Josh Klinghoffer has undergone a musical rebirth since he was replaced by the returning John Frusciante in the Red Hot Chili Peppers in 2019. He started his own solo project under the moniker Pluralone, became one of super-producer Andrew Watt’s go-to guitarists and picked up stints with Jane’s Addiction and Pearl Jam.

With time to reflect on his dismissal from the Chili Peppers, Klinghoffer has offered his thoughts on his long tenure with the band in a new interview with Guitar World – which also means giving his take on the band’s (spoken or unspoken) decision to bury the music from his era and omit it entirely from their setlists.

“All of that makes sense to me… but I guess it’s a little strange for people that connected to some of the other stuff. It’s almost like it disappears and doesn’t have a chance to live,” he says.

“I guess it’s particular to the way John views the band when he’s not in it, and it makes sense to me. They have enough music that they don’t need to look to some of the other records.

“But for anyone who connected with those albums, like One Hot Minute [with Dave Navarro], or the two [I’m With You and The Getaway] that I made with them, yeah… I can only imagine that it’s a little weird for me to be completely banished from the catalog and the live performance.”

Klinghoffer links this decision to the band’s revolving door of guitarists, as well as Frusciante’s ubiquitous presence as the definitive Chili Peppers guitar player.

“He’s kind of the preeminent guitar player, you know? He’s the one who made the work with them where they experienced their global game,” Klinghoffer adds.

“They have their thing and their formula. I guess it’s so much more definitive to the mass amount of Chili Pepper fans, you know, that’s just what the Chili Peppers are.”

He goes on to clarify that, despite all this, he genuinely likes the records he made during his tenure, but can’t help feeling that there’s “a slight disrespect to the records that aren’t the John records.”

“Once John’s back in the picture, it’s like the other records don’t exist,” he continues. “So, you know, that’s the only weird thing to me. Because those records were important at the time, you know? They were important enough to go and play them around the world for people.”

In 2023, Klinghoffer went as far as to comment that the music the band was creating before he was fired was “way cooler” than what was eventually released – 2022’s Unlimited Love and Return of the Dream Canteen.

“I would love for it to have been finished,” he told 5 Notas of the unreleased music. “I never want to sound negative about anyone doing music, but I honestly feel like I was shocked when I heard their new record.”

Guitar World’s full interview with Josh Klinghoffer will be published in the coming weeks.

His upcoming album under the Pluralone moniker, A Drop in the Ocean, will be coming out on June 12 via Org Music.

In 2024, Klinghoffer was involved in an vehicular accident that resulted in the death of 47-year-old pedestrian Israel Sanchez. Klinghoffer took a plea deal after being sued and charged with wrongful death and misdemeanor vehicular manslaughter without gross negligence.

At just 32, Matthieu Lucas has managed to build something extraordinary.

The entrepreneur, guitarist, and music enthusiast has painstakingly chipped away at building the emporium that is Matt’s Guitar Shop from the ground up, attracting A-list clients from all four corners of the globe.

The journey was far from plain sailing. However, judging by the caliber of artist guitars gracing every inch of the walls in this slice of musical paradise – tucked away on an unassuming street in Paris – it has well and truly paid off.

“It was not easy because you just show up at a store, and you look like a baby, and somehow, you start talking big dollars to very reputable dealers or collectors, and some of them were like, ‘How is this possible… this guy is selling drugs somewhere,’” he quips, as he recalls the early days of his ambitious venture.

However, it’s perhaps Lucas’ marketing prowess and ethos – that even the most prestigious of guitars are meant to be played on stage – that has transformed him into the go-to guy for artist guitars, with players such as Marcus King, Craig Ross, Billie Joe Armstrong, Myles Kennedy, and Yungblud all getting in on the action.

“I was very inspired by banks and huge associations buying Stradivarius [violins] very early on and lending them to musicians on tour playing classical music,” Lucas says.

“Guitars need to be shared with the world. That's my theory. That's why we lend ours on stage all the time, and that's always going to raise the value. They're really artifacts of a very specific period when the guitar revolutionized everything.”

What inspired you to start Matt’s Guitar Shop in the first place?

It’s been a little bit more than 10 years, actually. Time flies! [However], it all started when I was 15 years old.

I was not really interested in music or guitar in general. I was just playing video games with a friend of mine. His father showed up in the room and he said, “Guys, you need to listen to AC/DC.” And then I said, "Okay, [I’ll] give this guy five minutes with his old band and then I'm going to be finished with him.”

And we listened, and Angus Young was really the guy who penetrated my brain, and my passion for guitar started there. Six months later, I was seeing AC/DC in a stadium and buying an SG copy, and that started it all. And then I just wanted to buy more and more guitars because I started to discover bands.

Step by step, I went to Paris guitar stores. I was hanging out in a store called Guitar Store in Paris, and the guy was nice to me, and he let me discover the world of guitar sales – buying, selling… the daily life of a guitar shop.

I was already buying and selling privately. So it [Matt’s Guitar Shop] started in an apartment in Paris – a very small apartment. Three years, maybe four years later, we had the opportunity to get the place here, and that was it.

What were some of the initial challenges, especially as a young businessman?

They really put you in boxes initially, and that was not easy, but step by step, we met people that trusted me, and I knew who I wanted to work with over time.

I don’t come from a musical family myself. So I was mainly listening to those guys in my headphones when I was younger. I was listening to Lenny [Kravitz] and Craig [Ross] quite a lot because I have deep respect for that duo and what they represent.

One day, I show up at Rudy's Music [in New York], and Rudy just traded me one of Craig’s main touring guitars, which was his 1964 ES-345.

I didn't have the money back then, so I said, ‘Give me three months. I'm going to buy and sell in France, and I'm going to come back and pick it up.’ And my friend, who was with me at this time, told me, ‘Are you crazy? This guitar is way too much money.’

It was a time when social media was different. I just sent a message to Craig on Facebook, and two weeks passed by, and I was like, ‘Okay, this guy is busy. He's never going to reach me.’ And, suddenly, my phone is popping off, and Craig Ross just answered me, and he was so kind. [He was like,] this guy is 22 or 23 years old, he just made a huge purchase for himself, compared to his capacity.

So when I bought this guitar, we met at L'Olympia in Paris, and we got that connection going. So, for me, just meeting him was great because Craig really proves that you can’t buy class. I met Lenny later, but with Craig, it's been like 10 years and I still have that connection with him.

Which artists’ guitars command the most demand and attention?

It's quite mixed. We have John Frusciante's 1961 [ES-]335 that he played on stage. We have, of course, Paul Kossoff's 1955 “Black Beauty”, which was also used by Eric Clapton during Cream because they used to trade guitars quite a lot.

I’ve had this guitar for almost 10 years now, and I don't regret buying it. Another interesting one is Steve Lukather’s 1951 Esquire. We [also] have AC/DC's Cliff Williams’ bass – we have number three, which was toured all around the world for four years with AC/DC.

How has your vision for the showroom evolved, compared to when you first opened the doors?

When I started this business with artists’ guitars, I had two kinds of people: the people who believed in it and the people who were laughing at me.

Now, I was very proud when I was assisting at the [Jim Irsay] auction in New York City because I think that the guitar changed the world, and that the guitar will still be listened to in 1,000 years, and all those guys will be gone, and what's left is the music and their instrument. [When you buy that guitar,] you are the owner of their legacy.

So we feel kind of amazed at the shop every day because I really believed in that market when it was not fancy.

What made the Jim Irsay auction different?

Everybody was waiting for that auction. That was, after all, the greatest collection [that ever existed] of artists’ guitars.

People are starting to understand that there are good aspects to buying a guitar – whether it's for the investment or whether you're a guitar player – but if you choose wisely, those guitars will never go down [in price] because there is always somebody richer than you who wants to have that guitar.

Why have the Jim Irsay guitars leapt in value in such a short time span?

It depends on the auction house you're dealing with, the place you're buying the guitar from, and the marketing around that.

Marketing is key when you want to sell a pricey instrument like that, and I think Christie’s did a great job. They went everywhere, and when you're doing that, you just attract the best buyers because they don't have any doubt about what they're buying.

Everything went through the roof because those buyers were brought together by Christie’s in one room. They could have been telephone bidders. They could be room bidders, or internet bidders, but they were all together in one room for this collection, which was exceptional.

I see that with the shop. I don't have a single customer older than 60, and usually my customers are between 25 and 50, so it's a new generation who just discovered the world of guitars, and those people are working hard to get those guitars.

When you put them in one room, I can guarantee you that you will see new world records. If Jimmy Page's “Number One” was in that room that day, that would be between 20 and 30 million [dollars] easy.

But who are these people? What are their backgrounds?

I can give you an example of one person I know: Bobby Tseitli in Chicago. Bobby is a good friend of mine – those guys are really amazing, and they're putting together a collection called Family Guitars.

I knew they wanted [Jerry Garcia’s] “Tiger” so much. I gave him a huge hug when he bought that guitar, and I can guarantee you that this guy probably cried like a baby in his room sleeping next to the guitar that night, and that everybody in the room was feeling amazed because he was bidding with all his heart. The night after, Derek [Trucks] played it on stage. I mean, what's better than that?

I think we should be thankful for those guys who believe in the market and make it dynamic because they're not only buying guitars; they are making the shows more attractive. Everybody in the room will remember the day they saw Jerry Garcia's guitar in the hands of Derek Trucks. [In terms of the buyers’ backgrounds], I never ask too much unless they talk about themselves.

For sure, at Christie’s, we saw hedge fund guys, tech guys, cryptocurrency guys… so it's new money, in a good way, not in a bad way. From what I can tell, we have more and more young people who are just working hard, and they could be in tech, they could be in sports, whatever… we have so many kinds of buyers, and that's the beauty of this job.

Do you think we're going to see David Gilmour’s Strat one on stage anytime soon?

I know by name the guy who bought it. I don't know him personally. If he reads the interview, [I would say] I think you should put that guitar on stage. But I hope all those guitars [from that auction] are going to be on stage soon.

How do most of these clients find you?

Social media helps. You put the guitars on stage, and people are always filming. The audience recognizes the guitar, and I get texts or messages on Instagram.

So, I think it's a win-win-win because the crowd is winning because they get to see a very special guitar that day. Marketing-wise it's great for the shop, and it's also great for the artist because when this is going to the press, the tour is gonna get some marketing.

When Marcus King was touring in Paris 10 years ago, he was playing in clubs [in front of] 20 people, and we were there already, and now he's more famous, of course. And he still loves to play that Paul Kosoff guitar. Every time he’s in Paris, he plays that guitar on stage, and it's one of his favorite guitars to play.

What trends are you noticing in the types of guitars that command the highest prices in today's market?

When I started, nobody really wanted a guitar from Green Day, for example. Now, I’m getting asked more often.

I think it's a generation thing – Green Day are getting bigger because the older they get, the bigger their legacy. When the band is getting older, their fans are also getting older, and they have more capacity to buy the items of their dreams. When artists pass away, sometimes you get a bit emotional. So, of course, people are missing them so much that they want their guitars.

But I would be curious to have one of those big “dinosaur” guitars on stage [at an auction]. After the success of the Gibson Keith Richards signature, [I would be curious to have] one of Keith's guitars going on stage, the black [ES-]355, the “Micawber” Tele... or Jimmy Page's guitars or Brian May's guitar or Paul McCartney's bass – those legendary guitars that are still used by them.

I think we would be surprised by the price they fetch because records are made to be broken and are made to be set higher every time. And again, it wouldn't surprise me in the near future if we see a guitar [sell for] between $20 and $30-40 million.

Do you see any risks or misconceptions for new buyers entering the vintage guitar market, especially those treating it as an investment?

I would suggest that you check the provenance of the instruments. You have to choose wisely. If you're advised wisely and if you decide to buy the guitar at the right price, that's great.

To give you an example, when I bought Steve Jones' guitar, I knew there were rumors of Steve selling the original one 14 times to different people.

So we checked the mother-of-pearl inlays. We checked all the dings and marks. We scanned the pictures of the guitar today, and we matched those mother-of-pearl inlays. When [there are] three matches, then you know.

Beyond the monetary value, what makes a guitar collectible?

The more provenance you have and the more history you have with the guitar [the better]. For example, if Keith Richards just played one guitar one time on the sofa two minutes backstage and signed it, that doesn't really make sense to me. But what matters to me is if he played it on stage. Why did he choose that particular one for his personal collection? Was there a reason sound-wise?

I don't agree with comments on the internet that say that, ‘Oh well, David Gilmour modified the Black Strat like 700 times over time…’ [If you want a pristine guitar,] then just buy a vintage guitar. Don't even look at an artist guitar.

I understand that it doesn’t make sense for some people to buy a $15 million guitar, but I think the more modifications it has, the more personal the instrument becomes – and that’s what makes its value even higher.

There's been a lot of criticism over the amounts spent at the Jim Irsay auction. What would you say to people who feel that collectible guitar prices have lost touch with reality?

I think we are living in a world where records are made to be broken.

I would get [that comment] from the perspective of somebody earning a medium salary. That's understandable, because for some people, it's just hard to feed their children, and then you see on the news that somebody just bought David Gilmour's guitar for $15 million.

But I would say it has been like this forever, in sports, the arts… let's not even talk about the football world. I think the world is discovering guitars with these auctions, with these pieces of history, [and] with the new players as well. The rich will always be richer. We can't control that. If they want the David Gilmour Strat for $50 million one day, that's it.

What's been your proudest moment of seeing one of your guitars being played on stage?

I lent Myles Kennedy Jeff Buckley's guitar on stage in Paris a few years ago. That was the final show I assisted before Covid, but that was a moment because it was at L'Olympia [in Paris].

It was full of symbolism. We were preparing for that day for four months. Myles was the perfect guy to sing Hallelujah on stage with the very guitar that Jeff recorded the song with. I still get chills talking about it.

[Another standout moment was when] I saw Craig Ross playing [Jeff Beck’s] Yardburst in Paris.

If I told my young self, [who was] listening to Lenny Kravitz and Craig Ross, that one day I would have Jeff Beck's guitar and then Craig would play it on tour, especially in Paris, my hometown, I wouldn't believe it. It was really a full-circle moment.

• Learn more about Matt's Guitar Shop.

John Frusciante was just 18 when he was offered the guitar slot in the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

By that time, he had spent years honing his skills on the instrument, immersing himself in the playing of Hendrix, Beck and Page; Eddie Van Halen and Randy Rhoads; Steve Howe, Steve Hackett and Steve Vai; Frank Zappa and Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew.

He listened to the Germs and the B-52’s and Siouxsie and the Banshees, to Sly Stone and James Brown and Parliament, to funk and punk and rock and prog and shred and new wave and goth.

“I went through many phases,” Frusciante says. “Every year I was kind of a different person when I was growing up playing guitar, because as I kept getting better, my tastes kept changing toward something that was a little more difficult to play.”

But for all the music he loved – and he loved a lot of music – Frusciante loved the Red Hot Chili Peppers the most. “They were my favorite band,” he tells Guitar World one afternoon over Zoom. Living in L.A. at the time, he says, “I saw them as often as I could. You went to one of their shows, and there was this magic energy that was happening. It was like being in a dream.”

It would stand to reason, then, that being tapped to become a full-fledged participant in that magic energy would be, well, a guitar player’s dream. When Frusciante officially became a Pepper in 1988, he brought with him, as might be expected, the unbridled energy and enthusiasm of a kid who had just won the rock guitar lottery.

Another thing he brought? Sheer chops, with a high level of technical facility on his instrument (by this time, he says, he could peel off most any Frank Zappa instrumental, as well as all the solos on Alcatrazz’s 1985 metal platter, Disturbing the Peace, which were performed by a then up-and-coming six-stringer named Steve Vai) that enabled the predominantly punk-funk-based act to venture into previously unexplored musical realms.

But still, something was missing. “The first year or so that I was in the band was definitely a struggle,” Frusciante says.

He pauses, then restarts. “I’ve got something to say that I think could probably be good for guitar players. I think that at the beginning of my time in the band, I had my mind too much on trying to impress people, and I wasn’t trusting myself enough.

“I was feeling all these things – ‘I want to be unique,’ ‘I want to show off,’ ‘I want to stand out’ – and everything I was doing felt forced. I didn’t feel free and I didn’t feel like I was saying anything that I wanted to say. I didn’t feel like I was going deep in myself.”

Frusciante’s first album with the Chili Peppers, 1989’s Mother’s Milk, added a hookier, harder-rocking element to their sound, with bigger, thicker riffs and faster, flashier leads. The album was their most successful to date and became their first gold-certified seller.

But, Frusciante says, “by the time we were ending that tour, I got to such a point of unhappiness that I said, ‘I’m just going to throw away all these things I’m trying to do. I’m going to stop trying to grab people’s attention. I’m going to take my ego out of it entirely.’”

Instead, he continues, “I decided I was just going to use my guitar to try to support the other people in my band. So I simplified what I was doing. And at the same time, I was also putting a hundred times the amount of personal expression and soul into it than I had before.”

This change, according to Frusciante, “was the step that, all of a sudden, made people respond strongly to what I was doing. I wasn’t trying to be a Red Hot Chili Pepper in terms of what I thought other people thought that was – I just started being myself. And that honest version of myself is what you’ve had ever since.”

John Frusciante’s time in (and out of) the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and the very high highs and very low lows that have gone along with it, has been well documented. Through it all, he says, there’s a bond that has been forged between the band members that can never be broken.

“We have a special relationship because we went from being a club band to an arena band together,” he says.

“When I was first in the band, we had some bummer shows. Not all the time, but we had shows where nobody showed up, or shows where we were feeling like the audience wasn’t as enthused as they had been before I joined.

“So we had to build our energy together to make something new out of the band. And we pulled that out of each other. That’s a connection we share that nobody else can share with us, because it’s only the four of us that had that experience.”

It’s an experience, Frusciante also acknowledges, that is very different from the one that the original version of the band – Flea, Kiedis, guitarist Hillel Slovak and drummer Jack Irons – shared.

“Those guys knew each other in junior high school and high school, and they went from being kind of bummy guys sleeping on people’s floors to realizing, ‘Wow, when we step onstage, we have this energy that makes a whole club of people dance,’ ” Frusciante says. “For me, nothing we’ve ever done touches that lineup in terms of the energy I felt at their shows.”

Frusciante’s reverence for the original Red Hot Chili Peppers lineup runs deep, and it is sincere. So much so that, a week after our interview, he checks back in to further articulate how it felt to join his “favorite band in the world.”

“I just wanted to keep playing in the style they had created with Jack and Hillel,” he says. “I thought I would play like Hillel, but flashier. After about nine months I realized the flashiness wasn’t impressing anyone, and there wasn’t really a place for it in the band chemistry, so for a while after that I just relied on my energy. Those first nine months, I had the impression that a lot of their audience wasn’t into me, but by the time we released Mother’s Milk, I felt pretty accepted.”

Regarding the particular influence of Slovak, who tragically died of a heroin overdose in 1988 at just 26 years old, Frusciante says, “I’m very lucky to have replaced such a great stylist. The challenge of attempting to appeal to his audience was character-building, and even when my own style appeared, I was still using his style as the basis for what I did.

“And luckily for me, there was some strange confluence of souls, where the more I stayed within the parameters laid out by Hillel, the more I sounded like myself. I wanted to make the band sound good, and I stopped caring about how I might come across. I became content to back up the other guys in the band and, unexpectedly, that made me stand out more, rather than less.

“To this day I see Hillel’s style as the center of my own, where the band is concerned. He was a team player, and he added color and meaning to his bandmates’ contributions, and that’s what I try to do.”

Interestingly, for all of Frusciante’s youthful devotion to the Chili Peppers, he also says that “getting into them was actually a very gradual thing.” He was first turned on to the band when he was 14, when his guitar teacher at the time auditioned for a spot in the then-fledgling act.

“This was at the time when Hillel and Jack had quit [both eventually rejoined the group], and so they were looking for a new guitarist and drummer,” Frusciante says. “They got Cliff Martinez from Captain Beefheart’s band to play drums, and for guitar it was between Jack Sherman and my teacher. He didn’t get the job, but I knew about the band from him telling me that he was auditioning.”

Not long after that, a friend gave Frusciante a compilation of Chili Peppers music. Frusciante liked what he heard, but, he says, “it wasn’t until I saw them live that they became my favorite band. This was when the original band, with Jack and Hillel, had gotten back together, and I’d never seen anything like it.

“The energy was incredible. I jumped around the entire show, and the whole thing was just this psychedelic blur. Everyone was really happy, and it didn’t feel like the band and the audience were separate. So if you ask what I loved about them, that’s it – that magic energy.”

That magic energy is still alive in the Red Hot Chili Peppers today. But it requires tending to. “I think I loved the band with the Hillel lineup so much that, at the beginning of my time with them, all I could think about was that energy, and trying to match that energy,” Frusciante says. “And I thought that meant being as fiery a guitar player as possible, on every level.”

What it actually meant, as Frusciante returns to, was finding that “honest version” of himself as a guitar player. “Once I stopped forcing it,” he says, “that’s when it started to feel like, ‘Wow, we really do have that same magic energy as the band had with Hillel.’”

Frusciante pauses. “Like, we’re not trying to have it, you know? We just have it.”

This is an abridged version of a feature that first appeared in Guitar World’s June 2022 issue.

It's been four years since Red Hot Chili Peppers released their 12th and 13th albums, Unlimited Love and Return of the Dream Canteen, respectively. And with Flea set to release his solo debut, Honora, in March, questions regarding the Chili Peppers' next outing are naturally starting to arise.

“We’ve been writing music together, recording at [guitarist] John Frusciante’s house, and the music feels great,” the band's bassist reveals in a new interview with MOJO, while admitting that the two have been on a quest to unearth “magic” in the studio.

“Ultimately, once we start playing, it’s about… just catching a magic groove and doing it good.”

As for the difference between crafting a solo album and a Chili Peppers record, Flea explains, “It’s like being in a marriage with four people that’s always moving and changing, all these challenges and all the things that you have to deal with.

“Egos are inescapable and my ego is as big and as fragile as anybody’s. But it’s always, no matter what, this intrinsic part of who I am and it’s alive and it’s beautiful and you never know what shape it’s going to take next. I really feel like that right now.”

In a recent interview with Rick Beato, Flea recounted how he ended up getting his cherished – and now-iconic – 1961 Fender Jazz Bass from a seller on social media.

Sometimes these interviews are matter of fact; the player remembers the reason why they chose a particular electric guitar (often because it looked cool) for their Guitar World cover shoot, and there’s some fun anecdotes.

For Dave Navarro, looking back on his ’96 GW cover, it opened up some big memories, of the time he was in the running for GNR, his Black Beauty that he gave to John Frusciante, and also, it was a big deal. It was his first cover…

How exactly did you acquire this guitar?

I was a Les Paul player from day one. It’s actually not very well known, but in the early days of Jane’s Addiction, in the ’80s, I was a Les Paul player. I had a Black Beauty, and that’s what’s on the first live record [1987’s Jane’s Addiction]. I was always playing Les Pauls, but I was on tour once and one of them broke. The neck snapped off.

That’s how I ended up in the hands of Ibanez. At that point, we were so young; the only company that would grant me an endorsement was Ibanez. They turned out to be amazing. I loved them and I played them for many, many years, right up until 1991.

What led you to stray from Ibanez and pick up this Les Paul?

In terms of this guitar, sometime after 1991, I got a call to audition for Guns N’ Roses. And I think you could probably figure out that it was before Gilby [Clarke] joined, so it was right after Use Your Illusion came out. I was looking at my arsenal of guitars, thinking, “What would be right to show up to a rehearsal with?” Obviously, a Les Paul came to mind.

So you bought this guitar with Guns N’ Roses in mind?

I actually bought that guitar to go and play with Guns N’ Roses, which is wild. Now that I’m thinking about it, I ended up buying the Les Paul just to go over and jam out with the band, which actually never ended up happening. So the guitar just ended up staying in a case, because everything else I was doing from that point forward was with PRS, who I’d moved over to during Lollapalooza.

You’d moved to PRS and even used some Strats after you’d joined the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who you were with in 1996, when this GW cover shoot took place. Why did you use the Les Paul?

Years after the GN’R thing, I knew that guitar was kind of leaning up against the wall. I guess the Guitar World people came to the house to do the shoot, and if you walked around my house, there’s, like, 12 guitars all over the place – and they’re all different makes and models.

For some reason, I picked up that guitar and grabbed it for the shoot. I don’t even know why – and, I think, in hindsight, I was probably contractually supposed to be holding a PRS. [Laughs] I was endorsed by them, so I don’t know why I picked up the Les Paul.

What happened to this guitar after your GW cover shoot?

In a final twist of fate, John Frusciante was in detox at a hospital. He called me and said, “I’m sitting in a hospital and I don’t have a guitar. Can you loan me one?” I was like, “I’ve got this Les Paul sitting here if you want to play that.”

I was still in the Chili Peppers at the time, and he was getting clean. I was like, “I’ll come down to the hospital and bring this to you.” So I ended up giving him that Les Paul, which is… you know, the layers here are kind of bizarre. And I hadn’t thought about it until now.

Did you end up getting the guitar back from John, or did he keep it?

I never heard from John. He apparently sold the guitar once he got out of rehab. And that was that – I never saw that guitar again. That was somewhere in the ’90s.

Have you spoken to John about that guitar since?

Many years later, I was out of the Chili Peppers, he was back in, and I was with Jane’s Addiction; I think we were recording Strays [2003]. I got a call from John, and I hadn’t talked to him in years. I say, “What’s up, man?” He goes, “I remember years ago, when I was in the hospital, you brought me this Les Paul, which was really nice of you. Thank you so much for that.”

He went, “I got out of detox and I sold it. I’m really sorry. I was wondering if I could come visit you.” And I hadn’t talked to him since that day, to be honest, but he came up to my house, and he had a guitar with him. He sat down, opened the case, and it was a Black Beauty.

He was like, “I just wanted to apologize for selling your guitar. I know it’s not the same guitar, but I know you had a Black Beauty in Jane’s Addiction on the original record, and [it] got broken, and you don’t have it anymore, so I got you this.” It was a really nice, kind of an “amends” action on his part. We sat for a couple of hours and talked about music, our histories and how they’ve been intertwined.

Wow. Is it safe to assume you never toured or recorded with the Les Paul on the cover?

It literally had never been played live and wasn’t used to record anything when I had it. But there’s a history to it – and whoever has it now, you know, I wish I could buy it back.

It seems as if the guitar has a special place in your heart.

When it comes down to it, the guitar isn’t very significant in my career, but the tendrils of significance in terms of interpersonal connections are vast. So, in some ways, that’s a special photo. It was the first time I’d been on the cover of GW, so to have that documented reminds me of all the years I’d been in between bands and struggling with drugs…

It’s significant in a nostalgic sense. But I don’t think anybody, including the current owner, has any idea what this guitar is or where it came from. I’m sure [they] bought it off the wall of a pawn shop and have no idea it passed through my or John’s hands.

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

Dave Navarro was Guitar World's cover star for the March 1996 issue – and the guitar he brandished for the occasion, an early ’90s Les Paul, has one hell of a story behind it.

The electric guitar was originally bought for a Guns ’N’ Roses audition – which never transpired – and by the time the Guitar World shoot came about, Navarro had already jumped ship to Ibanez, PRS, and Fender Strats.

“Years after the GN’R thing, I knew that guitar was kind of leaning up against the wall,” Navarro tells Guitar World.

“I guess the Guitar World people came to the house to do the shoot, and if you walked around my house, there’s, like, 12 guitars all over the place – and they’re all different makes and models.

“For some reason, I picked up that guitar and grabbed it for the shoot. I think, in hindsight, I was probably contractually supposed to be holding a PRS!” he adds with a laugh.

The Les Paul's story doesn't end there, however. In a final twist of fate, John Frusciante also, somehow, got involved.

Navarro remembers, “He was in detox at a hospital. He called me and said, ‘I’m sitting in a hospital and I don’t have a guitar. Can you loan me one?’

“I was like, ‘I’ve got this Les Paul sitting here if you want to play that.’ I was still in the Chili Peppers at the time, and he was getting clean. I was like, ‘I’ll come down to the hospital and bring this to you.’ So I ended up giving him that Les Paul, which is… you know, the layers here are kind of bizarre.”

Turns out, once the guitar was with Frusciante, it was as good as gone, as Navarro puts it: “He apparently sold the guitar once he got out of rehab. And that was that – I never saw that guitar again. That was somewhere in the Nineties.”

Frusciante never forgot the gesture, though, and years later made it up to Navarro.

“I got a call from John, and I hadn’t talked to him in years,” Navarro continues. “I say, 'What’s up, man?' He goes, 'I remember years ago, when I was in the hospital, you brought me this Les Paul, which was really nice of you. Thank you so much for that.'

“He went, 'I got out of detox and I sold it. I’m really sorry. I was wondering if I could come visit you.' And I hadn’t talked to him since that day, to be honest, but he came up to my house, and he had a guitar with him.

“He sat down, opened the case, and it was a Black Beauty. He was like, 'I just wanted to apologize for selling your guitar. I know it’s not the same guitar, but I know you had a Black Beauty in Jane’s Addiction on the original record, and [it] got broken, and you don’t have it anymore, so I got you this.'”

For more from Navarro, plus new interviews with Eric Bell and Jim Root, pick up issue 598 of Guitar World from Magazines Direct.

The late 80s saw a brief explosion of funk-rock. While the Red Hot Chili Peppers are clearly the Beatles of that period of funk-rock in hindsight, the funk-rock invasion saw them initially competing with the likes of Jane’s Addiction, Faith No More, Primus, Living Colour, and 24-7 Spyz.

From that fertile scene came guitarists who combined Hendrix’s chord-melody approach with P-Funk syncopation and Zeppelin-level riffage. RHCP founder Hillel Slovak created the template, but the seven guitarists who later enjoyed stints in the band all created their own delicate balance of funk grooves and rock aggression.

Here’s a rundown of all eight players, and the other places you might find them.

Hillel Slovak – (1982–1983, 1985–1988)

The Chili Peppers’ founding guitarist left an indelible mark on rock history despite recording only two full albums with the band.

Slovak co-wrote five songs on the band’s 1984 self-titled debut, but left before its recording to focus on his other band, What Is This?, who had signed to MCA Records. After an EP and an album, Slovak asked to return to RHCP, prompting vocalist Anthony Kiedis to tell Flea, “I'd give my firstborn son to get him back in the band.”

Slovak’s influence loomed the largest on a young John Frusciante. He was best known for playing a rosewood-board Strat into a cranked Marshall (a 100 watt Superbass), for a style that was equal parts Hendrix and funk, and for his signature use of fuzz and wah – all elements that Frusciante would make his own trademarks.

Frusciante didn’t even play funk before studying Slovak’s style.

“I learned everything I needed to know about how to sound good with Flea by studying Hillel's playing, and I just took it sideways from there,” he told Guitar Player in 1997.

Slovak’s tragic death by heroin overdose in 1988, aged just 26, cast a long shadow over the band’s history. Multiple RHCP songs have been written in his honor, and when the band were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2012, Slovak was included.

“He's a beautiful person that picked up a guitar in the 1970s and didn't make it out of the 1980s, and he is getting honored for his beauty,” Kiedis said at the time.

Jack Sherman – (1983–1985)

When Hillel Slovak ditched the Chilis in 1983, Jack Sherman filled the position. He would go on to feature on the band’s self-titled debut album.

Bassist Flea later wrote on social media that Sherman had “played the most wicked guitar part on our song Mommy Where’s Daddy, a thing that influenced the way I heard rhythm forever.”

Although he was fired before the recording of Freaky Styley (1985), seven of the songs he co-wrote still made the album.

Post-Chilis, Sherman recorded with Bob Dylan, Parliament/Funkadelic founder George Clinton, and ex-Undertones frontman Feargal Sharkey. He died of a heart attack in 2020, aged 64.

DeWayne “Blackbyrd” McKnight – (1988)

After Slovak’s death, the Chili Peppers needed an emergency replacement, a role that would be filled by Parliament/Funkadelic guitarist DeWayne “Blackbyrd” McKnight. It further solidified the band’s authentic funk credentials, with P-Funk leader George Clinton having produced Freaky Styley.

McKnight didn’t exactly slot into the band smoothly, however, and they fired him three dates into the next tour. The guitarist was reportedly so unhappy that he threatened to burn down Anthony Kiedis’ house.

McKnight later revealed to Guitar World that he had been asked to fill-in for Slovak multiple times before his death, but each time Slovak came back in time to do the show.

“You might even say that they had gotten me in there to coax Hillel back; at least that's how I saw it. But I don't know how it went, and I don't know what they felt because I never talked about that with them.”

Outside of RHCP and P-Funk, McKnight also has credits with jazz legends Herbie Hancock and Miles Davis, as well as with the fusion band, The Headhunters.

John Frusciante – (1988–1992, 1998–2009, 2019–present)

Despite Hillel Slovak’s immense influence on the band, John Frusciante is for most the defining RHCP guitarist. He has twice left the band, and each time his return has brought a huge boost to the band’s creative and commercial fortunes.

His 1998 reunion with the band produced the 15-million-selling Californication, while his 2022 comeback with the band, Unlimited Love, shot to #1 in the US and ten other countries, a feat that the band had not achieved since before his departure.

But it was 1991's Blood Sugar Sex Magik, the band’s commercial breakthrough, that really secured Frusciante’s place in the guitar pantheon. Frusciante may have been following Slovak’s blueprint, but he made it convincingly his own.

On Under the Bridge, Frusciante appropriated Hendrix’s combined rhythm-and-lead style more convincingly than anyone since Jimi himself, while thumpers like Give It Away and Suck My Kiss had punk levels of aggression without the need for heavily distorted tones. While many bands in the funk-rock explosion sacrificed the funk element to sound heavier, Frusciante didn’t compromise on either.

The success was too much for Frusciante, who became a recluse and developed a heroin addiction. He managed a pair of twisted and experimental solo albums before reuniting with the band to power them to even greater success. He also found time for a side project, Ataxia, with Fugazi bassist Joe Lally and future RHCP guitarist Josh Klinghoffer.

The 2000s were a prolific decade for Frusciante, who released eight solo albums and juggled multiple side projects, as well as releasing By the Way (2002) and Stadium Arcadium (2006) with the Chili Peppers.

Frusciante left the band in 2009 and spent a decade making mainly electronic music, before giving the fans what they wanted in 2019. Whether he will ever leave again remains to be seen, but at this point anyone else who plays with the Red Hot Chili Peppers is just filling in for John Frusciante.

Reflecting on re-joining the band a second time in a 2022 interview with Guitar World, Frusciante said, “There’s an appreciation of the chemistry that I can’t say I really had towards the end of being in the band last time – an appreciation of what we’re capable of. When you get so used to something, you sometimes tend to take things for granted.

“I’d had lots of time making music where I do whatever I want. And that was great. And I continue to do that. But it seemed like a really good step for me as a human being to try to play in a band again. Most of all, I just have a lot of fun playing with those guys.”

Arik Marshall – (1992–1993)

When Frusciante quit abruptly in the middle of the Blood Sugar Sex Magik tour, the band needed a safe pair of hands. Arik Marshall provided those hands, having previously recorded with Tone Loc, Sting, and Etta James.

The band later praised him for learning the set quickly and never letting them down on stage. When it came time to write a follow-up album, however, Marshall quickly got the boot. The band felt he was not the right writer for the job.

Fortunately, Marshall’s stint with the band coincided with their golden-era guest appearance on The Simpsons in the episode Krusty Gets Cancelled, guaranteeing him cool points forever.

Marshall later played with Macy Gray, appearing with her on Saturday Night Live and in the Toby Maguire Spider-Man (2002). Since then he’s been largely quiet, although he was the guitarist in a wedding scene in The Hangover.

Jesse Tobias – (1993)

Anthony Kiedis felt Jesse Tobias was the guitarist to help the band follow up Blood Sugar Sex Magik, and he was hired in 1993 to help write the next album. Unfortunately, the chemistry with the rhythm section just wasn’t there, and Tobias was dumped months later.

It all ended well, though: Tobias joined Alanis Morisette’s band for the Jagged Little Pill tour, and on that jaunt met his wife, Angie Hart, who was singing in support band Frente. The band they formed together, Splendid, which made a cameo appearance on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In 2004, Tobias joined Morrissey’s band, where he is still a member.

Dave Navarro – (1993–1998)

After the arduous audition process for Frusciante’s replacement was over, Dave Navarro finally made himself available in 1993. The band have claimed that Jesse Tobias would have been fired anyway, but Navarro’s interest certainly sealed his fate. The former Jane’s Addiction guitarist made the next Chili Peppers lineup into something of a funk-rock supergroup. The resulting album: 1995's One Hot Minute.

At the time, One Hot Minute was considered a disappointing follow-up to Blood Sugar Sex Magik, but the album certainly has its fans. It went double platinum in the US and sold a million copies in Europe, which is hardly shabby. Pea has become an enduring live favorite, and single Aeroplane was added back to the band’s live set in 2016 because it was one of the favorites of Frusciante's second successor, Josh Klinghoffer.

Outside of the Chilis and Jane’s Addiction, Navarro has had an impressive session career, often getting the call when pop stars want a dose of rock: Alanis Morisette’s You Oughta Know, Christina Aguilera’s Fighter, and live versions of Janet Jackson’s Black Cat have all benefitted from Navarro’s weighty soloing.

In 2001, he released his solo album, Trust No One, and in 2020, along with Jane’s Addiction bassist Chris Chaney and Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins, Navarro began the side project NHC (Navarro Hawkins Chaney).

Josh Klinghoffer – (2007, 2009–2019)

Pre-Chilis, Josh Klinghoffer had carved out a career playing with bands like The Bicycle Thief and Golden Shoulders, as well as being a session musician for Gnarls Barkley.

When Frusciante again stepped down in 2009, Klinghoffer – with his experience in the Frusciante side project Ataxia – was a natural choice. At the time Frusciante commented in an interview with Alternative Nation, “In many respects he's the person who is closest to me, and with whom I can speak honestly about everything. His opinion is very important to me and I value it a lot.”

On the Stadium Arcadium tour, Klinghoffer had played additional guitar and keyboards for the final legs. He offered the band a smooth transition.

In Klinghoffer's decade with the band, they released a pair of albums: I’m With You (2011) and The Getaway (2016). While neither of these reached the commercial or creative heights of the band’s work with Frusciante, they were generally well-received.

Klinghoffer struggled to avoid playing too much like Frusciante, while the band were wary of moving too far from their core sound. That tension arguably kept the band’s creativity on a leash.

Klinghoffer said as much in a 2022 interview with Guitar World, saying his decade with the band was “enormously stifling creatively.”

“They’re an established band with an established sound, and I learned over time how little deviating from that was possible,” he explained.

“When I first joined, I wouldn’t use certain chords when I was writing if they sounded like something John would play. Or if it sounded like a choice they would have made on their last album, I purposely went the other way.”

“As much as I thought they were up for experimentation,” he continued, “they generally stayed in their own lane.”

Post-Chili Peppers, Klinghoffer has released three albums under his pseudonym Pluralone. Since 2021, he has been an additional touring musician for Pearl Jam.

He filled in for Dave Navarro on Jane’s Addiction’s 2023 tour as Navarro struggled with Long Covid. Klinghoffer has also recorded with Iggy Pop and Morrissey, although the latter recordings have not been released. Along with RHCP drummer Chad Smith, Klinghoffer played on Who Believes in Angels? (2025), a joint album by Elton John and Brandi Carlisle.

Typically found shirtless on stage left in leather trousers with a Les Paul hanging under his waist, Enslaved guitarist Arve Isdal could very well be the Norwegian answer to Slash.

And much like the cat in the hat, he’s a musician in high demand, having collaborated on all kinds of releases over the years thanks to the bluesy charm at the epicenter of his barbwire riffing and tasteful shredding.

The Bergen native has recorded 10 albums with progressive metal titans Enslaved, and another seven with hard rockers Audrey Horne (yes, named after the Twin Peaks character), in the process tallying up six Spellemannprisen awards – which anyone in Norway will tell you is their equivalent to a Grammy.

We meet at legendary Bergen concert hall Grieghallen. It’s home to the city’s Philharmonic Orchestra, and for one weekend every year, the Beyond The Gates Festival, when its quaint surroundings are invaded by heavy metal worshippers from around the world.

Next, we stroll to Earshot Studio, which the guitarist co-runs with one-time Enslaved keyboardist Herbrand Larsen. As well as recording their own bands here, the creative hub is also where they’ve worked with Immortal, Gorgoroth, Taake and more.

It’s an Aladdin’s cave of gear, packed with Peavey, Vox and Marshall amps, stacks of pedals and racks of guitars. Naturally there are some mid-’90s Les Paul Customs in the building – the guitar of choice for the man affectionately nicknamed Ice Dale.

“I remember having to decide between a Custom and an Ibanez seven-string,” he says. “I’ve always felt like more of a rock ’n’ roll guy, so it made sense to go with Gibson. I love Slash, Page, Wylde and Rhoads, who are all Les Paul players. Ace Frehley got me started on the whole guitar thing.

“I’ve never regretted it. That 1994 Custom was my main guitar for 20 years. But it got fucked up – I don’t dare take it out anymore, which is sad. My main Custom now is from 1996, fitted with Seymour Duncan Alnico II Pros, like what Slash uses.”

Some of the instruments here are not what you’d expect to find, including some Rivolta offsets and Fender Custom Shop showpieces. The Rivolta connection was made when Isdal was on the hunt for an affordable baritone.

“I looked at reviews of their higher-end models, which are still not that expensive at around $1,000,” he says, handing over one of his Mondata Classicos in Cats Eye Burst for closer inspection. “I got one, then another. They play well and sound different to Gibsons. They’re a great company; I’ll probably end up buying more.”

Those Fender Custom Shop guitars are pretty different to what you use live.

“I’ve got three: one Tele and two Strats, including a Dual-Mag II Journeyman Relic from 2020. People say you start buying more Strats as you get older – I guess that’s true. My first Fender was a Mexican Strat I bought in the States. I started writing on that, which made me want to upgrade.

“I tried a Standard in a shop and then got told to check out the custom ones. I never thought I’d spend $5000 on a guitar – but I tried one and went, ‘Oh fuck!’ It’s funny how you play different on certain instruments. What comes out on a Strat is different to a Les Paul. That’s interesting to me.”

What’s your touring rig at the moment?

“I’ve stuck with the Peavey 6505+ for a while. I like how they sound and the versatility when you turn the gain down. Ivar Bjørnson from Enslaved also has one. We used Kempers for a while, but now we use the Quad Cortex. Thomas Tofthagen, who plays guitar with me in Audrey Horne, has always used Marshalls. We figured a blend would work better than two Marshalls with Les Pauls.

“In that band my set-up is simple: a tuner, a delay and the Xotic EP Booster for solos. I used to run a Tube Screamer but for some reason it didn’t boost enough on a Peavey, even though it did with Marshalls.”

Not many people know you played with Paul Di'Anno. What was it like playing those Iron Maiden classics with the original frontman?

“It was a fun experience. Before I joined Enslaved, there was a festival that was similar to what we have now with Beyond The Gates. For the second year they booked Paul and told me I was playing for him! He had bands in different countries to make touring affordable.

“The show was packed – and it was the first time I played with leather pants and no shirt! Paul said we were the best band he’d ever had and booked us for a tour. Later on, we recorded a DVD in Poland [The Beast In The East].”

How did it all end?

“He booked another tour, but it felt like he was on his way down. He was a nice guy but pretty crazy. He started talking shit about Iron Maiden while playing their songs, which made us feel uncomfortable.

“But we had a great time playing Running Free and Wrathchild. That’s how I met Enslaved – they saw me after kicking out their old guitarist, and asked if I could help until they found a replacement.”

You played on the last Immortal album, which you also produced. You’ve played in Gorgoroth, Abbath and God Seed. It seems like you’re the go-to guitar hero in Norway.

“Maybe! At least in the Bergen scene, which has always been collaborative. People help each other out, playing in different bands. As well as Enslaved, Ivar had been in Borknagar and even did stuff with Satyricon.”

You formed a supergroup called Temple of the Black Moon with Dani Filth, Rob Caggiano and John Tempesta. What happened?

“We released a demo ages ago, but that’s about it. King Ov Hell started the band and Joey Jordison was involved early on. Eventually Dani came in, because Rob had worked with him. They came to Bergen and we hung out.

“Then Tempesta recorded drums for the album in LA. When we got a management and record deal, it got complicated. There were contracts about obligations, making it a priority, but I couldn’t leave Enslaved. It became a problem for Rob when he joined Volbeat. We were about to record guitars, then it all fell apart.”

Ground has one of your most classic Enslaved solos. It almost sounds like Gary Moore in places.

“I like my solos to have a good starting point and blend well into the next part. I’m not a shredder looking to show every skill in 20 seconds. With Ground, I played through a few times and then edited something together.

“I sent it back and everyone said, ‘Fuck yeah!’ Some leads can be more difficult. I don’t think anyone has mentioned Gary Moore before – people usually say it reminds them of David Gilmour. I love both.”

The Fusion of Sense and Earth solo, on the other hand, is pretty intense.

“It’s flashy, but it fits the song’s aggression. I wanted to bring energy. There’s always some melody in my solos, even when they’re fast. That track is atmospheric and dark, so I went for a harmonic minor feel.”

Which solo are you most of proud, then?

“I really like Neogenesis from the Isa album. That one presented more of a challenge because the solo section is a few minutes long, plus there’s an outro solo. I played a bunch of different ideas, from Beck and Gilmour stuff to Slashy things.

“If there’s one lead that combines all of me, it’s that one. I come from more of a pentatonic background, to be honest. I don’t know if many extreme metal guitar players throw much blues into the mix.”

You’ve gone on record admitting how much you love John Frusciante – something extreme metal musicians don’t tend to say!

“I listened to Blood Sugar Sex Magik and Mother’s Milk religiously to practice my rhythms. When John came back for Californication, I loved what he did because it sounded pure and simple. Not many people could pull that off – playing a couple of notes as your leads.

“Just listen to what he did on the title track. It’s simple, but it works. John Frusciante can be amazingly soulful and atmospheric at the same time. I almost started crying when I first saw him play live. When I got involved in extreme music, people would say ‘Don’t mention RHCP,’ which felt weird!”

From Jeff Beck to your prog heroes, you clearly wear your influences with pride.

“There’s Blow By Blow and Wired, but I also love what Jeff did with other artists, like on Jon Bon Jovi’s Blaze of Glory. He played some crazy parts on Roger Waters’ Amused to Death. He was the only one who could do stuff like that. It’s not easy to copy.

“When I got serious on guitar I discovered King Crimson, Yes and Genesis. Sometimes I might use fourth and fifth intervals like Steve Howe. Robert Fripp is rhythmically interesting. I particularly love the Discipline album. It’s obvious Adam Jones took a lot of inspiration there; you can hear it in Tool. I hope to see the tour with Vai soon!”

• Enslaved have a handful of European festival dates lined up this year.

Richard Z. Kruspe has a thirst for fire. You can see it coming from every corner of the stage when he’s performing in Rammstein, and depending on how close you are to the front, you can probably feel it, too. You can even hear it in his riffs, which often sound like they were born inside a blast furnace, where the rhythmic clangs of machinery orchestrate the production of the toughest metal on earth.

Pick any song out of the band’s sizeable discography – from Tier, Du Riechst So Gut, Asche Zu Asche and Engel to Links 2 3 4, Rammlied, Hilf Mir and Ich Tu Dir Weh – and it’s easy to see how he’s turned the sounds of a working factory into some of the biggest industrial metal anthems of the modern age.

And just like any blacksmith or steelmaker, certain tools are required to complete the task at hand. Earlier this year, he announced the latest addition to his signature guitar line, the RZK-III, arriving in both Japanese ESP Custom Shop and Korean factory-made LTD forms.

While the first model was more of a Strat/SG hybrid and its follow-up borrowed heavily from Les Paul’s singlecut design, for this latest version he’s settled on ESP’s Phoenix shape. So what made him want to explore the world of offsets?

“Back in 2021, I made a video for the song Freeze My Mind from my Emigrate project,” he says, speaking to us from his home in Berlin. “I wanted a different kind of instrument. I was looking for a 70s vibe in terms of the body and Stefan Kühn from [European music distributor] Sounds Service suggested trying a Phoenix.”

He got on so well with the guitar that it planted the seed for his next design, which comes with his signature Fishman Fluence pickups – the neck humbucker replaced by a Sustainiac in the ESP version – a three-piece maple neck-thru and alder wings in an Olympic White finish. It might look retro and classic, but rest assured, in his hands it will become an invincible weapon of hellish war.

“During the shoot I noticed the guitar seemed to have a lot of testosterone!” he laughs. “It wanted to be played hard, in a good way. I found that very interesting. Different guitars will bring different things out of you. There’s a synergy between the instrument and the player.

“It’s like kissing two different people: a kiss is a kiss, but each one is not the same. The same goes for guitars. That Phoenix gave me this very manly feeling and made me start thinking about building something new for the RZK range.”

This latest signature is notable for being your first without a Floyd Rose…

“In the beginning, I used to love playing guitars with a Floyd Rose. It wasn’t even because of the Floyd Rose, it was because of the sound. Those guitars had a faster attack than ones with a stoptail piece or string-thru body.

“This time I said, ‘I want to do a try out,’ because it can be hard building prototypes with people in Japan. It can take a while. The stoptail won, though we ended up having to recess the bridge into the body to make it more comfortable for me to play.”

Fair enough. Does this one shoot fire, though?

“Well, you can try – it’s a free country still, I guess!”

The killswitch is interesting, because you said you had wired it the German way. What exactly does that mean?

“Every culture has a different rhythm. The English language is based on the in-between words. The German language is based on the ones, and that is reflected in music, language and beyond.

“The American way is with the sound on and the killswitch kills the sound. The German way is the opposite. You have no sound at all; the guitar has been silenced by a toggle, and when you push the button you hear the sound.

“It brings a different rhythm, which is good because I can choose to sustain the sound on the one rather than the in-between. I guess my one shouldn’t be called a killswitch because it doesn’t kill anything – it does the opposite and switches you on!”

You’ve been downsizing your collection over the years. What kind of guitars might we finding kicking around in the house or in the vaults?

“There is no collection – or, at least, I’m trying to minimize what’s left of it. Here’s a funny story: There was a big announcement from the Fender Custom Shop about a replica of John Frusciante’s 1962 Strat. He’s one of my favorite players, so of course I would love to have his guitar.

“I called a good friend at Thomann, asking if he could get me one. The answer was no, because it was a limited edition of however many [Masterbuilt models]. But in the end asked around and found one. I was like ‘So how much?’ and the answer was something like €28,000. In the end I said, ‘You know what, buddy? Thank you so much – but no thanks!’”

You weren’t comfortable spending that much?

“It’s not that I couldn’t afford the guitar. It was more that I would be collecting guitars like paintings. Spending that kind of money on a guitar is ridiculous; it doesn’t do anything for me. When you grab a guitar, it doesn’t matter how fuckin’ expensive it is, there needs to be synergy – something special needs to happen.

“You need to feel comfortable and it needs to speak to you. That can happen with a guitar that costs €500. Spending €28,000 doesn’t mean the guitar will have that special connection. I’ve distanced myself from all that. If I have a guitar, I just want to play it. Something that expensive might scare you into not touching it.”

Which ones did you end up keeping, then?

“All the ones I have a special relationship with. They are mostly ESP because those are the guitars I’ve used since the ‘90s. I have an old ‘70s Stratocaster which I got from a friend in the East, but that’s about it. I have a Godin acoustic, which is a great nylon guitar, though it does look a little weird.”

It’s interesting to hear you mention John Frusciante – Rammstein and Red Hot Chili Peppers are musically worlds apart.

“It turns out Chad Smith is a big fan of Rammstein. He came to Berlin and visited our rehearsal room. I had the pleasure of jamming with him in there and I was like, ‘Wow!’ But it’s true: music-wise, Chili Peppers and Rammstein are very different. I can still appreciate music that is unique and guitar players who have a special touch.”

So what are your favorite things about John Frusciante’s playing?

“I really love his simplicity. He can get so much out of three notes and make it sound more impressive than other people playing 300. Maybe it’s because I’m not a fast player myself, so I’m more likely to appreciate that approach.

“Even though his sound would change record to record, he had this belief in simplicity and purity. He knows how to give each note enough space to react and touch people, rather than playing as many as he can and making people go ‘What?!’”

You’ve always described Malcolm Young as one of your biggest influences.

“I had the privilege of watching him from the stage. Every time I play live, I fuck up at least once or twice. But Malcolm didn’t – he was so switched on. The simplicity of AC/DC’s rock ’n’ roll is undeniable, and it still moves people to this day. It speaks to people in a very simple way. You don’t a lot of explanation; it goes right to your fucking heart.

“I appreciate people who have their own sound. I always loved Jim Martin from Faith No More. He had a very specific sound from the Marshalls he used, and you can hear that on albums like The Real Thing. He wasn’t the fastest player, but he had this unique style and sound that I always appreciated.”

You’ve written a lot of thunderous riffs over the years. Which one are you most proud of?

“I honestly don’t know. But I do remember the first time I played the Rammstein riff. It was actually when I was in a band called Orgasm Death Gimmick. It’s a very simple idea that still gives me goosebumps every time I play it. It’s one of my oldest riffs but a very specific idea that created the concept of Rammstein.

“Our riffs are quite simple. These days I see so many people widdling away and shredding. But in general, I think a guitar player should focus more on rhythm than soloing. All the players I loved were great rhythm players, even if some of them could solo too. The picking hand is the most important thing to me.”

What are the trademarks of a classic Rammstein riff?

“To create a Rammstein riff, you have to think simple but also think huge. There needs to be a lot of space. And finally... you need a lot of luck!”

So what would you say is the greatest riff of all-time?

“Whole Lotta Love. I mean, come on! It just doesn’t get better than that. That’s one thing I wish I had written.”

You and Paul Landers are one of the most dynamic forces in metal. How do you make each other sound better?

“It works best when he leaves the sound to me! No, I love Paul, but we are very different, like day and night. The polite thing to say is we let each other play to our strengths, in whatever positions that might be. We are not like Malcolm and Angus. We like different things – Paul is a SansAmp guy; I’m more into analog.

“I used to drive people crazy with my live rig in the early days. I wanted the same sound I had in the studio, so I bought all the preamps, mics, tents, iso-cabs. There was a whole truck just for my guitar equipment! After a while, I thought, ‘Fuck it, let’s try that Kemper thing!’ and life became so much easier.”

Like you say, it helps when two sounds come together as one.

“Exactly. We create one big sound together. That way we don’t have to argue over who is playing what. One goes left, the other goes right, and it’s the same information with our own unique tones. Very occasionally we’ll play different parts or in different octaves, but mostly we’re doing the same thing together.

“It can be a struggle, to be honest. It’s not easy having another guitarist with their own opinion about music. It takes a lot of communication and listening. Sometimes you need to put your ego to one side and let the other person lead. It’s a compromise – but sometimes those compromises will lead to good things.”

Speaking of good things, what’s next for Rammstein?

“There’s an old saying that I would like to repeat: if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans! So there you go.”

Behringer has forged a reputation for its ability to make affordable versions of high-end and sought-after stompboxes, so when it announced it was making a Boss CE-1 clone in 2022, it caused great excitement. Now, at long last, the Chorus Symphony is finally here.

The very first iteration of a chorus pedal, the Boss CE-1 can be heard all over the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ catalog, and is famously John Fruciante’s favorite chorus stompbox.

Its essence has now been captured and repackaged as the Behringer Chorus Symphony. Its makers talking up the return of “an icon of an era” and it arrives with a tidy $79 price tag.

Boss launched the celebrated CE-1 in 1976, and it made waves with its BBD shimmer and sizable stereo sounds. It was sadly discontinued long ago, with Frusciante – who has used it throughout his career – Rush’s Alex Lifeson and Andy Summers among its most famous admirers.

Few would have expected a nearly three-year wait for its release, but fortunately the Chorus Symphony is here at last and it's eager to charm its way onto pedalboards.

Behringer is urging guitarists to “strike a chord and let it shimmer”, with the pedal’s all-analog BBD circuit serving “a rich warm sound that helped shape many hits”.

It’s said to be suitable for “any instrument”, and comes bottled with the “thick, syrupy and multidimensional sound” of a Roland Jazz Chorus amplifier alongside those much craved CE-1 tones.

The employment of a bucket brigade circuit is crucial for that, with Behringer eager to follow the CE-1’s recipe as closely as possible.

Housed in a full metal enclosure with vintage visuals, the chorus' Speed and Depth controls have been streamlined into one dial. A High/Low switch, which sits beside a Level control for adding “crunch and drive” to the signal, “can add lot of body to your sound or push the preamp – also lifted from the Roland – into overdrive territory.”

A second footswitch is present to activate the pedal’s vibrato mode, which gets controls for Depth and Rate. There’s also a dip switch inside the pedal for switching between true bypass and buffered modes.

It’s a fairly comprehensive suite of effects and tones, helping the pedal stand out for its versatility as much as its vintage charm – and its $79 price tag is hard to ignore.

“The Behringer Chorus Symphony is a pillar in the monument of modulation, and now, with a bit of Behringer magic, it's more accessible than ever before,” the firm says. “It's a pedal that's touched every corner of music history, it's too prolific to avoid.”

Head to Behringer for more info.

The release follows Behringer’s other budget revivals of some other bygone classics, including its $65 Fuzz Bender, which clones a fuzz adored by Eric Clapton. The firm recently hit back at its critics, saying “No other company delivers as many innovative and affordable products as we do”.

Red Hot Chili Peppers’ former guitar tech Dave Lee has revealed that Eddie Van Halen’s tech once helped John Frusciante source an elusive vintage wah pedal – but the electric guitar god wasn’t particularly impressed with his gear choice.

Lee joined the RHCP’s wider circle of behind-the-scenes pros during Dave Navarro’s short stint in the band, having originally been recruited by the Jane’s Addiction man. Four years later, though, Lee was helping Frusciante – who rejoined the band in 1998 – to assemble his Californication pedalboard.

“It was a relatively small pedalboard for John to begin with,” Lee tells Boss. Among its humble inclusions was an original Ibanez WH10 wah pedal borrowed from SIR (Studio Instrument Rentals).

“John liked it so much that we took it with us when we left the studio. He wouldn’t use anything else,” Lee expands. However, Froosh’s reliance on the pedal would eventually prove to be a bit of sticking point as the shows rolled on.

Lee continues: “At the time, I didn’t realize how fragile they were. They kept breaking because they’re made of plastic. I thought I could just keep buying more, but they became increasingly difficult to find.”

Not one to be defeated, Lee turned to his Rolodex of contacts to get hold of another example of the revered-but-feebly-built wah – and Van Halen’s own guitar tech answered the call.

“Eddie Van Halen’s tech, Matt Bruck, was a genius at locating hard-to-find gear,” Lee says. “He helped us get John a WH10 and a Marshall Major [amp head]. I was at John’s house when Matt called me and said, ‘I’ve found you a WH10. I’m at Eddie’s house. You can come on over and pick it up if you like.’

“So, I drive over to the Eddie Van Halen residence, and when I pull up outside, Ed is standing there with the WH10 wah in his hand, just kind of looking at it. He goes, ‘Why does John Frusciante want a piece of crap like this?’

“I laughed and said, ‘Yep. You’re right. It is made of plastic, and they break all the time. That’s why we need this one. We only have one left,’” Lee relays. “He looked at me very seriously and said, ‘Listen, man. You need to tell John this is the only one left. Because when I’m using a pedal, and I think it’s the only one I’ve got, I’m a lot more careful with it.’

“That was some good guitar tech advice from Eddie Van Halen. John thought that was hilarious.”

Frusciante would leave RHCP for a second time in 2009, with Lee saying “the writing was on the wall” long before that moment. 10 years later, Froosh asked Lee to fix up some of his neglected Stratocasters – a move that hinted he was about to return to the band yet again.

Frusciante was recently bestowed with his first-ever Fender signature guitar, coming in at an eye-watering $20K.

Total Guitar’s July 2006 issue featured none other than John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers on the cover, with a line of text promising discussion of meditation, drugs, Hendrix and some chat about the band’s then-latest album, Stadium Arcadium.

As the interview went on, John waxed lyrical about his thoughts on learning music theory. Turns out he had more to say on the subject post-interview.

So he wrote TG a letter. And, rather than abridge it for you, here it is in full. Thanks again for your wise words, John!

John Frusciante on music theory and creativity

“Do as thou wilt shall be whole of the law.”

I am sitting here listening to The Beatles and I want to say a couple of things regarding my comments on the question of whether or not to learn theory.

If you don’t know theory, and yet when a chord progression is played low on the neck you can play a melody in keeping with the chords halfway up the neck without being lost, you are doing well. In this case, there is no pressing need to learn theory because you can make music with another person, understanding as you do the numerical relationships of music.

Though you may think of them as shapes, the relationship is a numerical one as numbers are a human’s way of measuring distance. So theory shows a person how to be far away in terms of frequency (how high or low the notes are) but close in terms of feeling and connectivity.

In the article [Phil Ascott’s interview with John, issue 150] I irresponsibly generalized that the reason people don’t learn theory is because they are lazy. There is another, better reason to not learn it. If you have such a good flow of creativity going and are making music that fills you and those who hear it with joy, or if in your heart you believe you are well on your way to doing that, learning theory could slow you down as your brain would have to learn to function in a different way.

I firmly believe it would help such a person eventually (as it helped Bach, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Frank Zappa, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, etc), but until a person can use this knowledge quickly and effortlessly without having to think about it, thinking theoretically will be a distraction.

Therefore, I encourage people to learn it when they’re young or when they have no creative demands on them. Theory can deepen anybody’s expression (even the hypothetical people I mentioned who already understand basic ‘numerical relationships’), but it doesn’t happen overnight.

And in the meantime, a creative person may think they have lost something, but once they can access their knowledge effortlessly they will be more free and will have more colours to choose from.

I must also comment on one of Joe Satriani’s (much respect!) reasons to learn theory, from an otherwise fine lesson on this subject, where basically the student is asked “Can you play like Stevie Ray Vaughan?”, thereby supposedly proving the need to learn theory. I postulate that none of these geniuses, who made great music without theory, knew they were geniuses when they were first learning.

If someone feels they have the time, patience and brainpower to form their own conception of musical relationship and to figure it all out in their own way, then they should. I have learned as much from the styles of musicians who don’t know theory as I have from musicians who do.

Many of them just found a unique style that resulted in beautiful music. Many of them don’t even understand the relationships I speak of too well and have to fumble around for 10 minutes before they play anything good, but when they do it’s something incredible.

But, by the same token, let it be remembered that some people, like Hendrix, were just too poor to take lessons and would have if they had had the means. Hendrix was quoted as saying he would like to quit the music business for six months and go to music school.

My own musical growth was compromised by not having enough money to pay the fee of the teacher I wanted to take from. But some of us have the desire to learn and the will to gain knowledge by whatever means necessary. Magazines like Total Guitar taught me immensely.

In fact, I don’t know what I would have done without them. Life gives you what you put into it, and if you have the will to learn, practice and make music, it doesn’t matter if theory is part of the equation or not (but! I recommend it).

Love is the law, love under will,

John Frusciante

Top-tier guitar tech Dave Lee has rubbed shoulders with some bona fide rock and pop A-listers. His most well-known gig, though, is undoubtedly his long-standing role as John Frusciante’s guitar tech during his early Red Hot Chili Peppers days.

So, owing to the fact he was in Froosh’s inner circle, it might come as a surprise that the esteemed tech didn’t immediately suspect the famed guitarist was considering rejoining the Chili Peppers in 2019 – even after he was summoned to set up Frusciante’s neglected Fender electric guitars.

“Right before he returned to the Chili Peppers again in 2019, John called me up out of the blue,” Lee tells Boss. “I was in my garage when the phone rang, and ‘John Frusciante’ appeared on the screen. I hadn’t talked to him in years.

“I answered, and he said, ‘Hi Dave. It’s John.’ I paused for a second, and he goes, ‘Frusciante.’ It was the craziest thing. He said, ‘I haven’t played my Strats in years. I’ve been messing around with them lately, and I think they’re broken. They just don’t feel right. I’ve had them on a stand in my living room, and the sun gets on them. I think that might have ruined them.’

“So, I asked him, ‘Do you want me to come over and look at them?’ He goes, ‘Would you do that?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll come by tomorrow,’ and he goes, ‘That’d be great!’”

However, even after this call, it didn’t immediately cross Lee’s mind that Frusciante was seriously considering reuniting with Anthony Kiedis, Flea and Chad Smith.

“It didn’t occur to me,” he admits. “There’s a place I go to called Eric’s Guitar Shop, where I’ll take instruments for major repairs or maybe something I’m baffled about.

“At least, I thought it best to take some of John’s main Chili Peppers Strats to Eric’s for a second opinion: the Sunburst ’62 and ’55, the Olympic White ’64, and the Fiesta Red ’61. I also took the ‘60s Telecaster Custom.

“When Eric saw them, he looked at me and goes, ‘John’s going back to the Chili Peppers.’ I said, ‘No way is he ever going back to the Chili Peppers. I just spent two hours with him, and he’s the happiest I’ve ever seen him.’ But Eric goes, ‘I bet you he is.’ I guess he was right!”

And while Frusciante did eventually ask Lee to rejoin his team, the in-demand guitar tech had to – regretfully – turn it down.

“I got a text from John. He wrote: ‘I know that you probably don’t want the job, but I’m just letting you know that it’s available to you if you want it.’”

He concludes, “Maroon 5 had so much work planned, so I texted him back saying, ‘John, I’ve committed to a bunch of stuff that I have to do. But I’ll gladly help you in any way I can to get stuff sorted out.’ It felt so weird having to turn that down!”

In recent John Frusciante news, the highly-respected guitarist's first-ever Fender signature guitar was recently unveiled – and it’s a $20k Custom Shop replica of his iconic 1962 Stratocaster.

Fender has painstakingly replicated John Frusciante’s legendary 1962 Stratocaster for its latest Limited Edition Masterbuilt Custom Shop signature guitar drop.

There have been plenty of iconic Strats across the decades – Gilmour’s Black Strat, Eric Clapton’s “Blackie”, and Rory Gallagher’s own 1961 model, to name just a few – and Froosh’s own heavy relic’d sunburst model is comfortably up there with the lot.

Perhaps the main electric guitar from his entire collection, the ’62 has been used extensively throughout his Red Hot Chili Peppers stints, and was responsible for tracking – and bringing to the stage – a huge assortment of the band’s biggest hits.

A foundational aspect of both Frusciante’s heralded guitar tone and the wider RHCP sound, the 1962 model has become deeply synonymous with its influential owner – and now, at long last, it’s been reproduced by Fender.

You may recall that rumors of a Frusciante signature Strat began circulating in May last year, after Frusciante was spotted playing a replica of his original model.

More than a year later, a hugely anticipated signature version of the Strat – which marks Frusciante’s first-ever signature Fender – has finally dropped, but this isn’t your regular US-made signature, nor is it a more affordable Ensenada-made spin-off.

This is very much a top-of-the-line Custom Shop replica created by Senior Masterbuilder Paul Waller. As such, it commands a hefty price tag: $20,000, to be precise.

That expense is reflected in the level of detail that’s been applied to this replica. As Fender stresses, it “spared no expense” in recreating every detail of the source material, from the dings and dents on the headstock and neck, to the heavy aging of the sunburst finish.

Naturally, the electronics and the physical playability of the replica have all been modeled on Frusciante’s OG model. That means it has a “singular worn in quality that is usually only attainable with a pre-owned vintage guitar”, while the pickups offer an ILLITCH hum-canceling system as per the source material.

Those pickups, notably, are hand-wound single-coils built by legendary pickup winder Abigail Ybarra, who first retired back in 2013 after spending more than five decades working as part of the Fender family.

Underneath all the cosmetics bells and whistles, you’ll find a select two-piece alder body, a rift-sawn maple neck, and a slab rosewood fingerboard that offers 21 narrow tall frets and a vintage 7.25” radius.

Other appointments include vintage-style tuners, a bone nut, Vintage Strat wiring, and a vintage-style synchronized tremolo.

All in all, it’s undeniably the closest thing you’re going to get to experiencing the real Stratocaster, which Frusciante bought way back in the late 1990s when he re-joined the band for the Californication era.

“The main guitar that I played was my ’62 Strat, which is the same guitar that I got when I rejoined the band back in 1998,” he told Guitar World in 2022. “Back in ’98 I didn’t have money for a Strat, but I told them all I had was a Fender Jaguar, and I felt that I should have a Strat for it to sound like the band.

“Anthony [Kiedis] and I went to Guitar Center and he lent me the money to get a Strat, and it was the one that spoke to me off the wall. And ever since then, I’ve had many other Strats – from that period of time, generally – and that one that happened to be there that day, I’ve never found one better than that.”

Now, $20k is hardly accessible for the majority of guitar players, but fear not: Fender also rolled out the red carpet for Mike McCready’s own sunburst Strat, which received a similar Custom Shop treatment before a Made in Mexico variant arrived later down the line.

Could a similar thing happen here? There’s no guarantees, of course, but it would be a no-brainer for Fender, which clearly recognizes the historical significance of this particular Strat.

“Frusciante’s Strat is right up there with the most iconic Fenders of all time; being able to work on his first-ever Signature model was a true privilege,” notes Waller. “Recreating this instrument’s many beautiful imperfections was no easy feat, but behind every ding and dent is a story and it’s our job to make sure that this guitar’s narrative is told in full, stunning detail.

“For an instrument this heavily reliced, it still retains so much of its original beauty. A ton of work went into this one, and while much of that can be reflected in its visual components, the whole team is tremendously proud of how this thing plays.”

Visit the Fender Custom Shop to find out more.

Warm Audio has announced it is launching the WA-C1 – an “authentic” analog take on the vintage Boss CE-1 chorus pedal beloved by the likes of John Frusciante.

The original unit debuted in 1976, aiming to repackage the chorus tones of parent firm Roland’s Jazz Chorus amps into a floor-friendly unit – and it remains one of the most prized early chorus units.

The CE-1 is particularly lauded for its preamp, which helped it become a cornerstone stompbox in the tone of Frusciante and many other players. However, modern-day takes on the unit often fail to accurately recreate that signal path, favoring digital substitutes, which is where Warm Audio hopes to win hearts – and ears.

As such, the WA-C1 aims to be more faithful recreation of that original circuit, using an all-analog preamp and pairing it with a modern recreation of the BBD chips used in the Boss unit.

“The WA-C1 Chorus Vibrato not only brings back that iconic, lush chorus sound and rich, three-dimensional vibrato,” says Warm Audio’s founder, Bryce Young. “But the high-quality preamp inside delivers pure, all-analog tone that just can’t be replicated by digital emulations.”

As you’d expect the control set remains pretty true to the CE-1, but here offers separate ‘Depth’ and ‘Rate’ dials (as opposed to the original ‘Intensity’), which open up some new options for players.

Warm Audio’s press release also notes that the pedal has been “carefully clocked to match the depth and rate of the original pedal to reproduce the detail expected from the most sought-after vintage pieces.”

A few nods to modernity have been made in the case of a selectable impedance (offering a choice between the period correct 50k ohm and a new 1.1M Hi-Z setting – which should help offer a crisper high-end, if need be).

There’s also an internal voltage converter, allowing it run off of the standard 9V power supply, but still deliver the same voltage internally as the original’s 120V mains power supply.

We think this is a pretty savvy move from Warm Audio. Behringer teased plans for a CE-1 clone back in 2022, but that unit has not made it to the market yet – and the prices for vintage CE-1 pedals remain prohibitively high for many.

Indeed, a glance at CE-1 prices on Reverb range from $500 to $1,500. Given those factors, Warm Audio’s $189 price tag is looking pretty attractive.

Elsewhere, the company has also announced plans to repackage its rack-mounted WA76 compressor (itself a recreation of the enduringly popular Universal Audio 1176) into a ’board-based all-analog compressor pedal, the Pedal76.

There’s been a trend for taking studio compressors into pedal formats in recent years, but Warm Audio has significant experience in studio builds, so is in a good position to adapt the design.

The Pedal76 uses a custom CineMag transformer to adapt the circuit to its pedal setting, and offers switchable buffered or true bypass, plus options for input sensitivity, ground/lift, pad engagement and high/low gain modes (both for DI operation). There’s also a handy balanced DI output that you can send straight to a mixer.

Price-wise, the WA-C1 comes in at $189, while the Pedal76 is $269.

For more information, head to Warm Audio.

Back in February 2020, John Frusciante played his first gig with the Red Hot Chili Peppers in over a decade as part of a memorial show hosted by the Tony Hawk Foundation.

The event was also attended by ex-RHCP electric guitar player Dave Navarro, who – along with the rest of his Jane’s Addiction bandmates – was present to perform a four-song set for the gig.

During proceedings, Froosh was invited onstage to join Navarro and the LA alt-rockers to perform Mountain Song – a cover, it turns out, that marked the first time the two guitarists had ever played together, despite their close friendship and RHCP ties.

In a new interview with Guitar World, Navarro reflects on the experience, and recalls how the impromptu performance came about.

“The time I played with John was the first time I'd ever played with him,” Navarro explains. “After all these years, and with me being in the Chili Peppers, I never got the opportunity to play with him.

“We were doing a benefit for a guy who lost his son – God rest his soul – and the Chili Peppers and Jane's Addiction were playing.

“I called John immediately and said, 'Dude, you have to join us for a song. I'm not going to let you not play with us.' He was like, 'Yeah, I'd love to.' And that's how it happened.”

Navarro joined RHCP to fill the space left by Frusciante, after the band’s most decorated guitarist left in 1992. Following brief tryouts with guitarists Arik Marshall and Jesse Tobias, Navarro – who had left Jane’s Addiction at the time – was recruited. He recorded 1995’s One Hot Minute with the band, before departing in 1998. Frusciante rejoined that same year.

The two guitarists remained close over the years, with Navarro previously recalling how he once brought a Les Paul for Frusciante to play in rehab after his first departure from RHCP. Frusciante ended up selling the guitar to buy drugs, but years later, he apologized to Navarro by gifting him a replacement Gibson Les Paul.

Reflecting on the pair finally sharing the stage after such shared experiences, Navarro continues in his GW interview, “I was just floored to have him because he's one of my favorite guitar players, and he's a contemporary favorite.”

Expanding on what it’s like to play with such high-profile guest stars such as John Frusciante and Tom Morello – another player with whom Navarro jammed recently – the Jane’s Addiction member adds, “They're nothing but exciting because these guys are great, and I have love and respect.

“I know they're phenomenal guitar players, and it's fun for me to hear our songs with just a completely out-of-left-field take on the soloing. There's like a brotherhood and a unity among musicians. And with guitar players especially, that happens. It's really special.”

Read the full interview with Dave Navarro, in which he recalls how he stopped playing guitar for a year after the tragic death of Taylor Hawkins, and discusses his battle with Long Covid.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers have revealed that John Frusciante has broken a finger, which forced them to cancel a KROQ performance in California earlier this month.

RHCP were scheduled to perform at KROQ's Almost Acoustic Christmas concert at the Kia Forum in Inglewood, with the injury causing the LA funk rockers to withdraw, but the extent of the injury, and which member was out of action, hadn’t been revealed until the event began.

The announcement came via a video, recorded by Kiedis as he sung his apology a capella, which was played on screens throughout the venue at the KROQ Christmas bash. The band will now play KROQ's Almost Acoustic Christmas Encore, which takes place March 2 at Kia Forum, meaning their return to the KROQ sphere, which Kiedis says “has always rocked”, isn’t too far away.

It’s a fate every guitarist fears, and while it hasn’t been revealed how the 53-year-old sustained the injury, the revelation follows news in early December that the band would be sidelined for six weeks due to a band member’s injury.

Frusciante, a key player in the group’s success, rejoined the Red Hot Chili Peppers in December 2019 after 10 years away. Since returning to the band he first joined at age 18, they have released two albums, with Unlimited Love and Return of the Dream Canteen both arriving in 2022.

The band returns to the road on February 17 at The Venue, Lincoln, California, with dates following across North America.

Since joining synth-indie meets alt-dance outfit AWOLNATION in 2015, Zach Irons has injected dissonant doses of atmospheric pressure via distinctive gear choices, a craving for vintage tube amps, and a burning love for a vintage Strat gifted to him by John Frusciante.

But it doesn’t hurt that Zach is the son of former Red Hot Chili Peppers and Pearl Jam drummer Jack Irons, who has traversed all of rock’s sonic spectrum. All that is to say that Zach Irons refuses to stagnate, instead basing his young career upon perpetual forward motion.

And that same mindset has Irons exploring even greater sonic ground on his latest project, IRONTOM's debut, GEL pt.1: "This is the first time I've produced a record on my own," Irons says. "And it's the first time I've owned a computer, other than when I was very young."

In an age where tech reigns supreme, Irons' revelation that he's lived a primarily computer-less existence is shocking. As for how it affected the guitars on GEL pt. 1, he says, "I learned how to engineer and produce while making this record. A lot of my guitar playing has to do with the sounds I was getting while learning to do that.

"I was trying to get sounds I'd never heard before. Some of that is inspired by not wanting to be self-indulgent. The guitars on this record are a product of letting it flow, and not overthinking them."

Zach’s dad, Jack, taught him to follow his gut. And he’s done so, damning fads, while his instincts pulled him down roads less traveled.

"There is a lot of self-indulgence out there on guitar, and there's also too much self-indulgence in the world,” he muses.

"There's too much social media, and that's not a diss: it leads to overthinking. I'm the type of person who tends to overthink things, and I have in the past on records. So, with this one, I wanted not to be too precious and only focus on things I loved."

IRONTOM is yet another bout of reinvention for Zach Irons, whose musically nomadic ways are signaling that what’s to come might be guitar’s most exiting era yet.

When asked how he’ll continue to push the envelope, he says, "I like the idea of getting even more organic. I'm conceptualizing songs that present as vague ideas of what I think they should sound like, but they never end up sounding that way. That’s led me down the path where I’m a hybrid version of raw and organic, mixed with someone who loves sonic manipulation."

"I can't be sure," he concludes. "But I'm looking forward to trying it out."

As I understand it, you've been computerless for a long time, but reintroducing them into your life helped shape GEL pt.1 in a big way.

"That's true. I grew up with my dad being a musician, and I had a sheltered mindset regarding how music is made. I had this idealist mindset that you learn your instrument, get in a room, and keep it organic. I held that ideal close to me until I realized that music didn't sound like that anymore, which was confusing."

How so?

"I would think, 'I'm hearing this band, but I can hear computerized elements,' which I found to be not as raw. But now my ears are trained to where I want to hear computerized sounds, but I didn't used to be that way; I was like, 'I don't care about that,' but when I joined AWOLNATION, I started recording that way, and that changed the way I looked at it."

Was GEL pt.1 a major departure from your approach with AWOLNATION? 

"I have a lot more space to explore. I've always wanted to do pitched things because I'd hear things with a lot of stereo choruses and stuff that was sped up, and I liked it. I liked half-speed and twinkly things and found them brilliant, almost like a keyboard sound, but with a guitar. I'm attracted to sounds that spin like a carousel, and I've been seeking them for years."

Is there a track from GEL pt. 1 that best exemplifies what you're looking to accomplish?

"The last song on the record, Stick Figure Attack, is special. It has elements from my favorite bands and genres, and it came together in a way that I felt good about. I played acoustic on it but did an extended solo as the outro that was soft, clean, and very sincere. That's the one I've been telling people about; it's not a loud rocker, but I'm super proud of it."

Tell me about the gear you used – especially during that solo.

"Well, I played a lot of acoustic but wrote it on my electric guitar. I used a [Roland TR-]808 drum machine and then live drums, which led me down a Zeppelin path. It's an obvious thing, but I'm always trying to recreate John Bonham’s sound, even if it's not possible.

"And that led me to want to do a Jimmy Page thing, so I pulled the acoustic out and did a Stairway to Heaven style thing where the acoustic is in one ear, and the Strat is in the other. It's basic, but I love it."

Did you use your trusty Japanese Strat or the '61 Strat that John Frusciante gifted you?

"No, I don't use the Japanese Strat much anymore. I stopped using it and never used it much on recordings. I mostly use the '61. But I only use the '61 in the studio and never take it on the road. It's too sentimental."

What led John to give you the '61 Strat?

"I first met John in 2009 or 2010, when I would go to his place and learn songs. He would teach me things, and at the time, I was only 16 or 17, so it was amazing. One day, I went over there – and I'm such a fan of his, which I'm open about – and I was talking to him about guitars. I'd ask, 'What did you use on this song?' and pick his brain. 

"And then, I looked around and said, 'Hey, where are all your guitars?' because I'd noticed that there weren't many around. John was like, 'I don't know…' and asked his assistant, 'Hey, where are my guitars?' And the assistant says, 'Oh, they're in the backroom, and I said, 'Can I pull some out?'

"So, we pulled a few out, and the '61 Strat was one, and I loved it immediately. Eventually, John said, 'I want you to take that guitar with you; it's yours.' It was an amazing thing."

Have you discovered the secret to that guitar's magic?

"For me, it has a ton of sentimental value. But at the time in my life when John gave it to me, I was so malleable; my brain was a sponge. And I looked up to John so much, which is interesting because initially, I wasn't really a fan of his playing. I was more into flashing stuff, like Eddie Van Halen, when I was a kid. 

"That changed after seeing John the Troubadour before Stadium Arcadium came out. He actually played my '61 Strat that night, and I could see how amazing he was. I always thought, 'If there was one guitar I'd want of his, that would be it,' and it's the one that ended up being mine."

If you don't take the '61 Strat on the road, how do you recreate its sound on tour?

"I have an '81 Fullerton reissue. I'm not sure how many people are familiar with the Fullerton reissues from the early '80s, but they're close to those sick guitars from the '60s. It's another reason I don't use the Japanese Strat because I was always bummed out when I compared it to the '61. But when I got the Fullerton reissue, I didn't have that problem. I never feel held back."

You and John jammed out on Led Zeppelin's Presence, right? How did that go down?

"I was at a BBQ with Flea when I was 14 or 15. So, Flea said, 'Dude, you have to sit down with my guitar player, John; he's the best.' And then he was like, 'There's Hendrix, there's Cobain, and then there's John.' I was like, 'Okay,' but wasn't a fan yet, so I didn't know what to say, but said, 'Cool. Let's do it.'

"So, John invited me over and said, 'I'm gonna teach you the whole record [Presence],' but we only did Achilles Last Stand the first day because it's so long. That started our friendship, and later, he taught me the rest of the album. We jammed on the whole thing one night live, and I've been considering resurrecting that idea because it was awesome."

Did your dad's work with the Chili Peppers and Pearl Jam influence you?

"It impacted me for a long time. My main outlet was the idea of getting into a room and feeling the energy of unspoken and unseen things like he did. That was the credo in my house with my dad, playing together and having camaraderie. It was the name of the game, and it influenced me a ton. 

"It was a massive part of my life to the point where it almost held me back. I was closed off to doing things and had complicated feelings about drum machines and loops, which I thought, 'That's not okay to do,' because my dad was a perfectionist drummer. But now I'm figuring out how it all works together."

How do you approach effects?

"I love the EHX POG and can't play a show without it. It's got that pitchy thing we discussed earlier, and it's otherworldly. It allows me to bring in different octaves, which I'm developing. But I yearn to write songs that don't turn anything on other than a boost or a chorus. As much as I love effects, I always want to be simple and basic. But I do love using a wah, too."

Do you have a wah you're partial to?

"Because of John, I love the Ibanez WH10. He influenced me, and I couldn't escape using his gear. I would want to do my own thing on principle; I don't want to do everything he does, but he paved the way there. I've tried other wah pedals, and I hate them. The Ibanez is a staple of John's sound, and I can't get away from it. I had a pre-Reverb.com obsession with finding them because they used to be very hard to find and super-expensive."

Do you get into vintage tube amps, or are you more of a solid-state guy?

"I just bought a '70s Marshall [JMP] 50-watt Bass. I’ve played through other amps, but that’s the best one. I also used some Fender stuff and went direct. When I was younger, I would have been like, 'We absolutely cannot use fake amps,' but I'm over that. I love my Marshall stuff, but I'm fine with onboard stuff because it’s easy."

How has the making of GEL pt.1 changed you as a guitarist? 

"I took a crash course in engineering and production, and now I can see the session in my head and go, 'This should be here,' and put audio to that visual. My playing is constantly evolving, and I'm excited for the future of melding old-school ways with how I did this record. I'm always looking to the future, saying, 'What's next?' That's just how I roll, I guess."

• GEL pt.1 is out now.

John McGeoch – the hugely influential and yet, somehow, massively underrated electric guitar talent behind a string of iconic ’80s alternative acts – is the subject of a new documentary, The Light Pours Out of Me.

Currently raising funds over on Kickstarter, the movie aims to tell the story of the innovative Scottish guitarist who performed on an astonishing run of key albums for UK post-punk acts, including Siouxsie and the Banshees, Magazine and Public Image Ltd.

McGeoch passed away in 2004 and counts many household names among his biggest fans: among them John Frusciante, Johnny Marr, Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien and Jonny Greenwood, and even the Edge.

However, despite playing a defining role in reviving innovative guitar playing from the ashes of punk’s slash and burn moment, he never received the recognition of his peers.

For their part, the filmmakers say they intend to redress that balance:

“This is John McGeoch’s story told by those who loved him most; his close family members and the wider family of leading musicians who are proud to have known and worked with him, as well as those who have been influenced by this visionary guitarist.”

Check out the preliminary trailer for the film above, which incorporates snippets of conversations about McGeoch from the likes of Johnny Marr, John Frusciante and Billy Idol, as a taster of what’s to come.

Despite building an enviable reputation (and contact book) as a game-changing guitar player, McGeoch nonetheless wrestled with addiction and poor mental health. 

He later stepped away from the limelight in order to raise his daughter and work in the care sector with Alzheimer patients, and the movie will reportedly attempt to encompass all these facets of McGeoch’s story.

“Universal questions, not only about music and creativity, but also about what an artist is willing to sacrifice on the path to recognition are embedded in this film,” says the team. 

“When success turns to pressure, pressure to addiction and fragility is masked by substance abuse, the effects can be devastating. Issues of mental health and addiction that are part of our contemporary conversation were not widely discussed when McGeoch was at the height of his fame. The Light Pours Out of Me considers these themes in a sensitive way, giving them a context that resonates with audiences today.”

The film is attempting to raise an initial funding target of approx. $49,000 (£40,000) via a Kickstarter campaign and has secured an award-winning team to produce it, including Nicola Black and Paul Sng, alongside Rory Sullivan-Burke – the author of McGeoch’s biography of the same name.

To learn more about the project and contribute towards its production (please do, we’d love to see this get made), head to John McGeoch: The Light Pours Out of Me Kickstarter.

In a rare moment of recognition, McGeoch was one of the players that (deservedly) made it on to Rolling Stone's highly controversial 250 greatest guitarists of all time list.

John Frusciante is one of the most prominent Fender Stratocaster players on the planet and, accordingly, he’s had a few over the years.

His most iconic Strat remains, of course, his sunburst 1962 model, which was purchased by Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kiedis when the guitarist rejoined the band in 1998.

But Froosh has had a string of other vintage squeezes over the years, including a stunning ’61 Olympic White Stratocaster, which found fame during the band’s 2006/2007 Stadium Arcadium tour. During this time, the guitar also made its way into the hands of Josh Klinghoffer, who was then a member of the group’s touring lineup, preparing to take over guitar duties full-time after Frusciante departed in 2009.

Yet when the Stadium Arcadium tour – and Frusciante’s tenure with the band – came to an end in August 2007, the Strat wouldn’t stay in the departing guitar hero’s rack for long.

Instead, it found its way into the hands of IRONTOM and AWOLNATION guitarist Zach Irons, son of original Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Jack Irons, who revealed how he came to own the vintage Strat in a new interview with Guitar World.

“I first met John in 2009 or 2010, when I would go to his place and learn songs. He would teach me things, and at the time, I was only 16 or 17, so it was amazing,” Irons recalls.

“One day, I went over there – and I’m such a fan of his, which I’m open about – and I was talking to him about guitars. I’d ask, ‘What did you use on this song,’ and pick his brain.”

Irons couldn’t see any of the guitars they were discussing around the house, so he asked his mentor where they were hiding – only for the Chili Pepper to wonder himself.

“John was like, ‘I don’t know…’ and asked his assistant, ‘Hey, where are my guitars?’” Irons continues. “And the assistant says, ‘Oh, they’re in the backroom, and I said, ‘Can I pull some out?’ So, we pulled a few out – the ’61 Strat was one, and I loved it immediately. Eventually, John said, ‘I want you to take that guitar with you – it's yours.’ It was an amazing thing.”

Frusciante clearly saw something in Irons’ abilities, and believed his ’61 Strat would bring out the best in the young player. The Red Hot Chili Pepper made the right call, as he would go on to share his admiration for Irons when he named his favorite modern-day guitar players in an interview with Total Guitar last year.

“Zach Irons is a very creative, unorthodox guitarist,” Frusciante said. “He’s always finding new ways to approach it: hand techniques I’ve never seen and ways of using effects unique to him. He is so deeply rooted in the essence of rock guitar playing that he’s finding ways of retaining that feeling while completely changing the role of the instrument.”

The respect between the two players is mutual: Irons is a huge admirer of Frusciante’s work with the Chili Peppers and beyond. But as he reveals, that wasn’t always the case.

“At the time in my life when John gave [the Strat] to me, I was so malleable; my brain was a sponge,” he recalls. “I looked up to John so much, which is interesting because initially, I wasn’t really a fan of his playing. I was more into flashy stuff, like Eddie Van Halen, when I was a kid.

“That changed after seeing John at the Troubadour before Stadium Arcadium came out. He actually played my ’61 Strat that night, and I could see how amazing he was. I always thought, ‘If there was one guitar I’d want of his, that would be it,’ and it's the one that ended up being mine.”

Being a left-handed player, Irons had to make a few tweaks to make the guitar playable: reversing the nut and saddles, and removing the control knobs to prevent accidental adjustment (thanks, GroundGuitar).

For sentimental reasons, however, Irons doesn’t bring the ’61 out on tour; instead, he uses an ’81 Fullerton reissue onstage with IRONTOM and AWOLNATION, which he claims is “close to those sick guitars from the ’60s”.

Frusciante also shaped Irons’ pedalboard, in particular his choice of wah pedal.

“Because of John, I love the Ibanez WH10,” Irons explains. “He influenced me, and I couldn’t escape using his gear. I would want to do my own thing on principle; I don’t want to do everything he does, but he paved the way there.

“I’ve tried other wah pedals, and I hate them. The Ibanez is a staple of John’s sound, and I can’t get away from it. I had a pre-Reverb.com obsession with finding them, because they used to be very hard to find and super-expensive.”

Read our full interview for more from Irons, including what it was like to get Led Zeppelin guitar lessons from Frusciante and what made him finally come round to digital guitar tones.

And for more info on Frusciante’s current Strats, have a read of our in-depth 2022 interview with the RHCP guitar icon.

John Frusciante is widely hailed as one of the finest players of his generation, but his path to guitar greatness was far from straightforward.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers stalwart has been candid about his desire to impress early on in his career – best encapsulated in recently unearthed footage of him shredding like a hair-metal guitar hero at the age of 17  – before settling into a more comfortable, band-positive role for RHCP’s 1991 masterpiece, Blood Sugar Sex Magik.

Now, in a new interview for bandmate Flea’s This Little Light podcast, Frusciante has opened up about why he once prioritized melting faces rather than hearts. And it all stems from a negative comment from a former guitar teacher.

At the age of 16, Frusciante had reached a crossroads. He was trying to combine two schools of thought in his playing: the textural guitar style of players like Adrian Belew and Andy Summers, and the flasher, speedier techniques pioneered by Eddie Van Halen and Randy Rhoads. Ultimately, he couldn’t decide what kind of guitar player he wanted to be.

In the search for his identity, he took lessons from a guitar teacher his mom met in a health food store. We say ‘lessons’, but it ended up being a singular encounter, after their first meeting ended in disappointment.

Frusciante began the lesson by showing the tutor a series of recordings he’d made at home on his Fostex X-15 four-track, inspired by Adrian Belew and Robert Fripp. “I was playing in the way that I should have been,” Frusciante recalls. “I was on the right path.” But that was about to change.

“This guy, he said, ‘Let me see you play a blue scale as fast as you can,’” Frusciante tells Flea. “And I played a blue scale as fast as I could, and he's like, ‘That's not fast. You're not a good guitarist.’

“He said, ‘You know that noise you're making on your recording is OK, but if you can't play a fast blue scale, you can’t go around telling people you're a good guitarist.”

The effect on Frusciante was devastating. “I never went to this guy again,” he says. “The feeling of being told that I wasn't a good guitar player was about the worst feeling I could imagine, and I was just gonna make sure that no-one was going to say that to me again.”

During the lesson, Froosh’s soon-to-be-ex-teacher cited Tommy Bolin and Steve Vai as examples of ‘good’ guitarists, lending him Vai’s 1984 debut album, Flex-Able. Frusciante never returned the record, and devoured the virtuoso’s playing style – both solo and with Frank Zappa – to make himself bulletproof to criticism.

“It [Vai’s guitar playing] became my benchmark,” Frusciante says. “I’d already started to get into some of Frank Zappa’s music, but I knew that Steve Vai had been in Frank Zappa’s band playing guitar. It was around that time Frank Zappa and Steve Vai just became my favorite thing. I think I’m about 16 by this point. And I just started learning every complicated Frank Zappa piece of instrumental music that he’d written.”

This put Frusciante on what he sees as the wrong path: prioritizing blinding scales over his natural expression as a player.

“I told him [the teacher], ‘I can’t figure out whether to be a textural guitarist or a flashy guitarist,’” Froosch recalls. “He said, ‘Of course flashy guitar player, because flashy guitar players can do whatever they want, but the textural guitar player can’t do what a flashy guitar player does.’ And that was his logic – I suppose on some level I saw the logic of what he was saying, but at the same time, I saw that different people have different things to say.”

With hindsight, the guitarist was able to look back at these events and reflect on how different players have different approaches – and that there is no such thing as a ‘bad’ guitar player, as long as they are being true to themselves.

“I saw somebody ask Steve Vai recently: what did he think of Kurt Cobain’s guitar playing, and it was a great answer. He said, ‘Kurt Cobain knew exactly enough to be able to say what he wanted to say.’” Frusciante continues.

“One person has ‘this’ to say, and another person has ‘that’ to say. For Al Di Meola to say what he had to say, he had to be able to pick every note really fast. But for Robert Johnson to say what he had to say, it had nothing in common with that kind of technique at all.

“I knew that what mattered was that you were feeling something and saying something. And so while I always was interested to hear different people’s perspectives, I did always know that that had to be the center.”

While that lesson was the last Frusciante would ever take – and initially dented his creativity, as his woodshedding put a halt to his songwriting efforts – the story ultimately had a happy ending. Not least when he relayed the tale to Vai himself.

“I actually told Steve Vai that story about five years or so ago, and he made me feel so good about it,” he beams. “He told me a story about a music teacher that he had who fucked up his brain for a while. Oh man, I can’t tell you how good it was to have Steve Vai sympathize with my position in that.”

To bring the whole story full circle, Vai himself is a fan of Frusciante’s playing – in particular, his take on Zappa’s material.

Last year, Vai told Guitar World, “John has always been an MVP in any band he performs with. He always writes the perfect part, and his passion for vintage recording gear captures his tone magnificently. 

“Perhaps one of my favorite performances by him is an obscure one, Inca Roads by Frank Zappa, performed solo live. Anyone who can play it is a Jedi boss! I never had to play that part when I was with Frank, thank goodness.”

For more wisdom from Frusciante and how he found his voice on guitar, check out his 7 tips that will make you a better guitarist.

In this lesson, we’re looking at pop-funk. Generally seen as popular, radio-friendly music, pop-funk is a pretty wide sub-genre, ranging from classic Michael Jackson to the output of modern players such as Cory Wong – part of a new breed of guitarists who skilfully blend old-school funk with other genres such as hip-hop, gospel and jazz. So here we’ll look at ideas from seven pop-funk players. 

David Williams is one of the most important funk guitarists, yet remains largely unknown. His  intricate lines have graced some of the biggest ever hits, including Rock With You, Billie Jean and Thriller.

During an era filled with hair-metal and shred, Williams extolled the virtues of the ‘rhythm solo’, as exemplified in his short lead break in Billie Jean. This characteristic style saw him as the most sought-after session guitarists of the ’80s and ’90s.

The other guitarists here surely drew inspiration from Williams’ playing, so here’s where we’ll start our lesson.

Example 1. David Williams

In this Williams-style riff,  precise syncopation and picking technique are required throughout, with a couple of phrases that start on the offbeat 1/16th upstroke. This B major based riff uses an Em7 chord borrowed from the parallel key of B minor.

When jumping between non diatonic chords, you need to use the appropriate notes. Here it means a slight tweak in Bar 4; we’re using a D note derived from B natural minor (B-C#-D-E-F#-G-A) for the Em7 section.

Example 2. Paul Jackson Jr.

Paul Jackson Jnr was one of the most prolific LA session guitarists of the ’70s-’90s, performing alongside Michael Jackson, The Temptations, Luther Vandross, Bobby Womack, The Pointer Sisters, Chicago and Whitney Houston.

His credits are truly astonishing, and extend beyond the classic session player era into the modern day with artists such as Daft Punk and The Weeknd. 

This example centres around an Am11 shape that’s played with the third and fourth fingers (the fourth finger should be barred over the top two strings).

This shape is derived from a concept known as quartal harmony, where 4ths are stacked on top of each other to create a slightly ambiguous, suspended sound that’s great for improvising in many styles including funk.

Example 3. Prince

Prince is one of the world’s most iconic artists who shouldn’t need any introduction. He helped to pioneer the Minneapolis Sound in the late ’70s, a funk-rock sub-genre that mixed in elements of new wave and synth pop. Even through the artistic changes in his career, there’s an identifiable funk undercurrent on every single album. 

The minor 11 shape used in the previous riff features heavily in this example. Most of the ideas are based around the closed A minor pentatonic shape in 5th position, but the extra major 6th (F#) provides that classic Prince twist, especially at the end of bar 4.

Example 4. John Frusciante

The Red Hot Chili Peppers emerged from the funk-rock revival of the ’90s, blending funk with aggressive rock to produce a punk-funk-rock sound. Unlike most of the guitarists here, John Frusciante wasn’t well-schooled in the ways of funk before joining the band. 

Although he was a fan of P-funk’s Eddie Hazel, his main influences were Page, Beck, Hendrix and Zappa. He learned most of his groove and funk style from emulating the playing the Chilis’ late guitarist, Hillel Slovak. 

This groove is based on a simple I-V7 (Em-B7) chord progression, but uses a D#dim7 chord as a great substitute for B7. This jazzy diminished 7th substitution is built on the 3rd degree of the V7 chord and creates a B7b9 sound. The D# also helps the chord resolve really well to the following one.

Example 5. Adam Smirnoff (Lettuce)

Lettuce have been at the forefront of modern, largely instrumental funk ever since their debut album Outta Here in 2002, with guitarists Adam Smirnoff and Eric Krasno providing the backbone to the Boston funk collective. 

Smirnoff effortlessly blends gospel, soul and dub ideas in his funk playing, and this groove features all these styles in quick succession. 

The palm-muted triplet in bar 4 is a typical reggae/dub style rhythm and sounds great against the straight eighth rhythm in the background. It should create the feeling of ‘putting on the brakes’ and is an excellent way to create rhythmic interest. 

Example 6. Mark Lettieri (Snarky Puppy)

Mark Lettieri started out in the R&B and gospel scene of the Dallas, Fort Worth area of Texas, which eventually led to him joining the instrumental jazz funk group Snarky Puppy. In 2018, Lettieri joined up with The Fearless Flyers, featuring Cory Wong and Joe Dart of Vulfpeck on guitar and bass. Lettieri often uses dextrous fingerstyle, combined with gospel chord chops. 

This groove borrows the slap technique of bass and converts it to the more guitar-orientated rest slap denoted by ‘RS’. The picking hand naturally comes to rest on the strings, rather than executing an overt bass-style slap. 

All of the ghost notes (shown by an X in brackets) and rest slap indications use this technique with varying degrees of force, and adding the thumb will accentuate the percussive sound.

Example 7. Cory Wong

Cory Wong, from the Vulfpeck and Fearless Flyers stable, has released several solo albums and collaborated with Dirty Loops. His early influences include David Williams, Paul Jackson Jnr, and Nile Rodgers, which can be seen in his particularly rubbery, loose picking hand wrist. 

This riff uses the bass guitar ‘pat’ technique (lightly patting the fretting-hand fingers on the strings, as opposed to slapping them, but without fretting specific notes, and is best executed with several flat fingers to avoid this). 

It also intersperses some traditional funk chord fragments with improvised double-stops. The lick in bar 4 can be viewed through the lens of a basic E major pentatonic scale shape, slightly tweaked to include the D note from E Mixolydian for a funky E7 sound.

Last week, Justin Hawkins invited What Makes This Song Stink mastermind Pat Finnerty onto his podcast, Justin Hawkins Rides Again, for an episode titled How NOT to Write a Song.

The two-hour conversation was, to say the least, incredibly comprehensive, and out of the numerous lines of thought-provoking discussion the pair pursued, one in particular stood out: namely, whether John Frusciante is an overrated guitar player.

In the episode, Hawkins addressed his historical criticisms of the electric guitar star, and explained why he believes the Red Hot Chili Pepper isn’t as good as people make him out to be.

During the conversation, Hawkins asked, “Why are the Red Hot Chili Peppers fans so sensitive? The videos that we do on them receive a lot of ‘critique’ from RHCP fans.

“My issue with Red Hot Chili Peppers is that I get nothing from John Frusciante’s guitar playing,” he added. “I feel like if we can call Mark Knopfler an underrated player, I would describe John Frusciante as an overrated player. In fact, I have done that, more than once.

“It’s always like, ‘You’re jealous because he sold more records than you have.’ And it’s like, well, Mark Knopfler has sold a lot more, more, more records than me, and I’m not jealous of him. I love his guitar playing. So that argument doesn’t really hold any water.”

Finnerty was in agreement: “I don't know why [Frusciante] is so revered. I feel like whoever’s listening to the Red Hot Chili Peppers only listens to the Red Hot Chili Peppers.”

As for what the pair didn’t like about Frusciante’s playing, criticism centered around his lead style and the feeling – or lack thereof – that Froosh puts into his solos. “He doesn’t give me any of the… [plays a single note vibrato],” Hawkins demonstrated. “He goes like this… [plays a single note without vibrato].

“Somebody said to me it’s deliberately minimalist,” he went on. “Maybe it’s like that thing where you become a super-accomplished painter and start doing some naive child-like daubings, and that’s your phase. I think that might have been one of the things he was exploring, but it doesn’t stop it from being shit.”

Finnerty echoed this observation, drawing attention to the “dinky” solo found in Californication as evidence of Froosh’s shortcomings as a soloist.

Despite the critique, Hawkins did reserve some praise for Froosh, complimenting him on both his tone and choice of guitars. The mention of Frusciante’s guitar collection, though, sent Hawkins down a different train of thought – one that took an unexpected aim at PRS.

During his praise of Frusciante’s Stratocaster ways, Hawkins launched a not-so-subtle dig at John Mayer, saying, “I’m not a fan of a very, very popular guitar player who has his own [PRS model], which I think is a guitar that no rock ‘n’ roller should ever play.

“You and I probably would recognize some Knopler influence in a lot of the choices they make,” he said to Finnerty, “but they do so on a PR… on a particular type of guitar which I personally don’t think any good rock ‘n’ roll has ever been played on, because no rock ‘n’ roller would ever play that guitar.

“It’s too polite, it’s too easy. There’s no friction between the meat part and the wood part. It’s all so beautifully luthier’d that it’s just like playing butter. I don’t want to pay good money to see somebody playing butter, I want to see somebody struggling with a [Les] Paul.”

Hawkins' podcast isn't unaccustomed to hot guitar takes. In an earlier episode, the guitarist singled out prog virtuoso Plini and labeled him “a bit boring”.

Former Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist Josh Klinghoffer has been sharing his opinion on the band’s recent recordings with John Frusciante, stating that he thinks that the group was making “cooler music” when he was in the lineup. 

“I had to listen to the new albums. I couldn’t let myself [not],” admits Klinghoffer, in a new interview with Brazilian podcast 5 Notas. “I was hearing little things about them. I don’t think I finished the second one. [2022’s Return Of The Dream Canteen]. I was trying to cram it in once before leaving on a plane, and I got as far as maybe the ninth song. I don’t think I listened to the rest.”

In addition, Klinghoffer discussed working with the group on new music prior to his 2019 departure when he was asked how he felt hearing the material RHCP released last year.

“It’s tough,” says Klinghoffer [around 33.12], in slight hesitation. “Because I honestly think we were doing cooler music. I would love for it to have been finished... I never want to sound negative about anyone doing music, but I honestly feel like I was shocked when I heard their new record.”

The comments are tempered elsewhere in the interview by Klinghoffer’s acknowledgement that he still loves and admires Frusciante – he also recalls fond times working with the RHCP man on solo material and in his and Flea’s Joy Division tribute band.

Later, Klinghoffer is asked about the prospects of working with Frusciante again, but seems (understandably) unsure about rekindling their relationship.

“I wouldn’t say there’s no chance,” offers Klinghoffer. “Even if we don’t talk much in the process, I feel like it would be fun to play some of those songs again or play them live.

“We don’t talk much these days but I've always maintained that I still have an enormous love for him, you know? He's one of my favorite musicians, one of my favorite writers, um, so you know, like… I’m not against the idea.”

Klinghoffer has previously described his time with RHCP as “enormously stifling creatively” and he has not been idle since leaving RHCP, having spent time touring with fellow rock veterans Pearl Jam and, more recently, Jane’s Addiction.

However, despite his heavyweight rock resumé, Klinghoffer told Guitar World last year, “I’ve never lost this sense that I’m a beginner.”

One of the first things you’re taught as an aspiring guitar player – aside from string names and basic chord shapes – is that warming up is key to playing stamina. Without limbering up the fretting hand with some rudimentary runs, you’re at risk of increasing the likelihood of a small injury.

However, no matter how in-depth your warm-up routine is, you can’t legislate for impromptu cramps, which can strike out of the blue when you least expect them.

The inevitable nature of such spontaneous six-string injuries was made apparent during a Red Hot Chili Peppers gig in Australia last week, when Stratocaster master John Frusciante – who prides himself on having one of the most regimented warm-up routines around – was spotted stretching out his fretting hand in the middle of an intense guitar solo.

During a particularly energetic and speedy solo run around the pentatonic scale over Suck My Kiss, Froosh was snapped taking a brief reprieve from proceedings, removing his left hand from the fretboard and using his picking hand to pull at his ring and pinky fingers.

Despite the stretch, Frusciante’s pinky finger looked to have been put out of commission for the duration of the clip, with the electric guitar hero instead relying on the rest of his digits to bring the solo home.

Such is the caliber of Frusciante’s skills and stamina, anyone who missed the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment would have been none the wiser, with the 53-year-old instead plowing on full steam ahead with the rest of the blistering lead effort.

We can’t imagine Frusciante’s twinge was the result of a laissez-faire approach to warming up, because – as has been documented on numerous occasions – the Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist takes his practice routine very, very seriously.

In a conversation with Guitar Player, Froosh revealed he spends “at least a couple hours of warming up in the morning, doing the exercises and stuff”, before making sure he plays at least four hours before the gig. Any less than that, and he’s “very unhappy”.

During the in-depth practice run-through, Frusciante also revealed he uses a Sous Vide – a machine used to cook meat in heated water – to soak his hands in an effort to loosen everything up.

“I also soak my hands in this thing that’s used to cook meat – a Sous Vide machine, which heats up water to a high temperature,” said the guitar titan, who took inspiration from Allan Holdsworth. “I started with it at 114 degrees Fahrenheit, but now I’m setting it to about 118. If I feel any tension at all, I soak my hands and my forearms for anywhere from 30 seconds to 10 minutes, depending on what I feel I need. 

“I do that over and over for the four hours before we go onstage, at different times during my warm-up.”

This case is by no means the most devastating injury we’ve seen from someone behind the fretboard – many more examples, some of which involve blood, spring to mind – but it’s something you don't see every day, and a reminder to take care when cranking up your solo speed.

Despite this, we’re confident that Froosh’s fretting hand is in top notch health and suitably robust, mainly due to his extensive and serious approach to practice, which pays specific attention to individual finger strengthening. 

Not only that, he has a history of high-speed fretboard action, which became apparent when footage of a 17-year-old Frusciante unleashing his inner hair-metal hero emerged online.

More recently, Frusciante has displayed a suite of solo skills in recent months, culminating in an Eddie Van Halen-channeling live performance of Red Hot Chili Peppers’ EVH tribute track, Eddie.

In other Frusciante news, we recently got a good look at his gigantic new Red Hot Chili Peppers pedalboard, which has been deployed during the band’s ongoing tour.

Back in 2019, Dutch YouTube guitarist Paul Davids (the guy who recorded reverb in a nuclear power plant) produced a video in which he discussed his struggle trying to nail John Frusciante's Scar Tissue intro. 

Davids has an expert ear and after some diligent listening and tuning experimentation, came to the conclusion that the secret behind playing the song was in lowering the tuning of the B-string by around 13-14 cents. 

It resulted, he told viewers, “in something I wasn’t expecting... my guitar sounded way better – de-tuned!”

According to his tuner, Davids notes, his Scar Tissue tuning “should be super-out of tune. But when I'm playing these notes it sounds pretty good.” He then asks if this is what Frusciante did – and, furthermore, if he did it intentionally. 

It’s taken three years for Davids to get the answers but, finally, he has them. Recently, the song’s producer, Rick Rubin, raised the clip with Frusciante in an interview on his podcast, Broken Record.

“I remember seeing a a YouTube video,” says Rubin, referring to Davids’ post [around 24.35]. “Where... he's saying you detuned one string slightly and that's the only way to play the song – that anyone who plays the song plays it wrong because the secret is detuning. Is that possible?” 

“It wasn't done consciously – I just was out of tune,” responds Frusciante, with refreshing honesty. “It’s Scar Tissue that that’s about. My guitar tech told me about that.”

“I guess one of my strings was a little out of tune,” expands Frusciante. “But it sounded good, so nobody ever said [anything]. Like, you would have said if it hadn't sounded good.”

“I would have been the first one!” adds Rubin.

Rubin also comments that it’s a “fascinating video” – and he’s right. 

As Davids explains in the original clip, the effect is down to the accidental creation of a more accurate major third interval between the F# and the D in the intro. 

This is because most tuners operate on the principle of something called ‘the 12-tone equal temperment system’ (aka 12-TET) which essentially splits the difference between the notes in an octave. However, the true distance in cents between certain intervals can vary (up or down) quite a bit, depending on the note progression.

12-TET is therefore a handy method for ensuring you’ll be pretty much accurate on most things, but not the purest sound, when it comes to the math behind certain intervals.

Frusciante says he’s noted the phenomenon himself when playing along to old blues records. 

“You have notes [cents] in between what the the normal 12 notes that we all use,” says the RHCP man. “And there's a lot of good expression in there by using these notes that are in between, if they're exactly in between in a precise kind of way. So I guess [on Scar Tissue] I was out of tune in a way that really worked, because that doesn't sound out of tune to me!”

Davids has since responded saying the conversation and the fact the clip was seen by Rubin and Frusciante “blew his mind”.

So there you have it: Paul Davids was right. Frusciante is again proven to be a genius, albeit somewhat unintentionally. And all guitar tuners are lying to you... 

John Frusciante is regarded as one of the pre-eminent guitar heroes of the past three decades – a position he attained thanks to his melodic, tasteful playing style, which always bears the rest of his Red Hot Chili Peppers bandmates in mind. Yet, as he’s attested in interviews, his style had far flashier origins – and now we finally have evidence of his shred roots.

Newly unearthed footage, posted to YouTube, shows an apparently 17-year-old Frusciante shredding like you’ve never seen him shred before, performing with his pre-RHCP power trio IKE in San Fernando Valley, 1987 – the video was shared by Matthew Goodman, one of the founding members of the band, who has teased more videos from this era.

Wielding a Kramer-inspired electric guitar custom-built by LA’s Performance Guitar, Frusciante’s playing is, in short, unrecognizable, despite the fact he would join RHCP just one year later.

Frusciante’s high-gain solos run the gamut of ’80s guitar excess: two-hand tapping (both above and behind the fretting hand); harmonic squeals manipulated by a Floyd Rose tremolo; and legato – so much legato – with liberal use of wah-wah throughout.

The clip ends with the band covering The Surfaris’ Wipe Out, on which John deploys a Strat-style guitar for some quicksilver pentatonic licks.

Elsewhere in the footage, there’s a snippet of high-gain riffs over a slap bassline, which hints at Frusciante’s funk-metal approach on his first album with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, 1989’s Mother’s Milk – especially raucous opener Goodtime Boys.

Froosh would even wield that very same Performance SuperStrat at some of his earliest shows with the Chili Peppers – as documented in the below clip of Punk Rock Classic, recorded at Long Beach in 1988.

On a purely technical level, Frusciante’s ability – which, at the time, was inspired by the likes of Steve Vai, Randy Rhoads and Eddie Van Halen – is undeniably impressive, but we think he’d agree with us when we say it’s hard to make out anything melodic over the relentless wailing.

The dramatic shift in Frusciante’s guitar style is something he discussed in our marathon interview with the RHCP guitarist last year.

“When I was 18 and the early part of being 19, I was trying to be impressive, because I could play fancy things, or because I could be intense,” he admitted.

“That never left, but I figured out pretty quickly that I couldn’t rely on that ability to be intense and I couldn’t rely on my technique – music doesn’t really mean anything to people unless you’re really giving something of yourself in it and putting yourself out there in a vulnerable way. Not trying to show people, ‘Hey, watch me, I’m good,’ but to give people a piece of your heart.”

This realization prompted Frusciante to rethink his approach – a change that ultimately benefited him and the Red Hot Chili Peppers as a whole.

“It was a switch that took place right after we got off tour for Mother’s Milk,” he explained.

“I just decided, if I keep going the way that I’m going, I’m never going to be happy with anything that I do, so I have to give up my ideas of what good is and I just have to try to be myself and figure out what that is – and stop trying to be what I think people want me to be, or what I think the Chilis are supposed to be. I have to try to just figure out: ‘Who am I?’”

While the 17-year-old John Frusciante is not the tasteful guitar hero he would go on to be, the footage does offer a fascinating insight into his level of technical self-restraint, which is lifted sparingly in his solo spots nowadays – most notably on last year’s Eddie Van Halen tribute, Eddie.

There’s a lesson to be learned for all guitarists here: technical ability is all well and good, but it must always be matched with a melodic quality that can resonate with audiences.

“Generally, when I put away all those ideas of trying to be ‘good’, or trying to impress people, a thing that I can’t explain from my soul started to come out of my playing,” Frusciante told us.

“People started liking my playing a lot more at that point; I started to mean something to people.”

John Frusciante has said he views the bass as the band’s lead instrument in a new 60 Minutes interview. 

Red Hot Chili Peppers were the somewhat unlikely subjects of a recent episode of the current affairs show and took the chance to discuss their remarkable, enduring connection.

“We’re all supporting each other at the same time,” says Frusciante early in the interview. “Everybody has different ways of doing that. I see the bass as the lead instrument the whole time. Flea doesn't see it that way. I see each song as being like a bass solo where I'm there to support it.”

The guitarist’s comments in the clip reflect those he made to Total Guitar last year.

“Too often people assume that a guitar player’s worth comes from their ability to draw attention to themselves,” Frusciante told Total Guitar. “To me, what [all the great players have] in common… is that they knew how to be a member of a band and make everybody else sound better.

“To me, it really doesn’t matter how much technique you have; the real skill in being a guitar player is in making the rest of the band sound good.”

60 Minutes host Jon Wertheim also underlines Frusciante commitment when he notes that the guitarist prefers to warm-up for four hours before a show.

Elsewhere, the footage documents the founding friendship of Anthony Kiedis and Flea – indeed the latter tears up, reflecting on their bond – as well as Frusciante and Flea’s (slightly less collaborative) concept of the ‘face-off’ songwriting technique. 

“We need a section. We've got a verse say and we need a chorus and in the old days we would start it out by going like that to each other,” says Frusciante, mockingly butting heads with Flea in the process. 

“We’d give each other a dirty look and then we'd go into other rooms, then we come in and each guy plays his section for the other guys.”

“We could either go home and like think of it at home,” adds Flea. “Or we can do it right then like, ‘We're gonna do a face-off right now and the part's gonna get done!’”

It's a technique that vocalist Kiedis comments creates an “unexpected moment of humility... whatever is the best for the song.”

Check out the full 60 Minutes interview in the clip above.

John Frusciante’s pedalboard is the stuff of myth and legend. So much so that guitarists have even gone to great lengths to replicate his gargantuan setup from the Stadium Arcadium era.

But what fans haven’t been able to get a good look at is the Red Hot Chili Peppers guitar great’s latest pedal rig. Sure, there are occasional awkwardly angled, zoomed-in pics or partial glimpses from the crowd, but it’s not the real deal. What we want is a Frusciante eye’s view of that mega-’board – and finally, we have it.

A snap of Frusciante’s pedalboard in all its glory was mysteriously posted on Reddit at the tail end of last week, taken at the band’s intimate show at New York’s Apollo Theatre on September 13 2022.

So not only do we get a conclusive overview of what the guitar hero is using on tour these days, but we can even have a proper gander at the settings (click the embed below to zoom in).

Of course, there are plenty of pedals that cropped up in the Unlimited Love/Return of the Dream Canteen sessions, which John revealed to us ahead of the first record’s release.

That includes old favorites – the stalwart Boss CE-1 and DS-2, Ibanez WH-10 wah, MXR Dyna Comp and Micro Amp – plus some new picks in the MXR Super Badass Variac Fuzz, ’78 Distortion and Reverb.

But there are some neat learnings here, too. The MuTron Micro-Tron IV and Moogerfooger Low Pass Filter MF101 handle the more esoteric sounds in the RHCP catalog, as does the Line 6 FM4, which you’ll note has a big ol’ button marked ‘Television’ – indicating it’s there purely for the step phaser sound in 2002 cut Throw Away Your Television. The Moog CP-251 Control Processor, meanwhile, nods to John’s love of modular rigs.

Also notable is the appearance of four different delays – the Dunlop Echoplex, MXR Carbon Copy, Boss DD-500 and DigiTech PDS1002 – to handle Frusciante’s newfound enthusiasm for the effect in all its forms.

Now, we were going to break the whole thing down, but the decent folk at John Frusciante Gear have done the hard work for us, so all credit to them.

The full John Frusciante pedalboard breakdown is as follows:

• Moog CP-251 Control Processor
• MXR Dyna Comp
• MXR Phase 90
• MXR Flanger
• Dunlop Echoplex
• MXR Dyna Comp
• Boss CE-1
• DigiTech PDS1002
• Boss DD-500
• Boss TU-3
• EHX Big Muff Pi
• MXR Micro Amp
• Boss DS-2 x2
• Boss SD-1
• Wilson Effects NotRite
• MXR Super Badass Variac Fuzz
• Ibanez WH10 V3 (modded by Wilson Effects)
• MXR Reverb x2
• Line 6 FM4
• Moogerfooger Low Pass Filter MF101
• MuTron Micro-Tron IV
• The GigRig Quartermaster (under the tier)

In our marathon interview with Frusciante last year, the guitarist was still gearing up for his first reunion dates with the band, and planning out his pedalboard picks. But he did explain why his ’boards tend to reach epic proportions.

“I never used very many!” he laughed. “A lot of the time, one pedal was just for one particular song, and so I had to have it there just in case we played that song.

“And it was also because sometimes after being on tour for a long time, I get bored with the same sound from night to night. I like to have pedals that are just there for me to do something weird and different if the mood strikes me.”

So Froosh might not hit any of these pedals for several gigs – until that one magic moment that calls for, say, the Micro-Tron IV.

Although many of the core pedals remain the same, Frusciante does swap stompboxes in and out from time to time depending on setlist or, indeed, mood. So we’re intrigued to see what might change over the coming year, as RHCP continue their marathon world tour with dates in New Zealand, Australia, US, Japan, Mexico and Europe, running from now through to July.

In other recent Frusciante news, the guitarist revealed he nearly abandoned his Eddie Van Halen-inspired guitar solo on tribute track Eddie, badging it “a mind fuck” as the last solo he tracked of all 48 songs recorded for the two RHCP releases last year.

In the history of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, the terms “funky Flea bass” and “guitar pick” have rarely been used in the same sentence. In fact, put a bass in Flea’s hands, and more likely than not, he’ll whip out some trademark slapped octaves or a funky fingerstyle groove. His slap-heavy style first got him noticed when the Chili Peppers lit up the L.A. music scene in the 80s, and it’s a technique that has set him apart ever since.

“Flea was my first influence on the instrument,” says Vulfpeck’s Joe Dart. "His commitment to playing every note as if it were his last, to truly dedicating his whole body and soul to the groove, and to holding it down in what is essentially a three-piece band – he inspired me as a kid and still does today.”

Flea toned things down for 1991’s Blood Sugar Sex Magik, which included the landmark bassline on Give It Away. Of all his skills, however, it’s his mastery of the pick that has escaped the most attention. "I always want to play melodically, but basslines take on a different type of melody with a pick," he says. "I'm more likely to strum chords or play with double stops when I play with a pick."

In this demo video, which showcases Flea’s own brand of bass guitar, Flea substitutes his usual Dunlop Tortex .60mm for a quarter.

Having immersed himself in a Joy Division cover band following the Chili Pepper’s 1999 album Californication, as well as studio sessions with the likes of Alanis Morissette and Tricky, Flea continued to push his bass playing boundaries. 

“Me and John Frusciante and Josh Klinghoffer had a Joy Division cover band for a while, so I was really trying to learn how to play with a pick," he told Joel McIver in his interview for BP.

"I love the way Peter Hook plays. It was such a melodic, hypnotic way of playing bass. Jah Wobble too - all that Public Image stuff, from the Metal Box period, really blew me away. Me and John always used to play Poptones from that record. I got really into that post-punk sound out of England. I love that music.”

Flea first sat in with Janes Addiction during a 1997 reunion tour, after original bassist Eric Avery opted out of performing. 

“I had to really get my pick chops together with Janes Addiction because those songs call for it,” he says. "Eventually I tried one with the Chili Peppers on Parallel Universe, and when John brought in By The Way it made sense to try a more melodic pick approach.” 

Red Hot Chili Peppers will continue their world tour in 2023. Visit the band’s website for a for a full list of dates. Parallel Universe appears on Californication.  

What can the greatest guitar solos of the year tell us about the business of playing the guitar? Well, in one sense, this annual democratic endeavor reveals a lot about where lead guitar is going technically. 

Once upon a time, some people were saying the guitar solo is dead, and yet here we are in 2022, in an era when individual virtuosity has never been more spectacular – and not just on social media, which has been an accelerant for neo-shred styles. Players are doing what they have always done, standing upon the shoulders of giants, in search of new techniques, new sounds, but also, more to the point, in search of themselves.

After all, that’s all technique is: a means to an end, a mode of expression. Once we look past the technique, we’ll find that the solos here all serve different purposes. They’re all telling different stories. That is what Chris Buck is doing with Cardinal Black’s Warm Love – we describe it as a journey, and it is, but it’s a narrative. It’s the same for Erja Lyytinen, whose meticulous intonation evokes the blues-rock greats, and for Slash, whose lyrical style is evergreen.

Take Eddie, from Red Hot Chili Peppers’ returning guitarist John Frusciante, a player of great gifts, not least his discipline, knowing when to temper his brilliance and when not to. Eddie, written in tribute to Eddie Van Halen, somehow does both, allowing him a bona-fide guitar hero moment that nonetheless has the good grace to not pull focus away from what Flea is doing on bass – a bassline like he is talking to Frusciante as he scales a rock face, telling him where to place his feet.

Others are the story, like how Steve Vai and Ibanez teamed up for one of electric guitar’s most bonkers, most intriguing creations, and the sound that he could get out of it. Or like when Steve Vai answered an email from two guys from Austin, TX.

And others act as all lead playing does – whether it’s clarinet, oboe, violin or a Les Paul – it acts as a power-up, changing the energy of the song, using all of the above, the sense of narrative, an exploration of technique and what’s possible, for a musical set piece that gets people out of their seats. And that’s why people play guitar.

• The 10 best guitar riffs of 2022

10. Erja Lyytinen – Bad Seed

The first single taken from the Finnish blues-rock phenomenon’s latest studio album, Waiting For The Daylight, features a solo that will stop you in your tracks should you be laboring under the impression that Lyytinen’s style is all about the slide, and strictly blues as manifested by all those 5s, 7s, and 8s on the tablature notation. 

This is the aggressive expansion of blues-rock’s melodic perimeter fence, as though Lyytinen is following in Gary Moore’s footsteps, chasing down big moonlit minor key melodies with her lead playing, digging into her two years getting musically booksmart at the conservatory, intonation on point, for a solo that effectively tells the story of the song without words.

9. Red Hot Chili Peppers – Eddie

RHCP’s big, massive and prolific 2022 was lit up with guitar highlights from returning guitarist John Frusciante. It wasn’t so much 365 days spent orbiting the sun as an outpouring – two albums, stadium tours, and a track that saluted the late Eddie Van Halen.

Taken from the Los Angeles superstars' second album of the year, Return of the Dream Canteen (where is this canteen, does it take reservations?), Eddie is not the sound of Frusciante with a modded Strat, a Marshall stack and a Variac in search of Eruption II, but in a sense it is the sound of Frusciante placing himself in that zone.

It opens with him at his most yowling, quasi-Hendrix fuzz, with the solo all the more impactful for sharing the mix with Flea’s peripatetic and propulsive eighth-note bassline. But as Eddie works towards a conclusion you ask yourself, ‘Is he going to go full-shred? He’s not.’ He did, kind of.

8. Slash – Fill My World (feat. Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators)

There is a case to be made that says 4 is the most Guns N’ Roses album Slash and Myles Kennedy have recorded together with their band of Conspirators. It has a sleazy grit to it, like an oyster recovered from the gutter on Sunset, a sense of animalism that is hard to put into a rock ’n’ roll record in the 21st century because contemporary audiences have long been deflowered; they’re inured to this kind of thing.

That the band were allowed to track it live – a long-held aspiration of Slash’s – was critical. There’s even something a little Sweet Child O’ Mine about the Fill My World, right there in that opening riff. But then Slash’s phrasing is always going to betray his latent appetite for destruction, right there in the controlled chaos, in the trebly clang of his Les Paul into Marshall head. Here, as ever, he proves that there’s no-one better at balancing noble melodic intent with rock’s devil-may-care fatalism.

7. Ghost – Griftwood

Sadly not a bold theater-metal cover of Scottish indie wets Travis’s Driftwood, this is kind of something else, subversive with its bash-the-bishop anti-religious pomp, and it plays out a little like Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love as reimagined for the Eurovision market.

It’s like they’ve turned black metal marshmallow pink. From the gussied up production to its redoubtable structure and pop dynamics, Griftwood is really is a masterclass in formal discipline, and of course a composition like this demands a big solo and a 2,000-watt spotlight to shine on it.

The anonymity of the Nameless Ghouls must make for an HR nightmare and streaming platforms must spend much of your subscription fees on designing the algorithm to administer royalties (no laughing at the back) to these cats, but it also makes adjudicating this style all that more difficult. Could it be Phil Collen in black robes and face mask? Is Vitto Bratta leading a double life? We’ll never know, but the solo rips all the same. La Suède, Douze points!

6. Nita Strauss – The Wolf You Feed (feat. Alissa White-Gluz)

Oh, so this is why they call her Hurricane Nita… Wowzers. With Nita Strauss’s 2022 was dominated by the headlines surrounding her departure from Alice Cooper’s touring band and joining up with pop superstar Demi Lovato, there was a risk her profile as a solo artist would fly under the radar.

But then Strauss had the good sense to hedge against this, drafting Alissa White-Gluz from Arch Enemy for some serious vocals – a collaboration she had been wanting to do forever – and firing out a work of anthemic up-tempo metal that could not be complete until she’d turned the strings on her Ibanez JIVAX2 signature guitar molten.

The Wolf You Feed was the second of two singles that will feature on her upcoming solo album, with the followup to 2018’s Controlled Chaos expected some time in early 2023. It is sure to be one of the guitar spectaculars of the year.

5. Alter Bridge – Pawns & Kings

Having ran away with the Palme d’Or for best riff of 2022, with Silver Tongue winning by a landscape, Myles Kennedy and Mark Tremonti return to chart highly once more for his unique abilities to gently melt the face. There’s something about the way those players just tease the notes off the fingerboard, with Pawns & Kings sounding like the divination of some sacred metal they have discovered while backpacking across the Sinai Peninsula.

The solo here is anticipated by an off-kilter legato shred-a-doodle that is more hyper-rhythm than lead, but when it arrives – complete with that high-end electric guitar tone courtesy of Paul Reed Smith’s R&D department – it is a stop-and-rewind moment.

It's also an invitation for all the young Tremontis to get their game faces on, retreat to the practice space, to try all the guitar picks at their disposal – maybe even all at once – and work on phrasing and those super-fluid transitions that Tremonti and Kennedy so insouciantly perform like a master maître d’ preparing his 10,000th Crêpes Suzette. Indeed, this is what 10,000 hours sounds like.

4. Cardinal Black – Warm Love

Chris Buck revs up his Goldtop Revstar to give Warm Love the warmth and the love that a soulful blues-rock track a decade in the making deserves. And it requires a fingerstyle approach to tease out all the dynamics. We’re assuming, or rather calling the live session version as definitive, because that’s where Buck really stretches out and perches his guitar where Tom Hollister’s vocals were just a minute before.

Using a wah pedal as an occasional filter, no doubt with some space added from a Dawner Prince Boonar, and then just seizing the improvisational initiative to take the solo from Point A through the scenic route to arrive at Point B in one piece. 

Though with a solo such as this, you don’t want the tension of thinking it’s all going to come crashing down; the tension here is how high he might take it. Well, 2022 was quite the year for Cardinal Black: Buck took this all the way to the Royal Albert Hall.

3. Steve Vai – Teeth of the Hydra

Steve Vai’s playing has outgrown the guitar. We have long suspected it. The clues were there: the accumulation of the double-necked electrics, the playing one-handed while recovering from surgery, all to keep things interesting and find new avenues for musical exploration. And now this: the best, the Ibanez Hydra, the triple-necked steam-punk custom build that inspired this ripping, not-of-this-Earth instrumental.

Anyone who has put in the hours working on their Travis picking will particularly appreciate Vai’s separation of various parts of his brain, as though head, shoulders, knees and toes can all act independently of each other, answering to their own metronome.

That Teeth of the Hydra is technically audacious goes without saying – it is a man playing a guitar with three necks – but it somehow encapsulates what an instrument like this should sound like, an instrument so cumbersome it needs to be on a stand, one that has its own theme song. We look forward to hearing a sequel.

2. Sophie Lloyd – Do or Die

Sophie Lloyd made her name by adapting tracks from across the length and breadth of the pop-culture firmament for shred guitar, and it turns out this gambit endows her with all the chops necessary to, y’know, just go out and tear it up as Machine Gun Kelly’s stunt guitarist, or to take on the big projects such as corralling her favorite singers into the studio – a power move inspired by Slash, who did something similar with his solo work – for an all-star album. 

Do Or Die is taken from her forthcoming solo album, Imposter Syndrome, which will be released in 2023, and features Nathan James on vocals. James, frontman of Inglorious, will thank you for not fast-forwarding the YouTube video to watch Lloyd set her Kiesel ablaze, but understands if you did.

1. Polyphia – Ego Death (feat. Steve Vai)

It had to be Ego Death. Just doing the arithmetic on the personnel involved would have led most to the conclusion that no other solo could compete. Here we have Steve Vai lighting up his Ibanez PIA with Scott LePage and Tim Henson holding down the rhythm.

With 8.8 million views on the Polyphia YouTube page, a second Top 10 finish for Steve Vai, and one of the most audacious moments on an album that in years to come might well become a byword for audacity, Ego Death is an early contender for the ne plus ultra of 21st-century guitar instrumentals. 

It is the sound of the master who never let himself lose his sense of radicalism stretching out to offer Tim Henson and Scott LePage a solo that is quintessentially Vai: virtuosic but playful, tricksy but melodic, and a perfect fit for the Polyphia aesthetic of pristine genius.

As Vai explained when he sat down with Henson, LePage and Guitar World, his playing on Ego Death was his gift for Polyphia to do with what they say fit. That meant cutting it up, as they often do, splicing instrumentation together, and taking a non-linear approach to writing and composition much in the way a hip-hop producer might.

“I wanted them to do it. It didn’t really matter – it’s not sacred,” Vai said. “It was chopped in a way that met their creativity demands, and I wouldn’t want them to do anything else. When I first heard it, though, it was so different. I thought, ‘Maybe they didn’t like what I did!’”

Oh, they did. Just listen to it. It’s perfect.

Red Hot Chili Peppers electric guitar player John Frusciante has announced that he will release a new solo electronic album next year. 

Making the announcement on Bandcamp, Frusciante cited a need to "clear my head" after releasing not one, but two, 70+ minute albums – Unlimited Love and Return of the Dream Canteen – with the Chili Peppers in 2022. 

There will, Frusciante says, be two versions of the new album, . I : and : I I . ("one" and "two.") . I : is shorter, and contains a vinyl-only track, while : I I . is a longer, CD version of the record, containing "sounds that cannot be pressed on vinyl." 

Produced by Frusciante himself, the album will be released – in both forms – on February 3. It follows Frusciante's most recent solo effort, 2020's Maya.

"After a year and a half writing and recording rock music, I needed to clear my head," Frusciante writes. 

"I listened to and made music where things generally happen gradually rather than suddenly. I would set up patches on a Monomachine or Analog Four and listen to them, hearing one sound morph into others, making changes to a patch only after having listened for quite a while, gradually adding elements, and finally manipulating the sounds on the fly. All tracks were recorded live to CD burner, with no overdubs, and executed on one or two machines."

In the statement, which can be found on Bandcamp, Frusciante also cites the role recording, writing and touring with the Red Hot Chili Peppers played in his desire to create the album.

"I cannot overstate the role that being in my band played," he says. "I had previously spent 12 years programming and engineering my own music, and then spent a year and a half making music where my role was basically to write songs and play guitar. When the band's recording phase was completed, I needed to go back to my adopted language. 

"I had done enough with chords, rhythms, notes, defined sections, sharp transitions, etc.. What I needed was to create music from the ground up with nothing but sound, and have that music reflect 'being' rather than 'doing'. It was a therapeutic way of re-balancing myself, before and during my band’s mixing process."

Frusciante – whose highly experimental, genre-fusing solo work often stands in stark contrast to the music of the Red Hot Chili Peppers – has been candid in past interviews about occasionally becoming fatigued with writing in a more conventional rock vein, particularly in the late 2000s, when he departed the Chili Peppers a second time.

“It was like, ‘I just really don’t want to do all this living in this world of fame and publicity; I just want to concentrate on making electronic music and making music just to make music, and not to make people happy, not to be successful,’" he told Guitar World earlier this year, in reference to his leaving the band in 2009. "And that was just what I needed at the time."

However, the alt-rock guitar hero also took care to mention in the same interview that he's found a healthy balance between his rock and experimental outlets during this, his third tenure with the Chili Peppers.

“There’s an appreciation of the chemistry that I can’t say I really had towards the end of being in the band last time,” he explained. “An appreciation of what we’re capable of – when you get so used to something, you sometimes tend to take things for granted.

“I’d had lots of time making music where I do whatever I want. And that was great. And I continue to do that. But it seemed like a really good step for me as a human being to try to play in a band again. Most of all, I just have a lot of fun playing with those guys.”

. I : and : I I . can each be pre-ordered now via Acid Test Records' Bandcamp page.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers have endured through multiple line-up changes from their formation in 1983, and are still recording and touring today. They sell out stadiums around the world and continue to be prolific with their output.

Founded in Los Angeles, California the band’s classic line-up is the one that still plays today; vocalist Anthony Kiedis, guitarist John Frusciante, bass player Flea and drummer Chad Smith. Frusciante joined in 1988 after the death of original guitarist Hillel Slovak, and Frusciante himself has been in and out of the band, at one point being replaced by Jane’s Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro. 

The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ style is a blend of rock, hip-hop, funk and metal, and it’s Frusciante’s Hendrix influenced playing style that has been the driving force behind many of their biggest hits and most well-known guitar riffs. 

The group’s big breakthrough came with the Blood Sugar Sex Magik album in 1991. After a dip creatively and commercially, they built upon this success during the late 1990s and early 2000s with producer Rick Rubin at the helm of albums such as By The Way and Stadium Arcadium.

The Chilis have also delved into various solo projects, including Flea’s acting in Back To The Future Part 2 and the recent Obi-Wan Kenobi Star Wars spin off series, and Chad Smith joining Sammy Hagar, Michael Anthony and Joe Satriani in the band Chickenfoot. Frusciante has released a number of solo albums, too. 

Frusciante’s early influences, as well as Hendrix included Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, and it’s this mix of classic guitar heroes that can be heard in his rhythm and lead playing. The Red Hot Chili Peppers as a band draw from influences as diverse as Metallica, James Brown and Yes.

Our track this month features the types of chord harmony and lead playing for which John Frusciante has become well-known, and you’ll encounter extended harmony embellishments around the chords, as well as modal sounds throughout the piece. 

We’re in the key of E Minor (E-F#-G-A-B-C-D), but the tonality is E Dorian which contains the notes: E-F#-G-A-B-C#-D. This leads to the A Major chord in the rhythm part (A-C#-E) and even though there’s a Minor sound to the track overall, it isn’t the stereotypical ‘sad minor’ feel but has much more of a bright, upbeat vibe.

The solo largely uses the E Minor Pentatonic scale (E-G-A-B-D), but again highlights the C# note over the A Major chord for something of a bluesy twist. 

Get the tone

Amp settings: Gain 8, Bass 5, Middle 6, Treble 6, Reverb 3

John Frusciante is a major devotee of the Fender Stratocaster and has played vintage Strats for much of his career. He likes Marshall guitar amps too and employs fuzz pedals and modulation effects such as chorus, Uni-Vibe and delay. Aim for a vintage Strat style tone if possible, using neck pickup clean tones for the rhythm, and adding fuzz and some delay for the solo. 

Example 1. Rhythm guitar

The chord and harmony embellishments should generally be allowed to ring into each other throughout the rhythm guitar part in a way very much reminiscent of Jimi Hendrix, who was a huge influence on John Frusciante, not only in playing style but in tone and equipment choices, too.

Example 2. Lead guitar

The solo generally has a swung feel to it, so even when the notes aren’t written as triplets, aim to keep the swing feel in place. When the fuzz sound is on, really dig in and aim to play aggressively ; this will get the most from the slides that flow into and out of the notes, providing extra impact. 

It’s been a hectic few years for John Frusciante, whose much-hyped return to Red Hot Chili Peppers involved writing and recording a whopping 48 songs, and releasing two full-length studio albums – Unlimited Love and Return of the Dream Canteen.

Despite the abundance of Hendrixian guitar work and trademark Frusciante fretboard workouts we’ve been treated to this year, one song in particular stands out as a highlight of RHCP’s 2022 repertoire: their emotive Eddie Van Halen tribute track, Eddie.

The studio version saw Frusciante dip his toes into Van Halen-inspired sonic waters, with the Stratocaster master doubling down with one of the most technical and emotional guitar solos of his career when the band debuted the track live for the very first time.

However, speaking in the latest issue of Guitar Player, Frusciante revealed the Eddie lead effort proved to be particularly challenging to craft, and that it was the last solo he recorded out all 48 songs RHCP tracked.

“When we’re in the studio and between takes, I’m always doing things, like two-hand tapping. The engineer hears it all the time; I’ll play really flashy stuff during breaks,” Frusciante explained. “But when it comes to recording, I’m doing what I think is right for the song, and in most cases that doesn’t involve playing really flashy. But it is something I enjoy.”

Despite his affinity for such Van Halen-esque techniques, it was hard to translate them into a proper solo: “Doing that solo was a mind fuck, I’ll tell you that,” he continued. “And it was the last solo that I did out of all the solos on the 48 songs we recorded. 

“I saved it for last, because the idea of having a song about Eddie Van Halen, you’re basically saying to people, ‘Think about Eddie Van Halen.’ And then when it comes to this long guitar solo at the end, you’re going, ‘Now watch this!’ And I did not like that idea.”

Given such challenges – and the trouble he had balancing his own style with Van Halen’s – Frusciante admitted he was “thinking of cutting the solo entirely”, but eventually managed to come up with something after taking a step back from his guitar.

“I was trying for a while, and I wasn’t happy with anything I was doing,” he reflected. “I was either going too far in the Eddie Van Halen direction, to where it was too busy and there was too much two-hand tapping and it didn’t sound like me, or I was just doing it and it only sounded like me… in a song about Eddie Van Halen.”

“I stopped being self-conscious about the idea that the song was about Eddie Van Halen and just did what was natural. We were recording, and I took maybe a 15-minute break. And when I came back in, I just did the whole thing, like I said, in one take.”

The result, according to Frusciante, is a guitar solo that reflects his love for Van Halen and “the love that I’ve felt for his playing since I was eight years old”.

In the same interview, the guitarist expanded on his appreciation for Van Halen’s approach to the guitar, observing, “There are also the parts of his style that don’t involve playing fast, that are just really exciting to me – playing in a way that feels spontaneous, or when you hear feedback because he recorded his parts in the same room as his amplifier. To this day, those things give me chills.”

Head over to Magazines Direct to pick up the latest issue of Guitar Player, which features the full interview with John Frusciante.

Red Hot Chili Peppers covered Nirvana classic Smells Like Teen Spirit during a show at Silverlake Conservatory of Music this weekend (October 29).

Fan footage shows the band launch into the track’s verse – John Frusciante’s Boss CE-1 Chorus Ensemble handling Kurt Cobain’s Small Clone warble – with Anthony Kiedis tackling the track’s lower-register verse (with a t-shirt over his head, obviously). But the rendition really erupts when Frusciante kicks in the Boss DS-2 Distortion and takes over lead vocals for the chorus, screaming the refrain that lit a fire under ’90s rock.

Sadly, the band only performed the track’s first verse and chorus to close out the show, which also featured Chili Peppers classics Snow ((Hey Oh)), Californication and By the Way.

The unexpected addition to the shorter, 11-track set is most likely down to the band’s venue for the evening: the Silverlake Conservatory of Music is a nonprofit organization founded by RHCP bassist Flea, and counts Kiedis among its board members. The bassist and his Chili Peppers bandmates regularly perform to raise money for the Conservatory, and audiences can usually expect a few surprises.

Nirvana toured with the Chili Peppers back in 1991 – an experience Kiedis would later describe as “life-changing” – but the cover is also timely given Cobain’s influence on the band’s pair of albums for 2022, Unlimited Love and Return of the Dream Canteen.

As Frusciante told us in our marathon interview earlier this year: “I really love guitar players like Randy Rhoads and Eddie Van Halen for the way that they could make the instrument explode through hand and whammy bar techniques. But I also really like the way people like Greg Ginn or Kurt Cobain play without it being so much about technique – although there are all kinds of unconventional techniques in there – but the focus is definitely a more visceral thing.

“Eventually, by the time we were recording, my concept was to find a bridge between those two conceptions of the instrument: that idea of making it explode with the electricity of the human energy that comes through the strings.”

RHCP’s world tour has been making headlines for John Frusciante’s virtuosic solos in Eddie, the band’s tribute to Eddie Van Halen, in which the guitarist channels EVH with wild leads featuring two-hand tapping and whammy dives.

Red Hot Chili Peppers recorded 48 songs during their 2021 studio sessions – their first with John Frusciante since 2005 – and the initial fruits of their labor emerged in April, on the 17-track Unlimited Love. During an in-depth interview about that album, Frusciante told this writer, “I definitely feel like we saved some of the best stuff for the potential next album” – and he wasn’t kidding.

Return of the Dream Canteen paints a much more varied picture of the Chili Peppers’ reunion than its comparatively safe predecessor. It sees the band color outside the lines they drew during their 2000s renaissance, while occasionally harking back to their ’80s funk pomp.

It also more explicitly delivers on Frusciante’s guitar approach for the sessions, which aimed to team the rootsy blues of Albert and Freddie King with the solo heroics of Eddie Van Halen and acerbic attack of Kurt Cobain.

In short, it’s a surprising listen for anyone who thought they knew what to expect from Frusciante and a RHCP record in 2022. It also provides additional context to Frusciante’s comments in that marathon interview earlier this year.

Here, we pull out a few of Dream Canteen’s guitar highlights, with additional insight from John himself, including several previously unpublished interview excerpts.

1. Eddie

We’ve all heard RHCP’s tribute to Eddie Van Halen, but in the context of the album, it really pops. You’d be forgiven for thinking the band had rehashed By the Way from those opening notes – and the timbre and melodies certainly channel that album – but Eddie is one of the most successful melancholy ballads their latter-day era has produced.

Yet it’s juxtaposed with an absolutely blazing solo that ranks among Frusciante’s most virtuosic: two-hand tapping, whammy warbles and quicksilver pentatonic runs are all present and correct, each laced with love for the fallen guitar hero – and live versions are even more fiery.

“I really love guitar players like Randy Rhoads and Eddie Van Halen for the way that they could make the instrument explode through hand and whammy bar techniques,” Frusciante told us of his influences for the sessions. “But I also really like the way people like Greg Ginn or Kurt Cobain play without it being so much about technique – although there are all kinds of unconventional techniques in there – but the focus is definitely a more visceral thing.

“Eventually, by the time we were recording, my concept was to find a bridge between those two conceptions of the instrument: that idea of making it explode with the electricity of the human energy that comes through the strings.”

2. Fake As Fu@k

Frusciante said his initial rehearsals back with the Chili Peppers consisted primarily of material from the LA funk institution’s first three albums, and that’s certainly in evidence on Fake as Fu@k. That sweet voice-leading intro is something of a Trojan Horse, giving way to a furious syncopated vamp that nods to the band’s Freaky Styley era – something reinforced by Flea’s trumpet fills in later verses.

“We were just playing songs by other people and really early Chili Peppers stuff for a month or two,” Frusciante recalls of the band’s early jams. “And we just had a lot of fun. And luckily that spirit of fun that we had when we were doing that ended up staying with us throughout the whole writing process.”

That exuberance is present in Fake As Fu@k’s tempo shifts, which provide a playful twist on the band’s funk formula, and make for an even more dramatic contrast when Frusciante kicks on the Boss DS-2 for the grungy outro, complete with the odd scorching pentatonic fill. There’s no big solo, but as a distillation of all the guitar hero’s influences, this is pretty comprehensive.

3. Handful

Handful plays host to some of the tastiest voicings Frusciante has yet splashed on RHCP’s canvas, and the waves of rich CE-1 chorus are the cherry on top.

But halfway through, the track morphs into a ’70s prog epic, positioned somewhere between the Mars Volta and Genesis, with a rollicking drum pattern, wandering organ and guitar counterpoints. And when the distorted riff variation kicks in? Chef’s kiss.

The Genesis comparisons also crop up in the track that follows, The Drummer, which is similarly driving and organ-led – and there’s good reason for that.

“I really love the band Genesis, their prog stuff, as well as their pop stuff,” Frusciante says. “And their keyboardist Tony Banks, I put him up there with the Beatles as far as really coming up with imaginative chord progressions all over the place. He's really one of the most masterful chordsmiths that I think we've ever had.

“He makes these chord progressions that are so fluid, they're more like a melody than they are a chord progression. I definitely became really fluent in that style of progression during the time that I wasn't in the band.”

4. Bag of Grins

One of the more sinister compositions to emerge from Frusciante’s return, Bag of Grins foregrounds an unsettling chord progression that steers well clear of conventional songwriting wisdom, and builds to a distorted, Nirvana-meets-Interstellar Overdrive chorus.

Indeed, the track takes many of its songwriting cues from early Pink Floyd recordings with Syd Barrett, who Frusciante heralds as a key influence on the Unlimited Love and Dream Canteen sessions for his “non-modal way” of positioning unlikely major chords next to each other – something that’s most apparent in Bag of Grins’ fierce middle section, which recalls Floyd epic Set the Controls For the Heart of the Sun.

“Syd Barrett began this sort of approach to being able to use regular major chords in a completely different way,” Frusciante relayed.

“Sometimes, when you learn the songs like that, you think, ‘That just seems arbitrary to put that chord next to that chord,’ but it really works in the song and the melody comes out great. I definitely wrote a lot of stuff inspired by that style of chord changes.”

5. Carry Me Home

Red Hot Chili Peppers play the blues! Dream Canteen isn’t an album awash with solos, but along with Eddie, Carry Me Home is the album’s guitar showcase.

Frusciante summons the spirit of Hendrix throughout the ’60s-inspired track: earthy leads open the song, leading into some nimbly embellished chords and a huge pentatonic riff in the vein of Manic Depression or Hey Joe – and there are plenty of wailing fuzz licks in between.

Earlier this year, Frusciante told us: “I wanted to imagine that I was a guy coming up at the same time as The Beatles or Cream or Jimi Hendrix, to see: ‘What would I have done to embellish upon that foundation?’ I felt like as long as I’m getting back into making rock music, let’s go to the roots of it.”

Carry Me Home more than delivers on that premise.

• Return of the Dream Canteen is available to preorder now ahead of its release on October 14 via Warner Record.

Last month, Red Hot Chili Peppers released Eddie, a lyrical and guitar tribute to the late Eddie Van Halen. The band played the single for the first time at Austin City Limits last night (October 9) – and live footage of the performance shows John Frusciante delivering one of the most technical and emotional guitar solos of his career.

Eddie was already one of the strongest new musical offerings from the band since Frusciante returned to the fold, but Sunday evening’s performance took the track to new heights.

While the songs’s composition nod to the band’s more mellow By the Way offerings, Frusciante takes heed of frontman Anthony Kiedis’s lyrical tribute and channels the more virtuosic, altogether more EVH side of his playing for his leads, whose virtuosity hark back to his debut with the Chili Peppers on 1989’s Mother’s Milk.

His first solo drops at 2:50 in the video below, opening with a blinding two-hand tapping sequence, followed by whammy bar dives and some typically lyrical pentatonic phrases.

From then on, the rest of the track is pretty much one continuous Frusciante showcase, with variations on the track’s melancholy theme followed by a barn-storming concluding solo.

Everything in the Frusciante arsenal gets a showing here, but the energy and fire is upped to 11: these are undoubtedly some of the fastest pentatonic runs of Frusciante’s career, while the tapping sequences – both legato and tapped bends – are relatively unexplored territory for the guitar hero. In short, it’s one of Frusciante’s most memorable live solos, and a worthy tribute to Van Halen.

Frusciante discussed EVH’s influence on his approach to new Red Hot Chili Peppers material in an in-depth interview with Total Guitar earlier this year.

“I really love guitar players like Randy Rhoads and Eddie Van Halen for the way that they could make the instrument explode through hand and whammy bar techniques,” he said. “But I also really like the way people like Greg Ginn or Kurt Cobain play without it being so much about technique – although there are all kinds of unconventional techniques in there – but the focus is definitely a more visceral thing. 

“Eventually, by the time we were recording, my concept was to find a bridge between those two conceptions of the instrument: that idea of making it explode with the electricity of the human energy that comes through the strings.”

Upon the track’s release, Anthony Kiedis shared the inspiration behind the writing of Eddie.

“Sometimes we don’t realize how deeply affected and connected we are to artists until the day they die,” he explained. “Eddie Van Halen was a one of a kind. 

“The day after his death Flea came into rehearsal with an emotional bassline,” he continued. “John, Chad and I started playing along and pretty soon with all our hearts, a song in his honor effortlessly unfolded. 

“It felt good to be sad and care so much about a person who had given so much to our lives. Although the song doesn’t speak to Eddie by name, it talks about his early days on the Sunset Strip and the rock ’n’ roll tapestry that Van Halen painted on our minds.

“In the end, our song asks that you not remember Eddie for dying but for living his wildest dream.”

Eddie is taken from Return of the Dream Canteen, RHCP’s second album with Frusciante back in the fold, and their second of 2022, following Unlimited Love, which dropped in April.

Return of the Dream Canteen arrives on October 14 via Warner Records.

Yesterday, Red Hot Chili Peppers shared a sneak sonic peek at Eddie – an emotional new single, which will serve as a tribute to the late electric guitar legend Eddie Van Halen.

Now, the band has dropped the heartfelt single in its entirety, along with new details regarding their second full-length LP of 2022, Return of the Dream Canteen, which arrives October 14.

Eddie is a fitting tribute to one of the greatest guitar talents to ever play the instrument, with RHCP’s own resident six-string hero John Frusciante delivering emotive lyrical lead lines aplenty over the top of Flea’s heartfelt bassline.

It was Flea who first conceived the idea of Eddie the day after Van Halen passed away, according to frontman Anthony Kiedis, something that can certainly be heard – Flea takes a starring melodic role throughout, keeping himself busy with rolling rumbles and galloping low-end motifs.

Frusciante gets the chance to personally pay tribute to one of his heroes on two occasions, too, following up a reflective mid-song solo with a blazing, whammy bar-tinged outro effort.

“Sometimes we don’t realize how deeply affected and connected we are to artists until the day they die,” Kiedis commented. “Eddie Van Halen was a one of a kind. 

“The day after his death Flea came into rehearsal with an emotional bassline,” he continued. “John, Chad and I started playing along and pretty soon with all our hearts, a song in his honor effortlessly unfolded. 

“It felt good to be sad and care so much about a person who had given so much to our lives. Although the song doesn’t speak to Eddie by name, it talks about his early days on the Sunset Strip and the rock n roll tapestry that Van Halen painted on our minds.

“In the end, our song asks that you not remember Eddie for dying but for living his wildest dream.”

The band’s fondness of Eddie Van Halen is well-documented, with Frusciante himself telling Total Guitar that his love for the late guitar legend informed Red Hot Chili Peppers’ new material.

“I really love guitar players like Randy Rhoads and Eddie Van Halen for the way that they could make the instrument explode through hand and whammy bar techniques,” he said. “But I also really like the way people like Greg Ginn or Kurt Cobain play without it being so much about technique – although there are all kinds of unconventional techniques in there – but the focus is definitely a more visceral thing. 

“Eventually, by the time we were recording, my concept was to find a bridge between those two conceptions of the instrument: that idea of making it explode with the electricity of the human energy that comes through the strings.”

Eddie is the second single from Return of the Dream Canteen, following the release of Tippa My Tongue. When the album arrives, it will be the band’s 13th studio album and their second of 2022, joining Unlimited Love.

In that same conversation with Total Guitar – which took place at the time of Unlimited Love’s release – Frusciante revealed the group had written 48 songs, and that they “saved some of the best stuff for the potential next album”.

Unlimited Love and Return of the Dream Canteen are the band’s first two albums since Frusciante rejoined Red Hot Chili Peppers in 2019.

“Return of the Dream Canteen is everything we are and ever dreamed of being,” the band said in a joint statement. “It’s packed. Made with the blood of our hearts.”

• Return of the Dream Canteen is available to preorder now ahead of its release on October 14 via Warner Record.

Never let it be said that the Red Hot Chili Peppers have lost the ability to surprise their audience. After making a triumphant return with Unlimited Love, their first album in six years seeing the band welcome erstwhile guitar virtuoso John Frusciante back to the fold, the band announced a second studio album of 2022, Return of the Dream Canteen. 

Recorded with long-time producer Rick Rubin at his Shangri-La studio in Malibu, California, Return of the Dream Canteen is scheduled for release on October 14, through Warner, and RHCP have shared the first single and video from the record, Tippa My Tongue.

Seasoned observers could press play on the video and have a good idea of where the Chilis are taking this musically. The psychedelic visuals, the RHCP logo acid tab on the tongue of frontman Anthony Kiedis, the color-timing and extra-trippy animation that looks inspired by Monty Python and the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine; it’s a not-so-subtle tell that the the band going all in on the funk.

“We have only just begun, funky monks are on the run,” sings Kiedis, referencing one of the breakthrough tracks from 1991 breakthrough album, Blood Sex Sugar Magik.

When the Red Hot Chili Peppers are in this mode, they tend to take an elementary approach to their sound, with Frusciante on the Fender Stratocaster, Flea on the Jazz Bass, frequencies all very complementary to Kiedis’s vocal, with plenty of space for drummer Chad Smith’s groove to land.

That, too, typically suggests that Frusciante will have something special when it comes time for a guitar solo – and he does – but it’s very much the less-is-more approach, hitting a note and holding it, letting it bloom, while all around him the beat goes on.

That the Red Hot Chili Peppers have returned with a follow-up so soon after the release of Unlimited Love is a testament to the creative chemistry that Frusciante says was responsible for him returning. Speaking to Total Guitar, he said there was a challenge there, to tap into that chemistry, to play an active role in band democracy, and to get one of the most bankable songwriting machines in rock history back up and running. 

“There’s an appreciation of the chemistry that I can’t say I really had towards the end of being in the band last time,” Frusciante says. “An appreciation of what we’re capable of – when you get so used to something, you sometimes tend to take things for granted. 

“I’d had lots of time making music where I do whatever I want. And that was great. And I continue to do that. But it seemed like a really good step for me as a human being to try to play in a band again. Most of all, I just have a lot of fun playing with those guys.”

If initial months of Frusciante being back found the band playing covers, that was just to get their eye in. The original ideas soon followed. That they had 45 tracks all in by the time they stopped writing for Unlimited Love, which goes some way to explaining how they could complete Return of the Dream Canteen in short order – an album that is now available to pre-order via Warner. 

Only a few months after the release of their 12th album, Unlimited Love, Red Hot Chili Peppers have surprise-announced a follow-up, titled Return of the Dream Canteen.

Arriving October 14 via Warner Records, the new LP is, like Unlimited Love, produced by Rick Rubin, and marks the band’s second outing since the return of longtime-on-and-off guitarist John Frusciante in 2019.

Frontman Anthony Kiedis surprised the audience during the band’s recent show at Denver Empower Field on Saturday (July 23), announcing the new full-length midway through the set.

On how their second album of 2022 came about, the band write in a new statement: “We went in search of ourselves as the band that we have somehow always been. Just for the fun of it we jammed and learned some old songs. Before long we started the mysterious process of building new songs. A beautiful bit of chemistry meddling that had befriended us hundred of times along the way.

“Once we found that slipstream of sound and vision, we just kept mining. With time turned into an elastic waistband of oversized underwear, we had no reason to stop writing and rocking. It felt like a dream. When all was said and done, our moody love for each other and the magic of music had gifted us with more songs than we knew what to do with.”

They continue: “We figured it out. Two double albums released back to back. The second of which is easily as meaningful as the first or should that be reversed. Return of the Dream Canteen is everything we are and ever dreamed of being. It’s packed. Made with the blood of our hearts, yours truly, the Red Hot Chili Peppers.”

Following Frusciante’s reentry into the band in 2019, the funk rock legends didn’t start writing at first, but rather they jammed early Chili Peppers material, as well as covers of classic tracks, including Some Other Guy by Richie Barrett and Johnny “Guitar” Watson’s Hot Little Mama. 

Soon after, the band began writing for a new studio album, and the creative juices were flowing such that they brought a whopping 45 completed songs to Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La studio in 2021.

“You know, I was ready to stop when we had, like, 20 – I felt like that was good enough,” Frusciante told Guitar World earlier this year. “But one thing led to another and somebody or other kept encouraging me to keep bringing in more songs. So, before we knew it, we had way more songs than we’d ever written for a record before.”

He added that he felt the four-piece “saved some of the best stuff for the potential next album”, now revealed to be Return of the Dream Canteen.

Red Hot Chili Peppers will continue their current North America tour at San Diego’s Petco Park on Wednesday (July 27). The trek is scheduled to run until September 25, when the quartet will headline the Sunday of Kentucky’s Louder Than Life festival. See the band’s website for a full list of dates.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Unlimited Love is quite possibly the guitar album of 2022. It has everything. 

There are the anthems, tracks that will soundtrack millions of people’s summers. There are ballads, the Chilis resizing their sound to compose something more intimate, tracks such as Tangelo, which let the acoustic guitar take the lead. 

But there’s more: this is the record that welcomes guitarist John Frusciante back to the fold, back where he belongs. A talent like his comes along once a generation if we are lucky. Whether he is casting a web of Hendrix inspired rhythm on his Fender Stratocaster or leaning into something more atonal and out there, somehow he always makes the right choices.

Game recognizes game, and so to accompany Guitar World’s epic interview with Frusciante, we tracked down some of the best players on the planet to get their perspective on his playing, to ask them what makes him great, and perhaps to pick some favorite moments from a discography animated by his gifts on guitar.

Let’s kick things off with the maestro…

Steve Vai

“John has always been an MVP in any band he performs with. He always writes the perfect part, and his passion for vintage recording gear captures his tone magnificently. 

“Perhaps one of my favorite performances by him is an obscure one, Inca Roads by Frank Zappa, performed solo live. Anyone who can play it is a Jedi boss! I never had to play that part when I was with Frank, thank goodness.”

Nili Brosh

“For me it’s Otherside off of Californication. It’s a great example of how the simplest guitar parts can be so clever and well-fitting for a band like RHCP. I can’t imagine that writing parts to complement Flea’s grooves (without getting in the way) is an easy task. Frusciante is the very definition of a guitarist who doesn’t overplay – and always lays down such appropriate ideas that include his specific voice.”

Rodrigo Sanchez (Rodrigo y Gabriela)

“JF is among the very few guitar players of our generation that came up with his own very distinctive sound, and that’s not an easy thing to do on an instrument that has been around for a long, long time. 

“Despite his being on my radar forever, it wasn’t until our 2019 album, Mettavolution, that you can hear his influence – and it’ll be very present in the new Rodrigo y Gabriela album.”

Philipp Dausch (Milky Chance)

“John’s songwriting and his sense for harmony and sound has always been so inspiring. Curtains [Frusciante’s 2005 solo album] is a masterpiece that showcases all of that – and A Name or Time Tonight are two of my favorites.”

Ayla Tesler-Mabe

“What I love most about John Frusciante is the way his style has the clear roots of old-school guitar greats like Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa, yet still remains completely of the times (if not a little bit futuristic). His heroes pushed the limits of the instrument and inspired generations of people to pick up the guitar… and John has done the same!”

Samantha Fish

“One of the first albums I bought for myself was Blood Sugar Sex Magik. The interplay between the bass and rhythm guitar is so in the pocket and organic – lots of innovative, understated guitar moments followed by chaos and fireworks. 

“The solo on I Could Have Lied is so expressive and emotional; it adds this desperation to Anthony Kiedis’ delivery. I loved the guitar playing on the title track – it’s riff-driven, melodic, explosive. The whole album kills.”

Joe Satriani

“Original, raw, heartfelt and pure, Herculean and supernatural – these are some of the words I would use to describe John’s guitar playing. 

“Whether he’s working with the cleanest of clean tones with a total absence of ambience, or the craziest of fuzzed-out, psychedelic, melt-your-face-off lead sounds, he always makes it feel natural and sound personal. 

“John’s live performances with the Chili Peppers are exceptional examples of his organic, highly creative and high-energy approach to using a Strat.”

Sophie Burrell

“By the Way was one of the first albums I ever heard. I was instantly fascinated by John’s playing and I always thought he had such an interesting style; it’s so dynamic and expressive, and you can tell it’s him straight away. Not to mention his tones are absolutely stunning! His songwriting is awesome too, always playing for the song and giving it exactly what it needs.”

Chris Buck

“I vividly remember hearing Under the Bridge the first time and not being able to fathom that it was just one guitar. There were bass notes, harmony and lead lines all happening at once, and for someone who had convinced himself that power chords were all that was needed, it was like he was playing a different instrument entirely. 

“It’s an experience John himself has echoed numerous times as he described hearing Little Wing for the first time – that melodic style of rhythm playing that Curtis Mayfield pioneered and Jimi Hendrix expanded on is an integral part of my playing today; John was the first person I heard put it to such good use.” 

Laura Jane Grace (solo artist, Against Me!)

“One of my first-ever public performances was at summer camp playing air guitar along to Under the Bridge. John was one of my earliest influences in that way. I was fascinated just mimicking him. I think he’s brilliant, one of my favorites. 

“The Red Hot Chilli Peppers Live at Slane Castle is one of the all-time best live performances ever captured on footage, and it’s at least half because of John’s contribution.”

Daniel Donato

“My favorite piece from Frusciante would, hands down, be Snow (Hey Oh) – for several reasons. Aside from the absolutely legendary complex arpeggio executed in a legato liquid manner, and the mass cultural timeless effect it has had since its recording, the homage paid to the traditions of J.S. Bach in the chordal cycle of the riff reminds us that sometimes the simple magics of this universe are just what our souls need.”

Sophie Lloyd

“John Frusciante is responsible for some of the most catchy and recognisable riffs in music. My fave is Dani California. Although he’s one of the most skilful guitarists out there, he’s not hugely technical – he just has enormous feel and doesn’t rely on fast, crazy runs to impress. He uses things such as dynamics and tonal range, interesting pedal effects and his other-worldly timing to compliment any song he’s playing on.”

Sadler Vaden (solo, Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit)

“Scar Tissue is one of my favorite Frusciante performances. I love the slide solos, and the main guitar parts are so economical, just like so much of his writing/playing. 

“Obviously, you can hear his influences such as Hendrix, etc., but the parts he composes are uniquely his own. 

“They are always deceivingly hard to pull off and most of the time you can sing his solos note for note. To me, that’s a mark of a great guitarist.”

Helen Ibe

“Every guitar part in Under the Bridge is iconic. The beginning is very stark and nearly plain. When the hi-hats enter, you can hear the Jimi Hendrix influence; John deconstructed Hendrix’s vibe and built it back up into his own thing. Sure, you can hear Jimi’s influence, but John’s invention is absolutely identifiable. 

“The variety of sounds he gets from the beginning of the song through the bridge are equally iconic. From solemn-sounding chords in the beginning, to the slightly overdriven and nearly reverb-free compressed sound of the chorus, to that chorused sound in the refrain where it goes from A major to A minor… The song has everything.”

Cory Wong

“One of the things I love most about John is his ability to fill up so much sound with so much simplicity. His parts leave room for the bass and drums to do their thing, but they outline the harmony. The hooks are always catchy, and they fill up just the right amount of space while leaving enough for the imagination to fill in some of the blanks. 

“A lot of the riffs are just so hooky – all the parts are so cool in the way they interact. But it’s not like he’s playing huge chords to fill things out; he’s playing things that are actually a little more simple, with fewer notes than what a lot of other people would play. 

“That plays into the technical and theoretical way he approaches things. He plays things that feel very catchy, interacting and weaving between the bass and the drums but also able to stand on their own.” 

Nita Strauss

“When I started playing guitar, Californication was the biggest album in the world. I was immediately struck by John Frusciante’s slinky, funky, effortless style of riffing and soloing – often imitated, never duplicated.”

 Josh Kennedy (The Black Moods) 

“Frusciante’s playing on Hey from Stadium Arcadium is impeccable. His clean guitar part creates this innocence that matches not only the vocal melody, but the tone of the overall piece. It creates this vibe to truly ride alongside the lyrics that Kiedis sings – all adding up to a guitar solo that can bring a man to his knees.”

Brian Fallon (solo, The Gaslight Anthem)

“The version of Don’t Forget Me from La Cigale feels like the entire band working at a fluidity you only find from people connecting to a moving force that’s beyond all of them. 

“The way John is playing here feels otherworldly. I’d think that even he would say he was connected to something beyond our human comprehension, where you get entirely lost in the music that’s happening at that moment. 

“There’s no way to force that state of mind for a musician or creative person; you have to just show up and hope it comes to visit you. Clearly, on this night John was met.”

Gretchen Menn

“John Frusciante is a master of riffs that are imaginative, interesting, yet totally in service of the song. And his sense of time and groove give an understated effortlessness. 

“One of my favorite riffs is on Snow (Hey, Oh); he takes a straightforward chord progression yet makes it so engaging, so musical, by choosing cool voicings, great articulation and well-placed slurs and dynamics.” 

Joe Langridge-Brown (Nothing But Thieves)

“There’s a song called Don’t Forget Me – I swear, the solo is only three notes played over and over again. At the time, I felt like I had to play really fast because the best players were doing all these amazing arpeggios. 

“So that was the song that made me understand that the right three notes can affect you way more than anything for the sake of speed or technicality. I’ve seen some pictures of his rig, and it’s unreal. The guy has so many pedals on different boards, so he’s probably to blame for my love for that as well!”

Dominic Fike

“I love John Frusciante’s top lines in relation to the rhythm guitar and bass. Every note feels like it’s where it’s supposed to be, but every choice he makes still catches me off guard. The perfectly placed hammer-on in every riff trickled into my playing early on. 

“And the way he can create so much tension with only one or two strings over a bass line – like the solos in Scar Tissue. Moments like that have always made me feel better about keeping it simple.”

Steve Selvidge (The Hold Steady)

“Pretty Little Ditty was a clear indicator of what was to come from John. I saw him on MTV, then on the Mother’s Milk tour when I was 16. Being a Funkadelic fan, his playing spoke to my aesthetic as a guitarist. Plus he just looked really fucking cool. 

“He was just old enough for me to still kinda idolize, but young enough that I could also relate to him and even think that playing to a sold-out room of 1,200 or so people might be possible for me, too.”

Zak and Rex Cox (Uncured)

“While John is best known for his work with RHCP, we know him best for his more avant-garde work with the Mars Volta and Omar Rodrígues-Lopez. The Bedlam in Goliath is one of our favorite progressive albums of all time, and the layers of guitar work are incredible. 

“John and Omar’s riffs are groovy throughout, with tasty wah solos and dirty stop-box effects pushing the experimental concepts developed through the whole album.”

Tad Kubler (The Hold Steady)

“I was a massive RHCP fan in high school. Hillel Slovak was still alive when I discovered them. It was wild to see the evolution/transformation of the band. I first saw RHCP on the Uplift Mofo tour, just after Hillel passed away. I was in 10th grade. 

“And then I think I saw five or six shows when they were touring Mother’s Milk. The difference in those two versions of the band was astounding. John was a guitar hero.”

Aaron Bruno (Awolnation)

“John Frusciante really sees music as a great tradition that is passed down and not something that’s possessed by individuals. It’s a more fluid thing that he’s a part of. He studies it and is very disciplined with how he relates to it.

“He’s good at constantly being inspired by different artists and different types of music, pulling from all of these different things when writing. He left RHCP after Blood Sugar Sex Magik and then didn’t play guitar for years!

“When he rejoined the band, his fingers didn’t have the same strength that they did before. Instead of feeling defeated and like he wasn’t good enough, he directed his attention to guitarists who weren’t as flashy but who played more simply and were more about the interaction with the other instruments. He used his limitations as a strength, not a weakness, which is an amazing mindset.

“Since then he has obviously regained all that strength and has played more like a ‘guitar hero,’ but the fact that when he couldn’t, he still wrote/recorded Californication – that’s amazing. I particularly love his playing on Hard to Concentrate – all those different guitar sounds (that don’t sound like guitar) are really special. 

“It’s hard to choose a favorite, but his playing on Dosed kind of sums up how much emotion he is pulling from the instrument, with all those different parts going at once.”

Ace (Skunk Anansie)

“What I like about John is, what he plays is really simple, totally direct and just literally works for the song. This makes people connect with it really quickly and easily. There is a certain honesty about is playing that also shows the flaws as well as the brilliance. 

“I like his tone because it’s quite classic and it sounds like he really likes Jimi Hendrix, which is always a good starting point. What he does is different from everyone else… he is just him, and his vibe and personality comes out through the playing. 

“It doesn’t sound like a technically brilliant virtuoso; he sounds like a musician with a lot of soul and feeling. I would say my favorite song by him, just for being a real standout track, is Under the Bridge. It’s simple, honest and really moving – three things that are very difficult to capture in a single guitar part.”

Roy Oliver (Capital Theatre)

“What instantly stood out to me about John’s guitar style was that it was so diverse. His tasty, clean, melodic riffs, crunchy funk rhythms and big, screaming guitar solos really showcase his abilities, and that’s been inspiring to me, a guitarist who loves all kinds of music and sounds. 

“To pick one piece of work is challenging, but I really love his work on This Velvet Glove. It’s got those nice clean riffs with that funky crunch guitar providing a great rhythmic change. Basically anything by John seems to float my boat.”

Pat Cassidy (The Districts) 

“There is an instrumental track on To Record Only Water for Ten Days called Ramparts that has owned a small piece of real estate in my subconscious since I was 13. Clocking in at roughly 70 seconds, the recording is rather sparse, just multiple layers of John’s signature simple yet hugely emotive guitar playing. 

“This song in particular was a big influence to me at that time because I had just acquired my first pedal, a Boss RC-20 Loop Station, and began making short instrumental recordings myself.

“I’ve always been drawn to some of John Frusciante’s solo home recordings and those of artists like Daniel Johnston for the same reason. They capture a certain sense of intimacy – as if nobody was intended to hear them. You can feel that the music was made purely for the sake of expression.”

The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Unlimited Love is one of the biggest rock albums of 2022, and one of the biggest guitar albums, too. It finds the Chilis at their most expansive. 

Here, prodigal six-stringer John Frusciante – a player of abundant abilities – walks through a handful of the album highlights, recalling how they came together, what gear was used, and how they cam to be. 

From the gentle acoustic Tangelo to the electric guitar freakouts of The Heavy Wing and more, he describes a songwriting approach that foregrounds dynamics – one that really gets going when he and bassist Flea put their heads together, literally.

Black Summer

“Through all the time that I wasn’t in the Red Hot Chili Peppers, there were only a few years that I was even using guitar in my music. But I kept on practicing, because practicing is something I do to stimulate the brain in interesting ways. I still hadn’t written any songs, though. 

“But now the possibility of me rejoining the band came into the air when Flea started talking to me about it, and so I picked up my guitar and I went, ‘Hmmm… I wonder if I can still write a rock song?’ Because my whole sense of melody had switched to a completely different vocabulary. 

“My memory of it is that I picked up my guitar and Black Summer came out. I wrote the initial idea for the verse and the chorus. I had a verse and chorus melody, too, but Anthony made up his own melody for the chorus and only used my melody that I had for the verse. And the thing he did in the chorus is way better than what I did originally. 

“One thing I’m very into is chord changes, where the chords are almost like a melody, and they’re not dependent on the bass line moving with them. 

“The changes and the little modulation things that take place in Black Summer, the fact that there’s an A major chord in the chord progression in the verse, but then there’s an A minor chord in the next line, simple little things like that are the kind of things that I find interesting.

“Or having there be an E major chord in the chorus, but in the verses, the E chords are minor. These are the kind of little mental exercises that make writing chord changes fun for me. And it’s visceral. It’s not like I’m thinking, ‘Wouldn’t that be cute if I switched the major to a minor?’ It’s just that this is what moves me.

“And I also think it keeps a song moving in a way that makes unexpected feelings come up. Even if you’re a non-musician, when that moment happens, a shift in your emotional reaction takes place.”

Veronica

“Flea and I, we’ve always done these things called ‘faceoffs.’ If we’ve been jamming and maybe we’ve got a good verse that we came up with, but it needs another section, in the old days we used to literally put our foreheads next to each other and give each other kind of a mean look. And then it would be, ‘Okay, I’ll go outside. You can stay here.’

“We’d go in separate rooms, and I’d write a section and Flea would write a section. We’d both attempt to write a chorus or a bridge or whatever it was, and then we’d come back into the room and one guy would play everybody his part, the other guy plays everybody his part, and one of them makes it into the song. Or sometimes both of them made it into the song. 

“I’m a big fan of tempo changes. It’s one of my favorite things about Black Sabbath – their first four records have all these tempo changes that take place within the same song. Another example would be Some Velvet Morning by Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra or We Can Work It Out by the Beatles.

“I thought, ‘That’s something we don’t have on any of our songs – a chorus that’s a completely different feel and tempo than the verse. And that became the object of Veronica. The verse is in 4/4, but the chorus has a triplet feel. 

“Another thing about the song is that wawawawow kind of filter effect in the verse. Some people probably think it’s a guitar effect, but it’s actually my modular synthesizer. 

“And we did all these backwards reverb treatments, sometimes on one instrument, but sometimes on the whole band, to make those tempo changes seem even more fluid. My ear is always looking for things like that – how can we make the recording more colorful without compromising the rawness of it?”

The Heavy Wing

“There was some song, it was either by Syd Barrett or the Move, where it was a really great song and the chords were E major, D major and A major. And I thought, ‘Those chords can be so powerful. I should write something with those chords.’ But I also thought, ‘Let’s start with those chords and then see what other realms I can take it to.’

“I started the song with just a simple funk riff. Because of my obsession with breakbeats and electronic music, I listen to a lot of funk music from the late Sixties and early Seventies. And so I thought, ‘I’ll start out with a riff that sounds like you could be getting into a funk song, but then it’ll go into this psychedelic world.’ 

“The guitar in the verse is treated with the modular synth, just to give it some subtle sonic movement. And in the breakdown before the solo, you hear the same guitar playing the same part as in the intro to the song, but being sent through a more pronounced modular treatment. 

“There’s also a modular treatment on the guitar in the last four bars of the solo on Black Summer – very subtle, but stereo – and it made a big difference. These are just more examples of my using the synth rather than guitar pedals.

“For the guitar solo, I had my ’62 Strat, which has been my main guitar since I rejoined the band the first time, for Californication, and I was playing it really loud through all four cabinets of my Marshall. Like, so loud that I had to wear headphones or I would blow my ear off. 

“I was in a pretty big room, so I had really good range to be able to stand at different distances and move around while I was playing to get different kinds of feedback from different places. 

“There’s a point in the solo where I’m feeding back and bending a couple of notes back and forth, and then it goes to a higher octave, and then it goes to two octaves higher than that. 

“It almost sounds like the kind of screeching feedback that people try to avoid, but you still hear that I’m bending the notes the same way I was when the feedback started. I didn’t plan that. I had no idea that those notes were going to happen. But when something like that happens, all you can do is just hold it and hope you don’t lose it. 

“I really like that aspect of soloing – not so much planning something out and being like, ‘All right, here we go,’ but more just listening as you’re doing it, and then responding to what you’re listening to.”

The Great Apes

“The Great Apes was something Flea brought in. In the chorus, the guitar part I play is just what his bass line brought out of me. It’s definitely a Fugazi-inspired thing. The fact that I’m picking fast, but playing a melody that’s kind of a slow melody, that feeling that it expresses is something that I hear in their music a fair amount. At the same time, those slides that happen in the midst of it are very much Johnny Thunders-inspired.

“I’ll tell you a little studio trick that we did on this one, because it sounds like I’m doing something more amazing than I actually am. At the outro, Flea and I do this switch. 

“For most of the song, during the chorus I’m playing the melody we’ve been talking about and Flea’s playing the chord changes. But when it goes to the outro, I’m playing Flea’s chord changes and he’s playing my melody. And somehow it sounds more bass-y, by the way, when I start playing the chord changes!

“Another thing about the outro: I’m playing those chord changes at the end, but then in the last few bars of the song I go back to soloing. I had two guitars – I’m pretty sure it was my Stratocaster through a distortion pedal on one side and a Yamaha SG 2000 straight into a Marshall on the other, and I would double them for that Black Sabbath-type of power. 

“But I started soloing so fast that I couldn’t double it. I tried, but it was way too fast. And so we did an artificial double for that, with delay and some tape speed manipulation. The tape is just slightly moving, so the parts are not exactly the same. 

“Because when you double something, that little difference in the parts is what gives it that power. So what you’re hearing gives the impression that I actually played the same thing twice, even though in this case I didn’t.”

Tangelo

“We were toward the end of the writing process, and I was thinking in terms of, ‘Okay, what styles are we missing?’ Because for a while we had a lot of funk and we had a lot of fun music, but it seemed like we were kind of light on heavy stuff. And so that’s when I was bringing in The Heavy Wing and some other ones. 

“But I also realized we were missing very soft, gentle things as well. And so I wrote Tangelo just to fill up that space. I figured I’d write a fingerpicking thing for acoustic guitar. And again, it was one of those things where I had a melody, and what Anthony did with it was inspired by my melody, but it was also completely different in a lot of ways. 

“He brought it into this almost Lou Reed-esque kind of half-talking, half-singing thing, whereas my melody was a very strict kind of melody that followed the chord changes. 

“I played the acoustic part on two different guitars. They’re both Martins – I don’t remember the models, but these are guitars I’ve had for a long time. One of them is a brown Martin that’s kind of small. It’s from the Forties or Fifties. And then the other one, it’s a Martin from the Sixties that looks like the guitar John Lennon plays in the Magical Mystery Tour film. Those guitars are my babies.

“The overdubs on this one were fun. I remember it was the very last day we were in the recording phase of the album, and I was supposed to be going home that day. I felt like I didn’t have anything left inside me. I felt completely drained. And then I thought, ‘Let me just try a little thing…’ 

“I started with one Mellotron, and then I wound up overdubbing synths and Mellotrons feverishly for, like, three hours, coming up with those parts that start in the second verse and go up until the last verse. It felt like it lifted the song to this other level. And it was really unexpected – I thought I had nothing in me and then I had all that come out of me. It was a really nice way to leave the studio.”

Although funk can be traced back to the early days of James Brown, like all styles, it has evolved a lot over the past 60 years. With an increasing body of great rhythm guitar players on the live circuit as well as well as online, there’s never been a greater abundance of talent and innovation, that’s constantly pushing stylistic boundaries. 

Within this evolution, funk has crossed over into other styles such as RnB, neo-soul, fusion, gospel, and many more guitarists are becoming switched on to the beauty of using a clean sound and really working on rhythm and harmony.

At its heart, classic funk is all about syncopation, space and generally static/simple chords. The crossover into neo-soul and gospel largely retains this element of syncopation and rhythm but tends to use more extended and colourful harmony. 

You’ll also find many of the guitarists featured here frequently use fingerstyle technique to bring in slaps/pops borrowed from classic funk bass technique, together with wider intervals and greater control over chord shapes.

Example 1. John Frusciante funk #1 

When many people think of funk, they often turn to this ’90s-inspired Frusciante style rhythm. This small partial chord is inherently funky because of the space, fret-hand mutes and swing feel. 

It’s all about how it interacts with the bassline, so notice how we’re not filling the bar with endless fret-hand muting. In this case, less is more.

Example 2. John Frusciante funk #2 

Just like the classic James Brown blueprint of having two interlocking guitar parts, this D minor pentatonic idea is designed to ‘fill in the cracks’ of our previous guitar part. 

John is a master of string muting, especially when fretting single notes while strumming through all the strings. Once you’ve mastered this technique, you’ll have the freedom in the picking hand to improvise any rhythm you like.

Example 3. Eric Krasno funk

As part of jazz-funk outfit Lettuce, Krasno’s style often mirrors the sparse single-note lines of James Brown’s most famous guitarist Jimmy Nolen. 

Try to view our example riff through the lens of the B7 chord shape at the 7th fret and you should be able to see the connection between classic blues lines that target pentatonic ideas within the shape. 

Aim to keep your pick hand moving at all times, but try to avoid constant fret-hand mutes.

Example 4. Cory Wong funk

Cory’s signature sound is position 4 on a Strat together with a dash of compression to make those funky lines pop. 

He has a particularly rubbery pick hand wrist, so the key to this riff is constant pick hand motion coming from the wrist rather than the arm. 

This riff is also a great lesson in how to get the most from a humble E7 chord, with Cory’s trademark melodic variations up and down the neck.

Example 5. Snarky Puppy fingerstyle

Snarky Puppy’s Mark Lettieri is a great fingerstyle specialist. Here the thumb, index and middle fingers can be used for percussive effects as well as playing chords/notes. 

Beat 2 is a great example of the ‘keeping time’ percussive technique. This offbeat ‘mini slap’ comes from pivoting the pick hand at the wrist, away from the strings and back to rest on the strings.

Example 6. Mark Lettieri neo-soul 

Here, as we delve into gospel-tinged neo-soul, we start to hear complex chord extensions such as the 9th and #5th for added tension. Much of the gospel/neo-soul stylistic vibe of this riff comes from the quick hammer-ons on chords. 

As with our previous Lettieri-inspired riff, fingers work best, as you can get some great separation between notes in the chords. You can also try raking through chords with the thumb (as with the C#m9 chord).

Example 7. Mateus Asato funk

This Mateus Asato-inspired riff is a natural development of Mark Lettieri’s fingerstyle approach, but here we’re also incorporating a similar funk chord shape to our Frusciante ideas. 

Again, the pick hand ‘keeps time’ by slapping/coming to a rest on the strings on every backbeat (beats 2 and 4). The final bar is a great example of how Mateus uses slick hammer-ons/legato as a rhythmic/percussive device.

Example 8. Melanie Faye neo-soul 

The use of the whammy bar is a great way to add a lyrical/vocal-like quality to your extended chords, and this is a feature heard a lot in contemporary neo-soul. 

Try to be subtle however, so you only need to use the ring and pinky finger to apply a gentle vibrato to the bar. The quick slide/legato manoeuvre that many guitarists all the way from Chris Buck to Melanie Faye love to use is a key idea that can add interest to simple single-note melodies. 

Example 9. Justus West neo-soul

Taking inspiration from Grammy-winning multi-intrumentalist and producer Justus West, here we have a beautiful Am6/E chord that provides harmonic movement from the E major base. 

Notice how there’s an internal melodic idea throughout that almost feels like a crossover from classic jazz. The downward chord slides can be a little tricky to master at first. Here you need to concentrate on getting equal pressure on all your fingers as you slide, so watch out for any fret buzz or muted notes. 

Example 10. Isaiah Sharkey soul/jazz

Isaiah tends to play lines on the jazzier side of the street, so alongside classic soul chord ideas and improvised pentatonic lines, you’ll also find ‘outside’ chords such as the G7#5#9. Here, the addition of #5 and #9 intervals provides tension before you move back to the home chord of Cmaj7.

When we asked Total Guitar readers to choose their favourite Chilis songs featuring John Frusciante on guitar, thousands of votes flooded in.

Here we present the top 10 – with analysis of what John brought to each track. Some of the band’s biggest hits are missing – including Give It Away, The Zephyr Song and By the Way. But in these 10 songs, the brilliance of John Frusciante shines bright.

10. Californication 

The intro to the title track of the Chilis’ 1999 masterpiece uses open-position A minor and F major arpeggios with open string notes to add colour – Flea’s bass plays the melodic fills Frusciante would normally add himself. The end of the verse builds momentum by changing chords twice as often, through C-G-F-Dm.

John plays soft, arpeggiated voicings, so when he starts aggressively strumming Am and Fmaj7, there’s a real lift. The solo changes key to F# minor, with a tone more typical of funk rhythm than rock lead. John repeats and develops simple melodic ideas, varying the rhythm or changing the ending, to make a satisfying break without the need for speed.

9. I Could Have Lied

The acoustic part opens, coincidentally, with the same notes as Metallica’s One: a B5 powerchord at the 2nd fret, alternating the open D string. The mysterious chord ending the first chorus is G6, played as an E-shape barre at the 3rd fret with the B and E strings left open. 

The acoustic was a Martin D-28, reportedly with the G string missing entirely, and the solo is distinctively John’s ’59 Strat. 

Frusciante recorded much of Blood Sugar Sex Magik plugged straight into the desk even for solos, distorted by overloading the input, but this sounds more like an amp – perhaps the 200-watt Marshall Major and 100-watt Marshall Super Bass, or even the cheap Fender H.O.T. practice amp John unexpectedly loved.

8. Dani California

Hendrix influences are front and centre here. In the verses, John embellishes each chord with a Jimi-style hammer-on and pull-off lick. The outro solo is built around a four-note theme that recalls Hendrix’s Purple Haze intro, complete with fuzz. Frusciante plays two-bar call-and-response phrases. 

Each opens with the same four notes (which makes it memorable) and finishes with a unique answering phrase (which keeps it interesting). Next, John kicks in his wah and goes for broke with a rapid repeating lick that explodes into tremolo picking and a climactic descending minor pentatonic run.

7. Soul to Squeeze

This track was left off Blood Sugar Sex Magik but recorded at the same time, and you can hear John’s ultra-clean tone straight into the desk on the intro lead licks. His Boss CE-1, normally used to split the signal into different amps, creates the swirling intro tone while he riffs around an open A chord with A major pentatonic fills. 

The slide solo is double tracked with each take panned hard left and right, an experience best enjoyed with headphones. Subtle differences between the takes give it personality, like at 2:38 when the slide rattles the strings of the left guitar.

6. Don’t Forget Me

Frusciante solos for almost all of this song, one of the 21st century’s first guitar hero moments. He gave TG the lowdown on how it was recorded back in 2002: the trebly lead tone comes from his Ibanez WH10 wah, left in a fairly forward position, and an envelope filter. 

His Line 6 Delay Modeler was in analogue mode, constantly on the verge of self-oscillation, which he controlled with a volume pedal and by adjusting the DL4’s feedback control on the fly. The delay repeats are set to triplets while John picks 16th notes, making the tremolo picking sound faster than it is.

5. Can’t Stop

There’s an art to playing fat single-note funk lines, exemplified on this track, which is to mute every string except the one you’re currently playing with your fretting hand. This leaves John free to strum aggressively across all six strings, creating a fat tone and extra excitement from the white noise of the pick on the muted strings.

When Anthony Keidis sings the verse, the guitar tone suddenly becomes anaemic. A ton of mid and bass is pulled out to make space for the vocal, but you won’t notice unless you listen for it because your brain tells you it’s still the same big guitar you just heard in isolation.

When recording By the Way, John made use of the core Blood Sugar Sex Magik amps, the 200-watt Marshall Major and 100-watt Marshall Super Bass. But rather than run them together as he has for most of his career, he typically used one in combination with another amp, often a blackface Fender Showman with a Marshall cab. 

John ditched the ’58 Strat from the Californication sessions for a ’62, saying: “That ’58 has a bit of a cleaner sound and it always seemed to sound better for what I wanted on Califonication, but for this album, the ’62 just sounded right straight away – the sustain’s better.” 

Unusually for Frusciante, this track mainly uses the bridge pickup. According to his tech Dave Lee, the pickups in that guitar came from a modern Fender American Standard Strat. Lee did not tell John that’s what they were, but Frusciante chose them after trying various alternatives.

4. Scar Tissue

This intro is popular with beginners because you can play it as a straightforward fingerpicking part, but Frusciante uses a pick, muting open strings with his fretting hand as always. The riff is based on playing the root note of each chord followed by the third an octave higher, using mainly F and D minor, with C making a brief appearance in between.

Like all Frusciante’s rhythm parts, it’s deceptively complex, although it’s not necessary to copy him verbatim. His relaxed feel on live performances suggests he was somewhat jamming the original, and it needn’t be played identically every time.

The clean tones on the Californication album came from a Fender Showman amp, and the tone is otherwise extremely dry. You might add some compression to mimic the response of the Fender amp at high volume, but not much else. The slide solo is another lesson in simplicity, a melody played entirely on one string that makes an ideal introduction to learning the technique. 

That simplicity was vital for John, who commented later that the process of making his first solo album was a journey to “playing with just a minimum amount of notes,” which informed his playing when he returned to the Chilis. 

“It’s a perfect place when you get to that point,” he said. “That’s why I like the Californication record, because I feel like it’s the result of all that searching. When I hear it, I hear someone trying the best they can at that time, whereas on Blood Sugar Sex Magik I was capable of playing much more than I did.”

3. Wet Sand

On 2002 album By the Way, Frusciante began moving away from the single-note funk riffs towards full chord voicings, requiring cleaner tones. “I was playing a lot bigger, denser chords than just your standard triads,” he said. “I wanted all those intervals to come through clearly. I’m not really into distortion, except for solos.”

Four years later, on Wet Sand from Stadium Arcadium, this transition was completed, with the cleanest tones permitting layers of strumming. 

There’s a bit of movement courtesy of a real Leslie rotary speaker, and as John said, some guitar tracks were mixed partially out of phase – “to make the guitars seem to project out in front of the speakers”. That’s not the end of the trickery: a tremolo effect on the verse lead lines makes the picking sound even more frantic.

The outro solo is the antithesis of shred, a passionate pentatonic outburst based on long notes and slow bends. The tone is clearer than the Big Muff Pi fuzz sound he uses on Strip My Mind, probably from the Boss DS-2 he also used for the harmonies in the last chorus of Dani California.

Arguably the most interesting sound, though, is pushed to the background. Starting at 4:00 and continuing under the outro solo, there’s a busy part that sounds similar to a harpsichord. 

After tracking the original arpeggiated chords, John slowed the tape down to record a harmony part a third higher using his bridge pickup. A pleased Frusciante said at the time, “I’m convinced that’s what Hendrix did on Burning of the Midnight Lamp.”

2. Snow (Hey Oh)

The third single from Stadium Arcadium is perhaps the most succinct expression of Frusciante’s approach to playing chords. 

There’s one Hendrix-style flick that is a huge part of Frusciante’s style, and for Snow he finally built an entire riff around it. To play it, you pick a note and immediately hammer onto and pull off from the note two frets higher. You finish by landing on the next note down the pentatonic scale from where you started. It’s also the basis for the verse fills in Dani California and Under the Bridge. For Snow, John plays this fill over every chord in the progression.

Stadium Arcadium saw Frusciante replace the Marshall Super Bass in his recording rig with the Marshall Silver Jubilee 25/50 he has been using live for years, apparently inspired by Slash’s use of the same amp.

The massive organ-like tone from 4:16 on the outro is created with an Electro-Harmonix POG. Then the huge harmonised, distorted chords from 5:09 were tracked painstakingly, as John explains: “I created an articulated arpeggio using three distorted guitar parts, each playing one note of the arpeggio recorded onto a separate track. 

“Normally if you tried to play that sort of line with a distortion pedal, you’d get frequency beating and the notes would be indistinct. But this way each note is clear, while giving the impression of being a single guitar.” 

It turns out that recording chords one note at a time is not the exclusive preserve of Def Leppard albums after all.

1. Under the Bridge

Undoubtedly the best Hendrix tribute riff of all time, Under the Bridge runs with the chord melody style Jimi showcased on Little Wing. Frusciante, though, leans into awkward C shape barres that Hendrix rarely used.

Under The Bridge is a pleasant introduction to embellishing a chord progression with fingerpicking and melodic fills, if you use a capo on fret 2. For some masochistic reason, Frusciante didn’t use a capo, which makes it an absolute pain to play! 

Even the most overused chord progressions sound fresh with a tasteful arrangement and a good song, and there’s no better example than Under the Bridge, in which the verse largely uses the same I-V-vi-IV chord progression that’s been battered to death in more pop songs than any other, sometimes with a I-V-vi-iii-IV variation.

Frusciante’s great rhythm, and just the right amount of ornamentation, keep the progression sounding as fresh as when it rolled out of Pachelbel’s quill in 1680. This is helped by the brooding D to F# major chord sequence of the intro, which was also a favourite of Kurt Cobain’s.

When the song shifts to E major for the verses, the mood lifts noticeably. Although less discernably funky than the rest of the album, Frusciante throws in some funk signature moves: the D-shape major triad in the chorus with a 16th note rhythm feels like something from a James Brown record, and his occasional scratching on muted strings helps the entire track to groove.

Part of the appeal of Under the Bridge is that it defies conventional pop song structure. After the second chorus, the song never returns to any of the earlier sections. The last 90 seconds can be seen as one giant outro. The melody and lyrics nod to what’s gone before, but musically it’s a different world. The key shifts to A, following an unusual progression from A major to A minor, followed by G6 and Fmaj7, with the high E ringing open to unify the sequence.

Despite this being the most obviously Hendrix-inspired track on Blood Sugar Sex Magik, Frusciante didn’t record the intro on the Strat he used for most of the album, instead choosing the 1966 Jaguar seen in this song’s video. 

Although the tone sounds clean, this style of playing works best with the amp on the edge of breakup. Sparkling clean tones can be too brittle for this approach. Frusciante keeps his Marshalls cooking to avoid that problem, or deliberately overloads the input when recording direct into an analogue desk. 

30 years on, Under The Bridge remains Frusciante’s signature. Flea has admitted that the song lost its spark live when the band performed it with Dave Navarro in the ’90s. It needs the chemistry of the line-up that recorded it to work, as anyone who remembers the 1998 version by All Saints will attest.

While the Chilis’ music has been hugely influential on both mainstream and alternative rock since, Under the Bridge remains largely untouched. It’s such a spare arrangement, such a distinctive guitar part, and such a vulnerable lyric that it’s almost immune to imitation.

• John Frusciante shares 7 tips that will make you a better guitarist

There’s a strong argument to be made that John Frusciante is the secret spice in the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ fiery funk-rock recipe. His second outing with the LA quartet (their fifth album), Blood Sugar Sex Magik, broke the band into the big time. 

After the commercial disappointment of 1995’s One Hot Minute (recorded with Jane’s Addiction recruit, Dave Navarro), Frusciante's return to the fold in 1998 saw the band on a path to global recognition, with three increasingly successful albums culminating in 2006’s Stadium Arcadium, which topped charts worldwide. 

Here we’re looking at some of our favourite Frusciante-penned Chili Peppers riffs. Can’t Stop will test your ability to groove. Scar Tissue offers Beatles-y chords with a fiercely tricky string muting technique. And, bringing proceedings right up to date, we’re looking at the Hendrix-tinged shapes of 2022’s Black Summer. Plug in and let’s get funky!

1. Can’t Stop

Appears at: 0:00 - 0:34

Tempo: 90 bpm

Key/scale: E minor

Main techniques: Fret-hand muting, accenting, 16th-note strumming

Since it dropped in 2002, Can’t Stop has become one of the Chili Peppers’ biggest tracks, racking up hundreds of millions of streams on every platform and becoming one of their most gigged songs. 

It kicks off with a repeating motif played at the 5th and 7th frets on the fifth string. Now, remember, this is the easy bit! Just remember to play the line eight times and you’re good. 

The real action begins at 0:21, with a deceptively tricky riff from Frusciante. We say ‘deceptive’ because the repeating treble notes (on the 7th and 9th frets of the third string) make it sound like it’s going to be simple; however, there is another element to master: a moving bassline on the fifth and sixth strings. 

And while Frusciante’s aggressive pick attack and wide strumming motion propel the track with urgency, you’re left having to keep five idle strings quiet as you navigate from string to string. Practice slowly at first, and keep in mind that your first finger will be doing most of the string muting. 

TG Tip: Try using your thumb to fret the notes on the sixth string. This allows you to play the entire riff without changing hand position.

2. Scar Tissue

Appears at: 0:00 - 0:11

Tempo: 90 bpm

Key/scale: F major

Main techniques: Fret-hand muting, string skipping, sliding, melodic lines over implied chords, pull-offs 

We’re looking at another Chilis mega-hit here, specifically the Beatles-y, Blackbird-esque two-note shapes that open Scar Tissue. 

Frusciante uses the root and 3rd intervals of F, C and D minor chords, but, instead of playing pure 3rds, he adds an extra octave in between each pair of notes, covering a wider register to outline the chord progression while still making room for melodic variations. 

If that sounds like a lot to take on board don’t worry! There are only three shapes to learn. The real challenge comes from the rhythm and picking. 

On the recording Frusciante singles out each individual note (downpick the root note; up-pick the high note), but note that in live shows he tends to strum, keeping the fretted notes ringing out over each other with the idle strings dead quiet. It’s ninja-level fret-hand muting, and it’s well worth practising the song this way to hone your own technique. 

TG Tip: Use your second finger to fret the sixth string to allow your first finger to get a better position to mute the idle strings.

3. Black Summer

Appears at: 0:00 - 0:09

Tempo: 105 bpm

Key/scale: E minor

Main techniques: Hammer-ons and pull-offs within a barre chord, slides, and regular string changes. 

Frusciante's 2022 Chili Peppers comeback track, Black Summer is drenched with Hendrix-esque decorative runs right from the top – and we’re looking at the intro riff here. 

It’s based around a 7th position E minor barre chord with hammer-ons and pull-offs included on the second, third and fourth strings. You’ll need a steady barre so that every string in the chord shape continues to ring out as you hammer and pull. Fluff your barre and it’ll all sound a bit thin! 

After the hammer-ons and pull-offs comes a sliding phrase on the second and third strings. You’ll be starting at the 8th and 9th frets and sliding up to the 10th and 11th. Just like the barre, this is another case where you need to keep your finger pressure consistent. Get it right and these two-note shapes will sing. Finally, note that Frusciante tuned to Eb standard here, but we’ve stayed in E to save you having to retune.

TG Tip: Use a chorus pedal with the rate set to pulse at an eighth-note triplet rhythm, and with mix and depth set to medium levels. 

When John Frusciante made his 2009 solo record The Empyrean, he invited Johnny Marr to play on several tracks. From there, a deep connection was formed between the two musicians.

“It was really fun,” John recalls. “I got to see how Johnny’s creative process worked on the guitar. He’s very unorthodox: in The Smiths’ stuff, the guitar is often a thing blending in with the band, but when you actually see the way Johnny comes up with things, and the way he thinks through the instrument, it’s just totally unconventional. And it was amazing to see that creative process at work fitting into the context of a pre-recorded piece of music. 

“He’s is an extremely nice person as well: mild-mannered, no ego there or anything like that. When we were doing the mix of that album, it wasn’t like normal, when you write down what’s on each track on the sticker that you put on the mixing console – you write rhythm guitar, lead guitar, whatever it is. But with him, it’s just ’Johnny Marr!’ 

• John Frusciante names his favorite modern-day guitar players

“It’s like a synthesizer or a sound effect or something. It doesn’t function in the mix in the way that a guitar usually does. It’s its own little universe coming out of that one track. It was really exciting to see it from that perspective. It just doesn’t fit into the mix in any kind of traditional way. You’ve just got to look at it as its own rule.”

Repaying the compliment, Johnny says: “Without being overly simplistic or corny, guitar players are definitely a breed, and John and I hit it off straight away. There is this obsessive thing with guitar players – whether it’s about sound or scales or models of guitar, it just seems to be part of the package. 

“John and I were recording in his house, which was nice. And with him, there was a quiet sort of intensity. There’s an almost zen-like stillness about his focus when he’s writing. There’s this underlying honour in what he’s doing. John has an approach to music which is almost sacred.”

• Fever Dreams Pts 1-4 is out now via BMG.

John Frusciante mostly listened to electronic music in his time away from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, but towards the end of the recording sessions for the LA outfit’s new album Unlimited Love, he began to seek out fresh approaches to guitar-led rock.

Asked about the modern-day guitarists who inspire him, he initially gives props to Anthony Pirog of Fugazi offshoot The Messthetics, but goes on to explain how he found himself gravitating towards a particular style that he describes as “modern California psychedelic music”.

“They take a certain amount from prog, and they go in such a weird direction in a lot of their work,” he says. “It’s really refreshing to me to hear people making rock music where they’re not just trying to have a hit or trying to do something that they think might be popular. 

“They’ve kind of thrown that idea out the window, and they just want to make music that’s fun to make. And I hear that spirit of fun in that music.”

With that, John shares his thoughts on four of his favourite contemporary players from the scene, all of whom are taking guitar playing in exciting new directions.

• John Frusciante shares 7 tips that will make you a better guitarist

1. Ty Segall

“Ty Segall is a great all-around musician. One of my favourite albums by him, Twins, is just him playing everything. Manipulator is another fave. I love his guitar style because he just goes for it and pours his energy and magnetism through it. 

“He’s so good at making the instrument and the amplification respond to his feelings – you never know what it’s gonna sound like next. His playing has that deceptive ‘careless’ quality that can only actually be done by people who are so intense as souls, that when they don’t give a fuck, you hear conviction and sincerity. In his carelessness, what comes across is that he cares deeply.”

• Ty Segall on his obsession with harmonization, insatiable fuzz lust and why he wrote the guitar parts for his new album on synth

2. Cory Hanson of Wand

“I’m so glad Cory Hanson exists. What he does is exactly what I want to hear from the instrument. He has a very arty approach which has a ton of heart in it – it’s a perfect balance. And he’s such a good singer and songwriter. He really puts himself out there emotionally, and goes out on creative limbs in all kinds of directions. 

“My favourite albums of theirs are probably Perfume, Plum and Golem. His soloing is so creative and engaging – he knows how to make the instrument speak, whether his tone is big or small. 

“I love it when music conveys a vulnerability that makes you feel you have a friend. He’s one of those people who can be just as powerful making soft acoustic music as making loud electric.”

• John Frusciante on what prompted his return to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and how a deep-rooted playing philosophy fueled their explosive comeback album, Unlimited Love

3. John Dwyer of Osees

“John Dwyer is a great band leader and conceptualist. Each of their albums is so unique – some of my favourites are Protean Threat, Orc, and Smote Reverser. I love the direction he’s been taking their music – they keep changing and growing in such unpredictable ways.

“There is a very serious sense of humour in their music – which is a rare kind of musical emotion – but there’s also a very warm comforting coldness to a lot of it. It’s beautiful when music unifies contradictions like that. 

“His guitar parts are extremely inventive – he uses both vertical and horizontal space in amazing ways, and creates guitar parts that assist in the big picture of what the band as a whole is saying, which often means he’s able to say a lot by barely playing at all.

“It seems he cares mainly for the overall statement being made by the group, rather than standing out or any crap like that. And he’s another one of these people whose energy rides like an express train through the instrument.”

4. Zach Irons of Irontom

“Zach Irons is a very creative, unorthodox guitarist. He’s always finding new ways to approach it: hand techniques I’ve never seen and ways of using effects unique to him. He is so deeply rooted in the essence of rock guitar playing that he’s finding ways of retaining that feeling while completely changing the role of the instrument. 

“Lately, he’s been reinventing his whole style, which I only know because he’s a good friend of mine – the first time Zach and I played together, he was 17, and it was him and his dad [original RHCP drummer] Jack Irons, Flea, and me. We played the whole of Led Zeppelin’s Presence album together – it was really fun.

“Ever since then we’ve been close. We understand and support each other in a way that is unique to us. He was born on [original RHCP guitarist] Hillel Slovak’s birthday, which is a trip.”

“The show must go on.” That’s the maxim the musician lives by, no matter what slings and arrows of outrageous fortune come their way. 

This is one of the immutable tenets of performance ethics, contributing to the surely apocryphal tale of the Titanic’s band maintaining their jam during the most infamous maritime disaster of all time. It’s also one that animates the following guitar players to keep on playing when their strings break mid-song, reducing the six-string electric guitar to five – a situation that’d reduce lesser players to jelly.

There is a lot we can learn from watching these professionals deal with a string breakage, often with an air of casual defiance, as though they were Da Vinci swatting a fly from his brow before gamely putting the finishing touches to the Mona Lisa. 

Of course, we know that sometimes the show must not go on, and yet it just does, steamed by its own momentum. How many times have we stood there, riffing into the abyssal void of an empty provincial venue? Or when the crowd just look confused, and it’s only once the adrenaline has subsided that you realize you can’t hear the singer, the drums are mixed too low and you’ve missed a chorus?

Just like string breakages, these things just happen. But, even if you’ve got a Floyd Rose vibrato and a B string flapping in the breeze, the show must go on. With that in mind, here are 10 notable guitarists who kept their cool and kept on playing after snapping a string mid-song.

1. Stevie Ray Vaughan

If the American Film Institute treated YouTube footage of master guitarists playing on after a string breakage with the same reverence it reserves for the feature film, this would be talked about in the same breath as Citizen Kane.

Here, playing with Double Trouble at Austin City Limits, Stevie Ray Vaughan was just 34, and was at the height of his powers. In an all too short a time on this world, SRV was generous with his gifts. This performance of the Hank Ballard blues standard Look At Little Sister is worth studying on many levels. Perhaps the first lesson is on how to stitch together a 12-bar groove with a relaxed-fit pocket with room to swing, and how to assemble a formidable backing band and then get the best out of them.

The second, though, is all about delivering the solo, and continuing to deliver it once the string goes ‘pop’. Wait for the vest to swap out his ‘Number One’ Strat for ‘Scotch’. There is a lot of scuttlebutt with regards to SRV’s preferred string gauge. If you believe some, he used tow ropes for the wound strings. That would certainly allow him to dig in as he did.

2. John Frusciante  

We’ve all been there, right? Jamming with the Red Hot Chilli Peppers in Brazil on our 1960 Fender Telecaster Deluxe, and a string goes. You can’t blame it. Its tensile fortitude had been tested to the limit and beyond by a particularly fevered performance of If You Have To Ask from the Chilis’ 1991 tour de force Blood Sugar Sex Magik – the solo of which is one of Frusciante’s most freaky-deaky.

If the stage-lights hadn’t got this gossamer strand of silver blowing in the wind, no one – perhaps not even Flea, who’s directing traffic in this jam – would have noticed, with Frusciante digging into the elasticity of his right wrist to keep the funk going. It’s funny, because on the record, Frusciante receives a round of applause from those in the studio when he finishes his solo. It’s like they knew… 

3. Slash 

One of the reasons Slash’s guitar playing is always worthy of deeper study is the dichotomy between his deft use of the harmonic minor scale and its melodic grandeur to complement the pentatonic bread-and-butter, and the fact that he has a quasi-bestial playing style. It’s like Dr. Jekyll picks the notes and Mr. Hyde plays them.

The man attacks the strings. Little wonder Ernie Ball used Slash as a test pilot to demonstrate just how tough their Paradigm sets are – Ernie Ball claims its RPS (Reinforced Plain String) technology improves tensile strength by up to 35 per cent, with fatigue strength up 70 per cent.

In this fan-filmed performance of Anastasia – the centerpiece of his 2012 album with Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators, Apocalyptic Love – Slash is tearing it up through the solo before the B string goes bye-bye. Which, frankly, begs the question: if you were to lose a string mid-performance, which would you want it to be? 

Either way, Slash is totally unperturbed. He knows his style, his gear. Those purple Tortex 1.14 mm guitar picks he prefers have very little flex, even when you’re playing a set of 11s. In other words, he knows the risks. They have been priced in. And even when things go south, you can’t let it take you out of the moment. Though, we’d wager it is on occasions such as this that Slash was more than happy he didn’t go down the Floyd Rose route like so many of his peers.

4. B.B. King  

Some might have worried that B.B. King would be out of his element when he took to the stage at Farm Aid – that the wide open spaces and bright afternoon light of the Memorial Stadium in Champaign, Illinois, were too expansive for the King of the Blues to seat 80,000 people in the palm of his hand. But just so long as there was a stage, B.B. King was all right.

Organized by John Mellencamp, Willie Nelson and Neil Young, this star-studded fundraiser must have drawn a high proportion of its audience from the agricultural community, and the cucumber growers among them would have recognized a whole new level of cool when King broke a string during a feisty rendition of How Blue Can You Get?, not taking a moment’s pause, and restringing Lucille while putting heart, lungs and soul into the vocals.

We know King was a stickler for intonation, with the fine-tuning TP-6 tailpiece one of the things that distinguishes Lucille from a garden-variety ES-345. Indeed, an unprintable curse word might have entered his head. But onstage, all that mattered was the song, the audience, the show. Total pro. 

5. Tommy Emmanuel  

If you are performing an unaccompanied rock ’n’ roll boogie on an acoustic guitar at a hazardous tempo – a performance so out-there in the scale of its virtuosity that we’re glad there was video to prove it was one player – and you do it all without breaking a string? Well, did you even perform such a piece.

Here, Australian acoustic maestro Tommy Emmanuel breaks a string and carries on, and that is why this performance is on this list. But this footage is more than just documented proof of Emmanuel’s god-like credentials; it’s that sort of humbling-yet-inspiring wizardry that makes people want to pick up the instrument in the first place.

And all of us who have done so already... well, it’s time to revisit the guitar and ask of ourselves; how can our technique and improvisational brio produce an étude such as this? Chet Atkins would have looked on with pride.

6. Mark Tremonti  

No-one will ever or has ever questioned the physical condition of Mark Tremonti. He is the one player you do not want to go circuit training with. That goes double when it comes to exchanging lead guitar lines. Who among us would not wither like a dandelion stewing in weed control at the prospect?

But such physical condition comes with a health warning for guitar strings, and on this occasion – as Alter Bridge took to the stage at the Baltimore Soundstage, Maryland – Mr. T leaned into the rhythm figure for Cauterize and opened up a can of whoop-ass on the E string.

As the other Mr. T might say, “To have a comeback, you have to have a setback.” Well, luckily a tech was on hand with another PRS solidbody Singlecut to see the song through. Tremonti never missed a beat.

7. Eric Clapton  

Here is some documentary footage of ecclesiastical importance, proving that Eric Patrick Clapton is not God. That’s right: if he really was God, do you think he would be standing onstage at Knebworth putting his Fender Stratocaster through the mill, only for a string to break? 

Surely, fellow six-string theologians, this is incontrovertible proof that Clapton puts one leg of his pink suit trousers on at a time like the rest of us. Or, is this just the sort of thing that God would want us to think. Why set a bush aflame or send Gabriel with a message when a little diversion could be just as effective? 

Whatever the divine provenance or otherwise of Mr. Slowhand, you have to admit that Clapton epitomizes cool here in this performance of Before You Accuse Me. 

You can just picture the scene, side of stage:

Satan (laughing): “Broken string, Mr Clapton? Do you want to have a cry?”

Clapton (hair flowing in the breeze, tastefully hirsute, definitely owns a sports-car): “Get behind me, Satan! I licked you at the Crossroads, mate, and I’m gonna lick you now. You got that!? I’m onstage at Knebworth, wearing a pink suit, with Lace Sensor single-coils in my Strat – ‘cos its 1990 and that’s still legit. This is still a free country, mate!”  

8. Buddy Guy  

Sometimes it’s happenstance that makes a performance great. That’s especially true of playing the blues – an art form that has parallels with stand-up comedy. The storytelling discipline and crowd management requires a similar temperament, the likes of which blues great and master showman Buddy Guy has in spades. 

This performance from 2010’s Crossroads Festival – since released as a concert LP and film – has an end-of-semester feel, the promise of an endless summer. Everyone played this show. But even as proceedings ease into a casual jam on the Stones classic Miss You, with Ronnie Wood and Johnny Lang as wingmen, Guy is always switched on.

When his string breakage interrupts his part and Wood steps in to offer him his Strat, Guy has that look in his eyes; it’s time to style it out and have a little fun with the crowd. “I broke my guitar string, I’m going to keep on trying to play…” His polka-dot signature Strat gets prepared, but all in good time. String breakage? Don’t let it give you the blues. Turn it into the blues. 

9. Ed Sheeran 

With his Chewie II loop station on hand, there are few players in the world more prepared for a string breakage than Ed Sheeran.

It’s a creative tool, of course – the looper building layers of accompaniment, with one of the world’s highest-grossing musicians ostensibly using a beefed-up busker’s rig – but it also serves as a technological prophylactic. Handy when you’re strumming the bejeezus out of a capo’d small-bodied acoustic guitar during the helter-skelter folk-pop of You Need Me, I Don't Need You... something could go.

And it does. The G string succumbs. The loop pedal hangs in there. Another five strings keep the layers going and Sheeran’s vocal delivery puts on a display of alphabet aerobics that’d see a veteran cattle auctioneer pull up injured with a twisted tongue. That’s showbiz.

10. Steve Vai 

Steve Vai’s DIY DNA has stood him in good stead over the years, and its reframing of challenges – physically, creatively and otherwise – as opportunities typically leads to him doing something pretty special, and more often than not something that no-one else has ever done before. 

Recent examples include Knappsack, from his latest album, Inviolate, quite possibly the most Steve Vai album ever recorded. With his arm in a sling, he wrote and performed a track using just his fretting hand, making full use of his Jedi legato training.

But what makes Vai more vulnerable to string breakages than anyone else on this list is that double-locking vibrato. As we all know, a breakage on a Floyd is panic stations for your tuning as the unit is off-balance.

Vai loses his top string, the least problematic, and yet to adapt the solo to The Crying Machine with intonation on-point is genius at work. When he gets the chance to switch JEMs, it’s like a video-game power-up has come online to see him through to the end, triumphant and divine.

Best of 2022: When Total Guitar spent the best part of two hours talking to returning Red Hot Chili Peppers guitar hero John Frusciante, we not only got his story on the making of explosive new album, Unlimited Love, but also delved into his evolution as a guitar player, and what you can learn from his journey.

Frusciante is a once-in-a-generation guitarist. From joining the LA funk-rock institution at the age of 18, to overcoming his preconceptions, finding his voice and ultimately writing some of the most iconic guitar parts of the past four decades, he has a wealth of wisdom to share.

But as he reveals here, it’s not just about the guitar player. The ability to listen, feel and complement the band are crucial steps in every guitarist’s quest to become the player they want to be.

Read on as John shares seven tips that will change the way you approach the guitar, not just from a technical level, but a philosophical one, as well…

1. Never stop pushing yourself

“The first couple of years I was in the Chili Peppers, I wasn’t really on the right path. I thought I could be like Flea where, in those days, he used to practise a half-hour a day, or some days not play at all. 

“And every time he picked up his bass, an awesome thing came out of it. And so when I joined the band, I thought, ‘I could be like that!’ And it turns out, I can’t be like that – if I did that, nothing original would come out of me, I wouldn’t feel good about what I’ve done, I wouldn’t have fun on stage, I wouldn’t be able to write songs and be able to match his level of creativity. 

“For me to be equal to Flea, I have to work 20 times harder: I have to be playing along with other people’s music all the time, I have to be writing way more ideas than I actually show to anybody. I have to be striving to understand things that I don’t understand, and that I may never understand.”

2. Stay true to who you are

“When I was 18 and the early part of being 19, I was trying to be impressive, because I could play fancy things, or because I could be intense. 

“That never left, but I figured out pretty quickly that I couldn’t rely on that ability to be intense and I couldn’t rely on my technique – music doesn’t really mean anything to people unless you’re really giving something of yourself in it and putting yourself out there in a vulnerable way. Not trying to show people, ‘Hey, watch me, I’m good,’ but to give people a piece of your heart. 

“It was a switch that took place right after we got off tour for [1989 album] Mother’s Milk. I just decided, if I keep going the way that I’m going, I’m never going to be happy with anything that I do, so I have to give up my ideas of what good is and I just have to try to be myself and figure out what that is – and stop trying to be what I think people want me to be, or what I think the Chilis are supposed to be. I have to try to just figure out: ‘Who am I?’”

3. Don’t set out to impress

“Generally, when I put away all those ideas of trying to be ‘good’, or trying to impress people, a thing that I can’t explain from my soul started to come out of my playing – and people started liking my playing a lot more at that point; I started to mean something to people. 

“It was one of those weird conundrums, because I had given up caring at that point: I figured I’m just gonna be myself, come what may; I’m going to stop trying to be impressive. And that was actually what caused people to start to really be into what I was doing.”

4. Keep it simple and your bandmates will shine

“When I started to put all those teenage ideas out of my head, and I started really simplifying and trying to play more from my heart rather than trying to dazzle people with my fingers, Flea started sounding a lot better.

“I realised that by going into rehearsal, and instead of playing, just do feedback, or hold one note for a long time. I noticed that this made Flea sound awesome! I saw how it affected the chemistry in the band, as well; it made everybody else sound better, because I was giving them this canvas that they could paint on, as opposed to trying to step in front of other people to do my painting. 

“I was like, ‘I’m gonna let them do the painting and I’m just gonna give them an atmosphere to do that in,’ and I saw that it had a really good effect on everybody.”

5. A guitar player’s true ability lies in how they interact with the band

“Too often people assume that a guitar player’s worth comes from their ability to draw attention to themselves. And there are a lot of great guitar players who are great at drawing attention to themselves. 

“But to me the essential thing that those people have – that other people who don’t draw attention to themselves like Bernard Sumner in Joy Division, or Syd Barrett, or Johnny Thunders or Matthew Ashman from Bow Wow Wow or John McGeoch in Siouxsie and the Banshees – to me, what they have in common with Eddie Van Halen and Randy Rhoads and Jimi Hendrix is that they knew how to be a member of a band and make everybody else sound better. They knew how to be team players.

“Yeah, Eddie Van Halen happened to have a flashy style, but he was a great rhythm guitar player, and he made those drums sound great. He made that bass sound great. He made the singer sound great. To me, it really doesn’t matter how much technique you have; the real skill in being a guitar player is in making the rest of the band sound good.

“And so for some people, it’s just who you are as a soul. For some people, that means doing a lot of flashy stuff as well as doing the guitar parts for the song. For some people, that means not soloing at all. For some people, it means doing a very simple kind of soloing.

“I feel like, for me, that’s where I measure a guitar player’s skill: in how they assist the rest of the band in creating one sound together. A rock band is not four separate people in their own bubble; a rock band is three or four or five people who all create one sound together. 

“And each person’s skill can be judged by what that sound is – not by what they’re doing individually or what it looks like, or whether or not it’s physically hard to do for up-and-coming musicians. I realised that when I was about 19, 20, and I’ve always felt that way.”

6. Master your dynamics

“Accents and non-accents are, I think, the most important thing in terms of sounding expressive as a guitar player. That’s the thing you have no control of when you start playing, and you wonder, ‘What is it that makes these people on these records sound so much better than me, and I’m playing the same thing?’ 

“It’s your accents and your non-accents, and then everything in between. My practice routine has a lot to do with playing scales in different ways that switch between accents and non-accents. I’m always extremely conscious of it – I’m really focused on that whole idea of the volume that comes from hitting notes harder and faster, or softer and slower.”

7. Switch off your mind and feel the chemistry

“When you shut your brain off [while jamming], that’s when you notice funny things happening – like, Flea and I will play the same exact riff at the same time without either of us having played it before. 

“It’s definitely best to turn your brain off, and just listen and feel whatever feelings everybody else is putting through you. It’s definitely important to listen to everybody else, but you should also be having fun listening to what comes out of your instrument. And it’s another thing I like about feedback: that you don’t know what’s gonna happen next. So, you listen to what’s coming out of the speaker, and then you play to that.

“Sometimes with guitar players, especially when they’re very concerned with whether or not what’s going to come out of them is good or not, they tend to place themselves before the notes that come out. And I know that’s a natural thing to do, the way our minds are locked into the present moment. 

“But if you can let go and listen to what’s happened as it’s just happened and respond to that, no matter how much you have to slow yourself down to do that, I feel like that’s the more productive angle to listen from, and it’s definitely the more fun angle to listen from. 

“Because if you’re worried about what’s gonna happen before it happens, you might miss the boat altogether, but if you listen to what’s just happened, and you pay attention to how that relates to the other things that are happening, it becomes a regenerative process.

“In the same way that feedback is something that, while it’s coming through you, it comes back at you, I feel like it can be that way with any kind of playing: play a couple of notes and wait for five seconds before you play any more notes. 

“Listen to the feeling of how that affected the other instruments, and then just play whatever the fuck comes out of you without thinking about it when the right time comes. 

“That’s one of the main ways that my whole mental state switched at that point when I felt like I found my own style: before that, I was stuck in that moment right before you play everything you’re gonna play. And after that, I found myself more located in that moment after you’ve played something.”

In the end, it was a simple reason that led John Frusciante to return to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. “I really wanted that challenge of trying to work in a democratic band with people that I respect and people that I have a chemistry with,” he says.

“I felt that to move forward as a soul and as a human being, I had to accept that challenge. I felt that it would be good for me to try to work harmoniously with them, and not have my ego be the thing that was driving me forward, but to have love and respect for them. That was the thing: to try to be a part of a whole.”

Frusciante is talking to Total Guitar from his home in Los Angeles, the city where the Red Hot Chili Peppers formed back in 1983. With his long hair unkempt under a wooly beanie, his face unshaven, wearing black-rimmed glasses and his lean frame clad in a loose-fitting yellow t-shirt and green jacket, the guitarist looks pretty much the same as he did 16 years ago, when double album Stadium Arcadium gave the band its first-ever US number one.

But it was in the wake of that album’s success that John quit the band – the second time he had done so, having previously bailed in 1992, both exits prompted by his discomfort with the pressures of fame.

Following his departure in 2009, the Chili Peppers went on to release two albums with another prodigious California guitarist, Josh Klinghoffer. Frusciante, meanwhile, pursued his love of electronic music and modular synths, in an effort to make music that stood apart from the band with which he made his name, and with entirely personal – and non-commercial – aspirations.

So it came as a surprise when the Chili Peppers issued a social media communique in late 2019 announcing Frusciante’s return, and with it, the potential for a new album – their first with John in the fold since Stadium Arcadium. 

The fruits of their labour, Unlimited Love, finds the band reunited with super-producer Rick Rubin, showcasing 17 tracks that run the gamut of their collective influences, from breezy funk to progressive rock and hardcore punk. 

In short, the chemistry between John, bassist Flea, drummer Chad Smith and frontman Anthony Kiedis has resurfaced intact, a musical formulation unimpacted by the decade-plus break and even a global pandemic.

Naturally, there’s a lot to talk about, and John is certainly in the mood to talk – so much so that his conversation with TG extends beyond its allotted 60 minutes to nearly two hours.

The guitarist loves to discuss the subjects closest to his heart – the art of making music, his studio secrets, the sense of anticipation ahead of the band’s return to the live stage. He is also candid about his reasons for leaving the band over a decade ago, and what ultimately brought him back to his musical brothers.

“I’ve done a lot of reflection on the causes of my quitting the band the last time that I don’t think I had the mental space to be aware of at the time,” he says. “It was like, ‘I just really don’t want to do all this living in this world of fame and publicity; I just want to concentrate on making electronic music and making music just to make music, and not to make people happy, not to be successful.’ And that was just what I needed at the time.

“But I looked back and realised that with some of the personal stresses between me and other members of the band, I saw my own part of it more than I think I saw it back in 2009. And while I think no one person is at fault in a situation where somebody quits a band, I’d grown enough as a person to see my side in it, as opposed to just playing the victim.”

A new beginning

It’s hard to overstate the impact John Frusciante has had on generations of guitarists. With his sparse, feel-driven lines on the Chili Peppers’ 1991 breakthrough Blood Sugar Sex Magik, he introduced ’90s players to a wiry, exhilarating blend of funk and post‑punk. 

And in his second tenure with the band, a run of three expansive, diverse, multi-million selling albums – Californication, By the Way and Stadium Arcadium – kept adventurous textures and guitar solos at the forefront of mainstream rock, at a time when pop-punk and nu-metal ruled the airwaves. 

For this third phase, the reunited band took their tentative first steps in the rehearsal room. Rather than begin writing straight off the bat, they played material from the earliest Chili Peppers albums – released when John was a fan rather than a member of the band – in a bid to reconnect with the roots of the group. 

Meanwhile, band members suggested covers of classic tracks – Some Other Guy by Richie Barrett, Trash by the New York Dolls, Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson’s Hot Little Mama and the Kinks’ Waterloo Sunset all received a workout – which injected fresh energy into rehearsals.

“I didn’t want to feel any pressure about writing stuff, because that would have been overwhelming,” John recalls. “So for a month or two, we were just playing songs by other people, and playing really early Chili Peppers stuff. We just had a lot of fun. 

“And luckily that spirit of fun ended up staying with us throughout the whole writing process, even after those songs had been phased out and replaced by going there every day being excited about the new stuff we were bringing in, or the jams that we were turning into songs.”

And boy, did they have a lot of songs. By the time the band hit Rubin’s Shangri-La studio in 2021, they had 45 tracks ready to go, with a further three written during the sessions. All were ultimately recorded, leaving more than enough material for a follow-up record (“I definitely feel like we saved some of the best stuff for the potential next album,” John teases). But, he adds, he never had the intention to write quite so many songs.

“You know, I was ready to stop when we had, like, 20 – I felt like that was good enough,” he laughs. “But one thing led to another and somebody or other kept encouraging me to keep bringing in more songs. So, before we knew it, we had way more songs than we’d ever written for a record before.”

For his part, Frusciante had to readjust his guitar playing to write rock music again. During his electronic music wilderness, any time with a guitar in his lap was more often spent appreciating music than composing it. 

He learned every solo recorded by jazz great Charlie Christian, and took inspiration from the chord progressions in landmark ’70s albums by progressive rock legends Genesis. It helped him reconnect with his love of the instrument.

“I developed a real fan relationship with the different forms of rock music, without it having anything to do with my identity,” he explains. “So when I went back to playing in the band, I knew it would affect what I wrote.”

Accordingly, the guitarist had a vision for where he wanted to take his compositions, and it harked back to the origins of the genre he was returning to.

“I really wanted to focus on where I see the beginning of rock music in history – the rock ’n’ roll of the late-’50s, and the electric blues that took place throughout the ’40s and ’50s,” he says.

“I wanted to imagine that I was a guy coming up at the same time as The Beatles or Cream or Jimi Hendrix, to see: ‘What would I have done to embellish upon that foundation?’ I felt like as long as I’m getting back into making rock music, let’s go to the roots of it.

“I’d spent so much time on other records specifically focusing on Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix and Cream. Rather than do that again, I thought, ‘Let’s focus on Elvis and Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown and Freddie King and Albert King, and Buddy Holly and Gene Vincent and Ricky Nelson – and then, okay, so how would I try to do something beyond this?’”

Those plans would change shape once John began collaborating with the band. To warm up for recording each day, he would play through Jeff Beck’s classic albums Truth, Blow By Blow and Wired. But equally, he was re-immersing himself in the textural approach of Siouxsie And The Banshees’ John McGeoch, as well as Greg Ginn’s abrasive riffs in Black Flag. His approach became an amalgamation of all those influences, with a smattering of ’80s guitar heroes for good measure.

“I really love guitar players like Randy Rhoads and Eddie Van Halen for the way that they could make the instrument explode through hand and whammy bar techniques,” he says. “But I also really like the way people like Greg Ginn or Kurt Cobain play without it being so much about technique – although there are all kinds of unconventional techniques in there – but the focus is definitely a more visceral thing.

“Eventually, by the time we were recording, my concept was to find a bridge between those two conceptions of the instrument: that idea of making it explode with the electricity of the human energy that comes through the strings.

“And, also, using the full range of the instrument in terms of the types of techniques that, while Eddie Van Halen and Randy Rhoads did a lot to develop them, I see them all as being rooted in what Jeff Beck did on Blow By Blow and Wired.”

Stretching out

Ultimately, Unlimited Love became a distillation of the guitar heroics Frusciante employed on the bombastic Stadium Arcadium, sitting alongside the ambient sonics found on By the Way’s more experimental moments, all while incorporating a more overt punk influence. 

His wide-ranging approach spans the anthemic alt-rock of Black Summer through to the sultry funk of Poster Child and the ferocious hardcore of These Are The Ways, which dishes out the album’s heaviest riffs – although the track’s inception was very different to the rock monster that ended up on the record.

“Before I wrote the music for These Are The Ways, I was playing along with Sparks’ album Propaganda,” John recalls. “I was just blown away by how seemingly simple but imaginative their chord progressions are. 

“But once I brought it to the band, we turned it into this heavy-duty thing where the drums go from being like Keith Moon to Black Sabbath to Metallica. The end seems like a speed-metal thing to me. With the power of the band, it definitely turned into something else.”

Another stylistic left turn crops up on White Braids & Pillow Chair, a mid-tempo chord workout that ends up as a full-blown rockabilly wig-out. It was one of the first songs John brought to the table, and one of his favourites in the way it “mixes up a few things that are important to me”, blending a voice-leading progression inspired by Genesis keyboardist Tony Banks with an early-’60s surf outro.

John’s more textural approach, meanwhile, crops up on slow-burn groovers Not the One and It’s Only Natural, which combine the minimal six-string ethos of ’80s goth with techniques inspired by all-time guitar greats. 

The former draws on Adrian Belew and Eddie Van Halen’s mastery of the guitar’s volume control, teamed with expansive digital delays. The latter features smatterings of backwards delay – an ’80s hallmark – on its psychedelic solo, but its deceptively simple verse atmospherics found John once again turning to Jeff Beck for inspiration.

“It sounds like there’s an echo on It’s Only Natural,” he says, “but I’m doing that with my hands. That’s not an echo. That’s me with my right hand just being loud, loud, loud, softer, softer, softer, softer, softer. 

“I had actually been doing it a lot because on Jeff Beck’s Blow By Blow there’s a song called Constipated Duck, and I think he probably actually has an echo on his guitar, but to play along with it, you have to do that: play loud, softer, softer, softer, softer, to sound like you’re matching the recording. 

“Flea had come up with the idea of It’s Only Natural on piano. And then when he switched to bass, I thought that would be cool if I tried to do that kind of thing, like I’m doing on Constipated Duck, but make it a part of the song.”

Old friends

While John sought to explore new ground on Unlimited Love with his songwriting and technical philosophy, his gear ethos saw him reunite with the familiar tools he used to carve his name into the hearts of millions of young players.

“The main guitar that I played was my ’62 Strat, which is the same guitar that I got when I rejoined the band back in 1998,” he says of his go-to, which still features the original hand-wound pickups, but now comes loaded with an ILITCH hum-cancelling system. “Back in ’98 I didn’t have money for a Strat, but I told them all I had was a Fender Jaguar, and I felt that I should have a Strat for it to sound like the band. 

“Anthony and I went to Guitar Center and he lent me the money to get a Strat, and it was the one that spoke to me off the wall. And ever since then, I’ve had many other Strats – from that period of time, generally – and that one that happened to be there that day, I’ve never found one better than that.”

Other old favourites also made an appearance: his maple-necked ’55 Strat – whose Seymour Duncans were recently replaced with a louder, better-matched set of pickups courtesy of Fender Senior Master Builder Paul Waller – as well as his ’61 Fiesta Red Strat and a Jaguar or two.

Acoustics – as heard on electro-folk groover Bastards of Light and delicate album closer Tangelo – were all Martin: two 1940s 0-15 mahogany models, a D-28 Dreadnought and a 12-string.

But there were some new-to-the-Chili Peppers additions, too, via a cabal of Yamaha SGs from the late-’70s and early-’80s. These dual-humbucker heavyweights became John’s main squeeze during his time away from the band, but proved to be the perfect guitars for overdubs during the album’s heavier moments.

He explains: “When there’s a heavy section with distorted powerchords and that kind of thing, a lot of the time the Strat was what I played in the basic track, but [doubled with a] Yamaha SG straight into the Marshall with no distortion pedal or anything, just getting the distortion from the amp. Quite a bit of the time it’s the Yamaha on the left, for example, and the Fender Strat through a distortion pedal on the other speaker. And there are even some mellow, soft things where it’s the SG.”

Amp-wise, the Marshall Silver Jubilee and Major stacks that flanked the guitarist at the Chili Peppers’ biggest shows were dusted off and taken out of retirement for the bulk of the tones, while a Roland Jazz Chorus wound up on a few dubs. But John’s lockdown reading also inspired him to seek out an old classic – which, as it transpired, had an unexpected connection to the band.

“I also had an Ampeg B-15,” he reveals. “I really loved both the guitar playing and the engineering of Greg Sage from the Wipers. He’s gotten some of the best guitar tones I think anybody’s ever recorded. He mentioned that he thought [the B-15] was the best amplifier ever made. 

“So I bought one of those while we were recording the record to have a small amp to have a difference in tone for certain things. Then when I brought it in, Flea looked at it and he said, ‘That’s the same amp my stepdad used to have!’ His stepdad was a bass player and upright bass player, and that was the amp he would plug his upright bass into. That was a funny coincidence.”

But it was the Marshalls that would light the tonal fuse for some of the album’s guitar highlights, in particular the visceral, screaming feedback that tears across the solo sections of The Great Apes and The Heavy Wing.

“Feedback is one of the funnest parts of making music for me,” John enthuses. “The approach to the feedback is just volume: having all four cabinets of two stacks on at once and finding the different places to stand where the really good feedback’s gonna happen, and walking around while I’m playing the solos to get different feedback on different notes. 

“And just being extremely loud – like, so loud that if I didn’t have my headphones on, I couldn’t have stood there. The headphones were the only thing preventing my ears from getting blown out!”

The sheer volume meant that while many of the rhythm tracks were recorded live in the room, John was forced to track most of his solos as overdubs to avoid the amps bleeding too heavily into the drum mics. 

But those band recordings found the guitarist fine-tuning his core sound, too, making one major adjustment to his Strat and amps compared with previous Chili Peppers outings.

“The bass [neck] pickup is on pretty much everything,” he reveals. “For a period of time, like By the Way or Californication, I was using the bridge pickup quite a bit. So, I noticed that when we were recording this, my treble was up on three on both of the Marshalls – in the old days, my treble was always on zero.”

As a result, the guitarist is still figuring out his pedalboard for the Chili Peppers’ upcoming live dates, and contemplating an EQ pedal to even out the treble response on those neck and bridge pickups. Naturally, the studio was ripe for effects experimentation elsewhere, too: modular and rack units received regular use, alongside more conventional pedals.

“I definitely used more delays on this than I had in any time in the past,” he says. “Mainly because I was inspired by that ’50s stuff – things like Gene Vincent or Elvis, where a lot of the time, there’s a slapback delay, not just on the guitar, but on the drums and on the vocal and bass and everything. 

“So, I had a few: I had an MXR analog one, I had a [DeltaLab] Effectron II digital delay. Somebody suggested that I get one of these tape delays that they make now, the Fulltone Tube Tape Echo. That’s the last thing you hear on the album at the end of Tangelo, when all of a sudden there’s a delay that starts and then it builds into a kind of feedback for a second and then it’s noise.”

One new discovery was the Boss SD-1 Super Overdrive for a chunkier rather than more aggressive tone, as well as the MXR Super Badass Variac Fuzz for hairier solos and meatier overdubs. But at the time of writing, it remains to be seen how many of those will make it out onto the road, and whether John’s ’board will approach Slane Castle levels of enormity.

“I never used very many!” he laughs at the mention of the cornucopia of stompboxes at his feet during the landmark 2003 show. “A lot of the time, one pedal was just for one particular song, and so I had to have it there just in case we played that song.

“And it was also because sometimes after being on tour for a long time, I get bored with the same sound from night to night. I like to have pedals that are just there for me to do something weird and different if the mood strikes me.”

I Like Dirt

John presents a guided tour of the key elements on his trimmed-down rehearsal pedalboard, stacked with pedals that wound up on Unlimited Love

Ibanez WH10 and Boss CE-1 Chorus Ensemble

“I used a lot of the same things – the same Ibanez wah-wah pedal, the old one. And the same old Boss chorus pedal, the Chorus Ensemble.”

Boss DS-2 Turbo Distortion and SD-1 Super Overdrive

“Normally, I would use the DS-2. But I also used the SD-1 – it’s less distorted. It’s not a super-extreme kind of distortion, but it can give you a powerful tone.”

MXR Super Badass Variac Fuzz and Custom Badass ’78 Distortion

“There was definitely a lot of MXR stuff on the album. They gave me a bunch of pedals early on. I used their fuzz tone quite a bit, not just for solos, but sometimes even for guitar parts for choruses or whatever. And a distortion pedal of theirs, too.”

MXR Reverbs

“That was on almost all the time [at rehearsals – the album features real room reverb]. It’s one of those things that comes from me being an engineer – I don’t think I used to be very conscious of room sounds, but now they’re very important to me to give some sort of sense of space to what you’re recording. And so it’s very subtle. It’s a very short room sound, but I just like to hear the guitar that way. The other is set for a more long kind of reverb.”

MXR Dyna Comp

“Sometimes the Dyna Comp was just exactly what I needed in terms of getting the right amount of sustain on clean things, and having a more Taffy-like kind of sound. I’ve loved the Dyna Comp ever since I was a little kid. I was a big fan of Adrian Belew when I was a youngster, and he had one of those on, like, all the time back in those days in the early ’80s.”

Around the world

Of course, there will be plenty of opportunity for Frusciante to push his tones and his playing on the Chili Peppers’ upcoming world tour. 

Unsurprisingly, the setlist is likely to be heavily populated by greatest hits from his tenures with the band, as well as plenty of new material – at the time of Total Guitar’s interview, the band have been almost exclusively rehearsing all 48 of the songs they wrote for this album and its potential follow-up. 

So, while the prospect of hearing Unlimited Love and even yet-to-be-released material is a tantalising one for fans, John emphasises how much he’s enjoying revisiting the old classics and adding some fresh, improvisatory twists.

“It really does feel good to play the old songs again,” he says. “There’s been a magic feeling for all of us going back to that material. And, you know, I like improvising on stage. So I look forward to the jamming parts of it, and making up new solos every night.

“[There’s] that reciprocal thing that happens with an audience, where their energy and the pressure of playing in front of them and not being able to rewind the tape and go backwards, it brings something out of you as a musician that there’s no way to recreate as a guitar player sitting in a studio recording your music by yourself, as I have in the past.

“I look forward to playing under that pressure, and letting go, and letting whatever spirits are with us that night come through me, and trying to match that feeling that gets generated between the band and an audience.” He pauses. “You know, I haven’t really played in front of an audience in about 12 years. So it’s as new to me as writing rock music was when I rejoined.”

Yet Frusciante has more than settled into his old role; it’s as if he never left. And while he’s brought some new tricks from an engineering perspective – citing his explorations of backwards delay and reverb and modular guitar treatments as highlights – it’s rediscovering that raw musical connection, and the simple joys of playing with like-minded musicians, that’s kept things exciting and fresh. 

All in all, it paints a rosy picture of John’s third act with the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

“There’s an appreciation of the chemistry that I can’t say I really had towards the end of being in the band last time,” he admits. “An appreciation of what we’re capable of – when you get so used to something, you sometimes tend to take things for granted.

“I’d had lots of time making music where I do whatever I want. And that was great. And I continue to do that. But it seemed like a really good step for me as a human being to try to play in a band again. Most of all, I just have a lot of fun playing with those guys.”

• Thanks to John’s guitar tech, Henry Trejo, for his assistance with this feature.