“I like to plug straight into the amp,” says Parlor Greens guitarist Jimmy James. “When I first started playing, I didn’t have effects, so I got used to hearing my guitar right into the amp. It makes my ears feel happy. It’s like I can make the music flow from my soul into my fingers.”

James’ clean, unadulterated tones, along with his astute, deceptively simple playing style – economical, soulful lead lines and tight, drop-dead funk rhythms – are indispensable elements of Parlor Greens.

Drawing inspiration from the Meters and Booker T. and the MGs, the trio, which also includes organist Adam Scone and drummer Tim Carman, made waves with their 2024 debut, In Green We Dream, an irresistible set of psychedelic funk-soul instrumentals highlighted by the stirring original West Memphis and a delightfully inventive take on George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord.

The group came together from various outfits; the Seattle-based James plays with the funk-soul band True Loves (and you might remember him from the Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio), Scone is known for his work with Miami’s Scone Cash Players and the Sugarman 3, while Carman is the former drummer for Boston blues stars GA-20 – but with Parlor Greens they’re a musical dream team.

They don’t burden their songs with unnecessary bouts of instrumental excess. They jam, but they don’t noodle. This is an intuitive, sophisticated bunch that knows when to leave space between the notes. With Scone’s righteous melodies leading the way, James and Carman provide groove-filled fuel, and the music takes flight.

“For me, it all comes from James Jamerson, the great Motown bass legend,” James says. “I watched the movie Standing in the Shadows of Motown, and Jamerson’s son quoted his father as saying, ‘If you don’t feel it, don’t play it.’ That stuck with me. I think that’s how the band approaches our music. When we first got together, we played what we felt, and if we didn’t feel it, we didn’t play it. We didn’t even have to discuss it.”

Touring tightened them to a dangerous degree, and they came off the road ready to track their new album with gusto. Produced by their Colemine label owner, Terry Cole, Emeralds sees Parlor Greens working their way through 11 impeccable jams that take no time at all to get going. Lion’s Mane is slinky and sensual, while Letter to Brother Ben is a fun and frisky shuffle update.

James gets into a frenzied, single-string situation on the upbeat dance gem Eat Your Dreams, and cool as can be, he tucks a snaky new riff inside their perky cover of Dolly Parton’s Jolene.

“On the first record, we were getting to know one another,” James says. “Now we have all this experience together, so we made this record with a different perspective. We took more chances – ‘Let’s try this’ or ‘Let’s try that.’ We got experimental, but we always had the song in mind. When you can get to that place where things are loose but tight, it’s a beautiful thing. It’s like we can shoot out into the stratosphere and go to the cosmos.”

One doesn’t have to think too hard to hear a lot of Steve Cropper in your playing.

Oh, I'm a huge Steve Cropper fan, of course – rest in peace. I actually got to talk to him on a podcast. I didn't get to meet him in person, but we talked on the podcast. I was really excited. I started playing some of his riffs to him and told him how much Soul Man influenced our song West Memphis.

He giggled and was very tickled by that. He was such a big influence on me – not only the stuff he did with Booker T., but also Walking the Dog with Rufus Thomas or Who’s Making Love with Johnny Taylor.

I was really grateful to talk to him because I consider him to be the last of that bunch. I didn’t get a chance to talk to Jimmy Johnson from Muscle Shoals. I didn’t get a chance to talk to Joe Messina or Eddie Willis from the Funk Brothers. They all passed before I could talk to them, but I did speak with Steve Cropper, and I’ll forever hold that dear.

Was he encouraging about what you were doing?

He was very encouraging. I sat there listening to what he had to say, because you know, he was in the thick of it. He was like, “You keep doing what you’re doing.” I said, “Thank you, Mr. Cropper. I'll take that and I'll savor that.”

The band is already distinguishing itself for its creative way with covers. First came My Sweet Lord, and now you’re having your way with Jolene. Have you tried any covers that you couldn’t get anywhere with?

No, that hasn't happened yet. Yeah, we got into the country roots, which I don’t get to play very often. It was great to do Jolene by Miss Dolly Parton. The whole thing was crazy. We put it out before the album, and I said, “I wonder if anybody will recognize this.” When we were doing it, it started out with a gospel intro, and then we hit that groove and I was like, ‘Wait, what song is this?’

When the melody hit, I was going, ‘Whoa, whoa, this is Jolene!’ The band was like, “It is Jolene!” We didn’t know it could be done like that. But like I said, I wanted to visit the country roots and do a groove take on it. My mother listened to country records when I was growing up – Loretta Lynn, Patsy Cline.

Are you still playing your ’64 Silvertone?

Yep. I had a Harmony Rocket awhile back. I’m not really big on hollow bodies, but the Rockets have this raw, jagged sound that I liked. You always want to find something that fits who you are on the inside. I was a teenager and something happened with that guitar – something went haywire – and I could never find a guitar that sounded like it.

I called around to vintage guitar shops, and shouted out to Mike Hitt and Chris Lomba at Georgetown Music. They had this guitar sitting there that they’d worked on. They said, “We’ve got a Silvertone here. Maybe you can check it out.”

I picked it up and fell in love with it instantly. It was like I was 15 years old all over again. It had that thing, you know? I was like, “Okay, this is meant to be.” I didn’t know if I could afford it, but then I said to myself, “You only live once.”

You made the right call.

Yeah, and the funny thing is, that guitar was on its way to the dump. They rescued it.

How about your amps? Are you still using a Sixties Ampeg Gemini II G-15?

Only for the recording sessions. The Gemini belongs to Terry Cole and his studio. I’d like to take it on the road, but you can’t find any replacements. For my own amps, I have a Peavey Delta Blues 115 and a Fender Hot Rod Deluxe. I take the Hot Rod on the road; the Delta stays in the studio.

And, of course, no pedals.

I don’t use pedals. I mean, sometimes if there's a certain amp I have to use and I need to boost the signal, I might put something in front of it. Most of the time, though, everything is straight in.

How long did it take to record the new album?

We didn’t take long, maybe two or three days. We didn’t really have distractions; it was cold and snowy outside. There was nothing much to do other than keep warm, so we just decided to stay in the studio. We probably could have taken longer to work on things, but we kept it live and fresh. There were no overdubs.

Was every song born out of a jam?

Not everything. There’s one song called Parlor Change that started when we were in Austin. The melody came about because we saw a barbecue joint with this sign: “You don’t need no teeth to eat my beef.” [Ed. note: The establishment is Sam’s Bar-B-Que]

Somehow a melody rang out. We were in the car singing, and I sang it into my phone. We recorded the melody and it became a groove.

Let’s talk about a few more songs on the new record. Your guitar takes somewhat of a backseat to the organ on Eat Your Greens, but there’s a section where it jumps out and you do a wicked single-string workout. It’s not really a solo; it’s more like a percussive thing.

Honestly, I never even think about what I’m playing. I just play what I hear. Whatever I’m doing there was just the first thing I did, and it felt right at the moment. It’s like this flow happens.

You get a little abstract in Lion’s Mane. There’s this passage where you play these way-out bends that border on the atonal. I’m assuming that’s spontaneous?

Everything is spontaneous. I don't ever work it out. It is just what I feel at the moment for the content of the song. I hear things as I hear them.

Your playing on Letter to Brother Ben is so energetic. You sound like you really enjoy playing a shuffle.

Oh yeah! Tim is playing a mean shuffle on that one. I don't get to play shuffles very often, so I had a lot of fun playing that groove. It was a total dream.

You dedicated the album closer, Queen of My Heart, to your late mother. It’s such a gorgeous ballad.

Thank you. That’s actually my mother’s voice you hear at the end of the track.

That’s right. It’s so touching.

That was one of the hardest songs I ever wrote. I brought my guitar to her grave, and I just started playing. I recorded what I played and kept it in my back pocket. I didn’t think we’d ever record it. Then one night I had a dream about my mother, and she kind of gave me a wink like, “Go for it.”

We went into the studio, learned the song in about 15 minutes and recorded it in two takes. The first time was a bit of a false start, but the second take flowed smoothly. I couldn’t listen to it once we’d laid it down. I had to go outside and let it all out.

I’m sure. What a powerful moment – writing a song at your mother’s grave.

Absolutely. I brought my little battery powered amp, and it just flowed. [Pauses] It’s still the hardest song to listen to on this record.

I have to ask – are you going to play it live?

I don’t know. I don’t know if I could make it through. If we played it, I’d be spent. It’s the most emotional tune I’ve ever had to do. Without my mother, I wouldn't be who I am. I miss her every day. It's going on four years in April, and it’s still hard. It’s good to hear her voice, and I want the world to hear it. It’s beautiful.

• Emeralds is out now via Colemine Records
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

John 5 has paid tribute to one of his favorite Squier Telecasters, which he says comfortably rivals a more premium Fender version.

As the budget-friendly branch of the Fender family tree, Squier guitars are sometimes viewed as inferior to more expensive US-made models. That is not always the case, though, and several players have proved their quality over the years.

John 5, a Telecaster fanatic like no other, is top of that list. The Mötley Crüe guitarist owns over 100 Teles. He launched his own signature model in 2023, and loved it so much that he wrote a song about it.

But there’s a Squier within his triple-figure collection of Teles, and he reckons it goes toe-to-toe with the best of them. It’s modeled after his 2003 Custom Shop J5.

“I had this black Tele with a chrome pickguard for so long, 13 or 14 years. I used it forever,” he says, speaking in the new issue of Guitar World. “It was just that amazing connection you have with an instrument. I really enjoyed playing that guitar, and it’s when I knew I wanted a beefed-up Telecaster.

“I was thinking of a beautiful Harley-Davidson motorcycle that’d shine up strong. I would see chrome and black and think they look just gorgeous together. This was before the kill switch, so it was an early Tele for me. I played it on everything, a lot with Marilyn Mason and Rob Zombie.”

Given the guitar’s ability to nail both sides of his juxtaposing sound, Fender turned to him for a special reissue.

“It was a monster guitar that could also do jazz and country [as well as metal],” he beams. “Squier did a version of that guitar and Goldie [the model he played so much that doctors feared for his health].

The Squier-ified Harley-Davidson model had a bolt-on maple neck, laurel fingerboard, and Artist Series humbuckers, complete with a chrome pickguard. Despite its affordable price, John 5 couldn’t believe how good the Squier version was. And it got an extended release.

“They were closing their doors, and I’m proud of the fact that they kept open for another year because they had so many orders for those two guitars,” he recalls.

“You couldn’t tell the difference between the Squier and the Fender. I played the Squiers live, and I couldn’t tell because they were so well done. If you find one, grab it!”

John 5’s full interview features in the latest issue of Guitar World, which celebrates the Tele’s 75th birthday. Print and digital copies can be ordered from Magazines Direct.

The musical worlds of Joe Satriani and Coldplay couldn’t be further removed. Yet there are two songs that bind the guitar virtuoso and stadium-conquering pop-rockers together.

In May 2008, Coldplay dropped Viva La Vida. The title track from their fourth studio record, it has since become the UK band’s defining anthem, underpinned by a catchy verse melody that helped the track on its way to two Grammy nominations.

But when Joe Satriani heard the song, he did a double-take. To his ear, the verse melody from Viva La Vida sounded a lot like his guitar hook in 2004 track If I Could Fly. In fact, it was a bit too close for comfort.

Satriani soon took Coldplay to court in a high-profile legal tangle that lasted almost a year. According to Satch, Chris Martin and co had plagiarized the hook from If I Could Fly, cribbing his instrumental lead line for their verse.

Coldplay denied the allegations, insisting that any similarities between the two songs were purely coincidental. Satriani wasn’t convinced, though, and during an interview with MusicRadar in 2008, said the situation “hurt so much”.

“I felt like a dagger went right through my heart,” Satriani said. "The second I heard it, I knew it was [my own] If I Could Fly.

“Almost immediately, from the minute their song came out, my email box flooded with people going, 'Have you heard this song by Coldplay? They ripped you off man.' I mean, I couldn't tell you how many emails I received.

“Everybody noticed the similarities between the songs. It's pretty obvious. It's as simple as that – when you listen to a song and you say, 'Wow, that's a real rip-off.'”

Satriani sued the band, demanding damages and “any profits attributable to the alleged copyright infringement”. His lawyers then claimed the band had been avoiding the plagiarism lawsuit, and threatened to use a fleet of servers to follow Coldplay and serve them the papers at the Grammys.

For Satriani, the plagiarism was blatant. Martin, however, was just as surprised by the similarities between Viva La Vida and If I Could Fly. And as heat around the allegations began to intensify, Coldplay were forced to address the case publicly.

“With the greatest possible respect to Joe Satriani, we have now unfortunately found it necessary to respond publicly to his allegations,” a statement on their website read.

“If there are any similarities between our two pieces of music, they are entirely coincidental and just as surprising to us as to him.

“Joe Satriani is a great musician but he did not write or have any influence on the song Viva La Vida. We respectfully ask him to accept our assurances of this and wish him well with all future endeavours.”

Coldplay drummer Will Champion also waded in on the matter, telling Australian outlet Confidential (via The Guardian) “It's so far-fetched and ridiculous, but that's about all we can say at the moment. We're waiting to see what's happening but it's frustrating and annoying… and totally unfounded.”

Coldplay asked for the case to be heard in a jury trial, but in a filing posted September 14 2009, judge Dean D Pregerson dismissed the case. He ruled that the two would “bear [their] own cost” for the litigation, with the stipulation suggesting an out-of-court settlement was reached.

After the dust settled, neither Satriani nor Coldplay addressed the case. But Martin had been adamant that there had been no wrongdoing – the similarities were coincidental.

“When these things happen it’s a coincidence and we’re as surprised by it as anybody else,” he told NME Radio. “I do feel a bit upset about it because I wrote the song. But, you know, these things happen. Whatever will be will be.”

Viva La Vida continues to be one of Coldplay's most popular hits. At the time of writing, it has amassed more than three billion streams on Spotify, and the music video on YouTube has well over one billion views.

If I Could Fly, meanwhile, ranks among Joe Satriani's most popular tracks, with 12 million streams on Spotify, and makes regular appearances in his setlists to this day.

Song copyright disputes can often be hotly contested and drawn out. Last year, Jimmy Page and Jake Holmes settled their decades-long lawsuit of Dazed and Confused.

Moving on from the ‘little’, these days Barrie Cadogan is a towering presence on the scene. A first-call collaborator for his impeccable tone and touch, and spotted on the stages of giants from John Squire to The Black Keys, our Zoom call finds him rattling around a New York hotel on a day off from his alt-blues trio’s US tour.

Indeed, the 51-year-old’s work rate and visibility is such that you might not have noticed the near-decade silence from the band that made his name. Now, though, Little Barrie are back with Gravity Freeze: a sixth album whose joyous soul-rock grooves sound like a band feeling its way back to the light after a period of deep personal trauma.

Gravity Freeze has been a long time coming. How have you evolved as a player?

This is the first Little Barrie album since 2017’s Death Express – Virgil [Howe, drummer] passed away the day before the tour, so we never toured it. I’m still infatuated with the guitar. I guess it’s just honing it, seeing where your interests go. I wanted to make this album personal, try to make music that had spirit to it.

What subjects did you write about?

I wrote the title track about sleep paralysis. When I first got it, I thought I was having a fit – it was scary. But I guess this album was documenting the things we were coming out of and processing losing Virgil.

I try not to force it, but I had a conversation with my friend Jim Jones and he said songwriting is like showing up for work. Sometimes it doesn’t happen, but you have to actually show up and be ready to receive things from the universe.

How did these songs come to you?

Some were written coming out of Covid. A friend of mine, who’s an artist and musician, let me use his studio in East London. He had a music setup – some drums and amps, a laptop and microphones – and I’d go in and make demos. I was surrounded by all his art equipment: brushes, glue, bits of wood, plastic and metal.

He was making sculptures, developing photographic film, it was an inspiring place. I’d close the door and just kick ideas around. Sometimes I’d start off playing a terrible bit of drums to make a loop.

Do you have favourite guitar moments?

Coralisa is kind of a groove, but the outro guitar was something different for me. Luggin’ Hurt came out good; we just carried on jamming after we’d finished the arrangement and it became this kind of cool, funky boogie. More Bad Miles Of Road had a good spirit: it’s a very rhythm-section-driven song, keeping the guitar super minimal. I wanted to make a guitar-heavy record but not a stereotypical rock record.

Where did you make the album?

We recorded it all in a tiny mixing room in Hornsey [North London]. We tipped the sofa on its side to fit the drum kit in there, and when we were getting the drums down, because we wanted a live feel, me and Lewis [Wharton, bass] played into amp simulators, so we didn’t have any spill. Then we reamped Lewis’s bass and my guitar, and then I’d do overdubs.

What amps did you use?

One we used a lot was a custom 212 combo built for me by Frank Cooke of JPF Amps. I wanted something that was voiced more British, like the mid-’60s Marshalls that ran on KT66 tubes. They have a beautiful kind of hi-fi tone, and the way they feed back is like that ‘Beano’ sound.

Then I used my ’62 brown Fender Super, a [black-panel] Bandmaster and an old copper-panel AC30. We ran all Lewis’s bass through the JPF as well, and used the AC30 on More Bad Miles Of Road because we wanted the bass to sound blown out.

You’ve never been a massive pedal fan, have you?

There’s a couple of fuzz boxes. I used the germanium Fuzz Face, the Dennis Cornell one. That’s on Luggin’ Hurt. I used a MkIV Tone Bender. But the song Wire, that’s just the trem on the Super. We threw up a bunch of mics in this small room. So sometimes we were using closer mics, and sometimes we were opening up the more ambient mics, just to see how much air we wanted in the sound.

What were the key guitars?

It varied. On More Bad Miles Of Road, I used the white custom-built guitar I had put together a while ago [made by Philippe Dubreuille]; it’s a bit like a Jazzmaster, with P-90s and a Bigsby. I used my old Casino on Coralisa and Wire.

Luggin’ Hurt was my Black Beauty Custom with that Cornell fuzz. For December, I used my ’60s Kay Red Devil – it’s got those Speed Bump pickups. On It Isn’t Soul, it’s an Esquire into a fuzzbox as I wanted it to be kind of wiry.

What do you like about the trio format?

There’s something exciting about the minimalism. Working with the space – there’s something liberating about it. I’ve always been as much inspired by rhythm and drums as by guitar.

So I try not to approach playing rhythmically in a rock way, y’know, I don’t really fill out songs with tracks of rhythm guitar. I tend to hold out and play around the vocal. Like More Bad Miles Of Road, I’m just singing off the bass and drums.

With a trio, you learn how to pull things back because if you go out on your first song playing at full velocity, you’ve got nowhere to go. You have to learn how to leave space.

With a lot of modern production, it feels like people just fill everything out with hundreds of tracks. The confidence in the space is something that takes a while to learn. It can feel vulnerable at first, but there’s so much dynamic scope in a trio just by holding back and not always playing at full velocity or volume.

How does your approach vary when you play with other musicians?

One key thing you have to be conscious of is that not everyone wants to play at the same volume. If I work more as a sideman with other people, the volume tends to be lower. But with bands like The The, I’m playing louder than with Little Barrie.

Probably the loudest band I’ve ever played with was Primal Scream. We were using Super Leads and cranking them. Or you might need a certain effect, like when I worked with Edwyn Collins and he used the Mu-Tron, so I had to have that in the chain.

You’re a lifelong Stone Roses fan. What was it like being in John Squire’s band with Liam Gallagher?

I never could have imagined it as a kid, with Stone Roses posters Blu-Tack’d to my wall. When I played bass on that Gallagher/Squire tour, it was a lot of fun switching hats. The parts were quite riffy and melodic.

Y’know, John said he wanted that movement from the bass because it was a single-guitar band. And the way John plays, he doesn’t need a second guitarist. He’s one of those guys – he can cover it all.

• Gravity Freeze is out now via Easy Eye Sound.
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

Nili Brosh – known for her work with Dethklok, Danny Elfman and Cirque du Soleil – is beyond excited about her new solo record, Eventide. And it’s not too tough to figure out why.

“This album reflects more of who I am than any record that I’ve made before,” she tells Guitar World. “A lot of these ideas have been in my head for a long time,” she says. “Actually, I should say they’ve been in my iPhone voice memos for a long time. It was just a matter of fleshing them out.”

Beside the names we conveniently dropped in this story’s first sentence, Brosh’s brand of hyper-melodic-meets-tasteful-shred has landed her gigs with Jennifer Batten, Tony MacAlpine, and the Iron Maidens, and opened doors to soundtrack work for Marvel’s 2024 animated series, X-Men ’97.

But it’s her solo work that’s most fulfilling, so it goes without saying that Brosh is stoked about taking Eventide and her new signature Ibanez RG on the road in 2026. She’s got more work with Elfman on tap, too. Beyond that, the sky’s the limit.

“One of the things I love is not knowing what’s going to happen next or what will be the next part of my musical voice,” she says. “Your guess is as good as mine. We’ll see.”

Bring us up to date on where you’re at, playing-wise. It’s been a few years since your last solo album.

I try to go where what I hear in my head takes me. That affects the playing, the ideas that come out and what needs to be done to convey them; that’s where I end up. But certainly, it’s been a few years, and I’m overdue for a new album.

This is the first time since the pandemic that I’ve had a moment to sit down and flesh it out. I’ve been blessed with a lot of live shows since touring came back. Spinning plates and juggling all that stuff has definitely kept me busy.

What gear are we hearing?

I used my custom Ibanez RG and Ibanez 550 quite a bit, plus the AS93 for some of the jazzier things and a nylon-string Cordoba GK Studio Negra. Amp-wise, it’s mainly the Mesa/Boogie Triple Crown and a bit of the Peavey Joe Satriani Signature JSX.

The Mesa has been my main amp for years, and before that it was the JSX. And I like to have an Xotic California EP Booster in the front, just to kind of thicken the tone. But I tend to record old-school by mic’ing the amps and getting a raw, basic tone, then shaping it after that.

Melody is present throughout your music and playing – along with plenty of shred. What’s the key to that marriage?

The thing that’s always helped bridge the gap between the melodic and the shred stuff is to focus on a fairly traditional song form, regardless of how complicated the music is.

I think in verse-chorus terms – bridge and that kind of stuff. That helps me zero in on the exact ideas, not overplay and focus on the hooks being hooks and the song feeling like a song.

Then, whatever the solo section ends up being, that’s time to play more notes, if that feels like the right approach. I’ve always been a big believer in not shredding for the sake of shredding. If you do shred, I believe in having something to say. Without a tune there, it’s kind of pointless. That’s helped me maintain structure.

You worked on the X-Men ’97 theme. What was that like?

I was on the road at the time, so I did the session remotely. I just used my HeadRush MX5 effects processor. I got them a DI as well, so between those two sources, they were able to mix the thing nicely. My approach was pretty straightforward.

They sent me a mockup of how they had the melody in the new version, and they asked me to do one version that sticks to that, played verbatim and articulated. Then they asked me to do one with a little more freedom.

For one of them, I used a lot of bends, which was part of my own interpretation. To my surprise, that was the part that was kept. I thought they’d keep the thing that was played straightforward.

What’s the latest on your work with Danny Elfman?

He has a new album and quite a bit of live stuff coming up. It’s a testament to Danny being very loyal to his musicians. He’s always seen this as a band from day one and treated us like family. I work very hard to be as reliable as I can to whoever the band leader is.

I make sure I’m prepared and that they can trust that the foundation will be there, so they can feel comfortable soaring on top of it and not have to worry about anything. I’d like to think that’s something that keeps me around.

How long was your new signature Ibanez RG it in development, and what was the process like?

It’s been in development for quite a while; close to five years. We started the conversation during the pandemic, and it was very clear that – because of the way production chains were going – it was going to take several years to actually get it out there. In a way, that was good because it gave us plenty of time to figure out what we wanted to do.

I created the Custom RG as a prototype for myself to see if that’s what I wanted from a guitar. There were a few things about it – like the burst color – that I wanted to change. We went from prototype to prototype until I felt like we nailed it.

Also, making it affordable was definitely important to me. So, keeping it in the premium line, and understanding what that factory is able to do, and where our limitations were – and the middle ground between all those things – took a little while.

Looking at your older guitars, what do you want to improve upon, and where did you pull inspiration from?

My favorite Ibanez was always the 550. That’s not to say I felt I needed to improve on it, but I wanted to make one RG that had all my favorite variables. The humbucker-single-single configuration was really important to me.

I basically wanted to make it a Fat Strat RG and add to the versatility. So I did keep a lot of the variables of a standard RG – that’s pretty obvious there. But I wanted to put my favorite aspects into it, like the Edge bridge, for example.

Is the body and neck construction pretty traditional?

A lot of those aspects were taken from a standard RG; it has a basswood body and a Super Wizard maple neck. Those are two things I’ve always felt very strongly about, especially the type of neck that has contributed to the playability of the music that I play.

How about the hardware and pickups?

Same with those. But the original Edge bridge was important to me. That’s something Ibanez does very well. It’s a really stable floating bridge. It’s been reliable for a very long time.

With the pickups, we talked about the humbucker-single-single configuration, and even though they’re EMGs, they’re passive, which is something that not everybody is aware that EMG even does. It’s something I’ve been using for several years, and it’s a nice combination of variables.

Your new RG and Eventide’s cover art definitely share a similar aesthetic. Was that intentional?

Absolutely. It all reflects back to how I see the music in my mind. I don’t know if I have actual synesthesia, but I have some sort of connection between sounds and colors. A lot of the music on this record went in that direction in my mind. So I wanted to reflect it in the visuals and give people a sense of what I see in my head when I hear this.

How do Eventide and your new RG reflect who you are as a player now, and where do you see yourself going in the future?

I really feel like it was very much primarily my voice on this record, and me conveying what I hear. It’s a good reflection of me and how I hear melodies and vocabulary. But I can’t tell you about the future. I definitely like to explore new sonic directions every time.

Who’s to say? Maybe I’ll latch onto that. I’m enjoying that direction, but a lot of people say the inspiration comes back around full circle. I hear different kinds of music all the time, so you never really know where that’s going to take you or how that’s going to reflect back.

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

For the past six decades, Keith Richards has claimed that he wrote (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction in his sleep.

But for all its mythical origins, Richards never thought of the song's iconic guitar hook as “the big guitar riff” – not even when he added a dose of fuzz to it.

“That all fell into place at RCA [recording studio in L.A.] when Gibson dumped on me one of those first Fuzz-Tone pedals,” he recalled in a 2005 Guitar World interview.

“I actually thought of that guitar line as a horn riff.”

For Richards, the song was never actually finished – his fuzz parts were only intended to be demos for a real horn line.

“When this new Fuzz Tone pedal arrived in the studio from the local dealership or something, I said, ‘Oh, this is good. It’s got a bit of sustain, so I can use it to sketch out the horn line.’”

So you can imagine his surprise when he realized his back-of-the-napkin riff ended up on the final recording.

“We left the track and went back out on the road. And two weeks later, I hear it on the radio. I said, ‘No, that was just a demo!’ They said, ‘No, it’s a hit.’”

Satisfaction helped the Stones clinch their first-ever number one in the States, after it reached the top spot on July 10. It stayed there for four weeks before being displaced by I'm Henry the Eighth, I Am by Herman's Hermits.

Otis Redding ended up covering the track on his album, Otis Blue/Otis Redding Sings Soul in 1965. And it was only then that Richards' original vision for the track was fulfilled.

“At least Otis got it right,” the guitarist later chuckled. “Our version was a demo for Otis.”

16-year-old guitarist and singer Nene Royal just stunned judges on America's Got Talent with an explosive cover of The Cranberries hit, Zombie.

The young Thai guitarist was already making quite a name for herself on social media before her audition. Royal’s renditions of Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit and System Of A Down’s Sugar and Chop Suey went viral, helping her amass over three million followers.

Royal took to the 3,000-capacity Pasadena Civic Auditorium in California for the America's Got Talent audition, and her take on Zombie has already racked up over two million views.

The young guitarist opted for a Fender Deluxe Reverb amp and an Ibanez Musician Series electric guitar for a heavier-than-usual version of Zombie, complete with a dash of two-hand tapping.

“Nene, that was spectacular,” raves judge Sofia Vergara. “You have a very big chance to do well in this competition.”

“You are such a surprise… and the energy, and the rock ’n’ roll. You are a rock star, young lady,” added one of the other judges, Howie Mandel.

Safe to say, the guitarist sailed through to the next round after receiving four nods of approval.

A self-taught guitarist since the age of six, Royal is now looking beyond AGT. According to her official website, she is also currently “recording original music and preparing her debut EP.”

As for the track she decided to cover on AGT, The Cranberries’ guitarist Noel Hogan spoke to Guitar World in 2025 about how Zombie came about.

Those hoping to catch Royal before she hits the big time can still see her perform at Naka Weekend Market in Phuket every Saturday – at least for the time being.

This month in Bought & Sold, the Cult’s Billy Duffy swoops in on the back of his Falcon to discuss all things guitar, from first electric guitars to the rig that gets him through a show – and why getting through the show is really the only thing he can be thinking about when it comes to pedals.

He tells us about Johnny Marr’s kind gift, winces in pain as he tells of a Les Paul loved and lost, and answers one of the greatest philosophical questions of our time: which combo is better, the cheap guitar/high-end amp or high-end guitar/cheap guitar?

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

“It was an Ibanez Les Paul copy from back when they were making copies in the ’70s. I got a complete deal on it… it might have fallen off the back of a lorry, if you know what I mean [laughs]. But it was Wine Red and like a Les Paul Standard. What I really wanted was a Les Paul Custom, but beggars can’t be choosers.

What was the last guitar you bought, and why?

I’m sitting right next to it: I just bought that Mick Ronson [1968 Les Paul Custom Collector’s Edition] tribute guitar from Gibson – and I did buy it with my own money!

The fact that it happens to be wood-fronted and a Les Paul Custom with no pickguard or pickup covers might be something that sounds familiar to me over the last 30 years [laughs]. I couldn’t not buy it. How could you not buy a Ronno?

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

Rapid City, South Dakota: Les Paul Custom with a wood front. Pawn shop: $400. We [The Cult] were supporting Metallica, so this would have been spring or early summer of ’89, I believe. I remember this because I never found anything in pawn shops, apart from that guitar, which I had sprayed black. I think it’s a ’75, or a ’76. That was my best score.

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

I remember going through a phase of buying, wanting and looking for the ultimate overdrive pedal. I kept buying pedals and trying them out, but they were basically all shite [laughs]. I wanted the ‘ultimate’, but nothing beats what I’ve got – a Klon – so that’s buyer’s remorse.

And okay, I did buy a Gibson twin-neck, which is on Sonic Temple somewhere, so I should probably get a demerit for that. I used the 12-string part, but I mean… what was I thinking? It was cream-coloured and I guess it was beautiful.

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

Oh, yeah. I bought a refinished but otherwise all-original ’59 Les Paul for about $10,000. You can see it on YouTube because I used it on a few TV shows around the Electric album. I would use it on stage occasionally, like at the live concert we did for the BBC in London. But I didn’t use it all the time, just for maybe encores, because I never really got along with it.

I knew the guitar was valuable, but remember: this was before Slash blew up, so nobody really wanted Les Pauls. They all wanted fucking Charvels, not flame-fronted Les Paul Standards. Then, all of a sudden, Slash came along.

Anyway, I sold the guitar to Bob Rock like an idiot for $10,000… then Slash blew up, and I immediately missed out on about $150,000 worth of profit right there [laughs]. But that was the marketplace for the guitar at the time – and we knew it had been refinished, but it was only re-lacquered on top, otherwise it was all-original. It had all the right electrics, but it was purchased knowing it had a refin.

So I let Bob have it for what I paid for it in a moment of largesse that I regret… and he still reminds me about it today! I also sold him a 1961 P-Bass that I bought and that we used quite a lot on the road. We used it on Sonic Temple, too. It was a cheap white P-Bass, but it was great-sounding.

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

Sit with the guitar in your hands and if it doesn’t feel right, if it doesn’t immediately feel good, it ain’t for you. Go with your gut. Trust your instincts. I’ve tried to make guitars work for me and, in the end, I’ve gotten rid of them. If you feel immediately at home with a guitar, that’s a beautiful thing.

And it doesn’t matter what type of guitar, you know? I’ve never been much of a Fender person, but there are certain Fenders that I’ve picked up, and I’m like, ‘Oh, this is epic.’ It’s not a branding thing, it’s just the individual instrument – and you have to bond with it.

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

It’s interesting because a good amp is a very useful thing to have because there are a lot of bad amps out there. So I’d be more inclined to keep the amp, but that sort of contradicts what I just said about buying a guitar!

If you buy a good guitar and a bad amp, you’re gonna have to get a good amp or else you’re always going to sound shitty. If you do it the other way around, you might actually sound better with a bad guitar because if the guitar is badly put together, you could change the pickups.

It’s much easier to throw a good pickup in the shitty guitar and transform it, right? Unless it’s a bad acoustic… You’ll have to find somebody to take it off your hands because there’s no fixing a bad acoustic.

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

You can answer that one. With me, you really can [laughs]. With humbuckers, I just love the thickness of the sound. Personally, I have never really gotten over walking on stage with a really good Les Paul and a really good Marshall – or equivalent – amp, and just letting rip with the visceral nature of what that can do, you know?

I’ve used single-coil guitars on albums for bits and pieces here and there, and for layering guitars. But, for me, they’re a bit too… they’re just kind of delicate, I guess. I’m a bit of an old-school player who likes to feel the air move and the raw power of the thing. And that’s a humbucker for me.

Billy’s Go-To Rig

After grunge happened and the band wasn’t as popular, I had to simplify my rig and just put together pedalboards where I can replace most of the stuff. I use two or three delays, though people tell me, "Why don’t you just reset one delay?" I say, "Have you ever done a gig in Argentina in front of thousands of people? There is no time to be resetting your delay," [laughs]. I’ve also got a couple of overdrives and a clean boost – I’d recommend one for any player.

I started using Friedman 50-watt amps, the Dirty Shirley. Dave [Friedman] modifies them for me a bit, but in essence, they’re pretty standard. With that, I’ve got two Marshall 4x12s – I use the Vintage speakers in one and the mid-’80s ones in the other. And then I use a Roland JC-120 for some clean stuff, and also a Vox AC30 – but it’s one of the Chinese-made ones. I found the hand‑wired ones to be a bit too honest.

For guitars, I’ve got a few Les Paul Customs that are very similar to each other, so I’ll take out three [Gretsch White] Falcons and three Les Pauls – I can get most of the sounds I need from that.

And for acoustics, Johnny Marr gave me his [Martin M-7] signature acoustic. That’s a really cool seven-string with the cheeky extra G string. It gives me a little bit of instant access to what was originally Roger McGuinn’s kind of trick, you know?

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

Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong is set to front a new punk rock supergroup to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Ramones’ first album.

The play-it-fast-and-simple icons are widely considered the world’s first true punk band, with the MC5 and the Stooges laying the groundwork before them. Their 1976 self-titled LP, which included stonewall classics like Blitzkrieg Bop and I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend, kick-started America’s powerful punk scene.

Armstrong, who performed Blitzkrieg Bop at the band’s 2002 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, will be joined by Rancid guitarist/vocalist Tim Armstrong, Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker, and C.J. Ramone on bass. Ramone played in the group between 1989 and 1996, when the band retired. His audition, however, got him sent to a naval prison.

Their one-off performance is slated to take place on August 30 at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles, which, apart from being a very rock n’ roll location for a gig, is where Johnny and Dee Dee Ramone were laid to rest. The show will raise funds for Dr. David Agus’s cancer research at the Ellison Institute Research Foundation.

John Travolta will host the event, which will also feature screenings of the supernatural horror film Carrie and Travolta's new film, Propeller One-Way Night Coach.

“The spirit of the Ramones is alive in every backyard punk show, punk club, and festival,” Armstrong enthuses (via Rolling Stone). “Generation after generation of cretins and weirdos become Ramones lovers. Kids are influenced by the Ramones, and they don’t even know it yet.”

Incredibly, Tommy Ramone was originally meant to be the band's manager, but after countless drummer auditions, it became clear he was the only sticksman capable of complementing Johnny Ramone’s buzzsaw guitar style.

And while the Ramones influenced a slew of next-gen punk bands like Green Day, the power trio have in turn inspired 21st century artists like Yungblud – it’s the cycle of punk. Yet Smashing Pumpkins man Billy Corgan believes Green Day have gone on to eclipse the Ramones.

The announcement coincides with the release of Green Day’s new single, I’m Never Gonna R.I.P, after Armstrong rekindled his love of guitar solos on their 2024 album, Saviors.

Following in the footsteps of Randy Rhoads is no easy feat. While now-veteran guitarist Robert Sarzo was hired and immediately fired by Ozzy Osbourne’s team in favor of Irish rocker Bernie Tormé, he holds no grudges.

“For me, it wasn’t a gig to get,” Sarzo tells Guitar World in a new interview.

“They just had a tragedy,” he says. “And Randy [Rhoads] was a very close friend of my brother [Ozzy Osbourne bassist Rudy Sarzo]. They were all having a difficult time, having lost a bandmate and a good friend. It was a dark moment, and I was in the middle of it.”

Sarzo had initially landed the spot after visiting the Ozzy circus a couple of times whenever they were in the New Jersey area. This, coupled with the fact that he was already touring with an artist signed to the prestigious Arista Records, made him an attractive proposition, especially in the face of immense tragedy.

“I got a call from my brother, and he said, ‘Ozzy wants to talk to you.’ And then Ozzy tells me that Randy died and asks if I’m available and interested in coming to Los Angeles to rehearse with the band. I told him I was and would go to L.A.”

And while Sarzo felt “a deep sense of validation” from the moment he got the call to his initial rehearsals, it turned out that, “Either Sharon’s dad [Don Arden] or brother David – I don’t remember which – had sent a guitar player from England with all his equipment. He’d already been paid for the tour, so they had to use him.”

True to his word, Sarzo showed up at a post-show gathering in New York celebrating Rhoads, even after he was fired.

“The atmosphere that evening felt less like a celebration and more like a memorial for Randy Rhoads,” he recalls. “At one point, keyboardist Don Airey sat down at the grand piano in the living room and began playing Goodbye to Romance.

“We all gathered around to sing along in Randy's memory. Even with our voices filling the room, there was a profound, heavy silence hanging in the air – a collective mourning for his absence.”

During the gathering, Ozzy took the time to apologize for his team’s snafu. “He explained that he had genuinely wanted me to join the band,” Sarzo says.

“However, the record company had already finalized arrangements and flown in another guitarist without his knowledge. Regrettably, that evening marked the last time I ever spoke with Ozzy and Sharon.”

Guitar World’s full interview with Robert Sarzo will be published in the coming weeks.

Many artists would have struggled to follow a debut album as game-changing as Texas Flood. Not SRV, however, who showed no signs of second album syndrome on 1984’s Couldn’t Stand The Weather. 

Its opening track, the fiery instrumental he named Scuttle Buttin’, is arguably the most technically demanding piece of music he ever put his name to. 

An uptempo 12-bar shuffle delivered in fast and furious style in under two minutes, in which he ripped through the open position of the Eb blues scale at 162bpm, demonstrating his ferocious alternate-picking skills with flickers of legato and glissando to round it all off. But it was far greater than an exercise in clinical repetition, instead typifying a gift most natural indeed – the kind very few are born with.

The title track from Couldn’t Stand The Weather was issued as a single with a video that received regular rotation on MTV. In this, Stevie can be seen playing his Hamiltone Stratocaster copy built by New York luthier James Hamilton. It had been commissioned by ZZ Top legend Billy Gibbons, and was presented to SRV as a gift on April 29, 1984.

Though it was similar in shape, the guitar carried a few notable differences to the real-deal Strats the guitarist was usually seen with, such as the neck-through-body design instead of the standard Fender bolt-on, and a two-piece maple body as opposed to his favoured alder. 

In place of the usual rosewood, the fretboard was made out of ebony featured an abalone inlay emblazoned with the guitarist’s name. Somewhat ironically, during the video shoot the guitar itself couldn’t stand the weather, with the EMG pickups damaged by the ‘rain’ falling on the musicians and their instruments. Stevie replaced them with stock Fender single coils.

Other highlights from the album included slow blues Tin Pan Alley, jazz closer Stang’s Swang and W.C. Clark/Mike Kindred cover Cold Shot – which, like title track, made use of the Fender Vibratone cabinet manufactured by the American guitar company during the late-’60s and early-’70s.

A modulation effect would be produced by its 10-inch speaker and cylinder being mechanically rotated by a motor with a rubber belt, taking advantage of the Doppler effect – which is the apparent change in frequency of a wave to the listener as a result of motion.

Soul to Soul, the third album by Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble, arrived in 1985, and again yielded some staggeringly thrilling and ambitious moments as the band dared to tread new ground with keyboardist Reese Wynans, who now plays with Joe Bonamassa.

Look At Little Sister, for example, drifted away from their roots as a power trio and incorporated some honky-tonk piano as well as a saxophone solo, whereas Change It felt like a heavier and more modern take on the traditional blues format pursued on their earlier recordings. And on the closing ballad Life Without You he sang as beautifully as he played – a masterclass in sonic perfection.

As drummer Chris Layton recalls: “I guess to some extent we all had that perfectionist ideal, always wanting to get a little better, but Stevie was a really easy-going guy. He was a very forgiving person, and generous.

“The one thing he was demanding of – without ever saying it – was trying our hardest and being the best we could be. It was never like, ‘Uh oh, you made a mistake!’ In fact, he’d often say a mistake might even be something new – let’s go with it and see where it takes us instead of stopping and starting again because it was played wrong.

“That was a beautiful thing about him. We never really analysed what we were doing. We just had to put our hearts and souls into what we were playing. There were no qualifications, rules or regulations, which was cool but also kinda daunting – especially when you’re on stage in front of 20,000 people and he starts playing something new! You have to jump in and not question whether it will work or not. We just had to take off and try our best!”

It was in this period that Stevie’s alcohol and cocaine addictions began to spiral out of control, almost killing him from dehydration in Germany and famously leading to a blackout on stage in London. As he later revealed: “I would wake up and guzzle something just to get rid of the pain I was feeling. It was like… solid doom.”

After doctors warned him that he was just months away from death, Stevie entered rehab in 1986 and continued his recovery after relocating back to the house he grew up in. Although he was nervous about performing sober, he returned to the stage on November 23 of that year at Maryland’s Towson State University.

Sadly, as fate would have it, the 1989 album In Step – its title openly referring to his recent experience of rehabilitation – would end up being the final release from Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble. 

It remains a favourite among fans for many reasons, with the quartet broadening their horizons and penning tracks that felt slicker and ultimately bigger than their earlier work, with additional horns, saxophones and trumpets for good measure. 

Opening track The House Is Rockin’ includes some phenomenal interplay between SRV and Wynans, and a new sense of musical focus is evident.

There’s the band boogie of Crossfire, and the funky shuffle of Tightrope features another example of Stevie’s dynamic phrasing during the solo section, where he leaves long gaps in between his musical sentences to let the conversation flow naturally. And, just like everything they’d recorded thus far, there were many different shades of blue to be found in between its energetic opener, the slower 1-4-5 of Leave My Girl Alone and grand finale Riviera Paradise. 

Says Chris Layton: “All the stuff we recorded together, from Tightrope, Lookin’ Out The Window and Leave My Girl Alone to Crossfire to Riviera Paradise and Stang’s Swang, these were all incredible songs and all very different. It wasn’t just the blues format dragging on and on.” 

To promote In Step, the band joined forces on a tour with Jeff Beck and his group, who had recently released the highly acclaimed Jeff Beck’s Guitar Shop album. Anyone who was lucky enough to catch any of the 29 dates on The Fire Meets the Fury Tour will have seen two of greatest guitar players of all time going head-to-head on latter-day releases that proved they still had plenty to say. But, of course, in SRV’s case, it was just not meant to be.

During one month in 1990 he had teamed up with big brother Jimmie to record the album Family Style, credited to The Vaughan Brothers. The album was produced by Nile Rodgers, and for a lot of those recordings Stevie ended up using the Chic guitarist’s black Strat with gold hardware.

“He loved the way it sounded,” Rodgers told Total Guitar. “A few months before doing that Vaughan Brothers record, I went out and bought that guitar from Manny’s in New York. I might actually send that to Fender and have them come up with the story of how it was made and why it was made that year… because it was not a normal kind of Strat.”

On August 27 of that year, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble played as support act to Eric Clapton at the Alpine Valley Music Theater in Wisconsin. The show climaxed with an all-star jam. Shortly after, Stevie joined three members of Clapton’s entourage in a helicopter bound for Chicago. In foggy conditions, the helicopter crashed half a mile from its take-off point, killing all onboard.

As Chris Layton solemnly recalls, “The night he died, we spoke for an hour about what was next. Stevie said that he and Jimmie were going to do some stuff to promote the Family Style record, and then he said, ‘I’m really excited because once we’re done with that, I’ve got a bunch of ideas that, I hope I don’t freak you out – but I’m hearing strings and brass and a whole different bunch of shit compared to what we’ve done in the past!’ 

“He was really jazzed about it and wanted us to be, too. These were just ideas pouring out of him and I couldn’t wait to hear them. Then he got on that helicopter and took off. I think that’s the best insight of knowing where he was going… and the future that never happened.”

Chris has so many great memories from the years he spent with Stevie. What he remembers most of all is a man who lived for playing guitar. “Stevie had a guitar in his hand most of the time,” he says. “He’d always be sat there playing away, but not rehearsing or anything. He was just always strumming that guitar. That’s what was amazingly pure about him. Playing guitar was his life.”

When a session guitarist’s vintage Gretsch was lost by FedEx, “guitar Batman” Johnny Marr came in to save the day to help discover it over 1,000 miles away.

Ella Feingold, who has worked with Bruno Mars and auditioned for Prince, bought a 1960s Gretsch 6105 online, only for it to disappear just minutes from her doorstep on delivery day.

It was only after Marr intervened that the guitar was found in the strangest of places.

“So, I got some tea,” Feingold says in an Instagram post. “For those that don’t know, about two weeks ago, FedEx lost my guitar. I got this vintage 1960s Gretsch, and it was supposed to show up in my house, but it just completely disappeared.

“It was scanned on the truck; it was like 30 minutes away from my house. Then nothing.”

Feingold reached out to FedEx, only to find herself contending with “useless” AI chatbots. The situation needed a hero – and it was Johnny Marr who sprang to action.

“My friend Johnny Marr put a post on his Twitter about what had happened, and today I got hit up by a guitar store in Memphis, Tennessee,” Feingold continues. “And they’re like, ‘Hey, a random Gretsch guitar that just showed up at our store. We don’t know where it came from, but we saw Johnny Marr's post, and we’re wondering if it’s possible that this is your guitar.’”

Pictures quickly confirmed it: FedEx had missed the delivery location by several states. It’s hardly ‘deliver to a neighbor’, is it?

“Don’t ask me how a guitar that was coming to Western Massachusetts somehow ends up in Memphis, Tennessee, of all places,” Feingold says, a look of bemusement on her face. “I mean, I have to thank Johnny Marr, who’s like guitar Batman, for finding it.

It’s not the only lost guitar to have made a miraculous recovery in recent weeks. A few days ago, Eric Clapton’s obscure Summersburst Les Paul re-emerged after six decades. Before that, Misha Mansoor recalled how he was reunited with his original signature Jackson in a surprising way.

The name Amir Derakh is bound to elicit one of two reactions from guitar fans. Some people will light up with immediate recognition, while others will stare blankly and go, “Who?” As it turns out, the guitarist is quite aware of his niche status in the music world, and he’s OK with it.

“I realized a long time ago that I was a bit different, and I quite like it, to be honest,” he says. “I don’t think I’m that obscure or unknown, but I don’t go out of my way to conform. I couldn’t see being a blues player and that’s all I ever did – no offense to blues players.” He laughs. “I just like doing different things. I get bored easily.”

Derakh’s fanbase is splintered across a wide spectrum of musical styles. There are those who have followed the guitarist since his mid-’80s shred days, when the San Diego native replaced Craig Goldy (who replaced Jake E. Lee) in the glam metal band Rough Cutt. Other fans discovered Derakh in the late ’90s, when his guitar synth skills powered the hit industrial rock band Orgy.

And still others started took to him via his more recent electronic project Julien-K with Orgy vocalist Ryan Shuck or the alternative rock band Dead by Sunrise, which featured Shuck and the late Linkin Park singer Chester Bennington.

“Funnily enough, I get fans from my entire span of career,” Derakh says. “I get Rough Cutt fans that come out to my shows, and then there are people who are more into the newer stuff. It’s very gratifying to know that people have embraced my work and have followed me through all of these projects.

“Obviously, I realize that what I’m doing now might not be for everybody, because some of the stuff is completely electronic – there’s no guitar at all. But there is some overlap, and it’s cool.”

Let’s go back to when you started on guitar. Who got you interested in playing?

The truth is, I didn’t want to play guitar initially. I wanted to play synthesizers. They had become a thing when I was in my mid-teens. My older cousin had a job, so he bought a Moog and started learning how to play keyboards. He kind of stole the idea from me, and I thought, “What the heck am I gonna do?”

I liked the guitar, and I loved bands like Thin Lizzy and Judas Priest – all the heavy metal bands of the time – so I thought I’d pick up the guitar. I got an Ibanez Iceman and started playing.

Did you take to the guitar pretty easily?

At first, it was total failure. A friend tried to teach me how to play, but he quit on me because he said I didn’t have what it took. But then I started taking binoculars to concerts, and I’d focus on what the guitarists’ hands were doing.

That’s how I taught myself. I could figure out the chords pretty easily, and then I focused on learning how to play leads. I started following players like Jeff Beck and Allan Holdsworth. Oh, and Alex Lifeson was a big influence.

You quickly became part of the San Diego music scene. It became kind of a thing. Bands and guitarists would get known around town, and then they’d split for L.A.

Yeah. I was one of the last people who came out of that whole thing. Jake E. Lee had already left San Diego. I kind of knew Warren DeMartini, but he was pretty much heading for L.A. at the time. They were a little older than me. San Diego became this hotbed for guitarists – I don’t know why. Craig Goldy was another one.

How soon after you moved to L.A. did you join Rough Cutt?

[Laughs] They came to San Diego and found me. A couple members had already left – Craig Goldy split to join Giuffria, and Jake left for Ozzy. The band decided to look around San Diego to see who else was around. They met with a bunch of great players, but nobody wanted to leave. They had families or whatever.

Finally, [bassist] Matt Thorr and [drummer] Dave Alford went to this music store, Guitar Trader, and said they were going back to L.A. because they were shit out of luck. Everybody in the store said, “You gotta check out Amir.”

Matt and Dave came by my house. I plugged into a little Super Champ, played one of their songs, and they went wild. They were like, “Can you get your gear and come to L.A. tonight?” It all happened really fast.

This was right in the middle of the Spandex-and-Aqua Net hair metal thing. You didn’t quite go for that all the way.

Not really. I think I’ve always wanted to be an individualist. I changed my look and my hair style a lot. There was just something driving me to be a little different. Musically, too, I didn’t fit in with other guys on the scene.

A lot of the guitarists from the ’80s had this shrill, screechy tone, but I always liked darker sounds. I like darker music, darker scales. My lead solos had a warmer, fuller sound. I think it was more melodic.

Do you think that was because of your interest in synths and their warm, atmospheric sounds?

Maybe. It’s funny, because I was actually using a guitar synth in Rough Cutt, but I had to keep it undercover because it wasn’t considered cool. My band was afraid to say anything about it. But early guitar synths were featured on Rough Cutt records.

What was your first guitar synth?

It was a Roland GR-700. Grover Jackson gave it to me. I was already working with Jackson and Charvel. Grover had gone to Japan and came back with the Roland. He knew I was into synths, and he thought, “There’s only one person who might know what to do with this.”

And did you?

Yeah. It was cool. I think a lot of people were using it wrong. They treated it like a keyboard, but it didn’t deliver good keyboard sounds. It tracked poorly and sounded pretty cheesy. I thought, “It’s a guitar, so I’ll treat it like a guitar.”

I plugged it into a guitar amp. It gave me a lot of cool added sounds. We downplayed it on Rough Cutt records, but I brought it back with Orgy. I hadn’t played it in years, and I thought, “I’m going to really make my mark with this.”

Rough Cutt was bouncing around for a while trying to get a deal. Once you joined, Warner Bros. signed the group.

That happened within a few months. We had problems, though: the A&R guy who signed us said that he was going to get Ted Templeman to produce us. We waited and waited for a long time, but Ted was too busy to get to us. Then the A&R guy left and completely abandoned us.

After Jake E. Lee left Ozzy, you auditioned to replace him.

I did. I think [bassist] Phil Soussan and [drummer] Randy Castillo championed me, so I was fast-tracked and avoided a lot of the B.S. They had already gone through a lot of guitar players, but there were only a few they liked. One of them was this kid, Zakk Wylde.

Oh yeah, I’ve heard of him. What songs did you play at your audition?

We did a few of the hits, pretty much what everybody knows – Crazy Train, Bark at the Moon, Shot in the Dark, Over the Mountain. I’m not a finger-tapper, so I thought, “I’ll do that stuff, but I’ll do it with one hand.” Ozzy was really impressed with my playing.

He did all the Ozzy stuff you’d think he would do – he got down on his knees and kind of performed. I was like, “Oh, my God. This is so weird.” But it was also a dream come true. I was a huge Randy Rhoads fan. I got my ear pierced when Randy died. I got a guitar like him. So to be playing with Ozzy, it was unreal.

On the other hand, there was something telling me that it wasn’t right for me. I remember they asked me to do a guitar solo on the spot – you know, an unaccompanied solo. I was like, “Yeah, I’m not really prepared for that.” I wanted to put something together and not rip off a bunch of stuff.

How were you told that you didn’t get the gig?

I can’t remember what they said; it was Ozzy and Sharon. It was kind of like, “Ozzy really likes you…” I pretty much knew that Zakk had the gig. I saw him at the Rainbow, and I said, “You’re going to get it.” He was like, “No, no, no…”

There were probably a couple of reasons why I didn’t get it. One, I was connected to Wendy Dio [who managed Rough Cutt], so they didn’t want to deal with that whole thing. Two, I wasn’t completely unknown. They preferred people who were new.

You and singer Ryan Shuck formed Orgy, and you achieved a fair amount of success. Your biggest hit was a dark electronic cover of New Order’s Blue Monday. Did you ever hear from the New Order guys?

Not directly, but I heard from a friend who had a friend that was playing with New Order, and as it was told to me, somebody in the band has a daughter, and she told Peter Hook in rehearsal one day, “I like Orgy’s version of Blue Monday better than yours.” I’m told they all laughed.

You and Ryan then formed Julien-K, and the two of you hooked up with Chester Bennington for Dead by Sunrise. What was it like working with Chester?

We were great friends and had been since the recording of the first Linkin Park album. Getting to create a project together was a dream for all of us. He had a one-of-a-kind voice and was very dedicated to his craft – always willing and able to go the extra mile. I feel lucky to have had him in my life. I miss him terribly.

Had he not passed, do you think the band would have continued?

Yes. He had talked with us about doing more DBS in the future.

Do you feel as if your post-Rough Cutt work has been a truer representation of your sonic style?

I do. Honestly, I wasn’t planning to be in Orgy – I was having a lot of success as a producer, engineer and programmer. I was talked into it, though, and I said, “Well, I’m going to play guitar synths.” Since then, it’s just a continuation of that vision. In Julien-K, I get to play keyboards, but I do play guitar. I’ve been playing a baritone guitar for the past 20 years. I get a darker sound with it.

I get to engage in a lot of different things with Julien-K. The middle of our set is completely electronic, and I play sounds that I created for the record on an iPad. I use a bullhorn that has a laser and a light on it, and I have my whole getup – it’s this different character that comes out.

All of that owes to my years of DJing in the club and techno scene. I got to do all of that incognito. Doing that stuff really allowed me to up my electronic abilities.

Rough Cutt have gotten back together sporadically over the past few years. The band’s latest record, 2021’s 3, was pretty solid. Was that a one-time deal?

Pretty much. We’ve had a very interesting relationship over the years. It was cool to go back and feel like the chemistry was still there. Everything sounded like it did before, even when we wrote some songs. But at this point, yeah, we’re kind of done. We’re grown-ups, and we all do a lot of different things. I was just like, “I can’t do this full time.”

Is there a specific non-synth guitar you rely on these days?

Absolutely. It’s the Yamaha signature guitar that I designed when I was in Orgy. It’s a baritone, but it’s not a super-long scale baritone, so it’s easy to play. Everything about this guitar is custom, including the pickup that I wound with Larry DiMarzio.

It’s been my workhorse for so many years. It’s an amazing guitar, but there’s not many of them. I think there are 75 models in the world.

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

Devon Allman has a regal guitar lineage through his father Gregg and uncle Duane. So it’s no surprise that, when asked who he’d like guitar lessons from, or to collaborate with, Allman tells Guitar World with a wink: “I’m all set!”

At 53, Devon Allman doesn’t bother much with genres – his career has run the gamut from metal-tinged hard rock to heavy blues. Along with his ongoing Allman Brothers torch-carrying activities, he’s kept himself busy.

As for what continues to stoke his passion for guitar, he says: “Pain and love, baby! There’s about 20 shades of color in them there volume and tone knobs on your git-fiddle. Use them bubbas!

“But remember – you, the artist, don’t matter. Only the audience and the music matter. Just go and serve up the medicine to soothe the souls. We’re sonic doctors, man.”

What was your first guitar and how did you get it?

It was a large box acoustic with cat-gut strings, purchased over the border in Matamoros, Mexico! My mom had bought it in ’78 to fiddle around with, as she'd taken lessons as a teen.

Later, when I showed interest in guitar, she said I had to start with that! I still own it, too… the neck is akin to a damn Louisville Slugger baseball bat!

What quirks of your playing have become part of your style?

I guess I end up caring more about the right hand than the left. I try to make a little melody and then skank it out with something rhythmic and weave in and out between the two. But turning the mind off is the trick, and it's not easy!

I just try to escape and paint the sky. Then, when I get to the point where I'm scared shitless, but I’m also in the place where I don’t give a shit – well, that's right about where I wanna be.

What was your greatest gear find?

I’d have to say my ’57 Les Paul Junior. She's a beauty, and she was a steal!

What’s your most memorable encounter with a guitarist?

Shit hoss, I'll give ya three! I've really been beyond blessed to have jammed with some doozies. First, playing with Les Paul at The Iridium – it was a spectacular evening, hang, and guitar lesson all wrapped into one.

Then there’s trading licks with Buddy Guy in Belgium. And third would be jamming with Slash on [The Allman Brothers’] Dreams at our Allman Betts Family Revival gig at The Ryman.

You can only take a Strat or a Les Paul to a gig. Which do you choose?

Well… I’ve got two hands, so I’m choosing both! But in a pinch, I can get away with a Tele or SG to have some versatility.

What was your worst onstage moment?

Puking before hitting the stage opening for my dad at the House of Blues in Los Angeles – as they were announcing my band! I had too much Jager pre-show… back then I really had my priorities dialed in!

Tell me about a lightbulb moment of genuine inspiration.

When I went to Greenland solo in June to write songs. I just wanted somewhere remote to hike, whale watch, fish – just check out of planet Earth. And man, I caught more than fish.

What’s been the hardest time you’ve had as a musician?

Playing in nightclubs for low or no dough about four nights a week from 1992 to 2005 – that was 13 years! And then touring in a van for a minimum of 250 shows a year from 2006 to 2017. All that was rough as shit; but I wouldn't change one bit of it.

What’s the best guitar tone of all time?

Damn, bro! Maybe Knopfler? That’s an impossible subjective question! Maybe Gilmour? Santana's Moonflower record might be the ultimate glory tone.

What most appeals to you when you pick up the instrument?

The curves of that guitar are like the curves of a lady, and it can take you to other realms.

What’s your number-one guitar and what’s its story?

Honestly, come see me play. The guitar will do the talkin’ and tell the story!

• Check out Devon Allman Project’s current tour dates.

Mike Campbell and Tom Petty only had two guitars during the band’s first two album cycles.

Despite their limitations, the dynamic duo managed to co-write some pretty timeless hits, including the sultry slow-rocker, Breakdown – the first single from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' self-titled debut album, released in 1976, and their first Top 40 hit in the States.

As Campbell looks back on the songs that his trusty companion – the 1951 Fender Broadcaster he bought for $600 in 1975 – helped shape, Breakdown is a clear standout.

“Tom had been playing bass up until then, so I let him borrow my ’64 Strat, and that was his guitar for the first few years,” he tells Guitar World. “Then I got the Broadcaster and, eventually, a Les Paul. But with Breakdown, all we had was my Strat and the Broadcaster.”

The limitation worked in their favor, however, as it pushed him to come up with a throwaway lick that became the song’s main hook.

“It was about a six-minute take one night at Shelter Studios in Hollywood,” he explains. “I said, ‘Let me put some guitar on it.’ It didn’t have the lick; it was just the chords, so I noodled for six minutes – and then I got bored. I couldn’t think of anything, so I picked up a slide and played that lick.”

He continues, “I didn’t think much about it and went home. An hour later, the phone rang. Tom said, ‘You’ve got to come back. We want to put that lick you played at the end at the front of the song.’”

Campbell made the effort to get up and drive back to the studio – and even had to listen back to the recording to remember what he had originally played.

“I ended up playing it without the slide, but I played that melody. That became the hook of the song,” he concludes.

And, speaking of classic gear and more throwaway hooks, Campbell recently talked about how American Girl came to be – and how the song was originally supposed to have a 12-string.

For more from Campbell, plus fresh interviews with John 5 and John Osborne, pick up issue 606 of Guitar World from Magazines Direct.

Back in the ’90s, just after leaving Guns N’ Roses, when he was slinging his Les Paul solo, Slash hit local LA bars and clubs playing blues standards. The project was called the Blues Ball and, according to the musician, it wasn’t remotely serious.

“It was basically just a drunken excuse to go out and jam,” Slash tells Guitarist. But nearly 30 years later, his love for blues – and the gear that inspires it – has turned serious. The result was 2024’s Orgy Of The Damned, a blues cover album featuring a who’s who of all-stars – and plenty of vintage guitars and amplifiers, among them Magnatone combos that have replaced his beloved Marshall stacks.

“[The Magnatone] just sounds so much fuller in the low-end, and cleaner,” he says. “When you do a chord, you hear all the notes. It’s been a huge shift for me.”

Slash toured behind Orgy Of The Damned, resulting in a live album, Live At The S.E.R.P.E.N.T. Festival, which captured the blues-laden magic he had been conjuring with a collection of blues standards and rock staples.

The core band line-up comprised Teddy ‘Zig Zag’ Andreadis (keyboards, harmonica), Tash Neal (rhythm guitar), Johnny Griparic (bass) and Michael Jerome (drums). And with the festival’s name bearing an acronym for Solidarity, Engagement, Restore, Peace, Equality N’ Tolerance, the event also supported various charities.

This endeavour is clearly more serious for Slash than his ’90s bar days, of course – but he is still focused on fun. “I’m not trying to be a ‘blues guy’,” he says. “A lot of rock guys do that, where they’re rock players and then suddenly they discover they’re blues guys [laughs]. I’m just doing an interpretation of stuff that really had a massive impact and influence on me when I first picked up the instrument.”

Blues has always been integral to your playing, but your live album, Live At The S.E.R.P.E.N.T. Festival, is a different level.

You hit the nail on the head. When I started playing guitar, there were a lot of blues-oriented rock ’n’ roll guys from the ’60s and early ’70s who were my first influences. But I got turned on to B.B. King right around that time by my grandmother, who was sick and tired of hearing me listen to all these blues guys [laughs].

She goes, ‘No, this is the real deal,’ so she really opened that door – the correlation between guys like Eric Clapton and where they got it all from. So it’s always been a major root of my playing.

And then, with different things going on in the ’80s, I incorporated my influence into playing with different kinds of musicians. When Guns N’ Roses came together, that was really an amalgamation of a lot of different styles that made that band. But, for me, the core of it is all the blues stuff.

Do you see playing the blues as very different from playing heavy rock?

I just approach the blues the way I approach rock ’n’ roll: I play for feel. And I’m not what you call a huge blues purist or any of that kind of thing; I just do what I do. But it’s a lot of fun and a great release for me. Back in the ’90s, we put together this band called The Blues Ball, which was a glorified cover band.

We played around LA and then it turned into sort of a bar-circuit touring band. I was out of Guns N’ Roses when I did this, and I was in between solo projects, so this was a great sort of fun filler for me.

Fast-forward a bunch of years, I’m back in Guns N’ Roses and we had a break between legs. I thought, ‘You know, I’d really like to go and record some of those songs with those guys.’ So I called them up and we put together a bunch of those songs that we used to play, plus a couple of other ones, and made Orgy Of The Damned.

While recording the recent live album, and on your blues tour in general, you used a lot of gear that we don’t see with Guns N’ Roses. Does the blues bring that out in you?

Definitely. While making Orgy Of The Damned, I used a Magnatone combo that I just happened to have, which actually opened a whole door for me. And I switched amp companies [from Marshall] because of that M-80 combo that I had lying around. Then I broke out a lot of vintage guitars for this because I had an idea in mind of the kind of sounds I wanted.

I picked up [a Gibson ES-335] maybe a year prior from Norm’s [Norman’s Rare Guitars] in the San Fernando Valley. So I pulled that out and I had a Strat, a Tele and a couple of old Les Pauls. I had an Explorer, a Firebird… That’s what I used to record the record.

To do the tour, I didn’t take all of those vintage guitars out, but [used] facsimiles – Custom Shop reissues of said guitars. But I did have a 335 from there, which was really probably the go-to guitar for the whole tour and the live record, along with a couple of Firebirds.

The Firebirds, with the P-90s, or whatever you call those – the mini-humbuckers, which are kind of like single coils – are great. And I only used two Les Pauls on the tour, a Standard and a ’59 reissue. The Explorer that I had on tour was a ’58 replica, which was an amazing-sounding guitar. I recorded Born Under A Bad Sign with that and took it on tour.

Oh, and I had a Travis Bean for slide, and a Jackson pedal steel that I used for [It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A] Train To Cry. That covered it. That stuff, with the Magnatone M-80 2x12 combos, was the sound.

Considering you’d used Marshall amps for so long, what caught your ear with the Magnatone?

It was a big deal for me. When we went in to do the record and started pre-production, I started jamming these arrangements and I just didn’t want to use my normal Marshall sound. I had a couple of Fender Twins, a couple of Fender Deluxes, a Vox half-stack, and a vintage Vox combo. I did have my old 50-watt Marshall with me – and I had that M-80 Magnatone.

What happened was, I went, ‘Okay, we’re going to do this song…’ and I imagined in my mind, ‘Let’s try this amp and this guitar.’ I went through different amps and when I got to the Magnatone, which had been given to me but I’d never used before, I ended up using it for every song.

And now, you’re using it live for your blues tunes, and with Guns N’ Roses.

It was a big revelation because it gave me the sort of power that I wanted, but it gave me a kind of clarity. I think I was starting to get tired – as much as I hate to say it – of the very predictable Marshall sound, which I’m sort of known for… but it was starting to wear on me.

I’d been using Marshall for so long that I’d never listened to anything else. I never gave anything else a shot because it didn’t have the Marshall mid-punch, this or that. But something about the Magnatone really worked and so I recorded with it, and when we did the tour, I just took those out and it really worked.

Unbeknownst to anyone else, I actually replaced my Marshalls on the next Guns N’ Roses tour with the Magnatones and that became my thing. I got together with Magnatone a little later and we designed the 100-watt [SL-100] model, which is what I’m using now.

You’ve noted being known for a specific tone, but you’re on stage paying homage to the likes of Peter Green, Albert King and other heavy hitters, while also being a notable player yourself. That’s a delicate balance to strike.

Right! Well, this is a renaissance period for blues guitar. There are so many really amazing purist blues guitarists, like, very well studied, very educated, great musicians going out there and doing a lot of blues stuff. I think we’re in a period for the blues now, more so than it has been in the last 20 years. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a renaissance.

But anyway, I just do what it is that I do. I don’t try to take it too seriously. That’s one of the reasons why some borderline corny covers have been done so many times in this performance. The whole thing is about the huge stepping stones for what I do, and I wanted to cover them. I just try to keep the melodies intact and honour the original compositions.

We took those and then just did our own thing and really didn’t think about anything else. The guys in my band, this is what they do for a living. They play with Walter Trout, so they’re those guys – blues guys. I get to do what I do on top of that, so it’s fun.

Listening to the live record, it’s clear that you had a blast on tour. Is there more blues in your future?

Right now, I’m juggling being on the road with Guns N’ Roses and doing some recording. I’ve got a new record with the Conspirators that’s already done, coming out at the top of 2027, and then, somewhere, I’m going to try to figure out where I can do another blues record.

There are some really cool tracks that I would like to go after with that, so I’m trying to figure out a window to do that. We need to take this to Europe because there’s a big demand.

• Slash’s Live At The S.E.R.P.E.N.T. Festival album and concert film are out now via EarMusic.
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

“While we’ve still got our Buzzcocks identity there, I’ve tried to take the music to a couple of different areas along the way,” says Buzzcocks guitarist Steve Diggle about Attitude Adjustment, the U.K. punk heroes’ new studio album. The band – which formed in 1976, punk’s “year zero” – continues to buck the trend of what constitutes the sound of punk rock.

“We were part of that whole Manchester punk explosion,” Diggle says. “But while there was this exciting, glamorous thing to the Sex Pistols and the Clash, we were quite avant garde compared to what they were doing.”

Since the 2018 passing of founding frontman and guitarist Pete Shelley, Diggle has remained the group’s lynchpin, keeping the Buzzcocks’ musical spirit alive by writing, recording and touring. His punk ethos remains as strong as ever, as showcased on the new album.

“It is always good to be spontaneous and work quickly,” he says. “If you overthink it, you’ll get too involved and lose that spontaneity. We’ve always recorded quickly like they did in the old days.

“For this album, I rehearsed the bass and drums for two days – with 14 songs – and then it took two days to record the bass and drums. So, seven tracks per day. Then I went back in and did all the guitars and vocals over a week and a half. It was done very quickly.”

When it comes to defining the Buzzcocks sound, Diggle spotlights two primary elements: a Fender Telecaster and an HH 2x12 Studio 100-watt combo amp.

“When you plug into the HH, it’s like, ‘That’s the Buzzcocks!’” he says. “That amp must be 50 years old, as it’s the one I used on all the early Buzzcocks recordings. I brought that into the sessions for this album because it gave us our definitive sound.”

“I have quite a few Telecasters,” Diggle explains, “which I also play live, mainly because they’re light. In the studio, I’d run the guide guitar, the Telecaster, with the band because it’s just quick and easy to use, especially when you’re doing guide tracks. Quite often, the guides are buried in the mix because it brings an element of live-ness to the finished tracks.”

Wanting to add some color to his sonic template on Attitude Adjustment, Diggle brought in some additional gear.

“I had a Marshall and a Vox AC30,” he says. “I also brought along two Les Paul Juniors, a couple of Les Pauls, an SG and six- and 12-string Rickenbackers. For effects, I used a Boss distortion, a Boss delay and a wah.

“Guitars are scattered throughout the album. On Poetic Machine Gun, I used the 12-string Rickenbacker on the jangly middle eight, while the riff was played with a SG going through the Marshall.”

Diggle believes that simplicity – which is part of the foundation of all punk rock – allows for a much more boutique approach during the creative process, something that shines through on Poetic Machine Gun.

“A string broke on the 12-string, and I didn’t have time to find a spare,” he says. “I left it as an 11-string. But you won’t be able to tell because that string wasn’t being used so much. There was enough jangle to do what it had to do. I think those types of limitations work for us in a less-is-more kind of way.

“Knowing you could use your limitations is a good thing when you’re starting out too, because you get straight to the point. It’s like when I’m coming up with riffs. I never know what riffs I’m going to put down in the studio. I’d do some takes, but by the third take I’d have a definite riff that wasn’t just kind of a blues riff to fill in the space, but was part of the tune.”

2026 is the band’s 50-year anniversary. Diggle is pleased that his group have etched a lasting legacy, in particular their immense influence on American hardcore.

“We almost have become a ‘band’s band,’” he says. “Though there have been bands that have been influenced by the Buzzcocks, it’s not something we set out to do. The riffs we did and our idiosyncratic approach wasn’t conventional; we’d just go in and make records and that was our message to the world at that time.

“The amount of people from hardcore bands I’ve met that have been influenced by the Buzzcocks is incredible.”

• Attitude Adjustment is out now via Cherry Red.
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

Kirk Hammett has expanded his guitar collection by adding Gojira guitarist Christian Andreu's brand-new Pro Plus Series signature model to his touring arsenal.

He debuted his new addition during Metallica’s triumphant return to London this past weekend for two back-to-back shows at the London Stadium – which wrapped up their mammoth M72 World Tour.

“London, you fought fire with fire!” posted Andreu on Instagram, alongside a photo of Hammett posing with his signature guitar. “Thank you Kirk for using my custom Jackson Rhoads guitar on Seek!” Gojira, as well as Knocked Loose, served as Metallica’s opening acts.

The Jackson Pro Plus Series Signature Christian Andreu Rhoads RR24 EVTN6 debuted in March.

Featuring a three-piece maple neck with neck-through-body construction, a graphite-reinforced truss rod, 24 jumbo stainless steel frets on an ebony fingerboard, a single Fishman humbucker, and an Evertune F6 bridge, it's safe to say this signature model’s built for modern metal… which includes stadium shows.

And, considering that Hammett is one of Andreu's ultimate guitar heroes and the player who inspired him to pick up the Rhoads design, seeing the Metallica icon wield his signature guitar while playing Seek & Destroy, from 1983's Kill 'Em All, was a true full-circle moment for the Gojira guitarist.

“Dreams come true,” concluded Andreu in his social media post.

Last year, the Gojira riffer made another player's dreams come true after he took Diamond Rowe's signature model out on tour.

Nuno Bettencourt’s love for Eddie Van Halen is well known, but at a recent Extreme show, he shone a light on his very first guitar hero – his brother, “King Luis the 1st.”

The super shredder has often spoken about his love and admiration for Van Halen, but it turns out his brother inspired him long before that obsession began. That’s why Nuno brought him out to tackle the leads on Extreme’s Get the Funk Out at Ormeau Park, Belfast, Northern Ireland, on June 26.

Posting a clip of the properly heartwarming performance on his socials, Bettencourt declared: “Long before King Edward, there was King Luis the 1st.”

“Yes, Edward, [Jimmy] Page, [Brian] May, and many more have influenced me as a player,” he says. But it was his brother – “My first true guitar hero” – who “created me as a player.”

“Without his presence and mind-blowing talent, I wouldn’t have picked up the instrument in the first place,” Bettencourt writes.

Playing a Nuno Guitars S-type – what else? – the other Bettencourt Brother shows some serious chops across the performance, with the tapping passage at the end particularly tasty. We aren't surprised, though. Luis Bettencourt is a virtuoso in his own right, with a number of solo records under his belt.

It turns out that it was Luis’ 70th birthday, and what a way to celebrate it was.

After recently raving about an up-and-coming guitarist that everyone needs to hear, Nuno has turned his praise to his brother.

“His fire, passion, speed, singing, and his compositions shaped me and molded me from the ground up,” Bettencourt purrs. “I wanted to be like him and play like him.

“He set the stage for me in a way that no matter what influences came along later, they were all built on his foundation and DNA.”

The younger Bettencourt sibling has also recently taken to socials to pay tribute to Yngwie Malmsteen’s playing, and reflected on the Extreme song that changed his life overnight.

The following excerpt is taken from The Original Punk – Jeff Beck Stories: From Yardbird to the Guitar Shop by Steve Rosen.

Sometime around mid-December 1974, Mick Taylor left the Rolling Stones. He had been in the band since June 1969 and played on their most legendary albums: Let It Bleed; Get Yer Ya Ya’s Out; Sticky Fingers; Exile on Main Street; Goats Head Soup; and It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll. Despite being part of the world’s biggest rock and roll band, Taylor couldn’t take another day.

“If I’d just been content to be a side man and make a lot of money,” Mick Taylor divulged, “I’d have stayed where I was, but I wasn’t content. There’s always something more I wanted to express and more I wanted to do. I went through a few years, which were kind of a bit of a wasteland, where I lost my sense of direction and my spiritual needs completely.”

Down one guitar player, the Stones put out the call. Jeff answered. “I got a call from Keith Richards,” Beck recalled. “He acted like he had known me for 20 years. He asked me to come over and play and I thought it meant just kill a weekend. So, I thought, ‘Well, it would be nice to spend a couple of days in Rotterdam [Holland].’

“I went over there and I found out they wanted me to join; I couldn’t believe that. I mean the money was tempting; I could have made a fortune and not ever have to work again. But I would have been half-dead, and my reputation would have been shot. I think things have worked out better this way; I couldn’t be happier really.”

Assuredly, his relationship with Jagger and the Stones was a love/hate thing. “I have this affection for them in a funny sort of way,” the sometimes Mick Jagger lookalike mused. “I don’t like their music at all ‘cause they were pirates; they pirated the whole thing.

“Eel Pie Island [island in the River Thames, which featured the Eel Pie Island Hotel, where everybody from the Yardbirds, the Tridents, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, the Who and the Rolling Stones performed during their nascent days] was my first introduction to this dreadful scene.

“I had a little combo from Richmond [the Tridents], but they were good though. The guy used to play the harmonica like Little Walter, and he was an unbelievable blues player and a little drummer who was 18 or 17 or something. Every group knew every other group by name and by every sort of detail; there was a hot interest then.

“I suppose it’s like if you invented something right now and it swept the nation; you’d be hot for it because it’s something you were part of from the beginning.”

When Beck quipped, “I don’t like their music at all,” what he actually meant was, “I have no respect for them whatsoever.” When questioned how he felt about the Stones going out on the Steel Wheels/Urban Jungle Tour [1989] when the bandmembers averaged an age of around 45, he responded with typically unfiltered comments. He also took a shot at the Who.

“That’s just ironic,” he mused, “these older guys coming out. It’s nothing to do with me at all. I intended to do this tour way, way back. I don’t know what motivated Pete [Townshend] to go back other than personally to see if they could do it or whether the money had anything to do with it. Or if it was just a fun thing to do for entertainment’s sake. A lot of kids would love to see that while they’re still able.

“Unfortunately, [Keith Moon] Moony isn’t around but [Simon] Phillips is in there and he’ll give them a kick up the ass. I’ve heard four tracks on the Stones’ album [Steel Wheels] and it’s really something. If they’re gonna come out with material like that, then hallelujah.

“If it had been a naff (bad) album, then I would have said for sure they’re doing it just for the money. People want to see them all up there on the stage; they don’t want to see Mick or Keith on their own in some yuppified, designer rock outfit. They want to see the Rolling Stones rolling.”

Several months later in 1986, he teamed up again to assist on Mick Jagger’s second solo album, Primitive Cool. Though he had played on seven of the nine tracks from Jagger’s first album, She’s the Boss, there he was only one amongst a cadre of lead guitarists who played. On the follow-up, he was bumped to the top of the album credits and listed as Lead Guitar: Jeff Beck.

“I did the first Jagger album [She’s the Boss], which was done just for fun, and it sounds like it,” Beck hinted. “It sounds like a good beginning to something really promising. But it was the second album [Primitive Cool] when I realized I was just slotted in as a guest, studio-type guy, and I really didn’t like that.

“I think he [Mick Jagger] had this brainwave that he wanted to put this big show together where he was the star and we were all planetary kinds of people and all [much in the same way as Rod Stewart treated Jeff during their short-lived tour). That didn’t appeal to me.

“I wanted to be in Rolling Stone number two with a tomorrow feel to it; like an experimental Rolling Stones with Jagger singing, and I was sure that’s what he wanted. As time drifted by, I realized he was determined to put these old songs on tape the way he wanted them. He wanted to produce and have a very stylized album, which I didn’t want any part of.”

If Jagger couldn’t have enticed Beck to join the Stones, he could at least have him play in his touring band. Wrong again. “He did say at the beginning of the project that he wanted me to tour as well, and I worked flat-out on the She’s the Boss album and he’d really liked that. It was only halfway through the second project that I started to back out of it.

“He liked what I was doing, but I just didn’t like the way it was going. There was rhythm guitarists every day coming and putting their 10 cents in [Living Colour’s Vernon Reid; the Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart; Jimmy Rip; and Jim Barber]. I just felt like a bump on a log. I walked out of it; there was no way I could handle it.”

• The Original Punk – Jeff Beck Stories: From Yardbird to the Guitar Shop by Steve Rosen is available now from Amazon and Tonechaserbook.com.

There is this whole thing in popular culture right now about relatability. Oh, would you look at them, they’re just like us. He likes pastrami on rye, too! And so on. Blame social media.

But sometimes, oftentimes, our pop-cultural heroes are more spectacular when they appear to have been wired to a different power grid – that there’s a little bit of Planet Krypton to them.

Reassuringly, Chuck Berry is like that, and in a recent interview with Rob Cass for the dopeYEAH talk YouTube show, session great Marc Ribot reminded us of the magic of the Godfather of Rock ’N’ Roll – and he did not disappoint.

Ribot got the privilege of playing alongside Berry when he was playing with the Realtones, the band fronted by Brenda Bergman. Bergman had to take some time out for “a drug problem”.

Thereafter, the Realtones – who were latterly known as The Uptown Hordes – would become a renowned backup band in the late ’80s, playing out of Tramps, in NYC, playing with a rotating cast of R&B greats, including the likes of Rufus Thomas, Solomon Burke and Carla Thomas.

“Because of that, we got to back up Chuck Berry whenever he’d come to town,” says Ribot. “And we took it super-seriously, as well we should have.”

Ribot says when Berry played, something magical happened. He didn’t need too many notes to do it either.

“The thing was that Chuck Berry’s power as a guitarist was such that when he’d play one note, you could see a ripple go out in the audience,” says Ribot. “It was like an electric charge. He had such an amazing economy of play, and an amazing power of playing, and what [Spanish poet, Federico] Garcia Lorca would have called Duende – just this attitude.”

But Berry was notoriously difficult. He was exacting on the guitarists he played with. Just ask Keith Richards. Berry punched him right in the kisser.

Ribot says backing Berry was a test of a player’s nerves, but more than that, it was a test of their dedication to their craft. Every player should know Berry’s guitar parts, front to back.

“It’s like if you’re a preacher, you should know the Bible, and if you’re a rock guitarist, you should know every Chuck Berry solo,” says Ribot. “It’s amazing. We would back him up, and we wrote out all the horn parts. We learned all the horn parts.”

Berry would not always turn up ahead of the show. If he did, the band could run things through with him. If not, they just had to be as prepared as they could be.

“If we're lucky he made it to part of a soundcheck. If we weren't, otherwise he’d just show up at the beginning of the gig, and he would call his tunes in whatever keys he felt like,” says Ribot. “But we were ready. We transposed them.”

The hard work paid off. Berry would haze guitarists who overplayed, who underplayed, who came somewhere in between but still fell short of moving him.

“I was very proud because Chuck was notoriously hard on guitarists,” says Ribot. “He was famous for featuring them, having them stand out front, and saying, ‘Isn’t he fabulous, ladies and gentlemen?’ You know, they clap him. ‘Now get the fuck out of here!’ [Laughs] Happily, I didn’t meet that fate.

“Its a thin line, because a lot of guitarists would go and either be so worshipful that they would want to imitate him exactly, which he didn't like, or they would be saying, ‘Hey, man, I’m gonna show everybody that I can play better than Chuck Berry.’ So they’d do some kind of bullshit hot-dog solo, and he’d say, ‘Get the fuck out of here!’”

Ribot was different. He actually got praise.

“He had kind words to say about my blues playing, which I never forgot,” he says. “So, yeah, it was great.”

You can check out the full interview above and subscribe to the dopeYEAH talk here. And if you think Chuck Berry sounds nuts, then Ribot has some fun stories about Wilson Pickett.

Who would have thought the soul star would be such a riot starter, but there you go. It's like the man said, take your pleasure where you find it.

When Samantha Fish’s stately (and, quite frankly, enormous) tour bus stopped outside the Guitarist studios during her recent UK live dates, the first order of the day was to commiserate with her.

Her latest studio album, Paper Doll, was up for Best Contemporary Blues Album at this year’s Grammy Awards but sadly missed out. However, she was philosophical about the whole experience.

“It was an honour,” she says, “I was really excited and humbled because you got to go. Who knows if it’ll ever happen again? So if you don’t go, you might never get to go. So I went, I dressed up, had fun, had a couple cocktails and it was a great day. And we didn’t end up winning, but being nominated is really the recognition of your art and a nice reassurance that I’m on the right path.”

Samantha’s new live album is called Paper Doll (Live) and it’s something that has been in the pipeline for quite some time, as she explains…

What finally persuaded you to release a live album now?

It’s something my fans have been asking for a long time and I keep telling them, ‘Yeah, we’re going to do it,’ and then five years later, they’re like, ‘She’s still not doing it…’

It’s a timing thing with live records, but I felt like it was a good time because we recorded this last [studio] record, Paper Doll, with my touring band and so, I know it sounds stupid, but, to me, it felt live. A lot of studio albums have dynamics and everything, but we had something on this last record.

We didn’t play with a click track, so we’re changing tempos in the middle of the song, and there’s just something about it that felt really open – it just lends itself to the stage and what we’re doing. I felt like it was a good time to capture it.

Where was it recorded?

“We did it at the Bijou Theatre in Knoxville, Tennessee. It’s an old theatre; the record label chose it because they know it sounds good and looks good. They brought in a camera crew and we had our lights, and we brought in the McCrary Sisters to sing backup vocals. It added an extra layer of dynamics and really beefed up the show and made it special.

Live recording can sometimes add nerves for the performer. How was your experience?

Not only are we recording it, but we’re filming it, too! So, “Try to look natural,’ right? I caught myself a couple times where I was thinking so hard about performing it perfectly that I thought, “You haven’t moved from this spot in, like, half a song. You need to just play your damn show!” You have to take it out of your mind a little bit.

For me, it’s about connecting with the audience. Anytime I’m feeling like, “Oh God, oh God…” I try to find a person that looks like they’re having a good time and [tell myself] “Okay, this is what I’m here to do – entertain that person, so forget about all this other stuff.”

It’s just hard, you know, because you want it to be perfect and I was taking notes as I was going and I really screwed up a song that night. At the end of the night I came out and said, “Hey, we’re gonna do it again, so just pretend to be as enthusiastic as you were the first time!” Everybody’s understanding and there’s a little freedom in that.

When you tell people you’re making a live record, they’re a little more open to you repeating songs; it’s hard to nail it in one shot. Things go wrong, guitars fall out of tune, singers don’t sing in key. I’m the singer and I’m the guitar player. The band sounded great, I was the one with the most problems. It’s hard to accept that when you’re a perfectionist, but you have to.

You’ve been using Gibson SGs live and in the studio for quite a lot of your career. What’s the attraction?

I find that the SG is the most versatile guitar in my whole arsenal. Some people might disagree and think, ‘No, it can only sound a certain way.’ But I feel like I can just apply it to a range of songs and I can shape the tone in a way.

And, honestly, it’s also my most comfortable guitar. The way the neck feels… I just feel the most comfortable playing it. When I stretch out on solos and everything, it fits my personality.

When I first got it, it just felt like me, and I’ve had [the one I’m using live] since 2015. I’ve relic’d it myself, you know, through the sweat and everything, just playing it – I didn’t actually take any tools to it. I really love this guitar. It feels good in my hands. It’s expressive when I need it to be. I can tame it when I need to. And it looks cool.

What drew you to the Gibson SG in the first place?

I don’t know how or why I landed on the SG. I guess sometimes you’re just naturally called to things. But I kind of chalk it up to three things: Angus Young, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Derek Trucks. They can all make them sound good, so I was hoping I could, too.

What pedals are you using on your ’board for the current live show?

I’m probably gonna get 150 guitarists telling me how I’m doing this wrong, but this is just what works for me. [My ’board is] a hot mess, but it’s been working for a long time. I generally go into my volume pedal first and I use that [for] volume swells. I really love pedal steel [effects] and I’ll do that in solos.

I see a lot of guitar players do that with their volume control, but they’re kind of far away from me on most guitars, you know? So I haven’t found a comfortable way to do that and pull it off effortlessly. So that’s a good way to cheat. Then I go into a tuner, a [TC Electronic] PolyTune; you know, it works.

Then I go into an Analog Man King Of Tone, which is probably my favourite, heaviest-relied-upon pedal. It sounds like a tube amp. The next one was a gift: it’s called Jail Guitar Doors [MXR JGD1 Drive], and it’s the MC5 drive pedal my tour manager gave me because we play Kick Out the Jams.

I’m a big MC5 fan. It’s a massive pedal with a single button, so you don’t have many options.

My next one would be the JHS Mini Foot Fuzz, this tiny little fuzz pedal that sounds crazy. I generally try to turn the volume up and I keep the fuzz around one o’clock so it doesn’t get too muddy. I go into the MXR Carbon Copy analogue delay, which is also a favourite. Then I’ve got my [Electro-Harmonix] Nano Pog, which is an octave [pedal]. Fun, weird stuff.

I like to use it on Black Wind Howlin’ and a couple other songs. Then we go into the [Boss TR-2] Tremolo, which is a new one for me. I got it for the song Don’t Say It. Then a [Boss PS-5] Super Shifter, which I use very minimally, really only for divebombs, though I know it’s got a million uses.

You have a new guitar on tour with you at present. Tell us about your sparkly ES-335.

I’ve wanted a 335 for several years, but when it comes to picking out and purchasing a guitar, I wait until one comes along, then I’m like, “That. I need that.” My friend Mike Zito had a sparkly Firebird and I was like, “Oh, that’s beautiful, where’d you get it?” [He said], “You need to go check out this guitar shop in St Louis.’

And they had all these Custom Shop sparkly 335s and pretty much every kind of Gibson. I saw this one and I had to have it. It looks like a disco ball and I just knew it would look great with my wardrobe and our lights.

You know, you kind of see the whole picture like it’s gonna fit right in. And I knew what they sound like, and you kind of hope that it’s gonna feel and play great. But, I mean, you can’t go wrong. I pulled it right out of the box and it played great.

It’s a Gibson Custom Shop. It’s a beautiful guitar. I’ve been wanting one of these for a long time because I really like how dark they can get, how resonant they are when you’re playing – and they just scream. I can get a lot of feedback with the amp, like really controlled feedback when I need it, and it just has great tone. I love it.

How does it differ from the SG?

It’s definitely got more body to it. The SG, as much as I like it, I beef it up with pedals and with amplifiers. This one, I almost have to tame it. You just have to approach things a little differently – like I can come out and throw on my crazy MC5 pedal, turn the amp all the way up with the SG and I’ve still got to work to keep the thickness of it.

With this one, if I plugged it in with that same kind of effect, it’d be screaming – a lot of feedback and everything. So there’s a little bit of a taming thing [going on]. But knowing where this threshold is it just gives you a lot of dynamics to play with. So one’s not better than the other; you’ve just got to approach it a little differently

Do you think that touring and playing live is getting easier for you?

Certain things get easier. You know, the way that we started travelling in a [tour] bus. So that’s easier in some ways. But then a new challenge will arise: so this is easier in this way, but this thing is a little more complicated, you know? That’s just life, right?

But I’m still in it. I try not to do things the hardest way possible, but sometimes you’ve got to get to the gig, you’ve got to make it happen. The travel sometimes can be a little bit daunting and exhausting, but I’m still down for it.

• Paper Doll (Live) is out now via Rounder.
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

Looming large in the incredible catalog of Hans Zimmer, perhaps the greatest film composer of the 21st century, are his collaborations with blockbuster artisan Christopher Nolan.

Zimmer scored almost all of Nolan's films between 2005 and 2017, a run that included the Batman Dark Knight trilogy, Interstellar, and Inception, the mind-bending epic starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a sort of dream thief given the near-impossible task of planting an original idea into someone's mind while they sleep without their noticing. Trust me, it rocks, if you haven't had the pleasure.

Zimmer is, in Nolan's words, “A minimalist composer with a maximalist production sense.” He tends to be best-known for the blaring climaxes of his scores, but he often doesn't really get enough credit for the subtler, more atmospheric soundscapes that help make those tremendous swells, when they arrive, so powerful.

Indeed, another, milder texture was what Zimmer had in mind when he began writing a guitar part to counterbalance the leviathan low brass swells of Time, one of Inception's pivotal instrumental themes.

“I was sitting and playing around with bad sampled guitar sounds, and I started coming up with this little tune,” Zimmer said in a 2010 interview. “I knew at that moment who I was writing for.”

“[Hans] said he was going to get somebody like Johnny Marr,” Nolan recalled in a 2010 interview. “That was how he said it, [but] the smile on his face meant to me that that was exactly who we were going to have playing it.”

Luckily for Zimmer, the real Johnny Marr was happy to put his inimitable touch on the ringing arpeggios the composer had written for him.

Marr discussed the experience of working on the Inception score in a 2013 Guitar World interview. He realized there are rules you have to follow when contributing to film scores, and shared what he learned from working with the decorated composer.

“As a guitar player I used to think that you could approach soundtracks in an abstract fashion, perhaps because of Neil Young’s work on [the 1995 Jim Jarmusch film] Dead Man,” he said. “It seemed like there was a lot of scope for experimentation.

“That may be so, but my experience doing two different soundtracks – Inception and [2011 film] The Big Bang – taught me that there are two aspects that you absolutely have to follow.

“The first is that you must be appropriate to the scene’s emotion, whether it’s sad, dramatic, tense, excited, erotic, or whatever,” he explained. “The second is that you have to click with the director, because it’s his vision.

“Working with Hans was great, because he insisted on me being free to make it sound like me.”

That said, the collaboration presented a number of obstacles for Marr – not least because he was adapting another instrument to the electric guitar.

“The most challenging thing about the Inception pieces was that the parts were originally composed on a piano and written for 10 fingers to play.

“Even though some of the parts sound simplistic, I had to really work it out by detuning and playing in weird positions,” Marr continued. “Then there were the odd time signatures and key changes to deal with. But I really love Hans’ voicings, so it was fun to work them out on guitar.”

Marr recently announced that he's set to join the parade of celebrity guitar auctions with a mega sale of his own. All proceeds from 10 of the guitars will go to British charities, The Guide Dogs for the Blind Association and The National Autistic Society.

Deep Purple may be one of the last bastions of the golden age of rock still churning out top-quality albums, but Simon McBride isn’t afraid to drag the band into the future. That’s why he’s ditched tube amps for amp modelers on their latest album.

The Irishman succeeded long-serving fusion ace Steve Morse in the band in 2022, adding to a lineage that includes Ritchie Blackmore (twice), Tommy Bolin, and Joe Satriani, who was their touring guitarist for a short spell.

With his addition, the band have returned to their blues rock roots, with McBride comparing their latest album, SPLAT!, to a “freight train” – and it’s the first Deep Purple album to use modelers.

“Steve [Morse] is a great player, but he’s a different sort of player, so that was a big thing for me – to get that big, powerful sound,” he tells Guitarist of his tonal task as the band’s chief shredder. “I have a lot of amps, but for most of the Purple stuff I use my live rig, which is the [Neural DSP] Quad Cortex.

“I can hear a lot of Ritchie Blackmore fans crying out, going, ‘No! He’s using digital stuff!’ But it’s brilliant.”

On his debut album with the band, 2024’s =1, McBride was cranking Engl amps for the required locomotive heft. But a year later, he slimmed his live rig down to a Quad Cortex, with a DigiTech Ricochet and a Formula B Vintage Vibe among the picks on his minimalist pedalboard. The Engl cabs, however, survived the overhaul.

So, why the change of heart?

“I had to change my sound a bit because you’re dealing with Don Airey, who plays keys, the Hammond and Leslie, and a Marshall head and cabinet,” McBride explains. “He’s in a very similar frequency range to [my] guitar, so I had to figure something out to make the guitar sound more powerful.

“I was talking to the guys at Engl, who made Steve Morse’s signature amp, and Engl gave me an Artist Edition head,” he adds, having been turned off by Morse’s amps for having too many buttons.

“I asked them to tweak it and put a lot more power in the lower mids and low-end. I knew the Leslie and Hammond didn’t have that, so that could be my little space and would cut through but also make me sound powerful when we play a riff together.”

Although he doesn’t say as much explicitly, we assume that Engl has been captured, and it now lives on in his QC, which is a smart way to honor Deep Purple’s heritage while also bringing something new to help him better weave around Airey’s ivory tickling.

There will likely be Purple fans who sit firmly in the amp purist category, but with even Joe Bonamassa warming to digital tones, it’s clear that modelers have more than earned their place in the pantheon of tone.

McBride also has a particularly hot truss rod take (yes, you read that correctly). But listening to SPLAT!, he might be onto something.…

Grab a copy of Guitarist from Magazines Direct to read the full interview and much more.

Considering that John 5 owns over 100 Teles – including one from every year of their production – it was always going to take something special for one to rule the roost. But one certainly does; suffice to say, this Telecaster changed his life.

His blend of metal and country shred has seen him take Mick Mars’ place in Mötley Crüe, having previously played with Rob Zombie, Marilyn Manson and David Lee Roth, and Teles have been with him every step of the way.

Yet, when it comes to sentimentality, there are at least 99 other Teles in his collection that aren’t a jot on his 1990s ’52 model.

“I used this ’52 reissue through my David Lee Roth and Rob Halford eras,” he tells Guitar World. “It’s exactly like a ’52.”

He, of all people, should know. It soon became a totem of the most important moments in his life.

“It was just that magical thing where you walk into a Guitar Center, which I did in Hollywood on Sunset Boulevard, and said, ‘Let’s look at the Teles,’” he recalls. “This was before I was endorsed by Fender.

“I saw this Tele and thought, ‘This is incredible.’ I took it off the shelf, bought it, put a stack pickup in it, and that was it. I played it forever, and I still do.

“It’s the guitar that got me endorsed with Fender because I’d play it so much that they had a picture of me playing it and put it up at the NAMM Show. It was this big display with all their other endorsees — but I wasn’t an endorsee!”

It wasn’t long before he did endorse the brand, however. Just as he got the DLR gig by cold-calling the singer’s management, John 5 seized the initiative with both his virtuosic hands. Or at least he tried to; it seems Fender was one step ahead of him.

“I went to the Fender booth,” he relays, “and they said, ‘We want to give you an endorsement deal.’ I was like, ‘Yes!’”

His latest signature guitar, Ghost, arrived in 2023 in all its blizzard-white glory, and it actually took its cues from a fashion brand. That’s how you know it’s chic.

For more from John 5, pick up the latest issue of Guitar World from Magazines Direct.

If there is an alternate history of electric guitar in which Megadeth frontman Dave Mustaine is the owner of Jackson Guitars, what might that look like?

We have cause to wonder, because it nearly happened. At least, Mustaine, a former Jackson signature artist, tried to purchase the brand, only backing out after being “jerked around”.

In a recent YouTube interview with Reverb, Mustaine recalled the time when he was Jackson’s most high-profile signature artist, and why he made the decision to leave its roster.

As he saw it, Jackson were handing out endorsements left, right and center, and it was devaluing the brand.

“It was cool at the beginning until they started giving their guitars out to everyone,” he says. “When you start giving your stuff out to everyone, it doesn’t matter any more. It’s like flooding the economy with dollars – inflation comes in.”

Jackson and Mustaine had been a good partnership. It was a natural home for him after leaving B.C. Rich following the 1986 release of Peace Sells… but Who’s Buying? Jackson swooped in just at the right moment.

Megadeth had hired this talented young graduate from the Shrapnel shred stable, Marty Friedman. They were about to cut the greatest album in their career, Rust in Peace. Friedman would play a Kelly. Mustaine picked up the King V.

Mustaine being Mustaine, he had some ideas on how they could improve it. Why didn’t they make a 24-fret version? Well, they did. The rest is history.

Mustaine still has the second one they made, complete with some fortune cookie wisdom taped on its upper wing. The first one went walkabout, and while it recently turned up for sale the megabucks price tag put him off.

“That was the first 24-fret Flying V in existence,” explains Mustaine, pointing out a Silver signature King V that would be very familiar to any Megafan who grew up in the Countdown to Extinction era. “There was one before this that got away from me, and I saw someone at Reverb has that #1 for sale for $193,000, and I said, ‘I would never pay that for that guitar. I would never pay that much money for that guitar – unless I physically came with it!”

Which would be pretty weird, given that Mustaine would be paying for it. But then it could be a Sweating Bullets scenario, a “Hello me, meet the real me” deal. Hey, we did start with an alternate universe. Anyway, moving on. As the millennium dawned, things were not to Mustaine’s liking at Jackson.

“I saw the girl that was working there. She was the A&R rep. She gave a guitar endorsement to a drummer, and I thought, ‘Man, this is not where I want to be.’ So I left,” says Mustaine.

Jackson is now part of Fender family of brands. It could have been part-owned by Mustaine.

“I tried to buy Jackson,” he says. “I tried to buy Jackson with Cathy Duncan, from Seymour Duncan. I tried to buy it with a guy named Joe Ensor, and after [Jackson] had jerked me around for a couple of times, that was the other variable in me leaving. When you are spending money on attorneys and doing due diligence, and all this stuff, and it’s just a wank, that wasn’t cool.”

Mustaine duly left, signing up with ESP in 2003. He is now with Gibson, with whom he has designed a range of signature guitars, his Flying V, an acoustic guitar. And he seems happy enough. Well, kinda grouchy when talking about all these old guitars, but that’s Mustaine.

In 2018, he tweeted that all was cool between him, Jackson and Fender – and actually admitted to trying to buy Jackson three times. With the aforementioned Cathy Duncan, with Joe Esnor, and then with Lloyd Prins (who built Mustaine a T-style back in the day).

You can check out the full interview above.

Buyer’s remorse is a brutal thing, but it’s arguably worse when the guitars aren’t fully out of sight.

That’s certainly the case for Jeff Tweedy, who regrets selling two guitars in a pinch, only to discover the ZZ Top legend Billy Gibbons was the one to snap them up.

The Wilco, Uncle Tupelo, and alternate tuning maverick has credited his mother’s eye for a bargain when it comes to his greatest purchases, but for every dynamite deal he’s struck, he’s also lost beloved instruments along the way.

Speaking in the new issue of Guitarist, Tweedy says there are “tons” of trades he regrets, but one particular trade-off stung more than most, with his mom-found bargains – a ’56 Gretsch Duo and a ’50s prototype ES-350 – the collateral damage.

“Uncle Tupelo was going on the road, and Jay [Farrar]’s amp was broken,” he details. “We didn’t have time to fix it, so I traded [the Gretsch] for a Fender Twin for him. The other one, I think, was at the same place, but I can’t remember what I got for the 350.

“But I know where they are, because Billy Gibbons came through town in St Louis; I think it was at Silver Strings guitar store,” he continues. “They told me that he bought both of them. And I did talk to Billy, and he confirmed that he has those guitars.”

Getting those guitars off of Gibbons represents a pretty mammoth task, so they’re as good as gone. Yet it must feel worse knowing where they are, but they’re still out of reach.

In October, Tweedy teamed up with Martin for a new signature guitar, while also reintroducing a fan favorite 13 years after Tweedy helped bring it to life.

His full gear-centric chat with Guitarist features in the August ’26 issue. Print and digital copies, and subscriptions, can be found at Magazines Direct.

The issue also finds Brian Robertson discussing his doubts about Scott Gorham for Thin Lizzy, and trading guitars with Jeff Beck.

Metallica shredder and obsessive guitar hoarder Kirk Hammett once bought one of his guitar hero’s axes for so cheap that he was riddled with guilt.

It might not be a heart-on-sleeve influence, given Metallica’s sound, but Hammett adores Journey guitarist Neal Schon. Understandably, then, he didn’t blink when the chance to buy Schon’s black 1957 Les Paul presented itself to him. But he couldn’t believe how small a price it cost him.

Granted, $87,500 isn’t exactly a bargain basement price to the everyman – and I dread to think how many Spotify streams it would take to generate that sort of moolah – but considering its pedigree, Hammett was gobsmacked.

“This guitar used to belong to one of my all-time star heroes, a huge source of inspiration, Neal Schon,” Hammett explained at the Dublin in-person event to promote his The Collection book (and spotted by MusicRadar).

“I got this in an auction, and I don’t know what was up, but I got this for, like, half the price that it was worth!”

Admittedly, the guitar doesn’t have ties to a magic Journey moment, which harmed its appeal during a 2021 auction where Schon said goodbye to 112 of his guitars. His Don’t Stop Believin’ Les Paul, conversely, sold for $250,000 – and again for $254,000 in March – with six guitars fetching six-figure sums.

Meanwhile, this late ’50s, P-90 pickups equipped six-string went under the radar. Hammett struck lucky.

“I felt kind of bad about it because I should have paid a fair price,” he confesses. “But I paid a price that was lower than it should have been.”

In fact, Hammett felt so bad about the price he paid that he phoned his hero to ask if he wanted it back.

“I actually called Neal,” Hammett says. “I said, ‘Neal, do you want the guitar back?’ And he said, ‘No, man, you keep it. You buy it; you keep it.’”

Many guitars went for unexpectedly low sums when the gavel crashed down on that fateful day in 2021, a time in which COVID was still ever-present. The auction has now been described as “brutal.”

Writing for Guitarist, vintage guitar expert David Davidson, who owns New York’s Well Strung Guitars, said: “It turned out to be the worst time to do an auction because his guitars really undersold.”

Davidson also confided that Joe Bonamassa believed Schon would have been better off waiting for a more opportune moment.

When Devo arrived out of Akron, Ohio, the world didn’t know what to do with them. After all, Ohio was part of the so-called American ‘Rust Belt’, an area known for adoring acts such as KISS, Ted Nugent and Grand Funk Railroad.

But Devo, with their weird guitars and even weirder music and looks, weren’t like those artists. In fact, they were deliberately something else entirely.

The band comprised guitarists Bob Mothersbaugh and Bob Casale, bassist Gerald Casale, vocalist/keyboardist Mark Mothersbaugh, and drummer Alan Myer.

“We didn’t like the arena rock kind of sound,” Bob Mothersbaugh tells Guitarist. “We wanted to make fun of it. We wanted to do anything but arena rock. We just wanted to do anything weird.”

And the band did just that – but not without consequence. “We were very misunderstood,” says Bob. “We didn’t try to produce hits… we wanted to be artistic. We’d play around Akron and people hated us!”

He recalls: “In the Devo documentary [streaming on Netflix], there’s footage of what it was like. People hated us, bullied us, threw stuff at us and even threatened to beat us up. But they didn’t leave… we knew we might have been upsetting them, but we had something.”

Although Mothersbaugh and company wanted to create unconventional music with an off-kilter aesthetic, his influences were decidedly run-of-the-mill. “I had favourite guitar players. Players like Chuck Berry, George Harrison, Jeff Beck and Muddy Waters.”

Those influences were not unique, but Mothersbaugh soon found that no matter the influence, his mind and body wouldn’t let him be anything other than himself. “I never took lessons,” he says. “I’d play what I felt. And when I tried to play those players’ parts, I always sounded like me. And now, I’ve been doing that for long enough that people try to emulate me! [laughs]”

It’s not just about longevity, though, as Mothersbaugh has played a huge role in the success of new wave music in general, as well as its adjacent guitar stylings. One listen to Devo’s first four records – 1978’s Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!, 1979’s Duty Now For The Future, 1980’s Freedom Of Choice, and 1981’s New Traditionalists – will tell you that. The records contain far-from-arena-rock-but-still-halcyon hits, a cover of The Rolling Stones’ (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, Girl U Want, and Whip It, among others.

And then there are the records that came after – 1984’s Shout, 1988’s Total Devo, 1990’s Smooth Noodle Maps, and the latter-day – and probably final Devo – record, 2010’s Something For Everybody. These records all proved critical to establishing Mothersbaugh’s legacy. The same can be said about his partner in guitar crime, Bob Casale.

Sadly, Casale passed away in 2014 and so Josh Hager joined the ranks, holding down the fort with style and grace. To Hager’s credit, Mothersbaugh calls him “a good player,” while joking… or lamenting the fact that many of Casale’s off-the-rails rhythm parts have fallen to him to execute, such as the idiosyncratic licks within Devo’s rendition of Satisfaction.

In August this year, Bob Mothersbaugh will be 74, but he’s not slowing down as Devo hits the road in the States, with UK dates coming in June. While he reveals that getting ready for gigs is tougher these days, he will “play just enough so he’s not in excruciating pain” on tour. “I’ll rock till I drop,” Mothersbaugh says.

Elsewhere, the band – whose current line-up is now Bob and Mark Mothersbaugh, Greg Casale, Josh Hager and another relative newcomer (who’s been with Devo since ’96) drummer Josh Freese – are surging after the recent Netflix documentary, Devo, shone a light on the band.

With a new generation of fans loving the band, Mothersbaugh is thankful: “As soon as we walk out, people are cheering,” he says. “I’m lucky to go out and do that every night. We’re having a resurgence.”

This has not caused Mothersbaugh to rethink his playing but to double down on what he’s always done, aka the thing that makes Devo so damn lovable in the first place.

“I think of my guitar like a shovel,” he says. “I’m just digging ditches with the rest of the band. I just play whatever there is and see what I can do to make it sound good.”

Devo came of age in the ’70s and presented an alternative to classic rock, which you almost seemed to be making fun of.

It’s funny… yeah. I always think back on that and it was just like a groundswell. You know, there were all these bands that weren’t doing arena rock, like the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, Blondie and the Talking Heads. Everything was cool for a short while.

If Devo were to land today and not in the ’70s how do you think it would go?

I think we would be well received with a larger audience because of the internet. I’d like to try it.

Early in Devo’s career, you and Bob Casale were a formidable guitar duo. But you were songwriters first. How did you bounce off each other?

Bob Casale was a great guitar player, but he didn’t like to play leads, so I got the job. Often, I would play both guitar parts on the album, and then we would work out who played what live. Bob was an easy person to get along with and one of the funniest people I’ve ever met.

He was just a great bandmate. [Our dynamic] came really naturally. He didn’t play leads. But you know, there’s a difference between playing good rhythm parts and then playing a lead where you don’t know where it’s going, you know? So he didn’t play many leads, but the big thing was we wrote songs.

What gear did you use for songs such as Satisfaction, Whip It and Girl U Want?

For Satisfaction, I used a Gibson L6-S guitar and an Acoustic model 470 solid-state amp. For Whip It and Girl U Want, I played the Ibanez ‘Cloud Guitar’ through a tube amp that Roland was developing; they loaned me a prototype. And Bob Casale is the one who came up with the riff for Satisfaction.

We were doing a tour where we did all the really early stuff. Bob had passed, so I played his part on Satisfaction and it was really hard every night, because I hadn’t played it every night for years [laughs].

Devo is known for oddball guitars. Was there a reason for that as far as sound goes, or was it more for aesthetic purposes?

No reason as to the sound… I just wanted to look different! Back in Akron, I saw a La Baye 2X4 guitar in a pawn shop and decided I had to play it live. It didn’t sound great or play great, but it was cool to play it on stage at club gigs in Akron and Cleveland.

After Whip It became a big hit, along with its kooky music video, how did your life change?

“We got to do whatever we wanted for a couple of years [laughs]. But with the video, we actually made that because the song was taking off. We just thought Whip It was going to be another song on the album and actually expected Girl U Want to be the hit.

Did you have a tried-and-true process for tracking guitars that you can look back on as essential to Devo’s albums?

I knew very little about the tracking process. In the basement in Akron, we just stuck a Shure SM57 in front of the amp. Our first four albums were recorded with producers and engineers who knew how to mic an amp.

You often used solid-state amps in the studio and live. Why did you favour those as opposed to tube amps?

I didn’t know much about guitar amps, and the Acoustic 470 had a five-band graphic EQ, which I would configure in patterns for each song. And the cabinet had 2x12-inch speakers and a high-frequency horn. I later disconnected the horn – too much high-end for me.

What gear do you rely on these days while touring?

At some point, I wanted a guitar that felt good. So what I’m playing now is a Les Paul that’s a Gibson Custom Shop recreation of Mike Bloomfield’s ’59 Les Paul.

I’ve one of those, and I’ve a Line 6 modelling amp, so that we don’t have to have amps with speakers. But apparently, a lot of places have stuff under the stage, and that was affecting and making noise, so our sound guy said, ‘Bob, you gotta get a guitar with humbucking pickups…’

I went to the guitar store, and I was just like pulling down all these Les Pauls, and going, ‘Boring. Boring. Don’t like this…’ And then I grabbed the Mike Bloomfield one and I was like, ‘Oh my God, this feels perfect!’ So I bought it and then took it home, plugged it in and said, ‘Oh, and it sounds perfect, too!’ I just wanted something that feels good in my hands.

With the amps, I like a really clean sound, where I can plug the Les Paul in, and go, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s the Les Paul sound.’ And then I can grab my Tele, plug it in, and go, ‘Oh, yes, there’s the Tele sound.’ I appreciate all of that.

But like I said, I don’t really use amps that much when we’re on stage any more. I mostly just use amps now when I’m back in LA and I’m working on TV shows, you know, mostly cartoons. But it really just takes too long to mic up an amp, so even then oftentimes I just plug right into the computer.

Talking now about the recent Netflix documentary, Devo, has its success altered your view on the band’s legacy or your influence as a guitar player? It offers a pretty full-frontal look at the band’s journey.

The documentary has allowed people some insight into what Devo was doing all these years. It has not altered my viewpoint on legacy or influence as a guitar player. I’m still doing what I’ve always done.

[Director] Chris Smith did a good job with it. He found a lot of really old footage that I’ve never seen or just didn’t remember. It was a lot of fun to watch. And, really, it’s a feelgood kind of documentary, you know? I felt good at the end of it. And that’s what everybody else has told me, too.

As someone who was put through the wringer early on and came out the other side a huge success, what’s your best piece of advice for would-be guitarists or bands looking to succeed?

I didn’t know I was in the wringer at the time; I just thought record companies were insane. I’ve always enjoyed writing music and playing guitar, so being successful is an added bonus. If you don’t enjoy the process, you’re in the wrong business.

Devo seems to have no intent to stop. What’s next and why, in your eyes, does the world need groups like Devo?

You’re right! Devo has no intent to stop. And starting in April, we will be touring the world. Devo is like the musicians on the Titanic who kept on playing as the ship was sinking. We are just trying to do our part.

The documentary has brought a new audience to our shows. I think people needed reminding about how fun Devo is live. I take nothing for granted and am truly grateful for Devo’s continued success.

• The Mutate, Don't Stagnate Tour is underway. See Devo for dates and ticket details.
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

Many guitarists spend hours navigating different string gauges in the quest for the perfect tone. In John Mayer's eyes, however, there are only a few factors you should really pay attention to.

The 'thicker strings equals thicker tone' debate is a popular topic among players, with some believing that a heavier string gauge can give way to meatier, beefier tones. The trade off, of course, is that thicker strings are harder to play.

But, speaking to Guitar World in 2010, Mayer dismissed such talk, saying that “the argument about string gauges is about the silliest thing a guitarist can engage in.”

“Maybe you get a better tone from bigger strings,” he conceded, “but if you can’t bend up to the note, what’s tone anyway? Hendrix probably had .010s, so it’s whatever you can bend.”

In other words, what's the point of picking heavier strings if you can't cope with them? Prioritize playability and the tone will follow.

His observation came during a discussion of Stevie Ray Vaughan, who famously opted for heavier strings. SRV played with a custom 0.13–0.58 set, tuned to Eb, which led many players to think that alone was the secret sauce.

That’s one of the reasons why Mayer feels Stevie Ray Vaughan has “the most misunderstood tone around.”

“Everybody thinks you get a Tube Screamer, you turn the distortion all the way up, and you turn the level as loud as it goes before you get yelled at,” he said. “But his sound wasn’t about gain – the gain was in his hands. It was in the muscular, atom-bomb left hand, which made it sound loud.

“It was loud, but it wasn’t distorted. When people try to play Texas Flood through distortion, it sounds awful. Stevie primarily used the amp’s volume [he played through edge-of-breakup Dumbles] and a distortion pedal as a boost. Then he just whipped the hell out of the strings to get that sound.”

Mayer’s argument is that the relationship between the fatness of the strings and the tone is not necessarily symbiotic, especially if it comes at the expense of how much movement you can get out of your bends.

That’s why his signature Ernie Ball string set is considerably thinner than SRV’s go-to, albeit coming in a little fatter than standard gauge strings at 10.5-47. They are, he reckons, the perfect Strat strings.

“The tension is exactly where I’ve always wanted it,” Mayer said of his signature Silver Slinky strings in 2024. “[They’re] big enough to get great tone, but nimble enough to finesse those vocal bends we as guitar players are always going for.”

So, yes, while he does seem to nod to the fact that thicker strings can contribute to a thicker tone, both his words and his gear reflect a belief that the quest for a beefy tone is far more multifaceted than most give credit for.

This is his sweet spot, but it must co-exist with everything else in his rig, and his personal playing style, too.

Other players prioritise playability alone. B.B. King famously used light string gauges to make bending easier, and Billy Gibbons ended up following suit after meeting the blues legend.

Alone in his dorm room, transfixed by the bloom and decay of a single note, Bentley Anderson discovered his obsession and his voice on the guitar.

“I spent years trying to learn how to play proper guitar, and I was totally mediocre,” Anderson says. “I could never learn how to shred, even though I really tried.”

Anderson weaponized that sound and resonance from his dorm into a glorious noise. Carved from saw blades, chisels, metal rods, and a Fender Jazzmaster, Valence – his latest collection of hellish soundscapes – dares the listener to turn away, offering catharsis only to those who return. Still, to describe Bentley Anderson’s music as “just noise” would be reductive at best.

“If you’re someone who’s never heard anything outside of, you know, Barry Manilow, you’re gonna be like, ‘What the fuck is this?!’” Anderson says. “It’s not a literal racket. You can glean some kind of narrative from it.”

“You can make all kinds of sounds, but they’re not all necessarily good. You have to dig deep for compelling sounds,” he says. “The saw blade just has this perfect kind of metal weight and size. I hold it over the pickups and hit it with my fingers.”

“I found it on the ground,” he says with a laugh. “I find all kinds of shit here in New York. I call them my ‘implements.’ It’s a little bit like a prepared-instrument situation.”

Anderson views playing guitar as an opportunity for deconstruction. Inevitably then, when he began interning at Sonic Youth’s studio in 2005, the band’s use of alternate tunings became another tool for Anderson to employ as he found his voice on his instrument.

“The guitar on Valence is, low to high, F#, F#, D, G, A, C#,” he says. “Altered tunings obliterated my knowledge of the fretboard to where I just put my hands on the guitar, started playing, and found I was using only my ear. It was liberating.”

Has traditional guitar-based music run its course, then?

“I think someone will always be writing an amazing song in a standard tuning,” he says. “I don’t think that’ll ever stop, and I don’t think people will ever get bored with that. It’s not that I’m bored with that either, but I’m obsessed with sounds, resonance, and weird. You have to find your strengths.”

• Valence is out now.
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

After Tom Petty unexpectedly died in 2017, his longtime partner in guitar and songwriting crime, Mike Campbell, found himself at a loss. But since then, he’s picked up the pieces and leaned heavily into his own band, the Dirty Knobs.

“Of course, I miss the Heartbreakers, and I miss my brother… that was very sad when that happened,” Campbell tells Guitar World. “But I’d always had it in the back of my mind that if the Heartbreakers ever retired, I would focus on the Dirty Knobs and make that my purpose.”

Campbell continues to expand on that purpose with The Dirty Knobs' fourth record, Mission of Mercy. “I named the record that because I kind of feel like The Dirty Knobs are on a mission of mercy,” he says. “We’re trying to bring a little relief from the wicked world we all live in.”

Songs like I Remember, Mission of Mercy, and Vicious Hangover do just that. But Campbell isn’t reinventing the wheel. “I stick with what I’m comfortable with,” he says. “I’ll try a new guitar or amp, but if I’m recording and working on a record, I don’t want to be bothered with too many choices. I want to focus on the song and the performance.”

For the most part, as he did with the Heartbreakers, Campbell leans on his beloved Fender Broadcaster and his gold top Gibson Les Paul, with a hint of Rickenbacker 12-string mixed in. “It’s whatever inspires you,” he says. “I’ll look at a guitar, and I’ll think, ‘I wonder what this chord would sound like on that guitar…”

Gear aside, when it comes down to it, Campbell is grateful to still be out there doing what he loves. “We, The Dirty Knobs, play these theaters; we have some rock ‘n’ roll soul healing together,” Campbell says.

He continues, “That’s the only way to get that in your life, you know? It has to be through that. So, that’s what I live for, and that’s what makes me happy. I’m very grateful to be where I am. I survived the [Tom Petty’s] death, moved on, and I keep making music.”

Do you still always write on guitar?

It used to always start on guitar, but lately, since I’ve been writing on my own, sometimes it’ll start with piano, or no instrument, and just in my head with some lyrics. I’ll hear something, and it’ll trigger something I heard in the Sixties, or whatever. Next thing you know, I’m writing a song.

The first single, I Remember, was written on piano, right?

Yeah, that’s an example of not writing on guitar. I’m not good on piano, but I can find chords. That song was just chords… on piano, you can have a bassline, and then the melodies on top, so it’s a little fuller than just a guitar chord. And then, I wrote the rest of the song over that.

I really like Let Me Back in My Dream. How did that come together?

I like that song a lot, too. I kind of dreamed that song up… no pun intended. [laughs] A lot of times, you can have a dream, and it might be a really good dream, and then you wake up, and you want to remember the dream and go back into it because you were enjoying it!

But it just vaporizes, and it’s gone if you don’t grab the idea right away. So, that’s what inspired that. And then, the music was just quickly written, probably, within five minutes. It’s just some loud chords and some unique chord changes in the verse. It’s mysterious.

How about the title track, Mission of Mercy?

I had that song in my head for a while in my tape library. I’d forgotten about it and never pursued it because I thought it wasn’t rock ‘n’ roll enough. It’s a real homage to Brian Wilson, who is a big hero of mine. And so, when I was writing that song, it was with him in mind with those chord changes and the background vocals.

Is that style of music more ingrained in your songwriting than people realize?

I don’t know what people realize, but it’s certainly buried in my history of listening to music. I grew up on that stuff, but I like new music, too. I'm occasionally inspired by new music, but mostly, I get frustrated with it because it all sounds computerized, and there’s no magic in the songs like there was in the Sixties.

Is that to say that when it comes to your music, you’re all analog?

No, I’m not all analog. I use Pro Tools, which I’ve used for a long time, or at least since they got the sounds together. Now, with that, it’s hard to tell if you’re on tape or digital if you record it properly. But I don’t do a lot of technical stuff with Pro Tools; I just use it to record, rewind, and play, like a tape recorder.

One of the more fun songs on the record is Vicious Hangover. How did that one come together?

That’s a perfect example of spontaneity. The band was coming over that day, and right before they got into the studio, I thought of this idea, which was just real simple, and I threw the chords together with rock ‘n’ roll energy. But I didn’t have it sussed out, so they came in, we changed the chords around, and we were able to capture it in one take.

[Guitarist] Chris Holt plays the song on that song, right?

Yeah, he did. It was all live, and the first time we played it through, I said, “Just go for it.” And he’s that good and has just been a breath of fresh air for the band. He’s so talented on so many levels, and brings amazing harmonies, doubles my voice, and can play strings and keyboards, too. He’s also really easy to get along with.

What’s your tried-and-true key to finding guitar tones these days?

Good question! I don’t spend a lot of time looking for tones. I get an amp setup that I like, starting off with the gain that’s right for the song, and then I try a couple of guitars. So, whichever guitar seems to fit, I start with that, and then if I get to a point where it needs to be beefed up, I might try a boost pedal or a wah. But I don’t do a lot of pedals. I like to get the tone from the guitar and amp if I can.

What was your main rig for this record?

For this record – and the last couple of records – I’ve reconnected with an old amp that I used early in the Heartbreakers, an Ampeg Rocket. I used that for the whole album, and Chris used a Fender Princeton. And for guitars, I gravitate toward my Broadcaster, my Les Paul, and occasionally, a Rickenbacker twelve-string.

What led you to reconnect with the Ampeg now?

It was just in my closet, and one day I pulled it out, turned it on, and thought, “Wow… this is a sound that I’ve been missing.” It sounded really good, and I sort of stumbled back into the room, and there it was. [laughs]

Do you put much stock into the so-called “connection” with a particular guitar, or amp, or can you write on any guitar, at any time?

That’s a deep question. If you get in touch with your instrument, and it speaks to you, it'll tell you what it wants to play a lot of times. If you’re doodling around, there will just be certain things that sound good on this guitar, and you’ll go back to it, and it'll become a direction for a song. So, a lot of times, the instrument, if you really get in tune with it, it'll speak to you.

Considering the years you spent with the Heartbreakers and the void you found yourself in after Tom’s death, what does the positive reception toward The Dirty Knobs mean to you?

Well, it’s my life. It means a lot. The good thing about The Dirty Knobs is that we started out playing in little bars, and now that we’ve done relatively well, we can play theaters, which I love. My goal was to get out of the bars and play theaters, and we’ve gotten there now.

I mean… it’s not a money-making thing, like the Heartbreakers, which was a big financial success. With this, I’m doing okay, but I’m doing what I love to do. Nothing makes me happier than taking this band into a theater with a group of people and having a moment.

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

You won’t hear Bill Frisell say a bad word about a well-made archtop. The archetypical jazz guitar has a special place in his heart. But there is a practicality about the Fender Telecaster that makes it his number one.

He tells Guitarist that it’s not only that it’s durable, it can be customised, with his number one electric guitar on new album, In My Dreams, unlike any Tele you’ll find in today’s Fender catalogue…

“My first guitar I ever got was in the summer of ’65 – a Fender Mustang – but soon after that I went into the pawn shop and saw a late-’50s Esquire that was $75. I thought, ‘Oh, that looks cool, I’ll get that.’ With the Telecaster, it’s like, they got it just right at the beginning, y’know?

“Everything about it is so simple. Everything you need is right there. I have a number of Teles now, and some of them have different pickups or whatever. But I just have an instinct for all of them. I know where the volume knob is, where the pickup switch is – I don’t have to reprogram my brain if I switch between them.

“Some of my guitars are just straight Telecasters, but the design is so easy to mess with. With my main instrument, it’s basically a Telecaster, but it comes from a bunch of different models, all put together by JW Black, who was one of the first guys that worked at the Fender Custom Shop. So he’s serious about Telecasters, knows them inside out and restores old ones.

“We have a sort of a dangerous relationship because he’ll always get some idea, like, ‘Oh my God, what if we put this pickup in this guitar…?’ So my main Telecaster is a shorter Gibson scale and the neck pickup is made by TK Smith – I guess he was inspired by those old Bigsby pickups.

“It’s painted by my friend Terry Turrell, and the bridge pickup is a Seymour Duncan, a Little ’59 or something. That Telecaster was the only guitar I used on my new album, In My Dreams.

“I have to say, I love playing archtops. Like, I have a Collings I-30 that I love. But it’s harder to travel with those. I don’t have a crew and roadies, or a truck with 50 guitars. When I travel, I carry one guitar and I end up checking it in under the plane.

“With a Telecaster, you can pretty much just throw it down there in the hold and it’ll survive somehow. And even if it doesn’t survive, you can just get a screwdriver and screw it back together.

“So there’s this practical thing about the Telecaster for travelling. I’d love to go out with a Gibson L-5 or something, but you just know it would be destroyed in a matter of minutes by the airlines!”

• In My Dreams is out now via Blue Note.
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

Over the years, Joe Perry has put together a seriously impressive guitar collection that, at one point, was recorded as 600 electric guitars and acoustic guitars. However, there is one particular guitar that he let go many years ago that he still wishes was in his possession.

In an interview with Guitarist, the Aerosmith guitarist was quizzed over whether he’d ever sold a guitar that he now particularly regrets parting ways with.

The story involves an unassuming red Hofner Stratocaster clone that was purchased on the road, which Perry used back in the 1990s to serenade the Lake Sunapee locals on 4th of July each year with a rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner.

“I did that for a couple of years with that particular guitar, and as the years went on the guitar ended up getting back with my main collection,” Perry reflects. “I was kinda in one of those moods at the end of the tour, and I had like 400 of these guitars that I never played.

“I said, ‘I gotta get rid of some of these things. It’s time to clean house a little bit.’ I earmarked a few guitars to go and somehow that guitar got on the list.

“And like three or four months later, I found out that it was gone and was like, ‘Next time, I gotta pay more attention to this. I’m not getting rid of anything else for a while.’

However, Perry would cross paths with the Hofner S-type again a few years later – when it was presented to him at a train station by the fan who got their hands on the six-string.

“A couple of years later, we’re on the bullet train in Japan, and as the bullet train is pulling out 30 or 40 people follow us up there. As the train was moving along, I saw a kid holding that guitar out for me to sign it.

“But the train was already moving, slowly pulling out, and the kid was holding it out with a Magic Marker. I’m thinking, ‘Man, I gotta get the kid’s number to see if I could buy it back or trade it for something else,’ because it did have some sentimental value, you know?

“But we were off to the next city, and at that point I didn’t have any ideas about how to get in touch with the guy. I suppose I could have tracked him down through the fan club and tried to figure out who it was, but it was lost.”

Perry hopes the story will have a happy ending, though, and is holding out hope that he may be reunited with the Hofner at some point in the future.

“I’ll buy it back. I’ll trade it for something else, you know? It would be fun to get that back. And again, that was one of those off-the-wall, not exactly the hippest guitar of the month.

“But it sounded pretty cool and it had a really good neck. It was more about the sentimental things. I regret having lost that.”

This is just one example of Perry letting go of a guitar he later wished he kept hold of. Speaking to Total Guitar, he revealed the golden-era Aerosmith guitar he misses the most.

Tobias Osland is the wildly inspiring guitarist and songwriter behind one of the most essential bands in hardcore right now, the Norwegian trio Hammok. He started in a place familiar to most players: banging out single-string renditions of Smoke On The Water and Seven Nation Army. The crucial difference is that he didn’t stay there.

His playing on the band’s latest effort, When Does This Place Become Our Scene, is an enthralling, kaleidoscopic blend of everything from the deeply industrial to colossal bending of metal’s finest dark-arts noise-smiths like Chelsea Wolfe, right through to math-rock rhythms and the manic melodicism of Refused. He knows both how to let it breathe and to leave you breathless.

Having harbored early and ultimately unfulfilled ambitions to be a drummer, Osland is a rhythm-first player – but don’t mistake that for being basic. Those instincts inform much of his playing, whether it’s his millipede fingering on Blast Off or the thundering arrangement of BANG.

“I do this picking thing a lot,” he says, “which is kind of a galloping rhythm and is very, very present in Blast Off. It’s very natural to me, but it’s not very natural to a lot of other guitarists. It’s like it’s in my hand. We have a guitar player with us now; he’s been struggling for ages getting it up to speed, and I was like, ‘Why is this so confusing?’”

He puts it down to his rhythmic obsession, along with hours spent drilling speed to Slipknot and the patterns of Dillinger Escape Plan and At The Drive-In; but it never feels dull.

“Everything is rhythm first; I feel like a lot of times it’s a drum beat and then I’m supplying the guitar on top,” he says. He’ll often flip the script by using the guitar as a percussive instrument – repeating a pattern, and then shifting the bass beneath it – for melodic interest.

“I fell in love with that on this album. Just not doing so many of the usual big chords and keeping the guitar to these small rhythmic patterns, like the song CND – that’s a kick pattern common in club music. I found it on TikTok. I was like, ‘Maybe that can be the guitar and you just make everything move around that.’”

Warped through a Whammy pedal and punctuated by wailing ghost-train leads and goliath bass drops, it’s hugely effective. It’s also one of those stupidly simple, massively inspiring ideas that works across just about any genre. I mention it feels like the rhythmic equivalent of lead guitarists channeling the phrasing of horn players.

“I’ve seen a lot of people talk about having rap flows in your head while you’re improvising guitar solos,” Osland responds. “Like following a Tupac or a Jay-Z flow in your head and playing to that. It’s fascinating.”

He’s equally varied and instinctive in his approach to tones. Most players can relate to the sinking feeling of having a great part lose its luster as they cycle presets in search of the ideal texture. The Hammok guitarist, again, does things differently.

“I think a sound can come first – you’re just playing to that sound or playing to whatever instrument you’re using. Like, is your guitar super-poorly intonated? What does that do to your playing? The guitar I played for seven years was impossible to intonate, so I couldn’t play open chords. That shaped how I play.

“Doing this album, I stumbled across so many sounds. Gooning for Free was just an accident of having my distortion pedals on and pitching the entire guitar an octave down with a Whammy pedal and reacting to that sound. I played one chord and it was like, ‘Whoa, that moves the entire room!’”

You can change your playing faster and more instinctively than you can switch a tone, meaning it’s a much more immediate way to write. “It’s all about responding,” Osland agrees. “There’s a lot of guitar moments on the album that I recorded with my phone in my bedroom, like the intro for CND and Confidence Of A Beaten Horse.

“Then I just popped it into the session and it sounded cool. I’m very happy with that. It feels like you’re collecting the memories along the way of creating the song – and it’s all there in the final product.”

It may not shock you to learn that the maverick guitarist-songwriter-producer behind one of the year’s most exciting and sonically unhinged punk releases is not super-fussy about his gear. His main guitar is an utterly trashed, but characterful 2009 Gibson Melody Maker.

He reports he’s broken the headstock twice: once on tour in the UK as guitarist with Sløtface; and once in a performance for a group of elementary school kids that I truly wish I’d seen. “It was this school program thing; we played two or three shows every day for from Monday to Friday.

“The last second of the last show of the week, I was out in the crowd and banging on the neck, and the headstock just popped off. It brought back all the trauma of the UK tour. I was like, ‘I’m standing in the middle of these young school children destroying my guitar – for this?!’”

His other option is a Frankenstein-ed Strat that kind of did come back from the dead: “The one that I use, my dad found on the street. I put a new neck on, and somehow it works. The pickups are super-high output because they’re super-cheap, so it’s super-aggressive.”

A new, considerably lower-performance spin on the Superstrat, then. On the amp front it’s a Laney V100R and a Vox V30 for most of the album (Quad Cortex live), though he admits to having a secret weapon in the box.

“I use lots of plugins – a lot of the stuff is meant for dubstep and those distortions are just insane. They’re not vintage, they’re not trying to be some cool outboard gear; they’re just kind of fucked. Whatever Skrillex is using is probably going to make your guitar explode, which is fun!”

• When Does This Place Become Our Scene is out now via Sargent House.

Bob Dylan has had some serious lineup changes over the past few weeks.

After Julian Lage sneakily replaced Doug Lancio at Dylan’s Santa Barbara show on June 17, and second guitarist Bob Britt quit with a “Sayonara Bobby” post on social media, Dylan fans were left wondering who would join his rotating roster of guitarists.

Turns out, it wasn’t too long before we got the answer, as Chicago-based blues guitarist Joel Paterson made his debut with Dylan’s band on June 29 at the Moody Amphitheater in Austin.

Up until last week, Paterson held a weekly residency at Chicago’s historic Green Mill Cocktail Lounge with his jazz quartet. Just two days ago, he went from playing to a crowd of 150 to performing for 5,000 alongside the Bard.

While it’s unclear how acquainted Paterson was with Dylan’s complete repertoire before he landed the gig, he did have a previous relationship with at least some of his songs, having played pedal steel on If Not for You, To Ramona, When to See the Gypsy, and Tell Me That It Isn’t True on alt-country and indie folk band The Cactus Blossoms’ Bob Dylan Songs Vol. 1 EP.

Paterson has been a mainstay of the Chicago roots music scene for over two decades.

Aside from his new gig with Dylan, his current projects include The Joel Paterson Quartet and The Western Elstons. He’s also an accomplished studio musician, having played with the likes of JD McPherson, Kelly Hogan, Pokey LaFarge, and Deke Dickerson.

As for Britt, following his public post announcing his departure, his wife, Etta Britt, took to Facebook to clear the air that he didn’t leave because of Julian Lage.

“Julian has gone back to his tour. He enjoyed playing with him and said he’s a great guy.”

Lage’s representatives confirmed with Rolling Stone that the jazz virtuoso will continue playing with Dylan this year – at least when his schedule permits. Comparing the pair's gig calendars for the coming weeks, it looks like Lage may make every show except the July 4 date.

Guitar World reached out to Joel Paterson with a request for comment about his new gig.

British MP Andy Burnham might be on the cusp of becoming the next Prime Minister of the UK, but he’s still had time to show off his surprising guitar chops.

The former Mayor of Manchester is set to take office from outgoing Labour Party leader Keir Starmer after a fairly turbulent few weeks for British politics. Nevertheless, he’s found the time to sit down with Manchester guitar legend Aziz Ibrahim of the Stone Roses for a candid chat about all things guitar.

The pair sit down for a chat for the Manchester Museum, where Burnham showed he can throw a few chords together.

Armed with a Gretsch Electromatic Jet, he showcased his talents by strumming an A minor-shaped barre chord, with a look of slightly pleasant surprise etched across his face.

“So you know your power chords,” Ibrahim responds, with Burnham quipping back a satisfied, “there you go.”

Burnham’s love for music has been evident throughout his career, as he has been a vocal figure in addressing the UK’s grassroots venue crisis. In 2024, he said that “the industry needs to support its own grassroots venues, rehearsal spaces and talent development systems” (via NME).

Sure, Burnham is unlikely to be joining a Van Halen covers band any time soon, but he’s certainly fared better on the instrument than former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who once went viral for playing an acoustic guitar, because he bizarrely fretted the strings behind the capo.

Still, the most impressive playing we’ve seen from a politician in recent years goes to former US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who played a Neil Young classic with a Ukrainian covers band in 2024 as he pledged his support to the nation’s war efforts.

When Eric Bell left Thin Lizzy, the group overhauled their guitar department, bringing in both Brian Robertson and Scott Gorham for a soon-to-be-legendary guitar tandem. But Robertson admits that he wasn’t all the convinced by Gorham at the start.

Gary Moore had stepped into the picture after Bell’s departure, with vocalist Phil Lynott later dramatically bolstering the band line-up with twice as much electric guitar firepower.

Robertson was first through the door, then he watched Gorham’s entrance into the band in real time.

“It was Phil’s decision because he liked his look, and he was American,” Robertson says in the new issue of Guitarist. “Brian [Downey, drums] and I didn’t think he was up to it, to be honest. He was perfectly capable of playing the major and minor chords in the right place, but not the lead.

“You’re playing a minor blues, and you’d say, ‘Take a solo,’ but he played it [in] major. That’s what jarred with Brian and I.”

There was also the small matter of Gorham’s Japanese Les Paul copy falling to pieces during his audition. Speaking previously to Guitar World about his audition, Gorham admitted it was a “chaotic” trial by fire. But he did enough to get the gig – something 25 players before him couldn’t manage.

Regardless, Robertson had his reservations.

“He was more of a rhythm player in the beginning,” he says of Gorham. “The solos he did take were meticulously worked out. They weren’t solos, as I understand solos. Even from the early days, I would just say, ‘Run the track, and I’ll just jam.’ We’d do it three or four times, and then edit them, so there’s some spontaneity.”

Gorham preferred the more exacting approach, a contrast to Robertson’s casual flair. Still, their guitar harmonies – which Robertson said he led on – became their trademark, with The Boys are Back in Town quickly becoming a staple hit when it was released in 1976.

In related news, Robertson also detailed how a guitar swap with Jeff Beck led him to bring a new instrument into the band.

He would eventually leave Lizzy behind, with Gorham partnering with Gary Moore on the 1979 LP, Black Rose: A Rock Legend. He says he knows what the band lost when he stepped down.

Robertson’s full interview features in the new issue of Guitarist. Print and digital copies can be ordered from Magazines Direct.

As a prolific songwriter, Stephen Bishop has penned songs for the likes of Art Garfunkel, Barbra Streisand, and Phil Collins.

However, Bishop is also the artist behind the 1977 soft rock hit On and On, as well as Save It for a Rainy Day, from his breakthrough album, Careless, which featured a veritable list of collaborators, including Eric Clapton.

“When my manager at the time, Bob Ellis, was at Shangri-La Studios visiting Ronnie Wood of The Rolling Stones, another of his artists, Eric happened to be there,” Bishops recalls of the collaboration in a new Guitar World.

“Bob told him, ‘You should meet this young artist I'm working with named Stephen Bishop. He's a funny guy – I think you’d like him.’”

Clapton dropped by the studio with his guitar, and, as Ellis predicted, the two hit it off immediately.

Bishop continues, “I played Eric some of the songs I was working on, and to my relief, he really liked them.”

Clapton performed the guitar solo on the single Save It for a Rainy Day, which ended up peaking at number 22 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 when it was released in December 1976.

He also provided what Bishop describes as “beautiful slide guitar work” on the fourth track on the album, Sinking in an Ocean of Tears.

“As a 16-year-old kid, I’d seen Cream perform, so having Eric playing on my debut album was pretty surreal,” he says. “He was exactly like what you’d imagine a rock star should look like; he had this effortless charisma about him.

“What means the most to me, though, is that all these years later we're still friends and still keep in touch.”

However, as important as Clapton was to Bishop’s breakthrough, no one was as critical to his success as his “lifelong friend” Art Garfunkel.

“Art’s support helped open doors that ultimately led to my record deal,” Bishop reveals. “He also sang background vocals on several songs on Careless, and I returned the favor by singing background vocals on Breakaway. That's how our friendship began, and it's lasted for more than 50 years.”

Guitar World’s interview with Stephen Bishop will be published in the coming week.

And, speaking of Clapton, his ‘Summersburst’ – used on Cream's debut album – has finally been unearthed after 60 years.

Growing up with a Broadway-singer father, whose musician friends were frequent visitors to the family home, meant a strong foundation for Eric Bibb’s eventual musical path.

The road ahead was a done deal when a school friend introduced him to influential artists such as Junior Wells, Buddy Guy, Leadbelly, Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters, and soon Eric was on course to become one of the most celebrated country blues artists around today.

Three times Grammy-nominated, Eric’s albums are a masterclass in how the country blues genre can glide smoothly over to a modern audience. With velvet vocals and enviable fingerstyle, his music has become celebrated worldwide.

Recently, his enthusiasm for seeking out new instruments to play on stage has led Eric to discover the rebirth of an old acoustic guitar brand, and an instrument he’s keen to share with us.

Tell us about your new acoustic guitar.

This is a fairly new friend that’s come into the family. It’s a Larson Brothers OM model. The Larson brothers were two Swedish brothers [Carl and August] who immigrated to the States in the late 1800s. They made great guitars – I think Stefan Grossman might have one or two of theirs, they’re hard to find these days.

But not so long ago, I think a company based in Germany acquired the rights to use the Larson Brothers logo and they [iMusicnetwork, founded by Toni Götz, together with Nikolaus ‘Klaus’ Eilken, founder of Thomas Guitars] are making really high-end guitars, and this is one of my favourite guitars to tour with. I have another model that’s all mahogany, but this is a spruce top. Just a lovely, lovely instrument.

How did you discover the Larson Brothers’ guitars?

Well, I was in Paris looking around for guitars and I spotted a Larson Brothers – the old mahogany one that I mentioned – in a shop window and the look of it just drew me in. I went in, I played it and I bought it. Then they got in contact and said, ‘Wow, we’re really pleased that you’re enchanted with our instruments.’

That first one was made by a known luthier, his name is Maurice Dupont. He makes mostly Maccaferri-type guitars, but he made that flat-top guitar and I loved it. The Larson Brothers company knows what I like. They sent me this guitar and I didn’t send it back.

Is the OM a good body size for you?

Yes, I’m not really a dreadnought type of guy; I like smaller body guitars. OM is a good size for me, or parlour guitars, you know? But this is about perfect for me.

What other instruments do you have on tour?

It’s always a challenge deciding what to bring. I have a lot of guitars. I have guitars I’ve toured with, guitars that are really precious, and I’m a little reticent about taking on the road because they go through a lot. I have the other Larson Brothers guitar, the all-mahogany one, which is tuned down a half step, so E is Eb.

I also have a thin hollowbody Takamine, another interesting guitar, which is tuned down a whole tone – this is just to accommodate my changing vocals. So, you know, songs I play in the 1st position, if I find my voice has dropped, then I need a guitar that’s a whole tone lower.

So I have one guitar in standard or drop D, I have another one half a tone down, and I have another one a whole tone down. Those three guitars more or less take care of what I need.

Do you have an amp on stage or do you go direct into the PA?

I go through a DI. In the past I’ve used – as my own kind of side monitor – a Roland Jazz Chorus amplifier. My sound guy prefers the direct signal because then he can do what he wants with it out front. It was a bit of a crutch leaning on that amplifier by my side, but I just discovered that, actually, if the monitors are proper, then I don’t really need it. It’s enough to have just two wedges in front of me and a direct DI.

What pickup do you have in the Larson Brothers OM?

I’m using the Blackstack by Fishman. I’ve had all kinds of soundhole pickups through the years, the Sunrise kind of started out as being the de rigueur option. It’s a heavy pickup and I found that even though the sound quality was great, the independent standalone power box was difficult for changing batteries.

I prefer a pickup where I don’t have to think about battery changes; you don’t want to be in the middle of a tune and it dies on you. So this is passive and it works.

I’m not really after a pure acoustic sound. Everybody’s wanting to find the pickup, either bridge pickup or soundhole pickup, that really gives you the true sound of an acoustic guitar.

I find, if I want that, I’ll just stick a great microphone in front of the guitar, you know? But in a situation where I’m with a band on stage with a drummer, that is challenging, so you want a pickup that’s going to break through all of that.

This is the best solution I have. And with a magnetic pickup there’s a kind of liquid sound that you get when it’s through the DI; it’s a little bit more fluid than just the sound you would get from a microphone, and that seems to suit my own stage sound. But in the studio I’ll often just have great microphones in front of the guitar.

Do you use any outboard effects on stage?

I used to. I used to use some chorus stuff and tremolo. But I’m really not a gear-oriented guitar player, so I had the most simple pedalboard with my Boss tuner. Maybe I’ll have an A/B switcher if I feel like I need to do something like that. But, lately, I like a really stripped-down situation where I don’t have to think about it.

And I have a great sound guy out front, so I trust him. I usually have another guitarist with me in the band and they have pedalboards to die for. I don’t know how they keep up with all this stuff, but I guess if that’s your thing, you figure out a way. But they’re like a ballet dancer, you know?

You had classical guitar lessons when you were young. How do you think that might have influenced your acoustic guitar technique?

What it told me right from the start was that the guitar really can be an orchestra, and if you use your thumb and three fingers on your right hand, you can arpeggiate and you can create all kinds of different sounds and textures.

It really helped me when I started discovering fingerpicking – you know, [Mississippi] John Hurt kind of stuff. I started out with Carcassi [Matteo Carcassi, 1792 to 1853, author of arpeggio studies still in use today], so all of that stuff sort of came together at a certain point.

When I really focused on my own style of playing, I knew I wanted to fingerpick, I knew I wanted to arpeggiate. So all of that has come into my technique. I tried fingerpicks at one point, and thumbpicks, but they’d fly off. I’d get excited and sweaty, and they’d just fly off.

But Ry Cooder once said there is really no better tool for the guitar than your right hand. There are so many ways you can approach the guitar with just your bare hands. I do have acrylic nail enhancement on three nails of my right hand because I found that, without it, I’m risking breaking a nail and then things get kind of complicated.

I discovered the hard way that if I chipped a nail in the middle of a show, it was really going to affect my playing in a negative way. And you can cover your nails with hard polish, but I find that the best thing for me is the acrylic. I’m not sure it’s really great for your health, but you sacrifice all for art.

Have you ever experimented with slide?

I love the textures that you can get and the sound, especially if you’re into country blues like I am. The slide sound is a part of the vocabulary, but I’ve never been one to dive deep into that. It’s almost like a separate universe. But I’ve always had guitarists close to me from very early days who were proficient at slide and bottleneck playing.

I’m on tour at the moment with Robbie McIntosh, who’s a master. He not only has the whole country blues vocabulary of bottleneck guitar and slide, he’s just so lyrical, he’s so fluid and melodic. There are a few players who have mastered it to that level. He’s one of them, but there are not that many.

He’s exceptional as a slide player and a player in general. I tend to be happiest when I have a really fine second guitarist in the band who has a huge understanding of blues first of all, but who is also familiar with other harmonies, jazz harmonies and that kind of thing.

Do you ever play electric guitars or hollowbody jazz instruments?

Well, I’m really not an electric guitar player. I find that the electric guitar is almost a separate species, you know? I have an old Danelectro solidbody that Hubert Sumlin signed the back of, so I love that guitar. I did a video of a song called This One Don’t and you can see that guitar. It was given to me by a wonderful bass player, Dave Bronze, as a birthday gift long ago.

But I play electric guitars like I play my acoustic guitars, I fingerpick them. I’ve never played with a plectrum, you know? I’ve never really mastered or even really been attracted to that style of playing, although I have band members who are wonderful players on electric guitar and who play with their fingers but also are masters of the pick.

I do love older jazz big-body guitars. If I had an Epiphone Emperor, that big, beautiful blonde guitar that they made in the ’30s, I’d hold on to that. But, yeah, a great acoustic guitar is the way to go for me.

• One Mississippi is out now via Repute Records.
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

She may have worked with Courtney Love playing keys in Hole, or alongside bands such as Radiohead and Depeche Mode while stationed in the studio with legendary producer Nigel Godrich, but it’s Bethia Beadman’s output as a solo artist that truly astonishes the senses.

The 11 tracks that make up new album, Kitten Feel, have a hypnotising effect. Think swampy primal energy and artful enigma, beaming into the soul like an abstract blues from a long-distant planet where the language is familiar but the message is curiously esoteric…

In other words, it’s the perfect marriage of hippie soul and spine-tingling atmospherics, and it looks set to be one of the alternative rock highlights of the year.

Sanskrit Roots

Bethia would be the first to admit her journey into guitar was more leftfield than most players.

“I got into guitar-playing through Sanskrit and mantra,” she says. “You have to go deep to find your voice without much thought. It’s like finding this place that’s so deeply buried, there’s no music.

“I don’t want to sound like a wanker, but I’m more of a mystic than a musician. I move in energy fields. When I saw Roy Harper at Glastonbury, I cried because his music is non-performative. It’s real and in the room, while also being healing.”

No Bounds

As a result of this creative background, Bethia’s approach is more natural and impulsive than a lot of her contemporaries, though artists such as Marianne Faithfull and Scott Walker helped show her the way.

“It’s like I have a sack of songs that just goes on,” she says. “I can’t necessarily control what they are. It’s like a cat bringing in a dead bird and leaving it on the mat. I try to live inside my music, it’s almost the greater reality, and getting to work with Tchad Blake [The Black Keys, Fiona Apple, Tom Waits] on the mix gave it all ultra-vision.”

Come Together

The initial sessions took place in Detroit before Bethia came back and finished recording at the Lightship 95 vessel studio moored in East London.

“The Detroit sessions were done spontaneously in five days,” she says. “We, producer Paul Simm and I, found this drummer called Adam Bradley Schreiber on Instagram. We didn’t know him, but he was a perfect fit.

“I play baritones and Adam tunes his drums down a 4th, like baritone drums. We were all about limitations and simplicity. Bass wasn’t needed because we had swampy guitars and deep drums covered in shammies.”

Baritone Bliss

One of the main guitars heard on the album is a Reverend electric baritone guitar kindly lent by Detroit thereminist/composer Via Mardot.

“It’s the perfect electric baritone,” says Bethia. “It’s so easy to play and sweet sounding. You can really hear it on the song Balcony.

“For the sessions in London, I used my Brook Tavy baritone acoustic, which was handmade in Exeter, and a Japanese Jazzmaster that I customised into a baritone. The electrics were plugged into my 1965 Gibson Explorer combo, which I love for its simplicity and tremolo circuit.”

A Simple Reason

Bethia has many reasons to be proud of this latest body of work, though it’s Balcony that tops the list in terms of personal achievements.

“That one has so many chords,” she says with a laugh. “I’m usually suspicious of songs like that. It was my least favourite initially. Generally, I prefer fewer chords, like Wicked Game by Chris Isaak.

“With fewer chords, the melody gets starved of its senses like a nursery rhyme. I like simplicity. That’s why nursery rhymes and mantras have survived so many years. They touch this collective place we all have inside of us.”

Bethia on using less gear over the years

Although she’s built up quite a sizable collection of stompboxes over the years, Bethia doesn’t feel the need to use them as much these days.

“I still have all the Boss ones I bought during my teens,” she says. “These days, I’m more about finding a good amp sound and keeping things simple. It’s mainly my Boss distortion and compression. We used a real Space Echo on this album.

“It sounds awesome and I ended up buying my own back in London, but maybe I should’ve just bought the new RE-2 pedal version because it’s supposed to be amazing and is bound to be more roadworthy!”

• Kitten Feel is out now via 5dB.
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

Bob Dylan is potentially on the hunt for yet another new guitarist after Bob Britt abruptly quit his band over the weekend.

Britt, who joined Dylan’s band back in 2019, apparently announced his surprise departure from the group in a Facebook post (as per Rolling Stone), which included an image of a plane flight and the caption, ‘Sayanora Bobby.’ And, in response to a commenter on the post asking for context, Britt replied, “I quit.”

In a later statement, Britt shed a bit more light on his sudden exit, stressing he was not fired but had decided to leave of his own accord.

“Apparently there are quite a few threads out there with people speculating about my departure from the Bob tour. I’d like to clear it up,” he writes. “I was not fired but left of my own accord for reasons I would prefer to keep private. I will miss my band mates and crew.

“I am looking forward to getting back to doing sessions (give me a call) and also finishing up Etta’s gospel record. As far as any touring goes, we will see what the future holds. Meanwhile, I have some flower beds to weed.”

Britt is the latest Bob Dylan guitarist to cut the band. His departure comes two weeks after the folk legend’s other longtime guitarist, Doug Lancio, was suddenly replaced by jazz virtuoso Julian Lage in one of the most unexpected and surprising lineup changes in quite some time.

Having already had the task of replacing Lancio, Dylan now seems to be in need of another new guitarist.

It remains to be seen what Dylan has planned going forward. It’s unclear just how permanent Lage’s appointment will be, given the solo commitments he has of his own.

According to Cult Following, session guitarist Joel Patterson was drafted for Dylan's show last night (June 29) to fill in for Britt, but, like the situation with Lage, it remains to be seen whether his appointment will be permanent.

Julian Lage declined to comment to Guitar World on his position in the band.

After years away from the stage, Frank Marino is making his grand return to the stage on August 7 for a rare appearance in Montreal’s Little Italy.

The performance marks Marino’s first live performance in years, after he announced his retirement from touring in 2021 and, subsequently, injured his hand while building pedals in 2024.

After Marino made the jump from player to pedal maker in an attempt to continue his career in music after health issues prevented him from touring, he suffered a hand injury that left him unable to play as he once had.

“I'm making all these pedals by hand, and basically, by doing the grinding, pressing, and everything that I was doing by holding stuff in my left hand, I damaged a nerve in the index finger of my left hand,” Marino said in an interview with Guitar World.

“I've been playing nonstop for 55 years,” he continued, “so suddenly, when I play my guitar, I've got to be careful about how I do it because it hurts.”

“That was on top of all the other things that were happening to me, not being able to use my left hand or my index finger on my left hand... it made it a lot harder,” he told CTV News Canada last year.

“So basically, I went to all the different doctors and hand specialists and all of that stuff, and nothing worked. They tried all these magnets, and it cost me a lot of money, and it was all really for nothing. And so, I just decided to wait and tried playing slowly and gradually. It’s all over time. My finger came back.”

A dose of patience, as well as therapy and cortisone, has enabled him to play again, starting with a private jam in Montreal with local musicians back in October.

“I’d say it’s about 80 to 90 percent back. But, you know, I can play anything that I could play before, but it hurts. So I have to play through the pain just like a hockey player,” he said.

Now, Marino is taking things a step further while paying homage to his city and mesmerizing audiences with a free 90-minute concert as part of ItalfestMTL 2026 – Montreal’s Italian-flavored festival, presented by the Caisse Populaire Desjardins Canadienne Italienne.

For more information about Marino’s concert, visit the official ItalfestMTL 2026 website.

In an exclusive Guitar World interview in 2015, Marino spoke about comparisons to Jimi Hendrix, Mahogany Rush's heyday, and his penchant for pedals – including carrying around a six-foot-by-three-foot, two-tier pedalboard with 22 stompboxes on it in the late '70s.

The critics were brutal, none more so than Guitar World’s editors, who branded Nitro’s 1989 debut, O.F.R., “dickhead music.” Michael Angelo Batio says the smackdowns stung, but he also reveals that what pissed him off the most was that he found himself agreeing with much of the criticism. “The band knew going into it that we were going to be very extreme, but we wound up going way beyond that,” he says.

Everything about Nitro was pushed beyond the max. The Los Angeles-based glam metal quartet, which also included singer Jim Gillette, drummer Bobby Rock and bassist T.J. Racer, was billed as having “the fastest, loudest, highest sound around.” And boy, did they ever. Gillette, whose ballsack-grabbing soprano seemed to extend to a range heard only by canines, reportedly shattered not one, not two, but three wine glasses at live shows.

Batio, brandishing a custom “Quad guitar” with four necks pointing outward, blitzed through songs with neutrino-like speed. (His solos were so blindingly fast, in fact, that many listeners assumed they were the result of computer manipulation.) With Nitro’s songs whooshing by at a head-spinning 200 beats per minute (perfect for cardio workouts), all the rhythm section of Rock and Racer could do was hang on for dear life.

The group’s image was as outlandish as their sound – circulation-constricting leather and Spandex, and bigger-than-big hairdos that surely boosted Aqua Net’s stock. Gillette took things to the point of parody, with a gravity-defying hairstyle that made him look like Tina Turner’s stunt double from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.

“It was all very calculated,” Batio says. “I was surprised at how divisive the record was. You loved it or you hated it with a passion. It was an odd thing, because I don’t consider it representative of who I am, or who I was at the time.”

Previously, Batio had high hopes for Holland, a Chicago-based metal band he joined in 1984. Fronted by singer Tom Holland, the group signed with Atlantic Records and recorded an album titled Little Monsters with hard rock production specialist Tom Werman.

“If you listen to that record, that’s the real me on guitar,” Batio says. “The playing is tasteful, kind of like Cheap Trick meets L.A. heavy metal. It’s got really ripping guitar sounds.”

When Little Monsters failed to chart, Holland broke up and Batio moved to Los Angeles. “Suddenly, I thought, ‘Is black really white? Is up really down?’” he says. “Fast didn’t sound fast to me anymore. High didn’t sound high. I hung out on the Strip, and I morphed into this hair metal guy. Nitro became an extreme version of it.”

According to Batio, the group’s demo – “all fast playing and high singing” – wasn’t quite extreme enough for Rhino Records President Bob Cahill. “He said, Angelo, I thought you were fast,” the guitarist says. “I was a little taken aback, and then he said, ‘I want you to overplay all the time.’ He wanted the record to be sonically abrasive.” Which it was, once the label mastered the album.

The finished product accentuated treble frequencies, rendering Batio’s fulsome sound thin and tinny. Worse yet, Racer and Rock’s bass and drum performances all but disappeared under Gillette’s shrill, multi-tracked gang vocals. “The label wanted the PMRC [Parents Music Resource Center] to ban the record, so everything was way over the top,” Batio says.

O.F.R., which stands for “Out-Fucking-Rageous,” appeared to go unnoticed by the nation’s self-appointed censors, but it reached an audience comprised of hardcore metalheads, shred-guitar enthusiasts and curiosity seekers. Boosted by the singles Freight Train and Long Way from Home, which received weekly plays on MTV’s Headbangers Ball and regional metal video shows, the album performed respectably, reaching Number 140 on the Billboard 200.

Even so, Batio and Gillette wanted more. “We just weren’t happy with the mastering of the record,” Batio says. “Jim and I even went to Bob Cahill’s house and said, ‘Look, we hate how the record sounds. We’ll take our own money to remix and master it.’ Bob looked at us and said, “Why? It’s on the charts. It’s selling!”

You wanted to be “the fastest, the loudest and the highest.” When you met Jim, did you think, “He’s the guy”?

Oh yeah. Jim’s outfit had so many metallic studs on it – the jacket weighed almost 80 pounds. It was very heavy metal. We didn’t have big hair – we had the biggest hair. We didn’t have any money, but that didn’t stop us from looking like rock stars.

Jim’s hair was the biggest of all. I remember when we drove to the photo studio to do pictures for our album, I had a hatchback car, and Jim had to sit in the front seat and push it all the way back to accommodate his hair. Even then, his hair was sticking out the car door.

How did you find Jim?

I met him at a party in Venice Beach. We had a mutual friend, a hair stylist who did people like Farrah Fawcett and all the stars. All the rockers used to hang out at her place and go to her parties. I thought Jim could fit in perfectly. He’s an interesting guy. He’s got a black belt in Gracie Jiu-Jitsu. He’s super-smart, super-street. He’s just an extreme guy. You don’t bet against Jim. And he had this voice.

Bobby Rock had already been in the Vinnie Vincent Invasion, so he had that extreme thing down already.

Oh yeah. We targeted Bobby. I don’t mean that in a stalking sense, but we used to see him on the Strip. Jim would be like, “Bobby Rock… We need Bobby Rock!” So I ended up talking to him, and he joined up.

Is it really true that Jim could shatter wine glasses with his voice?

He could. We advertised “double axes and shattered glasses” at Nitro’s debut show at Gazzarri’s. At first, we had no clue how to shatter glass. All we knew was that Ella Fitzgerald did it in a Memorex commercial, but we thought, “There must be a way.” Jim and I were on a quest.

We actually went to [California-based loudspeaker manufacturer] Renkus-Heinz, and we pumped 125 dB against a wine glass – and it still wouldn’t break! We tried everything. We got hold of the guy who did the Memorex commercial. He was like, “Who are these crazy rockers?”

But he liked us and he kept giving us clues. For example, it had to be a fluted goblet made by a German company called Schott Zwiesel, and it had to have a two percent lead content. If you had one of those goblets, it was easy.

Did have all the music written for O.F.R. before you found Jim?

The two songs that became singles, Freight Train and Long Way from Home, I had written before I met Jim. I didn’t have any words, though. I patterned Freight Train after Deep Purple’s Burn.

That’s how I came up with the riff. I had these words, “Believe in yourself, believe in yourself,” and Jim went, “Dude, that’s stupid.” In two minutes, he came up with lyrics to Freight Train. Sonically, what I did on the demo was killer. It was thick and heavy, but that wasn’t what the label wanted.

Were you already playing the four-neck guitar at this point?

No. What happened was, I had a two-neck guitar, and then Steve Vai came out with his three-neck heart guitar. My label wanted me to challenge Steve to a duel. I didn’t see the point in competitions like that.

You’d be doing the Crossroads thing in real life.

Yeah. I didn’t want to do that, but the label went, “Michael… Steve’s got three necks and you have two. You know what you need?” And I went, “Four.” They loved it. As it happened, Wayne Charvel was building all my guitars. I said to him, “Can you do this?” He said, “Sure.”

I have a good engineering mind for guitar design, so I designed the Quad. I told him how I thought it should be four separate guitars, and that was that. It was the wildest thing. There was no limit to what we were trying to do.

When the record came out, a fair amount of people thought you had sped up your guitar playing with computers.

No, no. Those songs were clocking at 200 bpm, which was nothing for me – that’s all 16th notes. There are a lot of guitarists who can play like that now. No, that was all analog tape. There were no punches.

What about Jim’s vocals?

With Nitro, we wanted the biggest background vocals since Queen. Jim could sing like that – five octaves. He was massive, and we didn’t even put reverb on him. There’s no reverb on my guitar either, except for one part of Machine Gunn Eddie. Live, we used the background vocals from our records, and we played everything to the clicks of the record.

How much touring did Nitro do for the album?

We did two- and three-month runs, but we couldn’t get on a big tour. The label gave us tour support for six months. Everybody else got paid, but Jim and I were broke. A lot of people liked us; others didn’t. There were no gray areas with Nitro. After a while, Bobby Rock got offered to play with Nelson. We couldn’t match the number they gave him. I understood. I’m still friends with him.

You guys made another album before breaking up. But you reformed for a time in 2016 with Victor Wooten on bass. How on earth did that happen?

We got Chris Adler from Lamb of God on drums. He was a fan of my solo albums. Victor, too. He’d heard songs from my solo albums, and he said, “I’m looking to get into something heavy.” We were like, “Yeah! We’ve got a supergroup.” Unfortunately, life got in the way. My mom got sick and I had to go take care of her. She ended up passing. I had already told Jim that I couldn’t focus on the band at that time.

Think you guys might ever try again?

No, no. I play in Manowar now, and I’m happy. We headline arenas – our average crowd is, like, 15,000 people. I love what I do now.

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

Simon McBride might have just sparked another footnote in the never-ending tone debate by sharing a rather novel hot take that you might not have heard before.

As Deep Purple prepares to release their second studio album with McBride, the guitarist has been fielding gear questions and has issued a red-hot take on the downside of truss rods.

McBride is the successor to Steve Morse’s decades-long tenure in the band and has brought a traditional blues approach back to their core, akin to Ritchie Blackmore’s legacy. As ever, everything goes through his trusted PRS 408 electric guitar.

“I played everything on this record with a prototype from PRS,” McBride tells Guitar World ahead of SPLAT!’s release on July 3.

“The idea is that there’s no truss rod,” he continues. “It goes back to the early days when guitars had no truss rods because I’m a firm believer that if you put a truss rod in a guitar, it sucks the tone and sustain out of it.”

Truss rods, typically made of metal or carbon fiber, run down the length of the neck of a guitar beneath the fretboard and work to reinforce the neck and counter the tension generated by the strings.

They are a necessary feature to prevent and remedy any nasty neck warps. For most, they’re a vital ingredient in guitar building. McBride disagrees.

“This guitar is like an animal,” McBride says of his PRS. “It’s hard to control because there’s so much natural sustain, and I don’t do high-output pickups.

“Acoustically, there’s such a difference without the truss rod,” he adds, alluding to the apparent increased sustain and resonance that comes with removing a chunk of metal from the guitar. “[The neck] must be the strongest piece of wood they could find because it doesn’t bend at all.”

Now, we aren’t expecting McBride to kickstart a trend of players yanking their truss rods out of their guitars – that really wouldn’t be advisable – but the thought that the truss rod actually harms a guitar’s sustain is certainly an interesting take.

Read McBride's full interview in the new issue of Guitarist, which includes a feature on the recent discovery of Eric Clapton's long-lost Summerburst. Pick up a copy over at Magazines Direct.

Laura Cox accidentally embarked on a fully fledged career after she started posting classic rock guitar covers on YouTube 18 years ago and went viral.

She’s now a bona fide touring and recording artist, with three albums under her belt. But as she herself admits, the transition from YouTube to recording her own material in a professional studio was trickier than she expected, or, in her own words, “a nightmare”.

“I was around 15 when I started playing the guitar. Then, two or three years afterwards, I was really into watching YouTubers playing covers of classic rock solos, and it was really motivating for me,” she tells Guitarist. “I thought, ‘Okay, I’m gonna do the same. I’m gonna post and maybe get some feedback.’

“A lot of the comments were really positive, really encouraging and motivating. But there was also a few criticising my looks, or almost sexual harassment. But, honestly, for me, it was the internet, it was not real life.”

Around 2014, Cox put a band together, and, thanks to her notoriety on YouTube, she managed to find a label and a booker – a move that led her to release her first studio album, Hard Blues Shot, in 2017.

“It was a nightmare,” she replies when asked about dipping her toes into the recording arena. “Because my only experience of music was playing guitar in my room in front of a webcam where I was alone, so I could re-record and re-record.

“But playing in the studio, recording an album with a band and engineers, and every second is costing me money, I was really stressed,” Cox continues. “We had a lot of technical difficulties; the gear was falling apart, and nothing was working.

“I was kind of going into depression after the first studio recording because we couldn’t see the end. Every day we were thinking, ‘Okay, we’re late on the schedule; we still have to record this and this,’ and it was never-ending.”

Thankfully, things got better over the years, and as she – and the rest of the band – gained more studio experience, she even discovered the joy of self-producing on her latest album, Trouble Coming.

“I didn’t record it this way in the studio. I recorded a lot at home, and it felt way more comfortable.”

For more from Laura Cox, plus new interviews with Jeff Tweedy and Brian Robertson, pick up the new issue of Guitarist from Magazines Direct.

Modern punks The Bobby Lees had just completed a sold-out European tour when they realized something was wrong. Crowds flocked, merchandise shifted – but when the band got home to the States and tallied the numbers, the reality was stark. “Everyone made almost no money,” says guitarist and vocalist Sam Quartin.

The Woodstock-founded foursome had self-funded their last three album releases after struggling to secure major-label support. But even for a band accustomed to doing it themselves, the situation no longer worked.

The perpetrator was clear – in an Instagram post later that year, Quartin and bandmates Kendall Wind (bass) and Macky Bowman (drums) announced an indefinite hiatus, citing streaming services' payouts as one of the biggest reasons mid-sized bands can’t sustain themselves.

“People don't want to say something because they're scared they won't get put on the playlist,” reasons Quartin. “We were like, 'Fuck it. Someone's gotta be honest!’" After the announcement she took a moment to disconnect, heading for a swim at her local river – oblivious to what was playing out online.

“I don’t have a personal Instagram account,” she says. “But my friend does. She said, ‘You should check the post, there’s a really positive response!’”

Expecting a message from a label or manager, Quartin instead found something far stranger. “There was a message from Jason Momoa, a video of him in his car saying, ‘Hey, you gotta call me. I want to help. I’m hosting SNL next week – I’ll be in New York. Maybe we can find a solution.’”

Quartin called him immediately. “He said, ‘We’ll get the record funded. How does that sound?’ He didn’t ask for anything in return. If only everyone who has the same position could just do one act of kindness for one of their favorite artists.”

The experience was surreal – while Momoa was busy promoting Aquaman, he was equally happy talking gear. “Kendall ended up giving him Zoom bass lessons when he was on set!” Quartin recounts.

If Momoa’s involvement felt like the beginning of a Hollywood ending, reality quickly intervened. The Bobby Lees found themselves confronting the same barriers they'd been railing against in the first place. Only this time, the challenges were being chronicled on Momoa’s HBO docuseries, On The Roam.

“Jason took us to Atlantic, Turnstile’s label, and they passed,” Quartin says with a droll laugh. “I wish that hadn't been filmed!”

The rejection was especially stark given the flawed discovery model of one the industry’s biggest streaming platforms and the ramifications for its algorithm towards new artists. As Momoa joked to the band, “‘If a new Nirvana or Bob Dylan emerged today, would the industry even recognize it?’” For a moment, it seemed the answer might be no.

Enter Epitaph – founded by Bad Religion guitarist Brett Gurewitz, the legendary punk imprint connected with The Bobby Lees’ first new music in years in a way others hadn’t. For Quartin, the relief was overwhelming.

“They filmed us going into Epitaph on the show, but they weren't with me after,” she recalls. When I got in the car to go back to the hotel,I just started crying.”

After years of self-funding records, scraping together tour budgets and publicly questioning whether they could continue, The Bobby Lees had finally found a home.

Momoa wasn’t the only famous supporter to emerge from the hiatus. “When we were in San Diego, Keanu Reeves came to a show,” says Quartin. “He said, ‘I'm a fan.’ I said, ‘Me too!’ It's cool when people whose work you admire appreciate what you do.”

Another unexpected ally was Flea, who Bowman knew thanks to his mom’s stint as a backing vocalist for Red Hot Chilli Peppers. “When we posted about the hiatus, Flea helped save money for our West Coast tour by putting the band up at his house – but I still haven’t met him!”

The emotional rollercoaster has inevitably bled into their latest record, New Self, specifically in the rap-rock leanings and snare snaps of the title track. Quartin admits to seeking something heavier while songwriting. “I was listening to the Beastie Boys and Rage Against the Machine. The goal was an empowering ‘don't fuck with me’ undeniable head nod.”

While longstanding guitarist Nick Casa has since amicably parted ways (“Every reason he had for leaving, I agree”), the pair’s dual-Telecaster command was still at play for the album. But Quartin was ready to push past some long-held studio habits.

“Dave Sardy [producer] brought over a few guitars. I used to be so superstitious about using mine. I bought it at the Chelsea Hotel, in Dan's Guitar Shop.” It’s a landmark of Manhattan that was once home to Patti Smith and Jimi Hendrix. “I was like, ‘Maybe it has some of their juice!’”

Wind and Bowman also picked up some fresh tricks in the interim, playing as part of Jon Spencer’s Blues Explosion. “Kendall and Macky are telepathic now,” she boasts. “A conjoined force!”

Ahead of hitting the road again this autumn, Quartin can see that while the economics that pushed The Bobby Lees to the brink haven’t changed, her perspective has. For the first time, they’re are no longer starting from underwater.

“This whole process turned the volume down on all the crap. I used to be like, ‘Why is that happening?’ But now, it's like, ‘Okay, we've said something. We've done our part. Let's use this opportunity to make the best work we can.’ We’re no longer paying attention to the bullshit.”

• New Self is out now via Epitaph Records.

The six-decade career of Dave Mason – who died on 19 April, just a few weeks off his 80th birthday – was equal parts fantastical and frustrating, but never dull.

For many, his defining work came in the late-’60s progressive-rock group Traffic, though you could also point to his serendipitous thumbprints on the albums of Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones, George Harrison, Eric Clapton and Fleetwood Mac.

Others, however, felt Mason might have achieved rather more were it not for the acrimony between band members – and particularly with Steve Winwood – which slowed Traffic down and arguably denied them the immortality enjoyed by their peers. “On one level,” Mason told The Guardian in 2024, “I could hate every one of them.”

David Thomas Mason was born on 10 May 1946, in Worcestershire, and seemed a perfect foil to Winwood when the prodigious frontman quit the Spencer Davis Group in 1967.

At first glance, it worked beautifully: the Mason-penned/sung early single, Hole In My Shoe hit UK No 2. But the rest of the line-up disliked its psych-pop leanings, and Mason was restless, too. “I realised I needed more life experiences in order to write stuff that would become timeless,” he shrugged, quitting shortly after the release of debut album Mr Fantasy (1967).

Having produced Family’s debut album, however, Mason was back for Traffic’s self-titled 1968 follow-up, on which the prolific guitarist once again threatened to steal the show with another enduring hit, Feelin’ Alright? (later covered by everyone from Joe Cocker to Paul Weller). But Mason would claim that Winwood “felt threatened”, and painted a cold picture of his sacking just months later.

“I don’t like the way you write,” he was supposedly told by his frontman. “I don’t like the way you sing. I don’t like the way you play. And we don’t want you in the band any more.”

For a time, it seemed Mason would do just fine without them. Having played the shehnai on the Stones’ classic 1968 single Street Fighting Man, he had the distinction of being one of the few guest guitarists to appear on a Hendrix track, strumming the deceptively tricky 12-string acoustic for All Along The Watchtower.

“It took me 10 or 11 takes to get the timing on the intro right,” reflected Mason, “and Jimi easily could have just done it.”

After touring with Clapton associates Delaney & Bonnie, and blowing through the line-up of Derek And The Dominos, there he was again in the studio with the scattered Beatles, contributing guest guitar to George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass album (1970) and Wings’ 1975 hit, Listen To What The Man Said.

That same decade, Mason enjoyed US platinum sales for 1977’s solo album Let It Flow. But his hit-rate settled down in the ’80s, while the star hook-ups became fewer and less fruitful (a mid-’90s tenure with Fleetwood Mac – including the Time album – was remembered by Christine McVie as “very acrimonious”).

Mason kept busy in the post-millennium, even finding time to launch his own sustainable guitar brand, RKS, alongside designer Ravi Sawhney (deemed a “fucking impressive device” by Keith Richards).

“When Dave joined me to create RKS Guitars,” Ravi said in tribute following Dave’s death, “he didn’t show up as a rock legend looking to put his name on a product. He showed up as a builder… Dave was deeply involved in every part of that process. Not as a celebrity, as a creator. That’s what made him rare. [He was] a creative force who never stopped asking what could come next.”

But in September 2024, the guitarist revealed he was undergoing treatment for a serious heart condition, while citing “ongoing health issues” for the cancellation of last year’s tour dates. Hearteningly, it was Winwood who led the tributes when news broke of his passing.

“Dave was part of Traffic during its earliest chapter, and played an important role in shaping the band’s sound and identity during that time. His songwriting, musicianship and distinctive spirit helped create music that has lasted far beyond its era, and continues to mean so much to listeners around the world. His place in that history will always be remembered, and through the music, his presence endures.”

Meanwhile, the valedictory post by Mason’s family suggested he had found fulfilment at the end.

“After cooking an amazing dinner with his wife, Winifred, he sat down to take a nap with his [pet dog] at his feet. He passed away peacefully, in his favourite chair, surrounded by the beautiful Carson Valley that he loved so much. A storybook ending. On his own terms. Which is how he lived his life right up to the end.”

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

“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.

Jeff Tweedy has named his Epiphone Casino as his greatest guitar bargain, but reveals that things once got heated with its former owner.

The Wilco man has a fairly extensive collection of electric and acoustic guitars, so he was hard-pressed when recently asked by Guitarist to name his most cost-worthy purchase. So, he picked out a small cluster, with family ties and trash-bound gems both included.

“I have to credit my mom with this one,” he says of the first two guitars. “When she got it in her head that I was really serious about playing guitar, she’d look for them at auctions and garage sales. She went to a farmer’s auction, and she got a ’56 Gretsch Duo Jet for 70 bucks.”

That alone is quite a steal, but Tweedy’s mom wasn’t done there. She had an eye for a bargain.

“Then she got a ’50s prototype ES-350 with three pickups, which was probably one of the first guitars with three P-90s,” he notes. “She got that for 120 bucks.”

Both sales represent a lot of value and playability for a combined $190, and echo the support his mother had for his burgeoning passion for guitar. Yet, his greatest find was all his own work, even if the guitar’s new life left its former owner rather peeved.

“I mean, a lot of the guitars I own would sound like fantastic stories now, but they didn’t feel cheap at the time,” Tweedy laughs. “I bought the Epiphone Casino for 100 bucks, and I use it all the time.

“The neck had snapped off, and the guy didn’t think it was going to be fixable,” he develops. Tweedy clearly had a different outlook on the situation. So he struck up a deal.

“I told him I’d buy it and I did,” he notes. “And then, when we came back years later to St Louis, and he came to our show, he saw me playing it, and he was mad at me. He said I took advantage of him. I was like, ‘You were gonna throw it away…’” It goes to show that even the most devastated-looking guitars aren’t unsalvageable.

Elsewhere, Tweedy’s bandmate, Nels Cline, has reflected on a life-changing conversation he once had with Tweedy, as Wilco continues to trek across the US.

Tweedy’s full interview can be found in the new issue of Guitarist. Issue 539 is available to order from Magazines Direct.