Latest articles by Gregory Adams
NOFX's Fat Mike: “You can play bass better with a thin pick. Our job, as bass players, is to play whole notes – not sharp ones – and play them smooth”
The frontman on why a bassist's job in a punk-rock band is to make everyone else sound good, and why a track he wrote for Blink-182 is the “worst song” on NOFX's upcoming record, Double Album
Fallujah’s Scott Carstairs: “Radiant Ascension is the hardest solo I’ve ever had to perform... that’s the only way to improve: really intense, difficult s**t”
Carstairs amps up the aggression for Empyrean – a fierce, uncompromising album which taps into the spirit of “an excited 17-year-old who knows how to play guitar”
Dead Cross: “With any of our other bands, a solo would almost be unwarranted – it would be silly. But for a thrash-related project, it screams for it”
The hardcore punk supergroup's sophomore album is a typically punishing riff fest with Michael Crain and Justin Pearson's guitars using Dave Lombardo's inhuman rhythms as a launchpad for audio violence
Nik Nocturnal: “A lot of what makes a song heavy isn’t the riff – the mix, I’d argue, makes something heavier than the riff itself”
The prolific metal content creator talks blending trap and metal with his new solo project, NIK NXK, how reaction videos became the bread and butter of his online presence, and the one amp modeler he uses for “literally everything”
Opening for Guns N’ Roses, taking lessons from Randy Rhoads and trading licks with Steve Vai: what the Sunset Strip's golden era was really like
As a new compilation album assembles some of the era's deepest cuts, Jaded Lady guitarist Danelle Kern and Romeo and Hellion alum Chet Thompson recall their fondest memories from the epicenter of shred guitar
Devin Townsend: “I don’t love playing guitar solos, but I think I’m good at them”
The Canadian supernova of creativity checks in to discuss the twists and turns in his predictably unpredictable 21st solo album, Lightwork – and a Nile Rodgers collaboration that may yet see the light of day
Jason Richardson on his love of Alexi Laiho, soundtracking Lifetime movies and how his late pet pug's progressive drinking habits shaped his new album
The virtuosic guitar ace dives deep on II, his blistering new full-length with drummer Luke Holland, taking inspiration from Nintendo and horror blockbuster It
Leprous guitarist Tor Oddmund Suhrke on his prog fanbase’s insatiable appetite for odd time signatures and going from massage table to festival stage
The Norwegian prog frontiersmen's new album, Aphelion, is a study in big musical ideas, articulated with restraint, with crowdsourced input as to where they take its finale
Bloodbath’s Tomas Akvik on stepping up and inaugurating his whammy bar for the death metal supergroup’s sick new album
Tomas Akvik had never used the whammy on a Floyd before, but for Survival of the Sickest, the Swedeath institution unleashed all the tools of the trade in search of audio extremity
Machine Head's Robb Flynn: “When we were first starting out, I used to say, ‘I want us to be the Grateful Dead of metal’”
Flynn discusses the making of Machine Head's epic new album, Of Kingdom and Crown, the magic of the Roland Cube, and why Wacław “Vogg” Kiełtyka is the perfect foil on guitar
Nick Zinner on the return of Yeah Yeah Yeahs: ditching amps, embracing EBow and his early love of Eddie Van Halen
The NYC garage-punk institution are back on grand, sweeping form with Cool It Down, their first album in nearly a decade – although their guitarist is still keeping his metal chops up with a thrash side-project or two…
GWAR on “doing drugs and collecting Marshalls”, becoming “a full-fledged rock juggernaut”, and enjoying wah nearly as much as Kirk Hammett
BalSac the Jaws of Death and Pustulus Maximus check in on Toilet Earth to discuss The New Dark Ages, tube amps vs modelers and the evolution of metal's most outrageous band
Lonely Robot: “I was listening to a lot of David Gilmour and Joe Bonamassa. I got really into that big vibrato – vibrato that you can drive a bus through”
After seriously reining things in on the latest offering by his main band, Frost*, prog-rock stalwart John Mitchell brings his axe to the fore on the new Lonely Robot album, A Model Life
Anthrax's Scott Ian on his thrashtastic history with Jackson guitars, shredding with his son and how an unlikely fretboard shaped the sound of Bring the Noise
One of thrash metal's most bankable rhythm players recalls how Randy Rhoads first drew him to the storied US brand and explains why he's digging the company's newly launched American Series Soloist
David Knudson on how sobriety, home recording and an unending love of the Line 6 DL4 helped him create his first-ever solo album
The Minus the Bear effects wizard opens up on his evolving relationship with the riff, his newfound studio production abilities and why you shouldn't hold your breath for a Botch reunion
King’s X stalwarts dUg Pinnick and Ty Tabor take you inside Three Sides of One, the prog-rock trio’s first album in 14 years
Pinnick and Tabor open up on the magic that makes King's X, talk aging and songwriting, while Tabor explains why solid-state amps work so much better for his sound
Ian Crichton on rediscovering his mojo with Six by Six – a power trio that offers the perfect platform for his blazing prog guitar style
The longtime Saga guitarist lets his inner shredder off the leash with Six by Six, and no one will be asking him where the guitar is when they hear this
Big Wreck’s Ian Thornley on chasing new frontiers of “fuzzed-out, messed-up” sounds with Page-inspired riffs and super-heavy slide guitar
The Canadian Suhr-slinger talks 7.1, the first of a trio of new EPs, the band’s new rhythm guitarist and the constant struggle to keep stuff simple
Rudolf Schenker: “We tried all our equipment from the ‘80s – the Marshall stacks, all this equipment – to find that original, old ‘80s sound”
The Scorpions founder on how the hard-rock institution is looking back to a brighter future with Rock Believer, and why you must put your body into it to play like the “King of Riffs”
I Built the Sky’s Rohan Stevenson on breaking out of the shred-metal box for an acoustic guitar album that makes space for banjo, xylophone and more
Stevenson is a prog-metal player who lights up the fretboard, but for The Quiet Place Away, he follows the inspiration of Tommy Emmanuel for an intimate, all-acoustic album
Charlie Griffiths: “Everyone knows the blues scale – just move it up a semi-tone from your root note and you get a whole new lease on life”
Well of course the Haken guitarist wants to talk scales; his debut solo album is inspired by a fish! And it is a stylistically omnivorous work that sees him swap eight strings for six
Pattern-Seeking Animals’ Ted Leonard on how he struck guitar tone gold with a ‘Franken-Tele’ rescued from the junk pile
The prog-rock supergroup’s freewheeling new album has Andean stringed instruments and orchestral strings but as Leonard explains, that ol' Tele holds it all together
How Coheed and Cambria embraced pentatonic riff slams and a Deftones 8-string to create prog guitar epics for a new generation
Claudio Sanchez and Travis Stever deliver you deep inside their latest sci-fi journey, Vaxis II: A Window of the Waking Mind
