The following content is related to the January 13 issue of Guitar World. For the full range of interviews, features, tabs and more, pick up the new issue on newsstands now, or in our online store.
This month, I’d like to address the sometimes tricky process of songwriting. Most of my songs start as a germ of an idea that comes to me during an improvisation. I’ll have a cool little nugget of “stuff” that catches my interest enough that I am inspired to investigate it further and perhaps forge a composition from it.
I think that for many of us, a new song idea springs from a moment of improvisation. From there, it becomes a question of how to take a cool little riff and expand it to something that can actually be played by a band. That’s the challenging part.
“I just learned them from the records. I don’t read tabs or anything, I don’t read music – I learned by ear”: How a teenage Muireann Bradley put a cover of Blind Blake’s Police Dog Blues on YouTube and became a standard bearer for country blues
“The Strat was about as ‘out’ as you could get. If you didn’t have a Floyd Rose, it was like, ‘what are you doing?’”: In the eye of the Superstrat hurricane, Yngwie Malmsteen stayed true to the original
