Joe Bonamassa has one of the world’s greatest guitar collections, but tracking down his iconic 1960 Gibson Les Paul Standard, the so-called Bolin ’Burst, led to what he described as “the strangest guitar deal I ever did”.

The Bolin ’Burst got its name from its long-running association with Deep Purple and Zephyr guitarist Tommy Bolin.

Guitarist got to see (and photograph) the instrument up close when they were invited to ‘Nerdville, USA’ – the guitar icon’s given name for his personal musuem – for a guided tour of his awe-inspiring 500+ guitar collection.

It’s full of stories of valuable vintage finds, but it seems even an instrument as famous as the Bolin ’Burst still has a few surprises to offer, as Bonamassa reveals...

“Tommy Bolin never owned this guitar,” explains Bonamassa. “That’s the misconception. It was owned by a guy named David Brown who bought it in 1966 for $125 in Denver. His daughter actually sent me the receipt.

“When Tommy’s Goldtop got nicked in the early ’70s when he was with Zephyr, David was Tommy’s right-hand man and he loaned him this ’Burst. And so Tommy played it all through Zephyr and Deep Purple.”

Bonamassa notes Bolin did not use it on his album with Billy Cobham, Spectrum (on which he favored a Fender Stratocaster).

“They put the [Bigsby] vibrato on the Bolin ’Burst because Tommy was a Strat guy,” says Bonamassa.

The blues rock ace learned the art of buying vintage guitars by accompanying his dad (a vintage dealer) on guitar safaris, throughout his childhood. However, even he says tracking down the Bolin ’Burst was not an easy process.

“I looked for this guitar for about a decade,” explains Bonamassa. “I finally located David in Moab, Utah. I made a deal with him, paid him in cash, and he died two months later in a car accident. His last text to his daughter was, ‘I buried the money in the desert.’ Weird, weird story. It was also the strangest guitar deal I ever did.”

We presume the guitar’s had a more secure homelife since it’s been under the blues rocker’s careful custodianship, but it does get live airings – such when Joe Bonamassa brought the Bolin ’Burst out to cover Deep Purple.

Along with Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, Deep Purple formed the holy trinity that would ultimately induce heavy metal. Yet while the band has always pinned the meters in terms of popularity, sales, and volume, critical acclaim has been less than royal – especially when viewed in the context of Zeppelin and Sabbath.

Consider Roger Glover's snarling bass guitar on Purple's 1972 classic, Machine Head – a record that would set the tone for decades of ensuing music – and it's clear his contribution to the canon of rock bass has been largely overlooked.

The Machine Head sessions were cut with what was effectively Deep Purple Mark II, the classic lineup of Ritchie Blackmore on guitar, Ian Gillan vocals, Roger Glover bass, Jon Lord keyboards and a thundering lan Paice on drums.

Glover's thunderously clanky Rickenbacker/P-Bass tones were formidable, though Glover himself admitted to being very unsettled by his sound at the time: “Too much clank and not enough thump”, he told Bass Player in 2013.

“By the time I got to Purple, I felt my tone was too distorted, with not enough bottom. I used a Rick on Machine Head and I wasn't happy with the sound.

“When we did the 25th Anniversary remix, my engineer (Peter Denenberg) isolated it and said, ‘People would kill for a sound like that’, but I always felt my tone was too distorted, especially with the Rickenbacker. Having had a P-Bass and a Fender Mustang previously, I guess I didn't realize what I had.”

Born November 30, 1945, in Brecon, Wales, and raised in London, Glover began his musical journey with piano lessons at age seven. Gravitating toward rock & roll, he picked up guitar at 13. Bass entered the picture soon after, when Glover saw his first live band, the Lightnings, rehearsing in a local gym.

“Upon seeing them, my two friends and I decided to start a band; they were both better guitarists than I was, so I said, I'll be the bass player, and I removed the top two strings on my Spanish guitar.”

Glover moved to North London in 1961 and formed the Madisons. A year later, the Madisons merged with the Lightnings to become Episode Six. Six released over a dozen singles, never quite breaking through, but that would all change for Glover when Deep Purple came calling in the summer of ’69.

How did you come to join Deep Purple?

Ian Gillan and I were in a band called Episode Six, where we were writing together. Purple was looking for a singer, and Jon Lord and Ritchie Blackmore came to see us and offered Ian the gig, which he took.

Soon after, Ian called me and said, ‘The band is looking for songs – come in and play them our songs.’ So I met Lord and he listened and passed on what we had, but he played me Hallelujah and asked me to record it with them that night.

After the session he offered me the gig and I turned him down. I said, ‘You already took our singer, if I leave Episode Six it kills everyone else's hopes and dreams, and I can't live with that.’ So he said, ‘Well, think about it.’

I went home and thought about it all night and called him the next morning to take the gig. It still amazes me how close I came to not following this path.

What about original bassist Nick Simper?

Well, the band politics were horrible. Nick didn't know he'd been replaced until someone told him, and on the Hallelujah session I used his bass and amp. I felt bad; both (original vocalist) Rod Evans and Nick were let go without notice, which must have hurt terribly.

I've never met Nick, but his bass playing definitely had an impact on me because I had to play his parts. I thought he had a great plucking sound; you can really hear it on Hush – I could never get that sound.

People have noted that the bass is louder on Machine Head than other early Purple albums. Was there a reason?

I really don't know why that was, but it surprises me, as well. I very rarely listen to our own stuff, and so you forget what the recordings actually sound like; but every time I hear the original on the radio I go, ‘Jesus, the bass is loud!’

How did you come up with those bass parts?

Do you know the theory of the zen archer? The zen archer draws his bow back and as soon as he eyes the target he lets his arrow go. The reason is, the longer he hesitates and tries to make sure he hits the target, the more off he's going to be because his hands will start to shake. In other words, your first instinct is always your best bet.

But at the basic level, the bass has to anchor and groove at all costs. I mean, you can get a little complicated on the bass, but it doesn't really help the song.

What’s your role as a songwriter?

There's no formula for it, other than we're aware we're a hard rock band, and that's what the music is going to be. So it's within those confines, except hard rock is unconfined in that it has elements of blues, folk, classical, and jazz.

Someone might come in with a riff or a chord sequence, something fairly basic that everyone can chew on for a while, and the song kind of evolves. It's always been the same with Purple. We don't write Purple songs; we just write songs that become Purple songs because we're playing them.

Who were your key bass influences?

The first bass player I heard who was totally different from everyone else was Jack Bruce. Then I got into John Entwistle – My Generation blew me away – and Tim Bogert with Vanilla Fudge. But they were all virtuoso players.

I think the bassist who had the most impact on me was Paul McCartney, because he was both a great songwriter and a great player. He had the lyrical sensibility to say something profound on bass that didn't get in the way of anything else.

Even though I don't want to emulate them, I admire technical players. Two of my heroes are Jaco Pastorius and Victor Wooten. They're just brilliant musicians. Occasionally I'll go on YouTube and check out Victor or Abraham Laboriel.

What advice would you offer to young bassists?

If you want to be a bass player, study and borrow from the best and learn how to really enjoy playing the instrument. You can have just as much fun gigging in a little band at your local pub every Saturday evening as you'll ever get from being a celebrity bass player.

A big reason Purple made it is that we didn't follow any trends; hard rock wasn't in vogue at the time, and we had no hope in hell of getting on the radio. We just did what we wanted to do, and it happened to become successful. That's really the truest kind of success you can achieve.

As a member of two major hard rock acts, Winger and Whitesnake, Reb Beach knows a thing or two about the intricate art of crafting an arena-worthy guitar solo.

Now, with both bands calling it quits and Beach looking back on his formidable career, the question is: which one allowed him to fully flex his guitar chops – and, more importantly, his individual playing style?

“Winger, for sure,” he replies matter-of-factly in a new interview with Guitar World. “I did a record with Doug Aldrich [one of Whitesnake’s guitarists] at his house, but we didn’t have an amp, so I went direct. He said he would do the thing where you mic up the amp later – re-amp it.”

Beach insists that not only did it not sound good, he was far from happy with that. However, it all stemmed from the boss’ orders.

“David Coverdale, for some reason, wanted my solos to be a certain way,” Beach explains.

“The record I wrote with him, he said to Joel Hoekstra [another one of Whitesnake’s guitarists] [in a regal voice], ‘You can play whatever you want, but Reb, I am going to take you under my wing.’ He had to kind of approve my solos.”

Beach pinpoints one album in particular on which he had to get all his guitar solos signed off by Coverdale.

“It wasn't as much on the one I wrote with him, Flesh and Blood, but The Purple Album, he was all over my…” he quips. “What’s that Deep Purple song? Mistreated! Yeah, he was all over me on that one. I had to make David happy on that.”

As for Winger, it was a whole different story. While Beach admits that he also had to make [frontman, lead singer, and bass player] Kip Winger “happy,” their long-term dynamic helped ease the pangs of criticism, notwithstanding that Beach considers him “a musical genius” who “had some great ideas for me as well.”

“I’ve worked with Kip since I was a kid. I don't know… I felt more freedom,” he admits. “I wrote the songs, too; we would always write the solo sections for me. Kip would say [in a dry voice], ‘Okay, and that's good to solo over.’”

Guitar World’s full interview with Reb Beach will be published in the coming weeks.

And if you need a refresher on all the guitarists Whitesnake had over the decades, check out Guitar World's ultimate guide to the shredders who graced the stage – from the project's inception to Coverdale's retirement.

Don’t believe everything you see or read on the internet. Ritchie Blackmore just found the other day that he didn’t like Jimmy Page, much to his surprise.

Because the Stratocaster-toting Deep Purple and Rainbow icon thinks quite the opposite, and has paid tribute to the Led Zeppelin guitarist, describing him as a “magical guy”.

Blackmore was speaking on April 14 during a livestreamed interview on his birthday (he was born at ten-past-midnight, UK time. Many happy returns, Ritchie), doing one of these ask-me-anything type deals.

And so one fan writes in to enquire if he likes Page. The answer is 100 per cent yes – though he understood where the question came from.

“I read the other day that I hated him,” says Blackmore. “I can’t believe they said that.”

Blackmore says he and Page go way back, and says he knew from the moment he met him that Page was going to be a star. This was the early ‘60s, and they were both sharpening their skills in backing bands.

“The first time I met him was 1963 or ‘62. He was in a band called Neil Christian and the Crusaders, and I was in Lord Sutch and the Savages,” Blackmore recalls. “I knew he was going places, because I could tell, not only did he have a style, he had the playing ability, and he just looked right, playing the guitar. He was a star in the making, Jimmy Page.”

Page spent much of the early ‘60s in and out of recording studios. He was one of the first-call players in the UK. He played on Shirley Bassey’s Goldfinger theme song, tracked with the Who, before the Yardbirds came calling, then Led Zeppelin, and then the rest is history.

Peter Grant might have been the administrative spearhead for the Led Zeppelin machine but Blackmore says Page’s business smarts have served him well. “He was a good businessman, too. Not only a guitar player, he was a businessman,” he offers.

Sadly, Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin never shared a bill, nor did Rainbow. So whenever Blackmore and Page’s paths would cross, it would be a social occasion, like the last time he bumped into him at the most-legendary of all Los Angeles’ rock-friendly watering holes

“Last time I spoke to him, he was probably in the Rainbow, in Hollywood,” recalls Blackmore. “He said to me, ‘Where did you learn all your runs from?’ And I thought, ‘That was a strange question.’ And I thought, ‘Runs? Well, they’re just improvisational, extemporizations, improvisational inversions.’ And that was quite a compliment coming from him.”

Remarkably, Blackmore and Page both grew up in the same small town of Heston, in Middlesex, England. There’s only a year between them. And yet they never knew each other till later.

“I never knew that he was even in the village, and that would have been when we were both 15 or 16,” notes Blackmore. “But magical guy, great guy. Always will be.”

In related Blackmore news, in the same livestreamed interview the Deep Purple guitar legend said that most guitarists aren’t nice people – but named one player who bucks the trend.

Ritchie Blackmore has claimed that “most guitarists aren’t nice people”, while naming just one player who bucks the trend.

The former Deep Purple guitarist, who was forced to cut short his tour last year with Blackmore’s Night due to a health scare, is currently recovering at home. Recently, his wife and bandmate Candice Night instigated a surprise Instagram livestream, during which the electric guitar hero fielded questions from his fans.

Blackmore touched on various aspects of his career during the Q&A, and paid particular praise to Tommy Bolin – one of his Deep Purple successors.

“He was such a nice guy that I couldn't believe he was a guitar player, because most guitar players aren't nice people,” Blackmore says.

“I would go around his house, and we'd often have fun just talking to each other. There was never ever any envy, no competition whatsoever.”

Now, Blackmore is well-known for his no-nonsense, matter-of-fact British sense of humor, so we imagine Bolin isn't really the only “nice” guitar player he's come across during his career.

Yet, despite his praise for Bolin, Blackmore did mention one other thing...

“I said to Tommy once, ‘When did you last change your strings?’ ‘cause they were so caked in dirt and grit,” he remembers. “And he looked at me, like, ‘I should change them?’ And I said, ‘Well, yeah.’ And he said, ‘Well, probably about five years ago.’

“He was a brilliant player, a great player, but he never changed his guitar strings!”

In related news, Blackmore once revealed that he very nearly formed a supergroup with Thin Lizzy's Phil Lynott, and recently recalled Jeff Beck's imposter syndrome in a revealing interview.

Steve Morse and Ernie Ball Music Man’s partnership is one of the guitar world’s most enduring, spanning back to a chance encounter between the pair at a NAMM show in the 1980s.

In fact, the Dixie Dregs and Deep Purple electric guitar legend was the first player to receive a signature guitar from the company.

Before that, though, Morse was being approached by other brands for potential signatures. One such rival was Fender – a solid choice, it would seem, given the fact Morse had been relying on a heavily modded Frankenstein’d Telecaster up until that point.

But, as Morse explained to Guitar World in an interview during NAMM earlier this year, it wasn’t to be, as logistical difficulties and creative differences meant the project ultimately failed.

Speaking of how his collaboration with Ernie Ball started, Morse said, “They [EBMM] were going to release the StingRay bass, and they said, ‘Well, we’d like to get the guitars where they should have been, and we want you to design a signature one.’ I said, ‘Well, I’ve been through this already with Fender. It didn't work out.’

Morse explained, “With Fender, it was like, ‘Alright, here's what we need. We need this bridge. We need this pickup.’ [Fender said], ‘Oh, sorry, those aren't Fender parts.’ I said, ‘I know, but we need this bridge.’ ‘No, you have to use Fender parts.’”

Ultimately, says Morse, the conversation started to run in circles. “I said, ‘Yeah, but you don’t make this bridge,’’ he recalls. “‘[It was like] ‘Right, but you have to use Fender parts...’ I said, ‘Alright, I'll see you guys later. Bye.’ That was the end of that.”

Morse says he found it was a different experience with Ernie Ball Music Man, though, which was more than happy to accommodate Morse’s ultra-specific spec requests.

He continues, “Dudley Gimpel was the luthier at Music Man and he really put in the time, and was very analytical about it. We started with the head stock, which is shorter [on the signature]. And the guitar, when you put it on your leg to practice, you can let go, and it balances perfectly.

“And it was lightweight, because I specified the lightest wood possible, so we got poplar. Then we started talking about the shape. I wanted more of a rounded edge, but not a cutaway, because I use it to support my arm, kind of like an acoustic or a classic guitar.”

Morse was also highly particular about the pickups, which were positioned and angled in a deliberate way to improve tone and prevent phasing issues.

Fender, meanwhile, has changed its tune somewhat since the ’80s administration, making some concessions on third-party components – for instance, the Floyd Rose-equipped builds in last year’s Player II Modified series.

Morse’s full interview with Guitar World will be published on YouTube in the coming weeks.

The Deep Purple guitarist has continued that experimental ethos towards guitar making throughout his entire career. Back in 2024, he showed off a DIY mute that he fashioned himself as a way to help him play through the pain of arthritis.

Ritchie Blackmore has recalled the moment he knew he had to leave Deep Purple.

For many, Blackmore was Deep Purple. He's been one of their most influential driving forces, helped the band cement their status as one of Britain’s premier rock bands with a pantheon of timeless guitar riffs.

He pushed the band’s unique blend of hard-hitting blues rock and classical motifs, carving out a reputation as one of the world’s greatest guitar players in the process. But all good things must come to an end, and he left after 1974’s Stormbringer. The writing, he says, was on the wall.

“The first time [I considered leaving] was when I thought about doing a song, and a band member said, ‘If we didn’t write it, there’s no point in doing it because we won’t get writing credits,’” he says in a new interview with Guitar Player. “I was really disappointed in that statement.”

He doesn’t specify what the song was. But it set a precedent.

“It was also a time when our management was starting to put together a tour, and everybody in the band was busy doing something else – a holiday, producing something, getting married,” he adds.

“In my mind, this showed that it wasn’t a band anymore. It was just a group of people with high-finance interests, business ventures, and personal bookings taking place instead of the band touring.”

Blackmore would go on to form a new band, Rainbow, and share the studio with vocalist Ronnie James Dio, who became Ozzy Osbourne’s successor in Black Sabbath several years later. Ironically, Deep Purple singer Ian Gillan also spent a short while in Sabbath, as the member merry-go-round gathered speed.

With Rainbow, Blackmore would go on to release seven studio albums in a mad dash eight-year spell, before returning to Deep Purple for Perfect Strangers in 1984. The atmosphere within the Rainbow ranks was a night-and-day contrast to Purple.

“When I did a session with Ronnie Dio in the studio, I started seeing things in a different light,” Blackmore continues. “I started having fun again, and music started being important again.

“John Cleese once said of Monty Python that there were far too many committee meetings about nothing. We had the same in Purple.”

Blackmore is currently recovering from health issues that caused the cancellation of last year’s run of shows with Blackmore’s Night.

Elsewhere, he’s reflected on Jeff Beck’s struggles with imposter syndrome, and his hit-and-miss experiments with using banjo strings on his Strats.

Steve Morse enjoyed a 28 year stint with Deep Purple, making him their longest serving guitarist. Morse played on eight studio albums during his time with the band, including 2021's Turning to Crime, and cemented his name as an integral part of the group’s legacy.

Morse stepped down in July 2022 to care for his late wife, Janine, who was diagnosed with cancer. However, those hoping for Morse-Deep Purple reunion anytime soon shouldn't hold their breath.

“There's a couple guys in the band that were really glad for me to be gone,” he explains in an interview with Guitar Interactive Magazine. “They were sort of heading back to their roots and wanted just to be a rock band – ‘Don't give me any of that fancy crap.’

“And when you look at me as a writer, I definitely give you that fancy crap – I can't help it. So I think the band's happier the way they are. And it would be kind of a step back for them to want to do something like that.”

However, Morse does divulge that there were plans for him to “play on something and actually do another gig,” but that didn’t end up happening.

“That was when my wife was in remission. Everybody knew it was a wild card whether I was going to be able to be around or not, but we could schedule that boat [referring to Rock Legends Cruise] thing, and we were looking forward to it.

“We were on that tour – that boat – the year before when it got cancelled from COVID. The whole band got bumped off anyway. They're happier and better off… and I think, ‘Same here.’”

In related Morse news, the virtuoso recently opened up about his struggle to prolong his gigging days amid an ongoing battle with arthritis.

Back in the day, guitar players didn’t have the choice of electric guitar strings that we have today, and for those operating at the outer limits of performance – you might even call them proto-shredders – that presented a problem. Players had to think outside of the box.

In the early 1960s, Ritchie Blackmore did just that. With mixed results. He was out cutting his teeth in the Outlaws, working the rock ’n’ roll circuit. A trip to Germany with Jerry Lee Lewis and Gene Vincent would present him with an epiphany that changed how he strung his electric guitar.

“I went to Hamburg in ’63 with Jerry Lee [Lewis] and Gene Vincent, in the same year, played at the Star Club like everybody else did,” recalls Blackmore. “It was interesting because we were the Outlaws, and Jerry Lee was topping [the bill]. We were backing him, but the opening band was the Searchers, and in England, at that point, they had a number one record with Sweets for My Sweet.

“So it was so strange to see the band opening and being nobodies, and they were number one in England. Of course, The Searchers became very, very big later on.”

All of this was great experience. The Outlaws were playing five, six sets a night, the instrumental backing band for a rotating cast of players, including Merseybeat champs Ted ‘Kingsize’ Taylor and Tony Sheridan – the very same Tony Sheridan who played with the Beatles way back in the beginning.

“We backed Tony Sheridan a few times,” continues Blackmore. “He was a guitar player, too, but when we were backing him he would turn around to me and say, ‘Take the solo.’ And I’d go, ‘Oh, all right!’ I’d take the solo. Every night on tour, ‘Take the solo!’ ‘What about you? You’re the guitar player. Everybody is coming to see you, not me.’”

It was all good practice. But Blackmore was looking for an edge to his playing, and he had been passed along a tip from a high-profile source that seemed to do the trick.

Like many players of the time, Blackmore was getting frustrated with the heavier gauges – some players, particularly those with Gretsch guitars, used sets with wound Gs as standard. Flatwounds were commonplace. He wanted to bend the strings. James Burton, one of his rock ’n’ roll heroes on account of his work with Ricky Nelson, was improvising with his Telecaster’s setup to great effect.

“I’d just heard James Burton, and I had met Elvis Presley’s guitar player [was this Scott Moore? Blackmore does not say], who told me that James Burton used banjo strings,” says Blackmore. “And of course, I got the banjo strings, put them on... I’m going to bend the strings like James Burton.”

As the godfather of country guitar, Burton’s approach was radical. He got the idea in the 1950s that he would restring his top four strings, low-to-high DGBE, with the banjo strings, then use a regular D string from a set of electric guitar strings for his A, and a regular A for his E.

“It’s a pretty interesting thing because I’m hearing all these wonderful slide sounds and bends and on my guitar it was impossible with the strings too stiff,” said Burton, speaking to Clash in 2008.

“It was a different sound, a completely different sound… It was an incredible sound because I ended up with an unwound third, and it was a bit more twangy from the regular strings, but it was incredible, it was a great sound.”

Blackmore agreed. It was a step forward. Banjo strings on his Gibson ES-335 was opening up new avenues for expression on the instrument. “I bent the strings and it sounded great,” he says.

Sadly, this early ‘60s hack that had worked so well for Burton did not work for Blackmore.

“The trouble was my guitar went totally out of tune,” he says. “And the whole cast got together and complained and said, ‘You’ve got to put normal guitar strings on again because using those banjo strings, everything is out of tune’ – which it was.”

This was a problem that would soon get solved. There was a gap in the market. Enterprising string manufacturers were reacting to players’ needs. In 1962, Ernie Ball had debuted his Rock and Roll strings – “Guitar strings created especially for the teen age market!” the ad. The Slinkys were born.

Blackmore would later team up with Picato for his RB77 signature set, 10-48 – nickel-wound, hex core, easy to bend, no tuning issues – but after his stint in Germany, he would soon find out that he and players like him had options.

Ritchie Blackmore has previously heaped praise on Steve Morse, but the man who took his place in Deep Purple had a difficult job of impressing the group’s fans as he tried to put his spin on their material.

Morse joined in 1994 after Blackmore stepped away from the band for a second time. He spent 28 years with the band, producing eight studio albums, and even embarking on a tour shortly after breaking his wrist.

But, despite being a valued member of the group, the fusion-minded virtuoso had a harder time reimagining Blackmore’s blues-y licks in the eyes of the fans.

“Now, the fans, when I played the Purple songs and took it out, some of them – a certain percentage of them – just hated me,” he says to MusicRadar. “And pretty much stayed in that position till 28 years later!

“I tried to incorporate my stylistic mixture with respect for what Ritchie did but with some of my own personality, too,” he develops. “And [it was for] the people there that hadn’t heard us yet. They had the old albums, of course – that’s why they came and bought tickets – but they got used to me being me, and that was kind of new.”

Deep Purple were notorious for changing up their songs live, typically expanding sections out into long, virtuosic jams. Morse’s mindset was very much in keeping with that spirit, even if the band’s more conservative fans weren’t bowled over.

Speaking of his predecessors’ legacies, the band’s newest guitarist, Simon McBride, says he’s quickly learned just how different Morse and Blackmore are in terms of style.

“The Steve Morse stuff is very different from the early Ritchie Blackmore stuff,” he states. “Steve had a bit of an injury to his wrist, so he doesn’t play the way he did in Dixie Dregs. If I had to play what he did there, I would give up!

“And with Ritchie’s style, for example, there’s a solo like Highway Star that I can’t change – [tell that to Morse!]. When you’ve got 65,000 people all singing the solo back at you note-for-note, it’s like, ‘Okay, I am so glad I did not change this at all!’

“But there are other solos, like the one in Smoke on the Water, where I changed it around and put my own flavour on it. There’s no point trying to compete with Steve Morse or Ritchie Blackmore.”

Over the past few years, Morse has been battling arthritis in his wrist. He's invented a hack to help his playing, and has now revealed how his wrist's ever-changing condition dictates how he approaches every show.

Still, that hasn't stopped him from writing a new album with the Steve Morse Band, and Eric Johnson and John Petrucci are along for the ride, too.

Legendary British rock vocalist David Coverdale has announced his retirement, bringing to a close an iconic career that has seen him perform with the biggest names in rock music.

He joined Ritchie Blackmore's Deep Purple, replacing Ian Gillan in 1973. He fronted the band for three records, including the barnstorming Burn and Come Taste the Band, their only record with Tommy Bolin.

Before the decade was out, he formed Whitesnake in 1978, a band that has played host to a legion of six-string talents, from Bernie Marsden to Steve Vai and many more beyond.

In the 1990s, he linked up with Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page for the cult classic LP, Coverdale–Page. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2016 when Deep Purple were rightfully inducted alongside Cheap Trick and Chicago.

“After 50 plus years of an incredible journey with you with Deep Purple, Whitesnake, and Jimmy Page, the last few years have been very evident to me that it's time really for me to hang up my rock and roll platform shoes and my skintight jeans,” he says in a video statement.

“I thank everyone who's assisted and supported me on this incredible journey. All the musicians, the crew, the fans, the family. It's amazing. But it really is time for me to just enjoy my retirement, and I hope you can appreciate that. I love you with all my heart. Fare thee well.”

His announcement presumably brings Whitesnake to an end, but with no official confirmation, the door still seems slightly ajar for a possible replacement. The band launched a farewell tour in 2022, but Coverdale’s health issues forced the run to be cut short.

After Jake E. Lee split from Ozzy Osbourne’s band in 1987, Jimi Bell was one of the many guitarists who auditioned for the gig. But while he respected Lee and Randy Rhoads, they weren’t his primary influences.

“Both were absolute monsters on the guitar, no question,” he says. “But I go a bit further back to guys like Johnny Winter, Ritchie Blackmore and Al Di Meola. And of course, Eddie Van Halen changed the game for me.”

Eventually, Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne narrowed their choice down to Bell or Zakk Wylde. And although Bell got on well with Sharon, the facts that Wylde was a Rhoads disciple and was already working with Ozzy sealed the deal.

But Sharon introduced Bell to Geezer Butler, leading to a spell beside the Black Sabbath bass player. He co-wrote Master of Insanity with Butler, which appeared on 1991 Sabbath album Dehumanizer. But he wasn’t paid or credited for it. “I wish some things had turned out differently, but I don’t carry bitterness,” he says. “I’m proud of what I did – even if the paperwork didn’t always reflect it.”

He went on to record with House of Lords and joined Autograph after Steve Lynch quit. “Sharon definitely vibed with me,” he says of his Ozzy audition. “But he made the final call. Zakk was the right fit for where Ozzy was going.”

What inspired you to pick up the guitar?

“I was a drummer first, from age 10 to 13. I used to jam with friends, and one day the guitarist left his guitar against his amp. I couldn’t resist. Even though it was right-handed and I’m a lefty, I plugged it in, hit the Big Muff fuzz box – and I was hooked instantly.

“I became obsessed with guitar, so I progressed quickly. By 15 I was already playing in public. At 16, I started gigging in clubs, and I had to get my parents to sign permission slips to get in the venues. The first time I played for a real crowd, I knew I’d found my path.”

How did you hook up with Joan Jett?

“Around 1984 I was in a band called Joined Forces, playing all original music. Someone from Joan’s label, Blackheart Records, saw us live and offered us a management deal. Next thing we knew, we were out on tour with Joan. We had a full tour bus, became close with her band and crew, and Joan herself was incredibly kind and down-to-earth.

“Joan was always particularly kind and friendly towards me. That led to us landing the role as The Hunzz in the Joan Jett/Michael J. Fox film Light of Day. The release party at the Hard Rock Café in New York could have been a chapter in a book all by itself!”

How did you get the call to audition for Ozzy?

“I was endorsed by Kramer Guitars and Dennis Berardi, the president, had kind of taken me under his wing. One morning he called to say Jake E. Lee was out and he’d sent a video of me to Sharon. Suddenly I had an audition – but the catch was I had to fly out that same day.

“I already knew four or five Ozzy songs, so when I got to the hotel I focused on brushing up on them: I Don’t Know, Crazy Train, Flying High Again and Suicide Solution.”

What gear did you use for your Ozzy audition?

“The backline was all set. I just had to bring myself and my Boss 7-band EQ to push the amp a bit harder. I’m pretty sure it was a Marshall JCM800. The energy in the room was intense but inspiring.”

What was the actual audition like?

“Part one was with Randy Castillo and Phil Soussan. Most of the players went through that first round. Sharon actually sat in on mine – probably to see if she’d wasted plane tickets! She liked what she saw, and I was told I did great. The next day, part two was at a different location, onstage with Ozzy. Surreal doesn’t even begin to cover it.

“It went exceptionally well – I was locked in with the band and stayed true to the song and the solo, but I added a little flair unique to me. Ozzy literally leaned down in front of my amp while I was playing.

“Then I played a solo on my own, and the vibe was strong. Ozzy and Sharon told me it was down to me and Zakk. I went to dinner with them at a fancy restaurant, where Ozzy ate off my salad plate with his fingers!

“Then I went back to their house and hung out for a while, and I even met Ozzy’s oldest daughter, Aimee. At that point Zakk had already started working with them, and I think his similarities to Randy played a big part in the final decision.”

Ozzy has said Zakk’s tape was the only one he really listened to. What do you think of that?

“I don’t know if he ever saw my tape; but I know Sharon did, and that’s what got me in the room. More importantly, Ozzy saw me live, just inches from my amp. I think that moment said more than any demo ever could.”

How did your connection with Geezer Butler come about?

“Even after the Ozzy gig didn’t happen, Sharon still believed in me. That belief led directly to Geezer and what became a whole new chapter in my career. Geezer wanted to explore a more melodic sound than Sabbath, but still heavy. We had an amazing lineup: Carl Sentance on vocals, now in Nazareth; Jezz Woodruff from Robert Plant’s band on keys; and Gary Ferguson on drums – his resume is unreal.”

What was your rig like with Geezer?

“We rehearsed in a killer studio in London, and I used Marshall 800 heads – they were essential to match Geezer’s massive low-end tone. Watching him play up close was wild. His thunderous attack on the bass is next level.”

You co-wrote Master of Insanity, which ended up on Sabbath’s Dehumanizer. But there were issues with credit and payment. What happened?

“In ’91 I got a call from Geezer’s wife, Gloria. She told me Sabbath was reuniting with Ronnie James Dio and wanted to use Master of Insanity on the new album. I was thrilled – until I found out I wouldn’t get songwriting credit. Tony Iommi apparently didn’t want a song by another guitarist on a Sabbath record.

“Geezer did thank me in the liner notes, and he promised me payment after the tour. I never saw the money. But hearing Dio perform a song I wrote was unforgettable. Ronnie even mentioned our collaboration in his book, and Geezer wrote about it in his autobiography, so I’ve made peace with it.”

There’s been talk that Computer God, also from Dehumanizer, came from your era with Geezer.

“We did have a song called Computer God, but it was totally different – more of a melodic hard rock track. There’s a rehearsal video of it on YouTube. Only the title made it to the Sabbath version; musically they’re worlds apart.”

You’ve had major runs with House of Lords and Autograph. What were those experiences like?

“House of Lords has been a huge part of my career. We’ve made 13 albums with Frontiers Srl, and I’ve written over 100 songs with the band. James Christian still sings like a beast. We’re heading to Europe for a tour in late 2025.

“As for Autograph, I joined after Steve Lynch left to form 222. Randy Rand brought me in and told me to make the guitar my own, which I did. We had a great three-year run before Randy passed. I’ll always treasure that time. – he was more than a bandmate; he was a close friend.”

Steve Lynch wasn’t thrilled about your version of Autograph. Was that uncomfortable?

“The situation was tough, especially after Randy passed. But I’ve moved on. I prefer to focus on the good times we had and all the friendships I made. We were very close on and off stage. Randy will always hold a special place in my heart.”

What’s next for you?

“I’ve got a bunch of things going on. I get called to lay down solos for other artists, which I love. I’ve also done music for WWE wrestler entrance themes and ESPN; projects like that are always exciting.

“One of my main focuses is my tribute band Beyond Purple. We honor the Deep Purple family tree – songs by Rainbow, Dio, Whitesnake and all three DP vocalists. We’ve started writing original music, and we’ve already got more than a full album's worth ready to go.”

• Beyond Purple tour the US throughout 2025.

Tommy Denander’s musical experience includes work on over 3,500 albums, of which over 100 are gold or platinum, and credits on eight Number 1 Billboard LPs.

“The list of who I’ve worked with looks like a guy who couldn’t hold down a gig to save his life!” he happily admits. “Michael Jackson, Anastacia, Steve Perry, Yngwie Malmsteen, Stephen Pearcy, Bernie Marsden, Eric Singer, Bruce Kulick, blah-blah-blah!”

His A-list collaborations span from the late ’80s to the present day, and also includes Alice Cooper, Deep Purple, Paul Stanley and Ace Frehley. “Those guys were on posters on my wall when I was a kid in Sweden,” Denander laughs. “So we really are talking about a dream coming true!”

He’s most proud of a quote from producer Mutt Lange – who rarely speaks in public. “Tommy has always been the consummate live player,” the rock icon said. “I recently found out that he’s the consummate studio guitarist as well. Excellent and so egoless to work with – great feel and a perfectionist, too.”

Denander, who signed his first record deal at the age of 15 and always knew he wanted to be “a studio musician, songwriter and producer instead of a rock star,” is also proud of his VGS signature guitar, which he states never goes out of tune thanks to the use of Evertune bridge and True Temperament frets.

“I’d been endorsed by Hamer, Steinberger, Yamaha, PRS and more, so when VGS asked, I said only if we could create my actual dream guitar. I’m close friends with Evertune, who asked me at NAMM one year if I’d like to be the first to have it on a real model.

“On the flight home to Sweden it just struck me that we should use the True Temperament invention, with the bent frets. It’s the first guitar to stay in tune and maintain 100 percent intonation.”

Denander’s guitar made it to a second model about 14 years ago, but then business issues got in the way. “The main company had the money – they just didn’t see a future in the products. What a miss!”

What’s the session industry like these days?

“Real music is coming back. Kids love great music played by top-level musicians again, so bigger studios are coming back as well. You need a collection of rare skills, gigantic determination and a strong sense of brand building – you need to find the balance of how and where to promote yourself, and when not to.

“Always answer people fast, deliver fast ,and leave your ego out of it, because no matter how sure you are of something, it’s always the client’s wish that matters. I like to suggest things and maybe give them too much, so they can pick the parts they like best.

“There are opportunities to become a solid touring musician too. It’s rare that the people you see on tour also play on the albums. It takes equal skill and time to do both, but in the studio no one can see you, so looks don’t matter. Live, they do!”

What’s the worst aspect of session work?

“Something that’s more important these days than in the ‘good old days’ – it’s when credits are missing. It happens more often now and it pisses me off big time. It happened with Paul Stanley, and he was pissed because I’d been in the album press release, that he put together himself. He said an idiot messed it up for the product.

“Then Ace Frehley ‘forgot’ that I wrote the music to a song on his latest album. I missed credit on, like, 25 variations of vinyl and all the CD and digital versions. It’s corrected now, but I lost a lot of media and PR was lost.

“Once, Ricky Martin decided he wanted big photos of himself all over the CD booklet of an album we did with Desmond Child, and put all credits on his website. I don’t even know what to say!

“I often work for much less money than than I should, because of the names involved. Getting those credits adds to my value which leads to income. When people are sloppy and miss it, we get screwed twice. So sloppiness bugs me!”

Regardless of the downsides, how was it to work on Paul Stanley’s 2006 solo album Live to Win?

“I saw a Kiss poster in a record store when I was 7 years old. That poster was why I started to play guitar, and to this day I’m a huge fan. Ace Frehley was my first guitar idol – I co-wrote Up In The Sky on his latest album 10,000 Volts.

“When I was asked to play on Paul’s Live To Win it was a surreal and beautiful moment. I ended up playing on the title track and Wake Up Screaming. First time I heard Paul’s voice through the big monitors in the studio, I just sat there smiling – I couldn’t even play!”

Working with Alice Cooper was another dream come true, wasn’t it?

“Yeah! In the mid ’80s I started writing songs with Alice in mind. I told my friends that I’d be perfect to write for him. My dear friend Desmond Child introduced me to Bob Ezrin around 2010, and that’s how I ended up playing on I Am Made of You on Alice’s Welcome 2 My Nightmare album.

“Then Bob and Alice asking me to work on Paranormal. I ended up co-producing it with Bob and I co-wrote half the songs. I play guitar on all the songs – including the ones with the whole original Alice Cooper Band.

“The song Fallen In Love started when Bob asked if I could write a take on Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water. I thought I’d done it quite well until Alice said, ‘Well, it has a ZZ Top feel to it.’ Then he asked Billy Gibbons to play on it. Cool!”

What about your rather minimal appearance on Deep Purple’s Infinite (2017)?

“When Bob Ezrin invited me to help with Infinite it meant I’d completed a triple of posters from my wall in the ’70s! They were almost done with the album, but Ian Gillan wanted to re-record his vocals and Don Airey wanted to add a keyboard part.

“They were in Stockholm and I worked at the biggest studio in Sweden, so it was perfect. Roger Glover and I recorded Ian’s vocals; it was stunning how professional these guys were. Don came over and nailed his part in one take, too.

“Then Roger said, ‘We’re missing one chord on the guitar.’ I said, ‘Can we get Steve Morse over from the hotel?’ Roger said, ‘No – Bob says you’re a great guitarist, so you can do it.’ I was like, ‘Did Roger Glover just ask me to play on a Deep Purple album?’

“I grabbed my Kemper and my VGS guitar. I knew that Steve used ENGL amps, so I found a profile that matched the recording perfectly. Roger was impressed! He showed me the missing chord – a missing D on a breakdown – and I recorded three takes: two mono for left-right panning and a stereo one with a small chorus.

“It hit me that I’d just had my Spinal Tap moment. I’d been playing guitar full-time for 25 years at that point, and when I got to play on a Deep Purple album it was just one chord!”

Your connection with Alice Cooper led to your work with the Hollywood Vampires, right?

“Right. I’ve done five or six albums with Alice. When we were doing Paranomal he invited me to play with the Vampires at a charity concert in Phoenix. Hanging for 12 hours with Johnny Depp, Joe Perry, Sammy Hagar, Korn and others, jamming and having way too many laughs, was a super-fun day.

“For their second album Rise (2019) the Vampires decided to recorded a song I wrote for Paranormal that hadn’t been used. Johnny wrote a cool lyric about a true event – it’s called Welcome to Bushwackers.

“Alice and Jeff Beck had talked for years about doing something together. To my big luck it ended up being my song! So it’s me, Johnny Depp and Joe Perry on rhythm guitars, and the stunning Jeff Beck on solos.”

You’ve also done solo work, usually under the banner of Radioactive. The first album, 2001’s Ceremony of Innocence, featured members of Toto. How did you swing that?

“I was living in Los Angeles and I’d become friends with all the Toto guys. I asked them if I got a solo deal would they play on it? I got an instant ‘Yes!’

“Luckily a friend at Sony Records was there too, and I got signed in a few days. Recording my first album, aged 23, with Jeff, Mike and Steve Porcaro and David Paich as my backing band was amazing.

“I was very close friends with Jeff and Mike Porcaro during those years. I miss them a lot. I’ve released six albums as Radioactive, and the list of legends on them all is pretty astonishing.”

Do you have any missing dream collaborations left?

“It sometimes feels like I have worked with them all! But Peter Gabriel has always been a major wish. I absolutely love his music, but also I feel deeply connected to it, and his way of writing. I think I’d be able to contribute something worthy. Then Sting, John Mayer, Stevie Wonder… the list is still long!”

And is there one who got away?

“The song Grace, from my first Radioactive album, was totally written with Richard Page from Mr Mister in mind. I managed to send him the song and he really loved it. But he said: ‘I’m aware of the value of my voice. I’d love to do but my price is …… dollars.

“He was and is worth every cent, but it was way out of my reach at the time, despite serious discussions about making it happen.”

• Keep up with Denander’s projects via Facebook.

If Fleetwood Mac can offer the ultimate in progressive rock ’n’ roll soap operas thanks to a turbulent history of personnel changes, casualties and group crises, the saga of Thin Lizzy would have run them a close second.

In their early ’70s heyday, no band had more potential to make the world their own than Lizzy. They were old-fashioned grafters who toured constantly, worked hard and played hard, learning fast in the process, but somehow never managing to get all the pieces of the jigsaw to fit quite at the same time.

Bestriding the stage like a leather-clad rock god, bassist Phil Lynott was the heart of Thin Lizzy and its songs, but in late 1972 he was poised to take a step back from his role as the band's frontman – with Deep Purple’s Ritchie Blackmore and drummer Ian Paice offering him a chance to form a truly supreme supergroup.

“Ritchie was getting fed up with Deep Purple, and he and lan were getting set to leave,” said Lynott in an interview from the Bass Player archives.

“He came down to see us, and then asked me to come round and have a go. We just went into the studio and played a couple of things as a trio, but he was thinking of adding Paul Rodgers on vocals as well.”

Settling on the name Baby Face, the mental image of Blackmore and Lynott on stage together is awe-inspiring, although it was never to be, unfortunately.

“Phil’s voice was staggering, wonderful,” Ian Paice told Classic Rock. “But he couldn’t play, at least not to the standard that we needed.”

“He was quite often out of tune and out of time. And although he became really, really good at everything he did, at that point he wasn’t. The bass playing had to be on a par with someone like Jack Bruce. And Phil wasn’t there yet.”

Phil Lynott was a poet, and he wore his heart on his sleeve as a lyricist. As a bassist, he wasn’t a technician, but with Thin Lizzy he didn’t need to be; his basslines always sat perfectly between the drums and the duelling guitars.

“Phil was a big entertainer onstage, but you can’t be Jaco Pastorius while you’re trying to talk to the audience and pull them into the music,” said guitarist Scott Gorham. “You’ve got to keep things level in order to bring an arena-sized crowd into a ‘club’ kind of feel, which is a real art in itself. And he was able to do that.”

Lynott used several basses throughout his career, but for fans, his black Fender Precision with a mirrored scratchplate was the favoured instrument. He used the scratchplate to highlight crowd members from his vantage point on the stage.

Thin Lizzy would end up using Baby Face as a song title on the band’s next album, Shades of a Blue Orphanage. Several members of the band would also record a Deep Purple tribute album in 1972 under the name Funky Junction.

Across an ever-busy career, Glenn Hughes has played with some of the best rock guitarists in the game. Two, he says, stand out above the rest. And one just about beats the other.

The bass player and powerhouse vocalist was a key part of Deep Purple’s Mark III and Mark IV line-ups alongside Ritchie Blackmore after rising through the ranks at the front of hard rock act Trapeze. Since then, he’s played on Gary Moore's 1985 album, Run For Cover, fronted Black Sabbath, and worked with Tony Iommi on the collaborative, underrated Fused LP in 2005.

Not to mention that he's shared studios and stages with Blackmore's Deep Purple replacement Tommy Bolin, produced five records with Joe Bonamassa in Black Country Communion, and drafted in the talents of Dave Navarro, John Frusciante, and Jerry Cantrell for his solo albums. His authority on who is the best of the best, then, is pretty formidable. So who takes the honor?

“That’s really difficult [to answer],” he says in the new issue of Classic Rock. “I don’t want people to be upset with me because I don’t mention Ritchie or Tommy [Bolin] or Mel [Galley, Trapeze] or Pat [Thrall, who he worked with in the ‘80s]. But I have to say it’s a tie between Gary Moore and Joe Bonamassa.”

Thankfully, he’s been happy to share his calculations.

“I’m talking about the fever it has given me working with them,” he explains. “Gary coming to my house at three in the morning and just blowing my mind – it’s incredible what a guitar player he was.”

However, it’s Bonamassa, who he says is “blowing my mind every night,” while on tour together, who is “the greatest right now.”

It seems he’s had a change of heart with his rankings. In October 2023, Hughes produced a very different answer to the same question.

“I played with Joe Satriani [on Satriani's 2018 album, What Happens Next], Bonamassa, Iommi and Blackmore, but Gary Moore was the best,” he had said. Seeing Bonamassa strut his stuff on stage every night seems to have tipped the scales.

When Blackmore left Deep Purple, he quickly struck up a fruitful partnership with Bolin. The guitarist moved into his house, and they wrote the bulk of 1975’s Come Taste the Band together during that period.

Last year, Hughes said that Bolin is “in my top three friends and guitar players,” placing him directly behind blues rock royalty in Blackmore and Bonamassa.

Fittingly, Bonamassa now wields Bolin’s famous 1960 Les Paul Standard, having had to go through a supernatural process to add it to his collection. The guitar has a checkered past, but it feels right that Bonamassa is the one to keep its flame burning.

Bonamassa, meanwhile, has looked back on the surreal experience of being asked to collaborate with Ozzy Osbourne, waxed lyrical about Eric Johnson's impact on his playing, and paid tribute to Rory Gallagher by playing his 1932 National resonator at a gig in the Irishman's hometown.

Terry Reid, the guitarist, songwriter, and vocalist whose emotive singing style led gave him the moniker “Superlungs,” has died at 75, following a battle with cancer.

Earlier in July, Reid was forced to postpone a European tour “due to medical issues arising from recent treatment for cancer” – while his family and friends had organized a fundraising appeal to support the cost of his ongoing treatment.

News of his death led to an outpouring of tributes from the music community, with Joe Bonamassa calling him “one of the greatest to ever do it and a beautiful person and soul.”

Determined to forge his own path, Reid famously turned down an offer by Jimmy Page to become the lead vocalist of the band that would evolve into Led Zeppelin, as well as an offer from Ritchie Blackmore to become Deep Purple's frontman. However, he was much more than that – in 1968, Aretha Franklin stated that the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and Terry Reid were the best talents England had to offer.

His career included extensive tours with the Stones, Cream, Jethro Tull, and Fleetwood Mac – the Isle of Wight Festival in 1969 and Glastonbury in 1970, as well as numerous collaborations with Graham Nash, a catalog of seven studio albums, session work with the likes of Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt, and songs he penned that featured in movies such as Up in the Air and The Devil’s Rejects.

In a 2023 interview with Uncut, Reid clarified that he’d rather be known as the man who put together Led Zeppelin.

“Jimmy [Page] asked me what he should do with the band,” he explained. “He needed a singer who could sing around those guitar licks, and not everybody could do that. I’d seen Robert with John Bonham, so I said to him, ‘Not only is Robert perfect, you’ve got to get the drummer – he’s an animal!’”

And while he may not have joined a big band, he clarified that he had no regrets and was proud of plowing his own furrow.

“When you’re in a band, you’re committed to that style,” he said matter-of-factly. “You’re not gonna be able to play any of that Brazilian music you like, cos they don’t do that. And all those folk things you like, well, forget that.”

In the ’70s and early ’80s, Eric Johnson cut his teeth in the session world, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Cat Stevens, Carole King, and Steve Morse, before eventually taking the plunge to release his debut solo album, Tones, in 1986.

However, before embarking on his solo journey, there was also a group called Mariani, through which he ended up supporting Deep Purple – and ended up developing a fruitful relationship with the Grammy Award–winning Christopher Cross.

“I was in a group called Mariani. We were opening for Deep Purple, and Ritchie Blackmore got food poisoning and was in the hospital overnight,” Johnson recounts in an interview with Guitar World.

“Deep Purple had to do this gig, and Christopher Cross was a real hot-shot guitar player, and he knew all the Deep Purple songs. So, they hired him to do this gig.

“I met him on that gig, and at the time, Chris was more of a rocker. He played a Gibson Flying V and had long hair,” he adds with a laugh. “He was really rocked-out; totally different from what he did later. We got to be friends, and we stayed friends after that gig.”

Years later, for what would become Cross' hugely successful eponymous debut album, he invited Johnson to guest on the track Minstrel Gigolo.

“He had, I think, three or four different guitarists, like Larry Carlton and Jay Graydon,” Johnson explains. “He had a number of guitarists play on that first record, and he just asked me if I’d play on that one song with him.

The album, released in 1979, would end up spawning Cross' career-making hit, Sailing – while it would be another couple of years (and tons of session work later, and the disbandment of the Electromagnets) before Johnson pivoted to his solo career.

Earlier this year, Johnson sat down with Guitarist to discuss his G3 reunion with Joe Satriani and Steve Vai, and observed that the limits of guitar have yet to be reached.

When Ritchie Blackmore left Deep Purple in 1974, there were internal discussions about whether the group could continue without their talisman guitarist. The story goes that David Coverdale, who had joined the band one year earlier, had been listening to Billy Cobham's Spectrum at the time, which featured Tommy Bolin’s talents. But he wasn't the only name in contention.

Clem Clempson, who had journeyed from jazz-rock wizards Colosseum to Humble Pie, where he replaced the outgoing Peter Frampton, was the other clear frontrunner. He even jammed with the band before Bolin got his chance, and though he quickly established a fruitful rapport with Glenn Hughes, he was ultimately overlooked.

“We had fun jamming for a couple of days and just hanging out,” he tells Guitar World of his audition experience.

“Although I think everyone enjoyed the playing we did together, it was clear that they didn’t just need a guitar player to replace Ritchie; they needed someone who could also fill Ritchie’s role as the main songwriter in the group,” he continues. “I definitely didn’t see myself as being the right man for the job in that respect.”

Bolin, conversely, had the songwriting skills the band needed, even if some may argue Clempson had more fiery chops. When Bolin joined, he’d co-write seven of Come Taste the Band’s nine tracks.

Before that, he’d proven an innovator. His wild, Echoplex-powered solo on Spectrum cut Quadrant 4 became a core influence for Steve Stevens’ now-iconic, toy ray gun-utilizing Rebel Yell solo. Looking back, Clemson understands the band’s decision.

“I believe Tommy had lots of songs which were exactly what the band needed,” he says. “And his style was more akin to Ritchie’s than mine. I was never into heavy rock as such. For me, there’s a subtle difference between Humble Pie and bands like Zeppelin, Purple, and Black Sabbath.”

Though his audition wasn’t successful, the guitarist didn’t feel his time was wasted. In fact, he has fond memories of the experience, which nearly spawned another project entirely – the thought of which will have ’70s rock fans salivating.

“One of the highlights was spending a very late night with Glenn Hughes and David Bowie,” he reminisces. “We wrote a song based on a riff I had, and made plans for a new band, the idea was to be Mahavishnu Orchestra with vocals.”

Bowie would stick around for Bolin's audition shortly after, as Glenn Hughes recalled last year, playing the role of chauffeur. The bassist felt immediately drawn to the band’s soon-to-be new guitarist.

“On his [Tommy’s] audition, [David] Bowie drove me down to the audition to meet Tommy, and I walked up to Tommy, I saw this guy with green and purple hair,” he says. “I whispered in his ear, ‘If you don't get the gig, you're coming back to my house tonight.’

“And he got the gig and he stayed at my house for three months. He moved in with me, and we became best friends. We wrote Gettin’ Tighter the first week together at my studio and look, I can talk about guitar-playing friends all day, but Tommy's in my top three friends and guitar players.”

Bolin's only album with the band received a mixed response from the fan base and at live shows, with many disgruntled that his solos were a stylistic far cry from Blackmore's – not to mention the excessive drug use throughout the group.

The line-up disbanded in 1976. Bolin would go on to record and release a second solo album, Private Eyes, later that year but, while on tour with Jeff Beck and Peter Frampton, tragically died of an overdose. The last photo taken of him sees him sitting alongside Jeff Beck.

The story goes that Beck told him to take care of himself when they parted ways, with Bolin responding, “I've been taking care of myself my whole life. Don't worry about me. I'm going to be around for a long time.”

His beloved Les Paul is now in the hands of Joe Bonamassa, who had to conduct a séance with the late virtuoso to get his permission. To this day, Bonamassa says it is one of the strangest guy purchases he's ever made.

Guitar World's full interview with Clem Clempson will be published in the coming weeks.

Deep Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore is reportedly experiencing “quite a few medical issues,” according to his wife, musician and bandmate Candice Night.

“Believe it or not, this man, it's April, and his birthday is coming, so he's going to be 80 in on April 14th, which is mind boggling, because he doesn't look and he certainly doesn't act it still,” Night tells Eonmusic.

“He actually had a heart attack about a year and a half ago, and he's got six stents in his heart at this point. And we're battling arthritis and some gout issues, and he's still got his back problem that he's had, so travel is difficult for him because of all that sitting.”

Night also mentions how, for Blackmore, “standing on stage, even standing with the guitars is tricky,” and that he was warned by his medical team not to fly – which hinders potential touring plans beyond the U.S.

Blackmore's Night, the husband-and-wife folk-rock project the two have together, still managed to tour over the past couple of weeks, with dates in Rhode Island and New Jersey, and upcoming dates in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York State.

Night clarifies that they're still playing shows “anywhere we can drive to”, concluding that she's putting “positive energy, out there in the universe, and hope that maybe we can get him back on there.”

Back in 2016, Blackmore had a frank conversation about the strain of touring and the steps he was taking to minimize its impact on his health.

“Optically, I’m deteriorating very fast, as we all are,” the guitarist had said. “All my friends are passing away. Some of my enemies are passing away, too. But we try and keep up with it.”

He had also commented on Deep Purple's relentless touring schedule back then, asserting that “personally, they’re milking it a bit too much.”

Ritchie Blackmore’s wife, Candice Night, has confirmed the legendary Deep Purple electric guitar legend suffered a heart attack last year, and is unlikely to perform in Europe in the near future.

During an interview with TotalRock, Night was asked about the possibility of her and Blackmore taking Blackmore’s Night – the pair’s folk-rock project – to Europe.

Night went on to reveal they currently have six US dates lined up, but are currently unable to commit to any European shows owing to the fact Blackmore has been told he can’t fly by his cardiologist.

Explaining the medical order, Night continues, “He had a heart attack about a year and a half ago. He’s got six stents. I can’t believe he’s going to be 80 on April 14th, which is crazy – he doesn’t look it, still doesn’t act it – but eventually medical things wind up catching up with you.

“So we’ve gotta make sure we keep him happy and healthy. And he’s dealing with gout and some arthritic things. And, of course, his back has always been an issue for years. So it’s getting harder for him. It’s tricky.

“But, hey, I’ve seen people younger than him in wheelchairs on stage doing what they do,” she adds. “So I think he probably doesn’t want people to see him that way.

“I see the other perspective. From a fan’s perspective, I would think people would just be happy to be under the same roof with him and listen to him play whatever he comes up with. So, we kind of have this discussion, or argument – I'll say discussion – all the time.

“But he was just recently at his cardiologist and they said, ‘Let's put traveling by plane on hold.’ So, hopefully we’ll get that all straightened out and that’ll change. But I’ll let you guys know if it does.”

Blackmore’s Night will perform six shows across April and May. Dates and tickets can be found on the band’s official website.

Recently, Blackmore began sharing stories from across his career on his YouTube channel. Tales include the time he bought his first Gibson from amp pioneer Jim Marshall, jamming Little Richard with George Harrison at a Deep Purple concert, and disturbing Eric Clapton by cranking amps in a hotel at 3am.

Yet another eyebrow-raising best guitar riffs of all time list has been published, and – as is usually the case with such round-ups – it has drafted up some rather interesting results.

The 40-strong list comes from uDiscoverMusic, which is part of Universal Music Group’s stable. With that in mind, it's noting that, in the list, the top five riffs all come from Universal artists or bands signed to one of its numerous subsidiaries.

Other notable caveats are that some big hitters and popular Guitar World poll-toppers are questionably relegated to more humble positions (or omitted entirely, in some cases) and the most ‘modern’ offering of the compiled list dates back 22 years to 2006.

That means that none of the riffs of our best riffs of the 2010s poll feature, as the likes of Tool (7empest), Arctic Monkeys (Do I Wanna Know?), and Gary Clark Jr. (Bright Lights) all miss out.

However, there is never an exact science behind compiling such lists, and while the resulting run-down leaves plenty of room for commenters to swing an argument, it’s still an interesting list nevertheless – even if there are some totally bizarre absences.

Kirsten Hersh’s acoustic-led Your Dirty Answer creeps in at the 40th spot on the list, hailed for its “pulsating main guitar riff” and deemed more worthy of a spot than White Stripe’s Seven Nation Army, which is left out entirely.

Eddie Van Halen and Van Halen make one sole appearance with Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love peaking at a fairly lowly 25, one place behind Johnny Marr's spangly This Charming Man riff, and two behind Mark Knoplfer's dancefloor-filling antics on Money for Nothing.

Led Zeppelin’s hip-shaking Whole Lotta Love, which topped Guitar World’s poll of the 50 best guitar riffs of all time in 2023, has to settle for 7th place, not even making it into the top 10. AC/DC’s Back In Black, triumphant in NME’s 2012 poll, falls to 16th.

They weren't the only world-conquering riffs to be humbled here, either. Crazy Train (15), and Enter Sandman (14), both nestle outside the top 10, while The Kinks' You Really Got Me (10) just makes the top bracket.

ZZ Top's ever-cool La Grange (9), Hendrix's Purple Haze (8), and Link Wray's hugely influential 1958 cut Rumble all follow, before Guns N' Roses Sweet Child O' Mine – which Slash says did not come from a warm-up routine, despite popular belief – kicks off the top five.

But it's Nirvana's '90s-shaping Smells Like Teen Spirit that reigns supreme, edging out Smoke on the Water (4), The Rolling Stones' (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction (3), and Chuck Berry's Johnny B Goode, despite the poll describing the four-chord smash as “unoriginal”.

UDiscoverMusic notes: “The four-chord pattern of the riff is unoriginal but the quiet-loud dynamic contrasts of the song, and Cobain’s visceral delivery, add to the potency of one of the best guitar riffs of the ‘90s”.

As reported by Guitar World, “while the Studio preamp, Boss DS-1, and Small Clone provide the essence of Cobain’s guitar tones on the song, several other production flourishes influence the finished recorded sound.”

Luckily, replicating the song's iconic tones can be done on the cheap. Check out Guitar World's guide to nailing Smells Like Teen Spirit's tone.

Check out uDiscoverMusic to see the riff list in full.

This month in Bought & Sold, the venerable rock guitar legend Steve Morse checks in to discuss his greatest gear hits and misses over the years.

The former Deep Purple guitarist (it still takes a bit of getting used to saying that) might not be a collector, but he knows exactly what he wants from the instrument – which is why his Ernie Ball Music Man signature guitar has four pickups. It’s a radical design, but as he explains here, everything – yes, including that neck pickup – is in its right place.

But we start as we always do, with his first good guitar. Like many of us, that’s when things got serious…

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

“The first serious guitar I bought with my own money was a new sunburst Strat in 1967. I later took the neck off that one, put it on a Tele, and ended up with humbuckers and single-coil pickups – my ‘FrankenTele’. The pickup layout became the starting point of my [Steve Morse signature] Music Man guitars.”

What was the last guitar you bought and why?

“The last guitar I bought was a Godin classical. The reason was that my custom-made Buscarino classical guitar, with the Roland synth module built in, was stolen while we were on tour.”

“I needed something quick to do the duets and nylon-string stuff – the quiet moments of the [Dixie] Dregs set. The Godin was a nice guitar, but I sold it to a fan as soon as I got my Buscarino back.

“And yes, I got it back, thanks to some people who worked with Joe Bonamassa. They somehow had contact with the guy and talked him into returning it anonymously.”

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

“The most incredible find I’ve ever had was buying a handmade classical guitar in Miami in 1971. The builder needed money. I was a broke student, and with the warning that the finishing was not complete, I bought it.

“I also never finished it because I was too busy playing it every single day to learn my studies at the University of Miami. It has a cloudy hand-rubbed finish and one crack, I think, but it’s a big part of my early history.”

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

“The strongest case of buyer’s remorse I ever had was when I traded an ES-335 for a ‘Black Beauty’ Les Paul. I couldn’t grab the strings to bend since the frets were so low, as it was probably meant for jazz players.

“It sounded decent, but since I couldn’t play it I traded it away in 1972. I didn’t know I could’ve just had it refretted – I was a teenager. But ergonomically, the Les Paul setup didn’t fit me anyway.”

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

“The one guitar I’ve intensely regretted selling was a Ramírez, which I didn’t like at the time due to tuning issues.

“Much later, I learned that there are ways of cutting the nut and bridge to lessen those issues, as well as trying different gauges of strings at the crossover point between plain and wound strings.”

What’s your best guitar-buying tip?

“My best guitar-buying tip is to make a deal that’s good and fair to both parties. Basically, then you’re starting your ownership on a good karma footing. Guitars are super important, but ultimately they are the least expensive thing you need to pay for if you count how many years they last.

“I’m not a collector, so I don’t have any tips, except I love it when real collectors make a find that an elderly person has in their closet and offer them more than the owner wanted because they know how valuable the instrument is nowadays.”

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

“The last time I was window shopping was really at the NAMM Show. Every year, somebody has a new type of accessory, guitar electronic, folding guitar or different body material. In particular, I’m always curious about folding guitars for minimalist travel practice.

“In reality, I designed my Music Man to fit in the overhead bin of small aircraft and be carried into a three-quarter-size gigbag, so it’s very easy to carry aboard a plane, so I don’t really need the folding guitar, but I love the ingenuity people have shown.

“Also, the adjusted frets to give better tuning temperament, the various tuning improving bridges, and so on. In the end, in order to know I’ve got the best compromise on my Music Man, I need to keep up with what’s around to see the advantages and disadvantages of various mods.”

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

“Man, that’s a tough one, but the guitar wins. I need to have various tones coming straight from the instrument. The amp is a big part of things, but the guitar is the biggest. That is partly because some cheap amps sound like 80 per cent as good as a great amp. But most guitars that are cheap can’t do anything like the range of sounds on my guitar.”

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

“Humbuckers. They are versatile in that you can play with the series wiring and pick off a coil to give you that single-coil type of sound, too. The actual hum rejection part of the design helps me stay sane when I’m in buildings with real RF problems; I simply always park my setting on a humbucker during a quiet part, even if I use the single coils during the song. I prefer the basic single coil to the stacked single coils in my applications.”

“It all starts with the guitar: my Music Man signature with four pickups – plus, usually, a Roland synth pickup GK-2. This guitar gives me control over volume and tone and allows me to bring down the gain and boost the high-end back up as I do so by selecting one of my single-coil pickups mounted further from the strings.

“The neck pickup is designed to be in the exact spot it’s mounted, which keeps the guitar down to a 22-fret fingerboard – but there is that all‑important fatness in the neck pickup as a result.

“I plug straight into a TC Electronic PolyTune Mini, and from that into my trusty Keeley Compressor. From there, it’s straight back to my Engl 100-watt signature amp. Channel 1 is a beautiful clean channel that can be driven hard to warm up smoothly or, with normal gain, is clean enough to run my Buscarino electric classical guitar into it without distortion.

“Channel 2 is the bread-and-butter rock sound. Channel 3 has the most midrange control knobs and can be used to make a solo ‘pop’ out in the mix without having any more noticeable level on the VU meters on the mixing board.”

Before Marshall Amplification, there was Jim Marshall, his business acumen, and his small music shop at 76 Uxbridge Road, Hanwell, just a few miles away from The Ealing Club – the birthplace of The Rolling Stones and British rhythm and blues, and a hot spot for musicians.

“Jim was a very affable kind of guy,” recalls Blackmore in an interview at his tavern in the States. “He knew nothing about amplifiers, yet it's funny to see today, every band has got a Marshall amplifier, and that was built in the beginning by someone who knew nothing about amplifiers.”

“He was a drum teacher. I always find that slightly amusing!” he quips.

Ritchie Blackmore was one of Marshall’s early customers who later made a name for themselves. Recently, he recalled how the amp pioneer persuaded him to buy a Gibson ES-335 when he was around 16. This guitar accompanied him throughout the '60s, from The Outlaws to Deep Purple’s 1970 breakthrough album, In Rock.

“I went there with the intention of buying a Gretsch Jet Firebird. After half an hour of a sales pitch, he said, ‘Forget the Gretsch. That’s a toy compared to the 335.’ I went, ‘But I want the Gretsch. I love the Jet Firebird.’ He said, ‘You'll appreciate the 335 Gibson much more later in life.’ [So] I walked out with a Gibson!”

Blackmore goes on to say he paid 30 shillings – which was significant money at the time – for the guitar, plus another 30 shillings for an amp, on hire purchase, putting a dent in his wallet. “So I was left with next for nothing to live on for the week!”

In a classic 1991 Guitar World interview, the former Deep Purple guitarist explained why it was so difficult to eventually switch from Gibsons to Fenders between the band’s In Rock and Fireball eras.

“It's much easier to flow across the strings on a Gibson. Fenders have more tension, so you have to fight them a little bit. I had a hell of a time. But I stuck with the Fenders because I was so taken with their sound, especially when they were paired with a wah-wah.”

In recent Deep Purple news, Simon McBride pinpointed the Ritchie Blackmore lick he found most difficult to learn.

Last month, Ritchie Blackmore started his new ‘Tales from the Tavern’ YouTube series, which finds the Deep Purple electric guitar legend look back over his storied career by sharing anecdotes of his most notable career milestones.

In the most recent episode, Blackmore has recalled the time he played alongside George Harrison in the mid 1980s, after the Beatle had spontaneously joined Deep Purple onstage in Australia to jam Little Richard’s Lucille.

In true Blackmore fashion, the guitar star couldn’t help retell the tale with a bit of his famous British humor, joking Harrison had once asked him to join the Beatles.

“I’d never heard of them, and I knew they were going nowhere, so I said, ‘No, absolutely not,’” he quips.

As for the time he actually met Harrison, Blackmore recalls, “The truth is, he was friends with Jon Lord and Ian Paice – he lived just down the road.

“He was over in Australia when we were there as Deep Purple, and he said to me very politely, ‘Can I get up on stage with you and use your guitar?’ I said, ‘Of course.’ I was flattered.

“Sure enough, we all got up on stage and we did the old rock 'n' roll number Lucille by Little Richard. We had a good time.”

To add to the recollection, Blackmore also shares footage from the gig, which took place in Sydney, Australia, in December 1984. In the grainy clip, Blackmore and Harrison can (just about) be seen riffing through Lucille, with the rest of Deep Purple in tow.

Fortunately, footage from that evening (albeit equally grainy) survives of the entire eight-minute jam.

“He was a very nice man, very serious, and very complimentary,” Blackmore adds. “It was very overwhelming to play with a Beatle. There will never be another band like the Beatles.”

The tale of the two guitar heroes joining forces to jam Little Richard has been told before, with Harrison once recalling how he was only vaguely aware of Deep Purple during their 1970s heyday.

“I never knew their music, but I’d heard this one thing, about Smoke On The Water or something like that,” the guitarist said in an old interview (via Louder). “But I’d never actually seen them… I’d heard they were in the Guinness Book Of Records for being the loudest group in the world.”

In an earlier episode of Tales from the Tavern, Blackmore recalled the time he disturbed Eric Clapton by cranking Marshalls in a hotel at 3am.

Though he’s insisted he won't write a book about all his rock ‘n’ roll war stories, Ritchie Blackmore has done the next best thing: he’s started a new YouTube series, during which he’ll recall the tales he’s been telling his closest friends over the years.

The first episode finds the Deep Purple electric guitar legend look back on the time he first met Eric Clapton when his band supported Cream back in 1968 – as well as a far more awkward encounter he had with Slowhand and his security team some time later.

Though Blackmore had given Clapton a good first impression, a subsequent impression wasn’t quite so favorable, after Blackmore and his friend decided to protest some noisy hotel maintenance by cranking their Marshalls at 3am.

Unfortunately, Clapton happened to be staying in the room next door to them, and wasn’t especially impressed with the high-gain antics.

“We were in a hotel, I think it was Melbourne, Australia,” Blackmore explains. “What happened was, I knew that Eric was with his band in that hotel. We'd had three days there where we'd been woken up very early with hammering – the usual nonsense that goes on in hotels.

“We were so sick of it we actually threatened the front desk, 'If you wake us up again tomorrow we will bring all our amplification into a room and play at 3 o'clock in the morning, and see how your patrons like hearing this noise.

"Which we did. The next day the hammering started as per usual, they took no notice of what we said, so we went ahead and brought in some Marshalls, stacked them, and my friend actually started playing the guitar – he started playing some bad blues, actually.

“As soon as he started playing we were so loud we got a bang on the door and it was Eric's security.”

Unfortunately, Clapton wasn’t staying on a different floor of the hotel, as Blackmore had believed. He was, unfortunately, right next door – and Blackmore was left feeling embarrassed by both the loud noise and the unimpressive playing.

"Believe it or not, Eric was in the next room to where we were," Blackmore continues. “I thought Eric was on another floor way away from where we were. And that was embarrassing, so we stopped playing."

"The next day we had some words with his security and I said, 'I'm really sorry, I didn't realize we were next door.' That was embarrassing, especially to think that Eric might have thought it was me making this racket on the guitar.

“I was in there having a drink, but I wasn't playing. That doesn't get me off the hook – it was really my idea to make all this noise.”

Head over to Ritchie Blackmore’s YouTube channel to follow the ongoing series.

Simon McBride is living the dream. “When I was growing up,” he says, “there were three giants – Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple. If you’d said to a 13-year-old version of me that one day I’d be in Deep Purple, I’d have laughed.” But 30 years later, that’s exactly where the Irish guitarist has ended up.

“I’m honoured and privileged,” he smiles, “because every guitarist under the sun has a dream goal to be in a legendary rock band, and here I am doing it. I’m loving every minute of it. And to have my name attached to such a legacy is amazing.”

For sure, Simon had big shoes to fill when he joined Purple in 2022. He was replacing Steve Morse, an iconic shredder and Purple’s longest-tenured guitarist. And when it came to playing live with the band, he faced an even more daunting task – performing those classic Purple songs from the ’70s, including Highway Star, Black Night and, of course, Smoke On The Water – all of which bore the indelible stamp of one of the most revered guitarists of all time, Ritchie Blackmore.

But Simon had years of experience behind him, including stints working with two of the guys in Purple, singer Ian Gillan and keyboard player Don Airey. With his trusty PRS in hand, he was up for the challenge. And now, two years on, comes the release of his first album with the band.

Titled =1, it’s the 23rd studio album of Purple’s long career, and its creation was a remarkably stress-free experience for the new guy in the band.

“I didn’t really need to prepare myself for it,” he says. “I always knew there was a record to be done, and it was very exciting – the prospect of doing a record with Deep Purple! But there was no pressure as far as what the other guys felt it should be. We just got in a room together. From my perspective, it was very easy. I just jumped in there and went for it.”

When you’re in a role previously held by Messrs Blackmore and Morse, how much does that play on your mind?

“You just have to be yourself, you know? If you try to think about what was before – and this applies to any situation – you’ll get a bit strangled musically. There’s no point trying to compete with Steve Morse or Ritchie Blackmore. I mean, nobody can do it better than them. Certainly not me! So my attitude is not to try to be like them.

“One of the things that the guys in the band like about me as a player is I do my own thing. I’m very respectful of the old songs because some of those parts that Ritchie and Steve played are huge parts of the songs, and there’s no way to change them. But for the writing sessions, it’s a combination of different influences from every member of the band. That’s what I’ve always loved about Deep Purple. There’s no rules when it comes to the songs.”

Did the album come together easily?

“Writing a song is just as hard as learning to play the guitar, but the more things you can learn from other people, the better. Listening to the early Ritchie stuff had me thinking, ‘Wow, I never would have thought of that or did that’, but now I would.

“Some of the stuff Steve did, he was a bit more progressive, which is really not my bag, but I learned from it. I said, ‘Okay, I get what he’s doing here.’ He’s going from this skill or this mode, and I learned from that, and I use it. I’m like a sponge. I soak it all up, take a dip from everyone, and use it in my own way.”

What sorts of tones were rattling around in your brain?

“I use the same rig as my live rig, so it’s Engl amps and stuff. I grew up with classic and hard rock, so that sound is always going to be in my brain no matter what rig I plug into. If I plug into a Fender, I still try to get a Marshall sound, and it’s the same with a Vox.”

Is your ’board the same in the studio?

“I sometimes use a DigiTech Whammy for various things, but in the studio, it’s mostly just my Engl amps, a Vox AC30 for some overdubs, and PRS guitars, which I use all the time. I have two signature ones [the 408] that PRS made for me – single-cuts, and they’re very versatile. I also use a Quad Cortex, which is great when you’re recording digitally because it gets things done quickly.”

What was your approach for solos?

“Solos can go one of two ways, right? I’d say about 50 per cent of the record had the solos done in the first take. I’d just go in and play, and then it’s done. The producer, Bob Ezrin, likes to do two or three different versions of the solo, so he can pick and choose.

“But I remember saying, ‘No, I ain’t gonna do any better than that!’ So there are solos that are very natural and improvised, but also other ones, like on the song Pictures Of You, where there’s a little bit more going on. It’s like a harmony guitar thing, and there’s more melody.”

And riffs?

“With riffs, it’s a weird thing. I find it hard to sit down and say, ‘I’m going to write a guitar riff, and it’s going to sound like this.’ It never happens. I’ll sit there for hours, just noodling, and nothing comes but pure crap! It’s always when I just plug in, don’t think and start playing that I’ll play the coolest riffs.”

Through the process of recording this album, did you ever get stuck?

“Oh, yeah. I’ve been stuck in a rut many times. How I get out of it is trying something different. I also started learning different skills, like modes. I know a lot of theory, but there’s an endless amount of it, so trying different things always helps.

“Even if it’s different positions on the fretboard or looking at an octave up or down, you know? You have to start trying to think outside of the box and find other ways to do it. It may sound terrible until you come up with something else, but that’s all part of the process.”

Have you adapted your style since joining Deep Purple?

“Technique-wise, no. There’s not really much to it when it comes to technique, so that wasn’t really a challenge. But the Steve Morse stuff is very different to the early Ritchie Blackmore stuff. Steve had a bit of an injury to his wrist, so he doesn’t play the way he did in Dixie Dregs. If I had to play what he did there, I would give up!

“And with Ritchie’s style, for example, there’s a solo like Highway Star that I can’t change. When you’ve got 65,000 people all singing the solo back at you note-for-note, it’s like, ‘Okay, I am so glad I did not change this at all!’ But there are other solos, like the one in Smoke On The Water, where I changed it around and put my own flavour on it.”

Have you had any exciting pedal discoveries recently?

“On stage, I’m tap dancing a lot because I’ve got so many different pedals. Probably the most obscure one is a Boss pedal called the Slicer [SL-2], which is absolute mayhem and chaos. Some people find it unusable, but I use it for some real freakout stuff in Black Night, and it’s just pure noise and a battle with my modulation.”

Steve Morse often ran a wet/dry system on tour. Is that something you’re doing, too?

“Yeah; so the main difference now is I am running a wet/dry system. I always used to run a stereo system, but the wet/dry gives more options. I also use some JAM pedals, like their chorus, the Analog WaterFall, and I’ve got an old [MXR] Phase 90 and an [MXR] Octavia. My pedalboard is huge, and people say, ‘Do you use all those?’ My answer is: ‘Yes!’”

You’ve got a lot of tones to cover!

“I use every single pedal on the ’board. It may only be for one or two bars, but it adds a bit of colour. It keeps it fresh and more interesting for people. Plus, I’m a guitar nerd, and we all love pedals!”

• =1 is out now via earMUSIC.

Just over two years ago, Simon McBride was set on a path that would lead him to permanently joining Deep Purple as the classic rock outfit’s lead electric guitar player.

After initially filling in for Steve Morse, who announced a temporary leave due to personal reasons, back in March 2022, McBride was then appointed on a full-time basis in September of that year.

Since then, he’s performed live with Deep Purple, and has also helped them craft =1 – the group’s 23rd studio album, their first to feature McBride as their guitarist, and a record that cements the blues-rock ace in the annals of Deep Purple history.

It was well-documented that McBride was stepping in to fill some fairly sizable shoes, joining a list of Deep Purple guitarists that features the likes of Morse and Ritchie Blackmore.

Speaking in the new issue of Total Guitar, McBride discusses just how he managed to adapt to his new role, and how he's been able to follow in the footsteps of Blackmore and Morse.

And the key, he says, has been to remain true to himself as a guitarist, recognizing that, while he can homage to the players that have come before him, he can never truly be them – and that’s not a problem.

“You just have to be yourself, you know? If you try to think about what was before – and this applies to any situation – you’ll get a bit strangled musically,” McBride reflects. “There’s no point trying to compete with Steve Morse or Ritchie Blackmore.

“I mean, nobody can do it better than them. Certainly not me! So my attitude is not to try to be like them. One of the things that the guys in the band like about me as a player is I do my own thing.

“I’m very respectful of the old songs because some of those parts that Ritchie and Steve played are huge parts of the songs, and there’s no way to change them.”

As he mentions, McBride has to draw from a catalog of tracks that has been assembled by two very different guitarists, who each have different qualities to their playing. When it comes to tackling their more iconic parts, each song requires a different approach.

“The Steve Morse stuff is very different to the early Ritchie Blackmore stuff,” McBride observes. “Steve had a bit of an injury to his wrist, so he doesn’t play the way he did in Dixie Dregs. If I had to play what he did there, I would give up!

“And with Ritchie’s style, for example, there’s a solo like Highway Star that I can’t change. When you’ve got 65,000 people all singing the solo back at you note-for-note, it’s like, ‘Okay, I am so glad I did not change this at all!’ But there are other solos, like the one in Smoke On the Water, where I changed it around and put my own flavour on it.”

Visit Magazines Direct to pick up the latest issue of Total Guitar, which features the full interview with Simon McBride.

There are few players who have wielded the Fender Stratocaster with more authority than the legendary Ritchie Blackmore. The firebrand guitarist who brought the world some of its most iconic riffs (and solos) with Deep Purple and Rainbow has made it his number one electric guitar for decades, and at 79 he is in no mind to change now.

It wasn’t always this way. Longtime Blackmore fans will tell you it was the Gibson ES-335 that he made his name on. So what was it that got him swap the semi-hollow for the solidbodied doublecut?

Well, as he explains here, in an interview that takes us from his 1991 GW cover shoot to the present day, there was a knock at the door. Enter, Eric Clapton’s roadie… But first, what about that Strat from the GW cover?

Where and when did you buy this guitar?

“I have no idea. I have probably 12 Strats, but I noticed when looking at the picture that it’s not one of my more favored Strats. I think I picked it up because sometimes when I do a photo session, I take a guitar that I very rarely use. I still do it today with the acoustic guitars that I play some of the Renaissance music with.”

So there wasn’t really anything special about it?

“Just because it’s in the photograph, it usually means I don’t use it. And looking at that guitar, it definitely looks like one of my substandard Strats. Whereas if it was my favorite Strat, it may get lost, I may forget it or leave it somewhere or it might get damaged in transit. So the reason I’m playing that guitar in the photo is because it isn’t one of my favorite guitars – in case I lost it. My good ones are usually under lock and key.”

Do you know what year it was?

“No. But the Strat I play now is an ’82. It’s a separate body put together with a different neck.”

Did you use the Strat on the cover for any notable recordings?

“No. I only use one, my favorite Strat, which is locked away for recordings or playing onstage. For photo sessions, as I said before, I use anything I can find.”

How did this guitar feel compared to your favorite Strat, which you’ve just mentioned?

“I think we should start speaking about my favorite Strat. And that is obviously white, and has a concave neck between the frets, which I usually do myself. It’s a very arduous process that takes about four days to shave down the wood. I cover the frets with tape, but I usually wind up having the guitar re-fretted with Gibson fat frets. I like really thick frets. I find the Fender frets are a bit too thin, personally.”

You gave me an idea of why you chose this Strat for your GW cover shoot, but are there any anecdotes from the day to share?

“Not really. As I said before, it was just a guitar lying around, so if I forgot it in the photo studio, it would be of no consequence in comparison to my good guitars.”

What got you started with Stratocasters?

“I do have a short story about my history with Strats. I was in Deep Purple in 1969 and I was living in Acton, London. We were all in the same house, the whole band, and Eric Clapton’s roadie came by the house because he knew one of my roadies, and he brought a Strat with him. I think it was black. So I said to him, ‘Do you want to sell that guitar? It looks interesting, and I wanted to try out a Strat.’

“He said, ‘I’ll sell it to you for £60.’ I said, ‘Okay, you’re on.’ So, for £60, I bought one of Eric Clapton’s old Strats that he obviously didn’t want because he gave it to the roadie. That was my initiation into playing a Strat. Up until then, I always played a Gibson ES-335.”

Did you use that Strat on any notable recordings?

“I think we made a record named Emmaretta, and I used a wah-wah pedal with that Strat. However, the neck was a little bit too bowed, so I moved on from that Strat to buying another Strat from my friend’s shop in London. It was a sunburst Strat and a black Strat.

“I often used to change necks on my Strats, sometimes with the three or four screws on the back of the neck. If I remember correctly, I changed the neck from the black Strat to the sunburst Strat because I preferred that neck.”

Was that, by chance, the guitar you used on Smoke on the Water?

“At this point, I had three or four Strats. The Smoke on the Water guitar, I believe, was the sunburst guitar with the black Strat’s neck. A lot of people ask me which guitar I used. I like the sunburst Strat color because of Buddy Holly, but I was always fascinated by the white Strat.

“I remember Colin [Manley] from the Remo Four playing a white Strat back in ’66. He was the first player I saw play with a white Strat, and it was very majestic and to me. It kind of said, ‘I don’t have to be any color because white stands out.’

“I wore a lot of black on stage and liked the contrast. Then I saw Jeff Beck had a white Strat, then Jimi Hendrix had a white Strat. But like I said, the first one I saw was Colin from the Remo Four playing it in Hamburg, Germany.

“My subliminal thinking was, ‘I would really like to get a white Strat one day.’ Now it would seem every guitar player that gets a Strat is playing a white Strat, so I may have to rethink my thinking on that one.”

The white Strat is kind of synonymous with you, though.

“Maybe I should get a green or yellow one. There was a time after seeing Albert Lee playing a black Les Paul Gibson in ’63, and I wanted a black Les Paul; however, by the time I got around to buying a black Les Paul, they had become so popular, everyone had one. I always liked to be different, so that put me off getting a black Les Paul. I stayed with my red Gibson [ES-335]. Les Paul was an incredible influence on me in the early ’60s.”

OK, just one more question about the Strat you’re holding on the February 1991 GW cover! Do you still own it?

“I have about three or four Strats, as I am a firm believer in not having loads of them. I can only play one at a time, so... And I do have a very special Strat. I also went through a period in the ’80s of playing with a tremolo arm, but I kept breaking them, so I had them made twice as thick so I wouldn’t break them.

“Funnily enough, I still broke them. So I had them made three times as thick [with] a ½” round tremolo arm. I have two Strats I count as my favorites. One has a ½” tremolo arm, and one has a really nice neck that I tend to play when I’m playing rock.

“It’s also very heavy, and I find that with my back problem, it’s very hard to stand on stage with this guitar because it’s so heavy, so I usually sit on a stool, which I know is not very rock ’n’ roll, but that’s what happens when you’re 78.”

Do you know what happened to the less-favored Strat you posed with on the cover?

“I’m not exactly sure what happened to the guitar on the cover. But whenever I would store the guitars or amps that I wasn’t using, and we would go on tour, they were stored in London. I would come back, and they were usually stolen.”

What does the Fender Strat mean to you?

“A way of paying the bills. It also happens to be an incredible guitar. It’s very adaptable for all sorts of music [like] country, rock [and] jazz.”

When Simon McBride joined Deep Purple in 2022, he was tasked with learning all the band's repertoire, including founding Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore's guitar work. McBride has now revealed which Ritchie Blackmore guitar lick he finds most challenging to play.

“Most of it is actually not too bad. There's one little lick which annoyed me for a long, long time, it's in Lazy,” he says in a new interview with Ultimate Guitar. I don't play the same solo he plays in Lazy, but Lazy is one of those songs where I feel I can just improvise a bit more and just have a bit more fun with it.

“But there's this one lick he does in it, and I said, ‘I have to play that.’ And it's a bitch of a lick. It's not ultrafast. It's just there's a lot of chromatic stuff in it and slides in a very tight space, within three or four frets, and that's it. So that, to me, is the hardest thing about playing Purple.”

McBride also notes that while Blackmore was never the most technical of guitar players, melody-driven compositions are his forte. “Even Highway Star, the fast part in that, it's fast, but it's not John Petrucci from Dream Theater or something ridiculously fast. It's fast, but it fits the song.

"But everything else that he played was more just melodies. Ritchie played for the song most of the time. But yeah, that lick in Lazy – that still haunts me every night when I come up to it. I'm like, ‘Oh shit, don't screw it up!’”

In a 2022 Guitar World interview, McBride talked about his unique way of learning and tackling ex-guitarist Steve Morse's guitar parts, particularly the unison lines between Morse and Purple keyboardist Don Airey.

“To learn things, I don’t necessarily pick up the guitar for the first two weeks; I’ll just sit and listen to the songs over and over until I’m sick of listening to them. When I actually sit down with the guitar, I like to be able to nearly play it already just from familiarity, knowing the chords and what positions they’re being played in.”

He continued, “I don’t think there’s too much that will be challenging for me. It’s mainly just remembering all the parts as a whole. It’s not like just learning a normal set with standard issue songs, which are verse/chorus/verse/chorus/solo and done. They have all these alternate endings and, as you said, those mad sections with unison lines.”

Deep Purple recently paid homage to one of their best-known songs, Smoke on the Water, by performing on a stage set up on the lake in Montreux, Switzerland that inspired its lyrics.

If heavy metal is the bastard son of rock ’n' roll, Deep Purple is due a paternity test. Like Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, their peers in the trifecta of hard rock, Purple reacted against the bubblegum pop and hippy-dippy fare of the 1960s with a high-octane sound that was powered by the blues and borrowed as freely from classical music as it did from psychedelia and folk.

From the band's 1968 debut, Shades of Purple, through its self-titled 1969 album, bassist Nick Simper anchored the burgeoning outfit with sinewy lines that darted deftly between guitarist Richie Blackmore's leads and Hammond organ player Jon Lord's progressive keyboard stabs.

Replacing Simper on 1970's Deep Purple In Rock, Roger Glover's entry into the Purple fold coincided with the arrival of vocalist Ian Gillan, forming a legendary lineup that would create the band's most celebrated recordings.

With 1972's Machine Head, Deep Purple secured its rank in rock royalty. While Smoke on the Water – the autobiographical song kicking off Side Two that details the album's recording in the south of France – is the band's best-known track, the album's opener, Highway Star, presents the best route to the heart of Deep Purple's riff-driven righteousness.

Kicking off the track with a chugging rhythm and a gritty tone, Glover sets the pace for seven bars before ripping through an upper-register fill. By the time Gillan enters with vocals, Glover is going full-steam ahead with eighth notes.

“I believe in playing simply, because of the virtuosity that surrounds me in the rest of the band,” Glover told Bass Player. “I have to be the bedrock for them to lie on and do what they do – I never think too much about what I play – I just like to go for what feels and sounds right at the time.”

You can listen to the isolated bass and drums below.

As you power through the driving eighth notes, you might try experimenting with different picking styles – downstrokes tend to give each note a stronger attack, but alternate picking makes the bluesy pentatonic runs sound smoother.

“In terms of the high-speed accuracy, feel and attack needed to play Deep Purple’s music, I get more volume and power when I play with a pick. When I pick up a bass guitar and just mess around, I usually play with my fingers, but I’ve always played better with a pick. I’d never properly be able to play Highway Star with my fingers.”

For the thickest tone and most convenient fingering, fret those eighth-note Gs with your ring finger on the fifth fret of the D string, and get comfortable – you'll be playing a few hundred of 'em before the tune is through.

Not one to rest on his laurels, Glover also played with Rainbow, David Coverdale, Alice Cooper and many more stellar musicians. As a producer, he has helmed albums by Status Quo, Judas Priest, Rainbow, Nazareth, Dream Theater, and has released solo projects such as The Butterfly Ball, a 1974 concept LP.

“There’s always something new when you’re a creative person. You can’t stop writing and expressing what you think. I find it hard to take in, sometimes: I think to myself, ‘How the hell did I get here?’”

Deep Purple have paid homage to Smoke on The Water's origins by returning to where it all started. On July 8, the band performed their iconic track at the 58th edition of the Montreux Jazz Festival, on a brand-new stage built over Lake Geneva.

As the classic rock legends – who now count guitarist Simon McBride among their ranks – played the instantly recognizable riff to an audience of 5,000, the curtain at the back of the stage dropped to reveal the lake and a setup of actual fire – and smoke – on the water.

Frontman Ian Gillan then instructed the crowd to take over singing duties for a crowd sing-along moment. This performance marked the 10th time Deep Purple have performed at the festival.

The band shared anecdotes about the fateful fire that inspired Smoke on the Water in a question-and-answer panel held before their performance.

In 1971, the band was in a casino in Montreux, recording what would be 1972's Machine Head, using The Rolling Stones' mobile studio.

On the eve of the recording session, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention were playing in the casino's theater. However, at the beginning of King Kong's synth solo, someone fired a flared gun towards the ceiling, and the casino caught fire – alongside the Mothers' equipment.

“It burned all afternoon, all evening, all through the night. We went and looked at it the next morning, and there it was, gone. It was a frightening thing,” recalled bassist Roger Glover, as transcribed by The Standard.

“The following morning, I was in my room alone and I woke up with those words on my lips, and I said them out to an empty room. And then I kind of really woke up and I said, ‘What did I just say? Smoke on the water?’ No idea what it meant. I mentioned it to Ian [Gillan] and he said, ‘Yeah, sounds like a drug song. Better not do that.’”

In an interview with Classic Rock, drummer Ian Paice recalled the chaotic recording session. “The first track we laid down – and the last to be finished – was Smoke on the Water, before we knew what it was going to be called. There was no soundproofing and we were recording at night. A hell of a racket!”

Founding guitarist Ritchie Blackmore added: “We did Smoke on the Water there, and the riff I made up in the spur of the moment. I just threw it together with Ian Paice. Roger Glover joined in. We went outside to the mobile unit and were listening back to one of the takes, and there was some hammering on the door.

“It was the local police, and they were trying to stop the whole thing because it was so loud. We knew that they were coming to close everything down. We said to Martin Birch, our engineer: ‘Let’s see if we have a take.’ So they were outside hammering and taking out their guns.”

Fortunately, the band managed to get the track down before the police broke in and chucked them all out. What was meant to be an album filler eventually became the band's greatest hit and, arguably, one of the most recognizable guitar riffs of all time.

Glenn Hughes may have ongoing disputes with the current members of Deep Purple. However, he recently gave more insight into his special friendship with the late Tommy Bolin, who was Deep Purple's guitarist between 1975 and 1976.

“Well, when I joined Purple, I was left with, you know, in a band that weren't really a family band,” admits Hughes in an interview with Guitar Interactive Magazine.

“As you know, it really wasn't a fun place to be. On his [Tommy’s] audition, [David] Bowie drove me down to the audition to meet Tommy, and I walked up to Tommy, I saw this guy with green and purple hair. I whispered in his ear, ‘If you don't get the gig, you're coming back to my house tonight.’

"And he got the gig and he stayed at my house for three months. He moved in with me, and we became best friends. We wrote Gettin’ Tighter the first week together at my studio and look, I can talk about guitar-playing friends all day, but Tommy's in my top three friends and guitar players."

In the same interview, Hughes reveals where he currently stands with Deep Purple's three longest-serving members, Roger Glover, Ian Paice, and Ian Gillan, after a tense exchange at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame ceremony back in 2016.

“I will never speak to any of them again,” he asserts. “Simply because they were rude. Both Roger, Ian, and Gillan were rude to David [Coverdale]. Very, very hurtful. I didn't give a fuck actually, because I knew they were rude to begin with.

“I was the only sober man there. I don't care about those guys. Gillan was rude to me on stage, accepting the award. He looked at me in the eyes, like I didn't exist." 

In April, Deep Purple ushered in a new era with Portable Door – the lead single from the upcoming album =1 and the first release to feature new guitarist Simon McBride.

Ritchie Blackmore long ago traded rock for Renaissance and medieval music, and the guitar for the mandola. However, despite the shift in music genres, there's still one guitar-related thing he likes doing, albeit occasionally. 

“Occasionally I like to have a blast plugging into my Engl amp and blast out. Not very often – even if it's just to wake up the neighbors,” he says in an interview with the New Jersey Stage. 

Blackmore also lifted the veil on his disenchantment with rock, a feeling that led him to forge a new path. 

“The stress was from the traveling to do with rock and roll, the continual trying to come up with different augmentations of heavy riffs, which can be boring,” he admits. 

“I was getting stale playing the same type of music: heavy rock for the sake of playing heavy rock. I have always been interested in melodic rock – melodies in general. 

“Toward the end of Purple, it was just being loud for the sake of being loud, so when I heard Renaissance music, there were so many incredible melodies that struck a chord with me. That was such a relief in many ways, so I jumped off the monster train just to play some melodies more organically.”

In 1975, after leaving Deep Purple the first time 'round, Blackmore founded Rainbow, which fused baroque music with hard rock. He took his passion for Renaissance and medieval music a step further in 1997, when he formed Blackmore's Night together with his wife Candice Blackmore, where he's since favored a multi-instrumental approach. 

“I have attempted to play the mandola, the hurdy-gurdy, and the nyckelharpa on occasion. I find it very difficult playing the wind instruments which are my favorite Renaissance instruments.”

In a 1991 interview with Guitar World, Blackmore had already revealed his ambitions for a folk-leaning music project. 

“I would love to go back to the 1520s, the time of my favorite music,” he stated. “A few of my friends in Germany have a very authentic four-piece, and they play medieval music. I've always wanted to play with them, but it hasn't panned out yet.”

Ritchie Blackmore is about to embark on a tour with Blackmore's Night. The short run kicks off on June 22 in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, and fans are invited to dress in Renaissance-style garbs. 

Deep Purple have shared Portable Door – the lead single from upcoming album =1, and the band’s first single to feature their new electric guitar player, Simon McBride.

McBride was first appointed as a stand-in guitar player back in March 2022, after Steve Morse announced a temporary hiatus due to personal reasons. In September that year, the blues rock ace was appointed on a full-time basis.

More than a year after the recruitment, Deep Purple have shared their first studio cut to feature McBride, who is eased into the song by way of a galloping riff that pins up the near four-minute effort.

That riff is expanded through a series of tight box-breaking turnarounds, before McBride throws his first official original Deep Purple guitar solo into the mix.

Though McBride has already played to Deep Purple crowds totalling more than a half-a-million people, Portable Door represents another milestone for the PRS player, whose contributions to the classic rock institution’s storied repertoire have now been eternalized in record form.

McBride spoke to Guitar World back in 2022 following his initial call-up, and discussed the challenges he faced going into the role – one of which was the “creative” nature of the solos he’d be covering.

“There are some solos that aren’t just standard solos; they’re more like creative pieces, so I’ll have to learn them exactly and remember,” he reflected. “I’ve spent the last few weeks working on all of the stuff, taking it all into my brain. 

“Whatever gig I’m doing, I always try to include a bit of myself where it works and also stick to the original solos as a mark of respect.

“I guess you could just say it’s all challenging, from timing to feel, there are all sorts of things coming together to make Deep Purple sound like Deep Purple. I have to try and get onboard with that and bring the same sort of energy that Steve would.”

McBride has clearly brought some of that famed energy to his own solo writing, marking his Deep Purple debut with a part that blends the best of his blues rock chops with an unmistakable Deep Purple sound.

Portable Door previews Deep Purple’s upcoming studio album, = 1. The album follows 2020’s Whoosh!, and will be released July 19. For the record, McBride will be joined by his new bandmates: Ian Gillan, Roger Glover, Don Airey and Ian Paice. Bob Ezrin was enlisted to produce.

• = 1 is available to preorder now.

Not content with turning Orange Amps purple with his signature Crush Bass 50 combo amp back in 2021, Glenn Hughes has given its O Bass the same treatment. It’s the British brand’s first signature instrument, and it too is given a vibrantly purple treatment ahead of NAMM 2024.    

Its lightweight African Okoumé body is partnered with a Seymour Duncan SPB-1 pickup in contrast to Orange’s custom-wound split coil pickup in the standard model. It has a strong maple neck with a purple fretboard which vie to give a clear and transparent tone.

Dimensions-wise, it features an 864mm scale length with a 43mm top nut and comes in at 3.9kg, just a smidge heavier than the standard’s 3.77kg weight. It also features a nickel four-saddle bridge and open gear tuners.

Another key differentiator from the standard model is the chequerboard binding found around the body and headstock for a subtle but lovely touch. As king of fashion Hughes would never be seen dead in the same outfit twice, it also comes with two changeable ivory and jet-black three-ply scratchplates for those all-important mid-gig costume changes.   

Longtime Orange Amps ambassador Glenn Hughes, known by many as the ‘Voice of Rock’ was a key player in the British hard rock scene as it transitioned into early heavy metal. With a storied career – and he has many to tell – he’s played with Deep Purple, Whitesnake, Black Sabbath, Gary Moore and Dead Daisies.

Having played more gigs than most of us have had hot dinners, he makes the perfect candidate for a signature bass. He’ll take it out on the road in 2024 as he celebrates the 50th anniversary of Deep Purple’s iconic record, Burn.

Says Orange Amps: “Orange Amplification takes great pleasure in launching the Glenn Hughes Signature Purple O Bass guitar. The luxurious colour evokes the 1960’s and ‘70s as well as the beginnings of heavy metal. Whatever the music played, this eye-catching deep purple bass guitar will certainly make a statement on any stage or studio.”

The O Bass was first introduced by Orange in 2015, with an initial small run succeeded by a large-scale rollout in 2022 which saw it go through some minor changes. It was designed in England's capital by Orange Technical Director and lead designer Adrian Emsley who had dreamt of creating a unique-looking, lightweight and classic, P-Bass-esque sounding bass guitar.

Influenced by his time working with bassists in LA throughout the '90s, the bass features custom pickup positioning that emulates the modification many of those players were making to their basses. Hughes’ endorsement of the instrument is a shift for the rock legend, whose career has thus far been defined by the sound of Precision and Jazz Bass guitars.

To keep up to date with the latest instrument, amp and pedal releases as NAMM 2024 draws ever closer, head over to our guide to the latest NAMM 2024 news.

For more information on the new O Bass, head to OrangeAmps.Com

Glenn Hughes was playing Saban Theater in Beverly Hills, CA, on Friday September 8, and to get that stage suitably warm for tour mate Yngwie Malmsteen, the Voice of Rock sent out a WhatsApp to draft his Black Country Communion bandmate Joe Bonamassa on electric guitar for trio of Deep Purple classics.

This being Los Angeles, and a Friday night, Hughes went all in and what-the-heck just went and got Chad Smith from the Red Hot Chili Peppers to play with them, too. Why not, right?

The more the merrier, and Smith looked like he really enjoyed the big hits on Highway Star and Burn, even going so far as to – gently – knock Ash Sheehan’s kit over as the occasion got the better of him.

The signs were there that Hughes might have some guest company onstage. Bonamassa hinted at some action for one of the most famous Gibson Les Pauls in his collection at Nerdville, posing on Instagram with his Bolin ‘Burst – so-called because the single-cut with the starred-and-barred pickguard was once owned by Tommy Bolin.

Some might wonder if a Fender Stratocaster would have been a deeper shade of purple, in keeping with Ritchie Blackmore’s weapon of choice – and surely JoBo has one or two of them lying around at home – but the Bolin ‘Burst was the perfect choice for such an occasion, having served time in Deep Purple when Bolin played in the British rock institution after replacing the outgoing Blackmore in ’75 and ushering in the MkIV lineup.

The Bolin ‘Burst is also the ideal instrument for stretching the epic blues of Mistreated into a 15-minute jam, with a little call and response between Bonamassa on the ‘Burst and Hughes on bass guitar, and for dialing in the firepower for Burn and Highway Star. Besides, Søren Andersen, Hughes' regular guitarist, was on-hand with the Strat.

Hughes’ co-headlining run with Malmsteen is billed the Classic Deep Purple Live Tour and is packed with MkIII and IV cuts, which seems to indicate a change of heart from rock icon. Speaking to Bass Player in 2021, he expressed some amount of regret at his decision to leave Trapeze and join Deep Purple. 

“In retrospect, I really should never have left Trapeze. With no disrespect at all meant towards Deep Purple, there’s not much swagger going on in that band,” he said. “It wasn’t a great role for me as far as the bass player that I am goes. Songs like Burn are very straight and strict, you know. That’s the way I feel these days – truly. Leaving Trapeze has been the torment of my life, but I had to let it go.”

It didn’t look that way on Friday night. Burn with JoBo on lead, Smith smashing the drums? That looked like enormous fun. You can check out Mistreated, Burn and Highway Star above thanks to Brian James on YouTube.

It's no secret that Black Sabbath went through a litany of lineup changes during their near-50-year run as heavy metal's pioneers. 

Though the band's music often shifted to accommodate the different strengths of those members who came and went – the vastly different, but equally powerful vocal styles of Ozzy Osbourne and Ronnie James Dio, for instance – rarely did it get as much of a jolt as when Dio left the group in 1982 and was replaced by then-former Deep Purple frontman Ian Gillan.

Gillan's bluesy singing and wry lyrics were, to put it mildly, a stark departure from Osbourne and Dio's respective styles as frontmen. Though the Gillan/Sabbath partnership ended after just one album (1983's Born Again), it did give us the unique spectacle of the godfathers of heavy metal covering one of hard rock's other giants.

During the Gillan-fronted tour in support of Born Again, Sabbath took to playing the song for which Gillan is most known, Deep Purple's none-more-classic Smoke on the Water, as an encore. Black Sabbath played the song over 60 times during the tour, which stretched from 1983 through the following year. You can hear a typically hard-edged version of it from the Born Again trek above.

“I suggested we play Smoke on The Water, because Ian was known for it and it seemed like a bum deal for him not to do any of his stuff while he was doing all of ours,” Sabbath electric guitar hero Tony Iommi recalls in his 2011 memoir, Iron Man: My Journey through Heaven and Hell with Black Sabbath. “I don't know whether we played it properly, but the audience loved it.”

Iommi would later cover the track again in 1989 with an all-star cast including Ritchie Blackmore, David Gilmour, Alex Lifeson and Brian May.

The Born Again tour was also notable in the band's history not only for this cover, but for the infamous 'Stonehenge' set the group ordered for the stage. 

Due to a misunderstanding between band and set designers, 'Stonehenge' ended up significantly different (larger, in this case) than the band envisioned.

Sound kind of familiar?

“When we were thinking about the stage set for our Born Again tour, Geezer [Butler, Sabbath's bass guitar player] said: 'Why don't we have something that looks like Stonehenge, you know, with stones and all that stuff?',” Iommi says in Iron Man.

“Geezer jotted down what it should look like and gave it to the designers. Two or three months later we saw it. We rehearsed for the tour at the Birmingham NEC and we said: 'Oh great, the stage set is going to come today!'”

You can probably guess the sight that greeted the band.

“It came in and we couldn't believe it. It was as big as the real Stonehenge,” Iommi remembers. “They had taken Geezer's measurements the wrong way and thought it was meant to be life-size. I said, 'How the bloody hell did that happen?'”

This is Spinal Tap simply took the legendary mishap and reversed it. 

Though it's rather grainy, you can get a sense of the true enormity of the set – at least the pieces of it that Sabbath's crew could squeeze onto the stage – in the fan-filmed footage of the band's October 21, 1983 performance at the Forum de Montréal in Canada below.

Aside from set design mishaps, Gillan – in a different way than Sabbath's previous two frontmen – was also quite the showman onstage, and struggled to acclimate to other aspects of the band's onstage setup when engaging with the crowd.

Gillan, Iommi says, “once fell over my pedalboard. He was waving at the people, stepped back and, bang! He went arse over head big time.“

All things considered, the Born Again trek was a strange period for the heavy metal godfathers. Gillan departed soon after to join the reunited Deep Purple, while Sabbath (with a number of personnel shifts in between) would struggle both critically and commercially for a number of years, before reuniting first with Dio in 1992 and – a few years later – with Ozzy Osbourne, in their original permutation. 

As for the fate of the Stonehenge props? 

“At the end or the tour we tried to give it all away to the people who had bought London Bridge and reassembled it in Arizona, but they didn't want it,” Iommi reveals in Iron Man. “We couldn't take it back to England, so the crew dumped it off at the docks somewhere and left it. Just ridiculous.”

For those not in the know, singer, songwriter and bassist Glenn Hughes honed his chops in the underrated funk-rock band Trapeze as a teenager and then sprang into the limelight in 1973 when he was recruited into Deep Purple, then one of the biggest bands ever formed. 

“They’d recently lost their singer Ian Gillan and their bassist Roger Glover, and were looking for replacements,” said Hughes in his 2021 BP cover feature. “I knew that if I was going to join Deep Purple that I would make my mark on the international stage immediately. I realised that I had to leave Trapeze, to go and find the world.”

Hughes then made an unexpected admission. “In retrospect, I really should never have left Trapeze. With no disrespect at all meant towards Deep Purple, there’s not much swagger going on in that band. It wasn’t a great role for me as far as the bass player that I am goes. Songs like Burn are very straight and strict, you know. That’s the way I feel these days – truly. Leaving Trapeze has been the torment of my life, but I had to let it go.”

“I’d seen Deep Purple when they played at the Wolverhampton Civic,” said Hughes. “I thought they were pretty good and that the guitar player, Ritchie Blackmore, was a bit eccentric. They were all good musicians, but it wasn’t soulful. To be honest with you, if it wasn’t soulful and funky, it didn’t interest me. My experience of funk was Sly & The Family Stone, so when I heard Highway Star or whatever, I thought it was okay, but it didn’t really do it for me.”

To his surprise, Hughes kept seeing members of Deep Purple showing up at Trapeze’s gigs. “I didn’t know they were actually courting me, but I felt better about the offer to join when I heard that they’d asked a hero of mine, Paul Rodgers of Free, to join too. It was also attractive to me to join the world’s top band, who were bigger than Led Zeppelin at the time. That on its own was pretty persuasive, but it wasn’t so much the money or the fame as the chance to have a bigger stage to play on and more people to sing for. And make no mistake: in 1973, Deep Purple were the biggest band on the planet.”

Does Hughes ever listen back to his early recordings and assess his youthful bass playing? “When we formed Trapeze, that’s when bass started to get funky for me. I’ve heard some Trapeze bonus tracks that I hadn’t heard before, and the bass was really something – and I was only 17 or 18. I was shaking my head as I heard it, thinking ‘Was I playing like that at that age?’ You can clearly hear that I was really into it.”

After all these years, has bass guitar changed its role for Hughes? “You know, people talk about my vocals, but I realise how lucky I was to have found myself as a bass player in 1967, when the bass player left the band I was in. I had 24 hours’ notice to switch from playing guitar to playing bass guitar on cover songs like Fire Brigade by the Move. People ask why I play with a pick – well, it’s because I had to switch from guitar so quickly. Andy Fraser told me that I sound like a fingerstyle player, even though I play with a pick.”

As for bass guitars, he explains “I’ve got a lot of classic Sixties basses, and I always fear losing one on the road – like I did with my Deep Purple P-Bass in 1977 – so they stay at home because I don’t want that to happen again. I was in a music store in Australia about 10 years ago, and I was playing basses that I thought were vintage models – and they were new Bill Nash instruments. So I called Bill up. I have four or five of his P-Basses and the same number of Jazz basses. Every one is brilliant: Bill doesn’t make bad basses. I’m playing a Nash J-Bass at the moment and it’s incredible.” 

Glenn Hughes: The Autobiography is available to buy on Amazon.

Whenever the conversation of the greatest guitar riffs of all time crops up, it isn’t long before the phrase Smoke on the Water is uttered. Such is the history of this Deep Purple classic, there’s no point wasting time mulling over just how iconic the humble four-note motif has become.

Despite its popularity, though, the world may have been without the hit riff had things panned out slightly differently when the English rock outfit were busy recording their sixth studio effort, Machine Head, back in the early ‘70s.

As the band recalled in the latest issue of Classic Rock – which gathered transcripts from various interviews surrounding the making of Machine Head – Smoke on the Water was almost lost due to one absurd reason: armed police attempting to gain entry into the studio.

The circumstances surrounding Machine Head and Smoke on the Water are well documented: though the band were set to record in Montreux Casino with the help of Rolling Stones’ mobile studio, they were forced to adopt a plan B when someone set the venue on fire with a flare gun during a Frank Zappa concert.

As a result, Deep Purple gathered in The Pavilion theater and ballroom to set about recording Machine Head. However, despite having a self-imposed 10pm noise curfew due to the proximity of the sound-carrying mountains, they didn’t finish until “four in the morning”.

Recalling the evening, drummer Ian Paice said, “The first track we laid down – and the last to be finished – was Smoke on the Water, before we knew what it was going to be called. There was no sound-proofing and we were recording at night. A hell of a racket!”

It turned out that racket – which had been “carrying across the mountain” – didn’t go down too well with the locals, or the police force, because it wasn’t long before the band received some unhappy visitors.

“We did Smoke on the Water there, and the riff I made up in the spur of the moment,” Richie Blackmore continued. “I just threw it together with Ian Paice. Roger Glover joined in. We went outside to the mobile unit and were listening back to one of the takes, and there was some hammering on the door. 

“It was the local police, and they were trying to stop the whole thing because it was so loud,” he went on. “We knew that they were coming to close everything down. We said to Martin Birch, our engineer: ‘Let’s see if we have a take.’ So they were outside hammering and taking out their guns… It was getting pretty hostile.”

Picking up from that point, Birch then added, “It was about two in the morning, the neighbours were complaining. We locked all the doors. I mean, literally, it was ‘da-da-da! Bang, bang’, “polizei, polizei” “Piss off!” ‘Da-da-da’. So we had to get the track down before the police broke in and chucked us out.”

Fortunately, everything worked out in the end, and Smoke on the Water eventually made it onto the album, despite only being included as a “filler”.

“It wasn’t being considered as a track for the album,” Ian Gillan revealed. “It was a jam at the first sound-check. We didn’t work on the arrangement – it was a jam. Smoke on the Water only made it onto the album as a filler track because we were short of time. 

“On vinyl, thirty-eight minutes – nineteen minutes per side – was the optimum time if you wanted good quality,” he explained, “and we were about seven minutes short with one day to go. So we dug out the jam and put vocals to it.”

Unsurprisingly, this nonchalance towards the track meant its eventual success took the whole band by surprise.

As bassist Roger Glover reflected, “With Machine Head none of us predicted [the success of] Smoke on the Water. That was the last thing on our minds that that would become an iconic song. You never can tell, it’s down to the people.”

Despite the riff's popularity, its origin is still something of an enigma. Back in 2007, Blackmore claimed he conceived the Smoke on the Water riff after listening to the ominous chimes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and attempting to reverse the classical track's hook.

However, Blackmore's tongue-in-cheek humor is well documented, meaning the riff may have just been a classic example of “talented guitarist plays guitar and stumbles on something that sounds good”. Judging by the comments used in the latest Classic Rock, though, this looks far more likely.

Head over to Magazines Direct to pick up the latest copy of Classic Rock, which contains the full deep-dive into the making of Machine Head.

We’ve heard about artificial intelligence creating code for virtual pedal plugins, but what if machines could do more than just create gear? What if, in some not-too-distant future, robots could actually play the gear they create?

It’s a hypothesis that’s currently being loosely tested by One Hacker Band on Instagram, who is assembling a burgeoning clan of ragtag robotics components to become a fully functioning, entirely human-less cover band.

Before you start worrying that an army of angry Terminator-style robots hell-bent on overthrowing the guitar charts is in the works, there are some caveats to this particular project. Namely, these “robots” aren’t AI robots at all – just wired and programmed servo parts, curated in order to play their respective instruments.

So far, One Hacker Band’s group comprises electric guitar, bass guitar and drums, with each custom, streamlined instrument relying on an assortment of animatronics, custom-made picking mechanisms and moveable drum stick holders to perform their respective parts.

As a musical creation, it’s something special indeed, but as a feat of engineering it’s truly eye-opening. It’s perhaps the most technologically oriented “band” of today – which is saying something in this age of digitally enhanced performance – but one that connects the worlds of futuristic technology with basic tools of rock ‘n’ roll.

If, however, the project does get out of hand and guitar-playing robots are unleashed into the wild, we can at least rest easy knowing they’ve got fantastic taste in music – because One Hacker Band has programmed them to play some of rock’s biggest and best hits.

These include Metallica’s Enter Sandman – which the three-piece tackles with impressive ease – as well as Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water, Aerosmith’s Walk this Way, Queen’s Another One Bites the Dust and Michael Jackson’s Beat It. Yes, the robot guitar does play the riff, and yes, it nails it.

One Hacker Band’s crew has also smashed Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, with the robot guitarist excelling at the grunge-y powerchord progressions.

The most glaring issue, though – other than it threatens to put human musicians out of work if they start getting too good – is that, as the old saying goes, ‘tone is in the hands’. In our minds, it’s hard for such creations to have any nuanced tone if… well, if they don’t actually have hands. 

Having said that, the point here doesn’t seem to be to painstakingly recreate a human instrumental touch, merely explore what’s possible when the worlds of robotics and music come together. And, regardless, the robot trio massively outperforms in our estimation of what they should sound like on paper. For that, we give kudos.

Covers aren’t the only thing this tech band is good at. Not only can the robotics be triggered to accompany One Hacker Band’s own guitar playing – via a wearable, ingeniously crafted control glove – the band can also play its own original material.

Using the Magenta Studio plugin in Ableton, which uses machine learning techniques for music generation, the intrepid engineer curated a range of artificially generated riffs and hooks, which the band had no issue performing.

We have to admit, the “band” is already at an impressive level, but according to One Hacker Band, it’s only going to get better. Currently, only three guitar strings are available for use, owing to the various mute mechanisms in place to stop the guitar from strumming out of control.

As such, a V2 guitar is on the way, which will give an expanded servo set access to 12 strings. Hopefully that means some robot guitar solos are on the way…

To see the robot band in action and to follow its development, head over to One Hacker Band’s Instagram page.

In this lesson, we welcome back Steve Morse to wow us with a performance over Guitar Techniques editor Jason Sidwell’s track, The Dude Ranch. With a straight eighth-note rock feel and a tempo of 110bpm, it has a steady groove with space for lots of colourful rhythmic and melodic phrasing. 

To begin his solo, Steve plays with strong blues phrasing in the style of players such as Albert King. To keep the delivery authentic plenty of space is left between the phrases. From a melodic perspective, Steve alternates between F# Major Pentatonic (F#-G#-A#-C#-D#) and F# Minor Pentatonic scales (F#-A-B-C#-E). 

For the chorus he switches to C# Minor Pentatonic (C#-E-F#-G#-B), and elaborates on the C# Minor Pentatonic shapes using extra chromatic notes. Steve uses chromatic notes throughout the solo – it’s been a trademark throughout his career – to link up the chord tones and add extra non-diatonic spice. 

To take us into verse 2 Steve plays an ascending phrase using pedal tones. The pedal note anchors the tonality; here the melody notes are played alternately against the pedal tone, and the semiquaver phrasing fits in nicely with the rhythm of the track. Steve is an expert alternate picker and this type of lick is a great workout for the picking hand (why not isolate it and use it as such?). 

For verse two Steve delivers a pre-composed motif which provides a  cohesive thread. Again the idea is based around F# Minor Pentatonic (F#-A-B-C#-E). Chorus two switches tonality once again and this time Steve shifts to D Major Pentatonic as his home base (D-E-F#-A-B). D Major Pentatonic contains the same notes as B Minor Pentatonic so feel free to think of it this way if you are more familiar with Minor Pentatonic fretboard shapes and positions.  

Jason has written a middle eight for The Dude Ranch, and Steve cleverly negotiates the chords with another pre-composed idea. He says his inspiration for this was imagining the type of line that a horn section might play. To add energy and power, Steve naturally adds string bends and finger vibrato to these phrases. There follows a two-bar break in which he plays a lovely descending chromatic line and this brings us neatly into the final verse.

To begin the climax of our piece, Steve releases some tension by letting rip with some F# Blues scale licks (F#-A-B-C-C#-E), while to finish his solo he reaches for some ascending unison bends, which players like Jimi Hendrix and Eddie Van Halen used to great effect. 

As Steve explains, the unison bends add power and you can also adjust their dissonance by adding finger vibrato to the bent note. This creates a spooky effect and a bit of extra thickness and voodoo. 

Hopefully there will be a new technique, lick or phrase in here for you to perfect. If so, memorise it, tweak and alter it for use in your own solos. Once you have mastered some of these concepts, be encouraged to try your own solo over The Dude Ranch – we’ve included a full chord chart with which you can plan your lead assault. Have fun! 

Chord Chart

Get the tone

Amp settings: Gain 8, Bass 7, Middle 7, Treble 6, Reverb 3

Steve used his blue Ernie Ball Music Man signature guitar. Bridge and neck pickup both get a lot of use so we suggest you do likewise. Steve has a general rule to even out his tone; above the 12th fret use the neck pickup, below the 12th fret use the bridge pickup. Any electric guitar will work well. Just dial up a clean sound for the start of the solo then switch to a rich overdriven tone with plenty of sustain. Add reverb to taste.

Steve Morse – The Dude Ranch

Intro [Bars 1-2] The intro section features a C7#9 sound  from the band so Steve nails this down this by playing a C# root note. 

Verse 1 [Bars 4 -15] In verse 1 Steve alternates between the F# Major Pentatonic (F#-G#-A#-C#-D#) and F# Minor Pentatonic scales (F#-A-B-C#-E. The phrasing is sparse and constructed in a musical, question and answer style fashion. 

Keep an eye out for any A Natural notes (Minor 3rds over F# chords) as these can be bent slightly sharp – there’s no need to be exact, as you’re aiming to bend the note ‘to nowhere’ to give it more of a classic blues feel. 

Chorus 1 [Bars 16-23] Here the scale of choice switches to C# Minor Pentatonic (C#-E-F#-G#-B). Steve uses chromatic notes throughout the solo to link up the chord tones and these also add extra colour. He demonstrates in his analysis how to bounce melodies off a pedal tone. The ascending lick in bar 23 is a good picking technique exercise and builds nicely into verse 2.

Verse 2 [Bars 24 -31] This section features an idea that groups together five notes. When this idea is repeated it means the next part of the pattern starts on the offbeat and this sets up a revolving syncopated accent. 

Chorus 2 [Bars 32-47] For this section Steve works an ascending pattern into the melody. For the super high string bends of this section he uses his fourth finger to reach and fret the notes. 

Being the smallest of our digits the fourth finger is the perfect choice when requiring accuracy in the cramped confines of this part of the neck. The other three fingers can be used to provide support, as of course the fourth finger, being the smallest, is also not the strongest.

Break [Bars 48-49] To take us back into verse 3 there is a pretty cool descending chromatic run to navigate. As already mentioned, Steve uses chromatic notes throughout the solo to link up the chord tones and to add tension and colour. This descending lick provides another good workout for the picking hand.

Verse 3 [Bars 50-end] Steve launches into the final straight with some cool F# Blues scale (F#-A-B-C-C#-E) licks before ending with some Hendrix-style unison bends. Bend the note on the third string until it matches the pitch of the fretted second string. Adding vibrato to the third string provides a cool dissonance. 

It’s a fact of life that few four-note riffs are as legendary as Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water. Heck, hardly any riff full-stop has had anywhere near the same cultural and musical impact the iconic 1972 track has had over the past five decades.

Give a guitar to somebody who has never even held the instrument before, and – such is the power of Smoke on the Water – their fingers will probably start haphazardly see-sawing between the third, fifth and sixth frets without prompt.

Of course, we’re exaggerating slightly, but there’s no denying the riff’s ingenious simplicity. Usually the first riff a budding guitarist gets taught in their first lesson and a firm fan-favorite for informal noodles, Smoke on the Water is seemingly sewn into the fabric of the music universe itself.

How, then, did Ritchie Blackmore manage to craft such a monumental melody? Well, contrary to what you might think, it wasn’t from divine intervention – if anything, the real story might be even harder to believe.

According to Blackmore, he wrote the riff based on Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Specifically, he supposedly reversed the classical track’s main hook and landed on something vaguely reminiscent of what would later become Smoke on the Water.

Speaking to CNN in 2007, Blackmore said he conceived Smoke on the Water after listening to the foreboding chimes of Beethoven’s track: “I thought [I’d] play [Beethoven’s fifth symphony] backwards, put something to it… that’s how I came up with it.”

When asked to clarify if Smoke on the Water really was just Beethoven’s fifth backwards, Blackmore explained, “It’s an interpretation of inversion. You turn it back, and play it back and forth, it’s actually Beethoven’s fifth.”

For those of you currently opening a new tab to look up “Beethoven’s fifth reversed”, don’t bother – it sounds nothing like Smoke on the Water. So, was Blackmore being serious, or is this just a classic example of his well-documented tongue-in-cheek humor? 

Well, we can’t say for sure. In Stephen Tow’s 2020 book London: Reign Over Me - How England’s Capital Built Classic Rock – an excerpt from which can be found on Classic Rock –  Deep Purple bassist Roger Glover admitted the whole anecdote “may have been a joke given Blackmore’s sense of humor”.

That – coupled with the fact Blackmore somewhat sarcastically said later in the same interview, “It’s a great riff. It’s a riff we should all have in our heads. I got to sleep with it at night, thinking, ‘I am so glad I wrote bah bah baahh…’” – suggests Blackmore might have just been playing games with the interviewer.

Still, Blackmore insists that Smoke on the Water is “an interpretation of inversion” of Beethoven’s symphony, so the fact it sounds nothing like the fifth reversed might not actually account for anything. One YouTuber took Blackmore’s comment to heart, and even attempted to break down whether the infamous riff really could have come from Beethoven’s song. We'll leave you to decide whether Blackmore's words are at all convincing.

Despite the debate, the interview clip does clear one thing up: how to actually play the riff properly. After demonstrating how not to play it, Blackmore confirms the real Smoke on the Water was written in fourths – a sound that pays homage to medieval songwriting.

No matter how mysterious the origin of the riff really is, though, the rest of the song’s story is set in stone. On December 4, 1971, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention were in the midst performing at the Montreux casino, when the wooden roof caught fire after a spectator fired a flare gun.

At the same time, Deep Purple were getting ready to record their seminal album Machine Head in the building, but were forced to vacate and abandon their plans because of the fire. To adapt, the band set up shop in Rolling Stones’ mobile studio and an old theater, and swiftly began work on eternalizing the Montreux incident in song form.

Deep Purple have announced that Simon McBride – who the band hired in March as a stand-in electric guitar player to replace Steve Morse, who took leave from the classic rock titans for family reasons – has fully joined the band as their permanent guitarist.

In a statement published on their website, the band said that they were "thrilled" that McBride – a veteran blues-rock guitarist – had agreed to join on a permanent basis.

"Simon’s playing is up there with the greats," the band said. "Of course, Steve can’t be replaced, the same as Ritchie [Blackmore], and Steve has a long legacy with Deep Purple. In Simon we have not found a replacement, but an extraordinarily talented and exciting guitarist in his own right. 

"The reception from audiences over the summer has already been great and we are looking forward to the forthcoming dates in the UK and Europe across the rest of the year. It is clear that Simon also holds great respect for those before him. We are all excited for what the years to come hold for the band.”

“I’m very happy to be asked to join the band," added McBride in a statement of his own. "At the start of the pandemic, if someone would have said to me that I was going to be the new guitarist in Deep Purple I would have just laughed, but here we are and it’s happening. 

"Deep Purple has a history of great guitarists so I’m very honored to be asked to be part of that. They are all amazing musicians and more importantly, I have become very good friends with the guys so I can’t wait to continue touring and even perhaps [do] some writing and recording.”

Steve Morse – who spent almost three decades as Deep Purple's resident six-string ace – initially said this spring that he was leaving the group temporarily to spend time with his wife, Janine, who is battling cancer.

“At this point,” Morse said at the time, “there are so many possible complications and unknowns, that whatever time we have left in our lives, I simply must be there with her. I am not leaving the band – I hope that after she gets a clean bill of health, I can re-join the tour.

“However, I am not seeing any likely situation which would allow me to do overseas touring in the immediate future. I continue to be privileged to be a part of the Purple family tree, and also to get to feel the amazing support of so many loyal fans and the rest of the band."

Purple's last album of original material was 2020's Whoosh!, with their most recent studio effort in general being 2021's all-covers Turning To Crime.

Although Steve Morse deserves full shred credentials for his incredible speed and dexterity on the instrument, he has always resided outside of the genre. 

His history with Dixie Dregs and Kansas means he has carved his own niche with a mixture of classical, country and classic rock, combined with a ferocious alternate picking style that makes most shred guitarists weep.

As well as classic Dregs albums like Freefall and What If, Steve has a discography of solo records including must listens like High Tension Wires and Southern Steel. For 28 years, he was Deep Purple's guitarists, leaving in July to care for his wife, who has cancer. He also has side project Flying Colors.

Our first three examples are based around alternate picking arpeggios as this is such a huge part of Morse’s style. First we have a baroque inspired ascending progression that alternates between two shapes and moves across the fretboard chromatically. 

This is a fantastic warm-up as it will allow you to focus on your picking hand; especially important with the string skipping element.

Example 2 is a palm-muted arpeggio part. The approach here is to form the chord shapes with your fretting hand and use the pick to articulate the arpeggio. Lightly resting the side of your palm on the strings at the bridge should produce a nice percussive effect, as well as separating the notes so only one is played at a time. 

Our third example is a lick similar to Steve’s work with Flying Colors. These arpeggios are articulated with the fretting hand, in much the same way as sweep picked arpeggios, but in Steve’s world, alternate picking is king, so start with a downstroke and keep the pick moving down and up throughout, no matter what the string change happens to be.

The aim is to give the notes a more mechanical sound, rather than the smoother sweeping sound. Both have their uses, but alternate picking generally requires more maintenance in order to achieve accuracy at higher speeds.

The key to the technique is to not dig in too much with the pick and to use just the very tip to strike the strings. This should give you the sensation of hovering, or dancing between the strings, rather than forcing the pick through them. You can also adjust the pick angle, or ‘pitch’ of the pick tip both up and down in order to clear the strings without accidentally hitting the wrong one.

Example 4 is in Steve’s riffing style, in which he often uses open strings and a combination of Minor scales, with passing chromatic notes to spice things up  and not sound too diatonic. 

Again, palm-muted alternate picking is the key to pulling this off, along with synchronised fretting. Continuing with the scalar theme, Example 5 is an A Blues scale lick using the three chromatic notes on the fifth string as home-base and the higher notes as accented melodic ‘pops’ which are played with snappy pick strokes.

In some of the examples the phrasing of the lick is at odds with the subdivision. If you are playing triplets, try groupings of four and, conversely, play groupings of three or six notes within 16th-note rhythms. The challenge is to never speed up or slow down, but to stay within the subdivision exactly; which is made easier with alternate picking. 

Get the tone

Amp settings: Gain 7, Bass 6, Middle 7, Treble 7, Reverb 3

Although Steve does use a fair amount of drive, it’s not what you would call a ‘shred’ tone, since there’s more ‘note’ than distortion in the sound. 

You want a smooth, sustaining drive tone so try bridge pickup and go easy on the treble (easier if using humbuckers). Set you amp to ‘just breaking up’ then add some drive from a pedal, and reverb/delay to taste.

Example 1 

Play the D triad with first, third and fourth fingers, and as you pick each note, lift the fingers slightly so as to keep the notes separated. For the second arpeggio shape use first, fourth and second fingers in ascending order and use the same muting techniques. Repeat those two shapes as you ascend the fretboard.

Example 2

Start by fretting the chord shapes and strumming in order to check the notes. For parts like this Steve frets the sixth-string note with his thumb, but you can play it with first finger too. 

Hold the chord shapes and palm-mute the lower four strings and move your hand from the wrist as you alternate pick the arpeggios.

Example 3

Play these Major triads using your first, second and fourth fingers, using first finger barre rolls to move between the 12th frets and 10th frets on the first and second strings. 

Start with a down stroke to alternate pick the arpeggios, so each note has a separate and precise stroke (we don’t want it to sound like sweep picking). 

Strike the strings with the very tip of your pick to reduce the chance of becoming caught between the wires.

Example 4

This riff uses a combination of A Minor scale (A-B-C-D-E-F-G), A Blues scale (A-C-D-Eb-E-G) and some chromatic passing notes. Keep the pick moving in even 16th notes using strict alternate picking and use the momentum of the pick to keep the volume of the notes even throughout.

Example 5

This lick is based in A Blues scale and is played with first, second and third fingers on the fifth string and interval jumps and string skips to other strings, while staying within the scale. 

The phrasing switches between six and four-note groupings, but remember there are always six notes per beat throughout.

Glam rock, prog rock, country rock, power pop, proto punk, funk, and heavy metal all thrived in 1972, a sign that record – and eight-track? – buyers were open to a wide range of electric guitar-driven styles.

While several established bands cemented their status as “rock elite” with what would go on to become all-time classic albums, there were also quite a few debuts, surprises, and LPs that only seemed to get attention many years later.

There is compelling case to be made that ‘72 was one of the most significant years for guitar music. Rock guitar’s horizons were being broadened by trailblazing artist and the omnivorous tastes of the record-buying public. 

Fender, ever aware of the prevailing trends in pop-culture, recognized that change was in the air, and that players wanted different. They hooked up with former Gibson pickup guru Seth Lover for Wide Range humbucker and duly augmented the Fender Telecaster’s design. 

But now, without further ado, let’s take a virtual time machine back a half century ago, to when Richard Nixon defeated George McGovern to be re-elected U.S. President, Pong became the first successful arcade video game, and West Germany defeated the Soviet Union in the UEFA European Championship, and inspect the albums that provided an awesome soundtrack to ‘72. 

Disclaimer: only studio albums released in ’72 qualify. So, no compilations, soundtracks, unplugged and/or concert albums were permitted in this rundown…

30. The Velvert Turner Group – The Velvert Turner Group

After the tragic passing of Jimi Hendrix in 1970, several guitarists attempted to fill the psychedelic-funk-blues-rock void – most obviously, Robin Trower and Frank Marino. But one seemingly forgotten gentleman had his “Jimi-isms” down pat, Velvert Turner, on this obscure self-titled debut by his Velvert Turner Group. 

Unlike the other aforementioned players however, Velvert had a legitimate link to the late/great guitarist – he took lessons from him.

29. Fanny – Fanny Hill

Fanny truly rocked hard, and was one of the few all-female groups of the era. And on their third album, they offered several spirited covers (Ain’t That Peculiar, Hey Bulldog) and kickass originals (Blind Alley, Rock Bottom Blues) – which feature the group’s singer/guitarist, June Millington, front and center. 

28. The Osmonds – Crazy Horses

What the heck is one of the era’s most family-friendly pop bands doing on this list? In one of the most dramatic stylistic shifts in pop history, the Osmonds suddenly transformed into a true hard rockin’ band for this release – particularly on the stomping title track, Hold Her Tight, and Life Is Hard Without Goodbyes (the latter sounding surprisingly similar to the future Rainbow composition, Love’s No Friend).

27. Big Star – #1 Record

Power pop was in full bloom in ’72, and one of the genre’s best was Big Star – featuring the vocal/guitar/songwriting duo of Alex Chilton and Chris Bell. 

It still remains perplexing all these years later how such seemingly made-for-the-radio tunes as In the Street and When My Baby’s Beside Me weren’t hits, nor the exceptional ballads Thirteen and Watch the Sunrise. 

26. Lou Reed – Transformer

That David Robert Jones was one busy fellow in ’72. Who? David Bowie! Huh? Let us explain – Bowie was a major appreciator of proto-punks the Velvet Underground, and when he was looking to start producing other artists, the first artist he and his then-guitarist, Mick Ronson manned the mixing desk for was ex-VU singer/guitarist Lou Reed. 

The production duo even performed on this classic, which served as a commercial breakthrough for Reed – thanks to the inclusion of such subsequent classic tunes as Walk on the Wild Side, Vicious, and the lovely ballad Perfect Day. 

25. Scorpions – Lonesome Crow

Curious to hear what a 16-year old Michael Schenker sounded like on the six-string? All you have to do is check out the Scorpions’ debut – which as evidenced by such tracks as I’m Goin’ Mad, In Search of the Peace of Mind, and the title track, are decidedly more 'hippie dippie' than the anthemic arena rock they would take to the top of the charts a decade later. 

24. Captain Beyond – Captain Beyond

Original Deep Purple singer Rod Evans’ post-Purple group was expectedly hard rocking (Dancing Madly Backwards, Mesmerization Eclipse), but also morphed into psychedelia at points (Myopic Void, As the Moon Speaks). And he found just the right men for the job via a pair of former Iron Butterflies – guitarist Larry “Rhino” Reinhardt and bassist Lee Dorman.

23. West Bruce & Laing – Why Dontcha 

With Mountain seemingly split up in ‘72, guitarist Leslie West and drummer Corky Laing promptly hooked up with ex-Cream bassist Jack Bruce, and showed great promise with this highly anticipated debut – particularly on the standout tracks, Why Dontcha, The Doctor, and Love Is Worth the Blues. However, the trio would be kaput two years later, with Mountain being briefly resuscitated. 

22. Wishbone Ash - Argus

It’s easy to assume that Iron Maiden got the idea for their trademark twin guitar harmony lines from Thin Lizzy, who perfected the approach within hard rock before Maiden came merrily galloping along. But it turns out that Steve Harris was a major fan of the third offering from this British prog band, which featured six-string duo Andy Powell and Ted Turner. 

And while their guitar harmonies are not as oft-used or intricate as Maiden’s would be, you can hear a preview of what was to come – particularly at the 3:00 mark of The King Will Come. 

21. Budgie – Squawk

The sophomore effort by these Cardiff rockers showed that Black Sabbath wasn’t the only group in ’72 laying down some serious proto-doom/stoner metal. 

Singer/bassist Burke Shelley and guitarist Tony Bourge team up for some industrial-sized riffing on Whiskey River, Hot as a Docker’s Armpit, and Stranded, and like Sab, would insert acoustic ditties from time to time (Rolling Home Again, Make Me Happy) before the next brutal metallic assault. 

20. Trapeze – You are the Music…We’re Just the Band

Although best known for his work with Deep Purple’s Mark III and IV line-ups, singer/bassist Glenn Hughes got his start with Trapeze. 

Also including future Whitesnake guitarist Mel Galley and future Judas Priest drummer Dave Holland, the trio began as a near metal band – specifically 1970’s Medusa – before getting a funk-rock makeover in time for this album, on the standouts Keepin’ Time and the title track, and momentarily turning down the amps for the gorgeous ballad, Coast to Coast. 

19. Blue Öyster Cult – Blue Öyster Cult

Fuzzed-out, distorted, and cranked-to-10 amps are usually associated with heavy metal. However, on Blue Öyster Cult’s self-titled debut, this was not always the case. Still, the New York group – featuring guitarists Buck Dharma and Eric Bloom – managed to create a seriously spooky vibe on Workshop of the Telescopes, Then Came the Last Days of May, and especially the awesomely-titled She’s as Beautiful as a Foot.  

18. Genesis – Foxtrot

As evidenced by several selections on this list, ’72 saw several prog bands choose to utilize entire sides of an album to get their point across, or in the case of Foxtrot, nearly an entire side (as a brief instrumental, Horizons, prefaces the 23 minute-plus Supper’s Ready). And Steve Hackett had no problem navigating his six-string through all of the unexpected compositional twists and turns. 

17. Roxy Music – Roxy Music

Were they art rock? Glam rock? Prog rock? Who knows for sure – and that is precisely what made the self-titled debut by Roxy Music so swell. Interestingly, one of their best-ever tunes, Virginia Plain (which featured a tasty lead break from guitarist Phil Manzanera), was included on the US version of the album, but was nowhere to be found on the UK edition. 

16. Todd Rundgren – Something/Anything?

Although often pointed to as a power pop tour de force, Todd Rundgren’s third solo effort (a sprawling double album), actually touched upon various styles – hard rock, R&B, psychedelia, piano ballads, etcetera. And while the radio hits Hello It’s Me and I Saw the Light remain the best known of the bunch, Rundgren gets to show off his underrated guitar soloing skills on Black Maria and Couldn’t I Just Tell You. 

Also of note, Rundgren proved to be an incredibly multi-talented musician – not only singing, producing the album, and penning 24 of the its 25 tracks, but also playing every bloody instrument on the first three sides! 

15. Neil Young – Harvest

Primarily thought of as Neil Young’s best – and most folky – solo effort (due to the inclusion of Heart of Gold and The Needle and the Damage Done), this US/UK chart-topper does include some rocking moments (Alabama, Words), and also a few tunes that contributed to the emergence of the “country rock” genre (Out on the Weekend, Old Man, Are You Ready for the Country?). 

14. The Allman Brothers Band – Eat a Peach 

When Duane Allman tragically died in a motorcycle accident on October 29, 1971, the Allman Brothers were in the midst of recording a studio album – which would go on to become the basis of this half studio/half-live double LP. 

That said, it’s no cobbled-together affair, as evidenced by the fact that two classic tunes, Melissa and Blue Sky (the latter penned by the group’s other guitarist, Dickey Betts) reside here, as well as a seemingly never-ending concert recording, Mountain Jam.

13. ZZ Top – Rio Grande Mud

You could always count on ZZ Top to deliver some lean blues-boogie throughout the decade. And their sophomore effort continued to help get the train a-rollin’, as singer/guitarist Billy Gibbons shines on such gems as Francine, Just Got Paid, and Chevrolet, as well as the forgotten riff rocker, Down Brownie. 

12. Jeff Beck Group – Jeff Beck Group 

The most celebrated eras of guitar great Jeff Beck’s career seem to be the psychedelic mid ‘60s with the Yardbirds, the hard rocking late ‘60s with the Jeff Beck Group (featuring a line-up that included Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood), and his jazz-fusion detour in the mid-late ‘70s as a solo artist. 

However, he had resuscitated the Jeff Beck Group for a spell during the early ‘70s (sans Rod and Ronnie), including this self-titled effort – aka The Orange Album – which spotlighted such guitar workouts as Going Down, Ice Cream Cakes, and Definitely Maybe. 

• 4 guitar tricks you can learn from Jeff Beck

11. Funkadelic – America Eats Its Young

Funkadelic once offered up a song entitled Who Says a Funk Band Can’t Play Rock?! And this is certainly a fitting assessment of most of their ‘70s albums – especially this double disc set. 

The George Clinton-led group utilized several guitarists here, including Eddie Hazel (I Call My Baby Pussycat), Garry Shider (Biological Speculation), Harold Beane (Loose Booty), and Catfish Collins (Philmore).

10. Curtis Mayfield – Super Fly

Undoubtedly one of the best motion picture soundtracks of all-time was this masterpiece by the former leader of the Impressions, which lyrically, reflected the onscreen story of tough guy/drug dealer, Youngblood Priest. 

Funky rhythm guitar (courtesy of Mayfield, Phil Upchurch, and Craig McMullen) and Mayfield’s incredibly soulful vocals are featured throughout – but especially on Pusherman, Freddie’s Dead, and the title track. 

9. T. Rex – The Slider 

Following in the same glam rock direction as its predecessor (1971’s Electric Warrior), Marc Bolan and company returned with another stellar album. And it’s loaded with guitar-driven treats, such as the classics Metal Guru and Telegram Sam, plus the lesser-known title track, Baby Strange, and Ballrooms of Mars. 

8. Jethro Tull – Thick as a Brick

As previously pointed out in the entry for Foxtrot, ’72 saw several prog bands offer up extended compositions – including Tull’s fifth studio effort, which featured two songs across two sides (both going by the name of the album’s title, but differentiated by a Part I and Part II). 

Part I is by far the best of the pair – starting with the strum of Ian Anderson’s acoustic guitar, introducing the full band (with a bang) at the 3:03 mark, then presenting one of the most bouncy and jolly pieces of music a rock band has ever offered up at 12:32, while guitarist Martin Barre’s soloing capabilities are showcased at various points throughout. 

7. Yes – Close to the Edge

Like Genesis and Jethro Tull, Yes opted to treat listeners to an extended tune that traversed many peaks and valleys. And on their fifth studio effort overall, that tune would be the near 19-minute title track. 

But it turns out that the two ditties that comprise the second side were just as good…and possibly, somehow even better than side one – the ballad And You and I and the funk-prog rocker Siberian Khatru – the latter of which features some superb interplay between guitarist Steve Howe and bassist Chris Squire. 

• How Chris Squire got his iconic bass tone

6. Steely Dan – Can’t Buy a Thrill

The band long led by Donald Fagan and Walter Becker has been described as many things – jazz rock, soft rock, and even pop. But the best tune on Steely Dan’s debut is a straight-up rocker, Reelin’ in the Years – which features a simply blazing guitar solo by session man Elliott Randall. 

That said, the guitar work by then-members Jeff “Skunk” Baxter and Denny Dias on Do It Again and Midnite Cruiser ain’t too shabby, either. 

5. Alice Cooper – School’s Out

It was on Alice Cooper's third album with producer Bob Ezrin worked that the group entered a truly cinematic realm – particularly on such tunes as Gutter Cat vs. the Jets/Street Fight, Alma Mater, and Grand Finale. 

Oh yes, it also contains one of the greatest guitar riffs of all-time (courtesy of the late/great Glen Buxton, along with Michael Bruce), within the anthemic title track. 

4. Black Sabbath – Vol. 4

Although it never received the same hefty amount of accolades as say, their debut or Paranoid did, Black Sabbath’s fourth offering overall is crammed with prime Tony Iommi detuned riffage. 

While a tune about the effects of the devil’s dandruff, Snowblind, is probably the best known rocker, it’s all killer/no filler here, particularly Wheels of Confusion, Tomorrow’s Dream, and Supernaut.

3. Rolling Stones – Exile on Main St.

Some musicians simply cannot function while on drugs. Others issue one of the best rock albums of all-time – case in point, the Stones with this classic double-LP (which come to mention it, that was another craze of ’72 – the double-LP!). 

Mick Taylor was still in the midst of serving as Keith Richards’ six-string lieutenant, and they sound gloriously ragged n’ rocking on Tumbling Dice, Happy, and Ventilator Blues – and a special shout-out goes to the greatest Stones song title ever, Turd on the Run). 

2. David Bowie – The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars

Although there had been glam rock albums issued before the arrival of David Bowie’s fifth studio album – T. Rex's Electric Warrior, Alice Cooper's Love It to Death and Killer – Ziggy was the one that truly sent the genre over the top. 

And while it was primarily the Bowie’s androgynous look and spaceman lyrics that made Ziggy stand out from the pack, there’s no denying what guitarist Mick Ronson brought to the album – particularly his out-of-this-world lead on Moonage Daydream and riffing on Ziggy Stardust.

1. Deep Purple – Machine Head

Is it much of a surprise that the album that gave us arguably the greatest rock guitar riff of all-time is numero uno?

Of course, we’re talking about Smoke on the Water. But Ritchie Blackmore’s Fender Stratocaster is in fine form throughout Machine Head. And with the likes of Highway Star, Pictures of Home and Space Truckin’, song for song, it remains Deep Purple’s greatest studio effort of all time.

In the second installment in Total Guitar's Greatest Guitar Albums of All Time, we're going to be looking at an era when the big beasts of rock turned up the volume, went big and bold with ideas that changed guitar music for keeps. 

If the greatest guitar albums of the ‘60s revolutionized rock 'n' roll, deflowering it amid the political turmoil of the decade, the '70s conducted rock on a scale like never before. 

After you voted in your thousands, we bring you profiles of your top 10 albums, and offer an in-depth look at the decade's number one album.

10. Black Sabbath – Paranoid (1970)

The definitive choice for guitarists who recognize that rhythm parts are more important than solos, Sabbath’s second album, Paranoid, saw riff lord Tony Iommi laying down the metal blueprint. 

Iron Man, War Pigs and the title track are the foundation of heavy metal, with Iommi sounding crushing even before the band discovered downtuning. The solos are fluid and exciting, usually improvised as part of live takes with the band; Iommi would add rhythm parts underneath later. But the riffs are the real story. 

Pete Townshend was known for power chords, but his sledgehammer strumming did sometimes include the major third. It was Iommi who really codified the root and fifth power chord we all play today.

Iommi liked the amps he got free from local manufacturers Laney, but he was always pushing for more gain. On Paranoid he was using a modified Rangemaster treble booster to overload the amp input. 

To keep the low frequencies tight, Iommi ran the guitar amp’s bass control on 0 while maxing every other control. His Gibson SG’s humbuckers helped too, with more push than the Strat he’d had in Sabbath’s early days. The title track, though, was played on a Les Paul, the only time Iommi recorded with one.

• Beginner guitar: How to play powerchord riffs

9. Pink Floyd – The Wall (1979)

By the time Floyd recorded this sprawling double album, David Gilmour’s Black Strat had a Charvel maple neck and a high output DiMarzio FS-1 bridge pickup, although other guitars delivered some of The Wall’s most famous moments. 

The Nile Rodgers-ish main riff on Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2) was played on a 1954 Fender Stratocaster, serial no 0001, and the solo came from a 1955 Les Paul Goldtop with P90 pickups and a wraparound tailpiece. 

But the Black Strat delivered the Comfortably Numb solo, through the Big Muff Pi pedal Gilmour first used on 1977 album Animals. Gilmour’s enormous live tone came from splitting his pedalboard signal and feeding each output through a separate Boss CE-2 chorus pedal.

8. Boston – Boston (1976)

Spearheaded by the classic hit single More Than a Feeling, Boston’s debut would go on to sell 17 million copies in the US alone. While Van Halen’s debut set the standard for guitar playing in the 80s, Boston’s heavily multi-tracked, chorused guitars and glossy production were just as influential on the overall sound of the coming decade.

Bandleader Tom Scholz, an MIT graduate, was equal parts mad scientist and guitarist. Building a studio in his spare time, the perfectionist designed new equipment to produce the sounds in his head. 

When Boston’s debut hit big, Scholz commercially released his inventions the Rockman Headphone Preamp and the Power Soak, a pioneering attenuator for valve amps. The Rockman appeared on albums by Def Leppard, Joe Satriani, and David Gilmour.

Boston’s heavily compressed clean tones and harmonized distorted guitars immediately defined the sound of AOR radio, and still sound amazing today.

The guitar parts are complex interweaved layers of rhythm and lead lines with different tones, making Boston a stepping stone between Queen albums and the even more complex productions that producers like Trevor Horn and Mutt Lange would create in the 80s. Scholz’s Les Paul produced a high gain tone that didn’t offend anyone, making it the ideal power ballad sound.

7. AC/DC – Highway To Hell (1979)

Producer Mutt Lange polished the sound enough to push AC/DC in to the big league with Highway To Hell, while leaving enough rough edges that no diehard fans were alienated. 

Rhythm guitarist Malcolm Young stuck with his modified Marshall Superbass, while lead guitarist Angus Young – according to Solodallas founder and AC/DC obsessive Filippo Olivieri – used a Marshall 2203. 

Lange tamed Angus’s shredding, producing his most melodic and considered solos to date. And on an unparalleled set of riffs, Malcolm’s almost-clean Gretsch and Angus’s slightly dirtier SG remains the best sounding guitar pairing in history. Their telepathic timing and epic open powerchords are the definition of rock guitar.

6. Pink Floyd – Wish You Were Here (1975)

David Gilmour’s titanic playing on Shine On You Crazy Diamond has some of the most imitated feel and tone in history. Gilmour pays tribute to blues pioneers, particularly BB King, with his controlled feel and sublime behind-the-beat timing. 

The Black Strat was still largely stock in 1975, and throughout this album his Colorsound Powerboost is featured – largely into his Hiwatt DR103. A silicon Fuzz Face lifts his slide parts, and an MXR Phase 90 appears for the first time. 

Back in the real world, you can get close to Gilmour’s sustaining, cleanish tone with a compressor and a low-gain overdrive pedal like a Boss Blues Driver.

5. Deep Purple – Machine Head (1972)

Deep Purple’s sixth studio album is, of course, much more than just that riff, but Machine Head deserves to be in this list for Smoke On The Water alone. 

Guitarist Ritchie Blackmore said simplicity was the key to the song’s success, but playing it like him is surprisingly tricky. Blackmore originally used pick and fingers to play both notes in each double stop at the same time.

Hendrix had exploited the potential of a Strat and a Marshall on 10, but Blackmore found a whole different set of sounds in that combination. There was no trace of icepick treble in his gutsy tone.

His unforgettable riffs and fluid soloing drew on both classical and blues influences to broaden the vocabulary of rock guitar. Even the self-critical Blackmore had to admit there were good bits on Machine Head. 

Highway Star was his homage to Bach, and his alternate picking was cutting edge for the time. He insisted it was the only solo he wrote before recording. Elsewhere, his off-the-cuff soloing exhibited feel, control, and his unmistakable approach to the tremolo arm. The solos in Lazy and Pictures Of Home raised the bar for technique and expression.

4. Led Zeppelin – Physical Graffiti (1975)

After the polished Houses Of The Holy, Zeppelin threw everything at Physical Graffiti, their philosophy of ‘tight but loose’ at the fore. Kashmir and Ten Years Gone have their sharpest arrangements, while In My Time Of Dying was essentially a jam. 

The song lasted over 11 minutes partly because they hadn’t rehearsed a proper ending. The double album format let Zeppelin demonstrate everything they could do, from thundering hard rock to acoustic folk. Jimmy Page’s Danelectro emerged for Kashmir, while his Martin D-28 never sounded better than in Bron-Yr-Aur.

3. Pink Floyd – The Dark Side Of The Moon (1973)

Floyd’s most famous album was also The Black Strat’s finest hour, as David Gilmour laid down some of the tastiest solos of the decade. While Ritchie Blackmore set new standards for flash, Gilmour’s tasteful phrasing and sublime behind-the-beat feel showed the power of a few well-placed notes. 

The Black Strat was still in close-to-stock form at this point, with its original pickups and white pickguard. His glorious fuzz tone, a silicon Fuzz Face boosted by a Colorsound Powerboost overdrive, is one of the most sought-after sounds in rock. His custom Bill Lewis axe also crops up; Gilmour makes use of its full 24-fret range towards the end of Money.

2. Van Halen – Van Halen (1978)

The date on the sleeve says 1978, but a cursory listen to Van Halen’s debut tells you that it is, by some distance, the greatest guitar album of the 1980s. Van Halen didn’t have much in common with The Clash or the Sex Pistols, but the Californians’ brand of ‘Atomic Punk’ had the same urgency as the London punks.

None of Van Halen’s 11 tracks gets near the four minute mark, the perfect antidote to sprawling 70s excess. MTV was three years away, but Van Halen had already invented MTV rock. “We’re playing the 80s,” grinned effervescent frontman David Lee Roth. “Other bands are still playing the 70s.”

The songs zipped by so quickly partly because Eddie could play his borrowed Clapton licks at four times their original speed. But describing EVH’s guitar playing as “fast” undervalues it, like describing the Great Pyramid of Giza as “large”. 

Not just the best soloist on the planet, Eddie was possibly even better at rhythm – effortlessly grooving, extremely dynamic, and with the best swing in the game. Debates about whether he invented tapping (answer: no) are beside the point.

Eddie Van Halen also did not invent harmonics, divebombs, palm muting, legato, or high gain tones, but no one had combined them seamlessly into one coherent guitar style, let alone perfected it on their debut album. 

Many of the final tracks are first takes, and it never sounds like Eddie might screw up. Where he hits a wrong note, he styles it out and keeps on wailing. Like the gymnast Simone Biles, no matter what acrobatics happen in the air, he always sticks the landing.

Besides his cutting edge technique, Eddie was best known for his infectious grin. Asked about Van Halen in 1986, Jimmy Page remarked, “It’s an incredible technique for what he does. I can’t do it. I can’t smile like him either.” 

Eddie’s smile reflects the sheer exuberance bursting from the grooves on the first Van Halen album. Listening to it is a joyful experience, and that love of music gave meaning to every note they played. Eddie’s licks had soul, even when he was showing off.

Then there was the tone. It’s doubtful the electric guitar has ever sounded better. Guitarists have devoted their lives to trying to discover how it was done. 

John Suhr worked on Eddie’s Marshall Plexi in 1991 and swears blind there was nothing unusual about it. He posted on The Gear Page forum in 2010, “When Ed played through this amp in my shop, it sounded every bit like Ed and the first album. When I played through it, it sounded every bit like me. Ed would make any decent amp sound like Ed.” 

The 23-year-old Eddie didn’t just invent 80s rock guitar; he did it in a way that no one would ever surpass. A generation of shredders took his technique to new heights, but no one had the tone or the vibe, and no one else looked like they were having nearly as much fun.

1. Led Zeppelin – Led Zeppelin IV

Led Zeppelin III was hardly a flop, but Jimmy Page took criticism of it personally. The guitarist refused interviews for the next 18 months and resolved to let the music do the talking in the most dramatic way possible. 

The next album would have no accompanying words – not even the band’s name on the cover. The resulting untitled effort, known universally as Led Zeppelin IV, is the most devastating answer a band has ever given their critics. 

“It was a really good and serious summing up of where we were,” said Jimmy Page of the album. “Each song has its own character. It gives all the different colors and textures of the band. We were moving the acoustic aspect of what we’d done on the third album into these more intimate areas with Going To California and The Battle Of Evermore. The music kept expanding.”

It was in 1970 that Page, singer Robert Plant, drummer John Bonham and bassist John Paul Jones began the first recording sessions for the album at Island Studios in London, but the magic was not happening. According to Page, an early version of a key track, When The Levee Breaks, sounded “labored”. The guitarist decided a new working environment was required.

He wanted somewhere the band could live, write, and record, so Led Zeppelin retreated to Headley Grange, a disused workhouse for the poor in Hampshire. Renting the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio to capture the results, the band dug in. 

“I liked the idea of everybody being in the same house and really working with the whole band,” Page recalled. “It was an old Victorian house, very imposing. It was in the countryside, so you weren’t going to have neighbors complaining. If it didn’t work we’d go into a studio, but in actual fact it was great. It was like everybody’s creative energies all joined. That’s what the whole magic of the environment was like.”

The band used cupboards and stairwells around the house as isolation booths for amps, setting up temporary studios ad hoc. They were constantly setting up in different locations, lending each track its own ambience. 

As Page said, “We used the acoustics of the house. We were playing in this drawing room to begin with, and then John Bonham has another drum kit turn up, and it’s in the hall, with this really high ceiling. When he started playing it was like, ‘right, we’ll have to do something in here now,’ with the drum sound like that, because it was just huge. You’ve heard it – on When The Levee Breaks.”

Levee was Zeppelin’s thunderous reimagining of a 1929 Memphis Minnie tune. Although the melody does draw on the original, it’s unlikely anyone would have recognized the song if Plant had bothered to change the lyrics. Memphis Minnie’s tune was an up-tempo blues with a bright fingerpicking part. 

The original follows standard 12-bar chord changes, but Page’s ominous, droning riff never modulates, designed to invoke a trance. He played it on his Fender Electric XII in Open G tuning, but it sounds like Open F because Page slowed the track with varispeed.

“If you slow things down, it makes everything sound so much thicker,” he told author Brad emphasized. “The only problem is, you have to be very tight with your playing because it magnifies any inconsistencies.”

Working quickly, Zeppelin captured ideas while they still sounded spontaneous. “We didn’t over-rehearse things,” Page emphasized. “We just had them so that they were just right, so that there was this tension – maybe there might be a mistake. But there won’t be, because this is how we’re all going to do it and it’s gonna work!”

The record sounds fresh because it is. If a song didn’t come together quickly, they simply moved on. 

As Page recalled: “We’d get it up to a serious speed, so it’s really firing on all cylinders, and then you’d start recording. With the red light on there’s even more urgency to it. We’d arrive at those takes in a pretty short time – just a handful of takes, maybe. If a song started to labour, and it just wasn’t working, there’s no point in just recording it. We’d just stop it and do something else, and then return to it later.”

Guitar solos were always the last thing recorded. 

“I wanted it to be totally in character of what’s going on with the lyrics and a summing up of my guitar playing for that particular song,” Page explained. “What I’d do is just limber up and then, okay, put the red light on. And again, those solos weren’t done over hours and hours. They were pretty much improvised. They weren’t worked out note for note. Never. The solos were always: take a deep breath and go for it! For the spontaneity. I might have worked out how I might start it off. But that’s it.”

With a combination of inspiration and ruthless efficiency, Zeppelin’s fourth was essentially complete by the end of their month-long residency at Headley Grange. Three tracks remained unfinished: Four Sticks (a rhythmic number on which Bonham on played with, yes, four drum sticks); Black Dog, the heavy hitter that would serve as the album’s opening salvo; and lastly, the song that many consider the greatest of all time.

“I had the sections for it. It was a question of piecing them together,” said Page of writing Stairway To Heaven. “By nature of the fact that it had acceleration through it, it needed some work on it. Definitely it was the sort of thing where you wanted to be all around each other. Because of the amount of overdubs that were going to go on it, it needed to be done in a studio.” 

Returning to London, Page picked Island Studio 1 for its ambience and clarity. The rich arrangement for Stairway to Heaven includes all of Page’s main guitars. The intro was his beloved Harmony Sovereign H-1260, a budget acoustic used to write the first four albums, while the lush electric rhythms came from two different 12-strings, DI’ed and panned left and right. 

His Fender Electric XII was joined by the Vox Phantom he’d used on Led Zeppelin II and earlier, in his previous band The Yardbirds, for the song Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor. They were recorded straight into the desk and compressed. 

Outro riffs came from his Les Paul, while the solo was played on the legendary Dragon Telecaster, a gift from Jeff Beck he’d used to record all of Led Zeppelin’s debut. The Gibson ES-1275 double neck didn’t arrive until after the song was recorded, when Page needed one guitar that could reproduce all the parts live.

The solo used the same approach as the others, Page preparing the opening lick and a few link phrases before improvising the rest. He says the solo came together easily, in about three takes. Producer Andy Johns, however, remembered things differently in a 2009 interview with Rhythm. 

“There was a bit of a struggle on the solo. He was playing for half an hour and did seven or eight takes. He hadn’t quite got it sussed. I was starting to get a bit paranoid and he said, ‘No, no you’re making me paranoid.’ Then right after that he played a really great solo.”

Page is notoriously reticent to give details of the amps used on specific tracks, sometimes complaining that after he mentions using a particular amp with Led Zeppelin they become impossible to buy. 

He has variously claimed the Stairway amp was a Marshall or a Supro. We do know that his Number 1 Les Paul Standard and Marshall 1959 Superlead head remained his main rig for the Headley Grange sessions. That tone didn’t work for Black Dog, however, and Page recut those guitars at Island with Andy Johns.

Despite his association with cranked Marshalls, Page is no valve amp purist. After the bass and drums were completed at Headley, Page cut the Black Dog guitars at Island Studios, using a direct box to plug straight into the desk. 

Andy Johns cranked the gain on the mic input to create distortion, and put the signal through two Universal 1176 compressors in series. The riff was triple-tracked, with one take panned left, one right, and one centre. Page has compared the resulting tone to an analogue synth.

For the solos in Black Dog, Page took a more orthodox approach. As he told Guitar World in 1993. “I wanted something that would cut through the direct guitars – I wanted a totally different tone color. So I ran my guitar through a Leslie and mic’ed that in the usual way.” 

This “usual way” of mic’ing was actually pretty unusual for the time. While most engineers close mic’ed cabs, Page would position an ambient mic anywhere from six to 20 feet from the speaker, depending on the room’s sweet spot. As with Bonham’s drums, Page followed his mantra “distance equals depth” for recording guitars.

The last completed track was Four Sticks, whose intricate overdubs also required the clarity of a recording studio. Along with Stairway, Page felt Four Sticks came the closest to fulfilling his artistic vision.

He told Steve Rosen in 1977: “My vocation is more in composition, really, than anything else. Building up harmonies, orchestrating the guitar like an army – I think that’s where it’s at, really, for me. I’m talking about actual orchestration in the same way you’d orchestrate a classical piece of music. 

“Instead of using brass and violins, you treat the guitars with synthesizers or other devices; give them different treatments, so that they have enough frequency range and scope and everything to keep the listener as totally committed to it as the player is. I can see certain milestones along the way, like Four Sticks, in the middle section of that. The sounds of those guitars – that’s where I’m going.”

Recording complete, Page mixed the album at Island with Johns after a disastrous ten days at LA’s Sunset Sound produced only one useable mix, When the Levee Breaks. What remained was sequencing the album – crucial for a band determined not to release singles.

“We were crafting albums for the album market,” he said. “It was important, I felt, to have the flow and the rise and fall of the music and the contrast, so that each song would have more impact against the other. I thought that Levee Breaks just had to finish the overall picture of what we’d done – the sonic picture – because it was just so ominous. After you’ve caressed them with Stairway, now you’re going to disturb them!”

Led Zeppelin IV is not just the greatest guitar album of the 70s, but the benchmark for every guitar band ever since.

Steve Morse has stepped down permanently from Deep Purple to care for his wife, Janine, who has cancer. Earlier in March, the guitarist announced that he would be taking a hiatus from the band, in the hope of returning to the fold once her health improved.

In a statement shared on the official Deep Purple Facebook page, Morse said that there was no way he could commit to tours under such circumstances. The situation had come to head in last fall, when Morse had to leave a writing session in Germany, after which he suggested to the band that they might need a substitute. Simon McBride duly stepped in to the touring lineup when Morse announced his hiatus.

“Almost a year later, we are learning to accept stage 4 aggressive cancer and chemo treatment for the rest of her life,” Morse wrote. “We both miss being at shows, but I simply couldn't commit to long, or far away tours, since things can change quickly at home. I suggested lining up a substitute guitarist last autumn, hoping we could see the miraculous cancer cure all of us have heard about. As time went by, I could see the way things were heading though, after 28 years of being in the band.”

Morse’s final show with Deep Purple was at the Rock Legends Cruise on February 14. As for his replacement, Morse said that McBride had the gig “nailed”. 

“I’m now handing over the keys to the vault which holds the secret of how Ritchie’s Smoke on the Water intro was recorded,” Morse wrote. “I guess you have to jiggle the key just right because I never got it open.” 

Morse thanked fans for turning “every show from a dress rehearsal to a thundering, exciting experience” and said he will miss the band and crew.

“Being Janine’s helper and advocate has made a real difference at many key points,” he continued. “As Janine adjusts to her limitations, she is able to do many things on her own, so we will try to play some shorter nearby concert tours with friends to, hopefully, get both of us out of the house!”

Morse joined Deep Purple in 1994, recorded eight studio albums with the band, and is their longest-serving guitar player. Paying tribute to him, Ian Gillan described Morse as a “musical genius.”

“I first became aware of Steve through the Dixie Dregs, particularly the track Take it off the Top, which was the theme tune for Tommy Vance’s BBC rock show and impressed me mightily,” wrote Gillan. “I didn’t realise at the time that one day I would be lucky enough to stand on stage with Steve and enjoy his consummate skills up close and dangerous.

“I got to know him as a very kind man, full of ideas and the patience to see them developed. He would say, ‘You never know until you try it’. We sure had some fun debating that approach, but mostly in good humor and he always gave as good as he got.

“Steve has a legacy with Deep Purple that can never be forgotten, and that smile will be missed. It would be wrong to comment on his personal circumstances, suffice to say he’s in a bad place right now but dealing with it bravely and as best he can; we all admire his devotion; he’s been a strong family man all his life.”

Drummer Ian Paice echoed Gillan’s comments that family came first, and that Morse’s talents had reinvigorated the band, presenting them with new ideas and musical possibilities. “Like most great creative musicians, he has the ability to come up with musical ideas that no one else has thought of,” wrote Paice.

Bassist Roger Glover said that playing with Morse was an education, and that the band had recorded some of their strongest material with him. 

“He’s a teacher, he inspired us, me in particular, with his energy, encouragement and wisdom, and his contribution and legacy in this band is beyond words,” he wrote. “He will be missed but our friendship will remain. Sadly, life has intervened, and different challenges are upon us. Janine needs him now, and my best wishes and thoughts go out to them.”

Don Airey, who joined the band on keys in 2002 after Jon Lord announced his retirement, described Morse as a “shining light both musically and personally”. With Paice, Glover, Gillan, Morse and Airey, Deep Purple enjoyed their most stable lineup in their history. 

Producer Ken Scott has recorded everyone. Or maybe it just seems that way. Graduating through the ranks as engineer at Abbey Road, Scott worked with the Beatles, the Jeff Beck Group, Pink Floyd to name a few.

Later he would produce and engineer David Bowie’s Hunky Dory and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust …, and Visions of the Emerald Beyond by the Mahavishnu Orchestra. He would reunite with George Harrison, engineering his solo albums, Wonderwall Music and All Things Must Pass. 

Scott has seen it all, some of the world's greatest players first hand, but out of all the great guitarists he has worked with, Scott says Deep Purple's Steve Morse is the best. Indeed, Morse is so good that, after working with him on the Dixie Dregs, Scott had an enhanced appreciation of pitch that made everyone else sound out of tune.

Scott was speaking to Gary Kemp (Spandau Ballet) and session bass legend Guy Pratt (Pink Floyd, Roxy Music etc) as a guest on their Rockonteurs podcast when he was asked about the guitar players he has worked with. Morse, he says, was the best, even better than Beck, whom Scott worked with on Truth, Beck-Ola, and There & Back.

“Steve Morse, as far as I’m concerned, is the best guitarist I’ve ever worked with,” Scott said. “He could cover every style and he knew what was needed. Jeff Beck is great, but Jeff has a certain style which he is brilliant at, whereas Steve, he covers all styles, from classical, acoustic – there’s one track on one of the albums called Little Kids which is him and just solo violin, which is brilliant.”

Scott observed Morse’s genius up close in March 1978 when he produced and engineered the Dixie Dregs’ sophomore studio album, What If, and its follow-up, Night of the Living Dregs. Working with Morse spoiled him for musical projects to follow. 

“He has perfect pitch,” says Scott. “I did two albums with him and the next couple of albums after that, I was having major tuning problems with the band. My sense of pitch had become that much closer to perfect pitch that when they were slightly out, it became painful.”

Not that there was ever much wrong with Scott’s ear. In a wide-ranging interview that covers all eras of his career, Scott described David Bowie’s processes, his talent for acquiring talent and letting them shape his sound. Talent such as Mick Ronson, with whom Scott recorded one of the greatest guitar solos of all time – the Moonage Daydream solo from 1972’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

Scott revealed that what we are hearing there was some post-production work on Ronson’s guitar, recording his '68 Les Paul Custom flat and then adding and subtracting reverb to taste.

“I have this thing, I’ve done it with other guitarists as well. I like the low end of the guitar to be right in your face,” explained Scott. “And the higher they go, I like to be airier. So as he’s going up the fret board I’m adding more reverb, and as he comes back down, I pull the reverb back down. I’m playing the reverb as he plays the guitar.”

Scott also talks about Ronson’s cocked-wah electric guitar sound, where he would be “messing around” with his wah pedal’s treadle until he found the sweet spot in the filter, parking it there and using that for his sound. “That was the sound,” he said. “Every one of his guitar sounds was done exactly the same way.”

You can listen to the full interview with Scott and more on the Rockonteurs podcast.

Earlier this year, Deep Purple announced resident electric guitar hero Steve Morse would be taking a temporary hiatus from the band, and that blues-rock ace Simon McBride would be stepping in to fill his spot.

Now, fan-filmed footage has emerged online of the legendary rock group performing with McBride for the first time, as they kicked off their tour on Sunday (May 22).

Taking place at the Menora Mivtachim Arena in Tel Aviv, Israel, McBride and his new bandmates flexed their chops over a number of Deep Purple hits, with the axeman employing his six-string skills on renditions of Highway Star, Strange Kind of Woman, Uncommon Man, Nothing at All and When a Blind Man Cries.

Footage of McBride – strapped to his trusty PRS 245 – playing Lazy, Space Truckin’ and Smoke on the Water can be found below, with the former track playing host to some incredibly tasty lead playing from the 3:00 mark, which eventually blossoms into an extended solo passage.

On Space Truckin’, the crew flex their neat onstage chemistry – helped by the fact McBride has previously toured with Ian Gillan and Don Airey – by making their way through the track’s swaggering riff exchanges with pinpoint accuracy.

Smoke on the Water, meanwhile, is performed with the exact amount of gusto you’d expect Smoke on the Water to be performed with, and accommodates another display of McBride’s accomplished technique – peep the solo at the 2:50 mark.

It was announced in March that Morse would be taking a step back from Deep Purple duties in order to look after his ill wife. At the time, he stressed “I am not leaving the band”, and revealed he hopes to return to the lineup in the future.

Speaking to Guitar World after his appointment, McBride spoke of the bittersweet circumstances surrounding his new role, and recognized that he had “big boots to fill”.

“When they first mentioned it, I was like, ‘Yeah, okay, whatever…’ because I take everything with a pinch of salt these days,” he said. “I thought if it happens, great, if it doesn’t, then don’t feel too let down. 

“We knew for sure in March,” McBride continued, “so I said, ‘Wow, cool, this will be great fun!’ But it’s also not great… which makes it so weird. In the back of my mind, I know it’s happening under crappy circumstances.

“It’s a bittersweet emotion for me, because it’s under sad circumstances, but on the other hand I’m also going ‘Yes!’ because it’s a dream opportunity. It’s a bizarre thing.”

Deep Purple’s next gig takes place tomorrow (May 25) at the Life Park in Istanbul, Turkey. 

For a full list of dates, visit Deep Purple’s website.

At the tail end of March 2022, Deep Purple shared the news that guitarist Steve Morse would be taking a temporary hiatus from the group in order to support his wife, who is currently battling cancer.

“I am not leaving the band,” explained Morse in the official statement, adding that he hoped “after she gets a clean bill of health, I can re-join the tour”. The Deep Purple legend also extended a warm welcome to the man who will be filling his spot for the live shows – Northern Irish blues rock ace Simon McBride – praising him as a “certified world-class guitarist… whom everybody will surely be happy to hear”.

For McBride, who has previously toured with Deep Purple members Ian Gillan and Don Airey and become well-acquainted with the band in general, it’s the opportunity of a lifetime – but also understandably one born out of incredibly sad circumstances.

“To be honest, I’ve known about this for a while,” he explains, talking to Guitar World from his home studio, with various PRS and Fender guitars hanging on the walls behind him. “There was talk of it before, since the end of last year. Steve wants to do the shows obviously, because he is the guitar player in Deep Purple. 

“It’s very unfortunate with his wife… so yeah, it’s very hard for him to leave and come over to Europe. It’s a bittersweet emotion for me, because it’s under sad circumstances, but on the other hand I’m also going ‘Yes!’ because it’s a dream opportunity. It’s a bizarre thing.”

As he goes on to explain, the initial discussions with Deep Purple felt surreal, to the point where McBride wasn’t too sure what to make of it. He agreed, like any guitar player would, but was careful not to get too attached to the idea and instead tread with caution. After all, it’s not every day you’re confronted with the prospect of playing in one of the most influential hard-rock bands of all-time.

“When they first mentioned it, I was like, ‘Yeah, okay, whatever…’ because I take everything with a pinch of salt these days,” McBride continues. “I thought if it happens, great, if it doesn’t, then don’t feel too let down. We knew for sure in March, so I said, ‘Wow, cool, this will be great fun!’ But it’s also not great… which makes it so weird. In the back of my mind, I know it’s happening under crappy circumstances.”

For the fans, sad as they’ll be to miss out on Morse’s technical wizardry, McBride’s appointment is certainly one that makes sense – he has no shortage of talent and established a strong chemistry with each of the group’s members long ago. 

“I’ve known the guys for a while,” adds McBride. “I’ve toured with Ian [Gillan] and Don [Airey] a fair bit over the years. I’ve also played with Roger [Glover] and [Ian] Paicey, so I’ve played with them all, just not at the same time! [laughs] Now I get to do that, and I’m very excited about it, running through all those classic iconic songs we all learn when we’re young. Now I get to play them as part of the band. Steve is an amazing guitarist, so I know I’ve got big boots to fill…”

What do you see as being the main challenges of the gig, technique-wise? Some of the unison lines between Steve and Don on the newer material can get pretty intense…

“I don’t think there’s too much that will be challenging for me. It’s mainly just remembering all the parts as a whole. It’s not like just learning a normal set with standard issue songs, which are verse/chorus/verse/chorus/solo and done. They have all these alternate endings and, as you said, those mad sections with unison lines. 

“There are some solos that aren’t just standard solos; they’re more like creative pieces, so I’ll have to learn them exactly and remember. I’ve spent the last few weeks working on all of the stuff, taking it all into my brain. Whatever gig I’m doing, I always try to include a bit of myself where it works and also stick to the original solos as a mark of respect.”

And which solos might those be?

“Well, there are some leads you just can’t get away with playing different, like Highway Star. I will just play it as is – what’s the point in trying anything else? I won’t come up with anything better. And some of Steve’s solos on the new stuff are also like that. I won’t be able to top them, so I’ll just learn them note-for-note. 

“Fortunately, though, there’s nothing too technically complicated with it. And when I play with Don, we do a lot of stuff from the [’70s fusion supergroup] Colosseum II days, the Gary Moore stuff. Now that’s complicated, and can be a bit of a nightmare technique-wise. There tends to be a lot of notes flying around. 

“To learn things, I don’t necessarily pick up the guitar for the first two weeks; I’ll just sit and listen to the songs over and over until I’m sick of listening to them. When I actually sit down with the guitar, I like to be able to nearly play it already just from familiarity, knowing the chords and what positions they’re being played in. 

“I guess you could just say it’s all challenging, from timing to feel, there are all sorts of things coming together to make Deep Purple sound like Deep Purple. I have to try and get onboard with that and bring the same sort of energy that Steve would.”

You have a new solo album, The Fighter, that’s coming out soon. What exactly are we hearing on the tracks?

“The main guitar was my red PRS 408 Singlecut, which I don’t think they make anymore. That ended up on nearly everything. I also used a Telecaster for certain clean sounds, just to get that ’80s kind of bright and compressed thing. There’s a song called Show Me How to Love and the chorus part is really clean with delays and reverbs and chorus. I had about seven guitars for that one part – including two Telecasters on the bridge pickup, my PRS Silver Sky and my PRS Starla…

“I also used my PRS 245 on one track for more of a vintage Les Paul kind of thing. My main guitar has higher-output pickups whereas the 245 has the ’70s classic rock vibe with not a huge amount of output but bags of tone. I didn’t really use much beyond that. I’m not the kind of person who uses a guitar for each song. 

“My main PRS is very versatile: it can do so many things, and though the pickups are hot you can still split them in different ways using the two switches. From rock to blues, metal and beyond, it can do everything.”

You’ve been using Victory amps a lot in recent years – is that still the case?

“Yeah, I used some of the Victory stuff on the album. There was the V30 and also a Super Kraken. I even used a Kemper, which maybe some people might be disappointed by, but in the studio they can be great tools. The line between real amps and digital stuff is getting very blurry. It can be hard to tell the difference sometimes. Having the Kemper there was very cool, because I could get some Vox AC30 kinds of sounds, or something more like a vintage Fender tone. 

“On some of the riffs, like the track High Stakes, I’d use my 408 – which is basically a humbucker guitar into a Victory for that classic Marshall sound – as well as a Telecaster into a Vox AC30 profile.

“There’s something that happens when you layer up a humbucker guitar into a Marshall-style amp and single coils into something like a Vox. The Telecaster and Vox alone can be just nasty, but you blend those two together and the guitars seem to poke their head through the mix that bit more. I do that all the time for my big riffs, because it helps them sit in the track.”

Don’t Dare has some really interesting usage of sixth intervals served up with Led Zeppelin swagger, and some creamy fuzz for the solo, too…

“That song is a funny one. I actually wrote the riff about 15 years ago, but I didn’t know what to do with it. Everything I came up with sucked. For this album, I showed it to a singer-songwriter friend of mine. I asked him what he thought, he liked how it sounded and suggested where it should go. And it made my day… because I loved that riff. 

“As you mentioned, it has that Zeppelin-y feel to it. The sixth intervals are also harmonized up the fretboard from halfway through. For the solo I got out this Octavia I use all the time, made by a German company called Vahlbruch who do a lot of different pedals. I just love this one. It’s always on my ’board because it sounds nasty.

“It does that classic thing where you switch to the neck pickup and play around the 12th fret, and you get that octave up vibe, but it also sounds filthy when you play chords on the bridge pickup. It’s the kind of sound I could have used for the whole record but no, thankfully I didn’t!”

Kingdom has some pretty colorful modulation at points. What were you using?

“I used my Uni-Vibe as well as some harmonizer stuff on the verse sections, just on the odd little lick here and there. For the vibe sounds, I used a Jam Pedals RetroVibe, which has two knobs and works great. 

“I’m very simple when it comes to pedals. You can get Uni-Vibes with six knobs and it’s like, ‘I don’t know what to do with this!’ The Jam one is great – you plug in, choose your speed and depth and you’re off.”

Was there anything else of note on the ’board?

“I could talk all day about pedals! I have quite a bizarre old pedal that I use a bit, made by Pearl, as in the drum company. They used to be into pedals for a bit. They made this flanger and I used it on the track 100 Days, for the noisy solo in the middle, and the song King of the Hill. It’s not a normal flanger. When you play notes through it, that thing just goes bonkers. It’s total madness, but I love it. 

“The only problem is that it’s old and not true bypass, so it’s very noisy. I don’t use it live, only on recordings. I also have a Hartman flanger I use live, which is another old one, and that’s also on this album.

“The reverbs and delays were done in post-production, because I record everything dry. I used some chorus effects, like the Boss Dimension-C, and some fuzz pedals for different tones. Actually, for the second solo in 100 Days, I did use a Boss DD-500 delay going into a fuzz pedal – I think it was the Keeley Monterey – with some overdrive from the amp. Normally I have my delays in the loop so that they’re crystal-clear, but for this part I wanted a distorted delay that was really thick and heavy. 

“It’s a cool sound, though I wouldn’t use it all the time. I don’t tend to use fuzz a lot; it’s just on the odd solo over here. I like to keep my albums fresh in terms of my guitar tones. There’s nothing worse than hearing an album where it’s the exact same sound for every song. It’s better to mix it up a bit!”

There are some fast two-note-per-string pentatonic runs on tracks like The Fighter and Show Me How to Love, reminiscent of Eric Johnson’s approach to the scale and the modern players he influenced like Joe Bonamassa and Eric Gales…

“I grew up in the ’80s with all the three-note-per-string stuff. That was beaten into me because I guess it was what guitarists were doing back then. I could do that no problem. But then it got cooler to play two-note-per-string lines. Like you say, there are a lot of people doing that kind of stuff now like Bonamassa and Eric Gales, and it does stem from Eric Johnson. 

“I didn’t want to go down the road of being a copy of players like that, but I wanted to learn more about different sequences. Obviously with Eric Johnson, a lot of it is in fives, which can sound really cool. Then there’s the classic Thin Lizzy one, which is threes, or you can try sequences of six. If you want to get really adventurous, you can try sequences of seven. Mixing sequences can be really good for learning this, as well as for phrasing in general…”

Because the accents change?

“Exactly. I might do a sequence of five, then four and back to five, then maybe a three or something… that’s where the rhythm starts to come in, because you’re placing your accents in different places. It’s constantly changing where the one is, and that’s where it starts sounding more rhythmically musical. Lots of people can fly up and down the fretboard sounding amazing and I sometimes think, ‘That’s cool… but I won’t remember it!’ Personally, I prefer the sound of more rhythmic ideas.

“So I just sat down and learned all those sequences in each of the five pentatonic positions. It’s great when you get it up to speed, but the biggest problem is crossing the boxes and moving down the fretboard instead of staying on the same frets. That’s where it gets more complicated.

“Just like anything, you’ll need to get your metronome out and do the hard work. And it gets harder once you’ve learned the technique, because then you have to figure out how the hell you can use it on a track.”

So what helped in terms of understanding how and where to use these techniques?

“My only advice to people trying to play faster stuff in songs is sneak it in by breaking it down into little fragments. Don’t do the whole scale; just play a one or two-second burst. That can be more impressive than a five-second run. 

“I learned about this stuff from Neal Schon and Steve Lukather – they’re the masters of throwing in those sneaky little runs that seem to come out of nowhere. Like you mentioned, on Show Me How to Love, I do that fast run at the end of the solo and it’s the one everyone asks me about…

“They’re always disappointed when I explain it to them: it’s just the A-minor pentatonic scale from the bottom to the top. It’s just played fast, that’s all. When it comes to short and fast bursts, things can get a bit blurry. I could have played something more complicated, but I decided it worked perfectly as a ramp up to that high note.”

Let Me Go nods to the greatness of another Belfast guitarist, Gary Moore. What did you learn most from him?

“Gary is a massive influence on me, like many others. I first saw him play live when I was a kid. My dad took me to King’s Hall in Belfast, which had four or five thousand people and big lights on a big stage. Seeing that show made me realize I had to do this with my life. That’s what got me started off. 

“When it comes to writing leads, everybody should go and listen to what he did. He was the master of gearing a solo, getting the build just right. He starts and gets more and more intense until you feel as if you can’t take it anymore and then you’re out of it. He was the king of that. The solo for Let Me Go had that kind of vibe, though to some extent I try to do that with every solo I play…

“When you’re writing solos, you really only need to think about one thing, and that’s the song. That’s what it’s all about. Does it suit the song, or are you shredding for the sake of shredding?

“I’ve gotten more ruthless in my older age. I ask myself if those massive runs are needed. For Let Me Go, I wanted it to build like a classic Gary Moore lead with a fast run at the end. You can always get your wind machine out when you play that way!”

• The Fighter is out on May 27 via earMUSIC.