Latest articles by Ellie Rogers
“In trying to make this huge sound, she ended up with this ‘one-person band’ approach that was completely different to the guitarists that’d gone before”: Jon Gomm on how Joni Mitchell changed progressive acoustic guitar forever
One acoustic hero pays tribute to another, with Gomm pinpointing the pioneering approaches championed by Mitchell that make her one of the most influential acoustic players of all time
“Eric Clapton played with a stately authority. It’s missing in guitar today. It seems every great player has to play very fast. It can be distasteful, honestly”: Scott Holiday says Slowhand’s slow hand is still the gold standard for expressive playing
Clapton remains an ever-present force in the Rival Sons star’s own sound – here’s why Holiday views his hero as one of the most influential guitarists of all time
“When you’re playing pop, you need to get the ego out of the way. You’re trying to elevate the song, rather than be heard as a guitar player”: The key to good pop guitar, says MUNA guitarist Josette Maskin, is to play less than you actually want to
Inspired by Jeff Beck and session legend Paul Jackson Jr, Josette Maskin explains how MUNA balances three guitar players, how they ended up using fuzz more than distortion, and why label boss Phoebe Bridgers is underrated as a guitarist
“Eddie was like a new sun appearing in the sky. You could sense that the world would never be the same”: From the big bang of Eruption to tone tips and warm-ups – Paul Gilbert shares the knowledge gleaned from a lifetime studying Eddie Van Halen
The shred icon salutes his greatest influence – with the insight of a fellow guitar obsessive
“A Whammy pedal might be sacrilege on a vintage National, but live, it’s really interesting!” Troy Redfern may play slide guitar, but he doesn’t want to sound like Derek Trucks – and his bold solo approach blazes a new blues trail
There's already a lot of hype about the British blues maestro's new Kickstarter-funded album. Redfern checks in to share his unconventional gear pairings, and how his solos are informed by Frank Zappa's musical philosophy
“It was so fun to learn how to play the doubleneck – there’s so many switches and knobs that it was essentially like learning another instrument”: Emily Wolfe is expanding her guitar arsenal – and processing rage through gnarly tones
The Epiphone signature artist isn't missing any targets on new album The Blowback, turning up the fury with a jerry-rigged DIY guitar sound that's set to blow
“It’s not about how fast you can play. It needs to sound like pain or it needs to sound disgusting – it’s about what the guitar needs to convey”: Introducing Hawxx, the feminist metallers out to “de-wankify” heavy guitar clichés
Jackson-wielding guitarists Anna Papadimitriou and Hannah Staphnill channel feminist rage into pummeling riffs on their debut face-ripper, Earth, Spit, Blood & Bones
“Most people think three guitarists is a lot, but to me, it’s the minimum – it sounds way thicker and heavier”: Meet Hotline TNT, the Jack White-approved shoegaze band who don’t like pedals
Think shoegaze is all reverb, delay, fuzz? Well, there's another sonic path, and Hotline TNT are taking it with three guitarists. Will Anderson unpacks the approach behind their acclaimed noise-pop sound
“I got my Telecaster in 2013 and it’s never been cleaned. It’s covered with blood. I like the idea of seeing the work I’ve done”: He’s guitarist for Iceland’s premier power trio The Vintage Caravan – and Óskar Logi Ágústsson’s rig lives up to the name
Inspired to pick up the guitar by School of Rock, classic rock acolyte Ágústsson has been leading The Vintage Caravan since he was 12 years old. He explains what makes fans liken his playing to Alvin Lee, how he wrings his tone from a collection of extremely loud vintage Marshalls and why he hates practicing
“A lot of solos in metal definitely have a formula... To me, a solo really hits home when you don’t hear the magic coming”: How Svalbard’s Serena Cherry is tearing up the metal guitar playbook
Told she was playing guitar “wrong”, Cherry instead took it as permission to embrace the unorthodox and chase metal guitar sounds from the primal to the orchestral
“Guitar Hero was such an important tool for exposing kids from the late-’90s to the electric guitar. We’ve got some guitar heroes now – 10 years ago, we didn’t”: Michael Rubin went from playing video games to rocking vintage guitars with King Falcon
He has an awe-inspiring collection of vintage guitars, all with stories to tell, and he plays in one of NYC’s most exciting indie-rock bands. But as Michael Rubin tells it, it all started with Guitar Hero…
They have a guitarist named Joe Perry, bought a Fender Telecaster from a KFC and their MO is to “scream, thrash guitars and put the heaviest overdrive on” – meet Coach Party, the UK’s next great indie-rock hope
With four distortion-strong pedalboards and Queens of the Stone Age support slots in tow, Steph Norris and Joe Perry run the gamut of dirty guitar tones – with gear that will end up getting “beat up to f**k”
“I like the rawness and the vulnerability you get from a cleaner sound... I like having to work for it a little bit”: Gina Gleason explains why Baroness made the switch from humbuckers to single coils – and sounded all the heavier for it
Telecasters and Jazzmasters for metal? The former Cirque du Soleil shredder unpacks the heavy institution’s unconventional approach to tone
“A humbucker is a lot more controlled, and a single coil is twangy and misses frequencies. The P-90s have the best of the two worlds”: Meet Graveyard, the Swedish classic rockers with tone and vibrato worthy of the ‘60s psychedelic blues explosion
Inspired by the likes of Peter Green, Danny Kirwan and Jimi Hendrix, Joakim Nilsson and Jonatan Ramm thrive on P-90 pickups, cranked Marshall Bluesbreakers and world-class vibrato – just don’t call their high-octane rock ’n’ roll “retro”
“Wendy Melvoin is a highly influential guitarist for me. Her feel is unmatched”: Madison Cunningham is the new face of the Fender Jazzmaster – and she has some seriously A-list collaborations in the pipeline
Hand-picked by Fender to head up its Vintera II campaign, the Grammy-winning folk-rock trailblazer discusses her spellbinding collab with Prince’s guitar player, challenging the Big F’s premier offset to a game of drop-tuning limbo, and how a mutual love of JHS Pedals introduced her to John Mayer
“People come up to me and say, ‘Man, you’re keeping the blues alive!’ I’m like, ‘You don’t even know that’s the worst thing you could say to me’”: Mixing Blind Willie Johnson covers with Slayer-inspired shred, Buffalo Nichols is no blues traditionalist
He avoids pentatonic cliches at all costs and thinks too many solos are “a problem in the blues” – now Buffalo Nichols is taking the genre in radical new directions with the help of heavily effected resonators and his “secret tuning”
“We were fed up with 90% of rock playlists being stuff where you don’t even know if you can hear a guitar”: James and the Cold Gun are bringing the “early noughties guitar rock revival” back – with a little help from Pearl Jam’s Stone Gossard
Meet the unapologetically high-volume, Laney-powered rock ’n’ roll band from Wales who got their big break via Seattle
“For me, Gibson and Epiphone are one and the same. But there is a richness within the Epiphone – you can get it and not be afraid to take it on the road”: Meet Abraham Alexander, Gibson’s first-ever Marquee Artist
The Texan singer-songwriter on collaborating with Gary Clark Jr., why he considers the guitar both a shield and a weapon, and how he found strength in vulnerability as he opens up on stellar debut album SEA/SONS
“There was a time when I didn’t want to make punk music because my dad makes that type of stuff”: Meet Jakob Armstrong, the Jazzmaster-toting son of Green Day’s Billie Joe who’s blazing his own trail with Ultra Q
The son of a punk megastar, Jakob Armstrong was born to play guitar. But that doesn't mean he has to play punk. In Ultra Q, the influences span The Cure to dance. Maybe they'll do metal next...
“Rick Rubin is one of the most inspirational guitar players of my childhood. It’s a curveball, isn’t it?!” Justin Hawkins names the 14 guitarists who shaped his sound
The Darkness frontman turned YouTube personality on why Keith Richards’ playing is underrated, what makes Eddie Van Halen’s solo blueprint so spectacular, and why guitarists who “make you feel like you want to grab a guitar and do it” are more important than any virtuoso
“Shredding over the top is what all prog-metal does – we have a Pink Floyd approach to lead rather than John Petrucci”: Nobody djents like TesseracT – and two decades in, the tech-metal heroes are making their most mind-bendingly intricate riffs yet
Influential UK seven-stringers Acle Kahney and James Monteith on the secret to mastering their shape-shifting time signatures, recording their most challenging riffs and why the Quad Cortex is their new amp modeler of choice
“Pedals are such an integral part of the music we make – potentially more than the guitar”: Meet BDRMM, the Mogwai-backed stompbox addicts behind one of 2023’s essential shoegaze albums
The Yorkshire sonic adventurers are on a quest for post-rock tonal nirvana, as they look past the guitar and towards the pedalboard in search of new sounds that defy convention
“People tell me my big mistake was not learning guitar right-handed... No, my big mistake was not learning guitar upside-down!” Meet Nat Myers, the Dan Auerbach protégé updating rootsy blues for the post-pandemic era
An unlikely email led the southpaw singer-songwriter to the Black Keys frontman’s Nashville studio. Here’s how they made an authentic old-school blues album – and why it featured just one guitar
“The inability to play music or access words was quite frightening, but it was interesting… It became a focal point to write around”: Ben Howard feared the worst after suffering two mini-strokes. He returned with his most adventurous album yet
Inspired by John Martyn, Echoplexes and open C tunings, the UK guitar maverick describes his playing as a “car crash of whatever suits me and whatever use I can get out of it” – but even he couldn’t have anticipated just how weird things would get…
Introducing HotWax, the 18-year-old grunge enthusiasts named after an unsung overdrive pedal and making ’90s alt-rock anthems for generation Z
Tallulah Sim-Savage was a country fan until she heard Hole, then everything changed. She explains how her love of modded offsets, discontinued Fender amps and many, many dirt pedals have made HotWax one of the hottest guitar bands to come out of the UK in years
