Radiohead went wireless for the first time during their recent tour after testing a new system that left even their most cynical techs impressed.

The band’s shows across the UK and Europe late last year were their first in seven years, and a newly forged relationship with US firm Sound Devices has helped modernize their live rigs and perhaps convinced them to ditch cables for good.

“The band doesn’t tend to change how they operate for the sake of changing; they are only interested in upgrades that will serve their musical goals,” says Radiohead FOH mixer Simon Hodge. “Although the band has used RF [Radio Frequency] systems for guitars in the past, the opinion was always that it never sounded as good as a cable.

“In an arena, you have so many factors affecting the sound that go far beyond RF or cables, which is why we spend so much time in advance doing blind tests and ensuring we’re starting from the best place.”

Jonny Greenwood, Ed O’Brien, and Thom Yorke, as well as bass player Colin Greenwood, have all welcomed Astral ARX32 Wireless Receivers and Astral TX Wireless Transmitters into their setups.

One important factor was Sound Device’s Astral Guitar Cable – for connecting electric guitars to the Astral transmitters – which ended up having no impact on their tone whatsoever.

“We brought it into Jonny’s studio and did some blind tests between Astral and their preferred cables,” Hodge recounts. “We all listened, and even the most cynical guitar techs were impressed.

“The quality of the audio path was obvious, and it wasn’t changing the sound at all. The packs also auto-detect the cable, allowing us to easily adjust them in the receiver menu or UI as needed per instrument.”

Then there was the matter of dealing with the multiple guitar changes throughout the set.

So, the tech fed the Astral ARX32 inputs into a Prodigy Audio Processor via Dante and custom Streamdeck controllers, essentially creating a main hub for all the guitar signals.

“The band travels with dozens of guitars; Ed O’Brien himself had 32 on this run,” Hodge says. “This was the first time we could have all 32 at once accessible and easily switchable in the same interface, a choice that either the musician or tech can make as needed.

“The Astral Guitar System ended up being a game changer for us.”

As revealed to Rolling Stone in March, the band has adopted a less chaotic touring model moving forward, promising 20 shows per year on a different continent. Last year, they played four-show residencies in five European cities, with other continents set to get some Radiohead action in the near future.

Elsewhere, Ed O’Brien, who recently announced a new solo album, has opened up about how the guitar has helped him combat depression.

Ahead of Radiohead’s long-awaited reunion tour, the band’s music is once again coming to the fore of the music public’s consciousness – and, naturally, that means it’s been picked up by a few new fans.

Specifically, the melancholic arpeggio-heavy Let Down – from 1997’s OK Computer – has been doing the rounds on social media, and has hit the popularity milestone that only a select few modern mainstream artists achieve: TikTok virality.

To the casual listener, it might not be that much of a surprise. Let Down is, after all, a great song. However, at the time of its writing, it wasn’t equally appreciated by all members of the band.

Speaking to The Times, Thom Yorke, Ed O’Brien and Jonny Greenwood reflect on the origins of Let Down, which almost spelled an end for the UK alt-rock icons during the making of their third studio record.

“I find that especially bizarre,” Yorke notes of the song’s skyrocketing popularity. “Because I fought tooth and nail for it not to be on the record, but Ed was, like, ‘If it’s not, I’m leaving.’”

O’Brien himself was keen on Let Down. He saw it as the “emotional heart” of OK Computer, a record whose other standout tracks include No Surprises, Karma Police and Paranoid Android. Still, Let Down’s contemporary success took him by surprise.

“I was astonished,” he says in the same interview. “So I told my kids, who are 18 and 21, and they said, ‘What do you expect? Teenagers are depressed. It’s depressing music!’”

In a 1997 interview with Guitar World, Radiohead’s guitar triumvirate discussed the making of OK Computer and the far-flung influences that shaped the guitar parts of each song – Let Down included.

“We do try to be diverse,” O’Brien said. “The guitar sound on No Surprises was supposed to hark back to [the Beach Boys’] Pet Sounds, Let Down was a nod to Phil Spector, Exit Music had a [composer Ennio] Morricone atmosphere, Airbag was an attempt to do something like DJ Shadow.

“But because we haven’t paid the dues, if you like, to play those types of music, we fail to get what we hope to achieve. But by going down that route, we find our own thing.”

In that same interview, O’Brien and co looked back on how their debut album changed the way they thought about recording guitars, and set them up for two landmark albums.

OK Computer, which catapulted Radiohead from alt-rock outcasts to true rock royalty, was just one of a number of hugely influential records from Radiohead. In 2000, the band ripped up the guitar rulebook to create OK Computer’s follow-up, Kid A.

Tremolo picking is the relentless, rapid-fire technique that has electrified generations of guitar players across multiple genres. It’s the thread that connects surf rock to extreme metal, classical finesse to experimental noise rock. At its core, tremolo picking involves continuously alternating up and down strokes on a single note (or set of notes), creating a sustained and often urgent texture.

Its origins trace back to acoustic instruments like the mandolin, oud, and classical guitar, where it was used to emulate sustained tones on otherwise percussive instruments. The electric guitar’s amplified nature supercharged this technique, pushing it from subtle shimmer to full-blown sonic assault.

If you've been playing for several years, learning tremolo picking is a powerful skill as it will develop speed, stamina, and control. It builds wrist strength, teaches rhythmic precision (and when to abandon it), and enhances your tone. Whether you’re aiming to channel the wet, reverby energy of Dick Dale, the sinister churn of Morbid Angel, or the textural nuance and kineticism of Radiohead, tremolo picking is a must-know guitar technique to take your playing to the next level.

The key to mastering this technique is in the wrist motion, pick angle, and watching for excessive tension in the picking hand.

You’ll use your wrist – not your elbow – to generate motion. Keep your pick slightly angled (about 15-20 degrees) to minimize resistance, and avoid tensing up - especially at higher speeds. If you feel your arm locking up, stop, reset, and try again.

When holding the pick, don't use too much pressure and expose the pick's tip between 2-5mm from the thumb - you don't need lots of pick connecting to the string. As for the pick itself, most fast players opt for substantial thickness: while it can be pleasing to strum an acoustic with a 0.60mm pick, anything under 1mm is likely to be moving around too much when you're picking fast with a moderate amount of force.

Timing and Tremolo: What Do Those Slashes Really Mean?

Let’s demystify the timing side of tremolo picking. Two rhythmic styles are used:

● Measured tremolo, often played in 16th notes.

● Unmeasured tremolo, where you try to cram in as many strokes as possible within the written note’s duration.

In notation, the number of diagonal slashes on a note’s stem tells you how fast to pick. One slash means 8th note tremolo, two slashes for 16th notes, and three for 32nd notes. At slower tempos, it’s easy to keep things precise - 8ths and 16ths can be played with steady, measured picking. But once you hit 32nd notes (or faster), it’s a different story. This is a max-out speed for many, where trying to track every individual stroke becomes mechanically unrealistic or impossible. That’s where unmeasured tremolo comes in.

Instead of counting, you simply unleash a rapid, all-out, continuous motion - to create a fluttering effect. The goal here isn’t precise rhythmic accuracy, but sonic texture. Think of it as controlled chaos: fast, loose, and expressive rather than mathematically perfect.

In tablature without note stems, you may see the slashes placed above or below the fret number.

Ready to dive in? Great. What follows are six comprehensive examples that unlock the deep potential of tremolo picking in your guitar playing!

Tremolo Picking examples

Example 1: Dick Dale and the surf guitar tsunami

Dick Dale brought tremolo picking into the mainstream with high-speed, reverb-soaked lines that sounded like crashing waves. His technique and tone were inspired by jazz drummers like Gene Krupa - fast, bombastic, and full of syncopation.

In this example, use a clean tone with spring reverb (the 'boingy' type found in old tube amps) and focus on measured sixteenth note tremolos, with accenting on specific beats for rhythmic bounce. Explore picking closer to the bridge for that classic surf guitar snap and bite.

Example 2: Eddie Van Halen's classical twist

Eddie Van Halen’s Little Guitars intro is a pastiche take on nylon-string fingerpicked guitar tremolo which involves either the thumb, first and second fingers or those plus the third finger. Here, you are maintaining a high open string with unmeasured tremolo while the fretting hand fingers hammer-on lower notes to create a layered, two part sound.

Inspired by composers like Francisco Tárrega (check out the famous Recuerdos de la Alhambra) and classical guitarists like Andrés Segovia, Eddie used tremolo in this case as a texture, not just a technique. This one demands twitch picking - the rapid wrist shake that comes from a relaxed shoulder and snappy wrist, not brute force. If you’re struggling with the 'hammer on from nowhere' technique required by this example, check out this 10 Guitar Tips article that includes hammer-on strength exercises.

Example 3: Jonny Greenwood and the art of texture

Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood brought tremolo picking into the world of alternative and art rock. He blended measured and unmeasured tremolo, double stops, and octave shapes across wide string spans for a textural, orchestral vibe.

This style requires more wrist mobility and a looser picking grip, like a funk rhythm guitarist. The result? Ambient washes, punchy cacophony, and ethereal richness. In this example, there's a set of 'false notes' - two of the same exact pitch played on two different strings simultaneously. This adds thickness and dissonance as the C note on the third string is slowly raised by a ¼ step.

Example 4: Slayer and the thrash revolution

In thrash metal, tremolo picking is an engine of aggression. Slayer’s riffs - like in Postmortem or Raining Blood - use measured 16th-note tremolos to match relentless double bass drum.

As stated earlier, there's a key skill to maintaining fast tremolo picking. Here's what Kerry has said about fast tremolo picking: "A lot of people don't know that they don't need to play from the elbow. If you want any kind of speed and you want to be articulate, play from the wrist. You've got to have as minimal movement as you can."

Add distortion and pick hard(ish) for maximum attack but be mindful about tension and/or pain over long bouts of heavy and fast picking. Use single-string dissonant intervals and punctuate with occasional unmeasured bursts to ramp up tension. Thrash tremolo is tight, rhythmic, and physically demanding - this is a real stamina-builder.

Utilize the unused parts of both hands to control noise in this style. Quick position shifts and fast tremolos with this amount of distortion makes playing tight and cleanly a battle. Again, you can refer to chapter six of the 10 Guitar Tips article to work on controlling string noise with both hands.

Example 5: Death metal and the extreme edge

Bands like Morbid Angel use tremolo picking with almost reckless abandon, creating riffs that sound like turret fire. This style leans heavily on unmeasured tremolo, often alternating between rapid picking and muted power chords.

As stated earlier, keep your pick angle sharp not flat contact to the string but angled so each stroke has less resistance. Practice in short bursts to avoid hand stress as 200 bpm with constant tremolo is intense. This example is a great workout for tone control and switching between muted chords and high-octane single note runs.

Example 6: Black metal – something wicked this way comes!

Black metal, pioneered by players like Euronymous of Mayhem, uses tremolo picking in haunting, melodic ways. This style incorporates arpeggios and scalar runs, all tremolo picked with sixteenth notes at warp speed over blast beats.

Unlike death or thrash metal, don't mute - let the strings ring with icy clarity. Practice bar-by-bar to learn the fingerings, then stitch each bar together. Think piercing winds and revelatory chaos: this is tremolo picking’s most brutal form.

Tremolo picking in 5 iconic songs

Dick Dale – Miserlou

The original surf tremolo anthem. Fast, dry-picked, and soaked in reverb. An electric guitar game-changer.

Eddie Van Halen – Little Guitars

Flamenco flair in a classically inspired masterpiece. Combines blazing tremolo with fret hand tapping/hammer-ons for added challenge.

Radiohead – Just

Jonny Greenwood unleashes tremolo picking through octave swells and fuzzed-out textures in this explosive solo from The Bends.

Morbid Angel – Immortal Rites

A blueprint for death metal riffing. Unrelenting tremolo picking and tonal brutality.

Yngwie Malmsteen – Trilogy Suite Op: 5

Perhaps a good starting point for a part two, this neoclassical opus combines fast measured tremolo picking between fretted notes and the open string.

“Every time I picked up a guitar I got the horrors.”

Speaking to Q in a 2000 interview, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke was reflecting on the Herculean task of writing the material for what would become the band’s fourth album, Kid A.

The picture of what seems like a somewhat over-the-top reaction to your run-of-the-mill writers block becomes a bit clearer when you take into account that Yorke was attempting to follow up OK Computer, the landmark 1997 album that catapulted Radiohead from alt-rock outcasts with a fairly sizable following to true rock royalty – uniting in euphoric praise all but a few scattered dissenters in the music journalism intelligentsia, and raising the eyebrows of even those who didn’t really like what they heard.

It came at a curious moment in rock guitar. The garage-through-a-broken-mirror riffs of the grunge tidal wave had well and truly washed away – the genre’s biggest bands having mostly fallen apart due to tragedy or stasis – but the feral aggression of down-tuned nu-metal was still just out of sight, gathering strength for its JNCO jean-powered offensive.

It was into that vacuum that the world received OK Computer, a collection of jittery and jagged rock anthems (and they were anthems) that expressed uneasiness and disaffection with what at the time made many optimistic and hopeful – the embrace (by choice or by force) of the cutthroat capitalist Washington Consensus ideology around much of the world, and, in particular, the seismic advances of technology.

There was little reference point for it, musically. It featured the birth of a (very) reluctant new guitar hero in Jonny Greenwood, who ripped sounds out of his Telecaster Plus that were not of this Earth.

Paranoid Android, Subterranean Homesick Alien – he graced the sci-fi names of the songs with tones to match. Not one, but two, disconcerting solos in the former – the first opening with a frenzy of gonzo tremolo picking, the wayward stabs of the latter sometimes sucked into a black hole by the envelope filter of Greenwood’s Mutronics Mutator rack unit.

Aiming for the cosmos on Alien while Radiohead’s ever-steady third guitarist, Ed O’ Brien, kept a foot on this planet with haunting arpeggios, Greenwood used the ever-versatile DigiTech Whammy to beam three-note statements into interstellar space.

OK Computer was immediately recognized as singular. “Saviors” of rock, of the guitar – got thrown around a lot. A 1997 Guitar World piece on the band noted frequent comparisons of the album to the work – in scope and significance if not subject matter – of Pink Floyd and U2.

Moving into the 21st century, an essay in no less than the United States Library of Congress equates OK Computer to the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

During the presidency of George W. Bush, Coldplay’s Chris Martin went so far as to suggest that the Bush administration’s policies might change for the better if then-Vice President Dick Cheney gave the album a spin.

“It changed my life, so why wouldn't it change his?”

How do you follow something like that up?

Well, O’Brien explained in a 2017 interview with Total Guitar, the answer was “‘Bring synths in, throw our tools away.’”

Mind you, this wasn’t a unanimous decision.

Ever the band’s liaison to the world of Guitar Rock™️, O’Brien felt that if Radiohead were indeed seen as the genre’s foremost creative talents, why not double down?

Coldplay were channeling the band’s soaring melodies and enormous choruses into sing-along giga-hits, while millions of those attracted to the band’s heavier, dystopian side were finding kinship in the work of Muse. Show the world who the originals are, eh?

For Yorke, who was feeling the aforementioned pressure of writing, as O’Brien put it in a 2000 interview with Total Guitar, “three-minute guitar songs,” the doubling-down idea was a non-starter.

“I'd completely had it with melody,” Yorke told Q in 2000. “I just wanted rhythm. All melodies to me were pure embarrassment.”

Hugely inspired by the angular beats and expansive ambient soundscapes of electronic music boundary-pushers like Boards of Canada and Aphex Twin, Yorke wanted to build songs up from drum machines and textures, not riffs, melodies, or hooks.

Though he had no attachment to his status as a nouveau guitar hero (he told Rolling Stone in 2017 that he’s “always hated guitar solos”) even Greenwood was reportedly thrown by just how left-field Yorke’s newfound approach was, never mind the feelings of the band’s bassist – Greenwood’s older brother, Colin – drummer Phil Selway, and, of course, O’Brien.

The subsequent recording process was lengthy, and beset with teething problems, as the band tried to start from square one. Songs were nebulous, with the band exchanging roles ad hoc – Jonny Greenwood responsible for beats on one song, keys on another; Yorke on bass here with Colin Greenwood on keys there. Even Selway picked up the guitar on occasion.

Of an August 1999 rehearsal featuring much of the band’s new material, O’Brien wrote – in his revealing online diary documenting the Kid A recording process – “[I] think that these rehearsals will be viewed in hindsight as where we turned a corner (or hope so).

“Obviously, working on the songs and playing again has helped, but just as importantly we have been forced to confront certain things – like what the fuck are we doing exactly? – how do we set up the next bit of recording so that we don’t start 20-odd songs and not finish one of them?”

Speaking to Total Guitar in 2000, Selway described the band’s six-string division of labor up to that point thus: “In the past, Ed would make these marvelous sounds, Jonny would play the angular lead parts, and Thom would be playing the driven parts, but that's over now.”

Jonny Greenwood, though still picking up the guitar from time to time, ventured off into instrumental lands unknown. In particular, he developed a fondness for the Ondes Martenot, an obscure early electronic instrument not too distant from a theremin – all eeriness and sustained whirring.

O’Brien, in turn, realized that – aside from working more on keyboards – he had to take his playing’s more textural side one giant leap further; and to do so, he too needed some new kit.

An October 1999 diary entry, for instance, reveals a Roland guitar synth to be his “new toy.” But he also wanted something that could add bang-for-buck value to his limited-by-necessity playing, and contribute prolonged textures, like those the younger Greenwood was discovering in his Martenot and innumerable other analog synths.

Enter the Sustainer pickup.

“The first time I heard the Sustainer thing was on Michael Brook’s Infinite Sustain guitar,” O'Brien told Total Guitar in 2017. “He gave one to the Edge on The Joshua Tree; that’s the sound on With Or Without You, that high-pitched thing. So as a young guitarist I was always drawn to sounds that didn’t sound like the guitar.”

“When we threw guitars out, I got in contact with Michael Brook and had a great conversation when we were in the studio. And he directed me towards Fernandes, who had the Sustainer,” he recounted later in the interview. “I had a Clapton Strat from the mid-’90s, and we put the Sustainer unit in there, and that’s when we started using it, around 2000.”

Just as this was occurring, the guitarist was contrasting the vintage, analog tools strewn about the studio by eagerly adding new tech to his pedalboard.

“We took my Clapton Strat with Lace Sensor pickups that I loved, fitted a Fernandes Sustainer unit in it, and at the same time it was the birth of all these new looping pedals,” he told Total Guitar. “The Akai HeadRush had come out and the Line 6 DL4. The combination of the two was… bonkers!”

Slowly but surely, the stubborn, amorphous songs began to take shape – some picking up more conventional arrangements on the way, others ditching them.

One of the first to solidify was Optimistic. Having begun life on Yorke’s 505, it quickly evolved into one of the album’s few full-band, guitar-heavy workouts.

“Optimistic is possibly my favorite band song that is played together live in a room,” O'Brien wrote online in October 1999. “Sounds fucking great.”

The end result was a rare display of muscle, a thundering, hard-riffing statement that kept with the album’s obscure atmosphere, but was dressed in enough conventional rock-with-a-capital-R clothing to, say, soundtrack a Top Gear montage of Ayrton Senna whipping his Formula 1 car around the streets of Monte Carlo.

Charles Mingus-style free jazz freakout brass was added to The National Anthem, a freight train of rhythm section drive led by one of the great rock basslines of the 21st century – a must to get under your fingers, especially if you’ve got some dirt at hand on your pedalboard or amp.

Those songs aside, though, the bring-the-guitars-off-the-stands moments were thin on the ground as things finally finished up.

There’s a climactic outburst of built-up riffing following the third verse in Morning Bell, the dazed triplets of In Limbo, and the dreamy acoustic strums of How to Disappear Completely – all mesmerizing. But it's always when the band steps off into the synthesizer and effects deep end – truly burying the instruments that had made them the belles of the ball and making them unrecognizable – that the album becomes a world unto itself.

There’s Everything in its Right Place, essentially a drone with looping wizardry and one of Yorke’s most expressive vocal performances; the ever-underrated title track, a beautiful and disquieting lullaby; Treefingers, a pure formless soundscape that wouldn’t sound out of place on one of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works albums... guitars are barely discernible, texture only, if that.

Idioteque, arguably the album’s (if not the band’s) crowning achievement and thesis statement, was built not from a riff or chords but an otherworldly four-note synthesizer hook, poached – with permission – from composer Paul Lansky's early electronic composition, Mild und leise.

“Knives Out is the only song on the new record which is basically three guitars, bass, drums, and vocals,” O'Brien explained to Total Guitar in the months before the album's release.

“The only one, and when we finished it we worked out that we'd spent 373 days on it. And when you hear this song, you'll go ‘Why did you take so long to do something like that?’”

When Kid A was released on October 2, 2000, though, Knives Out was nowhere to be found. Eager readers would have to wait for the release of Kid A’s sibling, Amnesiac, the following year, to hear it.

Radiohead had indeed thrown away their tools, and the pedestal that so many had put them on. They were nothing close to the first band to blend guitars and electronic instruments, but the way they did it – turning the former into tools that generated quiet sound manipulation and atmosphere more than melody and rhythm – re-defined what “rock” and even “alt-rock” meant to people.

When all was said and done, listener confusion meant little – the album became the band's first chart-topper in the United States. Upon release, it, unsurprisingly, met with a far more polarized critical reception than its predecessor, but those who praised it often did so in euphoric terms.

Austere and inscrutable, the album was a violent reaction to the messianic expectations that had been placed upon the band, and couldn't have stood out more in the environs of rock's other chart-toppers; aggro blasts of angst that told listeners to, among other things, “break stuff.”

Even 25 years on, Kid A still sounds like nothing else – alien, you might say.

As Radiohead's first tour in seven years inches closer, we take a deep dive into the Guitar World archives to uncover the game-changing band's approach to recording guitars during what many may consider Radiohead's golden era: from Pablo Honey to OK Computer.

“There are lots of mistakes on it,” Ed O’Brien – one-third of the band's guitar triumvirate – commented back in a 1997 interview with Guitar World, referring to Radiohead's debut, Pablo Honey.

“But you learn from your mistakes. I still think it’s a valid album. It’s very up, quite hedonistic – ‘Let’s put on eight guitar overdubs and turn them all up!’ I think it’s one of those albums you might put on in an open-top car on a Saturday night going to a party, but I could be wrong.”

The Bends, released in March 1995, in particular, marked a significant shift from a guitar perspective: it was a band finally (fully) dipping its toes into experimenting and flexing its creative use of its three-guitar lineup, a peek into what Radiohead was to become.

“We were very aware of something on The Bends that we weren’t aware of on Pablo Honey,” O’Brien continued.

“There was a need to put more and more guitar tracks on Pablo Honey, and you had to play all the time. Whereas the approach to The Bends was, if it sounded really great with Thom playing acoustic with Phil [Selway, drummer] and Coz [Colin Greenwood, bassist], what was the point in trying to add something more?”

“Sometimes the nicest thing to do with a guitar is just look at it,” Thom Yorke jokingly added.

As for the division of guitar labor between Yorke, O'Brien, and Jonny Greenwood, Yorke commented, “I just keep time, really,” while Greenwood was uncomfortable being referred to as the lead guitarist. “You could describe it like that, I suppose, but it’s not really like that.”

Yorke quickly came to Greenwood's defense, adding, “When I run out of melodies, there’s usually something on Jonny’s guitar that’s a melody, like Mr. [George] Harrison used to do. You know, pick a melody up here [fingers upper reaches of imaginary fretboard], and so on, because it gets a bit boring listening to one voice all the time.”

As for why Yorke felt The Bends was successful, he divulged, “We had to put ourselves into an environment where we felt free to work. And that’s why we want to produce the next one ourselves, because the times we most got off on making the last record were when we were just completely communicating with ourselves, and John Leckie wasn’t really saying much, and it was just all happening.

“I don’t know if it’ll work again, but I hope it does,” he concluded.

28 years later, Radiohead have just released the live album Hail to the Thief (Live Recordings 2003–2009) and are set to embark on a series of European dates in November – their first since their 2018 tour, which marked the release of A Moon Shaped Pool.

Ever wondered whether you can turn your acoustic guitar or bass into a quasi-violin? Or perhaps you've been inspired by Jimmy Page, Eddie Phillips, Jonny Greenwood or Lee Ranaldo to explore new soundscapes by turning your guitar into a bowed instrument?

Well, the Pickaso Guitar Bow, (as the name suggests), promises to deliver just that – and at first glance, it seems like a nifty accessory for those guitarists who want to venture beyond using their fingers or a pick.

For Pickaso inventor and CEO Jonathan Shenhav, it all boils down to Jimmy Page. “One day, I saw Jimmy Page using a violin bow on his guitar, and it clicked,” he writes on the brand's official website.

“What if I could do this on an acoustic guitar? That moment felt like my whole path was written. I grabbed a violin bow and tried it. It sounded beautiful – but it wasn’t perfect. I kept hitting the guitar, and it felt limited. That’s when I thought, I’m going to invent a bow specifically for acoustic guitars!”

He continues, “I had many ideas, but the one that truly captivated me and was practical enough to pursue was a micro double-sided bow. I didn’t know how to make a bow, so I contacted a local bow maker and shared my idea. Two weeks later, I held my first prototype in my hands. I played it, and I couldn’t believe it – it sounded incredible. I had created something that had never existed before. It was my baby.”

The Pickaso is made from plastic and chrome-coated aluminum and uses synthetic hair on both sides, made by Herco, a Dunlop subsidiary. Its hand-grip section also has a built-in pick, which makes for an easy transition between the violin-like approach, and picking.

According to the company, the mini bow works easily on non-coated steel strings – provided that you rosin it up first. Then, insert the Pickaso between the strings, and begin bowing.

And while it works best on acoustic guitars and basses, that doesn't mean guitarists haven't tried using it on electric variants. Octavio Campo, the player in the video above, got rid of his bridge pickup to make way for the Pickaso – props for commitment.

Speaking of off-kilter guitar accessories, last year, AXExel introduced the FreeStyle – an expanded capo of sorts that gives players access to alternate tunings without needing to retune their guitar.

Colin Greenwood has had an illustrious career as Radiohead's bassist and is currently moonlighting with Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds. Standing side-by-side for decades with his brother and Radiohead's lead guitarist, Jonny Greenwood, and multi-instrumentalist frontman Thom Yorke, Greenwood is well-versed in the two guitarists' differing – yet complementary – styles, which form the very essence of Radiohead.

“[Thom] takes it very seriously,” he tells Rolling Stone's Brian Hiatt. “He's probably, for my money, one of the finest guitarists in the world.

“He's one of the best guitarists I know, like rhythm guitarists, because of the way he plays the guitar. The way he rolls with his shoulders when he plays, it's sort of [the guitar] part of his body. He's just incredibly physically connected, and always [has] been.”

Hiatt comments that Jonny Greenwood, on the other hand, has a more “cerebral” approach to guitar, to which the bassist replies, “Yeah, I agree. They're very different, how they work, which is probably why they complement each other so well.”

“[Jonny's] first record was Cool for Cats by Squeeze on pink vinyl that my mother threw away because she thought it was obscene,” he recalls when reflecting on how his brother's eclectic playing style developed. “But he listened to anything, and I think he learned guitar by [listening to] the Pixies and Lou Reed's album New York.

“Then he was in the Thames Vale Youth Orchestra playing the viola, which I always forget because I don't know how many times he went. So you know, he's one of these people who can just pick anything up and make something cool out of it.”

And as for whether we can expect any Radiohead shows next year to coincide with the 30th anniversary of breakthrough record The Bends, Greenwood replies, “Genuinely, I've been so focused on Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds for the last two months. I don't know what plans are afoot in Radiohead land.”

The Smile – the sonically adventurous trio of Radiohead's Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood, and jazz drummer Tom Skinner – are fresh off the release of Cutouts, the band's second album of 2024, and third in as many years overall.

That sentence in particular is still a surprising one for many Radiohead fans, given that eight years and counting have elapsed since that band's last studio effort. Then again, despite featuring Radiohead's two principal members, the Smile are a very different beast indeed.

The sheer knottiness and prog inclinations of their music, even in comparison to Radiohead's more difficult material, were apparent from their very first gigs. Also apparent from those early shows was Jonny Greenwood's newfound love of rhythmic delay pedals, a preference the guitarist expounded upon in a new interview with NME.

“The guitar parts [on Cutouts] are often focused on using a delay pedal,” Greenwood said. “A few years ago, I started to wonder if technology was moving too fast to appreciate how powerful old ideas – like a simple echo – still were. So I decided to just use a delay pedal, a guitar, and an amp for a year or two, and see what I could write with that (supposed) limitation.

“But then,” he continued, “the guitar, on its own, is already an amazing thing. Treating the delay as its equal opened up lots of directions. It’s still giving me ideas – probably to the point of nausea for Thom and Tom, but maybe there’s still room for a few more on the next record. If they’re different enough…”

One looking for an example of this delay-forward sound need only hear the Cutouts standout Eyes and Mouth, which has been kicking around the trio's setlist since the beginning.

GW.com EIC Michael Astley-Brown, writing about the band's first gigs, wrote, “With the wrong pedalboard, set closer Eyes and Mouth could be mistaken for a pentatonic scale exercise, but a shower of dotted-eighth repeats lent it an altogether more ethereal quality.”

Greenwood's guitar approach has branched off in other ways with the Smile, the most notable being his adoption of a Gibson Les Paul.

Though he's used a Les Paul on occasion with Radiohead, and never kept to one model exclusively overall, Greenwood is synonymous with his Honda sticker-adorned Tobacco Burst Telecaster Plus, which he can be seen thrashing on in just about every Radiohead era, particularly in their earlier days.

Asked by The Sunday Guardian in 2015 why he had been playing a Les Paul more frequently, Greenwood nonchalantly offered, “Guitars are like typewriters. It’s technology, it’s not something to be admired or worshipped. Like, oh, a washing machine or something. It does the job.

“You start seeing people putting them on walls as decorations and it’s just… it’s like putting a vacuum cleaner there. That’s really bizarre for me. They’re okay; they all sound the same, it’s the brutal truth.”

The Smile have announced the cancellation of their upcoming European tour dates after guitarist Jonny Greenwood was hospitalized for emergency treatment.

The band – a Radiohead offshoot which features Greenwood, Thom Yorke and Tom Skinner – were scheduled to play eight festival and headline shows across August that would have seen them visit Germany, Austria, France, Spain and more.

Each show has now been canceled, with The Smile confirming in a statement that tickets for headline shows will be refunded from ticket providers.

“A few days ago, Jonny became seriously ill from an infection that needed emergency hospital treatment, some of it in intensive care,” the band’s statement read. “Mercifully he is now out of danger and will soon return home.

“We have been instructed by the medical team in charge of Jonny’s care to cancel all engagements until he has had time to make a full recovery. To that end, The Smile tour of Europe in August is cancelled.”

The band first formed back in 2021, and made their live debut during that year’s Glastonbury festival.

They then played their first-ever public gigs back in January 2022, and have since gone on to release two studio albums. Their second, Wall of Eyes, arrived in January this year, and followed their debut effort, A Light for Attracting Attention.

Visit The Smile's website for future updates.

A full list of canceled dates can be found below:

• 13 August – Sigulda, Latvia - Sigulda Castle
• 14 August – Warsaw, Poland - Progresja Summer Stage
• 16 August – Winterthur, Switzerland - Winterthurer Musikfestwochen
• 20 August – Frankfurt, Germany - Jahrhunderthalle
• 21 August – Munich, Germany - Zenith
• 22 August – Vienna, Austria - Open Air Arena
• 26 August – Bordeaux, France - Arkea Arena
• 28 August – Valencia, Spain - Marina Norte

Hello, and welcome to a new Spotify playlist-embiggened Essential Guitar Tracks. As you may well know, every seven days (or thereabouts), we endeavor to bring you a selection of songs from across the guitar universe, all with one thing in common: our favorite instrument plays a starring role.

Our goal is to give you an overview of the biggest tracks, our editor’s picks and anything you may have missed. We’re pushing horizons and taking you out of your comfort zone – because, as guitarists, that’s something we should all be striving for in our playing. 

So, here are our highlights from the past seven days… now with a Spotify playlist (scroll to the bottom for the latest additions)!

Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck – Moon River

Thought to be one of the late Beck’s final studio recordings, this new take on the crooning classic lets his guitar do the talking. Perhaps it’s simply the context of Beck’s passing, but the guitarist’s signature whammy-riding Strat tone really tugs the heartstrings here. Indeed, even Clapton wisely keeps out of the way for the first minute and a half… (MP)

Nita Strauss – The Golden Trail

The latest single from the Ibanez signature shredder’s upcoming album, The Call of The Void, which marries Strauss’s scintillating riff work with the visceral vocals of In Flames frontman Anders Fridén. (MO)

Joe Bonamassa – I Want To Shout About It

The blues guitar king channels his soulful side on this Stratocaster, horns 'n' organ-powered new single. Of course, though, Bonamassa allows himself some fun – impressing with a celebratory solo and limber, fiery fills that demonstrate his impeccable phrasing and sense of timing. (JM)

RVG – Common Ground

The Melbourne indie-punks' new track was born from a “deep depression” and absolutely wears its heart on its sleeve. There’s a moody, melodic starkness that evokes Echo And The Bunnymen, drenched in a level of cavernous reverb that appropriately reflects the depths from whence it came. (MP)

Red Devil Vortex – More Luck Than Brains

Reverse tapping pioneer Luis Kalil returns with his band for one of 2023’s most explosive guitar tracks yet, tipping his hat to the likes of Eddie Van Halen, Randy Rhoads, Buckethead, and more with a fretboard masterclass of the highest order. (MO)

Blur – The Narcissist

The Narcissist – the lead single from Blur's first new LP in eight years, The Ballad of Darren – finds guitarist Graham Coxon doing what he's done impeccably for over 30 years now, serving Damon Albarn's affecting narratives with supple fretwork highlighted by his deft melodic touch and propulsive, memorable, and just-a-little-jagged riffs. (JM)

Bully – Change Your Mind

Alicia Bognanno’s grunge-y new cut is blessed with the sort of fat, fuzzy bassline that is so enveloping you want to fashion it into chunky knitwear. Admittedly, we’ve not yet figured out how to translate audio waveforms directly into trendy knit designs but we’re pretty sure that’s an Etsy goldmine waiting to happen. (MP)

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – Gila Monster

King Gizzard turns metal?! That’s certainly the vibe we’re getting with Gila Monster, what with its Metallica-esque riffs, hypnotic guitar solos, and no-nonsense arrangement that launches a full throttle high gain assault. This next King Gizzard album – the band’s second incursion into thrash, following 2019’s Infest The Rats’ Nest – could be very interesting indeed. (MO)

R.L. Boyce – Coal Black Mattie

Mississippi native and blues veteran R.L. Boyce is one of the many artists featured on the upcoming Dan Auerbach-produced Easy Eye Sound compilation, Tell Everybody! (21st Century Juke Joint Blues From Easy Eye Sound). With a hypnotic boogie riff and fire-and-brimstone slide work, Coal Black Mattie is a perfect adrenaline shot of pure, proper, old-school blues guitar. (JM)

Yusuf / Cat Stevens – All Nights, All Days

King of a Land, the forthcoming album from songwriting legend Yusuf / Cat Stevens, has been previewed with All Nights, All Days – a delightful display of electric and acoustic interplay that uses an upbeat vibe to serve up slinky riffs and chord work. (MO)

Creeping Death – The Common Breed

The Texan death-metallers are gathering a reputation as a tonal force majeure –responding with overwhelming crunch, darkness and a grooving pace that suggests they’ve got a few hardcore records stashed under the bed. (MP)

Dudu Tassa & Jonny Greenwood (feat. Nour Freteikh) – Taq ou Dub

Fans of Jonny Greenwood's recent guitar work with The Smile will find plenty to like in Taq ou Dub, the hypnotic new track from Jarak Qaribak, his upcoming full-length with Israeli musician Dudu Tassa. There are no made-for-120 Minutes alt-rock-guitar-hero moments here, but the spidery arpeggios Greenwood weaves throughout this spirited version of the Lebanese folk song are quintessentially his. (JM)

Foo Fighters – Under You

Foo Fighters returned with Rescued last month for their first new material since the passing of Taylor Hawkins, and the emotional core in their new music remains in strength in Under You – another anthem that channels raw human emotion through high gain guitars and heartfelt lyrics. (MO)

NewDad – In My Head

Grizzly oversized hooks and irresistible indie guitar action is the order of business for Irish rock band NewDad, whose In My Head delivers delicate lead work and a pummeling progression that’ll knock the wind out of you. (MO)

Gregory Alan Isakov – The Fall

There's a lot to peel back in this, the stately lead single from Isakov's new effort, Appaloosa Bones, but we're big fans of how its electric and acoustic parts weave themselves seamlessly into the track's beautiful, hypnotic fabric. (JM)

Wallice – Loser at Best 

After three years of singles and EPs, Wallice is finally gearing up for her debut studio album – and judging by Loser at Best, her commitment to angsty guitars will be front and center in that offering: it’s gnarly and noisy in all the right ways, and dripping in a stage-ready attitude. (MO)

Mandy, Indiana – Drag [Crashed]

The cathartic, industrially-abrasive rally against misogyny your Friday was thus far missing. It comes from an experimental four piece in Manchester, UK and, if you’re wondering, ‘Where’s the guitar?’ It’s that thing that sounds like a whale eating a freight train. (MP)

Liam Fender – Time Comes Around

An accomplished singer-songwriter in his own right, Liam Fender – brother of Seventeen Going Under sensation Sam – has given listeners another insight into his own independent sonic universe via Time Comes Around, which is heavy on the heavenly guitars and equally heavy on the luscious instrumentation. (MO) 

Julie Byrne – The Greater Wings

Summer Glass – the lead single from Julie Byrne's forthcoming album, The Greater Wings – was powered by lush, synth-driven arrangements, but the LP's recently-released title track is built upon brilliant, multi-dimensional acoustic fingerpicking. It's a musical backdrop that will be warmly familiar to anyone who's been following the singer/songwriter's career for some time, and the perfect introduction to her for those who haven't. (JM)

The lustrous gold Vox logo has been an enduring presence in the world of guitar-based music. From its humble beginnings in the late '50s to helping the Fab Four be heard over hoards of adoring fans in the swinging '60s, this British institution would cement itself into every decade thereafter. Walls of AC30s would enable Queen to break free in the '70s, cause Tom Petty to free fall in the '80s and there should be no surprises that these amps would end up in the hands of Radiohead axeman Jonny Greenwood in the ’90s. In the present day, Vox amps can be seen taking up residence on stadium stages around the world. So, if you've been thinking about following in the footsteps of rock royalty, this guide to the best Vox amps is a great place to start.

Perhaps best known for their vintage diamond-clad AC combos, the British amp legends actually do a lot more than that, with an expansive catalog that includes modern digital modelers, pint-sized practice companions, as well as their celebrated tube amps. In this guide, we've made sure to include a wide selection of the amplifiers Vox offers today, covering various price points, applications and styles.

So, if you're on the hunt for an amplifier that sparkles both in sound and looks, that's earned a boatload of kudos from the biggest names in music and can turn its hand at almost any genre, then Vox is most certainly the brand for you.

Best Vox amps: Guitar World's top picks

If there's one unit that stands as a symbol for Vox's longevity, it has to be the glorious AC30C2 - and that's why it tops our list. This moderately sized combo may weigh so much that even Thor would struggle to lift it, but what it lacks in the weight department, it more than makes up for in tone. The AC30 is crisp and articulate, with a shimmering top end that makes our hearts sing. If you are looking for the quintessential Vox tone, then the AC30 is for you.

Now, while we love the sound of the AC30, we'd be the first to admit it isn't exactly bedroom friendly. That 30 watts of power is deceptively loud and it could result in your entire neighborhood finding out you haven't quite nailed the intro to Johnny B Goode yet. Enter the Vox AC10; a shrunken-down take on the famed AC tone that won't result in a knock at the door from the cops. This little amp is not only more manageable, but it's also insanely affordable, seriously stylish and sounds epic!

Best Vox amps: product guide

Really, there was only ever going to be one amplifier that topped this list – the AC30C2. This sophisticated – yet simple – combo has been the secret weapon of many guitar-wielding legends. Now, while a certain other gilded British amp gets most of the credit, the humble AC30 has been working away tirelessly in the background to bring the power behind acts such as Brian May, The Edge, Mike Campbell, Tom DeLonge, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, Dustin Kensrue, Tame Impala, and many more.

Famed for its recognizable bright tone, piercing mid-range and lush tube-driven reverb and tremolo, the AC30 produces a sound like no other. Utilizing a trio of 12AX7 preamp valves, as well as a quartet of EL84s, this combo's sound is dynamic, complex and harmonically rich.

With the option to plug into two channels – as well as a high and low impedance option for both – the Normal and Top Boost channels cover a lot of sonic ground. The Normal circuit is perfect for those who like it simple. With a solitary volume dial and no control over the EQ, it doesn't come much simpler than this. However, the Top Boost channel is where you go if you want things to get a little hairy, as you can easily push this channel into overdrive, as well as gain access to bass and treble controls.

As much as some guitarists don't want to admit it, 30 watts of full tube power isn't always the way to go – especially at home or in a small practice room. Luckily, Vox has a little amp that still delivers all the valve tone you expect from this legacy brand while also keeping the volume to a much more manageable level – the Vox AC10 Custom.

Comprising of just the Top Boost tone circuit, this plucky little amp is sophisticatedly simple. While it does take inspiration from the original AC10 of yesteryear, it upgrades its core elements, bringing it into the modern day.

Unlike the original, the contemporary version comes with a full complement of tone-shifting controls, such as volume and gain for dialing in the exact amount of drive, as well as bass and treble controls for balancing the overall tone. Better yet, you also get a digital reverb and a 10-inch Celestion speaker.

Continuing the theme of smaller versions of the renowned AC range, we have the most undersized amp available, the Vox AC4 Custom. Much like its slightly larger brother above, the AC4 distills the AC30 down into its most basic components while also reducing the power and therefore, headroom.

Yes, this amp is perfect for those looking to reduce the volume at home, but it's also an ideal option for those looking to unlock the tone of a cranked AC without worrying about complaints from the neighbors. Since the AC4 is only a mere 4 watts, it doesn't have the headroom of the others, meaning it breaks up way sooner.

It is worth noting that, unfortunately, you don't get a reverb this time, so you'll need to grab your favorite reverb pedal to add a little depth to the sound. You do, however, get a 12" speaker, meaning the bass response is a little fuller than the AC10.

We can't mention Vox without discussing The Fab Four, with The Beatles helping catapult the brand's popularity into the stratosphere. The Liverpool quartet would use Vox amps throughout their career – with McCartney still using them to this day.

Vox – and the Beatles – were all too aware that the AC30 sadly wasn't cutting it anymore, as it couldn't be heard over the screams of admiration from their teenage fans. This would lead Vox to create the AC50 and AC100 as well as the highly sought-after, made-for-USA, solid-state Super Beetle introduced in 1966, which was manufactured by Thomas Organ, the US Vox distributor. It's the latter from which the Vox Mini SuperBeetle would take its inspiration.

The tiny little head and cab set brings that iconic stadium rig to your living room. Powered by Korgs Nutube technology, the Mini SuperBeetle delivers that warm and rich break-up Vox is famous for, but at a practice amp volume – and thankfully, it also has reverb and tremolo on board, so you can create all your favorite '60s sounds at home.

With Vox being known as a retro brand, it could be argued that it keeps one foot in the past when it comes to its modern amps. That said, the Adio Air GT is so forward-thinking that it has both feet firmly in the future.

Combining a powerful, portable desktop amp, a Bluetooth speaker and ​a USB audio interface, this combo's functions go way beyond that of a traditional amp. Coming loaded with 11 built-in amp models, including classic sounds as well as high-gain and non-Vox tones, the Adio Air GT is a versatile practice partner.

So if you are looking for an amp that can do way more than just provide a stellar tone, then the Vox Adio Air GT is the amp for you.

When the market is awash with hi-tech amps such as the Boss Katana, Positive Grid Spark, Line 6 Catalyst and, of course, the Vox Cambridge, it's reasonable to assume we are living in the golden age of digital modelers.

It's never been more affordable to get an amp with so many tones locked away inside, making it a truly inspiring time to be a guitarist. The Vox Cambridge50 uses Virtual Element Technology – or VET for short – to model various types of amps, while the Nutube preamp delivers the creamy distortion that all guitarists love.

Clocking in at 50 watts and utilizing an open-back cabinet with a 12-inch Celestion speaker, this unassuming combo is most definitely stage ready, meaning it can comfortably be your gigging amp as well as your go-to practice unit.

It's every guitar player's worst nightmare – you take to the stage, hit your first chord and nothing. Your amp has chosen this exact time to fail. Luckily, you have the Vox MV50 tucked away in your gig bag. You quickly plug it in and well, the gig is saved. Crisis averted.

Like many of the amps on this list, the MV50 is fueled by Nutube technology and produces an impressive 50 watts of power. A triad of controls – Gain, Tone and Volume – provide a basic level of tone shaping while giving players a fantastic bed for pedals.

This amp is so small, affordable and simple to use that we strongly believe every guitarist should have one. Okay, it may not replace your main amp, but it's perfect as a backup or as a mainstay in a rehearsal room.

If you have your heart set on a genuine vintage experience – but don't want to sell a kidney to get an original amp from the sixties – then the Handwired series is your best bet. Relying on turret board hand-wiring, this AC15 will get you eerily close to the beloved old-fashioned combo while benefiting from modern manufacturing techniques.

Draped in a gorgeous tan covering, the AC15 Handwired looks every bit as good as it sounds – and boy, does it sound superb! Naturally, the 15 watts of power offered up by this mighty little combo is somewhat less than its bigger brother, the AC30, resulting in reduced headroom and more gain at lower volumes – pretty ideal for those sheering rock tones!

So if you want to own a little slice of history – but can't get your hands on an authentic piece, then this AC15 is the next best thing.

Best Vox amps: Buying advice

A brief history of Vox amps

While the Vox story is a rather long tale spanning decades, it's a pretty straightforward one. Dick Denney, a young amplifier designer working for JMI amplification saw the rise in popularity of guitar-based music in the late '50s and sought to create an amp that delivered not only the volume this new breed of player needed, but also the sustain and attacking tone they craved so much.

By the beginning of 1958, the very first unit bearing the now iconic Vox moniker was released – AC1/15 – and the British amp legends were off to the races, with guitarists of the day flocking to get one of these hip modern amps. Only a few years later, guitar players would be demanding even more volume to keep pace with the loud and brash new medium of rock 'n' roll, resulting in Denny and Co. upgrading their popular AC15 model to create a new amp in their expanding lineup, the AC30/4 Twin. Now sporting a larger cabinet, extra volume, as well as an additional speaker, this new amp was an instant success – and is still one of the most popular units Vox creates today.

Of course, the Vox brand would go from strength to strength over the years as more and more famous players would go on to adopt the bright shimmering tone as their signature sound. The company would create various incarnations of their popular AC range, including 50 and 100-watt options, as well as quirky designs with 'zimmer-like' frames that didn't quite catch on as much as their regular combos.

Through the decades, artists such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Tom Petty, Brian May, Dave Grohl, Chris Shiflett, Elvis Costello, Joe Walsh and Yvette Young would harness the power of the Vox to achieve tonal greatness, with many more following suit.

Today Vox is owned and operated by Korg and produces various other products, such as electric guitars, pedals and headphones, as well as their world-class amplifiers.

Things to consider when choosing a Vox amp 

If you are looking to purchase a Vox amplifier, your main consideration should be whether or not you are looking to go for traditional tube-driven, Korg's contemporary Nutube technology or digital modeling. Each option brings its own unique set of pros and cons to the table, so it's worth putting thought into which would benefit you the most.

Of course, if you're looking for the most authentic Vox tone, then it makes sense to opt for the traditional tube circuitry of the AC or Hand-Wired series. These amps will get you as close as you can get to that legendary retro sound while also delivering the classy look Vox is known for.

Perhaps you're looking for a lighter – or smaller – option that still retains the dynamic 'feel' of a valve amp but without the bulkiness. Well, in that case, an amp equipped with Nutube tech should definitely be top of your list. Vox has gone all in on this brand-new tech, and offers many amps that have Nutube at their core, so you are definitely not short of options – just make sure to think carefully about the wattage you need if you plan to hit the stage with your new amp.

Lastly, we have digital modeling combos. Again Vox offers a wealth of digital amps, from some of the best amps for beginners to stage-ready combos. Their celebrated Valvetronix and VX range are perfect for those seeking multiple tones and effects at home, while the Vox Mini Go is ideal for musicians practicing on the move.

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The Smile – the English trio featuring Radiohead's Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood, and Sons Of Kemet’s Tom Skinner on drums – have finally detailed their highly-anticipated debut album.

Called A Light for Attracting Attention, the album will be released on May 13 via XL Recordings. Helmed by longtime Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, the LP features strings by the London Contemporary Orchestra and a full brass section comprised of UK jazz greats such as Byron Wallen, Theon and Nathaniel Cross, Chelsea Carmichael, Robert Stillman and Jason Yarde.

With the album's announcement came the release of its fifth single, the eerie, acoustic guitar-driven Free in the Knowledge. Played by Yorke at multiple recent solo shows, the song features plaintive acoustic strums couched in stunning string arrangements and dreamy, textural piano work courtesy of Greenwood.

You can watch its equally haunting music video – directed by Leo Leigh – below.

Free in the Knowledge was preceded by the release of You Will Never Work In Television Again, The Smoke, Skrting On The Surface and Pana-vision.

The Smile are set to promote A Light for Attracting Attention with a European tour that's set to begin on May 16 with a show in Zagreb, Croatia and run through July 20. The band played their first three public gigs at the London event space Magazine – which we happened to witness in person – in January.

You can take a look at A Light for Attracting Attention's cover art and track list below.

To preorder the album, visit The Smile's website.

The Smile – A Light for Attracting Attention:

1. The Same
2. The Opposite
3. You Will Never Work in Television Again
4. Pana-vision
5. The Smoke
6. Speech Bubbles
7. Thin Thing
8. Open The Floodgates
9. Free In The Knowledge
10. A Hairdryer
11. Waving A White Flag
12. We Don’t Know What Tomorrow Brings
13. Skrting On The Surface

Back in May 2021, Radiohead masterminds Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood surprise-debuted The Smile, a new project with bolder guitar leanings than their day jobs. Completed by Tom Skinner, drummer for London jazz outfit Sons of Kemet, the trio made their debut via a Glastonbury livestream, held in place of the actual festival.

This weekend, the group played their first gigs in front of actual human beings. The ambitious setup saw the band perform three shows in the round, all within the space of 15 hours to allow for livestreams of the concerts across three time zones.

As luck would have it, Guitar World was on hand to experience the group’s first performance at London event space Magazine and note down any especially nerdy guitar details. And with two members of Radiohead in the band, there were plenty to spot. Here are six things we just had to share…

1. The Smile are unashamedly prog

Radiohead are perhaps the ultimate ‘stealth’ prog band, consistently pushing their sound but without delving too far into progressive excess. But The Smile don’t hold back.

The time signatures are evidence enough: from the second Yorke launched into the uneasy piano tinklings of 7/8 opener Panavision, the evening only occasionally ventured into 4/4 – hell, the band’s big ‘single’, the Sonic Youth-flavored You Will Never Work in Television Again, is in 5/4, and there were two songs in the rather more challenging 11/8: the eerie Waving a White Flag and unreleased Radiohead reworking Skirting on the Surface.

In part, the band’s penchant for off-kilter grooves could be attributed to Skinner’s fluid drumming, but there’s also the notion that with fewer moving parts to manage, Yorke and Greenwood are able to span a wider array of times, tones and textures themselves. Certainly, there were few sonic landscapes left unpainted by the trio and the monumental array of gear they’d brought with them. Which brings us to…

2. Jonny Greenwood is really into rhythmic delays now

The manic outro of Radiohead’s Identikit was something of a precursor to this particular development, but The Smile’s debut performance confirmed that closely sync’d delay pedals are very much Greenwood’s guitar sound du jour.

There was the tight slapback of Greenwood’s, erm, slapped Les Paul riff that drives Thin Thing, Open the Floodgates’ dreamy cascading repeats and the skronky, angular echoes of The Opposite. With the wrong pedalboard, set closer Just Eyes and Mouth could be mistaken for a pentatonic scale exercise, but a shower of dotted-eighth repeats lent it an altogether more ethereal quality.

Interestingly enough, while Greenwood had been spotted with a Strymon TimeLine in rehearsals, he opted for a Boss RE-20 and DD-200 for the live shows. Oh, and he played sans shoes all evening. Toes of steel, that man.

3. Thom Yorke is a mean fingerstyle bass player

The Smile’s trio format finds both Yorke and Greenwood alternating between bass and guitar, but they each have very different approaches to the four-string.

When Greenwood donned his blonde P-Bass, he attacked it in a similar manner to his Telecaster Plus, with aggressive pick strokes and plenty of action at the upper end of the fretboard. Hell, he even whipped out the ol’ violin bow for A Hairdryer’s transcendent intro drone. In short, he plays bass like a guitarist.

Thom Yorke, on the other hand, treated his Fender Mustang like a dedicated maestro of the low-end, whether navigating The Smoke’s snaking bassline with a deft fingerstyle touch, or laying down The Opposite’s slinky stabs. No doubt he picked up a few tips from his time spent with Flea in Atoms for Peace, not to mention Jonny’s brother Colin, who was in attendance that evening.

4. Jonny Greenwood sold a whole new audience on the Les Paul

Rather than his customary Tele Plus, Greenwood relied solely on a Goldtop Gibson Les Paul for his six-string duties – an instrument rarely seen with the guitar anti-hero outside of performances of Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint.

The result was a warmer, more robust sound than his wiry single-coil jabs, and one better suited to bolstering the sound of The Smile’s leaner lineup. It was a reminder of the LP’s ability to generate warm, enveloping clean tones, and any hipsters who sauntered into the show thinking they weren’t a ‘Les Paul kind of guitarist’ left craving a big slab of single-cut.

Yorke, however, broke out many of his regular Radiohead touring instruments, including two Epiphone Casinos (one with Bigsby, one without), drop D-tuned Fender Jazzmaster on We Don’t Know What Tomorrow Brings, and a Gibson SG for open-tuned C# modal showcase A Hairdryer. Neil Young-esque ballad Free in the Knowledge played host to a Martin 00-18, while a Guild Starfire II hollowbody bass made a thumpy appearance on Skirting on the Surface and The Opposite.

5. The band are really good at multitasking

Yorke and Greenwood are used to having a few more musicians to play with, so the three-piece format forced every member to cleave their brains in two to conjure the kind of expansive textures you’d expect for their large-scale compositions.

Yorke and Greenwood frequently switched between synths and guitars – Skinner even dropped his sticks for the odd modular workout – while one particularly memorable moment found Greenwood plucking a harp while traversing a spiralling piano line in Radiohead-but-not-quite track Speech Bubbles.

Greenwood was masterful with his socked feet, too – on more than one occasion, the multi-instrumentalist went full Geddy Lee, hitting bass pedals while handling tricksy arpeggiated chords in Waving a White Flag or hammering out a blistering punk bassline in We Don’t Know What Tomorrow Brings. Blasts of overdrive and Electro-Harmonix Freeze gave smart dynamic contrast to moments of the set, too.

6. The Smile’s debut album will be something special – and there’s more to come

Yes, comparisons with Radiohead are unavoidable by the very nature of the band’s members and their songwriting tendencies. But The Smile color outside of Radiohead’s lines: there’s a sense of experimentalism that embraces krautrock and prog, and one that feels entirely free of expectation.

It’s the sound of three seasoned musicians making music for the sheer thrill of it, using all the tools at their disposal. It’s a joyous thing to behold, and it appears the band agree, already hinting at music beyond the band’s debut album, which is still yet to receive a release date.

“This has been all too brief,” Yorke admitted towards the tail end of the evening’s 70-minute performance. “When we’ve written some more, we’ll do some more, but we haven’t written any more… yet.”

The Smile – the British trio comprised of Radiohead's Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood and Sons Of Kemet’s Tom Skinner – have released a new single, The Smoke.

A dreamy funk-by-way-of-Krautrock jam driven by an infectious bass guitar line from Yorke and Greenwood's spacious horn and woodwind arrangements, it stands in stark contrast to the post-punk fury of their debut single, You Will Never Work In Television Again.

You can hear the song – and check out its appropriately opaque music video, directed by Mark Jenkin – below. 

The Smoke was first premiered at The Smile's Live at Worthy Farm performance in May 2021, and will likely feature on the band's as-yet-untitled debut album, which Greenwood told the NME in September was "just about finished." 

Just as on all of Radiohead's albums for the last 25 years, production duties for The Smile's debut full-length will be handled by Nigel Godrich.

The band are also set to perform their first three open-to-the-public shows this weekend, with three performances in 24 hours at Magazine London on January 29 and January 30. The trio will play before a seated, sold-out crowd, but all three of the shows will also be broadcast in real time via a livestream. 

Those wishing to watch livestreams of the shows can purchase tickets to view them online, or at a number of independent venues and cinemas in the UK, Europe and the United States.

You can see a full list of the participating venues and theaters, and purchase tickets for one of the livestreams, at The Smile's website.

The Smile – the band featuring Radiohead's Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood and Sons Of Kemet’s Tom Skinner – have released their debut single, You Will Never Work In Television Again.

Clocking in at under three minutes, the song – which the band performed at Glastonbury‘s Live at Worthy Farm streaming event in May and at a livestreamed rehearsal in December – shows the profound influence Sonic Youth have had on Yorke and Greenwood. 

Going by what we saw on the aforementioned livestreams, we'd wager that Yorke's using an Epiphone Casino for the song's tightly-coiled, rapid-fire riff, while Greenwood – likely with a Fender P-Bass – keeps to bass guitar duty.

Lyrically, Yorke is in classic form, bemoaning the "beautiful young hopes and dreams" that have been taken away by those with "evil eyes" and "piggy limbs." Yorke delivers the words with a righteous fury that's been largely absent from his recent work – particularly his subdued, largely electronic solo albums of recent years (2014's Tomorrow's Modern Boxes and 2019's Anima).

You Will Never Work In Television Again was helmed by longtime Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, and presumably will feature on the band's as-yet-untitled debut album, which Greenwood told the NME in September was "just about finished." 

Along with the release of the song, the Smile announced that they will perform three live shows in 24 hours at Magazine London on January 29 and January 30. Though the trio will play before a seated audience, all three of the shows will also be broadcast in real time via a livestream. 

The three performances will take place on January 29 at 8 p.m. GMT/3 p.m. EST, January 29/30 at 1 a.m. GMT/8 p.m. EST, and January 30 at 11 a.m. GMT/6 a.m. EST. All three of the broadcasts will also be available to ticketholders as unlimited on-demand replays for 48 hours starting at 2 p.m. GMT on January 30.

Tickets for both the physical show and livestream can be pre-ordered via The Smile's website.

The Smile, the new project composed of Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood and Thom Yorke and drummer Tom Skinner, unexpectedly livestreamed their rehearsal yesterday (December 2), offering a glimpse into their latest material and guitar rigs.

Footage of the stream has been uploaded to YouTube (thank you, identikit), and showcases three songs, Look at All the Pretty Lights, Free in the Knowledge and You Will Never Work in Television Again.

Jonny Greenwood can be seen playing a Fender P-Bass throughout the stream, even deploying his trademark violin bow on the instrument.

The footage also offers a glimpse at Greenwood’s pedalboard, which has hardly changed over the decades, but now offers a number of fresh additions for the new project.

Our ageing eyes spotted an Electro-Harmonix Freeze and Nano POG, off-’board Strymon TimeLine, and what looks to be an Ibanez TS808 Tube Screamer.

Otherwise, most of Greenwood’s staples are present and correct, including the Boss OD-3, EHX Small Stone, Akai Head Rush and Boss RE-20. We can’t quite spy the Marshall Shredmaster, though.

Another camera angle also offers a look at Thom Yorke’s pedalboard, which is a) gargantuan, and b) slightly harder to discern.

We can make out multiple Boss RE-20s, a Line 6 DL4, EHX Nano POG, Death By Audio Echo Dream 2, MXR Distortion+, TC Electronic Ditto X4, plus an EarthQuaker Devices Rainbow Machine and Astral Destiny. But don’t quote us on those.

There’s also Yorke’s long-favored Telenordia Kompressor and Treble Booster. As for the rest, answers on a postcard, please.

Guitars-wise, Yorke leans on his Bigsby-equipped Epiphone Casino, while Greenwood has a blonde Telecaster and Les Paul Goldtop waiting in the wings, as well as the aforementioned Precision Bass.

As for the material itself, we’re getting strong indie-rock/Sonic Youth vibes, harking back to Radiohead’s guitar-driven roots.

The Smile made their official debut at Glastonbury earlier this year, and in interviews since the performance, Greenwood has indicated their debut album is “just about finished”. Hopefully last night’s livestream means we don’t have too much longer to wait.

Noah Yorke – the son of Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke – has shared his new song, the eerily atmospheric Trying Too Hard (Lullaby).

While the guitarist/vocalist has already released music under the name Alec Owen and L.E.T.H.A.L, arriving most recently in the form of last year’s 10-track self-titled album, Trying Too Hard (Lullaby) marks the first time Yorke has shared music under his own name.

The texturally rich track itself is what you’d expect from someone who has been heavily exposed to Radiohead’s sonic universe: a captivating electric guitar motif, a haunting vocal line and a kaleidoscopic soundscape comprising layer upon layer of dissonant-yet-smooth background lines.

It’s an impressive start to Yorke’s newly launched music project – one that has already caught the attention of his father’s Radiohead bandmate Jonny Greenwood.

“Cor, what a glorious piece of music,” tweeted Greenwood. “Today was the first time I heard it, and I’m so impressed. Nice work, Noah.”

Writing on social media prior to the track’s release, Yorke admitted it was the first song of “a new solo project that I have wanted to get going for a very long time”, and that the track “means the world to me”.

“Thank you to everyone who listened to this song in the first couple of days,” a follow-up post read. “It’s now at 10,000 plays which is nuts to me. I know the reasons for this aren’t always much to do with me but it means the world to me that anyone gives a fuck or connects with it in any way.

“It’s scary to try and establish one’s identity and people caring about a song that is so important to me gives me a tiny bit of confidence that I’m not just an offshoot,” Yorke continued. “More stuff coming soon.”

As for Noah's father, Thom Yorke recently teamed up with Jonny Greenwood for an all-new musical project of their own – titled The Smile – which they debuted earlier this year during Glastonbury's Live at Worthy Farm streaming event. According to Greenwood, the group's debut album is "just about finished".

The Smile – the guitar-driven side project of Radiohead members Jonny Greenwood and Thom Yorke – have “just about finished” their debut album, according to Greenwood.

In a new interview with NME, the guitarist says that the band – which also features Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner – are “sitting in front of a pile of music, working out what will make the record”.

“We're thinking of how much to include, whether it's really finished or if there are a few guitars that need fixing,” he explains. “I'd hope it'll come out soon, but I'm the wrong person to ask.”

He also says that as the band was formed during the COVID-19 pandemic, writing in lockdown has been “very stop-start”, but that the process has been a “happy way to make music”.

The “most impatient member of everybody in Radiohead”, Greenwood explains that he'd rather records he releases be “90 percent a good, but come out twice as often”.

“I've always felt that, the closer to the finish, the smaller the changes are that anyone would notice,” he continues. “I'd have said The Smile could have come out a few months ago, but it wouldn't be as good. I'm always impatient to get on and do more.”

Jonny Greenwood, Thom Yorke and Tom Skinner debuted The Smile at Glastonbury's Live at Worthy Farm streaming event earlier this year, announcing the band's existence only hours before the performance.

On the songs the band played during their set, Greenwood explains: “We've recorded everything we played at Glastonbury, but I don't know if it'll be on the album. We've got to go through everything in the pile. I'm very relieved that everything for Spencer [the forthcoming Princess Diana biopic for which Jonny Greenwood is composing the score] finishes this week, because next week we can get into The Smile and make sure that's in a healthy state.”

Greenwood says that although the band's debut album is on its way, he has “no idea” whether they'll tour it.

“It's undiscussed and undecided,” he continues. “But it feels like we now have to start engaging with the outside world, having worked on this stuff alone. That's the test, when people finally hear it. I'm looking forward to that, as what the outside world makes of you is more than half the reason for doing it. I've never understood the idea of music for its own sake.”

Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke and guitar anti-hero Jonny Greenwood have formed The Smile, a new three-piece project with Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner, and debuted the lineup at Glastonbury‘s Live at Worthy Farm streaming event this weekend.

In typically cryptic Radiohead fashion, the band’s existence was announced mere hours before the livestream, which found the group play an eight-song set. You can watch footage of new song Thin Thing below.

Led by a fingerpicked – borderline thumped – riff from Greenwood (with a little slapback delay for good measure), the track recalls Radiohead’s darker forays into guitar-driven, progressive alt-rock.

Greenwood dons a Gibson Les Paul Goldtop – rarely seen in Radiohead, but previously used for renditions of Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint – for the performance, while Yorke showcases his impressive fingerstyle technique on a Fender Mustang Bass.

A two-minute snippet of a further track, We Don’t Know What Tomorrow Brings, finds Greenwood on bass, while Yorke harnesses an array of sweeping synths before strapping on a Gibson SG for some biting treble-string riffs.

There’s no word on what’s next from the project – which is also said to involve longtime Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich – although judging from the weekend’s set, there’s already enough material for a full album.

Yorke and Greenwood have been predominantly involved in their respective soundtrack efforts since the 2016 release of Radiohead’s last album, A Moon Shaped Pool, while fellow guitarist Ed O’Brien released his debut solo record as EOB in 2020.

Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood is known to have a difficult relationship with his status as a guitar anti-hero, once comparing the instrument to a typewriter (really) - and now the alt-rock icon has spoken out on what he views to be the superiority of classical musicians.

“I stand in awe of classically trained UK musicians,” Greenwood says on the website of newly launched classical label Octatonic.

“A 20-something carrying a cello case will always be more impressive than someone with a guitar. It’s just harder to do. It takes more commitment, and the sounds they make are so limitless - for all that the instruments they play are ‘traditional’.”

Octatonic Records’ first releases include music by Greenwood himself, as well as music by Bach, Messiaen and Michael Gordon, with Steve Reich on the cards, too.

We hate to reignite the ‘classically trained’ vs ‘feel’ argument, but we can’t help feel a little slighted by Greenwood’s comments - particularly when they come from one of the ’90s’ and 00s’ most inventive electric guitar players.

These latest comments are also in sharp contrast to Greenwood’s thoughts just last year, where he stated, “Nothing’s more exciting than playing an electric guitar in a small room with a good drummer.”

Greenwood has won considerable acclaim in recent years for his soundtrack work, which includes a run of movies with director Paul Thomas Anderson, including There Will Be Blood, The Master and Phantom Thread. Radiohead’s most recent album, A Moon Shaped Pool, was released in 2016.

From far-out pedalboard wizards and ambitious loopers to state-of-the-art shredders, there has never been a shortage of fearless creators boldly pushing music and guitar technology forward. Here are just a few of the players who have embraced gear to its fullest, innovating new sounds and styles in the process.

Jonny Greenwood, Radiohead

Behind the spacey soundscapes of Radiohead lies the guitar sorcery of Jonny Greenwood. One of the most experimental guitar players of his generation, the multi-instrumentalist and composer has relied on a rotating cast of gear to generate his radical sounds, including the Marshall ShredMaster, Digitech Whammy and Roland RE-201 Space Echo. But the oddest part of Greenwood's rig might be the Roberts R737 transistor radio that he manipulates during the intro of each live performance of "The National Anthem."

The Edge, U2

With his airy, trance-inducing riffs, The Edge forged an instantly recognizable sound for U2 and helped popularize delay effects with songs like "Where the Streets Have No Name" and "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For." The guitarist's lineup of delays over the years has included the KORG SDD, TC Electronic TC 2290 and AMS SDMX.

Vernon Reid, Living Colour

These days, Vernon Reid's setup looks closer to a NASA mission control center than a guitar rig, and the guitarist incorporates a wide range of effects to paint Living Colour's genre-bending sound. While Reid's equipment list would be too long to list here, he's a known devotee of Line 6 devices, including the company's POD HD500X and M9 stomp box modeler.

Tom Morello, Rage Against the Machine/Audioslave/Prophets of Rage

Launching on the scene with Rage Against the Machine in the early Nineties, Tom Morello instantly turned heads with his aggressive, groove-laden riffs and dizzying guitar solos that mimicked synths and DJ scratching. The guitarist uses a Dunlop Cry Baby Wah and Digitech Whammy as the source of many of his trademark sounds.

Tosin Abasi, Animals as Leaders

Tosin Abasi is carrying the art of shred and progressive metal into the future with his instrumental trio, Animals as Leaders. One of the early adopters of ergonomic, extended-range eight-string guitars, he has introduced both new sounds and techniques into the genre. Abasi is currently running a pedal-based setup — including his own Abasi Pathos distortion pedal — through a single-channel Morgan Amps SW50R. The guitarist also implements Line 6 Relay G70 and Relay G55 wireless systems, the Stagescape M20D mixer and, of course, his own Abasi Larada guitars.

David Knudson, Minus the Bear

While Minus the Bear called it quits late last year, guitarist David Knudson's inventive ability to take two-handed tapping techniques out of the realm of flashy solos and into the world of primary hooks hasn't been forgotten. Armed with four Line 6 DL4s and a collection of stomp boxes, his pedalboard savvy made his riffs sound less like traditional guitar and more like an orchestra of electronic artists. Where will Knudson's sonic explorations take him next? We're excited to see.

Sarah Longfield

Sarah Longfield's latest single "Now" is an electronic-inspired, ambient sound collage emphasizing her unique mastery of the eight-string. With fluid two-hand tapping skills and an instantly recognizable sound, the guitarist is forging her own future for modern shred. Longfield is often seen with an eight-string Strandberg Boden axe and a Fractal Axe-FX rig — she also recently added a Line 6 HX Stomp to her setup.

Adrian Belew

Throughout his work with King Crimson, Talking Heads, David Bowie and Frank Zappa, Adrian Belew's guitar playing often sounds like…well, anything but the guitar. "My rig tends to get bigger almost every day," Belew told Guitar Player. "Because so many different things get invented all the time that change how we can approach the guitar. It's so hard to say 'no' to something new, because, well, I want that new toy [laughs]." Belew's equipment has changed quite a bit over the years, but various looping devices and Parker Fly guitars are standard in his rig.

Nick Reinhart, Tera Melos 

Incorporating experimental rock, ambient electronics, alternating time signatures and start-stop dynamics, Tera Melos' sound is startlingly inventive. Guitarist/vocalist Nick Reinhart generates many of the band's unorthodox sonics through two-hand tapping, effect pedals, looping and samplers. The guitarist is a known fan of Nineties Squier guitars, the Roland GR-30 Guitar Synthesizer, and pedals from Line 6, Boss, EarthQuaker Devices, Digitech and more.

Matt Bellamy, Muse

Arena rockers Muse combine prog, electronica and pop into their own brand of epic, genre-shifting rock. Frontman Matt Bellamy gets plenty of cred for his showmanship and operatic vocal range, but it's his bombastic, electronic-inspired approach to guitar that keeps fellow players scratching their heads. Over the years, Bellamy's rig has included the DigiTech Whammy, ZVEX Fuzz Factory, custom Manson guitars and more.

While Radiohead’s second album, The Bends, did not ascend to the creative heights of the band’s subsequent breakthrough masterpiece, OK Computer, there’s no way it was ever a sophomore slump. The seeds of Radiohead’s transformation from Pixies-influenced quasi-grunge music to the atmospheric, ambitious and sometimes experimental style they honed on OK Computer are most evident on “My Iron Lung,” where guitarist Jonny Greenwood more freely explores sonic guitar textures to enhance the song’s mood.

What is particularly refreshing is that Greenwood used a rather primitive, inexpensive and arguably limited rig to craft the sounds that fit that song so well. Even more impressive is that Greenwood still relies on much of that gear today, even after the band has sold millions of records and after his rig started to expand in size only a few years after the release of The Bends. Greenwood’s amp here is a Fender Eighty-Five, a late- Eighties 85-watt solid-state combo with a single 12-inch speaker that was inexpensive when it was new and has remained a dirt-cheap bargain on the used market since the early Nineties.

On “My Iron Lung” Greenwood mainly used the Fender amp as a clean foundation for a pair of pedals: a DigiTech Whammy WH-1 and a Marshall Shred Master. Set to its octave-up setting, the Whammy provides a somewhat harsh, warbling texture that is the product of its primitive 12-bit tracking technology, but in this case what many could perceive as a “flaw” actually enhances the desired effect of the melodic guitar line. The Shred Master is employed for louder and more violent sections of the song to produce aggressive bursts of distortion, although a few overdubs were recorded with just the Fender Eighty-Five cranked up as loud as it could go. The Fender Eighty-Five’s clean tones are also employed on their own for the jazzy chords heard throughout the verses.

ORIGINAL GEAR

GUITAR: Early Nineties Fender Telecaster Plus with Red-Red Dually (bridge) and Blue (neck) Lace Sensor pickups (bridge pickup setting); volume: 10, tone: 10

AMP: Fender Eighty-Five with one 12-inch Eminence speaker (Clean tone - Input 1, Volume: 6, Treble: 7, Mid: 5, Bass: 4, Reverb: 0; Dirty tone – Input 1, Volume: 10, Treble: 7, Mid: 8, Bass: 7, Reverb: 0, Gain: 10, Mid Boost: On, Limiter: 3, Presence: 5, Volume: 10, Select: On)

EFFECTS: DigiTech Whammy WH-1 (Octave +1 setting, foot pedal 100 percent toe down); Marshall Shred Master (Gain: 9, Bass: 8, Contour: 0, Treble: 8, Volume: 6)

STRINGS/TUNING: Dean Markley Blue Steel .010-.046/Standard.009-.040/ Standard

PICK: Jim Dunlop .60mm Nylon Standard 44P

GET THE SOUND, CHEAP!

• Squier FSR Affinity Telecaster HH
• Lace Sensor Red-Red Dually (install in bridge position)
• Fender Champion 40
• DigiTech Whammy Ricochet
• Joyo High Gain Distortion JF-04

TONE TIP: Set the Whammy Ricochet to 12-bit mode and adjust the Momentary switch to the “off” position for a consistent octave-up effect when the pedal is engaged.

This past Sunday, singer Lana Del Rey revealed that Radiohead are suing her over similarities between her 2017 song "Get Free" and the band's September 1992 single, "Creep."

Del Rey announced the news via Twitter, adding that the lawsuit will likely end up in court. "It’s true about the lawsuit," she wrote. "Although I know my song wasn't inspired by Creep, Radiohead feel it was and want 100% of the publishing—I offered up to 40 over the last few months but they will only accept 100. Their lawyers have been relentless, so we will deal with it in court."

Oddly enough, several years ago, songwriters Albert Hammond and Mike Hazlewood sued Radiohead, claiming that "Creep" sounded a bit too much like their own composition, "The Air That I Breathe," which was a 1972 hit for the Hollies.

According to Hammond, "Radiohead agreed that they had actually taken it...Because they were honest they weren't sued to the point of saying 'we want the whole thing.' So we ended up just getting a little piece of it." As a result of the Hammond/Hazlewood incident, the official songwriting credit for "Creep" is now "Radiohead/Albert Hammond/Mike Hazlewood."

Below, you can check out all three songs in order of release:

Of course, things tend to remind me of other things, and today I'm reminded of the time Joe Satriani sued Coldplay because their 2008 single "Viva La Vida" sounded like his 2004 tune, "If I Could Fly."

Sure, that's all ancient history now, and the lawsuit was settled out of court in 2009—but if you'd like to refresh your memory, check out the two videos below.

It was the late winter of 1995, and Kurt Cobain had been dead for almost a year.

American alternative rock was caught in a grunge hangover; top acts of the time included Pearl Jam, the Smashing Pumpkins, and Dave Grohl’s new project the Foo Fighters.

In the U.K., a few bands such as Bush were attempting to cash in on the post-Nirvana craze for big distorted guitar riffs and feral howling, but the real chart conquerors were Oasis, Blur and their counterparts in the fun but mostly backward-glancing Britpop movement.

Meanwhile, on both sides of the Atlantic, thanks to the likes of Moby, the Prodigy and Massive Attack, electronic music was beginning to seep into the mainstream. With all this going on, it’s fair to say that most band watchers didn’t expect much from Radiohead.

Sure, the young quintet from England’s Thames Valley had lucked into a hit two years earlier. A big one, too: “Creep,” a melodramatic anthem of self-loathing marked by singer Thom Yorke’s surprising emotional range—first moping, then soaring—and a memorable guitar hook (played by curtain-haired Jonny Greenwood) that sounded like a shotgun being loaded.

But their subsequent singles hadn’t performed anywhere near as well. Neither fish nor flesh, Radiohead didn’t fit in with the Britpoppers and weren’t grungy enough to be grunge. Music industry folks were already writing them off as a one-hit wonder.

Then, on March 13, Radiohead’s second album, The Bends, was released. From its very first few seconds—the Roland Space Echo whooshes, reverberating piano chords, and crashing drums that open “Planet Telex”—the message was clear: We’re not the people you thought we were, and we’re about to make a major statement.

Forty-eight astonishing minutes later, Radiohead had done just that, serving notice to the world that their talent, ambition, and ability to execute were far greater than just about anyone had imagined. From the uneasy slow-build balladry of “Fake Plastic Trees” to the dizzyingly complex three-guitar arrangement of “Just” and the plaintive, heart-piercing chorus of “Street Spirit (Fade Out),” The Bends was a modern rock tour de force.

Although it took a while to catch on commercially—its biggest sales figures weren’t achieved until nearly a year after it came out—The Bends won critical acclaim from the start. (I was so taken with it that I eventually wrote a book on the band.) And that acclaim has only grown over the years.

The Bends now routinely takes high spots on critics’ and music fans’ lists of the best rock albums of the Nineties, or the past two decades, or ever. A 2006 readers’ poll in the British music magazine Q placed it at No. 2 all-time (No. 1 was Radiohead’s follow-up disc, 1997’s OK Computer). More important, the album’s influence on other musicians has been both wide and deep. Nearly every arty, big-sounding band of recent vintage owes something to Radiohead’s example; just follow the lines from Coldplay to Arcade Fire to Mumford & Sons.

But at the time The Bends was released, influencing others wasn’t exactly foremost in the minds of Radiohead’s members. Their prime concern was to establish a lasting career, and to escape the pigeonhole they’d been stuffed in by the success of “Creep.” In their early music, they’d moved with the alternative tide, referencing the work of Eighties juggernauts like U2, R.E.M., the Pixies and the Smiths. Now they were thinking bigger, and looking further back: to the high drama of Queen, Pink Floyd and the psychedelic-era Beatles.

And so it was entirely appropriate that the band chose John Leckie as the producer for their second album.

First hired by Abbey Road Studios as a tape operator in 1970, Leckie had cut his teeth working on John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band, George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, and Pink Floyd’s Meddle. Since then, he’d produced many other Radiohead favorites, including Simple Minds, XTC and Magazine.

Radiohead’s label, EMI, booked nine straight weeks with Leckie at RAK studios in North London, beginning in February ’94. Band and producer got along famously: “The best part about working with John Leckie,” Greenwood later recalled, “was that he didn’t dictate anything to us. He allowed us to figure out what we wanted to do ourselves.”

Unfortunately, the RAK sessions soon turned tense. Word from the label was that the band should concentrate on producing a leadoff single first, but no one could agree on what that single ought to be, so they tried four single contenders in succession: “Sulk,” “The Bends,” “Nice Dream” and “Just.” None of them felt right. The constant search for some magic hit sound slowed the recording process to a crawl. “I couldn’t have been more freaked out,” Yorke remembered. “We had days of painful self-analysis, a total fucking meltdown for two fucking months.”

The turnaround finally came in April, when Leckie suggested that Thom try playing “Fake Plastic Trees” by himself. There was nothing to lose; all previous attempts by the full band to capture this anti–power ballad on tape had failed. “There was one stage…when it sounded like Guns N’ Roses’ ‘November Rain,’ ” guitarist Ed O’Brien reported. “It was so pompous and bombastic, just the worst.” But this time, alone with his acoustic guitar, Thom was finally pleased with the results. It was this solo performance that Leckie and the rest of the band used as their foundation to build the final track.

With that song and several others in the can—and the original October deadline for the album put aside for good—Radiohead took to the road, playing a series of shows in Europe, the U.K., Japan, and Australasia through May and June. They took the opportunity to air much of the material they’d been working on at RAK.

One gig, at the Astoria in London on May 27, was filmed by MTV Europe and recorded by Leckie. That was a smart move, because the band’s fiery live take of “My Iron Lung,” another song they’d labored in vain to get right in the studio, ended up winning approval from all concerned. The band liked it so much, in fact, that it became the first Bends-era song to see the light of day, as the leadoff track of an EP released in September (the other six songs on that EP were cut at RAK but rejected for the final album).

At the time, “My Iron Lung” was greeted with some puzzlement by fans and critics alike. Its transitions from jangly, ring-modulated opening hook to McCartney-esque verse melody to pulverizing guitar explosions in the bridge were jarring and didn’t correspond to what anyone expected from Radiohead. But now, placed next to its 11 fellow songs on The Bends, it makes much more sense. And except for Yorke’s lead vocal, which was replaced later, what you hear on the final recording is exactly what was played on the Astoria stage that night in May ’94.

From here, the going got easier. The weeks spent playing live had loosened Radiohead up, and they completed The Bends in bits and pieces over the next several months at the Manor in Oxfordshire and Abbey Road in London. Songs like “Bones,” “Sulk” and the album’s title track, which had caused no end of problems earlier in the year, were set down with a minimum of fuss.

“When we finished The Bends,” Yorke said, “it felt like going back and doing four-tracks again. That’s what was so exciting—that we were in control of it, that it was our thing. We were simply satisfying ourselves.”

Still, EMI remained uncertain about the album’s commercial prospects and didn’t want to take any unnecessary chances. Once recording was finally concluded in November, the label asked both Leckie and the American team of Sean Slade and Paul Q. Kolderie, who’d produced Radiohead’s debut album Pablo Honey, to mix it. In the end, three Leckie mixes and nine Slade/Kolderie mixes made the cut.

Considering all the drama that had been generated during recording and mixing, it was interesting, and a little amusing, that one song in the album’s final running order—“High and Dry,” also released as a single—actually predated the RAK sessions by almost a year, having been recorded in ’93 at Courtyard Studios just outside Oxford by the band’s live sound engineer Jim Warren.

Among the most striking aspects of the new material was that it found Radiohead expertly exploiting one of their most unusual traits: the fact that they were a three-guitar band (with O’Brien, their tallest member, joining Yorke and Greenwood on six-string duty).

On Pablo Honey, their general tendency had been simply to lay one more or less identical guitar part on top of another and another, forming a dense, fuzzy wall. For The Bends, they took a completely different approach, creating a sensible division of labor. In general, Yorke handled the chords, Greenwood did the fancy lead playing, and O’Brien was in charge of the unusual effects, but this could vary from song to song—or second to second. And for the first time, no one was afraid not to play.

In O’Brien’s words, “we were very aware of something on The Bends that we weren’t aware of on Pablo Honey…if it sounded really great with Thom playing acoustic with [drummer] Phil [Selway] and Coz [bassist Colin Greenwood], what was the point in trying to add something more?” Yorke added, “Sometimes the nicest thing to do with a guitar is just look at it.”

One other thing that set The Bends apart from Radiohead’s previous work was the greater amount of group contribution to the songwriting. Though Radiohead’s songs have always been credited to the whole band, most of the early ones were mainly by Yorke.

This changed during The Bends. “Nice Dream,” for example, was originally a simple four-chord Yorke composition, but Greenwood and O’Brien added more parts, including the intro. And the music to “Just” was largely written by Greenwood, who Yorke said “was trying to get as many chords as he could into a song. It was like writing a medley.” Because Jonny is the most musically knowledgeable member of the band (trained as a classical violist, he has since carved out a distinguished side career as a composer), it’s not entirely surprising that he’d be interested in showing off this way.

Sure enough, the progression of “Just” is full of jagged chromatic twists, and Greenwood lays an octatonic diminished scale ascending through two octaves over the chorus, adding to the feeling of menace. Other guitaristic high points of the song include a cool, clean two-part harmony section (played by Thom and Jonny) and Greenwood’s closing solo, affectionately referred to by some as the “bwena-bwaaa” part because of the strikingly vocal quality of his vicious bends.

Interesting historical note: On this track and throughout the sessions for The Bends, Jonny used two 1990 Fender Telecaster Plus models exclusively, one with a Tobacco Burst finish, the other in Ebony Frost. These guitars were stolen while the band were in Denver for an October ’95 concert.

Last year, a fan browsing a Radiohead gear site saw a description of the ebony Tele and realized he owned it, having bought it in Denver in the mid-Nineties. Messages were exchanged, arrangements were made, and nearly two decades after the theft, Greenwood was reunited with his Tele—which he took back onstage for the first time this past February, performing Steve Reich’s “Electric Counterpoint” with the London Contemporary Orchestra in his hometown of Oxford.

Upon its March ’95 release, The Bends was hailed by critics worldwide as a masterpiece. “Radiohead have suddenly bloomed into one of this country’s most magnificent bands,” the London Times proclaimed. Setting the tone for the band’s future work, Yorke’s lyrics are pretty grim throughout the album, a veritable compendium of disease, disgust and depression.

To pick just one example (from “Street Spirit”): “Cracked eggs, dead birds/Scream as they fight for life/I can feel death/Can see its beady eyes.” And yet the melodies to which these lyrics are set are so inviting, their arrangements so creative, and the group playing so powerful, that the overall effect is uplifting.

Radiohead supported The Bends with relentless gigging. They toured the U.S. alone six times within a year and a half, including a stint opening for new pals R.E.M. The hard work paid off, as the album slowly crept toward Gold (500,000) and then Platinum (one million) sales status in America. Even so, it never got any higher on the Billboard charts than No. 88, which to this day remains the worst U.S. chart placing for any Radiohead album.

In the middle of all this live activity, on September 4, 1995, with The Bends’ principal engineer Nigel Godrich at the controls, the band recorded a slow, grand, highly Pink Floyd–ian number called “Lucky” for a charity compilation album.

O’Brien opens the song by strumming the strings of his ’86 Squier Strat above the nut, creating a kind of sonic halo over Selway’s beat that perfectly establishes the ghostly mood. (Like Jonny’s ebony Tele, Ed’s Strat would be stolen in Denver a month after this recording session; unlike the Tele, it’s never been recovered.) The “Lucky” session took only five hours to complete, including mixing, and all concerned regarded it as one of their finest moments. “ ‘Lucky’ was indicative of what we wanted to do,” Yorke told me after the fact. “It was like the first mark on the wall.”

The song would reappear two years later on OK Computer, the album that made Radiohead global stars. But just as they resisted being pigeonholed after “Creep,” so too would they quickly veer away from the guitar-focused art-rock atmospherics of OK Computer.

Further groundbreaking music lay ahead: Kid A, Amnesiac, Hail to the Thief, In Rainbows, The King of Limbs.

Today, nearly 25 years into their professional career, Radiohead have the same five members they started with, but they continue to grow and change stylistically. And the more wildly they experiment with their sound, the more popular they seem to become.

Their journey together is of a rare and inspiring sort, and The Bends was that journey’s crucial turning point.