Cardboard has become a weirdly talked-about tone-material in recent years, and now the brains behind the viral cardboard electric guitars has returned for its latest wood-less creation – the world’s first acoustic electric guitar made of cardboard.

In the past, we’ve seen Cardboard Chaos – the joint venture between Ernest Packaging and Signal – partner with the likes of Fender on Telecaster and Stratocaster-style guitars, as well as a bass, which have been played by everyone from Robby Krieger and Billy Gibbons to Keanu Reeves to Dweezil Zappa.

Now, the cardboard enthusiasts have unveiled the result of their latest collaboration with famed guitar builder Gabriel Currie – the world’s first archtop acoustic electric jazz guitar to be made almost entirely from cardboard.

The project has been a long time coming. The idea of an archtop of this ilk has been in the minds of the Cardboard Chaos team for “over a decade”.

To bring it to life, the jazz guitar began life at the Ernest Packaging innovation lab in Southern California, carving bodies, backs, sides and necks out of poly and paper. The lab’s leader, Mike Martinez, had to “push cardboard to its absolute limits” so he could pass the production baton onto Currie.

From there, Currie of Echopark Guitars – who has built instruments for Josh Homme and Steven Tyler – took it past the finishing line, but not before rethinking his approach to guitar-making: “Everything I thought I knew, I put aside,” Currie says of the build.

The guitar was inspired by a vintage Benedetto jazz box, of which the team had schematics and blueprints to study going into the process.

It’s something of an engineering marvel, built from countless resin-coated molds, a delicate archtop construction, lattice-style reinforcement and a neck made from mostly solid resin with paper as a binder. Throw in some electronics and you have a fully playable, fully functioning archtop made from cardboard.

“Chaos is an understatement when you set out to make an arch-top acoustic guitar out of cardboard,” a press release says.

“What comes out the other side is the world’s first Cardboard Acoustic Guitar that actually slays,” adds Signal, one of the driving forces behind the project.

“Not a prop. Not a joke. A real deal, jazz-style cardboard guitar that rings, sings, and proves what a small crew of friends with ridiculous ideas can pull off when they decide to bend the rules on purpose.”

Like the cardboard guitars to come before it, the Echopark Cardboard jazzbox will be put to use in an upcoming Cardboard Session.

Keep your eyes peeled on the Cardboard Sessions YouTube series for when it drops.

Amp Week 2026: For many guitar players, their first amp is a predictable choice. Maybe it was an affordable Marshall or Fender five-watt combo – or, for those of a certain age, a primal modeler like the iconic Line 6 Spider or Peavey Vypyr.

For a young Josh Homme, who would later make his name in Kyuss and Queens of the Stone Age, it was something a bit more obscure – something that would set the scene for the left-field gear picks for which he'd later be known for.

“My first amp proper was an Ampeg VT-40, and I still have it,” he tells Guitar World. “It was so heavy to lift as an 11-year-old.”

Ostensibly a bass amp, the VT-40 was a choice that didn’t necessarily match Homme's instrument as an electric guitar slinger. In fact, he bought a Teisco Del Rey Tulip at the same time as the VT-40, and, in his own words, found that “two wrongs don’t make a right, but 40 wrongs make a weird.”

He’s spoken to GW previously about how the amp, coupled with his exclusive use of the neck pickup, defined his unusual Kyuss guitar tone. It was an unorthodox sound because... well, the gear and the choices behind it were atypical.

Yet it was the amp's aesthetic, more so than anything else, that drew Homme to the Ampeg.

“I knew I wanted something old, because it's such a tactile sensation,” he says. “The knobs on an amplifier mean something. And if they’re not to my taste, it sort of turns me off.

“In Liar Liar, they say, ‘Don't judge a book by its cover. But that's what people with a shitty cover always say,’ right?” he goes on. “Of course, the cover matters. I do this solely by visual, and then sort of just make it into being.”

Later, when Kyuss broke up, and he kick-started life with Queens of the Stone Age, Homme left the amp behind, finding a new, unassuming secret weapon that has since become his first signature amp.

But Peavey wasn’t the first firm to approach him about a collaboration. Homme also revealed to Guitar World that he turned Ampeg down for one particular reason.

Elsewhere, Homme has credited his off-kilter playing style to his ‘oompah oompah’ upbringing, and has explained why he always writes his songs on acoustic guitar first.

“The drama and chaos of Courtney Love and Hole are infamous, but to me it all felt familiar,” writes Melissa Auf der Maur in her newly released memoir and homage to the ’90s, Even the Good Girls Will Cry.

Like all great memoirs, Auf der Maur vividly encapsulates the pivotal moments that saw her transcend from DIY venues in Canada to joining Love and co. in front of 65,000 people at the UK’s Reading Festival in 1994. It all happened mere weeks after the tragic deaths of Hole bassist Kristen Pfaff and Kurt Cobain – and that’s just the first chapter.

“I found comfort in the chaos. My upbringing was the perfect training ground to be in a rock band and immersed in the world of Courtney. Despite how new I was to the band, I fitted right in,” she continues.

Indeed, Auf der Maur's grunge Cinderella story depicts a series of full-circle moments: her encounter with Billy Corgan at a low-lit punk venue in her native Montréal – and her becoming absolutely enthralled with the Smashing Pumpkins' music – led to a recommendation to join Hole, and later, the Pumpkins as their touring bassist, before she plunged into a solo career at the turn of the millennium.

“There's a reason why the introduction to my book, which is the Reading Festival, is [called] ‘Through the Looking Glass,’” Auf der Maur tells Bass Player, as she dials in from a room lined with photos – vignettes from those heady days.

“It was David Lynchian, Alice in Wonderland… I just stepped into another dimension. I went from a tiny town to a global stage with grief and chaos and death and everything.”

In the book, you describe feeling chosen by the bass. What was it about the instrument – its physicality and frequency – that felt like destiny rather than a practical decision?

When I was awarded Female Bass Player of the Year by Gibson, in the limo ride on the way [there], I started writing my acceptance speech, and that's when I came up with [the idea that] the bass is the mother of all instruments. So in my acceptance speech, I described the bass as the glue and the connector.

The bass is the connector that connects the singer to the drummer, to the audience, to the rhythm, and to the melodies, all at the same time… The place in which the bass sits in any music, not just rock music, but especially dance music or even jazz, the bass brings you on a different kind of journey. It brings you on a feeling journey. You fucking feel the bass.

Geddy Lee has a TV show called Are Bass Players Human Too? [and] he came to Hudson [New York, where Auf der Maur currently lives]. At the end of the visit, I was like, well, ‘Bass is so easy. That's why I picked it up.’ And he looked at me, he's like, ‘Well, that's a secret. Don't tell anyone.’ But he also said, ‘Bass isn't easy for everybody.’

I then realized, even during all my years in Hole, when it was clear that I was so young and had only played six concerts in my life, I played the bass, and didn’t make a mistake. When I joined the band, I only had five days to rehearse with them, and people say, like, ‘How did that happen?’ I was like, ‘I don't know. It was easy.’ So I feel my way through a song.

What did bass playing give you that the other art forms didn’t?

It entirely connects me to a deep way of feeling human connection, because the best of bass is when you're playing with a drummer and playing with a band and playing in front of an audience – that is the magic.

Me alone in a room with a bass; it means absolutely nothing to me. It does not please me nor make me feel anything. That’s my relationship to the instrument – it’s to connect with human beings.

How did you come across your first bass?

I had borrowed basses from older men. I was a DJ, a cassette DJ, at the local dive bar where all the older guy musicians worked with me. And I started plugging into their amps with their instruments.

Then, one day, the guys just said, ‘Hey, it’s time to get your own bass. You're turning 21, you've been borrowing all this time. Let's go find you a bass.’ And so they brought me to this second-hand shop. We walked into this giant music room. It just called me. She had the same color as my hair.

I said, ‘What about this? Is this a good one?’ They're like, ‘Oh yeah, you know, vintage Squier Precision, made in Japan, high quality…’ And then I said, ‘Great, my father, I'll just tell him it's my birthday present.’

My father [Canadian journalist and politician Nick Auf der Maur], who is a very adventurous, courageous, weird person, was having lunch, and I said, ‘Can I have $500 for this bass for my birthday? I'm turning 21.’ That was the bass I played in Hole until I was sponsored by Fender.

You joined Hole amidst unimaginable grief. How did you manage to adapt to the circumstances?

A switch flipped, and I was just the exact same person, but in a completely different environment. I was not raised in a suburban, boring family. I was raised by radical people who did radical things.

When I saw the Smashing Pumpkins and Hole play in 1991, when I worked as a ticket girl, and I saw both of them play in front of 20 people, I knew what was happening.

The world was changing, and something huge and magical was happening for my generation. I picked up the bass because I wanted to be part of the movement of radical noise-making for my generation. So I felt at home. I'm like, this is where I belong.

I was not a drug addict [but I was] watching what money and fame did to all these fragile people who were already, for the most part, coming from broken families and didn't have love and support, so their band and their community and their generation and the stage and the audience were their only family. I adapted very quickly because I understood what was happening.

What gear were you using during that time?

I only ever played the same thing, an [Ampeg] SVT tube amp – with the drive knob, not without. I had been playing a vintage one that was one of the boys' back home. I only ever borrowed until I joined Hole, so I knew what I wanted to buy when they bought me my amp – it's an SVT Pro tube head and SVT cabinet. My Fender Precision, Boss tuner pedal… that is it.

I didn’t use any distortion until later, when SansAmp made these cool distortion pedals. I also love phaser and chorus. I didn’t use anything else. [More recently] Geddy gave me all of his [signature] pedals, so I have some Geddy Lee pedals.

How did your sense of rhythm evolve once you locked in with Hole drummer Patty Schemel?

Patty and I played really well together. We [even] had a little side project when Courtney was becoming a Hollywood movie star – it was called Constant Comment. It was harder to adjust to [Smashing Pumpkins’ drummer] Jimmy Chamberlin. Me and Patty were easy.

By the time I was playing with the Pumpkins, it was a much more complicated catalog with a very complex drummer. Jimmy is a jazz-prog drummer. He's crazy cool. The sound of the Pumpkins is so Jimmy. So that was an interesting adaptation because Jimmy, like jazz drummers, does not play to a click. Patty's actually very tight. She's very, very rhythmically solid. Jimmy is like a wild animal.

It's like you're following this wild creature through two-hour sets of changing songs every setlist, and it took so long for me to figure out, ‘How do I keep up with this dynamic band?’ Because Jimmy is also following Billy, and Billy speeds up, and it's like this weird machine.

But when I did Billy's podcast [recently], I learned something about myself musically that I've never learned before. He told me about my specific pocket, which I knew nothing about. I'm on top of the beat. I’m ahead. I'll take it as a compliment, because [Led Zeppelin’s] John Paul Jones and [John] Bonham, who are one of the most famous rhythm sections, Bonham is behind, and Jones is above. I guess I naturally sit on top of the drums.

What are your memories of writing the bassline for Celebrity Skin? It’s unusual for a bassline to follow the vocal melody.

I don't remember anything. I'm very, very proud of my bass playing on that album, because I had so much time, because some of those songs, we'd be playing for hours and hours and hours.

You just play for Courtney to find her lyrics. She's someone who needs to be screaming to find the whole song for like 20 hours, so as a rhythm section, you're sitting there just playing in a loop over and over and over. So I had a lot of time to find melodic licks.

We were brought to see a Fleetwood Mac rehearsal with the producer, Michael Beinhorn [renowned producer who worked with the likes of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Soundgarden, Hole, and Ozzy Osbourne]. I was not a Fleetwood Mac fan because I'm more of a heavy, visceral rock fan, but I recognized being in that room watching the drums and bass, [their tracks] could be seen as simple, airy songs, but this is not simple.

What they are doing, the complexity of it when you step back, when you do a melodic line, when you open it up, when you push it… Through just one sitting and watching that rhythm section, it opened my mind to the power of less is more, but also [that] minimal changes make huge impacts on a song.

Billy Corgan famously recommended you to Courtney, and you later joined the Pumpkins. I'm curious how your dynamic with him changed across all these chapters of your life…

Our bond started when we discovered we were both born on St Patrick's Day. We're both pretty tripped-out hippie people that get a little romantic and convoluted and [are all] about the stars and destiny and astrology… He's a trip of a guy, and I am a trip of a girl, I guess, and so I think our relationship reflects this ebb and flow. Sometimes he feels like a soulmate, and then sometimes he's a total stranger.

What did you learn from him about bass playing?

I learned how to be an incredible bass player. Learning that catalog and playing 183 shows with those incredible players totally defined me as a bass player. I was a good bass player, and I am proud of my Celebrity Skin work, but oh my God… I mean, it changed my level of musicianship forever and opened my repertoire of understanding what my hands can do.

My solo records most certainly were expanded by having to learn that catalog and play it with them. So I always say the Pumpkins was my “Master’s in Music”… just phenomenal music training.

How did that impact on your solo career?

Living in the shadow of my grunge parents, Courtney and Billy, who made me, who found me out of nowhere… it was a complex and exhausting shadow to come out from under.

I made those solo records myself for myself, even though I put one out on Capitol [Records] and one on Roadrunner [Records]. I paid for them myself, because I was not going to let other motherfucking people tell me who I am or what I'm going to do and be.

It was done in protective force fields of independence so that I could explore, authentically, what it is to be me, alone, as the captain of the ship. So those two albums were completely self-exploration.

Especially my first record, being able to work with [Queens of the Stone Age’s] Josh Homme and [record producer] Chris Goss… I got to invite the people I admired the most. John Stanier from Helmet, one of my favorite drummers ever… having my favorite drummers play on my solo record was pretty much the coolest thing a bass player could ever do.

From its title to its content, your book, and, by extension, your career, have a feminist overtone. Did you feel a strong sense of responsibility in that respect when you were playing in Hole and Smashing Pumpkins?

The people from the record industry realized that the money is with the women, the money is with the girl fans. They turned the whole music industry, the pop music industry, into a female-led [industry].

Billie Eilish, I think, is a woman you couldn't even invent in the ’90s, because she's a product of a new world where, actually, women can be empowered and protected from a horrible system. She's a product of a new world, of a very special kind of world that didn't exist for women [before].

My mother, which I write about in the book, she wanted to change the way women were. She raised me, saying over and over, ‘No man should ever define a woman. You have to be your own person. Do not be defined by a man.’ So that's how I was raised, and that's what I did.

I felt a responsibility to continue what my mother had started. I just saw myself as a continuation of new feminism, and it still has to happen right now. I got very nervous in the past 10-20 years watching, well, rock music dying. So then, visceral, strong women kind of died and went more into pop.

It was a rare moment in the ’90s where women were being given a bridge into a very male form of expression, and it was so fucking powerful. [Nowadays] there's Picture Parlour, Wet Leg… of course, there are tons of women playing guitar. Thank God. But there was a dead moment there, between this and that, there weren’t any. When I was putting out my solo records, all of a sudden, I was the only woman on the bill again.

There’s this beautiful description in your book of the bathroom stall at Reading Festival as a liminal space – transitioning pre-fame Melissa into a public-facing bass icon. Looking back at that life-changing moment now, what would you tell 22-year-old Melissa?

I would tell her that she's doing it all right. It is her who has the answer. No-one in the future outside of her has the answer. The greatest thing I learned writing this book is that I already knew what I was and who I wanted to be.

I had all the tools, and I began to realize that my 22-year-old self was a teacher to me now. So I would basically tell her fucking follow your wildest dreams, listen to the craziest ideas you have in your head, and trust yourself.

I've already been everywhere in my life and back, and I'm just trying to ride the right wave to have meaningful experiences and share something of my perspective and my love of life with other people so that I can have good energy in my lifetime.

• Melissa Auf der Maur's memoir, Even the Good Girls Will Cry: My 90s Rock Memoir, is out now.

There’s something sexy about secrets, and Josh Homme knows that. While he was down-tuning a whole genre into existence with Kyuss, making waves with Queens of the Stone Age, or crafting one of the best supergroup records of all time with Them Crooked Vultures, he was pretty tight-lipped about the gear he uses.

But during an interview with Mark Ronson for Apple TV in 2021, he disclosed that his “secret weapon” was a rather unassuming Peavey Decade combo amp. Since then, the mask has begun to slip, punctuated by a signature version of the 10-watt, solid state workhorse – the first time he’s ventured into the world of signature amps.

Outside of his go-to Maestro Parametric Filter, Homme steers clear of pedal chat. But there’s comfort in knowing that his greatest gear secret is that, when it comes to amplifiers, pretty much anything goes – as long as you drive it hard enough.

Homme still wants to retain some mystique. After all, the greatest journeys through the Wild West of gear are the ones strewn with detours, mistakes and happy accidents. Only then can a player find their true self.

You used to play your gear cards close to your chest. What changed?

It feels like talking over your art project in a classroom – it's exciting to break it apart and see how the sausage is made. I used to have a couple dummy pedals on stage behind my amps, because people would always come up and try to sneak photos.

I think those secrets are what's cool about this. There’s a sound that sounds just like you. It takes a minute to figure out what that is, and that journey is truly joyous to take. Like everyone else, I love knowing what Angus Young is doing – but it’s also fun to make it a bit of a scavenger hunt for people, so they don't miss the good stuff along the way.

Nobody here is inventing the wheel. You're really just saying, “I made a wheel. Do you want to roll with me?” And that’s what's so wonderful about this: you get to explore, and oftentimes the mistakes you make end up being the secret sauce.

Why choose the moment with Mark Ronson to give the Peavey Decade game away?

I don't know what it was about that day, but I thought, “If I keep it a secret forever, no-one will understand where I’m coming from.”

When did Peavey come into your life?

I’m from a smaller town that was about 30,000 people when I was a kid, over a really vast expanse of land. But one thing was constant: in the States, there's always a little music store, and Peavey always did a really good job of making sure that's the store they were in. Peavey was the PA at your mom's wedding, the gear that people were playing in church.

Peavey was always reliable, a little bit bombproof. You could drop it off the back of your truck and not feel that you've destroyed it. It would still plug in and play, and, and it wasn't expensive. It was something that every man, woman and child could scrape up the dough to get.

Was your first amp a Peavey?

My first amp proper was an Ampeg VT-40 – I still have it. It was so heavy to lift as an 11-year-old! But I wanted an amp, and I knew I wanted something old, because it’s such a tactile sensation. The knobs on an amplifier mean something. If they’re not to my taste, it sort of turns me off.

In Liar Liar they say “Don't judge a book by its cover. But that’s what people with a shitty cover always say!” Of course the cover matters. I do this solely by vision, and then sort of make it into being. The truth is you can make anything sound like you. I’ve picked amps, guitars, pedals, and outboard gear solely because of the knobs and things like that, without any regard to if it plays well.

What about your first guitar?

One of the first electrics was a Teisco Del Rey [Tulip] flower guitar, which I bought with the VT-40. It was instant Kinks. As I got older, I realized that the Japanese – because of the post-World War II economy – couldn’t get the best stuff, so they had shitty beginnings. But they did the best they could. It’s really well-made shit, and it creates this unforgettable sound.

I went through this phase of buying Japanese guitars; they were cheap, so it was an easy experiment. Then I discovered Tempo’s high-end guitars. I started exploring cool combinations of three and five pickups, and switches that are like a little light switch instead of a pickup selector; hearing what that does to the phase. They had the skinniest tones ever.

Later, having an opportunity to work with people like Echo Park and Motor Ave, I could ask for things. I’ve been fucking with out-of-phase things a lot in the last 10 years, because then you have multiple amp sounds out of one guitar in just a couple switches. You can do it with your pinky while you’re playing. I always respected Hendrix for doing that.

What were some of your early lessons about gear?

As teenagers, the only rule was that if you sounded like someone else, people gave you shit – and rightfully so. When you're young, you wear your influences on your sleeve pretty heavily. You don’t know if that’s right or wrong. Until you experience a penalty for doing that, you progress in that direction.

In early Kyuss we drank too much of the Misfits Kool-Aid. We got a little shit for it, but I walked away from that taking the right influence from Black Flag, which is that you I can love something and be influenced by it without having to sound that way. When I was 16 I felt like there was some combination of sounds that sounded like how I felt. I needed to look only for that thing.

I couldn’t afford a tuner, so I started experimenting with detuning guitars, because it was the one thing I did not see out there at that time. I’d take the guitar down so it was floppy, then tune it back up a little bit; it was as low as I could go, in C and B. All of a sudden you could feel that.

I guess you’re looking for something that resonates with you. You’re looking for your frequency. Years later I learned that’s the natural order of things. It injected this beautiful philosophy about what it means to play – how you’re actually getting closer to the universe. So gear became the most important thing. It was the right tie pin or the right fucking socks, you know?

That set you down a path…

I bought a 12-channel PA from the ’70s and started playing guitar through that, because I was looking for ways for that C and B tuning to be accepted by an amplifier without it folding on itself.

That’s when I went, “I’ll play through bass cabinets!” You're looking for any way, visually and sonically, to do something that nobody else was doing. Getting shit from people was the best thing that could happen – it made me think, “Never again will anyone ever say I sound like someone else. I’ll find a way.” My goal was that, within three seconds, you know it’s me.

Is that what led you towards atypical gear?

There are so many examples of plugging a Telecaster into a Fender amp, or a Les Paul into a Marshall. There’s a homogenization that leads to sterilization. I call it “unsupply on demand” – what’s in the nothingness between those things? That’s where I should live.

Anything is an amplifier to me. I love playing out of old stereo tuners, old tape machines; anything with a speaker and a jack. Forget quarter-inch. RCA, TT, if I can get in there I will. With a Les Paul and a Marshall I know what’s going to happen there. I figured I’m good; music is about matching your own evolution.

It’s hard not to want to get behind the underdog, because music is about being an outcast. All I need is insurmountable odds and I’m in. Give me your worst guitar, a boutique amp made in someone’s mom's garage, and a pedal that’s not supposed to be there, and we’ve got something. When you do that, you instantly feel like these things are yours.

Were there any other unusual aspects to your Kyuss rig?

Kyuss was all neck pickup. That was one of the secrets to thickening things up and taking leads that were one-strings. It just sounded wider. Playing through bass cabinets, I learned that two wrongs don’t make a right but 40 wrongs make a weird. So a bunch of little adjustments – neck pickup, bass cabinets – and their grand total sound completely different.

And you can add the Decade to that…

When I found a Peavey Decade back in the day, it was $15 at a flea market. There was no risk in trying it. It was so small I could take it anywhere. I could hammer nails into it and it wouldn’t break. It was really versatile because there’s saturation, a clean input, and it has a pre- and post-gain; that’s where I learned about that relationship. And with a Coles ribbon mic, it’s one of the greatest bass amps of all time.

For many years we’ve used Decades to warm up before gigs – and in a strange way we never sound better. You can make yourself sound like you’re in the Kinks in two seconds, and if you want to blow it out, it blows out in such a strange way.

I was never a huge fan of distortion but I’m a huge fan of overdrive. I want to blow something apart. Distortion is compression; you’re shrinking it down, and then you need to turn that up, right? The idea of overpowering something seemed more punk rock to me. It’s about the gear, but also the attitude you have to it.

Has anyone ever dismissed the Decade on looks alone?

I showed the Decade to John Paul Jones when we were in Them Crooked Vultures. I have this Yamaha hollowbody bass with flatwounds on it, which I call Lame-aha. Instead of a pickup switch, it’s a volume knob, so you’re on the spectrum of which pickup you’re using. I said, “Try that with the Decade and a Coles ribbon mic.”

He laughed – and I love that, because the looks are deceiving. You’re like, “What is this entire piece-of-shit setup?” Then he played it. It was fun to see him go from giggling about how shitty something looks to complete joy. It’s fun to do that to people and it’s fun to do that to yourself, too.

Peavey is the first brand you’ve done a signature proper with. Had there been other offers on the table before that?

Years ago Ampeg came to me about remaking the VT-40. I was a little suspicious because I’ve never really done endorsements. That’s not my thing – I don’t work for you, man. The way Ampeg approached me, what they wanted to do and how they wanted to treat me, I felt like I was being used.

It was like, “You’re the only person playing this since Keith Richards, so we want to use that image; but we want to make the amp like this…” I wasn’t having it. And I love Ampeg; I have so much Ampeg gear. But life is about what it is now, not what it was. I’m not a puppet that you can put your hand up its ass and make do stuff.

Plus, I wanted to make something that anybody could buy. I’m talking with Echo Park about doing a line of limited guitars, and I have a few ideas about the styles of the tone. Those things will be expensive because of what it takes to do that. It’s unfortunate.

So I thought, “I’ve gotta do something with Peavey that everyone can get!” And there’s that notion of a little kid in a small town; when they get started playing guitar or bass, I’m there with them.

And the amp has some added extras.

We went back to the Decade and tried to retain all the good stuff. But I said, “You’ve got to hear this WEM solid state head that I have!” There’s a bright switch that turns your eyes from half open to pinned open like Alex from Clockwork Orange. So we took a note from that for the treble switch.

There’s a bass switch to make it eat a little chocolate so it gets a little chubby on the bottom. Then, since you want to use stuff like this in the studio, a direct out with XLRs, so you're not fucking with buzz and noise. You can control that volume too, so you can really pin the rails going direct and just blow the thing out completely.

Then I was like, “We’ve got to do a stack! We have to have an extension cabinet and ape the Vox cabinet stands because they look so fucking cool!” It’s such an over engineered idea to have a stand for a small cabinet. It’s funny.

Is that your Spinal Tap Stonehenge moment?

Yeah, 100 percent – it turns it into a Stonehenge! Everyone can do 90 percent; it’s that last 10 percent that matters. It’s the little details that reveal your true intentions.

Like a hammer, it’s useful in all situations. You can pull nails, break windows and build something with this thing. It was fun to design; John, the engineer at Peavey, really got it.

What other gear is exciting you right now?

Have you tried the Jack White Fender Pano Verb? It’s fucking insane! Jack clearly has OCD on an exaggerated level; he’s such a stickler for details. He sent over a cavalcade of shit. The Triplecaster is great, too; it’s a lot of possibilities in one guitar. So I’m giving Jack my Stonehenge in return.

Our guitar player, Troy Van Leeuwen, has a knack for being really loud and demolishing things without noticing. So I plugged into this thing with the settings that were on there. I always do that whatever an amp is sent – I plug in and assume that somebody had some idea somewhere, and it sounded fucking amazing.

We tracked some music with it right away, and we ended up using it as scratch because the tone was so good. Then Troy plugged into it, same settings, different guitar – boom! He blew the speaker.

What’s your strangest gear find?

Many years ago, in a pawn shop in Lawrence, Kansas, I found a 1938 Gibson EH-185 combo amp. At the time, Gibson was making amps in batch of fives; everything was handmade, so each batch sounded subtly different. It’s one of the great amps of all time.

And I got the matching lap steel that came with it. It was $300 for the pair, because who plays lap steel? That’s one of the reasons it’s been a part of Queens since the very beginning. Lap steel is to guitar what ice skating is to walking: it’s the slippery version. So I’ve always had this attraction. It’s wonderful to get something when someone didn’t know what they were getting rid of.

On tour I’d go through the Recycler papers. When everyone was moving to digital I got so much outboard gear from old churches, like Collins compressors for $100 – and now they’re thousands and thousands. Going through a church yard sale and picking out two noise gates and suppressors for $100… that sort of scavenger hunting is one of the real joys of this. As a shepherd of the weird, I can say those are the places to go.

• For more on the Decade Too, head to Peavey.

Josh Homme’s collaboration with Peavey for the Decade Too was the first time the Queens of the Stone Age man had released a piece of gear with his name on it. But he’d had offers to work on signature gear before – and even once turned down the chance to work with a company he loves.

The Peavey Decade practice amp was unveiled as Homme’s “secret weapon” back in 2021, and it’s since developed an almost mythical reputation as part of his elusive guitar rig.

When in Them Crooked Vultures, his supergroup with Dave Grohl and John Paul Jones, Homme showed it to the Led Zeppelin bass player, who laughed at the “piece of shit” amp before plugging into it.

Yet, before linking up with Peavey, Homme was in line for another potential signature release with a different company. But, in a soon-to-be-published interview with Guitar World, Homme explains why he ultimately turned them down.

“Years ago, Ampeg came to me about remaking the VT 40, and I was a little suspicious, because I've never really done endorsements,” he says. “That's not my thing. I don't work for you, man.”

Homme had famously turned to the bass amps and an exclusive use of the neck pickup of his guitars to forge his stoner rock-inspiring tone in Kyuss. As such, a signature model, from Ampeg’s side at least, felt like a sure-fire winner. But Homme’s reservations stood tall.

“With the way Ampeg approached me, what they wanted to do, and how they wanted to treat me, I felt like I was being used,” Homme returns. “It was like, ‘All right, you're the only person playing this since Keith Richards, so we want to use that image, but we want to make the amp like this…’

“Honestly, I wasn't having it. And I love Ampeg. I have so much Ampeg gear. But life is about what it is now, not what it was. I'm not a puppet that you can put your hand up its ass and make do stuff.”

The Peavey tie-in, he goes on to say, was different on all levels. Here, the collaboration produced a $399 combo amp, and a $199 pedal edition, that “every man, woman, and child could scrape up the dough to get.”

It seems to have sparked a newfound appreciation for signature gear, with other collaborations in the works, which he alludes to in his Guitar World interview.

Elsewhere, Homme recently credited ‘oompah oompah’ guitar for aiding his knack for writing off-kilter guitar riffs, and explained why much of his core songwriting takes place on an acoustic.

Queens of the Stone Age’s inimitable bandleader, Josh Homme, has historically been tight-lipped about the gear he uses, but that all changed in 2021 when he revealed his “secret weapon” to be the Peavey Decade, a tiny and ultra-affordable combo amp.

The amp, first released in the 1980s – and re-released as a Homme signature model last year – proves that good things can come in small packages, and it’s helped define the band’s sound over the years. But when Homme showed the amp to Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones, the legendary bassist couldn’t help but laugh.

The pair had teamed up with Dave Grohl for the short-lived supergroup, Them Crooked Vultures, for one album in 2009. There, Jones quickly learned that looks can be deceiving.

“I have this Yamaha hollowbody bass with flat wounds on it, which I call Lame-aha,” Homme tells Guitar World. “Instead of a pickup switch, it’s a Volume knob, so you’re on the spectrum of which pickup you’re using.

“And I said [to John Paul Jones], ‘Try that with the Decade and a Coles ribbon mic.’ He laughed, and I love that, because the looks are deceiving.”

Homme revealing that his go-to amp for both electric guitar and bass was a Peavey that packed just 10 watts of power was met with disbelief. Surely his secret weapon was something more... well, glamorous. Powerful. Homme feeds off those reactions.

“The first thing after you look at it is you're like, ‘What is this entire piece of shit set up?’” Homme accepts. “And then he played it. And to see him go from giggling about how shitty something looks to joy, it's fun to do that to people. And it's fun to do that to yourself, too.”

Homme's signature Peavey Decade Too was given a host of new features, including Bass, Treble, and Saturation (Overdrive) boosting switches, alongside more output options to cater to modern recording needs. Don’t underestimate it.

Guitar World’s full interview with Josh Homme, exploring his unique approach to gear, will be published online in the near future.

In recent news, Homme explained why he prefers to write on an acoustic, and discussed why getting ‘oompah oompah’ lessons as a child helped him write more off-kilter guitar parts.

When I was growing up, devouring guitar magazines and scouring internet forums, it was a truth universally acknowledged that good guitar tone could only come from a tube amp. End of discussion.

But our definition of what makes a ‘good’ guitar tone has changed dramatically in the past 10 years. Heck, it’s changed in the past 10 days, after revered tonesmith John Mayer ditched the amp and plugged directly into JHS Pedals’ latest offering – you know, the one designed to sound like a Tascam Portastudio.

Not too long ago, this kind of behavior would have got you booted out of any self-respecting studio or rehearsal room. But the next generation of guitar heroes is changing our relationship with guitar tone. Or, as Mayer puts it, “There is a revolution taking place right now in guitar playing.”

Mk.gee, of course, is the poster boy for this particular uprising, running a baritone-strung Fender Jaguar into a Tascam 424 and cranking it into the red for a splatty overdrive that would have Klon owners’ monocles popping into their bourbon.

But with Mk.gee’s viral success (not to mention Eric Clapton plaudits), it’s become a sought-after tone – to the point that multiple pedal companies have been rushing to bring their own take on the 424 circuit to market.

And that’s hardly the first traditionally ‘bad’ guitar tone to catch fire recently. It was a similar story with the Peavey Decade. After it was revealed as Josh Homme’s ‘secret weapon’ several years ago, used prices exploded, boutique pedal companies issued their own versions, and now Peavey – the once derided, blue-collar amp brand – has released a signature combo and its own stompbox version.

Yet when those amps were widely available for sale, guitarists couldn’t wait to ditch their buzzy solid-state practice combos.

In the mix

Back in my day (God, I feel old), bad tone was once considered to be that buzzy, ‘wasp in a jam jar’ tone that came from tiny combos, budget multi-effects and the Line 6 Spider II’s infamous Insane channel. Anything boxy, lacking in low-end or tube-like dynamics wouldn’t cut it.

So what gives? Does ‘bad’ guitar tone no longer exist? And, star power aside, how did we get here?

The turning point might be when every young guitarist also became a producer. When previous generations first picked up the instrument, they were developing their guitar tone in isolation – they didn’t have the ability to record themselves without booking an expensive studio. For me, good guitar tone was dialing in a usable sound on the Marshall MG in my bedroom.

Anyone picking up the instrument now, however, could be recording their playing from day one. They’ll be used to hearing the sound of a naked guitar running straight into an audio interface, slotting those recordings into tracks on their laptops, and tweaking plugins that model most of the guitar gear ever made.

And, as any engineer will tell you, the guitar tones that sound best in isolation often don’t work in a mix – but the ‘bad’ tones can burst out of the speakers in the best/worst way.

The good, the bad and the ugly

The other overriding factor is the democratization of ‘good tone’ – we live in an age where anyone can get a studio-worthy guitar sound with cheap amp modelers. So much so that you could make the argument that we’re approaching ‘good’ guitar tone overkill.

How do you stand out when everyone is using the same high-gain Soldano-voiced preset in the same Neural DSP plugin as everyone else? You break the rules.

Mark Speer runs a wah pedal all the time for his dreamy sounds in Khruangbin. St. Vincent and Matt Bellamy are die-hard fans of the sound of fuzz pedals straight into the board. Record an entire album on your phone, like Steve Lacy – then stick a fuzz circuit in your Fender signature model.

Stu MacKenzie snapped up $10 transistor amps for King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s latest record. Heck, Instagram guitarist Emi Grace has amassed over 200,000 followers with her ‘Trashy Tone Thursdays’ video series.

Of course, unconventional tonal practices like this have been around forever. John Frusciante, Nile Rodgers and the Beatles used to record direct to the desk. Dimebag Darrell’s solid-state rig flew in the face of all high-gain tonal wisdom. And when Dave Davies slashed his amp’s speaker cone, he lit the touchpaper on guitar distortion as we know it.

All these approaches were technically wrong, but they worked because they fit the material. And that’s the thing we don’t talk about enough when it comes to guitar tone: everything is contextual. The ugliest tone can work in the right spot of the right song – and that is, in part, why it’s so hard to give out bad reviews to guitar gear these days. Every sound has its place.

Tone is where the heart is

All of which provide yet more reasons why it’s such an exciting time to be a guitarist. We’ve never had access to more gear or more music, and as old tonal judgements die out, fresh blood comes along and reassesses what they want to hear.

Music is being experienced without any sense of time, place or scene – one playlist can take you around the world, explore every genre under the sun and span a century of popular music. The next generation of players is picking and choosing the sounds that stand out to them and that makes for a more colorful guitar landscape.

We’re also way beyond the ‘pros only play tube amps’ argument. Fender is remaking its classic combos as new digital offerings. Boss Katanas are being played in stadiums. And pros like John Mayer are playing direct into Akai MPC samplers, and letting producers decide what the tone should be.

That’s no reason not to covet the same Fender Vibroverb that Stevie Ray Vaughan used to use, but as Mayer points out in his JHS demo, different tones make you play differently. It forces you to rethink your relationship with the instrument when you’re playing with less gain or different dynamics.

With that in mind, let’s be real: very few guitarists will make the 424 Gain Stage or Peavey Decade the center of their tonal universe. But the fact these tones are now not just acceptable but downright desirable indicates a full-circle moment for the way we perceive the sound of the electric guitar.

Maybe it’s no longer a case of ‘bad’ tones, just ‘different’ tones. And in the guitar world, that really is a revolution. So put me down for the inevitable Line 6 Spider II Insane pedal. I’m sure I’ll find a use for it…

What is it?

The Peavey Decade Too is an interesting thing to release in 2025. Harking back to the practice amps of the eighties that purveyed long past their initial release, it largely shuns 45 years of progression and stays faithful to what the original Decade practice amp was, albeit with a few additions.

The instigator behind this is the one and only Josh Homme, declaring the Peavey Decade as the “secret weapon” behind his recorded tone (see video below), leading to some internet hysteria and skyrocketing prices for the discontinued Peavey Decade. However, even with this in mind, is there a place for such an old-fashioned amp alongside some much more capable, feature-rich and affordable practice amps out there now?

Specs

• Launch price: $399/£299/€329 (1 x 8" Extension Cabinet $199/£199/€229)
• Type: Combo practice amp with optional extension cab
• Origin: China
• Output: 10W
• Speaker: 8" combo and 8" extension cab
• Channels: Normal, Saturation
• Controls: 3-band eq, Top and Bass Boost, Pre and Post gain
• Connectivity: 1/4 inch input, effects loop, balanced 1/4 inch out, balanced XLR DI out
• Footswitch: Sold separately
• Weight: 5.4kg/12lb
• Dimensions: 15.7x26x16.1cm/6"x10"x6.3"
• Contact: Peavey

Build quality

Build quality rating: ★★★★☆

We’ll have to keep that context in mind when it comes to the sounds, but the build is solid regardless. The Decade Too's open-backed, wooden construction feels sturdy, and with metal braces at the corners by way of reinforcement, this thing will surely be long-lived.

The simple array of controls all feel capable of taking some punishment, and the amp itself is reassuringly heavy at 12lbs, particularly considering the generally lightweight nature of solid-state amplifiers . When I say heavy, I mean it’s heavy for its diminutive size. It’s still a very portable piece of gear, with a small 8” speaker that you can chuck in the back of any car.

The only slight concern with this test model are the switches that produce an audible pop under operation. It's not too loud a pop, and often this issue can be resolved with some repeated presses to dissipate static, however, this did not seem to help here.

Moving on to the 1 x 8" extension cab, it’s much the same thing, minus the controls. The extra feature here is a frame that allows the cab to tilt. It’s quite an imposing, industrial-looking solution that some may find a little obnoxious, especially given how other cabs utilise a couple of low-profile legs to do the same job.

Having said that, the mechanism does work well, and the benefit of the design is that we are afforded the luxury of tilting the cab in whichever way we like, unlimited by the length, shape, and play of the aforementioned legs. It also allows for the stacking of the combo on top of the extension cab, even while tilted. In another plus, it's also completely removable - a good option if that look does offend you.

Usability

Usability rating: ★★★★★

Modern practice amps have come a long way and sport a large number of features, some easy to use, some not so much. Without those extra bells and whistles, practice amps of the '80s and '90s were simple beasts, and the Peavey Decade Too is no different.

Guitar goes in, volume is controlled via a pre- and post-gain, there's a 3-band EQ to tweak the tone, and new for the Decade Too, Bass and Top switches to boost the bass and top end, plus a Saturation (overdrive) switch. Whilst that is a fair amount on the front panel, it is all well laid out and mostly self-explanatory.

Some may not be used to the pre/post gain setup, but that is easy enough to understand once you know how it works. And even if you don’t, a little messing around will quickly get you there.

The original Peavey Decade had two inputs - a Normal for clean sounds and a Saturation for overdrive. This new version puts this on a switch on the front panel, and can also be controlled via a footswitch - an appreciated improvement.

Around the back of the unit, we have an output for the extension cab, an effects loop, pre-amp out, and a 1/4" unbalanced and XLR transformer balanced direct out, all clearly labeled. Also living here is a phase switch for keeping the extension cab and combo in phase.

Setting up that extension cab is also straightforward, as it’s literally plug and go. Which sums up the operation of the product as a whole - there are some extra features, but no menus or anything complicated, just good old-fashioned, well-labeled knobs and switches.

Sounds

Sounds rating: ★★★★☆

Judged as a normal practice amp, the Peavey Decade Too sounds like most solid-state practice amps of the affordable ilk from the '80s and '90s, often typified by a thin and wiry tone that we have mostly moved on from in modern equivalents. The Decade, however, was a good example of one thanks to Peavey's proprietary TransTube technology, which has been carried on into the Decade Too.

Many contemporary practice amps now have all sorts of digital wizardry and speaker setups that allow them to get closer to the sounds of bigger and more expensive gear in a way that is impressively versatile. Not to mention the onboard effects, and many of these offerings from the likes of Boss, Blackstar, and Yamaha are just as affordable as the current iteration of the Decade; therefore, it can't compete in this context.

The Peavey, however, is not meant for this. Josh Homme liked it for that ‘wiry’ tone, and used it to cut through a mix along with other guitar amps, so the fact that the Decade Too, accurately recreates the lo-fi sound of practice amps from yesteryear is entirely the point.

The clean sound is quite boxy in the low end, and the Bass switch did not help with this, as it muddied things up a bit. I found the best way to use the clean was to lean into the bright nature of a tiny solid-state amp, as the high end is surprisingly nice with the High control taming it a little. The Top switch renders the sound quite a painful one in the room, but in a way that could cut nicely in a studio mix.

Contrary to this, the Bass switch is useful when the amp is working in its Saturation mode. The overdrive here is thin, so the bass boost helps round it out when used with a set of single-coil pickups, without losing too much of that cut. For even more of that piercing cut, bring in the top boost, and you'll have a sound that will sit forward in any mix, particularly effective with humbuckers.

Tune a guitar to C standard, punch in the Saturation switch, turn the preamp gain to full, and suddenly, it all starts to make a lot of sense. Doing this and blasting through some Queens Of The Stone Age riffs on my PRS S2 Custom 24 is endless fun, as every note punches through with clarity thanks to that wiry nature.

The TransTube-powered saturation sounds massive in a lo-fi way within this context, with the 3-band EQ proving fairly powerful. I found myself leaving them mostly in the middle and using the treble to cut out some fizz whilst leaving the top boost switch in to retain that clarity.

All of this can be effectively replicated through the D.I output on the back of the amp. In Peavey's words, this is a "full range old-school transformer balanced design, that's great for DAWs and IRs". My experience recording our demo of the amplifier is in line with this. Using PreSonus Studio One and adding a cab from Helix Native, I got a purposefully cutting tone from the D.I so that it can be blended nicely with the darker sound we had set up on the microphone.

A surprising discovery is just how loud the thing is. More than enough to encourage complaints from the neighbours on its own, and with the cab plugged in, the Peavey Decade Too could easily keep up with a drummer in a rehearsal room.

It's not a sound that can compete in a modern context, but the Decade Too does what it sets out to do - recreate the original Peavey Decade, with some extra tone-shaping features. As a recording utility to help a part cut, a way to get you closer to the QOTSA sound, it's mission is accomplished.

Verdict

If you are looking for a practice amp, to, you know, practice on - don’t buy the Peavey Decade Too. There are better options for this use, that are, in some cases, more affordable to boot.

Still, even with this in mind, I couldn’t help but have fun with this little box and its surprisingly loud extension cab. Nostalgia is a powerful thing, and it took me back to my first Stagg amplifier and the old Peavey Decades I would go on to use in university guitar tutorial rooms.

All the things that make the sound of those amplifiers unpleasant in the room add up to make it cut in a mix, which seems to be why Josh Homme took to it as his secret weapon.

Because of Josh Hommes' reverence for the original Decade, those originals are currently getting listed between $300-$400 at the time of writing. At the end of the day, despite the dated technology, things are worth what people are willing to pay for them, which makes the Decade Too an interesting proposition if you are in the market for an effective tool to get closer to an aspect of that massive Queens of the Stone Age sound.

Guitar World Verdict: What the Peavey Decade Too does is recreate the sound of an old style of practice amp, warts and all, but with some handy extra features for further tonal sculpting. If you're a Josh Homme fan or would like a quirky studio tool to add some cut to your mixes, the Peavey Decade Too is worth a look.

Also try

Hands-on videos

Guitar World

Sweetwater

The Guitar Geek

Queens of the Stone Age have just released their latest sonic adventure, Alive in the Catacombs. It finds Josh Homme’s outfit stripping back an intriguing mix of songs for an acoustic film captured in the depths of the Paris Catacombs.

However, discussing his songwriting approach with Uncut reveals that these songs likely started in such bare-bones formats as they're presented here – pun intended. Homme believes every guitarist should sow the seeds of an idea on an acoustic guitar before even thinking about going electric.

“Most of our songs start by sitting on the edge of the bed, playing acoustic guitar. If something works there, it works everywhere,” he believes (via Guitar.com). And so peeling off the layers of their songs for a rare audience with the dead wasn’t a daunting task; it’s one they were made for.

“There’s been talk of secret meetings and late-night raves, but we’re the first people to legally play there,” Homme says of their performance in the French capital's unique underground maze of ossuaries, which holds the remains of more than six million people. “The catacombs is the star of the show, so all the decisions we made were about respecting the space.

“You can’t plug anything in – we had an electric piano that was hooked up to a car battery. The floors were wet in some areas like you were in this living, breathing thing. It felt like we’re not supposed to roll out the hits, we’re not supposed to play loud.”

The songs presented during the film – we won’t give the game away for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet – certainly show QOTSA in a very different, slightly morbid light.

While watching, this writer – already a huge admirer of Homme’s lyricism – found himself awe-inspired by his wordplay and the emotional depth of the songs all over again. Writing in a far less electrified and gung-ho manner, he believes, helps those elements shine.

“I feel that [in this setting] these songs really change their intensity,” he muses. “When things are stripped away, lyrics step forward, emotions run much hotter and higher. We’re a band that always had a lot of emotion on its sleeve, but somehow we’re not as known for our softer side as maybe we should be. I could not have enjoyed it more.”

Homme's unique approach to mastering the guitar can also be attributed to the often left-field ideas he cleverly weaves into more catch-all song formats. As a guitarist, he was polka first rather than rock.

“I took guitar lessons from nine years old till about 11, and I never learned any barre chords, all I've ever learned was oompah oompah,” he told Q last year. “I was always hearing sounds in my head. That's why I wanted to play guitar... to get that out.

“When left to my own devices, there are no rules. There are blind spots [referring to his guitar playing] that I know nothing about, but I can play you something that is ultimately off-kilter.

“I wouldn't have had the chance to find who I am and do the right thing the wrong way if I hadn't had that beginning from polka.”

The band’s ringleader is typically outspoken, his on-stage attitude so often swaggering backstage with him after every encore. But when he got to play George Harrison’s one-of-a-kind Rosewood Telecaster, he was rendered speechless.

Queens of the Stone Age: Alive in the Catacombs is out now.

Head to QOTSA to download or stream the film.

Josh Homme is so cool he has to live in the desert. It’s, like, medical or something, regulates the body heat. But seriously, when we talk of rock stars having a certain presence, the Queens of the Stone Age frontman is the kind of person we mean – he’s the walking definition of cool.

He, is however, reassuringly human, and we have video evidence to prove it. Said footage shows us why no one – besides maybe four other people, two of whom are deceased – is cool enough to play George Harrison’s iconic 1968 Rosewood Telecaster and not break out into a sweat, to find that even the gift of speech has deserted them.

That is exactly what happened to Homme in this clip. Surrounded by Harrison’s guitars – the Rocky Stratocaster, the Duo Jet – the earth tones of the mise en scene a pleasing shade of vintage Tweed – Homme is handed the rosewood Tele by the late Alan Rogan, guitar tech of Pete Townshend and guitar whisperer for some of Johnny Marr’s most-famous six-strings, and he proceeds to melt.

Turning puce as he picks up the Tele, feeling not on the considerable weight of the instrument itself (a prototype that reportedly weighed in excess of 10lbs) but of musical history itself, Homme is lost for words.

It’s like he is speaking in tongues.

“Oh my God. Wow! Wow! I had no idea that… Wow!” But what can you say? You’ve been handed the thing. You are on camera. You can’t back out. Do as the late, great Frank Zappa said, shut up and play yer guitar.

Homme duly plays, gives it his best shot, against all odds he attempts to get his right hand into the aerobic zone, work the muscle memory of QOTSA’s groove, but that is no good. Sometimes you get so flustered that there’s nothing that will work.

We have all been there. Just remember the first time you tried out an electric guitar in a store, on a Saturday afternoon perhaps. Not the first time you had done so. But you have gotten just good enough as to be self-conscious and critical of your playing. Everything sounds choked. The strings – these precision engineered alloys of nickel and steel – turn to spaghetti.

Homme tries some licks. It is no use. This was the prototype electric that was there as the curtain began to fall on the greatest pop-cultural institution of all time.

Fender saw this as a promotional coup. They had presented the Beatles with some very nice kit: a Bass VI, Jazz Bass, plus their Bassman and Twin Reverb tube amps, a Rhodes Piano, and a PA system. The coup de grâce was to be the Tele, a prototype built by Fender's Roger Rossmeisl and Philip Kubicki. Hendrix was to receive a prototype rosewood Stratocaster but sadly died before he could receive it.

Harrison’s ’68 Telecaster travelled in style. As in the fashion of Joe Bonamassa’s Principal Skinner and friends, it had its own seat on the flight over to London.

The design was quietly radical for the Telecaster. It had a sandwich body design, two slabs of rosewood, a thin slice of maple in between. Gibson used a similar “crossbanding” construction technique for some Les Pauls during the Norlin era.

It is cheaper, and this, after all, was a guitar that would go into production a year later. Fender would ultimately chamber the body, taking some of the weight out. A wise decision. Chiropractors could plan some vacation time again.

Although he would give the guitar to Delaney Bramlett in December 1969, Harrison’s prototype saw plenty of action with the Beatles. Harrison used it on the Get Back and Abbey Road sessions.

You can hear it on Get Back, Don’t Let Me Down, I’ve Got a Feeling, and the single version of Let It Be. You can see it in action on the Beatles' last live performance on the roof of the Apple Corps headquarters in central London.

You can see it and hear it in the hands of Homme above. But you might never see him playing it again. Once was enough.

“I think I have to stop playing these things. Man, I… Seriously, I think I have to stop playing these things,” he says. “I’ll tell you, some things you are supposed to touch, and some things you are never supposed to touch.”

NAMM 2025: While Josh Homme isn't known for revealing too much about the gear he uses to craft his signature (and much-debated) tone, four years ago, he disclosed something that set tongues wagging – and sent many flocking to second-hand gear stores: his “secret weapon,” the Peavey Decade.

According to Homme, the compact and modest amp from the ’80s plays a vital role in achieving the tone imprinted on his repertoire, including No One Knows from Songs for the Deaf. Fast forward to 2025 – specifically NAMM 2025 – and Peavey has just launched a revamped, Josh Homme–inspired version of the amp: the Decade Too.

Weighing only 12 lbs and delivering 10 watts of “pure solid-state power,” this small guitar combo amp was designed in collaboration with Homme, with the intention of being practice room, recording- and stage-ready.

As the name suggests, it takes inspiration from the Peavey Decade's dedicated Normal and Saturation inputs, 3-band EQ, and Pre/Post gain knobs – but Homme requested a few enhancements to better suit modern players.

These include elevating the 3-band EQ with Bass and Treble boost switches, adding footswitch control to toggle between the Normal and Saturation channels, as well as an effects loop.

Peavey, alongside Homme, have also made this new version into a proper studio amp by adding a transformer-balanced XLR speaker-simulated direct out, complete with a level control and ground lift switch, that enables silent recording no matter how much you crank the amp.

And to hone in on the quintessential ’80s tone, it's also loaded with an all-new 8”, 8 Ohm internal Celestion driver voiced “like the best” of the Rola speakers used between 1980 and 1983, guaranteeing it packs a punch.

However, if the amp's volume isn't enough for you, there are also dual 1/4” speaker outputs for connecting to various cabinets – including the newly launched 1x8” Decade Too Extension Cab, which promises “superior projection and enhancement.”

For pedal enthusiasts, Peavey has also packed the original Peavey Decade tone into a pedal that guarantees a “faithful recreation” of the sought-after amp. Emulating the amp’s iconic features, the pedal includes a switchable Saturation “channel” function, Pre and Post gain controls, the three-band EQ, and a hard bypass switch with an anti-click circuit.

The Peavey Decade Too and the extension cabinet, priced at $299.99 and $149.99 respectively, are currently available for pre-order from partner retailers – and, at that price, they’re going to make a significant dent in the sky-high asking prices of listings in the vintage market.

The price of the Peavey Decade pedal hasn’t been revealed yet, but we expect more information over the next few days.

For more information about the Decade Too, head to Peavey.

At 52, with a heavy bass slung over his shoulder, a half-burned cigarette dangling from his lips, and a maniacal grin accented by a raggedy goatee, Nick Oliveri is a throwback to a bygone era. He’s never been afraid to speak his mind, but he’s earned that through years of throat-stomping music.

Despite his explosive reputation, Oliveri speaks with a weary tone, and one can’t help but get the idea that he’s seen too much. “Unfortunately,” he says of the members of the halcyon Palm Desert rock scene, “we all got old. But we’re still playing; we’re still at it.”

According to Oliveri, the fact that he’s still at it is probably only because he, like many of his old pals, “weren’t afraid to leave the desert.” Adding, “That’s why we did so well; we weren’t really accepted in the early days, so we weren’t afraid. That didn’t change until later, to be honest.”

The post-desert success Oliveri alludes to came after Kyuss, an iconic cult act he co-founded in 1987 while he was perched beside fellow hellraiser Josh Homme, who asked him to join Queens of the Stone Age. Oliveri’s impact was immediate, as Rated R (2000) and Song for the Deaf (2002) clocked in as iconic.

But an epic fall-out ensued, leading to Oliveri’s departure in 2004 and the end of what he calls the band’s “definitive lineup.” A lot has been said regarding his departure, but Oliveri claims there’s no bad blood. “There’s been bad times, good times, and great times,” he says.

“We accomplished more, I think, than we ever accomplished outside of knowing each other within other bands. So, I don’t know… I’ve got nothing bad to say about the dude. We’ve had our moments; it’s all water under the bridge, and everything’s good.”

For better or worse, Oliveri will forever be tied to Josh Homme. But that hasn’t stopped him from creating music outside of that sphere over the last twenty years. “I write about things going on,” he says. “I don’t always like the things going on around me, but I just try to have fun and stay happy.”

Despite the message of hope, when Oliveri speaks of the future, there’s heaviness in his voice and a tinge of sadness behind his eyes. “That’s all we can do these days. I’ve thought a lot about death lately. A lot of good people have died, and so have friends of mine. A lot of good people; it’s sad.”

“What are you gonna do? We are getting older, but I still make music. I still love it. I’m still at it. I still want to keep going.”

You were a key member of the early desert rock scene, though it was really a ‘scene’ back then, was it?

“I don’t remember a whole lot of it. [Laughs] We partied quite a bit, but it was fun and great. From what I remember, it was a really good time. But there really wasn’t a scene per se… it was, for us, all in a small town. But it wasn’t like a thing that people came from out of town to come see years and years later. And now, it’s pretty much gone.”

What do you remember about the early hours of Kyuss?

“I remember in 1987, I was just a little kid. Those guys were even younger. Chris Cockrell was the original bass player. I played rhythm guitar, and we played our first party at a house on Primrose Avenue near Palm Desert Middle School. It was a house party; we got our set together like we were gonna dazzle some people or whatever.”

So, you were confident.

“We were gonna rock out and have some fun. We were actually kind of nervous and scared that people weren’t gonna like us. But people did like us, and I remember John [Garcia] was scared to come in and sing because he was kind of shy. He sat in the car reviewing lyrics while we played this long instrumental, and he came in. I remember they liked what we were doing so much that they made us play twice. [Laughs]”

By 1991, you had your legs under you and recorded Wretch. And in 1992, you recorded Blues for the Red Sun, but you left soon after.

“I think it’s important that we broke up and that I left after Blues for the Red Sun and have Scott Reeder come in and play bass for Welcome to Sky Valley and for …And The Circus Leaves Town. Had the band stayed together, I don’t know what it would have been… who knows?”

Do you ever think about what might have been?

“Well, Kyuss wasn’t big until the fans made it big by trading the MP3s and shit like that, you know. They were trading cassettes and CDs; it’s funny because not a whole lot of people liked the band back then, so I didn’t regret it then. We had no way of knowing. The fans took it further than the band ever took it. And so, who knows what it would have been… maybe it would have crumbled, maybe it would have gotten big. I don’t think people were ready for it back then.”

You were only in Kyuss with Josh Homme for a short time, but he called you to join Queens of the Stone Age in 1998. You must have gotten on well.

“Yeah, well, when Queens started, Josh called me up and said, ‘Hey Dude, I was you to play bass.’ And I was living in Austin, Texas, and I said, ‘Well, send me a cassette; I want to hear it.’ He sent me a cassette, and it was like Mexicola, and things like that. It sparked my interest, so I told him, ‘I’ll come down and do it.’ I liked it.”

Your era of Queens produced some of the band’s best-loved music. Can you explain why that is?

“It was cool. We just kind of started like that, like old friends talking on the phone about music, and it just started that way. I said, ‘Sure, man, I’ll come on down. We’ll try it out and see what happens.’ We went for it, and it was immediately good, felt comfortable, and we all had that same hunger for belief in what we were doing. That mindset is why I think we did something good… we definitely were into it.”

Did you ever stop being into it?

“I mean… I’m still into it. It’s a good band and there’s good songs. We brought it, you know? We really cared about it, cared for it, loved it, and had pride in it. I think that’s a starting point for any band to succeed. Whether it be within themselves, national, or international success, you’ve got to give a shit about it. We really did, and I still love it. So, what the hell, you know?”

Paint a picture of what it was like to record albums like Rated R and Songs for the Deaf.

“Man, we had so much fun recording those records. We were crazy, and we were young. We’d do mushrooms, and then the next day, we’d be drinking or whatever. We’d be doing different things, being creative, wild, and crazy, and just having fun. We were young, wild, and crazy, and that led to some great moments on those records.”

Is there anything that sticks out most musically?

“What I remember most is a lot of good times and just listening back to them. And when I do listen to them, it reminds me of some great moments, like leaving the studio at seven in the morning after being there all night. And instead of going home, we’d go to this hotel down the street from Sound City in LA, and we’d go have more beer, smoke, and sit there and listen to what we had from a CD, just taking in what we’d accomplished that day. We’d make notes and just keep going until it was done. I’m still living that way, dammit. [Laughs]”

There has been plenty of speculation about your departure from Queens of the Stone Age. What is the truth of the matter?

“A lot of different things happened. We did a lot of things in a short period of time, you know, in a five-year period. We did a lot of records, a lot of non-stop touring, and a lot of side projects, which is crazy. We kind of burnt out on each other, I guess… I guess you could say that.”

Are you and Josh still friends?

“We still pick up where we left off whenever we see each other. We still talk on the phone. We’re still good friends. Josh is a good dude, and we get along well. I wish him all the success in the world; I just wish he’d take Mondo Generator on tour with them. [Laughs]”

So, things weren’t as volatile between you and Josh as they were made out to be?

“Well, we’ve had our ups and downs. We’re like brothers, you know? We, like I said, got burned out on each other. We spent too much time together. So, being creative, you know, we spent a lot of time together, and we bounced off each other great. We made a lot of good music and had a lot of good times and laughter. I’d write apart, he’d write apart, and I’d come up with something for it, and we’d start laughing because it’s rad, you know? But there’s been bad moments as well. And there’s been great moments, you know, on tour, swapping girls, being crazy, and having fun.”

There’s a case to be made that Queens has never been the same without you. If given the chance, would you rejoin?

“I would do it, but it’s not my decision anymore. It’s Josh’s, and, well, I don’t really see him giving up what he’s got for bringing a partner in for his thing. He’s already gotten moving well on his own now. I would do it, but that’s… that’s on him.”

Do you agree that your era of Queens is the definitive era?

“I think we kind of peaked out. I mean… there’s a thing with the band, you know, you had Dave Grohl on drums, Mark Lanegan on vocals, I’m on bass and vocals, and Josh is on guitar and vocals. I think when you have a band like that going, it’s kind of hard to do better, you know? You can’t, really… there’s no way you can continue something like that with different members. I don’t see it as possible. I think that’s the main choice for most people as their definitive lineup because it’s the best lineup there was. It’s the best band I ever played in. I’ve yet to play in a band of such greatness and be surrounded by such greatness.”

Where would you be now if you hadn’t had that experience?

“Having to really up my game to be there with them got me better on my instrument real fast. So yeah, that’s definitely the definitive lineup for me. Great band, and the best band I ever played in.”

Has your bass rig changed much since your Kyuss and Queens days?

“I play through all different kinds of stuff. I collect amps like a carpenter collects tools. [Laughs] I don’t know… I like pedals, and I play through Acoustic amps, Orange cabinets, Ampegs – all that stuff is tried and true. It sounds good, turns up, and can take punishment.”

Is there a particular bass that’s served you well?

“I’ve got a Fender Precision bass. It fits my style, so I play that; they feel right to me. I use Quarter Pounder pickups by Seymour Duncan because they have great output and give me a great tone. And I always use Ernie Ball strings and shit like that. I don’t know… I use whatever strings they give me. It’s pretty fun, and just hours of good times, making some noise, going through different pedals, like envelope filters, delays, fuzz and distortion pedals, and shit. I love all of it, like any other guitar freak, but I play bass. [Laughs]”

Since leaving Queens, you’ve kept at it with varying levels of success. What’s the key to staying afloat as a career musician after leaving a big band as you have?

“It’s stressful. Shit, I don’t know what would make it better. Well, a lot of things will make it better, but I don’t know what’s actually realistic. It seems to be all on the internet now, and everybody’s the same. There’s gonna be no more rock stars; we’re like the last of a dying breed of rockers that come from when there was still a record business out there. It’s a different game we’re playing and very tough.”

Do you ever regret getting into the music business?

“I don’t know… I’m just trying to stay afloat, man. It’s been a hard road with the change that’s happened in the past 20 years. But I’m still here. I’m still at it. I do it for myself, my friends, and my bandmates and because I don’t know what else to do. I don’t want to do anything else.”

• For more information on Nick Oliveri’s tour dates and releases head to Mondo Generator

Former Queens of the Stone Age bassist Nick Oliveri is best known for his work on two of the band's seminal albums, Rated R (2000) and Songs for the Deaf (2002) – and he thinks the Josh Homme-fronted outfit has never topped the lineup that appeared on the 2002 classic.

“I think we kind of peaked out,” he says in an upcoming Guitar World interview. "I mean… there's a thing with the band, you know, you had Dave Grohl on drums, Mark Lanegan on vocals, I'm on bass and vocals, and Josh is on guitar and vocals. I think when you have a band like that going, it's kind of hard to do better, you know?

“There's no way you can continue something like that with different members. I don't see it as possible. I think that's the main choice for most people as their definitive lineup, because it's the best lineup there was. It's the best band I ever played in. I've yet to play in a band of such greatness and be surrounded by such greatness.”

As to whether he would ever rejoin Queens of the Stone Age, Oliveri admits, “I would do it, but it's not my decision anymore. It's Josh's, and, well, I don't really see him giving up what he's got for bringing a partner in for his thing. He's already gotten moving well on his own now. I would do it, but that's on him.”

Despite all that ensued, Oliveri reveals that he and Homme are still on good terms.

“We still pick up where we left off whenever we see each other. We still talk on the phone. We're still good friends. Josh is a good dude, and we get along well. I wish him all the success in the world.”

John Paul Jones has no need for further feathers in his cap. The bassist, keyboardist, and general rock ’n' roll badass anchored Led Zeppelin – arguably the most influential hard rock outfit in history – and has gone on to collaborate in too many cool projects to mention.

When he took the stage at London's O2 Arena in 2007 with Zeppelin bandmates Jimmy Page and Robert Plant (along with Jason Bonham, son of late, great Zep drummer John Bonham), Jones sealed his reputation as a top-notch performer with deep soul, crisp tone, and killer chops.

Jones could have easily rested on his laurels, retiring to the countryside with his countless acoustic instruments and giving his ears a well-deserved rest. Instead, he formed one of the most riveting new groups in contemporary rock, Them Crooked Vultures.

A collaboration between Jones, ex-Nirvana drummer and current Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl, and Queens of the Stone Age principal Josh Homme, Them Crooked Vultures took the '70s-era riff rock of Jones's youth and blended it with punk-rock energy courtesy of drummer Grohl. For his part, Homme tapped the sludgy depths of his stoner rock past.

“The first time we got together we just jammed in a normal muso sort of way,” Jones told Bass Player. “New Fang was one of those early workings.

“Another idea Josh came up with, Dave and I looked at each other and thought, ‘Are you serious? What are you thinking?!’ He played this riff that he’d recorded in a hotel room on an electric guitar that wasn't even plugged in, but Josh was telling us, ‘No, it's going to be good,’ so we tried it and that turned into the track Reptiles. If you heard the first demo of that song you wouldn't believe it.”

Bass Player spoke to John Paul Jones back in March 2010 about what it's like playing with Dave Grohl, why you have to use a pick to play multi-string basses, and why he has no plans to write an autobiography.

How did you record with Them Crooked Vultures?

“We basically went into Josh's studio, sat in a room, and wrote and recorded at the same time. It was a very organic process where we'd groove in the studio, working on each other's ideas. There was a lot of laughing involved as well – it's amazing we got that much work done!”

Prior to these sessions, had you ever played with Dave Grohl?

“No, I hadn't. He's wonderful, and we get on really great together. He appreciates good grooves and good riffs. We listen to each other and we reinforce each other and we stretch each other, which is the best combination.”

Has your concept of tone changed much through the course of this project?

“I'm playing with a pick a lot more. You have to use a pick to play multi-string basses, or you don't get the full advantage of the double crosses.”

Do you find playing with a pick compromises your low-end?

“No, not really. It's just a different feel – a different attack. It's a much faster attack, and it gives you more of a rhythmic drive, especially on faster songs.”

What is that wild-looking guitar you play on No One Loves Me & Neither do I?

“That's an instrument Hugh Manson made that is based on the Melobar. It basically allows me to play lap steel while moving around onstage. I wanted one I could hang around my neck so I asked Hugh to make me one.”

Live, Alain Johannes is playing some of the bass, guitar and keyboard parts. How much did you work with him to get him up-to-speed?

“Not much at all – he's a good enough musician to have picked it up on his own.”

What basses are you playing?

“I've got my good ol' Manson 4-string, plus a 10-string and some 12-strings he's made for me. The 10-string is in octave courses, tuned EADGC, and the 12-string is BEADGC. Those go through an SWR SM-900 with 4x10 and 1x15 cabinets.

“I use an identical rig for my bass pedals, which are made by Roland. They span an octave-and-a-half-from C to G, and they're run through a Korg M3 synth, which provides the actual sound. I also play the M3 for piano and organ parts.”

With multiple basses, keyboards, slide guitar, and mandolin, you do a lot of changing instruments. Do you find that makes it difficult to get into a groove?

“No, I'm rather used to it. I used to do that in the Zeppelin days, as well. I quite like changing instruments.”

How much of the gig is set in stone, and how much is kept open-ended?

“The setlist mostly stays the same, but things really change a lot from show to show. A lot of it depends on the vibe of the night, but we'll often hit a different kind of groove to keep it interesting.”

The album has quite a few distorted bass sounds. What effects are you using?

“On the record, most of the distortion comes from running bass guitar through Josh's guitar amps. Live, I'm using an Electro-Harmonix Big Muff. I'd never really used distortion before – it's a new thing for me.

“The bass just sounded too clean when we were first trying things out. Now it fits a lot better with the guitars. Usually I'll split the signals from my basses and mix them together to get a blend of clean and distorted sounds.”

Is there anything you miss about your old Acoustic rig?

“No... except that it used to catch on fire! It actually caught fire quite spectacularly at the end of one show. I suppose the power amp got overheated. But no, I'm quite pleased with the SWR. It's got a nice clean, punchy sound.”

Have you given thought to writing a memoir or autobiography?

“No. Several people have asked, but I've just got too much to do. Life's too short to write about it.”

Queens of the Stone Age have canceled a host of tour dates as frontman Josh Homme has been rushed to surgery.

In a statement posted to social media, the band wrote that “every effort was made to push through and play for you, but it is no longer an option to continue”, since Homme is required to return to the US “immediately” for emergency surgery.

“Queens are gutted we aren’t able to play for you,” the post’s caption reads. “We apologize for any inconvenience and share in your frustration and disappointment.”

QOTSA’s remaining European headline shows and festival slots scheduled for July have all been canceled as a result of Homme’s surgery.

These include Festival Jardin Sonore, Pohoda Festival, Zitadelle Spandau, Colours of Ostrava, METAstadt, Electric Castle Festival, SRC Salata and Athens Rocks.

A full list of canceled dates can be found below, and in the band’s Instagram post.

As per the post, ticket holders for those headline shows will be contacted directly with further information. Those who hold tickets for festivals are advised to visit specific festival websites for updated information.

The band have provided no further details regarding Homme’s condition, and whether there are any plans to cancel QOTSA’s shows that are slated to take place in August.

In 2023, Homme revealed he had been diagnosed with cancer in 2022, and had undergone successful treatment.

Visit Queens of The Stone Age’s website to keep up to date with future developments.

In other Homme news, the band’s frontman recently revealed how learning polka as a kid developed his off-kilter guitar playing style.

Queens of The Stone Aged canceled July dates

• 10/07 – Festival Jardin Sonore – Vitrolles, FR
• 13/07 – Pohoda Festival – Trencin, SK
• 16/07 – Zitadelle Spandau – Berlin, DE
• 17/07 – Colours of Ostrava – Ostrava, CZ
• 18/07 – METAstadt – Vienna, AS
• 20/07 – Electric Castle Festival – Cluj, RO
• 23 & 24/07 – SRC Salata – Zagreb, HR
• 27/07 – Athens Rocks – Athens, GR

In a recent interview on Q with Tom Power, Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme revealed how his distinct guitar playing style can be traced back to learning polka in childhood.

“I took guitar lessons from nine years old till about 11, and I never learned any barre chords... all I've ever learned was oompah oompah,” said Homme.

“I was really frustrated by it, and so it drove me to either give up guitar or start writing music. So at nine or 10, I was always hearing sounds in my head. You know, you're walking down the street and that's at a rhythm, and so I was always singing along to my own soundtrack. That's why I wanted to play guitar... to get that out.”

Coming from such rigid rules led Homme to rebel and push the envelope of his guitar playing. “When left to my own devices, I was like 'fine'. I'll have none of that. There are no rules. There are blind spots [referring to his guitar playing] that I know nothing about, but I can play you something that is ultimately off-kilter.”

One of the reasons he started detuning was this desire to create something he had never heard before. “One of the reasons that I wanted to detune is because I wanted something that was mine, and there was no example of tuning down to B and C. There was no such thing.

“Maybe Black Sabbath were detuning some songs, but I'd never heard them before. I was just a kid in the desert with a very small record collection, and I was like, I wonder if you just do this, what happens.” Homme's detuning “became such a thing that now there's like seven string guitars with Bs on them”.

One of Queens of the Stone Age's most popular songs, No One Knows, which arguably has Homme's most famous guitar riff, not only features the C Standard tuning but also polka's oompah rhythm.

As Homme put it, “I wouldn't have had the chance to find who I am and do the right thing the wrong way if I hadn't had that beginning from polka.”

You might remember Funny Little Boxes for its excellent 1991 pedal, which delivers the sound of Pearl Jam’s Ten in a box. Well, now, FLB founder Andy Ilgunas and YouTube channel Let’s Play All’s Matt Webster have once again collaborated, with their sights set on recreating one of modern rock’s most revered, yet hard-to-approximate guitar tones: Queens of the Stone Age.

That’s quite a blanket description given Josh Homme’s blueprint has graced eight studio albums and dozens of side-project releases. So which is the Skeleton Key gunning for? 

Well, it’s a fitting name, because the answer is simultaneously all of them and none of them. Instead, this op-amp-based distortion is designed to capture the overall vibe of Josh Homme’s clandestine, cleaner-than-you-might-think sound: part overdrive, part fuzz, all down-tuned and instantly recognisable character. 

There are three controls, and while you might expect some esoteric descriptions, FLB has kept it to simple tradition: Gain, Volume and Tone. The Skeleton Key features one input, one output, and a power jack, and to cap it off, has enlisted official QOTSA artist Boneface to create the Skeleton Key Graphic that adorns the front. 

We fed the Skeleton Key humbucker pickups and single coils, with our guitars tuned to C standard, drop C and standard tuning, and the results are oddly uncanny. Crucial to the Skeleton Key’s sound is its gain range, which, while labelled distortion is closer in terms of saturation levels to a heavy overdrive.

However there’s a layer of aggression that takes it away from sounding like another OG OD circuit. First, it’s dynamic, responding to our guitar’s volume with versatility.

Second, you’ll get a totally usable range of sounds out of the full travel of the controls – even with everything maxed out it maintains its clarity and throaty growl thanks to it never reaching white-hot molten gain levels.

It’s actually quite a strange experience, in that with the output pushing at a decent level and beyond, the QOTSA flavour remains throughout. This leaves you with the tone and gain controls as your seasoning without leaving the desert.

Specs

• PRICE: $123/£99
• ORIGIN: UK
• TYPE: Distortion pedal
• CONTROLS: Gain, Tone, Volume
• CONNECTIONS: Standard input, standard output
• POWER: 9V DC adaptor (not supplied)
• CONTACT: Funny Little Boxes

YouTube channel Let’s Play All and UK pedal builder Funny Little Boxes have announced a new Queens of the Stone Age-inspired distortion pedal, the Skeleton Key, which aims to bottle the essence of Josh Homme’s guitar tone in a single box.

Now, admittedly, the secrets of Homme’s guitar tone remain closely guarded and much debated. 

Indeed, when it does eventually see the light of day, we suspect the information will be drip fed to the public over many years, in the manner of a UFO cover-up, lest we lose our collective minds. 

Fortunately, the minds behind the Skeleton Key (namely YouTuber Matt Webster and pedal builder Andy Ilgunas) are a little less fussed about replicating the exact circuits and are more focused on creating the sound itself, in a simple, highly-usable one-box format. 

“Let us be clear, this is not a clone of [the Peavey Decade],” writes Ilgunas in a Funny Little Boxes blog (in the process, distinguishing it from the likes of Acorn Amplifier’s Solid State preamp). 

“Whereas it is verified that the Decade has been used throughout the making of several QOTSA records, the fact is it is only a single part of the sound as a whole and I remain unconvinced that the Decade alone can truly capture the QOTSA sound.”

Instead, what we have is an op-amp distortion circuit that is designed to pair with humbuckers and down-tunings and specifically voiced to nail the QOTSA tone of tracks like No One Knows and Go With The Flow.

There’s no frippery here: controls are limited to Gain, Tone and Volume and it runs only on 9V DC negative PSU (no battery option). However, sometimes simple is best and listening to the Let’s Play All demo, the result is a thoroughly convincing take on the Homme rhythm sound.

Perhaps equally impressively, Ilgunas and Webster also tracked down and commissioned Queens of the Stone Age’s go-to artist, Boneface, to contribute artwork and control labels for the unit. All of which means the Skeleton Key doesn’t just sound like the band’s output, it looks like it, too.

This velvety distortion goodness comes in at a nice price, too, with the Skeleton Key costing £99 (approx. $125). 

The ’Key is actually the second collaboration from Ilgunas and Webster. Let’s hope the duo can repeat the trick after the acclaimed Funny Little Boxes 1991 pedal – a Pearl Jam-inspired unit designed to nail the tones from the Seattle band’s iconic debut album, Ten. 

For more information and to pre-order the Skeleton Key, head to Funny Little Boxes. 

Josh Homme has revealed that he was diagnosed with cancer last year.

In a new interview with Revolver, the Queens of the Stone Age frontman spoke about the diagnosis he received in 2022, from which he says he will make a full recovery.

He also called his diagnosis “the cherry on top of an interesting time period”, following a series of legal battles with his ex-wife, Brody Dalle.

As per Revolver, Homme didn’t reveal any specifics regarding his diagnosis, but confirmed surgery to remove the cancer was successful. He is currently still recovering, and feels occasional pain.

“I never say it can't get any worse. I never say that, and I wouldn't advise it. But I do say it can get better," Homme reflected. "Cancer is just the cherry on top of an interesting time period, you know? 

“I'm extremely thankful that I'll get through this, and I'll look back at this as something that's fucked up – but will have made me better,” he added. “I'm cool with that. There's a lot of stuff I want to do. And there's a lot of people I want to do that with.”

Later on in the conversation, Homme reflected on the mechanisms that helped him deal with the various issues he’s faced over the years, saying he found solace in his music.

“I've got nothing against therapy. I just don't go because I play [music] instead,” he offered. “Over the last couple years, I've done a lot of therapy, but at the end of the day, I understand how to proceed, moving forward with the religion that I use – music.”

Though Homme described the past few years as the ”darkest” period of his life, he put a positive spin on his experiences, saying they’ll help inform the next chapter of his life.

“This has been the darkest four years of my life,” he said. “But that’s okay, too. Even though all that has occurred and smashed my old life to pieces, those pieces I’ve been able to build into a ship that’s about to launch.”

In part, that “ship that’s about to launch” will take the form of Queens of the Stone Age’s eighth studio album, In Times New Roman – the band’s first effort in five years, which arrives this week (June 16).

“I think this is the first time I didn't want to make a record,” Homme admitted to Revolver, “but I was dealing with a lot of stuff in my personal life. We recorded a lot of stuff. I think I was doing it because when I'm in trouble, this is what I do. This is where I go to get right.”

When it comes to playing guitar, Nikki Lane likes to refer to herself as “Clangity Lane”. Her playing is fairly straightforward. Nonetheless, it’s vital to her songwriting process. “My guitar playing has always been for the purpose of writing,” she says. “It’s not a natural thing for me to play guitar. It took a lot of work for me to have the muscle memory to do it. So now I say my style is just indicative of the tone I’m trying to write.”

Even so, Lane felt her playing took a step forward on her latest album, Denim & Diamonds, which was produced by Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme. Homme, who also played guitar, assembled an all-star backing band featuring QOTSA collaborator Alain Johannes on guitar, Dean Fertita on organ and Michael Shuman on bass. Arctic Monkeys’ Matt Helders, Autolux’s Carla Azar and Lane’s go-to pedal steel player, Matt Pynn, are also featured. 

“There’s nothing those guys couldn’t play, so that makes it really easy to make a record,” Lane says.

In the past, Lane would demo songs on guitar but would “always encourage it to be replaced by someone who played guitar solely for a living.” However, this time she decided to use more of her own playing. “I was proud that so much of my acoustic playing showed up on the record, because I had never felt confident enough to play in those settings,” she says. “It was fun to have a little bit more ownership, musically, in the studio.”

For Lane, each record is like a mixtape of her emotions. Working with Homme gave the country music-leaning artist confidence (as well as some tips on guitar playing) to embrace an edgier and grittier rock sound that compliments her spirited, take-no-BS lyrics. She sees herself as a rhythm player and “a player that fills a space so that these guys can ice the cake.”

“I was able to dictate melodies more than I had before. I was encouraged to bring things that I was curious to hear to the table,” she says. “It really gave me a chance to blossom as an equal… Now I feel like my record sounds exactly like I do.” For example, album closer Chimayo is purely driven by acoustic guitar.

The acoustic nature of the song stands out in stark contrast to the album’s more boisterous songs. Its lyrics were inspired by a former coworker who stole items from her house, including her one-of-a-kind Chimayo jacket. 

“It’s different for me, and I think that’s what I liked about it,” she says. “I never want to experience something like that again, but it did create a beautiful creative moment.”

• Denim & Diamonds is out now via New West Records.

Fran Blanche – the unique brain behind pedal maker Frantone Electronics – always has interesting insights into tone, and she’s recently posited a theory that questions the secret of Josh Homme’s velvet-y sound.

Last year, in Apple’s TV’s documentary series Watch That Sound with Mark Ronson, Homme indicated that the Peavy Decade – a tiny ’80s solid-state combo – was the surprise ‘secret’ to some of his most iconic Queens Of The Stone Age tones, including the stomping No One Knows.

At the time, Ronson joked the revelation was the “hard rock equivalent of, ‘Who shot JFK?’” and resale prices of the amp have since shot up, with used combos now regularly fetching prices far north of $500.

However, Blanche – whose ears and expertise are both well-established – says she has two issues with this turn of events. First, she notes the same preamp tone can be found in a number of much cheaper amps, notably her favored Peavey Bandit 65 and also the brand’s smaller Back Stage combo.

Second, Blanche reveals that she suspects Homme’s professed love of the Decade is not the whole story, and alleges it may even be a bit of cunning misdirection from the QOTSA man. 

Instead, the tone guru references an old Liam Lynch video interview with Homme (the original has since been deleted) in which she alleges Homme referenced “a little box on the floor” with a built-in speaker and top-mounted handle.

The unit, Blanche reckons, is likely an old mag recorder – a sort of auxiliary amp designed to add the ability to play back magnetic tape audio recordings on old 16mm film editing desks.

“These things were made in small lots and I’ve found examples of them from throughout the ’60s and ’70s, but I’ve not found anything that has the form factor of that ‘secret weapon’ that Josh Homme has,” says Blanche. 

“It’s clear that at some point in the ’80s and ’90s that these little mag recorder amps were making their way to surplus stores. And, sure enough, when they found that they really loved that sound, these guys in the high desert were snarfing up these little mag recorders.”

“I think that is the real secret weapon,” Blanche says later in her post. “I think that saying the Peavey Decade was the real secret weapon was a very convenient way of [throwing people off]. I’m sure he used them, but it was not the original secret weapon, at least not from 15 years ago in the video that I recall.”

Guitar World has also found part of the original Homme interview clip re-posted on YouTube [embedded below, while it lasts], which features the box. Homme says in the footage that the mysterious unit is the “shittiest out of the like 10 of these I have... [because] it was left sitting out in the rain”, and that it is “meant to get blown-out”. He also plays a guitar made out of an old crucifix through the amp, so it’s worth watching just for that.

So there you have it: a new dimension to the ongoing Homme tone debate. Blanche is calling for anyone with a similar unit to get in touch so she can identify the make and model, which could be one of a high number of small producers from the era.

In the meantime, Blanche leaves Homme tone hounds with a word of warning: “Don’t buy a Peavey Decade for $500. If you want that sound, go with the Bandit 65 – you won’t regret it…”

For further updates, keep an eye on Fran Blanche’s YouTube channel.

During Saturday’s Taylor Hawkins tribute concert, Foo Fighter frontman Dave Grohl unexpectedly reunited with his Them Crooked Vultures bandmates Josh Homme and John Paul Jones, as the supergroup performed together for the first time in 12 years.

Homme, who had joined Nile Rodgers earlier that evening to cover David Bowie, returned to the stage with the support of Grohl and Led Zeppelin legend Jones, with the three making their first public live appearance as Them Crooked Vultures since 2010’s Fuji Rock Festival in Japan.

It was only a short set – three songs in total – but it was enough to satisfy those in the crowd who were familiar with the three-piece, who first formed back in 2009 and released only one studio album.

Up first was a surprising cover of Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, for which Homme left his strapped-on Motor Ave BelAire electric guitar untouched as he focused his attentions on the microphone.

The BelAire was plenty busy during the next track, though, which was an energetic rendition of Them Crooked Vultures original, Gunman. With the help of additional guitarist Alain Johannes, the trio showed no signs of their 12-year hiatus, seamlessly launching into a polished performance filled with punchy riffs and gnarly noodles.

It proved to be the only Them Crooked Vultures song on the setlist, with Homme, Grohl and Jones then bringing things to a close with a cover of Queens of the Stone Age’s Long Slow Goodbye.

It remains to be seen whether this cameo will be the catalyst for more Them Crooked Vultures activity in the near future. In February last year, Grohl voiced his desire to record a follow-up to the supergroup’s self-titled debut record.

“It was incredibly inspiring – it was a really incredible time,” he said of the whirlwind experience. “I hope that someday we do it again.”

Them Crooked Vultures’ set came just before the halfway mark in the tribute gig’s 50-strong setlist, and had followed performances from Liam Gallagher, Nile Rodgers, Chevy Metal, Justin Hawkins, Violet Grohl, Chris Chaney and Wolfgang Van Halen, who nailed two classic Van Halen tracks.

Their set was followed by appearances from James Gang, Brian Johnson, Lars Ulrich, Brian May, Paul McCartney, Chrissie Hynde and Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee, who reunited to perform three Rush songs.

To find out more about the second Taylor Hawkins tribute show – which will take place September 27 at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles – head over to Foo Fighters’ website.

Last week, the Foo Fighters announced that they would hold two massive tribute concerts in honor of their late drummer, Taylor Hawkins.

Today (June 15), the band revealed the lineup for the two shows, which will take place in London and Los Angeles on September 3 and September 27, respectively. Filled to the brim with guest stars, the lineups are a testament to the rock world's love of Hawkins, who died in March at the age of 50 while the Foo Fighters were on tour in Colombia.

At both shows, the Foo Fighters – now comprised of Dave Grohl, Nate Mendel, Chris Shiflett, Pat Smear and Rami Jaffee – will be joined by Brian May, Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson of Rush, Wolfgang Van Halen, Josh Homme, Stewart Copeland, Chris Chaney, Omar Hakim, Mark Ronson, Hawkins' side band Chevy Metal, and many more.

Liam Gallagher, Chrissie Hynde and Supergrass, among others, will guest at the London show, while Miley Cyrus, Joan Jett, Chad Smith, Brad Wilk, Gene Simmons, Nikki Sixx and Alanis Morissette and more will appear at the Los Angeles show.

“As one of the most respected and beloved figures in modern music, Taylor's monolithic talent and magnetic personality endeared him to million of fans, peers, friends and fellow musical legends the world over,” read a statement – issued last week – announcing the concerts.

“Millions mourned his untimely passing on March 25, with passionate and sincere tributes coming from fans as well as musicians Taylor idolized. 

“The Taylor Hawkins Tribute Concerts will unite several of those artists, the Hawkins family and of course his Foo Fighters brothers in celebration of Taylor's memory and his legacy as a global rock icon – his bandmates and his inspirations playing the songs that he fell in love with, and the ones he brought to life.”

Tickets for the shows – which will take place at London's Wembley Stadium and LA's Kia Forum – have yet to go on sale, but fans can sign up to the Foo Fighters' mailing list for information on tickets, the shows and more.

Last November, eagle-eyed Ozzy Osbourne fans noticed that an official document published by Sony Group Corporation – the over-arching parent company of Sony Music Entertainment and Osbourne’s label, Epic Records – listed a new album from Osbourne under a category titled "Selected upcoming releases anticipated over the next six months."

To that end, Osbourne announced on social media this past Saturday (April 9) that he had completed a new album, and delivered it to Epic. 

"I’m so happy to let everyone know that I finished my new album this week and delivered it to my label @EpicRecords," wrote on Instagram. "I’ll be sharing all the information about the album and its upcoming release with you in the next several weeks."

The as-yet-untitled follow-up to 2020's acclaimed Ordinary Man (which itself was Osbourne's first solo effort in a decade) is set to be a doozy, packed to the brim with guest appearances from a who's who of electric guitar legends.

Osbourne's former Black Sabbath bandmate, Tony Iommi, wrote an entire song for the album, which is also set to feature appearances from Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton and Osbourne's longtime six-string sidekick, Zakk Wylde.

As if that wasn't enough, Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith – who serves as the drummer on both the new album and Ordinary Man – revealed earlier this month that Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready and Queens of the Stone Age guitarist Josh Homme will also make appearances on the album.

Reportedly, Wylde will handle rhythm guitar duties on many of the album's cuts, with the other guest stars focusing mainly on lead work.

“It [the album] definitely sounds slamming," Wylde revealed to MusicRadar in an interview last October. "The same goes for all the guys – what Tony Iommi played, and then Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, it’s all killer for sure.

“On those tracks I’m playing rhythm guitar for my heroes… it’s crazy! It sounds awesome and I’m beyond honored to be doing it.”

Ozzy Osbourne’s next album will feature appearances from Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready and Queens of the Stone Age man Josh Homme, according to Chad Smith.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer was involved in previous Ozzy album Ordinary Man and was called back to play on metal icon’s (still untitled) follow-up, thought to be due this Spring.

We already know that the new Osbourne album will feature an astonishing lineup of guitar players, including Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Tony Iommi and the return of Zakk Wylde, but in an interview on the Talk Is Jericho podcast, Smith revealed some additional names.

“Mike McCready’s on a track, Josh Homme, my neighbor from Queens [of the Stone Age] solos on a track,” says Smith. “And then Zakk Wylde is on the record as well, all over it, so it’s like if you’re a guitar player, it’s pretty fucking good.”

Smith has handled the lion’s share of the drums on the album, though our 2021 interview with Andrew Watt reported that the late Taylor Hawkins was also involved in early sessions. Meanwhile, producer Andrew Watt, Duff McKagan and Metallica’s Robert Trujillo have contributed bass tracks.

In the same interview, the RHCP man also expanded on the contributions of the other guitar talent and even mentions the one name on their wishlist that proved a holdout.

“Tony [Iommi] sent us some riffs on some files – he’s in England and we played to it,” explains Smith. “It’s got everything. It’s got all the stuff that you would want and Ozzy loves it, and so he’s on that track. And then Eric Clapton plays a wah-wah fucking Cream type solo.

“We’re like, ‘Eric can you solo on this song? Wah-wah please! Eric, what do you think about this with the wah-wah?’ And that’s his fucking thing, so he’s soloing all over this other track. And then Jeff Beck is on two songs. We tried to get Jimmy Page – we wanted the holy trinity – but I don’t think Jimmy plays too much anymore.”

Despite all the leaks and reports of big names involved in the record, there is still no word on an official release date. In October 2021, Sony’s financial statement listed it among the company’s selected upcoming releases for the next six months, suggesting a spring 2022 release. That has not yet been confirmed, though.

Indeed, in the podcast interview, Smith tells host Chris Jericho that songs are still in production, “We did another one and it’s getting mastered tomorrow,” he says. “And oh shit, I’m in trouble again…”

Listen to Smith's full interview on the Talk Is Jericho podcast above and stay tuned to Ozzy Osbourne’s official site for more information on the album.

Legendary as it is, the rock community has for years been fooled into thinking Billy Gibbons' beard is a mere statement piece. But according to Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme, it actually once helped the ZZ Top leader play a harmonic on his guitar.

In a new interview with Marc Maron on his WTF podcast, Homme remembers the sessions for QOTSA's Lullabies to Paralyze in 2004, and recruiting Gibbons for some guest playing. He recalls getting the bearded one into the studio with the promise of recording a cover of ZZ Top's Precious and Grace.

“For me, that was one of the huge moments of my career,” Homme says. “Really, at the time he hadn't really jammed with many outsiders in years, and luckily there were some people at his management who were into Queens. I got him in there under the guise of doing Precious and Grace but then I said, ‘But I have this thing...”

After the Precious and Grace cover was recorded – with Gibbons on co-lead vocals with the late Mark Lanegan – Homme and Gibbons set to work recording a QOTSA original, Burn The Witch, and a strange thing happened when the ZZ Top man attempted the guitar solo.

He continues: “When he was playing the lead on that song, his beard gently floated down and hit the strings and it made a harmonic with his beard. I swear. It's on film. And I literally grabbed him by the shoulders, I'm shaking Billy Gibbons, ‘Dude, you did the first ever beard harmonic!”

Elsewhere in the interview, the QOTSA frontman says that during the same sessions he asked Gibbons how he executed one of his signature licks.

“He's got this certain lick that only he does,” Homme continues. “And I was always like, ‘How?’ I said, ‘I deserve to know what that is. Because I can play [it] but there's a way that you're doing it.’

“He'll bend a note and then tap, like Eddie Van Halen's tapping on the neck but he's doing it once, and holding it. And instead of a million taps, it's one. It was so simple I was like, ‘You're fucking kidding me.’ [laughs] It was so awesome.”

In the latest development in the long-running feud between Brody Dalle and ex-husband Josh Homme, Dalle's current boyfriend Gunner Foxx has accused the Queens of the Stone Age frontman of attempting to throw him off a balcony on Christmas Eve.

The alleged altercation began while Foxx was inside an Apple Store on the second floor of the Oaks Mall in Thousand Oaks, California on December 24, when Homme approached him from behind, pressed his chest against Foxx’s body, and said, “I’m going to kill you, you fucking pussy.”

Foxx says he left the store following the exchange, however Homme was waiting for him outside. He says Homme “lunged” at him, and threatened to throw him over a balcony.

“He then attempted to use the momentum of his upper body combined with his grip on my arm to throw me over the rail,” Foxx said in a recent court petition for a temporary restraining order.

“I could feel one of his fingernails digging sharply into my hands. In that moment I truly felt that he was going to throw me over the balcony to my death.” He continued: “It was an indescribable, terrifying and surreal experience to have someone try to take your life.” 

Foxx's petition also alleged that Homme labelled him an “alienator” during the incident. “I haven't seen my kids in three months and it's your fucking fault!” the QOTSA man allegedly “screamed” at him outside the Apple Store.

Homme reportedly filed a petition for a civil harassment restraining order against Foxx back in November, claiming he was intentionally interfering in his relationships with his two sons. A hearing from this petition is scheduled for February 2.

“I have been really scared and worried for Gunner's safety since we started dating,” Dalle told Rolling Stone on Tuesday. “He's been targeted in a terrifying way. He is a loving, nurturing, protective dad to his own little girls and an incredibly positive, loving and protective father figure to my kids.

“He’s sober and clean eight years and an active member in his community. We love each other and have an amazing and loving blended family together. No one should ever live every day worried about their safety or the safety of their loved ones. I cannot wait for the day that all of this is behind us.”

Foxx's petition led to the judge granting him an emergency restraining order. Homme or his representatives are yet to comment on the incident.

The alleged altercation comes after a bitter and extended custody battle between Josh Homme and The Distillers frontwoman Brody Dalle.

Last month, Dalle was sentenced to 60 hours community service after she failed to deliver the couple's son Wolf to Homme on September 3, after a restraining order filed against Homme on behalf of their two sons was denied by the judge.

In a split ruling, however, Dalle was acquitted of a similar charge relating to their other son, Orrin, who the judge believed refused to visit his father of his own volition.

A few months ago, Jane’s Addiction's bassist and guitarist – Chris Chaney and Dave Navarro – teamed up with Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins to form the supergroup NHC.

That group – sans Navarro and plus a staggering band of rock A-listers – came together on Friday, December 3 for the Bring Back The Arts benefit concert at Malibu Elementary School.

Featuring Hawkins, Chaney, Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith, Tool drummer Danny Carey, super-producer Andrew Watt, and Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme and Troy Van Leeuwen, the ad-hoc group covered a selection of late-70s/early-80s rock classics, plus a smattering of original material from their own bands. 

Hawkins took the mic for an appropriately rowdy cover of Rod Stewart‘s Hot Legs, while Homme handled lead vocals for a rendition of Warren Zevon’s Werewolves of London and, naturally, Queens of the Stone Age's Go With the Flow.

All of the musicians also came together for a cover of The Clash's 1982 mega-hit, Should I Stay Or Should I Go.

Thankfully, attendee Shaun Conrad was on hand to capture the performances, a couple which he shared excerpts from on his Instagram page.

Though each famous in their own right, many of the one-off supergroup's members have previously collaborated and/or played together, in various studio and live contexts. 

As previously mentioned, Hawkins and Chaney play together in NHC – who have released a number of new songs in recent weeks – while Smith and Watt both worked with Eddie Vedder on his forthcoming solo album, Earthling, with Watt handling production and Smith contributing drums. 

Smith, Watt and Chaney, meanwhile, will all tour the US with Vedder in February 2022 as part of his solo band.

Best of 2021: Not too long ago, notorious tone-secret-keeper Josh Homme made a revelation that raised quite a few eyebrows. In an appearance on Watch the Sound with Mark Ronson, Homme dropped the bombshell that Peavey’s humble Decade practice guitar amp was the secret weapon behind some of Queens of the Stone Age’s most iconic tones.

The announcement, unsurprisingly, sent the price of Peavey Decades skyrocketing, with many flocking to second-hand gear stores to find the amp that gave birth to the earth-shattering bass guitar tones in No One Knows.

St. Vincent, as it turns out, was similarly inspired by the revelation, though took a far more pragmatic approach to capturing the band's sought-after sound.

Rather than forking out the $1,000-plus that vintage Decades now sell for – thanks, she acknowledges, to Homme’s revelation – she recruited gear guru Jason Moser to put the tiny ‘80s-era solid-state into a pedal. 

Speaking to Guitar Center, St. Vincent – aka Annie Clark – said,  “Queens of the Stone Age were very secretive about their guitar tone. It’s a bitching guitar tone, right?

“But the secret was this Peavey Decade – the amp that you get as a kid, that probably comes in a box with your first guitar. It’s this little, little amp that sounds so good, this hidden gem,” she continued. “They used to be $200.

“But then Josh Homme was on a Mark Ronson show, and finally was like, ‘Okay, I’ll tell you. It’s the Peavey Decade.’ Now they’re like $3,000, instantly.

“Anyway, a guitar tech I work with, Jason Moser, builds pedals and synths. He built the Peavey Decade into its own little amp.”

The importance of the Peavey to Queens of the Stone Age’s sound can’t be overstated. While people at the time viewed Homme’s admission with skepticism, an old video recorded by Eric Valentine – the band’s former producer – confirmed the guitarist was being entirely serious.

“It has a really cool little saturation in there, and so it would get cool distortion and you could have it at a really low volume,” explained Valentine during the No One Knows breakdown. “It ended up being the majority of the bass sound. It’s an amazing sound."

Now, the only thing that remains to be seen is whether St. Vincent’s boutique pedal will be made available to the general public. The chances are, unfortunately, immensely slim, so it's back to Reverb and eBay for the rest of us on the hunt for that Queens of the Stone Age tone.

After being convicted of one count of contempt last week in her ongoing custody battle with Josh Homme, Brody Dalle has been sentenced to 60 hours of community service.

She was found guilty by Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Lawrence Riff for violating a September 1 court order after she failed to deliver five-year-old son Wolf to ex-husband Homme on September 3.

In court on November 4, Dalle had testified: “I demanded they go [to Homme's house] and I pleaded with them. I told them there was a court order, and if they didn't go, that I could go to jail.” Prior to the conviction, Dalle had pled not guilty.

In a split ruling, however, she was acquitted of a similar charge relating to the couple's other son Orrin, as the judge believe the child refused to visit his father of his own volition.

Dalle was required to deliver Wolf and Orrin to Homme after a restraining order she filed on their behalf was denied by the judge in September. The couple's daughter, 15-year-old Camille, successfully applied for her own restraining order, however.

Judge Riff yesterday (November 30) sentenced Dalle to 60 hours of community service – as well as a $1,000 fine – despite Homme's lawyers pushing for a jail term of five days.

In her court statement prior to sentencing (reported by Rolling Stone), Dalle said: “I didn't withhold our children. Our children testified to that. Our children testified to the abuse they have experienced at the hands of their father and the reasons why they refused to go and continue to refuse to go.”

She added that Homme, “testified to calling me a cunt, a cow, and telling me to, ‘Fuck off forever.’”

“Does this sound like a person who wants to do the right thing by our children?” she continued. “He has taken no responsibility for his words and actions and the effect that they have had on our children.”

In his own statement, Homme said he was “willing to take responsibility for things that I do”, but added that he desired “justice” and “one set of rules for both sides”.

“I've suffered a lot of parental alienation in a short period of time,” he told the court. “This family is in grave danger and so fractured and ripped apart. All I want to do is see my kids. I want my mother to see her grandkids. I want my father to see his grandkids.”

In response, Dalle said the accusation of “parental alienation” was a “strategy used in family court by abusers to take the onus off the abuser and place it onto the victims.”

As he sentenced Dalle, Judge Riff said: “What I'm hearing, I hope, is that [both sides] want the same thing. They want a healed family with three quite lovely children who need the benefit of two loving parents. Both sides want that.”

Speaking to Rolling Stone following the sentencing, Dalle said: “I'm relieved by the court's decision. I don't believe anyone should go to jail or pick up trash for protecting her children. As a mother, I will always put my children first and protect them at all costs.”

Brody Dalle, frontwoman of The Distillers, has been convicted of one count of contempt of court in her ongoing custody battle with ex-husband Josh Homme.

Delivering the judgement last week, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Lawrence Riff found Dalle guilty of violating a September 1 court order after she failed to deliver their five-year-old son Wolf to Homme on September 3. Dalle had previously pled not guilty.

Testifying in court on November 4, Dalle said: “I demanded they go [to Homme's house] and I pleaded with them. I told them there was a court order, and if they didn't go, that I could go to jail.”

But in a split ruling, Judge Riff acquitted Dalle of a similar count relating to the couple's other son, 10-year-old Orrin, stating that he believed he resisted visiting his father of his own volition.

Dalle was also found not guilty on two separate counts, which alleged she refused to let Homme speak with their children via video call, a violation of their custody agreement. She is due to be sentenced next Tuesday (November 30).

Dalle's guilty verdict is the latest in a series of developments in the ongoing custody battle between her and Josh Homme. 

A restraining order was filed against Homme by Dalle on behalf of their two sons in September, accusing him of physical and verbal abuse. This was, however, denied by the judge, though the couple's daughter, 15-year-old Camille, successfully applied for her own restraining order, which required Homme to stay at least 100 yards away from her.

Later that month, Homme was permitted 15-minute FaceTime sessions with the boys by the judge.

And in a development of the battle last month, Judge Riff ordered Dalle to let Homme see their two sons in person, but also ruled that four court-appointed monitors must be present 24/7 when the children are with either parent.

A judge has ordered Brody Dalle to let Josh Homme see their two sons, but has ruled that round-the-clock monitors must be present when they are in the custody of either parent.

It comes after Dalle last week pleaded not guilty to contempt after reportedly violating the pair's equal custody agreement by refusing to release their two sons, aged ten and five, into Homme's care.

On Friday (October 15), Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Lawrence Riff ordered that four court-appointed monitors must join the pair's three children 24/7 when they are with either of them for the next 30 days. 

He also ordered Homme and Dalle to split the cost of the monitors – estimated to be north of $1,000 per day – pending further review of each of their respective finances.

The pair's teen daughter will also be subjected to monitoring, despite currently living with Dalle full-time, and having been granted a temporary restraining order against Homme.

“It's clear to me you need monitors,” Judge Riff said. “Some or all of you might disagree on that, but I think you do.”

Last month, Dalle filed a restraining order against Homme on behalf of their two sons, Orrin and Wolf, accusing Homme of drinking in the car while his children are present, using abusive language towards Dalle and making threats towards Dalle’s boyfriend, as well as grabbing, hitting and flicking his sons.

Following the hearing, Dalle told Rolling Stone that she's only acting in the best interest of the safety and welfare of her children.

“That's all I'm asking for, that my kids are safe,” she said. “We have to protect kids. We should always protect kids.”

“The hardest job in the world is to be a mom, but dads are important, too,” Homme also told Rolling Stone. “I'd wade through anything for my kids, even this.”

The Distillers singer and guitarist Brody Dalle has pleaded not guilty to contempt in her ongoing custody battle with her ex-husband, Queens of the Stone Age singer and guitarist Josh Homme, Rolling Stone reported.

The charges originated in early September, when Dalle reportedly violated the pair's equal custody agreement by not releasing their two sons, aged 10 and 5, into Homme’s care. 

Dalle subsequently filed a restraining order against Homme on behalf of the two boys – alleging that Homme grabbed, flicked and hit the children and made threats about Dalle’s partner. The request was denied by both Los Angeles and Santa Monica courts.

Though Homme was subsequently granted 15-minute FaceTime calls with his two sons, a restraining order against Homme filed by the couple's 15-year-old daughter remains standing.

The judge handling the case – Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Lawrence Riff – said he was leaning toward appointing around-the-clock monitoring in Dalle and Homme's homes starting on Friday, October 15, when Homme is due to resume his custodial time with his two sons.

“Her pleadings speak for themselves in the sense that she’s expressed how the children feel,” Dalle’s lawyer, Doreen Olson, said in a statement after the hearing. “We just want the children to be healthy. We want the children to be helped.”

“That’s all I’m asking for, that my kids are safe," Dalle said to Rolling Stone as she left the courthouse. "We have to protect kids. We should always protect kids."

Homme, a few minutes after Dalle's departure from the courthouse, gave his own statement to Rolling Stone, “The hardest job in the world is to be a mom, but dads are important too. I’d wade through anything for my kids, even this."

A judge has ruled that Josh Homme should be granted 15-minute FaceTime calls with his two youngest children, but the Queens Of The Stone Age frontman is still not permitted to contact his daughter.

Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Lawrence Riff ruled that Homme should be granted joint calls with the two boys every other day. Meanwhile, a temporary restraining order issued by Homme’s 15 year-old daughter has been extended to November.

Judge Riff told the assembled: “I don’t think I need to warn anybody, but I will: If I get the slightest whiff that anybody is coaching these kids not to talk to their father, it would go down very hard with me.” 

The judge also specified that Homme’s ex-wife, Brody Dalle, was not to monitor the calls, saying “I think that would be a very bad thing.” 

The decision is the latest development in a three-month custody dispute that has seen both Homme and Dalle (vocalist and guitarist with The Distillers) exchange numerous allegations. 

Earlier this month, reports revealed that Homme’s youngest sons, aged 5 and 10, had filed for a restraining order through Dalle  – alleging that Homme grabbed, flicked and hit the children and made threats about Dalle’s partner – only to see the request denied by both Los Angeles and Santa Monica courts.

In a statement at the time, Homme’s lawyer Susan E. Wiesner said: “The allegations made by Ms. Dalle against Mr. Homme are categorically false. In order to protect the children, we will not be making any further statements.”

The court has since appointed a lawyer, Sonia Dujan, to represent the couple’s children and both sides have iterated that they hope to resolve the dispute.

“I agree that a continuance of all the matters would be very helpful in this case,” said Dujan, in court on Tuesday (September 28). “[It] would really be in the children’s best interest if we could reduce the conflict.”

A restraining order has been filed against Queens of the Stone Age frontman and electric guitar player Josh Homme by his family, who are accusing him of physical and verbal abuse.

The request of the order was filed on behalf of his children by his ex-wife, Brody Dalle, and stipulates that Homme must remain at least 100 yards away from his sons, Orrin and Wolf, and the family dog.

According to documents seen by TMZ, the domestic restraining order request accuses Homme of drinking in the car while his children are present, using abusive language towards Dalle and making threats towards Dalle’s boyfriend. 

He is also accused of grabbing, flicking and hitting his sons, with TMZ reporting that Orrin and Wolf are scared Homme is going to hurt them.

Speaking to TMZ, Homme’s lawyer Susan Wiesner said the singer denied the claims, and commented, “Ms. Dalle has previously brought these claims to the police, DCFS, and the presiding judge of the family law court, all of whom have declined to take any action based upon these spurious claims.”

A restraining order against Homme was filed in 2019 by Dalle – who fronts the punk rock band the Distillers – after their divorce, with Dalle claiming that he showed up drunk at her house and head-butted her.

Homme later accused Dalle of trying to get him arrested, and subsequently filed his own protection order against her, claiming that she would show up at events he attended in order to provoke him into violating her order.

Josh Homme isn't somebody who is known for giving away too many tone secrets, and instead is notorious for keeping his cards very close to his chest. Therefore, when Homme talks about anything relating to his tone, we listen.

And, thanks to a clip from Apple TV’s documentary series Watch the Sound with Mark Ronson, it’s not just any old minor tidbit that the Queens of the Stone Age guitarist is sharing – it’s his “secret weapon”.

So, what is this weapon, you ask? What’s the kit behind some of Homme’s most mesmerizing hard rock tones? Well, it’s something we’d certainly never have expected – not by a long way.

As it turns out, said secret weapon is, in fact, a Peavey Decade guitar amp. Yep, that’s right. Peavey’s modest, tiny solid-state amp from the ‘80s is behind some of the most recognizable tones in the Queens of the Stone Age repertoire.

“This is the secret weapon,” said Homme, before pulling out the Peavey. “This is a Peavey Decade. This thing is incredible.”

“This is, like, the hard rock equivalent of, ‘Who shot JFK?’” quipped Ronson in return, before Homme flexed the humble amp’s admittedly very impressive gain tones.

For those of you interested in the specs, the Decade has two input channels – Normal and Saturation – and five control knobs, with a Pre and Post Gain stage lining up alongside a three-band EQ. That’s it.

It would be easy to dismiss such a claim as nothing more than a red herring designed to send tone chasers on a wild goose chase. However, further research confirms Homme is being entirely serious, and that the Peavey Decade actually played a huge part in creating the awesome No One Knows tone.

In an old video recorded by the band’s former producer Eric Valentine  – available via Reddit – it was revealed that the Peavey Decade was used to record the stomping bass guitar lines that can be heard on the mammoth track.

“It has a really cool little saturation in there, and so it would get cool distortion and you could have it at a really low volume,” explained Valentine during the No One Knows breakdown. “It ended up being the majority of the bass sound. It’s an amazing sound.”

There you have it, folks. Who says you need the newest and most expensive gear to sound good? Sometimes, the best tones can come from the most unlikely places. It’s just a matter of finding them.

McCartney III Imagined, the all-star collaborative remix of Paul McCartney’s recent McCartney III album, is released today via Capitol Records – and it’s an absolute treat for guitarists.

Alongside previously released tracks from Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien, Dominic Fike and Beck, today’s release showcases remixes from St. Vincent, Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme, Phoebe Bridgers and Khruangbin for the first time.

St. Vincent tackles Women and Wives, transforming it from a piano ballad into a Portishead-esque trip-hop masterpiece, complete with a bluesy pentatonic solo – a rarity for Annie Clark.

There are similar six-string thrills from Josh Homme’s distinctly QOTSA take on Lavatory Lil, which is awash with his grinding guitar and bass tones, wailing overdubs and a lead that echoes George Harrison.

Bridgers, meanwhile, takes Seize the Day far from its Hello, Goodbye-style origins, with an orchestral epic that foregrounds psychedelic Leslie’d electrics and ethereal synths.

And Khruangbin manage to completely transform Pretty Boys into, well, a Khruangbin song, which moulds Mark Speer’s masterful modulation and delay lines into a trippy counterpoint to McCartney’s familiar vocal.

Other artists featured on McCartney III Imagined include Blood Orange, Damon Albarn, Anderson .Paak and 3D RDN.

Released in December 2020, the original McCartney III album is the third in Macca’s series of home-made and self-titled records, and was written, recorded and produced in isolation by the Beatles legend.

McCartney III Imagined is available to stream and buy now.

After teasing a new project on social media earlier this week, Paul McCartney has announced McCartney III Imagined, a star-studded reworking of his latest album, McCartney III. Listen to its first single, a cover of The Kiss of Venus by Dominic Fike, now.

The project was first alluded to in a video posted to the Instagram on March 10, which shows several multi-colored dice, each etched with the name of a musical artist. 

Names on the clip include St. Vincent, Damon Albarn, Beck, Anderson .Paak, Khruangbin, Josh Homme, Ed O’Brien, Phoebe Bridgers, Blood Orange, Dominic Fike and 3D from Gorillaz.

Theories quickly circulated, with fanpage Beatlefan writing on Facebook: “More teases about the upcoming McCartney-related project are leaking out on Spotify and in online forums,” before sharing what turned out to be a pretty accurate tracklisting.

Now that the album's been confirmed, we'd wager the guitar expertise of Annie Clark, Homme, Beck et al, combined with the R&B/hip-hop stylings of Anderson .Paak and Blood Orange, are sure to make this project eclectic.

Check out the tracklisting of McCartney III Imagined below:

1. Find My Way (feat. Beck)
2. The Kiss of Venus (Dominic Fike)
3. Pretty Boys (feat. Khruangbin)
4. Women And Wives (St. Vincent Remix)
5. Deep Down (Blood Orange Remix)
6. Seize The Day (feat. Phoebe Bridgers)
7. Slidin’ (EOB Remix)
8. Long Tailed Winter Bird (Damon Albarn 
9. Lavatory Lil (Josh Homme)
10. When Winter Comes (Anderson .Paak Remix)
11. Deep Deep Feeling (3D RDN Remix)
12. Long Tailed Winter Bird (Idris Elba Remix)*
    * Physical release exclusive track

McCartney III – Macca's long-awaited follow-up to his 1980 full-length McCartney II – was released on December 18, 2020. The Beatles great wrote and recorded all the instruments on the album.

There's more in the works from the Macca camp, also. Back in December, a new tell-all Beatles documentary was announced by McCartney and producer Rick Rubin.

Over the course of his prolific career, Dave Grohl has been involved in a number of iconic rock groups, spanning his early days as drummer for Nirvana to his current role as frontman and guitarist for Foo Fighters.

One band in particular that holds a special place in Grohl's heart is Them Crooked Vultures – the three-piece group that saw the multi-instrumentalist join forces with Led Zeppelin bass guitar extraordinaire John Paul Jones and Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme to release a self-titled album in 2009.

Although the group never released a follow up to their hard-rocking, heavy-riffing offering, Grohl has revealed he wouldn't be against the idea of reuniting with his former bandmates to record a Them Crooked Vultures volume two.

In fact, he's all for the idea, admitting that recording a second album would be "a dream come true".

As part of his promotional duties following the release of Foo Fighters' latest album Medicine at Midnight, Grohl hosted Medicine at Midnight Radio on Apple Music Hits, during which he spoke fondly of his old project and revealed his desire to get the band back together again.

Citing Josh Homme as "one of his brothers" with whom he has a relationship that "really goes into the stratosphere" every time they collaborate, Grohl said: "When we put on the instruments it's like, now we're speaking a language – we don't need words, we're speaking a different language.

"If ever you've seen me while I'm playing drums with Josh," Grohl continued, "you'll see in our eyes this relationship we have together."

After reminiscing about his time as guest drummer for Queens of the Stone Age on their landmark Songs for the Deaf record, Grohl segues into a chat about Them Crooked Vultures, saying that the band blossomed from his and Homme's "wonderful friendship".

"Them Crooked Vultures was just a dream come true for me," says Grohl. "For years Josh and I had talked about doing some side project, something that wasn't Queens of the Stone Age, something that wasn't Foo Fighters... something that was just an experimental project."

Grohl saved some gushing words for John Paul Jones, saying, "He is one of the most wonderful, generous, kind people you've ever met. He's obviously brilliant, but he's also just cool!"

Shortly after recruiting Jones to the project following an appearance at an awards ceremony in London, the trio recorded their self-titled debut album, which was released in 2009.

Said Grohl: "When we sat down to start playing, it was about 30 seconds to a minute and we realized, this is a real band. This is the real deal. We would walk into the studio everyday with no ideas... by the end of the night, we'd have an eight-minute-long opus, just a rock masterpiece."

Following its release, the album peaked at number 12 in the US in November 2009.

Grohl rounded off his trip down memory lane by voicing his desire to reunite with his Them Crooked Vultures collaborators to make new music.

"It was incredibly inspiring – it was a really incredible time," he reflected. "I hope that someday we do it again."

These days, Josh Homme may be primarily known for leading Queens of the Stone Age, but back in the early ‘90s the electric guitar player was spearheading a new wave of stoner metal with desert-rockers Kyuss.

Since then, his relationship with his ex-band mates has been rocky – in 2012 Homme and former Kyuss bassist Scott Reeder filed a lawsuit against former Kyuss drummer Brandt Bjork and singer John Garcia over their involvement in the band Kyuss Lives!, alleging trademark infringement and consumer fraud.

At the time, Homme and Reeder said in a statement: “To think we went to a meeting in January solely to help them with their request to continue Kyuss Lives! With open arms, we made every attempt to help them continue Kyuss Lives! respectfully. Only to discover while they looked us in the eye, Kyuss Lives! management and band had filed federal documents in 2011 in an attempt to steal the name Kyuss.”

But in a new interview with Kyuss World Radio (via Blabbermouth), Homme considered the idea of a reunion.

"My philosophy has always been, never do a reunion, never do a sequel. It's not what it was; it's what it is,” he said.

“And that's kind of how I've felt. A legacy that involves having been at the epicenter of a scene that got created, it's so fragile; it's like an ice sculpture. And I don't wanna be a blow dryer on that thing.

“That being said, I was in full support of Kyuss Lives! and I would go to the shows and I told them as much, until what Brant and, unfortunately, what John tried to do. And that was terrible.”

But, he continued, “I have thought about this, especially in the last few years, to do something special, and even to make up for that mistake of Brant and, unfortunately, John, to make up for it. [I thought we should] play and give all the money away. Like, play for the fans - cover your costs and make it five bucks. Figure out a way to be, like, this is how the punctuation will end the sentence of this band.

“Because it was never about money - it never was about money. It never was about fame, and when it felt like that was the move they were making, I was so sad."

“It’s really beautiful out there but at the same time kind of grimy,” ponders journeyman guitarist and perennial collaborator Matt Sweeney of Joshua Tree.

“You’re not too far from the highway and a meth dealer. It’s a mix, partly it feels almost like you’re on the moon, which is utterly humbling, but then you also know that you’re close to desperation.”

This is Sweeney’s colorful take on the location of the legendary Rancho De La Luna studio, where he partook in the recording of Josh Homme’s Desert Sessions Vol 11/12.

His past projects have seen him work with the likes of Iggy Pop and Billy Corgan, and Sweeney was once again amongst some stellar company during the sessions, which included Billy Gibbons, Les Claypool, Royal Blood's Mike Kerr and even Jake Shears from Scissor Sisters.

The idea is simple: to gather a collection of interesting and innovative musicians together to see what they can come up with when taken out of their usual environment.

“I suppose ‘cos I’d known Josh for so long, I didn’t ask any questions and he didn’t tell me anything,” Sweeney explains.

“I was thinking I won’t bring anything I’ve already prepared, to keep in the spirit of spontaneous collaboration, but then I got there and he’s like, ‘What have you got?’ [Laughs] There are no rules. Whoever can get a ball rolling, that’s what we’d roll with. There was no memo, or if there was, I didn’t get one!”

Sweeney’s recording CV contains a list of wildly diverse artists ranging from Adele to Johnny Cash. His ‘secret’ is disarmingly simple.

“I think showing up is really important,” he laughs. “I can play a few things, I can fingerpick, I know how to sound good, I know how to stay the fuck out of the way, and I smell nice.

“The reason my CV looks so good is largely due to Rick Rubin. He’d put me in unimaginable situations and say, ‘Play what you want; you’re isolated so if I don’t like it, I can erase it.’ That really freed me up. I thought, ‘I’m here because somebody wants me here, and I should do what I want.’”

Sweeney isn’t optimistic about Homme taking the new album out on the road, however.

“I think probably not, that’s my impression. There would be too many schedules to resolve. Also, the nature of the project is purely to make music, with zero thought about whether we can do this live or how would it work, y’know?

“Having no constraints is really important to let the music go where it wants. That’s true for Josh and for my own work as well, actually.”

Desert Sessions Vols. 11 & 12 is out now via Matador.

Queens of the Stone Age have gotten in the holiday spirit in their characteristic weird way, with a rendition of the holiday classic, “Silent Night.” The song, which features QOTSA leader Joshua Homme with Australian blues singer-songwriter and guitarist C.W. Stoneking, is available as a limited-edition Christmas single available on 7” vinyl. The B-side boasts a reading of "'Twas the Night Before Christmas," with Homme, Distillers frontwoman Brody Dalle and “their three merry-making elves.”

Proceeds from the single will benefit the Sweet Stuff Foundation, the non-profit created by Homme in 2013 to provide assistance to career musicians, recording engineers and their families struggling with illness and disability, and to Support Act, an alliance with a similar mission founded in 1997 in Australia by AMCOS, APRA, ARIA and PPCA.

“Silent Night” / “ ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” was recorded in East Fremantle, during Queens of the Stone Age’s 2017 tour of Australia. 

The limited-edition vinyl will be released December 14 and is available exclusively at QOTSA.com.

Queens of the Stone Age have shared a live performance of their 2017 song, “The Way You Used to Do,” in radically reworked form.

At a one-off acoustic set at the Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania, Australia—a show that benefitted the Royal Hobart Hospital Pediatrics Ward—the band transformed the jaunty, upbeat single from their 2017 album, Villains, in a darker, more stripped-down affair.

The show at MONA reportedly raised $10,000, which was matched by QOTSA frontman Joshua Homme’s own Sweet Stuff Foundation, for a total of $20,000. The following day the band visited the Pediatrics Ward at the Royal Hobart Hospital, where they presented staff with a check for the donations.

Check out the performance above.

Queens of the Stone Age have released the creepy, disconcerting animated music video for their song, "Head Like a Haunted House." You can check it out above.

The video—which was directed by Liam Lynch—shows frontman Josh Homme (or his head really, crudely attached to an animated body) in a soundproofed cell, in a bed surrounded by skeletons, at a creepy seance and trapped in any number of other strange scenarios.

Queens of the Stone Age are coming off an eventful 2017, to put it rather lightly. In August, they released Villains, a swaggering, hook-laden album that ranked as one of their best. What should have been a year of triumph however, ended in controversy after Homme kicked a female photographer in the face during a performance at KROQ's Almost Christmas show in December.

Regardless, the band is set to embark on another North American tour, after wrapping up a few shows in Latin America, in addition to their first North American trek in support of Villains.

Queens of the Stone Age have announced a series of tour dates for early 2018, that will take the hard-rock quintet to the western United States and Canada.

The dates—which are in support of the band's terrific new album, Villains—begin in late January, and will keep the band on the road through early February, with a couple of additional dates in mid February.

Known for their intense performances, the band will bring their trademark mix of punk attitude and artistic fearlessness to the stage. Speaking to Guitar World in August, Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme said "For me, playing music is an escapism worth its weight in gold, and trying to do it in an artful manner is totally everything, man."

"My grandpa used to always say, if you can’t outsmart them, out-dumb them, and I feel like my calling is to out-stupid everybody."

You can see all of the band's 2018 tour dates below, and be sure to read our August cover story with Homme if you haven't!

Queens of the Stone Age 2018 Tour Dates

• Jan. 24 - Vancouver, British Columbia @ Pacific Coliseum
• Jan. 25 - Seattle, Wash. @ KeyArena at Seattle Center
• Jan. 26 - Portland, Ore. @ Rose Quarter – Veterans Memorial Coliseum
• Jan. 27 - Eugene, Ore. @ Hult Center For the Performing Arts – Silva Concert Hall
• Jan. 28 - Fresno, Calif. @ Selland Arena at Fresno Convention Center
• Jan. 30 - Sacramento, Calif. @ Sacramento Memorial Auditorium
• Feb. 1 - San Francisco, Calif. @ Bill Graham Civic Auditorium *
• Feb. 16 - Las Vegas, Nev. @ The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas – The Chelsea
• Feb. 17 - Los Angeles, Calif. @The Forum

* Ty Segall supports

When it was announced that Villains, the new album by Queens of the Stone Age, was going to be produced by pop renaissance man Mark Ronson (Adele, Bruno Mars), logic dictated that he would chisel away at the band’s quirky edges.

Queens guitarist and chief conceptualist, Josh Homme, dismisses the notion with a wave of his hand. “There’s this perception that there’s no musical overlap between us and Mark, but, in reality, there’s a stunning amount. We wanted this album to be tight like an early ZZ Top record, and he is so beat-centric, we knew he would help us keep the rhythm section tight and dense.”

Homme’s instincts proved to be correct. Far from being a soulless slice of modern pop product, Villains is infused with an almost old fashioned sense of rock and roll exuberance and devilish mischief.

The fierce robot boogie of the album’s inescapable first single, “The Way You Used to Do,” captures the overall spirit of the album, which manages to reference oldies but goodies like Chuck Berry and Little Richard while still sounding fresh, funky and futuristic.

“I was watching this wild footage of Jerry Lee Lewis from one of his first performances on television during the early Fifties, and he was really putting on a show,” says Homme. “He was going into fits and the shakes while he was singing and playing the piano, and basically encouraging the audience to do the same. The kids were totally losing it. Early rockers like Jerry, Elvis and Little Richard were so radical for their time, I could just imagine parents saying, ‘These guys are villains—this has to stop!’

“That is the punk rock infiltration that I’ve always desired. I have no interest in fitting in or playing nice. My interest is in when you’re revolting against your parents—or if you’re just plain revolting and a sick individual—you come to me.”

Rock and roll subversion is rarely accomplished alone, and Homme has amassed a pretty impressive team of henchmen to help him on his mission. It’s not an overstatement to say Queens of the Stone Age features three of the most creative guitarists in rock music.

In addition to the innovative frontman, the current lineup includes Troy Van Leeuwen, a respected session musician who also moonlights with Tool’s Maynard Keenan in A Perfect Circle, and Dean Fertita who plays with Jack White in the Dead Weather (see sidebar). So, how do the three make room for all the side projects and still stay focused on the mothership?

“I think the way you live your life has such a massive impact on how long you do your art,” says Homme. “I’ve really staked everything on the fact that music is my religion and my philosophy. It’s how I explain myself when it’s difficult, it’s how I teach my kids, and how I live. I want the guys that are in Queens to unequivocally understand we’re here because we want to be, not because we need to be. So, everyone is encouraged to go do other things, and pick up as much knowledge as they can, so they can bring it home so we can pick through it and get inspired.”

As you will see, there is plenty in Villains to get inspired about. The trio brings a whole new bag of guitar licks and sonic strategies to the band’s already super distinctive sound. In the past, Homme has been reluctant to talk specifics about his sound. But clearly a new spirit of openness pervades his music, and during our conversation, he decided to share a few of his most interesting and provocative ideas.

I really enjoyed the almost uplifting rock and roll attitude on Villains. It’s “let’s have some fun and break some rules,” as opposed to “fuck you, I’m gonna go and shoot some smack.”
JOSH HOMME I like the idea of putting an accelerant on somebody who is thinking, This is who I really wish I was, and this is what I really want to do. Saying “fuck you” is lame and boring. That’s uniting over what you don’t like. It’s too easy, and I have no interest in that.

For me, playing music is an escapism worth its weight in gold, and trying to do it in an artful manner is totally everything, man. My grandpa used to always say, if you can’t outsmart them, out-dumb them, and I feel like my calling is to out-stupid everybody.

That’s a good calling! On the cover of the album I noticed the devil is sitting next to you. He’s covering your eyes, but you’re seeing right through him.
Yeah, man. Everyone feels like they’ve got the devil on their back, or everyone is worried about the devil. But what if that’s your good buddy?

One of the roles of the devil is to go against the grain, which is essential to good rock and roll.
Totally. I think I’ve always felt like if everyone is doing it, how good could it be? There’s only a few instances of things that we all agree on, like Coca-Cola, and maybe like, two other things. On a very fundamental level, whatever bothers a lot of people is a really great place to start, especially if you do it with a nod and a wink. I think for me, that devil is about cutting loose. Life is too short to let fear drive. Now is all you’re ever going to get.

Are you a realist or an optimist?
Both. The realist has a bit of disdain for humanity. The optimistic side, however, believes in truth, to strive for something, to have a faith, and my faith is in rock and roll. My religion is in rock and roll. That’s how I question rules, and that’s how I say: you should think for yourself. That’s how I say: if you don’t make your own plans, you’re part of somebody else’s, and I simply refuse to do that. Defiance looks beautiful no matter who wears it.

Speaking of defiance, you recently recorded an album with Iggy Pop, one of the ultimate rock rebels. What was that like?
Doing Iggy’s record, Post Pop Depression, was the single coolest thing I’ve ever been allowed to be part of. It was a total recharge. It left me feeling like, “Let’s go get ’em, boys!” I love Iggy so much because I really try my best to live in the third truth—you know, yours, mine and what actually happened.

I think Iggy has been living in the third truth his entire life. He wrote this thing for me about what happened during the recording of his solo albums with David Bowie, The Idiot and Lust for Life, and it was so beautifully written because it was completely honest. You just read it and you go, “He never tries to take credit for anything that isn’t his. Nor is he trying to doll up what he did do.” It was just very matter of fact.

Let’s talk some guitar. You regularly express your admiration for loose punk rock bands like Black Flag, the Cramps or the Stooges, but your signature sound is often this super tight, sort of buttoned-down thing. Is there a dichotomy there?
No, I don’t think so, because the lesson of punk rock is to do your own thing. If I’m influenced by Black Flag’s Greg Ginn, it’s not to be Greg Ginn. It’s to find who I am in this grand experiment of life. I’ve always had this un-supply, undemand theory. If I see a repetition of something out there, I just presuppose we don’t need more of that, so I think I’ve always tried to shoot the gap. I’ve always tried to play what I don’t hear.

When did you decide that you were going to try to make a unique statement on the guitar?
I must have been around 13. When I started Sons of Kyuss, my band before Kyuss, we wore our influences on our sleeves and we kind of sounded like other bands, as you do when you’re young. There was a little blowback from that. I think the sting of being embarrassed about imitating somebody at that early age was so powerful, I remember saying, “Never again will somebody say that we sound like somebody else.”

That’s interesting. Usually, when you’re that young, people ask you to cover other bands.
Well, I was fortunate that my little community demanded something unique. It had nothing to do with me. It already existed when I showed up. We lived in Palm Desert, California, and played these outdoor shows powered by a generator that was owned by a guy named Mario Lalli. It was a real DIY environment. And Mario, who we called “Boomer,” in a nice way would just encourage all the bands to find their own voice.

Just like any recipe, that little sprinkle really germinated this attitude of: you must sound like yourself or who do you sound like? Who are you? There were no clubs to play and, in a way, it was incredibly fortunate, because there was no pressure to play Top 40 music and no money to be made.

Honestly, there wasn’t even a way to get out. There were about a thousand windmills at the entrance to the valley I lived in, and it always seemed like we were trapped behind an iron curtain. No way in, no way out—just these spinning blades. So, I never thought I was going to get out. The fact that I’m still doing this is kind of a mystery, but I do attribute the reason I’m still here is that drive to try to find yourself over and over and over.

I never wanted anyone to ever say I sounded like someone else ever again, and that was that. It was as if it was the simplest thing in the world. I struggled to find my voice, but I believed I would accomplish that goal. I never questioned it, and I’m thankful. However, I would not have gotten there on my own without the encouragement of the locals.

Josh Homme with his custom-made nine-string Echopark Esperanto Z

Before you were in Queens of the Stone Age, you were in Kyuss, who were very influential in the early Nineties. Can you tell me about some of your early guitar experiments in Kyuss?
When Kyuss first formed, there were very few people experimenting with detuning. Back in 1988 or 1989, there was nobody tuning down to B and C like I was—I challenge you to find someone else. I thought it was a good first step toward creating a unique sound. I saw an absence—an un-supply un-demand. Part of it was that I didn’t have a tuner, so I started asking myself, how low can you go?

There are times when I’m drunk, I wonder how much of this detuning business I’m responsible for. I think it’s more than I realize, but a lot of it is not that great, so maybe it’s not the kind of credit I should be looking for. [laughs]

I also used the neck pickup exclusively in Kyuss. I never used the treble pickup, because I thought in the singularity of doing the same thing over and over I would find myself. What’s funny is, I’m using my Kyuss heads on tour with Queens right now, just to change up my shit. It’s funny to go full circle after so many years. The same Ampeg heads that I used when I was 15 still work and sound great! I mean, I guess there’s no reason they shouldn’t.

Playing through Ampeg heads was another interesting choice.
The first amp I ever bought was an Ampeg VT40. They don’t make ’em like that anymore. All that Ampeg stuff is very special. But when it was time not to be in Kyuss, I pretty much left that sound behind.

So we’ve established that you’re a pretty conceptual guy when it comes to your gear. When you started recording Villains, was there something new that you wanted to do or accomplish with your sound?
For years I kept most of my recording techniques a secret, and for some reason, I feel like all of that doesn’t matter now. I didn’t want to take somebody’s journey away by telling them what I did. But everyone has their own secrets in their world, and it’s also cool to share some of them. I’m just going to kind of unload what I did on this record.

This is our seventh record, and I decided it was time to burn some of the ideas that became so closely associated with our sound. On past albums, I really explored using dirty reverbs and mid-range sounds almost to a point of obsession. Looking for ways to get width, and using the darker side of the guitar’s mid-range was not an area people were paying much attention to, so it really appealed to me. I also secretly used solid-state amps in the studio, because I liked the sound of that fast electricity. To my ears, solid state amps just sound like they are charged with electricity.

On this album, I changed my entire approach and decided to experiment extensively with recording many of our guitar parts directly into the board. I wanted the sound of the guitars to be completely vacuous, so that you could hear exactly where the note stopped. Not just where it started, but where it stopped.

I think one of the cues I took was from listening to the old Stooges albums. You can turn them up to 10 on your stereo, and they’ll still sound great because the guitars are not so big that they eat up all the real estate in your stereo and your speakers. I wanted to make something that you could crank the piss out of and it would still sound fantastic.

Now, I’d be willing to bet in that first song, “Feet Don’t Fail Me Now,” that you turned it up in the beginning when all those ambient guitar sounds come in. I kept them quiet on purpose. It’s a dirty trick, because I wanted to lure the listener to turn up their stereo, so when the rhythm guitars finally kick in, it’s so tight and dense it will knock you back, but still sound amazing.

It’s interesting that more players don’t explore the joys of DI (direct input) recording. Some of the greatest—and largest—recorded guitar sounds of all-time were DI. Neil Young’s guitar on “Cinnamon Girl” and Jimmy Page’s guitars on Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog” are great examples.
Yes. It really gets interesting, especially when you pair that DI tonality with a room amp. The combination is like having the tip of a spear almost poking you in the eye, while the back end is on the other side of the room.

I’ll add that I love a good room sound as opposed to reverb, because reverb goes and goes and goes until it dissipates, but room sound is like saying: the box we play in is this size. It’s finite. When I listen back to our tracks, I always have this picture of what the room size was. You blow smoke in the air and you see the clear walls of this box that things were put in. Does that make sense?

Yeah, most of my favorite albums, like the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. and Led Zeppelin IV, were recorded in interesting spaces. I think part of the reason I like them is because the sound describes the complexity of the rooms they were recorded in.
I know that the most important thing to me over the last 10 years has been depth of field. I mean, I certainly use left and right, of course, and this record is extremely hard-panned much of the time. But depth of field is way more important, because I like that you can hear something that clearly sounds like it’s in the back of the room. And I love that occurring at the same time as that DI needle hovers close to your eardrum.

Your playing has to be pretty tight to withstand the microscope of DI recording.
The most difficult song that we’ve ever had to play is our single, “The Way You Used to Do.” It’s a fuckin’ nightmare. I don’t know what it is. To sing and play with that sort of tightness is really demanding.

Why put yourself through it?
I wish I had more choice in what music we played. I do feel like I’m being dragged behind a boat a lot of times, because you play what comes out of your mind. I love that Johnny Cash quote, “I’m not the creator of the music, I’m a deliverer.”

Does your distortion come from the amp, or are you a pedal guy?
I feel like driving the pre-and driving the head is the way to go. I just presuppose that the people that made these heads know what they’re doing and gave a shit. If anything, I might add one of my all-time favorite pedals, the Maestro Parametric Filter, because they add or subtract up to 20db with a wide or tight cue of a wide spectrum of frequencies, all in one go.

There’s an infinite universe in that.
Yeah, that’s why I don’t mind talking about it, because even if you like what we do, and decide to buy one, you still need to find who you are within that universe. The sweep is so wide and variable that it doesn’t really help to know I use it. You still need to discover what you like when you use it. I think it’s the greatest pedal ever.

I understand you’re a fan of big band music, and it shows. Between the fuzz tones and the harmonies, many of the guitar parts on Villains sound like they could be arranged for horns.
I’ve been experimenting with arranging guitar parts to emulate the sound of horns since our first album, Rated R. As I mentioned earlier, I’m really interested in the edge of the sound, and how it stops, and horns do that well. I wanted to see if I could create the same effect with guitars, so I kept pursuing that idea in the Eagles of Death Metal. I wanted the guitars to simulate the baritone trombone and saxophone parts heard in sleazy burlesque clubs. I always kind of thought of Eagles of Death Metal in those terms.

It’s an idea that is also a constant on Villains. How do I make a DI and a little bit of room seem like horns? And how do I do it over and over? And how am I able to layer it? Because when you have three guitars it’s difficult. Everyone needs to be able to be heard, and I think the important thing in Queens of the Stone Age is that it’s about the details. So how do I have three guitars of varying mid-range frequencies all be heard properly?

Combining DI parts, using some depth of field and thinking of the guitars like they were horns helped. Those were the three main questions. Who’s playing saxophone-style guitar? Who’s going DI, and who’s set back but heard clearly? That was our approach to get all three guitars to play nice together. Additionally, we ended up using a lot of keyboards to add to the effect that we were creating a horn section. And, of course it all had to live in that weird 400 to 1k world Queens lives in.

You mentioned that one of your goals for Villians is to make it a dance album. Why was that important to you?
Rock and roll should dance. It always did before, so I don’t see what the fucking problem is. You know, there’s something beautiful about headbanging because it’s like telling everyone else around you, “I don’t care what you think. I like this.”

It’s the same thing with dancing, and that’s why I love it so much. Dancing is like saying, “I don’t care what you think, I’m doing this.” In other forms of music, dance is so acceptable, it’s at the forefront of what it is. I always think of that as being at the forefront of rock and roll, and I’m always surprised when people’s inhibitions and fears, which translates into them thinking they’re cooler than something, gets in the way of something joyous and vulnerable and emotional.

Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme and Jesse Hughes have announced the first new album from their band, Eagles of Death Metal, in seven years.

The album, which is titled Zipper Down, is set for an October 2 release via T-Boy/UMe.

You can check out the album's first single, "Complexity," below and take a gander at the album's insane/amazing cover over to your left. Interesting, yes?

Let us know what you think in the comments or on Facebook!

Dave Grohl's new album, Sound City: Real To Reel, won't be released until next week, but you can check out one of the tracks, an instrumental called "Mantra," in the video below.

The video, which was posted to YouTube yesterday, shows Grohl (in drumming mode) in his studio with two members of his Sound City Players ensemble, Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme on bass and Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor on keyboards.

Sound City: Real To Reel will be out March 12, courtesy of Roswell Records (Listen to the entire album here). The album is the soundtrack to the Sound City documentary, which is already available. For more information, check out the film's website, soundcitymovie.com.

Grohl's Sound City Players will perform at SXSW March 14.

Widely hailed as one of the best live acts in music and one of the last remaining members of the 2000's garage rock revival, The Hives are set to unleash their new album Lex Hives on the masses on June 5 for the United States.

The band decided to self-produce their fifth full-length album in order to get as much Hives essence as physically possible onto one disc.

In order to bring material to people's ears as soon as possible, the band has undertaken a massive world tour that has already had them play Coachella and sites across Europe.

Guitarist Vigilante Carlstroem took time out of recuperating back in Sweden to talk about the new album and The Hives' epic live shows.

GUITAR WORLD: When did you start working on Lex Hives?

Pretty much immediately after we stopped touring on the last one, probably a couple years ago. Around two years ago.

This was your first self-produced album. What's the main difference between working with a producer and doing it yourself? Was it a mostly democratic process or did one person take charge?

I guess on the first three we had a guy that helped us record, but on the last album we had a bunch of producers. The good thing about having a producer is that you have someone that you can discuss things with. You're getting paranoid after working on the record for a year whether it's any good. As for the process, if we find something that one person finds more important, then they take charge but usually we try to keep going as long as everyone's happy. That's what we've always done. If someone's unhappy, then you work it out.

What are you proud of about this album? What is something you want Lex Hives to impress on people?

I guess we wanted to make it bigger. We wanted it to be very Hives-ey, we wanted to go back to the way we recorded at the beginning. So we found ourselves recording straight to tape and trying to capture our sound again. We didn't use any synthesizers or things like that. We tried to capture as much as we could recording live.

While the main part of the album was self-produced, the bonus tracks were produced by Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme. How did that collaboration start?

Well, as a band in the summer you tour and play festivals, that’s how we've spent our summers for 15 years. We met Josh a long time ago playing festivals alongside Queens of the Stone Age, we've been friends for a long time and been talking about doing something together for a long time. We were mixing and we still had some work to do on the record for a couple of b-sides and it just worked out. I think it turned out really well.

You are widely recognized as one of the best live bands out there. What takes a show from good to great?

You want the band to do something more than just stand up and play the record. The show, it could be good in different ways, but you want something to happen all the time. If you see a bad band or a boring band, you don’t like the songs and you sort of walk away. You just try to have a really good show. Also, it makes it fun for us to play with energy.

What's it like playing new songs live for the first time? How have fans been reacting to the new material?

First of all, it's really exciting to have some new songs to play. It takes a couple of times before you can get it right, but we usually do a couple of small shows before we start playing bigger festivals or tours. The overall reaction has been really great so far. I mean, we played Coachella and have been doing some small shows in Europe. It's really fun. It's amazing how YouTube works, you play the song once and the next show people know the lyrics already.

What are some of your favorite songs to play live?

I like the “Try it Again” and “Main Offender” is probably my all-time favorite song, I love that song. But again, it's really exciting to be playing new songs.

You're in the midst of a massive world tour. What's it like preparing to go back out on the road for so long? Any road rituals or preparations?

Not really, no. You just make sure you're at the airport at the right time.

You've basically covered the globe, any particular country (besides Sweden) particularly fun to play for?

I kind of like the mix of not being at the same place all the time. If you stay somewhere for too long, you want to get going to the next new place. I like touring the States because it's such a big country. I love Australia because it's a beautiful country. We played South America for the first time, that was really fun. Argentina and Chile were beautiful and we'll definitely be going back.

Anything I haven't touched on that you'd like to add?

It's like I said before, we wanted to try and get as much Hives as we possibly could. Try and record live and try to make it old-school. The way it should be done. Instead of spending ages making every drum beat perfect and moving guitars around, we really tried to keep going. You play the song and if you like the way you sound, you keep it. If you don't like it, you play it again.

When are you going to be in the States?

I think we'll be back in June for the East Coast. Come see us, we'll make you happy.

Lex Hives will be released June 5 in the US via Disque Hives, the band's own label. Follow the band on their Facebook page and official website.

The Hives on Tour in June:

June 19 - Washington, D.C. @ 9:30 Club

June 20 - Philadelphia, PA @ Electric Factory

June 22 - New York, NY @ Terminal 5

June 23 - Boston, MA @ House of Blues

June 25 - Montreal, QC @ Metropolis

June 26 - Toronto, ON @ Sound Academy

June 27 - Pontiac, MI @ Clutch Cargo's

June 29 - Milwaukee, WI @ Summerfest

June 30 - Chicago, IL @ The Vic Theatre

John Grimley writes The Oil Slick blog for GuitarWorld.com.

Kyuss members Scott Reeder and Josh Homme have filed a federal lawsuit against John Garcia and Brant Bjork, aka Kyuss Lives!

The suit alleges trademark infringement and consumer fraud by Kyuss Lives!

Here's a quote from Reeder and Homme from a press release:

"It sucks. To think we went to a meeting in January solely to help them with their request to continue Kyuss Lives! With open arms, we made every attempt to help them continue Kyuss Lives! respectfully. Only to discover while they looked us in the eye, Kyuss Lives! management and band had filed federal documents in 2011 in an attempt to steal the name Kyuss.

"This is desperately what we were trying to avoid. It's a sad day for us and for John -- but most of all for the fans. What a needless mess."