Features archive
September 2024
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95 articles
- September 30
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- “I don’t normally enjoy co-writes, but when Billy Corgan says he wants to work on your stuff, you say yes”: Rosie Bones on her guitar chemistry with Carmen Vandenberg, Corgan collabs – and why Bones UK doesn’t need a bassist
- “I went backstage and said to Rory, ‘There’s a guy out there called Slash who’s come to see you…’ Rory’s eyes lit up”: The night Rory Gallagher gave the Guns N’ Roses guitarist a taste of affordable Gibson via his 1960 Melody Maker
- September 29
- September 27
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- “He taught me how to play songs by Dream Theater, Iron Maiden and King Diamond… though I remember giving up on some of the John Petrucci solos!” Tor Oddmund Suhrke on guitar lessons with Ihsahn and casting musical illusions with Leprous
- “Joe and I had been hanging out, secretively making music, knowing that one day we'd do something. Four sessions later, we had an album”: How Glenn Hughes brought his low-end expertise into the spotlight with Joe Bonamassa and Black Country Communion
- “One thing I won’t waver from is a chorus effect on my clean tone. I love the underlying sadness it gives, even if you’re playing something happy”: Los Bitchos guitarist Serra Petale on repurposing ’80s sounds and the tone so good she wanted to eat it
- “I walked through the ‘Nothing To Declare’ lane, though it was in an embarrassment of a guitar case at that point”: The remarkable story behind Rory Gallagher’s 1968 Coral 3S19 Electric Sitar
- September 26
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- “Most musicians can relate to being at the grocery store, humming riffs into their phone and looking like a weirdo in aisle six”: With Thick Riff Thursdays, producer Nick Broomhall is teaching guitarists how to nail the sound in their heads
- “I think of the guitar as a punctuation to the vocal. It's about, ‘How can I be an exclamation point?’” Cage The Elephant guitarist Nick Bokrath explains his unique guitar grammar – and the innocence of pedal steel
- Neural DSP Quad Cortex vs Nano Cortex: Which should you choose?
- “The Rolling Stones gig is the culmination of my childhood dreams – I figure now that I've played with Miles, Sting, Herbie Hancock, Peter Gabriel, and Madonna, I've pretty much covered it”: Darryl Jones looks back at the path that led him to the very top
- September 25
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- “We went to Billy Corgan’s place in Chicago. He said, ‘When you think you’ve got a chorus, just write another one’”: Bones UK’s Carmen Vandenberg on going hard to make Soft – and the Jeff Beck pedal that won’t leave her ’board
- “I can’t stop being bewildered by all these people who say, ‘That guy sucks!’ I’ve got news for you – you don’t get to where you’re at if you suck! Okay?” Kirk Hammett on why bad solos are dying – and dealing with armchair guitar critics
- “It creates the illusion of speed and intricacy”: Inside the evolution of selective picking – one of modern guitar’s most expressive techniques
- “I’m almost getting scared about my love affair with this guitar – I’m worried what I would do if something happened to it”: Trey Anastasio on the creation of his “perfect” custom Languedoc guitars – and the genius who made them (who only sees mistakes)
- September 24
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- “I use a lot of chords with open strings. The guys in the Heartbreakers used to laugh at me, saying, ‘You’re doing the bagpipes again!’” Mike Campbell on his unorthodox guitar style – and how Tom Petty saved his definitive Breakdown lick
- “We put out Rock in a Hard Place and went out on the road, which was the definition of the word ‘fiasco.’ Too many shows ended early due to the excessive use of chemicals”: Tom Hamilton on Aerosmith’s past challenges – and why they still have a future
- “Back in the ’60s, none of those guys had Pro Tools. It had to be that take – and there’s a reason those recordings are still loved today”: Cash & Carter’s Ross O’Reilly is using a one-take guitar approach to write new songs for the old frontier
- “Contrast is more important than the tone itself. If you just have the hardest, heaviest tone as a constant you get numb to it”: How Zeal & Ardor are adding light and shade to black metal with plastic guitars, chunky strings and unlikely tube amps
- September 23
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- “I developed my playing style from being in bars, playing solo. People are shouting over your music... silences make them notice themselves – and then they notice you”: Ani DiFranco on the dark arts of acoustic – and why she’s over online ‘performers’
- “If you’re going to make instruments in 100 years, you better be growing that supply chain, not barely maintaining it”: When the guitar world’s most prized woods are endangered, how can we ensure the future of tone?
- “He looked at it, closed the case and said, ‘Let’s get out of here before they realize what they’ve sold you’”: How Rory Gallagher grabbed his iconic 1963 Gretsch Corvette for the princely sum of $150
- “Ibanez strives daily to be the cutting-edge guitar brand. This approach will never change”: How Ibanez is flipping the script on everything you think you know about acoustic guitar design
- September 22
- September 21
- September 20
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- “Everywhere I go someone knows my name because of that bass solo. It’s not like with Michael Jackson – I don’t get mobbed – but I am famous”: How Willie Weeks' unbelievable solo on Donny Hathaway's 1972 Live album made him a bass legend
- “It may be the first dedicated guitar effect”: From its journey from amp to stompbox to how it works, this is everything you need to know about tremolo
- “Even for a beginner to pick it up and play it, it almost plays you. I can tell you, it brings power to your hands”: The story of Rory Gallagher’s 1932 National Triolian – the resonator that had all the mojo but not the volume for his raucous live show
- “When it comes to heavy rock, the definitive icon always has been RG”: How Ibanez raised the bar for high-performance electric guitar with the RG
- September 19
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- Boss CE-5 settings you need to try: how to get the best out of the industry-standard chorus pedal
- “There’s so much we are working on, I'd rather keep my eyes forward. We’ll ultimately emerge stronger”: Why Chase Bliss has been forced to discontinue 5 of its finest pedals – and what it means for the firm's future
- “Bearing in mind the colossal success of The Police, isn’t it odd that no-one has ever surfaced to say, ‘By the way, I modded that guitar?’” Investigating the mystery mods of Andy Summers’ mongrel Telecaster
- “This guitar is among the top 10 Stratocasters from the 1950s. If the Lord Almighty ever wanted to carve a guitar neck, this is the template he should use”: Before Lake Placid Blue there was Moreno Blue, and it makes this ’57 Strat a true unicorn
- “I feel like a Telecaster just makes you play differently – for me, it’s a pretty unforgiving guitar”: Tyler Bryant on the new Tele that rivals his beloved ‘Pinky’ Strats – and how he’s journeying beyond “bone-headed rock ‘n’ roll”
- September 18
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- “The neck is essentially twice the thickness of many standard necks. It was like, ‘Let’s see how big we can go – let’s go for a record-breaker’”: The making of Phil Collen’s monster new Jackson Tele-style
- “Quite often we hear really good artists say ‘the guitar feels like home but it rings so well.’ That’s music to our ears”: Joe Knaggs on the tonewoods, inspirations and philosophy behind Steve Stevens’ favorite high-end guitar company
- “Rory was a peaceful man, but I thought he’d thump poor Chris on the spot”: The story of Rory Gallagher’s 1959 Fender Esquire, the guitar crushed on a runway with a refinish job worth fighting over
- “There are so many emulators of Steve Vai, Joe Satriani and Eddie Van Halen, but no one has been able to play like Frank Gambale”: Matteo Mancuso names 10 guitarists who shaped his sound
- “The boutique amp market thrives and exists as it does today largely thanks to Mike Soldano”: From Eddie Van Halen and Steve Vai to Eric Clapton and Mark Knopfler, the Soldano SLO-100 changed the sound of shred and blues alike
- September 17
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- “If you’re making music that’s got guitar on it, and not reaching the masses, you might be like, ‘Wow, people just hate guitar music.’ Well, I don’t think we can blame the guitar...” FINNEAS on bringing guitar back to pop and revamping the Acoustasonic
- “Be intentional about where you’re picking. Moving from the bridge to the fingerboard is as dramatic as switching pickup positions on an electric”: 21 ways to get more from your acoustic guitar
- “I'm often working in fractions of a millimeter in dentistry – and with guitar, too, even the slightest movements can make all the difference”: How shredding dentist Steve Dadaian landed his dream collaboration with Dream Theater’s Jordan Rudess
- “Learn how to play – because if you can’t play, you’ll find a pedal and you’ll cheat”: Dave Mustaine on guitar collecting, switching to Quad Cortex and why some players are “living a lie” with stompboxes
- “It’s capable of being terrifyingly loud. When we launched the LFR-412 at NAMM 2024 we couldn’t turn it up beyond 2”: How Laney brought volume and best-in-class tone for digital rigs with the world’s loudest active guitar cabinet
- “Tony Rice said, ‘This is the sound you should be going for – you just need to put it in a bigger package’”: How Dana Bourgeois led the OM-style guitar renaissance and turned Bourgeois Guitars into a guitar craftsmanship powerhouse
- “It actually goes up to infinity, which is what true tape flanging sounds like”: Beloved by Pat Travers and Adrian Belew, the A/DA Flanger was one of the greatest guitar effects of the ’70s
- September 16
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- How to Get Your Music on Spotify with Distrokid
- “Fender mentioned that for the Tone Master Pro it takes about 3 months to model a channel. With TINA, we've got that down to hours”: How Neural DSP changed the digital guitar gear game with the help of a robot called TINA
- “It’s so difficult. The guitar has got a life of its own and it’s got to move on”: Why Rory Gallagher’s iconic Strat is up for auction now – and the political pressure to keep it in Ireland
- “You have more tone, more sustain and more stability. It’s like the best just got better”: How Eastman realized its vision for the future of the electric guitar with the D’Ambrosio range
- “Why are the single-pickup models of particular interest? Well, they really can sound better”: The Gibson ES-330T might have been the “runt of the litter”, but its unusually positioned P-90 pickup offers a unique experience among Gibson hollowbodies
- “Since the Sphere, we have begun using iso cabinets for the speaker cabinets and the Leslie, leading to all the amps and speakers being off-stage”: Trey Anastasio’s tech, Justin Stabler, reveals all about the Phish frontman’s new live guitar rig
- “Paul was a guitarist who switched to bass because the group needed one, as this song proves”: Did Paul McCartney fumble a note on this classic Beatles bassline?
- September 14
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- “It was a bit of a number for me to have to dare to tell George Harrison not to play guitar. It was like an insult”: Paul McCartney turned down George Harrison's proposed guitar parts for Hey Jude
- “We grabbed a taxi home, but I left the bass in the trunk. I woke up in the middle of the night and started freaking out”: Viral bass hero Blu DeTiger just gave the Fender Jazz Bass a radical revamp – but she started on a Gretsch she left in a cab
- September 13
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- Download and stream the audio from Total Guitar 389
- “He taught me that it was OK to play the music you wanted to play. He was my mentor and a surrogate father, too”: Why John Mayall was the godfather of British blues guitar
- “You could sing along to the songs – including the solos. You can really mess a song up by playing the wrong solo. You can put people off”: Phil Collen on Def Leppard x Tom Morello, his love of thick guitar necks – and why Pyromania still blows him away
- “They really should replicate that, because it just has some magic”: Alex Skolnick on Criss Oliva's favorite guitar, “the Gargoyle” – the ESP Superstrat he likens to Billy Gibbons’ Pearly Gates Les Paul Standard
- September 12
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- Fender Player 1 vs Player 2: should you upgrade?
- “When I came back into Lynyrd Skynyrd, I knew that Free Bird was going to be my lead. I was the drummer in Muscle Shoals when we cut the original. I watched Allen. I knew the licks”: Rickey Medlocke unpacks his history with Skynyrd – and that guitar solo
- September 11
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- “When I encounter Kurt Cobain’s Sky Stang I, I'm evaluating it like a tech. Then I'll have a beer and go, ‘Did that just happen?!’” From fixing Lennon’s Framus to giving Prince's Cloud III a CAT scan – it's all in the life of an A-list guitar appraiser
- Acoustic guitars FAQ: from understanding tonewoods to the different sizes available, get to know your acoustic with these common questions answered
- Download and stream the audio from Guitar Techniques 366
- “My band and crew hadn’t worked in three years so we plowed on – eight epidurals later and 180 opium tablets, I made it through the tour”: Blackie Lawless on touring, talking solos with David Gilmour – and that time W.A.S.P. bought 52 Marshall heads
- “It was the pick my playing had been waiting for”: I’ve been on a quest to find the perfect pick – and it didn’t just improve my tone, it made me a better player
- “At a certain point we couldn’t get into 606 anymore. Some band called the Foo Fighters had it booked out for a month”: Scott Ian and Jonathan Donais check in from the studio to explain why the new Anthrax record will “punch people in the face”
- September 10
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- “I’m sick of people saying Walk On the Wild Side is a classic. I got paid £12, and David Bowie didn’t even show up”: Session bass legend Herbie Flowers on the making of Lou Reed’s 1972 hit – and the hardest session he ever did
- “I remember trying a Telecaster and finding the sliding so complicated, like a mountain between one fret and the other. I hated it. That’s why I stuck with Jazzmasters”: Hinds talk learning guitar on the road, recruiting Beck – and rebuilding the band
- “If there is a Jane’s Addiction in 2025, there will be new music. But you never know if there’s going to be a band at all”: Eric Avery on overcoming JA’s “unthinkable” time without Dave Navarro and his brief stints with Metallica and Smashing Pumpkins
- “I learned the hard way many years ago that daisy chains are not reliable!” Serena Cherry shares her pedalboard secrets and admits she’d feel naked without “big, cavernous reverb”
- September 9
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- Boss discontinued the Katana:GO mere months after launching it – these are 4 headphone amps you should try instead
- “It’s amazing to see Adrian Belew and Steve Vai playing together. My temptation is to pick up the camera! I have to remind myself to stick to my job playing bass”: For the King Crimson-channeling Beat tour, Tony Levin is a virtuoso among virtuosos
- “I’ve done somewhere close to 30,000 fret jobs. Holding a crowning file for that many hours a day will tear you up if you’re not careful”: How fixing thousands of guitars changed the way Tulsa blues cat Seth Lee Jones plays the thing
- “I couldn’t work with John Lennon and Paul McCartney. I’d end up being beaten to death”: When we locked horns with Lemmy to talk Motörhead, Marshalls and why he wouldn’t fit in with one of his favorite bands
- September 8
- September 7
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- “Someone told me you can’t play slap bass on a fretless, but when Prince picked up my bass he slapped the heck out of it!” Esperanza Spalding on jamming with Prince, and her stunning Justin Bieber upset
- “We end up drinking until 5 in the morning. I wake up with the worst hangover of my life, and now I’ve got to play with Metallica”: How a late-night drinking session with Lars Ulrich almost ruined Robert Trujillo’s Metallica audition
- September 6
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- “I heard some criticism that I didn’t play the parts enough like Criss, but I didn’t want to just go in there and try to be a clone of him”: When Alex Skolnick quit Testament – and was recruited to replace the late Criss Oliva in Tampa metallers Savatage
- “We don’t want to use guitar solos as a crutch. You know – ‘after the bridge, solo!’ When I do play a solo, I want it to stand out”: Following mega-tours with Muse and Royal Blood, sister act The Warning are riff rock’s next big success story
- September 5
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- “We were trying to put blues riffs on dance beats. We wanted to see what happens if you fuse those two worlds”: Meet Daniel ‘Dafreez’ Johnston, the “blues rave-up” pioneer combining folk fingerstyle and EDM
- “I drank my liver into submission and snorted a mountain of cocaine, and I didn’t die. Now I’m trying to stay away from that stuff so I can still be around. I keep myself really busy with music”: The redemption of High on Fire and Sleep icon Matt Pike
- “It was suggested we try making a Dumble-style clean. They’re so mystical – I’d never played one. You can look at the circuit and still be none the wiser”: The unstoppable rise of Victory Amps – and what comes next
- “We're witnessing history in the same way that the Beatles changed the music industry in the early 1960s”: Gibson reveals Taylor Swift’s go-to guitars during the Eras tour and hopes for a signature model
- September 4
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- “People are responding because of the realness and vulnerability, instead of that persona of a drunk rockstar”: Koe Wetzel abandoned his party animal image to show who he really is on 9 Lives, and found a new reason to play his beat-up Gibson J-200
- “When I heard Nirvana’s Live at Reading it became less about learning solos than putting the guitar in front of an amp and making it scream”: Fontaines D.C.’s Carlos O’Connell on playing Rory Gallagher’s Strat and why a spring reverb is the best overdrive
- “Offset guitars can be really clumsy, but that makes me approach them differently. I kept hitting the kill switch mid-solo, thinking, ‘Why is this here?!’” Samantha Fish on how Kurt Cobain turned her onto the Fender Jaguar
- September 3
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- “Mick Jagger was moving around like a marionette, responding to every squeak coming out of my guitar”: Eric Bazillian on playing with a Rolling Stone, writing Joan Osborne’s One of Us – and helping Cyndi Lauper find a career-defining hit
- “Allan recorded a bunch of takes. He apologized, saying they all sucked… Of course, every note he played was miraculous”: Grammy-nominated virtuoso Alex Masi on why he turned down Stevie Ray Vaughan, his Allan Holdsworth collab and time with Shawn Lane
- “Why wouldn’t you stay in the Sphere and make a lot of money? Because it’s not as much fun. It doesn’t last forever. Look at how many musicians have passed away. What are you going to do with what you have?” Trey Anastasio explains Phish’s joyful rebirth
- September 2
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- “If we’re able to reach millions of people with this stupid solo, then obviously we’re doing something right”: Corey Feldman discusses his limits as a guitar player, copping David Gilmour’s tone and why his viral guitar solo really is a joke
- “I always wanted to play with my fingers, but now I was forced to”: When his keys player quit, McKinley James had to rethink his playing style to play in a duo – and he did it without turning to pedals, because “none of my heroes did”
- “The main secret behind those classic grunge sounds is that they were loud. You need a high-volume amp…” Enumclaw are on a quest for alt-rock tone nirvana – using other people’s guitars and The Smashing Pumpkins’ fuzz pedal
- “I’m like the power forward on a basketball team – I bring out the best in my teammates”: A pillar of the L.A. session scene, Bob Glaub might be the most famous bass player you’ve never heard of
- September 1
