Dozens of world-class guitarists have passed through Bob Dylan’s backing band over six decades – and the current leg of his tour in support of 2020 album Rough and Rowdy Ways has seen several come and go.

Jad Tariq, a Memphis-based R&B player, was on the road with veteran blues harpist Charlie Musselwhite when he got the call to become the latest member. “I was interested immediately,” he says. “I was like, ‘Hey, I’m on the road for the next couple weeks. Here’s what I’ve got coming up.’” They landed on dates he could make, and that was that.

“People expect a crazy story in terms of how the gig came about, but it was just like getting called for anything,” he adds. “I was available for those gigs, I went and played them, and had a really fantastic time.”

His years of playing in the blues and jazz bars of Memphis prepared him to step onto Dylan’s stage. “When I was first doing gigs in town, people would call out tunes that I didn’t know. You've got to figure them out on the bandstand. That trains your ear to be ready for surprises. I do gigs all the time where you just show up and wing it.”

That flexibility, learned by backing Beale Street legends like Earl “The Pearl” Banks, was a perfect match for Dylan’s throwback rhythms of Rowdy Ways tunes like False Prophet and Goodbye Jimmy Reed. His habit of switching keys and arrangements kept Tariq nimble on the fretboard – in fact, he never settled into any one mode of playing.

“There were solos, and a lot of that was just off the cuff,” he says. “If he looks at you, if there’s a space to play, you play something. He’d play something on piano and [guitarist] Joel Paterson or I would respond with a lick. It was pretty fluid.”

Tariq’s music education was centered on the classic rock and big-band crooners his mother played in the car. He paid particular attention to the 1983 Albert King and Stevie Ray Vaughan In Session DVD as he explored the foundations of rock and roll. “As I got older I started getting more into the jump and swing side of the blues stuff. That’s where I've been living for a while.”

He first had to get acquainted with his instrument of choice. “I was probably more trained on the upright bass – I did that in orchestra my whole life,” he says. “I learned a lot of guitar stuff by ear.”

A bit of music theory helped him get started; and as he progressed, he preferred to stay in lanes established by players like jump-blues bandleader T-Bone Walker and bebop pioneer Charlie Christian.

“I had sounds in my head that I was able to pull out of the guitar,” Tariq says. “I could bend in tune, I had good tone and I had good vibrato. I picked them up from B.B. King and Albert King – they had great vibrato, great touch, great tone, and they were really expressive.”

He moved to Memphis after high school, attending college and playing upright bass in jazz bands around town. His time on Beale Street prepared him for his first solo album, 2025’s Jad Tariq Sings, and his recent release, Precious Company, which came out in September.

He went on a creative spree at the end of 2025, penning 15 songs in 10 days by committing to writing every day. Instead of decamping to one of Memphis’ legendary studios like Royal or Sam Phillips Recording Service, though, he set up his band in his living room and let it rip live.

“You get a lot of dynamics that way,” he says. “The band has to really stay under you – and that doesn’t just mean volume. It means that whatever you’re singing or whatever story you’re telling, they’ve got to find a way to be the rock underneath it, and push whatever you’re doing to the front.”

Tariq says used “pretty rudimentary” equipment, without even a basic headphone monitor system, as he led his band through jump-blues tunes like Poor Me and September Moon, relying on the spontaneity in the room. “We might have run it down once to make sure we had the form, and then boom – one take.”

He maintains he’s no gear obsessive; but his minimalist, decidedly vintage gear choices point to at least a strong preference. His current objects of affection are a ’49 Gibson ES-5 archtop and a replica Fender Tweed Deluxe 5E3. “That was the whole signal chain,” he says. “The microphone was an RCA BK-5 ribbon, and it was kind of off the amp.”

Nothing was close mic’d. “A lot of the guitar tone on the record really is the bleed,” he says. “It’s a pretty ambient guitar sound. There’s no reverb on it, but there’s a whole lot of room sound.”

One thing Precious Company lacks for sure is fussiness. Like the ethos behind his makeshift studio the album is about having fun playing music and grounding it in a way listeners can relate to.

“I love recordings where you can sort of picture the room the band’s in,” Tariq says. “You get a really good sense of the space. That’s what we go for.”

• Catch Tariq live in Memphis over the coming months. Precious Company is out now.

Phil Collen has looked back on his surprising switch to heavy guitar strings – and revealed it was Gary Moore who set him on his path to conversion.

The Def Leppard guitarist is a proponent of fretboard pyro. He plays a high-performance signature twist on the Jackson Dinky, and those US Custom Shop builds have all the luxuries to make them easy to play.

Collen can play a ripping solo with the best of them. But he likes a guitar that fights back. The production models of his PC-1 signature guitar – most recently reimagined as the pre-relic’d PC1-E Mexican-built Pro Series model – have skinny necks as per the brand’s house style, and yet Collen will get his tech to find him baseball bat necks.

Those signatures also ship with 9-gauge strings, but Collen puts 13s on his own. In the new issue of Guitarist, Collen explains exactly why he likes heavy electric guitar strings – and it all goes back to his early touring adventures with Def Leppard, when one of his all-time heroes was opening the show for them.

“Back on Def Leppard’s Pyromania tour, Gary Moore was opening for us,” recalls Collen. “I went into his dressing room and saw the famous Peter Green Les Paul. I said, ‘Is that the Peter Green Les Paul?’ and Gary said, ‘Yeah, do you want to play it?’ So he picked up another guitar and we jammed for about an hour.”

This was a real pinch-me moment for Collen. It was also life changing. Greeny was working its magic on him, and he liked how Moore had set the guitar up.

“He had 10s on the Les Paul – I was used to playing nines, but I loved the feel,” says Collen.

Collen duly started using 10s. But that’s the funny thing about the guitar; you start going down the rabbit-hole, and you keep going deeper. The heavier gauge strings allowed him to express himself better.

“I use 13s to 54s now,” says Collen. “After a while I moved up to 11s, then 12s and eventually 13s. I’ve probably been using 13s for about 10 years now. Your fingers get stronger, and I like being able to really lay into the guitar.”

Collen isn’t the first high-profile player to use heavy strings on his electric guitar. Stevie Ray Vaughan was the most-famous proponent of strings like power cables.

Malcolm Young liked a set of 12s, and the Edge and Joe Bonamassa string up with a set of 11s, which is still pretty heavy – and it feels like a bigger step up from nines to 10s. Jim Adkins of Jimmy Eat World uses 13s, as does Bonamassa’s rhythm guitarist and co-producer Josh Smith.

And if you think these guys are nuts, then just consider Dick Dale. He used a set of 16s.

You can read this Phil Collen interview in full in the latest issue of Guitarist – better still, save and subscribe.

Car Bomb have never been particularly interested in doing things the conventional way. Since releasing their debut album in 2007, the Long Island outfit have carved out a reputation for some of the most unpredictable, rhythmically complex and downright punishing music in modern metal.

But while their music might be anything but straightforward, their approach to running the band has always been refreshingly simple: do things on their own terms, and make the music they want to hear.

“When we started, it was just three metal guys trying to write some ridiculous music,” says bassist Jon Modell. “We were quite old-school in the way we worked back then – we would just get in a room and throw ideas at each other.”

A combination of word-of-mouth connections and the band’s own grassroots efforts helped bring Car Bomb to the attention of Relapse Records, setting the stage for their debut release.

“I had a friend who worked for Relapse Records. He put our name forward, and eventually, the label approached us about releasing our first record.

“This was during the MySpace days, so we’d spent a lot of time pushing ourselves and building an audience that way. We’d also become friendly with Joe from Gojira, who sang on one of our songs, and had taken us out on tour in 2009.”

Car Bomb decided to take matters into their own hands for their second album, parting ways with Relapse Records and choosing to go it alone.

“Relapse were great. They didn’t do anything wrong; I think we just couldn’t give them enough. We weren't touring enough for them, and we weren't writing music quickly enough either. We're very much on our own schedule, so it was a mutual decision.

“We’re still friendly with those guys, but we wanted to see whether we could do it ourselves, and we thought we had the pieces in place to make that happen. Giving away the rights to our music was never something we were interested in.”

You mentioned that another of your early ambitions was to tour with Meshuggah.

The password to our band website was ‘TourWithMeshuggah’, but it was a joke – it was never meant to happen. It was an aspirational goal, and we’d laugh about it because we thought there was no way they were ever going to tour with us.

Then, in 2014, they reached out. They were celebrating their 25th anniversary, around the time of Koloss, and they brought us over to Europe for a short run of shows. It was completely surreal. We couldn’t believe it was happening.

Who were your other musical reference points at the time?

Meshuggah and The Dillinger Escape Plan, for sure. We were also listening to Fantômas, The Locust and, of course, Mr. Bungle. Elliot comes from more of a jazz background, and he and I are big Frank Zappa fans.

Our guitarist, Greg, is more into electronic music. Autechre and Aphex Twin are practically his Bible, and he’s also a big Failure fan. We threw all those influences into a blender, and somehow Car Bomb is what came out.

Does Greg’s approach to guitar influence your bass playing?

Absolutely. Greg is such a wild guitar player. He’s really into all the sub-menus of the Axe-Fx, and he’ll have pitch-shifters going down and up at the same time. You hear something like that and then have to figure out what you’re going to do with it. Finding things to work with in that space has been really interesting.

Obviously, there’s also the rhythmic side of things. We’re a pretty intense band, so working all that stuff out is a big part of the challenge.

You originally played fingerstyle before moving to a pick.

I was a fingerstyle player when Car Bomb started, but I had to move to a pick because the music was becoming too demanding. Either that, or I didn’t have enough faith in myself to do it with my thumb! Learning to play with a pick just seemed more achievable than trying to develop my thumb technique.

Back then, Victor Wooten was the only guy I could think of who was doing that kind of thing. Maybe if I’d started playing now, I’d have developed that technique further. There are guys like Jacob Umansky who are absolutely ridiculous with it.

When did you first start playing Dingwall basses?

I found one towards the end of 2015, just in time to record Meta in 2016. I have five or six Dingwall basses now, and they’re all I ever want to play.

Before that, I went through quite a few different instruments. At the beginning of Car Bomb, I was playing a Modulus, followed by a five-string Fender P-Bass.

I also had this really badass five-string Rickenbacker. It had a standard four-string neck, but they’d fitted a five-string bridge, so the string spacing was incredibly tight. It was quite difficult to play, but it looked amazing.

Then I started looking for something that could really handle the low tunings we were using for Meta. I was online searching for basses when I came across a live video of Nolly playing a Dingwall, and I haven’t looked back since.

What's your live rig looking like at the moment?

It’s very simple. I’m using an old-school Gallien-Krueger 1001RB head, along with a Darkglass Microtubes B7K Ultra. I also have a Fortin ZUUL Noise Gate and a Darkglass Hyper Luminal Compressor.

Do you still enjoy having an amplifier and cabinets on stage?

I really do. There’s something about feeling the sound behind me and in my ears. I only moved over to in-ear monitors in the last couple of years, so the thought of dropping the cabinets is quite appealing, but I’m not quite there yet.

Marcin Patrzalek is one of the acoustic guitar’s most formidable talents: a jaw-dropping percussive player, meticulous arranger, and dramatic performer. But his new single, PANICATTACK, takes his playing in its boldest direction yet: electric.

But before you yell ‘Judas!’, rest assured, the Polish wizard’s electric playing is just as fierce as his acoustic approach, all flying fingerstyle and harmonic minor flourishes.

“I’m a really loud player on acoustic guitar,” Marcin tells GW. “That’s the reputation I have. A lot of the things I play are very loud, dynamic, and pretty in-your-face. That’s just who I am as a person and as a musician.

“Because I play so hard on acoustic, I can bring that same approach to electric without it overpowering the other instrument too much.”

Marcin chops and changes between acoustic and electric to match the mood of the track – literally swapping guitars mid-music video. His jagged electric playing was inspired by everyone from Tosin Abasi to Deftones, Tame Impala, and Tool.

But the guitarist sought to team those heavier styles with his newfound passion for clubbing, and Polyphia producer RJ Pasin was key in developing not only the throbbing EDM production but also the guitar approach. The two had previously collaborated on Art of Guitar – 2025’s highest-streaming instrumental track.

“RJ is a beast,” Marcin says. “His signature crunch is a big part of this track. There’s a particular line that comes right after the first hook. That exact two-bar phrase was written by RJ, and it really inspired me to build more around it.”

Electric guitar is a relatively new instrument for Marcin. He started with classical guitar, developing into flamenco and percussive acoustic. Electric came later.

“I wanted to go to college in the States, at Berklee, and everyone there plays jazz. Jazz is a huge deal for admissions. That’s why I picked up the electric guitar: to improvise.

“I never really loved electric guitar until about a year and a half ago, when I started getting into a heavier sound.”

Ibanez hooked him up with a new HSS Premium for the electric parts, which he ran into the Neural DSP Archetype: Petrucci plugin. “As someone who isn’t traditionally an electric guitar player, being able to do all of this on my laptop is a game changer.”

Acoustics were his signature MRC10, recorded with a Manley microphone running through a Manley preamp into a MOTU UltraLite audio interface. A new custom Ibanez also features on the track and in the opening shot of the video, its fretboard squiggle looming as large as Marcin’s sonic signature on the song itself.

It all points towards a big 2027: a new album, complete with vocals, and a daring new approach to the electric/acoustic paradigm. And anything that brings guitar into the wider collective consciousness is good news in our book.

“There’s a really big shift coming in my music. One thing people can expect is a much greater emphasis on original music and original compositions. PANICATTACK is just the start.

“The music is going to be much darker and heavier. It’s also going to be a completely self-produced, self-created, self-directed, and self-written record. I’m extremely excited about it.”

• PANICATTACK is out now.

The primal urge to play guitar with fire, skill and dizzying velocity is as old as rock ’n’ roll itself. But while the godfather of shred is debatable – you could equally fight the corner for Les Paul, Ritchie Blackmore, Alvin Lee, Eddie Van Halen and Yngwie Malmsteen – there’s no doubting the guitarists who have flown the flag highest since the mid-’80s.

It hardly needs restating that Joe Satriani and Steve Vai were – and are – mindblowing players. But the New Yorkers also redrew the landscape of instrumental guitar. By launching the all-star G3 tour in 1996 – an era in which Satriani recalls that hotshot guitar players were told: “Don’t stand next to that guy because he’s your competitor” – the pair proved virtuosity and community needn’t be mutually exclusive.

But does shred still have a place in the modern world? With the web churning out gunslingers, and the limits of human physiology surely now in sight, is the pursuit of hard, cold technical prowess, as Keith Richards once put it, “a dead-end street”?

As Satch and Vai hit the promotional trail for their first joint studio album, The Sea Of Emotion, they open up on the new material and take the pulse of the scene they helped create.

Let’s start with The Sea Of Emotion. Are you pleased with how the album’s come out?

Joe Satriani: Well, it’s too late now [laughs].

Steve Vai: My affection for it grows every time I listen. And it started out very high.

You’ve helmed your respective solo careers for decades now. What was it like relinquishing a little control on this joint album?

Satriani: When we’re working together, it’s the best feeling of comradeship, competition and support all wrapped up into one. If there was one person I would trust to push me into areas I didn’t think I could play – or say, “That sucks, Joe, can you do something else?” – it would be Steve.

Vai: Well, the feeling is mutual. It takes a certain chemistry to help you to raise your own bar. But it just happened so organically. Each of us knew if something was working or not. When Joe would write back and go, “You know what? Let’s put this one on the shelf” – because we had, like, 17 tracks we were working on – I would always instinctively feel, “Yeah, he’s right.”

Satriani: If we’re critiquing each other about how we build things, y’know, I [tend to] want to underproduce something and Steve might want to overproduce something. I’m always like, “Sorry, I only have two guitar parts for this song.” And he’s like, “Sorry, I’ve only got 17 guitars already on this song.” But somewhere it all makes sense.

Which guitar parts really pushed you out of your comfort zone?

Satriani: The nylon-string intro to The Sea Of Emotion Pt 2. When I first composed that, I had full distortion, stereo echo, chorus, and I’m playing it on electric guitar. And I’m so excited, like, ‘This is huge!’ But then reality sets in.

So the song made this journey from a grown man who still thinks like a 14-year-old, sitting by his amplifier, having a rock ’n’ roll moment, to seeing that I should play it on a nylon-string and leave space for what Steve did, which is that electric violin-type dreamscape.

But playing that on nylon-string – and keeping it well intonated and not squeaky – was hard because I hardly ever play those instruments. It was a piece of cake on the electric but not on the acoustic.

Vai: One of the big challenges for me was Old Sins Have Long Shadows. Joe had a riff and I wanted to create something that didn’t get in the way but didn’t copy it. When I approach a part, there’s kind of two sides of me.

One of them is thinking, [panicked] “My God, what am I going to do? I don’t want to ruin this!” Then there’s the part of me that just shuts up and waits. And what came out was, “You’re gonna make it sound like a ghost and play a fretless guitar.”

Fretless guitars – they’re not my expertise. I struggle with them. But to get that ghostly, weird, offbeat riff, it had to be, y’know? All the vibrato and little shakes – it doesn’t sound like a guitar. It sounds like a ghostly spirit.

How did you react to that contribution, Joe?

Satriani: “It’s completely insane that Steve would think that way. When he comes up with these parts, the first time you hear it, you often go, “What the hell is that?” But the next time you hear it, if that track isn’t on there, you go, “Well, where’s that really cool part?”

Vai: For me, the thing that’s always fascinated me to death about Joe is just his musical instincts. He’s able to just touch the notes in a way that perfectly fits. Like, after you hear what he does, you just think, “Well, it really couldn’t have been anything else,” y’know?

How do you see the health of the instrumental guitar scene today, compared with when you guys set out back in the early ’80s?

Satriani: It’s changed a lot. There’s less attention on it. But the market is bigger because the world has opened up. When Steve and I started out, we didn’t have the internet to tell everyone, all at the same time, that we had a new album coming out. So we didn’t get invitations to tour the world. But as the internet opened up the planet to us, we got invited to play everywhere.

We could literally stay on the road 12 months out of the year. So that’s been wonderful for us. But for instrumental guitarists who are just starting out? The talent is fantastic. The technique is the best it’s ever been. But their only outlet is Instagram or TikTok, and that is changing how they play because they figure, “I only got 30 seconds, I better give them everything, or dress up, do something really weird, play with my cat on my head.”

It’s totally different from, let’s say, when I went to a New York club to see Allan Holdsworth back in the ’70s. He’s up there thinking, “Well, I got three hours to play in front of 14 people.” It was a very poorly attended event [laughs]. But can you imagine if Allan was 18 today and looking to make a name for himself – I mean, can you imagine his Instagram posts?

Do you think guitarists can realistically get much more technical?

Vai: Yes, but it’s going to depend on a unique individual to do it. The funny thing about us humans is that we come across something that feels new and we think, “That’s it, it’s not going anyplace from here.” It’s a kind of ignorance and arrogance.

There’s always those individuals who will not give up, who look at the intense guitar technique that’s already there and say, “Okay, this is where I start.” Those glass ceilings are always shattered by people who don’t even recognise the ceiling.

And God knows where they’re going to go. Even in the ’90s, when shreddy ’80s guitar playing took a hit, it seemed there was this underground movement of kids just wanting to shred the shit out of the instrument. They’re the ones that will take that particular torch and burn it brighter. When I listen to Tosin Abasi in Animals As Leaders, say, he’s doing something really melodically challenging. It sounds different.

Do you hear young players, Joe, who prick up your ears?

Satriani: Every single day. Some of them have been around for a long time: I just never knew about it. And some are just kids. Y’know, all of a sudden, there’s a kid from New York or Tokyo or Moscow or China, and you go, ‘Oh wow, that’s elevated the level of guitar playing.’ Like, you take two players like Alyssa Day and Ariel Posen. They’re from different worlds, but they’re both amazingly accomplished players using the internet to spread their musical message.

What do you think is the key to writing great instrumental music?

Vai: The first artist that really moved me was Jeff Beck. He was handing you the melody on a silver platter. There was something in Beck’s melodies that made songs sound like pieces of standalone music, y’know, with a voice.

I thought Carlos Santana was doing some really cool stuff, and then, of course, there was more fusion stuff like Al Di Meola and John McLaughlin. But really, I didn’t hear [those melodies] again until Joe. And then, on top of that, the sheer technical evolution of the instrument in his hands.

I’m sure there’s a lot of beautiful instrumental guitar records that have come along since then. And there’s a lot of great contemporary players doing fascinating, impossible things, technique-wise. But for my personal ears, some of it lacks those kind of melodies that are handed to you on a silver platter. And I think that’s the thing that gives artists and songs real shelf life.

Would you agree or disagree that the internet has made people better technical players?

Satriani: Well, it’s helped me a lot. I’ll give you two examples. A couple of years ago, I was listening to a song called 4+20 by Stephen Stills. It’s an acoustic song, just him playing acoustic, Travis picking while he’s singing. It sounds like a Civil War-era kind of a song. I always loved it, always thought it was really spooky and beautiful.

Then I thought, you know, “I don’t know how to play that.” How stupid is that? Like, I can play all this stuff. I’ve been listening to this song since I’ve been a teenager and I don’t know how to play it.

Obviously, within about 30 seconds, I’m looking at a guy on YouTube going, “This is how you tune your guitar for 4+20.” A minute later, there I am playing it and I’m like the happiest kid in the world, you know?

Another example is when Alex [Van Halen] and Dave [Lee Roth] called me about the Eddie Van Halen tribute tour. After I explained to them, “I don’t know how to play any of those songs” – because I’ve avoided it on purpose, y’know? – I thought, “Well, damn, how do you play that stuff anyway?” It’s basically a sort of glorified cover gig but in the most extreme. Covering Robert Fripp and Eddie Van Halen – that’s like super-extreme and it took a lot of physical work.

So, of course, the internet opened me up to this community of thousands of amazing players who have dedicated themselves to figuring out exactly how Eddie played all these songs. And when you see a 15-year-old nail Mean Streets, you go, “Okay, it’s achievable.”

Was this new album recorded nose-to-nose or remotely?

Satriani: The only time we were together was when we recorded Glenn Hughes singing I Wanna Play My Guitar at Steve’s house. The rest of the time we were engineering on our own in our separate pods, separated by 400 miles.

Vai: There is actually one little snippet we did play together because the technology to record remotely didn’t exist. That’s the intro to The Sea Of Emotion Part 3: Reflections On A Year And A Half. That was recorded during one of my guitar lessons with Joe when I was, like, 13.

We still don’t even know who played what, but it’s eight minutes of these teenage kids having total freedom. So I took a little snippet of that. That’s the only time on the record we’re sitting in the same room playing together. And it was over 50 years ago.

So what guitars were you both playing when you recorded the new album?

Satriani: [Deadpan] I did all my guitar parts on the Hydra.

Vai: So did I – at the same time [laughs]!

Satriani: No, it was a small cache of my ‘home’ guitars. So I had my [Ibanez] ‘Chrome Boy’, the very first gold JS, the MCR #2, and the Paisley prototype. I had a Taylor nylon, a Guild acoustic 12-string, my ’72 P-Bass and a Jerry Jones sitar. Steve and I are always putting sitars on our albums. No amps, no mics. Basically, SansAmp, Tonex, Brainworx plug-ins, Neural DSP…

Vai: Similar to Joe, a lot of my gear was in transit. So I used JEMs and PIAs – the Evo, Flo III, my black onyx PIA. And I have this crazy seven-string sitar Sterling Ball made for me.

So you guys have both come around to plugins?

Vai: After I heard Joe’s album, The Elephants of Mars [2022], he told me he’d used plugins. And I was stunned because I had a very snobbish attitude: ‘Oh, you have to have microphones.’ So I started fooling around with SansAmp and realised how easy it is. Now, it’s mostly the Neural stuff that I use.

There were a couple of things where I still used a combination of my [Carvin] Legacy 3 amp and my Synergy module. And I would mic things ad nauseum. Y’know, I’d have two stereo cabs, three mics on the front of each, one in the back, then 4ft away. And then sets of stereo 414 room mics. And it’s nice… but it’s a lot of setup, a lot of work.

You both have such towering reputations. Every time you put your fingers to a fretboard, do you think, ‘This has to be amazing,’ or does that not cross your mind?

Satriani: It’s funny. It doesn’t bother me that much when I’m working on my own stuff. It certainly was a concern these last couple of years where I had to play like somebody else. When I had to play with Van Halen, a couple of times I was thinking, “Oh, I bet people in the audience are thinking that it doesn’t sound exactly like the albums.” But Steve and I both had to get over that with our extracurricular gigs.

Finally, which two guitarists would you most like to see record an album together?

Satriani: I mean, we don’t have enough Jimmy Page, first of all. Steve and I really love Jimmy Page, and he just hasn’t recorded enough for us, if I’m going to be selfish about it. If he was a friend of mine, I’d call him up and I’d say, “Will you please record yourself more?” But who would you pair with Page? I mean, Jimmy Page and Brian May…

Vai: Yeah, they would work together well, I think.

Satriani: Or Tony Iommi and Page would be good. Two guys that are so close to each other in where they come from and when they were born and how they grew up, but wow, what different players and entirely different composers. I’d be fascinated to hear that.

• The Sea of Emotion is out now via earMUSIC.
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

Julian Lage says it blew his mind when he was invited to play Eric Clapton’s Crossroads festival by the man himself.

Like many, the jazz virtuoso was drawn towards the guitar through Clapton’s playing, albeit in a roundabout way. So having the influential bluesman approach him out of the blue was an unreal moment for Lage.

“I was on tour in Europe playing solo guitar,” he explains to Guitar Center about how he got involved in the recent Crossroads Festival. “I got [forwarded] an email from my manager, Aaron Sawyer, from Eric. I remember Aaron said, ‘Well, I can verify this is the Eric Clapton; this is legitimate,’ and it blew my mind.”

Lage appeared at Clapton’s star-studded Crossroads in late September alongside the likes of John Mayer, Derek Trucks, and Joe Bonamassa. His own performance saw him and his trio team up with Trey Anastasio to play his original song, Northern Shuffle.

It was another footnote in what has been a hectic year for Lage, who became a surprise addition to Bob Dylan’s band, and joined the Tedeschi Trucks Band in New York for an extended, shred-laden jam.

Getting recognition from Clapton, though, is understandably the feather in his cap.

“You have to understand that many people started playing guitar because of him,” Lage beams. “When his Unplugged album came out, that was what inspired my father to get a guitar, which in turn inspired me to want to play with my father. It all comes from him.

“So it blew my mind,” he repeats. “I wrote immediately back to him and just said I would be thrilled, and thank you for being such an inspiration, and then the rest is history. It was a memorable thing.”

Lage has been balancing his own touring commitments with life in Dylan’s band in recent months, having been invited into a greatly rotating cast of players. Jimmie Vaughan and Jad Tariq have also made appearances, after Dylan lost two long-term members earlier this year. Last month, Dylan revealed his sixth guitarist in five months.

Elsewhere, Lage sat down with Al Di Meola and Guitar World to discuss everything from sloppy solos to dark secrets, and has reacted to Alter Bridge’s two guitarists heaping praise on him.

Michael J. Fox – perhaps best known among guitar heads for his role as Marty McFly in Back to the Future – inspired the members of British powerhouse Coldplay to form a band. In 2024, things came full circle when he joined the band on stage during their record-breaking fifth headline performance at Glastonbury.

Fox, complete with a peach/pink Fender Strat, joined Coldplay on their 2021 track Humankind, before layering up guitarist Jonny Buckland’s lead line on the career-defining Fix You. Fast forward two years, and Fox is looking back on that special show.

“A well-timed kick can seal the show,” he tells Esquire. Fox, who was diagnosed with young-onset Parkinson’s at the age of 29, reveals that he couldn’t properly “hold the guitar” and “was having a hard time playing it.”

However, there was one thing that led him to – as he himself puts it – steal the show.

“There was a change in tempo, and I had just been kicking in rehearsal. I rehearsed a few times. I kept kicking, and I didn't think about it. It just was an expression of the music.

“We're in front of 300,000 people playing the song. Comes the part where I kick. I kick, and fireworks went off and explosions. They saw it in rehearsal, and they timed it for this thing. So it scared the hell out of me. It’s like, ‘Whoa! What happened?’ It was this explosion.” Undoubtedly, “300,000 people went nuts.”

Fox had also joined Coldplay onstage on other occasions. In 2016, he walked onto the stage at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, Les Paul in hand, and joined the band for renditions of Johnny B. Goode and Earth Angel – a direct homage to Back to the Future and Marty McFly and the Starlighters. At the time, Martin called the experience a “dream come true.”

The Hollywood guitarist continued his playing streak last year when he locked fretboards with Jackson Browne at a charity gala.

Last week, the ears of guitarists the world over pricked up when John Fusco, screenwriter of the beloved, guitar-centric 1986 film Crossroads, revealed to Guitar World that he and Ralph Macchio were developing a sequel.

The original movie centers around a young guitarist named Eugene – played by Macchio, best known his starring role in The Karate Kid – who goes on a journey of discovering the joys of the blues. After a winding series of events, he eventually finds himself in a guitar duel with Jack Butler – played by a Jackson-wielding Steve Vai – a guitarist who sold his soul to the devil for his, well, devilish abilities. It makes sense if you watch the movie, trust.

When asked by Guitar World if he’d be down to appear in a potential sequel, Vai seemed to be game. “I know Ralph wants to kick my ass,” he told us with a laugh. “Jack Butler needs his revenge!”

But earlier this week, Vai clarified that he had only heard rumors about the film, and that if it did end up happening, it was unlikely that he’d be involved.

While that’s disappointing, it does beg the question: surely, if a Crossroads 2 did come to pass, its apex would be another guitar duel. If so, who should take Vai’s place?

This question was tossed around between us GW.com muckrakers quite a bit over the past 24 hours, and we have some ideas...

Tosin Abasi has this sewn up, surely? The chops are undeniable, and he certainly fits the next-generation bill. He has past ’80s revival experience, having been the designated “air shredder” for 2020’s Bill and Ted reboot. And dude is already jacked like an end-of-level boss.

If John Fusco and co wanted to go in a different direction, Marcin plays acoustic guitar like the devil incarnate. His performances – all whiplash fretboard taps and percussive body beatdowns – are pure drama. He’d be perfect.

Nita Strauss would also embody the role. Her fluid playing nods to Vai, one of her early shred heroes, but the Alice Cooper gig could give her the edge when it comes to theatrical flair. Especially if the second film leans more into the horror of modern-day ‘vampires play the blues’ epic Sinners.

I take my casting very seriously. So, really, I’d want to know the plot, the character outline, the goddamn motivation, before I start picking players. Still, if we take our cues from the valuable lessons of the original Karate Kid Crossroads, it’s about a generic youth pulling off a virtuosic takedown in the face of devilish wizardry and unmatched resources.

However, now we’ve all become numb to YouTube mini maestros and AI-augmented influencers, I think it might be truer to our times to flip the script for Crossroads 2026 and not just make it a battle of speed. Perhaps with a working title of Crossroads 2: I'm Actually More of a Feel Player, like David Gilmour.

For my sequel, then, I can envision any number of technical titans shredding our faces off with some grating djent tones, but then picture this: Ralph Macchio Jr. (or whoever) fires back with a series of bullet-curving bends, over-dubbed by Chris Buck, Marcus King, or Christone ‘Kingfish’ Ingram. Cut to the villain. A solitary tear falls on the dust. Fade to black.

It would also be fun to flip the gear choices of the original Eugene, with his down-home guitar. After all, what kid is playing a US Telecaster in 2026? These days he’s more likely show up with a modded Harley Benton and a Tonex pedal. In that case, you’d need a much-maligned vintage obsessive with a bevvy of ’Bursts and lightning fretwork to play the villain. But, er... where on Earth would we find such a person?

Or maybe I would cast an actual villain. A Giacomo Turra-type influencer. Picture the scene: just as all hope seems lost for our hero, the tech glitches exposing the real player beneath, warts ’n’ all. The crowd falls silent. A whistle sounds in the distance. Then Danny Sapko crashes through the wall riding an ACTUAL STEAM TRAIN, yelling ‘Choo choo, ya bastards!’

The possibilities are endless…

The first to come to my mind was Guthrie Govan. Though he’s not the new kid on the block, his chops are, of course, otherworldly, and he’s already got the Hollywood credits! What’s a better classroom for learning cinematic shredding than in the live band of one of the greatest film composers of all time?

I’d also argue in favor of St. Vincent. She’s a virtuoso and a stylistic wildcard who can play pretty much anything – there’s not a cliché guitar lick to be found in her entire catalog. Plus, her game-changing signature guitar still looks futuristic, a decade on.

Finally, though he’s not a whole lot younger than Vai, I feel that John Petrucci should also be given consideration. We all know about his technical abilities, of course, but keep the vivid themes of Dream Theater’s music in mind – Petrucci knows how to make shredding accompany, and color, a story.

A Crossroads sequel would be pointless unless it showed just how radically guitar music has changed since the 1980s. A shred-off would be fun to watch, sure, but realistically who is going to step in and out-speed Vai’s chops in the original?

Therefore, the only answer to this question I will accept is Tim Henson. It’s a no-brainer; in fact, maybe it’s too obvious. Ralph Macchio has the sleight of hand to keep up with Vai, but what happens when Henson rocks up in his fluffy hoody and sunglasses, and starts ripping Polyphia riffs on an eight-string? If it were me, I’d probably run and hide.

Today’s pre-eminent shredder Matteo Mancuso could be a good shout if we want to keep things more conventionally virtuosic. In a wicked twist of fate, Vai was one of the earliest to champion Mancuso. It almost feels written in the stars.

Oh, and the John Mayer fan in me would also like to think he could be a dark horse contender. Let’s not forget, Mayer can shred. And if it was a stank face competition, Macchio wouldn’t stand a chance.

• Who do you think could fill Vai’s devilish shoes in a Crossroads sequel? Let us know in the comments.

Jimmy Page hasn’t performed publicly since the 2023 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony, when he paid tribute to Link Wray. Now, while attending this year’s Music Industry Trusts Awards in London, he has confirmed that his touring days are well and truly behind him.

“The whole sort of, ‘Living out of a suitcase, bags go down at seven in the morning, and then you leave for the plane at midday,’ that doesn’t really appeal to me any more,” Page told The Sun. “But the idea of playing does, and I am still playing – of course I am.”

Page hasn’t toured since 2000, when he wrapped up the Excess All Areas tour with the Black Crowes. Since then, his live appearances have been few and far between. His most recent full-length performance was at the Led Zeppelin reunion in 2007, which saw him reunite with Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and drummer Jason Bonham, son of late Zeppelin drummer John Bonham.

The one-off show, which took place at London's O2 Arena and was staged as a tribute to the late Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun, saw the band perform 16 songs from across their career.

While Page is still playing, he isn't actively releasing material for public consumption. He released what may or may not count as his latest “official” album, Lucifer Rising and Other Sound Tracks, in 2012. This avant-garde record, available only through his website, contained music he produced but never used for the Kenneth Anger movie, Lucifer Rising.

Preceding that limited-edition release, he dropped Walking into Clarksdale with the Page and Plant project in 1998. That was just under three decades ago.

He went on to release the live album, Live at the Greek, with the Black Crowes in 2000, followed by several guest appearances, lending his chops to the 2006 Jerry Lee Lewis album, Last Man Standing, and Foo Fighters’ Live at Wembley Stadium in 2008. That same year, he also took a Led Zeppelin classic to China, for the closing ceremony of the 2008 Olympics.

These days, Page can be spotted at London gigs supporting up-and-coming bands, while his focus has shifted to signature gear releases, including a new 6W signature amp with a $10,000 price tag.

Bryan Bassett’s licks start Wild Cherry’s 1976 funk-rock classic, Play That Funky Music – but the 72-year-old Pittsburgh native doesn’t consider himself a funk guitarist. “I’m a blues-rock player,” he says. “I do have a funky overtone. But Jeff Beck is number one for me. Nobody could play like him.”

Following Bassett’s arena-dominating days with Wild Cherry, he became the lead guitarist for “Lonesome” Dave Peverett’s version of Foghat in 1989. He went on to join Molly Hatchet, and since 1999, he’s been with Foghat proper.

“The club scene in the ’60s and ’70s was a training ground,” he says. “You had to learn a list of new hit songs every couple of weeks. Covering funk by the Commodores, as well as Ritchie Blackmore and Jimmy Page, served me well.”

Foghat are currently on the road. They just released Live & Loud Across the USA, and when the road trip finishes, it’s back to studio for a follow-up to 2023’s Sonic Mojo.

“The fanbase still comes out and sees us, so we honor the songbook,” Bassett says. “Sonic Mojo went to number one on the Billboard Blues charts. That was great for all of us ‘new’ guys – validation for sure.”

How did you cut your teeth on guitar?

I got a real interest in playing in high school. My friends and I would play coffee houses. The club scene was alive then; there were dozens of places playing music every day of the week. In the late ’60s and early ’70s you could make a pretty decent living playing the club circuit.

What led you to turn pro?

I met Rob Parissi, who had a band called Wild Cherry, but it had disbanded. I always admired him; I said, “If you ever reform your band, give me a buzz.” He did, and we got to work together in Wild Cherry – but we were playing clubs.

What gear were you using?

My first great amp was a Hiwatt 50; I loved it. I should have never gotten rid of it, but I couldn’t fit it in my station wagon! I used that and a Fender black[-panel] Super Reverb, which is still one of the best-sounding amps.

I never got into pedals; I always depended on the amplifier. I was using my first great guitar, a ’68 Gibson Les Paul Goldtop with P-90s, and I had another Les Paul from the early ’70s, a Tobacco Sunburst.

Wild Cherry moved up from clubs once Play That Funky Music hit. What did you use for that session?

I borrowed my friend’s blonde maple Fender Strat for that session. It had a black pickguard and it was probably from the early ’70s. I played that through a Music Man 410, which I loved.

How did Funky Music come about?

We loved Zeppelin, Rainbow and ZZ Top, but bands like The Bee Gees, Earth, Wind & Fire and all that were turning up on the club scene. There was this dance-and-R&B vibe. Someone said to our drummer, ‘You better start playing some funky music, white boy!’ We laughed about it in the dressing room, but Rob started writing lyrics then and there.

When we played it live, people would start hitting the dance floor – that was before it was even recorded. Back then jukeboxes were still a big deal, and we wanted to produce a single for those. While we were recording it the A&R guy for a label called Sweet City Records came in and liked what he heard. That’s how we ended up on Epic – Sweet City was a subsidiary.

They released it and we went from clubs to arenas. Within a month or two it went up the charts. It was a mind-blowing time. The recording was very straight-up – done in one or two takes. It was minimal, but it was pretty cool.

After Wild Cherry broke up in 1979, you got into production work before hooking up with Dave Peverett in his version of Foghat.

Dave had relocated to Orlando from England and he’d been on a hiatus. He was a sort of blues historian, and he came to see a band I was in that did a lot of those songs. We hit it off. We had natural chemistry.

He called and said, “I wanna go back out on tour. Wanna to go with me?” I said, ‘“Of course!” We went out as Lonesome Dave’s Foghat for maybe five years. I think he liked that my playing was immersed in blues and I was familiar with the songbook.

When Foghat’s original lineup got back together, you joined Molly Hatchet.

Yeah, Foghat reformed with the original members at the behest of the record company. I’d just finished a European tour with Dave and we’d been playing with Molly Hatchet. When I got back to the States, they knew I’d be out of a gig, so they said, “Wanna join our band?”

That lasted until 1999, when Rod Price retired from Foghat.

Dave called asked me to rejoin in ’99, and I’ve been here ever since.

Dave was sick with cancer in those final years. What was it like navigating that?

He played pretty much up until he passed away. He’d been undergoing treatments; I’d kept in touch with him while I was in Molly Hatchet. He called and said, “I feel like doing a bit of playing.” I said, “I’ll come over if you want to jam.’ He goes, “No, I want to go back out on tour.”

He was in remission from the big C. We got together in New York, rehearsed, and for a time I was playing in both Molly Hatchet and Foghat. Then Dave passed away. I was glad to have that last year of touring with him.

What’s it like in Foghat today?

It’s a lot of fun. There are signature lines in songs like Stone Blue and Slow Ride, where you want to play the notes on the record because that’s what’s in people’s heads.

What’s the key to nailing Slow Ride?

Rod was a fantastic slide player. I’ve spent the last 20-plus years trying to emulate his style. It’s almost impossible because he had the widest vibrato – and playing slide through a distorted Marshall stack is totally different than playing it clean with a Strat like, say, Bonnie Raitt’s style.

It’s a different technique where you’re muting more strings than you’re playing because of the volume and distortion. So the first thing about covering Rod is isolating your notes, and the second is intonation. If I tried his wide vibrato I’d sound out of tune!

He played with such ferocity – he was a very in-your-face, hardcore player. I’m a little more contained, but I’ve finally gotten to the point where I’m fairly satisfied with the way I play slide.

What’s next for you and Foghat?

We like to play, write and record, so we’ll be making another record of new material. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s great that we’re able to carry on the Foghat legacy and that great songbook, and still contribute to it with new material.

• Foghat have shows booked until May. Live & Loud Across the USA is out now.

Stevie Ray Vaughan was a once-in-a-generation guitar talent, and it is a tragedy that he left the world all too soon.

John Lee Hooker was among the first stars to have laid eyes – and ears – on the young guitarist, years before SRV weaved magic with a Dumble amp and a Fender Stratocaster on Texas Flood. What he saw left him convinced of his impending greatness.

“I loved him so much, it’s such a great loss,” Hooker told Total Guitar in March 1997, seven years after his death. “He was so good and such a nice person, too.”

Hooker has played with a who’s who of prolific players over the years, and so he knows a top tier guitarist when he sees one. Him dedicating his 1991 album, Mr. Lucky, to SRV, tells you everything about how highly he rated the Texan. He knew Vaughan was destined to become a legend.

“I remember before he got famous, he got on stage and jammed with me at Antone’s club in Austin, Texas,” Hooker recalled. “I told him then, I said: ‘One day you’re gonna be really famous’. He just looked down real modest and said ‘Yeah?’”

It’s not clear what year this was, but what is clear is that 1983 was a life-changing time for SRV. Bowie, having witnessed a “devastating” performance somewhere in Europe, enlisted him for his album Let’s Dance, which released in the April. His instant classic debut album followed in its footsteps just one month later.

Hooker said it was “without any doubt” his favourite record of all time. Fast-forward 14 years, and he felt the modern blues scene was at a loss without him.

“There’s a lot of good blues around but nobody that unique,” Hooker claimed at the time. “I’m listening but I ain’t hearing anything. I said to Jimmie [Vaughan, his brother], ‘There’ll never be another Stevie.’”

The Texas Flood amp, a Dumbleland Special with the serial number 005, was later used by John Mayer during SRV’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2015. Two of his guitars, meanwhile, have ended up in the extensive collection of filmmaker Robert Rodriguez.

Notably, the success of Texas Flood flew in the face of the blues diminishing public reputation as grunge took hold. He helped make blues guitar cool again, dragging it from small clubs onto MTV. Ideas were said to be “pouring out of him” before a helicopter crash took his life.

Guitar World has explored the legacy that could have been, while remembering the icon he was.

Poll a circle of prog-rock lifers on the bands who built the genre and the usual suspects – Pink Floyd, Genesis, Jethro Tull – will loom large. Certainly, there’s no arguing with the guitar contributions of David Gilmour, Steve Hackett, and Martin Barre. But let the conversation roam, and Jan Akkerman’s name will soon drop.

Born in the Netherlands in 1946, and playing accordion through his formative years, this classically trained alumnus of the Amsterdam Music Lyceum was a fascinating dichotomy, drawn to both the roar of Sixties rock and the delicate renaissance music, the latter inspired by his love of Julian Bream.

That musical curiosity was writ large in Akkerman’s breakout band of the early Seventies, Focus, who interwove jazz, classical, blues, and hard rock into a technicolor tapestry. Albums like Focus Plays Focus (1970) and Focus II, aka Moving Waves (1971), were game-changers, as was their much-underrated live record, At the Rainbow (1973).

“We certainly did not realize,” Akkerman tells Guitar World, “that what we were doing would cause the shit to hit the fan.”

One song in particular, Hocus Pocus, from Moving Waves, earned the most attention. “The thing with Hocus Pocus is that after playing it five million times, I got fed up,” Akkerman says. “For a moment, I said, ‘No more Hocus Pocus’, because I felt there were other things in the world.”

Akkerman duly moved on, finding further success with Focus 3 (1973), which featured another hit in Sylvia. Then came Hamburger Concerto (1974) and Mother Focus (1975), after which the guitarist quit Focus to kick off his solo and session career.

Back then, he never considered himself a prog talisman. And to a degree, he still doesn’t.

“I never thought about it in that sense,” he says. “For me, music is music. If it’s progressive, or whatever they want to call it – that’s fine. They can give it that name. But I never stick to one form of music.”

True to his word, since leaving Focus – and even after reuniting with the band in the Eighties and Nineties – Akkerman has run the gamut. Scan his activities through the decades and you’ll find him winning a Dutch Edison Award in 1976 for his solo concept album, Eli, experimenting with parallel fifths and guitar synths, even stretching himself in the studio with Jack Bruce, Phil Collins, Paco de Lucia, Ice-T, and B.B. King.

A nasty back injury from a car accident in ’92 nearly took him out of the game for good, but Akkerman returned, rattling off more solo music, with even more on the way.

“For me,” he says, “new music is an open field…”

How did your interest in jazz, classical, and rock form you as a player?

I come from an environment of business people, like scrap-metal merchants, secondhand car dealers, etc. I grew up in the middle of the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam and right around the corner from the red-light district, where music oozed out of bars at every corner.

It was not boring. [Laughs] There was a very famous button accordion player, a man called Johnny Meyer, who played all the jazz standards but also J.S. Bach. I was so mesmerized that I wanted to play the accordion. I was 5 or 6, and that music turned me on.

How did classical music impact your playing?

It led me to grow up. I was very curious. That’s a good way for everyone to be. I was very interested in discovering more types of music and instruments.

I ended up going to [Amsterdam Music Lyceum], and found I’d rather learn about new things all the time. My dad once took me to a cafe where an orchestra was rehearsing. They put me on a chair right in front. I was 12, and what other folks must have experienced when listening to Jimi Hendrix, I had listening to that orchestra.

Your first proper band was Brainbox. What gear were you using then?

I played a Gretsch White Falcon, a gift from my father because he had seen on TV a guitarist named Van Wood. By coincidence, my “uncle” became the importer of Gretsch drums and guitars. After that, I had a brown Country Gentleman and a ’63 White Falcon.

My old man told the importer, the “uncle” man, that if he wouldn’t make a gesture, let me have that White Falcon, he wouldn’t buy one screw, amp, or drum kit from him because all our instruments were bought from him. So we made him an offer… [Laughs]

How did you first meet Pierre van der Linden?

I had gotten sacked by Brainbox, which wasn’t so bad, as I was only in the band for seven months. For some reason – probably because of envy, jealousy, and all the other feelings one has in this world – I got kicked out. But before this, I was in a band with Pierre called Johnny and his Cellar Rockers, so I knew him from there.

Moving on to Focus, what gear were you playing?

I played a Tele on the first Focus LP because I loved the clear sound and sustain. But after a while, I started fiddling around and wound up with a body in the shape of a tulip because after my Gretsch, nothing could touch my White Falcon, so I wound up using my White Falcon again. But then, the manager of Focus at that time showed up with a 1954 Les Paul Black Beauty.

I embraced that guitar like my old lady, but there was something missing. I came to realize that I missed my Gretsch sound so much. So, I took my White Falcon pickups and put them in the black Les Paul, but I forgot how the wiring was done. So, I rewired them in the wrong way, which triggered this whole customization business. Nobody said thank you. [Laughs]

What amps did you use back then?

In the old days, I played a lot on German-made amps, like Dynacord suitcase amps. Later, I started using a Cordovox Leslie, and then a 60-watt white Marshall with a separate top, and after that, a Fender solid-state with two cabinets and 4x12-inch speakers and a bass cabinet with eight 10-inch speakers.

Even later, I had 40 Leslie cabinets. Great sound, but they were only 30 watts each, so I replaced them with two large cabinets powered by two 1,000-watt Crown amps, plus crossover filters… just to cheer them up. And I had a Colorsound preamp, which gave me all the FM and radio stations as an extra.

Focus II, also known as Moving Waves, ended up being a pillar of prog. What are your memories of it?

In those days, even before Focus, I listened to a lot of John Coltrane, Django Reinhardt, and all sorts of things. And with Hocus Pocus, I remember I was listening to a lot of the Beatles’ White Album. I loved the craziness of that album.

I’d be listening to that with one ear while having the other fixed on the television while sitting on the floor with a guitar. I’d come up with a heavy lick, and through that sort of process, tracks like Hocus Pocus and that album came together. That album has a lot of different influences layered in.

By then, was it still Fender amps and your Black Beauty?

Yes, in those days, it was mostly just my Les Paul. At first, I used big solid-state Fender amps, but the studio was too small, so I found smaller 30-watt amps for the recording. But I still felt like I needed amps with more sustain, so I went for a walk in London to Shaftesbury Avenue and I found some great gear.

I saw this thing called Colorsound [Supa Tonebender Fuzz], which had boost, treble, and bass. Instinctively, I felt that gadget would do the trick, and it did. The problem later, when touring the States, was that I had every radio station in the neighborhood because this thing not only boosted the guitar sound but also worked as an inductor.

What’s your tried-and-true secret for guitar tone?

The secret to my tone is purity of sound and balance, just like the old bebop players. I keep the bridge pickup full and the switch in the middle and use the neck pickup as a volume pot with the little finger.

How did Hocus Pocus come about?

I heard a song by Frank Zappa called Willie the Pimp, which was in the same category as the Beatles or Rolling Stones but more genuine. This triggered the old R&R feel in me, not realizing how good it felt playing it, and of course, [Focus vocalist] Thijs Van Leer started to yodel – with the result everybody knows now.

Did its success take you by surprise?

In a way, yes. I guess it did alright in the polls, right? It’s a funny album because there’s a lot of heavy rock on there, but also yodeling to the point where it’s almost half opera. [Laughs] It was kind of like a big opera-type story; the only thing missing was stabbing a knife in each other’s back, but that happened later anyway. As for me, I like the opening lick – what comes after that, it’s beyond my budget.

I’ve always loved the 15-part suite, Eruption.

With Eruption, that was kind of this weird, patched-together thing. It was a true conglomeration of ideas. That’s the nice thing about fusion, jazz, and even rock – there’s things you can’t calculate in advance, but sometimes, in the right place, or at the right time, they come together.

Eruption was a sort of liberation. Drummer Pierre van der Linden always wanted to experiment with different styles, just like me. And I wanted to surprise him and gave him a copy of Concerto for Orchestra by Béla Bartók. That triggered van Leer and the form for Moving Waves! The second Focus album was set.

Another classic was Sylvia from Focus 3.

Funnily, the only thing I remember about recording Sylvia was that I added depth with a second guitar part to make it sound like a Doppler effect. I didn’t want to use effects, so I just played the part a second time, doubled it, and got what I wanted. It was easy and only took me maybe five minutes. I never expected the song to be so popular; I thought it was a song with a nice melody, and that was it.

What led you to hook up with Framus for one of the first-ever signature guitars, the Akkerman?

Well, I liked the Framus because I designed it myself. It’s a similar shape to a Les Paul, and they were making them at a good factory. I loved my Les Paul, but I also loved my Tele and my Broadcaster, so I liked guitars that were less about luxury. At the time, I was very happy with my Framus and played it as much as possible.

You added more guitar synths as a solo artist in the Eighties. What led to that?

My experimental period! It goes back to what I said earlier – I like to experiment. At the time, those things were fairly new to Europe, where it was almost like the Renaissance in the 14th or 15th centuries, you know?

I even got into drum machines and, like you said, guitar synthesizers because I liked the sounds I could make with them. It’s like, “Oh, I can make a cow’s ‘moo’ on a guitar,” which was something I never thought possible but also thought was funny. [Laughs]

What are your memories of working with B.B. King?

He was fantastic. He invented that type of blues, right? While playing with him, I realized I had picked up more things from him over the years than I ever realized. Working with a guy like him was like learning a new language – one which makes you wiser, though not luckier. [Laughs]

How did your car accident in 1992 impact your guitar playing?

It’s always difficult to overcome a sickness or injury. I had broken my back in several places and found myself in a wheelchair. The recovery was slow to the point that I felt like I could only move maybe a 10th of a millimeter, and if I did so the wrong way, I’d never walk again. It was hard, and I couldn’t play for over a year. To that, I always say, “Thank God it’s over.”

Which record means the most to you?

It sounds cliché, but they’re all good! The problem for me is not in the music. Let’s put that upfront. I love the music of Focus. The problem is the right or wrong synergy – or whatever you want to call it – that’s involved. I said earlier that envy and jealousy are factors, and those feelings are often underestimated.

So, that’s the stuff that factors in for me rather than how good the music was – it’s all good. Every album is like one of my babies. I have two albums out – Live Under the Rainbow by My Focus, recorded in the U.K. – and the one I’m working on now is a studio album that has no title yet.

I don’t suppose a Focus reunion is in the cards?

No. I mean… the idea is, of course, very tempting, but there are plenty of other tempting things in life. Life is basically one risk after another. To get involved in that again, part of me thinks that would be crazy. You don’t have to be crazy to make music, but maybe it helps!

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

Since it arrived in 2018, John Mayer’s PRS Silver Sky signature guitar has undergone a handful of careful revisions, and a few more radical iterations could yet be in the offing – including an HSS model.

The Silver Sky was recently reimagined as a Land Rover Defender collab electric guitar and, perhaps more notably, given a ‘Dead Spec’ spin-off.

But as Mayer recently told Guitar World, he and Paul Reed Smith are constantly discussing ways they can further fine-tune the template for potential limited runs.

“It’s telling a story really thoughtfully,” Mayer said of the Silver Sky line. “It’s basically two SKUs: it’s a Core model and it’s an SE, with a slight number of limited models like the Dead Spec. There was 1,000 of the Dead Spec, which, to me, I always see as a kind of concept guitar.”

“I just think there’s something that feels good in my brain, and maybe other guitar players’ brains, about this model,” he continues.

“I would like to introduce – and will introduce – evolutions of this as we go. Paul is always calling me with another idea.”

One of those ideas, it turns out, is a Silver Sky with a bridge humbucker. “I have a prototype of an HSS,” Mayer reveals.

It’s a popular after-market mod that many Silver Sky owners have taken upon themselves to retrofit – Neal Schon included. So any talk of an official HSS Silver Sky could spark borderline hysteria from Mayer fans.

But the Sob Rock guitarist is quick to quash the idea. Almost as soon as he reveals its existence, he plays down the idea it could become a future ‘concept guitar’ a la the Dead Spec.

“I think that’s too much of a tease,” he replied when asked if it’d be released. “I don’t think it would be a limited run. I’m not out to frustrate people. I’m out to excite people – and it’s a fine line between excitement [and frustration].

“It’s got to be right. You’ve got to be braiding it very slowly – everything has to be as tight as the braid before it. And it’s not a matter of, ‘When’s the right time to drop this on people that would be the most exciting?’ It’s like, ‘When is it right?’

“You know, you have a geometry puzzle on a design level when you take two single-coils and you place them together. How are you going to express the shape of that in a way that communicates with the rest of the design language? How do you do it sonically so you don’t go full blast when you go into the [bridge pickup]. You need it to stay even. These are design-based timelines.”

Given Mayer’s comments, it seems unlikely there will be a design-timeline for an HSS Silver Sky. For now, we can just rest easy knowing one exists – and pray Mayer takes it on to the stage when he hits the Sphere for his solo residency next year.

For more from John Mayer, read Guitar World’s interview on the making of the recent PRS x Land Rover Defender collaboration.

With the new documentary on the life and times of Ann Wilson set to land on streaming services later this month, the Heart vocalist has explained why her sister, guitarist Nancy Wilson, doesn’t feature.

In My Voice premiered in the rock band’s hometown of Seattle back in May, and will now launch for home viewing via Amazon Prime and Apple (iTunes & Apple TV) on November 25. The film features many notable music figures spanning generations, with interviews with the likes of Paul Stanley, Chapelle Roan, and David Letterman bandleader, Paul Shaffer, interspersed between Ann Wilson’s own contributions.

There being nothing from Nancy Wilson in the documentary has raised eyebrows, but now her reasoning has been revealed in an interview with Classic Rock.

“I asked her to come and speak, but she wanted to wait for her own documentary,” Ann Wilson explains. “She’s got her own life, you know? She didn’t want to forever be known as the two of us joined at the hip.”

It’s an understandable reasoning, with the Wilson sisters clearly set on identifying themselves as individuals, rather than two halves of a double act. Yet, Nancy wasn’t part of Heart at first. She had to audition for the gig – and wowed her future bandmates with a Yes cover.

Her older sister had co-founded the band a year earlier, and was intended to be their acoustic guitar player, before she recognized her sister’s skills were far superior.

Wilson has also been talking to Guitar World about how Heart survived the excesses of the 1980s to redefine their sound, and sell more records than ever before.

In other Heart news, the band’s US tour last year was blighted by the theft of the Nancy’s cherished baritone Tele. The custom-made six-string and a vintage Gibson mandolin were swiped from the stage at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Atlantic City, where they were due to begin their tour.

Thankfully, the Tele was eventually recovered, with the perpetrator reprimanded, and the guitar got its belated live debut alongside Chapelle Roan. Together, they ripped through a Heart classic.

Jimi Hendrix is set to feature on commemorative coins, after he was named Washington’s submission to the U.S. Mint American Innovation $1 Coin Program.

The program was first launched by the Mint in 2019 to honor innovators and innovations from all 50 states, with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs getting the nod for California, while Texas has honored NASA. The districts of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, U.S. Virgin Islands, and Northern Mariana Islands are also set to be acknowledged as part of a 57-coin program.

Hendrix has become the first musician to be recognized so far, and given the electric guitar revolution he helped kickstart, he is a worthy representative of American music culture. He won the race after a committee had presented five finalists for Governor Bob Ferguson to choose from.

“Picking just one example from the most innovative state in the nation was difficult, but Jimi Hendrix’s historic innovation on guitar and his deep roots in Washington make him a great choice to represent our state,” says Governor Ferguson.

Now his name has been submitted, the coin’s design will be drawn up. The Secretary of the Treasury will ultimately have the final say, with the coin set for a 2029 release.

The firebrand guitarist was born in Seattle, Washington, in 1942. But it was in the UK with a British backing band – after early-career stints playing with Little Richard, Buddy and Stacy, and the Isley Brothers – that he truly made his name with the Experience, stunning everyone from Eric Clapton to Jimmy Page and Paul McCartney on arrival.

His legacy cannot be understated. The Stratocaster poster boy – who currently sits in second place in Guitar World’s ranking of the world’s best players – was an early adoptee of guitar effects like, feedback, fuzz and wah, and took blues to new heights in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Decades after his death, many music lovers believe there are very few players that can lay a glove on him.

Last year, his take on Bob Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower was voted the world’s best cover song, and it is a song that showcases his rhythm chops as well as his fiery leads.

In related Hendrix news, Orianthi was recently granted access to Hendrix’s archive and wrote a new song out of an unused riff with Power of 3, her new Hendrix-inspired trio.

The worlds of heavy metal and military history have collided many times over the years, dating as far back as Black Sabbath’s War Pigs, with other notable works coming later from the likes of Iron Maiden – who have documented battle stories quite extensively – Metallica, Megadeth and Slayer.

But if there’s one band who’ve evolved that formula to the nth degree, it’s Swedish power metal quintet Sabaton: a band whose live shows are renowned for featuring cameos from Julius Caesar, Napoleon and the Knights Templar amongst their immersive melee of battle reenactments, cannons and pyro.

In September it was revealed that Jackson were releasing a signature seven-string for guitarist Chris Rörland, marking his first artist model since joining their roster four years ago.

The Pro Series Signature Chris Rörland SL7 comes with a 26.5” scale length, EMG 81-7H and 85-7H pickups and a recessed Floyd Rose 1000 series double-locking tremolo, with a Nyatoh body, a three-piece maple neck and ebony fingerboard.

If you tell the man himself it looks like a war machine, he won’t disagree. “It’s definitely that!” he laughs. “I’ve dreamed about my own Jackson guitar since I was a kid, seeing Adrian Smith from Iron Maiden playing his models. I played Jacksons early on and ended up trying out some other brands [ESP, Ibanez, Caparison], but now it’s like I’m finally home.”

Nyatoh is an interesting choice for the body. It’s sonically similar to mahogany but lighter.

Yeah, it’s unusual. It was the Jackson team who suggested Nyatoh, which I was unfamiliar with. It’s nice because it’s not too heavy – it won’t break my shoulder like playing a Les Paul while headbanging. A lighter guitar with lots of tone was exactly what I was looking for.

And the EMG 81/85 set is as legendary as pickups can get for heavy metal tones.

I’ve tried so many pickups over the years. My first proper set was the Zakk Wylde EMG set. I got hooked into that sound. So when we were designing this guitar I decided it was time to go back.

It’s perfect for my needs in Sabaton. When I’m at home, sure, I like to play different styles and dial in different sounds; but in Sabaton, it’s pure punch-through-the-wall. I don’t need something versatile. It just has to be high-gain everything in a good way.

It’s interesting how you use a seven-string Soloist while your other guitarist, Thobbe Englund, sticks with six-string Strats. Most twin guitar bands double up on extended range instruments if they’re going low.

I guess I’m the demon driver in the band! Thobbe is a huge Yngwie fan who’s played Strats his whole life. He’s never tried anything else, though when he played one of my new Jacksons the other day he said it felt like cheating because it was too easy to play! I know sometimes it’s good to work for it, but if a guitar feels easy to play, I’m home.

So Thobbe tunes down, but you can go way lower than him.

Yeah, way lower. He tunes his six-string a whole step down to D standard, but my seven-string is dropped a step to A. We don’t play the same thing; he’ll play an octave higher.

Some people don’t realize Thobbe’s guitars are in the usual spot and mine as super-low. That’s what makes our sound so wide. Two guitar players playing the same exact thing makes no sense to me.

You mentioned Adrian Smith earlier. Is he your biggest guitar hero?

He’s one of them, but I think my main influence is John Petrucci. I got his old Rock Discipline VHS tape when I was a kid, trying to play exactly like him. He’s unbelievable. Maybe it’s a mix of those two; Adrian has these amazing melodic ideas, it’s all about phrasing.

I like to write my guitar solos and I recently started writing them on piano first. It was the hardest thing ever because the stretches got a bit crazy, but it definitely sounded more interesting. When you stay on guitar it’s too easy to stick to the same old patterns. Writing on another instrument is a great way of switching things up.

Did you get the chance to meet Adrian when your toured with Iron Maiden in 2013?

I usually try to stay away, because they say never meet your heroes. But one time we played with them in Switzerland and somebody knocked on the door. It was Nicko McBrain – he sat down and talked to us for a while. At the end he said had a great tip for us: “It’s all for fun. If you don’t have fun, it’s not worth it!” That was a very cherished moment for us, and his advice was pretty accurate.

Another time we were touring with Judas Priest and Rob Halford came into our room. It’s surreal getting to meet some of these heroes. I’ve never met anyone who was an asshole, even if they’re rumored to be. Even Kerry King – I’m sure someone said stay out of his way, but honestly, he was the nicest guy ever.

What kind of rig will you be plugging your new Jackson into?

We’ve switched from the Kemper to the Quad Cortex. I’m still learning how to use it because it’s a bit of a spaceship. The main sounds are based on an EVH 5150 with a Green Scream pedal in front, plus some digital delay.

In the studio, our engineer is a good friend of the band and a total gear nerd. We never really know what we’re going through! We used a Marshall Silver Jubilee for a bit, then a Soldano, then an ENGL. I don’t even know what’s on the albums any more – we’re mad puppets in the studio. Anything goes! There’s no signature sound that gets used on every album.

What’s your approach to writing music around historical events?

Pär Sundström [bass] and Joakim Brodén [vocals] are the history buffs. I was really bad at history in school so I just stick to writing music. We get so many emails from fans; we keep them in a big folder of all the different years and battles.

The songs get based on the album theme. One might be about World War II. Our most recent one [2025’s Legends] was about legend; that was great – they could go wherever they liked in terms of themes.

Some riffs might fit perfectly with a lyrical idea; like Hordes Of Khan actually feels like Genghis riding his horse in how it pushes. But when we’re in the studio I have no idea what the vocals will be about. Sometimes it might sound happy for a lyrically dark song, but it’ll fit anyway.

You now headline the world’s biggest arenas, festivals like Wacken Open Air and even have your own cruise. Are you surprised the band has grown to that level?

Yes and no! We work hard, even when we’re not touring or recording. Sometimes we go up to the band HQ in Falun to make plans, write music or sign stuff. Sometimes it’s hard to see the progression when you are so close to it. You wake up one morning and suddenly it’s like, “Wow – we’re doing this now!”

You have to really pinch yourself at times. I enjoy every second. When you’re standing on stage in front of the audience, with Julius Caesar, Napoleon and other historical figures turning up, it’s the best feeling in the world.

• For more info on the Pro Series Chris Rörland SL7 Signature, head to Jackson Guitars.

Faith No More are set to return to the stage in 2027, and former guitarist Trey Spruance is back in the fold after 31 years.

After weeks of teasing their return, the experimental American band has posted an image to their socials showcasing the line-up – and some big name players are ecstatic.

Spruance, who formed Mr. Bungle with Faith No More vocalist Mike Patton in 1985, went on to join FNM in 1993. During a two-year spell, he featured on their fifth album, King for a Day... Fool got a Lifetime, meaning he’s now back in the picture after over 30 years away.

Anthrax riffer Scott Ian, Korn's Munky, Dillinger Escape Plan’s Ben Weinmann, and Mike Vennart have all expressed their delight at the news in the comments section.

Spruance himself has also taken to socials to show off some FNM-branded Schecters and convey his own joy at the news.

“It means the world to me to be invited to strap on my big boy boots and join Faith No More for their upcoming appearances all around the world,” he writes.

“Looks like I’m gonna be riding out into the sunset well equipped with these fine angelic weapons – huge thanks to Schecter. [I’ll be] aiming my damnedest to do the Hudson and Martin eras proud.”

Spruance replaced founding guitarist Jim Martin, and was subsequently succeeded by Jon Hudson, after Dean Menta filled his place on the King for a Day... tour.

“This is so crazy,” he adds. “I can’t believe I get to take this insane victory lap with Billy, Roddy, Mike and Mike!”

The guitarist’s first show back in the saddle will be at the Maracanã Stadium in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on January 15, 2027, supporting System of a Down. That tour then hops over to Australia and New Zealand.

Two American shows, at Welcome to Rockville and Sonic Temple, have already been confirmed for the summer, alongside a slew of Europe festival dates. With Ozzfest returning in 2027, the band could finally join that bill for the first time, too.

And if the FNM guys are in the mood for another reunion, Jerry Cantrell has previously spoken about his desire of reuniting his Degradation Trip band, which included FNM drummer Mike Bordin, and now-Metallica bassist Robert Trujillo.

Steve Vai has revealed that, on the day he quit David Lee Roth’s band, he received an unexpected phone call from Eddie Van Halen.

Vai walked into the Roth gig with big shoes to fill. The vocalist was looking to kickstart his post-Van Halen solo career, and needed a virtuoso who could live up to the precedent set by Eddie.

So it was a full-circle moment that one of the first people Vai spoke to after he departed Roth’s band was the very guitarist with whom he’d been pitted against by both the singer and fans.

“I didn't even know how he knew,” Vai remembers in a new interview with Chris Jericho (via Guitar Player). “He said, ‘You have to come over to my house,’ and we kind of struck up a friendship that was very heavy for, like, four months where we were virtually talking every day. It was weird.”

The Roth gig was a huge role for Vai, but one that never fully fazed him. There were some nerves in living up to the era’s greatest guitarist, but Vai approached the Roth spot as his own – even if the singer wanted to compete with Van Halen.

“I just knew that I could make it work, because I had a rock and roll fire that I loved in me,” Vai said of his time in the band earlier this year. “I knew that I wasn't going to try to sound like Edward or do anything like him, because people are very hip to that.”

Though the wider perception was of two elite guitarists going head to head, the reality was anything but. And when the pair struck up their friendship, Vai was given a look behind the Eddie curtain.

“During that period, I’d go up to his house and he would play me this amazing stuff because Edward was like an audio pack rat,” Vai adds.

“He was showing me the studio that was being built at the time and he would just go in there and he'd record by himself all you know tons and tons of stuff. I just thought, ‘Make a solo record,’ but [he’d say], ‘No, I’m Van Halen.’”

Vai, of course, did go solo. Recently, he teamed up with Joe Satriani to release The Sea of Emotion – the pair’s first collaborative studio album, which has been decades in the offing.

In the most recent issue of Guitar World, the pair looked back on the making of the record, recalling the time they saw Billy Gibbons and Brian May play through their rigs along the way.

Vai has also recently clarified his involvement in a potential Crossroads sequel, seemingly ruling out his return after the rumor mill went into overdrive.

In the middle of a July heatwave we’re speaking with half of New York City’s Telescreens – singer/guitarist Jackson Hamm and drummer Oliver Graf – as they join a Zoom call before their show in Nantucket.

The band is on tour supporting their sprawling new album, Why the Lights Flicker. It’s their third record overall and second with Graf behind the kit. Interestingly, Graf is quick to reveal that when he auditioned for the band, he almost didn’t make the cut.

“He was playing quiet and all this shit,” Hamm says. “Then Josiah [Valerius, keyboards] jumped on the kit and was like, ‘Nah, let me show you,’ and Oliver goes bright red in the face. He sat back down at the kit and bled and broke the shit out of this practice kit that we were using. It was the moment the band was born. Plus, he’s a legend at the pub. He can drink so much!”

“That’s actually why I’m still here,” Graf says with a laugh.

The album’s title, Why the Lights Flicker, comes from a phenomenon Hamm experienced writing songs in the house he grew up in, which he believes is a signal that he is channeling the energy from the universe. For Hamm, capturing that lightning in a bottle comes easy, but the real skill lies in sustaining that magic for the duration of a song.

“Everybody is capable of channeling from the outer realm or getting hit with some sort of pure inspiration from the collective unconscious,” Hamm says. “But where you become a musician is whether or not you can sustain that for three or four minutes.”

One way that Hamm sustains that magic is by putting the song before his capabilities as a guitar player.

“I can do the scale thing and I can do the shred thing,” he says. “It’s more about what kind of energy is being emitted rather than [whether it’s] a fast or impressive part.

“It’s like with Billie Joe Armstrong. You could say all the guitar parts are easy, but I challenge you to sing them and play them perfectly at the tempo that [Green Day] sing and play. Do it for 20 songs in a row. It’s fucking hard and it’s seriously physical.”

The band has already begun work on their followup to Why the Lights Flicker.

“[Lights] is our quintessential record that represents us as a rock band,” Hamm says. “A lot has changed since we wrote and recorded it. This next batch of songs is much more in the box. It’s just about cleansing the palette and letting the pendulum naturally swing toward things that sound fresh.”

• Why the Light Flickers is out now via +1 Records.
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

Canadian indie-rockers The Beaches have gone from suburban garage band shows to opening for the Rolling Stones, knocking the spangly socks off Elton John and being pelted with seven Juno awards, all in less than 10 years since debut album Late Show.

Named after the neighborhood where they grew up, the band formed in Toronto in 2013 when guitarist Leandra Earl joined singer-bassist Jordan Miller, guitarist Kylie Miller (Jordan’s sister) and drummer Eliza Enman-McDaniel.

Working across Canada and the States in their early years, The Beaches racked up a devoted fan base, leading to a record deal with Universal Music. Late Show, released in 2017, was a hit – but international interest only sparked when they left the label in 2022.

“It gave us the freedom to try new things and decide what we wanted to sound like and what we wanted to say,” Miller says. “I think that if we’d stayed, we wouldn’t have come up with the songs we did, or have the success we now do.”

Their 2023 platinum single Blame Brett featured on second album Blame My Ex. “That was the moment it all changed,” says Kylie Miller. “We were able to sell tickets globally and have a lot of excitement and buzz around us.”

The Cure-inspired four-piece have secured much more than their hefty collection of Junos.

“Elton John got into the band much earlier than a lot of people did,” says Miller. He’s shown continued support since then, often playing The Beaches’ songs at his shows. The group returned their gratitude earlier this year, performing John’s The Bitch is Back for the Glenn Gould Prize winner.

“Elton was at the foot of the catwalk and Jordan went up and started shaking her hair. It was a really crazy experience!” recalls Miller.

“He really liked T-Shirt,” adds Earl. “We were like, ‘How does Elton John know us? How is he a fan?’ We ended up FaceTiming him and then he got us backstage to meet him at one of his shows.”

The Junos are more than ornaments: “We’re the first girl band to win these awards,” says Earl. “We’re so honored. We hope it inspires other girls to do the same; we grew up watching the Junos and watching Avril Lavigne win, but never a girl band.”

“To have seven of them kind of speaks to that trajectory of the music industry changing, with more women being at the forefront,” says Miller. “It’s giving us women the flowers we’ve earned for a long time.”

The band have opened for The Rolling Stones on two occasions. Miller describes the first outing as a particularly welcoming show, as it came shortly after singer Mick Jagger had recovered from heart surgery in 2019. “He came back bigger and better. There was like 50,000 people there. Everybody was really into it.”

The band’s wall of sound is built with contrasting guitar tones, Earl preferring a Gibson-style sound and Miller favoring Fender. Their third studio album, No Hard Feelings, features a Les Paul and Stratocaster, although their live setups differ. Miller is currently sponsored by PRS and plays a Fiore, while Earl uses her Frank Brothers Radar.

“What I’m playing now kind of looks like an SG, which I’ve always wanted,” she says. “It’s their take on it. Playing the Frank Brothers with the humbuckers, everything feels like I’m playing a Gibson – but better.”

The Beaches’ live show is no static experience, which is why both guitarists use a Quad Cortex fit with synchronized lighting changes to create a truly immersive gig. “We put our time in with pedals and amps and being little rockstars,” says Earl, “but we’re focusing on the show itself, connecting with fans and whatever choreography we do.”

“Everything on the Cortex switches for us,” Miller says. “We’re able to move around a lot more. We used to have these massive pedalboards and had to look down all the time and stomp on them. It became a harder to connect with the fans. Now it’s all MIDI-synced, which is really helpful.”

No Hard Feelings, which hit the charts last year, is an unapologetically honest and infectious anthem-packed album, described by Earl as “happy-sad.” It kicks off with a chorus-soaked reverbed guitar, reminiscent of The Cure.

“Can I Call You in the Morning is in drop D,” Miller says. “It’s a really easy part to play because it’s two open strings. It sounds more complicated than it is.”

“It’s quite layered,” adds Earl. “I remember me, Kylie and [producer] Gus Van Go making a lot of noise and putting a riff within the noise. We mic’d up some amps and got them to ring out with feedback. We had a shit-ton of fuzz and added more and more and more. It’s fuzz, delay, chorus and then all these layers that build the tension.”

Asked to pick a personal highlight, Earl points to Should Have Known Better. “A lot of the songs are about angry and blameful breakups. But Should Have Known Better is like, ‘I’ve come out of all this and figured out I do deserve better than how I’ve been treated.’

“Getting to write that song with my best friends was such a powerful experience. When we play it, I love that it doesn’t feel like my song anymore. It feels like it’s empowering other people.”

• No Hard Feelings is out now.

Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr are set for a rare reunion next year, as part of a one-off charity show – VetsAid 2027, hosted by Joe Walsh.

The last surviving members of the Beatles haven’t performed together since December 2024, when Starr joined Macca for his finale Got Back tour show in London. For that gig, the drummer played drums on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Helter Skelter.

Before then, McCartney and Starr have only shared the stage on a handful of sporadic occasions. In 2019, they played those same two songs on McCartney’s final Freshen Up tour date. In 2015, McCartney inducted his fellow Beatle into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with a joint performance.

Macca and Starr will be reuniting for the Joe Walsh & Friends at VetsAid 2027, a charity show that will raise money for Nevada veterans and their families.

The two Beatles will join Walsh on the bill alongside other special guests, including The Killers, The War on Drugs, St Vincent, Lucius, and more.

“Having spent the past two years at the Sphere and working with the hardworking people of Las Vegas, I want to show them my gratitude and respect,” Walsh said in a statement.

“This city has taken such good care of me and my family that it would be my privilege to give back to the large veteran community here and to their families.”

The show will take place on January 29, 2027 at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas. General public on-sale will begin November 13.

For more information, head over to AXS.

As Led Zeppelin’s musical backbone, John Paul Jones brought a distinctive blend of rhythmic sophistication, harmonic invention and technical precision to the band’s sound.

His twisted Black Dog riff was an attempt to trip up fans who would dance at the band’s concerts. His tasty subhook on Ramble On brought the song’s verses to a completely different place, and The Lemon Song is a masterwork blues that every developing bassist should try to transcribe or learn – preferably, both.

With a seemingly bottomless skill set, Jones has also worked with the likes of Dusty Springfield, Seasick Steve and R.E.M., and even provided the string arrangement for The Rolling Stones’ 1967 hit She’s a Rainbow. He was also among the early pioneers of the eight-string bass guitar.

So, how well do you really know John Paul Jones? Did you know, for instance, that John Paul Jones isn’t his birth name, but a stage name inspired by a 1959 film starring Robert Stack?

From his iconic Led Zeppelin basslines to his work as a session musician, and multi-instrumentalist, there's plenty more to discover about one of rock’s most versatile musicians. Test your knowledge in our quiz below.

Steve Vai has clarified his involvement in a potential Crossroads sequel.

2026 marks the 40th anniversary of Crossroads, one of the more beloved Hollywood films in the guitar canon.

It revolves around a young guitarist named Eugene – played by Ralph Macchio, most famous his starring role in The Karate Kid – who plays at Mississippi juke joints, then goes to the titular crossroads where blues forefather Robert Johnson, according to legend, sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his world-changing songwriting and guitar talents.

Eugene then finds himself in a climactic guitar battle with a guitarist who did sell his soul to the devil, played by a Jackson-wielding Steve Vai.

It’s fun stuff – a fond cinematic memory for guitarists who saw it as a youngster; which explains why the internet was set abuzz when Crossroads screenwriter John Fusco revealed to Guitar World in a recent feature about the making of the film that he and Ralph Macchio were developing a sequel.

The flames were fueled further when Steve Vai told Guitar World in that same feature: “I know Ralph wants to kick my ass. Jack Butler needs his revenge!”

Now, though, with talk in overdrive, Vai has sought to clarify his involvement, or lack thereof, in a potential, still-unofficial Crossroads sequel.

“I’ve been getting quite a few questions lately about whether I’ll be appearing in a sequel to Crossroads,” Vai told Guitar World in a statement.

“For the record, I haven’t heard anything official about a sequel, other than that Ralph Macchio and the film’s original writer, John Fusco, have apparently been discussing the possibility of revisiting the story with a more contemporary generation of players, which I think could make for a compelling film.

“As for Jack Butler, I checked in with him, and he assures me he has no intention of leaving the realm of the fellow with the pointy horns and pitchfork to return to this mortal coil to reclaim his guitar-slinging crown. Apparently, he’s working on a new solo record called ‘Eternally Damned’, but he’s having trouble finding a record label willing to commit to an eternity of royalties.”

Drats. Well, who would you like to see take Vai’s place in a Crossroads sequel? Maybe we can run your picks by Mr. Fusco...

For more about how Crossroads was made, plus new interviews with Vai and Joe Satriani, pick up issue 611 of Guitar World from Magazines Direct.

Joe Bonamassa has recalled the poetically stormy evening during which Jeff Beck blew his mind with an unforgettable Crossroads Guitar Festival set.

The bluesman was speaking at the recent Crossroads Festival – Eric Clapton’s star-studded charity event, at which he is a frequent performer. Asked to name his favorite memory of Crossroads gone by, Bonamassa is quick to recall a performance where the Weather Gods were on lighting duty.

“My best Crossroads memory [is from] 2010, is Jeff Beck playing Nessun Dorma,” he says. “I was watching him play it from the stands. I snuck out front and as he was playing it, and it was starting to crescendo, this storm cloud had come over, and the clouds were purple.

“It was the most amazing visual to go along with some of the most amazing guitar playing I've ever heard in my entire life.”

A spine-tingling take on the opera classic lifted from Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot, it featured on Beck’s superlative 2010 album, Emotion & Commotion, before he brought it to the stage at Crossroads.

Atop slowly moving strings, Beck, sharply dressed in an outfit seemingly built around his iconic White Strat, put Pavarotti in his place. When people talk about players who can make a guitar sing, this is the kind of example that should be presented; the emotion he gets out of his whammy bar alone is outstanding.

“It’s quite a ludicrous choice,” Beck once told Guitar Player of his decision to take on such an iconic piece of music. “When I heard Pavarotti sing it, I thought, 'All this is is sophisticated blues.' He bellows out those notes the way a blues singer would.”

“No one’s done it on guitar, as far as I know,” he added. “It just somehow has a majestic feel, playing simple one-note melodies.”

The song was nominated for Best Pop Instrumental Performance at the 2011 Grammys, though from three nominations, the only award Beck took home that night was for Hammerhead, which won the Best Rock Instrumental Performance.

Beck, who famously turned down the chance to replace Eric Clapton in the Bluesbreakers, passed away in 2023.

Mark Knopfler says he was planning on making an album with Beck before his death, while the last-known recording he made looks unlikely to ever see the light of day.

“I wanted you to know I wasn’t AI,” jokes L7 frontwoman Donita Sparks as her video camera flicks on for just a few seconds. And Sparks – who co-founded the band alongside fellow guitarist Suzi Gardner in Los Angeles in 1985 – is nothing but authentic.

The story of throwing a tampon into a crowd of muddy misogynists at Reading Festival in 1992 is well documented. L7’s arrival on the international alternative-rock scene was a welcome shock to the male-dominated establishment, proving that the sludge-heavy sound and ferocious riffs of the day didn’t belong exclusively to the boys.

After their original run ended in 2001, Sparks helped put L7’s history in focus by archiving photographs and footage online. That renewed interest helped bring about the 2016 documentary L7: Pretend We’re Dead – and, eventually, the reunion of the band’s best-known lineup.

Now on their Last Hurrah farewell tour, they’re navigating an emotional final chapter, following the death of longtime bassist Jennifer Finch from aggressive brain cancer in July. “Her doctors were hoping she could do some of these shows,” says Sparks. “Over the summer, the cancer moved swiftly and the whole thing escalated into a cascading shit show of the American healthcare system.”

Alongside ex-drummer Dee Plakas, former bassist Janis Tanaka has returned to the lineup. Sparks has noticed the focus she’s brought to the tour. “Where L7 wing it sometimes, Janis is very pro. Every night before we play, she’s got her headphones on, running through the songs.”

You’re out on the final L7 tour. How are you feeling about the shows so far?

The finality is starting to hit me. The emotion becomes overwhelming at times. I can hold it together until I get backstage – but every once in a while, there’s a little weepiness. We’re doing meet-and-greets for the first time to supplement the tour. People are saying how long they’ve followed us. One woman said, “You’ve taken me from puberty to menopause!”

Jennifer’s memoir Shooting Up and Making Out is due to be published in January. She shared a couple of chapters with the band before she passed. What did you make of them? How have you found preparing for this tour with everything that’s happened?

I have different recollections of some things, but nothing was egregious. The scope of this tour is bigger than we’ve ever done. I didn’t have much time to reflect on – or even, quite frankly, to grieve – what was going down in real time because I had so much to do. My mantra was, “Move the ball forward every day.”

The thing about us is that we’re real people. We’ve got other cancer survivors in the band currently. This is life; other bands have lost members. Jennifer quit the band in ’96. We had Gail Greenwood and Janice Tanaka after her, so we’ve lost her before. But this is a huge fucking loss.

You released Smell the Magic on Sub Pop in 1990. What was it like being part of that underground scene as it grew into a major movement?

There was a lot of excitement. Different areas in the US had their own labels, like Alternative Tentacles in San Francisco and Amphetamine Reptile in Minneapolis. All these bands were on the same circuit. We’d crash with the same people in every city.

Sub Pop did well, mainly because of Nirvana and Soundgarden. When they signed us they said, “You’re in the inner circle of Sub Pop now.” Everyone got huge, except for Mudhoney! There was so much hype, especially in the UK. We’d show up to a club and instead of saying “L7” it would say “Sub Pop Artist” or “Sub Pop’s L7.” It was like the label was getting bigger than the bands were.

Seminal album Bricks Are Heavy was recorded with Butch Vig, following his work on Nirvana’s Nevermind. How did his production change the songs?

We always had a very powerful sound on stage. You can’t put that in a bottle. Producers and engineers would go to an L7 show, after they worked on our record for months, and be like, ‘What the fuck?’

Butch was great because he encouraged our melodic stuff. When we started, we wanted to play hard music sans melody because we were tough cookies; then melody came in. Nirvana and the Pixies gave me more confidence to throw my musical roots into the stew. I love a lot of ’50s/’60s pop; I love a lot of country.

As Keith Richards says, “A lot of bands rock, few roll.” At first, L7 rocked. Then we got rolling, too. Our songs got better, like Shove. Suzi thought it was too sing-songy. I had to fight for that.

You’ve described the musical split between you and Suzi Gardner as David Bowie versus Ozzy Osbourne. How do those influences come through in your respective guitar parts?

Suzi’s leads are a bit more freeform and blues-based and mine are a bit more surf-based. I use a lot of half-steps. I love Dick Dale – I love that Middle Eastern flair that he threw in.

L7 have a lot of ingredients in a very basic recipe. When people post themselves playing our songs online, they’re always wrong because they’re going to the chord they think should be there. They’re not getting the nuances of our songs. Suzi once stayed with some musicology grads from UCLA, who broke down the songs and said, “What is up with these chord changes?”

L7 performed at Gloria Steinem’s Voters for Choice benefit in 1995 alongside Pearl Jam and Neil Young & Crazy Horse. What are your memories?

We met Neil Young that night. I remember Pearl Jam asked us on stage because they were singing Rockin’ in the Free World, but I fucked up my verse by one line!

You’ve just released Loma Linda, which dates back to a 2003 demo featuring Janis. Are there plans for more material?

Even though the band is wrapping up touring life, we’re still going to release music. We’ll also be touring the UK and Europe in 2027. After we announced The Last Hurrah in the US, a shit ton of people in the UK were like, ‘What about us?’ We’re going to do South America and Australia, too.

What gear are you taking out on the tour, and how has your rig evolved over the years?

Suzi and I are currently playing Blackstar St. James 50-watt amps. They’re small and lightweight. It’s like, ‘Oh my god, finally an amp I can fucking carry myself!’

My favorite guitar to play is the 1963 Gibson Melody Maker; it’s got great action and a thinner neck. Suzi plays a Melody Maker, too. But my look is a Gibson Flying V – I need a tremolo bar for a lot of songs.

• L7’s Last Hurrah tour continues across North America until mid-November. New single, Loma Linda, is out now.

Some might say Robin Finck is one of rock music’s rarest and most enigmatic chameleons. Whether it’s his work in Nine Inch Nails – standing as founder Trent Reznor’s longest-serving live member – or Guns N’ Roses, Danny Elfman, Gary Numan, composing for video games, soundtracks and beyond, he’s the kind of guitarist who can effortlessly fit into just about any kind of musical scenario.

This stretches far beyond the notes he’s playing and into the tones he’s dialing in, from the classic overdrive crunch associated with one of the biggest rock and roll bands of all-time, to the highly effected surrealist dreamscapes required when Nine Inch Nails are at their most unfathomably atmospheric. It’s hard to think of an environment he can’t dress himself into.

Last week, he announced the Official Robin Finck Reverb Shop, which will include over 200 items used during key moments of his career, including stage-played gear that has made history in the world’s biggest arenas and stadiums beside him.

The list includes the Les Paul Goldtop used on every Nine Inch Nails tour until 2014, having been first debuted 30 years prior in the band’s March Of The Pigs video. Then there’s the 2000 Gibson R8 played extensively during his tenure in Guns N’ Roses, which he describes as the “S on my chest” during a “strange and unsteady time.”

But if you’re expecting just a bunch of beaten-up Les Pauls, think again.

There’s the Fender Custom Shop Nocaster that was played from Nine Inch Nails’ 2013 Tension tour to 2018’s Cold And Black And Infinite run, a Gibson ES-335 used in both arena-conquering bands, a one-off Manson Custom that Finck boldly claims could be the best guitar of the lot, the Martin Classic Backpacker used on live renditions of Nine Inch Nails tracks like La Mer and Disappointed, plus a Schecter signature model as well as various pedals and a Marshall JCM2000 TSL head.

“I’m letting go of just less than half of what’s around me,” he explains, speaking exclusively to GW from his home in Los Angeles. “I can only play one at a time anyway. I like the idea of someone else creating with these guitars. Considering what stays and goes was a bit like having my life flash before my eyes. I’d open these cases and relive the cold midday arenas or festivals in the sun or full moon.

“I would remember what songs they’d be paired with and how they sounded at rehearsals, or what my techs would say. I either associate them with a past experience or they’ve been replaced by something new.

“I’m 1,000 percent sentimental, which is the perfect cocktail for me to end up three decades later with so much gear.”

These might not be the oldest instruments in the world, but they certainly carry their fair share of stories, as well as a few cuts and bruises picked up along the way.

These guitars had a long run but they’ve always bounced back. They’ve been my bed partners for a long time. It’s a privilege to steward them forward to someone new. I’m certainly nostalgic about it and have had my long goodbye. It’s time to move on. But don’t get me wrong – I’m not without a Les Paul or Telecaster.

Your Old Gold Les Paul is quite special, given its history with Nine Inch Nails, and the same goes for the 1990 Custom in white. What are the differences between the two?

Old Gold is a Les Paul Classic with a thinner neck. It’s gold everywhere on the back of the neck and body. The Translucent White Custom was actually the first Les Paul I ever bought. Not too many years after that, I ended up with Old Gold, which can be seen in the March of the Pigs video. That might have even been the first day I played it. Through the years, I’ve paired them with particular songs and they’ve stayed that way to anchor the sound.

It’s interesting you say the Manson custom is quite possibly the best guitar of the bunch. High praise indeed.

Yeah! To play it is to know that. The neck – to be honest, the whole guitar – is a well cared-for experience in its creation. That’s very obvious when it’s in my hands. I can tell it was built by people who were excited about what they were doing.

You’re also selling the Martin Backpacker used on tracks like La Mer, where you would play a piano part on acoustic.

Through the years we’ve experimented with wedging different bits of foam and rubber or mismatching string gauges to make sure it’s perfectly out of tune in the right way. That’s always been an experimental piece in the collection.

Your approach as a whole is experimental. So who are the guitar players that influenced you most over the years?

During my seminal years, it was the metal players like Randy Rhoads, Steve Vai and Yngwie Malmsteen. I was interested in the fretboard gymnastics because the players sounded exciting. I remember trying to play along to the cassettes.

I moved through that into bands like The Cure, Bauhaus and Siouxsie and the Banshees. I think that’s where my interest in other sounds and effects originated from. But it really started when I started working with Trent.

You learned on the job?

Yeah, because I didn’t own much gear before that. I hadn’t had much hands-on time with effects. I would have to pick it up quickly for the next rehearsal. That’s when it was ‘go time’ for me. I’ve been walking with the soundscape approach all these years with Nine Inch Nails. That was clearly the gig from the beginning. I’ve been lucky to play my part in that.

You’re also parting ways with the 2000 R8 used extensively during your time in Guns N’ Roses.

I was fortunate to have been able to use that for those iconic songs during those tours. I’d never had a guitar like that until then. It seemed like the right move to make... in a long list of wrong moves I was making at the time.

You’ve described those years as a turbulent period. It must have been very different to Nine Inch Nails.

Oh, in more ways than I could have been prepared for. It was an excellent time and I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to step through all that. I was really tight with the band and crew. It was the best of times, but not without its turbulence.

It’s hard to summarize. It started, then it went on, then I left, then I was back. I continued to jump forward, then some different players were coming in and out of the group for tours. It was a wild time – but we had a blast.

You’ve had signature models through Schecter and Reverend. Interestingly, those guitars are quite different in terms of design and functionality.

I love that Schecter guitar. That’s what made me fall in love with a B5 Bigsby, and I have that on some of my Reverend guitars now. The pickup configuration was really cool, because you could split the coils using different switches. I like the two and four tuners on the headstock, which felt unique at the time, as did the shape.

Those guitars are bright and snappy. They were what I would play before I got into Telecasters. But my Reverend signature is my favorite because it can do all things and it’s the most dynamic-sounding guitar. I love the bass roll-off [control] and it’s so comfortable and reliable to play. That’s why it comes with me.

I would go as far as saying your solo in Better could very well be one of the finest leads in Guns N’ Roses history. How did you come up with it?

We played the song a lot, all together, really loud in the room. And that solo is something I played off the floor. I heard it back on the rehearsal DAT, then played something similar next time. By the time we were recording Chinese Democracy I had a good idea of what would be fun.

I’ve always liked singable melodies and phrases that take a breath in between the notes, like a horn player might. Some of my favorite solos are by Elliot Easton from The Cars or Neal Schon. Very singable and fun to air guitar to, and even more fun to play at loud volumes.

I’ve seen Slash play the Better solo. He doesn’t play it note-for-note but he does pay tribute to what you recorded in his own way. It must be crazy seeing that.

Oh yeah – that’s been really fun to hear. He does his own thing with it; but he can, because he’s the originator.

You’ve been Trent’s right-hand man on guitar for several decades. What have been your favorite tracks to play and tones to dial in?

Through the years, I’ve been trying to find some consistency between so many Axe-Fx presets and pedal pairings. I’m making an effort not to send a wholly unique signal to front of house every eight bars. It can be a challenge to approach all of the parts and represent them authentically in a live configuration.

I want my guitars to sound like the record. There’s the anthemic stuff and the buzzy power chord songs, but also the nuanced tracks like The Fragile. We haven’t played it much, maybe once or twice on the last run, but that’s always fun because it has a lot of layers. The Day The World Went Away is another.

Moving away from digital gear, what are the analog pedals you couldn’t live without?

I’m always stepping on my Voodoo Lab Proctavia – it’s a longstanding favorite of mine. I think it’s the gate that attracts me to it, because it works so well going into a driven tube amp. There’s the JHS Kilt, which is super-versatile pedal, going from drive to distortion to fuzz.

I’m really into the Death By Audio stuff; their Echo Dream 2 is maybe my favorite delay, and the Fuzz War is always on and off my board. Recently I did a short tour with Danny Elfman and built an all-Boss board, which is something I’ve always wanted to do. That went straight into two 100-Watt Orange Rockerverb heads.

When it comes to amps you aren’t necessarily team analog or digital. It’s more about what’s best to get the job done.

That’s right. I love my Orange amps and using pedals – that’s what I did when I played with Chelsea Wolfe last week. With Nine Inch Nails I’m deep into Axe-Fx with a few drawers of supplemental pedals like a POG, a DD-8 for the reverse effect, a Catalinbread CSIDMAN and a Red Panda Particle. When I went to play on Danny Elfman’s record, I didn’t need the Axe-Fx; it was just amp and pedals.

You even did that for some Nine Inch Nails tours – quite brave given how many sounds are needed to get through the set.

That was a challenge! Even more than I anticipated. But once we had committed to it we had to see it through. Some of the biggest challenges are the clean sounds or what happens during Hurt, because I’m playing a Godin nylon-string through the Marshall. I needed a Boss Line Switcher to turn everything off at the end of the song, because there were too many pedals growling. It was my master kill!

• The Official Robin Finck Reverb Shop opens on November 11.

Television guitarist and NYC guitar icon Richard Lloyd passed away on November 7 at the age of 75.

He was one of the instrument’s true journeymen, and led a remarkable career with many twists and turns, from learning the secret of guitar playing from John Lee Hooker to spearheading post-punk with his six-string compatriot Tom Verlaine.

He was also a guitar teacher and regular columnist for Guitar World, imparting his fretboard wisdom as the Alchemical Guitarist.

In December 2025, Guitar World’s Andrew Daly conducted our final interview with Lloyd. In a wide-ranging conversation, he looked back at how he first fell in love with guitar, his star encounters, and changing rock history with Television.

Like many of his generation, Richard Lloyd was moved by The Beatles during his early guitar journey.

“I recognized that the guitar was their magic wand,” Lloyd says. “They were casting a spell over young people. It’s an impulse that never left me.”

With Tom Verlaine, Lloyd went on to cast spells of his own with Television. Songs like See No Evil, Marquee Moon, and Friction became punk-meets-art-rock guitar anthems.

“We were like the glamor of poverty,” Lloyd says. “We looked like runaways playing rock ’n’ roll.”

Musically the pair were a match made in heaven – but personally they were plagued by decades of turmoil. “Dynamic tension existed, and that was responsible for a great deal of the creativity,” the guitarist says.

“There’s no denying that Tom was a genius. He was a poet. I’m not poetic. His double- and triple-entendre was better than mine. But in the realm of our magic, my guitar playing was on another level, though he could play and sing. It satisfied me.”

Verlaine died in 2023, and Lloyd hadn’t kept in touch. He’s okay with how things turned out.

“I wanted to make a dent in rock history. That was my goal, and that came true.

“We made a difference with how rock was thought of. I’m proud of that. Tom didn’t want to talk about that… he thought he was above mentioning the past. But I’m extremely proud. I know we made a difference.”

Did you choose the guitar, or did it choose you?

It chose me. I was playing drums first. I have synesthesia, so the cymbals had a color different than a snare drum – stuff was very lively. One day I was playing, and the color went out of the instrument. The drums sounded nothing like they had before.

They went black, grayscale. Then a voice announced in my left ear, ‘You gotta play a melody instrument.’ I tinkered with the piano but nothing ever came of it – I knew one note sounded good and two notes sounded good together, but three notes, I couldn’t figure it out. I still don’t like the piano much.

Around 1958 I went over to my cousins' for a sleepover, and they passed around a guitar. I got my hands on it and just fell in love. They wanted to go to sleep, so I went to the bathroom and played three chords until there was a knock at the door: “Get out of the bathroom!” I’d played those three chords all night long.

Did you take to it quickly?

The guitar was a powerful motivator. I began trying to bend strings, and I wanted to go electric right away. I’m not fond of acoustic; it doesn’t suit me. I have one, and I can play.

I’m drawn to electricity – when I was four or five, I pulled a plug out halfway, grabbed it with my licked fingers, and got a shock all the way up my shoulder. I wanted to know what electricity was, and I sure found out!

I found it’s a ruthless, uncaring energy that wanted to go through me and evict me from my own body. It caused my arm to buzz for two weeks! So I knew what electricity was, and the guitar and electricity were mighty fine.

As you grew older, you met a musician named Velvert Turner, who claimed to be close with Jimi Hendrix.

He was a scrawny black kid and he wasn’t dressed spectacularly. Everybody laughed at him. One of the kids asked him, “You know Jimi? Prove it!’” He said, “Well, he’s in New York because he has a show later. I could call him at his hotel.”

He went into the other room and dialed a number. It rang, and he asked for a name other than Jimi’s. We proclaimed, “You didn’t ask for Hendrix. Who’s this other guy?” He said, “Jimi doesn’t register under his own name.”

He handed the phone off to the guys, who handed it to me, and while I was on the phone, Jimi picked up and said, “Hey, man, who is this?” I said, “It’s Velvert, Jimi,” and handed the phone back.

Was it actually Jimi Hendrix on the line?

I recognized Hendrix’s voice. It was immovable. You couldn’t disguise it. He had a particular way of speaking. So this was the verifier. But he took the phone, talked to Jimi privately, hung up, and said, “Jimi is playing tonight in town. I can bring one person.”

He did a little pirouette, pointed at the sky; and when he brought his hand down he was pointing at me. He said, “I’m going to take you.” I never found out why he picked me, but I assume it’s because I believed him when nobody else did.

Is it true that Jimi was teaching Velvert guitar, and that you picked up some tricks too?

It turned out that Jimi considered Velvert his little brother. He was teaching him to play electric guitar at an apartment on 12th Street. Velvert would call me because I lived six blocks away.

I had a guitar by then – a Stratocaster named Samantha. Velvert would come over and show me what Jimi was teaching him. Things like double stops, bends, octaves, and little things that I picked up on because I have a photographic memory.

I couldn’t play them for a couple of years, but because of my memory, I had them locked up in there. So many of the things I was trying to accomplish came way down the line, but it didn’t matter to me. It was one of the funniest periods of my life. We hung out a lot.

Through Velvert’s Hendrix connection, you met and spent time with Led Zeppelin and many others.

I’m starproof – I wasn’t in awe of anybody. I’d tried to learn from their records, but I wasn’t very good at that. I can repeat what another person’s hands are doing, but I can’t repeat from ear; I learn by sight.

You were invited to a Led Zep show, weren’t you?

I’d turned Robert Plant on to some very good hash, and they invited me to bring some to a show! Before it started I asked the guitar tech if he would show me what Jimmy Page did to warm up.

He got all excited, took me to one of the vacant rooms backstage, and showed me a bunch of stuff. Like I said, I’m very good at picking up what’s played in front of me. I got a lot out of that night.

Before forming Television, you sat in with John Lee Hooker.

One thing I learned then was that, if you keep your mouth shut, you’ll survive a lot longer in delicate social conditions. John Lee Hooker was playing in Boston, where I was living. I went backstage, entered the dressing room, sat down, and didn’t say anything.

John Lee Hooker was working with someone, then he turned to me and said, “Sonny, what you do?” I said, “I play guitar.” He said, “Are you good?” I said, “Well…” He said, “No, you’re great, man! I’m gonna call you up on stage. You’d better come or I’ll chase you down!”

He told me, “I’ll tell you the secret of playing electric guitar.” I went over to listen and he said, “Bend the strings. Learn one string, how to go up and down, bend the notes, and shake them until the woman go, ‘Whoa!’ and the man go, ‘Ahhh!’’’ That’s a literal translation. Since then, I’ve been bending and shaking the strings.

How did you meet Tom Verlaine?

I’d never had a band. I didn’t want to be in a band until I found something I could really participate in. I wanted to be surrounded by something that you can’t describe. I was hanging around Max’s Kansas City, where I met [manager] Terry Ork.

He said, “Do you want to see this guy Tom? He plays solo electric guitar like you do.” I said, “What good is it for me to see him when I could be practicing?” But that day one of my strings had broken, so I told him I’d go to see this guy.

When Tom turned on his amp – one of those really old Fender amps that thumped when you turned it on – the club manager told him to turn it down! After he did his songs, I turned to Terry and said, “Forget putting a band together around me. Hook the two of us up.”

I said, “With Tom and myself, you’ll have a history-making something. You’ll have a band you want to manage.” So Terry sponsored Television. Neither of us had amps at the time, just electric guitars, so he bought us a couple of Fenders and let us rehearse in his loft.

We passed the guitar back and forth. Then Tom went off to the side and muttered something, came back, and said, “Yeah, let’s try it.”

One of your main guitars back then was a pinstriped Tele. Where did you get that?

It was an amazing guitar. I couldn’t afford a Strat, but I scraped up enough money by selling my drum kit and went with the Telecaster because Stratocasters were $100 more. I bought the Telecaster with a rosewood ‘board.

What do you remember about putting together songs like See No Evil and Marquee Moon from Television’s debut, Marquee Moon?

Those are songs we did in our live act. In the beginning, with Richard Hell [on bass], it was very slaphazard musically. But when Fred Smith took over after quitting Blondie – which was considered a smart move because Blondie were not well-respected compared to Television – things changed.

When we went to record I had these lead parts for the verses at the beginning; I had most of that stuff. But the song Marquee Moon didn’t come until much later. I remember rehearsing it and playing it.

With See No Evil, Tom was fooling around with octaves, and I came up with the rest. There have been debates on that – I didn’t get a penny for the songwriting, nor the other ones that I was responsible for. A real drag, because publishing is where you can actually make a living.

Why is that?

Tom went by the argument that everything is the melody and the lyrics, and that there was nothing deserving of credit for what he called “the arrangement.” I debated that. For instance, with Guiding Light, I wrote the part that runs through the whole song.

That was the final straw. I said, “You’ll either give me credit for this, or you can come up with something else because I won’t play it if you don’t give me credit.” I got half credit on that.

I fought him over See No Evil and Friction, but he went behind our backs – you’d find out he put it under his own name.

Did that make it hard for you to stick around for another record, which turned out to be 1978’s Adventure?

I’d say so. But it was hard for both of us. Tom wanted to be everything. He was gonna head out on his own because he figured he’d make more money. That’s all that motivated him: the almighty dollar. I call him a nickel-nursing, penny-pinching thief.

I created this thing. I said to Terry, “Put this guy and me together.” It was me who came up with the notion that I’d be the lead guitarist, but that we’d split solos. I played the leads anytime that Tom was singing. And that was most of the damn song.

Things like Friction, I came up with that bottom line, and it never varies for the whole song. It’s the ground upon which it’s built, and I never got credit for that. That sucks.

Is that what led you to make your solo album, 1979’s Alchemy?

Not exactly. We were both straining. I wrote songs, but none of them fit Television; I recognized that. I tried to present ideas – but when I did, he took writing credit for the whole fucking thing. You have to say, “Does the benefit outweigh the negatives in sticking around? Am I better off somewhere else?”

For 35 years, Television was my number one priority. Even if I had stuff going on, if Television looked like it was going to get together or do something, I’d abandon my own works.

Seeing that Tom didn’t feel the same way, do you regret that?

Well, I’m already a manic depressive – bipolar A, as they say. Every time we went into the studio, Tom would literally drive me nuts. He would act in such a way that I would end up in the mental hospital, or just the regular hospital.

What sort of things would he do?

There’s no answer to that. I don’t know anyone who’s ever worked with Tom who’s not completely distraught by his lack of cooperation with anybody or anything.

Even David Bowie had to basically mix him out of his own song because Tom drove him nuts in the studio. But Bowie could bury his parts, or not hire him again. I couldn’t do that.

So you and Tom had lost touch before he died?

We didn’t keep in touch at all. After I left, that was that. We were together basically 24 hours a day when touring and making records, and it was a great, fantastic, laugh fest. We had a good deal of fun together, but it didn’t reach our personal lives. We’d only meet up when we were making music.

How do you remember Tom?

I remember his sense of humor, which was outstanding. He nearly brought me to piss with his jokes and tomfoolery. He wasn’t above making fun of himself, so his personality had good elements.

I loved being around it – as long as we weren’t making a decision about anything. If we were coasting along, he was fabulous to be with. He had another side.

What’s next for you?

I have a tour coming up in the Northeast and Midwest as The Richard Lloyd Group. We’re a trio, which suits me. For many years I wouldn’t touch Television songs.

But as the last functioning member of the band, I have a responsibility to the fans. I play a number of Television songs, my own songs, and some covers, so everybody has a good time.

The story of the Minutemen is one of the most tragic in the annals of ’80s indie rock.

Led by guitarist/vocalist D. Boon and bassist Mike Watt, and rounded out by drummer George Hurley, the Minutemen were unlike any of their contemporaries.

Their pace was relentless – their masterpiece, 1984’s Double Nickels on the Dime, featured an incredible 45 songs over barely 80 minutes. Contained within was a roller coaster of musical styles – frenzied punk outbursts like Corona (which will be instantly familiar to anyone who’s ever seen Jackass) shared space with an earnest Steely Dan cover.

As they softened their punk edges (musically, mind, not politically) in 1985, it seemed like the band might be primed to travel the road of college-rock-to-mainstream success laid down by R.E.M. Sadly, just as they seemed to be on the threshold of that well-deserved wider recognition, tragedy struck.

On December 22, 1985, while laying in the back of his van without a seatbelt as his girlfriend drove down the highway, the vehicle suffered a sudden structural failure, sending it off the road. Boon was thrown out of its back door, and killed instantly. He was just 27 years old.

Boon’s bandmates were devastated – Watt, always Boon’s foil, lost all desire to play music.

On that note, in a 1995 interview with Guitar World, Watt detailed his beloved Minutemen-era bass, and its fate after the band’s dissolution.

“I got this Gibson – I think it was in 1976 – an EB3-L, like the one Jack Bruce played, but with a slotted headstock,” Watt told GW. “What was important was that it had a thin, three-quarter-scale neck. I played that thing like crazy – it played faster than a guitar – and the strings were so close to the neck that I could really wail on it.

“After D.Boon was gone, I didn’t feel right playing it anymore, so I just gave it away to Flea.”

It was Sonic Youth, with whom Watt was close, who brought the bassist back into music. They recruited him to play on two tracks on their landmark 1986 album, EVOL. Lacking his own bass after the hand-off to Flea, Watt used Youth bassist/vocalist Kim Gordon’s four-string.

Re-energized, Watt teamed up with Hurley to form Firehose, a band that would go on to achieve some of the mainstream success the Minutemen never got the chance to see.

“Mike’s innovative, melodic, and hardcore, all at the same time,” Flea – the recipient of Watt’s Minutemen-era bass – told Bass Player in 1995. “He can also play the simplest thing in the world and imply that he can play anything. He’s one of the greatest bass players ever.”

In this extract from new biography Edged in Blue: A Rock ’n’ Roll Odyssey with Rory Gallagher, Rory and Dónal Gallagher first encounter the ’61 Strat that would become Rory’s constant companion for thousands of gigs and an icon of his music – though not before landing in hot water with their mother, Mona, for secretly bringing the guitar home...

Who's that coming?

‘Are you awake?’ Rory said, shaking my shoulder. Big brother was back late from a gig with news as urgent as if a spacecraft had landed in the city.

‘There’s a Buddy Holly guitar in the window of Crowley’s music shop,’ he exclaimed, ‘Can you believe it – a Fender Stratocaster in Cork? Will you come and look at it with me tomorrow? I might buy it – it’s only one hundred pounds.’

‘What?’ I said, rubbing my eyes and sitting up in bed. I felt like I was still dreaming. ‘And which bank do we rob? That’s the price of a car … for God’s sake, Rory.’

‘Don’t say anything to Mammy until I see if I can get a deal on it,’ my sibling warned.

Standing outside Crowley’s store at Merchants Quay the next day, my brother and I gazed at the contoured, sunburst-finished instrument displayed on a stand in the window. To me, it had all the serenity and presence of Our Lady’s statue in a grotto.

‘Come on, we’re going in,’ Rory ordered.

Reluctantly, I followed him into the small store, which had stringed instruments hanging from every wall like Christmas tree decorations. I tried to make myself as small as possible as Michael, the shop’s genial owner, retrieved the Stratocaster from the front window at my brother’s request.

Rory confidently caressed the guitar’s sleek contours and strummed it acoustically. Even unplugged, its voice was strong and distinctive, the fragrance of its polished lacquer adding to the instrument’s allure.

‘Do you want to plug it into that amp?’ Michael asked Rory.

Rory nodded and, moments later, my ears tingled with shimmering, mirage-like notes that magically filled the shop. The warmth of the amplified chords from the Fender seemed like something from another world.

‘Where did the guitar come from?’ asked Rory.

‘The Royal Showband,’ Michael replied in his soft-spoken way. ‘Their guitarist, Jim Conlon, is after a red one like Hank Marvin has, to suit the band’s new look or something. He only hung onto this one until he could get the red one shipped over from California.’

‘What kind of trade would you give me for my Solid 7 and the Selmer amp – and how would that work with the hire purchase scheme?’ my brother enquired coolly.

Michael did some calculations, his pencil moving quickly as he glanced at the hire purchase rate chart.

‘With the trade-in, it would work out at about £2 and 10 shillings over the next 36 months,’ he said. ‘Sure, why not take the instrument home, try it out at a gig. But obviously, you’ll have to have your mother’s consent and signature for extending the commitment you already have,’ Michael added.

We returned to my grandmother’s house full of glee and trepidation, carrying the guitar in its beautiful buff-coloured case, with stitched tan leather binding at both ends.

‘You’re not to say anything to Mammy or anyone. It’s a secret,’ big brother said gravely.

I nodded.

‘I want you to swear you won’t tell anybody for now. You can guard it when I’m not around in case someone sneaks up from the bar.’

‘Can I play it?’ I asked.

‘No. You can look at it, to make sure it’s safe, but you can’t take it out of the case’, he ordered. Rory also informed me that the guitar was to be hidden under my bed.

‘Mammy will never look there – you’re the pet,’ Rory explained.

During the following days, I’d return regularly to check on the guitar and admire its perfection, swaddled up in its reddish-gold lining and cradled by the case’s inner structure. But what started as a quick peek once a day became an hourly occurrence.

While I kept my word not to touch the guitar, I had a good look through the case during these inspections. I remember there was a blue bottle of Fender-branded polish inside that seemed more like a solvent.

Later, when Rory first began using the guitar in the band, I’d always ask him if he wanted the guitar polished – without quite realising, I was getting a bit addicted to the fumes from the stuff.

It wasn’t long before our cover was blown. One evening, my mother bumped into Michael Crowley in the street and he soon told her about the arrangement he’d made with Rory regarding the Strat. This was news to her, of course, so she came back with a face like thunder.

‘What’s this about another guitar?’ she demanded.

‘Oh, Michael’s just lent it to me,’ Rory replied, all innocence.

‘Well, you know we can’t afford that. You’ll have to take it back right away,’ she said.

Then she turned to me.

‘And what about you? The guitar’s under your bed.’

I explained that I was just minding it for Rory, but my mother shook her head again.

‘No, it goes back.’

Rory was so upset.

‘We won’t ever get to be professional if I don’t have a proper guitar,’ he protested.

But my mother wouldn’t budge.

‘We won’t be able to pay for it – you’ll never get the money,’ she said, with a note of finality.

To be fair to her, the whole situation raked up difficult feelings. On the one hand, she had unflagging support for her brood. But she also had painful memories of my father, Danny, falling into debt and having to pawn his piano accordion – and it was only the money she earned as a seamstress that had allowed him to get his instrument back again.

Rory kept at it, however.

‘Look, if I had that guitar, then we wouldn’t need a rhythm player and I could get paid twice as much because I could play rhythm and lead.’

This argument seemed to tip the scales a little and, after some careful thought, my mother said she could spare an hour to go to Crowley’s with us that Friday and talk things through with Michael.

And so, the big day finally came. We went back down to Michael, who set out terms for extending the hire purchase agreement that my mother already had with him for Rory’s earlier instruments.

This now went from an 18-month ‘jail sentence’ to a five-year extended contract. Michael had this wonderful look about him that used to make me think of the Beatles’ suave producer, George Martin: he was so cool and calm, and he was a very rational man.

Many years later, when Michael died, his daughter told me that Michael had inherited the shop at the age of just 14. Having built the business up from there, he knew how difficult it was to make your way as a young man getting started in music – and he had a kind heart. He reassured my mother that Rory had never missed a payment on the previous equipment he’d had.

‘Look, if he can’t pay for it, I’ll be taking it back off him and selling it to somebody else,’ he said.

So, with my mother’s help and Michael Crowley’s forbearance, Rory got his Strat. It was 1963 and he was just 15 years old. Getting that guitar was a huge moment for Rory and it would become his lifelong musical companion.

Having been granted my mother’s blessing, the guitar was now legitimate and I wanted to take a picture of Rory holding it. To do this, we had to climb out the window onto the roof because it was too dark to take pictures inside.

My mother said, ‘Stand beside the parapet. I’ll take a picture of you both with the guitar.’

But Rory protested.

‘No, you can’t take a picture of Dónal holding it. He doesn’t even play the guitar!’

‘Yeah, I can,’ I said, taking it off him and holding down a simple chord. This didn’t satisfy Rory, however, who begged my mother to take the guitar off me.

But she said, ‘Oh, go on. It’s only a photograph.’

Rory compromised and said I could hold his acoustic guitar instead and so, with a small ‘click’, the picture was taken, capturing us both smiling as Rory took possession of the guitar with which he would make his name.

• Edged In Blue: A Rock ’n’ Roll Odyssey with Rory Gallagher by Dónal Gallagher with Jamie Dickson is out now via Red Stripe Press.
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

Having built a career playing bass guitar for some of the biggest names in music, from Gwen Stefani and Shania Twain to Don Felder, life on the road and the Las Vegas Strip has given bassist Derek Frank no shortage of stories.

But Frank is more than just a first-call sideman, and has increasingly made room for his own instrumental project, channelling decades of experience into a distinctive blend of deep grooves and ’70s-inspired funk.

His latest release, In Case You Missed It, Volume 2 – Live at The Baked Potato, captures Frank and his seven-piece band in full flight at the legendary Los Angeles club – despite having had no rehearsal beforehand.

“Rehearsal is overrated,” says Frank. “There’s a certain nervous energy when you get onstage knowing you haven’t played something together before. Everybody has done their homework, but you never know exactly what’s going to happen.”

Frank’s ability to hit the ground running has been a recurring theme of his career. Joining up with singer-songwriter Melissa Etheridge was a case in point. As he explains, preparation and confidence can go a long way.

“My first show with Melissa was at Radio City Music Hall in New York. We ran a couple of songs at soundcheck, but not even half the set. There was no rehearsal, but I’d learned everything beforehand, and I felt good about it.

“Melissa asked what I was comfortable with, and I said, ‘Don’t run anything on account of me. Run what you need to run, and I’ll be fine with everything else.’

“It was the same with Don Felder. We just showed up and played the gig. I had to do my homework, but if you’re a bass player in L.A., that’s just part of the job.”

Where did the desire to make your own music come from?

I enjoy playing with other artists. That’s been my career. But I also need to create my own stuff – to explore techniques and tones that I hear in my head but don’t necessarily get to use on other people’s records.

Have the artists who hire you as a sideman heard your solo material?

When Melissa Etheridge was considering me for her band, she checked out some of my videos. Don Felder also looked into my work after I started playing with him. He said he hadn’t realized I could play like that.

Gwen Stefani still pops up in my Instagram story views all the time. I played with her for about four years, but she never comments on anything, so I’ve no idea what she thinks of my solo stuff!

You joined Gwen Stefani’s band for her Las Vegas residency. How did that opportunity come about?

I was on tour in China when the musical director called and told me Gwen was doing a Vegas residency and rehearsals were starting the following week. So I got back on a Friday night and was in rehearsal with Gwen on Saturday morning.

Eventually, I was juggling Gwen Stefani and Shania Twain, who had residencies in the same theater in Las Vegas. Their schedules didn’t overlap, so I did both, but when Shania went out on tour, I couldn’t continue with Gwen.

I loved the experience, especially getting to play the No Doubt material and dig into Tony Kanal’s basslines.

How did that production compare with playing with Don Felder?

They’re very different kinds of shows. Gwen’s is a huge production where the music is only one part of the experience. You have dancers, video, costume changes and lots of stage direction. You might be on a riser for one song and moving to the front of the stage for another.

With Don, it’s much more about the songs and the guitar solos. We play primarily Eagles material, and there’s no elaborate choreography. You have your microphone and your position onstage, and then you just play rock ’n’ roll.

I enjoy both approaches. With Gwen or Shania, you’re active onstage, running around and putting on a show. With artists like Melissa or Don, things are more subdued. You can stay in one place, focus on the music and concentrate on supporting the songs. Sometimes it’s nice not to have to work quite so hard physically and just let the music do the talking.

But I enjoy all of it. That’s what makes the job so rewarding.

How did your new album come together?

I’d just finished with Melissa Etheridge, and I had two weeks off until I went back out with Don Felder, so I booked a gig at the Baked Potato. We didn’t have time to rehearse, so I charted everything out and sent it over to the guys in the band.

The first set came together brilliantly. Everybody showed up ready to play, and it was a really good gig. The Baked Potato has a great recording setup now, with multiple cameras and multitrack recording, so they capture most of their shows.

When I got the board mix back, I listened to it and thought, ‘Man, this sounds really good. Maybe we should just mix it and put it out.’

The album includes a Tower of Power cover.

Rocco Prestia has always been one of my favorite bass players and a huge influence on me. I play a lot of fingerstyle, muted notes and 16th-note funk, and I love that kind of stuff. When I’m playing pop gigs, I don’t necessarily get to explore it, but I’ve always wanted to play Squib Cakes with a band.

For this gig at The Baked Potato, I wanted to introduce some new material, but the creative juices weren’t really flowing while I was out playing other people’s music. So I decided to put a few covers into the set instead. I found an arrangement of Squib Cakes, wrote up a chart, and we played it.

You got to spend some time with Rocco. What was that experience like?

Toward the end of his life we hung out in Las Vegas. I was doing a residency out there, and our tour manager had worked with Tower of Power for years. He connected us, I got Rocco’s number, and we arranged to meet up.

We spent about an hour in a friend’s studio, playing a little and exchanging ideas. Afterwards, the band I was playing with was going out for dinner, so I invited him along. At the time, he wasn’t comfortable driving at night, so I actually drove him home. I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m driving my hero home!’

You have quite a bass collection. How many are we talking about?

Somewhere around 30. I suppose I’m an unintentional collector at this point! But I don’t buy basses simply to put them on a wall or hold on to them as investments. Usually, I’ll have my eye on an instrument for a while, but I can’t justify buying it. Then a new tour, gig or record comes along, and I realise it would be useful for that particular job.

Has one instrument surprised you more than any other?

Probably my short-scale Music Man StingRay. I didn’t even know they existed until my friend Philip Bynoe connected me with Music Man. I’ve always been a fan of StingRays and short-scale basses, so I thought it was really cool.

I bought my first StingRay in 1991, when I was about 18, and I’ve loved them ever since. But I hadn’t really considered that a short-scale version might become the defining sound of my band.

If you could keep only one bass from your collection, which would it be?

That’s an easy one. If I could own only one bass and still do everything I do, it would be my 1963 Precision Bass. It’s my prize possession, and it’s also the most expensive bass in my collection.

If you asked which instrument has the most sentimental value, I’d say my 1991 StingRay. That was the bass I learned a lot on and used through an important period of my early career. If I could save two, those would be the ones.

Richard Lloyd, the guitarist of Television and a core part of the CBGB and the ’70s New York punk rock scene, has died at the age of 75.

His family issued a statement to Rolling Stone, revealing that the guitarist died on Saturday morning at his home in Chattanooga, Tennessee. “His loving wife Sheila and his dog Willie Mays were with him at the end.”

Lloyd was diagnosed with bile duct cancer in March 2026. In August, a GoFundMe was set up to support his treatment and cover medical expenses. At the time, Sean Seymour, who played bass in his solo project, revealed the extent of his condition.

“He has tumors in his liver, including one located dangerously close to a major blood vessel,” Seymour wrote. “Because of its location, doctors cannot safely operate to remove it at this time.” His health also forced him to stop touring.

“For a working musician, that’s devastating – not only because performing is what he loves, but because touring is his primary source of income.”

Lloyd’s playing was a core part of Television, with the twin-guitar dynamic between Lloyd and frontman Tom Verlaine, along with their genre-blending approach, helping the band stand out from their peers. The band’s debut album, Marquee Moon, released in 1977, is considered one of the defining releases of ’70s rock and the punk era.

Despite their limited output – which consisted of the 1977 release, its follow-up, 1978’s Adventure, and 1992’s Television – the band’s technicality and songwriting prowess, which drew from jazz, art-rock, proto-punk and even jam bands, cemented their legacy.

“I wanted to make a dent in rock history,” Lloyd told Guitar World earlier this year. “That was my goal, and that came true.

“We made a difference with how rock was thought of. I’m proud of that. Tom didn’t want to talk about that… he thought he was above mentioning the past. But I’m extremely proud. I know we made a difference.”

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on October 25, 1951, Lloyd initially played drums before his growing fascination with the guitar led him to switch instruments.

“The guitar was a powerful motivator. I began trying to bend strings, and I wanted to go electric right away. I’m not fond of acoustic; it doesn’t suit me. I have one, and I can play. I found it’s a ruthless, uncaring energy that wanted to go through me and evict me from my own body. It caused my arm to buzz for two weeks! So I knew what electricity was, and the guitar and electricity were mighty fine.”

In his teens, Lloyd was an avid music fan and, after meeting a Brooklyn guitarist who claimed to know Hendrix, became a regular at Hendrix shows, as well as those by Led Zeppelin, The Who, The Jeff Beck Group and the Grateful Dead.

After dropping out of high school, Lloyd moved to Boston, where he even ended up playing with John Lee Hooker. After a stint in Los Angeles, he became more deeply involved in New York’s proto-punk scene.

An encounter with a certain Tom Miller – who would later change his last name to Veraline – in the summer of 1973 would mark the start of Television.

“Those are songs we did in our live act,” he said, speaking about Marquee Moon.

“In the beginning, with Richard Hell [on bass], it was very haphazard musically. But when Fred Smith took over after quitting Blondie – which was considered a smart move because Blondie were not well-respected compared to Television – things changed.

“When we went to record, I had these lead parts for the verses at the beginning; I had most of that stuff. But the song Marquee Moon didn’t come until much later. I remember rehearsing it and playing it.”

The band broke up following the release of 1978’s Adventure. In 1979, Lloyd launched his first solo album, Alchemy. Over the course of his career, he released seven more albums, with the latest being 2018’s The Countdown. He also played live and toured regularly until very recently.

“For many years I wouldn’t touch Television songs,” he shared. “But as the last functioning member of the band, I have a responsibility to the fans. I play a number of Television songs, my own songs, and some covers, so everybody has a good time.”

John 5 was the ideal candidate to assume Mick Mars’ role in Mötley Crüe. He is one of the few rock guitar players whom you can hand an electric guitar and all bets are off – he can play anything.

By the time he joined Mötley Crüe, John 5 had plenty of experience, playing with Marilyn Manson, Rob Zombie, and more. He was no novice. But in a recent video interview with Guitar World, he admits that his first how with the LA rock legends caught him off-guard.

It was an East Coast date, Crüe were playing Atlantic City – Hard Rock Live at the Etess Arena. February 10, 2023. He’ll never forget it. He had some special guests in the audience.

“The first show, this is kind of weird,” he says. “I never talked about this. It was in Atlantic City. My first and favorite band is Kiss, and I’ve, you know, been very close with those guys for probably 30-something years. And Ace [Frehley] and Peter [Criss] came to the first Mötley show.”

Frehley and Criss were both New Jersey residents, but nonetheless, they had to travel considerable distances to get there.

“I invited them, and they drove – they drove, you know, two hours each!” says John 5. “And I remember they were right over there watching the first show, and I was playing the show, and it’s exciting, ‘cos everybody was watching.”

Maybe he was so concentrated on playing everything to a Tee that he hadn’t given a thought to what all this meant to him, but when the house lights went up and he got backstage the emotion of it all overwhelmed him.

“I got off the stage and everyone was like, ‘That was awesome,’ and I burst out into tears for some reason,” he says. “Like, uncontrollably. I was like, ‘What’s going on!?’ It was just so much emotion. It was so weird. I had my heroes there, and I’m playing with Mötley Crüe, and all my friends there. It was very odd. It was so… weird.”

But that hasn’t been the highlight of his Mötley Crüe career so far. There have been enormodome shows, hard rock bacchanals in the wide-open spaces of the world’s biggest sports stadiums, all of which was pretty exciting stuff. For a die-hard Crüe fan who was now in the band, going back to where the band cut their teeth in West Hollywood clubs has been John 5’s pinch-me highlight so far.

“The club shows,” he says. “We did the Whiskey [a Go Go], the Roxy, and the Troubadour. Playing the Whisky, ‘cos that’s where they started. We pulled up in the Dr. Feelgood ambulance, like they do in the video. I think that was probably one of the highlights.”

You can check out our interview with John 5 above – and don’t forget to subscribe to the Guitar World YouTube channel.

When the Mount Rushmore of the 20th century’s most innovative guitarists comes to be carved, John Martyn will not feature. The musician born Iain David McGeachy is often overlooked in discussions about players who changed the way the instrument is played. But why?

Firstly, Martyn rarely sold many records. While innovative works like Solid Air and Inside Out were critics’ darlings and attracted cult followings, they never really bothered the charts. How many players can an artist inspire when they sell fewer records than the guitar heroes of the day? Some of whom were, ironically, huge Martyn fans.

Secondly, he was too creatively slippery to become a legitimate guitar hero. He was a mercurial musician who loved to experiment with radical sounds and approaches – however successful they turned out to be. The musical identity of a Page or a Hendrix was fixed during their imperial phase; Martyn was more mutable.

At the start of his career he was inspired by both Scottish folk and saucer-eyed hippie music; his work at the time was all twinkly guitars and songs about – as he memorably put it – “the dingly-dangly-dell of life.” Then, on albums such as Bless the Weather and Solid Air, his playing became more influenced by jazz, folk rock and prog, with stranger tunings and those iconic, frayed-sounding chords.

More experiments followed in the form of the transcendent One World, made in Jamaica with Lee Scratch Perry. In the 1980s (partly due, in this writer’s opinion, to the malign influence of Phil Collins) he ventured into something like easy-listening territory, before experiencing more diminishing returns in the 1990s – not that there weren’t highlights – until his death in 2009.

Outside of music, his conduct was considerably less inspirational. He perpetuated years of abuse against his ex-wife, for example. So while we won’t take any lessons from his personal life, there’s still merit in exploring his complex legacy, particularly how he changed the game for guitarists – many of whom don’t even realize it.

The visual guitar solo

Martyn was a notorious showoff. Those who witnessed his first gigs at the famous London folk club Les Cousins remember that he took great delight in being the fastest, the most technically proficient, the most incendiary player.

Ralph McTell, in the excellent Johnny Too Bad documentary, recalls how Martyn “came in like the new kid, full of vim and vigor and life.” The best example is Seven Black Roses, or what Martyn eventually dubbed “the visual guitar solo.”

The song starts off incongruously enough, with quicksilver fingerpicking in an open tuning. Then he starts moving the capo up the neck while still fingerpicking. The effect is like a record is being played at increasing speed. Then he starts detuning the strings with the machineheads, still fingerpicking all the while. Sure, it’s showing off, but who cares?

Seven Black Roses is wild and utterly brilliant, as demonstrated by the many live versions floating around YouTube. While it might seem like a sonic curio or a joke, the piece demonstrates that Martyn was always looking to squeeze new sounds out of the guitar, even so early into his playing career.

Echoplex 16th notes

A number of innovative players did fall under Martyn’s spell – Paul Weller, Ryley Walker, Beth Orton and Morcheeba have all named him as a guiding light. Perhaps the most famous example, though, is U2’s The Edge.

Part of his signature sound is the chiming, delay-drenched quarter notes that stack and stack, creating a pulsing undercurrent of rhythm. Listen to Martyn’s playing from the early to mid-1970s, though, and it’s easy to see who The Edge got it from. Martyn used the Echoplex on songs such as Rather Be the Devil and Outside In to create something almost frighteningly modern-sounding.

Marking one of Martyn’s true creative peaks, Outside In fuses jazz, folk, rock, and prog into something heady and propulsive. Front and center is the kind of delay-soaked playing that’s all over Where the Streets Have No Name or I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.

Look out of his Old Grey Whistle Test version, where he and Danny Thompson strip the maximalist studio arrangement down to just guitar, Echoplex, voice and bass, creating something a little less messy; a little more focused and muscular. Of all Martyn’s innovations, his popularization of the Echoplex is perhaps the one for which he’ll be remembered.

Pedalboard wrangling

Although large and unwieldy pedalboards are de rigeur for guitarists these days, it was more unusual in the 1970s, and even rarer for an acoustic player. As well as the Echoplex, Martyn experimented with the EHX Big Muff (which he named a song after), choruses, and phasers; he described using different pedals as his “hobby.”

It was his use of a volume pedal, though, that characterizes one of his most interesting sonic explorations, and one of his most beautiful songs. Small Hours is the phosphorescent final track from 1977’s One World, recorded after a period of particularly high turmoil (even for Martyn) leading him to move to a farm belonging to Island label boss Chris Blackwell.

The foundation of Small Hours, along with the low-voltage drum machine and distant sounds of geese, is Martyn’s gradual volume swells. It’s incredible how something so intimate can sound so eternal. Of course, he wasn’t the first to use volume swells, but he was certainly one of the first to combine them with meditative music and a delay unit.

Listen to One World or Live At Leeds and it’s easy to see how his ability to stack effects places his music upstream of more modern genres like dream pop, shoegaze and post-rock.

Esoteric tunings

Martyn was also not the first to experiment with esoteric tunings, but his combination of a style typically associated with folk and blues with jazz, and beyond, was one of the ways his music and playing was so distinctive.

The philosophy behind his tuning style is interesting: In 1990 he told Guitarist magazine that “the reason I use open tunings comes primarily from those years of playing solo. It made it much easier to get a big, warm sound.” Indeed, tracks where he plays solo are remarkable in how full they sound; he pays attention to the full harmonic range.

For many people, the definitive Martyn tuning is CFCCGD. The key factor is the third and fourth strings tuned to the same note, which achieves all sorts of resonances that are usually unavailable in standard tuning.

When you hear chords played with CFCCGD or DADDAD – another of his favorites – it’s immediately clear who they sound like. How many other guitarists have claimed a tuning as their own?

Slap-and-pop style

Much like his approach to tuning, his pop-and-slap playing technique was not revolutionary; but when combined with quirky and unique songs, it became another of his calling cards. That style, which introduced a backbeat on the 2nd and 4th beats of each bar, was taken from Davy Graham, a huge influence on Martyn’s playing.

Much in the same way that his tunings were selected for fullness and warmth, to make up for the lack of other instrumentation, Martyn’s slap-and-pop technique adds rhythm and bite. In a sense, his right thumb was his drummer.

It sounds a little ludicrous – but listen to May You Never, One Day Without You, or pretty much anything from Bless the Weather until his Phil Collins era, then imagine them without that metronomic pulse. Better still, try to play them without the thumb slap and see how they sound.

The technique sums up why Martyn is such a brilliant player. Although he took relatively humble playing elements – acoustic guitars, folk guitar style, jazz chords – he was able to alchemize them into something radically new.

The world has waited a long time to hear Joe Satriani and Steve Vai collaborate on an all-original studio album together. We have seen them on tour, individually as part of the G3, together as Satch/Vai.

But on record, making music together? The pair just couldn’t get around to it.

Until now. The Sea of Emotion is released today (November 6) and finds the two virtuosos driving each other forward, pushing each other’s playing to the limit. There is a catch, though. They had to make the album remotely, recording song ideas then sending them to each other email.

There were a couple of notable exceptions. In a recent interview with Guitarist, Satriani and Vai explained why the two moments they did record together were pretty special.

Firstly, this is an album that references their times growing up in Long Island, looking out to the fields across from Carle Place school that inspired the title of the album. They called it the Sea of Emotion. It was real Dazed and Confused stuff, formative years, learning guitar, Satriani teaching Vai, listening to Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Jimmy Hendrix and Kiss, long summers and goofing around. So it was a pretty big deal to get Deep Purple’s frontman to guest on the record.

“The only time we were together was when we recorded Glenn Hughes singing I Wanna Play My Guitar at Steve’s house,” says Satriani. “The rest of the time we were engineering on our own in our separate pods, separated by 400 miles.”

For the remainder of the time, Satriani was in San Francisco, Vai in LA. Their schedules were brutal. Satriani had to prepare for the ultimate guitar test, playing Eddie Van Halen songs with Sammy Hagar on the Best of All Worlds Tour. Vai had his own Herculean endeavors – he was playing Robert Fripp’s King Crimson guitar parts alongside Adrian Belew in Beat.

The time flew by, as did the deadlines. The label kept asking when the record was coming.

But they had already got together in a room to record for the record. They just didn’t know it at the time. When they were teenagers, fooling around with the guitar during a lesson, they made a recording, and that found its way onto the album.

“There is actually one little snippet we did play together because the technology to record remotely didn’t exist. That’s the intro to The Sea of Emotion Part 3: Reflections on a Year and a Half,” says Vai.

“That was recorded during one of my guitar lessons with Joe when I was, like, 13. We still don’t even know who played what, but it’s eight minutes of these teenage kids having total freedom. So I took a little snippet of that. That’s the only time on the record we’re sitting in the same room playing together. And it was over 50 years ago.”

The Sea of Emotion might be a celebration of an analog era but it was a 21st-century production, put together via email, and the pair left their tube amps on standby, relying instead on guitar plugins. Vai admits that this was a crossing the Rubicon moment for him.

“I had a very snobbish attitude,” says Vai. “‘Oh, you have to have microphones.’ So I started fooling around with SansAmp and realized how easy it is.”

You can read this Satch/Vai interview in full in the latest issue of Guitarist – better still, save and subscribe.

The Sea of Emotion is out now via earMUSIC.

The Rolling Stones have a new album out. It’s titled Foreign Tongues. It is another late-career doozy shepherded onto tape by über-producer Andrew Watt. And it begs the question: when will we see the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll institution hit the road and perform it?

Every day, the emails come pouring in from Ticketmaster, Live Nation, See Tickets et al, and, all of a sudden, summer 2027 looks pretty busy. And yet there is still no sign of any Stones dates.

Appearing on Argentinian talk show, Otro Día Perdido (Another Day Wasted), on Thursday, November 4, guitarist Ronnie Wood explained all, and said he’s champing at the bit. But they’ll have to wait for Keith Richards to give them the shout. And we might be some time.

“Mick and I have already been promoting a little bit, but we are waiting for Keith to set down what he wants to do for his future,” said Wood (via Guitar Player). “Because he’s a bit road weary at the moment. He said, ‘I don’t want to do any more touring – for a bit, you know?’”

Wood is not road weary. He’s the opposite. He’s got ants in his pants, which is why he is in Argentina, playing the Movistar Arena in Buenos Aires tonight (November 6).

“I’m not going to sit back and wait,” said Wood. “So I’m going to get out there and play!’”

Wood also has a solo compilation to promote. His Fearless: Anthology 1965–2025, was released on September 26 and collects tracks from all eras of Wood’s epic discography, including four brand-new tracks, early teenage recordings, tracks from the Faces, and a previously unreleased songs such as his cover of Ernie K-Doe’s A Certain Girl, featuring the Pretenders’ frontwoman Chrissie Hynde.

We wouldn’t give up hope on the Stones announcing dates just yet. Wood did place a lot of emphasis on “for a bit”. This is a break from the road not retirement.

Speaking to Guitar World in April, Keith Richards explained how arthritis had affected his playing.

“Well, I do have arthritis and very large knuckles,” said Richards. “They don’t hurt, but it does get in the way sometimes. I’m going for a wider fingerboard for that reason.”

Richards says he has to talk them into action: “I sit on ’em,” he said. “No, I do have one of those hand pumps, you know. I’m really lax, quite honestly. I just look at my hands and my hands look at me, and we say, ‘Well, let’s see what we can do today.’ And that’s the way I play guitar. I look at it and I say, ‘We’ve got nothing else to do. Come here. I love you!’ [Laughs]”

“When Steven first mixed the record, I thought the bass was too quiet,” said Nick Beggs in the August 2016 issue of Bass Player, recalling the final stages of his work on Steven Wilson’s 2013 prog rock opus, The Raven That Refused to Sing.

“I didn't want to say anything, because I didn't want to be that guy – y’know, the bass player who says the bass guitar isn’t loud enough.”

Almost a month later, Wilson shot Beggs an email explaining that, after repeated listening, he had come to the conclusion that the bass was, well, too quiet, and he asked Beggs for his opinion on the matter.

“You’re probably asking the wrong person,” said Beggs, “but, in my opinion, every record ever made has mixed the bass too quiet!”

The upshot? On the final mixes, “Steven bumped up the bass 2dB.”

Whether by direct or indirect means, Nick Beggs has made a career of bumping up the bass, from the Larry Graham-approved slap bass fixtures on his band Kajagoogoo’s classic ‘80s single Too Shy to the pummeling Chris Squire like 16th-note power riff that fires up intro to The Raven’s leadoff track, Luminol.

In between, Beggs has plucked, slapped, and picked bass with an impressive array of artists, including Alphaville, John Paul Jones, Kim Wilde, and ex-Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett, as well as charting hits with his own projects Ellis, Beggs & Howard and Industrial Salt, and quietly releasing noteworthy solo albums featuring his other favorite instrument, the Chapman Stick.

Do you enjoy being referred to as ‘an 80s guy?’

I can go and do all this other stuff, but for some people, that’s all I’ll ever be.

Is that the downside of achieving success at the start of your career?

That was the plan, though. We did think in Kajagoogoo about how to be instantly successful, from the songwriting upwards. Everything we did was based around what was happening on the radio and what people were listening to, and how we could achieve that. And it worked!

But it’s taken me years in the industry as a professional bass player for the heavy metal magazines to want to talk to me.

You’re sounding rather like a closet metalhead.

I love that music. People might find that hard to believe, but I know my stuff. All those seminal bass players from the ’60s and ’70s were what I was listening to.

That music has come around again: heavy metal is cool again, and bands like Meshuggah are making music in subdivisions of the genre. They take what Frank Zappa did and reinvent it, because they love that stuff and they’re fans of it.

Essentially what you try to do as a musician is find a new take on what's been said already, while earning a living from it, in an industry that you love, in a genre that you’re interested in.

Well, Robert Trujillo of Metallica always references you as one of his inspirations.

He’s a very sweet guy. I did a couple of interviews for his Jaco movie. I’m really glad he made that film. I met John Pastorius, who was also a lovely fellow. He said to me, ‘Man, you ’80s guys, you all really understood my dad.’ And of course we did: he was a huge influence.

You’re known for technical playing. Are there any songs that you find difficult to play?

There are pieces which are challenging, definitely. I would find it tricky to play a gig that was too far into the jazz idiom, but I would take it as a challenge and take the time to master it. I’d say to myself, ‘You have a fixed time to get this music under your fingers. Get some tuition, and get it done.’

Talking of jazz, do you play double bass?

I’ve always wanted one, but never got around to it. But to have the jazz chops, and the ability to improvise, is more important than the execution. Steven Wilson told me that you get the most interesting improvisation when you get jazz players to play rock.

Sound the Eric Clapton holy grail klaxon: Slowhand’s 1989 to ’93 guitar rig is being auctioned off, and this is a big one.

ANALOGr is hosting the auction and has placed estimates between $2,500,000 and $3,000,000. One lucky collector will be able to set this up in their backyard and play the same 1988 Custom Shop signature Fender Stratocaster and the same Soldano amp that Clapton played at Cream’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in January 1993.

Heck, the neighbors won’t mind, not once they see what you’re playing through (though if you can afford to drop $3m a guitar rig then perhaps the neighbors will be far enough away not to matter).

This is is Journeyman-era treasure, and so it’s hard to know which item to get more excited about first. The Soldano SLO-100 was hand-built by Mike Soldano himself, and comes with a COA signed by the tube amp guru.

It’s paired with a full-stack – one slanted Soldano 4x12, one straight 4x12 – and they all come in that silver snakeskin vinyl covering that was the fashion of the time.

The Strat, however, has a sort of "Blackie" MkII mojo to it. This was built by the Fender Custom Shop’s founder and Master Builder Mike Stevens, and was the very first Clapton signature Strat. It’s finished in black with a white pickguard. It has trio of Lace Sensor single-coil pickups, and the onboard boost.

It looks like Stevens used a particularly nice piece of maple for the neck and fingerboard. This was for Mr Clapton, after all. But Clapton did enjoy a cigarette while he performed, and this guitar bears the scars from where he would place it between his strings.

This guitar was sold before in 2004 as part of Christie’s epic Crossroads Guitar Auction. Back then, Clapton’s tech, Lee Dickson, explained why this made this particular Strat special. Clapton was about to go on the patches.

“I think this is the last smoking guitar,” said Dickson “This to me is one of the killer guitars. It was played an awful lot through the early '90s. It has no serial number on it because it’s the first [black] one, almost like a prototype. It was Eric’s suggestion at the time. He said we should really have a black one in the range. So this is the first officially sanctioned black [Clapton] Strat.”

The Clapton Strat was released in Torino Red, 7-Up Green and Pewter. In 2004, Stevens revealed that this guitar was originally finished in Pewter. And it most definitely was a prototype

“I remember this guitar well. It started life in Pewter as the Royal Albert Hall pics show,” said Stevens. “When it finally became black and beautiful I do not know, but I applaud it.”

Like Stevens says, this guitar was at the Royal Albert Hall, played with Cream – it was his main stage guitar from the summer of 1990 to March 1993.

Stevens left no stone unturned when designing Clapton’s signature Strat, and he was given access to the holiest of holies to get the neck profile just right, Blackie. Stevens had Blackie for two weeks, and not that he was paranoid, but he says it “never left my sight unless locked in my office in Corona or stashed under my bed with a pistol under my pillow while I slept.”

“When I finally copied Blackie, to finalize the Clapton series for Fender, I made two necks for Eric that were approved,” he said. “John Page, George Blanda, the electronic R&D guys and I all worked on this project. I built the necks and the carving templates and later helped get it into regular production. But then my job was to assemble my necks on these two bodies and make them play great!”

According to Where’s Eric?, this 1988 Custom Shop prototype Strat sold in 2004 for $231,500. It might be worth considerably more now. Might Joe Bonamassa be tempted to add Clapton's SLO-100 to Gary Moore's?

Head over to ANALOGr for more.

Stanley Jordan was never one to flood the market with new music (throughout his career, he seemed to average a new album every three or four years), but even he didn’t plan on the 11-year gap between his last album, 2015’s Duets with Kevin Eubanks, and his latest, Feather in the Wind.

“The album was originally made for Mack Avenue Records as part of my deal with them,” Jordan says, “but it didn’t really fit their stylistic A&R policy or whatever, so it kind of sat in limbo for a while. The way we resolved it is I now own the rights to the album, and I’m putting it out through my own channels.”

Ahead of the album’s release, Jordan issued two brilliant – and brilliantly distinctive – singles. On the sumptuous ballad Meditation, he trades his signature two-handed touch technique for a flatpick.

Playing a Vigier electric guitar that beautifully mimics an acoustic, he weaves a joyous dialogue with legendary Brazilian vocalist Milton Nascimento. By contrast, the high-energy Flight of the Eagle is a spectacular, one-take slice of classic jazz-rock fusion that features Jordan masterfully blending pick and touch techniques.

Beyond the stellar musicianship, however, the album carries a profound, bittersweet weight, as several of Jordan’s collaborators on the project have since passed away. He points to Flight of the Eagle, where he is backed by a “dream team” of drummer Kenwood Denard, keyboardist Delmar Brown and bassist T.M. Stevens – the latter two of whom are no longer with us.

But the album’s most poignant tribute is a planned duet that never was. For years, Jordan had discussed collaborating with his first guitar hero, B.B. King. They finally settled on an unexpected song choice: a cover of the Doors’ eerie classic, Riders on the Storm.

Tragically, before they could record together, King fell ill and passed away. Rather than scrap the track or hire another guitarist, Jordan completed the recording alone as a tribute, playing King’s parts himself.

“It’s my imaginary version of my dialogue with B.B.,” he says. “Of course, it would’ve been better to have him do it himself, but this is what I did, and I think people can feel the heart in it.”

For Jordan, that emotional resonance is the thread that binds Feather in the Wind together. “A lot of what the album is about is the things we do to find constancy in the face of loss and change and death and all the stuff that the world throws at us,” he says.

We tend to associate you with your touch technique, yet you also play with a pick. How do you make the distinction?

It has to fit the song. My two-handed touch technique is perfect for solo pianistic counterpoint, but on Meditation I had a keyboardist covering those textures. Playing with a pick lets me focus purely on a single line to create a vocal-like dialogue with Milton Nascimento.

Did the touch technique conceptually change how you play with a pick?

Definitely. I actually mastered the pick before developing the touch technique. Now, I find myself trying to recreate touch-style ideas using a pick. For example, I’ve been practicing sweep picking to capture some of that same fluidity.

In the ’80s, you began a long, professional relationship with record exec Bruce Lundvall. Before you signed to Blue Note, you actually turned him down when he was running Elektra Musician. What was going through your mind?

It wasn’t that I turned him down per se – I just wasn’t ready. I had a baby on the way and was living in Wisconsin, not New York. Bruce would call me every month and say, “I just want you to know you’ve got a record deal waiting for you here.” People told me I was crazy to wait, but I wanted to make sure the timing was right.

I was also paying close attention to how record labels operated. I had already released my independent record, Touch Sensitive [1982], so I was tuned into the manufacturing side. I noticed Elektra Musician was using a two-color print on their otherwise gorgeous album covers. Even though it was elegantly done, it made me question how much the parent label was truly invested in the imprint. I wondered, “What happens if I sign and then Bruce leaves?”

I’ve never heard of an artist raising the issue of printing techniques when deciding whether to sign a contract.

Exactly! So anyway, eventually, the time came. I walked into Bruce’s office with my attorney and said, “Okay, I’m ready.” Bruce looked at me and said, “Before we talk, I’ve got to tell you something. I don’t work here anymore. I got a call last night – Capitol-EMI wants to revive Blue Note, and they want me to run the whole thing. I want you to be the first artist I sign.” That’s how it happened.

Did Bruce give you total autonomy to record whatever you wanted?

He did. Bruce was incredibly artist-friendly. This was the same guy Bobby McFerrin approached about doing a solo, unaccompanied vocal album. Bruce told him, “I don’t think that’s a good idea for your first record.” Bobby replied, “But Bruce, I have to do the album that way. That’s what God wants.” Bruce just shrugged and said, “Who am I to argue with God? I guess you’d better do the album your way.” The rest is history.

Your first album for Blue Note, 1985’s Magic Touch, spent 51 weeks at Number 1 on the jazz charts. You were only about 25 at the time. How did that kind of success not completely mess with your ego?

I had a plan. I had been a street musician in New York, and I’d developed a strategy to succeed in the music industry. It worked – even better than I expected – and there was certainly some luck involved, like choosing the exact right day to sign with Bruce. But ever since I was a teenager, I’d viewed myself as an underground musician.

I thought of myself as the kind of artist where, if I was lucky, “people in the know” would appreciate me, but not necessarily the masses. When the mass success hit, I enjoyed it, but I never counted on it.

My instinct has always been to focus on the art and let the chips fall where they may. To appreciate what I do, it helps to know something about it. It’s not just listening. On Magic Touch, we had a disclaimer from the critic Bill Milkowski on the jacket: “Don’t be deceived. This is just one artist playing.”

When we think of guitarists who totally expanded the instrument’s vocabulary, we think of Eddie Van Halen and you. Did you and Eddie ever trade notes?

We did. We participated in a documentary concert honoring Les Paul, where a huge group of us played with him. There was Brian Setzer, B.B. King, Eddie Van Halen, Steve Miller, David Gilmour and me. We jammed together at the end. A while later, Eddie and I ran into each other at a NAMM Show, and he said, “Let’s go jam!” But in the chaos of the convention, someone spun him around, he got pulled away and it didn’t happen.

During that Les Paul tribute, I played a solo piece of my song Flying Home. To me, it was one of my best performances ever, though they didn’t end up putting it in the final film. Right after I played it, Eddie came up to me and said, “I’m speechless. I had no idea you were that good.” Hearing that from him was incredibly special.

How did it come about that you played on a Kenny Rogers record?

I love playing with other people. I treat it like a research project to figure out how to make my style complementary to theirs. Playing with Kenny Rogers is a great example.

I worked with him on a track called Morning Desire, which ended up being the Number 1 country track of the year. George Martin was producing it. Kenny had seen me on The Johnny Carson Show and was looking for something to make his track stand out so it wouldn’t be compared to Bruce Springsteen’s I’m on Fire.

Being in the studio with George Martin was incredible. I remember him practically pulling at me going, “I want that Stanley stuff. Give me more of that Stanley stuff!”

He was very energetic. He told me, “Pretend this is your album. What would you play?” The song is about a man who doesn’t want to go to work. He just wants to stay home with his lover and listen to the rain. So, with my guitar, I became the rain.

Are Vigier guitars still your go-tos?

Oh, yeah. Vigier is still my overall favorite. However, I’ve recently gone back to my “tandem guitars” setup where I play two guitars simultaneously. For the right-hand guitar, I’m using a PRS Santana. I love its short-scale length.

The strings feel loose, which makes the touch technique much easier. I also have an ESP James Hetfield Iron Cross guitar that I’m getting adjusted. It’s a great heavy metal guitar with a great feel for the right hand.

Are we gonna see a metal album?

Yes, it’s coming! With my tandem guitars, I can run different distortion pedals and wah-wahs on both guitars at the exact same time. It’s insane what you can do. I’ve also wanted to do a flame technique.

I once visited a science museum where they hooked me up to a Rubens tube, meaning my guitar was literally controlling and shaping physical fire. You can find the video of it on YouTube.

That we’ve got to see. So you’re going to make a metal record with you operating two distorted guitars, flames and fire and all that. What else are you working on?

I’ve been developing a concept called Stanley Jordan’s Live Tronica. Essentially, I’ll act as a DJ and a live guitarist simultaneously. I have a rig with two computers running Ableton Live, which allows for intense, real-time looping.

I use a massive array of foot pedals to DJ with while I’m playing guitar with my hands. The secret sauce is that I’m bringing complex, harmonically interesting jazz theory to the electronic music space. I want to bring a totally new, age-diverse audience into the clubs and festivals. It’s on the way.

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

After much speculation, the return of Ozzfest has been confirmed, with three one-day shows planned in the UK, US and Mexico in 2027.

The heavy music event, which has a history of pitting the biggest rock and metal acts with up-and-coming artists on one lineup, was founded by Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne in 1996.

Now, one year on from Ozzy’s passing – and 30 years since the inaugural gathering – Sharon and Jack Osbourne are honoring Ozzy’s legacy by bringing it back.

The US edition will take Ozzfest back to its original home at the Glen Helen Amphitheater, California, on September 11, 2027. There will also be shows at The National Bowl in Milton Keynes, England, on July 10, and the Estadio GNP Seguros in Mexico City on September 18

No bands have been announced for the trio of festivals, but its tradition of playing host to household names and fast-rising acts is expected to continue.

Over the years, alongside the obvious headliners of Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osbourne, Metallica and Maiden have been notable headliners in previous editions. Slipknot, System of a Down, Lamb of God, and Killswitch Engage were all relatively unknown bands when they first graced its stages, with both Slipknot and System of a Down going on to headline the festival years later.

In previous years, the US editions have been touring festivals. In 2005, it took over Download Festival for a day, which say Ozzy, Velvet Revolver, HIM, and Anthrax top the bill.

Could we see some previous Ozzfest heavy-hitters return for the 2027 shows? It remains to be seen, but we imagine it highly likely. It’s time to get guessing who’s going to be on the bill.

“Ozzy was the first to launch his own traveling metal festival,” says Sharon Osbourne. “Ozzfest will always remain an important part of Ozzy’s legacy.”

Early Bat tickets – we see what you did there – will go on sale on Friday, November 6 at 10am local time.

Check out Ozzfest for more.

In related news, Sharon recently revealed that Ozzy defied doctor’s orders in order to play Back to the Beginning.

Wata is a name that inspires awe and respect among the most grizzled tone nerds. From monolithic metal riffers to shoegazing pedal geeks, the diminutive guitarist of Japanese noise rock icons Boris is regarded by those in the know as a tonal wizard.

She is a player who conjures an elemental sound from surprisingly humble ingredients: a Les Paul, Orange and Matamp tube amps, and a few cornerstone pedals – most notably, a wah pedal, Boss DS-1, her EarthQuaker Devices Hizumitas signature, and (the pedal that inspired the latter build) the ELK Gakki Big Muff.

In the latest addition to our In Their Own Words series, Wata explains how she thinks about fuzz and distortion, her dedication to the Space Echo, and her personal history with dirt.

Sound is an experience

Connecting a guitar amp and playing at high volume, feeling the air and your own body vibrate, and experiencing a sense of oneness with the world, is crucial, with a variety of songs. It is the sensation of becoming the very “piece of music” you are playing, performing in unison with the world itself. I believe that “sound” is, in essence, an experience.

All three members of Boris are deeply particular about guitar tone; we would collect various fuzz pedals and rigorously test them during rehearsals to find the ones that best enhanced our high-volume sound.

The ELK Big Muff I acquired was rich in low-end frequencies; it possessed a unique blend of delicacy and raw power, allowing the tone to constantly shift in character as a note sustained after the initial pick attack. Boris’ music often features slow tempos, long sustains, and feedback-heavy passages, and this fuzz pedal added a wonderful richness and color to those moments.

Bring the thunder

[On tracks like Blackout] I hope to create a sense of majesty, like thunder rumbling in the darkness of night. A single pluck yields long sustain, while the distinct, gritty texture of the fuzz pedal’s distortion allows the tone to constantly shift and evolve. I aim for a sound that melds seamlessly with Takeshi’s bass, allowing the listener to fully immerse themselves in the long, sustained notes.

The Boss DS-1 actually belonged to Atsuo; I kept it on my pedalboard for moments when I needed a touch of light distortion. I decided to keep using it after trying it out in front of the ELK pedal, when I engaged both at once, I got this amazing, long sustain. So I decided to keep using it. It was purely by chance. It was a total coincidence.

Since the [EarthQuaker Devices] Hizumitas is also modeled after the ELK Big Muff, you can achieve a similar effect using the same settings. I never imagined that something I tried out on a whim would become such a crucial part of my sound.

Raise a Blue Cheer

When choosing pedals, I always test them using my own amp and guitar at high volumes, just as I would in a live setting. My approach to signal chains and settings is intuitive; I rarely read the manuals. During band rehearsals, I’ll have the other members listen as we decide on the direction of our arrangements, saying things like, “This pedal sounds great” or “Let's use it for that song” and sometimes a song is born directly from the unique sound of a specific pedal. Often, my bandmates or the music itself reveal new possibilities to me.

[When I think about the first distortion or fuzz sounds that resonated] Blue Cheer’s Summertime Blues left a particularly strong impression on me. When I first heard it, I was amazed by the sheer mass of sound, the commanding presence, and the boomy tone, things I had never experienced before.

While it seems fewer guitarists are using amplifiers these days, I consider the Orange and Matamp amps I always use to be instruments just as important as the guitar itself. Resonating sound together with my bandmates in the same space is crucial. For me, it is vital to move the air and experience the sound with my whole body, not just hear it with my ears, when making decisions about the tone.

Play to the environment

As I mentioned earlier, the Hizumitas is based on a specific ELK Fuzz unit that I own. It possesses a heavy character that constantly generates tonal shifts, yet it has earned a reputation for being easy to control despite that versatility.

I perform in various locations, and the audience and the atmosphere of the venue at any given moment influence the high-volume amp sound and my use of feedback techniques. Rather than me controlling the guitar sound, it feels more like the environment guides the sound, leading me in my performance.

Just like my amps, fuzz pedals, and wah pedals, the Space Echo RE-150 is a crucial part of my guitar sound [you hear it on tracks like Farewell]. Its wet signal constantly shifts, adding nuance and character to the tone, it feels almost like the unit is playing right along with me. I really love that sense of unpredictability. Although maintaining it is a huge hassle, I make sure to bring it on tour, because I want to share this sound with everyone.

I frequently use a wah pedal for the lead parts in Boris’ songs [for example, PINK]. Much like the fuzz sound, it enriches the guitar tone; it adds a variety of tonal nuances and allows the emotions I feel while playing to come through directly. It produces a pleasant sound that resonates through your entire body.

Even when played at high volume, it doesn’t feel noisy; instead, it’s the kind of sound you could listen to endlessly. It’s similar to the sound of a massive waterfall. The kind of thing you encounter in the great outdoors. That organic feel is important, too.

• Boris is currently on tour in Europe celebrating 20 years of PINK. For more information and tickets, head to Boris Heavy Rocks.

Following their successful Fifty Something reunion tour, Rush have just announced a five-day residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas.

Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson – alongside drummer Anika Nilles and keyboardist Loren Gold – are set to perform on May 21, 23, 26, 28 and 30 2027, with “a set of fan favorites and greatest hits from across their catalogue” that celebrates their immense legacy.

“When I first heard of Sphere, I thought to myself, ‘Wow, what a shame that Rush is no longer touring, because this venue sounds tailor-made for the kind of visual attitude with which we have always designed our shows,’” says Geddy Lee.

“Normally we spend months designing the visual effects for our shows, and this scenario seemed like the cherry on top of the ice cream for our design team. But life is nothing if not surprising, and now, here we are, living and touring in the present tense, and we are able to make that particular dream come true.”

Lee also mentioned that the band is working hard to expand their touring concepts, and, in his own words, “concoct some new madness to suit this incredible venue.” He revealed they’ll be playing all of 2112, Moving Pictures, as well as “an array of other songs.”

“We are so effin’ excited to make use of this incredible opportunity to please our fans both visually and viscerally – from wherever they might fly in from. Gonna be so much fun!”

Rush Backstage and Rush Newsletter subscribers will receive an exclusive two-hour window to purchase VIP and Travel packages, beginning November 6 at 10 AM PT/1 PM ET, with artist pre-sale kicking off on November 11.

Residency aside, Rush’s reunion tour is expected to end in April 2027, with the tour covering North America, Central America, South America, Europe, and the UK.

For more information, head to Rush’s official website.

A Perfect Circle guitarist Billy Howerdel is selling off a swathe of pre-loved gear via Analogr, including the guitar that’s all over one of the band’s biggest albums.

The pick of the bunch is his semi-hollow Yamaha AES 1500, which was a key player in shaping A Perfect Circle’s distinct alt-rock sound on 2003 album, Thirteenth Step.

“I’m not happy about letting this one go,” he sighs. “Don’t sleep on the made in Japan stuff; it’s amazing and this is no exception.

“It’s got PAF-style pickups and it splits to single coil,” he adds. “This was my only single coil-option guitar,” and it can be heard on tracks like The Noose and Vanishing.

“Any things that had a pretty sparkle to them,” he adds, “would be this guitar. It was my forever guitar. Now it’s not.”

The other guitar of note is a one-of-one S-type gifted to the band by the CFE Arena in Orlando, Florida ahead of their show on October 30, 2018. APC frontman Maynard James Keenan famously dressed as Beetlejuice that night.

A Gibson Goldtone GA-15RV combo amp, said to be heard on around 40 percent of A Perfect Circles material, also features, with Howerdel believing it would be a pirate’s amp of choice. Swashbuckling.

See too a “punchy and clean” Fender Tone Master amp head and cab, which has been a valued studio workhorse over the years, a cluster of Ernie Ball volume pedals that got heavy use on the road, and Axe-Fx amp modelers.

Howerdel is also selling off several Voodoo Lab Ground Control switchers, flight cases, and APC backdrops from tours gone by.

The seven-day auction launches Sunday November 8, with the AES 1500 expected to be the top seller with an estimated price of $5,000 - $7,500. Sounds like a bargain.

See Analogr for more.

Howerdel, meanwhile, has told Guitar World he’s embracing Jack White’s “dangerous” guitar playing style as he works on A Perfect Circle’s next record. It’s set to be their first album since 2018’s Eat the Elephant.

Millennials will know Rivkah Reyes as bassist Katie from generation-defining Jack Black classic School of Rock. Fast-forward two decades, and Reyes is now looking back on those heady days, from landing the audition to being thrust into the limelight.

“Bass didn't even happen until School of Rock,” Reyes tells Guitar World. “I had never picked up a bass in my life until I was cast. They auditioned me originally for the guitarist role, but they kind of fell in love with Joey [Gaydos Jr.], who ended up playing Zack Mooneyham.

“They wanted to find something for me to do. So they asked if I would be comfortable playing bass. I was super-precocious when I was 10 – I was just like, ‘Well, yeah, it's only four strings. I'm sure I'll nail it.’”

It was also Reyes’ first time playing in a band. “I was just like, ‘My heart's on fire. I want to do this for the rest of my life,’” she says.

Reyes got plenty of practice – the cast filmed the movie's climactic battle of the bands performance many times over. She describes the experience as nothing short of “insane.”

“We were playing in front of a huge audience in a huge theater. We were just ready to put on a good show for these background actors that were in the audience,” she says.

“With every take, I was finding new things, finding people in the audience to connect to, and, you know, flipping my hair around. It really was such a formative life experience for me.”

School of Rock became a worldwide hit, grossing $131.3 million. However, the pressure to live up to the cultural phenomenon and the movie's success soon led to resentment.

“There was a lot of time between School of Rock and me starting to gain traction again as an actor and as a musician,” she admits.

“I'm still kind of in this place where I'll look at the numbers on my streaming or on TikTok or whatever, and be like, ‘Is School of Rock gonna always be just the thing that I'm known for?’

“But even if it is, like, who cares? School of Rock inspired millions of people to stick it to the man, to pick up an instrument. Every time I see a girl playing bass, I'm like, ‘Did I have a little something to do with that?’”

You can watch Guitar World's full interview with Reyes on YouTube.

Alice Cooper guitarist Nita Strauss is making a bid to be the unofficial Queen of the NFL this season, shredding through her second halftime show in a number of weeks as the two Los Angeles sides faced off at the SoFi Stadium.

Strauss has spent much of 2026 on maternity leave after giving birth to her first child with her husband and solo band drummer, Josh Villalta. She handpicked her Cooper stand-in, the supremely talented Anna Cara, before taking a seven-month break. After playing at a couple of LA Rams games, she marked her return to the Cooper band by playing the halftime show at a Las Vegas Raiders game just under a month ago.

This time, the husband and wife duo took on a slew of rock classics, including Metallica’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, Iron Maiden’s The Trooper – a nod to her former gig in the Iron Maidens – and Kenny Loggins’ Danger Zone.

Foo Fighters anthem My Hero and Godsmack’s Awake gave ’90s and ’00s rock a look-in, with Steve Stevens’ iconic Top Gun licks also added to the occasion. The Ibanez-endorsed shredder wrapped up proceedings with a mashup of Queen’s perennial crowd-pleaser, We Will Rock You, and Metallica’s drop-tuned rager, Sad But True.

The pair’s young son, Max, was there to watch the whole thing, marking the first time he’s seen his parents strut their stuff on stage – he was napping during the Cooper show.

Strauss will be 40 next month, and speaking to Guitar World in a soon-to-be-published interview, the guitarist admitted motherhood was fast becoming a now-or-never situation. She wants to use her story to inspire other women into pursuing motherhood and their careers simultaneously; it doesn’t have to be one or the other.

“I feared being replaced and losing opportunities, but a career that’s built over decades doesn’t disappear because you take a step away; it just comes back in a different form,” she says. “Why can’t it be better?

“There’s something that fundamentally changes in a woman when you become a mother, and it’s a huge identity shift. So the challenge, and the exciting part, is bringing that new energy forward rather than trying to go back to the way that things were. I can be grateful for what I have, and still have ambition.”

Strauss is set to hit the road with Alice Cooper starting tomorrow (November 6), with a score of summer festival dates over in Europe also in the book. Her solo band will support Paul Gilbert and John 5 in January, and they have been confirmed for Sonic Temple 2027.

Max and Josh will be with her every step of the way as she juggles being a guitar hero and a mother like a boss.

Between arranging the Back to the Beginning show in 2025, touring with his solo band and voicing his opinion on various socio-political issues, it’s hard to believe Morello has had time to make a new record.

Yet Everyone Gets Everything They Want, which features five tracks co-written by his guitar-wielding teenage son, Roman, delivers what the ’90s hero is known for. With big riffs, off-kilter solos and fury to spare, the record, as Morello puts it, is his “heaviest since Rage’s debut.”

“I’ve been playing solo shows since 2001,” Morello says. “I’m very comfortable. But many of those shows were acoustic folk shows, and it’s only recently that I’ve fully embraced an electric band.”

This led Morello to make what he deems his “first solo rock record,” and he couldn’t be more excited.

“The dissolution of Rage Against the Machine or Audioslave opened a path for me to embrace the totality of what I can do,” Morello says. “I love playing huge monster riffs, I love playing solos that sound like R2D2 or barnyard animals, and I love jamming with my shredding son, Roman. All roads have led to a record that I’m super-proud of and that’s super-heavy.”

They have also led him to Guitar World’s Goes to 11 format, where we ask heroes our most probing questions. Starting with…

1. What are the quirks or habits of your playing – like them or not – that have become a part of your style?

One thing that’s constant in my playing history is embracing mistakes. When it’s time to do a solo, there’s zero preparation. I’ll just step on a random pedal, hit go and see what happens. In songwriting, there’s inspiration and there’s craft.

You write a riff, and you say, “Okay, I can see a field bouncing up and down in Germany.” And then there’s craft, which is, “Let’s make sure we get a good take.”

But I remember doing records with [producer] Brendan O’Brien, with Audioslave and Rage Against the Machine, where it would be time to do the solo, and he’d be laughing his ass off at whatever came out of my guitar. He’d be like, “That’s the solo?” And I’d be like, “Yes, bro, that’s the solo.” [Laughs]

2. Which guitar do you have the closest relationship to?

For the longest time, I tried to deny any personal relationships with my instruments. I used to just say, “They’re tools or colleagues that you see at work.” But through the years, the Arm the Homeless guitar is the one I’ve been on a journey with. It’s a deep love affair.

I have to admit that after all these decades. I’ve had hedge-fund guys offer me insane amounts of money for it, and I’m like, “This thing ain’t going nowhere, buddy.” I stopped modifying it in 1988, but from late ’86 to ’88, a tremendous amount of modifications happened. After that, I literally gave up. [Laughs]

3. What’s been the hardest/toughest time you’ve had as a musician, and how’d you get through it?

There have been four pillars of my career, which are four great failures. The first was when I was 13 and wanted to learn Led Zeppelin’s Black Dog and Kiss’s Detroit Rock City. I failed, and I quit guitar. I told my mom, “Music is not for me,” and the guitar sat in my closet for four years before I touched it again.

After getting a Sex Pistols cassette, which is when I picked up the guitar again, there was a determination to forge my own path without lessons and to find my voice without someone telling me what to do.

Failure number two was when I had this overpriced guitar that I got at a custom shop in L.A., and it was the worst guitar I ever played. It felt and looked the worst, and I’d blown a bunch of money. I spent the next year changing the neck, pickups, electronics and whammy bar, and I also had an amp I thought sucked.

Then one day, I spent a couple of hours in rehearsal and realized there was a sound in my head that I failed to get. I gave up. I was spending too much time worrying about tone and not creating. So, I marked the setting on my amp and said, “This is the guitar I’ve got, and this is the gear I’ve got.” That was the Arm the Homeless guitar, my 50-watt Marshall half-stack and the Peavey cabinet I’ve used on 22 records.

The third failure was when my band Lock Up got dropped. I moved to Hollywood to be a rock star and make records. I got a record deal, and it was spectacular. Our record came out, and 15 minutes later, we got dropped. I failed my quest.

The producer for that record had me tone it down and be smoother. After that, I vowed to never play another note of music that I didn’t believe in, and that’s when I started writing riffs for Rage Against the Machine.

That leads to the fourth failure, and the last pillar of my career: not being able to keep Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave together. I had these two massive bands with billions of streams, and they dissipated.

But that opened a door to some of the greatest musical experiences of my life. A million windows opened for me because those two doors closed, leading to what I'm doing to this day. So, those four massive failures led to a career I’ve absolutely loved and am proud of.

4. What was your first guitar, and how did you get it?

It was the guitar that sat in my closet for four years, the Kay “SG” I got when I was 13 and took lessons on. My mom would say, “Whatever happened to that guitar that we blew 50 bucks on?” And then, when I started playing with my punk band in high school, I got another guitar, and that Kay sat in my closet in Libertyville, Illinois, for decades.

Then, one day, I thought to myself, “I wonder if that Kay SG is still there.” So, the next time I was in Chicago, I went to the house, and sure enough, it was there. I brought it to L.A. and put new frets on it, and I’ve used it on a bunch of records. It couldn’t – and still doesn’t – stay in tune to save its life, but I’ve used it a bunch anyway.

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

I was looking at my guitars yesterday, and there are a lot more than I thought. [Laughs] I’m not a collector, and I’m not buying vintage guitars. My guitars are either for a specific purpose or ones that I’ve been gifted.

But including the ones in storage, there are probably 50. But none of them are fancy! I do have a couple of [Gibson] Les Pauls in a special place, but the rest are all from the Island of Misfit Toys.

As for surprising – and I don’t know if it’s all that surprising – I’ve leaned heavily on two pedals: the small [EHX Nano] POG [octave pedal] and the DigiTech Space Station [XP300] that they made in, I think, 1994. It’s got some freaky sounds that lead to solos where we’re on an unknown journey together. [Laughs]

6. Tell us about a moment of genuine inspiration.

For my new album, I was determined to make my first rock solo album. I’ve made plenty of band rock albums and some collaborative rock albums, but over the last five years, in live settings, I’ve played some of the best shows of my life. I’m having more fun than ever fronting the Freedom Fighter Orchestra.

I’ve been playing heavy music and loving it. I wanted to make a record that reflected that. I’d say that this record, Everyone Gets Everything They Want, is probably the heaviest record I’ve made since Rage Against the Machine’s [self-titled] debut. I wanted to meld and bring the Morellian riffs from Rage Against the Machine, Audiosalve and Prophets of Rage, but also bring them into the present and future.

7. What was it like being in the room with Chris Cornell, Zack de la Rocha and Bruce Springsteen?

What a great blessing to have been in bands with Zack de la Rocha and Chris Cornell, and to have worked with Bruce Springsteen. They’re some of the greatest to ever do it. To be able to witness the way they rock a crowd, their mannerisms and preparation has been hugely influential.

With Bruce, there’s that commitment each night that every time you go on stage, there’s determination that this is going to be the best show you’ve ever played. You’re going to give these people something that’s better than what they’ve seen before.

It’s like, “Just wait until they fucking see me tonight.” That’s something I very much ingrained in myself. The intensity of Rage Against the Machine, the melodic ability of Chris Cornell, along with their kindness, and the way they treat people… all of that has been inspirational as well.

8. Who is the most exciting up-and-coming guitarist?

Here’s the thing: it’s not nepotism when your kid’s that fucking good. [Laughs] There’s a lot of great players out there, but I’ll put my kid up against anybody.

He has something that I didn’t have, which is an ear. I had to fight forever because I had zero natural ability, so it took me maybe 10 years to find my voice. But Roman Morello has got an ear and has a natural [internal] jukebox.

9. Which of your songs do you find most challenging to play, and why?

Well, from my new record, that’s easy. My son Roman was a co-writer of five songs from this record. I always have an ear to his door and poach his best riffs, so there’s a kinship there.

He has the Morello DNA and writes riffs that are familiar to me. But his fingers move in ways I’d never think of. So, the riff from Everyone Gets Everything They Want is really counterintuitive to me.

And then there’s another from Soldier in the Army of Love, where there are these big pentatonic riffs. You might go, “That’s a Tom Morello riff,” but it’s not. That’s a Roman riff that Tom had some difficulty learning. [Laughs]

10. What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received as a guitarist?

That’s easy! I was a beginner guitarist, and there was a high schooler who was more advanced than I was. He’d come to my house to jam, and he said in an offhand way – though I took it as gospel – that if I wanted to get better on guitar, I needed to practice one hour a day without fail.

I said to myself, “I’m going to try that.” I practiced one hour a day, every day, without fail. I immediately noticed – because I started late at 17 – that I was getting better. Then I thought, “What if it’s two hours? What if it’s four? Shit! What if it’s eight?” That’s when I hit this crazy, euphoric stride where I felt the tide rising almost daily.

I locked into it, and there were times when I was pursuing honors at an Ivy League university, and I was practicing until four in the morning obsessively for 365 days a year. I don’t necessarily recommend it, and it hurts your social life, but that bit of advice is what allowed me to unlock the guitar and my creativity.

11. What’s the biggest misconception about you?

People are often surprised that I have a folk music career. People are surprised by Saturday-night disco nights at my house. [Laughs] But one time, I went to see my friend Warren DeMartini, and he said, “A friend of mine is in a metal band, and he’s a big fan. He wants to meet you.” I was like, “Totally cool.” So, I was hanging out, just sitting there, and there’s metal dudes all over.

I saw Warren standing with the dude, and he was pointing over at me. The guy came over and was very excited, and he walked right past me to a dude that looked exactly like Zakk Wylde. [Laughs] He assumed that must have been the guy Warren was pointing to! It couldn’t have been the half-Black dude in a Cubs cap wearing a Charlie Brown shirt! [Laughs] Then that guy behind me that looked like Zakk Wylde goes, “No, no, no, that’s Tom!”

The other guy had this look of utter bewilderment. [Laughs] I mean, this other guy was like a cross between Zakk Wylde and Rob Zombie, so he must have thought, “That’s gotta be the guy.” I guess the greatest misconception about me leads to: don’t judge a book by its cover.

• Everyone Gets Everything They Want is out now via Mom & Pop Music.

As the lone studio guitarist on Protest the Hero’s new Within album – the Canadian progressive-metal veterans’ first in six years – Luke Hoskin multi-tracked wizardly scale runs and dizzyingly arpeggiated harmonies by the boatful.

Hoskin admits he loves guitar heroics, and it’s been a major part of the act’s sound over the past couple of decades. Despite this, the writing phase of Within found the shredder scaling back his most masochistic whims – not for his own sake, but rather for fellow co-founder Tim MacMillar and touring member Ben Davis, the two guitarists tasked with actually recreating Hoskin’s fretboard bedlam on stage. After he sent out the first few demos, his bandmates politely asked him to chill.

“It was definitely a check. Like, ‘That is too fast… the bpm needs to come back on that,’” he says, explaining that he also excised a few ripping but ultimately unnecessary sections that would’ve got buried beneath the roaring vibrato of vocalist Rody Walker. “I got a lot of feedback from Tim and Rody, and it was a reminder to think about Ben, who has to carry the torch live. You have to exercise some restraint; you can’t go nuts and be like, ‘I never have to be in front of an audience doing this.’”

Within remains a knuckle-busting endeavor. Mouthpiece, Fishhook and Grandfather’s Axe offer an ambitious and often blistering splatter of progressive heaviness, pure-speed pop-punk-isms and power-metal bombast. Up until formally retiring from the road in 2021, Hoskin would have been hitting those licks on stage with MacMillar.

But a few years back – despite his show experience with Protest the Hero – a towering sense of anxiety began to grip the guitarist whenever he thought about performing live. Hoskin hasn’t toured with the band since before they put out 2020’s Palimpsest. He’s totally fine with that – thriving, even.

“Part of the reason for me leaving is that I stopped loving performing,” he says, reiterating that his passion lies with writing and recording. “I did the live side for a long time, because I thought it was a necessary part to facilitate me being able to write music.”

Hoskin, MacMillar and Walker have been together since they were teenagers, initially forming in Whitby, Ontario, under the name Happy Go Lucky in 1999 before rebranding as Protest the Hero in 2001. They wanted to keep up the creative connection, which is how Hoskin arrived at the idea of continuing with two distinct versions of the Protest the Hero.

For Within, the studio band included chief songwriter and guitarist Hoskin, bassist Cameron McLelland and drummer Nathan Bulla. MacMillar and Davis are the guitar tandem on the road, and they’re supported by the rhythm section of bassist Henry Selva and drummer Matt Kidby. Walker handles vocals for both entities.

“The band was so receptive about having a two-pronged approach,” Hoskin says with relief, “I felt like, Oh, cool, I don’t have to completely exit altogether.”

Still, there’s a natural downside to having Hoskin off the road; MacMillar is bummed to no longer be traveling the world with one of his best buds, who just so happens to kill on guitar. Davis, of fellow Canadian progressive unit the Kindred, stepped into the fold as their live lead guitarist in 2022. “Those were big shoes to fill,” MacMillar says. “We got really lucky that we found someone who could knock it out of the park live.”

Davis has been devoted to locking into the lines as laid out by Hoskin’s dexterous studio performances. Hoskin tried to keep track of his playing throughout the sessions while mapping things out through Guitar Pro software; he also runs sheet music publishing company Sheet Happens, and a member of his team went through the recording stems to double check the accuracy of the tabs.

While Hoskin and Davis share a fretboard aesthetic, MacMillar jokes that the guitarists’ similarities extend beyond their playing. “Ben kind of looks like a smaller version of Luke, so on his first tour people thought it was Luke. And we gave him Luke’s signature [Ibanez LHM1] guitar to play as well, so people would come up and be like, ‘Hey Luke, good job!’”

The Within sessions found the studio band tracking their parts at various home-recording spaces around Canada and the U.S. Armed with a grip of Evertune-loaded Ibanez guitars, Hoskin recorded his parts in Boulder, Colorado, under the supervision of Good Tiger member Derya Nagle. Through his hands, the album flows from shred-locked complexity (Mouthpiece) toward orchestral passages peppered with polyrhythmic natural harmonics (i. above).

Punk is also a huge part of Protest the Hero’s latest LP. The lyrics to Liberty Spike recall the days when they would head to their local mall to buy NOFX and Pennywise T-shirts. The chord-forward, speed-barrier-pushing melodicism of Fishhook is indebted to their love of Canadian punk progressives Propagandhi.

“That’s one of the pillars of what we do – fast, fun and melodic,” Hoskin says of the influence, MacMillar confirming of the track’s hectic pace, “Fishhook is at 190bpm, that fast spot where there’s a lot of 16th-note palm-muting.”

Hoskin continues: “We idolized those bands and learned everything we could about what they were doing and how they were approaching songwriting. I grew out of that at some point and got more into metal. I came back to punk in my late twenties realizing the songcraft is unbelievable.”

A more self-referential moment on the album arrives with Grandfather’s Axe, an “all fucking throttle” bang-out that finds vocalist Walker challenging his bandmates to step up their game, in-song (“Play that fuckin’ riff, you dickhead/I wanna hear it sing”). Its title alludes to the Theseus paradox, an ages-old philosophical question around whether or not a boat that’s been stripped and rebuilt one piece at a time remains the same ship over time. “It’s an analogy for the band,” Hoskin theologizes.

In obvious ways, Protest the Hero are not the same band they used to be. It’s been more than a quarter century since they formed, and members have come and gone since the early Noughties. The current two-lineup approach means both iterations experience their time in Protest the Hero in vastly different ways. It’s perhaps the spirit of friendship that ties things together and keeps the progsters afloat.

“The term ‘It takes a village’ keeps coming up… I think the future of the band is a village,” Hoskin says while not only contemplating the path forward with Protest the Hero’s two lineups, but the friends and collaborators that are helping the band plug along behind the scenes. In other words, there’s a lot of people helping right the ship.

Hoskin concludes with gratitude, “The only way it can exist is to embrace the help and talents of all the brilliant people that we know.”

• Within is out now.
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

Robin Finck, best known as Nine Inch Nails’ longest-serving guitarist, is selling a horde of guitars that have been played on some of the biggest stages in the world.

Finck’s new Reverb Shop plays host to over 200 pieces of gear that have been used throughout his time alongside Trent Reznor and during his stint with Guns N’ Roses.

Arguably the biggest draw of the collection is “Old Gold”, a Gibson Les Paul ’60 Reissue Goldtop guitar that was Finck’s main squeeze during Nine Inch Nails’ Downward Spiral era.

He played it for their iconic Woodstock ’94 performance and Self Destruct tour, and the guitar featured on every NIN tour until 2014. Its first ever appearance was in the March of the Pigs music video.

“This is the only guitar that made it out of 1994 intact,” Finck says. “I don’t know why or how because it’s also the guitar I played more than any other.”

Another Gibson also takes top billing: a 1990 Les Paul Custom in limited-edition Translucent White, which was the first Les Paul Finck ever bought.

“It’s the only guitar I had when I landed in Nine Inch Nails,” Finck says. “I’ve played it for over 35 years. It has always been favored.”

The guitarist also highlights a Gibson Les Paul Custom nicknamed “Nothingface”, which featured on five NIN tours, from Lights in the Sky in 2008 to Cold and Black and Infinite in 2018. It’s the guitar he gets asked about more than any other, owing to its bare-wood finish.

Other models include a Gibson ES-335 that featured on both GNR and NIN tours, a Gibson ’57 Les Paul Goldtop Reissue that was used to record the nine-years-in-the-making Chinese Democracy with Axl Rose, and a one-of-one Manson MA-RF-01.

“There is a deep history for me with, well, all of these guitars. But if you ask me which is the best guitar? It might be this one,” Finck says of the UK company’s custom build.

“I have been so fortunate to have played these on stages all over the world,” Finck says of the collection. “Now they’re poised to play with someone new.”

The Official Robin Finck Reverb Shop launches on November 11. Head to Reverb for more info.

The members of Mastodon filed paperwork on Monday (November 2) to dismiss the lawsuit filed against the band by Billy Hinds, Brent Hinds’ father, on behalf of the Brent Hinds estate.

They reject claims that they owe the Hinds estate any money for using the late guitarist’s likeness on the cover art of Marrow Deep, the band’s latest album, arguing that the lawsuit relies on a technically flawed legal claim.

“These distinctions matter,” write the band’s lawyers. “Defendants therefore seek dismissal only of those claims, or portions of claims, that lack a legal basis on the face of the complaint. The parties’ remaining factual and contractual disputes – and the truth – will be addressed in due course.”

They also oppose the “buyout process” through which Hinds would be divested of his business interests in Mastodon, arguing that individual members should not be held liable because Mastodon is a limited liability company.

Mastodon’s lawyers go on to state that a buyout offer to Hinds before his death from one of the band’s subsidiary companies is not a binding obligation.

According to the court’s filing, obtained by Billboard and Rolling Stone, “His contributions to the band’s legacy are undeniable, and his death was a profound loss. None of that is in dispute.

“But honoring Hinds’s legacy does not require rewriting the agreements governing his business interests or imposing obligations on his former bandmates that Georgia law does not recognize.”

In another section, the lawyers dispute allegations that the rest of the members stole Hinds’ 25 percent ownership interest in the band.

“While the Estate alleges that [Mastodon] purported to redeem those interests and refused to recognize its rights, there is no allegation that [Mastodon] seized, transferred, or withheld any stock certificates or other documents embodying Hinds’s interests.”

The Hinds estate had previously filed a complaint in September, alleging that Hinds had not legally formalized his dismissal from Mastodon before his death in a tragic accident in August 2025.

The filing claims the band gave the estate an $80,000 check – representing Hinds’ share of the band’s operations – which the estate considers far too low, prompting it to refuse to cash the check.

“Sadly, a private business dispute with the estate of our dear departed friend Brent Hinds was made public,” Mastodon said at the time.

“We strongly deny allegations of ill intent on our part and intend to vigorously defend what we believe is a meritless lawsuit.”

Back in 2007, as part of its regular Dear Guitar Hero column, Guitar World asked readers to submit any burning questions they had for ageless blues guitar legend Buddy Guy. Guy, of course, had stories and wisdom aplenty...

What was the hardest part for you on the road to becoming such an accomplished guitar player? – Stephen Lang

The rhythm. When I first came to Chicago in 1957, they was making fun of me! The late Junior Wells used to say, “You can play, but you ain’t got no time.” And I was like, “What the hell is that?” So, [drummer] Fred Below and me would go play, just drums and guitar, and he told me, “Every time you hear me make this turnaround, that’s the end of a chorus.” And that's when I started learning rhythm.

What was it about those old blues players that gave their records such a warm, honest sound? – Todd Walker

I think it has to do with technology. What you hear on those old recordings is exactly what the artists were doing in the studio. Nothing was added to make my sound perfect; it was just a guitar, an amplifier, and a microphone.

Nowadays, you’ve got so many buttons to push in a recording studio, I wouldn’t know what to do with it.

When I play the blues, I find myself repeating too much. How did you learn to keep your licks and phrases different and interesting? – Tommy Lee Atkins

I think you just need to let someone listen to you. Something new is coming out each and every time you play, but you can’t hear it. I know that I couldn’t hear it in my own playing.

I used to throw my guitar in a corner and attempt to walk away from it. I’d be thinking, ‘You’ll never get it!’ I felt like I was at a stand still, that I wasn’t learning anymore. But every time someone else heard me, they could hear things in my playing that I couldn’t. Man, all you’ve gotta do is keep playing that guitar.

Of all the musicians you’ve heard over the years, who stands out in your mind as being underrated and under-appreciated? – Patrick Fischer

Earl Hooker. I tried to figure out slide guitar after I’d heard Elmore James play slide, but people kept tellin’ me to go hear Earl Hooker play. I said, “Who is that?” ’cause he didn’t have no records out. But one night I walked into a club and I heard this melody, like someone was singing. I said, “Who is that singing?” and someone said, “No-one. That's Hooker playing the slide.”

I had a slide in my pocket, and even before I got introduced to him, I just walked up and gave it to him.

Buddy, some of my favorite albums of yours are the ones you made for Vanguard Records, like A Man and the Blues. How do you feel about that period in your career? – Rick Longley

My feeling was that Muddy Waters had made Chess Records a success, so where could I fit in? When I went to Vanguard, I was able to have some impact finally, because I had a little more freedom there. When the British guys started hearing my Vanguard recordings, they started cranking up, too.

Even so, I still had one hand tied behind me. Vanguard wanted that Muddy Waters kind of “real” blues, and they wouldn’t let me turn it up like I was doing when I played live.

What was the Chicago club scene like in the late Fifties and early Sixties? And what did audiences expect from their entertainers? – Janie Reagan

The audiences in the clubs were 99.9 percent black, and when you played for black audiences, you had to put on a show, just like Little Richard or James Brown did. It was a show when guys like that played, and that’s what people went to see.

The performers danced, and they wanted you to be into it. It wasn’t a Nat King Cole or Frank Sinatra type thing where you could stand there and stop people in their tracks and make ’em just listen to your voice. We had to make ’em look and say, ‘What is he doing?’

Countless prominent guitarists – of all musical persuasions – have likened their instrument of choice to a weapon. It can be argued, though, that no guitarist ever had a playing style as intentionally weapon-like as the late Johnny Ramone.

His disdain for fretboard frills, flourishes, and flash was legion. His modus operandi was leading the Ramones, his band of outcast weirdo (pretend) brothers, with naught but relentless, pulverizing, downstroked power chords. On the occasions that one of the band’s songs called for a guitar lead – or at least something more textural – Johnny often outsourced the part.

The Ramones’ catalog is driven by guitar at its most instinctive and primal. “Right when I started with the Ramones is when I bought a guitar and learned how to play, so I didn’t have any influences insofar as learning how to play,” Johnny told Guitar World with a shrug in a 1995 interview. “The first song I learned to play was a Ramones song.”

These are far from your usual “guitar hero” ingredients, but Johnny Ramone’s influence as a player can’t really be overstated. Punk guitar – and metal guitar, really – as we know it simply wouldn’t exist without his library of buzzsaw riffs and no-bullshit approach.

In an interview featured in the new issue of Guitar World, Linda Ramone, Johnny’s widow, pointed to that army of players who he inspired, and whose style he impacted, as evidence of his guitar heroism.

“[Metallica’s] Kirk Hammett and Johnny would sit on the floor together and talk about horror movie posters and everything, and then Kirk would say, ‘You know, Johnny, you really influenced me.’ And he’s like, ‘Oh, wow, that’s great!’” Linda told Guitar World with a laugh.

“The Ramones didn’t know who they influenced, but I don’t know who else really influenced as many people to pick up a guitar and form bands.

“You know, Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix, they’re great guitar players, but Johnny influenced a whole generation of people who realized you don’t have to play that great to be great.”

• To read our full feature on the Ramones’ groundbreaking, self-titled debut album, featuring interviews with Linda Ramone, C.J. Ramone, Ale Campos, and the Pixies’ Joey Santiago, pick up a copy of the new issue of Guitar World at Magazines Direct.