Features archive

December 2021

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63 articles

December 28
- Amyl And The Sniffers’ Dec Martens and Gus Romer: “If we’re eating the same foods and sharing the same bathroom, we end up making music naturally”
December 23
- Poison Ivy: “It was easier for me to consider playing guitar because I was such a misfit. For me, anything was fair game”
December 22
- The 20 best guitar albums of 2021
- Carlos Santana: “I’ve always really loved B.B. King and Peter Green, and I wanted to combine that with Tito Puente and Mongo Santamaria”
- Robin Guthrie: “I’m not playing a guitar – I'm playing the sound, I'm playing the pedals, I'm playing the reverb”
- Samantha Fish: “Guitar playing is a puzzle you’ll never put together, but you find little things that make you happy, and they fuel the pursuit to get better”
- The Darkness's Dan Hawkins on his love for ABBA
December 21
- Dooms Children: “I had no interest in compartmentalising everything and smoothing out the edges”
- Kiss's Tommy Thayer: “My legacy will be a guy who came in, worked hard, and was the glue that kept the band together”
- Ruth Goller on her best bass albums
- The origins of Ibanez and the anatomy of Steve Vai's pioneering JEM
- Win a TriceraChorus pedal from Eventide and stomp your way into a world of swirl
December 20
- The 10 best guitar riffs of 2021
- How the Edge changed the sound of guitar playing forever: 17 guitarists share their favorite U2 moments
- The secrets behind Joan Jett’s guitar tone on I Love Rock ’N Roll
- Paul Gilbert gives us a track-by-track tour of his new Christmas album, ‘Twas
December 17
- The Beatles' 50 greatest guitar songs
- Marshall guitar amp heads: what you need to know
December 16
- The 10 best guitar solos of 2021
- Taylor Momsen: “While grieving, I was depriving myself of what I loved most. When I picked up a guitar and started writing, the floodgates opened up”
- Geezer Butler names 5 bass albums that shaped his style
- James Dean Bradfield shares the secrets behind his songwriting and guitar craft
December 15
- Guitar pedals are a great holiday stocking stuffer – and these seven are some of the best on the market
- Iron Maiden’s Dave Murray, Adrian Smith and Janick Gers share the guitar strategies behind their epic new album
- Bria reveal how a 1963 Epiphone Casino and their decade-long musical relationship led to their "accidental" debut EP
- Brandy Zdan: “To me, this ended up being a guitar record, because of the range of emotions in the instrument. It's a vehicle for my grief and anger”
December 14
- Hard-Ons’ Blackie and Tim Rogers: “it’s almost like ‘Hard-Ons Plus’ now”
- Kim Thayil on 30 years of Soundgarden's Badmotorfinger: “Right before we released the album, you could feel things were ready to explode”
- How to get noticed by guitar brands on Instagram
- Verdine White: “Apart from the drums, the bass is the instrument you need to play the longest to become truly funky”
- Pond’s Jay Watson on the search for improv gold, the freedom to make weird noise and why lead guitar rules
- Man With a Mission's Jean-Ken Johnny: “I’m not really a technical guitar guy: it’s all about the emotion – how you descend your soul into the sound”
- Joachim Cooder on how his kids helped inspire his new album reimagining the folk-blues of Uncle Dave Macon
December 13
- Meet the compact, all-solid Taylor AD22e
- How Chuck Schuldiner pioneered the sound of death metal and became its spiritual guide
- Maybeshewill: “On this record, we tried to lean less heavily on powerchords for the energy and find other ways to employ the guitars”
- Austin Meade on tracking against the clock, nerding out with pedals, and why his PRS Mira is the best of both worlds
- Download and stream the audio from Guitar Techniques 330
- What happened to Jimi Hendrix’s Stratocasters? Tracking down the guitars that made music history
December 10
- Download and stream the audio from Total Guitar 353
- K.K. Downing: “I don’t want to discard my heritage, my legacy, who I am, what I sound like and my style of writing”
- Jerry Cantrell: “I'd plug into Eddie Van Halen's amp and sound like Jerry Cantrell. Eddie would play through my s**t and sound like EVH. It's in the hands. It's in your flesh”
- Joel Crouse: "In a lot of ways, mental health is its own pandemic"
- Adi Meyerson on taking inspiration from avant garde artist Yayoi Kusama and processing synesthesia through bass
December 9
- The story of Africa’s guitar god Dr. Nico, the Congolese innovator admired by Jimi Hendrix
December 8
- Looking for the perfect guitar for the holidays? Guitar World’s holiday gift guide is here to help
- Creeping Death's Trey Pemberton: “It used to be, ‘Let’s write a bunch of riffs, throw ‘em together, and go hard.’ Now we think about how it flows together”
- DMC & The Hellraisers’ David Filice: “Amateurs learn something until they can play it right – professionals learn something ‘til they can’t play it wrong”
- Meet the local shredder who became the last guitarist to play the Walk solo on Dimebag Darrell's guitar, less than 24 hours before the Pantera legend's tragic death
- The Edge: “Digital delay was a way for me to add coloration, dimension, additional rhythm and a certain machine-age quality”
- ABBA guitarist Janne Schaffer: “You can hear a lot of heavy rock guitars in the first and second albums. We’d been listening to Deep Purple”
- Robben Ford on why making an instrumental record was a good excuse to play a lot more music
December 7
- Justin Bernasconi: “I could see swirls of paint strokes and hear dissonant phrases on the guitar”
- Nashville Pussy's Ruyter Suys: “Simple is not my playing style. Most of the time, my erratic side gets the best of me”
December 6
- Looking to expand your playing and have more fun on guitar? Grab a Black Mountain Pick and unlock your creativity!
- George Lynch: “You can get fast using fuzz if you use it in the right way. Look at Eric Johnson – his main tone is a Fuzz Face!”
December 3
- TASCAM is celebrating its 50th anniversary with an incredible giveaway featuring a TASCAM dream home studio and PRS S2 Custom guitar
- Ozzy Osbourne rates his guitarists and reflects on the highs and lows of Black Sabbath
- Why the P-90 pickup is making a comeback
- Charnett Moffett: “I try to get a lyrical, singing quality through the fretless bass. It’s a way of being in direct communication with people”
December 2
- Circa Survive: "It used to be difficult not to fill up every space with guitar – this record shows how our ability to restrain ourselves has grown"
December 1
- Dave Pomeroy: “Banjo bass, string bass… I did one song with nine tracks of uke bass. There are a million different ways to play the bass”
- Mark Tremonti on finding the right guitar, the economics of Dumble amps and the Goldtop that got away