Back in March, Fender announced Tele Town, a star-studded concert at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Telecaster.

The vision of the show, which took place Monday night (May 4), was to bring Tele titans of every generation and genre together under one roof, with an emphasis – understandably, given the location – on the pioneering solidbody electric's massive role in the development of country music.

As announced, the lineup was already surely one of the greatest gatherings of country guitar virtuosity we've ever seen: Brad Paisley, Brent Mason, Brothers Osborne, Derek Wells, Guthrie Trapp, James Burton, Luke McQueary, Ricky Skaggs... Nashville Mount Rushmore, but you need room for a bunch more heads.

But the Tele has always been about much more than country, and the jaw-loosening caravan of special, unannounced guests that made their way onto the stage Monday night was a testament to that.

And most of these vaunted names all came together to close the show out with what we're confident in declaring as the greatest Tele jam of all time.

Of course, the concert made sure to highlight those who've been carrying the Tele torch for decades, but Fender also included on the bill a number of incendiary talents poised to bring the instrument into the future.

One of these, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, was reluctant to adopt the Tele at first, but now he's got two signature variations of the model. The reason he did take to the Telecaster at the end of the day was Prince, who he saluted with a funky cover of Cream.

First-call Nashville session titans like Guthrie Trapp and Brent Mason got some well-earned time in the spotlight during the show's middle section.

The household names in the building that were in the building that evening might have more Instagram followers, but it's players like Trapp and Mason whose Tele twang has reached the most ears – with appearances on thousands of records between the two of them – even if listeners didn't realize it.

Then came those marquee names. Billy Gibbons, for one, joined the sisters Lovell (Larkin Poe) to guide the proceedings into soulful territory with a salute to Steve Cropper in the form of a spirited take on Sam & Dave's classic shouter, Hold On, I'm Comin'.

Tommy Emmanuel, meanwhile, gave a lesson to those who didn't know already that he's just as much of a beast plugged in as he is on one of his signature Maton acoustics, with a stunningly lyrical version of his tune, Hearts Grow Fonder.

Jack White got a lot of attention, but country giga-star Brad Paisley was the show's anchor, reminding everyone that aside from his stadium-filling hooks, he's one of the greatest Tele slingers to ever walk the earth. He highlighted his brief solo set with some absolutely scorching, high-wire licks – just look at him go.

“75 years ago, Leo Fender had a pretty simple idea, and that idea was to build a guitar that worked for players – great tone, reliable, zero fuss,” Fender CEO Edward ‘Bud’ Cole said by way of an onstage introduction. “What came out of that was the Fender Telecaster, and it ended up shaping the sound of modern music.

“From James Burton to George Harrison to Sheryl Crow and to the incredible artists on this stage tonight, generations have picked it up and made it their own, and there's no better place to celebrate that than right here in Nashville. This city didn't just embrace the Telecaster. It helped define it.”

The concert is just the latest of the company's celebrations of the 75th birthday of its first marquee model. One of the most recent of these was the March release of five new Teles, including the return of a cult classic and some Tele firsts.

Since its inception in 1999, Eric Clapton's Crossroads Guitar Festival has featured the crème de la crème of guitarists who, in one way or another, have earned the blues-rock legend’s respect.

Now, the seventh edition of the festival will be held on September 26 and 27 in Austin, Texas, at the Moody Center, marking the 28th anniversary of the 1998 founding of the Crossroads Centre Antigua, the drug treatment facility spearheaded by Clapton himself.

Among the numerous Crossroads veterans returning this year will be Joe Bonamassa, Billy Gibbons, Buddy Guy, Gary Clark Jr., Sonny Landreth, John Mayer, the Del McCoury Band, Tedeschi Trucks Band, Jimmie Vaughan, as well as Clapton himself, who will be performing on both nights. Meanwhile, Trey Anastasio, Tommy Emmanuel, Julian Lage, and Pete Townshend will all be making their festival debut.

Guitar Center was also announced as the exclusive retail partner of the festival, and, in addition to onsite retail, there will also be a rare showcase of its Legends Collection. This includes Clapton’s 1956 Fender Stratocaster, “Blackie,” the 1964 Gibson ES-335 he played in Cream, and Stevie Ray Vaughan’s iconic 1965 Fender Stratocaster, “Lenny.”

Speaking about the festival in a 2019 interview with Guitar Center, Clapton said, “My identity is always going to be linked to Crossroads. I can't walk away, so I've come back to do the thing I know how to do best, which is play, and also invite people that I have high admiration for in the music world.”

He continued, “I like to use the festival platform as a way of getting [musicians] to come and play to a big audience, maybe for the first time. I think it's quite nice for the other musicians to meet them, too. I like cross-fertilization. I mean, that was a fascinating thing for me, the fantasy. And it worked.”

Tickets for the event will go on sale on April 3 at 10 a.m. CDT. For more information, head to the official Crossroads Guitar Festival website.

Tommy Emmanuel says bluegrass and Americana guitar is officially in safe hands with a new generation of players who have come along to “shake us out of our comfort zones”.

Speaking to Guitar World, the Australian acoustic guitar virtuoso was effusive in his praise for four young players who have “raised the bar” for the art form, and just as importantly, turned a new generation of fans onto it.

Asked who his guitarist of the year was for 2025 in the new issue of GW, Emmanuel had no hesitation, naming the man who had just been voted guitar player of the year by the International Bluegrass Music Awards for the third time.

“Trey Hensley,” said Emmanuel. “I’m glad to see the IBMA Bluegrass Music Awards thought so, too.”

But Emmanuel couldn’t stop at one. There were three more, including a Gibson signature artist, a former Guitar World columnist, and another player whom the IBMA considers bluegrass guitar royalty.

“Billy Strings, Molly Tuttle and Sierra Hull have come on like a tsunami in Americana/ bluegrass,” he continued. They’ve raised the bar, stretched the boundaries and won the ears and hearts of the young generation.”

Informed by the likes of Chet Atkins, Django Reinhardt and Paco De Lucia – “the greatest guitar player I‘ve ever seen, period” – Emmanuel’s approach to the acoustic guitar is still radical long over 45 years since the release of his debut album, From Out of Nowhere.

Even electric guitar luminaries such as Joe Satriani have said no way could they do what he does on acoustic. “I routinely humiliate myself by putting on a live DVD of Tommy Emmanuel, and I go, ‘I will never achieve that!’ [Laughs] But thank God for Tommy for doing that,” said Satriani, speaking to MusicRadar in 2022.

For many players, Emmanuel is the archetypical acoustic maestro. But even he feels the challenge coming from the next generation, and welcomes it, too. “More power to those young guns who come into our world to shake us out of our comfort zones,” he says.

Emmanuel also had some props to share from one of the old guard – a guitarist who has consistently reinvented how we he approaches the instrument, who has not stopped.

“I also think Robben Ford has killed it in 2025,” he says. “He’s kept writing, recording, shooting videos, touring with multiple lineups and shown us all what an artist can do. His sound is revolutionary; his enthusiasm is infectious. More power to you, Lord Mr. Ford!”

In another recent interview with Guitar World, Emmanuel shared his trick for putting a capo on the right way to avoid tuning issues.

Les Paul made no secret of the fact that he loved to jam. He would welcome all kinds of players up onstage with him. Slash, B.B. King, Eddie Van Halen, Brian Setzer, David Gilmour... The list goes on. They have all shared the stage with the man.

Besides putting his name to one of the most-famous electric guitars of all time, he was a heckuva player. He also had a heckuva sense of humor, as Australian acoustic guitar virtuoso Tommy Emmanuel learned when he was first invited to sit in with the Les Paul band during his residency at the Iridium, in New York. You would find Les Paul in there every Monday night. He played there weekly from 1995 until his dead in 2009.

Well, Paul could spot an easy mark. He was going to have a little fun with Emmanuel.

The gig was simple, a two-hander. The first night was easy. “I take a little solo then throw it back to him then I play one more tune, like Caravan or something like that, and then I bow and go off,” says Emmanuel, in a recent radio interview with Q104.3. “I didn’t make anything of it, and I was being very low-key.”

Emmanuel was being a perfect gentlemen, respectful of his host, and we would expect nothing less (a few later years, he would recount onstage that he and everyone who played with Paul for the first time would be “scared shitless” as Paul chuckled in delight).

With his bit done, Emmanuel kicked back in the dressing room. In came trouble. Paul wanted a word with him.

“When he finished the first show, I was sitting in the dressing room, and he came straight in like a rabid dog and he said, ‘I know what you’re doing!’ He said, ‘You think I’m old. Don’t you ever hold back onstage again. When I call you out there, you get up there! You give it hell. You give it all you’ve got!’” says Emmanuel.

Naturally, he was taken aback. But also, he’s also no shrinking violet. Challenge accepted. “I looked him right in the eye,” says Emmanuel, “and I said, ‘Okay, Les, I will.’ Just like that.”

He would not make the same mistake twice. On night two, Emmanuel was taking no prisoners.

“He calls me up, I come running out there, I crank my amp up, and I went straight into Classical Gas,” recalls Emmanuel. “The audience erupted at the end, jumped to their feet. They were screaming. Deafening. And just going wild.”

Something tells us this is what the cunning Les Paul had been planning all along. Emmanuel says he walked into the punchline: “When they finally calmed down, Les gets on the mic and says, ‘Ah! So he waits till I’m old to come and beat me up!”

Emmanuel was a longtime friend of Les Paul and first played with him during his 90th birthday bash at Carnegie Hall. He insists that the guitar icon only got better in his 90s.

“In that last year of his life, I said to him one night, ‘Les, I don't know, but I swear, you're playing better than you were last year,’” said Emmanuel, speaking to Rick Beato.

In his later years, the notes didn’t come just as easy, but Emmanuel says there was no stopping him. He adapted his style.

“The funny thing is, after hanging around with Les Paul those few years before he passed away, watching him deal with the pain in his hands, and watching him playing melody, using four fingers to get one note... that's dedication.”

Australian acoustic guitar virtuoso Tommy Emmanuel has issued a public service announcement by demonstrating what he believes is the best way to put on a capo in order to eliminate tuning woes.

“I try to make people aware of things that are important on stage,” he says in a new in-depth chat with Guitar World, during which he warns players of the tuning issues that can come with capos.

“I think tuning is the most important thing. You’ve got to be in tune. Every time you put the capo on wrong, you are going to pull the guitar out of tune.”

For Emmanuel, who incorporates lots of percussive techniques into his wide-ranging and ever-expansive sound, correct capo technique is paramount to his performances.

After all, for some of his arrangements, he equips and removes his capo mid-song. His inventive reimagining of George Harrison’s Beatles hit Here Comes the Sun is an example of that.

However, because capos apply extra pressure on the strings when depressed, it's all-too-easy for them to pull your guitar out of tune.

So, what is the correct way of doing it, and how does Emmanuel avoid such issues? For his GW demonstration, Emmanuel uses a Kyber-style capo with top-mounted levers. This, he says, helps with the mid-song changes.

“The capo has a spring in it, so it's going to push down on the strings a little bit,” he prefaces. “The best way you can get as accurate as possible is, put the guitar on an angle [slightly flatter against your knee].

“You look down at the fret where you want to put it, squeeze it, drop it on, and you'll feel it sit kind of flat. Now, take your right hand and with your palm just push down on the strings.”

Pushing down on the strings helps ensure all strings are being put under even pressure by the capo.

Check the video above at the 01:01:00 mark to see the technique in action.

For more valuable insights from Emmanuel, find out what he thinks is the difference between a guitarist and a guitar player – and why that matters – and how knocking on his hero's door helped kickstart his career.

Sometimes, you bump into high-profile players when you least expect it. If you’re anything like Tommy Emmanuel, though – who literally walked up and knocked on the door of his guitar hero – you meet them exactly when you expect to.

Speaking on The Zak Kuhn Show, the Aussie acoustic guitar virtuoso reflected on the time he first visited Music Row in Nashville as an aspiring musician and took the opportunity to swing by the abode of none other than Chet Atkins.

After heading over to the Atkins household during his pilgrimage to Nashville, Emmanuel explains, “He had a lady named Caroline working for him and I knocked on the door and she let me in. I had my guitar and I had a photo album with photos of me holding up his albums and stuff as a kid.

“I'm waiting downstairs and she gets on the intercom and says, ‘There's a boy from Australia here to see you.’ And I hear him say, ‘Is he a fingerpicker?’ She looks at me and I go, ‘Yeah!’ She goes, ‘He says he is.’ [Chet says], ‘I'll be right down.’

“I'm waiting and then down the stairs he comes, and there he is, looking exactly like he does on his record. There he is, my hero, the guy I have learned [and] stolen everything from.”

This wasn’t an ordinary meet and greet, though. Emmanuel had come prepared with his guitar, and Atkins was keen to make his fan’s trip worthwhile.

“He came straight up to me and he said, ‘You want to pick a little?’” Emmanuel remembers. “We go into a side room and I start playing Me and Bobby McGee, and he doesn't play straight away. He's just sitting there.

“He's just watching me, and I get to the end of the first chorus, and when it comes into the verse, he joins in when the second guitar comes in on the arrangement. What he played made me sound so good.

“What he played was so beautiful and so tasteful. And then when the chorus came around, he went straight to a harmony. He phrased it like I phrased it.”

The encounter gave way to one of the most important lessons that Emmanuel ever learned – something the acoustic virtuoso uses to inspire other aspiring players.

“He listened to me and it was so beautiful,” he continues. “I thought, ‘Chet was not just a great player and a great arranger and a great producer and all that, he was a great listener.’ And I learned a lesson from that.

“So, when anyone says, ‘What advice would you say to musicians?’ I always say, ‘Be a listener first, be a player second.’”

It would be the start of a fruitful relationship between the two fingerstyle maestros, who would go on to release The Day Finger Pickers Took Over the World in 1973.

In related news, Mark Knopfler recently recalled the time he was called up by Chet Atkins to jam following the release of Brothers in Arms.

Just weeks after Cory Wong broke the internet with his divisive claims about music theory and what it takes to be an elite guitarist, acoustic guitar extraordinaire Tommy Emmanuel has opened up about the “bizarre” struggles he faces because of the holes in his knowledge.

Yet, with the Grammy winner regarded as one of the best acoustic guitar players in the world, his comments add weight to those who argue that music theory isn’t the be-all-and-end-all, and may leave Wong red-faced.

The funk guitarist, who is on a one-man mission to prove that rhythm guitar isn’t boring, feels players can’t count themselves as “advanced players” unless they can ace his note-finding test.

His claims sparked a vibrant debate, with Stevie Ray Vaughan used as an example in one outstanding counter-argument. It seems Emmanuel is among those voices standing in the opposite corner, even if he’s greatly aware of the issues it causes.

“I can’t read notes,” he says while appearing on Australia’s The Project. “I can read a chord chart and follow the chords, but I can’t read notes.

“It’s really weird, being a teacher in a place like Berklee College of Music: 400 students asking questions, and I’m the only person there – and I’m the instructor – I’m the only one there who can’t read,” he adds. “It’s bizarre.”

But the guitarist, who has released four platinum-selling records across a tireless career, has never let his weaknesses weigh him down. Handily, he also has help when it matters most.

“I can write you a song and play it, but I can’t write it on paper,” he says. “I have to hire people to do that.”

Recording voice notes on his iPhone, he extends, has been a life-saver. During lockdown it was a method he stuck to religiously, ultimately writing an entire movie score with it – which, going off the timeline, is most likely Ray Giarratana's The Tiger Rising; it is never confirmed during the interview.

“I wrote the whole film, all the themes, on my iPhone and texted it to the guy in LA and he put an orchestra and stuff on it,” he continues. “And then I redid the guitar in a proper studio when we were able to move around,” he says.

The ‘to theory or not to theory’ debate will likely still be raging on come doomsday, with, for instance, Jason Richardson recently giving his own take on the matter.

Superlative songwriters and shredders are standing on opposing sides of the argument which, truthfully, hints at the answer lying in preference more than anything else.

Back in 1990, Tommy Emmanuel opened for a certain Eric Clapton on the Australian leg of the Journeyman tour. For Emmanuel, it was a pivotal support tour, helping him gain further prominence in his home country – a few months after the release of his album, Dare to Be Different, his first top twenty album on the ARIA Charts.

“I went from selling 500 tickets to a 1000 almost like the next week, doing that tour with Eric,” he tells Ed Struijlaart on the Gitaarmannen podcast. “He was so nice to me. He was so professional.

“Eric was very quiet, and he was a kind of recluse. And so he would turn up three minutes before he was due on stage, and they would put the guitar on him, and he would stand at the side, and then the intro to Layla on the piano would come on, the lights had come down, and then he'd just walk out and go straight into the song, Pretending.”

However, this doesn’t mean the two never interacted. Indeed, one of Clapton's guitar techs was visibly impressed by Emmanuel's immense talent from the get-go and made sure he was properly introduced to the former Yardbirds guitarist.

“He's working at the side, tuning guitars and doing strings and all that,” Emmanuel relates. "And we set up quickly and do a quick soundcheck. As soon as I finish the song, he comes running up on stage and says, ‘Eric needs to see you. I'll make sure he'll be here tomorrow night.’

“So, sure enough, the next night, I open the show with a song by the Shadows. And I look over at the side, and there's Eric watching from the side.

“Then I got invited back to Eric's dressing room – and Eric's standing there drinking an orange juice, and he looks at me and he says, ‘Been doing this a while, have you?’ That was his compliment, and we got a photo together, and then I had to leave.”

Emmanuel goes on to say that right after every show on that tour, he went straight to playing a club show – just to make sure he had enough money to cover the tour expenses.

“[As] an opening act, you'll be lucky if you get $300 to $500,” he says, shedding light on the less glamorous side of touring. “I was playing the set, opening for Eric, and then racing out and doing a show in a club somewhere so I can pay my band and my crew and accommodate them. So this is all grinding.”

In recent Tommy Emmanuel news, the acoustic guitar virtuoso gave his take on what differentiates a “guitar player” from a “guitarist.”

Tommy Emmanuel has been giving his thoughts on guitar playing following the release of his new Live at the Sydney Opera House opus. In a new interview, the acoustic guitar master philosophizes about the difference between being a guitarist and a guitar player.

“My music is not for musicians; it’s for everybody,” insists Emmanuel in an interview with The Bluegrass Situation. “I’m trying to be an all-around artist, entertainer, writer, player, performer. I’m trying to give people a bit of everything.”

“Being a guitarist is being a gun for hire. Being a guitar player is a way of life,” explains the maestro. “A guitar player is someone who loves to play for people and who loves his instrument deeply.”

Emmanuel knows a thing or two about both. He was a gun for hire in the ’80s, playing in bands for Australian vocalists John Farnham and Doug Parkinson. He is also undoubtedly a guitar player, being one of a handful of musicians conferred the title of Certified Guitar Player by the late Chet Atkins.

“My role model, Chet Atkins, worked harder than anybody I’ve ever seen at practicing and making sure that every little detail was so smooth,” he recalls.

“If you want it to be good, to flow, and to be wonderful to watch, then there’s a lot of work ahead. You’re going to have to work so hard to make it that way. I never stop working on my abilities, because it’s so important.

“Everything comes down to commitment. How committed am I to be a better player?” asks Emmanuel.

Despite this, Tommy insists that technique is not the most important thing. “I often tell people who want to talk about my technique, ‘I don’t talk about my technique. It’s invisible.’ The music is what counts, not how I do it.”

His chops are awe inspiring, but Emmanuel admits he has his struggles. “My abilities fluctuate because I’m a human being. I’m not a robot; I’m not going to be exactly the same every time.

“My age is challenging me as well,” admits the 69-year-old. “There are things I could do twenty years ago that I can’t do today and I have to be okay about that.”

Even on the road, with little chance to practice, Emmanuel is constantly looking for ways to improve. “Every day was like, get to the venue, get my guitar out, start playing, work on some songs that maybe I didn’t play the night before… remember some of my other songs that I haven’t been playing, put them in the show, and constantly find ways of making it different and interesting from the night before.”

Emmanuel recently expressed his admiration for Les Paul, saying that in the last year of the pioneer’s life, Emmanuel told him “I swear, you're playing better than you were last year.” Tommy also gave us a picking masterclass alongside Molly Tuttle.

Tommy Emmanuel had the opportunity to play side by side with the legendary Les Paul in his later years – moments he looks back on fondly, recalling the polymath's determination to continue performing and improving his playing even past the age of 90.

“The funny thing is, after hanging around with Les Paul those few years before he passed away, watching him deal with the pain in his hands, and watching him playing melody, using four fingers to get one note... that's dedication,” gushes Emmanuel in a new interview with Rick Beato.

“I guess he must have thought, ‘Well, I'll go home and put on some old black-and-white footage of me just tearing the crap out of it.’ Because he did – he tore it up like crazy. But it didn't mean that what he was doing when he [was] in his 90s was not as important. It's just different.”

Emmanuel recalls the time he played with the guitar innovator on his 90th birthday at Carnegie Hall, an experience he describes as “beautiful”, and an event that sparked a lasting friendship.

Following that encounter, Emmanuel visited Paul at his usual Manhattan haunt, The Iridium, where Paul jammed every Monday night from 1995 until his death in 2009.

“In that last year of his life, I said to him one night, ‘Les, I don't know, but I swear, you're playing better than you were last year,’” Emmanuel adds.

“He said, ‘I better be. I'm practicing more.’”

Tommy Emmanuel is a master of acoustic guitar. And yet, at its core, his approach is simple. “I never think about technology,” he says. “All I’m looking for is good sound. Just give me one great sound, and I’m off. That’s all I’m looking for.”

Tommy has learned a thing or three after nearly 30 solo albums, tons of guest spots and more accolades than you can shake a stick at. He’s a virtuoso of the highest order, but the beautiful thing is that he’s never stopped learning. What’s more, he revels in teaching.

“If you’re just picking up the guitar,” he says, “you better learn some chords, song structure, and as many songs as possible. You’ve got to learn how songs are constructed, how to count the beat, and when to change. Learn how to get that all together.

“People approach me and say, ‘I want to play Lady Madonna like you. How?’ I say, ‘How long have you been playing?’ They say, ‘Two years.’ And I’ll say, ‘Forget it!’”

Tommy reiterates that if you want to be the best, first, you’ve got to get down to basics – and never forget them. 

“It’s another world doing all the harder stuff,” he says. “So you’ve got to learn to do it all properly. Learn why the melody works against chords. Figure out how to make that feel like a singer. But all that comes with experience and time. I encourage young people to use tabs as a roadmap, but it all comes down to learning song structures, chords, and, most importantly, things you can work on with other people!”

So, what’s the first step to getting it right – specifically, your style of cascading harmonies?

“If you want to get it right, you’ve got to break everything down into its slowest and easiest way and then work it up. There’s a lot of variations of how to use harmonics in music, but I’d say the best songs to showcase my Chet Atkins style of cascading harmonics would be songs like Somewhere Over the Rainbow, Michelle, or Secret Love – songs that I’ve specifically arranged so they can be all around that technique.”

Break down that technique.

“I play the harmonic with my thumb, while my index finger is just barely touching the string up the octave. So I’m getting the harmonics up the octave and using my thumb to pluck the string. And then, if you look at my right hand, my middle finger is my balancing point. It’s like the central point of my hand, and I use that as my balance point.”

And then there’s the open notes you often have going on…

“Right. So then, with my third finger, I play the open notes. I make the harmonic and the open note kind of melt together. When you do it right, the ear can’t really tell which one is which until you hear the sound of the harmonic being picked. So I can get all kinds of sounds using that particular technique.

So that all comes from things you picked up from Chet Atkins and Lenny Breau and then made your own? That’s important, as a lot of people are nervous about copying their influences, but sometimes, it’s not copying but a starting point. But you use other types of harmonics, like juxtaposing chiming chords.

“It comes directly from Chet Atkins and Lenny Breau. And then, there’s other kinds of harmonics, where I might play a passage, or just hit a chord in the middle of a passage with the palm of my hand. I’ll barely touch the string with my palm and hold the chord so the chord chimes up the octave.”

It’s reminiscent of certain lap steel techniques.

“It actually comes from the Hawaiian technique of playing lap steel! When I was a kid, I learned all that because my mother played Hawaiian steel, and my sister played and she would play the melody. Then she would take a break, like the second time around, and quote the melody up the octave, using her palm to strike the harmonics.”

This is important for young players to know because it shows that there’s not just one way to approach harmonics.

“Exactly. So, that’s the couple of techniques that I use, and, of course, there are harmonics all over the guitar. Open harmonics, anyway. You’ve got to spend time looking for them and remembering exactly where they are so you can hit it dead in the middle of the passage.”

Another integral part of what you do is your use of alternating basslines. What’s your crash course as far as that goes?

“The best thing to get you going on that is finding the song that needs a moving bass part. I remember when I first heard Chet Atkins playing A Taste of Honey, which is a song that The Beatles recorded. You know what? I’m going to put you on speaker and play it for you. Are you ready?”

Oh, absolutely. Let’s hear it!

“Here’s how the song goes [Tommy picks up his acoustic guitar and demonstrates how to play it]. In order to make that melody and make the bass move, Chet created this thing, and it’s kind of what a bass player would play.”

So, how did you learn to make the moving bassline and that melody work together? It’s almost like two people are playing, but it’s just you.

“In order for me to work out how to play that moving bassline and have the melody, I had to learn everything at once. The best part about moving bass parts is they just keep the song moving along. So it’s not necessarily about the technique, but finding the right songs that really suit that and need it.”

This is a good example of how sometimes the best technique applied to guitar has nothing to do with technique but incredible love and desire for the instrument. With that in mind, what’s your best advice for those who are at the point of arranging songs?

“I’m a producer and arranger. I’ve always got those hats on. I’m not just a player, I’m everything, and I’m looking at it from every angle. Everything must satisfy me. When I find a song that needs the right kind of approach, I make sure that everything is covered and that the melody has a life of its own.”

Many people find it challenging to shift gears, step outside the music they’ve written, and look at it objectively. Do you find that to be the case?

“There’s a lot of things that a producer will do. He’ll take a song, listen to the song, and say, ‘Okay, instead of that chord, let’s make it more interesting. Let’s surprise the listener. When we hit that note, let’s make it an unresolved chord and resolve it in the next bar.’”

So it’s about creating interest through the unexpected.

“Right, it’s unexpected. And then, there’s little things that I’ve learned along the way a long time ago. I’m always looking for the element of surprise and the chance to do something musically different and unexpected. There are enough people out there just playing overs, trying to play it exactly like the record. I tend to do the opposite.”

That’s another important point. Many players are fearful of altering something established or beloved. But sometimes, that’s necessary.

“I tend to take a song, even if it’s iconic, like a Beatles song, and I’m always true to the melody but I try to do something unique with it. That makes it sound like me, even if it’s a Paul McCartney or John Lennon song.

“I always have a deep respect for the song, but sometimes, like John Lennon’s Imagine, I try to interpret the song in the best way I can. But there are little musical bits along the way that are part of that arranger and producer’s skillset I have.”

Getting stuck is another big part of playing guitar that isn’t mentioned enough. No matter how long you play, it’s inevitable.

“Oh, I’m always stuck! Just this morning, I was playing my very latest composition, and part of me wants to change it already, and I only wrote it a couple days ago! So I started messing with it, but I’m always waiting for inspiration. I’m always waiting for something to happen that will cause me to compose and have great ideas that I’m excited about.”

Do you have any tried-and-true tricks for getting out of a rut when you do get stuck?

“You know, it’s not something you clock on and off. Sometimes I get the best ideas at the weirdest times, and I don’t always have a guitar close by. So it’s not something you can manufacture. I’m always looking for something to give me an idea. Just give me one idea – I’ll run with it, you know?”

And sometimes those ideas come from unexpected places.

“Sometimes I get them from watching a movie or meeting somebody. Or maybe I’ll get some idea one day, and it turns into a song, like a song of mine called Drivetime. I wrote that song a long time ago, and I had been seeing Stevie Wonder live, and when I got home, I got my guitar and started playing this little phrase. 

“It’s C# minor, and I just walked around the house playing that for hours. I really, really loved it, and then, I thought, ‘Well, okay, that’s the foundation. Now, I’ve got to tell a story. Where am I gonna go?’”

That piggybacks onto what you were saying before about embracing the unexpected.

“Right. So, from that one idea, came this song, some of the first bridge, and then, the second goes around again, and when you least expect it, it goes into a second bridge, which is different. I put that all together from just one good idea. But then, my arranging and producing skills take over, making the whole thing interesting and going somewhere unpredictable.”

You mentioned earlier that you’ve got a new composition and are already tweaking it. For many guitarists, overthinking is a problem, but finding a balance between the blueprint and the unpredictable is significant.

“A good example of that is my song Angelina. The harmonic ending of that song – when I first wrote the song, that was the introduction. But when I got to the studio to record, it all my instincts told me, ‘Don’t give away the harmonic ending at the start’. So, I came up with the introduction that we know to Angelina right there on the spot.”

Should players learn to trust their instincts?

“I think so. In that instance, it seemed to work. I recorded it, and everybody loved it. I brought the harmonic ending in at the beginning instead of giving it away too early. If you’re an enthusiastic and excited composer, you’ll know when you’re onto something good. But eventually, when you record that’s when you have to say, ‘Okay, now we get serious about every little millisecond of this song.’”

As far as gear goes, there’s so much of it out there. It’s hard to know what’s worth one’s time. How do you navigate that?

“When I play a show, I have one pedal on stage. It’s a tuner. That’s it! I have no loopers, no chorus, no delays – all that is done for me by the sound person. The most important thing for me is good sound, and that’s it. But when I go into the studio, I’m in heaven, and I’ll tell you why – I wear headphones! I sit in front of microphones and play acoustically, and I can get the engineer to give me whatever I need into the headphones.”

So it’s less about new gear and tech and more about pure sound?

“Right. We’ll keep working on it until we get the mix and we monitor it. The sound in the headphones causes me to go deeper into my abilities and creative ideas. But when I’m on stage, it’s a completely different beast – I’m out there to totally knock people’s socks off. 

“I’m there to give them the best time of their lives and to play the best I can. But when I’m in the studio, it’s about getting the feeling right, diving into the song, and capturing a performance. My best advice is that if you can’t get it in one or two takes, there’s something wrong.”

And in terms of live performance, what’s the best advice you can give?

“You have to have the right songs. It has to be something good. You want to play something with feeling that I can pour myself into, have fun with, and surprise an audience with. And you have to have a repertoire of different feelings, sounds and styles. 

“You might come out guns blazing, and you’re taking the audience with you, and when you finish that, you might go into something more traditional. It’s about putting a smile on their faces and making them forget about everything. It’s all about the songs. If you have the songs, then your instrument can help you be the painter.”

Famed acoustic guitar virtuoso Tommy Emmanuel has been a longtime Chet Atkins fan – ever since he heard his music on the radio at the age of six, to be exact. 

However, having Atkins as his guitar hero apparently came with some downsides, such as struggling to understand the hype surrounding The Rolling Stones and The Beatles when they first came onto the scene.

“You gotta remember, I'm a boy from the bush. So when I heard Chet Atkins and people like that, I heard somebody who played incredibly in tune with a great tone, great ideas, and all that sort of stuff,” Emmanuel says in an interview on the Jay Jay French Connection podcast.

“When I heard The Rolling Stones, they sounded like a bad high school band to me, I didn't get it. And they were in and out of tune.

“The singer [Mick Jagger] sounded like he didn't give a shit. And my brother and I were like, ‘What the hell do people see in this crap?’ Because we were used to hearing these polished, beautiful records.

“Of course, I love The Rolling Stones, and I love The Beatles, and I love the mojo that they bring, but it took me a long time to appreciate them because I was ignorant. I knew nothing. 

“You know, and when someone said, this is a good guitar player, and I heard him I'm like, ‘He doesn't even get it out of a case compared to Chet Atkins.’

“For a little boy, he set the bar pretty high early, you know, I heard Windy and Warm on the radio when I was seven. I could hear that he was playing everything at once. I just didn't know what he was doing or how to do it. But I knew that. 

“And everybody said to me, ‘Don't take any notice of that. It's a recording trick. You can't do all that.’ But I could hear it. I just didn't know how to do it yet.”

Emmanuel goes on to say that from an early age he was entranced with Atkins' playing and fingerstyle technique, which incorporated a walking bass, rhythm, and melody.

“I wasn't aware of this technique. I just knew what I heard. And I started finding a way of making that muted bass. And then I tried to get my fingers to play the melodies like this, while trying to keep that going, you know, and it was so hard. I was eight.”

In a 2019 GuitarWorld interview, Emmanuel reiterated how important Chet Atkins was for him to develop his intricate, melody-centered technique. “I call it a science experiment. It’s like a juggler and a card dealer all working at once and it is just too much.

“Y’know, just tell me the story, and lay it out for me. That’s what I am looking for. Growing up listening to Chet Atkins taught me to find the melody and stick with the melody.”

Tommy Emmanuel has been a working professional musician from the somewhat staggering age of six, when he toured his native Australia playing rhythm guitar in his family’s band, living on the road in their cars and rarely going to school. He was inspired to play after hearing the Travis picking style of Chet Atkins on the radio, a lightbulb moment and one that he still remembers vividly.

Six decades on, Tommy is widely regarded as one of the world’s finest acoustic fingerstyle players, a guitarist whose emotive playing and impeccable feel are matched by his sublimely dextrous technique. He sets the bar high for himself, and his incendiary live shows regularly wow audiences in venues across the globe. 

Who better, then, to offer advice on how to hone your technique, your creative processes, and your entire mental attitude when venturing out to the studio and the live circuit? 

Once you’ve got some material together and you’re thinking about going into the studio, what do you do to make sure that, when you start tracking, you’re able to freely express yourself with the music? 

“Well, it’s all about the homework you’ve already done. I have to be absolutely be in love with the song and know that this is a song that I want to record. I write songs and record them on my iPhone and that’s my demo. That song, in every way, has to stand up and once I’m certain of that, then when I go to the studio, I’m in heaven.

“It’s really all about the quality of the music and your belief that everything about the song is as strong as you can get it. Once I feel that every part, every minute detail, is right and that the song does what I need it to do, it satisfies me in every way, once I’m certain of that, then okay, ‘Boom!’ I’m ready to go. My guitar’s got good strings on it, it’s in tune, we’ve got good microphones, I’m wearing headphones, I can hear a little reverb or whatever. I’ve got the sound of my dreams in my ears. 

“Now I’m going to play the song to the best of my abilities, with the best time, the best feeling. That’s really the bottom line. I never go into the studio unprepared.” 

What do you do if or when you encounter a phrase that will make the strings squeak?

“You know what? All arrangements have that in them. What you’ve got to do is practice a lot more. You’ve got to play that thing a thousand times until you iron out all the noises, until you can play it fluidly, so it just flows along. There are no shortcuts or easy ways. There’s only getting it right.”

There’s always the one track, especially if you’re playing it live, where you think, ‘Oh, this is the really tricky one, this is the one that’s got that long stretch that sometimes trips me up.’ Is that just a case of focusing as well, or do you rewrite your way around it?

“If there’s a song I’ve written and there’s a part in it that I don’t really feel 100 per cent about, I usually get rid of it. I usually write something else that’s better. I never think, ‘Oh, I’m writing a fingerstyle song.’ I always think I’m trying to write the best song I can with this idea I’ve got. So I never feel constrained by being a solo player. 

“I always imagine that I’m trying to write a hit record. I’m trying to write something that I want to hear over and over: that’s the feeling we’re looking for. How many thousands and thousands of times have I heard Penny Lane? But I could hear it again right now because that song does it for me.”

Some acoustic guitars feel like they really tend to love certain tunings. Do you keep guitars for particular tunings? 

“I have three basic guitars with three different tunings. My main guitar, that I use on stage, is always in normal tuning; I don’t play anything at all in DADGAD. I have another guitar with bigger strings on it that is tuned down a whole step. Then I usually do it in drop D so it’s down to C and I play ballads and tunes that I’ve written with that lower, more beautiful-sounding tuning. And then the third guitar is a real traditional-sounding cutaway that I usually use the G6 tuning [for] or just drop D. 

“The other thing is that I’m a touring concert artist, so I’ve got to say everything that I want to say in an hour and a half maximum and I’ve got to give it hell, give people the best time of their lives, play the best I can, keep it interesting, keep the tones interesting, make sure I’m perfectly in tune, I’m perfectly in time. So if a guitar is not doing it for me, I just leave it at home; find the ones that do.”

What advice do you have for those who are new to the stage as solo fingerstyle acoustic guitarists? If you’ve always been in bands with electric guitars, for example, you’ve got quite a lot of cover there, haven’t you? 

“Exactly [laughs]. Well, that’s why I tell people, ‘If you want to do what I’m doing, you’d better be prepared to be naked on stage because there’s nowhere to hide.’ Everything is exposed. So if you want to be doing well at that, you’d better get to work on it. You better do it a lot, find all the weak spots and get rid of them.

“I need my guitar to be awesome every single time I walk on stage. I need my tuning to be the greatest, the most in tune that satisfies my really picky ear, all that sort of stuff. You know what works and you’re always diligent about your tuning, your strings, your action and then your material choice.” 

When you’ve got a flowing piece of fingerstyle acoustic to play, every single piece is essential. So if you fluff one section, it feels like there’s no safety net there. Is the only strategy to that to just routine it as often as possible in front of people and drive out those demons of doubt? 

“Yeah, that’s it. I mean, the truth is, we’re not machines. So some days I play things better than I played the last time I played it. And I don’t know why that is. And there are some days where I think, ‘Oh God, I feel like I’ve got lead in my fingers, I’m playing so slow.’ Then I watch a video of that very same performance a week later and it’s fast as hell. It was my perspective on it at that moment. 

“We vary. What I aim for is trying to be consistent. You know, trying to, even on my worst day, still play something that gives people a great time [so] that hopefully, people won’t sense that I’m struggling or that I’m not in the zone.

“So much of it is about what’s going on in our minds and that’s a dangerous area. If I let my mind wander, that’s a bad thing: I’m playing a song and [I think], ‘Have I played two bridges or have I played three choruses, not two?’ You can’t let that happen. You’ve got to find a way of staying absolutely 100 percent present when you’re playing.”

There are going to be days when you feel like you’re grinding through something, even if other people don’t detect it, and then the days when everything flows and you just cannot make a mistake. It’s literally like you’re better than your best day, which is a battle as well…

“[Laughs] The older I get, the more I go, ‘Oh man, it was the most incredible night. Oh shit, now we gotta try and top it again tomorrow night. How are we gonna do that?’ And you’ve just got to know that you’re human. There’s gonna be cracks and there’s gonna be days when you make the most stupid mistakes because you got cocky or because you stopped being 100 percent concentrated. It’s just part of being a human being. 

“So, I try to make that happen as [little] as possible, you know? And try not to get angry at myself. What I’ve got to do is say, ‘Right, here’s why. All right, I accept that. Now, tomorrow I’m gonna try harder.’ And that’s all I can do.”

The reassuring thought with music is that, at the end of the day, if you’re a guitarist and you screw up, everyone moves on. 

“Well, exactly. I mean, there are times, if things are not going well, I’ll sit and tell the audience that I’m struggling or that, you know, ‘I came out here full of vim and vigor and now I’m really struggling. But I’m going to tell you this because it makes me feel better that I’m honest with you. And that I’m just human like everybody else. So let me try this.’ And I’ll play something else and people will applaud and people will be with you. 

“That’s why I always tell students, when you go on stage, you’d better be honest with your audience. And every day I’m nervous, but I’m going to do the best I can and everybody will be with you. There’s no judge and jury out there, they’re all in your head.”  

• Tommy Emmanuel’s latest album, Accomplice Two, is out now on Slimstyle Records. For more info and tour dates, see his official website.  

Watching Tommy Emmanuel play his music live on stage is memorable in itself, but when it’s combined with bluegrass singer-songwriter Molly Tuttle as the support act, it becomes an experience not to be missed. 

Tommy’s presence on the scene has been one of the wonders of the acoustic world for many years. And while Molly is a relatively new name on the circuit, she is beginning to garner the international fame she richly deserves. 

In 2023, she won a Grammy with her band, Golden Highway, for the Best Bluegrass Album with Crooked Tree, and this was followed by the gong in the same category at this year’s ceremony for City Of Gold. 

Both Tommy and Molly are fiery performers in their own right, so when their talents are combined – as witnessed on their recent UK tour – the result is a formidable tour de force of acoustic guitar virtuosity. 

When the pair were set to appear in our home town of Bath, UK, at a venue right next door to the Guitarist offices, we sent an invitation to meet for a catch-up and a truly remarkable video masterclass.

Tommy Emmanuel interview

When we spoke to Tommy about his upcoming work we couldn’t help but notice his timetable is as packed as ever. However, keeping himself busy is precisely what fuels his creative fires, whether in the studio or out on the road.

Your professional life seems as hectic as it ever was. How are you coping with the work schedule these days?

“Well, this year there’s three periods where I have a little time off between tours because I have a new live album coming out that I recorded at the Sydney Opera House. I did two shows, recorded them both and filmed them, and so I have that to finish mixing and mastering. I have a bunch of new songs and I want to get my next solo album done this year, ready to come out next year. So there’s a lot of stuff in the works. 

“The way my life is right now, it would wear most people out. But this is what I’ve always done, you know? I was looking at some of the schedules from 2001, and holy smoke! I was doing, like, 46 dates in a row and stuff like that. So I’m used to hard work, it’s what I love. And when I get going, that’s when my creativity seems to show up. 

“I mean, playing a show nearly every night is good for me – it makes me dig deeper and I get a momentum going. Even just coming here today, and talking with you and shooting videos and playing, is so good for me because I get to talk about creative things and things that I love.”

You’ve said in the past that when you go into the studio you take a selection of guitars with you. How do you go about choosing which guitar is the best fit for any particular song?

“I just find the guitar that’s right for the song. I have a Larrivée C-10, which is a 12-fretter, and I use that in some songs where I’m looking for a certain texture or warmth. But then there are other songs where the little Maton 808, with the smaller body, works beautifully. Sometimes, I use the bigger-bodied Maton as well. 

“I have a few voices; I have a Martin-sounding guitar, a 000-28 [style]. I don’t own a D-28, a dreadnought Martin, but I do have a couple of dreadnought-size guitars that were handmade and given to me ages ago; I just hung on to them, but I haven’t used them for recording. But most of the guitars I’ve collected over the years, I’ve given away, you know? I auction them off for my charities: Doctors Without Borders, Guitars 4 Vets and the Salvation Army.”

Do you enjoy recording?

“When I’m going to record in the studio I’m in heaven because, first of all, I’m playing acoustically on great microphones and we’ve spent time finding exactly the right choice of mics, the right placement, all that. And then I have headphones and I can hear everything so clearly. 

“I very rarely do more than one or two takes of a song in the studio because I don’t like dropping in and fixing up and doing all that. I like playing the song and feeling the momentum of the song. So if I have to keep dropping in and fixing things, then I haven’t practised enough! 

“I recorded the whole of Tommysongs, which is a double-album of 24 original songs, in two days: 24 songs, you know? I had just finished a tour and I planned it that way. I went straight into the studio the day after the last show and I was ready to fire. You’ve got to be prepared, you can’t waste time in the studio. 

“I don’t have a studio at home. I don’t want one. Basically, I’m a writer who uses my iPhone as my writing tool. I just go on to Voice Memos and when I’m writing a song, I record it, then I listen back and see what it needs. When I get the song done, I’ll record what I call the ‘definitive demo’ of the song – this is how it goes – and then I move on to the next song. 

“Then, when I’m ready to record, I want the best microphones, the best engineer and the best sound that I can possibly get. So I’d rather spend the money on a great, great studio and a great engineer, than spend a fortune decking out some studio and then trying to engineer it myself. I’m not an engineer, I’m a player. And I need to capture that.”

How long does it take you to practise a new song before you feel it’s ready to perform?

“For some songs, like Fuel, I wrote that on a train trip from Paris to Cologne, and I played it that night on the show because I felt it was all done. Other times I think a song is done and then I’ll play it again at another time and my instincts will say, ‘No, it’s not done yet. This needs something else.’ 

“There’s a song that’s coming on the new album called Scarlett’s World. That took me two weeks to finish because I wrote all this stuff and I put it in there and jammed it in. Then when I went back and listened to it, I went, ‘I’m trying to do too much…’ and my instincts were like, ‘Get rid of that and get rid of that…’ and so I narrowed it down to the meat and potatoes of the song. Tell the story and leave it: stop.”

You’ve changed your live setup since we last spoke and you’re now using the Udo Roesner Da Capo acoustic amp. Tell us more…

“Yeah, the Da Capo 75. Basically, it’s to replace the [AER] Compact 60 that I used for so many years. The Compact 60 is still a great amp and it always will be, but when Udo brought that amp to me, we A/B’d them. I did the soundcheck using the Compact 60 and then plugged in Udo’s and the sound just opened up. 

“If you have a look at some of my TikTok videos from last year, I have the Udo amp under a table and it’s barely on. I can hear the amp, but when you watch the video, you think it’s just a mic. That’s how good the amp is. You think it’s just a mic, right?” 

Do you still try to keep your live setup straightforward and simple?

“Absolutely, yeah. I have one pedal on stage and it’s a tuner that mutes, right? That’s it. So my signal is from the guitar into the tuner, tuner into the AER Pocket Tool preamp, which is basically just the AER technology and sound – so that’s a big, fat clean signal. 

“Then I come out of that and go into the Udo amp and I come out of the amp into the PA. So it’s two direct signals, one direct from the Pocket Tool to the PA, then direct from the amp to the PA.

“[Front-of-house engineer] Steve [Law] puts them at a certain level so it all gels together. So from the direct signal, you’re getting all the rich bottom-end from the bass of the guitar, and the high-end and all that. Then, from the amp, you’re getting that woolly, kind of gritty midrange. You add the two together and they become one sound. 

“I do the same kind of thing with microphones when I’m recording. I get the mics that sound really sweet and woody, and then I have a Royer ribbon mic sitting about a foot behind the mics in front of me and it just adds grit to the whole picture – a certain grit that you can’t get with a normal microphone, you know?”

Travelling around, you’re at the mercy of different PAs of varying quality in the venues you play. How do you manage to maintain a good sound every night? 

“How I cope with it is I have the best sound guy there is! He knows what I’m looking for; he knows what I need. When you’re playing through your own amp and your own preamp and you know your sound, you’re going to get a sound that inspires you.

“The only things I struggle with are, firstly, my own hearing because I wear hearing aids, right? My hearing was destroyed before I was born: I was born with yellow fever. So I’ve been wearing hearing aids for a long time. So there’s that, and then there’s modern technology. 

“PAs are all flown now and they’re line array and so people on stage wouldn’t even know the PA was on. I’m used to feeling the size of my notes. So we use side fill for me, where we have a small PA equivalent 10ft from me on both sides [of the stage] pointing in my direction. It’s got bigness to the sound, but it’s not affecting the sound that Steve’s getting out the front.”

Is playing live still as exciting for you as it always was? 

“Well, I hope I’m getting better at it! It’s a love-hate relationship because I love playing so much, but when I struggle with sound or something, then I think, ‘Oh God, I can play so much better when I’m just in a room and I can hear myself…’ But that’s the stuff that sharpens your sword; when the going gets tough, that’s when I dig in, that’s when I really try harder. 

“And you’ve got to do that. The older I get, the more I depend on that part of me: ‘Okay, this is getting like a struggle, time to relax…’ and so I try to undo all my urgency because I know I can play better or whatever. I try to do something to defuse those emotions, so I can just constantly play and enjoy it. 

“When you’re sitting out in the [audience], you have no idea what the player is going through. And a person like me, I’m on stage, I’m looking at you, I’m looking at my guitar and I’m listening to every detail. I’m listening to my timing, my tuning, the sound that I’m making, the feel that I’m playing with. I’m listening to everything on a really hyper level. But, at the same time, I want to be enjoying myself. That’s what it’s all about.”

Molly Tuttle interview

After the dust had settled at the Guitarist studios and both Tommy and Molly had motored off to their next tour date, we heard about the duo’s success at the Grammys in LA on 4 February where Molly picked up her second award in the Best Bluegrass Album category for City Of Gold. 

Remarkably, she was up against both Willie Nelson and Billy Strings and described winning for a second year running as “surreal…” If you look at the video of her winning this year’s award you’ll see her sprinting to the stage to pick it up. If you wondered what the rush was all about, read on…

Winning the 2023 Grammy Award for Crooked Tree wasn’t exactly without incident, was it?

“It was amazing. I was up for Bluegrass Album and Best New Artist, and the Best New Artist thing was really unexpected. It was outside of the American Roots genre, which I definitely didn’t see happening, and it was a wonderful surprise. We got there and got through the red carpet and sat down in the auditorium and they announced that Crooked Tree won and it was surreal.” 

“I was towards the back of the place and I was running to the stage, but they didn’t see me. And when someone’s not there for the award, they just move right along to the next one. So they started announcing the next award and it was this moment like, ‘Oh, my God, I just won a Grammy!’ and, ‘Oh no, I don’t get to do my speech and thank all the people who helped to make the album…’ 

“It was pretty funny, looking back on it, but in the moment I was trying to balance feelings like: ‘Well, that is the coolest thing that’s ever happened’ and ‘Wait, what just happened? and ‘How did I not make it to the stage in time?’ 

“After that, I went through the press interviews and got to hold one of the Grammys they keep backstage but don’t have anyone’s name on them, but you have pictures taken with them. Just soaking in the whole show was amazing.” 

Have you experienced any after-effects on your career, having won a Grammy?

“Yeah, totally. I mean, I’ve been performing and making records for a long time, but when I made Crooked Tree, it felt like I was going back to my roots. Coming out of the pandemic, I was feeling nostalgic for the music I grew up with, so I made a bluegrass album, put together a brand-new band, and it felt like the start of this new exciting path that I was on. 

“Winning the Grammy solidified us as a band; it really boosted our profile, in a way. So many cool opportunities came from it. I think our first show of the year was playing on Jimmy Kimmel [Live!]. That was very cool, to get to do some TV stuff and publicity around winning that award. 

“Since then, it’s just felt like so many things have happened over the last year that have been really exciting, like bucket-list moments for the band. And we made an album together and put it out last year. We’re just on this really fun ride right now.”

Where does a new song start for you – is it usually a melodic idea or does it come from a lyric?

“It usually starts with some sort of idea for what I want to write about. Maybe a lyric idea or sometimes I just talk to someone who I’m writing with for a while about what we’re wanting to say with the song. Then someone might start strumming a guitar, humming a melody. 

“Sometimes you come up with a couple of words that lead you in a direction. But these days I like to have an idea of some topics I want to write about – what I want to say with my song – because that keeps it all focused and can even inform how the music sounds.”

Do you find that playing live and playing in the studio involves two completely different headspaces? 

“Oh, yeah, totally. I think I really realised that on this last record, City Of Gold. It was the first time I had gone into the studio with my live touring band and I think we’re so used to playing together with an audience and feeding off the energy of the crowd. If you don’t play everything perfectly, it’s okay. It’s like this energy that you’re putting out there into the audience and they’re giving it back to you. 

“Playing with Tommy, he talks about showmanship a lot: ‘I just do it for the show.’ And, obviously, he’s such a virtuosic player but he’s also an amazing performer and extremely entertaining to watch. So you kind of get into that headspace. 

“When you go into the studio, it’s just the sound of what you’re playing and singing and the songs you’ve written. So you have to think about it in a different way: ‘How do I get the best tone?’ ‘Am I perfectly in tune?’ ‘Am I playing everything as well executed as I can?’ 

“And you can also really obsess over stuff because you have the chance to go back and fix things as many times as you want, as long as you don’t run out of studio time. It can be hard to know, ‘When do I stop? When is it good?’ I’m definitely someone who just wants to go back and fine-tune everything as much as possible.

“Working [and co-producing] with Jerry Douglas on the last two records, he’s someone who’s more of the mind that you ‘get it in the moment’, and usually what you played when you were feeding off each other’s energy had the best vibe. You shouldn’t go back and try to redo everything and make it perfect, because [that way] it loses some of the soul.”

You’ve brought a special custom-made Pre-War guitar out on tour with you this time. Tell us more…

“I have two Pre-War guitars now. One is rosewood [back and sides], one’s mahogany – and I have my rosewood one with me here. It’s a Brazilian rosewood dreadnought-style guitar and the wood was actually gifted to me from someone who came to my show years ago. They gave the wood to the Pre-War guitar company and they made me the guitar. It was cool, I got to be in on the whole process of creating the guitar, making the neck the size I wanted. 

“The company bases its guitar designs on guitars from the 30s and a lot of them have these really thick necks. So the first Pre-War guitar I got had this really fat round neck and, for the one that I have here, I told them I wanted it a little thinner. I got to design the sunburst; I like sunburst guitars, which you don’t see too often in bluegrass, but I think they’re pretty. 

“I got to visit while they were making the guitar and they said, ‘Do you want to write a little message on the inside of the guitar?’ and I ended up writing a quote from the song Standing On The Moon [by The Grateful Dead] that I cover a lot and I wrote: ‘A lovely view of heaven… but I’d rather be with you’, which is one of my favourite lyrics from that song. You can’t actually see it, it’s on the inside of the top so I don’t know if I’ll ever actually see the little message I wrote.”

What’s your live setup? 

“I’m always tweaking things a little bit. I have a new pickup; I just last month got a Fishman Aura pickup and preamp that is brand-new. Before, I was using two different pickups from K&K [Sound] – a Double Helix and a Pure Mini – but there was some sort of issue with the interface, the way the two pickups were working together. 

“I loved how they sounded, but there was some sort of humming thing that would happen sometimes and we didn’t know how to fix it. So I got a new pickup and I’m down to just one input now, which is good. Before, I was on a stereo system, which sometimes made it hard using other people’s gear – you know, sitting in with people. It was just a little bit more complicated. 

“So now I have the Fishman, which has been good so far. I’m still getting used to it and working out the kinks and dialling it in. Sometimes I have effects pedals that I use – delay or tremolo – but I’m not a huge gearhead. I usually keep it fairly simple.”

Do you go straight into the PA from the guitar then? 

“I go through my Aura preamp. I sent my guitar to [Fishman] and they sampled my guitar through different mics and so it has all these settings where I can go from mic to mic and it’s supposed to make it sound more natural.”

What lies in the immediate future for you?

“It’s busy. We’re starting to announce some dates for this year and I’m probably gonna go back into the studio at some point. Touring with my band, starting in April, is when we really are going to pick up. We have a couple of shows here and there for the first couple months of the year, but then we’re taking a little bit of a break as a band before hitting it hard again, starting in April. 

“We did 99 shows last year and I’ll probably do close to that amount this year. I know I’ll be recording another album, obviously. I’m not sure when exactly. I’m kind of getting back into the writing process, but I would like to release some new music this year. So I think, whether it’s an album or a collection of songs, I’m gonna go back and record some new songs.”

• Molly Tuttle's Crooked Tree is out now via Nonesuch. Tommy Emmanuel's Accomplice 2 is out now via CGP Sounds.

Guitarist recently sat down with two of the world's best acoustic players in Molly Tuttle and Tommy Emmanuel to learn more about their approach to right-hand technique, open strings, and tuning choices.

The rapport between the pair is palpable as they share their top tips in a must-see interview for acoustic guitar lovers.

Regardless of playing style, right-hand technique is often criminally overlooked when it comes to refining your playing. For Tuttle, fluidity is paramount.   

“I use a flat pick, gripping it between my index and thumb, and I usually play on the back end of the soundhole,” she says. “When I strum, I float my hand so that no part touches the strings or the guitar. But when I switch to lead, I flatten out my wrist and anchor it on the bridge, so you'll see some fluidity in my playing when switching between parts.”

In the interview, she clearly shows the positional switch. For lead, you see that her hand pulls closer to the bridge so that it gently brushes against the bridge pins, anchoring her hand without completely locking it down onto the body of the guitar.  

“It's a beautiful floating technique that Molly has,” says Emmanuel. “The hardest part of acoustic guitar is getting that effortless approach. Making it nice and relaxed is a good idea.”  

With that in mind, Tuttle recommends players adopt a loose grip of the guitar pick. “You want to almost feel like you're about to drop your pick, you're not gripping onto it,” she says. “Just don’t actually drop it like I’ve done before. It’s embarrassing!”  

Another top tip from Tuttle comes from her Shakespearean-like thinking of ‘to capo, or not to capo’.

“When I'm playing with another guitarist, I like to play in a different position [to them],” she says. “If they're not putting on a capo, I will. That way, we're not stepping on each other's toes too much.”

The conversation also discusses the value of and reasoning for a heavy reliance on open strings in bluegrass. Both draw sonic parallels with the banjo.

“A lot of it comes from the banjo sound and, [as a result], I'm always looking for ways to use open strings against each other so it sounds a little sweeter or unusual,” Emmanuel explains. “Jerry Reed brought that to our attention. Tony Rice added so much of that into the records he was making, too. It's a beautiful sound.”   

“For me, a lot of it for me comes from wanting the notes to sound fluid,” adds Tuttle. “So, with open strings, you can have notes ringing out over each other which can be really pretty, or you're cross-picking so it almost sounds like a banjo. It took me years to venture up the neck and play in closed positions! Throwing in an open string can give you time to reposition your hand too, which gives the impression of playing faster.”

The pair were also quizzed on their tuning preferences, with Tuttle explaining why she alternates between standard and Open Gsus4.

“I was inspired to play [banjo technique] clawhammer style on the guitar in Open Gsus4 after someone showed me I could take the same right-hand technique and incorporate it on the guitar,” Tuttle says. “You don't use a pick and you want an open tuning for those ringing notes, and you're hitting the higher strings with index and middle finger nails and plucking the lower strings with the thumb.”

“The first song I ever learned on clawhammer guitar was Little Sadie,” adds Tuttle, “which uses a common rhythm called a ‘bum ditty’ pattern.”

For this rhythm, you'll want to play the higher strings with your index and middle fingernails, playing 'bum' and 'di-', with your thumb playing a bass note to round the phrase off with a '-tty'.

The equivalent with a pick would be 'down, down up’. You can hear the pair play the song from 17:40. For a Tuttle-written song using this rhythm, check out Take the Journey (above).

“Open G also works really well for modal songs in between major and minor, because it’s all Gs and Ds apart from a weird C on the second string – you actually tune that up [from B].”

It’s not been a bad start to the year for Molly Tuttle, with City of Gold picking up the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album.  

The interview follows Emmanuel's sit down with Guitarist back in October to discuss his approach to thumbpicking.

"When you practice the skills enough, one day, just like magic, the skills turn into music," he said, before advising us all to "leave the fingers out entirely”.

Emmanuel went on to explain how he developed this fingerless mindset when teaching guitar in Australia. He would tell students to rest their fingers on the guitar top, then he would tape their fingers down so they couldn’t move. “They’re rebellious digits,” he said. “They always want to join in.”

All guitarists get that lightbulb moment when a technique or theory suddenly becomes transparent. For Tommy Emmanuel it was looking at a Chet Atkins album cover and spotting a thumbpick: “So that’s how he does it,” said the young lad.

Fundamentally, a thumbpick adds weight to the thumb, giving basslines clarity and space in the mix between the thumb and fingers. In interview Tommy talked about songs like Guitar Boogie that are used as a skeleton for taking wherever you want, using the skills you’ve learned that enable you to improvise. 

Freight Train is also often used as such a vehicle, especially in the acoustic or country world where it lends itself to fingerstyle, hybrid picking or, as we shall see, the thumbpick style of Atkins, Tommy and others. Of course, we know of Tommy as one of the most technically adept musicians, irrespective of the fact that he chooses acoustic guitar as his weapon of choice. But in this video he brings thumbpicking down to its absolute basics, showing exactly how he taught himself the nuts and bolts before putting it all back together so fluently.

Tommy begins with a highly engaging chat on being in tune.“I tune up because I care, but also when you play solo it’s very exposed,” he explains. He follows with an equally interesting discussion on the thumbpicks themselves; the different types, which gauges he likes, how he often grips the pick with his first finger and uses it like a flat pick, and how not to wear it too tight or you’ll get “blue finger!” He’s no snob, either; he simply buys a bag of medium Jim Dunlop thumbpicks and pulls out those that feel good to him.

Tommy starts his lesson in earnest by describing how to just practise the thumb part, alternating the bass note and (usually) the 5th with a ‘ghosted’ part chord. Leave the fingers out entirely he says, telling of how when he was teaching guitar in Australia he’d tell students to rest their fingers on the guitar top; he’d then tape them down so they couldn’t move. “They’re rebellious digits,” he jokes; “they always want to join in.”

Next he introduces the fingers. “Second step is the beginning of getting your fingers to do something different from the thumb.” He demonstrates by playing a simple C-F-G chord part on top, yet it already sounds impressive. The third step moves it up a notch. “It’s to create something where the thumb stays steady and the fingers do something against it,” explains Tommy. “It’s the beginning of your brain and hand connecting, and your hand doing what your brain tells it. It will be a mental conundrum for a while, but it will kick in if you keep at it.” He then plays a slightly syncopated chord part on top.

Using our C-F-G sequence Tommy now plays an arpeggio on top of the rocking thumb, getting into Streets Of London territory. “If you can play that after practicing it slowly for a while, then you’re ready to learn a song,” says Tommy. “And the song I suggest you learn is Freight Train. But you have to realise that it’s not music yet; this is learning skills. When you practice the skills enough, one day, just like magic, the skills turn into music.”

Tommy now runs through the ‘head’ of Freight Train bar by bar, putting together everything he’s told us so far. He rounds things off with a full rendition in proper Tommy Emmanual style. Below is the full video – which we recommend watching before you start the exercises – and then with each example the videos should start at approximately the correct place. And if you don’t want to rush out and buy a thumbpick or two after that, then we’ll eat the office fedora.

EXAMPLE 1

The first thing to note is that Tommy says that it took him 10 years to feel comfortable with a thumb pick and so resign yourself to the fact that it will feel strange and unwieldy at first. This first example is a workout for the thumb – we’re not employing any fingers yet. This is the most important part to get firmly established in the head and hand as everything else will spring from what you’re doing here. So work slowly and don’t move onto the next exercise before the information here is bedded in.

EXAMPLE 2

Now we’re going to introduce the fingers into the chord progression. If you were able to master Ex 1 to the extent that you can do it in your sleep, this will be easy – if not, it’s back to the woodshed! Inserting the chords with the fingers shouldn’t give you too much trouble as there’s no syncopation here, you’re just playing the chord on the first beat of the bar in time with the thumb.

EXAMPLE 3

We’re turning up the heat a little here as now we’re going to introduce the chords on the first beat once again, but we’re also going to employ them on an offbeat. You’ll need to study the video in order to hear – and feel – where it fits in but, loosely speaking, it’s just after the second beat and right before the third. Don’t worry too much about it and, more importantly, don’t allow yourself to become frustrated if all the pieces don’t fit straight away. Practise is your friend here.

EXAMPLE 4

In this exercise, we’re not playing anything new, we’re just organising what we’ve already learned differently. This is where things start sounding more musical – but take note of what Tommy says: “The skill comes before the music!” So whereas it might feel like there’s a lot going on in your right hand and that thumb pick still feels a little alien, keep on working at it and also refer back to the video to see and hear what Tommy is doing and all should be well.

EXAMPLE 5

It’s graduation day! This is where we put everything together and play a tune. In order to keep things really simple, we’ve transcribed the melody separately and if you study the video you can see that all the melody notes fall under the fingers. It’s probably a good idea to make sure that you know  the melody thoroughly before trying to combine the parts together – referring to the video will help a lot. The most important thing is to take things very slowly at first, build your confidence and dexterity and then slowly bring the tune up to tempo. 

This lesson first appeared in Guitarist present Acoustic, a special from May 2018.

Last Sunday (June 4), a stellar lineup of electric guitar greats came together at the London Palladium to pay tribute to James Burton, a legendary guitarist most famous for his tenure as Elvis Presley's six-string sidekick.

In a nod to the immense scope of Burton's influence, the show's lineup spanned both genres and generations: from classic rock A-lister Brian May, to acoustic guitar maestro Tommy Emmanuel, and younger blues guitar aces like Arielle and Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, to name just a few participants.

To emphasize the inter-generational spirit of rock n' roll, May also invited an even-younger guest to the Palladium stage for a set-closing jam on Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Goode, 11-year-old Britain's Got Talent sensation Harry Churchill. 

Churchill – for those who haven't been following along in recent weeks – has gone viral twice over for his show-stopping displays of six-string skill on the much-watched competition reality show, first for a phenomenal medley of Queen classics and later for a fiery (literally) display of shred that almost earned the youngster a spot in the competition's final round.

Churchill, to his credit, hardly seems fazed by the star power around him, and is even given the honor of kicking the performance – which you can see below – off.

Churchill also takes the first lead break, executing – just as he did on Britain's Got Talent last week – a smooth impression of Berry's famous 'duck walk' and some tasteful licks, before ceding the spotlight to Arielle, who takes things in a slightly bluesier direction.

Ingram, May, and, of course, Burton himself, also contribute some slinky, satisfying solos to the proceedings. 

“Ladies and gentlemen, rock is a river,” May tells the crowd prior to the performance. “You've seen the river flow tonight – three or four generations all inspired by the amazing James Burton.” 

In an interview with Guitar World earlier this year, May listed Burton – along with early rock guitar pioneers Buddy Holly and Hank Marvin, and latter-day influences like Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, and Pete Townshend – as one of the guitarists who most shaped his playing.

“When I look back on it, I don’t think I could have been born at a better time," May explained. "As kids we were so lucky to have grown up in that period when things were bursting through and all the boundaries were being broken.” 

As if the names above weren't enough rock royalty for the evening, Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood also made an appearance, lending a hand on the rockabilly standard Suzie Q, among other tunes.

Both Wood and his Stones bandmate, Keith Richards, were enormously influenced by Burton. Richards even said, when inducting Burton into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001, “I never bought a Ricky Nelson record, I bought a James Burton record.” 

Wood – wielding a gorgeous Gibson Les Paul – was also on hand to back up one of the show's other top-tier guests, Van Morrison, for an impassioned version of Worried Man Blues.

The Burton tribute show was a one-night only event, but Burton himself said, while sending off the crowd, “I can't wait to do [this] again.” 

Everyone has had that dream where you turn up at school – and it is always school – and what do you know? You’ve got no pants on. Well, there is a six-string equivalent of this, and Mike Dawes recently lived it when he started jamming with Tommy Emmanuel on live television, only to discover that his acoustic guitar was in the wrong tuning.

There he was, on the genial, comfortably beige set of what looks like a morning TV show, in a guitar situation with all the horror of the last act of The Exorcist.

That would kill most of us. No sacred rite could exorcise that memory from our minds. That would be preferable. Honestly, if given the choice, send us to school, with no pants on, like, forever. 

But when you have two of the world’s foremost acoustic virtuosos in session, those years of professionalism and practiced calm goes a long way – and Dawes, with the help of the unflappable Emmanuel, executed an act of mid-song guitar tuning that is an example to us all.

Watching it in action, as Dawes shared it on his Instagram page, is a little like a seasoned circus pro walking the high-wire, having a wobble, then back to business. It heightens the drama. But really in this instance Dawes and Emmanuel turn it into comedy. 

He doesn’t miss a beat, mic’d up and calling out the tune as they assemble the jam – “…and I’m in the wrong tuning so let’s fix that!” A twist of his low E to take it down to D, Emmanuel giving it a tweak for good measure, like the chef checking the sauce, or as Dawes comments, “The king being the king”, and then they’re off.

Dawes and Emmanuel are quite the double act, Dawes on his koa-bodied Andreas Cuntz CWG 23 and Emmanuel on his Maton TE Personal signature guitar. Together they have reimagined classic tracks from across popular music as acoustic studies. 

Emmanuel welcomed Dawes for the latest in the Australian acoustic legend’s collaborative albums, Accomplice Series Vol. 3. The album found the pair transforming The 1975’s Be My Mistake, unplugging Nirvana for a second time with Smells Like Teen Spirit, and going pastoral with Fields of Gold by Sting. Dawes and Emmanuel even took on John Mayer’s 21st-century smooth-rock favorite Slow Dancing in a Burning Room.

Is there a lesson to be taken from this? Well, before going live on network television, it’s always worth referring to the trusty guitar tuner and making sure you’re all set to go. 

Failing that, a phenomenal ear, smooth tuners (Gotoh 510s will do the job), and a once-in-a-generation talent sitting alongside you should see you through the gig.

Tommy Emmanuel paid tribute to late electric guitar legend Jeff Beck at his January 11 show at the Lexington Opera House in Kentucky, performing a rendition of Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers, a Stevie Wonder song famously covered by Beck on his 1975 album, Blow By Blow.

The performance, which took place on the day of Beck’s passing, saw the Aussie maestro transform the original – which features Beck’s gloriously vocal and articulate electric guitar leads – for fingerstyle guitar, in a touching homage to the former Yardbirds man. Check it out below.

Emmanuel also paid tribute to Beck on social media, calling him an “original, an artist of the highest order, the finest guitar player that could not be copied, only enjoyed and appreciated”.

“Thank you for all your dedication, love of good songs and totally adventurous spirit,” he added.

Jeff Beck died suddenly last week at the age of 78 after contracting bacterial meningitis. The news stunned the guitar world, prompting players far and wide to pen tributes and share their memories with the guitar icon.

Among those who paid homage were Joe Satriani, who said Beck had “an enormous impact on my guitar playing, my musicianship and my soul”, Sir Rod Stewart, who commended him as “one of the few guitarists that when playing live would actually listen to me sing and respond”, and Jimmy Page, who praised the “spell he could weave around our mortal emotions” with his playing.

Other tributes came from David Gilmour, Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Jack Bruce, John Mayer, Joe Perry, Johnny Marr, Sammy Hagar, Mick Mars, Mike McCready, The Edge and many more.

One of the most in-depth, though, came from Queen guitarist Brian May, who last week posted a five-minute video on social media waxing lyrical on Beck’s influence on him and on the wider guitar world.

“I don't think I could ever put into words exactly how much I did revere him, I hope I gave him the picture,” he said. “I don't know if he knew. But I feel like I wasn't a good enough friend to him. And that's one of the things that happens, I suppose, but particularly in this case I feel like there were so many times I could have rung him up, and I wish I had, to be a proper friend.

“But Jeff Beck was so unique, so influential on every guitarist I've ever met in my life. The loss is incalculable. It's so sad not having him in the world anymore. I still can't quite compute it in my head.”

It’s been something of a banner year for fingerstyle virtuoso Mike Dawes. He spent a significant part of 2022 on a world tour with Tommy Emmanuel, in addition to playing his own headline solo gigs, and holding down his job as guitarist in Justin Hayward’s band.

Dawes has been a professional touring musician for the better part of a decade, spending 10 or 11 months a year on the road. Consequently, extended pandemic lockdowns took a toll on him, both professionally and personally. Being back on tour, he says, made this “the most exciting year since I was 17 years old and discovering the acoustic guitar – it really feels like starting again.”

Said restart has primed him for an intensely busy 2023. He has a new album in the works, which he only hints at in this interview. And of course he’ll be on the road nonstop, both on his own and with Tommy Emmanuel, performing tracks from their recent EP, Accomplice Series Vol. 3.

As always, Dawes will make it all seem effortless – a feat that in fact requires considerable effort, as he explains below.

How did you develop the percussive element and timing in your playing?

“I remember seeing a wonderful lecture online from Victor Wooten. He was talking about playing solo and how to really get in the groove. He was saying that what he does is imagine a drummer that you're jamming with playing alongside you in the room.

“Your imagination can run wild for what that drummer is doing, but of course that drummer is certainly staying in time. That's the core purpose of this thought experiment. 

“I started doing that not just when I play electric, but when I play acoustic solo, because when I'm doing my solo arrangements I don't have a metronome or click track or anything in my ears, like many rock bands do, or even a drummer. So I imagine the drummer playing along, and if I'm feeling wobbly about the time that's what I try to do consciously to lock myself back in. It really does work. 

“I remember specifically a gig I did in Florida in 2014. Someone came up to me at the merch table and said, ‘Oh my God, that was amazing, but you kept rushing during one song.’ 

“I was taken aback and defensive, like, ‘You must be mistaken. What are you talking about?’ And then I went on YouTube and saw a bootleg from that specific gig, and it's true – I was rushing. It was then that I started thinking about that Victor Wooten lecture and imagining a drummer. It really helps. I'd recommend people try it out.”

When you're thinking about what the imaginary drummer is doing, how do you focus on what you're doing at the same time?

“I'm not consciously thinking about the drummer the whole time. It's almost like when you're driving and you're kind of on autopilot, and then suddenly you think, ‘Oh, I should be thinking about driving right now,’ so you bring yourself back into the present. In terms of guitar, I'm usually thinking about only one of my hands, and the other hand is muscle memory. 

“There's also certain cue points in songs where I focus heavily on one particular line. If you asked me to stop and start again, I'd have to start at one of those specific points. I wouldn't be able to just start on any random 16th note. I have to start on one of these cue points. So a combination of those cue points and one hand muscle memory, plus general daydreaming. That's how I get through the concert. 

“That's actually something they proved years ago, that musicians have these little cue points. You can't just pick up a piece from any random beat. It has to be from some predetermined little gateway in your mind. I always found that interesting.”

Let's talk about a couple of things that are more difficult than you make them seem: care and maintenance of hand strength and dexterity.

“I’d like to say that I do rigorous warm-up exercises now, and there was a period where that was true. But the schedule dictates that I'm playing concerts so regularly that the best warm-up for me is to run the songs. What I typically do is practice the songs from least demanding through to most demanding. That doubles as my rehearsal for the show as well. 

“One thing I do, much to the horror of those around me, is I will practice these songs in completely wrong tunings usually, and the reason I do that is to save the guitar strings, because many of my songs are in different tunings. If I'm constantly changing tunings every time I want to practice a song, the strings are going to break, and I'm terrified of them breaking onstage. 

“So backstage I usually tune to the tuning of the first song of the show. But then I'll practice all of the songs in that tuning, and it's hilarious because it sounds absolutely horrible. People are looking at me, thinking, ‘God, this guy's horrible!’ 

“That's something I do, and then my friends enjoy when I’ve stopped playing. Sometimes you discover some really magical chords, if you're putting your hands in these positions and in completely wrong tunings. You can come up with some cool ideas, actually. 

“The way I play, the two-hand technique, does build up your strength on both hands. I did lose my calluses briefly during the pandemic because I did not pick up a guitar for about six months, and it did take me a little bit to build them back. 

“The thing I noticed is that as long as I'm playing at least a couple of times a month, I'll maintain my calluses. But the climate changes them. If I go to a very humid country, then sometimes the calluses disappear and it suddenly becomes very painful to play. That's just the nature of the beast. 

“There was one place I went to with Tommy Emmanuel, it might have been Florida, and we were both complaining about how much it hurt playing the guitar – and that's Tommy Emmanuel, who’s been playing forever. 

“Justin Hayward has that problem sometimes as well. When we were rehearsing in Tennessee, it was the same thing. So sometimes the physics of our planet get in the way a little bit. But I don't consciously have to rest or anything like that. If anything, I have to make sure that I'm playing regularly to maintain them.”

How did you develop your style and sound?

“When I was starting out, I was always thinking that exactly: ‘How do I get my own sound? What do I need to do so that people can identify something as me when they hear it?’ 

“There are some guitar players I've listened to and I wouldn't be able to distinguish who they are versus another twenty guitar players, but then there are some players with incredibly unique voices. When Tommy Emmanuel plays, I know it's him. When Antoine Dufour plays, I know it’s him.

“There was almost a eureka moment, which firstly was that it’s okay to try anything you want to do. When I was starting, I was thinking, ‘Is it okay to play this lick? Would Andy McKee play this lick?’ 

“When I stopped thinking like that, that's the moment people started coming up to me, saying, ‘I love your sound,’ or ‘I can always tell when it's you playing.’ It's just breaking down the rules, understanding that it's okay to try any kind of technique, tuning, passage, whatever it is. 

“When you do that enough times, that will become something that is unique for you, not to mention your own diverse set of experiences. Everyone's influences are different, everyone's path is different, so they will all sound unique. It's just whether or not they choose to really explore and let go of that rulebook. 

“That's just my own opinion based on my experiences. It's okay to try anything new. You are allowed. I actually can’t wait for people to hear my next album. It’s different.”

Have you ever encountered the sea of folded arms?

“Oh yeah, of course. I grew up playing open mic nights in pubs to a bunch of drunk English people on Friday nights. That teaches you to not only not care about that kind of response, but to engage with it and try your best to manipulate it to your advantage. 

“I don’t think I would enjoy live performance as much if I didn’t spend a year around the south of London, playing open mic nights as many weeks as I could. You encounter all sorts of personalities, and that teaches you to deal with an audience, work an audience, and more importantly, entertain the audience. 

“That’s the whole point: trying to make people forget about their mortgages for the evening. So I love that. I love that manipulation. I don’t use the word ‘manipulation’ in a manipulative way. I love doing my best to make people happy, and the experience of dealing with drunk English people really helped that journey.”

How do you push yourself as a guitarist? At the same time, is there a risk of self-indulgence? If so, how do you keep from crossing that line?

“Absolutely, and I think that line is getting progressively blurred during the internet age, when you have suddenly a ton more musicians all competing for the same eyeballs. The problem is that we have a situation where, algorithmically, we’re having to catch and maintain people’s attention in the shortest possible window. 

“The net result is music that doesn’t really sound like a journey, doesn't really sound like an experience, but it sounds like a slap in the face because it has to, in order to grab people's attention.

“This is where I see both electric and acoustic guitar right now: heavily edited, very engineered to engage, snippets of sound. Now, because I’m a live guy and I've always enjoyed being on the road, you can't get away with that and hold people's attention for more than that initial ‘wow’, so my material has to, by definition, be engineered for a longform journey. It has to bring people up, it has to bring people down, it has to make people laugh, it has to make people cry. 

“You can't do that in the online space and expect anyone to care or anyone to even see your stuff. So by definition of loving the live show format, there's certain ways I have to write. I like to think I'm treading a line that resonates with people, because that's exactly how I've been able to have people unfold their arms. 

“You can't go one hundred miles an hour all the time. But that's where we're at with the online culture right now, or for those who want the clicks, which is obviously everyone on some level. I could talk about that for days. 

“The thing that I hope I'm doing differently is engaging an audience for not just four seconds online, but for an hour at a show… and they will let you know if you're not. 

“Hopefully what stops me from crossing the line into candy and sugar without the substance is that the audience will let me know. That's the best possible answer I can give, really. The audience will let me know if I'm going too far into chaos. 

“And having the respect of people like Tommy Emmanuel means the world, because he's the king of music and the king of guitar. So, occasionally, the old pat on the back from one of my guitar heroes doesn't hurt.”

I’ve heard musicians say that there are times when they get sick of their own playing. Does this happen to you? 

“Oh, yeah. ‘My playing is garbage, I hate everything I do.’ That's just the way it is. When one creates a piece of music, once it's out there in recorded format, or if you're playing it live, it no longer belongs to you. You're not responsible for how it's received, and you shouldn't therefore feel negatively affected by it, because it's not yours to be negatively affected by anymore. You're putting something out there for people to internalize and respond to, as that’s their right.

“If you understand that, when you're playing a song live, it doesn't matter if you're liking it or not. If I'm having a crappy day, it's still my job to try and brighten someone's day, so if I'm playing a tune that I'm not really feeling, but I know people in that room want to hear it, then it's my responsibility to play it, because I don't have the right to it anymore. 

“I've created it and put it out there. During the creation process, it's all thrills and loveliness, but once I put it out there, it's my responsibility to entertain the people who have come to see me play and give them the songs that they want to hear. That being said, I do indulge in the occasional self-indulgent deep cut!”

What is the difference between playing guitar and being a guitarist?

“I would say the difference is not limiting yourself to that box, being open to all musical ideas, and being inspired by whatever the people around you are playing. For example, I used to go to drum workshops. I’m not a drummer, but I would always learn something. 

“To associate that with the word ‘guitarist’, I suppose, would be how much of your identity it consumes. I can’t think of any world where I would be doing anything else. I’ve always wanted to be a professional guitar player, and it’s a privilege to be able to do that. 

“It also comes down to intent as well. Are you playing because you want to impress your friends, or are you playing because you have to? Personally, I have to, so I hope that encourages any people that want to take it seriously.”

• Mike Dawes and Tommy Emmanuel's new EP, Accomplice Series Vol. 3, is out now via CGP Sounds.

Acoustic guitar virtuosos Tommy Emmanuel and Mike Dawes are currently gearing up to release Accomplice Series Vol. 3, an EP of covers.

We've already heard their thrilling acoustic reinvention of Nirvana's world-conquering Smells Like Teen Spirit, and now, the duo have premiered another song from the collection, a beautiful take on The 1975's Be My Mistake. You can check it out below.

Pristine and reflective, the recording is an incredible showcase for Emmanuel, who, as Dawes accurately describes, does his best "mandolin impression," while putting on a masterclass in articulation with his lead playing. 

“Mike brought this song to my attention, and he had it all arranged and worked up as a solo piece," Emmanuel said of Be My Mistake in a press release. "Everything he was doing was just what it needed, so I only had to find some spaces to add a few ideas and stay out of his way. Hopefully, I embellished enough to create some beauty.

"Recording together with our engineer, Marc DeSisto in LA, was a happy, creative experience that recording should be, and we found our mojo in our different sounding guitars and styles and put them together and let it mesh! Hope you all enjoy the music.”

“Be My Mistake is probably my favorite cut from the record," added Dawes. "This The 1975 cover was the only new arrangement we didn't record live together in the studio. Instead, as Tommy hadn't heard it before, I played my rhythm guitar part in one take whilst he listened. He then listened to playback to further acknowledge the structure. Then, he sat down and just nailed it. 

"This moment captured is a testament to Tommy as the greatest player out there. Every touch and delicate phrase sit with such an iconic character. Note his amazing mandolin impression in the second half. A beautiful way to conclude a special record that has been a privilege to create.” 

Accomplice Series Vol. 3 is set for release this Friday, September 23, on Emmanuel's own CGP Sounds label.

To preorder the EP, visit Emmanuel's website.

Earlier this month, Steve Vai hosted the 6th edition of his annual, all-star Vai Academy workshop at the Hilton Lake Las Vegas Resort & Spa.

Featuring electric guitar greats Nuno Bettencourt, Guthrie Govan, Larry Mitchell and Yvette Young, bass guitar wizard Billy Sheehan, acoustic guitar ace Joe Robinson, and, of course, Vai himself, the academy ran from August 4-8.

For those of us who don't attend them in person, the highlights of these workshops tend to be videos of the all-star jams that leak out one by one in the weeks after they occur, and Vai Academy 6.0 hasn't disappointed in that regard.

Earlier this week, a video of Vai jamming with Yvette Young surfaced on the interwebs, and now, a video of another one of the academy's star instructors, acoustic maestro Tommy Emmanuel, taking a rare public turn on an electric at the workshop (with Vai and Larry Mitchell backing him up on rhythm guitar to boot) has surfaced as well. You can see the brief clip below.

As if seeing Emmanuel trade his usual spellbinding, textural acoustic work for some wailing electric blues leads wasn't cool enough itself, eagle-eyed readers will notice that he's using one of Steve Vai's personal custom Ibanez JEMs.

Unlike most JEMs, the 1998 Ibanez custom six-string in Emmanuel's hands is a Strat-style model, with only single-coil pickups. 

“I enjoy Strats, but they are missing a few elements that I’m accustomed to in my JEMs,” Vai told Guitar World when showing us the guitar in question earlier this year. "So, Ibanez made me this custom JEM/Strat[-style] in September 1998." 

Vai most prominently used the guitar on Candle Power, the finger-twistin' 2020 single that would later appear on his 2022 album, Inviolate.

Seeing Emmanuel plug in is certainly a novel sight, but it's not quite unheard of. In early 2020, he engaged in a thrilling electric duel with Josh Smith and Joe Bonamassa on the latter's Keeping the Blues Alive at Sea cruise. He also famously got his shred on with Joe Satriani and Def Leppard's Phil Collen in the climactic final jam of the 2017 G4 Experience.

On the acoustic front though, Emmanuel is currently gearing up to release Accomplice Series Vol. 3, an EP of covers recorded with his fellow acoustic innovator Mike Dawes. To hear the duo's audacious, brilliantly arranged version of Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit – premiered in June by Guitar World – step right this way.

Welcome to Guitar World’s weekly roundup of the musical highlights from the, erm, world of guitar. Every seven days (or thereabouts), we endeavor to bring you a selection of songs from across the guitar universe, all with one thing in common: our favorite instrument plays a starring role.

Tommy Emmanuel and Mike Dawes – Fields of Gold 

What is it? A cover of Sting’s 1993 track Fields of Gold, and the second single from Accomplice Series Vol. 3 – the latest collaborative effort from acoustic virtuosos Tommy Emmanuel and Mike Dawes. The lead single, a thrilling rendition of Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, gave us a taste of what's to come from the album, and Fields of Gold once again proves the pair’s exceptional musical partnership is a genuine force to be reckoned with. The tones are immaculate, the technique is exquisite and the final result is one of the duo’s best efforts yet.

Standout guitar moment: The emotive grand finale, which is the culmination of almost three minutes of intense acoustic strumming courtesy of Dawes and a fretboard-spanning solo via Emmanuel.

For fans of: Marcin Patrzalek, Sting

– Matt Owen

Alter Bridge – Silver Tongue

What is it? The second single from Alter Bridge’s forthcoming seventh album Pawns & Kings. Following the record’s title track, Silver Tongue is a masterclass in impactful riffwork, with both Mark Tremonti and Myles Kennedy forgoing any leads to double up on the track’s sizzling drop-tuned low-string antics.

Standout guitar moment: It’s gotta be that absolutely chonky intro riff, hasn’t it? It shows that power is in simplicity, and is likely to be one of the standout riffs on the band’s forthcoming album.

For fans of: Shinedown, Black Stone Cherry

– Sam Roche

Chat Pile – Pamela

What is it? In the week since its release, God's Country – the first full-length from Oklahoma City noise-rockers Chat Pile – has built up quite a bit of buzz. Filled as it is with visceral, lurching and explosive tracks like Pamela, it’s easy to see what the hype is all about.

Standout guitar moment: Brutality might be the name of the game for this band, but Pamela has a strong melodic core, best expressed in the eerie, single-note-based riff that sets the tone for the song early on.

For fans of: Joy Division, Big Black, Molchat Doma

– Jackson Maxwell

The 1975 – Happiness 

What is it? Indie rock stalwarts The 1975 raised quite a few eyebrows when they ditched chorus-drenched guitar leads and electro-pop vocals in favor of an orchestral instrumentation for Part of the Band, the first single from their upcoming album, Being Funny In a Foreign Language. Second single Happiness, though, rekindles the group’s relationship with the above, bringing snappy six-string motifs, dancing basslines and ‘80s-esque keyboard progressions to the table. The songwriting chops are cut above, too, with frontman Matty Healy seemingly on top form heading into the new LP.

Standout guitar moment: At the 2:36 mark, Healy rests his vocals and gives the floor to the guitar, which delivers a classically 1975-style, lick-laden interlude via a subtle acoustic guitar. We imagine this section, which is soon joined by the sax, will be significantly cranked up for the live versions, though.

For fans of: Beabadoobee, Dayglow, The Night Cafe

– Matt Owen

Lorna Shore – Cursed to Die

What is it? The third single from the New Jersey deathcore stalwarts forthcoming album, Pain Remains. Like the previously released Sun//Eater and Into the Earth, Cursed to Die is both brutal and expansive, painting a sprawling sonic soundscape with a series of melodic and gut-punching drop-tuned electric guitar riffs.

Standout guitar moment: Adam De Micco’s solo from the 3:29 mark brings a healthy dose of melodic respite after the three minutes of pure chaos that precedes it.

For fans of: Fit For an Autopsy, Make Them Suffer, Slaughter to Prevail

– Sam Roche

Boris – My Name Is Blank

What is it? Fuzzed-up eighth-note hardcore punk from the protean Japanese noise-rock stalwarts, and it’s relentless – a sugar rush that won’t quit, not that you’d want it to. Indeed, it’s a song for the weekend. Guitarist Wata is already drinking wine in the video while Takeshi works an insistent melody on his custom First Act double-neck electric-and-bass guitar.

Standout guitar moment: There’s a guitar solo that’s pretty cool. The melody is pretty cool. But if you sum all of this together it’s the sound, the energy, the vibe, and most of all the guitar tones that will get you. 

Boris are nothing if not epicurean when it comes to the sound of the electric guitar, and the little rituals from which we draw such great satisfaction. Like at the start of the video, when Wata switches on her OR-120 head and there’s the satisfying pop of a powerful tube amp coming to life. That stuff sustains us; it nourishes the soul.

For fans of: Melvins, Sunn O))), Jesu

Bullet For My Valentine – No More Tears to Cry

What is it? A new single from Bridgend, Wales metal mainstays, Bullet For My Valentine, and one which finds them harking back to the riff-driven, emotive sound of their 2005 debut, The Poison. Showcasing their long-honed songwriting prowess, No More Tears to Cry finds Matt Tuck and co bouncing effortlessly between massive electric guitar riffs and softer acoustic-driven bars, with some singalong-worthy vocal hooks thrown in for good measure.

Standout guitar moment: That recurring guitar riff that is introduced at the 0:15 reminds us of early Hand of Blood-era Bullet, and activates our nostalgia like nothing else in the song.

For fans of: Atreyu, As I Lay Dying, Trivium

– Sam Roche

Winter – atonement (ft. Hatchie)

What is it? The new single from What Kind Of Blue Are You?, the forthcoming album from LA-based singer/songwriter Samira Winter. Featuring Harriette Pilbeam (who performs under the name Hatchie) and Joe Agius, atonement is a shoegazey gem, built upon a glitched-out beat, bubbly synths and an infectious bubblegum-pop chorus.

Standout guitar moment: That woozy whammy bar work. You can hear it from the very first bar, and – aside from adding a layer of dreaminess to the proceedings – it pulls the eager synths and beat back a little bit. A perfect balance.

For fans of: My Bloody Valentine, Alvvays, Cocteau Twins

– Jackson Maxwell

City of Caterpillar – Decider

What is it? Decider is a new track shared ahead of the release of the recently reunited Richmond, VA post-hardcore group’s forthcoming album, Mystic Sisters. Said album is the band’s first in 20 years, and if this is anything to go by then it is going to be an angry, skronky difficult noise record that pokes and prods the inner ear in search of your pressure points.

Standout guitar moment: It’s probably when the squall of noise abates into an ethereal middle eight, an arpeggiated dreamscape and moment of relief – but more than that, an opportunity for City of Caterpillar to expand the dynamics, to take us from frenzy to rest and back again, to show their adventurism. Brandon Evans and Jeff Kane’s guitar tones are perfectly voiced for this material.

For fans of: pg. 99, System 2600, Majority Rule, Mogwai, Godspeed! You Black Emperor

– Jonathan Horsley

Cecil Alexander – Shrug 

What is it? Berklee College of Music is no stranger to having an ace guitar player associated with it: John Mayer and Tomo Fujita, of course, immediately spring to mind. However, we need to add Cecil Alexander to that list, too. The college’s assistant professor’s new single, Shrug, showcases the virtuoso's mind-melting jazz skills, which followers of his will no doubt be aware of. Simply put, it's perhaps one of the best displays of bebop prowess and sophistication we’ve heard thus far in 2022.

Standout guitar moment: It’s hard to pick, but the extended solo effort that follows the 0:54 mark probably takes it. Throughout its almost two-minute runtime, Alexander delivers Houdini-like turnarounds, surgically precise scale navigation and a sizzling run at the 2:22 point.

For fans of: Julian Lage, Wes Montgomery, Joe Pass

– Matt Owen

Black Anvil – Castrum Doloris

What is it? The long-awaited return of the NYC black metal band whose personnel otherwise have occupied themselves in a projects that would be more traditionally associated with the Big Apple, namely hardcore. In some respects, black metal from the largest city on the eastern seaboard makes perfect sense. 

There are no fjords, but the vertiginous skyline, the isolation that can come from life in the metropolis, that has a certain Nordic aspect to it. Sonically, this is second wave black metal, an uptempo scream into the abyss.

Standout guitar moment: The melody that insinuates itself at the end underneath some clean and faintly ecclesiastical vocals. The song needed that. 

For fans of: Goatwhore, Absu, Watain 

– Jonathan Horsley

Suede – 15 Again

What is it? The second tune we’ve heard thus far from the British glam-rock institution’s upcoming album, Autofiction. Frontman Brett Anderson puts on a hell of a performance, imbuing the nostalgic song with all the drama and yearning one feels when they’re that formative age.

Standout guitar moment: That rather Billy Duffy-esque opening riff is certainly a contender, but those squeals of feedback guitarist Richard Oakes gets before the third line in both verses? Now that’s just plain cool.

For fans of: The Cult, Johnny Marr, The Stone Roses

– Jackson Maxwell

Tommy Emmanuel and Mike Dawes have teamed up for a cover of Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, transforming the grunge anthem into a supernova acoustic guitar duet.

The video, which is making its official world premier on GW – right up there above this text – is a fitting way to mark the announcement of Tommy Emmanuel’s Accomplice Series Vol. 3, on which Mike Dawes joins the Australian guitar virtuoso in the studio for a handful of covers. 

Together, the pair will tackle Sting’s Fields of Gold, 1975’s By My Mistake, Somebody I Used to Know by Gotye, the video for which was revealed last year, and Slow Dancing In a Burning Room by the one and only John Mayer.

Emmanuel’s Accomplice Series has thrown up some fascinating collaborations. On Vol. 2 he worked with fingerpicking phenom Richard Smith on four tracks that saluted the influence of Jerry Reed and Chet Atkins. Vol. 1, meanwhile, saw him hook up with Rob Ickes on Dobro and Trey Hensley on guitar. 

Smells Like Teen Spirit, however, might just be the most audacious work yet. Ostensibly, Dawes is on rhythm, while Emmanuel sketches out Kurt Cobain’s vocal on his signature Maton, but those roles are kind of interchangeable. 

Dawes handles his parts on his Andreas Cuntz cutaway acoustic, with a DiMarzio acoustic guitar pickup in the soundhole, and credits his rhythm approach to his old guitar teacher, the fingerstyle whiz Stuart Ryan, who teaches guitar the BIMM Institute, in the UK.

In 2021, Total Guitar readers voted Smells Like Teen Spirit the 17th greatest guitar riff of all time, and for a generation of players it was the very first they learned. Here Dawes and Emmanuel transform it into something altogether more baroque, without forgetting the energy that made the song so vital in the first place. 

Indeed, this is an instrumental performance but of course Emmanuel can’t help singing along to the pre-chorus – that has been most people’s experience since 1991. The video was directed and edited by Joshua Britt and Neilson Hubbard for Neighborhoods Apart, recorded live by Dylan Allredge, with mixing and mastering by Marc DeSisto.  

Tommy Emmanuel’s Accomplice Series Vol. 3 is available to pre-save on digital platforms, and is set for release in September.

“The show must go on.” That’s the maxim the musician lives by, no matter what slings and arrows of outrageous fortune come their way. 

This is one of the immutable tenets of performance ethics, contributing to the surely apocryphal tale of the Titanic’s band maintaining their jam during the most infamous maritime disaster of all time. It’s also one that animates the following guitar players to keep on playing when their strings break mid-song, reducing the six-string electric guitar to five – a situation that’d reduce lesser players to jelly.

There is a lot we can learn from watching these professionals deal with a string breakage, often with an air of casual defiance, as though they were Da Vinci swatting a fly from his brow before gamely putting the finishing touches to the Mona Lisa. 

Of course, we know that sometimes the show must not go on, and yet it just does, steamed by its own momentum. How many times have we stood there, riffing into the abyssal void of an empty provincial venue? Or when the crowd just look confused, and it’s only once the adrenaline has subsided that you realize you can’t hear the singer, the drums are mixed too low and you’ve missed a chorus?

Just like string breakages, these things just happen. But, even if you’ve got a Floyd Rose vibrato and a B string flapping in the breeze, the show must go on. With that in mind, here are 10 notable guitarists who kept their cool and kept on playing after snapping a string mid-song.

1. Stevie Ray Vaughan

If the American Film Institute treated YouTube footage of master guitarists playing on after a string breakage with the same reverence it reserves for the feature film, this would be talked about in the same breath as Citizen Kane.

Here, playing with Double Trouble at Austin City Limits, Stevie Ray Vaughan was just 34, and was at the height of his powers. In an all too short a time on this world, SRV was generous with his gifts. This performance of the Hank Ballard blues standard Look At Little Sister is worth studying on many levels. Perhaps the first lesson is on how to stitch together a 12-bar groove with a relaxed-fit pocket with room to swing, and how to assemble a formidable backing band and then get the best out of them.

The second, though, is all about delivering the solo, and continuing to deliver it once the string goes ‘pop’. Wait for the vest to swap out his ‘Number One’ Strat for ‘Scotch’. There is a lot of scuttlebutt with regards to SRV’s preferred string gauge. If you believe some, he used tow ropes for the wound strings. That would certainly allow him to dig in as he did.

2. John Frusciante  

We’ve all been there, right? Jamming with the Red Hot Chilli Peppers in Brazil on our 1960 Fender Telecaster Deluxe, and a string goes. You can’t blame it. Its tensile fortitude had been tested to the limit and beyond by a particularly fevered performance of If You Have To Ask from the Chilis’ 1991 tour de force Blood Sugar Sex Magik – the solo of which is one of Frusciante’s most freaky-deaky.

If the stage-lights hadn’t got this gossamer strand of silver blowing in the wind, no one – perhaps not even Flea, who’s directing traffic in this jam – would have noticed, with Frusciante digging into the elasticity of his right wrist to keep the funk going. It’s funny, because on the record, Frusciante receives a round of applause from those in the studio when he finishes his solo. It’s like they knew… 

3. Slash 

One of the reasons Slash’s guitar playing is always worthy of deeper study is the dichotomy between his deft use of the harmonic minor scale and its melodic grandeur to complement the pentatonic bread-and-butter, and the fact that he has a quasi-bestial playing style. It’s like Dr. Jekyll picks the notes and Mr. Hyde plays them.

The man attacks the strings. Little wonder Ernie Ball used Slash as a test pilot to demonstrate just how tough their Paradigm sets are – Ernie Ball claims its RPS (Reinforced Plain String) technology improves tensile strength by up to 35 per cent, with fatigue strength up 70 per cent.

In this fan-filmed performance of Anastasia – the centerpiece of his 2012 album with Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators, Apocalyptic Love – Slash is tearing it up through the solo before the B string goes bye-bye. Which, frankly, begs the question: if you were to lose a string mid-performance, which would you want it to be? 

Either way, Slash is totally unperturbed. He knows his style, his gear. Those purple Tortex 1.14 mm guitar picks he prefers have very little flex, even when you’re playing a set of 11s. In other words, he knows the risks. They have been priced in. And even when things go south, you can’t let it take you out of the moment. Though, we’d wager it is on occasions such as this that Slash was more than happy he didn’t go down the Floyd Rose route like so many of his peers.

4. B.B. King  

Some might have worried that B.B. King would be out of his element when he took to the stage at Farm Aid – that the wide open spaces and bright afternoon light of the Memorial Stadium in Champaign, Illinois, were too expansive for the King of the Blues to seat 80,000 people in the palm of his hand. But just so long as there was a stage, B.B. King was all right.

Organized by John Mellencamp, Willie Nelson and Neil Young, this star-studded fundraiser must have drawn a high proportion of its audience from the agricultural community, and the cucumber growers among them would have recognized a whole new level of cool when King broke a string during a feisty rendition of How Blue Can You Get?, not taking a moment’s pause, and restringing Lucille while putting heart, lungs and soul into the vocals.

We know King was a stickler for intonation, with the fine-tuning TP-6 tailpiece one of the things that distinguishes Lucille from a garden-variety ES-345. Indeed, an unprintable curse word might have entered his head. But onstage, all that mattered was the song, the audience, the show. Total pro. 

5. Tommy Emmanuel  

If you are performing an unaccompanied rock ’n’ roll boogie on an acoustic guitar at a hazardous tempo – a performance so out-there in the scale of its virtuosity that we’re glad there was video to prove it was one player – and you do it all without breaking a string? Well, did you even perform such a piece.

Here, Australian acoustic maestro Tommy Emmanuel breaks a string and carries on, and that is why this performance is on this list. But this footage is more than just documented proof of Emmanuel’s god-like credentials; it’s that sort of humbling-yet-inspiring wizardry that makes people want to pick up the instrument in the first place.

And all of us who have done so already... well, it’s time to revisit the guitar and ask of ourselves; how can our technique and improvisational brio produce an étude such as this? Chet Atkins would have looked on with pride.

6. Mark Tremonti  

No-one will ever or has ever questioned the physical condition of Mark Tremonti. He is the one player you do not want to go circuit training with. That goes double when it comes to exchanging lead guitar lines. Who among us would not wither like a dandelion stewing in weed control at the prospect?

But such physical condition comes with a health warning for guitar strings, and on this occasion – as Alter Bridge took to the stage at the Baltimore Soundstage, Maryland – Mr. T leaned into the rhythm figure for Cauterize and opened up a can of whoop-ass on the E string.

As the other Mr. T might say, “To have a comeback, you have to have a setback.” Well, luckily a tech was on hand with another PRS solidbody Singlecut to see the song through. Tremonti never missed a beat.

7. Eric Clapton  

Here is some documentary footage of ecclesiastical importance, proving that Eric Patrick Clapton is not God. That’s right: if he really was God, do you think he would be standing onstage at Knebworth putting his Fender Stratocaster through the mill, only for a string to break? 

Surely, fellow six-string theologians, this is incontrovertible proof that Clapton puts one leg of his pink suit trousers on at a time like the rest of us. Or, is this just the sort of thing that God would want us to think. Why set a bush aflame or send Gabriel with a message when a little diversion could be just as effective? 

Whatever the divine provenance or otherwise of Mr. Slowhand, you have to admit that Clapton epitomizes cool here in this performance of Before You Accuse Me. 

You can just picture the scene, side of stage:

Satan (laughing): “Broken string, Mr Clapton? Do you want to have a cry?”

Clapton (hair flowing in the breeze, tastefully hirsute, definitely owns a sports-car): “Get behind me, Satan! I licked you at the Crossroads, mate, and I’m gonna lick you now. You got that!? I’m onstage at Knebworth, wearing a pink suit, with Lace Sensor single-coils in my Strat – ‘cos its 1990 and that’s still legit. This is still a free country, mate!”  

8. Buddy Guy  

Sometimes it’s happenstance that makes a performance great. That’s especially true of playing the blues – an art form that has parallels with stand-up comedy. The storytelling discipline and crowd management requires a similar temperament, the likes of which blues great and master showman Buddy Guy has in spades. 

This performance from 2010’s Crossroads Festival – since released as a concert LP and film – has an end-of-semester feel, the promise of an endless summer. Everyone played this show. But even as proceedings ease into a casual jam on the Stones classic Miss You, with Ronnie Wood and Johnny Lang as wingmen, Guy is always switched on.

When his string breakage interrupts his part and Wood steps in to offer him his Strat, Guy has that look in his eyes; it’s time to style it out and have a little fun with the crowd. “I broke my guitar string, I’m going to keep on trying to play…” His polka-dot signature Strat gets prepared, but all in good time. String breakage? Don’t let it give you the blues. Turn it into the blues. 

9. Ed Sheeran 

With his Chewie II loop station on hand, there are few players in the world more prepared for a string breakage than Ed Sheeran.

It’s a creative tool, of course – the looper building layers of accompaniment, with one of the world’s highest-grossing musicians ostensibly using a beefed-up busker’s rig – but it also serves as a technological prophylactic. Handy when you’re strumming the bejeezus out of a capo’d small-bodied acoustic guitar during the helter-skelter folk-pop of You Need Me, I Don't Need You... something could go.

And it does. The G string succumbs. The loop pedal hangs in there. Another five strings keep the layers going and Sheeran’s vocal delivery puts on a display of alphabet aerobics that’d see a veteran cattle auctioneer pull up injured with a twisted tongue. That’s showbiz.

10. Steve Vai 

Steve Vai’s DIY DNA has stood him in good stead over the years, and its reframing of challenges – physically, creatively and otherwise – as opportunities typically leads to him doing something pretty special, and more often than not something that no-one else has ever done before. 

Recent examples include Knappsack, from his latest album, Inviolate, quite possibly the most Steve Vai album ever recorded. With his arm in a sling, he wrote and performed a track using just his fretting hand, making full use of his Jedi legato training.

But what makes Vai more vulnerable to string breakages than anyone else on this list is that double-locking vibrato. As we all know, a breakage on a Floyd is panic stations for your tuning as the unit is off-balance.

Vai loses his top string, the least problematic, and yet to adapt the solo to The Crying Machine with intonation on-point is genius at work. When he gets the chance to switch JEMs, it’s like a video-game power-up has come online to see him through to the end, triumphant and divine.

Last week (February 27) electric guitar legend Neal Schon celebrated his 68th birthday. 

Over the last five decades, Schon – through his work with Journey and Santana – has influenced countless guitarists, some of whom went onto become A-list players themselves.

Quite a few of those guitar all-stars came forward last week to wish Schon many happy returns in a special video that was organized by his wife, Michaele. You can watch the video above.

On the guitar hero front, the video includes well-wishes from John McLaughlin, Slash, Steve Vai, Tommy Emmanuel, Joe Satriani and Zakk Wylde. Bad Company frontman Paul Rodgers, LL Cool J, Dolly Parton, Sheila E., Huey Lewis and Narada Michael Walden also give birthday well-wishes. 

Randy Jackson and Deen Castronovo, both of whom currently play with Schon in the latest incarnation of Journey, also make appearances in the video.

For his part, Schon recently revealed on Instagram that Journey will soon release Freedom, their fifteenth studio album, and first since 2011's Eclipse. Of the album, Schon simply said "It’s coming and it’s loaded."

Journey are also currently in the midst of a lengthy North American tour with Toto. Having begun at the end of February, the tour will run through mid-May, taking the groups across the continent.

For tickets and more info, visit Journey's website. 

In recent months, acoustic guitar maestros Tommy Emmanuel and Mike Dawes have been frequent collaborators, both onstage and in the studio.

What's more, neither are strangers to re-tooling high-volume rock standards to fit their own, distinctive acoustic styles. So perhaps it wasn't a huge surprise to stumble upon this recently-uploaded, fan-shot video of Emmanuel and Dawes re-working Nirvana's grunge landmark, Smells Like Teen Spirit, live at the Triple Door in Seattle.

The duo's take on the holiest of grunge sacred cows is fairly faithful (at least at first) but is still richly imbued with their respective musical personalities.

Dawes incorporates plenty of the against-the-guitar's-body percussive work and bell-like harmonics he's known and loved for, while Emmanuel ventures off the beaten path with some rapid-fire lead lines that showcase his second-to-none, bluegrass-influenced pickin' chops.

Nirvana by way of the Appalachians? We're here for it and, judging by his visible glee, so is Dawes. You can check out the video (which does, sadly, cut out a little early) above.

It also reminds us of the time – during the 2016 edition of the G3 tour – that Joe Satriani, Steve Vai and Guthrie Govan gave Smells Like Teen Spirit their own (decidedly more shreddy) makeover. 

Emmanuel and Dawes are scheduled to play quite a few more shows together – in both North America and Europe – over the next few months. We're most certainly hoping to see more amazing, location-themed covers as the tour goes on... 

You can see where and when the dynamic duo are set to perform together at Emmanuel's website.

Gibson Gives – Gibson's charitable arm – and blues guitar A-lister Jared James Nichols are set to co-host the second annual Rock to Remember concert, a benefit for the Guitars for Vets organization.

With performances from the likes of Tommy Emmanuel, Lzzy Hale, Joey Belladonna, Tesla's Frank Hannon, Jimmy Vivino and Kat Dyson, and more, the concert will be streamed on Guitars for Vets' website today, Thursday, November 11, starting at 8 p.m. EST.

Other performers include Meghan Linsey and Tyler Cain, Cassadee Pope, Daughtry, Nelson, Tyler Connolly, Hannah Dasher, Clayton Anderson, Laine Hardy, Eric Paslay, Kapali Long, Francisco Martin, and Nichols himself. 

U.S. military veterans David Cox, Jesse Tyler Frewerd and Scotty Hasting – who are graduates of Guitars for Vets' program, which aims to help veterans struggling with physical injuries and PTSD from their service through music – will also perform original material.

"As a proud son of a proud veteran, Guitars for Vets means everything to me,” Nichols said in a statement. “Guitars For Vets and Rock To Remember are life changing for so many. 

"The sheer amount of talent and heart that each artist performing is giving, alongside the respect not only for our veterans, but for our country is astounding. I’m grateful for the opportunity to be included in such an amazing event. Let’s rock!”

“From my personal experience, playing guitar has saved my life and offered me peace of mind through many hard times,” added Frank Hannon. “To give this gift to our most deserving veterans is the least I can do, so I’m grateful to team up with Guitars For Vets and Gibson guitars for this special event.”

Fans can donate directly to Guitars For Vets by texting G4V to 443-21 or by going to the Guitars for Vets website and clicking the donate button.

To stream the concert, head on over to Guitars for Vets.

“There’s something incredibly inspiring about playing a guitar that offers amazing comfort and ease of playing across the fretboard, as well as an acoustic tone that has both stunning presence and responsive low end whether you’re picking or strumming,” says resident six-string ace Steve Stine.

And we couldn’t agree more.

Especially when the guitar in question is the Maton EBG808TE, which the renowned Australian company designed in conjunction with acoustic legend Tommy Emmanuel.

Built to Emmanuel's exacting specs, the model boasts a AAA Select Sitka spruce top, Queensland maple back, sides and neck and a streaky ebony fingerboard and bridge.

It’s a top-quality build, to be sure. But, Steve says, “there’s another level I wasn’t even expecting – the acoustic pickup offered in Maton’s guitar line has given me the ability to simply plug in and record with literally no post-production, EQ’ing or tweaking needed, which has made my job so much easier and keeps me moving forward quickly with all of my projects.”

That pickup is the AP5 PRO, which Emmanuel helped develop as well.

The updated pickup system features separate microphone and piezo input controls to allow for blending of both microphone and piezo levels prior to sending the actively combined signals through to the master volume. 

Additionally, the highly selective cardioid microphone system offers greater microphone level before feedback in live environments, and the newly upgraded microphone is directly mounted to the preamp casing via an adjustable arm for easy position tweaking.

What’s more, the system is, as Steve says, incredible easy to use.

Just how easy?

Watch Steve take the EBG808TE and the AP5 PRO pickup system for a test drive in the above video, demonstrating “how easy it is to capture audio for livestreaming, or recording direct to video, or maybe building a recording.”

To check out the EGB808TE for yourself, head to Maton.

And find out more about the AP5 PRO here.

Just a few weeks following his announcement of a massive, 54-date 2022 US tour, Steve Vai has revealed the lineup for the latest edition of his popular, multi-day Vai Academy. 

Vai Academy 6.0, as it's being called, will feature electric guitar greats Nuno Bettencourt, Guthrie Govan, Larry Mitchell and Yvette Young, acoustic guitar maestros Tommy Emmanuel and Joe Robinson, and bass guitar wizard Billy Sheehan.

Titled “Finding Your Note,” this edition of the Vai Academy will allow attendees to jam with Vai and his band, attend master classes taught by Vai and attend nightly concerts featuring the virtuoso and other instructors.

There will also be a master class and matinee concert by Tommy Emmanuel, a signing and photo session with Vai, and team breakout workshops and master classes with Bettencourt, Govan, Mitchell, Robinson, Sheehan, and Young. 

It will take place August 4-8, 2022 in Las Vegas at the Hilton Lake Las Vegas Resort & Spa.

“Anybody that expresses themself on an instrument has a choice of learning what they hear and trying to reproduce it, or listening deeply to their unique musical creativity voice – their 'note,'" Vai said in a statement. 

"At Vai Academy 6.0, we will be looking into both of these kinds of expressions, but giving great emphasis on 'finding your note.'" 

Those interested can register for Vai Academy 6.0 at the academy's website or via Dreamcatcher Events.

Rejoice, dear readers, for it is finally that time of the week again. No, it’s not the weekend just yet, but what we do have for you is basically the next best thing – yes, that’s right, it is time for Guitar World’s weekly essential guitar tracks round-up.

What’s on offer today, we hear you ask? Well, allow us to get you up to speed before we guide you on through this week’s carefully curated collection.

The last seven or so days have seen the arrival of Journey’s first single in over a decade, filled-to-the-brim with killer leads, a technically fierce fretboard exploration from The Neal Morse Band, the long-awaited guitar-heavy return of Australian indie-rock outfit Gang of Youths, a brutally brilliant riff-fest from extreme-metal icons Carcass and an oh-so virtuosic acoustic cover of a pop hit from Mike Dawes and Tommy Emmanuel.

Sound good? Yeah, we thought so too. Let’s dive right in then, shall we?

Bullet For My Valentine – Knives

Bullet For My Valentine are notoriously difficult to pigeonhole. Their debut album, 2005’s The Poison, has a sound deeply rooted in metalcore – albeit with emo-tinged lyrical stylings. Their sophomore offering Scream Aim Fire explored thrashier territory, while on the other end of the metal spectrum, their most recent album Gravity featured notably poppier-style arrangements.

But with their forthcoming seventh album, the Bridgend quartet are leaving little room for interpretation.

“This is the beginning of Bullet 2.0,” enthuses frontman and founding member Matt Tuck. “It signifies where we are right now. The music is fresh, it’s aggressive, it’s more visceral and passionate than it’s ever been.” And aggressive, visceral and passionate it is.

The album’s debut single Knives dropped last week – we expect a chorus of praise from BFMV purists – and boy, does it deliver on the heavy. Tuck and co-guitarist Michael “Padge” Paget set the tone for the album with a furious open string-centric main riff – upon which the entire track’s arrangement is built – occasionally changing course with some monstrous chug work and squealing pinch harmonics.

“I think it’s the most ferocious side of Bullet For My Valentine that I’ve ever known,” says Paget. “It’s time for us to put out a really angry, heavy, aggressive record.” (SR)

Mike Dawes & Tommy Emmanuel – Somebody That I Used to Know

Nearly a month to the day that he dropped his blockbuster team effort with Jack Gardiner and Plini, UK fingerstyle wizard Mike Dawes has unveiled another A-list collaboration, this time with acoustic legend Tommy Emmanuel, for a fresh take on Gotye’s Somebody That I Used to Know.

Revamping the cover that we used to know, Emmanuel sprinkles some bluesy spice onto Dawes’ hypnotic arrangement, which is now bolstered by some extra lead lines, octaver and neat harmonic tuning-peg turns. Check out the 2:50 mark for some serious percussive swag and jazz-inflected chord changes.

It’s been nine years since Dawes’ original cover went viral, but this new incarnation makes it feel fresh once again. (MAB)

Gang of Youths – the angel of 8th ave. 

Australian indie-rock group Gang of Youths have released their first song since 2017, titled the angle of 8th ave., and they've marked their long-anticipated return with a bang.

It’s one of the more memorable studies into how the electric and acoustic guitar can work together to paint a stunning sonic picture, with the instantly-catchy-yet-innocently simple gain-y guitar riff conversing with some of the cleanest stripped-back strums to ever have left a studio.

Vocalist David Le’aupepe is on hand to show that his songwriting form has not slipped an inch in the five years that have passed, with his ever-poetic, story-like lyrics and booming cavernous vocals undoubtedly one of the track’s show-stopping centerpieces. In fact, so hypnotic is the command of his voice that you’ll be forgiven for letting the delicate layering slip under your radar on first listen.

Play it again and you’ll pick up on all the delicious nuances Gang of Youths have crammed in. Those synths, for example, which sit just right in the mix, or those bite-y guitar riffs that build momentum with the drums as the track gallops towards its harmony-laden finale. An impromptu arpeggio here, a one-off lead lick there, and it’s all carefully pieced together like some glorious sonic tapestry.

Aside from the gorgeous instrumental layering, exquisite production value and stunning vocal work, there is so much more to unpick. At the end of the day, it’s probably best to keep the summary (relatively) simple: it’s a really, really good song. (MO)

Carcass – Kelly’s Meat Emporium

Metal guitar has few more distinctive voices than Bill Steer, whose unique ear has guided British legends Carcass to god-like status in death-metal circles.

With Kelly’s Meat Emporium – the first single to be released from Torn Arteries, the band’s first album in eight years – Steer’s well of hammering riffs and exotic scale-infused lead lines shows no sign of depleting.

KME is a masterclass in rhythmic intensity and lead intrigue – it’s old-school songwriting nous fortified by contemporary production, and the resulting aural punishment is quite, quite exquisite. (MAB)

The Neal Morse Band – Do It All Again 

Taken from upcoming album Innocence & Danger, The Neal Morse Band’s latest single Do It All Again is bound to strike a chord with fans of technically impressive soloing, high-gain riffage and tasty songwriting. In essence, there’s something in there for everyone.

It’s almost nine minutes long, meaning there’s more than enough tasty guitar parts to go around to quench all your guitar-based thirsts. From the opening passage, which begins tame then suddenly explodes into a fiery barrage of high-end licks, to the deliciously melodic, bend-infused extended solo effort, Do It All Again is a non-stop exploration of the fretboard.

As you can imagine, given its lengthy run-time, there’s more to this track than just its excellent lead-based six-string escapades. There are some neat chordal constructions tucked underneath as well, with the stripped-back sections serving up some cool interplay between Randy George’s bass guitar and Mike Portnoy’s drums.

Keep your eyes and ears peeled for Innocence & Danger, which is set to serve up both a half-hour and 20-minute long epic when its released on August 27. (MO)

Journey – The Way We Used To Be

Returning with their first single in over a decade, Journey have shared The Way We Used To Be. A quintessential classic rocker, the track sees guitarist Neal Schon’s gain-heavy leads weave in and out of Arnel Pineda’s vocals throughout, once again reminding us of the group’s musical and compositional maturity. 

And there’s soon to be more where that came from, too. In an interview with Rolling Stone earlier this year, Schon explained that the band’s 15th studio album is “coming along”, and “really shaping up”.

He also hinted at embarking on a new musical journey with, um, Journey: “We aren’t afraid to go to new places. It’s easy to stay safe and write where we have always been. We have a bit of that so we don’t lose everyone, but at the same token, this is a new chapter of Journey. I want to go where we have not gone before.”

Whatever happens, we’re looking forward to what’s to come. (SR)

Quicksand – Missile Command

NYC post-hardcore vets Quicksand this week announced new album, Distant Populations, and this raucous first single.

The release marks the group’s first recording as a three-piece following the departure of guitarist Tom Capone, but judging from Missile Command, they’ve lost none of the serrated edge that left its mark on a generation of bands that followed their '90s heyday.

Built around a droning groove from Sergio Vega – who now performs double-duty with Deftones – and bolstered by a monster production from Will Yip, Missile Command dives and soars dynamically, but really lets loose when Walter Schreifels emits guitar wails so utterly primal, we can only assume they were a direct inspiration for the pterodactyl-like creatures that appear in the track’s video. (MAB)

Conor Albert – Moonlight feat. Mac Ayres

It seems that, with every day that passes, a new wave of “next big things” emerge on social media raring to take their respective genre by storm. Conor Albert has been knocking on the door for quite some time now, but with his new track, Moonlight, the South London-based multi-instrumentalist and producer has officially booted said door clean off its hinges.

Fans of Albert will be no stranger to his sonic direction, which blends jazz, fusion, hip-hop, electronic music and almost everything in between. Moonlight is no exception to this, with Albert executing an instantly catchy, super-infectious guitar hook that works alongside Ayres’ groove-inducing vocals over some tasty extended chords. 

Oh, and those neat melodic bass parts that are filled with chromatic runs and clever harmonies? They’re played by Albert, too. And the drums? Yep, you guessed it. Heck, he even produced the track, which, if you listen to – and we implore that you do – sounds like it's been engineered by a seasoned studio dweller who knows all the tricks of the trade.

When his guitar-playing, bass-slaying, drum-beating and production prowess are all taken into consideration, there’s only one question left that needs to be asked: Is there anything Albert can’t do? (MO)

Following his 2020 greatest hits album, The Best of Tommysongs, Tommy Emmanuel has announced a brand-new EP with Grammy-nominated duo Rob Ickes and Trey Hensley, entitled Accomplice Series Volume 1.

The four-track album is set to comprise three covers – Chet Atkins and Doc Watson's Lester Flatt tribute Flatt Did It, Buck Owens' Raz-Ma-Taz Polka and Copper Kettle (made popular by Joan Baez) – as well as a reimagining of the title track from Emmanuel's 2015 album, It's Never Too Late.

Kicking off proceedings, Emmanuel has just dropped the album's first single Flatt Did It. You can listen to the track below:

Says Emmanuel: “The sessions [for this album] were very spontaneous, and in fact, I suggested Flatt Did It and Copper Kettle as pieces on the day we recorded them. That’s how it came about. It was very spontaneous.”

“It’s always great to work with Tommy,” Ickes adds. “He's such a great artist, and such a great person. There are always a lot of sparks flying when we play together, and all three of us are into lots of different musical genres, so that’s always fun to explore different musical territories when we get together.

“I love to hear Tommy and Trey play together. There’s a great respect between the two of them. It’s great to hear them feeding off each other. And [Flatt Did It] is just the perfect vehicle for a Dobro, so I’m enjoying the whole thing!”

“Getting to pick with Tommy and Rob any time is always a blast!” Hensley explains. “Working in the studio with Tommy was so much fun, which I think is evident throughout this EP. 

“The great vibe in the studio that day is prominent in the recordings. It was really just the three of us hanging out and playing tunes…what could be more fun?”

Check out the tracklisting for Accomplice Series Volume 1 below:

1. Copper Kettle (featuring Rob Ickes & Trey Hensley)
2. Raz-Ma-Taz Polka (featuring Trey Hensley)
3. Flatt Did It (featuring Rob Ickes & Trey Hensley)
4. It’s Never Too Late (featuring Rob Ickes)

Tommy Emmanuel is no stranger to having his own Reverb Shop, and now the Australian fingerstyle virtuoso is returning to the online marketplace to unload a new cache of incredible gear.

The new Official Tommy Emmanuel Reverb Shop will feature acoustic and electric guitars, amps, pedals and accessories, with a portion of proceeds from the sales donated to Guitars for Vets, which gives instruments to US military veterans to help ease post-traumatic stress disorder.

Among the items included in the shop are six – yes, six – models of Emmanuel’s Maton Tommy Emmanuel 808 Signature acoustic, offered in both traditional and cutaway styles. The guitars boast an inlay on the 12th fret that reads "C.G.P." for the Certified Guitar Player title given to Emmanuel by Chet Atkins, as well as a kangaroo on the headstock reminiscent of the guitarist's tour pendant.

There’s also a vintage 1945 Martin D-18, a Martin StreetMaster acoustic, a custom TSW Tele-style electric and a Hofner bass.

Additional pieces of gear include five of Emmanuel’s new signature Udo Roesner De Capo 75 amps, as well as signature series David Laboga cables and more than a dozen pedals from Boss, Ibanez, Xotic and other manufacturers.

The Official Tommy Emmanuel Reverb Shop goes live on February 24. For more information head to Reverb.

No matter how romantic the origin story behind our favorite guitar players, people don’t just pick up the guitar for the first time and run through 16th Century Greensleeves, Scuttle Buttin’ then Eruption to close things out. No. 

It doesn’t matter whom you sell your soul to, whether you start on the acoustic or electric guitar, it takes time to get good. More often than not, it takes a teacher’s guidance too. With a mind to the Guitar Teacher of the Year category in our Guitarist of the Year 2020 competition, and in a mood that could only be described as being hot for teacher, we’d like to give an apple to some of pioneers and trailblazers of guitar instruction.

We have cut this down to 15 guitar teachers who are not only teaching us to play but making us think about the instrument anew.

There will be omissions. That is the nature of a list. There will be some surprise inclusions. We’ll look at the teachers of yore, those whose instructional books taught our heroes, and who laid the foundations.

But we’ll also look at those who continue to push the boundaries as players in their own right and are sharing that knowledge in real-time, and those who have used the internet’s reach to spread knowledge and offer a digitally enriched platform for today’s player to learn on.

There have never been more educational resources available to guitarists. That invites a new discipline, a rigor in curating your learning. With that in mind, our first pick is straight out the old-school and started teaching long before we had the color TV let alone the internet… Heck! Before we had the Telecaster.

1. Mel Bay

It is only right that we should start with one of the OG founding fathers of popularized guitar instruction – and indeed of banjo, harmonica and more. Mel Bay’s name is so embedded in our consciousness as the publishing brand that it transcends Melbourne E. Bay, the man. 

Born in Bunker, Missouri, in 1913, Bay was a self-taught guitarist who made his bones playing various gigs across the Ozark region. He moved to St. Louis and after falling on hard times he ended up teaching up to 100 students a week. By 1947, he started writing lessons. 

The Mel Bay Modern Guitar Method series might seem antiquated these days in its choice to use standard notation to encourage sight-reading, but, like eating your vegetables when you're young, it’ll make you grow up big and strong… 

Selling over 20 million copies, it could lay claim to being the most-influential series of guitar instructional books ever. Mel Bay’s Guitar Chords remains an invaluable resource for players of all abilities.

2. Joe Satriani

Even before you start talking pedagogies and knowledge, curriculum and delivery, you can tell a lot about a teacher from the quality of their students, and no one has a more celebrated alumni body than Joe Satriani. 

Alex Skolnick, Steve Vai, Kirk Hammett, Larry LaLonde, Charlie Hunter, Counting Crows’ David Bryson! The range of guitar talent weened on Satch’s wisdom speaks for itself.

With or without the guitar, Satch is an excellent communicator. As in his own compositions, he is a master in breaking down music theory and expressing it in something that’s digestible, human and ultimately musical. 

His teaching started when he was at Five Towns College, in New York, with Vai an early pupil, but he was soon inundated after moving out west to Berkley, California. Check out Satch’s Guitar World lesson above – it’ll help you approach melody differently when building solos.

3. Michael Angelo Batio

Where do you start with Michael Angelo Batio? The pioneer of double-neck shred is one of the world’s most incendiary players, but that’s not enough. No, the Notorious MAB has made it his mission in life to lift thousands of players onto the shred pantheon. 

A Guitar World columnist, whose Learn Shred Guitar lessons series was published in conjunction with GW, his curriculum covers all the essentials you need to make your fingerboard feel the burn – sweep picking, flat-picking, rock/classical fusion, soloing over odd time signatures and, of course – the bread and butter of technical proficiency – ruthlessly efficient picking techniques.

4. Paul Gilbert

Like Joe Satriani, Paul Gilbert is someone who inspires players to play just by talking about the instrument. That’s what the best teachers do – they communicate. 

Of course, his discography with Racer X, Mr. Big and as a solo artist bears testimony to his chops and the playbook that’s behind them, and a philosophy that takes his schooling from the Guitar Institute of Technology and applies it to life lessons learned from absorbing the pyrotechnic rock theater of Eddie Van Halen, the classicism of Page, the melodic playfulness of the Beatles and a lot more besides. 

Kudos if you own a GW/Paul Gilbert Shred Alert DVD. It’s out of print now but you can find Paul Gilbert’s lessons on the Artistworks platform. Right now, sign up, get new video lessons, share your own progress on video and receive feedback and lesson videos to take your playing to the next level. Just don’t disappoint him with wet sandwich vibrato.

5. Tomo Fujita

Learning guitar can be an unforgiving experience at times. When we first start out it’s intimidating, with a little finger pain on top, then, as we progress, we periodically hit some speed bumps and fall into a rut. Few teachers are better at getting you back on track than Berklee professor Tomo Fujita. 

He has the uncanny knack of presenting simple steps that deliver immeasurable improvements on your playing. No detail is spared. He’s a stickler for the importance of phrasing, muting and dynamics, and how paying attention to the small things – sometimes obviously so in hindsight – delivers big results. 

He has over three decades of experience, taught John Mayer, has a similarly great ear for sweet clean tones, and has some of the best funk chops you’ll hear. His YouTube channel, TomoFujitaMusic, is an invaluable resource for guitar players, no matter their expertise. Even if you just want to learn a nice chord progression.

6. Justin Sandercoe

Testimonials from the likes of Mark Knopfler, Steve Vai, Brian May and Tommy Emmanuel speak to the quality of teaching Justin Sandercoe offers – and his platform, JustinGuitar, is free to join, with a cornucopia of learning materials and lessons provided free of charge. 

But once you have spent some time working through his lessons – you can mark them complete and move on – you might want to enroll in some of his more in-depth digital programs.

There are lessons covering subjects from the the major scale, to music theory, solo blues guitar and more. You can go as deep as you want, but for a beginner or intermediate player who's looking to put some theory together with some song knowledge and develop their chops, Sandercoe is one of the best around – 1.28 million subscribers on YouTube can’t be wrong.

7. Burt Weedon

Those raised on the digital immediacy of YouTube and its smorgasbord of educational canapés are really following a path that was set by Burt Weedon way back in the late '50s. 

Weedon’s Play In A Day instructional book taught a whole generation of guitarists how to play. Legends such as Brian May, John Lennon, George Harrison and Eric Clapton referenced Play In A Day as a source text. 

It's still in print and on DVD if you’re willing to hunt it out. Techniques have evolved, so too playing styles, but the fundamentals remain unchanged, and it's a credible argument to say that no one has done more to popularize guitar playing than Weedon. He was a great player, too.

8. Jennifer Batten

Michael Jackson and Jeff Beck's former shredder-in-chief can be found on the TrueFire platform, where she has released three courses. Her Rock Sauce courses – one for rhythm, one for lead – will give you a working knowledge of her incendiary style, with 50 Ultra Intervallic Guitar Licks You Must Know a veritable masterclass in the sort of melodic patterns and scalar approaches that will prime you for improvisation. 

Any player of intermediate to advanced skill will know that feeling where their proficiency becomes a crutch and it’s time to bust out of the comfort zone. Batten’s the sort of player and teacher to do that. 

Now, get yourself a Gravity Pick and check out this masterclass in building strength and stamina, while finding new ways of phrasing familiar patterns.

9. Greg Koch

The Gristleman is one of the most prodigiously gifted players of his generation, playing a kinetic hybrid style of country, blues, rock ’n’ roll and jazz… It’s one hot jam. 

He’s also a prolific teacher. If you're an intermediate or advanced player, it might well be worth spending a hundred bucks for an hour-long Skype lesson to crib some licks from him and workshop your technique. 

But if your budget is more modest, Koch has written and produced a wide variety of instructional books and DVDs with Hal Leonard, that not only unpack his style in granular detail but cover blues, rhythm guitar, country and players such as Stevie Ray Vaughan. He’s an affable host, a killer player, and knows how to put a fun lesson together.

• Diversify your playing with Greg Koch's red-hot hybrid-picking lesson

10. Guthrie Govan

You might recognize Guitar World's erstwhile Professor Shred from Hans Zimmer’s blockbuster world tours and movie soundtracks, the Fellowship, Asia, the Aristocrats or his expansive adventures with Steven Wilson. 

But there’s a good chance you already know his name and his style on the strength of his teaching alone. He's a relentless educator of guitarists with an encyclopedic knowledge of theory and a near supernatural talent for playing and teaching in any style imaginable. 

His two-volume Creative Guitar book series makes an excellent showcase for his ideas for guitar playing; indeed, his lessons are very much geared towards equipping you to chase your own musical rainbow – which is where a sound knowledge of theory and technique can take you.

11. Wolf Marshall

The Tolstoy of transcription, Wolf Marshall was a super prolific figure in guitar culture from the late '80s onwards, with his Signature Licks series unpacking the styles of Robby Krieger, Steve Vai, Eric Clapton and more. 

Indeed, any of the high-profile guitar heroes of the day were put under the microscope, digested and presented in a way that could let those learning the instrument borrow from the masters. 

The Wolf Marshall Guitar Method was a leader in its field, offering a comprehensive syllabus for guitarists. These days, Marshall’s syllabus is more jazz-orientated, and you can find his lessons on TrueFire.

12. Sarah Longfield

Sarah Longfield is a polymath phenom whose trailblazing, extended-range style typifies the frontier spirit in today’s experimental metal. It has also helped change the design of the extended-range guitar, with her signature Strandberg models tailor-made for some of the – quite frankly – crazy stuff that is going on with her lessons. 

Enlisting to her master course on JamPlay is to prepare to take that seven- or eight-string of yours out of the chug zone and into some celestial territory where next-gen techniques such as "paradiddle tapping” and “advanced tapped arpeggios” will change not just how you play but perhaps what you think of the instrument itself. 

We mentioned she was a polymath, and this is writ-large in her playing and teaching, with a style borne out of her training on drums and piano.

13. Yvette Young

Another new-school polymath guitarist with a penchant for Strandberg’s Boden seven-string and hybrid tapping, Yvette Young teaches a style that resists easy categorization. 

Mastering it might considerably rewire your chops and technique. If that sounds complicated, it nonetheless makes perfect sense when you hear it in the context of her band, Covet. The melody and the purpose is always foregrounded, and that’s one the key takeaways from her JamPlay course. 

Young teaches us how to write in odd meters and incorporate both hands in playing riffs, and also takes you inside the approaches she uses on Covet songs such as Shibuya. 

As you can see from her Guitar World lesson above, her rhythm style shows her right hand assuming fingerboard positions that might be alien at first, but are a key part of what is ultimately a wholly practical approach to defying the limitations placed on us by the instrument.

14. Tommy Emmanuel

Who could be better at teaching fingerstyle guitar than the best fingerstyle player in the world? Tommy Emmanuel is just incredible, and he covers some ground. There’s country, bluegrass, folk, jazz and more, but it just sounds like Emmanuel. 

He cites Chet Atkins as a key influence. “Growing up listening to Chet Atkins taught me to find the melody and stick with the melody,” he told Guitar World last year, and that is, in essence, akin to his playing and teaching philosophy. All the technique is focused on expressing nuance of musical information in a part. 

His teaching is borne of practical wisdom, breaking fingerstyle and Travis picking down into manageable exercises that, in sum, demystify the process and choice cuts from his discography. His lessons are available on the TrueFire platform.

15. Andy Aledort

Okay, so maybe we are a little biased in picking long-time Guitar World contributor Andy Aledort in this list but, come on, his services to guitar tuition, particularly in the field of blues-rock, are unparalleled. 

He has sold over a million instructional DVDs, written over 200 books on guitar instruction – taking a deep dive into the styles of Albert King, Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan – plus a number of tab books that are bona fide bookshelf essentials, such as Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite For Destruction and The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Axis: Bold as Love. 

To get some some Aledort Jedi fretboard knowledge in your life right now, well, just point that browser to his current series of lessons on GW – which right now sees him exploring the major hexatonic scale. Alternatively, look him up on TrueFire or go direct to his site.

It's hardly a novel statement - or, for that matter, one that’s much open to debate - to say that Tommy Emmanuel, Certified Guitar Player (according to Chet Atkins, at least), is one of music’s greatest acoustic guitar fingerstylists. 

But when it came to his latest album, The Best of Tommysongs, the 64-year-old Australian artist was less concerned with technique and more preoccupied with tunes.

“Rather than trying to focus the world on my abilities, I felt I’d rather have people pay attention to the importance of melody and groove and telling a story,” Emmanuel explains. “So I think the focus of this album is on my songwriting.”

Indeed it is. The Best of Tommysongs is, quite literally, a compilation of Emmanuel’s finest and most beloved compositions from the past 30 years or so of his career, all of them re-recorded and, in some cases, updated with new arrangements to reflect how they’ve evolved through live performance over the years as well as Emmanuel’s current musical state of mind.

In addition to much-loved tracks like Angelina, a lyrical, harmonics-laced composition that first appeared on Emmanuel’s 2005 album, Endless Road, and Halfway Home, a driving and nimble alternating-bass number that sounds like Chet Atkins sitting in with the Beatles, The Best of Tommysongs includes five new instrumentals that demonstrate why the New South Wales native maestro is more or less without peer in the acoustic fingerstyle world. 

The highlight of these would undoubtedly be the track Fuel, an energized, acoustic tour de force that incorporates elements of Mason Williams’ Classical Gas into a composition in which Emmanuel traverses every inch of his Maton TE Personal Custom’s fretboard to intricately weave bass, rhythm, melody and harmony together in a single breathtaking performance.

And to be sure, the songs you will hear on the new album really are literally performances. “I did the whole album, 26 songs, in two days and one morning,” Emmanuel goes on to tell us. 

“And I would have to say at least 90 percent of the songs were one take. But you know, I had just finished a tour when I went into the studio, so I was in good shape to do it.”

As for why he decided to name the album Tommysongs? “I got the idea from Jerry Reed’s song, Reedology,” he says. “I thought, What a great idea. Because the title is telling you, ‘This is how I write. This is my sound. This is my voice.’ 

"I find that the older I get, the more that all seems to come naturally. But it’s taken a lifetime to get to this point.”

Did the process of re-recording (and in some cases radically rearranging) songs from your back catalog for Tommysongs reveal anything new to you about your musical self?

"It taught me to appreciate the work that I’d already put in. And this is not an ego-driven statement. What I mean is, it was a beautiful surprise that when it came to playing these songs I realized, “Wow, I really love these songs, and the amount of work that I put into writing them was well worth it. Because when I play them, there’s nothing that I think is missing.

"The time I spent writing them came from a very deep place, and I’m glad I went that route because after all these years, I’m still in love with these songs. So it was kind of nature’s way of affirming to me that I’m heading in the right direction, and that I’m doing what the universe needs me to do. 

"That’s a great feeling of accomplishment, like, 'Yeah, okay, you can have some ice cream now!' [Laughs]

"I remember reading a book on Muhammed Ali and it said that every time he won a fight he would have a bowl of ice cream afterward, just to reward himself. There’s something symbolic about that: you worked for it, you achieved it, now have your ice cream!"

I love the version of Halfway Home that you do on the record.

"It’s one of my favorite songs that I’ve written. Sometimes I open my show with it because it’s a really, 'Hello everybody, this is who I am,' type of song. It’s introducing the listener to my inner-self, somehow. 

"I love it deeply and so I wanted to record it again, but in a different key. I wrote it originally with a capo on the third fret, and I’m playing it in F. The version that’s on the new album is in E flat, with the capo on the first fret. It has a certain brightness to it. 

"And it was purely just an instinct thing. When I put the capo on the first fret and played it, I said, 'That’s where I like it - it sounds good down there.'"

As far as the new material is concerned, I’d say Fuel ranks right up there with anything you’ve done previously.

"Thank you. That was an experiment to see if I could write something that created the same kind of movement as Classical Gas has. I wrote it while I was on a train from Paris to Cologne, Germany. When the train left the station I was off. And I had the whole thing together in about an hour. 

"I was really thrilled with how that song came out because I did a lot of things in it, like the odd time bars and stuff. I don’t usually do that, but I found a way of being able to tap my foot straight through the whole thing, so the beat never moves, even though the time signatures change.

"As for the title, fuel can mean many things - Hunter S. Thompson said 'We need fuel every day.' And what he was talking about is inspiration. So that’s kind of how I look at it - 'What’s going to lead me to write a song today?' That’s the fuel."

What were the main guitars you used on the record?

"My main one was the Maton I use onstage [the TE Personal Custom]. That’s my number-one axe. For stuff like Halfway Home, I used a jumbo-sized Maton, which we call the Mega Mouse. It has the same wood as my main little one, it’s just a bigger body - not quite as big as a [Gibson] J-200, but pretty close. 

"On stuff like (The Man with the) Green Thumb I used my Larrivée C-10, and on some of the drop-D songs I used my Maton Traditional, which is a cutaway model. 

"Eric Johnson uses the same guitar. Once he heard me play it he had to have one!

For much of your early career in Australia you played electric guitar and backed a variety of artists on their own music. At what point did you find your own voice as an acoustic fingerstylist?

"I can actually pinpoint it - it was sometime around when I was in my early 30s. I discovered that I had a sound and a voice that wasn’t like other people’s. Even though I may have been playing a Beatles tune or a Elton John song or a Chet Atkins arrangement, it still sounded like me. 

"Whereas when I was younger and playing around Sydney I was kind of a gun for hire because I could play like everybody - I could make it sound like Chuck Berry or Andy Summers from the Police, or I could play a solo like George Benson or imitate a flamenco player. 

"I wasn’t very good at it, but I could get away with it. I was a chameleon who had a go at everything, and not a lot of people wanted to do that. They were too precious about their own abilities. But I saw the fun in it. 

"What changed it was when I got into songwriting. That’s when the person I am evolved and my playing became what it is. And I just kind of relaxed and followed it. I didn’t try to force anything."

Chet Atkins once called you a "fearless" player. What does that mean to you?

"Well, I’m willing to risk everything and jump in and have a go at anything at all. And believe me, sometimes that doesn’t always bring praise from people. Sometimes it brings criticism. And so you’ve got to be careful about how fearless you are with people. 

"But I can sit here and say they can eat my shorts anyway, because I don’t really care what they think. What other people think is none of my business, you know?"

You always talk about the fact that your songs are “stories without words.” Is that the way you approach your writing? Meaning, are you thinking more in terms of a full band, with vocals, as opposed to just your guitar?

"A lot of times, yeah. When I write, I don’t think I’m writing just for guitar - I think I’m writing for a band and a singer, so everything has to work for me in my head. The melody has to have a certain course, and the chords underneath create the emotions that go with that. 

"But I try not to let the instrument dictate to me. Because when we pick up the guitar our old habits come straight out. You know, our fingers are like dogs - they go straight to the food bowl."

Our fingers are like dogs?

"[Laughs] Yeah. And we don’t want to be allowing those dogs to devour everything. We need to be in charge and tell them where to go!

As one decade passes into the next, you may be reflecting on how much you’ve managed to improve as a player during that time – or, just maybe, feeling a little guilty if you’ve fallen short of where you hoped to be. 

Don’t despair, though: even pros don’t improve as fast as they’d like. To help you turbo-charge your own playing skills, we spoke to some of the biggest names in guitar to ask how they feel they could have improved faster…

Joe Bonamassa

1) A technique-based ‘I wish’

“Legato: I have absolutely no capacity to play anything using the legato technique. Eric Johnson blends legato and picking perfectly in my opinion. I am an Al Di Meola school player, especially when it comes to faster playing. I pick literally every note unless I’m on stage playing pretend rock star. 

"I’ve tried to incorporate legato a little, but as my tech – who is extremely good at it and a huge Allan Holdsworth fan – glares over with the look of, ‘You are embarrassing yourself, Bonamassa,’ I decided it was not in my best interest to pursue that avenue.”

2) A theory-based ‘I wish’

“One of my strengths and weaknesses is that I have a very limited knowledge of theory. Strength: it makes me more fearless as a musician. I don’t care if what I’m doing is in the book; it just sounds good to me. 

“You use that intra-barometer in all facets of your playing and life. I don’t want the numbers or the rulebook swirling in my head. Weakness: some people ask me if I want a chart for the song. I laugh and say, ‘Play the demo and save a tree.’”

3) One music-related thing I wish I had done earlier

“One of the reasons I do not collect celebrity instruments is because they will not write those iconic songs for you. Right now, I am in Abbey Road Studios making a new album. The Hey Jude piano is in eyesight. If I went over and played it, it’s not gonna write a song of that calibre for me. It’s gonna sound like a hack piano player playing in the key of G. In hindsight, I would trade some of my playing ability for songwriting ability without hesitation.”

Martin Barre

1) A technique-based ‘I wish’

“Nobody mentioned alternate picking in 1960 when I bought my first guitar. Many years later, I pay the price for having a hybrid picking technique! There are some things I struggle to play picked and resort to a legato style to bridge the danger areas; I’m frustrated when I can see the obvious method but have to take a bypass. 

“I construct musical passages that, in theory, have no barrier in executing them. It is a challenge that I can meet, but only if I had worked on alternate picking. That said, playing mandolin helps my picking technique – a great instrument to explore.”

2) A theory-based ‘I wish’

“Music has a habit of taking us on a journey. At no point on this fabulous trip is there something that is not a pleasure to discover and examine. So the rules are written in stone yet I would rather discover them with an ear for music than to transcribe them or download a video. Self-discovery makes music a very personal journey and gives the player a unique ‘personality’.”

3) One music-related thing I wish I had done earlier

“I have no regrets with my music career. I savour the good times and learn from the bad. If anything, I should have had a business ‘head’ earlier on. In the late 60s and early 70s it was all about the music and very little attention to finances. 

“This enabled a lot a bad deals from a handful of dubious music execs. The mindset was to make business appear too complex for the average rock musician. Nowadays, we can run our own band, record and market our own music – we do a better job

Paul Gilbert

1) A technique-based ‘I wish’

“I had all kinds of strange technical ‘mistakes’, but they all turned out to be beneficial. The first two years I played guitar, I only did upstrokes. But I got really good at upstrokes! I also held the pick with too many fingers and at a backwards angle. This turned out to give me a larger palette of tones and textures I still use all the time. 

“My fingering for an open G chord is also really odd. I didn’t know I was doing it ‘wrong’ until a few years ago. I may switch to the world-standard G chord, as it’s a little easier on my wrist, but my old weird one sounds good for a lot of things!”

2) A theory-based ‘I wish’

“Melodies often drop from the root, directly to the lower 5th, without playing the 6th or 7th. This can be a bit of tangle to do on the guitar, especially if you’ve trained your hand to play every note of the scale… which I certainly did! My recent experiments in leaving these notes out has been such a great melodic discovery. I certainly wish I had left out the ‘Crazy Train note’ [the b6] a bit earlier.”

3) One music-related thing I wish I had done earlier

“When I set up my monitors on stage these days, I just need to hear my guitar, my voice and some snare drum. I used to want all kinds of things like ride cymbals and hi-hats and a pretty blend of everyone’s voices. That made for some long and ultimately impractical soundchecks. The Beatles didn’t have any monitors when then played stadiums in the 60s. Simpler is often better. And always wear earplugs!”

John McLaughlin

1) A technique-based ‘I wish’

“I wish I could have had either a drum kit and teacher, or the possibility to learn and be able to articulate the fundamentals of rhythm. In improvised music, 99 per cent of the time we play with drummers, and to fully understand what they are playing is essential in this world.”

2) A theory-based ‘I wish’

“The harmonic foundation that is used in contemporary jazz for the past 60 years is founded upon the music of Ravel, Satie, Fauré, Scriabin and others such as Bartok and Stravinsky. It would have been extremely useful to have had an opportunity to learn the harmonic techniques of these composers.”

3) One thing related to music I wish I had done earlier

“I should have taken singing lessons!”

Mike Stern

1) A technique-based ‘I wish’

“I always knew guitar came first, but I wish I had learned at least one other instrument. Sometimes when you learn another instrument, it can help your guitar playing. When I was a kid I took some piano lessons, but then I let that go when I started playing guitar. But no real regrets, there is so much to learn on guitar; it’s endless. It’s always a challenge and it’s always kicking my ass!”

2) A theory-based ‘I wish’

“I wish I had studied a bit more classical music when I was younger. I do it now. I read and try to learn some Bach pieces, but I do it with a guitar pick. I wish I had learned more fingerstyle classical technique at the beginning.”

3) One music-related thing I wish I had done earlier

“I got into drugs and alcohol when I was younger. I’ve been sober for over 30 years now. The guitar may have enabled my drinking and drugging, but it also had a lot to do with saving my life. Music is such a positive force.”

Tommy Emmanuel

1) A technique-based ‘I wish’

“I wish I had learned to read music. I could have learned a lot more and perhaps had a better understanding of the fretboard. I was busy trying to earn a living and support my family by playing and teaching guitar. I tried once, but I found it impossible, so I just carried on as I do today and followed my instincts.”

2) A theory-based ‘I wish’

“I learned later in life to be more adventurous and unafraid when going for a solo. When you are young and inexperienced you tend to play it safe and stay close to the melody. But when you’ve had some time to grow as a musician you feel the freedom to step outside the comfort zone and see what’s possible to make a bolder statement and have fun with music.”

3) One music-related thing I wish I had done earlier 

“I wish I’d have been more aware of time when I was younger. I was too busy trying to impress people enough so I had plenty of work. What I now feel is that I would have been a much better musician if I’d started working with a metronome, every day! 

“Time, feel and groove: these are the elements that put bums on seats and cause people to run out and buy concert tickets. So I suggest getting to work on training your mind to understand time and groove. When you’ve spent enough time with a metronome, that thing will set you free!”

John Etheridge

1) A technique-based ‘I wish’

“I wish there had been a good theory of picking. Like everyone else my age, I developed my own erratic methods. Actually, this has worked okay and helped to give my generation of players individual approaches. When I see a lot of young players, particularly the Gypsy guys, their picking hands look so beautifully efficient.”

2 ) A theory-based ‘I wish’

“Reading music. I’m very slow and this has cost me energy, nerves and given me a sense of inadequacy when playing with other musicians who tend to read better. I wish someone had forced me to do this at age 13 to 15. It’s boring but is so helpful, time saving and opens up so much music to you. And more money could have been made from playing sessions!”

3) One music-related thing I wish I had done earlier

“I always practise with a metronome or drum programme nowadays. For years I practised all my scales just tapping my foot. I was a terrible ‘racer’ as I always wanted to play like John Coltrane. Cramming more notes in does, in an undisciplined player, lead to speeding up. For people playing with you, this is infuriating. I think I’ve got over this now, although as a result of years of bad practice, it can creep in. Good time is the best ingredient a player can have.”

Andy Timmons

1) A technique-based ‘I wish’

“The whole idea and application of economy picking and sweeping has largely eluded me for most of my playing career, even though some of my lines do include some of these techniques – it must have happened naturally. 

“There is now much more awareness and instruction available for working on developing these techniques that I wish would have been around in my early years of learning. But as they say, ‘It’s never too late!’ I’m now working on these techniques daily as part of a practice regimen, so I will see if any of it works its way into my playing.”

2) A theory-based ‘I wish’

“Learning by ear is most assuredly the best way to obtain and retain music. I feel fortunate to a degree that there wasn’t an abundance of didactic material when I was growing up. I eventually took lessons, but I was largely self-taught from the age of five to 16. Someone showed me barre chords and the A minor pentatonic scale and off I went. 

“I had my guitar and a record player. Occasionally, you’d see someone on TV – I loved Roy Clark on Hee Haw! – but I had to ‘earn it’, meaning figure out by ear what was on the recording.

“This realisation was fortified years later – if I would learn a song first by the chart, I would be reliant on the paper as opposed to when I took the time to learn it by ear. It internalised aurally instead of visually – and isn’t music largely an aural experience? Of course, some music may be more complicated than your ear is capable of ‘figuring out’, but always make an effort to get as much as you can, then check out the video or transcription.”

3) One music-related thing I wish I had done earlier

“I wish I’d have been a more ardent and disciplined practiser. I played all the time, but I wasn’t always practising. Big difference! Playing all the time is essential, of course, but also pushing yourself to learn new things consistently while also fortifying what you already know is a way to grow rapidly. I’m only now – at the age of 55! – becoming a good practiser. I’ll keep you posted how it goes.”

Alex Skolnick

1) A technique-based ‘I wish’

“The main technique that I wished I’d learned earlier is mental: achieving focus and clarity, or what is often referred to today as ‘mindfulness’. I was already in my late 20s when I discovered a great book by jazz pianist Kenny Werner – one of the best, in my book – Effortless Mastery, which deals with these concepts for musicians. That led to other enlightening materials, with care taken to avoid anything pseudoscientific or ‘culty’. 

“Today there are great apps for your smartphone, such as Waking Up App by Sam Harris.  John McLaughlin really set an example with his embrace of meditation and Eastern philosophy in the 70s, which I dove into and appreciated more as I got older. But as a young guitarist, I just wanted to rock! Ironically, the rock is the perfect metaphor for stillness, tranquillity, inner calm and strength.”

2) A theory-based ‘I wish’

“My hindsight theory relates to music theory itself and if written as an equation, it would be this: Music > Theory. In other words, music determines music theory, not the other way around. 

“History is full of music theory taboos that later became acceptable to our ears, from a minor 3rd rubbing up against a chord with a major 3rd, a staple of the blues, to the tritone interval, once thought to be sacrilegious. The earliest musicians – probably cave-dwellers who discovered sound-making in a manner similar to Kubrick’s apes in the opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey – were not thinking, ‘Wait! The book says we can’t use this note in that scale!’

“Yes, music theory is quite useful and recommended for some; I wouldn’t play the way I do without it. But that doesn’t mean it’s required for everyone. Whatever your musical trajectory, it’s most important to focus on sound first and theory later, if so inclined.”

3) One music-related thing I wish I had done earlier

“What I wish I’d done earlier is pursuing additional instruments, particularly piano. I did get a piano about 15 years back and just love getting lost in music separate from the familiarity of the guitar, as well as figuring out piano parts from recordings – film and TV soundtracks, classic tunes I grew up with, manageable classical and jazz pieces. 

“I also have some percussion instruments and know some very basic drum beats, but, again, I wish I’d started much earlier. It took a while to figure out, but so many of my favourite guitarists play other instruments, too, from Pat Metheny composing on the piano, to Al DiMeola getting behind the timbales in concert, to Stevie Ray Vaughan playing drums occasionally, to Eddie Van Halen’s keyboard skills – drums, too – to the all-time master multi-instrumentalist, Prince.

“Though I wish I’d started sooner, having incorporated piano and percussion into my practice in more recent years has helped develop my playing, timing and composing invaluably. Better late than never!”

Steve Lukather

1) A technique-based ‘I wish’

“I wish I had practised more!”

2) A theory-based ‘I wish’

“I wish I had started learning to read music when I started as a kid of seven or eight years old. I started to learn and study at 14. Wish it was day one, but… rock ’n’ roll hit! I can’t tell you how much it has helped me, but sight-reading takes time. No way around it.”

3) One music-related thing I wish I had done earlier

“Watch my money and I wish I’d never let ‘the party’ get in the way. It was okay as a kid, but when I got older, not good. So I quit all that 10 years ago. I wish it was 20. Sorry. It creeped up, ended bad, but I am okay now, thank God. I was 18, thrown into a room with 20-, 30- 40-year-old people and it was 1976 to ’77 to the early 80s, the most insane times in rock ’n’ roll. Fun as some of it may have been, a waste of time and money and life.”

Joe Satriani

1) A technique-based ‘I wish’

“I wish I had found my most comfortable ‘right-hand position’ at the start. I’ve gone through three radical shifts in how I anchor or float my picking hand. At first it was resting my palm right above the bridge, at the muting spot. Then I tried no anchoring, but dropped that after many trials and tribulations. Next was resting my fingers on the pickguard area – good for some stuff but not everything. So now I use all three whenever they seem appropriate. I’m still searching!”

2) A theory-based ‘I wish’

“All theories are equally golden and dangerous. It’s good to remember that in music there are no rules, only cause and effect. The key to embracing this approach is to learn all the cause and effect situations, remember them and apply accordingly. If you want people to sing along with your melody, don’t make it complicated. If you want people to get up and dance to your song, don’t make it dreadfully slow or painfully fast. Theories get dangerous when they stifle creativity and lead you down the path of mediocrity. Free your mind, your guitar will follow.”

3) One music-related thing I wish I had done earlier

“I wish I’d pursued learning recording studio techniques. Perhaps a job at a local studio would’ve been the right move when I was in my teens. I can’t help thinking it would have opened my eyes and ears to the wonders of the recording studio. However, my path led me to the stage, which helped me build my live performance chops. After answering these three questions I’m reminded of an old Scottish proverb: ‘If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.’ So true!”

Rusty Cooley

1) A technique-based ‘I wish’.

“I wish I had developed my eight-finger tapping and hybrid picking all the way through, the way I did many other techniques. I see a lot of value in it now and the added creativity that it can bring to your playing.”

2) A theory-based ‘I wish’

“I wish I had kept up my sight-reading. There was a time when I could read really well, but as the old saying goes, ‘Use it or lose it’!”

3) One music-related thing I wish I had done earlier

“I would have done anything to have gone to GIT [Guitar Institute Of Technology] right after high school. It just wasn’t in the budget. Being in LA at that time would have been amazing. All things aside, it’s never too late for anything and I still have lots of things I want to accomplish as a musician and plan on continuing to work on it each and every day.”

In a recent interview with Guitar World, Joe Bonamassa opined, "It’s easy to play marginally good blues. It’s very difficult to play great blues."

With that in mind, we present this clip of some very, very great blues playing, courtesy of JoBo, one of today's top-rated players Josh Smith and, in a rare electric guitar performance, the Certified Guitar Player himself, Tommy Emmanuel.

The three got together during Bonamassa’s recent Keeping the Blues Alive at Sea cruise for a performance of Breaking Up Someone’s Home, complete with plenty of head-cutting six-string playing. 

The results were, needless to say, electric.

Bonamassa has already announced dates and details for the 2021 iteration of the cruise, which will feature George Thorogood & the Destroyers and Eric Gales, among many others. 

For more JoBo info, head to Blues Alive at Sea.

In unexpected acoustic guitar news, Larrivée has announced a partnership with longtime Maton player Tommy Emmanuel on a new custom six-string model.

The new guitar, the C-03R-TE Custom Tommy Emmanuel, is based on a one-off model the company built for Emmanuel several years ago – a C-10 12-fret acoustic with an Angel headstock inlay.

“The guitar has since found its way onto many studio albums and distinct live performances," said John Larrivée. “Then a few years ago, as part of our 50th Anniversary celebrations, we built a replica of Tommy's C-10 custom and gave it away at a Tommy Emmanuel show in Santa Barbara. 

"The feedback was overwhelming. Many Tommy fans and Larrivée players alike wanted to get their hands on one. But a C-10 custom with inlay can be unaffordable to most people. That's when Tommy and I started talking about replicating his C-10 on an 03 Series and making it more accessible to players."

Larrivée continued, “Tommy loved the idea, so we took the key features - East Indian rosewood back and sides, BC Sitka spruce top, florentine cutaway and 12-fret neck joint - and put them on one of our 03 series. What we came up with was the C-03R-TE Custom ‘Tommy Emmanuel.’ ”

The C-03R-TE Custom Tommy Emmanuel is available for $2,898. For more information, head to Larrivée.

Tommy Emmanuel is freezing his ass off outside a coffee shop in Nashville, Tennessee, ostensibly so he can promote his upcoming show in Orange, California, at the Musco Center for the Arts, which takes place on December 10, and for which you can buy tickets here. 

But mostly because we couldn’t resist the opportunity to pick the brains of a player whose approach to the acoustic guitar is truly awe-inspiring.

Emmanuel is a phenomenon, a maverick. There are few, if any, better fingerstyle players on the planet. His style is descendent from the work of Chet Atkins, with whom he collaborated on The Day Finger Pickers Took Over the World, in 1997, and yet it is entirely his own.

With Emmanuel, the style never gets in front of the idea. Songwriting is storytelling, whether there are lyrics or not, he says, and players have to give the audience just enough room to exercise their imaginations. That, he says, is part of the magic of songwriting.

Next year will see the release of a double-album of 26 original compositions, many of which he will be debuting on this December tour through California. It follows Heart Songs, which was recorded with John Knowles and released in January this year. 

Covering the likes of Hank Williams and the Bee Gees will make this a fascinating release, and it’s similarly intriguing to hear Emmanuel’s thoughts on how to reinterpret a song for acoustic guitar, and what makes a good cover.

It’s funny - Emmanuel says he can’t read music, but he sure can read a room, and his insights into what the audience want are as good an example of songwriting wisdom as you will read today...

We’ll start with the easy ones, Tommy – what guitars are you playing at the moment?

“My three Maton guitars that I travel the world with. That’s what I’ll be playing. They are three Custom Shop Maton guitars, made in Australia.”

Do you still keep them in different tunings?

“My main guitar is in normal guitar tuning, and then one of the other ones is in a drop D tuning but it’s down a whole tone, so it’s down to drop C. And that has the big medium strings on it.

"Then the other guitar goes between a drop D tuning and an open G tuning, depending on what songs I want to play. And the reason I have three guitars is because I have them pre-tuned so there is no putting my guitar in and out of different tunings all the time. I want to be perfectly in tune.”

What is your approach to alternate tunings?

“I put my guitar in the tuning that is appropriate to the song. That is all I can say on that. [Pauses] No, playing in drop D is nice because you have got that nice low bass, and it just gives you a wider tone band to work with, and that low string can be a beautiful effect. And even when you capo up with the drop D it still sounds big down the bottom.”

You made some really interesting song choices on Heart Songs. What draws you to a cover?

“When you are playing an instrumental it has to be interesting, have movement, and tell a story without words. So that is what I am looking for. If I am going to do a cover of a song, I still try to make it my own. I try to take someone’s work and give it my own voice, and people always say to me, ‘Oh, why don’t you do Blackbird? Why don’t you do blah blah blah?’ 

"Certain songs such as Michael Jackson’s Beat It, or Thriller, or something like that, and those things don’t work as instrumentals. They work when Michael Jackson sings them, but they don’t work as an instrumental."

“I am very careful. I have really got to be in love with a song to want to make a cover of it, and that is the reason why the Beatles songs that I do - Lady Madonna, and Day Tripper - because they are monumental challenges to try and work out where all the parts go at once. 

"But that stuff really works. It tells the story. It lays it all out. And I can show people, ‘Well here’s the bass part, here’s the piano part, and here’s the vocal part, and now I am going to put them all together and do it all at once.’ And that’s what amazes people, but also there is a lot of good stuff in those songs. I did that because it was a unique thing, and I didn’t see anyone else doing it. That is why I did that in the first place.”

It is amazing to hear the Bee Gees’ How Deep Is Your Love arranged for acoustic. There are so many melodic elements to incorporate.

“I didn’t try to put too much in there. I just listened to the actual melody, of what Barry [Gibbs] was singing, and I just took that, rather than trying to put in all the other stuff that the brothers sing. I just stuck with the melody, and I find that that worked.

"If I start chasing a lot of stuff then instrumentally it is going to sound like a science experiment, and I don’t want that. That’s why there are certain people out there in the guitar world, playing covers, who are trying to cover all the parts at once, and when you watch them play it there is a lack of feeling because there is too much going on and they are trying to cover everything.

“I call it a science experiment. It’s like a juggler and a card dealer all working at once and it is just too much. Y’know, just tell me the story, and lay it out for me. That’s what I am looking for. Growing up listening to Chet Atkins taught me to find the melody and stick with the melody.”

Absolutely. Like you say with the science experiment, you’ve almost got to leave yourself a little spare capacity in your playing ability so that you can enjoy the performance, and to perform.

“I think so. Plus, you’ve got to leave something for the imagination, and for people to fill in the gaps themselves, y’know.”

That is really interesting. Is that something you think of when you are composing?

“Of course. I think the way people are nowadays, because of technology and iPhones and computers and everything, people want everything and they want it all now, and that is not how life works.

"You don’t have to fill up every millisecond with sound and noises. I remember when I had a young guy, I won’t say his name, but a young guy I admire very much on the road with me, and he was opening. He was a young teenager and he was playing his heart out, and really giving the audience 35 minutes of everything he had, and I said to him one night, ‘Y’know, you could just put one slow song in your show just to give the people a break from constant, full-on, everything going. Why don’t you just play one ballad.’ And he said to me, in all honesty, he said, ‘I am so afraid of the space between the notes.’

“I realized that’s what it was; he is from this younger generation, so they are afraid to just be, and to just let things hang, whereas he would watch me play and say, ‘I wish I could play ballads like that but I am so afraid.’ I admired his honesty, but I learned a kind of clarity from that, that younger people, everything has to be moving and full of action, and full of stuff all the time otherwise they lose their attention.

“A guy my age is the opposite of that. That’s why you see great art, great movies, and there is a lot of action, but there are some where there are five minutes of stuff that is so subtle that it gives you a chance to watch it and be, and almost be a part of it. 

"I think, musically, I try to let people do that. Like sometimes I’ll break into a tune like What a Wonderful World, because everybody knows that song. I don’t play the chords. I just play the melody like I am singing it a cappella and let them fill in the chords with their minds. 

"They don’t know I am doing that but that is what I am doing. I am just singing the song to them and they don’t even realize; they are hearing the chords and it is their imagination.”

Sometimes we need reminding that the space between the notes is the music.

“Totally. It’s the same thing with our thoughts. Thoughts come and go and our minds are active because we are either always on the phone or we are doing something, and there has to be times where we just stop and give our consciousness a break.

"And it’s the same thing [with music]. I find that if I get an idea to write a song, if I am inspired - and I really can’t write it if I am not inspired - I know I don’t think about anything else, only this idea that I’ve got, so that nothing comes in and sweeps it away and clouds my thoughts. I just stick with what I am doing so that it is one thing at a time that is important to me, and that’s it.

“I think that principle works for the public, because I can play a million things and be improvising and jumping around, and blowing their minds, entertaining them, but there has to a break from that, and that’s when, say I’ve done that for three songs and the audience are on the edge of their seats, then I’ll play something really soft and simple, and it gives them a chance to just sit back and relax, and let it just wash over them. That is all part of it.”

It is like you said earlier there, about telling the story, that is part of the story, and even with acoustic instrumental music, it is all storytelling.

“Oh it is, definitely. Yeah, well a lot of young guys who are big into songwriting now are eager to impress everyone, and so they are writing stuff that’s really just a lot of chords moving around with a groove, and I am waiting for them to tell me a story. And they don’t know that.

"They think that songwriting is about creating a structure and making it really fantastic, and moving all the chords around and all that, and it’s like, ‘Hang on a second! You are not telling me a story and you are not moving me emotionally. Take me somewhere. Tell me something.’ That’s what I am waiting for. When I hear someone who does that I am excited because, yes, they have got it.”

There’s no better gift than someone creating an atmosphere, an emotional range, or a story to inhabit for an hour or so...

“Oh yeah, and you’ve got to remember it as well! I hear a lot of young composers writing things and there is so much going on that I can’t remember any of it. All I want to do is stop them, take away half of that, say half as much so I can have a chance to get onto it and get it into my head.

"You’ve really got to think about that, and you’ve got to say something and create an emotion that moves people, that they can hook onto straight away.”

Does the acoustic guitar lend itself to a more individualist style? Because, in a sense, you are trying to do more with less...

“I think it really comes down to what you have got to say. For myself, I like both; I like the electric guitar and the acoustic, but I mostly write on acoustic - even back in the ‘80s when I was playing electric mostly I was still songwriting on the acoustic because it has got to stand up on that.

"There’s no frills, y’know, and so I used to try and write on the acoustic so that it was sort of chiseled, the melody was chiseled in stone, and that’s what I was trying to achieve there.

“Everybody has their own way of doing it, and I don’t think my way is right or wrong - it is just how I do it and it works for me. You may have a completely different approach and that’s your way.”

True. Everyone has their own style...

“Hearing Billy Joel talking about his songwriting, he said, ‘Well I like to tell a story musically first, and then I find the words second.’ So, y’know, he does that. 

"John Lennon used to write down poetry, and write down words - he could be at dinner and he would get an idea and he’d write words down and put music to it later. So Lennon was the opposite. Everyone has their own approach.”

There is an immediacy with the acoustic that let’s you know when something isn’t working.

“Also you have to have your quality control going, and I certainly have that. There are two songwriters inside me. There is one inside my head that is full of ideas, and then there is one deep in my heart that has to be satisfied, and that is the one that always wins. But the guy in my head will come up with a thousand ideas until the guy in my heart says, ‘No more, no less, just that.’ That’s my quality control.”

Your technique is formidable. Is there any aspect of your playing that you worry about?

“I don’t worry about anything. No, I work on it, I work on what I need to be better at. I go through periods of practicing strength, skills, things like that, but mostly when I practice I usually play songs as if people are listening and that is what makes me a better player; playing the songs. I know my strengths and my weaknesses, so I know what I need to work on, and I approach it that way.”

Nothing inspires a better performance than knowing - or thinking - that someone is listening.

“Oh, totally. Totally. I play like this is the last time I am going to play, all the time. I don’t know any other way. I’m just following my own instincts and trying what works for me.”

Tommy Emmanuel has long included Mason Williams’ 1968 instrumental, “Classical Gas,” in his repertoire, and recently Feng E, a young ukulele player from Taiwan, went viral with his rendition of Emmanuel’s version of the tune, which he played on the street in Taipei. 

The exposure Feng received on Instagram led to an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and then, finally, to a duet with Emmanuel himself on the song when Emmanuel came to Taipei for a concert last month.

You can check out Emmanuel and Feng E’s performance of “Classical Gas” below.

Last month, I demonstrated how to play the main theme to my tune “T.E. Ranch,” from my latest release, It’s Never Too Late. This month, I’d like to show you the tune’s bridge section.

As I’ve detailed in previous columns, I often rely on what’s commonly known as the “Merle Travis” picking style (“Travis picking,” for short) in the performance of many of my tunes, wherein the bottom three strings are always picked in an “alternating bass” fashion with the thumb, and melodic lines that fall on the higher strings are picked with the index and middle fingers and occasionally the pinkie.

Essential to each performance is absolute precision in defining the song’s melodic line rhythmically: some notes fall squarely on the downbeats, in sync with the bass notes, and some fall in the spaces between the bass notes, on the upbeats. I like to play as freely as possible, and oftentimes a bar is a little bit different than its predecessor, so focus on each bar individually.

The bridge section features a modulation from A major to A minor, and additionally I switch from the verse’s alternating bass approach to a “pumping” bass-notes attack in order to create more tension and drama in the musical story. In bars 1–4 of FIGURE 1, I spend a significant amount of time picking straight eighth notes on the low E string, specifically in the second half of bars 1, 2 and 3 and on each beat in bar 4. Starting in bar 5 and through bar 6, I switch to a “triplet”-type picking pattern, in that I pick the bottom three strings in succession in straight eighth notes, additionally plucking the top three strings along with the D string.

Utilizing a picking pattern based on this kind of repeating three-note contour played in a straight-eighths rhythm is known as a “threes on fours” pattern. It can be tricky to move smoothly from the Fmaj7/A to F#m7 to G(add4) to Bb(#4) and keep the picking articulation crystal clear, so work through these bars slowly at first and gradually build up speed.

In bars 7 and 8, I change the picking pattern again, now picking the sixth string on each downbeat, alternating with the higher strings on the eighth-note upbeats. Bars 9–16 are basically a recap of bars 1–8 with slight improvised variations. In bar 17, I introduce a fast picking pattern played in straight 16th notes: after first striking the sixth string with my thumb, I pick the first and second strings with my middle and index fingers, respectively, and then pick the third string with my thumb. The top two strings are picked again in a similar manner, and then I introduce a melody on the fourth string that moves from E, the root note, to F, the b9 (flatted ninth), to D, the b7 (flatted seventh) and then back to E. This pattern must be executed very quickly, so to me this is the most challenging part of the tune to master.

The 16th-note pattern is played three times and is followed by half-note chord hits on Fmaj7#11 and G, after which we return to the tunes’ “head,” or verse section. Hope you have fun with this one!

I’d like to kick things off with a look at my approach to the song, “El Vaquero,” written by the great Chet Atkins and Wayne Moss, which I recorded for It’s Never Too Late.

A vaquero is a cowboy, and, as the name implies, this song has a “western” feel, with a Spanish/Mexican flavor. I first heard this song as recorded by Chet for his Hometown Guitar album, on which Wayne played the rhythm guitar part and Chet added the melody, or lead, part on top, along the lines of FIGURES 1 and 2. To execute the rhythm part properly, use the standard Merle Travis fingerpicking technique, wherein the notes on the bottom three strings are picked with the thumb, with light palm muting, in an “alternating bass” fashion, and the notes on the top three strings are picked with the index and middle fingers.

My goal with this tune was to find a way to play the song as a solo piece, so I had to devise a way to cover both the rhythm and melody in one guitar part. FIGURE 3 represents my take on the first six bars, and throughout this section (as with most of the song), my pick-hand thumb alternates between the bass notes in steady eighth notes. While doing this, my index and middle fingers pick the melodies and harmonies, often with the index picking the G string while the middle finger strikes the B string; if the index finger needs to move up to the B string, the middle finger will then be used to sound the notes on the high E, as the fingers work together (in most places) on adjacent strings.

In bar 1, notice that I use a hammer-on to move the melody note from C to D on the B string right on the downbeat of beat three. Using a hammer-on here works well because of the consistent alternating bass. In bar 2, I take a similar approach, using a pull-off from C to the open B string on the downbeat of beat two. The second time through (second ending), this B-string melody is a little different, as it ascends up to a high E over the A chord in the last bar of the example. Be sure to play through this figure slowly and carefully, with focused attention paid to the subtle syncopations between the “bass” parts and melody.

FIGURE 4 recalls the subsequent five-bar section, wherein the bass notes ascend in half steps every two beats, from F (Dm/F), to Fs (D/Fs), to G (G), to Gs (E7/Gs), setting up the return to Am. Notice that the highest note of the melody replicates this movement on the first string. The first section of the tune ends with FIGURE 5, as somewhat unusual chord voicings for E(f9) resolve to Am.

A few weeks back, two phenomenal, Chet Atkins-certified guitar players stopped by for a visit.

Tommy Emmanuel and John Knowles—hot on the heels of their new collaborative instrumental album, Heart Songs—came by our studio to treat us to a spellbinding performance of two of the album's highlights. 

You can watch the second of the two performances, the duo's lovely take on the West Side Story song, "Somewhere," above. Just as they did before, the duo followed up their incredible performance with a detailed breakdown of their arrangement of the song, and the techniques they used for it.

To watch the duo perform and break down the Don Gibson classic, “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” step right this way.

For more information on Heart Songs, head on over to TommyEmmanuel.com.

Let us be the first to tell you that work is always better when two Chet Atkins-certified guitar players stop by for visit.

Recently, Tommy Emmanuel and John Knowles—hot on the heels of their new collaborative instrumental album, Heart Songs—did just that. 

You can check out one of the highlights of their time at our HQ, their stunning rendition of the Don Gibson classic, “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” above. Even better, the duo follow up their incredible performance with a detailed breakdown of their arrangement of the song, and the techniques they used for it.

For more information on Heart Songs, head on over to TommyEmmanuel.com.

Tommy Emmanuel has announced a spate of new U.S. headline tour dates starting July 15 in Homer, New York. For this run Emmanuel will be joined by various guitarists including Jorma Kaukonen, Mike Dawes and Joe Robinson 

Tickets are on sale Friday, March 1 at TommyEmmanuel.com.

In January, Emmanuel and John Knowles released the collaborative instrumental album, Heart Songs. Recorded at EastWest Studios in Los Angeles, Heart Songs features arrangements of Hank Williams’ "Cold, Cold Heart," the Bee Gees’ "How Deep Is Your Love," Billy Joel’s "Lullabye (Goodnight, My Angel)" and Michael McDonald’s "I Can Let Go Now" among its 14 tracks.

Said Emmanuel about the album, "A 'heart song' is really a love song. Love has many facets—love of family, romantic love. So we started there and then looked for melodies that could be played with heart."

You can check out the full itinerary below.

Tommy Emmanuel U.S. tour dates:

7/15    Homer, NY @ Center for the Arts of Homer                   with John Knowles*

7/17    Wilkes Barre, PA @ F.M. Kirby Center for the Arts         with Mike Dawes

7/18    New London, CT @ The Garde Arts Center                     with Mike Dawes

7/19    Beverley, MA @ The Cabot                                                 with Mike Dawes

7/20    Oak Hilly, NY @ Grey Fox Music Festival         

7/21    Englewood, NJ @ Bergen Performing Arts Center          with Mike Dawes

7/23    Wilmington, DE @ The Queen                                           with Mike Dawes

7/24    Annapolis, MD @ Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts   with Mike Dawes

9/18    Elmhurst, IL @ Hammerschmidt Memorial Chapel        + Benefit Show

9/20    Oklahoma City, OK @ Rose State College Hudiburg       with Joe Robinson

9/21    Kansas City, MO @ Arvest Bank Theatre                           with Joe Robinson

9/22    Lincoln, NE @ Rococo Theatre                                            with Joe Robinson

9/23    Des Moines, IA @ Hoyt Sherman Place                             with Joe Robinson

9/25    Kalamazoo, MI @ Kalamazoo State Theatre                     with Jorma Kaukonen

9/26    Columbus, OH @ Davidson Theatre                                  with Jorma Kaukonen

9/27    Cincinnati, OH @ Taft Theatre                                             with Jorma Kaukonen

9/28    Frankfort, KY @ Grand Theatre                                           

*Rescheduled dates from Heart Songs tour

+Benefit Show for Elmhurst College & Emmanuel Family Scholarship Fund (rescheduled date)

Happy holidays to everyone!

For your listening pleasure, here’s Tommy Emmanuel’s “One Christmas Night. As always, Emmanuel’s delivery is spot on. A simply gorgeous listen.

In this video, Emmanuel is playing a custom David Taylor - hand made in Nashville, TN.

Tommy Emmanuel and John Knowles have premiered their new "How Deep is Your Love" performance video. You can check it out above.

"How Deep is Your Love" is a standout cut from the master guitarists' new collaborative album, Heart Songs. 

Set for a January 11 release via CGP Sounds/Thirty Tigers, Heart Songs features arrangements of Hank Williams’ "Cold, Cold Heart," Billy Joel’s "Lullabye (Goodnight, My Angel)" and Michael McDonald’s "I Can Let Go Now" among its 14 tracks.

"A 'heart song' is really a love song," Emmanuel said. "Love has many facets—love of family, romantic love. So we started there and then looked for melodies that could be played with heart."

"And we tried to choose songs that people have heard," Knowles added. "So that when they hear them, even though we're not singing or they may not know all the words, they have a connection to these songs in their own hearts."

Regarding their playing on the album, Emmanuel said, "It was a wakeup call to not overplay, to be respectful and serve the music properly.”

“When you're being respectful to the melody, you're also respecting the listener's previous experience with that song," said Knowles. "We play into their expectations while at the same time surprising them now and then."

Emmanuel and Knowles will kick off a tour in support of Heart Songs in San Francisco on January 8, 2019.

For more information on the album and tour, head over to TommyEmmanuel.com.

Heart Songs track listing:

"Cold, Cold Heart" (written by Hank Williams)

"How Deep Is Your Love" (written by The Bee Gees)

"I Can't Stop Loving You" (written by Don Gibson)

"Somewhere" (written by Leonard Bernstein from West Side Story)

"I Can Let Go Now" (written by Michael McDonald)

"Lullabye (Goodnight, My Angel)" (written by Billy Joel)

"After Paris" (written by John Knowles)

"Walkin' My Baby Back Home" (written by Roy Turk and Fred Ahlert)

"I Can't Make You Love Me" (written by Allen Shamblin and Michael Reid)

"Where Is Love" (written by Lionel Bart for Oliver!)

"He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother" (written by Bobby Russell and Bobby Scott)

"Eva Waits" (written by Tommy Emmanuel)

"Turning Home (Live)"

"How Deep Is Your Love (Live)"

Tommy Emmanuel and John Knowles have announced the release of a new collaborative instrumental album, Heart Songs, on January 11, 2019, via CGP Sounds/Thirty Tigers.

Recorded at EastWest Studios in Los Angeles, Heart Songs features arrangements of Hank Williams’ "Cold, Cold Heart,"  the Bee Gees’ "How Deep Is Your Love," Billy Joel’s "Lullabye (Goodnight, My Angel)" and Michael McDonald’s "I Can Let Go Now" among its 14 tracks.

Said McDonald about the cover of “I Can Let Go Now,” "To hear a master like Tommy Emmanuel interpret any song is a joyous and emotional experience to say the least. To hear such a master perform one of your own compositions is the experience of a lifetime. One for which I'll be forever be grateful."

Said Emmanuel about the album, "A 'heart song' is really a love song. Love has many facets—love of family, romantic love. So we started there and then looked for melodies that could be played with heart."

Added Knowles, "And we tried to choose songs that people have heard. So that when they hear them, even though we're not singing or they may not know all the words, they have a connection to these songs in their own hearts."

Regarding their playing on the album, Emmanuel said, "It was a wakeup call to not overplay, to be respectful and serve the music properly.”

“When you're being respectful to the melody, you're also respecting the listener's previous experience with that song," said Knowles. "We play into their expectations while at the same time surprising them now and then."

Emmanuel and Knowles will kick off a tour in support of Heart Songs in San Francisco on January 8, 2019. Tickets for all shows go on sale November 2. For more information on the album and tour, head over to TommyEmmanuel.com.

Heart Songs track listing:

"Cold, Cold Heart" (written by Hank Williams)

"How Deep Is Your Love" (written by The Bee Gees)

"I Can't Stop Loving You" (written by Don Gibson)

"Somewhere" (written by Leonard Bernstein from West Side Story)

"I Can Let Go Now" (written by Michael McDonald)

"Lullabye (Goodnight, My Angel)" (written by Billy Joel)

"After Paris" (written by John Knowles)

"Walkin' My Baby Back Home" (written by Roy Turk and Fred Ahlert)

"I Can't Make You Love Me" (written by Allen Shamblin and Michael Reid)

"Where Is Love" (written by Lionel Bart for Oliver!)

"He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother" (written by Bobby Russell and Bobby Scott)

"Eva Waits" (written by Tommy Emmanuel)

"Turning Home (Live)"

"How Deep Is Your Love (Live)"

Last year, Joe Satriani hosted the 2017 G4 Experience—a four-day instructional/performance camp—at Asilomar Center in Pacific Grove, California.

Satch's special guests at the event—which honored the 30th anniversary of his landmark 1987 album, Surfing with the Alien—included Paul Gilbert, Def Leppard's Phil Collen, acoustic master Tommy Emmanuel and Ratt's Warren DeMartini.

Below, be sure to watch our exclusive video of a jam session featuring Satch, Emmanuel and Collen.

It even features Emmanuel on electric guitar (a fine-looking Tele)—a fairly rare sight these days. In the clip, the band tackles a fun I-IV-V blues-rocker in E, and there are plenty of fretwork fireworks to go around. And yes, that's Stu Hamm on bass.

For more information about the G4 Experience, visit G4Experience.com.

The title track of my latest release, It’s Never Too Late, is a tune I wrote for my daughter Rachel.

Though I knew that the song would be an instrumental, it was essential for me to craft a melody that had a lyrical quality.

While there is no vocal, one can easily imagine words being sung, due to the clarity, strength and conviction of the melody. Last month, we covered the tune’s intro and verse sections, and now I’d like to present the intricate chorus section.

If you’ve been following these columns, you know that I rely heavily on a fingerpicking approach based on the standard “Travis picking” pattern: the bottom three strings are generally picked in an “alternating bass” pattern, with the thumb moving between the appropriate strings in a steady eighth-note rhythm, providing the low root notes and fifths of the chords. The melodic lines and higher chord tones that are sounded on the higher strings are picked with the index and middle fingers, and occasionally the pinkie.

The steady thumb movement lays down the rhythmic “grid” of the song while the index and middle fingers add the melodic notes and chord tones in varying 16th-note syncopations. Some of the patterns become tricky to execute cleanly and clearly, so strict attention to detail is essential. Additionally, the tune is performed with a capo at the second fret, which transposes everything up a whole step.

FIGURE 1 illustrates the first 14 bars of the chorus, along with the first bar of the chorus tag (which continues in FIGURES 2 and 3). I begin by fretting a Cmaj13 chord, wherein the low C bass note is fretted with the thumb wrapped over the top side of the neck. This technique is required in order to properly fret the other notes of the chord, as well as the melody. I think of this section as being built around a three-note melody sounded by the fretted notes on the top three strings. I “hear” the two higher melodic notes as stating my daughter’s name “Rachel” repeatedly.

After three bars of Cmaj13, the notes sounded on the sixth and fourth strings move down in bar 4 to sound Bm7sus4. This four-bar pattern repeats, and the chordal/melodic concept is resolved in bars 11–14, as the chords move in this way: Aadd9/Cs D7sus4 Dadd4 C(add2). Keeping the higher strings fretted throughout this section while the lower bass notes change can be a little stressful (and potentially painful) for the fret hand, so try to keep the hand as relaxed as possible.

This leads us to the chorus tag, shown in FIGURES 2 and 3: this section is also built around a repeating three-note melody, fretted on the top three strings and requiring another challenging fret-hand stretch. I use a “banjo roll”–type picking pattern to repeatedly sound the top three strings in a descending sequence. Notice how this pattern steadily floats over the top while the lower bass notes move from an open low E to A to G, then back to both fretted and open low E notes.