From being named Eric Clapton’s favorite new guitarist to making a special appearance at Millennial pop prince Justin Bieber’s highly anticipated Coachella set, Mk.gee has, for many, redefined what it means to be a guitar hero in the 2020s.

In particular, his tone and, in turn seemingly leftfield gear choices have played a key part in that process.

Mk.gee’s baritone-strung Fender Jaguar into a Tascam 424 set-up – in full display on his 2024 debut record, Two Star & the Dream Police, and piquing the interest of tone geeks during his shows – has forced many to reconsider what makes a ‘good’ guitar tone, and inspired guitar pedal brands such as JHS Pedals to capitalize on the lo-fi trend.

Now, as The Atlantic reports in their Mk.gee gear deep dive, another essential piece of his tonal puzzle, the Roland VG-8 – an early-stage modeler released in 1995 that well predated current-day amp modeler technology – is also seeing something of a renaissance.

According to The Atlantic’s interview with Chris Bristol, the former chair and CEO of Roland U.S., the VG-8 was crafted as “a toolbox filled with essentially every existing guitar sound.”

It was famously used by experimentalists such as Joni Mitchell, David Lynch, David Bowie-era Reeves Gabrels, and even Sting.

However, its hefty $3,000 price tag meant that it held a degree of exclusivity, or, as Paul Youngblood, the former president of Roland’s U.S. BOSS division, describes it, “because of the price, it was a very elitist, expensive technological product.”

Music technology in the mid-90s “wasn’t anywhere near what it is today,” but, as Youngblood asserts, it “had a lo-fi kind of sound to it” that made – and still makes – it appealing. It also marks a “nostalgia for a time when digital was still new,” notes Steve Waksman, a rock musicologist at the University of Huddersfield, in the same interview.

And thanks to the Mk.gee school of guitarists, the VG-8 is well and truly making a comeback, and this hype is reflected in its price tag on the secondary market.

At the time of writing, the VG-8’s estimated price range on Reverb is between $807 and $1,065, with prices reaching as high as $2,999 in October 2024 – a few months after Mk.gee’s debut album release. Mere coincidence? Unlikely.

In more recent news relating to this early-stage modeler, David Lynch’s Parker Fly guitar, which sold last year at auction, also came with a Roland VG-8 – and the two oddball pieces of equipment were put through their paces by their new owners.

Alabama has lost one of its most talented guitar players as Wayne Perkins, the legendary Swamper who played with the Rolling Stones, Joni Mitchell, Bob Marley, and more, has died, aged 74.

His death was confirmed on Facebook by his brother, Dale, who played with his brother in Alabama Power, and said there was no one quite like him.

“For those who haven’t heard, Wayne passed away yesterday peacefully,” wrote Dale. “Our sisters and family members were there with him. We appreciate all the kind thoughts and memories. He was one of a kind and we loved him very much, and thank you all.”

Perkins was a giant of southern rock guitar. He started gigging at 15, quit school a year later, and soon found himself making his bones in Muscle Shoals, working as a session player in Quin Ivy’s studio.

One thing led to another. He spent nine months getting acquainted with the business before the money ran out, and Ivy suggested he tried his luck at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio. He had some, working with David Porter and the Soul Children, Dave Crawford, Brad Shapiro, and Dee Dee Warwick. He played on Lynyrd Skynyrd's demos.

The late ‘60s was a time for experimenting with the guitar. Perkins was no different. He recalled digging into his tool box to find something to play slide with. He credits Duane Allman for introducing him to the Coricidin pill bottle.

“He was recording with a band called the Hour Glass, before the Allman Brothers, I went over to show him my slide piece. I had a deep well socket, a 9/16” craftsman tool bit, a socket,” said Perkins, speaking to MoJo Road Media Creations Producer Glynn Wilson. “So I went over to show it to him – and this is a really cool thing – he went, ‘Isn’t that a little heavy or something?’”

“He said, ‘Look, try this out!’ And I said, ‘Oh, this is kinda loose,’ but the thickness of the glass made the string hum a little better.’ He let me try that thing. He said, ‘Get yourself to the drugstore, get yourself a Coricidin bottle, pour all the pills out, take the label off. That’s your slide piece.’ That was what he used.”

Perkins was just getting started, acquainting himself with the greats. He would consider then ultimately reject an offer to join Lynyrd Skynyrd. He joined up with Steve and Tim Smith for Smith, Perkins & Smith, a four-piece with another Muscle Shoal alumnus, Roger Hawkins, on the drums, and Island Records snapped them up.

Their eponymous 1972 debut would be overshadowed – at least in the remorseless shuffle of musical history – by Perkins’ collaboration with Bob Marley. But this was a great time for the band, who supported Free and Uriah Heep, and played at the Cavern in Liverpool.

At Island boss Chris Blackwell’s request, Perkins played on Concrete Jungle, Baby We've Got a Date (Rock It Baby), and Stir it Up from the Wailers’ Island Records debut, Catch a Fire. Blackwell’s instincts were good; Concrete Jungle was a breakout moment for Marley.

Not a bad thing to have on your resumé. He was 21 years old.

“He wanted me to ‘do that Southern rock guitar thing, or whatever you do.’ So I met Marley, but just briefly,” recalled Perkins, speaking to Black and White’s Ed Reynolds in 2009. “I didn't know any of these guys. And the first thing I noticed when I walked downstairs was that the basement was in a fog. Lots of [marijuana] smoke. It was too funny. I tried to get down to business.”

Next up for Perkins was Joni Mitchell – whom he dated for a while. Perkins played on her 1974 masterpiece Court and Spark, using James Burton’s pink Paisley Telecaster for the session. Tom Scott of the LA Express was putting some overdubs on Car on a Hill and Mitchell asked if he had any ideas. He did. But he didn’t have a guitar with him; his gear was with Leon Russell.

“We got her band's equipment but the guitar wouldn't stay in tune on the bottom three strings, so I told her this wasn't going to work like I wanted it to,” Perkins told Black and White. “I pointed to this huge anvil guitar case in the studio that had ‘James Burton’ written on the side of it. It’s 3 a.m. Joni was hesitant to mess with it. But I flipped the case open and there was that pink paisley Telecaster.

“I told her, ‘Here's what we're gonna do, we’re gonna do some city sounds like you want.’ So I took Burton’s Telecaster and I overdubbed the slide parts on Car on a Hill on James Burton's guitar. When I put the guitar back in the case, I folded the damn strap different than the way I found it, so he’d know somebody had messed with it [laughs].”

What did we say about Catch a Fire being a good thing to have on your resumé? It led to arguably Perkins' greatest collaboration, working with the Rolling Stones. He nearly got the gig to replace Mick Taylor. Leon Russell and Eric Clapton had vouched for him. Keith Richards loved reggae.

Ronnie Wood would pip him at the last, but not before sufficiently impressing the Stones that they would invite him into the studio as a session player on Black and Blue.

Hand of Fate just came together, right there in the studio. Perkins couldn’t believe what was happening.

“The whole thing sounded real rough, too. It kinda just sucked,” he said. “It was like the worst garage band I'd ever heard in my life. Then the engineer turned on the red light and it’s like somebody reached out with a magic wand and went, ‘Bing!’ And all of a sudden, it’s the Stones! Damnedest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Those sessions found Perkins playing lead on Hand of Stone, Memory Motel, and Fool to Cry. Worried About You was recorded then, too, but was only released on 1981’s Tattoo You.

Missing out on the Stones gig didn’t seem to bother him unduly. He went onto Alabama Power, played bass guitar with Lonnie Mack, recorded soundtrack work for Karate Kid II and the 1986 Rodney Dangerfield vehicle Back to School, and pursued a solo career before retiring in ill health in the 2000s after being diagnosed with brain tumors.

Along with having released nearly 30 solo records, Robben Ford has played with everyone from Joni Mitchell to Kiss to Miles Davis. He’s 74, but he’s not done yet – he's just moved to London and is preparing to release another album, Two Shades of Blue, in 2026.

“What keeps me going is that I love to play music,” he tells Guitar World. “I love the whole experience: playing with people whose playing you like, and having an audience out there.”

For his upcoming release the maverick nomad explored territory previously claimed by Jeff Beck. “If I was going to do another album, I didn’t wanna do the same thing,” Ford says. “Deciding on a tribute meant I needed to bring myself to do it justice. It gave me a new lease on guitar playing, in a way. I’ve appreciated this little journey.”

Was Jeff Beck a significant influence on you?

Not in the beginning. Like everyone else I had the Truth album and I loved that – but that’s a long time ago. I was more inspired by Mike Bloomfield, Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix. As the years progressed I got more into jazz, Miles Davis and John Coltrane.

So Jeff wasn’t really on my radar. I saw him play live for the first time in about 2008, and it was the best guitar concert I’ve ever been to. I started listening to him – but not a ton, because his style is so personal to him, and you sound like who you listen to.

I’ve never listened to any players for extended periods of time because it’s a big mistake. That’s how I feel about it. But I got to hear him play a few more times, and I came to think of him as the outstanding living guitar player of our time. Then he passed away, and it lit me up to tribute him in some way; and it was a way for me to go somewhere with the guitar that I hadn’t gone before.

What’s it been like playing a Strat, which you’re not known for?

I played a Strat a little in the ‘80s; I used it when I was in more of a supportive role when I toured with David Sanborn and in the time I spent with Miles Davis. The vibrato was on the guitar, but I was rarely using it – just a bit here and there. I’m more of a straight-ahead kind of player; I went back to the humbucking style of guitar.

So revisiting the Strat has really been a blast! I didn’t own a Strat. I’m living in London now and I had a relationship with Anderton’s, so I went there and found one, a ’66 reissue from the Fender Custom Shop.

How has the Strat altered the way you play?

It’s very specific. I used it on the music that was written for and inspired by Jeff Beck. It has its own function; the vibrato really makes a big difference. The Strat has an entirely different feel from the guitars I normally use.

I’m still learning – the use of harmonics, the use of the vibrato, the use of the sounds. It takes a while to get good at these things. But I’m really pleased with what people are gonna hear.

What amps are you going with?

Always tube amps. The last few years, if I’m not able to take the Dumble with me I’ve been using a Little Walter. I met the guy who makes those, Phil Bradbury, through Vince Gill, because Vince was using them. We had to find the right speaker configuration – Phil’s really into that. So I have what’s called The ’59: a 50-watt head with a 2x12 cabinet. And I also have a 100-watt.

Listeners aren’t always keen on new music from elder artists.

Yeah, I know. We all have to just give up on that and do it for ourselves – and I don’t wanna play somebody else’s music. I wanna play my own. I’ve been writing music since I was 17; and I don’t mean with any great result, necessarily, although over time it does get better. If you wanna play something, you gotta write something.

You could have joined other bands, but you do what speaks to you. Do you know what drives that?

There’s always something about working for other people where I get bored. I would get bored within a matter of weeks – though with Joni Mitchell I was never bored. But that was a long time ago. David Sanborn was fun. But I got bored with Miles Davis; he started tightening up the music, and we stopped playing a lot of the things that were fun to play.

He was like, “Robben, play that shit just like the record,” and we’d be doing more and more of the Tutu record, and less improvisation. It was just playing the parts, and I didn’t join Miles Davis to do that.

I always wanna be playing something for real. I wanna love it and be able to feel that I’m giving it 100%. But working for other people, it’s usually about them, you know? When you really feel it’s about them, you’re just a cog, just punching a time clock.

I’ve always needed to feel like there was room to move and that we were all in it together. So I kinda have to have my own band, and I try to be the bandleader that they deserve.

Why do you think you were never bored with Joni?

She’s just the ultimate creative artist. She was lovely to work for and the musicians around her were all great – especially on the first tour, which resulted in the Miles of Aisles album. It was just a constant joy. She was just one of the guys and behaved that way; that never changed.

She loved working with the people, and we had that feeling where we were all in it together. And of course, her next record was The Hissing of Summer Lawns, which is like frigging Sgt. Pepper’s, you know? It’s just a work of genius.

What gear did you bring into the studio with you for The Hissing of Summer Lawns?

I did In France They Kiss on Main Street, Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow, and Harry’s House/Centerpiece. But it’s hard for me to talk about a rig because I didn’t have one! I was probably playing through a Fender Twin, which is ridiculous in a recording studio because they’re so loud.

Or maybe it was something rented from SIR, which is very possible. I probably had a little pedalboard with a tuner, a phase shifter and a fuzztone. I was not hip in those days! It wasn’t quite as big of a deal in those days, but it became a big deal for sure. It was more about the playing than the pedals – and thank goodness for that because I was not into the pedal thing!

But I’ll tell you one thing that exemplifies what it was like to work with Joni. We used the volume pedal a lot in those days, but she said, “How about you just plug into a fuzztone then plug directly into the console, and we’ll see what that sounds like?”

I was like, “Oh, Joni, that’s gonna be terrible! We need an amp.” She said “Would you just try it?” Begrudgingly, I tried it – and that turned out to be the guitar on In France They Kiss on Main Street. It’s different and cool, and it made me play a different way. Joni was creative, and never in a hurry.

I had a similar experience when she was doing Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter. We were in the studio, and she was doing what she considered “source music” that was going to be in the background of something – like a cinematic happening in the foreground; but it never came to fruition.

We recorded this blues that was like John Lee Hooker, a slow, one-key, funky thing. I was playing acoustic guitar and she goes, “Robben, could you tune down to the key that we’re in, so you have all those open strings?” I was like, “That’s gonna sound terrible, Joni…”

She said “Would you just try it?” I had to tune a regular six-string Martin guitar down to C with just .12s on it. The strings were practically hanging off the guitar, but it was cool! I wish that had been on the record or heard somehow; but once again, working with her was like that. It was really special, man.

People have grown to love Summer Lawns, but critics were harsh at the time. Did you know you had a winner despite that?

I had no idea what critics thought – I never looked! I was just grateful for having been a part of it. I mean, I can tell you, with a light touch, that the tour was not so great; The concerts maybe weren’t received as well that first year.

Was that a reaction to the subject matter of the record?

I think it was. Joni was going through a rough patch emotionally; and that music, a lot of it was pretty dark. People were a little surprised that it wasn’t that lovely, light, bright, and wonderful Joni Mitchell thing. guess I was aware of that; the whole vibe overall was not really great. The ‘70s were a rough period – on the road, people were misbehaving, shall we say, quite a lot!

Where do you go from here?

The new record, Two Shades of Blue, will come out in 2026 through Mascot. And since I’ve been living in London for about two and a half years, I’ve met so many great musicians. The reception I’ve gotten here has been fantastic, and that helps to keep you musically frisky!

So there’s new people to play with who are really good, and it’s just great. London has been really marvellous on the music side for me, though it’s hard to find a guitar tech – I don’t have that dialed in.

• Keep up with Ford’s album, teaching and touring via his website.

Robben Ford has reflected on working with Joni Mitchell, and how her defiance of guitar pedal conventions led to one of her most unique tracks.

Before becoming a solo artist revered for his virtuosic jazz/blues fusion chops, Ford had ingratiated himself into the music scene at a young age and became a go-to hired gun for many big-name artists.

He earned himself a place in George Harrison's live band for the Dark Horse tour, and worked closely with Joni Mitchell on stage and in the studio. His relationship with the Big Yellow Taxi singer is one he holds in high regard.

“She was lovely to work for. The musicians around her were all great – especially on the first tour, which resulted in the Miles of Aisles album. It was just a constant joy,” he tells Guitar World in a soon-to-be-published interview. “She never distanced herself in any way from the band, [there was the] feeling where you’re all in it together.

“And, of course, her next record was The Hissing of Summer Lawns, which is like frigging Sgt. Pepper’s, you know? It’s just a work of genius.”

When it came to recording, the gear that Ford and the rest of the band used on her albums was never a huge deal. They worked with what they had – and Mitchell had some maverick ideas for recording.

Ford continues, “I’ll tell you one thing that exemplifies what it was like to work with her: we used the volume pedal a lot in those days, but she said, ‘Robben, how about you just plug into a [Maestro FZ-1] Fuzz-Tone and then plug directly into the console and we’ll see what that sounds like?’

“I was like, ‘Oh, Joni, that’s gonna be terrible, we need an amp,’ you know?”

But the singer pushed back, argued the case for trying it out. Just to see.

“Begrudgingly, I was like, ‘Okay…’” he says. “And that turned out to be the guitar on In France They Kiss on Main Street. It’s different and cool, and it made me play a different way. So, she was creative, and never in a hurry, you know, patient, like that.”

https://www.guitarworld.com/gear/does-bad-guitar-tone-even-exist-anymoreMitchell understood that just because something wasn’t the ‘done way’, it didn’t mean it was necessarily the wrong way. It's a mindset that has shaped many contemporary trends, including the djent guitar movement, and the current obsession with plugging direct into multi-track recorders a la Mk.gee. Mitchell was ahead of the curve.

Ford’s full chat with GW will be published online in the near future.

In related news, session virtuoso Andy Wood recently recalled the time Ford brought his prized Dumble to a guitar retreat and let fans play it. Ford's jazz and blues-amalgamating guitar style has also been the subject of an in-depth GW guitar lesson.

After Joni Mitchell's near-fatal brain aneurysm in 2015, it was unlikely she would ever sing and play guitar again. Fast forward to her surprise appearance at the Newport Folk Festival in 2022, and, on the brink of turning 80 – and after years of hard work to strengthen her voice and relearn guitar – Mitchell was well and truly back.

However, that performance was far from a last-minute affair. In 2017, Brandi Carlile took the initiative to organize “Joni Jams” at Mitchell’s home – monthly jam sessions that assisted her recovery and encouraged her to entertain the possibility of playing on stage again.

It all culminated in a three-hour “Joni Jam” in 2023, at the Gorge Amphitheater in Washington State – billed as Mitchell’s first ticketed concert in 20 years. It was as miraculous a comeback as there ever was.

Despite Carlile's years-long efforts to get Joni back on stage, she admits she received her fair share of critique for her involvement.

“I took a lot of shit for my time with Joni in a way that just made me feel so beat down,” she tells Howard Stern. “And I don't know why, because most people were beautiful about it, and in some ways, I got too much credit. But any criticism at all just felt so unjust, because I knew people didn't understand what was happening.”

When asked by Stern what the backlash was exactly, Carlile replies, “People that didn't understand the situation wanted me to get out of the way and hear more of Joni or see more of Joni, and just didn't understand the dynamic that we had established.

“And I remember talking to Joni about it, and she was like, ‘Brandy. Those people [have] always been there. They'll always be there.”

“That was probably the hardest thing I've ever seen in terms of criticism about myself, which makes me lucky, because I think people can be brutal. That one set me back a little bit. I had to rethink some shit.”

Following her momentous return to the stage, Mitchell opened up about how she relearned guitar by watching videos online to “see where I put my fingers.”

Jeff “Skunk” Baxter has played with everyone from Steely Dan, the Doobie Brothers and Joni Mitchell to Gene Simmons and James Brown. It’s not surprising that his advice errs to eclecticism. “The more you have to call from your encyclopaedia of music, the better it gets,” he says.

With his wide range of credits and a mad-scientist inclination to Frankenstein every guitar he touches, one might think Baxter has a scattered approach. But he reflects: “I’m a fairly well-rounded player. I’ve been in a studio position for 60 years. I know a little bit about playing the guitar, I guess.”

When he’s not rewinding pickups or working with Roland on his beloved Blues Cube, he’ll be found touring or recording. “I still love it; I’ve enjoyed all the session work,” he says. “It’s the challenge to play something that’s creative and also contributes to the song.”

What was the key to your tone with Steely Dan on Rikki Don’t Lose That Number?

“I don’t know! I built all my own guitars, so I guess it had somewhat of a unique sound to it. I was building guitars as a kid. I worked at Dan Armstrong’s shop for a long time. I learned a lot from Dan, Bill Lawrence and folks like that. I strove for the ability to build a pickup and electronics that would allow me to be really dynamic.

“I think the more dynamic you can be, the more expressive you can be. I just love the clarity of brand new steel strings on an electric guitar. My goal was to translate that sound as best as possible. The guitars I worked on had different kinds of decks and fretboards. I’d fret them with different kinds of frets.

“I was always a big fan of Gibson bass frets that were big and chunky. When you dressed and crowned them they were solid, and you could feel that. That was what I was looking for.”

You played a lot of pedal steel early on with the Doobie Brothers. Did you build those too?

“No, I’ve never built a pedal steel. I just got reunited with the folks at Sho-Bud, a steel guitar company founded by Shot Jackson and Buddy Emmons. I think it’s the world’s greatest instrument, frankly. There’s nothing you can’t do on it.

“With pedal steel, you’re there as a guest; it really challenges you. But it’s so beautiful – and it’s not just a country instrument. I think a lot of people tend to put it in that category; but it’s an incredibly eclectic instrument. It’s my favorite at the moment. “

You recorded a memorable solo for the outro of the Doobies’ How Do the Fools Survive? Do you remember doing it?

“I do. I had a couple of Fender Deluxe Reverb amps that were customized and modified by Paul Rivera, who did virtually all the amps the LA studio musicians used. It was kind of the LA sound. The guitar was a Fender Stratocaster I’d built with custom pickups.

“The idea was that it was the last song on the album, and the opportunity just unfolded. The fade was so long that I thought, ‘Wow, maybe this is an opportunity. I’m going to approach this in a slightly different manner – I’m going to stay away from the dominant chords of the song and play around them.’

“I used it as kind of an exercise, and it was a bit of a challenge. I believe that was one take; I just sat down and played it. When I finished, it was kind of like, ‘Oh, wow… what just happened?’”

You played guitar on Joni Mitchell’s In France They Kiss on Main Street. How did you approach that?

“Basically, as a professional studio musician; I thought, ‘What does it need? What can I do that would add to the overall presentation and feel of the song?’ It wasn’t really about me. It was more about wanting to make her happy and wanting to do the best I could for her song. Not that I didn’t put a lot of emotional effort into it.”

You played on four songs from Gene Simmons’ 1978 solo record. Did Gene call you himself?

“Yeah, he reached out to me. I said, ‘Sure, I’d love to. What you got?’ I went in, listened and said, ‘Yeah, I could do that one, and this one sounds good to me, and that one.’

“He had some ideas about what he wanted me to play and which songs he wanted me to play on. I think there was one that went by, and I said, ‘Hey, I think I’ll take a shot at that.’ But it was pretty much doing your own thing. He wanted the expertise I had to apply to it. I think he wanted something that was more personally stylistic.”

You toured with James Brown in 1986. Were those funky guitar bits a challenge?

“I already knew them because I’d learned to play that kind of music, being such a fan. I was going to a gig with Bobby and the Midnites, and James Brown was on the bill. His guitar player got caught in a snowstorm so they were looking for somebody. I said, ‘I know all that stuff,’ and that’s how it started. I put on a nice suit, and it was away we go!”

Did James talk a lot about “putting it on the one,” as he was known to do?

“Not a whole lot. I think he expected the rhythm section to perform flawlessly. I think he also expected that everyone in that organization would understand what he was trying to do.”

You worked on Albert King’s Red House album in 1991. What are your personal observations of Albert ?

“I loved his playing. The dynamics and the geometry of his playing were different because it was a regular guitar but played upside-down, which opened up all kinds of interesting things.

“I loved the fact that his guitar playing was so close to a voice – it’s like there were two singers; him and his guitar. I was always fascinated by the way they interacted. I wondered if maybe there was a singer inside of him that never came out in his voice, but came out in his guitar.”

In your opinion, who is the best of the Three Kings – Albert, B.B., or Freddie?

“Well, each one is unique, so I’m not sure about who’s best, if that term is even applicable. Each is the King of his own realm, and each realm is unique and excellent.”

Speaking of the best, you were in a supergroup called The Best with John Entwistle and Joe Walsh. How did that come about?

“John and Joe were friends of mine. We were unofficially the house band at the China Club in Los Angeles, with Simon Phillips – an unreal drummer – and Keith Emerson, who’s probably my favorite keyboard player of all time.

“Michael Jensen, the publicist, came into the China Club one day and said, ‘We ought to take this on the road.’ He booked four shows in Japan and one in Hawaii. We managed to shoehorn those shows into the schedule, and that was it.”

Was there ever a thought of recording music?

“The good news is that it was recorded, so you can go online and see it. The bad news is that the reason you can see it is because the person who recorded it stole all the master tapes. We’re still trying to track them down.”

What’s been the secret to your success as a lifelong session player?

“That’s an interesting concept! I’d certainly say a lot of it is application and perseverance. The bottom line is exposing yourself to as many different musical influences as possible.

“The more electric you can make your playing, the more opportunities it gives you to accomplish whatever someone wants you to do; it gives you more color and facets.”

• Baxter’s most recent solo album, Speed of Heat, is on sale now.

As sideman, bandleader or composer, Jaco Pastorius is one of those rare players who can legitimately be said to have revolutionized their instrument. With his lyrical, melodic fretless work, growling fingerstyle 16th note playing and jaw dropping harmonics Jaco had total control of the bass guitar, and a charisma and stagecraft that would put many rockers to shame.

It’s a sign of this unique status that we in the bass playing community only need to use his first name when referring to him: like Elvis, Madonna and Prince, everybody knows who Jaco was. In simple terms, there’s bass before Jaco, and bass after Jaco, and that alone is reason enough to love the man.

His work with jazz-fusion giants Weather Report is seminal stuff, but if jazz ain’t your thing then check out his superb work with Joni Mitchell to hear his bass playing in the context of more accessible songs.

Mitchell’s first encounter with Pastorius came during the recording of 1974’s Court and Spark, as she recalled during an interview for the 2014 documentary, Jaco. “One of the guys in the section said to me, ‘Joni, there’s this really weird bass player in Florida. You’d probably like him.’ He was showing off beautifully, and that’s what I wanted to bass to do. I wanted it to show off a little more.”

Mitchell had collaborated with some impressive bassists in her early years, including Wilton Felder and Stephen Stills, but Jaco was far more than simply “the bass player”; rather, he was a consummate musician, and could build up inventive basslines according to the arrangements he could hear in his head.

“Jaco and Joni Mitchell had a very unusual and tremendous chemistry together,” the late jazz saxophonist Michael Brecker told Bassist magazine back in December 1998. “They took each other to places that I don't think either of them knew they would be going to, musically speaking. She was able to hear the beauty in his playing and use it to change her own music, I think.”

Interviewed for the December 1987 issue of Musician Magazine, Mitchell said, “Until then I had started to think, ‘Why couldn't the bass leave the bottom sometimes and go up and play in the midrange and then return? So when Jaco came in, I remember percussionist John Guerin said to me, ‘God, you must love this guy; he almost never plays the root.’”

Jaco became integral to Mitchell’s new sound during the recording of her eighth studio album Hejira, playing bass on four tracks: Hejira, Black Crow, Refuge Of The Roads, and Coyote, each featuring the more sensitive side of Jaco’s playing rather than the fiery technical wizardry with which he is often associated. That said, there are some tricky harmonics involved in his bass parts.

“The band with Joni Mitchell, Shadows and Light Band, was really extraordinary,” said Michael Brecker. “It consisted of Jaco, Pat Metheny, myself, Don Alias and Lyle Mays and Joni, of course. It was a group of very good soloists who managed to play together really well. We brought a different sound to Joni's music.”

Despite his contributions, Pastorius hadn't listened to any of Mitchell's music before working as a studio musician, later recalling in Bill Milkowski’s book, Jaco: The Extraordinary and Tragic Life of Jaco Pastorius, “Once my kids were born, I was working around the clock and didn’t have time to listen to music.

“So I didn’t know Joni’s music, but it was really fun coming in from nowhere and adding this thing. It was a nice combination, especially on the Hejira album.”

Jaco's unique tone began with a '62 Fender Jazz bass which he promptly converted into a fretless, pulling out the frets and filling the slots with wood filler

To protect the fingerboard from abrasive roundwound strings he coated it with 10 layers of marine epoxy, providing a hard surface that gave the bass its singing quality.

He played through an Acoustic amp (model 360 X 2 with built-in fuzz) and also used an MXR digital delay and a Boss Octave Divider.

Amanda Seyfried’s musical pedigree has never been in doubt – anyone who has watched her belt out ABBA in either of the Mamma Mia movies can attest to that – but while her stellar vocal chops are common knowledge, her skills with stringed instruments are less so.

That no longer seems to be the case, though, after the Hollywood star appeared on The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon to cover a Joni Mitchell classic while strumming away on a dulcimer.

When asked if she played any instruments to go along with her voice, Seyfried reveals she plays both the guitar and the dulcimer – an acoustic lap-style string instrument that she learned during the pandemic.

Of course, show business being show business, Fallon is able to produce an actual, mic’d up, headstock tuner-equipped mountain dulcimer from underneath his desk, which Seyfried uses to play California by Joni Mitchell.

As Seyfried notes, the cover is rather fitting: Mitchell is famously a dulcimer player herself, and used the instrument to write and play a number tracks from Blue, including California.

Indeed, Mitchell’s use of the dulcimer on that hugely influential record was something of a big deal, and introduced many listeners to its ethereal tones for the first time.

That album – and by extension that instrument – has directly influenced generations of musicians, with the dulcimer’s feathery character and jangly charm serving as a bedrock for Blue.

Unsurprisingly, Seyfried nails the cover and makes light work of the dulcimer, alternating between full chord strums via the open tuning, and thumb-picked arpeggiated lines. Fallon, naturally, is full of praise: “Are you kidding me? That was amazing.”

Now we just need to see Seyfried shred a guitar solo over a glam pop anthem in Mamma Mia 3 and we can all go home happy.

Fallon’s show is something of a stomping ground when it comes to high-profile celebrities showing off their instrumental chops. Back in 2019, Cara Delevigne revealed she could play guitar… by ripping on a Gibson SG behind her head.

Later on, comedian Fred Armisen showed off his acoustic nous when he demonstrated the strumming styles of the world.

A host of music icons – including the first-time duo of Dave Matthews and John Mayer, Joni Mitchell, Billie Eilish and Finneas, Lady Gaga, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Sting, Stephen Stills, and Green Day – are coming together for the fundraising mega-event FireAid, to support relief efforts for the victims of the Los Angeles wildfires.

The star-studded benefit concert is set to take place on January 30 at L.A.'s Intuit Dome and Kia Forum, just three days after this year's Grammy Awards.

Furthermore, FireAid will also be broadcast in select AMC movie theaters, as well as on numerous other platforms, including YouTube, Apple Music, Prime Music, SiriusXM, Paramount+, and iHeartRadio.

Other stars joining the lineup include Stevie Nicks, Earth, Wind & Fire, Gracie Abrams, Gwen Stefani, Jelly Roll, Katy Perry, Lil Baby, P!nk, Rod Stewart, and Tate McRae, with more artists set to be announced in the coming days. While the Eagles are not scheduled to perform, they have already pledged a $2.5 million donation to the cause.

It's a remarkable roster of artists. So much so that Testament guitarist Alex Skolnick badged it “on a level of Live Aid, mid-'80s” in a comment on John Mayer's Instagram post about the event.

The ultimate aim of the event is to motivate viewers across all platforms to contribute donations, with proceeds benefiting numerous California relief initiatives and organizations, under the advisement of the Annenberg Foundation.

The event is being produced by longtime artist manager and music industry powerhouse Irving Azoff, alongside his wife, Shelli. Live Nation and AEG Presents are also involved, while the Los Angeles Clippers, the pro basketball team that moved into the Intuit Dome last fall, are set to “cover the millions in expenses associated with the event.”

According to the event's organizers, proceeds from FireAid will “focus on rebuilding infrastructure, supporting displaced families, and advancing fire prevention technologies and strategies to ensure L.A. is better prepared for fire emergencies.”

Tickets for FireAid go on sale through Ticketmaster on January 22 at 12 p.m. PST/3 p.m. EST.

Aside from FireAid, Guitar Center, Fender, the NAMM Foundation, Sweet Relief Musicians Fund, and MusiCares are among the many music companies and organizations that have launched initiatives to support musicians, music education programs, and music professionals impacted by this large-scale tragedy.

It was 1972, and the turbulent ‘60s were giving way to the decadent '70s. Nixon was in the White House, and the Los Angeles home of Hugh Hefner's international Playboy Club – newly relocated from Sunset Boulevard to Century City and frequented by the likes of Johnny Carson – was a shining beacon of swinging bachelor-pad possibilities.

25 miles away, in suburban Monterey Park, a 16-year-old wunderkind was beginning to find his groove. After starting on guitar at six and switching to bass guitar at nine, Larry Klein’s teacher, Herb Mickman, was schooling him on electric, upright, piano, and jazz harmony, and it was Mickman who suggested they go see the Bill Evans Trio – at the Playboy Club.

“I wasn't even allowed to be there, but somehow he managed to spirit me into the place,” Klein told Bass Player. “You can imagine a 16-year-old kid seeing Bill Evans and Eddie Gomez at the Playboy Club, with Playboy Bunnies walking around. I thought I had died and gone to heaven!”

However, Klein's career hadn't even begun. His broad palette and ear for pop allowed him to move smoothly from a promising late-'70s stint as a top-flight jazz sideman to a career as a versatile session ninja with film-scoring skills, capable of creating bass sub-hooks on huge '80s hits, as well as a fresh, contemporary approach to Joni Mitchell's music after her celebrated string of albums featuring Jaco Pastorius.

“Before me, guys like Max Bennett – and even earlier, Stephen Stills – had played bass on her records. Joni was ready to work with someone who played in a way where the bass wasn't down at the bottom of the track. Jaco was her liberator, but she also wanted the bass to play a greater part in holding down the groove.”

Klein developed a reputation for being relaxed, sensitive, and open to new ideas, qualities that certainly endeared him to Mitchell, who first hired him in 1982.

They were married from 1982 to 1994, and Klein played on, produced, or co-produced everything she's done since the '80s, nabbing Grammys for 1995's Turbulent Indigo, 2001's Both Sides Now, Herbie Hancock's 2008 masterwork River: The Joni Letters, and its follow-up, 2011's The Imagine Project.

When the mood strikes him, Klein still reaches for a sunburst '62 Jazz Bass, a Gretsch Country Gentleman, or his longtime favorite, a Music Man StingRay 5-string, but producing is what he loves most these days.

The following interview from the Bass Player archives took place in 2014.

You took lessons with Fred Rivera and Herb Mickman, but did you have other teachers?

“Those were my two first teachers. I also took private composition classes with a guy named Wayne Bischoff, a Mr. Holland's Opus-type character, in seventh grade, and I studied classical arco technique with John Schiavo of the L.A. Philharmonic. I was really lucky all my life in finding the right teachers.”

How relevant to your career were those years of studying theory and harmony?

“All the things you absorb, whether it be a Beethoven symphony or a song you hear on the radio – all of it ends up informing your musical instincts. Early on, it may have seemed like all that disparate information had no effect on what I played intuitively, but eventually, it affected how I built basslines and how I saw bass fitting into the design of a given track.

“Everything in our world now is so abbreviated, moving at such an incredibly fast rate, people forget that apprenticeship and studying and focusing on the basic building blocks of playing and writing music are so important. I'm happy to rant on that whenever possible.”

How did your time with Joni Mitchell affect your knowledge of harmony?

“Profoundly. She crafted a sense of harmony for herself by virtue of the tunings she developed, all because she just didn't have the hand strength to finger chords in the usual way. I ended up using those guitar tunings myself to write with, so yes, she strongly influenced my sense of harmony and composition.”

You began working with Joni just after her last album with Jaco. How was that?

“Jaco was functioning pretty much exclusively as a melodic counterpoint to Joni. At the same time, she also didn't want anything that resembled a conventional approach. So l was searching for my own way of approaching both her music and the role of the bass.”

Of all the work you've done together, what stands out?

“Different tracks from all the records pop out from time to time. I like so many things, but Night Ride Home was a wonderful record to make, and I’m really proud of the bass work on there.

“I was asked to contribute to a book about Joni (2013’s Gathered Light: The Poetry of Joni Mitchell's Songs), and I chose to write about Chinese Cafe/Unchained Melody from Wild Things Run Fast. There's something so profound about that track – it makes me cry every time I hear it.”

Did you get to hang with Jaco?

“Yes. As a person, he was such a walking idiosyncrasy. He was so confident and arrogant, but there was a part of his spirit that was innocent and had such a fun edge that I would never hold that against him.”

You walk into a session and hear a track for the first time. What goes through your mind?

“I hear things that tie into the melody, the chord structure, and the way the song is designed. I hear these repetitive things, and I'm sure the reason I hear them is that I've absorbed so many great bass parts by other bass players.”

Do you think bass players are naturally suited to being producers?

“We sit at the intersection of groove, harmony, and melody, and spending years providing the right kind of structure can prepare one to have a vision of how the landscape of a track should be built. But being a producer is a very complex job that changes with every record and every artist.”

Do you usually play on sessions you produce?

“I go back and forth. Sometimes, it's just too many things to do at the same time, so I have some great bass players who are also very patient with me suggesting things. I work with David Piltch quite a bit. I've been a fan of Lee Sklar since I was a kid, and I love using him on records, too.”

Is it true that you had to convince Walter Becker to play bass on his own Circus Money?

“Yes! I produced it and Walter wanted me to play on it, but I felt adamant that he play on it. People don't know – he's serious as a bass player! He's got such a deep groove, and the combination of him and drummer Keith Carlock on that record was just amazing.”

What's your take on creating a long-term career in the music business?

“Joni always used to say that the quickest way to kill your career was to have a hit, and maybe that's true. I certainly like success, but I don't make my decisions based on what I think is going to be a hit.”

What's the most crucial advice he could give after all these years of high-profile collaborations and successes?

“Hold on to your humility, and seek out great teachers. That would be at the top of my list.”

At the humble age of 18, Pat Metheny had already developed a reputation as a wunderkind, with a musical talent far beyond his years. After being offered a place at the University of Miami, the young jazz guitarist dove headfirst into the city's jazz club scene – a network that would lead him to one of the most influential bassists of all time.

“It was the happiest day of my parents’ lives because I hadn’t taken a book home since I was 14, so they had resigned themselves to me never getting into college,” he tells UK outlet The Guardian in a new interview.

“The second night after I arrived in Miami, I went to a jazz club. This guy played bass for one tune and it was like he had dropped out of a spaceship. That was the first time I met Jaco Pastorius.”

Bonded by their mutual musical obsession, the two would embark “on a series of dumb gigs with D-list celebrities in Miami Beach”. Within a year, the University’s Dean, Bill Lee, offered Metheny a professor position since the school had just introduced an electric guitar course. When Metheny turned 19, Berklee College of Music had summoned him to teach there.

“It was a crazy time, since neither me nor Jaco had any notoriety, we were just playing,” he recalls.

Metheny also appeared on the unofficially titled Jaco – the 1974 album released on Paul Bley's Improvising Artists Label, which is notably the first-ever recording featuring the talents of the bass and guitar greats.

Their collaboration continued on Metheny's debut, 1975’s Bright Size Life, which, while moderately successful at the time, didn't receive the recognition it deserved until a decade later.

“Not long afterwards, Jaco joined [pioneering fusion group] Weather Report, released his debut album and I put out my debut. That all happened within a few months,” Metheny recalls.

Relentless touring followed, triggering Pastorius’ drug addiction and worsening his mental health. In 1979, when Metheny and Pastorius had the opportunity to join Joni Mitchell on her Shadows and Light tour, Metheny notes, “Jaco was a different Jaco at that point and I thought by doing that tour I might be able to help him.”

Eight years later, Pastorius was involved in a physical altercation with a nightclub employee. He suffered multiple facial fractures, injuries, and a brain hemorrhage. On September 21, he died at the age of 35.

Metheny released Watercolors in 1977 and formed the illustrious Pat Metheny Group in 1978, with Danny Gottlieb on drums, Lyle Mays on piano, autoharp, and synthesizer, and Mark Egan on bass.

Their 1979 release, American Garage, clinched the number-one spot on the Billboard Jazz Albums chart – the start of a truly illustrious career.

There’s nothing wrong with a good honest E, C# minor or B, but sometimes it’s nice to give things a twist – and that’s what we’re doing with this lesson’s theme of alternative voicings using open strings. Players such as Joni Mitchell, Steve Hackett and Steve Howe have all demonstrated this with considerable aplomb.

In these examples, I’ve used the open first and second strings to keep a jangle at the top-end, while looking to stray from the norm – and perhaps even emulate the effect of using an alternative/open tuning. In a band mix, it can also be desirable to keep a certain uniformity to the sound, so arranging chords like this can make it easier for the mixer to feature your guitar more prominently.

The five examples below will work equally well on acoustic or electric guitar (without too much distortion) and will hopefully lead you to make some other happy discoveries along the way.

Example 1. C#m9

This C#m9 omits the fifth string – this is done by allowing the (usually second) finger fretting the root on the sixth string to lay across and stop it ringing. We get a 7th (B) from the fourth string at the 9th fret, plus the open second string. 

The 9th is added at the 8th fret of the third string. Finally, the minor 3rd (E) is added courtesy of the open first string. Some duplication of notes is going on, but it’s still an interesting sound.

Example 2. Add9/E

This example looks and sounds very much like an Asus/E, but there is more going on in the low-end. The presence of the C# on the fifth string means we should call it an Aadd9/E. 

This is particularly reminiscent of Joni Mitchell’s open-tuned chords and makes a great ‘set up’ as a IV chord returning to E major. In fact, that’s exactly where we’ll be going shortly, but there will be a twist to that one, too!

Example 3. E(add9)

This is an alternative take on the E major chord but a sort of ‘deluxe’ version. Your ears, skill and judgement will tell you whether it’s appropriate or not to replace this with a regular E major. 

Note that removing the first finger from the G# on the third string and leaving this open gives us an open G natural. This is the b3rd, making a lovely Em(add9). Be sure to experiment with the other examples in a similar way where possible.

Example 4. B7sus4

If this sounds like B7sus4 to you, you’re correct! The 4th (E) is heard on the open first string, with the root (B) appearing on the open second string and the 2nd fret of the fifth string. 

Looking more closely, you’ll see this is similar to the more conventional barre chord version of B7 that appears in this position but with the advantage of the ringing open high strings – and less effort for the fretting hand.

Example 5. Emaj7

This is an unusual ‘stacking’ of notes, with a little dissonance in the low-end, but the most technically correct name for it is Emaj7. The major 7th itself (D#) is happening down on the fifth string, adjacent to the root (E) on the open sixth. 

That’s the reason for the dissonance, but it’s easy to omit the sixth string. Moving onto the fourth string we find the major 3rd (G#), then the open second and first strings (B and E) give us the 5th and root respectively.

Where are all the great female electric guitarists? Not in music magazines, according to new academic research published in the Journal of Popular Music Studies.

The study, conducted by guitarist and MA student Isabella Fincher, analyzes coverage of 43 influential female guitarists between 1959 and 2023 in 10 established American press outlets. It includes pioneering players like Joni Mitchell, Bonnie Raitt, St. Vincent, Joan Jett, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Memphis Minnie. 

According to the study, 16.3% didn’t appear in a single article. 46% were mentioned in fewer than 10 articles – and often cited in connection with their work with a well-known male artist, such as Orianthi with Michael Jackson, Lady Bo with Bo Diddley, and Carmen Vandenberg with Jeff Beck.

It should be noted that while, historically, guitar publications, including Guitar World, have likely been no exceptions to this trend, this particular study has limited its focus to mainstream music and news titles such as The New Yorker, NPR, and Rolling Stone. 

Black female guitarists, in particular, tended to get even less press coverage. 27.9% guitarists in the study are Black women. Yet they were only featured in 10.6% of the articles analyzed.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the electric blues pioneer and Godmother of rock and roll who inspired everyone from Eric Clapton to Keith Richards, was only praised in 29 of these articles posthumously. According to Fincher’s study, none of these major publications wrote anything about her while she was still alive.

In her analysis, Fincher proposes that these players have been the subject to a set of double standards rooted in long-running masculine stereotypes around the electric guitar and rock music. 

Fincher writes that male electric guitarists are typically perceived as mythological god-like figures. Their over-the-top performances, with shocking gestures and over-exaggerated facial expressions, are key to their fans worshipping them as their heroes. 

On the other hand, women are chastised for similar performances. Most notably, a 1989 Rolling Stone article criticized Vicki Peterson of The Bangles for “relying heavily on cliched Moves R Us poses” and “playing guitars in a Pete Townshend-like windmill motion.”

In addition, many of these guitarists have often been framed as novelty acts and exceptions, or depicted as female versions of male stars.

For instance, the study notes Orianthi has routinely been described in the press as a “female Slash”, “female Carlos Santana” and “female guitar hero”. In a live review of The Runaways, Lita Ford was described by a Los Angeles Times critic as “a girl guitarist [that] can play [as] authoritatively and obnoxiously as the boys.” 

In a New York Times article from 1971 about the band Fanny, the writer posits: “a Four-Girl Rock Group, Poses a Challenge to Male Ego. Going to see an all-girl rock group, one has to bring a mixture of condescension and paranoia. What if they are good?”

The study evidences what has long been considered the anecdotal experience of many non-male guitarists.

In 2024, gender inequality remains a clear issue in the music industry, particularly in the guitar scene. Fender research revealed in 2018 that 50% of all beginner and aspirational guitar players are women – yet only 6% of all signature electric guitars were designed by women and non-binary artists, despite demand for female and non-binary artists' signature guitars outstripping supply. The relative lack of publicity from the mainstream music press may have contributed to these statistics.

On the music press side, meanwhile, inequality is slowly being addressed. For instance, Fincher notes that of the articles in the study that were published between 2020 and 2023, 41.3% of them were written by women.

Fincher suggests that to continue to address these systemic inequities, the music press must actively feature more female guitarists from all across the board, especially women of color. 

Moreover, Fincher stresses that it's necessary to go beyond gendered categories and markers, such as “women in guitar”, as well as their hyper-sexualization, as this excludes, rather than includes, women from serious consideration. 

Fincher concludes that, by challenging the stereotypes of rock culture, female guitarists embody the values and ethos that we associate with rock 'n' roll in the first place.

The full study is available at University of California Press.

The 66th Annual Grammy Awards ceremony took place this weekend, and it turned out to be yet another triumphant evening for guitar-based acts – both in terms of those who ended up taking home the prizes and those who entertained attendees with show-stopping performances.

As expected, the evening was dominated by chart-topping pop superstars – including Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus, Billie Eilish and SZA – but the headlines this week will also be shared by the likes of boygenius, Paramore, Metallica, Joni Mitchell and Larkin Poe, who all won big during the ceremony.

Though boygenius lost out on Album and Record of the Year to Swift and Cyrus, respectively, the alt rock supergroup (comprising Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus) ended up taking home the awards for Best Rock Performance (Not Strong Enough), Best Rock Song (Not Strong Enough) and Best Alternative Music Album (The Record).

boygenius, who recently released their joint Gretsch signature guitar, successfully fended off competition from the likes of Arctic Monkeys, Foo Fighters, Metallica, The Rolling Stones, Queens of the Stone Age and Black Pumas on their way to their trio of trophies.

“We were all delusional enough as kids to think this might happen to us,” Dacus said while accepting Best Rock Performance for Not Strong Enough (via BBC). 

“Phoebe [Bridgers] would sing at the Guitar Center, hoping that she would get discovered. Julien [Baker] wanted to play sold out stadiums. 

“And I would practice writing an acceptance speech, and thank all the people who'd been nice to me - like my bus driver and the guy that held the door at church. So I feel kind of like a kid, because that was the last time that something like this felt possible.”

Their fellow alt rock peers Paramore also ended up having a successful night, pipping Foo Fighters, Greta Van Fleet, Metallica and Queens of the Stone Age to win the prestigious Best Rock Album award with This Is Why.

The Hayley Williams-fronted outfit also took home the award for Best Alternative Music Performance with This Is Why, edging out Alvvays, Arctic Monkeys, Lana Del Ray and Boygenius in the process.

Elsewhere, Metallica went home with Best Metal Performance thanks to 72 Seasons, and Juanes – the newly anointed Fender signature artist – won Best Latin Rock or Alternative Album with Vida Cotidiana.

In the country, folk, blues and americana departments, Joni Mitchell, Chris Stapleton, Jason Isbell, Larkin Poe and Molly Tuttle all ended up taking trophies home. Mitchell’s award proved to be especially significant, with the folk icon scooping Best Folk Album for her comeback Joni Mitchell at Newport (Live) effort.

Isbell, meanwhile, took home both Best Americana Album and Best American Roots Song with Weathervanes and Cast Iron Skillet, respectively, while Larkin Poe’s Bloody Harmony was awarded with Best Contemporary Blues Album ahead of Christone Kingfish Ingram, and Samantha Fish and Jesse Dayton.

Tuttle, meanwhile, scored her second consecutive Best Bluegrass Album with City of Gold.

And, as everyone expected, a Barbie track – not the one that featured both Slash and Wolfgang Van Halen – was also recognized with a trophy: Billie Eilish’s What Was I Made For? won Best Song Written for Visual Media and Song of the Year.

As mentioned above, the evening’s itinerary was also filled with a handful of notable performances, not least from super-producer Andrew Watt, who wielded a Prince guitar to perform alongside Lenny Kravitz, Chad Smith and George Clinton – a group he dubbed “The new Van Halen”.

For a full list of winners, head over to the Grammys website.

Joni Mitchell penned some of the 20th century’s greatest songs and devised more alternate tunings than any of her peers.

Modern fingerstyle wizard Jon Gomm outlines why Joni is the G.O.A.T. of progressive acoustic guitar…

She broke into uncharted territory with over 50 tunings…

“It used to be that tunings made logical sense. You’d think: ‘How can I play the chords I always play, but in a different tuning to allow me to do different technical things with my fingers?’ That’s where Joni started: messing about with open major chord tunings from the old blues tradition. 

“The reason she was interested in them was because she had polio, and particularly her left hand could be really limited. She wanted to 'paint' with sound, so she started to look at these tunings and experiment with them, moving the strings further apart from each other so that she had a bigger range or compositional matrix of pitches.”

…and devised her own system to keep track of them all

“Joni didn’t think of her tunings as being, for example, CGDGAD. She’d tune the bottom string and remember what that was – in this case C – and then would call the tuning 77525. The numbers relate to which fret you play to get the next string. I have this theory about that, which she’s never spoken about. 

“But, if you know what notes your guitar strings are tuned to individually, then you can start to think about finding particular chords. She never wanted to do that because she wanted to create this big colour palette background with her guitar tuning, then experiment to find sounds within it.”

She pioneered an “orchestral” approach to guitar

“Joni would think about the bottom strings as doing the job of bass instruments and the top three strings as being the horns. In trying to make this huge sound, she ended up with this 'one-person band' approach that was completely different to the guitarists that’d gone before. 

“Whereas great technical guitarists like Robert Johnson or Elizabeth Cotten were fingerpicking to make it sound like more than one instrument, she had this completely opposite approach: to make the guitar itself bigger. 

“She opened up the acoustic guitar from being a folk instrument, to being this orchestral instrument where you could fill a concert hall with sound on your own by playing it differently and seeing it as a huge sound and colour generator.”

Her right-hand chops were second to none

“Joni would fingerpick sometimes, but what I loved most was her strumming technique, which would sometimes be with a plectrum and sometimes not. She could produce different sounds and have everything be really exciting, just by the way she used her right hand. 

“She’d only allow certain notes to come through at certain points so that you’d get melodies and the sense of basslines. The whole time, it’s really rhythmically driven by the way her right hand’s moving.”

She influenced fingerstyle’s greatest influencers

“For my generation, Michael Hedges is our touchstone god of reinventing the acoustic guitar. My peers think that you have to go back to Leo Kottke or other technical guitarists that came before, but Hedges doesn’t sound anything like those guys. It came from Joni Mitchell. That’s who [Hedges] was getting his ideas from. 

“There’s one particular song called The Wolf That Lives in Lindsey. It’s got a low tuning and she uses the bass string to keep things constant, then she uses harmonics in a way which is so reminiscent of modern guitar playing. They’re like these shards of ice crashing on the ground over the top of thunderous bass. She hits it so hard that the note warps in and out of tune to create this dramatic effect. It’s revolutionary. 

“Then, there’s a Michael Hedges song from his first album – which is the one that kind of blew the acoustic guitar world apart – and it’s called Silent Anticipations. If you listen to those two songs side by side, I’d almost say he ripped her off! He goes somewhere else, but you can really, really hear it.”

Last Saturday, Joni Mitchell took to the stage for her first headline show in 23 years – an event that turned out to be a three-hour celebration of Mitchell's music, which saw the folk legend perform next to a handful of special guests.

It was Mitchell’s first live appearance since her surprise cameo at last year’s Newport Folk Festival, but her first full headline set since 2000, and was made all the more notable given the fact a headline concert from Mitchell seemed implausible just a few years ago.

Mitchell’s 2022 Newport Festival cameo came seven years after she suffered a brain aneurysm that rendered her unable to walk or talk, and that robbed her of the ability to play the electric guitar. 

Having relearned the instrument by watching videos of her performances online over the past few years, Mitchell made her comeback at the Gorge Amphitheater in Washington in truly awe-inspiring fashion.

The 24-song setlist spanned three hours, and saw Mitchell share the spotlight with a multitude of special guests, including Brandi Carlile, Marcus Mumford, Celisse Henderson, Annie Lennox and more, who interspersed Mitchell's performances with covers of their own.

As expected, the list of highlights is near endless, but it was Mitchell’s encore containing a rendition of her 2007 cut, If – performed from the fretboard of a Parker Fly Concert model – that particularly stood out to guitar fans.

It wasn’t just the angular axe – also used by the likes of Kiko Loureiro, Adrian Belew and David Lynch – that caught eyes and ears, though. The song itself is a classic example of Mitchell’s expansive acoustic imagination, recruiting an unorthodox open tuning to help accommodate the artist’s dreamy harmonics and trademark vocals.

For the show last Saturday, Mitchell locked into If’s open Cm11 tuning – C-G-Bb-Eb-F-Bb – and made her way through the track’s percussive strums, which were carried by the Parker Fly Concert’s hidden, ultra-clean piezo pickup.

It was an inspiring showcase of Mitchell's reacquired guitar powers, and a powerful testament to the folk titan's musical journey over the past few years.

If turned out to be the penultimate track of the night, for which Mitchell assumed lead vocal and guitar duties, before closing out the night with a cover of Johnny Richards’ Young at Heart.

Earlier in the evening – which was modeled on Mitchell’s famous “Joni Jams”, hosted at her LA home – Mitchell and co performed songs from across her storied repertoire, such as Shine, The Circle Game and many more.

As per The Guardian, the evening was also one of storytelling, with Mitchell also treating the crowd to many anecdotes from her musical career – including one that involved her forgetting and making up a verse to a Bob Dylan song while on tour with Dylan and Van Morrison.

There are plenty of professional session guitarists out there who have impressive resumes, but Michael Landau’s seemingly endless list of collaborations and genre-crossing discography reads more like a fairytale.

Over his career, the 64 year-old Californian has appeared on some of the biggest albums of their time – from famous releases by Michael Jackson, Stevie Nicks and Rod Stewart right through to modern-day A-listers like Michael Bublé.

You’ll find his name on the inlays of albums by Donna Summer, Chaka Khan and Joni Mitchell or pop legends like Cher, Mariah Carey and Celine Dion, as well as more modern artists like Anastacia and Beth Hart. He’s even been credited for his contributions to albums by other famous guitar players such as B.B. King, George Benson and close friend Steve Lukather and, perhaps most impressively of all, ended up playing guitar on a Pink Floyd track (One Slip from 1987’s A Momentary Lapse Of Reason) right in front of David Gilmour himself.

It doesn’t end there, either – over his many prolific years, he’s worked with household names like Ringo Starr, Miles Davis, Glenn Frey, Bonnie Raitt, Joe Cocker, David Crosby, Alanis Morissette... the list goes on and on and on.

It should, therefore, come as no surprise that this year Fender announced that it will be awarding him a signature instrument through their Stories Collection, based on the highly modded 1969 ‘Coma Strat’ that’s been in his hands throughout the decades and ended up on many a hit record.

The faded red satin guitars will feature his ML Ultra Noiseless neck and middle pickups, plus a custom Wide Range humbucker in the bridge, along with a six-screw vintage style tremolo and Floyd Rose route. There will also be a limited-edition relic’d run through the Custom Shop, fitted with what Fender are calling “elevated features”.

The new instruments are currently being promoted by a video in which Landau chronicles the story behind the instrument he’s become closely associated with, decorated by some of the moody blues and wonderfully atmospheric leads often found on his solo releases.

When Guitar World connects with him on a breezy early spring afternoon, our first question is perhaps an obvious one... what is it about Strats that allow him to execute his musical ideas better than any other kind of guitar?

“It just comes down to that body and those contours,” he admits, in a slow and softly spoken drawl that’s charming, almost hypnotizing, to listen to.

“Strats are like the ultimate couch guitar and that’s probably where I’ve done most of my playing over the years! They just seem to fit. I love the balance, too. Sometimes a Gibson can get a little top or bottom heavy. I find Fenders always play great if you get them set up right.”

And, as those of us who have experimented will know, hours of fun can be had on a Strat with a floating bridge, provided it’s been set up well. In this case, even more so, given the new signature’s recessed Floyd route...

“I know, I agree!” grins Landau. “I’m kicking myself because that’s one of the things I really love about the guitar and I forgot to mention it in the video we filmed. When you pull up or do a really wide vibrato with the tremolo, obviously the bridge doesn’t bottom out on the body. It’s cool you picked up on that! Having said that, I’m very proud of how the video came out. We worked on it for a while. I did all the music here at my studio and then went and played on top of it at Fender.”

Tonally, this looks like an instrument that can cover a lot of ground – from the more dynamic Noiseless pickups in the neck and middle positions to the extra roar available through the humbucker in the bridge…

“It does roar! Though what’s cool about the Wide Range humbucker is that it really does match well with the Noiseless pickups. It’s a little brighter than a normal humbucker. There’s a different hump there in the upper midrange, but it works very nicely with the neck and middle pickups. It doesn’t have a really high output either, so altogether you can get a nice blend.

“I’m super-excited about the noiseless pickups we designed together. I usually have a love/hate thing with things like that, because they do cancel some of the tone there. But these ones are incredible. I don’t know how it was done, but they’re super-lively and have a lot of output. They sound the closest I’ve ever heard to a single coil in terms of the snappiness.”

You were 16 years old when you found the original ‘Coma Strat’ at an LA guitar store. Which shop was it and what do you remember about the experience?

“It was called Sol Betnun’s Instruments in Hollywood and it was pretty much just this old house some guy converted into a music store, with all these different rooms. Technically, it wasn’t a vintage guitar shop, but he had mostly used gear in there. Once we got our licences, me and Steve Lukather used to drive down there once a week... a very cool place!”

We’re curious – how did you know it would be an instrument you would be taking home with you?

“It looked really cool. Someone had stripped the finish off, I guess to do the John Lennon Epiphone thing. I kept it that way for a long time. It was a super-light guitar when I picked it up, so I think I appreciated that.

“The neck was great, the original one was made out of maple, then I modded it and kinda destroyed it by putting a Floyd nut on there… but I’m glad I did. I actually still have the original neck here, it’s just sitting on my wall. I was just 16, I didn’t know a whole lot about specs and stuff like that. It just sounded good and played good. That was the main thing.

“In the past, I’ve always just taken my time and tried to find a private room in one of these music stores. Just play it for a while and it will eventually reveal itself as either the right one for you or not. I’ve played heavy Strats that I’ve loved as well… so I’m not sure about the whole debate about weight when it comes to tone. As far as standing up and holding one, I much prefer a lighter one, but heavier guitars can sound great, too!”

Modded or not, a 1959 Strat would fetch a handsome price now...

“I know! But in 1974, they weren’t that much. I guess I was lucky!”

So what kind of things are you plugging into at the moment? Talk us through the rig...

“There’s an old Roger Mayer pedal called the Voodoo-1 that I’ve probably used for 30 years now. I’ve tried to take it off my ’board but it always goes back on. There’s also a DOD Looking Glass overdrive, a Drybell Vibe Machine, a Vemuram prototype distortion and a Way Huge Blue Hippo going into the amp head.

“From there I take the speaker output and go into a Suhr Reactive Load, then a custom Dave Phillips Small Buffer, a Boss expression pedal, a Strymon TimeLine, a Strymon BigSky and finally a Seymour Duncan Power Stage 170 which feeds into a cabinet fitted with Greenbacks. I’ve used all kinds of amps in the past, like 1964 Princeton Reissue, a vintage Deluxe Reverb, a vintage Plexi Marshall JMP 50-Watt and a Suhr Badger 18.”

Your approach to the guitar is a unique one. There are elements of blues, jazz and psychedelia – welded together in quite often unpredictable ways...

“Everyone my age grew up with the blues. We had The Beatles, Hendrix and Clapton, so that’s kinda like my core. I became a jazz fanatic in my late teens, almost becoming an anti-rock guy. I loved Weather Report and Pat Martino, who is a tremendous player. You could spend a whole lifetime trying to figure out that guy.

“I actually had one lesson from the master Joe Pass. Somehow I got a private lesson from him and he gave me too much stuff. I was in way over my head! I guess I have a mixture of influences, a bit like Robben Ford and how he stretches out. I’m a huge fan of his and it’s all basically blues.”

Larry Carlton must be another one then, given how him and Robben almost seem to come as a package!

“Yeah, Larry Carlton was another, for sure. Me and Steve Lukather would go to watch Robben and Larry play a lot in a small club in North Hollywood called Donte’s. Those guys were playing on all the cool records at that time and we’d see them live whenever we got the chance. It became a thing for us!

“I was a jazzer… or at least trying to be. I used to struggle with navigating through altered chords but once you figure out the code, you can play more freely and go with what’s in your head rather than worrying about all these changes.”

Your resume is unlike any other we’ve seen. What have you learned along the way, from all those hit records you’ve played on?

“The main thing for me is just playing for the song. You want to stay out of the way, but at the same time you want to make a bit of a statement, either sonically or melodically. I was always a gearhead, so I would have everything together when heading into a session. So you definitely need to have all that stuff in order. It doesn’t have to be a complicated setup – it just has to work really well. You don’t want hums or buzzes. Just be respectful of the song.”

So how exactly did you get your big break?

“As far as the amount of sessions I’ve done, the timing was perfect. In the ’80s there was a lot going on in LA. Lukather had just started Toto, so he kept passing things over to me. It kinda snowballed, you know? I never intended to be a studio musician, but it’s been great. Working with Joni Mitchell was one of my favorite things ever… I was such a fan of hers.”

Would it be fair to say the biggest record you played on was Michael Jackson’s Bad – with you handling the guitars on Stevie Wonder duet Just Good Friends?

“It was an unbelievable experience. I’ve always been a massive Stevie Wonder fan and he is still one of my favorites. The thing about this record is that they were doing it all so hectically. Michael had three or four studios going at the same time.

“I did that one tune pretty quick because it was all happening so fast. Michael popped in for a minute but Stevie wasn’t there. But before that, I had done one Dionne Warwick session where Stevie Wonder came in and played piano with us. I think Steve Gadd was on drums. This was very early on for me, so I was kinda freaking out.”

How exactly did you end up playing guitar on a Pink Floyd album, and was it just the track One Slip, or were there any other contributions?

“I think I might have played on one more, though I’m forgetting the title of it right now. It was crazy, David was right there! I’d been working with Bob Ezrin on several other records, and he ended up producing that Pink Floyd album. I think they brought in a couple of outside guitar players.

“There was that delay part I did, that dotted eighth kinda thing that was very popular back then, and for some reason David didn’t want to do it. He wanted to bring someone else in. I’m sure he didn’t specify me, but Bob suggested it and yeah… playing guitar for Pink Floyd was one of the most bizarre things ever.”

Given his own brilliance, it’s hard to imagine David Gilmour needing the services of any other guitar player...

“I was in a studio looking back into the control room and there was David Gilmour saying, ‘Hey, this sounds good!’ I hung out for a minute afterwards… actually, I was there for a long time, because David had this huge rig setup and he was super-sweet. He took me through a lot of it and played me a bunch of stuff on all his Marshalls that were lined up. It was an amazing afternoon. Again, it was pretty quick. They specified what they wanted and I did a few passes. That was it!”

That’s not the only guitar legend you’ve worked with. There’s B.B. King and George Benson – arguably two of the most influential guitarists in their respective genres…

“Absolutely. B.B. has always been the king for me. The raw power of his vocals and guitar playing was unbelievable. Have you seen the Mohammed Ali movie? That’s one of the greatest blues performances ever. B.B. was at times a minimalist but he was also fiery back in those days. He was a musical force and the whole package too, when you factored in his voice.

“And when I was working with George, I noticed he was the most natural jazz guitar player of them all. He makes it sound like the notes were just flying off the fretboard. I’ve never heard him come remotely close to struggling with anything. He’s so fun to listen to.”

Both you and Steve Lukather have worked with Ringo Starr, which is interesting given how long you and ‘Luke’ go back...

“Steve’s been in the All Starr Band for quite a while now. Those two guys have become really good buddies. It’s hilarious to me! They go to the movies together and hang out. I did a few songs with Ringo on that one [Time Takes Time] record. The producer Don Was brought me in. Ringo was right there, man, playing 20 feet away on his Gretsch kit. That was another moment where I had to try to maintain, you know?!”

You’ve also worked with soul and pop singers like Whitney Houston, Barbara Streisand, Mariah Carey, Celine Dion and many more – many of whom aren’t hugely associated with guitar music. How did that happen?

“In the ’80s, they were definitely mixing it up more. Guitar was just popular back then, even heavier sounds. With Joni Mitchell, when she stopped doing her thing with Jaco [Pastorius] and Pat [Metheny], she joined up with [bassist] Larry Klein and wanted to do a complete 180 with some young dudes in a rock band. She wanted to have fun! I think the ’80s were more accepting of rock guitar. Maybe they were trying to stay hip, I don’t know.”

What were the challenges bringing guitar into some of these productions? Were there any you took more pride in or required more guesswork from you?

“Joni was the most enlightening because she was so creative. We did a long run together in the ’80s. All in all, I think I’ve always managed to find my place on sessions – if I’m struggling, I’ll just kinda sit back and really check out what everyone else is doing. Eventually I’ll find something to contribute to the song.

“Some are easier than others. Some artists are more fun and have a looser vibe in the studio, which always translates well into the music. But under pressure, I was always okay. I wasn’t afraid, I didn’t have Red Light Syndrome and would always be ready to record with stuff I’d spent time figuring out.”

Well, that can’t hurt when you find yourself in high-pressure environments around big-name artists...

“If you know everything gear-wise is working nicely, that will always help your confidence. I’ve seen a lot of people bring stuff into the studio and struggle with their equipment. It puts them in a state of panic. If you work all that out before, it really helps because then all you have to do is concentrate on the music. You need to have good people skills and let the artist or producer rule for the day. You don’t want to step on any shoes… it’s all about contributing to the music.”

• For more information on the Michael Landau Coma Stratocaster, head to Fender.com.

"He had some serious attitude and it's all there in his bass playing," said Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones when asked about Charles Mingus. "He really thought the bass was important, and the way he worked with a drummer was fantastic."

Beyond his brilliance as a bass player, Mingus was one of the most commanding bandleaders in jazz history. "A lot of people wanted jazz musicians to be reserved and stately,” said saxophonist Branford Marsalis, who recorded Mingus’ Scenes in the City in 1984. "But Mingus was wild. That’s what I love about him."

Mingus died on January 5th, 1979, in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and having penned tributes to his own musical heroes throughout his career (Reincarnation of a Lovebird for Charlie Parker, Jelly Roll for Jelly Roll Morton, Goodbye, Porkpie Hat for Lester Young), his influence has remained evident in the work of musicians as diverse as Keith Richards, Charlie Hunter and, of course, the Mingus Big Band.

Here’s our compilation of the 10 best covers of classic Mingus compositions.

1. Joni Mitchell – Good Bye Pork Pie Hat (1979)

Originally a tribute to tenor sax player Lester Young, Goodbye Pork Pie Hat is also the closing track from the unique collaboration between Mingus and Joni Mitchell. Mitchell’s lyrics were based on John Handy’s original sax solo, as well as the melody. The bass playing is unmistakably that of the great Jaco Pastorius.

“Charles Mingus died in Mexico, January 5, 1979 at the age of 56. He was cremated the next day. That same day 56 sperm whales beached themselves on the Mexican coastline and were removed by fire. These are the coincidences that thrill my imagination.” So read Joni Mitchell’s liner notes on the LP, which was released five months following his death.

2. Maceo Parker – Better Git It In Your Soul (1990)

Better Git It In Your Soul was written as an homage to the church music that Mingus grew up with, and was a perfect fit for Maceo Parker’s own hard-swinging salute to the ‘50s and ‘60s. The alto saxophonist recruited fellow J.B.’s alumni Fred Wesley and Pee Wee Ellis, while Bootsy Collins takes up the bass chair. This is a straight-ahead run through of one of Mingus’ most popular numbers, with Maceo doing most of the soloing. 

3. Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and the Uptown Horns – Oh Lord, Don’t Let Them Drop That Atomic Bomb On Me (1992)

Oh Lord, Don’t Let Them Drop That Atomic Bomb On Me was first recorded by Mingus on November 6, 1961, but this version is taken from Hal Willner’s 1992 tribute album, which Willner called Weird Nightmare: Meditations on Mingus. The album also featured the likes of Elvis Costello, Dr John and Leonard Cohen. “Mingus was the hippest thing to listen to when I was a kid,” says Charlie Watts in the video. “His music was very logical, but he was a sort of an edge player. It was almost a cacophony.”

4. Charlie Hunter Trio – Fables of Faubus  (1993)

Charlie Hunter's solo guitar arrangement of Fables of Faubus was released in 1993 by Prawn Song records, a label owned by Les Claypool, who also produced the subsequent album. For the recording, Hunter manhandled a specially-made 8-string guitar that allowed him to play rhythm and melody simultaneously.

5. Andy Summers – Remember Rockefeller at Attica (1999)

Following the demise of The Police in the late 80s, Andy Summers recorded tributes to Thelonious Monk (Green Chimneys) and Charles Mingus (Peggy’s Blue Skylight), which featured this latin take on Remember Rockefeller at Attica, complete with Alison Wedding’s vocalization of the melody. Listen out for her echo of the Star Trek TV theme.

6. Marcus Miller – Goodbye Pork Pie Hat (2001)

Following his acclaimed solo albums The Sun Don’t Lie and Tales, Marcus Miller released M2 (‘M-Squared’) in 2001 and won his second Grammy for Best Contemporary Jazz Album. One of the album’s highlights is this sensitive reading of Goodbye Porkpie Hat, with Miller out front on his remarkably fluid fretless bass and Herbie Hancock contributing some equally delicate piano work.

7. No BS! Brass – Haitian Fight Song (2001)

This compilation wouldn’t be complete without a contribution from No BS! The Mingus credits in their repertoire range from Boogie Stop Shuffle to Nostalgia in Times Square, and in this clip they stretch out on the 1959 classic, Haitian Fight Song. Written as an ode to the triumph of freedom in the face of persecution, it was originally recorded for The Clown in 1957.

8. Chrissie Hynde – Meditation on a Pair of Wire Cutters (2019)

Inspired by Eric Dolphy and his thoughts on slavery, the original release of Meditation on a Pair of Wire Cutters lasts up to 31 minutes depending on which recording you track down. This clever reinterpretation by Chrissie Hynde is about 3 minutes long and features on her 2019 Valve Bone Woe album. It’s essentially an instrumental, with Hynde humming a few bars deep in the mix.

9. Kyle Eastwood – Boogie Stop Shuffle (2017)

A staple in the book of the Mingus Big Band, Boogie Stop Shuffle is a 12-bar blues that Kyle Eastwood (revered jazz bassist and eldest son of Hollywood star Clint) made the closer on his 2017 album, In Transit. Eastwood’s ultra rhythmic arrangement is ushered in by solo bass before the band hit their collective romping stride.

10. Mingus Big Band – Meditation for Moses (2022)

The most recent of all the recordings in this list, Meditation for Moses appears on The Charles Mingus Centennial Sessions, which was released in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Mingus’ birthday. The album includes new arrangements, as well as narrations by Charles’s son Eric Mingus. Co-leader and bassist Boris Koslov arranged several of the tracks including this one, which features a seriously impressive bowed bass solo at 05:37.

The Charles Mingus Centennial Sessions is available digitally through iTunes and Amazon. For more on Mingus’s legacy, visit charlesmingus.com

David Crosby, who passed away on January 18 at the age of 81, was one of the leaders of a musical revolution inspired both by British invasion bands of the '60s and the music of the American folk and blues minstrels.

Alongside fellow singer-songwriters Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and James Taylor, they melded their influences into a new kind of electro-acoustic folk-rock, using open tunings and introspective lyrics, often layered up with glorious vocal harmonies.

Crosby was at the heart of The Byrds and several iterations of the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young brand and continued to work with various members for many years.

This included recording, gigging and doing sessions with Nash, as on David Gilmour’s solo album On an Island, plus legendary Royal Albert Hall appearance Remember That Night (captured on DVD). Crosby and Nash also sang on John Mayer’s Born and Raised, and on tracks by Elton John, James Taylor and many others. 

However, always interested in new singers and writers (who were even more interested in him), he never stopped making musically relevant and highly listenable music, both on solo albums and as collaborations with a number of contemporary artists, including Snarky Puppy’s Michael League. 

Crosby’s final studio album was aided by his musician-producer son James Raymond, and was part homage to Joni Mitchell, with the title-track cover of her ballad, For Free.

The album also included collaborations with Texan singer-songwriter Sarah Jarosz, plus vocal additions from Doobie Brother Michael McDonald, and a long-awaited co-write with Steely Dan legend, Donald Fagen.

In this conversation, which was conducted in late-2021 and marked one of his final guitar interviews, David joined Guitarist by phone from his California homestead to discuss his approach to songwriting, his love of Martin acoustic guitars and the golden era of the Laurel Canyon scene.

You’ve made the new album For Free with your son James Raymond, who produced it, co-wrote some tracks and played piano on it. 

“Yes. A wonderful cat, too, man. He’s a really, really decent guy and he loves making music, and so we have a blast doing it. We have a record that we haven’t even put  out yet, and we are already recording the next one. It’s a joy to work with him. He has just turned into the best record producer and the best writing partner that you could hope for.”

In your work with bands, you could always recognise the Crosby songs. Is it a certain attitude that sets you apart?

“I think it has to do with the fact that I’m usually trying to tell a story of some sort, and I think it has to do musically with the fact that I like more complex chord structures and progressions. I did listen to a lot of jazz, and so I like dense, unusual chords. But if you try to shape it to what the pop taste is at the moment, you listen to everything that’s succeeding and then you try to be just like that – it doesn’t work for me.”

Did you play guitar on new album, For Free? And if so, what tunings did you use?

“Yes, I did. I used the tuning [EBDGAD] on the track I played the most on, which is I Think; I have a good guitar part on that. There are guitar parts on some of the others, but it hasn’t been a major thing on this one.”

In previous interviews, you’ve mentioned the difficulty you might have playing guitar because of your hands. How is that affecting your playing? 

“I’ve lost a percentage, maybe 10 per cent, maybe 15 per cent. But I can still play, just not quite as well as I used to. It’s heading in the wrong direction. There isn’t anything anybody can do about it. It’s tough, but whining isn’t going to help anybody. All my guitars are set up as low as they will go. I can play, but I know in the long run I’m going to lose it.”

From the very beginning, vocal harmonies have been integral to everything…

“Well yes, they are for me. I love them, and if there is a chance to do those dense chords that I like, I always will. Most commonly, although we did it in every possible variation, Stephen would sing the melody, I would sing the middle, which is the hard one, and Nash would sing the top. All the harmonies in The Byrds are me. The Byrds is basically two-part, although sometimes Gene [Clark] was in there, too.”

You emerged at a time and in a place where the music was spectacular…

“There was a plethora of really talented people really trying hard to make good music, and that was a wonderful thing.”

CSNY, Joni Mitchell and James Taylor all released landmark albums in 1970, the year The Beatles broke up. The pendulum swung from British to American. You guys had the talent and were making all the moves. 

“Thanks, man. I think Joni was a thing on her own. She is probably the best singer-songwriter that ever lived. But I think, yes, it did shift to the United States right then, but I’m sure it shifted back when Pink Floyd happened.”

It must have made everybody raise their game because you had these friends putting out brilliant stuff? 

“If I think about it, I knew that there were all these other people who were really good. People I was competing with were James Taylor and Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan and the singer-songwriters. Nobody could compete with The Beatles, but we did compete with the singer-songwriters and we generated a whole lot of really wonderful songs.”

There are some great collaborators on the new album, the instantly recognisable Michael McDonald helps out in the opener River Rise, for instance.

“I’ve been saying for a while that probably the two best singers in the United States are Stevie Wonder and Michael McDonald. Michael is the best singer I know. [Everybody] heard him on Steely Dan records and went, ‘Holy shit!’ And those hits with The Doobies, ‘Holy shit!’”

There is some great guitar on the record from Shawn Tubbs, and from session legend Dean Parks.

“Shawn was an LA guy, but he moved to Texas. I sent a couple of things down to him and got him to play them. Dean is just a freaking genius. I just did another thing with him. It was so much fun I couldn’t believe it.”

On this album, when you recorded the tracks did you layer everything up or did you learn the songs as a band and put them down in the studio? 

“We had to do it piecemeal because of the pandemic. So these were built piece by piece, but I always have done it the other way.”

In a normal situation do you like to have control over what people play? 

“No, no, I get really good musicians and then I listen to what they do, unless there is something more that I want I tell them. But the best thing is, see what they come up with because they are probably going to come up with something you didn’t think of, which may be absolutely fucking wonderful. So don’t close the door!”

Rodriguez For A Night has lyrics by Donald Fagen. That song really nails those Steely changes, doesn’t it?

“Yes, we went for it, no question. We love Donald. We loved Steely Dan. Aja and Gaucho are both in my Top 10 for life, up there with Blue [Joni Mitchell], Heavy Weather [Weather Report], and Kind Of Blue [Miles Davis]. There’s a handful of records, and two of theirs are in there.”

The title track, For Free, is such a simple song, but you can’t slavishly copy it. So how did you and Sarah Jarosz approach it?

“I had listened to her singing with Sara Watkins and Aoife O’Donovan in I’m With Her, their band together. They are fantastic. Then I listened to Sarah Jarosz’s record, Build Me Up From Bones, a fantastic record. Then she put out World On The Ground and it was even better. I couldn’t stand it.

“I got hold of her and I said, ‘Listen, this is a stunning record. I really love your stuff and I’d like to sing something with you. I don’t know what. I don’t know where. I don’t know where we’d put it. I just want to do it because it’s fun.’ 

“She said, ‘I’d absolutely love to.’ I said, ‘Okay, let’s figure out a song and we’ll sing it. We are not trying to accomplish anything. We just want to have some fun. How about ‘For Free?’ She said, ‘Oh, I love that song.’ Then I went to James, and James did a piano track for it that is so evocative and so beautiful that it made me sing it better than I’ve ever sung it. I transcended myself. 

“We sent it off to her and she sent it back with that harmony on it, which is like a lesson in how to do harmony. Just fucking perfect. I called her up and said, ‘Listen. Can I put that on my record? It’s just so good.’ She said, ‘Of course you can. I think it’s fantastic.’”

James also plays a lovely piano part on I Won’t Stay For Long. He wrote the song, too, even though it could be something autobiographical from you... 

“He wrote it and it’s the best thing on the record. He says that he wrote it off [the Greek legend of] Orpheus and Eurydice. Hmm-hmm.”

Onto guitar, you were all playing Martin D-45s around the Woodstock era… 

“Yes, And we loved them. I have three 1969 D-45s. But I have a bunch of really great guitars, man. I didn’t buy famous people’s guitars; that’s what Nash did. I think he probably made more money on it than I did. But I bought guitars that played unbelievably well. I have probably the five best acoustic 12-strings in the world. 

“I have a [Martin 12-string] that was converted from a D-18 that I bought in a store in Chicago. It’s the best guitar I’ve got. It’s louder and more resonant with more overtones than anything else I’ve ever played.

“I’d always been drawn towards Martins until I ran into a guy right outside Seattle named Roy McAlister. I have five of his guitars. That should be everything you need to know right there.”

You recently sold your publishing to help fund your life. That must have been a big burden lifted. 

“We had two ways of making money: touring and records. Streaming doesn’t pay us. It’s like you did your job for a month and they gave you a nickel. You’d be pissed. That’s why we are pissed – because they are making billions and not paying the people who are creating the music. So I’m trying to be grateful that I can still play live and pay the rent and take care of my family. But along comes Covid and I can’t play live. That was it. Now I’m broke. I don’t want to lose my home, man.

“We’ve got an old adobe house here in the middle of a cow pasture. It’s just fucking wonderful. A beautiful, beautiful place in the middle of a bunch of trees. It’s just lovely; it’s not fancy and it’s not rich and it’s not big, but it’s really right. We want to live here all our lives, so I sold my publishing.”

People still want to hear new music from you – and not every musician from the era you came up in can say that.

“Nope. I guess I’d better keep trying…”

Last weekend, Joni Mitchell took part in a surprise “Joni Jam” at the Newport Folk Festival – a 13-song set that marked the legendary songwriter’s first public performance since she suffered a brain aneurysm in 2015, and her first full set since 2002.

Mitchell spent most of her time singing while seated, but took to her feet and picked up a super-lightweight Parker Fly electric guitar for a rendition of her 1974 track Just Like This Train. That was no small feat for Mitchell, whose aneurysm robbed her of the ability to play the instrument.

Speaking to CBS Mornings, Mitchell opened up about her journey to relearn the guitar, saying she watched videos online to “see where I put my fingers”.

When asked about how she taught herself to play again, Mitchell responded, “I’m learning. I’m looking at videos that are on the net to see where I put my fingers. It’s amazing what an aneurysm knocks out… how to get out of a chair, you don’t know how to get out of bed.

“You have to learn all these things again,” she continued. “I was into water ballet as a kid, and I forgot how to do the breaststroke. You’re going back to infancy almost, you have to relearn everything.”

Mitchell’s return to the Newport Folk Festival – an event she first played as a 23-year-old in 1967 – was something that her close friend and fellow songwriter Brandi Carlile always knew would happen. 

Joining Mitchell for the interview, Carlile said she had been dreaming of her friend’s return ever since her recovery. “The first time she opened her mouth and sang Summertime, I saw Herbie Hancock burst into tears and everybody in the room catch their breath – because she had decided to sing – I knew she’d do it at Newport.

“I can’t really say how I knew it,” she continued. “I just pictured her out there, I pictured the water and the boats.”

During the festival, while Mitchell got comfortable with her guitar, Carlile told the crowd, “Joni’s going to get situated for a second. She’s spent some time working on something just for you here at the Newport Folk Festival that she hasn’t done since her aneurysm. She’s doing something very, very brave right now for you guys.”

You can watch that performance in the video above.

Mitchell's appearance wasn't the only surprise at this year's Newport Folk Festival. Elsewhere at the Rhode Island event, Paul Simon came out of retirement to take part in a surprise set, performing some of his biggest hits, including The Boxer, Sound of Silence and Graceland.

Songwriting icons Joni Mitchell and Paul Simon both made surprise appearances during sets at the Newport Folk Festival this weekend (July 22-25).

Neither performer was listed on the bill or trailed in advance of the event, and both made appearances during sets featuring a cast of contemporary musicians that had been intended as tributes to their musical legacies. 

Simon appeared during Nathanial Rateliff’s American Tune Revue performance on Saturday (July 23), alongside the likes of Lukas Nelson, members of Midlake, Natalie Merchant and Rhiannon Giddens, plus slide guitarist Jerry Douglas. 

Rateliff introduced the songwriter himself, some 10 songs into his set. “It’s been a joy and honor for us to learn these songs in a tribute to our good friend Paul Simon and the work he has done,” Rateliff told the assembled, before taking a tactful pause. “And I’d really love it if I could invite Paul Simon to the stage…”

Coming out of retirement, however temporarily, Simon then joined a number of guests to perform some of the biggest songs in his extensive back catalog, including Graceland, The Boxer, Sound of Silence, and American Tune. During the latter, Simon performed using his Martin signature OM-42PS acoustic guitar.

Meanwhile, Mitchell’s set on the Sunday (July 24) was perhaps the bigger surprise, featuring a 13 track setlist from an artist who has not performed a full show for more than 20 years. 

Like Simon, the songwriting icon made a relaxed appearance, surrounded by a cast of supporting musicians – among them Blake Mills, Lucius, Wynonna Judd, Celisse, Taylor Goldsmith and Marcus Mumford – led, in this instance, by Brandi Carlile. 

Mitchell – who is 78 and suffered an aneurysm in 2015 – initially came in and out of the songs, but her contributions grew throughout the set. 

By the close of the show, she took to her feet for an electric guitar solo on Just Like This Train and also delivered a tear-jerking Both Sides Now – looking clearly moved by the rapturous response from the crowd.

Indeed, both appearances proved poignant, as old favorites were given new context. Mitchell’s line “I would still be on my feet”, from A Case Of You, rung true with the audience and performer, as did the fragility of the 80-year-old Simon’s vocal on The Boxer: “The fighter still remains, he still remains…”

If you’re feeling inspired by the folk icons’ return to the stage, check out our lesson on Joni Mitchell’s imaginative acoustic guitar techniques.

For Joni Mitchell, songwriting is as much about crafting a tuning as it is about choosing the chords, melodies, or lyrics. Her creative process is a fluid, intuitive blend of many musical elements, drawing on ideas spanning blues and banjo techniques to jazz harmony and indigenous folk songs. 

By her own estimation, she has used more than 50 different tunings over the years – or 80-plus if you count capo'd variants.

Her expansive, imaginative approach to tuning has roots in her earliest creative experiences. Born to a military father and a school teacher mother in small-town Canada, she was drawn to painting and poetry before music as a child, obsessing over the former in particular.

But despite an irrepressibly inquisitive mindset, Joni struggled to find inspiration in her school curriculum – save for a bond with one encouraging teacher. She describes this nameless early influence as “a great disciplinarian in his own punk style... more of a social worker or a renegade priest... [he] extracted the individuality of his pupils, creating monsters who were almost ungovernable within the rigidity of that system. We nearly drove our next year's teacher nuts.”

Similarly, the rigid strictures of classical piano lessons did not enthuse her: “I wasn't into music....I wanted to do what I do now, which is to lay my hand on it and to memorize what comes off of it and to create with it. But my music teacher told me I played by ear, which was a sin, you know”. She asked for a guitar, but her mother – reportedly wary of its “hillbilly associations” – got her a ukulele instead.

When she did eventually get an acoustic, she taught herself from a book by banjoist Pete Seeger, also learning old blues numbers – notably the ‘Cotten picking’ alternating bass style of Elizabeth Cotten’s Freight Train. 

Even at this early stage, she was used to switching between different instruments and string layouts (four-string ukulele, five-string banjo ideas on a six-string guitar, etc). Additionally, a serious polio episode had weakened her hands, probably making the physical ease of slacker tunings more attractive.

As a young, unknown performer she was entranced by seeing guitarist Eric Andersen play in a Detroit nightclub. Andersen, who had studied the slide tunings of Muddy Waters and Mississippi Fred McDowell, recounts that Joni “hated playing guitar in standard tuning... boring, missing many musical regions she had in mind”.

“I was playing in E, D, and G tunings. Afterwards we went to her lovely home. She was curious about these tunings, so I showed her...”. They would go on to record and perform together, and remain close friends today (Joni is godmother to Eric’s daughter).

The E, D, G tunings mentioned by McDowell are [E-B-E-G♯-B-E], [D-A-D-F♯-A-D], and [D-G-D-G-B-D]. Joni used them as fuel for decades’ worth of multidirectional exploration – though she went far further in before long, these are the starting points in many ways. So here they are, tuned with a little bluesy roughness and imperfection:

Below, we get stuck into a few of Joni’s most distinctive tunings and ideas. In keeping with the initial foundations of her own approach, we’ll be treating them more like ‘color palettes’, without so much explicit focus on harmonic or intervallic analysis. 

In her words, “I was a bad English student because I was good in composition, but I wasn't good in the dissection...I didn't like to break it down and analyze it in that manner.” This, of course, is absolutely no barrier to harmonic or expressive sophistication.

Exercise 1. Hejira-style tuning (C-G-D-F-G-Bb)

Joni’s fascination with blending folksy melodies and nuanced jazz harmony reached its most seamless heights on her collaborations with Jaco Pastorius - an extraordinary musician, often described as ‘Hendrix of the fretless bass’. She describes what led to their partnership:

“I had tried all along to add other musicians...Nearly every bass player that I tried did the same thing. They would put up a dark picket fence through my music, and I thought, why does it have to go ploddy ploddy ploddy? Finally one guy said to me, ‘Joni, you better play with jazz musicians.’”

Jaco overdubbed several sublime bass parts for Joni’s 1976 album Hejira – an Arabic term she loosely transliterated from a dictionary, meaning ‘rupture’ or ‘break with the past’, and signifying the migration of Muhammad to Medina (in Joni’s words, she was searching for a term which meant ‘running away with honor’, a recurring lyrical theme throughout).

The album’s title track presents a perfect balance of their distinctive sonorities. For Joni, it was “probably the toughest tune on the album to write”, with lyrics tackling a recent breakup with jazz-rock drummer John Guerin (...although three tracks later, Blue Motel Room muses on whether the relationship could be rekindled).

It was also one of Jaco’s first experiments with overdubbing, something he would later famously apply to the live setting with a loop pedal. On Hejira he recorded four separate layers of bass, combined sparingly with Joni’s two not-quite-identical guitar parts:

In the exercise below, we approximate Joni’s tuning for Hejira. It is generally considered to be C-G-D-F-G-C, which here we will tweak to C-G-D-F-G-Bb. If, like the track, we take our open 6th string as the root, we can see the arrangement as follows - this is about as much ‘theory’ as we’ll get into in the whole lesson. 

(n.b. once you’ve tuned the 6th string, the ‘fretmatches’ are the frets you press to tune the next one over, i.e. instead of ‘5-5-5-4-5-x’ for standard tuning):

• Notes: C-G-D-F-G-Bb
• Intervals: 1-5-2-4-5-b7
• Fretmatches: 7-7-3-2-3-x

The study below explores this tuning with some of Hejira’s characteristic fingerpicking patterns - although it works fine with a pick too if you can handle the string-skips. Hear how the open strings allow for floating, harp-like resonations, which hang in the air and recolor all the notes around them, being ‘recharged’ back to full volume with each cycle of the fingerpicking sequence:

Exercise 2. Appalachian dulcimer tuning (C-G-C-G-G-C)

Joni didn’t just play guitar and piano. She also recorded and performed on the Appalachian dulcimer, a 3-to-5-stringed folk instrument placed flat on the lap. Joellen Lapidus, who first introduced her to the dulcimer, tells the story:

“One day I found out there was going to be the Big Sur Folk Festival and I thought to myself, ‘I'll make a dulcimer and call it the Festival Model. And I'll sell it to either Joni Mitchell or The Incredible String Band.’ They were both my idols at the time....I told all my friends and they said yeah, yeah, yeah. So, anyway, I went out into woods, looking for inspiration, and there were these beautiful red, wild columbines. And I just thought, ‘That's it.’”

“I brought it to the festival...and I saw Joni walking down the path, and I just put the dulcimer right in front of her... She said, ‘Oh, what is that instrument?’ And I said, ‘It's a mountain dulcimer.’ She said, ‘Well, what does it sound like?’ So I played for her and I told her, I said, ‘You know, this is something that you could really get into, because it's all open tunings..."

Joni immediately saw what Joellen meant, and went on to play the dulcimer some of her best-known songs, including Carey, A Case of You, All I Want, and California. Her approach to learning it gives us core insights into her guitaristic thinking, too – she bought it without really knowing anything about how it was supposed to be played, so had to work it out herself based on her own intuitions and musical desires.

She explained the beginnings of this journey in a 1996 interview: “The only instrument I had ever held against my knee was a bongo drum...so when I started to play the dulcimer I beat it. I just slapped it with my hands...” She would retain this percussive essence, supplementing it with other non-traditional ideas including characteristic palm-muted strums.

In fact, the only dulcimer instruction she ever received in these early days was when Joellen briefly showed her a few strumming techniques around the time of purchase. And Joellen, a self-taught player, had in turn adapted her style from her main skill as a folk guitarist.

But these two ‘outsiders’ are now hailed as pioneers by the global dulcimer community - Joni for doing more than anyone before or since to popularize their instrument in the public eye, and Joellen for how she “sings and plays the dulcimer with complex rhythms, while incorporating a variety of musical genres from folk to jazz to Arabic...”

In this exercise we go ‘back to source’, imitating Joni’s guitar-derived dulcimer style with some open-tuned, folksy chords on the actual guitar. In keeping with her general musical approach, she turned to a variety of different dulcimer tunings over the years, and even rearranged the strings for a time, putting the bass in the middle for a less ‘directional’ strumming resonance.

Here, we approximate the common ‘perfect 5th’ dulcimer arrangement she used on Carey (DDAA), tuning to a wide, pure-toned setup of C-G-C-G-G-C from low to high:

• Notes: C-G-C-G-G-C
• Intervals: 1-5-1-5-5-1
• Fretmatches: 7-5-7-0-5-x

Your strings will probably sound buzzy and slack. To some degree this is part of the dulcimer tone we want, although shorter-necked guitars and thinner string sets may struggle a bit when tuned very low. 

We also have to contend with ‘inharmonicity’: essentially, the fact that the physical vibration of a string is essentially a small, ever-shifting set of ‘bends’, meaning that – in literal terms – all strings always ring a little sharp (as they do with any type of bend).

In standard tuning we don’t really need to worry about this very much, as the effect is minuscule, but it comes into play with low, loose tunings, especially if we pluck forcefully. Hear inharmonicity in action on my down-tuned 6th string:

So in the exercise below, be careful not to pluck too hard, or push down on the fretboard with undue force. In the exercise we imitate the dulcimer’s limited range of strings by only fretting on the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th strings, just using the others to add color and textural depth:

Insights from Joni’s paintings

Joni famously described herself as a “painter derailed by circumstance”. As detailed above, her first creative passion was visual art rather than music - in her teens she studied with painter and interior designer Henry Bonli (he found her “an argumentative pupil”), and later enrolled at the Alberta College of Art before dropping out aged 20. She continued painting throughout her career, designing many of her own album covers and receiving acclaim for gallery exhibitions.

All facets of creativity are inextricably interconnected – especially in Joni’s case. Many of her tracks have corresponding paintings, made in tandem, and in several interviews she refers to how she visualizes sound itself, seeing it as “colors and shapes”. 

She would often draw or paint to settle nerves and pass the time before concerts, and describes sometimes having to be “dragged away” from the activity when it was time to get onstage.

It’s useful to think of Joni’s approach to tuning in similar terms. For example, you can just pick up a guitar and play it, but you can’t start painting without deliberately picking out which colors you want to put on the brush. 

In essence, Joni treats the tuning process like this ‘color selection’ step – each one brings its own tones, shades, and densities, meaning she can draw on a fuller overall spectrum in her work. To her, confining yourself to standard tuning is like ignoring all the other paint pots.

So to get closer to her music, have a look at some of her intriguing visual art too - for example her vivid self-portraits, and Morning Glory on the Vine, a book of watercolors originally produced for friends which includes a striking portrait of close friend Neil Young.

Exercise 3. This Flight Tonight-style tuning (G-G-D-G-B-D)

For the final exercise we turn to one of the few non-piano songs from Blue, one of her best-known albums. As noted by guitarist Howard Wright, This Flight Tonight takes a tuning of Ab-Ab-Eb-Ab-C-Eb, essentially the blues open G we heard at the start (D-G-D-G-B-D) moved upwards a half-step, with the 6th string lowered to a whole octave below the 5th for some ‘slack thwack’. Here’s how we can mirror this idea while minimizing retuning:

• Notes: G-G-D-G-B-D
• Intervals: 1-1-5-1-3-5
• Fretmatches: 12-7-5-4-3-x

Joni was consistently frustrated by the exacting nature of her early art lessons. In this spirit, I’m just going to give you a brief chord sequence for this one, which aims to capture the character of her ambiguous, cycling resolutions (as she christened them, “Joni’s weird chords”). See what you can draw with these starting colors:

Round-up

Of course, this lesson is only a small window into what is now a long lifetime of tuning explorations. Joni’s arrangements gradually moved lower down as the pitch of her voice dropped with age, and she contended with the added complexities of touring by simplifying her system, bringing along five separate Ibanez jazz guitars, each strung differently to allow for a clear tone at different tensions. 

Ever keen to experiment, she played through a Roland VG-8 synth for a time, which allowed her to digitally alter the guitar’s tuning without actually retuning the strings themselves.

If you want to use Joni’s other tunings as starting points, see the heroic, fan-compiled List of guitar transcriptions sorted by tuning pattern on her website, along with a superb Tips for guitarists playing Joni songs page, covering such things as string gauges, fingerpicking techniques, and her mildly microtonal, James Taylor-style ‘stretched tuning’. Her legacy, deservingly, is in little danger of being forgotten by today’s guitarists.

The purpose of this lesson isn’t really to teach specific tunings. It’s more to remind us that we can take a ‘step back’ in our creative process, making deliberate choices about the natural colors of our tuning patterns as well as about the chords and melodies we set to them. 

So for each of the exercises above, explore how you can recolor things by further altering the strings. Before long, you’ll have stumbled into some entrancing sonic spaces, that you wouldn’t otherwise have been able to dream up. And you’ll never run out of new tunings to explore...

Further learning

See more lessons on the Raga Junglism ‘World of Tuning’ - everything you didn’t realise you wanted to know about guitar tuning, from musical manuscripts from ancient China through to modern scientific insights into string vibration and the cognition of sound. Give me feedback too!

Read the curious tales of Joni’s guitars: “The first professional instrument she owned was acquired back in 1966, when she received a 1956 Martin D-28 from a Marine captain. The captain was in Vietnam when his tent was hit with shrapnel, injuring him. The captain had two guitars inside his tent at the time. 

Joni claimed this Martin to be her best guitar ever. She wondered if the explosion did something to the modules in the wood, since the guitars sound was incredible.”

Hear from Joni herself in a rare, revealing NPR interview (Joni Mitchell At 75: Trouble Is Still Her Muse): “Her music has consistently made her vulnerability clear. And it is not the pretty kind. In another excerpt from an interview played at the concert, Mitchell complained of ‘being stereotyped as a magic princess ... you know, the sort of 'twinkle, twinkle, little star' kind of attitude’. Vulnerability, in Mitchell's songs, is often dissembling...”

Sometimes you want small chords in order to fit into a funk song or add a percussive backbeat. Today, we’re not talking about these – we’re looking at making the most sound possible, using all six strings and a wide range of notes (that is, from low to high). 

Chords such as these examples can be very effective on acoustic guitar, particularly if it is the sole accompaniment to a voice. Joni Mitchell is a master at this and would frequently use open tunings to assist with wide-ranging, complex chords. 

The good news here is that these chords capture much of that sound without the need for retuning. Based in the key of E major, the example chords outline part of an ascending major scale, which you’ll find quite useful as a compositional device with some experimentation, playing them in and out of scale sequence. 

All the chords feature the sixth, second and first string open (E, B and E), which allows us to make various triads and superimpose harmonic ideas elsewhere.  

1. Emaj7

This Emaj7 takes its name from the D# at the 8th fret of the G string. You’ll find the 3rd (G#) over on the D string and another root on the 7th fret of the A – giving us three Es in total! As well as strumming up a storm, unusual voicings such as this can yield very interesting arpeggiated parts.

2. F#m11/E

I’m calling this F#min11/E as we have (from low to high) E on the open sixth string, F# A E (in that order) making an F#min7 triad on the fifth, fourth and third strings, the open B giving us our 11th – then, finally, another 7th in the shape of the open high E string.

3. Eadd2

Of the various names this chord could correctly be given, I’m opting for Eadd2. It could also be called Eadd9, or G#min7/E. While the latter gives a context after the previous F#minor11/E, I’m not convinced enough to call it that as a ‘standalone’ chord. Hopefully, this will give a bit of insight into how and why people name chords the way they do!

4. Amaj9/E

This example suits the name Amaj9/E. I think we know where the low E comes from by this point, but the A, C# and G# on the fifth, fourth and third strings are our maj7 triad, further extended by the open B string as the 9th then the open E, which (as the 5th) doesn’t require adding any further numbers to the name!

5. Emaj9

Finally, we flip the shape round and get this nice ‘doo-wop’ style Emaj9. We have our open Es and B in the usual places, with the G#, D# and F# giving us the maj3, maj7 and 9th respectively. Like all of these examples, it’s worth shifting these about the fretboard for some nice surprises!

Chelsea Wolfe has dropped two previously unheard tracks, taken from the 2019 recording sessions that brought about her most recent studio album, Birth of Violence.

The first – a haunting, piano-fueled cover of Joni Mitchell’s 1970 song Woodstock – is a masterful demonstration of Wolfe’s gripping vocals and sonic range, though it's the second offering of the pair that displays her six-string skills.

Green Altar, an original that was left on the cutting room floor three years ago, is equally haunting in its opening exchanges, providing an ample supply of soft acoustic guitar strums and wispy lyrics.

After the chime-y strums, some tight arpeggio work – supplanted by a bed of dense piano stabs, booming soundscapes and ethereal vocal harmonies – arrives to neatly carry the track along towards its heart-aching finale.

Of the never-before-heard-original, Wolfe said, “Green Altar is a cherished song that unfortunately didn’t make it onto the album. 

“It’s a love song I wrote after finding out that my dear friends (artist) Bill Crisafi and (designer) Hogan McLaughlin were engaged,” she continued. “I envisioned them getting married in a lush, green outdoor space outside of some majestic castle ruins.”

As for her cover of Woodstock, Wolfe commented, “While preparing for the Birth of Violence tour, I was watching a lot of Joni Mitchell videos. A 1966 Canadian performance that I found of hers ended up inspiring the video for my song Highway.

“One night after working on the live set, Ben (Chisholm) and I were hanging out and I was just letting the Joni videos roll... Woodstock came on and I started singing along. After that I simply asked Ben if he’d be into covering it with me for the tour, and we just went back into the studio and started working it out. 

“The cover came together quite naturally and it was a treat to play on stage every night. Joni is obviously such a big inspiration to this side of my music, so it felt right to pay tribute to her.”

In addition to the two tracks, Wolfe has also announced the release of her official Birth of Violence tour documentary – a 30-minute film that traces the progression of the tour from its beginning right up to its pandemic-induced postponement.

Captured by photographer/director Bobby Cochran, the documentary explores the show, the stage, behind-the-scenes moments, and the development of the album.

“It’s not my natural inclination to want cameras around when I’m in my head or doing vocal warmups before a show, or when I’m with friends or family backstage,” began Wolfe, “but Bobby asked, and in the spirit of pushing myself to document that era of my musical life, I welcomed him along. 

“Then, after the COVID-19 pandemic hit and I had to fly home from the European acoustic tour before I got to play a single show of it, I was so grateful that he had this footage and was putting it together. 

“I wanted to share this documentary for that reason as well, for those who had tickets to cancelled shows (I love you!), and as a sort of wave goodbye to the time I spent focused on Birth of Violence, as I’m now making plans for and in the headspace of the next new album.”

• Green Altar and Woodstock are available to stream now.

Back in March 1968, singer/songwriter Joni Mitchell – on the eve of the release of her debut album, Song to a Seagull – embarked on a two-week residency at Le Hibou Coffee House in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

During her residency, one Jimi Hendrix happened to play two shows at Ottawa's Capitol Theater, just a few blocks away. Following the completion of his performances at the Capitol, on March 19, Hendrix called Mitchell, and asked if he could record her performance at Le Hibou that evening.

He recorded the interaction in his diary, writing, “Talked with Joni Mitchell on the phone. I think I’ll record her tonight with my excellent tape recorder (knock on wood) – hmmm... can’t find any wood... everything’s plastic.”

You can hear one of the performances from that night, Mitchell's stirring rendition of The Dawntreader (which would appear just a few days later on Song to a Seagull), below. 

Though he sold out the Capitol, Hendrix was able to move to the front of the crowd largely unnoticed with his reel-to-reel recorder and kneel in front of the stage, where he would record the entirety of both of Mitchell's sets that evening.

To add another remarkable twist to this already-surreal tale, Hendrix's tapes from that evening were stolen just a few days later and were thought for 50 years to be lost forever, until they were re-discovered in a private collection and returned – via the Library and Archives Canada – to Mitchell.

Upon the October 29 release – via Rhino Records – of Joni Mitchell Archives Vol. 2: The Reprise Years (1968-1971), the recordings will at last be released.

“They came and told me, ‘Jimi Hendrix is here, and he’s at the front door.’ I went to meet him," Mitchell tells Cameron Crowe in the liner notes of Archives Vol. 2. 

"He had a large box. He said to me, ‘My name is Jimi Hendrix. I'm on the same label as you. Reprise Records.’ We were both signed about the same time. He said, ‘I'd like to record your show. Do you mind?’ I said, ‘no, not at all.’ There was a large reel-to-reel tape recorder in the box.

“The stage was only about a foot off the ground," she continues. "He knelt at edge of the stage, with a microphone, at my feet. All during the show, he kept twisting knobs. He was engineering it, I don't know what he was controlling, volume? He was watching the needles or something, messing with knobs. He beautifully recorded this tape. Of course I played part of the show to him. He was right below me.” 

Joni Mitchell Archives Vol. 2: The Reprise Years (1968-1971) will be available digitally, as a 5-CD set and – exclusively from Mitchell's website – as a 10-LP set on 180-gram vinyl, limited to 4,000 copies.

It features outtakes, alternate versions and demos of songs from some of Mitchell's most acclaimed albums – such as Blue – previously unreleased live recordings, and compositions seeing the light of day for the first time.

To preorder the album, step right this way.

David Crosby has released two new tracks from his forthcoming album For Free: the title track – a cover of Joni Mitchell's track of the same name – and an original titled Rodriguez For A Night.

Following the album's debut single River Rise – which arrived last month – Crosby's For Free remains largely faithful to the original – with lush and enveloping piano the central instrument – though it sees him team up with Texas singer-songwriter Sarah Jarosz for some truly gorgeous vocal harmonies.

“Joni's the greatest living singer-songwriter, and For Free is one of her simplest,” Crosby says. “It's one of my favorite songs because I love what it says about the spirit of music and what compels you to play.”

On Rodriguez For A Night, Crosby joins forces with his son Raymond and Steely Dan's Donald Fagen for a far more upbeat number, implementing clavinet-fueled funk stylings and smooth winding bass lines.

“Steely Dan's my favorite band and I've admired Donald a long time, so that was a thrill for us,” Crosby says of the collaboration.

On working with his son Raymond – who has also produced the album – Crosby explains: “Can you imagine what it's like to connect with your son and find out that he's incredibly talented – a great composer, a great poet, and a really fine songwriter and musician all around?

“We're such good friends and we work so well together, and we'll each go to any length to create the highest-quality songs we can.”

David Crosby's For Free arrives July 23 via BMG. Pre-order is available now.

Given that Eddie Van Halen once asked Jennifer Batten to show him how to play his own Beat It solo, we can assume she knows a thing or two about teaching electric guitar.

More recently, Batten, who has played in Michael Jackson and Jeff Beck’s bands, has hosted the Guitar Cloud Symposium online lesson series. Now she’s just announced the newest Guitar Cloud event – a Deep Dives “Heroes” session decoding the techniques and creative strategies of four guitar legends: Eddie Van Halen, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page and Joni Mitchell.

In addition to Batten’s instructional on Jeff Beck, the Guitar Cloud Symposium features: Jefferson Starship guitarist Jude Gold, who also performs in the Van Halen tribute band Hot For Teacher, teaching the Eddie Van Halen lessons; Zepparella member Gretchen Menn on Jimmy Page’s playing and style; and guitarist Vicki Genfan, a “master of tunings, rhythmic tactics and songwriting techniques,” on Joni Mitchell guitar approach.

The "Heroes" live lesson event is a one-day, eight-hour full-immersion session that takes place January 16. Register at Guitar Cloud Symposium.

Joni Mitchell, Love Has Many Faces: A Quartet, A Ballet, Waiting To Be Danced is a critically acclaimed deluxe 4CD box set featuring a career-spanning 53 songs, curated and sequenced by Joni herself, presented as a book including 52 pages of lyrics, art pieces and a self-penned liner notes. Available now at Amazon here>>

In celebration of Love Has Many Faces, we have a very special giveaway this month!!

One lucky reader can win this rare limited edition numbered and framed giclee print, featuring the cover art painting, created by Mitchell specifically for the box set, and signed by the artist.

Enter for a chance to win now>>(Contest has now ended.)

Provided to us by the folks at Rhino Records, the print is 22” x 29” and it’ll be shipped to you directly from the label.

Love Has Many Faces: A Quartet, A Ballet, Waiting To Be Danced was first conceived as the music to a ballet about love. But after spending 18 months trying to distill everything she’d written about love—and the lack of it—down to a single disc, the influential singer-songwriter abandoned the ballet.

“I wanted the music to feel like a total work—a new work. No matter what I did, though, at that length, it remained merely a collection of songs,” she writes in the set’s liner notes.

Undaunted, Mitchell did not give up. Instead, she continued to sequence her songs, determined to prove to herself that what she was after was possible. After two years, she had created a four-act ballet based on the 53 songs that make up this inspiring collection.

“I am a painter who writes songs. My songs are very visual. The words create scenes… What I have done here is to gather some of these scenes (like a documentary filmmaker) and by juxtaposition, edit them into a whole new work,” the artist writes.

Love Has Many Faces: A Quartet, A Ballet, Waiting To Be Danced is available now and makes an excellent Valentine’s Day gift!

Mitchell designed the package which is a book containing 53 lyrical poems, six new paintings, and an autobiographical text illuminating her recording process. It is funny, mystical, and informative.

For more info go here>>

Enter here for a chance to win this print here>>

The following content is related to the February 13 issue of Guitar World. For the full range of interviews, features, tabs and more, pick up the new issue on newsstands now, or in our online store.

Canadian-born Joni Mitchell originally intended to be a fine artist and considered herself a hobbyist musician in the early Sixties, occasionally playing paid gigs to support her painting studies.

That all changed by the mid Sixties, when personal issues, including needing to give a child up for adoption, inspired her to channel her troubled thoughts into original songs—music that would soon be covered by established folk artists like Tom Rush and Judy Collins, who had a Top-10 hit with Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” in 1967.

In 1965, Mitchell moved to the U.S., performing her own material in coffee houses and folk clubs along the East Coast. At a Florida gig in 1967, she met David Crosby (soon to form Crosby, Stills and Nash), who was floored by her soaring voice, innovative use of altered tunings and profound lyrics.

He convinced her to move to California and encouraged Reprise Records to release her solo acoustic debut (Songs to a Seagull) in 1968. By the end of that decade, Joni Mitchell was a household name. This month, I’ll examine the tunings and techniques of this legend’s signature songs.