“It happens all day,” Tom Morello says, speaking about the number of requests he gets from artists looking for him to sprinkle his secret guitar sauce on new pieces of music. “I do a lot of it, too,” he says. “I’ve donated guitar solos to younger bands. They’re fans of Rage Against the Machine or Audioslave, and they want me on their songs.”

He admits he can’t accept every request that comes across his desk. “Hey, I’ve got a lot going on,” he says with a laugh. “These days, I’m driving my kids to a lot of high school baseball games.”

Recently, the guitarist received an offer he couldn’t refuse when noted video game composer Masayoshi Soken reached out and asked if he’d consider contributing a song for the latest update of Final Fantasy XIV.

Morello admitted that he wasn’t much of a gamer, but he understood the significance of the Final Fantasy franchise, and he was delighted at the prospect of working with Soken.

There was just one problem, however; Morello would have to turn in a ready-to-go track within 36 hours. Fortunately, the guitarist was already working on some new music with producer Tyler Smyth, so the prospect of banging out a banger wasn’t out of the question.

“I said to Tyler, ‘I’ve got a hot riff, and you’ve got some beats. Maybe we can do this,’” he says. The producer then rang up his friend Caleb Shomo, singer with the metalcore band Beartooth, and asked, “Do you want to make a song with Tom Morello right now?”

In no time at all – 48 hours, to be exact – the collaboration yielded the monster jam Everything Burns, a feral blend of rap-metal and electronica that features, one might expect, one hell of a gargantuan riff.

When you’re noodling, do you have some sort of litmus test that makes you go, “That combination of notes does the job”?

It’s not overthought. Sometime around maybe 1991 [or] ’92, I began to be able to write music that I loved, and was able to tap into some of the essence of the Tony Iommi and Jimmy Page-ness of it all. From that time, these big-ass riffs have kind of been low-hanging fruit. It’s like, “Stick to the dots, try a little syncopation and don’t be afraid to be equal parts funky and heavy.”

Is it deceptively easy? One wrong note could make all the difference between a classic riff and one that’s just “eh.”

Oh, sure. Some of the longer riffs through my history, like Testify or Down Rodeo, where there was sort of a more simple version of the riff, I said, “Well, if it’s going to happen four times in a row, perhaps it’s a journey that stays true to coming back to the one, but then adds some extra heavy metal flavor along the way.”

So in the case of Everything Burns, you already had the riff.

It was around in a rudimentary way, and it was sort of looking for a home. I have a lot of riffs hanging around, and this was one that Tyler and I had been tinkering with. When this opportunity came up, I was like, “Okay, hold on one second. Let’s see if Beartooth wants to jump on.”

At what point did you realize that the combination of you, Tyler and Caleb was working?

It was maybe two hours after Tyler reached out to Caleb. Caleb dropped everything to do this. He’s a great singer, and he’s also a producer himself. He’s got a studio. He wrote and produced the vocals to it, came back in about two hours with a first draft, and I was like, “Holy shit, that’s a jam!”

I did notice the lack of a solo. Is that something you wrestled with?

I wouldn’t say “wrestle.” There was, however, a version of it that had sort of a more expansive middle section. At the end of the day when we were mixing, it felt like it didn’t add to the power of the song. It felt more like I was just sticking a solo in.

When I was A/B-ing in my car, I liked the version that, while it doesn’t have a guitar solo, it’s about as guitar-y as anything I’ve ever done. There’s no lack of guitar on this song.

As for solos, there will be plenty more to come, let me tell you. I’m in the midst of working on what will be my first solo rock album. I made some Americana albums and some EDM-influenced records, but I want to make a record that is going to be an unapologetically Tom Morello solo rock record.

Any idea when we might see that?

In this day and age, what is an album? We’ve released three singles from this album over the course of the year and a half. There’s a lot of intense work ahead. I hope I’ve got maybe three or four songs in the can and another sort of five or six in the hamper. I’ve got a lot of touring coming up this summer. I’d love to try to get it out before then.

And you’ve been touring with your son.

That’s something I’m most excited about, continuing the collaboration with my son, Roman, who has become quite a technical guitarist. He’s been a collaborative partner on a couple of songs, and that will continue. [Laughs] One of my favorite parts about working with Roman is that if we have disagreements, I’m able to send him to his room.

You can’t do that with everyone.

No, I can’t. [Laughs]

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

With Måneskin, Thomas Raggi may be part of the most distinctly rock ’n’ roll band to explode onto the international scene over the past decade.

After making a name for themselves in their native Italy, which led to a global breakthrough, Grammy nods, collaborations with powerhouse producer Max Martin and Rage Against the Machine's Tom Morello, and Rolling Stones support slots.

Faced with Måneskin's hiatus, Raggi has ventured out on his own and made his mark on the guitar world with the release of his debut solo album, Masquerade – a through-and-through guitar album that offers a fresh take on the classic rock guitar genre, thanks to a little help from Morello.

“He had a super-cool vision,” Raggi tells Guitar World in a new interview. “The way to arrange the song, and to put the guitar in the main center. The whole songs are super-cool, the singers are amazing, but at the same time, my guitar is the main thing that is connected to all the different vibes and the different songs.”

One piece of advice the veteran Tom gave the younger Tom “was to trust the first take, because lots of times happened that I would find a riff, and say, like, ‘I don't know, maybe this is not the one.’

“He said, 'Yeah, of course this is great!' You just have to trust yourself on the first stage. Sometimes, exactly the magic of the first take is the best.”

Another challenge for Raggi was his quest to find – and nail – his own signature guitar tone. One of the effects helping him achieve this is a rotary simulator – specifically, the “one inside the Strymon Mobius” and the Strymon Lex.

“I'm trying to find my marker,” he explains. “The fact that you can recognize me thanks to the rotary is a super-cool thing. Another thing that I took from Tom is the fact that you can recognize him thanks to the sound that he has.

“I would love to do the same as a next step. I'm trying to find the right pedals that you can just hear it and say, like, ‘OK, that sounds like Thomas.’”

Guitar World’s full interview with Thomas Raggi will be published in the coming weeks.

Aside from his work with Måneskin, this is not the first time that Morello has collaborated with Raggi. Over the past few years, the two have traded licks on stage – including a standout performance in Verona, Italy, on MC5's Kick Out the Jams.

It started life as the worst guitar its owner had ever played, and was modified with a grab bag of parts from bargain bins. It features arguably the most provocative slogan to be scrawled on a guitar since Woody Guthrie added “this machine kills fascists” to his acoustics in 1943. And it’s covered in cartoon hippos.

As an instrument, Arm the Homeless is an unlikely candidate for the signature guitar treatment – but 30 years at Tom Morello’s side has cemented it as one of rock’s most iconic electric guitars.

This is the divining rod that brought the world explosive riffs like Bombtrack and the radical toggle-switching technique and whammy whoops in Know Your Enemy, which lit the molotov cocktail that was Rage Against the Machine’s 1991 debut (Killing in the Name came courtesy of Morello’s drop-D tuned Sendero Luminoso Telecaster – surely on the cards for its own replica down the line).

Bulls on Parade, Sleep Now in the Fire, Guerrilla Radio, and Audioslave’s debut album – written before ATH’s successor, the Soul Power Strat, came on the scene – were all chiseled into shape by Morello’s hands on this guitar – or, as he calls it, his “artistic co-worker”.

“We’re collaborative partners,” he tells me over Zoom. “The chemistry that that guitar and I accidentally backed into has forged this career of 22 albums, thousands of shows… and a lot of dangerous music.”

With no brand name to speak of, fans wondered if an authentic Arm the Homeless replica would ever become a reality. Ibanez had previously made a backup version. But Fender ended up winning the gig, after Morello and CEO Andy Mooney met via – what else – a school fundraiser.

The Soul Power Strat was their first collaboration in 2020, bottling the early-noughties magic of Morello’s main squeeze in Chris Cornell-fronted supergroup Audioslave. Mooney hinted that a Fender Arm the Homeless was on the cards. That was five years ago. But the new guitar proved to be a difficult birth: this was no cookie-cutter Stratocaster. It required a whole new approach.

“The challenge with Fender was: ‘How do we recreate something that is so imperfect?’” Morello laughs. “For example, I have no idea what that neck is. It was the one that I got on a particular day. They got a machine over there that makes a bunch of different necks. They don't got one that makes this.”

Fender persevered. After “20-25 iterations”, they mastered the neck, along with the guitar’s many idiosyncrasies: the indestructible killswitch, the Gotoh locking tremolo, EMG pickups and, of course, the hippos, hammer and sickle, and rabble-rousing slogan. Heck, the strings are even uncut at the headstock end – to our knowledge, it’s a first for a production-line guitar.

Like all of Morello’s signature gear, there’s a charitable component to the release. Part of the proceeds will be going to teen homeless shelter Covenant House and LA’s Midnight Mission shelter, where the Morello family volunteer on a regular basis.

“If you're going to put ‘Arm the Homeless’ on a guitar, I want to make sure there's a component of giving back. I want to make sure that there's a Robin Hood factor to this as well – that while we're making this guitar for fans and collectors who want this thing, we're going to be able to give back to people who are in need.”

I sat down with Tom Morello to find out how Fender got the details right and why, for a man who once declared that “gear doesn’t matter”, he’s finally coming round to the importance of his most iconic guitar.

Walk me through the process of recreating Arm the Homeless with Fender: how did it start?

When we were talking about doing the guitar, I said, “OK, this is a bigger challenge because, while the Soul Power guitar is complicated, it uses parts that exist in the world. The Arm the Homeless guitar is from the island of Misfit Toys.”

It has a neck that I found in a used neck bin at some off-brand store. Originally I had it made at a local guitar shop in Hollywood, and it was the worst guitar I'd ever played in my life. I didn't know. I made all the wrong choices with regard to fretboards, frets, whammy bars, electronics, everything about it. Over the course of the next few years, I changed everything out multiple times looking for a sound I never found.

And probably in late 1988 or so, I just gave up. And I was like, “I'm going to stop whining, and I'm going to start creating. I've spent all my money on making this guitar. I had no more money left. This just has to be my guitar. I'm stuck with it. So I'm going to start writing songs.”

And that's exactly the Arm the Homeless guitar. I drew the hippos on it back then. A couple of years later, I scrawled Arm the Homeless on it in Magic Marker, and from that day to this, that's what it is.

I wanted this guitar to be absolutely interchangeable for me. I wanted to use this guitar without losing any miles per hour. The neck on the Fender Arm the Homeless guitar must have gone through 20-25 iterations to get it just right. I was always sending it back. I'm like, “Well, nope, nope, nope.” We finally got that right.

The Gotoh whammy bar was not exactly the one that anybody wanted, but that's the one that worked for me. One thing that I ended up loving about it was the imperfections of it. After a while, the actual bar becomes really loose in there. Not what you want with a whammy bar… or do you?

Because I was able to use that to create some sort of helicopter sound, some sort of monkey sound – there was something in that particular whammy bar that, because it's the one that I was stuck with, I made the most of, and it helped me forge my signature sound.

What about the pickups? It’s an unusual configuration.

It's two EMG pickups, and the pickup in the neck position is basically a single-coil pickup disguised as a humbucker, and that is what provided the springiness to the riffs in a lot of those songs, from Fistful of Steel to Sleep Now in the Fire, Guerrilla Radio, and that, I think, really differentiated my sound from a lot of metal players. It allowed the songs to lock in with the rhythm section in a very different way than a lot of metal or nu metal players would.

The bridge pickup was my tip of the cap to my metal roots. It's the distorted sound of Know Your Enemy. It's the outro to Bullet in the Head. It's the sound for all of my guitar solos – when I kick on the echo pedal and just start space-jamming.

The toggle switch, too. The normal toggle switch that is in a Gibson guitar or whatever, if you use it like God intended, which is a lot, it'll burn out. It'll burn out quick. The toggle switch that is in my Arm the Homeless is the one in this, so you can just go to town on that baby.

Did you road-test the guitar at all?

The final prototype that I approved I've been using in concert on the last tour this year. So I feel great about it. It's interchangeable down to the aesthetics of the guitar.

The other day, we were shooting some promos, and I was at Cello Studios where we made a number of Audioslave and Rage Against the Machine records. I put three of the Fender Arm the Homeless guitars and the real one down on the mixing board. And I brought people, and I was like, “Pick the real one.”

And I'll tell you, here's the clue: the only distinguishing characteristic sonically or visually, is that on the real Arm the Homeless guitar, couple decades ago, a dog chewed the headstock. So there are teeth marks on the headstock. I think it was a dog. It's hard to say whether it was a fan or whether it was a badger, but there's teeth marks on the headstock of that one. But other than that, they're absolutely identical.

You say you've been stealth-playing the replica on tour – did anyone notice?

Zero. Zero percent. You'd never know. I mean, I don't know! And as far as feel and tone and whatnot, we got that right a while ago, getting the neck good. That took the longest, because that's a really unique part of it. It's tapered in a way that had allowed me, when I was practicing eight hours a day shredding scales, to be able to do that.

But also, the feel of a guitar ends up suggesting riffs. It ends up suggesting ideas. And if it were more of a thicker neck, it was more of a baseball neck, or wider in the wrong places, it never would have suggested Bulls on Parade. It never would have suggested People of the Sun.

What do you remember about the moment you first wrote ‘Arm the Homeless’ on the guitar?

I scrawled the words on it at a Rage show. It was the afternoon. We were playing at the Whiskey that night. We were opening for two other bands at the Whiskey that night, and that would have been in probably early ’92.

I was sitting on the dirty carpet in my little apartment in West Hollywood, and there were a couple markers around. They happened to be black and red, or it would have been something else at the time. I like slogans that are provocative.

And I love the juxtaposition of something that says “Arm the Homeless” with these cute, smiling hippopotamuses. That feels like multiple facets of my personality – those boxes are checked.

As you say, the Fender recreation looks remarkably faithful. There are a couple of very small changes, though: the Fathead Sustainer on the back of the headstock and the big hippo on the back of the guitar are both absent. What prompted those tweaks?

Well, the Sustainer on the back of the headstock of the real one never did anything. It was a pain in the ass to put that thing on. It was a pain in the ass to take it off. So I just literally never took it off. It literally did nothing. Literally nothing. So we're like, “Oh, like, I'll spare people having that.”

And then the hippo on the back. One of the reasons why I didn't put that on is because one of the features of this guitar through the last 10-15 years is when I'm showboating and playing with my teeth, I will write some sort of city-appropriate or political news cycle-appropriate thing on the back of it, and flip it over and read that so that, to me, didn't feel like it was any important part of the guitar at all.

I should say, another one of the motivations, not the principal motivation, but on the page of motivations, was all of the horrible knock-off Arm the Homeless guitars that exist in the world. There's a bunch of them out there.

People think they're getting my guitar because they're able to get the artwork sort of right, and I just think it's awful to have fans ripped off like that, to think that they're getting something that really is the Arm the Homeless guitar. It's not this one. I am the guy who made the Arm the Homeless guitar. This one is it.

You resisted signature gear for decades. What prompted that shift? Because now you've got pedals and plugins as well.

Because the stuff is exact. Here's the thing that I was always happy to put out and promote in the world: my music, because it's mine. My videos, because they're mine, or my bands, right? My ideas, because they're mine.

I was approached countless times: “Will you endorse this amp or this guitar or this pedal?” And I didn't want to do it because I didn't play it. I'm very conservative with my gear. It's the same guitar from ’87 till now. It's the same amp from ’88 till now. It's the same pedals from ’91 till now. So the only time when I've put stuff out is when it is exactly my gear.

The guitar is built in Mexico. Did you ever consider a high-end Fender Custom Shop version with all the relic’ing and road wear?

No, I didn't. Let the relic’ing and road wear be your own. Here it is. Now it's up to you to let your dog bite it.

The guitar must have been through its fair share of scrapes over the years. Dog bites aside, do any others stand out?

Oh, I mean this guitar has been at every show that I have ever played, outside of maybe a handful of Nightwatchman protest solo acoustic shows. So it’s seen it all. Some people get very emotional about their guitars, like, “Oh, this is my baby.” And I was always like, “This is a tool. This is an instrument. This is a battering ram for justice and big riffs.”

And over time, I gotta admit, I've become somewhat emotional about it. I play at night [at home], and I'm like, “We've been through a lot.” It is a long, long relationship that I have with this guitar, and it really is a relationship.

It's not just a thing; the way that it is, and the unique journey of how it arrived, is what helped me find my sound in the world, is what helped me become the artist that I am. And everything that's flowed from that, from the bands that I've been in to the ideas that I've been able to get out in the world, from the solos I've been able to shred standing next to Bruce Springsteen. You know, it's not just, “Hey, I'm doing this.” We are collaborative partners.

Does that mean you'll be retiring the original Arm the Homeless?

Well, it's taking a step back. Like the Jerry Garcia guitar or Prince’s guitar or Bruce Springsteen’s, the Arm the Homeless guitar is a working guitar in a real punk-rock context.

I play a lot of shows. Yes, there are festival headlining shows. Yes, there are shows with crews and whatnot. But I play a lot of shows for the people. And we were doing something in New Jersey within the last year, where I was walking backstage, a bunch of people walking around, I just saw the Arm the Homeless guitar, like, in a hallway, and I just went “Ah!” If I had wanted to steal it, I could have walked right out the door with it right then.

So I thought that the [original] Arm the Homeless guitar needs to maybe come out for special occasions. I used it the other day. I played Purple Rain at the Hollywood Bowl with a celebration of Black music and film. And it came out for that one, but now it's gonna come out for special occasions.

Musically speaking, what can we expect next from you? Can we ever expect to see you in a full-band context again, like Rage and Audioslave?

I'm in the midst of working on my first solo rock album, poaching riffs from my son, Roman, who's got the hot hand these days. And over the course of the next couple of months, releasing some more singles from that upcoming record. There's a full fall of acoustic, electric shows in Canada, East Coast, North American Tom Morello and friends tour playing in India at the end of the year.

I wrote a musical that's opening in Chicago called Revolutions, which has some songs from my career that Arm the Homeless guitar has created. And so it's a very, very busy time. I feel very, very comfortable in not being in a band. You know, if something comes up, I'm always willing to look at it, but I've got a lot of stuff on the docket as it is.

• The Fender Tom Morello “Arm The Homeless” Guitar is available now. See Fender.com for more.

After years of speculation, Fender has granted Tom Morello fans’ wishes and announced a replica of his Arm the Homeless electric guitar – the misfit six-string that fueled Rage Against the Machine and changed the face of rock guitar as we know it.

Fender has replicated every part of the one-of-a-kind instrument, which was Frankensteined together by Morello after he commissioned a custom guitar and hated every single part of it. Over several years, he would swap everything, settling with the iconic configuration that hasn’t changed over the past three decades.

There’s the EMG pickup combo – an 85 in the bridge, H humbucker-sized single-coil in the neck. The indestructible toggle switch. Gotoh’s Floyd Rose-alike locking tremolo with the rattly whammy bar.

The striking aesthetics are replicated, too: Morello’s hand-drawn hippos, the “Arm the Homeless” slogan in black and red permanent marker, all atop a blue ice metallic finish. And yes, in what’s possibly a first for a production-line guitar, the strings are uncut at the hockey-stick headstock.

In fact, the neck shape was the hardest thing to get right – after all, this was a knockoff Kramer neck that Morello found in a bargain bin. It took 20 to 25 iterations for Fender to nail the formula, but now the replica and the original are so interchangeable that Morello has been stealth-testing it on tour – and no-one, not Arm the Homeless die-hards (guilty) or even his bandmates, noticed.

“Zero. Zero percent. You'd never know. I mean, I don't know!” Morello told Guitar World. “The final prototype that I approved I've been using in concert on the last tour this year. So I feel great about it.

“It's interchangeable down to the aesthetics of the guitar. We were shooting some promos, and I was at Cello Studios where we made a number of Audioslave and Rage Against the Machine records. I put three of the Fender Arm the Homeless guitars and the real one down on the mixing board. And I brought people, and I was like, ‘Pick the real one.’”

But, as he reveals, there is one distinguishing characteristic between the original and the new guitar – and it’s a highly unusual bit of wear.

“On the real Arm the Homeless guitar, a couple decades ago, a dog chewed the headstock. So there are teeth marks on the headstock. I think it was a dog. It's hard to say whether it was a fan or whether it was a badger. But other than that, they're absolutely identical.”

There are a couple of teeny tiny differences on the rear of the guitar, too. There's no Fathead Sustainer on the rear of the headstock (“It literally did nothing”) or giant hippo on the back of the body – but the latter is normally covered up with a political statement that Morello flips to the audience while playing with his teeth.

And, unlike many of Fender’s recent Mexico-built signature models, the guitar is box-fresh and isn’t relic’d in any way. As Morello puts it, “Now it’s up to you to let your dog bite it.”

As per the guitarist’s other signature gear releases, proceeds from sales of Arm the Homeless will go to charity organizations Midnight Mission and Covenant House, which help those experiencing homelessness.

The Fender Tom Morello “Arm The Homeless” Guitar is available now for $1,699. Head to Fender.com for more info.

Read Guitar World’s full interview with Tom Morello.

Since making its debut on October 11, 1975, NBC’s Saturday Night Live has been a pop-culture juggernaut like no other.

But before becoming a weekend staple for generations of late-night viewers, creator Lorne Michaels’ variety show began as a brash, uniquely irreverent counterculture experiment boldly pairing off-the-cuff outsider comedy with of-the-moment musical guests – for the record, the first show featured Billy Preston, Janis Ian and, arguably most memorably, Andy Kaufman miming his way through the Mighty Mouse theme song.

Indeed, while it’s a comedy-first operation, music has always been a major part of SNL’s appeal – and, obviously, that means we’ve seen a lot of guitarists grace the show’s stage.

It’s been a spot for bands to crank it up just before their careers went supernova. Others faltered spectacularly on live TV, beneath the bright lights of Studio 8H and under the watch of millions of viewers at home.

Some of the greatest guitar virtuosos showed up unannounced for once-in-a-lifetime jams. A pair of blues-loving bees morphed into the show’s breakout musical act.

While it’s all made for hundreds upon hundreds of must-see moments, to paraphrase the show’s iconic metalhead character, Wayne Campbell – a.k.a. Mike Myers, an obtuse on-air shredder in his own right – some were more worthy than others.

So, in honor of the show’s staggering 50 years on the air, ladies and gentleman, behold the 50 greatest guitar moments in SNL history.

50. The Rolling Stones – Shattered

Season 4, Episode 1; October 7, 1978

While nabbing the Stones was a major coup, the band’s lone SNL appearance isn’t remembered for being great. Mick Jagger’s voice is shot and unpretty through Beast of Burden, but Shattered taps into the sleazy urgency of the Some Girls era.

It also embodies the chaotic, anything-goes-in-the-moment spirit of live TV right about the time Jagger starts snapping his ivory sportcoat at Ronnie Wood, wet-towel style.

49. The Devil Can’t Write No Love Song sketch

Season 25, Episode 5; November 13, 1999

Garth Brooks plays a down-on-his-luck musician willing to sell his soul for a hit. Ready to make a trade, Lucifer – a horned-and-bearded Will Ferrell – bursts onto the scene with a devil-red Fender built out of a “hell-spun mixture of the bones of fornicators.” Trouble is, the dark lord is a damned terrible songsmith. Fred’s Slacks is a brittle-toned, out-of-tune geek-rock atrocity, and his originals only get cringier from there.

48. Joan Armatrading – I’m Not in Love / Down to Zero

Season 2, Episode 21; May 14, 1977

The highlight of Joan Armatrading’s SNL performances is the sound of her rich and oaken vocal – but her stately 12-string chording chimes through the mix quite nicely, too.

Whether through the dew-eyed I’m Not in Love or the yearning folk-rock of Down to Zero, guitarist Jerry Donahue also brought a waterfall-rippling wave of flanged-out fretboard elegance to the arrangements.

47. System of a Down – B.Y.O.B.

Season 30, Episode 18; May 7, 2005

The SNL censors were prepared to bleep out the F-bombs SOAD’s Serj Tankian and Daron Malakian regularly scheduled into their zany, kinda thrash/kinda ska single B.Y.O.B. The latter let loose an unscripted “fuck yeah” during a surf-zested string slide, though, which ended up putting he and the rest of System on SNL’s blacklist. They never played the show again.

46. Metallica – Fuel

Season 23, Episode 8; December 6, 1997

An argument could be made that SNL blew it by not booking Metallica during the height of ’80s thrash and that they slept on the biggest metal band in the world circa Enter Sandman.

But producers gave ’tallica fans that which they desired by finally bringing aboard the band during their Reload period. Fuel found Kirk Hammett all-gassing his wah-wah solo. James Hetfield kept on theme by strapping himself to a flame-emblazoned Flying V.

45. The Tragically Hip – Grace, Too

Season 20, Episode 16; March 25, 1995

When original Not Ready for Prime-time Player Dan Aykroyd was asked to co-host this episode, he agreed – with a caveat: fellow Ontarians the Tragically Hip had to come along with him.

Gord Downie grinned cherubically as he flubbed his first line, but Canada’s Band otherwise nailed the artfully hard-rocking Grace, Too, guitarist Rob Baker flexing a wide, flavorful vibrato into its finale.

44. Adam Sandler – The Thanksgiving Song

Season 18, Episode 7; November 21, 1992

Sandler used his Weekend Update segments to test out goofball characters like Cajun Man and Opera Man. The news desk was also where he developed his voice as a singer-guitarist, and that all starts with The Thanksgiving Song.

Coming out the gates with cheerful 7th chords and a toothy grin, he uses the quaint acoustic jazz-folk song to toast turkey dinners and serve up a side of pop-culture non-sequiturs.

43. Queens of the Stone Age – Little Sister

Season 30, Episode 19; May 14, 2005

Though drummer Joey Castillo was already clonking his plastic jam block hard-and-heavy through this segment, Will Ferrell apparently felt that Queens could use more cowbell.

The comedian reprised his famous Gene Frenkle character – ill-fitting shirt and all – and whapped to his heart’s delight, but the impromptu percussive performance wasn’t the scene-stealer. Credit that to Josh Homme putting on a clinic with his serpentine flair.

42. Big Ricky & the Minnows – “Bass Lake” sketch

Season 50, Episode 16; April 5, 2025

A lakeside potluck jam on Tom Petty’s Free Falling goes horribly awry once Big Ricky – played by an increasingly exasperated Jack Black – realizes everyone hitting the stage is hoisting a bass and the soupiest tone of all time (“The quality of sound feels like a sinus infection”).

The low-end nightmare swells into a dozen rhythm-stringers and one particularly talented basset hound trying to find their footing within the frequency, with disastrous results.

41. Spinal Tap – Big Bottom

Season 9, Episode 18; May 5, 1984

Talk about bass chops, these guys got ’em. Unlike Black’s bass sketch, Tap’s low-end monstrous performance of Big Bottom was no shit sandwich. Performed on air just two months after This Is Spinal Tap hit screens, the band’s performance of their multi-bass opus rumbled with hilarious, horn-dog fervor.

Derek Smalls lays down the initial rhythm with a double-neck bass. Nigel Tufnel hits those perfect fourths like a pro. The synth-bass is on point, too. But it might be David St. Hubbins mud-flappin’ lead bass prowess that pushes the ludicrous metal anthem into overdrive.

40. J Mascis & the SNL band – Out There

Season 25, Episode 16; April 8, 2000

It’s a travesty that J Mascis never got to chop through this Where You Been? stunner on the show with the rest of Dinosaur Jr. in the ’90s. Nevertheless, a 20-second sampling of Out There – which Mascis performed while sitting in with the house band – found the alt-rock guitar hero wham-smashing his way through a micro-sized but massive-sounding SNL moment. This performance took us to the commercial break seconds after the show staged its iconic “More Cowbell” sketch.

39. The Black Crowes – Sometimes Salvation

Season 18, Episode 9; December 12, 1992

Sometimes Salvation is a funny pick because the Crowes’ aching, extended blues ballad shares a similar feel to the SNL band’s longtime closing credits jam, Waltz in A. Where it differs is that the Georgia rockers also had Marc Ford sustaining a series of seismically reckless and romantic bends through his spacious solo. And it’s spectacular.

38. Foo Fighters – Times Like These

Season 28, Episode 13; February 22, 2003

Foo Fighters are prolific SNL guests, having hit the program nine times since 1995. Their third pop-in at 30 Rock came during the promotion cycle for One by One and began with a crunching version of All My Life.

But Times Like These is what makes the highlight reel – not just because the Foos crushed their yearning anthem with ease, but because Jim Carrey stormed the stage mid-song to air guitar his right leg like a maniac.

37. Red Hot Chili Peppers – Stone Cold Bush / Under the Bridge

Season 17, Episode 14; February 22, 1992

Dubious to include, but hard to ignore, the Chilis left a strange taste in millions of mouths with this off-kilter two-fer. Stone Cold Bush was funky, but merely fine – Flea gets appropriately slappy on the bass, but things get weird when vocalist Anthony Kiedis soccer-slides toward John Frusciante and boots his bandmate in the butt.

Under the Bridge is even more tense, with Frusciante cresting through a loose fluidity that paints a bit too outside the lines – and with a lot of brown. He ends the alt-ballad howling in falsetto like a hound from hell. The rest of the band seem stunned over their tragic Magik performance.

36. Boz Scaggs – Lowdown

Season 2, Episode 2; September 25, 1976

Elliot Randall’s wildcard solo is one of SNL’s most uproarious musical WTF moments. Halfway through the hit’s soft disco shuffle, Randall rips out to center stage for a furious hellfire of hammer-ons.

He tries to hit a behind-the-nut bend but kind of biffs it, then walks back with a huge smile to resume his soulfully rhythmic plinking.

Slang-style praise or secret diss, Scaggs jumps back in to croon with perfect comedic timing: “You ain’t got to be so bad.”

35. Prince – Partyup

Season 6, Episode 11; February 21, 1981

Prince’s most storied SNL performance arguably isn’t this one, and it wasn’t even in public – rather, a slow-jammed Let’s Go Crazy during the show’s 40th-anniversary afterparty in 2015 apparently had cast members losing their minds. But his televised Partyup in ’81 was still plenty iconic, with the Purple One parading around in thigh-high boots and sex-grinding his guitar with slinking funk licks.

34. Tracy Chapman – Give Me One Reason

Season 15, Episode 9; December 16, 1989

Here’s a good reason to have owned a VHS machine in the ’80s: Chapman’s rhythm-locked, Grammy-winning blues-rocker Give Me One Reason was performed on SNL a full six years before it made it onto an album.

Chapman anchored its television debut with subtle, staccato acoustic fingering and her soulful vocal, though the house band gets into the action, too; Tom “T-Bone” Wolk injects jumping-bean bass accents while bandleader G.E. Smith delivers Delta-ready slidework.

33. Devo – (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction

Season 4, Episode 2; October 14, 1978

Devo’s subversive take on the Stones classic harnesses the palpably anxious and painfully horny undercurrent of the anthem arguably better than when it’s ever sung by Jagger.

Sweet release arrives through this performance, where Devo – deep in their matching hazmat suit-and-3D glasses era – twitch through the tune like a bunch of broken androids, Mark Mothersbaugh wilding out while using a Hagstrom 1 with boosts and overdrives duct-taped all over its cherry body.

32. Pearl Jam – Not for You / Rearviewmirror / Daughter

Season 19, Episode 18; April 16, 1994

Pearl Jam were arguably the biggest band in the world in the spring of 1994, so SNL showcased the hell out of the Seattle quintet during their second appearance on the show – even offering them a rare third song. Their Daughter performance, in particular, presented an extended Jam; the group gave the alt-rock anthem a funky two-minute outro full of vibe-heavy fretless bass and ad-libbed Crazy Horse lyrics.

31. AC/DC – Stiff Upper Lip / You Shook Me All Night Long

Season 25, Episode 15; March 18, 2000

AC/DC’s SNL debut found the band cranking into their Back in Black classic a whopping 20 years after its initial release. In a solid performance, Angus Young wails hard and goes full-Curly while spinning around the ground during the finale.

Earlier in the evening, though, the eternal schoolboy and brother Mal arguably locked in harder for the gritty, then-current and super-underrated Stiff Upper Lip.

30. Punk Band Reunion at the Wedding sketch (Crisis of Conformity – Fist Fight in the Parking Lot)

Season 35, Episode 14; February 6, 2010

What begins as a father sheepishly getting his old band back together at his daughter’s wedding reception quickly devolves into one of SNL’s most raging hardcore performances ever. Fred Armisen sneers his way through ’80s-style Reagan-punk lyrics, while the arrangement itself quotes Suicidal Tendencies’ Institutionalized.

The table-crashing, glass-smashing melee gets all-too-real once drummer Dave Grohl’s mic cuts out. A cream Strat-strapped Kutcher saves the day by lunging over with another mic – which also reveals he’s definitely not the one punk-chording through their Parking Lot.

29. The Replacements – Bastards of Young / Kiss Me on the Bus

Season 11, Episode 7; January 18, 1986

G.E. Smith was a Replacements fan and called the group when SNL needed a last-minute replacement for the Pointer Sisters. The Replacements proceeded to get drunk backstage with host Harry Dean Stanton and strolled out to deliver slapdash Tim songs while sloshed out of their skulls.

Paul Westerberg fumbled lyrics, Bob Stinson played a loaner Les Paul after he fell on his own guitar on the way to the stage. The night was best summed up by the first line of Bastards of Young: “God… what a mess.”

28. Bonnie Raitt – Thing Called Love

Season 15, Episode 11; January 20, 1990

Nearly 12 years to the day after her first SNL appearance, Bonnie Raitt returned to the show to slide through this blues-rock blazer. At one point she bats at the body of her Strat to gain some gnarly sustain. Later, she juxtaposes a fiery, near-30-second glass slide solo against the arrangement’s laidback, roadhouse-reggae breakdown.

27. Lenny Kravitz – Are You Gonna Go My Way / Always on the Run

Season 18, Episode 18; April 17, 1993

Everything went Kravitz and co-guitarist Craig Ross’ way. Sporting the rawest and most iconic rock riff of ’93, the pair brought harmonized pull-offs and Hendrix-ian sharps to a pitch-perfect performance of Are You Gonna Go My Way – and then Ross delivered a wailing solo.

They then dug into their retro-rock war chest for Mama Said single Always on the Run, expertly swaggering themselves through fuzz-funk syncopation before Ross splintered off with another heater solo.

26. Nirvana – Smells Like Teen Spirit / Territorial Pissings

Season 17, Episode 10; January 11, 1992

Nirvana’s Nevermind dethroned the King of Pop’s Dangerous from the Number 1 spot on the Billboard chart the same week they dropped by SNL. Understandably, they played Teen Spirit, the industry-revolutionizing game-changer that got them there.

That said, Territorial Pissings was the livelier of their two performances; Cobain capped the manic track by smashing his guitar into a tower of logo-less cabs; Krist Novoselic hucks his bass into the air like loose change; Grohl rains drum hardware across the soundstage.

25. Rage Against the Machine – Bulls on Parade

Season 21, Episode 17; April 13, 1996

Interestingly, the SNL time bookers paired billionaire media mogul and Republican nominee hopeful Steve Forbes with left-leaning political rap-rockers Rage Against the Machine.

Rage tried to hang upside-down U.S. flags across their cabs as a form of protest, which led to an onstage confrontation with patriotic stagehands, who yanked away the subversive Stripes milliseconds before the band kicked into Bulls. Tom Morello crushed it with his wah work and mock-scratch technique. Then the band got booted out of the building.

24. Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers – You Don’t Know How It Feels / Honey Bee

Season 20, Episode 6; November 19, 1994

Petty’s fifth of eight appearances on SNL came during his Wildflowers cycle and boasted a new, temporary Heartbreaker behind the drum kit: Dave Grohl. The performance interestingly falls between the latter’s post-Nirvana, pre-Foo Fighters period, and he hits those cans heavy.

You Don’t Know How It Feels was a crowd pleaser, but the real treat is Honey Bee. The swamp-soupy garage-blues tune had Mike Campbell dripping out liquid gold guitar leads, but Petty hits an uncaged-and-uncouth, bendy solo of his own.

23. Aerosmith on Wayne’s World

Season 15, Episode 13; February 17, 1990

Satirically or not, SNL’s resident headbangers-cum-cable access hosts hoisted the flag for heavy music during a time where the show probably should have booked more metal acts.

Nevertheless, Wayne and Garth still got their party on with Aerosmith one time, with Joe Perry and Brad Whitford beefing up Mike Myers’ mock-squealing Wayne’s World theme as a basic-but-brawny basement rocker. Aerosmith also hit a pair of Pump tunes for the show, but this was their biggest bash of the night.

22. Fear – Beef Baloney

Season 7, Episode 4; October 31, 1981

Fear was brought onto SNL as a favor to fan and then-former castmate John Belushi, whom showrunners were hoping would pop back on the program for a cameo.

Fear then invited hardcore kids from across the Eastern seaboard – including members of Minor Threat and Negative Approach – to mosh out during a chaotic four-song medley. Bassist Lee Ving is constantly chasing a micstand as it gets knocked about by stage divers.

21. Phoebe Bridgers – I Know the End

Season 46, Episode 11; February 6, 2021

Phoebe Bridgers wasn’t the first person to smash a guitar on SNL, but she’s the one who got the most flak for it. I Know the End starts subtle, but the indie-rocker ended up primal screaming her way through the climax – which likewise found co-guitarist Harrison Whitford delivering quixotic scalework – before yanking off her jet black Danelectro and decimating it against a speaker wedge. The misogyny brigade tried to shame her on socials; Bridgers sold the axe for $100,000 and donated it all to charity.

20. Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band – Hot Head / Ashtray Heart

Season 6, Episode 2; December 22, 1980

Beefheart’s underrated early ’80s period found the experimental icon making music with the meanest-sounding iteration of his Magic Band. They put on a feisty performance for a shocked SNL crowd – guitarist Moris Tepper, in particular, spewing hot fire with his junk-blues sliding.

Beefheart cradled a cigarette, brilliantly rifling off a dadaist word salad through a haggard wheeze that sounded like his lungs had burnt right down to the filter.

19. Living Colour – Cult of Personality / Open Letter (to a Landlord)

Season 14, Episode 16; April 1, 1989

Living Colour’s April Fool’s appearance found Vernon Reid going off-the-charts gonzo with his inspired fusion playing.

He cut loose through a mind-bending, minute-long solo on Cult of Personality and then leaned into a vivid display of ambulance siren-styled inverted bending on Open Letter (to a Landlord).

The only thing that might’ve outshone Reid’s playing was Corey Glover’s extremely late-’80s, iridescent purple-and-yellow BodyGlove wetsuit.

18. Rihanna (with Nuno Bettencourt) – Diamonds

Season 38, Episode 7; November 10, 2012

Nuno Bettencourt never got the funk out on SNL during Extreme’s peak. Despite this, the Boston virtuoso was able to shine bright like a diamond when he popped up on the show as part of Rihanna’s backing band. The focal point is the pop star, without question, and Bettencourt begins the song with minimalist, volume pot-craning ambiance. But by song’s end, he’s soaring through the mix with a boldly prismatic vibrato.

17. David Bowie – Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)

Season 22, Episode 12; February 8, 1997

Armed with a Parker Fly, an unruly series of harmonic slides and an onslaught of out-of-control pinch-squeals, ace guitarist Reeves Gabrels (nowadays a member of the Cure) was a beast to behold on Scary Monsters.

Bowie & Co. were supposed to play something off 1997’s Earthling, but they went rogue and performed the retro cut as a form of protest after the singer objected to a sketch idea – and as a dig on Lorne Michaels, who told Bowie about a terrifying cocaine binge he’d been on while listening to Scary Monsters in the ’80s.

They were ushered out of the building ASAP. Bowie reportedly regretted not grabbing the fruit basket on the way out.

16. Top of the Pops sketch (aka Ian Rubbish & the Bizarros – It’s a Lovely Day)

Season 38, Episode 21; May 18, 2013

Fred Armisen’s SNL tenure was full of musical characters, one of his most memorable being comically hate-filled Spirit of ’77 punk eccentric Ian Rubbish.

While the U.K. snarler had many memorable lyrical barbs, Armisen’s last show as a full-time cast member found him slapping on Rubbish’s peroxide wig and a Fano Alt de Facto to deliver an earnest farewell anthem called It’s a Lovely Day.

It turns into a jam featuring Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein, the Sex Pistols’ Steve Jones, J Mascis, Aimee Mann and Michael Penn. Is this one of Armisen’s top-10 greatest TV appearances of all time? Yeah, probably.

15. H.E.R. – Hold On

Season 46, Episode 4; October 24, 2020

H.E.R. wowed guitar-heads doubly in this Season 46 standout moment. She shot melodious, mile-wide vibrato through the ceiling during a revelatory performance of R&B slow jam Hold On.

She also used her time on SNL to showcase a then-brand-new signature Fender Chrome Glow Strat, which reflected a rainbowed array of colors beneath the stage lights that was almost as resplendent as her tone.

14. Robert Cray – Smoking Gun / Right Next Door (Because of Me)

Season 12, Episode 13; February 28, 1987

While Smoking Gun was tight, we’re going to suggest that it’s Cray’s run-through of Right Next Door that left a stronger impression on the music-loving public.

There’s a sleek, clean-channel mystique coursing through the smooth-blues arrangement, Cray accenting his adulterous tale with perfect, passionately plinking accent rhythms.

By song’s end, he bait-and-switches us with a yearning backend climax of wry little wriggles and finger-snapped string work. Of course, if you're going back and watching all these, don't deprive yourself of Smoking Gun.

13. The Smashing Pumpkins – Cherub Rock

Season 19, Episode 5; October 30, 1993

The Pumpkins went in for the kill during their first appearance on SNL. The performance of loud-quiet-loud classic Today was spectacular, but the alt-rock champs went nuclear on Cherub Rock.

Billy Corgan shreds his sinewy vocal cords throughout and wails a furious solo on his modded Bat-Strat. James Iha likewise gets in a few nasty and textural bends before they put this all-out bash to bed.

12. Beastie Boys – Ricky’s Theme / Heart Attack Man

Season 20, Episode 8; December 10, 1994

The Beasties’ second muscial spot of the night began with instrumental soul jam Ricky’s Theme, where auxiliary Beasties player Money Mark’s morning glory electric piano glistened against Ad-Rock’s sly-and-wily wah-wah guitar and MCA’s lithe standup basslines.

An extended cymbal segue leads to gear-swapping and a furious aesthetic pivot, as the Boys then go buckwild with a pacemaker-exploding old-school hardcore freakout. Ad-Rock smashes an S-shape into the ground – splinters fly into the air as the screen fades to black.

11. Adam Sandler – Lunch Lady Land

Season 19, Episode 11; January 15, 1994

From Red Hooded Sweatshirt to The Chanukah Song, most of Adam Sandler’s SNL music went unplugged. But unencumbered by the confines of the Weekend Update desk, the Sandman went full-electric with a black Gibson Les Paul to strum this Bruce Springsteen-ian opus about elementary foodstuffs revolting against their maker.

Sandler sells his Jungleland rip with goofball heartland earnestness. Of course, the sight of Chris Farley’s hair-netted Lunch Lady gracefully plié-ing across the stage near Kevin Nealon’s sentient Manwich pushes the performance into all-timer territory.

10. Fishbone – Sunless Saturday / Everyday Sunshine

Season 16, Episode 16; March 23, 1991

Despite its gloom-clouded song title, Fishbone were beyond brilliant on Sunless Saturday. Frontman Angelo Moore somersaulted across the stage with manic energy and put on an acrobatic vocal performance. John Norwood Fisher flexed thick bass thwaps across the soul-metal fusion piece.

A double-strapped Kendall Jones switched between acoustic strums and flanged-out-and-frantic tap solos on an S-shape. Keeping things on-theme, they then dipped into the funkily Vitamin D-dosed “Everyday Sunshine” for their second song.

9. St. Vincent – Birth in Reverse

Season 39, Episode 21; May 17, 2014

While the Season 39 finale brought out rappers 2 Chainz and Lil Jon for a pair of sketches, Annie Clark commanded the stage with playfully panicked art-punk energy during her performance of Birth in Reverse. Early on, she’s twitching out jazz chords on a vintage 1955 M-75 Aristocrat.

By the finale, a choreography routine finds St. Vincent and guitarist Toko Yasuda harmonizing post-shred bristliness while parading the stage like a pair of nectar-crazy hummingbirds.

8. Elvis Costello – Radio Radio

Season 3, Episode 8; December 17, 1977

“I’m sorry ladies and gentlemen; there’s no reason to do this song here.” In one of the show’s most iconic moments, musical or otherwise, Elvis Costello came into 8H to play Less Than Zero but abruptly and awkwardly halted the single to re-route his band toward a spritely but unexpected Radio Radio.

The swerve had staff panicking behind the scenes. He’d later say it was because Zero was too slow; it might’ve been that its lyrics on the rise of British fascism were, well, incredibly British. Costello satirically recreated the chaos for SNL’s 25th-anniversary special in 1999, hijacking Beastie Boys’ Sabotage to once again play Radio Radio.

7. David Gilmour with G.E. Smith & the SNL Band – Song for My Sara

Season 13, Episode 7; December 12, 1987

This episode brought out two musical guests, wildly juxtaposing Buster Poindexter’s broad, brass-heavy calypso-sleaze smash Hot Hot Hot with Gilmour’s tastefully funky instrumental, Song for My Sara.

Supported by the SNL band, the latter echo-quaked melodious vibrato from his headless Steinberger GM 3T. T-Bone Wolk thumb-and-finger popped his way through the piece. G.E. Smith is all smiles while supporting the Pink Floyd legend. The song was never officially released, making Gilmour’s drop-in appearance even more unique.

6. Eddie Van Halen with G.E. Smith & the SNL Band – Stompin’ 8H

Season 12, Episode 13; February 28, 1987

Van Halen’s lone and unplanned SNL appearance arose out of boredom. As then-wife Valerie Bertinelli was rehearsing skits that week, EVH ended up in the music office trading licks with Smith, and together they whipped up a bluesy lil’ choogle named after the show’s 8H soundstage.

Eddie goes full Orca-moan on his striped Kramer 5150 before flitting between tasteful quarter-note taps and cut-throat runs. Smith is ear-to-ear grinning while chopping at his Tele. The two guitarists literally – but playfully – butt heads mid-stage, though they stood united for this memorable drop-in moment.

5. Stevie Ray Vaughan – Say What! / Change It

Season 11, Episode 10; February 15, 1986

As Double Trouble drummer Chris Layton recalled years later, host Jerry Hall’s then-husband, Mick Jagger, was around during rehearsals. Mick almost sat in with the band for their SNL debut but ultimately didn’t have the stones to go through with the team-up. Instead, a mass of Texas talent graced the stage, with SRV first hitting 12-bar instrumental Say What! as a screaming, whammy-and-wah-wild workout.

For the cocksure Change It, he strutted through flavorful blues runs alongside fellow Strat-smith, brother and Fabulous Thunderbirds co‑founder Jimmie Vaughan.

4. George Harrison and Paul Simon – Here Comes the Sun / Homeward Bound

Season 2, Episode 8; November 20, 1976

Back in the first season, Michaels went on-air to offer the Beatles a hilariously paltry $3,000 – to split however they’d like – if they appeared on his show (“You want to give Ringo less? That’s up to you”). Paul McCartney and John Lennon were apparently watching the show together in NYC and damn near took a cab to 30 Rock to collect. But it was Harrison who became the first Beatle to play on SNL, and he did it with another music icon.

In one of most stunningly tender musical moments of the early years, Harrison and Paul Simon teamed up to strum and folk-finger through the former’s Here Comes the Sun and the latter’s Homeward Bound, back to back. Outside of their acoustics and gentle vocal harmonies, it’s pin-drop silent in the studio, the audience watching history in the making.

To say the least, the performance was more than alright – it was god damned magical. McCartney would ultimately show up as a musical guest four times between 1980 and 2012, and he closed out this year’s 50th-anniversary show with another Abbey Road classic, The End. Ringo hosted in 1984.

3. Jack White – Taking Me Back / Fear of the Dawn

Season 48, Episode 13; February 25, 2023

Ever since the White Stripes bashed through a radically raw Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground on 8H in 2002, Jack White has been an SNL fixture.

On top of being a five-time musical guest, he once ripped a solo as a six-stringing wedding crasher in a 2018 sketch and also covered Rockin’ in the Free World during this year’s SNL50 concert.

While he cut a memorable double-handed tapping tribute to EVH in 2020, his mic stand-toppling, pedalboard-maximalist Taking Me Back / Fear of the Dawn medley in 2023 was a fiendishly feral display of fuzz-blown sonics and wah expressionism.

2. The Blues Brothers – Soul Man

Season 4, Episode 6; November 18, 1978

John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd prototyped their musical-brothers band in the first season with a buzzy, bee-costumed performance of Slim Harpo’s I’m a King Bee. They eventually bought some fedoras and rechristened themselves as Jake and Elwood Blues.

Flanked by members of the SNL band (blues vet Matt “Guitar” Murphy and Stax session all-stars Steve Cropper and Donald “Duck” Dunn), this Season 4 cold open is the Brothers’ defining moment – and it led them toward a hit record and a blockbuster film.

After smashing into a sweat-box vamp of Otis Redding’s I Can’t Turn You Loose, they choogle through a cool-as-ice cover of Sam & Dave’s Soul Man. Cropper steps into the spotlight with sleek vibrato waggling while Elwood honks his harmonica.

1. Frank Ocean with John Mayer – Pyramids

Season 38, Episode 1; September 12, 2012

Pop-bluesmith John Mayer’s earnest-but-animated performance style was roasted on the show several times, via squinty-eyed, fat-tongued and faux-ripping impersonations from Bill Hader, Jimmy Fallon and host Ashton Kutcher. Mayer got the last laugh with his staggering 2012 guest solo for Frank Ocean.

The R&B singer walks over to a vintage arcade cabinet and starts gaming once Mayer unearths deep, atmospheric bends on a finish-obliterated Strat. A fighting game plays on in the background, but Mayer delivers the knockout blow.

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

When Sharon Osbourne approached Tom Morello about being Back to the Beginning’s musical director, his response was immediate: “If called, I will serve.” Now the Rage Against the Machine guitarist is helping to assemble what he calls “the greatest day in the history of heavy metal, in honor of the band that started it all.”

The July 5 event will feature an unprecedented lineup of heavy bands including Metallica, Slayer, Pantera, Alice in Chains, Guns N’ Roses and Tool. Morello will be directing segments featuring legendary individual musicians like Slash, Billy Corgan, Wolfgang Van Halen, Jake E. Lee, K.K. Downing, Lzzy Hale, Duff McKagan, Rudy Sarzo and more in what he describes as revolving supergroups.

“You’re never going to know what’s going to happen next on this day, trust me,” he says.

How did you go about getting musicians on board for this event?

“People pick up the phone, dude! When you’re able to call up and say, you know, ‘Final Black Sabbath show, with all four original members. Final Ozzy Osbourne show. Happening in the birthplace of heavy metal – Birmingham, England. In the soccer stadium that these guys attended as kids. And we would love for you to come and play some songs…’ People tend to respond positively.”

So it was up to you to reach out?

“I called everybody! I looked at my heavy-metal Rolodex and just called up friends who Ozzy, Sharon and I had talked about wanting to have there. I take this job so seriously as a curator, and I’m looking at who’s gonna be the most impactful, the most meaningful, the most moving, the most fun, the most metal. [Laughs]”

What can fans expect at the show?

“With regards to the individual musicians, there’s going to be time during the day and evening for these revolving supergroups where some of the greatest drummers and guitarists and singers and bass players are going to play in different combinations, which is going to be exciting.”

Any collaborations you’re excited about?

“One thing I’m looking forward to happening is it’s the first time that Billy Corgan, [Tool guitarist] Adam Jones and myself will be playing together. Three dudes from northern Illinois! Adam and I went to high school together. Billy grew up a couple towns over. All of us were so influenced by Black Sabbath, but we’ve never played together. So that’s something I’m really psyched about.”

What is your personal history with Black Sabbath?

“I remember very clearly being scared shitless when I saw the Sabbath Bloody Sabbath album cover as a child… and then I fell in love with the music. Paranoid was the first record I got. Iron Man was the first hook that drew me in, and it began riff imprinting on me. It’s a cornerstone of every song I’ve ever been a part of.”

What sets Tony Iommi apart as a guitarist?

“Along with Jimmy Page, he’s the greatest riff writer of all time. The riffs are so heavy, and there’s also great grooves. I remember an early guitar lesson where I was learning, I don’t know, Sweet Leaf or something like that. And the teacher, who was a bit of a muso, was kind of denigrating Tony’s playing, saying, ‘These riffs are so simple.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, but he wrote them and they’re just awesome!’

“Like, simple doesn’t take it off the awesome scale. [Laughs] I’ve always tried to keep that in mind in my riff writing. Because the more you develop technically as a musician, sometimes you start to think that if it’s not complicated, it’s not good. So I’m constantly bringing myself back to the incredible catalog of Tony Iommi and his great riffs. He is a singular stylist.”

You’ve worked with Ozzy before. Any funny stories?

“There was one time where Ozzy nearly blew up me and Slash. We joined him and his band as guests at the Voodoo Fest in New Orleans [in 2015], and during a part of the show where we weren’t playing, the two of us were sitting behind the stage chatting. And there’s this crew guy at the side of the stage who’s apoplectic.

“He’s gesturing wildly to us, and finally he gets the courage to come over. And he says, ‘You guys are sitting on the pyro!’ So yeah, Ozzy nearly blew us up. Anyway, we survived that.”

Given your history with these guys, how does it feel to be given this responsibility?

“It’s a great honor and I take it really seriously. This is something meant to pay tribute to one of the greatest bands of all time, and it’s going to be a really special day.

“Every day we kind of go through the run-of-show and the stuff that’s changing – who’s added, who’s subtracted and what other elements are going to be there that are going to make it even more spectacular. But it’s a labor of love. I can’t wait for July 5.”

• Black Sabbath's final performance will be livestreamed on July 5. See Back to the Beginning for details.
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

Tom Morello, Slash, and a host of big names joined forces as The Freedom Fighter Orchestra on Friday (February 7), with the Rage Against The Machine ripper spearheading the second of two performances in aid of the LA wildfire relief.

Members of System of a Down, Wu-Tang Clan, Maneskin, and The Struts also featured alongside Morello’s shred-laden son, Roman, as part of a mammoth set at the Fonda Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard.

Unsurprisingly, it was the Guns N’ Roses man's three-song cameo that stole the show. He joined the set late on, ripping through an original and two classic rock bangers peppered with sweet, bluesy leads.

“Sounds just like Slash, doesn't it,” Morello laughed as the guitarist plugged into a Marshall stack. They quickly turned to Interstate 80, the song the pair wrote over lockdown, which sees them trading blazing solos like they're going out of fashion and neither of them held back here, either.

Next on the bill was MC5’s Kick Out the Jams – previously covered by RATM and, more recently, at Soundgarden’s first show since Chris Cornell’s passing – before rounding out with the snake-hipped AC/DC classic, Dirty Deeds (Done Dirt Cheap).

Again, there are solos aplenty from Slash, wearing a beanie and glasses for the occasion, and shredding like he’s got his feet up in his living room with no one watching – making for a spontaneous, off-the-cuff performance.

That latter track was brought together by a sizable cast, with Måneskin's Thomas Raggi, SOAD bass player Shavo Odadjian, and The Struts singer Luke Spiller all joining in, after Raggi and Spiller had dropped in for Måneskin's Morello-bolstered Gossip earlier on in the night.

Wu-Tang Clan's RZA then stepped in to keep up the momentum, performing Ain't Nuthin' to Fuck Wit, while Roman Morello – a player his father says “can shred circles around me” – stepped up for his dad's career-defining hit, Killing in the Name, alongside Soldier in the Army of Love, the song he wrote with his dad.

The LA Wildfires started on January 7 and have caused widespread damage to the infamous American city. Many musicians, including Iron Maiden’s Adrain Smith and Primus’ Larry LaLonde, have lost their homes and gear.

The industry has responded by putting together a string of benefit shows, initiatives, and raffles to help support those most affected. Fender, Gibson, Guitar Center, and Spiritbox's Mike Stringer have helped raise vital funds.

Another benefit show saw an unexpected Nirvana reunion. The band was fronted by four mega-talented women, including Joan Jett and Grammy-winning shredder St. Vincent.

The idea had come from Dave Grohl, who wanted to use their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame performance to showcase female talent, and that legacy continued in incendiary fashion at the end of January.

“If we can fill the performance with these incredible women singing Nirvana songs, then we’ll have achieved our own revolution,” he had said to Rolling Stone about the Hall of Fame show.

For his revolution, Morello rounded-out his monstrous set with a RATM/Audioslave medley (in E, key fans) and concluded with Power to the People.

All merchandise proceeds and a portion of the ticket sales from the events at Anaheim's House of Blues and the Fonda Theatre have gone to LA Wildfire Relief.

For nearly two decades with Rage Against the Machine and six years with Audioslave, Tim Commerford has navigated a never-ending quest for the ultimate distortion tone. He's built his own stompboxes. He's tinkered with his amps. He's even wound his own pickups – by hand. And he's as secretive as he is satisfied about the progress of his one-man tone trek.

“I'm like the Pablo Escobar of bass,” he told Bass Player, referring to the notoriously violent drug kingpin. “If a dude works on my pedalboard, it's almost like I have to kill him after he's done. I don't, but a few times I've told people, ‘If you let anyone know what you've done to my 'board, I'm coming back!’”

With his larger-than-life personality, and obsessiveness about his sound, it's easy to see how Commerford has become one of the most distinctive voices in rock bass. But don't be too quick to categorize him: he's also a jazz fan who's studied upright and actively applies the advice of Jaco Pastorius to his bass playing.

Since Commerford first set about establishing a bass sound for Rage by using a Marshall Guv’nor stompbox for riff-rock distortion, he has constantly experimented with his tone and he is quite secretive about his discoveries.

“My setup is my shit; I spent 10 years getting it to be the way it is, and for me to just break it down and tell everyone exactly what I've done, is just blowing it.”

Still, he confided some of his gear secrets to Bass Player.

For Commerford, it all starts with pickups. For a time his main bass was a BEAD-tuned Fender Jazz with an ash body, maple Precision neck, and Leo Quann Badass bridge. That bass contained the pickups from a similar instrument he used on three Rage albums and numerous tours.

“I smashed that bass on MTV and I regret it to this day. It had these '70s Jazz pickups I got in England. When I'm on tour I'll go to all these luthier shops and look for Jazz pickups.”

After Commerford acquired those pickups, he rewound them by hand, which he says gave him more sustain and feedback. “To wind pickups by hand, you have to take your time and slowly stack the wires. It's not the kind of thing you can do in one day; it took me about two weeks.

“I liken it to winding the winch on my four-wheel-drive truck: You don't want to just hit the rewind button and let it stack up wherever it wants. You want it to stack perfectly so it almost looks brand-new. And thicker wire doesn't take as long to wrap. I don’t look for the cleanest sound; I like that edgy, dirty tone. If you use different wire on your pickups, you'll absolutely get a different sound.”

One of Commerford's main musical goals is to fill the sonic space of both bass and rhythm guitar, especially during Tom Morello's guitar solos.

“During the show, I know fools are focusing on those solos, but when Tom goes from rhythm guitar to solo, I jump that shit up to another level, and it sounds like nothing drops out. If I don't already have it maxed out, I will max it out during his solos.”

Commerford achieves his multi-level bass sound with a three-rig setup: one amp and cabinet for a clean sound, one for a middle-of-the-road overdrive, and one for full-on distortion. The clean sound always stays on, and he can kick in the two other layers of grit using a custom pedalboard switching system.

“You can try to figure it out, but there's no way you ever will. I even have cords on my shit that don't do anything!”

Before the switcher splits the bass signal into three paths, it goes through a delay pedal, so that all three parts of the signal are affected when Commerford kicks in the delay. While his clean sound remains stompbox-free, post-switcher distortion and wah pedals feed his two edgier sounds.

Commerford's ultimate secret weapon is a one-of-a-kind, custom-made distortion box, based on a pedal he crafted himself from parts of an old wah pedal. “My distortion comes before everything else. If you have a good distortion box, then all the other pedals work great.

“I always shoot for distortion that sounds like a saw blade without a lot of teeth. It's not like a guitar distortion that goes sshhhhh; it's more like a gritty a-a-a-gghhh! As of late, though, l've been getting more of my distortion by turning up the amp gain and the master volume. That's the best distortion.”

After the distortion stompboxes, Commerford has a pair of bass wahs, one going to each of his distortion rigs. “When I use the wah, it's not just the highs or the mids, it's the whole range. I've got my foot on both wahs at the same time; I put a piece of wood on top of them so I can use them like one pedal.”

Commerford's favorite recorded sound with Rage Against The Machine was on the group's second album, Evil Empire, on which he used two SVT heads and two Classic 8x10 cabinets, both mic'd and direct.

“I let producers use as much DI as they want until I start noticing it. Those clackety sounds that come out of it are not good. With three amps and cabinets, it's like there are two other guys waiting backstage to come back me up. It just thickens things up and brings in more tone. And it's ultimately about the tone.”

The announcement of Ozzy Osbourne's return – and last-ever live performance – on July 5 marks the historic reunion of the original Black Sabbath members for their first show in 20 years.

Dubbed ‘Back to the Beginning’, this homecoming – and, frankly, celebration of a great legacy – takes Sabbath back to where it all began: Birmingham.

However, instead of a traditional headliner-and-support-style show, this event will bring together some of rock’s most influential, generation-spanning talents – a supergroup, if you will, or a “very supergroup,” as Tony Iommi shared with Planet Rock – for what already looks like an event destined for the history books.

Most intriguing among the lineup is a Tool, Rage Against the Machine and Smashing Pumpkins supergroup, teased by Sharon Osbourne, who appears in the same interview.

“Tom Morello is going to be playing with Billy Corgan and you know the drummer from Tool [Danny Carey]. You wouldn't have thought that you would see those three guys together, but they're all from Chicago, so they're all home guys,” says Osbourne.

“Then you’ll see Slash and Duff [McKagan] and whoever they choose to play with,” she elaborates in an interview with NME. “David Draiman [Disturbed] is going to come up and sing, Jonathan [Davis] from KoRn is going to be here and he could be playing with [Red Hot Chili Peppers’] Chad Smith or whoever! Alice In Chains are coming and they’re playing as the band.”

As Osbourne explains, assembling all these big names was no easy feat – but their willingness to commit is a testament to Ozzy’s legacy and, by extension, Black Sabbath’s.

“People are coming in from all over the world – they're all gigging because it's the summer, so everybody's out doing festivals, and somehow, it worked. Bands like Anthrax, we asked them to be a part of it, and they said, ‘Oh, don't even bother to send us a ticket. We're going to be there no matter what.’”

After all, as Osbourne puts it, “This is a celebration – of the genre and the pioneers who started it and passed it on to all these bands. Usually, this thing is done when you’re dead – so it’s nice that these guys can be alive to be appreciated!”

Tickets for the mega-event go on sale on February 14, with proceeds from the show set to be shared equally between Cure Parkinson’s, Birmingham Children’s Hospital, and Acorn Children’s Hospice.

Visit Live Nation for tickets.

NAMM 2025: Ernie Ball Music Man has unveiled a new signature guitar for Tim Commerford, which serves as an ode to the bassist’s beloved pawnshop StingRay that featured on the first Rage Against The Machine record.

Two formats have been introduced: an active four-string in a Xavier Green finish and a Quentin Blue-colored passive edition.

Commerford – whose politically-driven basslines helped raise the profile of the StingRay bass significantly – says he fell in love with the StingRay as soon as he saw it.

“This is a bass that I fell in love with at a pawnshop and used to play the first Rage record,” he remembers. “I’m proud to play these basses and feel wholeheartedly that they are the best basses I’ve ever played in my life.”

It’s high praise for the StingRay, which has been further optimized as part of this limited signature run. Only 50 of each variant have been made, and Commerford was heavily involved in every step of the build process to ensure his pawnshop star got a faithful recreation, with some modern tweaks to boot.

There is a minor Commerford flourish – his name is engraved into the neck plate, alongside his logo and the model’s number – but otherwise, they stay true to the DNA of the bass that has rarely left his side throughout his career.

Solid ash bodies and roasted maple necks with five-bolt joints and ebony fretboards are common across their respective specs, while painted headstocks to match the body colorways and black lightweight clover-style peg heads are nice aesthetic touches. They’re augmented by classic oval pickguards.

They both also feature string-through bridges, which benefit from vintage plated saddles and adjustable mute pads. Further adjustability comes via the custom finger ramp for setting the height of the beveled thumb rest to each player's desired point.

Naturally, they deviate when it comes it electronics, but they are in fact different takes of the same recipe. Both passive and active models feature StingRay humbuckers with neodymium magnets, “bringing you more output and a wider range of sounds”.

The passive model offers a three-position parallel/single-coil/series pickup rotary switch and a push volume control with a passive gain boost to ensure its tones cover a wide spectrum. The active ’bucker, meanwhile, comes with a three-band preamp with 18 volts of extra clean headroom.

Commerford, who leans heavily on his picking hand thumb, sees the adjustable thumb ramp – positioned beside the pickps – as a worthy USP for his twin signatures.

“This is what truly makes this bass unique,” he says. “If you’re a thumb player and you anchor down like I do, to just have a few spots to be able to put your hand that are comfortable is really helpful.

“It’s a Music Man StingRay, but better than that, it’s my own version of that,” Commerford states. “This bridge, to me, is a work of art, and the mutes that are on it really are useful, especially for effects, distortion and whatnot.”

The Tim Commerford StingRay models are available now, priced at $3,099 apiece. Check out Ernie Ball Music Man for more.

Before they emerged as two of the biggest progressive and alternative metal guitar players of the ’90s and early ’00s in their respective bands, Tom Morello and Adam Jones were high school buddies.

Morello, who would go on to fight the system with Rage Against The Machine’s change-making rap metal, has now taken to Instagram to reflect on their early friendship and the impact it’s had on their careers.

Jones, it turns out, played bass in Morello’s high school band, The Electric Sheep, named as a reference to a Philip K. Dick dystopian science-fiction novel. It’s anyone’s guess which of the two players coined the name – it could have been either of them, and it’s very fitting.

While Jones – who would later delve into more progressive waters with Tool – provided the band’s low-end, he also taught Tom Morello some valuable tips and tricks that would help shape the player he is today.

“He showed me chords, pinch harmonics, drove us to see Judas Priest at Alpine Valley in his pickup truck for inspiration, and was ceaselessly encouraging to me when I was a beginning guitarist,” says Morello.

And, when Jones needed a place to stay when he first moved to LA, Morello was more than happy to strike a deal that mutually benefitted both parties. Again, Jones’ presence would have a huge impact on Morello’s life.

“Adam was my roommate briefly when he first landed in LA and paid his rent by sharing his extensive (and exotic) VHS collection with us,” he says. “He was also responsible for helping jump-start my career when he dragged me out of bed on a work night to go all the way downtown to Al’s Bar where a great band called Lock Up was playing. I later joined the band and got a record deal.”

As Morello cut his teeth in his pre-RATM bands, Jones formed Tool, a group that, according to Morello, was exceptional from day dot.

“I saw his band Tool at their first show and was stunned,” he recalls. “They arrived fully formed and fully great. They also were kind enough to invite Rage Against the Machine to open for them numerous times in Hollywood clubs which greatly helped grow our following and get us attention.”

In all, he says he’s “proud and pleased that all these years later he and his band are thriving and kicking ass around the world”.

Suffice to say, Morello’s career hasn’t been too shabby, either. He’ll be hoping to channel some of Jones’ paternal care and wisdom upon his shred-crazy son, Roman, who apparently “can shred rings around” his father.

“What’s the state of the guitar?” Tom Morello asks. “How is it? Do people still play?” He’s asking because his 13-year-old son Roman has recently been ripping it up, as evidenced by Soldier in the Army of Love, a song they wrote together.

When told by Guitar World that the guitar is alive and flourishing, he replies: “I’m doing everything I can. Roman will be, too. Somebody's gotta break through. Perhaps this Post Malone song… my thought was it could be like the Beat It of pop.”

But the song he’s talking about – and leads him to compare Malone to his late Audioslave bandmate Chris Cornell – remains unreleased. “If you’ve got Post’s cell number, tell them to finish the song because it's an absolute banger!” Morello says. “People will lose their minds!”

The Rage Against the Machine co-founder has had a busy 2024. He’s made appearances on stage with everyone from Jane’s Addiction to Buddy Guy. “If you look at my history of collaboration, there’s crazy diversity,” he says. “From Pete Seeger to Kirk Hammett to Chuck D…

“I’ve made 22 records now, and I’m in the process of making what will be my first real solo rock record. While there will be some collaborations on it, it’s not going to be dependent on one person. But one person I can guarantee will be on it is Roman Morello.”

While he often changes genres, he’s long since stopped changing his rig, which he perfected out of frustration in 1988. “I was having so much anxiety about trying to get a great sound that I wasn’t writing songs or doing anything with the sound I had,” he recalls.

“So I made markings on my amp for the sound and just stopped thinking about it. Those are the same markings on that amp, for the same guitar. They’re the same markings for every Rage record, every Audioslave record, every Prophets of Rage record and every live show I’ve ever played.

“There's a lesson to be drawn from that: sometimes chasing tone or chasing stuff through gear may not be where your creativity can blossom to its highest degree.”

You’ve said your son Roman can shred circles around you. When did you realize he was so talented?

“During the pandemic, while everybody else was learning to make sourdough bread, he was in a room practicing for hours and hours a day. When it began, my kids were not all interested in playing music. But I said to my son – who likes Led Zeppelin – ‘If you can take a couple of minutes away from Zoom school, or playing Fortnite, I’ll teach you the first three notes of Stairway to Heaven.’”

“He thought he could probably spare five minutes of his day, so I taught him the first three notes, and he did pretty well. The next day I said, ‘How about the next three notes?’ He said, ‘Okay, sure.’ On the third day he asked me if he could continue on the journey, and never got off it. Soon we were learning the guitar solo.

“I took guitar lessons when I was 13, and that convinced me to never play an instrument and to put the guitar down for four years! I learned that the genesis of someone playing the guitar is a very, very fragile time.

“So I wanted to make it totally positive. I knew he liked this song, and we were going to make it bite-sized, so it was fun. It’s an instant accomplishment. He just got going with it, and it’s been so great to watch that journey. Pretty soon he was learning Randy Rhoads solos on his own, and then we started writing together.”

How big of an influence has your style been on Roman’s?

“My kids never really knew what I did for a living. Honestly, they’d never heard of Rage Against the Machine. I never played Rage for them, and I never played Audioslave for them, ever. It wasn’t really until 2022, when we began rehearsing for the Rage tour, that they really knew what Dad did for a living. I was just the guy who drove them to all their Little League games!

“To be exposed to that power and those riffs at a time when you’re learning guitar was important. He’s got that Morellian DNA to begin with – but being exposed to five nights in a row at Madison Square Garden was pretty powerful.”

What’s it been like writing with him?

“He began writing riffs kind of in his dad’s vein, and some of them were pretty good. Over time I would hear something coming out of his room, and I’m like, ‘Can I borrow that?’ That’s how we wrote Soldier in the Army of Love. Those riffs are his and I’m the lyricist; that’s my contribution to the song. The rest of it is him, his riffs and his shredding.

“He’s in sort of a sweet spot, where there are great riffs that are low-hanging fruit. So I've been harvesting that fruit for future collaborations. And more recently he wrote the music for the end title of the Venom movie. I sent them about 25 ideas that were just sitting on my phone, and the one they picked was one of Roman’s!”

There’s talk of an unreleased track you did with Post Malone, who you recently compared to Chris Cornell. That’s heavy praise.

“His process was very similar to Chris’ in that, whatever music I threw at him, he would mumble melodies that were pretty damn compelling right off the bat. There was a natural inclination to come up with great melodies; they have that in common.”

Speaking of Chris, what’s the status of the unreleased Audioslave recordings?

“There’s no good reason why they’re not out. Every time this comes up, I get messages from people getting on me! But yeah, there are great songs there. It had to do with band dynamics more than anything else. There’s some great Chris Cornell performances, and great Audioslave songs that are waiting to be unleashed.

“We’ll have to get it together and figure it out. There's nothing preventing those songs from coming out other than us getting our act together and doing it.”

Are there any Rage Against the Machine songs in the vault?

“No, there’s not.”

Over the summer you jammed with Jane’s Addiction and swapped guitars with Dave Navarro. What was that like?

“I’ve been a fan of Jane’s Addiction since they were a club band in Los Angeles, and I’m a huge fan of Dave’s playing in that band. I’ve been on stage with them a number of times. I love the fact that my favorite Jane’s memories are when they're set up in a rehearsal room backstage, where Stephen Perkins and Navarro play through a heavy metal catalog.

“They’re like a jukebox of Maiden, Ozzy, Dio; they know it all and can play it all. Watching them do that was one of my favorite things. But Dave is great – I know we’re both getting up there and we’re just going to shred our butts off together. It’s an honor to rock Mountain Song with those guys any time I have the chance.”

Dave told GW a story about your band Lock Up coming on stage and pretending to be Jane’s way back in the day. What are your memories of that?

“Yeah! Perry Farrell was friends with the singer in my band Lock Up. It was a big New Year’s Eve homecoming show. I think it was ’87 turning into ’88, and the place was packed. Perry asked us to impersonate them and play. I had a Dave Navarro wig, and the singer had these fake braids! I remember coming on, and people were losing it.

“It was the first time I really felt what it was like on stage when someone doesn’t love a band, but the people believe in a band. And I was an imposter out there. I was fake Dave Navarro! We played the song, the lights went out and Jane’s came on and finished it. I think the audience was just bewildered by it, but it was an extremely memorable New Year’s Eve.”

You hopped on stage with Buddy Guy last year. How do you rate your blues chops?

“Buddy Guy is a Chicago staple of history and culture. I was opening up for him in Brazil. His righthand man came over before the show and said, ‘Buddy would like you to join him on stage for a song.’ I said, ‘I would be honored to do so.’

“At 80-something years old, he still has it. He’s a great player, and he has sexual magnetism that is undiminished from his youth – like, ladies are going crazy, you know? But I play a lot of different styles that don’t necessarily litter my records, and it was fun to get up there. I did my best to stay in my box.”

Martyn LeNoble recently offered his memories of you and him working with Layne Staley on The Faculty soundtrack. What are your recollections of making that track?

“That was Layne’s last recording. We were never in the same room, though he recorded his parts up in Seattle. Layne was someone I considered a really good friend, and my memories are ones I cherish. He was so funny; he had such a great sense of humor, he was so smart, and he had this great, self-effacing sense of humor. We would argue laughingly for hours about which one of us was more metal.

“My memory of that was that we put together the track for this thing, and Layne was not in a great place. It was sort of hard to get the vocals finished. I will say that I think he did a great job; it’s his swan song as a recording artist.”

Fender has talked about wanting to produce more replicas of your guitars. Could that include a replica of Arm the Homeless?

“The only time I’ve done an endorsement is when it’s really my thing, like the Soul Power one. They promised me they would make it exactly like the guitar – and they did. It’s crazy just how identical it is to that guitar that played on all the Audioslave records. I don’t have a vast collection of notable guitars, but I’m open to the idea.”

Why don’t you like endorsements?

“I did a distortion pedal [MXR Power 50], and that sounds exactly like the sound of my amp. The thing I don’t like about endorsements is that when I saw them as a kid, my favorite players would be selling a new guitar that was not the brand of the guitar that they played on the albums that I liked. It just didn’t feel right to me.

“So when it’s my song, my book, my movie; when it’s my pedal, when it’s my guitar, I’m happy to endorse it to the moon – but that’s all. Everybody’s got to make up their own mind about what’s for sale and what’s not. Convincing people to buy a product that’s not the one they like on your work always felt a little funny to me.

“Having said that, I will proudly proclaim my son Roman just became a Marshall endorsee. And I stand behind his decision!”

There’s a lot of new gear out there. The tendency is to want all of it. Is there anything you’re especially jazzed about?

“I don’t have that problem – you say we want to try all of it; frankly, I want to try none of it! I am still crafting and harvesting new and exciting music from the gear I’ve been using since 1988, and some of it from before. If somebody’s got some awesome new pedal or whatever, send it my way and I’ll plug it in; but I’m not looking for new stuff.”

Why haven’t you strayed from that rig?

“I made a personal, artistic decision long ago. I had a Marshall half-stack that got stolen, and I had a recording session the next day. I had to buy something and they had a solid-state head or a tube head. I bought the tube head, which is a 50-watt Marshall 2205 channel switching head.

“They had one 4x12 cabinet, which was a Peavey. That was my gear. And I had a guitar made by a custom maker that I hated everything about. I changed everything except the block of wood, and I couldn't stand my sound. I was trying for a sound in my head that I was never going to get.

“I was so frustrated. I was buying gear, different guitar necks, different pickups. I spent one day – which was a life-changing day – in a rehearsal room on the Eastside of LA, where I worked on my sound for about two-and-a-half hours. I finally gave up. I was like, ‘I’m never gonna love the sound that I get out of this guitar and this amp. I’m gonna stop thinking about it. This is going to be my sound.’”

Steve Stevens recently reminded GW that you had a big hand in getting Randy Rhoads inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And you’ve been championing Iron Maiden of late. What are your feelings about the Rock Hall?

“A lot of great bands have gotten into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame more recently, in part because they’ve had stronger advocates in the room. I’m one of those advocates. I have to give credit to the Hall of Fame – they put me in the room because I complained so damn much!

“When I toured with Bruce Springsteen, at every hotel bar I’d make a case to his manager, John Landau, who’s on the nominating committee for the Hall of Fame. My argument was: if you’re a kid playing little league baseball, your dream is that you might one day end up in Cooperstown, in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

“But if you’re a hard rock guitar player, you don’t care about the Hall of Fame because none of your favorite bands are in there. To John’s credit, he put me in the room and said, ‘Make your case.’ I did for Kiss, Rush, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Judas Priest and Randy Rhoads.

“It really opened the door and people’s minds and hearts to the idea that it shouldn’t be such a precious curated thing, and that an entire genre of music was been overlooked. But I will say that one thing that people get wrong is that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame should be just for rock ’n’ roll bands.

“That’s not what it’s for. Public Enemy is more rock ’n’ roll than 95 percent of all the hair metal bands that ever picked up an instrument, you know? It’s music that has spirit to it, like a youth spirit… I think rock ’n’ roll should have a very, very broad sense. I think there’s room for a lot of different genres.”

So how are you going to get Maiden in?

“I have a hit list! The last one on my extended Mount Rushmore hit list is Iron Maiden. It’s strategic. This year I’m all in on Maiden. I know they don’t care – I don’t care that they don’t care because I think it’s the place where they belong.”

You’ve just played two shows to celebrate Wayne Kramer. What does his music mean to you?

“First of all, MC5 was punk rock before there was a name for it. They were the cornerstone – they built the scaffold on which punk rock exists. Without them, there is no Rage Against the Machine, no System of a Down, no Clash, Sex Pistols, Ramones; none of that.

“Their fearlessness, both musically and politically, was hugely inspirational to me. Their live recording of Kick Out the Jams might be the greatest moment of rock ’n’ roll that's ever been captured. It was the first time anybody cussed on a record and the first time anybody had the audacity to say that human liberation can be found in what we’re doing in this room tonight.

“That’s why I think they got into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year – though sadly it’s after all the members had passed away. But Wayne was a great friend of mine; he was one of the best humans I ever knew. He went from selling drugs, being in prison, and being a real rascal to someone who saved hundreds of people’s lives.

“He created this organization called Jail Guitar Doors. The shows sold out in two minutes, so I’m glad to raise money for a great organization in honor of Wayne.”

• Tom Morello’s new album is due out in 2025.

There have been all kinds of Fender Stratocasters through the 70 years since its release, some traditional, some modern, while others, such as Tom Morello’s Soul Power Strat, embrace the modular aspect of Leo Fender’s design and are modded into something new.

Yes, it’s still a Strat – a Designer Series Strat, to be precise – but as the Rage Against the Machine guitarist tells us, it is a Strat with a whole raft of changes to facilitate his unorthodox style, and usher in a new era for him artistically as he hooked up with the late Chris Cornell and co for Audioslave.

This, Soul Power, is the Audioslave Strat, and it is one of the coolest electric guitars in 21st century rock.

Where and when did you buy your “Soul Power” Strat?

“What’s interesting about the Soul Power guitar is that I had never played a Strat before. But around the time Audioslave was forming, I was looking for a new guitar to be my primary form of expression. I ended up going into a Guitar Center in Hollywood, and I found this Strat on the wall and took it home.”

Why did you choose this Strat above the others at Guitar Center?

“I literally saw it as a blank canvas. I wanted to have something totally different from what I’d had previously. I loved its stock form but needed to make it my guitar. I wanted it to be unique to point toward a new batch of songs.

“We were entering this new sonic landscape led by Chris Cornell’s amazing vocals, so I wanted a guitar that could undertake that new level of nuance and undertake new sounds that I hadn’t heard before from my other guitars.”

Did you use this guitar on any notable recordings?

“I used it on songs like Cochise, Like a Stone and I Am the Highway. It was the guitar I used on all three of Audioslave’s records. The Soul Power guitar was the Audioslave guitar!”

What about this guitar felt right in your hands compared to your “Arm the Homeless” guitar?

“I liked that this guitar spoke to me deeply. I’ve been known to scrawl things on instruments, and almost the second I got home, I took a white marker and scrawled ‘Soul Power’ on the guitar because I knew this was going to be a new era and a new band with Audioslave.

“The Arm the Homeless guitar has taken me on one journey, and I’d used that on a lot of stuff. I also used my Telecaster on the Rage Against the Machine stuff, but I wanted this guitar, the Soul Power guitar, to be something different from what that had been.”

What were some of the modifications you made to the Soul Power Strat?

“Soul Power had to be different from the other guitars I had, so within 72 hours of owning it, I added the kill switch for the stuttering sounds, some Seymour Duncan Hot Rails pickups and an Ibanez whammy bar. I also had this idea of the fretboard being like what Ace Frehley would’ve had on, like, [Kiss’s] Alive II, so I believe I had it re-fretted a couple of times too.”

Though you’d never endorsed a guitar before, Soul Power became your first signature guitar with Fender.

“I’d never done any signature guitar stuff before and had never really wanted to do any sort of endorsement. But if I was going to do one, it had to be something I believed in, that was done the right way.

“I’m very proud of the fact that when I did the Soul Power guitar with Fender, they came out exactly like my original guitar. I still have the original at home, and I have one of the ones we did with Fender – and they’re exactly the same.”

You mentioned you still own the original Soul Power Strat, but when did you last play it?

“Around 48 hours ago. [Laughs] I’m working on some new music, and it’s one of the guitars I still play regularly. But it’s funny – I’ve been relegated to being a rhythm guitarist in my house, as my 13-year-old plays my other [signature] Soul Power guitar, and he’s a shredder!”

What does the Soul Power Strat mean to you, considering that most people associate you with Arm the Homeless?

“It’s an important guitar because it represents a transitional period in my career with Audioslave. Soul Power was a new way to express myself during this new phase with this new band that included Chris Cornell, Tim Commerford and Brad Wilk. It became an instrument of liberation, was about inspiration and was not overthought from the second I grabbed it off that wall.”

Rage Against The Machine have always faced one apparently insoluble criticism. Railing against capitalist exploitation in all its forms, from the enslavement of the masses by advertising and TV to America's foreign policy, the Los Angeles quartet made a vast sum of money for themselves by signing to a major label, Epic, and touring the world enabled by a network of music-industry corporations – the very targets of their songs.

Noticing this, many an observer remarked on this apparent ideological inconsistency, but the band – Zack de la Rocha (vocals), Tom Morello (guitar), Tim Commerford (bass) and Brad Wilk (drums) – shrugged off the naysayers with the reasonable retort that the use of major communication networks makes for a better dissemination of information. Did people listen? No.

This alone made Rage much more interesting than your average rock band, whatever you may think of their political agenda – but what is more gripping still, is that their music is rooted in the amazing basslines of Tim Commerford.

To understand Commerford's bass playing, you need to understand the man himself. In everything he does, from extreme sports to extreme music, he applies himself with total commitment, unafraid of causing controversy and only interested in causing reactions. 

He rides bikes with the American cyclist Lance Armstrong. He keeps himself in ridiculous shape, covering his body with a degree of tattoo coverage that most headbangers would quail at. In 2013, he returned from a period out of the limelight since the demise of Audioslave, the supergroup which succeeded RATM, with a new band, Future User.

The trio (Commerford plus keyboardist/programmer Jordan Tarlow and drummer Jon Knox), self-released an album in 2015 called #SteroidsOrHeroin and a couple of eye-opening promo videos. 

In the first, Clockwork, Commerford adorns a gimp mask and subjects John McEnroe (yep, the tennis player) to actual – not simulated – waterboarding. 

In the next, Mountain Lion, Commerford goes for a merry bike ride with Lance Armstrong and then has his naked torso set on fire. Yes, set on fire. Oh, and he used his own blood to colour the vinyl used for the album.

Bass Player spoke to the great man in December 2015 about his love of Steinberger basses, and how to set yourself on fire.

You set yourself on fire for the Mountain Lion video. How on earth do you approach that?

“You gotta be careful, and you have to not be afraid of pain! I'm really not: I am a pretty avid, extreme athlete, so to speak, and I have my fair share of stitches and bruises and road rash, and metal plates in my head and cadaver parts in my body. Right now I'm three weeks out of back surgery from crashing my bike.

“So I'm not afraid of pain, and when I went into that fire burn I was thinking. ‘What's the worst thing that could happen?’ I'll have a second-degree burn somewhere, or burn my hair or eyebrows off, or something.”

Did no one say, ‘Tim, this is a really stupid thing to do?’

“People were saying that, and I told them ‘Is it any more dangerous than doing a flip off a rooftop, or riding a bike or skateboarding?’ It's all the same.

“The guy who did it for me, who is the only guy who does what they call a skin burn, where you actually burn without clothes on, told me afterwards – and I'm glad he didn't tell me this beforehand – ‘Hey man, this was the biggest skin burn I've ever done. Also, you're the first person I've ever burned who's not a stuntman.’ I was like, ‘Right on, that's awesome!’”

Does it hurt?

“Well, you're on fire until it burns you. That's how it works. It was very uncomfortable to get this thick, malleable protective gel on you. They mould it onto your body and in your ears and your eyes and inside your lips and in every orifice. That stuff is freezing cold, especially because we did it on a freezing night and it was a combination of cold on cold. It was like jumping into a river.

“The gel protects you, but only for so long: eventually it burns off and then it's up to you to decide when you've had enough. Then they put you out. 

“The guy said, ‘Dude, I know you've been through a lot of pain and you have a lot of scars, but don't try to go too long, because you really can get burned. I probably went too long, but it was awesome. I was so cold that I was hyperthermic, probably: I couldn't control my shivering, so I was looking forward to any source of warmth. I was like, ‘Please light me on fire!’”

The videos you've done are shocking. Was the idea to get people's attention?

“Yes, it sort of was the plan. I knew there'd be a ton of people who didn't understand why I would want to play such a drastically different style of music, but I love all kinds of music and I like to be able to play whatever I want. I just wanted to lay a foundation and have songs out there so I could say. ‘By the way, this is my band’ and people wouldn't just have an opinion about one song.

“When we made those two videos with Michael Moore – Testify and Sleep Now In The Fire – those were, to me, the greatest videos of all time. That was my template for Future User. I wanted to make real videos that have something to say, like it or not.”

Tell us about Future User. How did it come about?

“Me and Jordan wrote and produced the music: Jordan has an incredible studio at his house, he's just a studio rat and knows everything. He's got this massive collection of analogue synths. We recruited a guy named Jon Knox who I grew up with in Irvine, California: he's an insane drummer. There was probably four black people who lived in Orange County, and he was one of those people – and he was also a Rush and Iron Maiden freak, so he was an anomaly!”

The cyclist Lance Armstrong was in the Mountain Lion video. Was too much made in the media about his drug use?

“He's a cool person, and we get along in a real shit-talking kind of way, which is a side of him that most people don't get to experience. I enjoy that a lot. I'm a lot like that as well, and I've always believed right from the onset that sports fans are a huge contingent. You'd be hard pressed to find a bigger group of people than sports fans.”

You're using Steinberger basses in Future User, correct?

“Yeah man, I use a Steinberger, and that's a big deal. A lot of people probably hate me for that, but you know what, that's a sick bass. I always wanted one. I had one of the cheesy ones when I was in high school, like when Geddy Lee switched over to Steinberger for Rush's Grace Under Pressure album. I was intrigued and got the one that they call the XP2, the wooden-bodied one. I played it for a while but I didn't really like it that much, so I got rid of it and got my first Fender Jazz bass right after that.”

Contrary to drummer Brad Wilk’s claim that Rage Against the Machine is “finished,” bassist Tim Commerford has added fuel to debate over the band's future by admitting he isn’t sure what the story is.

In a recent conversation with Rolling Stone, he said: “I don’t know; I’m the bass player. I just wait for someone to tell me what to do.”

While it’s a reaction that does no favors to punchlines aimed at bass player stereotypes, it clouds the certainty of Wilk’s statement and leaves the possibility of future RATM tours and beyond lingering. If only a little bit.

During the interview, Commerford acknowledged his bandmate’s statement, adding: “Brad said what he said, but he’s one step above me. He’s in the number three spot. I am the low man on the totem pole.

“That’s all I can tell you,” he continues, “I’m the bass player. The bass players always are the last people to find out about shit like that.”

As was the case with Wilk’s statement, there has been no official band comment since Commerford’s interview was published to underscore or contradict what has been said by the bassist.

Intriguingly, in the drummer’s Instagram post, he did name Commeford – and the rest of the band for that matter – in his stark drawing a line in the sand. Yet, according to Commerford, he’s just as clueless as the rest of us.

“I don’t want to string people or myself along any further,” Wilk said. “I want to let you know that RATM (Tim [Commerford, bass], Zack [de la Rocha, vocals], Tom [Morello, guitar] and I) will not be touring or playing live again.”

During the group’s long-awaited 2022 North American dates, de la Rocha sustained a leg injury that forced the cancelation of their remaining world tour and 2023 US shows.

The politically charged band were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2023, although only Morello attended.

For Commerford, life after RATM – or at least during what may prove to be a hiatus interim period – is hard at work with his new band, 7D7D. The stripped-back, grunge-tinted, and politically propelled band includes guitarist Jonny Polonsky, with whom Wilk and Commerford briefly played together in Big Nose, and Wakrat drummer Mathias Wakrat.

The RATM pair’s relationship with Polonsky, as revealed by Commerford during his Rolling Stone chat, goes back to the recording of Audioslave’s 2005 album, Out of Exile. Producer Rick Rubin had brought Polonsky in as a guitar tech, but the multi-instrumentalist was able to leave a lasting impression.

After the band returned from a break, they found Polonsky playing one of the songs they were tracking on piano.

“He was playing it like Thelonious Monk,” Commerford says. “I was fuckin’ blown away.”

The three musicians would later jam, with Polonsky on guitar, and discovered his talents extended beyond the ivory.

“After Audioslave, we went through a period where me and Brad and Jonny jammed together in a band we called Big Nose,” he told Guitar World. “I got exposed to Jonny as a guitarist and I was just like, ‘This is like jamming with Hendrix.’ Or as close as I'm gonna get to jam with someone who can play like that, at least.”

The band have released four singles, with their latest, Insignia, released earlier this month.

RATM’s last live performance was on August 14 2022 at New York's Madison Square Garden. The 20-song set kickstarted with Bombtrack, with trademark rebellion anthem Killing in the Name the last song of the night.

Whether it's the final time the band will perform the song is yet to be seen. Commerford certainly hasn't backed up his bandmates' statement, leaving plenty of wind in the air to spin the rumor mill evermore.

Rage Against the Machine drummer Brad Wilk has ended talk of the band’s live return. In a frank Instagram post dated January 3, the drummer said that the band “will not be touring or playing live again.”  

His full post reads: “I know a lot of people are waiting for us to announce new tour dates for all the canceled RATM shows. I don’t want to string people or myself along any further.

“So while there has been some communication that this may be happening in the future… I want to let you know that RATM (Tim [Commerford, bass], Zack [de la Rocha, vocals], Tom [Morello, guitars] and I) will not be touring or playing live again.

“I’m sorry for those of you who have been waiting for this to happen. I really wish it was…”

There has been no official band statement at this time, but it seems unlikely that any statement would contradict the drummer’s own words.

Scott Ian, Velvet Revolver guitarist Dave Kushner and Gojira drummer Mario Duplantier were just some of the big names to express their sadness at the news, alongside their appreciation for all the band has done.

"Dood… that sucks. I know how hard you worked at trying to make this happen," reads Kushner's comment. "You will do something great again. Don’t forget that when you weren’t in a band with those guys, you were in @blacksabbath !!! Hang in there @bradwilk and talk soon."

Scott Ian simply put: "Respect. Always. Cheers Brad."

Rage Against the Machine, who count guitarist Tom Morello among their ranks, formed in Los Angeles, 1991 and quickly became one of the most influential rock and metal bands of the ‘90s.

Tracks like Killing in the Name and Know Your Enemy, from their self-titled debut album, made a huge imprint on guitar playing at the time, thanks to Morello’s innovations with his DigiTech Whammy. The record went triple-platinum in 2000.

The band broke up that same year but became unlikely heroes in the UK in 2009. Killing in the Name spearheaded a campaign to end a four-year run of X Factor winners claiming the much-coveted Christmas number one. To celebrate their strange success, the band reformed for a show at London’s Finsbury Park in 2010.

The campaign also sparked a resurgence in popularity for the band, who went on to headline Download Festival, Rock am Ring and Rock im Park in Germany, and Rock in Rio Madrid in 2010. But it wasn’t until 2019 that the band properly greased their wheels again, announcing a 2020 world tour that ultimately didn’t take place until 2022 owing to the pandemic.

Frontman de la Rocha sustained a leg injury during the second show of the group’s North American dates, forcing the cancelation of the remaining world tour and 2023 US dates, which now look extremely unlikely to be rescheduled.

The politically charged band were finally inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2023, although only Morello attended. The ceremony included Jimmy Page’s first live performance in eight years, which saw the Led Zeppelin man pay homage to Link Wray.  

Away from the Hall of Fame and RATM, Morello has kept busy. 2023 began with his guest spot on the Måneskin single, GOSSIP, in January, and also included trading solos with Nuno Bettencourt, Slash and Buddy Guy across multiple live appearances, not to mention a signature Neural DSP plugin.

Meanwhile, RATM’s future may be cast in doubt, but the future of Morello’s son, Roman, looks bright. Footage has recently emerged of the young guitarist – who can “run circles around” his father according to Morello senior – shredding Killing in the Name to an empty stadium during soundcheck.

Roman Morello – the 12-year-old son of Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello – is becoming something of a household name for guitar fans, owing to the youngster’s impressive six-string chops.

Of course, it helps when your father is one of the greatest guitarists of all time, but even that is no guarantee for success, and as Roman has proved on numerous occasions, he can hold his own when armed with a Fender Soul Power Stratocaster – case in point, his recent cover of Ozzy Osbourne’s Mr Crowley.

But for any member of the Morello clan, we imagine Rage Against the Machine’s Killing in the Name is a rite of passage – and it’s a track that Roman can be seen tackling in new footage posted by his father on Instagram.

Specifically, the clip captures Roman (at that point a newfound RATM fan) on tour with the band last year, where he got the opportunity to shred Killing in the Name during soundcheck.

Swapping the Soul Power Strat for papa Morello’s 1982 Fender ‘Sendero Luminoso’ Telecaster – the same dedicated drop D guitar that Tom used on the original track – Roman took up position behind his father’s pedalboard inside an empty arena, navigating the Whammy pedal maneuvers and alternate-picking lines with ease while receiving the rhythm section support of Tim Commerford and Brad Wilk.

Clearly, we aren’t the only ones who are once again impressed with Roman’s guitar skills: “This fn awesome,” Slash commented on the post.

“Upon our Rock n Roll Hall of Fame induction I’d like to say THANK YOU to all the #RATM fans who over the course of 30+ years have been the heart and soul of the music,” Morello wrote in the clip’s accompanying caption. “One of my favorite memories is my son Roman (who became a fan on tour) rocking Killing In The Name with Tim & Brad at a soundcheck in 2022. 

“I have such love and gratitude and appreciation for all our fans who continue to be an inspiration, generation after generation.”

Rage Against the Machine were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame last week, though Morello was the only band member to attend the ceremony. At the time, the guitarist hinted towards some disagreements within the group over the induction, saying during his acceptance speech that they had “differing perspectives on a lot of things, including being inducted into the Rock Hall”.

As mentioned above, that Roman is adept with a guitar in his arms comes as no shock, given the growing body of evidence pointing toward his six-string skills. And, once again, this clip serves to highlight the youngster’s lead skills – skills that Tom Morello says far exceed his own.

Speaking to Rolling Stone earlier this year, the RATM innovator admitted, “I’ve been very inspired by my 11-year-old son. I’ve been relegated to being the rhythm guitar player in my family now because my 11-year-old can shred circles around me. 

“I’ve been inspired by him. He’s been writing some riffs, and I’ve been writing some riffs. It’s been fun.”

Tom Morello clearly knows how to host a party that spans the generations. The Rage Against the Machine guitarist celebrated his mother’s 100th birthday last weekend, organizing a star-studded birthday bash that saw the likes of Jack Black, Perry Farrell and the entire lineup of Rage Against the Machine gather to celebrate with the Morello family.

The highlight of the event was a cover of Mr Crowley, featuring Black – in a spiritual reprisal of his School of Rock role – fronting a group of 12 and 13 year-old musicians, including Morello’s son Roman on guitar.

The rest of Black’s band was completed by 13 year-old Yoyoka Soma (drums), Roya Feiz (bass) and Hugo Weiss (keys), and footage of their performance has now been shared online by Soma.

“What an amazing mom and what an amazing life,” says Black in his introduction. “You guys ready. I’m ready... How do we start?”

We’ve only got phone footage (and audio) to go on, but what follows is an objectively great performance of Ozzy Osbourne classic, with Roman doing a fine job handling Rhoads classically influenced shred leads – and even playing the closing sections behind his head. In a nod to his dad, he’s also wielding papa Morello’s signature Fender Soul Power Stratocaster.

Following the gig, Soma took to Instagram to post pictures with attendees and discuss the experience, writing: 

“It was such a honor to be invited by Tom Morello, whom I adore, to join in the performance and celebrate Mary as a part of the band... Jack's vocals got us going like a scene from his movie, School of Rock. I love his singing and his character!”

Perhaps the ultimate compliment, however, came in an Instagram comment from Randy Rhoads’ sister, Kathy Rhoads D’Argenzio. 

“Awesome,” wrote Rhoads D’Argenzio. “My brother would have loved this! Birthday wishes from the Rhoads family!”

As we reported earlier this year, Morello Sr. has previously said his son’s playing progress has left him sidelined when it comes to their jams at home. 

“I’ve been relegated to being the rhythm guitar player in my family now,” Morello told Rolling Stone, back in March. “Because my 11-year-old can shred circles around me. I’ve been inspired by him. He’s been writing some riffs, and I’ve been writing some riffs. It’s been fun.”

Roman previously gave his lead guitar skills an airing – again with a cameo from Jack Black – when he recorded The Children Will Rise Up with Nandi Bushell back in 2021.

Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine recently turned out in support of striking WGA and SAG-AFTRA members, as he joined the Hollywood picket line with an acoustic guitar in hand, delivering a short set that included a cover of Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land.

Speaking to the NME, Morello said it was a historic moment for the labor movement in the US. “They’re making history here on the sidewalk in front of Paramount Studios and I’m here to support them and express my solidarity,” he said. “I’ve made music throughout my entire life to be played on picket lines and on the front lines. So today is just one more day at the office with regards to that.”

Morello has a history of picking up the acoustic and joining in with protest movements. In 2011, he joined Occupy Wall Street protesters with his Gibson J-45 ‘Black Spartacus’ slope-shouldered dreadnought (a guitar that might be just as famous for the song it inspired, Black Spartacus Heart Attack Machine) and played a number of his Nightwatchman tunes.

Besides the Guthrie classic, a clip of which you can see below, Morello’s set on Monday, August 14 reportedly featured his solo Nightwatchman work once more, with Union Song and Union Town reportedly getting an airing, and Hold the Line – from his guest-studded 2021 album, The Atlas Underground Fire – also on the set.

The writers and actors of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA are on strike together for the first time since 1960. Back then, it was over improved rights, pensions and healthcare for screenwriters. Now, it is over various disputes over residuals for streaming and the threat of AI replacing creative talent. 

Rage Against the Machine’s sound might be animated by Morello’s avant-garde noise techniques and big, primal, post-Sabbath electric guitar riffs, but he has always made the argument that folk music is the heaviest genre of them all. 

Speaking to Guitarist in 2020, Morello said he discovered metal first, then, punk. Years later, artists such as Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and Bruce Springsteen turned him onto folk. 

“I realized that folk music is the heaviest of all, because the right couplet, matched with the right minor chord, can keep you up five nights in a row,” he said. “In order to convey what I want to as the agitprop folk troubadour in The Nightwatchman, that’s going to require an acoustic guitar. That’s still a very important part of my musical life.”

Rage Against the Machine are that rare thing: a protest band that aren’t faintly embarrassing. Although mainstream acceptance and chart success have taken the intimidating edge off their political rants – which target a vague combination of corporations and governments – there’s no denying the immense power of their music, and their often jaw-dropping musicianship.

The opening riff to Rage’s best-known song, Killing In The Name, is a sinister D plus octave of D#, with bassist Tim Commerford exploiting the wide frequency range of his Music Man StingRay, before his subsequent associations with Fender and then Lakland. It’s a prime example of how the bass guitar in a heavy-sounding, aggressive band can be supportive yet interesting, holding down the groove with robotic accuracy.

Listen below to the monstrous bass tone for which Commerford is known. It’s an iconic performance that deserves re-listening.

“Every band that I’ve ever been in, whether it’s Rage, Audioslave, Future User, whatever, everything is organic and starts in the room," said Commerford in the December 2021 issue of BP. "Some idea, whether it’s a drum beat or a bassline, happens, and we’re like, ‘How about this? Oh, that’s cool’ and then it just snowballs. Whenever we’d drop that bass riff, places would become unhinged.”

As for sounds, there’s no getting away from it – this is a StingRay. “I was 18 years old when I first saw a Music Man Stingray,” said Commerford. “It was a blonde one with a black pickguard, and it was at a pawnshop and it was $300. I wanted it so bad, and I scraped up the money, and I got it. That bass was the one that I used to record the first Rage record, and it was a big part of my life.”

Ernie Ball’s latest collaboration with Commerford follows the same blueprint except with four variants of the StingRay: a passive full-scale, an active full-scale, a passive short-scale, and an active short-scale. “Back in 2015 I was approached by Brian Ball, who’s the grandson of Ernie Ball, and he wanted to make me a bass. He gave me this Music Man StingRay – I think they call it the HH model. I was blown away by the construction, by the way that it sounds, the way it plays acoustically in my living room. I plug it in and I have to drastically change my settings on my amps: it sounded really, really good with my set-up.”

The basses all had standard pickups and controls and were streamlined in production numbers: each version was limited to just 50 units worldwide. “Over the years people have come to me and told me they wanted to make a bass for me, and I’ve always shied away from it, but with Music Man I’m really happy to say that this is a bass I’m part of, and that it was not made using exploitation of humans. It was made in a really awesome factory in San Luis Obispo where people are looked after and are happy. That happiness shows in how beautifully this instrument is made. This is the dopest bass that you can get!”

Rage Against the Machine is available to buy and stream.

In the new issue of Guitar World, Tom Morello is asked to pick his favorite Nuno Bettencourt solo, and selects an early career obscurity, performed before the band were even signed.

The Rage Against The Machine man is something of a mega-fan and tells Guitar World that he first discovered the group during his time studying in Boston, and attended many of their earliest shows.

“I don't know if people know this, but I was a fan of Nuno Bettencourt years before Extreme signed a record deal,” reveals Morello. 

“They were a club band in Boston when I was attending Harvard, and I would go see them religiously and was blown away by this 16-, 17-year-old guitar phenomenon who I would stand in front of with my jaw, like, on the floor.”

As such, when prompted to pick his favorite Nuno solo, Morello responds with a deep cut that is, well, so deep that it never actually appeared on an Extreme record.

“It is one that probably no-one reading this has heard,” says Morello. “Which was the Nuno Bettencourt a cappella guitar solo that he would play as a teenager, sort of his version of Eruption. 

“Which was basically all of the kind of pyrotechnics that he still has today, but woven through a series of, like, cartoon themes and game-show themes and sort of clever, playful melodies, intermixed with his overwhelming technique.”

It’s perhaps not surprising giving the heavy amount of copyright material reportedly incorporated into the original shred parody that it didn’t make it onto an Extreme album, but the guitarist says he would take Flight of the Wounded Bumblebee as a close second. 

“It is on my ‘Guitars Rule the World’ playlist,” reveals Morello. “That is a standalone sort of exercise in awesomeness that really sets him head and shoulders above the pack.”

We’d agree, but we’d also like to take a moment to acknowledge the fact Morello has a playlist called ‘Guitars Rule the World’, which you can listen to on Spotify.

Morello concludes his tribute by dubbing Bettencourt “the funkiest dude in the shredder family tree”, which from a man who memorably covered Renegades of Funk, is a true compliment.

As if to return the compliment, Extreme’s Gary Cherone and Bettencourt both recently appeared onstage with Morello to perform Audioslave’s Cochise – and Bettencourt offered his own effusive praise for Morello’s guitar playing, including what he finds underrated.

To read more insights from famous fans of Bettencourt’s, including Brian May, Steve Vai, Zakk Wylde and Steve Lukather – alongside an in-depth chat with the man himself – pick up the new issue of Guitar World from Magazines Direct.

Resurgent Extreme guitarist Nuno Bettencourt has shared some choice thoughts on what he admires about his friend and guitar contemporary Tom Morello as a player – and what he’d like to see more of from the Rage Against the Machine legend.

Bettencourt and Morello were speaking at a press conference ahead of the Best of Blues and Rock festival 2023 in São Paulo, Brazil, when journalist Igor Miranda asked Bettencourt what he admired about Morello.

“It’s funny because when we heard Rage Against the Machine for the first time, we loved it so much that we hated them,” he laughs of Extreme’s initial reaction to the band.

“We have this saying that Jimmy Page – and I said this to Jimmy Page, I thought Jimmy Page wrote all the great rock ’n’ roll riffs and threw the rest of us all the scraps, the bones. And that was until I heard Rage Against the Machine. Every riff was monstrous; it was everything. And the fact that they had a rapper took it to a whole other level of genre and changed the game.”

At this point, Bettencourt hones in on what he loves about Morello’s guitar playing and what he believes is underrated – and why it frustrates him.

“Tom can actually play as well,” he explains. “The thing about Tom that to me gets a little underrated – and pisses me off a little bit, because he tends to pull back and I want him to do this more; he did it more in the early days – you think that he’s got one of the most iconic, inventive, innovative styles with electronics and making sounds like a DJ, but then all of a sudden, he starts really playing playing… like, go fuck yourself, because he’s a dangerous player that way.”

When RATM’s debut dropped in 1992, Morello was known as much for his shred chops as his unconventional sonic bombast. Take the Power Back and Know Your Enemy boasted awe-inspiring alternate picking and legato guitar solos, reflecting Morello’s religious eight-hour practice regime while attending Harvard University.

From 1996’s Evil Empire onwards, the guitarist leaned heavily into ‘noise’ solos that combined toggle-switching, whammy bar warbles and DigiTech Whammy pitch-shifts to bonkers effect, sometimes even embellished with slides and Allen keys. And while Morello’s virtuosic tendencies cropped up in a handful of choice Audioslave cuts, much of his post-RATM recorded output hasn’t reached for the warp-speed licks of Rage’s debut. (Although we’d argue his best-ever solo wasn’t on any album.)

On hearing Bettencourt’s plaudits for his technical abilities, Morello quipped, “It’s because I practiced all the Nuno solos!”

The RATM guitarist was also effusive in his praise for Bettencourt, noting: “He's been a huge influence. Combining funky music with heavy music and then musicianship with abandon are things that have been involved in this band [Extreme] and I think in Nuno's playing from the very start.”

The pair have played together on several occasions – most notably on their Fender-orchestrated cover of the Game of Thrones theme tune – and reconvened at the Best of Blues and Rock festival that evening to perform Audioslave classic Cochise with Extreme frontman Gary Cherone.

Morello’s collaborative spirit was in full force at the festival, as he also traded blues licks with Buddy Guy, wielding the Strat legend’s trademark spotted Fender.

Bettencourt, meanwhile, brought out social media star Mateus Asato for a killer guest spot on Extreme staple Get the Funk Out.

For a guitarist who has barely changed his rig in over three decades, and insists “gear doesn’t matter”, Tom Morello has sure gone heavy on the signature gear in the past three years. Now, following the Fender Soul Power Stratocaster, Dunlop Tom Morello Cry Baby and MXR Power 50 Overdrive comes, of all things, a signature Neural DSP plugin.

This comes as something of a surprise given the Rage Against the Machine firebrand will readily admit he is far from a tech-savvy guitarist – he got so fed up of trying to figure out his home studio over lockdown that his last album was tracked by balancing a microphone on a folding chair next to his amp.

So maybe the arrival of a fully fledged plugin will make future at-home projects that little bit easier.

At the core of the rig is a model of Morello’s faithful Marshall JCM800 2205 head and Peavey 4x12 cab, which has accompanied the guitarist on every recording and live performance since RATM’s debut album in 1991.

Given Morello’s career-long association with the original DigiTech Whammy pedal, Neural DSP saw fit to equip his signature plugin with two separate pitch-shifters: Dive Bomb (which glides +/- 12 semitones) and the not-so-subtly named Wham-1, which pitches your guitar between -24 and Killing in the Name-ready +24 semitones. There’s also a detune function to emulate the Whammy’s warbly chorus effects.

Next up is a wah pedal modeled on Morello’s longstanding Cry Baby, and true to the guitarist’s own unconventional setup, it runs in the amp effects loop along with simple digital delay, eight-band EQ and phaser pedals, emulating Tom’s Boss DD-2, DOD EQ and MXR Phase 90 respectively.

This is followed up by a cabsim and IR loader, featuring captures of Morello’s battered old Peavey 4x12, offering 10 virtual microphones and a room mic section. You can also load your own IR files.

Finally, post-effects including a nine-band EQ, stereo reverb and additional delay, plus a metronome and transpose/doubler.

Above, you can watch the man himself demo the plugin in his inimitable style, opening with a series of – admittedly not hugely useful – noises featuring his old Testify cable-on-the-palm trick and a series of scratches with (what else?) a wrench.

The pitch-shifter-laden section that follows, however, is testament to Neural DSP’s dedication to authenticity, with some of the best emulated Whammy tones yet committed to a plugin. That hard-rocking riff crunch is dead-on, too.

Naturally, you’ll have to hone your toggle-switching chops to make the most of the plugin, but – minus Morello’s recent real-world addition of the DigiTech Space Station to his pedalboard – the suite really can handle most of the tones used throughout his career.

Although there’s only one amp onboard, for our money, the assortment of pedals and the quality of the Whammy emulation makes this one of the more compelling Neural DSP Archetype offerings, especially for hard-rock players.

“We have worked tirelessly to perfect the Archetype: Tom Morello plugin to make sure it sounds EXACTLY like my amp and set up,” says Morello.

“The plugin is a testament to how amazing Neural DSP’s proprietary modeling technology is and how meticulous their development process is. I told them I only want to do this if we get it just right, and we got it just right. It’s really pretty incredible.”

“What we share with all guitarists is a deep and abiding respect for their core sound, their sonic signatures, so to speak,” adds Neural CEO Douglas Castro.

“Our modeling technology has been able to precisely capture the contemporary sounds of brilliant guitar innovators like Cory Wong and John Petrucci. Now, with the release of the new Archetype: Tom Morello plugin, we’ve extended our lineup to include one more singular star in the universe of the guitar.”

Archetype: Tom Morello is available now for €119 (approx $128) from Neural DSP.

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame's 2023 list of inductees was revealed today (May 3), and leading the honorees is an eclectic group of guitar-toting artists. 

Rap-metal pioneers Rage Against the Machine, superstar singer/songwriter Sheryl Crow, instrumental guitar titan Link Wray, and country legend Willie Nelson highlight a group that also includes pop auteurs Kate Bush and George Michael, R&B A-lister Missy Elliott and vocal group The Spinners. 

Rounding out the induction list is DJ Kool Herc, Elton John lyricist Bernie Taupin, Al Kooper, R&B/soul singer Chaka Khan and Soul Train host Don Cornelius.

“This year’s incredible group of inductees reflects the diverse artists and sounds that define rock & roll,” Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation Chairman John Sykes said in a press release. “We are honored that this November’s induction ceremony in New York will coincide with two milestones in music culture – the 90th birthday of Willie Nelson and the 50th anniversary of the birth of hip-hop.”

In the wake of their induction, Rage Against the Machine paid tribute to both their fans and influences on social media.

“Many thanks to the Hall of Fame for recognizing the music and the mission of Rage Against the Machine," the band wrote on Instagram. "We are grateful to all of the passionate fans, the many talented co-conspirators we’ve worked with and all the activists, organizers, rebels, and revolutionaries past, present, and future who have inspired our art.”

Notably omitted from the Hall of Fame's induction list were nominees like Iron Maiden, Soundgarden, The White Stripes, Joy Division, New Order and Warren Zevon.

The inductees were selected by a body of more than 1,000 artists, historians and members of the music industry, with the public participating via a process called the Fan Vote, an online poll conducted on the Rock Hall's website that was tallied along with the other ballots.

The 2023 inductees will be honored at the 38th Annual Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony on November 3 at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York.

Last year's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony saw the long-awaited (and overdue) induction of Judas Priest, along with that of Eminem, Dolly Parton, Duran Duran, Lionel Richie, Carly Simon and influential blues guitar player Elizabeth Cotten, among others.

For more info on the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame museum and this year's inductees and induction ceremony, visit the organization's website.

Guthrie Govan is surely one of the greatest living guitarists. A master of rhythm and lead across all genres – but, crucially, with an ear for melody that keeps all his contributions highly musical – the UK virtuoso can tackle absolutely any material that gets thrown his way… and, somehow, make it better.

Case in point is his late-Noughties collaboration with UK rapper Dizzee Rascal, then riding high on the success of monster single Bonkers. Govan was seemingly given free rein with his guitar parts throughout his time in the Rascal band, during which the curly-haired maestro played some of the UK’s biggest musical stages.

One of the highest-profile shows of his session stint took place at iconic London venue The Roundhouse for the BBC’s Electric Proms, a televised broadcast that played host to a particularly mind-blowing cover of Rage Against the Machine’s Bulls on Parade.

Footage shows Govan playing the alt-rock classic’s rhythm parts relatively straight, bar the occasional tasty harmonization of the track’s opening riff and wah-wah breakdown. But naturally it’s the guitar solo that plays host to his zaniest contributions, as he reimagines Tom Morello’s trademark toggle-switched DJ scratches in his own idiosyncratic image.

Whipping out a glass slide seemingly from thin air, Govan begins tapping on his Suhr’s pickups, emulating the original solo for all of a bar, before he ingeniously uses the slide to two-hand tap notes off the fretboard while his left hand delivers some blinding legato runs.

The overall effect of his slide-enabled vibrato on those tapped exclamation points is quite simply jaw-dropping, and it’s all rounded off with a descending flourish and one final lightning-fast left-hand run.

It’s worth noting that Tom Morello frequently experimented with slides to achieve a pitch-modulated DJ-style effect – clock the solo in RATM’s Fistful of Steel – but it never formed the basis for quite such a virtuosic display.

Dizzee Rascal’s full Electric Proms set showcases Guthrie’s staggering versatility, as he deploys everything from metal chugs to hyper-clean funk and country hoedowns, while the full-scale orchestra set the scene for the guitarist’s future session gigs alongside superstar composer Hans Zimmer.

“At any point in time you have a spectrum of notes to choose from, with the ultimate right note at one end and the ultimate wrong note at the other,” Govan told Total Guitar of his unique solo approach. “It’s all about what kind of note you want right now. It would be boring if every note you played felt right, without tension or release.

“It’s better to ask yourself at what point in this gradient is the note interesting enough, but not so ugly it will ruin what you’re trying to say. I like that idea of weaving around predictable and surprising notes, because it’s the balance between the two that makes a melody compelling.” 

Tom Morello has revealed his son Roman can already outplay him when it comes to lead guitar, despite the fact that he’s only 11…

Speaking to Rolling Stone the Rage Against The Machine guitarist said that he was enjoying a “very fruitful period” since the band cancelled their remaining 2022/23 tour dates, following Zack de la Rocha’s onstage injury.

“I’ve been very inspired by my 11-year-old son,” reveals Morello. “I’ve been relegated to being the rhythm guitar player in my family now because my 11-year-old can shred circles around me. I’ve been inspired by him. He’s been writing some riffs, and I’ve been writing some riffs. It’s been fun.”

Roman Morello recorded a solo that was very much in his father’s sonic wheelhouse on fellow child prodigy Nandi Bushell’s 2011 single, The Children Will Rise Up.

Later, Morello says he has also been inspired by Jack White (who, in turn, referenced Tom Morello last year, when discussing a heavily modded-Jazzmaster.)

“I saw Jack White play a small show recently in Los Angeles,” comments Morello. “We have something in common in that we’ve both been in a lot of bands. 

“The way that he weaved and synthesized a life’s work into a very cohesive and compelling whole was very inspiring to me. I was like, ‘You can take the whole thing and make it all one.’ 

“I’ve always sort of segregated a bit, whether it’s the acoustic Nightwatchman stuff or EDM-leaning Atlas Underground stuff. But that was very inspiring.”

Elsewhere in the piece, despite a tremendous and persistent effort on the part of Rolling Stone interviewer Andy Greene, an amiable Morello repeatedly bats away attempts to reveal any information about Rage Against The Machine’s future plans.

Greene notes, not unfairly, that some fans will think Morello is being “evasive, and conclude that Zack [de la Rocha] has lost interest again, or something else is going on you’re not saying.”

“I can’t help that,” responds Morello. “It’s hard to even describe it. But when Rage Against the Machine is going to tour or break up or hold a seance on The Joe Rogan Show, you’ll hear it from Rage Against the Machine. Until such a time, there is not news.”

So that’s fairly definitive. At least we know the Morello guitar legacy is safe for another generation...

Read the full Tom Morello interview over at Rolling Stone.

The 2023 nominees for induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame were revealed today (February 1).

Iron Maiden, Rage Against the Machine, Soundgarden and The White Stripes lead a nomination class that also includes seminal post-punk acts Joy Division and New Order, country-pop superstar Sheryl Crow, hip-hop legends Missy Elliott and A Tribe Called Quest, and pop auteurs Kate Bush, Cyndi Lauper and George Michael.

R&B legends The Spinners, country icon Willie Nelson and the beloved singer/songwriter Warren Zevon round out the 2023 nominee class.

Crow, Elliott, Joy Division/New Order, Lauper, Michael, Nelson, The White Stripes, and Zevon are all on the ballot for the first time.

“This remarkable list of nominees reflects the diverse artists and music that the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame honors and celebrates,” John Sykes, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation's chairman, said in a statement. “These artists have created their own sounds that have impacted generations and influenced countless others that have followed in their footsteps.”

Nominations will be voted on by a body of more than 1,000 artists, historians and members of the music industry, but fans can also participate in the Hall of Fame selection via a process called the Fan Vote.

Through April 28, fans can vote online at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame's websiteor in person at the Museum itself in Cleveland, Ohio. The top five artists in the Fan Vote will then comprise a “fans’ ballot” that will be tallied along with the other ballots to determine the 2023 inductees. 

The 2023 inductees will be announced in May, with the induction ceremony set to take place this fall, though the date and venue have yet to be announced as of press time. 

The 2022 ceremony saw the long-awaited (and overdue) induction of Judas Priest, along with that of Eminem, Dolly Parton, Duran Duran, Lionel Richie, Carly Simon and influential blues guitar player Elizabeth Cotten, among others.

For more info on the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame museum and this year's inductees, visit the organization's website.

Tim Commerford recently wrapped up a North American tour with Rage Against the Machine, but he’s already back with a new project, 7D7D, for which he handles bass guitar and lead vocals alongside drummer Mathias Wakrat (with whom he previously played in the trio Wakrat) and guitarist Jonny Polonsky (whom he has a long musical history with, including in the band Big Nose). 

It's a diverse lot of musicians, and the band’s sound, as evidenced by their debut single, Capitalism, is likewise unconventional. Built upon propulsive beats, shifting time signatures, thick, darting basslines and livewire guitars, the tune lays serious lyrics (“No matter where I am / I’m in hell,”) over a jaunty, at times almost carnivalesque atmosphere. 

According to Commerford, this is one of their more straightforward tunes. “Most of the songs that we've done have been more challenging,” the bassist says. We’ll soon find out for ourselves, as he assures there’s much more to come from the trio. In the meantime, Guitar World sat down with Commerford and Polonsky to get the scoop on the past, present and future of 7D7D.

How did this project come to be?

Jonny Polonsky: “I hadn't talked to Tim in a bunch of years, but he called me out of the blue last summer and he said he had this thing he was working on. I guess he and Mathias had had their other band, Wakrat, and Tim wanted to still play with Mathias but also do something brand-new. He sent me a track and said, ‘Do whatever you want.’ So I did. They dug it, and we kept it going.”

Tim Commerford: “Mathias and I have been playing for many years, and I love playing with him. He's a punk drummer, but he's got like a very jazzy kind of feel as well. He's very syncopated, and almost electronic. I love the freshness of what he's doing, and it's really easy for me to go into the studio, pull up one of his beats, trip out on it and create songs. 

“And when we write a song, Mathias and I do the whole thing – bassline, drum beat, lead vocal and backing vocals. Then we had been looking for guitar players, and I just went, ‘Jonny Polonsky’. In my career as a musician, there's only been a couple people that I would put in the category of a Jonny Polonsky.”

How so?

Commerford: “Jonny Polonsky is like a human jukebox. My first encounter with Jonny was when I was with Audioslave and he was an assistant in the studio when we were working with Rick Rubin. Rick had signed him to his label, and he was very young.

“And I remember being in the studio with everyone, working hard on arrangements and trying to nail everything down, and then taking a lunch break and going into the control room… and Jonny Polonsky was in there playing the entire arrangement, on the piano, with the vocal melody and everything. It blew me away. He really is on that next level. Dude is so talented. 

“Later on, after Audioslave, we went through a period where me and [Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave drummer] Brad [Wilk] and Jonny jammed together in a band we called Big Nose. I got exposed to Jonny as a guitarist and I was just like, ‘This is like jamming with Hendrix.’ Or as close as I'm gonna get to jam with someone who can play like that, at least.”

Jonny, how did you approach the guitars in 7D7D?

Polonsky: “Whenever I would get music from them, it would have everything there – bass, drums and lead vocal – which was really interesting. I've never worked that way before. And I mean, these songs are unusual. I love a lot of different kinds of music and I've played with a lot of different kinds of people, but this was super-challenging, in the best way.

“So typically, they’d send a track, and how it would go is that for the first 10 or 15 minutes, I'm just like, ‘What is this?’ [Laughs] Then I'll start playing along and just messing around and then eventually I'll latch onto something that sounds like it's working. 

“And the thing is, there’s never any standard riffs or strumming, like the Ramones or something like that. It’s more like these independent entities trying to coexist at the same time. And that’s cool to me, because I really love players like Duane Denison from the Jesus Lizard, Keith Levene from Public Image Ltd., John McGeoch, James Honeyman-Scott, all these different guitar players that have never really come out my playing before, but that this music brings out of me. 

“That sort of melodic, post-punk thing. That’s one of the great things about playing with different people – it brings out different aspects of your personality. And what's the point of doing something unless it's gonna be something new?”

Commerford: “When we send a track to Jonny, it always comes back in, like, a day. It's so crazy. And it’s always some weird shit that I would've never thought of. But it’s musical and it works and it just makes me and Mathias sound way better. That's the truth of it.”

The one 7D7D song we’ve heard so far is Capitalism. How did that one come together? 

Commerford: “The song is built off the drum beat. That opening beat is kind of a signature Mathias thing. And that dictated the music. Then lyrically, the idea of capitalism, I mean, that’s at the root of everything, right? And look, I get a lot of shit, like, ‘Oh dude, you're a rock star. You should never talk about what's up in the world.’ But you could just look at it simply by just going, ‘There's people that don't have healthcare... and then there's billionaires.’ 

“I mean, I have to write about that. I have to be angry about that. That is an obligation. I feel obligated to make music that has something to say. I don't give a fuck if people like it or not. And musically, I like how the lyric is treated in a really happy, goofy way in the chorus. Instead of just playing minor chords my entire career, I wanted to try to play a major chord and put this fucked-up lyric on it and make it sound dark.”

Jonny, how did you compose your parts on the song? 

Polonsky: “I used this old Strat that I had built out of Warmoth parts when I was a teenager. It has Lace Sensor pickups and it sounds great. I started playing around with that and I was making myself laugh, because I was thinking about songs like Some Like It Hot by The Power Station, or Hot Hot Hot by Buster Poindexter. Almost like a calypso thing.

“And there’s probably some John Frusciante/Chili Peppers in the right hand, and a very Adrian Belew, kind of skronky, weedy guitar tone, especially in that last section. But in general I just react to what they give me. And sometimes it's immediate and sometimes I have to play around with stuff for a while.”

What other gear are you using with 7D7D?

Polonsky: “I have a Gibson Melody Maker, I think it's a Joan Jett signature model, that I got off of Reverb, and I used that a lot. I also have a Rherry Red Gibson Flying V that I bought during lockdown, because I always wanted a Flying V. 

“And you know, I was half-expecting to be like, ‘Oh man, I can't play this.’ I thought it’d be cumbersome. But it sounds really great and it feels fantastic. Then I also used a [Gibson] SG with P-90s, a Squier Bass VI, a First Act 12-string electric that they made me years ago and an Ernie Ball Music Man Goldie, the St. Vincent model.”

Tim, what was your main setup? 

Commerford: “I have this amp that I got from [producer] Brendan O'Brien. It's an Ampeg, I think a ’68 maybe, and it’s a 15-inch flip-top. It's so fucking cool. And it’s really just that with maybe a little dirt on it. Then for basses, I had my [signature Ernie Ball] StingRay, and I've been using the short-scale, man. And I'm gonna tell you, the short-scale Stingray is a thing of beauty. 

“Over the course of being a bass player, I never played a short-scale. I never allowed myself to realize that it actually has a darker sound. But when I went in to play with Rage on this recent tour, initially I brought the short-scales. I was like, ‘They're lighter, they're smaller, I don't care if it makes me look weird, it's gonna be cool!’ 

“So we went into rehearsals and I was playing nothing but short-scales. But when you're playing in unison with another player, a short-scale is not the way to go, because the string moves a little more under your left hand and it's easier to pull it a little bit out of tune. Which makes things difficult when you’re doing the unison riff thing, which Tom [Morello] and I do a lot. 

“So I switched back to the long-scale for that tour. But for this thing with Jonny, we’re never play riffs together. We never lock in on anything together, ever. Every instrument is doing something different, so I don't have to worry about the unison thing. So the short-scale is the way to go.”

Finally, what’s next for 7D7D?

Commerford: “We're gonna start by dropping one new song each month. And we’ve talked about putting out a record out, and I'm sure we will. The idea is to build a little bit of a catalog so that we can eventually play shows.”

Polonsky: “I'm sure we will play shows. That’ll happen at some point. And we have so much more music we’ve recorded, and also that we’re working on. It’ll all come out at some point.” 

Commerford: “I was telling Jonny the other day, I don't even know what this thing is, man. But it could be anything. It could be something that we can continue to do as we grow old, it could be a platform to be artistic and be political and just do whatever we want. I don’t know. 

“But what I do know is that I feel lucky. I tell everyone, ‘You're lucky if you're in a band.’ I don't care if you just have a couple buddies coming over and you’re playing in your living room. You're lucky. Because it's not easy to get together with people and create art, you know? But when you can do it, it's a beautiful thing.”

• 7D7D's latest single, Misinformed, is out now via Mad Bunny Records.

Rage Against the Machine bass guitar player Tim Commerford has revealed he has been privately battling prostate cancer amid the band’s reunion this year.

Speaking to Spin, Commerford also revealed he underwent surgery to remove his prostate just two months before the band embarked on their many-times-postponed Public Service Announcement tour in July this year.

During the conversation, the 54-year-old said only his bandmates and a tight-knit circle of close friends were initially aware of his diagnosis.

“I’ve been dealing with some pretty serious shit,” Commerford said to Spin. “Right before I was about to go on tour with Rage, I had my prostate removed, and I have prostate cancer. I’ve been someone that’s taken a lot of pride in being in shape and taking care of myself. But it’s something where either you’re either lucky or not.”

Elsewhere in the conversation, Commerford said he was diagnosed with prostate cancer after he attempted to get life insurance, but was unable to as his “PSA [Prostate-Specific Antigen] numbers were up”.

“I watched it over the course of a year and a half, and it kept elevating further,” he explained. “Eventually, they did a biopsy and found out I had cancer, so they took my prostate out. I had been thinking, well, because they’re watching it and let it get to this point, maybe it’s not that big of a deal.”

As for Rage’s reunion tour that kicked off earlier this year, Commerford said he had surgery just two months before the first show and that doctors said he “wasn’t going to be ready”.

“That was brutal,” he added. “I would be on stage looking at my amp in tears. Then you just kind of turn around and suck it up. I kept it to myself throughout the touring we did and it was brutal.”

Despite his struggles, Commerford has vowed to become “the fittest motherfucker with cancer that’s 54 that you’ve ever fucking seen in your life”.

“When I got my physical, my doctor said I was in the best shape of any 50-year-old he’d ever seen there,” Commerford said. “There’s plenty of people that are in great shape that have cancer. And I’m hoping to continue as long as I can be that. I work out religiously, and I try my hardest to stay in shape. I’m still very proud of who I am.

“Now I’m in the situation that I’m in, which is, hold your breath for six months. It’s not a good one and not one that I’m happy about. I’m just trying to grab ahold of the reins. It’s gonna be a long journey, I hope. My dad died in his early 70s from cancer and my mom died from cancer in her 40s. 

“Split the difference to 65 and I’ve got 10 years. I’m trying to get to the 100-song mark – I have some goals now.” 

The goals Commerford referred to were related to his new side project, 7D7D. Unveiled last month, the project also involves Wakrat drummer Mathias Wakrat and guitarist Jonny Polonsky.

7D7D released their debut single, Capitalism, on Mad Bunny records, with Commerford telling Spin of his aspirations to play live with the band in the future.

Rage Against the Machine were forced to cancel a string of European dates and their entire batch of North American tour dates for next year after frontman Zack de la Rocha tore his Achilles tendon on stage.

Rage Against the Machine have canceled their 2023 North American tour, following a leg injury sustained by frontman Zack de la Rocha earlier this year.

The injury – a torn Achilles tendon – occurred during the second show of the band’s long-awaited Public Service Announcement tour with Run the Jewels in Chicago on July 11. 

Though the vocalist continued the band’s set seated – “We’re gonna keep this fucking shit going. I can crawl across this stage,” he proclaimed to the crowd in attendance – the severity of the injury became clear later on, leading the group to cancel a string of European tour dates scheduled for August and September.

And now, in a new social media post, the singer has confirmed the injury will take considerably longer to heal, meaning the band have to cancel their planned 2023 North America tour dates.

“It’s been almost three months since Chicago, and I still look down at my leg in disbelief,” he writes. “Two years of waiting through the pandemic, hoping we would have an opening to be a band again and continue the work we started 30 some odd years ago. Rehearsing, training, reconciling, working our way back to form.

“Then one and a half shows into it and my tendon tears. [It] felt like a sick joke the universe played on me. As I write this I remind myself it’s just bad circumstance. Just a fucked up moment.

“Unfortunately it is a moment that requires a lot of work and healing. I have a severe tear in my left Achilles tendon and only eight percent of my tendon was left intact. And even that portion was severely compromised. 

“It’s not simply a question of being able to perform again, but extends to basic functionality going forward. That’s why I’ve made the painful and difficult decision to cancel the remaining shows on our 2023 North American leg.”

The vocalist continues: “I hate canceling shows. I hate disappointing our fans. You have all waited so patiently to see us and that is never lost on me. I never take that for granted. For you I have the ultimate gratitude and respect.

“To my brothers Tim [Commerford, bass], Brad [Wilk, drums] and Tom [Morello, guitar]; to El P, Killer Mike, Trackstar and the whole RTJ crew; to everyone on our production team: techs, cooks, drivers, assistants, security squad, to anyone and everyone who made the shows thus far possible, all my love and respect. I hope to see you very soon.”

The post notes that all tickets purchased through Ticketmaster or AXS for the 2023 North America dates will be refunded automatically to the original method of payment once the band receives funds from the venues.

At present, there is no word of new dates, or even if there’ll be any, so in the meantime you can check out good-quality fan-shot footage of Rage Against the Machine’s first show in 11 years in Alpine Valley, Wisconsin on July 9.

Back in May, Total Guitar conducted a series of polls on GuitarWorld.com. A staggering number votes were cast – just over 150,000, in fact – and now the results can be revealed.

Because we wanted to represent every era, from early classics to contemporary guitar heroes, we divided up our polls decade by decade from the 1960s all the way through to the 2010s and 2020s. Here, we present the top 10 guitar albums of the '90s, as voted by you.

Throughout the '90s, heavy music was redefined by Rage Against the Machine, Pantera, Soundgarden and more. But incredibly, four of the decade’s greatest guitar albums were released within a six-week period in 1991.

10. Red Hot Chili Peppers – Blood Sugar Sex Magik (1991)

Leaning harder into the funk of funk-rock than any of their peers, the Chilis’ defining moment finds John Frusciante drawing as much on Parliament-Funkadelic and Sly Stone as Hendrix. 

It turned out that playing James Brown riffs with a grittier tone and a drummer who wanted to be John Bonham was a winner. Frusciante’s angular soloing on Suck My Kiss and the graunching string bends of Give It Away explored how percussive lead guitar can get, while Under The Bridge is the best anyone has appropriated Hendrix’s combined lead-rhythm style. Amps? You don’t need one – John did most of this straight into the desk.

9. Tool – Ænima (1996)

Unlike his former bandmate Tom Morello, there’s no single aspect of Tool guitarist Adam Jones’ playing that is identifiably unique. Somehow, though, the overall effect sounds quite unlike anyone else. The majority of riffs are in 4/4, but the band’s knack for placing accents in different places for each instrument makes Ænima constantly rhythmically engaging.

Jones’ Les Paul tone is gigantic yet clear, coming from an early blueface Diezel VH4. His use of flangers gave the tone movement, and he’s one of the few guitarists to exploit his guitar’s tone control. The grooves in Ænima are so hypnotic that epic tunes flash by.

8. Soundgarden – Superunknown (1994)

For all the success of Superunknown, a number one in the US, Soundgarden’s fourth album saw fearless experimentation with time signatures. Spoonman is in 7/4, My Wave in 5/4, and Limo Wreck in a head-spinning 15/8 (five ‘triplet’ beats per bar). Their wild tunings included Open C (C-G-C-G-G-E), and Open E5 (E-E-B-B-B-B). 

Nevertheless, MTV found Black Hole Sun irresistible. Chris Cornell and Kim Thayil somehow retained clarity amid such sludgy riffing, thanks in no small part to Cornell’s choice of a Gretsch Duo Jet and Silver Jet and a Fender Jazzmaster to record all the rhythms, split through a Mesa/Boogie Dual Rectifier and 50-watt Marshall JMP.

7. Pantera – Vulgar Display Of Power (1992)

Dimebag Darrell was one of metal’s great characters – Zakk Wylde and EVH mashed into one fret-melting force of nature. On paper, Pantera should have been too heavy to get as big as they did, but Dime’s riffs had such an irresistible groove that everyone got on board. His vibrato was wider than the Grand Canyon, and his chromatic licks were vicious. 

The 12/8 rhythm of Walk defines groove metal, and its hand-crossing tapping lick is just plain fun. Dime proved you didn’t need valve amps for brutality, either. His preferred Randall solid-state heads grind with an unceasing fury here.

6. Alice In Chains – Dirt (1992)

Riffing harder than any of their Seattle contemporaries, Alice In Chains brought metal and grunge fans together. Them Bones successfully turned a piledriving riff in 7/8 into a hit single without sounding remotely prog, and Cantrell’s drop D grinding and layered parts earned him the admiration of Dimebag Darrell and Eddie Van Halen. 

Producer Dave Jerden recorded a separate amp for each EQ band. A Rockman supplied the treble, and a Bogner Ecstasy brought the mids. Bass was either a prototype Dual Rectifier or a Bogner Fish preamp, depending who you ask, but either way the resulting tone is colossal.

5. Megadeth – Rust In Peace (1990)

Marty Friedman’s choice soloing made Megadeth the guitar connoisseur’s favourite thrashers, and he was never in better form than on Rust In Peace. With exotic pentatonic scales and artfully chosen ‘wrong’ notes, he never sounded predictable but he kept enough blues influence to be accessible.

Standouts like Tornado Of Souls show a vibrato Kirk Hammett could only dream of and a perfect balance of technique and melody. Dave Mustaine isn’t outclassed either – his ‘machine gun’ alternate picking is blistering. He delivered his best riffs and songs to date, and went toe-to-toe with Friedman for Hangar 18’s duelling solos.

4. Rage Against the Machine – Rage Against the Machine (1992)

There’s a lot to say about Rage Against the Machine’s musical innovation, but ultimately every landmark album needs great songs, and Rage had ’em. Their debut had the best set of Jimmy Page-inspired blues riffs since Led Zeppelin II, and frontman Zack de la Rocha created slamming hooks without the need for singing. Drummer Brad Wilk had a Bonham-esque ability to hit each snare slightly late and guitarist Tom Morello also sat behind the beat, sounding like a T-Rex stomping through New York.

Morello’s preference for neck pickup tones on rhythms made him stand out. He used his Arm the Homeless guitar for standard tuning and American Standard Telecaster for everything in drop D, with overdubs from a Les Paul. 

Sick of tone chasing, Morello picked one amp setting in rehearsal and has stuck with it ever since. Luckily, his Marshall 2205 sounded awesome. Innovation is part luck, and Morello happened to be the first breakthrough guitarist with a DigiTech Whammy. But he also had an astonishingly creative mind and a refusal to be limited by conventional approaches.

His DJ scratching, created with a killswitch and a wide-open wah pedal, was brand-new. At times he’d unplug the guitar and exploit the noises made by a live cable. Somehow, Tom made it all work in context without sounding weird for the sake of it.

3. Nirvana – Nevermind (1991)

The ’90s didn’t really begin until Nevermind came out. There had long existed a punk scene for people who felt alienated by bands like Mötley Crüe. By 1991, that was the majority, and a generation embraced Nirvana for rejecting what had gone before.

Kurt Cobain had bought his Fender Jaguar because it was the only decent lefty he could find, but it helped that it looked unlike anything on MTV. Where ’80s chorus had been digitally pristine, Kurt chose an analogue MXR Small Clone. Where their distortion had come from giant amps, Kurt had a $40 Boss DS-1. And where they had shredded, Kurt played the vocal melody.

Ironically, producer Butch Vig didn’t let Nirvana sound the way they wanted. Nevermind’s sonics reflect the tension between Kurt’s urge for rawness and Vig’s radio-friendly instincts. Audiences connected to Cobain’s raw emotion, but they might not have done so in such numbers had Vig not persuaded him to multitrack a slick wall of guitars.

Beyond the sonics were Kurt’s immaculately crafted songs. The soft-loud dynamics were undeniably effective, and he had a Beatles-like knack for unexpected but satisfying chord changes. Lithium dances between D major and D minor for its verse and changes key for the chorus, while In Bloom somehow weaves a beautiful melody around the most jarring set of chords.

It’s hard to think about Nevermind without thinking of the overall tragedy of Kurt’s life, but it’s a monumental testament to the power of music – and guitars – to communicate feeling.

2. Pearl Jam – Ten (1991)

Stone Gossard and Mike McCready’s smart approach to having two guitars gave Pearl Jam’s debut its expansive sound. Generally McCready plays a Strat while Gossard plays a Les Paul, and one plays high while the other plays low. The distinct tones and frequencies from each guitarist give everything clarity and fill the entire audio spectrum with sonic excitement.

Pearl Jam have been called Seattle’s Rolling Stones to Nirvana’s Beatles. Like the Stones they have the knack of “weaving sonic tapestries”, as Keith Richards put it. Their thoughtful part writing also left space for Jeff Ament’s enormous 8- and 12-string basslines.

Mike McCready’s undisguised Stevie Ray Vaughan passion saw him bring Strats back into vogue. After a decade of compressed humbucker tones, McCready’s dynamic single coils underlined that this was a new generation.

He described his playing on Black and Even Flow as an SRV “rip off”, while he saw the epic outro solo in Alive as a copy of Ace Frehley’s solo in She by Kiss, which in turn was taken from Robby Krieger’s Five To One with The Doors.

Both guitarists used JCM800s for dirty tones and Fenders for clean parts. The guitarists happily shared the spotlight, with Gossard often playing main riffs on songs where McCready took solos. 

Kurt Cobain may have sneered that Ten had too many solos for an alternative band, but Pearl Jam were reconnecting rock with more organic tones and blues-rock roots, more Hendrix than hair metal. Ten was a classic rock masterpiece disguised as a grunge album.

1. Metallica – Metallica (1991)

The standout guitar album of the ’90s. The best-selling heavy metal album of all time. A sonic and creative benchmark for the genre. Metallica’s self-titled fifth album, forever known as The Black Album, is also the inspiration for countless young guitarists, with lead single Enter Sandman an essential riff for every new player. And for Matt Tuck, leader of British metal stars Bullet For My Valentine, the influence of this album is profound.

“They were a big band before that anyways,” Matt says, “but as soon as they released The Black Album it went stratospheric. They’ve been untouchable ever since, as far as getting an album to connect with as many people as they did. The amount of sales, how relevant it is 30 years later – it’s just a phenomenon!”

Tuck tells a story millions of metal fans can relate to: “I was 14 years old. We had just got Sky installed so we had MTV. We put it on and there was this music video on of a truck smashing through a man’s bed, with all these crazy low-end toms raging. It was Enter Sandman. The moment I heard it I was like ‘What the fuck is this?’ I was hooked from that moment. Within a couple of weeks I went out and bought my first ever album, Metallica’s Black Album.”

In that moment, Matt Tuck’s future was set. “I started to learn to play guitar by myself that year, off the back of that album,” he continues. “I learned some basic chords, then put on that album and started to work it all out. I wanted to be James Hetfield!”

In the early ’80s, Metallica had risen to cult status as pioneers of thrash metal, a super-fast, super-heavy hybrid of metal and punk. After a doggedly anti-commercial start to their career, they had made their first MTV video, for the song One, in 1988. 

The following album would be a risky move into the mainstream. For this, they enlisted producer Bob Rock, best known for working with Mötley Crüe and Bon Jovi. James Hetfield’s touring guitar had long been emblazoned with a “Kill Bon Jovi” sticker, and some Metallica fans were nervous.

Rock was famously demanding in the studio. Tensions between band and producer are visible in the Year In The Life Of Metallica documentary, and there were times during the making of the album when band and producer were barely on speaking terms.

Matt Tuck compares the process to working with producer Don Gilmore (Linkin Park) on Bullet’s 2010 album Fever. “We’ve never had that kind of ascendancy,” he says, “but Fever felt like a big stepping stone for us. That took us from Brixton Academy to Wembley. Up until that point, nobody questioned the songwriting. Don Gilmore was the only guy that really challenged me as a writer and I didn’t like it! He’s trying to get us to take out double kick patterns and not dumb it down, but just try and make it a little bit more Black Album.”

Matt can understand Metallica’s difficulties with Rock. “It’s such an intimate long-term personal process. The first time you work with these guys you don’t know them, there’s no relationship, there’s no trust. It’s only really when the dust settles and you can look back on it a couple of years later that you actually appreciate the process.”

The Black Album’s monochrome cover both earned its nickname and invited comparisons to AC/DC’s Back In Black. The albums have more in common than just their ultra-noir sleeves. Both were made at the turn of a decade by bands in mourning (AC/DC for singer Bon Scott, Metallica for bassist Cliff Burton).

Both bands had begun with cult followings and made steps towards the mainstream with Highway To Hell (1979) and ... And Justice For All (1988) respectively. For both bands, though, black albums marked the leap to global stardom, securing their places in the rock pantheon – even if diehard fans still prefer their earlier work.

The AC/DC connection was conscious. Drummer Lars Ulrich told Uncut magazine’s John Robinson in 2020 that they listened to the Australians when writing The Black Album: “We thought about the art of simplifying and writing shorter songs... A little more bounce, to make the music more physical than cerebral.”

Where Metallica’s trademark in the ’80s had been fast and furious, AC/DC often made songs heavier by slowing down.

The Black Album was notable for establishing scooped mids as the dominant metal guitar tone. The main rhythm amp was a Mesa/Boogie Mark II-C++ as it had been since Master Of Puppets, but a modded Marshall JCM800 and a Boogie Mark V were among the other amps to hand. 

On Hetfield’s Mesa, mid control was at 0 and the amp’s graphic EQ was a shaped in a V, with the middle 750Hz band all the way down at -12dB. There were two further parametric EQs in the FX loop, cutting mids at 900Hz and 1.2kHz and boosting presence at 4.2kHz and 6kHz. By now, Metallica were using ESP guitars with EMG pickups.

It was directly the opposite of classic mid-heavy tones from bands like Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden, but Metallica did strategically replace some of the lost mids with the Marshall amp. Rock’s JCM800 was modified by Jose Arredondo, famous because Eddie Van Halen had claimed (falsely, it later emerged) he had modded Ed’s famous Plexi.

“James wanted crunch,” Bob Rock told Reverb.com. “Crunch to me is upper mids. Crunch to him is that resonance when he palm mutes and it goes gonk! It’s the sound of the room we made for the guitar sounds, it’s not all close mic’ed.”

Rock’s input on the guitars was huge. He suggested they tuned down to D standard for Sad But True after noticing all the songs were in the same key. He pushed Kirk to try harder on solos, insisting on him laying down an improvised solo with every live take of each song.

When lead guitarist Kirk Hammett recorded the final solos, they used the improvised takes for inspiration. Rock rejected Kirk’s initial idea for The Unforgiven, and suggested Kirk fingerpick the clean half of the solo – “really pull on the strings and slap them against the frets,” as Kirk recalled to Guitar World. His insistence paid off and Kirk can be seen grinning in A Year In The Life...

“It’s pretty much the type of guitar solo I’ve been trying to do for the last five or six years,” he said, “and I’m really proud of that.” 

It was also Rock who gave James the confidence to pursue the ballad Nothing Else Matters, notable for Hetfield’s first Metallica solo. The Black Album forever positioned Metallica as metal giants. And for Matt Tuck, is still stands tall as a masterpiece.

“We’ve managed to play a few festivals and shows with Metallica,” Matt smiles. “It’s always a bit of a headfuck, I’m not gonna lie. They’re such a huge part of my life from such an early age and they’ve defined me as a person and my career. It’s as big as that for me. So for them to pass me in the corridor at a festival and go, ‘Hey, Matt!’ just blows my mind. They’re the most important metal band there’s ever been, and The Black Album deserves every accolade. They are the kings.”

Aside from his politics, Tom Morello is known for two things: one is, naturally, those regime-toppling riffs, and the other is his adventurous sonics, which boldly took the guitar into the realm of the DJ.

When Rage Against the Machine’s self-titled debut dropped in 1992, it was a wakeup call to guitarists taken in by the raw, unprocessed guitar tones that dominated the alt-rock revolution of the early-’90s. It was bold and defiant: it flew in the face of convention and helped to stitch together the hip-hop and metal influences the band wore so lovingly on their sleeves.

And while Morello would go on to share a wealth of sonic tricks over the decades that followed – with Rage, and later, Audioslave, Prophets of Rage and solo projects – he previewed many of those trademark sounds right at the outset of RATM’s career.

During the 1993 tour in support of the band’s debut, Morello and his iconic Arm the Homeless ‘mongrel’ electric would routinely take an extended solo spot during Bullet in the Head – and the guitarist, clearly eager to share his discoveries with the world, seized the opportunity to stun audiences with guitar tones quite unlike anything they had heard before.

The best example of this solo is heard during a show at Melkweg, Amsterdam in February 1993, which features on the band’s Japan-only Live & Rare compilation (now available on streaming platforms), and later resurfaced on the 20-year anniversary reissue of their debut.

Sadly, there’s no video of this particular set, but there is footage of another Netherlands gig that features this expanded spot at Pinkpop festival that same year (although it’s not the finest example of Morello’s closing ‘conventional’ guitar solo).

The lead can be broken down into five constituent parts, four of which showcase the unconventional techniques Morello would employ in later RATM and Audioslave cuts.

Several of these utilize the Morellian foundation of toggle switching (achieved by setting the volume on one pickup to zero and the other to full and rapidly switching between them), but – get this – not one features his pedalboard staple, the DigiTech Whammy.

The marathon solo begins with a dash to the 4x12 to generate the feedback required for Morello’s toggle-switching, Floyd Rose-shaking siren wail, which wound up on record in 1999’s Sleep Now in the Fire.

Another toggle-happy line is up next, this time featuring a healthy dose of wah pedal, which approximates the descending solo on the studio version of Bullet in the Head – a similar effect can be heard during Guerrilla Radio.

Audioslave fans might recognize what follows: the love-it-or-hate-it ‘laughing monkey’ solo from 2006 groover Original Fire, achieved by depressing the tremolo system all the way and slapping the strings against the pickups.

A ringing low E ushers in the arrival of a move Morello would go on to employ at pretty much every show of his career: it’s the Bulls on Parade toggle-scratch, a studio version of which would appear three years later.

Finally, there’s a brief blast of ’80s metal-style alternate picking to bring the one-minute solo home, and call time on Morello’s DJ guitar excursions.

In modern parlance, the lead is a baller move and a serious flex: Morello was here to lay down the groundwork for the future of guitar playing – and, as it turned out, his own recorded output, too.

And while some may disagree with calling this his ‘best’ solo – shredders will point to Take the Power Back and Know Your Enemy, while Killing in the Name remains the Whammy pedal moment – it is perhaps the ultimate example of the ingenuity he brought to the electric guitar.

Morello discussed his approach to breaking the shackles of traditional guitar playing with Total Guitar last year.

“Once I had the blinders off and realised the parameters of rock and roll guitar playing were not just Chuck Berry to Eddie Van Halen, I started practicing sounds – whether that was DJ scratching or wild boars rutting at the zoo or the helicopters overhead,” he recalled.

“Even if I couldn’t exactly mimic those sounds, practicing non-guitar noises led my playing in an entirely different direction. It felt like that lane was open. There was no-one else in it. I started constructing a whole sonic world out of these barnyard animal noises, old war films and Public Enemy records.”

Oh, and in case you’re interested in the leads that inspired Morello, he once named his favorite guitar solos of all time (none of which resembles a laughing monkey, for the record).

Last week, Rage Against the Machine concluded the North American leg of their Public Service Announcement reunion tour with a five-day New York residency, during which the band performed deep cut Fistful of Steel for the first time since 1997.

Thanks to the residency, the band have also announced they have managed to raise a total of $1 million for charity through the sales of charity tickets.

Fistful of Steel, taken from the band’s 1992 self titled LP, was revisited during RATM’s penultimate residency show that took place at Madison Square Garden, and shared the set list with a number of more commonly performed hits.

On the night, Tom Morello and co performed Killing in the Name, Guerrilla Radio, Township Rebellion and Sleep Now in the Fire and a collection of other songs from their first three studio albums: 1992’s Rage Against The Machine, 1996's Evil Empire and 1999’s The Battle Of Los Angeles.

Footage of Fistful of Steel – which preceded a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s The Ghost of Tom Joad – can be found below.

Elsewhere during the residency, Rage once again teamed up with Run the Jewels for a cover of the latter’s Close Your Eyes (And Count to Fuck), which they’d already performed together earlier this year. 

Other tracks that made it onto the residency set list include Bombtrack, Bullet in the Head, Down Rodeo, Vietnow, Born of a Broken Man and more.

As for the money raised for charity, 10 per cent of residency tickets sold were sold with charity pricing, which meant higher fees were introduced in an effort to generate additional revenue for charitable organizations.

On social media, the band confirmed the funds will be split between three non-profit organizations: the Immigrant Defense Project, Neighbors Together and The Campaign Against Hunger.

The Immigration Defense Project provides legal aid to people in the US facing deportation “and other adverse immigration consequences”, while the latter two aim to give food and other resources to those in need in New York.

In order to donate to Neighbors Together and The Campaign Against Hunger, the band have joined forces with Why Hunger, whose mission it is to “provide critical resources to support grassroots movements and fuel community solutions rooted in social, environmental, racial and economic justice”.

Charity pricing was also implemented throughout the whole Public Service Announcement reunion tour, meaning the total sum of funds raised for the above charities equals $2,223,345. 

Zack de la Rocha was indeed present for the final five shows, despite having injured his leg on stage earlier in the tour. As a result of the injury, the band recently canceled their European tour dates following “medical guidance”.

“Per medical guidance, Zack de la Rocha has been advised that the August and September 2022 UK and European leg of the Rage Against the Machine tour cannot proceed,” the band wrote. “It is with great disappointment that we announce this cancellation.”

De la Rocha reportedly tore his Achilles during the band’s rendition of Bullet in the Head on July 11.

Rage Against the Machine have been forced to pull out of a string of European headline shows, due to “medical guidance” received following frontman Zack de la Rocha’s leg injury.

The band are currently playing their first run of shows for 11 years, but de la Rocha injured himself while performing the second show of their Public Service Announcement North American tour in Chicago (July 11). 

The vocalist finished that gig and has since continued to perform seated, with the band intending to honor the remaining US dates (including Madison Square Garden on August 14). However, it seems that the injury has not improved in recent weeks. 

RATM informed fans of the decision to cancel the shows yesterday (August 11) via social media, issuing the following statement: 

“Per medical guidance, Zack de la Rocha has been advised that the August and September 2022 UK and European leg of the Rage Against the Machine tour cannot proceed. It is with great disappointment that we announce this cancellation.

“Rage Against the Machine will be finishing their run at Madison Square Garden on August 11, 12 & 14 and then Zack must return home for rest and rehabilitation. The flights, travel time, and rigorous schedule in the UK and Europe are simply too much of a risk for a complete recovery.

“We are so sorry to all of our fans who have waited years to see us and hope to Rage again soon. Please contact your point of purchase for refunds to any headline shows. Brad, Tim, Tom & Zack”

The band‘s 2023 US dates remain unaffected. However, the canceled shows include some major events on the European festival calendar, not least the UK’s storied Reading and Leeds Festival. You can view the full list of cancelled shows below. 

Reading and Leeds has already booked a replacement in the form of The 1975, but some fans have nonetheless been left disappointed and demanding refunds, with several describing the booking as a “downgrade”. 

There’s no word of new dates, yet, so for now European fans will have to make do with this fan-shot (but pretty decent) footage of Rage’s first reunion show at Alpine Valley, Wisconsin on July 9.

Rage Against The Machine 2022 cancelled tour dates

• August 24 – Edinburgh - Royal Highlands Centre
• August 26 – Leeds - Leeds Festival
• August 28 – Reading - Reading Festival
• August 30 – France - Rock En Seine Festival
• September 1 – Antwerp - Sportpales
• September 3 – Germany - Expo Plaza
• September 5 – Zurich - Hallenstadion
• September 8 – Malaga - Andelucia Big Festival
• September 10 – Madrid - Mad Cool Sunset
• September 13 – Austria - Stadthalle
• September 15 – Poland - Tauron Arena

Keep an eye on Rage Against The Machine’s site for more information about future tour dates. 

Tom Morello was the unfortunate recipient of a hefty wipe-out during Rage Against the Machine’s show last Saturday (July 23), after he was accidentally tackled by a security guard who was chasing down a stage invader.

In footage captured by a fan, Morello and co were in the midst of performing Killing in the Name when a mischievous gig-goer attempted to make their way on stage with what looks like the intention of making the large jump across the pit to the crowd.

The would-be stagediver's plan was scuppered by a diligent security guard, who intercepted the interloper en route at the edge of the stage. Alas, such are the laws of physics, the guard’s momentum sent him on a collision course with Morello, who was sent tumbling in a twisted heap of limbs and his electric guitar.

The rest of the band continued the performance with vigor, though the seated singer Zack de la Rocha – who was also on the receiving end of an on-stage injury earlier this month – quickly brought proceedings to a close to check on Morello.

After the lights came on, Morello was fished from the abyss, and stood triumphantly on the precipice of the platform, egging on the crowd. With his in-tact Telecaster back in position, the guitarist then returned to join his bandmates to start Killing in the Name all over again.

That wasn’t the only thing that caught attendees by surprise, though. Halfway through the set, Rage invited show opener’s Run the Jewels on stage for a performance of their track, Close Your Eyes (And Count to Fuck), which features de la Rocha. Fortunately, that went without a hitch.

The gig, which took place at Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena, was the latest date in the band’s much-delayed Public Service Announcement tour with Run the Jewels. The tour’s debut date – a performance in Wisconsin – marked the band’s first live show in 11 years.

Across the 51-date stint around Europe and North America, Rage Against the Machine will visit 12 countries and 40 cities. The hefty touring schedule continues tonight (July 25) in Buffalo, New York, and will run until September 19, which will host a rescheduled date at Prague’s O2 Arena.

A four-month break will precede the tour’s second leg, which runs from February 22 to April 2.

For a full list of tour dates, head over to Rage Against the Machine’s website.

Rage Against the Machine have commenced their many times-postponed Public Service Announcement tour with Run the Jewels, playing their first show in 11 years.

The titanic political rock outfit served up a barrage of classics during their 16-track set at the Alpine Valley Music Theatre in East Troy, Wisconsin, including Bulls on Parade, Testify, Guerilla Radio and Killing in the Name. 

Other songs featured on the setlist included opener Bombtrack, People of the Sun, Know Your Enemy and their first performance of Bruce Springsteen’s The Ghost of Tom Joad in over 20 years.

The band also took an opportunity during the show to express their discontent with the recent repeal of Roe v Wade, which protected American women’s constitutional right to have an abortion.

In a straight-talking message displayed at the back of the stage, the band wrote: “Forced birth in a country that is the only wealthy country in the world without any guaranteed paid parental leave at national level. Forced birth in a country where Black birth-givers experience maternal mortality two to three times higher than that of white birth-givers.

“Forced birth in a country where gun violence is the number one cause of death among children and teenagers. Abort the Supreme Court.”

Rage Against the Machine originally planned to hit the road in 2020, but the Covid pandemic put a considerable spanner in the works, forcing them to postpone the tour until summer 2021. The rescheduled trek was subsequently postponed again until 2022. 

And while the wheels of the Public Service Announcement tour are finally turning, a string of dates – which were scheduled to take place between March 31 and May 23 – were again postponed before the run kicked off. These dates will now take place in 2023.

While the patience of Rage fans is admirable, they were treated last year to two new solo albums from guitarist Tom Morello: The Atlas Underground Fire and The Atlas Underground Flood.

Both outings were studded with a stellar lineup of guest artists, including Bruce Springsteen, Eddie Vedder, Kirk Hammett and Alex Lifeson, as well as contemporary names like grandson, phem and Mike Posner.

The Public Service Announcement tour continues tonight (July 11) at the United Center in Chicago, Illinois. For a full list of dates, head to Rage Against the Machine's website.

Robert Fripp and Toyah Willcox have covered Rage Against The Machine’s Killing in the Name in their latest Sunday Lunch session.

In the footage, the couple perform in front of hand-painted sign quoting a phrase from poet/musician Gil Scott-Heron, “The first revolution is when you change your mind.”

Fripp and Willcox’s rendition is somewhat abridged, as ever, but manages to pack in the meatiest riffs from Rage’s original protest anthem and concludes with a single ‘Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me’, as opposed to Zack de la Rocha’s rousing 16 repetitions.

Throughout the performance Willcox daubs herself in red paint, in what is either a symbolic invocation of the bloodied hands of unnamed oppressors, or pure visual effect – or, er, both. 

Rage vocalist Zack de la Rocha originally wrote the lines that would become the band’s calling card in response to institutionalised racism and police brutality – in particular the beating of Rodney King by the LAPD in 1991, which sparked the 1992 LA riots. 

Tom Morello, meanwhile, came up with the iconic central riff while teaching a student how to play in drop-D tuning before he wisely stopped his session to get it on tape. 

However, the song is best known for its infamous closing refrain, which has since helped it become a soundtrack for rebellions of all scales – from issues of social injustice to disrupting Simon Cowell’s pop chart monopoly. 

It seems like Rage Against The Machine are a resurgent force at the moment. In addition, to the Fripp and Willcox endorsement, Limp Bizkit recently covered Killing In The Name onstage in Wilkes-Barre, PA, while RATM teased their live return last week by sharing a thunderous clip from their rehearsal sessions ahead of their summer tour.

Rage Against the Machine are heading out on their previously-postponed US tour dates next month and have shared a clip of a recent rehearsal session to whet fan’s appetites.

In the short clip, posted on Instagram, the group can be heard running through 30 seconds of War Within a Breath from the band’s 1999 album, The Battle of Los Angeles. It’s a storming rendition of the track – sounding tight and aggressive – and showing no signs of rust setting in, despite its age and the fact the band have not performed live together since 2011. 

Indeed, RATM’s upcoming world tour, featuring support from Run The Jewels, is set to be their first full run in over 20 years. Originally scheduled for Spring/Summer 2020, it was postponed due to the pandemic, initially to 2021 and early 2022, before being further delayed.

The rehearsal clip, recorded on June 7, suggests the band are now clearly itching to get on the road. It was accompanied by the text “31 days” – a likely reference to their first tour date – July 9 at the Alpine Valley Music Theatre in East Troy, WI. 

Meanwhile, demand for RATM performances clearly remains high, as Limp Bizkit proved when they covered Killing In The Name onstage in Wilkes-Barre, PA recently – all with the help of a fan who was both willing and able. 

Head to Rage Against the Machine’s official site for tickets and more information on their 2022/2023 tour dates.

Fan footage has emerged of Fred Durst inviting a fan onstage at a recent Limp Bizkit show to perform a cover of Rage Against the Machine’s Killing In The Name.

The show took place on May 7 in Wilkes-Barre, PA and saw the band – led by a buoyant Durst, dressed in full Dad Vibes regalia – seamlessly blend from their 1999 track Re-Arranged into RATM’s signature hit.

In the footage below (around 3 mins 53 seconds), founding member Sam Rivers kicks off Tim Commerford’s iconic bass riff and Durst can be heard yelling, “Karaoke!”

Durst then invites an audience member to step on stage and share the vocal duties. Much to the delight of the crowd, the fan doesn’t miss a beat and injects a new level of energy into the performance, with the rest of the band upping their game to match – clock Borland's cunning alternate-picked octave take on Tom Morello's solo.

In a gesture of thanks, the onstage guest is then treated to some Gatorade and an honorary sit down on Durst’s onstage Dad Vibes La-Z-Boy chair, as guitarist Wes Borland kicks it in to recline mode. 

“That's my man right there,” comments Durst. “He was going hard as fuck!”

Limp Bizkit have been touring in support of Still Sucks, which was released last fall and represents their first album in nine years. The tour continues until May 31. 

Head to Limp Bizkit’s official site for tickets and more information. 

After pushing back the start date of their forthcoming Public Service Announcement tour with Run the Jewels last month, Rage Against the Machine have announced rescheduled dates for the postponed shows.

The tour is due to commence at the Alpine Valley Music Theatre in East Troy, Wisconsin on July 9, with the first block of dates wrapping up with five shows at Madison Square Garden in New York from August 8-14.

Postponed dates – which were initially scheduled to take place between March 31 and May 23 – will now be held in early 2023, starting February 22 at the Pan American Center in Las Cruces, NM, and concluding April 2 at the Little Caesars Arena in Detroit, MI.

All tickets held for the postponed shows will be honored, and fans have until March 15, 2022 to organize a refund at their point of purchase if they wish to do so. See below for the full list of rescheduled shows.

The Public Service Announcement tour marks the first time Rage Against the Machine have hit the stage since 2011. The reunion was initially scheduled between March and May 2020, but was subsequently put on hold due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Following this, the tour was rescheduled to take place in summer 2021, but was subsequently rescheduled for a second time, and pushed back to begin in 2022.

While fans are still waiting to catch a glimpse of Rage Against the Machine as a collective, they've been treated to a wealth of new music from Tom Morello as of late.

Last year alone, the guitarist released two solo albums – The Atlas Underground Fire and The Atlas Underground Flood – both packed with a killer lineup of guests, including Bruce Springsteen, Eddie Vedder, Kirk Hammett and Bring Me The Horizon.

Morello said in a 2021 interview with Guitar World that The Atlas Underground Fire was a record “born of lockdown”.

“From the time I was 17 years old to the time that the world shut down in March of 2020, I've had a nonstop creative motor on me of writing, recording and performing,” he said. “And it all came to a screeching halt.

“For the first four months or so I was absolutely adrift. You know, I have a nice studio in my house, but I don’t know how to work it. Like, I don’t know how to move any of the buttons around. So I was like, ‘I’m not going to be able to play shows. I’m not going to be able to record music.’ 

He also revealed that he became inspired by Kanye West's approach to recording the vocals for some of his records using the voice memos on his phone, and opted to record some of the guitars for the The Atlas Underground Fire in the same way.

“My laptop’s open so I can have the BPMs in my ears or whatever, and the phone is balanced on the edge of the laptop on a chair facing the amp,” he said. 

“But there’s no manual that says, like, ‘The voice memo of your iPhone needs to be 8.4 inches away from the top left speaker...’ I just set it up on a chair. And I’ve gotta tell you, the guitar sounded pretty freaking great.”

17 artists are up for induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2022, the organization announced today.

Among the artists on the ballot this year are Rage Against the Machine, Fela Kuti, the New York Dolls, Dionne Warwick, Devo, Kate Bush, MC5, Eurythmics, Pat Benatar and Judas Priest.

Making the nominee list for the first time, meanwhile, is an eclectic group that includes hip-hop legends (Eminem, A Tribe Called Quest), new-wave hitmakers (Duran Duran), a country superstar (Dolly Parton), an alt-rock non-conformist (Beck), and two hugely successful singer/songwriters (Lionel Richie and Carly Simon).

Nominees are voted on by a voting body that includes over 1,000 artists, historians and music industry figures.

Starting today, through April 29, the public can also participate in the selection process by voting at the Rock Hall's website or at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame museum in Cleveland. The public's top five artists will comprise a “fans’ ballot” that will be tallied along with the other ballots to select the 2022 inductees.

The 2022 inductees will be announced in May, while the induction ceremony will take place this fall, though the date and venue have yet to be announced as of press time. 

2021's ceremony saw the induction of the Foo Fighters, Tina Turner, Carole King, the Go-Go’s, Jay-Z and Todd Rundgren, and the posthumous awarding of the Musical Excellence Award to late Ozzy Osbourne electric guitar player Randy Rhoads.

For more info on the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame museum, ballot and induction ceremony, stop by Rock Hall.

For the past three years, Ernie Ball Music Man has been steadily introducing signature bass guitars for heroes of the low-end, including Vulfpeck’s Joe Dart, Dream Theater’s John Myung, MxPx’s Mike Herrera and AC/DC’s Cliff Williams.

Each one uses the basic template of an existing model with slight tweaks to personalise it to the player. So far, that has mostly meant streamlining electronics and controls.

Their latest collaboration with Tim Commerford follows the same blueprint except for the less-is-more concept. Instead, the Rage Against The Machine, Audioslave and Prophets of Rage bassist worked with the company to come up with four variants of the StingRay: a passive full-scale, an active full-scale, a passive short-scale, and an active short-scale.

The basses all have standard pickups and controls and have been streamlined only in production numbers: each version is limited to just 50 units worldwide. We got our hands on one of the active short-scale models to see if the little beast can muster the monstrous tones for which Commerford is known. 

As with any short-scale, this bass feels small as soon as you take it out of the case, but its construction makes it feel solid as a rock. It’s crafted with an ash body in a natural finish with a black pickguard – a configuration Commerford latched onto by way of slap legend Louis Johnson – as well as a maple neck and fingerboard.

The neck has a gunstock oil and hand-rubbed special wax blend finish, leaving it silky smooth to the touch. The whole package weighs in at just over seven pounds, which I found to be light enough to sling around but heavy enough to feel substantial. 

Aside from what we think of as a classic StingRay, there are two main features that are unique to Commerford’s new axe. First is the height-adjustable finger ramp, which sits snugly against the bass’s single neodymium humbucker. It offers an extra couple of inches of thumb real estate to find your sweet spot for plucking. Its height is set simply with four screws to line it up with your pickup. Conversely, you can lower it all the way to be flush with the pickguard.

The second new feature is the adjustable mute pads built into the bass’s bridge. First found on early StingRay models, the system gives each string its own foam pad that can be raised or lowered by a thumbscrew. The screws sit directly under the string, so you have to reach in between the strings to adjust. Rounding out the spec list is a fine set of hardware with a compensated nut, slick lightweight tuners, and a string-thru-body bridge.

As for sounds, there’s no getting away from it – this is a StingRay. Even though short-scales tend to be darker sounding, the pickup sounds just like you might expect: super punchy with a snarling midrange. The pickup and electronics were dead silent, making this a great option for studio work as well as the stage.

The three-band EQ also adds to this factor; each control’s voicing is highly musical. Dialling in a little bass added a warm heft rather than any tubbiness. The mids merely accent the punch, while the treble knob added top end bite. I did find that I leaned toward turning up the bass to add a bit more girth to the natural sound.

Before even getting to the EQ, there are tons of fun to be had with the mute pads. I spent a good long while just geeking out on adjusting the mutes between lightly touching the strings and squashing into them.

Commerford explains he uses them to dampen overtones when kicking on his overdrives. This certainly does the trick, but I had just as much fun exploring its vintage textures. You can jam RATM’s Bombtrack on this bass just as easily as Tyrone Davis’s If I Could Turn Back the Hands of Time. You can also get creative, leaving the low strings for bass notes and chording on muted higher strings for interesting textures.

This bass is American made and carries a price tag to match, but simply put, EBMM has knocked it out of the park with this bass. Even in a smaller setup, they’ve captured Commerford’s powerful sound in an extremely comfortable package. This bass doesn’t need to have his name on it to be great, but it does live up to his reputation. Let’s just hope that the models continue beyond this limited edition run!

Specs

• Price: $2,999
• Made in: USA
• Body: Ash
• Neck: Select maple, 30”
• Neck joint: Five-bolt, sculpted neck joint
• Nut width: 38.1 mm
• Fingerboard: Maple
• Frets: 22 high-profile stainless steel
• Pickups: Single humbucker with neodymium magnets
• Electronics: Three-band active 18-volt preamp
• Controls: Volume, treble, mid, bass
• Hardware: Custom Music Man tuners, string-thru-body bridge with adjustable mutes
• Weight: 3.3kg / 7.3lbs
• Case/gig bag included? Yes 
• Left-hand option available? No
• More information: Ernie Ball Music Man

Rage Against the Machine have pushed back the start of their forthcoming Public Service Announcement North America tour with Run The Jewels.

The tour will now commence at the Alpine Valley Music Theatre in East Troy, Wisconsin on July 9, meaning 19 shows from March 31 through May 23 have been postponed with new dates to be confirmed. The band say these dates will be announced “soon”.

All shows after July 9, including those in Chicago, Quebec City, Pittsburgh and New York will go ahead as planned.

Tickets purchased for any rescheduled dates will be honored, and refunds are available at the point of purchase until February 19.

The postponement marks the third change of plans for the band's Public Service Announcement reunion tour. The run was originally scheduled between March and May 2020, but was subsequently put on hold due to the then-emerging Covid-19 pandemic.

Thereafter, the tour was rescheduled to take place in summer 2021, but was again postponed until 2022.

While fans have been patiently waiting for Rage Against the Machine to reunite on stage for some time now, they've been treated to a plethora of new music from guitar-slinger Tom Morello in the meantime.

In 2021 alone, Morello dropped two solo albums – The Atlas Underground Fire and The Atlas Underground Flood – both studded with a stellar lineup of guests, including Bruce Springsteen, Eddie Vedder, Kirk Hammett and Alex Lifeson.

“It was sort of a free-for-all creative process,” the guitarist told Guitar World last year of The Atlas Underground Fire. As he explained, the album recruited a host of names more associated with the EDM sphere, including Mike Posner, Phantogram, Protohype and Sama’ Abdulhadi.

“What I’ve tried to do is create this alloy between two worlds,” he explained. “It’s a cyborg – you don’t know where the guitar ends and the EDM begins. To me, that feels like an exciting future for the electric guitar.”

“Man, I can’t wait for people to see this bass,” says Tim Commerford when we speak to him prior to the launch of his signature StingRay bass guitar. “It’s so beautiful. It does everything I need, and way more. I’ve played some beautiful basses in my time, but this one has to be one of the very best ones that I’ve ever played. Ernie Ball really did a spectacular job on it. We went back and forth on it until we got it perfectly right.”

For the past three years, Ernie Ball Music Man has been steadily introducing signature instruments for heroes of the low end, including Vulfpeck’s Joe Dart, Dream Theater’s John Myung, MxPx’s Mike Herrera, and AC/DC’s Cliff Williams. Each one uses the basic template of an existing model with slight tweaks to personalize it to the player. So far, that has mostly meant streamlining electronics and controls.

Their latest collaboration with Tim Commerford follows the same blueprint except for the less-is-more concept. Instead, the Rage Against The Machine, Audioslave, and Prophets of Rage bassist has worked with the company to come up with four variants of the StingRay: a passive full-scale, an active full-scale, a passive short-scale, and an active short-scale. 

The basses all have standard pickups and controls and have been streamlined in production numbers: each version is limited to just 50 units worldwide.

Aside from what we think of as a classic StingRay, there are two main features that are unique to Commerford’s new axe.

First is the height-adjustable finger ramp, which sits snugly against the bass’s single neodymium humbucker. It offers an extra couple of inches of thumb real estate to find your sweet spot for plucking. Its height is set simply with four screws to line it up with your pickup. Conversely, you can lower it all the way to be flush with the pickguard.

“I was 18 years old when I first saw a Music Man StingRay,” explains Commerford. “It was a blonde one with a black pickguard, it was at a pawnshop, and it was $300. I wanted it so bad, and I scraped up the money, and I got it. That bass was the one that I used to record the first Rage record, and it was a big part of my life.

“At that time I was pretty much glued to playing right over the pickup, but I’ve learned to play in different ways so my hand is more comfortable, so I added a piece of plastic to the pickguard. This wasn’t anything like we’re seeing on the new bass, which is the most high-tech version of a ramp and the most comfortable place I’ve ever put my hand on a bass guitar. I’m blown away by it!” 

The second new feature is the adjustable mute pads built into the bass’s bridge. First found on early StingRay models, the system gives each string its own foam pad that can be raised or lowered, using a thumbscrew. The screws sit directly under the string, so you have to reach in between the strings to adjust.

“This bridge is the most incredible thing to me,” explains Commerford, “because it has these mutes on it – and the mutes, as someone who enjoys playing with distorted bass, in layman’s terms these mutes eliminate all the noise that you don’t want to hear. There’s certain noises that I like, and certain ones that I don’t, and this is the only bridge that does that.”

As it turns out, the bass had been six years in the making after Commerford reconnected with the brand prior to the advent of Prophets of Rage.

“Back in 2015, I was approached by Brian Ball, who’s the grandson of Ernie Ball, and he wanted to make me a bass,” he recalls. “He gave me this Music Man StingRay – I think they call it the HH model. I was blown away by the construction, by the way that it sounds, the way it plays acoustically in my living room. I plug it in and I have to drastically change my settings on my amps: It sounded really, really good with my setup.

“For Prophets of Rage, Music Man made me these StingRays, which are the HS models. They are the closest thing I have ever felt to a Steinberger bass. There isn’t a single dead spot on the neck, because they have this integrated nut so everything on the bass is just smoothed out. When it comes to hitting really hard, you don’t have to worry about your fingers hitting a sharp magnet or anything like it. Everything is just so solid and they just feel really good.”

Of course, this isn’t the first time Commerford has been approached to make a signature bass – far from it – but it was the company's values that finally sealed the deal.

“Over the years, people have come to me and told me they wanted to make a bass for me, and I’ve always shied away from it, but with Music Man I’m really happy to say that this is a bass I’m part of, and that it was not made using exploitation of humans,” he enthuses.

“It was made in a really awesome factory in San Luis Obispo where people are looked after and are happy. That happiness shows in how beautifully this instrument is made. This is the dopest bass that you can get!” 

• Head to Ernie Ball Music Man for more info on the Tim Commerford Artist Series StingRay.

Jim Dunlop kicked December off with the launch of the MXR Power 50 Overdrive, a signature Tom Morello overdrive pedal designed to distil the tone of the Rage Against the Machine guitarist’s long-running Marshall JCM800 2205 and Peavey 4x12 amp rig into a pedal. Now the man himself has put the stompbox through its paces in its first official demo.

In the clip, Morello demonstrates his tones from his original rig, before showcasing how the pedal incarnation stacks up through a variety of different combos, including a Vox AC30, Mesa/Boogie Lone Star, Fender Hot Rod Deluxe, and even his son's 8” Fender Frontman 15-watt bedroom amp.

Utilizing his trademark Arm the Homeless electric and an identical pedalboard for each setup – connected to the Power 50’s onboard effects loop, which emulates the way Morello runs his effects through his Marshall – the results are uncanny.

Of course, there’s always the argument that tone is in the fingers, but even so, the sag and snap of that Morellian crunch is very much in evidence, whatever amp the pedal is plugged into.

The Power 50 utilizes a MOSFET-based circuit to emulate the preamp of Morello’s JCM, ​​and also features its full complement of controls, including Gain, Bass, Middle, Treble, Volume, and Presence.

“The Power 50 Overdrive emulates the amp setup that I’ve used since 1988,” Morello says. “I’ve made 21 studio albums, and that amp, that head, and that speaker, and that tone has been on 21 of them. It’s been my signature identifiable sound since Day One of my career.

“If you want to have the sound that has been on those records, you don’t need to find an amp and speaker cabinet from 1988. You can get that sound with the Power 50 Overdrive, no matter what your setup is.”

The MXR Tom Morello Power 50 Overdrive is available to preorder now, priced at $189.99 street.

Morello recently released his second solo record of 2021, The Atlas Underground Flood, which features his long-awaited collaboration with Kirk Hammett and Alex Lifeson.

During a conversation with Tom Morello on his Maximum Firepower podcast, Jerry Cantrell has recalled Layne Staley’s early fascination with the Rage Against the Machine firebrand’s guitar playing.

Alice in Chains and RATM were both part of the bill at Lollapalooza 1993, an experience Morello cites as formative given it was the politically charged outfit’s first major tour, but it also marked an influential time for Staley’s development as a guitar player.

“I remember, during that tour, Layne really had a shine for you,” Cantrell recalls. “He wanted to play guitar more, and he was kind of intimidated because he didn’t play that much guitar, but he really was turned on by how you played guitar – I was a little hurt by that. [Laughs]”

“But I remember that, and you gave him the spark to learn how to play guitar and write more songs.”

Staley, who favored Gibson SG and Les Paul models, wrote and played guitar on Alice in Chains’ Angry Chair, Hate to Feel and Head Creeps, and also performed on Mad Season’s I Don’t Know Anything during their performance at the Moore Theater in Seattle.

Elsewhere in the interview, Morello shared some of his own memories of Staley during the run.

“He and I had a lot of laughs on that tour, man,” he enthused. “We would have a daily argument of who was more metal: him or me. It would be part metal trivia and part posturing, but I remember that very very fondly.”

Staley and Morello would eventually join forces in supergroup Class of ’99 to record a cover of Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2) for 1998 sci-fi horror flick The Faculty. It became one of Staley’s final studio appearances prior to his death in April 2002.

To hear Cantrell and Morello’s conversation in full, check out Tom Morello’s Maximum Firepower podcast.

Tom Morello had big plans for 2020 – first and foremost, a world tour with a reunited Rage Against the Machine that would’ve seen him rocking stages from Pittsburgh to Prague, Kansas City to Krakow. 

Instead, like all of us, he was stuck at home. “Pretty frankly, it was a time of great anxiety and depression,” Morello admits to Guitar World.

But then something shocking happened. “Weirdly,” he continues, “inspiration came... from Kanye West.” 

Let us state for the record that, no, Morello has not collaborated with the hip-hop icon. Rather, he found encouragement in something West had said in an interview. 

“He was talking about how he recorded the vocals to a couple of his big hit records on the voice memo of his phone,” Morello recalls. “And I thought to myself, well, I have a voice memo on my phone. Can I just record guitar riffs that way? So I did.” 

Those riffs, he continues, “sounded kind of great, so I started sending them out to various engineers and producers around the world. And that was the genesis for The Atlas Underground Fire.”

The follow-up to Morello’s 2018 solo effort, The Atlas Underground, the new The Atlas Underground Fire is built on a similar foundation, with Morello collaborating with a variety of musicians in a wide range of genres, from rock (Bruce Springsteen and Eddie Vedder on a cover of AC/DC’s Highway to Hell), metal (Bring Me the Horizon on Let’s Get the Party Started) and country (Chris Stapleton on The War Inside) to punk (Refused’s Dennis Lyxzén on Save Our Souls), alternative (Grandson on Hold the Line) and reggae (Damian Marley on The Achilles List). 

“It was sort of a free-for-all creative process,” Morello says. “The Atlas Underground project allows me to go well outside my safety zone.”

That’s particularly evident in Morello’s deep exploration of electronic music – the new record features a slew of artists that inhabit various corners of the EDM world, including Mike Posner, Phantogram, Protohype and Sama’ Abdulhadi – which he says is foundational to the Atlas Underground spirit.

“What I’ve tried to do is create this alloy between two worlds. It’s a cyborg – you don’t know where the guitar ends and the EDM begins. To me, that feels like an exciting future for the electric guitar.”

As for what The Atlas Underground Fire offered Morello in the present? “It allowed me to get out of the bunker,” he says. “It was a way to create connections and find a musical community in a time of absolute isolation. Really, it was a life raft for sanity.”

Is The Atlas Underground Fire a record that would have been made had it not been for the pandemic?

“Heavens no. This is a record that was born of lockdown. From the time I was 17 years old to the time that the world shut down in March of 2020, I’ve had a nonstop creative motor on me of writing, recording and performing. And it all came to a screeching halt.

“For the first four months or so I was absolutely adrift. You know, I have a nice studio in my house, but I don’t know how to work it. Like, I don’t know how to move any of the buttons around. So I was like, ‘I’m not going to be able to play shows. I’m not going to be able to record music.’ 

“But then I was reading an interview where Kanye West said he recorded the vocals to a couple of his big hit records using the voice memo on his phone. So I did that.”

I’m imagining you seated in front of a big mixing desk, surrounded by gear in your fully stocked studio... with a little phone propped up on the console for you to record into.

“[Laughs] Yeah. On a little folding chair. My laptop’s open so I can have, like, the BPMs in my ears or whatever, and the phone is balanced on the edge of the laptop on a chair facing the amp. But you know, there’s no manual that says, like, ‘The voice memo of your iPhone needs to be 8.4 inches away from the top left speaker...’ I just set it up on a chair. And I’ve gotta tell you, the guitar sounded pretty freaking great. 

“And a couple months in I did get a little mic to put on the actual phone. One of the guys that I work with was finally like, ‘Dude, we’ve gotta help you out in some way!’’

How did working in this way influence the record?

“It really affected the way I play and write. Because this is, what? My 21st studio album? And probably 20 of those records were made with four or five people in a room. I couldn’t do that this time. So necessity being the mother of invention, the process wasn’t, ‘Hey, let’s jam, let’s get a vibe in the room and see how it’s going.’ 

“It was ‘Here’s the four biggest, hairiest, gnarliest riffs that I came up with today. Who should I send those to?’ And maybe I’d send those to Bring Me the Horizon. And then the next day maybe it was, ‘I’ve got an idea for the solo for Highway to Hell. I’ll send that to Bruce Springsteen.’ Every day was kind of this creative oasis in the middle of all the chaos.”

So you weren’t necessarily writing with specific collaborators in mind?

“No. It was really just a free-for-all creative process. For example, the song that starts the record, Harlem Hellfighter, I had four or five big-ass riffs that were low-hanging fruit on that particular day. And so I sent them to Jon Levine, who’s a producer friend of mine that I’ve always wanted to work with. I said, ‘What do you think of these?’ And he’s like, ‘I’ll get to work.’ And he sent me back a track that I could play over. 

“Then the next day I had a few riffs that Bring Me the Horizon responded to, and that song was recorded on three continents – South America, Europe and North America. We just sent tracks back and forth. 

“Actually, a number of the songs had very sort of extraordinary recording circumstances. Mike Posner, on Naraka – which is the Hindu word for ‘hell’ – from the time we began working on the song until to the time we finished it, he summited Mount Everest. Some of those vocals were recorded at 25,000 feet.”

Mike Posner is one of several “non-rock” artists on The Atlas Underground Fire. What excites you about bringing the electric guitar into these other sonic realms?

“I firmly believe that the electric guitar is the greatest instrument to ever be invented by mankind. There is no instrument with more power and nuance. There’s nothing like the electric guitar – you can go anywhere with it, from a gorgeous Segovia classical piece to, you know, Sepultura destroying a stadium somewhere. 

“But I think the electric guitar has a future, not just a past. And so working with artists who push me beyond what I’ve been comfortable doing before is very important to me. I always want to anchor the thing with the Sabbath/Zeppelin/Deep Purple riffs that are my bread and butter, but I never want to be stagnant. I always want to challenge myself and try to play stuff that I never imagined.”

That seems to be an ongoing theme throughout your career.

“Well, there’ve been countless times when people have counted the electric guitar/rock ‘n’ roll out, you know? And one of those times was when people were like, ‘You can sample electric guitar, so you don’t need a guitar player anymore. A DJ can do that.’ So I said, ‘Well, I’m going to be the DJ, only with a Marshall stack and my bare hands.’ 

“Then when electronica came along there were all these acts like the Crystal Method and the Prodigy that were great rock ‘n’ roll bands that didn’t necessarily have guitar in them. And I would approximate the sounds and the textures of that vibe, only, again, using my guitar and my bare hands.

“There was a reason why all those Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave records said, “All sounds made by guitar, bass and drums.” Because I was literally stealing from other genres, but finding a way to make it come through a Marshall stack.

Looking at the more traditional rock aspects of The Atlas Underground Fire, you bring in Bruce Springsteen and Eddie Vedder to duet on a cover of AC/DC’s Highway to Hell. What’s the backstory there?

“Well, Bruce and Eddie and I have a history with Highway to Hell. When I was playing with the E Street Band in 2014, we were in Perth, Australia, the home of Bon Scott, and I wanted to pay my respects at his grave. 

“So I’m wandering around this Perth-ian graveyard at, like, 11:30 at night, and I’m unable to find it. I’m out there for about an hour, and then out in the distance comes this motorbike, like this little light in the cemetery. And this dude rides up – a heavy-set dude with a German WWII motorcycle helmet on and a T-shirt that reads ‘I don’t give a shit, but if I did, you’re the one I’d give it to.’ 

“I’m like, ‘This guy is going to know where Bon Scott’s grave is!”

Did he?

“Sure enough, he did. So he shows me, I pay my respects, and I go back to the hotel. And when I get there I see Bruce in the bar. And I’m like, ‘Bruce, since we’re here in Australia, do you think there’s any way that the circle of the E Street Band and the circle of AC/DC might overlap?’ And he goes, ‘I never really thought about that before, but I’ll think about it now.’ 

“And over the course of the next few days, we started rehearsing Highway to Hell at soundcheck. Then we were playing this huge soccer stadium in Melbourne, and Eddie Vedder happened to be at the show because he was on a solo tour at the time. And I had an idea. 

“I knock on Bruce’s door and I say, ‘We are in Australia, the land where AC/DC is king. What if we open the show with Highway to Hell with Eddie Vedder?’ And he was like, ‘That sounds like a good idea!’ And we did. And if you think you’ve seen an audience go nuts? You haven’t – unless you were there on that night. It was crazy.

“So when I was making this record with a lot of great young artists on it – Phantogram, Grandson, Mike Posner, Protohype – I knew I wanted a song with my rock brothers on it. And I reflected back to that night and the transcendent apex moment of rock power that that felt like. 

“I put the track together, sent it to Bruce. He sang two takes, and then I sent that to Eddie. And that’s how it came together.”

What gear did you use on the record?

“Well, the advantage of being kind of trapped in my studio was that I would just go in there and pick up a guitar to be the flavor of the day. Some of the music was recorded on the ‘Arm the Homeless’ guitar. Some of it was recorded with that guitar of mine that looks like an SG, but it’s not – it’s a $50 Kay, my first guitar. 

“I used my Audioslave-era Les Paul that I burned the Budweiser logo off of, the Soul Power [Stratocaster] guitar, the ‘Sendero Luminoso’ Telecaster, the Jimmy Page [Gibson EDS-1275] double-neck... There was a complete freedom in the recording of the ideas on whatever day. 

“It was just like, ‘I’m here alone, what guitar do I want to play? I’ve got 90 minutes until the grandmas and kids start screaming, so let’s get in as much rock ‘n’ roll as I can!’”

How about amps?

“Pretty much just my regular Marshall half stack, the [JCM800] 2205. That’s where the folding chair was – in front of that amp – so that’s where I rested my phone, and that became the setup. 

“As far as effects, a big part of the record was done with one of those little [Electro-Harmonix] POG pedals. It allows you to kind of sound like two guitars and a distorted bass all at once, and so I relied on that pretty heavily. 

“I also had the [Way Huge] Swollen Pickle [fuzz pedal], and then the Space Station, which DigiTech made in 1994 or something, trying to copy all my sounds and jam it into one shitty pedal. [Laughs] I still use that one.”

Although you were more or less using your traditional gear, do you feel the tones came out differently due to the fact that they were being recorded through your phone?

“It is a little bit different. But it is what it is. And there’s something very liberating about that. I’ve always been about embracing limitations, and this was a pretty significant limitation. Not sonically, because the guitars from beginning to end sound pretty great, and they do it sometimes in different and unexpected ways, which I think is healthy.

“But the way I had to create changed the way I created. Normally if I’m doing a guitar solo I’ll record a bunch of takes and listen back to them, and maybe there’s some piecing together of this part and that part. But this time I would just blow into the phone and go, ‘Let’s call that one Wednesday.’

”Like, the Highway to Hell solo? That was a Wednesday, man. It was great to be able to let go like that and let the chips fall where they may. It felt like there was a lot of very intuitive playing on this record, and there were a lot of riffs that went in different directions than they would have had I spent a lot of time overthinking things.”

Not only were you attempting to reevaluate the role of the guitar in popular music, but also how, as a rock guitar player, you can create with and record the instrument in the studio.

“Oh, absolutely. I mean, the first cornerstone of my playing is unapologetically and uncompromisingly big rock ‘n’ roll, and I will never budge an inch on that. That’s what I get off on the most, going back to the first AC/DC and Kiss and Led Zeppelin posters on my wall. That just feels right and feels like home. 

“At the same time, the other cornerstone of my playing has been to just disregard anything that has to do with tradition, whether it’s melody or tone or sound, or even what part of the guitar to look at as a sound-maker.

You hear that on The Atlas Underground Fire.

“That’s been the common thread through everything, whether it’s an Atlas Underground record or an Audioslave record. I need to feel a jam move air, but I also want it to challenge me. Vernon Reid called it the ‘What the fuck’ factor, you know? Like, when you put on a record and you hear what must be a guitar but can’t possibly be a guitar, you’re like, ‘What the fuck?’ 

“I remember thinking about that over and over again as a young person, and as a young guitar player. Every record I make, I try to have as many 'What the fuck?' factors as possible.”

• Tom Morello's The Atlas Underground Fire is out now via Mom + Pop Music.

Tom Morello's been a busy man of late – promoting his brand-new, star-studded solo album, The Atlas Underground Fire, and jamming (and appearing in music videos) with 11-year-old multi-instrumentalist sensation Nandi Bushell.

Now, the Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave electric guitar innovator has another new project – a limited series of opinion columns for The New York Times.

Morello's column will be the first in a new subscribers-only series from the paper's op-ed section, one that will feature artists "who have shaped the cultural landscape" offering "provocative commentary" on a wide range of issues.

According to a statement from the paper, Morello will use his column to examine his own music, as well as the music of others, and offer "insight into the ideas and arguments shaping the world today."

Morello will write his column through the lens of that music, and will give readers "a window into his creative process," allowing them to "hear in his words the stories behind his work."

Of the perspective he will offer in his new column, Morello said, “I was the only Black kid in an all white town, the only anarcho-syndicalist at a conservative high school, the only spandex clad heavy metal guitarist at Harvard University, and the only Star Trek loving Ivy League nerd rocking some of the world's biggest stages and on off days dodging tear gas at the barricades. 

"I firmly believe that both the pen and the guitar can serve as a battering ram for justice.”

Morello’s first column for the paper will be released tomorrow Wednesday, October 20.

A Rage Against The Machine fan named Marat Nigametzianov has created a machine learning network and set it to do god’s work:  generating 1,500 RATM-style ideas a month.

Nigametzianov was reportedly inspired to take the challenge back in January 2020, when he attended Tom Morello’s Guitar Revolution event in LA. Morello led a workshop in which five people were chosen to write a song in 15 minutes, with the help of mentors like Wayne Kramer, John 5 and Vernon Reid. 

“When Tom gave his mentee his Black Spartacus [guitar] – [the] dude almost fainted,” says Nigametzianov in his post on Reddit. “This event was to inspire people to make music, [to] write and record their songs. I’m not a musician, but I was very well inspired.”

Some months later Nigametzianov heard about the release of the Open AI’s Jukebox – ‘a generative model for music’, which provides an open source basis for generating music via machine learning or ‘neural network’.

He soon set to work building servers and testing the capabilities of a burgeoning Rage machine: feeding it selected Morello and RATM cuts and steering it via the code to generate Morello-esque riffs and other samples.

“I started to generate one minute samples [at a] speed of 1500 samples per month,” Nigametzianov says. “[In total now I have] generated around 12k samples to this date. I personally listened to all this stuff and picked samples with song ideas.”

Listen to Riffs, Bass, Meow, Vol. 1 on streaming platforms

Nigametzianov then put out the call for willing musicians to participate and recruited three ‘teams’ of musicians and engineers – including guitarists Anton Dokuchaev, Rostislav Chaban and Mick Lisov. 

The best of the samples were then grouped up and sent out to the musicians, who recorded six album’s worth of the material.

You can hear the results on streaming platforms under the band name AI Kittens. 

We’re not sure RATM need to worry about AI Kittens threatening future bookings, but there is something weird and wonderful about listening to this material and considering the melding of man and machine learning that created it. 

We wonder what Morello will make of it. At the very least, we figure he’ll have to appreciate the phenomenal, none-more-internet album cover of Music Samples in Style of RATM. Vol. 1...

Listen to Music Samples in Style of RATM. Vol. 1 on streaming platforms

“All this was done for my own fun and for the fun of RATM fans all over the world,” says Nigametzianov. “It is not intended to offend anyone. Just listen and have fun if you like it.”

If you’re interested in learning more about the project, or hearing some of the original samples generated by the neural network, check out Nigametzianov’s full post on Reddit.

Some quoted material in this story has been adjusted for ease of readability.

Ernie Ball Music Man has announced a new limited edition run of Tim Commerford signature StingRay bass guitars. 

The four instruments all feature a range of customizations favored by the Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave bassist, who has a long-running association with the StingRay bass.

Most notable among the signature tweaks is an adjustable plastic thumb rest – what Commerford dubs ‘the curve’ – that allows Commerford to anchor his thumb in his preferred position.

As Commerford points out in the video above (approx. 5.55) you can lower the thumb rest to be flat to the body with the turn of a few screws, making adjustment a breeze for pick players. 

Alongside this is a classic string-through body bridge, but it’s been tweaked with mute pads, which Commerford uses to damp down unwanted frequencies when he’s playing with distortion.

There’s also a sculpted five-bolt neck joint, which allows for improved access to the neck’s dustier regions, with Commerford's trademark tattoo etched into the neckplate.

Electronics-wise, the bass is available in passive and active configurations, both with a single neodymium StingRay humbucker.

Commerford says: “I literally was like 18 years old when I saw a Music Man StingRay. It was a blonde StingRay with a black pickguard, and it was at a pawn shop. I scraped up the money and I got it, and that bass became the bass I used to record the first Rage [Against The Machine] record and it was a big part of my life.”

The four models are limited to just 50 instruments each, including a 50 full scale active basses in black, 50 full scale passive basses in natural, 50 short scale active basses in natural and 50 short scale passive basses in vintage sunburst.

The collection will be available exclusively from Music-Man.com. We'll take one of each, thanks...