Features archive
June 2025
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50 articles
- June 21
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- “Greg had this ‘60s P-Bass with a nut that had been cut so many times that the strings were rattling around, and a pickup that couldn't really handle how hard I played”: Alex ‘V-Man’ Venturella on tone, technique – and how he nailed his Slipknot audition
- “He could take a rock tune like Fleetwood Mac's Black Magic Woman and transform it by adding a hint of salsa clave rhythm”: Remembering Peter Green and Carlos Santana’s supernatural jam at the 1998 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Awards
- June 20
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- “We all have easy access to the parts needed to make a pickup… You certainly don’t have to start like Seymour Duncan did with a record player’s turntable”: Why more guitar builders are making their own pickups
- “Rates are coming back up, rents very rarely go down, and suppliers are in straitened circumstances”: Is crowdfunding the answer to ensuring guitar stores’ survival? One family-run business has launched an innovative campaign to keep its stores alive
- June 19
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- “If you stick a modern production tube in an old vintage amp, you may be a little disappointed with the tone”: Do vintage NOS tubes really sound better? Here’s what you need to know
- “I’ve seen it with my own eyes and heard it with my own ears, some people sound better than all of us playing a cheap Squier Stratocaster”: Charlie Starr on guitar collecting, his vintage Juniors theory – and the time he was gifted a ’58 Les Paul
- “Tubes are overrated. And you never know what you’re going to get overseas. I can’t play through a Marshall JCM – they sound like crap”: Sludge titans Thou have never been afraid to tear up the rulebook – but they do need a spreadsheet for their tunings
- “People tell me that I invented that rhythmic gallop – but I just brought it to the fore”: Iron Maiden remain one of most domineering forces in heavy metal – and bassist Steve Harris has led the charge
- June 18
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- How Ibanez flipped the script for Japanese electrics with the Iceman – a flavor of original cool that Steve Miller and Paul Stanley of Kiss were waiting for
- “He needed nobody; Jerry was his only customer”: Tom Lieber apprenticed to Jerry Garcia's guitar builder Doug Irwin in the ’70s – now he’s raising the ’Dead once again
- He played a guitar held together by a belt, was admired by Keith Richards, covered by Springsteen and described by Bert Jansch as “the most underrated guitarist ever” – the life and times of a beatnik folk pioneer
- “I used to ask, ‘What was Hendrix really like?’ All Noel would say was, ‘He was a black blues player who took a lot of acid’”: Eric Bell tells the tale of how he joined forces with Noel Redding, after leaving Thin Lizzy as a self-confessed ‘basket-case’
- June 17
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- “You’re talking about somebody who’s touched by the hand of God. You can’t even fathom it”: Paul Gilbert worshipped his playing, he tutored Luther Dickinson, and he remains, decades after his death, perhaps the greatest little-known guitarist of all time
- “Siouxsie tried out her newfound kung fu on me and barged me in the back. That was enough – I walked out and Kenny came with me”: A brawl ended John McKay’s tenure with Siouxsie and the Banshees, but not his influence on a generation of players
- “The guitar that I used on my first album cost me $20, and I got a good sound out of it. It's what you put into the guitar that counts”: He collaborated with Johnny Winter, and was covered by Phish. Son Seals is essential listening for any blues guitarist
- “Most of these dudes don’t fall quite as far as I did. They don’t develop a meth habit and end up shoveling dog s**t for $6 an hour”: Gary Holt on his thrash metal redemption story, balancing Exodus and Slayer – and why even Hetfield cheats on downpicking
- “I would listen to Eric, but my responsibility was with the rhythm section”: You know the tune, but maybe not the player – how an unassuming bassist carved out a spot in music history on Derek & the Dominos’ Layla
- June 16
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- “The good news is it was recorded – you can go online and see it. The bad news is that’s because someone stole all the master tapes”: Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter on his supergroup with Joe Walsh, sessions with Joni Mitchell and the voices of Albert King
- “There were all these killer players. I was shy and kind of sat there, but Etta said, ‘I like that little white kid’”: Brian Ray wowed Etta James at 18, lost-out on Shakira and landed his gig with Paul McCartney – after auditioning at the Super Bowl
- 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
- “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
