Pedals Week 2026: Looper pedals are undoubtedly one of the best writing tools a guitar player can have in their arsenal, but they’re also invaluable for anyone looking to sharpen their skills as a soloist, both technically and theoretically.

You could take the chord progression from one of your favorite songs, for example, and start testing out new ideas – which will help you find your voice and identity on your instrument.

As any Guitar World reader already knows, it can be highly rewarding to learn your favorite solos note for note, but studying the chord progression underneath them will help you put your own spin on things. And this is precisely where a looper will come in handy.

Some of the world’s greatest solos were written over movements that allowed the players to create something truly astounding and unique. The more attention you pay to chords and rhythms, the more impactful your solo might end up sounding.

Play the chords into your looper and start experimenting with different sounds and feels. You might notice how some tracks stay in one key and allow you to build your story a scene at a time without any radical harmonic departures.

In other situations, you might notice that some of the chords you’re playing over allow you to add in other tonalities and venture outside of the key, with options for more ear-catching notes from a different scale – from the introduction of Dorian, Aeolian or Mixolydian flavors to more dramatic-sounding harmonic and melodic minor scales.

So, even if you feel like music theory isn’t a strong point, just a little bit of due diligence can go a long way to impress listeners and help you learn how to deliver a solo that truly soars and sings. Your ear is the most important thing here.

Here are 10 tracks that are great for looping, with repetitive progressions that give you plenty of opportunities to conjure up something extra special.

1. Eagles – Hotel California

It’s one of those songs that’s always in the running for the greatest guitar solo(s) of all-time, with Don Felder and Joe Walsh going head to head before joining forces for some lavish harmonized arpeggios at the end.

The minor chord progression underneath is what gives ample opportunity to create something dramatic, with the V chord being changed to dominant (F#7 instead of F#min) and the IV chord alternating between major and minor instead of staying minor.

This is what allows soloists to switch between B pentatonic and Aeolian to harmonic minor, especially on the substituted chords Ultimately, the goal here is to not stick with one scale – make your solo more fluid and unpredictable to catch listeners off-guard.

2. John Mayer – Slow Dancing In A Burning Room

If you’re looking for the perfect song to master your C# minor pentatonic chops, as well as its E major relative, this could very well be it. Unlike Hotel California, the progression is completely diatonic and therefore feels like it’s all in one key, so it’s more about phrasing and delivery than note choices when targeting chords.

With a laid-back tempo and slinky feel, it’s the kind of musical scenario that calls for big pentatonic bends, and therefore works as a practice tool for pitch accuracy. It’s worth asking yourself what note are you trying to bend up to and how close are you getting.

3. Pink Floyd – Comfortably Numb

Often cited as one of David Gilmour’s greatest moments, this final single from Pink Floyd’s 1979 rock opera The Wall is an absolute masterclass in how to speak B minor pentatonic.

Pay attention to your vibrato and note choice, because these are two areas where Gilmour is known to excel, and see if you can find your own lines that feel natural and avoid over-complication.

The bar where the chords drop from G to F#min and Emin calls for something extra special – think about what you can play to emphasize the movement underneath you and have some fun with it.

4. B.B. King – The Thrill Is Gone

Anyone trying to master the art of 12-bar blues will undoubtedly come across this Grammy-winning hit from 1969. This is another B minor progression that’s all about the bends – know exactly what you’re aiming for and see what happens when you undershoot or overshoot to unlock “the in-between notes” on the fretboard, like the original blues masters.

The minor pentatonic will be your friend here, but if you’re looking to spice things up, try introducing B melodic minor or A# half-whole diminished scales over the dominant chord (F#7) to create tension before the progression returns to root. This resolution from the V chord to the I is often referred to as a perfect cadence.

5. Metallica – Wherever I May Roam

Arguably one of the most famous heavy metal tracks written using the Phrygian scale, the fourth single from Metallica’s self-titled landmark album of 1991 is a great way of introducing yourself to more outside ideas.

For his solo, Kirk Hammett chose to use a mixture of E minor pentatonic and E Phrygian Dominant – which is the fifth mode of A harmonic minor – to great effect. The big jump from a minor second to a major third is a surefire way of capturing people’s attention.

Use it too much, however, and it loses its effect. So try switching between Phrygian, which has a minor third, and its dominant sibling to mix things up – essentially swapping a G for a G# wherever you think it feels right. Follow your ears and have fun.

6. Led Zeppelin – Stairway To Heaven

Maybe don’t try this one while testing looper pedals in your local guitar shop, but if you’re hoping to explore the world of natural minor, this hit provides a perfect backdrop.

The A minor pentatonic scale will do the trick for most of the chords, but highlighting the F chord with an F note will add a sense of sophistication to what you play, showing everyone how you understand the song’s inner workings by targeting the sound of a minor 6th at exactly the right time.

If you listen to the last note of Jimmy Page’s opening line, you’ll hear how it creates an atmosphere of tension after the familiarity of more bluesy sounds.

7. Free – All Right Now

Some of the world’s greatest guitar solos aren’t strictly major or minor, with the player blending ideas from both worlds into one seamless package. This 1970 hit is one of those, thanks to Paul Kossoff’s iconic fretwork halfway into the song.

Maybe start off in A major pentatonic and work your way into A minor pentatonic as your solo builds towards its grand crescendo, or try using both in a ‘call and answer’ fashion. Kossoff’s vibrato also played a huge part in his solo’s overall feel, so experiment with how you shake the notes you’re choosing to let ring – there’s plenty of space to get creative and express yourself here.

8. Joe Bonamassa – Sloe Gin

The New York blues maverick is one of the undisputed titans of the long-form solo, and the title track from his 2007 album is the perfect example of why that is. Once you’ve recorded the chords into your looping pedal, begin with some simple phrases in D minor and slowly build your ideas in terms of intensity and dynamics.

The original solo is almost three minutes long and never outstays its welcome. Holding back is an art form in itself – and playing along to a progression like this is a great way of learning how to flow naturally through control and discipline, keeping the listener on the edge of their seats every step of the way.

The chords to Purple Rain by Prince would also work very well for this – look at it as telling a story with a beginning, middle and end, rather than going in all guns blazing.

9. Joe Satriani – Flying In A Blue Dream

If you’re mainly used to pentatonic scales, Lydian – which is the fourth mode of the major scale – can present some serious challenges when it comes to phrasing.

Jamming along to the chords from this title track on Joe Satriani’s third full-length, released in 1989, is a great way of familiarizing yourself with these shapes and sounds. You can look at C Lydian from a G major perspective, which is its parent scale, or think of it as C major with a sharpened fourth, or even C major pentatonic with the inclusion of a B and an F.

Ultimately, different ways of visualizing a scale can help you explore new sonic horizons. Experiment with every possibility, even the ones that feel more confusing and less natural, because they might push you in a completely new direction.

10. Gary Moore – Parisienne Walkways

Much like Moore’s most famous track Still Got The Blues, this late ’70s hit is a great way of getting used to cycle-of-fifth progressions, also typified by songs like Autumn Leaves and I Will Survive.

Parisienne Walkways is in the key of A natural minor but at the end of the main progression, the perfect cadence of a V chord (E7) into the I chord (Amin) provides an opportunity to use the A harmonic minor scale for extra tension, which is then released by resolving back to the root.

Like Stairway To Heaven, it’s a great way of learning how to change just one note over the right chord and provide more depth for the listener to appreciate, taking them on a journey that travels further and therefore exceeds expectation.

“Joe Walsh and Don Felder would show up for a session and unpack a minimum of 30 guitars and five or six amps apiece,” Hotel California producer Bill Szymczyk says. “It was, ‘Let’s try this with that.’ What I remember most, though, throughout Hotel California, was a whole lot of Gibson Les Paul with a lot of Fender Telecaster.”

No one can be sure exactly how many – or which – Les Pauls make appearances on Hotel California, but we do know about one of them: Felder’s famous 1959 Burst, which was painstakingly reproduced by Gibson in 2011.

As he told Guitarist around that time, Felder bought the original guitar from a traveling dealer who was famous for his superb stable of vintage axes.

“His name was Tony Dukes,” he said, “and every time we’d go through Texas, Tony would show up. He was a horse trader, and he always had something in his truck you wanted. He would show up in a station wagon or a truck that was full of Les Pauls, Teles and Strats, and I bought probably 20 pieces from him over the years.

“It must have been about 1974 or something, right after our first big hit, One of These Nights, when I started making money. He came round, and I think I bought three or four pieces from him – the Les Paul, a Tele, a Strat and some other stuff.” And, as he told Guitar World in 2013, he plugged his LP into a Fender Tweed Deluxe – “just kind of cranked up, with just the guitar into the amp.”

“The acoustic guitar in the intro to Hotel California is a Takamine 12-string with a DeArmond pickup,” Felder added. “We mic’d the acoustic and put that in the center of the mix. Then we took the pickup’s output and ran it through a [Maestro] Echoplex and a Leslie. We mic’d that in stereo so it has this left-to-right kind of swirling, ethereal characteristic.”

“For recording acoustic guitars, I usually used a Neumann KM84,” Szymczyk says. “Don had a pickup on his guitar running to a pair of little Orange amps, and we mic’d them in stereo. The initial opening-guitar intro is an acoustic guitar in the middle and an amp on both sides, with a chorus that is flowing back and forth between the two amps.”

“Felder and I always found that if we both used single-coil or double-coil [guitars], there wasn’t enough contrast to give the songs any personality,” Walsh told Total Guitar in 2012. “It just turned into a guitar wall.” That’s why he famously played a Telecaster on Hotel California, which was perfectly paired with Felder’s Les Paul.

“I played a Tele, through – I think – the Roland Cube, which I used a lot back then,” Walsh added. It was most likely the same Roland Cube he and his Strat used on Life in the Fast Lane.”

On the Hotel California tour, Walsh also used a Fender Black Panel Deluxe Reverb, a Fender Tweed Deluxe and a Mesa/Boogie Mark I.

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

Don Felder is used to pain when it comes to music. I mean, the guy was in the Eagles, a band that epitomized the idea of seemingly seeking pleasure through agony. He took that to a new level when he was carted off the stage in February 2025 due to a pretty serious case of dehydration.

“My phone has never blown up so much in my life as it did when I had that little thing,” Felder says with a laugh.

That laugh is key, as it shows that at 78 – and now incredibly well-hydrated – Felder isn’t about to curb his touring career. “I’m going to rock until I drop,” he says. “But I didn’t think I’d be dropping in the middle of Tequila Sunrise! I thought I’d be dropping during Life in the Fast Lane, and they’d just drag me off the stage.”

Happily, there will be many more stages to drag Felder from. He has a slate of shows planned in 2026 and released a new record – The Vault 1975-2025: Fifty Years of Music – last year. There is, however, a bit of a gray area when it comes to the word “new,” as some, though not all, of the tracks from The Vault are, well, vintage.

For example, Felder wrote Move On, which features some tasty slide work, as an offering to Don Henley and Glenn Frey when he joined the Eagles. Henley and Frey didn’t dig Move On, but Felder did – especially when he recently rediscovered the original 1973 demo in a storage cabinet. He loved his slide work on the track, the roots of which date to an evening spent with Gregg and Duane Allman.

“We became friends,” Felder says. “One night, Duane was sitting on the floor playing slide. I said, ‘You’ve got to show me how to do that.’ He showed me the open tuning and how to pull down the fifth, slide up to the third and have a flat seventh on it. You know, the basics.”

After that lesson, as evidenced by Move On, Felder made the technique his own. “I’ve never tried to copy or emulate Duane,” he says. “He was so far ahead of me. I just felt like, ‘Now that I know how to get around on the instrument, I’ve got to learn to sound like me.’ I can’t sound like him; no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t do that. But I stole as much as I could from him, watching him play in the old days.”

The Vault is actually a perfect marriage of old and new – a middle ground, if you will. And that’s just the right fit for Felder, who’s sometimes overlooked when it comes to ’70s guitar titans. Not that he cares.

“I never did it for the money, the fame or the legacy,” he says. “I did it because I was fascinated with music. I love to play and write. I love to go to the studio when it’s dark, turn it on and have no idea what I’m gonna do. I pick up a guitar, see what comes out and put it on record.

“I don’t know what I’d do if I retired; I’d be bored to death! It’s fun to have something to be excited about, and I always hope somebody else will be excited, too.”

You recently released The Vault 1975-2025: Fifty Years of Music. What’s the story with that?

I moved out of Malibu in 2000 after going through five major fires – and all the mudslides and road closures – and moved into town. I had a little studio I dismantled and put into storage, and all my tapes and demos were in storage, too. I hadn’t seen that storage locker for 20-something years, so it was time to go through it.

There were boxes of cassettes, CDs and DAT machines that recorded half-inch four-track, half-inch 24-track, 16-track and all the stuff I’d been working on since 1974 and 1975 as demos. I said, “I don’t even know what this stuff is!”

One of the demos you mentioned is Move On.

I’d just been invited to join the Eagles, and [ex-Eagles guitarist] Bernie Leadon told me, “If you want to write songs in this band, just worry about song structure – don’t write lyrics or melodies. Give those ideas to Don and Glenn, and they’ll write lyrics if they like the track.”

So one of the very first things I did was, with a four-track, I recorded myself playing on a cardboard box for the drum track, and then I played bass and slide. It was a very basic, raw demo of the idea. I hadn’t heard it for 50 years.

What did you think when you heard it again?

I went, “I remember that slide part! I loved that slide part.” When I submitted it to Don and Glenn, they went, “I like the slide, but there’s really not much of a song there,” so that’s what I heard, the slide part. I said, “I like that track. I’m gonna finish this.” I finished it, reproduced it, re-recorded the slide part, did the lyrics and harmonies and brought new life to an old idea.

Steve Lukather plays on Digital World. What’s it like working with him?

When he comes over – and he’s played on just about every solo album I’ve made except for the first one, Airborne [1983] – we spend the first 45 minutes to an hour just laughing, telling stories and having a great time before we plug in and tune up. It takes 30 minutes for us to walk through an idea, trade solos and create harmonies. I enjoy working with Steve. He’s brilliant, and a lot of fun to hang out with.

You re-recorded 1981’s Heavy Metal (Takin’ a Ride). How’d you approach It?

When I hear the original recording, it sounds technically dated. It was all analog, and just the echo chambers; it doesn’t sound up to the level of technology today. I decided I’d re-record it in today’s technology, which sounds 100 times better. If you were to play the old two-track version of the stereo version and compare it to today, there’s a massive difference.

You’ve been at it for a long time, which probably means you’ve got gear you’ve had for just as long. It would be easy to fall back on all of that, but you’re leaning into what’s new. Why?

I use vintage microphones, and I have a rack of classic outboard gear I use to record. I just think the process of recording at 96 kHz with high-resolution, quality analog gear on the front end is a wonderful combination.

I use some great new guitars and amps, and I’ve got six or seven amps that Alexander Dumble re-did for me. I’ve got Bogners and tons of different amps and guitars. It’s easy to go in and multi-track. I was looking at something yesterday; I think it’s I Like the Things You Do. There might be 30 guitar tracks on that.

What’s the reason behind that?

Some of them are doubles; some are split left or right. Some are effects I use. There’s just a lot of different ideas and approaches to making a track. Instead of just playing a thing top to bottom with the same rhythm guitar, that, to me, is old school. I was trying to explore, taking old ideas musically and making them sound modern with new techniques and approaches.

Do you still fall back on your guitars from your Eagles days?

I have close to 300 guitars. They’ve all been photographed and given a name. They’re separated by manufacturer; everything by Gibson is in one rack, everything from Fender is another. If I want to pick up my ’57 Strat from the locker, I can open up my spreadsheet, walk into the vault, pull the guitar off the shelf and bring it back – or have somebody go get it.

Of those 300 guitars, which is the most important?

My ’59 Les Paul. I played that on just about every Eagles record that I recorded with a Les Paul. I’ve recorded with it a lot for my albums, and I used it on a couple of tracks on this record, too. I used it on I Like the Things You Do and Free at Last. It feels like home.

Do you see yourself working with Gibson on more signature gear?

No, not right now. I’ve dealt with Gibson since I started playing music, and they released the Don Felder Hotel California copy of my ’59 Les Paul and the white Hotel California [EDS-1275] double-neck guitars, probably 10 or 12 years ago. They sold out immediately.

I don’t know that I’ll do many more endorsements. I really respect the fact that Gibson did it, and was honored that they asked me to do it. I work very closely with them; their Custom Shop makes things for me that are spectacular.

You talked about rocking until you drop – and you’re still writing songs.

I write all the time – almost every day. I write, scribble down a little something while listening to something on TV. I’ll hear an orchestra and go, “That was a beautiful change, back that up…” I’ll grab an acoustic and figure out what chord progression this orchestra was playing, put it on my phone, record it and collect bits and pieces.

When I’m on the road, it’s hard to write music; I can write lyrics, but not necessarily music. So when I come back home, I’m in the studio writing, recording, producing and coming up with ideas. Not all of them will become finished products, but you never know what’s going to come out until you step into it.

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

“The desert is where mirage and myth are created, and so is Hollywood,” Eagles founding member Don Henley tells Guitar World. “We are just as susceptible, now, to illusion as the pioneers were – if not more so.”

That mirage, myth and illusion was immortalized on Hotel California, the Eagles’ big American dream-come-true. “Hotel California was obviously our creative peak,” Henley says. “Every band, every artist, has one.” Released 50 years ago – on December 8, 1976 – it’s not only their personal best, but the third-best-selling album of all time, at 32 million copies and counting (the Eagles’ Their Greatest Hits (1971–1975) is Number 1).

The epic title track inspired a thematic album about the toll of dreams, touching on fame (New Kid in Town), the high life (Life in the Fast Lane), relationships (Victim of Love) and westward expansion (The Last Resort). The message throughout was that dreams often look different up close and have a way of vanishing in thin air.

“We were always keenly aware of the transitory nature of fame and fortune,” Henley says. “The entire Desperado album was basically about that. We had witnessed all the wreckage alongside the Yellow Brick Road. Pop culture, for lack of a better term – and which might be an oxymoron – is all about the new.

“You grind away for seven or eight or 10 years, and suddenly, boom, you’re on the radio; your face stares out from a billboard on Sunset Boulevard. Then your sophomore album flops, your record label drops you, and you’re right back to square one – ‘Please drive through.’”

While square one wasn’t part of the Eagles story, chasing the new was. And the turmoil and pressure to keep outdoing themselves led to substance-fueled power struggles that turned once-close friends into rivals and led to a breakup three years after Hotel California. As Glenn Frey once said, “We made it, and it ate us.”

Significantly, the mythic desert passage is one that all five band members on the album had made respectively in the late ’60s and early ’70s. It was a more innocent time, as they relocated from the South and Midwest with hopes of being part of the burgeoning hippie country scene in and around Laurel Canyon and nightclubs like the Troubadour.

The spot where everyone from Kris Kristofferson to Carole King made their debut is where Henley first joined Glenn Frey for a beer, starting a friendship and the creative nucleus for the Eagles. Back then, the two would ride around L.A. in Frey’s ’55 Chevy, nicknamed Gladys, “plotting and planning.”

It took a while for things to take shape. Both were already in groups signed to the same indie label. Henley’s Shiloh made one album, produced by Kenny Rogers. Frey’s Longbranch Pennywhistle (with J.D. Souther, a key collaborator on Hotel California) did one that included Wrecking Crew cats James Burton and Larry Knechtel. Neither record troubled the charts.

The duo joined Linda Ronstadt’s touring band in 1971, which soon added bassist Randy Meisner of Ricky Nelson’s Stone Canyon Band and guitarist Bernie Leadon of the Flying Burrito Brothers. The proto-Eagles quartet played together only once, during Ronstadt’s engagement at Disneyland, on the Coca-Cola Terrace in Tomorrowland. It was a prophetic spot for the birth of a band that would become as ubiquitous – and successful – as America’s favorite soda.

Within two months, thanks to help from Jackson Browne, they’d signed to David Geffen’s Asylum Records. Their first two albums – Eagles and Desperado – produced by Glyn Johns, were released in 1972-73, inside 10 months. And thanks to Take It Easy and Peaceful Easy Feeling, the group quickly climbed to the top of the country-rock heap. But they craved a bigger heap, especially when they found themselves on the bill with arena rock acts.

“Opening for Jethro Tull and Yes was odd because it was such a mismatch, musically, but it did have the effect of toughening us up,” Henley says.

“But our main problem was that we didn’t have a repertoire. We had released only one album, and Take It Easy was our only hit song at that point. But somehow we survived. Glenn was right saying so-called country rock had its limitations in terms of commerciality, but I think we defied those limitations as we expanded our stylistic perimeters to include more different veins of music. Ronstadt did that, too.”

In the studio, the toughening up got a boost from a new producer. “My first thought was, ‘I don’t want to do a cowboy band!’” Hotel California producer Bill Szymczyk tells Guitar World.

“But they wanted to rock. They’d started their third album with Glyn, who was one of my heroes. But they weren’t happy. Glyn was a taskmaster and had rules about no drink or drugs in the studio. Meanwhile, the guys had heard The Smoker You Drink, The Player You Get, which I did with Joe Walsh [in 1973], and said, ‘Who produced this?’”

“Bill was – and is – a lover of rock ’n’ roll, blues and funk music,” Henley says. “He had produced Edgar Winter and B.B. King, among others. After a long day of grinding away on our own material, Bill would put an Ohio Players or a Parliament album up on the big playback speakers in the studio, and we’d kick back and listen. It was fun. The great thing about Bill was that he was willing to let us follow our own instincts, which, at that time, were leaning more toward rock and R&B.”

Szymczyk called Johns to get permission to take over the album. “The answer was, ‘Better you than me, mate!’” A week later, they cut Already Gone, a rousing rocker that gave Frey a chance to bust loose with some razor-tooth lead guitar. Suddenly, the band was getting the edge they wanted.

“It was the beginning of a great marriage,” Szymczyk says, “with each album doing better than the one before, and then Hotel California, which was the high point of their career – and mine.”

For 1974’s On the Border, they added hotshot guitarist Don Felder, who’d been touring with David Blue and Crosby & Nash. Bernie Leadon, who’d played with Felder in high school bands, said, “Felder was a really great guitar player, but when he joined, I could see the writing on the wall for me. I thought, if I’m going to leave, better that a friend of mine gets the gig.”

Leadon stayed for 1975’s One of These Nights, which further upped the ante on extended solos (the title track and the underrated Visions were both six-string showcases). “We were balls to the wall on that album,” Szymczyk says. “They wanted to rock, and we proceeded to damn-sure rock.”

With each album came more fame, more pressure to outdo themselves and more substances. In the mid-’70s rock world, cocaine was the drug of choice. “It was a writing tool, but one that brought out the worst in everyone,” Frey once said. But even without drugs in the mix, there was always creative friction between Henley and Frey.

“It was the Lennon and McCartney thing,” Szymczyk says. “Don writes this way, Glenn writes that way, but together they write better than they do separately. There was always a lot of competition. Frey was competitive in everything! Darts, shooting pool, you name it. He wanted to win. Henley wasn’t as up front about it, but he knew very well what he had, talent-wise. We called him Golden Throat.”

Since the days of cruising around in Gladys, there was one thing the two leaders did agree on; they wanted their band to be the biggest on the planet. And that meant pushing the rock sound to the limit. As Leadon predicted, that put him in their crosshairs. The guitarist had played lead on Take It Easy and Tequila Sunrise. He’d co-written Witchy Woman. His background with the Flying Burrito Brothers had imbued the Eagles with country-rock cred.

For all that, his relationship with them was never easy. Exhaustive touring (he’d already logged five years of roadwork before he joined) and the drug use (he’d kicked those habits) only deepened his discontent. “None of it sat well with Bernie,” Szymczyk says. “The further we went into rock, the less he liked it.”

He remembers asking the guitarist what he thought of a take of One of These Nights with Leadon replying, “I think I’m going to go surfing.” Things came to a head one night in 1975, backstage at the Orange Bowl. As Frey was rallying the band, Leadon poured a beer over Frey’s head and walked out.

Enter Joe Walsh. Late of the James Gang, Walsh was three albums into a successful solo career in 1975. He was already friendly with the Eagles from crossing paths on the road. When they approached him, his response was, “Being part of a group would take a whole lot of weight off my shoulders.”

But it’s easy to forget what a mismatch it seemed. Walsh recalled in The Guitar Greats, “I think 80 percent of people said, ‘That’s stupid – there’s no way it’s going to work.’”

Not only did it work, it changed the band’s energy level. “For starters, things got louder,” Henley says. “Joe, being a bona fide rock ’n’ roll guitar slinger, was the perfect foil for Don Felder. They propelled one another in a friendly-but-competitive sort of way. We had upped our horsepower. This is not to take anything away from Bernie, who was – and still is – a highly skilled musician.”

“As we got into Hotel California, it was like, ‘This is a match made in heaven,’” Szymczyk says. “The friction with Bernie was gone, and it was replaced with somebody that could just blister with a forceful edge.”

Speaking of forceful edge, in Walsh, the Eagles now also had a resident bad boy and gleeful wrecker of hotel rooms. His instrument of choice was a chainsaw. Dressers, chairs, tables got sliced, diced and tossed from windows.

“Keith Moon and Joe were good buddies, and that, of course, led to some mischief,” Henley says. “It was amusing for a little while, but it eventually became a very expensive hobby, and we were beginning to get barred from some of the hotels we liked to stay in. So, after a while, the chainsaws got locked away in storage and other kinds of dramas replaced the ‘remodeling’ of rooms and hallways.”

He adds, “But, at least Joe got a hit song out of it,” referencing 1978’s Life’s Been Good.

In 1976, the Eagles played 68 shows worldwide, from Tucson to Tokyo. For most bands, that would not be a year to make a new album. But the Eagles did, grabbing studio time whenever and wherever they could.

“The demands of touring definitely made it more difficult for us to stay in a creative space, particularly in terms of songwriting,” Henley says. “But, because we were young – and driven – we managed to learn how to juggle. Did the work suffer? Probably, but we did the best we could, given the circumstances we were in. It’s a demanding job, feeding the machine. The machine is always hungry.

“But momentum is important,” he continues. “Once you’re on a hot streak, it’s wise to try to maintain it. Otherwise, you get forgotten or replaced pretty quickly. Back in the ’60s, the Beatles had set an impossibly high bar, both in terms of quality and quantity. So record companies had come to expect an album or two every year. But the Beatles had been able to stop touring and focus solely on recording. Touring was a necessity for us so that we could pay for rent and gas.”

The first sessions for Hotel California were in March at Studio C, the coveted big room at the Record Plant in Los Angeles, with Szymczyk back behind the board. “We’d do two or three weeks, then the band would go back on the road,” he says, recalling they had only one finished song – Meisner’s Try and Love Again. Beyond that, just a “handful of fragments, licks and phrases.”

As Walsh said in Buzz Me In, “We took all of that, put it on a table and said, ‘Okay, let’s pretend this is a jigsaw puzzle,’ and we started piecing things together.”

The jigsaw puzzles could be complex. On the surface, the album’s first single, New Kid in Town, is a soft-rock sigh. But structurally and harmonically, it’s one of the most-involved Eagles songs. Henley says, “That one was mostly J.D., with some essential input from Glenn in terms of words, melody and arrangement, and a few lyrical contributions from me. It’s a great piece of work.”

Modulations, shifting choruses, meticulous ornamentation from Felder on electric and Meisner on the guitarrón Mexicano, wrapped in a harmony cascade that earned a Grammy for Best Vocal Arrangement (“It had parts out the wazoo,” Szymczyk says). How did those beautifully complex arrangements get written?

“Well, nobody ‘wrote’ anything; it wasn’t that formal,” Henley says. “We did everything intuitively, including vocal harmony arrangements. First, we’d decide who was going to sing the lead vocal and then assign harmony parts around that, depending on the key of the song and where the melody sat within the chord progression.”

In the studio, they worked from “2 to 2, with a dinner break at 7,” usually at Dan Tana’s, a favorite red-boothed old Hollywood eatery, next door to the Troubadour. Though friends dropped by the studio, mostly it was the band and Szymczyk, who they nicknamed “Coach.”

“They said I was the Don Shula of rock ’n’ roll,” he says, referencing the Miami Dolphins’ legendary honcho (who was at the helm for their perfect 1972 season). “I was a player’s coach more than Shula,” says Szymczyk with a laugh.

He kept a keen eye and ear on the sessions and was a wizard with a tape-editing razor. And on Hotel California, he had to lay down what he called “the six o’clock rule” to make sure recreational activities didn’t derail progress, including his own.

“Everything was getting a little out of hand by three in the afternoon, so I was like, ‘Okay, enough of that. No beer, no blow, no reefer, no nothing until six.”

That worked for a few weeks; then the grumbling started. Szymczyk says, “I’d be changing reels in the control room, and I’d hear them muttering, ‘Is it six yet?’ followed by ‘It had better be.’”

On the initial pressings of the album, “It is six o’clock yet?” was etched into the runout groove of Side A.

On Side B, the etched phrase was, “VOL is five-piece live.”

“That’s because we were proud that we got that song, Victim of Love, in one take without any edits,” Szymczyk says. The rocker began with a Don Felder guitar instrumental that he passed to Henley and Frey. They brought in J.D. Souther again, who came up with the concept – that having a broken heart is like being a victim of a car crash. In that scenario, all three were frequent car crashers, burning through relationships. “Dudes on a rampage” was how Henley described it.

When it came time to do an album, he and Frey would usually move in together. Before Hotel California, they were briefly ensconced in a Beverly Hills house that once belonged to actress Dorothy Lamour. With panoramic 360-degree views, it was nicknamed “the Eagles’ nest.”

They were an odd couple – Henley the tidy one, Frey the lovable slob, leaving mountains of cigarette ash everywhere. The togetherness might not have helped their friendship, but it was great for songwriting.

Victim of Love’s tale of betrayal and disillusionment was paired with a stuttering, crunchy groove. Felder had assumed he would sing lead, but after a week’s worth of takes, his vocal was deemed “not up to band standards.” Henley recorded the lead while manager Irving Azoff took Felder out to lunch to break the bad news.

In the summer, Szymczyk moved the sessions to Criteria Studios in Miami. “The guys were actually quite happy to be out of L.A. and away from all the partying and the hangers-on,” he says. The only challenge in Miami was the occasional ear-splitting squall coming from the studio next door, where Black Sabbath were recording their 1976 album Technical Ecstasy.

Meanwhile, in the world outside the studio, the United States was basking in its bicentennial. On the surface, the country’s 200th birthday was all stars and stripes, but that was tainted by a Watergate hangover and relentless dark stories in the news.

“The ‘peace and love’ idealism of the ’60s had faded by the beginning of the decade,” Henley says. “The so-called counterculture, due in part to its own excesses, had disintegrated. The U.S. was trying hard to focus on the bicentennial, but the Cold War continued and the Boomer generation had slowly realized that the same corporate forces that had always been in charge were still, in fact, in charge, and there was an air of capitulation.

“There were now the realities of jobs and families to consider. Gone was the dream of a new kind of America; gone was the appetite for rebellion. ‘We haven’t had that spirit here since 1969.’”

One of the album’s standout tracks was both a celebration and critique of L.A.’s decadence and the band’s own excesses – Life in the Fast Lane could’ve been subtitled Nervous, Edgy Feeling.

“There are a great many of our songs that could be retitled Note to Self,” Henley says. “Excess – too much of a bad thing or a good thing – was a subject we examined, both from a personal perspective and an American cultural standpoint.”

The song’s classic riff began as what Walsh called his “coordination drill.”

“I had this lick that I played that I would warm up for a show with,” he told Paul Shaffer on Plus One. “It’s an exercise between your right and left hand, faster and faster. I was just playing, warming up for the show, and Glenn comes busting in my dressing room and says, ‘What the hell’s that?’ ‘I don’t know, it’s just this lick I warm up with.‘ He said, ‘No, that‘s an Eagles song, dude!’”

On In the Studio with Redbeard, Frey said the title came one day after a crazy car ride with a drug dealer nicknamed The Count. Going 90mph, Frey asked the dealer to slow down, and the answer came – “It’s life in the fast lane!” With that title, he and Henley wrote the lyrics and melody together.

“We knew it was going to be the most rock ’n’ roll thing the Eagles had attempted so far,” Walsh said. “They turned me loose on that one.”

And what guitar was he using? “That’s a Strat,” Walsh told Total Guitar, “and the amplifier was probably this little orange Roland Cube I was using a lot back then. I found it to be a pretty darn good little amp for recording with a Strat, by turning it up pretty good to make it work.”

The killer riff doubled with guitar and bass, cliff-hanging power chords and trademark four-part harmonies on the chorus. This was a classic Eagles record, yet one that sounded like nothing they’d ever done. And as sonic icing, Szymczyk employed a Jimi Hendrix trick – the “Electric Ladyland two-track flange technique” – to add a whooshing sound to the song’s off-ramp exit.

“When I suggested phasing at the end of the song, Henley and Frey were skeptical,” he says. They thought it might sound too much like the Small Faces’ Itchycoo Park, which Szymczyk says was the inspiration. “I just wanted listeners to feel the rush of the wind in their hair!”

An ocean breeze was in Don Felder’s hair the afternoon he got the idea that would become Hotel California. In his Malibu beach house, noodling on a 12-string Martin acoustic, he hit on a Spanish-sounding chord progression. He put it down on a reel-to-reel four-track, then layered on syncopated electric guitars and a samba beat from a Rhythm Ace drum machine.

He sent it off to Henley and Frey on a cassette with another dozen snippets. They liked what they called “the matador in Mexico” vibe of it and experimented with lyrical and melody ideas.

Henley took the cassette in the car, his favorite place to write. He says, “I think it has something to do with movement and a constantly changing view. Just sitting in a room and trying to find inspiration can be stifling; it’s a static situation. Driving, if you’re not in heavy traffic, creates a feeling of flow that can free the imagination and call up memories and images while the music’s playing.”

After a week or two, the song took shape. “The hotel concept came first, and then the melody,” Henley says. “Sometime in May of ’76, Glenn and I had gone to see Neil Simon’s play California Suite in Los Angeles. But that was after we had come up with the hotel concept; seeing the play was a ‘field research’ trip, just to see if it would help us to flesh out our initial idea. But it wasn’t very helpful; it wasn’t dark and spooky enough for what we were after.”

Or maybe the title influenced them, because their spooky inn became the Hotel California, and in turn, a metaphor for everything from the myth-making of the American Dream to an artist’s search for the muse and spiritual meaning.

The recording of the song took some searching, too. “We cut the track several times, first at Criteria Studios, shortly after Felder had given me the demo,” Henley says.

“The Miami recording was a rough arrangement with the working title ‘Mexican Reggae.’ The second time we cut it was at the Record Plant in L.A., after Glenn and I had come up with some ideas for lyrics and melody, but that recording turned out to be in the wrong key, at least for singing.

“There was often a schism between what key was best for the guitars and what key was best for the lead vocal. At the end of the day, though, the vocal has to take precedence. There are workarounds on the guitar – tunings, capos, etc – but you can’t capo a voice. Or at least you couldn’t then. So we ended up cutting the final track in Miami in the key of B minor with the choruses going to G major.”

Szymczyk recalls that the final version consisted of “33 separate tape edits from five different takes.”

Aside from being the album’s thematic centerpiece and the Eagles’ best song, it also rode out on one of rock’s most iconic guitar duels, with Felder and Walsh trading sizzle and sting, one-upping each other, then finally merging in triumphant two-part harmony.

“We worked really well together,” Walsh told Guitar World while promoting Analog Man in 2012. “It was competitive. We brought out the best in each other. We liked to kick each other in the butt! He would play something, and I’d get an attitude, like, ‘Oh yeah? Listen to this.’ And he’d go, ‘Wow, listen to this!’”

“For two days, we workshopped the hell out of that,” Szymczyk says. “We had amps out in the studio, but Felder and Walsh were in the control room with me, one to the right, one to the left, like gunfighters! Felder was the ultimate technician, always a tad on top of the beat. And Walsh was the ultimate ‘feel’ guy, always a tad behind it. Together, they were phenomenal. Those two days were one of the high points of my career.”

“There are at least half a dozen guitar tracks on the original recording,” Henley says. “In live concert settings, this required Felder to play a double-neck guitar, with the 12-string neck being capo’d on the seventh fret for the intro and the breakdown, and the six-string with no capo for the single-line phrases and the tag solos.

“One of the unique things about the song is that it ends with extended dual guitar solos. Skynyrd had done something like that a couple of years earlier.”

Another thing it shared with Skynyrd’s Free Bird was a length that wasn’t exactly radio friendly – six and a half minutes, to be exact. “The label wanted us to do a single edit, and we all said no way,” Szymczyk says. “Obviously, we were right to.”

After seven months of off-and-on recording, the album wrapped in October.

The cover artwork, designed by John Kosh (who also handled Who’s Next and the Beatles’ Abbey Road), featured a photo of the Beverly Hills Hotel taken from a cherry picker 60 feet above Sunset Boulevard at dusk. Built in 1912 in a Mediterranean Revival style, the pink stucco hotel had hosted famous guests from Marilyn Monroe to Frank Sinatra.

A month after the album came out, when the hotel learned that the Eagles had used the image without permission, they threatened a lawsuit, then dropped it when they realized their bookings had tripled because of the record’s success.

Hotel California was released December 8, 1976, and certified platinum in its first week. It went to Number 1 on the Billboard 200, where it stayed for eight weeks. Reviews were glowing. Creem said there were “no weak tracks; the music flows majestically every step of the way.”

Phonograph Record praised its “peerless harmonies" and said it was “pretty and punchy, as the best albums of fellow troubled hedonists Steely Dan and the Beach Boys are.” NME said, “There’s no laurels-resting, and a lot has gone into its meticulous crafting.”

While Szymczyk calls the record a “quantum leap forward,” Henley’s estimation is more modest. “I don’t know if I’d call it a ‘quantum leap,’” he says. “One of These Nights had three big hits on it. But, in terms of growth and consistency and range, I’d agree that Hotel California was an improvement.”

But the 10-month, 72-date world tour that followed was grueling, so much so that the band’s road crew nicknamed it “The Prison California.” Everyone traveled with their own little entourage. Walsh and Felder had their faction, briefly entertaining the idea of forming their own band.

In History of the Eagles, Henley said, “Glenn and I saw ourselves as the leaders, but other people saw us as dictators. You just cannot have five leaders in a band. It doesn’t work.” But according to To the Limit: The Untold Story of the Eagles, even the two leaders had stopped talking and would only communicate through second parties.

There were also cocaine-induced physical ailments. Stomach ulcers all around. Henley suffered back pain. Frey’s nasal lining was shot (he’d have two surgeries before getting his nose repaired with teflon). By the end of the tour, Meisner had become persona non grata after refusing to sing Take It to the Limit at one show; he left the band shortly after.

The Eagles managed one more album, 1979’s difficult The Long Run (“We called it ‘The Long One,’” Szymczyk says) then broke up after a benefit concert where Frey and Felder openly threatened to fight each other on stage during the performance. It would be 14 years before they reunited.

Despite one album of new material in 2007, the Eagles have become a heritage act, playing the hits – albeit one of the highest-grossing ones on the circuit. After Glenn Frey died in 2016 at age 67, they soldiered on with his son Deacon and Vince Gill taking his place. And so it’s gone over the past decade.

Meanwhile, there are at least 10 high-profile Eagles tribute bands who are on the road as much as the Eagles were in their ’70s heyday. And though classic rock radio has mostly disappeared, subscription services have kept the music playing. Hotel California alone passed two billion streams on Spotify in October 2025.

During the Eagles’ 2026 residency at Las Vegas’ Sphere, Henley confided to CBS Sunday Morning that “This year will probably be it. I’ve said things like that before, but I feel like we’re getting toward the end.”

Meanwhile, their Sphere setlist contains the three key tracks from Hotel California – New Kid in Town, Life in the Fast Lane and the title song. With sold-out audiences singing along to every word and guitar lick, this is music that is now an indelible part of musical culture. It’s a reminder of how the world felt and sounded in the mid-’70s, and also how the American Dream continues to roll along that desert highway, toward the light, but surrounded by the dark.

It makes the album sound just as relevant as it did 50 years ago. “I could make a case for it,” Henley says. “The political chicanery, the national delusion, the undoing of decades of environmental progress, the rebirth of the military-industrial complex. I’ve lived long enough to see that we go around in circles. I think it was Mark Twain who said, ‘History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.’”

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

Considering Don Felder owns nearly 300 different electric and acoustic guitars, it was always going to take a special six-string to stand out as the pick of the bunch. But one instrument holds its headstock higher than the rest, and the evidence is there to hear.

Speaking in Guitar World magazine, he has reasoned that his collection is justified. Each gets the same amount of love.

“They’ve all been photographed and given a name,” he says. “They’re separated by manufacturer; everything by Gibson is in one rack, everything from Fender is another. If I want to pick up my ’57 Strat from the locker, I can open up my spreadsheet, walk into the vault, pull the guitar off the shelf, and bring it back.”

It’s an insane level of organization that speaks to his care for each instrument. Every purchase isn’t just another one for the pile. But which is his most important?

“My ’59 Les Paul,” Felder confirms. “I played that on just about every Eagles record that I recorded with a Les Paul. I’ve recorded with it a lot for my albums, and I used it on a couple of tracks on this record, too [The Vault 1975-2025: Fifty Years of Music]. I used it on I Like the Things You Do and Free at Last. It feels like home.”

Felder has previously revealed he parted with $1,200 for his secondhand Les Paul from a man called Tony Dukes in Texas. He'd pass through the state with a pickup truck full of old Telecasters, Stratocasters, and Les Pauls. But Glenn Frey's “kind of derogatory” remark about the guitar led him to dub it the “cheap Les Paul.”

The guitarist has worked with Gibson on two signature guitars, with the double-neck EDS-1275 and 1959 Les Paul reissue dropping in 2012. He doesn't expect to reconnect with the firm anytime soon.

“I really respect the fact that Gibson did it, and was honored that they asked me to do it,” he says, diplomatically. “I work very closely with them; their Custom Shop makes things for me that are spectacular,” but adds that another signature release is not on the cards.

Elsewhere, Felder's former Eagles bandmate Don Henley has explained how Bono helped inspire the band's comeback following Glenn Frey's passing, while also praising relative newcomer Vince Gill as a valuable asset to the band's latter-day line-up.

The band will retire after their record-breaking Las Vegas Sphere residency comes to an end this year, but that's proving enough time for Joe Walsh to debut some new toys on their stages, with a fast-rising electric the latest to make an appearance.

Felder’s full interview features in the latest issue of Guitar World, which can be ordered from Magazines Direct.

The Eagles has been the home to a handful of guitar greats – but the introduction of one such player into the mix helped spell the end for one of the band’s founding members.

The mid-1970s was a transitional period for the Eagles, who, after dropping their first two records – Eagles and Desperado – began to embrace a harder-leaning rock edge in a quest to be the biggest band on the planet.

To help, Don Henley and co recruited Don Felder – a hotshot young player who at the time had been touring with David Blue and Crosby & Nash.

However, his arrival helped speed up the existing creative tensions between the band and their founding guitarist, Bernie Leadon. When this sound became the priority, he knew his days were numbered.

“Felder was a really great guitar player, but when he joined, I could see the writing on the wall for me,” Leadon remembered in the new issue of Guitar World. “I thought, if I’m going to leave, better that a friend of mine gets the gig.”

Felder’s appointment coincided with the Eagles wanting to push their rock sound to the limit. And, speaking to Guitar World, Henley and producer Billy Szymczyk recalled how it led to Leadon’s departure.

“None of it sat well with Bernie,” Szymczyk says of the band’s new direction. “The further we went into rock, the less he liked it.”

Leadon stuck around for 1975’s One of These Nights, but it wasn’t exactly smooth sailing in the studio.

The friction between Leadon and the band was apparent. Szymczyk recalls asking Leadon one day what he thought of a take of One of These Nights. Leadon replied, “I think I’m going to go surfing.”

Things famously came to a head between Leadon and the band when, while backstage one night at the Orange Bowl in 1975, Leadon poured a beer over Glenn Frey’s head and walked out.

In the wake of Leadon’s departure, the Eagles hired Joe Walsh. He was, as both Henley and Szymczyk admit, a far better fit for the band, and the perfect companion for Felder’s high-octane rock style.

“For starters, things got louder,” Henley says of Walsh’s appointment. “Joe, being a bona fide rock ’n’ roll guitar slinger, was the perfect foil for Don Felder. They propelled one another in a friendly-but-competitive sort of way. We had upped our horsepower.

“This is not to take anything away from Bernie, who was – and still is – a highly skilled musician.”

“As we got into Hotel California, it was like, ‘This is a match made in heaven,’” Szymczyk adds. “The friction with Bernie was gone, and it was replaced with somebody that could just blister with a forceful edge.”

Head over to Magazines Direct to subscribe to Guitar World. The latest issue features a deep dive into 50 years of the Eagles, as well as interviews with Michael Angelo Batio and Jerry Cantrell.

On paper, the Eagles’ hiring of bluegrass guitarist Vince Gill as they adjusted to life after Glenn Frey’s passing was a surprising choice. But Don Henley says he’s become a talismanic figure in the group.

The 69-year-old has previously spoken about how the Eagles gig has allowed him to flex his secret rock guitar chops, and since stepping into the group in 2017, he’s been doing just that. As the band nears their end, with their latest tour set to be their last, Henley is full of praise for the band’s final line-up.

“It's been wonderful to have Deacon and Vince in the band,” he tells SiriusXM in light of their pop-up channel returning. “Vince Gill, of course, is one of the best musicians in the world. He's the only guy who could have filled that space.

“It took two guys to replace Glenn,” he adds, with his son, Deacon, in a move inspired by U2, joining simultaneously. “Those are the only two guys in the world, I think, that could have done it.”

The band will retire after their record-breaking run of shows at the Las Vegas Sphere comes to a close in November, eclipsing Dead & Co.'s residency in the process. Gill is ensuring they go out on a high.

“Vince is a real dream to work with,” Henley continues. “He can play anything. He can sing anything. He's got a great personality. Always laughing and joking. It's been a real pleasure to have those two guys in the band.”

Since joining the band, Gill has confessed to going on “guitar safaris” with Joe Walsh, and sees the gig as a career highlight. But with a new solo album, 50 Years From Home: End of the Night, released just last month, he seems set to move to a new chapter in his career.

The same could be said of Joe Walsh, who, having recently debuted a Yamaha Revstar on stage with the Eagles, doesn’t look to be slowing down any time soon.

Meanwhile, the Eagles' latest guitar recruit, Chris Holt, who was sworn in following Steuart Smith's retirement, recently reflected on the “terrifying job” of trading solos with Joe Walsh.

The perception of Vince Gill as anything but a rocker is not true, judging by the versatility he’s shown during his last 10 years with the Eagles.

“Whatever you’re walking into, you try to be authentic,” he says. “You’re trying to fill up space with the right sound, just like a painter with the right colors. I’m doing the same thing with guitars.”

He’s currently promoting a series of EPs titled 50 Years from Home, with the idea of giving his followers their musical fill.

“What you’re striving for is many subtitles,” he explains. “It’s about phrasing, editing, and not playing as much as maybe you think you should. I try to be as musical as possible and say the most with the least.”

Whether or not the Eagles are planning to hang it up later this year, Gill isn’t done. “There’s an awful lot of music inside this old knucklehead – I gotta try and get it out! I don’t have as much time left in this world as I once did. I’m trying to accommodate my love for being creative more than anything else.”

Meanwhile, he regards his experiences with the Eagles as “the gift of a lifetime,” adding: “What I’ve learned most is how important songs are. But I’m only getting to do it because of something sad.

“It’s because of the tragedy, the passing of Glenn. I’m not beating my chest saying, ‘I’m in the Eagles!’ I’m just grateful to be there, and help continue a legacy that’s pretty unmatched.”

What inspired your 50 Years from Home EP series?

Over the last bunch of years, I wound up with tons of songs. And the funny thing these days is that, in the record industry, you can kind of do whatever you want. People like a lot of content and a lot of information. So I’m trying to accommodate – I had all of these songs and I said, ‘It’d be fun to see what they turn into.’

What keeps you inspired as a songwriter and guitarist?

In all honesty, I’m as good as I’ve ever been. I’ve not seen my abilities go the other way – which at some point they’re going to. You’re gonna have trouble breathing; you’re gonna have arthritis; you’re not gonna be able to play like you could. Those things are coming but they haven’t shown up yet. So I feel compelled to take advantage of that.

You’ve been with the Eagles for around a decade. How has that changed you as a player?

My ears have taught me how to be authentic. You don’t have to play one way – you can play all kinds of ways if you want to. I remember early on, we were playing Rocky Mountain Way and I was just rippin’ these power chords for Joe. Don Henley’s looking at me like I’m crazy. He goes, “I thought you were a bluegrasser!”

I said, “Well, I am – but I’ve played a good bit of this stuff too!” I’ve always prided myself on being a chameleon. If you wade into any music there is and do it with a sense of authenticity, it doesn’t sound like a country player trying to play rock or a rock player trying to play bluegrass.

So you really haven’t had to adapt your style?

It’s all in there! It’s not much of a guitar chair for me because they didn’t need that. They needed a singer more than another guitar player. I play a little bit, but not very much – not nearly as much as I do in my own shows.

I think you’re being modest.

Well, I play a couple of solos, and that’s about it! But I knew what I was supposed to do when I joined the band. I’m doing the job at hand, trying to authentically replicate the way Glenn sang those songs.

I’m mostly playing rhythm all night long; it could be crashing big chords for Joe on In the City and Life’s Been Good. I get with play with Joe on Funk #49 – we trade back and forth and have a little fun that way. I just play what’s appropriate and use the right guitar for the right part, like an acoustic for Lyin’ Eyes, Take It to the Limit, and Tequila Sunrise.

Speaking of appropriate gear, what do you use while recording?

I’ve got an awful lot of blackguard Telecasters, but I always pull the white one out; it’s the most familiar to me and sounds to my liking. And I’ve got a ton of different amps, so I don’t lean one sound and one guitar, and just make it “one size fits all.”

People see my guitar collection and get kind of wide-eyed, going, “Why do you need so many?” I say, “If I were a painter, do you think I’d paint with just one color?” They all do different things, sound different, and play differently.

You mentioned your white Tele, which has become synonymous with you. How did you acquire it?

I got it in 1978 – it was the first Fender I’d ever bought. I always wanted a Telecaster. A guy named Bob Woods had a guitar store in Dell City, Oklahoma, and I happened to be there that day. They’d traded about 20 guitars for another 20 guitars, and I watched this whole big swap go down.

I saw that white Tele, picked it up, played it, and it just felt like a million bucks to me. I asked, “Would you sell this?” He goes, “Sure – $450.” I’ve had it ever since.

What makes that Tele special?

It just felt right in my hands. Certain neck profiles don’t feel good because I don’t have big hands. A lot of necks from the early Fender days were a little on the big side for me. But I’d never had a Telecaster before, so I didn’t have any reference for saying why this one was great or not. I just loved the way it felt, how it sounded, and how it played.

It’s been the sound of my life for nearly the last 50 years. I’ve played it on just about everything – Pure Prairie League records, my solo records, and sessions I did for other people. Even though I have 15 or 20 other blackguards from the same era, that’s always the Tele I gravitate toward.

How big of an influence has playing with Joe Walsh been on your gear choices?

I pretty much use the same stuff I’ve been using. I use a lot of Little Walter stuff live; I really like the way those amps will take a humbucker, a Tele, or a Strat – whatever you put in front of them, they sound real musical.

When we’re out on the road, Joe and I go on guitar safaris. He’ll buy 10 guitars while I might buy one. He’ll say, “You only bought one!” And I say, “Yeah, but my one costs more than the 10 of yours combined!”

Joe is such a joy to spend time with and play with. He was a big inspiration to me when I was playing in my little bands in school. We played all those James Gang songs like Rocky Mountain Way. It’s pretty surreal to be standing across the stage from him, getting to play those songs with him that I always loved.

I always loved that he didn’t have to play a lot to impress you – he just played with such restraint. He’s still willing to play with brevity. So many musicians aren’t; they have to play everything and a lot!

You never really know what Joe’s gonna play. We’ll start Funk #49, and we’ll get into a little duel. He’ll play something, and I’ll try to play it back at him in some way. It’s not always note for note, but it’s always fun to see what he’ll play, and watch him laugh when I play something back to him. We’ve just become really sweet friends.

Don Henley has said that 2026 will mark the end of the Eagles. Have you thought about what life will be like once those guys retire?

I’m in such a beautiful position – I don’t have to decide anything! It’s been fun having a boss again, doing something for someone the way they want it done. I’ve tried to further the creativity they’ve shown and the wealth of great songs they came up with. I’m just part of reproducing those songs. I don’t get to lay claim to any notes of music they’ve created.

What will you cherish most about being a part of the Eagles story?

For me personally it’s been validation of the work I’ve done for the last 50 years. That work is why they chose me to try to carry their catalog forward. I was really grateful to be the one they asked – that’s not lost on me.

What will you do after the Eagles play their last show?

I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished in my 40 or 50 years of being an artist, and I’ll continue to do that. You know, the kids won’t get Christmas gifts as good as they’ve been getting for the last 10 years! But I look back on it all with nothing but gratitude.

• The Eagles continue to add 2026 tour dates to their schedule. Head to Gill’s website for details on his 50 Years From Home series.

Vince Gill has proven that he's more than a soft rocker or a bluegrasser. Judging by his past decade of wielding guitars with the Eagles, versatility is Gill's trump card.

“Whatever you’re walking into, you try to be authentic,” Gill tells Guitar World in a new interview.

“More than anything, that’s what I’ve strived to accomplish. You’re trying to fill up space with the right sound, just like a painter with the right colors. I’m doing the same thing with guitars.”

Following the death of the sorely missed Glenn Frey in 2016, the remaining Eagles asked Gill to join the band. As an avid fan of both the band and Frey's solo material, Gill realized he had big shoes to fill – but it quickly led with his ethos.

“My ears have taught and shown me how to be authentic,” he says matter-of-factly. “You don’t have to play one way. You can play in all kinds of ways if you want to.

“I remember early on in the process of playing with the Eagles, as we were playing Rocky Mountain Way, I was just rippin’ these power chords for Joe,” he laughs.

“Well, Don Henley’s looking at me like I’m crazy, and finally I said, ‘What?’ He goes, ‘I thought you were a bluegrasser…’ I said, ‘Well, I am. But I’ve played a good bit of this stuff, too.’ I’ve always prided myself on being a chameleon.”

Gill goes on to say that he knew the role he was expected to fulfill when he joined the band, and it was always a case of “trying to authentically replicate those records, and solos, and the way Glenn sang those songs.

“I’m just doing the job expected of me,” he concludes.

Guitar World's interview with Vince Gill will be published in the coming weeks.

In more Eagles news, Don Henley recently revealed how he “didn't think it was feasible” for the group to continue after Glenn Frey's passing and how U2’s Bono was crucial for the band’s survival post-Frey.

Eagles bandleader Don Henley says he “didn't think it was feasible” for the group to continue after Glenn Frey's passing, revealing that it was Bono that helped get the band back on track.

Frey, the Eagles' founding guitarist, passed away aged 67 in January 2016. By Henley’s own admission, the loss felt like it spelled the end if the band. A year went by in which he felt the Eagles were lost, only for two factors to change that.

“Our manager, [Irving] Azoff, came to me, and said, ‘You know, I've been talking to a lot of people in the industry, and there are still a lot of fans out there who would like to see you come back and play music,’” he recalls in a new interview with CBS Sunday Morning. “I said, ‘Well, I'll think about that.’

Henley’s condition was clear: “I'll only do it if we can get Glenn's son to be in the band,” he says, referring to Deacon Frey. “I wanted the blood.

“There's a tradition, both here and in Europe, called The Guild, where the son apprentices with the father, whether it's carpentry, glass blowing or any kind of craft,” he explains. “The son works with the father until the son develops an ability high enough to go out on his own and carry on the tradition.”

And, as Henley admits, it was the U2 frontman who put him onto the idea and ultimately steered him towards hiring Deacon.

“I have to give Bono credit,” he continues. “Because he reminded me of that when I was at a convention in Europe. We were sitting by each other at dinner, and I was telling him that I was in a quandary about what to do about the band. And he said, ‘Well, you know, there's this thing called The Guild...’

“Ringo's son is a drummer; there are a lot of offspring in the business. Then we decided that Vince Gill would be the other person who would be capable; it took two people to replace Glenn.”

Henley praised Gill's appointment, too, saying his talents stretch far beyond the realms in which he made his name.

“He's so much more than a country artist, and he was delighted to get the chance to play rock n' roll,” Henley says. “He showed up the first day with these big amplifiers, and I was like, ‘What is that stuff?’ ‘They're amps.’ ‘Okay, half that.’”

With the pair in their ranks, and with Deacon Frey playing many songs each night on his late father's electric guitars, the band has enjoyed a remarkable turnaround. They've also broken records with their ongoing residency at the Las Vegas Sphere, surpassing a record set by Dead & Company's stay at the new venue.

“The Sphere run has been a late career blessing for us,” Henley smiles. “We're grateful for it. It's a nice way to go out.”

Recently, Chris Holt became the latest guitarist to join the group. He has hailed Gill as the band’s best guitarist, and explained why he takes on less of the heavy lifting during their live shows.

Best of 2025: Over the holiday season, GW is shining the spotlight on some of its biggest stories of the year.

Tim Pierce is one of the most prolific session electric guitar greats in the game. From pop megastars Michael Jackson, Miley Cyrus and Demi Lovato, to Stevie Nicks, Shinedown and Adam Lambert, there are few big hitters he hasn't worked with.

But, he says in a new YouTube video, in a bizarre turn of events he was banned from being backstage moments after opening for The Eagles on what he calls “the biggest night for musicians in history at that time”.

It was New Year's Eve at the turn of the Millennium, and Pierce was part of Linda Ronstadt's backing band. Jackson Browne and the Eagles were set to follow them at the then-newly opened Staples Center (now the Crypto.com Arena) in Los Angeles. Tickets ranged from $50 up to $1,000 apiece. This was no humble bash.

“It's the reality of big-time show business,” he says in his latest YouTube video, discussing the events that followed Ronstadt’s set. “Every musician and artist I knew had a huge gig for great fees that night. No matter who they were, somewhere in the world, they had a huge gig.”

The group, which also included another seasoned session guitarist, Waddy Wachtel, played a smattering of warm-up shows before the big night, on which security was understandably tight.

“Now, I even heard that Don Henley had trouble with security,” Pierce recalls. “I think he had a moment of, 'Hey, don't you know who I am?' So, there was some sort of kerfuffle. Some angry words were exchanged.”

Pierce says his set went by quickly as the band performed at a multi-million dollar venue that “slowly began to be filled with New Year's Eve revelers”. He intended to watch the rest of the historic evening from the side of the stage and made full use of his Access All Areas pass as the frivolities moved through the gears – until matters took a turn.

“About halfway through the Jackson set, my wife and I went backstage and I was informed all of a sudden that my backstage access was about to be revoked and denied,” the guitarist then says. “We were informed that at the end of Jackson Browne's set, we were no longer welcome in the building.

“My mind went into overdrive and I began to investigate and I realized that all of the Eagles crew had a tiny yellow dot – a sticker – that had been attached to their laminated photo ID credentials. We didn't have the yellow dot. My mind began to spin and I began to formulate workarounds. What could we do to stay in the concert?

“I was about to give up and then I remembered that my friend [audio engineer] Dave Covelli had spent four years with us on the road with Rick Springfield. He was the manager of the Staples Center. That meant he ran every event, sporting or concert. And I said, 'Dave, any chance of us getting credentials to stay? Because they want us out of here.'”

Cavelli obliged and Pierce proceeded to sit by the side of the stage with his new “unimpeachable” Staples Center-issued pass. The acreage by the side of the stage was now “a ghost town as Eagles staffers passed us by with daggers in their eyes”.

“But there was one more moment of awkwardness,” he continues. “We decided to leave and drive away before the encore to beat traffic. So, I went backstage to my dressing room, and an LAPD officer stopped me.

“Even with all my credentials, during the Eagles concert, it was a forbidden zone to go back into the dressing rooms. I had to start telling this nice officer my story and [that] my guitar was backstage. So, he gave us an exemption to walk down the hallowed halls of Eagledom.”

Other recent Tim Pierce anecdotes include how an off-the-cuff guitar solo went down in Bon Jovi folklore, how Kurt Cobain changed the guitar landscape in the 1990s, and the time PRS hung up on John Mayer after he called regarding the prospect of making his now-best-selling Silver Sky.

Meanwhile, there’s been plenty of plot twists for the Eagles in 2025. Long-serving guitarist Steuart Smith was forced to retire from the band in January amid health issues. Smith’s replacement, Chris Holt, has also spoken to Guitar World about his nonexistent audition and how he’s settling into the gig.

Joe Walsh has become the latest big-name guitarist to shift a score of stage-played gear at auction – and there are some rather notable lots in the collection.

The Eagles guitarist is looking to give some of his pre-loved, and rather quirky, a second life with Julien’s Auctions.

Auction highlights include a 1966 Framus Strato Gold De Luxe 12-string guitar (est. $15,000-$20,000). It featured on his debut album with Barnstorm, which he formed after leaving the James Gang. It's an odd-looking build, with gold control plates and a woodgrain-like pearl celluloid pickguard covering its sunburst finish, while gold single coil pickups complete the look.

“I worked on it for a long time,” he says of the workhorse guitar. “Tuning it was really hard, especially because I was stoned a lot.” The fact that it has a whammy bar didn’t do him any favors, either.

There's also a Paoletti Wine Series Telecaster (est. $4,000-$6,000), which was custom-made for Walsh. The 25.5" scale guitar is made from century-old reclaimed chestnut – they were formerly wine barrels – with a thin satin finish. It was a gift from the Paoletti wine vineyard in Italy, and, according to Walsh, “it's got 100 years of mojo in it”.

For other notable picks, see the heavily played 2015 Duesenberg signature guitar, which is prototype #1 (est. $4,000-$6,000), and features Morse code inlays as a nod to his radio ham side gig. Or how about the Breedlove Mark I Electric Guitar (est. $5,000-$6,000) he played in the video for Ringo Starr's Fill In The Blanks?

There are around 420 guitars and other instruments in the collection – choose from a violin, a Blue Moon Cittern, and several lap steels if you’d prefer – among some other interesting picks.

All proceeds will go to Walsh’s charity, Vets Aid, which offers financial support to veterans after they've served their country. It's a cause close to Walsh's heart, given that his father was a flight instructor for the first US operational jet-powered aircraft, the Lockheed F-80 Shooting Star.

Vets Aid has raised over $4M so far, and this auction is set to give that figure a healthy boost.

Head to Julien’s Auctions to learn more.

Elsewhere, Walsh's exacting ear for tone left his guitar foil confused, and then hugely impressed. It served as a valuable lesson.

Don Felder is 77 and in February of 2025 he had a health scare, collapsing on stage due to dehydration. You’d think he’d be mulling the idea of slowing down, but when Felder talks about his career, there’s an urgency to his voice. “I’ve got to work and produce as much as I possibly can while I’m still in good health, and still happy and inspired by it.”

To that end, Felder is holding up his end of the bargain, releasing The Vault – Fifty Years Of Music earlier this year. The album is a collection of old, new and reworked material. “I walk into my studio with it being totally dark, [thinking], ‘I have no idea in the world what I’m going to do,’” Felder tells Guitarist.

His approach seems a bit whimsical, if not entirely romantic. But given his prowess – which has produced classic solos on songs like the Eagles’ One Of These Nights, Hotel California and his beloved cut on Heavy Metal – who can argue?

But that’s not to say that Felder isn’t without a plan. In fact, he’s downright techy: “I open up Pro Tools and I’ve got everything set up,” he says. “Then I grab an electric guitar and see what comes out.”

Though many of Felder’s iconic solos present as pre-composed, it’s his underrated improvisational nature that guides his playing. “I love walking into my studio and going, ‘Let’s try this….’ The worst thing that can happen is it goes to digital heaven. But I don’t erase anything, to tell you the truth.”

Felder’s solo career is booming, with his live shows well attended, but there’s no denying his association with the Eagles, a band he left under difficult circumstances in the early 2000s. Nevertheless, the veteran guitarist is past all that and keeps a cheery outlook bred through the Malibu sunshine he finds himself in while off the road. And unlike the Eagles, who are currently playing out a residency at Las Vegas’s Sphere following the ‘Long Goodbye’ tour, Felder isn’t hanging up his six‑string anytime soon.

“It’s a great life,” Felder says. “I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to do this. I’m still in good health and writing and recording good stuff, so I’m going to keep doing it. My philosophy is: I’m going to rock till I drop.”

You had a health scare mid-performance earlier this year. How are you feeling now?

“I’m feeling fantastic. I didn’t realise what dehydration is, or what it could do to you. When it hit me in the middle of the set on that cruise ship, I had no idea what was going on. It was like somebody reached over, took the light dimmer and just slowly dimmed it down to zero.

“I was holding onto the microphone stand just to keep myself from collapsing when Jaden [Osborne], my girlfriend, who was on the side of the stage, recognised it immediately and came over to help me get off the stage.

“Ironically, there happened to be a paramedic in the crowd from Gainesville, Florida, of all places – where I come from – who came backstage and took me down to the medical place.

“They gave me an IV and 30 minutes later I was back, saying, ‘Let’s go finish the set.’ But they said, ‘No, everybody left,’ so I took the rest of the day, and the next day I continued the show. But I didn’t realise how important it was to stay hydrated, especially at sea.

“I don’t drink alcohol or do any drugs, so I couldn’t figure out what the hell it was. But it was just a total matter of not drinking enough electrolytes. So I’m back to 100 per cent.”

You have a new record, The Vault – Fifty Years Of Music. What’s the story there?

“I lived in Malibu for 29 years and after the fifth major forest fire running through, though I’d never lost a home, I was at the point where I was tired of the roads closing and the mud slides from the rain. I said, ‘I’m just going to move into town.’ So I packed my studio up and carted it into town, and in 2000 we put it all in a storage unit.

“I hadn’t seen anything in that storage unit for over 20 years, and about four or five years ago I took a look and found a huge box of four-tracks, cassettes and CDs. I thought, ‘I don’t even know what this stuff is…’ but as I played them, I kept hearing some of these ideas, which were great. They were just thumbnail sketches of song ideas, so I took those and finished them – and also wrote two new songs.”

You’ve got a reworked version of Heavy Metal on the record. What led to that?

“After listening to it since 1981 or ’82, just the tonality and the quality of it sounded kind of dated, you know? I thought, ‘I really like that song. I love playing it, and I play it at almost every one of my live shows. I just want to do a fresh version of it.’ I used 96k Pro Tools and with the remastering that we have today you can make things sound really great. So I went back and re-recorded it. It was fun to do and it just sounds a lot better to me.”

Is it true that Heavy Metal was a song that started with the Eagles but found life after you broke out the solo?

“It was going to be a follow-up on The Long Run to Hotel California. It had a real kind of heavy hand to it and I wrote it so that Joe [Walsh] and I could play even harder than we did, or edgier than we did on Hotel, against each other. It had harmony parts, trading-off solos and a much harder rock edge.

“We went in and recorded the basic track for The Long Run but never got around to finishing the lyrics. So we had a basic track, but it just died in the Eagles’ vault until I got a call years later about doing a song for the Heavy Metal movie [released in 1981].

“Without the title Heavy Metal, that song could have, and should have, in my opinion, been finished on an Eagles record with Joe and I following up on Hotel with some dazzling guitar solos and stuff. It didn’t happen, we just didn’t have time.

“We had a tour booked and planned, and we were just dying to get through this record [The Long Run], the final mixes, cleaning up vocals, mastering, artwork. We just didn’t have time to do everything we needed to do. There were a lot of dropped ideas along the way, but I took the idea and turned it into Heavy Metal.”

How about the opening track, Moving On, which dates to 1974 when you first joined the Eagles?

“It was the first demo I wrote for the Eagles as a contender for a song that might wind up on an album. Bernie Leadon, my high school friend and [Eagles] bandmate told me, ‘If you want to write songs for the Eagles, don’t write lyrics, only write music, like a song structure.’

“So it was like intro, first verse, second verse, chorus, third verse, chorus, solo, chorus, chorus, chorus, outro, right? Every time I would write song ideas, I wrote them with no lyrics, no vocals, no nothing. Don Henley loved that song, it was just that we had no time to actually do a basic track of it.

“We were interested in finishing an album, getting it out and getting back on the road, doing promotion and live shows. That song literally sat in that cardboard box since 1974, I guess, until I pulled it out, and said, ‘What is this?’ I listened to it, and went, ‘Oh, yeah, I remember this… this was a great idea.’ That’s how I breathed new life into some great old ideas.”

On the subject of the Eagles, people often talk about your Hotel California solo, but you had a lot of improvisational moments with the band, too.

“I guess my most famous improvisation was the introduction on the acoustic version of Hotel California for Hell Freezes Over [1994]. We had worked it out at rehearsal, and Henley said we needed an acoustic version because everybody was doing the unplugged thing back in the mid-90s.”

It seems precarious to alter such an iconic song, especially given the reunion nature of Hell Freezes Over.

“I worked up an arrangement where I didn’t use steel-stringed acoustic guitars because we’d have sounded like a bunch of flat-top country pickers [laughs]. I have pretty good acoustic chops on nylon-string guitar, so when we went and got on stage, we were ready to do the soundcheck, Henley says, ‘Hotel needs a special introduction.’ I said, ‘Well, what are you going to say? Are you going to talk about how it came about or what it means?’

“Henley said, ‘No, no, it needs a musical introduction. Make up something.’ So I’m sitting on stage, there are about nine to 10 cameras, and an orchestra behind us all sitting there waiting for me to make up the introduction of Hotel California…

“I said, ‘Well, okay, you guys play a chord and I’ll diddle with this chord and then I’ll diddle some more.’ I played a chord, diddled all the way up to the end of it, and when I hit the last note, I said, ‘I want you guys to strum the last chord and then we’ll start percussion.’

“We did that, made two takes of it – because we did two shows in the same outfits and clothes so we’d have a lot of footage – and when we got to the studio, we listened to it and that one was the one, the first one was what wound up on the record. A lot of times, my first shot from the hip is the best thing that I’ve got.”

Your acoustic work on The Sad Café from The Long Run seems to have an improvisational quality to it. Was that the case?

“The ability to just make something up on the spot and being able to improvise has just been a wonderful thing for me to explore. But when we were doing The Sad Café, I’d been playing acoustic on it and Don said, ‘Why don’t you do a guitar solo here?’

“I said, ‘Well, I can’t do an electric guitar solo in the middle of that song. Let me come up with something that’s an acoustic solo.’ It was the first time I had multi-track harmony acoustic guitars playing a solo. It was just something new, different. I said, ‘Let’s try this…’”

Given that your fans expect you to play a lot of well‑loved Eagles material live, are you able to improvise as much as you’d like?

“When I walk out on stage, I have to play a lot of things that I recorded and wrote with the Eagles and co-wrote with those guys. I have to play it pretty much verbatim. I can’t go out and jam on the end of Hotel California; people will go, ‘What is he doing? That’s not like the record!’ So I’ve got to play stuff like people have heard it for the last 40 or 50 years. To be able to open my creativity in my studio is really a blessing and I love doing it.”

We’ve heard a lot about your Gibson Custom Shop guitars in recent years, but what else are you using these days?

“I have a little over 300 guitars and just about every name, brand and model you can think of. I met Leo Fender out in Corona at the Custom Shop when he was still alive, and I’d go out there, grab four or five necks out of the trash can and they’d give me unfinished bodies.

“If I wanted to have pickups, I’d go up and see Seymour Duncan, my buddy, and we’d wrap some pickups up there, which I still do.

“So I’d build these Strats – I’ve probably got six or eight Stratocasters that I just built out of parts that are in my locker. That, to me, is really kind of fun because I’m building things that are totally different from what you’ve ever seen, heard or used in the past. It’s a different-sounding Strat. I love experimenting with just building stuff.”

Do you have one guitar to rule them all, so to speak?

“My original ’59 Les Paul that I spent $1,200 on. When I bought it, I got it from a guy named Tony Dukes in Texas. Every time [the Eagles] came through Texas, he would show up with either a station wagon or a pickup truck full of old Telecasters, Stratocasters, Les Pauls – you name it. And we’d buy everything he had.

“I bought that Les Paul for $1,200, brought it to soundcheck, opened the case and Glenn [Frey] went, ‘Wow, that’s really nice. What’d you pay for that?’ I went, ‘1,200 bucks…’ Now, that was a lot of money then and so Glenn said, ‘Cheap!’ in a very kind of derogatory way. So I have always called my ’59 Les Paul ‘the cheap Les Paul’. But now, today, it’s probably worth well over a million bucks, if not more. I think it was a good investment at the time [laughs].”

How do you view your solo career versus your work with the Eagles?

“Looking back, the Eagles were a very controlled environment. We were all trying to do the absolute best that we could do, from writing lyrics, vocal tracks, guitar parts – everything. And whoever was the one who came up with the strongest idea and had the greatest energy in a certain direction, that’s what we followed.

“But it wasn’t like I could walk in and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got this rough idea for a song here,’ and I’d start playing a groove and have everybody just jump on it. It didn’t work quite that way. A lot of what happened was under a kind of group control, if you know what I mean.”

What does the future look like for you in terms of live performances and new music?

“The future looks really bright. I love touring, despite the fact that when you tour, you spend more time every day tracking than you do actually playing music. That’s why when I’m going from A to B, I always break out a laptop and start writing down song ideas.

“I hate to have that time just evaporate and not be productive. I got to the point where there’s nothing else I would rather do, and there’s nothing more fulfilling, exciting and that I’m more passionate about in life than writing, recording and touring.”

• The Vault – Fifty Years Of Music is out now via Frontiers

In 1976, The Eagles released one of the best guitar songs – and, in turn, one of the best guitar solos – ever committed to tape when they dropped Hotel California. A few years later, plans for a spiritual sequel were in motion – but they never came to pass.

Instead, that song, which had been mooted as a follow-up to Hotel California, found life outside the confines of The Eagles – and ended up as the theme song for an animated feature film five years later.

Speaking in the new issue of Guitarist, Eagles guitarist Don Felder addressed rumors that his solo hit Heavy Metal had originally been conceived as a song for the band, confirming it had been intended to be another excuse for him and Joe Walsh to let loose on some “dazzling” guitar work befitting a Hotel California sequel.

“It was going to be a follow-up on The Long Run to Hotel California,” he states. “It had a real kind of heavy hand to it and I wrote it so that Joe [Walsh] and I could play even harder than we did, or edgier than we did on Hotel, against each other.

“It had harmony parts, trading-off solos and a much harder rock edge. We went in and recorded the basic track for The Long Run but never got around to finishing the lyrics.”

The track went unfinished, but Felder would bring it out of its early retirement a few years later when he got tapped to write a song for animated sci-fi feature film Heavy Metal. He had the perfect song in mind for the gig.

“We had a basic track, but it just died in the Eagles’ vault until I got a call years later about doing a song for the Heavy Metal movie,” he continues.

“Without the title Heavy Metal, that song could have, and should have, in my opinion, been finished on an Eagles record with Joe and I following up on Hotel with some dazzling guitar solos and stuff.

“It didn’t happen, we just didn’t have time,” Felder continues of Heavy Metal’s fate. “We had a tour booked and planned, and we were just dying to get through this record [The Long Run], the final mixes, cleaning up vocals, mastering, artwork.

“We just didn’t have time to do everything we needed to do. There were a lot of dropped ideas along the way, but I took the idea and turned it into Heavy Metal.”

Back in 2021, Walsh discussed the makings of Hotel California, revealing the iconic lead lines were not pre-planned – and were instead entirely improvised.

Visit Magazines Direct to pick up the latest issue of Guitarist, which also includes an interview with Mark Knopfler and his former guitar tech – who discusses why he convinced Knopfler to swap Strats for Les Pauls.

After Hotel California, the Eagles’ landmark 1976 album, saw them rise from country rockers to just plain rockers, Don Felder and his bandmates should have been on top of the world – but all was not well in paradise.

The warm smell of colitas was not rising up through the air, and there was a distinct lack of cool wind in the band’s collective hair. Exhaustion, infighting, drugs and alcohol – basically the tropes that were supposed to drag down rock bands, as per Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous – had all but derailed the Eagles.

After the supporting tour for Hotel California, they could have stopped – and they should have stopped… for the night (okay, that’s my last Hotel California reference) – but they didn’t. Instead, they hit the first of what would be five studios in 18 months and kicked off the sessions for the aptly titled The Long Run.

Don Felder, one of the classic Eagles lineup’s trio of guitarists alongside Glenn Frey and Joe Walsh, remembers this period well. “The Long Run was a kind of crazy album,” he says. “We started without very many song ideas.”

Given the sheer strength of Hotel California, it’s strange to think the Eagles suffered from a lack of songs, but it’s true.

“Joe had joined during the Hotel California album,” Felder says. “When we got to The Long Run, we were right off the road, going into the studio, and nobody had a break or time to start writing. It was a difficult time personally, physically, emotionally and creatively in every way.”

On the surface, The Long Run doesn’t seem too far off from Hotel California. But Felder refers to The Long Run sessions as a dark time, adding, “If you look at it, that’s why the record is black. And when you opened it up, the photo of us was dark.”

To Felder’s point, if you dig deeper into The Long Run, themes of darkness linger. Be it The Disco Stranger, with its overt disdain for four-on-the-floor beats, or the bewilderment of I Can’t Tell You Why, The Long Run is a snapshot of a band on the brink of self-destruction. But it wasn’t all bad, as Felder and Walsh traded off plenty of quintessential riffs and solos.

“Joe and I always had a great personal relationship and a great deal of respect for each other,” Felder says. “We developed, without even talking about it, the ability to dance together, where somebody would take a step back and support the person who stepped forward, and that person would step back and support the other person to step forward.”

After a year and a half of self-inflicted damage, The Long Run hit shelves in September 1979. Although not as lauded as Hotel California, The Long Run eventually sold in the millions, giving the Eagles a proper followup.

Still, critics weren’t initially kind to The Long Run, likely as a market correction for lavishing so much praise on Hotel California. But no shade thrown the Eagles’ way could do more damage than the wounds already inflicted, and by 1980, the Eagles had imploded.

Darkness, sadness and an eventual public breakup will always be inextricably linked to The Long Run. But like most things in life, there are two sides to every story, and with separation, Felder can see some positives.

“We made the absolute best product we could,” he says. “Fortunately, it’s kind of stood the test of time. Even though it took a long time to produce, I think it was well worth the effort, the energy and not letting stuff slide by that really shouldn’t be on the record.”

Did the Eagles feel pressure to follow up Hotel California with a great album?

“I think Glenn [Frey] said it best when he said we “created a monster with Hotel California, and it ate us.” We were trying to get back up over the bar because we had raised the bar every album with the songwriting, performance, vocals and guitars; it was more and more refined toward being spotlessly perfect.”

Notoriously, The Long Run took 18 months to record – in five different studios! That had to be draining.

“Bernie [Leadon] had left the band during the very end of the One of These Nights album [1975] because he kept saying, ‘We need to take a break. We just needed to take three weeks or a month off, stop doing it, go to Hawaii, get some rest, get off drugs and drinking and just recharge ourselves, and then regroup.’ Nobody wanted to do that.”

Why not?

“Everybody kept saying, ‘We’re pushing this uphill, we’ve got to keep going.’ [Bernie’s advice] was probably the most sound advice anybody gave that band, and it was only upon his departure that I realized how right he was. The longer we stayed at that pace, the more difficult it became to be happy, in a good mood, have fun and write great songs. It was just very heavy to continue on.”

Despite the heaviness and darkness surrounding the band, The Long Run boasts several great songs, including Those Shoes, which features you and Joe on dueling talk boxes.

“I wanted to do some unique stuff with Joe, so I wrote the music for what became Those Shoes. I wanted to do two talk boxes, like two trumpets that would play that line. So Joe and I played harmony talk boxes, and we had a place for a talk box solo, which had never existed on any of the Eagles’ records. It was a new sound in those days.”

You also wrote the music for one of the more rocking tracks on the record, The Disco Strangler.

“I wrote the song that Don Henley started writing lyrics to called The Disco Strangler. It was back in the disco days, and [Don] hated disco. [Laughs] He hates the four-on-the-floor beats; he just wanted to kill disco, you know? So he took this little music track I had written and he wrote [the lyrics for] The Disco Strangler.”

It’s it true that your solo song Heavy Metal originated from The Long Run sessions?

“I wanted to do a follow-up to Hotel, where Joe and I could play off each other, much like we do in Hotel. We recorded a basic track tentatively titled You’re Really High, Aren’t You? but we didn’t have lyrics, and I was just writing the music. It was much heavier, sort of toward the heavy metal edge, but it would have been more refined, like Hotel was, but with a harder rock edge. We loved it.”

If you loved it, why didn’t that track end up on The Long Run?

“We ran out of the time we had allocated to finish the album. We had a tour starting, so there’s a track that was written by me and played live by the Eagles, but it never got finished. So when I got a call from a movie director to come to the studio and write songs for this crazy animated movie called Heavy Metal [1981], I thought of the track and said, ‘Maybe I could take the idea musically and turn it into something for this movie,’ because it was never going to happen with the Eagles at that point. So I did.”

How did you, Glenn and Joe divide the guitar parts on the rest of The Long Run?

“A lot of that just kind of fell into place as things happened. It really fell into what was needed for each song and who was going to play what. We never played three Gibsons; it was always a Strat, a Tele and a Les Paul, or a Gretsch, just to have tonal separation. You could recognize one player because his sound was so different from the others.

“I remember Joe came into the studio one day with this old Strat. He brought it in, plugged it in and was sitting there playing, and I said, ‘That thing sounds great. Let me hear that,’ and I picked it up, and it sounded like me. [Laughs] It didn’t sound like Joe. So we just kind of figured out, ‘Okay, who’s gonna play what?’”

As far as lead guitar goes, how would you describe the yin and yang between you and Joe while recording The Long Run?

“As we were soloing together, he would go up and be playing high and I’d be playing a solo underneath him halftime, and he would be playing faster, and I’d be playing low and slow. Then he would start coming down, so I’d start going up, and he’d be playing low and slow and I’d be playing fast and high.

“It was a dance we worked out without ever having talked about it. It was just a natural way we figured out how to play together, sense each other and respect each other.”

Despite it being a long process during a dark period, did you feel good about The Long Run the first time you listened back to it?

“I thought we had done a really good job with what he had. We had people with casts and wounds and crutches to get through the very few last months of finishing that record. But when you listen to it, you don’t hear any of that. It just came across really great. I was happy that we had done it, you know, put a bow on it and put it out.”

Do you look back on The Long Run fondly now that you’ve had some separation?

“Yeah. I think the combination of all the players I was in the band with, like Bernie and then Joe, and Randy Meisner and then Timothy [B. Schmit], who joined to replace Randy, the music and the writing were of a really high quality.

“We just kept setting the bar higher and higher and higher in songwriting, lyrics, vocals and guitar parts and in the way the band sounded and the way it was recorded.”

• The Long Run is out now via Elektra.
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

Chris Holt’s passion keeps him busy – along with being the new Eagles guitaris alongside Joe Walsh and Vince Gill, he’s Mike Campbell’s sideman in the Dirty Knobs, and he’s also working on his solo career.

“Music was the perfect storm for me,” he says of how he started. “I was the right age to be reeled in by MTV. I got hooked immediately and I suddenly started noticing guitar players everywhere.”

While he appreciated the coolness, he knew there was more to it. “Everyone around me in Dallas was playing blues. I started digging into more complex stuff, trying to learn solos. I didn’t have formal training; I just played by instinct.”

Holt noticed that many of the players around were Stevie Ray Vaughan clones and Clapton devotees. And while Chuck Berry caught his ear, he couldn’t escape ‘80s shred, though he admits: “I’ll never able to shred in the Van Halen school.”

His lack of proper technique led him down another path. “I started loving players like Page, Townshend, Harrison, Walsh, Gilmour and Campbell – not hardcore shredders, but rather great melodic and textural players who were also composers.” It’s resulted in working with Campbell since 2022 and now taking over from Steuart Smith in the Eagles.

Holt releases his fourth solo album Across the Milky Way on May 9. After that he’s back on the road with his other bands. “Fingers crossed, all this stuff will continue for a while longer,” he says. “I’m having too much fun. I don’t want the train to stop.”

Is there a tone secret you’ve carried through your various gigs?

“I just try to keep it simple. I prefer tube amps with a lot of clean headroom, so I can start with a very clean, big sound. Then I just add simple effects as needed, with various overdrives without much gain – I stack them for leads – reverb, a little delay. Nothing’s ever too processed. I get a little crispier sound these days with the compressors, and it helps me balance out. I’m not nearly as loud as I used to be!”

How did you end up in Mike Campbell’s Dirty Knobs?

“That was very serendipitous. I toured with Don Henley for years with Lance Morrison on bass; Lance and I would talk a lot about Mike. Lance played with him in the Dirty Knobs for years. It was just a side project before Tom Petty passed away.

“I used to tell Lance that I loved Mike – he’s always been one of my very favorite players – and that I wanted to jam with them someday. When the Knobs’ other guitar player [Jason Sinay] left in 2022, Lance said he was gonna recommend me. Next thing I know, I’m in the band.”

Would you say Mike was the true sound of the Heartbreakers?

“Absolutely – or at least one of the key ingredients. Mike and [pianist] Benmont Tench really define the sound. But then, of course, you have to factor in the mastermind: Tom Petty’s voice and songs.

“Mike was such a huge part of the songwriting too. He’s an endless well of riffs and hooks. The dude just oozes songs all day, every day. It’s inspiring, but also intimidating; it’s like ‘Damn, how do you do that?’ He never gets blocked.

“The main thing about Mike’s playing is just how restrained and melodic he is – he never overplays. He can do more with one note than most can do with a dozen. I always felt the same way about David Gilmour. Just pure melody, simple, effective, and always playing for the song.”

You mentioned Don Henley; how did you end up with him?

“I met Don through a producer friend of mine, Salim Nourallah, in Dallas. After a short period he invited me to work on what became his Cass County album. He kept asking me to do more work. Eventually, he asked me to join his touring band, which I did in 2015. He sang a guest vocal on my solo album Stargazer, which was an amazing thing!”

Is the connection with Don how you landed the Eagles gig?

“The guys in the Eagles knew me from Don’s band. I’d played with all of them at various points before the pandemic, except for Vince. Steuart and I played together for years in Don’s band, and I guess they thought I’d be a good fit.

“There wasn’t really an audition. When they knew Steuart was going to step down, I think they had a shortlist. Somehow, luckily, I got the call. It was the highest honor – I immediately accepted! It’s the gig of a lifetime for a rock ‘n’ roll guitar nerd like me.

“Just being onstage with Joe and Vince is the most exciting thing I can imagine. They’re very different players, and I love that. They’re both capable of great spontaneity. But we don’t veer off script much in the Eagles. Those guitar parts are so iconic and integral to the songs, so we don’t go changing them up.”

How will you fit into the mix?

“Vince is probably the best guitarist of any of us on the stage, but he isn’t doing a ton of heavy-lifting guitar-wise, ‘cause he’s singing a ton of stuff. Steuart covered a lot of the trickier lead parts, so I stepped in to do that stuff. It allows everyone to keep doing their usual parts without having to rework the show.

“Playing with Joe is an absolute delight. He’s still got it, and you can still hear so much joy and swagger in his playing. We stand shoulder-to-shoulder and do our thing, and I still have to pinch myself. He’s been one of my favorite guitarists since I was a kid.”

Do you consider yourself a free-flowing player, like Joe, or more straight-ahead, like Vince?

“I’ve always been a lot like Joe in the way I play – my vibe is very rock ‘n’ roll. Vince is more of a hot-pickin' country player, though he really can do anything. I’ve got a lot of Joe’s style in my DNA; I think that’s why I filled that role well in Don’s band. I did a lot of the Joe guitar parts back then.

“Nowadays I’m covering the parts that Felder and Leadon played on the records. It’s different – some of them can be pretty tricky to navigate. It’s still rock ‘n’ roll, but with impeccable precision and some twang too. It’s a challenge to get the parts right, especially while singing harmony.”

What’s your favorite Eagles solo?

“Oh, man, there are too many! The solo in One of These Nights is a monster. I love doing all the lead fills in Lyin’ Eyes and Tequila Sunrise. The B-bender stuff in Peaceful Easy Feeling.

“All the Mike Campbell licks in Don Henley’s The Boys of Summer, which is an amazing coming-together of two worlds that have been a huge part of my life. And how can I forget Hotel California? I play the double-neck and trade solos with Joe. It’s a bit terrifying, but it’s the greatest thing ever.”

How will your rig shape up for the Eagles gig?

“I have two completely different rigs for the Knobs and the Eagles. For the Knobs, I have three amps that I toggle between: a Princeton, a Deluxe Reverb, and a custom Voltmaster combo that my friend Matt Iddings built. I get a gnarly fuckin’ sound out of that. And I have a big pedalboard with all the toys on it.

“My Eagles rig is considerably more stripped – a single Little Walter 50w combo amp, and just the necessary pedals for classic Eagles tones; overdrives, fuzz, delay and tremolo. It’s crazy in the Sphere because there are no amps onstage. My amp is in another room altogether and everything is in-ears. That took some getting used to.

“It’s definitely two completely different worlds! But in both gigs I have about a dozen electric guitars. It’s the usual suspects: Les Pauls, Teles, Strats, 335s and 345s, various Duesenbergs, the White Falcon. I love having lots of options.”

What’s next for you?

“The Eagles finished out our spring Sphere dates in April, then I have Across the Milky Way coming out. It’s my fourth solo album overall, but my first in quite a few years, so I’m excited about that. The Knobs will tour the US and Canada during the summer, and I’ll be back with the Eagles at the Sphere in September.”

• Across the Milky Way is available for pre-order now.

The Eagles’ newly appointed touring guitarist Chris Holt has revealed he didn’t have to audition for the gig, and has detailed what it’s like playing alongside Joe Walsh and Vince Gill.

Holt, who has been playing with Don Henley and Mike Campbell & the Dirty Knobs since 2015 and 2022, respectively, was sworn into the band following long-serving guitarist Steuart Smith's retirement. The veteran guitarist had enjoyed a two-decade-plus stint in the band but was forced to step down at the start of the year in light of health struggles.

In contrast to the open auditions recently held by the Smashing Pumpkins and Chaka Khan, the Eagles kept recruitment in-house, with Holt’s reputation helping him to secure the job.

“It wasn’t really an audition,” he tells Guitar World in a new interview. “When they knew that Steuart was going to step down, I think they had a short list of names that would be considered a good fit. Somehow, luckily, I got the call. It was the highest honor, and I immediately accepted the invitation. It’s the dream gig of a lifetime for a rock n’ roll guitar nerd like me.”

The coup means the band’s classic, harmony-rich three-guitar tandem will remain, and Holt has a key role in the refreshed setup. He is, however, sensitive to the legacy of the band, who have produced seven studio albums and won six Grammys across their prolific career.

“Just being onstage with those two guys is the most exciting thing I can imagine,” Holt continues. “Joe and Vince are very different players, and I love that. They’re both capable of great spontaneity. But we don’t veer off script much in the Eagles – it’s all about the songs – and those guitar parts are so iconic and integral to the songs, so I don’t go changing them up.”

Holt’s hiring was announced in January, with Smith’s retirement coming halfway through the band’s Las Vegas residency at The Sphere. It’s a venue, as John Mayer learned last year, that has strict volume restrictions and stage limitations. Those same restrictions saw the Edge turn to amp modeling pedals for the first time in his career.

Being drafted into the fold at such short notice, and for such high-profile shows to break the ice, is no small task. So how exactly did Holt fit into the band?

“Vince is probably the best guitarist of any of us on that stage, but he isn’t doing a ton of heavy-lifting guitar-wise, ‘cause he’s really singing a ton of stuff in the show,” Holt explains.

“Steuart covered a lot of the trickier lead parts, so I stepped in to do that stuff. It allowed everyone to keep doing their usual parts without having to rework the show too much.

“Playing with Joe is an absolute delight,” he continues. “He’s still got it, and you can still hear so much joy and swagger in his playing every single night. We stand shoulder-to-shoulder and do our thing, and I still feel like I have to pinch myself. He’s been one of my favorite guitarists since I was a kid, so getting to play alongside him every night… it’s a dream come true. I can’t state that enough.”

Lionel Richie guitarist Greg Suran is another player full of praise for Walsh. He recently shared the top-tier soloing advice he got from the guitarist, which has served him well across his rich variety of touring gigs.

Guitar World’s full interview with Chris Holt will be published online in the near future.

After recently being ushered offstage due to a medical emergency, former Eagles guitarist Don Felder is sharing his side of the story about what really went down last Thursday during his Rock Legends Cruise performance.

“I have always said that I'm going to rock till I drop. I never [thought] it would be in the middle of Tequila Sunrise, instead of like [Life in the Fast] Lane or Hotel [California] or something really fun,” he quips in an interview with Sal Cirrincione from iHeart Radio.

“I was feeling fine before the show – all day long, I felt naturally my 100 percent or my 99.9 percent, and I went onstage, and I started the introduction forTequila Sunrise. I stepped back from the microphone, and I just was like, ‘Whoa, wait a minute. This feels like acid.’ I just felt like I'm leaving my body.”

Felder recounts how he looked over to his girlfriend, who was standing at the side of the stage and “knows every look I've ever made to her.”

She saw him losing his balance, and within seconds, “came right out on stage, grabbed me and had to get me offstage. She saved me from one of the most embarrassing things, which would have been to fall down onstage by myself. So I owe her big time.

“We got down to the medical room, and they did a heart check and they did all this stuff. They realized that I was just dehydrated, [and] they put me on an IV. 30 minutes later, I was back making bad jokes, and everybody in the place was laughing.”

Guitar legend Robin Trower, who was also part of the panel, then chimes in with a similar on-stage experience.

“Five years ago, that was the last time I was touring in the States,” he recounts. “And same thing, dehydration. Nearly collapsed on stage, but managed to make it to the side and then collapse. It's scary, though, when it happens, because you think, ‘Is this where I finish up?’ but thank God I didn't!”

Former Eagles guitarist Don Felder has released a statement to fans after suffering a medical emergency on stage last Thursday when he was rushed offstage during a Rock Legends Cruise performance.

In a video shared with TMZ by an attendee, Felder was introducing Tequila Sunrise [from 1973’s Desperado] – which he dedicated to Eagles founding member Glenn Frey – when he suddenly stopped strumming his acoustic guitar and appeared to lose his balance.

A crew member promptly came to his assistance and escorted him backstage, alongside the rest of the band members, who looked visibly concerned.

A day after the event, Felder's team shared an update via Instagram. “We appreciate everyone’s concern regarding Don Felder’s abrupt stop to his show last night on the Rock Legends Cruise,” they wrote. “After receiving medical attention he was deemed to be suffering from dehydration. He was given fluids, and is feeling much better.”

The statement further announced that the remainder of Felder's cruise performances will be rescheduled to “ensure he has ample time to rehydrate and recover fully,” before adding, “Thank you for your understanding and remember – drink your water!”

Felder served as the Eagles' lead guitarist from 1974 to 2001 and contributed to some of the band's best-known albums, including 1976's Hotel California. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the rest of the band in 1998. In 2001, Felder was fired from the Eagles, which led to a lengthy legal battle.

Felder's incident follows the announcement that his successor, longtime touring guitarist Steuart Smith, is stepping down from the band due to his recent Parkinsonism diagnosis, amid the Eagles' Las Vegas residency.

The Eagles' longtime guitarist, Steuart Smith, has announced his retirement from the band after 24 years, midway through the group's residency at Sphere in Las Vegas. Smith has attributed his decision to his recent Parkinsonism diagnosis, which has impacted his playing.

“It is with profound regret that, due to performance issues associated with my recently diagnosed Parkinsonism, I find that I must bow out of my role with the Eagles while I can still do so gracefully,” Smith shared in a statement to the Los Angeles Times.

“It's been a great quarter of a century, and I had hoped to be able to finish out this year with the band, but I must now do what's best for all concerned.”

Eagles founding member Don Henley also commented on Smith's departure in a statement: “Steuart Smith has retired from touring. The Eagles will be forever grateful for the extraordinary talents that he brought to both our recordings and live performances. Steuart will be greatly missed, but he will always be a part of our musical family. We know our many fans join us in wishing him well.”

Smith has had an illustrious career recording and touring with a host of music legends, including Bob Dylan, Ringo Starr, Dolly Parton, and Stevie Nicks, to name a mere few.

He began touring with the Eagles in 2001, following the departure of Don Felder, but never officially joined the revered group, famously saying, “I'm not an Eagle,” in the 2013 documentary History of the Eagles. Despite this, he co-wrote six songs on the band's first full studio album after their initial ’70s run, 2007's Long Road Out of Eden, and is also credited as a co-producer.

Following in Smith's footsteps will be singer-songwriter Chris Holt, who first took the stage with the Eagles on January 17, stepping in for the veteran guitarist. Holt had previously played alongside Smith as part of Don Henley's solo band and has also been a member of the Mike Campbell-led Dirty Knobs since 2022.

“I’m trying to fill the giant shoes of all three that came before me,” Holt told The Dallas Morning News, referring to Smith, as well as previous Eagles guitarists Bernie Leadon and Don Felder. “It’s some of the most beautiful guitar work ever recorded, in my opinion. It’s the highest honor for me to do it, and it’s my duty to get it right.”

The Eagles' Las Vegas residency, which kicked off back in September as part of their (very) Long Goodbye tour, was originally scheduled to run until mid-October but has since been extended well into April due to overwhelming demand.

More than 60 one-of-a-kind items, including guitars signed by Paul McCartney, Slash, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, Sheryl Crow, and Olivia Rodrigo, will be auctioned on February 2 via Julien's Auctions, with all proceeds benefiting the leading music industry charity MusiCares.

“Year after year, our partnership with Julien's Auctions helps MusiCares provide vital support to the music community. The generosity of artists and fans fuels our mission to care for those who make music possible,” comments Laura Segura, Executive Director of MusiCares.

Amongst the memorabilia, highlights include a 2023 Martin DX-2E X Series Special acoustic signed by a host of music stars, including McCartney, Crow, the Eagles, Jon Bon Jovi, and Brandi Carlile, estimated to sell for between $3,000 and $5,000, and a 2024 Fender American Vintage II 1951 Telecaster in butterscotch finish, donated and autographed by Bruce Springsteen, with bids already exceeding its $4,000 estimate.

Other noteworthy guitars include a 1995 Gibson Les Paul Studio in Wine Red finish signed by Neil Young (estimated at $2,000-$4,000), a 2024 Gibson Slash Les Paul Standard in November Burst finish autographed by Slash ($2,000-$4,000), and a 2009 Squier Avril Lavigne Telecaster signed by Olivia Rodrigo ($1,000-$2,000).

The auction will take place live at The Recording Academy in Santa Monica, California, and online through Julien's official website. For more information about this auction, visit Julien's.

In addition to its ongoing work providing critical health and welfare services to the music community, MusiCares has also launched a new initiative to provide immediate assistance to musicians and music industry professionals affected by the Los Angeles wildfires.

From his childhood years tagging along with his musician father in the family's ‘Expando' trailer home to his seven years in the saddle with Poco (country-rock's boldest pioneers), Timothy B. Schmidt has logged more miles than even the toughest road dogs. Of course, most know him as the high-tenor-voiced bass guitar man for the Eagles.

Schmidt got his Eagles wings in 1977, on the tail end of the band's blockbuster Hotel California tour, and went on to record 1979's The Long Run, the last album before the band split in 1980. The Eagles re-convened in 1994 for Hell Freezes Over, and again in 2007 for Long Road Out of Eden.

But Schmit's varied career goes far deeper than just the Eagles or Poco. In his 1980s downtime, he hit the road with Jimmy Buffett's Coral Reefer Band, and he has worked as a session vocalist for artists as wide-ranging as Steely Dan, Toto, Bob Seger, Poison, Tim McGraw, and Spinal Tap.

“I consider myself a singer first, and a rather basic bass player. I'm really an accompanist,” Schmidt told Bass Player. “There are guys who play bass like a lead guitar, but that's way beyond my comprehension and abilities. Sometimes they go so far that it doesn't even seem like bass anymore. To me, the bass should hit you low; it's the foundation.”

“You can make a mistake on a piano or guitar riff. But if you're off by a fret on bass, everybody turns and looks at you. So it's pretty important. There are a lot of non-musicians who may know nothing technical about music, but who will certainly know it if you take the bass out of a piece of music.”

None of that kept Schmit from consistently delivering high-quality solo albums, starting with 1984's Playing It Cool, and continuing with 2022's Day By Day, certainly Schmit's most self-assured, mature offering to date.

“It still amazes me that I get to do what a I do. I've had a really exceptional career, which I'm still pretty mystified about and grateful for.”

The following interview from the Bass Player archives took place in August 2010.

How have you managed such a long and successful career?

“In some ways, I have no idea. That would be my honest answer; I'm not trying to be overly humble. I have talent, but there are people out there with way more talent. So there's a certain element of serendipity in how my career has evolved. But as far as work goes, I think I have more hustle in me than I realize.”

How did you first get the call to join the Eagles?

“Poco had levelled off in popularity, and I was becoming a little disenchanted with it all, so I began to put out feelers to determine my next move. I had met Eagles manager Irving Azoff through things like working with Steely Dan, and I think he brought my name up to Don Henley and Glenn Frey when things with Randy Meisner started to fall apart.

“A little while later, I got a call from Glenn asking if I was interested in joining the band. I just said. ‘Where do I sign? How soon can we do this?’ Here they were asking me to join the band outright without playing one lick of music with them.”

“I was really happy when we had our first rehearsal, just because I wanted to really feel it. Up to then it had all felt like science fiction. Right from the time I heard of the possibility of my becoming an Eagle, I thought that it was an ideal fit. And I don't mean that in a cocky way.”

To your ears, what were some of Randy Meisner's strongest moments in his tenure in the band?

“He's on their first six albums; he's the one that was in the trenches. He obviously had a beautiful voice, he was a real decent bass player, and he was just part of that whole movement. I have a lot of respect for him.”

When you first joined the band, how did you adapt to your new surroundings?

“I really was careful. I knew there were some pretty large egos in the band and obviously huge talent. I watched gingerly for a while to see where I'm going to fit in sociologically, and as a player. And I'm pretty good at that – I'm perceptive about people and situations, and I'm not a big trouble maker. I'm the guy who wants things to work out, so we didn't have any problems.”

In what ways, either general or specific, have you come to put your own stamp on those bass parts that were there before?

“The Eagles have always been sticklers for making things sound just like the records. So I didn't have too much wiggle room when I joined, because I pretty much copied parts. I knew I was copying them, and that I didn't make them up.

“When I did my first studio album with the band, The Long Run, I got to run with my own ideas. That was really satisfying. But I have no problem with playing Randy's parts, and I have no illusions.”

Of the many sessions you've done, do any stand out as supremely satisfying?

“I would say Steely Dan – almost anything I sang on there. That was the first time I ever heard myself on the radio nearly every hour with that song Rikki Don't Lose That Number. Those sessions were great because their music is so truly awesome – and I don't use that word lightly.”

Do you have a hard time playing when you're singing?

“No, I don't. If I'm learning a new piece or working something out for the first time, I'll work on it until it becomes second nature, but I have a pretty good work ethic, because I don't want to appear like I don't know what I'm doing.”

“For instance, in 1992 I got a call from Ringo Starr, who wanted me to play in his band. We had a long list of tunes to learn, but nobody knew which ones we were going to actually play. So I learned them all. I just sat learning the songs and picking out the parts I would probably be singing.”

Poco is often cited as being the first authentic country-rock band. In terms of your own contribution, how do you view that legacy?

“With Poco, there was a great energy onstage, but there was some weirdness offstage. But that's like every band, right? Towards the ends of our shows we used to stretch out and do some actual jamming. I always really enjoyed that, but it’s hard for me to listen to old Poco now. It feels really young and unsophisticated, at least in terms of my contributions.

“There's nothing wrong with that – it's like going through an old photo album. It can be a really strange experience and you can get hung up on it. But I don't want to do that with music. I really try to look forward.”

The Eagles’ 1976 song Hotel California makes just about every list of best guitar solos, including ours.

Credit for the guitar majesty of Hotel California is often given to Joe Walsh, who toughened up the Eagles’ laid-back California sound when he joined the band just prior to the Hotel California album’s recording.

Actually, the primary guitar heard throughout the solo belongs to Don Felder, who wrote the music for the track and actually conceived and played the solo’s intricate harmonies on his initial, instrumental demo.

“Every once in a while it seems like the cosmos part and something great plops into your lap,” Felder has said.

In the video below, Felder explains the inspiration behind the song, which he cowrote with Don Henley and Glenn Frey.

More importantly, he also shows you how to play it, with an in-depth, unaccompanied playthrough of the iconic chord progression, followed by its epic solo section.

The original studio version of the song was recorded in B minor with a capo at the 7th fret, but Felder would play the track live in A minor, and uses a capo at the 5th fret for his lesson. He removes the capo for the solo.

In his book Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles, Felder described how he wrote the track.

“I had just leased this house out on the beach at Malibu – I guess it was around 1974 or ‘75,” he recalled.

“I remember sitting in the living room on a spectacular July day with the doors wide open. I had a bathing suit on and was sitting on this couch, soaking wet, thinking the world is a wonderful place to be.

“I had this acoustic 12-string and started tinkling around with it, and those Hotel California chords just kind of oozed out. I had a TEAC four-track set up in one of the back bedrooms and I ran back there to put this idea down before I forgot it.”

By Vince Gill’s admission, most know him as the ‘country-rock guy’. That checks out given his resume, including Pure Prairie League and a decidedly country-leaning solo career spanning over 20 records.

When Gill joined the Eagles in 2017 in the wake of Glenn Frey’s death, some were surprised that the SoCal classic rockers would choose such a Nashville-leaning player to take his place. But the move made sense – especially considering the Eagles’ own early ’70s country roots.

“I enjoy spontaneity,” Gill tells Guitarist. “I love trying different things, and with this gig I knew it wouldn’t be much of a guitar gig.” 

That’s an odd take for a player known for his guitar exploits, but there’s a method to Gill’s madness. “I’m fine with it,” he says. “My favourite compliment came from Don Henley, who got a country rock guy in his band because I know how to be in a band. That’s high praise. I know what’s needed and don’t waste time playing stuff that no-one wants to hear.”

If the Eagles had gone with a younger gun, the inclination to overplay might have influenced the nuances within the band’s iconic songs. But Gill, through years of experience, doesn’t have that issue. 

“Man, I got a great lesson when I was a young whippersnapper when I played a solo on a record, and when I was done, the producer said, ‘That was impressive. Now do it again.’”

He explains: “I learned then and there only to do half of what I know. It was like a knife to the heart, but I got it. The real gift is playing what’s appropriate, not always to chase the first instinct but to take it, edit it and refine it.”

Time is ticking on the Eagles, as they’re currently on their final tour, The Long Goodbye. They seem to be taking their time, and there’s no end in sight just yet, but, regardless, Gill is prepared for whatever comes next. 

“There’s a sense of mortality in music,” he admits. “Great playing has a beginning, a middle and an end. I try to have my playing tell that story, just like any song. I think about all the elements; I intend always to serve the song, not myself. My favourite music is never distracting; the things you don’t notice mean the most.”

He adds: “People always ask me, ‘Who is the greatest guitarist ever?’ I always say, ‘There’s no such thing.’ Why does anyone have to be the best? There’s a bunch of good players; it’s funny how guitar playing turns into a matter of outplaying each other. I don’t want to show anyone up. I like things simple. That’s how I live my life; that makes sense to me.”

You’re currently out on the Eagles’ The Long Goodbye tour, and by the looks of it, you’re having a blast. 

“It’s pretty surreal, to be honest with you. Some nights, I look over to the side and see Joe Walsh while we’re playing Rocky Mountain Way, and I’m transported back to being a kid in my bedroom trying to learn that song.

“I played it at every school dance and there’s even tapes of me singing Eagles songs when I was a kid [laughs]. It’s been pretty amazing to be a part of keeping the legacy of those songs going. You’re right – it’s a blast.”

Joe is a hell of a player, but you are, too. After all these years, what keeps you inspired?

“It’s interesting because as I’ve gotten older I spend more time thinking about what not to play. That’s very different from when I was young and constantly thinking about playing as much as possible. My mindset is all about brevity and restraint now. That’s what I love about the way Joe plays – he shows tremendous restraint. He could play more, but he doesn’t. I really enjoy that.

“My inspiration comes from the little things I’m trying to do, like sounding better and choosing the right guitar for the songs. This is an interesting gig for me with the Eagles because I only play a little lead guitar; there are only two or three songs that I solo on, which is different from what I’m used to, where it’s solos all night long.

“But I knew going in that they needed a rhythm player more than a free-wheeling lead. I’m more than happy to spend the night ripping powerchords for Joe.”

To your point, you’re covering the parts of players who came before you and who wrote these songs. How do you manage that?

“The most important thing is that I don’t put my spin on things. The beauty of what this band is, as it is today, is that we replicate those songs verbatim.

“It’s been interesting to learn to play these songs the way they deserve to be played because they’re not only iconic but also great songs. The solos and the background are memorable. As a listener, you want to hear whoever is up there play Hotel California the way it was recorded. Anything other than that would be a disservice to the songs.”

Reviewing your playing history, restraint has always been integral to your style. 

“Yeah, I think you’re right there. The songwriter in me understands that side of it, you know? That part of this is powerful. The lesson I’ve learned over the years is how important songs are, and when you look at this catalogue of songs, it’s crazy. 

“Don Henley told me the first song he wrote for the Eagles was Desperado, and I said, ‘Oh, come on, man! You started with the lame stuff!’ He started laughing and said, ‘No, that was the first one,’ which, jokes aside, is a great example of the catalogue.”

Is it easier to disassociate from a guitar perspective because you didn’t write the songs?

“I don’t take ownership of a single note within that music because I didn’t create any of it. That would be foolish of me to do, though I do have enough respect for it that I really want to try to honour the songs and be respectful of what they are. 

“Again, they’re not just iconic; every part of those records, meaning the lyrics, backstory and everything else is so familiar. The Eagles, as a band, is the furthest you could get from a jam band, so it’s important to do what’s appropriate in the name of moving the song along and keeping everyone happy.”

Joe is a laid-back, off-the-wall guy who doesn’t plan much. You seem different, so what’s the secret to locking in with him?

“The big thing with Joe is to follow him. I also need to trust him and know that, regardless of what happens, he’s gonna show up. I play a lot of rhythm with the Eagles, and there’s a lot of people who don’t look at playing rhythm guitar as important. But, in many ways, I think it’s even more important than playing lead.”

And why is that?

“If you’re playing rhythm the way I am, using it as a device to guide the song and inspire things… rhythmically, that in and of itself can make you play better but feel better, too.

“I’ve learned to apply the way I play rhythm guitar to my leads over the years. This seems obvious, but I want to make them more rhythmic. I love playing rhythm guitar, so I don’t see it as secondary. Sure, it doesn’t grab the same amount of attention as the lead stuff, but in a way, it’s almost more important.”

So, when you do take a solo, how do you approach it?

“I trade licks with Joe on Funk 49, which is amazing. That’s enough for me, and my head would explode if I had to go back and forth with Joe on a song like Hotel California [laughs]. I try to show Joe I’m listening to him play by throwing back similar things. I’m not going note‑for-note; it’s more like a spiritual way. It’s like, ‘Yeah, I hear you. Check this out.’ 

“That’s the essence of what makes call and response so much fun. Some guys just go off when it’s their turn, and they have no clue about what’s just been played. But when we do it, we listen, have a sense of humour and try to make each other smile with the things we’re playing.”

What gear are you relying on most these days?

“The big thing is for the last few years I’ve been using these great amps by Little Walter Tube Amps. I really like the way they build and design amps.

“There are a lot of great amps out there, but regardless of whether I’m playing the guitar with humbuckers or single coils – the Little Walter stuff handles anything I throw at them. They’re very musical sounding, but I’m far from technical, so I couldn’t begin to tell you why.”

Do you get much into effects pedals?

“I don’t get much into the minutiae of all that; I trust my ears. I use a handful of pedals, like overdrives and some compression. It’s not a ton of stuff and, really, I mainly depend on my amp sounding good from the get-go before I go messing around with stompboxes.

“I keep it minimal and, aside from the overdrive and compression, I might do a little delay. The overdrive comes into play on, say, Boys Of Summer where I need a nice hi-fi sound to complement Joe, so I try to use pedals to do things like that. It’s all about the right gear for the right song, rather than a one-size-fits-all mentality.”

And you’re a big user of vintage guitars, too.

“Man, vintage guitars have a soul to them. They’ve got a different kind of soul, which is different from new guitars. I’ve had a few ’Bursts, though I’m not bringing them out as much these days. The one nice Les Paul I am playing out now is a reissue of Eric Clapton’s 1960 Gibson Les Paul Sunburst. 

“It’s the one they called the ‘Beano’ guitar – it’s been on the cover of magazines, was on the album he did with John Mayall, and it’s well known. Gibson was cool enough to reissue that guitar, and they gave me one when they did. Eric Clapton took the first of the reissues they made and they let me have number two.”

Do you have any vintage guitars on the road with you?

“I’ve got an old custom-coloured Strat, which I believe is a ’64 or ’65. I’ve also got a Les Paul Junior that I use on three or four songs. People know me for my old white Tele, but I’m not using that all that much for this gig. It doesn’t fit the songs; it’s about the right guitar for the right song. I do have an old ’60s Thinline Tele that I use for Hotel California, and I’ve got a couple of great old Martin acoustic guitars, too.”

What types of vintage guitars tend to catch your eye?

“Oh, man, all the shops know me and they sure do find me [laughs]. I’ll get random emails from different shops, saying, ‘Hey, I have this. It’s the neck profile you like,’ or whatever. I like the ’59 and ’60 ’Bursts, but I’m always on the hunt.

“I love Gibson stuff, Martin acoustics, and even mandolins and banjos. I love the possibility of always being able to find a new instrument. Something about trying to do that moves and speaks to me.”

Is there a guitar you let go of that you wish you hadn’t?

“No, not really. I’ve never been much of a seller. I still have my first guitar from when I was 10, a ’67 Gibson ES-335. That’s not the most desirable year for 335s, but it was my first and I love it. And I’ve got my white Tele, which I bought in 1978 for 50 bucks. It’s been my go-to guitar since and it’s the one that’s given me my definitive sound. 

“I don’t let guitars go often, but I’m also aware of reaching for guitars that are right for the space and sound. It’s about creating the right frequency that is needed, so I don’t let the special ones go. I’ve bought a lot of Teles after that white one, but I’ve never found one like it.”

What advice would you give to young players just getting into vintage gear?

“The best way to buy vintage gear that will hold value and appreciate is to buy the right things. People talk about the cost of vintage gear, but if you buy the right things, there’s a better-than-average chance that it will be worth more than what you paid at some point. If you’re gonna lay out a lot of money, it’s best to try to not get hurt doing it.

“Gear is different from buying a new car, where it loses all its value after you roll off the lot. If you think of it that way, you’ll go into buying and owning these great instruments – the best of the best – and you won’t get hurt. I will always contend that, for me, at least, I can write these guitars off on my taxes as a business expense. They truly are that. Most of them will appreciate; I couldn’t do anything smarter with my money.”

Of course, you have to be able to lay out – or comfortable with laying out – that amount of money… 

“The prices do sometimes make it very difficult, if not impossible, for a young musician to be able to acquire some of this stuff. I mean, when I was a young musician, I couldn’t afford this stuff, even back in the day. When I was a kid, an old Blackguard Tele was 600 or 700 bucks – I didn’t have that. But when I did, I spent it on an old guitar, meaning I found enough to buy one.

“Little by little, the prices have increased over the years, and my laying out of that money back then has been worth it. I don’t know… it’s been a fun journey with the gear. I’ll find old Les Pauls that I love and then I’ll find one I like even better. It’s always like that. I guess it’s pretty neat to work your way up the gear ladder, but if you buy the right stuff to begin with, you will never get hurt.”

With the Eagles winding down, what’s next for you?

“I’m always working on new music and another record. There’s always some sort of song I’ve got going, and over the last few years I’ve written well over 100 songs. When things were shut down [during the pandemic] and no-one was doing anything, I found that to be a great time for creativity. 

“Little by little, I’ve recorded a new batch of songs, so those will come. I love being creative – that will never change. So when the Eagles finally shut it down, I’ll go back to singing my hillbilly songs and playing my white Tele. There’s some kind of magic in that; I can attest to that.”

• Sweet Memories: The Music Of Ray Price & The Cherokee Cowboys is out now via MCA Nashville.

The Eagles are one of the most successful bands to emerge from the '70s country-rock scene. The group’s mixture of styles can be heard on countless hit songs that are embedded in the very fabric of popular culture. Indeed it’s hard to imagine rock music without The Eagles. 

As well as their wealth of hits – including Take It Easy, One Of These Nights, Desperado, Lyin’ Eyes, and Tequila Sunrise – they are also responsible for some of the most iconic guitar performances ever committed to tape. 

The guitar solo on Hotel California is seen as one of the greatest of all time, and is the perfect example of two guitar players totally in sync with each other. But listen to the rest of the song – the rhythm parts, the acoustic picking, the harmony counter melodies. It’s just incredible. But it isn’t just Hotel California. The guitar plays a massive part, in both sound and appeal, throughout the band's immaculate catalogue of hit songs.

The Eagles were formed in 1971 by drummer and vocalist Don Henley and singer-guitarist Glenn Frey, with the band originally put together as the backing group for Linda Ronstadt. The original lineup also included Bernie Leadon on guitar and vocals, and bassist-vocalist Randy Meisner. Their blending of country and rock as well as their rich vocal harmonies helped to quickly establish the band’s unique sound. 

Guitarist Don Felder was brought into the fold for guest solos on the band's 1974 album, On The Border. This record has more of an overt rock sound, as it showcased Felder’s tasteful and feel-drenched lead playing, with the opening track Already Gone featuring a guitar duel between Felder and Frey.

Leadon’s final album with the band was One Of These Nights, which included the instrumental track Journey Of The Sorcerer, which would be used as the theme tune to the original television version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. 

Although the album was a huge success and included two of the band’s most popular songs, One Of These Nights and Take It To The Limit, Leadon felt the group’s new rockier appproach was not for him, so he left. 

Joe Walsh was brought in as Leadon’s replacement, and the pairing of Walsh and Felder took the band to new heights. Walsh added a more gritty rock element to The Eagles’ polished sound. 

This unrivaled guitar partnership recorded the band’s most popular material, with 1976’s Hotel California being the first album to feature Walsh, who made an instant impression with his performance on such songs as Life In The Fast Lane, Victim Of Love, and, of course, the title track itself, which not only became the band’s signature song, but also a textbook example of rock guitar done well.

Felder had a turbulent relationship with Henley and Frey, leaving once and then being fired after the band had reformed. He was replaced by guitarist Steuart Smith.

So what makes the guitar style of The Eagles so great? At its heart we have incredible songs with satisfying chord changes, and a wide variety of guitar-driven textures. One musical tool we see throughout is subtle tension and release, using slash chords within a progression. A chord move heard a lot in their early music is based around the open G, shifting up to C/G and resolving back to the G Major.

And then there’s slightly more elaborate chord harmony and movement; listen to the picking during the conclusion of the verses in In The City. Here there’s an open D Major chord which shifts up a tone to E/D, which is simple yet very effective. As well as chord rhythm we have riffs; Victim Of Love and Life In The Fast Lane both provide a more classic rock backdrop to their sound. Harmony plays a big part, too, and not just in the solos.

Listen to the intro to One Of These Nights, or the counter melodies in Hotel California; these harmony lines add movement and richness, not obtrusively, just perfectly orchestrated and arranged. There’s also a mixing of styles, including country and western, rock, bluegrass, and even reggae. So, from a guitar perspective, there’s a mixture of approaches that you wouldn’t normally hear in a rock band from this era. 

When it comes to lead guitar, once again we see lots of different approaches. Country lead work plays a big part in the early songs, mixing double-stops and pedal steel-style bends, mostly played by Leadon. Blues rock is also plainly in evidence, with the use of traditional Pentatonic licks but also with a focus on chord tones outlining the accompanying progressions.

Then there’s slide playing; Joe Walsh favours opening tunings for this approach, often choosing open E. And let’s not forget the twin leads, from intricate harmony lines to the classic arpeggios of Hotel California, played by Walsh and Felder in 3rds. 

In the following four examples we’ll examine different approaches to rhythm, looking at powerchord-based riffs and country-style parts. We’ll then look at two lead examples, with slide in open E tuning, plus a ‘guitar trading’ style solo that also includes that legendary arpeggio sound.

Dig back into your Eagles albums and listen again to the sheer brilliance of this great group. And, above all, have fun! 

Get the tone

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

Both Don Felder and Joe Walsh favoured a mixture of Gibson and Fender guitars and Fender amps during the classic era of The Eagles. Aim for a bright, slightly pushed clean tone for the country rhythm, while opting for a mildly driven tone for the more rock orientated rhythm parts. For the solos aim for a classic overdrive tone with an American edge. 

Example 1. PowerChord Riff

This example kicks off with a descending harmony riff idea, and illustrates how orchestrated harmony guitar is used by The Eagles as a way of setting up the feel and mood of a track. 

The main riff kicks in at bar 5 and is based around powerchords. Really pay attention to the space of the chords, as well as how the delay repeat fills in the gaps. 

We also have some ‘pushes’ during this riff, with chord changes appearing on the ‘off beat. I have have tipped the hat to one of my favourite examples of Joe Walsh’s rhythm playing with the use of the F to the G/F triads, which add interesting harmonic movement. 

Bar 13 introduces a tight 16th-note figure which is based around triads. Once again, pay attention to space, and keeping the rhythm tight.

Example 2. Country-Style Rhythm

Our next example looks at the band’s country style. This example kicks of with the G to the C/G slash chord but is embellished by sliding the the shape up a whole tone. Bars 5-8 introduce the A to D Major chords, and here we embellish with stylistic intervals including 6ths and 3rds. Following the repeat we conclude this section at bars 15-16 with some country-fueled bends. 

Bar 17 introduces the second half of our progression as well as changing the feel with the addition of Minor chords. This section uses country inspired string bends and intervals, as well as including fills based around C/E and D/F#. 

The track concludes with a classic harmonic move where we modulate from C Major to C Minor, before returning to G Major with a classic country bend.

Example 3. Slide Soloing

Here’s a Joe Walsh-style slide solo in open E tuning. Raise the fifth and fourth strings by a tone and the third string by a semitone. This makes it easier to play vertically as well as allowing the notes to blend into each other during phrases. Bars 1-8 kick off with us playing over the A-G Major chords, before resolving to C-D Major. 

Due to the tuning we can largely stay around a single fret! But what makes it interesting is how we phrase, sliding in and out of notes and adding tension by lowering either the 3rd or the 5th before resolving back to pitch. In bar 5 you’ll have to jump out of position to achieve higher chord tones. 

The solo concludes with a harmonic shift as we play over a tight E5 chord riff. Use the position of the E barre chord at the 12th fret as your point of reference. Concentrate more on the phrasing for this example.

Example 4. ‘Duel’ style Guitar solo

For our final example I’m emulating the sound of Don Felder and Joe Walsh jamming over a colourful chord progression. Although we are using predominantly B Minor Pentatonic, the focus is on chord tones, targeting notes that are relative to each chord of the progression. Pay attention to the pitch of your bends, especially at bar 3, bar 4, and bar 5. 

Also look out for the string bending lick at bar 7; for this lick you’ll bend up a whole tone on the first string, but release a pre-bend note on the second. This is a very tricky lick to master, so take your time practising it. 

The example concludes with a take on those legendary arpeggios, performed on the top three strings, so you’ll need to pay attention to your picking as well as the position shifts.

“Meat and potatoes.” It’s a recurring phrase during conversation with Timothy B. Schmit when discussing his technique. He loves jazz, but quickly points out that he is “not a good improviser” and “not one of those guys”. 

He played an upright bass, inherited from his father, while recording his new solo album, Day By Day, but notes, “I’m a terrible standup bass player, but if you have patience as an engineer, I can make it happen.” Each time, without fail, he returns to his nutritional analogy.

Meat and potatoes, however, are a dietary and music staple. Trends come and go, but meat and potatoes stay. There is always an audience, always a demand, always a palate for tasty food and tasty chops. Meat and potatoes have been featured on countless menus, just as Schmit’s solid basslines and pristine vocals have been featured on countless recordings and live performances. It doesn’t hurt that he’s a genuinely nice guy, which speaks to the frequent callbacks and his decades-long post in the Eagles.

Day By Day is Schmit’s seventh solo album and his first since 2016’s Leap Of Faith. He recorded the dozen original songs at his home studio, Mooselodge, during breaks with the Eagles and a long stretch of pandemic lockdowns and cancelled tours. 

“This is my third album of just my own compositions, without collaborating with anybody or doing somebody else’s songs,” he says. “I look at it as a trilogy, these albums, because it’s all just me. 

“The Eagles have been busy on and off for quite a few years again,” he adds, addressing the gap between his own projects. “Sometimes we take large breaks, a whole year, and sometimes we take six months or three months. That’s my exceptionally great job that I need and want. And what is really good for my psyche and spirit is writing songs, recording them, and producing them. 

“Between the Eagles’ stuff, I would come home, settle down, and try to write. I say ‘try’ because it’s work for me. It’s work that I enjoy, although sometimes it’s incredibly frustrating to get to a point where I can’t go further with a song. I persevere and then put it away for a little while and write something else. 

“But it’s a process I really love. It takes a long time because I’m busy with the Eagles, and then Covid happened. I probably wrote half of this album, and certainly recorded half of it, during that time. That’s why it takes so long, and that’s why there’s an album now.”

Schmit grew up in Sacramento, California, where he and two childhood friends formed a folk trio that they simply called Tim, Tom, & Ron. By the time they graduated high school, they were enamored with the music of the so-called British Invasion of the day, and had also graduated to electric instruments and a drummer, George (it merits note that the bandmates remain close friends and still keep in touch.) 

The four-piece became The Contenders, who became The New Breed, who became Glad. During their years together, they released several singles, recorded a couple of albums, and charted a Number One song on Sacramento radio that also landed in the Top 20 in San Francisco. 

Early into this trajectory, at age 14 or 15, it was decided that Schmit was destined to play bass guitar – which he did on a guitar or borrowed instruments until 1963, when he was able to afford his first Fender Precision. 

Through a turn of events that included selling it early on and repurchasing it decades later from its then-owner, the bass is still with him.

“I used to go to the music store and stare at it on the wall, knowing that I was so far away from getting it,” he says. “I did some work for my dad, babysat my infant brother for a summer, did this and that, and finally got enough money together to buy it.” 

The P-Bass made way for a 1963 Gibson EB-2, also still in his possession. That’s the bass he brought to Poco in 1969, until he bought a Candy Apple Red 1964 Fender Jazz from a surfer for $175. “In my hippie dreams, the color wasn’t very cool,” he says, “so I hand-sanded it, which took forever.” 

That instrument was featured on all his recordings with Poco and on the Eagles’ 1979 The Long Run album, his first studio project with the band, whom he joined two years prior during their Hotel California tour.

He added a 1961 Jazz as a backup, which came to figure prominently onstage with the Eagles.

“This is a super-funky one,” he says. “We call it Woody because it is a piece of wood. Somebody did a worse sanding job on it than I did on my other one. There’s initials carved into it. I bought it as is, and I’m really glad I did. I play it quite a lot. Those were the only two basses I had for a while.”

For a period of time in the 1990s, he played a white custom-made Carvin. “That bass was great,” he says. “I used it for a long time on recordings and with the Eagles. But it was a neck-through bass, and whenever it needed tweaking... it just got to the point where it couldn’t be tweaked any more. I still have it, but now it’s a museum piece.” 

He owns some 20 or 25 basses, by his estimation, including a mid-1960s Hofner that he used on Day By Day. Mostly, though, he’s a dedicated Fender man. 

“I have six basses onstage with the Eagles and one backup, a 1966 Jazz,” he says. “A couple are a half-step down and one is a full step down. The bass my tech and I call Number One is a 1962 Jazz. It’s got halfrounds on it and a great feel. I’ve probably had it for 10 years. That’s the one I play most onstage, and I played it on my new album. 

“‘Woody’, my ’61 Jazz, has flatwounds. It’s great onstage and in the studio. That’s one of those basses where you instantly know it’s going to sound good. You don’t even have to plug it in; you play it, and you can feel it and hear it. I play a white 1964 Fender Custom Shop on three songs: Life In The Fast Lane, Joe (Walsh)’s In The City, and we do a version of the James Gang’s Funk #49. That bass sounds a little different, and I like that sound for those songs. I don’t use that one in the studio. 

“I have a black Jazz; I’m going to say it’s a ’62 or ’63. This is an interesting-looking bass and it’s got a great sound for certain songs onstage. I bought it really used. Part of the finish on the back is scraped off and you can see that it was originally sunburst. My tech thinks that someone had this bass, wanted a black one, and they just took it back in and sprayed over it.

“I have a 1965 Jazz that’s in mint condition. It’s got a super-thick neck, bigger than I would normally play. That’s the one I tune down to D. I play it on slower songs, like Wasted Time from Hotel California, because we do that song a whole step lower than the original. It holds the tone and sounds great.

“Don (Henley)’s The Boys Of Summer requires a fretless bass. I have a Pedulla Buzz, which Jennifer Condos, one of Don’s former bass players, turned me on to. Those basses sound really good. We used to do New York Minute, and I played it on that too, but right now I only use it for one song. I’m not really a fretless player. I can get by, but I’m not great at it, so I don’t use it in the studio.” 

And there, once again, is the humility. For all that Timothy B. Schmit has done and all that he continues to accomplish, in many ways he remains the aspiring youngster from Sacramento. 

Despite becoming a multi-platinum singer, songwriter, and musician in one of the industry’s most enduring bands, he still considers himself a work in progress – solid, reliable, grateful, and always striving.

“I do call myself a ‘meat and potatoes’ bass player, but that’s exactly what is called for with anything I might be doing,” he says, when his affinity for the phrase is pointed out.

“I don’t mean to overdo, ‘Oh, little ol’ me’. I’m just so fortunate to be able to do this. I’m not denying any talent I might have, but there are so many great players out there. I think I’m good at what I do, but ‘great’ is a little much for me. I just do what I do, and I’m glad that people appreciate it.” 

• Day By Day is out now via Benowen Records.

Three men – including a curator for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame – have been indicted over allegedly possessing a selection of stolen notes containing lyrics and other material handwritten by Eagles co-founder Don Henley. The notes are estimated to be worth more than $1 million.

Craig Inciardi – who has been suspended from his role at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, according to Rolling Stone – as well as Glenn Horowitz and Edward Kosinski, are accused of conspiring to sell nearly 100 pages of Henley’s stolen notes – which include lyrics for Hotel California and Life in the Fast Lane.

The handwritten notes were reportedly stolen in the 1970s by an unnamed biographer, who sold them to Horowitz in 2005. Henley has been attempting to recover them since.

According to the indictment, Horowitz recruited Inciardi and Kosinski, whereafter the three men went about selling the notes to various auction houses – including high profile auctioneers such as Sotheby’s and Christie’s – and even tried to “coerce” Henley into buying them back. 

Shortly before the death of founding Eagles frontman Glenn Frey in January 2016, the New York County district attorney’s office started investigating the case, alleging that Horowitz had planned to claim the notes belonged to Frey, with the intention of making any criminal investigation against the men crumble.

Rolling Stone alleges that Horowitz once wrote in an email that “identifying [Frey] as the source would make this go away once and for all”.

In terms of charges, all three men are facing one count of conspiracy in the fourth degree – which carries up to a four-year prison sentence – while Horowitz also faces one count of attempted criminal possession of stolen property in the first degree, and two counts of hindering prosecution. Both Inciardi and Kosinski have been charged with first-degree counts of criminal possession.

Regarding Inciardi’s current employment status, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame President and CEO Joel Peresman wrote in a recent letter to board members: “At this time we do not know whether Craig engaged in any wrongdoing. He will remain on leave pending the resolution of the third party internal investigation and the extent of the charges once the indictment is unsealed.”

“This action exposes the truth about music memorabilia sales of highly personal, stolen items hidden behind a facade of legitimacy,” Eagles manager Irving Azoff tells Rolling Stone. “No one has the right to sell illegally obtained property or profit from the outright theft of irreplaceable pieces of musical history. These handwritten lyrics are an integral part of the legacy Don Henley has created over the course of his 50-plus-year career.”

Echoing Azoff’s statement, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg writes in a press release: “New York is a world-class hub for art and culture, and those who deal cultural artifacts must scrupulously follow the law. 

“These defendants attempted to keep and sell these unique and valuable manuscripts, despite knowing they had no right to do so. They made up stories about the origin of the documents and their right to possess them so they could turn a profit.”

Deacon Frey, the son of late Eagles co-founder Glenn Frey, has departed the band after filling in for his late father for the past four-and-a-half years.

In a statement posted to the Eagles’ website, the band confirmed Deacon will be leaving the iconic rock outfit to “forge his own path”, and said they’ll “support him in whatever he wished to pursue in the years ahead”.

The group also went on to say the door will remain open for Deacon, should he wish to join the Eagles onstage for future gigs.

“Deacon Frey has devoted the past four-and-a-half years to carrying on his father’s legacy and, after some weeks of reflection, he now feels that it is time for him to forge his own path,” the statement read. “We understand completely, and we support him in whatever he wishes to pursue in the years ahead. 

“In the wake of his dad’s demise,” the band continued, “Deacon, at age 24, did an extraordinary thing by stepping from relative anonymity into the very public world of his father’s long illustrious career. 

“We are grateful to Deacon for his admirable efforts and we wish him well as he charts his future. Deacon’s Eagles Family will always be here to surround him with love, support and goodwill, and he is always welcome to join us onstage at any future concerts, if he so desires. 

“We hope our fans will join us in wishing Deacon the very best as he moves into the next phase of his career.”

Glenn Frey, who co-founded Eagles in 1971 with Randy Meisner, Bernie Leadon and Don Henley, passed away in 2016 at the age of 67. His son, along with Vince Gill, was drafted in to fill Glenn’s place in 2017, and has been touring with Eagles ever since.

There’s been no word if a replacement guitarist will be recruited, meaning the current lineup – comprising Gill, Henley, Joe Walsh and Timothy B. Schmit – will continue operating as a quartet for the foreseeable future.

The band are set to continue their 2022 tour, which will resume on April 19 at the Nationwide Arena in Columbus, Ohio. The 18-date stint around Europe and North America will conclude on June 26 at Hyde Park in London.

For a full list of tour dates, head over to the Eagles’ website.

Back in 2016, when we met Timothy B. Schmit of the Eagles, he was at a bittersweet crossroads. Eagles founder member Glenn Frey had passed away not long before our interview, and the future of the Eagles was in question. 

But following the completion of a fine new solo album, Leap Of Faith, the Californian bassist was poised to begin a new chapter in his eventful life. He gave Neville Marten the lowdown on his years as bassist with country-rock’s highest-flying band, and how his early love of US folk act the Kingston Trio saw him sing for Steely Dan and moonlight with Crosby, Stills and Nash.  

Glenn Frey’s death was a terrible shock. Does his passing mean the continuation of the Eagles on hold – or is is it over? 

“My answer is... I have no idea. I just don’t know… Sorry.“  

You seemed almost ‘custom-made’ to fit in with the Eagles. I liken it to Ronnie Wood and the Stones.  

“Yes, I think you’re right. I’ve often said that it was a great fit, all around. And you are the second person that’s compared that move to Ronnie’s.“

Really? 

“Only two. I thought about it a long time ago…”  

You’ve said that Glenn phoned you to offer you the job. Did you have any idea that might happen? 

“I did. The reason was because of my neighbour across the street from me in the Hollywood Hills. It was JD Souther. And he’s literally across the street, you know? Right there. I could see his house from mine, and we used to hang out a lot. One time I was over there, and he said, ‘I’m not supposed to tell you this, you’ve got to keep it quiet. 

“But I think you’re going to get a call, that Randy [Meisner] is quitting, and I’m pretty sure you’re going to get the call.’ So I was like, going, ‘Okay, that would be nice. How do I not be excited about this?’ I can’t remember how much time passed, it wasn’t that long – maybe a few days, maybe a week or two. And I did get the call, I got the call from Glenn.“

What did he say and how long did it take you to respond? 

“I can’t remember exactly how he couched it. But it was, ‘Randy’s quitting, and we’re wondering if you’re interested?’ Something like that. You know, I was pretty much ready to just stop everything, and start, and I let him know that. But as it turns out, they wanted… I had to keep a lid on it. 

“And we had already had… Poco already had another tour planned. I had to go out on this tour with them, but not tell them. And then we came back, and we were going to start our next whatever it was. Maybe we were going to tour. And I called up Irving [Azoff, manager of the Eagles], and I said, ‘I’ve got to tell these guys. I can’t pretend like I’m going to do this, when I’m not.’ So I was allowed to tell them, then.“

I suppose the members of Poco [the band Timothy was in at the time] would have been both pleased and mortified... 

“The important thing to me was not to have management do it [tell them]. That happened to me once before. Where somebody left the group and they didn’t talk to me personally, I didn’t like that. I thought it was odd, actually. So I told management that I was going to go tell them, and I went to everybody’s house and told them.“

When you joined the Eagles, did you have a great deal of input in the writing process? Or did they want you to play specific parts? 

“No, they never said that… Because when we started the record, we had no songs. That seems strange, doesn’t it? It kind of was. But we worked them out, and we worked them out together. 

“And they didn’t say, for instance, ‘This is how the song goes, and we want you to play these notes.’ It wasn’t like that. It all came naturally. Comments and suggestions, maybe: ‘Leave this out, don’t do that, don’t do this.’ But basically, I didn’t feel that constricted.“

Did you have to do much trying to get songs in the band? 

“I presented them with songs a lot. Was that a struggle? Not really. I mean, I didn’t have as many songs as them on records. But I was fortunate. I chose to look at it that way. And songs that I thought that were really, really good, that they probably should have done... I just put in my back pocket and did them myself. Everybody wants to shine but they were really savvy, as far as really good stuff goes. And the bar was high, so it was fine.“ 

I remember hearing One of These Nights and thinking it was a masterpiece – little parts put together in an amazing way. 

“The real master of that was Glenn, he was really good at it. One of his nicknames was The Lone Arranger!“

Did you start off as a guitarist or as a bass player? 

“Well, at the very beginning, I was just strumming ukuleles and banjos, and so on. One of my best friend’s older brothers was into singing, learning simple folk songs, and stuff. So those were my first instruments. Then, we started doing this during the 60s folk thing. 

“And we became really enamoured with the Kingston Trio, as well as other groups from that era. We were 13, 14 years old, so we got ourselves matching button-down shirts like the Kingston Trio wore. And we tried to find striped shirts, because that’s what they wore a lot. By the way, a footnote, if you look at early Beach Boys, they’re wearing striped shirts.“

Exactly, I was just going to say it… 

“That’s Al Jardine’s influence – he was a Kingston Trio fan. I took the role of Nick Reynolds, who played a tenor guitar. But I couldn’t afford a Martin tenor guitar. So I scrimped and saved for months – maybe a year – to buy it. It was a Harmony tenor guitar, out of a catalog, for $52.“

Is that trio where you started to hone your harmony skills? 

“Yes. The two other guys in our trio were working with somebody else who wasn’t that good. And I came over once, and I joined in – and this is what they told me happened, because I don’t remember it that much – but I started singing a harmony, very easily. The other guy couldn’t do that, and they never went back to him.“

You have such an individual voice and you’ve done thousands of sessions. I heard you did three Steely Dan albums? 

“Yes. I’m really proud that I got to sing with those guys. The first song I did, that they tried me out on, was Ricky Don’t Lose That Number. Back then, radio was a little less sophisticated, so you listened to the Top 40 a lot. And that was the first time I heard myself on the radio – it was great.“ 

What other things have stood out in your session-singing life? 

“There was a period of time when Crosby, Stills and Nash were making a new album and David was, shall we say, indisposed. So they needed a third singer, and they were doing it on Oahu, Hawaii, at a studio. They asked me if I would go there, and pretty much do most of the album with them, as their third voice. That was great. 

“They flew me and my wife, my girlfriend at the time, there, and I just went and sang with those guys every day. It was great. They couldn’t tell the record company that David wasn’t on most of that stuff. They had to keep that secret. So I’m credited as Additional Voice or Backgrounds or something.“

When you recorded vocals with them, did they do it round a mic or was it layered? 

“We sang: Stephen and Graham and I sang together. And I think, at times around the same mic, but I honestly don’t remember. Things are sometimes a little fuzzy, I’m not really sure why .“ 

On Leap Of Faith, do you play all the acoustic guitar? 

“I play acoustic guitar on every song. I took it out on one song – I just did it as a guide, on the song, of what I should do. After it became a bigger track, I took it out, because there wasn’t any place for it. Basically, the whole album is layered. I put acoustic guitar down, get a good lead vocal, edit it down to a good lead vocal, and then add everything else.“

The Island is beautiful. The harmonies are stunning, and the chords are lovely. Tell us about the track. 

“My wife and I have a place on the island of Kaua’i, so we visit there as much as we can. And we have a lot of friends there. There’s three main rooms in my studio, which is really a converted guesthouse. There’s the control room, and an office behind it. No glass window between it, but everything’s wired up – every room’s wired up. 

“And I was sitting on the couch in the office part, and I have a 1940s Gibson baritone ukulele, which I bought on eBay. It was sitting there, so I picked it up and started strumming. I just started singing some words, and then wrote them down. I was strumming the ukulele with my feet up on the couch. 

“It was like I had an imaginary – what I say in the song – umbrella drink, you know? And I said, ‘I’m just going to write, I’m not going to try and be clever with this. I’m going to just sing a song about the island.’ And I wrote that fairly quickly, and I knew how I wanted to record it. I could hear it. At first it reminded me of… What’s the a capella Beatles song?“

Because? 

“Yes, it reminded me of that. And it was obviously Beach Boys. So when it was time to record it, I thought that right then and there, I knew I had to try and get a Beach Boy on it, you know? Anyway, I was talking to Geoff, the guy who’s assisting me here today. 

“He’s worked with the Beach Boys for 20 years, and I said, ‘I need some more singers, besides Al Jardine.’ And, in fact, his two boys are great singers, and I knew one of them. So I got them all set up, because they live out of the state, and Al lives up north. I got it all arranged, and Al calls me up, and says, ‘I can’t make it, I’m sick. I don’t feel well.’ And I thought, ‘I’m not going to change everything up, I’m just going to have the boys.’ 

“The boys, they’re like in their 30s and 40s. And I think they thought they were just going to come and do some oohs and aahs, and I said, ‘No, we’re going to hunker down here for as long as it takes, and we’re going to sing everything’. It took two days and two nights, and they were hard workers, and I wanted everything as precise as possible. And that’s how it came out. 

“Also, there was a time I could have done those parts myself, but I didn’t want that quality, I want some different characters in there. And the fact is, I can’t hit those notes anymore. Which is painful, in some ways, but I have to embrace it.“

Would you join another major band? Suppose Elton, Clapton, Springsteen, or even Toto approached you, what would you say? 

“Well, that’s so hypothetical! It would depend… When the Eagles had broken up, for almost 14 years, I was doing a lot of sessions. I didn’t have that six years of hits before I was in the band for a while. I had to work, put it that way. And I had a new family and stuff. So I was doing a lot of work. And I realized that Bill Wyman had quit the Rolling Stones. 

“Then I heard they were searching for a bass player. And I thought, ‘What the heck.’ I wrote them a letter, and found out through my management the right people to get it to. Anyway, they called me back – they were holding auditions in New York, for that spot. My wife was in the kitchen, when I got the call. I wasn’t supposed to tell anybody. But of course I said to her, ‘The Rolling Stones called me back!’

“You know, I saw the Rolling Stones play a half-house in Sacramento in the early 60s. And then of course they got huge. I decided to try to get the gig. I went to New York, and they were auditioning. They asked me what kind of amplifiers I wanted, but you had to bring your own bass.

“I don’t know how many people were going for it – it could have been 10 or 20 people. When I got off the plane, into baggage reclaim, I saw Stu Cook from Creedence Clearwater. We looked at each other and laughed. So we had dinner that night, kind of going like, ‘Hey, this is cool.’ You know?“

How did it go?

“So I went in, and when it was my turn, I spent well over an hour playing Rolling Stones songs with them. And it was so great… It was me, a sound guy and the Rolling Stones. And it was just so thrilling. And I didn’t do bad – I didn’t go away going, like, ‘Oh man, I blew it.’ 

“I went like, ‘You know what, I feel good about this.’ But I didn’t expect to get it and in fact, to keep my mind off it, I booked some writing time with some friends in Nashville instead of going right home. So I could keep busy and not obsess.“

“But, in the event, I didn’t get it. Later on they played the Rose Bowl, and I wanted to go see who they got. And it was Darryl Jones. And when I saw the posters, I realized, this is how it relates – Darryl Jones is not one of the Rolling Stones, he’s the hired bass player. So would I do that? Well, I would have to see what they were talking about, and who it was. It wouldn’t be just anybody. If it was Elton John, for example, I wouldn’t fill that bill.“

Given the title of your recent album, one might reasonably think that it’s a statement of intent connected to the Eagles possibly finishing, and a whole new road now opening up for you? 

“No, they’re not connected. I was searching for the right title, and I found it in a lyric. I think every time I put out a record, or any time you go on stage, you’re doing that. You’re saying, ‘Here it is,’ you know? I hope this is good. Every artist is going to say this about their newest project, but I think this is some of my best stuff. 

“It’s all completely from me, it’s almost like a diary. There’s some personal stuff in there, that if you were to ask me what it’s about, I’d probably say, ‘I’d rather not say.’ But I think the feeling’s there, of all that stuff. And I hope people can get into it.“

What lies ahead for you? 

“I don’t have anything else to say. It’s my latest stuff, and I feel like I’m getting better at what I do. Which is really great, because I’m older now, I didn’t peak in my 20s or 30s, like a lot of songwriters do. I’m starting to get it now, which keeps me really alive and feeling hopeful for the rest of my life.“

• Timothy B. Schmit's new solo album, Leap of Faith, is out now via CD Baby.

What makes for a great 12-string guitar song as opposed to a great song that just happens to have a 12-string guitar somewhere on it? Let's face it, if Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven had a ukulele on it, it would immediately be in the running for Greatest Ukulele Song of All Time.

That being said, we looked at not only the legacy of the song but how prevalent 12-string guitar is in the song and how influential the song would be in inspiring others to pick up their 12-strings.

Without the 1964 Beatles film A Hard Day's Night, the Byrds might not have existed as you now know them (assuming you know them - and you should know them), and without Stairway to Heaven, the double-neck guitar might be sitting in a museum as a one-time oddity produced by Gibson. So what song will we crown as the best 12-string guitar song of all time?

Read on ... (And yes, we threw in an extra song; our math isn't too good. Enjoy our top 31!).

Also, before we get started, we're presenting an "honorable mention" award for Tom Petty's Somewhere Under Heaven, his standalone 2015 single, which proves artists are still writing and recording great 12-string guitar songs in the modern era. The song, which was written by Petty and Mike Campbell, was featured in the Entourage soundtrack in 2015 (but don't hold that against it). It's actually an unreleased song from Petty's Wildflowers sessions.

31. Pantera - Suicide Note, Part 1

Album: The Great Southern Trendkill (1996) 

This song marked one of the most experimental moments in Pantera's catalog, with Dimebag Darrell's dark 12-string guitar part perfectly echoing the song's somber subject matter.

30. John Butler Trio - Ocean

Album: John Butler (1998) 

The newest song to make the cut, John Butler's instrumental masterpiece Ocean stands as a fine example of the timeless sound of the 12-string. Keep an ear out for Butler's use of two-hand tapping ala Satriani in Midnight.

29. America - A Horse with No Name

Album: America (1971) 

Although the 12-string acoustic guitar plays only a supporting role in this ubiquitous folk-rock tune about a nameless equine, it actually plays a major part in its overall sound.

When A Horse With No Name was released, a lot of people thought it was a Neil Young song, which is ironic because it replaced Young's Heart of Gold at the Number 1 spot on the U.S. pop chart.

28. Bob Dylan - Hurricane

Album: Desire (1976) 

Most assume it was Dylan himself who played the 12-string here, but it was actually session guitarist Vinnie Bell manning the Danelectro Bellzouki 12-string guitar on this classic cut.

27. Gordon Lightfoot - Early Morning Rain

Album: Gord's Gold (1975) 

Gordon Lightfoot re-recorded this old Gordon Lightfoot tune for his 1975 compilation album, Gord's Gold, and it's this lush, radio-friendly version that became the hit. While 12-string electric guitars were all the rage in the '60s, 12-string acoustics had taken their place in the '70s; this song is a prime example of that shift.

26. Alice In Chains - I Stay Away

Album: Jar of Flies (1994) 

If ever there was a rock band who had an equally strong handle on menacing drop-D riffs and menacing, introspective acoustic music, it was most certainly Alice In Chains. I Stay Away from Jar of Flies is not only the band's best 12-string moment, but it marks the first track Jerry Cantrell wrote with then-new Alice in Chains bassist Mike Inez.

25. The Hollies - Look Through Any Window

Album: Hollies (1965) 

As you'll see, 1965 was a huge year for the electric 12-string guitar. It was big like synthesizers and skinny black ties were big in 1982. You had your Byrds, of course, your Beatles - and your Hollies, who rode the 12-string bandwagon to great heights with this song written by Graham Gouldman and Charles Silverman. That's Tony Hicks on the 12-string, by the way.

24. Queen - 39

Album: A Night at the Opera (1975) 

Brian May's massive-sounding 12-string acoustic is an integral part of this sci-fi masterpiece, the B-side of You're My Best Friend. It's about a group of astronauts who set out on what they think is a one-year journey, but when they get back, they realize they've been gone for 100 years. They simply don't write Einstein allusions like this anymore.

23. Mahavishnu Orchestra - You Know You Know

Album: The Inner Mounting Flame (1971) 

It's undeniable that Mahavishnu Orchestra had many fine 12-string moments in their career, but You Know You Know off their first album, The Inner Mounting Flame, stands out as guitarist John McLaughlin's shining moment with the instrument. Fun fact: This song was later sampled by both Mos Def and Massive Attack.

22. Red Hot Chili Peppers - Breaking the Girl

Album: Blood Sugar Sex Magik (1991) 

One of only two Chili Peppers songs in 3/4 time, John Frusciante's main 12-string riff in this song was inspired by none other than Jimmy Page.

21. Jimi Hendrix - Hear My Train a Comin'

Album: Blues (1969) 

Jimi Hendrix sitting alone playing blues on a 12-string acoustic guitar is a reminder that, despite all of his distortion and psychedelia, he always felt a strong connection to his roots, including Delta blues. Although he performed and recorded electric, full-band versions of this song (as heard on the Valleys of Neptune album), this version is more stark and disarming.

20. Supertramp - Give a Little Bit

Album: Even in the Quietest Moments... (1977) 

This international hit for Supertramp is a pop masterpiece in the key of D, which, as the Byrds proved a decade-plus earlier, is the 12-stringiest of all the keys. It was written by Roger Hodgson, and a solo Hodgson performance is featured in the video below.

19. David Bowie - Space Oddity

Album: David Bowie/Space Oddity (1969) 

Long before working with the likes of Adrian Belew, Carlos Alomar, Robert Fripp and Stevie Ray Vaughan, Bowie himself manned the 12-string for his 1969 ballad of Maj. Tom. The song was so well-received, the album it appeared on, David Bowie, was renamed after the song before its 1972 reissue.

18. The Who - Substitute

Single (1966) 

When Pete Townshend wanted a riff to one-up the Rolling Stones' (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction, he reached for his 12-string. "Substitute" was a top ten hit twice in the U.K., once in 1966 when it was originally released an again 10 years later when it was re-issued. The track found unlikely supporters in the punk rock movement, being covered by both the Sex Pistols and the Ramones.

17. The Beatles - A Hard Day's Night

Album: A Hard Day's Night (1964) 

Although the Byrds were the band that was most associated with the 12-string Rickenbacker in the '60s, their inspiration came from the Beatles. "We went as a group to see A Hard Day’s Night multiple times and were totally taken with the Beatles," said Roger (formerly Jim) McGuinn. 

"I liked George Harrison’s Rickenbacker 12, but I couldn’t find one that looked like his with the pointy cutaways, so I bought the blonde 360 model." For a clear, crisp example of the beauty of the guitar's sound, check out the 12-string riff as the song fades.

16. Rod Stewart - Maggie May

Album: Every Picture Tells a Story (1971) 

Maggie May, Rod's Stewart's first hit as a solo performer, starred a striking combination of 12-string acoustic guitar and mandolin. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked the song at No. 130 on its list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. We like it too.

15. Bon Jovi - Wanted Dead or Alive

Album: Slippery When Wet (1986) 

Half-inspired by Old West Outlaws and half by Bob Seger's Turn the Page, Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora managed to craft arguably the most recognizable acoustic guitar riff of a ballad-heavy era in rock music.

14. The Rolling Stones - As Tears Go By

Album: December's Children (And Everybody's) (1965) 

This was one of the first Jagger/Richards compositions - although producer Andrew Loog Oldham is also credited as a writer. Legend has it that ol' Loog Locked Mick and Keith in a room and told them to come out with an original song, period. This is what they came up with, and they gave it to Marianne Faithfull in 1964 before taking a stab at it a year later.

13. The Byrds - Mr. Tambourine Man

Album: Mr. Tambourine Man (1965) 

Even though George Harrison had been recording with his 12-string Rickenbacker for a while, with this song, Jim (later Roger) McGuinn showed the world exactly how cool a 12-string guitar could be. Its jangly sound was the perfect partner to Bob Dylan's ethereal lyrics. The 12-string Rick would be an integral part of the Byrds' sound until they disbanded in 1973.

12. Led Zeppelin - Stairway to Heaven

Album: Led Zeppelin IV (1971) 

With this song, Jimmy Page did for the doubleneck guitar what Roger McGuinn of the Byrds did for the 12-string electric. Or perhaps more fitting, Page did for the doubleneck what Henry Ford did for the horseless carriage.

11. Rush - Closer to the Heart

Album: A Farewell to Kings (1977) 

Taken from Rush's 1977 album A Farewell to Kings, Closer to the Heart begins with a majestic-sounding arpeggio picking pattern played by guitarist Alex Lifeson on a 12-string guitar. This song was also Rush's first hit in the U.K. and has been a staple of their live show ever since.

10. Ozzy Osbourne - Mama I’m Coming Home

Album: No More Tears (1991) 

Zakk Wylde's obvious Southern-rock homage in the opening bar gives way to beautiful, descending riff, which anchored Ozzy Osbourne's only solo Top 40 hit. Rest assured there are plenty of Zakk's patented pinch harmonics to go around, but the sound of the 12-string intro is what makes this song instantly recognizable.

9. Boston - More Than a Feeling

Album: Boston (1976) 

A classic rock radio mainstay and one of the most recognizable 12-string guitar intros in all of rock, More Than a Feeling reportedly took Tom Sholz five years to write.

8. Tom Petty - Free Falling

Album: Full Moon Fever (1989) 

Back when the Traveling Wilburys ruled the airwaves, Tom Petty, a Wilbury himself, adopted the band's thick, acoustic sound for Full Moon Fever, his first solo outing. He also took fellow Wilbury Jeff Lynne along for the ride as co-producer. 

This one features 12-string acoustic on the rhythm and a touch of 12-string Rickenbacker on the mini-solo.

7. The Byrds - Turn! Turn! Turn!

Album: Turn! Turn! Turn! (1965) 

Yes, it's the Byrds again. This song is higher up on the list than Mr. Tambourine Man because of its beautiful 12-string Rickenbacker solo and the fact that the Byrds are actually playing on it (which is not entirely true for Mr. Tambourine Man).

6. The Beatles - Ticket to Ride

Album: Help! (1965) 

Yet another one from '65. This tune, with its crisp 12-string Rickenbacker intro, is one of the many highlights from the Beatles' second feature film, Help! Just play an A on the G string, an open E string, a C sharp on the B string, that A again and then an open B string, and you're on your way.

5. Stevie Ray Vaughan - Rude Mood

Album: Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble (Box Set) (1990) 

It was a little surprising when SRV turned up on MTV's Unplugged in 1990 with a Guild 12-string, tearing through a slew of Texas Flood tunes, including Pride and Joy, Testify and Rude Mood. 

Then again, that's also the year he recorded Life by the Drop on a 12-string. Perhaps he'd stumbled upon something new that he could've put to greater use in the future.

4. Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here

Album: Wish You Were Here (1975)

Recorded to sound like it was being played through an old transistor radio, the 12-string intro of Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here never fails to evoke a sense of nostalgia. 

When David Gilmour plays the overdubbed six-string solo, sounding like a lonely old man playing along with the radio, you get one of the most timeless songs in the back catalog of one of the most timeless bands of all time.

3. Led Zeppelin - Over the Hills and Far Away

Album: Houses of the Holy (1973)

Stairway might be the most revered song on this list, but there's no denying Over The Hills and Far Away as the quintessential 12-string guitar song in Led Zeppelin's catalog. Yes, that Davey Graham was a great guitar player...

2. The Byrds - Eight Miles High

Album: Fifth Dimension (1966)

Hey, we love big, sloppy guitar solos played on Rickenbacker 360s. This is Jim (later Roger) McGuinn at his, well, 12-stringiest.

1. The Eagles - Hotel California

Album: Hotel California (1976)

Yes, it's Hotel California. What a nice surprise! Admit it: Don Felder's 12-string acoustic guitar intro (and every other note and chord he plays on this song) is, at this point, a part of our collective consciousness. 

This song, the ubiquitous soundtrack to 37 trillion barbecues, elevator rides and long trips through Joshua Tree and Yucca Valley, California, at 3 a.m., has never gone away - and probably never will.

David Myhre - session whiz, solo artist and right-hand guitar man to ex-Eagle Don Felder - was raised in Anchorage, Alaska, but shifted to Nashville in the early 2010s in the (ultimately, successful) pursuit of musical opportunity. 

While the closest most of us get to Alaska is re-runs of The Deadliest Catch, Myhre’s early days in Anchorage offered, in some ways, the ultimate training ground for the touring guitarist. 

“I tell a lot of guitar players that I think the long winters there really do the trick when it comes to honing the craft,” he says. A gig in the next city would involve a seven hour drive through the snow, the temperature played hell with guitars. “There was a lot of variables,” he deadpans. “But it made for a crazy adventure.”

Maybe it was the environment, maybe it was the busy mind, but Myhre found time for hockey, soccer, tae kwon do (gaining his black belt) and boxing (“maybe not the best for the hands…”). The discipline he developed outside of music was crucial to sticking it out on guitar.

“I think there was never a ‘limit’,” he says. “Where I was like, ‘I did enough time. I can stop today.’ Then the more I discovered bands and new music, I just couldn’t stop. I wanted to be like those players where the guitar looks like a part of them. That’s what I was attracted to.”

Gigs with his first band turned into 2am blues bar sets in high school and then national tours with the likes of Static Cycle. His break came, though, with a move to Nashville. Sticking-out as a rock player in a country town, he landed shows with The Band Perry and Tanya Tucker, before Don Felder recruited him in 2016. Now he’s focussing on a diverse run of new solo singles, which will drop over the coming months.

We talked to Myhre about his rise through the ranks, landing the Felder gig and musical method acting.

Things took off for you after you moved to Nashville. What made you make that move down from Anchorage?

“Well, I graduated and did one semester of college in Anchorage, and realized there wasn’t really anything for me at college at that time. I wanted to do music. I don’t know why I didn’t push for LA or New York, but I had a family connection in Nashville and a couch I could sleep on! 

“Musically, my upbringing was blues, rock, jazz and some old-school country, but I was never really a chicken picker. I was much more of a Les Paul, overdrive kind of guy, so moving there forced me to open up and learn some other stuff. But also, sticking to my strengths [as a rock and blues player] allowed me to stand out there, too.

“Then it just spider-webbed, like anything. I got the call to do the CMAs performance with The Band Perry and that was a big moment. Then, in 2015, I got the call to do the gig with Tanya Tucker.

Was that the first gig of that size you’d be involved in?

“Totally. And it was great. She was relaunching her career at that time - so that was a process I got to see from the ground up, which was cool. Also, I wasn’t a totally a fish out of water, but it was the most country stuff I’ve played. It allowed me to grow in that area but I got to mix it up some, as Tanya’s got this great rock/blues vibe to her vocal and her persona. She loved blending the two at the time.”

What was the most challenging element of that first big job with Tanya Tucker?

“You couldn’t really hide, you know? I came in as band leader, helped to form the band and you really just had to be wide open, work as a team and make strong decisions to help the artist. 

"The artist is expressing what they want and you have to become really intuitive to cater to that. Also, just playing onstage in front of bigger crowds and having to deliver a consistent show really helped open up my stage presence. It allowed me to start to take on that lead guitar player role, too.

“I remember, the very first show, at soundcheck my amp literally caught on fire. The very first show! I was like, ‘This has never happened in my life and it happens at the very first show!?’ It was crazy, but it felt like we’d got that out of the way early on and then I was ready for whatever.”

After playing all those gigs for others and now writing your own music, where do you think it’s left you as a player?

“I feel like I’m more in tune for myself, now that I’m focussing on my own writing. As a guitar player, I’m not being a chameleon, so it’s just sticking to what feels good. Trying to play with genuine feeling - and not letting my brain get in the way! You learn all these things that are like muscle memory and then you get onstage and you’re like, ‘I’ve got to play my hot licks!’ [laughs] 

"So I’m trying to eliminate the thought and just play with emotion and fun, like when I first picked it up. Once you do that, I feel like nobody can take that from a player. When it’s honest like that, that’s when people notice. I feel like that’s the most beneficial way to stand out.”

Gary Lucas once described that to me as ‘going for god’. That sense of removing your brain from the process.

“Yeah, that’s an awesome way to word it. I think that’s the goal for a lot of us. When you’re trying to play music and you do it for a living, it becomes a career. You have to really protect the innocence of it all and stay rooted in that.”

What have you found helps to get you into that headspace?

“I think it’s helpful when you’re playing with players who are like-minded and you feel you can do that. But at the same time, even in those instances where it’s a super last minute jam, I still try to zen out and focus and not get caught up in overthinking it - being mindful and not trying to control it. 

"It’s reaffirmed when you play with musicians that you idolized growing up, too. Seeing their approach and philosophy helps you to feel like you’re on the right path.”

We haven’t talked about Don Felder yet. Was that the case with him?

“Yeah, for sure. He has such a sound and style. It is just like ear candy. It has feel, it’s got articulation, you can sing what he’s playing. I’m such a melody guy and I love crazy fast riffs and he’s the perfect blend of all those worlds. It’s what I’ve always taken to as a listener. I think it’s the singer/songwriter side of me – then your playing starts mirroring that. 

“We’re playing Hotel California, all these songs from the Eagles catalogue and you can sing those solos. Everybody knows every lyric, every part. It also helped me, when I was onstage, to be like, ‘OK, this is the feeling that you’re trying to chase’, or ‘I need a song like Heartache Tonight that gets people off their seat.’”

You got the gig after you sat in with Felder during a soundcheck jam in Nashville. What do you think helped you to land that job?

“A lot of it was that he saw some of my improv playing and, like I say, saw we were cut from a similar cloth as players. I think that was the biggest thing. The blues and rock background was something that he connected with. I also really rehearsed the songs and dived into the live arrangements, the original recordings - all the details, articulation - and really tried to embody the parts. 

"There was no fooling him, so it was like method acting. I had to really immerse myself into that music and that catalogue. Over the years, I’ve definitely gotten more comfortable and perfected parts and, looking back now, it was a lot of gradual learning.”

Does Don Felder let you play his guitars?

“He has an insane guitar collection. It’s awesome. Just recently, we added a couple of Les Pauls into my rig that are ‘59 Reissues that he has, so you get spoiled really fast. It’s also been really awesome just seeing what kind of pick he plays with. He has like a nylon pick, which has the grip on it. That’s a big part of his sound, how that pick grabs the string. If you go back and listen to some of the stuff now, you’ll catch that.

“Our gear is pretty straightforward, though. My pedalboard has the Talk Box on there, we both do the Talk Box for Those Shoes, and some overdrives, which get plugged into a Fender Deluxe Reverb Reissue. Then it’s just your skin tone. It’s pretty straight ahead.”

Does your setup differ for your solo work?

“Right now, I’m using a 38-watt 3rd Power amp, Wooly Coats. It’s a local firm, based in East Nashville. Growing up, I had the Marshall amp stack, the ‘59 100-watt Plexi and it was just like, ‘Oh my gosh! I wanna be Hendrix!’ Then when you go to Nashville, from gig to gig, you quickly learn everything is mic’d up and you just need an amp that you can throw in your car. 

"The Wooly Coats has built-in reverb and a hybrid master control, so you can crank it, turn down the hybrid master and have that control over the tubes. It has those kind of fat, warm Fender tones, but at the same time, punches like a Marshall. 

“I’ve been working, too, with this pedal company called Vertex FX. They’re based out of LA and their pedals are awesome, so I’ve been incorporating their stuff into my board.

“But I’ve never been much of a gear head. I’ve always just learned by ear and feel, so I sometimes struggle with that side of my brain. I’ve also noticed I tend to get the most compliments on my tone when it’s really simple.”

You’ve just released a new solo single, Disguise. What are your solo plans?

“Well, songwriting has always been a part of it as much as the guitar playing for me. A lot of my time in Nashville has been spent co-writing and learning to write. They tend to start on acoustic and the production is fun, because I listen to all sorts of styles, so you can listen to Disguise and hear my pop influences and RnB melodies. 

"Then some of the singles that are to follow, you’ll hear the country side and the rock ‘n’ roll side. Right now, I want to release the stuff as singles and create a world around each song. I’m excited. I’m not just a country artist, or a pop artist, it’s really everything and I’m trying to get that across.”

Joe Walsh’s contributions to rock electric guitar tone are immense. With the bands James Gang, Barnstorm and the Eagles - and as a solo artist - he has recorded dozens of influential solos and riffs that continue to inspire guitarists today.

He also introduced the talkbox to the rock guitar vernacular and made highly innovative use of effects like the Echoplex and Leslie rotating speaker.

Walsh played a crucial role in the gear choices of other iconic players by selling Jimmy Page the legendary #1 Les Paul Standard heard on dozens of Led Zeppelin recordings and giving Pete Townshend the Gretsch 6120/Fender Bandmaster rig used on the Who’s early '70s albums.

As a noted gear hound, Walsh has recorded a multitude of awesome guitar tones, from his solos on the Eagles’ Hotel California to the seminal talkbox hit Rocky Mountain Way.

One of the coolest tones Walsh ever recorded is also one of his simplest: Funk #49. Internet 'experts' often claim that Walsh used only a Fender Tele and tweed Fender Champ to record the song, but Walsh corrected this - in his May 2012 Guitar World interview - by noting it was actually a blackface (circa 1964-’67) Champ.

40 years earlier, in a 1972 Guitar Player interview, Walsh said he used a 'Vibroplex', but this was probably an inside joke as Walsh is a ham radio enthusiast and a Vibroplex is actually a Morse code key. Perhaps it was actually a 1964-’67 Vibro Champ, which is identical to the Champ with the exception of its added tremolo circuit.

Details about the exact year of Walsh’s Tele are unknown, although in the 1972 interview he said it was “old” and he had modified the pickup wiring to provide “modern” bridge/both/neck settings. Teles featured either a 'blend' circuit until 1952 or a neck bass/neck with tone control/bridge without tone control circuit from 1953 until 1967, so the Tele was most likely from 1959 or earlier as Walsh prefers Teles with maple necks - and he referred to it as “old.”

Walsh’s Tele tone on Funk #49 sounds particularly raunchy and percussive due to the guitar’s lowered action and Walsh’s use of a light-gauge nylon pick. Having compared the sounds of a tweed and blackface Champ when playing the song, I can attest that it’s definitely a blackface, as the tweed’s midrange is too prominent and the bass is too loose, while the blackface has the perfect treble sparkle and low-end spank.

Get the sound, cheap!

• Squier Classic Vibe Telecaster ’50s
• Fender Pro Junior IV

TONE TIP: The Pro Junior IV is bigger and louder than a blackface Champ, so don’t overdo the controls. Volume at 8 and Tone at 5 (using the front panel’s 1-12 designations) works best.

Original gear

GUITAR: Circa 1953-’59 Fender Telecaster with maple neck and modified “modern” pickup wiring (bridge pickup); Volume: 10, Tone: 10.

AMP: Circa 1964-’67 Fender Champ or Vibro Champ with 8-inch Utah or CTS speaker (Volume: 10, Treble: 10, Bass: 10; if Vibro Champ Speed: 0, Intensity: 0), Input: 1

EFFECTS: None

STRINGS/TUNING: Ernie Ball Slinky .010-.046/Standard

PICK: Herco Light/Flex 50 (gold) nylon

The capo is to electric and acoustic guitars what sugar - or Stevia, if you prefer - is to food: it makes everything sweeter.

Musicians started noticing the capo's inherent sound-sweetening properties in the early 17th century, when primitive versions of the handy accessory were employed to raise the pitch of a host of fretted instruments.

The point of a capo is, of course, to be able to perform a song in a different key while using the same fingerings and chord formations you'd use in an open position. This enables performers to stick to positions they're more comfortable with and to enjoy all the benefits - including ringing, open strings- high up on the neck.

Capos also facilitate or create alternate chord voicings and help performers accentuate certain melody lines in a song. Of course, the higher up the neck you go with a capo, the more you change the voicing of the guitar - to the point that you can even imitate a mandolin.

Former Eagle Don Felder says it best in the video below, which he created for Guitar World:

"When I originally wrote [Hotel California], it was in the key of E minor, which is a really great guitar key to play in and write in. We recorded the whole track in E minor, and then Don Henley went out and tried singing it... and it was way too high for him.

"So I took a guitar, went out in the studio and said, 'OK, let's move it down to D minor.' Still too high... C minor, a little bit too high; A minor; no, that's too low. It wound up being in the key of B minor, which is on the seventh fret."

The seventh fret is exactly where Felder's capo wound up; the song is played as if it were in E minor.

Below, members of the Guitar World staff - including Jimmy Brown, tech editor Paul Riario and online managing editor Damian Fanelli - have rounded up 15 essential 'capo songs' - out of hundreds of worthy choices - that show off the benefits of, and alternate voicings created by, the capo. We tried to make sure no bands are repeated (although three bands are, indeed, repeated); we also set out to create a well-rounded list.

Note also that we've chosen videos that aren't necessarily vintage or classic- or that don't even show the 'classic' line-ups of certain bands; they do, however, show the capo'd guitar being played (in most cases, at least).

• Pop a capo on your axe with our guide to the best guitar capos you can buy today

1. Eagles - Hotel California | Capo 7

As stated earlier, to play the Eagles' Hotel California in its original key, try using a capo on the seventh fret. The song is played as if it were in E minor, the song's original key, as explained by Don Felder above (and in the video below). This makes the song 'sound' in B minor. Note: The capo is used on the acoustic guitar part that starts the song.

In the top lesson video below, Fender also shows you how to play part of the guitar solo (Note that Felder plays Hotel California in A minor now because he sings it when he performs it, and it works better with his vocal range).

2. Jethro Tull - Aqualung | Capo 3

This classic 1971 Jethro Tull tune features a capo on the third fret - for the acoustic guitar part, that is, which is performed by Ian Anderson in the vintage live video below.

The acoustic part is played as if it were in E minor, but it 'sounds' in G minor. Don't worry, we'll have more classic Tull for you later in the list!

3. Oasis - Wonderwall | Capo 2

Jumping ahead to the height of the Britpop-dominated mid-'90s, we bring you one of the songs Oasis will be remembered for - Wonderwall, which was composed by Noel Gallagher.

To play the song in its original key (as thousands of wide-eyed kids of all ages sing along with you), put a capo on the second fret and play the song as if it were in E minor. It, of course, 'sounds' in F# minor.

4. The Who - The Real Me | Capo 3

Although this one doesn't normally leap to mind when one thinks of "popular capo tunes," this rocking Quadrophenia track from 1973 was recorded by Pete Townshend using a capo on the third fret.

The song, which is played as if it were in a power-chord-friendly A, 'sounds' in C.

5. The Beatles - Here Comes the Sun | Capo 7

George Harrison was fond of sticking a capo on the seventh fret of his guitar and playing songs in the 'D' formation that sound like they're in A. He did it on the Beatles' If I Needed Someone and followed it up a few years later with 1969's Here Comes the Sun, one of his greatest compositions.

Below is a Here Comes the Sun lesson by Jimmy Brown.

6. Fleetwood Mac - The Chain| Capo 2

This classic Fleetwood Mac song is played in drop-D tuning - the studio version, that is - with a capo on the second fret.

The song, which emphasizes a 'swampy stomp' groove, incorporates an octave bass line on the guitar and some greasy finger picking.

7. Tom Petty - Free Fallin' | Capo info below

Free Fallin', the most popular track from Petty's first 'solo' album, 1989's Full Moon Fever, was played like so:

• Capo 1 main, low guitar part and second, higher guitar part (played as if the song were in E; sounds in F.)
• Capo 3 third guitar part (played as if the song were in D; sounds in F.)

In this song in particular, we hear the capo truly 'sweeten up' the beefy chords.

8. James Taylor - Fire and Rain | Capo 3

This beautiful song by James Taylor is played as if it were in the key of A. It 'sounds' in C. It features open-chord embellishments and sliding chord shapes.

9. Bob Dylan - Don't Think Twice, It's All Right | Capo 4

When we spoke to Ed Sheeran, we asked him to name a few acoustic guitar songs every guitarist should know how to play. He named this one, a bouncy track from Bob Dylan's 1963 album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. At least John Mayer knows how to play it - and we've included his live video below.

Note that there aren't many (or any) videos on YouTube that show Dylan playing this song the way he played it in '63. There is, however, an interesting clip of Dylan performing the song with Eric Clapton. By the way, Blowin' in the Wind is another fine capo tune by Dylan (capo 7).

Almost forgot: For Don't Think Twice, It's All Right, it's capo 4; play a C chord; 'sounds' in E! There are some fun changes in this tune.

10. The Guess Who - No Sugar Tonight | Capo 4

This classic Guess Who tune - which is performed with a capo as a straight chord melody - is played as if it were in D. It 'sounds' in F#.

Note: We're talking about the original version. In the video below, you'll notice the capo doesn't play a huge role in the song in modern times.

11. The Beatles - Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) | Capo 2

This late-1965 Beatles song is played as if it were in the key of D, but it 'sounds' in E, with a capo on the second fret. Right-hand-wise, it's a 'strum-picky' chord melody - not quite picking, not quite strumming.

Because there are no videos of the Beatles performing this song live (because it never happened), we've provided a basic (non-Guitar World) lesson video that shows everything clearly, including the capo on the second fret, the chords and embellishments.

12. Harry Chapin - Cat's in the Cradle | Capo 8

This 1974 Harry Chapin tune is played as if it were in the key of A but 'sounds' in F. It's another example of a 'chord melody' piece.

13. Jethro Tull - Thick As a Brick | Capo 3

This classic Jethro Tull tune is played as if it were in D, but it 'sounds' in F. It is packed with rolling arpeggios that make non-stop - and awesome - use of the capo.

14. Fleetwood Mac - Landslide | Capo 3

We don't like to repeat bands in our lists (OK, we've already done it with the Beatles and Jethro Tull), but it's difficult to leave out this Fleetwood Mac tune.

The song, which highlights a form of Travis picking, is played as if it were in the key of C. It 'sounds' in Eb.

15. Clarence White - I Am a Pilgrim / Soldier's Joy | Capo 2

Here's a curveball for you - a selection from the world of bluegrass. Here's Clarence White (on the left, with the beard) performing a medley of I Am a Pilgrim and Soldier's Joy with his brother, Roland, on mandolin and Bob Baxter on second guitar (later joined by Byron Berline on fiddle and Alan Munde on banjo for Soldier's Joy).

The clip is rare in that it shows White's fingering and fretwork up close. Second, there's White unusual sense of timing in the first tune (I Am a Pilgrim); it's as if he's throwing in chord substitutions like a jazzer, while Roland plays it straight on mandolin.

It can be a little disconcerting and confusing (but I love it). But pay close attention to the second tune (starts at 3:47), which is a traditional fiddle tune adapted to guitar. It is almost always played with a capo on the second fret, in D, although played with a C chord.

Like a lot of music-obsessed people, I tend to create a fair amount of iTunes playlists. Why? So that I always have just the right music for any setting or situation.

I make them for different vacation destinations, certain times of the week (my massive "Sunday Morning" playlist gets a lot of use), different background-music-friendly weekend activities and, of course, holidays.

For the past year or so, I've been tinkering with a playlist that's perfect for trips to one of my favorite places on earth, the southern California high desert—especially the stunning landscapes in and around Joshua Tree National Park (Yucca Valley, Joshua Tree, Twentynine Palms...you get the idea). Or maybe even Death Valley or the drive from Los Angeles to Barstow.

Below are 10 songs that are featured on this playlist; consider them recommendations for your own "ultimate desert playlist." As you're listening, picture the sandy, rocky nothingness; picture Gram Parsons and his buddies being photographed on the side of the road in early 1969; picture the high-lonesome, dry, rocky journeys of countless forgotten 19th- and 20th-century migrants, drifters and adventurers. Or picture Milton Berle, Mickey Rooney and Sid Caesar as they search for that elusive $250,000 in 1963.

One final thought: Please avoid being a troll. This list is purely subjective; if you disagree with something, that's nice. If you have a recommendation of your own, please add it to the comments at the bottom of this story (Seriously, I'm always looking for more desert songs). Enjoy!

One final-final thought: Just assume that America's "A Horse with No Name" is a given. Honestly, I didn't want to waste a spot on something so obvious. Besides, everyone knows that song already; this list gives you a chance to hear some off-the-beaten-path stuff, including songs by the Hacienda Brothers, Marty Robbins, Phil Baugh and the Flying Burrito Brothers. There is a method to all this.

SAGUERO
Hacienda Brothers

Let's just say this song sets the scene perfectly. The guitarist is Dave Gonzalez of the Paladins, a veteran SoCal rockabilly band that's hitting the road this spring and summer. If you like this tune, be sure to check out its equally effective sequel, "Son of Saguero," and a huge chunk of their Arizona Motel album from 2008.

PEACEFUL EASY FEELING
The Eagles

I know this selection is about as obvious as America's "A Horse with No Name" (see above), but leaving it off this list is akin to leaving the Byrds' "Chestnut Mare" off a list of songs about deranged cowboys chasing after female horses. That's Bernie Leadon—a former member of the Flying Burrito Brothers—playing the B-bender-equipped Telecaster. Another good Eagles choice for this list is "Hotel California."

WAY OUT WEST
Marty Stuart and His Fabulous Superlatives

Marty Stuart's latest album is called Way Out West, and pretty much any song from the disc would fit nicely on this list. I've decided to go with the title track (mostly because its music video lends some impressive visuals to this article), but feel free to sample "Lost on the Desert," "El Fantasmo Del Toro" or "Old Mexico." For more about this album, head here and here.

CHRISTINE'S TUNE (DEVIL IN DISGUISE)
The Flying Burrito Brothers

Before U2, no recording artist was more closely associated with Joshua Tree than Gram Parsons. The original Flying Burrito Brothers—Parsons, Chris Hillman, Sneaky Pete Kleinow and Chris Ethridge—shot their first album cover in Joshua Tree National Park, and Parsons died while staying at the Joshua Tree Inn in 1973. Here's the opening track from the Burrito Brothers' debut album, The Gilded Palace of Sin; check out Kleinow's fuzzed-out pedal steel guitar work. While you're at it, be sure to sample "Hot Burrito #1," "Juanita" and "Wheels" from the same (brilliant) album—not to mention any of the Parsons-led tracks on the Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo.

I KNOW THAT FEELING
Phil Baugh

I don't know about you, but I can't imagine a desert playlist without a few slow early to mid-Sixties country tunes, complete with a whining pedal steel guitar and some Earl P. Ball-style piano. Phil Baugh's "I Know That Feeling" is just one of a thousand possible choices. By the way, guitar fans might want to hear Baugh's "The Finger" (and perhaps use it on another playlist).

BIG IRON
Marty Robbins

Every good desert playlist needs at least one cowboy song, so it's Marty Robbins to the rescue. Robbins has two classic "cowboy" albums: 1959's Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs and 1960's MoreGunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs. "Big Iron" is from the former—but he has so many songs that are just as fitting.

BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE
Calexico

Some people say, "Anything by Calexico is perfect for a desert playlist." Yeah, that's not true; but this tune fits the bill, and the scenery in the video doesn't hurt. Be sure to also check out "Fake Fur."

I'VE BEEN EVERYWHERE
Johnny Cash

Here's Johnny Cash's version of one of the greatest "road songs" of all time; he recorded it in the Nineties with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Be sure to lend an ear to the Hank Snow version while you're at it. Best of all, the video below supplies the lyrics.

PANORAMA
Daniel Lanois

Besides being a great "desert drive" track, this also might be the most beautiful piece of music written for solo pedal steel guitar. As with all of the songs on this list, I ask that you imagine hearing this tune at 11:36 p.m. while passing through that lonely stretch between Twentynine Palms and Yucca Valley, California. To add to the image, you're alone—just like Daniel Lanois.

I WISH I WAS THE MOON
Neko Case

Neko Case's voice is like an incredible, never-ending multi-course meal; there's so much there to enjoy, so much to bite into. Case is one of those artists who, like Calexico, is often associated with desert music. I've chosen this song for its subject matter but also for its dreamy guitar work. On second thought, Case's voice isn't like a meal at all, since you can never quite get enough of it.

SING ME BACK HOME
Merle Haggard

It would be strange to ignore the Bakersfield, California, gang—Merle Haggard, Buck Owens, Don Rich & Co.—so I'll include this classic 1967 Haggard track. It's actually perfect because it was covered by pretty much everyone involved in the late-Sixties, long-haired, West Coast "country rock" scene, including the Flying Burrito Brothers, the Byrds (live) and Nashville West. And if nothing else, it's a powerful song that everyone should have tucked away—somewhere—on their iPod.

WHITEWATER
Kyuss

I love lists that go from Merle Haggard to Kyuss. A lot of people will say the band's entire Welcome to Sky Valley album (1994) needs to be on this list. Perhaps not, but a strong argument can be made for "Whitewater," despite its mention of water (this is a playlist about desert songs, after all). The late-night-desert-drive portion of the song starts around 5:41.

COMANCHERO
Mister Neutron

I wrote and played lead guitar (a '66 Gretsch Tennessean) on this tune, which is dedicated to the 19th-century Mexican traders in the New Mexico Territory who made their living by trading with the Great Plains Indian tribes. It's crazy, but I actually recorded this song with a desert playlist in mind, so there's no way in hell I'm leaving it off this list. Besides, this is actually the 13th song on this list (of "10" songs), so no complaints, people! In retrospect, I wish we'd played it a bit slower that day; the trumpet (not played by me), however, is just right.

Follow Damian Fanelli, an all-around swell guy, on Twitter and/or Instagram.

Former Eagles guitarist Don Felder will release a new solo album, American Rock ‘n’ Roll, April 5th via BMG. The record features a slew of guests, including Slash, Bob Weir, Sammy Hagar, Joe Satriani, Chad Smith and Mick Fleetwood.

In advance of the album’s release, Felder has shared the title track, which features guest guitar work from Slash, as well as drums from both Chad Smith and Mick Fleetwood. You can check it out above.

Regarding the track, which references artists from Jimi Hendrix and Santana to Van Halen and Guns N’ Roses, Felder told Rolling Stone: “Slash lives really close to me. He came over, brought his guitar, plugged into one of my amps and we traded off on some solos. He actually plays on the part of the song that mentions Guns N’ Roses by name.”

Discussing the impetus behind the album, Felder continued: “I wanted to bring in as many people as possible to share the experience with me. I knew it should be bright, cheery and fun or it wouldn’t be worth doing. It should be a labor of love, not a labor of work.”

American Rock 'n' Roll is available for pre-order here.

If you’re a Jethro Tull fan, you probably noticed years ago that there is a distinct resemblance between one of the prog-rock group’s older songs and the Eagles’ monster hit “Hotel California.”

The track in question is “We Used to Know,” from Jethro Tull’s 1969 album Stand Up. The chord structure to “Hotel California,” which was released in 1976, is remarkably similar to it. The most obvious difference is that the chord changes come every measure in the Tull song and every two measures in the Eagles’ cut. In addition, “We Used to Know” is also in 3/4 time, while “Hotel California” is in 4/4.

Jethro Tull frontman Ian Anderson, who wrote “We Used to Know,” has offered up a possible reason for the resemblance.

“[‘We Used to Know’] was a piece of music that we were playing around the time, I believe it was late ’71, maybe early '72, when we were on tour,” Anderson explains in an interview, which can be heard below. “And we had a support band who had been signed up for the tour and subsequently, before the tour began, had a hit single, a song I believe called ‘Take It Easy.’ And they were indeed the Eagles.”

Yes, despite their remarkably dissimilar styles of music, Jethro Tull and the Eagles did share a bill in 1972 when Tull were on tour for their classic album Thick as a Brick. Tull were the headliners, supported by the Eagles, who at the time were just getting started and enjoying some success with their first single, “Take It Easy,” released in May of that year.

“We didn’t interact with them very much because they were countrified, laid-back polite rock and we were a bit wacky and English and doing weird stuff,” Anderson says. “I don’t think they much liked us and we didn’t like them.”

“They probably heard us playing [‘We Used to Know’], because that would have featured in the set list back then,” he continues. “And maybe it’s just something that they picked up on subconsciously and introduced that chord sequence into their famous song ‘Hotel California’ some time later.”

The music to “Hotel California” was written by guitarist Don Felder, who recorded a demo of the song at a rented beach house in Malibu. “I remember sitting in the living room on a spectacular July day with the doors wide open,” he told Guitar World in 2013. “I had a bathing suit on and was sitting on this couch, soaking wet, thinking the world is a wonderful place to be. I had this acoustic 12-string and started tinkling around with it, and those ‘Hotel California’ chords just kind of oozed out.”

Felder actually wasn’t a member of the Eagles at the time that the Eagles toured with Jethro Tull, though as a friend of founding member Bernie Leadon, he could have been in attendance at a show where Tull performed “We Used to Know.” Felder has denied having heard the song before writing “Hotel California” and said his main knowledge of Jethro Tull is that Anderson plays flute.

Though Anderson has commented on the similarities between the songs over the years, he says he’s always meant his comments as a joke. He dismisses the idea that anyone in the Eagles plagiarized “We Used to Know.”

“It’s not plagiarism. It’s just the same chord sequence,” he says. “It’s in a different time signature, different key, different context. And its a very, very fine song that they wrote, so I can’t feel anything other than happiness for their sake, and I feel flattered had they come across that chord sequence. It’s difficult to find a chord sequence that hasn’t been used and hasn’t been the focus of lots of pieces of music. Harmonic progression—it’s almost a mathematical certainty that you’re gonna crop up with the same thing sooner or later if you’re strumming a few chords on a guitar.”

Anderson discusses the similarities in the first clip. You can hear “We Used to Know” and “Hotel California” in the subsequent clips. 

The Eagles have announced the release of Legacy, a comprehensive 12-CD/DVD/Blu-ray set spanning the band’s entire career.

Legacy will be released on November 2 in two versions. The first boasts 12 CDs and includes the band’s seven studio albums and three live albums, as well as a compilation of singles and b-sides and two concert videos, Hell Freezes Over (DVD) and Farewell Tour: Live From Melbourne (Blu-ray). A vinyl version of Legacy features all the music from the CDs on 15 LPs, but without the two concert videos. Both sets are housed in deluxe slipcases and accompanied by a 54-page hardbound book filled with rare and unseen photos, memorabilia and artwork.

Grammy-winning mastering engineer Bob Ludwig remastered Hell Freezes Over and Millennium Concert especially for Legacy. Both albums—along with several tracks from the singles and b-sides compilation—are being released on vinyl for the first time ever as part of this collection, save for a small European vinyl pressing of Hell Freezes Over around its original release in 1994. In addition, the double-album Eagles Live is making its long-awaited return to vinyl in this set after being out of print for decades.

Legacy CD/DVD/Blu-ray Listing:

Eagles (1972)

Desperado (1973)

On the Border (1974)

One of These Nights (1975)

Hotel California (1976)

The Long Run (1979)

Eagles Live - Double LP (1980)

Hell Freezes Over - Double LP (1994)

Millennium Concert - Double LP (2000)

Long Road Out of Eden - Double LP (2007)

Single and B-Sides (2018)

1.    "Take It Easy" (Single Version)

2.    "Get You in the Mood" (Non-LP B Side)

3.    "Outlaw Man" (Single Version)

4.    "Best of My Love" (Single Version)

5.    "One of These Nights" (Single Edit)

6.    "Lyin' Eyes" (Single Edit)

7.    "Take It to the Limit" (Single Edit)

8.    "Please Come Home For Christmas"

9.    "Funky New Year"

10.  "Hole in the World"

DVD: Hell Freezes Over (1994)

Blu-ray: Farewell Tour: Live From Melbourne (2005)

Legacy LP Listing:

Eagles (1972)

Desperado (1973)

On the Border (1974)

One of These Nights (1975)

Hotel California (1976)

The Long Run (1979)

Eagles Live - Double LP (1980)

Hell Freezes Over - Double LP (1994)

Millennium Concert - Double LP (2000)

Long Road Out of Eden - Double LP (2007)

Single and B-Sides (2018)

Welcome back to "The Next Bend," a column dedicated to B-bending guitarists, guitars, gear, news, licks, songs and more.

For the uninitiated, a B-bender is a contraption (the perfect word for it) that lives in- or outside your guitar and allows you to pull—usually with some sort of arm, palm, shoulder or hip movement—your guitar's B string up a perfect whole step. So, a B note would suddenly become a C# (or a C, if you don't bend the string all the way).

Although this simple explanation might not convey the wonder of a B-bender (it sounds more like an exercise regimen), suffice it to say the contraption allows guitarists to create sounds that would be impossible otherwise. And it sounds cool as hell.

So, to kick things off, and perhaps to best demonstrate what B-benders are all about, we present this guide to 13 (possibly 14; our math isn't too good) essential B-bender guitar songs.

Sure, we could've packed this list with songs with B-bender solos by Diamond Rio's Jimmy Olander, the Hellecasters' Will Ray or the Byrds' Clarence White. Instead, we've gone for a more well-rounded approach, attempting to include as many different guitarists as possible, not to mention a few super-accessible (even "classic") songs. We might've even thrown in a bonus song or two. Our math isn't too good.

Note that we couldn't resist including a triple dose of tunes featuring the late, great White, the pioneering guitarist from the Byrds, Kentucky Colonels and Muleskinner—the granddaddy (or perhaps the grand-uncle) of B-benders. White's flights of fancy with the Parsons/White StringBender—an ingenious B-string-pulling device invented and installed in White's 1954 Tele by fellow Byrd, multi-instrumentalist and machinist Gene Parsons—is legendary, or at least it should be.

We'll discuss the uncalled-for obscurity of B-bender artists in a future column. We'll also discuss all the guitarists named below (but in greater detail), not to mention gear, including production-model B-bender-equipped guitars, Hipshot B-benders, palm-benders, the B-Blender, the Rolling Bender, you name it.

As you peruse the admittedly country-music-centric list below, remember that even Metallica's James Hetfield has used a B-bender from time to time. It's just a handy device.

Enjoy the tunes below!

THE BYRDS, "You Ain't Going Nowhere"
Guitarist: Clarence White

Because the Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo version of this Bob Dylan tune highlights pedal steel guitar (courtesy of the great Lloyd Green), we suggest you check out a slightly later live rendition instead—like this one from a 1968 TV appearance. It puts the emphasis on White, his still-Nudie-sticker-free Fender Telecaster and his Parsons/White StringBender.

LED ZEPPELIN, "All of My Love" and/or "Ten Years Gone"
Guitarist: Jimmy Page

Even though "All of My Love" is probably Page's all-around best B-bender solo, I've also included a live video of "Ten Years Gone" from Led Zeppelin's 1979 Knebworth performance. It's noteworthy because it shows Page actually using the bender. This, by the way, is the same Telecaster Page is holding in the photo at the top of this story—and on the cover of the July 1986 Guitar World. Page continued to use his B-bender into the Eighties with the Firm and the Honeydrippers.

THE EAGLES, "Peaceful Easy Feeling"
Guitarist: Bernie Leadon

As I was listening to this song while compiling my list, someone walked by my desk and said, "I always just assumed that was a pedal steel guitar." It is, in fact, Bernie Leadon on a B-bender-equipped Tele. The cameraman who shot this video was considerate enough to film Leadon's entire solo. It's interesting to note that Leadon is the official link between the Eagles and the Byrds. Before he joined the Eagles, Leadon played guitar with the Flying Burrito Brothers, which was founded by former Byrds Chris Hillman and Gram Parsons (with former Byrd Michael Clarke on drums to boot). But I digress...

WILL RAY, "Hellecaster Stomp"
Guitarist: Will Ray

The original Hellecasters version of this boppin' tune appears on The Return of the Hellecasters. What we have here, however, is a more recent solo performance (with a backing track) of the song by Will Ray, one of the band's uber-talented guitarists. Ray employs a variety of techniques (he has many to choose from), and—especially toward the middle of the clip—these techniques include some Hipshot B-bending (Hipshot actually makes a Will Ray model B-bender). By the way, if you're not familiar with the Hellecasters, there's still time to change that. The Return of the Hellecasters is a must-own album if you're a ... well, a guitar player who wants to hear what good playing sounds like.

THE BYRDS, "Buckaroo"
Guitarist: Clarence White

Feel free to argue, but if you had to choose one Byrds album that best demonstrates Clarence White's electric-guitar prowess, it'd be Live at the Fillmore—February 1969. The musicians on the album are Roger McGuinn on his 12-string Rickenbacker 360, Gene Parsons on drums, John York on bass and White on his B-Bender Tele. He never puts it down, so there's no escaping it. The most impressive guitar track on the album is the band's cover of Buck Owens' killer-catchy instrumental, "Buckaroo," which finally exists on YouTube. White rips open his bag of B-bender licks—and never closes it. Even his mistakes sound good, like the random open G string he hits at :32. Play this one good and loud, people.

MARTY STUART, "Hummingbyrd"
Guitarist: Marty Stuart

As White and Stuart fans know, Stuart is using White's original '54 Tele in this clip. He bought it from White's wife a few years after White's tragic 1973 death. The song, as its title suggests, is an instrumental ode to the guitar's original owner ("Hummingbyrd" ... the Byrds ... Clarence White). "I always felt a little guilty about not having a recital piece for that guitar," Stuart told Guitar Player in 2010. "With 'Hummingbyrd,' I feel like I finally recorded a song that honors that guitar properly."

ALBERT LEE, "Lonely Guy"
Guitarist: Albert Lee

The internet isn't exactly packed with videos of Albert Lee using his B-bender, which is disappointing. Lee does, however, give it a wee workout on "Lonely Guy," a relaxing instrumental number. We've also included a brief clip of Lee (with Sterling Ball on bass) demo-ing his beloved "pull string." To read about Lee's thoughts on (and history with) B-benders, check out my Lee interview from the July 2014 issue of Guitar World.

THE BYRDS, "Tulsa County"
Guitarist: Clarence White

Here's White (again), playing one of his most beloved B-bender solos on Pamela Polland's "Tulsa County," a standout track from the Byrds' second of two 1969 albums, Ballad of Easy Rider. Because there's (of course) no video of White playing this tune, I've included a brief clip of me, myself and I playing a brief, uptempo version of White's solo (with many liberties taken along the way). It's in the key of E if you're following along at home. By the way, my Fender Telecaster has a Parsons/Green bender, an Emerson four-way switch and Lollar pickups; that's a Lollar Royal T in the neck position.

HERB PEDERSEN, "Easy Ride"
Guitarist: Bob Warford

If there were a Clarence White School of B-Bender Guitar, Warford would be its dean. It's freaky to listen to "Easy Ride," a mid-Eighties track by Herb Pedersen (available on iTunes), because it sounds very much like White on guitar. It's actually the incredibly talented Warford, whose style is a bit more "sparse" than White's (fewer droning D strings and all that). His Tele solo starts at 1:48 and includes a killer harmonic; he's also playing fills throughout the song. Warford, who was a key part of Linda Ronstadt's band, also can be heard on several mid-Eighties solo tracks by Chris Hillman.

LINDA RONSTADT, "Dark End of the Street"
Guitarist: Bob Warford

We're gonna stay in "Bob Warford mode" for one more song—Linda Ronstadt's cover of "Dark End of the Street," a late-Sixties soul number that works so well as a country tune (just ask the Flying Burrito Brothers). This is a master class on how to play B-bender, and it's possibly the best "slow" B-bender solo I've ever heard.

DIAMOND RIO, "The Ballad of Conley and Billy"
Guitarist: Jimmy Olander

All I can say is, I'll be writing more about Jimmy Olander in the future. He plays a B- and G-bender. I need to start doing that.

MICHAEL NESMITH, "Propinquity"
Guitarist: Al Perkins

This is a track from Michael Nesmith's Live at the Palais album, on which Al Perkins plays B-bender and pedal steel guitar. Like a lot of B-bender solos recorded since the early Seventies, this sounds a bit like a nod to Clarence White. Perkins, by the way, is another former member of the Flying Burrito Brothers, and you can hear some of his best work—six-string and pedal steel—on that band's Last of the Red Hot Burritos album (1972).

MARTY STUART, "Wait for the Morning"
Guitarist: Marty Stuart

I'm happy to report that Marty Stuart's 2017 album, Way Out West, is packed with B-bender tunes (not to mention a bevy of enjoyably tunes that'll make you wish you were in Joshua Tree National Park at this very moment). The song that truly grabs me, though, is the powerful "Wait for the Morning," an acoustic performance of which can be seen below; and you're reading that correctly—Stuart's Martin acoustic has a B-bender. To me, his simple solo—especially the one heard on official "electric" version of this song—sums up what the B-bender is all about—the way it can stir up deep emotions with the simple pull of a string. We've also included a new Reverb.com video dedicated to Stuart and his beloved guitar, "Clarence." For more about Stuart and "Clarence," check out my recent interview right here.

A FINAL THOUGHT: I normally don't include my own songs in the Guitar World stories I write, but someone recently reminded me of a B-bender tune I recorded about 10 years ago, before I had truly taken the bender super-seriously (These days, my customized Fender B-bender Tele is my main guitar, and it's difficult to imagine life without it). It's an instrumental ditty called "I'm a Geezer for Your Love" by my old surf band, Mister Neutron. It's packed with B-bender action. I hope it provides you with a pleasant three minutes!

What’s better than a master guitarist pouring their guts out through their strings?

How about two master guitarists simultaneously pouring their guts out through their strings? You read me?

Do I hear three master guitarists? Will these questions ever stop?

Whatever the case, synchronized guitar work—which requires skillful harmonization—can take the multi-guitar lineup to its full potential—that is, make all lead parts sound bigger and badder. Here are some of the baddest.

10. Racer X, “Scarified”

That Paul Gilbert and Bruce Bouillet play these stunning neoclassical arpeggios with such apparent ease is enough to make any insecure guitarist closet his ax for good. The fleet-fingered duo speed-pick their way through a cycle of 4ths, sweep-pick across all six strings, and tap the fretboard like some four-armed guitar god that worshippers both fear and revere.

09. Metallica, “Master of Puppets”

It’s rare for James Hetfield to play lead, but when he does he makes it count. The solo he composed for the gentle middle section of this rager about drug abuse is a true attention-getter thanks largely to the sweet melody and high-register trills. In addition, the harmonies here proved that Hetfield and lead guitarist Kirk Hammett were more than just heavy-handed thrashers.

08. Steve Vai and Billy Sheehan, “Shy Boy”

How does David Lee Roth make himself look good after parting with Van Halen? Well, he hires two Eddies. Sure, Sheehan is a bassist, but he plays the thing like a six-stinger. The breakdown at the song’s end, though short, displays some truly terrifying, ultra-meticulous two-hand tapping. The section functions much like a dangerous high-speed stunt—where a good deal of the audience’s thrill derives from a secret, morbid desire to see the stuntmen fall.

07. Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, “Three Guitar Special”

As the hired guns for Wills’s Western swing band, electric guitarist Eldon Shamblin, pedal-steel man Herb Remington, and electric mandolin player Tiny Moore held down three-part harmonies as though they were a horn section from a big band, all the while shredding through sophisticated jazz-based chromatic passages and arpeggios. Check out the ballsy amplification, especially of the mandolin. And this is 1947!

Note: We can't find "Three Guitar Special" on YouTube, so we've included the audio of "Twin Guitar Special" from 1941:

06. Ratt, “Round and Round”

Of those hair-farmin’, lip-poutin’, pantyhose-wearin’ pop-metal bands from the Eighties, this combo—featuring guitarists Warren DeMartini and the late Robbin Crosby—has the distinction of scoring a dual-guitar hit that wasn’t just a sappy ballad. After DeMartini takes a Halen-esque lead, Robbin Crosby joins in for the sustained string bends and descending scales that steal the spotlight from vocalist Stephen Pearcy.

05. Thin Lizzy, “The Boys Are Back In Town”

The trademark sound of the Scott Gorham–Brian Robertson tandem became the prototype for virtually every twin-ax metal band that followed. This sound is immortalized in this Top 40 hit, in which the guitarists' singing lines, adept phrasing and gradual ascension of the fretboard took the song to a dramatic climax above and beyond that of the final chorus.

04. Slayer, “South of Heaven”

Love them or hate them for pioneering a style of metal lead that is more noisescape than it is either tuneful or technical, the team of Kerry King and the late Jeff Hanneman created some of the most instantly recognizable harmony leads around, owing mostly to intervals that will creep the hell out anybody within earshot. If the chromatic descent on this unusually slow pounder doesn’t make you crap your pants, you’ve earned the right to join the Freemasons.

03. Boston, “More Than a Feeling”

When Les Paul pioneered multitrack recording, it was inevitable that someone like Tom Scholz would take it to the limit—by recording a solo six times over. Armed with pristine distortion, this one-man guitar army launched with this song what is perhaps the most evocative melodies in rock. Eventually, the consistent string bends, slurs and vibrato start to feel almost like a synthetic string section on the recording—a fact that would have disqualified Scholz from this list had he not hired Barry Goudreau and Brad Delp to help him reproduce the harmonies live.

02. The Allman Brothers Band, “Jessica”

This joyous tune recorded shortly after the death of superhuman slide guitarist Duane Allman, with Dicky Betts and Les Dudek on electric guitars. They followed this theoretical formula on one of the most famous rock instrumentals of the Seventies: simple, catchy melody times two equals mondo hooks. The countrified harmonies that constitute this instrumental’s “verse” section are, arguably, the most lyrical in all of classic rock.

01. The Eagles, “Hotel California”

Californian country-rock? Yeah, right. But throw in former James Gang guitarist Joe Walsh with Don Felder and Glen Frey and you’ve got a dreamy and dramatic chorus of electric guitars stacking arpeggios over a quasi-Spanish chord progression. Ah, you can almost detect the warm smell of “co-lee-tas” in the air…

The Eagles have announced a 2018 North American tour.

The shows, which will feature the same iteration of the band—Don Henley, Joe Walsh and Timothy B. Schmit with Vince Gill and Glenn Frey's son, Deacon—as the "Evening with the Eagles" shows that took place this fall.

Notably, the band will be joined by Jimmy Buffett and the Coral Reefer Band at four of the shows, James Taylor and his All-Star Band at two shows and country star Chris Stapleton at a show in Arlington, Texas.

You can see the full itinerary below.

“While I was still in shock during some interviews after Glenn passed away, I did say I thought that was the end of the band,” Don Henley told the Los Angeles Times after rehearsals for the band's first shows after Frey's death in 2016. “But I reserve the right to change my mind. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds'.”

For more information, visit Eagles.com.

Eagles 2018 Tour DatesMarch 14 – Chicago, IL @ United Center
March 23 – Nashville, TN @ Bridgestone Arena
April 14 – Orlando, FL @ Camping World Stadium (with Jimmy Buffett)
April 21 – Miami, FL @ Hard Rock Stadium (with Jimmy Buffett)
May 10 – Vancouver, BC @ Rogers Arena
June 23 – Arlington, TX @ AT&T Stadium (with Chris Stapleton)
June 28 – Denver, CO @ Coors Field (with Jimmy Buffett)
June 30 – Minneapolis, MN @ Target Field (with Jimmy Buffett)
July 15 – Toronto, ON @ Air Canada Centre
July 20 – Boston, MA @ TD Garden
July 26 – Washington, DC @ Nationals Park (with James Taylor)
July 28 – Philadelphia, PA @ Citizens Bank Park (with James Taylor)

The Eagles have announced a 40th anniversary, deluxe reissue of their landmark 1976 album, Hotel California.

The deluxe reissue—which comes in a 2-CD/1-Blu-ray Audio package that includes remastered sound, 10 previously unreleased live recordings, as well as hi-res stereo and 5.1 mixes—will be available on November 24.

The live recordings were taken the band's three-night stand at the Los Angeles Forum in October 1976 and feature one of the first ever live performances of "Hotel California" and "New Kid In Town" along with other Eagles classics including "Already Gone," "Take It To the Limit" and "Witchy Woman."

The deluxe edition also includes an 11 x 11 hardbound bookwith rare and unseen photos from the era, a replica tour book and an 11 x 22 poster.

Alongside the $99.98 deluxe edition, a $19.98 2-CD Expanded Edition and a $9.98 single-disc edition will also be available, along with digital download and streaming versions.

You can check out the tracklist below.

HOTEL CALIFORNIA: 40TH ANNIVERSARY DELUXE EDITION
Track Listing

Disc One: Original Album

1. "Hotel California"
2. "New Kid In Town"
3. "Life In The Fast Lane"
4. "Wasted Time"
5. "Wasted Time (Reprise)"
6. "Victim Of Love"
7. "Pretty Maids All In A Row"
8. "Try And Love Again"
9. "The Last Resort"

Disc Two: Live at The Los Angeles Forum (October 1976)

1. "Take It Easy"
2. "Take It To The Limit"
3. "New Kid In Town"
4. "James Dean"
5. "Good Day In Hell"
6. "Witchy Woman"
7. "Funk #49"
8. "One Of These Nights"
9. "Hotel California"
10. "Already Gone"

An interesting 2017 version of the Eagles has announced a set of “An Evening with the Eagles” shows that will take place this fall.

As expected, Don Henley, Joe Walsh and Timothy B. Schmit are in the band. But instead of former members Don Felder, Bernie Leadon and/or Randy Meisner, this year's bonus Eagles are country music star (and brilliant guitarist) Vince Gill—and Deacon Frey, the 24-year-old son of Eagles co-founder Glenn Frey, who died in early 2016. Below, you can watch footage of Gill and the young Frey—who bears a strong resemblance to his father—in action.

If you have a faint memory of Henley announcing the end of the Eagles last year, read on:

“While I was still in shock during some interviews after Glenn passed away, I did say I thought that was the end of the band,” Don Henley, 69, told the Los Angeles Times after rehearsals for the band's money-making July shows in LA and New York. “But I reserve the right to change my mind. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds'.”

Gill added: “In my mind, I always thought I’d have made a good Eagle. But in a million years, I never would have seen this coming. It’s pretty surreal. I turned 60 recently, and to get to be a part of this amazing legacy of songs, that’s the greatest part of all this for me.”

The shows kick off kick off October 17 in Greensboro, North Carolina, and wind down 10 days later in Detroit. You can see the complete list below.

“An Evening with the Eagles”
OCTOBER 17: GREENSBORO, GREENSBORO COLISEUM
OCTOBER 20: ATLANTA, PHILIPS ARENA
OCTOBER 24: LOUISVILLE, KFC YUM! CENTER
OCTOBER 27: DETROIT, LITTLE CAESARS ARENA

American Express card members can buy tickets starting 10 a.m. August 15; everyone else can buy tickets starting 10 a.m. August 19 through LiveNation.com.

For more information, visit Eagles.com.

Timothy B. Schmit first experienced commercial success as a teenager, when his band the New Breed had a hit in 1965 with "Green Eyed Woman."

A few years later, he joined Poco, which led to his joining the Eagles in 1977. Schmit co-wrote and sang lead on the Eagles hit "I Can't Tell You Why" and remained with the Eagles through the group's hiatus in 1980.

What many people might not realize about Schmit is that he's had an amazing career beyond his work with Poco and the Eagles. He has sung and/or played on hundreds of other artists' releases, including Steely Dan, Elton John, Linda Ronstadt, Bob Seger, Toto, Spinal Tap and Poison. He's also been a featured touring sideman with Toto, Jimmy Buffett, Dan Fogelberg and Ringo Starr & His All-Starr Band.

Schmit has released six full-length solo releases. Leap of Faith—released late last year—is Schmit’s latest studio album. In support of the new album, Schmit is on the road with a full backing band, and you can check out the dates below. This summer, he'll perform with the Eagles for a pair of stadium shows as part of the Classic East and Classic West festivals at New York’s Citi Field and Los Angeles’ Dodger Stadium.

GuitarWorld.com caught up with Schmit to learn more about his past, present and future. More on the legendary bassist can be found at timothybschmit.com.

When did you first perform in New York?
It might be 1969; if not, very early 1970. Probably early 1970, and I played with Poco at the old World’s Fair location in Flushing, Queens. I remember it really well because we played in that, I don't know what it's called; it's sort of an outdoor sort of Grecian circular structure that's still there. We had to play there like third-bill, I believe the opener. The headliner was somebody like Albert King, and that was the first time I had ever gone to New York at all, and that was my first concert.

You've sung backup on so many albums, for so many artists. Beyond Poco, was Steely Dan your first backup-singing gig?
I don't think so. That was among the first, I think. I’m not sure, actually. I know I met Gary Katz, the producer, prior to singing with Steely Dan. I actually sang for another artist, Thomas Jefferson Kaye, and Gary Katz had me and Richie Furay sing on that.

How did word get out that you were such a great singer?
You know what, back then I was having a great time and I loved singing, I still do. I would meet people from time to time, like I met Gary Katz at ABC Records; a friend casually mentioned to him, “If you ever need any singing help, let me know.” I would say that same thing to other people, and they would start taking me up on it. A lot of people, they would go, “Really? You would? You’d do that?” And I’d thought, “Hell yeah, why not?”

Were you a "ghost singer" on a number of albums? As in, were there times when you weren't credited?
Only a few, a handful. Maybe less than a handful.

When that was happening, were you bound to a non-disclosure or confidentiality? Or did you get paid and wouldn't see your name in the credits?
Sometimes that would happen, and actually a couple of times it didn’t bother me at all. I did a lot singing for one album for Crosby, Stills & Nash, and at the time they didn’t want anyone to know it wasn’t Crosby. They had to keep that scene under wraps. Darren, are we going to talk about my new album?

Do you have a favorite song on your album, Leap of Faith?
I suppose I’m partial to some more than others, but I wouldn’t put anything on this album that I didn’t really think was worthy of putting on. I’m kind of partial to a song called “All Those Faces.” I like the song “Slow Down.” I can’t say these are my favorites; they just came into my mind [as songs] I really like.

On this tour, are you playing a lot of material from your new album or just weaving in one or two songs?
Oh no, my stage show has a lot to do with my last couple of records especially, and then a few things from my past. Of course, it includes some Eagles and Poco.

Who's in your band at the moment?
Well, Hank Linderman, who I’ve credited as co-producer for this album. I have a drummer named Herman Matthews, who has a long list of credits. A man from Orange County who toured with the Beach Boys for many years named Chris Farmer. My tech from the Eagles, who also goes out and techs with me and is an excellent musician, his name is Bobby Carlos. And then I have three singers that come out for most of the show, and their names are Marlena Jeter, Lynne Fivmont and Mortenette Stephens.

How do you feel about the process of making an album these days? Is it still exciting? Do you record mostly at home?
Yeah, I’m actually talking to you from my home studio, and I do record here. It’s a lot more relaxed for many reasons. There’s not a record company breathing down your back. There’s no pressure on any level. I’m writing it all, and Hank and I come in here and record things at a very relaxed pace because I don’t have any deadlines. It’s nice, it’s a luxury, actually.

For you to feel like the album is "successful," does anything specific have to happen? Or is it just the joy of making it?
You mean “have to happen” as far as my career, or financial—or, what do you mean?

Some people say, “My album isn't successful unless it sells 50,000 units.” Others might say, “The songs represent the way I feel, and the fact that I released it and people are paying to hear the songs live, that’s the goal.”
Well, the chances of me selling that many records so far have been very slim, and so I try and keep writing and growing as a writer and recording and growing as a recording artist. It really is sort of an internal, personal kind of thing. I love doing it, and if I should get lucky and be all over the radio, great, but I have no expectations.

Do you know what's next for you when this tour wraps up?
I started planning this forthcoming tour during the wrapup of my last tour, which was in January, which was mostly California and Nevada and Arizona. But I don’t know. Like I said, I have the luxury and the time in most cases to kind of do what I want to do. The only thing I would need to do, I have to really figure it out and think about it, if I want to do a lot of touring, it might be wise for me to pair down the band, because this is not about the money.

When you're not busy with music, do you have a main hobby or something you like to do in your free time?
I have an interest in Native American artifacts, mainly Plains Indians from the 1840s to the 1900s, and I go in and out of that. I get really into it and then I put it down, but it’s surrounding me. I’m looking at it right now. It’s in my studio. I do have that interest, but I would say that’s a quarter or a fifth of what I spend my time doing.

I’m curious how you think of being viewed as one of the pioneers of the “yacht rock” genre.
Of what rock?

Have you ever heard of the term “yacht rock?”
Oh yeah, I guess I did. I don’t know, I don’t think about that. I just want to keep going as long as I can. I’m getting older and I want to keep growing, and I feel pretty excited about what I do. Whether it’s true or not, I believe I’m doing better as a writer, which is really nice. It’s like a lot of writers have their heyday in their 20s and their 30s, and I feel like personally in a way that I’m actually just starting to get on it, which is nice.

Any last words for the kids?
The kids ... I say this a lot. Wherever your musical interest takes you, whether it’s just in your garage or in your shower, never forget why you started. Keep that first and foremost in your mind.

NOW ON TOUR:
FRI 4/28 Hartford, CT - Infinity Hall
SUN 4/30 Jim Thorpe, PA - Penns Peak
TUE 5/2 Annapolis, MD - Ramshead
WED 5/3 Annapolis, MD -Ramshead
FRI 5/5 Hopewell, VA - The Beacon
SUN 5/7 New York, NY- BB Kings
TUE 5/9 South Orange, NJ - South Orange PAC
THU 5/11 New Hope, PA - Havana New Hope
SAT 5/13 Newton, NJ - Newton Theatre
SUN 5/14 Ridgefield, CT- Ridgefield Playhouse
SAT 7/15 Los Angeles, CA - Dodger Stadium (with the Eagles)
SAT 7/29 Queens, NY Citi Field (with the Eagles)

The 39th Annual Kennedy Center Honors aired on CBS December 27, 2016, celebrating James Taylor, Al Pacino, Mavis Staples, Argentine pianist Martha Argerich and the Eagles.

The annual broadcast usually features at least one emotional performance (Remember when Heart completely crushed "Stairway to Heaven" as Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones looked on in 2012?), and December 27 was no exception.

Below, check out a pro-shot clip of Steve Vai, Colombian singer Juanes and Eagles guitarist Steuart Smith performing "Hotel California" in front of Eagles Don Henley, Joe Walsh and Timothy B. Schmit.

Let's get right to the business end of things: The truncated guitar solo gets off the ground at 2:35. Smith, who was hired by the Eagles in 2001 to replace Don Felder, kicks things off, followed by Vai at 2:49. Then they jump right into the famous dual-guitar section and wrap things up after a single go-around.

Although Walsh, Henley and Schmit nod their obvious approval at various points, one can't help but miss Eagles co-founder Glenn Frey, who died in January 2016—one of many celebrity deaths that year—at age 67.

The show featured several other performances of Eagles tunes, including Vince Gill's reading of "Peaceful Easy Feeling" and Bob Seger's rocking "Heartache Tonight." You can watch them both—plus Ringo Starr's introduction speech—in the bottom video.

The show was hosted by Stephen Colbert. During "Life in the Fast Lane," Vai played a guitar solo while his arms were wrapped around Colbert. You can watch that magic moment at 14:41 in the bottom video.

PHOTO: CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images

• Check out this just-released video of an exciting and comprehensive discussion on the making of the Eagles' "Hotel California."
• Filmed January 23 at the 2016 Winter NAMM Show in Anaheim, California, "Birth of a Record: Hotel California" presented Eagles guitarist Joe Walsh, producer/engineer Bill Szymczyk and moderator Mr. Bonzai getting deep into the details, myths and personal stories of the 1976 epic that won two Grammys and generated album sales of more than 32 million units.
• Think you know everything about Hotel California? Check out the video and see!

Below, Guitar World rounds up the top 19 Eagles tracks and breaks them down in an effort to provide some insight into what made this legendary guitar ensemble soar to great heights.

And yes, you read that right; there are only 19 songs on this list. We'd like your input—via the comments below, Facebook or Twitter—on the song that deserves to be Number 20. Let us know your thoughts!

19. “Doolin-Dalton” | Desperado

Glenn Frey has stated that the idea for the song “Doolin-Dalton,” was born from a jam session following a Tim Hardin concert, wherein they decided to give the next album an “anti-hero” theme. “Doolin-Dalton” is the opening track on the 1973 release and features lead vocals by Don Henley and Glenn Frey, acoustic guitar and harmonica by Frey and lead guitar by original Eagles member Bernie Leadon.

The Eagles’ songwriting partner Jackson Browne had turned the band onto a book about the Old West that included colorful stories about Bill Dalton, the American outlaw and prominent figure of the notorious Dalton Gang, and Bill Doolin, the founder of the equally violent Wild Bunch.

“Doolin-Dalton” is a slow, country-style song with a plaintive vocal melody and is a perfect vehicle for the expertly crafted vocal harmonies and instrumental work that define the Eagles’ sound.

18. “In the City” | The Long Run

Surrounded by such formidable songwriting talent as Glenn Frey, Don Henley and Don Felder, Joe Walsh was unfortunately relegated to very few songwriting opportunities. His powerful pop masterpiece “In the City” was first recorded for the soundtrack to the 1979 movie, The Warriors, used for the movie’s closing credits. The song’s powerful rock groove sets up superlative vocal hooks and great signature slide guitar work. Henley and Frey loved the song and decided to re-record it for The Long Run.

Although it was never released as a single, the track became a rock radio favorite in the U.S. and a Walsh concert staple. As compared to the original, the Eagles’ version of “In the City” boasts fuller production, via dense vocal harmonies, intricate multiple rhythm guitar overdubs and extended slide guitar solos.

17. “I Can’t Tell You Why” | The Long Run

“I Can’t Tell You Why” was the first song completed for The Long Run, recorded in March 1978, and it was the first Eagles song ever to feature Timothy B. Schmit on lead vocals. It was also the band’s last Top Ten hit on the Billboard Hot 100.

Schmit composed the majority of the song, after which he, Frey and Don Henley completed the track. As described by Henley, this is another R&B/soul-influenced tune, with a direct nod to soul music giant Al Green, and Frey was responsible for crafting the R&B feel of the track. According to legend, Frey had said to Schmit, “Let’s not do a Richie Furay, Poco-sounding song—you could sing it like Smokey Robinson and let’s turn it into an R&B thing.” [Schmit had been the bass player in the band Poco before joining the Eagles].

Schmit says, “While it was being developed in the studio, I knew it was a great song, and thought, Yes! This is an amazing debut for me. When we finally mixed it, we had a little listening party at the studio. As people were hearing it, Don turned to me and said, ‘There’s your first hit’.”

16. “Victim of Love” | Hotel California

This is one of several harder-edged song ideas that Don Felder put together for the Hotel California album. Co-songwriters Don Henley, Glenn Frey and J.D. Souther brought Felder’s idea to completion. But “Victim of Love” also has Joe Walsh’s distinctive touch all over it. The hard-hitting chordal riff—perhaps the closest the Eagles ever came to head-banging—could have come right off one of Walsh’s solo albums or the discs he did with the James Gang. And of course Walsh’s unmistakable slide guitar lines are all over the thing, meshing beautifully with Don Felder’s electric leads.

As Don Felder came up with the original idea for the song, he was hoping to sing lead on it. But that role ended up going to Don Henley. The Eagles played the basic track live in the studio and were so proud of this fact they scratched a message into the run-out groove on side two of the original vinyl release: “V.O.L. is five piece live.”

15. “Heartache Tonight” | The Long Run

“Heartache Tonight,” released as the first single from The Long Run, reached No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 in November 1979, selling a staggering one million copies in one week. It was also the last No. 1 song the group would have. The Long Run stayed at the top of the album chart for two months, and since then it has gone on to sell over eight million copies in the U.S. alone.

During a jam session with J.D. Souther at Glenn Frey’s home, the two devised the first verse of what would become “Heartache Tonight” while listening to Sam Cooke. Frey phoned Bob Seger immediately and sang the verse to him, and Seger responded with the powerful chorus. The hard-driving R&B-style of this tune is accentuated by greasy, signature slide guitar work from Joe Walsh.

14. "James Dean” | On the Border

This song is the Eagles’ tribute to Fifties film star James Dean, who personified rebellious mid–20th Century youth through roles in films such as Rebel without a Cause before dying in a car crash in 1955. Fittingly enough, the main body of the song takes the form of rip-roaring, three-chord Fifties rock and roll, powered by a fuzzed-out boogie-woogie riff. This structure provides an ideal backdrop for Bernie Leadon to tear off some scorching solo guitar licks.

“James Dean” is one of several Eagles songs that Glenn Frey and Don Henley co-wrote with Jackson Browne and J.D. Souther. It was originally intended to be part of an album about great outsiders and anti-heroes. But when that disc ended up taking a more Western turn, becoming the album we know today as Desperado, the Eagles put James Dean on the follow-up disc to Desperado, 1974’s On the Border.

13. “The Long Run” | The Long Run

Similiar to “Heartache Tonight,” “The Long Run” was inspired by the R&B/soul sounds of Glenn Frey’s home city of Detroit. Once again, Joe Walsh supplements the lock-step groove of the song with blues-inflected slide guitar solos and fills, devising beautifully harmonized lines for the song’s intro, verse sections and guitar solo. The thick, perfectly crafted vocal harmonies that are an Eagles signature are featured during the chorus sections.

12. “Tequila Sunrise” | Desperado

The Eagles used acoustic guitars very effectively on “Tequila Sunrise” to help create a tranquil, “tropical” vibe, with Glenn Frey’s main acoustic guitar accompaniment pattern beginning the song. Notice the catchy-sounding hammer-on in the middle of the strummed open G chord, from the fifth, D (the open D string) to the sixth, E (second fret).

This one-bar strum pattern incorporates the traditional Spanish rhumba rhythm (with the signature two 16th notes on the upbeat of beat one) and is used throughout the arrangement with a progression of stock open chords. It’s interesting to note that Don Henley decided not to play the same rhumba rhythm on the drums, opting instead to lay down a more simple, straightforward and light eighth-note rock beat.

Another acoustic guitar enters the mix in the fifth bar of the intro (at 0:09) with a simple, first-position bassline melody over an Am-D7-G turnaround. Notice how beautifully this part complements the weeping pedal-steel fills, played by Leadon.

After the second verse (at 1:44), an acoustic guitar shares the spotlight with the electric for a tastefully arranged “Mexican-style” instrumental break that brings to mind the old standard rhumba “Spanish Eyes,” which happens to also be in the key of G. Notice how sweet and harmonious the diatonic thirds, played on the top two strings, sound with the open G string ringing beneath them. Also note the sophisticated use of chromatic passing tones over the D7 chord. This sequence of chromatically descending parallel minor thirds (moving down in half steps) resolves very satisfyingly to Am, adding just the right splash of dissonance to an otherwise harmonically tame passage.

11. “One of These Nights” | One of These Nights

“A nasty track with pretty vocals.” That’s how Glen Frey described “One of These Nights,” the title song from the Eagles’ fourth album, released in 1975. At this point in their career, the band wanted to move in more of a rock direction, away from the soft-edged country sound that had first brought them to fame.

“We wanted to get away from the ballad syndrome with ‘One of These Nights,’ ” Don Henley recalled. “With Don Felder in the band, now we can really rock.” Felder had joined the Eagles in 1974. And while R&B is the primary musical influence heard in “One of These Nights,” Felder’s incandescent mid-song solo kicks the track squarely into rock territory. He played the solo on a 1959 Gibson Les Paul through a narrow-panel, tweed Fender Deluxe amp.

“That amp has a very unique sound," says Felder. “I have about six of them, but that particular one has a real sweet spot, because of the speaker and the way it’s wired.”

10. “Take It to the Limit” | One of These Nights

The Eagles also made very effective use of a capo-ed acoustic guitar on the soulful ballad “Take It to the Limit” (One of These Nights), which is built around a slow, laid-back acoustic strum pattern in 6/8 meter. Frey, using a capo at the fourth fret, strums big, ringing open chord voicings in the acoustic guitar–friendly key of G, which, due to the capo, sound a major third (two whole steps) higher, in the concert key of B (a key probably chosen to showcase Randy Meisner’s high, powerful voice).

These open “cowboy” chords add extra warmth and shimmer to the already big bed of harmony provided by the piano, bass, electric guitars and string section and impart a “down-home” country vibe to an otherwise r&b-flavored song. Notice how the acoustic strum pattern emphasizes the bass strings on the downbeats and the treble strings on the 16th-note upbeats. Also note the judicious use of bluegrass-style “walking” bassline fills within the part.

These ascending and descending “walk-ups” and “walk-downs” add melodic interest to the accompaniment and help convey a strong feeling of forward motion within the chord progression. It is for these reasons, plus the fact that they sound big and are easy to play while holding the upper notes of the chord, that these types of ascending and descending bassline fills have been employed by generations of country, bluegrass, folk and rock guitarists alike.

9. “Lyin’ Eyes” | One of These Nights

“Lyin’ Eyes” is another classic Eagles tune that features tastefully arranged acoustic and electric guitar parts that mesh together seamlessly to create a warm bed of rhythm and harmony and complement the vocal phrases with well-placed fills.

The song’s intro is built around a beautifully simple melody, played mostly in first position and doubled by acoustic and electric guitars, and two strumming acoustics, one playing garden-variety open chords in the key of G while the other plays with a capo at the fifth fret, as if the song were in the key of D (transposed up to G, via the capo), resulting in a lush bed of harmony featuring “tall” chord voicings in the overall arrangement and mix.

As the third verse unfolds, an acoustic guitar, doubled by a clean electric, interjects a series of short, sweet fills between the vocal phrases, using arpeggiated diatonic triads on the top three strings over the four chord (C) at 1:18, pedal steel–like chromatically descending triads over the five chord (D) at 1:24 and fingerpicked sixths (sixth intervals) over the final one-six-two-five-one cadence (G C G D7 G) in the two bars before the chorus (at 1:38).

The use of two or more acoustic rhythm guitars, with each playing a different set of chord voicings, via the use of a capo or Nashville tuning, is common among contemporary rock and country studio guitarists/arrangers/producers seeking to both “fatten” and “sweeten” the sound of a rhythm section. As pointed out earlier regarding “Peaceful Easy Feeling” and “Best of My Love,” the Eagles were very keen to these guitar-arranging techniques. To experience the magic of layered rhythm guitar parts firsthand, sit down with a jamming partner or recording device and play the two sets of corresponding chords used on the chorus of “Lyin’ Eyes.”

8. “Best of My Love” | On the Border

“Best of My Love” is built upon a billowy bed of acoustic chording, an effect heightened thanks to an old studio musician’s trick called “Nashville” tuning (also referred to as the “poor man’s 12-string”). Widely utilized in both rock and modern country music, this tuning is achieved by replacing the guitar’s bottom four strings—the low E, A, D and G—with thinner strings, which are tuned one octave higher than normal, just like the additional strings on a 12-string.

When a conventional guitar part is doubled by a guitar in Nashville tuning, the result is a chime-y, yet full, sound that many discerning players prefer to that of a single 12-string guitar. This is probably due to the fact that the six individual strings on each guitar have more room to vibrate than the close courses (pairs) of strings on a 12-string, and thus ring better. It’s also easier to play on six strings than 12.

Throughout the song, Frey doubled his six-string acoustic rhythm part on a Nashville-tuned acoustic, then created an even bigger, wider sound by separating and opposing the two guitars in the stereo mix, via hard-left and -right panning. The conventionally strung acoustic is in the right channel, and the Nashville-tuned guitar is in the left. Notice also the catchy use of melodic “extensions” in each chord, specifically the way some of the fretted notes on the middle strings in the first two chords, C and Dm9, are preceded by open strings. The open D note on the downbeat of the third bar is what makes that second chord sound like Dm9 instead of Fmaj7. (This tonality is firmly established by the bass when it enters at 0:17 and plays a D root note under this chord voicing.)

One great benefit of using a Nashville-tuned guitar is that, like a 12-string, it transposes, or displaces, certain notes in a chord an octave higher, making the voicing sound lighter and “taller.” Frey capitalizes on this sonic benefit during the verses and bridge of “Best of My Love” to build a big, majestic wall of harmony. The octave displacement effect is particularly evident during the arpeggiated G7 chord at 1:37. (Listen to each stereo channel separately to get the full effect.)

7. “New Kid in Town” | Hotel California

“New Kid in Town” is a great example of tasteful, intelligent songwriting on acoustic guitar. A straightforward “strummer,” the tune includes two clever, yet natural–sounding, modulations that serve it well without drawing attention to themselves. The first modulation occurs at the end of the bridge (at 2:38).

Up to this point, the song has been in the key of E major, but with the chord sequence C#m F# Am7 C/D D G, the key smoothly changes to G major for the third and final verse. At the end of the third chorus, which, like the first two, is in the relative minor key (E minor in this case), another smooth and satisfying modulation occurs.

This time the listener is gently and discreetly guided back to the original key of E major for the ensuing outro, by way of the progression Em A7 Am7 B7 E that begins at 3:30.

6. “Peaceful Easy Feeling” | The Eagles

As most guitar-playing Eagles fans are aware, “Peaceful Easy Feeling” features sweet, pedal steel-like double-stop string bends throughout the arrangement. These mellow, country-style licks are masterfully performed by guitarist Bernie Leadon on a clean electric Fender Telecaster, equipped with a Parsons-White pull-string bender (also known as a “B Bender”).

But the foundation of the song’s arrangement is two acoustic guitar parts, with both strumming more or less the same repeating rhythm pattern but using entirely different sets of chords, with one playing mostly first-position chords in the key of E while the other plays the song as if it were in the key of C, with a capo placed at the fourth fret transposing all chords up two whole steps to the concert key of E.

Some of the corresponding chords differ slightly, and it’s the combination of these two sets of complimentary voicings and the aggregate “stacking” of notes that results in the rich bed of harmony and shimmering texture that help establish the tune’s serene mood.

5. “Already Gone” | On the Border

For On the Border, the Eagles made a move away from the country-tinged sound that defined their first two albums and toward something harder-rocking. To aid them in their efforts they picked up a new producer, Bill Szymczyk (a veteran of Joe Walsh records), and also a new guitarist, Don Felder. The first and clearest indication of this change in direction was “Already Gone.” Another Jack Tempchin tune (co-written with Robb Strandlund), the track kicked off On the Border in rocking—and rollicking—fashion, with Frey’s euphoric, chorus-capping woo-hoo-hoos offering up a hook as ear-wormy as Felder’s slippery single-note riff.

In addition to lead vocals, Frey also shared lead guitar credit with Felder on the tune; but whereas an Eagles song with multiple soloists often meant plenty of harmony guitar lines, here the two gunslingers ripped distinct leads right on top of one another.

4. “Desperado” | Desperado

The Eagles pulled out all the stops on this title-track ballad from their second album. The result is one of the best-loved songs in their entire catalog, covered by countless artists in a variety of genres—from Linda Ronstadt to punk band Me First and the Gimmie Gimmies. Don Henley takes the lead vocal, and “Desperado” is one of many songs he would co-write with Glenn Frey.

“That was the beginning of our songwriting partnership,” Henley would later recall. “That’s when we became a team.” Henley has said that Ray Charles and Stephen Foster were key musical influences behind the song. Brother Ray’s inspiration most likely led to a piano—played by Glenn Frey on the master track—being the instrument that drives the whole thing.

An old bandmate of Henley’s conducted the song’s lavish string arrangement, performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra. And when Henley’s drums kick in midway through with a Ringo-esque drum fill, people just want to reach for their cigarette lighters and wave them in the air.

3. “Life in the Fast Lane” | Hotel California

“That was actually a coordination drill that I’d come up with on guitar to warm up to play live,” says Joe Walsh of the main riff that drives this classic Eagles track. “I was just playing it one time and Don Henley goes, ‘What the hell is that!?’ ”

Glenn Frey found the perfect lyrical hook to go with Walsh’s fleet-footed riff when he took a car ride with a drug dealer known as “the Count.” [See page 64.] And so “Life in the Fast Lane” was born somewhere between a rehearsal hall and an L.A. freeway. Frey played clavinet on the master track, leaving Walsh and Don Felder to work out the guitar arrangement, which features alternating lead lines from both. In the outro, Walsh even squeezes in a melodic quotation from his 1971 recording with the James Gang, “Walk Away.”

“Once we knew it was an Eagles song, they turned me loose a little bit,” he laughs.

2. “Take It Easy” | The Eagles

The band’s first hit, “Take It Easy” is built around a heartily strummed acoustic guitar playing big, bold open chords in the key of G (popular with bluegrass and folk stylists because of the easy fingerings and ringing open notes they afford).

It’s interesting to note in the song’s instantly recognizable intro that, while an acoustic guitar strums the “country” G voicing with the open B string, a clean electric guitar plays the “rock” G5 grip, with the D note at the third fret instead of the open B note. This is a classic Eagles country-rocker. Though the full band arrangement of “Take It Easy” is rather ambitious, with two electric guitars, banjo, bass and drums joining in, the song can nevertheless stand on its own with just a single acoustic guitar accompanying the vocals.

1. “Hotel California” | Hotel California

The crown jewel of the Eagles catalog, “Hotel California” features some of the band’s finest guitar work and arranging. The main part that begins the song, written and performed by Don Felder on a Takamine 12-string acoustic with a capo deployed at the seventh fret, is built around an elegantly inventive eight-bar chord progression, which the guitarist flatpicks and arpeggiates as ringing single notes, creating a signature melodic part.

By employing the capo (the part was originally composed in a much lower key, without the use of a capo), Felder is able to play unusually high, bright-sounding voicings as easily and clearly as if they were open cowboy chords played in first position. And thanks to the 12-string’s octave doubling of notes on the low E, A, D and G strings, each chord voicing includes additional high notes that make it sound even brighter and more chime-like, kind of like a cross between a mandolin and a zither.

Felder recorded this historic guitar part with both a microphone and an internal pickup. The microphone signal was sent directly to the mixing board, while the pickup’s signal was routed through a Leslie rotating speaker cabinet that was set on slow speed and placed between two additional microphones, producing a psychedelic, stereophonic swirling sound. The second time through the intro’s eight-bar progression, at 0:26, a nylon-string acoustic guitar, no capo, enters and provides an elegant quasi-flameco-style single-note countermelody with expressive finger vibratos and slides.

Joe Walsh’s contributions to the song, in addition to his role in the duet guitar solo on the outro, were mainly in regard to the arrangement and production, with such classic Washian touches as the background percussive “chick-a” track and the octave-doubled bass figure, beginning with the first verse.

“Hotel California” also features, as its climactic grand finale, one of the most celebrated electric lead guitar solos of all time, with Felder and Walsh trading brilliantly improvised melodic phrases over the repeating verse progression and using lots of big, souflful string bends before eventually coming together to harmonize a poignantly sweet repeating melody line in thirds as the arrangement fades out.

Note how well the two guitarists’ distinctly different overdriven tones blend here, with Felder’s creamy Gibson Les Paul complemented by Walsh’s sharper Fender Telecaster, treated with a swirly, slow phase-shifter effect. Also noteworthy here is the way both guitarists opt to not just rely on staying in the musically safe and predictable-sounding minor pentatonic scale of the “home” key of B minor and instead venture to play outside of that scale (B minor pentatonic) and in a more harmonically aware manner, like jazz musicians, acknowledging and outlining the underlying progression by targeting chord tones, such as the third or fifth, as the chords change.

During a recent interview with BBC Radio 2's Simon Mayo, Don Henley pretty much announced the end of the Eagles.

Henley called the band's mid-February Grammy appearance "the final farewell."

"I don’t think you’ll see us performing again," he added. "I think that was probably it. I think it was an appropriate farewell.”

Not that it can be considered an official source, but former Eagle Don Felder commented on the situation over the weekend, posting a simple message to his Facebook page:

"It looks like "THAT'S ALL FOLKS" for the Eagles."

At the Grammy Awards, the Eagles' Henley, Joe Walsh and Timothy B. Schmidt were joined by former Eagle (and Flying Burrito Brother) Bernie Leadon, plus Jackson Browne, for a touching performance of "Take It Easy." The performance was a tribute to Eagles co-founder Glenn Frey, who died in January at age 67. "Take It Easy" was written by Browne and Frey. You can watch the performance below (We apologize for the quality).

According to multiple news sources, Lana Rae Meisner, 63, the wife of Randy Meisner, a founding member of the Eagles, was found shot to death at the couple’s home in Studio City, California, Sunday (March 6).

It is still unclear how Lana Rae was killed.

According to RadarOnline, Randy Meisner told police his wife was shot by accident as she searched for something in a closet at their home.

“Randy seemed to be in shock,” Page Six adds, “and wasn’t even able to acknowledge that Lana Rae was dead from a gunshot wound.”

Law enforcement had been to the Meisner home earlier that evening; Lana Rae allegedly called 911 to report a domestic-violence incident, according to TMZ, which adds that she accused the founding Eagles bassist of “acting erratically.” About an hour and a half later, Randy Meisner called to say his wife had gone into another room when he heard a shot, according to multiple sources.

RadarOnline also has quoted an unnamed law-enforcement source. According to him/her, Meisner told the police his wife “was stumbling around, looking for something in a closet where there were two guns. She was looking for something in the hall closet, and Randy told cops one of the guns was falling and in the process, Lana Rae caught it and it ended up blowing her head apart.”

UPDATE: TMZ reports that Meiser has been cleared in the shooting death of his wife.

FROM TMZ:LAPD detectives have concluded she accidentally shot herself. It seems weird, because police say she was "moving a rifle that was stored inside the closet" when it accidentally went off. It's odd as to why she'd be "moving" a rifle less than two hours after calling 911, reporting domestic violence. Law enforcement sources say the gun discharged inside the soft gun case, and the trajectory of the bullet was enough for cops to conclude Randy was not involved.

Meisner quit the Eagles in 1977. He was known for his incredibly high singing voice, which graces several Eagles tracks, including "Take It to the Limit." Meisner wrote the song with Don Henley and Glenn Frey, who died in January at age 67. Meisner was replaced in the Eagles by Timothy B. Schmit.

Here's one that's been making the rounds lately. It's the isolated guitar tracks from the Eagles' "Hotel California."

Best of all, it contains the entire song, including guitars and solos.

If you want to jump directly to Don Felder and Joe Walsh's legendary solo, head to 4:21.

Credit for the guitar majesty of “Hotel California” is often given to Walsh, who toughened up the Eagles’ laid-back California sound when he joined the band just prior to the Hotel California album’s recording.

Actually, the primary guitar heard throughout the solo belongs to Felder, who wrote the music for the track and actually conceived and played the solo’s intricate harmonies on his initial, instrumental demo.

“Every once in a while it seems like the cosmos part and something great plops into your lap,” Felder says.

“That’s how it was with ‘Hotel California.’ I had just leased this beach house in Malibu and was sitting in the living room with all the doors wide open on a spectacular July day, probably in ’75. I was soaking wet in a bathing suit, sitting on the couch, thinking the world is a wonderful place to be and tinkling around with this acoustic 12-string when those ‘Hotel California’ chords just oozed out. I had a TEAC four-track set up in a back bedroom, and I ran back there to put this idea down before I forgot it.

“I set this old rhythm ace to play a cha-cha beat, set the right tempo and played the 12-string on top of it. A few days later, I went back and listened to it and it sounded pretty unique, so I came up with a bass line. A few days after that, I added some electric guitars. Everything was mixed down to mono, ping-ponging back and forth on this little four-track. Finally, I wound up with a cassette that had virtually the entire arrangement that appeared on the record, verbatim, with the exception of a few Joe Walsh licks on the end. All the harmony guitar stuff was there, as was my solo.

“Then I gave it to Don Henley on a tape with eight or 10 ideas, and he came back and said, ‘I really love the one that sounds like a Matador…like you’re in Mexico.’ We worked it all up and went into the studio and recorded it as I wrote it—in E minor, just regular, open chords in standard tuning—and made this killer track. All the electric guitars were big and fat and the 12-string was nice and full.

"Then Henley came back and said, ‘It’s in the wrong key.’ So I said, ‘What do you need? D? F sharp?’…hoping that we could varispeed the tape. But he said no, that wouldn’t work, and we sat down and started trying to figure out the key—and it turned out to be B minor! So out comes the capo, way up on the seventh fret. We re-recorded the song in B minor and all of a sudden the guitar sounds really small and the whole track just shrinks! It was horrible, so we went back and tried it again. Luckily, we came up with a better version in B minor."

For the rest of this story, head here.

Last night, the Eagles and Jackson Browne performed a spirited version of "Take It Easy," the Eagles' first hit from 1972, as a tribute to band cofounder Glenn Frey, who died January 18.

The band lineup for the Grammy Awards performance was notable because it featured original Eagles guitarist Bernie Leadon, who played his famous guitar solo on the same stage as Don Henley, his former Eagles bandmate, plus guitarist Joe Walsh and bassist Timothy B. Schmidt, who joined the band after Leadon's tenure.

Leadon quit the band in 1975, and Walsh actually replaced him.

In terms of composition, Browne laid the groundwork for "Take It Easy," but Frey added what has evolved into the song's best-known line, "It's a girl, my lord, in a flatbed ford, slowing down to take a look at me."

Browne released his own version of the song in 1973, but it failed to chart.