As a songwriter, David Bowie’s legendary status is undisputed. But what was he like as a guitar player?

The chameleonic rock icon produced 26 solo albums during his lifetime, with one posthumous album following in 2021. Over the course of his prolific career, he partnered with a number of incredible guitar players, who often took on the lion's share of six-string duties.

Bowie could play guitar, and wasn’t opposed to strumming an acoustic or electric guitar on stage – especially early into his career – so what did the stars he worked with make of his playing?

“This is an interesting thing,” Adrian Belew – who featured on Lodger, the live album Stage, and later served as his musical director on the 1990 Sound+Vision tour – tells Guitar World when asked exactly that. “All the time I worked with David, I actually never saw him play much of anything. Not piano, not guitar. He must have done it privately.”

Thankfully, come the early 2000s, Bowie was a little less cloak-and-dagger with his playing, as Gerry Leonard recalls.

“David wasn’t virtuosic or anything like that. He didn’t have any aspirations in those ways,” he notes. “He had a kind of caveman instinct with the guitar of what he wanted to do in a broad sense.

“For instance, when we did The Next Day [2013], he’d say, almost apologetically, ‘Do you mind playing this part?’ And he’d play me a part from the demo, which was a stabbing chord or something like that. It was great, so raw and punk rock. He’d say, ‘Take it and do what you want with it,’ so sometimes I would modify it, but I would always be very careful to try and keep the intention.”

Bowie, then, perhaps knew his craft – it was raw and emotive rather than technical and virtuosic – and so he entrusted his foils to bring some nuance to his parts.

“He had good instincts,” Leonard says. “He could write on the guitar, and he could play a mean riff, too.”

Speaking of riffs, Peter Frampton, who played on 1987’s Never Let Me Down, had an interesting story to tell.

“David played the riff on Rebel Rebel, so we know he was a great guitarist,” he nods. “But I think he used guitar and keyboard to write.”

Mark Plati worked with Bowie in the 1990s and believes once his band pivoted to having two guitar players “he became more of a frontperson”, but he had chops to embolden his creative process.

Expanding on that, Carlos Alomar, who was Bowie’s most-used guitarist in the studio, said: “Bowie, like John Lennon, was a great rhythm, acoustic guitar player. Basically, they played triads, and they could play chords, but they couldn’t play chords and bass lines together in opposition. It’s what we call metronome playing. They could keep the rhythm down for the whole song.”

As Frampton says, the guitar, for Bowie, became a vehicle to create, and he could lead his cavalry with real class, but when he needed a little, he knew he wasn’t the man for the job.

The full interview with Bowie’s rich lineage of guitarists is the cover story in the latest issue of Guitar World. Copies can be ordered from Magazines Direct.

For his first three years as a superstar, David Bowie found his partner in crime in Mick Ronson.

The guitarist’s expressive playing style never shied away from different sonic territories, lending itself to Bowie’s genre-blending songwriting style on classic early albums including The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972) and Aladdin Sane (1973).

It set the stage for the caliber of six-string talent that accompanied Bowie throughout his career.

Adrian Belew was one such talent. On the recommendation of producer extraordinaire Brian Eno, Belew graduated from the Frank Zappa Band right around the time Bowie was looking for a new guitarist.

“We first met when he appeared at a concert in Berlin, when I was playing with Frank Zappa,” recalls Belew in the new issue of Guitar World.

“Two nights before that, Brian Eno had come to the show in Cologne, and Brian knew David was looking for a fresh guitar player, so he told him, ‘We’ve got to go see this guy that’s with Zappa.’”

And, turns out, Zappa’s onstage theatrics helped Belew land his next gig.

“There was a part of the show where Frank took an extended 10-minute solo, leaving just Terry Bozzio (drummer) and Patrick O’Hearn (bassist) on stage, and the rest of us were supposed to walk off the stage at that point.

“As I was doing that, I looked over at the monitor guy, and there was David Bowie and Iggy Pop standing there.”

Belew wasted no time. “I walked over and shook David’s hand and said, ‘I just want to really thank you for all your music.’ I didn’t even have time to say anything to Iggy before David said, ‘Well, good. How’d you like to be in my band?’”

To this day, it remains a standout moment in Belew’s career and still gives him shivers. “Two weeks later, I was in David’s rehearsal.”

Belew ended up serving as Bowie’s lead guitarist on his Low / Heroes World Tour in 1978 – documented on the live album Stage. On the recording front, he lent his chops to his 13th studio album, Lodger – the final release of his Berlin trilogy.

However, his tenure with Bowie didn’t quite end there. 12 years later, he returned as Bowie's musical director on his mammoth Sound+Vision Tour.

“That was a whole other level; it took me months of preparation,” says Belew.

“One of the main difficulties was that he wanted just a four-piece band, and yet he was doing a retrospective of all his career.” Fortunately, this coincided with the arrival of the first-ever sampler on the market, prototypes of which Roland had sent to Belew, making all the instrumental layers possible.

“Me and my engineer and the keyboard player, Rick Fox, sat for hours and tried to sample all this stuff. We kept buying more samplers, so in the end we had two huge racks of samplers!”

For more from Belew, plus interviews with some of Bowie’s other key guitarists, pick up issue 607 of Guitar World from Magazines Direct.

Adrian Belew has opened up on his 1990s collaboration with Nine Inch Nails, admitting he had no idea who the band were before heading into the studio with Trent Reznor.

Alongside his work with King Crimson, the prog electric guitar great also carved out a prolific session career, working with a huge list of big-name artists from the likes of Paul Simon and David Bowie all the way to Tom Tom Club and Talking Heads.

His collaboration with Nine Inch Nails, though, is up there as one of his more adventurous partnerships. In the early 1990s, when Trent Reznor was putting together the project’s second record, The Downward Spiral, Belew was brought on board to provide guitars.

However, when he received the call, he needed to be convinced by his manager before he was fully onboard.

“I had no idea who Nine Inch Nails were. To be honest, my manager had to talk me into this one,” Belew remembers in an interview with Vulture. “He said, ‘No man, these guys are doing really well. They’ve got a big following. You should go check it out and talk to this guy named Trent Reznor.’

“I was in Los Angeles and had my gear, so there was no reason not to. I drove up to this house, and it was very strange-looking. It had a big electric fence around it and every single window was blacked out, but it looked like a farmhouse.”

Belew’s early reservations quickly evaporated, and before long he was deep in Nine Inch Nails territory. So deep, in fact, that he can’t recall the ins and outs of the sessions. He can’t even remember how long he was in the studio with Reznor.

“I went in and we started working right off the bat. I don’t even know how long I was there – they brought in food and we never left, we just kept plowing through music.

Trent wanted me to check out all of his songs and would ask, “Is there anything you’d like to do in this? Is anything inspiring you?” He was pretty quiet, but quietly intense. He had a group of guys around him, kind of like his own posse who did different things. That became The Downward Spiral. I later found out the place we were recording was the Sharon Tate house.”

The collaboration proved to be so effective that plans were mooted for Belew to join Reznor for a Nine Inch Nails tour: “I was going to go on tour with them, but Trent changed his mind, so that didn’t work out,” Belew reveals. “I think it was for the better. But I still love him.”

Belew’s resumé isn’t short of A-list collaborators. He also once worked on one of Mariah Carey’s Number One hit singles – but, as he once told Guitar World, he had no idea about the song’s success until a fan once asked him to sign a copy of the CD.

Prog rock legend Adrian Belew has shared previously unseen images of his infamous relic’d Fender Stratocaster, which he and Seymour Duncan put through the wringer for its battered look.

Today, off-the-shelf relic’d guitars are commonplace. The Fender Custom Shop and Gibson Murphy Lab are but two examples of high-end mainstream relic'ing. Plenty of other brands have hopped on the artificial aging hype train, though, from Charvel, EVH to Solar and beyond.

In the late 1970s, however, Belew wasn't spoiled for choice with relic'd guitars, so he – with the help of Seymour Duncan – decided to take things into his own hands.

The electric guitar, originally sporting a brown sunburst colorway, was bought on the cheap, and the “ugly-ass” instrument was promptly hacked, gouged, set alight, and exposed to other barbaric and torturous relic'ing techniques. It was brutal, but it worked, and it would later grace the cover of Guitar World magazine.

Now, Belew has reflected on that day by sharing unseen photos on his Instagram.

“Seymour Duncan just sent these cool photos from the day he and I – mainly he – battered and burnt the $285 Strat I had just bought,” his caption reads. “It had to have been one of the earliest examples of ‘relic'ing’ a guitar: he laid it in the grass, doused it with lighter fluid, and phoof! the relic'ing ritual began.

“When we were finished gouging it with screwdrivers, spraying blobs of paint on it, dragging it around the yard, and banging it on the driveway, we hung it up in a tree,” he continues. One of the images shows it pinned against a large tree trunk, broken and scarred.

“The next day, when I took it into rehearsals, Frank [Zappa] said, ‘If you wanted to ruin your guitar, Adrian, why didn't you loan it to a friend?’”

Belew, who spent a year in Frank Zappa’s band before working with David Bowie and later linking up with Robert Fripp in King Crimson, said the Zappa gig was a game-changer for him.

But it's not the first time Belew has reflected on the creation of that fateful relic'd Strat. Last year, he told Guitar World that he believed it to be the first of its kind.

“I’m gonna be bold and say that might be the first relic’d guitar,” he said at the time, “and you can thank Seymour Duncan for that.”

In January, Belew revealed he'd had surgery to combat his carpal tunnel struggles. He's since opened up about how his recovery is going, while hinting at his next musical adventure.

Belew has also paid tribute to the late and highly innovative luthier, Ken Parker, who built his trusted and feature-laden Parker Fly signature guitar.

Few effects firms have had the impact or commanded the universal adoration of Electro-Harmonix. Without it, it’s highly likely that the pedal market – plus guitar playing and music itself – would look and sound very different in 2025.

The brand launched by Mike Matthews enjoys a position few others could manage. It’s become one of the most ubiquitous names out there, but maintains the aura of an indie builder. It’s both boutique and accessible; wild and dependable; liberal in its experimentation and, since its 1990s revival, conservative in its business.

Products like the Big Muff, Small Clone and Small Stone have not just entered pedal history, but become the foundation stones for a whole industry of builders, spawning a mythology almost independent of the music they made.

Of all the brand’s eras, the late ’70s period is its most iconic and fetishized –and it’s easy to see why. This is an incomplete story of that time, told through the memories of Matthews, key EHX employees and friends from the period.

More particularly, it’s about the firm’s space-age physical location, the Hall of Science – a giant, all-singing, all-dancing (but non-selling) venue-cum-demo space that became a bricks-and-mortar metaphor for the peak of EHX’s outrageous, risk-taking pomp.

Million-dollar baby

Between 1968 and 1978 EHX debuted the LPB-1, Big Muff Pi, the Electric Mistress, the Memory Man and the Small Stone. To say it grew rapidly is an understatement: a firm that started with little more than Matthews’ $1,000 savings expanded to a $50,000 annual turnover, and on to $5 million within 10 years. In today’s money, that’s around $24 million.

“I started working for Mike right out of my first year of college,” says Matt Meng, former Director of Manufacture and Development. “I think I was employee number seven. By the time I left in 1980, Mike had about 350 employees.”

Matthews is renowned for his off-the-wall thinking, and Meng believes it was never further from the studwork than in the ’70s.

“As someone in my 20s and late teens, it was wonderful to work for him. He had all these crazy ideas. I’d describe him as a genius, but a madman – a real crazy scientist.”

That’s one of several images Matthews has fostered over the years, albeit not unfairly. “I just did unorthodox things,” says the man himself, now in his 80s.

In some ways that’s the whole mantra of EHX’s golden era – from the tones and the business model to the way they worked. As King Crimson and David Bowie guitarist Adrian Belew says: “The thing I always loved about their pedals was that you could make them do things they weren’t actually meant to do.”

The guitar pedal Ark of the Covenant

By the late ’70s EHX was riding high – and so was New York’s West 48th Street, aka Music Row. At the time it was the world’s leading music mecca, home to ruthlessly guarded ‘Are you ready to buy?’ guitar stores and a surefire pitstop for the great and good of players, from wannabes to session pros and touring superstars. Everyone was there, spending their advances and buying up vintage guitars like candy.

At this point, Matthews came up with one of his most unorthodox ideas: a way to get EHX gear in front of those at the center of the musicians’ universe. He called it the Hall of Science.

Even those in the know find it notoriously hard to describe the concept; but picture an Apple Store for pedals and music tech, painted black throughout, and you’re sort of there. Except you couldn’t buy anything.

“It’s the pedal equivalent of finding the Ark of the Covenant,” says Josh Scott, JHS founder and devoted EHX scholar. “It’s very difficult to explain; It’s weird. At first we couldn’t even decide what it was – ‘It's a store. No, it’s not a store, It’s a venue.’ You’d just go in a circle!”

Adding to the mystery is the lack of photos and online documentation. Even Matthews laments that he doesn’t have any pictures. And because it wasn’t a proper retail space, and the company later went bust, there are very few records.

But if the Hall of Science seems ahead of its time, and a little crazy, it’s because it definitely was – it predated the likes of the Gibson Garage, Fender flagship stores and indeed the Apple Store by decades.

“The idea was Mike’s,” confirms EHX lifer Larry DeMarco, who was tasked with running the place. “He was always a visionary. The idea of a standalone exhibition center was truly revolutionary in the late ‘70s.”

West 48th Street was already packed, of course. “There were about 15 different music stores – Manny's Music, Sam Ash, Terminal Music, repair shops – everything,” says Matthews. But as usual he spotted an opportunity others had missed. “There was a four-story garage. On the bottom floor we rented half of that space. It was pretty big. We turned it into the Hall of Science.”

In the gutter, looking at the stars

Mention of Apple Stores might conjure images of spotless brightness and exquisite presentations. But it’s important to note that this was New York in the 1970s; those terms did not quite apply to West 48th Street at that point.

“New York City back then was rough,” DeMarco recalls. “Times Square and the surrounding environs were packed with peep shows and porno joints. Hustlers, hawkers and three-card-monte games were all over the place. We were located a bit north of Times Square between 6th and 7th Avenues. You never knew who or what was going to come through the doors.”

That’s if you could get through them. “It was disgusting!” Meng says. “I remember opening up one morning. You had gates that came down with padlocks on the bottom. I remember finding vomit on the padlock and saying, ‘How do I how do I open this this? I can’t even go in and get a bucket of water to rinse it down!'”

If you made it safely inside, however, you found a veritable candy store for audio pioneers. “The entire place was done in black,” says DeMarco. “There was a stage that stretched across the back of the room and behind the stage was a wall-to-wall LED display that blinked randomly – but it always seemed to be in time with the music!

“Black wooden benches provided seating; on the east side of the room, self-demo stations were provided, where people could wank away and hear themselves through headphones.”

To your right as you entered were the glass display cases. It would make sense to fill them with pedals; but no – instead they were filled with EHX-branded LED jewelry. Above, the ceiling was adorned with electric artwork.

“I got plastic pallets, four feet by four feet, put LED bulbs in them and hung them from the ceiling,” says Meng. “Our engineers designed the patterns, so no pattern would repeat itself, and they were multicoloured. I remember it was certainly very futuristic, very out there and very mesmerizing.”

Meanwhile, the stage was used for live demonstrations, which more often than not seemed to unravel into jam sessions. “It was very beautiful,” says Matthews. “At first Manny's was pissed off that we opened it, because they thought we were gonna start selling stuff from there – but we didn't.”

Looking for a sound you’ve never heard before

Matthews maintains he held to his agreement not to sell gear. But always open to making a buck, they did shift the artwork, to everyone from Bloomingdale’s to Gallery Lafayette in Paris.

Meanwhile the jams were legendary, with a different genre days and prizes given to the best performances. Alongside running the joint, DeMarco was part of the in-store band alongside guitarist/bassist Kenny Richardson and drummer Larry Holloway.

“Kenny and Larry were wonderful musicians,” DeMarco says. “I typically played through the same rig I used at trade shows. The chain started with a MicroSynthesizer and ended with a Deluxe Memory Man. Larry had a setup of EHX Talking Drums – he made them talk and sing!

“Occasionally we’d get an oddball product in. I recall a 19-inch rack-mount guitar synthesizer, festooned with a cryptic array of sliders and no presets. You’d dial up an incredible sound by fiddling with the sliders. But move them a fraction of an inch and that great patch would be lost forever! I’m not sure it ever made it to market…”

The fact stuff like that saw the (LED) light of day at the Hall of Science is part of its allure to EHX obsessives, and anyone who was fortunate enough to wander through the doors on a Saturday afternoon. Belew recalls: “I’d go there and, of course, Mike Matthews would just talk my arm off about all the new pedals they were designing, and show me some of them.

“I’m one of the players still digging around for a sound I’ve never heard before. And that’s what made Mike’s pedals unique – if you played around with them long enough, something really strange would happen!”

Science and celebrity

The Hall of Science was the perfect venue for such experimentation, in the booth or on the stage – and the performances didn’t stop inside the building. “One time Mike asked me to demo some pedals live out front of the store,” Belew says. “Like, ‘I’ve got these new boxes. You record a sound into them and then you can play them like a drum kit.’ And we did that right out on 48th Street!

“I have no idea what it must have sounded like, but there was a band backing me. So I’d record a percussive guitar sound in one box at a time then play drum patterns with the band. I had about eight boxes on a stand. Really, it was early sampling – and crude as it was, you’d never heard anything like it.

“Mike was very generous to me and all the other players I knew who worked with him. You could always depend on him inventing things no-one had ever thought of before and giving them crazy names.”

Despite, or perhaps because of, Matthews’ agreement to only sell artwork from the space, it drew all kinds. “We welcomed everyone from Stevie Wonder to Buddy Rich,” says DeMarco. “I remember Howard Leese of Heart bought a huge LED display from me. A young Marcus Miller jammed out on stage. Tennis star Vitas Gerulaitis pulled up out front in his Rolls Royce with a vanity plate that proclaimed ‘VITAS G’!”

Matthews remembers getting a call at the office to be told Roberto Durán – one of the greatest boxers of all time – had just walked in. “He started flirting with my common-law wife,” recalls Matthews. “I was thinking about slugging him. But I held back because he was a professional and he’d have knocked me out!”

It’s hard to think of another gear spot with this kind of pull. Even today, when the cult of guitar gear has never been stronger, it’s mainly around vintage collections. The idea of a space stocking cutting-edge, slightly bonkers audio products and pulling in A-listers in the process seems unimaginable. And yet it happened; and that was only part of the picture.

We felt invincible

While all that went on, Matthews was back at EHX HQ leading the charge on his ever-expanding line of pedals, and more products with forward-thinking specs and madcap marketing schemes. For instance, the first battery-powered amp, 1975’s Freedom amplifier.

“I remember renting a truck. It had to be an American-made truck,” says Meng. “We put custom-made umbrellas on it to demonstrate wind energy. We were driving down Fifth Avenue so the movement simulated the wind – and we had a press conference about how ‘the answer is blowing in the wind!’”

The Freedom amplifier took an unholy amount of size D batteries, but nonetheless campaigned on the appeal of “freeing yourself from the bureaucratic domination of electricity.” Essentially it was the first prepper amp. And again, this actually happened.

“It was an incredible period for Mike, EHX and, by extension, myself,” says DeMarco. “In addition to running the Hall of Science, I did a lot of traveling and demoing. Crazy stuff like doing a show solo in East Germany before the fall of the Iron Curtain.

“I had to travel through Check Point Charlie and take a train from East Berlin through Dresden and into Leipzig. I got stopped on the train and questioned by the East German police. Every place in East Germany looked as it did the day WWII ended.

“I carried the EHX banner around the world, from Fiji to Stockholm, and was with Mike in Russia as a member of the EHX Work Band. We felt invincible.”

Matthews’ sheer charisma is well-documented. “It was wonderful,” says Meng. “I was sent off to do things I knew nothing about! I’d studied business management in college, but I didn’t even finish my fourth year because I was so into Electro-Harmonix. I learned so much more hands-on than in school.

“I remember getting up at three o’clock in the morning because Mike wanted to meet me at the intersection of some road. I’d go meet him and we’d walk for hours before starting the day at Electro-Harmonix. He was, at times, up all night doing things.”

The sense of EHX and Matthews’ invincibility strikes a chord with Meng, too. “Mike showed up at my apartment once and I was cooking a roast beef. He loved the smell of it. Talking business, he actually ate the whole five-pound roast beef! I don’t even know if he was aware he’d done it.”

The death of a dream

Of course, nothing we make is truly invincible. You’ve seen the films; you know the story arc. By the late ’70s EHX was flying too close to the sun, but it wasn’t sheer folly that brought about its end.

Its successes were being noted. New York’s labor racketeers were trying to muscle in, causing trouble for staff and production issues in the process. Cracks were starting to show in Matthews’ “unorthodox” financial approach. By the early ’80s the Hall of Science was no longer sustainable, and Matthews sold the unit to Sam Ash.

“I don’t remember when the doors closed,” says DeMarco. “But I remember how I felt – ‘gutted’ is an apt descriptor. Electro-Harmonix was more than a job to many of us. When the company folded, it was the death of a dream we’d all shared.”

When Matthews re-entered the pedal world in the ‘90s, having noticed the price of vintage EHX units, it was in his own words as “an arch-conservative,” as opposed to his previous “aggressive” position. But some of his hunger for experimentation remained.

All those involved in the Hall of Science have left their own legacies. “It taught me that I could do whatever I put my mind to – and that you really needed a team effort,” says Meng, who went on to a successful career outside EHX. “Even if all the ideas are wonderful, you need to have good people to help implement them.”

There must be lessons to be learned by struggling modern retailers; stores and brands need to offer experiences to get people in the door. It’s what we’ve seen at Fender Flagship Tokyo and the Gibson Garages. Stores can’t just tell people a story anymore – you need to put people in it. That was the genius of the Hall of Science concept. Although we recommend you actually sell the gear from the space…

Josh Scott is, of course, a noted pedal maker in his own right. He’s studied the EHX golden period in detail, and has literally written the book on the firm (Made on Earth for Rising Stars: The Electro-Harmonix Story). He says his research, and personal interactions with Matthews, taught him two things.

“When you look at their story, EHX is at the top of the world. It’s a movie plot,” Scott says. “The biggest thing – and it's exactly what he said to me – is be careful that your really good ideas are actually good for your business. That’s big.”

It’s the second point that nails not just the essence of EHX, but the reason musicians adore their products; and it also defines the real allure of the Hall of Science. Scott says: “Give creative people the space to make things – and see what happens.”

Do you have any photos of the EHX Hall of Science? We'd love to see them! Get in touch via guitarworld@futurenet.com.

Likewise, if you have any memories of the space, or Music Row and West 48th Street in the ’70s and ’80s, please share them in the comments below...

Ken Parker, the mastermind behind the innovative Parker Fly electric guitar, has died at the age of 73, it has been confirmed.

News of Parker’s passing was confirmed on Tuesday (October 7) morning via an update on the late guitar maker’s GoFundMe page, which had been set up mere days ago in order to help raise funds for Parker’s cancer treatment.

“Ken Parker, age 73, passed away peacefully at his home in Gloucester, Massachusetts on October 5, 2025, with Susan Kolwicz by his side,” the update read. “Your generous contributions have helped tremendously.

“However, Ken’s family is still faced with a great deal of debt. So, please, continue your contributions in Ken’s honor… they will be greatly appreciated.”

A guitar maker who approached the craft like no other, Ken Parker’s legacy will largely be defined by his innovative Parker Fly – a futuristic, forward-thinking electric guitar that was beloved by a wealth of top-tier artists, from Adrian Belew to Joni Mitchell.

Born August 25, 1952, Parker set foot on his guitar-making journey when, as a 13-year-old, he crafted his first guitar from wood and cardboard, later crafting an electric bass for his brother.

His career was driven and informed by an unwavering desire to push the scope of accepted guitar-building norms, experimenting with modern materials and construction techniques to take the humble guitar in all-new directions and create instruments that could overcome traditional limitations.

By the early 1970s, Parker was living in Rochester, New York, where he built his first archtop guitar. He’d later work at Stuyvesant Music in Manhattan, working with, and repairing guitars for, a line of high-profile players.

Two decades later, Parker launched Parker Guitars with the help of Larry Fishman. In 1993, the now-iconic Parker Fly – a guitar known for its super-lightweight build, unique double-cut design, inherent playability, and advanced electronics – was first released.

Before long, it had found favor among some of the biggest players in the world, from Eddie Van Halen and Reeve Gabrels to Matt Bellamy and Joni Mitchell. Another player on that list was Adrian Belew, with whom Parker worked on a signature version of the Parker Fly shortly after.

“I felt like Ken Parker had taken 20 years to eliminate all the problems you have with electric guitars; the tuning, the neck, the frets wearing out. Everything that normally can go wrong with a Fender or Gibson,” Belew once said.

“I swear this guitar never goes out of tune. I play better with the [signature] Parker Fly. I can't explain it better than that.”

In the wake of the news, Belew has come out and paid tribute to his close collaborator, calling him a “visionary” and a “genius”.

“Ken Parker, gentleman visionary. I cannot thank you enough for your incredible Parker Fly design. Your genius changed my life. Thank you. May you rest in peace,” he wrote, before following up on a separate post with a picture of his signature and the caption, “The Adrian Belew Signature Parker Fly. My favorite guitar ever.”

At the turn of the century, Parker diverted his attentions back to the archtop and began working on ways to reinvent the format. His mission, according to an obit shared by those close to him, was to “liberate the sound and make it more accessible for all guitarists.”

Archtoppery, a series of videos launched in 2020 to help track this journey, was established. It comprises over 190 videos, which explore his construction techniques, building philosophy, and more.

In early 2023, Parker was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer that robbed him of his ability to work. With the help of his life partner Susan Kolwicz and Bob Martin, Parker launched a GoFundMe page to help raise funds for his treatment.

“It hasn’t been easy living with this nasty disease, having chemo treatments that zapped my energy and slowly took away my ability to earn a living,” he recently reflected. “Now, I’m on a breathing machine 24/7 and I’ve started to lose the use of my left arm.”

In a more recent statement dated October 3, Parker assured his friends and fans that Sam Krimmel, his guitar-making partner, will continue his legacy.

“Sam is a natural co-conspirator and he and I will be will be working together down the road through some sort of psychic medium,” he wrote. “We’ve already got some amazing new things underway and soon we’re going to show you what that is all about. So stay tuned.”

Parker's official obituary concludes, “[Ken Parker's] extraordinary and unequalled instruments also survive, living on in the hands of legions of guitarists worldwide, as well as luthiers whose lives are immeasurably enhanced by his shining example, his insights, and his encouragement.”

Donations to help the Parker family can be made at GoFundMe. At the time of writing, $135,860 of a total goal of $450,000 has been raised.

[Update 10/08 – Since this article was published, Ken Parker sadly passed away at the age of 73. He passed away peacefully at his home in Massachusetts with Susan Kolwicz by his side. Ken's family is still asking for donations]

Ken Parker, the man behind the innovative Parker Fly adored by King Crimson’s Adrian Belew and Joni Mitchell, has launched a crowdfunding campaign to help pay for cancer treatment.

Parker has revealed the extent of his 2023 diagnosis via a GoFundMe page, writing that he suffers from a rare form of cancer that has slowly been debilitating him.

“It hasn’t been easy living with this nasty disease, having chemo treatments that zapped my energy and slowly took away my ability to earn a living,” he writes.

“Now, I’m on a breathing machine 24/7, and I’ve started to lose the use of my left arm. I humbly ask for your support to reduce the medical and personal debt that I’ve incurred and to help with my family’s expenses.”

Parker founded his namesake Parker Guitars in the early 1990s, with the Fly being his standout build. Its body is made from lightweight woods and reinforced with a carbon fiber exoskeleton. Belew – a key champion of the Fly – had a signature model that was bestowed with MIDI technology, which allowed him to imitate the sounds of a whole arsenal of axes and other instruments.

The original Fly was intended to be a MIDI guitar, but it was Belew's quest for more versatility that got the concept over the line. The result was a guitar-meets-synth model that boasts a 13-pin out for MIDI/synth capability, DiMarzio and Sustainiac humbuckers, a Fishman piezo, and Parker's flat-spring vibrato system. Belew doesn't feel the instrument can be topped.

“I felt like Ken Parker had taken 20 years to eliminate all the problems you have with electric guitars; the tuning, the neck, the frets wearing out. Everything that normally can go wrong with a Fender or Gibson,” he recently said.

“I swear this guitar never goes out of tune. I play better with the [signature] Parker Fly. I can't explain it better than that.”

The Parker Fly also became the adopted axe of Grand Funk Railroad's Mark Farner, while D'Addario has dubbed Parker as “the man who changed guitar forever”.

“Throughout my life, I’ve done something that I love and am proud of – making guitars that advance the art, science, and craft of building far beyond traditional methods,” Parker reflects. “Most importantly, it has been a true joy and especially gratifying experience to see my guitars in the hands of all of you gifted and aspiring players.”

Parker has now retired from guitar-building, but is passing his wisdom on to his colleague Sam Krimmel.

“Sam has this gift which feels remarkably similar to the gift that I feel that I have that’s allowed me to do my work,” he enthuses. “I’ve never had a deeper and more interesting work relationship on a daily basis than I have with Sam.”

At the time of writing, over $96,000 has been raised through Parker's GoFundMe, stretching just beyond 20% of the desired $450,000 target. A total of 122 contributions have been made so far.

Head to GoFundMe to donate.

Now the hysteria surrounding King Crimson offshoot Beat is dying down, Adrian Belew knows what’s next. “I want to get back to angry guitar and also fretless guitar,” he says.

It couldn’t be a better time for the Zappa, Bowie, and Fripp alum to revisit those styles – he’s just had carpal tunnel surgery and reports he’s recovering well. “The speed I’m playing at is as good as ever,” he says of his left hand’s progress.

“With some things, I had to practice hard to get back up to speed,” he explains. “The thing about being older is keeping yourself in shape and keeping yourself creative. I’ll keep making new records – making music is the most important thing to me. The performance is just the second half.”

What’s the prognosis for your left hand?

“It was an easy recovery and an easy operation; no problem at all. While recovering you can’t do much with it and it’s a little tender. Then you finally work back up to tempo. I’m playing as I always did – except there’s no more pain.”

What exactly had been going on?

“My hand started getting numb, and during part of the Beat tour it would stay numb from the moment I woke up until sometime during soundcheck. It was a little scary. I’d be like, ‘You better wake up soon here, hand!’”

Was there a moment you feared that you might not play again, or it might impact your playing forever?

“Yes – but also, not really. Steve Vai was able to walk me through the process since he’s had it done twice. He assured me it was a simple operation and it wasn’t going to go wrong. And he introduced me to one of the best surgeons in the US.

“Dr Azari is so good at what he does. He was one of the first surgeons who did a hand transplant successfully. So, carpal tunnel, for him, is like changing strings! I was actually going to ask him to put on a second left arm, to see what I could do with three hands on the guitar!”

Have you needed to circumvent the impact of age on your playing?

“The truth is I’ve never worked on the basis of notes, speeds, scales, and all that stuff. The physical aspect of it was never as important to me as the mental aspect. I imagined making the guitar do more than just what it does.

“A lot of guitar players just want to be like their heroes; but as you get older that gets harder and harder. But I can still get the sounds I’ve always gotten, so it’s not harder – there’s just more of them!”

You and Steve Vai both have histories with Fank Zappa. Has that helped you forge a working relationship together?

“The year I spent with Frank was the first and only time I’ve ever had serious instruction. Frank was a great teacher and very generous to me. He taught me a lot of things about music and the business of music. It wasn’t just how to play odd time signatures or do wild stuff, but how to behave and have a life as a professional. All those things were unknown to me.

“Steve and I agree that when you go through what Frank teaches you, you come out as a high-quality professional. You know you’ve got to play things consistently and correctly and that you can’t mess around. The main thing Frank wanted from you was to show up at every gig in perfect shape and do the music correctly.”

Without that Zappa training, could you have handled working with David Bowie thereafter?

“It would have been harder to some degree, but I think that music could have been done. But then you move forward a year or two, and I’m in King Crimson, where it’s all about playing in one time signature, and singing in another.

“I would have had a much more difficult time with that if I hadn’t worked with Frank. By the time I came out of that I was very comfortable with odd time signatures – I could write in seven, five, nine, or whatever was required. I understood it from a different basis than some people might have.”

What was Frank’s explanation of odd time signatures?

“It was that you felt the accents. If it’s a seven, that’s what you’re feeling. You’re not counting seven – that would be ridiculous. I’d been a drummer since I was 10, so once I understood that it rang a bell: ‘All I have to do is learn what those accents are, and then I can play in 15.’ I’ve been doing it ever since. Without Frank I would have just been guessing.”

Did that idiosyncratic thinking makes you appealing to Talking Heads?

“Absolutely. They needed someone to throw a lot of color on the painting, and someone who could break loose and do wild soloing. Those things were the perfect additions to their music, but they couldn’t do them. They were really nice to me; they loved what I did and were very supportive.”

Have you ever wondered how an off-the-beaten-track player like you keeps finding himself at the center of pop culture moments?

“I don’t know… You think of people like David Bowie, innovators, and I think I belong in that club. I certainly don’t belong in the club that's doing sessions every day, or the club that’s shredding, or any other club!

“But club I do belong to is the one where you do interesting things that no one else has done. As I said, I always wanted to express sounds with the guitar, more than just knowing how to play the notes. I guess that's how I’ve moved from one thing to another so quickly.”

What are some of your favorite off-kilter guitar sounds?

“The first one that comes to mind is a piece I wrote for my second solo record, Twang Bar King, called Ballet for a Blue Whale. I wanted to make the guitar sound like it was an actual whale. An expert informed me that it’s not the sound of a blue whale – it’s the sound of a humpback whale! But ‘blue whale’ sounds more artistic! Figuring out how to do that was a tremendous thing.

“You have to play through a synthesizer. Then I put it through a delay with an expression pedal. Then I made it so you weren’t hearing the original note – just the note that was being bent by the expression pedal. It could go all over the place. It was fascinating to hear and do that.

“Many times when I’m doing something it just catches my ear, and that takes me in a new direction which leads to new music and songs. Like, if you don’t have the tight, fuzzy sound on the song Big Electric Cat, you’ll never come up with the song Big Electric Cat!”

What pedal did you use for that?

“That’s a Foxx Tone Machine, a pretty underrated ’60s pedal that I found in a pile in a music store. Once I realized what it could do I did so many things with it.”

What’s the most interesting pedal you’re currently using?

“On stage with Beat I play an Electro-Harmonix Echo Flanger. Not many people realize this, but with the five-way mode selector switch you can catch it between two modes. If you do that with the feedback turned all the way up, you can get all kinds of crazy sounds.

“You can make it sound like big, flying metal insects, or make it so that it slows things down. It’s just a monster thing – but it really wasn’t supposed to be that. It was accidental, so thanks for the accidents!”

What sounds are you looking to mess with next?

“I think I’d like to do some tricky stuff with delays and pitches. I wrote a piece a long time ago called Variations of Wave Pressure in which I could play one note, get another note in harmony and a bass note as well.

“You can come up with some really interesting things if you do that. And you’re actually not playing much if you take away the effects – you can’t play a lot because it’ll be too busy. You’re making sure the notes fit properly, which can be really great.”

• Beat will release Beat Live on September 26.

Adrian Belew is currently touring alongside fellow electric guitar behemoth Steve Vai – as well as bass and drums extraordinaires Tony Levin and Danny Carey – under the moniker BEAT to celebrate his King Crimson catalog.

However, one of his earliest gigs was with Frank Zappa. In a story for the ages, the avant-garde musician discovered him in 1977, while Belew was playing with Sweetheart at Fanny's Bar in Nashville. What would transpire was a year that Belew has often described as a “crash course” in music theory – and to an extent, in life.

“The year that I spent with Frank was the first and only time that I’ve ever had serious instruction,” Belew tells Guitar World as he reflects on that game-changing year. “Frank was a great teacher and very generous to me. He taught me a lot of things about many different things to do with music and the business of music.”

Belew clarifies that it wasn't just about playing odd time signatures, or doing “the wild stuff within his [Zappa’s] music”.

Rather, it was a full crash course in music business – specifically, “How to behave and have a life as a professional touring musician and recording artist who goes around the world. All of those things were absolutely unknown to me.”

Playing alongside Vai, who also went through what we might call the Zappa School of Music, Belew noticed some throughlines in their approach to both music and the business.

“I think that both Steve and I agree that when you go through what Frank teaches you, you come out the other end and are truly a high-quality professional,” he reflects.

“You know that you’ve got to play things consistently and correctly, and that you can’t mess around. The main thing that Frank wanted from you was to show up at every gig in perfect shape and do the music correctly.”

In more recent Belew news, the legendary guitarist shared his carpal tunnel syndrome diagnosis and how he's recovering post-surgery.

Adrian Belew has been busy celebrating King Crimson’s golden era with what can only be described as a legendary tour alongside Steve Vai, Tony Levin, and Danny Carey.

However, the tour came with its own health challenges, as the multi-instrumentalist recently had his left hand repaired following a bout of carpal tunnel syndrome mid-tour.

“What was happening was that it would get numb,” he explains in a new interview with Guitar World.

“My hand started getting numb, and during part of the [BEAT] tour, it would stay numb from the moment that I woke up, all the way until sometime during soundcheck. It was a little scary. I’d be like, ‘Oh, boy, you better wake up soon, here hand!’”

It got to a point where Belew feared he might not play again. However, thanks to Vai, he realized that not all hope was lost. “Steve Vai was able to walk me through the process since he’s had it done twice,” he imparts.

“He reassured me that it was a simple operation and that it was not something that was going to go wrong. And on top of that, he introduced me to one of the best surgeons in the United States, who had done this work.”

As for where things stand now, Belew replies with, “Oh, it's perfect.

“This was an easy recovery and an easy operation. No problem at all,” he reassures fans.

“It was on my left hand, and I’m back to full use of my left hand. While recovering, you can’t do much with it, and it’s a little tender. And then, you finally work back up to tempo. Now, I’m playing as I always did, except that there’s no more pain.”

In more recent Adrian Belew news, cult guitar hero Rob Fetters reflected on forming a lifelong friendship with the King Crimson guitarist – and the time they raced home to try tapping after seeing Eddie Van Halen.

The ongoing BEAT tour has been a true manifestation of the crème de la crème of prog-rock. With former King Crimson members on guitar and bass – Adrian Belew and Tony Levin, respectively – alongside the inimitable Steve Vai and Tool drummer Danny Carey, it's safe to say that it's been a victory tour for the whole genre.

Belew's contribution cannot be understated – and as a guitarist who, like Belew, was once part of the Frank Zappa camp, Vai tells MusicRadar that he “can't say enough about Adrian” and his distinct guitar work.

“I knew about his work with Zappa, but that didn’t show me all of his brilliance. You need to hear him flexing his muscles in different situations to discover the breadth of the man’s abilities. There are his contributions to David Bowie and Talking Heads, but what he did on those ’80s King Crimson records was monumental.”

Having two guitar virtuosos team up as part of a supergroup can either lead to one outshining the other or a scrumptious feast for the ears. Thankfully, for the BEAT tour, it's the latter. “Together we’ve merged our sounds in a way that creates a really dynamic show,” describes Vai.

“I would say Adrian is underrated in the echelons of guitar,” he asserts. “Nobody plays like anybody else, nobody can play like me, but they can get sort of close. Honestly, there’s no one close to Adrian.

“There’s a special way he’s crafted his own dimension of sounds. To see him play this complex polymetric music while singing at 75 is unbelievable. He still hits the notes with that silky voice. He’ll talk and joke around while I have to keep my head down. The man is a marvel!”

While the first run of the BEAT tour took place last year, the next batch of shows is set to kick off in April in South America.

Adrian Belew has announced he has undergone carpal tunnel surgery after the recent Beat tour left his hand “numb and burning like fire”.

The electric guitar icon spent his 2024 on tour with Beat, the supergroup he formed with Steve Vai, Tony Levin, and Tool drummer Danny Carey to play King Crimson’s 1980s material with Robert Fripp’s blessing.

Ironically, Steve Vai had spoken of the physical struggles he faced when trying to master Fripp’s “relentless” parts in the wake of a recent shoulder surgery. But it seems that now the tour is over, it’s Belew who has been left feeling the brunt of performing such challenging music.

“Early this morning I had hand surgery for carpal tunnel at UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica, CA,” he says in an Instagram post.

Something of a guitar player's worst nightmare, carpal tunnel is a condition that affects the nerves in the wrist, with pain, numbness, and weakness in the fingers common symptoms. None of them are handy when trying to perform two sets of punishing prog rock every night.

Thankfully, Belew reports the surgery was a success: “I am super fortunate to have Doctor Azari, a world-renowned surgeon who was the first in America to do a successful hand transplant,” his post continues. “A bit overqualified for my minor surgery. He's a fan!”

Belew says the issue flared up while out on the road, and so he deserves all the plaudits for playing through the pain barrier.

“Throughout the Beat tour, my left hand kept going numb and burning like fire,” he adds. “Try playing Three of a Perfect Pair without feeling your fingertips! It often happened during sound checks but was almost always good by showtime. No worries now, I'll be better than new in no time!”

The tour had provided Belew the chance to dust off his oddball signature Parker Fly guitar – one that’s packed with voice-changing features – and hit the road alongside Vai, who had been singled out as the only suitable Robert Fripp replacement for the band.

Vai’s decision to join the band went against his long-standing anti-supergroup stance, but Beat provided a different kind of opportunity.

“There was something that resonated in me that just said, ‘Yes,’” Vai recently explained. “Because when the appropriate creative project comes to you, there’s something that feels enthusiasm and knowing that it’s meant for you.”

After what he thought was a successful start to the tour, Vai received an email from Fripp, offering playing tips to help him overcome the most challenging song of the set.

Guitar World wishes Adrian Belew a speedy recovery.

Growing up in Ohio, Rob Fetters wasn’t even sure he liked music. And although he was playing guitar by his mid-teens, it wasn’t his planned career path. “I went to college to be a journalist,” he tells Guitar World. “But in my first semester, I dropped a hit of really good LSD and saw the light. I called my dad and said, ‘You’re wasting your money!’”

Fetters took his beloved Les Paul Gold Top around the Ohio area with his band, The Raisins, meeting fellow Mid-Western guitarist Adrian Belew along the way and forming a lifelong friendship.

The pair saw early Van Halen shows on the Sunset Strip, which, along with love for The Beatles, left Fetters with a strong opinion about playing. “I’ve always been more impressed by melodic guitar than blinding, speedy stuff,” he says.

“I’ve fallen prey to speedy stuff,” he admits. “When I look back at The Raisins, I think, ‘Why was I sprinting when I should have been more of a long-distance runner?’ But I guess that just happens if you’re a guitar player, right?”

Post-Raisins, he and Belew formed The Bears, chopping it up on stage and in the studio before transitioning to commercial work with everyone from Disney and Nickelodeon to Microsoft. But he’s gotten back into making his own music, leaving the “repetitive” world of jingles.

He hopes a regrouped Raisins will perform in 2025. He has no plans to reform The Bears with Belew – though he acknowledges that their friendship is stronger than ever. “I’m a studio rat,” he says. “I love to hole up and spend long hours.”

“I’ve learned so much from that. And with Adrian, I feel like I’ve been mentored by arguably one of the greatest all-around musicians in the world. I’m very lucky that way.”

Where did your love for guitar come from?

“I didn’t even know if I liked music when I was young, because I went to a Methodist church, and there were these horrible hymns that had like six verses. My mom and dad liked jazz, so I heard some good music at home. When I saw The Beatles on Ed Sullivan I thought, ‘Wow, those adults are having a lot of fun.’ It eventually appealed to me.”

Do you remember your first guitar?

“My sister had a little Stella acoustic that she didn’t want to play. I got that and took a couple of lessons. Then my parents bought me a Fender Musicmaster, and I took more lessons, probably to be like a Beatle! But I was actually thinking of being a classical player.

“I saw the Jimi Hendrix Experience in the spring of ’68, and it changed everything. I went kind of crazy and did what most guitar players did – I spent every waking moment with it.”

You eventually formed The Raisins. What gear did you have?

“The early Raisins were like a boogie-woogie cover band. I loved that because all I had to do was play guitar. I started with a Les Paul Gold Top from 1969 that my parents bought me for my 15th birthday. I think every other guitar player in Sylvania, Ohio, despised me for having such a great instrument!

“It was a sweet guitar; I just played the thing to death. It was gold, but it turned green from my sweat. Then I had a Fender Quad Reverb, which was like a Twin with four speakers. It was so fucking loud. I was living at home, and with all the money I was making, I didn’t really have anywhere to spend it, so I brought home interesting things.”

The Raisins did a lot of Beatles covers.

“I just liked the sound of The Beatles’ guitars. I’d assumed they were using Rickenbackers and Gretch guitars, but I found out that John Lennon and George Harrison had been given a couple of matching Strats by Fender that they simultaneously played to get those wonderful double-tracked sounds on Revolver, and, I think, Rubber Soul.

“How do you get that with one guitar player? You can’t! But occasionally The Raisins would have another player, and we’d do the double parts. I don’t ever remember thinking it was challenging, but it was fun to figure out how to get the tones. I learned that John and George weren’t playing fast but very melodically. I’ve always been more impressed by that.”

After The Raisins, you formed The Bears with Adrian Belew. How did you two meet?

“Adrian was living in an apartment in Nashville before Frank Zappa heard him. He’s originally from Covington, Kentucky, across the river from Cincinnati, so he’d come to see The Raisins – he was a fan before I knew him, and before he was a rock star.

“Adrian was in a really good cover band called Sweetheart. We were playing the same circuit and had the same manager booking us, although I didn’t know Adrian yet. When he was doing demos the manager would say, ‘Hey, can Adrian borrow your flanger?’ I’d say, ‘Yeah, sure.’ So I knew the name and started to know the guitar player.”

“The thing that really sealed the bond was when he got the gig with Frank. While that was going on, I had a terrible crush on a young woman who was singing in a lounge act in LA. I went out to see her in the summer of 1977 or ’78, when Adrian started rehearsing with Frank.

“After about four hours I realized the love affair wasn’t going to go anywhere, but I was in LA for a week. I called my manager, and he told me Adrian was out here too. He said, ‘He’s rehearsing with Frank Zappa.’ I was a fan of Frank so I called Adrian.

“He had me pick him up in a borrowed, beat-up, green Ford Falcon station wagon, and we went to the Warner Brothers lot where the band was rehearsing. It was a great band! I watched them play, and then I was going to give Adrian a ride back to his little apartment, when Frank stuck his head out and said, ‘Hey, can you give me a ride home?’

A car ride with Adrian Belew and Frank Zappa must have been memorable!

“Frank’s in the back seat, Adrian’s in the front – we’re pushing paper bags and empty beer cans around and out of the way for Frank to sit! He invited us up to have enchiladas and coffee. I was too nervous to eat, though I did drink coffee.

“It was an idyllic week for me. Adrian and I connected on everything and even went to the Whisky and paid $5 to see Van Halen play in a one-third full room.

That would have been a very early Van Halen show. Did you and Adrian have a sense that you were witnessing greatness?

“In our minds it was like, ‘Yes, this is amazing.’ And Eddie was so much fun to watch, and always had a smile on his face. Adrian and I have always said, ‘Why would you go on stage with a grim look on your face?’

“That band was having a blast. They didn’t give a rat’s ass about how many people were in the room – they were going to have fun no matter what. That’s the way you want to perform. Don’t take your work so damn seriously.

“We thought, ‘Well, you’re in Hollywood; you’re in the right place. This is going to go somewhere.’ It was no surprise that, within a year, everybody was crazy about Van Halen. It was mind-blowing.”

Did you and Adrian attempt any of what you saw?

“We hurried back to the apartment, where Adrian had a Stratocaster plugged into a Pignose amp. It must have been in the air – everybody was trying to do hammer-on notes and things like that. We’d been doing that too, but after seeing Eddie provide us with a masterclass, we went to work.”

What led to you and Adrian forming The Bears?

“Adrian’s star rose, and he became famous for his guitar playing and songwriting. He decided to record The Raisins, which led to us making a record and having our only hit, Fear is Never Boring. But when The Raisins didn’t get a major record deal, and because the members were going in different directions, I quit. When I told Adrian he got quiet, and said, ‘Are you sure?’ I said, ‘I’m sure,’ and he said, ‘Let’s start a band.’

What gear did you bring into The Bears?

“I moved over with my patched-together Raisins equipment! I had a Mesa Boogie amp that I tore the speaker out of, and I just used the power amp and plugged it into an efficient Marshall cab with 25-watt Greenbacks. Apparently, that’s some kind of Holy Grail amp, but it was beat up then and even more beat up now.”

What was the trick to sharing space with Adrian in a band?

“I guess I was more traditional, even though, at times, I was a wild-ass guitar player. But I wasn’t doing that then. There was no conflict and I love to play a supporting role. It’s fun to create a foundation. I assumed I’d be doing that with The Bears, but Adrian said he wanted two lead guitarists.

“We’d both studied The Beatles long enough to know that if you’ve got two-part harmonies, you’re doing great. Adrian was more of the rock star, but he’d force me to take a solo. But on tour, I’d be playing a solo, and the light guy would have the spotlight on Adrian! Adrian would say, ‘Hey, Rob’s over there!’ There was never any jealousy – we always had fun.”

What was the biggest lesson you learned from Adrian?

“I would always tell a younger person: ‘If you can get in a band with people who have more experience than you and run circles around your playing, do it, because it lifts your game.’ That’s how you learn. You learn a lot faster when playing with people that pull you up. Adrian has always been that way to me. He’s always been very generous and open with me about saying, ‘This is how we did it. This is what happened.’”

You’ve got some things happening with The Raisins, but are there plans for you and Adrian to work together again?

“I’m back to making my own records – which barely make it into the black – and performing, which I always loved doing. I’m dearly hoping that The Raisins play a few more shows, although we’ve all got different things going on.

“But as far as playing with Adrian, we’ve lost our drummer, so I don’t know if The Bears will play again. We have talked about it, and obviously, there’s other drummers that could do it. But I don’t know if we have the match.

“I can’t take it off the table that Adrian and I might record a song or two together. He’s been on my solo records, so I can’t say yes or no for sure. All I know is we’re still really good friends, and I’m lucky to have a friend like that who’s got my back.”

• Fetters’ latest album, Mother, is out now.

When BEAT – the supergroup tasked with performing King Crimson’s trilogy of ’80s albums – formed last year, it did so with the blessing of Robert Fripp, who even coined their name.

The touring project brought together Crimson alumni Adrian Belew and bassist Tony Levin, Tool drummer Danny Carey, and electric guitar virtuoso Steve Vai, who was cast as the stand-in for Fripp.

In between that initial announcement and the tour’s opening night, Vai spoke of his troubles with nailing some of Fripp’s “relentless” parts, while Belew theorized about how the Fripp/Belew and Belew/Vai guitar partnerships would compare.

However, while Vai felt the pair had gotten off to a successful start, an email soon landed in his inbox from none other than Robert Fripp, which offered some additional advice on a rather tricky track.

“So this is a funny story,” Vai tells Sweetwater as part of a special mini-documentary of the tour. “We get to our second show and I get an email from Robert. He was commenting on some of the clips he saw, which was very nice and constructive. And then he said at the end, 'Can I make a suggestion for Frame By Frame?’”

Funnily enough, Fripp singled out the song that Vai had struggled with most in the run-up to the tour. Vai had previously cited his shoulder issues, which required surgery, as the reason why he struggled with its demanding endurance.

“‘Why don't you do your hammering with the notes, and then take it out? Improvise your hammering and move from one chord to the other,’” was Fripp's advice.

Vai has previously spoken about the advice he received from Fripp following those early shows, and recently discussed with Guitar World how his approach to tackling Frame By Frame completely changed after receiving that email.

“That was something I’d thought about doing initially, but it would take it far away from the original part,” he said. “But when it came from Robert as a suggestion, I thought, ‘Yeah, that’s my wheelhouse.’

“I did it that night at the show, and it worked beautifully. It’s unique to me – yet it was birthed by Robert and Adrian, you know?”

The talents behind BEAT have previously spoken about how it would be “disrespectful” to label the band as King Crimson, despite half of the group’s history with the iconic prog rock institution.

Yet they wanted to stay as true to the original songs as possible, so it’s surprising to hear Fripp wanted to push Vai into a more individualistic territory. Nevertheless, it showcases Fripp’s understanding that every player approaches the guitar a little differently.

Vai has another chance to put the advice into practice when the band plays Chile in June, with more tour dates expected to be announced in due course.

2024 Year in Review: Though King Crimson, the highly influential English progressive rock band, are spoken of in the past tense these days, founder Robert Fripp ended up giving his blessing to latter member Adrian Belew for a semi-official celebration of his time in the band.

Exploring the music heard on the group’s ’80s albums – namely Discipline, Beat and Three of a Perfect Pair – the Beat tour consists of Belew on vocals and guitar, joined by bassist Tony Levin (who played on those albums), Steve Vai and Tool drummer Danny Carey.

“The first show of a tour can be like a gauntlet,” Vai reflected on social media after the opening night. “You can rehearse until you’re blue in the face, but once you hit the stage the lights go out and there’s a live audience eager to be entertained, all bets are off.

“But the band delivered well and we were all relieved to get through a good first show.”

Stay tuned; we might want to revisit this in a future interview…

Steve Vai says he has turned down offers to join supergroups in the past, but when the prospect of forming BEAT – the King Crimson-honoring project created with Robert Fripp’s blessing – came along, he was forced to rethink his supergroup stance.

Alongside Crimson alumni Adrian Belew and Tony Levin, and Tool drummer Danny Carey, Vai was cast in Robert Fripp’s role as electric guitar provocateur as part of the supergroup’s lineup.

Across their recent US tour, Vai and co plucked hits from the band’s trio of 1980s LPs, Discipline, Beat, and Three of a Perfect Pair, to help revive some of King Crimson’s most celebrated material.

Speaking in a new interview with GW, Vai explains what made this particular offer different from all the ones he had been quick to reject.

“It started about five years ago, before the pandemic, when Adrian called me. Before that, I was often asked if I planned to join a supergroup, and my stock answer was, ‘No,’” Vai says. “Most people who approach me to do something like that are looking to relive the glory days of ’80s rock.

“I love that music,” he extends, “but I probably wouldn't consider joining a supergroup unless there was a group of people that were wildly talented, innovative, not so concerned about commercial potential, and willing to make very creative music that's accessible, but not necessarily with an audience in mind.”

As Vai recalls, after a period when “nobody was knocking on my door”, Belew then came along with an offer he simply could not refuse.

“Boom, the phone rings. It’s Adrian Belew, and he’s got Tony Levin and Danny Carey, and I'm like, ‘Yes!'” he goes on. “There was something that resonated in me that just said, ‘Yes,’ because when the appropriate creative project comes to you, there’s something that feels enthusiasm and knowing that it’s meant for you.”

Naturally, the project came with some challenges. Talking about the task of tackling the role, Vai has previously spoken of the “relentlessness” of Fripp's picking technique and the “specific and refined” playing style he’s employed across the band’s celebrated discography. Another challenge lay in establishing a partnership with Belew.

“It really came to the point where Robert and I had separated into our own worlds, like two sides of the same coin,” Belew once observed of the guitar partnership he built with Fripp.

As for how that translated to Vai, he continued, “Steve wants to make sure that what we do is honorable to the originals. Not that we have to play them exactly the same and not that we're going to be a cover band, I believe we will make it our own.”

Vai has never shied from a challenge, and BEAT proved to be too good an opportunity to pass up. After the opening night of the tour, the guitarist took to Instagram to say: “You can rehearse until you're blue in the face, but once you hit the stage and the lights go out, all bets are off.

“It is so enjoyable to play this historical music for such a passionate fan base. I discovered the sincere devotion of the audience for this music and the whole band felt their firm support.”

The full interview with Steve Vai will be published on GuitarWorld.com in the coming weeks.

Through various stints with power pop outfits The Raisins, The Bears and psychodots, Rob Fetters – who has also navigated a successful solo career – has crossed paths with a number of A-list electric guitar heroes.

Some of his closest confidants, including Adrian Belew – with whom he formed The Bears in the mid 1980s – came as a natural side effect of swimming in similar sonic circles. Other interactions, such as the time he first met Frank Zappa, occurred completely by random.

In a new interview with Guitar World, Fetters looks back on his relationship with Belew, and recalls the time he managed to meet one of his heroes after the soon-to-be King Crimson guitarist successfully auditioned to join Zappa’s band.

It wasn’t your average meeting, though. Instead, it proved to be far more memorable.

“The thing that really sealed the bond between Adrian and me was when he auditioned and got the gig with Frank,” Fetters says. “I was in LA for a week. I called my manager, and he told me that Adrian was out here rehearsing.

“I said, ‘What’s Adrian doing out here?’ He said, ‘He’s rehearsing with Frank Zappa.’” he continues. “I was a fan of Frank Zappa, so I called Adrian. He had me pick him up in a borrowed, beat-up, green Ford Falcon station wagon, and we went to the Warner Brothers lot where the band was rehearsing.

“It was a great band, and I thought, ‘Oh, man, what a fantastic version of Frank Zappa’s band.’ I watched them play and was going to give Adrian a ride back to the little apartment he was renting, and Frank stuck his head out and said, ‘Hey, can you give me a ride home?’”

Frank Zappa asking for a lift home wouldn’t have been an every-day occurrence, and Fetters was all too aware of this. As such, he did what any Zappa fan would have done in his situation: he invited Zappa into his car.

“Next thing I know, I’m driving Frank Zappa home to Laurel Canyon! He’s in the backseat, Adrian’s in the front, and we’re pushing paper bags and empty beer cans around and out of the way for Frank to sit.

“I drove him back, and he invited us up to have enchiladas and coffee – but I was too nervous to eat, though I did drink coffee. It was an idyllic week for me.”

As far as first meets go, giving Frank Zappa a lift home after rehearsals wouldn’t have been half-bad.

The full interview with Rob Fetters will be published in the coming weeks.

“I’ve had guitar partners in my life,” says Adrian Belew, simultaneously looking backward and forward.

It’s an interesting thought. Given the glorious absurdity and rainbow-like color of his parts – the frenetic samurai-chop rhythms; the effects-heavy solos that can sound like car horns and elephant growls and frazzled dial-up modems, depending on what the song requests – it’s almost shocking that any band could accommodate both his playing and someone else’s.

But then again, he’s built a career out of team-player malleability: supporting Frank Zappa’s comedic rock experiments in the late Seventies, then David Bowie’s artful avant-pop, then the warped post-funk grooves of Talking Heads, then the gleaming New Wave prog of Eighties King Crimson. And that’s just the first few years of a wild and winding career.

Belew has always had impeccable intuition for knowing how – and when – to partner up. And that’s an obvious prerequisite for his latest venture, Beat: a heavyweight live celebration of the Eighties Crimson catalog co-starring former bandmate Tony Levin (bass guitar), Tool’s Danny Carey (drums) and famed virtuoso Steve Vai (guitar). Which brings us back to those “guitar partners.”

“I won’t count Frank [Zappa] because I just played his parts,” Belew says with a laugh. “I spent years with Rob Fetters developing all the stuff that we did with the Bears. Then Robert [Fripp in King Crimson]. And I think Steve and I will be the same.” It’s a bold statement for a band that, at the time of his quote, hadn’t played one of their scheduled 65 dates.

These are also some enormous shoes to fill: After all, the Eighties Crimson lineup (Belew; Levin; drummer Bill Bruford; and Fripp, the band’s co-founder and lone consistent member since 1968) crafted three of the era’s most distinctive albums – 1981’s Discipline, 1982’s Beat and 1984’s Three of a Perfect Pair – from a tool box of interlocking gamelan guitars, low end often supplied by the extended-range Chapman Stick, acoustic-electronic drumming, Frippertronic ambience and cutting-edge guitar-synthesizers.

In other words, no other band – not even Crimson – has sounded quite like these three albums.

And no matter how much star power they have at their disposal, Beat have found themselves with a lofty task: honoring the past while also making it feel like the future.

The original impetus for Beat was the 40-year marker of Discipline – a tantalizing jumping-off point in our era of widespread anniversary tours. The year was 2019, and Belew had a radical question: While he hadn’t been a member of King Crimson since 2009 (and wasn’t involved in the final, three-drummer lineups), why not shake off the collective cobwebs and get the old band back together?

It wasn’t going to be easy – after all, Fripp had moved Crimson “from sound to silence” in 2021 and Bruford retired from pro drumming in 2009, 12 years after his final stint in the group. His attempt to conquer the impossible proved fruitful, just not in the way he expected.

First, Fripp politely declined, while offering his blessing for Belew to steer the ship as he pleased. He even (later on in our timeline) suggested the moniker: “[Robert said], ‘I have used the name Discipline for lots of things, even my record label. You and Tony and [King Crimson/Stick Men drummer] Pat Mastelotto have, for 13 years now, have used the name Three of a Perfect Pair for the band camp you do every August. How about you call it Beat?’

“My original thought was that if Robert said yes, maybe Bill would think about it,” he continues. “Once Robert declined, I felt I was honor-bound to make sure Bill didn’t want to do it. I felt it was very unlikely.

“But I’ll tell you something that happened a long time ago to me: I was working with [the Police’s] Stewart Copeland, and he told me had stopped playing drums for 10 years and started doing orchestral things.

“I said, ‘How was it when you came back?’ And he said, ‘It’s just like riding a bike – I could play everything right off the bat.’ So I thought Bill would be able to do the same.

“I love Bill personally. I would love to be hanging around with him again. He’s really a funny and super-smart person. But I did understand [him saying no]. He’s happy where he is and loves being retired. I’m happy for him.”

Two asks, two “no’s” – but it didn’t deflate Belew’s spirits. “I didn’t give up on the idea,” he says, “because I thought it’s worthy to play this music again.” He even held out hope through the pandemic, which derailed any chances of making the 40th anniversary date.

Eventually the stars aligned: Levin, fresh off touring the world with Peter Gabriel, agreed to take part – giving them half of the original lineup. With the other half, they went in a more surprising direction.

Prog-god-on-drums Danny Carey, long an admirer of the Eighties band and even known to sport a Crim T-shirt on occasion (Google it), became the next man up – and with Tool finishing their own massive jaunt, the timing seemed perfect.

(“I’ve known Danny for a long time now, and I know he reveres Bill,” Belew says. “If he wants to be, he’s the closest thing to Bill of any drummer I know of. He’s very invested in – and was very moved by – the three records. He told me many times that those records changed his life, kind of like for my generation how the Beatles did.”)

And Vai, who’d previously toured with Fripp as part of G3, had the obvious technical skill to fill the guitar role – but also, just as crucially, a taste for the unexpected, giving Belew an ideal sparring partner. To the latter’s delight, Vai (eventually) leaped at the opportunity – in some ways, it felt weird that these two Zappa alumni hadn’t made it happen sooner.

As an early teenager, Vai was obsessed with the era’s biggest rock bands: Led Zeppelin, Queen, Aerosmith, Kiss. But he later ventured into more progressive music via his friend John Sergio, who turned him on to Jethro Tull, ELP, Yes and early Crim.

“We’d sit in his room and listen to In the Court of the Crimson King. It took a little getting used to for me because it’s so different from something like Led Zeppelin. But I enjoyed it. I was very into high-information music, but I was too young to understand what was really going on.

“It wasn’t until [the 1979 solo album] Exposure that Robert Fripp came onto my radar in a bigger way. I remember when that record came out, and I knew there was something going on in that guy’s head.”

At that point, prog was only “part of a steady musical diet” for Vai – it was the kind of stuff his band couldn’t play because “we just didn’t have the skills for it.” But in the Eighties, “those three monolithic [Crimson] albums really rocked my world.”

“At first, you could hear them on the radio,” he says with a laugh. “And in listening to them, I just fell in love with them for the melodies and the seamless complexity. Some things sounded complex, like Larks Tongues in Aspic (Part III) or Discipline, but it was just beautiful. I didn’t lift up the hood at that time to see what was actually going on in the parts.

“My ears could tell there was polymetric stuff – there were juxtaposed eighth notes, and there were formulas for lines that repeat where they come around. I admired how they were doing it so beautifully.”

So when Belew called all those decades later, Vai was eager for the challenge. He just needed the scheduling to make sense.

“When things started opening up, I had a solo record, Inviolate, and I did a full world tour on that,” he says. “We did 194 shows in 51 countries, and Adrian waited patiently. [Laughs]

“Then we spoke, and it started to become more of a serious consideration for everybody. When I heard that Danny Carey was in, obviously with Tony, I just thought, ‘Wow, that is some band.’”

“With Steve, I feel the same kind of chemistry already that I had with Robert,” Belew says. “What I always said with Robert is that we’re like two sides of the same coin – there’s a middle ground that we have in common, but each of us has taken the guitar and our approach in a completely different direction.

“It was pretty easy with Robert because I knew, ‘If I’m gonna do this, he’s gonna do that’ and vice versa. We complemented each other. There’s a lot of being together, sitting together, playing together, talking – the chemistry comes over time, but I automatically feel it now with Steve.”

The Vai/Belew pairing, indeed, seems perfect. With another fret-gymnast on hand, the latter can sing without carrying so much of the guitar burden – and not be forced to rely on looping those interwoven parts himself, as he often does for his solo runs and with his rock-solid Power Trio.

“[Vai] can do his own thing, and he’s got stuff he can do that I wouldn’t even attempt,” Belew says. “Then there are my specialties that I do, and I’ve got the job of being the frontman and singer too. So I can rely on him doing things when I’m not available. [Laughs]

“In the other bands I’ve had in the recent past, it’s mostly been by myself, and I do looping and things. I really like that, but with the King Crimson material, it’s pretty laid out – here it is, and you need to play this much of it perfectly in sync.

“But there’s also a great deal of music in there that you can kinda take and make it your own. And that’s what I’m hoping all of us will do – especially Steve and Danny. We’re not trying to be a cover band. We’re not aiming for that at all. We’re honoring the music, and you can do that in multiple ways.

“Some of this stuff will have to be played as-is – more of the songs, I think. But some of the instrumental stuff, I think me and Steve can fly together or in opposite directions or do whatever we choose.”

That versatility – and that supergroup-level of marquee talent – makes Beat feel like a brand-new venture. But when you survey the lineups of so many long-running prog bands (Yes, for example, now have zero original members), it’s interesting that they didn’t lobby for the King Crimson banner.

“I don’t think I even thought about trying to [use the name],” Belew says. “I know Robert very, very well, and he thinks of King Crimson as being his, and rightly so. And it took me years to realize that, no, it truly is not King Crimson without Robert involved.

“If you think about all of the things he brought to the picture in terms of his leadership and his vision, along with what he added musically with the soundscapes and the fast picking and the gamelan guitar and all the explosive solo sounds… He’s such a big part of it. I wouldn’t even attempt to do that.

“I would think it dishonors that brand a little bit to say, ‘Now we’re King Crimson.’ But we have the ability to say, ‘Look, this is legitimate because half of the band is onstage here.’”

Levin doesn’t even allow himself to ponder labels. “First of all, I don’t think about what King Crimson is, even when I’m in King Crimson,” he says, smiling widely. “I leave that to other people. In the last incarnation of King Crimson, I had to face a new challenge for me, even though I’ve played in a lot of situations.

“When we played the classic material from the Seventies, before I was in the band, it was a top priority to stay true to what’s special about the wonderful John Wetton bass parts, for example. I had the challenge of loving those iconic parts but trying to make them my own.”

“What there wasn’t much of in that incarnation was bass parts that I had written,” he adds. “In this case [with Beat], we’re gonna hit that in spades, and that’s a related challenge but different. There are a few songs where every note has to be what it is – where if I play one note different the whole band might fall apart.

“But mostly, I feel if it’s a good piece of music, there’s room to grow and see where it goes live. In the case of the Beat tour, I’ll be reacting strongly to not only what Adrian plays, but also what Steve plays and what Danny plays. It’s kind of a triple challenge, and I like challenges.

“In a way, it’ll be Crimson-like in that I’ll be able to further refine my part, even on the old pieces where it was pretty darn good but could be better. I’m fine with anything, but if things get changed, that’s great with me. And with Danny, I know they’ll get changed. He’s not gonna literally play the exact drum parts, and that’s why I’m excited about the tour. I’m like a fan – I’m looking forward to going along for the ride.”

It will be fascinating to see Carey – perhaps the most accomplished prog-metal drummer in history, a polyrhythm master who plays with the thunder of 10 men – put his own spin on the Crimson songbook, from melodic staples like Frame by Frame and Three of a Perfect Pair to elliptical instrumentals like “Discipline.” (During our conversation, Belew was reluctant to spoil the set list surprises, though he did share my enthusiasm for dusting off the funky Beat deep cut “Sartori in Tangier.”)

Whatever Carey brings, it will be worthy. And he’ll also offer, personality-wise, lightness and warmth – qualities Belew recognized back when Tool brought along King Crimson, one of their major inspirations, as tour openers in 2001.

“I thought the whole thing was special in the sense that they said to their audience, ‘Here. This is what we like, and this is what helped us get where we are,’” Belew says. “When does a band do that for another band? [Laughs] It really endeared me to them, and their shows were phenomenal. I do remember one crazy thing; we played in Red Rocks, a very amazing 10,000-seat place – and you don’t get to play there very often, and you’ve got to be a pretty big band.

“King Crimson on its own couldn’t have played there, but they allowed us to be their opener. We played, and there were maybe 1,500 people there. That was fine – these were Tool fans who came to see what all the excitement was about.

“Then we stopped and the place filled up to 10,000. I was standing at the mixing board, looking around at all of these people, thinking, ‘They have no idea what I’ve done.’ [Laughs] I really felt like, ‘Wow, I’ve got to start over!’ ” [Laughs]

With Beat, Carey is giving his props in a more overt way – but again, nothing about this project seems nostalgic or rote. For one, these guys are putting in the hours to make this thing electric: mixing new and vintage gear (Belew mentions both the Roland Jazz Chorus amp and a bonkers Electro-Harmonix Echoflanger pedal), workshopping tons of songs, and, for the newbies at least, figuring out where to pay homage and where to forge ahead.

“Robert has been so generous and so kind and so communicative,” Vai says. “We’ve been going back and forth on all sorts of interesting things. For instance, I said, ‘In Neurotica, in various versions… sometimes you’re doing this, and sometimes you’re doing that. Could you tell me a little about that?’ Boy, he was just so generous and explained it all, but at the end he said, ‘Don’t do any of it. Do you!’ It’s just marvelous.”

“We do email, and we met up several times,” he adds. “There were a couple of days I went out to see him. I just love his musical mind so much – and his whole self, his whole personality. We’re both a little quirky. He just did something so beautiful the other day; we were talking about the splendors of the altered scale, and he sent me this beautiful one that he uses.

“Altered scales allow you to do certain things with chords that conventional scales don’t. He was explaining his approach to these very Fripp-type altered chords with all of the theory behind it.

“The man is a wizard. I have my own private little video from Robert giving me a demonstration. Those are the chords I’m going to use in Neurotica, but I’m going to smooth them in a very Vai-istic way. He really wants to see this music being reimagined, blendered and done with joy. And who wouldn’t? What musician wouldn’t?”

And though he won’t be on stage, Fripp’s enthusiasm – and even active assistance – is essential to this whole endeavor.

“It means a lot,” Belew says. “I don’t know how it got started years ago, but there were rumors that me and Robert didn’t get along and this and that. I could go back, point by point, and dispute everything that was said. People can believe whatever they want to believe, but Robert and I have been close friends for 33 years. He used to live in my house. One year he lived here 109 days. I keep a calendar of everything that happens every day. The closeness between the two of us is something that goes beyond what most people experience.”

Meanwhile, Belew says his newest “guitar partner” just wants to approach the gig “honorably.”

“One of the first things Steve said to me was, ‘Is Robert good with this? I just want to be able to honor Robert’s playing.’ Because it means a lot to him. When you have people with that kind of attitude, great things can happen.”

While primarily known for his work with King Crimson, Adrian Belew has taken his inventive and boundary-pushing approach to guitar to various camps, including Frank Zappa, David Bowie, and Talking Heads, to name just a few – heck, he's played so many sessions, he even ended up on a number one Mariah Carey single without realizing it.

This year, he added another star-studded project to his resume: the Beat Tour, alongside Steve Vai, Tool drummer Danny Carey, and King Crimson alumnus Tony Levin.

Joining this troika means Belew is bringing some of his most iconic, career-spanning guitar gadgets and gizmos on the road once more, including his signature Parker Fly – and in a new Rig Rundown with Premier Guitar, he has revealed the guitar's origin story.

“I felt like Ken Parker had taken 20 years to eliminate all the things that normally happen with electric guitars, all the problems you have, the tuning, the neck, the frets wearing out, just everything that normally can go wrong with a Fender or Gibson. He figured it all out,” asserts Belew.

He explains how he first had the Parker Fly – the 1993 model co-designed by Ken Parker and Larry Fishman – for years, before realizing he required a model more tailor-made to his experimental leanings.

“So I called Ken Parker and I said, ‘You know, I've really been wanting to use your guitar. I love it so much, but I need a synthesizer guitar. Is there anyone [or] any way we could do something about [that]?’ I need a MIDI guitar, is what I said.

“He said, ‘Well, that's funny, because when we first brought it out, it was supposed to be a MIDI guitar. It was built to be that.’”

While that was the famed luthier's original plan, the Parker Fly already had a lot of specs that made it revolutionary – not least its light weight, which made it an unlikely guitar of choice for Grand Funk Railroad's Mark Farner.

Accordingly, Belew claims teh guitar had already taken them four grueling years to produce. However, the Beat guitarist eventually managed to persuade Parker to create the MIDI guitar of his dreams.

“I said, 'I just want the most modern things we can have now.' So I was only changing the sound parts, not the guitar.” What transpired was a guitar-meets-synth model with a 13-pin out for MIDI/synth capability, a DiMarzio humbucker, a Sustainiac humbucker, a Fishman piezo, Line 6 Variax components and Parker's flat-spring vibrato system.

“I swear this guitar never goes out of tune. Plays beautifully. I play better with the [signature] Parker Fly. I can't explain it better than that,” Belew concludes.

The 65-date Beat tour kicked off in San Jose, California, on September 12, with the supergroup performing 19 songs across two sets.

Steve Vai and Adrian Belew have finally kicked off one of 2024’s most anticipated live acts with the opening night of the Beat tour.

The pair formed Beat – a supergroup whose name was coined by Robert Fripp – for a tour that will see them play King Crimson’s trilogy of 1980s albums: Discipline, Beat, and Three of a Perfect Pair.

They’ve been joined by King Crimson alumni Tony Levin on bass and Tool drummer Danny Carey for the shows. Vai says he has been working “feverishly” to be stage-ready over the past five months.

The 65-date tour began in San Jose last Thursday (September 12), with the band delivering a 19-song show across two sets.

“The first show of a tour can be like a gauntlet,” Vai reflected on social media afterward. “You can rehearse until you're blue in the face, but once you hit the stage the lights go out and there’s a live audience eager to be entertained, all bets are off as to what it’s like in rehearsal. But the band delivered well and we were all relieved to get through a good first show.

“I’ve been fronting my band for the last 35 years and I discovered a very comfortable place on the Beat stage with master of ceremonies, Brother Adrian Belew at the helm. It is so enjoyable to play this historical music for such a passionate fan base. I discovered the sincere devotion of the audience for this music and the whole band felt their firm support.”

Indeed, a big part of Vai’s prep for the shows focussed on finding that balance between playing like himself and playing like Robert Fripp, who he is essentially replacing.

Speaking to Guitar World, Adrian Belew, who spent just shy of two decades as the band’s co-guitarist alongside Fripp, had previously theorized about how the two guitar partnerships would compare.

“It really came to the point where Robert and I had separated into our own worlds,” he said. ”But I always said the perfect analogy was like two sides of the same coin. Because Robert has his approach, and I had my approach.

“I suspect Steve and I will end up being the same as Robert and me – a different version of it, of course, but two sides of the same coin.”

Footage from the opening night shows the band working through Man With An Open Heart, a song rich with chiming-yet-biting clean guitars, driven by Belew. But when it comes to the leads, there's a distinctly Vai-like flavor to the way they are delivered, complete with some subtle whammy bar wavers.

That trend continues on Heartbeat, with some overdriven volume swells and swish cleans coming from Vai's Ibanez signature guitar. It feels like a very natural marriage between the Fripp and Vai styles – something that will surely excite fans of both world-class players.

Of course, this is Steve Vai, who can make even the most finger-breaking shred look as simple as brushing your teeth. But in the five months leading up to the show, Vai wrestled with his abilities and his physical limitations in the wake of undergoing shoulder surgery.

That surgery meant wielding his ridiculous Hydra guitar became a challenge. It also meant living up to Fripp's endurance and “the absolute relentlessness of what he does” made Vai's task all the more tricky.

“I am looking so forward to the roll out of this tour and being on stage with such seasoned and immensely talented bandmates,” Vai’s post concludes. “Not to mention they are all outstanding people that I enjoy being with. Thanks so sincerely to our San Jose audience for making this first show such an enjoyable experience.”

Head to Beat for details regarding the rest of the tour.

Guitarist Adrian Belew has worked extensively as a session guitarist and touring musician – in addition to his tenure with King Crimson, he has toured with Frank Zappa, David Bowie, and Talking Heads, to name but a few. Another role on his resume? Being featured on a hit Mariah Carey track without him even knowing.

In a recent interview with Guitar World on the subject of his extremely well-worn Stratocaster, Belew discussed how that Strat has become one of the most-heard guitars on the planet… without him realizing.

“Maybe one of the most well-known songs [it was featured on] would be [Tom Tom Club’s] Genius of Love, which has been a huge hit now three times,” he says. “It’s been sampled 166 times by different artists, which is something I only learned recently when [Latto’s Big Energy] came out in 2022.”

“I was at a King Crimson show, I was signing autographs and somebody handed me Mariah Carey’s record and said, ‘Would you sign this?’ I said, ‘I don’t even know Mariah Carey. Why would I do that?’ They said, ‘Oh, you’re right here. It says you co-wrote this.’

“They opened it up and showed that I co-wrote [her 1995 hit Fantasy, which samples Genius of Love] with [Talking Heads’] Chris [Frantz] and Tina [Weymouth]. I was amazed.

“That’s exactly how I learned about it – otherwise I might have never known. It was the Number 1 record in the country at the time, but I don’t listen to mainstream radio. I called up my manager the next day, and he didn’t know, either. This guitar has crossed over a lot of people’s ears.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Belew told the story of how he got his go-to Strat from a used guitar store in Nashville for $285 in 1978.

However, he didn't like its brown sunburst finish, so he enlisted the help of Seymour Duncan to give it a complete makeover, resulting in perhaps the first-ever relic'd electric guitar.

As the Fender Stratocaster celebrates its 70th anniversary as one of, or surely the world’s most successful electric guitar design of all time, Guitar World has been leafing through the cover archive, in which, unsurprisingly, there are a lot of iconic Strats and their owners.

We thought we would give those owners a call to see what those Strats are up to now, and to find out more about what made this guitars special.

On the cover of our May 1982 issue, it was Adrian Belew’s turn, and his has truly lived a life less ordinary, tracking with Frank Zappa, David Bowie, Talking Heads, King Crimson and more, but Belew thinks it might just have started something big in guitars. Is this the first relic’ed guitar?

Where, when and why did you buy this guitar?

“I had a plain, natural-finish Stratocaster when I joined Frank Zappa’s band [in late 1977], and I used it only on the American tour because it never made it home. I don’t know if it was stolen or if the airline lost it, but that Strat was never seen again. I had two weeks before we were going to start the European dates [in 1978], and we were going to rehearse in London for 10 days or something.

“At the time I was in Nashville, where I live now. I went to a local used guitar store and was poking around, and in the back they had this kinda ugly Stratocaster hanging on the wall – like a brown sunburst. [Laughs] I said, ‘How much for this one?’ They said, ‘It doesn’t have a case, so we’ll give it to you for $285.’ A pretty good buy, I thought.”

“Seymour Duncan used to live where I grew up in Cincinnati, and he was a spectacular guitar player in that area long before I even played out. I called up Seymour when I was back out in California, and I said, ‘What am I gonna do? I have this ugly-ass guitar.’ He said, ‘I know what to do.’

“He got in the trunk of his car and took out all these things – files and a screwdriver and spray paint and lighter fluid. He laid it on the lawn, and before I could say anything, he took the lighter fluid out and squirted it on the face of the guitar and set it on fire. I said, ‘Well, I guess I’m committed now!’ [Laughs] It looked just like the beginning of Bonanza.

“Then he went to work. He dragged it through the grass. He sanded the back of the neck and put motor oil on it. He took screwdrivers and things and chipped some of the stuff off of it. I did the spray paint – a few bits here and there. I’m gonna be bold and say that might be the first relic’ed guitar – and you can thank Seymour Duncan for that. I took it back the next day, and Frank said, ‘If you wanted to ruin your guitar, Adrian, why didn’t you loan it to a friend?’” [Laughs]

What songs or albums did you record with it?

“I used this guitar on my European tour with Zappa in ’78, and because some of [Zappa’s 1979 album] Sheik Yerbouti was done from live shows in Europe, that guitar will be on there. I used it again when I jumped into David Bowie’s band – and to make Lodger and the live record, Stage.

“Then I joined Talking Heads, and in 1980, I used it for five albums that were Talking Heads-related: Remain in Light, Tom Tom Club’s [self-titled album], Jerry Harrison’s The Red and the Black, David Byrne’s The Catherine Wheel and The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads. In fact, it was the only guitar I had through this whole period.

“I probably did some other projects in that period, including Laurie Anderson. I was really busy then, and everybody wanted me to jump on their record.

“Then I joined King Crimson, and the next one everyone would know for sure was [1981’s Discipline]. The next year I put out my first solo record, Lone Rhino. The cover was made in Japan, and I explained to the photographer, Mr. [Masayoshi] Sukita, that I wanted to be standing in a field with a rhinoceros, wearing a red suit with that guitar.”

Any stories/quirks/anecdotes about it?

“Maybe one of the most well-known songs [it was featured on] would be [Tom Tom Club’s] Genius of Love, which has been a huge hit now three times. It’s been sampled 166 times by different artists, which is something I only learned recently when [Latto’s Big Energy] came out in 2022.

“I was at a King Crimson show, I was signing autographs and somebody handed me Mariah Carey’s record and said, ‘Would you sign this?’ I said, ‘I don’t even know Mariah Carey. Why would I do that?’ They said, ‘Oh, you’re right here. It says you co-wrote this.’ They opened it up and showed that I co-wrote [her 1995 hit Fantasy, which samples Genius of Love] with [Talking Heads’] Chris [Frantz] and Tina [Weymouth]. I was amazed.

“That’s exactly how I learned about it – otherwise I might have never known. It was the Number 1 record in the country at the time, but I don’t listen to mainstream radio. I called up my manager the next day, and he didn’t know either. This guitar has crossed over a lot of people’s ears.”

Do you still have it?

“It’s in the Number 1 spot on the wall of guitars in my studio, where I’m standing right now. The Twang Bar King guitar is Number 2.”

Adrian Belew is known for playing an array of Fender Stratocasters, but one of his most notable examples is a heavily relic’d brown sunburst model.

The beaten-and-busted Strat – which once featured on the cover of Guitar World magazine – was purchased in the late 1970s by Belew, who was in need of a new axe ahead of an upcoming tour he was set to undertake as part of Frank Zappa’s band.

However, the rather unsightly Strat wasn’t deemed fit for purpose until after a rather adventurous and experimental cosmetic overhaul that was carried out with the help of one of Belew’s famous friends.

As Belew reveals in the latest issue of Guitar World, such relic’ing isn’t the result of natural wear and tear over the years: it was an ahead-of-its-time DIY job instigated by Seymour Duncan.

“I went to a local used guitar store and was poking around, and in the back they had this kinda ugly Stratocaster hanging on the wall – like a brown sunburst,” Belew recalls. “I said, 'How much for this one?' They said, 'It doesn’t have a case, so we’ll give it to you for $285.' A pretty good buy, I thought.”

The guitar itself wasn’t too pretty, though, and Belew quickly turned to Duncan, who helped him overcome his grievances… with some screwdrivers, spray paint and lighter fluid.

“I called up Seymour when I was back out in California, and I said, 'What am I gonna do? I have this ugly-ass guitar.' He said, 'I know what to do.' He got in the trunk of his car and took out all these things – files and a screwdriver and spray paint and lighter fluid. 

“He laid it on the lawn, and before I could say anything, he took the lighter fluid out and squirted it on the face of the guitar and set it on fire. I said, 'Well, I guess I’m committed now!'

“Then he went to work. He dragged it through the grass. He sanded the back of the neck and put motor oil on it. He took screwdrivers and things and chipped some of the stuff off of it. I did the spray paint – a few bits here and there.”

Suffice to say it’s a far more archaic approach to artificial relic’ing, which has drastically improved in recent years owing to innovations pioneered by the likes of the painstaking Gibson Murphy Lab, and even Fender’s Heirloom aging process.

Still, Belew’s hands-on approach was somewhat ahead of its time, with the King Crimson hero going as far as to say it was the first of its kind.

“I’m gonna be bold and say that might be the first relic’d guitar,” he goes on, “and you can thank Seymour Duncan for that.”

Head over to Magazines Direct to pick up the latest issue of Guitar World, which features a deep-dive into the Stratocaster’s 70th anniversary

Since his days alongside Frank Zappa, David Bowie and Robert Fripp, Adrian Belew has refused to remain static. Now, at 74, the Kentucky-born Strato-slinger is at it again, this time with his latest and entirely mega project, Beat.

You’ll have heard the news, which Fripp leaked a few weeks before the band formally announced themselves in April. And you’ll be preparing for wild prog rock dreams to come true when Belew hits the stage with Steve Vai, Tony Levin and Danny Carey to celebrate King Crimson’s well-loved ‘80s albums Discipline (1981), Beat (1982) and Three of a Perfect Pair (1984).

Though Fripp declined an invitation to participate, Belew was glad to receive his blessing, because he holds his ex bandmate in the highest esteem.

“It was a great pairing,” Belew says. “We could interlock our styles of guitar playing – but we could also go completely apart from each other. It was wonderful; I knew what he was going to play and vice versa. We did three world tours; and strangely, those records are now coming back into people’s minds again. I think they’re as fresh as ever.”

Taking on King Crimson music without Fripp is challenging, but Belew believes he and Vai are up for it. “The internet is already full of comments and thoughts, so it’s a lot of pressure. I think we’ll do great. Steve and I will have to do the same thing that Robert and I did – Steve and I are going to be guitar partners. I’m absolutely certain he can do it.”

“He’s on tour now with Joe Satriani. I texted him yesterday and I said, ‘I’m thinking about adding these two songs. Did you happen to bring that book of transcriptions?’ And he said, ‘It’s sitting right here beside me on the bus.’ We’ll dedicate ourselves to trying to bring this music from where it once was to where we are now.”

You, along with several other alumni, have been celebrating the music of David Bowie lately. 

“I sometimes join the large expedition, where they put a new band together. I’ve had a lot of chances to go back through that era and listen through it again. What happened to me from ’77 through about ’82, with Frank Zappa straight into Bowie straight into Talking Heads straight into King Crimson, I was traveling at light speed!”

You came in during a pretty experimental period alongside the D.A.M. Trio. What was that like?

“It’s hard to remember because so many things happened so fast. It was like I was halfway dreaming, halfway awake; I just could’t focus – like, ‘This is what’s happening here. Not two years ago, I was making $75 a night, if I made that much, playing in bars. And now here I am at Madison Square Garden with David Bowie!’

“I was lucky to fall into that era of his music; the Brian Eno trilogy, as they call it. They were stretching things and trying a lot of new things, and I seemed a good fit for that. They used to laugh at me, saying: ‘You’re not supposed to be able to play that!’”

It must have been a trip going from working with Bowie after someone like Frank Zappa.

“Frank’s work, for me, was life lessons – how to be in the music business, be a professional touring musician and travel around the world. Maybe even, you know, make records or films; we did both of those.

“It was how to how to run your own business – so many things that weren’t really related to the notes and the sound. But of course, learning five hours of Frank Zappa material was a 24/7 job for me the whole time!

“I was catching up because I was the only one in the band who didn't read music. Frank wanted you to play his music correctly and consistently. He wasn’t really there for you to say, ‘Hey, I’d like to try this. How about that?’

“That was not Frank’s way. He had everything the way he wanted, and he needed people to play it right, be on time, and not come in half-drunk or any of those stupid things.”

How did working with Zappa prepare you for what was to come with Bowie?

“It was a school and I graduated from it. Before that point no one had really shown me anything – not even how to play guitar. I worked things out myself. To have someone of Frank’s stature, his genius, telling me what to do and showing me the ropes, was more important than even being in the band. It was incredible tutoring.”

“David wanted someone to just go wild on guitar. That’s what he needed; Frank didn’t need that from me. He needed me to sing a lot and play his parts. David needed me to grow wings and fly away. And he encouraged that all the time.

“You can see in some of the videos that, while I’m taking a solo, David’s standing with his arms crossed and beaming like a Cheshire cat because he just loves it. He loved to hear people go wild like that.

“And it fit in with what he was doing: David’s music was always strangely mainstream and yet really off-the-wall, especially during that period.”

I imagine your previous experience of working things out on your own lent itself to going off the wall with him. 

“Absolutely. I was ready to go. I didn’t have a lot of titles or sounds to choose from, but I was able to combine them in different ways with some of the hand techniques I was using, like bending the neck and crazy things like that.

“It all came across as kind of a new picture; I don’t think anyone had heard or seen that. It was another thing David loved – he wanted somebody that could kind of match his stage thing, not just another player standing up there playing their instrument.”

Did your gear change much as you transitioned from Zappa to Bowie?

“Oh, yeah – everything changed. When I was with Frank, I had just come from nowhere; I had no equipment to speak of. I auditioned for Frank through a little Pignose [battery-powered] amp. But by the time I got to David, I had discovered a the Roland Jazz Chorus [JC-120], and that became my amp.

“That really changed things. It was a completely different way of playing guitar. Strangely, it’s solid-state, very clean, and Japanese-sounding. But there were other things you could do – you could warm it up and pair it with some of the Electro-Harmonix pedals.

“One day I realized that if I walked over in front of the Roland Jazz Chorus, a Stereo Chorus amp, I could suddenly point the guitar at the front of the amp and move it around, and it would make this incredible oscillating sound.

“I could take the chorus setting and move it back and forth between that and vibrato and so forth. It’s a sound you cannot possibly get – no pedal in the world will make it. It’s a natural occurrence between two speakers being in chorus together. I used that a lot of early records.”

How did you take the rig you used with Bowie and push it forward with King Crimson?

“The main thing that changed from that first period from David to Talking Heads to King Crimson was that I went to Japan. I met the people at Roland and they said, ‘We have a new thing – a guitar synthesizer.’ I’d been dying to have something akin to what keyboard players could do for 10 years, and they gave me one.”

You were one of the earliest adopters of the guitar synth, right?

“I’m not certain but I’m pretty sure I had the first one in New York, as they weren’t available there yet. When I joined King Crimson, Robert had a Roland JC-120 and also the synthesizer; it was actually the second one they made, but it was the first one that anyone ever used.

“The first one has been a bit too much – it was like a big Farfisa organ. The second one is the blue one, the GR-300. So much of the King Crimson sound of the ‘80s came from that one device.

“It was a simple instrument: you could only do maybe five or six things with it, and you had to manually tune all the different oscillators. You couldn’t save a sound! It was the era before things got much more digitized.”

You’re primarily known as a Strat guy, so the guitar synth must have been a shock to the system.

“Even if you just put it with the guitar, you had a very unusual sound. The guitar didn’t sound like a normal guitar and that really changed things. So the next thing I did in that period was my first solo record, Lone Rhino, using all the things I had coming from David, Talking Heads and King Crimson.”

What was that setup like?

“The Strat and maybe four, five or six little pedals. But for Twang Bar King, the second solo record, I started using the guitar synth. I had Fender build me a Mustang with all the accoutrements from the guitar synthesizer.

“You had all kinds of things you could operate from the guitar, and you had to have a special pickup. Once that got designed, I started using what became known as the ‘Twang Bar King guitar’ because I made that record with it. I used that in King Crimson from there on.”

You’d matched wits with Zappa, Bowie, Eno and David Byrne – a lot of interesting characters. What was it like working alongside Fripp?

“The first thing with Robert was that he’d already designed the kind of guitar playing he favored – fast picking; very, very precise. He needed a second guitar player to play it. It required two people playing the same thing, offsetting from each other. Frame by Frame is a great example of it.

“Robert and I sat down for hours every day; I had to get up to speed with being able to play like him. After we got to a certain point, and I was getting good enough to do it – because it wasn’t my style at all, and I’m not the best picker in the world – and Robert was feeling good about it, I started trying to write songs with it.

“Then it was, ‘Okay, get back to your Stratocaster and start making your sounds like an elephant!’ It really came to the point where Robert and I had separated into our own worlds. I always said it was two sides of the same coin: Robert has his approach, and I had my approach of making those sounds, noises, feedback, and bird calls.”

Fripp named the Beat project – is that right?

“Yes – in brief, I’d been working on the idea of putting together a band to do those three records – Discipline, Beat, and Three of a Perfect Pair – the ‘80s trilogy. I talked to Robert in 2019 and he declined being any part of it. But he said, ‘If you want to celebrate King Crimson and you want to drive it, go ahead. I will give you my blessing.’”

How did Steve Vai become involved?

“We started thinking, ‘Well, who could possibly be in the band?’ The big part would be, ‘Who would step into Robert’s role?’ The only person I could think of was Steve. I heard him say in an interview that he had a lot of affection and admiration for Robert.

“So I thought, ‘Well, maybe there’s a chance – you never know.’ I called him, and lo and behold, he was so excited; I couldn’t believe it. So we started talking… and then, of course, COVID hit. That added another two and a half years onto the waiting process.

“I wasn’t sure Steve would ever be able to do it because, after COVID, he had 18 months of touring commitments that he’d previously booked. We had to keep waiting. By the time we thought, ‘Okay, let’s call Steve now,’ he was ready to do it; he thought he could fit it into his busy schedule.”

Is that when you approached Tony Levin and Danny Carey?

“Yes. Tony had been in King Crimson, but I didn't think we were ever going to get him. But his schedule opened and he was delighted to do it – he said, ‘It would be a big challenge!’ But he accepts that kind of thing. He thrives on it.

“I thought, ‘Wow, we are one person away from having the kind of elite musicians that could do this.’ I didn’t want to have a band that didn’t do it as well as it could possibly be done. You had to have people of that caliber. And then Danny Carey came into the picture. 

“I’ve known Danny for many years; he’s always talked so much about Bill Bruford and those three records. He said that when he first started drumming, those were the things he listened to and was inspired by.

“So I knew he was a huge fan of that music. The same thing happened – the Tool tour was about to end and they were going into writing mode and didn’t know how long that would take. So yes, Danny wanted to go off for a few months with us.”

How will you and Steve approach the gig?

“We got together in L.A. after we had all that stuff in place. He and I sat down in his studio full of gorgeous stuff – like 400 guitars – and we sat there for a whole day ticking through. We listened to all the songs I had decided we should do; although I’m still considering things. I’m going to have that done in a few days.

“We had a book with all the material transcribed for guitar – my parts and Robert’s, except my solos. They say in the book that there’s no way they can tell you how to play my solos. And that’s true because I can’t either!

“I think it really relieved Steve a lot because he wants to make sure that what we do is honorable to the originals. Not that we have to play them exactly the same, and not that we're going to be a cover band. We certainly will not be over time; I believe we will make it our own. 

“But there are many well-defined elements in King Crimson’s music that have to be there. Steve was concerned about those things, and after we went through it, and I told him the things I thought we could branch out from, he felt a lot more relieved.”

What’s the key to locking in with Steve, seeing as you’re both going to need a lot of space?

“We don’t know – we have yet to play a note! I suspect Steve and I will end up being the same as Robert and me. A different version of it, of course, but two sides of the same coin.

“I’m anxious to hear what he’ll come up with – which won’t be just him playing Robert’s parts. But Robert’s parts are fantastic, and they will need to be there. Once we’ve had some rehearsals, I’ll tell you how it’s going. Until then, I’m guessing.”

• Beat commence their tour on September 12. See Beat Tour for full dates.

The definitive track from Three of a Perfect Pair, King Crimson’s underrated 10th LP, could be its deepest cut: Dig Me is three minutes of atonal avant-rock chaos interspersed with gleaming New Wave choruses – a combo that crystalizes the prog quartet’s evolved form by 1984. 

“I went into the studio one day and said, ‘[This piece] is going to be no set tempo or rhythms – very disconnected,’” says singer-guitarist Adrian Belew, describing an early session in England. “It was our way of combining this industrial approach with an actual song.”

It’s a microcosm of Perfect Pair itself, the summit of what guitarist and Crimson torch-carrier Robert Fripp had mapped out, creatively, as the “incline to 1984.”

“When we started, Robert had a kind of plan laid out that we would do three records in three years,” Belew says, describing the fertile period that also birthed 1981’s Discipline and 1982’s Beat. But this third installment of the ’80s trilogy was more experimental and more melodic, with each sonic mode occupying its own half of a vinyl LP. 

Belew says he and Fripp outlined most of the basic frameworks together, playing “quietly with our two electric guitars unplugged.” And even though he’d recently exhausted a mountain of ideas on his first two solo LPs, Belew still managed to polish off Perfect Pair’s more radio-friendly cuts, including the shadowy Sleepless; some of the more untamed tunes, like Larks’ Tongues in Aspic (Part III), remained instrumental.

The final product is essentially two EPs smashed together – a unique bit of sequencing that gives the album its own quirky character. 

Belew muses that the hooky Man with an Open Heart, for example, would sound “really out of place” surrounded by “this muscular, crazy, wonderful stuff” from side two – in “this industrial musical junkyard we created.” 

Still, there were strange sonic secrets lurking within even the catchiness, including Three of a Perfect Pair, which mingles interlocking guitars and complex time signatures with a blues-like three-chord structure and backing vocals that – no joke – were inspired by Motown.

“When I got to the chorus – and I know this is going to sound crazy – I thought I’d write something like the Supremes might have sung,” Belew says with a laugh, recreating the refrain. “But, of course, with it turning out to be in 7, it’s not exactly a Supremes song, is it?”

The term ‘supergroup’ is often overused – but in the case of Beat, that moniker can be used with full confidence.

Featuring Adrian Belew, Tony Levin, Steve Vai, and Tool’s Danny Carey, the band has been assembled with Robert Fripp’s blessing to perform King Crimson’s ‘80s trilogy of albums: Discipline (1981), Beat (1982), and Three of a Perfect Pair (1984).

In an upcoming interview with Guitar World, Belew sat down to dish out the project’s details – and tease what fans can expect from his new guitar partnership with Vai ahead of Beat's extensive US tour.

“I had been working on the idea of putting together a band to do the '80s trilogy,” he explains of Beat's origins. “I talked to Robert in 2019. He declined being any part of it, but he said to me, 'If you want to celebrate King Crimson, and you want to drive it, go ahead. I will give you my blessing.'” 

This left Belew scratching his head for a suitable electric guitar stand-in – and only one name came to mind. 

He continues, “We started thinking, 'Well, who could possibly be in the band?...Who would step into Robert's role?' The only person I could think of was Steve Vai.

“I heard Steve Vai say in an interview that he had a lot of affection for Robert Fripp's playing, especially the '80s Crimson. So, I thought, 'Well, maybe there's a chance.' Lo and behold, he was so excited; I couldn't believe it.”

After Vai was locked in (and COVID had delayed the project by three years), Belew turned to fellow King Crimson alumni Tony Levin, and Tool's Danny Carey, to complete the lineup.

With the band formed, there was just the tricky part of piecing the music together. For Vai and Belew, that meant developing a guitar-playing relationship that could live up to Fripp/Belew double-act.

To do that, the two Beat bandmates hunkered down and Vai's LA studio and began the process of going through the King Crimson catalog.

“Steve and I got together in LA, and I went to his studio full of gorgeous stuff, like 400 guitars, and we sat there for a whole day ticking through,” Belew recalls. “We listened to all the songs I had decided we should do, which was a partial setlist.

“We went one by one through them, saying, 'Okay, here's what you can hear, here's what Robert's doing there, here's what I'm doing here.' We also had a book with all that material transcribed for guitar, my parts, and Robert's, except my solos.”

As for what fans can expect from the Vai/Belew partnership, the guitarist acknowledged it will be different from the relationship he shared with Fripp, but asserted there will be some certain sonic similarities.

“It really came to the point where Robert and I had separated into our own worlds,” he concludes. ”But I always said the perfect analogy was like two sides of the same coin. Because Robert has his approach, and I had my approach.

“I suspect Steve and I will end up being the same as Robert and me – a different version of it, of course, but two sides of the same coin. 

“Steve wants to make sure that what we do is honorable to the originals,” Belew expands. “Not that we have to play them exactly the same and not that we're going to be a cover band, I believe we will make it our own.”

Keep an eye on GuitarWorld.com to catch the full interview with Adrian Belew.

Last month, it was revealed that Steve Vai would be joining King Crimson alumni Adrian Belew and Tony Levin, as well as Tool’s Danny Carey, for Beat – a forthcoming tour that will see the four musicians play the music of three iconic King Crimson albums.

Now, official details of the supergroup’s upcoming tour have been announced, with Vai and co set to play an extensive tour across North America, during which they will revisit and reinterpret tracks from the Discipline, Beat, and Three of a Perfect Pair albums.

The tour will begin on September 12 at the San Jose Civic in California, and is currently scheduled to conclude on November 8 at Las Vegas’ The Theater at Virgin Hotels. Between those two dates, the group will embark on a mammoth run of 40 near-consecutive nights of shows.

Vai – whose 2024 touring schedule has already included the G3 reunion and Satch/Vai tour – said of the tour: “Being a part of this ensemble is an extraordinary privilege and opportunity to perform some of the most beloved, timeless, and monumental music of the 80’s (and beyond) with truly inspired musicians. 

“This music resonates deeply with me. Adrian, Tony and Danny are unique musicians with an otherworldly insight into presenting rich musical complexities in a very accessible way, and I am looking forward to searching each other’s musical minds in real time on stage. I’m sure sparks will fly.

“Father Robert Fripp is one of our historical geniuses,” he continued. “His highly specific and exceptionally brilliant guitar technique is studied and revered. His contribution to the quality of my musical life, and so many others is supreme. 

“I can assure the fans of KC that I will be putting my best foot forward to respect this great music with the care and intensity it deserves.”

Vai has already received the blessing of King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp, who voiced his support for the group in a series of Facebook posts. In one, he called Vai “the only guitarist who could play my parts.”

“This is music to be played, engaged, re-imagined, heard anew, chewed up and digested,” he said in another post. “I'm totally psyched for this.”

For Beat, Vai will be sharing guitar duties with Belew, who explained the purpose of the project: to shine a new light on King Crimson’s ‘80s-era material.

“The 1981 through 1984 King Crimson created a music all its own,” he noted. “Timeless. Beautiful. Complex. Fierce. For the fans who lived through it then, and the ones who never got to witness it, our aim is to bring it to life again. A monumental task, but we're going for it.”

You can see a full list of dates below. For tickets and more info, visit the band's website.

Beat Tour 2024 Dates

9/12     San Jose, CA                           San Jose Civic

9/13     Napa, CA                                Blue Note Napa Summer Sessions at Meritage Resort

9/14     Los Angeles, CA                    The United Theater on Broadway

9/15     Anaheim, CA                          City National Grove of Anaheim

9/17     San Diego, CA                        Humphrey’s Concerts

9/18     Phoenix, AZ                            Celebrity Theatre

9/20     Austin, TX                              The Paramount Theatre

9/21     Houston, TX                           Bayou Music Centre

9/22     Dallas, TX                              Majestic Theatre

9/24     Atlanta, GA                            The Eastern

9/26     Fort Lauderdale, FL                The Parker

9/27     Orlando, FL                            Hard Rock Live

9/28     Clearwater, FL                        Ruth Eckerd Hall

9/29     Charleston, SC                        Charleston Music Hall

10/01   Charlotte, NC                          Knight Theater

10/02   Durham, NC                           Carolina Theatre of Durham / Fletcher Hall

10/04   Washington, DC                     Warner Theatre

10/05   New York, NY                       Beacon Theatre

10/06   Glenside, PA                           Keswick Theatre

10/08   Richmond, VA                        Carpenter Theater in Dominion Energy Center

10/09   Red Bank, NJ                          Count Basie Center

10/11   Boston, MA                            Shubert Theatre

10/12   Hampton Beach, NH              Hampton Beach Casino Ballroom

10/14   Halifax, NS                             Rebecca Cohen Auditorium

10/15   Moncton, NB                          Casino New Brunswick

10/17   Montreal, QC                          Theatre Maisonneuve

10/18   Toronto, ON                           Massey Hall

10/19   Rochester, NY                        Kodak Center

10/21   Albany, NY                            The Egg

10/22   Greensburg, PA                      Palace Theatre

10/23   Reading, PA                            Santander Performing Arts Center

10/25   Cleveland, OH                        Agora Theatre

10/26   Cincinnati, OH                        Taft Theatre

10/27   Royal Oak, MI                        Royal Oak Music Theatre

10/28   Nashville, TN                         Ryman Auditorium

10/30   Indianapolis, IN                      Murat Theatre

11/01   Chicago, IL                             Copernicus Center

11/02   Milwaukee, WI                       Pabst Theatre

11/03   Madison, WI                           Orpheum Theater

11/04   Minneapolis, MN                    State Theatre

11/06   Denver, CO                             Paramount Theatre

11/08   Las Vegas, NV                       The Theater at Virgin Hotels

Lots of guitar nerds would consider Adrian Belew a virtuoso, and it’s hard to argue against them. But he’s really a virtuoso of sound and form more than show-off technique. 

As a one-time member of prog rock institution King Crimson, a solo artist balancing Beatles-like ear worms and outré studio craft, and an A-list hired gun for legends like Talking Heads, Frank Zappa and David Bowie, he’s created his own language on the guitar. Literally no-one else could sound like him if they wanted to – partly because his skill set is so distinctive, partly because he approaches effects pedals like a painter would colors. 

For Belew, head-turning gigs begat head-turning gigs in the late Seventies and early Eighties: In a legendary three-year studio streak (not even mentioning his stage work), he appeared on Zappa’s Sheik Yerbouti, David Bowie’s Stage and Lodger and Talking Heads’ Remain in Light – solidifying his joyously wacky approach to sound design and an aggressive rhythmic energy that drew on his background as a drummer. 

In the reformed Crimson, he teamed with bandmate Robert Fripp to create a startling guitar style drawing, at various points, from the glow of New Wave, the bombastic snarl of metal, and the interlocking principles of gamelan. And he’s continued to innovate with each band, album, and one-off collaboration. 

The beauty – and irony – of Belew is that his sound is in constant flux, but few guitarists are so easily identifiable. No list could even scratch the surface, but below we round up 10 of his definitive guitar moments. 

10. Young Lions – (Adrian Belew, from 1990’s Young Lions) 

Belew’s fifth solo album is a bit of a grab-bag, source-wise – compiling covers of The Traveling Wilburys (Not Alone Anymore) and, technically, himself (King Crimson’s Heartbeat); two link-ups with Bowie (Pretty Pink Rose and Gunman); and a track that samples radio evangelist Prophet Omega (I Am What I Am). 

You’d think the vibe would be chaotic, but Young Lions could be his most consistently melodic work, kicking off with the sharpest pop song in his catalog, the chugging title track. 

The primary guitar part is more subtle and funky than Crimson fans may have expected, showcasing his knack for Beatles-y chord changes. But there’s also some good old-fashioned Belew animal noises (elephants and lions, at the very least), matching the mood of this “hot tribal night.”

9. This Is What I Believe In – (Adrian Belew, from 1992’s Inner Revolution)

Belew opens this introspective rocker, a sort of bluesier cousin of King Crimson’s Neal and Jack and Me, with several sweetly sung sentiments: “Hold tight to your faith / Don’t let nobody make you jaded / Your love is precious / Give it to somebody who deserves it / This is what I believe in / Hold tight to yourself / Don’t let nobody give you hell.” 

But the song grows darker as it grinds on, with Belew warning of a “dangerous,” cannibalistic world “full of homicidals and terrorists.” Still, by the song’s conclusion, you’re left with a warm sense of optimism – urged on by some of his most colorful guitar work, including an instrumental bridge full of violin-like churning and a solo that recalls the soulfulness of Stevie Wonder’s harmonica.

8. The Momur – (Adrian Belew, from 1982’s Lone Rhino) 

Falling somewhere between palm-muted power-pop and ragged New Wave punk, The Momur is Belew at peak silliness. Between swarming feedback, atonal fills, and an impressively sustained solo, the guitarist channels the absurdity of Zappa, sharing a B-movie-type tale his old pal and musical mentor might have appreciated. 

Here’s the plot: The previous night, the protagonist’s wife turned into a monster, backed him into a corner, tried to kill him with a broom (seems difficult, doesn’t it?), smashed his favorite guitar, and even danced on the wreckage. (The seemingly random title was a family joke: Belew’s daughter Audie, then only three, used to babble the word “momur” instead of “monster” when she got scared by something.) 

“It’s from back in the day when I was still trying to be funny in my songs, which came from my work with Frank Zappa,” Belew explained to Innerviews in 2022. But that tip of the cap seems to extend even beyond the words – musically, it’s easy to picture The Momur as part of a late-Seventies Zappa album like Sheik Yerbouti.

7. Tango Zebra – (Adrian Belew, from 1986’s Desire Caught by the Tail) 

On a purely tonal level, Belew is probably best known for being animalistic. Literally – he once displayed his gift for beastly mimicry during a Japanese TV commercial, accurately channeling chickens, cats and elephants. 

But his guitars, when prompted, can also speak the language of other instruments, as showcased through the experimental folk orchestrations of Tango Zebra. It’s a journey song of the highest magnitude, opening with the twang of resonators and gradually growing more synthetic – the result lands somewhere between jazz, bluegrass and avant-rock. 

It’s unlike anything else in his catalog, not least because of the unique arrangement, inspired partly by George Gershwin. “[T]hat’s how I approached it,” Belew told Music Technology in 1987, “as though there really were members in this orchestra and I had to produce for their instruments.” The most blatantly orchestral touch: a section of electric guitars that sound uncannily like woodwinds. Except that they don’t quite – like basically every other Belew tone, it sounds uniquely his.

6. e2 – (Adrian Belew, from 2009’s e) 

By the late 2000s, Belew had collaborated with the elite of prog and art-rock – he could pretty much record with anyone, forming whatever outlandish supergroup he pleased. 

Most people in this exalted position wouldn’t start a brand new band from scratch – in this case, the Adrian Belew Power Trio – with a pair of relatively unknown young adults. But brother-sister rhythm section Julie Slick (bass) and Eric Slick (drums) brought a renewed vitality and edge to Belew’s music, best displayed on a knotty five-part suite dubbed e. 

It would be cheating to pick the full, 42-minute piece (the swaggering live favorite b deserves an honorable mention), so let’s turn to the eight-minute finale, e2, in which Belew unfurls chromatic runs and unnerving harmonies over Julie’s staccato bass riffs. As with many of his tunes, this one takes on a new intensity in concert, as Belew builds mountains of overdubs with a looper pedal.

5. Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On) – (Talking Heads, from 1980’s Remain in Light)

Talking Heads didn’t exactly need any guest players on their fourth LP – and they certainly didn’t need a gravity-bending show-stopper like Belew on the densely arranged funk-rock opener, Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On). 

The song is stuffed to the gills with overdubs, as electronic bloops, bass riffs, and backing vocals pile into a polyrhythmic groove that borrows its all-hands-on-deck heft from African music. And that’s before even mentioning Heads frontman David Byrne, whose raving lands somewhere between cryptic paranoia and plain gibberish (“Take a look at these hands / The hand speaks, the hand of a government man / Well, I’m a tumbler / Born under punches / I’m so thin”). 

In summary, there’s already a lot to unpack. But then Belew, who’d later join the band on the Remain in Light tour, added a magic dash of secret sauce: a long stretch of guitar playing that sounds like an ancient, defective modem booting up on an alien planet. 

“I recorded a guitar solo and then ran it through an expensive piece of studio gear called a Lexicon Prime Time,” Belew wrote on Facebook, “which allowed me to alter the [bandwidth] of the sound while capturing quick little loops I could fool with.”

4. Three of a Perfect Pair – (King Crimson, from 1984’s Three of a Perfect Pair) 

Throughout the Eighties, King Crimson invented their own language within progressive rock – their best songs were both snappy and strange. 

By the time the classic quartet lineup reached Three of a Perfect Pair, their last of an early-decade trilogy, those extreme sensibilities seemed to be diverging: “The album presents two distinct sides of the band’s personality, which has caused at least as much confusion for the group as it has the public and the industry,” Fripp wrote in the album’s press release. “The left side is accessible, the right side excessive.” 

Kicking off the former half is the classic title track, which is – let’s be honest – still pretty damn unorthodox for any band not named King Crimson. Belew and Fripp revive their now-standard interlocking guitars for the verses, grounded by the polyrhythmic force of bassist Tony Levin’s jumpy low-end and Bill Bruford’s restrained acoustic drumming. 

It’s already a highlight of their entire Eighties run, but that’s before you dig into Belew’s sputtering guitar-synth solo, assembled, like Born Under Punches, through studio doctoring with the Lexicon Prime Time.

3. Level Five – (King Crimson, from 2003’s The Power to Believe) 

During a run of dates with heavy prog masters (and King Crimson disciplines) Tool way back in 2001, the prog legends road-tested fresh material that wound up on their 13th and final studio album, The Power to Believe.

Tool’s influence seemingly rubbed off: The music is darker and more metallic than anything Crimson had released since 1974’s Red. (The album’s working title was, fittingly, Nuovo Metal.) There’s no better example than opener Level Five, a piece almost frightening in its attack. 

The track, originally described as the fifth installment of their Larks Tongues in Aspic series, offers plenty of fireworks from both Belew and Fripp, as both players react to the sputtering, glitchy electro-acoustic drumming of Pat Mastelotto. But Belew’s MVP moment arrives after the five-minute mark, when he breaks into a torrent of high-octave squeals and dazzling dives.  

2. Frame by Frame – (King Crimson, from 1981’s Discipline) 

If Elephant Talk is the playful centerpiece of Discipline, Frame by Frame is the album’s serious, beard-stroking prog moment – the yin to that song’s yang. (Ironically, the lyrics originated from a sort of in-joke between Belew and Levin, the band’s other American member, about the analytical side of their studious British bandmates.) 

The track is quintessential Eighties Crim, built around a complex twin-guitar pattern in 78 that drifts apart before locking back into place. 

But even if Fripp and Belew could meld into each other’s styles, they never tried to hide their differences: Frame by Frame opens with a disorienting instrumental section with the two playing off each other brilliantly – Fripp overcome in a flurry of rapid-fire picking, Belew strangling his strings into chunky rhythms and whammy bar wildness. (To fully appreciate the latter’s work on this behemoth, check out the live version from the Neal and Jack and Me concert DVD.)

1. Elephant Talk – (King Crimson, from 1981’s Discipline)

It may be the obvious choice, of course, but… come on! Elephant Talk has everything you could possibly want from Belew: the elite musicianship, the raw creativity, the sense of child-like wonder, the boatload of guitar effects. (The one thing it doesn’t feature is the man’s underrated singing – this one’s basically spoken.) 

The song bloomed from a funky guitar riff that Belew eventually suggested that Levin refine on his Chapman Stick – and from there, the former was free to go nuts with the pedals. It’s a tour de force: woozy dives, static-wrapped rhythms, harmonic pings and, most crucially, a flange-and-fuzz combo that sounds unmistakably like the roar of a freaking elephant. 

Belew’s lyrics add another layer of gleeful mania, moving alphabetically to list the various kinds of human speech. (Best part: “These are words with a ‘d’ this time!”) Since the words didn’t rhyme, he felt no need to sing in the traditional sense, instead leaning into a bizarre holler. Luckily he made it up to the letter “E,” allowing him to connect the dots between elephant sounds and, well, whatever it was Elephant Talk actually meant. 

Because Steve Vai clearly doesn’t have enough projects to keep his fretboard-bothering fingers busy, he’s joined a new King Crimson-honoring supergroup, Beat. 

It sees him join forces with King Crimson alumni Adrian Belew and Tony Levin, and Tool’s rhythmic tour de force Danny Carey. With the blessing of Robert Fripp, the band will perform tracks from King Crimson’s trio of ‘80s LPs, Discipline, Beat, and Three Of A Perfect Pair.

Writing on Facebook, the King Crimson guitarist detailed the background to the band’s formation, saying: “This is the project that Adrian Belew called me about last Autumn, a project which I support and fully encourage, and discussed with Steve Vai recently... Even, I suggested the name.”

In a separate statement, Fripp added, “Steve Vai asked me what I thought when Adrian Belew told me Steve would be the guitarist. My reply: Steve Vai is the only guitarist who could play my parts.”

Via a third Facebook post, Fripp hyped the band, revealing he is excited by the prospect of the four distinguished musicians re-energizing Crimson’s music. 

“This is music to be played, engaged, re-imagined, heard anew, chewed up and digested,” he said. “I'm totally psyched for this.”

Details of Beat’s plans are scarce, save for one confirmed show at Humphrey’s Concerts By The Bay in San Diego on 17 September.

The show adds to Vai’s tireless 2024 touring schedule, which started off with the reunion of the classic G3 line-up and also includes a co-headline tour with Joe Satriani in the US.  

It seems unlikely that Beat will be just a one-show-wonder, so keep your eyes on these pages for further details in the future. 

Beat may have plenty in the pipeline, but King Crimson’s future is a somewhat clouded. Speaking to Guitar World previously, Fripp has admitted that it’s “hard to say” what the future holds for the progressive rock giants.

In other news, another former King Crimson man, Trey Gunn, recently championed Fripp’s impact on his guitar playing. He says he “helped create almost a new genre” with each King Crimson song the pair worked on.

By his own description, Adrian Belew’s latest solo LP draws more from “quirky pop” than the proggy acrobatics of his former band, King Crimson. But these two creative roles – the Beatles-y hook writer and the experimentalist – always balance each other out in the long run, eternally linked by his uncanny gift for summoning strange noises. “[That’s] been my most important contribution,” Belew says. “I’ve always had a knack for emulating sounds or creating new ones.”

In the emulation category, Elevator has plenty of choice moments, like a frenetic sedan-horn guitar solo on the bluesy A Car I Can Talk To. 

“It harkens back to the very early days of my career, back to right before Frank Zappa discovered me,” Belew says, reflecting on the period before his life-changing big break in the late '70s. “I was beginning to realize how to make different sounds with the guitar using the volume and a couple of notes squished together in the right way. I’ve had that car sound in my menagerie for decades.” 

And in the creation category, there are the eerie, droning tones that decorate the hypnotic acoustic reverie The Power of the Natural World. “There’s a very small guitar called a Loog that costs a couple of hundred bucks,” he says. “The idea is that you build it together with your child. It has three strings; I tuned it to three open D’s, and they’re rather floppy that way too, because I thought they would make a really interesting chorused sound on their own. 

“I was searching around for a way to make it sound like some kind of Eastern instrument, and I realized that, by using a piece of wood like a drum stick and rolling it up and down across the strings to change the note, I could achieve that effect. Then we triple-tracked it, and it just worked out beautifully. It’s a haunting sound, and if I heard it, I would say, ‘What instrument is that?’ Because it’s not an instrument – it’s a sound I made up.”

Belew had plenty of time for such tinkering on Elevator, writing most of the material at his home in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, amid the early Covid lockdown. 

“It was the first time when there wasn’t a deadline or something else coming around the corner,” he says. “I was able to completely craft exactly what I wanted without worrying about going on tour or having other commitments.” (As the live music realm has returned to normal, he’s resumed his typically all-over-the-map itinerary, playing and announcing shows with his regular band, the all-star Celebrating David Bowie tribute, and the Talking Heads Remain in Light celebration alongside guitarist Jerry Harrison.) 

While it’s far from a pandemic-themed album, Elevator is certainly a reaction, at least in spirit, to the onslaught of bad news everyone seemed to be experiencing at that time: “I wanted everything to be really clean and upbeat. I felt like when the clouds were lifted, so to speak, I’d want to have an uplifting kind of record to bring everyone back to normalcy, back to love.”

No song illustrates that longing for escape better than A13, a rollicking open-road rocker about “getting away from Covid” via “some fantasy train to nowhere.” The music, he notes, tips its hat to the Fab Four and, with its “big separation” between vocal harmonies, Simon & Garfunkel. But he was also hoping to evoke a vibe that’s even older: some kind of nostalgic romance that might have highlighted a 1950s film. 

“I had a very clear roadmap,” he says. “The running, fast piano figure is actually played on an [electronic] Japanese instrument called the [Yamaha] Tenori-On, which has a lot of different sounds in it. The song came from making that loop, and that led to me writing the chorus.

“I wanted some of those edgy, almost out-of-phase guitar sounds that were on early '60s records, so I used an Epiphone that has a five-way selector switch. I also used a Stratocaster that’s been modified with six switches on it, so it will do all 35 sounds you can possibly get out of a Stratocaster. Many of them are really edgy.”

Detailing these tones, Belew comes off positively childlike – enthusing about the nuances of every instrument, whether they already existed or he invented them himself. 

“I basically never really stop,” he says with a laugh. “It’s just always flowing out of me.”

• Elevator is out now.

With a 32-disc boxset of his solo work during the late 1970s already released into the wild and a guitar book coming out in early autumn, Robert sits down with us at Fripp HQ in the middle England countryside to talk all things King Crimson, as we take an exclusive look at the instruments that have given voice to some of prog-rock’s finest moments...

Interviews with ‘That Awful Man’, as Robert Fripp refers to himself these days, are rare, and until now he hasn’t allowed his collection of guitars to be photographed, including the ’59 Les Paul Custom that was used on so many classic Crimson albums.

“I don’t collect guitars,” he tells us as we settle down to talk, “they are merely tools that I use in my work.” However, we note that the famous ’59 appears to be in almost pristine condition – in fact, it’s still shiny even after years on the road. “One careful owner,” he quips with a wry grin.

Anyone who wants to assess Fripp’s skills as a guitarist need only check out Fracture from the King Crimson album Starless And Bible Black. The Moto Perpetuo from that piece is a legendary example of his crosspicking finesse. 

His guitar journey began with lessons that found him playing some challenging classical pieces with a plectrum, instead of the more conventional fingerstyle. This influence reached into the Crimson repertoire and is apparent in 1970’s Peace – A Theme from In The Wake Of Poseidon.

“Yes, Carcassi Etude No 7, the middle section,” he tells us. “You probably wouldn’t be able to see the connection, but Peace – A Theme wouldn’t have quite ended up that way unless I practiced the Carcassi Etudes for fingerstyle, but with a pick because crosspicking was my speciality.”

Now that Crimson has entered another hiatus, the rendition of Starless in Japan last December being regarded by all as the last we’ll hear from the band, it’s time to catch up with Crimson’s only permanent member. And we start our conversation at the very beginning...

How did you become interested in music – and specifically the guitar – in the first place?

“My trajectory was at age 11 my sister and I bought two records, Rock With The Caveman by Tommy Steele and Don’t Be Cruel by Elvis Presley. The guitarist on Tommy Steele I learnt later was Bert Weedon, on Elvis, Scotty Moore. There weren’t any English rock musicians, they were all jazzers. Old men, basically. Old men who would come in and do the young character sessions. 

“Mel Collins’ [Crimson sax player] father would be doing the ripping tenor solos on [BBC music programme] Six-Five Special with Tubby Hayes and Ronnie Scott sitting next to him. They would be making derogatory comments on these young rock artists who really weren’t in the same musical ballpark as they were. 

“In America it was entirely different. There was nothing demeaning about playing rock music and moving out of blues. Scotty Moore, Chuck Berry, the sheer power of Jerry Lee Lewis... That was me around 11 to 12.

“At 13 trad jazz came along. I would go down to the Winter Gardens in Bournemouth and see all the characters: Chris Barber, Acker Bilk, Monty Sunshine and just about everyone else that was working at the time. Memphis Slim I saw there, too – I think he was supporting Chris Barber. Wow, wow. At 15, hearing Mingus, Extrapolation. Max Roach, Town Hall New York City. 

“Then, at 17, the more challenging aspects of what we call classic music. It segued into The Beatles and 1960s English rock instrumentals. I saw The Outlaws at a show in Poole when I was 17 with Ritchie Blackmore, he was then 18. He was phenomenal. He had all the moves. He had the music, he had the playing, it was astonishing.

“The Bournemouth scene was very hot. Working in the first League Of Gentlemen we would do lots of specialty vocals: Four Seasons, Beatles. We would also do the instrumental specialities, Entry Of The Gladiators, which I didn’t realize until I met him years later was Mick Jones of Foreigner. Then I went off to college to take A-levels to go onto university and take a degree in estate management.

“My musical interest went slightly to the side, and I went to the Majestic Dance Orchestra to pay my way through college. When that came to an end, there was Hendrix, Sgt Pepper and things shot off in a different direction, to the extent I could no longer continue. Going on to London where I’d been accepted for a place for three years to take a degree in estate management at the College of Estate Management in South Kensington, I had my digs booked in Acton; how awful that was. I said to my father, ‘I can’t continue,’ and I turned professional on my 21st birthday.”

What was the first guitar you had when you began playing?

“It was an Egmond Freres, an appalling instrument. The action at the 7th fret, you needed pliers to depress it. It was appalling. It required me to develop such strong muscles that I remember in 1971 practicing to put less pressure into my left hand. I moved onto a cheap Rosetti guitar, which was not good. Then a Höfner; I believe it was a President, it was the cutaway version. It wasn’t great, but at least it was an instrument.

“My first good guitar was my Gibson ES-345 Stereo, which I bought from Eddie Moors music shop in Boscombe where on a Saturday afternoon I would give guitar lessons. Young characters would come in and say, ‘I’m interested in buying a guitar.’ They’d say, ‘We have an in-store guitar teacher who can give you lessons on Saturday afternoon.’ I’d go around the corner to something like a village hall in Boscombe and give guitar lessons. 

“Then in the evening I’d go on to Chewton Glen Hotel, this was when I was 17, and play in the Douglas Ward Trio. This was my first good guitar, and it was expensive, something like £350. That was the guitar with The League Of Gentlemen. That took me to London with Giles, Giles And Fripp, that guitar, which I used until 1968 when I got my first Les Paul. I only used the 345 again with Crimson on In The Wake Of Poseidon on Cat Food, and Bolero [from Lizard].”

1959 Gibson Les Paul Custom

Was there an influence on you musically from listening to classical music?

“I began listening to the Bartók String Quartet and Stravinsky’s Rite Of Spring. The turning point in my musical, and I suppose personal, life was something like ‘music is one’. I didn’t hear separate categories, I heard music but as if it was one musician speaking in a variety of dialects. The crashing chords of Rite Of Spring or Bartók, where is that coming from? The opening bars of Purple Haze or Day In The Life, I Am The Walrus, it all had this incredible power as it reached over and pulled me towards it.”

You’re well known for your crosspicking ability on pieces such as Fracture. How did this skill begin to develop?

“It’s what in Guitar Craft is called ‘a point of seeing’. It’s not the process of rational deduction of working out; you simply see something. I remember specifically the moment. I was at home in the first floor rear room where my sister and myself would do homework. I was practicing Study In 3/4 by Dick Sadleir. 

“My guitar teacher, Don Strike, gave me a very good technical foundation. In terms of current music, it was a little old-fashioned. It was kind of corny for a young character who enjoyed Scotty Moore. Instead of doing bom-bish-bish bom-bish-bish, I began crosspicking. The same shapes, the same notes but crosspicking it. 

“Seeing that that was so obviously the way to go I continued to develop that as a speciality, including [Francisco] Tárrega’s Recuerdos de la Alhambra, which was a very challenging piece for the pick.”

There’s not a great deal of blues influence in your playing...

“Why didn’t I become a blues guitarist? Probably because I wasn’t a very good blues guitarist. The thing is, a lot of young players and some established players have said to me, ‘I only wanted to be like Clapton.’ They didn’t say it, but you knew it. That wasn’t my aim. Stunning player, but... The question eventually became formulated for me as, ‘What would Hendrix sound like playing the Bartók String Quartets?’

“In 1969 the major musical influences in Crimson were Ian McDonald and Michael Giles. I recognized they had a connection with music, which at the time I didn’t have, but I could recognize in others. I’d known this probably since I was 17 or 18 working alongside and going to see the other young players in Bournemouth, stunning young players.”

How did McDonald’s and Giles’ influence connect with you in Crimson’s early days?

“In the studio recording In The Court Of The Crimson King they would make a comment, [and] I would adjust my response to sit in accord with theirs. Then when they left it was heartbreaking for me, because although Giles wasn’t a writer his contributions to the arrangements and direction were stunning.

“My primary role for In the Court... in Crimson in 1969, as I saw it, was to come up with guitar parts that supported the writing. Although you could say that McDonald and [Peter] Sinfield were the main writers, you can’t exclude Giles from that. You can’t really exclude anyone from that, it was five people. 

“Moonchild on that album, the music was 99 per cent Robert [Fripp, himself] with one suggestion from Ian McDonald to move a G to a G#, which we incorporated. This was Ian, he had a gift for the simple melodic phrase.

“That’s what we went with. For the writing credit, which properly should have been Fripp/Sinfield, I decided to have all the names of the members because I felt that actually everyone was involved equally. How can you exclude anyone at that point? For me, Crimson has always been a co-operative, which it certainly was in 1969.”

• Robert Fripp’s 20 greatest guitar moments

This led to some turbulence within the band, didn’t it?

“My personal difficulties with any Crimson musician since have been if they favor themselves or see themselves as somehow coming ahead of the other players or the music. To put that positively within Crimson, the music comes first: principle one. Principle two: the band comes first. The interests of the band come ahead of the interests of the other players. Three: we share the money. Why do there seem to be personal difficulties? Look at those three principles and really that’s the clue to anything that follows.

“If the music does come first, then all the names are there at the top. We shared the record royalties; we shared the publishing royalties. There is a legitimate concern that if you have one person who writes all the music, shouldn’t they get a disproportionate part of the publishing? The answer is yes, they should. This was a legitimate concern for Adrian Belew.

“From 1994 onwards, we would look at essentially who had made the greatest contribution to writing this piece. Between 1970 and 1974 when Robert was the primary writer, even if Bill Bruford didn’t play a note he would receive an equal share of the publishing income. Why? Firstly, because it exemplified the view that where there is an equal commitment there is an equitable distribution.

“Secondly, if Robert made a value judgement or recommendation that we go this way, there was never any question that my recommendation for either a musical or business direction favored me. There was never a conflict of interests with Robert. If I said, ‘Look, lads. I think we should do this.’ It was because I thought we should do this. Why? Primarily for the music, then primarily the interest of the band and so on.”

Gibson ES-345

The recent release of the Exposures boxset features Steven Wilson remixes of your solo material. As with the Crimson remixes Steven has done, they’re remarkably faithful to the originals.

“When I go in to mix something, I don’t go in with a historic overview to mind. Steven’s aim was very faithfully to reproduce the original but with modern technology. There had been the odd discussions. For example, with Lizard there were one or two things we didn’t quite put in and so on. My view on occasion has been we actually didn’t get it right the first time, so now is an opportunity. Then you say, ‘What’s right and what’s wrong?’ If it has been adopted and accepted by decades of listeners, then maybe that’s what it is. Steven aims to get it exactly as. Me, I’d be very happy to go a different way.

“In terms of Exposure I went down and worked with Steven, I was very up for complete reimagining. Steven: ‘No, this is a classic.’ His brief, this is Steven, is to present this as the original. How can I put it? That desk [pointing to an antique writing desk in the room in which we are sitting] is an 1830s desk. It’s a classic of its kind. If I were designing a desk for today to use with modern things, such as having computers on the side, it wouldn’t be designed like that. However, for me that is the classic and I’m not going to redesign it. That’s Steven’s point of view: this is the classic. The only innovation we had on Exposure was with [Dolby] Atmos mixing, which isn’t, I suppose, entirely legitimate.”

Revisiting Exposure, it is possible to see a stylistic link between the albums Red from the mid-70s and Discipline from the early 80s, with the two guitars playing offset then synchronous parts. Was this an idea forming in your mind during Crimson’s hiatus in the late 70s?

“Was it Steve Reich? Was it Philip Glass? Was it Robert Fripp? Was it in the air? Was it world music? Anyway, all of this, my thinking, my academic interests and approach to music were in place in 1980, 1981, with the coming together of that form of King Crimson. I met Adrian [Belew] personally at The Bottom Line in New York when I went down to see Steve Reich. Bowie was there with Adrian. We went over and said hello and Adrian said, ‘Let’s get together for tea tomorrow,’ so we did. That’s how our personal connection began.”

People might not be aware that you actually write these pieces out on manuscript paper.

“Yes, I do. I don’t give the other players charts. I don’t like the word ‘bandleader’ because I’ve never viewed myself as a bandleader. That’s another endless wittering on. You have [Charles] Mingus. I understand that Mingus didn’t give the other characters in the band charts. Why? Because it goes in through your eyes. You present the music you have and you say, ‘If I’m playing this, what are you playing?’ One of Bill’s good quotes from the time was, ‘It was as if Robert expected us to know what to play.’ Of course. If I have to tell you what to play, why are we working together?

“What I would aim to do is construct situations or conditions within which the talent of each of these players is given an opportunity to develop. To the extent that when Robert composed for Crimson it was writing specifically for these people in this band to play. Not a generic piece that anyone could play, it was specifically for these people.

“There were two occasions when I presented Larks’ [Tongues in Aspic, Part] Two to that formation of Crimson. We had short rehearsals in Covent Garden and then we went to Richmond Athletic Club. I presented the defining Larks’ rhythm and chords at Covent Garden and it wasn’t heard, it went nowhere. Then I played it at Richmond Athletic Club and Bill and John [Wetton] leapt straight in. They had it; clicked, it worked. Most really good rock drummers in London at the time wouldn’t have heard it because it wasn’t written for them.

“With Crimson it was an open form of engagement, which has always been complex, always problematic and always very demanding. If you would like a band to break up, have writing rehearsals. What you do when you hit that problem is you get on the road. Then you introduce an audience into the situation, music comes to life and you’ll keep going. Not that Robert is a bandleader, but in terms of practical strategies for keeping the band together and working, you move from writing rehearsals as quickly as possible into live performance.”

Can we talk a little about gear?

“You know I have no interest in that. I have no interest in gear at all. For example, whatever fuzzbox, whatever guitar, whatever amp I’m using I’ll get my sound. Here’s an example of this. I went to see Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea at Carnegie Hall: wow, breathtaking. Chick Corea is stage right, Herbie Hancock on the left. They changed places and played and their sounds went with them. I still don’t understand that. How can that be? It cannot be that the sound of a piano changes. The sound of a piano is the sound of a piano, surely?

“With Crimson I use Axe-Fx, which is very good. For basic work that I can carry myself without a team of engineers I use a Helix. Why? Because Jakko [Jakszyk] uses a Helix and if you’re working in a band with another character you aim for compatibility. The other thing is, he can tell me how to work it.”

The rig you use for soundscaping hasn’t changed too dramatically over the years, has it?

“It changed. I’m trying to think when it changed from the ‘Solar Voyager’ to the ‘Sirius Probe’. It changed when I stopped using the [TC Electronic] TC2290, which I used to use for sampling. It developed high-level digital frizz. I started using the Eventide 8000s, which are astonishing things. You have 90-second samples that will repeat. You can leave them 24 hours, come back, no decay, no degeneration whatsoever. For sampling, that’s astonishing. There is something irreplaceable in those early versions of the Eventides. I’ve no idea what the algorithms are, but wow. They shape the sound.

“In terms of the 8000s where I have bona fide quadraphonic sound, what I do is I work to ratios in delay. If you have four outputs, if a short loop is needed, one stereo pair will have 12 seconds on one side and 18 seconds on the other. You have a 3:2 ratio. On the next one I tend to have an offset of maybe 20.5 to 21 seconds. It’s just essentially the same delay, which over a period of maybe half an hour will change. 

“If I’m going for longform soundscapes it might be something like 42:49 or 42:63. On the other stereo pair to complete the quadraphonic might be 21:35 or 63:72. In other words, there are ratios within the time delays generally in terms of six or seven seconds, which lots of experience – including being booed constantly – has suggested to me this has resonance.

“I’ll then go in and I have my defining programs within the Eventide 3000s, which sends it shooting off in different directions. In terms of soundscape performances, I bypass all of that and through an Eventide Eclipse I have a solo sound. It gives me my solo voice. In the quiet moments the solo voice will come up with all of this, all in real-time. 

“I have had various suggestions, ‘Bob, why don’t you use Ableton Live?’ The answer is, when I’m doing a live performance soundscape with the rig I have, the Sirius Probe, all of the parameters I can change in real-time by hand as I am playing. I don’t have to go to a computer and fiddle about. I don’t have to look up here and see what’s going on, I can do it all with one hand.”

Tokai LP-type

Are you still using the Roland GR-1?

“It’s set up in my full Crimson rig. I haven’t been using it recently, but I have used it certainly in 2015, probably using it for the first half of seven-, eight-piece Crimson. Why? Because it does two or three things that nothing else does. The same as the 3000s. The GR-1 has a fretless bass sound, that is breathtaking, which I would use to have fun with Tony Levin. Tony would be doing some upright slides, I might slip in some fretless. Tony would look up wondering where the bass sound was coming from.

“It’s also stunning in terms of low-end for soundscapes. It also has bell sounds, which in combination with an Eventide 3000 programme called ‘In Six’ makes astonishing sounds. It also has a piano sound, which I haven’t really used since 2003, but which was astonishing. I used it a lot in all the ProjeKcts.”

Technology has come a long way since your early Frippertronics work.

“Yes, that’s right. I’ve had these posts, ‘Bring back the ReVox. Where is Frippertronics?’ It’s just not feasible. Why not? If you go back to when I used that technology you’d have to fly it. What would happen if there was a bounce? Here’s another one: you have it set up on the table, what would happen if someone walked by and bumped the table? The answer is, there would be a fluttering on the tape. You’d then have to shape the entire Frippertronics piece around the flutter. If, as in Madrid in May 1979, what happens if the ReVox the record company has brought in begins to catch fire? What do you do? These are practical examples. It’s not feasible.”

Would it be true to say that The Guitar Circle book you have coming out in September isn’t what you might call a conventional guitar tutor?

“Correct. It’s the attitude. It’s less what you do, it’s more how you do and why you do. We’ve now had guitar courses since March 1985 and the book is essentially a report on the history of Guitar Craft and the Guitar Circle to date. If you’re looking for a book of guitar exercises, this is not the way to go.

“People who have a background in martial arts feel an immediate affinity with Guitar Craft in the Guitar Circle. One character said to a pal of mine it’s like martial arts with a guitar. I’ve a little tai chi, some muay Thai. Here, your response is governed by the intentionality of the person with whom you’re sparring. If you wait for them to make a move you’re on the floor. 

“What you respond to is their intention. How we respond to someone’s intention before there’s any movement at all is a subtle thing. How to explain that? That falls under the heading of ‘cosmic horse shit’. The point is, it can very easily be experienced.

“Guitar Craft was basically developing a personal discipline with a guitar. The Guitar Circle is developing a personal discipline within others. We’re learning to work with others and with ourself. In a sense it’s a maturing and a development within a social context.

“One of the difficulties I’ve had doing interviews over a period of 53 years with guitar magazines is that just about everything that is real with me in terms of how I experience and engage with music and other musicians is subtle. If I’m explaining it in bold terms, it falls under the heading of cosmic horse shit. 

“One of the important principles in this is ‘accept nothing that someone is telling you, presenting you, judge by your own experience’. When someone comes into a Guitar Circle, don’t take Robert’s view of what might be happening for yourself, what is your experience?”

Fernandes Gold Custom

• Robert Fripp’s 32-disc boxset, Exposures, is out now, via DGM/Panegyric. The Guitar Circle book will be released on 1 September via Panegyric Publishing in association with Discipline Global Mobile.

Welcome to Guitar World’s weekly roundup of the musical highlights from the, erm, world of guitar. Every seven days (or thereabouts), we endeavor to bring you a selection of songs from across the guitar universe, all with one thing in common: our favorite instrument plays a starring role.

Hermanos Gutiérrez feat. Dan Auerbach – Tres Hermanos

What is it? The latest single from brother duo instrumental act Hermanos Gutiérrez and the second to be lifted from the pair’s forthcoming record El Bueno Y El Malo, which also boasts the six-string expertise of The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach. The guitar triumvirate of Estevan, Alejandro and Dan is truly a force to be reckoned with – so much so, in fact, that Auerbach has been dubbed “the third brother” in Tres Hermanos. Sounding like something from a Western epic, the track is an instrumental accomplishment, rammed with silky slides, mysterious trills and a gorgeously crafted main melody.

Standout guitar moment: Tres Hermanos spends the first 30 seconds finding its feet, though the guitar interplay that crops up immediately sets the tone for the track completely: haunting, emotive, melancholic… choose your poison. Let's hope the three write more songs together in the future.

For fans of: The Black Keys, José González

– Matt Owen 

Buddy Guy – Gunsmoke Blues (featuring Jason Isbell)

What is it? The somber lead single from the legendary guitarist’s forthcoming album, The Blues Don’t Lie. Guy might be 86, with a legacy that’s been sealed for decades, but he sure isn’t stuck in the past, recruiting one of Americana/roots music’s biggest names and turning his lyrical sights on America’s ever-growing epidemic of gun violence for this powerful song.

Standout guitar moment: A game of guitar one-upmanship this duet is not – Guy and Isbell engage in a candid conversation throughout with their lyrical, piercing and atmospheric licks, conveying together the song’s atmosphere of dread and tragedy as much as its lyrics.

For fans of: B.B. King, Eric Gales, Johnny Winter

– Jackson Maxwell

Black Lava – Soul Furnace

What is it? The title track from the Australian extreme metallers' debut album, Soul Furnace, combines elements of black metal, death metal post-metal, and Mastodon-style enormo-riff metal, and holds it all in uneasy equilibrium. It taps into the bleak desolation of a country in unending pandemic lockdowns, but it also finds a way to express that bleakness in a way that is sweet music to the ears of those who enjoy a taste of nihilism and a soupçon of apocalyptic thinking in their metal.

Standout guitar moment: It has to be the riff that Ben Boyle builds towards around the 3:30 mark, a hulking great motif to expel the tension of the dissonance that's gone before. 

For fans of: Tombs, early Mastodon, Deathspell Omega

– Jonathan Horsley

Fit For a King – End (The Other Side)

What is it? The second single from Fit For a King’s just-announced seventh studio album, The Hell We Create. Dealing with the personal story of frontman Ryan Kirby’s wife nearly dying from a stroke, End (The Other Side) is as visceral as you’d predict, with an instrumental bedrock of aggressive drop-tuned electric guitars and ground-pounding double kick-driven drumming bolstering Kirby’s gut-punching vocal monologue.

Standout guitar moment: The Texas troupe go for the classic heavy-verse-melodic-chorus arrangement that’s heard so often in modern metalcore, and a wonderfully slotted-in lead guitar line in the choruses makes a crucial element of the sonic tapestry.

For fans of: Like Moths to Flames, Miss May I, Bury Tomorrow

– Sam Roche

Strigoi – King of All Terror

What is it? Strigoi is a blackened death doom project headed up by Paradise Lost guitarist Gregor Mackintosh and his former Vallenfyre bandmate Chris Casket, and King of All Terror, from their forthcoming sophomore album, Viscera, is a shapeshifting genre-masher that shifts air on a hefty backbeat before settling into a pure doom misery groove in what seems like no time at all. 

Standout guitar moment: There are none of those epic leads that Mackintosh dispenses liberally across Paradise Lost's grand compositions – there's just no time for that – but the monochrome riffs not to mention Mackintosh's ungodly electric guitar tone are essential for those weaned on the pristine misery of Gothic, Icon, et al.

For fans of: Paradise Lost, Vallenfyre, Godthrymm

– Jonathan Horsley

The Wombats – Is This What It Feels Like To Feel Like This

What is it? Despite only releasing an extended LP in January this year, English indie rock outfit and festival favorites The Wombats are already churning out more music. Is This What It Feels Like To Feel Like This is the first offering from a forthcoming EP, and is irrefutable The Wombats at their head bop-inducing best: it’s speaker-rumbling guitars, infectious guitar hooks and a lung-bursting chorus line aplenty. They say quality over quantity, but such a notion doesn’t seem to apply to The Wombats at the moment.

Standout guitar moment: The Wombats are no stranger to a crowd pleasing guitar hook, and they’ve continued their fine melody making form with aplomb here, conjuring up a particularly catchy chorus line that’s assembled from some neat hammer-on and pull-off action.

For fans of: Circa Waves, Sundara Karma, The Kooks

– Matt Owen

Todd Rundgren – Puzzle (feat. Adrian Belew)

What is it? This beautiful, philosophical and distinctly David Bowie-esque song is the lead single from the pop-rock chameleon’s star-studded forthcoming LP, Space Force. Cosmic, classically tuneful and just a little weird (in only the best way, of course), Puzzle features Talking Heads/David Bowie/King Crimson textural guitar master Adrian Belew, and is all you could ask for from a Rundgren tune. 

Standout guitar moment: Belew’s appearances on Puzzle are few, but boy does he make them count. Peep the absolutely glorious tone he gets in his wailing contribution to the song’s intro – now that’s how you make an entrance.

For fans of: David Bowie, Talking Heads, Steve Vai

– Jackson Maxwell

Miss May I – Free Fall

What is it? A crushing new single from Miss May I’s forthcoming album, Curse of Existence. Expertly arranged and brutally delivered, Free Fall is touted as an anthem for those seeking to take a leap of faith despite feeling as though they don’t have the courage.

“When you reach the edge of a journey you have struggled to travel through and you back out before the final step, this is your chance to take that leap off the edge and see where the journey takes you,” says vocalist Levi Benton. “I know the popular term for this is ‘imposter syndrome’ and for anyone who has felt the relief of pushing through, this song is your anthem.”

Standout guitar moment: No moment stands out in particular, simply because B.J. Stead and Justin Aufdemkampe’s guitar lines are stellar throughout.

For fans of: Fit For a King, Bury Tomorrow

– Sam Roche

Rhet Miller – Go Through You 

What is it? A dream pop-tinged new offering from indie rock artist Rhett Miller, who props up his vocal swells and effortless lyrical flow with a smattering of sun-splashed six-strings and recurring licks that flirt with fuzz throughout the track’s runtime. The album that Go Through You is lifted from will arrive later this year, and was inspired in part by the relationship between David Bowie and Brian Eno. As far as sonic inspirations go, it's not a band one to have.

Standout guitar moment: The tone employed here is particularly tasty, and is utilized to its full potential during a brief jolly up the fretboard at the 1:52 mark.

For fans of: Daniel Donato, Beck, Fountains of Wayne

– Matt Owen

Demi Lovato – 29

What is it? The latest single from the pop superstar’s forthcoming rock and punk-inspired album Holy Fvck is more subdued than previously released singles Skin of My Teeth and Substance, but is shaped by a series of shimmery Shadows-esque clean guitar lines underneath Lovato’s retrospective lyrics.

Standout guitar moment: The ethereal tremolo which flavors the track’s opening riff is refreshing to hear from an artist of Lovato’s stratospheric caliber.

For fans of: Machine Gun Kelly, WILLOW

– Sam Roche

Lande Hekt – Backstreet Snow

What is it? The second preview we’ve heard from the Muncie Girls bassist/singer’s upcoming album, House Without A View, Backstreet Snow is effortless-sounding indie-pop of the first order.

Standout guitar moment: The song’s jangly central riff is one of those that can get stuck in your head for days. 

For fans of: Courtney Barnett, The Radio Dept., Stella Donnelly

– Jackson Maxwell

Daeva – Arena at Dis

What is it? A black-thrash track to strip the paint off the wall, from an album that is sure to be on many a shortlist for best underground metal album of 2022, the evocatively titled Through Sheer Will and Black Magic. The song, as with the album, is wall-to-wall action, taking the some of the sounds and steel of classic '80s metal and putting it through the black metal chaos machine. 

Standout guitar moment: Steve Jansson (Crypt Sermon) keeps the riffs coming but the solo at 1:50-ish does what all good metal guitar solos do, offering an exhilarating power-up for a song that's already in the red in every sense.

For fans of: Aura Noir, Devil Master, Midnight

– Jonathan Horsley

Electric guitar wizard Adrian Belew and Todd Rundgren will lead a North American David Bowie tribute tour this fall.

Titled Celebrating David Bowie, the trek is set to begin on October 6 at the Balboa Theatre in San Diego, California and will cover much of the continent before ending with a November 13 gig at the Celebrity Theatre in Phoenix, Arizona.

Anchored by Belew and Rundgren, the tour will also feature Narada Michael Walden bass guitar player Angeline Saris, Scrote, Fishbone’s Angelo Moore (on select dates), saxophonist Ron Dziubla, Spacehog's Royston Langdon, Jeffrey Gaines (also on select dates), and veteran session drummer Michael Urbano.

“With such a large catalog to choose from, different songs affect us and the audience in varying measure,” Belew – who toured with Bowie as a guitarist in the late '70s and early '90s – said of the endeavor in a statement. “It's always amazing to feel the excitement of a Bowie audience beaming directly at you. Pure adrenaline! So much love for David.”

"This is Major Todd to ground control. I’m stepping through the door... In 1973, I met David Bowie and one of us ended up crying,” added Todd Rundgren. “I met David several times after that. Some of our phases, like glam, coincided. David had more of that Andy Warhol kind of sensibility, a pop sensibility.”

This tour will mark the first Celebrating David Bowie shows since fall 2018, when the rotating ensemble visited South America. That lineup also featured Belew and Moore, in addition to longtime Bowie pianist Mike Garson, Carmine Rojas and more.

You can see the current 2022 Celebrating David Bowie itinerary below, though representatives for the tour say that more appearances will be confirmed in the next few weeks.

For tickets and more info on Celebrating David Bowie, visit the tour's website.

Celebrating David Bowie 2022 North American Tour

10/06: San Diego, CA – Balboa Theatre
10/07: Beverly Hills, CA – Saban Theatre
10/08: San Jose, CA – San Jose Civic
10/09: Anaheim, CA – City National Grove
10/13: Prior Lake, MN – Mystic Lake Showroom
10/17: Quebec City, QC – Le Capitole
10/18: Montreal, QC – Olympia
10/31: Annapolis, MD – Rams Head On Stage
11/03: Atlanta, GA – The Eastern
11/05: Buffalo, NY – Town Ballroom
11/07: Nashville, TN – Schermerhorn Symphony Ctr
11/10: Denver, CO – Paramount Theatre
11/11: Albuquerque, NM – Kiva Auditorium
11/12: Tucson, AZ – TCC Music Hall
11/13: Phoenix, AZ – Celebrity Theatre

Adrian Belew – of David Bowie, Frank Zappa, King Crimson and Talking Heads guitar fame – has debuted his energetic new single, a13.

The track is taken from Belew’s upcoming album Elevator, which will be his 25th solo studio record and his first solely digital release. It will also be his first LP since signing with Bliss Entertainment/Ingrooves Music Group.

Bursting out the gates with an eerily dissonant chord strum, a13 wastes no time in introducing its upbeat hook, which first arrives courtesy of some punchy piano stabs that Belew decorates with his modulation-drenched electric guitar progressions.

Once the guitar begins to share melody duties, Belew doesn’t let up for the track’s entire three-minute-plus runtime, sporadically sprinkling a13 with a dusting of whammy-tinged six-string embellishments and off-kilter soundscapes.

And, to cap off the quintessential Belew display, the rock titan treats the final 60 seconds of a13 to a liquid-like guitar solo, laid-back interlude and a rip-roaring finale that culminates in the form of a descending lead guitar line and a dreamy open-chord strum.

Elevator, which hasn’t yet been given an official release date, will contain 12 new compositions written, recorded and produced by Belew. The album will also feature 38 of Belew’s most recent digital paintings, as well as lyrics to the songs.

Accompanying the album announcement is the news that Elevator will be released in conjunction with a US summer tour of North America. The tour will commence on July 13 at Turf Club in St. Paul, Minnesota, and conclude at the Ridgefield Playhouse in Connecticut. 

For the 25-date stint around the country, Belew will be joined by bass guitar player Julie Slick and drummer Johnnie Luca. The shows have been described by the guitarist as “part ‘classic’ power trio”, featuring “new power trio songs never performed before and a short solo acoustic performance”.

Aside from his solo activities, Belew will spend the latter half of 2022 touring with Todd Rundgren as part of the Celebrating David Bowie Live Show. Earlier this month, he also teamed up with Talking Heads guitarist Jerry Harrison to perform Remain In Light – the band’s 1980 studio album – at the Rites of Spring Festival.

According to Belew, Elevator will be released “closer to our tour”. For a full list of tour dates, visit Adrian Belew’s website.

It goes without saying that Eddie Van Halen redefined the way in which people – both fans and professional musicians alike – view the electric guitar. One individual in particular who falls in the latter camp is Adrian Belew, who recently declared that Van Halen took the guitar, and the concept of tapping in particular, “to the next level”.

Speaking to Ultimate Classic Rock, Belew recalled the first time he saw a young “unsigned” Van Halen perform live, revealing it was during a time when he and the Bears’ Rob Fetters were attempting to pioneer their own style of prototype fretboard tapping – a relatively new technique that, at the time, didn’t have a name.

“I had just started playing this thing where you hold a note down and then you do this,” he said. “It’s called tapping, but back then we didn’t have a name for it. Rob Fetters and I were the only two guys we knew who were doing it. 

“It was on a Steely Dan record [Kid Charlemagne, from 1976's The Royal Scam], and I figured out, that’s how [Larry Carlton] must have done it. I thought, ‘Okay, I’m going to start doing that.’ Rob started doing it, too.”

However, they’d only get so far in their tapping journey before coming across a young Van Halen who, by Belew’s own words, was already a master of the blossoming technique and utilizing it better than they were.

“We walked in and there’s Van Halen, unknown, unsigned, no one knew them, playing like crazy on stage,” Belew continued. “Eddie Van Halen is doing that all over the neck of the guitar. We looked at each other and said, ‘Hey, he’s doing that thing that we do!’ 

“We laughed, and we said, ‘And he’s doing it better than we do!’ Because he had already taken it and advanced it to the next level. Good for him.”

Belew, whose credits include King Crimson, Frank Zappa and David Bowie, then acknowledged Van Halen’s prophetic impact on the guitar world, saying the tapping technique he championed “became something that a million different young guitar players tried to do since then”.

The only thing as iconic as Van Halen's playing is the red-black-and-white striped aesthetic of his Frankenstein guitar – a design motif that David Lee Roth recently claimed was his own idea.

This tale was, however, rebutted by EVH guitar expert Chris Gill, who noted three key factual errors that render Roth's recollection a "complete revisionist fabrication".

Adrian Belew has taken delivery of two new, heavily customized Fender Custom Shop Stratocasters, both crafted by the firm’s master builder Ron Thorn.

The guitarist already has a signature Parker Fly, which he uses in his usual, highly complex MIDI setup, but as Belew explains over on Facebook, he needed a non-MIDI option for the festival circuit and other gigs, and knew he wanted a Strat for the job.

As such, Belew reached out to Thorn at the Fender Custom Shop. 

“Ron Thorn is the Principal Master Builder for the Fender Custom Shop who crafted this beauty and is one of the good guys,” says Belew in the first of two posts about the instruments.

“Ron is held in high esteem throughout the known guitar universe. He is also a knowledgeable fan of my work which made the process easy and even more enjoyable.”

When it comes to gear, Belew is one of the world’s most innovative and demanding players. It follows then that the resulting instruments, one in Solar Red (based on a favored Mazda finish) and one in blue have a pretty astonishing list of features.

Thankfully for us guitar geeks, Belew goes into some detail about the builds, even posting the spec sheet.

At the heart of the build is a basswood body with Ultra contours. That’s paired with a quartersawn maple neck with medium jumbo frets and red Corian inlays. 

Then there’s the hardware appointments, which include Sperzel locking tuners, Fender roller nut and a Vega-Trem bridge.

As Belew says: “One super-important aspect of playing this Strat is its ‘twang bar’. The Vega-Trem is fabulous! What a dynamic tremelo! Made in Spain this design pulls up or down and never affects the tuning. It has a delicate but springy feel that is just perfect for me.”

The other headline grabbing element here is the pickup combination. There’s a DiMarzio Tone Zone humbucker at the bridge, a Fender Texas Special single coil in the middle position and a Fernandes Sustainer at the neck (controlled by the two small toggle switches).

The pickup covers, ‘cupcake’ control knobs and pickguard area have been painted in an aluminum silver color to create a uniform look.

It seems there are currently no plans to reproduce the model on a broader scale, but who knows – that might change if there's enough of a demand. 

Belew also mentions that Thorn and he discussed the dream of one day producing a signature model based on his Twang Bar King Mustang. Another one we’d love to see hit the shelves. 

For now, though, we’re content to bathe in the (aluminum) reflected glory of Thorn’s masterful Custom Shop build.

RELEASED: MAY 18
STANDOUT TRACK: BOYS KEEP SWINGING

Lodger is generally regarded as the last in the “Berlin” trilogy of Bowie albums - although ironically it was recorded in Switzerland and the U.S. The album had a mixed reception at the time of release, although it has been favorably reappraised in the numerous Bowie retrospectives that seem to turn up every year. The oft-repeated “reinvention” notion was reaching the end of another cycle with this album. Continuing Bowie’s knack for finding great guitarists to compliment his vision, this was the first appearance of Adrian Belew - who’d previously worked with Frank Zappa - on a Bowie record, replacing Robert Fripp. Belew was unconventional enough to be the right man at the right time for some of the experimental recording techniques and left-field methodologies being employed.

Alongside Belew’s inventive input, credit must also go to Brian Eno, who sampled and constructed various guitar parts from fragments of Belew’s playing to produce some otherworldly solos. Boys Keep Swinging is a pop song with plenty of non-traditional pop elements guitar-wise, courtesy of Belew, via Bowie and Eno’s machinations. “They gave me two or three attempts at putting a part down without first having heard the song,” Belew said. “That would be it. Then they’d make a compilation of their favorite bits, which is why the guitar parts seem odd at times as they were never actually played in the sequences they used.”

From far-out pedalboard wizards and ambitious loopers to state-of-the-art shredders, there has never been a shortage of fearless creators boldly pushing music and guitar technology forward. Here are just a few of the players who have embraced gear to its fullest, innovating new sounds and styles in the process.

Jonny Greenwood, Radiohead

Behind the spacey soundscapes of Radiohead lies the guitar sorcery of Jonny Greenwood. One of the most experimental guitar players of his generation, the multi-instrumentalist and composer has relied on a rotating cast of gear to generate his radical sounds, including the Marshall ShredMaster, Digitech Whammy and Roland RE-201 Space Echo. But the oddest part of Greenwood's rig might be the Roberts R737 transistor radio that he manipulates during the intro of each live performance of "The National Anthem."

The Edge, U2

With his airy, trance-inducing riffs, The Edge forged an instantly recognizable sound for U2 and helped popularize delay effects with songs like "Where the Streets Have No Name" and "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For." The guitarist's lineup of delays over the years has included the KORG SDD, TC Electronic TC 2290 and AMS SDMX.

Vernon Reid, Living Colour

These days, Vernon Reid's setup looks closer to a NASA mission control center than a guitar rig, and the guitarist incorporates a wide range of effects to paint Living Colour's genre-bending sound. While Reid's equipment list would be too long to list here, he's a known devotee of Line 6 devices, including the company's POD HD500X and M9 stomp box modeler.

Tom Morello, Rage Against the Machine/Audioslave/Prophets of Rage

Launching on the scene with Rage Against the Machine in the early Nineties, Tom Morello instantly turned heads with his aggressive, groove-laden riffs and dizzying guitar solos that mimicked synths and DJ scratching. The guitarist uses a Dunlop Cry Baby Wah and Digitech Whammy as the source of many of his trademark sounds.

Tosin Abasi, Animals as Leaders

Tosin Abasi is carrying the art of shred and progressive metal into the future with his instrumental trio, Animals as Leaders. One of the early adopters of ergonomic, extended-range eight-string guitars, he has introduced both new sounds and techniques into the genre. Abasi is currently running a pedal-based setup — including his own Abasi Pathos distortion pedal — through a single-channel Morgan Amps SW50R. The guitarist also implements Line 6 Relay G70 and Relay G55 wireless systems, the Stagescape M20D mixer and, of course, his own Abasi Larada guitars.

David Knudson, Minus the Bear

While Minus the Bear called it quits late last year, guitarist David Knudson's inventive ability to take two-handed tapping techniques out of the realm of flashy solos and into the world of primary hooks hasn't been forgotten. Armed with four Line 6 DL4s and a collection of stomp boxes, his pedalboard savvy made his riffs sound less like traditional guitar and more like an orchestra of electronic artists. Where will Knudson's sonic explorations take him next? We're excited to see.

Sarah Longfield

Sarah Longfield's latest single "Now" is an electronic-inspired, ambient sound collage emphasizing her unique mastery of the eight-string. With fluid two-hand tapping skills and an instantly recognizable sound, the guitarist is forging her own future for modern shred. Longfield is often seen with an eight-string Strandberg Boden axe and a Fractal Axe-FX rig — she also recently added a Line 6 HX Stomp to her setup.

Adrian Belew

Throughout his work with King Crimson, Talking Heads, David Bowie and Frank Zappa, Adrian Belew's guitar playing often sounds like…well, anything but the guitar. "My rig tends to get bigger almost every day," Belew told Guitar Player. "Because so many different things get invented all the time that change how we can approach the guitar. It's so hard to say 'no' to something new, because, well, I want that new toy [laughs]." Belew's equipment has changed quite a bit over the years, but various looping devices and Parker Fly guitars are standard in his rig.

Nick Reinhart, Tera Melos 

Incorporating experimental rock, ambient electronics, alternating time signatures and start-stop dynamics, Tera Melos' sound is startlingly inventive. Guitarist/vocalist Nick Reinhart generates many of the band's unorthodox sonics through two-hand tapping, effect pedals, looping and samplers. The guitarist is a known fan of Nineties Squier guitars, the Roland GR-30 Guitar Synthesizer, and pedals from Line 6, Boss, EarthQuaker Devices, Digitech and more.

Matt Bellamy, Muse

Arena rockers Muse combine prog, electronica and pop into their own brand of epic, genre-shifting rock. Frontman Matt Bellamy gets plenty of cred for his showmanship and operatic vocal range, but it's his bombastic, electronic-inspired approach to guitar that keeps fellow players scratching their heads. Over the years, Bellamy's rig has included the DigiTech Whammy, ZVEX Fuzz Factory, custom Manson guitars and more.

The full performing lineup for Yes’ Cruise to the Edge has been announced. The five-night progressive rock experience, which runs from February 4-9, 2019, sails out of Tampa, Florida aboard Royal Caribbean’s Brilliance of the Seas and visits ports in Key West, Florida and Cozumel, Mexico.

Alongside Yes and previously-announced artists including former Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett, Mike Portnoy, Riverside, Fish and Dream Theater’s Jordan Rudess, new additions to the all-star line-up include: The Neal Morse Band, featuring Neal Morse (lead vocals, guitars, keyboards), Mike Portnoy (drums, vocals), Randy George (bass), Bill Hubauer (keyboards, vocals) and Eric Gillette (guitars, vocals); The Sea Within, featuring Swedish guitarist and singer-songwriter Roine Stolt, bassist Jonas Reingold, guitarist Daniel Gildenlöw, German drummer Marco Minnemann and American keyboardist Tom Brislin; Rachel Flowers; the Adrian Belew Power Trio; Focus; Haken and Brook Hansen.

Limited cabins are still available, beginning at $1,299 per person, double occupancy. For booking and more info, visit CruiseToTheEdge.com. 

See below for the full Cruise to the Edge lineup. 

Your work is a through-line for some of my favorite music: Frank Zappa to David Bowie to Talking Heads to King Crimson. Apart from good taste in guitarists, what would you say those artists had in common? —Jeff Niemczura

They’re innovators, and so are people like Paul Simon and Nine Inch Nails. So many of the people that have been drawn to me—and who’ve had me work with them—are the kind of artists I’d naturally love, because that’s the kind of music I’m drawn to. I think what we have in common, and I’ll include myself in this since I’ve worked with all these people, is that we’re trying to take music and move it forward and not just stay in one place with it. Every one of those artists you mentioned has their own unique way of approaching music, and I just happen to be one of those people who has enough flexibility that I can fit into any of those packages.

How did Gizmodrome come together, and how would you describe its sound? —Damien Linotte

The last couple of summers, I’ve been in contact with a keyboard player named Vittorio Cosma and a producer named Claudio Dentes about a project in Milan with Stewart Copeland [of the Police]. Eventually I found out Stewart and Vittorio had been doing this for about 10 summers, just getting together, finding a reason to play—just so they could hang out in Italy and eat pasta. By the time I could do it, it had changed to something a little more organized; they’d been offered a record deal from Germany. Without letting me know they were hoping I would join a band with them, they got me to come over.

I thought I was gonna play on four tracks—you know, come in, be in the control room and add guitar. But when I got there, I realized, nope, this is something else. We were set up in a large studio, we could see each other, hear each other, talk to each other, and we started right in doing basic tracks. I was having fun, and I loved the people in the band, so I wasn’t too concerned about it. It took about two or three days before I realized, Hey, this is really good. So that’s how I fell into it.

I wasn’t thinking I’d be in another band; I’ve got the Power Trio, which I’ve had for 11 years. But this was something different. How would I describe the sound? I couldn’t possibly do that, but it’s funky, it’s groovy, it’s happy, it’s joyful, it’s played by guys who know how to play. [laughs] I think it’s a feel-good kind of record.

I read an interview with you years ago where you discussed a new tuning. It was right around Twang Bar King [1983] and Three of a Perfect Pair [King Crimson, 1984]. Robert Fripp had started using his new standard tuning, but you were doing something else, a simple alteration. What was it? —Keith McCrea

In the Eighties, I used altered tunings a lot, and Robert used standard tuning. So, even on records like “Heartbeat” or something like that, you can play it in standard tuning but it’s different. I always would change maybe one or two strings, so it wouldn’t be a very radical change. Then I came up with a very radical tuning I used on a Dobro for many years, and I wrote a record called Desire Caught by the Tail [1986], which was done with that tuning. But by the end of the Eighties, I had decided it was too cumbersome to have so many tunings, especially if you were gonna play those songs live.

King Crimson stopped for a number of years, and in that period, I switched back to standard tuning and Robert made up his “new standard” tuning. So, when we came back together in the Nineties, our roles had kind of reversed. I never did use Robert’s tuning. I tried it once and, well, tunings are relevant to the player. If they ring a note for you and you find some chord shapes, away you go. I couldn’t do that with that tuning. It’s not meant for me.

Have you ever used Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies in the studio? —Bjorn Lakenstrazen

The only time I actually used them is when we were making [David Bowie’s 1979 album] Lodger. We used them in the studio then. I thought they were kind of fun. You’d draw a card, and it says, “Think green.” Okay, I’m gonna try to think green now. I don’t know how seriously they were supposed to be taken, but we kind of more or less giggled at them. [laughs]

Can you describe your audition for Frank Zappa? I hear it’s kind of a funny story. —Tommy Moore

I flew out to Frank’s house—my first time on a plane. That’s how green I was. They picked me up and took me to his house in the basement, which would turn into his studio over the years. It was just a big empty room. Frank’s sitting behind a console, he’s got a cigarette in his mouth, of course, and there’s a microphone in the middle of the room. Unfortunately, there were people moving things all over; here goes a piano in front of you, they’re setting up something over there and so on. It was very distracting. Frank gave me a long list of songs. I had to borrow the albums from friends because I was so poor.

We started, and he’d say, “Okay, let’s try ‘Andy,’ ” and I’d play it for a minute or two and sing some things, and then he’d stop me, take another puff and say, “Okay, try ‘Wind Up Workin’ in a Gas Station.’ I was fumbling and really being distracted by all the stuff going on. I had nowhere to go, so they were gonna take me back to the airport and fly me back home, so I just watched everyone else’s terrifying auditions. I watched keyboard players and percussionists and thought, “Oh my god, these guys are so great, I don’t know how I’ll ever be in this band.”

There was a moment at the end of the day, though, where it was just Frank and I standing there, and I said, “I’m sorry, I really thought I could do this, and I thought it would be different.” He said, “What do you mean?” I said, “I thought it would just be you and me somewhere quiet where I could show you that I could do this.” So we went up to his living room and sat on his purple couch, I took my little Pignose amp and stuffed it between the pillows so I could turn it up as loud as I could, and we started over. We got about a third of the way through and Frank was starting to sing along with me. Finally he put his hand out, shook my hand and said, “You’ve got the job.” Changed my life, that handshake did.

You started out as a drummer. Does that affect how you play guitar? —Louis-Jules Trochu

Absolutely. I don’t think, for example, I would’ve done that well with Frank [Zappa]’s music had I not had such a rhythmic background. It’s very natural to me. I’ve always been able to play in an odd time signature and shake my booty in 4/4 at the same time and make it groovy, because it’s all a matter of accenting anyway. I also think my time with Frank and my time as a drummer—and I still play drums on my solo records—was important to my being able to write the kind of material I’ve written with King Crimson. Frank was a drummer first too, by the way.

What really led to the end of your involvement with King Crimson? —Ken Brown

Simple! Robert just pulled the plug. [laughs] We had done 10 shows as a five-piece band with new drummer Gavin Harrison along with Pat Mastelotto, and I thought we were gonna continue on from there, and at the end of those 10 shows, Robert seemed to be game for that as well. But within a few weeks, it was over. He said, “I’m not gonna play anymore,” and that was that. When he put together the current lineup, he had something totally different in mind, and he told me it wouldn’t be right for me and I wouldn’t be right for it.

I love your Flux by Belew app. Is there a chance you’ll expand upon any of its musical pieces and make extended versions—or will there just be more Flux in general? —Jim McCurdy

Both, yes. Right now, however, time is not on my side because not only am I getting ready for Gizmodrome, but I’m also being asked to do more Celebrating David Bowie shows next year. But any time I have on my own, I dedicate to Flux. I’m always recording things that can be used as snippets, whether I record them on my iPhone or in the studio. I probably have around 18 songs that I haven’t had time to record. But the idea always was not just new material but taking that material and refashioning it. My thought about music is, how come you do a song and that’s the only life it ever has? That’s it? One arrangement, one version? I think that’s cheating your song. I think what you should do, then, is go back, take another look at it, change it, maybe even change some words, change the style, whatever.

There are songs on Flux that are short because that’s kind of the nature of Flux, but I could see taking them and making them longer arrangements. I have an idea in mind that at some point, I’m going to make a record of the songs from Flux. My first solo vinyl record would be songs from Flux, and it would be full-length songs, more like the Gizmodrome record.

What was your involvement in your signature Parker Maxx Fly guitar? —Craig Jones

When I came into the picture, I was using Strats, but they were modified with Roland GK 13-pin MIDI pickups and Sustainiacs. I asked Ken Parker if there was a way we could put those things in a Parker. He told me that when they first put out the Parker Fly, it was designed to be a MIDI guitar, but they left that out because he was afraid it was too revolutionary. When I approached him, I think he felt, This is the time to do it. I helped them upgrade the electronics. I mean, the guitar was designed in the Eighties, and we’re talking about 10 or 15 years later, so I said, let’s put in the MIDI, keep the piezo, make it so you can get a million sounds. Line 6 had just developed the technology for the Variax, so we said, “Let’s put that in there.” I can’t take any credit, though; I just kind of gave them the problems to solve and they did it.

Steve Vai has confirmed that he will participate in the upcoming Eyellusion/Zappa Family Trust Frank Zappa hologram tour, explaining his involvement in a lengthy Facebook post.

The initial press release announcing the tour claimed that former Zappa collaborators such as Vai, Adrian Belew (who has since confirmed that he is not, in fact, participating in the tour) and Ian Underwood had "committed" to the tour.

Vai wrote that while the endeavor struck him initially as "odd," he added that he soon began to feel that it "could also be pretty special too."

"A day doesn’t pass that I don’t think about Frank. Nothing could, or ever will take his place in the hearts of the fans, his family and the musicians that have toured with him and loved him," he wrote.

"I believe that the fans understand it’s just an image and that holographic technology has its limitations, but it is an evolution in technology and with an open mind it could be embraced for a worthwhile experience," he added. "I would want to attend this show if I heard about it. If a person can attend the show with their spirit of the love of Frank’s music at the forefront I believe it could be a very touching event for all involved."

Vai said that he will contribute to "3-4 shows" as part of the tour. Over the weekend, Zappa's son, Dweezil—who for years has played his father's music as a part of his Zappa Plays Zappa tours and was also mentioned as a possible participant in the hologram tour press release—confirmed that he would not be involved.

You can read Vai's full statement on the matter here.

Dweezil Zappa—son of legendary guitarist Frank Zappa—has confirmed that he will not participate in the upcoming Eyellusion/Zappa Family Trust Frank Zappa hologram tour.

Shortly after the tour's announcement, Zappa tweeted a clip from the film Goodfellas in which Ray Liotta laughs maniacally. He captioned the clip by saying, “This seems appropriate at this moment in time.”

A user then asked Zappa, “I take it you won’t be in the touring band for this farce?,” to which Zappa simply responded, "You are correct."

Dweezil Zappa was namechecked by his brother, Ahmet, in the press release announcing the hologram tour. Ahmet Zappa said, "How radical would it be to have Moon singing 'Valley Girl' onstage with Frank? Or to see Dweezil side by side with our father playing dueling guitar solos?"

This prompted another user to ask if Dweezil's name had been used in the press release without his permission, to which he simply said, "correct."

The elder Zappa's four children have clashed over the rights to his estate since their mother, Gail, died in 2015. Gail left the rights to the Zappa Family Trust to Ahmet and Diva Zappa, excluding Dweezil and his older sister, Moon.

Dweezil in particular has come into extensive conflict with the Trust over his regular Zappa Plays Zappa tours, with Dweezil even changing the name of his most recent tour to the “50 Years of Frank: Dweezil Zappa Plays Whatever the F@%k He Wants – The Cease and Desist Tour.”

When it first blew through America in the mid-Fifties, rock music’s main calling card was its simplicity.

Thumbing its nose at the lavish arrangements typical of the pop music of the day, rock thrived on volume, rhythm and excitement. Of course, in order to survive, rock couldn’t simply rely on its roots indefinitely.

As the Beatles began to take mainstream audiences on journeys to uncharted musical waters (and further underground), some bands began to chuck the rock-music rulebook entirely.

In New York City, the Velvet Underground incorporated pop art, noise and drones into their otherwise conventional pop songs. In California, the Grateful Dead mixed their rootsy, proto-Americana tunes with extended improvisation and free-form jamming.

All of these branches swung the doors open for the full-blown experimentation of progressive rock, a genre defined by ambition, complexity and some of music’s all-time six-string greats.

Here, we present 15 of the best progressive rock guitarists through the years. Enjoy—and feel free to recommend others in the comments below.

FRANK ZAPPA

No list of progressive rock guitarists, or guitarists as a whole, is complete without Frank Zappa. A true musician who was never afraid (and often all too eager to) offend, or challenge any convention, he constantly flouted the boundaries between genres. On a dime, he could switch from absurd, funk-laden pop, to devoted recreations of the Fifties R&B he so loved, to dizzyingly complicated, classical-influenced passages. It’s hard to find a guitarist who cast a wider musical net.

ROBERT FRIPP | KING CRIMSON

Though King Crimson has swung wildly from one sound and concept to another over the past half-century, the prog pioneers have had one constant: Robert Fripp. Fripp, the band’s intellectual and creative powerhouse, has constantly eschewed both expectation and convention, using his astonishing chops to forge a sound and identity that is at once both unique and unmistakable.

STEVE HOWE | YES

For over 45 years, Yes have been one of progressive rock’s titans. Their records have featured extraordinary playing from numerous musicians, Steve Howe certainly being among them. Howe has been with the group for all but a handful of years since 1970, in doing so lending his eclectic influences and tastes to the band’s sound. Howe was instrumental in creating prog classics like “Roundabout,” and the influence of his playing can be heard across genres to this day.

STEVE HACKETT | GENESIS

It’s unfortunate that when most people think of Genesis, they immediately picture either Peter Gabriel or Phil Collins. Though entirely worthy of their immense success, Gabriel and Collins have overshadowed the contributions of Genesis’ early guitarist, Steve Hackett, in the public eye. Hackett’s early explorations of two-handed tapping and sweep picking were far ahead of their time, and influenced Eddie Van Halen and Brian May, among countless others.

JOHN McLAUGHLIN | MAHAVISHNU ORCHESTRA

Miles Davis was somewhat infamous for not giving the musicians he worked and collaborated with a lot of credit for their contributions. So, the fact that a track on Davis’ landmark fusion LP, Bitches Brew, is simply named “John McLaughlin,” speaks volumes to how highly regarded McLaughlin’s playing was in both jazz and rock circles. Once on his own, McLaughlin continued innovating with the groundbreaking Mahavishnu Orchestra, who played a huge role in the jazz fusion movement. Few guitarists were as good at blending previously incompatible sounds.

TODD RUNDGREN | UTOPIA

A reliably unpredictable jack-of-all-trades, Todd Rundgren has spent the last four and a half decades wearing all sorts of musical hats. On Utopia’s Deface the Music, he paid tribute to, and emulated the sound of the Beatles so closely that one of the tracks (written for the film Roadie) was rejected out of a fear of lawsuits. Before then, of course, he had piloted Utopia through their years as prog-rock pioneers, and then unlikely new wave hit-makers. Few other musicians have as fascinating a resume.

ALLAN HOLDSWORTH

Many guitarists on this list have made their mark primarily by executing blazing solos in front of arenas full of screaming fans. Allan Holdsworth, however, is one of those musicians whose influence is infinitely greater than the amount of platinum records he has been involved with. His back catalog, and list of collaborators, is immense. Incorporating numerous scales and complex chord progressions into his jazz-inflected playing, Holdsworth has been a huge influence on Eddie Van Halen, Shawn Lane, Yngwie Malmsteen and countless others.

ALEX LIFESON | RUSH

Chops-worshipping fans have long heralded Alex Lifeson, drummer Neil Peart and bassist-singer Geddy Lee for their supreme instrumental skills, but the intriguing thing about Rush is the way they deliver the goods without infantilizing their musicianship. Their razzle-dazzle never seems as if it’s tossed off to satisfy some demand for immediate gratification; it has grace and purpose. Take, for example, "Jacob's Ladder" ...

ADRIAN BELEW | KING CRIMSON

Robert Fripp may be the name most associated with King Crimson, but the influence of Adrian Belew on the band’s post-1981 material cannot be discounted. As the band’s frontman and second guitarist, it was Belew who was responsible for bringing Fripp’s ideas to light, which he did with aplomb. Belew has brought a fearless attitude to each and every one of his many projects, exploring and creating otherworldly sounds most would never dream of crafting on a six-string.

TREVOR RABIN | YES

Few guitarists have the talent to fill shoes as big as Steve Howe’s, but Trevor Rabin happens to be one of them. While Howe left to form the early Eighties super group Asia, Rabin teamed up with bassist Chris Squire, drummer Alan White and (later) vocalist Jon Anderson. Though Rabin was initially apprehensive about the new band’s decision to adopt the Yes name, the new lineup was more than worthy of it. Rabin’s compositions and powerful guitar playing helped Yes move seamlessly into more pop-friendly territory, and introduced the band to millions of new fans.

STEVEN WILSON | PORCUPINE TREE

Taking cues from ambient and psychedelic music, Steven Wilson breathed fresh air into the increasingly staid prog rock genre with his band Porcupine Tree in the early 1990s. Ignoring the oft-dramatic elements of prog in favor of more ethereal vibes, Porcupine Tree’s music was incredibly forward-looking, while still blending quite well with the popular music of the time. Though he has repeatedly disavowed the comparison, Wilson has often been labeled as the heir to Pink Floyd’s legacy, and with good reason.

JOHN PETRUCCI | DREAM THEATER

Often seen as one of the leading figures of progressive metal, John Petrucci, with his band Dream Theater, has left an intangible mark. Focusing more on technique and complexity than speed and power, Petrucci created a sound that has been emulated by countless guitarists over the last two decades. His intricately detailed six-string work helps convey the often complex themes and narratives in Dream Theater’s music, and played a large part in changing the world’s conception of metal.

ALAN MORSE | SPOCK’S BEARD

Since their beginning in the mid-Nineties, Spock’s Beard have been this era’s answer to bands like Genesis. They even have a similar story with singer and main/songwriter Neal Morse leaving the group and having the drummer take over as singer. Now with their third singer, the band have continued to produce great Prog albums, most recently 2015’s The Oblivion Particle. Original guitarist Alan Morse has remained the linchpin between all the lineups, with his signature finger-picking shredding-style and is one of the genre’s most underrated guitarists.

RICHARD HENSHALL, CHARLIE GRIFFITHS | HAKEN

Formed in 2007, London-based prog metal group Haken have quickly climbed to the top of the new prog heap based on the success of their 2013 breakthrough, The Mountain. Their new album, Affinity, takes the band’s creativity even further, combining their wide-ranging influences from Seventies prog to djent, even borrowing from the Eighties on the track “1985." Richard Henshall and Charlie Griffiths take turns as lead guitarists, showcasing their diversity through metal epics like the 15-minute “The Architect” or the pop-flavored “Earthside." The group has toured with bands like Between the Buried and Me and Leprous, and hit the U.S. for a headlining tour with Thank You Scientist starting August 30.

JIM MATHEOS | FATES WARNING

One of the pioneering groups of the progressive metal movement, Fates Warning formed in 1982 under guitarist and main songwriter Jim Matheos. The band found commercial success in the Nineties with albums like Parallels and Inside Out, before venturing into darker, more progressive territory with 1997’s A Pleasant Shade of Grey. Through it all, Matheos has been the band’s driving force and is highly regarded as one of the most influential guitarists of his era. The band’s new album, Theories of Flight, was released earlier this year and was their best-selling album in almost two decades with Matheos still at the helm.

ROINE STOLT | ANDERSON/STOLT

Jon Anderson returned to prog with the new album Invention of Knowledge, partnering with guitarist Roine Stolt. Stolt is known for his work as leader of the Swedish outfit the Flower Kings, as well as with Prog supergroup Transatlantic, which includes Mike Portnoy. Anderson and Stolt decided to join forces after Jon joined Transatlantic for a set of Yes classics on 2014’s Prog Nation at Sea Cruise. On their new album, Stolt composed much of the music around Anderson’s lyrical melodies and ideas, resulting in what many are calling Anderson’s return to the style of Yes music he helped create. Stolt was also on tour with Steve Hackett earlier this year, joining the band on bass.

Got a question for your favorite guitarist? Let us be your go-between. The concept is easy—you submit your queries and we pass them on to some of the world's greatest guitarists.

Only the sharpest and funniest questions will be used.

This month, we're giving you the chance to ask guitaristAdrian Belew anything you want! From his days with Talking Heads, Frank Zappa and David Bowie right on up to his extended stretch with King Crimson, nothing's off limits! Not even that whole Nine Inch Nails episode!

Just email your questions to dearguitarhero@guitarworld.comand put "Adrian Belew" in the subject line.

Remember to include your name in the email body, so you can get credited in the magazine, and impress and annoy your jealous and stupendous friends!

Here's an ode to a piece of gadgetry rarely heralded on GuitarWorld.com, something that has brought a whole new world of sounds to guitarists' fingertips: the guitar synthesizer, aka the guitar synth.

A guitar synth is a synth module whose input device is a guitar instead of a keyboard. To quote Norm Leet from Roland's UK website, "The most important part of a guitar synth system is the divided—or hexaphonic—pickup, which allows each string to be treated individually and for the attached synth to be able to detect finger vibrato and string bending."

At first these systems were farily sizable, taking up so much space that they had to be housed in specially designed guitars that were part of the entire synth system. Today's synth systems, however, are tiny things that can fit into pretty much any guitar.

Modern systems send the pitch information as MIDI to allow you to control external modules or keyboards. This also means that pitch information can be recorded by a MIDI sequencer.

Countless artists have dipped their toes into the world of guitar synths—everyone from Eric Clapton to Steve Hackett to Eric Johnson and Jeff Loomis—and some players made it a massive part of their sound, including Pat Metheny, Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew. Carlos Alomar even recorded an entire album for synth guitar—1990's Dream Generator.

Here are 10 classic songs that feature guitar synths. They demonstrate at least some of the many dreamy, bizarre sounds (or "soundscapes," as some people like to say in this context), these devices can create.

10. "Stranger In a Strange Land," Iron Maiden, Somewhere in Time, 1986

After completing a masterful trilogy of albums with 1984's Powerslave, Iron Maiden took a turn for the progressive, unleashing a barrage of synth guitars on their listeners with their sixth studio album, Somewhere in Time.

Easing their fans into the idea, the album's first single, "Wasted Years," was the only track on the album to feature no synthesizers at all. Its follow-up, "Stranger in a Strange Land"—the tale of an Arctic explorer frozen and lost in time—featured Adrian Smith and Dave Murray's guitars processed through synth effects, giving their dual guitar attack a distinctive larger-than-life chorus sound.

09. "Never Make You Cry," Eric Clapton, Behind the Sun, 1985

By the mid-'80s, the guitar synth was officially a bandwagon, and even ol' Slowhand himself, Eric Clapton, hopped on—if only briefly.

Clapton used a Roland guitar synth to record "Never Make You Cry" from his successful 1985 album, Behind the Sun, which was co-produced by Phil Collins of Genesis (a major guitar synth band, especially during the Duke tour).

It's only fitting that Clapton experimented with cutting-edge technology on Behind the Sun, the album that kicked off a period of slick commercial releases by the venerable guitarist, including 1986's August and 1989's Journeyman.

Before its release, he had been coasting along on a series of rootsy, laidback, Band- and J.J. Cale-inspired albums, from 1974's 461 Ocean Boulevard to 1983's Money and Cigarettes.

08. "Are You Going With Me?," Pat Metheny, Offramp, 1982

Over the decades, guitarist Pat Matheny has become closely associated with Roland guitar synths—especially the GR-300. But it all started with his 1982 album, Offramp, which featured his first documented use of the Roland GR-300.

The album features the samba-based "Are You Going With Me?," which has since become a trademark Metheny song. Its lengthy, trancelike guitar solo is played on the Roland. Check it out below.

Metheny still uses his GR-300, which has since been discontinued by the company.

07. "Who's to Blame," Jimmy Page, Death Wish II, 1982

In 1981, former Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page was asked to compose and record the Death Wish II soundtrack by his neighbor, director Michael Winner.

It was just what Page needed—an opportunity to start creating music again, now that John Bonham (and with him, Led Zeppelin) was gone.

Page mirrored the film's moodiness and edginess with a slew of new devices, including the Roland GR-505 guitar synth and TR-808 Rhythm Composer. The guitar synth can be heard on the entire soundtrack album, which was recently re-released on JimmyPage.com in a "heavyweight vinyl package." Only 1,000 copies were made.

Page continued experimenting with guitar synths and even appeared in several Roland print advertisements in the early to mid-'80s.

06. "Venus Isle," Eric Johnson, Venus Isle, 1996

Texas guitar great Eric Johnson started dabbling with guitar synths in the late '80s, but he didn't seriously record with them until his 1996 album, Venus Isle, an album full of what he calls "extra textures."

Johnson uses a Roland guitar synth to create those textures on several tracks, including "Mountain," "Battle We Have Won," "When the Sun Meets the Sky" and the title track, which you can check out below.

05. "Discipline," King Crimson, Discipline, 1981

If you were putting together a dream team of guitar synthists, you'd probably want King Crimson's Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew batting third and fourth in your lineup.

The guitarists were among the most proficient guitar synth users of their generation, and Fripp continues to push the boundaries of synthetic sound with his mesmerizing Soundscapes shows.

On King Crimson's Discipline album, Fripp and Belew made great and bountiful use of the Roland GR-300. On later albums, they moved into GR-700 territory.

04. "Racing in A," Steve Hackett, Please Don't Touch, 1978

The upbeat and catchy "Racing in A" is from Steve Hackett's Please Don't Touch album from 1978.

It was the first solo album he recorded after leaving Genesis and his first album to feature his pioneering work with the Roland GR-500 guitar synth.

"Racing in A" is a five-minute-long progressive-rock masterpiece that glides along for more than a minute with its almost-Yes-like rhythm before the vocals kick in (But Hackett keeps the spotlight squarely on the GR-500).

As is the case with several other selections on this list, be sure to check out the entire Please Don't Touch album for more examples of Hackett's guitar synth work.

By the way, that's Hackett's photo at the top of this page (and all the pages in this story).

NOTE: We've included a cool live performance of "Racing in A," plus (for the purists), the studio version.

03. "Turbo Lover," Judas Priest, Turbo, 1986

"Turbos were all the rage, the in-thing," said Judas Priest bassist Ian Hill of the mid-1980s. "I'd even bought a vacuum cleaner because it had the word 'turbo' on it!"

Perhaps this obsession with the super-charged is what lead the boys in Priest to experiment with guitar synthesizers on their 1986 classic "Turbo Lover."

Taken from the album Turbo—easily among the most divisive albums for diehard fans—the song featured a whole new sonic palette for the band, with guitarists K.K. Downing and Glenn Tipton employing guitar synths and anything else they could get their hands on to give the song its distinctive futuristic, sci-fi feel.

02. "Don't Stand So Close to Me," The Police, Zenyattà Mondatta, 1980

"Don't Stand So Close to Me," which appeared on The Police's 1980 Zenyattà Mondatta album, features Andy Summers jamming away on an early Roland synth (He had a few models during the band's heyday, including a GR-707).

"After Sting had put the vocals on 'Don't Stand So Close To Me,' we looked for something to lift the middle of the song," Summers said in 1981. "I came up with a guitar synthesizer. It was the first time we'd used it. I felt it worked really well."

"I was sort of known for [guitar synth] then, and I was in a pretty high-profile band," Summer said in a more recent interview for Roland. "I was trying to fill out two hours with a trio, trying to keep it interesting all the way. The Roland synths blended in quite well."

01. "Ashes to Ashes," David Bowie, Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), 1980

It's Hammer time. Guitarist Chuck Hammer is an accomplished player and Emmy-nominated digital film composer who has recorded with Lou Reed, David Bowie and Guitarchitecture, to name just a few.

But Hammer might be best known for his textural guitar synth work on "Ashes to Ashes" from Bowie's Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) album. Hammer used a Roland GR-500 with an Eventide Harmonizer to get the synthetic string sound that can be heard in the video below. He actually used four multi-tracked guitar synths, each one playing opposing chord inversions. Be sure to check out the rest of album, which features a healthy dose of Hammer.

Rolling Stone put Hammer in the category of "musical pioneers" along with guys like Robert Fripp and Allan Holdsworth.

Matt Smith, Adrian Belew and Snarky Puppy's Chris McQueen and Bob Lanzetti dropped by the Supro Amps booth at the 2015 Winter NAMM Show to demo the company's new Royal Reverb amp.

You can check out the video, which also features Supro's guitars, below.

This 2x10-inch vintage reissue with reverb and tremolo has headroom to spare and a huge, punchy tone. The Royal Reverb's stout 6L6 output stage can be configured for Class A or Class AB power at 35, 45 or 60 watts with selectable 5U4 tube or solid state rectifier modes. Street price on the Royal Reverb is $1,499 U.S.

For more about Supro, visit suprousa.com.

Last night, guitarist Adrian Belew announced he was quitting Nine Inch Nails.

Belew, noted for his work with Talking Heads and King Crimson, posted the following note on Facebook, via Consequence of Sound:

"hey folks, before this goes too far let me say this: I greatly respect trent and the music he makes. no one is at fault. we both agreed it just was not working. I’m sorry to disappoint anyone. that really hurts. but NIN will do an amazing show and I am back where I belong: creating FLUX."

That post, which has since disappeared from Belew's page, was replaced by the following sentence:

"concerning me being part of the 2013 Nine Inch Nails band: it didn't work."

FLUX, by the way, is Belew's solo project. It also describes the state in which Nine Inch Nails' lineup has found itself in 2013. Bassist Eric Avery left the band in May. A week later, former NIN guitarist Robin Finck rejoined the band.

It should be noted that Belew played an important part in Nine Inch Nails' recent reformation. As Reznor explained in a press release earlier this year, "I was working with Adrian Belew on some musical ideas ... which led to the decision to re-think the idea of what Nine Inch Nails could be."

And let's not forget the quote that appears in the photo below, which is from Belew's official website:

In 1990, guitarist Ned Evett smashed his Strat onstage.

When he noticed the neck was unbroken, he simply removed the frets and developed a style he'd eventually become known for -- even developing his own fretless, mirrored-glass-necked guitars along the way. His own website refers to him as "The Glass Guitarist," and Joe Satriani has called him "a monster player."

Now, after releasing Treehouse, his sixth solo album, in January, Evett is finally getting some long-overdue recognition as a singer and songwriter.

"Being well known for something innovative is great, but sometimes it gets in the way of what’s really important, which is the music I’m writing," Evett said. "I love what I’m doing right now as an artist writing songs -- and, of course, my guitar is integral to my songwriting process.

"Writing music that is an honest reflection of your life experience is hard work, and recording it right and then performing it with sustained conviction on the road is even harder, and I live for that struggle and opportunity to share my music with the world."

We recently spoke to Evett about his guitars and about Treehouse, which was produced by Adrian Belew. The album features songs drawn from his own experiences and observations. They run the gamut from tender pieces to hard-rocking blues -- and everything in between.

GUITAR WORLD: What's up with this glass guitar of yours? How much of it is made of glass? Who made it? Where’d you get it -- and why?

The fingerboard is glass. I developed the glass fingerboards in 1996 with my friends Cherian Jubilee and Rob Renick. I was living in San Francisco and had been wearing out ebony fingerboards playing loads of gigs. I didn't have the money for a metal fingerboard, so I thought of the glass option, which Rob knew how to cut. Glass is cheap, easy for an expert glass guy to shape, and sounds incredible; on fretless guitar, whatever the fingerboard is comprised of directly affects the tone.

In 1999, I launched fretlessguitar.com [now redirected to nedevett.com] and started selling Fernandes guitars with glass and lined-wood fingerboards. This led to me releasing Fretless Guitar Masters in 2001, the world's first fretless guitarist compilation, co-produced with Franck Vigroux.

What other gear did you use on Treehouse?

Ampwise, we used a Buddah Superdrive 18 and Adrian's Matchless DC-30 for the solos: we cut the solos in one six-hour session. For the leads I used my Peavey Omniac with an aluminum fretless fingerboard, and my glass fingerboard Fernandes Native Pro with a sustainer pickup.

For the rhythm electric parts, the magic bullet was my Fretless Danelectro ‘59 reissue (with a radiused glass fingerboard) into a Peavey Delta Blues 2x10 combo. I first cut a radius glass fingerboard for John Frusciante in 2007, courtesy of a chance meeting with his guitar tech, Dave Lee.

What led you to the world of fretless guitars in the first place? Who were your influences on that route?

Adrian Belew and Jaco Pastorius, in that order of discovery. I witnessed Adrian playing the fretless with King Crimson on their Live in Japan concert video on MTV Concerts in 1984 and wondered what it would be like to play it on EVERY song. Jaco came into the picture for me later, after he passed away, which was such a tragedy. I should note, there were no "fretless guitarists" per se in those days to model from, so playing the fretless guitar always felt like new ground.

Who are your influences in a more general sense?

I grew up on Bach, baseball, The Beatles and the blues. I was born in Nashville, Tennessee, and raised in Boise, Idaho, both towns full of amazing pickers. In Idaho I learned to play traditional folk tunes alongside Bach Lute Suites and push-pull contrary motion bends from the local country players. Growing up I focused on finding my own voice on the guitar and was never been satisfied with being a clone.

Who inspires you today -- and/or what do you listen to?

I’m listening to Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson and Ravi Shankar. For true inspiration, there is spending time with my 11-year-old son, who co-wrote "Sayonara Serenade" off of Treehouse with me. I’m also addicted to documentaries streamed on demand and recently enjoyed Bela Fleck’s Throw Down Your Heart documentary, which was filmed in Africa.

How important are effects to you, and what's on your pedal board these days -- if anything?

Effects aren’t that crucial to my sound; the fretless glass fingerboards and my fingerstyle electric playing define my style more sonically. However, I have a Fulltone GT500. I've worked with Line6 stomp boxes for ages, and use the DL4 and MM4 religiously. I also use a Vox Ice 9 overdrive, which really shines in the transparency department. I love amp reverb and tremolo; I have an expession pedal for the MM4 so I can alter the tremolo speed on the fly.

You used to work with Mike Fuller at Fulltone, the effect pedal company (maker of the OCD). What did you learn from him?

I was 15 when I met Mike -- this was before he launched Fulltone -- and he managed the local guitar shop called Music World. He always stressed to me the importance of getting great tone from your fingers before anything else. Via his record collection, he introduced me to Jeff Beck and many classic players. He was tracking the importance of vintage gear way before anyone I knew, and he showed me the basic concepts of getting great tone: heart, mind, fingers, pickups, pedals, amps -- in that order. He also didn't suffer fools gladly, and you'd better bring the goods if you were playing him something you had learned. He also gave more props to you if you wrote something as opposed to copping something off of a record.

For more about Evett, visit nedevett.com or his official Facebook page.

Photo: Gregg Roth

A few days ago, I caught another very cool show at The Iridium on Broadway and 51st Street here in Manhattan.

It was the opening night of a two-night visit by Tony Levin's band, Stick Men, and the Adrian Belew Trio.

I went with my comrade, Brian Thornton of New Jersey, a major fan of the whole Levin / Belew / Robert Fripp / King Crimson universe. In fact, he and I saw Fripp perform downtown this past winter; it was one of his solo "Soundscapes" shows, and it was peaceful, tranquil and ethereal.

Totally unlike the Levin/Belew show at Iridium.

Levin's Stick Men kicked things off with their heavily syncopated grooves. The band -- Levin on the Chapman Stick and occasional vocals, Markus Reuter on a touch guitar he designed himself and the great Pat Mastelotto on drums -- ran through a powerful set that included "Speed Bump," "Supercollider," "Relentless" and "Breathless," from Fripp's Exposure album (All of these song titles could be used as descriptive adjectives for the set's many peaks and valleys).

I'm not gonna make it sound like I knew all the tunes Stick Men played that night (I basically know Levin as that really tall guy at NAMM -- also as the bassist on John Lennon's Double Fantasy album), but that didn't matter; the playing was ridiculous. They're one of those trios that makes you understand that there are so many levels of musicianship -- and these guys are way at the top, looking down -- smiling, perhaps -- at a bunch of folks like us.

And if you've never seen Levin play the Stick, check it out on YouTube (or just watch the video above). He's taken it to such a high level that the Stick website refers to him as a "Stickist." I'd ask for a better nickname if I were him ...

After a short break, the Adrian Belew Trio took over.

I met Belew at NAMM in 2010, and he's a nice, normal guy. At NAMM, I said, "Hey, you're the guy who played on that Talking Heads tour" (I like to bring up random things from people's careers; if I were to meet Paul McCartney, I'd say, "Hey, you're the guy who played drums on "My Dark Hour" by Steve Miller."), and he was talkative, friendly and crazy-normal. The same regular guy was onstage at the Iridium, performing in a white T-shirt and joking between songs. He even threw a pie in drummer Tobias Ralph's face, which is a very normal thing to do, I'm told. On bass was the immensly talented Julie Slick.

Highlights of Belew's set included "Young Lions" and the super-dynamic "Of Bow and Drum." The man knows his way around a Parker guitar, and it was nice to hear Belew stretch the ol' vocal chords.

If you've payed attention, you noticed that I've mentioned three members of the current (if such a thing exists) lineup of King Crimson -- Levin, Belew and Mastelotto. And, as luck would have it, these guys took the stage as a trio, kicking off a King Crimson Finale that built to a supergroup including all the musicians from both bands.

The set included "Neurotica," "Red," "Thela Hun Ginjeet," "Three of a Perfect Pair," "Elephant Talk" and "Frame By Frame" -- but my personal favorite was the ultra-catchy "Dinosaur," which is still stuck in my brain, trying to get and dig some bones.

My friend Brian -- remember him? The King Crimson fan? -- made it clear that this was a unique and decidedly awesome show.

Me, I was just happy to soak in some beer, eat a pizza and catch a rare glimpse of something very much akin to King Crimson. I hear an actual King Crimson sighting is as rare as a dinosaur these days.

P.S.: I used a photo, above, from Levin's website, which was shot by Levin himself; if you'd like to see more of his photos from that night, check out his tour diary right here.

Damian Fanelli, the online managing editor at Guitar World, has performed around the world as a member of Mister Neutron, The Blue Meanies (the New York version) and/or The Gas House Gorillas. He loves anything associated with Quebec, which is why he's really into Godin and Richmond guitars at the moment.