Hickman on his pre-Cracker band, the Unforgiven, revisiting the Cracker catalog, and big, bone-headed riffs
- “He says, ‘Isn’t this a great guitar? I bought it off some guy on the street for 350 bucks’”: How Lita Ford reacted when she came face-to-face with her stolen B.C. Rich Mockingbird – and the only amp she ever returned
- June 4
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- “It felt like a boot camp... It tested what we were made of”: Fresh off of Jared Dines' ‘instant band’ documentary, Musician Mansion, Chena is ready to introduce her intricate, highly melodic playing to the world
- “I love my Strat; I’m a Strat guy through and through, but I just needed a guitar with humbuckers”: Cory Wong on the making of his signature StingRay and how Vulfpeck just, y’know, made an album during a show
- “The only gear I brought was a red Hamer prototype. That guitar is magical. I used it on Robert Palmer’s Addicted to Love, David Lee Roth’s California Girls and with Mick Jagger”: Eddie Martinez explains how he helped Run-D.M.C. bring rock to hip hop
- June 3
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- “People are infatuated with heavy solidbody guitars for no real reason. It was a fad, a myth; the more mass, the less it can vibrate and the more the strings have to vibrate, which may be true”: How Rick Derringer helped create the B.C. Rich Stealth
- “Any distortion came from the amp itself. It was considered a rather clean sound compared to other punk bands”: Joe Genaro on overhead conversations, ad-libs, and making it catchy and funny on the Dead Milkmen’s classic punk debut
- June 2
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- “With this pedal, you’re practically getting a Gilmour tone cheat-code”: From totally unique synth pedals to signature collabs and game-changing takes on the classics, here are our 30 favorite guitar pedals from the past 5 years
- “In all the years I’d played with Albert, I’d always wanted to hear him play something in a minor key – and he smoked it!”: Robert Cray tells the story behind the greatest all-star blues team-up of the ‘80s
- “I had this little house in California, back in 1984. My Marshall stacks and a reel-to-reel were set up in the living room. I remember getting my drummer to have a jam at 3am”: From his live show, to cutting classics, Yngwie Malmsteen lives off-the-cuff
- June 1
