The 2010 movie The Runaways introduced a whole new generation to the trailblazing ’70s band that bore that name.

With the definitive lineup featuring Joan Jett and Lita Ford on guitars, Cherie Currie on vocals, bassist Jackie Fox, and drummer Sandy West, it was the two guitarists who carved out successful careers beyond the band’s lifetime.

Despite their chops and constant hustle, The Runaways never made it big in the States, but became something of a sensation in Japan.

The biopic-of-sorts offers a glimpse into their story and the complex world they had to navigate during that time – as well as the heartbreak that followed when the band officially dissolved in April 1979.

“I was devastated when the Runaways broke up, for a million reasons – my dream was over,” Jett told Guitar World back in 2010.

“I felt we had failed; I thought maybe it was all my fault. And I just felt really laughed at. It was like you could sense all of Los Angeles going, ‘We told you it wouldn’t work. Ha-ha.’ And I was probably drinking too much, partying too much, kind of spiraling downward.”

Jett reveals that she even thought about pursuing other avenues. And while Lita Ford traded her Gibson SG for the cosmetics counter, Jett briefly considered enlisting in the military.

“I figured it’d help me get myself together; I’d get to travel some, maybe get some discipline.”

Much like her experience with The Runaways, Jett faced one closed door after another when she decided to go solo.

“Kenny [Laguna, Jett’s longtime producer/business partner] knew a lot of people, and he figured he could get me a deal quick, no problem. But everybody he went to said, ‘Can’t help you, Ken, can’t do it.’

“And they all gave various excuses that he thought were ridiculous: ‘She can’t play.’ ‘She can’t sing.’ ‘She’s too intense.’ ‘Maybe she should lose the guitar.’”

Creating her own label, Blackheart Records, was therefore born of necessity, or as Jett put it, “We had to.

“I’m glad it went that way, because now we own all our stuff,” she clarified. “But it was totally DIY, selling records out of the trunk of the car after the show, getting the music directly to the fans.

“And I mean, back when we were being turned down by all these labels, the songs we had been sending around were I Love Rock ’n Roll, Do You Wanna Touch Me, Bad Reputation, Crimson and Clover...”

As Jett very aptly pointed out, all these songs eventually became hits.

I Love Rock 'n Roll, her first studio album with her backing band, the Blackhearts, reached the number 2 spot on the U.S. Billboard 200 in 1981 – cementing her status as a true rock ‘n’ roll icon.

What is it?

Like the Jason Isbell 00-10E that crossed my path recently, this tidy 000-size acoustic guitar, honoring star songsmith Shawn Mendes, is loosely based on a pre-war Martin that Mendes owns – and blends vintage styling with modern functionality at a price everyday players won’t baulk at.

The 000 body shape is one of the best-loved platforms in the Martin canon, being favored by everyone from Clapton to Mendes himself - this being his second signature model following 2022's 000JR-10E Shawn Mendes model.

While it resembles Martin’s equally famous OM model, the 000’s scale length is shorter at 24.9” as opposed to 25.4”, giving a slightly looser, more relaxed playing feel than the OM.

That’s made it a favorite with fingerstyle players and trad-bluesers over the years, with bends and delicate fingerwork all falling easily to hand.

Specs

• Launch price: $1,099 | £1,079 | €1,333
• Made: Mexico
• Body shape: Auditorium-size ‘000’
• Body top: Solid FSC-certified spruce
• Top bracing: Scalloped spruce
• Back & sides: Solid sapele
• Neck/shape: Select Hardwood / Performing Artist profile
• Scale/length: 24.9” (632.4mm)
• Nut/width: Corian / 1.73” (44mm)
• String spacing at bridge: 55mm
• Fingerboard wood/Radius: Ebony/16”
• Body depth: 4” (102mm)
• Finish: Natural, as reviewed
• Bridge/pins: White plastic
• Tuning Machines: Enclosed chrome
• Electronics: Martin E-1 pickup system; phase switch; tuner
• Weight: 4.1lb/1.88kg
• Case: Premium softshell gig bag
• Left-handed options: Yes, 000-10E Shawn Mendes LH
• Contact: Martin

Build quality

Build quality rating: ★★★★☆

Like many mid-price acoustics, the Shawn Mendes 000-10E features a solid spruce top with solid sapele back and sides – sapele is a commonly used, cheaper alternative to mahogany with broadly similar tonal qualities and appearance, hence it finds its way onto a lot of guitars in this price bracket and does them no disgrace.

Because this 000-10E is derived from a rare pre-war Martin, it’s been given a bit of a vintage makeover. For the first time on a Road Series guitar, for example, we get that lovely, archaic-looking straightline bridge with crisply carved pyramids at either end.

The faux tortoiseshell scratchplate, too, is patterned on that of Mendes’ pre-war 000. So much for tradition, however, because there’s also an eagle inlaid into the fretboard that’s based on one of Mendes’ tattoos. Eat your heart out PRS.

As a modern electro, there's also a Martin E1 pickup system and a built-in tuner, too, which definitely aren’t to be found on Mendes’ original. Martin doesn’t specify if FSC-certified spruce top is Sitka or some other type but the amber toner used on it gives it a suitably vintage look – while scalloped bracing does its usual job of balancing strength with ample resonance.

The neck, meanwhile, is made from what Martin calls ‘Select Hardwood’ – a catchall term that typically means a tropical hardwood, such as sipo or sapele, that performs a role similar to true mahogany at a lower cost.

The 20 frets are tidy, though the fret slots are cut quite deep and filler is very faintly visible under some of the fret ends. The enclosed chrome tuners are perfectly effective, though I wonder if an open-gear set would have looked the part better alongside that vintage bridge.

The nut is made of white Corian, while the saddle is white TUSQ which is compensated for accurate intonation through clever shaping of its top edge.

Playability

Playability rating: ★★★★☆

Straight out of the box, this 000-10E has a fairly high action, measuring just under 3mm on the treble side at the 12th fret, so a little extra effort is required to get around the fingerboard, though a quick truss-rod tweak would remedy that niggle and the 44mm nut width gives decent room for fingerstyle.

The neck has a ‘happy medium’ Performing Artist profile – not skinny, not clubby, just familiar and comfortable, while the guitar voices and intonates single notes and chords clearly and holds its tuning well.

Sounds

Sounds rating: ★★★★☆

Strumming the 000-10E in standard tuning, I'm surprised to find it has quite a bold voice, louder and more bassy than many guitars of its size, with a crisp midrange.

It almost comes across almost like a mini dreadnought, though it lacks some of the breathy sweetness that really good Auditorium-size guitars often have. Overall, it’s a guitar with a strong, appealing sonic personality – not the subtlest, but harmonious and clear with a good amount of power. It’s a guitar I’d trust to get the point across on a live stage.

Its amplified sound, as tested through the acoustic preamp setting of a Blackstar Beam Mini and also through a Boss Cube Street II is clear and reasonably natural-sounding for an under-saddle piezo pickup.

Judicious EQ of the mids permits me to dial in a warm, balanced tones with no piezo ‘quack’. The chromatic tuner, whose display sits just inside the lower rim of the soundhole, tracks well and gives a nice positive reading.

Verdict

Despite its hip vintage vibe, the Shawn Mendes 000-10E feels very much a modern, performer’s guitar and its clear, assertive voice is more ‘festival’ than ‘folk club’.

GuitarWorld verdict: It's a fairly-priced guitar with custom-style touches and strong workhorse potential, plus you won’t have to be a fan of Mendes to appreciate its power and utility. A capable performer with a strong, clear voice and modified-vintage vibe.

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• Best Martin guitars: we rank the legendary acoustics of an industry icon

In the immortal words of 38 Special, “Just hold on loosely, but don’t let go. If you cling too tightly, you’re gonna lose control.” Those are the lyrics I offer to Cut Worms’ Max Clarke as he describes relinquishing control of his music to Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, who took on the role of producer for Cut Worms’ latest LP, Transmitter.

The indie singer/songwriter, who lifted his band name from William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell – “The cut worm forgives the plow” – stares blankly back at me through our Zoom meeting, completely bemused by my callback to one of classic rock’s great wordsmiths.

“Yeah, that’s a good one,” he manages. Even if he was silently judging my taste in music, the cut worm forgave the reference.

“Historically, I’ve white knuckled it through other people’s playing,” Clarke says. “I had a very specific idea of what I wanted, and I did it all myself a lot of the time. I had a stranglehold on the thing. This time, I trusted that somebody else could bring something to the music that I couldn’t. He pretty much got what I was going for right away.”

If you’re going to enlist an outsider to bring a fresh perspective to a song – and maybe an expensive guitar or two – Tweedy and The Loft is not a bad choice. Since Tweedy records at The Loft on a near-daily basis, Clarke spent virtually no time setting things up or getting sounds.

“If you wanted to use an instrument, you just picked it up and used it,” he says. “At one point, when we were sitting there in the control room area, I reached for an acoustic guitar to idly play or strum. Jeff’s like, ‘That’s the most expensive guitar in this building.’ He wasn’t taken aback, but it was like, ‘Just so you know.’ I didn’t ask how much it was. I was just like, ‘Get it away from me.’”

It’s good to know that Tweedy’s on-stage, chill dad persona translates to the studio. “He had 15 original Rickenbackers from the ’60s,” Clarke says. “Even though there was all this really cool old gear and things that could be in museums, Jeff wasn’t precious about any of it. The instruments are meant to be played.”

• Transmitter is out now via Jagjaguwar
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

With the Fender Telecaster celebrating the big seven-five this year, Guitar World has been speaking to some of the biggest names to pick it up in anger. Here's Blur's Graham Coxon's take on the Tele, and he's very much of the opinion that Leo got it right the first time around.

“It’s one of the first designs for an electric guitar, and there’s nothing on there that you don’t particularly need,” says Coxon. “If I had a perfect Strat, I’d take off a volume and a tone knob – because I’m a dreadful man – just to make it stripped down like a Tele.

“The Tele is a stripped-down hot rod. It’s easy to play, simple and really versatile. It’s a funny-looking thing, but I think people who actually settled down with a nice Tele as a wooden wife saw this incredible thing that Leo Fender decided to make.

“He made it out of bits of old tin and wood and put strings on it, and it was one of the best things ever – and it still is one of the greatest guitars ever built. Maybe because the design was too perfect in the first place, compared to the Strat, which came after… it was an absolutely perfect design.

“But it’s a funny old shape. And the headstock isn’t quite like a Strat headstock. With the Tele, it’s like, 'What’s happened to your headstock?' And it’s like, 'Man, I was born this way…' [Laughs] It’s kind of weird and not quite formed. It’s strange, but it fucking does the job!”

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

Hotone has shaken up the AI-powered smart amp arms race, going up against the likes of Positive Grid and JBL with the Pulze Jr.

The practice amp market has been increasingly exposed to artificial intelligence advancements in recent years. Positive Grid pioneered AI tone generation. JBL turned heads at NAMM with its AI stem separation tech. Blackstar recently partnered with Moises to offer the same with its Beam Mini.

Now, Hotone has sought to offer the best of both worlds and put that all together in a pocket-sized amp that is gunning for the ‘best in class’ title.

But the competition is steep. So, to go up against the industry’s big guns, Hotone clearly hopes to stand apart by packing both AI Tone Creation and AI Track Separation into the Pulze Jr.

Both function as you’d expect. One takes a prompt via text or voice, and uses artificial intelligence to build the tone. It can then be refined or tweaked.

The other, meanwhile, is a bit more novel and rare among pint-sized practice amps, though it’s certainly becoming a more valued feature. On paper, it can separate parts from an imported song to create practice tracks, study or mute guitar parts, or help with transcription.

In the past, it has been said this feature could change the way guitarists practice. Add that to the AI tone generation, and this is one practice powerhouse.

Then there’s a third element in the mix, as Hotone has gone a step further to offer full Neural Amp Modeler (NAM) compatibility. That means it stays in keeping with one of the digital amp market’s most prominent trends, and can support open-source NAM files, opening up an enormous library of third-party tones.

All of which means Hotone is the first to nail the trifecta of smart practice amp must-haves – stem separation, NAM compatibility and tone generation – all in one box.

Elsewhere on the smart feature front, Hotone is rolling out Intelligent Backing Tracks, which is its version of the tech popularized by Positive Grid – creating accompaniments on demand that are responsive to a player’s style and tempo prompts.

Then there’s the generous 200 preset locations, a companion app that can control the customizable signal chain, eight-hour battery life, and the 20W stereo output. There are 52 amp models, 48 cab models, and loads of effects.

The amp itself – somewhere between the Beam Mini and Spark on the size scale – is also nicely proportioned, and looks sleek. It has ambient lighting, a multi-function encoder, a 240-second looper, and MIDI functionality.

The market is evolving quickly, but right now, the ball appears to be in Hotone’s court.

The Pulze Jr. is available now for $299, which makes it fairly and competitively priced against the $299 Spark, $229 12W Beam Mini and $249 BandBox Solo.

Visit Hotone for more.

When Led Zeppelin were in session, Jimmy Page was on top of everything. He knew the arrangements. He knew exactly how he wanted his guitars to sound. And he expected everyone else to be on point, too.

The sessions for Physical Graffiti are a cautionary tale of what can happen when someone takes their eye off the ball – you can lose something great. That nearly happened to Page.

Speaking to Guitar World in 2005, he explained how disaster struck when one of the hottest engineers in the business turned out to be not the best for LedZep. The band had repaired back to holy ground, at Headley Grange, and it was time to put the finishing touches on a track they had sitting around on tape since 1972 and the epic sessions for Houses of the Holy at Mick Jagger’s country manor, Stargroves.

“The Rover was originally recorded at Stargroves during the making of Houses of the Holy, with Eddie Kramer using the Rolling Stones’ mobile recording unit,” said Page. “When we began recording Physical Graffiti, we continued working on the track at Headley Grange. At the time, we were using [Faces bassist] Ronnie Lane’s mobile recording truck and an engineer called Ron Nevison, who everyone was recommending at the time.”

The Rover wasn’t the only holdover from the Stargroves. Led Zeppelin had recorded Black Country Woman out in the garden at Stargroves, like a field recording capturing the world’s biggest rock band. You see photos from the time, Page, bearded, in his element playing a Martin D-18.

It was a legendary location. The Stones tracked there. The Who recorded there. Doctor Who was filmed there, too. It was all going on. Lane’s recording truck had a state-of-the-art Helios console with 16 tracks.

Page had some great stuff recorded for The Rover – but he had some ideas on how to finish it off. He told Nevison to roll the tape. There was a take incoming. Oh, and he had a word of warning before the red light came on…

“I had an acoustic guitar overdub that I wanted to put on the verses of The Rover, and I told him, ‘Be sure you record this onto an empty track,’” recalled Page. “I went back into the hall at Headley Grange to record the part, but I thought the track sounded a bit odd through the headphones.”

Something was not right.

“When I went back into the mobile studio, I saw why it sounded that way,” said Page. “He erased one of the original guitar tracks, which we’d recorded with two microphones across two tracks. For some reason, he’d rubbed the damn thing out. I’d told him what to do, but he hadn’t paid attention and erased this wonderful, fat-sounding guitar.”

This was a five-alarm fire. The Rover had been rattling around Page’s mind for nearly five years. He started working on it in 1970, initially envisioning it as an acoustic song. Listening to it now, that’s hard to believe; Page’s Les Paul sawing its way across the mix, the metallic sheen of the modulation (the Eventide FL 201 Instant Flanger entered the picture during the Physical Graffiti sessions)… It’s just so electric.

Also, how all that hard-rock strut gives way to the chorus melody is primo Led Zeppelin. After all this time it was coming together and now it was ruined. But Page knew who might be able to fix it.

“When it came time to mix the song, we went to see Keith Harwood, who I had a great relationship with and who was really sympathetic to the band, and we went about salvaging it,” said Page. “Keith took the safety copies of the originals, but we discovered then that there was a problem: it sounded like someone had thrown a blanket over the guitar.

“Keith went to [London’s] Olympic Studios and ran some cables from Studio 2 to Studio 1 and he re-EQ’ed the signal to put more treble on it.”

Harwood and Page copied sections of the track then dropped them in and fixed it up. Harwood worked miracles. Little wonder he got a special thanks in the liner notes. Nevison, who, for the record, denies Page’s account of events and says he never recorded the overdubs, got a barb aimed at him. Thirty years on, Page’s feelings with regards to Nevison had not changed.

“It was an amazing salvage,” he said. “I remember Ron Nevison saying, ‘Oh, never mind…’ when I’d ask him something. I thought he should change his name to Ron Nevermind – because after Physical Graffiti, that was what I thought of him. [laughs] No, he didn’t work with us again, though later, he did work with Heart.”

What Nevison did next might have been the source of Page’s ire, or at least contributing to it. The Physical Graffiti sessions started late. The band had to wait around playing Elvis covers until John Paul Jones got there.

Nevison says he didn’t even know it was a double album when they started. “I don’t know if anybody knew that it would be a double album,” he told The Sonic Road Podcast last year. “But at some point in the recording, they decided to take some tracks from Houses of the Holy.”

Nevison had a hard deadline. He was booked to work on the Tommy film with the Who.

“I called up and said, ‘Look, I can’t continue working on the record,’ and they weren’t really happy about that,” he said. “I guess nobody quits Led Zeppelin, right?”

Bassist Rachel Bolan has co-authored six records with Skid Row, dating back to 1989’s mega-successful self-titled release. Now 62, with the band in search of their next lead singer, he’s stepping out solo with Gargoyle of the Garden State. But if you’re expecting Bolan solo to sound like Skid Row, you’d be wrong. “This is me,” Bolan tells Bass Player. “This is raw, unfiltered me.”

He grew up idolizing song-first – but still accomplished – players like Paul McCartney and Gene Simmons, which led to him helping write hit songs like 18 and Life, Youth Gone Wild, I Remember You, and Monkey Business. “We didn’t really sit down and think about it,” he says of Skid Row’s early creative process. “We had no formula. We just worked completely off of feel.

“Snake Sabo is like the master of the riff. I’ll never forget when he played me 18 and Life for the first time: it was haunting and so cool. We were like, ‘Is this as good as we think it is?’ That kind of stuff – you know, creating – is a process that I love.”

He continues: “I love getting into a flow where you can’t stop writing songs and your whole day just revolves around it. You forget bills – you forget to feed the cats… Actually, I never forget to feed the cats! But you forget everything else when you’re in that bubble.”

Skid Row are still searching for a singer – no, it won’t be Sebastian Bach – but Bolan says they have “four or five” people they’re keen on. They’re writing as a group while he continues to write solo. “It’s not freeing,” he says of his own work. “But it’s cool.

“Now people are hearing my contribution to the songwriting of Skid Row, but without the contribution of Skid Row. I don’t mean that in a bad way; it’s another chapter of my songwriting history.”

After picking up bass, when did you clock what sort of player you wanted to be?

My biggest influences were Paul McCartney, Dennis Dunaway, Gene Simmons, and Roger Glover – guys that could really dictate the feel of the song. That’s really all I knew. They knew when to shine and when to get the hell out of the way.

What techniques were toughest to harness?

Using my pinky! But watching Gene Simmons play – he’s so overlooked as a bass player, and an all-around musician – and learning to sing and play bass at the same time was something I was blown away by. Guys like Paul McCartney and Gene Simmons have these little idiosyncrasies.

But I think the main thing was using my pinky and not overusing an octave. Those guys seemed so good at just poking the octave in the perfect spot, so I had to learn that.

Paul and Gene are also great songwriters, a role you grabbed by the horns with Skid Row.

Even as a little kid I felt like that was a natural thing to do. All the guys I looked up to were also songwriters, and I thought, ‘Maybe I could piece together some music.’ And once I got into intermediate and high school, any chance I had, I would write lyrics.

When you formed Skid Row, were you bothered much with the typical hair metal tropes going around?

I wasn’t really worried about labels. I was worried about how we were perceived. We loved Aerosmith and the Stones, who were so bluesy. That’s the stuff we were into. And when Snake and I wrote, it was about a great groove and a cool riff.

What gear did you use on classic tracks like 18 and Life, I Remember You, and Monkey Business?

What amp did I have? I don’t even remember! But before I could afford a good amp or had an endorsement, I used a ’78 mocha-colored P-Bass. I used that on a lot of the recordings, and I still have it.

And I had a ’70 P-Bass from when they came out with that colored series. They made the red, turquoise, and yellow, and I had the red. I still have that too. Then I had an old Peavey head, and an 8x10 cabinet that was homemade – with no handles!

At first I was broke as a joke, so I couldn’t afford anything. But eventually I moved toward a small company out of New Jersey called Dyne Acoustics, who used 4x10 cabinets. Then, I got my endorsement with Spector, which I’ve used live and in the studio.

What do you remember about writing those early songs? Did you have a sense you were really on to something?

When you write a song, you always hope. You have these dreams and aspirations that your songs will become timeless – but you don’t know. We were 23 when we wrote them; we were just full of ourselves, like, ‘Yeah, we’re going to be a huge band!’

What was the secret sauce?

The thing about Snake was I knew we had the same work ethic. I had a feeling we were on a collision course with something successful and special. I remember coming up with the bassline for Youth Gone Wild; that odd pattern, where I play behind the riff, which came from that weird pattern from Yes’ Roundabout popping into my head.

I’d been playing it straight in rehearsal and at gigs, but when we recorded the demo, I came up with that. So, sometimes I’d work it out before, and sometimes I’d do a quick rewrite on the spot.

Has your inspiration changed much between those early days compared to working on Gargoyle of the Garden State?

I’ll be sitting on my couch watching a Yankees game, and something will pop into my head. I’ll pick up a bass or a guitar, and maybe come up with a riff during the commercial. Then I’ll come down into my studio, and in a couple of days – or even quicker – something comes together.

Skid Row are looking for a singer. Is that why you pivoted to a solo record?

Yeah; we had some downtime. We said we were going to take our time, because we have the luxury of time. We weren’t going to rush into the first person who came in, saying, ‘You can hit the notes – you’re in!’ We’re not in the middle of a record, or a tour, like last time [2022’s The Gang’s All Here], so we had time.

You have an established sound with Skid Row. Did you feel beholden to that with the solo album?

No; I didn’t feel I should try to sound like Skid Row, because it’s made up of a bunch of influences. I was just trying to be me. I think people want to hear something different. Skid Row have been around for the better part of four decades, so you know what fans expect to hear.

Do you have solo shows planned?

I’d love to. [Skid Row drummer] Rob Hammersmith is on board since we have the same schedule. I’d like to get out there.

What’s the latest on Skid Row’s lead singer search?

It’s going, man. We’re pretty keen on a couple of people right now. We received about 400 video submissions that we’ve gone through, and there have been 25 outside of the Sweetwater campaign, you know, just word-of-mouth kind of things. We’ve come across four or five people we thought might work.

For the most part, no one knew Erik [Gronwall, singer from 2022 to 2024], but it worked out great. We’re not worried about or looking for someone with celebrity or history. But sure, if Steven Tyler came along and said, “Hey, let me sing!” we’d be like, “Okay!”

Of course, you have to contend with fans clamoring for a reunion with Sebastian Bach…

It doesn’t last long. Maybe a few days and it’s gone. It’s just one of those non-issues.

Where do you go from here?

I’m already writing to put out a second solo record at some point. We’ll just keep checking singers out; and Skid Row have been writing as well, so that’s cool.

• Gargoyle of the Garden State is on sale now.

An essential rhythm playing technique every guitarist should learn is what I call eighth-note “pendulum” strumming. It involves keeping your pick hand constantly moving down and up across the strings in a steady, unbroken eighth-note rhythm – “1 and, 2 and, 3 and, 4 and” – with downstrokes on the downbeats and upstrokes on the upbeats (the “and” counts).

The movement is comparable to that of a pendulum on a grandfather clock that swings back and forth, the only difference being the horizontal orientation of your arm, as opposed to the vertical hang of a pendulum.

The technique takes a bit of practice to master, but once you get the hang of it, it makes your strumming feel natural, flowing and automatic, to the point where you don’t even need to think about it and can just feel the eighth-note groove. As always, it helps to tap your foot on each downbeat as you play.

Note, however, that this down-up-down-up eighth-note strumming technique isn’t universally applicable to every style of music and at every tempo.

In some styles, such as punk rock and metal, most songs call for the eighth-note rhythms to be strummed with consecutive downstrokes, oftentimes in conjunction with palm muting (P.M.), to create an urgent, “pumping” effect, which is totally cool.

But in many other genres, such as pop, rock, folk, country and R&B, you want to create a more laid-back strum feel, and that’s where eighth-note pendulum strumming works best.

To demonstrate the differences between all-downstrokes strumming (aka “downpicking”) versus down-up strumming, FIGURES 1 & 2 show the same repeating G-to-C chord change strummed two different ways but with the same eighth-note rhythms. (Note the use of the “all-purpose passing chord”.) Notice the difference in the sound and feel of the rhythms.

Sometimes you don’t want to just play a continuous stream of eighth notes and prefer to mix up the rhythms with various combinations of quarter notes and eighth notes, or decide to strum a chord on an eighth-note upbeat and hold it into the next beat, what’s known as a tie. This is where eighth-note pendulum strumming is especially useful and effective.

The key is to keep the pick hand in perpetual motion, without stopping, even while you’re letting a chord ring for longer than an eighth note.

FIGURE 3 shows our G-to-C chord change again, this time with some quarter notes and tied eighth notes used, to break up the “busy-ness” of the continuous eighth-note rhythms.

Notice that, for the quarter notes, you have two consecutive downstrokes and, for the ties, two consecutive upstrokes. Unless you’re performing Pete Townshend-style “windmills,” you’re going to automatically do a silent, “phantom” upstroke between two downstrokes and, likewise, a phantom downstroke between two upstrokes.

The key is to allow your pick hand to silently pass over the strings during these moments where you’re letting the previous strum ring and to not freeze up and “stop, start, stop, start.”

To the observer, it looks like you’re strumming continuous eighth notes, even though you’re playing various combinations of eighth and quarter-note rhythms and using ties.

Again, as always, I recommend counting “1 and, 2 and, 3 and, 4 and” as you play and tapping your foot only on the downbeats, like a human metronome. This will help ingrain the coordination of your technique.

Also keep in mind that, in some songs, there may be parts where you’ll want to momentarily switch from pendulum strumming to all downstrokes, say, for a buildup leading into a chorus.

A good example that comes to mind is the Foo Fighters song Big Me, where guitarist Dave Grohl uses eighth-note pendulum strumming for most of the song but briefly switches to pumping downstrokes in a few spots.

In its earliest days, Guitar World ran a number of columns authored by the late Merle Travis. One of the greatest country guitar players of all time, he was so influential that one of the more common styles of fingerpicking is named after him.

Travis was one of the ultimate “been there, done that” guitar guys (though he was always incredibly humble), and had stories aplenty, some of which he kindly shared to Guitar World readers when the magazine was still in its infancy.

In Guitar World’s second ever issue (September 1980), Travis paid tribute to his late friend, Paul Bigsby, inventor of the revolutionary vibrato tailpiece that still bears his name.

Travis had already known Bigsby – who, in addition to his luthiery hobby, was a motorcycle designer and racer – for years when he asked him to take a look at his Vibrola, the earliest guitar vibrato device. Fitted to Travis’ Gibson L-10, the Vibrola was fine mechanically, but it often pulled the country legend’s strings out of tune.

Bigsby had impressed Travis when he crafted a guitar for his friend, Joaquin Murphey. Travis wrote in Guitar World that when he asked Bigsby if he could fix the Vibrola, “Without hesitating a second, he roared, ‘I can fix anything!’”

Only, things didn’t quite go according to plan at first.

“In about a week he brought it back,” Travis wrote in the 1980 column. “With a flourish he pitched the thing to me and said, ‘Now, see how it works.’

“It was as bad as ever. We all kidded P.A. [Bigsby]. He turned a little red around the ears. His only comment was, ‘The damn thing’s made wrong in the first place.’

“‘You're just a big blowhard,’ I kidded him,” Travis recalled. “‘Let me see you build a vibrato contraption that works.’ ‘By god, I'll do it,’ Bigsby said, and had a hearty laugh.”

Bigsby was confident, determined, and innovative, and had no intention of striking out twice.

“In a couple of weeks he brought over a neat-looking thing with pegs sticking out of a roller for the string ends, and a handle on it. A triangular affair went back to the guitar where the tailpiece fits,” Travis wrote.

“On it was the name ‘Bigsby’. A ‘Bigsby Vibrola’. I put it on my Gibson L-10 and it worked like a charm. There was no way I could pull the strings out of tune.

“I still have that Vibrola. I see its great grandchildren on every kind of guitar imaginable. Later P.A. sold his gadget to Ted M. McCarty. His name is still on it, as it should be.”

Being Eric Clapton’s sideman is no easy feat. Around 1978, Albert Lee found himself in the unenviable position of being Clapton’s right-hand man for five years, following the release of two back-to-back albums, 1977’s Slowhand and 1978’s Backless – and just as Clapton was in the midst of firing his entire backing band.

“We’d met a few times,” Lee tells Guitar World in a recent interview. “When he was with Mayall, I was with Chris Farlowe; we’d play at the Flamingo Club and run into each other fairly often. We didn't hang out much, but he was really friendly; we saw each other a lot and admired each other’s playing.”

Lee was working on an album with Texan singer-songwriter Mark Benno when Clapton’s manager called.

“I did a week in the studio with Eric, and we had a great time. At the end, his manager pulled me aside and said, ‘Do you fancy going on the road with him?’

“My first album was just about to come out, but I thought, ‘I want to do this!’ So off I went with Eric. He fired the whole band at the end of that tour, and I managed to survive. Two years later, he fired another band, and I survived that time, too. So he liked having me around, which is nice! I enjoyed it.”

During this period, Clapton was going through intense mental health struggles while also grappling with substance abuse… which may gone some way to explaining why he was often firing and hiring different band members.

When it came to the music, however, the Clapton–Lee duo worked well, with their contrasting styles complementing instead of competing with each other.

“I thought it would work really well because we’re so unalike. A lot of guys who play with him have always been blues players. But that’s his job, you know? So I thought, ‘I’ll do what I do and try and complement him.’”

Lee was also involved in the 1979 show at Tokyo’s legendary Budokan, immortalized on Clapton’s live album Just One Night. Released in 1980 as a double album, it achieved astounding commercial success, especially for a live album, reaching No. 2 and No. 3 in the US and UK, respectively.

“[I was] in that building and seeing this huge Japanese flag with the rising sun and thinking, ‘Boy, what a place!’” he recalls. Lee goes on to reveal that he was encouraged to play his single, Country Boy, during the show, although it was not included on the live album.

“Eric wouldn’t play on that – he’d usually sit behind his amp with a cigarette and a glass of brandy, going, ‘Go on, Albert! Go on!’ It was great.”

During his time with Slowhand, Lee also wielded a Les Paul Custom that originally belonged to Clapton.

“At the first rehearsals I did with Eric, we were talking about guitars, and I said, ‘I used to have this Les Paul Custom.’ I think I had a picture of it. He said, ‘I’ve got one of those at home somewhere.’

He continues, “And the next day, Alan Rogan, the guitar roadie, walks in with this Les Paul Custom. That became my guitar for when I was working with Eric. That show at Budokan was with the Les Paul.”

Despite Clapton’s personal struggles, Lee notes that he was “very gracious. He let me play solos. I was stretching out towards the end… Maybe I was stretching out a bit too much! [laughs]”

Robert ‘Bubby’ Lewis remembers his first Winter NAMM Show like it was yesterday. It was 2003, he was 17 going on 18, and he had been playing bass for a couple years. He was there with his older sister, the drummer Benita Lewis.

“I was at the Ken Smith booth playing with Etienne Mappé, and I had my eyes closed,” Lewis told Bass Player back in July 2017. “I didn't know anybody – I'm from Flint, Michigan, so I just knew names. I didn't know what people looked like. I opened my eyes, and I saw this big security-guard-looking dude staring at me.

When I put the bass down, he grabbed me by the shoulder and said, ‘Come with me.’ I’m trying to text my sister, like, ‘Help!’

“So he walks me down to the Mike Tobias booth and makes me sit down and play. When I finish, Mike says that if I ever wanted a bass guitar, he'd be happy to build me one. The security guard tells me I sound great. I thank him, and then he says, ‘I'm Andrew Gouche.’

“I was like, ‘Wait... freakin’ Andrew Gouché?’”

Thanks to Gouché, Lewis landed the bass chair with Snoop Dogg in 2007. Shortly after he moved to LA. for good.

Now a familiar MTD-booth presence at the annual NAMM Show, Lewis spends most of his time on the road and in the studio, having also worked with the likes of Jhené Aiko, Dr. Dre, Lupe Fiasco, The Game, Warren G, and Kurupt.

Lewis may have built his reputation as a gospel/hip-hop/R&B bassist, but he’s also constantly refining his knowledge of soloing over complex changes, and every facet of being a working bassist in the 21st century.

“Every time I plug in my bass, I start soloing. With no music behind it, it sounds like a bunch of rubbish. But I hear chords in my mind and I try to solo over them. I explain that to people, and they're like, ‘You don't practice songs?’ Nah. Sometimes I just sit down and start playing whatever I'm hearing.”

You don't warm up over chord progressions?

No. If it sounds like random notes, well, that’s because it is random notes.

I've seen the crazy fingerboard stretches you do.

Somebody wrote me and asked me why I do all those stretches if they can't ever be used, and I was like, ‘Speak for yourself!’ Maybe you can't use them, but I do, and so do lots of my friends, like Hadrien Feraud and Federico Malaman.

Do you prioritize playing what you hear instead of muscle memory?

Muscle memory is one thing, but knowing what you want to play, and executing it, is another. Some guys play scales or modes when they start soloing; everyone has their own method, and there's no right or wrong way.

Personally, I get a rush from trying to create melodies as chords go by. It's much easier to think, ’We’re in E minor, so let me slide up on the G string to the 12th fret and play some E minor pentatonic licks.’ But I like the challenge of coming up with a melody on the fly.

What inspired that connection between your ear and your fingers?

When we were growing up in Flint, I used to be in awe of my boy Eddie Brown. He would be looking at the celling and playing all this stuff on organ. I couldn't figure out what scales he was using, but it wasn't a matter of scales – he was hearing stuff and just playing it.

And Allan Holdsworth, may he rest in peace, he saw dots on his guitar neck that represented all the notes he could play over a particular chord.

Frank Gambale, my other hero, said the same thing. If you know where the notes are, you can play whatever you want.

What’s the best way to feed your mind new ideas?

If you listen to the same stuff, you’ll hear the same stuff. I grew up in church, and I was listening to a lot of gospel, funk, R&B and hip-hop, but when I started checking out rock and country, it changed how I heard things. Listening to Indian music really affected me.

How did you get into Indian music?

When I discovered there was so much outside of Western music theory, I began listening to a bunch of raga, qawwali, and sufi music, and after that, I went on this tangent, studying classical Indian music and classical Arabic music.

How did it influence your playing?

It changed the way I hear stuff. Somebody will ask me to play on a jazz tune, and yeah, I could give it a Charlie Parker approach, but instead I might hear what Bade Ghulam Ali Khan would do. That's how it happened it for me.

How important is it to stay open to different types of music?

If you want to progress and expand, you have to have an open mind. A lot of my homies diss punk rock and metal, but try playing those classic Robert Trujillo basslines while jumping around onstage with Suicidal Tendencies. Thundercat had Mike Muir call me for a couple of gigs in Japan, and it was a workout!

Since launching 15 years ago, Positive Grid has become one of the biggest success stories in the industry. It all began with software products like the JamUp and BIAS line, designed specifically to make studio-quality tones accessible to players everywhere.

A few years later, the company moved into the hardware market with the BIAS head and rack, bringing that tech into the physical world.

But some might say the biggest game-changer came in late 2019 with the arrival of the Spark amp – a revolutionary 40-watt smart desktop workhorse that outperformed its competitors in terms of features, connectibility and ingenuity.

Smart Jam, for example, was created to instantly generate authentic bass and drums to accompany guitarists in real time, essentially serving as a virtual band that never keeps you waiting, while Auto Chords was designed to display shapes in real time, allowing users to slow down or loop difficult sections in order to learn.

Then came the Spark MINI, the even more downsized Spark GO, the Spark LINK wireless system, plus an array of cabs, footswitches and audio interfaces. For the world premiere of the 50-watt Spark 2 in 2024, hosted by GW’s Paul Riario, Nuno Bettencourt took a central role in sharing his enthusiasm for the new release, describing it as “like taking Madison Square Garden wherever you go.”

Around the same time, Steve Vai, Paul Gilbert and Zakk Wylde were signing up to promote their own signature Sparks, putting stamps of approval on the company’s ingenuity alongside custom presets to nail their iconic tones.

Product Manager Mike Lee and Senior Vice President of Marketing Laura Whitmore tell GW about Positive Grid’s journey so far and what we can expect to see down the road.

What was the mission statement early on?

Laura Whitmore: The idea was to make playing guitar feel effortless. We wanted to remove friction. Traditional gear can be complex and expensive. You usually need a whole rig to get you where you want to go. We saw a chance to change that. It was about packing more features and value into one unit to give players great tone, instant control and tools they’d actually use.

For decades, amps followed a familiar path – better tone, more channels, incremental upgrades. Instead of complicating things, we streamlined the amp concept into something more powerful and immediate – a single product you could fire up for everything from practice to writing sessions. It’s not about adding in features for the sake of it. It’s about those “A-ha!” moments, like when you plug in and instantly find a tone that works.

What was the thinking behind your first products, and what were the challenges in terms of delivery?

Mike Lee: The early products came out of fairly simple observations about what guitar players actually needed. JamUp was a mobile app built around a familiar pedalboard interface.

The goal was to give players something that sounded good, felt natural on a phone or tablet and was approachable enough that you didn’t have to think about it. It worked just as well as a daily practice companion as it did for setting up chains and switching between them on stage.

BIAS built on that by letting players go a step deeper – swap components, adjust the details, design their own amp voicing. For a lot of people, that was the first time amp design felt accessible. You didn’t need a workshop or a collection of vintage heads, just an idea and curiosity.

Who were we making this for? Players like the ones on our team. People who cared about tone but didn’t want the cost, the complexity or the isolation that often came with it. The hardest part was keeping things simple. Real amp modeling, component-level control, a community layer – under the hood, there’s a lot going on. But if it doesn’t feel easy to the player, none of it matters.

Spark took the desktop-amp world by storm. How did you go about creating such a game-changing practice tool?

Whitemore: The success of BIAS got us thinking: could we put that software inside a physical product? And that led to Spark. Instead of a traditional practice amp, our team took everything they’d learned about how players work – and the tones they’re after – to build a self-contained product you’d want to plug in and play.

But what really made it fly was the Spark app and its features, like automatic chord recognition, intelligent jamming and seamless tone discovery; players really hadn’t interacted with an amp like that before. It shifted expectations because this was no longer just about sound output. Instead of just dialing in settings, you had a creative tool.

There were moments early on where it wasn’t clear if the idea would fully land, and there were even talks about us going in a different direction. But the positive response from players drove us on. They were using it to get inspired, chase down ideas, freshen up practice sessions and more.

The Spark NEO is the latest addition to the Spark line, including AI features. What did you learn from redeveloping the amps into a headphone format?

Lee: Spark NEO was one of the more ambitious things we’ve taken on, and it came down to a simple question: could we move the full Spark experience into a pair of headphones? Getting there meant solving three very different kinds of problems at once – the sound, the trust and the feel of wearing them, so that people can put them on and focus on playing.

Our team framed it well early on; the biggest challenge wasn’t the size, it was the physics. An amp moves air in a room. A headphone seals sound against your ear. That difference shaped everything. We had to rethink driver design and acoustic tuning to recreate that amp-in-the-room feel inside your head, rather than just shrinking a tone into a pair of headphones.

NEO was our first product where human ergonomics became a central part of the design. Headphones sit on your head for hours, and we wanted NEO to hold up through real, long practice sessions.

Which of your products has been the bestseller, and why do you think that is?

Whitmore: The original Spark launched during Covid, when people were looking for creative outlets and ways to stay connected. People began to see that amp as a companion, a way to start playing, keep improving and stay active when the rest of the music scene shut down.

Aside from the tone, the built-in smart features and the ToneCloud community made people feel less isolated; they shared videos, traded tones and bounced ideas off each other. Each new Spark product found an audience while staying true to that core idea.

Spark MINI hits a sweet spot. Steve Vai loves it so much he collaborated with us on a signature edition. Spark GO made the whole Spark experience even more portable and accessible.

What names are you most proud to have affiliated with Positive Grid?

Whitmore: The Spark MINI collaborations with Vai, Paul Gilbert and Zakk Wylde were special. When giants like that connect with your work, it shows you’re doing something right.

Beyond formal collaborations, seeing someone like Elliot Easton embrace Spark felt like a huge endorsement. We’ve also worked with Jake Bowen from Periphery, Jeff Loomis and Dustin Davidson from August Burns Red. Nuno Bettencourt played a key role in the launch of Spark 2.

What can we expect from Positive Grid over the next year or so?

Lee: The biggest thing for us right now is Reactor, which we’ve just launched. It’s a combo amp, 50 or 100 watts, and it represents a different way of thinking about tone. What makes it different is the technology inside – we call it Amp Intelligence. It’s a sound engine that doesn’t just model existing amps; it builds tone from scratch based on what the player asks for.

You can describe a sound in your own words, upload a recording or snap a photo of something that inspires you, and the amp builds a complete tone for you in seconds. You also can use it to design amp voices that don’t exist anywhere else and save them as your own.

The question wasn’t “How do we add the latest technology to an amp?” It was “What would an amp look like if it actually understood what a player is trying to create, and how can new technology help them do that?”

That’s the direction we’ve been working toward; Reactor is the first product where it all comes together. What it means for musicians, day to day, is less time fighting with menus or hunting for the right preset, and more time playing. The amp listens to what you want and meets you there.

Would you consider making an all-tube guitar amp, or is that not really an area of concern for PG?

Whitmore: An all-tube amp isn’t in our plans, but, as they say, “never say never!” If we did make an all-tube amp, it’d include a new twist that combines the best of the classic experience with something players haven’t seen. So again, it’s not just about making great gear, but finding new ways to inspire guitarists.

• Find out more at Positive Grid.
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

To celebrate 75 years of the Fender Telecaster, Guitar World assembled a riotous group of Tele superfans – who just happen to be pro players in their own right – to decide whom and what they are carving into the side of a mountain in tribute to the guitar that changed the world.

Who’d be carved into your Telecaster Mount Rushmore?

Mike Campbell: James Burton, Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck. But also Mike Bloomfield because he killed it on that first Paul Butterfield Blues Band album [self-titled, 1965]. I wore out that record. He burned that Telecaster all over the place there. He’s the main one who turned me on to that sound.

John 5: Jerry Reed – and Brent Mason because he had that weird-looking Tele and was a huge inspiration to me. Jerry Donahue, who I love so much with those behind-the-nut bends, and, of course, Keith Richards.

John Osborne: Brent Mason introduced a lot of people to the Tele by what he did – and is still doing – on these country records. Then Vince Gill, Danny Gatton and Steve Cropper. Bonus pick? Albert Lee.

Joanne Shaw Taylor: Albert Collins is an absolute legend, and his vibrato is one of the most distinctive in the history of the instrument. Then Prince, one of the most underrated players ever. Keith Richards; I don’t think there’s a guitar player alive who’s come up with as many iconic riffs as Keef. And Jeff Buckley, who gets overlooked, but he created some beautiful guitar parts in his short career.

Greg Koch: Jimmy Bryant because he’s the O.G. James Burton because he was the first and finest of the poultry pluckers. Albert Collins because he was a true original with the tone and chops of doom. Roy Buchanan, just because. And Danny Gatton, because, because… [Laughs]

Kirk Fletcher: Prince, Bobby Womack, Eddie Hinton, Albert Collins, Reggie Young, Cornell Dupree, David Spinozza, Al McKay, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, Jesse Ed Davis, John Leventhal, Roy Buchanan, Roy Nichols, Brent Mason, Guthrie Trapp, Mike Stern – and I definitely still missed a huge amount. And, hands down, Robben Ford!

Keith Urban: James Burton, Keith Richards, Ray Flacke and Brent Mason.

Brent Mason: Jerry Reed, James Burton, Roy Nichols and Danny Gatton.

Jim Weider: Roy Buchanan for his tone, touch and expression; James Burton for his fingerpicking style with country bends; Steve Cropper for his rhythm playing, which set the standard; Jesse Ed Davis for his touch, tone, feel and liquid bends.

Hugh Cornwell: James Burton epitomizes the Tele. Then there’s Steve Cropper, a lesson to us all in longevity, and Wilko Johnson. His style was so unique.

J Mascis: D. Boon from Minutemen for being lovable, energetic, trebly and inventive. Keith Richards… just riff after riff, song after song, and cool solos. “Cousin” Kenny Vaughan from Marty Stuart’s band for his ripping country and rock licks and always serving the song. And Terry Reid. I loved seeing him with a Tele in his hand at Glastonbury [1971].

Christone “Kingfish” Ingram: Prince for the way he approached the guitar. Albert Collins for that icy, cutting tone. “Frosty” says everything you need to know. It’s raw, direct and unmistakable. Cornell Dupree for taste and feel. The way he sits in a groove is unreal.

He shows you how musical a Tele can be without ever overplaying. Keith Richards – the riff side of it. Open tunings, rhythm playing, just that attitude. He made the Tele sound like a band by itself. Roy Buchanan and Danny Gatton stretched the instrument in ways that still don’t make sense. Honorable mentions to Bill Kirchen and Freddie Stone!

Graham Coxon: Wilko Johnson and Albert Lee. And then Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. Albert Lee was insane because he was 16 and playing with all these people, like the Everly Brothers, doing that chicken pickin’. And Frank Black from the Pixies, because Surfer Rosa was amazing.

But there’s also Paul Weller, David Gilmour and George Harrison, who you saw playing that solid-rosewood monstrosity at that point where they seemed to be allowed to play something other than Rickenbackers and Gretsches through Vox amps. [Laughs]

Marty Stuart: Clarence White, Roy Nichols, Luther Perkins, James Burton, Ralph Mooney, Don Rich and Jimmy Bryant – all with a fun, accessible California vibe. Living in Mississippi, I could close my eyes and see palm trees when those guys played.

There was a cool factor. They could dazzle you, but they could also lay low with three notes. I’ve heard the songs a thousand times over, but they still light my heart up the same way they did the first time I heard ’em.

What are your favorite Tele riffs or solos?

Mike Campbell: My first thought is me going to the first Led Zeppelin record – all those riffs on Dazed and Confused and Good Times Bad Times.

John 5: Jimmy Page played the Stairway to Heaven solo on a Tele – and how incredible is that? And I love those Rolling Stones songs where Keith Richards plays a Tele, like Honky Tonk Women, and when Jerry Reed did Jerry’s Breakdown on a Tele.

Greg Koch: The Nightrider by Jimmy Bryant & Speedy West, Ice Pick by Albert Collins, Albert Lee’s solo on Dave Edmunds’ version of Sweet Little Lisa, Roy’s Bluz by Roy Buchanan and any version of Danny Gatton doing Harlem Nocturne.

Brent Mason: Two More Bottles of Wine, which has Albert Lee soloing on Emmylou Harris’ single. Workin' Man Blues, specifically James Burton’s solo and intro. Alabama Jubilee, but the original version with the Jerry Reed intro and solo. Goodnight, Irene with Jerry Reed’s solo and intro.

And Honky Tonk Night Time Man with Roy Nichols’ solo. All these tunes inspired me to play a Tele as a kid. I also watched my Uncle Terry play his white Tele with his blackface Super Reverb and coil cord. With tons of reverb!

Kirk Fletcher: Rainy Night in Georgia by Brook Benton, I’m in Love by Wilson Pickett and Memphis Soul Stew by King Curtis, but I like the live Fillmore version with Cornell Dupree and the studio version by Reggie Young.

Done Change My Way of Living by Taj Mahal with Jesse Ed Davis, Natural Anthem by Jesse Ed Davis, Frosty by Albert Collins, Jesus Just Left Chicago by ZZ Top, Sweet Dreams by Roy Buchannan, Swinging Doors by Merle Haggard, Start It Up by Robben Ford and so many more!

Keith Urban: Guitars & Cadillacs by Dwight Yoakam (Pete Anderson on guitar), Crazy Little Thing Called Love by Queen (with Brian May playing the solo), Country Boy and Chattahoochee by Alan Jackson (featuring Brent Mason) and Highway 40 Blues by Ricky Skaggs.

Taylor Goldsmith: Brown Sugar by the Stones, Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen, Paranoid Android by Radiohead, Breakdown by Tom Petty, Mama Tried by Merle Haggard and Let It Be by the Beatles.

Jim Weider: Paul Burlison’s Train Kept-a-Rollin’ with that thumb and first finger; Roy Buchanan’s Sweet Dreams, which is so beautiful and melodic; Jesse Ed Davis on Jackson Browne’s Doctor My Eyes – his solo, tone and double-stop bends. Any live James Burton with Elvis Presley, any Ricky Nelson with his pick-and-fingers country bends, and Clarence White doing the Byrds’ Eight Miles High live with his B-bender.

J Mascis: Happy by the Stones. It’s got a ripping riff right outta the gate, and it goes on from there. Communication Breakdown by Led Zeppelin because it’s punishing and awesome. Last Word by Youth Brigade for its buzzsaw mayhem. American Girl by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers because it’s classic, and the lead at the end is magic. Cut by Minutemen because it’s relentless and piercing, yet harmonic.

Hugh Cornwell: James Burton's solo on Ricky Nelson's Just a Little Too Much. I had the record in my teens, and the solo was my favorite part of the song. You can't get a more perfectly composed solo.

Christone “Kingfish” Ingram: The live While My Guitar Gently Weeps by Prince. It didn’t feel like he was playing a Tele; it felt like he was playing everything at once. [Ed. Note: Prince is actually playing a Hohner Madcat in that classic 2004 video. There was a Tele on the scene, but it was played by Jeff Lynne.] Plus Frosty by Albert Collins, Hey Joe by Roy Buchanan, Brown Sugar by the Stones and Hot Rod Lincoln by Bill Kirchen. They’re all from different worlds, and that’s kind of the point.

Joanne Shaw Taylor: Iced Over by Albert Collins, Grace by Jeff Buckley, Prince’s While My Guitar Gently Weeps – and Jumpin’ Jack Flash and Tumbling Dice by the Rolling Stones.

Graham Coxon: Country Boy by Head Hands & Feet with Albert Lee. He’s just going insane. I’ll send that off to people because it makes people happy, and it’s just brilliant. And then there’s early Zeppelin, where Jimmy Page had that Dragon Tele. This was before he got his Les Paul and all his sperm were going nuts. [Laughs] And then, early Eric Clapton with the Yardbirds.

That stuff… what an experience that would have been to get that flipping amp and just dime it. As far as others, in America – in Nashville – there are people. Those people will read this and think, “Who is this asshole, Graham Coxon?” And those people are playing Teles properly, you know, just doing it nicely.

Marty Stuart: If you go to Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Three, there are several versions of Folsom Prison Blues, but if you go to the live recital version, what Luther Perkins played on that takes me back to when I was nine and got my first guitar. It reminds me of everything I love about the guitar. Merle Haggard’s Workin' Man Blues with James Burton playing the solo; if they recorded that song one more time, it would not have sounded the same. They caught lightning in a bottle.

Clarence White’s solo on This Wheel’s on Fire from Dr. Byrds & Mr. Hyde – go figure that one out! [Laughs] Love’s Gonna Live Here by Buck Owens and the Buckaroos. If [Buckaroos guitarist] Don Rich had lived – same as Clarence White – there’s no telling where he would have taken it.

Why do you play a Tele?

John 5: When kids are growing up, they see something and are drawn to it. I saw that guitar and loved it. I had an acoustic when I was six, but then I saw the electric guitars on Hee Haw. I was like, “Wow!” They looked so shiny – and the shape… I didn’t think there was any other shape for an electric guitar besides a Telecaster. They all used Teles on that show, and I was so taken aback by it.

Greg Koch: It was the only Fender that was available to me in my formative years, and it just so happened to be the perfect tool for what I do. I love other guitars, but the Telecaster and its variants are always home for me. If I have to bring one guitar into the breach, that’s the one I’m reaching for.

Brent Mason: It’s perfect for any situation. Whether it’s country, rock, jazz, blues… the tone, the pickups, the wood all play into its character. And it’s practically indestructible!

Keith Urban: It’s like meat and potatoes, and it’s built to take any player's style, from a light touch to beating the hell out of it.

Joanne Shaw Taylor: I started on a Strat, and while I still enjoy it for rhythm parts, I prefer the Tele for its bite. That and its versatility seem to suit me best.

Jim Weider: It was popular in the ’60s and used by the guitar heroes I watched, like Steve Cropper, James Burton, Rick Nelson, Jeff Beck, Robbie Robertson and Roy Buchanan. I also loved – and love – the look and feel of the Tele.

J Mascis: I just like the leads I play on a Tele better than other guitars. It sounds more inspired and less generic.

Graham Coxon: It’s light, and it seems to disappear when you play it. I was this Les Paul person when I was young, and it felt kind of sharp, and it was hurting my ribs. Then, in the early days of Blur, while we were recording the first few records with [producer] Stephen Street, he had this lovely old Tele, and I was like, “This is so comfortable.”

I didn’t have to think about bruised ribs. I’ve never used Teles nicely. I’ve put them through tons of pedals to get what I need out of them, but it’s such a beautiful and easy instrument to play, so that’s why I used them, just as a tool to get the sounds I needed. But I’ve realized that proper Tele players don’t really do that. [Laughs]

Marty Stuart: When I was falling in love with guitar and putting my first band together when I was nine, I’d look around on TV and magazine covers, and it was the guitar my heroes played. I just wanted to get into the parade, wear cool cowboy clothes and boots, play a Telecaster through a Fender amp and play the kind of songs that I loved.

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

Jerry Cantrell can be his own worst critic. He will have song ideas he will sit on and see nothing in them, only for his bandmates in Alice In Chains – or his producer – to persuade him to change his mind.

Speaking to Guitar World in 1996, upon the release of the Seattle grunge legends’ eponymous third album – the so-called ‘Dog Album’ – he explained how it took a group effort to help him sort treasure from trash.

“We have shared tastes as well as shared dislikes. It’s an unspoken language that we have,” he explained. “That’s not to say that we don't sometimes disagree on stuff. There have been plenty of times where I think something is completely horrid and the other guys will make me check it out again. For weeks I’ll be like, ‘God, that sucks!’ Then one day it’s like, ‘Ohhh, I get it. Okay. That’s good!’ [laughs]”

As Cantrell says, it can take weeks for him to come around to an idea he originally thought was bogus. Sometimes longer. Sometimes he never comes around to them, especially when it comes to his guitar solos. It’s always weird to hear an artist appraise their own work, especially when that work has established itself as part of the pop-cultural canon.

For many, Dirt is a front-to-back classic, the feelbad hit of the ‘90s, all swampy nihilism and self-loathing. But key are the moments of grace and levity that give it this great dynamic power. Cantrell’s ‘70s rock influences expanding the canvas. Hate to Feel could be an alternate title track, such as it captures the vibe.

But its seesawing wah solo? Cantrell never liked it. “I thought the solo on Hate To Feel was a piece of shit,” he said.

Cantrell was in good spirits in ’96. The ‘Dog Album’ had his tail wagging. They had recorded it at their usual spot in downtown Seattle, Studio X, then owned by the Heart sisters, Ann and Nancy Wilson.

Even so, there was part of him that still wished he could have found the time to nip back into the booth to fix up the solo to Grind and do it all over again. Toby Wright, the producer, talked him out of it. What we hear on the record was what he tracked for the ADAT demo.

“[It] works fine. I didn’t think it was that strong, but I never got around to fixing it,” said Cantrell. “Toby kept trying to sell me on it. I kept telling him I wanted to do it better because it just didn’t seem to work for me. In the end, it’s perfect for the record, but it took me a long time to feel comfortable with it.”

Maybe that is because Cantrell doesn’t see lead guitar as his strongest suit. We know he can rip – the solo to Them Bones has everything, including that Aristotelian narrative structure where we get a beginning, a middle and an end. Plus, it doesn’t outstay its welcome.

Cantrell says he has never been big on solos.

“I just put in what needs to be there. I’m more of a rhythm player who plays lead – or tries to play lead,” he said. “I’m not saying I do bad shit, but I just do what fits the part. I’m more interested in what the whole picture is instead of creating a big vehicle for Cantrell to wank off all over everybody.”

For most bands, life on the road is a carefully choreographed operation: soundchecks, hotels, venues, tour buses and the occasional late-night scramble to find something resembling dinner.

For The Last Dinner Party, however, the reality has often been somewhat more chaotic – and bassist Georgia Davies wouldn’t have it any other way.

Since the band’s rapid ascent to fame, Davies and her bandmates have found themselves navigating sold-out shows, international tours and the strange logistics of keeping five musicians functioning on the road.

Along the way, she’s taken on roles that extend well beyond playing bass guitar, from unofficial “food and vibe technician” to participant in the band’s “Roadie Friday” tradition.

And then there was Kansas when a hospital stay offered a stark reminder that even the most glamorous rock ’n’ roll adventures can sometimes go sideways.

“Touring asks a lot of you – physically and mentally,” says Davies. “Musicians get injured all the time, whether it’s falls, repetitive strain, exhaustion or the psychological toll of constantly being on the road.

“I could have fallen down the bus stairs anywhere, but the fact it happened halfway through a huge American tour and I ended up in hospital in Kansas somehow feels symbolic.

“Emily [Roberts], our guitarist, was amazed I was happy to get back on a tour bus so soon afterwards. She said if it had happened to her, she’d never have stepped on one again. I was just desperate to get back out there. Looking back, though, it is a reminder of how much of yourself you give to this job.

“It’s an all-consuming way to live. But I'd still choose it every time because I absolutely love it.”

So much so, in fact, that Davies turned her experiences into The Hunger and the Road, her own Substack chronicling the food, travel, chaos and camaraderie that come with life in a touring band.

“Everyone expects stories about getting signed or making records, but the blog is about the in-between moments that nobody ever sees.

“People imagine you disappear backstage and materialize in another city the next day. They don't think about the reality of living on a tour bus, wandering around motorway services in your pyjamas, buying bottled water and whatever food you can find before climbing back on for another eight-hour drive.

How did the band meet?

We all met at university, so in the early days it was the classic routine of studying, working jobs, rehearsing with barely any gear, and playing gigs around London’s independent venues.

Then everything changed thanks to Lou Smith, who documents unsigned bands. He shot a video of us that somehow made its way around the industry, and suddenly we were getting emails from managers, labels… and, weirdly, lawyers.

Our reaction was, ‘We're just a rock band. Why do we need a lawyer?’ As it turns out, we definitely needed one!

From there, things moved incredibly quickly. We found ourselves in the middle of a label bidding war, which was surreal. We got to meet everyone, hear what they had to offer and, admittedly, enjoy a few very fancy dinners.

About a year later, our debut album came out, and roughly 18 months after that we released the second. So while it hasn’t been a long career in terms of years, we’ve packed a huge amount into that time.

Going from playing clubs to having lawyers knocking on your door sounds exciting, but also pretty intimidating.

The funny thing is that lawyers seem to be the first people who approach a band. You’d expect it to be labels or managers, but it wasn’t. Before we'd even decided to pursue this professionally, we had three different lawyers asking if we needed representation.

What was your goal when you started out?

We came up through the London scene when post-punk was everywhere. There were so many brilliant, dark, atmospheric bands, and we wanted to be part of that world because they were the coolest people in London. But we also realised pretty quickly that we were complete nerds.

We weren't very good at pretending not to care. Plenty of bands have that effortless, ‘we just threw this together’ energy, but we were the opposite. We cared about every detail, and we embraced that.

Before we'd even rehearsed properly, we'd already imagined this little universe built around ideas of decadence, euphoria and excess. We wanted everything to feel huge – visually and musically.

On the first record it was almost a running joke. If someone asked, ‘Should we add more strings?’ the answer was always yes.

Where did that mindset come from?

Looking back, I think it was probably a reaction to coming out of COVID. We’d all lived through this period of restriction, isolation and constant caution. Once that was over, our instinct was just to throw ourselves into everything.

How would you describe your approach to bass?

I've always loved melodic bass players like Peter Hook – people whose basslines have real character. I think it was on the second record that I really started to hear my own voice coming through.

On the first album I was still figuring out how the bass could fit into these really busy arrangements. In a funny way, being a less experienced bass player actually helped. I wasn't trying to show off – I was trying to make the songs work. Now I feel like the basslines I write actually sound like me.

What's your current bass rig?

My main bass for years has been a red Fender Mustang that I bought when I was 18. More recently I've been playing an Epiphone Jack Casady hollow-body with flatwound strings, which has become a real favorite. It's probably the bass people comment on most because it looks so distinctive, but I also used it quite a bit in the studio and it sounds fantastic.

Do you get attached to particular instruments?

Absolutely. My red Mustang is named Cassandra after Cassandra Wong from Wayne’s World. My parents showed me Wayne's World when I was pretty young, and I remember thinking, ‘That’s the coolest person I've ever seen. I want to do that.’ She was a huge influence, so my bass became Cassandra.

Recently the electronics started playing up and Fender very kindly sent me two replacement Mustangs, one gold and one cream. But I wasn't interested. I just kept saying, ‘No – we’re fixing Casandra. I'm not playing the cream one.’

Some instruments just become part of who you are. Once you’ve built that relationship, replacing them isn't really an option.

I wanted to ask about your Substack post titled Service Stations of the World.

I've spent far too much time hungover in service stations, and they can be bleak. When you're exhausted, and you've got another eight hours on the bus, stopping somewhere genuinely nice can completely change your day. Those little stops become a much bigger part of tour life than people probably realize.

Another post to look out for is titled Hangover Inferno. Can you explain Roadie Friday?

Roadie Friday is the day before a day off – whatever day of the week that happens to be. For most people, Friday has that feeling of, ‘Work's over, let's go out.’ On tour, that feeling could happen on a Monday, a Thursday or whenever you’ve got a rare day off coming up. The final show before that break instantly becomes Roadie Friday.

‘Should we go out? Should we do shots? Should we stay out until four in the morning? Well... it’s Roadie Friday!’ It’s completely ridiculous – but also brilliant.

You also mention a drink called The Hammer?

My tour manager – who is genuinely excellent, despite what I'm about to say – came up with that after we'd had this chaotic crew dinner in America.

We’d spent forever trying to split the bill, everyone got increasingly drunk, and eventually he announced that I needed a Hammer. It turned out to be a double gin and tonic poured into a pint of lager.

Another thing I loved from the blog was discovering that you're effectively the band’s food coordinator. How seriously do you take that responsibility?

Far more seriously than I probably should! I’ve basically become the band’s food and vibe technician. Before every trip I’ll research the hotel, look up the best restaurants nearby, ask fans on Instagram for recommendations and then build a shared Google Maps list for the whole band. By the time we arrive in a city, everyone has this carefully curated guide to the best places to eat.

Your Substack posts also talk about the strange feeling of coming off tour.

For me, it takes at least 24 hours while my brain adjusts. Even if I haven't seen my fiancée for months, I’ll be unbelievably excited to see him... but I’ll also need a bit of space.

One thing I realised while writing the blog is that cooking has become my way of reclaiming a bit of control after tour. On the road, everything is scheduled for you – when you wake up, when you eat, when catering opens, when you leave. Cooking a few dinners at home is my way of resetting. After that, I’m usually fit for human interaction again.

Is it the same within the band?

Completely. At the airport we’re all hugging each other, saying, ‘That was the best tour ever – I love you all.’ Then nobody hears from anyone for about a week.

It’s not personal. We all understand that’s just part of the process. Everyone needs a little cooling-off period before we remember how to be normal people again. Then we’re ready to start talking about the next thing.

What advice would you give to aspiring musicians?

The biggest mistake people make is convincing themselves they can’t do it before they’ve even tried. They think they need more lessons, another qualification, a music degree or years more experience before they're allowed to join a band.

But some of the most interesting musicians I know came at their instrument from completely unconventional backgrounds. They developed their own voice precisely because they weren’t following a rulebook.

If I’d listened to that voice telling me I wasn’t good enough, I never would’ve joined a band – even though it was all I wanted to do.

So my advice is simple: just do it. Start a band. Go to as many gigs as you possibly can. Immerse yourself in music and learn by doing. That’s how I did it.

• To read more from The Hunger and The Road head to Georgia Davies’ Substack.

Heartland storytelling seems to come easy for Gaslight Anthem frontman Brian Fallon, but he couldn’t do it without the guitar. “The guitar is a magical thing,” Fallon tells Guitar World. “Even more so after I found my own style.”

That style is apparent on classic Gaslight songs like Great Expectations and American Slang, and his latest solo singles, Not Bad for New Jersey and Better Before, which come from his upcoming solo record, Not Bad for New Jersey.

Once again, it all boils down to six-strings. “I really love this,” Fallon says. “A lot of players don’t want to try and find their own thing, but it’s really important. I just put my fingers where they feel good, and that works. Sometimes people are afraid of that, but there’s no reason to be.”

The rest of 2026 sees Fallon focusing on his solo work with his band The Painkillers, but 2027 will be for The Gaslight Anthem. “It works because those guys in Gaslight like to chill and recharge for a year after we tour and do promo. That’s when I said, ‘Okay, I’m gonna do my other thing over here,’’’ Fallon says.

“I just love music so much that I can’t sit still. I need to do it all the time. I’ll do my solo shows, and during that time, I’m writing for Gaslight, so I’m always flip-flopping. I wouldn’t recommend it, and I don’t know why it works, but it does. [laughs]”

During a break from the action, Fallon dialed in with GW to talk gear, his love for and approach to rhythm guitar, why Keith Richard is the GOAT, and more.

Do you write mostly on guitar?

I almost always write on guitar. I’ve written a few songs on piano, but it rarely happens. It’s always guitar, and never acoustic. I like electric guitar – especially a [Fender] Telecaster. I can just sit in the back of a van, play that thing, and if you stick your chin up to it, you can hear it. It's usually either my black Tele or an old ’62 Fender Jaguar that’s been re-fanned.

What about the Tele and Jag inspires you?

I can do everything with the Tele. It goes everywhere with me. It’s become part of me and is a really trusted tool. And in a completely different way, the Jaguar is old and mysterious… it’s a little beat up, and I wonder who owned it, where it’s been… someone really played the crap out of it. [laughs]

Do you prefer worn-in guitars as opposed to new ones?

I do wonder where [they’ve] been before me and what spooky stories are in [them]. I think the old ones do that. The new ones have another kind of thing, too. When you get a certain guitar, it will make you play differently from others. It’s about how the instrument grabs you.

But the old ones have this other element… if it’s too nice, I don’t like it. [laughs] The vintage ones that hang on the wall, those are not for me. I feel like they repel me, because I have a couple of really nice guitars, like a 1945 Martin, and it sounded good, but it was like sunlight to a vampire.

Is that because you couldn’t really lay into it?

Yeah, I knew that it was delicate. Like, it had a little case bite hold in it, and you could just tell that it was like, ‘If you treat me the wrong way, I’m gonna fall apart.’ [laughs] I don’t like that feeling… I can’t be trusted with nice things. That’s the truth!

As you’re working on your new solo music, what amps and pedals help shape your tone?

Most of the time it’s the same. Anytime I try and change it, like patching in a Quad Cortex, I get it sounding good, and then it goes back to the nice things thing… I’m just one of those people who needs to have this one thing, and it does that thing, and I know what it does, and that’s it.

I usually use an [MXR] Phase 90, a wah pedal, and for this stuff, I wanted more of a chorus sound, like The Police, so I have [producer] Butch [Walker] help with that. I can say to him, “Dude, do something like Mark Knopfler,” and it might as well be like Mark Knopfler is sitting there.

How do you view the progression of your playing?

I can only do what I can do, and that’s it. I can’t try to keep up with everybody – and I don’t have to. I do one thing, and I think I do that thing better than almost anyone, you know, the rhythm thing. I’m like the guy in the back who plays rhythm. I’m like Izzy Stradlin.

What’s the key to solid rhythm guitar?

Not getting in the way of the song – but also not being boring. Rhythm guitar is an incredibly difficult skill, and the people who are best at it, like Keith Richards… it’s not just sitting there and strumming a chord. You’re not just playing parts – you’re catching an upstroke, you’re adding a triad-based thing, so it’s all of that. I don’t think I’m a master yet, but I’m getting to be Bruce Lee-level on rhythm guitar. [laughs]

A common thread within your solo work and with The Gaslight Anthem is storytelling. How does the guitar lend itself to that?

Man, it’s really important. It’s bizarre because if I sit at a piano and play the same chords, it’s not the same as on guitar. There is nothing like the sounds you can make on guitar – especially a Telecaster. That sound really speaks to me. Like, the overtones in a chord, there can be only a little bit of information; your brain fills in the other instruments, and it becomes a symphony.

What advice would you have for young players struggling to find their sound, considering that the information overload out there today causes players to become discouraged by their so-called limitations?

I struggled with that for a long time. So many players out there are just so advanced from what I think I’m capable of doing. But going back to Keith Richards, while he didn’t have much to do with this record, his essence of guitar playing lives in my [style].

I’ve always viewed him as… I can’t do all that other stuff, but I can do that. I feel that rhythm deep in me. Keith did that with all the attitude in the world, and it was awesome, and it was totally cool. So, you can do your own thing. You don’t have to be a shredder.

And even if someone can shred, can they write a song?

Totally. Some people underestimate what a great guitar player is. There’s multiple facets to it. There’s the traditional shredder, but then there’s Julian Lage or John Frusciante from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Take Snow, for example; that lick isn’t hard to play…, but it’s super hard to get up to speed for five minutes.

I don’t think a lot of people could do it cleanly. I really try to excel at that kind of thing. Instead of solos, I want to learn licks. It’s about the relationship between the two. That kind of playing is overlooked.

We have a lot of Ron Wood’s and Mick Taylors’, but we need more Keith Richards’s and Marley’s. But you know what I think is one of the most fundamental licks?

What’s that?

Your Favorite Mistake by Sheryl Crow. It’s crazy. It’s slamming. That opening lick is so dope. It’s Wendy Melvoin, and it’s perfectly played. That there is the goal. If you’re a guitar player out there, go listen to her – that is the way you should play guitar. But only half of you… the other half needs to be shredders, because every Izzy needs a Slash. [laughs]

Where does your solo work sit compared to your work with the Gaslight Anthem?

With the Gaslight Anthem, we know what people want from us. We’re all explorers… those guys really love to search and see what we come up with. I’m a huge fan of that. But at the same time, there’s this other thing where I want to steer the whole thing.

It would be a disservice to the guys in Gaslight to instruct them on what I want a song to be. But I always send those guys my solo records before anyone else hears it. I was like, “You guys check this out and see what I’ve got,” and they send me their stuff, too. So, we’re in a good spot now because we’ve been best friends for like 20 years.

What’s next for you in the near and far?

Next, we will probably write the next Gaslight Anthem album, and then probably work on that next year. And on guitar, I’ve been doing this weird thing where I’ve been learning the solo from Skid Row’s I Remember You. [laughs] I’m like really [New] Jersey, and I wanted to learn some of those little dive bomb licks. Let’s just say it’s funny what you can do with a Jaguar and that floating trem. [laughs]

• Not Bad For New Jersey is out September 10 via Lesser Known Records
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

“I’d never say they were difficult to work with, because we had a really good understanding of each other,” Elliott Randall told me during a recently rediscovered – and previously unpublished – 2003 interview. He was talking about working with Steely Dan’s co-founders, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen.

“Everybody’s got their own brand of craziness,” Randall said. “With Donald, Walter and me, we just realized we were a bunch of nutty guys, and – as long as we could get together on a level that we felt happy when creating music – what more could you ask for? Nobody could be more meticulous than those two. They were absolutely the top of the bill.”

Prior to working with Becker and Fagen on their Steely Dan outings, Randall first met the pair when they were doing time on the road as part of Jay and the Americans’ backing band and later while working on early pre-Steely Dan demos.

“We’d been friendly acquaintances for quite a while, and I was asked to do a bunch of their demos when they were trying to get themselves a deal in New York,” Randall said. “This was way before they got signed to ABC. Then in 1972, they moved to California. I moved there too [from New York], sort of part time to test the waters and see if I liked it.

“At that point they asked me to join the group, but I had a funny feeling that I’d be better off just being friendly with the guys. I said, ‘I don’t want to join the group, but I’d be happy to make records with you. If you want me to come and do personal appearances, that’d be fine, but I don’t want to be a full-time member of a group at this point in my life.’ That was met with a little bit of eyebrow raising.”

When Becker and Fagen finally began working on Steely Dan’s debut album, 1972’s Can’t Buy a Thrill, they asked Randall to contribute guitar to two tracks, Kings and Reelin’ In the Years, the latter of which would secure Randall’s reputation as one of the group’s go-to guitarists. His blistering solo is nothing short of iconic.

“That solo actually was the first thing that happened when they hit the red button,” Randall said. “I listened to it a couple of times and said, ‘Let’s roll the tape – let’s record.’ I just wacked it off from the very beginning to the very end, but it turned out that the tape operator hadn’t pressed the ‘record’ button. So we wound up doing another one, which is the one you hear on the record.

“[Because of] that incident, producer Gary Katz introduced a policy of where the minute somebody starts doing anything, he made sure you hit the red button so everything was recorded. You never know when you’ll get an accidental piece of music.”

Randall used his usual workhorse, a ’60s Fender Strat, on the track. “I bought it in 1965, though it was two years old at the time,” he says. “It cost me a whopping $175. While the body is ’63, the neck is ’65 [because] I had put it in the trunk of a friend’s sports car on the way to a gig. When we got there, the case had wiggled around so much that the neck got broken.

“But I was able to get a new neck right away. The guitar has been basically that ever since. It’s souped up in terms of the pickups and electronics. The front pickup is a Gibson PAF humbucker I [installed] in 1969.

“There’s a wonderful guitarist from Toronto, Dominic Troyano. He had a Telecaster with two humbucking pickups, and I loved the sound of it. He said, ‘If you love it, let me take you to my friends, Barney Kessel’s Music World in L.A., and they’ll put one in for you.’ They totally warmed up the instrument. It’s really big and fat and very un-Strat-like.”

And then there’s that fiery, unrestrained solo on Kings.

“It’s a really out-to-lunch solo that goes from being very sort of within the changes to being dissonant and wacky,” Randall said. “It actually kind of spoke from my head state at the time. I was going through some serious life changes. I had a failed marriage – we just didn’t understand each other – and I was in the process of getting a divorce. I just played out my nuttiness in that song.”

The obscure lyrical content to Steely Dan’s music has confounded many fans, yet Becker and Fagen have consistently refrained from revealing much behind the songs’ meaning, preferring the subject matter to remain enigmatic.

“They were into combining elements of good literature along with their sophisticated musical knowledge,” Randall said. “They’d write a song like Rikki Don’t Lose That Number, and there’d be a story behind it, but you play it for 10 different people and 10 different people will find 10 different stories.

“That’s the beauty of it. It’s almost like looking at certain kinds of paintings and how they will evoke different thoughts from different people. You can span the entire spectrum, and nobody’s wrong. And the painter’s having a good time because everybody’s enjoying the work in their own way.”

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

Sharing airspace with someone while they listen to your music is among the most mortifying things a working musician can experience. It often happens at the most unsuspecting moments, and it never gets any less embarrassing.

During our call, Kyle Thomas – aka King Tuff – recounted an example of this humiliation ritual during an Uber ride. The former L.A. but now Vermont-based singer/guitarist is one of those insanely prolific rock ’n’ roll lifers who always seems to be recording or touring in one of his bands: King Tuff, Witch or Ty Segall’s backing band, the Muggers. Naturally, Thomas had his guitar in tow. It’s a late-’90s Gibson SG that Thomas painted with metallic blue craft paint.

“I don’t tour with this guitar anymore,” Thomas says. “It has a broken headstock that was fixed with this Frankenstein bolt. I snapped the headstock while trying to do a throw-it-over-my-shoulder move. I brought it to an idiot who tried to fix it with epoxy.

“Within weeks it peeled away and ruined the joint so you couldn’t even use wood glue. I brought it to Reuben Cox at Old Style Guitar Shop in L.A. He’s a genius. He just drilled a bolt through it and put it on either side and it stayed ever since. A lot of people might think it was ruined, but I think it’s like 10 times cooler because of that.”

The Uber driver, noticing his guitar case, probed Thomas about its contents. Rather than let the driver imagine some Antonio Banderas-in-Desperado gunslinger fantasy, Thomas told the truth.

“I told him the name of my band and he wanted to listen to it. I’m like, ‘Oh, God… here we go,’” Thomas says.

It gets worse.

“He turns it down and says, ‘Okay, here’s my review: the band is good. It’s got a good groove, but you’ve got to get a new singer,’” he says with a laugh. Thomas agreed completely.

“I sound kind of like a demented child, but there are people out there that relate to it or like it,” he says.

“There are some songs where I do think I sound great. A lot of the singers that I love don’t have technically great voices, but I love them because they’re unique. You’ve got to embrace it all. You’re not gonna win over every Uber driver, and you’re not gonna win over everybody on the planet.”

• MOO is out now via MUP.
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

Welcome to Guitar World’s weekly gear round-up, your one-stop-shop for keeping up to date with what’s been happening in the big wide world of guitar gear over the past seven days.

From new electric guitars to amp modeler updates, the guitar industry is never short of fresh releases, and it can sometimes be hard to stay in the loop with every new launch.

To make things a little easier, we’ve put together an essential must-read guide that will cover the major releases, the boutique drops, and everything in between.

Below you'll find my personal highlights from the week, along with plenty of honorable mentions for the new gear you might have missed. Agree with my picks? Have a highlight of your own? Let us know in the comments.

Death By Audio x Rainger FX Amp Crash

When Oliver Ackermann and David Rainger gather around the breadboard to work on a pedal collab, expect the unexpected – and the Death By Audio x Rainger FX Amp Crash does not disappoint.

It’s a pedal, yes, gathering reverb, echo and chorus in one unit. But it’s also a guitar amp and a microphone, complete with a 2” internal speaker and an eight-ohms speaker output for hooking it up to a speaker cabinet. What’s the purpose of having an onboard mic and speaker?

Well, it allows you to blend the direct signal from the amplifier with the mic signal to create an all-new species of fuzz-drive, harmonically volatile with all kinds of strange overtones and, yes, feedback. It’s an all-new species of pedal. C’mon, we’re happy with an internal trim pot and a dual-mode footswitch and just consider what’s going on here.

“Unlike traditional distortion or amp simulation pedals, Amp Crash creates sound physically, not just electronically,” reads the blurb. “As the amplifier, speaker, and microphone interact, they generate harmonics, feedback, compression, and textures that only exist because air is physically moving inside the pedal.”

How you choose to use this is up to you. You could use it as a practice amp, an unorthodox recording device, or just something scare your bandmates.

It was Rainger’s idea to put a microphone inside the pedal. But trust DBA’s Ackermann to take things one step further.

“David from Rainger is who I always gravitate to at any event. His effects are bonkers in the best way possible,” says Ackermann.

“When he told me he was coming to NY to work on a collaboration, it was a dream come true. Like cities in the world, Rainger FX is Death By Audio's sister company: weird, wild, and totally extreme. Working on this project with Rainger pushed us to create something so extreme, and then we took it further.”

This wild puppy is priced $395 and is available now. See Death By Audio for more.

Epiphone Lzzy Hale

Say what you like about Lzzy Hale but you can’t ever question her commitment to Sparkle Motion – that is, like, the whole thing about this new Explorer Custom she has cooked up with Epiphone.

It arrives resplendent in the Black Diamond Holographic finish we saw on her signature Kramer Voyager, a look that is beyond KISS, beyond disco, and yet with the Explorer’s bold angles – Ted McCarty’s silhouette still radical after all these years – it’s even got a mirror pickguard which can come in handy if you’ve had spinach at lunch.

Fundamentally, it’s a slab of mahogany, with a mahogany SlimTaper neck, topped with a 12” radius ebony fingerboard with block inlays.

There are a pair of Epiphone ProBucker Ignite humbuckers at the neck and bridge, each served by its own volume control and a master tone (Speed Knobs, as per the fashion). You know the drill.

But it’s the little details that get us, and once your eyes have adjusted to this retina-burning finish you’ll notice that the Epi logo on that six-in-line headstock is 3D and holographic, too. And the finish is reprised on the neck, which is cool. One to play loud.

Find out more at Epiphone.

Jam Pedals Tiny Amp Destroyer

Jam Pedals has always got something interesting bubbling in the pot but the Tiny Amp Destroyer, a signature pedal for Stu Mackenzie of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard is really something different, and something quite special.

Those steeped in the lore of the Gizzverse will know just what it’s about. The secret weapon to Mackenzie’s electric guitar tone on record is a bunch of beat-up cheapo solid-state practice amps he bought down at Cash Convertors. That’s what you are hearing when you hear that warm, scratchy drive on albums such as Flight b741.

“Some of the tones are pretty crispy, and pretty hot, pretty spicy, but in my mind it was like the-first-couple-of-Black-Sabbath-records distortion,” Mackenzie told Total Guitar in 2024. “They weren’t using tiny amps but that was the sound. It’s different from stepping on a fuzz pedal. When you roll back the volume on your guitar you can really, really clean up in a way you can’t do with pedals.”

The Tiny Amp Destroyer will get you those kinds of sounds, and then some. There are two footswitchable gain stages, plus a boost section modeled after the Jam Rooster (a Rangemaster-style treble booster), and we want to get one of these on the pedalboard ASAP.

Okay, an outlay of $399 to make your amp sound like a $30 amp sounds a bit silly on the face of it but there's much more to this ingenious drive/distortion/preamp/miracle box.

Find out more at Jam Pedals.

ALSO LAUNCHED THIS WEEK

Walrus Audio Canvas Expression

Walrus Audio expands its Canvas range of utility pedal with an expression pedal that reimagines the concept with dual expression outputs that are configurable, plus MIDI support.

For more: Walrus Audio

Cort Guitars Exotic Series

Cort acoustics always present a lot of spec for the money, and you can be pretty sure of a pristine build. It’s latest augments its SFX and Grand Auditorium cutaway models by pairing solid spruce tops with ash burl, myrtlewood and walnut, and they look pretty sweet.

For more: Cort Guitars

Fender 75th Anniversary additions:

Fender is keeping the 75th Anniversary Telecaster releases coming and this drop caused some excitement in the GW office. We’ve seen these at first hand. They are all, y’know, nice.

But that 1951 Nocaster is pretty much what the American Vintage II was made for – and has real vintage mojo – and the return of the baritone Telecaster is a real cause for celebration.

For more: Fender

Gretsch Limited Edition Professional Collection G6134T-58 Penguin

Made in Japan, refreshed in a Light Blue Pearl finish, with a string-through Bigsby B3CP tailpiece and a pair of TV Jones Ray Butts Ful-Fidelity Filter'Tron pickups, this is a Gretsch guitar to throw fiscal responsibility out of the window for.

It ain’t cheap but has the arched-top singlecut ever looked better? Well, we say that every year when Gretsch releases one into the wild like this, and yet, still. Look at it!

For more: Gretsch

Charvel Pro Mod DK 24

The headline specs on these new DK24 models might include the Seymour Duncan Nazgul and Sentient humbucker pairings on the HH models, the Seymour Duncan Full Shred ‘bucker and Flat Strat single-coil pairing on the HSS – the latter with a quilt-maple top in lurid/gnarly Zombie Fade finish.

But what we love about the DK24 is the Jackson Dinky body shape – compact, ergonomic, and a reminder of the close history between the Charvel and Jackson brands.

For more: Charvel

Ibanez Wes Hauch

Wes Hauch’s new signature Iceman is a super-metal, super-cool and super-upscale take on the classic Paul Stanley and Tom G. Warrior-approved shape and it is 100 per cent a home run – except that $9,999 price tag somewhat cools our ardor.

For more: Ibanez

D’Addario XPND Voltage Booster

Reasons we love D’Addario No. 1,427,812: It makes stuff like this power booster that can turn your 9V output into a 12V, 18V or 24V output. Yup, accessories we can actually use, accessories that can be a total pedalboard life-safer.

For more: D'Addario

Godin Limited Edition 25th Anniversary Steve Stevens ACS Nylon

If you’ve been tempted to dive into the nylon-string acoustic electric hybrid revolution but were just waiting for that one instrument then this signature model for Billy Idol’s six-string lieutenant could be the one. It’s typically Steve Stevens, designed with a bit of flair, with its silver leaf maple top painted a deep high-gloss purple. Lovely stuff.

For more: Godin

Washburn Sonamaster Elite

Let’s round out the week with some S-style guitars from Washburn that offers us HSS and HH pickup configurations and figured maple veneers on mahogany bodies for what, $399? Oh and they’ve got roasted maple necks too, coil-splits, and 18:1 Grover tuners, too.

For more: Washburn

On May 7, 1964, a who's who of future blues guitar luminaries – among them Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Keith Richards, and Brian Jones – gathered, with a number of other excited blues fans, at the Wilbraham Road train station in south Manchester.

Clapton, Beck, and co. had journeyed to the out-of-use station all the way from London to see a show unlike any other – the Blues and Gospel Train.

Staged dramatically on the station's platform – with the audience on one end of the tracks and the performers on another – and filmed for a Granada TV special, the show gathered together a mind-blowing lineup of blues giants: Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Muddy Waters, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Cousin Joe, Otis Spann, and the Reverend Gary Davis.

Though all of the aforementioned blues legends brought their A-game, it was Tharpe – brought to the stage in style in a horse-drawn carriage – who completely stole the show.

Inspired by the downpour that had lashed the station shortly before her arrival, Tharpe decided to open her set with a ferocious rendition of the gospel standard, Didn’t It Rain.

Armed with her beloved, three-pickup 1961 Gibson Les Paul SG Custom, Tharpe treated those in attendance – and the estimated 10 million viewers who would later watch the broadcast at home – to a display of powerful, hard-driving blues guitar fire that was years ahead of its time.

You can draw direct lines, for instance, from Tharpe’s fluid but always in-the-pocket rhythm work to Richards’ later playing with the Rolling Stones, and hear the influence her lyrical slides would go on to have on Jones, already a huge fan of slide master Elmore James.

You can see Tharpe’s Didn’t It Rain performance above, and the full Blues and Gospel Train TV special below.

Tharpe’s performance has now been commemorated with a plaque at the Manchester Central Convention Complex – the former Manchester Central Railway Station – where Tharpe and those she shared the bill with boarded the train that took them to the Wilbraham Road station.

The plaque is part of a Manchester-based campaign by social historian and broadcaster Karen Gabay, to place plaques that honor Black musicians who influenced the city.

Of Tharpe, she told the BBC, “She was one cool sister; that swagger, that strut, the way she played the guitar – so many people who see it for the first time are instantly taken aback.”

Back in 2022, Lizzo guitarist Celisse and Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter/guitarist Amythyst Kiah staged – as part of Gibson's Shout, Sister, Shout! mini-documentary on Tharpe – a tribute to the 1964 train station performance.

Wielding Custom Shop replicas of Tharpe's 1961 Les Paul SG Custom, the duo put their own, unaccompanied spin on Didn’t It Rain, while retaining the spirit and passion of the original.

“She [Tharpe] entranced audiences and inspired untold numbers of blues-loving players from across the pond, people like Eric Clapton and Keith Richards,” Celisse says in the film. “There’s an endless list of artists that borrowed from Sister Rosetta – folks like Elvis, Johnny Cash, Led Zeppelin, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, even me!

“Sister Rosetta Tharpe was born to be on stage and channel her joy of faith through her powerful voice and volcanic playing. She took audiences to church and her male guitar playing contemporaries to school.

“While it’s taken decades to finally give her her due,” Celisse concludes, “there is no debating that Sister Rosetta Tharpe is the unquestioned founding mother of rock 'n' roll.”

Though popular and commercially successful in her day, Tharpe – who died in 1973, and was buried in an unmarked grave in Philadelphia – has only recently begun to receive recognition as one of the formative figures in blues and rock electric guitar playing.

In 2018, decades after many of the guitarists whose style she helped shape received the same honor, Tharpe was finally inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame in the “Early Influences” category.

Greg Dulli has fashioned himself into an indie rock icon with the Afghan Whigs. Albums like 1992’s Congregation, 1993’s Gentlemen and 1996’s Black Love explore his vision, as does their latest record, Soft Control.

“I write songs the exact same way I did when I was 15,” Dulli tells Guitar World. “I might bring other things in, but it’s all about coming up with a riff, putting a melody on top, and then writing the words.”

He’s also remained in his comfort zone when it comes to playing guitar. “I started very late,” he says. “My playing had nowhere to go but up! I’m still very remedial, but I can play better than when I started. But I’ve had excellent taste in guitarists along the way – I’ll employ a ringer when I need to!”

1. What was your first guitar?

It was a Hagstrom 12-string with six strings taken off, and I played it as a six-string. I got a Tele in the mid ’80s that had a sort of swirled pattern, and then I got a rosewood Telecaster. For the last 20 years I’ve been playing a Gibson ES-335.

2. What are the quirks or habits that define your playing style?

I lived in Phoenix for the summer of ’86, right before I went back to Ohio and started the Whigs. This dude named Ryan, who I had a band with for a couple of weeks, taught me a couple of tricks that I use to this day.

He was like, “I can show you how to play five notes by moving one finger.” He did, and I still do that. So I owe it all to Ryan. I don’t remember his last name, but that’s still in my trick bag!

3. What’s your number-one tone tip?

Know what sounds good. If you can get a guitar, an amp and pedals you like, dial that in. I’ve been using Mesa/Boogie since 1996 – that’s my tone. And with pedals, it’s the silver one, the red one and the black one!

4. You can only take a Strat or a Les Paul to a gig. Which?

I wouldn’t wanna play a gig with either of those! They’re great in the studio, but I can’t make them work for a show. It’s like saying, “You can either use a Marshall or you don’t play.” I’d just rather sing then!

5. What’s been the hardest time you’ve had in music?

I come from a blue-collar background and I’ve seen tough times. My times as a musician haven’t been as tough as times I’ve seen, so in that regard, I wouldn’t say it’s been any tougher than it’s been for any other human.

I sort of always did music; it was my constant companion. Even if it wasn’t feeding me physically, it was feeding me in other ways.

6. Is there a philosophy that’s stuck with you?

Dare to fail – try anything, man. Don’t be afraid to do something because you’re worried about how it’ll come out. Just let it come out and react to it then.

7. What’s the best guitar tone of all time?

Listen to any Prince record – there’s your tone.

8. Who would you most like to collaborate with?

I’ll say the same thing I’ve said for 40 years: Jimmy Page. And he could play the Les Paul at the gig! First of all, he’s a songwriter. Like Prince, when you’ve written and produced the song, you know how it’s gonna sound in your head. It’s called a vision, and both those guys had it.

Vision is something you can’t learn. You have it; you don’t develop it. On top of being phenomenal guitar players, they’re both phenomenal songwriters, live performers and producers.

9. What makes you pick up the guitar over and over?

Because I can, and because I can put something down that wasn’t there two seconds before I picked it up. I can make a sound.

10. What appeals to you most when you pick up the instrument?

I can comfort myself. I can entertain myself. I can drive myself crazy. As soon as I pick up a guitar, possibilities are at hand. That’s always tempting.

11. What’s your number-one guitar?

That would be my 1946 Martin acoustic that I bought in 1994. It’s the guitar that I write on. I bought it at a place called American Music in Seattle – I walked in the place and saw it like you’d see a pretty girl across the room.

I was just drawn to it. I sat down with it, started playing, and I felt like I’d known it forever. It’s either in my bedroom or downstairs with me. If the house were on fire, it wouldn’t just be the one guitar I’d take – it would be the one possession I’d take. I love it that much.

• Soft Control is out now.

What is it?

Ever since the ‘relic’ guitar movement started, it's been an unending topic of debate. For every person who loves the look and feel of a guitar that's been pre-emptively ‘broken-in’, there's another who will decry it as a cringeworthy act of deception for those who want a storied-looking instrument without putting in the work.

Regardless, the guitar market marches on and, as long as people keep buying ‘em, companies will keep making ‘em. Fender's Road Worn series pioneered the concept as a mass-market proposition in the late 2000s, but have we ever seen relic'd instruments offered for quite so little outlay as the subject of today's review?

In-house brands for music stores aren't a new idea by any means, but Harley Benton has become an unprecedented success story. The guitar and bass-centric sub-brand for German music retail giants Thomann now has quite a life of its own.

With a bass line-up offering bargain-priced takes on everything from a ‘51-style P-Bass to a neck-through seven-string monster, there's something for everyone, and the brand's instruments have become well-liked even by professional players.

Now, Harley Benton adds a pair of very reasonably-priced Aged Series basses, based on the existing PB-62 and JB-62 Precision and Jazz Bass-a-likes, with what’s touted as ‘hand-aged’ finishing. Today, the attention is on the the former, in Light Aged Olympic White.

Specs

• Price: $238 | £214 | €249
• Type: Four-string electric bass
• Body: American alder
• Neck: ‘Lightly caramelised’ Canadian maple, D shape
• Fingerboard material/radius: Laurel, 305mm
• Scale length: 34”/864mm
• Nut/width: 43mm, graphite
• Frets: 20, medium jumbo nickel silver
• Hardware: Aged chrome - CB01-CR machine heads, B401 bridge with brass saddles, string retainer
• String spacing at bridge: 20mm
• Electrics: 1x Isola VT-PB Alnico 5 split-coil, Volume, Tone
• Weight: 7.5lb/3.4kg
• Options: Heavy Aged finishes available at the same price.
• Left-handed options: None
• Finishes: Light Aged Olympic White (as reviewed), Light Aged Black
• Case: None
• Contact: Harley Benton

Build quality

Build quality rating: ★★★★½

Right away, the PB-62LA seems impressively well-built for a bass of its very modest price. The body is alder, true to Fender’s blueprint, and the ‘lightly caramelised’ maple neck is crowned with a laurel fingerboard, a common rosewood substitute on cheaper instruments.

Hardware-wise, it all looks and feels more substantial than you'd expect for the money, with a chunky Sandberg-style string retainer and brass bridge saddles. These components have even been quite nicely aged, to complement the finish.

And let’s talk about that finish. Viewed from a distance, the Light Aged aesthetic isn’t unconvincing. Up close, things are a little different – it’s a thin, satin poly finish with very obvious edges to every patch of wear.

But then, this bass costs just over £200; you can’t expect vintage-correct nitrocellulose checking. And the nature of the finish means that it’ll keep aging, theoretically taking on a more natural look as it gains genuine play-wear.

The neck, though – whatever Harley Benton has done here, it’s worked well. It really does look, and even feel, like it’s got some actual miles on it – though there are some minor fret end imperfections that let the side down a little, and the laurel board looks a little dry.

Playability

Playability rating: ★★★★☆

The neck itself is fairly chunky; traditional wider P-bass nut width, and a D-shaped profile with medium depth and not too much shoulder. Precision fans should enjoy it, Jazz loyalists may find it tougher going.

The setup from the box is more bow-and-arrow than bass guitar, though; I needed to drop the strings quite a bit at the bridge to make it playable.

That done, it’s a solid playing experience – that aged neck feels good in the hand, and the body and neck have a welcome degree of resonance that isn’t a given at this price.

Another notable plus point is that the PB-62LA is a very reasonable weight; with the usual Fender-esque ergonomics, it's a comfortable bass to play sitting or standing.

Sounds

Sounds rating: ★★★☆☆

This PB-62LA comes out of the box with its Isola VT-PB Alnico 5 pickup sitting far too low.

Raising it up toward the strings, it starts to find its voice – although even at the very top of its travel, it’s still noticeably low on volume compared to the two other P-pickup basses I'm able to compare with – my ‘83 Ibanez Roadstar, plus a new Washburn Scavenger bass that’s also here for review.

Comparing all three pretty extensively for output, it's clear that the Harley Benton is some way behind the other two in that department. As ever, my test rig consists of a variety of Line 6 HX Stomp patches, ranging from clean to overdriven, and from vintage to modern.

That aside, it’s a decent enough Precision tone that possesses the right kind of thick low-mid focus, and a subtly snarling top end (due in part to the new strings, of course).

As a result, it’s still a fairly enjoyable bass to play plugged-in, but all the while I can’t help thinking it’d be so much better with a pickup that lets it punch through properly.

Verdict

Harley Benton’s goal with the Aged Series is simple; to offer a smattering of its successful, existing Fender-style guitars and basses, with an ‘authentic, hand-aged’ finish and the tantalising promise that each example will be unique as a result.

Judged on those criteria, I’d argue the PB-62LA is a success - the pickup leaves something to be desired, but I was impressed by the instrument it sits in. Once set up, it feels great and is a lot of fun to play, and while the Light Aged finish is hardly the last word in sophistication, it’s convincing enough to look cool on stage and should only improve with time.

Relic sceptics still won’t be convinced, but the rest of us might enjoy what Harley Benton has cooked up here.

Guitar World verdict: The PB-62LA is far from the last word in realism as far as that relic job is concerned, but it still looks pretty cool – and it’s a lovely bass, well-built and featuring quality hardware at a knock-down price. Replace that gutless pickup and you’ve a real weapon on your hands.

Also try

Hands-on videos

Harley Benton

Bob Maerten

• Best beginner bass guitars 2026: top starter basses for beginners

A GoFundMe has been set up to support veteran session guitarist Chris Spedding as he begins treatment for non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

Campaign organizer Eden Cale writes that Spedding – whose illustrious résumé includes credits with Paul McCartney, Brian Eno, the Pretenders, John Cale, and Jack Bruce – was recently diagnosed with large B-cell high-grade, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and is now undergoing intensive chemotherapy treatments.

“Chris’ genius as a musician, session guitarist, and producer has touched generations of music lovers. But to our family, he's just been Uncle Chris,” Cale says. “Now, at 82, Chris faces a tough new battle.”

“Because this fight will pause his ability to work and tour, Chris and his wife, Jody, need our support to help cover essential living expenses and additional medical expenses as they navigate this difficult period.

“Anyone who knows Chris knows he is a kind, generous soul who would step up for anyone in need. For decades, he has given us unforgettable music. Now, it is our turn to rally around him to show our appreciation of him during this challenging time.”

The campaign aims to raise £50,000, and is online now.

Earlier this year, Spedding spoke to Guitar World about some of the highlights of his amazing, 60-year career. Aside from his work with McCartney, Eno, the Pretenders, Cale, and Bruce, Spedding has also played with Roxy Music, Bryan Ferry, Elton John, Tom Waits, and Robert Gordon.

Back in 1969, a 22-year-old drama student, Albert Goodman, found himself face-to-face with Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock and managed to capture his iconic closing set.

Now, this rare footage has been unearthed in a new film, Jimi Hendrix: Live at Woodstock – A Second Look, which premiered during a YouTube livestream on August 18 at 9 pm ET.

Goodman left his tent and managed to sneak onstage, shielded by a friend who was carrying a guitar. After securing AC power for his Sony CV ½” video camera, he set it up just 15 feet across the stage where Hendrix would grace the Woodstock revellers.

According to the official description, “Goodman was left alone, assumed to be just another member of the sprawling film crew who had surrounded the stage for the entire event. He settled in behind percussionist Juma Sultan and prepared to document history.”

While technical limitations caused occasional interruptions in the video signal, the more obvious glitches have been replaced by photos.

Goodman managed to capture Hendrix in his prime on August 18, 1969, in Bethel, New York. The newly available footage includes Purple Haze, Voodoo Child, Hear My Train a Comin’, Message to Love, and his history-making rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner.

Wielding a Strat, Hendrix can be seen setting the stage on fire with his playing, alongside the newly formed Gypsy Sun and Rainbows, also known as the Band of Gypsys.

The lineup consisted of guitarist Larry Lee, bassist Billy Cox, Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell, and percussionists Juma Sulytan and Jerry Velez.

Following Woodstock, Goodman hitchhiked and was offered a ride by a driver who, coincidentally, said he was friends with people working at the house Hendrix was renting nearby. This eventually led to the legend himself screening Goodman’s footage and giving his seal of approval.

Goodman kept his tapes stored for the next three decades, before making them available to the Hendrix family.

Since footage from Woodstock is rare, these new videos offer new insight into a performance that not only captured the zeitgeist, but also cemented Hendrix as a guitar hero for the ages.

Johnny Marr has accumulated a fair few guitars since his time with British indie rock pioneers The Smiths. In fact, he's gotten to the point where he’s auctioning off his four-decade guitar collection at Christie’s in London this September.

Yet, among them all, there’s one guitar – a 1960 Cherry Red ES-355 – that harks back to a very exciting time for Marr. It was 1984, around the time The Smiths started generating enough buzz to be wined and dined by the industry.

So, when legendary music executive Seymour Stein of Sire Records approached the band, Marr took the opportunity to coax him into acquiring his dream guitar.

“[It was] one night in 1984. It was a done deal we were going to sign to Sire,” Marr tells Guitarist. “We’d have happily paid him: it was our dream label. But I was asking about The Stones in the ’60s, and he made the mistake of telling me he’d always take Brian Jones to get a guitar. So I saw my opportunity. I told him if he bought me a guitar, The Smiths would sign to Sire.”

Marr was committed to not letting Stein’s promise slide. “On a snowy day in New York, I hung around the Sire offices all day, so Seymour wasn’t going to escape,” he reveals. “We walked to We Buy Guitars on 48th Street and, as is often the way – and it’s a bit like this with pets – it already felt like I owned it when I saw it.”

Now estimated to fetch over $200,000 at auction, the Cherry Red ES-355 is one of the guitars that’s most associated with Marr’s Smiths era.

The veteran guitarist points to the “romantic notion” that many musicians, including himself, have: “that instruments have music in them”. And, in the case of the ES-355, it would deliver some pretty timeless hits.

Not only did he write two songs shortly after acquiring it, but he also used it extensively in the studio for the band’s sophomore album, Meat Is Murder. It was a fixture on stage throughout 1984 and 1985 as well – widely regarded as The Smiths’ golden era.

“As soon as I got that 355 back to the hotel, I wrote Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now,” he remembers fondly. “Which took about 10 minutes. Then I immediately wrote Girl Afraid.

“There’s a few guitars like that in the auction. If they end up in the hands of songwriters, they’ll definitely deliver songs.”

For more from Marr, pick up issue 541 of Guitarist from Magazines Direct.

Back in mid-1967, neither Jimi Hendrix nor Buddy Guy had yet cemented themselves as Mount Rushmore-level guitar pioneers who delighted in breaking rules, bending convention, and blowing minds.

Hendrix was on the cusp of a blinding ascendancy that would see him become, arguably, the most influential electric guitar player who ever lived by the time of his tragic death just three years later. Guy, however, was – and would remain for decades – not nearly as famous as some of the A-list blues-rock guitarists who took cues from his stinging phrases, piercing volume, and embrace of feedback.

Back in 1967, you could forgive the man for snickering a little when compared to one of his younger, more famous blues guitar contemporaries. For instance, Eric Clapton, who decades later would refer to Guy as “the greatest living guitarist”, was already packing arenas with Cream by that time.

Speaking to Guitar World in 1983, Guy recounted the first time he came across Jimi Hendrix’s name in 1967, via an excited concertgoer who was trying to pay him a backhanded compliment after a gig.

“He said, ‘You sound like Jimi Hendrix!’ I said, ‘Jimi who?’” Guy remembered. When the surprised fan asked the Chicago blues legend, “Don't you know Jimi Hendrix?” he replied, “‘No, but if he and I play alike you should ask him if he's heard of me.’”

It wasn’t long before Guy met Hendrix in person, with the latter supposedly telling him that he cancelled a gig to see Guy play. Not too long after came an after-hours Guy/Hendrix jam that was captured for posterity via some wonderfully grainy footage.

Ironically, given that Guy was often chided early in his career for playing too loudly, he felt the same of Hendrix when he first saw the latter play live.

“You’ll laugh, but I thought he used to play too loud,” Guy told Guitar World last year. “When I first came up, Muddy Waters and those guys had two little speakers at each corner of the blues club, and it was a clean sound.”

Waters and co. weren’t playing arenas, however. As rock shows began drawing people by the tens of thousands, and with amp technology in many ways still in its infancy, the first volume wars took hold.

“The clean sound went away because, with the amplifiers, it was a dogfight. It was just a rat race,” Guy told GW. “And then all the special effects came in, and Jimi, I think he was one of the greatest who ever took advantage of the special effects, because a lot of people used them after him.”

Today, Guy is a mainstay act on the ongoing Experience Hendrix tribute tour series. “I'm so grateful we had the chance to become friends,” he told GW last year. “It's an honor to help keep his legacy alive.”

Self-taught guitarist Sawyer Hill went from playing in an Arkansas high school garage band to America’s next best country-tinged indie-rocker overnight, after a viral video of Look at the Time flooded his inbox with A&Rs applauding his flair, hair and knack for songwriting.

“You’re an unknown – then all of a sudden 10 million people have seen you,” Hill recalls. In 2023, after being fired from his lab assistant day job, he’d decided to stop “sleepwalking through life” and devote himself to guitar, determined to prove his viral success wasn’t a fluke.

Three years on he’s tallied up over 130 million streams of Look at the Time, opened a North American run for Yungblud, and now awaits the launch of his debut record Everybody’s Home, Nobody’s Happy. “Playing for Yungblud’s crowd was really incredible,” Hill says.

“Ozzy had just passed and Yungblud was on his rise. Everyone was really excited for rock music, and obviously I’m a rock musician. So it was the perfect storm of this moment between generations and genre.

“I didn’t have to fight the audience on anything – everything we did super-hit. Yungblud taught me how to control a room three times bigger than anything I’d ever played before. He’s a fucking entertainer.”

Hill’s fascination with music kicked off in the early 2010s with classical ukulele. Longing for more strings, he was gifted a $100 Epiphone Dreadnought one Christmas from his grandparents, which he used to write some of his most-played songs.

His love for rock began during a high school lunch break talent show. “I thought it was the sickest thing ever. I auditioned to be in the band with the intro of Stairway to Heaven.” He got the gig and was handed an Ibanez Artcore – although, as it turned out, it had been stolen from a pawn shop.

Fast-forward to present day and he now plays a Gibson 335. “I always found Artcores to play easily until last year, when I went to a Gibson showroom. I wanted a light guitar that’s gonna play similar every time. I really hate a heavy guitar that cuts off your circulation.

“Gibson lent me a 335 that’s super-light and sick. It’s fucking amazing; it plays great. I played that on the Yungblud run with the intention to give it back. Little did they know, at the end of every set I would crash the headstock on a cymbal. I bent the tuning pegs all out of whack.

“Magically they still work, but they were all sorts of fucked. I posted a photo with the 335 on socials, and Gibson said, ‘You look so great, keep the guitar!’”

Hill plays his askew 335 through a Fender Blues Junior after he learned that “you don’t need a giant-ass amp to be super-loud and have a great tone.” He pairs it with a small pedalboard consisting of distortion –always on – plus an overdrive for ripping solos and a trusty tuner.

Everybody’s Home, Nobody’s Happy is a captivating mix of country and indie blues rock, each track tied with a sweep of slide guitar. “Some of the singles might have painted a picture about the record’s totality, but I think the record will catch people off guard,” he says.

The 11-track debut rejects country’s notorious themes of love and heartbreak. “It’s half-autobiographical and half what I’m feeling at the time,” he explains. “The songs that are really sad for me are some of the more happy sounding ones, and there isn’t one total message throughout.”

Fuzz-filled track Jimmy’s Gone Numb was recorded using a “crazily” tuned-down hollow-body, paired with another dropped acoustic – and bizarrely, it’s played even lower live. Described by Sawyer as “Johnny Cash meets surf rock,” it juxtaposes the promised American dream and its harsh awakened reality – despite the song’s upbeat feel.

Slide guitar is the “connective tissue,” heard in second-to-last track Lady Arkansas, which is a heartfelt piano-led tribute to his hometown, with a solo that melts like butter, written by Yungblud collaborator Chris Greatti.

“Musicians are overthinkers,” Hill argues. “With the Lady Arkansas solo, I wanted a musical non sequitur, which is really hard to communicate with someone. Chris is a guitar god. We composed it together; it’s really nice how that solo pans over.

“If you’ve been given a talent, you have to do something with it. Otherwise you’re displeasing fate, Mother Nature – whatever you like to call it. You have to act in the world; you can’t just work on one song or album for three whole years. That’s what was so great about The Beatles. They made a song and moved on to the next one.”

• Everybody’s Home, Nobody’s Happy is out now. Sawyer is on tour from September 23 to November 21, with further dates booked for 2027.

The Yardbirds’ revolving mid-’60s line-up is unrivalled when it comes to guitar star power. The London group famously featured Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, in that order, across a period of just three years.

However, what’s less well documented is that there was an attempt to recruit Page to the band’s ranks before Jeff Beck’s arrival, while Eric Clapton was still in the band.

Page discussed the clandestine offer in one of his most detailed and candid interviews – a legendary six-hour discussion with Dave Schulps of Trouser Press in 1977. Part of that interview was later featured in the book Led Zeppelin: Heaven and Hell: An Illustrated History, and appeared in Guitar World in 1991.

“The Yardbirds’ manager, Giorgio Gomelsky, approached me and said that Eric wasn’t willing to ‘expand,’” recalled Page. “I guess it was probably pretty apparent to them after they did For Your Love – Clapton didn’t like that at all. They had already started using different instruments, like harpsichords, and at that point Clapton felt like he was just fed up.”

Page then revealed that it wasn’t the only time he was approached while Clapton was still in the mind.

“The first time… was some time before then,” said the guitar icon. “Gomelsky said that Eric was going to have a ‘holiday,’ and I could step in and replace him.

“The way he put it to me, it just seemed really distasteful and I refused. Eric had been a friend of mine, and I couldn’t possibly have been a party to that. Plus, Eric didn’t want to leave the band at that point.”

Clapton, Beck and Page had a rivalry of sorts, but it was a friendly one, with all three players forming part of the bustling blues scene that was coming out of London’s Richmond-upon-Thames, at venues like The Crawdaddy Club and Eel Pie Island.

When Page did eventually agree to join the Yardbirds, it wasn’t as Clapton’s replacement, or even Beck’s, but after a request from the latter, who suggested he play as emergency cover for bassist Paul Samwell-Smith, who had quit suddenly in 1966.

That would prove to be a fateful decision, laying the foundation for Beck’s departure and emergence as a solo star, for Page’s own chapter with the group, and his eventual vision for ‘The New Yardbirds’ – perhaps better known by their later moniker… Led Zeppelin.

The start of the the 1980s saw the dazzling rise of the Pretenders. Led by American expat Chrissie Hynde, the dynamic British rock ’n’ roll quartet issued a one-two punch of albums, Pretenders (1980) and Pretenders II (1981), that featured memorable hits such as Stop Your Sobbing, Brass in Pocket, Kid, and Talk of the Town.

A former rock critic, Hynde quickly established herself as a crafty songwriter and a captivating singer, and she was aided by an ace band that included drummer Martin Chambers, bassist Pete Farndon, and the immensely gifted guitarist, James Honeyman-Scott.

The band’s rapid ascent came to a crashing halt in June 1982. First came the firing of Farndon (his increasing drug use had fractured relations within the group), and two days later, Honeyman-Scott died of heart failure caused by a cocaine overdose (a year later, Farndon succumbed to a heroin overdose as well).

“I was good friends with Jimmy, and his death was such a shock,” says guitarist Robbie McIntosh. “I met him before he joined the Pretenders, and we had stayed in touch. He had actually talked to me about playing with the band. The idea was to flesh things out as the band were evolving. I hadn’t said I’d definitely do it, but it would have been great. It’s a shame it didn’t happen that way.”

Hynde and Chambers channeled their grief by recording a smashing double hit single, Back on the Chain Gang and My City Was Gone, utilizing ex-Rockpile guitarist Billy Bremner and Big Country bassist Tony Butler. Because of his commitments to Big Country, Butler was unable to join the Pretenders, and in the case of Bremner, McIntosh says, “I don’t think Chrissie saw him as the right fit. He’s a great player, obviously, but he was more of a rockabilly guy.”

McIntosh, who had played various bands throughout the late Seventies and early Eighties, shared Honeyman-Scott’s musical tastes. “We were rock and pop guys,” McIntosh says. “We loved Pete Townshend, the Kinks, the Beach Boys, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones. That might be a reason I got called up to audition for the band.”

By the end of 1982, McIntosh was asked to join a new Pretenders lineup, which would also include bassist Malcolm Foster. Much was expected of the band – could they match the power and tunefulness of the first two albums? – and they came through like champs with 1984’s Learning to Crawl.

The record featured Back on the Chain Gang and My City Was Gone, but it also packed forceful rockers like Time the Avengers and Watching the Clothes, along with two tracks that demonstrated Hynde’s softer side, Show Me and the shimmering Christmas ballad 2000 Miles.

The album burst out of the gate with the seismic single Middle of the Road, on which McIntosh burned through a breakneck solo that ranks as a masterclass in kinetic excitement.

“I’m extremely proud of the album,” says McIntosh, who stayed with the Pretenders until 1987. “It was a big jump for me, working with a famous band and with Chris Thomas, an established producer.”

He laughs. “I did get some bad reviews, though. Some people called me ‘the guy who ruined the Pretenders.’ But you can’t take reviews seriously – good or bad ones. The album did extremely well; it went double platinum in America, so there was that. I was young and confident, so I just plowed on.”

Being that James Honeyman-Scott was a friend, did you have mixed feelings about auditioning?

Yeah, although I felt very lucky in one respect that I had been his friend. The fact that I did an audition meant I didn’t walk straight into the gig. I mean, the band might not have liked what I did, but as it turned out, they did. For the first few songs we did, I thought things worked out pretty well.

Did you have any interactions with Chrissie Hynde before the audition?

No, I met her at the audition. That was the first time, and then she rang me a few days later and said, “Do you want to join the band?” Obviously, I said yes.

What did the audition entail? Were you given a list of songs to prepare?

No, we just jammed. I played for maybe 20 minutes with another guitar player, Mick Green, who I was sort of in awe of, and a bass player whose name I can’t remember. Martin was playing drums. Chrissie and Dave Hill, the manager, sat in front of the stage. A few days later, I got the call from Chrissie and she said she wanted me in the band. I didn’t have a clue that I’d passed the audition.

The great thing about the Pretenders is that Chrissie is kind of garagey and punk – she’s a great songwriter and lyricist, and she’s got an individual voice – but it was embellished by Jimmy’s musical style. He wasn’t into punk at all, and neither was I.

What was it like the first time you played in rehearsal with Chrissie?

I remember she played quite loud, but that didn’t worry me. I was more concerned with how I could complement her and play off what she did. I can’t remember whether the first thing we did was 2000 Miles or Middle of the Road. I think it was Middle of the Road.

Okay, dude… that solo, I mean, come on. It’s so electrifying and beautifully composed. How long did it take you to work it out?

Thanks so much. But no, I didn’t work it out. Chrissie had the chords, kind of a Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels thing, and I came up with some ideas.

I remember there was a growing riff part – I came up with that, and it seemed to work. In the studio I did maybe three or four solos, all different kinds of things, and Chris Thomas said, “I like that bit. We’ll keep the first half.” I think I dropped in the really fast bit on its own, and I did that thing with the delay at the end of the solo. We worked on it for maybe half an hour.

Which guitar did you use for that track?

My 1977 Fender Telecaster, which I still own. And my amp was a Marshall 20 head into a 2x10 cabinet. I had Marshall 100s as well, so maybe there was a bit of that in there. But the body of the sound was the Marshall 20, which is my favorite amp.

If Chrissie had any doubts about hiring you, they were put to rest with that solo.

[Laughs] It was a bit more aggressive and flashy than what Jimmy would’ve done. People always ask me about the picking on that solo. I just used my fingers, and the pick was inside my hand. Then if I needed the pick, I’d just pull it out.

Chris Thomas always complimented me on the guitar playing on the album. I saw him a couple of years ago and he said the same thing. He said what a great time he had making that album. I was quite chuffed.

You mentioned 2000 Miles. Chrissie later said that she should have given you songwriting credit because of the riff you came up with.

Yeah, it was the same with Middle of the Road, actually. Chrissie would come up with a very basic accompaniment, and then I’d come up with riffs that went over the top. It was the same later on with Don’t Get Me Wrong. That guitar part is very distinctive.

Did Chrissie demo anything, or did she just play what she had right in the room?

It was all done in rehearsal, and we just remembered it. It was old-school. We never recorded anything. If you came up with something great, you just hoped you’d remember it.

How much leeway did Chrissie give you in terms of coming up with guitar parts?

The big thing with Chrissie was, she would say, “Don’t be too smooth.” I mean, Larry Carlton never would have fit in her band, and I say that as someone who loves Larry Carlton. I hate to use the expression “dumb it down,” but, to a certain degree, playing with Chrissie is about doing just that. She was into Mitch Ryder, Question Mark and the Mysterians, and the Ramones, while I was into the Beatles and Bad Company.

But you know, Chrissie is a great songwriter, and a lot of the greats, apart from people like Jimmy Webb, don’t really have a clue about the mechanics and the rudiments of music. That’s what makes them so good or so unique.

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

Shortlisted for the 2026 Mercury Prize, up-and-coming jazz outfit Knats have carved out a sound that feels as much about storytelling as it does sheer musicality.

Their latest album, A Great Day In Newcastle, brings together contemporary jazz and hip-hop, capturing the energy and character of their home city in the North East of England.

At the low-end is bassist and frontman Stan Woodward, who, alongside drummer King David Ike-Elechi and trumpeter Ferg Kilsby, has pushed the group’s identity further than ever.

“When I was writing this record I really wanted to tell stories,” says Woodward. “We’d never used spoken word before, so I had this idea of bringing Cooper Robson in to do an opening monologue.

“Cooper wrote some incredible words for a track called War Jackie, and after that we just thought, ‘Fuck it, let's get him on the whole record.’ It's completely transformed the band.”

Evidence of that transformation was brought home by a memorable TV appearance on Later... with Jools Holland.

“I remember my bass was slightly out of tune, which was driving me mad, but the nerves were the biggest thing. We thought we were on second, then every time another act finished we’d think, ‘Right, we’re next.’ Then somebody else would walk on, so the nerves built and built.

“Before we knew it, Shania Twain was on playing You're Still the One, but as soon as we started playing, the nerves disappeared. It ended up being one of the most surreal experiences of my life.”

For Woodward, finding the right bass wasn’t simply a case of choosing an instrument – it was about finding something that felt genuinely his. The answer came in the form of a Gibson SG, a bass he’d previously dismissed as “a bit ugly.”

After hearing about vintage Gibson basses from Black Midi frontman Geordie Greep, who also produced their debut album, Woodward decided to take a chance on a 1968 model he found on eBay. What began as an unlikely purchase quickly became a revelation.

“I’d never really considered them, but then I found a ‘68 Gibson SG on eBay for about £1,500. The neck has snapped three times on tour, but it's still the best bass I've ever played. It's been repaired, and somehow it still sounds incredible.

“You’ve got the Mudbucker pickup at the neck, which has this huge, almost piano-like low-end, then the bridge pickup gives you all the clarity you could want for solos. I tend to roll in the bridge pickup almost like it's a built-in boost.

“I've since picked up a 1972 SG as well, although the late-'60s ones are definitely my favourites. The necks are incredibly thin, they're ridiculously comfortable to play, and they've just got this character that I haven't found in anything else.”

Was bass always your first instrument?

I actually started on guitar when I was about 10 or 11. I was completely obsessed with Arctic Monkeys. My mum bought me this cheap little acoustic for Christmas – I think it was about 60 quid – and that was it.

I was about 16 when I started taking it seriously. I got obsessed with jazz, walking basslines and transcribing bebop. I remember trying to learn Donna Lee at that age and absolutely butchering it. But I just kept at it and improved pretty quickly.

How much thought do you put into your bass tone?

Less than people think. The biggest part of my sound is still the SG. That said, I don't think the instrument is what makes the player. You can hand somebody the greatest bass in the world, but your sound is still in your fingers.

Lately I’ve been playing through Orange amps with just a touch of grit, because the band’s getting a bit heavier and rockier. That slight crunch sounds amazing.

Is that what I'm hearing on War Jackie?

That’s actually this cheap Ibanez I bought as an experiment. I completely gutted it – new pickups, new bridge, new tuners – the lot.

I stuck a set of flatwounds on it and ended up recording with it. It’s a bit of a weird-sounding bass, if I’m honest, but that’s kind of why I like it.

The War Jackie bass solo was almost an afterthought. We’d recorded the song on the first day, but I wasn’t happy with the solo, then completely forgot about it.

Right at the end of the final session, after we’d had a couple of drinks, Geordie just turned to me and said, ‘You need to do that solo again.’ I went in, played two takes, and that was it.

It sounds like you’ve got some effects on your solo on Azure Blues.

There’s a phaser on that one, and halfway through we kick in a chorus effect as the band gets louder, just to help the bass push through the mix. I was still using that cheap Ibanez with flatwounds, so I really had to dig in to make it speak.

I was improvising during that solo, but there's quite a lot of Messiaen in there. There's one point where I'm basically superimposing an E-flat minor triad over C major. It's incredibly nerdy, but I remember thinking it sounded cool.

A lot of the material on this record actually started from Olivier Messiaen's modes. The main riff in Carpet Doctor is built almost entirely from Mode 3. War Jackie is the same – the melody stays in Mode 3 almost until the very end.

Do you worry that talking about all that theory makes people see you as the music theory guy?

Not really. I don’t actually talk about it that much unless someone asks. The theory is just part of my process. It isn’t the point of the music. If people are interested, I’m happy to explain it, but I don’t expect listeners to hear a tune and think, ‘Oh, that's Messiaen Mode 3.’ I just want them to feel something.

What advice would you give to bass players who want to build the kind of career you’ve built?

I think writing is one of the most overlooked skills a musician can develop. You can spend years transcribing, practising and becoming an incredible player, but if you want your own artistic identity you have to write your own music.

What is it?

It’s true that Mooer doesn’t have the same weight of gravity to it as the likes of Neural DSP, Kemper, and Line 6 when it comes to amp modeling. But that doesn’t mean you should dismiss it.

As a penny-conscious entry point into the world of digital amp tones, Mooer’s ever-growing GE line has proven to offer a lot of bang for not all that much buck. The GE150 Pro Li, then, clocks in at a fairly eye-watering 200 presets, 55 amps, 26 cabinets, and support for third-party IRs as well as compatibility for NAM captures. That’s a lot of choice.

Following the success of the $240 GE150 Max Li and the €449 GS1000 modeler and profiler, Mooer continues to expand its all-in-one rig roster. The most noteworthy upgrade sees Mooer expanding from two to four footswitches with recent releases, and this one is no different.

The headline is that the Chinese firm touts “improved control logic” that makes preset switching mid-gig faster and more seamless. Those two improvements show Mooer pushing players to take these from bedrooms to the stage and grow its presence on the live circuit.

There’s a 2.8” LCD screen at its heart, an expression pedal with toe-tap mode for engaging it in a flash (another live-minded addition), an 80-second stereo looper, 40 built-in drum patterns, 10 metronome modes, and a USB-C port for desktop tone building, firmware updates, and an audio interface for recording.

It also has mono and stereo outputs, but it doesn’t go as far as adding an effects loop. Powering it via the mains or, for nine hours, with its built-in lithium battery adds flexibility that puts gigs back in its crosshairs. So, is it good enough to make the jump from bedroom to the stage?

Specs

• Price: $180|£165|€192
• Type: Multi-effects and amp-modelling/profiling pedal
• Features: 55 amp models, 26 cabinets, built-in effects, third-party IR compatibility, software editing, NAM profile loader, 200 preset slots, 80-second stereo looper, 40 drum patterns, 10 metronome modes, and expression pedal
• Connectivity: 1/4” input, stereo and mono outputs, USB-C, 3.5mm aux in and headphone port
• Power: DC, 9v, center negative, 1A, built-in lithium battery with 9-hour playtime
• Dimensions: 310xH35x153 mm
• Weight: 1.17kg (41.27054 oz)
• Options: GE150 Pro (white finish) is mains-powered only ($155 / £138)
• Contact: Mooer

Build quality

Build quality rating: ★★★★☆

If I’m being harsh, despite the lovely embossed swirl design on its expression pedal trying its best to suggest otherwise, it doesn’t look or feel that premium. Its housing is plastic, like pretty much everything else except its quartet of footswitches.

But it’s compact, and at 310xH35x153 mm, it will easily slip into a guitar case. That size makes it a little wider than a Quad Cortex, but still smaller and less bulky. The pinky-red finish is quite nice too; it’s good to see a splash of color in the often monochrome modeler world.

It’s fairly well equipped, with a single jack input, mono and stereo outputs, 3.5mm inputs for aux cables and headphones, a USB-C for updates and doubling as an interface, a power switch, and an input for the power adapter. It’s limited, sure, and lacks MIDI compatibility, which other affordable Mooer offerings include. But for an everything-you-need-and-not-much-more starting point, it has the necessary bases covered. Still, no XLR output does seem an oversight, considering Mooer seems to be angling for the stage here.

What I will praise is its pretty fast start-up; for my money, my Quad Cortex is a little slow here. Also, having a built-in battery with a battery percentage indicator visible on the main page for each preset is a really handy feature. And yes, preset switching is very fast and smooth.

Sure, the screen could be bigger, but the text is clear enough from a distance, especially at a glance, and the footswitches are decent quality underfoot. I also feel swerving the touch screen is a good move, given that other Mooers have felt somewhat second-class in that department.

The lights are bright enough without feeling like a distracting rave. Though it does give away its stunted price a little, what matters most is what it can do. The build quality holds up as well as I expected before getting my hands on it.

Usability

Usability rating: ★★★★☆

Without a touchscreen, the Select and Mode dials do most of the operational heavy lifting. You can think of the Select as a mouse or arrow pad: scroll through presets, then push down to select the setting you want to tweak.

Mode, meanwhile, leafs through the various blocks of each preset, which take in a Compressor slot, Overdrive/Fuzz/Boost, Amp, Cab, Noise gate, EQ, Modulation, Delay, and Reverb. All of these slots are optional, with plenty of choices and familiar names for each. I also don't encounter any latency issues, with the on-screen ‘dials’ reacting to my touch immediately.

It works and is a far more enjoyable experience building and tweaking tones on the unit itself versus other budget modelers.

The software editor is certainly effective, with an intuitive interface that spells everything out. Assigning the footswitch takes just a few clicks and lets you control many different block parameters. Getting the change to stick, however, can be a little fiddly. And the pedal’s actual sweep feels limited.

Unfortunately, the signal chain is locked in place, so I can’t stick a flanger before the amp if I wanted to. But the order makes perfect sense, and so will be perfectly good enough for most needs.

It just falls short when it comes to that extra level of customization. It also means it can handle whatever processing I dial in. There’s no way I can run six amps, three different overdrives and delay pedals at once. Even the most full-on presets didn’t tax its processing power.

Although I sometimes find myself turning the Select dial when I should have turned the Mode, or vice versa, it is easy to navigate and tinker. It’s especially pleasing that all controls fit onto its 3x3-dial screen.

Pressing footswitches A and B engages the tuner, which is easy on the eye and has Bypass and Mute modes. Pressing footswitches C and D loads the looper. Here, the four switches control playing, recording, and clearing the loop, with D for exiting it entirely. It’s all pretty straightforward, and I felt comfortable using the pedal's functions after just a few minutes of experimenting.

Admittedly, it would have been nice to have dedicated switches for both the tuner and looper, but in the spirit of streamlining its design, it’s a perfectly acceptable compromise.

The Tap Tempo button, however, is tiny and right beneath the Master Volume. That’s not wholly practical. Still, it's a nice addition.

The lack of a screen that shows everything active in a preset at a glance is a minor disappointment. An update now highlights which blocks are active in a preset, but it doesn’t show specifics like the selected amp model.

Also, the lack of lists for each block – I have to scroll through the numbered slots individually to find what I need – is another small drawback, but the desktop is at least a little better for it. It could be smoother, but I’ve encountered a whole lot worse.

Sounds

Sounds rating: ★★★★☆

Broadly speaking, the tone quality is respectable. From the crystal-clear cleans of its ‘65 Fender Deluxe, to the distortion of a Marshall JCM 900, and the odd but surprisingly entertaining Game Boy preset – a ring modulator-warped Jet City JCA100H that gives off 8-bit charm – it covers a lot of ground.

With its cleaner amps, especially Fenders like the Twin and the aforementioned ’65 Deluxe, there’s a recognizable quality under the fingers. They sound pure, putting the character on the guitar, its pickups, and the player front and center, just like the original. As for impressions of famous gear elsewhere, they often leave me guessing.

The JCM 900 preset included with the modeler sounds good to my ears; it’s a chug-friendly, high-gain amp. But after playing a few bars, I can't tell you what amp it's supposed to be specifically. It sounds good enough, and for filling the kind of role a JCM 900 is built to, I can’t fault it. How faithful it is to the real deal, however, feels debatable.

The same goes for the Mesa/Boogie Triple Rectifier. It sounds like a generic high-gain amp, and I would probably estimate 'American' in a blindfold test, but anything beyond that is guesswork.

The EVH 5150, though, is at least undeniable. It’s got that snarl that really makes me want to dig in and play pinch harmonics until the cows come home. So really, it’s a mixed bag. Some tones are close enough to do a job; others make it obvious you’ve got an approximation over the real deal.

Elsewhere, its effects offerings start to highlight further shortcomings. The Pitch Shifter is littered with harsh artifacts that really get in the way of my enjoyment of the effect. Attempts to assign the effect to the expression pedal stomp to make a faux Whammy pedal prove unsuccessful too. It just doesn't want to play ball, which is sadly the case with a good few effects parameters.

The Delay is good to a point, but even the analog mode has a digital sheen. That said, the Phaser is satisfying on clean and ultra-high-gain tones, especially at slower settings, and its Noise Killer is very reliable. It doesn’t need cranking to clean up signal hiss, either.

Then there’s its built-in drum machine, which is a nice touch for novice players looking for something to jam along to and unlock their creativity. Its simple-but-effective beats come with tweakable tempos, and you can adjust the guitar output and drum volumes. But I don’t expect more advanced players to be particularly moved by it, beyond treating it as a more interesting metronome for practice.

For the money, it’s hard to argue with what you get. In fact, it’s pretty astounding how much is crammed in, and the quality of what you get is generally solid. But I also feel that the tones I got out of my first modeling amp – a Peavey Vypyr combo bought about 15 years ago – could go toe-to-toe with this. This is especially true with the effects, because more often than not, they nestle in that very digital, clearly-a-cheap-version-of-something territory.

Still, when you compare the price to the product, it’s very impressive.

Verdict

As someone who learned the foundation of a lot of gear via a modeling amp early in my playing days, the Mooer feels like the modern equivalent that a young me would have really gotten on with. On price, portability, versatility, and ease of use, Mooer ticks a lot of boxes without fetching a silly price.

However, in the wake of cost-cutting measures, I feel this pretty red modeler has hit a ceiling that makes it ideal for less experienced players rather than seasoned giggers looking to ditch their tube amps at long last.

That doesn’t make it bad, and for an entry-level modeler, it could absolutely handle smaller gigs, and one that can inspire plenty of ideas and teach players a lot about tone building in the process.

For under $200, I can say with confidence that it goes a long way. The amp models may not always be the most convincing, and some effects disappoint, but there’s so much to extract from this very cheap, easy-to-use, and gig-worthy floor modeler. For newer players, products like this feel like essential parts of the journey. An ideal stepping stone.

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Def Leppard and Last in Line guitarist Vivian Campbell says that his cancer has returned.

Campbell was first diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma in 2013, and announced in 2025 that he was “completely in remission” after undergoing a donor transplant.

Now though, in a new interview with Francisco Sigüenza of Radio YSKL FM in El Salvador, Campbell revealed that the transplant “didn't stick.”

“There’s only been one time that I felt it was gonna kill me,” Campbell said in the interview [transcribed by Blabbermouth]. “In the winter of 2023, I got really scared about what was happening and the pace at which it was happening. And I realized at that point that I had to do a donor transplant. It was my only hope to survive. And that’s what I did.

“I did that in January of 2025. I did a donor transplant. Unfortunately, it didn't stick. So the cancer has returned. And I’m continuing treatments to manage it.”

Campbell says he’s facing the development head on, and has no intention of pulling back from his creative endeavors.

“I’ll probably have to do another transplant within a few years with another donor to try and see if maybe that would cure me,” he said. “But in the meantime, I’m certainly not slowing down. I’m doing as much with my life as possible, not just with Def Leppard and Last In Line – I’m also rally driving, ’cause I always wanted to do that. So I’ve been doing that more and more, ’cause I love cars and I love driving.”

“Life is for the living,” he added. “And I encourage everyone to look after their own health – and if you are unfortunate enough to get a cancer diagnosis, to overcome the fear. Fear is inevitable when you’re first told those words. But once you get over that, you gotta realize just how to manage it and how to deal with it as best as possible, and just don’t give in.”

Asked about his cancer treatment in a 2019 Guitar World interview, Campbell struck a similarly determined note.

“It’s difficult with touring, but I’ve been doing immunotherapy for the last three-and-a-half years,” he said at the time. “Even when it was at its worst it was the least of my concerns. I’m stubborn and Irish and refuse to capitulate to cancer. I’ve never been so busy, and I fill every day with work. It makes me happy and my body responds to it. I believe that’s helped me survive it.”

Epiphone and Halestorm leader Lzzy Hale have joined forces yet again, unveiling Hale’s seventh signature model (between Epiphone and its parent/sibling companies, Gibson and Kramer).

It’s an Explorer, adorned with an unmissable Black Diamond Holographic finish of the variety that first appeared on the rocker’s signature Kramer Voyager.

This is beefier than that guitar, however, and has more to chew on than just its loud finish. It’s got a few vintage touches, and strands of Les Paul DNA, perhaps inspired by Hale’s Les Paul-slinging past.

Let’s start with the obvious, though. Not only is the Explorer adorned with that Black Diamond Holographic look, there’s a mirror pickguard. Hale jokes in a new interview that she uses it as a “weapon to blind not only my sound guy, but anybody that isn’t paying attention in the show.”

There’s some Les Paul Custom influence here and there – a SlimTaper ’60s C profile neck and an ebony fretboard with pearloid block inlays. There’s more old-school cool, as well – your standard hockey stick headstock, with a raised Epiphone nickel logo a la early Flying Vs.

More modern are the guitar’s pair of Epiphone Probucker Ignite pickups, controllable via a slim setup of a volume for each pickup, a master tone, and a 3-way toggle switch.

Thankfully, we don’t need to speculate idly on what sounds they produce – Guitar World Senior Deals Writer and resident Gibson/Epiphone expert Daryl Robertson has already taken the guitar for a spin, and had this to say: “They’re a key part of what gives this Explorer its modern edge, and they sound pretty great.

“​For me, I’d say these pickups are definitely voiced with modern players in mind. They have a bit more output than your average PAF, but they aren’t so loud that they lose all definition.”

Thanks, Daryl! Overall, he gave the guitar a rare five-out-of-five stars – not too shabby! You can read his full review of the Epiphone Lzzy Hale Explorer Custom – which is available now for $999 – here.

For more info on the guitar, visit Epiphone.

Yngwie Malmsteen’s journey to becoming a master neoclassical shredder began when his sister gave him a copy of Deep Purple’s Fireball for his eighth birthday.

“When I heard that, my path was clear,” Malmsteen said in a 2008 interview with Guitar World.

“What I loved about Blackmore’s playing were his syncopated pentatonic lines. I bought [Deep Purple’s] Made in Japan when it first came out, and a year later I knew all of those solos inside out. I would play them all day long.”

Malmsteen also primarily plays through Marshall stacks because of Blackmore (and, of course, Jimi Hendrix). Both guitarists wield white Stratocasters, too.

Fast-forward to 2018, and his guitar hero had plenty of praise for the Swedish virtuoso and his playing.

“I know him, and he’s a very nice guy,” Blackmore told Guitar World. “Excellent guitar player. A lot of people have kind of questioned his angle, but he obviously knows his stuff.

“He might be a bit too tall, but that’s my only criticism,” he quipped.

Blackmore even went as far as to say Malmsteen was “like a family member”, sharing his admiration for the Swedish maestro’s technical knowhow.

“I definitely think he’s probably the best at what he does and – for what it’s worth – the fastest. And he doesn’t play the typical blues, minor kind of interpretations. He knows his scales. It’s more interesting.”

Despite heavy fan speculation – and several Deep Purple covers featuring in Malmsteen’s live shows over the years – the two have never officially collaborated.

However, with Ritchie Blackmore returning to the stage for a surprise appearance with Deep Purple last week, and a new Malmsteen album in the pipeline, we still hold out hope for a Blackmore-Malmsteen collaboration one day.

Lita Ford started her professional career at 16 years old with ’70s rock band The Runaways alongside fellow guitarist Joan Jett.

However, when the band parted ways in ’79 – and after years of not being taken as seriously as their male peers – Ford went through a period of “seclusion for a few years.” She traded her Gibson SG for the cosmetics counter of a department store.

However, she was anything but resentful. “It was kind of fun,” she told Guitar World in 1985. “I used to go all dressed in black leather, and I used to wear my Runaways tour jacket. Everybody there thought I was in a gang… But I got bored and couldn’t really handle it after a while, so I split and started practicing.”

She eventually found herself putting together another band – but only after an intervention by Eddie Van Halen.

“[He] had come over and yelled at me for not doing anything, and my friend Ray Marzano got me into rehearsing every night. I went looking for a male singer, but I couldn’t find anybody that was really different.”

She scoured the scene for female singers. But she didn’t manage to find the right person, either – or, as she put it, “I couldn’t find anybody that really had the balls to sing what I wanted to write. They all sang sort of lightweight stuff. So I decided to do it myself.”

It was an arduous task for Ford, who didn’t consider herself a singer. Ever the perfectionist, she wasn’t at all happy with her debut album, Out for Blood, released in 1983. “It was poorly produced,” she said. “The performance was real good, but it wasn’t properly produced, so you don’t come across well because of the production.”

Ford wasn’t discouraged and kept going, cementing herself as a guitar icon along the way.

“This is what I am. I live up to me. I don’t do anything that isn’t real. I’m not a bullshitter, and I can’t lie or be phony about anything. I would never get on that stage and play anything that I didn’t like or didn’t believe was really me… So when I write these songs, this is really me.”

Norman Harris, the most recognized name in the vintage guitars, has been at it a long time. Nearly 60 years, to be exact.

His client list is legendary – Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Robbie Robertson, Tom Petty, Eddie Van Halen, Eric Johnson and Joe Bonamassa, just to name a few. His store, Tarzana, California’s Norman’s Rare Guitars, has been a Southern California landmark for decades.

So when the news hit in January that Harris sold his store to the North American Guitar Corporation (TNAG), it was a big surprise. But at age 77, Harris has had to consider his mortality, as well as his legacy, which he feels is in good hands with Carter Vintage Guitars, a company based in Nashville.

Harris is speaking to Guitar World about why he’s selling now after fielding offers for years, where the vintage market is today and where it, and his legacy, will be in the future.

In recent years, Harris had serious health issues, including a bout with cancer and several stents placed in his heart.

“When you’re faced with a major health scare, things become a lot more real,” he says. “I thought of my family, everybody who works at the store is like my family, and I wanted the store to have a smooth transition in case anything should happen to me.”

Norm’s health issues also prevented him from hitting the trade shows where he’d buy guitars. “We were selling more guitars than I was buying and I felt at some point I was gonna run out of good stock,” he says.

Harris had been in touch with TNAG, and they had been inquiring about buying the store for about five years. Harris liked the people at TNAG and felt they would be best to take over the reins. “They’re really professional,” he says. “And it was a very good move all around for everybody.”

It took some time for Norm to warm up to the idea of selling the company, and today he says, “It’s always bittersweet when you do something all your life, then you come toward the end. With my health issues, I just wanted to make sure I was doing the right thing. I wanted my grandchildren to drive by and say, ‘That was grandpa’s store.’”

As Ben Montague, founder and CEO of TNAG, explains, “The goal was to make sure these amazing mom-and-pop shops stay around. We have to make sure we support the employees, the customers and the inventory and try to make sure that they’re here for generations to come.” (Montague, a native of London, points out here are great vintage stores overseas as well, and he considers vintage guitar buying “a global movement.”)

While Norman’s Rare Guitars already has a good social media presence, including their popular YouTube channel, one of the reasons Harris wanted to sell to TNAG was to strengthen his social media presence and bring it up to date. “I like to describe it as we used to be the Flintstones and now we’re the Jetsons,” Harris jokes.

Both Harris and Montague have the same goal with social media, to give people from all over the world a feel for the store and give them a good idea of how a vintage guitar sounds before they potentially buy it

When Harris first started selling guitars in the late ’60s, there wasn’t even a vintage market, just a used guitar market, and he’s seen it go through incredible changes. Back then, you could buy a vintage ’59 Les Paul for $800, which many considered an insane amount of money.

Of course, the value of the ’59, which is considered the holy grail of the realm, kept going up and up, and people finally started to realize rare guitars could be great investments.

Decades later, the vintage market is still going strong. “We’ve been killing it,” Harris says, and vintage guitar prices have reached insane new levels with public auctions. One recent example is David Gilmour’s classic Black Strat, which sold for $3.9 million in 2019, and it was resold this year for $14.5 million. (Gilmour’s Strat is the current record holder for most expensive guitar ever sold.)

“The vintage market is coming into a real boom at the moment,” Montague says. “There’s a whole other asset class now, and I think more people are moving into the vintage market because they realize the value of these instruments.”

In a day and age where people are afraid of AI taking over, Montague sees the current state of guitar, and the vintage market, as a very positive sign for the future.

“We’re living in a world now where AI and creativity is done with the click of a button,” he says. “People don’t want that. They want authenticity; they want to see musicians playing an instrument, crafting a song, performing. I think that’s what we saw with the vinyl market; people buying LPs has gone up because people want authenticity.”

While Harris took a tough hit from his health issues, he says, “I’m up and about and doing my work. I still come in and do my business as if I owned it. Most people when they walk through the door wouldn’t even realize that there’s been any real change.”

And indeed, when you come to Norman’s, it still has a welcoming family vibe, there are beautiful guitars – new and rare – everywhere, and it’s also nice to walk into a guitar store where customers can actually play guitar.

“It’s a huge responsibility to make sure this store stays here forever,” Montague says, and you can tell it’s a responsibility he takes seriously.

Thankfully, after spending an afternoon with Harris and Montague, you walk away with the impression that good guitar playing, the vintage market and mom-and-pop shops like Norm's will enjoy a healthy future.

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

Joe Bonamassa may now be the reigning king of signature models – only last week, he added a new Martin signature to his roster. However, two decades ago, the Nerdville owner’s first artist model wasn’t deemed a surefire hit – so much so that it was limited to a run of 300.

“Mat Koehler over at Gibson told me that next year is the 20th anniversary… Time flies!” he says on the Gear Gab Podcast with Eric Dahl. “We originally started with 300 Custom Shop ‘Inspired By’ Les Pauls – that was my take on an old Goldtop.”

True to its name, this early model drew inspiration from Bonamassa’s childhood and his own much-modded 1955 Goldtop that came through his dad’s shop when he was just 11 years old.

“The late, great Pat Foley [Gibson artist relations executive] was the one that basically approached me about that,” he continues. “Rick Gembar, who was the head of the Custom Shop at Gibson at the time, he was the one that greenlit the whole thing. ”

During this period, Bonamassa was transitioning from being a fringe blues player to one of the leading bluesmen of the modern era.

His 2007 record, Sloe Gin, marked his first foray into the U.S. Billboard 200. He even topped the Billboard Top Blues Albums chart, and this success had an impact on signature model sales.

“I don’t think they were expecting to sell those kinds of guitars that fast,” Bonamassa says, “especially because I was not as well known, but for some reason they sold really fast, and we did other ones.”

Between signature Gibsons and Epiphones, Bonamassa’s total signature-model tally is now well into the tens, with no signs of slowing down. As for sales, he estimates that well over 40,000 Gibson and Epiphone signature models are now out in the wild.

“Custom Shop JB ones… there’s maybe a couple thousand out there. I know there’s at least 20,000 Epiphones out there, so we’re vastly approaching 25,000 Gibsons over the last 20 years.”

Despite his arsenal of models, the novelty of having his own name etched on a guitar hasn’t worn off, as Bonamassa himself explained in a chat with Norm Harris from Norman’s Rare Guitars.

Back in 2017, JoBo traded the prototype of his first Gibson signature at the legendary guitar store, prompting him to reflect on the moment it was first delivered to him.

“When you’re a kid, and you see a Gibson Les Paul, and then something that you’ve idolized over the years shows up at your door, and it says [your name] on the truss-rod cover – it was a very special day.”

No discussion of Mastodon can ignore the sense of renewal running through the band’s latest release, Marrow Deep. Following the departure and tragic passing of longtime guitarist Brent Hinds, and with Nick Johnston stepping into the role, the Atlanta metal titans found themselves entering unfamiliar territory.

Hinds’ departure in early 2025 represented the biggest personnel change in Mastodon’s history. After 25 years together, the remaining members faced a decision that would ultimately shape the band’s next chapter.

“We knew the change had to happen,” says bassist Troy Sanders. “But we had absolutely no idea what the future looked like.

“We were prepared to do whatever it took. If that meant auditioning 500 people or spending months looking for the right person, then that’s what we were going to do. Finding the right fit was that important.”

Instead, the search barely had a chance to begin. Nick Johnston was the first person the band invited to Atlanta – not to audition, but simply to hang out.

“Our drummer Brann had met Nick years ago and always thought he was a great guy and an incredible player. So before we even talked about music, we just asked him to come and hang for a couple of days.

“At this point in our career, being a good human being is every bit as important as being a great musician. We wanted to know whether we’d actually enjoy spending time together.”

As fate would have it, the timing couldn’t have been more surreal.

“The day Nick arrived was the morning Brann’s mother passed away. Nick knocked on the door after flying into Atlanta, and we had to tell him straight away, ‘Hey… really nice to meet you, but Brann’s mom died this morning.’

“Nick immediately said, ‘I’ll turn around. I’ve got a friend nearby. I don’t need to be here.’ But we told him, ‘No, come in. Stay with us.’ Looking back, I think that told us everything we needed to know about his character.”

“When we finally got around to playing together, he walked in and said, ‘I know about 20 of your songs. Which ones do you want to play?’ We were like… ‘Wait, what?’ He’d already done all the homework because he’d been a fan for years.

“Nick said, ‘I’m not here to fill Brent’s shoes. I want to help write the future of Mastodon.’ That was exactly what we wanted to hear. At that point it was basically, ‘You’re in.’”

The band immediately hit the road, first touring North America with Coheed and Cambria before tackling a full European festival run. Another summer of overseas shows followed.

“Those have honestly been the three best tours of our career. The camaraderie, the energy, the appreciation – we all feel renewed. It doesn’t happen very often that something this significant changes, and somehow everything just clicks.”

That renewed confidence carried directly into the recording sessions for the new album. Rather than treating Johnston as a hired hand, he was encouraged to become a genuine creative partner.

“If we’d hit a section where something wasn’t working, Nick would jump in with ideas straight away. He wasn’t trying to dominate anything. He just genuinely wanted to make the songs better.

“He’d throw ideas into the room whenever he had them, but he’s equally happy if somebody says, ‘Actually, I think we should try something else.’ There’s no ego attached to it.”

For Sanders, adding another songwriter has subtly shifted the band’s musical vocabulary without sacrificing its identity.

“It naturally evolves the sound because another creative voice is involved, but it still sounds completely authentic. It never felt forced.”

Despite being one of modern metal’s most acclaimed outfits, Sanders insists Mastodon’s greatest strength remains its willingness to challenge one another.

“If somebody tells me I’m overplaying something, my response is usually, ‘Okay… what would make it better?’ I’m never precious about it.

“There are times where someone might say, ‘That vocal isn’t quite there,’ or, ‘That bass part could probably be simpler.’ You’ve got to be willing to hear that.

“If everybody’s trying to protect their own territory, you spend more time arguing than making music. We’re way beyond that.”

As anticipation builds around the new record, Sanders has deliberately stopped measuring success by sales figures or chart positions. Instead, he sees two distinct milestones.

“The first success is simply finishing the album and putting it out into the world. We’ve been living with some of these riffs for nearly two years. We finished recording almost a year ago, and now it’s finally being released.

“Of course we hope people love it. But we never expect anybody to love it. We’ve never written records to win over old fans, attract younger fans or chase a different audience. We write albums that satisfy the five of us first.

“If we’re hugging each other at the end of the process because we genuinely love what we’ve created, then hopefully enough people will connect with it, too. But that can’t be the reason you make it.”

His second measure of success is far simpler.

“It’s spending the next few years travelling the world and playing these songs live. When you walk onstage every night and feel that connection with thousands of people… that’s when you remember you’ve got the coolest job on Earth.”

When Vivian Campbell joined Dio in early 1983, he found himself thrown in the deep end. The band had just parted ways with future Ozzy Osbourne guitarist Jake E. Lee, and had already written most of their debut studio album, Holy Diver.

“One reason I was hired for this band was because I have empathy with song,” Campbell told Guitar World back in 1985.

“I’m not out there to be the fastest guitarist in the world,” he said. “There’s also too much competition among players. They approach the instrument like an athlete approaches a race… I’m not in competition with Eddie Van Halen or Gary Moore or Yngwie Malmsteen. They’re my contemporaries, not my competitors.”

It was perhaps Campbell’s self-confidence that helped him push through the initial doubts of joining Dio.

“I was playing in my first band, Sweet Savage, and we were touring through Ireland with Wild Horses, a band which featured Brian Robertson on guitar and Jimmy Bain on bass. Jimmy told me he really liked my playing a lot.

“And then, when we ran into each other again, he told his friend Ronnie James Dio called him from L.A. to tell him that he and Vinny had just left Black Sabbath and that Ronnie was looking for a guitarist and bassist.”

Bain went as far as to recommend him for the guitar spot. Campbell gave him an audition tape, and a month later, he scored the gig. While he maintained his cool, he soon came face to face with the reality of recording the band’s debut record. Safe to say, the new responsibility took its toll.

“My hands started shaking as soon as I began recording,” he admitted. “I mean, we weren’t talking about it or rehearsing – we were actually doing it. It was the first time I was ever in a professional situation of this sort, and the pressure was getting to me.”

Released on May 25, 1983, Holy Diver became a heavy metal staple and cemented Campbell as a fast-rising guitar hero. While he parted ways with the band in 1986 – or, as he later revealed, was fired – and subsequently joined Whitesnake, those years proved to be formative.

“Ronnie gave me great advice about building a guitar solo with memorable lines – and not overplaying,” he told Guitar World in 2024, despite his complicated relationship with the frontman.

“I appreciated that guidance; if left to my own devices, it would have been a case of how many fucking notes I could fit in.”

What is it?

As the frontwoman, guitar slinger, and songwriting powerhouse behind Halestorm, Lzzy Hale has already been honored with six signature models to date, ranging from Gibson, Epiphone, and even Kramer, and now with the new Explorer Custom, that makes seven models to bear her name.

Lzzy is a long-time fan of this angular Gibson, so it’s no surprise this new model is an Explorer, but what makes this one different is the appointments. Built around the attributes of a Les Paul Custom, the mahogany Explorer body features elegant 7-ply binding, the mahogany neck is the standard SlimTaper 60s C profile and is equipped with an ebony fretboard that sports those classic pearloid block inlays.

Of course, the neck is crowned with the iconic hockey stick headstock, but this one showcases a raised Epiphone nickel logo, not unlike what you’d find on a vintage ‘58 Flying V. Rounding out the peghead is a Graph Tech nut and Grover Mini Rotomatic tuners.

The model is dressed in a striking gloss Black Diamond Holographic Sparkle finish, just like Lzzy’s Kramer Voyager, and is paired with a single-ply mirror pickguard.

Tonally, we have a pair of Epiphone Probucker Ignite pickups, with no fancy electronics here, just a volume for each pickup, a master tone, and, of course, a 3-way toggle switch. The model comes bundled with an Epiphone hardshell case that bears Hale’s signature.

Specs

• Launch price: $999 | £859 | €999
• Made: China
• Type: Six-string electric guitar
• Body: Mahogany
• Neck: SlimTaper 60s C
• Fingerboard: Ebony
• Scale length: 24.75"/628.65 mm
• Frets: 22, Medium jumbo
• Hardware: LockTone Tune-O-Matic bridge, LockTone Stop Bar tailpiece, Grover Rotomatic tuners, Silver Speed knobs
• Electrics: Pickups, controls, switching
• Left-handed options: No
• Finishes: Black Diamond Holographic Sparkle
• Cases: Epiphone Lzzy Hale hardcase
• Contact: Epiphone

Build quality

Build quality rating: ★★★★½

I’ve never had an electric guitar arrive for review that’s had such a big reaction from others in the house. My wife kept coming into my office just to look at it. Simply put, this guitar looks stunning. Yes, it looks good in photos, but in person you can really see how all of those little flecks of glitter catch the light and morph through greens, silvers, and purples – and that black stinger on the rear of the headstock is the icing on the cake.

Thankfully, the finish has been very well applied, with nothing to spoil its striking appearance. I like the black edge to the binding too. It’s the perfect understated frame for that pretty wild finish.

While we’re on the aesthetics, the raised Epiphone logo is a bold choice, and I think this guitar pulls it off. It reminds me of the models produced by Gibson Custom and master artisan Leo Scala, and the very limited '58 Addiction Explorers. It’s a cool look, and I’d love to see this appear on more instruments going forward.

Moving on to the fretwork, I’m happy to see a clutch of well-polished and very well-installed medium jumbo frets. They are well cut and trimmed, with no sharp ends or high spots. They also look good against a jet-black ebony board that is perfectly dark and without streaks or marks.

The only issue I could find from a build point of view was with the control knobs. The silver speed knobs look great, but have been poorly installed from the factory. Not only were they a little crooked on the pots, but they also pop straight off with very little force.

It’s an easy enough fix if you have two minutes spare and a small screwdriver to open up the post of the pot, but at this price point, it’s the sort of thing you’d hope wouldn’t make it through quality control. I’ll chalk this one up to bad luck, though, and I hope the rest are all fine, as otherwise it’s a neat and tidy build overall.

Playability

Playability rating: ★★★★★

Explorers can feel a little unwieldy and just straight up awkward if you’re not used to them. I happen to be a die-hard fan of Explorers, so I’m more than familiar with their quirks.

It’s fair to say weight distribution can be an issue with this style of guitar, but this one’s 8lbs are surprisingly balanced, whether I’m playing seated or standing with a strap. It stays put and sits rock-solid. The cutaway and deep lower bout give easy access to the upper frets, so stretching for those high notes is no problem at all.

Billed as a SlimTaper ‘60s neck profile, this guitar actually feels pretty substantial, and a little thicker than I was expecting – but in a good way. Once I pick it up, the neck fills my hand just right, striking a nice balance between not too thin and not too thick. More rounded than my own Gibson Explorer, especially in the open position, but it’s very comfortable indeed.

What surprised me most, though, is how effortless it is to move up and down the fretboard. The setup from the factory was spot-on, with a low action that measured just about 1.5mm at the 12th fret on the low E. There’s no fighting the strings here. ​

I guess it’s to be expected with whose name is on the headstock, but it feels great for riffing – and that’s thanks to the nicely rounded neck. Chording is comfortable, and the slightly chunkier neck profile gives you something to really hold onto, especially when you’re laying into heavy power chords.

But that’s not to say it’s not capable of some speed too. Thanks to the low action, you get a slinky feel that makes fast runs and bends easy, but without any annoying fret buzz. All in, I think this is a fabulous feeling instrument.

Sounds

Sounds rating: ★★★★★

Epiphone’s new ProBucker Ignite humbuckers are at the heart of this guitar’s sound. I recently reviewed the excellent Epiphone RD Futura Custom, which featured these pickups, and I’m glad to see them used here as well. They’re a key part of what gives this Explorer its modern edge, and they sound pretty great.

​For me, I’d say these pickups are definitely voiced with modern players in mind. They have a bit more output than your average PAF, but they aren’t so loud that they lose all definition.

For testing, I opted for a Positive Grid Spark Live modeling amp and matching cab. Now, from what I believe, Lzzy is a fan of a dimed Marshall JCM800 – aren’t we all? – so that’s exactly what I dial in with a touch of verb for some space.

As expected, the tone here is tight and focused, with a slightly hollowed-out mid-range that pairs really well with a healthy dose of distortion. As I noted the last time I used these pickups, the bottom end has been excellently shaped. There’s no flabby low-end with these pups, meaning I can de-tune without worry that things will get too muddy.

Unlike the Futura series, there is no extra switching with the Custom Explorer. No coil-splits or out-of-phase switch, which feels like a shame. I understand that Hale may not use anything like that herself, preferring to keep this simple, but this switching worked well on the Futura, and I think it would work equally as well here – it would certainly make the model more versatile.

That said, this is a fantastic-sounding guitar, and one that perfectly nails those Halestorm high-gain tones and a whole lot more.

Verdict

There’s no denying this is a bold guitar, and that’s definitely in keeping with Hales's other signature guitars. From her Falcon-esque white and gold Explorer, her Firebird-headed Explorerbird, and her Kramer Voyager, she just doesn’t do subtlety, and I, for one, am here for it. In fact, this may be my favorite of her signature models so far.

It isn’t all about looks either; this guitar more than delivers on playability and sound, too. My review model arrived perfectly playable straight out of the box, and as I’ve noted before, the Ignite pickups from Epiphone may be up there with the best the company has produced.

Yes, this is a guitar that will appeal to Halestorm fans, but I think its appeal goes far beyond that. If you’re looking for a stage-ready axe that is most definitely a show-stopper, then this is the Explorer for you.

Guitar World verdict: With its stunning good looks, flawless playability, and a sound to match, this guitar isn’t just a model for Lzzy Hale fans, it’s for anyone who wants a show-stopping Explorer at a reasonable price. Okay, while a couple of minor quirks keep it from perfection, its bold aesthetic and stellar sound make it impossible to ignore. This Explorer delivers the goods in spades.

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• Best metal guitars: hell-raising electrics for shredders on any budge

Charvel has announced four new additions to its speedster-friendly Pro Plus Dinky DK24 model range, and they seem particularly primed for metal madness.

Three of them are HHs, with an HSS thrown in for those looking for something a wee bit more Strat-like. The latter is the only one of the bunch to feature the more typically Charvel combo of a Seymour Duncan Full Shred TB-10 humbucker at the bridge and Seymour Duncan Custom Flat Strat SSL-6 single-coils in the middle and neck.

The HHs are the eyebrow-raisers – all three are armed with a Seymour Duncan Nazgul ’bucker at the bridge and a Seymour Duncan Sentient ’bucker by the neck. With those, we reckon, we’ve moved beyond shred and into straight metal territory.

Moving to hardware, the HSS again stands out from its siblings with a WVS130-2p tremolo bridge. Two of the HHs boast dive bomb-primed, recessed, double-locking Floyd Rose 1500 Series trems, while another has a Charvel HT6 string-through-body hardtail bridge.

The hardtail model is also unique in its Ash Dinky body – its brethren are built from Basswood bodies. One thing all four have in common, though, is 24 stainless steel jumbo frets.

But let’s talk about those finishes, eh? Alongside your more reserved blacks and whites (that HH FR EB Crimson Eclipse is suave), there are the HSS 2PT QM’s two loud colorways: Amber Tiger Eye and the none-more metal Zombie Fade.

The new Pro Plus Dinky DK24s range in price from $1,199 at the low end (the HH HT EB Crème White) to $1,399 at the high end (the HH FR QM EB and both HSS 2PT QM models).

These happen to be the company’s first new models since the death of its founder and namesake, Wayne Charvel. Though he hadn’t been associated with the company in decades, Charvel’s legacy as one of the fathers of the custom shop revolution, and the so-called Superstrat, can certainly be felt in them.

For more info on the guitars, visit Charvel.

David Bowie, who left us on January 10, 2016, was a highly accomplished singer, songwriter, performer and actor, and a fine musician too, although he knew his limitations when it came to musical virtuosity.

As he told Guitar Player’s Joe Gore in 1997, “My guitar playing hasn’t moved with the times at all. I use the same chords as always, but I do know a lot of them, and I’m able to put them together in interesting juxtapositions. Any time I did spend being disciplined was learning how chords work together.”

Make no mistake, Bowie knew his way around a fretboard, as a number of stellar guitarists explain to us below – but he had bigger goals in mind than being a virtuoso axeman.

In his 54 years as a recording and performing artist, he managed to redefine the role of the theatrical musician, refining the art of the alter-ego, touring the world in several incarnations and making an impact on the worlds of cinema and finance (remember those 1990s Bowie Bonds?) along the way. To help him achieve those objectives, he recruited some of the most fiendishly talented guitar players in the world.

You’ll already know most, if not all, of the names on the roster. For his first three years as a bona fide star, after he blew the minds of a generation with 1970’s The Man Who Sold the World, Bowie’s guitar partner was Mick Ronson, who also played so memorably on Hunky Dory (1971), The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972), Aladdin Sane and Pin Ups (both 1973), as well as performing on the Ziggy Stardust World Tour.

Listen to the metallic solo on The Width of a Circle, from The Man…, the acoustic textures on Oh! You Pretty Things from Hunky Dory, and the all-out wall of sound on Suffragette City for a taste of Ronson’s magical approach. Sadly, he died in 1993 at age 46, or we’d be talking to him today about that unmatched early catalog.

After the unsung session hero Alan Parker helped out on 1974’s Diamond Dogs, assisting Bowie on the unforgettable main riff of Rebel Rebel, Earl Slick and Carlos Alomar, the latter Bowie’s longest-serving guitarist by some distance, stepped up to the plate for his next five and 13 studio albums respectively.

Both men recorded away from Bowie in extended breaks from his band, but they’re the most prolific of his sidemen by a long shot. Where to start? Check Slick’s performance on 1975’s Young Americans and Alomar’s sterling work on Bowie’s Berlin-recorded landmark, Low (1977), which also featured the late Ricky Gardiner, or any of the early-2000s albums that kept Bowie in the millennial bloodstream.

Let’s not forget the guitarists who played with Bowie’s live band, of course, even if they didn’t record album sessions; these include Stacy Heydon, who held it down on the Isolar Tour 1976; the great Adrian Belew, who graduated from Frank Zappa’s band in time for the Stage live album in 1978 and returned 12 years later as musical director of the Sound + Vision Tour; and the equally great Peter Frampton, who came alive on the Glass Spider Tour in ’87.

It says much about Bowie that many of his guitar players were superstars themselves. Take King Crimson’s Robert Fripp, who recorded Bowie’s best-known lead line on Heroes in 1977; Stevie Ray Vaughan, who guested on Let’s Dance in 1983; and Nile Rodgers of Chic, who played on and co-produced the same album.

Lesser-known session stalwarts played their part, too, notably Chuck Hammer, who played guitar synth on Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) in 1980. That album also featured a notable guest slot by Pete Townshend of the Who.

In 1988 Bowie took a four-year sidestep off the main drag with Tin Machine, the heavy rock quartet in which Reeves Gabrels carried most of the weight, guitar-wise.

Live, he was assisted by Eric Schermerhorn, who went on to work with Iggy Pop after Tin Machine called it quits; Gabrels later played on Outside (1995), Earthling (1997) and Hours... (1999). In the 2000s, Gerry Leonard played textural guitar on Heathen (2002) and Reality (2003) and on the accompanying tours, joined on those albums by Mark Plati, also an acclaimed producer and multi-instrumentalist who had previously worked with Prince.

Slick, Leonard, David Torn, producer Tony Visconti and Bowie himself recorded guitar for The Next Day in 2013, and for his valiant, multifaceted final curtain, 2016’s still-astonishing Blackstar, jazz guitarist Ben Monder was recruited.

So what memories do these musicians have of their late employer – and what did they think of Bowie as a guitar player? Let’s find out. Belew, Schermerhorn, Leonard, Plati, Frampton and Alomar are grilled on that subject below (Fripp gave us such an expansive interview that we’ve given him his own feature, coming soon).

As for the much-missed Vaughan and Ronson, they’ve been jamming away in the sky since 1990 and 1993, respectively, but we’ll raise our glasses to them in salute.

Was David Bowie a good guy to be around, generally speaking?

Adrian Belew: Absolutely. David wasn’t a person to say bad things. That would be left to someone around him. To me, he was always upbeat. He loved me, we loved each other, and we had a great time together, so there was nothing to be critical about.

It was simple. If he didn’t like something, he’d simply say, “I don’t know about that,” and that was as far as it would go. I never saw him angry. He was too sophisticated. He had so much interest in so many different things.

That’s one of the things I loved about him. He would always discover a new subject matter to start reading about. Once he got into something, man, he knew everything about it. That’s what made him such an interesting person to be with.

Eric Schermerhorn: His bunk was above mine on the bus, and he read books non-stop. I remember talking to him about Philip K. Dick. The best thing David did for me, which really shows his character, was after we played the Budokan at the end of the tour in 1992. I talked to him and he said, “We’re done. The gig’s over. What would you like to do in the future?”

I heard Chrissie Hynde was looking for a guitar player, so I was like, “Well, Chrissie Hynde would be fun.” I get back to New York, and two weeks later, his manager calls me and goes, “Chrissie wants to meet you in London.” I went to London, hung out with her all day at her house, and she was great.

She said, “David says you’re really good. I need a guitar player.” I had already sent Iggy Pop a tape, and he said, “Let’s do something,” and I said yes because he lived in New York, but I look back sometimes and think, “I could have moved to London in 1992, and that would have been fun.”

Gerry Leonard: David was very perceptive and insightful – and he had this gift for reading a room. Everybody that was in his band was there for a very specific reason that he had in his mind. He had this knack of figuring out people’s strengths and really leaning into those strengths. He was very good at pulling together all of those seemingly disparate elements into making art.

Mark Plati: Aside from what a lot of people say about his curious nature, and how he was always trying to stretch his own musical and visual boundaries, he just really enjoyed doing it.

He loved the process and had a lot of fun with it, and that was contagious to anybody in the room, which made these experiences a really wonderful adventure. Sometimes you didn’t know where you were going, but boy, you had a good time getting there.

How did you first meet him?

Belew: We first met when he appeared at a concert in Berlin, when I was playing with Frank Zappa. Two nights before that, Brian Eno had come to the show in Cologne, and Brian knew David was looking for a fresh guitar player, so he told him, “We’ve got to go see this guy that’s with Zappa.”

There was a part of the show where Frank took an extended 10-minute solo, leaving just Terry Bozzio and Patrick O’Hearn on stage, and the rest of us were supposed to walk off the stage at that point.

As I was doing that, I looked over at the monitor guy, and there was David Bowie and Iggy Pop standing there. So I walked over and shook David’s hand and said, “I just want to really thank you for all your music. You’ve really inspired me. You’ve done so much amazing stuff.”

I didn’t even have time to say anything to Iggy before David said, “Well, good. How’d you like to be in my band?” It was an amazing moment. It gave me shivers. Two weeks later, I was in David’s rehearsal.

Schermerhorn: I met Reeves Gabrels in Boston in 1979. We played in different bands together, and we worked at the same music store. We were just guitar buddies, and we were into Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew as well as older guys like Jimi Hendrix.

His wife, Sarah, worked for David as his publicist, so he got the Tin Machine gig around 1988 after she said to him, “Hey David, my husband’s a guitar player” and gave him a cassette. When I was in Boston I was in a band called East Of Eden.

We were on Capitol and we did a record with Roy Thomas Baker, opened for the Psychedelic Furs for a tour and then we broke up. I moved to New York in 1990, and Reeves calls me around April or May of 1991 and says, “Hey, do you want to come out to L.A. and audition? We need a guitar player for Tin Machine.”

I was like, “Whoa… this is life-changing!” So I learned the records in every key, because you never know when you go to an audition; flew out to L.A. and played a couple of songs with the band.

It was great, and at the end Reeves goes, “Hey, Eric, play [Jimi Hendrix’s] Little Wing for David,” because he knew I could play that shit. So I did that, and as we’re packing up, David comes up to me right there, shakes my hand, and goes, “I’m really looking forward to working with you.”

Leonard: David was intrigued by my playing, I think. He came and saw me play live and then asked me to be part of it. I think he wanted somebody to cover the stuff Fripp had done, or Belew had done, or Eno had done, and that was right up my street, because I was a big fan of all those guys.

I didn’t study Fripp or anything, but people would tell me, “You sound like Fripp,” and I would deliberately not listen to him when I heard that, because I didn’t want to be a copyist. Of course, I’ve listened to Fripp since, and he’s got a beautiful tone and a unique style.

Plati: I worked with Prince before I worked with Bowie, which I guess is kind of an odd combo in that you don’t expect one to follow the other in sequence, but that’s David. I can think of a lot of other artists who would have been like, “He worked with Prince – that’s really not up my street.” Not David. If anything, he’d be like, “Wow, what’s this guy about?” because he had an eternally curious nature.

Were you a fan of his music before you played with him?

Schermerhorn: Absolutely. I bought Low and Heroes in high school. Those records were so powerful. When I met David, I said to him, “Those records changed my life,” and he said, “They changed my life, too!”

Plati: My first experience with Bowie’s music was Space Oddity. I most likely heard that on the radio when I was, maybe, 12. If you were a musically aware teenager in the early ’70s, you got to grow with David’s music and with his guitar players.

Station to Station was the first big Bowie record for me that I was aware of as an album and on FM radio. All those tunes were on the radio, and the guitar playing from Carlos and Slicky really stuck with me.

How did you approach the task of being Bowie’s guitar player?

Belew: He really had a fascination for guitar players, and one of the things I noticed is how much his songs were open to guitar playing. Songs like Stay or Heroes are custom-made for guitar. I was his musical director in 1990, and that was a whole other level; it took me months of preparation.

One of the main difficulties was that he wanted just a four-piece band, and yet he was doing a retrospective of all his career. So you had symphonies, you had saxophone sections, you had everything in there.

Fortunately, this coincided with the first sampler coming out. Roland had the first couple of samplers and they sent them to me, so me and my engineer and the keyboard player Rick Fox sat for hours and tried to sample all this stuff.

We kept buying more samplers, so in the end we had two huge racks of samplers. Most of the stuff was played live, but anything that was beyond our ability was Rick Fox just pressing a sampler button, and the stage would fill with beautiful orchestral sounds.

Leonard: I tried not to be too intimidated by the lineage that had gone before me, because hats off, those guys are incredible voices on the guitar.

But, you know, that was David’s thing, too: he was very generous in that way, validating you when you couldn’t do it for yourself. We need that as artists: at times, we need someone to say “Keep doing what you’re doing, because it’s going somewhere.”

Plati: When I met him, he was writing with Reeves Gabrels, and while they would both play guitar when they were composing, Reeves would go off and record the parts, and David was perfectly fine with that because he was always about the people he would bring into the story. He was always about letting them do what they do best.

Carlos Alomar: I’m just fine all over the place, playing what we call rhythm-lead. Because in my world, there’s no lead guitar player. You play a part, I play a part, and we switch off. And if I want to, I’ll play your part too if I need to.

Did Bowie have specific requirements, or was he more about, “Hit me with what you’ve got”?

Peter Frampton: He never said a word apart from, “Just come and be you.” It was such an honor and a relief that he trusted me, you know, and got me there because of what I do. So I wasn’t on Let’s Dance, and I didn’t sound like Stevie Ray Vaughan, but I quoted Stevie and all the other great guitar players. It was a thrill to be able to do that.

Belew: I had just come from working with Frank Zappa for a year, and Frank was very directive. He wanted you to play consistently and correctly, and he really didn’t need you to come up with much of anything. The music was the way he already wanted it to be. David was entirely the opposite.

He was just thrilled to have someone who could play wild and run around on stage with him. At one point he said, “You can be my Keith Richards!” He never really directed me about anything. He was a supporter more than anything else. He just got so excited if you did something really cool.

There’s a video of me playing Stay on the German television show Musikladen, and I launch into the first section where I can play a solo. He’s standing across the stage with his arms crossed, with this big grin, looking at me the whole time. He’s got this look on his face like, “That’s my boy!”

Schermerhorn: I think his genius, probably like Miles Davis, was to ask himself, “Who do I have around me?” Even if he had a guy who could only play two chords, then he’d write something using those two chords. His genius was hearing what you could do.

Alomar: I always say this: if you had Jimi Hendrix as your guitar player, would you tell him what to play? Fuck no. I tried to be inspiring, and I tried to give him what my best was. We always asked ourselves, “What if?” like, “What if we take the amplifier and we put it in the hallway?”

One time, Tony Visconti found a chandelier and threw a rope over it and then hoisted a microphone up there. These types of outlandish ideas, and that curiosity, will keep you young forever.

What did you think of Bowie as a guitar player?

Belew: This is an interesting thing. All the time I worked with David, I actually never saw him play much of anything. Not piano, not guitar. When I was his musical director in 1990, I just about managed to talk him into playing saxophone for one song, just because I thought it would be a cool look for David.

All those years I never thought about it, but when I ask myself when he sat down and wrote all these great songs, I don’t know the answer. He must have done it privately.

Schermerhorn: I thought what was cool was he never did barre chords. He did the E shape and slid that up and down the neck. He was letting the other strings ring on the 12-string. That’s how I remember him playing, and his timing was great.

Leonard: David wasn’t virtuosic or anything like that. He didn’t have any aspirations in those ways. He had a kind of caveman instinct with the guitar of what he wanted to do in a broad sense.

For instance, when we did The Next Day, he’d say, almost apologetically, “Do you mind playing this part?” And he’d play me a part from the demo, which was a stabbing chord or something like that. It was great, so raw and punk rock.

He’d say, “Take it and do what you want with it,” so sometimes I would modify it, but I would always be very careful to try and keep the intention. So he got people to do the things that he wasn’t able to do himself, but he had good instincts; he could write on the guitar and he could play a mean riff, too.

Plati: In the Spiders, he was basically the second guitarist for a while and he had chops, but once he started incorporating two guitar players in the band, then he didn’t have to be that any more; he became more of a frontperson.

Alomar: Bowie, like John Lennon, was a great rhythm, acoustic guitar player. Basically, they played triads, and they could play chords, but they couldn’t play chords and bass-lines together in opposition, so the bass couldn’t go down when the chord was going up. You always have to hit the root: you never hit an inversion. It’s what we call metronome playing. They could keep the rhythm down for the whole song.

Frampton: David played the riff on Rebel Rebel, so we know he was a great guitarist, but I think he used guitar and keyboard in order to write. He was like me in the sense that I can play piano enough to write a song, but I’m not a piano player, whereas I am a guitar player.

When were you last face to face with Bowie?

Belew: A long time ago. I don’t know. He called me several times, though. One time he called and asked, “What are you doing?” I said, “I’m out in my garden.” He said, “You’ve got a garden?” I said, “Yeah, I’ve got a garden. You could have a garden, too, if you want. You’re David Bowie!”

Schermerhorn: I ran into him a few times in New York, and he was always so nice to me.

Alomar: About a year or so before he died. It was Tony Visconti’s birthday, and he was there. I didn’t know he was sick. He seemed a little pale and rather frail, but it was mostly just about renewing old times, tying up loose ends, and rededicating our passion and love for each other as well as celebrating Tony’s good fortune and health.

Later on, I found that it was more of a pleasant goodbye. But one of the things that we have in Buddhism is that we don’t look at death as being death. It’s like when you call somebody after a long period of time.

You’re just calling to see how they are, to make sure that they know that you remember them and cherish them. As a Buddhist, I feel that if I don’t make that phone call to check up on you, then you’re still having a good old time. I know you’re fine.

What is your best memory of him?

Belew: Oh, man. There were so many. I feel like I have my own private film in my mind of everything that went on. Maybe the Sound + Vision tour. That was 108 shows, and it went for a year, and we played in 26 countries.

That’s when I really got to know David and befriend him. I got to experience a side of him that few other people did, because I spent time with him at night in his room, just talking about things, or having dinners or whatever. We were pals, so everything comes out. All kinds of joyful things happen.

Leonard: The whole experience was life-changing, and I feel very lucky. It was a little bit of “right place, right time” for me.

Alomar: I love the Scary Monsters… album. We had this period where we were so locked in. We could do anything; we were flipping beats and doing split-rhythms, and it was just amazing.

When we got together, our intent matched the level of our efficiency, so satisfaction was guaranteed. As a traveler in time, every one of us has that moment where you can hitch a ride to a star, and I think Bowie did a pretty good job of that.

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

Green Day’s Mike Dirnt has just announced that he’s selling a selection of iconic basses and amps – as well as clothes and accessories – used on tour and in the studio via his official Reverb shop.

Among the instruments up for grabs are several basses that were burned on stage during the late ’90s and early 2000s Nimrod and Warning tours. For Green Day fans, this was the era when Tré Cool would famously set fire to his drum set.

“Tré Cool is our resident pyromaniac,” says Dirnt. “There’d be a 20-foot fire going, and my bass and Tré’s kit are burning while Billie’s playing Time of Your Life. It was pretty awesome, actually.”

Other collectibles include two American Idiot-era Fender Mike Dirnt signature Precision basses and one of the first Ampeg SVT-810 cabinets that he purchased with his first Green Day paycheck – also used on the Dookie tour.

There’s a signed Fender bass used on the Nimrod album, an “unintentionally smashed” Gibson Grabber bass, and a Yamaha G100-II amp head from the band’s early days.

The 1962 Fender P-Bass in Fiesta Red, once part of Dirnt’s “studio quiver,” will also be available for purchase, along with several Mesa/Boogie amps and speaker cabinets that have racked up thousands of touring miles.

“They’re just bulletproof, incredible cabinets. I should probably keep one and use it as a coffee table because they’re really cool,” he quips, “but I could also plug stuff into it at the same time.”

Aside from the gear, Dirnt’s official Reverb shop is set to include dozens of pieces of clothing that MTV aficionados will surely recognize from music videos like Wake Me Up When September Ends and Oh Yeah, as well as outfits worn on the 21st Century Breakdown, American Idiot, and ¡UNO! tours.

“I’ve found some amazing guitars and basses over the years,” says Dirnt. “When you’re on tour for a long time, you’re always looking for cool gear. You’re always thinking about what could be on the next record, or what do I need to play tonight, or what can I find that sparks inspiration.

“Every guitar, every bass, every amp has something different. You pick up a guitar and strum it, and you think, there’s songs in this thing and I’m going to extract those songs. Then, once you feel like you’ve gotten the songs or the recording out of it, it’s time to let it go and give it to the next person.”

Dirnt’s official Reverb shop goes live on September 9.

For more information, visit Reverb.

Wes Hauch is one of the tidiest technical metal players on the planet – his electrifying solos have lit up punishing cuts from the likes of Alluvial and The Black Dahlia Murder. Now he has a well-deserved Ibanez signature guitar to his name – but the price tag is blowing as many minds as his playing has.

The Ibanez Custom Shop ICWH727 Wes Hauch Signature Iceman 7-String looks the part: trans black finish, Lo-Pro Edge trem, black hardware, that lower horn scoop. Fans were hyped. Then they saw the price.

Preorders for the Hauch model have gone live at Axe Palace for $9,999, and let’s just say that the reaction has been mixed – a quick scroll of the YouTube and Instagram comments reveals responses that vary from “crazy” to “delusional”.

No, the ICWH727 doesn’t look like a $10,000 flame top from Gibson or PRS. But this Iceman is priced the way it is because it’s being built at the Ibanez Custom Shop in Japan by master-builder Sugi and his team.

That’s the same workshop where Meshuggah’s iconic M8M was crafted, which had a list price of $9,066 at the time of its launch in 2013.

And lest we forget that a significantly more affordable Indonesian-built version of that model, the $1,699 M8M, followed a year later. Let’s hope the Hauch follows suit.

Anyway, what are the specs on this thing?

Wood-wise, you’re looking at an African mahogany body with premium flame maple top, and set-neck construction with a three-piece maple-purpleheart neck at 27” scale.

That neck is a slim Wizard 7 variety, with a rosewood fingerboard and 24 jumbo frets that have received the Ibanez Custom Shop fret-edge treatment.

Naturally, Hauch’s signature Seymour Duncan Jupiter Rails humbuckers are onboard to deliver high-gain output paired with enhanced articulation and midrange.

We mentioned the Lo-Pro Edge tremolo earlier, which comes with recessed fine tuners and locking studs. Hipshot open-gear machineheads and a single volume control round out the spec.

According to Axe Palace, it’s “the first ever commercially available Ibanez Custom Shop 7-string, and the first Japan-built Iceman model in over 30 years”, which makes it something of a historic release.

Let’s just hope a more affordable version lands before too long, because fans are stoked on everything else about this guitar.

For more information, head to Ibanez.

Angine de Poitrine are arguably the breakout band of 2026. Since their otherworldly KEXP session went viral, guitarist Khn de Poitrine and drummer Klek de Poitrine have set the guitar world into a microtonal-guitar-meets-prog-rock frenzy.

The mavericks have now gained the support of fellow Canadians and prog legends Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee, who have recently spoken about the Québécois phenomenon.

“Well, I think they're fantastic,” Lee told Chile’s Radio Futuro in a recent interview. “I love the fact that they've gone viral, because they're so unusual, peculiar, idiosyncratic.

“It's a sound that no-one's heard before. They've taken Primus and a bit of Rush and all the complexities and sort of boiled it down to a two-piece band using an incredible array of technology.”

Lee went as far as to say that Angine de Poitrine’s repertoire is the “most entertaining and exhilarating bits of music that I've heard for a long, long time.

“And I think most people that hear them find it somehow infectious, and I don't mean that like it's poisonous. I mean good infectious.”

Lifeson also chipped in, calling their arrangements and songwriting “hypnotic.

“You know, using the looping pedals to create a bassline, and then guitar lines over it, and keep building on it,” he pointed out.

“And above all, they're just great players. They really play their instruments so well, and that whole microtonal approach just makes it sound so exotic, and just mesmerizing.”

“And the drummer has a bigger nose than me, so I love it,” Lee quipped.

Other recent Angine de Poitrine disciples include Animals as Leaders’ Tosin Abasi, who recently had the privilege of wielding Khn’s microtonal double-neck guitar/bass, as documented by Willow Smith.

The two guitarists recently attended an Angine de Poitrine gig, and Abasi couldn’t help but lay his hands on what’s already proving to be quite the legendary guitar.

As for the rest of us, well, it seems like a signature may or may not be in the works – at least according to CEO Simon Godin.

“I’m speaking with their team,” he told Guitar World. “It’s not a yes or a no. Everything went very big, very fast, and now this is the instrument they’ve dreamed of.

“Maybe this is why, for now, they want to keep it unique. If we do make a signature version, it won’t be a big production. It will be more of a collectible item that you hang on your wall.”

Last time, I talked about how coming up with a great, catchy lick or riff can inspire an entire song. Great riffs have the power to do that, and the best ones do it instantly.

From the Beatles’ I Feel Fine, to the Rolling Stones’ Honky Tonk Women, to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama, these are all songs that pull the listener in immediately.

A great guitar solo can do the same thing, offering the listener an unexpected journey to a new place before steering the music back to familiar territory. Many players refer to this as the “song within a song” approach to crafting an effective, memorable solo.

The song we covered last month was Let It Burn, from our 2017 album, Like An Arrow. This song is built from a rock-and-roll-meets-country feel, and the solo needed to stay in that wheelhouse while elevating the music to another level.

Right before the solo, we play a bridge/breakdown lick that serves as a hook of its own. As shown in Figure 1, I arpeggiate the notes of an open G chord into a C chord, followed by a reference to Bb. In bar 4, I incorporate 6th intervals into the phrase. The guitar solo is then played over that lick and similarly blends the sounds of rock and roll and country.

I like to envision my guitar solo as being another voice that’s singing a new melody. To my ears, a melody is a great place to start, as opposed to just a flurry of notes. The solo needs to “sing,” so I thought, “What would I sing over that breakdown lick?” Figure 2 shows the solo.

In bars 1-4, I play a singable melody based on the G minor pentatonic scale (G, Bb, C, D, F), starting with two-note double-stops played 3rds apart. At the end of bar 4 into bar 5, the solo is based on G major pentatonic (G, A, B, D, E), and in bar 6 I play a couple of 6th intervals. The solo then wraps up with a return to G minor pentatonic.

The solo is concise so that it gets out of the way and brings us back to the big chorus, shown in Figure 3 with the ringing C, F/C, G5 chords.

Those initial 3rd intervals work really well over the feel of the breakdown lick underneath. Following the return to the chorus, we reprise the song’s intro lick in order to wrap up the song, with all its elements pulled together in an effective way.

When we play Let It Burn live, I like to stretch out the intro by soloing in this style. Sometimes I stretch it out so much that our bass player will yell, “Hey, start the song!”

Figure 4 offers an example of the types of licks that live in that world where the lines between country music and rock and roll become blurry. In this example, I begin with hybrid-picked double-stops that shift to straight country/blues in bar 3.

There really are countless ways to craft a solo by drawing upon one’s various stylistic influences, so never be afraid to push the envelope in your quest for a captivating and expressive feel and sound.

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

What is it?

I’ve often heard it said that if you ask someone to draw a picture of a guitar pedal, the likelihood is they will draw something akin to a Boss compact. It's a format with heritage that harks back to the release of the Boss OD-1 Overdrive, the PH-1 Phaser, and the SP-1 Spectrum in the ‘70s, and has since developed into an expansive range of pedals that follow the successful compact design. Perhaps one of the most famous is the BD-2 Blues Driver overdrive pedal.

It's a fully analog, transistor-based pedal that uses multiple gain stages to emulate an amplifier's natural breakup. That may sound a little complicated, but one reason Boss’ compact pedal range has become so ubiquitous is its simplicity.

The user sees just Gain, Volume and Tone controls, plus a footswitch. That’s it. In return for that simplicity, you're rewarded with affordability as the pedal comes in at around $109. It’s also worth noting that the BD-2 circuit is not a clone of something else, but is its own thing, as are many other Boss pedals.