When you think of movie directors, you probably think of a bullhorn-wielding figure, script in one hand, camera in the other. Now, add a guitar slung casually across their shoulder, and you’ve got Robert Rodriguez. The Texas-born filmmaker is the director behind cult classics like From Dusk Till Dawn and Planet Terror, as well as box-office smash hits like Sin City and the family-friendly Spy Kids franchise – and he’s just as passionate about guitars as he is about making movies.

While many film fans know him for his flicks, fewer may know him as a keen guitar player – although guitars are featured heavily in his works. Take his Mexico Trilogy – El Mariachi, Desperado, and Once Upon a Time in Mexico – where a wandering, guitar case-carrying musician named El Mariachi takes on the bad guys.

​We dial in with the director, and it seems he’s more than happy to get a chance to talk about his passion for the six-string.

“I was super-excited to get that call,” he says from his home in Texas. “I’m a huge fan of the magazine, obviously, since I was a kid. I was thinking, ‘Am I the first director to be on Guitar World?’” he quipped, and well, he very well may be the first we’ve featured.

Rodriguez grew up in a musical family, so it was inevitable he’d pick up an instrument, he tells us.

​“There was always music in the family. My mom used to take Spanish guitar lessons. She would have us all sing. As the family grew, she would learn guitar and sing Spanish songs – and she would have us sing for anybody who came over,” he recalls.

“I remember taking my first guitar lessons around 12 with my older brother. He was always a better guitar player. Around that age, a family friend was teaching us, just kind of simple chords,” says Rodriguez. “But there was a real romanticism towards the guitar in the family. I think probably because it was just so portable, too. We could all kind of go learn piano, but this one you could just pass around the house. I just found that I loved the iconography of it. I loved how it felt.”

​The guitar has become one of Rodriguez’s secret weapons, helping him unlock his creativity in other areas of his life, like filmmaking.

“I realize it’s instant meditation. So it really triggers a lot of ideas if you’re creative and kind of helps bring a lot of focus,” he says. “That’s why you’ll always see pictures of me with a guitar on a movie set. I’m probably the only director who always has a guitar on his set.

​“As soon as you’re done filming the shot, you put the camera aside, and you’re waiting for the next setup. Instead of pacing around or looking at my phone, I would pick up a guitar, and it would instantly keep me in creative mode. I’m not thinking about the guitar. I’m thinking about what the next shot is going to be, and inevitably, I would end up writing something.”

​These snippets of ideas would often lead to full-blown tracks that would go on to underpin iconic moments in his films, as Rodriguez explains.

“I remember I was on the set of Spy Kids 2, and my still photographer came over, and he goes, ‘What’s that thing you’ve been playing for the past few days?’ I went, ‘Oh, I don’t know. Do you like it?’ He goes, ‘You should record that.’ ‘I’ll go record it tonight. Maybe it’s the theme for this movie!’

​“It wasn’t the theme for Spy Kids 2,” he says. “It was the theme for the next movie I was doing, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, that I had already shot – it turned into the song. I recorded it that night, and Salma [Hayek] ended up singing it. It’s the end title song, and that theme is the theme of that movie.”

Rodriguez’s approach is a little left-field when compared to his peers, but it could be argued that his attitude to filmmaking, composing, and, of course, the guitar, is what makes his films unique. “I’m a better filmmaker by playing guitar. I’m a better storyteller by playing guitar,” he says with confidence.

And, as he tells us, music is just as important as the lines the characters are saying. “You have a soundtrack of dialogue to tell people about your movie. Well, the music’s like a soundtrack that tells them about your character.”

Rodriguez has amassed a pretty broad collection of guitars over the years. Some models he bought for movie projects, some were elaborate gifts from studios, and others are the tools he uses to perform live with his band, Robert Rodriguez’s Chingon Band, a music collective the director put together to perform popular songs from across his filmography with their signature Latin rock style.

“It’s kind of cinematic Latin rock, but for people who don’t even like Latin rock – it’s got its own, very cinematic quality to it,” he says.

To pull off this unique blend of “Mexican Spaghetti Western,” Rodriguez tells us that 24 frets are an absolute must, and that’s why, for a long time, he relied on a PRS Custom 24. However, his head has recently been turned by a striking custom build from Castedosa Guitars that got some serious action during a special Chingon performance in Los Angeles at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures to celebrate the anniversary of From Dusk Till Dawn and Spy Kids earlier this year.

​“When I met the Del Castillo brothers that are now in my band, they were playing these Yamaha or Takamine 24-fret acoustics,” he says. “They would do these harmonized runs all the way up to the 24th fret. So when they joined my band, I thought, I like that sound, but I want to do it with electric. Not a lot of electric guitars are 24 frets, so I had to go with a PRS. So that’s why that became my main guitar,” he elaborates.

​“I’ve always had painters paint my guitars,” he tells us. “The famous Latin painter, George Yepes, painted this one. He’s the one who did the cover of our Mexican Spaghetti Western album and the famous Los Lobos album La Pistola y Corazón. I was a fan of his art and wanted playable fine art, something I could hang on my wall yet also pull down and play.”

As much as Rodriguez loves his personalized PRS, it is now playing second fiddle to his new Castedosa Maravilla.

​“I heard about Carlos Lopez starting his own company, [Castedosa Guitars], and I bought one of his baritones, which is an awesome freaking guitar. This baritone is so killer, but I had limited use for it in the band,” he says.

​“I told him three years ago, ‘If you ever do a 24-fret guitar, that would be my main guitar.’ Then I saw that he started making them, and I told him about the LA show. So he made that guitar and had Sergio Robleto do a painting on the back because he wanted to showcase Latin art on the back of some of his guitars,” says Rodriguez.

“I didn’t know he was going to throw that in. And I also thought he was just going to make me a guitar for that one show. But as soon as I played it, I was so blown away that I knew it would be my main guitar going forward!”

​“The PRS is great, but this is a custom,” he continues. “You can just tell these are magically hand-built guitars that sound great. So for my live stuff, that’s definitely my main guitar now.”

We shift focus to one of the director’s early guitars, and it just so happens to coincide with one of his early films, Road Racers. He tells us how he acquired an old Silvertone to use in the movie, and it could be argued that Rodriguez had more than a little hand in repopularizing the guitar stylings of Link Wray.

"I actually got Link Wray to sign it for me, because the whole reason his music came back is that I made this movie called Road Racers just before Pulp Fiction. It’s like a love letter to [Wray]. It was a movie after El Mariachi,” he explains. “I got this guitar to use in that movie, and a friend that co-wrote it with me owned a bunch of old Link Wray records. We’re like, ‘Let’s put all this music in.’ There are five or six Link Wray songs in Road Racers,” he elaborates.

“I was able to license the originals really inexpensively. So when Quentin [Tarantino] heard that I got the licensing for an actual Link Wray song for so little, he put two of the songs in Pulp Fiction – and that got Link Wray’s resurgence.

“So when I met Link, he’d come to Austin in ’97. I got him to sign the guitar and told him that I put his music in Road Racers, and that’s why it’s in Pulp Fiction – he was like, ‘Oh, you’re the reason I got back!’ He was so grateful.”

Now, the crown jewel in his collection once belonged to another guitar hero of his, none other than Stevie Ray Vaughan.

“Some of my best guitars were given to me,” he says. “I’ve got Stevie Ray Vaughan’s 12-string. The guitar is from Stevie’s Live Alive tour. He gave it to his friend Larry Warren back in June of 1989. Larry eventually put it up for auction in 1997,” he explains.

“I did a big favor for a friend of mine at a movie studio by helping them out with some extra filming on one of their movies and not charging them an arm and a leg. They were in a bind; in fact, I probably did it for free, and they were so grateful that they bought me that guitar at an auction. I was stunned! You know, that’s one of the best guitars in my collection.”

Being a proud Texan himself, Rodriguez is quick to point out how much love he had for Stevie from a very young age, getting into music in 1979. “I mean, talk about a blowout year. I was 10. We had Dire Straits’ first album – Mark Knopfler’s stuff blew our minds. Van Halen’s stuff blew our minds, and Andy Summers, what he was doing in The Police. That was all in one year,” he continues.

“So we were all about the guitar and trying to figure out, ‘How do you play that?’ Then Stevie Ray Vaughan came out, and there was no going back.”

Now, that isn’t the only guitar he has with an SRV connection. Rodriguez was also lucky enough to snag the famous “Family Guitar,” which Stevie would play alongside his brother.

“The Rockin Robin double neck is one that Jimmie Vaughan had donated to a big charity auction, and I didn’t think it should leave Texas, so I bought it. It’s a real piece of Texas history,” he says. “And having four brothers myself, I loved that he and Stevie used to play that guitar at the same time for the song Pipeline during shows like the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.”

The director has been gifted many instruments over the years, from the financiers of a movie presenting him with a 1964 Fender Stratocaster, to being handed a striking cherry Gibson Les Paul on the set of Grindhouse. He was even gifted a model from Metallica’s shredder-in-chief, Kirk Hammett.

“Kirk Hammett gave me his LTD Nosferatu,” he says. “He had come over to look at some paintings that I had from [Frank] Frazetta, and he was so grateful he gave me a guitar.”

The conversation shifts to nylon acoustic models, and a road-worn, battle-scared Cordoba catches our eye.

“My favorite one that I bought back then when we started the band was this old Cordoba FCE, which I’ve had for about 24 years. I love the thin body of it,” explains Rodriguez.

“I’ve always had this on a set. That’s why it’s all beat to hell. It’s something I bought specifically for recording the Once Upon a Time in Mexico score back in 2002. It’s used throughout that score and just about any other score later that has acoustic nylon in it, which is most of them. I also played it at our live Chingon concerts. It was not used on screen in any movies, but certainly looks like it should be!”

Rounding out our chat with the director, we ask what advice Rodriguez has for aspiring musicians and filmmakers.

“Learn it all,” he says confidently. “Never stop learning. Always be a student and try to live a creative life and actively apply creativity to everything you do. If you actively say, I’m being creative, you’ll see everything change. I found I was happiest, most successful, most prolific, and most fulfilled when I was being creative.

“If somebody asks you, ‘Why do you keep playing that guitar?’ You tell them, ‘It’s just part of my creative process. I’m actually unlocking the secrets to the universe while I’m playing it.’ And you wouldn’t be lying! It’s very much like meditation in that it’s all in the practice of it.”

Back in 2005, Brian May and Roger Taylor embarked on their first full Queen world tour since the death of their enigmatic frontman, Freddie Mercury.

Not only did it find May and Taylor performing under the Queen moniker for the first time since 1986, it also saw them joining forces with a new lead vocalist.

Bad Company’s Paul Rodgers was given the unenviable task of filling Mercury’s shoes, but he stepped up to the plate. Queen + Paul Rodgers, as the project was officially called, was a huge success, lasting for two world tours, several high-profile shows and a studio album over the course of four years.

And, as May explained in the May 2005 issue of Guitar World, the lineup had rather surprising origins: a celebration event for the Fender Stratocaster.

For Fender’s 50th Anniversary Strat Pack concert, May and Rodgers joined the bill to play a cover of Free’s All Right Now. May knew they were on to something.

“We were both so knocked out by the sheer chemistry between us on stage,” May remembered. “Afterward, we were talking together when someone – I guess it was me – said, ‘Well, you know, maybe we should do more of this sometime.’”

Taylor remembered May’s excitement over the prospect of getting the band back together with Rodgers at the helm.

“After the Fender gig, Brian got on the phone to me and said, ‘You really have to look at what we just did,’” Taylor recalled. “He sent over a videotape and I could see what he was talking about. I wondered why we hadn’t thought of doing this before.”

To test the waters, May and Taylor teamed up with Rodgers to play at Queen’s induction into the UK Music Hall of Fame. The trio was easily convinced. The Return of the Champions World Tour was swiftly announced. A studio album, Queen’s first post-Mercury, was made.

“Paul does amazingly well, I think,” May said of the collaboration at the time. “The first time I heard him sing We Will Rock You, I knew we had something valid and new here. Paul brings things out of that song I never even knew existed before!”

Despite skeptics surrounding the project, Queen + Paul Rodgers got the Queen machine up and running again. Mercury’s presence was undeniably irreplaceable, but it gave May and co. the chance to honor his legacy by taking the band’s music back on the road. And it can all be traced back to that Stratocaster event.

Things eventually fizzled out in 2009 after Rodgers reunited with Bad Company for a summer tour. It was an amicable split; no one thought it would be a permanent arrangement.

“We did two world tours and a couple of live recordings, and...made a studio album… which was pretty historic,” Rodgers told Billboard (via NME). “They hadn't really gone in the studio with anybody and recorded something like that for a very long time. So it was quite an achievement, I think.”

On the flipside, Queen hasn’t been the only rock institution that Rodgers joined – or at least came close to joining – in his time. Earlier this year, it was reported that Rodgers was approached to front the new Van Halen album.

Mike McCready was sinking just as Pearl Jam’s career was taking flight. The early ‘90s were a blur as he was blacked out on alcohol and drugs and withdrew from the band.

Speaking to Guitar World in April 1995, he recalled how he and frontman Eddie Vedder had grown apart, keeping their distance from one another for the past couple of years.

“I didn’t have a lot of confidence,” said McCready. “I was literally afraid of everybody. I didn’t know how to relate to Eddie, and after the band really took off, I went off in my own world.”

One of the first things McCready did when he got help and got sober was reach out to Vedder.

“I told Eddie, ‘Listen, man, I know I’ve been fucked up for a long time, but I want to reestablish the relationship that we had in the beginning,’” he recalled.

McCready got there in the end, but there were many false starts. He would get on the wagon then come off. His bandmates tried to help as best they could. Looking back at it, he admits he thought that he was going to be kicked out of the band.

“We had a lot of meetings where they would say, ‘Hey, Mike, you’re getting way too fucked up.’ But we’re all really good friends and we love each other,” said McCready. “I think they actually thought I was going to die, but they never took steps to kick me out of the band, which I can’t believe because I fucked up so many times. I was drunk and making an ass out of myself and they were concerned about it.”

McCready bit the bullet and checked himself into rehab. That’s when he realized the strength of his relationship with the band. Before, he had been in a bubble. That’s the company you keep when you’re using.

McCready would have to get sober by himself, but he was not alone. Stone Gossard came out to visit him. They would all check in with him.

“They called me all the time, and it was cool because I really needed their support,” said McCready. “They’re my greatest friends. I couldn’t believe it; when you clean up, you start realizing that people actually care about you. You just don’t think about it when you’re using all the time because you’re only into the people you’re using with. It clouds everything.”

But the newly sober McCready needed something else to occupy himself with. As he tells it, getting off the alcohol saved him from blacking out and the downward spiral, but there was nothing to attenuate life’s highs and lows. He wanted to have a drink when everyone else was. He wanted to drink every day. He just couldn’t.

Instead, he got busy. McCready getting clean is the origin story of Mad Season, the all-star grunge supergroup featuring the late Alice in Chains frontman Layne Staley, and Screaming Trees drummer Barrett Martin. While in rehab, McCready had met a bass guitar player called John Baker Saunders.

Saunders would soon join Seattle indie-rock stalwarts The Walkabouts, but right now he had a purpose. Mad Season were going to make an album.

Staley was going through his own issues with substance abuse at the time. Maybe being around these guys could help clear his head, give him something positive to focus on. Pearl Jam had recorded their third studio album, Vitalogy, in sessions snatched between touring commitments. For Mad Season’s debut, Above, sadly their only studio album, McCready could give the material his full attention.

“It’s great to be clear-headed and wake up early and get on with my day,” he said. “And putting this Mad Season thing together has been a blessing.”

As the urge to drink receded over time, he realized two things. One, that his relationship with his bandmates was tighter than it had ever been. And secondly, he was a better musician for that clarity.

He had labored under the misconception that he’d need some stimulant, legal or otherwise, to perform at his best, or to find ideas.

“Playing live, I’m a lot more focused on the music rather than just being in a daze, the way I was before,” he said. “The whole concept of me thinking that I needed something – be it valium or crystal meth or pot – to write songs or be creative is bullshit.

“I couldn’t put anything together when I was doing that crap. LSD might have helped me in certain ways, but it fucked me up a lot more than it helped.”

Raphael Saadiq has been a torchbearer for organic bass grooves in contemporary R&B since his early-’90s breakout as Tony Toni Toné’s frontman.

Since then, he has provided basslines for East and West Coast rappers such as A Tribe Called Quest, Snoop Dogg, and Q-Tip, and he's played a key role on D’Angelo’s critically acclaimed neo-soul albums.

When asked in the May 2004 issue of Bass Player about the loose, way-back-in-the-pocket feel that he and groove masters such as Pino Palladino brought to ’90s R&B, Saadiq simply replied: “We call it the grease.”

“It’s a way of laying behind and then jumping right back on top of the beat when you feel you’re pulling back too much, sort of like a rubber band.”

And while the feel may be rooted in the pocket, Saadiq’s approach to tone is decidedly old-school. “I use old flatwound strings, backing off the treble and doing some thumb plucking. It gives me a tone somewhere between a kick drum and vintage James Jamerson.”

It was Jamerson's work on Marvin Gaye's How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You) that first sparked Saadiq’s interest in bass at age seven.

“My father and my uncle played guitar, so I was around a lot of music, but when I heard Jamerson on that song I told my dad, ’Whatever instrument that is, that's what I want to play.’”

Little did he know at the time, but family connections would bring Saadiq a lesson from one of the greatest players to have ever picked up the electric bass.

“My godfather, James Levi, played drums with Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters. He always had musicians over at his house, and one day he asked this bass player to help me out.

“The guy drove me home, came up on my porch, pulled out his bass, and started playing and giving me pointers. Years later I found out it was Jaco Pastorius.”

With additional inspiration from local hero Larry Graham, Saadiq earned his calluses in every musical setting and venue imaginable.

“I'd get on stage and play solo bass, or play with a drummer behind a rapper all night, changing my bassline every 16 bars or so.”

That diversity has stayed with Saadiq, who loves to jump from project to project, sometimes spontaneously contributing to an artist in an adjoining studio.

“The original greats on my instrument, like Jamerson and Chuck Rainey, played music that was for everybody, young and old, of all races. I’ve always wanted to make music that can touch that many people.”

The first of these two 1954 Strats is dated March 1954 and it has serial number ‘0108’ on the spring cover. The rumour is that the Strats with trem-cover numbers were actually salesman samples.

They’re often very heavy and the bodies were usually made using multiple pieces of ash, rather than the single pieces Fender did later. The weight difference can be as much as 3lb. I’ve had a couple from January 1954 in the past, but the earliest Stratocaster I currently have pre-dates the ‘0108’ by a couple of months.

I’ve had some with slot heads for the switch or pickup-adjustment screws, but this is the only one where every screw in the guitar is a slot-head. The potentiometer date stamps on the ‘0108’ show the 42nd week of 1953 and there’s no ‘worm rout’ in the bridge pickup cavity.

Fender later figured out how to cut a wire channel in there by using a rounded router bit, but with very early Strats they just notched the wood out with a chisel. It has the more translucent polystyrene pickup covers, which gives it a much cooler look because they go a little grey as they age.

There’s also the short skirt knobs, the round spring cover holes and the football-shaped switch tip. I’ve had maybe 20 trem-cover serial number Strats in my life and they always sound darker and a little boomier, especially on the middle and neck pickups.

I wouldn’t say they’re as sonically balanced as the later ’54 guitars were. The early pickups also had softer-sounding Alnico III magnets with a shorter G-string slug. The darkness may also have something to do with the 100k potentiometers Fender used on the earliest Strats, rather than the 250k.

I definitely think it’s the extra weight, too, just like heavy ’Bursts always have a deeper roar than lighter ’Bursts. The body shapes are similar, although the belly cut is just a little deeper on very early ones.

By late ’54, you see a lot more one-piece bodies and some very pretty quarter-sawn ones. The white polystyrene covers don’t go translucent and there’s the full skirt polystyrene knobs. The neck profile was not as big by late-’54 guitars and centre-pocket tweed cases replaced the form-fit cases.

The very early trem arms have a sharper bend that was soon softened out and continued getting straighter throughout the ’50s and ’60s. We know Fender got a lot of feedback from the musicians when they lent guitars to local barn-dance guys, and I’m sure the biggest complaints about the early guitars were the weight and the neck size. That early U-shaped profile is kind of clubby, and although collectors prefer them, I don’t know many players that do.

In mid-’54, Fender started to make hardtails. People often think that option came later, but Fender planned that from the beginning and I think that was done to try to sell Stratocasters to Telecaster players.

Not everyone wanted a vibrato on their guitar, and because hardtail Strats sustain better they just prefer the overall sound. Putting in five springs and locking that bridge plate down gets you pretty close, but the hardtails always sound a bit better to me.

These guitars are both very original. At some point the earlier one had somebody’s name across the body and they used little brads to put the letters in.

There are lots of tiny holes, but they just look like regular nicks and I haven’t been able to figure out the name. We’ve also had a lot of ’54s with the big elongated truss rod plug.

We used to think they were modified to match the Strat Fender used in the publicity photos, but from what I understand now, it’s because Fender often had to do some reworking in that area. They either had to make a larger plug or paint around the general area to hide evidence of work being done.

Collectors get very excited about owning very early ’54 Strats because they’re so scarce. Fender only made around 200 and the majority of them have been monkeyed with. The late ’54 we’re looking at is essentially the same as a ’55 because by around August or September of ’54 Fender had settled on the production version. My feeling is that Strats made from late 1954 onwards are the best for tone and playability.

• Vintage guitar veteran David Davidson owns Well Strung Guitars in Farmingdale, New York / 001 (516) 221-0563
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

Perhaps The Darkness – the quadruple platinum, outrageously infectious rock band – made their riff-roaring, double-entendre-laden debut, Permission to Land, 20 years too late. There was a significant backlash on its release: due to the outlandish lyrics and falsetto vocals, many critics were quick to assume the band were a glam rock parody.

Yet here the four-piece unapologetically are, 23 years on, having secured three BRIT and two Kerrang! awards, and with eight albums under their rockstar, or catsuit, belts.

GW sat down with Darkness guitarist and producer, Dan Hawkins, at a weekend-long classic rock workshop, hosted by WaterBear – the College of Music.

What was your first guitar?

My dad had a couple knock-off Les Pauls; they’re the reason why [brother and Darkness frontman/rhythm guitarist] Justin and I are musicians. When I think about an electric guitar, the shape and weight of a Les Paul comes to mind. The only reason I got one was because Justin got one; he’d made some money doing an IKEA advert.

We went to a shop in West London. I said: “That one looks cool, I’ll have that.” Justin said: “Yeah, I’ll have that black one.”

Thin Lizzy – mostly a Les Paul band – are one of your favorites. Did they inspire your guitar playing?

People are always surprised when I say Eric Bell is my favorite Lizzy guitarist, because it completely goes against my look, choice of guitar, and tone. I consider Whiskey in the Jar the best guitar-ing in the world.

I challenge you to put a band’s entire catalog on shuffle, and have it take you through an entire weekend – apart from The Beatles. There’s so many different rhythms and approaches.

There’s a Les Paul Custom here today that Jimmy Page briefly had his hands on.

When Led Zeppelin reformed for their final gig at the O2, Page asked Gibson to make an exact replica of his stolen Les Paul Custom ’57 3-pickup. They sent it to him and he said, “This sounds absolutely perfect – but it’s too heavy for my age!”

It’s the heaviest Les Paul you can get because of the wood, the amount of metalwork, and the extra pickup in the middle. It’s an absolute back breaker.

I happened to phone [Gibson’s] Pat Foley the day it ended up back in his office. The Darkness were recording One Way Ticket To Hell…And Back and I said, “I need a Custom Black Beauty 3-pickup.” Foley sent it to me. It was fate!

One of the pickups has been swapped, hasn’t it?

Its pickup was a Burstbucker, but my other guitars were really high output 498s. It wasn’t loud enough. So my guitar tech – who’d just come off an AC/DC tour – swapped it with one of Angus Young’s pickups. It sounded amazing. I didn’t ask what it was; all I know is it came from one of his SGs.

How many guitars are in your collection?

Every 10 years I have a massive clearout. I have seven Les Paul Standards for my touring guitars, four in Europe and three in America. I play Les Paul Standards from the 2000s. The pickups are too loud – to hear your guitar’s tone you have to drop it back a bit. I worked that out three years ago, so all my albums are just fucking blaring and really distorted!

It took The Darkness 11 years to get proper recognition. When did you first feel out of your depth?

Most of my career, really! Being a musician is weird – it’s an insular thing. I was a session guitarist for a bit, which is unbelievable because I can’t read music; I play by ear. I used to pretend to flip the music sheets during sessions. How the hell I blagged that, I don’t know!

What’s the toughest choice you’ve made as a musician?

There is an answer I want to give, but legally I can’t. Sometimes you have to make really tough choices about who is and who isn’t in your band. We had to stop for Justin to get better, and I understand that. He came out of rehab and suddenly started doing solo stuff; that’s what the rift was.

It’s a miracle my band made it through unscathed. In that capacity, it can affect you really really badly – talk about a recipe for disaster, mental health-wise. I feel I’ve made some good decisions over the years. I’m currently in a really good place.

What does your stage setup look like?

A really big pedalboard, made by Mike Hill, who’s sadly passed. I play with a 100ft cable, which is unusual, straight through to a Marshall 100 watt Super Lead. I’ve got a couple of distortion pedals – mainly old Tube Screamers.

I don’t know why I bother having pedals; the outputs of my Les Paul Standards are so loud they distort the sound of the amp. I’m just piling shit on shit, really… but I’ve got something to stand on!

How has streaming affected your band?

There was a moment when it changed. Our second album didn’t do as well, but it still sold around 100,000 CDs. That was considered a bit of a disaster at the time. These days I’d be like: ‘Oh my god, can you imagine!’ Each record sold used to generate £16, now it generates nothing.

An upside to streaming, and people’s obsession with living their life through a lens, is that the appreciation of live music and human interaction has gone through the fucking roof. You see that in ticket sales and how much people are prepared to pay.

The youngsters know what they want – they want to go to a gig and push each other around. They want records and physical things, and to beat the shit out of each other at gigs. They don’t want AI.

What’s your most memorable encounter with another guitarist?

I’ve been back-to-back with Brian May playing Tie Your Mother Down at Hammersmith Apollo. I thought, ‘What’s Brian doing?’ then I realized he was doing the rock triangle. I’d never done it before. I was like, ‘Oh my God, if I move he’ll fall over!’

It was before he was a Sir. It would have probably been best if I killed him before he was a Sir. If he survived, he would have had me beheaded in the Tower of London. I think those are the sort of privileges you get!

You recently supported Iron Maiden at Knebworth. What’s it like playing to their crowd?

When we started our career we played with everyone: The Rolling Stones, Deep Purple, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Metallica, Alice Cooper, Def Leppard – it’s all we did for two years.

I’ve played gigs – and I’m talking about Metallica here – where the first 5,000 people are either throwing bottles of piss at you, or they’re facing the other way with fingers in their ears. But it wasn’t like that with Maiden. It just went off and it was fucking amazing.

• The Darkness will tour the UK in December.

When you think of the iconic guitar sounds on some of the biggest records in rock, consumer equipment definitely isn’t the first type of gear that comes to mind. But a small and mighty consumer device from SRS called The WOW Thing changed that, and proved that great guitar tones can come from the most unlikely of places.

This is the story of how a quirky, lo-fi spatial effects processor built for consumer audio became a studio secret weapon: “the little plastic box that makes guitars a big thing.”

History

SRS Labs began as SRS (Sound Retrieval Systems), a psychoacoustic research branch of Hughes Aircraft in the early 1980s. The mission was to create a realistic 3D soundstage from stereo audio.

In the 1990s, acquired and rebranded SRS Labs, they brought multiple products to the consumer market, including a tiny box full of sonic voodoo called the WOW Thing. This modest desktop hardware was intended to make inexpensive computer speakers sound more full and spacious.

Nobody working in professional audio should have cared. But a mix engineer working on what would become one of the biggest albums in rock history accidentally stumbled on what it could do, and the secret eventually got out.

Sonic secret sauce

The WOW Thing works by utilizing a unique blend of extreme equalization, psychoacoustic processing and phase delays. This dramatically widens the stereo sound field and boosts low frequencies.

It’s built around three proprietary technologies. SRS 3D widens the stereo image. Originally conceived for car playback where speakers are not ear level, Focus “lifts” the sound vertically. Designed to make small speaker drivers sound huge, TruBass uses psychoacoustic bass enhancement to give the source material a deeper natural low end.

It employs similar EQ moves to what’s traditionally done in mixing guitars – emphasizing low end, a scoop to clear low midrange, and a subtle lift in the high-end presence. Processing like this is ubiquitous today with plugins, but in the early 90s it was fairly revolutionary.

Discovery

“Wider, brighter, and huge.” That’s the way engineer Randy Staub (Metallica, Mötley Crüe, U2) described how the WOW Thing sounds on guitars. He stumbled on the software version while listening to music on his home computer and discovered what it could do to distorted guitars: thicker bass, a high-end lift, and gentle low-midrange scoop that helped them sit perfectly in a dense mix.

At the time he was mixing Metallica’s Black Album and was searching for a way to make the guitars sound bigger and wider. The WOW Thing provided the sonic secret sauce he was looking for.

He told Ultimate Guitar: “I started using the WOW Thing on guitars to spread them out in the stereo image, and that’s what I’ve been using for years and years.”

In the mix

He also set the device to boost the bottom end, add more presence to the high frequencies and attenuate some midrange. It helped the rhythm guitars feel bigger and separated them from the vocals and snare, which tend to occupy overlapping areas of the frequency spectrum.

The WOW Thing provided a way to make doubled guitars larger-than-life in a unique way, rather than standard processing like EQ and compression, which created definition between the layers of tracks.

Since it was designed to process stereo material, Staub used it on stereo guitar busses and pairs of panned guitar tracks. The result is a thick, defined sound that’s still a gold standard 35 years later.

Korneff Audio’s plugin

Eventually, recording engineer Dan Korneff (Breaking Benjamin, Papa Roach, My Chemical Romance, Paramore) got turned on to it and was using it in his mixes when he decided to create a plugin version. “This happy accident changed what we thought was possible for electric guitars,” he says. “Instantly you can hear the guitars get wider and deeper.”

As the WOW Thing secret got out, original units became increasingly difficult to find. Korneff Audio, formed in 2019, designed a plugin version that closely models the hardware in sound and GUI, operates in mono and stereo, and extends the capabilities.

Under the hood are selectable frequency centers for the TrueBass control (from 40Hz to 400Hz) and options of two different spatial processing types for the WOW control to sound like the desktop or Megawide rackmount versions. There’s also a Blend control for parallel processing, and a switch that sets the low end mono to achieve a wider stereo effect.

The TrueBass control adds low-end depth that thickens and cranks a source to add novel low end effects. This makes it versatile enough to use with downtuned and extended range guitar tracks. It sounds equally great on guitar busses too. There’s also a TrueBass Dynamics switch that adds a four-band frequency-dependent compressor for better control over the low end.

As far as why Korneff decided to create the plugin he says, “I wanted my guitars to be as huge as Randy Staub’s,” Korneff said, explaining why he created the plugin. “This does all that and more – like the guitars are giving you a bear hug.”

Happy accidents

Recording has always rewarded outside-the-box thinking and new approaches to timeless techniques. It’s fascinating that a consumer audio device that originally sold for just $20 became a secret sonic weapon that found its way onto iconic rock records.

The effect the WOW Thing has had on professional mixing is proof that the tools used for production matter less than how they're used.

“Frank who?”

Kylie Gaspard is describing her inbox flooding with DMs from her friends about a guy named Frank sharing Beginner, a song by her alt-rock band, Cashier.

“They were like, ‘Frank Ocean!’,” laughs Gaspard, vocalist of the Lafayette, Louisiana-based band. “He listened halfway through, took a picture and posted it. I think it’s in a Rolls Royce. Really crazy, super surreal, and really awesome. He's everything.”

“He’s one of the best artists of the past 15 years, for sure,” says Cashier lead guitarist Jo Perillo.

A mega star like Frank Ocean discovering and sharing one of Cashier’s songs validated their DIY philosophy.

“It made me feel like we could pop off doing it ourselves,” Gaspard says. “It’s definitely reaffirming,” Perillo agrees.

Cashier weren’t always the alternative rock, shoegaze-leaning band that caught the ear of big-time celebrities. Before Covid, they were a textural indie rock band that Perillo says sounded like Alex G. Then the Big Muff showed up.

“I feel like that's like the sound of Cashier,” Perillo says. “We both have a Big Muff and a Rat. Basically, the Rat is, like, the normal sound. I have my Big Muff after and Kylie has hers before it, but just for the heavier parts. My always-on is the Fuck Overdrive by this pedal company called Smallsound/Bigsound that doesn't exist anymore.”

The other key piece of gear that helped push the band toward their heavy sound is a Squier J. Mascis Jazzmaster. Borrowed from a friend, Perillo’s Jazzmaster became Cashier’s version of Metallica’s EMG pickups or Kurt Cobain’s Small Clone.

“I've been borrowing it for seven years very graciously from a friend,” Perillo says with a laugh. “She just told me, ‘Oh, you can keep using it.’ It's a great guitar. I feel like it enabled Cashier to come into its own because I didn't really have a very rock-sounding guitar.”

It’s these things combined that have helped the band achieve the sound that they have on The Weight, their debut on the Philadelphia-based label Julia’s War Recordings. The EP is a departure from their shoegaze-influenced singles.

“Shoegaze is such an umbrella term now,” Gaspard says. “On The Weight, we’re more obviously alt-rock. The songs don't have much meat to them.”

So what’s next for the band?

“Hopefully the EP and our singles can feed everyone enough [for now,]” Gaspard says. “Contractually, next year there will be an LP. It’s definitely being worked on. I have the pressure of a deadline, so I can get it done.”

• The Weight is out now via Julia's War.
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

There are several benefits to be taken from this solo, even if I do say so myself, depending on how you might choose to approach it. First, the selection of ideas is particularly useful to call upon in a trio situation where there is limited harmonic support available from a simple groove-based backing like this.

Second, there are useful pentatonic/blues scale ideas, transferable to any key and not limited to the trio format. And, not least, third, there is a kind of SRV vibe, so that’s always nice!

In a broader sense, this solo is also an exercise in rhythm. Often the phrases coincide with the drums, but, as you’ll hear, the first example plays swung eighth notes, which deliberately contrast against the accents of the kick drum and bass guitar. Elsewhere, I’m somewhat mindful of where there should be a space, to let a drum fill breathe or simply to take a moment to decide where to go next.

One of the steepest learning curves we can embark on is to record ourselves improvising in a scenario like this, then listen back and evaluate the results. To get the full benefit, it’s important that we make an ‘honest’ recording – don’t overthink or compose anything at first.

Listening back can be tough, but this is information nobody else can give you. It’s also true that there can be some nice surprises, often resulting from the moments when we feel we slipped and didn’t play something the way we intended to in that moment.

Coming back to an earlier point, many players are also surprised to hear how much they’re filling the space, especially in a slower/half-time context such as this. All that said, do use these ideas as extra vocabulary, but aim to improvise as freely as you can. Hope you enjoy and see you next time!

Example 1

We start this opening phrase with a series of swung eighth notes, deliberately contrasting against the accents from the bass guitar and kick drum. I’m drawing on pentatonic patterns here up to and including the second bar (not counting the pickup bar). In bar 3, we change to some rhythmic.

Example 2

We're starting with quite a long pickup bar here but moving swiftly on to break the flow a little. This allows some of the bass guitar and kick drum accents to ‘poke through’ during the gap, giving the feeling of interplay between the elements – and avoiding possible listener fatigue from a constant barrage of notes...

The overall feel is derived more from triplets (both quaver and semiquaver) than swung quavers. The last E will be reused at the beginning of Example 3. We thought this phrase sounded better with it in isolation and didn’t want to cut it from the next phrase!

Example 3

Starting with that duplicate E, this final example has one of the longest pickup bars we’ve seen, but it all makes sense once you land on beat 1 of bar 1!

This starts with some sustained blues bends, before mixing up some triplets, swung quavers and doublestops in bar 2. We revert to a more rhythmically simple pattern in bar 3 before digging in to some heavy accents on an E7#9 chord.

This coincides somewhat with the drum accents, but the most important consideration is to dig in with confidence. A good drummer will probably follow…

Hear it here

Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble – Texas Flood

This album is packed with exemplary playing in a trio format. What’s more, it was recorded live from the studio floor.

There is something to be learned from every track, but perhaps the most relevant to the approach highlighted in the example solo are Pride and Joy, Texas Flood and I’m Cryin’.

Though always technically proficient, Stevie manages to create excitement without sounding like a rock player. His rhythms also sound super-confident.

Robin Trower – Robin Trower Live

Another example of a trio-based record, here Robin fills a lot of space without coming across as unaware of the other instruments or the vocals.

His soloing can oftentimes be frenetic, but there are many areas where he’ll happily hold a note and let the bass and drums carry things.

Check out Too Rolling Stoned (with its somewhat conspicuous edit!), and for the ultimate laid-back live feel make sure to have a listen to Daydream. The live version Day Of The Eagle is also one to track down.

Philip Sayce – The Wolves Are Coming

This is a very ‘in your face’ production, but the arrangements are carefully constructed to allow all the instruments to have their place in the mix. Have a listen to Oh! That Bitches Brew, Your Love and The Moon Is Full.

Honourable mention also goes to Intuition for its more laid-back feel, dynamics and bluesy soloing. Though this is very much a studio production complete with rhythm guitar and keyboards, it’s not too hard to imagine this arranged for the trio format.

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

What happens to iconic guitars after a famous (or cult hero) guitarist dies? These days it’s common to see instruments sold at high-profile auctions and vanish into the clutches of anonymous collectors with deep pockets.

However, some guitars live on in museum collections, remain under close guard as family heirlooms, or pass along to famous player friends, where they continue to make history.

We decided to take a closer look at five of the most celebrated Telecasters (actually, one is an Esquire) played by guitarists we’ve loved and lost, and figure out where those instruments are now. Today, we examine the legendary Danny Gatton’s 1953 Fender Telecaster.

If there were any justice in this world, Danny Gatton would have been a superstar. He more than lived up to his nicknames, “The Telemaster” and “The Humbler,” thanks to his spectacular technique and mastery of multiple styles, including jazz, country, rockabilly, blues, and more – an amalgamation he called “redneck jazz” and fellow guitarists described as mind-boggling.

Despite earning a heap of acclaim, releasing a handful of albums on major labels, and appearing on the cover of guitar magazines, Gatton never surpassed cult-hero status.

Gatton worked his way from playing clubs in the Washington, D.C. area during the ’70s to the public spotlight backing rockabilly revivalist Robert Gordon and classic country icon Roger Miller during the ’80s. During this period, his main guitar was a 1953 Telecaster (serial number 4883) that featured several highly personalized modifications.

Gatton refretted the neck and installed cubic zirconia side markers on it, replaced the original knobs with a pair of custom heavily knurled stainless steel knobs made by Jay Monterose, and bent down the pickup selector switch to keep it out of the way when manipulating the volume and tone knobs.

The ’53 Tele’s electronics provided the essence of Gatton’s unique, multi-voiced tones. His pickups were custom made by Joe Barden, featuring a humbucking design in a standard Tele-size single-coil pickup featuring two side-by-side bobbins with blade polepieces.

The pickups were wound to deliver single-coil tones without hum. Gatton used a standard audio-taper 500k ohm pot for his volume control, but his tone control had a linear-taper 1-megohm pot and a .05µF capacitor that enabled him to create wah effects.

Other distinct features included a stainless steel plate behind the bridge that was the mount for Gatton’s “Magic Dingus Box” remote effects controller, a trophy plate from the October 1988 Greasers Halloween Car Show placed below the high E string, and autographs that Willie Nelson and Roger Miller carved into the finish.

Gatton used this Tele to record his acclaimed independent solo album Unfinished Business. It can also be heard in its full glory in a recording of his live performance in the early Eighties at Berkeley Square with Robert Gordon that was released in 1996 as The Humbler.

During the early ’90s, after Gatton signed a record deal with Elektra and the Fender Custom Shop began collaborating with him on a Danny Gatton signature model Telecaster, Gatton traded his ’53 Tele to his good friend Jack Jensen for a 1934 Ford four-door sedan. Although the ’53 Tele had served him quite well, he couldn’t resist the offer to trade it for the car of his dreams.

After Gatton’s tragic suicide, Jensen returned the Tele to Gatton’s widow, Jan. On October 24, 2015, Heritage Auctions sold Gatton’s ’53 Tele for $62,500. The winning bidder was private collector and Gatton fan Nathan Lefcowitz, who planned to continue playing, performing, and recording with the instrument.

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

Ritchie Blackmore may be forever associated with stacks upon stacks of Marshalls. However, it turns out that, at least at the beginning of his Deep Purple years, his Marshalls were actually Voxes – a fact he says Marshall wanted to keep on the down-low.

“I really loved my Vox sound, but I wanted to change to Marshalls for the look,” he told Guitar World in a 2018 interview.

Being a regular at Jim Marshall’s shop in Ealing, London, gave Blackmore the unique opportunity to spend hours tweaking his tone.

“I’d go to the Marshall factory in Bletchley, where I met Ken Bran and Dudley Craven, who devised the circuit for me in a Marshall setup. They’d be there with their soldering irons, and I’d be batting away on the guitar trying to get the amp to sound like a Vox.

“I’d be playing so loud that all the women there, who were doing the construction of the amps, would storm out together, saying, ‘We can’t work with that loud nonsense going on.’ 60 people or so working there would leave the factory,” he admitted.

To accommodate Blackmore, Marshall went so far as to devise a soundproof room for the Deep Purple guitarist to use.

“I was there so often looking for this sound,” he recalled. “One of the secrets that they will deny to this day – ’cause they told me they would – was that they could not come up with the sound that I wanted.

“I wanted this Vox sound which was very distorted and very cutting, but seemed to have a bass resonance. And they just couldn’t get that. So in the end they said, ‘What we’re going to do is get one of our combo amps, and we’ll take out the innards and put in the Vox innards. So you’ll actually be playing a Vox, but it’ll say Marshall.’ That was the big secret of the day.”

Despite this workaround, the Marshall team were “determined” to get the right sound for Blackmore, so that he eventually became arguably the loudest guitarist of that era.

“What they did was put an extra output stage into one of their 200-watt amps [the Major], which gave it a fatter sound, a bit more distorted,” he explained. “This extra output stage basically made the 200-watt into a 280-watt.

“So for the first probably five years of Deep Purple – ’70 to ’75 – I did have the loudest amp in the world. Although I’m sure it’s dwarfed now by people who have a million watts. You know how it is. Everyone’s got to have one more, one more.

“Going up to – what? – 11 now, I guess,” he quipped.

With sonic explorers Angine de Poitrine starting their sold-out US tour this week, the guitar world’s most viral two-piece will no doubt have everyone talking about their mind-bending microtonal guitar tones once again. Alongside King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, they're reshaping the idea of what modern guitar players can do thanks to the use of microtones.

As well as getting into the gear, I’m going to take you through everything you need to know about microtonal music. In this article, we'll take a journey through the history of music itself, dabble in some mathematics, and come out at the other end with a much better understanding of why microtonal guitar sounds so weird to the Western ear.

By the time you get to the end, you'll have learned some music theory and, if I've done my job correctly, expanded that Western mindset way beyond the constraints of the frets on your electric guitar.

Standard tuning

Let’s start with standard tuning on a guitar. Western music is built on something called the 12-tone equal temperament system (12-TET). On the guitar, you can find this by playing every note in sequence from the open string to the 12th fret on the low E. That’s every note in the 12-TET system, and pretty much every major pop, rock, blues, funk, or heavy metal song was built on those 12 notes.

This isn’t all the notes that exist in music, though. It’s just what Western music evolved to become thanks to the adoption of the 12-TET system – more on which in the history section.

There are many more notes in between the 12 core tones we use in Western music. It’s like colors: you have your reds, blues, and yellows, but there are countless shades in between that you can use to paint a picture.

To keep things simple when we get into the math of this, it’s easier to look at the notes as cents rather than as a frequency (Hz). If you’ve used a guitar tuner, you’ll have come across cents before. They’re a measure of pitch, broken down into little sections. There are 100 cents per fret on a guitar, with 1,200 for a full octave, and 50 for the quarter tones currently being utilized by King Gizzard and Angine de Poitrine.

The notes between the notes

In nature, sound isn’t split up into sections; it’s just one continuous note that rises. Technically speaking, there are infinite notes available to us. The problem is we can’t hear all of them. A trained ear can distinguish roughly 240 distinct pitch changes within a full octave; that’s an accuracy of about 5 cents. This varies depending on where you are in the frequency range, as the human ear is more accurate in the midrange and less so in the low and high-end.

With microtonal music, you’re playing those notes in between the 12 we’re used to. Bands like Angine de Poitrine and King Gizzard use guitars with extra frets to access these smaller intervals, called quarter tones, giving them additional sounds you can’t easily play on a normal electric guitar. Where a normal guitar neck has 12 frets per octave, a microtonal one can have 24.

Here's a demonstration of this using cents. Imagine your open guitar string is 0 cents. The 3rd fret would be 300, and the 4th 400. That quarter tone in between? That’s 350 cents. It sits exactly between major and minor, and to a Western ear, it sounds like an unresolved note because we’re so used to hearing music in the 12-TET system. For a Middle Eastern or Indian musician, these in-between notes have been a core part of their music for thousands of years.

The history: how the West lost the in-between notes

Microtonal music isn’t the exception to the rule we think it is. For most of history, microtonal music was just music. When humans first began to sing, blow into tubes of bone, or pluck animal gut-derived strings, there was no system of notes to abide by. Sound was already in the world; we just created ways to imitate it.

Here’s one scholar’s reconstruction of one of the oldest known melodies in human history. It comes from a Babylonian text of a musical system based on tuning in fifths:

Before we get to microtonal music specifically, it’s important to understand more about how Western music developed into the 12-TET system we use today. This is pretty math-heavy stuff, so make sure you’ve got your thinking cap on.

The Pythagorean Comma

Legend has it that Pythagoras first discovered the mathematics of musical tuning by stretching a piece of string along a block of wood, somewhere around the year 500BCE. His device, now called a monochord, had a movable bridge, and by using this, he realized you could divide that string into intervals that sounded pleasing to the human ear.

To give you a real-world example of this, just pick up your guitar. If you take any string and divide the length exactly in half, you get an octave. This is the 12th fret on your guitar. Similarly, if you divide the string into thirds, the first third of your string will be the 7th fret of your guitar. Known as the perfect fifth, this note comes from the remaining two-thirds of the string that vibrates. You’ll note these are natural acoustic sweet spots where harmonics ring out nicely.

Using Pythagorean tuning, the idea was that if you stacked 12 perfect fifths on top of one another, you would be on the same note you started on, just 7 octaves higher. Fast forward to the Renaissance and Baroque period, however, and we run into a big issue with tuning in perfect fifths.

The keyboard had been invented, and composers were making music on organs and harpsichords with multi-part harmonies and complex chords. When they tried to tune them using pure fifths, they sounded completely out of tune after a certain point.

Here’s the problem:

• Moving up 7 octaves: An octave is 1,200 cents, so you add 1,200 seven times in a row. That gives you 8,400 cents.
• Moving up 12 perfect fifths: A Pythagorean perfect fifth is 701.955 cents, so you add that twelve times in a row. That gives you 8,423.46 cents.

That’s a difference of just under 24 cents, nearly a quarter of a fret, which, as we discussed earlier, is a difference pretty much anyone can hear. Because we’re adding a set of even numbers against a set of odd numbers, there’s no way their paths would ever cross in order for them to align perfectly.

This gives us what is now known as the Pythagorean Comma. If you tune an instrument in mathematically perfect fifths using the string length, you will eventually overshoot the octave and sound out of tune. It also affects the tunings of other intervals, like thirds. Don't worry, though; humans will solve this problem in a few thousand years.

Two solutions, one problem

As music evolved throughout the years and became more complex, musicians started to encounter this issue with tuning in 5ths. There were a few solutions to this.

India & the 22 shrutis

Ancient Indian music mapped the octave out into 22 ‘Shrutis’ somewhere around 200BCE and 200CE. This comes from the Natya Shastra, a treatise on the performing arts which was highly influential in the evolution of Indian music.

Keeping it to stringed instruments, a great example of this approach is the Veena, a relative of the sitar. Unlike the fretted instruments of the West, the frets on a Veena weren’t glued into the neck; they were tied on or attached by wax. This meant players could move them to wherever they needed to suit the microtones and scales of the piece they were playing.

Indian classical music is also notable for another feature of microtonality: string bending. Western stringed instruments used gut strings, and these bent so easily they were unpredictable. They could stretch out of tune, and the low action of instruments of the time also contributed to the difficulty with accurate string bending.

The frets on a Veena were curved and made from metal, allowing players to bend the strings into those spaces in between the notes. They also were well above the neck wood, like you’d find on a scalloped guitar neck. This allowed players of the time to bend up to five semitones from a single fret.

Here’s a great example of bending a 'meend' on a sitar:

The Arab world and the Maqam

In the Middle East, musicians took a different approach entirely. The Maqam came about gradually, evolving from the Islamic Golden Age, when scholars began translating Greek texts of Pythagoras. Less a scale and more a set of rules to follow, the Maqam tells the musician which notes to emphasize and how to phrase a sequence, but it’s more based on improvisation than rigid rules.

Safi al-Din al-Urmawi, an Iranian musician, encountered the same problem that Western musicians did with the Pythagorean Comma. Middle Eastern musicians went along a different path, though, choosing to keep stacking perfect fifths, ending up with a 17-tone system. To play these microsteps, they relied on instruments like the oud, which allowed players to hit all the correct notes required in a 17-tone system.

Al-Urmawi’s system meant that a whole step wasn’t two notes as we have with the 12-TET system. Instead, a step was broken down into three unequal micro-steps. To envision this on your guitar neck, imagine you’ve got 17 frets, but they’re all spaced out differently. Some would be closer together, and others further apart.

These frets would equate roughly to 90 cents, 90 cents, and 24 cents on a modern guitar neck. This concept still exists today in the Baglama (or Saz), a traditional Turkish instrument, which, as we’ll find out, is one of the major influences in microtonal guitar music of the modern age.

The oud goes to Europe

There’s one other important subject we need to touch on in order to fully understand microtonal music, and that’s the oud. The first ouds were around in the 8th century and were fretless instruments, which were needed to play the Maqams of the time using the 17-tone system. This allowed players to hit those microtones and execute vibrato and slides that mimicked the sound of the human voice.

The oud was introduced to Europe during the Moorish occupation of Spain beginning in 711CE. Europeans loved the instrument, but as mentioned earlier in the article, they wanted polyphony. If you’ve ever tried to play a chord on a fretless instrument, you’ll know it’s incredibly difficult to keep the whole thing in tune.

To get around this, they took thick pieces of gut string and tied them around the neck of the oud to create frets. This allowed them to play chords, but took away the microtonal capabilities of the oud. They also took the Arabic name ‘al-’ud’, which became the Spanish ‘laud’, French ‘leut’, and is how we ended up with the English ‘lute’.

The lute was popular for a time, but Western musicians didn’t love the deep body, which made it difficult to play standing, as well as preventing hard strumming. So instrument makers began flattening the body and pinching the waist, creating a shape that was much more recognizably close to today’s acoustic guitars.

This gave us the vihuela and the Baroque guitar. Over time, tied-on gut frets were replaced with metal ones, and strings that were grouped in courses became the six single strings we know today.

The 12-TET system

The 12-tone equal temperament system (12-TET) is the answer to the Pythagorean Comma we mentioned earlier, and is still used in modern guitar playing today. To get around the issue of perfect fifths not matching equally with octaves, Western musicians realized they needed to divide the octave into 12 perfectly equal steps.

The idea works like this. We take all 1,200 cents of our octave and divide it into exactly 12 equal steps. Every fret on your guitar is exactly 100 cents from its neighbour all the way up the neck. Of course, the distances between the frets shrink as you move up, but if you get your digital calipers out, you’ll notice that the distance between the nut and 1st fret is exactly halved by the time you get to the 12th and 13th frets.

With this system, our perfect fifth, the 7th fret, lands at exactly 700 cents. Pythagoras’ perfect fifth was 701.955 cents. It’s very difficult to hear a 2-cent difference, so to our ears they sound pretty much the same. The major difference comes from when we move further up. Twelve lots of 700 cents is exactly 8,400 cents, so our 7 octaves and 12 perfect fifths now land in the same place.

Two solutions combine

Heading back to the Middle East, musicians began to realize that the 17-tone system was difficult to teach and incompatible with Western music notation, which had become the global standard. Thus, Arabic music was standardized into 24 equal quarter tones in the 19th century. This was just for notation; the actual notes of maqams still vary by region and player, but the 24-TET system is a Western approximation of the Middle Eastern system that allows the two to interact.

Back in mid-19th century Europe, Antonio de Torres Jurado completely changed the game by redesigning the Baroque guitar. He increased the body size, added bracing to the inside, and introduced the 650mm (25.6”) scale length. The 12-TET system became a permanent feature of the guitar as we know it today, and classical guitars still have this same scale length.

Once the 20th century arrived, composers began to try and break the rules again. Julian Carrillo had microtonal guitars and harps built specially for his Sonido 13 microtonal music theory. Alois Hába wrote microtonal music in Czechia, commissioning a quarter-tone piano to be built. Harry Partch built a 43-tone intonation system and a whole orchestra of instruments in order to play it.

Electronic music then made it cheap for anyone to start using microtones. Wendy Carlos designed her own non-octave scales, famously used on ‘Beauty in the Beast’ in 1986. In Turkey, classical guitarist Tolgahan Cogulu invented the adjustable microtonal guitar with frets that slide in channels so it can be set up for maqams, 24-TET, or any other kind of microtonal tuning.

Microtonal music today

Somewhere around 2014, Stu Mackenzie of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard bought a Turkish Baglama, which shared the lineage with the instruments al-Urmawi would have used back in the 1200s.

Enamoured by its sound, he got his luthier friend to combine the electric guitar with the baglama, resulting in the instrument we now know as the Flying Microtonal Banana. The rest of the band bought cheap guitars and retrofitted them with extra frets, resulting in multiple albums written and recorded in the 24-TET system.

Angine de Poitrine have taken this idea to a new plane. A double-necked microtonal guitar and a Boss looper pedal, alongside a look only a mother could love, have taken microtonal music almost into the mainstream.

Interestingly, we’ve essentially come full circle. Microtonal music was the norm in ancient times; it was categorized and systematized via mathematics, and now musicians are breaking down the walls again.

Is it a rallying cry for real music against the incoming onslaught of AI slop? Or a rebellion against music tuned and gridded to within an inch of its life? Maybe it’s just the natural progression that stems from an abundance and easy access to information for all, and our natural inclination as guitar players to experiment.

Whatever it is, hopefully this newfound popularity encourages more guitar players to experiment with sounds less popular in the Western hemisphere.

How to play microtonal music

Bending

Something that should already be within most guitar players' repertoire. We don’t think of it as microtonal, but the blues note, or quarter-tone bend, has defined electric guitar for a long time, and it’s a microtonal note. If you need assistance with this, do it with your guitar tuner engaged, and aim for the space halfway between one note and the next.

Slide

Using a guitar slide essentially turns your guitar into a fretless instrument. Every pitch on the string is suddenly available, giving you the same freedom that fretless oud players have. Try landing on these positions between the frets rather than sliding through them to add some maqam-style flavour to your licks.

Detune a single string

Some clever folks on the internet have realized you can play some of Angine de Poitrine’s music on a regular guitar by detuning a couple of strings by a quarter tone. Example video below:

Pitch-shifting pedals

Any pitch shifter that gives you a treadle for continuous movement can be used to create microtones. Not every pitch shifter or octave pedal lets you do this, but those like the Digitech Whammy, or the EHX Pitch Fork and Boss PS-6 paired with an expression pedal, can help you unlock those in-between sounds.

Microtonal guitars & necks

Due to the Angine hype, you can now preorder microtonal guitars on the Eastman Guitars website. They also have necks you can stick on a guitar you already own, and even a double-necked instrument similar to what everyone’s favorite Quebecer duo uses.

Most good luthiers will also be able to turn any regular guitar into a microtonal one by adding new frets in between the existing ones. This is how King Gizzard got hold of multiple microtonal instruments, and it is a great way to repurpose an old guitar you're not using anymore.

You can also purchase custom microtonal necks on Etsy from JLJInstruments.

Top microtonal guitar tracks

Totally new to microtonal music? Here are some top tracks and interesting videos to get you started.

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard

Angine de Poitrine

Julian Carrillo

Harry Partch

Jon Catler

Brendan Byrnes

Tolgahan Çoğulu

Kasim Sulton didn’t fancy himself as a session musician – but that hasn’t stopped him from appearing on dozens of iconic records.

He’s worked with everyone from Steve Stevens to Richie Sambora, but it’s his relationship with Todd Rundgren and Meat Loaf that he’s remembered most for – especially Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell. “I had no idea the album would become one of the top-selling records of all time,” Sulton tells Bass Player.

“Jim Steinman was shy and reserved; Meat Loaf was loud and boisterous. Together they bottled lightning. Of course, the musicians involved – myself, Todd Rundgren, Roy Bittan, and Max Weinberg – took our performances seriously.

“But for the most part, the music and the sessions were quite funny. You couldn’t help but laugh at the content of most of the songs!”

Sulton was also a member of Rundgren’s Utopia, and tours with the guitarist’s solo band today. “Todd is demanding, but he trusts the people he surrounds himself with. We just celebrated 50 years working together, and I feel we have a pretty good understanding of each other.

“As long as you’re working hard and not slacking off or dialing it in, Todd is easy. If you ask him what you should be playing, he’ll probably tell you, ‘I don’t know! Figure it out – that’s why I hired you!’”

Now 70, Sulton remains very inspired. When he’s not working with Rundgren, he’s writing solo music. Looking back, he says: “What kept me working with Meat Loaf was a true sense of what Jim Steinman’s original idea was and how best to perform those songs.

“Not too many people were in the room when that record was being made. I was. I’ll remember Meat as a big teddy bear who loved performing in front of an audience. And Todd is the consummate artist – one of the best lyricists in the second half of the 20th century. I’m proud to have worked with them both.”

How did you break into session work?

I never really considered myself a session musician. I cut my teeth in live situations. I was always happy to be in a recording session or going into the studio to work on my own music; and I always looked forward to performing in front of an audience. I think I became pretty popular on the studio call list because of my work with Todd and Utopia.

What led to your landing the gig with Utopia?

I was close with [orchestrator and pianist] Michael Kamen, who was friends with John Siegler and Roger Powell, both in Utopia at the time. John was leaving the band and asked Michael if he knew anyone who might take his place. He recommended me.

After borrowing $20 from my uncle, I took a bus up to Woodstock, where the band was based, and auditioned. Utopia were a prog rock band at the time and my bass playing was adequate – but my real selling point was the fact that I could sing.

Tell us about Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell sessions.

About six months after I joined Utopia, I was sitting in a rented home in Woodstock, New York. Todd called and asked if I wanted to play bass on a record he was producing. I said, “Sure,” and asked what the artist’s name was. When he said, “Meat Loaf,” I thought he was joking, and I said as much. He said, “Just show up at the studio tomorrow!”

Next day, I witnessed Jim Steinman sitting at a small upright piano and Meat Loaf, Ellen Foley, and Rory Dodd performed the entire record. There was no demo tape – just these four people belting out the seven songs for Bat Out of Hell.

What was it like working on songs like Bat Out of Hell and Paradise by the Dashboard Light?

No one gave me any direction. I had free rein to come up with any bass lines I thought would be good. In retrospect, I took liberties that might be frowned on in today’s sessions – what I mean is, I played a lot! I riffed and stuck in little ad-libs all over the place that, to this day, I’m extremely proud of.

Todd has been critical of Meat Loaf and how people view the project on the whole. What were your thoughts then compared to now?

After we finished the record, I honestly thought I would never hear it again. It was great to have a hand in that music, working with Jim, Roy Bittan, Max, and Todd.

But at the time it didn’t strike me as a landmark record. In hindsight I can see that it spoke to a segment of youth that connected with the brilliance of Jim’s lyrics.

Elsewhere, you played a big role in Utopia’s only top 40 hit, Set Me Free.

I was signed as a solo artist to Bearsville Records during Utopia’s time on that label. I was given 100 hours a year to work on demos, and I used every minute recording what I hoped would be my first solo album. I went in to see Albert Grossman to tell him I was ready to officially start on that record, but he didn’t think I was, and that I needed to write more and record more demos.

I disagreed. As a hot-headed 21-year-old, I told him I wanted out of my contract. He said, “Sure thing, that’ll be $50,000 and 5 points on whatever you record. Welcome to the real world!”

That’s when I took out my frustration in a song. I wrote Set Me Free in 20 minutes. It became the only top 40 hit Utopia would ever have – thanks in no small part to the contributions of Todd and the band.

In the ’80s you worked with Steve Stevens and, later on, Richie Sambora. What was that like?

Steve is a brilliant guitarist, and I had the pleasure of working on his solo album along with my childhood friend, drummer Thommy Price. His influences span a pretty wide spectrum, from Segovia to Robert Fripp.

I toured for a year with Richie, and it was one of my most memorable experiences. Richie is an exceptional guitarist and was so generous and kind to me that I wrote his mother a letter at the end of the tour, telling her what a great son she raised.

You were also a member of Joan Jett’s band.

I played with Joan from 1986 to 1989. Thommy Price was her drummer – we grew up together. When her bass player left Thommy thought to call me. Like most successful artists, Joan knows exactly what she wants. Not so much demanding, but confident.

I’ve found that people hire me not only because of what I bring to the table, but because I’m clear on who I’m working with. Doesn’t matter if it’s Joan Jett or Celine Dion, I’m there for them, not for myself.

Meat Loaf had a big rebound with Bat Out of Hell II, which you were a part of. Did you see that coming?

Who could have predicted lightning striking twice in the same place? When Todd and I recorded all the background vocals on Bat II, we had an idea that it was going to be a decent-selling record. We didn’t expect it to sell 17 million copies! Kudos to Alan Kovac, who managed Meat Loaf at the time and was integral to the success of that record.

Later you were a member of The New Cars. What did you make of Benjamin Orr’s playing style?

The beauty of Ben’s playing was in its simplicity. The New Cars was a pretty cool project. I know Ric Ocasek didn’t like it! We were writing new music and hoping that we could continue. Were it not for an unfortunate accident involving Elliot Easton, it could have survived much longer.

How has your rig changed from your early days to now?

I like to keep it as simple as possible, whether with Utopia, my solo band, or anyone – an amp and a bass. Unless, of course, the gig requires a pedalboard with some effects on it, in which case an Eventide H9 and a couple of Keeley stompboxes do everything I’ll need.

Any regrets?

I’ve met three Beatles and worked with one. I wish I could have shaken George’s hand and thanked him. I’m proud of the fact that I’m known and respected by musicians I grew up listening to and admiring. What more can a kid from Staten Island ask for?

The old saying, ‘everyone has to start somewhere,’ has been repeated a billion times in a billion contexts for a reason – it's true for even the most successful in any field.

Take Bon Jovi, who have spent the last 40 years taking their particular brand of hard-rock – peppered with literal million-dollar choruses – to stadiums and arenas around the world.

Needless to say, they've gotten that live show in tip-top shape during that time – their 2013 outing, for instance, was the single highest grossing concert tour in the world that year.

But what were we saying about ‘everyone has to start somewhere’ again?

Back in 2013, former Bon Jovi guitarist Richie Sambora told Guitar World about the band's very first arena engagement, an opening slot for ZZ Top at Madison Square Garden.

ZZ Top were at the absolute peak of their commercial success, but the up-and-coming Bon Jovi were hungry, and all too eager to leave a real impression on the packed crowd. In that regard they did succeed, though not in the way they had in mind...

“We were opening for ZZ Top at Madison Square Garden. The first Bon Jovi record was in the can but hadn’t come out yet,” Sambora recalled to Guitar World.

“We had no management. We were just brazen kids who wanted to play Madison Square Garden. We probably had no business doing it. Not that the band wasn’t ready, but we had no road crew, no infrastructure.

“I knew this was a heavy blues-rock crowd, so I told the guys, ‘I’ll go out there and blow for about 60 seconds, then we’ll go into the first tune.’ I hit the first chord and my Marshall blew up.

“I had a spare head, but it took about 45 seconds to switch and get the tubes warmed up. The crowd started chanting, ‘Z-Z-Top! Z-Z-Top!’ Consequently, we played a 40-minute set in about 19 minutes.”

Reflecting on the experience 30 years later, Sambora saw it – rather than an embarrassment to be buried – as a learning experience. “Getting through moments like that,” he told Guitar World, “is what shapes you as a pro.”

For Anna Cara, a 22-year-old guitarist from Newcastle, England, temporarily replacing Nita Strauss in the Alice Cooper Band is daunting. The music Cara covers with Cooper was laid down by greats like Dick Wagner, Steve Hunter, Kane Roberts, Vinnie Moore, Orianthi and, of course, the out-on-maternity-leave Strauss, making the gig even weightier.

But Cara isn’t alone. She has help in the form of guitarists Ryan Roxie – who has played with Cooper since 1996 – and Tommy Henriksen, who joined Cooper’s ranks in 2012. That experience, along with their collective forays beside the likes of Slash and Joe Perry, makes them the perfect partners in guitar-related crime for Cara, who has watched the band’s antics all her life.

“I really loved Orianthi and Nita,” Cara says. “I used to play along to their videos as a kid, so I can’t even describe the feeling of this. It’s so crazy.”

“You’ve got to be adept at learning a whole spectrum of music,” Roxie says. “When I heard Anna play, I knew right from the get-go that she’s cut from a different cloth. She can play mechanical shredder stuff with ease but also can slip into classic-rock mode at the drop of a hat.”

Henriksen, who discovered Cara and likens her tone, vibrato and versatility to that of Gary Moore, agrees. “I kept telling Ryan, ‘You’ve got to see this kid play, man,’” he says. “She’s got that thing. I can’t explain it. There’s not many people who have it, but she’s got it.”

Humble as Cara is, when pressed, she’s able to describe what that thing is. “I like playing with feel and emotion,” she says. “I enjoy shredding, but the main thing for me is feel and emotion. That’s what I enjoy, and that’s what’s kept me playing.”

Until Strauss makes her triumphant return, Cara is on the road with Cooper, a place where there are no tricks, gimmicks or safety nets. “Nothing you hear is on tape,” Roxie says. “If it’s a bad night, you’ll hear it. That’s rock ’n’ roll. Real guitars, scratchy voices. It’s the real deal.”

“There’s a lot to learn,” Cara says. “I never think I’ve done it, or that this is my level of guitar. I don’t think that way. I think about how I can get to the next level and push myself to be better. But it’s hard to put into words. I couldn’t ask for more from life because this is one of my biggest dreams. I’m still processing it. I look over at Alice, and he’ll point to me during these songs, and it’s just unreal.”

But Roxie, who has been around the merry-go-round many times, advises Cara to embrace her new reality. “If you stick with it, you’ll get your shot. Tommy and me got our shot years ago, and we’re still trying to make the most of it. Now Anna has her shot, and the world is her oyster.”

Tommy, Anna came into Alice Cooper's orbit through you, right?

Tommy Henriksen: I found Anna for [my band] Crossbone Skully. I’m always looking on Instagram and YouTube for musicians, and when I was putting Skully together, I was like, “I wanna put a bunch of [bedroom guitarists] together and get them out there.”

What appealed to you about Anna’s guitar playing?

Henriksen: She never showed her face, just her playing guitar. She wasn’t doing all that stupid stuff – not posing or anything. I sent her a message and said, “I love what you’re doing. You’ve got great vibrato and feel. Can I call you and your parents?”

I didn’t know how old she was. [Laughs] I FaceTimed with them and said, “I like your daughter’s playing. She’s a natural. She plays like Gary Moore. She’s got the vibrato of a 55-year-old man.” I’d never heard a girl – and don’t take that the wrong way! – play with that type of vibrato other than Orianthi. I asked who showed her that, and she said, “My dad!”

Eventually, Anna joined Crossbone Skully. What led to that?

Henriksen: I said, “I’m putting together a band. I’m going to call you. Be show-ready. You’re going to be going on a plane to L.A.” Months later, I called her and said, “Are you ready to come to L.A.? We’re going to make a few videos. I’ll pick you up at the airport.”

I picked her up, and the first place I drove her to was Johnny Depp’s house, where the studio is. This kid has never been out of Newcastle, and now she’s at Johnny Depp’s house. Johnny goes, “Let her play any guitar she wants,” so I handed her Johnny’s guitar. That’s how she wound up working with me.

Eventually, Nita gave Alice notice that she’d be leaving the band for a bit, leading to Anna taking her place. Anna, this all must have been a whirlwind.

Anna Cara: When I was discovered by Tommy in 2022, I was 19. Since then, there have been years of development, and I’ve become a better musician and live player. I’m still in disbelief because I used to watch Alice Cooper’s live videos when I was 14 and play along with them.

Ryan, you’ve been with Alice the longest and have been in the band with a lot of great guitarists. What did you think of Anna after first hearing her, and did you get the sense she’d be a good cultural fit?

Ryan Roxie: Absolutely. Fitting into any gig is just as important, if not more so, than musicianship. You have to have a high level of musicianship, but in this band you wear a lot of hats and share a lot of things. You have to be adept at learning a whole spectrum of music.

When I heard Anna play, I thought, “How the hell is that sound coming out of a 22-year-old’s fingers?” Usually, to get a tone like that, it comes from years of playing. You’ve heard the stories about smokey bars and how you get experience, but she got it from many years of woodshedding in her room and putting out videos.

Tommy, was it you who first presented – to Alice – the idea of Anna filling in for Nita?

Henriksen: Alice was looking for a guitar player, and I said, “Do you want a girl or a guy? I’ve got either/or.” But the first thing I did was send Anna’s stuff to Ryan because I wanted him to see her. Ryan heard her play and said, “I see it. I hear it.” And that was it. Alice was into it, too. Next thing you know, he’s like, “Let’s bring her to Vegas to watch the show and get her familiar with everything.”

Anna, can you put your finger on that thing that Tommy is alluding to? Is it inherent to you, or is it learned?

Cara: When I started, I learned a few things from my dad. We used to play together, but it was more of a hobby to him. When he showed me songs, the things he always focused on were vibrato and rhythm. He said, “Nail that before trying to do any fast shred stuff.” From there, I was watching Tony Iommi, Eddie Van Halen and Gary Moore. I liked players with the right feel and tone.

Roxie: The crazy thing is that I’m 60 and she’s 22, but we have the same influences. That might have something to do with the way she plays – old-school influences. It reflects in her playing.

What’s the division of guitar-related labor like, and has it changed compared to when Nita is in the band?

Roxie: Alice loves lead guitar, so there’s usually a minimum of two, if not three, solos per song. Everybody gets to get their ya-ya’s out. [Laughs]

The catalog sort of dictates itself, where, depending on the genre, you can tell who is going to be featured for the solo. If it’s an ’80s Kane Roberts thing, Anna is going to take that. If it’s more classic rock and chunky, Tommy’s got that. If it’s somewhere in the middle, I kind of float around in all those areas. We’re trying to carry the spirit of the original songs.

Henriksen: Most of the time, I prefer playing rhythm. I can do a solo, but I’m Malcolm Young, bro. [Laughs] If I’ve got a solo, I have a couple of licks, like three of them, and I just put them in a different order.

Roxie: Yeah, but I’ve said this to Tommy many times; he’s the most-improved guitar player I’ve ever played with in the history of this band. He was a bass player by trade, but he started taking guitar seriously when he joined. He’s progressed every year and has taken it seriously.

Cara: It comes down to the trio thing; everyone has a certain thing they’re good at. When we’re rehearsing, we’ll come up with really cool harmonies and things like that.

Can you pick out a favorite Alice Cooper song to tackle on guitar?

Henriksen: Caught in a Dream because of the rhythm. It’s not easy like everybody thinks. Also Cold Machines because we’ve never played it before. It’s in drop D and has that industrial metal vibe.

Cara: Feed My Frankenstein. The rhythm and solo, the duo-solo Ryan and I do, is just so much fun. Poison, too. I love the harmony solos.

Roxie: The challenging stuff is the fun part. We’re doing a song called Chasing Rainbows, which is from the ’40s, I think [Ed. note: Harry Carroll’s I’m Always Chasing Rainbows was first published in 1917], but Alice covered it on 1976’s Goes to Hell. There’s piano on that, and one of the funnest things I’ve ever done is transposing that into a piece for us to play live with the whole band.

What gear are you using these days?

Henriksen: I’m pretty much playing B.C. Rich stuff. One day, I was on a hunt, and really, because Joe Perry is the coolest guy to ever be in a band and has the coolest guitars, and I remembered seeing him with his B.C. Rich on Live! Bootleg, I thought, “I want to get a B.C. Rich.”

I got a Bich and a Mockingbird from a guy from my old neighborhood. I paid five grand for both, and it was from the original owner, who got them in 1980. After that, I said, “I’m just playing B.C. Rich right now.” Then I went out and found an ’80s Warlock. Aside from that, I use whatever built-in effects we have.

Roxie: I grew up on Gibsons, and I’ve always tried to represent those classic, iconic shapes. It’s not just for tones, but I’ll play a Flying V for ’80s stuff, an Explorer for industrial stuff and a Les Paul for ’70s songs.

But I’m not working with Gibson anymore as a clinician, so now I get to play whatever I want, and I’m kind of like a kid in a candy store. [Laughs] What I’ve grabbed onto lately is Rock N Roll Relics, Billy Rowe’s company. It’s a great boutique company, and he has a bunch of killer shapes.

Beyond that, I have a custom effect coming out with Citadel. We’re calling it the Pin Sound. It’s a cool, sort of Van Halen boost, like a micro amp with a noise gate. Look for that to come out by the end of the year. Oh, and for acoustic stuff, Alvarez has been very gracious to us, and they sound great.

Cara: We’re all using Kempers live. I’ve got to give Tommy credit for the tones on that. For guitars, I’m using Ibanez’s X Series. I’m thankful to Ibanez for sorting that out because they feel amazing.

With the X Series, Tommy sent me a picture and was like, “Check this one out!” I have this nickname, Blackthorn, and when we saw the guitar, we were like, “Oh! It looks like a thorn,” so it made perfect sense to have that guitar.

But I’ve also got a Les Paul because I grew up playing Gibson. I love SGs too, but I got my Les Paul from Alice’s son, Dash Cooper. He’s letting me use it for this run, and it’s been fun to have that classic sound.

What’s the key to locking in together within a three-guitar band?

Roxie: It’s easy in this band. We know whose name is on the marquee, and it ain't mine, it ain’t Tommy’s and it ain’t Anna’s. [Laughs] That keeps us in check. But we’re lucky to have a boss who, although it’s called the Alice Cooper Band, wants everybody to shine, have their moment and make the most of it. Alice is confident and secure with his iconic status, and his ego is in check. That makes us all aware of our own egos, too.

Henriksen: The whole thing is about rhythm. It’s about timing and feel. When you lock it in, dude, it just sounds like a wall of guitars. It’s cool to have that. We’re all playing something different – and on different parts of the neck – so that makes it fun.

Cara: The music is timeless. It’s such a range of genres. I don’t just gravitate toward one type of music, and I don’t listen to modern stuff because I love the ’70s and ’80s. With the guitar playing, along with what Ryan and Tommy said, I just get into it. That type of playing is big for me.

It seems being a guitarist with Alice is all about balancing individuality with the needs of the collective.

Henriksen: I’m always on Instagram, watching every kid, and they’re just amazing. I’m trying to learn new licks all the time, dude. But everyone has a different approach, and I’m just out there trying to figure shit out. [Laughs] But it’s so cool when you see stuff that inspires you, because I’m always trying to get better.

Roxie: Anna’s journey is just beginning, but for Tommy and me, we don’t want our journey to end. It’s that simple. Once you’re in this game, if you’re good at it and still love doing it, why quit? As long as the wheels are going, we want to keep going. We are individuals, but that doesn’t mean shit unless the collective comes across as something sincere.

Night after night, our performance speaks for itself. It’s not perfect, and no one ever claims it is, but that’s rock ’n’ roll. It ain’t supposed to be perfect. We all miss notes, but the collective is so strong that we cover for each other.

Tommy and Ryan are well established. But for you, Anna, joining Alice represents being recognized on a large scale for the first time. What do you want the guitar world to understand about you, first and foremost?

Cara: One thing that was really nice for me, and I can’t recall his name, so apologies, but he said, “It’s so inspiring to see someone your age up there doing it.” And, you know, it’s hard work, so you’ve just got to keep trying. I kept posting on social media all the time. I’d do that because I wanted to be seen. I could have just stopped; I could have not uploaded the blues cover that Tommy saw.

I could have given up and said, “You know what? Not today. I’m not going to put anything out today.” That would’ve had a butterfly effect. If I’d done that, I wouldn’t have been seen by Tommy and none of this would have happened.

Just keep trying. Work hard and do it because you love it. A lot of people just want to learn the next lick or scale and enjoy it. Enjoy the feel of the music. That’s the main thing for me: enjoy playing every day.

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

2026 marks four decades since U2 entered the bona fide rock-star club. But while other top-drawer rockers learned their craft in bedrooms and bars – playing for friends and forgiving fans – Adam Clayton’s evolution as a bassist took place on the world’s biggest stages.

“Even up through our first few records we got by on very little, at least musically,” he told Bass Player back in December 2000. “But we were always able to make something of it, just in the way we played together.”

Of course, superstardom was never the point. The three Dublin schoolboys who answered drummer Larry Mullen’s ad for bandmates simply wanted to find out what it was like to stand onstage and bash out three-minute songs – and, at first, they were terrible. That all changed when they began writing their own material.

“On the early records, it was really just a case of Edge and Larry struggling to keep the whole thing together. We were all surviving on minimal technique, and the formula in those early days was 4/4 bass over a relatively complex beat from Larry, with Edge doing his arpeggios over the top.

“But by the time we got to War, the songs were more structured, and the bass sound was featured more. Also, I suppose by then I could actually play things in time – and in tune – so I was able to be a bit more melodic.”

As elemental basslines like With or Without You and New Year's Day gave way to the Jamerson-style bounce of Angel of Harlem and Sweetest Thing, Clayton went from struggling to hold together simple eighth-note grooves to incorporating bass influences from Motown to reggae into his ever-evolving style.

“It's always depended on the tune with us, so as our songwriting became more developed and there were better chord progressions, I found I would fall into more interesting things.

“I wouldn't literally know where I was headed when I started out, but Larry’s drums have always told me what to play, and then the chords tell me where to go. Because of this, my parts are very much created as the song is evolving.”

Does the whole band compose this way?

We do write in an unconventional way, I suppose. If we try to arrange a song that's already been worked out on acoustic guitar, it's hard for us. But if we start with a few bits and then work around each other to develop the song, we seem to go to more interesting places.

Bullet the Blue Sky is a great example; it’s really just one musical moment, extended in time. Larry started playing that beat, and I started to play across it – as opposed to with it – while Edge was playing something else entirely.

Bono said, ‘Whatever you’re doing, don't stop!’ So we kept playing, and he improvised that melody.

Is it true you were U2's musical leader in the beginning, back in the late ‘70s?

Perhaps – but that's only because punk rock had just happened, so it wasn't really important that you knew how to play so long as you had some equipment!

I’d simply decided I was going to be a musician, so I got this Ibanez copy of a Gibson EB-3 and a Marshall head, and I guess those crucial ingredients made the others figure I knew a bit more about music. I did know a thing or two about my equipment, but I certainly didn't know anything about playing.

What were the band's goals in those days?

The ambition was just to end the song together! We had these interminable rehearsals where we would never actually get to the end of the song. But we also wanted to be a part of what we felt was going on.

It was a time of throwing off the idea that people who played guitars in bands were these rock gods who were to be obeyed and saluted. We got off on the idea that you could play a three-minute song with a few basic chords as fast as you possibly could, and that was a good enough reason to be onstage.

It meant that you had a life right now – that you didn't have to spend three years in your bedroom trying to figure out how to play Stairway to Heaven.

Jethro Tull’s first album, 1968’s This Was, featured guitarist Mick Abrahams and leaned in a decidedly bluesy direction. That approach didn’t work out for the British soon-to-be-prog rockers, and neither did Abrahams, leading to a short spell during which some guy named Tony Iommi took up six-string duties in Tull before bandleader Ian Anderson found his long-time running mate in Martin Barre.

Barre’s first album with Tull, 1969’s Stand Up, was a harbinger of things to come, meaning less blues, more flute from Anderson and undertones of prog. But there was heaviness, too; the record featured riffs that stood up to anything Iommi, Ritchie Blackmore or Jimmy Page were doing.

“We’d recorded Stand Up, and that was a new direction for Ian because Tull was a blues band,” Barre says. “And then suddenly we were this other animal you couldn’t put a title to.”

Barre did his best to put a title to said animal by kicking the riffs-meet-prog into overdrive for Tull’s third record, 1970’s Benefit, showing that he, too, was on the precipice of guitar-god greatness. Of course, Barre didn’t know that at the time – and doesn’t necessarily see it that way today.

“I just played,” he says. “We didn’t really investigate tone and sounds. We just got in there, and the sound of Jethro Tull was there, needing to be examined.”

Examine it they did. Songs like With You There to Help Me, To Cry You a Song and Teacher showcased Barre’s open-minded approach as well as Anderson’s status as a guitar maestro.

“I guess it was what was going to become prog,” Barre says. “The birth of prog sounds stressful, but it was exciting. We didn’t know if people were going to like it. Jethro Tull was a blues band, and they were like, ‘What’s happened to you?’ But slowly, we won them over. We had what people would call a ‘blank canvas’ because nobody knew what to expect. It was a relief in many ways.”

The relief didn’t last long, as Benefit was disregarded upon its release in April 1970. Rolling Stone even called the album “lame and dumb.” But as time has gone on, Tull did more and more of that winning people over that Barre talks about, and in retrospect, time has been kind to Benefit.

By the time Benefit came out, Tull were moving away from blues and toward prog, but the album also has a ton of heavy riffs.

At that point in time we’d been touring, and we’d met bands like Led Zeppelin and all these great bands. We knew Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck and Cream; they were bands we loved and listened to, so we were going to be influenced by them. That’s what everybody was doing.

When I play, I think, “There’s a riff that hasn’t been invented, and it’s probably not difficult.” I love the power of a great riff. There are classic riffs that were immortalized by Hendrix, Beck and Jimmy Page, but I love the concept that music can be so simple but so important because the riffs are so dynamic. I guess everybody fed off everybody else.

The general understanding of Tull’s music is that Ian played the acoustic guitar parts and you the electric, but that wasn’t entirely the case on Benefit. Ian is a better player than he’s credited.

Yeah, he is. He was a guitar player before Tull, and he told me he started listening to Clapton, Beck and Hendrix and realized he was never going to be as good as them, so he turned to the flute, but he is a great guitar player.

It’s a very focused area of play, but what he does – because I’ve learned his acoustic parts – is really good. They’re fun to learn, demanding and very, very precise.

Do you remember recording With You There to Help Me, which has a distinctive guitar flare and features you and Ian?

We both played electric. Ian played a rhythm track, and then I put all the riffs, bits and pieces. It was all live in the studio, so the whole band played that track live to record it.

Were there many overdubs on Benefit?

No, it was nearly all live. Maybe we used some overdubs, and I don’t know if [we had] an eight- or 16-track, but there weren’t many, so you didn’t have the luxury of doing 20 takes and then taking the best bit from each one.

Even when you overdubbed a solo, it was a live solo from beginning to end. You couldn’t drop in and repair it, so we mainly recorded it live in the studio.

To Cry You a Song has an incredible harmonized guitar riff. Was that you and Ian together?

Yeah, that’s me and Ian again. It was fun. It was inspired by Blind Faith’s Had to Cry Today. It’s a similar feel and riff, and we just had a lot of fun with it. I think it shows in the recording. You can tell it was something that was really easy and positive to put together.

What guitars were you using while recording Benefit?

Well, it wasn’t good stuff! Benefit was done on a Les Paul that I bought, and I’m ashamed to say that it was a fake. [Laughs] I didn’t know it then, and I loved it. I just wanted a Gibson Les Paul because when I was at college and starting in bands, it was the Holy Grail.

Just to see one was like, “Oh, my God,” you know? You wouldn’t even need to touch it; it was this… thing. You couldn’t have it, and you couldn’t find them, so you couldn’t play them, but they had this mystique about them, which, I guess, they still do. Not in my mind, but they still do.

Where did you get the Les Paul copy from?

Stand Up was done on a Les Paul Special, a really beat-up thing I bought from a shop in London. But then, I bought this [fake] Les Paul from a dealer in America, and that was the one guitar; it’s all I used for the whole record. Nobody had two guitars in those days; you couldn’t afford it! But yeah, it wasn’t a great guitar. [Laughs]

You used Hiwatt amps in the studio.

The Hiwatt amps weren’t particularly good, either. [Laughs] They didn’t drive easily; they weren’t really rock amps. Marshall began doing that well and [were available] at the time, but we all used Hiwatt, so that side of it was against everything, with the formula of a fake guitar and Hiwatt amps that weren’t very good and didn’t inspire.

I didn’t really know anything about amps or guitars at the time, so you just made the best of what you were given. And I had a sort of treble boost pedal to get a bit of sustain at the Hiwatt.

How do you feel about Benefit now?

We were really happy with it. Going back to the way Stand Up was received, we knew we were going to make a good album. Whether it sold tens or hundreds of millions of copies, that was never the formula.

We were just so confident, enthusiastic and positive about making more music in that direction. That’s what rock bands did. They just went in their own direction. It was great fun to make. If it had failed and sold nothing, I still would have been happy with it.

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

Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament has owned plenty of memorable bass guitars, but few have a story as wild as the “NBA” basses built by renowned Seattle builder Mike Lull. The distinctive custom basses became some of Ament’s most recognizable instruments – and some of his most spectacularly ill-fated.

On a special edition of NBA Soundsystem, Ament explained: “I wanted to be inspired 100 percent of the time I was playing music. And by putting the names of my most inspirational pro basketball players on the bass, at any given time, if I felt like the mojo was slipping I would look down at the bass and see Nate Archibald’s name and get fired up.”

When Ament first approached Lull, the two Seattle bass veterans had a shared understanding of what Ament needed from an instrument: something distinctive enough to stand out onstage, but rugged enough to survive the rigors of Pearl Jam’s increasingly unpredictable live shows – including one particularly chaotic night that would leave it in pieces.

“The first NBA bass was probably the first really nice bass I ever had. It had good electronics and played great,” said Ament in the December 2011 issue of Bass Player. “I had two of those basses. Both met their demise on the road.”

The “NBA” bass was a particularly ambitious build for Lull, both in terms of its electronics and its design. It also marked the first time he had combined several Bartolini pickups in this particular configuration.

“It was the first time we had used a big Bartolini humbucker in the neck position and a pair of Bartolini J-Bass pickups,” said Lull. “It had a J-style alder body, a maple neck, and a rosewood fingerboard. Jeff did all the graphics on it. It was pretty extreme.

“It also had high-end hardware – I think it had Gotoh tuners and a Ken Smith bridge, since they were the big high-mass bridges of the day. That first one was a pretty tremendous sounding bass.”

Both basses would ultimately meet brutal ends. “I think that one got destroyed in Vancouver,” said Ament. “It was right at the end of the main set, somebody in the audience threw a full 7-Up can at the stage and it hit me right between the eyes. I remember being stunned for 10 or 15 seconds, and then looked down to see 7-Up spraying out of the dented can. Then I got super-pissed!

“Back then we were pretty loose – I'd throw basses across the stage to my tech George Webb. But that time I just threw it back towards my amp and went back to the dressing room. I was really upset. I didn't mean to break that bass, but we don't play music to get full cans of soda thrown at us.

“I wasn't going to return to the show, but the guys talked me into coming back out. When I did, George handed me my crappy backup bass and said, ‘You broke your bass.’ It was horrible – a double whammy.

“Mike built another one, and that one broke at the first Lollapalooza show in San Francisco. For the first four songs there were about 200 photographers up front and my rig wasn't working. By the second or third song it started coming back.

“I went back out, but then it died. So I chucked my bass straight up in the air. As it was up in the air, I walked over to George and said, ‘I'm not going back out there until you get this rig running.’ But the bass didn't make it. Unfortunately, being young and stupid can ruin some good things.”

Jeff Beck was once asked to follow in Eric Clapton’s post-Yardbirds footsteps when he was scouted by John Mayall for the Bluesbreakers.

In the 1960s, Beck and Clapton both cut their teeth in the Yardbirds. After Slowhand left in 1965, Beck was drafted in as his replacement. And, when Clapton departed his subsequent seat in Mayall’s band shortly after, Beck was high up on the list to replace him yet again.

The prospective move made sense. The Bluesbreakers was a fellow incubator of British blues and rock music. It would go on to welcome Peter Green, Mick Taylor, and other guitarists destined for greatness among its ranks over the years.

Mayall had earmarked Beck to fill the vacant guitar spot. But this time things were different. The project wasn’t quite what Beck was looking for.

“He did,” Beck told Guitar World readers in May 2010, when asked whether Mayall ever approached him.

“John called my mum several times. He found my mum’s number, and she said to me, “Oh, that John Mayall sounds very nice!” [laughs] But I didn’t want that – I didn’t want to be playing blues all of the time.”

The blues-heavy direction didn’t appeal to Beck, who had grander designs on experimenting with a more distinctive rock guitar sound. Plus, he didn’t think he could live up to his predecessor.

“I’d seen Eric with them, and he was fantastic, really,” Beck reflected. “He did the job better than I could have, and I just didn’t want to have that challenge. My musical taste was changing radically from 12-bar blues.

“I might have done better in that band than in the Yardbirds, but I certainly would not have been given the same kind of free rein to do the experimenting that I did in the Yardbirds”

Mayall had shown interest in Beck before. He’d attended a Yardbirds gig before he broached the idea of the two teaming up. He even gave some rather pointed feedback.

“He was very straightforward. He never embellished or gave us any flowery comments about the gig,” Beck remembered, “He said, ‘The audience loved it, but there was not much blues, was there?’

“And I thought, ‘Excuse me, but this isn’t a blues band.’ It sort of was, but he’s a purist and he was listening for Little Walter-style harmonica solos.

“I didn’t want to be mimicking Chicago blues musicians forever. My thinking was, We’re not them, we’re not Black, we’re British middle-class kids and let’s get on and do our own music. We had a bit of disharmony about that, but not to take away from John’s dedication to it.”

Mayall got a no, Peter Green got the gig, and six months after leaving the Yardbirds (having been fired on tour in the US in October ’66), Beck released his first solo single Hi Ho Silver Lining, with Beck’s Bolero as the B-side.

A year later he dropped his seminal debut album, Truth. The rest was history: Beck went off in his own direction and became one of the all-time greats of rock guitar.

There’s no doubt he made the right call, but still, we can’t help but wonder what Beck in the Bluesbreakers would have sounded like…

It would take a lot for Brad Gillis to sit his beloved '62 Strat down for five minutes to play something else, but in the late '80s, Hamer had it. Here we take a (quick) trip down memory to learn a little more about the guitar that put Bubba in the corner.

Oh, and before we get to the story of the guitar on the cover, a word on the cover itself, and an ancient GW typo alert. On page 4 of the February 1989 issue, Gillis’ guitar (below) is misidentified as his 1962 Fender Strat, aka Bubba.

BTW, Jeff Watson is holding the prototype of his custom signature Hamer Watson. Watson and his namesake guitar would start appearing in full-page Hamer ads by the early '90s.

Where did you get this guitar?

Oh, yes, my 1985 Hamer Strat that appeared on the Guitar World cover! Night Ranger had hooked up with Paul Hamer, and he wanted to build us a few different guitars. I started playing this guitar live, but I’d always revert back to “Bubba,” my main 1962 Fender Strat.

Did you modify the Hamer at all?

In some ways, it was similar to Bubba. In 1983, after I left Ozzy Osbourne, I rejoined Night Ranger, and in the mid-'80s, I started using PJ Marx pickups. At one point in the mid-'80s, my brother built me a wireless switching unit that we mounted inside my guitars.

At that time, it switched delay, chorus and lead/rhythm on my Mesa/Boogie Mark IIC [Simulclass]. That gave me the freedom to walk anywhere on stage and switch components. Ronnie Montrose caught wind of my brother’s wireless system, which I also had in Bubba, and he built Ronnie one for his guitar strap.

Did you use this guitar on any recordings or tours?

Well, Paul Hamer also built me a Hamer Scepter, which appeared on the cover of my solo record, Gilrock Ranch [1993]. I used the Hamer live a bit, but I played Bubba on all of the Night Ranger records and live around the world. We were playing more than 200 shows a year.

Why did you choose this guitar for your Guitar World cover shoot?

I was just stroking Hamer, to be honest! [Laughs]

Do you still have this guitar?

No, I sold it years back.

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

Brian Setzer is looking forward to a summer full of motorcycle riding, and when he’s not on his bike he’s amped up to hit the road with the Stray Cats. While that might not sound exactly newsworthy, it was only a few months ago that the 67-year-old guitarist couldn’t even tie his shoe, much less work a throttle or a vibrato bar.

Last October, Setzer was forced to cancel the Stray Cats’ fall U.S. tour as a result of a debilitating autoimmune disease that left him unable to play guitar – or do much else.

“It was the strangest thing,” he says. “It started about two years ago, around the end of 2024, and before you knew it I was having trouble holding a toothbrush, a fork. I couldn’t button my pants. There was no pain, but my hands just wouldn’t work. Of course, there was no way I could play the guitar, which was pretty scary.”

The three-time Grammy-winning guitarist sought treatment at the Mayo Clinic – a block away from his home in Rochester, Minnesota. “When my doctor diagnosed my condition, he told me there was no real cure, so it wasn’t a slam-dunk that I would see results,” Setzer says. “But his plan A was to get me playing again.”

As for plans B and C, he laughs and says, “I don’t know what they were. I’m just glad plan A worked.”

Treatment for Setzer’s condition took nearly a year, during which time he received infusions at the Mayo Clinic. “It’s easy to feel bad about yourself, but I remember lying in bed at the hospital and right next to me is a guy with cancer,” he says. “At that moment, you realize how lucky you are, and you become pretty grateful. I didn’t have anything that bad. At least what I had was thought to be treatable.”

Little by little, Setzer made progress, and his ability to play came back – so much so that he gave the go-ahead for the fall tour. Sober 14 years, he was curious about an energy drink called kratom that he saw in a smoke shop, so he tried one… and another.

“Big mistake,” he says. “I got hooked on it. They advertise it as safe, and yeah, it gives you a lot of energy. You feel like mowing the lawn that you’ve been putting off. But it totally messed up my immune disorder, and my hands went back to the bad state they were in. I was in a tailspin. I messed myself up and had to clean up.”

​He entered Minnesota’s Hazelton Betty Ford Clinic and underwent a 30-day rehab program. “It’s one of the best places around,” he says. “If there’s anybody out there dealing with similar problems, I recommend it. So I took care of that demon, cleared everything out, and then fortunately the AI [autoimmune] went into remission.

“I feel 98 percent now. I don’t want to say 100 percent because the darn autoimmune thing could strike again, but right now I’m feeling really good, and I’m playing as well as ever.”

He laughs. “So let’s talk about some other things!”

Ahead of the Stray Cats tour, the band is issuing a new single, Stampede, and a cover of Eddie Cochran’s Teenage Heaven. When did you record those?

About three or four months ago. In this day and age, I think you need to go out on tour with a new song or two. Making albums now is hardly worthwhile; you’re only making records for your fans and yourself.

Plenty of artists have already decided they’re done making albums.

Yes. I can feel that way sometimes because when you’re making a record, I mean, it’s not for free, let’s face it. So when you’re just about break even paying it back, it’s frustrating. It absolutely is. So I feel the only time to really make a record is to accompany a tour.

I love what you did with Stampede. It’s like a revved-up Bo Diddley.

Yeah! It’s from an instrumental song by a band called the Scarlets. I heard the song and thought the guitarist was so good. I said, “I want to play that!” There wasn’t enough of a song there, but I loved the riff, so I basically wrote a song around it. And the B-side is Teenage Heaven, an older song by Eddie Cochran that’s been covered a lot.

Your soloing on that song sounds just as fluid as ever.

I appreciate that. Thank you so much.

Let’s talk about the band. You guys formed in the ’70s, and you kind of seemed like a real gang. What’s it like being with the same guys as mature men in your 60s?

That’s pretty interesting, and you’re absolutely right. It starts off as a gang; you’re all three hanging out, and you’re in the back of the van and you’re looking for cool threads to wear. All of that changes. You grow up, you get married, you have children and you move apart. I think what it is now is just a longing, not to recapture the past, but to just keep the sound we have alive.

I’m telling you, when I get on stage and I hear that guitar sound no-one else really plays… Except for me, I don’t know anybody else who plays a Gretsch through a Fender Bassman. That sound is so unique, and I want to keep it alive.

And then I turn around and I look at [drummer] Slim Jim Phantom over there, and he brightens my day. You know what I mean? It really makes the whole thing worthwhile, but at the same time, it changes.

The band had a pretty notable breakup in the 1980s. Are all the troubles you guys had water under the bridge?

Oh, gosh, yeah. I mean, the kinds of things you go through in a band – it’s like being in any kind of relationship. You have to learn how to deal with other people, and that takes time. Any rows we might have had are long gone.

It could have been from drinking too much alcohol one night – who knows? There are so many things people fight over. They fight over nothing! So you learn to talk things out and get over it. The music is so good, and that’s what’s important.

You mentioned your Gretsch guitars. If you were somehow banned from using Gretsch 6120s, what would you play?

That’s a great question because I want to segue to this… I recently bought a ’59 Flying V and a ’59 Les Paul. I bought them because, fortunately, I had the money saved up, and I wanted to see what the fuss was all about. Now, the Les Paul is a beautifully built guitar, and it plays beautifully. I cannot fault it. The only thing is, it’s not my tone. It’s not my particular sound. I couldn’t bring it on stage or even record with it. It’s just not me, even though it’s a joy to play.

But let me tell you about the Flying V. It sounds like the Gretsch. I kid you not, man! I played a Gretsch and then played the ’59 Flying V, and I couldn’t tell the difference. The only other guitar that could take the place of the Gretsch would be an older Flying V. It sounded so similar – I couldn’t believe it. It had the balls, it had that twang. The Les Paul doesn’t have it, but the old Flying V does. It’s the weirdest thing.

No chance you’re going to take the V on tour with you though, right?

I’m afraid to take it out. It’s worth so much money.

Is there any new gear that has impressed you recently?

You know, I’m of the mind that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. The Bassmans have worked over the years so darn well. The only thing I do now is, I turn the cabinet around because I want the band to be the same volume. The Bassman is so loud.

A lot of the tweed amps from the ’50s are too mushy-sounding for me. When I fingerpick or do something complex, it just gets lost in the mush. But the Bassmans from the early ’60s, they’ve got those rectifier tubes, and they really tighten up the sound.

I do have a new echo unit that I’m really impressed with. It’s an Echo Fix [EF-P2 Spring Reverb pedal]. The people who make these have copied the Roland Space Echo, so you can bring it out on tour without worrying about it breaking down. I’m really impressed with it, because they’re copying a piece of machinery that actually worked.

Here’s something I haven’t seen you talk about. In 1989, the Stray Cats were on tour with Stevie Ray Vaughan. What do you recall about that experience?

I recall that the crowds hated us. [Laughs] They hated us! They were only there to see Stevie Ray, and they didn’t give us a chance. It wasn’t an easy tour for us, I can tell you that. I loved listening to him. I remember thinking, “How does he get that sound?” Only he get could get a Strat to sound like that.

One night he called me on stage, and he handed me a Strat and put it over me. I thought, “Oh, great! I’m finally going to see what this is all about.” There were rumors that he had amps underneath the stage and he had them mic’d up in the basement – all sorts of stuff.

So I played it… and it sounded like me. I didn’t sound like Stevie Ray. I mean, his guitar even felt like mine. The action was the same, the volume he played at, the amp he played through. I was like, “Well, this is interesting. Stevie sounds like he does because it’s all in his hands.”

He was phenomenal. He was so fluid, and he played the blues differently every night. Besides us getting booed off the stage, it was a great show.

Did he ever come backstage and talk to you about the crowd reaction?

Not exactly, but I used to go back and see him all the time. I remember he flew in different kinds of exotic foods he liked. He was going through the throes of alcoholism, trying to keep off the booze. I know what that’s like. It was a tough time for him, but he was a great guy and a great guitar player.

Are there any new, young guitar players you’ve noticed in the last couple years? Anybody in the rockabilly world who’s impressed you lately?

Who’s rockabilly? I don’t even know! I mean, rockabilly is really only alive for us. Where would you even go to hear rockabilly? There’s not much around, right? You know how I hear new players? I go on YouTube and the Carter Vintage Guitars page. There’s a guy named RJ Ronquillo. Fantastic player. Marcus King is another. Great player. He’s a rockabilly guy.

It’s interesting how the Stray Cats have dominated the rockabilly market all these years. Years ago, during the height of punk and new wave, did your friends and families think you guys were crazy to seek fame and fortune in England?

Oh, sure, especially when you consider that we were getting really popular around New York. My dad and Jim’s dad came to a show and they said, “You want to go where? Why would you leave this?” We had the whole thing. We’d go into these towns, and we had girls coming to the shows. We were making money.

Going to the U.K. was our real break. The music scene and the people we encountered understood what we were doing. I always said the British musicians wanted to be the American guys, and the American guys wanted to be British guys.

In England, the guys want to be me. They want to be Scotty Moore. They want to be Cliff Gallup. Here in America, guitarists want to be Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck. It’s just how it is.

Where does Jimi Hendrix fit into all this?

Oh, he’s a unicorn. Jimi Hendrix is from Mars. He doesn’t figure into any of these battles.

In a recent Guitar World interview, Keith Richards said he “laughed his head off” at the Sunset Strip shred guitarists. What did you think of them?

I don’t laugh at any guitar player. I mean, I have very varied tastes, and I like all styles of music. So no, I don’t laugh at shredders, but it would be good for them to step outside the box and put on a blues record. It wouldn’t kill ’em!

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

Most tribute bands are content with nailing their heroes’ parts to the point of uncanny believability. Floyd Nation, however, are celebrating the 50th anniversary of Wish You Were Here by asking, “What if there was more story to tell?”

Pink Floyd’s ninth album is dominated by the nine-part epic, Shine on You Crazy Diamond, a tender tribute to troubled co-founder Syd Barrett. But Floyd Nation – inspired by David Gilmour’s comments on his desire for tribute bands to put their own spin on things – have set out to expand on the original album’s complex narrative.

Inner Light, recorded in the same Abbey Road studio where the original was tracked, delivers three new original songs for a unique director’s cut of the classic album.

“I consider I Wish You Were album a complete work,” says Floyd Nation guitarist Brendon McDonnell. “Musically and conceptually, it’s brilliant. The album ends almost like a funeral dirge with Shine Part IX; it’s such a tragedy. Then they throw a gratuitous G major chord.”

That chord, McDonnell notes, offered a hint of a happier ending. That’s where instrumental track Shine Zero, the first of their three new compositions, comes in. By starting on that G major but climaxing in G minor, it closes a continuous loop that connects all the Shine On songs, with McDonnell’s clean and weeping solo the thread that binds them.

“I wanted to end on a note of hope,” he says. “If the whole album is a longing for Syd and a testament to lunacy and losing somebody, First Light / Pale Diamond Eyes – the second new track – is Syd’s response to that.”

The third, Watching the Sunrise, features another heart-wrenching, this time fuzz-flecked guitar solo, and embraces the concept that new dawns will follow even the darkest of nights.

Yet, as intriguing as the project is on paper, they know they’re stepping onto sacred ground. Some may think they’re sacking the church rather than praying at its altar. “I expected almost everybody to be like, ‘Who are you to do this?’” McDonnell admits. “But we’re coming from a place of deep appreciation – and also throwing a little bit of our own feelings in there.”

To pull it off he needed to embody Gilmour better than anyone else has. But notably, they weren’t laser-focused on tracking down a period-correct Dallas Arbiter Fuzz Face.

Gilmour has said he likes to crank his amp cranked so that “you can lean back and the volume will stop you from falling backward.” That mentality – and the emotional resonance of his playing – mattered more to McDonnell than the gear itself.

“His tone is characterized by a super-loud and powerful clean sound that’s enhanced by various pedals,” he says. “That’s always been my directive: to get a really great, punch-you-in-the-gut clean sound, and use whatever pedals will do the task.

“We all use Axe-Fx amp modelers, but I identified pretty early that I couldn’t get that amp-in-the-room response out of it. It’s amazing for delays, reverbs, and choruses; I just had to find an amp to integrate. I’ve been a Mesa/Boogie guy all my life, so I used the Heartbreaker with a power booster.”

That, scrupulous tone cork-sniffers will realize, is far removed from Gilmour’s preferred Hiwatt DR103. It typifies the band’s commitment to “knowing the rules, and therefore how to break them”.

The Heartbreaker, though, met a gruesome fate at Abbey Road while recording the Shine Part I solo. “I walked into the booth and I was like, ‘Oh my God! You hear how loud the amp is in there?’ But it was so loud that it vibrated some components loose!”

It’s been replaced by a Mesa Mark VII, which sits in the middle of a complex hybrid rig that splits the signal between the modeler, the Mesa and his pedalboard. “Once the signal goes through the time-based processing, it comes out into a stereo wet.

“But the signal also feeds into my amp without the time-based effects, keeping the compressors, EQs, drives and fuzzes, putting out a mono signal. It’s like a wet/dry/wet, except the wet also has the dry in it. It’s a huge, enveloping sound.”

Going into all of that calculated chaos is an extremely weighty 1973 Blonde Fender Strat. “It has a 7.25” radius, so you’ve got to really hold on to it and dig into it. I’ve had a PRS on stage maybe to play Money, and an Ibanez JEM, but they didn’t feel right. You need a guitar that’s fighting you back.”

The Strat has gone through six different pickup changes before landing on a Lollar set wound to resemble Gilmour’s beloved EMGs. Beyond that, McDonell says “the strings make a huge difference.”

“I’ve gone through so many different kinds. I found the Ernie Ball Cobalts have this gnarliness that adds to the gnarliness of my Strat. I’ve been Frankensteining sets together. Having 0.12 and 0.16 for the B and G strings [versus 0.13 and 0.17] makes all the difference to my bends.”

No technique is as personal as a bend; so McDonnell had to find a balance between sounding like his new solos could have come from Gilmour’s fingers, without forgetting whose digits they were really coming from.

“I’m not trying to be Gilmour,” he says. “I’m emoting. Bending is the ultimate expression on guitar – there’s so much to be said in that up-and-down motion, and all the nuances come from where you are in that moment.”

He warns others wanting to nail Gilmour’s bends: “You’ve got to slow down. Give the bend the time to reach where it needs to be, and when you get it up there, don’t vibrato it like crazy; let it coalesce into its own thing. Let the bend guide you.”

• Inner Light is out now – see Floyd Nation for more.

For bass players, stepping into the spotlight can be daunting enough. Take away the rest of the band, and suddenly there’s nowhere to hide – just four strings, an amp and the challenge of carrying an entire performance on your shoulders.

That’s the premise behind the first annual Solo Bass Guitar contest, which is inviting bassists to put their creativity, technique and musicality front and centre.

“The goal is to celebrate bass musicianship and bring the bass community together,” says Phil Jones, founder of Phil Jones Bass and sponsor of the event. “We already have contestants planning to attend from across the UK, Europe and the United States, making this a truly international gathering of bassists.”

The finalists will compete for a haul of prizes including Phil Jones Bass amps, basses, effects and other bass gear, with the competition offering a chance to showcase just how far the instrument can be pushed beyond its traditional role.

Few bass players understand that challenge better than Michael Manring. A pioneer of the solo bass guitar, Manring has spent decades exploring the instrument’s melodic, harmonic and textural possibilities, proving that a bass can be far more than the foundation of a band.

With the countdown to the contest now underway, Manring has offered some advice to the players brave enough to step out on their own.

“You have to get used to being the only one onstage,” says Manring. “But there's real beauty in solo bass guitar if you're not afraid to look for it.

“For most of us, it's kind of a shock to find yourself having to create all of the entertainment, especially if there's not even a drummer to fall back on. But once you get past that, I think the challenge is to create interesting and engaging music with the tools available to you.”

What are the common pitfalls of solo bass guitar?

I find there’s a danger in that once you learn to make relatively full-sounding music by yourself, there can be a tendency to think you’ve reached peak badassery, but there's always more to learn.

In my opinion, it's a good idea to strive for structural and expressive elements that make your music compelling regardless of format, as opposed to just a collection of cool sounding random tropes.

What first inspired you to start approaching the bass as a solo instrument?

As a teenager I started getting interested in a particular way of thinking about music that, in addition to orthodox aspects like functional harmony, orchestration and counterpoint, incorporates concepts such as resonance, spectralism, ethnomusicology, music cognition and just intonation.

Solo bass, especially fretless, is a really good tool for exploring these ideas as opposed to, say, piano, which tends to lead you down more conventional paths. For me, it's always been about trying to find a language that can communicate something meaningful in this time and place.

Why do you think it’s still relevant for today’s bass players.?

In addition to conventional playing I always encourage my students to work on a few solo bass pieces. I think it teaches us a lot about harmony, melody, composition, groove and how to create complete musical statements. I'm convinced that doing a bit of solo bass makes you a better ensemble player.

Are you still finding it as inspiring?

Absolutely. It's as much an obsession as always.

Are there players still taking it in new directions?

Yes, I think so. Everyone who gives it a go is going to add their own particular spin. In a context as exposed as solo bass, your individual personality is going to be pretty conspicuous, and there's not much to hide behind. I think that kind of situation offers a good opportunity for expressive individuality.

• The UK's first-ever dedicated solo bass guitar competition takes place on September 5 in Penarth, Cardiff, Wales. For more details, head to Phil Jones Bass.

When Chicago-based indie rockers Friko were writing and recording their first album, 2024’s Where We’ve Been, Where We Go from Here, it wasn’t hard to keep the sound lo-fi. Singer Niko Kapetan was the band’s lone guitarist, so there wasn’t much that could be done to stretch out the sound.

“That’s what we stuck with, because it was honest for that time,” Kapetan says. “But on this one, we could kind of expand on ideas and go to some places that we wouldn’t have been able to go with the first record.”

This time around, Kapetan was joined in guitar duties by newcomer Korgan Robb. Having a second player to bounce off allowed the band to expand its sonic palette. The result is a fuller, more complex sound that really highlights the band’s biggest strength – its ability to create dynamics that ebb and flow.

While there are moments of quiet-to-loud, Something Worth Waiting For truly shines when the shifts aren’t sudden, but rather build slowly, until a song that started with simple strummed clean chords has built to an all-out fuzzy freakout.

The key to getting the huge tones that define the album turned out to be keeping it small. Alongside their Fender Deluxe and Princeton amps, the duo depended on tiny lunchbox amps to get their outsized sounds. Kapetan and Robb pushed those small amps with some rare pedals from New York-based musical gear wizard Jay Andersen, particularly a pedal designed to emulate the warm, fuzzy tones of a Tascam preamp.

“It’s just a white box pedal with, like, Sharpie on it, and it is the crown jewel of my little ’board, definitely,” Kapetan says.

“If it sounds like we’re really loud, I bet we both have it on,” Robb adds. “Once I got one of those pedals, it was just like, ‘That’s the sound.’ It feels like your amp is about to explode.”

Adding to the explosive sound was Robb’s Red Panda Tensor, a bizarre pedal that allows users to mimic tape loops, with the added bonus of reversing or modulating them, or even just randomizing them for extra chaos.

“I love using loops,” Robb says. “I have a looper as well that I loop in real time, but I don’t loop things to be in time. I loop drones or stuff like that.”

While modern boutique pedals played an integral part in getting Friko’s sound, they went with the classics when it came to guitars. Both guitarists have Jazzmasters in their arsenals, though Kapetan’s is unique; it was pieced together with his dad.

“That’s just my go-to. It’s consistent – and a really good sound.”

• Something Worth Waiting For is out now via Ato.
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

Les Paul was a man of many fine qualities, but understatement probably wasn’t one of them. Rather than ease loyal Gibson customers into the concept of a solidbody electric guitar, Les came out swinging when he specified a metallic gold finish for his official signature model. Back in 1952, it would have shone like a supernova in an era of muted sunbursts.

With the metaphorical dial already turned to 10, Gibson had its work cut out when devising an even more upmarket version of Les Paul’s signature guitar, but it still had a few more cards to play. It’s almost as if someone on the design team pondered about the world’s classiest musical instrument and decided it was probably a concert grand piano.

With its lustrous gloss black lacquer finish, gold-plated hardware and multi-ply body binding, the Les Paul Custom must have seemed like a lap Steinway when Gibson introduced it at the 1954 NAMM Show. But it wasn’t simply a glitzed up version of the Goldtop, because there were several differences.

Peculiar Customs

Of greatest significance was a change in the way the body was made. The Goldtops that preceded the Custom, and the sunburst Standards that followed it, are all known for their maple tops. In contrast, Custom bodies were carved from a single slab of mahogany, so they didn’t have the dampening effect of a maple cap.

There were significant changes to the neck, too. While most (but not all) 1952 and 1953 Goldtops had fairly substantial neck profiles, the Custom necks often feel a bit slimmer and faster. Upmarket ebony was favoured over Brazilian rosewood for the fretboard and, rather than use celluloid nitrate inlays, Gibson ‘upgraded’ to mother-of-pearl blocks with wider fretboard binding.

Perhaps the most contentious change, from a contemporary player’s perspective, was made to the fretwire. Les Paul would whizz around the fretboard interspersing lightning-fast runs with jazz chord voicings. To facilitate his style, Les specified fretwire that was wider and even lower than the relatively small wire used on the earlier Goldtops.

In its promotional literature, Gibson said: “Players [who] rave about its extremely low smooth frets and playing action call it the ‘Fretless Wonder’.” Les wanted the frets to be as close to imperceptible as possible, but for players who like to bend strings more than a semitone, Customs can feel like hard work.

This may be one reason why most big-name players of the ’60s and ’70s chose other models and Customs have always been less popular, collectible and valuable than Goldtops and ’Bursts.

Few liked the wrap-under iteration of the trapeze tailpiece that Les Paul designed. It worked well and sounded fantastic in wrap-over form on the ES-225 and ES-295, but most players would have welcomed the stability of the fixed wraptail bridge that superseded it on Goldtops in 1953.

Here’s where things get contentious because some consider the wraptail to be the best-sounding bridge that Gibson ever fitted to Les Pauls, but the counter argument is that intonation can never be perfect.

Leaving aside the fact that Gibson somewhat undermined its own efforts by positioning it sub-optimally, the Tune-o-matic bridge and stoptail combo allowed strings to be individually adjusted for intonation.

Although the first Gibson with a Tune-o-matic was the 1953 Super 400, the Les Paul Custom was the first solidbody to have one. The two models also shared the same inlay on the front of the headstock.

Staple Diet

Another feature unique to Les Paul Customs made before 1957 was mismatched pickups, and this was almost certainly done at the behest of Les Paul himself. If you closely examine footage of Les playing very early Goldtops, you will notice that whatever pickup he had in the neck position wasn’t a P-90.

The giveaway is wide and off-centre round polepieces with a series of smaller holes that seem to indicate he was using a DeArmond Dynasonic under a cream plastic cover.

Whether he was actually using stock DeArmonds in disguise or, as suggested by his tech Tom Doyle, pickups that Les wound himself using DeArmond parts is open to debate. But one thing we can say for sure is that Les wasn’t using P-90 neck pickups. Given that he was Gibson’s number one endorser and something of a superstar at the time, this must have been seen as problematic.

Rather than ape Gretsch and simply buy Dynasonics from DeArmond, Gibson tasked Seth Lover with creating a Gibson version of the Dynasonic. The resulting pickup is often called the ‘Staple P-90’, but besides the shape and size it’s a very different pickup from a regular P-90 and has a clearer and a more ‘hi-fi’ sonic characteristic that is oddly reminiscent of – you guessed it – the DeArmond Dynasonic.

Early Customs provide the best of both worlds because you still get the snarlier joys of a regular P-90. The Staple’s power means the P-90 has to be set quite high to balance out, but with such differently voiced pickups it’s a mismatch made in heaven. In that sense it’s a bit like a Telecaster and yet far more versatile because the pickups have individual controls.

There was something about the way Gibson wired controls and wound pickups in that era that allowed volume adjustments without losing clarity and tone finessing without losing definition. Watch any footage of Paul Kossoff and you’ll see him continuously switching pickups and using the controls. It’s entirely possible that he learned to do so on this actual guitar.

Prior to the introduction of the humbucker in 1957, the Staple P-90 was Gibson’s most prestigious pickup and featured in various high-end jazz guitars as well as the Les Paul Custom. The ‘Staple’ nickname was probably inspired by the thin rectangular polepieces, all of which had height-adjustment screws.

It’s interesting to note that for the Staple P-90 Gibson reverted to the pickup mounting method used for a brief period on the bridge pickup of the earliest Goldtops, with screws going through diagonal corners.

Blues Boomers

Maybe it’s because of the frets, the non-robust gold plating or a long-standing preference for Patent Applied For pickups over P-90s, but very few big-name players are associated with pre-1957 Les Paul Customs.

The guitar we’re featuring here is an exception because it belonged to two British blues legends – Paul Kossoff and Eric Clapton. We caught up with its current owner, Matthieu Lucas of Matt’s Guitar Shop in Paris, to learn more about its history.

“My understanding is that the guitar was brought back to England in late 1965 or very early 1966 by Paul’s father, David Kossoff,” Matt recalls. “He was an actor who travelled back and forth to the US and he bought it from Manny’s in New York. Paul was playing an SG Junior at the time, so the Custom was basically the first serious two-pickup Les Paul he ever owned.”

Paul auditioned for a North London blues combo called Black Cat Bones in 1966. The band’s drummer Frank Perry joined the band in the summer of 1966, shortly after Paul, and he recalls Paul having a black Les Paul at the time, but [remembers Paul] quickly acquiring a sunburst Les Paul.

Since Paul was only on the cusp of turning 16, he probably wouldn’t have been acquainted with a rockstar like Eric Clapton. It’s most likely he traded the black Custom for the ’Burst at Selmer’s and, since Eric was a regular visitor, that’s probably where he bought Paul’s guitar.

“Clapton was certainly playing a 1950s Custom around that time,” Matt insists. “There are quite a few pictures of Clapton playing a Staple P-90 Custom with Cream at the Marquee Club, and we don’t know of any other pre-1957 Custom that was played by Clapton, except this one.”

It was very rare to see Clapton playing P-90 Gibsons during the Cream era, so it’s tempting to imagine him experimenting with different guitars before he moved onto the Firebird, ES-335 and SG that he’s most closely associated with during the mid-to-late 1960s. He did play another black Les Paul Custom, notably with Blind Faith and Delaney & Bonnie, but that was a three-pickup 1958 model that he later gifted to Abert Lee.

Matt offers another clue that Kossoff and Clapton owned the same Custom: “Paul didn’t like the way the binding was turning yellow, so he stripped the lacquer off the binding to make it white again. You can see in the Clapton pictures that the binding is very bright white and it remains that way today.”

Accounts suggest that Clapton left the guitar at the offices of Cream’s agent, the NEMS Organisation, in April 1967 because it was surplus to requirements for a forthcoming US tour. This is where the name Howard ‘H’ Parker enters the story because it’s thought the guitar was passed to him in lieu of payment.

Parker was a well-known face on the late-’60s music scene in London who worked as a roadie and road manager for Hendrix, Pink Floyd and Cream. He kept the Custom under his bed, and when he died in 1974 the guitar passed to his friend and fellow road manager John Wilson who kept it under his bed for the next 32 years.

Although aware of the Clapton connection, Wilson had no idea the guitar had belonged to Paul Kossoff. This was discovered when he took the Custom to auctioneers Cooper Owen in 2006.

“They only found out about Paul’s ownership when they removed the switch and control covers,” Matt reports. “Paul used to put paper stickers under the covers and write his name on them. He sometimes wrote the serial numbers of guitars and his address on there, too.”

“At some point it supposedly belonged to Duff McKagan,” Matt adds, “but I actually have no proof of that and I haven’t asked Duff personally if he ever owned it. I just know that after Howard Parker it went through several hands and apparently went to Japan at some point. It definitely ended up in Florida when Melvyn Franks was building his guitar collection. I bought it from him about 10 years ago.”

We’re obviously curious to know how the guitar feels to play and whether the neck profile is thinner than the ones generally found on 1958 or 1959 ’Bursts?

“Actually no, I would say it feels quite a beefy neck to my hands,” Matt insists. “It’s actually quite fun with this guitar because it has a very unique profile. It’s fuller and really not comparable to any other mid-’50s Customs that I’ve played before now. If I had to define it, I’d say it’s the type of chunky C profile I would expect to find on a ’58 Standard.

“What’s really nice is that the original frets are almost unplayable… but still very playable at the same time. It’s very weird because when you get to the high notes, there are basically no frets left. It’s like the definition of a Fretless Wonder, but at the same time it’s very easy to play. It’s also super light for a Les Paul Custom and weighs just 3.84kg, which is just under 8.5lb.

“The hardware, frets, pickups, potentiometers and the caps are all original to the guitar, along with the finish. It remains exactly as Kossoff and Clapton left the guitar. Although I do have some photos of Clapton playing it with a white or cream pickguard. But, for sure, this guitar has either been stored under a bed or owned by collectors from that point onwards.

“That’s probably why it has survived the way it has,” Matt concludes. “It’s an exceptional-sounding guitar. Every artist that has played it goes crazy about it, and it has been owned by two legends for a reason. It’s really a special instrument.”

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

When it comes to Mike Campbell’s sound in and out of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, there’s a common thread – his 1951 Fender Broadcaster, a guitar he picked up in 1975 at Nadine’s Music in Hollywood for $600.

Given the sheer number of iconic tracks this guitar has appeared on, it’s safe to say it was worth the investment.

“All my Teles sound good,” says Campbell, who has his own namesake Fender Stories Collection Red Dog Tele. “But that one is still bright and has a nice midrange. It’s got a warm tone underneath there, and that makes it sound different from other Teles.”

You can decide for yourself as you check out Campbell’s picks for his five favorite Broadcaster-enriched Heartbreakers tunes.

1. American Girl

We didn’t have a 12-string, but we wanted one on the song. Well, I did! I took my Broadcaster and played octaves – because a 12-string is multiple notes and octaves on one string. I tried to simulate a 12-string on that riff throughout the song. At the end, where I do that triplet thing – that was an afterthought.

I didn’t like it, but Tom said, “No, it’s great. Now you’ve got to double it.” So I doubled it, and that became the end of that song. American Girl is kind of just the sound of that guitar. It was the harmonics between the rhythm and the Broadcaster on top of it. That became the Heartbreakers' sound.

2. Breakdown

We had only two guitars during the first couple of albums. Tom had been playing bass up until then, so I let him borrow my ’64 Strat, and that was his guitar for the first few years. Then I got the Broadcaster and, eventually, a Les Paul. But with Breakdown, all we had was my Strat and the Broadcaster.

It was about a six-minute take one night at Shelter Studios in Hollywood. I said, “Let me put some guitar on it.” It didn’t have the lick; it was just the chords, so I noodled for six minutes – and then I got bored. I couldn’t think of anything, so I picked up a slide and played that lick.

I didn’t think much about it and went home. An hour later, the phone rang. Tom said, “You’ve got to come back. We want to put that lick you played at the end at the front of the song.” I got up, drove back down, and I had to hear it to remember what it was and learn it. I ended up playing it without the slide, but I played that melody. That became the hook of the song.

3. Mary Jane’s Last Dance

I think I had my Ampeg Rocket set up in the garage while we were working with [producer] Rick Rubin. Tom picked up my Broadcaster. He was working on a rough idea for the song, and he just started playing that rhythm through the Ampeg. That’s what ended up on the record – the sound that set up the song.

The Broadcaster just keeps popping up throughout our whole career! It was like, “What goes here? The Broadcaster will work!” It’s a workhorse. But yeah, “Mary Jane” was Tom playing the rhythm on the Broadcaster, and I played a goldtop Les Paul against it, which created that sound.

4. You Wreck Me

You Wreck Me was just a bolt of adrenaline. I was writing it in E, and I got bored with it. So I put a capo on the first fret just to change the tone a bit, and I got those three chords.

It was all written in the key of F with a capo on the first fret. It’s just open chords like that on the Broadcaster – but they sounded really raunchy, full and exciting.

5. Here Comes My Girl

When we played this one live, I used a 12-string, but in the studio, I used the Broadcaster and doubled it for those suspended chords. The cool thing about the Broadcaster is that you can play a chord, and if you’re set up right, you can hear every string clearly.

On Here Comes My Girl, we needed the clarity of those chord suspensions going up. And it couldn’t be cloudy because you have to hear each string ring clearly.

So it was written and recorded on the Broadcaster, and then it was doubled here and there. So, yeah, it’s a good guitar. Talking about it makes me wanna go play it!

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

As we strive for new modes of expression, it is no surprise to see players such as Blake Mills, Molly Tuttle, Tim Henson and Tosin Abasi reaching for hybrid guitars in search of inspiring sounds and blended textures.

While the origins of the acoustic guitar and its electric sibling are relatively well documented (with enough ambiguity to maintain the mystique), less has been written about the sub-genre of weird and wonderful instruments that has resulted from chimeric collisions of the two worlds. This potted history will attempt to fix that…

Necessity being the mother of invention, hybrid guitars are intended to offer the player access to ‘acoustic’ sound and playing experience, coupled with the comfort and feedback resistance of a solid or thinline body.

While the Danelectro convertible 1959 – a hollow Masonite guitar with a lipstick pickup mounted in its soundhole – and the heroically hideous Burns Steer with its Chris Eccleshall active electronics deserve honourable mentions, the first real hybrid guitar was brought to us by Gibson guitars in partnership with one of the world’s leading fingerstyle players: Chet Atkins.

Frustrated by the primitive options available when amplifying acoustic steel-string and classical guitars, Atkins approached Gibson with a new concept – a solidbody design with an acoustic voice that would allow him to turn things up. The resulting nylon-string Gibson Chet Atkins CE/CEC hit the market in 1982, with its steel-string equivalent SST model joining five years later.

It remains a favourite of players such as Mark Knopfler, David Gilmour, Johnny Marr, Lindsey Buckingham and Sting. With an average weight of 7lb, the Chet Atkins is significantly lighter than a Les Paul but still cumbersome for players more used to an acoustic, and while its piezo-driven voice is far from a natural acoustic sound, it still works well in a full band.

For many years the Gibson Chet Atkins model was the only viable option in an extremely niche market. Granted, legendary Bay Area luthier Rick Turner had designed his iconic Model 1 with Fleetwood Mac guitarist Lindsay Buckingham in 1979, but it was only later that he would add a piezo bridge option before launching his Renaissance acoustic electric model in the 1990s.

In 1993 a big ripple hit the hybrid-guitar world with the Parker Fly. Created by the late, great Ken Parker and Larry Fishman, the Fly featured a carbon-fibre exoskeleton over a tonewood core and was arguably the first production electric guitar to combine active piezo electronics with magnetic pickups.

Finding immediate favour with players such as Eddie Van Halen, Joni Mitchell and Reeves Gabrels, the Parker Fly was a revolutionary instrument, but as Ken Parker himself said, “We were making a $10,000 guitar and selling it for $3,000.”

Double Design

As radical as it may have been, the production Parker Fly was actually a corporate compromise. In a conversation with Ken Parker in Colorado, he showed me his 1987 prototype for the Fly, which was no more than 10mm at its thickest point with most of it being substantially thinner.

“The idea was to create a guitar that had the top of an archtop without the back and sides, so it was designed to be a resonant structure… reflective and conservative of energy, which means that it sustains a long time,” Ken said.

“This is pretty close to what I was hoping to manufacture at the Parker Guitars factory… but it was decided that we couldn’t use non-standard magnetic pickups [so the production models were a lot thicker].

“I have to be honest and say it was a little bit of a bummer… Here I am trying to make this magical new thing and they wanted me to incorporate heavy, dopey pickups that were made in the ’50s. Anyway, I got over it and we produced the Parker Fly.”

By the mid-1990s other brands had woken up to the musical potential (albeit coupled with limited commercial appeal) of hybrid instruments – bridge-mounted piezo systems were becoming increasingly common in guitars aimed at session players and experimental heads looking for new textures – and the big names such as Fender and PRS were starting to get properly involved.

In a rare break from its acoustic lineup Taylor Guitars launched the hybrid T5 model in 2005, which combined Taylor active electronics with one or more lipstick pickups like the old Dano Convertible. It was later superseded by the T5z, which features a smaller body and remains in production today.

Perhaps the most outlandish hybrid design of the early 21st century was the somewhat short-lived Line 6 Variax acoustic. This solidbody electric with soundhole offered digitally modelled acoustic sounds including banjo and sitar, as well as access to altered tunings with some clever pitch-shifting.

Yamaha also gave the hybrid a shot with the launch of its Silent guitars, which, although mainly aimed at the quiet-practice/travel-guitar market, make superb hybrid instruments. However, for some years the alternative choice was a luthier-made marvel, which includes Rolf Spuler’s Paradis model or Uli Teuffel’s Antonio.

Things changed in 2019 when Fender debuted the Acoustasonic Telecaster, with the Stratocaster arriving in 2020 and the Jazzmaster following the year after. These guitars had been created by a team that included Brian Swerdfeger, who was instrumental in the design of the original Taylor T5, chief engineer and pickup guru Tim Shaw, and Larry Fishman, who had played a vital role in the world of acoustic amplification for decades.

Available in various formats and often including modelled sounds and textures, some even overdriven, the Acoustasonic range is currently the number one choice of many guitarists entering the hybrid world.

At first glance, hybrid guitars may have limited appeal – not everyone wants to play a loud acoustic after all – but those players who do use them extensively find them to be expressive and engaging instruments that can offer new and inspiring sounds. Try one for yourself!

Three acoustic-electric guitars to check out

Fender American Acoustasonic Jazzmaster – $1,999/£1,799

Yes, you can get a Telecaster or Stratocaster version, but wouldn’t you prefer an achingly cool offset? Featuring a triple active pickup system, internal resonance and a plethora of different acoustic voices, this is a great choice.

Fender’s Acoustasonic range instruments are currently top dogs for a reason. This model even has a semi-usable unplugged sound for texture work in the studio.

Parker Fly – circa $/£3k

Now only available on the secondhand market (because Parker Guitars closed in 2016; pictured here is the Parker DragonFly DF524 offshoot), the Fly is perhaps the apogee of the hybrid-guitar idea with its carbon-fibre exoskeleton, custom-made DiMarzo or Seymour Duncan pickups (depending on the model) and the active piezo bridge.

The top horn may poke you in the moob, but you do get whammy bar dips with an acoustic sound – so it all pans out nicely.

Yamaha SLG200 Series Silent Guitar – from $879/£716

Available in both nylon- and steel-string (pictured) configurations, the Yamaha Silent guitar models are much more than quiet practice tools – they’re lightweight, well designed and have a great plugged-in sound with internal reverb and chorus effects.

A future update with Bluetooth connectivity would be very welcome, but in the meantime you can still have a very nice time indeed.

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

When inducting Tele-master James Burton into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Keith Richards famously said, in reference to one of the many illustrious names the guitarist has backed, “I never bought a Ricky Nelson record, I bought a James Burton record.”

It was that already formidable reputation that led Elvis Presley himself to call Burton in 1969, when he was forming a crack band to back him for his first full live performances in over a decade.

Burton took The King up on his offer, and would anchor what would become known as the TCB Band until Presley’s tragic death in 1977.

Though Presley’s latter-day concerts were sometimes glitzy affairs, Burton maintained that the performances afforded him more musical freedom than you might expect.

“It was great,” Burton told Guitar World in 1983 of his time backing the game-changing superstar. “I enjoyed every minute of it. The music was great, the excitement, the energy that flowed through the music, the feeling with everybody, it was super.

“I got to stretch out more so than was usual in most bands, because he did a lot of uptempo bluesy stuff and we worked out great country things.”

Even as Presley’s health declined towards the end of the ’70s, his touring schedule remained relentless. Indeed, the day he died suddenly at 42, he was scheduled to depart his Memphis mansion, Graceland, for Portland, Maine, for another tour. The TCB Band were already on their way.

Asked by GW about that day, Burton said, “We had just left Vegas that morning on our way to Portland. They called us in the chartered plane and told us to turn back.

“We couldn't figure out what the problem was, so we told the pilot to return to Vegas. He told us there wasn't enough fuel, so we had to stop in Pueblo, Colorado, to fill up. When we got down, Marty Harrell – the trombone player – called Vegas. I decided to call my wife while he was doing that. Everyone was walking around, kind of stretching, and I headed to the phones. I didn't quite make it.”

It was Harrell who had the unenviable task of delivering the sad news to the band and crew.

“Marty was on his way back from the phones and there were tears in his eyes,” Burton recalled sadly to GW in the 1983 interview. “He put his arms around me and said, ‘Elvis passed away this morning.’ God, chills went all over me and I couldn't believe it.

“Well, that plane flight back to Vegas was one of the longest flights I've ever been on. Everybody was just all tore up. It was such a shock to the world.”

Though he was already a titanic figure in rockabilly and country guitar before his Elvis tenure, Burton’s years with Presley cemented him as a true legend – the dream choice for anyone looking for that fleet-fingered twang.

He still casts a massive shadow, something that was apparent when he appeared with multiple generations of Tele talent (all of whom owe him some degree of debt) at Fender’s massive Telecaster 75th anniversary show in Nashville earlier this year.

Nils Lofgren’s life changed with the invite to go play some guitar with a friend. It was Bruce Springsteen on the phone, and he was wondering if Lofgren could come over.

“‘Jam with the band,’ is how Bruce phrased it,” said Lofgren, speaking to Guitar World in 1988. “I thought it was a little funny, really, ‘cause it was only four weeks or so until the start of the tour. And, you know, the E Street Band has something like a million songs at their instant recall.”

The call could not have come at better time. This was a tough time for Lofgren. His life was in retreat.

“I didn’t have any money and I was forced to stay with my parents in D.C., my hometown,” he said.

It was also a little spooky that the Boss would be on the phone calling him. They were friends, so it was not unusual. But it was all Lofgren heard at home over the kitchen table.

“My mother was funny, saying, ‘You’re friends with Bruce Springsteen, why don’t you play with him?!’” said Lofgren. “And I was going, ‘Aw, Mom, he’s got a band, he doesn’t need me.’”

Sometimes a mom’s straightforward logic is just what you need to hear. Mom always knows best. Because this was 1984. There were changes afoot in the E Street Band. Steve Van Zandt was on his way out. Not that Lofgren was to know, and either way he could not bring himself to get his hopes up.

“When I heard ‘Jam with the band’ ...well, what was I to think? The first thing you do is think nothing,” he said. “I tried not to take it too seriously, ’cause you can be pretty crushed when something you want doesn’t turn out the way you planned.”

Springsteen did not give him much information to go on. This was just an invite. But even so, Lofgren’s mind started racing – with the possibilities, yes, but also with the realization that the E Street Band repertoire was already pretty formidable, and Springsteen was liable to call a tune from any record.

“Bruce called and asked me to come to Jersey and jam with the band. Real low-key, nothing big was said, but I, of course, don’t let go of an idea,” said Lofgren. “So I contacted a local bootlegger who had all of these live Bruce tapes – he even had a tape of Born In The US.A. before it was released – and I studied pretty hard, so people wouldn’t have to call out chord changes in my ear or anything.”

Those jams, informal or otherwise, turned out to be sounding pretty good. “Real good,” was how Lofgren remembered it.

They played for a couple of days, the band getting into their groove, Lofgren familiarising himself with the changes, with the dynamics of a Springsteen set. There was no serious talk about anything. It was still casual. Until it came time for Lofgren to split.

“It was the day that I was supposed to go back home, and I guess Bruce had asked all the band when I wasn’t around what they thought of me,” recalled Lofgren. “I was all set to say goodbye and all, and Bruce asked me to come outside. There and then he asked me if I wanted to join.”

There was only going to be one answer. It was also an act of mercy from Springsteen. Lofgren’s mind could finally be at ease, or at least it could rush ahead to thinking about leaving his parents’ house.

“Thank God he did it like that, ’cause I was all prepared to spend four or five sleepless nights wondering,” he said.

Bruce Springsteen has always made good driving music. It had never sounded so sweet to Lofgren’s ears than when he got behind the wheel and headed back to Washington D.C.

“I couldn’t have been more elated,” he said. “I drove all around playing Dancing In The Dark, stopping every half-hour or so, you know, to break down sobbing with relief. It was a dream come true, right when I needed it.”

Back in 2019, Lofgren sat down with Guitar World to look back on his Springsteen days, as well as his collaborations with Lou Reed and Neil Young.

When Ginger Baker, Jack Bruce and Eric Clapton were putting together Cream in summer 1966, Eric had with him his Les Paul. This was the guitar that we now know as the ‘Beano’ ’Burst.

He’d bought it the previous year when he was a member of John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, but now he plugged it in for Cream’s early rehearsals at a church hall in north-west London.

However, before he’d had a chance to play it in public or in the studio with his new band, it was stolen from the hall. Infamously, the ‘Beano’ ’Burst’s whereabouts remain a mystery to this day.

Eric began to seek a replacement, at first borrowing a few guitars. He used Keith Richards’ Bigsby-loaded ’Burst in July for Cream’s debut at a festival in Windsor (and a try-out in Manchester the night before). In a London club in August he played a cherry double‑cut Les Paul Special borrowed from support group The Clayton Squares.

Eventually, probably in August ’66, he bought a ’Burst from Andy Summers, the Summersburst that recently emerged thanks to Matt’s Guitar Shop in Paris. In the early months of the following year, Eric dismissed that guitar when it was the victim of an unsympathetic repair.

A New Psychedelic Fool

Perhaps he started to wonder if Les Pauls were jinxed for him, and he settled on a circa-1964 cherry-finish SG Standard – a different style, for sure, but with familiar humbuckers and control layout. Within a short time he took it to a pair of Dutch pop artists newly arrived in London, Marijke Koger and Simon Posthuma, who later started an art collective – and, briefly, a band – that they named The Fool.

Marijke and Simon painted colourful scenes and swirls all over the guitar, which Cream fans know as ‘The Fool’ guitar. Eric later called it a “psychedelic fantasy” and he played it as his main stage guitar throughout 1967 and into the summer of ’68, recording with it extensively, too, notably on much of Disraeli Gears.

On tour in America in spring ’67, Eric scooped up a few more guitars: a three-pickup 1958 Les Paul Custom, a Fender XII and a Danelectro Standard 3021. Again, he’d record some of Disraeli Gears with the Custom, and played the XII on Dance The Night Away. On a few occasions he played the Custom and the Dano on stage, but none of the three would count among his most favoured instruments.

A significant purchase came along in May ’67 when he went to Sound City in London and bought a secondhand 1956 Stratocaster, the one that later became known as ‘Brownie’. He got it just days before Cream travelled to New York City to record Disraeli Gears, heard at least on Tales Of Brave Ulysses, with its Strat-like tones and aggressive wah-wah sounding like an homage to the current king of the Strat, one James Marshall Hendrix.

Aside from sporadic uses in Cream, this Fender would later feature on stage regularly with Eric when he began touring with Delaney & Bonnie toward the end of 1969, and it was also prevalent in the studio during 1970 for his first solo album and the Layla sessions.

In his autobiography, he recalled how at age 12 he’d first seen a Strat, in the hands of Buddy Holly on a TV show.

“I thought I’d died and gone to heaven,” he wrote. “It was like seeing an instrument from outer space, and I said to myself: ‘That’s the future – that’s what I want.’ Suddenly, I realised I was in a village that was never going to change, yet there on TV was something out of the future. And I wanted to go there.”

Meanwhile, Eric hadn’t given up entirely on Telecasters: in 1968 he botched together a bound Custom Tele body and a contemporary rosewood-’board Strat neck.

During a brief visit to Denmark in February, Cream were filmed for an of-its-time movie, Det Var En Lørdag Aften (It Was A Saturday Night). In one of two scenes in which they appeared, performing We’re Going Wrong, Eric is seen with the unusual Tele/Strat hybrid.

This oddity’s most visible appearance would come in June ’69 when, now with a maple neck, it was his main guitar throughout Blind Faith’s debut concert in London’s Hyde Park.

A further acquisition on a US Cream tour arrived in April ’68 in the reverse-body shape of a 1964 Gibson Firebird I. At the time, Firebirds were not considered to rank among the front-running Strats and Lesters and Teles that many prominent guitarists of the day treasured. But the Firebird was nonetheless a useful instrument, and his single-pickup model turned up on stage during the band’s farewell dates later in the year.

More Les Pauls and a 335

Eric could be generous with guitars to his friends, and the most famous example concerns a Les Paul he gave to George Harrison. It was a ’57 Goldtop refinished in cherry that George would name ‘Lucy’ and use on several ‘White Album’ and Abbey Road cuts.

In September ’68, he asked Eric to play the recent gift once more, on While My Guitar Gently Weeps, an event that saw Eric become the only non-Beatle to play a guitar solo on a Beatles record.

The cherry-refin Goldtop had been owned by Rick Derringer, guitarist in The McCoys, and before that by John Sebastian of The Lovin’ Spoonful. Derringer decided the guitar was so beat up it could do with a fresh new finish and, living not far from the Gibson factory, he delivered it there in the mid-’60s with instructions to paint it with an SG-like cherry finish.

When he got it back he felt its quality had suffered in the process, so he traded it for another guitar at a New York City store – which is where Clapton acquired it, and Clapton in turn gave it to his Beatle chum.

Toward the end of ’68, Eric acquired his third Les Paul ’Burst, which he used occasionally on stage during Cream’s farewell tour. This one, too, did not last long, going to Paul Kossoff in a trade when Free supported Eric’s new band, Blind Faith, the following summer.

Another key purchase that most likely took place in late ’68 concerned Eric and his 1964 ES-335. Why “most likely”? There’s been speculation about when he got the 335 thanks to conflicting claims and a tangled history.

Eric was seen with this guitar on Cream’s final farewell dates at the Albert Hall in London, and he kept it until selling it in 2004 at one of his Crossroads-benefitting auctions. Eric recalled then that he’d bought it when he was still with The Yardbirds.

While there were certainly a couple of 335s around in that band – mostly played by Chris Dreja – specs and serial numbers and shipping dates prove that neither was the one Eric played in ’68.

Photographer John Peden snapped Eric at a San Francisco Fillmore gig in summer ’67 where, as one might expect, he played the psychedelic SG… but also apparently a red ES model, possibly a 335.

More recently, Jerry Donahue has said he sold the Albert Hall 335 to Eric a few weeks before the London shows of the farewell tour. At the time, Jerry was still an up-and-coming guitarist – this was before he’d played with Fairport Convention, Joan Armatrading, The Hellecasters and others – and he had a day job working at the Selmer music shop in London.

That leaves three possible scenarios. The first is that Eric bought the Albert Hall 335 in 1964 while in The Yardbirds, never played it at the time but instead kept it hidden away for years, only pulling it out for a gig at the Fillmore in ’67. Then he put it away again until the London gigs. But why would he go so long without using what is clearly a great guitar?

The second is that he bought the Albert Hall 335 in San Francisco in 1967, played it on one gig, and then squirrelled it away until the London shows. Same question: why would he ignore such a great guitar for so long?

The third scenario seems most likely, that Eric bought the ’64 Albert Hall 335 from Jerry at Selmer in 1968, a few weeks before the London shows. But a four-year-old guitar? Well, we know that Eric had a taste for used guitars.

Of the dozen Cream-era electrics itemised in this feature only one, the Electric XII, might have been new – but even that could well have been secondhand. He was so taken with the benefits of budget-friendly used guitars that when he sat down with a ’60s interviewer who wanted to hear some tips for guitar buyers, Eric said that he’d recommend seeking secondhand instruments.

He gave his reasons: such instruments are “broken in and easier to play”, he insisted, and “the older the guitar the better it seems to have been made”.

Jerry Donahue recalled a happy Eric as the deal was sealed at the Selmer shop for that lovely ES-335.

“He really liked it,” Jerry said, “the feel, the sound – it was perfect. Certainly, it took no time at all for him to get his wallet out.” Even when you’re God, sometimes it’s impossible to resist the lure of a potentially great guitar.

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

This month in Bought & Sold, we’ve got a real maven of guitar gear on the horn, Mr Jeff Tweedy of Wilco. The country-leaning indie rock tone guru knows a good instrument when he sees one – and he knows when he’s got one in his hands that’s a little rich for the show.

Here, he talks all things electric and acoustic guitars and offers a little advice for anyone who is in the market for a new guitar. He’s a vibe.

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

I bought a late-’50s Gibson J-45. I’m not sure of the exact year, maybe a ’57. But it had been stripped and it was still just barely something that I could afford [laughs], it was like $600. I still have it. It’s the one that has ‘Wilco’ spelled out in stickers across the neck. I got the stickers at a stationery store.

What was the last guitar you bought, and why did you buy it?

Geez… I buy a lot of guitars. It’s kind of a gross amount of guitars [laughs]. I bought a Martin 00-18 from the first year that they made them. I collect those from that weird period in the late ’50s and early ’60s. It’s gotten to be famous as the ‘Kurt Cobain guitar’, but I just like them, so whenever I see one, I try to get it.

What’s the most incredible find or bargain that you’ve ever had while buying guitars?

I have to credit my mom with this one. When she got it in her head that I was really serious about playing guitar, she’d look for them at auctions and garage sales. She went to a farmer’s auction, like an estate sale, and she got a ’56 Gretsch Duo Jet for 70 bucks. And then she got a ’50s prototype ES-350 with three pickups, which was probably one of the first guitars with three P-90s. She got that for 120 bucks.

I mean, a lot of the guitars I own would sound like fantastic stories now, but they didn’t feel cheap at the time [laughs]. I bought the Epiphone Casino for 100 bucks, and I use it all the time. The neck had snapped off and the guy didn’t think it was going to be fixable.

I told him I’d buy it and I did. And then, when we came back years later to St Louis, and he came to our show, he saw me playing it and he was mad at me. He said I took advantage of him. I was like, ‘You were gonna throw it away…’

What’s the strongest case of buyer’s remorse you’ve ever had after buying gear?

There’s a ton of stuff that I own that I haven’t used as much as I thought I would. But I don’t know that I really get sad about stuff like that. I figured out that if I hang onto it, eventually I’ll find a use for it. Or somebody else will come through our studio, pick it up and fall in love with something that I’ve never really made a connection with.

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

Oh, yeah, tons. I traded the two guitars I mentioned earlier that my mom got at the auction. Uncle Tupelo was going on the road and Jay [Farrar]’s amp was broken. We didn’t have time to fix it, so I traded one of those for a Fender Twin for him.

The other one I think was at the same place, but I can’t remember what I got for the 350. But I know where they are because Billy Gibbons came through town in St Louis, I think it was at Silver Strings guitar store, and they told me that he bought both of them. And I did talk to Billy, and he confirmed that he has those guitars.

What’s your best buying tip for anyone looking to buy their ultimate guitar?

I guess you should play a lot of guitars. You should go to guitar stores and really get a good grip on what the differences are, you know? Before you buy a Rickenbacker, you should really know what a Rickenbacker is all about.

There are guitars that people buy because they see lots of people playing them, but they’re not all created to do everything. So if you have a specific task, you probably know what you’re looking for.

If you just want an everyday guitar and have a dream of being a certain type of guitar player, you should get your hands on one. Try to learn about how different some guitars are from year to year. The shape of the body does not necessarily mean it’s the same guitar at all.

What were you looking at the last time you stopped and looked in a guitar shop window, or browsed online?

I spend an insane amount of time doing that. It was maybe 20 minutes ago that I was doing that! I have a list of stuff that I’m looking for and, lately, it’s Japanese guitars from the late ’70s and early ’80s. I have been really enjoying those and have a bunch of them.

I’ve been swapping them out for the Gibsons I play live because they’re getting ridiculously expensive – I don’t mind taking [the Japanese guitars] out on the road because they’re supposed to be used, and they’re tools – but I feel a bit self-conscious when I get handed a guitar that I can see somebody in the front row going, ‘Oh, my God, that’s an expensive instrument.’

I don’t like that feeling [laughs]. So the Grecos from that era are what I’ve been playing a lot. If you see me playing an SG, it’s usually a Greco.

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

A shitty amp is useless. I could probably get sounds that I enjoy out of a cheap guitar and a good amp. But I think it could go both ways… it depends on the cheap amp. Some cheap amps, to me, sound better than the most expensive amps. So it’s all relative.

If you could only use humbuckers or single coils for the rest of your career, which would you choose, and why?

Can’t we have both? I know it’s a hypothetical question… For the last 20 years or so, I’ve probably played single coils on records more than anything else, and my main thing in the studio has been an Esquire top-loader.

Jeff’s Go-To Rig

My main guitar right now – and everything I’m about to say contradicts what I’ve said [about single coils] – is a Jaguar with one humbucker in it. It was Candy Apple Red, but it was pretty bad when I got it, so I stripped it but left the headstock red.

My friend Woody [John Woodland], who invented the Mastery bridge, helped me put together this Jaguar a long time ago. It’s got a Mastery floating tremolo and it’s just a magical guitar. The pickup is this sort of underwound humbucker, so it’s not super-saturated.

My pedalboard is almost all Fairfield Circuitry stuff. I’m probably one of the only people who has a ’board that’s all one manufacturer [laughs], but I just started out making it that way because I liked the way it looked… I have added one pedal to it that’s not Fairfield, which is a Rose Electric Audio Console Overdrive. It has what looks like Neve [console] knobs on it and it’s a really great overdrive pedal.

As for amps, when I’m with my band doing solo material, it’s just a ’50s Fender Deluxe. There’s a specific period that I like, and I have a couple of them as backups. For Wilco, I have a Fender Vibrolux that’s been modified – it’s basically been made to be like a standalone Fender Reverb – and then a narrow-panel [5E3] Deluxe.

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

People – OK, boomers – like to say that “rock is dead,” but one look at the 80,000-strong students enrolled in a School of Rock program, and it’s very obvious that statement is complete nonsense. Rock is very much alive and kicking, and if this new crop of talented youngsters is anything to go by, it’s in very safe hands indeed.

For those not in the know, School of Rock is a Philadelphia-born, now-international music education platform with an impressive 650 locations across the world. Now, it does more than teach young musicians how to play guitar, bass, drums, or sing. It helps them “master skills, unleash creativity, and develop the tools they need to thrive in life.”

Earlier this month, the firm kicked off its “All Stars Tour,” a nationwide run of 34 shows across 32 cities showcasing the organization's most elite young musicians.

Less than 1% of students earn a spot in an All Star band, making it the highest achievement in the School of Rock community. 162 students from 99 locations, including the United States, Chile, Mexico, Peru, Brazil, Canada, and Australia, make up the 2026 class.

The group was divided into six teams and spent 10 days touring the country, playing iconic venues including Trees in Dallas, Sony Hall in New York, and 3Ten at ACL Live in Austin.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the All Stars Tour, and certainly the most heartwarming, is not in the new musical skills the participants gain, but the massive sense of community it brings. We caught up with three of the standout stars of the current tour to get their perspective on what School Of Rock means to them.

“I remember watching the documentary when it first came out, and people were saying, ‘Yeah, on day one, we're strangers, by day 10, we're a family,’” recalls 15-year-old guitarist Logan C.

“I always thought that wasn’t really that true. I thought it would just be some type of School of Rock marketing thing. I didn’t expect that connection to be so wholesome with everyone, but truly everyone was so welcoming to me on day one. It made it just so easy and stress-free for me as a first-timer.

“Everyone was crying on the last day, and we were all hugging and reminiscing on something that was just a 10-day-long thing – it was incredible.”

That sentiment is echoed by bassist Chloe A., 17: “School of Rock has given me that community and that comfort to be okay with stepping outside of my comfort zone.

“Embracing the mistakes that I make on stage or embracing my nerves and using that as fuel to push my performance to a higher level. It makes the band sound better, and it makes it a more enjoyable experience for people watching.”

For 17-year-old Alex D., who has been with the program since he was only seven, the school has been a constant in his life. “It’s kind of what I grew up with,” says Alex. “It’s about community. These guys are your friends; they're cool people. We all share the same interest in music.”

Now, when School Of Rock says these are the most elite players from across their schools, they really do mean it. Indeed, the tour saw the musicians tackle everything from rock standards to some considerably more challenging tracks, too.

“I think for us, Hallowed Be Thy Name by Iron Maiden was the hardest to get right,” says Logan. “Musically, it’s not the most challenging, but it’s still got parts to it that you definitely need to focus on. But what made it harder was that we choreographed the entire song; we wanted to embody what Iron Maiden does in their live shows.”

Music is in Logan’s blood. His grandfather played bass for a teenage Van Morrison in The Monarchs. Logan is following in his grandfather’s footsteps, having not only reached AllStar status in only a few short years, but he has performed the national anthem solo for 26,000 fans at a professional soccer match.

“Preparation is always key,” he says, noting how performing as a house band outside the stadium helped him release his nervous energy before the big moment of going out solo.

Chloe says it was a surprising Mars Volta prog classic, L'Via L'Viaquez, that gave her the most trouble on this tour, but it was still enjoyable. “Going on stage and just being able to play that, it was so fun!”

Chloe is a California-based bassist. Known as ‘Chlo Dart’ – a nod to her favorite player, Vulfpeck bassist Joe Dart – Chloe’s journey has been one of building confidence, and she’s now contemplating making music full-time, although it may have to take a backseat if she plans to study biomedical engineering.

“I don’t know if I’m going to do it as a career,” she says. “I never really thought of music as an option, but it has given me so much joy and so much happiness that I think that if I don’t do music later, it would not help me.”

From performing at a bustling NAMM show to walking the red carpet at the She Rocks concert, she has achieved a lot already, but admits that the dream is still to perform with Vulfpeck someday, “I don’t want to kick Joe Dart out,” she jokes. “But it’d be pretty cool if I could go up there with him. I want to do New Beastly, and we trade off solos.”

For Alex, it was Avenged Sevenfold’s mega hit, Beast and the Harlot, that proved to be the biggest challenge for the young guitarist, although it could be argued that he has tackled much trickier things in his career so far.

Alex, based in Seattle, is a lifer. He took up the instrument at just four years old, driven by “toddler curiosity” after watching his father play. By the time he was seven, he was enrolled. Today, he’s a veteran student who helps the newcomers.

Alex tells us that he was given the Extreme track Get The Funk Out, with only a day’s notice to learn Nuno Bettencourt’s notorious solo.

“Getting those Nuno tapping licks [down in a day] was not easy, but it definitely helped me. Tapping was not one of the things that I was good at in comparison to others,” he explains. “So it was a great learning experience, just learning it on the fly and getting the hang of tapping.”

We all know the importance of onstage time in shaping musicians, but for these particular students, School of Rock is more than just a program, or a gig. It’s a launchpad for confidence, creativity, and lifelong friendships – a real world community.

There is, of course, a lot of marketing and ‘selling the dream’ around music programs, but Logan, for one, reckons the proof is in the progress.

“For anyone looking to be a musician, get better at their instrument, or join a band, School Of Rock is genuinely the perfect place to do it,” he says. “I just love the fact that you can grow as a musician, as a technical player, and see your progress while also making so many friends, like lifelong friends, and genuine connections.”

• For more details about School Of Rock, visit schoolofrock.com.

Of all the obituaries relating to industry figures that we have published in past months, this one has been the hardest to write.

When you lose a member of a tightly knit team suddenly and unexpectedly, it’s akin to grieving a family member. And the sense of loss is definitely on that kind of level among the magazine staff. After all, Dave was entrenched in guitar journalism well before any of us had even thought of doing what we do today.

Despite being such a well-known music industry figure, Dave Burrluck was an intensely private individual who rarely, if ever, talked about himself – unless it was related to guitars, of course. His father was an instrument builder and this was a course Dave set himself on at one phase of his career.

Building guitars was to set him up for his later role as a discriminating critic of guitar builds far and wide, as well as being an advisor and enthusiastic voice at the other end of the phone to many luthiers, eager to learn from the vast wealth of experience he had gained over the years.

Seth Baccus tells us: “I first met Dave nearly 30 years ago through Andy and Hugh Manson. Dave was always a passionate champion of British guitar makers, and both Andy and Hugh held him in the highest regard.

“When I began building guitars, Dave was incredibly supportive and encouraging. His kind words about my work over the years meant more to me than he probably ever knew. He was always generous with his time, knowledge and wisdom, all delivered with his wicked sense of humour. Dave undoubtedly left the guitar world a better place than he found it, and we all owe him a debt of gratitude.”

Naturally, building, modding and generally tinkering with guitars wasn’t everything within Dave’s compass. He was also a fine guitarist, too, having played in bands from his teenage years right up until illness claimed him. We spoke to James Digings, who played drums in one of Dave’s early music adventures.

“I first met him in Colchester when we were both about 15,” James tells Guitarist, “and we started playing in a local band called Firebird, which was a four-piece (guitar, bass, keyboards, drums) playing fairly heavy rock: Uriah Heep, Black Sabbath, et cetera. I was on drums, and Dave was the first guitarist I ever played with, using guitars he made himself under the guidance of his father, who made a variety of instruments in his home workshop.

“He was an impressive guitar player, but I don’t think he was totally committed to the heavy rock genre, as I remember him playing me a Lindisfarne LP, saying they were his favourite band.”

This early experience of the music business very nearly led to success – and could have set the teenage Dave on a very different course.

“After I left Firebird,” James continues, “they were mysteriously ‘discovered’ by ’70s pop impresario Barry Blue, producer of early hits for the band Heatwave, such as Boogie Nights and Always And Forever. He changed the band’s name to Patches, dressed them in patched outfits, and wrote a single for them called Telltale, which was a big hit in Colchester but sadly nowhere else.”

Steve French, who played keyboards with Patches, remembers: “We did the national TV show Rock On 45 but sadly failed to trouble the Top 40. After a couple more failed singles, Dave decided to go to college to study English or journalism.”

Alas, with fame in the halls of rock ’n’ roll eluding the young Dave, he soon found himself writing for International Musician & Recording World where his experience as both player and builder came into play.

That magazine morphed into The Guitar Magazine in the early 1990s and was seen as a rival to Guitarist, but that rivalry was always friendly – after all, we all did the same job, it’s just that we saluted different flags. While he was with The Guitar Magazine Dave wrote The Player’s Guide To Guitar Maintenance (Balafon/Backbeat, 1998), which became something of a must-have among guitarists eager to tweak their instruments under his guidance.

Another book of Dave’s that became an essential reference was The PRS Guitar Book (Outline Press, 1999). Since its initial release, the book has received several updated and revised editions, including a notable third edition released in 2007, and The PRS Electric Guitar Book followed in 2014.

It was around the turn of the century that Dave joined the ranks of Guitarist as reviews editor, serving under Neville Marten, Mick Taylor and Jamie Dickson, respectively, as editors.

Here, Dave’s reputation blossomed further and, judging from the outpouring of love and respect for him when we announced his passing on social media, he was to become known as one of the world’s top authorities on guitars. His depth of knowledge really was that astounding.

His voice in reviews was always fair and precise, and his passion for instrument tinkering was embodied in his Guitarist column ‘The Mod Squad’, which quickly became the flagship resource for DIY tweakers and amateur builders alike.

But pro builders would often run ideas past him, too. We’ll leave the final words to another great British builder, Patrick Eggle: “I never had a quick chat with Dave, this was virtually impossible. His enthusiasm was infectious. His knowledge of guitars and those who build and play them, massive.

“I will miss our conversations, his encouragement and sage advice. I’ve got a new model of guitar almost finished. I really, really wanted him to see it…”

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

After making a name for himself as a teenager with East Coast funk outfit Wood, Brass & Steel in the mid-’70s, bassist Doug Wimbish helped shape the sound of early hip-hop.

Working for producer Sylvia Robinson at All Platinum and Sugar Hill, he laid down basslines on classics including Grandmaster Flash & Melle Mel’s White Lines, before bringing his unmistakable groove to Unity, the landmark 1984 collaboration between James Brown and Afrika Bambaataa.

By his 35th birthday, he was juggling sessions with Mick Jagger, Madonna, Seal, Annie Lennox, Joe Satriani, and Ronnie Wood while mulling an offer from Bruce Springsteen. Then came the call that would define the next chapter of his career.

When Living Colour needed a replacement for founding bassist Muzz Skillings, Wimbish was an obvious contender. He’d first met guitarist Vernon Reid in the early ’80s, and in 1991 he was invited to audition.

Flying through a hurricane on his way into New York, Wimbish arrived at the band’s Brooklyn rehearsal space. Reid, drummer Will Calhoun, and frontman Corey Glover asked what he wanted to play first, and Wimbish suggested Time’s Up, the blazing title track from the band’s second album. The room got so quiet that Wimbish wondered if he’d said something wrong.

“I’m looking around, and I can feel the vibe,” said Wimbish in the October 2017 issue of Bass Player. “They’re looking at each other and not saying anything. Finally, they said, ‘We've auditioned a lot of people, and you're the only bass player who wants to play that song.’”

Wimbish nailed the audition, and officially joined Living Colour in early 1992.

Although 1993’s Stain didn’t match the commercial success of its predecessors, it produced some of the band’s most adventurous material.

“Go Away was the opening track of Stain and I’ll never forget it, because Will and I were so tight. We locked in perfectly. Some of those songs had a lot of twists and turns, and we had to watch each other’s body language to make it happen.”

Tensions within the band led to a hiatus in 1995, which saw Wimbish move to London, adding Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Little Annie, Brooklyn Funk Essentials, Nitzer Ebb, Bomb The Bass, Depeche Mode, and a dozen other credits to his resumé.

Since Living Colour reunited in 2000, Wimbish still approaches songwriting as a collaborative process rather than a fixed formula. Drawing on ideas developed across a wide-ranging career, every project seemingly feeds into the next.

“I’ve worked with different bands for quite some time like TackHead, Little Axe, Bad Dog, Mark Stewart and the Mafia, and there are different layers of all these things that are part of the ingredients I use to assemble ideas for Living Colour.

“I might start off with some chords and I will present it to Will, or maybe I will just track everything – bass, guitar, drums – and build the song from there.

“Vern might come in with a riff or another way of approaching the line, and you just use the resources that are there and get everybody involved in what’s happening so you can really make the music for the band. That’s how I like to work with Living Colour.”

Alongside drummer Will Calhoun, Wimbish has built one of modern rock’s most intuitive creative partnerships.

“When you play with a drummer and you listen to each other it’s always a very rewarding and healthy environment to be in. I could play four notes and a rhythm and be already knows where to go with it, and vice-versa.

“I know his swagger and when he's going to speed up or slow down. I sound better with him on drums, and he sounds better with me on bass. Period.”

What happens to iconic guitars after a famous (or cult hero) guitarist dies? These days it’s common to see instruments sold at high-profile auctions and vanish into the clutches of anonymous collectors with deep pockets.

However, some guitars live on in museum collections, remain under close guard as family heirlooms, or get passed along to famous player friends, where they continue to make history.

We decided to take a closer look at five of the most celebrated Telecasters (actually, one is an Esquire) played by guitarists we’ve loved and lost, and figure out where those instruments are now. Today, we look at Muddy Waters’ circa-1957/58 Fender Tele, aka “The Hoss”.

Rightfully revered as the “father of modern Chicago blues,” Muddy Waters greatly inspired blues guitarists as well as rock players in England and America during the ’60s and beyond.

From the mid-’60s, when he gained prominence and acclaim from white rock audiences, through his death on April 30, 1983, at the age of 70, Waters was regularly seen and photographed playing a bright red Telecaster on stage. This Tele, which Waters nicknamed “the Hoss,” became almost a holy relic among devotees of electric blues.

Waters acquired the Tele, probably as a brand-new purchase, sometime during the late ’50s. It was a standard 1957/58 model with a maple neck/fretboard and light blonde-finished ash body that looked almost white.

Despite numerous accounts claiming that Waters painted the guitar red and swapped the maple neck for a later version from a Telecaster Custom with a rosewood fretboard during the early ’60s, a photo shot on May 7, 1964 – while Waters was filmed in Manchester, England, for the Granada Television special Blues and Gospel Train – shows that the Tele was still in its original blonde/maple neck configuration.

By the summer of 1965 (as verified by credibly dated photos), Waters had performed several significant modifications to the guitar. The original 1957 body remained, but it was now painted in a vivid, metallic red hue, and the aforementioned circa-1959-61 Telecaster Custom neck with slab rosewood fretboard also made its debut.

Waters also replaced the chrome-plated metal flat-top control knobs with a set of skirted and numbered plastic knobs from a Fender amp, a mod that may have inspired Fender’s switch to these knobs on Telecaster Custom and Deluxe models starting in 1972.

At some unknown point during the ’60s, four extra screws were added to the original five-screw pickguard to keep the pickguard from warping. Finally, in 1980, Waters swapped the original ashtray bridge with three smooth steel saddles to a gold-plated flat-plate brass bridge with six adjustable saddles.

Although Waters played a variety of other electric guitars earlier in his career, including a goldtop Les Paul, his “Hoss” Telecaster with its red finish became an icon thanks to its appearances in numerous photos and television appearances from 1965 onwards. This was the guitar Muddy played at several Montreux Jazz festivals from 1972-77, on his 1977-81 “comeback” albums produced by Johnny Winter, and at high-profile concerts with Eric Clapton, Robert Cray, and the Rolling Stones.

After Waters died in 1983, his manager Scott Cameron took possession of the “Hoss” Telecaster. It appeared in public occasionally and was displayed at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame museum in Cleveland starting in the ’90s. George Blanda of the Fender Custom Shop closely examined the guitar in 1999 when Fender developed the Muddy Waters Artist Signature Series Telecaster produced from 2001 to 2008.

In 2017 after Cameron’s death in 2015, Cameron’s widow gave the guitar back to Waters’ family, where it remains to this day. Most recently it was displayed in 2019 at the “Play It Loud” exhibit at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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

Yngwie Malmsteen’s existence on this planet reminds us that we might all be unique but some are more unique than others. There is no-one like Yngwie.

He is our shred maestro, the purveyor of the neoclassical before neoclassical was a thing, faithful keeper of the Stratocaster flame and the man whose live rig “could be seen from space”. And he’s also great conversation.

Some time in Malmsteen’s company is always time well spent (he was oversharing before oversharing was a thing). On occasion, he has been a conversational Icarus, flying a little too close to the sun when shooting from the hip, and that got him a reputation. He had an ego. He was this. He was that. But all musicians have an ego. They just present themselves differently.

Malmsteen? He’s 100 per cent certified WYSIWYG. He appreciates the finer things in life, driving a Ferrari, thicker guitar picks, Paganini, Bach, Mozart, breaking new ground in studio techniques… This, ladies and gentlemen, is the man who triggered a snare by discharging a firearm in the studio, a long-held ambition that was finally realized when making 2021 studio album Parabellum.

With Malmsteen sharing a new single, Now or Never, and announcing an epic new album, Hell or High Water, out November 13 via Music Theory Recordings/Artone Label Group, we would like to take this opportunity to revisit some of his bons mots, the wit and wisdom of one of electric guitar’s most colorful characters.

On the sound in his head

I realised that that violin sound, the wee-eee-eee-eee, like, this linear, completely concise sound, that’s what I heard in my head, that’s what I wanted to do! And so it was like a fucking revelation, y’know.

Obviously, you just don’t say, ‘Yeah, I want to play Paganini, Tchaikovsky, Vivaldi violin technique on guitar.’ You don’t say that. That’s literally impossible to be honest with you. But I decided, even if it was literally impossible, I was gonna fucking try.

MusicRadar, 2021

Playing philosophy, part 1

I don’t want to just play it safe. Two-string, maybe three-string, four-string, five, six-string arpeggios… But people kept on telling me to slow down, you know? “Hey, slow down! Remember, less is more.” And I always said, “How can that be? How could less be more?” It’s impossible. More is more.

Playing philosophy, part 2

I don't consider myself to be a very fast player. I'm sure there are other guitarists who can play faster: what I do that a lot of other guitarists don't do is I don't play things that are rubbish.

If you would slow down the fast licks that a Iot of other guitarists do, people would puke. I play classical runs, arpeggios and broken chords that if played at a slower speed would sound very nice as well.

Guitar World, 1986

On tone

I remember, when I first came on the scene, people used to come up to me and say, ‘I can’t believe you don’t have any gain on your amp. You don’t have any distortion!’ You know what the truth of the matter is? I have more fucking gain than a nuclear power plant! I have so much fucking gain, I don’t know what to do with it!

MusicRadar, 2021

On his live sound

I said to my tech, ‘Before I go out, I want to line check my shit to make sure it works. Make sure you get the elephant.’ The elephant means that when you just stand there in front of the amps and you turn up the volume, and do nothing, it should sound like an elephant. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaarghhhh! Uncontrollable fucking elephant. But you have to be really fast with the volume knob, you know what I mean?

MusicRadar, 2021

On heavy metal

I don’t care if people call our music heavy shit or heavy metal. Onstage we’re definitely metal because we’re just as heavy as the headbangers could ever want it. But what we play is a lot more sophisticated than what those run-of-the-mill metal bands are doing.

Guitar World, 1986

On gunplay

I have always been collecting guns. I always have lots of guns. So, I go into the studio. This was 1986, for Trilogy. [Laughs] Crazy days... I go in and I say, ‘Hey, bring me a big old fucking tree stump, y’know?’ And they said, ‘Okay.’ They put a big old tree stump in there and mic it up, and I bring out a .357 Smith & Wesson Magnum pistol and I blow this fuckin’ thing off in the studio. And the people were like, ‘No! It’s too loud.’ They’re freaking out!

MusicRadar, 2021

On space

If you went up into space and you looked down on Earth, there are only two man-made objects that you’re gonna see: the Great Wall Of China and my wall of Marshalls. My road crew hates me. Seriously.

Guitarist, 2021

On jazz

I went to the bookstore and they were playing free-form jazz in there, and it was a little bit out of tune, some horns and stuff, and I felt like I needed to flush my brain out like a fucking toilet! So I listened to Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto on the way home.

MusicRadar, 2025

On writing

Even without a guitar in my hands, the music just comes to me. It’s like that movie Amadeus. Mozart was getting music given to him in complete form. I understand the building blocks and can therefore build you anything you like.

If you asked me to write you a death metal song, call me back in five minutes, and I’d have it ready for you. You want country and western or reggae? No problem. I can give you whatever you want.

PR for Hell or High Water, 2026

When your gig is a seemingly permanent slot as the rhythm guitarist and co-songwriter for a rock icon, everything else is pretty much gravy. Billy Morrison, who was brought into Billy Idol’s band in 2010, has gravy to spare – enough to cover Thanksgiving dinners for everyone in a sold-out stadium.

On top of that, Morrison has become a successful painter, with a healthy list of wealthy return clients. He has displayed his work in numerous exhibitions, and one of his pieces from a series of butterfly paintings has been hanging in the U.S. Capitol for more than 10 years.

So, when it comes to his solo albums, Morrison doesn’t need to write hit songs, address a particular audience, or play out live. His sole focus is to write in a variety of rock, punk, and metal styles he enjoys, then get together with friends to hang out and jam. Of course, as a fixture of the L.A. scene for more than a decade, many of his friends just happen to be multi-platinum rock stars.

His fourth solo album, Hollow, features guitar work by Billy Idol’s lead guitarist, Steve Stevens, Nuno Bettencourt, and Duff McKagan, and guest vocals from Sully Erna, Dexter Holland, Marilyn Manson, and rappers Chuck D, B-Real, and D.M.C.

“I love working with musicians I like and admire,” Morrison says from the desk in his home studio in Beverly Hills. “That’s a real thrill for me. And I can work with whoever I want and put as many different genres onto a rock record as I want, because the only person I have to please is myself.”

It’s a formula that has served Morrison well. In 2024, Crack Cocaine, the snarling riff-driven anthem he co-wrote with Ozzy Osbourne, went to number one on the Mediabase Active Rock Chart, and fueled the success of Morrison’s third album, The Morrison Project.

The record also featured the Ozzy co-write Gods of Rock N Roll, an epic, orchestral power ballad that went top 10 on the Active Rock Billboard Mainstream Rock charts. Becoming, a new, brooding, caustic grunge-metal collaboration with Godsmack’s Sully Erna and Bettencourt, went top 20 on Active Rock and created a strong buzz for Hollow.

“My God, it seems like it was just yesterday that Crack Cocaine went to number one,” Morrison says, his hands linked in front of him, revealing colorful tattoos and blue polished fingernails. “And Gods of Rock N Roll was still in the charts while I was writing these new songs. Before I knew it, I had written enough for another record, so I figured while I was having fun, I might as well start recording it.”

Morrison’s eclectic guitar style and aesthetic are partially rooted in the UK punk and old-school glam he grew up on, which explains the abundance of reverent Sex Pistols and David Bowie nods. The other main inspirations on Hollow are late ’90s and early 2000’s alternative rock. There’s a reason for that.

“I was a heroin addict for 15 years, and I only woke up in the early 1990s,” Morrison says. “So, everything between the late ‘70s and the mid ‘90s was just a blank. It didn’t seep in.

“I caught up to it later, but what really stayed in my blood is drop-D Seattle music, stuff like Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson, and then pop-punk stuff like Blink-182 and the Offspring. That’s the kind of thing that gets me excited about writing music, and it’s good because a lot of it is pretty different than what I’m doing with Billy Idol, so neither gig ever gets boring.”

In a revealing interview, Morrison talked about how he wrote and recorded Hollow, his escape from near-terminal addiction, his tight friendship with Ozzy Osbourne, and the gear and goals he has as Steve Stevens’ sidekick.

Did you write songs for Hollow with particular vocalists in mind?

No, that came later. I’d get two-thirds of the way through writing a song before I figured out who I wanted to sing on it. Like, The Tailor had an industrial feel with heavy guitars and electronics, and I went, ‘I’ve got to text Marilyn Manson.’ Now, Manson is a friend so it wasn’t hard to get things started.

The same went for Dexter Holland. I wrote Never Gonna Change in about four minutes. It’s a pop-punk song with four chords in it. I love The Offspring, and I could hear Dexter singing on it so I texted him. It was like that for pretty much everything I didn’t sing on.

You wear your influences on your sleeve, but with great reverence for the artists who inspired you. And you combine them in creative ways. Take Me As I Am, for example, sounds like a hybrid of Soundgarden and Oasis.

I’ll take it. Thank you. At the end of the day, all you can do is put out a record and hope other people understand what you’re doing. I’m proud of my influences, but at the same time, I never said, “Okay, I’m going to rip this off and that off, and combine them.”

What you hear is what comes out of me naturally when I pick up a guitar. It might be a drop-D riff, or a jangly open-chord thing. But then, maybe I’ll do something with it like add another guitar or put some EDM samples on top of it, and if it fits my limited vocal range, I’ll sing on it. And if it doesn’t, I’ll call one of my rock star buddies.

You’re well-versed in straightforward rock, power-chord riffing, drop-D doom, open-chord spangle, country twang, and driving percussive punk. Do you view each of these as separate entities requiring specific playing techniques?

When it comes to rhythm, I learned everything I know from Steve Jones. If it works, it’s good, whatever label you want to put on it. And you know, The Sex Pistols only wrote 12 songs 50 years ago. But every one of them has a chorus to die for.

That band played with anger and venom, which put them in what became the punk genre, but those are pop songs, and they’re all about huge choruses, which are what I love and what I go for.

Hollow ebbs and flows through a wide range of emotions.

There are peaks and valleys because life’s like that. Look at [David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of] Ziggy Stardust [and the Spiders from Mars]. That album is a journey through his mind. I want Hollow to be a journey through different areas of my brain, and that includes some very energetic stuff and some very dark things.

When you mix different subgenres within a song, do you use different gear for each style?

It depends on what I’m going for. Let’s say you have a riff that goes G-D-A. You can play that Noel Gallagher style with open chords down on the first, second, and third fret areas. For that, I would probably go to my JCM 2000, which was modified by Dave Friedman, and it’s a big, important mod that makes it sound nothing like a JCM 2000.

I’d play that on my signature Knaggs [double-cutaway solid body] with P90s on the bridge. And then, I would go to my Friedman [BE-100 Deluxe] head with a Les Paul, and I would play fifth-fret and seventh-fret power chords and layer left and right. I’m a huge fan of playing the exact same thing twice, so you have four tracks shaping the sound.

To make the sound thicker?

There’s that, but also, you want to play it twice because you physically, humanly can't play it exactly the same way, so it’s more organic. Sometimes, I’ll pan the takes at ten and two, and then do another pair of tracks with a different rhythmic technique hard left and hard right.

You produced Hollow in your Beverly Hills home studio. When you’re writing the songs, do you have a basic idea of how you’re going to engineer them?

To an extent, but that’s not why I do it. Producing my albums gives me time and creative freedom. I’m not on anyone else’s schedule, so I can make sure the aesthetic of the music is visually and sonically consistent. If you play this and the last album back-to-back, it sounds like the same band.

There are only two guest guitar leads on the album. You play all the other solos, which suggests you’ve overcome the insecurities you used to have about soloing.

I'm going to be as honest as I can without being narcissistic. I don't feel insecure anymore. I definitely wouldn't try something like Eruption. I know who I am as a player and who I am not, and on the songs I played leads, I totally enjoyed pushing myself to make them as good as they could be.

You prioritize melody over speed.

I don’t care about playing fast. I’m more concerned about having the right notes and the right space between them. Some of the greatest solos to me are things I can hum, and that’s always at the front of my mind.

Are you schooled in the seven diatonic modes?

No, I haven't got a clue. I tried, but I just… You know, it wasn't for me. And you know what? I probably play them. Clearly, someone could dissect one of my solos and say, “Oh, he was in Dorian, and then he went to Mixolydian,” but I’m playing with my ears. I have no idea what to call what I do.

Why did you invite Nuno to play on Becoming?

When I first heard Nuno’s playing it felt to me like someone raising the stakes of the game. And Sully and Nuno are both from Boston, and they’re friends. So, when I was working with Sully, a lightbulb went off in my head.

Nuno was in town doing a charity gig, and we bum-rushed him in the dressing room and asked him to do it, and he said sure because, you know, you don’t want to say no to your friends. It was only later that he said, “Man, I didn’t even think about what I would have done if the song sucked.”

Steve Stevens plays lead on Another Day.

I didn’t even have to think about that one. I love my brother, and if I’m making a record, he needs to be on it.

You met Steve when you were in the LA cover band Camp Freddy (with Dave Navarro and Matt Sorum), and Steve started joining you onstage. The two of you had shared interests and you quickly became friends. Steve had long been Billy’s only guitarist. Why did Steve suggest to Billy Idol that he hire you as the band’s full-time rhythm guitarist in 2010?

They decided it was time to be a two-guitar band. The two of them wrote Rebel Yell, White Wedding, Eyes Without a Face. They were like Mick and Keith for a long time. I’m nothing compared to them. So, I’m fortunate that they asked me to play with them and they didn’t say no.

So, once you have us being a twin-guitar band, the two of us need to complement each other and play off one another. And you can't do that if both of you are playing Les Paul-style, PAF humbucking pickup guitars. You just sound the same. And we're both using Friedman amps. So, that’s where my signature guitar with Knaggs came in.

Your Knaggs Keya B-M is your primary guitar onstage with Billy Idol, and it was your go-to for Hollow?

My signature guitar is a nod of the hat to Steve Jones, who played a white Les Paul Custom that was so nicotine-stained from the clubs that it was more of an off-white. So, we called the color “nico-cream,” and it has a thick neck profile. Most Les Paul Juniors are really skinny, so you don't get all of the tone from it.

I’ve got big, fat fingers, so I asked for a thicker neck that was more like a Les Paul, but with Fralin Noiseless P90s. So now, Steve’s on the humbuckers and I'm on the P90s, and they sound great together. And I know Billy and Steve appreciate what I bring to the performance, which is what matters most to me.

What made you decide to kick drugs?

That's a very powerful question. And the truth of the matter is, I had a moment of clarity. It was an acute realization that I was going to die. I was homeless, living under a piece of corrugated iron propped up on someone’s fence. I was shooting in my neck.

My body had abscesses and was going septic and shutting down. But it wasn’t the thought that I was going to die that really affected me, it was the thought that I was going to die and I would have done nothing with my life and no one would care. That was the kicker.

No one in my life would even be surprised that I was gone. That’s when I was able to start turning things around, and it was hard. I was a nasty person when I was using. You have to be if you’re homeless with a five-hundred-dollar-a-day habit. I’ve been clean 30 years now, and I would hope most people would say I’m not a nasty person.

When you finally kicked drugs, was music a salvation for you? A new addiction?

Um, yeah, but I had a lot to catch up on. I felt like I'd been missing for 15 years, which I had been. So, I really got into music again, but I also had to go back and discover what had happened while I was gone. It’s funny because I was actually in LA during that time and there was all this music happening that inspired people. I always say I couldn’t even get that right.

All these other musicians formed a band, got a couple of gold records, and then shot heroin. I went straight to shooting heroin. I didn't even get to the “form a band, make the records” part.

The Morrison Project included two songs you co-wrote with Ozzy Osbourne. The two of you were close friends. Before he got terribly ill, was there ever talk of working with him again on Hollow?

No, we did it – twice. So even when he was alive, there was no talk of him being on the record. I got to have my moment with my best friend. That’s it. Done.

The Back to the Beginning show was an incredible, emotional tribute to Ozzy and Black Sabbath. People were aware he had Parkinson’s and had undergone dangerous surgeries. Fans and musicians at the show were in tears because they knew he was ailing. Yet, it was still a huge shock when he died 17 days after the concert. Did you know how ill he was?

Everyone with a heart was crying the day of that show. Obviously, his health had been declining, and I had been witness to that. I had seen him in more than one hospital with tubes attached. I visited him coming out of surgeries. But you know you don’t go there in your head.

Ozzy was so strong and overcame so much. He would text me: ‘I'm in pain. This thing, it's getting me down.’ I would just say: ‘You're the strongest man I know.’ So, I expected him to overcome everything like he’s Superman because, to me, that's who Ozzy Osbourne was.

He bounced back time after time after time. So certainly, I don’t know whether it was expected, but I was not ready. And the hardest day I've ever been through was his funeral. I flew to his funeral in England, and I delivered a eulogy. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.

What made him your best friend?

Humor was what bonded us. Sharon would tell you that we were like two 11-year-olds when we got together. We were annoying to anyone else. It was difficult taking us both to the same dinner because we would be giggling and making inappropriate jokes and laughing at things no-one even vaguely understood. And we would be shuddering with tears of laughter, so we couldn’t speak.

That's what made the friendship special. We understood each other in situations where, perhaps, other people didn't understand us.

And as friends, there were huge life events for both of us where one of us helped get the other one through. And there were events in our lives that happened, and we had a connection. I miss him.

• Hollow is out now via TLG/Zoid.
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

As fast friends and close collaborators, Eric Clapton and Duane Allman formed one of rock guitar’s most potent partnerships.

They may not have been in a band together per se, but that didn’t stop them from working together on one of Slowhand’s most iconic recordings.

At the turn of the 1960s, the Allman Brothers Band guitar hero was a Clapton fan. The feeling was mutual. Clapton said Allman’s turn on Wilson Pickett’s Hey Jude was the greatest rock guitar playing he’d ever heard.

Allman wanted to meet Clapton. And so, when he caught wind that he was coming to town to record a new record, Allman requested a meeting through a mutual contact.

“I said to Tom Dowd [producer for both the Allman Brothers and Derek and the Dominos], ‘Man, you’ve got to call me when he comes to town,’” Allman told Good Times magazine in 1971, which was re-published in the November 1991 issue of Guitar World. “‘I want to hear him play, and I want to meet him.’

“He’s a good player and I’ve always admired him a lot – his style and everything he ever did,” Allman continued. “So Dowd told me, ‘He’s going to be in. Come down.’ So I got down there, and Eric knew who I was – he’d heard some of my records and stuff.”

The pair, clearly fans of one another, decided to work together then and there. This was no ordinary collaboration, though. Allman caught Clapton at a good time.

With his band Derek and the Dominos, Slowhand was about to set to work on what would become Layla & Other Assorted Love Songs – a magnus opus that would be widely regarded as one of Clapton's finest works.

“He said, ‘Okay, man. We’re going to make us a record here, and we’re going to have two guitar players instead of one,’” Allman remembered. “Then we made the Layla album.

“And we worked our butts off on it! It’s a good record! Everybody got behind it, with no [ego] trips or anything. It’s just good music all the way through. And it was a pleasure to do it.”

The impromptu partnership would become the beating heart of some of Layla’s… most iconic guitar moments. On tracks like I Am Yours and Nobody Knows You, Allman’s landmark slide guitar work injected the record with elevated dynamics and melody.

Little Wing, Tell the Truth and Key to the Highway showed Allman and Clapton’s potent chemistry. He even played a starring role on Layla, twinning with Clapton for the opening iconic riff. Not bad for an off-the-cuff collaboration.

The pair continued their partnership after the Layla sessions, sharing the stage across a handful of Derek and the Dominos gigs. Tragically, before they got a chance to enter the studio again together, Allman died in a motorcycle accident less than a year later, in October 1971.

It made Layla & Other Assorted Love Songs their final, and only, record together.

But Allman was eternalized in the Slowhand repertoire, with his slide playing in particular stealing the spotlight on Layla. His work proved to be a fruitful source of inspiration for Clapton.

“It’s all in the wrists,” Allman said of his technique at the time. “Eric is coming along on his slide. He’s doing okay. He ain’t no Duane Allman of the slide guitar, but he's doing all right!”

Everyone at Guitarist was deeply saddened to learn the news that Steve Clarke, the vintage guitar expert who authored the Famous Frets books, died recently after a short illness.

Though not someone who often stepped into the spotlight – at least not without a guitar in his hands – Steve inspected and authenticated some of the most famous guitars in the world, including Rory Gallagher’s 1961 Stratocaster and dozens more in the course of his work with renowned auction house Bonhams and for his reference books.

Like the best experts, Steve’s enthusiasm for his subject went well beyond a mere ‘job’. If it were possible to ‘hear’ the twinkle in someone’s eye over the phone, you could surely do so Steve’s when he called Guitarist and said: “Hiya, Jamie, are you sitting down? I think I’ve got something you might be very interested in…”

Though always the soul of discretion when working on high-profile instruments, Steve relished sharing detailed insights on the historic instruments that passed through his workshop whenever he was able to. And, indeed, the list of guitars he worked on over the years was like a roll call of legends: Peter Green’s 1931 National Duolian, Rory Gallagher’s 1961 Stratocaster, Paul Kossoff’s ‘Stripped ’Burst’ 1959 Les Paul Standard, Gary Moore’s ‘Red Strat’ and many more.

Born in Wythenshawe, Manchester, on 12 March 1955 (in a strange coincidence his two siblings were also both born on 12 March), Steve first fell in love with guitar watching Hank Marvin playing a Strat with The Shadows on Sunday Night At The London Palladium.

“He was about nine, maybe 10,” Steve’s wife, Anni Clarke, recalls. “And after he saw that, he actually made a cardboard guitar and drew frets and pickups on it, cut it out in the shape of a Strat with strings on it, and he tried to copy where they placed their fingers. His dad eventually got so sick of hearing Steve try to make guitar noises with his mouth, he said, ‘Do you think you’d take it up if we bought you one?’”

Steve never looked back. After cutting his teeth playing guitar in cabaret acts in working men’s clubs in the North of England and touring further afield in Europe, he became a pro guitarist just as punk was at its vitriolic height. He played with Manchester band The Drones, who were signed to Quarry management (who also looked after Status Quo) and toured extensively.

But while Steve loved the energy of the punk scene, it was not without its perils, Anni Clarke recalls: “I can remember once there was a student union club in Manchester called the Phoenix at the time, and he came off stage after a fantastic show and he actually had to stand under the shower with his clothes on, even his shoes, because he’d been spat at that many times. It was a really exciting time for Steve, but that was a side effect of punk that he wasn’t particularly keen on [laughs].”

Deepening his connection with guitar to include restoration and teching in the years that followed, Steve was prompted to become an author on guitars after writing to Guitar & Bass magazine urging them to give more comprehensive details of the famous instruments they covered.

To his credit, then-editor John Callaghan invited Steve to provide that very service to the magazine himself. And thus a new career was born as a scrupulously accurate and insightful writer on historic instruments, the highlight of which was the two-volume Famous Frets book series, which offered readers unprecedented detail on guitars belonging to Jan Akkerman, Marc Bolan and many other legendary players.

To this magazine’s great benefit, Steve also worked closely with Guitarist in later years, becoming a go-to expert on iconic guitars that came his way for authentication via Bonhams – most notably Rory Gallagher’s aforementioned ’61 Strat.

“I remember the day I told Steve I needed him to pop down to London to look at something special,” recalls Claire Tole‑Moir, head of Popular Culture at Bonhams. “I kept him guessing for a few days, before finally revealing it was Rory’s guitar – and he cleared his diary immediately. As with every guitar, he approached it with care and professionalism while taking a closer look at it.

“It was only at the end of the day when he was heading home, he rang me on the train and freaked out – just a little – that he had had Rory’s Strat in his hands that day. Like so many guitarists, for him, Rory was it. It was a humbling moment, and a day I know he treasured.

“Steve’s encyclopaedic knowledge about all vintage guitars was incredible,” Claire reflects. “But so was his passion for them – he loved understanding the history of a guitar, where it was used, by who, how the guitarist played and how all of those factors contribute to a guitar’s make-up. Not only was he a master guitar technician, he was also an undercover detective – and he loved the search.”

Anni Clarke agrees but says Steve’s scrupulous honesty about the guitars he inspected was what kept people coming back for his services as a restorer and authenticator, although Steve modestly referred to himself simply as ‘The anorak in the North’.

“He always said, ‘Tell them if it’s right, tell them if it’s wrong,’” Anni recalls, a personal maxim that is a fitting testament to the expertise, honesty and touch of humour that Steve brought to all his work, which was also his lifelong passion. He will be much missed.

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

For most bassists, getting the call to play alongside Black Sabbath guitar legend Tony Iommi would rank somewhere between fantasy and impossibility. For Becky Baldwin, it became reality after a single email snowballed into one of the biggest opportunities of her career.

What began as an invitation to record a couple of songs soon turned into playing bass guitar across Iommi’s new solo album – despite Baldwin spending the first studio session convinced she'd blown it.

“When I got to the studio they played me one of the songs – I think it was World Alone,” says Baldwin. “They asked what I thought, and I loved it immediately. Great riff, great melody, and the vocals sounded fantastic.

“Then they rewound the track and said: ‘Okay... now play along.’ That was terrifying. They were expecting me to perform in front of someone I admire enormously, with absolutely no preparation time.

“They said we could do as many takes as we needed, but they wanted to capture my first instincts. I asked whether they wanted me simply to double Tony’s riffs or whether they wanted something different.

“Tony just said, ‘Play whatever you think you'd naturally record if we weren’t here.’ So I thought, ‘Right... what would Geezer Butler do?’ I've studied Geezer’s bass playing for years, and I know Tony loves Geezer’s style, so I started there.

“Working songs out instantly isn't my strongest skill – I like to analyse things carefully, go back over sections, make notes and really learn them properly, so having all of that taken away, combined with the pressure of the situation, made me feel like I was falling apart.

“The whole time I was convinced I wasn't playing well, but they kept calling me back! Before I knew it I was playing bass on the entire album. And that first performance ended up being the take they used for World Alone.”

What do you think made you the right person for this album?

The producer, Mike Exeter, had seen my videos online and followed some of the touring work I’d been doing. I suppose he could tell I was heavily influenced by classic metal bass players, especially Geezer Butler, and thought I’d be a good fit.

They were also looking for a bass player who was local enough to get to the studio easily and fit into the recording schedule. The album had already been in the works for a while, but the Back to the Beginning show took up a lot of Tony’s time and pushed his schedule back a little.

By the time I arrived, most of the record was already done. The band was already in place, including Jørn Lande on vocals and Karl Brazil on drums, so I think I was the last piece of the puzzle.

How did they get in touch?

I first got an email from Tony’s manager. You know when you see the preview in your inbox and it mentions Tony Iommi? I thought, ‘Hang on... what's this?’ As I read more it said Tony was working on new music and wanted me to come to the studio. My first thought was that it couldn’t possibly be real.

Do you remember where you were when you got the email?

I was sitting on my sofa when it came through. I checked the sender, researched the website, confirmed it really was Tony’s management, and realized it was genuine. I immediately sent over my number, and Tony’s manager called me.

What was that phone call like?

He was incredibly casual about the whole thing. He just asked if I’d be interested in coming to the studio. Of course I was interested! I’ve been a fan for more than 20 years, and I’ve spent a huge amount of time learning about the history of heavy metal and how much of the genre exists because of Black Sabbath.

There was never going to be any answer other than yes. We arranged for me to visit Tony’s studio a couple of weeks later.

What happened when you got there?

Tony asked what I’d been up to, and I wanted to ask him loads of questions too, but it’s strange when you're talking to someone you feel like you already know because you’ve read every interview and every article they’ve ever done!

What was the first thing you did after you walked out of the studio?

I drove away from Tony’s house, pulled the car over and just sat there for a minute trying to process everything that had happened. I remember filming a short video on my phone, just talking about what I was thinking. I’ve never watched it back, but I wanted to capture that moment while it was still fresh!

Did you prepare any differently before going back?

One thing that actually worked in my favour after that first session was that I apologized for how underprepared I felt. I told them that, normally, I'd spend time living with the songs first. I'd chart them out, work through different ideas and arrive with everything properly prepared.

They completely understood because they’d thrown me in at the deep end. Their concern was that they didn’t want any music leaking before the album was ready, so they hadn’t wanted to send anything out in advance.

Eventually they decided to send me a couple of demo tracks at a time so I could prepare before each session. The later sessions felt much less intimidating.

Now that the album’s finished, what can people expect?

Naturally, there's a lot of Geezer in my bass playing because he’s always been one of my biggest influences. That's simply how I play bass, so I think listeners will hear that influence, but they’ll also notice that the bass isn’t quite as prominent in the mix as it was on classic Black Sabbath records.

That's partly just the way modern productions are. Bass guitar tends to sit differently in today's mixes compared to albums from the 1970s. So I’d say it’s a more modern interpretation of what people might expect from a Tony Iommi record.

Did you think much about the gear you were going to use?

I assumed I’d take my Rickenbacker 4001 because I use that for almost everything. Then I realized I had no idea what tunings Tony would be using.

For the later sessions I took two Rickenbackers – one set up for E-flat standard and another set up for D standard – which covered everything we needed. In the end I recorded the whole album using those two basses.

It felt appropriate because they’re very ’70s-style instruments, but they’re also simply the instruments I use all the time. That's my sound. The team already knew how I sounded from my previous work, so I figured they wanted me to sound like me rather than imitate someone else. Thankfully, it all worked out.

This all sounds like an overnight success story, but you've worked hard to get to this position.

I suppose it seems unusual that someone from Tony’s generation discovered me online, because when Black Sabbath started there obviously wasn’t the internet. But that's one of the positives of today's world – you can discover musicians you would never otherwise come across.

Growing up in Wiltshire, I didn't have loads of venues nearby bringing through the bands I wanted to see. There wasn't really a pathway to playing with those kinds of musicians. The internet changed that.

I started posting classic metal bass covers online while also playing every tiny venue I could across the UK and Europe. Over time people realized I genuinely loved this music. I wasn't just an internet personality – I was also out there playing real shows. Those two worlds started feeding into each other.

Getting the Mercyful Fate gig was already a huge step forward in my career, and I think once people saw how well that worked – and how accepting the fans were – it opened more doors. It showed that bringing a younger musician into a legendary band could actually work.

What's next for you?

I've got a few festivals with my band Fury and with Delilah Bon. We'll be working on a new Fury album, and it's looking quite likely that Mercyful Fate will be touring next year as well. So there are lots of exciting things on the horizon.

Chris Poland is best known as the original guitarist for Megadeth, appearing on the group’s first two records, 1985’s Killing Is My Business… and Business Is Good! and 1986’s Peace Sells… But Who’s Buying?

He’s the archetype for that group’s style, if you will. Beyond that, Poland’s oddball style – which stems from a nasty hand injury he suffered before he turned pro – is a pillar of Eighties thrash. But that’s not all there is to Poland’s playing.

“I came from a rock background – guys like Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix and Leslie West,” Poland says. “When I heard Jeff Beck’s Blow by Blow, I went down the rabbit hole of bands like Weather Report, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, Tony Williams with Allan Holdsworth and bands like that. My Ohm project and any other of my solo instrumental records are just me being influenced by this music.”

Going into Black Flame, Poland’s new album with Nuclear Messiah – which, by the way, features fellow former Megadeth men Marty Friedman, Glen Drover and Chris Adler – his rock and metal roots collided with his fusion sensibilities, creating an amalgam of six-stringery only Poland could conjure.

“Am I a fusion player? I don’t know,” Poland says. “But it was the Mahavishnu Orchestra’s The Dance of Maya on Guitars That Destroyed the World [a 1973 compilation album featuring the fretwork of John McLaughlin, Carlos Sanata, Leslie West and more] that really turned my head.

“When I first heard it, I hated it but couldn’t stop revisiting it. Until one day I got it.” Poland has been down this path before, like on 1990’s Return to Metalopolis. And, by the sound of Black Flame, Poland has still got it. It’s with that in mind that the 68-year-old virtuoso beamed in with GW to dig into the record.

How did Nuclear Messiah get off the ground?

It was the brainchild of Brian Perera, president of Cleopatra Records. I had worked with Brian on several projects before this and knew that if he was involved, it was going to happen.

When he explained who was involved, I was blown away. I was amazed by who he got to contribute to the album. That’s why it came out so great.

Nuclear Messiah seems to have been built around you, with others coming on board to pitch in. What was the process like?

Original song ideas started with Derek Hughes and Jürgen Engler. They’d send song ideas to me and I’d add parts to those, then other players would add their parts. That’s the beauty of the internet and ProTools.

Then Derek and Jürgen would mix everyone’s parts, and what you hear is the end result. Derek and Jürgen did such an amazing job mixing. It’s hard enough to mix one band. But on Black Flame, each song was different – with a different vibe and different artists. They need to be commended.

What was your rig like for this recording?

I used my Custom Audio Electronics rig that I’ve had for decades. I used an Egnater IE4 red face preamp with a modded Peavey 120/120 tube power amp with 5881 tubes in it, plus assorted pedals and rack effects. Bob Bradshaw’s system is my palette.

Fellow Megadeth alumni Marty Friedman, Glen and Shawn Drover, and Chris Adler appear on this record.

Yeah! Wow… between Marty, Chris and Glen and Shawn, that’s a lot of Mega talent. [Laughs] Each of them is legendary in their own right. Each of them brought their vibe to the record. It was my honor to be on this record with them and everyone else.

Pat Travers and Vinnie Moore also appear, adding more six-string firepower.

Oh, my God! Pat Travers! Snortin’ Whiskey? Holy shit, man… I loved that song and record. Pat’s phrasing and tone is peerless. And Vinnie Moore is the same. He has a lot of blues in his playing, but at the drop of a hat he can sweep and pick some impossible phrases.

Both have perfect bend pitch as well. All the other guitarists brought their own sound and feel. And then there’s Bumblefoot [Ron Thal], Joel Hoekstra, Lance Lopez and Mick Box; they’re all world-class players. Add Jürgen Engler to this list as well!

Electric Burn is cited as a highlight from Black Flame. What’s the story there?

Electric Burn is such a great track. I feel it has a lot to do with Chris Adler’s drumming. It’s relentless and at breakneck speed. Add Marty’s incredible soloing, especially the end of main solo ascending harmony section, and Marc Lopes’ intense vocal performance and you have a song that never gets old.

But my favorite moment is Arthur Brown’s performance on Ride the Sky. It gets me every time I hear it. But all the other songs are just as good. But that vocal – I just love it.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention William Shatner’s spoken‑word introduction…

William Shatner is a force of nature. He’s an amazing actor, but when I heard his spoken word back at the studio – which is the first of two takes, by the way – I realized he was speaking in perfect 3/4 time. I really don’t think he planned it. It just came out that way. That’s how good an orator he is.

That is how I wrote the music around his spoken word. By the way, Brian Perera wrote the words that Mr. Shatner spoke. I want to mention how welcoming he was when we went to his home. He’s such a great person with a great sense of humor. It’s something I’ll never forget.

What excited you about this project most?

I learned a lot making this record, including how to realize what works and what doesn’t work on the spot and when to let your best instincts take over. That said, I admit I asked to revisit a couple of solos I did after I turned them in. That was a luxury not often given. As far as my playing and writing goes, I hope it’s always evolving. I guess time will tell.

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

The Pretenders’ self-titled debut album turned 45 years old in 2025. It featured the guitar playing of the late James Honeyman-Scott, whom Chrissie Hynde believes made the record magic.

Honeyman-Scott was a major player in the new wave movement of the 1980s, spearheading two albums and an EP with the Pretenders before his untimely death in 1982.

Fast forward through the decades, and Hynde has become the only continuous original member. Yet, speaking in a fan Q&A hosted by the Guardian, Hynde downplayed her role in the band’s early success – and puts the spotlight firmly on Honeyman-Scott.

“I was staying in a freezing cold attic in a women’s boarding house in Tufnell Park, north London, and had probably written a few of the songs before I met them,” she says of Honeyman-Scott, Pete Farndon, and drummer Martin Chambers.

“Every guitar player I’ve had since James Honeyman-Scott has been influenced by him, for example: Johnny Marr,” she continues. Marr briefly joined the band after the Smiths broke up in 1987.

“The moment James came to my front door, I knew we’d be in a band together. I got friendly with Benji Lysaght – who produced and plays on [her 2025 solo album] Duets Special – after he came up to me in catering and said: 'Can I ask you something about James Honeyman-Scott?'

“It’s insane: Jimmy died aged 25. Only guitar players remember him, and yet he was the sound of the Pretenders.”

“I was an angry biker chick,” she adds, “but he brought out the melody.”

In the following years, Hynde spearheaded the band as the leader and figurehead of the Pretenders. The 1983 single, 2000 Miles, which is considered a Christmas song despite being lyrically tied to Honeyman-Scott’s passing, is a prime example of her own prowess.

“A year after he died, I was in the Sunset Marquis [in LA] thinking about him,” she recalls. “I rented a guitar and wrote 2000 Miles. I’ve always regretted that the rental company wouldn’t sell it to me because I wanted that guitar so much.”

Hynde has talked about her relationship with Honeyman-Scott in the past – once recalling a moment at a gig where she fell foul of her fellow guitarist's wrath because she stopped playing mid-gig.

It's fair to say that as recording gear has become more affordable, more portable and more user-friendly, there has been a massive increase in the number of musicians recording themselves at home, instead of hitting up professional studios to track their band's demos, EPs or even full albums.

Tracking at home has genuinely never been easier. If you’re recording guitar on your own, you can do so with just a few select pieces of gear. You don’t need to spend loads either, and it's totally possible to get pro-sounding recordings without stepping foot in a legit studio.

However, there are a few things to consider if you want your home-recorded guitars to be taken seriously. When I'm not reviewing gear and writing buyer's guides for Guitar World, I run a small company helping musicians with songwriting, production and performance. Based on that experience, I've put together a few tips to help you get better results when recording on your own.

Tips for recording at home

1. Practice before the session

I'm starting with an obvious one. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but it really is key. You might think you know your part, but as soon as you see that little red ‘record’ light glow on your screen, you can bet your bottom dollar that your fingers will completely forget what they’re doing. Red light fever is real.

So my advice is not to practice the part until you get it right; instead, practice it until you can't play it wrong. That way you'll nail it take after take, and you can focus on things like phrasing and tone, not just getting the notes in the right order.

2. Consider your space before you set up

Before wiring up your recording gear, have a look around the space you’re setting up in. Do you have room for everything? Is everything you need within easy reach? Are you going to be sitting or standing whilst recording, and can you easily control your DAW in that position?

You want to be comfortable whilst recording; anything that puts that in jeopardy can starve your creativity and effectively make your tracks suffer.

3. Invest in a good cable

You don’t have to drop a ton of cash here, but spending as much as you can afford on a good, noise-free guitar cable is definitely worth it if you’re recording at home.

Even a slightly noisy cable, when doubled, tripled, or quadrupled up, will start to become a real problem. You’ll get unwanted hum and hiss layered up on your track, meaning you’ll have to spend time either chopping it up or trying to EQ it out.

A decent cable is the way to go. Plus it’ll likely last longer too, meaning that the investment pays off in the end.

4. Double tracking is your friend

A very common trick for making your guitars sound bigger in a mix is double tracking. It essentially means recording the same part twice. Try to get the second part as close to the first one as possible. The natural differences in time and attack will give it a slightly different feel, but if played tightly enough, it will lock in and help your guitars punch more in the mix.

If you then pan these left and right, you can achieve some really nice, wide tones that envelop the listener. Want to go even bigger? Then you should try quad tracking.

5. Give capo/chord inversions a whirl

Similar to double tracking, using a guitar capo or even just different inversions can help make chords sound much more interesting. Say your song has a C, F, G chord sequence – record that with open chords and then use a capo on the third fret and play A, D, E. They’re the same chords, but they’ll ring out differently, and you’ll get a more interesting texture when recorded.

If you don’t have a capo, then maybe play the second part using barre chords – it will give a similar effect.

Essentially, just play around the fretboard, and you might discover some new and interesting voicings of the same chords you’re already playing. Some of these could even inspire new vocal melodies or interesting harmonies.

6. Think differently for each part

If you’re tracking guitar music that would traditionally be played by a band, then try to act like another guitarist when recording multiple guitar parts.

By that, I mean try to think differently. One trick is to use the above point and try out different inversions. If your go-to is to play mostly open chords, then for the second part, don’t play any open chords; maybe try to play everything further up the neck.

Another thing is to alter your physical connection with the instrument. So if you normally record sat down, for the second part you could try and play stood up. Or, maybe use a different thickness of guitar pick or, if you can be bothered, try out a different set of electric guitar strings.

Anything that can be changed, try changing it, as it might make enough difference on the recording for it to sound like it’s not the same person tracking everything.

If you’ve got the luxury of a gear collection, it’s also definitely worth experimenting with different guitars, amps, or pedals.

7. Listen intentionally

Whether you’re making the music all on your own or you’re playing on top of other people’s tracks, make sure you listen properly.

What other instruments are playing? What frequency ranges are they occupying? Could I potentially clash with them? Where are the vocals sitting? Is guitar needed on all of it? Really listen to what’s going on in the track and make sure that what you’re playing complements it and doesn’t override anything.

Try to put yourself in the mindset of a music listener, not a music maker.

8. Don’t be dominated by the click

Using a click is a great way to keep yourself in time – I use one on 95% of the things I record. However, try not to let the click stiffen you up. If you fixate on the click too much, it’s easy for your parts to then lose all feel and any natural swing they might have. Whether you’re playing to drums or not, try and use the click as a guide rather than a shackle.

If you trust your timing, try and brave it without a click! After all, tempo is just as much a sense of expression as dynamics or anything else.

Pros of recording at home

1. You’re not on the clock

Studio time is expensive and, if you’re not used to recording, it’s easy for time to just disappear. If you’re recording at home on your own, the only thing you’re wasting is your time (though it’s not wasted if you’re learning!).

2. It’s great practice for a real studio

Recording at home is probably the best practice you can do if you’re thinking of one day recording in a professional studio. It helps you work alongside a click/other instruments; you get used to that little red light glowing up, and you know more about how to layer up guitar tracks.

3. You might get good at it!

If you start out experimenting with recording your own guitar parts at home, who knows where it might take you? If you get good at it, people might start to come to you, and you could edge towards being a producer.

4. Less pressure = more creativity

Some players thrive in a less pressured environment. Recording on your own, in the right space, can be a really chilled place to create, so you may well end up making the best music you possibly can.

Cons of recording at home

1. It's easier to not commit to an idea

Because you’re not on the clock, you constantly change your mind about particular guitar tones or parts. You can hyper-focus on things that don’t really matter in the bigger picture. If you’re recording in a studio, you have to commit a little more, which can lead to being more productive.

2. You may find better gear in studios

The gear that’s available for budget home studios now is great; there’s no denying it. However, tracking guitars through vintage tube amps, using quality microphones, preamps, and EQs will undoubtedly result in better guitar sounds.

3. You won't have a producer to work with

It’s great to have total control over what you’re recording, but sometimes the trained ear of a good producer can really set you on the right path. You might have thought your tricky, string-skipping riff was the perfect backdrop to verse two, but when it’s all said and done, the producer’s call to just try power chords instead was the right one.

Gear essentials

You don’t need to spend a lot to start recording, but as a starting point a decent audio interface is a must-have. You want something that offers low latency, because any noticeable latency will instantly kill the vibe.

There are a number of ways to get great guitar tones at home:

1. Guitar amp
The first is using a traditional guitar amp. You plug into your amp as normal. You plug a microphone into your interface, and you place that mic in front of your amp. If you’re new to recording guitar, you might be surprised at how much difference the position of the microphone affects the sound. Experiment with different mic placements and angles – how close it is to the center of the speaker cone, etc.

This way you can use an amp that you know well, and simply record that.

Some amps even have USB outputs so you can record direct to your computer without the need for an interface.

2. Plugins
Plugins are another way of recording guitar at home. In this instance, plugins are digital software emulations of many classic amps. Using these to track guitars on your own means you can record almost silently, plus you can make changes to your tone even after you’ve recorded the part.

Plug your guitar straight into your audio interface and load up your preferred plugin. There are lots of different ones available to download, many of which offer free trials before committing. See our list of the best plugins for guitar for more recommendations that we've tested.

3. Modeler
Using an amp modeler is another popular way of recording guitars on your own. Modern modelers can replicate the sound of lots of different sought-after tube amps. They’ll usually have a bunch of effects on board too.

Depending on the unit itself, you’ll probably take either an XLR, jack, or USB cable out of the modeler and into your interface or computer, and you’re set to record straight away.

Some will come loaded with plenty of Impulse Responses (IRs), though you can always download more should you want them. They are particularly good for recording, as they are snapshots of various speaker cabinets, mics, and rooms, so they can give you different options when it comes to finding the right sound.

Other essentials
You’ll also want to make sure you’ve got a good set of monitor speakers or monitor headphones. Ideally, you want something that offers a flat response; that way, when you hear your guitars back, you know that the gear isn’t adding any frequencies and what you’re hearing is just what you’ve laid down.

Finally, you’ll want either a DAW or some sort of multi-track recorder. A DAW (digital audio workstation) is a piece of software that enables you to record and edit audio, e.g. Logic, Ableton, Pro Tools, etc. Some you have to pay for, but there are some fantastic free options too. Apple offers GarageBand for free, which is certainly good enough to get started.

If you’d rather steer clear of computers, then worry not; the likes of Tascam, Boss, Behringer and more offer standalone units that allow you to record multiple tracks on top of one another.

With D’Addario shot down for (supposedly) using AI-generated music in a product demo, and female content creators replaced by horror-doll avatars, the knives are out again for the technology of our times. Giving you the news in quickfire conversational style, it’s… Fret Buzz.

Good to see AI in the headlines, for a change. Has it done something astonishing to elevate human existence, like curing cancer or restoring the dolphin population?

Don’t be silly. It’s just stepped up its dead-eyed mission to decimate the arts sector. And given musicians a few new reasons to march on the gated communities of Silicon Valley’s pallid, god-complex princelings.

But what does this have to do with D’Addario? Don’t they make good, honest guitar strings, not insidious lines of code that will lead us to fiery armageddon?

You’re right: D’Addario does indeed produce some of the very best strings in the world. However, its PR crisis management needs a little work.

I mean, how much scandal can a G-string generate? Actually, don’t answer that.

It’s all kicked off over a demo video for the new NYXL HD strings. With the blogosphere accusing D’Addario of creating the music using AI, the firm’s scattershot, flustered denial – issued over several days – seemed oddly unconvincing, like a frosty-faced Mötley Crüe insisting they honestly have no idea what happened to that attaché case full of cocaine.

Sounds pretty mortifying. What else has AI been up to lately?

Everybody’s favorite semi-sentient technology is keeping busy. Of course, there’s AI’s ‘day job’ – stealing musicians’ copyrighted material to train its models, spewing soulless dreck across streaming sites and making a career in music financially unviable. But its latest trick is lifting the videos of (mostly female) content creators and repurposing them in various dystopian ways.

This conversation is about to turn from flippant to quite dark, isn’t it?

Afraid so. In June, GW reported how some of the world’s best-known online players – from Sophie Lloyd to Larissa Liveir – have seen their videos replicated in minute detail with an AI-rendered avatar in their place. Seriously, check out the AI facsimile of Sophie Burrell’s Sultans Of Swing, with an eerily glossy Bratz doll pulling the exact same shapes.

I’ve just watched it. That thing should be killed with fire.

What really stings is that the AI version clocked 17k-plus ‘likes’ that by rights belong to Burrell. But it gets bleaker. Ukrainian guitarist Tanya Yakimova has reported her likeness being used to scam fans and generate deep-fake AI porn. Given all that, Bud Cole’s recent comments on AI were about as welcome as pubic lice on a tourbus.

The Fender CEO? Surely he’s keeping his head down after that Strat lawsuit debacle?

You would think. But he’s just compared cover bands to “a sort of analog AI” (although he’s since rowed back, a bit). Which is totally missing the point.

You’re going to tell me why, aren’t you?

Every human musician – even if they’re covering an old song – has their own individual, imperfect, messy thumbprint, and an emotional impetus behind what they’re playing. AI understands nothing of glorious human fallibility. It’d probably take Jimmy Page’s classic Heartbreaker solo and fix the bum notes.

Is there any good news here?

Only that maybe AI is so busy defrauding musicians that it won’t have time to take physical form and force mankind to toil in a choking warren of copper mines. You have to look on the bright side, right?

“My dad's a plumber, and I did plumbing with him as a kid,” says John Osborne, guitarist and co-songwriter behind acclaimed country-rock duo the Brothers Osborne.

“I wanted to not be a plumber so bad that I practiced guitar every damn day. Then, the older I get, the more I realize, ‘I’m just a plumber with a guitar!’ [Laughs] I’m just showing up to do a job, hoping I do it well.”

If you’ve ever heard this man play, it’s clear that obsession paid off. Across their four LPs, he and singer/sibling T.J. pair classy Nashville twang with pop hooks, elevated by the kind of blazing musicianship suited for an arena stage flanked by pyrotechnics.

It’s no surprise Fender tapped him for this year’s signature John Osborne Telecaster, inspired by his own modded-out ’68 – B-bender and all.

The design draws on many years of his own tweaking, experimentation and “aha” moments. There’s the maple neck, the “lifeblood” of the instrument. The quirky pickguard, which “lends itself to the almost outlaw era of Teles.”

The custom pickups, which nail that sweet spot of “spank.” Then there’s that B-bender, which channels classic pedal-steel sweetness by raising the B string’s pitch a whole step to C#.

“You’re trying to make it an emotional thing,” he tells us of the device. “When you get it, it’s so much fun. You get to create a sound you’ve never made before. Once you get through the honeymoon period, you realize, “Now I have this other tool to use when it’s necessary – emphasis on when it’s necessary.”

Osborne gave us an overview of his signature Tele, shared his history with the B-bender and mused about finding the perfect balance of craftsmanship and technique.

You’ve talked about how you constructed your current guitar, making modifications over the years to the ’68 Tele you bought at age 21. Was the idea with this signature model to recreate that precisely?

The idea was to replicate it as precisely as possible, with all of the slight – and maybe large – modifications I made over time. This is where the guitar has ended up over 20 years of experimenting. I wanted to recreate that because it really is a unique Tele in so many ways. I wanted whoever picks it up to realize, “This is very classic but also very different.”

Tell us about your history with the B-bender.

When I was in late high school, I became obsessed with Brent Mason. That’s after I did my long stints of wanting to be a rock player and a blues player and all the different genres I’ve encountered.

I heard a solo on the radio on an Alan Jackson song, and I thought, “Who is bending that note so perfectly?”

The song is called Who’s Cheatin’ Who? It has these bends that are so snappy, and I couldn’t figure out what was going on. I learned how to do it with my fingers, but could never quite get the sound right.

I remember watching a Brad Paisley video and seeing this contraption attached to his strap: “What is going on here?” Through that and a little investigating – the Internet was still in its infancy and you really had to dig – I heard of this thing called the B-bender.

I never had enough money to put one on my guitar. For the longest time, I just had one guitar, the ’68 Tele. I remember opening up for Brad Paisley in his early career, and his tech was joking with me, “Don’t do the B-bender thing. That’s Brad’s thing.”

Then he looked at my guitar and was like, ‘Wait, you don’t have one!” I was like, “Yeah, I had to learn how to do it like this.” But I was always obsessed with that sound.

When we recorded our second record, [2018’s] Port Saint Joe, a phenomenal Tele player/artist/songwriter/producer named Keith Gattis – a dear friend of mine who passed away [in 2023] – let me borrow his B-bender.

At the time, he was playing it on a lot of Dwight Yoakam’s stuff. His B-bender playing is otherworldly – it’s got so much stank on it. And when I played that on the record, I realized, “This is so much fun.”

I finally could get all of the sounds I heard, and it came very naturally because I learned how to do a lot of those things with my hands. After that, I became obsessed with B-benders. I don’t know if I know how to bend a B string in tune anymore because I have a contraption that does it for me. [Laughs]

Dead Man’s Curve is considered a modern-guitar classic. Does it feel like a signature moment for you?

It does, and it doesn’t. At the end of the day, I love that moment. I love the song Muskrat Greene that goes into Dead Man’s Curve. It’s a time to show off and step out there as a player, but first and foremost I consider myself a songwriter, and the song is paramount to anything else. If the song lends itself to more or less guitar, that’s what’s needed.

The older I get, the more I believe that. I grew up listening to Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan – the kings.

But as you grow up, you realize there has to be a reason for that guitar, and it’s the song. We have songs with zero solos because I didn’t think it was necessary. I thought it would be too much icing on the cake. I just play rhythm and make it a textural thing.

At the end of the day, the guitar is just a tool for the song – even though, when you’re young, you think the song is just the tool for the guitar. [Laughs]

The reason the Stairway to Heaven solo is so great is that it’s a tension release.

Yeah! I love jamming and jam bands, listening to the Allmans and anything Derek Trucks is involved in. I love bands that solo, and I’m hanging on to every note.

The format we’re in, you have three to four minutes to have a song and maybe a moment like that. I’ve always treated the solo as its own mini-song, something you can sing along to.

I’m just trying to service the song. But we do have a few moments in the set where we unwind and let our fingers go. We need those as players. It’s so much fun to stretch out.

I know the original Tele neck was the heart and soul of your guitar. What makes it so special?

The first thing you notice when you pick up a guitar is what the neck feels like. The back of your hand touching the back of the neck, it immediately informs what is about to happen with you and the guitar.

It’s this subconscious thing. Every time I picked up my guitar, it felt like putting on your favorite pair of jeans. It’s like, “Damn, these things fit like a glove.” It has a lot to do with how smooth the neck is. We did our best to get there.

You can’t beat 60 years of playing on the back of a neck, but it’s very, very close. But also the rounded edges of the fingerboard indicate there’s a lot of natural hand wear on it. It becomes a little more contoured and ergonomic on your hand.

The last thing you want is to feel like you’re fighting your guitar to get sound out. That can be fine, but you want to enjoy it and have it be really comfortable. You can talk body woods all day, but you’re not touching the body – you’re holding on to that neck; that’s where the expression comes from.

It’s got the maple cap, and I’ve always found ’68-era Teles to have an interesting spank because of that. I found out that Brad Paisley’s original is a ’68. There’s something special about that year.

• “I’ve been playing B-benders since 1999, so I was eager to get my mitts on this guitar”: Fender John Osborne Telecaster review
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

In any discussion concerning the greatest alternate pickers to walk the earth, names like John Petrucci, Paul Gilbert, Al Di Meola, Jason Becker, Chris Impellitteri and Shawn Lane will never be far from guitarists’ lips.

These are the players that set the bar impossibly high with their near-perfect storm of precision, dexterity and control – at times often sounding like they’ve beamed in from a different planet altogether.

If there’s one name out of the younger generation that could undoubtedly sit among the ultimate pickers and super shredders, however, it’s 26-year-old Chilean guitarist Bastian Martinez, better known to the online community as Baxty.

Having already inked up deals with Neural DSP, Jim Dunlop and Ernie Ball, this year he announced his debut signature model through Kiesel, and he’s now adding the final touches to a debut album featuring high-profile guests such as Joe Satriani.

It only takes a quick scroll online to see the likes of Tosin Abasi, Misha Mansoor and Rick Graham praising Baxty’s incredible musicianship and flawless delivery, and – having been invited to teach at John Petrucci’s Guitar Universe camp last year – it would be fair to say the Santiago-based prodigy now has a lot of friends in high places.

It was perhaps inevitable that Baxty, whose father and grandfather played guitar, would one day pick up the instrument. By age six, he’d grown accustomed to hearing the music of Ozzy Osbourne, Symphony X and Yngwie Malmsteen around the house.

The greatest education came in the form of a G3: Live in Tokyo DVD that he’d watch religiously, basking in the magnificence of Satriani, Petrucci and Steve Vai – three musical magicians who each had their own otherworldly quality when it came to touch and feel.

“I fell in love with how they made their guitars sound,” Baxty says from his home studio. “Steve had all these whammy tricks while Joe had this strong melodic voice. John was even more out there technically, which made me want to work harder.”

Besides those guys, who else ended up influencing you?

When I was 15, I saw Guthrie Govan on YouTube. It was inspiring to see how far he had taken the instrument, and it made me want to practice more. Later on, I got into Nick Johnston, who likes to blend piano with guitar on tracks like Gemini.

He doesn’t just write guitar music, which is why I find him interesting. I also love how Fredrik Åkesson from Opeth plays; there’s so much feeling and intensity in his lines, especially in the note choices and bends.

A guitarist of your caliber could pick any company in the world for an endorsement deal. What made you choose Kiesel?

They sent me a guitar in 2024, and I knew straightaway how well it suited me in terms of comfort and sound. I visited the factory in 2025 and Jeff Kiesel handed me a guitar.

I think they were like, “Let’s see if this internet guy can play!” I’m not faking anything because my dad always told me to be myself. Give me any guitar and I’ll be happy. It’s like a disconnect from the world. Playing guitar makes me feel alive.

It must be wild to see players like Misha Mansoor and Tosin Abasi saying how brilliant you are.

The first mind-blowing moment was when Joe Satriani commented on a post in 2022. I also couldn’t believe it when Tosin sent me a guitar and started sharing clips of me. Then John Petrucci inviting me to Guitar Universe was insane.

He and his wife Rena had seen my masterclasses online and thought I’d be a great fit. I thought it was someone impersonating John; I didn’t fully believe it until I saw my photo on the Guitar Universe website.

At the camp, I met Chris Broderick, who is guesting on my album. All these guitar legends are paying attention to what I’m doing. I don’t know why! It feels weird, but I’m happy about it.

Joe Satriani will also be appearing on your album. What can we expect?

I’d written one track that represented a dream, which felt like a good place for Joe – because of his 1989 album [Flying in a Blue Dream] and the fact that it’s a dream come true. What’s interesting is that it’s almost what Dream Theater would sound like with Joe on guitar.

This album will be like a natural connection between ambient stuff and heavier ideas. I love songs with a melodic climax. Sometimes simplicity can blow your mind more than the technicality. It’s great if you can alternate-pick crazy lines, but if you can’t bend, you’re a bad player.

You’re playing in real time on your videos, but you still get accusations of faking it.

People say things like, “This is sped up,” but I’m kinda grateful because it means they find it impressive. One guy commented on every post saying I was a Petrucci copy that didn’t have my own sound. I’m still trying to find my own voice, but if someone thinks I sound like John Petrucci, I’m fine with that.

What’s the secret to alternate picking so fast?

I’ve seen some Cracking the Code YouTube videos [hosted by Troy Grady] and felt stupid after watching them. I didn’t understand. I’m not reading a biology book. What I will say is that alternate picking is a 3D movement from the wrist rather than straight up and down.

If you want to go fast, you need to test your body. New things will feel uncomfortable, but keep pushing. See where the tension is, slow down, then eventually build back up. It takes time.

What exercises would help people build up speed and precision?

Try playing a line that goes up the 16th, 19th and 22nd frets of the G-string followed by the 15th fret of the high E and back. Once you have that going, occasionally add in the 19th and 22nd on the E. It’s good because you are mixing stretches with fast alternate picking and string-skipping.

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

Prior to embarking on an unplugged tour, Cardinal Black guitarist Chris Buck decided he needed a really good acoustic guitar. He chose a lovely used Atkin OM37, but there was one slight hitch: it needed a pickup system. After doing some research, Chris decided on LR Baggs HiFi Duet and asked me to fit it for him.

Although some of the procedures are specific to LR Baggs, much of the work required applies to acoustic pickup systems in general. The HiFi Duet comprises two pickups and a small electret microphone, all of which attach to the bridge plate. There’s also a control unit with an internal preamp and an output socket that doubles as a strap button.

Holey Moley

The scariest procedure in most acoustic pickup system installations is making and/or widening holes in the body.

The first hole I’m referring to is the one that often needs to be drilled through one end of the saddle slot to install an under-saddle piezo pickup. Thankfully, there’s no need to do so with this system, but some under-saddle pickups require an angled hole and care must be taken not to drill through the X-brace.

Most pickup systems have the output socket mounted through the tailblock and that usually means widening the strap button hole to around 12.5mm or ½ inch. Loading a ½-inch bit into your drill and just going at it is dangerous because the bit will most likely bounce around before it gets a grip and chip the finish.

Granted, the Atkin is reliced and that takes some pressure off, but I’m sure all but the most ardent anti-relicers can agree there’s a difference between tasteful ageing and damage.

To avoid the latter, my advice is to use a step cutter because they’re easy to get hold of, inexpensive and ideal for the job. I bought my first set from the ‘middle of Lidl’ several years ago and they’re still going strong.

The existing strap-button hole will help to guide the step cutter and the hole should get incrementally wider while retaining a crisp edge.

Once the step cutter has opened up the outer part of the hole to the required diameter, I swap over to a regular drill bit of the same diameter to continue through the tail block. If you can get your arm inside, try pressing a scrap chunk of wood up against the tailblock to minimise tear out and don’t forget to vacuum out any debris.

LR Baggs suggests fitting the output socket assembly after installing the pickups and before the microphone. Given all the messing around inside the body needed to install the socket, I decided to fit it first, rather than risk knocking the pickups off the bridge plate.

The entire socket assembly is threaded and a cover screws onto the inside end to protect the solder joints. A nut fixes it in place, and both can be adjusted to match the depth of any tail block so that about a millimetre of the wider threaded section protrudes outside the body.

It may take a few attempts to get it just right, but you can make things simpler by placing a long screwdriver or a piece of dowel through the hole that’s thin enough to enter the socket.

You can use this to guide the socket assembly through the tailblock hole and slip over the first washer with the wider aperture followed by the second one, which goes over the narrower threaded section.

The small nut goes on next and, once it’s finger tight, you can push an Allen wrench through the holes in the narrow threaded section to prevent the assembly from turning as you fully tighten the nut. Lastly, the outer collar/strap button is screwed on to cover the small nut and washers.

Fixing The Bug

LR Baggs specifies a minimum ¾-inch of bridge plate in front of the bridge pins for mounting the sensors. I used my phone camera to look inside the Atkin’s body and found there was just enough space to mount the pickups. After ensuring the surface was smooth and free from glue, I gave it a wipe down with isopropyl alcohol as instructed.

Speaking of instructions, none are included with the product, but you can scan a printed QR code and follow the link to a video demo explaining the installation procedure. Like other LR Baggs pickup systems, the HiFi Duet comes with a jig for aligning and installing the pickups.

This comprises a clear Perspex plate and two pairs of rods. Each pair of rods has a different diameter and you should choose the pair that is closest in diameter to your guitar’s pin holes. The rods mount onto the plate and can be adjusted to align with the outer pin holes before you tighten them up.

The short end of the rods are placed through the outer pin holes, and the pickup positions should be aligned with the saddle with the leadout wires running between the top E and B pins and the low E and A pins. They are then temporarily fixed to the Perspex plate using small sticky pads that are stuck over the LR Baggs logo.

If you’re feeling confident, you can peel off the adhesive pad coverings and go ahead with the installation. I chose to perform a dry run before exposing the adhesive to assess the difficulty of getting the rods to go through the pin holes. It turned out to be fairly easy and I just went ahead with the installation.

After pressing the pickups firmly against the bridge plate, the alignment jig can be pulled clear leaving the pickups in situ.

Power Stations

It’s suggested that this is a good juncture to test that everything is working before installing the microphone. In order to do that, the pickups must be connected to the control unit and the battery pouch must be installed so the system can be powered up.

To make battery changes easier, the pouch is secured by Velcro so it can be taken in and out. The conventional location is up against the neck block, but you should ensure that the pouch doesn’t obstruct truss rod access. For this guitar, I decided to put the pouch in sideways, rather than upright.

The control unit has a moulded notch to clear any braces placed in the vicinity of the soundhole. If the braces are unusually thick, it may prevent the control unit from attaching firmly, so you need to find out if it will fit and identify the best position. I had no problems finding a workable location and I used low-tack masking tape for a visual reference.

After connecting the battery, pickup and output wires, I peeled off the adhesive pad coverings and stuck the control unit under the soundboard. I put the strings back on the guitar, tested it through an amplifier and everything worked as it should with an even string-to-string balance and a strong output level. The strings were then removed once again to install the microphone.

Final Hook Up

Installing the microphone is done by feel, rather than jig. It’s positioned between the two pickups, and the leadout wire passes between the D and G bridge pins. When positioning it, try to leave sufficient space for the ball-ends of the strings. The microphone cable must also be connected to the control unit by feel, but again it’s not tricky at all.

The final part of the installation involves tidying up all the cables that are loose inside the body. Pliable metal hooks with adhesive pads are provided and LR Baggs is very generous with both the hooks and spare adhesive pads.

In fact, if you store all the spares in the box, you’ll be able to transplant the entire pickup system to another guitar if you ever decide to. I have also seen identical metal hooks at B&Q if you need more.

I prefer to partially pre-bend the hooks prior to installation because it makes it easier to gauge when the wires are in position. After all, this is yet another part of the installation that is done by feel. I placed the first hook just behind the bridge plate and used it to secure the pickup and microphone wires.

Although some fix the hooks to the soundboard itself, I prefer to keep that to a minimum. Instead, I attach the remaining hooks to the side just under the kerfing, with the second hook placed as far inside the body as I could reach to retain the output wire.

The third hook was positioned on the bridge side of the waist to grab the pickup, microphone and output wires, with a fourth on the other side of the waist. The object of the exercise is to ensure that there are no loose cables inside the body that can rattle about and create unwanted noises.

Plug & Play

When testing the sensors without the microphone installed, I had noticed that I was still getting signal when the mixer control was fully set to ‘Mic’.

That’s because the mixer also acts like a crossover to attenuate the pickup’s highs while retaining some of the low-frequency content to beef up the tone in microphone mode.

The mic level control provides additional tone shaping and, overall, the system delivers a dynamic and natural acoustic tone that’s pleasingly devoid of piezo quack.

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

It’s a dreary April afternoon, and we’re getting ready to talk to slacker indie hero Kurt Vile about his new record, Philadelphia’s Been Good to Me. The lead single, Chance to Bleed, begs to be blared from a car stereo at dusk on a humid August night.

Here in Michigan, a few 70-degree days in March had us hopeful we could place ourselves in Vile’s snapshot of Philly summers by taking the call from our back porch. But with grey skies and temperatures back in the mid-40s, we opt for the living room – a space mostly commandeered by this writer’s one-year-old daughter.

As we clear the books and toys she’s scattered across the floor to make room to move around during the call, we’re reminded of how often Vile has written about his own daughters.

“Girls are the sweetest and the best,” he says. “As soon as the kid shows up, life is completely changed. It’s psychedelic and beautiful, because that kid is part of you. They go through all the phases that you went through, and you watch through them.”

As we pace up and down our living room, we talk gear – we had to ask about the Gretsch Tennessean he picked up from Travis Good of the Sadies – but the conversation keeps circling back to a word Vile uses more than once to describe the record – “homespun.”

Much of it was written and recorded after dark in his basement studio, when he could lean into what he calls the natural cycle of life – catching up with himself and creating the loose, sprawling music he’s known for. That balance between family life and the habits of the past shows up in the lyrics, too.

On Zoom 97, you sing about trading substances for time with your girls. Are you sober?

I quit drinking in 2018. Alcohol is a tough one. You think it’s casual – which it is, because it’s ingrained in us – but before you know it, that’s kind of the nastiest one.

That concept – “my baby girls, they keep me high. Ain’t on no trips, no LSD, pure love drug for me” – it’s true. I definitely don’t party the way I used to, but I’m not straight edge. I like weed, probably because it makes me hear music like I was in high school. I don’t do it all the time, but it’s a nice vacation for anyone who plays music.

How do you come up with lyrics?

Sometimes the lyrics come out fast, but obviously it’s my trade. Zoom 97 is one I’m really proud of, because that one is actually the first song we got for this album that I knew was a quality song. I had that Gold Tone mandolin riff on a recorder. The people at Gold Tone down in Florida, they’ve hooked me up a few times. They gave me this little, tiny guitar. It sounds like a mandolin, but it’s just six strings.

Anyway, it was summertime. My new bandmate, Matt [Jugenheimer], was there – there’s always got to be something new to keep you going, or a new guy in the fold – and I just heard [the riff] back. I had some melody in there, but then I didn’t have the words. I just said, “I know this is catchy; let’s add synth here.”

And then, literally, just because I was there and because the mics were on, I sat out back and wrote the lyrics. They came to me because I was there to catch them. It turned out cool. If my brain is open, one thing leads to another once I start writing.

What do you do to try to get your brain open?

Ideally, you want to be present. There are so many different ways to write a song, and there’s no rules. In the old days, I’d think about it too much. “Why am I not writing a song?” You can’t force anything.

What about when you’re in the middle of recording and have to pick up the kids?

Yeah, that happens. You get used to that. You’ve got to embrace that. I’ve always been a nighttime man. After a certain point, everybody’s asleep, and then you’ve got the whole nighttime to yourself. But the reality is that during the day, ideas come.

It might be fragmentary. There are times in your life where you’ve got to think ahead or you’re just tired. In those interruptions, you get ideas from being in flux.

You’re at a point in your career where some of your heroes have become your collaborators. What’s it like to make that transition from fan to peer?

I’m definitely a shy person, so whenever I meet somebody at first, I’m nervous. I can’t help it, but you’ve got to make yourself uncomfortable. It’s similar to playing live; you’ve got to fuck up in front of lots of people to get it right. You’ve just gotta be a sponge – take it in and try to be chill.

What was it like recording with John Prine?

John came into the studio last minute. I know people that work for his label and I had played with him on stage enough times. He heard my version of Speed of the Sound of Loneliness, and I knew he liked it. Over time, he would remember who I was.

When he showed up at the studio, he was so nice. He said, “You know, I’d love to sing with you, Kurt,” and we recorded that song [How Lucky from 2020’s Speed, Sound, Lonely KV EP] in two takes. That’s the way they do it over there in Nashville. It was unbelievable.

How did you meet Neil Young?

I finally did see Neil up in Toronto with my friend Travis from the Sadies, who’s one of my favorite guitar players of all time, and a good friend of mine. Neil loves Travis. Travis was the first person I ever was standing next to who knew me while Neil was around and actually said, “This is Kurt.”

The beauty of Neil is he’s 100 percent his own world. He’s got friends, but he’s just in his own realm. So you just say hi when you can, and you assume he won’t remember who you are until maybe one day he does. You see Neil on stage – he’s the same Neil Young he ever was.

Is that Travis’ Gretsch Tennessean you’re playing on the new record?

Yeah, and if you ever see him play, he just shreds so hard. When you watch him play, it’s unreal. If you look at the fretboard of this guitar, it’s just so worn in from his playing. He sat in when we played Toronto and lent me the guitar to see if I wanted to buy it. I immediately laid down something with the band.

Some guitars just sound and feel great and play themselves. It’s a genuinely great guitar. I just kept playing it. It sounds so good in the studio. It’s got really hot pickups. It’s the lead guitar on Zoom 97, 99th Song and Every Time I Look at You. It really cuts through.

Are you bringing it out on the road?

Yeah, I’ve started bringing it on the road. One of my favorite live guitars – I’m not sure if it made the record – is a sunburst 1965 Jazzmaster that J Mascis put into my hands when I was working on his record up in Massachusetts. He went to some store and the guy was trying to peddle this Jazzmaster, and J has so many of ’em.

He actually showed up at J’s studio and put it in my hands, which was the coolest part of all. I have reissue Jazzmasters that are made to seem vintage. I got them from Fender and I love them – but to have an old one is… it really plays. That was another example of a guitar that plays itself.

As far as guitars on the record that I played, shit, there were so many. I’m spacin’! [Laughs] There’s another Gretsch, an orange 6120. That’s my favorite lead guitar that I’ve played. I was playing the Travis guitar nonstop, but I wasn’t changing the strings, so they were dead.

Rob Schnapf came down to my studio and put the orange on the lead guitar in 99 bpm because the strings on the Tennessean were so dead, and he was right. The lead guitars really cut through and shine. We’ve since changed the strings on the Travis guitar.

Do you prefer the sound of dead strings?

I do. I have this Gibson J-45 that was my main acoustic at the start of the Watch My Moves tour. We had a new guitar tech, and the first thing he did – I wasn’t thinking about it – but the first thing he did on the first day was cut all the strings off.

It was devastating. [Laughs] Rob Schnapf is all about that too; I sort of learned that about him. New strings take a while to break in, especially when you’re playing live. When you’ve got to change the acoustic strings, you’re gonna have a weird show at first. They just sound so different, like bells or something.

What about practice? What does your practice routine look like?

I kind of just pick up and play whenever I want when I’m feeling psychedelic. Lately, I feel weird because I haven’t, but then you just get a show and you’re forced to play again, and your fingers get blistery.

That’s all part of it. It’s interesting now, because I have a career, there’s going to be a moment where all of a sudden I have to play. My music’s not like Led Zeppelin or anything too technical. In some ways, my songs feel a little more simple all the time, so I don’t sweat it.

What’s on the horizon?

I put everything into this record. It did take a lot out of me by the end. They always do. It’s my most organic record. It was homespun. I worked with other studios, people I really liked, who similarly work in an organic way.

I’ll definitely try to make other records, but I do feel in another way that this might be my last conventional record for a long time, and I’ll just get weird for a while. But yeah, you never know.

• Philadelphia Has Been Good to Me is out now via Verve Forecast.
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.