Alive and Living is the second track to be shared ahead of the release of Basilio's new album, Your Love, and it finds her alternating between six and seven strings
Lari Basilio has shared the second single from forthcoming album Your Love, and it is a track that sees the Brazilian instrumental guitar phenom augment a typically effervescent and summery composition with seven-string guitar.
No, Basilio has not taken her super-melodic sound djent, but nonetheless, the new track, Alive and Living, finds her leaning into the extra weight and bass-heavy range of an Ibanez Prestige AZ24047 for a chorus section that’s already benefitting from the bass of the legendary session pro Lee Sklar.
It works gangbusters with Basilio’s fingerstyle funk on top, complementing that super-bouncy electric guitar tone courtesy of her Ibanez LB-1 with its middle pickup and inner coil of the bridge humbucker engaged.
Basilio turns to the AZ24047 once more for a fleet-fingered low-end rhythm that serves as a launchpad for the blazing solo of the track’s denouement, in which Basilio’s immaculate intonation and judicious phrasing are in full effect.
As with the video for the title-track, which premiered on GW on June 24, Basilio is joined in the video by Sklar on bass guitar, Ester Na on keys, and Vinnie Colaiuta on the drums. Your Love was recorded at Los Angeles’ United Recording Studios, and was written and produced by Basilio.
If the evidence of Alive and Living is anything to go by, expect Basilio to stretch her sound further on this one. Her LB-1 signature guitar was designed for that sort of approach; as a guitar that can do it all.
It is equipped with Basilio’s signature Seymour Duncan electric guitar pickups, which are arranged in an HSS format, with a five-way blade selector and an alt-switch to toggle between two configurations offering a cornucopia of tones.
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With the alt switch disengaged – as it looks like in the video here – you can select the bridge pickup, bridge pickup’s inner-coil plus middle single-coil, middle single-coil, both middle and neck single-coils in parallel, and the neck single-coil. All very conventional for an Ibanez.
When you engage the alt-switch, however, you can access the inner-coil of the bridge humbucker alone, the bridge humbucker plus both single-coils in series, the outer-coil of the bridge humbucker and the neck single-coil, and both middle and neck single-coils in series.
That makes for 10 core tones in total – which is a lot. But then Basilio did say that she wanted a guitar that does it all.
Your Love is out August 5, and is available to preorder now.
Jonathan Horsley has been writing about guitars since 2005, playing them since 1990, and regularly contributes to publications including Guitar World, MusicRadar and Total Guitar. He uses Jazz III nylon picks, 10s during the week, 9s at the weekend, and shamefully still struggles with rhythm figure one of Van Halen’s Panama.
