They say the best way to improve as a guitar player is is to record yourself and listen to it back. But it’s not easy. In fact, it can be all kinds of horrible.

It used to be worse. At least nowadays we can quickly record something, apply a little bit of digital voodoo to it, a nice IR, some reverb for space, gussy it up and make it sound all right, even if the playing stinks.

But if you’re at the stage where you are listening to yourself back and thinking of sticking your electric guitar on Reverb and giving up, then just take a moment, because you’re not alone. Even the pros feel this way from time to time.

Chet Atkins is one of the greatest to ever have done it – hero and mentor to Tommy Emmanuel, inspiration to a generation and all-round virtuoso. They called him ‘Mister Guitar’ – he’s the one and only Country Gentleman – and yet Atkins would hear himself play and his heart would sink.

Speaking to Guitar World in March 1986, he admitted that his playing made him feel sick. “I never like what I play – especially the old things,” he said, and there was one incident that especially stuck out in his mind.

“I remember going down the road one day and I heard a tune on the radio called The Love Bug Crawl,” said Atkins. “I can’t even remember the artist, but I was listening to this thing and I said, ‘Boy, that sounds good. Wonder who that guitar player is?’ Then suddenly I realized it was me and it sounded terrible.”

Atkins would have been forgiven for the lapse. The Love Bug Crawl was an old rockabilly standard from 1957, recorded by Jimmy Edwards. Atkins was just a young buck when he sat in on the session, alongside the likes of Floyd Cramer and Buddy Harman, aka the Nashville A-Team.

But then again, Atkins would later sign Edwards to RCA on a one-year deal, and got him to track y Otis Blackwell’s Your Love is a Good Love. So there’s that.

But anyway, the point is, our perception of our playing is now how others hear us. When Atkins was listening to this long-forgotten recording, it sounded good. It still sounds good.

But there’s a psychological switch that’s flipped when we know that’s us. For Atkins, it was a particularly violent and visceral reaction.

“It’s always that way when I hear myself,” he said. “If I don’t know it’s me I think, ‘Damn, that’s pretty good. Wonder who that is?’ Then when I realize it’s me I kind of want to throw up.”

The moral of the story? There’s a fine line between applying a critical ear to your playing and to trashing it completely, and if the great Chet Atkins feels like this, what hope do the rest of us mortals have?

Last year, Tommy Emmanuel – one of Atkins' proteges – revealed how he first met his biggest guitar hero by knocking on his door unannounced.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a pop or rock guitarist who came of age in the ’60s who isn’t a fan of the Beatles. Carlos Alomar is no different. This is why, despite years spent working with James Brown, Chuck Berry, David Bowie, Brian Eno, Iggy Pop and Mick Jagger, Alomar was slack-jawed at the chance to work with Paul McCartney on his 1986 record, Press to Play.

“It was truly a wish-come-true moment,” Alomar says. “I’m not sure why Paul liked my playing, but maybe my success with David Bowie, Iggy Pop, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Duran Duran and others might have tickled his curiosity.”

This seems a good time to remind you that, in 1976, Alomar actually co-wrote a song – Fame from Bowie’s Young Americans – with Lennon, putting him in rare company with McCartney. And yes, Alomar also shares that co-write with Bowie.

Regardless of how or why it happened, Alomar lent his unique brand of rhythm playing (and a bit of lead) to McCartney tracks like Press, Pretty Little Head, Stranglehold and Only Love Remains, all of which turned 40 years old this year.

“The fact that I was included with such notable musicians who have played with Paul was awesome in itself,” Alomar says. “Paul was gracious enough to allow me to always complete my musical ideas, and then he’d simply say, ‘Great! Let’s try another song.’ Many of my tracks were first takes.”

While he and McCartney got on well during the Press to Play sessions, they haven’t seen one another since. “I departed the same way I arrived,” Alomar says. “Happy and knowing I had just served Sir Paul McCartney. Paul, in turn, met a Puerto Rican Buddhist rocker who satisfied his curiosity and gave him stories to remember!”

What led to your being called to play on Press to Play?

Like most musicians, it always starts with a call to action. I got a call from producer Hugh Padgham, whom I’d met when he produced David Bowie’s Tonight [1984]. He was now producing Paul and wanted to know my availability.

Paul had laid down some guitar parts, but Hugh felt that a “finishing” session with me would complete the tracks. At first, the answer from Paul was, “No.” But a little later, I received a call confirming that, on second thought, Paul thought it was a good idea. So off I went to meet my second Beatle.

What was it like meeting Paul?

It was unreal to meet another Beatle. [Laughs] I’d already worked with John and Yoko, and my wife, vocalist Robin Clark, worked on Ringo Starr’s 1977 album, Ringo the 4th. So – to us – George Harrison was the only missing member.

Paul is known to be pretty chill. What was he like?

He was the most regular guy I’d ever met. Almost a farmer, the kind of guy that frequents the local pub, no pretense whatsoever… a lovely chap. And I was in a friendly “home” environment as well. His wife, Linda, was there; his daughters, they were all there! But here’s my real first impression.

When I arrived, Paul invited me up to his study. There, a comfortable high‑back velvety chair invited me into its warm embrace. We talked. Paul was super-intrigued by my stories about being on the R&B chitlin’ circuit tours. We talked about Bowie, James Brown, the Apollo Theater and Harlem. Quite honestly, my curiosity as a Buddhist prompted me to ask about the Beatles and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. That time in their career had always intrigued me.

While listening, Paul turned his back to me slightly to get something. What emerged was a perfectly rolled Jamaican “carrot” ganja joint. [Laugh] We talked and talked, and time stood still. Finally, I said, “Maybe I should listen to some of the tracks before it gets too late – or we get too wasted.” That’s when we headed down to his Hogg Hill Mill studio [in East Sussex, England].

What was Hogg Hill Mill like, and what gear did you bring in?

I brought my favorite Strat, thinking it might be stylish enough to create whatever I’d need. And yes, maybe I’d get an offer to try one from the studio. But it wasn’t really a plan… more like a wish. [Laughs] But since you asked, I’ll tell you this. While maneuvering the corridors to his studio, we came across an enclosed glass studio room.

My gait stalled while the vision of what lay within froze me instantly. I felt a slight lip-drool. I might have slobbered a little as I stood in front of all this vintage Beatles gear. I’m talking about his Hofner basses, Vox amps, Mellotrons and a Beatles-logo drum kit.

There was so much gear that it was impossible to take it all in. It was too much for any musician to endure for too long, so I followed them down the hall, promising myself the luxury of returning to this sacred crypt once again.

Paul and Hugh Padgham produced Press to Play. How did they impact your guitar playing?

Hugh is one of my favorite engineers. He mixes while we’re listening. That’s really cool. So when I play anything, it already sounds like it’s mixed into the record. And he records everything, regardless of what you think. This methodology helps capture great bits of music when you least expect it.

What do you remember about putting together Press and Pretty Little Head?

We finally got to the studio, and Hugh started playing tracks for me. First song, I said, “Nah! That sounds finished. Next...” And another, I said, “That one’s cool… “Nice guitar work…” Finally, they played Press. When I listen to the tracks, I try to hear this other [hypothetical] guitar player, not me, playing something, you know?

I kinda hear it, and then I think, “Damn! Can I play that? So I look over at Hugh and tell him that I hear this digital delay effect on my guitar, and we started setting the timing.

Little did I know, he was recording everything. It appears as the intro to the song before the count-in, which was brilliant. After that, I just used classic call-and-response for the rest of the song. And then it happened – the moment every guitar player wants to hear: “Would you like to take a solo?” I was in heaven. Somebody pinch me! [Laughs] Incidentally, we used the same digital delay effect on Pretty Little Head in the Ursa Major section of the song.

What are your memories of recording Stranglehold and Only Love Remains?

Not much, because there are some songs that you have to lay in the cut, you know? Like, no signature guitar lines, just accompaniment and tone. For example, when you have a string section playing syncopated stabs and other rhythmic parts, it’s best to just play a little acoustic for color. For horns, it’s best to follow or get out of the way. Sometimes less is more; don’t disturb the groove.

Pete Townshend played on Angry. Were you in the studio with him?

No. Regrettably, sometimes we are called upon to do overdubs and not the basic rhythm tracks. To that end, I’ve not met many iconic guitarists that I’ve shared credits with. I guess the wish list continues.

The first time you heard Press to Play, what were your thoughts?

I loved it – especially the intro to Press. And I liked that it was the album’s sort-of title track. Wish-list – check! Also, remember that the final vocals, some of those spoken voices and other tidbits weren’t there when I laid down my tracks. I heard it all for the first time just like everyone else. I love being a fan.

40 years later, what does Press to Play mean to you?

It was a pleasure working with Hugh Padgham again, and we’re still connected. As for Paul, he and I had a large time. We raised our glasses high, visited Jamaica on the down-low, flew kites on the hilltop and broke bread together as family. Who could ask for more? Although we haven’t spoken since, I can always visit him in the inner chambers of my heart.

• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

Anyone looking for a natural inheritor to Bert Jansch and John Renbourn should pay serious attention to rising Scottish guitarist Sam Grassie.

Grassie grew up around traditional folk music in Glasgow, and his deft, melodic guitar playing was shaped by the influence of British players including Dick Gaughan, Dave Goulder and the aforementioned Jansch and Renbourn. His blending of folk and trad, with complex yet expressive playing, has seen him share stages with Robert Plant, Martin Carthy and Gwenifer Raymond.

Having played with Scottish trio Avocet, Grassie moved to London in 2022 and immersed himself in the folk community, playing in ‘travelling folk club’ Les Caravanes and London collective The Broadside Hacks.

He has now released his solo debut, Where Two Hawks Fly, 11 tracks featuring both traditional and Grassie-penned arrangements, with a host of collaborators. When he spoke to Guitarist, Sam seemed happy with how the guest-filled LP translated to the live stage.

“I toured with Alfie Jones [grandson of Wizz Jones] on electric guitar, which really works well depending on the venue,” Grassie explains.

“It was great to have lots of people involved on the album, but the nice thing about acoustic guitar playing in the vein that we’re chasing is that if you’re on stage, feeling calm and your fingers are working, the guitar can do a fair amount of talking.

You’ve played in various line-ups on the British folk scene. Why did now feel like the right time for your solo debut?

I love collaborating and probably never want to do this alone, but I’ve wanted to create my own album for as long as I’ve been recording anything. When Avocet came to an end, I tried to work on my singing, but chronic fatigue meant I’d get dizzy. It was hard to practise as I was so ill. In some ways it happened as early as it could.

My Sandwood EP [2024] did better than I expected, so I wanted to build on that. Luckily, on that day I actually managed to play in time! Going from trying to play technical guitar that was above me and too fast, I realised that all the greats are just playing in time, and that’s why it sounds so bloody good.

I sent the tune that became Abhail’s to Alfie Jones [Wizz Jones’s grandson]. He added some lap steel, and that little bit of alchemy on a bare guitar track made me think that could be the sound of the album. I went for it and ran off to Berlin to record it as quickly as I could.

What did you learn from the recording process?

There was enough material to create something fairly coherent, but I was a bit slapdash when I went to Berlin and the guitar I recorded on was a nightmare! My friend Herbie Loening, who played double bass on the record, is a trad strummer and lent me his Yamaha FG-110: small body, high action, not good for fingerstyle.

There’s so much reverb on the track [so] the guitar sounded like a metallic Transformer walking down the road!

[Another thing I learned was] just be way more ready than you think you need to be. Because every time you sit down, you make loads of mistakes and you’ve spent £300 per day!

You often cite Bert Jansch as a major influence. How has your relationship to his music changed over time?

“I like that it hasn’t [changed]; it’s a constant. The deeper I go, the more admiration I have. It’s an asymptotical relationship – I’ll never be able to do what he was doing, but it’s that freedom I chase, his dexterity and fluidity. When I started getting into guitar and writing my own stuff, I thought he was the GOAT, and if I could ever do anything like that it’d be fun.

I still come back to tunes like Come Back Baby from the really early days and just think, “Fuck, that’s it.” For me, it doesn’t really get any better – it’s raw, rugged, gritty, stubborn, dark but free.

Production-wise, it’s interesting to see how the pressures of being a proper recording artist affected his later work, but I’m lucky that I’m unsuccessful enough that those pressures won’t be on me! But he always stayed true to what he wanted to do.

Your 2025 EP, Jarabi, Winter Has Gone, blended Celtic trad with Malian blues. What drew you to that crossover?

What’s cool in London at the moment is quite gritty, while in Scotland, everyone is playing super-fast and technical; it’s light and breezy with electric guitar, synth and a token gesture towards dance music with the thumping bass. But that lighter aspect isn’t raw. So there’s dark folk that’s raw, but the light folk is very clean, and something that’s trying to be light doesn’t need to be clean.

Martyn Bennett took Scottish trad music and fused it with drum and bass and jungle – his albums will knock your socks off – so when all these bands take light folk and add all this soft stuff, it’s like, “Surely, you’re all aware of this guy?” He managed that, and we should all be striving for the same.

I came across Malian music by attending gigs at the Fringe, like banjo player Jayme Stone with kora player Mansa Sissoko playing Africa To Appalachia. Malian music is the closest you can get to the sound of life and the natural world. It’s so free, fluctuating, fluid and absolutely beautiful. I’d love to find a collaborator to do more of that, but I don’t know if I have the tekkers!

You’ve had the chance to play Bert Jansch’s and Jackson C Frank’s guitars – and you recently performed a set for Turnstone Guitars with a Select Series TG model. Do you have a preference between vintage or modern instruments?

I love vintage guitars, but the Turnstone guitar [made from katalox and Swiss moon spruce] knocked me out, to be fair. I love playing beautiful modern boutique luthier guitars, and some aspects are better than vintage for live, especially unamplified. That Turnstone guitar echoed through the room, it was like playing a harp.

For recording, I really prefer vintage. Modern guitars have so much to say, so there isn’t much space left for giving it what you want to. You have to do what the guitar tells you to do – modern guitars are all light and amazing and everything is ‘Wow!’ But what if the song is sad? It’s different tools for different jobs.

I’ve literally just been to the [New Kings Road] Vintage Guitar Emporium to play a 000-28 from 1967. It was fucking amazing! But for gigging I use a modern Martin that I’ve set up myself to sound twangy and old. I’ve got a 1968 000-28; I love playing it, but I don’t have enough money to risk taking it around the place.

I have Bert’s Yamaha [LL11e] from the ’90s. It’s strange playing that because if you’re a big fan you’re thinking of the Blue Album [self-titled debut] when he had a Martin. Yamahas are great, but for me [they] don’t stand up to a high-end Martin. I’ve had nice moments sitting with it, thinking, “Shit this is Bert Jansch’s guitar and I’m lucky to hold it,” but, playing-wise, it’s not super-inspiring.

However, Jackson’s guitar was a [1948] Brazilian rosewood D-28 and it’s probably the best guitar I’ve ever played, like a whole other thing, and speaks to the fact it was there. It was inspiring to play that, and felt like there are songs still in there.

In a recent interview, you talked about coming from a rich folk tradition that’s being chipped away by TikTok. How do you think social media has shaped your playing?

Hopefully it hasn’t! The more you engage with it, the more you’re vulnerable and likely to be malleable to it. It’s like an alternate reality that we believe to be the same as our own. For me, the guitar is opposite to all that.

There are all these things in life that try to compartmentalise and distract and atomise, but when you’re playing guitar – and if you manage to get to that nice spot – you’re in a nice state of flow. If anything, it’s decreased the frequency and ease with which I can get there, but what I’m making isn’t tailored to that at all.

One of reasons I’ve stuck with the guitar is that it’s like a torch to follow; the ‘me’ when I’m playing guitar in the way that I want to play it, or [am] trying to, is a better person than me outside of that. I can learn from that self. If I could take a leaf out of the ‘guitar Sam’ book and apply it to other things, that’d be good – and one of those things is fuck social media changing how I do this thing.

What have you got planned next?

I’m going to get a dreadnought Martin, as I’ve missed that. And it’d be really cool to record the next album live. I want to get the funds together to get everyone in the room and capture that moment over a few days or weeks. Giving tracks to people to work on at home is not the same as working together in the room; people can inhabit the songs and find their space within it.

• Where Two Hawks Fly is out now via Broadside Hacks Recordings.
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

My friend James had been gassing for a ’50s-style single-cutaway Les Paul Junior and got a pretty good deal at Gibson’s Garage for a sunburst VTB model. To be fair, the VTB version is more ‘in the spirit of’ than an accurate vintage reissue. Gibson’s VSB VOS Junior ticks that box very nicely, but it costs around £2,000 more than the VBT.

Rather than break the bank, James bought the cheaper version and asked me to get it closer to vintage spec. This project isn’t going to demand any advanced luthier skills and there’ll be no refinishing or finish relicing. Instead, I’ll mostly be swapping and upgrading parts to give the guitar a ‘closet classic’ look and, hopefully, a more vintage tone.

Strip Down

Since so many parts were being changed, I began by completely stripping the guitar. With no pickup, controls and tuners onboard, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to put the husk in my freezer to see if I could force the lacquer to check. In all honesty, I did so more in hope than expectation and, sure enough, nothing happened.

Gibson claims to use nitrocellulose lacquer and, having stripped it for relic refinishes, I can confirm it is very combustible and it produces a camphor smell when you scrape or sand it. I’m happy to take Gibson at its word, but the nitrocellulose it uses below the Murphy Lab level contains a lot of plasticiser to prevent checking and it does that job very effectively.

An inverted air duster might have worked, but James’s brief was to leave the finish intact if the freezer failed.

Pots, Cap & Pickup

With the pickup disconnected and the controls removed, I grabbed the chance to measure the potentiometers. You can verify pot values by taking a resistance reading across the outer solder tags with the pot turned fully open. Both potentiometers read slightly over 500k, but I’m always bewildered by 50s-style Gibsons – such as this guitar – that aren’t wired 1950s style.

During the 1950s and early 60s, Gibson wired tone controls to the centre tag of volume controls, rather than the input tag. It may seem like a minor detail, but it generally results in a more pronounced darkening of the tone when volume controls are turned down.

James had sourced a paper-in-oil ‘Bumblebee’ replica capacitor, so I installed that 1950s style and removed the factory Orange Drop capacitor and brown jumper wire between the volume and tone pots in the process. If you find that your Gibson or Gibson-style guitar gets a little dark when you turn down the volume, take a look at the controls to see how they’re wired.

Changing to 50s wiring is one of the simplest mods you can do, and if you own a soldering iron, it won’t cost you a bean. Hardcore Junior fans may also wish to try out a 250k potentiometer for the tone control because they often featured in 1950s Juniors and apparently soften the treble response.

The stock P-90 was wax-potted and gauss readings also exceeded those I took from a couple of mid-50s P-90s. This suggested that the factory installed magnets are more likely to be Alnico V than mid-50s-spec Alnico II or III. Although swapping the magnets would have been simple enough, James wanted non-potted coils so he sourced a boutique pickup that was closer to vintage specs and also reliced.

Plastic Parts

In another departure from vintage specs, Gibson equips the Junior VBT with black control knobs, not gold. Similarly, the truss rod cover is a black/white laminated item, rather than one-ply black, and overall the plastics look a bit too shiny. James sourced some gold knobs and a butyrate P-90 cover and asked me to perform some light relicing on the parts.

Sourcing a one-ply truss rod cover wasn’t straightforward. My go-to suppliers didn’t stock them and those I found online were eye-wateringly expensive. Sometimes, however, it pays to cast the net a bit wider and I eventually found one for less than £7 on Amazon UK.

Using a scraper blade, I softened the edges of the pickguard, control cover and truss rod cover and knocked back the glossiness using 0000-grade steel wool. At this point, the plastic will often look a bit too muted and so I usually give it a light polish with Meguiar’s Scratch X to bring it back to a dull sheen.

Gold top-hat knobs are actually made from clear plastic and painted on the underside with gold lacquer. I used a scraper blade to shave off the gold around the edges and applied metallic green enamel mixed with a darker green to simulate verdigris.

I then used a cotton bud to apply StewMac’s amber and medium brown tints mixed with diluted acetone onto the outer surface and set the pots aside to dry.

Tuner Swap

Although the factory-fitted tuners worked perfectly and looked fairly good, the plan was to replace them with vintage-correct three-on-a-plate Kluson replicas and 10mm conversion bushings. This is where I ran into a slight problem because the bushing holes were not drilled in a straight line.

This was deliberate on Gibson’s part because if you look at vintage Gibsons with three-on-a-plate and individual tuners, the A and B strings are often in contact with the E string posts. Locating the A and B string bushings closer to the centre of the headstock solves the problem, but it makes fitting three-on-a-plate tuner sets a bit more complicated.

Placing masking tape strips between the outer bushing holes made it easy to see how far off the centre line the A and B string bushing holes actually were.

I only needed to make an adjustment of about 1.5mm, and I used a round rasp to modify the shape of the bushing hole. I did need to ream the outer bushing holes fractionally wider to get conversion bushings to go in, but I was just shaving off excess lacquer, rather than wood.

Doing so enabled me to position the tuners accurately so I could test fit the A and B string bushings. It was simply a case of filing, testing and then filing some more until the centre bushings pressed down into their modified holes.

The plates covered all the original screw holes and a couple of them even lined up, but fresh holes had to be made for the other replacement tuner screws, so this isn’t a modification that can be reversed without leaving telltale evidence.

Brazzing The ’Board

Another feature that distinguishes this Junior from its VOS counterpart is a far paler rosewood fretboard.

Although I didn’t have a VOS on hand to compare, I would imagine the feel of the ’boards must differ, too, because James’s Junior had the roughest fretboard I’ve ever seen on a brand-new guitar.

I can only compare its texture to dried out snakeskin leather, and there seemed to be a real prospect of getting splinters.

Sanding between frets is tricky, but scraping is fairly quick and easy. For this job, I used single-sided razor blades, which are sold online as glass scrapers. Quality can vary, but I’ve had good luck with Personna-branded blades. After scraping, I used 0000-grade steel wool to clean away the rosewood shavings and make the ’board even smoother.

To darken the fretboard, I used Angelus Dark Brown leather dye. I applied it with a cotton bud, taking care not to allow the dye to run over the ’board edges.

The dye is spirit based so it doesn’t raise the grain like water-based stains, and once it’s dried it doesn’t rub off. I’d recommend wearing latex gloves to apply it because if it gets on your fingers, it won’t wash off in a hurry. The dye also gave the marker dots a more vintage appearance. After it had dried, I followed up with some fretboard oil.

Junior School Report

So, has all this work actually improved the guitar? Visually, at least, it’s now closer to what James wanted, but any judgement would be entirely subjective. The replacement tuners work very smoothly and tuning is stable with maybe a tad less neck heaviness.

As for the tone and playability, the guitar was pretty great from the get-go, with perfectly levelled frets and nut slots that couldn’t be faulted. Then again, a lightweight mahogany body with a set neck, wraptail bridge and a P-90 is about as close to a slam dunk as it’s possible to get in guitar making.

All James’s guitar needed was a quarter turn of the truss rod nut to reduce neck relief. The replacement pickup is more microphonic than Gibson’s and has the sweeter treble and quackier midrange you probably want from a pickup wound to vintage specs with lower gauss magnets. The 50s wiring has also made the volume control more usable.

James had already fitted a lightweight aluminium Faber wraptail bridge as well as installing a full set of reliced screws before bringing the guitar to me. Whether you approve of aged parts or not, the guitar’s specs have ended up far closer to Gibson’s VOS model for considerably less outlay.

That said, the VOS version is built with hot hide glue, rather than (presumably) aliphatic resin glue, and disassembling James’s guitar to rectify that would have been both impractical and insane. All things considered, this has been a worthwhile project and well within the scope of most guitar tinkerers.

• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

As a teen, Leo Nocentelli lent his licks to Motown’s biggest and brightest stars. In his 20s, he formed funk legends The Meters. Beyond that he’s worked with Albert King, Paul McCartney, Etta James and Peter Gabriel.

He wrote hits including Sophisticated Cissy and Cissy Strut – but he took little to no credit. “I did what I had to do,” he says. “But I don’t owe nobody nothing. I really didn’t owe nobody from Jump Street. I did it because that’s the way my heart is.”

He believes his appeal – for big names in rock, soul and blues to the countless hip-hop producers who have sampled him – is simple.

“I was able to adapt,” he says. “It didn’t matter the genre. It could have been Coltrane; it could have been Miles Davis; it could have been anybody. Everyone who hired me knew I’d adapt.”

Nocentelli is likely one of the most widely recorded and sampled players of all time. “I’m like the guy from that movie,” he laughs. “I’m a guy that happened to be at a certain place at very historical times, so I’d call myself the Forrest Gump of the music industry!”

What got you started on guitar?

My dad played banjo in a band in Donaldsonville, Louisiana. He grew up in New Orleans, met my mom, and didn’t do any more gigs. He kept after me to try and play ukulele, and I started hearing some things. I graduated to six-strings and started picking out things that were interesting to me.

I don’t know where it came from, though. It’s just what was in me. Regardless of genre, I was attracted to things, and I really wanted to play them when I heard them. Everything from Bach and Beethoven to country sounded interesting.

By 13 you were working on sessions for Otis Redding, The Supremes, The Temptations and more.

I just played for different people who were looking for music. I just happened to be 13! My first major recording was for Allen Toussaint with an artist called Lee Darcy he was producing. That started me in the recording industry.

What gear were you using for Motown?

I used a big hollowbody guitar, because when I started out, I wanted to be a jazz player like Wes Montgomery or Kenny Burrell; but then I got caught up in playing different genres. To survive in New Orleans – and to survive, period, as a Black guitarist – I had to learn how to play different genres.

How did you come to play for the Temptations and the Supremes?

I got a call one day to take a trip to Motown in Detroit. This guy named Joe Jones had a deal with Barry Gordy to bring four artists there, and I was one of them. Motown and Barry Gordy loved the band, so we started playing behind a bunch of acts that had no names at the time. They’d pay us $12 a side, and we’d be playing behind acts that became The Moonglows, The Temptations, and The Supremes.

What was the first Motown hit you played on?

It was Where Did Our Love Go, Baby by the Supremes. Nobody knew it was a bunch of New Orleans musicians – and then everyone in Motown was tripping out about this new band from New Orleans. This was before James Jamerson and all that. So you might say that New Orleans was more Motown than Detroit was at first!

In the mid ’60s you joined the army. But you kept on doing sessions during your breaks, leading to the formation of The Meters.

I was drafted but I went voluntarily. When I got there, I ran into a few musicians in Fort Riley, Kansas, and they asked me to do some gigs. I started playing guitar around there, and when I came back, The Meters started to happen.

You penned two hits: Sophisticated Sissy and Sissy Strut.

I not only had a big hand in those – I had the whole hand! Of course, those songs couldn’t have been manifested, even though I wrote them note-for-note, without the individuals in the band. That’s why I gave them credit and didn’t take it all for myself.

Do you regret not taking more credit?

After a while I thought, ‘I should take credit for writing.’ The problem was I felt like I should give them something – so I did. I gave them six or seven different albums’ worth of songs that I wrote. They used to come into the studio and wait for me to play the song, and then they’d put their expertise on it. I didn’t start taking credit until later.

What was your primary guitar with The Meters?

All those early albums were done with my Gibson ES-175. But after we signed with Warner Brothers and started Cabbage Alley, I started using a Fender Starcaster. They didn’t make many of them back then, so I was really the only notable one playing one. I actually started getting some recognition for playing one.

What led to The Meters hooking up with Dr. John for In the Right Place?

I played on a lot of Allan Toussaint's productions; I really did all of them. He had us fly down to Miami to Criteria Studios, where we did that album. I didn’t really have too much of a hand in deciding anything – Dr. John told me what to play. But it was a fantastic experience.

In 1975, The Meters attended an infamous boat party hosted by Paul McCartney. What was that like?

We had a lot of fun! Paul came down to New Orleans to record an album called Venus and Mars, and I played on a couple of songs. He asked us to do the going-away party on the Queen Mary, and we played live.

Everyone was there from Yul Brynner to Fred Astaire – he was dancing to Cissy Strut – and even Michael Jackson from The Jackson 5, who was dancing right in front of the stage to us. To be witnesses to all that, man, to be involved, was just amazing. I got to be really good friends with Paul, who showed his admiration for me and The Meters.

He was a fan of blues and R&B – no doubt, man. There’s actually a couple of photos of Paul, me and Linda, and a couple of other big stars. I think in one of the photos he’s actually passing me some weed!

You went on work with everyone from Albert King to Etta James to Peter Gabriel. What do you think all these artists liked about you as a player?

That I managed to come up with something unique when I’d play. On that Albert King record [New Orleans Heat] he recorded one of my songs.

Were you caught off guard when hip-hop artists started sampling The Meters’ songs in the ’80s and ’90s?

The first thing I thought was, ‘How much money am I gonna make from it?’ I wasn’t thinking, ‘Wow! They must really love the way I sound.’ I eventually did make some money. That was the slickest thing that ever happened to me on a business level.

A lot of those samples were used without clearance, right?

Yeah. I was honored to be sampled by Naughty by Nature, Snoop Dogg and all that. But then you had LL Cool J, who didn’t want to pay nobody. We wound up suing him, and the court granted us a win. That’s when I really learned how much money you could make. Then everybody started sampling The Meters, man – but they were doing the right thing and paying us.

In 2021 your unreleased solo album from 1971, Another Side, generated a lot of attention. Are you working on new music?

Yeah, and it’s got a lot of people on it. I’ve got Peter Gabriel, Stanley Clarke, Harry Connick Jr. and a lot of other people. It’s called Leo with The Project, and man, it’s killer. There’s no category you could put it in. I’m expecting it to be nominated for a Grammy, man. I can’t wait for the public to hear it.

Do you still play guitar every day?

No; I’m kind of really sick and tired of it. I dread doing it every time I have to, you know? I don’t feel the same way about it. I’ll play, but I don’t play with the passion I used to. I can still play at the same level, or close to it, but I don’t have anything to prove as a player. I am who I am.

Is there a future for The Meters?

It was eight or 10 albums, and I was always there until four o’clock in the morning, editing stuff and getting no credit. That’s not where my head’s at anymore. As for live gigs, I’m not really for that either. I wouldn’t care if I never did it again.

We’re starting to get revisited again; we did two sold-out shows in New Orleans at Jazz Fest, and there’s one at the Orpheum Theater that’s gonna be totally sold out. But I don’t hustle for gigs. I don’t look to be booked because I don’t really want to be booked.

Do you have advice for young players?

Learn the business. No matter how good you are, get paid for it. Otherwise you could end up being broke. It’s a cesspool of a business, man. Everybody is grabbing at you and taking advantage, so please learn the business. They’re cold-blooded, and only care about what they’re gonna get from you.

This month on Bought & Sold, Andy Powell of Wishbone Ash fame drops in to talk all things guitar, from first loves to his current live rig, gear regrets and the answer to some of the guitar world's most difficult questions…

What was the first serious guitar that you bought with your own money?

It was a Burns jazz guitar. Burns hooked up with, I think, Rice Krispies and if you entered this competition on the back of the cereal box, you could win this guitar. There was no chance that I would win, although I think I did enter the competition. But, like a lot of kids in the ’50s, I had a paper round and I managed to save up money.

Somebody had won one of these guitars – this must have been about a year or two later – and wanted to sell it. So my mother pinned all the money I’d earned from the paper round to the inside pocket of my school blazer, and I went down on the train and I bought this guitar off this boy and came back on the train.

And that was my first serious guitar. It was a great guitar, it was a short scale and it had a tremolo arm on it, so I was able to emulate my hero, Hank Marvin.

Later, just before I joined Wishbone Ash, I decided I was going to go on a big adventure to Morocco overland. I’d had the guitar for a few years and played in bands with it, but I decided that I needed to travel more than I needed the guitar and I sold it.

I went up to London, sold it to Macari’s Musical Exchange and I believe at the time they gave me 40 quid for it, which was enough to go on this overland trip in a Land Rover with a bunch of strangers and end up in Marrakesh with food poisoning!

What was the last guitar you bought, and why?

Well, I’m known for being a Flying V player, but the last really good guitar I bought was a Fender Custom Shop Stratocaster. I used to collect guitars and I had a collection of about 85, and I had Stratocasters all the way from ’54 through to the early ’60s.

Anyway, I bought this Stratocaster and it’s the closest I’ve found to some of the vintage ones. It’s a good one, you know? It has a resonance to the body and you can get all the Strat tones out of it, and it’s just absolutely brilliant. They finally figured out how to remake them. I paid way too much money for it, but it will find its way onto an album.

What’s the most incredible find or bargain you’ve had when buying gear?

Probably the most incredible guitar I got was a ’58 Flying V. Later on, I got a ’59. So those two would be the most amazing guitars that I was offered. I was playing a ’67-style V; different concept, really, but also a great guitar. I never realised, but they only made about 100 of [the ’59s], but the ’58, I think they made about 98 of them.

They were subsequently sold, and I made good money on selling them. But I would say the first ’58 I got, I just couldn’t believe it. I think I appreciated these things as works of art, actually – as well as being guitars, they played great and they sounded fabulous.

What’s the strongest case of buyer’s remorse you’ve experienced when buying gear?

I had two Firebird VIIs. The most gorgeous-looking one that I bought was an original white Firebird VII with gold hardware, and I tried and tried to make that guitar sound good.

But what had happened was, at the Gibson factory, they had put so much paint on the guitar – there was probably about 3lb of paint on that guitar – it would come off in chips a 16th of an inch thick.

I tried to bring it into the stage show, but it was a thin-sounding guitar because the lacquer had simply killed the tone of the wood. I never really regretted it, I loved having it as an artefact sitting around the house, but eventually it got sold to Stephen Stills.

Have you ever sold a guitar that you now intensely regret letting go?

Well, that would be the ’58 V. I mean, I could have put my sons through college with the money from that! I could have bought a house for that! Well, times two because I had the ’58 and the ’59.

They sounded amazing and they were great, but they had big old necks on them. Albert King had big hands, he could master one of those things. I’ve got small hands, you know? So it was quite a beast, but as a thing, as a beautiful instrument, as an investment, as a piece of history, yeah, I pretty much intensely regret that.

What’s your best guitar-buying tip?

Well, first of all, don’t plug it in. Just put it on your knee and play it. Does it feel as if the whole thing is resonating? Is it responding to your touch?

And if that’s happening, then plug it into an amplifier, preferably an old tube amp, and then see if the pickups are matched with each other. Does it seem balanced? I’d say those are my two big tips. The guitar has to work acoustically, it has to give you something back.

If forced to make a choice, would you rather buy a really good guitar and a cheap amp, or a cheap guitar and a top notch amp?

Oh, that’s a really tough question. If you were looking to make a big, good sound on stage, and you were looking to make the right kind of sound on an album, probably the amplifier would make a big difference.

You could compensate for a lot of things that were wrong with the guitar with your fingers. I mean, I’ve got a ’59 Bassman sitting over there in the corner. That’s been on many albums, and if you plug a cheap guitar into that amplifier, it would sound very good.

Andy’s Go-To Rig

I’m doing a lot of festivals in the summer, so I have gone over to using a semi-digital amp called a BluGuitar made in Germany by Thomas Blug. I can throw it in a backpack, and then no matter what speakers they give me at a festival, I can plug that in. I met Thomas and he’s shown me how to do a few tweaks on it. And so, yeah, that amp with two 2x12 speaker cabs. I do prefer 10-inch speakers, to be absolutely honest with you.

I’m using fewer pedals compared with what I used to. My main overdrive is an Analog Man King of Tone. It’s got two channels and I use one as a crunch and one as an overdrive, and then if I really want to go berserk, I bring in an Ibanez Tube Screamer on top. Then it’s just a standard Boss Delay and I use an Analog Man chorus unit.

Oh, I use an [Xotic] EP booster, too. I use that a lot, especially if I want to bring the level down and I want more definition for picking. I went through a whole phase of using piezo pickups on the guitar.

I had some Flying Vs made with piezo pickups in the bridge, and I would often take a signal off and run that through the PA system. But these days I’ve found I’m going simpler and simpler. It’s all about gain management: how much do you need? When do you need it? And how do you manage it?

As far as guitars are concerned, I have to play a V. I mean, I have no choice!

• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

It’s often hard for players to recall the exact moment they stumbled across a riff or lick that would end up becoming a hit. It’s equally difficult to pinpoint the ins and outs of a recording session. That was especially the case for Mars, who failed to remember recording of Mötley Crüe’s Girls, Girls, Girls – because he was unconscious for it.

Bizarre stories fly out of the Mötley Crüe camp with wild abandon, and have done since their 1981 debut album, Too Fast for Love, hit the shelves. In the May 2005 issue of Guitar World, Mars regaled another.

The story centers around the band’s fourth album, Girls, Girls, Girls. It was a standout smash in 1987, and is certified four times platinum in the US.

Mars revealed he recorded the title track’s water tight rhythm parts with a “Kramer through a Marshall head absolutely dry”. No effects were allowed anywhere near his signal.

“It's doubled,” he adds. “So it's big, but everything's dry – a nice big dirty sound.”

As for its leads, while a guitar solo punctuates the middle section, a descending staccato run rounds the song out in flashy fashion. The rumor was that Mars fell off his chair while recording it and producer Bob Rock simply let the tape run. Mars remembers it in a slightly more dramatic – and suitably rock ’n’ roll – manner.

“I was drunk,” he says. “I fell flat on my face, but I held onto the guitar neck, so I could still squeeze out some notes, even though I was unconscious.”

It sounds impossible – and it could well be, given that not all stories that come out of the Crüe camp are based entirely in reality. But we’ll let this one slide, as it’s a great tale regardless. Even if it comes from the band’s most substance-soaked era.

“That was during a dark period,” Mars accepts. “I was drinking my head off. It's always something. I have a very addictive personality. Even when I quit drinking, I couldn't stop taking pain medication.”

Sadly, for Crüe fans, Mars acrimoniously left the band in 2023. John 5 was drafted into the group in his place. Mars has since said that reconciliation is off the table and the relationship between both parties continues to sour amid disputes over the resulting lawsuits.

But the crazy stories of the band’s 1980s peak cannot be taken away from Mars, and recording licks like that on Girls, Girls, Girls – while slipping out of consciousness – is classic Crüe, whichever way you look at it.

Picture the scene if you will. It’s Christmas morning in 1950s America, snow is falling, Bing Crosby is crooning carols on the wireless, and a family is gathered around a tree with presents arranged beneath.

Having grown out of little league baseball and lost interest in push bikes, Johnny has been begging his parents for an electric guitar and it looks like his dreams are about to come true.

Johnny has promised his parents that he will take lessons and learn those wholesome standards they so enjoy. But we all know that will never happen because Johnny has been secretly listening to Elvis and Chuck Berry, and his family doesn’t know what’s about to hit them.

No doubt countless guitar-playing journeys started with fortunate kids tearing wrapping paper off a Fender Esquire and a Champ, or a Les Paul Junior and a GA-5. They were the relatively affordable products that the manufacturers of the time marketed as ‘student models’. But the most remarkable thing about those guitars, and to a lesser extent the amps, was that many were good enough to become career instruments.

Maintaining Standards

A degree of compromise followed by a series of upgrades is pretty typical with modern entry-level guitars, but things weren’t always like that and Gibson’s 1950s student models are a case in point. In 1954 the Les Paul Junior became Gibson’s second solidbody and it predated the two-pickup Special by a year.

When designing a more affordable version of the Goldtop, Gibson clearly decided to simplify the production process, rather than compromise quality, and that distinction is crucial.

Instead of joining and carving maple pieces into an arch, Gibson dispensed with maple altogether (though some early Juniors with maple bodies are known to exist), opting for a flat and unbound slab of mahogany – much like the approach taken by another manufacturer then coming to prominence out on the West Coast.

Bolt-on necks would have been anathema to Gibson, so the Junior had a set neck attached with Gibson’s regular hide glue. There was no body binding, and simple celluloid dots were installed, but the unbound fretboards were still made from Brazilian rosewood.

Although fixed to a single plate, rather than mounted individually, the inner workings of the Kluson tuners were no different from the ones fitted to the Goldtop. As for the wraptail bridge, it was identical to the one that would feature on Goldtops from 1953 and is considered to be tonally superior to the later tune-o-matic.

Potentiometers varied in value, with 250k sometimes used for tone, but they were the same Centralab units featured in Gibson’s most prestigious models. Depending on when they were made, 1950s Juniors were also equipped with the ‘Grey Tiger’ and Sprague ‘Bumblebee’ tone capacitors.

Most remarkably, Gibson decided to install a P-90. Granted, you only got one, but the Junior’s P-90 was no different from the ones in Gibson’s top-end guitars. Besides a vogue for replacing tired Klusons with cast tuners in later decades, there was nothing about Les Paul Juniors that could be or needed to be upgraded.

Building ‘student models’ to a standard – not a price – could be viewed as shrewd. In the 1950s the thinking was that budding guitarists who had a good experience with their first guitars would stay loyal to the brand and eventually go more upmarket.

Cheap Thrills

During the 1970s there wasn’t a vast variety of quality guitars to choose from, and cash-strapped musicians would often seek out secondhand Fender and Gibson models that had fallen out of favour. With all the ’Bursts and 335s hoovered up by heavy rockers and prog players, pub rockers and proto-punks started buying Juniors and Specials.

Gary Moore cottoned onto Les Paul Juniors early on, maybe having heard what they could do in the hands of Leslie West and Mick Ralphs. Pete Cummings, who was road manager for Gary’s band Skid Row, has told of an incident that occurred in Cincinnati in the early 1970s.

“When we were there Gary saw an ad for a Gibson Les Paul Junior somewhere about 50 miles from the city,” he recalled. “We went to a private house in a rural location and Gary went into the house while I waited outside. About 15 minutes later Gary emerged with the guitar and a battered case. That was certainly his first Les Paul Junior.”

It wasn’t to be his last because Gary acquired this 1955 Junior from Steve Jones of The Sex Pistols. Over a decade on from Gary’s death, Bonhams handled the sale of his guitar collection – The Final Encore – and managed to trace some of its history. According to Bonhams’ lot notes, “Steve Jones of The Sex Pistols left this guitar at Gary’s Hampstead flat for some months before Gary bought it from him”.

In his autobiography Lonely Boy: Tales From A Sex Pistol Steve Jones details some of the gear he acquired before he became famous. According to Jones, the Les Paul Junior he sold to Gary Moore was taken from Mott The Hoople, but it didn’t belong to Mick Ralphs. It was actually one of two mid-50s Les Paul Juniors that his successor Luther Grosvenor – aka Ariel Bender – used on Mott’s 1974 US tour.

When we contacted Luther, he stated that in 1974 after he had left Mott The Hoople and was forming the band that would become Widowmaker, they were “rehearsing on New Kings Road in a basement that lots of people used. I suggested having a break and when we came back, the guitar had gone…”

Unlikely as it may seem, Gary and Steve Jones played together in a band called The Greedy Bastards that was formed by Phil Lynott in 1978. Although the project proved shortlived, black-and-white footage of the band playing a gig at The Electric Ballroom in Camden can be found online. Gary appears to be playing a Les Paul Standard, while the Junior is being wielded by Steve Jones.

In the March 1987 edition of Making Music magazine, Gary said that his Junior “used to be Steve Jones’, but he left it at my house one day… so I gave him £250 for it…”

The Junior was definitely Gary’s by 1979 because there is plenty of photographic evidence of him using it on Thin Lizzy’s Black Rose tour that year. In that same issue of Making Music Gary said that he used the Junior for guitar harmonies on his Wild Frontier album, and it was also the main guitar on Victims Of The Future.

California Dreaming

In November 2025, Bonhams sold the Junior for £40,960 including premium to Matthieu Lucas of Matt’s Guitar Shop in Paris.

“We had sold Steve Jones’ Les Paul Custom a couple of years ago and I really wanted to get another Sex Pistols guitar,” Matt tells us.

“I bought it believing it had potential to go to a Sex Pistols collector, but we were contacted by Will Wallner, who is a professional guitarist and a massive Gary Moore fan. He was disappointed that he couldn’t get the guitar when Bonhams auctioned it, so it’s great that he was able to buy it from us.

“The Junior is a very interesting guitar,” Matt continues, “because it has such a fat neck and the P-90 sounds amazing.

“It was modified by Gary over the years and he tried another pickup at some point, but he went back to the original P-90. It had a typical late-’70s or early ’80s refret with medium jumbo wire, and the tuners were changed for Schallers. It’s not too light or heavy, and more of a riff machine than a lead guitar, but that didn’t stop Gary because he was such a genius player.”

Will Wallner was born in Devon but has been based in LA for most of his adult life. Formerly a member of White Wizard, Will is now a solo artist, session player and currently plays with Seattle-based metal band Sanctuary.

“Gary is my favourite guitar player,” Matt says, “and I may have the largest collection of his gear. I have lots of his guitars and amps, including the amp he used to record The Loner, the ‘Plexi’ that he used on the BBM album [Around the Next Dream], his two main DSL heads, ’70s stuff like 20-watt Marshall heads, and a nice 1959 Gibson combo.

“The main reason I wanted the Junior is the clip of him jamming backstage with Phil Lynott and, of course, he played it with Thin Lizzy. When I first opened the Junior’s case and tuned it up, I played some of Gary’s old stuff, like Victims Of The Future, and it sounded exactly like it did on the album.”

“It’s a beautiful instrument, everything works perfectly and I have no problems with the bridge,” Will tells us.

“It’s beaten up, but that makes it more special. I read an interview with Gary describing an [incident] at his flat with Steve Jones. Apparently, Steve threw the Junior against the wall, stormed out and never came back to get it. When I look at the knocks, I imagine one of them must be from the wall at Gary’s place.

“I had never played a Junior before this one, but I’ve been playing it non-stop since I got it and I used it on a recording just a couple of days ago.”

Will assures us that Gary’s Junior will continue to be played live and in the studio, and we can’t help feeling it has ended up in exactly the right place.

• With thanks to Matt’s Guitar Shop in Paris for allowing us to photograph this guitar.
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

25 years ago, Jimmy Eat World’s breakthrough 2001 album, Bleed American, took the Arizona emo band from VFW hall shows to the top of the charts. But it almost didn’t happen at all. To paraphrase frontman and co-guitarist Jim Adkins on the album’s mega hit The Middle, it just took some time.

Scooped up by Capitol Records during the ’90s alternative-rock gold rush, Jimmy Eat World arrived in major-label land with just a scrappy indie release of speedy pop-punk under its belt and a growing interest in the barbed riffs and mathy rhythms of post-hardcore. After two albums, 1996’s Static Prevails and 1999’s Clarity, posted dismal sales, though, they quietly exited the big machine.

But unlike scores of other alt-leaning rock bands that were gobbled up and spit out by the majors, Jimmy Eat World wasn’t finished yet. Hopeful for a second chance, the band again enlisted producer Mark Trombino, who had helmed their previous records – albums which, especially Clarity, fans loved for their strong melodies, titanic riffs and increasingly ornate instrumentation.

In the van Capitol bought them years earlier, Jimmy Eat World toured relentlessly and saved the earnings to pay Trombino. They grabbed copies of their Capitol releases to sell at gigs while playing to thousands across Europe and worked day jobs in the interim. When they had pooled together enough cash to track Bleed American, they not only had the strongest songs of their career but had tightened into the band that could pull them off.

“Going in to make Bleed American was a little bit different than making Clarity because of the amount of touring that we were doing in between, and just being in that environment where it's just two guitars,” Adkins says, “so you're thinking about your creative solutions with that in mind.”

Stripping their sound back to a two-guitar attack from the adventurous experimentations of their previous work – whose lack of sales got them dropped, only to be rediscovered and championed by bands like Paramore during the aughts emo explosion – suited their increased use of drop-D tuning, which helped lower the boom on songs like the stomping title track.

“At first it was like a novelty thing, like you get a new effect pedal and all of a sudden you write a song around it,” he says. “It's that thing that tricks you to get you out of your own head, so you can just experiment. Then you hear yourself play something that sounded cool so you do that again, and before you know it, you're fleshing out a song.”

While dialing up their ambitions in songcraft, the band also scaled down the scope of their songs. Adkins says he found inspiration listening to classic songwriters like the Everly Brothers and Bruce Springsteen, who mastered the ability to execute an idea with simplicity and directness.

“You might have heard it a million times and not really paid attention to it growing up, but then all of a sudden you're like, wait a minute – Dancing in the Dark just works,” he says. “Like, what is it that makes it work? How can I do that? I think most of our material that pushes the band forward has started off like, ‘I don't know if we can get away with this, guys.’”

But they did and then some. After total sales of their previous album barely cracked five digits, Bleed American’s punchy, anthemic tunes quickly scored the band its first Platinum album.

Three singles – the bruising title track alongside the thundering sing-along Sweetness and the emotive Hear You Me – all yielded Gold and Platinum platters of their own. But The Middle, certified 9x Platinum, peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100, making it a genuine crossover smash. In 2024, the song joined Spotify’s Billion Streams Club.

On the opening riff of The Middle, Adkins and Linton lock into a tightly wound guitar figure composed of variations on the same riff.

“Sometimes it might be unison, sometimes we might hit a lower voicing, the notes that imply the progression, but add in a mid-to-high voicing that's sometimes unison or sometimes maybe like a harmony itself,” Adkins says – the kind of interlocking guitar line he traces back to Thin Lizzy's twin-guitar harmonies.

After years chasing the sprawl and mathy detours of post-hardcore, the band started exploring how to extract the most from each riff instead. “There was a tendency to scale back the scope of what you're trying to do," Adkins says, “and push how tight and lockstep you can make it and how simple you can make it, as almost a subversive kind of goal.”

For two guitarists who'd been shredheads in the early '90s, stripping a song down to a handful of chords was more Never Mind the Bollocks than Surfing with the Alien. "That's the best way I can describe it: oh man, we can get away with this!"

The guitar solo on The Middle broke a different rule. Where the solo on Bleed American and most of the band's earlier leads – like the extended bridge solo on Clarity’s Just Watch the Fireworks – grow out of the vocal melody, hinting at it and then taking off, the solo on The Middle has no connection to anything else happening in the song. "That was different," Adkins says. "That might be the first time we've ever done that."

He built it across a series of takes rather than working it out on paper. "I knew what I wanted to do; the arc of it was there from the beginning," he says. "It was just figuring out how to build something with that arc – theme, repeat, variation, kick it up a notch." The one consistent trick, he says, is that it never backs off: "always ascending, that's either ascending or faster."

Adkins doesn't consider himself a lead player by nature.

"I'm not like a shredder guitar player. I don't do leads, even though I kind of grew up with that scene of players," he says. "It was more about finding a clever way to make a theme and variation of it that is building. There's a narrative arc to it, and that I knew I wanted to have. But what actually happened in it was figured out on the spot."

Across the album, Adkins and co-guitarist and vocalist Tom Linton kept the gear simple, a stark contrast from Clarity’s kitchen-sink list of bells, chimes, glockenspiels and other ornamentation.

Adkins used a Gibson Les Paul Studio and 1979 Marshall JMP Super Lead, while Linton played his Gibson SG through an Orange AD140, with a Vox AC30 and a Fender Princeton for occasional overdubs.

However, the band did experiment on the album’s more reflective moments. Hear You Me, Your House and Cautioners all feature looping, shimmering guitar textures built with Line 6 DL4 Delay Modeler pedals, which had recently hit the market.

“You could loop things and then reverse it and do an octave and record it. Sometimes it might take like 10 minutes to get the composition of your loop just right. After you’d get it to a place that sounded cool, we’d hit record, walk out of the room, and five minutes later come back.”

While Bleed American changed everything for Jimmy Eat World, Adkins and his bandmates were seasoned enough to keep the focus on the music and not merely the success.

“The best outcome would be this gives us an opportunity to keep doing this,” he says of the band’s philosophy of the new world they entered on Bleed American. “That's the best we could hope for.”

• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

Back in 1982, a fast-rising – and perhaps unassuming – jazz virtuoso by the name of Emily Remler told People Magazine, “I may look like a nice Jewish girl from New Jersey, but inside I'm a 50-year-old, heavy-set black man with a big thumb, like Wes Montgomery.”

She may not be a household name, but Remler had the technique to hold her own alongside contemporaries like Pat Metheny, John Scofield, Joe Pass and Jennifer Batten. She also had something rarer: a sound and a musical personality that were unmistakably hers.

This was precisely what drew filmmaker Al Naffah, the writer, director and producer of Firefly: The Emily Remler Story, to her. It eventually compelled him to craft a documentary that celebrates her work and legacy – often ignored in the mainstream.

“I was a student in Paris and used to regularly listen to the station TSF Jazz. I remember one evening hearing Emily play and feeling an immediate connection to her phrasing and tonality,” he tells Guitar World in an exclusive interview.

“Discovering not only that it was a woman playing, but also that she had died at just 32 made me intrigued to find out more about her life and discover her outstanding discography.”

Naffah couldn’t help but draw parallels between Remler and another jazz great gone too soon.

“I remember watching Asif Kapadia’s Amy about Amy Winehouse and thinking about Emily Remler. Both were extraordinary Jewish women in music who battled addiction and intense sexism but whose lives were cut tragically short,” he explains.

“But what stayed with me was the possibility of hearing Emily tell her own story. When I realised how much footage and audio of her existed, I could see a film built around her voice and performances. That was the moment she stopped being a subject I admired and became a film I felt I had to make.”

Naffah went on a journey to unearth rare performances, television appearances, photographs, and interviews in which Remler speaks about her life, in her own words.

He also went a step further by interviewing a rolodex of guitarists, including Jennifer Batten, Martin Taylor, and The Last Dinner Party’s Emily Roberts – those who either experienced Remler’s music firsthand or were influenced by her legacy.

“What comes through in the interviews is that Emily’s influence began with how she played. She was doing that in a world where women instrumentalists had to work much harder to be taken seriously. She endured horrific sexism and misogyny throughout her career but became something that she had to rise above.

“She would frequently say that she had to be ‘Twice as good as a man.’ [For example,] Emily used Polytone solid-state amplifiers and Fender tube amplifiers, but frequently had to endure comments like, ‘Can a woman really carry that big amp?’

“One contributor in the film even tells of how she would go into recording studios, and people would look at her like she didn’t know how to plug in the guitar.

“Emily refused to let those expectations define what she could do. For later guitarists, that combination of musical excellence and determination made her a powerful example.”

Moreover, he notes that Remler herself refused to be defined by style or genre – describing herself as a “melting pot” in archival footage. She wasn’t just a composite of her heroes – namely, Wes Montgomery, Herb Ellis, Joe Pass and Charlie Christian – but, armed with her distinctive red Gibson ES-330, and later, a Borys B120 hollow body, took a magpie-like approach and created something uniquely hers.

“She studied the tradition closely, then played with enough conviction that you hear Emily, rather than a list of her influences,” Naffah continues.

“Seeing the evolution of her playing in early footage of concerts alongside people like Astrud Gilberto to her towering presence on stage leading a group of guitar legends – John Abercrombie, Mick Goodrick and John Scofield – you can see how much she wanted to be, and was, a natural leader.”

After poring over hundreds of hours of footage and interviews, Naffah points to a story that best encapsulates Remler’s character and dedication to her craft.

“My favourite story in the film is her simple reply to what she would consider to be the greatest achievement of her career: to have earned the respect of the idols she looked up to.

“For Pat Martino to tell her he had a good time, for Pat Metheny to be in the audience at her shows, and for Joe Pass to have recommended her for gigs. It says so much about her character and her motivation to be respected amongst the greats despite all the obstacles she had to deal with.”

Remler’s promising career was cut short when she died of heart failure at the age of 32 while touring in Australia. Her longstanding addiction to heroin and Dilaudid is thought to have contributed to her death – a tragedy that Naffah says the team was careful to touch upon without falling into the trap of sensationalism.

“We have worked very hard in co-operation with Emily’s closest friends and family, particularly her sister Jane Remler Blank and childhood friend, Susan Itkin Kurshenoff.

“We all felt that it would be wrong to ignore the theme of addiction in the film, and we have managed to find previously unseen footage of Emily discussing her challenges openly so that the audience can hear it directly from her.”

As Remler would have turned 70 next year, Naffah says it feels particularly timely to release the documentary in 2027.

After receiving crucial support from Berklee College of Music and Beth Marlis at Musicians Institute Hollywood, he’s now appealing to the guitar community to contribute to his team's Kickstarter campaign. The aim is to raise roughly $27,000, “to strengthen the story edit and move the film toward completion.

“We felt that starting with the Kickstarter was the right way to tap into Emily’s huge grassroots fanbase and invite people to become part of the project,” he explains.

“A personal recommendation to a friend, a guitar teacher, or a local jazz group can make a real difference. Backing it will help us build momentum and bring Emily’s story to the screen.”

More importantly though, releasing the film during such a poignant year gives Naffah, his team, and Remler’s friends and family a chance to bring her work to a new generation.

“I don’t think a film can define Emily’s legacy; she did that through her playing. But it can help ensure that more people hear it, understand the obstacles she faced, and recognise just how much she achieved.”

• For more information, head to Firefly: The Emily Remler Story's Kickstarter campaign.

The fretboard of an acoustic guitar can be a lovely place to live – inspiring, rewarding, nice view et cetera.

However, when it comes to the number of frets that should ideally sit between the nut and the body join, there remains plenty of room for debate. In the following numerical stream of consciousness I’ll shed light on the two most popular choices and one increasingly prominent outlier.

From its classical roots to the first flat-top prototypes, the 12-fret neck-to-body join has been the original choice for an acoustic guitar. More traditionally entrenched players to this day continue to see any diversion as an evolutionary dead end. There are evidently pros and cons involved, of course. Let’s look at the good stuff first.

It is undeniable that the sound of a 12-fret instrument is one of the primary advantages. The architecture of these guitars involves a neck that joins the body at a nodal point and a bridge location on or near to the centre of the guitar’s lower bout. This lends a voice that players often describe as rich, sophisticated and complex.

You can certainly expect a more diffuse response that pushes the soundboard’s monopole and cross dipole in a different way from a 14-fret instrument, especially when playing fingerstyle. Some players – myself included – also enjoy the visual logic of each string meeting the body join at the octave as you sight down the neck, very helpful.

In the cons column we have to address the fact that many of us make extensive use of at least one capo. On a non-cutaway 12-fret guitar it doesn’t take long before things start getting cramped.

We should also add the fact that the majority of 12-fret instruments are built in the vintage style and that inevitably means a chunky old neck and the challenge of changing steel strings on a slotted headstock without bleeding out on the floor.

While cutaway 12-fret guitars do exist, they tend to be the preserve of bespoke acoustic luthiers such as Marc Beneteau and Michael Greenfield.

Some such as Casimi Guitars of South Africa go so far as to make 12-fret instruments almost exclusively (bar the 13-fret C5 Baritone in this case). As ever, the sublime comes at a price.

Numbers Game

Now let’s address the 14-fret guitar. Martin’s short-lived relationship with the banjo superstar Perry Bechtel is often credited with the introduction of the 14-fret guitar when he approached the company in 1929, but Gibson’s 14-fret Hawaiian models were released around the same time, following on from the success of its L-5 archtop, launched in 1923.

Ironically, Bechtel himself defected to an L-5 within a couple of years of Martin’s first 14-fret models leaving the production line. The perfidy of that banjo player may never be forgotten, but he did play a part in some wonderful guitars.

Let’s face it, the vast majority of flat-top steel-string guitars in the world today feature a 14-fret neck-to-body join. There are some very good reasons for this.

The 14-fret design addresses most of the 12-fret equivalent’s foibles, giving unfettered access to loads of notes (including a far more comfortable octave E blues scale), a solid headstock, a slimmer neck, and a voice that loves being driven with a pick and cutting through a band mix.

While the 14-fret dreadnought dominates in the acoustic guitar domain, there is now increasing love for Orchestra, Grand Auditorium, Grand Concert, Jumbo and Small Jumbo instruments that go up to 11 – plus three. If you’re reading this then the chances are that you own and love at least one similar instrument.

Now it’s time for our wildcard: the 13-fret acoustic guitar. Setting aside any latent triskaidekaphobia, we need to look back to the very first acoustic steel-string guitar signature model – the Gibson Nick Lucas Special – which in between its 12- and 14-fret iterations briefly saw the sun as a 13-fret model. But why?

Logic dictates that a 13-fret guitar should occupy a happy medium – a fine balance between the warm, intimate tones of a 12-fret and the muscular articulation of the 14-fret. So what went wrong? Well, things sometimes just don’t work out, and while the 13-fret Nick Lucas did not last as a production model, original examples are now highly prized by players and collectors alike. Bob Dylan had one, which helps.

Credit for the current resurgence of interest in 13-fret guitars must go to the late Paul Hostetter who collaborated with Richard Hoover of the Santa Cruz Guitar Company to produce a deep-body 13-fret version of the Nick Lucas design under the H13 model. This is, it has to be said, a superb guitar.

The past few years have seen adoption of the 13-fret instruments by several prominent players – in fact, it seems like all the cool kids have got one. Martin Simpson and Louis Campbell can both be seen toting 13-fret Fylde instruments, and bell harmonic maestro Alan Gogoll has been melting faces around the world with a 13-fret signature model by Swedish luthier Ted Åstrand.

This reinvigoration of the 13-fret instrument’s popularity has led to some luthiers making standard models with this design. Regardez s’il vous plaît the elegant Blind Guitars B-24 model by French luthier Virgile Pilon (pictured above) we featured recently as one such example. That whole instrument was designed as a 13-fret guitar and Virgile is sticking to his guns – there are no plans for any other iteration.

In practice, what this all means for us – as lovers of the guitar and its music – is that once again we stand to benefit in this golden age of acoustic lutherie.

Choice is a beautiful thing, especially when it is guided by in-depth collaborations between guitar makers and the musicians who play their work. No matter what configuration you choose, the options for ergonomic joy, aesthetic depth of meaning and sonic splendour are more varied than ever before. Give thanks.

Three to get ready: From 12 to 14 in three easy steps

Gibson Century Collection – $2,299

If you’re into the 12-fret idea then Gibson’s new Century Collection should very definitely be on your radar. As 2026 brings with it the centennial of the brand’s flat-top acoustics, Gibson has released 12-fret versions of the venerable J-185 small jumbo, small-body L-00 and slope-shoulder dreadnought J-45 (pictured) models. That’s a lot of tone to go for. Which to choose? That’s up to you. Maybe all three!

Åstrand Guitars – $21,000

While still rare and wonderful, 13-fret guitars are indeed out there. Among the finest I’ve heard recently was Ted Åstrand’s new 00 Signature Goldfish model for Alan Gogoll (both pictured above).

I had the pleasure of hearing this instrument in action while producing Alan’s album Echidna’s Parade at Hansa Studios in Berlin when it was only days old. A beautiful sound and the ideal starting point for a bespoke creation.

Greenfield Guitars G1 From $30,000

Looking for one guitar to rule them all with a choice of neck joins? Michael Greenfield’s G1 model is now available in both 12- and 14-fret configurations with no difference in base price.

Players from Keith Richards and Andy McKee to Tony McManus and Paul Stanley are devotees of this S-Tier Canadian luthier. There’s a waiting list, of course, but that could give you time to save up.

• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

Davidson’s Well Strung Guitars was founded in 2019 by Paige and David Davidson. Prior to Well Strung, David was a co-owner of We Buy Guitars alongside Richard Friedman, as well as the curator at Songbirds Guitar Museum in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Paige has a business and marketing background, serving as the social media director for Songbirds Guitar Museum, where she fell in love with the rich history that surrounds vintage guitars and their brands.

Following the museum’s closure during the pandemic, David and Paige decided to take their small store and turn it into one of the world’s largest vintage-exclusive shops, specializing in Fender, Gibson, Gretsch and Rickenbacker. We’ll let Paige take it from here.

How many instruments are in your shop right now?

We’re home to more than 500 vintage instruments, all of which are available for sale!

What’s the coolest guitar in the shop?

Tough question. Cool is subjective, but the coolest piece right now is a 1960 Gibson Les Paul Custom in Cherry. Only about six of these were produced, making this guitar truly special.

What’s has been your favorite instrument you’ve ever had in the shop?

A 1963 Fender Strat in Olympic White with gold hardware and a tortoiseshell pickguard. The combination was something I hadn’t seen before. It was the most fantastic-sounding, perfectly worn-in guitar. Plus, who doesn’t love gold hardware?

What’s the most sought-after model by customers, generally speaking?

This changes from week to week, but at the moment, we’ve been fielding the most calls about 1958 to 1960 Gibson Les Pauls in Sunburst, more commonly referred to as “’bursts.” A close second is Blackguard Telecasters from the ’50s.

What separates good and great guitars?

Some players are looking for specific tonal qualities while others are focused on pickup output or neck thickness. I think you just need to love what you play. Jack Pearson gigs with a $199 Squier Strat, so…

When someone walks in for the first time, what do you hope they feel?

Like they are in the comfort of their home, just surrounded by some of the most iconic instruments of our time. We like to keep our environment one that feels like a cozy, well-stocked living room. We want you to feel like you’ve been coming here for years, even if it’s the first time we’ve met.

What is one thing everyone should know about your shop?

That any player can come in and play any guitar. How can you know if it’s the one for you if you can’t play it? I’ve never been a fan of a shop that doesn’t let you play the good stuff.

What’s your best advice for someone looking to buy their next guitar?

Go into the shop with an open mind. You might have always wanted a Gibson Firebird, but the sound from an ES-335 resonated more with you. Listen to your gut. When you’re connected to your guitar in a real way, the music you make is the proof.

What’s the best part about owning and running a guitar shop?

Being able to pair someone with the perfect guitar. You’d be shocked at what people do and don’t know from what they’ve seen on the internet.

Being able to physically put the narrow-nut width SG into someone’s hands that they swore they wouldn’t like, and watching that “aha” moment, is such a cool experience. Having someone find “the one” in your shop is the best feeling.

• Find out more at Well Strung Guitars.
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

You could hardly have two higher-performance careers than being an engineer in the RAF and then Formula 1. But Mark Woodward, founder and designer of Woodfield amps, did both – and when he was done with them, he started making amps.

“It was always just a background hobby – a fascination with valve tech,” Mark says of his passion for amps, which he sustained even while working within the highly pressured world of an F1 test team.

“But towards the end of my time working in F1, I started to get more seriously into it,” he says. “And the love of it just came back. I thought ‘I’ve got to make something, I’ve just got to create something’.”

The combo he created, the AFON 20, is built to the same exacting standards that Mark brought to his earlier work on radar and race cars. It takes the classic Marshalls of the ’60s as a jumping-off point for a more highly evolved modern amp that still has bags of sonic charisma and classic tones in an exacting, thoughtfully built package.

“It’s got a lot of headroom,” Mark says of the surprisingly loud and throaty combo that puts out 20 watts RMS in continuous power handling but peaks at 39 watts.

The power stage features a pair of Harma EL84s, which Mark says he chose after A/B testing with other valve brands for their organic compression that tempers the bright glassiness that some EL84 amps can exhibit. The amp also makes use of power scaling to offer precise volume control and a broad palette of responsiveness.

“We all love the breakup of an amp, but unfortunately that usually means you’ve got to upset the neighbours,” he says. “So I thought, well, how can I get around that? So I think I’ve achieved it through power control – basically if you tone down the power on to the anodes of the valves, you compress the output response of a valve. Obviously, you introduce other harmonics and so on, but it’s actually quite interesting.”

The power control works differently to a simple master volume (which the amp also has) and could be thought of as a ‘power delivery’ control offering everything from richly expressive squash and crunch at home-use volumes to gig-conquering projection and power at full tilt.

The feature-rich control panel also has a mute switch, a three-way brightness voicing control and the option to run the amp in single-ended or push/pull configuration, which also alters the feel and headroom of the amp.

“The way I look at the amplifier, it’s an instrument,” Mark concludes. “It is as important as your guitar.”

Builder Profile

• Name: Woodfield Amplifiers
• Founder: Mark Woodward
• Location: Shipston-on-Stour, Warwickshire
• Status: Founded 2024; prototyping from 2015
• First Amp Shipped: 2024
• Current Output: 4-8 per year
• Style: Head and combo versions
• Valves: Preamp: 2x Harma ECC83 (retro paired); power amp: 2x Harma EL84 (retro paired)
• Speakers: 1x 12” Celestion G12 Greenback, Qty 1 (in combo)
• Cabinets: Zilla Cabs, 12mm Latvian birch ply
• Repairs: Woodfield products only
• Custom Orders: Yes, 5 standard colour choices/3 control-panel finishes; further customer requests if required
• Deposit/Build Time: 50%/2-8 weeks, depending on supply
• Waiting List: 2-12 months, depending on size
• Dealers: N/A
• Price Range: Head £1,949; combo £3,299

• For more details, head over to Woodfield Amplifiers.
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

Laurence Juber grew up a Beatles fan, which isn’t exactly uncommon, especially among the generation of British musicians born in the early ’50s.

“When I started playing guitar in November 1963, it was during the breaking wave of Beatlemania in the U.K.,” Juber tells Guitar World. “The Beatles had an impact, but so did the Shadows, the Rolling Stones, the Animals and other British Invasion bands. My focus was on being a studio musician – once I learned that it was an actual career path.”

That career path got rolling pretty quickly, as Juber, a versatile player with a knack for laying back and choosing the right gear, became an in-demand session guitarist. His first brush with the Beatles’ universe came when he hooked up with their producer, George Martin, for Cleo Laine’s 1976 album, Born on a Friday.

“George was the first real record producer I worked with – and an icon,” Juber says. “His manner in the studio was relaxed and encouraging.”

It’s very possible that Martin’s relaxed demeanor rubbed off on Juber; still, the guitarist admits to feeling nervous when he joined Paul McCartney’s successful post-Beatles band, Wings, in 1978, replacing Jimmy McCulloch, who had been fired for drunken misbehavior.

“Recording was my day-to-day experience,” Juber says. “Being on stage with a Beatle was a different perspective.”

In the case of Back to the Egg, the 1979 Wings album on which Juber played (along with another new member, drummer Steve Holley), perspective is everything.

Some of its reviews were negative, perhaps because the LP represented the tail end of a band that was a spent force after eight years of ups and downs. Then again, there are some fabulous moments, like Rockestra Theme, which bagged a Grammy, plus Spin It On, Getting Closer, Arrow Through Me and After the Ball/Million Miles.

There was a missed opportunity, though, with Goodnight Tonight, one of Wings’ last hits. Although it was recorded during the Back to the Egg sessions, it didn’t appear on the album, robbing the LP of the pop single it needed to take it over the edge.

What led to your joining Wings? Longtime Wings guitarist Denny Laine had a hand in it, right?

I was very active in London as a session guitarist in the mid-’70s. I was playing lead guitar on a TV show with David Essex. Denny was a guest, performing the Moody Blues hit Go Now! [Editor’s note: Laine was in the Moody Blues from 1964-66]. He liked my playing and recommended me to Paul and Linda McCartney.

What were Paul’s expectations of you going into the studio, and what do you think he liked about your playing?

The basic expectation was that we were forming a new incarnation of Wings and to think of it as a band. I think my versatility was an asset. My predecessors were fine rock players, but Paul was looking for a more comprehensive approach to the guitar.

What was the studio like, and what gear did you use?

We started Back to the Egg on the farm in Scotland, where the studio was basically a barn with a mobile recording truck. It was quite basic but functional.

My go-to electric guitars at the time were a mid-’70s Gibson Les Paul Custom, a ’63 Fender Strat and a mid-’70s maple-board Strat. For acoustics, I had a Martin D-28 and some Ovations. I had been using a Music Man amp, but we also had some small old Fenders and a Mesa/Boogie.

Paul is on the record as suggesting he wanted to record an up-tempo album influenced by things other than the previous Wings albums. Is that how you remember it?

The musical zeitgeist was changing, punk was in the air and new wave was around the corner. Our co-producer Chris Thomas was in between doing the Sex Pistols and the Pretenders.

What was it like putting together To You, Spin It On, Old Siam, Sir and Arrow Through Me?

The first tunes we recorded were To You, Spin It On and Old Siam, Sir. To You was interesting, as Paul played a Zemaitis acoustic bass on the track. For the solo, I was playing the ’63 Strat through the Mesa/Boogie.

Paul was in the control room manipulating an Eventide harmonizer while I was improvising, so I was hearing notes in the headphones that were transposed from what I was actually playing. That led me to play outside of the changes… weirdly satisfying.

The Spin It On solo was done in the control room with the same gear. Paul and I sat eye to eye, and I learned his strengths as a producer while he coaxed a punk-rockabilly-like solo out of me. Arrow Through Me had a whole different sensibility and was keyboard- and horn-driven.

How about Rockestra Theme, Winter Rose/Love Awake and The Broadcast?

Winter Rose was started in Scotland. I played an Ovation nylon-string direct with a pickup that alternated the strings left and right in the stereo spread. Love Awake was recorded in our second studio, which was a medieval castle [Lympne Castle in Kent]. I played bass when we cut the track, while Paul and Denny played acoustics.

I figured Paul would replace the bass, but he said he liked my part. When I rerecorded it, he knelt on the floor in front of me and gave me picking tips. It was pretty cool getting a bass lesson from Macca. I overdubbed the harmonic cascades near the end with an Ovation Adamas.

The Broadcast was also done at the castle. Paul played a Tele copy with a Gizmotron prototype, plusa Mellotron for strings. I played my ’70s Strat with a Roland pickup through an Arp Avatar guitar synth with a string-type patch. I used that setup on Reception, too, doubling the lead guitar with a horn patch.

We demoed Rockestra Theme at the castle but recorded it with the full Rockestra band in Studio Two at Abbey Road. That was quite a session – being in the guitar section with Denny Laine, Hank Marvin, David Gilmour and Pete Townshend.

And then there’s After the Ball, which has a brief outro solo made up of longer solos played by Denny, Paul and you.

Also done at the castle. I recall playing a Gibson ES-335 Dot, the same one that’s in the Goodnight Tonight music video. I forget which amp I used. That guitar also was on Baby’s Request – and that’s curious since I had a Gibson Super 400 [archtop], which would have been the more obvious choice. I think I played it through a 50-watt Hiwatt. The tone was right.

What did you think of Back to the Egg the first time you heard it?

I thought it turned out quite well – the fans liked it. Other than Rockestra Theme and a few other spots, Denny mostly played acoustic guitar and contributed to the backing vocals.

The sound of Paul, Linda and Denny singing together still gives me chills. In the 2026 Man on the Run documentary, the director, Morgan Neville, very effectively used some of the Back to the Egg tracks as underscore. Hearing the music in a Dolby Atmos mix made me want to hear the whole album that way.

Some of the reviews for Back to the Egg were negative, which is interesting because, as you said, fans tend to love it. How did the reviews affect everyone?

Not all the reviews were negative – just the ones Paul reacted to. It went platinum in the U.S. and was more successful than some other Wings projects. The album would likely have sold better if the hit single from that period, Goodnight Tonight, had been on it.

Why was Goodnight Tonight omitted?

The Beatles’ singles in the U.K. weren’t on the albums, and Paul had the notion of standalone singles giving the fans extra value. It didn’t really work the same way in the U.S., where labels depended on singles as the primary promotional tool.

I don’t know if he regretted not putting the single on the album. Goodnight Tonight and its B-side, Daytime Nighttime Suffering, were added to the CD release. Paul generally seems to move on to the next project without reflecting much on the previous releases.

Some fans also wonder why Denny Laine’s Weep for Love wasn’t included on the album.

It wasn’t recorded for Back to the Egg; the album was already finished. It was recorded at Lympne Castle, May 23, 1979, during the period we were filming the video special [also called Back to the Egg].

We had the mobile studio and did some extra recording on days we weren’t filming. Steve plays the percussion groove. Paul is playing the bass guitar with a drumstick. I played the tremolo electric guitar and both of the harmony solo parts.

How do you think the album stands up?

It occupies a unique spot in Paul’s artistic timeline – a slightly different dimension. [Laughs] I’m gratified. It’s nice to get some peer recognition, but the real satisfaction is reaching people with music.

Over the years, it’s been reevaluated and recognized on its own musical terms, especially among musicians and musical artists, and Rockestra Theme won the first Grammy awarded for Best Rock Instrumental Performance in 1980.

How do you view your time with Wings?

I look at it as getting my “master’s degree from McCartney University.” [Laughs] It was a great musical experience, an education in the business of music, plus it gave me a launching pad to develop the next phase of my life and career.

The Japanese bust was unfortunate [Editor’s note: McCartney was arrested in Tokyo in January 1980 for attempting to smuggle around 7.5 ounces of marijuana into Japan]. It functionally put an end to the touring band. Subsequently, Wings’ live version of Coming Up went to Number 1 in the U.S.

What advice would you offer a guitarist stepping into a similar situation?

For professional freelance players, be a musician – study the masters, take care of business and be on time and well-prepared for the gig. In the studio world, you never know what you might be called on to play. For performing artists, life on the road can be hard and, for solo performers, quite solitary. But it develops chops, style-refining opportunities and audience interaction.

• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

On his second album, Wrong Kind of One, Birmingham, UK-based folk singer-songwriter Amit Dattani is taking listeners deep inside the heart of Americana.

Songs such as Steady The Boat, Gathering Acorns and One Too Many Mornings are brimming with a sense of soul-baring honesty, almost like a musical confession, one where the guitar tones are every bit as exquisite as the voice accompanying them.

Fingerstyle Fan

Though he grew up listening to blues masters such as Muddy Waters and Buddy Guy, it was the fingerstyle approach of Blind Blake, Mississippi John Hurt and Elizabeth Cotten that helped guide Amit towards the musical style he would pursue.

“Hearing them cover so many bases with their fingers blew my mind wide open,” he says. “It was magic. I got pretty obsessed with trying to work out how the heck they managed it, spending weeks and months working on my right hand – learning how to syncopate, mute and emphasise different notes.”

Open Approach

This led to Amit discovering the likes of Kelly Joe Phelps and Paul Curreri, and looking deeper into their techniques. “That’s when I got into open tunings,” he continues, “as well as wrapping your thumb over the top of the neck to grab those lower strings, giving more freedom to my fingers. I was amazed by how they were able to merge voice and guitar in such a unique way.

“Now I listen to folks like Ali Farka Touré, Joseph Spence and contemporary players like Kris Drever or John Doyle. I’m always interested in new picking patterns and ways to express yourself through guitar in ways that best serve a song.”

Custom Creativity

On his latest recordings, Amit can be heard playing his custom Hammett Guitar Co Astro Strat.

“It’s a hollowbody electric fashioned after the old Harmony Stratotones,” he says. “I’d always been an acoustic player. In 2018, I got diagnosed with a genetic degenerative nerve condition that impacts my hands and my feet. Long story short, the prognosis was I’d likely have two years of playing left in me before the batteries in my hands ran out.

“I got talking to Pat Hammett and we hatched a plan to create a custom electric with lower string tension and a flatter angle for my picking hand, plus super-wide string spacing. It has single-handedly helped me carry on playing.”

Electric Connection

The album was recorded live with Steph Sanders on drums. “I plugged my Astro Strat into a Tone King Imperial amp,” Amit says. “Stepping into the electric space as a fingerstyle acoustic player has been so fun. Everything was in straight takes with my incredible drummer Steph.

“I find her musicality so inspiring. I wanted to make an album that sounded like the stuff I listened to as a kid – stripped back, live and all about the energy and performance. It’s all about connection between the folks in that room in that moment.”

Under the Thumb

A Rory Gallagher DVD inspired Amit to give thumbpicks and fingerpicks a try.

“He was on an old National and I just loved the sound,” Amit says. “By then I was already sort of hybrid picking with a plectrum and using my middle and ring finger to pick melodies, so the transition to a thumbpick felt natural. I find using it with fingerpicks helps me to play cleaner and more articulately.

“The main thing for me is making sure the thumbpick blade is tiny. I file it right down so it’s more like an extension to my thumbnail. I would recommend experimenting lots and making sure it’s on tight – I once had one fly off mid-concert before, which was not fun.”

Amit picks his favourite guitar moments on Wrong Kind Of One…

“There’s a semi-improvised take on the hymn Just a Closer Walk With Thee that felt super emotional to record. And the song Now I Can Play On is an ode to my guitar and literally being able to play on.

“It makes me smile because I can sort of hear the joy I’m feeling from being able to play along to Steph’s drums in full flow. The hardest song to play is the title track. It’s a pretty detailed picking pattern, and depending on what kind of day my hands are having, it can be tricky to keep up.”

• Wrong Kind of One is self-released and out now. Get it at the official Amit Dattani website.
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

Drowning Pool’s juggernaut single Bodies was released on May 14, 2001. The debut single from the Texan metal mob quickly made its presence known to hard rock fans around the world, and changed the lives of the four musicians who recorded it.

Their signature brand of nu-metal placed equal emphasis on heavy groove and melody. For guitarist C.J. Pierce, who wrote the iconic riff, it was a case of combining the Mardi Gras music that soundtracked his childhood with the distortion and intensity he fell in love with as a teenager, in order to create something joyful and spirited.

This is Pierce’s story of the song that filled the floor of almost every metal club across the globe and become an anthem for a generation.

A house in New Orleans

I grew up in New Orleans, surrounded by jazz and funk. One of my first loves was funk – stuff by James Brown and The Meters. Later on the Red Hot Chili Peppers came out, and John Frusciante was a huge influence on me.

Then I got into Testament. Alex Skolnick is one of my favorite guitarists of all time, so that was my journey from funk into thrash. I’ve met him at the NAMM conventions. I’m always nervous – like, “Hello Mr. Skolnick, so nice to meet you!”

Then you have players like Nuno Bettencourt who mix heavy with funky. Faith No More were huge for me. When we started, Angel Dust was an album every single member loved.

I was doing a lot of electrical work during the early ’90s. I’d get home and rock out on my guitar. I still have the four-track tape with the first version of the riff. You’d be surprised; everything on it, including Bodies, was in a straight-up funk style.

The song carried on evolving when me and [drummer] Mike Luce moved to Dallas and found Stevie Benton [bass]. Our original singer Dave Williams’ voice was the icing on the cake. When he came in, he added more heavy. There was more of a Pantera influence coming through.

In the beginning we used to count to eight. In the studio we cut it down to four. There was also some wacky Mike Patton-style stuff that Dave used to do – some local people might still have that demo version.

Dive bombs

When we started out as a local band we didn’t have many fans. We had friends who wanted to stage dive, but nobody would catch them. They would literally hit the floor, which is how we came up with the lyrics.

I remember drinking a couple of Coors Lights and Jägermeister shots then trying to write a good rock song while having fun with music and lyrics. I wasn’t trying to be the best guitar player or songwriter in the world; I just wanted to create something fun. I had six strings and definitely had three of them figured out. In the end that was good enough!

The song is in drop C. Maybe it wouldn’t have sounded as big in standard or regular drop D. Lower tunings add that bottom end and thickness. I currently use 13-65 gauge strings, but for the recording it would have been 12-60.

We tracked Bodies at NRG Studios with Jay Baumgardner. There was this modded Marshall JCM800 head and a black Les Paul that James Hetfield from Metallica had recorded with. We turned that shit up way loud and just went for it.

That’s been my setup ever since. I still swear by Marshalls – they’ve always been a big part of my rig. They have such a wide range. Turn any knob and the tone will change a lot. Other amps don’t do that as much.

You can have five people play the same rig and it’ll sound different, because these amps let you hear the player. Marshalls are just the universal rock amp for me. I didn’t need any overdrive pedals for the recording; I just went straight in.

Break stuff

The first time we played it live was at Zeppelin’s in Metairie. My mom was at the show and there was such a vibe. I figured if she liked the song, then it must be cool. Now it doesn’t matter if there’s four people or 4,000 people – everyone goes nuts. It’s not really about the band, it’s purely about the music. The pit becomes like a tornado.

One time someone was crowdsurfing and threw out their prosthetic leg for me to sign! Another time we saw a guy crowdsurfing in his wheelchair – it got totally destroyed. The audience threw all the pieces on stage and we had to call the security to help him out. Luckily nobody got hurt.

Crazy things happen when we play this song. One time we played it outdoors where they’d just put new grass down. People started throwing chunks everywhere. By the end of the song it had all ended up on stage. I swear we didn’t incite that!

Don’t get me wrong

Bodies has been quite misinterpreted. It’s about being in the pit of a rock show and helping your friends get back up. So the idea of our music being used for anything negative – especially torturing prisoners in Guantanamo Bay – is very strange to us. We didn’t want that to happen. We still don’t know if it did even happen; it might have been a hearsay thing. I jokingly tell everyone that I torture people every day when I pick up my guitar!

Seriously though, music should be a positive thing, so we had to hit this on the head and explain that it’s a moshpit anthem. It’s definitely not about killing people. I don’t mind it being used in sports – you’ll hear it at wrestling events. I’ve heard it in movies and on soundtracks. That’s all great. The torture thing is terrible. It never made any sense to me.

A 25-year rollercoaster ride

I couldn’t have imagined how far this song would end up taking us. But I guess thinking back to that first live performance, we could tell something magical was happening. Our lives changed pretty fast once the single came out and went straight to MTV.

We were the last band added to Ozzfest 2001, going on stage at 10am every morning. They’d open the gate, everybody would come running to the stage and then we’d start playing Bodies. I remember seeing Tony Iommi watching from the side of the stage.

We ended up playing shows with Korn, Rob Zombie, Alice In Chains and Limp Bizkit. I try to be cool when I meet my heroes, but I’m screaming in the back of my head. We even ended up working with Nikki Sixx on some songs.

It’s been a rollercoaster ride. A lot of great things happened in the first two years of this band. To get to that level and still be touring 25 years later is crazy. There’s nothing like the adrenaline rush I get when I come off stage after playing Bodies. It takes hours to come back down every night.

• Drowning Pool tour the US throughout October.

Rock players seeking an acoustic guitar usually follow the adage that bigger is better, since bigger guitars like dreadnought and jumbo models usually deliver higher volume output and more assertive bass and treble.

However, choosing an ideal acoustic for playing blues – specifically fingerstyle and Delta-style blues – requires a different approach, as tighter bass, warm, round midrange and full-bodied, sustaining treble become prioritized over loud and aggressive tone.

One of the best flattop guitars for fingerstyle blues also happens to be one of the most affordable models made during the pre-war great depression era – the Gibson L-00. Gibson produced a variety of small-body flattop L series models before the L-00’s later introduction, including the L-0 and L-1 introduced in 1926 and L-2 introduced in 1929.

Specs changed considerably over the years, but by 1929 Gibson settled upon a consistent body style for these small-body L series flattops that measured 14.75 inches wide and had a less-rounded squared lower bout compared to rounder earlier models. The scale length is 24 ¾ inches, which allows for a very comfortable transition for Gibson electric players switching to acoustic.

Probably due to guitarists’ shrinking budgets during the depression years, the relatively stripped-down L-00 made its debut in 1931. Distinguishing features include binding surrounding the top only, a 3- or 4-piece spruce top, mahogany sides and a one-piece slab-sawn mahogany back.

Initially, the L-00 came only with a black finish to hide the piecemeal top construction, although by 1933 Gibson started offering the model with a sunburst finish. The L-00’s neck switched from a 12-fret to 14-fret configuration, and the x-braces were scalloped also starting that same year. In 1941, Gibson offered the L-00 with an optional natural finish at an additional expense due to its higher-quality materials.

Many players prefer the more modern 14-fret neck because it offers easier access to the higher frets. However, some discerning guitarists prefer the earlier 12-fret version for its bigger tone and more robust bass, thanks to the placement of the bridge further down the body, right in the center of the lower bout, which optimizes top vibration and dynamic responsiveness.

Interestingly, the cheaper L-00 and L-0 models generally have a bolder, more focused tone than fancier similar models like the L-2, Nick Lucas and Century, which have more delicate construction and lighter braces that tend to enhance sparkling treble overtones.

Gibson reissued the 14-fret L-00 as the L-00 Blues King, which was produced from 1991-2016. These are very good small-body flattop blues fingerstyle guitars, but the L-00 models Gibson has offered since 2017 are even better and built much closer to the originals.

Today Gibson offers several L-00 flattop models in 12- and 14-fret versions and with a wide variety of classic and new finish options.

With prices starting at $1,999, they are considerably cheaper than an original vintage example with prices that start around $5,000 for one in very good condition (a considerable increase from its original $25 list price in the early ’30s).

• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

Fingerstyle acoustic guitar is a hard game. It’s possibly the most exposed, intricate form of guitar to perform in front of an audience. There’s no safety net, no band to carry some of the weight of expectation or mask mistakes. So it’s unsurprising that Pierre Bensusan has spent a fair bit of time thinking about the deep questions of what connects a guitarist to an audience and what conjures magic from the thin air of solo performance.

Half a century on from the start of his career with the brilliant folk album Pres De Paris, Pierre believes that summoning perfect poise and concentration when playing guitar are hard disciplines to master – but that it is the duty of every guitarist to try to let nerves and ego fall by the wayside when you play, so the music can truly and fully come to life.

As he sits down to a cup of coffee in the Guitarist studio – he didn’t sleep well the night before – Pierre says that the mundane cares of daily life are a recurrent enemy to what a touring musician can achieve on stage, if you let them be.

“I guess this is the work,” he reflects. “To travel, to have to deal with all the aggravation of being away from home. Having to go through all kinds of little things, such as driving long distances, parking, dealing with aggravations and stuff, in order to be in a venue and play music for people.

“And when people come, of course, you give your best – you have to be at your top every time, and so you cannot let any grain of sand come and destabilise this,” he says.

“So, for me, everything else is just building momentum for that to happen. Whatever happens, it has to be recycled and transformed into pure energy…. touring life is full of so many little details, which are absolutely nothing to do with a pure rendition of the music when it happens. And yet it feels like if you succeed well to go through all of those, the music is going to be better.”

As a solo fingerstyle guitarist, do you think you have to be uniquely present and focused on your performance in a way that might not be necessary in a band?

I don’t know. I think you have to be present. You play one note, whatever you do… even if you play in a band, you have to be present. You have to be present listening to what other people play, how they interact with the music, how they expect you to interact with it… So I think presence is the key. If you are not present, you lean towards chaos as soon as you start thinking about something – that’s it, you’re no longer in the moment.

But when you are a solo performer, whatever the instrument, it is even more crucial [for you to be present in the moment]. Because it’s only you who is making this music. This music needs 200 per cent of you. But the balance is extremely subtle between being present but not being overwhelmingly present.

If you are too present and you make yourself too important, you hide the music. So, for me, a musician serves an intention, serves a continuum, serves a storytelling through music. And, of course, you need to be listening carefully to what you play.

In fact, you need to be a listener – a big-time listener. There is not much difference between you listening and the person in front [in the audience] listening. We are two listeners – and the person listening is also very creative. Because, in fact, when I play for myself, I play for myself; there is only me and the music.

But when we are together [as performer and audience] we share this intimacy, I hear the music and I understand that it’s far more, it’s going much further than just my moves to make that music happen. You should never play without listening to what you play – there is no reason why you should play if you don’t listen. What’s the point?

But all my moves, I look at them with a microscope before each sequence, the geography of where my fingers and hands are on my fretboard. The geography of my right hand touching the strings, where they are, how they touch…

All those little things can be slightly nuanced to make a sound richer by just where you touch, how you work on the sustain of a note, how you express that note.

Do you use vibrato? Or do you have the note just stand straight? Because no vibrato is also an effect – too much vibrato is a way to hide something, and it’s too much sometimes. So the effects need to remain effects, but something neutral with no vibrato is also very beautiful.

So this is a thing, you know. How do you make the music stay and then be shared by people without intruding as an ego? And so I think when you play for people, this is when you understand a lot of those things; you understand them better than when you play for yourself.

For me, music needs the experience of being shared to understand what it takes to go from you to another person – to create that bond without intruding. And so that’s why playing for people is part of my progression and evolution. I’ve learned so much.

And also, when you play for yourself, you can stop any time. When you’re recording in the studio, you can stop any time. And to know that you can stop already dictates something in the dynamic. But when you’re on stage, the only reason that I will stop will be because my guitar is so out of tune that I have to stop and tune. But now I stop between each song and I tune my guitar again, and I take the time to tune before each song.

In this era of on-demand digital entertainment, it’s easy to forget that an audience contributes directly to a live performance, through their engagement and emotional response; it’s not just a passive thing.

People are part of the music. In fact, they make the music. They let this music enter and they start to process what they hear, so they take advantage of the person playing to start creating something, and so the music becomes a pretext to get to a state of being that is going to allow this person to open up completely.

So, you know, the beginning of a concert is very important. People come and they are not aligned [with the performance] at first. They come from their reality, from work or whatever, they talk with friends, and then the music starts. They need time to be receptive.

All of that is important, especially nowadays with artificial intelligence. What’s the point to do something perfect if it’s made by a machine, right? Why should I feel anything? But this is a live performance, it is still one of the very last things where people are people – people come to see and they get what they see, it’s all there. There are no secrets, nothing hidden. What you hear is what you see, and it’s made for you.

It’s like a cooking recipe by a chef who is working very hard for all the taste to be there for the people who are going to appreciate the meal, to really have the best possible [experience] – and that’s why I didn’t feel those 51 years go by.

Each concert is very different for me and I do play notes that… try to capture what I hear at the moment, and I really try to play what I hear. It’s not always the case. Sometimes I go back to what I know for security, and I try to enhance that in the most beautiful way possible. But when I can incarnate what I hear, this is when I really am the happiest man.

When playing solo fingerstyle guitar, it’s really hard not to let conscious thoughts intrude as you play – the part of your brain that vocalises self-criticism if you scuff a note or play something slightly wrong can really upset the flow.

That thought could lead to losing it. To shut the mind from thinking… this is something that every one of us is trying to [achieve]. How do we stop thinking, even when we go to bed? How do we stop thinking and let sleep come? The mind is always late… the attention, the reaction are, in fact, the instant thing.

So when we play there is no time for thinking. The thinking comes before, maybe like when you are away from your instrument and you start imagining the music. I don’t even know if it’s a thought or if it is a very active mental vision, not even mental, but something you hear inside of you. It’s not mute, it’s very rich, you know?

I do compose a lot by just imagining music and by imagining where that music could go… and this is the beginning, for me, of the creative and compositional process: that I identify a journey and then when I take my guitar, I go back to that journey and try to make it on the guitar – to make it playable.

And so if I have an idea I will record it or I will write it down in [such] a way that it can be played. But all my ideas have to be there as well – and it also has to be doable physically. It has to be playable. Very often I end up writing music that I have no idea how to play. But I think that technique [when used properly] becomes completely invisible. The technique is a tool, so you need a lot of technique, you need a lot of expertise, you need a lot of ability to make that technique become invisible, in order to just let the music be…

And I’m sometimes thinking, ‘Is there an artificial intelligence that could just listen to my thoughts and put them on paper, so I can hear them?’ In fact, no. It’s going to be my work – that’s what is going to make it happen, all my short lifetime. So there is no time to lose, really. Especially now, 51 years on, I need to see what is essential. I cannot lose time.

You’re known for pushing the boundaries of what is possible with the DADGAD tuning. How did you first discover it?

Well, I mean, I found it on my own when I was 13 or 14 – I played guitar before in standard tuning and sang and even wrote lyrics and songs.

When I found DADGAD, it was a time when I started to listen to Alan Stivell playing the harp and then from him I went to listen to Irish music but also British folk music, Steeleye Span, Fairport, Martin Carthy, Dick Gaughan, Nic Jones. Some of my friends were into Merle Travis and Chet Atkins, but I also played bluegrass – and I loved Doc Watson and Joan Baez and Dylan and Cat Stevens and Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell.

I’m self-taught, so I was free. And I like that freedom; I don’t like people to tell me what I should do. But I learned [the value of taking] advice later in my life. Can you help me? Can you inspire me? What is the next move? And so, of course, that’s different… but then I came from piano and I already had a lot of information that helped me to really love music.

I knew from a very early age that my life was going to be in music, since I was 12 years old. I knew that I would be playing full-time, so I didn’t deviate. And today I’m just on the same road that I [embarked on] when I was six, when I started to play piano.

No-one told me, ‘Oh no, you should not play in different tunings,’ you know? Some self-taught guys did it and they were playing beautiful stuff that was very interesting. For me, it was always obvious that I should try different tunings.

There was a Martin Carthy tuning, which I tried, and I even played a couple things with that tuning, but after a while I found DADGAD and it spoke to my North African roots, my Jewish roots… you know, it opens things. And that taught me especially to work on melodies or phrasing without having to worry about chords because of the three Ds – the drone and everything – so that really spoke to me.

It’s like a relationship. You meet someone and at the very beginning you see what is obvious. But what is less obvious, you will have to work hard [to reveal].

You will have to really want to deepen that relationship. Some people like to stay at the surface, but they are afraid to deepen things because deepening means to put yourself in danger. And I think some people like to play because they are creating a zone of comfort, and it’s great. We need to reach that zone – but that zone of comfort is very short, it is a very short pleasure, in fact.

It doesn’t last long and so you always go from one zone to another zone to another zone, and in order to go from one zone to next, you have to study. I think studying is beautiful, you know? Studying means deepening, to go into the core of things, into the heart of the things. I cannot explain where music comes from. I don’t explain where my inspiration comes from. I have no idea. I haven’t learned it. I’m listening, and I’m very grateful and I’m lucky – but that means a lot of responsibility and a lot of work.

To go back to your question about guitar technique, I never try to impress people. I try to tell a story with sound and that story requires dynamics, and so I can look at music with a microscope to see how those dynamics work, and it requires a lot of introspection on the technique – that I need to do this, or I need to touch the guitar like that – and then I expand my technique and my vocabulary every time I’m confronted with a technicality that I do not master, and there are a lot of those. I try to understand what it takes and I confront myself, and I win because there is no choice.

• Azwan is available on MVD Audio
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.
  

For Owen Biddle, playing bass guitar with The Roots on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon was about as far removed from a typical gig as it gets.

Presiding over the nightly comedy show, the band had to be ready for anything, all while delivering the kind of bulletproof groove that made The Roots one of the most formidable backing bands around.

“We’ve gotten to do some really cool gigs,” said Biddle in the July 2011 issue of Bass Player. “It’s definitely been a whirlwind. I’m trying not to take for granted that my résumé now has this huge spike in it!”

It was August 2007 when bassist Leonard “Hub” Hubbard announced he was leaving the Roots after 15 years, opening the door for Biddle to take over.

Before long, the Roots had become the backing band de jour for everything from NBC’s Haiti Relief Telethon and Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity in Washington, D.C., to Carnegie Hall’s Tibet House benefit and Comedy Central’s inaugural Comedy Awards.

“I remember Bootsy Collins sat in on bass and vocals with the Roots all night on a Fallon show; we did Tear the Roof Off the Sucker at the end.

“Backing Sting was definitely one of the highpoints; he got to rehearsal while we were jamming and said, ‘Keep it going!’ and he jumped right in.”

“Probably my standout memory was the night we did two songs with Bruce Springsteen. When I first encountered Bruce and Steven Van Zandt, and they saw my bass, they lit up like two kids in a guitar store: ‘You have a six-string bass!’

“Then Bruce told me this story about when he was young and trying to get his tone together on guitar. He wanted to get more of the lush sound he was hearing from players like Jeff Beck, so he ended up buying this Gibson that had a real smoothness to it – but people kept saying, ‘Hey, that's a cool-sounding bass you have there.’

"It turns out he had bought an EB-6! So we bonded over six-string basses.”

Biddle was handed his first G&L bass at 14, which had been left behind when his cousin’s ska band broke up. He later worked his way through a succession of basses before turning to Philadelphia luthiers CallowHill Basses to build his dream instrument: a six-string bass with a compact 30-inch scale.

“I went into CallowHill basses with a laundry list of features that I wanted, and they catered for all of my quirky requests. I wanted the mahogany fretboard for the tone, and an overdrive circuit before the preamp so that the signal runs directly from the pickups to the overdrive, which I keep it on at all times.

“What I wanted was the sound of a short-scale bass, like a Höfner, but with more rigorous construction and modernised amenities.”

“The preamp, the pickups and the extended range of the B and C strings all give it a uniqueness that I sort of conceptualised when I knew that I was going to create this custom bass.

“The B string holds the tension of the notes beautifully because it is short scale at 30 inches, so the notes don’t die out and they get this punchy feel if I need it.”

Despite the instrument’s six-string range aiding his upper-register excursions, Biddle finds the low B string far more relevant to his playing than the high C.

“The 6 hasn’t changed the way I play; I still think like a 4-string player, but there are more opportunities for notes, especially down low. I don’t use the C much except for the occasional chord, or to show a keyboard player a specific voicing.”

“What I do like is having something visually provocative, which sorts people out for me – from the open-minded to the purists.

“I use flatwounds, which are also have that sort of built-in muted tone. The two pickups are Fat Stacks by Nordstrand, which I keep full on, in single-coil mode. Add in the warmth of the mahogany body and it has a classic, understated, all-purpose tone that I use for almost everything.”

By now you’ll have seen endless clips of the Angine De Poitrine live set recorded by KEXP, which went viral after in February. You might even have read my exclusive interview with guitarist/bassist Khn – the very first conversation dissecting the enigmatic musician’s background and his approach to tone and effects.

Given their meteoric rise over 2026, cementing their name as the music industry’s biggest and most unexpected success story, it would be all too easy to dismiss their microtonal math rock as a fad masked by quirky imagery – boosted their claim of being 333-year-old time travelers inspired by a solemn choir of proboscis monkeys from Borneo.

Cosmic primates and temporal displacement aside, microtonal music has been around a lot longer than most people think. And just like anything that becomes hugely popular in a matter of months – to the point where it feels like it’s inescapably everywhere – there can often be a handful of misconceptions.

It’s an out-of-tune guitar

“The most common one is that a microtonal guitar is an out-of-tune guitar,” says Dr. Tolgahan Çoğulu, a professor at Istanbul Technical University and Turkish Music State Conservatory. “However, if people knew about the harmonic series and just intonation, they might instead see the standard guitar as an out-of-tune instrument.

“For example, major thirds are clearly high or ‘out of tune’ on standard guitars and pianos, when compared with just intonation. I discussed this in my 2017 video Major Third Problem Of All Guitars In The World.”

Çoğulu notes how a microtone is often incorrectly labeled a quartertone. “A semitone is divided into 100 equal units, and Alexander John Ellis named each of the pieces a cent in the 19th century,” he says. “But a natural major third is approximately 14 cents lower than the equal-tempered major third”.

Then there’s the idea that microtonal guitars are notoriously difficult to play – something which the founder of the world’s first microtonal guitar department, opened in 2014 at Istanbul Technical University, fundamentally disagrees with.

It’s a new concept

To some, microtonal might feel like a relatively new thing, but its roots stretch surprisingly far back into history. Çoğulu points to the research of Harry Partch in his book Genesis Of A Music, which traced the lineage back to ancient China around 2600 BCE, when the musician Ling Lun cut a series of bamboo pipes of different lengths and generated a sequence of pitches through successive perfect fifths.

He also underlines how Pythagoras Of Samos used a monochord to generate perfect fifths in ancient Greece in the 5th century BCE.

Experimentation with the music system stretched into the middle ages, with theorists such as Aristoxenus, Ptolemy, Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi and Ibn Sina investigating different systems of tuning and intervals. It was a phenomenon happening around the world. inspiring elements of Indian raga music, Persian dastgah, Arabic makam, Turkish makam and Balinese Gamelan.

These are all styles that Çoğulu says “developed their own pitch systems and melodic practices outside 12-tone equal temperament [TET] over centuries.” So when did all of this cross over into the world of guitar playing?

It’s only just being applied to guitar

In his History Of Microtonal Guitar video, Çoğulu refers to the 1829 arrival of Perronet Thompson’s Enharmonic guitar in London as the official place of birth. “This was followed by the first movable-fret guitar, developed in Paris by luthier René Lacôte around 1845,” he continues, emphasizing that further arrivals came in the 20th century largely thanks to composers who were writing music based on 24 tones per octave.

The Turkish professor names Alois Haba’s Suite No.2 For Quarter-Tone Guitar composed in 1947 – a piece he’s performed himself – as “a particularly interesting and important work in the microtonal guitar repertoire.”

Which brings us to the big question on everyone’s lips. Why exactly is microtonal music having its moment in the sun in 2026? “It’s exciting to see a major revival thanks, in part, to bands such as King Gizzard and Angine de Poitrine,” says Çoğulu. He feels it’s also because a lot of people seem to be getting bored of tradition and “becoming more open to exploring new pitches in rock music.”

The phenomenon is particularly tangible in America and Europe, places that have long been dominated by the 12-TET system, heard time and time again.

There are only a few artists playing microtonal music

“Turkish people grew up listening to Anatolian rock from the 1960s and 1970s, so we’re familiar with some of the sounds heard on King Gizzard’s Flying Microtonal Banana,” the professor says.

“What’s remarkable is that King Gizzard has brought this kind of sound to the attention of a much wider international audience. As for Angine De Poitrine, their combination of math rock and 24-tone equal temperament is particularly refreshing – it demonstrates how microtonality can be integrated into new contemporary musical languages.”

If you’re looking to sink your teeth into more microtonal music, Çoğulu has homework for you, and it’s quite the list: Partch Ensemble, Mercury Tree, Brendan Byrnes, Sevish, Gabriel Marin, Maddie Ashman, Stephen Weigel, Catherine Lamb, Stephen Altoft, Julian Woods, Dave Fiuczynsky, Philip Gerschlauer, Dsilton, Matthew Sheeran, Anna-Maria Hefele, Rami Olsen, Levi McClain, Subraag Singh, Daragh Black Hynes, Matt Pollock, John Gzowski, Sina Shirazi, Radu Varga, Alper Yakın, Hakan Görener and Decolonize Your Mind Society.

As for the future, he believes these more curious and otherworldly sounds will only become more and more integrated into the musical tapestry that stretches across every corner of the globe.

“For a long time, the main problem was not a lack of ideas – it was a lack of instruments, repertoire, performers and education,” he argues. “Today, all four are developing simultaneously.”

“For Weezer’s upcoming tour – The Gathering – I’ve got my arsenal pretty dialed in. It’s kinda like when Santa leaves the workshop and the elves get to play! [Laughs]

“It’s insane the sounds we can make by tweaking knobs. It’s fascinating because there are people who can hone in on different elements of music and love gear. And I do love gear to the extent that I’ve got a new pedalboard made by a guy named Mason Marangella, who’s the [owner and CEO of] Vertex Effects. I basically spent a week up in Oakland to construct it. He did the work; I told him what I wanted, and my pedalboard has some swirl. [Laughs]

“It has distortion, it has fuzz, it has boost, it has analog delay, reverb and a talk box. I have to use the talk box for Beverly Hills. It’s all just so beautifully laid out.

“The signal path starts with a Radial SGI RX receiver. Then there’s my Boss TU-3W Waza Craft Chromatic Tuner, a Fulltone Supa-Wah and The GigRig Quartermaster QMX-6 true bypass loop selector in the Number 1 input. Then there’s Loop 1 – a Nu-X Optima Air acoustic simulator; Loop 2 – a DryBell Vibe Machine v3; Loop 3 – an Electro-Harmonix Big Muff fuzz; and Loop 4 – a ProCo Rat 2 [fuzz/distortion].

“After that, there’s The GigRig Quartermaster QMX-6 true bypass loop selector Number 1 output and TheGigRig Quartermaster QMX6 true bypass loop selector in the Number 2 input.”

“After that, we’ve got Loop 5 – a J. Rockett “The Jeff” Mod Archer [overdrive/boost]; Loop 6 – a Boss DM-2 analog delay; Loop 7 – an Electro-Harmonix Holy Grail Reverb; and Loop Eight – an MXR Talk Box. Then there’s another TheGigRig Quartermaster QMX6 true bypass loop selector in the Number 2 output and a Lehle Little Dual II Amp Switcher.

“As for amps, I’ve got SGI TX Stereo to Amplifiers (A) Clean - Vox or (B) Dirty - Mesa Boogie MKI. It’s all powered by a Cioks DC7 and Cioks 8 Power Supplies.”

• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

To call Tony Levin simply a bassist would be doing him a disservice. He’s a full-scale multi-hyphenate musician who’s added his magic to the work of Peter Gabriel, Alice Cooper, King Crimson and more.

For the last two years he’s been touring with BEAT, celebrating Crimson’s music. He has a new Stick Men record out titled Let’s Thrak. Meanwhile he’s writing his memoirs.

“I've been working on it for years,” he says. “I’m lucky to have great stories of these bands I've played with, including playing under Igor Stravinsky. It’s pretty wild to have played with both Igor Stravinsky and Alice Cooper!”

1. What was your first bass?

I started on upright as a classical player, but I don’t have that bass. My first Fender was a Precision I bought in the ’60s. I saw a guy playing one at a show and asked him, “Hey, what’s that?” He gave me great advice: “Don’t buy a new one; buy a used one.” In the ’60s we didn’t use the term “vintage” – it’s just that older instruments were cheaper than new ones.

He said, “Go to New York and for $180 you’ll buy a used Fender Precision.” I did that; and for many years, that was my bass. Later on I switched to Music Man, also designed by Leo Fender. Unfortunately there was a fire in my barn in Woodstock, New York, and all my basses except for my road ones were lost.

2. What’s a quirk or habit of your playing’s become a part of your style?

There are probably a few, but I’m not aware of them because I don’t analyze my playing that way. No matter how complex or simple, when I hear a piece of music, I’m not thinking with the prefrontal cortex. I just let the bass player take over.

3. How many guitars do you own, and what gear do you own that might surprise people?

I don’t have that many, considering how many years I’ve been doing this! We all love to collect instruments, but frankly I can’t tell you how many I have. As for surprising instruments, I have a cello, and if it’s my album and nobody to stop me, I’ll play some cello.

4. Which bass do you have the closest relationship with?

It varies with the band I’m touring with. With Stick Men I play the Chapman Stick. Mine has 12 strings, with six guitar strings and six bass strings, and it’s touch-style with a stereo output.

And then there’s BEAT, which is the music of Crimson from the ’80s and maybe the ’90s, and I’ll play more Stick but also bass. My five-string Music Man is my go-to bass now. But I also have the four-string Music Man I played in the ’80s.

5. Tell us about a time you were faced with a decision that had real implications for your life as a musician.

There is, of course, no single moment; but I’m still going to pick one! I harken back to 1976 in July when I was called to play on an album in Toronto with Peter Gabriel, whom I didn’t know of. I hadn’t even heard of Genesis! One of the guitar players was Robert Fripp, so I met the two of them that day.

Now, there’s a craft to studio work. I loved doing it, and I’d just fallen into it. I’d started playing on rock albums for Lou Reed and Alice Cooper. Then Peter gave me the choice to go on the road with him, or I could continue to be a New York studio player.

I chose to play live, which is what I love to do. I chose to be musically kicked in the butt and given subtle music lessons on how not to be a “normal player,” and how to step outside the business as usual. A few years later I joined King Crimson, where business as usual is not even considered – we wanted to truly be progressive.

6. What’s your most memorable moment with a guitarist or guitar hero?

A day that’s been on my mind lately, is from 1980, when Robert asked me to get together with some guys he knew and think about forming a band. I went to downtown New York, and in the studio were Adrian Belew, Bill Bruford and Robert.

I hadn’t even heard the music of Bill and Adrian, but I knew Robert’s playing because I’d played on his solo album, Exposure, and I’d played on the road with him with Peter.

I vividly remember the first few minutes of them playing, and my jaw dropped. Adrian was a completely unique guitar player, Bill was the same on drums, and then there’s Robert Fripp, who, obviously, was completely unique.

My thoughts while looking down at my bass and Chapman Stick were, “I’m not even going to touch the bass. in this band I’m going to be super-challenged to just belong in the room.”

7. What’s it like being in the room with Adrian and Steve Vai with BEAT now?

It’s the same – but I’m not shocked anymore! I’m used to it. Steve is just a unique player and an amazing technician. I take it as an honor to be in a band with both of them. It’s a challenge to up my game musically; not technically, necessarily, but musically: to be fresh and unique and special enough. To try – and maybe I won't succeed – to be that kind of player, because that's what is called for.

8. What’s been the toughest time you’ve had as a musician?

I’ve been rejected from a band or from a tour. It hurts. It happens to most of us. This strange occupation of being a musician often entails being in situations where you’re not wanted. You put a lot of your deepest self into it, so when you’re rejected, it hurts. It can be rough, but we deal with it.

9. What’s the best piece of advice you’ve received?

I can’t think of verbal advice, but when I was at the Eastman School of Music with Steve Gadd, he was a great drummer even then. He got me on gigs and mentored me, and it was invaluable just standing next to him.

I got to feel what it was like to have good time, never speed up or slow down too much, and just have good feel – which is a pretty advanced lesson. He wasn’t showing me or even telling me; it was just subtle things I picked up.

10. What’s the biggest misconception about you as a player?

The truth is that I don’t think about how people think about me. I’m a little famous in some niches, and that’s nice; that’s okay – but I don’t think about it at all. I’m very aware of how lucky I am to be playing really good music with really good musicians.

11. What lessons have proven most true throughout your career?

With being humble, you want to talk to Peter Gabriel. I’ve been with the guy for 40 or 50 years; he asks if anyone in the room wants tea – and then he goes and makes it! He’s the guy who, at meet-and-greets or an after-show thing where everyone in the room is there to see him, will see the person in the corner not talking to anybody, and he’ll talk to that person.

I’ve been around Peter and people like him a lot. If some of that rubbed off on me, I give them the credit.

• BEAT hit the road again across North America on October 9.

George Thorogood’s knack for popularizing older songs by blues greats – coupled with his trademark brand of high-energy boogie blues – has made his music a radio mainstay for the past couple of decades or so.

And, much like his inextricable link to American rock radio, Thorogood has been associated with his go-to hollow-body electric guitar, the Gibson ES-125, since the early ’70s.

A week before his first gig with what would become the touring behemoth, the Delaware Destroyers – later, the Destroyers – Thorogood headed to a pawn shop to buy the guitar model that would go on to accompany him throughout his career.

“I’d been traveling around the country as an acoustic street musician,” Thorogood recounts on his official website. “I was back home for my sister’s wedding, and Jeff booked the gig without telling me.”

Speaking more about his early days to Guitar World, Thorogood describes what led him to the ES-125: “I was broke. I only had $200, and we booked a gig, and there was this guitar at a pawn shop – a $200 Gibson that had been there for years. So, I bought it, and it worked because I was always playing acoustics.

“And in those days, they called those guitars [the ES-125] ‘semi-acoustic.’ And the Beatles played guitars like that, and so did Keith Richards. I thought, ‘If it’s good enough for The Beatles and The Stones, it’s good enough for George.’"

The rest, as they say, is history, though Thorogood can now be seen mostly playing Epiphones – a decision born out of necessity.

“I’m using a custom-made Epiphone archtop, single cutaway design, just like my Gibson [ES]-125 that I used to play, because I wore them out,” he explains. “The only guitar that I could ever play was the 125, and I wore them out so bad; it was costing thousands of dollars to repair them.

“And they stopped making them in like 1970, so I was ready to stop playing altogether. And then, our manager got together with Epiphone, and they donated me like 10 Epiphone guitars. 10 of them!

“I said, ‘Wow…’ and they started working on them to make the sound right. So, that’s what I’m using these days.”

As for how his new Epiphone compares to his vintage Gibson, Thorogood – with the help of some baseball jargon – admits he still prefers his trusty Gibson.

“There’s no comparison. It’s [the Epiphone] like hitting a baseball into the gap, and you have to slide into second [base] with a double. The other thing [the Gibson] is like hitting a ball into the upper deck,” he adds with a laugh.

This interview shouldn’t be happening. He’s pulverized our ears since the mid ’80s in such anvil-heavy operations as Napalm Death and Godflesh – but most media requests to Justin Broadrick, the reclusive godfather of industrial-metal, are met with silence. Forget about Zoom, suggests his press officer, but try emailing a few questions about a catalog whose shuddering highlights have influenced Nine Inch Nails, Metallica and more.

Then, suddenly, unexpectedly, we get the word: Broadrick is willing to talk. And how: in a world of say-nothing, media-trained stars, the Birmingham-born songwriter is a bucking bronco of an interviewee, daring you to interject in his bitingly funny, brutally honest five-minute screeds.

And while Godflesh's penultimate album, Decay, is the hook, Broadrick – who attributes his “hyper” personality to a late-life autism diagnosis – is happy to drag us all over the map of his seminal four-decade career.

You don’t normally do phone interviews. We appreciate you doing this one.

I’ve just always hated speaking on the phone. It’s fucking horrible. I mean, the best of people get anxiety about it.

Do you remember the moment you knew you wanted to play guitar?

It was prompted by a photograph in Sounds magazine of Micky Geggus from the Cockney Rejects. They were a pretty remedial punk-rock band. But he was stripped to the waist, he had a really gnarly-looking face, and he was holding a barre chord on, like, a Gibson SG. That photo just captured me. I wanted to know how to play that chord.

When you first picked up the guitar, was it a toy, a weapon, a comfort blanket?

All of those things. Even though I come from a poor council estate in Birmingham, I had a stepfather who played a Strat, which he couldn’t really afford. He barely spoke, my stepdad. In hindsight, he was clearly autistic himself. But he was a brilliant guitarist and painter.

He taught my mum to play bass and they were in a short-lived but somewhat legendary punk band called Anti-Social. He showed me how to play this chord. I ran it up the neck and I was like, “Wow, I can play Discharge riffs!” He tried to say, “I can teach you more,” but I was like, “Nah, I don’t need to know anything else!”

Punk rock was your founding influence?

The record that got me straight away was the first Stranglers album [1977’s Rattus Norvegicus]. JJ Burnel’s bass was the lead instrument, which was a life-changing thing for me – that’s why the bass in Godflesh sounds like it does. I was buying any seven-inch single I could get, even though we had no money, because we were just “dole-dwellers” or whatever.

What emotional impact did punk have?

I was a frail, scared kid. At my infant school and junior school, I couldn’t speak to people. I was mute; I was isolated – I couldn’t deal with anything. My sensory shit is off the charts. So I often say that punk saved my life, because it got me out of my ultra-introspective autistic state.

At my first year of senior school in 1980, where I would have normally been bullied the fuck out of, I went armed with all these punk rock records. And these tough kids who’d have kicked the shit out of me for being a fucking freak, I would speak to, because they were into punk rock too. It was a survival thing.

How did your own music-making progress?

I was bought my first cassette recorder when I was nine. I started recording myself on any instrument I could pick up, just making a fucking noise. I was doing these shit punk demos with guitar and my stepdad’s really basic drum machine. So I was literally already a one-man band at 11 years old.

You played guitar on Napalm Death’s 1987 grindcore classic, Scum, then joined Head of David still aged 17.

In Head of David I was drumming, but also writing guitar and bass parts. When we did Dustbowl [1988] I was the only guy who worked on the mixes with Steve Albini – the rest of the band had given up by that time. They kicked me out because I was writing what they called “noisy bastard music.” They basically left me at a bus stop.

But I was already writing these grinding, evil basslines, dissonant guitars, beats that I wanted to crush with. I was living with Ben Green [Godflesh bassist] at the time. So I was like, “I want to use these songs,” and that was the genesis of the first Godflesh album.

What was your approach to the Godflesh material?

For a start, I wanted to tune everything down as far as possible. I wanted this repulsive sound – I wanted it to be an expression of pain by going as low as possible, making a terrifying sound, you know? As a scared little kid who was terrified of everything, it was my way of communicating that horror. I wanted to make fucking terrifying music, in any which way I could. Filthy, dirty, mechanized but organic painful fucking music.

What gear did you use to create that?

Shitty stuff, back then. The first two Godflesh albums was the same Westone ST guitar I used on Scum. I've still got it now in my studio. I was just using junk prior to that, from second-hand shops. The Westone had a tremolo arm, which I used a lot on Godflesh’s debut mini album and Streetcleaner [1989].

I was using a shitty amp borrowed off some kid who lived on the street. An HM-2 pedal, a cheap Boss delay, half-broke cables – council estate equipment, basically. After that, the band started earning money, so I got a Strat. And my wish was always to use what I've been using since 1990: a Marshall JCM800 and 4x12 Marshall speaker.

By the early ’90s Godflesh were a pretty big deal. Did you have the personality type to cope with being a well-known musician?

Not at all. My fantasy of expressing myself that began when I was eight years old – by the time I started getting on stages, I was like, “This is fucking horrible!” The whole thing was so overwhelming that the only way I could get by was with alcohol and whatever substances would nullify the experience.

I mean, I stopped proper touring almost 20 years ago. At most I do six shows in a row, and that’s it. I will not tour because I can’t fucking stand it. I just go into self-destruct. Even now, every time I’ve got a show, the lead-up is utter distress for me. I don’t want to leave the house. I don’t want to leave my things. I don’t want to be in unpredictable situations with unpredictable people.

Luckily I jacked the alcohol years ago. Now it’s all just medication. I used to be brought onto a plane, pissed out of my mind. Now I take benzos to fly.

Godflesh had a US tour around the turn of the millennium that you canceled. What happened there?

Ben had already left the band, so the band had changed – it felt like it had run away from me. The day of flying out to a seven-week tour in America, having just done two months in Europe, I knew, “The only way I’m getting through this is by alcohol.”

Every time I was on tour I’d turn into an alcoholic. Back then, I couldn’t communicate it to people. I’d tell them: “Touring is a fucking major problem for me,” and they’d say, “Well, you get onstage, you play your music. What’s the fucking problem?” You were bullied into everything, by labels, by everyone.

The day I was meant to leave for that tour, I hadn’t slept for three days, I was having panic attacks, and I was lying in my bed, paralyzed, just crying. I was like, “I can’t fucking do this anymore. If I’ve got to keep doing these tours, I’m going to end up dead by the end of the next one. So for the sake of self-preservation, I’m finishing Godflesh right now.” On the day of the fucking tour. And I tell you what – I was made to pay for that.

What were the repercussions?

The tour had no insurance, so everyone came to me for compensation, and I was fucking broke. It took two years for me to financially recover. I had to get credit cards to pay off credit cards; you know, that shit. I even had death threats from the tour bus company. He got me on the phone and said, “I am a fucking Vietnam vet. I know people in your fucking area. If you don’t pay me within two weeks, I wouldn’t like to say what’s gonna happen to you.”

It got so out of hand. So for two years I had zero money. I had to remortgage my house three times. It was terrible. Luckily, while Godflesh was gone, I was working on material that became the first Jesu album. My whole experience of this shit went straight into that.

Tell us about your recent collaboration with Phoebe Bridgers.

I’m on Bobby and the hidden track Best Dressed. The collaboration was nothing to do with Godflesh. People in the media wanted to run with, ‘Godflesh man works with Phoebe Bridgers!’ I was really upset, because I’m not there because of Godflesh.

On the album I’m credited as Justin Broadrick/Jesu. Phoebe doesn’t even know Godflesh. She’s got no fucking interest. But she loves Jesu. She knows every fucking song. She was like, “You do something that people in melancholy music don’t do, and it's the heavy factor. I’ve got to get you in there, fucking doing that.”

Bobby sounds great – Best Dressed is even better, though. It’s slower; even more melancholy. It's a sad fucking track, man. It’s much more droney, played on an ultra-low-tuned eight-string guitar. You know, loads of minors, open strings, open tunings, shit like that.

Decay has some seismic guitar moments, from Fodder to Feral Colony. How did you approach them?

My main guitar on the album was a seven-string Schecter Hellraiser Hybrid. But ultimately, the guitar is just a tool to me. I probably spend more time on computers, taking my guitar and chopping it up, than I do physically making the music.

On Decay I used the guitar sparingly for hyper-focused moments. It’s really quick shit that I do with guitar on this album; I don’t sit there and jam. I don’t rehearse. I don’t do that shit.

Decay is supposedly Godflesh’s penultimate release. Why stop?

I can’t perform this music live. I had surgery for a debilitating hernia, and if I shout like that again I’m going to break my abdomen wall. I had a six-and-a-half inch incision and really complex surgery. It’s fucking brutal, man.

All that shouting I do with Godflesh is all rooted from my abdomen, you know? It’s so physical and I don’t fake anything. I can’t go through the motions. When I get on a stage, it’s got to feel like this is the end – it’s the last performance I’m ever going to do, and I could fucking die right now.

So what’s next for you?

Jesu can do anything because it’s essentially shoegaze metal, so I don’t have to shout or move much onstage. I’ve got my heavy electronic project, JK Flesh. The last Godflesh album will come out, then I've got my new project, White Light District. It’s not a Godflesh replacement. It’s heavy and guitar-oriented, but more all-encompassing.

I was tiring somewhat of the Godflesh template. I wanted to step outside of guitar/bass/drum machine and samples; it’s too restrictive now. Obviously I’m fucking autistic, so I’m entirely ritualized and entirely restricted – but the Godflesh template, I’m starting to tire of it.

I want to step outside of it, make heavy, ugly music that isn’t written whatsoever to perform live. I want it to be cinematic and really fucking ugly. Way uglier than Godflesh. Really terrifying. A massive wall of sound.

Looking back over your career, do you have a theory on why you're so productive?

Oh, absolutely: it’s my autism. I never knew about any of this shit – why I operate like I do – until I got diagnosed. I’ve been surrounded by people all my life who have always questioned it. Like, “How are you so prolific?”

It’s no coincidence that any artists who are close to being as prolific as me seem to be spectrum-dwellers themselves. It’s singular, hyper-focused obsessive behavior – and a bludgeoning need to express myself.

• Decay is out now.

It’s been 13 years since Guitarist stood onstage with Eric Johnson for a tour of his rig. And we muse that it had probably seen some changes since that time.

“Not as many as you’d think,” he says with a laugh, explaining that he actually ships his USA rig across to Europe, rather than hiring backline on this side of the Atlantic.

“Yeah, it’s pretty extravagant,” he continues. “I’m going to go home broke because I shipped everything over here, so I’ll be eating bread and cheese for the next year or two, but that’s okay, at least I’ll have my sound, I guess.”

Known for his connoisseur-level guitar tone, we were surprised to find that the actual sum of parts doesn’t comprise anything that might be described as ‘exotica’. We were even more surprised to find that Eric has been experimenting with digital amps. But the 21st century hasn’t quite found its way onstage with the Tonemeister General quite yet…

Could you give us a guided tour of your live rig?

I use three different sounds: the guitar goes into two A/B boxes; the first A/B selects whether it’s going to be lead or it’s going to be a choice of rhythms. So it comes out for the lead, goes into a wah-wah, and then it goes over to an Echoplex and a Tube Driver, and it comes out of that and goes into a Marshall [JMP] head connected to the bottom [Marshall] cabinet. I can then switch to a second A/B box, which will give me a choice of rhythm.

The first is a clean rhythm, which goes into a loop box for the Deluxe Memory Man, which goes into another Echoplex and a TC Stereo Chorus. That goes into two [Fender] Deluxe Reverbs.

If I choose the other type of rhythm, I can switch this second A/B box and get a dirtier rhythm, which goes into an [Ibanez TS808] Tube Screamer, an [Arbiter] Fuzz Face, and an MXR Digital Delay. That goes into a Two Rock Classic Reverb amplifier, which goes into the top Marshall cabinet.

So it’s really just a matter of having three different sounds: one clean stereo rhythm, one dirty rhythm with fuzz, or a lead with the tube overdrive. Pretty much the same as it’s been for years, although the particular amps might change, but the general structure and architecture stays the same.

A lot of players have a single amp setup and use pedals for a clean boost, crunch and a lead sound. When did you discover the three-amp system worked for you?

Well, one thing is the gain structure of the amps. I was able to get a better lead tone out of a high gain or a higher gain amp like a Marshall. And I was able to get a better rhythm tone out of a lower gain amp like a Fender.

Also it’s the way the tone controls work on the amp. The tone controls are in a different place in the schematic on a Marshall than they are on a [Fender] black-panel, so it affects the sound.

So to try to get that clean country tone, or Wind Cries Mary kind of tone, the black-panel Fender works for that. But the Marshall works better for that blues-rock thing, so I just had to part it out because I could never figure out a way to make it work just using one amp and getting all those sounds. I wish I could do that. I think they actually call that the Neural DSP [Quad Cortex], don’t they?

Have you experimented with digital amps?

A little bit, yeah. The Tone Master by Fender and the Neural [Quad Cortex]. Still messing with it. I’m trying to decide whether to try to replicate my sound or to just go with it in a different sonic direction. I think at this juncture it seems that its strength is to use it as its own tool instead of trying to make it sound exactly like a vintage amplifier, you know?

What about guitars?

I just use my ’54 Strat, and I have one of my EJ rosewood [fingerboard] Stratocasters with me. But the Strat is the main thing I use for most of the show. I also brought a Custom Shop Les Paul along for a few songs.

Do you have very specific setup requirements for your Strats?

I like the fretboard a little flatter with bigger frets, and I hook [the lower] tone control up to the bridge pickup. The neck and middle are the old pickups, but I replaced the bridge pickup with a HS2 DiMarzio. But I don’t hook up the bottom coil, I just leave it single coil, so it has a little bit more gain than a regular Fender pickup. The action is not too low, but kind of low; so that it doesn’t fret out, you know?

It’s been refinished and [the neck] was already flattened before I got it, which is perfect because nowadays you don’t want to touch it anymore. But in the old days it didn’t matter. I mean, I used to find [’50s Strats] for 400 bucks and you could do whatever you wanted. But it’s kind of become a stigma now. This is the only ’54 I have and it’s a good guitar, although it’s not particularly original, but it does the job.

What about the profile of the neck? Is it a soft V?

“It’s not too sharp, which I like. It’s kind of rounded, that’s really my favourite neck. They’re smaller than they were in the later ’50s, but they’re thicker and rounded, which I find to be kind of nice because with the smaller neck you can do different [chord] voicings and stuff like that.

What gauge of strings do you use on your Strat?

I just use a stock 10 through 46: 0.010, 0.013, 0.017, 0.026, 0.036, 0.046. I was using a little bit thicker [gauge] but it kind of got to where I thought these were more balanced.

You actually started on piano. How do you think that influenced your guitar playing?

It was in a pretty major way because I kind of assimilated all the nuances and technique of piano and so when I started guitar, I wanted to get those chord voicings. So it’s almost like your principal language in a way, whether you got real good at it or not, you think that way, and so I transferred that to guitar, and it helped me not be too myopic about how I looked at chord voicings or tone.

I like the sound of the piano because it’s a lot of note and not a lot of attack. Usually on a nice piano, and similarly with some of my favourite guitar players, there wasn’t a lot of noise or attack. It was just the blooming of the note, like Wes Montgomery, or in particular steel-guitar players. They get this sound where it just jumps out because of their picking.

Do you think it’s true that guitar players learn chords and scales using patterns or diagrams, whereas a keyboard player would learn the same information from a more musical perspective – note names, key signatures and so on?

That’s true, and I think most guitar players are still somewhat trapped in patterns. But I think the less you are, the better, obviously. We’re all trying to get out of that and become more liquid and just be able to play melodically.

When I started playing guitar and didn’t know how to play, one of the first things I did was teach myself by sitting at the piano with the guitar in my hand and taking the notes and moving them over [to the guitar].

So what I had to do with this strange way of learning guitar was learn all the notes on all the frets; that’s one of the first things I did. And I think it helps if you look at a string on a fret, and you immediately know what note it is. So that you’re not so bound by those patterns.

Guitarists can find it very difficult to break away from shapes and patterns…

One of the first things [to do] is just sit down and learn – to where you [can do it] without thinking – to look at any fret on any string and know what note it is. It is a daunting task, but it’s totally doable. And then, once you get it, it’s like breathing. We don’t think about breathing, we just do it, and it really helps free you up and not be so stuck on the pattern thing.

In the past you’ve said that your style is a mixture of diverse influences, from Eric Clapton’s period with John Mayall to jazz players such as Wes Montgomery. How did that come about?

“You know, when I was really young, my dad loved music so much he just played all these records of all these different styles. And I saw how much it made him happy. [I thought] “Oh, there must be something to this music thing”. Then you start listening to different music, which continues to this day.

I mean, you can find stuff in any style of music. It’s just incredible, and I think it kind of broke the conceptual mould for me. I realised I just like the sound of the guitar, whether it’s Chet Atkins or Jimi Hendrix or Django Reinhardt or Wes Montgomery or Jerry Reed.

With all these musicians there’s something there, so I think that’s what prompted me to keep the door open and stay a student of the guitar and learn from everybody. And you never really arrive on your journey because you go back to the ’30s and ’40s and listen to all the sax players or keyboards, all different instruments, and you go, “Oh well, I’m not doing anything new!” I should have started when I was two years old if I wanted to catch up with these people, you know?

• To keep up to date with Eric’s tour dates, clinics and album releases, visit the Official Eric Johnson Website.

Victoria Williams may now be living quietly in California’s Joshua Tree; however, at one point, she was carving out a path as one of the most distinctive voices in American rock – both as a lyricist as well as a guitar slinger – and opening for the likes of Neil Young.

“I never play the same solo twice,” Williams told Guitar World back in 1995. “And that's pretty dangerous, ’cause you never know what you're going to get.”

On her third studio album, Loose, her lead guitar chops are on full display on several tracks, with her percussive soloing style evoking Young’s. Williams had crossed paths with the Godfather of Grunge in 1993, when she landed a support slot on his tour.

“I got to know Neil when he asked me to open for him after he heard the version of Don't Let It Bring You Down that I did on The Bridge, the Neil Young tribute album.

“He was supposed to play the solo on You R Loved, but he couldn't make it, so I did it myself,” she added.

Around the same time, though, the promising artist’s career nearly came to a tragic end.

“I was on the 23rd show,” Williams told NPR in 2017.

“All of a sudden my hands were numb, and I couldn't play the guitar, so I'm just standing there, sitting and singing a capella. His manager said, ‘You've got to go to the hospital and figure out what's wrong with you.’”

Williams was eventually diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a long-lasting and degenerative condition of the central nervous system. This meant she had to choose between her budding career and regaining her health. Unable to tour, she was soon overcome by medical bills, when an impressive number of artists stepped in.

“I was mesmerized,” said Sylvia Reed, the late Lou Reed's second wife. “Her voice and the song, the lyrics were amazing. And I called Lou over and said, “Look at this, look at this…’”

Reed, Pearl Jam, Lucinda Williams, The Waterboys, and a host of other artists came together to release a benefit album – Sweet Relief: A Benefit for Victoria Williams – to help cover her medical costs.

Williams managed to get her health back on track enough to hit the road in 1995. Not only that, the benefit album raised enough funds to kickstart her own foundation, Sweet Relief Musicians Fund, which provides financial support to musicians struggling to make ends meet to this very day.

There are perks to growing up with a pro guitarist as a dad. "I consider myself extremely lucky," says Italian virtuoso Matteo Mancuso. "I think we had almost 50 electric guitars at home, so I had plenty of choices when I was a little kid especially."

The spread was impressive: five Strats, three Les Pauls and plenty of other brands – the young musician got to experiment with an array of sounds, figuring out what spoke to him and what didn’t.

“Once you go past that period of time where you need to know the different guitars, you can have a clear idea of what you really want from [one],” he adds.

All of that early homework proved valuable for Mancuso as his playing evolved. The fingerstyle master needed a versatile guitar to handle his equally versatile music, which on his latest LP, Route 96, ranges from fiery prog to delicate classical-guitar textures to jazz-fusion workouts.

Back in 2017, he discovered an ideal vehicle for that range: the Yamaha Revstar, which is now his go-to instrument “90 percent of the time”. Two years later, he received a custom shop model, and now he’s taken that partnership one step further with the signature RS20MM, featuring custom inlays and DiMarzio PAF 36th Anniversary pickups.

We spoke to Mancuso about his distinctive technique, the target player for the RS20MM, and why the Revstar is an ideal Swiss Army knife for his style.

You play with your fingers on your right hand, a technique inspired by watching your father play classical guitar. Is there anything about the Revstar that complements that playing style? What makes it a good platform for your technique?

I don’t think it’s the specific guitar that helps you, particularly with the fingerpicking style. I think it works for every instrument. For the Revstar, I was just searching for a guitar that was versatile enough to do the rock and jazz stuff. It didn’t have anything to do with the technique itself, let’s say. I was able to play fingerstyle with various guitars.

If there’s a little bit more space between the strings, for example, it usually helps me a little bit for some things – just because I have a little bit more space to have the finger get inside the string and have enough volume as well, and that’s a technique I learned from classical guitar. With electric guitar, you need to develop less volume because you have the amps that help you, of course, and you have distortion as well, and you have pickups.

So the movement is a little less wide compared to classical guitar. It’s not specifically the Revstar that helps me with technique. It’s just that I developed a lot of technique with the classical guitar and then tried to borrow some things from the classical world for the electric.

Derek Trucks is another iconic fingerstyle player, though your techniques are very different. Just curious, though: Have you listened to much of his work?

Oh, yeah! We’ve never met, but I know Derek and his music. Of course, I’m a huge fan of his work. He’s an incredible player. We both play with our fingers, but it’s a completely different approach from my right-hand technique.

Your signature model is based on your 2020 custom shop Revstar. What were the most important specs that you wanted to make sure they got right?

One important thing was the pickups. I’m a big fan of humbuckers, and for the sounds I’m searching for right now, I always get closer when I start with a humbucker rather than a single-coil. But that’s, of course, just preference. In the case of the Revstar, I wanted to have the splitting options just to experiment a bit with how much output I want to have with each sound.

With that kind of stuff, I prefer to have pickups with slightly less output than you’d imagine. My go-to decision was with DiMarzio, and the pickup I’m using now are called PAF 36th Anniversary. They don’t have a gigantic amount of output. It’s the right amount if you want to play clean and distortion stuff as well.

Because they have a solid body, you cannot have the same acoustic volume of a semi-hollow or a hollow body, of course. But the thing with the Revstar, especially the new ones, is that they have a chambered body.

This is for two reasons: for weight relief, so the guitar feels a little bit lighter, and to also have a tiny bit of that acoustic volume that you might prefer, even for solid-body stuff. It’s not a great amount of volume, but you can hear it compared to a full solid-body, you know? Plus the weight relief is great for me. I don’t want to have a heavy guitar.

I can’t play a Les Paul for two hours straight because my back will hurt so much. I prefer to have lighter guitars with small bodies as well. I’m a small person, so I don’t want to have a big guitar with me. I’m more on the ergonomic side of things.

Of course, you also need to like it, aesthetically speaking. I’m a really big fan of gold hardware, so I really wanted to have gold hardware. It sounds like a very small feature, but it’s actually big for me – I have Luminlay dots on the fretboard.

That’s actually very useful if you have a really dark stage in some moments, and you need to know where the 12th fret or 5th fret is. That’s way more important than you can imagine for a lot of concerts. There are a lot of features that I really like on this guitar.

How long did this process take? Was there a lot of back and forth and experimenting? Did you add anything new?

To be honest, the first thing we talked about was the price range. [Laughs.] [Then] I immediately knew what I could have and could not have – and what would be the best solution in that price range. I’m super-happy with the guitar because the most important things are already there.

Of course, if you have an unlimited budget, you can go crazy with it, but at the end of the day, the most important things for a guitar are: It needs to be reliable; it needs to be always in tune; [the wood] needs to be great quality; and of course you need to like the tone.

Once you have those things, everything else is just secondary. Then we tried different neck shapes, and we even tried a very thin neck shape for one of the customs. Even if it was maybe a little more comfortable with the left hand, the sustain was not the same.

Let’s say the quantity of wood in the neck should be the right amount to have the sustain you want. I prefer to have, let’s say, a bigger neck – not too much because I don’t have huge hands – but the right amount of wood to have a great sustain for that kind of guitar. That was very important to me.

Has the Revstar unlocked anything new in your playing?

I’m so used to it that I don’t know if it pushed me to do things differently from other guitars. Of course, if you have a Telecaster in your hands, it will influence you to do things that are associated with the Telecaster. It all starts with the music that is recorded with that guitar – not so much the instrument itself.

When I have a Telecaster in my hand, I immediately think about Brent Mason or Brad Paisley or Johnny Hiland – those kind of guys, because I’m a big country fan. That kind of material can be inspired more with a Telecaster because the sound is already there and closer to what you have in your head, if you want to go that route.

Same with a Les Paul and other guitars – some have such a great character that you can’t deny that you’re influenced by it. I always have music in my head that I want to translate into the real world. Whatever instrument is available to me in the moment can be the right choice.

With the Revstar, of course I tend to have more humbucker-inspired sounds. If I want to do more of a Hendrix-inspired rhythm section, of course the Revstar is not the right guitar to do that kind of stuff. The Revstar is my go-to guitar 90 per cent of the time.

I consider myself extremely lucky because my father is also a guitar player. I think we have almost 50 electric guitars at home, so I had plenty of choices when I was a little kid especially. [Laughs]

We had like five Stratocasters, three Les Pauls, and various brands. We had Gibson, Fender, Squier – actually my first guitar was a 3/4-size Squier because I was a very little kid. The full-size was too big for my body to handle. I got super-lucky because I tried every famous guitar since I was a little kid, and I’d already tried a wide variety of sounds.

Once you go past that period of time where you need to know the different guitars, you can have a clear idea of what you really want from [one], especially if it needs to be a custom model or a future signature model. As a matter of fact, I have two guitars on tour with me: a Yamaha Pacifica, which is a Strat-style guitar, and I play it for more single-coil kind of stuff. If I need to use the whammy bar, it’s my go-to guitar as well.

Of course, I also have my Revstar. That’s it. But in order to get there, you need to try a lot of different guitars and amps, and I got lucky because my father basically did my same job when he was my same age. He was touring a lot, and that was super-useful, having a professional with you when you were a kid.

The Revstar is unique in that doesn’t have that super-famous lineage that some brands might have. It gives you kind of a blank slate.

You can achieve very traditional sounds with Yamaha as well. If you want to get Hendrix stuff with the Pacifica, it can be totally done. If you want to sound like Santana with a Revstar, it can be totally done. But the thing is that I’m not searching for these particular sounds.

I’m just searching for a guitar that is versatile enough to do a lot of things in the same moment. My kind of music goes from heavily traditional, jazz-oriented stuff to almost metal-sounding stuff. So you need a guitar that can have the best of both worlds and be super-versatile for these reasons.

Plus, Yamaha are concentrating on the innovation side of things, and maybe if you go with other brands, there are a lot of people attached to the tradition as well. They want the guitar that is always like the ’60s or ’70s model, and you don’t want to change that if you’re searching for that.

The people who go with Yamaha aren’t those kind of people who say, "I want the old-style version." I think there’s a level of freedom if you’re a brand that doesn’t have that same baggage. There’s a higher level of freedom if you want to experiment with the newer models, as opposed to maybe other, more popular brands in the guitar community.

Your music covers so much ground stylistically – it’s very difficult to describe, in a great way. Do you think the Yamaha is a good canvas for that versatility? How much of your latest album, Route 96, were you able to record with it?

Black Centurion, for example, was totally recorded with the Revstar. Of course, different amps, different digital stuff for every sound, but I think I pretty much recorded everything with just one guitar on that particular tune.

There are some other tunes I recorded with different acoustic guitars. I remember that I used a Guild for some of the acoustic sections. I also have a Yamaha Grand Concert, a great classical guitar, which I used for some pieces on the album.

And the Pacifica, as well. I don’t think there are many electric guitars, maybe just two or three, and maybe there’s more variety on the acoustic and classical stuff. I recorded a lot of stuff just with the Revstar and the Pacifica.

When you created this signature model, did you think much about the target player? It’s obviously a versatile instrument.

First off, it's a great, versatile guitar for everything. It can be for the intermediate player as well, not just professional people. You don’t need to take too much care of the guitar because it’s very stable by itself, and that’s a very important thing I wanted to achieve. I don’t want to touch anything. I don’t want to touch the truss road or adjust the action. I want to do this just one time and then it’ll be okay for the next 10 years.

This is a guitar where you can actually do that. It’s super-stable. It plays everywhere from the last fret to the first one. I think it can be a really good guitar for someone who’s studying music and wants to have a guitar for all kinds of gigs – the more jazz-oriented stuff or the pop stuff.

That can be totally done with the Revstar. It’s a great chunk of people, maybe more toward the rock player because this guitar can be very aggressive as well. A little bit less toward the jazz player because, of course, in the jazz community there’s still a huge number of people who prefer to have the semi-hollow. But I think it will be a great guitar for everyone, from intermediate to advanced musicians.

• For more info, head to Yamaha Guitars.
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

Some bands get kicked offstage for being too loud. Freeze the Fall had to leave because they were too young. But for bassist Aria Becker, her age was never supposed to be the headline.

“There were shows where we literally weren't allowed to stay inside the venue,” says Becker. “We’d have to wait in the car until the support act had finished. We’d then quickly go inside, play our set and run back out.”

Their youth became an unavoidable part of the Freeze the Fall story, with the band frequently introduced as a “teen band.” It’s an understandable label for a group that began making waves while its members were still in high school.

“We’d hear things like, ‘You’re so good for a teenage band,’ but we didn’t want to be known for being a young band. We just wanted to be known as a band.

“There were shows we couldn't play because of age restrictions, and certain parts of the industry were harder to navigate, but we’re starting to move beyond that now, which I'm really excited about.”

Luckily, it was never a dealbreaker for their record label. In fact, 604 Records came looking for them – but signing a young band meant figuring out how to build a career around restrictions that most artists never have to think about.

“They reached out to us first, so there wasn’t really any hesitation from them about our age. They’ve obviously had to work with us a little differently because some opportunities just aren’t available to us. Getting tour managers and booking agents can be difficult when you’re an underage band.

“I think that’s been one of the biggest challenges – people sometimes don’t believe you're going to stick with it. Now that we’re getting older, that's all starting to fade away.”

With a new single, Crescents & the Torch, out now and a new album pencilled in for later this year, Freeze the Fall are opening the door on their next chapter.

“It’s really the beginning of a new era for us. Like most of our music, you can think of this first single almost like a movie trailer for what’s to come. It lays the ground work for the sound and for the story we want to tell.”

Was making a full-length album always an ambition?

There was actually some debate about whether we should make an album at all. A lot of people don't necessarily sit down and listen to an entire record anymore – they pick their two favourite songs and then move on to the next thing.

So there was some discussion about splitting it into two EPs. But writing a full-length album has always been a goal for the three of us. We’re storytellers, so this is a concept album with a big overarching story.

You’ve described the band as having a medieval-inspired aesthetic. Where does that come from?

Ever since making our last EP, The Red Garden, we’ve fallen in love with that whole medieval aesthetic. We bring it into our social media, our outfits and the way we present ourselves on stage. The visual side is a big part of the band. Quinn, our singer, especially loves all the medieval stuff, so we use a lot of it.

What drove that evolution in your sound?

As we've learned more about writing music, our sound has just evolved with us. You can hear a jump from Thrones to The Red Garden, and the jump from The Red Garden to this new project is even bigger.

It's definitely the most jarring change we’ve made, but I think it's a good change.

What was your first bass guitar?

It was a three-quarter-size Jackson. I wasn’t really into music at the time. I played ukulele, but my parents basically said, “No, you need to play an instrument.”

One day I walked into my room and there was this Jackson sitting on my bed. I got a teacher straight away, and he completely changed everything for me.

Have you had any other “lightbulb moments” since then?

There was another big switch in my playing when I joined Freeze The Fall. I practise quite a bit, and before joining the band my practice was focused on warm-ups, techniques and things like music theory. I was a really good student!

But once I joined the band, that all went out the window. My practice became about singing and playing bass guitar at the same time, working on stage presence, writing for the band and running through the setlist.

My technical skills didn’t necessarily get worse, but they became stagnant for a while because I was developing a different set of skills as a performer.

Now I spend half my practice time working on bass skills and the other half working on band skills. They’re two completely different things.

Who have been some of your biggest musical inspirations?

My favourite band is Bring Me the Horizon. A lot of my writing influences come from them, too. They’ve definitely been a kind of moral compass for me. I even named one of my basses after the singer’s dog!

Have you had any memorable onstage disasters that taught you a lesson?

I had a strap lock come off during a show. The entire metal part that screws into the bass flew off, and the bass just started falling towards the ground.

I caught it before it hit the floor, but we were literally in the middle of a song. I had to play the rest of the song sitting on the stage!

I learned a very important lesson that night: check your instrument before every show. Make sure your patch cable is properly connected, make sure nothing is loose and make sure everything is secure. Especially on the road, things get bumped around and things come loose.

When did you first discover Dingwall basses?

I’d known about Dingwall since around 2022. All my favourite bands were using them, so I really wanted to play one. I got my first one in 2023.

I also use Darkglass gear. I have their Anagram, so Dingwall and Darkglass are kind of a match made in heaven. They sound really good together.

How attached do you get to your instruments?

It depends on what’s happening in my life or what I’m inspired by at the time, but I name all of them. I give them little personalities. I have one called Luna, and another one called Taz. It makes me feel more connected to them.

It’s like customizing your character in a video game. You get to hone in on the instrument and give it its own identity.

Tell us about your bandmates. What's the dynamic like?

Quinn is the guitarist and lead vocalist, and Jonah is the drummer. We’re all really close friends, and we understand each other really well.

Because we’re a three-piece, people often comment that we need another guitarist or a keyboardist. We do use backing tracks to fill out the sound, but I don’t think we’ll ever add another member.

What are your favourite songs to play live?

A song called VHS. There’s a lick at the end that I love playing. There are also a lot of songs on the new album that are really fun to play.

As a three piece the bass plays a big role so I have to be artistic with it, sometimes writing bass parts that are more like guitar parts to fill in the sound.

What's the best piece of advice you've been given?

Our drummer Jonah’s teacher, Justin, is also kind of our hype man. He’s always giving us pep talks. His advice sounds cliché, but it’s basically: don’t fake it – just be yourself.

Jack White is one of the 21st century’s greatest guitar heroes. But like many true guitar heroes – from Hendrix, to EVH and Jimmy Page – he’s also obsessed with the tools that create the music.

White started out as a furniture upholsterer, hiding his own records between the folds – he cares about how things feel and how they look, and what that means for his playing. Now he’s taken that blue-collar mindset and applied it to every possible aspect of guitar gear via his own firm Third Man Hardware. The company has collaborated with everyone from major global firms Fender and Donner to boutique outfits Anasounds and 1981 Inventions.

The result is one of modern guitar’s most idiosyncratic rigs: nearly everything has been designed from the ground up to fulfil White’s every sonic desire. And now I find myself standing onstage at soundcheck, in front of his full pedalboard, and about to play through his entire signal chain, from his mind-boggling Triplecaster to custom pedals and astonishingly loud signature tube amps.

I met Jack’s guitar tech and chief Third Man Hardware collaborator Dan Mancini several NAMM shows past. Every year, I swung by the booth to check out which of Jack’s instruments was hanging out as the resident demo guitar. Once it was his original tour-ravaged Triplecaster prototype. The next it was the Tele he played at the NFL Thanksgiving half-time show with Eminem. No biggie.

But rocking up at Bristol, UK’s Prospect Building 30 minutes earlier to film a walkthrough of Jack White’s guitar rig, I still didn’t believe I’d actually get to experience the full rig at ear-splitting stage volume. I was about to be proven wrong.

Dan is my tour guide, which is fortunate because he’s very encouraging. We start with the pedalboards. By my count, there are 20 stompboxes, not including switchers. He gives me a quick overview of the first half of the ’board. Then comes the question: “You want to try it?” Yes, Dan. Of course I want to try it.

As I sling Jack’s very own Triplecaster over my shoulder, the gravity of the situation hits me. Not only am I about to play through his rig at full blast in front of his guitar tech, sound tech and touring crew, I am navigating an unfamiliar setup. In a tight 20-minute window. And it’s being filmed. And on top of all that, the strap height leaves the guitar hanging nearer my knees than my naval. If I learn nothing else from this experience, I surmise, it’s that Jack White is a lot taller than you think.

At least I know the guitar. I’ve played various configurations of White’s Triplecaster build over the years. For this tour, Jack’s main squeeze is an American-made factory version, rather than a Custom Shop one-off. It has a B-bender fitted and a few aesthetic tweaks, but is otherwise fresh off the production line.

The action on White’s touring guitar is medium to low and the soft V-shape neck really doesn’t feel a world apart from many other modern Fender builds. In short, it is immediately and surprisingly familiar. White started collaborating with his guitars rather than fighting them years ago, and the Triplecaster is the culmination of his efforts. So far, I reassure myself, so good.

Then my eyes dart back to the pedalboard. There are six different types of fuzz alone. Even for the most acerbic of noise-rock guitarists, that would be considered overkill. But this is an interesting experiment. The Bumble Buzz is tight and spitty. The Black Squirrel smooth yet nasty. The Knife Drop… well, that’s like the universe imploding in on itself in an endless downward spiral.

Each time, Dan asks me, “How does that make you feel?” with a glint in his eye. And every effect makes me play differently. I’m normally something of a widdly player. But now, here with this ’board, I want to hear the splutter and fizz of every note, and that means slowing down. Bigger bends, dynamic intervals. Responding to the variations in rhythm as the note decays.

Aesthetics are everything in Jack White’s world. The trademark Third Man yellow and black color scheme is all over his pedalboard, right down to the custom Klon Centaur enclosure. He’s a painter, and the amps are his canvas. The pedals are the paint.

In the moment, you feel the way it’s been geared towards spontaneity. White’s gigs don’t have setlists. He plays what he feels each night. A bank of presets on a MIDI switcher is never going to work. He has to be in the moment and he wants every sound at his disposal.

So many touring rigs are reverse engineered from a starting point of ‘consistency’, but now I realize White has designed his to do the exact opposite. Switching to a different fuzz for a solo one night will make him play differently. It’s another way to guarantee a fresh experience for the next audience.

Thankfully for me, at this point in time, it’s also designed to be immediate. There’s no messing with menus. Each pedal offers an arcade-like instantaneous gratification. For my money, White’s collabs with Black Mountain are the pinnacle: the Roto Echo and (shhh) soon-to-be-announced Roto Trem have a massive rotary dial slap-bang in the center that you can roll with your foot.

The trem is what Dan is most excited for me to try, and it is an unreasonable amount of fun. The ratcheting chop-chop takes the modulation into unhinged territory, creating a sense of drama: “This solo isn’t just off-the-cuff. It’s dangerous.”

It occurs to me that, in my 14 years on the job, this is the first interview I have had to conduct with ear plugs in at all times. White’s 70W Fender Pano-Verbs are staggeringly loud. The vibrations literally move you. They make you want to do crazy things. And it’s easy to forget that feeling in today’s dB-monitored, DI-centric live arena.

Playing through Jack White’s rig is a seat-of-your-pants experience in the best possible way. The tones can lean on the futuristic, but the approach is resolutely old-school. It takes me back to my teenage years, before amp modeling and switching units took over. When your sounds were limited to what was what in your hands, at your feet and in your imagination.

Most of all, it’s exciting, and it makes me question my own rig. Should I re-embrace whammy bars? Ditch the presets? Heck, maybe I do need another couple of fuzz pedals. I resolve to reconsider doubling the size of my pedalboard.

Returning for that evening’s sold-out sweatbox of a show, I hear the setup in the hands of the player it was designed for. White is in astonishing form, darting through his back catalog and summoning devilishly wiry solos. Halfway through, he snaps a string on the very guitar I played. I feel a small twang of guilt. Did my slapdash picking contribute to the wear and tear on those wires?

But I also know that’s the sort of thing that doesn’t really matter to White. This is raw rock ’n’ roll, the likes of which you hardly see in a live setting anymore. It makes the show another one-off. White’s tones that night are unique. And test-driving his rig has given me an insight into just how far he goes in pursuit of that.

This month's Inquirer finds Guitar World in the company of Micki Free, and having administered the truth serum, he's going to tell us all about his firsts – first gigs, first songs and first guitar he ever got – and share his most embarrassing moments.

Just don't ask him to save only one guitar from burning building...

What was your first guitar?

I made it out of a Cheer detergent box! I cut a hole in it and used a ruler as a neck and rubber bands as strings. I’d imitate Jimi Hendrix. Then one day, my Uncle Frank says to my mom, “You’ve got to buy Micki a guitar because he’s driving me crazy with that Cheer box!” So, he finally got me a guitar. It was an acoustic; I don’t remember what kind it was.

What was the first song you learned how to play?

Secret Agent Man by the Ventures because I loved them too. I played that as much as I could play it, and my mom would be like, “Would you shut up with that?” It was annoying because that’s all I could play – but I could play it well.

What was your first gig?

In the early 1970s, we had moved back from Germany to the Midwest. I had a little band there that I was playing with that had started in school. At the time, Grand Funk Railroad was my favorite band, so I thought I was Mark Farner. I even had really long hair. The first gig was playing in the school gym for a dance when I was 16.

Have you ever had an embarrassing moment on stage?

When I was younger, the most embarrassing moment of all I had was when I was trying to look cool onstage as I was playing my guitar. I fell off the freaking stage! They had to help me get back on – and that was pretty embarrassing. After that, I started to get my footing, so I never did that again, thank God!

What’s your favorite piece of gear?

Since I dig Hendrix and Cream, I’m a Marshall purist because that’s what I grew up on. My go-to amp is my 18-watt Marshall 1974X with a 12-inch speaker. It’s like the Bluesbreaker amp.

They have a fantastic sound because their impedance is low, and, because it’s 18 watts, when you crank it up, it breaks up at the best time. It’s like money in the bank. [I can get] the tone I like to get, which is kind of like a cross between Hendrix and Eric Clapton.

The building is burning down; what one guitar from your collection would you save?

That’s too hard. Can I take three? If it has to be one, it’d be my Teye guitar with the turquoise inlays. It’s so versatile. I can get sounds that are close enough to a Strat and to a Les Paul – and if you back it off a little bit, you can get anything you want with it. It has something called a Mojo button on it, and I can select the kind of vibe I want. It’s amazing. I love it so much.

When was the last time you practiced, and what did you play?

I don’t practice a lot. I’m not that kind of a guy that goes, “I’ve got to play my scales.” I pick it up when I feel like it. Billy Gibbons once told me, “Play the stuff you want to play, like, the stuff you hear,” and I got what he meant by that. So, when I’m practicing, I’ll play some Jimi, I’ll play some ZZ Top, I’ll play some funky stuff, some Santana. That’s how I practice. It’s not like a schedule.

What aspect of the guitar would you like to be better at?

I’d like to know more about the scales since I’m mostly a blues-rock player. Technically I’d like to really get into scales and see how they do arpeggios and stuff like that, because that’s not in my lane. I play more like Billy Gibbons. Hendrix didn’t play scales, either – and I learned everything from those guys.

But as I listen to current players, there are some where I’ll go, “Wow, that sounds good.” Maybe I should investigate that, widen my style and go to some places where I’d normally not go.

What guitar-centric advice would you give your younger self if you could?

I’d tell myself to practice more and widen my range of music besides the greats, like Clapton, Hendrix and Jeff Beck. When I was young, I only listened to blues-rock. I’d tell myself to open my mind a little more.

• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

Many people will always associate Deirdre Cartwright with the BBC Two programme RockSchool, which ran from 1983 to 1987 and was hosted by top players and teachers of the day: Henry Thomas, Alastair Gavin and Geoff Nicholls.

The show featured tutorials on various styles of popular music as well as pro tips on maintaining gear. Since then, Deirdre has become a well-known jazz player on the festival and club circuits and has released a string of albums under her own name, as well as been an ensemble player on many more.

Her most recent album, Organik, finds her back in the role as band leader.

Why the 15-year gap between albums?

I’ve led lots of really great bands. Some of them involved musicians from Europe, and it’s a lot to organise – touring, getting gigs and all the rest of it – and I think I just became a bit wiped out with it all. At the same time, Alison Rayner, who I’ve played with for a very long time, wanted to form her own band because she wanted to do more composition.

She had written a little bit for my band, but it was mostly my compositions, so she said she was going to form ARQ, the Alison Rayner Quintet, and that started in about 2012, 2013. I actually thought, “Oh, it’s so nice just to be in a band, as opposed to leading a band,” because when you lead a band, you also have to do all the organising as well. So I’ve done four albums with ARQ, and that’s been great. I really love working with that band, and hopefully that will continue.

But gradually I began to get back much more into what I’d call classic jazz, if you know what I mean, and I got into exploring again all those wonderful guitarists – Wes Montgomery, Pat Martino, Kenny Burrell and Grant Green – all that kind of playing. I had started to play with Pete Whittaker [Hammond player].

We were doing a sort of jazz-duo gig, and I hadn’t really played with organ before. We just got on really well. And then Gary Hammond, who’s a wonderful conga player and percussionist, played in my bands in the ’90s, and he ended up playing with The Beautiful South. He was down in London and so I thought, “Okay, let’s just try doing an organ trio.” We’ve only ever done about half a dozen gigs [as Organik], but it really gave me enthusiasm again for playing and, I suppose, leading a band again.

What gear did you use to record the Organik album?

When I first started playing with Organik, I was playing a Heritage, which is based on a [Gibson] Super 400 so it’s a really big guitar. I’m relatively tall, but I thought, “Wow, this is a really big guitar…”

I often go down to Cornwall and I know a jazz guitarist down there called Martin Bowie. When I’m down there we often do a duo gig together and he has a Gibson L-4. So I had a little go after a gig and I said, “This guitar is just a little bit smaller and it feels really nice to play.’ I thought I would love to get a blonde 175 like Pat Metheny, who I’ve loved since the ’70s.

I’d been down to the Bath guitar auctions [at Gardiner Houlgate], and they had about half a dozen 175s and L-4s, and I thought I might get one from there, so I tried them all out. I also spotted an L-4 and I thought what a beautiful guitar it was, in really beautiful condition.

Anyway, when the auction came up, I put a bid on a 175 [and won], and I put a lowish bid on the L-4. I’d just arrived in Greece, looked at my phone and it said, “Congratulations, you’ve got the L-4”, and I went, “Oh my God!” So I ended up with two guitars and they’re both really fantastic. They’re both beautiful. So on the album I use the 175 and a Lazy J amp.

Which model Lazy J is it?

It’s a 20-watt model reverb. I used that on the album and then I realised halfway through that it was making a slightly odd sound. I actually discovered afterwards there was a problem with one of the reverb springs, and it was just rattling around a bit.

So I also used my little Fender Princeton, which is a 12-watt amp, but it has a 12-inch speaker in it. It’s a 1971, but it looks like it’s not really a ’70s one inside; it’s all totally ’60s still. It’s got the most beautiful sound. It’s a little too quiet for most gigs, but it’s got wonderful sounds, so that’s what I used on the album: the 175, the Lazy J a little bit, and a Fender Twin that was in the studio and was a little bit bright, and then my Fender Princeton.

Any effects?

No effects. I’m getting less and less into effects. I started off always playing with effects pedals, but I think [not doing so] really improved my technique and my playing. I think it’s really made me focus on the notes more. You have to be able to do it all. So all I had was the guitar lead into the amp, and that was it.

Funnily enough a couple of weeks ago, I was talking to [jazz guitarist] Rob Luft, and he’s got a pedalboard. He was using what looked to me like a Gibson L-5 through all these effects. And I came home and I got my old [Line 6] POD out and I started playing with the delays and I thought, “Oh yeah, maybe for the moment I’m not using effects, but maybe I’ll try the 175 or the L-4 through a couple of things,” you know? I won’t do a Ted Nugent, though.

You’ve included quite a few jazz standards on the album, including The Gentle Rain and On Green Dolphin Street. Are these particular favourites?

Yeah, I’ve always loved The Gentle Rain. I’ve always kept that in my repertoire, even though I play other bossa novas. I went to see Pat Metheny playing in the ’90s at the Mean Fiddler. He played all standards that night – and maybe a couple of his tunes but mostly standards – and he played The Gentle Rain and I thought, “Oh, that’s gorgeous!” It just made me think, ‘I’ve got to learn that tune.’

Are you going to take Organik on tour?

Yeah, I would like to do some more gigs. I’m going to be getting some gigs in the autumn and next spring, that’s the thing. I’ve been offered a couple, which is really nice, because people don’t really know about it and I play with two or three different groups, but I definitely want to tour Organik.

I’ve actually fulfilled a lot of what I wanted to do when I was younger, just being able to play certain things, and I’ve fulfilled a lot of my aspirations, you know? But it doesn’t stop there.

I just always want to learn more and improve and keep on bringing what I observe and what I hear into the music. There’s a couple of great jazz standards I really want to learn, and I heard Bill Frisell playing a fantastic version of Epistrophy, and I just think, “Oh, that’d be great.” So who knows, on the next one I might do a couple of Thelonious Monk tunes.”

• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

In the latest Guitar World video, Editor-In-Chief Mike joins Jack White's guitar tech Dan Mancini, @OfficialTMR , for a walk through Jack's current tour rig, covering both pedalboards, the Pano Verb amp setup, and the guitars in the vault.

Dan breaks down how the board is built for a show with no set list, from the MXR Double Down he calls a secret weapon to the always-on Klon, the new Big Muff 2 and a first look at the Rototron. He also explains how the Pano Verbs recreate Jack's old two-amp White Stripes sound in one head, the B-benders added to his Triplecaster and Triplesonic, and the battered slide guitar that's been with Jack for over 20 years.

If you're interested in copping Jack's guitar sound, we've compiled all of his go-to gear (that you can actually buy) from the video in one handy list.

Rory Gallagher’s heavily weathered 1961 Stratocaster is a blues-rock icon. So much so that it sold for $1.16m at auction last year. Naturally, icons have their admirers, and a young Johnny Marr went to brutal lengths to make his own electric look like Gallagher’s. It didn’t go to plan.

Speaking in the May 1995 issue of Total Guitar, the former Smiths guitarist, then working with New Order’s Bernard Sumner in Electronic, was asked about his first guitar.

“It was a Vox that looked like a Strat,” he said. “It was well weird.”

For years, the guitar was his pride and joy, and it remained by his side unscathed until he hit his teenage years.

“It had two Strat-like pickups, and a curved head,” he remembered. “Great sound, and it was red.

“I had that for a few years, then when I got to secondary school, about 13, I took a blowtorch to it. I wanted it to look absolutely fucked like Rory Gallagher’s. It looked so funky, and that’s what I wanted it to be.”

Gallagher’s Strat itself tells a remarkable story. He bought the guitar from Crowley’s Music Store in Cork, Ireland, for £100 in 1963, and it originally had a Sunburst finish. He was said to be in tears when its paint started stripping away, the result of his aggressive picking technique, highly acidic sweat, and the fact that he never stopped playing it.

Not once did he take a hammer, a chisel, or a blowtorch to the guitar to give it one of rock guitar’s most unique ‘colorways’. Marr was forced into cutting corners.

“I nearly killed myself trying to get the lacquer off; it kept catching fire,” he laughed. “I kept blowing it out; I’d inhaled all these fumes. I ended up conking out in the road.”

Given Marr’s age – he was born in 1963 – this would have been roughly the same time period when Adrian Belew enlisted the help of Seymour Duncan to relic his Strat, in truly brutal fashion. The difference is, Belew was so happy with the results of his aggressive modding that it went on to grace the cover of Guitar World in May, 1982. He also never passed out during the process.

“I guess I went a bit too far with it,” Marr conceded. “It ended up looking terrible.”

Marr has just sold nearly 100 of his guitars – and a healthy dollop of amps – in a bumper Christie’s auction that raised nearly $5m. Guitars tied to milestone indie moments with the Smiths and beyond went under the hammer, including a bizarre nine-pickup Strat, and his prized ’82 Rickenbacker 330 Jetglo.

Kiss lead guitarist Tommy Thayer has a new band, Shogun Mojo – but he’s not trying to compete with the legendary hottest band in the world. “I’m not starting Shogun Mojo thinking, ‘How do we compete with that?”’ he says. “You can’t.”

Their debut single single, Under the Gun, will be followed by their self-titled album on November 6. But that’s not the only new music Thayer has had a hand in, as rumors of Kiss working on tunes have been circulating. “We did record a great new song that Paul wrote,” he reports. “That’s probably about as much as I can tell you right now.”

He continues: “Kiss may have stopped touring, but that doesn’t mean things have stopped happening. There’s still a lot going on and a lot of new things developing.” He’ll take part in Kiss’ second annual Land Locked in Vegas event in the fall, and then Shogun Mojo will embark on a short tour.

“More than anything, I want this to be fun,” he says. “I want to make records I’m proud of, play some great shows and keep creating. At this point in my life that’s much more important than anything else.”

How did Shogun Mojo form?

It happened pretty organically. I’ve been spending a lot of time in Prague the last couple of years because my daughter lives there. Dan Reed has been there for almost 15 years; he and I go way back to Portland in the early ’80s, when Black ’N Blue was getting started, and Dan was playing in bands around town.

We’d lost touch for a long time, but when I started spending more time in Prague, we got together, had coffee, and he invited me over to his home studio. We started messing around with some ideas, really just for fun. There was no big plan.

But we realized we had something really good happening, and that’s what eventually became Shogun Mojo. And it feels great! It’s exciting to walk into a room without any preconceived idea of what something has to sound like.

You’re known for Kiss and also Black ’N Blue. How did those bands inform your sound and guitar objectives?

Those things are always going to be part of me. Black ‘N Blue was where I really developed as a guitar player and songwriter, and then obviously being in Kiss for over 20 years has had a huge impact on me. You don’t spend that amount of time playing those songs and with those guys without learning a lot about what makes a great rock ’n’ roll song.

I’ve always been a song guy first. I love playing guitar, but I’m not interested in putting 100 notes into something just because you can. The riff is everything, the solo has to be memorable – and most importantly, the song has to be great.

With Shogun Mojo Dan brings the rhythmic, funky influence that he’s always been known for, and I’m coming more from a straight-ahead hard rock world. Dan’s actually a Van Halen nut! There’s a lot of common ground between us, so the combination feels very natural.

Tell us about the first songs you wrote.

The first things came from Dan and me throwing ideas around in Prague. Gonna Raise Hell was one of the first ones. One of us would have a riff or a chord progression or a groove, then we’d start building on it. It wasn’t like one of us showed up with finished songs.

That’s part of why I think the record has the personality it does. Dan and I were in a room together developing the songs, and then with [bandmates] Bengt and Ikiz, you get this incredible rhythm section. That’s important, because this isn’t supposed to be straight-ahead hard rock all the time. There’s a cool funk element to it.

Under the Gun is a good example; there’s a big rock guitar sound and a strong chorus, but underneath it there’s this groove going on.

How will you balance Shogun Mojo with your ongoing activities with Kiss?

That won’t be difficult. The schedule is obviously very different to when we were doing 100 or however many shows a year. There are still Kiss things happening, and I’m very much part of the Kiss family, but that leaves me time to do other things. The idea is for Shogun Mojo to do selected shows, probably in Europe, and make them special.

There’s been chatter about new Kiss music for some time. If there was a new Kiss album, what might that look like in the modern age?

That’s a good question, because the record business is completely different now. When Kiss started, and even when I started, an album was the centerpiece of everything. You made the album then you toured behind it for a year or two.

Today people consume music completely differently – for the most part, they aren’t buying music anymore. It’s a bummer. It’s really hurt that side of the business, particularly for the people creating music. The royalty structure for artists and songwriters hasn’t caught up with the streaming business, and it needs to. I know there’s legislation in Congress that will hopefully help address some of that.

But Kiss has always believed in making things an event. So whatever new music comes, it has to feel special and have a reason for existing. You don’t make another Kiss record just because you’re supposed to make another Kiss record.

How are you preparing for the next Kiss Landlocked in Vegas? Is it like riding a bike?

It really is! I’ve played those songs thousands of times, so they’re pretty deeply embedded in me at this point. Once the four of us get together and start playing, everything comes back very quickly. That doesn’t mean you don’t prepare. Kiss has always had a high standard. If we’re going to get up there together, it has to be great.

But there’s also something different about doing this event in Vegas now. We’re not in the middle of a huge world tour. It becomes more of a celebration, with fans coming together from all over the world, and I think we can enjoy it from that perspective too.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Destroyer. As a fan, and someone who played many of those songs for many years, what does that record mean to you?

Destroyer is one of those records that’s almost bigger than an album at this point. When I was in high school I never imagined I’d be standing onstage playing Detroit Rock City with Kiss. Think about that – you’re a kid listening to your records, dreaming, looking at the album covers, and years later you’re in the band playing those songs all around the world. Crazy!

Bob Ezrin took Kiss somewhere different on that record. He produced these massive rock songs. But then you have something like Beth, with an arrangement and production that was much more ambitious than anything the band had done up to that point.

Now, 50 years later, you hear that opening to Detroit Rock City and everybody knows exactly what’s coming. It’s bombastic, it’s larger than life, and to me that’s the definition of a classic Kiss record.

What are your plans for Shogun Mojo?

Now Under the Gun is out, people can finally hear what we’ve been talking about. We definitely want to play live. I’m not interested in touring extensively – I’ve done plenty of that in my life. But getting together and doing a short run of shows sounds great. Europe probably makes most sense initially, because we’re already connected there. So doing some selected European dates in the spring is something we’re looking at.

Any upcoming surprises you can tease us with?

I’m continuing to spend a lot of time in Europe and getting more involved creatively there. I’ll be the featured guest at the Kiss 50 Years in Germany fan event in Düsseldorf on October 30. And Kiss is still Kiss – just because the touring chapter ended doesn’t mean everything stopped.

There are things happening there and I think the next few years are going to be very interesting. But as far as surprises, if I told you, they wouldn’t be surprises, would they? Let’s just say I’m enjoying having the freedom to follow things that excite me creatively right now. There’s definitely more coming.

• Shogun Mojo is available for pre-order now.

Let’s not kid ourselves; one instrument and one alone will forever be tied to Paul McCartney in the minds of the masses – the Höfner 500/1 Violin Bass. It is to Macca what the Frankenstein guitar is to Eddie Van Halen, practically serving as an emoji for the man himself.

Be that as it may, the Höfner is just one of many instruments McCartney calls his own. That, of course, includes a host of guitars he has embraced throughout nearly seven decades of playing.

Paul has never been a gearhead or a self-styled guitar hero. From the moment he traded his trumpet for a Framus Zenith 17 acoustic as a teen, he has used the guitar as a tool for self-accompaniment, not for instrumental acrobatics or deep dives into the mechanics of sound manipulation. Nor has he made it a priority to accumulate the most expensive or sought-after instruments.

“The terrible thing about me is that I got locked in a mindset that I picked up from my dad,” he once told Guitar World Acoustic. “He really ground it in me to never be in debt, because while we weren’t on the poverty line, there wasn’t much money to go around.”

Even after all the sweet Beatle cash started rolling in, that mentality led the Cute One to continue choosing economy-class guitars over luxury gear. That said, when you’re Sir Paul McCartney, loved ones and admirers tend to give you an extravagant instrument here and there. Over time, that has helped him build a collection that reflects both his modest background and his present-day status as musical royalty.

Here, from the unassuming to the lavish, are six of the guitars most central to McCartney and his artistry.

1964 Epiphone Texan FT-79N

The Texan acoustic has been one of Macca’s pet instruments for more than six decades. It’s the guitar he used not only to write and record Yesterday, but also to play said song in an Ed Sullivan Show performance that fairly shifted the Earth’s crust. Much later, it helped bring solo cuts like Calico Skies and Jenny Wren to life.

The FT-79N (N for “Natural,” as in “natural finish”) is a close cousin of the Gibson J-45, but at 25.5 inches, it’s significantly longer. It has a slope-shouldered dreadnought body, a spruce top, parallelogram-shaped fret inlays and mahogany back, sides and neck.

Restrung and flipped upside-down for left-handed use, McCartney’s Texan still bears the Detroit Red Wings sticker he was given when Wings played Red Wings Stadium in 1976. Depicting a wheel with two wings, that emblem held obvious appeal for a man with a winged band and a heart like a wheel.

In 2004, McCartney worked with Gibson to create a signature replica of the Texan. While not radically different from the original, the updated instrument offered some fancy new frills. Not the least of these were an embroidered case and, in some cases, a soundhole label signed by the Big Mac himself.

1962 Epiphone Casino ES-230TD

“If I had to pick one electric guitar, this would be it,” McCartney has said of his fully hollow thinline Casino. Equipped with a Bigsby tremolo and an early Gibson-design headstock, it’s the axe that helped send his playing on tunes like Taxman and Paperback Writer into the red.

According to legend, McCartney bought his Casino in late 1964 on the advice of his close friend John Mayall, leader of the Bluesbreakers. In photographs taken backstage at the Hammersmith Odeon in December ’64, it still appears to be set up for right-handed playing. Paul would soon modify it for lefty use by changing its nut and bridge and installing a strap button on its upper treble bout.

Following McCartney’s lead, John Lennon and George Harrison quickly purchased their own Casinos. Not coincidentally, sales of the instrument nearly doubled between 1965 and 1966. The folk musician Donovan would later convince Harrison and Lennon to sand the finishes off their Epiphones for improved tone, but McCartney opted to preserve his guitar’s sunburst lacquer. To this day, the Casino remains one of his most cherished companions, original finish and all.

1964 Fender Esquire

As a more affordable precursor to the Telecaster, the Fender Esquire offered just one single-coil bridge pickup, with a three-way pickup switch serving as a tone selector. After taking one of these utilitarian instruments home while the Beatles were cooking up Revolver, McCartney turned it into a left-handed guitar in his usual way: by restringing it and moving the strap button to the upper cutaway horn.

Featuring a sunburst finish, maple neck and rosewood fretboard, it was his favored guitar on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. On songs like Good Morning Good Morning and the title track, its raw, cutting tone imbued his performances with a kick that threatened to send turntable arms flying.

1967 Martin D-28

With its dreadnought body, solid Sitka spruce top, rosewood back and sides, mahogany neck and ebony fretboard and bridge, the D-28 is an ordinary-looking acoustic with an above-average sound. The combination of spruce and rosewood helps give it a full-bodied voice, powerful projection and a crystalline top end.

Shortly after acquiring his Martin in 1968, Macca put it to use on Beatles cuts like Blackbird and Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da. It has stood the test of time, enhancing solo works such as 2005’s Chaos and Creation in the Backyard and popping up in McCartney’s current-day live sets.

Ovation 1619-4 Custom Legend

In the early Seventies, Macca stepped back onto the concert stage after a long absence. By the middle of the decade, he and Wings were helping inflate the airbrushed zeppelin we now call arena rock. The new aesthetic demanded new sounds, as offered by the Ovation acoustic-electric guitar.

There’s some dispute over whether Paul’s Ovation is a Custom Balladeer or a Custom Legend. However, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s Paul McCartney and Wings Exhibit unambiguously identifies it as a 1619-4 Custom Acoustic, part of Ovation’s Custom Legend series. It has a rounded back made of Lyrachord, an undersaddle piezo pickup system, a solid sitka spruce top, an ebony fingerboard and a neck made of a five-piece mahogany/maple laminate.

1957 Gibson Les Paul Goldtop

Fifties Les Pauls are already highly prized, but left-handed models are among the rarest of beasts… and when one of them happens to be a goldtop owned by pop music’s Mozart, it might as well emit rays of white light and a heavenly hum when its case is opened.

McCartney’s Les Paul has a Tune-o-matic bridge, which became a feature of the goldtop in 1955. In 1957, Gibson started equipping goldtops with dual-coil PAF humbuckers rather than single-coil P90s, giving this instrument a punchy tone, expanded dynamic range and greater responsiveness to attack.

Not to be confused with the coveted ’57 Les Paul that Brian Ray has been known to play during Macca’s live sets, McCartney’s goldtop is said to be a gift from his late wife Linda. This is a golden axe fit for a knight, demonstrating just how far he’s come from the “smoky bars and cheap guitars” he looks back on in his new song Days We Left Behind.

• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

John Mayer isn’t just a guitar player. Nor is he just a singer, or a songwriter. As he explains in an exclusive new interview with Guitar World, he’s also crazy about product design. The time he’s spent building and refining his signature guitar, the PRS Silver Sky, is testament to that fact.

“It’s probably my favorite thing next to making music,” Mayer tells us. “And when I say next to, I don’t mean below it. I mean parallel with it.”

That’s why the subject we’re sitting down with Mayer to talk about is particularly significant. Today, PRS and John Mayer have announced a milestone collaboration with Land Rover, resulting in a run of US and SE Silver Sky models with Defender finishes never before seen on guitars.

It’s a big deal for Mayer, who's an avid collector of Defenders. But for those who don’t have a garage filled with luxury 4x4s, or any interest in Land Rover at all, there’s a more universal talking point that will make you sit up and pay attention.

Besides those fresh new colorways, the collection introduces the first Silver Sky to come factory-fitted with a black pickguard. It might not be the place fans were expecting it to pop up, but it finally brings one of the most requested Silver Sky features to the masses.

Mayer has long spoken about his desire to elevate electric guitar design. He’s been influenced by movements outside of the music world, looking to lifestyle brands such as Tesla, Apple and Leica as inspiration for the Silver Sky.

It’s unconventional thinking for a guitar, resulting in a signature platform that has led by example when it comes to keeping modern guitar aesthetics fresh. That’s always been the goal.

“I knew from the very beginning of the Silver Sky launch that I wanted to have a new relationship with colors when it came to the guitar,” Mayer dissects. “I wanted to elevate the sense of what colors are on the guitars.

“Color communicates so much. It’s the same way, if you're at a restaurant, fonts on a menu can communicate things. When you see that Rolex Green, it's a hex code.”

This Land Rover link-up feels like a full circle moment, then. It has allowed Mayer to geek out about a brand he loves, while flexing his passion for product design and trying to keep the guitar landscape fresh.

“I thought, ‘This is the perfect opportunity to legitimize this concept that I’ve had for so long,’” Mayer explains of the collab. “Instead of pantone-matching someone else’s colors, we got to go to the brand and get involved in the heritage of these colors and tell a deeper story.

“We were given the actual paint samples from Defender, and the paint codes. Most people don’t have those paint codes. We were entrusted with them.”

Trust is at the heart of this partnership, and that’s not lost on Mayer.

“We’re using Land Rover paint. That’s the legitimacy that I feel like is a dream come true. It’s just trust. Trust that, when I create the Silver Sky in these colors, I’m going to be an extension of the Defender story.

“It’s been a dream of mine for a long time to align with a brand that’s known so well for its colors and adapt those colors so that they live on the Silver Sky,” Mayer says. “I’m a huge fan of Defenders and a collector of Defenders. This is marrying two things I love.”

Of course, car colors and guitars have always been intertwined. In the ’50s and ’60s, Gibson and Fender used custom car colors for their builds. Dakota Red. Lake Placid Blue. Candy Apple Red. The list goes on.

But this puts a different spin on the car color theme. For a start, no-one’s used actual Defender paint before. Plus, Defenders of this style were made no earlier than the 1980s. It’s a more contemporary – and, yes, more exclusive – approach that’s in keeping with the Silver Sky’s ethos on color.

And this new collection is all about color. Keeping the same specs as regular Silver Skys, the US model gets heritage colors no longer offered on the 4x4: Arles Blue, Willow Green, Portofino Red and Sandglow Yellow, with color-matched headstocks to boot.

Meanwhile, the SE gets contemporary finishes Petra Copper, Sedona Red, Carpathian Grey, and Woolstone Green. The SE models also get the honor of bringing that black pickguard to the lineup.

It’s one of the most anticipated new features for the Silver Sky. Many fans have taken it upon themselves to make similar mods with off-label parts in the past. Now PRS is leaning into it. And Mayer is giving back to the SE in the process.

“It’s almost like the first appearance of Wolverine. Everyone’s waiting for it,” Mayer acknowledges. “I think it’s interesting that it makes its appearance on the SE line as opposed to just having it trickle down from the Core line.

“I thought it was nice to give something to the SE. When I was growing up, the more accessible guitar got punished for being more accessible. I learned a lot from the SE.

“I originally had the idea like, ‘Oh, you tier it.’ Then guitar lovers of the world spoke to me. I learned that some people are going to have an SE forever. It doesn’t have to be a consolation and someday you’ll work your way up. That’s when I thought, ‘There should be a little bit to separate the lines.’”

Players have been waiting for this one since the Silver Sky first landed. To have it appear in a Land Rover collaboration might seem odd, but it all fits Mayer’s vision for his signature guitar. This is no ‘black pickguard Silver Sky’ for the sake of it. The Defender drop felt natural.

Mayer explains, “The US core model has a white pickguard, because the wagon version of the Defenders from the 1990s had a white top. The colorway on the modern edition of the Defender has a lot of black accents, which is how we arrived at a black pickguard on the SE.

“If the SE was grabbing from modern colors, then black is the roof and hood color of a new Defender.”

Granted, a formal collaboration with an actual car brand might seem indulgent. Mayer is certainly no stranger to luxury link-ups, having worked in the past with premium Swiss watchmaker Audemars Piguet.

But Mayer maintains that, despite the fact this limited-edition drop has one eye on attracting collectors as well as players, it never loses sight of what’s at the center of the partnership: his signature guitar.

“The greatest compliment on the instrument side of my life is when somebody says, ‘If he put his name on it, you know it’s right,’” Mayer stresses. “That means everything to me. I don’t want to break that chain. But in the meantime, you can play with the colors and play with the story it can tell.”

This whole venture goes back to Mayer’s obsession with design and color. This is a man who has looked to fashion and cosmetics as inspiration for his guitars. The Faded Black Tee Silver Sky was color-matched to a T-shirt he likes. Moc Sand came from a pair of shoes.

“If you like one of the colors, you’re not going to get weighed down by branding,” Mayer says of this new drop. “I made sure the whole time, and so did Land Rover, that this is not a guitar feeling like it has four wheels.

“It’s not meant to combine the design DNA of a Defender and a Silver Sky. It’s telling a color story, and that’s what I really love. That’s why I think it should be known as the Defender Color Collection.”

Only 500 of each of the US Silver Sky models will be made. The SE variants won't be limited editions, per se, but will only be available until mid-year 2027.

For more information, head over to PRS Guitars.

More from John Mayer’s interview with Guitar World will be published in the coming weeks.

I bought my first guitar when I was 17. I paid for it with my own money, which I earned working a long, tedious summer job in 2006. When I got my final paycheck, I knew exactly what I was going to buy as soon as it hit my sweaty hands.

Mom drove me to Guitar Center and I purchased a cream-colored, solid body Fender Stratocaster with a light maple neck and fretboard. I ran up to my new best friend and pulled her off the stand: “Mom, I want this one!”

Living in Seattle and being the only Black guitarist I knew at the time, I was obsessed with Jimi Hendrix. I wanted to do more than just dress like him – I wanted to sound like Jimi too. So I became a Fender girl.

The instrument was made in Mexico and cost me $399. Of course, it wasn’t exactly what Jimi had, but it was close enough for a teen’s summer job budget. Little did I know that the guitar would stay with me for nearly 20 years; the one I played opening for the likes of Weezer, Death Cab for Cutie and Fishbone – and that ultimately got me discovered by Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready.

Over the years my guitar and I have played for a swath of fans, and each time, in a small way, it feels like I’m paying homage to the man who inspired my purchase. Shoot, I played that cream-colored Fender for the Seattle Sounders the year the MLS team introduced Hendrix-inspired purple jerseys. My band The Black Tones played the jersey launch in front of 40,000 people.

I started a band and wrote our first record on this guitar. We’ve been on TV, tours and some of the biggest stages I never knew I’d get to. And I couldn’t do all this with the guitar and not name her. So, I gave my cream-colored instrument a name – Ruth, which also happens to be my New Orlean-born maternal grandmother’s middle name.

When my grandfather Poppie passed away, Ruth and I wept together at his funeral, playing a song for him there as he lay in his casket. In short, we have history, Ruth and I. So much so that I thought I’d never let her go.

But then something happened to change those plans.

One day last year, I got a call from my manager DeVon with an unexpected offer. “Eva,” he said, “I know you’ve been trying to do this for years, and I think we finally got our opportunity – the band has been invited to perform at a prison in Oklahoma.”

I couldn’t believe it! He was right. This was something I’d actually been trying to do for some time. I know how important music can be to the incarcerated community. Now, the chance to be part of that was finally offered to me.

Why? Well, that’s where this venerable publication comes in.

I didn’t know anyone connected to the prison system in Lexington, Oklahoma. So I asked my manager how and why they’d reached out. “They saw an interview you did in Guitar World before,” DeVon told me. “And they dug into your music!” The power of journalism is real!

DeVon continued: “There’s a festival the prison puts on every year produced by the inmates,” he said. “This is their fifth year. They want to fly you in.”

“I’m in!” I said.

Since then, a whole new world and an exciting project has opened up. I have Guitar World to thank for it! (If my editor ever needs a kidney, I got you!) Now in all seriousness, it was hard to believe this was finally going to happen. The prison had come to me, to my band. They wanted us. And we would certainly rise to the challenge.

The gig was set for May 18, 2025. That morning, my band boarded a plane. A few hours later, we touched down in the dustbowl. A driver was there to pick us up to take us straight to the Joseph Harp Correctional Center, a medium-security men’s state prison. After a security check, it was time to enter their place.

When we got near the stage there was a strange silence. Then we saw a group of men in bright orange jumpsuits staring back at us. Was this going to turn into a bad movie scene? Had we made the wrong choice in coming?

Every worry my fantastical brain could think of melted away in about .5 seconds. The inmates began singing our songs: “Mama! There’s a spider in my room!” Then another shouted: “Craaaaaazy!”, which is a note to one of our tunes, Welcome, Mr. Pink. Several others joined in, yelling other lyrics to other songs. I could not believe what was happening. We were already rock stars in a far-away Oklahoma prison.

We smiled at and greeted as many of the inmates as we could as we walked to the stage. We took a tour of the prison music room, which had some really solid gear that had been donated by musicians who’d previously performed there. It was all pretty impressive.

But now it was time to do what we’d flown down to do. We were the headliners for the night and I couldn’t wait to play. We performed an hour-long set, dishing out songs from our debut LP, Cobain & Cornbread.

I wailed on my Vox wah-wah, as I love to do, and tried to drench the walls of the prison with my Electro-Harmonix Cathedral Stereo Reverb pedal. For the ’70s Nigerian rock cover we play, Troublemaker, I used my all-time favorite distortion, the OCD pedal.

That gear had long complemented Ruth so well. Finally, as we wrapped up the gig, as I strummed the final chord, I told the inmates about her. I talked about how special Ruth was, how special she’d been. Every song I’m proud of, I’d written with Ruth. We’d shared a musical journey for nearly 20 years. Then without hesitation, I decided something.

“You know what?” I shouted. “This feels like the right time to leave her. Right here!” In that split-second, I gifted my Ruth to the inmates there at the Joseph Harp Correctional Center. The crowd erupted in a loud cheer. I saw a few tears in the audience, too.

For the first time in my life, I said goodbye to my guitar. To Ruth.

The next morning, my band and I boarded a plane back to Seattle. But I couldn’t stop smiling. I knew in that moment that I would miss my Ruth. But more than that, I knew that there are times in life when you have to let loved ones go. You have to make room for​ the new.

A few weeks later, I was that little girl in a guitar store yet again. I was now looking for my first new guitar in nearly two decades. But instead of running up to a new Ruth, I let this new one choose me. I meandered through the Seattle shop, I let each instrument on the wall, on the racks, and in between make their subliminal case.

In the end, I reached out and found a blue, Gretsch Electromatic Pristine LTD Jet. The beautiful electric guitar boasts gold hardware. She looks like a queen strutting down a ballroom staircase.

Later in 2025, I took my new guitar to play a gig at the Monroe Correctional Complex in Monroe, Washington. But while I couldn’t part with her just yet – we have a lot of memories yet to make – I did let the guys there name her.

You can call her Crazy Blue.

• The Black Tones’ new album, Diamond Ruby Night, is out on October 30 via Reptar Records. New single Bombs is out now.

On a hot Sunday afternoon, Tim Montana reclines in the gleaming-white interior of a luxury RV outside the Wise River Club, the musical mountain outpost he co-owns with Billy Gibbons in the state that shares his surname.

Lodging in his tour vehicle is only temporary while he renovates his family’s nearby permanent lodgings. But it’s still a marked improvement on how he grew up while learning to play guitar – at least this home has power and water.

“I’m very fortunate now, but a single-wide trailer with no electricity and an outhouse is how I spent most of my life,” he says of his rural upbringing.

Back then he kept himself occupied with a nylon-string acoustic and a Squier while learning how to fret the grungy guitar riffs he still favors today, and making a deal with his maker: if music didn’t pan out by the time he turned 40, he’d try to make a living another way.

He’s enjoyed some big moments before reaching that golden age, like performing his song Butte, America on Letterman in 2008, scoring co-writing credits with Gibbons on his 2016 album Tim Montana and the Shrednecks, and touring with ZZ Top and Kid Rock.

Then, at 39-and-a-half, his song Devil You Know became his first bonafide hit after nearly two decades of grinding. “It was getting close, and all of a sudden, bam, we smack one up the Billboard charts!” he laughs.

That breakthrough gave him room to recruit some of his guitar heroes as guests for his seventh album, Entire State of Tim Montana. But it wasn’t mapped out in advance: “I had one or two collabs in mind but it wasn’t intended to be a giant collab album – it just naturally happened.”

Gibbons lent a hand on a cover of Brown Sugar, which originally appeared on ZZ Top’s First Album in 1971. Montana thought the chord structure would translate well to modern rock. “Billy laid down the intro, and you can hear his jewelry vibrating,” he says. “It was not intended for the album; it was for him to tell me how to play his part.

“He did this one take, and he’s growling and all that stuff he does. I can’t redo that – no way! It’s the coolest thing I’ve ever heard. His heart and soul and his blues musicianship are all over it.”

Another connection traces back to a night at the Troubadour in LA, when Montana played alongside Slash at Gibbons’ birthday jam. When the ZZ Top hero reached out on Montana’s behalf, Slash texted him two hours later, saying he was in for Brown Sugar.

Montana sent the tracks over and the part was done in 48 hours, after Slash asked what Gibbons thought a solo should sound like. “He looks up to Billy as much as we all do,” Montana says. “Now I have a group text with those two, and every time it lights up, I just smile, thinking about 13-year-old me!”

He got to know another teenage idol, Jerry Cantrell when they both toured with Bush in 2024. The Alice in Chains guitarist invited him to jam so Montana showed him Watch Me Drown, a work-in-progress that’s a highlight of the album. “I said, ‘Do you want to finish writing this?’ He goes, ‘Dude, I’d love to, but this song’s in the bag. It sounds like a hit. Finish that yourself!’”

Back in Nashville, producer John Pierce suggested spicing up Kinda Like It with an Alice in Chains vibe. They added a wah-wah to the mix; but before the album was finished, Cantrell replaced it with his own part after a phone call about hunting changed direction when the Gibbons and Slash pairing came up.

“Jerry was like, ‘You got something for me to shred on?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, actually, I do.’ I was kind of nervous that he was gonna be like, ‘Are you ripping off my sound?’ I fixed that problem by having him play it! You hear the first 60 seconds of that song and that insidious wah pedal, and there’s only one person on planet Earth who does that.”

Gibbons has become a big-brother figure to Montana. He tells him to slow down, to play fewer notes, his pedalboard is too big. He’s particular about wardrobe, too – screenshotting YouTube clips of Montana’s outfits and texting corrections: ‘Wear long sleeves, ditch that jacket.’

He sends clothes, guitar straps, and gear on his own. The two are also building a street rod together, a ’42 Ford, fitted with a pair of Magnatone amplifiers in the back. One is running Gibbons’ signature model, the other has Slash’s.

“I went and found my heroes, the people that I’ve listened to my entire life,” Montana says. “I haven’t changed much since I was a kid – it’s grunge music and rock ’n’ roll.”

• Entire State of Tim Montana is out now.

Fender’s brown-panel amps have always occupied a fascinating place in the company’s history. Sitting between the raw grit of tweed and the familiar sparkle of black-panel designs, they offer a warmer, more mid-forward voice that really comes alive when pushed into break-up.

For players who already know the appeal of these amps, the new ’62 Deluxe Amp is a chance to revisit a distinctive and often underrated tone. For everyone else, it’s an invitation into a part of Fender’s catalogue that’s often overlooked.

We sit down with Fender product manager, Rick Heins, to discuss the ’62 Deluxe Amp, how it came together and what makes it special.

After the success of the ’62 Super Amp reissue, what made the Deluxe the next logical brown-panel amp to resurrect?

Once we decided to do the ’62 Super Amp [released last year], it felt right to round out that part of the line with a Deluxe, too. There’s something really cool about bringing attention to an amp that people have heard about but few have actually played.

Brown-panel amps have a very loyal following, but they’re still a little under the radar compared with some of Fender’s better-known classics. This amp gave us a chance to show people another side of Fender that has always been there, even if it hasn’t always been front and centre.

What was Fender trying to capture by returning to this design?

We wanted to honour Fender’s history but also introduce something that has a new flavour to it. There are players out there who already know how great these amps can be, but there are plenty of people who haven’t really heard what a brown-panel Deluxe can do.

This amp gives them that chance. It wasn’t just about copying an old circuit because it looked nice on paper. It was about making sure the character of the amp came through in a way that felt relevant to players now.

What’s the first impression you wanted this amp to make?

If someone plugs into this amp and gets that immediate reaction… that sense that the amp is doing something a little different, then we’ve done our job. We wanted it to feel like a discovery, not just a reissue. The big appeal is that it gives you a lot of Fender tone in a very usable package.

It has warm cleans, great tremolo, and beautiful break-up when you push it. It’s also lightweight and grab-and-go, so it’s the kind of amp that works well in a band, in a studio or at home if you want an amp that feels alive.

I think the first thing people notice is that it doesn’t behave quite like the more familiar Fender amps they may already know. There’s a different kind of warmth, and the way it moves from clean to drive feels really musical. It’s responsive but not in a fussy way. It gives you enough under the fingers that you feel connected to it, which is something we wanted to preserve.

How does this amp distinguish itself from Fender’s other recent reissues?

The main thing is that this amp really has its own voice. It’s not just a smaller version of something else that we’ve done, and it doesn’t sound like the black-panel amps or the tweeds.

Brown-panel Fenders sit in a really nice middle ground; they’ve got warmth, midrange and they have a really musical overdriven sound when you turn them up. That middle ground is what makes it so interesting. It can be clean and elegant, but it can also get into this really rich, chewy overdrive.

How faithfully does the Deluxe follow the original circuit?

We tried to keep the circuit very faithful to the original, but we did make some refinements that improved usability. The tremolo, for instance, was extremely fast on the original Deluxe, so we slowed it down to give it a much better range and make it more playable.

That sort of decision is always about asking what a player needs from the amp now, not just what the original happened to do. So the process is really about refinement, rather than reinvention.

Were there any areas where modern components forced you to engineer around unavailable vintage parts?

Most of the parts in this amp are still things you can get, so we weren’t fighting against a lot of obsolete components. The bigger challenge was making sure the circuit did what it was supposed to do and getting the speaker and tremolo right.

The original Deluxe allows both channels to be used together. Was preserving that part of the design important?

Yes. Both channels have tremolo and they’re in phase, just as they were on the original. That means you can use an A/B/Y setup with a clean sound on the normal channel, a driven sound on the tremolo channel, and combine the two. It’s a hidden feature that makes the Deluxe feel almost like a three-channel amplifier.

Since the original Deluxe was hand-wired, was there ever a point when the team questioned whether PCB construction could deliver the sound and feel you were after?

Not really. Personally, I’ve never had a problem with PCB sounding great. If the circuit is right and the components are right, the amp is going to do what it needs to do. What mattered to us was being meticulous about the circuit and using the original as the starting point. What mattered most to us was the sound, the feel and the way the amp responds.

When you revisited this amp, were you thinking about how it sounded when it was new, or how a vintage example sounds now?

We just wanted it to sound great right out of the box. An old amp can be magical, but it can also be tired, noisy or just inconsistent. Our goal was to capture the zone of a great-sounding Fender Deluxe and make that experience more consistent from amp to amp.

That’s a big part of what a reissue should do. It should give you the essence of the original without making you hunt for the one magical example that happens to still be in perfect condition.

How much of the original Deluxe character depended on getting the speaker right?

That was a big part of it. We tried a number of off-the-shelf options, but the best result came from something we developed with Celestion specifically for this amp and it made a huge difference. We wanted a speaker that would give us great cleans and overdrive, not just one or the other.

The speaker is one of those things that can quietly make or break an amp. You can have the right circuit and still miss the mark if the speaker isn’t doing the right job. Sometimes that means taking a bit more time and doing the work from scratch.

How closely did the final speaker need to behave like the original Alnico design?

The original Alnico speaker from our reference amp was tired, so it wasn’t really a fair reference for the whole story. We tried a few different things, and in the end the custom Celestion just suited the amp better. The extra effort paid off because the speaker became part of the amp’s personality, rather than just a component that was inside it.

Did developing a custom speaker mean you could go beyond what Celestion already offered?

Yes, even the speaker basket is different from anything else Celestion makes, so it brings its own character, rather than sounding like a Creamback or Greenback. We tried the V-Type, too, but to our ears the final speaker was less strident, more organic and had more of that swirling quality in the tone.

The brown-panel look brings a lot of character on its own. How important was it to keep the visual side of the amp intact?

Quite a lot, actually. The original brown-panel amps had a very distinctive look, so it felt right to keep that visual identity intact. When an amp looks right, it already starts telling you something about what it wants to be. With this one, the look is part of the experience. It helps frame the whole identity of the amp.

What do you think gives brown-panel Fenders their own distinct character?

They’ve got a really special midrange warmth and a beautiful way of breaking up. They’re not as scooped as black-panels and not as raw as tweeds. They sit in a very musical place, and a lot of players really respond to that when they hear it. I think that’s what makes them so compelling. They don’t shout in the way some amps do.

They have a way of sitting in the mix and feeling natural under your fingers. When you hit the strings, they give back something that feels rounded and alive. That’s a hard thing to put into words, but players know it when they hear it.

How does a vintage valve reissue like the ’62 Deluxe fit alongside Fender’s modern digital development?

Fender is moving forward in a lot of directions at once, but the goal is to keep doing both the vintage tube thing and the modern digital thing exceptionally well. Those worlds aren’t opposites to us. What we learn from building tube amps influences what we do with digital products, and vice versa.

At the same time, it’s about respecting the past without getting stuck in it. The tube side keeps us close to the roots of what made Fender special in the first place, while the digital side lets us keep innovating and serving players in new ways.

What do you hope players take away from the ’62 Deluxe?

I hope they hear something inspiring and maybe discover an era of Fender they haven’t spent much time with. More than anything, I hope it reminds people that Fender’s story is bigger and more varied than the best-known chapters. If it gets more players into that brown-panel world, that’s a win.

• Find out more at Fender.

The British punk scene was as simple as 1-2-3-4! But by the end of the ’70s, this spittle-flecked, safety-pinned hooligan was flanked by its more sophisticated, open-minded cousin, billed by the weekly music press as ‘New Wave’.

Dave Gregory had looked on with admiration – and perhaps a little envy – as his old mates from the Swindon circuit had broken through with 1978’s White Music and Go 2 (“I thought, ‘It’s kind of punk, but they’ve got something those other bands don’t, some musical skills and really good songs’”).

But as the 73-year-old guitarist reflects, he had no inkling the phone was about to ring with an invitation to join XTC for 1979’s classic Drums And Wires.

You joined just in time for Drums And Wires…

I’d been in the band three months and suddenly we had an album to make. So it was a big thrill for me. I wasn’t sure how long that thrill would last, but I was going to make the most of every minute. XTC had been keyboard-based for the first two albums and Barry Andrews was a huge part of their sound, so to replace him with me, I thought, “That’s a pretty drastic move. Thank you for being brave, fellas. I’ll do what I can…”

What was your own musical experience?

By ’76, I’d quit the prog band I was in. They couldn’t get any work and I was fed up of being skint. So I came back to Swindon, tail between my legs, got a job and was doing local deps for country and western groups. New Year ’79, the phone rang. My brother answered: “Oh, I just had a call from [XTC guitarist] Andy Partridge.”

I think they were desperate to keep the ball rolling. We started rehearsing in a freezing cellar. Next door was the kitchen for the Rendezvous Chinese restaurant. So we’d be doing battle with pots and pans, people yelling at each other through the breeze-block wall.

Was XTC an easy adaption for you?

When it came to rehearsing the new stuff, I was winging it. But Andy was winging it as well. He didn’t like rock ’n’ roll. He didn’t like rock ’n’ roll clichés. He didn’t want to repeat anything that had been done before, by anybody else, for any reason at all. No more wailing around, playing blues clichés. Any hint of a blues cliché was out.

The songs were so good: they were full of melody, plenty of hooks, rather than just showing off for the sake of it. So there was that unwritten discipline that I was happy to comply with.

How did the sessions get started?

After Life Begins At The Hop, Virgin wanted another single straightaway, and Colin [Moulding, bass] had this melody that became Making Plans For Nigel. We went into the studio the first week of June ’79 for two days, with Steve Lillywhite and Hugh Padgham.

Then it was like, ‘Right, we want you back here in 10 days to do the album.’ We knew we had three weeks to record and mix Drums And Wires, so that meant cutting two or three basic tracks a day, then overdubs and vocals. Amazingly, we did it. That’s why I like listening to the album today – because it wasn’t fussed over.

How did Making Plans For Nigel come together?

Well, that ‘dah-dah-dah’ riff, that’s Andy. I’m doing these slashing chords, locking in with the bass and drums, fleshing it out. The great thing about Andy is, he can throw his left hand on the neck and something comes out. He will not move his left hand unless he absolutely has to.

He’s thinking more laterally than longitudinally. So he’ll make a false nut with his first finger, then he’ll mess around. That’s how that riff came about. There’s hardly any movement. It’s so typical Andy. Brilliant. And I could certainly relate to Nigel because my parents were not happy about me having a career as a rock musician…

How did you slot in with Andy’s playing?

Again, we just winged it. We never sat down face to face and said, ‘Right, what do you want to play?’ We’d just keep running the songs in rehearsal until it felt right, and sometimes we’d get so far then he’d point at me and say, ‘Solo.’ That meant I’d get eight bars to do something with. But on Drums And Wires, most of the leads are his. Because I was the new boy, I wasn’t going to challenge him.

What did you play on Making Plans For Nigel?

Well, it was this Strat. I bought that used from a friend in 1978, so I’d owned it for about a year when I joined XTC, and it was actually Sherwood Green metallic, a custom colour that today would be worth a fortune. But it didn’t go with the rosewood ’board at all. I thought it looked really dull, so I got it lacquered with a sort of antique violin stain.

The guitar itself is extraordinary. It’s the loudest Strat I’ve ever played. There’s something about how it’s set up, the components, and I guess the wood. The neck had a twist in it. That was a reason the guy wanted to sell it because it was difficult to set the action. There was a big lump that meant you had to have the action high. I didn’t mind that because my hands were quite strong. That funny neck gave it a certain timbre.

What else did you use?

I used this SG on one or two songs. It’s the first Gibson I ever bought, and I bought it used in 1972. It’s an early ’65. Again, I was playing in this country and western band. And what everyone was doing in those days was taking the covers off the pickups because you were going to get more output and sustain and all the rest of that nonsense.

So I removed the cover from the bridge pickup and broke the wrap. A friend said, ‘Oh, I could fix that for you.’ And he basically destroyed it. It wasn’t easy to get Gibson spares in the ’70s, but someone had some humbuckers for sale. I bought one and wired it in, but it just wasn’t a patch on the original. Just so weak and skinny.

But then, at some point in ’77 or ’78, someone advertised an original [Patent Applied For pickup] in the Melody Maker, taken from the middle position of a Custom. I paid £60 for it, and once I put that in, the guitar came back to life.

But then, when I joined XTC, I thought, ‘They’re not going to want a big full-throated Gibson tone. I’ll get some coil-taps.’ It kind of worked, but it didn’t do anything the Strat wouldn’t do better. The one song I used this SG for was the solo on Outside World, and I might have played it on the rhythm part to Complicated Game.

Speaking of Complicated Game, how did that song come together?

It’s Andy’s creation. He just wanted this huge outburst of frustration at things being messed up by other people. Live, it would start with a whisper, then it would build, and you had this massive key change into the middle eight and this extraordinary guitar solo. Andy, at the time, had been using his Ibanez 2619.

Quite a rare guitar, I’ve never seen another one. But I seem to remember, for Drums And Wires, he had a sunburst Les Paul Standard and a little Marshall, one of the first 210 combos, 100-watt. Horrible thing! I hated the sound, but it suited his style because it was visceral and spiky.

Helicopter has an entirely different energy…

It’s like a little nursery rhyme. That used to have the kids pogo-ing. The Strat plays the riff and solo and it was through my little Tremolux with the shimmer on it. It’s just Fender nonsense, all done on the bridge pickup.

What bands were you listening to?

Well, Talking Heads were definitely featured. Television. Iggy Pop. David Bowie, who was always new wave, despite being an old hippie. A lot of dub reggae: Andy and Colin were well into that. Terry was more into traditional rock ’n’ roll like Hawkwind and Pink Fairies.

I just liked everything and was open to being educated, but a lot of it didn’t click with me because there wasn’t enough blues in it. I still retain a strong instinct for blues music. It’s always going to be there, but I had to rein it in because it wasn’t to Andy’s liking at all. But we would listen to whatever was floating around.

Tell us about Scissor Man.

Andy had given me the riff to play and Lillywhite wanted it doubled. I would’ve thought it was easier to just put a bit of slapback echo on it, but no. So I doubled it and I thought, “You’d never know that was two separate takes.” So I’m very happy with my playing on that. When we played Scissor Man live, it used to go at such a pace.

We just released this bootleg of a 1981 gig in New Jersey. I was horrified at how fast everyone was playing, and mostly it was my fault. But we thought speed equalled energy, equalled excitement, which to an extent it does. But to listen back, it’s a bit exhausting. You just think, “Whoa! Slow down, boys. Where’s the fire?”

When You’re Near Me I Have Difficulty is a kind of socially awkward love song…

One of my favourite songs on the album. I thought, "This is a McCartney song, surely? No, it’s Andy." What a joyful noise. I even liked my out-of-tune intro. Steven Wilson corrected that when he remastered everything. But I miss it. So if I want to hear my out-of-tune guitar intro, I’ll put the original vinyl on.

Beyond the Tremolux, what were you using when it came to amps?

As far as I can remember, that’s the only amp I had. The Tremolux, it’s a piggyback amp, with a cabinet with two 10-inch speakers. But the speakers had blown. So I had an old Selmer bass cabinet and I bought a brand-new ATC 12-inch 100-watt speaker that I knew would cope with as much noise as the Tremolux could send. I used to turn everything up to 7. And that was the sound.

There might have been a little Mesa/Boogie, too. But this was the one set of sessions where I didn’t keep a daily log. I wish I had now. Of course, you don’t realise at the time that 47 years later you’re going to be pinned down about details. Y’know, were we still going to be alive in 10 years’ time? Would people still remember this album when we’re old and grey? Well, the amazing thing is, yes, they do, and they’re still buying it.

I also did a couple of solos direct to the desk, like Ten Feet Tall. I used the 335 for the arpeggios. Then Andy took the first four bars of the solo, then handed me the 335 and I played the second four bars.

How did you feel about the album’s reception?

I remember, when we were sitting on the studio couch, Andy turned to me and said, “It’s going to be a good album.” And I thought, “Actually, it does sound pretty good already. And it’s not even finished.” And he was right. It is a good album, and it remains one of my favourites because of the fun we had making it.

We were still friends. We were still up for anything. And when the album came out, we were happy to see so many good reviews. Nobody slagged it, and you have to remember the inkies would jump on anything and rip it to pieces. But sales were slow until we had the hit with Nigel, then things started to pick up…”

• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

“I call this record ‘the best Billy Squier record you’ve never heard,’ because it’s the record most people haven’t heard,” says Billy Squier, one of the Eighties’ biggest rock stars, from his New York City home. “Capitol did put it out, but they did nothing to promote it, and the president of the label told me they were going to bury it.”

Squier first broke through on a mass scale in 1981 with his second album, Don’t Say No, and its signature track, The Stroke, before going on to enjoy continued success throughout the decade. In the early Nineties, as grunge began infiltrating the musical landscape, Squier’s guitar-driven style of melodic hard rock had seemingly become old hat.

Yet Squier had just handed his label the best record of his career, Tell the Truth, a record that would re-establish his brand of rock as a force to be reckoned within the grunge-soaked climate. Sadly, Capitol Records, Squier’s label at the time, had other ideas.

“I felt what Capitol label head Gary Gersh did was malevolent and almost vindictive,” says Squier today. “If he didn’t want me on the label, there were better ways to go about it. We could have sat down and he might have said, ‘The label’s going in a different direction. What can we do about it?’

“We could have sorted it out in an honorable way, but he couldn’t be bothered. He just fucking kicked me to the curb. I never expected to be sabotaged by the industry I’d come to think of as family, so my gut reaction was, ‘I don’t think this is a place I want to be anymore. I don’t want to be anywhere near this bullshit.’ So I walked.”

In 1993, soon after his showdown with Capitol, Squier exited the music industry for good. Apart from releasing an acoustic blues album in the form of 1998’s Happy Blue and embarking on sporadic live appearances, including two stints in Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band in the later part of the 2000s, he has mostly remained out of the public eye.

Last year, though, after years of silence, he tested the waters by releasing a new single, Harder on a Woman, and this July sees a reissue of Tell the Truth on vinyl. Finally, fans will get to hear what they weren’t able to hear upon its initial release in 1993.

“I’ve owned Tell the Truth outright ever since leaving Capitol, but I didn’t want to go out and peddle it,” he says.

“I didn’t feel I could simply hop to another label and be accepted with open arms. Capitol had put me in a position where I was suddenly on the outside looking in, where I couldn’t just take the record and go wherever I wanted and put it out and it was going to be great. So I just sat with it for a long while and waited for the right time.

“Then, about a year ago, I got an email from a guy I’d never run into before. He said he worked for a small boutique label and they were really interested in doing a project with me, and was there anything I might want to do? A light went off in my head. I said, ‘I want to do a vinyl release of Tell the Truth.’

“He freaked out when I told him because he worked at Capitol when Truth first came out and he loved the record. He was young and just getting into the business, and he told me no one at The Tower could figure out what the label was doing with the record.”

For Tell the Truth, Squier brought in uber-producer Mike Chapman. “Mike was great to work with,” Squier says. “He came with his own engineer, Kevin Shirley. Between the two of them, they had the production end of it in really good shape. Mike came from a songwriting background, so he was able to comment insightfully on the songs I was bringing in.

“We shared a high level of mutual respect; at one point he actually told me I was the best songwriter he ever worked with, which I took to be a huge compliment.”

To flesh out his core band, Squier wanted to approach the recording of Tell the Truth with a more expansive perspective. “I had this idea of bringing in some of the other players I’d come to know over the years and put together different ensembles for each particular song,” he says.

“That really worked out quite well. The sessions got a lot more exciting; cats were playing together who didn’t normally play together. Everybody was on their toes and there was this aura of discovery. Everything was fresh and exciting.”

For the record, Squier utilized a number of vintage guitars, depending on what each song required. “Different songs call for different sounds,” Squier says. “I used a ’59 burst and a ’56 Junior, a ’51 Fender Nocaster and a ’62 Strat, a Gretsch White Falcon, a Martin D-18 acoustic, and a ’65 Rick-12. My amp of choice was a Marshall Super Lead 100 half-stack that I hot-wired in the mid-Seventies.”

How does Squier feel about Tell the Truth today? “Much the same as I did about Don’t Say No – you work your whole life to make records like these. I’m very proud of it.”

• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

In 1970, Mick Ronson changed the musical fortunes of David Bowie, a struggling singer-songwriter with two novelty hits behind him.

Together, and with their band the Spiders from Mars, they reinvented Bowie musically, and created some of glam-rock’s best-loved albums: Hunky Dory, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Aladdin Sane, and Pin Ups.

Afterward, Ronson struggled to match that initial success, despite a catalog of collaborations that included some of rock’s biggest names: Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Ian Hunter, Roger McGuinn, Morrissey, John Mellencamp, and many others.

Although Ronson’s career was defined by his time with Bowie, there was a significant before and after.

In the 1960s, he played in various groups from his hometown of Hull, England, including the Mariners, who were advised by the Rolling Stones’ Bill Wyman to change their name to the King Bees around the time Bowie was fronting a group called Davie Jones and the King Bees. He was also a member of the Rats, whose main claim to fame was the 1967 single The Rise and Fall of Bernie Gripplestone.

“Mick was the best guitarist in Hull, so when he left to head down south and join Bowie, I was pretty upset,” recalled Benny Marshall, the Rats’ lead singer and a close friend of Ronson’s.

“John Cambridge, our drummer, had played with Bowie on Space Oddity [his second album, a.k.a. David Bowie]. He was the bloke who went back to Hull in January 1970 with the brief to find Ronson and bring him to London. He found Mick marking out the lines on the municipal football pitch.”

Cambridge did as instructed, and Bowie and Ronson were introduced at the Marquee club, where Bowie was playing on February 3, 1970. Two days later, Ronson had learned the riffs and song arrangements well enough to back Bowie, Cambridge, and bassist/producer Tony Visconti for a John Peel Radio 1 show live in concert at the Paris Theatre in London’s Lower Regent Street.

They played 15 songs, including a new number, The Width of a Circle, and plenty of material from Bowie’s recently released self-titled second album. Reaction was positive, and Ronson moved into Bowie’s Haddon Hall apartment on Southend Road in Beckenham in South East London, becoming part of the family.

The timing of his arrival was perfect; Bowie wanted to make a hard-rock album. As Visconti said later, “We respected groups like Cream, but we didn’t have that in us. We needed someone to be [that] important element, and that somebody was Mick Ronson.”

In terms of his personality, Ronson was a good fit. Everyone loved Ronson’s laconic Northern humor too, especially Bowie, whose father and mother came from Yorkshire and Lancashire, respectively. He’d tease Ronson and get just as good back. But it was, of course, his guitar playing that stunned them.

“He floored us,” Visconti said. “When David and I met him, we knew he’d fit in looks-wise, but we had no idea what was coming until he picked up his Les Paul and played for us.

“He really didn’t have to be taught the few songs we’d already worked up with John Cambridge. Mick watched our hands on the guitar and bass necks, and he just knew what to play, but he didn’t say much. We thought he was just a cool, silent type. Later we found out that our apartment in Beckenham was very ‘big time’ for him, and he was simply overwhelmed.”

Visconti insists Ronson came to Trident Studio in September 1969, when the David Bowie/Space Oddity album was being finalized.

“Mick came to the mix of Wild-Eyed Boy from Freecloud and was persuaded to play a little guitar line in the middle part and joined in the handclaps on the same section,” he said.

But if he did, he isn’t credited. Ronson’s first recorded work with Bowie was on the remade and rocked-out single Memory of a Free Festival Part 1/Part 2, recorded in September 1969 and released to zero chart success in June 1970.

In April, sessions began for The Man Who Sold the World, featuring the core band of Bowie, Ronson, Visconti, and former Rats drummer Mick “Woody” Woodmansey.

It was a brilliant album, full of Ronson’s crunching heavy-metal attack allied to arcane, Wagnerian, dystopian lyrics. His contributions to Bowie tracks such as She Shook Me Cold, Running Gun Blues, and the epic The Width of a Circle cemented his place in Bowie’s orbit, leading the singer to call him, with a smug smile, “my Jeff Beck.”

As it happened, both Bowie and Ronson were huge fans of Beck’s Truth album. Marshall said, “[Mick] knew all the licks, except Beck’s Boogie, which he dissected but couldn’t master. It infuriated him. In 1968, the Rats had supported Beck at the Cat Ballou in Grantham, and afterward Ronson asked him to show him the fast run at the beginning. So Beck plays it, and Mick says, ‘No, play it slower.’ Beck said, ‘If I play it any slower, I’ll stop!’ But he was patient, and Mick learned that riff.”

The Man Who Sold the World had not been a commercial breakthrough, but it added to Ronson’s confidence. Visconti and Ronson had masterminded the sound and dashed off the arrangements, while Bowie canoodled with his new bride, Angie.

She Shook Me Cold, the dirtiest song he ever wrote, was directly about Mrs. Bowie, but it was Ronson who provided the Jimi Hendrix-style intro and the power-trio setting à la Cream. Later, Angie lamented the fact that Ronson didn’t receive the publishing he deserved. “In terms of kudos and feeling that one is valued, it would have been nice for Mick Ronson to have had publishing credits,” she said.

Visconti’s departure from the group saw the arrival of bassist Trevor Bolder. It also gave Ronson his in.

“[Visconti had] done all the string and piano arrangements, so it was my chance to fill the gap,” Ronson said. “I’d never done it before, but I could read and write music, and I’d watched Tony at Haddon Hall, writing in the basement, saw how he did the charts, and I’d help out.”

Ronson had already written a mini-score for four recorders, used in the break of All the Madmen. It was a start. “I thought, ‘Well, if you can do that then so can I,’” he said.

“I went out for dinner with [singer] Dana Gillespie, who had tracks that needed strings, and David said, ‘Oh, Mick’ll do that!’ [Like Bowie and Ronson, Gillespie was managed by Tony Defries’ MainMan company]. I never had, but it was great. David pushed me forward. That was his thing. He made stuff happen.”

With Visconti gone, Bowie was now reliant on Ronson. His next album, 1971’s Hunky Dory, saw the emergence of his new quartet, featuring Ronson, Bolder, and Woodmansey, a taut group that gave his folkie tunes their strong rock underpinnings.

Ronson finally got his credit as the arranger of its songs, Changes, Life on Mars?, Kooks, Quicksand, and the Biff Rose cover Fill Your Heart, which was copied virtually note for note from the original. In retrospect, many have noticed how similar the sound of Hunky Dory is to Michael Chapman’s Fully Qualified Survivor, the 1970 album on which Ronson had made his debut.

Ronson’s burgeoning role extended to instructing hired gun Rick Wakeman for his now iconic piano parts on Life on Mars? The Royal College of Music–trained keyboardist (and future Yes member) didn’t mind the input. “He was a tremendous human being, with oodles of talent,” Wakeman said.

Bowie producer/engineer Ken Scott pointed to “the great orchestral versions that Ronno put together. [They’re] even more brilliant when you consider he had this habit of running out of time. I remember him rushing in 10 minutes before the session, running up to the bathroom, and locking himself in so he could find the privacy to finish writing. He’d come out with a huge grin and a stack of charts.”

By the time the band assembled for the follow-up, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Ronson’s talents were in full bloom. On the epic Five Years, his string section whipped up the hysteria, while on Suffragette City, it was Ronson who came up with the funky, lurching ARP synthesizer sound that many mistake for saxophones.

But working with Bowie had its challenges for Ronson, a now-25-year-old who, until recently, had been a practicing Mormon. In January 1972, shortly before the Ziggy Stardust sessions were complete, Bowie told Melody Maker he was gay, or, more accurately, bisexual. Ronson admitted he found it hard to deal with at first.

“It embarrassed me,” he said. “I wondered what people would say about me. I knew my family in Hull would get flak. I gave dad a car when I left for London, and people threw red paint over it.”

Aside from his own feelings about it, Ronson understood Bowie was playing with his image as a way to keep the media engaged. “Personally, it was a bit of a shock,” he admitted, “but Bowie manipulated the media again and again.”

Overall, Ronson approached the Ziggy Stardust project with slight suspicion. The explicitness of Suffragette City and the discarded track Sweet Head concerned him. “He worried about the lyrics,” Angie said. “I told him. ‘Look, all these people are waving their arms in freedom thanks to you. It may not be what you’re used to in Hull, but accept it.’ Then he’d simmer down and be happy.”

If Ziggy Stardust was a Ronson tour de force, the follow-up, Aladdin Sane, was a mixed blessing for him. His contributions were immense, but so were those of recently arrived pianist Mike Garson, whom Ronson had auditioned and later advised to “make yourself indispensable. That’s what David likes. Don’t just be a session man.”

Ronson lived up that credo. His work on Lou Reed’s Transformer, produced with Bowie the August after Ziggy Stardust, effectively rescued Reed’s career after his debut solo album had bombed.

“It was a good experience for me,” Ronson said. “Lou’s guitar was always out of tune, so I’d kneel in front of him and tune it properly. He didn’t care, ’cause he was so laid-back.”

Without his contribution, Transformer might never have gotten off the ground. “It came out pretty well,” Ronson said. “Though I didn’t know what the hell Lou was talking about half the time. He’d say stuff like, ‘Can you make it sound a bit more gray?’”

Fortunately the album was a success. “Transformer is easily my best-produced album,” Reed said. “That has a lot to do with Mick Ronson. His influence was stronger than David’s, but together, as a team, they’re terrific.”

By 1973, though, it seemed that Ronson had become dispensable, along with Woody Woodmansey and Trevor Bolder, both of whom had been dropped for having the gall to protest when they discovered that new arrival Garson was making 10 times their salary.

The guitarist’s relations with Bowie were frosty when, on October 20, 1973, Ronson played with Bowie onstage for the last time in that decade. Only 200 people saw the appearance in the flesh, shot for NBC’s The Midnight Special.

Dubbed “The 1980 Floor Show,” the concert featured Bowie serenading French singer/actress/model Amanda Lear with Sorrow, a 1966 hit for the Merseys that Bowie would record for 1973’s Pin Ups. He and singer Marianne Faithfull also duetted on Sonny & Cher’s I Got You Babe.

But Bowie hated the end result, which he derided as “shot abysmally.” This was the night Ziggy Stardust truly left the building, which might explain why a smiling Bowie ended each song with an affectionate pat on Ronson’s white satin-clad back.

As the wingman was increasingly sidelined, MainMan, his and Bowie’s mutual management company, promised him the earth. He was to be the next superstar off the production line, said manager Tony Defries. In the summer of ’73, having finished his sessions for Pin Ups, most of which he’d arranged, as usual, Ronson returned to the Château d’Hérouville studios outside Paris and made his solo debut album, Slaughter on 10th Avenue.

Bowie chipped in from a distance, gifting the songs Growing Up and I’m Fine, Pleasure Man/Hey Ma, Get Papa, and Music Is Lethal. RCA wasn’t overjoyed with what it heard, and the album’s release date was put back more than six months, to 1974.

Within months, Ronson was in another band, joining Mott the Hoople for what would be their final single, Saturday Gigs.

Ronson and frontman Ian Hunter had bonded back when Mick had knocked out a string arrangement for Mott’s Sea Diver, but the other band members resented the arrival of this “rock star” in their midst, with MainMan and RCA sending limos for their boy while Mott traveled together in a bus. Tired of the conflict, Hunter split the band.

Ronson went back to his solo career. Bowie didn’t take part in the follow-up album, Play Don’t Worry, but he allowed Ronson to use the backing track from their cover of the Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat, which had been recorded for an American attempt at a Pin Ups album that was discarded soon after.

Play Don’t Worry was excellent in parts. Although he wasn’t a natural songwriter, Ronson did himself proud on Billy Porter, Empty Bed, and versions of two songs by Pure Prairie League, whose 1972 album Bustin’ Out featured his guitar and string arrangements.

While Slaughter on 10th Avenue was being mixed, Ronson returned to the studio with Bowie to create demos for the future Diamond Dogs tracks 1984 and Dodo. His work wouldn’t appear on the finished album, a creepy, avant-garde affair, but his trademark guitar style did in the shape of Rebel Rebel, almost a Spiders from Mars pastiche riff, played now by Bowie.

According to Ronson’s wife, Suzi, “When Mick heard Diamond Dogs, he wasn’t exactly depressed. He just thought, ‘Oh, that’s Dave going out on a limb.’ But he would have done that record like a shot.”

Instead Ronson embarked on a brief solo tour, including a show at London’s Rainbow Theatre in February 1974, where he had strings and woodwind sections and, on backing vocals, the Thunderthighs – Karen Friedman, Dari Lalou, and Casey Synge – who appeared on Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side and Mott the Hoople’s Roll Away the Stone.

Cast into the spotlight, Ronson didn’t appear confident. The ultimate sideman was too modest to carry this off. Bowie watched on from the wings and offered words of encouragement during the intermission, but he decided against making a guest appearance.

After Bowie, where does one go? Ronson produced and played on Ian Hunter’s self-titled 1975 debut solo album. That same year, he moved to New York City, rented a place on Hudson Street near the Meatpacking District and enjoyed NYC with his best friend, Hunter, who had provided safe haven via Mott the Hoople, Mott, and the Hunter Ronson Band.

This is where they met Bob Dylan, who invited Ronson to join his band of gypsies, the Rolling Thunder Revue, after a meet engineered by Dylan’s main fixer, Bob Neuwirth. That evening began at the Bitter End on Bleecker Street.

“We weren’t Dylan fans at all,” Suzi Ronson said. “Mick thought he sounded like Yogi Bear. But Ian took us anyway, and Dylan played [his 1976] Desire album, and he was mesmerizing, better than David. Then we went to the Bottom Line, where Mick got thrown out three times for being drunk and disorderly.”

Back at the Bitter End, Hunter recalled “the whole place going insane ’cause Dylan was singing with Neuwirth and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. And Neuwirth [sees] Mick and says to Dylan, ‘Go and ask him!’” In Ronson’s version, “[Neuwirth] was with this guy,” he recalled. “And I looked at this bloke he was with and thought, ‘Wait a minute, I know you!’

“Of course, it was Dylan. We talked, and he said, ‘We’re going on the road. Why don’t you come with us?’ I honestly thought it was a hoax. Then Dylan phoned me, said the tour was going to happen and would I be there? Like a shot!”

“That tour rescued Mick’s professional life,” Suzi said.

Ronson was soon back with Hunter, appearing on You’re Never Alone with a Schizophrenic and Welcome to the Club. With his solo career on hold, he became a full-time producer. He worked with Van Morrison, John Mellencamp, Roger McGuinn, and Meat Loaf backup singer Ellen Foley. He even contributed guitar to the title track from David Cassidy’s 1976 album, Getting It in the Street.

Despite his signature guitar style and tone, Ronson became engrossed in writing string arrangements.

“He lapsed into the language of strings,” Hunter says, “but he was a bit lazy, ’cause if it was interesting he’d do it using 15 tracks and one guitar track. He wrote arrangements on Marlboro Light [cigarette] packets. But he could be persnickety and picky if he was involved. He could have matured into a world-famous musician again, but he’d meet people on the street and, next thing, he’s doing a Mexican punk band.

“But he was great with fans. He’d invite them back for tea, he’d return their phone calls. Sometimes he could be the big guy and show off, so he wasn’t perfect, gorgeous as he was. I considered him like family, so there were arguments.

“One time he disappeared to Sweden for a project when we were in the middle of something, so I had a go. And he just said, ‘Look, I’ve done Bowie and I’ve done you, so I’m allowed to fuck up,’ and we just collapsed into laughter.”

In the late Eighties, Ronson’s health began to cause concern. He was diagnosed with liver cancer, something he neither made a secret of nor chose to acknowledge as a serious threat. Instead, he threw himself into engaging projects such as Morrissey’s heralded 1992 album, Your Arsenal.

Speaking with Classic Rock, Morrissey said, “Mick told me that he alone wrote the main guitar hooks for Starman, The Man Who Sold the World, and others – not just hooks, really, but grand choruses in themselves – but a share of publishing wasn’t ever on offer for him. When you consider his guitar solos in Time and Moonage Daydream, then you can guess they were his own creations.”

A fan of Ronson and Bowie, Morrissey was intrigued by letters Bowie sent to his old guitarist chum during the making of Your Arsenal. “One day at breakfast, I asked Mick why Bowie wrote so often,” Morrissey recalled, “and he said, ‘He keeps asking me what you’re like in the studio,’ and then he exploded with laughter. I have no idea why this was so hilarious. I think Bowie had interest in Mick only as much as it was in his nature to like anyone.”

Certainly, Bowie was impressed enough by Your Arsenal that he invited Ronson to work with him on his 1993 studio album, Black Tie White Noise. He also kicked off a fine version of All the Young Dudes with Bowie and Hunter at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert at Wembley Stadium on Easter Monday, 1992, which was the last time his fans saw him onstage.

One year later, on April 29, 1993, Ronson died of liver cancer at age 46. He spent his last hours in the company of Hunter, Suzi, and sister Maggi at Tony Defries’ house on Hasker Street in West London.

Ronson didn’t die penniless, but he wasn’t wealthy by rock-star standards. “He bought the house in Woodstock on Glasco Turnpike [Ulster County, New York] because he made money out of my records and Ellen Foley’s Night Out,” Hunter said. “His car was an old Toyota Corolla that sounded like a hair dryer.”

Hunter summed up the gloomy finale in his Ronson elegy Michael Picasso, from 1997’s The Artful Dodger: “You turned into a ghost surrounded by your pain/And the thing that I liked the least was sitting round Hasker Street, lying about the future.”

“What is remarkable is that he was so overlooked, and he still is,” Morrissey said of Ronson. “Has Mick ever been on the cover of a major British music magazine? Even when he died? He was by nature extremely humble. He was just happy to be there.”

Though he was the first of many great guitarists Bowie would adopt, champion, and cast aside, Ronson continued to hold a place in his heart after their split, perhaps more than any other who followed him.

“Mick was the perfect foil for the Ziggy character,” Bowie admitted years afterward. “He was very much a salt-of-the-earth type, the blunt northerner with a defiantly masculine personality, so what you got was the old-fashioned yin-and-yang thing. As a rock duo, I thought we were as good as Mick and Keith.”

• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

Everything about the Animeros seems to come straight from the movies. Take the Austin trio’s cinematic debut album, ¡Qué Bárbaro!, whose splice of Latin rhythms with soul, funk, psychedelia – and beyond – just needs a Tarantino movie to soundtrack. “We’re here, Quentin,” guitarist Mauro Lopez says. “Hit us up!”

Then there’s the Hollywood-worthy story of how they came to record it for Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound label.

“We got together for the second time as the Animeros to play South by Southwest,” Lopez says. “It was, like, a 30-minute unofficial showcase on a hotel roof patio. Like the Beatles playing on the Apple rooftop, I guess. [Laughs] A week later, our bassist gets an email; Dan saw us play. He came into town and we had breakfast. What shocked us all was his knowledge about Latin music. It comes from him being a vinyl DJ. He's like, ‘Hey, do you want to come to Nashville and record?’”

Just as fantastical, Lopez was invited to bolster his workhorse Telecaster Vintera ’60s and Cry Baby with the Black Keys man’s trove of rare guitars, amps and pedals. “I can’t remember the models, but he’d be like, ‘Hold on, let me grab this one’ and put, like, a vintage Danelectro in my hands. ‘What do you think?’ He just had an ear for it.”

If their rise sounds almost annoyingly easy, be assured that Lopez, Nicolas Sánchez (bass) and Nick Tozzo (drums/percussion) have individually paid their dues, grinding out a decade-plus on the Austin circuit. But it’s as the Animeros that something has clicked, with the trio’s melting-pot style meeting their gift for painting vivid pictures.

“With instrumental music, it’s like, ‘How do you tell a story without words?’” Lopez says. “We might be writing a song and realize it feels like driving through the West Texas desert at night looking for UFOs. Or, ‘Man, this riff sounds like a Tarantino fight scene.’ Our favorite one is from Kill Bill, with Uma Thurman and Lucy Liu in the snow. It starts off with these claps and you just know something’s going down.”

But as the affable guitarist reminds us, the Animeros are here to make us dance, not fight. “There’s enough bad things going on in the world, man. When people hear this music, you forget all that. Something about the rhythm is contagious. You just can't help but move.”

• ¡Qué Bárbaro! is out now via Easy Eye Sound.
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.