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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A New Psychedelic Fool

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Les Pauls and a 335

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian May and the Darkness recently joined forces for the soundtrack of the Masters of the Universe film, but it wasn’t their first encounter. Dan Hawkins remembers that time fondly.

It was back in 2011, as the classic rock revivalists were themselves revived after a five-year hiatus. The band were back on stage at London’s Hammersmith Apollo, and they brought out Brian May, Red Special in hand, to play the Queen classic Tie Your Mother Down.

It seemed May really got into the spirit of things. He and Dan Hawkins even played back to back at one point early on. It was high energy.

“I thought, ‘What is Brian doing?’” Hawkins remembers in conversation with Guitar World. “Then I realized he was doing the rock triangle. I was like, ‘Oh my god, I’ve never done this before. If I move, he will fall over.’”

The song went off without a hitch, but it’s clear from the show’s video footage that May is far more comfortable. Hawkins, playing a burst Lest Paul, exudes trepidation; a fear of the worst.

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

It was a night to remember as the band linked up with one of their foremost influences. The Queen cover was sandwiched between Bareback and their trademark hit, I Believe in a Thing Called Love. Before that last song, May took to the mic.

“I just want to say, how happy are we that The Darkness are back together and conquering the world again,” he beamed.

Back in March, May was making another guest appearance on someone else’s stage as he offered his services to Benson Boone, after a surprise tie-in at Coachella 2025. Hawkins, meanwhile, has shrugged off his public fallout with Yungblud.

Guitar World’s full interview with Dan Hawkins will publish online in due course.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeff’s Go-To Rig

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Living Colour needed a replacement for founding bassist Muzz Skillings, Wimbish was an obvious contender. He’d first met guitarist Vernon Reid in the early ’80s, and in 1991 he was invited to audition.

Flying through a hurricane on his way into New York, Wimbish arrived at the band’s Brooklyn rehearsal space. Reid, drummer Will Calhoun, and frontman Corey Glover asked what he wanted to play first, and Wimbish suggested Time’s Up, the blazing title track from the band’s second album. The room got so quiet that Wimbish wondered if he’d said something wrong.

“I’m looking around, and I can feel the vibe,” said Wimbish in the October 2017 issue of Bass Player. “They’re looking at each other and not saying anything. Finally, they said, ‘We've auditioned a lot of people, and you're the only bass player who wants to play that song.’”

Wimbish nailed the audition, and officially joined Living Colour in early 1992.

Although 1993’s Stain didn’t match the commercial success of its predecessors, it produced some of the band’s most adventurous material.

“Go Away was the opening track of Stain and I’ll never forget it, because Will and I were so tight. We locked in perfectly. Some of those songs had a lot of twists and turns, and we had to watch each other’s body language to make it happen.”

Tensions within the band led to a hiatus in 1995, which saw Wimbish move to London, adding Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Little Annie, Brooklyn Funk Essentials, Nitzer Ebb, Bomb The Bass, Depeche Mode, and a dozen other credits to his resumé.

Since Living Colour reunited in 2000, Wimbish still approaches songwriting as a collaborative process rather than a fixed formula. Drawing on ideas developed across a wide-ranging career, every project seemingly feeds into the next.

“I’ve worked with different bands for quite some time like TackHead, Little Axe, Bad Dog, Mark Stewart and the Mafia, and there are different layers of all these things that are part of the ingredients I use to assemble ideas for Living Colour.

“I might start off with some chords and I will present it to Will, or maybe I will just track everything – bass, guitar, drums – and build the song from there.

“Vern might come in with a riff or another way of approaching the line, and you just use the resources that are there and get everybody involved in what’s happening so you can really make the music for the band. That’s how I like to work with Living Colour.”

Alongside drummer Will Calhoun, Wimbish has built one of modern rock’s most intuitive creative partnerships.

“When you play with a drummer and you listen to each other it’s always a very rewarding and healthy environment to be in. I could play four notes and a rhythm and be already knows where to go with it, and vice-versa.

“I know his swagger and when he's going to speed up or slow down. I sound better with him on drums, and he sounds better with me on bass. Period.”

Yngwie Malmsteen’s existence on this planet reminds us that we might all be unique but some are more unique than others. There is no-one like Yngwie.

He is our shred maestro, the purveyor of the neoclassical before neoclassical was a thing, faithful keeper of the Stratocaster flame and the man whose live rig “could be seen from space”. And he’s also great conversation.

Some time in Malmsteen’s company is always time well spent (he was oversharing before oversharing was a thing). On occasion, he has been a conversational Icarus, flying a little too close to the sun when shooting from the hip, and that got him a reputation. He had an ego. He was this. He was that. But all musicians have an ego. They just present themselves differently.

Malmsteen? He’s 100 per cent certified WYSIWYG. He appreciates the finer things in life, driving a Ferrari, thicker guitar picks, Paganini, Bach, Mozart, breaking new ground in studio techniques… This, ladies and gentlemen, is the man who triggered a snare by discharging a firearm in the studio, a long-held ambition that was finally realized when making 2021 studio album Parabellum.

With Malmsteen sharing a new single, Now or Never, and announcing an epic new album, Hell or High Water, out November 13 via Music Theory Recordings/Artone Label Group, we would like to take this opportunity to revisit some of his bons mots, the wit and wisdom of one of electric guitar’s most colorful characters.

On the sound in his head

I realised that that violin sound, the wee-eee-eee-eee, like, this linear, completely concise sound, that’s what I heard in my head, that’s what I wanted to do! And so it was like a fucking revelation, y’know.

Obviously, you just don’t say, ‘Yeah, I want to play Paganini, Tchaikovsky, Vivaldi violin technique on guitar.’ You don’t say that. That’s literally impossible to be honest with you. But I decided, even if it was literally impossible, I was gonna fucking try.

MusicRadar, 2021

Playing philosophy, part 1

I don’t want to just play it safe. Two-string, maybe three-string, four-string, five, six-string arpeggios… But people kept on telling me to slow down, you know? “Hey, slow down! Remember, less is more.” And I always said, “How can that be? How could less be more?” It’s impossible. More is more.

Playing philosophy, part 2

I don't consider myself to be a very fast player. I'm sure there are other guitarists who can play faster: what I do that a lot of other guitarists don't do is I don't play things that are rubbish.

If you would slow down the fast licks that a Iot of other guitarists do, people would puke. I play classical runs, arpeggios and broken chords that if played at a slower speed would sound very nice as well.

Guitar World, 1986

On tone

I remember, when I first came on the scene, people used to come up to me and say, ‘I can’t believe you don’t have any gain on your amp. You don’t have any distortion!’ You know what the truth of the matter is? I have more fucking gain than a nuclear power plant! I have so much fucking gain, I don’t know what to do with it!

MusicRadar, 2021

On his live sound

I said to my tech, ‘Before I go out, I want to line check my shit to make sure it works. Make sure you get the elephant.’ The elephant means that when you just stand there in front of the amps and you turn up the volume, and do nothing, it should sound like an elephant. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaarghhhh! Uncontrollable fucking elephant. But you have to be really fast with the volume knob, you know what I mean?

MusicRadar, 2021

On heavy metal

I don’t care if people call our music heavy shit or heavy metal. Onstage we’re definitely metal because we’re just as heavy as the headbangers could ever want it. But what we play is a lot more sophisticated than what those run-of-the-mill metal bands are doing.

Guitar World, 1986

On gunplay

I have always been collecting guns. I always have lots of guns. So, I go into the studio. This was 1986, for Trilogy. [Laughs] Crazy days... I go in and I say, ‘Hey, bring me a big old fucking tree stump, y’know?’ And they said, ‘Okay.’ They put a big old tree stump in there and mic it up, and I bring out a .357 Smith & Wesson Magnum pistol and I blow this fuckin’ thing off in the studio. And the people were like, ‘No! It’s too loud.’ They’re freaking out!

MusicRadar, 2021

On space

If you went up into space and you looked down on Earth, there are only two man-made objects that you’re gonna see: the Great Wall Of China and my wall of Marshalls. My road crew hates me. Seriously.

Guitarist, 2021

On jazz

I went to the bookstore and they were playing free-form jazz in there, and it was a little bit out of tune, some horns and stuff, and I felt like I needed to flush my brain out like a fucking toilet! So I listened to Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto on the way home.

MusicRadar, 2025

On writing

Even without a guitar in my hands, the music just comes to me. It’s like that movie Amadeus. Mozart was getting music given to him in complete form. I understand the building blocks and can therefore build you anything you like.

If you asked me to write you a death metal song, call me back in five minutes, and I’d have it ready for you. You want country and western or reggae? No problem. I can give you whatever you want.

PR for Hell or High Water, 2026

Joe Bonamassa has called out “armchair quarterbacks” who are having a damaging impact on guitar culture.

Ever since Adam asked Eve how the apples were, people have had opinions. It comes with being sentient. It is part of the human condition.

But only in the 21st-century has every single individual on the planet had the means to broadcast their opinion – and this paradigmatic change in how we communicate with our fellow human beings has put the zap on some people’s heads.

Guitar culture is no exception. It might even be one of the more dysfunctional discourse spaces on the web.

Joe Bonamassa has had enough of this. In a recent interview with Guitar Interactive Magazine, he took aim at the “armchair quarterbacks” who are doing a lot of commenting, maybe less playing.

“I could sit in my chair and say to Tom Brady, ‘I could have thrown that ball better than you.’ No, you can’t,” says Bonamassa.

The blues guitar superstar says it is so bad that it’s affecting pro musicians’ mental health, citing the famous episode when Nick Jonas “clams” a solo when playing with Kelsea Ballerini at the ACM Country Awards in 2016.

“That one that caused this guy to go into therapy,” says Bonamassa.

Jonas went viral, memes were created to tear him down, and an artist who has struggled with stage fright for a number of years had to seek professional help, all because of what he called “a huge brain fart”.

“We’ve all done that,” says Bonamassa. “Everybody’s done that. You know, like, ‘I didn’t even know what I was thinking!’ But the vitriol. What do you want him to do? Burn his guitar in effigy? Like, jump off a cliff? The guy had to go to therapy! What’s wrong with people?”

“Kenny Wayne Shepherd and I have been on stage a lot together, the last five, six years. It’s not a competition,” he continues. “We don’t look it like that. Warren Haynes and I, we’re on stage a lot. We’re having fun. But what do they expect? A trophy at the end? A cash prize? A judge that goes, ‘I declare the winner!’ like a fucking boxing match.”

Perhaps, yes, and that is all kinds of weird.

When your gig is a seemingly permanent slot as the rhythm guitarist and co-songwriter for a rock icon, everything else is pretty much gravy. Billy Morrison, who was brought into Billy Idol’s band in 2010, has gravy to spare – enough to cover Thanksgiving dinners for everyone in a sold-out stadium.

On top of that, Morrison has become a successful painter, with a healthy list of wealthy return clients. He has displayed his work in numerous exhibitions, and one of his pieces from a series of butterfly paintings has been hanging in the U.S. Capitol for more than 10 years.

So, when it comes to his solo albums, Morrison doesn’t need to write hit songs, address a particular audience, or play out live. His sole focus is to write in a variety of rock, punk, and metal styles he enjoys, then get together with friends to hang out and jam. Of course, as a fixture of the L.A. scene for more than a decade, many of his friends just happen to be multi-platinum rock stars.

His fourth solo album, Hollow, features guitar work by Billy Idol’s lead guitarist, Steve Stevens, Nuno Bettencourt, and Duff McKagan, and guest vocals from Sully Erna, Dexter Holland, Marilyn Manson, and rappers Chuck D, B-Real, and D.M.C.

“I love working with musicians I like and admire,” Morrison says from the desk in his home studio in Beverly Hills. “That’s a real thrill for me. And I can work with whoever I want and put as many different genres onto a rock record as I want, because the only person I have to please is myself.”

It’s a formula that has served Morrison well. In 2024, Crack Cocaine, the snarling riff-driven anthem he co-wrote with Ozzy Osbourne, went to number one on the Mediabase Active Rock Chart, and fueled the success of Morrison’s third album, The Morrison Project.

The record also featured the Ozzy co-write Gods of Rock N Roll, an epic, orchestral power ballad that went top ten on the Active Rock Billboard Mainstream Rock charts. Becoming, a new, brooding, caustic grunge-metal collaboration with Godsmack’s Sully Erna and Stevens, went top 20 on Active Rock and created a strong buzz for Hollow.

“My God, it seems like it was just yesterday that Crack Cocaine went to number one,” Morrison says, his hands linked in front of him, revealing colorful tattoos and blue polished fingernails. “And Gods of Rock N Roll was still in the charts while I was writing these new songs. Before I knew it, I had written enough for another record, so I figured while I was having fun, I might as well start recording it.”

Morrison’s eclectic guitar style and aesthetic are partially rooted in the UK punk and old-school glam he grew up on, which explains the abundance of reverent Sex Pistols and David Bowie nods. The other main inspirations on Hollow are late ’90s and early 2000’s alternative rock. There’s a reason for that.

“I was a heroin addict for 15 years, and I only woke up in the early 1990s,” Morrison explains. “So, everything between the late ‘70s and the mid ‘90s was just a blank. It didn’t seep in.

“I caught up to it later, but what really stayed in my blood is drop-D Seattle music, stuff like Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson, and then pop-punk stuff like Blink-182 and The Offspring. That’s the kind of thing that gets me excited about writing music, and it’s good because a lot of it is pretty different than what I’m doing with Billy Idol, so neither gig ever gets boring.”

In a revealing interview, Morrison talked about how he wrote and recorded Hollow, his escape from near-terminal addiction, his tight friendship with Ozzy Osbourne, and the gear and goals he has as Steve Stevens’ sidekick.

Did you write songs for Hollow with particular vocalists in mind?

No, that came later. I’d get two-thirds of the way through writing a song before I figured out who I wanted to sing on it. Like, The Tailor had an industrial feel with heavy guitars and electronics, and I went, ‘I’ve got to text Marilyn Manson.’ Now, Manson is a friend so it wasn’t hard to get things started.

The same went for Dexter Holland. I wrote Never Gonna Change in about four minutes. It’s a pop-punk song with four chords in it. I love The Offspring, and I could hear Dexter singing on it so I texted him. It was like that for pretty much everything I didn’t sing on.

You wear your influences on your sleeve, but with great reverence for the artists who inspired you. And you combine them in creative ways. Take Me As I Am, for example, sounds like a hybrid of Soundgarden and Oasis.

I’ll take it. Thank you. At the end of the day, all you can do is put out a record and hope other people understand what you’re doing. I’m proud of my influences, but at the same time, I never said, “Okay, I’m going to rip this off and that off, and combine them.”

What you hear is what comes out of me naturally when I pick up a guitar. It might be a drop-D riff, or a jangly open-chord thing. But then, maybe I’ll do something with it like add another guitar or put some EDM samples on top of it, and if it fits my limited vocal range, I’ll sing on it. And if it doesn’t, I’ll call one of my rock star buddies.

You’re well-versed in straightforward rock, power-chord riffing, drop-D doom, open-chord spangle, country twang, and driving percussive punk. Do you view each of these as separate entities requiring specific playing techniques?

When it comes to rhythm, I learned everything I know from Steve Jones. If it works, it’s good, whatever label you want to put on it. And you know, The Sex Pistols only wrote 12 songs 50 years ago. But every one of them has a chorus to die for.

That band played with anger and venom, which put them in what became the punk genre, but those are pop songs, and they’re all about huge choruses, which are what I love and what I go for.

Hollow ebbs and flows through a wide range of emotions.

There are peaks and valleys because life’s like that. Look at [David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of] Ziggy Stardust [and the Spiders from Mars]. That album is a journey through his mind. I want Hollow to be a journey through different areas of my brain, and that includes some very energetic stuff and some very dark things.

When you mix different subgenres within a song, do you use different gear for each style?

It depends on what I’m going for. Let’s say you have a riff that goes G-D-A. You can play that Noel Gallagher style with open chords down on the first, second, and third fret areas. For that, I would probably go to my JCM 2000, which was modified by Dave Friedman, and it’s a big, important mod that makes it sound nothing like a JCM 2000.

I’d play that on my signature Knaggs [double-cutaway solid body] with P90s on the bridge. And then, I would go to my Friedman [BE-100 Deluxe] head with a Les Paul, and I would play fifth-fret and seventh-fret power chords and layer left and right. I’m a huge fan of playing the exact same thing twice, so you have four tracks shaping the sound.

To make the sound thicker?

There’s that, but also, you want to play it twice because you physically, humanly can't play it exactly the same way, so it’s more organic. Sometimes, I’ll pan the takes at ten and two, and then do another pair of tracks with a different rhythmic technique hard left and hard right.

You produced Hollow in your Beverly Hills home studio. When you’re writing the songs, do you have a basic idea of how you’re going to engineer them?

To an extent, but that’s not why I do it. Producing my albums gives me time and creative freedom. I’m not on anyone else’s schedule, so I can make sure the aesthetic of the music is visually and sonically consistent. If you play this and the last album back-to-back, it sounds like the same band.

There are only two guest guitar leads on the album. You play all the other solos, which suggests you’ve overcome the insecurities you used to have about soloing.

I'm going to be as honest as I can without being narcissistic. I don't feel insecure anymore. I definitely wouldn't try something like Eruption. I know who I am as a player and who I am not, and on the songs I played leads, I totally enjoyed pushing myself to make them as good as they could be.

You prioritize melody over speed.

I don’t care about playing fast. I’m more concerned about having the right notes and the right space between them. Some of the greatest solos to me are things I can hum, and that’s always at the front of my mind.

Are you schooled in the seven diatonic modes?

No, I haven't got a clue. I tried, but I just… You know, it wasn't for me. And you know what? I probably play them. Clearly, someone could dissect one of my solos and say, “Oh, he was in Dorian, and then he went to Mixolydian,” but I’m playing with my ears. I have no idea what to call what I do.

Why did you invite Nuno to play on Becoming?

When I first heard Nuno’s playing it felt to me like someone raising the stakes of the game. And Sully and Nuno are both from Boston, and they’re friends. So, when I was working with Sully, a lightbulb went off in my head.

Nuno was in town doing a charity gig, and we bum-rushed him in the dressing room and asked him to do it, and he said sure because, you know, you don’t want to say no to your friends. It was only later that he said, “Man, I didn’t even think about what I would have done if the song sucked.”

Steve Stevens plays lead on Another Day.

I didn’t even have to think about that one. I love my brother, and if I’m making a record, he needs to be on it.

You met Steve when you were in the LA cover band Camp Freddy (with Dave Navarro and Matt Sorum), and Steve started joining you onstage. The two of you had shared interests and you quickly became friends. Steve had long been Billy’s only guitarist. Why did Steve suggest to Billy Idol that he hire you as the band’s full-time rhythm guitarist in 2010?

They decided it was time to be a two-guitar band. The two of them wrote Rebel Yell, White Wedding, Eyes Without a Face. They were like Mick and Keith for a long time. I’m nothing compared to them. So, I’m fortunate that they asked me to play with them and they didn’t say no.

So, once you have us being a twin-guitar band, the two of us need to complement each other and play off one another. And you can't do that if both of you are playing Les Paul-style, PAF humbucking pickup guitars. You just sound the same. And we're both using Friedman amps. So, that’s where my signature guitar with Knaggs came in.

Your Knaggs Keya B-M is your primary guitar onstage with Billy Idol, and it was your go-to for Hollow?

My signature guitar is a nod of the hat to Steve Jones, who played a white Les Paul Custom that was so nicotine-stained from the clubs that it was more of an off-white. So, we called the color “nico-cream,” and it has a thick neck profile. Most Les Paul Juniors are really skinny, so you don't get all of the tone from it.

I’ve got big, fat fingers, so I asked for a thicker neck that was more like a Les Paul, but with Fralin Noiseless P90s. So now, Steve’s on the humbuckers and I'm on the P90s, and they sound great together. And I know Billy and Steve appreciate what I bring to the performance, which is what matters most to me.

What made you decide to kick drugs?

That's a very powerful question. And the truth of the matter is, I had a moment of clarity. It was an acute realization that I was going to die. I was homeless, living under a piece of corrugated iron propped up on someone’s fence. I was shooting in my neck.

My body had abscesses and was going septic and shutting down. But it wasn’t the thought that I was going to die that really affected me, it was the thought that I was going to die and I would have done nothing with my life and no one would care. That was the kicker.

No one in my life would even be surprised that I was gone. That’s when I was able to start turning things around, and it was hard. I was a nasty person when I was using. You have to be if you’re homeless with a five-hundred-dollar-a-day habit. I’ve been clean 30 years now, and I would hope most people would say I’m not a nasty person.

When you finally kicked drugs, was music a salvation for you? A new addiction?

Um, yeah, but I had a lot to catch up on. I felt like I'd been missing for 15 years, which I had been. So, I really got into music again, but I also had to go back and discover what had happened while I was gone. It’s funny because I was actually in LA during that time and there was all this music happening that inspired people. I always say I couldn’t even get that right.

All these other musicians formed a band, got a couple of gold records, and then shot heroin. I went straight to shooting heroin. I didn't even get to the “form a band, make the records” part.

The Morrison Project included two songs you co-wrote with Ozzy Osbourne. The two of you were close friends. Before he got terribly ill, was there ever talk of working with him again on Hollow?

No, we did it – twice. So even when he was alive, there was no talk of him being on the record. I got to have my moment with my best friend. That’s it. Done.

The Back to the Beginning show was an incredible, emotional tribute to Ozzy and Black Sabbath. People were aware he had Parkinson’s and had undergone dangerous surgeries. Fans and musicians at the show were in tears because they knew he was ailing. Yet, it was still a huge shock when he died 17 days after the concert. Did you know how ill he was?

Everyone with a heart was crying the day of that show. Obviously, his health had been declining, and I had been witness to that. I had seen him in more than one hospital with tubes attached. I visited him coming out of surgeries. But you know you don’t go there in your head.

Ozzy was so strong and overcame so much. He would text me: ‘I'm in pain. This thing, it's getting me down.’ I would just say: ‘You're the strongest man I know.’ So, I expected him to overcome everything like he’s Superman because, to me, that's who Ozzy Osbourne was.

He bounced back time after time after time. So certainly, I don’t know whether it was expected, but I was not ready. And the hardest day I've ever been through was his funeral. I flew to his funeral in England, and I delivered a eulogy. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.

What made him your best friend?

Humor was what bonded us. Sharon would tell you that we were like two 11-year-olds when we got together. We were annoying to anyone else. It was difficult taking us both to the same dinner because we would be giggling and making inappropriate jokes and laughing at things no-one even vaguely understood. And we would be shuddering with tears of laughter, so we couldn’t speak.

That's what made the friendship special. We understood each other in situations where, perhaps, other people didn't understand us.

And as friends, there were huge life events for both of us where one of us helped get the other one through. And there were events in our lives that happened, and we had a connection. I miss him.

• Hollow is out now via TLG/Zoid.
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

As fast friends and close collaborators, Eric Clapton and Duane Allman formed one of rock guitar’s most potent partnerships.

They may not have been in a band together per se, but that didn’t stop them from working together on one of Slowhand’s most iconic recordings.

At the turn of the 1960s, the Allman Brothers Band guitar hero was a Clapton fan. The feeling was mutual. Clapton said Allman’s turn on Wilson Pickett’s Hey Jude was the greatest rock guitar playing he’d ever heard.

Allman wanted to meet Clapton. And so, when he caught wind that he was coming to town to record a new record, Allman requested a meeting through a mutual contact.

“I said to Tom Dowd [producer for both the Allman Brothers and Derek and the Dominos], ‘Man, you’ve got to call me when he comes to town,’” Allman told Good Times magazine in 1971, which was re-published in the November 1991 issue of Guitar World. “‘I want to hear him play, and I want to meet him.’

“He’s a good player and I’ve always admired him a lot – his style and everything he ever did,” Allman continued. “So Dowd told me, ‘He’s going to be in. Come down.’ So I got down there, and Eric knew who I was – he’d heard some of my records and stuff.”

The pair, clearly fans of one another, decided to work together then and there. This was no ordinary collaboration, though. Allman caught Clapton at a good time.

With his band Derek and the Dominos, Slowhand was about to set to work on what would become Layla & Other Assorted Love Songs – a magnus opus that would be widely regarded as one of Clapton's finest works.

“He said, ‘Okay, man. We’re going to make us a record here, and we’re going to have two guitar players instead of one,’” Allman remembered. “Then we made the Layla album.

“And we worked our butts off on it! It’s a good record! Everybody got behind it, with no [ego] trips or anything. It’s just good music all the way through. And it was a pleasure to do it.”

The impromptu partnership would become the beating heart of some of Layla’s… most iconic guitar moments. On tracks like I Am Yours and Nobody Knows You, Allman’s landmark slide guitar work injected the record with elevated dynamics and melody.

Little Wing, Tell the Truth and Key to the Highway showed Allman and Clapton’s potent chemistry. He even played a starring role on Layla, twinning with Clapton for the opening iconic riff. Not bad for an off-the-cuff collaboration.

The pair continued their partnership after the Layla sessions, sharing the stage across a handful of Derek and the Dominos gigs. Tragically, before they got a chance to enter the studio again together, Allman died in a motorcycle accident less than a year later, in October 1971.

It made Layla & Other Assorted Love Songs their final, and only, record together.

But Allman was eternalized in the Slowhand repertoire, with his slide playing in particular stealing the spotlight on Layla. His work proved to be a fruitful source of inspiration for Clapton.

“It’s all in the wrists,” Allman said of his technique at the time. “Eric is coming along on his slide. He’s doing okay. He ain’t no Duane Allman of the slide guitar, but he's doing all right!”

Everyone at Guitarist was deeply saddened to learn the news that Steve Clarke, the vintage guitar expert who authored the Famous Frets books, died recently after a short illness.

Though not someone who often stepped into the spotlight – at least not without a guitar in his hands – Steve inspected and authenticated some of the most famous guitars in the world, including Rory Gallagher’s 1961 Stratocaster and dozens more in the course of his work with renowned auction house Bonhams and for his reference books.

Like the best experts, Steve’s enthusiasm for his subject went well beyond a mere ‘job’. If it were possible to ‘hear’ the twinkle in someone’s eye over the phone, you could surely do so Steve’s when he called Guitarist and said: “Hiya, Jamie, are you sitting down? I think I’ve got something you might be very interested in…”

Though always the soul of discretion when working on high-profile instruments, Steve relished sharing detailed insights on the historic instruments that passed through his workshop whenever he was able to. And, indeed, the list of guitars he worked on over the years was like a roll call of legends: Peter Green’s 1931 National Duolian, Rory Gallagher’s 1961 Stratocaster, Paul Kossoff’s ‘Stripped ’Burst’ 1959 Les Paul Standard, Gary Moore’s ‘Red Strat’ and many more.

Born in Wythenshawe, Manchester, on 12 March 1955 (in a strange coincidence his two siblings were also both born on 12 March), Steve first fell in love with guitar watching Hank Marvin playing a Strat with The Shadows on Sunday Night At The London Palladium.

“He was about nine, maybe 10,” Steve’s wife, Anni Clarke, recalls. “And after he saw that, he actually made a cardboard guitar and drew frets and pickups on it, cut it out in the shape of a Strat with strings on it, and he tried to copy where they placed their fingers. His dad eventually got so sick of hearing Steve try to make guitar noises with his mouth, he said, ‘Do you think you’d take it up if we bought you one?’”

Steve never looked back. After cutting his teeth playing guitar in cabaret acts in working men’s clubs in the North of England and touring further afield in Europe, he became a pro guitarist just as punk was at its vitriolic height. He played with Manchester band The Drones, who were signed to Quarry management (who also looked after Status Quo) and toured extensively.

But while Steve loved the energy of the punk scene, it was not without its perils, Anni Clarke recalls: “I can remember once there was a student union club in Manchester called the Phoenix at the time, and he came off stage after a fantastic show and he actually had to stand under the shower with his clothes on, even his shoes, because he’d been spat at that many times. It was a really exciting time for Steve, but that was a side effect of punk that he wasn’t particularly keen on [laughs].”

Deepening his connection with guitar to include restoration and teching in the years that followed, Steve was prompted to become an author on guitars after writing to Guitar & Bass magazine urging them to give more comprehensive details of the famous instruments they covered.

To his credit, then-editor John Callaghan invited Steve to provide that very service to the magazine himself. And thus a new career was born as a scrupulously accurate and insightful writer on historic instruments, the highlight of which was the two-volume Famous Frets book series, which offered readers unprecedented detail on guitars belonging to Jan Akkerman, Marc Bolan and many other legendary players.

To this magazine’s great benefit, Steve also worked closely with Guitarist in later years, becoming a go-to expert on iconic guitars that came his way for authentication via Bonhams – most notably Rory Gallagher’s aforementioned ’61 Strat.

“I remember the day I told Steve I needed him to pop down to London to look at something special,” recalls Claire Tole‑Moir, head of Popular Culture at Bonhams. “I kept him guessing for a few days, before finally revealing it was Rory’s guitar – and he cleared his diary immediately. As with every guitar, he approached it with care and professionalism while taking a closer look at it.

“It was only at the end of the day when he was heading home, he rang me on the train and freaked out – just a little – that he had had Rory’s Strat in his hands that day. Like so many guitarists, for him, Rory was it. It was a humbling moment, and a day I know he treasured.

“Steve’s encyclopaedic knowledge about all vintage guitars was incredible,” Claire reflects. “But so was his passion for them – he loved understanding the history of a guitar, where it was used, by who, how the guitarist played and how all of those factors contribute to a guitar’s make-up. Not only was he a master guitar technician, he was also an undercover detective – and he loved the search.”

Anni Clarke agrees but says Steve’s scrupulous honesty about the guitars he inspected was what kept people coming back for his services as a restorer and authenticator, although Steve modestly referred to himself simply as ‘The anorak in the North’.

“He always said, ‘Tell them if it’s right, tell them if it’s wrong,’” Anni recalls, a personal maxim that is a fitting testament to the expertise, honesty and touch of humour that Steve brought to all his work, which was also his lifelong passion. He will be much missed.

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

Airbourne frontman Joel O’Keeffe has a not-so-secret penchant for classic gear. SGs, vintage Ibanez Tube Screamers, and, of course, his wall of trusty Marshall stacks are just a few of the gear choices inspired by the golden era of rock.

However, as O’Keeffe himself admits in a new interview with Guitar World, the Gibson Explorer trumps them all.

“It's just the most extreme rock and roll guitar there is, and when you strap one on, it's like putting on like a Superman cape or something,” he says. “It’s just… a switch goes off.”

You’ll never find O’Keeffe wielding an Explorer at home, though. “I'm more SGs and Les Pauls and sort of 335-y kind of stuff,” he explains. “Couch guitars.”

As for the stage, that’s a different story altogether. “At the end of the set, I’ll always throw the guitar up like that, and I’ll give it a flip,” he says, demonstrating his onstage stunt of swinging his guitar of choice above his head.

But if you’re thinking of doing the same thing with your Explorer, well, think again. O’Keeffe is clear that, like any other pointy guitar, T&Cs apply.

“With an Explorer, I've gone and knocked myself out almost, and [you] just hit your head with the thing,” he cautions. “You’ve got to be careful with the Explorer. Should come with a warning label that says, ‘Might cause physical harm,’ but they sound so great!”

O’Keeffe cannot help but wax lyrical about the Explorer’s unique tone, describing it as a “kind of mix of Les Paul and SG sort of vibe.”

Or, as he sums it up, “They’re a pointy guitar, but it's not like an Ibanez-y, ’80s sort of thing.”

Nikki Sixx has admitted that Mötley Crüe have embraced the use of backing tracks during their shows, but promises they still play all their own instruments live.

The glam metal veterans have faced numerous allegations of using tapes during their gigs in the past. In the most serious instance, former guitarist Mick Mars once accused them of miming on stage.

Responding to a fan’s question on X, though, bass player Nikki Sixx has now admitted that, yes, they do use backing tracks. But they play their own parts live. And they’re comfortable with that.

“Since we saw Queen using some to help during the song Bohemian Rhapsody live, we understood that we could bring in elements that we could not do live,” he writes.

These are extra instrumental layers, such as orchestrations and saxophones, rather than guitars, he says. Their ballad Home Sweet Home and the upbeat Rattlesnake Shake are examples of songs that have those extra sprinkles.

“We sync them up with what we are playing, and we do play 100% live,” Sixx continues. “It’s better for the fans, and we enjoy being able to do what we did in the studio live. It’s a win-win for us.”

As MusicRadar reports, Crüe have come under scrutiny before. A 2022 performance seemed to suggest that Tommy Lee wasn’t playing his drum parts. Fans had noted discrepancies between his movements and what came out of the PA.

Backing tracks with live performances are a sensitive subject, and many bands have been accused of ‘faking’ their shows before now.

It’s often a delicate balancing act for artists to tread. Fans don’t want to buy expensive tickets to see musicians miming, but there are instances where those extra tracks are accepted.

Wolfgang Van Halen may have called bands who heavily rely on extra tracks “lame as hell,” but John Petrucci offered a more forgiving take. He says backing tracks are fine, so long as the guitarist on stage is playing their ass off.

Then, of course, there’s the whole other world of ‘fake guitar playing’ in the online sphere. It’s generated some fascinating conversations with our readers as to where the line is drawn. Similar debates could be sparked around live performances.

Mick Jagger has shared some insight into the making of the Rolling Stones’ new record – revealing how his guitar contributions helped bring a new element to their music.

Jagger says he’s the man responsible for the more raucous songs on the new album. As he explains, he took to the guitar to smash out some riffs during the writing process, despite Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood not taking too kindly to it.

At face value, Jagger is the band’s mouthpiece, their enigmatic and energetic frontman. Keef is meant to be the riffs. But in many cases on Foreign Tongues, their new Andrew Watt-produced LP, several riffs have come from Jagger’s fingers. He believes his playing style fills some important gaps.

“I write different kinds of songs to Keith,” he tells Variety during a breakdown of the song Mr. Charm alongside Watt. “It sounds like the wrong way round, but I write a lot of the more punky rock songs.”

The song is driven by a punching kick drum and some dirty blues licks reminiscent of Brown Sugar, and the Stones at their most swaggering. Yet it comes from the half of the Jagger-Richards partnership that most wouldn’t have expected.

“I want to hear this distorted slashing guitar sound,” Jagger explains. That means he was prone to taking one of Keith Richards or Ronnie Wood's guitars off them, so he can better present the idea he has in mind.

“I don’t think Ronnie and Keith really like me doing it, but I do it anyway,” he laughs. “Sometimes I’m hearing something that they’re not doing. They’re doing great things, but I still want that original thing on it, you know?”

As Watt explains, in the chorus, what fans are hearing is Wood on the left, Richards on the right, and Jagger straight down the middle “doing the power.”

The lick that the other two guitarists are trading off, meanwhile? “That’s my lick,” Jagger shouts with great enthusiasm. “It’s his now,” Watt returns, laughing.

Another one of Jagger’s upbeat numbers is Covered In You, which features Paul McCartney on bass. Richards, meanwhile, recently explained why the guest spot meant the world to McCartney.

Julian Lage might be one of the world’s best jazz guitar players, but he has admirers on the heavier end of the scale, too.

Last year, Alter Bridge’s Mark Tremonti and Myles Kennedy revealed they were surprise Lage fanboys in an interview with Guitar World. Kennedy said Lage’s playing was as impactful on him as Eruption was. In the same interview, Tremonti branded him “intelligent and sophisticated”.

Guitar World brought those compliments up in a recent interview with Lage, who was staggered by the praise.

“I’m very humbled by it. I find it hard to believe because I don’t think of myself as [an inspiration],” he says. “I’m touched by it. If anything I’m doing is meaningful to them, that’s great. They’re monsters.

“I will say, though, that I recognize that our community is a good one,” he adds. “There’s a sense of camaraderie, and if someone’s carving a path out or pursuing something, that person’s discoveries are available to everybody else.

“Because I do it too; I go to bed at night, like, ‘I want to know everyone who played a pine Telecaster,’ you know? So I’m learning from all these people’s experiments.”

These learnings, he then says, are not bound in place by genre. That’s the beauty in two prominent metal guitarists immersing themselves in the music of Lage, or, like Cecil Alexander, bringing metal and prog influences into the bebop space.

“It makes me feel like we work for the same company; we’re all in different branches,” he smiles. “I get it, because I feel the same with them, too. Those guys are amazing.”

To that end, Lage keeps a close eye on what his fellow employees are doing and name-drops Little Barrie main man Barrie Cadogan as a player doing something very interesting in a more raw setting than his.

“He’s doing all the things I said I wish I could do," Lage says. “He’s pushing amps, and he’s using phrasing in a beautiful way. Guthrie Govan and Tosin Abasi are amazing, too.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Lage discusses sharing the stage with slide guitar master Derek Trucks, and how he had to convince himself it wasn’t a dream. He also recently sat down for a fascinating chat with Al Di Meola.

Head over to the Guitar World YouTube channel to watch the full interview with Julian Lage.

Pepper Keenan has looked back on the time he was given the keys to Malcolm Young’s legendary AC/DC rig – an experience he describes as “concussive”.

Speaking on the latest episode of Chris Garza’s podcast, the Corrosion of Conformity guitarist explained the opportunity arose because he and Young both had the same guitar tech, Takumi Suetsugu.

The world-renowned technician, who also worked with Prince, was a mutual contact that connected Keenan’s world of heavy metal with the classic rock style championed by the Young brothers.

As such, Keenan was invited to an AC/DC show by Suetsugu, and offered the chance to play the late rhythm guitar great’s iconic ‘Beast’ Gretsch through his fully fledged stock of Marshall stacks.

Loud is an understatement. Ear-splitting would be more appropriate. Keenan compared the experience to getting a concussion.

“[Suetsugu] ended up working for AC/DC, and that’s when he called me up. I went to a show and, yes, I got to play Malcolm’s rig,” he remembers.

“It’s all Marshalls, improperly biased, that are microphonic,” Keenan explains of Young’s setup. “It’s hot. Insane. And they’re all on – it scared the shit out of me.”

Keenan observes that there was no overdrive whatsoever from Young’s amps. Just sheer, unadulterated volume that powered AC/DC’s sound and became the bedrock for his brother Angus’s lead musings.

He notes, “It’s just volume. No overdrive, just volume pushing it. There’s no pedals. It’s loud, you know? It’s just concussive, would be the right word.”

Keenan also got his hands on the Beast, Young’s 1963 Gretsch 6131 Jet Firebird, which was by the guitarist’s side for his whole career. It was one half of a streamlined guitar rig that was defined by its raw, sledgehammer-style rock tone. And, on paper, it was a nightmare to play.

“The action’s high. It’s an animal, dude,” Keenan says. “It’s a monster. [But] I loved it. I usually have shitty action, too. That was a fun thing.”

As for why Malcolm’s tone felt particularly intimidating, Keen continues, “Angus’ tone is kind of spongy. Malcolm’s tone is not. It’s almost closer to a Fender Twin. It’s concussive.”

In related news, earlier this year Keenan reflected on his ill-fated Metallica audition, admitting he knew the exact moment he failed his chance to become the band’s new bassist.

For most bassists, getting the call to play alongside Black Sabbath guitar legend Tony Iommi would rank somewhere between fantasy and impossibility. For Becky Baldwin, it became reality after a single email snowballed into one of the biggest opportunities of her career.

What began as an invitation to record a couple of songs soon turned into playing bass guitar across Iommi’s new solo album – despite Baldwin spending the first studio session convinced she'd blown it.

“When I got to the studio they played me one of the songs – I think it was World Alone,” says Baldwin. “They asked what I thought, and I loved it immediately. Great riff, great melody, and the vocals sounded fantastic.

“Then they rewound the track and said: ‘Okay... now play along.’ That was terrifying. They were expecting me to perform in front of someone I admire enormously, with absolutely no preparation time.

“They said we could do as many takes as we needed, but they wanted to capture my first instincts. I asked whether they wanted me simply to double Tony’s riffs or whether they wanted something different.

“Tony just said, ‘Play whatever you think you'd naturally record if we weren’t here.’ So I thought, ‘Right... what would Geezer Butler do?’ I've studied Geezer’s bass playing for years, and I know Tony loves Geezer’s style, so I started there.

“Working songs out instantly isn't my strongest skill – I like to analyse things carefully, go back over sections, make notes and really learn them properly, so having all of that taken away, combined with the pressure of the situation, made me feel like I was falling apart.

“The whole time I was convinced I wasn't playing well, but they kept calling me back! Before I knew it I was playing bass on the entire album. And that first performance ended up being the take they used for World Alone.”

What do you think made you the right person for this album?

The producer, Mike Exeter, had seen my videos online and followed some of the touring work I’d been doing. I suppose he could tell I was heavily influenced by classic metal bass players, especially Geezer Butler, and thought I’d be a good fit.

They were also looking for a bass player who was local enough to get to the studio easily and fit into the recording schedule. The album had already been in the works for a while, but the Back to the Beginning show took up a lot of Tony’s time and pushed his schedule back a little.

By the time I arrived, most of the record was already done. The band was already in place, including Jørn Lande on vocals and Karl Brazil on drums, so I think I was the last piece of the puzzle.

How did they get in touch?

I first got an email from Tony’s manager. You know when you see the preview in your inbox and it mentions Tony Iommi? I thought, ‘Hang on... what's this?’ As I read more it said Tony was working on new music and wanted me to come to the studio. My first thought was that it couldn’t possibly be real.

Do you remember where you were when you got the email?

I was sitting on my sofa when it came through. I checked the sender, researched the website, confirmed it really was Tony’s management, and realized it was genuine. I immediately sent over my number, and Tony’s manager called me.

What was that phone call like?

He was incredibly casual about the whole thing. He just asked if I’d be interested in coming to the studio. Of course I was interested! I’ve been a fan for more than 20 years, and I’ve spent a huge amount of time learning about the history of heavy metal and how much of the genre exists because of Black Sabbath.

There was never going to be any answer other than yes. We arranged for me to visit Tony’s studio a couple of weeks later.

What happened when you got there?

Tony asked what I’d been up to, and I wanted to ask him loads of questions too, but it’s strange when you're talking to someone you feel like you already know because you’ve read every interview and every article they’ve ever done!

What was the first thing you did after you walked out of the studio?

I drove away from Tony’s house, pulled the car over and just sat there for a minute trying to process everything that had happened. I remember filming a short video on my phone, just talking about what I was thinking. I’ve never watched it back, but I wanted to capture that moment while it was still fresh!

Did you prepare any differently before going back?

One thing that actually worked in my favour after that first session was that I apologized for how underprepared I felt. I told them that, normally, I'd spend time living with the songs first. I'd chart them out, work through different ideas and arrive with everything properly prepared.

They completely understood because they’d thrown me in at the deep end. Their concern was that they didn’t want any music leaking before the album was ready, so they hadn’t wanted to send anything out in advance.

Eventually they decided to send me a couple of demo tracks at a time so I could prepare before each session. The later sessions felt much less intimidating.

Now that the album’s finished, what can people expect?

Naturally, there's a lot of Geezer in my bass playing because he’s always been one of my biggest influences. That's simply how I play bass, so I think listeners will hear that influence, but they’ll also notice that the bass isn’t quite as prominent in the mix as it was on classic Black Sabbath records.

That's partly just the way modern productions are. Bass guitar tends to sit differently in today's mixes compared to albums from the 1970s. So I’d say it’s a more modern interpretation of what people might expect from a Tony Iommi record.

Did you think much about the gear you were going to use?

I assumed I’d take my Rickenbacker 4001 because I use that for almost everything. Then I realized I had no idea what tunings Tony would be using.

For the later sessions I took two Rickenbackers – one set up for E-flat standard and another set up for D standard – which covered everything we needed. In the end I recorded the whole album using those two basses.

It felt appropriate because they’re very ’70s-style instruments, but they’re also simply the instruments I use all the time. That's my sound. The team already knew how I sounded from my previous work, so I figured they wanted me to sound like me rather than imitate someone else. Thankfully, it all worked out.

This all sounds like an overnight success story, but you've worked hard to get to this position.

I suppose it seems unusual that someone from Tony’s generation discovered me online, because when Black Sabbath started there obviously wasn’t the internet. But that's one of the positives of today's world – you can discover musicians you would never otherwise come across.

Growing up in Wiltshire, I didn't have loads of venues nearby bringing through the bands I wanted to see. There wasn't really a pathway to playing with those kinds of musicians. The internet changed that.

I started posting classic metal bass covers online while also playing every tiny venue I could across the UK and Europe. Over time people realized I genuinely loved this music. I wasn't just an internet personality – I was also out there playing real shows. Those two worlds started feeding into each other.

Getting the Mercyful Fate gig was already a huge step forward in my career, and I think once people saw how well that worked – and how accepting the fans were – it opened more doors. It showed that bringing a younger musician into a legendary band could actually work.

What's next for you?

I've got a few festivals with my band Fury and with Delilah Bon. We'll be working on a new Fury album, and it's looking quite likely that Mercyful Fate will be touring next year as well. So there are lots of exciting things on the horizon.

Chris Poland is best known as the original guitarist for Megadeth, appearing on the group’s first two records, 1985’s Killing Is My Business… and Business Is Good! and 1986’s Peace Sells… But Who’s Buying?

He’s the archetype for that group’s style, if you will. Beyond that, Poland’s oddball style – which stems from a nasty hand injury he suffered before he turned pro – is a pillar of Eighties thrash. But that’s not all there is to Poland’s playing.

“I came from a rock background – guys like Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix and Leslie West,” Poland says. “When I heard Jeff Beck’s Blow by Blow, I went down the rabbit hole of bands like Weather Report, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, Tony Williams with Allan Holdsworth and bands like that. My Ohm project and any other of my solo instrumental records are just me being influenced by this music.”

Going into Black Flame, Poland’s new album with Nuclear Messiah – which, by the way, features fellow former Megadeth men Marty Friedman, Glen Drover and Chris Adler – his rock and metal roots collided with his fusion sensibilities, creating an amalgam of six-stringery only Poland could conjure.

“Am I a fusion player? I don’t know,” Poland says. “But it was the Mahavishnu Orchestra’s The Dance of Maya on Guitars That Destroyed the World [a 1973 compilation album featuring the fretwork of John McLaughlin, Carlos Sanata, Leslie West and more] that really turned my head.

“When I first heard it, I hated it but couldn’t stop revisiting it. Until one day I got it.” Poland has been down this path before, like on 1990’s Return to Metalopolis. And, by the sound of Black Flame, Poland has still got it. It’s with that in mind that the 68-year-old virtuoso beamed in with GW to dig into the record.

How did Nuclear Messiah get off the ground?

It was the brainchild of Brian Perera, president of Cleopatra Records. I had worked with Brian on several projects before this and knew that if he was involved, it was going to happen.

When he explained who was involved, I was blown away. I was amazed by who he got to contribute to the album. That’s why it came out so great.

Nuclear Messiah seems to have been built around you, with others coming on board to pitch in. What was the process like?

Original song ideas started with Derek Hughes and Jürgen Engler. They’d send song ideas to me and I’d add parts to those, then other players would add their parts. That’s the beauty of the internet and ProTools.

Then Derek and Jürgen would mix everyone’s parts, and what you hear is the end result. Derek and Jürgen did such an amazing job mixing. It’s hard enough to mix one band. But on Black Flame, each song was different – with a different vibe and different artists. They need to be commended.

What was your rig like for this recording?

I used my Custom Audio Electronics rig that I’ve had for decades. I used an Egnater IE4 red face preamp with a modded Peavey 120/120 tube power amp with 5881 tubes in it, plus assorted pedals and rack effects. Bob Bradshaw’s system is my palette.

Fellow Megadeth alumni Marty Friedman, Glen and Shawn Drover, and Chris Adler appear on this record.

Yeah! Wow… between Marty, Chris and Glen and Shawn, that’s a lot of Mega talent. [Laughs] Each of them is legendary in their own right. Each of them brought their vibe to the record. It was my honor to be on this record with them and everyone else.

Pat Travers and Vinnie Moore also appear, adding more six-string firepower.

Oh, my God! Pat Travers! Snortin’ Whiskey? Holy shit, man… I loved that song and record. Pat’s phrasing and tone is peerless. And Vinnie Moore is the same. He has a lot of blues in his playing, but at the drop of a hat he can sweep and pick some impossible phrases.

Both have perfect bend pitch as well. All the other guitarists brought their own sound and feel. And then there’s Bumblefoot [Ron Thal], Joel Hoekstra, Lance Lopez and Mick Box; they’re all world-class players. Add Jürgen Engler to this list as well!

Electric Burn is cited as a highlight from Black Flame. What’s the story there?

Electric Burn is such a great track. I feel it has a lot to do with Chris Adler’s drumming. It’s relentless and at breakneck speed. Add Marty’s incredible soloing, especially the end of main solo ascending harmony section, and Marc Lopes’ intense vocal performance and you have a song that never gets old.

But my favorite moment is Arthur Brown’s performance on Ride the Sky. It gets me every time I hear it. But all the other songs are just as good. But that vocal – I just love it.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention William Shatner’s spoken‑word introduction…

William Shatner is a force of nature. He’s an amazing actor, but when I heard his spoken word back at the studio – which is the first of two takes, by the way – I realized he was speaking in perfect 3/4 time. I really don’t think he planned it. It just came out that way. That’s how good an orator he is.

That is how I wrote the music around his spoken word. By the way, Brian Perera wrote the words that Mr. Shatner spoke. I want to mention how welcoming he was when we went to his home. He’s such a great person with a great sense of humor. It’s something I’ll never forget.

What excited you about this project most?

I learned a lot making this record, including how to realize what works and what doesn’t work on the spot and when to let your best instincts take over. That said, I admit I asked to revisit a couple of solos I did after I turned them in. That was a luxury not often given. As far as my playing and writing goes, I hope it’s always evolving. I guess time will tell.

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

The Pretenders’ self-titled debut album turned 45 years old in 2025. It featured the guitar playing of the late James Honeyman-Scott, whom Chrissie Hynde believes made the record magic.

Honeyman-Scott was a major player in the new wave movement of the 1980s, spearheading two albums and an EP with the Pretenders before his untimely death in 1982.

Fast forward through the decades, and Hynde has become the only continuous original member. Yet, speaking in a fan Q&A hosted by the Guardian, Hynde downplayed her role in the band’s early success – and puts the spotlight firmly on Honeyman-Scott.

“I was staying in a freezing cold attic in a women’s boarding house in Tufnell Park, north London, and had probably written a few of the songs before I met them,” she says of Honeyman-Scott, Pete Farndon, and drummer Martin Chambers.

“Every guitar player I’ve had since James Honeyman-Scott has been influenced by him, for example: Johnny Marr,” she continues. Marr briefly joined the band after the Smiths broke up in 1987.

“The moment James came to my front door, I knew we’d be in a band together. I got friendly with Benji Lysaght – who produced and plays on [her 2025 solo album] Duets Special – after he came up to me in catering and said: 'Can I ask you something about James Honeyman-Scott?'

“It’s insane: Jimmy died aged 25. Only guitar players remember him, and yet he was the sound of the Pretenders.”

“I was an angry biker chick,” she adds, “but he brought out the melody.”

In the following years, Hynde spearheaded the band as the leader and figurehead of the Pretenders. The 1983 single, 2000 Miles, which is considered a Christmas song despite being lyrically tied to Honeyman-Scott’s passing, is a prime example of her own prowess.

“A year after he died, I was in the Sunset Marquis [in LA] thinking about him,” she recalls. “I rented a guitar and wrote 2000 Miles. I’ve always regretted that the rental company wouldn’t sell it to me because I wanted that guitar so much.”

Hynde has talked about her relationship with Honeyman-Scott in the past – once recalling a moment at a gig where she fell foul of her fellow guitarist's wrath because she stopped playing mid-gig.

Alice Tai is currently one of England’s top Paralympic swimmers. At 27, she’s already achieved remarkable international success at the Paralympic Games, European and World Championships, and the Commonwealth Games.

She recently topped it off by winning gold in the women’s 100m backstroke S9 at the Glasgow 2026 Commonwealth Games.

Aside from being a decorated swimmer, Tai is also a guitarist, a multi-instrumentalist (leave some talent for the rest of us!), and a member of the alternative rock band BLUSH!

In a video she posted on social media, Tai notes that her newest addition to her arsenal of gold medals looks like a guitar pick.

Designed by artist and designer Militsa “Milly” Milenkova, the medal, inspired by Glasgow’s coat of arms, could indeed be mistaken for a pick. So, instead of leaving it to collect dust, Tai decided to use her medal as a plectrum.

“I just won gold at the Commonwealth Games, and my medal looks like a guitar pick,” she says before launching into Megadeth’s Symphony of Destruction – from the band’s fifth studio album, 1992’s Countdown to Extinction – on her Fender Telecaster Deluxe.

Now that’s as “heavy metal” as any guitarist can get – pretty sure Dave Mustaine would approve.

Joe Bonamassa has looked back on the time he shared the stage with one of his blues guitar heroes, Albert Collins.

When he was just 11 years old, Bonamassa found himself tucked under the wing of blues virtuoso Danny Gatton. Just a year later, he was trading licks with Albert Collins on stage. It was an education.

For two years on the trot, the young blues starlet was invited to play at the New York Blues Festival in Hog Rose. Having impressed at Gatton’s side, he was rewarded with another enviable slot 12 months on.

“They convinced Albert Collins to let me sit in,” Bonamassa recalls on the No Cover Charge podcast. “He taught me the greatest lessons I’ve ever learned on stage.”

A revered Telecaster enthusiast, Collins’ cold, biting guitar tone earned him the nickname 'Iceman'. On stage in New York, he tested a young Bonamassa’s mettle.

“At the time, I worshiped all the Ice Pickin’ and Frostbite records,” Bonamassa explains. “So I got up on stage, and I had my little USA Strat with Lace Sensors, and my Sunn Beta Lead solid state 4x12 amp.

“It was prime time Albert Collins. He had a Tele, a [Fender] Quad Reverb, and about a 150-foot cable because he would go out into the crowd.”

It was a trial by fire for a 12-year-old Bonamassa. He had to earn his place on the stage. Collins wanted him there on merit. He put Bonamassa through his paces.

“He stung a note and pointed his Tele [like it was a gun] at me,” he develops. “I’m this little kid in a cowboy hat; it was his way of saying, ‘Welcome to the big leagues, kid. I don’t care how old you are, being up here requires a certain amount of intestinal fortitude, and I’m testing you to see if you have it. So I did my best Albert impression.”

Bonamassa lived to tell the tale and became a modern blues legend in his own right, inviting next-gen guitarists to his stages in the same vein as his early guest spot alongside Collins.

In related news, Bonamassa recently took a deep-dive into an Eric Clapton classic and explained why it’s essential learning for every blues soloist in his latest Guitar World column.

But the real news reverberating around camp Bonamassa right now is his shock pivot to digital amps, and he has now revealed the one key moment that changed his mind.

“My dad's a plumber, and I did plumbing with him as a kid,” says John Osborne, guitarist and co-songwriter behind acclaimed country-rock duo the Brothers Osborne.

“I wanted to not be a plumber so bad that I practiced guitar every damn day. Then, the older I get, the more I realize, ‘I’m just a plumber with a guitar!’ [Laughs] I’m just showing up to do a job, hoping I do it well.”

If you’ve ever heard this man play, it’s clear that obsession paid off. Across their four LPs, he and singer/sibling T.J. pair classy Nashville twang with pop hooks, elevated by the kind of blazing musicianship suited for an arena stage flanked by pyrotechnics.

It’s no surprise Fender tapped him for this year’s signature John Osborne Telecaster, inspired by his own modded-out ’68 – B-bender and all.

The design draws on many years of his own tweaking, experimentation and “aha” moments. There’s the maple neck, the “lifeblood” of the instrument. The quirky pickguard, which “lends itself to the almost outlaw era of Teles.”

The custom pickups, which nail that sweet spot of “spank.” Then there’s that B-bender, which channels classic pedal-steel sweetness by raising the B string’s pitch a whole step to C#.

“You’re trying to make it an emotional thing,” he tells us of the device. “When you get it, it’s so much fun. You get to create a sound you’ve never made before. Once you get through the honeymoon period, you realize, “Now I have this other tool to use when it’s necessary – emphasis on when it’s necessary.”

Osborne gave us an overview of his signature Tele, shared his history with the B-bender and mused about finding the perfect balance of craftsmanship and technique.

You’ve talked about how you constructed your current guitar, making modifications over the years to the ’68 Tele you bought at age 21. Was the idea with this signature model to recreate that precisely?

The idea was to replicate it as precisely as possible, with all of the slight – and maybe large – modifications I made over time. This is where the guitar has ended up over 20 years of experimenting. I wanted to recreate that because it really is a unique Tele in so many ways. I wanted whoever picks it up to realize, “This is very classic but also very different.”

Tell us about your history with the B-bender.

When I was in late high school, I became obsessed with Brent Mason. That’s after I did my long stints of wanting to be a rock player and a blues player and all the different genres I’ve encountered.

I heard a solo on the radio on an Alan Jackson song, and I thought, “Who is bending that note so perfectly?”

The song is called Who’s Cheatin’ Who? It has these bends that are so snappy, and I couldn’t figure out what was going on. I learned how to do it with my fingers, but could never quite get the sound right.

I remember watching a Brad Paisley video and seeing this contraption attached to his strap: “What is going on here?” Through that and a little investigating – the Internet was still in its infancy and you really had to dig – I heard of this thing called the B-bender.

I never had enough money to put one on my guitar. For the longest time, I just had one guitar, the ’68 Tele. I remember opening up for Brad Paisley in his early career, and his tech was joking with me, “Don’t do the B-bender thing. That’s Brad’s thing.”

Then he looked at my guitar and was like, ‘Wait, you don’t have one!” I was like, “Yeah, I had to learn how to do it like this.” But I was always obsessed with that sound.

When we recorded our second record, [2018’s] Port Saint Joe, a phenomenal Tele player/artist/songwriter/producer named Keith Gattis – a dear friend of mine who passed away [in 2023] – let me borrow his B-bender.

At the time, he was playing it on a lot of Dwight Yoakam’s stuff. His B-bender playing is otherworldly – it’s got so much stank on it. And when I played that on the record, I realized, “This is so much fun.”

I finally could get all of the sounds I heard, and it came very naturally because I learned how to do a lot of those things with my hands. After that, I became obsessed with B-benders. I don’t know if I know how to bend a B string in tune anymore because I have a contraption that does it for me. [Laughs]

Dead Man’s Curve is considered a modern-guitar classic. Does it feel like a signature moment for you?

It does, and it doesn’t. At the end of the day, I love that moment. I love the song Muskrat Greene that goes into Dead Man’s Curve. It’s a time to show off and step out there as a player, but first and foremost I consider myself a songwriter, and the song is paramount to anything else. If the song lends itself to more or less guitar, that’s what’s needed.

The older I get, the more I believe that. I grew up listening to Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan – the kings.

But as you grow up, you realize there has to be a reason for that guitar, and it’s the song. We have songs with zero solos because I didn’t think it was necessary. I thought it would be too much icing on the cake. I just play rhythm and make it a textural thing.

At the end of the day, the guitar is just a tool for the song – even though, when you’re young, you think the song is just the tool for the guitar. [Laughs]

The reason the Stairway to Heaven solo is so great is that it’s a tension release.

Yeah! I love jamming and jam bands, listening to the Allmans and anything Derek Trucks is involved in. I love bands that solo, and I’m hanging on to every note.

The format we’re in, you have three to four minutes to have a song and maybe a moment like that. I’ve always treated the solo as its own mini-song, something you can sing along to.

I’m just trying to service the song. But we do have a few moments in the set where we unwind and let our fingers go. We need those as players. It’s so much fun to stretch out.

I know the original Tele neck was the heart and soul of your guitar. What makes it so special?

The first thing you notice when you pick up a guitar is what the neck feels like. The back of your hand touching the back of the neck, it immediately informs what is about to happen with you and the guitar.

It’s this subconscious thing. Every time I picked up my guitar, it felt like putting on your favorite pair of jeans. It’s like, “Damn, these things fit like a glove.” It has a lot to do with how smooth the neck is. We did our best to get there.

You can’t beat 60 years of playing on the back of a neck, but it’s very, very close. But also the rounded edges of the fingerboard indicate there’s a lot of natural hand wear on it. It becomes a little more contoured and ergonomic on your hand.

The last thing you want is to feel like you’re fighting your guitar to get sound out. That can be fine, but you want to enjoy it and have it be really comfortable. You can talk body woods all day, but you’re not touching the body – you’re holding on to that neck; that’s where the expression comes from.

It’s got the maple cap, and I’ve always found ’68-era Teles to have an interesting spank because of that. I found out that Brad Paisley’s original is a ’68. There’s something special about that year.

• “I’ve been playing B-benders since 1999, so I was eager to get my mitts on this guitar”: Fender John Osborne Telecaster review
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

Yngwie Malmsteen has announced his new studio album, Hell or High Water, set to be released on November 13 via Music Theories Recordings/Artone Label Group. It will mark his 23rd solo album, following 2021's Parabellum.

Speaking about Hell or High Water, Malmsteen says, “When I started making records, I would just take the songs I had lying around.

“Later on, I fell into a schedule – make a record, tour the record, and then write the next record. Over the pandemic, I realized it was better to focus completely uninterrupted, so I stayed at home to write this album over the course of eight months. I had around 80 or 90 tracks finished, and then I had to decide which ones were the strongest.”

Malmsteen went on to detail the meticulous songwriting process that led to this album. “Even without a guitar in my hands, the music just comes to me,” he reasons. “It’s like that movie Amadeus. Mozart was getting music given to him in complete form.

“I understand the building blocks and can therefore build you anything you like. If you asked me to write you a death metal song, call me back in five minutes, and I’d have it ready for you. You want country and western or reggae? No problem. I can give you whatever you want.”

The guitar maestro likens the songs he chooses for his records to “gifts” that he “captures” because “they amaze” him, as exemplified by the palm-muted riffing and baroque inflections of Now Or Never – or the instrumental piece Am Caprice/Hell Or High Water.

Virtuosic capabilities aside, closing track Father takes a more personal turn, as it pays homage to his late dad, who passed away last year.

“He was an amazing man,” says Malmsteen. “I was proud to have him as a father, and I loved him. I wanted to dedicate all of this to him, and that one particular track is for him. I wanted others to feel what I felt when they hear it.”

Ahead of his album release, Malmsteen is set to embark on a tour of China and Japan, kicking off in Beijing on September 4.

For more information about his album and tour, head to Yngwie Malmsteen’s official website.

Melissa Auf der Maur took fans of ’90s alt-rock connoisseurs Smashing Pumpkins by surprise in June last year when she re-emerged on stage in her native Montréal. Wielding her trusty P-Bass, she joined Billy Corgan and the Machines to hold down the low-end on The Everlasting Gaze.

Fittingly, the track – from the Smashing Pumpkins' 2000 release, Machina/The Machines of God – was the first to feature Auf der Maur in the music video following the departure of original bassist D'arcy Wretzky.

It marked the beginning of Auf der Maur’s tenure with the band, which she described as her “‘Master’s in Music’… just phenomenal music training” in a recent Bass Player interview.

Last year’s brief reunion with Corgan wasn’t a one-off, however. Auf der Maur’s memoir, Even the Good Girls Will Cry, released earlier this year, kicked off a conversation that led to the bassist joining the Pumpkins on stage at Lollapalooza this past weekend.

It wasn’t just any other show, either. It was their first appearance at the festival – which, coincidentally, takes place in the Pumpkins’ hometown of Chicago – since 1994.

“It was a natural, healing and gorgeous reconnection that happened around the release of my ’90s rock memoir,” Auf der Maur says in an exclusive interview with Bass Player.

“This past spring, I was scheduled to do a memoir event in Los Angeles, with Jennifer Finch (rest in peace) as my conversation partner. She called in sick that morning. Billy was planning on popping in as a friend to support me and my book.”

Auf der Maur ended up asking him – at the last minute – to be her conversation partner. “This led to one of the most meaningful conversations between my mentor and me, and was really exciting for the diehard music fans in the audience that night.”

This soon led to another opportunity altogether. “Just before we went on stage, he shared with me that the Pumpkins had confirmed headlining Lollapalooza in their hometown and said sweetly, ‘If you wanna join us for a song, please do.’”

Around the same time, Auf der Maur’s daughter was checking out this year’s Lollapalooza lineup, giving her the nudge she needed to join the Pumpkins on stage.

“I casually mentioned that Billy had invited me to join for a song and she said, ‘You better do it so we can go for the weekend,’ and we did, and it was awesome.”

Thankfully, Auf der Maur wasn’t thrown in the deep end as the Pumpkins had organized a warm-up show at Chicago’s iconic Riviera Theatre on July 29.

“I arrived in Chicago the day of the Riviera warm-up show so we could soundcheck together. Billy showed me the new twist on the ending lick, which took a couple minutes. We ran through the song one-and-a-half times. That was it.”

She continues, “Part of me accepting the invitation was testing the theory that music is like riding a bike... the heartbeat and rhythmic feel is eternal. The fingers need a little awakening and refreshing, but otherwise I am ready.”

The next day, Auf der Maur was fully prepared, or, as she puts it, “It felt like putting on my favorite leather boots, very comfortable and at home, but an omnipresent powerful feeling of karmic past lives being played through music.

“Playing on that stage, connecting with the band and the fans, is a way of kindling that magic, and it felt incredible. The Riviera, glorious, gorgeous theater, felt romantic, whereas Lollapalooza felt momentous, not only in scale, but in the return to those stages which the Pumpkins graced in 1994 and Hole in 1995.”

And if that doesn’t quite set the scene, Auf der Maur added, “As Billy introduced me, my favorite Charlie XCX song, SS 26, was wafting through the breeze from the other main stage a mile away, which was hilarious.”

Choosing The Everlasting Gaze was also a “no-brainer.” Aside from being one of her favorite Pumpkins songs of all time, she notes that, while it’s in some ways overlooked, “judging by the crowd's response, it is being well received as one of their great riffs.”

True to her ’90s sensibilities, Auf der Maur opted for her “trusted black Precision bass with the mirror pickguard that I used during the Machina tour, but for ease, I plugged into their bass player Jack [Bates]’ rig. Ask him what it was!”

“I would’ve preferred my overdriven tube Ampeg stacks,” she admits. “I’m pretty hard on the attack, so I need a pretty saturated, smooth sound. There is no way for me to lighten my hits; the moment I get on that bass, I hit hard. I guess it’s my style.”

The Pumpkins also leveraged their Lollapalooza set as an intergenerational bridge to a younger crop of rock artists, inviting Yungblud and Olivia Rodrigo as special guests.

“I didn’t get a chance to meet that charismatic Yungblud, but saw his set and loved his tribute to Ozzy,” says Auf der Maur. “He’s filling a void of emotional, heavy rock males – I was moved.

“Olivia, on the other hand, was a total bonus track! I love her new record, and I’ve been following her thanks to my music-obsessed teenage daughter.”

Rodigo’s ascent to the top – and her admiration for the female rock icons who came before her – is also something that Auf der Maur is keen to point out.

“My daughter’s first giant concert was the Guts tour at Madison Square Garden almost two years ago,” she recalls.

“I managed to get backstage passes. I was honored and floored when Olivia told her, ‘Without your mother this would not be possible…’ I think it might’ve been the first time that cross-generational affirmation was said out loud to me. It made me proud, but most of all grateful that ‘we’ have arrived.

“I said yes to joining Hole in 1994 as a commitment to put women on the male-dominated landscape of rock music. And look where we are now.”

Fender CEO Edward “Bud” Cole has addressed the backlash against his comments concerning AI after they were re-circulated last month.

During a conversation with T3 earlier this year, Cole likened cover bands to a form of “analog AI”. It came as part of a wider conversation discussing AI’s place in the guitar world.

His sentiments were scrutinized by the online guitar community. Key figures such as Rhett Shull, Josh Scott, and Samuraiguitarist were among those to take issue with Cole’s stance.

Cole has now addressed the controversy in a statement issued to Fast Company, in which he dives further into his view of AI.

“I had a conversation a few months ago about AI in music,” Cole says. “My intent was to talk about how technology can help artists and players learn and grow, but I realize I didn’t fully convey that perspective

“Music is an inherently human experience, and great songs are born out of people’s lives, their creative energy and the countless hours spent learning their instruments – something no machine can ever replicate.”

Cole had received criticism for his apparent oversight in failing to recognize the importance of that latter point.

By comparing cover music to artificial intelligence, Cole’s comments seemingly ignored the craft required to learn the music and instrument, and the innate human experience that comes with playing in a real band.

Cole now admits his original words were misguided, recognizing that music is first and foremost a human discipline. And, while he continues to champion AI’s place in music, he also recognizes that musicians cannot be jeopardized in doing so.

“Many of the concerns people have about AI are real,” Cole continues in his Fast Company statement. “Conversations need to happen about how to advance AI while protecting artists and upholding respect for their work.”

However, while Cole does recognize the innate human aspect of music, he doesn’t directly address his comments specifically on cover music. Rather, he doubles down on the notion that AI should be used by players to explore “their own creative ideas”.

Indeed, Fast Company notes that Cole views AI as a supporting tool that should be used to help beginners learn and give seasoned artists “new ways to explore, refine and experiment with their own creative ideas”.

“Music starts and ends with people,” Cole says. “It always will.”

It’s the latest controversy for the firm, after its high-profile legal campaign to protect the Stratocaster body shape has come under fire. In a recent development, Fender sued Thomann for copyright infringement.

Glenn Hughes has been forced to retire from touring due to ongoing health issues.

The former Deep Purple bassist and singer announced his retirement in a post on social media, and revealed he is set to undergo open heart surgery.

“This past year, I’ve had some health issues,” Hughes says. “The results from numerous MRIs, CT scans, and an echocardiogram have alerted my medical team, that I need another open-heart surgery.

“I really have no option and no choice as health is my number one priority. Grateful to have been chosen with a life full with the gift of music… Thank you for walking beside me.”

Joe Satriani, Richie Kotzen, Nuno Bettencourt and other music heroes offered their support in the comments.

Hughes’ retirement brings the curtain down on a decorated and prolific career that has seen him front Trapeze, Black Sabbath and the Dead Daisies. He played his most recent show over the weekend during a Kings of Chaos covers band gig in California.

The retirement comes off the back of Hughes’ latest health setback, after he was forced to cancel plans for a US tour back in January. His management at the time put this down to “a minor health issue that requires his attention over the upcoming months”.

He was able to return to the stage for a Dead Daisies show in St Charles, Illinois, back in May, but plans to perform later this year in Agoura Hills, California, have been cancelled.

Hughes also has a history of heart-related health problems, having been diagnosed with a heart murmur as a child and undergoing heart surgery in 2013.

“Having the operation with my heart and the new aorta has really changed my psychology about life and people and love itself,” Hughes said of the operation in a 2016 Classic Rock interview. “It’s really quite simple. I surround myself with loving, nurturing people.”

Hughes has played with a pantheon of rock guitar greats over his career, from Ritchie Blackmore and Tommy Bolin to Pat Thrall and Mel Galley. Speaking to Classic Rock last year, he named the best guitarist he ever worked with.

King Crimson offshoot BEAT have announced a US tour for Fall 2026, for which they’ll be joined by a new member.

The upcoming tour will also expand on the breadth of King Crimson material they’ll be drawing from.

The supergroup was formed by King Crimson alumni Adrian Belew and Tony Levin in early 2024. Steve Vai was recruited to take on the mammoth task of assuming Robert Fripp’s role.

Since their inception, BEAT have been playing music from the band’s 1980s records with Fripp’s blessing and guidance. But changes are afoot for their next run of shows.

Notably, Danny Carey has been replaced by former Frank Zappa and U.K. sticksman Terry Bozio due to the former’s commitments with Tool.

It’s also been announced that tracks from King Crimson’s 1995 album, Thrak – which featured both Belew and Levin – will make their way into the set.

“We feel this will result in a new experience for our audience,” Belew believes. “We’re very excited to play for you again.”

Previously, the band’s material had focused on Crimson’s 1980s trio of records, Discipline, Beat, and Three Of A Perfect Pair. Vai had been put through the wringer learning some of Fripp’s most physically demanding parts.

They’ve toured across the US, Mexico, South America and Tokyo, and have just completed a tour of 31 European cities. The boss, Fripp, was in attendance in Tallinn, Estonia.

This next chapter means that Vai now has some more learning to do, with Thrak’s more industrial clangor adding a new dimension to their upcoming shows. It also means he gets to share more stages with the “underrated” Belew.

“Being a part of this ensemble is an extraordinary privilege and opportunity to perform some of the most beloved, timeless, and monumental music with truly inspired musicians,” Vai purrs. “This music resonates deeply with me.

“Father Robert Fripp is one of our historical geniuses. His highly specific and exceptionally brilliant guitar technique is studied and revered.”

Speaking to Guitar World previously, BEAT’s virtuosic guitar tandem assured fans that they don’t see themselves as the new King Crimson, but they do believe there’s a good degree of legitimacy to their performances.

Given that King Crimson remains quiet despite rumors of a new album, they’re filling an important void.

Tickets go on sale Friday, August 7 at 10 AM local time.

See BEAT for more.

Tour Dates

• 10/09 Santa Cruz, CA - Quarry Amphitheater
• 10/10 Napa, CA - Blue Note Napa Summer Sessions at Meritage Resort
• 10/11 San Diego, CA - Civic Theatre
• 10/13 Las Vegas, NV - Theater at Virgin Hotel
• 10/14 Phoenix, AZ - Celebrity Theatre
• 10/16 Denver, CO - Bellco Theatre
• 10/17 Omaha, NE - Orpheum Theater
• 10/18 Waukee, IA - Vibrant Music Hall
• 10/19 Milwaukee, WI - The Riverside Theater
• 10/21 Chicago, IL - Copernicus Center
• 10/22 Madison, WI - Orpheum Theater
• 10/23 Saint Charles, MO - The Family Arena
• 10/24 Prior Lake, MN - Mystic Lake Casino Showroom
• 10/26 Cincinnati, OH - Taft Theatre
• 10/28 Columbus, OH - Palace Theatre
• 10/29 Detroit, MI - Masonic Temple Theatre
• 10/30 Cleveland, OH - Agora Theatre
• 11/01 Toronto, ON - The Theatre at Great Canadian Toronto
• 11/02 Montreal, QC - Theatre St-Denis
• 11/04 Huntington, NY - The Paramount
• 11/05 Uncasville, CT - Mohegan Sun Arena
• 11/06 Boston, MA - Boch Center Wang Theatre
• 11/07 Hampton Beach, NH - Hampton Beach Casino Ballroom
• 11/09 Newark, NJ - Prudential Hall at NJPAC
• 11/10 Washington, DC - MGM National Harbor
• 11/11 Rochester, NY - Kodak Center
• 11/13 Virginia Beach, VA - Sandler Center
• 11/14 Reading, PA - Santander Performing Arts Center
• 11/15 Philadelphia, PA - Academy of Music
• 11/17 Durham, NC - DPAC
• 11/18 Nashville, TN - Grand Ole Opry House
• 11/21 Charlotte, NC - Ovens Auditorium
• 11/22 Daytona Beach, FL - Peabody Auditorium
• 11/24 St. Petersburg, FL - Mahaffey Theater
• 11/25 Atlanta, GA - Cobb Energy Center
• 11/28 Houston, TX - 713 Music Hall
• 11/29 Austin, TX - ACL Live
• 11/30 Dallas, TX - Music Hall at Fair Park
• 12/02 Inglewood, CA - YouTube Theater
• 12/03 Riverside, CA - Riverside Municipal Auditorium

In any discussion concerning the greatest alternate pickers to walk the earth, names like John Petrucci, Paul Gilbert, Al Di Meola, Jason Becker, Chris Impellitteri and Shawn Lane will never be far from guitarists’ lips.

These are the players that set the bar impossibly high with their near-perfect storm of precision, dexterity and control – at times often sounding like they’ve beamed in from a different planet altogether.

If there’s one name out of the younger generation that could undoubtedly sit among the ultimate pickers and super shredders, however, it’s 26-year-old Chilean guitarist Bastian Martinez, better known to the online community as Baxty.

Having already inked up deals with Neural DSP, Jim Dunlop and Ernie Ball, this year he announced his debut signature model through Kiesel, and he’s now adding the final touches to a debut album featuring high-profile guests such as Joe Satriani.

It only takes a quick scroll online to see the likes of Tosin Abasi, Misha Mansoor and Rick Graham praising Baxty’s incredible musicianship and flawless delivery, and – having been invited to teach at John Petrucci’s Guitar Universe camp last year – it would be fair to say the Santiago-based prodigy now has a lot of friends in high places.

It was perhaps inevitable that Baxty, whose father and grandfather played guitar, would one day pick up the instrument. By age six, he’d grown accustomed to hearing the music of Ozzy Osbourne, Symphony X and Yngwie Malmsteen around the house.

The greatest education came in the form of a G3: Live in Tokyo DVD that he’d watch religiously, basking in the magnificence of Satriani, Petrucci and Steve Vai – three musical magicians who each had their own otherworldly quality when it came to touch and feel.

“I fell in love with how they made their guitars sound,” Baxty says from his home studio. “Steve had all these whammy tricks while Joe had this strong melodic voice. John was even more out there technically, which made me want to work harder.”

Besides those guys, who else ended up influencing you?

When I was 15, I saw Guthrie Govan on YouTube. It was inspiring to see how far he had taken the instrument, and it made me want to practice more. Later on, I got into Nick Johnston, who likes to blend piano with guitar on tracks like Gemini.

He doesn’t just write guitar music, which is why I find him interesting. I also love how Fredrik Åkesson from Opeth plays; there’s so much feeling and intensity in his lines, especially in the note choices and bends.

A guitarist of your caliber could pick any company in the world for an endorsement deal. What made you choose Kiesel?

They sent me a guitar in 2024, and I knew straightaway how well it suited me in terms of comfort and sound. I visited the factory in 2025 and Jeff Kiesel handed me a guitar.

I think they were like, “Let’s see if this internet guy can play!” I’m not faking anything because my dad always told me to be myself. Give me any guitar and I’ll be happy. It’s like a disconnect from the world. Playing guitar makes me feel alive.

It must be wild to see players like Misha Mansoor and Tosin Abasi saying how brilliant you are.

The first mind-blowing moment was when Joe Satriani commented on a post in 2022. I also couldn’t believe it when Tosin sent me a guitar and started sharing clips of me. Then John Petrucci inviting me to Guitar Universe was insane.

He and his wife Rena had seen my masterclasses online and thought I’d be a great fit. I thought it was someone impersonating John; I didn’t fully believe it until I saw my photo on the Guitar Universe website.

At the camp, I met Chris Broderick, who is guesting on my album. All these guitar legends are paying attention to what I’m doing. I don’t know why! It feels weird, but I’m happy about it.

Joe Satriani will also be appearing on your album. What can we expect?

I’d written one track that represented a dream, which felt like a good place for Joe – because of his 1989 album [Flying in a Blue Dream] and the fact that it’s a dream come true. What’s interesting is that it’s almost what Dream Theater would sound like with Joe on guitar.

This album will be like a natural connection between ambient stuff and heavier ideas. I love songs with a melodic climax. Sometimes simplicity can blow your mind more than the technicality. It’s great if you can alternate-pick crazy lines, but if you can’t bend, you’re a bad player.

You’re playing in real time on your videos, but you still get accusations of faking it.

People say things like, “This is sped up,” but I’m kinda grateful because it means they find it impressive. One guy commented on every post saying I was a Petrucci copy that didn’t have my own sound. I’m still trying to find my own voice, but if someone thinks I sound like John Petrucci, I’m fine with that.

What’s the secret to alternate picking so fast?

I’ve seen some Cracking the Code YouTube videos [hosted by Troy Grady] and felt stupid after watching them. I didn’t understand. I’m not reading a biology book. What I will say is that alternate picking is a 3D movement from the wrist rather than straight up and down.

If you want to go fast, you need to test your body. New things will feel uncomfortable, but keep pushing. See where the tension is, slow down, then eventually build back up. It takes time.

What exercises would help people build up speed and precision?

Try playing a line that goes up the 16th, 19th and 22nd frets of the G-string followed by the 15th fret of the high E and back. Once you have that going, occasionally add in the 19th and 22nd on the E. It’s good because you are mixing stretches with fast alternate picking and string-skipping.

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

Former Eagles guitarist Don Felder says he practices the Hotel California solo every night before stepping out on stage.

The 78-year-old left the Eagles in 2001, but hasn’t left the track he co-wrote with Don Henley and Glenn Frey behind him. He says that nailing the iconic guitar solo, as it is on the record, every night is an obligation to his fans.

“I’ve played it so many times,” he tells Ultimate Classic Rock. He played it “hundreds of times” with the Eagles, and has always included it in his solo shows, his trademark white Gibson EDS-1275 double-neck in hand. He never takes it for granted.

“The one thing I do at every show, before I go on stage, is work on Hotel California, because I don’t want to disappoint anybody,” he explains. “Everybody knows every note in that solo, and I’m afraid if I started jamming on it people would go, ‘What is he doing? That’s wrong! That’s not the solo! Is he having a moment? Or maybe he’s just too old to remember it?’”

That’s an understandable concern. With the solo rightly regarded as one of the best, he understands its appeal is just as big as it was half a century ago. Fans are paying big money to hear the track live.

“I think people want to hear it as they remember it from 50 years ago,” Felder adds. “So I do my best to play that, and it really takes the most amount of intense concentration to execute that solo over and over. You never want to just go on autopilot with it.”

He’s also jokingly blamed “lugging that beast [double-neck] around for the last 50 years,” as the reason for his back problems. Angine de Poitrine, take note.

Chris Holt is the Eagles' latest guitar recruit and has called trading solos with Joe Walsh on Hotel California a “terrifying” experience.

The 1976 track centers on its elongated guitar solo, and though it is now considered a masterpiece, its composition relied on a heavy dose of luck and vision. There were some strange gear picks behind the scenes, too.

Keith Urban’s guitar, Clarence, has been a core part of the multi-decade career. The 1989 Fender 40th Anniversary Telecaster is now road-worn and battered, but still holds a special place in his heart – and his touring arsenal – because it harks back to a time when Urban, as an aspiring country star, was trying to make it in the States.

“Clarence would have to be the moment that a Telecaster really grabbed my attention,” he tells Fender.

“Clarence came about from my very first trip to America, which was in 1989. My manager at the time and I were coming to Nashville to bring my really crappy demo tape over to anybody who'd listen to it.”

During this grueling trip, which also required Urban and his manager to attend a music seminar in New York, the guitarist took the opportunity to visit the mecca of guitar stores: Manny's Music.

The iconic shop on 48th Street was in business for over seven decades and saw its fair share of stars or would-be stars pop in to acquire their dream guitars – including Urban.

“I got in a cab and went to Manny's. I was hoping to find a really good Tele. That was kind of the goal,” he continues.

“I guess because this [referring to Clarence] had just come out that year, for the 40th anniversary of [the] Tele, it was in a glass case right near the entrance when you walked right in. Talk about getting your attention!”

Urban admits he was immediately “obsessed.” He was already trying to figure out a way to buy it.

“So this guy came over, and he says, ‘Can I help you?’ And I go, ‘Ah, can I play that guitar?’ And he condescendingly looks at me, and he goes, ‘Take your ring off. You got a belt. Take your belt buckle off.’ It was like take off everything that could scratch the Mona Lisa,” he adds with a laugh. “And he pulled it out, and I played it, and it was just like it was butter.”

However, Urban quickly realized that the guitar was way out of his budget – costing a cool 2,300 bucks. But, as luck would have it, Urban had done some production work back in Australia which he hadn’t yet been paid for.

“My manager was managing him [the other artist],” he explains. “I produced the whole album, and I guess my manager was trying to figure out how to pay me for producing the record.

“So he basically went, ‘Oh, what about I give you that guitar for producing the record?’ I went, ‘Perfect.’ So that became my payment for producing this guy's record. Went back, bought it. The best feeling ever is going back to a snarky sales guy and going, ‘I'll buy that guitar.’”

And it was definitely worth the investment. As Urban relates, when he was crafting his self-titled debut record the next year, he used Clarence on every single track. However, he wasn’t as keen to take it out on the road with him…

“To me, it was just too beautiful and priceless and gorgeous and expensive,” he says. “I kept this under my bed, and I'd pull it out in a nice tweed case. I'd get the guitar out, and I'd play it and play it and play it, and I'd be like, ‘Oh man, wish I could take this on tour.’

“Then one day I was like, ‘What are you doing? It's your guitar, man. Just fricking take this one.’ And I took it out, and I think within a night or two, it fell off the stand and got a chip somewhere. I was like, ‘Ah, gloves are off, road guitar.’ And it just became my number one.”

If you’re wondering why he christened it Clarence, well, it’s got nothing to do with Leo Fender, whose full name was Clarence Leonidas Fender.

“The reason I called it Clarence was from It's a Wonderful Life – the Christmas movie, and there's a scene where Jimmy Stewart is going to jump off the bridge, and then this angel appears, and the angel's name is Clarence,” Urban relates.

“In a kind of reverse way of looking at that story, what Clarence says to Jimmy is, ‘I'll show you what life would have been like if you hadn't existed,’ and it was just chaos. And I thought, ‘That's what my life would have been if this guitar hadn't existed.’”

Bob Dylan has brought an end to his hectic US tour by recruiting one final guitarist to his ever-changing live lineup: blues legend Jimmie Vaughan.

Dylan finished his tour with one more guitar player rotation after a dizzying few months that have seen him flanked by five different foils.

The folk legend has been keeping the guitar community on its toes with his appointments. One of the world’s greatest jazz players, Julian Lage, was the first surprise addition. Lage quietly stepped into the shoes of outgoing Doug Lancio, who first joined in 2021.

Three weeks later, there were two more stealth recruits in Jad Tariq and Joel Patterson. Fans have speculated that Tariq was filling in for Lage, whose solo commitments prevented him from playing certain dates with Dylan.

Vaughan, brother of the late blues great Stevie Ray, has a deep-rooted relationship with Dylan. He supported him on a 2006 tour and has since shared the stage with him in 2024, replacing Lancio for nine songs in Austin, Texas.

Performing at the Ascend Federal Credit Union Amphitheater in Nashville, Tennessee on August 1, opening act Vaughan reemerged for three songs during Dylan’s set. He first played False Prophet, and a cover of Bo Diddley’s I Can Tell, before returning for the penultimate track, Goodbye Jimmy Reed.

According to Dylan superfan Henry Bernstein’s review of the evening, Vaughan “started off quiet but then got more and more brave with his solos.”

He adds that, during False Prophet, “Jimmie got very close to Bob, was playing to him and Bob was smiling, laughing and actually singing some pointed lyrics at Jimmie.”

This final twist in the tail doesn’t bring us any closer to understanding why Dylan is going through so many guitarists, but the 85-year-old is proving to be full of surprises nevertheless.

Interestingly, Lage had spoken to Guitar World just weeks before his first show with Dylan, but didn’t hint at what was on his horizon. He did, though, talk about his ‘pinch me’ moment of sharing a stage with Derek Trucks.

Dylan is back on the road in Europe in October, November, and December. Who knows who’ll be flanking him across the tour. Rest assured, Guitar World will be keeping a beady eye on proceedings.

A young folk guitarist has been praised by several guitar greats after posting an original song on Instagram.

16-year-old Todd Crozier, from Liverpool, England, is winning the hearts of many on social media. His nostalgia-tinged piece, Horned Creature, has received over 230,000 likes since it was posted last week.

Steve Vai, Dave Navarro, and Chimp Spanner are among those waxing lyrical about his talents. Queens of the Stone Age, Vernon Reid, and H.E.R. have also showered Crozier with likes and comments.

Everyone is praising the teenager for his chops and lyricism that extend far beyond his years.

“You obviously have what it takes,” Vai writes. “Now, go boy go!”

Dave Navarro adds: “Count me in as a new massive fan! You are simply amazing, and in this day and age, with the state of the music business, it’s such a refreshing thing to hear something so new, vulnerable, and dissonant. I wish you all the luck in the world, buddy.”

He’s also garnered comments from Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst, while the official QOTSA account went as far as to say: “It’s an honor to listen to you free yourself from the difficulties of this life. My deepest respects.”

Horned Creature is not yet on streaming platforms, but we expect it to land in the near future as Crozier’s music continues to draw eyes and ears. He is a raw talent; it’s easy to be swept into the emotionally potent atmosphere of his music.

As another user says, Crozier feels like an old soul in a young body. His future is bright, and the reaction to his vulnerable songwriting online is nothing short of heartwarming. Remember the name.

In related news, Nuno Bettencourt has been left spellbound by another young guitar prodigy on Instagram. Elsewhere, Bay Melnick Virgolino has followed up his stellar America’s Got Talent showing by jamming with Slash and Joe Bonamassa, and playing Jimmy Fallon with Phoebe Bridgers.

It’s a dreary April afternoon, and we’re getting ready to talk to slacker indie hero Kurt Vile about his new record, Philadelphia’s Been Good to Me. The lead single, Chance to Bleed, begs to be blared from a car stereo at dusk on a humid August night.

Here in Michigan, a few 70-degree days in March had us hopeful we could place ourselves in Vile’s snapshot of Philly summers by taking the call from our back porch. But with grey skies and temperatures back in the mid-40s, we opt for the living room – a space mostly commandeered by this writer’s one-year-old daughter.

As we clear the books and toys she’s scattered across the floor to make room to move around during the call, we’re reminded of how often Vile has written about his own daughters.

“Girls are the sweetest and the best,” he says. “As soon as the kid shows up, life is completely changed. It’s psychedelic and beautiful, because that kid is part of you. They go through all the phases that you went through, and you watch through them.”

As we pace up and down our living room, we talk gear – we had to ask about the Gretsch Tennessean he picked up from Travis Good of the Sadies – but the conversation keeps circling back to a word Vile uses more than once to describe the record – “homespun.”

Much of it was written and recorded after dark in his basement studio, when he could lean into what he calls the natural cycle of life – catching up with himself and creating the loose, sprawling music he’s known for. That balance between family life and the habits of the past shows up in the lyrics, too.

On Zoom 97, you sing about trading substances for time with your girls. Are you sober?

I quit drinking in 2018. Alcohol is a tough one. You think it’s casual – which it is, because it’s ingrained in us – but before you know it, that’s kind of the nastiest one.

That concept – “my baby girls, they keep me high. Ain’t on no trips, no LSD, pure love drug for me” – it’s true. I definitely don’t party the way I used to, but I’m not straight edge. I like weed, probably because it makes me hear music like I was in high school. I don’t do it all the time, but it’s a nice vacation for anyone who plays music.

How do you come up with lyrics?

Sometimes the lyrics come out fast, but obviously it’s my trade. Zoom 97 is one I’m really proud of, because that one is actually the first song we got for this album that I knew was a quality song. I had that Gold Tone mandolin riff on a recorder. The people at Gold Tone down in Florida, they’ve hooked me up a few times. They gave me this little, tiny guitar. It sounds like a mandolin, but it’s just six strings.

Anyway, it was summertime. My new bandmate, Matt [Jugenheimer], was there – there’s always got to be something new to keep you going, or a new guy in the fold – and I just heard [the riff] back. I had some melody in there, but then I didn’t have the words. I just said, “I know this is catchy; let’s add synth here.”

And then, literally, just because I was there and because the mics were on, I sat out back and wrote the lyrics. They came to me because I was there to catch them. It turned out cool. If my brain is open, one thing leads to another once I start writing.

What do you do to try to get your brain open?

Ideally, you want to be present. There are so many different ways to write a song, and there’s no rules. In the old days, I’d think about it too much. “Why am I not writing a song?” You can’t force anything.

What about when you’re in the middle of recording and have to pick up the kids?

Yeah, that happens. You get used to that. You’ve got to embrace that. I’ve always been a nighttime man. After a certain point, everybody’s asleep, and then you’ve got the whole nighttime to yourself. But the reality is that during the day, ideas come.

It might be fragmentary. There are times in your life where you’ve got to think ahead or you’re just tired. In those interruptions, you get ideas from being in flux.

You’re at a point in your career where some of your heroes have become your collaborators. What’s it like to make that transition from fan to peer?

I’m definitely a shy person, so whenever I meet somebody at first, I’m nervous. I can’t help it, but you’ve got to make yourself uncomfortable. It’s similar to playing live; you’ve got to fuck up in front of lots of people to get it right. You’ve just gotta be a sponge – take it in and try to be chill.

What was it like recording with John Prine?

John came into the studio last minute. I know people that work for his label and I had played with him on stage enough times. He heard my version of Speed of the Sound of Loneliness, and I knew he liked it. Over time, he would remember who I was.

When he showed up at the studio, he was so nice. He said, “You know, I’d love to sing with you, Kurt,” and we recorded that song [How Lucky from 2020’s Speed, Sound, Lonely KV EP] in two takes. That’s the way they do it over there in Nashville. It was unbelievable.

How did you meet Neil Young?

I finally did see Neil up in Toronto with my friend Travis from the Sadies, who’s one of my favorite guitar players of all time, and a good friend of mine. Neil loves Travis. Travis was the first person I ever was standing next to who knew me while Neil was around and actually said, “This is Kurt.”

The beauty of Neil is he’s 100 percent his own world. He’s got friends, but he’s just in his own realm. So you just say hi when you can, and you assume he won’t remember who you are until maybe one day he does. You see Neil on stage – he’s the same Neil Young he ever was.

Is that Travis’ Gretsch Tennessean you’re playing on the new record?

Yeah, and if you ever see him play, he just shreds so hard. When you watch him play, it’s unreal. If you look at the fretboard of this guitar, it’s just so worn in from his playing. He sat in when we played Toronto and lent me the guitar to see if I wanted to buy it. I immediately laid down something with the band.

Some guitars just sound and feel great and play themselves. It’s a genuinely great guitar. I just kept playing it. It sounds so good in the studio. It’s got really hot pickups. It’s the lead guitar on Zoom 97, 99th Song and Every Time I Look at You. It really cuts through.

Are you bringing it out on the road?

Yeah, I’ve started bringing it on the road. One of my favorite live guitars – I’m not sure if it made the record – is a sunburst 1965 Jazzmaster that J Mascis put into my hands when I was working on his record up in Massachusetts. He went to some store and the guy was trying to peddle this Jazzmaster, and J has so many of ’em.

He actually showed up at J’s studio and put it in my hands, which was the coolest part of all. I have reissue Jazzmasters that are made to seem vintage. I got them from Fender and I love them – but to have an old one is… it really plays. That was another example of a guitar that plays itself.

As far as guitars on the record that I played, shit, there were so many. I’m spacin’! [Laughs] There’s another Gretsch, an orange 6120. That’s my favorite lead guitar that I’ve played. I was playing the Travis guitar nonstop, but I wasn’t changing the strings, so they were dead.

Rob Schnapf came down to my studio and put the orange on the lead guitar in 99 bpm because the strings on the Tennessean were so dead, and he was right. The lead guitars really cut through and shine. We’ve since changed the strings on the Travis guitar.

Do you prefer the sound of dead strings?

I do. I have this Gibson J-45 that was my main acoustic at the start of the Watch My Moves tour. We had a new guitar tech, and the first thing he did – I wasn’t thinking about it – but the first thing he did on the first day was cut all the strings off.

It was devastating. [Laughs] Rob Schnapf is all about that too; I sort of learned that about him. New strings take a while to break in, especially when you’re playing live. When you’ve got to change the acoustic strings, you’re gonna have a weird show at first. They just sound so different, like bells or something.

What about practice? What does your practice routine look like?

I kind of just pick up and play whenever I want when I’m feeling psychedelic. Lately, I feel weird because I haven’t, but then you just get a show and you’re forced to play again, and your fingers get blistery.

That’s all part of it. It’s interesting now, because I have a career, there’s going to be a moment where all of a sudden I have to play. My music’s not like Led Zeppelin or anything too technical. In some ways, my songs feel a little more simple all the time, so I don’t sweat it.

What’s on the horizon?

I put everything into this record. It did take a lot out of me by the end. They always do. It’s my most organic record. It was homespun. I worked with other studios, people I really liked, who similarly work in an organic way.

I’ll definitely try to make other records, but I do feel in another way that this might be my last conventional record for a long time, and I’ll just get weird for a while. But yeah, you never know.

• Philadelphia Has Been Good to Me is out now via Verve Forecast.
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

Former Whitesnake guitarist Adrian Vandenberg has been forced to cancel his tour dates this year due to health issues that have left him unable to travel or perform.

The tour, dubbed My Whitesnake Years, was set to kick off today (August 3) in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

“Never in my roughly 60-year-long career as a touring/ gigging guitar player [have] I had to cancel a show or tour,” writes Vandenberg in a social media statement.

“Not even when in 1987 I had my face totally ripped open in an early morning traffic accident in New York, and I still played the show that evening because I absolutely did not want to miss playing a sold-out show at the legendary Madison Square Garden.”

However, Vandenberg has now been forced to cancel his upcoming tour, after being “strongly urged by the medical specialists involved to not do this upcoming USA tour at this point.

“Right now, it’d be just too short after a bacterial infection that invaded my body and that needs to get taken care of right away,” he details. “Those creepy bad boys need to get their treacherous asses kicked out of my body asap.”

Vandenberg goes on to reassure fans that he’s in “great, very capable, expert hands in the hospital, and things are fortunately moving in the right direction.”

According to the guitarist's statement, the tour is expected to be rescheduled for a later date, and he encouraged fans to visit his official website for the latest updates on the postponed tour.

Eric Johnson is a bona fide modern day guitar great, so every time he talks tone and technique, we listen.

In a new interview with Guitarist, the Stratocaster master offered some sage advice for players that feel “trapped in patterns”, and shared a valuable lesson in the quest to achieve total fretboard freedom.

“I think most guitar players, except maybe a few, are still addicted or somewhat trapped in patterns,” he reflects. “But I think the less you are, the better. We’re all trying to get out of that, to become more liquid, as it were, and just be able to just play melodically.”

For Johnson, the best way to break out of a rut and become a more fluid player is to learn the notes on the fingerboard off by heart. It’s not for the faint of heart, but it’s an exercise that will set you up for success.

“When I started playing guitar, I taught myself by sitting at the piano with the guitar in my hand and taking the notes and moving them over,” he remembers. “So what I had to do with this strange way of learning guitar was I had to learn all the notes on all the frets.

“I think that that helps – if you look at a string on a fret and you immediately know what note it is, you're not so bound by those patterns.

“Sometimes I do these classes, and one of the first things that I say is really paramount is to just sit down and to learn where, without thinking, you can look at any fret on your string and know what note it is.

“It is a daunting task, but it’s not undoable. It’s totally doable. And then once you get it, it’s like breathing. We don’t think about breathing, we just do it. And it really helps free you up, you know, and not be so stuck on the pattern thing like a time.”

Given Johnson’s voice on the guitar is defined by liquid-like melodicism and effortless phrasing, there’s a lot to take away from his guidance here. The ability to recall notes is a priceless ability that will make you both more responsive in improvisation, and more adept at connecting boxes across the neck – not that we’re thinking in patterns.

Like Johnson says, it's a daunting task, but fear not: we have a step-by-step deep dive into mastering the entire fretboard to help you.

And, for those who graduate from this particular lesson, Johnson is also an excellent case study in leveling up your soloing.

For more advanced tutorials, see GW’s lesson on how to create fluid streams of notes by combining economy picking with legato pentatonics, and Joe Bonamassa’s tips on connecting lead phrases like Eric Johnson.

The Smashing Pumpkins reunited with former bassist Melissa Auf der Maur during their Lollapalooza set this past weekend. It also marked their first performance at the festival since its traveling edition back in 1994.

Billy Corgan and co. – guitarists James Iha and Kiki Wong, drummer Jimmy Chamberlin, and touring bassist Jack Bates – went head to head with headliner Charli XCX. They delivered a 17-song set that paid homage to their most beloved records.

Opening with 1979 from Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (1995), they dove straight into Bullet with Butterfly Wings from that same album, and Today from 1993’s Siamese Dream.

The Pumpkins balanced nostalgia with their more recent era by incorporating Edin, War Dreams of Itself, and Pentagrams from 2024’s Aghori Mhori Mei.

Speaking of contemporary, Olivia Rodrigo – albeit guitar-less – joined the band for Thirty-three, their fifth and final single from Mellon Collie.

Ozzy Osbourne protégé Yungblud was also summoned to the stage to take over vocal duties on Luna from Siamese Dream.

The previous evening, the fast-rising rock star – wielding his vintage “voodoo” ES-330 – shared the stage with a Flying V-laden Corgan at his own Lollapalooza aftershow at Chicago’s Riviera Theater. They performed a live rendition of his track Zombie, which the two had collaborated on earlier this year.

However, the biggest surprise for Pumpkins fans came by way of a lineup addition on bass.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have one more special guest – our former bandmate, a former member of Hole, Miss Melissa Auf der Maur,” Corgan told the audience. Auf der Maur held down the low end on The Everlasting Gaze, from 2000’s Machina/The Machines of God.

It was a fitting choice, considering the single's music video was the first to feature Auf der Maur following the departure of original bassist D'arcy Wretzky.

The band had road-tested the collaboration at their July 29 pre-Lollapalooza show at the Riviera Theatre, marking a reunion that came just over a year after the bassist performed with the band in Montreal for the first time since 2000.

In a Bass Player interview earlier this year, Auf der Maur referred to her stint with the Pumpkins as her “‘Master’s in Music’” – a notion she details in her recently released memoir.

As for the Pumpkins, they’re about to embark on The Rats in the Cage Tour – kicking off on September 30 in Columbus, Ohio – which celebrates the career-defining Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.

Before the arena run, Corgan will also set out on his own European tour – dubbed A Night of Mellon Collie and Infinite Sadness – which promises to be an operatic and orchestral rendering of the album.

Leo Fender couldn’t have foreseen John 5 when the first Telecaster rolled off the line 75 years ago. But since going public in the late-’90s as the chalk-faced sideman for Marilyn Manson, the Michigan-born shredder has been arguably the heavy mob’s greatest ambassador for the model.

As 5’s career has twisted and turned – from early shifts with David Lee Roth, Manson and Rob Zombie to his solo career and recent stunt-guitar duties for Mötley Crüe – his appreciation of the Tele has evolved in lockstep.

Scan 5’s rack through the years and you’ll find a musician plainly in love with the Tele foundation but constantly pushing the envelope. From his paddle-headed, Bigsby-fitted custom curio of the post-millennium, and early Fender and Squier J5 signature models, all the way to 2023’s top-dollar Ghost and recent lava lamp-inspired models few modern players have done more to keep this ancient design so eye-poppingly relevant.

Now, choosing just a fistful of favorite Teles from his personal arsenal is a challenge that 5 gladly takes up for Guitar World.

“It’s funny,” he says. “I have different guitars, like Les Pauls and things like that. But aside from the Tele, I don’t know what I would play. I try to think about it, and I really don’t know! Maybe a Strat? [Laughs]

“It’s so strange because when you’ve done something a certain way your whole life, it’s so weird to think, ‘What would it be like?’ It’s so hard to think about because I’ve always played a Telecaster.”

2022 Fender Custom John 5 Ghost Tele

My Ghost is Number 1. It was put together when Fender did a collaboration with [NYC skateboarding and streetwear brand] Supreme.

I thought, “This guitar is strikingly beautiful. I want to do a guitar like this.” That’s where we came up with it, and it’s by far my favorite. I even named a record after it! [2025’s Ghost] I feel safe with the Ghost. I know I’m not gonna have problems live or in a studio. It’ll stay in tune and sound and feel great.

It’s like when you’re getting on an airplane, and you’re like, “I don’t know about this,” but then you get on a really nice one, a beautiful double-decker, and you think, “This is gonna be amazing.” [Laughs] That’s how it is with the Ghost! I travel with it everywhere. In fact, I’m driving home right now from Joshua Tree, and I have my Ghost in the back seat. So yeah, it’s important.

2025 Fender Custom Tele, aka “The Phantom”

Number 2 is the Phantom. That’s my 100-percent Number 1 guitar with Mötley Crüe. It’s just a monster. It sounds and feels so good. It’s got this beautiful cutaway and this contour, and a Floyd Rose, of course.

Fender Custom Shop Tele, aka “Goldie” 

Goldie’s been on a zillion recordings, and it’s one of those special guitars. I’ve played it so much, so I’m always worried about getting him re-painted or re-fretted or something. So whenever it’s time for a really major re-fret, I just retire it and search for another. I got Goldie after I stopped using my black-and-chrome Telecaster.

I wanted a gold Tele, but I wanted the Shoreline Gold Fender used in the ’60s when they used car paint on guitars. Alex Perez [at Fender] found that paint – and it’s still the real paint – and now Goldie has chipped so much that you can see the wood.

When it was put together, we did a kill switch for the first time – that guitar was an epiphany for me; it changed my life. I played it until it wasn’t safe to play anymore because I don’t want anything to happen to it. It’s on so many records and was used at countless shows.

2003 Fender J5 Telecaster

I had this black Tele with a chrome pickguard for so long, 13 or 14 years. I used it forever. It was just that amazing connection you have with an instrument. I really enjoyed playing that guitar, and it’s when I knew I wanted a beefed-up Telecaster.

I was thinking, “I really love this sound,” and when it came down to how it would look, I was thinking of a beautiful Harley-Davidson motorcycle that’d shine up strong. I would see chrome and black and think they look just gorgeous together. When it all came together, it had this double binding because I love the ’60s Teles that had that, and I thought, “This is beautiful.”

This was before the kill switch, so it was an early Tele for me. I played it on everything, a lot with Marilyn Mason and Rob Zombie. It was a monster guitar that could also do jazz and country. Squier did a version of that guitar and Goldie.

In fact, they were closing their doors, and I’m proud of the fact that they kept open for another year because they had so many orders for those two guitars. You couldn’t tell the difference between the Squier and the Fender. I played the Squiers live, and I couldn’t tell because they were so well done. If you find one, grab it!

1990s Fender ’52 Telecaster 

I used this ’52 reissue through my David Lee Roth and Rob Halford eras. It’s exactly like a ’52. It was just that magical thing where you walk into a Guitar Center, which I did in Hollywood on Sunset Boulevard, and said, “Let’s just look at the Teles.” This was before I was endorsed by Fender. I saw this Tele and thought, “This is incredible.”

I took it off the shelf, bought it, put a stack pickup in it and that was it. I played it forever, and I still do. It’s the guitar that really got me endorsed with Fender because I’d play it so much that they had a picture of me playing it and put it up at the NAMM Show.

It was this big display with all their other endorsees – but I wasn’t an endorsee! [Laughs] I went to the Fender booth, and they said, “We want to give you an endorsement deal.” I was like, “Yes!”

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

For more than 25 years, Billy Howerdel’s A Perfect Circle has blended alt-rock, heavy metal and progressive elements to seamless perfection. The latest example of this is Starless, a new single released in May ahead of their 2026 tour dates.

Thankfully, Howerdel says that Starless is an appetizer that will eventually lead to the band’s first LP since 2018’s Eat the Elephant. For a player who started his career as a guitar tech before forming A Perfect Circle, the group’s continued success is a dream come true.

But he doesn’t let his ego get in the way. “I do sometimes underestimate that I’ve played or written music that people seem to be inspired by,” Howerdel tells Guitar World. “It’s the greatest compliment when someone says, ‘Your music made me pick up guitar, and it’s changed my life.’”

As for what A Perfect Circle’s yet-to-be-announced fifth record might sound like, Howerdel says, “Even our last album, Eat the Elephant, when we played it live, I thought, ‘These are the best songs we’ve done…’ I’ll think that, but then I have to let it go.”

“You’ve got to be a Buddhist about it,” Howerdel says. “You’ve got to draw the picture in the sand, and then let the waves wash it away, so to speak, and move on. Then you look for the next piece of art you’re going to draw in the sand but not get too captured by what it used to be.”

What’s the story behind the latest single, Starless?

In a very distracted way, I had this little practice amp I’d been using a lot, and in the middle of watching a TV show, probably sitting around with the family, an idea would strike, and that’s where it started. This little amp was inspiring, and just a little different than going into the lab, flicking everything on, and making sure everything’s just right. It was more about capturing a moment.

Do you have a typical riff-writing process?

Recently, I haven’t been allowing myself to touch the keyboard, even if that could inspire things. Sometimes I’ll write a keyboard riff and replace it with guitar, but I’m sticking strictly to guitar right now. Having a decent-sounding amp at your disposal at all times is really inspiring and useful, but I don’t have a magic formula – just the mechanics of accessibility. [laughs]

Is there an album on the way?

Yeah, it’s underway. I’m sitting here looking at my rig in my hotel room right now, so… it’s being written and recorded. I’ll probably go back and finish the tracks in my studio once I get home from this tour in a few weeks, but I’m kind of right in the middle of it.

Is Starless a good indicator of what the rest of the record will sound like?

I don’t know what to say, except for the turns it [the upcoming album] takes. It’s always interesting to me when a song takes a turn that I’m not expecting, you know? It can just get you out of your modes and patterns.

What does that mean exactly?

For me, it’s looking at little riffs, of things that I’ve done from years past that I forgot I did. I have this big, long library of ideas that I’ll grab from, and I’ll listen through things, and I’ll not hear anything. But then, you pick it up on a Tuesday instead of a Thursday, and all of a sudden, that idea you had seven years ago is suddenly interesting, whereas yesterday, it wasn’t.

Are there any quirks or habits that, like them or not, have become integral to your playing style?

I’m trying not to get too good. [laughs] But I don’t know… there was a time when I was like, “I’m gonna try and become a much better player,” and I am a better player than I used to be. But I don’t let acrobatics get in the way of the song, you know?

There are things that I’ve done that were aggressively technical, and I’ve just stripped them back a bit. I’m not trying to be cool. It’s just that sometimes it doesn’t move the song forward. But then again, I do listen to things that are technical and enjoy them. It’s just different strokes.

Ultimately, you can be a great player, but can you write a song?

Yeah, but then again, there’s also the thrill of different appetites for different times. I very much appreciate Steve Vai, you know, the fluidity, and the gorgeous technique that guy has. It’s inspiring. But when I break it down, I want to write songs, so I might go more towards Will Sergeant from Echo and the Bunnymen, or David Gilmour.

Was there a lightbulb moment for you that brought you to that conclusion?

When I started playing guitar, there was this guy, P.K. Lavengood, on the [New] Jersey club scene who gave me a talking-to when I was getting into the lighting and guitar-tech world. He talked to me for probably three minutes, and it was about not being shy when you play guitar and to really give everything you’ve got in the moment.

It did a lot for me to kind of play harder, which lends itself to not playing technically very fast. So, I play really hard for better or worse. And after we released our first record, and were doing the second, I fell in love with The White Stripes. I think Jack White is like the last rock star that I can think of.

How so?

He’s very dangerous, and it [the music] feels dangerous. His approach to playing… you just don’t know what’s going to happen. He’s leading the band, but is the guitar in tune? Is he pulling it in? It was really exciting to me, and that was a reminder of what P.K. said to me years ago. It’s about what makes it the most human experience. When you’re seeing something almost come off the rails, and it doesn’t, but you’re at the edge of your seat.

So, is that sort of a mantra that you live by guitar-wise?

No. [laughs] Those things just happen through time. If you’re asking me to reflect on it, that’s the best I can do. But there’s nothing that sticks with me day to day, you know? But certainly, with playing live, it’s your job to eat, sleep, rest, and get ready for the show.

Do you have a favorite guitar at the moment?

Yeah, that’s easy! I’ve been playing the same 1960 reissue [Gibson] Les Paul Classic with Tom Anderson pickups. I play that ninety-nine percent of the time live. I also use it in the studio, but sometimes I dive into some other things and am starting to look at other colors with guitars.

How about amps and effects?

Amps are inconsistent. My Friedman is my main dirt sound, unless I’m using my Gibson amp, which is a more pirate-based sound. It’s like a gnarly, very squishy sound. And for pedals, I use a Prescription Electronics Experience pedal, which I don’t think they make anymore, so I just got a clone from a company in Europe. That’s the only pedal I lean on.

As a so-called “super group,” what’s kept A Perfect Circle together?

I don’t know… the “super group” thing, even back then, I was a little bit like, “What? I don’t know what that means exactly.” I mean, I was a guitar tech, so I don’t know if I count as defining any “super” part. [laughs] But it’s an interesting band.

The parameters of [vocalist] Maynard [James Keenan]’s schedule dictate when we’re going to do something. He’s always looking to create and move things forward, but he’s got three musical projects that he oscillates between, so I don’t know, it’s always exciting.

How would you say A Perfect Circle has progressed from where it started?

We’ve progressed a lot. I’m as guilty as a music listener with the negative comments that come our way that say, “Why don’t you make the same music as the song that I first fell in love with?” But we’re always trying to move things forward because it’s about capturing where you are today.

It can be Maynard lyrically, or me musically; it’s about the melting pot that’s coming our way. Recently, that’s been things I’ve listened to forever, so I’ll revisit things that were first inspiring and see where they bring my writing.

When Eddie Van Halen burst onto the scene in the late-’70s, aspiring players and professional virtuosos alike were all lining up to watch him up-close.

Like Hendrix before him, the Eruption mastermind was changing the very fabric of guitar playing in real time. He needed to be seen to be believed.

But not everyone was swept up in the hysteria. The late Jeff Beck, for instance, was full of admiration for the virtuoso’s ability, but kept a level head about it – this not being his first brush with a generational guitar talent.

“I love it, I think it’s the greatest,” Beck said of Van Halen’s music in the January 1985 issue of Guitar World. “I've been there, y'know, but he lives and dies for that whereas I don't – I'm not really a heavy metal boy, through and through.

“I’d love to go and see him but I probably wouldn't stay for the whole concert: I’d just get a flash of brilliance and then I’d go, saying to myself, ‘That guy is really great.’”

At the time, Beck appeared to believe Van Halen – as has often become a criticism of the shred scene, though rarely EVH himself – was prioritizing technicality and showmanship. Beck was all about expression and storytelling. He didn’t get that from Van Halen.

“I wouldn’t want to get bored with it, which I could easily do with that style of music,” Beck continued. “I like rock concerts, concerts in general, to go through different moods, but there aren’t too many concerts like that now.

“I mean, those guys like Van Halen are so great, but they seem to be stuck in that kind of stuff. Still, he’s got the most amazing technique, you’ve got to take your hat off to him for that – the speed and the frantic element. I could do well to learn from him some of those tricks he pulls.”

It wasn’t the only time Beck praised Van Halen, even if he couldn’t see himself sitting through a whole show.

“He brought tapping to the forefront, and I still think he was one of the tastiest players doing it,” he gushed in Van Halen: A Visual History (via Van Halen News Desk) “It wasn’t his fault that all these other horrendous people tried to emulate him.

“I actually saw Eddie play some blues once and it was really beautiful. It would be great to hear him play more in that style.”

The two heroes certainly met in later years and were photographed together in 1987, albeit not in a show setting – and the respect was mutual.

Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2011, Van Halen noted, “I didn’t get into him until [1975’s jazz-fusion album] Blow By Blow. Just the instrumentalness of it. And [1976’s] Wired. Interesting stuff in there.

“I guess it was just the experimentation in there that I liked. Jeff Beck is definitely a standalone. You never know what the hell he’s gonna do.”

Seven decades since it rolled off the production line in Fullerton, California – and whatever your personal tastes – you’d have to agree that Leo Fender’s deathless doublecut is the quintessential electric guitar.

It’s the shape a kid would draw if you handed them a crayon. It’s the model you’d show to a visiting glow-fingered alien curious about humanoid rock ‘n’ roll.

To sling a Strat is to experience the ultimate collision of tone and ergonomics.

Respect to the Telecaster (born three years earlier, in 1951), but it’s a caveman’s club next to Leo’s next great lightbulb moment.

Sleek as a surfboard, contoured to the body like a well-cut suit, with stellar access and the first bulletproof tremolo system. Sonically unique, with an unmistakable singlecoil ‘cluck’ that could be fattened, starved, or stacked via a cluster of idiot-proof dials and a five-way selector (from the mid-’70s on).

Back then, in 1954, the Strat seemed to come from the future, and even now, if you pause and consider it afresh, it still does.

But the Fender Stratocaster would just be a glorified carpentry project without the players who danced across its neck and gave it life. Here we celebrate 25 of the very best Strat-o-masters, from the worlds of blues, rock, funk, disco, prog, shred, grunge, metal, and beyond.

Buddy Holly

It’s December 1, 1957. Buddy Holly is performing That’ll Be The Day on his Ed Sullivan Show debut, and the great American public is seeing the Fender Stratocaster in action for the first time.

He might look like a librarian on uppers, but the Texan bandleader’s piston-pump rhythm work is not to be sniffed at, and to a generation that has known nothing but horn bands, that hard, biting jangle is a clarion call announcing that things will be different from now on.

Jimi Hendrix

Admittedly, the defining image of the Strat’s greatest Sixties ambassador sees him torching the damn thing onstage at 1967’s Monterey Pop Festival. But the instrument’s real pyrotechnics happened before Jimi lit the match.

Exploring the outer limits of its mischief-ready sonic scope and easily abused tremolo, he couldn’t have conjured the same black-magic cacophony – or the beauty of Little Wing – from any other model. Jimi’s trademark flip ‘n’ restring, meanwhile, was an audio-visual WTF that only cemented the impression he’d just stepped off a spaceship into Swinging London.

Hank Marvin

You Americans don’t know how lucky you are. It wasn’t until 1959 – a full five years after US production began – that Shadows bandleader Cliff Richard bought and gifted to his guitarist what is believed to be the first Strat on British shores (a Fiesta Red stunner with gold hardware). Those gorgeous, glassy, plaintive melodies on Apache and Wonderful Land wouldn’t have shimmered the same on anything else.

Jeff Beck

Sure, a Telecaster (in the Yardbirds) and Les Paul (on Blow By Blow) were fine for the punch-your-lights-out early stuff. But when Beck really found his voice and fell into his signature techniques – the volume swells and whale-song whammy tickles, exemplified by Where Were You – only the Fender doublecut could get the job done.

“What is it about the Strat that I love so much?” he mused in an interview with Malcolm Gerrie of Sky Arts. “Its endless color…”

Eric Clapton

Like Beck, EC played ’em all, from his Yardbirds Tele, through the revved-up Les Paul of the Bluesbreakers, to the SG-fueled ‘woman’ tone showcased on Cream’s Disraeli Gears. But like so many Sixties galacticos, as the decade turned, he was drawn to the Strat, retooling a clutch of second-hand models bought from a Nashville music store into the fabled Blackie mongrel that drove everything from Cocaine to Wonderful Tonight.

“I felt like Blackie had become part of me,” Clapton once told Guitar Player. “A guitar like that comes along maybe once in a lifetime.”

David Gilmour

Compared to his ’70s-gunslinger peers, the Pink Floyd man didn’t play too many notes. But the sweetness of his phrasing, twinned with the haunting, bell-like quality of his ’69 Black Strat, meant each one was a symphony (revisit the shivering four-note starburst of Shine On You Crazy Diamond Part II).

That Black Strat was just recently auctioned from the private collection of late Indianapolis Colts boss Jim Irsay for $14.5 million, making it officially the world’s most valuable guitar.

Stevie Ray Vaughan

The Texas bluesman picked up his early-’60s Strat – known as both Number One and First Wife – from an Austin music store in 1974. As a man who played so hard he had to perform DIY on his own tattered fingers, the instrument probably deserved its retirement in 1990 – while SRV’s tragic death that August meant he never saw Fender’s signature replica launch two years later at NAMM.

Ritchie Blackmore

Deep Purple’s dark wizard got his wings on a Gibson ES-335, but a fateful 1969 encounter with Eric Clapton’s roadie changed everything (“He brought a Strat, so I said to him, ‘Do you want to sell that guitar?’”).

In a 2024 GW interview, Blackmore told us he tracked Smoke On The Water on a mongrel, before summing up the Strat’s pragmatic magic: “It’s a way of paying the bills. It also happens to be an incredible guitar.”

Nile Rodgers

Just for a moment, consider how many unfathomable millions of dollars must have flowed through the Chic legend’s ‘Hitmaker’ Strat.

Seeing action with everyone from David Bowie to Madonna, the sonic character of its unusually light alder body is perfect for Rodgers’ muted hits and zingy chord fragments. But he might never have picked it up from a Miami pawn shop in ’73 were it not for the curt advice of wingman/bassist Bernard Edwards (“Get a Strat, motherf***er!”)

Yngwie Malmsteen

Before the Scandi shredder broke out with 1984’s Rising Force, ‘scallops’ were something you gagged on at posh dinner parties.

Inspired by a 16th century lute with carved-out frets, Malmsteen recalled that “people thought I was crazy” when they saw his teenage handiwork. But there was no arguing with the added velocity of scalloping, which made this already-lightning-fast player even speedier, like strapping rockets on Usain Bolt’s sneakers. Only Clapton was offered a Fender signature Strat before him (but Malmsteen’s ’88 model was the first to feature his signature on the headstock).

Dave Murray and Janick Gers

Given all that demon iconography, you’d expect Iron Maiden’s three-guitar frontline to reach for something macabre from the B.C. Rich brochure. In fact, the British metallers’ gallop is largely underpinned by a pair of workhorse Strats, with Janick Gers favoring a Seymour Duncan JB JR-bolstered model and Dave Murray driving a pair of Hot Rails (Adrian Smith is more of a dabbler, mostly wedded to his Jackson San Dimas).

Tom DeLonge

The Blink-182 man has bounced between Fender and Gibson his whole career, and lately seems sworn to his signature Starcaster. But after retiring the iconic early “Sticker Strat”, the Enema Of The State period saw DeLonge punch out parts like All The Small Things on a pastel-hued Custom Shop Strat with a lonely Seymour Duncan Invader bridge ’bucker (it was released in 2001 as a production guitar).

Albert Hammond Jr

Beset by bowel-tuned nu-metal, it felt like we hadn’t seen a Strat in years when The Strokes broke out with 2001’s Is This It.

While Nick Valensi was all studied cool on an Epiphone Riviera, his corkscrew-curled wingman hammered thrillingly at a high-strapped 1985 reissue of a ’72 Strat (that instrument was also behind the feral, Freddie King-inspired solo on Last Nite).

Billy Corgan

Alt-rock will forever be associated with a sticker-coated Jazzmaster, but look closer and the Strat appeared in the hands of everyone from Kurt Cobain (at the ’92 Reading Festival) to Mike McCready (the out-of-phase shimmer on Yellow Ledbetter). Amongst these, Corgan was arguably the greatest virtuoso and most committed Strat-o-phile.

In his words, the Smashing Pumpkins leader “walked into a Guitar Center one day and, off the wall, bought an Eric Clapton ’57 reissue. That became the main guitar for Siamese and Mellon Collie, and launched a thousand ships of people chasing that sound.”

Mark Knopfler

Before he settled back into the molten Les Paul solos of Brothers In Arms, the Dire Straits leader was the fastest gun on London’s post-punk scene, revered for the quicksilver bob ‘n’ weave outro to 1978’s Sultans Of Swing.

Tellingly, the red ’61 he played it on (supposedly something of a partscaster) was one of the few models that Knopfler chose to ring-fence from his 2024 guitar auction.

Bonnie Raitt

The Californian slide goddess and 13-time Grammy winner picked up her first Strat on the street following a 1969 gig – immediately falling for the often-neglected third position. “It’s all about that middle pickup,” says Raitt. “You just can’t beat it.”

Eric Johnson

The Cliffs Of Dover virtuoso could easily have followed his G3 brethren into an Ibanez endorsement. But Johnson is a Strat diehard with a very specific wishlist, insisting that models from ’54, ’57, and ’58 are best (“I think Fender had a shipment of wood that was real special”) and adding an offbeat f-hole to his 2018 signature thinline.

Cory Wong

Funk belongs on a Strat – don’t argue – and Wong’s kinetic grooves with Vulfpeck have moved more feet than anyone on the modern scene. He’s proved price isn’t everything with his dedication to his teenage Highway One model – also the inspiration for his 2021 signature model – and should really be taking a salary as Fender brand ambassador.

Wong was led to the aforementioned Highway One Strat by his father, who – Wong said in a 2023 Guitar World interview – told him, “‘Listen! You love the Chili Peppers, you love Stevie Ray Vaughan. Look at Jeff Beck, look at Jimi Hendrix, look at Stevie Ray and Eric Johnson.’ He gave me this lineage of the Stratocaster and basically said: Look at all the things this guitar is capable of.’”

H.E.R.

The Strat’s generation-leaping appeal is underlined by Gabriella Sarmiento Wilson, whose breakout 2021 album, Back Of My Mind, bends the backbone of vintage R&B into bold new shapes.

“The Strat is an iconic guitar, just because of the look and shape,” says the 28-year-old Californian (who got her own signature model in 2020). “But the tone, the heaviness… to me, it’s the unicorn. It’s classic, but it’s new at the same time.”

Rory Gallagher

Bought on credit in 1963, and beaten like a dog through the ’70s and ’80s, the Irishman’s ’61 looked set for a quiet retirement. Instead, it now enjoys an afterlife as a blues-rock Excalibur, loaned out to wide-eyed fanboys like Joe Bonamassa.

“I’m thinking, ‘I’m gonna take so much shit for this’,” recalled the US bluesman of test-driving Rory’s doublecut at London’s Hammersmith Apollo in 2011. “Because everyone on the Internet will go, ‘Who do you think you are?’ But anybody would have done it…”

The Edge

U2’s sonic maverick has built up quite a rack since 1980’s Boy (you could argue he’s equally associated with the Explorer). But hands-down the most neck-tingling moment of any show is the delay-drenched jewelry box tinkle of Where The Streets Have No Name, and for that, a Strat on the middle pickup is non-negotiable.

Mdou Moctar

If your first guitar had been built from driftwood, bicycle cables, and the keys used to open sardine tins, you’d be glad to get on a Strat too. The desert-blues figurehead’s only stipulation is that the strings on his American Professional left-hander are at least two years old.

Steve Lacy

Every time you think you’ve got the Strat all figured out, a twenty-something gunslinger comes along and flips it on its head.

Take the Californian alt-R&B phenom, who splits his licks between solo work, The Internet, and a billion guest-spots with everyone from Vampire Weekend to Tyler, The Creator. Then there’s Lacy’s rulebook-shredding People Pleaser signature Strat – complete with an onboard fuzz circuit.

Ry Cooder

There’s a case that the Californian slide man barely qualifies as a Strat player. His trademark ‘Coodercasters’, after all, are so heavily modded that Leo Fender would barely recognize them as his children. But Cooder demands inclusion for his beyond-spellbinding, desert-baked, and dust-blown tone.

Buddy Guy

When the great Louisiana bluesman headed north in ’57, he assured his ailing mother he’d return from Chicago at the wheel of a polka-dot Cadillac. Guy couldn’t keep that promise, but made amends by commissioning his spotted Fender signature model.

He’s never strayed from the Strat, and even on the brink of his nineties, used it to dig out a gorgeous fingerstyle blues in the credits scene of last year’s Oscar-winning Sinners.

Malina Moye has recently made history as the first woman of color to partner up with Kramer on a signature guitar. This is far from her only accolade – having released four studio albums, dominated global stages spanning NBA and NFL events, major festivals, and international tours, and even collaborating with Bootsy Collins.

However, as Moye explains, her hard-earned journey to the upper echelons of the guitar world wasn't without immense sacrifice.

“I came out to Los Angeles with $20,” she tells Gibson TV. “I was homeless. I lived off of two tacos and water a day.

“I used to wash up in a gas station. I would sleep in between the front and back seat of my car, and I would take a knife and a Bible. Someone ended up hitting the back of my car, and you know what? I ended up buying a guitar.”

As Moye put it in a 2019 interview with Guitar Girl Magazine, “I was looking on the ground for pennies to just buy a sandwich. Life is going to break you down. You get up and keep fighting every day.”

And fight she did. Years later, thanks to her relentless dedication, she found herself performing at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame – an experience that was nothing short of surreal.

“I remember I was getting on a plane and I remember going, ‘Who is this?’ And he’s like, ‘Hey, I’m actually the president of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I just saw your video.’ Then next thing I know I’m on a plane to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to honor Chuck Berry and to have a chance to play in front of him!”

Through her signature guitar, Moye hopes to “incorporate lots more people” to tell their own story, as she was able to tell hers.

“I'm saying, with this guitar, play me your story. I hope that this guitar shows you that magic is real. If something like this can happen to me, with this instrument, maybe it can happen to you too.”

Imitation is said to be the highest form of flattery, but from a guitar perspective that has never sat right with The Edge. In fact, he’s never been that impressed by those who look to copy his sound and style.

In a 1996 interview with Guitar World, the U2 icon reflected on the guitar scene at the time, and discussed the fact many were settling with imitating a style as opposed to developing their own.

“It is so hard to really pull something out of yourself,” he conceded. “If you think about guitar players down through the years who have that fire, who have that ability to play and really, really connect with you, there aren’t that many.

“The odds are really stacked against you doing it, so most people settle for the imitation – that’s reliable at least, and kind of impressive, if not life-changing.”

He turns to Jimi Hendrix for an example. Trailblazers will always have their imitators, but he questions what value that actually brings.

“Jimi Hendrix’s work was life-changing, astonishing,” The Edge observed. “But all the people down through the years who’ve played his style have been, at best, impressive. Is it craft and not art?

“I tend to cringe a bit when I hear people who’ve obviously taken my style. I think it’s a joke that’s often played on me in that it’s the simplest of my ideas that ends up taking off – it’s my one-note solos that work! And the problem is you cannot argue with something if it really works.”

Naturally, many players will always wear their influences, perhaps a little too proudly, on their sleeves. Wolfgang Van Halen, for instance, once suggested his dad ruined ‘80s guitar because of the legion of copyists his magic conjured.

The Edge was getting tired of imitation, which is perhaps why, in 1997, U2 made a stylistic U-turn and embraced electronica on Pop, peeling away from the blues rock pool.

In the same GW interview, The Edge spoke out against the stupid mentality of the “white blues rock thing”, and shrugged off players who commit to 15-minute guitar solos.

But musical brilliance doesn't always mean virtuosic prowess. As he found out while tracking one of the band’s biggest records, sometimes the simplest ideas work for a reason.

“I remember on Achtung Baby [1991], I wanted to “fix” the solo in The Fly, and I just wasn’t allowed. ‘No! You cannot touch that! You cannot argue!’” he reports. “As much as my pride would have loved me to go back and do something more elaborate, I knew that this thing did work.”

It proved a valuable lesson for the guitarist. Blazing virtuosity and fanciful fretboard dances aren’t always the answer, even if most players have that urge to do so. Sometimes, it’s better to leave an itch unscratched.

This feature was originally published in the January 1995 issue of Guitar World.

Punk lore has it that British punk began on the 4th of July, 1976, when the Ramones played the Roundhouse in London. They shared the bill with the Flamin’ Groovies; the Stranglers were the opening act.

The following night Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee, and Tommy played another London rock club, Dingwalls. It’s been said, only half in jest, that everyone who went on to be in a major London punk band was at one of those two shows. Steve Jones certainly has fond memories of the shows: “The Ramones were rocking. It was great!”

“We met all these kids there afterwards,” Johnny Ramone recalls, “and they said, ‘Oh, we’re starting our band this week. We just formed, but we haven’t rehearsed yet. We were waiting to see you guys.’ And it was the Damned and the Clash.

“We thought it was cool that all these kids were forming bands. I think one of the Damned said, ‘You want to go back to the Sex Pistols’ loft? They’ll play for you.’ We said, ‘Oh no, we can’t do that. We don’t wanna.’ We thought kids would be asking us this everywhere we went. We didn’t know they were gonna be famous or anything. We just thought they all looked cool. They looked like little kids to us.”

There was also a dark side to this leather-jacketed children’s crusade. The London bands, recalls Johnny, “all hated each other. Like, the Damned hated the Sex Pistols, and they all hated the Clash. They all hated each other, like little tiny gangs.”

It was the second night, at Dingwalls, says Johnny Ramone, that he first encountered Sex Pistols frontman Johnny Rotten. “He comes up to me and says, ‘You know, I think Patti Smith sucks.’ I go, ‘I don't give a shit. I don’t like her either.’ And he goes, ‘Oh you don’t?’

“He was trying at first to be, you know, like, nasty. And when he heard what I had to say, he was all friendly. I guess he wanted to get a reaction out of me with that stuff about Patti Smith or something. Like I cared.”

Actually, British punk rock had begun to develop long before the Ramones arrived in 1976. In the early ‘70s, a growing pub rock scene had resulted in a “back to basics” vibe in British music.

In 1974 Malcolm McLaren had taken on the management of the Faces copy band that the kleptomaniac Steve Jones had formed with his friend, drummer Paul Cook. Together with Vivienne Westwood, McLaren ran the Sex shop on London's fashionable King's Road, selling bondage gear and underground designer wear.

McLaren had also had a brief stint managing the New York Dolls at the end of their career. He returned to London with a white Gibson Les Paul that had belonged to the Dolls’ Syl Sylvain. In what retrospectively seems a heavily symbolic gesture, the instrument was passed on to Steve Jones. Originally the group’s singer, Jones was to become the definitive punk guitar stylist.

By 1975, the name and original lineup of the Sex Pistols had fallen into place. Musically, Cook and Jones didn’t have too much in common with the two new Pistols. Singer Johnny Rotten had wide-ranging tastes – everything from reggae to Captain Beefheart to experimental ‘70s German groups like Can.

Bassist Glen Matlock was an avid pop fan. His love for the Beatles was to prove a constant source of conflict with the others. As his main guitar influences, Jones lists Ron Wood, James Williamson, Johnny Thunders, and Free’s Paul Kossoff.

The pub rock scene had given rise to acts like the Stranglers, Eddie And The Hot Rods and the 101ers – whose singer, Joe Strummer, would eventually go on to lead the Clash. These acts would later become more associated with punk; but Jones maintains that the Sex Pistols’ sound and approach developed independently of any outside groups or punk “agenda.”

“I just thought of the Sex Pistols as a rock band. When we started, we didn't say, ‘Okay, we're gonna call ourselves “punk” and it’s gonna sound like this…’ I just couldn't play very well and John couldn’t sing. And that’s the sound it created – purely by accident, I guess.”

“I’d only been playing for like three or four months before we did our first show. All I could do was just play a barre chord and move it up and down the fretboard. One chord, you know. It wasn’t until about a year later, until we did Never Mind The Bollocks, that I loosened up a bit.”

Judging from the incredibly powerful guitar work on Bollocks, Jones developed very quickly. So quickly that it was widely rumored that guitar veteran Chris Spedding actually played on some or – depending on who’s telling the story – all of the tracks. But if that’s true, then Jones learned to imitate Spedding’s work awfully well later on.

Jones has his own explanation of how his bruising, rhythmically precise chordal style developed so quickly: “It's ‘cause I was doing a lot of speed at the time. I would just practice for hours and hours, literally over and over again. I’d practice to records and all of that – wake up, take me little Black Beauty and just play for 12 hours.”

The interplay between Jones and Cook is another factor in the Sex Pistols’ tremendous power. Together they took the Ramones’ muted, down-picked eighth-note feel and somehow made it sound 10 times larger. “I think it came from masturbating too much,” Jones suggests.

Jones and Cook never really seemed to need a bass player. When the two of them played together – whether in the Sex Pistols or, later on, in the Professionals – they instantly got that sound. And, like the Patti Smith Group, the Sex Pistols were without a bassist at certain critical formative stages in the band’s career. Musical differences with Glen Matlock led to his expulsion just as sessions for Never Mind The Bollocks were getting under way.

“He was into the Beatles too much,” Jones says. “He kept trying to teach me these weird, funny chords and it just didn’t sound good. He kept saying, ‘Play a B7,’ And I didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about.”

Matlock’s replacement was Rotten’s friend, John Ritchie, who took on the name Sid Vicious. Selected mainly for his look and his compatibility with Lydon, Vicious couldn’t actually play the bass when he joined. As a result, for most of Never Mind The Bollocks, says Jones, “whenever we put tracks down, it was just me and Paul. We didn’t have a bassist playing with us; it was just guitar and drums.

“Except for Anarchy In The U.K. – Glen Matlock was still around for that one, and he played bass with us at the same time we put down guitar and drums. But on the rest of the songs, it was just me and Paul, and I would put the bass on afterwards.

“Sid wasn’t around and he couldn’t play anyway. He was in the hospital or always fucked up. Which was a godsend, really, because he kept wanting to play on the record, and we were trying to think of ways to get him out of the studio. He was just making a fucking mess. And then he got hepatitis and had to go into the hospital for a few weeks. So it was a perfect opportunity for me to play the bass. God bless him.”

Yet another reason why the Bollocks tracks are so tight and have such devastating economy of arrangement is that they were heavily demoed. Each of the songs was recorded numerous times in various studios. As the Pistols and McLaren led the British media on a mad chase, getting booted off major record labels more quickly than they’d been signed, there was ample time to polish the tracks.

But Jones bristles at the suggestion that he overindulged in guitar overdubs on the final version of the album. (Rotten used the phrase “21 tracks of guitar” to describe the venture.) “Lies!” Jones cries. “What the fuck does he know, anyway?

“I mean, there are guitar overdubs on there – like on Anarchy In The U.K., there’s mainly two guitars doing the rhythm with some kind of flange or phase on them. And then there’s one playing chords here and there; not throughout the whole song, but coming in at certain places. There’s one doing a feedback thing near the end, and another doing power chords at the end. I would say there were about six guitars on there. A far cry from 21!”

Most people assume that Jones got his wall of guitar sound by plugging his Les Paul into one or more Marshalls. But he’s keen to set the record straight on that point as well. “All I was using was one Fender Twin Reverb, which I stole off Bob Marley at the Hammersmith Odeon.

“It was an older one with a silver front. I put Gauss speakers in, which took away the real trebly Fender sound and gave it a lot of midrange. It was a nice, warm sound, but it had a lot of distortion on it. I just had it turned up to 10 the whole time.”

Jones complains that latterday guitarists are clueless when it comes to playing punk. “A lot of people just don’t know; they get it completely wrong. They say, ‘Okay, we’re going to do a Sex Pistols song.’ And they play it three times faster than the actual song was.

“But that’s where the power is – when it’s slowed down, when it’s paced. Everyone thinks punk has got to be fast and stupid. They get it all wrong.”

The artists and crazies within McLaren’s social circle created a bold new visual style around the Pistols and punk itself, including a style of album graphics that’s now routinely taught in university art history courses.

McLaren made the Pistols the center of a media circus that was much like a performance art piece in its own right. But the whole thing wouldn’t have meant doodley-squat if the Pistols hadn’t been an absolutely great rock ’n’ roll band.

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

You could forgive Blondie for soaking in the incredible run of success they were enjoying in 1980.

They’d certainly paid their dues – spending years slogging it out in New York City’s dingy punk spawn point CBGB’s and throwing spunky guitar-pop darts at a wall to no avail, before they hit it (really) big in 1979 with the irresistible Heart of Glass.

Disco-tinged as that song was, Blondie were and are still a guitar band first and foremost, and six-stringers Chris Stein and (at that time) Frank Infante were heartily enjoying their much-expanded tools-of-the-trade budget.

“By the time I got to CBGB’s. I didn't have any money or resources,” Stein recalled to Guitar World in a 1980 interview. “I used this old Supro Ozark guitar. I played it for a long time but it was only on loan; I had borrowed it from this guy who later had a sex change operation and decided he wanted his guitar back.”

By the end of 1980, though, those trying days were three chart-topping hits behind Blondie, and the sort of kid in a candy (guitar) shop stories we all dream of were now well within reach for them. And, when asked by GW during that peak-era interview where the Burns Ampeg guitar sitting on his living room couch came from, Stein had a story to tell...

“We’re in Indianapolis and we’re staying in this hotel across from a huge, gigantic pawn shop,” Stein recounted to GW. “So Frankie [Infante] or somebody went over there and came back with this really weird story. He said, ‘This guy in the pawn shop says he has a roomful of Les Pauls upstairs, but he won't let me see them.’

“So we went over to the store and there were lots of guitars all over the place, and the guy said, ‘Yes, there is a room upstairs filled with guitars, but you can’t see them because we’re only selling them all at once.

“So we finally came back and we waved hundred dollar bills in his face and said, ‘Let us in and we’ll buy the guitars individually.’ We were on tour with Rockpile. We had two bands and roadies there ready to spring for them. Finally he let us into the room which was filled with guitars.

“It was sort of like a dream, you know,” Stein continued. “We spent the whole day opening up these dusty guitar cases. They had been saving them up for years. A lot of them were brand new. I got six guitars all together. They weren't all Les Pauls. There were some really old Epiphones, in great condition. I got a Gibson Trini Lopez custom model. And I also got that Burns Ampeg.”

Offbeat in design and origin story, the Burns guitar in question appealed to Stein's punk roots.

“I mostly used to use Strats before this, and I still use Strats,” Stein explained. “But I like Burns [company founder James Ormston Burns] and I like what he is about.

“I was immediately attracted to it because it looked like a Telecaster I once carved up with two sets of horns and painted black. I had to sell it because we were out of money. Burns has been fucked over by the system so much that he says this guitar is against the system. He says it's the devil’s guitar.”

Don't get me rambling about Drive-By Truckers. They're one of my favorite bands, and if I've had a beer or two and they come up, you might be in for an excruciating tangent about how, as good as their records are, the triple live album It's Great to Be Alive! is really what best captures the spirit and power of the band, and how... Ah, see, there I go.

I bring this up because the Truckers' two leaders, singer/songwriter/guitarists Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley, happen to be my favorite guitar duo of all time. The vivid stories they tell of the South – of rotten politicians, dirtbag romances, gut-wrenching tragedies, and larger-than-life figures from the history books – wouldn't be what they are without Hood and Cooley's glorious call-and-response playing.

Cooley has an answer for all of Hood's barreling rhythm work – swaggering fills, sneering solos, sweet or nasty phrases. And never mind when they were fully a guitar trio, augmented by the great Jason Isbell.

Anyway, I wouldn't call them the best guitar duo of all time, that's not for me to say, but they're my personal favorite.

You, however, can say what the best guitar duo of all time is. In fact, we'd like you to tell us who you feel should wear that crown. And yes, you can name a trio if you're partial to, say, Skynyrd.

Who had the greatest chemistry? Who pushed each other to the greatest heights? Who best knew how to serve the song together? Let us know in the comments below.

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Samantha Fish has played with a who's who of the blues world, but one especially memorable mentor has been bona fide blues legend, Buddy Guy.

Back in 2013, after a whole night driving across Canada to make it to Guy’s show on time, Fish was coaxed to the stage to jam with the guitar ace himself.

“I see this look on Buddy Guy’s face that’s like, ‘What’s this girl's name? I’ll put her on!’” she recalled in a 2019 interview with Blues Blast Magazine.

“That’s when Buddy called me up. I was so nervous. My recollection of it is terrible, ’cause I was so damn nervous. I do remember him saying, ‘When shit like that happens, I can play all night.’”

Since then, Fish has carried on Guy's mission of “keeping the blues alive,” even trading licks with him on stage as a special guest on multiple occasions.

Those experiences have presented plenty of valuable lessons for Fish, who revealed the most important ones she learned from Guy in a recent Guitar World interview.

“​​Well, Buddy Guy is, as far as guitar players go, one of the best conversationalists on the planet,” she says.

“What he does with his guitar, and when you're doing a back and forth with him, trading licks, he's fully immersed. For me, the best thing you can do for a guitar, as a guitarist, is try to make it sound like a human voice. Emote a voice out of it... and he just does that perfectly too.”

Fish notes that Guy “takes a lot of pauses,” and when he stops playing, the audience “just goes nuts”. It's all about finding the space, playing with emotion, and trying to squeeze every ounce of emotion out of each note.

“It’s amazing,” she raves. “People really do respond to it. He's just one of the best emoters there is.”

Fish will be taking part in Buddy Guy’s 90th birthday concert at New York’s Radio City Music Hall on May 1st. As part of a stellar lineup, she’ll be honoring his legacy and celebrating all things blues alongside Eric Clapton, John Mayer, Susan Tedeschi & Derek Trucks, Joe Bonamassa, and, of course, Guy himself.

There are a myriad of well-known licks in guitar playing, but the Gaslight Anthem’s Tele-wielding band leader says there’s one that all players need to learn above the rest.

In recent years, Fallon has become a prolific solo artist and is set to release his latest solo LP, Not Bad for New Jersey, in September. That’s led him to tell Guitar World what he thinks should be a fundamental piece of knowledge for every guitar player. Regardless of genre.

“Some people underestimate what a great guitar player is; there’s multiple facets to it,” he says, building up to his point.

“There’s the traditional shredder, but then there’s Julian Lage or John Frusciante from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Take Snow (Hey Oh), for example; that lick isn’t hard to play, but it’s super hard to get up to speed for five minutes. I don’t think a lot of people could do it cleanly.”

Fallon is keen to point out that the upper echelons of playing are not reserved for superstar shredders alone. He puts himself firmly in the Frusciante camp here, and puts a clear divide between guitar solos and lone-standing licks.

“Instead of solos, I want to learn licks,” he quips. “It’s about the relationship between the two. That kind of playing is overlooked. We have a lot of Ron Woods and Mick Taylor’s [of the Rolling Stones], but we need more Keith Richards’s and [Bob] Marley’s.”

That leads him, at last, to the lick in question: Your Favorite Mistake by Sheryl Crow.

“It’s crazy. It’s slamming,” he purrs. “That opening lick is so dope. It’s Wendy Melvoin, and it’s perfectly played.

“If you’re a guitar player out there, go listen to her – that is the way you should play guitar. But only half of you. The other half needs to be shredders, because every Izzy needs a Slash.”

Indeed, for every Yngwie Malmsteen-inspired shredder who can dance through arpeggios like it’s a task as easy as putting socks on, there needs to be understated players who keep things simple and grounded. They complement one another.

Fallon isn’t speaking out against shredders; he is simply proving that there are other ways to be great. And he’s certainly doing it in a more understated way than Keith Richards, who said he laughed his ass off when the ‘80s shred scene built up speed, or modern prog hero Steve Wilson, who said shredding wasn’t music but sport.

Guitar World’s full interview with Fallon will be published online in due course.

Bassist Tim Bogert first came to prominence via Vanilla Fudge’s eponymous debut in 1967. His virtuosic style helped define that band’s sound during a prolific five-album stint that lasted up until 1969.

“Vanilla Fudge were an amazing band,” said Billy Sheehan. “Tim was all over the place on bass – but everything he did worked. He was a huge influence on me.”

Bogert and Fudge drummer Carmine Appice went on to create Cactus, which churned out four studio albums before dissolving in 1972, when the duo teamed up with guitarist Jeff Beck to form the power trio Beck, Bogert & Appice.

But despite boasting the kind of explosive musicianship not heard since Cream, the trio never found the chemistry to match its collective talent.

“The nights that BBA were on, we were frightening,” said Bogert in the March 2011 issue of Bass Player. “But we were only on maybe one of three nights.

“That group was like a dragster when it does a burnout: you get a lot of smoke and a lot of noise, but it doesn't go anywhere. But when it hooks up, my God, it's amazing. That's what that band was like. I lived for those moments when it all hooked up; they're some of the best musical memories I have.”

Lady, the second song on the group’s only studio album, exemplified Bogert’s freewheeling inventiveness on the bass guitar.

“For Lady, I played whatever flopped out of my head at the time, trying to be appropriate, flashy, or both. We did the basics in one take, and then everything else was over-dubbed.

“No-one taught me to play the bass; I just picked it up and did my thing. So it was out of ignorance of the rules that my style developed.”

To record the track, Bogert played a Fender Precision Bass with a Telecaster neck and La Bella flatwound strings through a Sunn Coliseum head and custom cabinet made by Tony Frank of Univox.

“I'd mic the cabinet, which had two 15-inch speakers, and play the bass hard – you had to with the flatwound strings, so it would distort and break up.”

The guitar and drums set the mood in the first three bars with a gritty stop-start riff, joined by the bass in the second half of bar 4, as Bogert enters with an echo of the track’s defining E minor pentatonic figure.

At 00:07, Bogert – who employs a two-finger plucking technique and occasional rakes – settles into a simmering groove that makes full use of the open E string.

Note how he matches the rising intensity of the drums with a high staccato root-note figure at 00:22, which he contrasts with flowing, chromatic 16ths through beats three and four.

Bogert opts for a simpler riff under the first 12 bars of the 16-bar verse, sticking to root notes while the vocals sketch out harmonies atop his basic foundation. Appice and Bogert both sing on the track: Bogert is the higher of the two voices.

As the promise of a guitar solo unfolds at 02:05, Bogert navigates Beck's dense, multi-layered guitar work with fearless creativity, injecting the music with fluid chromatic runs and rich, Jamerson-influenced syncopation.

The low-end excitement continues as Bogert soars up to a high B on the G string under the B major chord at 02:47 before working his way down to the open E, leading to a period of quiet E7-based reflection.

This is followed by two more verses, during which Bogert’s on-the-fly development continues: Highlights include a cool descending D Mixolydian run at 04:08, and some wide-ranging skips at 04:14.

After a semi-false ending, followed by a drum solo, the final section pivots around bass-heavy reiterations of the track's E-minor pentatonic theme.