Indholdsfortegnelse for December 2019 i Guitar Player

IF THERE IS a theme to this issue, it might be reinvention. The four artists in our main features have each released a new album that shows them taking a fresh approach to their music, instruments or career. Reinvention is part of Wilco’s DNA. Jeff Tweedy and company emerged in the 1990’s No Depression alt-country movement, merging country, folk, and rock and roll on early albums like A.M. and Being There before switching into psychedelic rock with Summerteeth. On 2001’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, the musical arrangements became more varied and less predictable, as Tweedy tore away any sense of a cohesive band, preferring to expose the rhythms and disparate musical elements underpinning each song’s structure. The guitarist has continued to confound expectations ever since, bounding from alternative country to alternative…

YOU NEED ONLY check out the music of Scott Henderson to recall why the guitar style known as fusion was so exciting at its inception, back when it was a fresh stew of raw rock and jazz sophistication. Over three decades and almost two dozen recordings, Henderson’s work has preserved all that made fusion great — the sounds, the energy, the harmonic and rhythmic interest — while never descending into the smooth jazz or pointless pyrotechnics that sometimes gave the genre a bad name. With 2015’s Vibe Station, Henderson shifted toward the more complex music he created with the band Tribal Tech. On his new album, People Mover (CD Baby), the guitarist continues in that vein while creating a different texture, thanks in part to his trio’s new rhythm section…

THIS HAS BEEN a landmark year for Gibson as the company moves forward under new leadership to rebuild its business and reclaim its place as one of the most revered brands in guitar history. Gibson was clearly on a roll at the Winter NAMM show last January, where scads of models were on display in a huge space filled with dealers, music store owners and guitar fans. The recent Summer NAMM show in Gibson’s hometown of Nashville witnessed more of the same, with the launch of the G-45 series acoustics [see review on page 104], the Strings Collection, and new signature models for Sheryl Crow, Vivian Campbell and Paul McCartney guitarist Brian Ray. Those guitars join tributes to Slash, with an exacting replica of his 1966 Gibson EDS-1275 double-neck [see…

MARIAN HALL WAS a steel-guitar pioneer. I was introduced to her by my pal, and fellow steel player, Cindy Cashdollar, who was good friends with Marian up until her death in 2006. Marian grew up in Los Angeles and started playing professionally in her teens with her sister, Joanie. She then branched out on her own and joined the house band of the early country music TV variety shows Town Hall Party and Ranch Party. Over her more than 30-year career, Marian played and recorded with an impressive list of musicians, including Gene Autry and Rosemary Clooney, Johnny Bond, the Collins Kids, Rose and Joe Maphis, Tex Ritter, Merle Travis, Patsy Cline and many others. It was enlightening to speak with her about her start in the business and hear…

AS THE GUITAR boom of the 1960s progressed, so too did guitar technology and quality. Guitar manufacturers like Teisco and Danelectro, who produced thousands of stripped-down entry-level guitars, slowly started to offer guitars that had some if not all of the features professionals sought. Conversely, a lot of popular pro-guitar manufacturers, like Gibson and Fender, started to emphasize their student or entry-level designs, perhaps in an effort to compete with the flood of imported guitars. As a result, consumers had a veritable international smorgasbord of guitars from which to choose, including models by Kent. The Kent nameplate was actually used by two different Japanese companies. Manufactured in the early 1960s, Teisco’s Kent guitars were very low-level stuff, but around 1967, Guyatone took over and produced a wonderful, high-end line. This…

FROM BACKING A newly electrified Bob Dylan to carving out woody, jagged guitar lines in the Band, Robbie Robertson has been part of the fabric of American rock. And no instrument is more associated with him than the bronze-coated ’54 Strat he used on the night that Dylan, Eric Clapton, Muddy Waters and many other notable performers joined the Band for the concert known today as the Last Waltz. Held on Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 1976, at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, the concert both closed and crowned an era. For Robertson and bandmates Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson, the event marked the end of a touring career that had covered untold thousands of miles. As the Hawks, they’d played at Dylan’s side around the globe…

IN THEIR QUEST for fresh approaches to the instrument, guitarists throughout history have found creative ways to mimic the sounds and phrasing characteristics of other instruments. This includes valiant attempts at copying the musical methodology, tonal qualities and sonic blueprint of the violin, saxophone, harmonica, banjo, pedal steel, piano and even the human voice. The practice of emulating other instruments is nothing new to many adventurous guitarists, and it is a rewarding approach that often spawns fresh musical ideas and interesting licks. If you’re searching for an untapped realm of musical inspiration with an exotic vibe, one good source can be found in the traditional music and unusual instruments from Japan. This includes the koto, a very old, stringed Japanese instrument, which could be viewed as a distant relative of…

CANADIAN MANUFACTURER REVV Amplification is probably best known for its highly functional, high-gain, all-tube 120-watt Generator 120 head and the other handmade amps in its Pro Series. But the company is also looking to the future of studio and onstage guitar-tone generation, and the D20 is the result. Outwardly, the D20 is a simple 20-watt tube amp, switchable to four watts, with fairly standard control features. However, a deeper dive finds it’s primed to link you to the brave new world of hybrid tube-digital performance, with built-in Two Notes Torpedo speaker-cabinet emulation and a world of clever connectivity, plus a front end designed for optimal pairing with Revv’s own amp-voiced G Series drive pedals or your own. All that, and it’s a compact, ultra-portable package in the “lunch box” vein.…

LOLLAR HAS A stellar reputation for crafting aftermarket replacements for every traditional pickup you can imagine, many of which have also become OEM for several boutique manufacturers these days. In addition, the company has re-created and reworked several quirkier vintage pickups of yore, with great results. Now joining Lollar’s lap-steel pickups, trend-setting Gold Foil pickups and Charlie Christian–inspired blade pickups is the MiniBroiler, a tasty single-coil homage to the legendary Rickenbacker toaster-top pickups of the 1960s, encased in a mini-humbucker cover that makes for an easy retrofit. As such, the pickup can be hung from a pickguard or pickup ring like a Firebird mini-humbucker, or mounted LP Deluxe–style in a P-90 ring, allowing it to fit a wide range of guitars. The original Rick toaster top was often mistaken for…

Raid Dana’s Gear Stash! Guitar Player sends a big thanks to VHT for offering their V-Drive stomp box to my Gear Stash. It has controls for volume, tone, drive, depth and texture, plus an 11-position select switch with 10 different clipping diode configurations and a clean-boost diode-bypass mode. All these options give you everything from clean boost to creamy-smooth sustain to raging harmonic complexity. For a chance to get the V-Drive on your pedalboard, send an email with “V-Drive” in the subect line to nbmgearcoordinator@gmail.com. Deadline for entries is November 20. It’s been a blast gifting these effect pedals over the past few years, but I’m venturing back to my first and true love: drums and percussion. You can find me on Facebook or on Instagram @DanaParkerDrums. —DANA PARKER Warren…

THERE ARE DEDICATED music lifers who grind out gig after gig, and then there are musicians who are literally born into the business. Nashville-based singer-songwriter Lillie Mae can lay claim to both. Born with a prodigious musical talent and a busker’s hustle, Lillie Mae Rische could strum a guitar before most kids can write their own names. She honed her chops on the road, traveling with her family in an RV and performing alongside her parents and siblings at churches and makeshift venues around the country. “My style of playing with a pick just developed around playing live,” she says of her early touring days. “I play this way because I couldn’t keep up, or you could never hear it, so you have to play with a pick as opposed…

Brian Ray creates his ultimate SG Junior The Brian Ray ’62 SG Junior comes on the heels of your custom Shop ’63 SG. What was your aim for the new model? It’s a hybrid of an SG Junior and an SG Standard: a single-pickup guitar with an SG Standard neck, appointments and vintage-style binding. Because of the success of the ’63 SG — the initial run of one hundred sold out in about six months — Gibson asked me if I had any ideas for another model, so I suggested something with a TV white finish, which I thought would be a good companion to the the translucent black Silver Fox finish of the ’63 SG. It’s like the Arctic White that Gibson and Epiphone have done before, and they’re…

PEOPLE OFTEN ASK about the “proper” order of effects in an effects chain: Should pedal A be before or after pedal B? I think the best answer is, Try it both ways, and find out for yourself! Playing with effects should be fun, and there’s nothing like a happy accident to make your day. Sure, there’s a “standard” order: Effects that need an unprocessed guitar sound (octave dividers, envelope followers, pitch trackers, synth pedals) Dynamics processors (compressors, noise gates) Overdrive/distortion effects Modulation effects (chorus, tremolo) Time-altering effects (delay, reverb) Volume pedal But why be normal? Instead, let’s play with some nonstandard options. EQ An EQ pedal can go in multiple locations. Placing it after distortion alters the distortion timbre, but placing it before distortion can change how the distortion reacts.…

TO SAY THAT Wilco have their own thing going is a big understatement for a band that has been a defining force on the alternative-rock scene for the past quarter century. The brain trust of the lineup — drummer Glenn Kotche, bassist John Stirratt, keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen, multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone and guitarist/sonic sculptor Nels Cline — has remained unchanged for 15 years. That durability is a testament to the creative bond they have with vocalist/guitarist/songwriter Jeff Tweedy, who has been the mastermind behind Wilco’s sound since its inception in 1994. Typically working alone at his Loft studio in Chicago, Tweedy has unfettered freedom to steer the band wherever his muse leads, and thusly it’s completely in character that laying the groundwork for the new album, Ode to Joy (Wilco’s 11th…

ADRIAN BELEW’S NEW self-released record, Pop Sided, is his first compilation of complete, immutable compositions since 2006’s Side Three. But Belew has been far from idle in the interim. Under the rubric Flux, he has released two apps: Flux by Belew, which mixes recordings of tunes that never play the same way twice with snippets of sounds and visual art, and Flux:FX, a multi-effects processor for iPad. He has also kept up a touring schedule with his power trio, using cutting-edge technology to fill out the sound and provide all the distinctive effects he has developed through the years. Belew is in that pantheon of players like Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck and later Tom Morello, all of whom have pushed the limits of what an electric guitar can do. In…

DOCUMENTARIST KEN BURNS isn’t a guitar player, but he is the Hendrix of history. His latest film, Country Music, is another virtuosic piece from the man whose previous documents of Americana explored the worlds of jazz and baseball. Burns has a gift for getting to the heart of his subject matter sociologically. “Country music is made by people who are working hard but getting no respect,” he says. It turns out that Burns also understands players, as evidenced in the following conversation when technical aspects come up or someone draws comparisons between Eddie Van Halen’s shredding and Earl Scruggs’ banjo rolls. Vince Gill is one of country music’s premier guitar and mandolin pickers as well as a member of the ultimate country-rock crossover band, the Eagles. The Oklahoma native’s new…

MOST ACOUSTIC PLAYERS are familiar with a few body sizes but remain foggy about the many options available. This Frets column aims to provide clarity, not with a big chart you could find using a Google search but with some real-world examples that reveal the positives and negatives inherent to each size category, and a bit of history that explains how we got to where we are today. SMALL-BODY PERSPECTIVE From the time C.F. Martin opened shop in the mid 19th century until well into the 20th century, the acoustic guitar was a relatively small instrument that was played primarily by women in home parlors. Parlor guitars, such as Milk Carton Kid Kenneth Pattengale’s new signature Pattengale Special Martin single 0 and Gretsch’s Rancher Penguin Parlor, are resurgent these days,…

CHARLES “BUD” ROSS built his fame on the Kustom amps he began creating in the mid 1960s. In the 1970s, he went on to launch the Ross Electronics stompbox company, and today his name is perhaps most famous for the number of clones that the company’s delectable gray Compressor inspired. Although Ross’s stompboxes were arguably B-list boxes behind the likes of MXR and Electro-Harmonix, many guitarists belatedly discovered how magical the unassuming two-knob Compressor could sound, while others stumbled upon the raunchy glories of its mustard-colored cohort, the Distortion. Not surprisingly, both effects have become highly sought after on the vintage market, and the high prices they’ve commanded have put them beyond the means of most players. Now, some 35 years after production ceased, the Ross Compressor and Distortion have…

GENERATION 45 ACOUSTICS are aimed at the player looking for a bona fide American-made Gibson at an entry-level price. Options include the G-45 studio ($999 street) and the G-45 Standard on review here. Built in Gibson’s Bozeman, Montana, factory, G-45 acoustics offer plenty of bang for the buck, including a dovetail neck joint attached via hot hide glue to a neck with a modern profile and a sleek body constructed from all solid woods. G-45s ship equipped for the stage with an onboard Fishman Sonitone pickup. The G-45 body style is essentially a modified round-shouldered dreadnought with the slightly shallower body depth and shorter scale length usually associated with a triple-0 body style. Neither model is designed to be super fancy, but the G-45 Standard is a little more upscale…

> As the primary songwriter and singer for the Cars, guitarist Ric Ocasek defined the early years of new wave with his music, vocals and style of dress. Tall, gaunt, sporting a shock of jet-black hair, and often wearing black jackets and sunglasses, Ocasek recalled Roy Orbison for a less-romantic, technological age. His voice, pitched high like Orbison’s, was tense and lined with apprehension, but there was lightness and even joy in his songs, all of it presented with a demeanor of eternal cool. According to the official record, he was born Richard Theodore Ocasek on March 23, 1944, in Baltimore. Other reports put his birth year at 1949, which is supported by Ocasek’s own recollection of falling in love with Buddy Holly and the Crickets’ 1958 hit “That’ll Be…

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CHRIS DIFFORD AND Glenn Tilbrook began writing songs together in 1973, after Tilbrook answered Difford’s ad seeking a guitarist for his band. In fact, Difford had no group, but the two men soon formed one together. Squeeze subsequently went on to become the darlings of the U.K.’s late-1970s post-punk scene, thanks to the group’s impressive musical chops and Difford and Tilbrook’s effervescent songwriting. Featuring Difford’s incisive and frequently witty lyrics and Tilbrook’s stylistically varied music, early Squeeze hits like “Cool for Cats,” “Up the Junction” and “Pulling Mussels (From the Shell)” showed off their fluency with rock, pop and R&B while they revealed the group’s impressive chops. “Because we were playing as a band before punk reared its head, there’d already been some pivotal moments for us,” Tilbrook relates. “We…

THROUGHOUT THE DEVELOPMENT of the electric guitar and gear related to it, the first iterations of new designs haven’t always been the best. Gibson improved the Les Paul throughout the 1950s, Fender perfected the Bassman amplifier only with the final version of the tweed combo, and Vox arguably introduced the most classic AC30 when it added Top Boost several years after the first rendition arrived. Turn to the humble chorus pedal, though, and that pattern falls down entirely. Few guitarists and collectors would disagree that the Boss CE-1 Chorus Ensemble of 1976 was the greatest such pedal amid a flood of effects that followed over the next decade and a half. And it’s still the source for many of the lushest, richest examples of the sound ever recorded. Effects designers…

MOST COLLECTORS KNOW Emmons Guitar Inc. as the Black Album, a fitting name for a record shrouded in mystery. It was released in the late ’60s, or as late as 1971, and distributed by the Emmons Guitar label through music stores, specialty record shops and steel-guitar retailers. Buddy Emmons was born in Indiana in 1937 and began playing lap steel at age 11. He joined Little Jimmy Dickens while still young and went on to make significant contributions to pedal-steel guitar and country music, recording with Ray Charles, Ernest Tubb, Ray Price, Roger Miller, the Everly Brothers, Danny Gatton and many others. With collaborator Shot Jackson, Buddy made innovations to pedal-steel mechanics, leading to the signature Sho-Bud model. He won the Academy of Country Music’s Best Steel Guitarist award nine times…

ALTHOUGH SHERYL CROW has been a household name since “All I Wanna Do” became a global hit in 1994, her album output has been anything but steady. She’s just released what is only her 10th studio album. Titled Threads, it will also be her last, barring any unforeseen changes. After 25 years as a solo artist, Crow has decided her days as an album-oriented songwriter are over. Streaming services have, as she points out, allowed consumers to choose exactly what they want to hear by plucking songs from an artist’s carefully chosen track order and often inserting them in playlists populated by tunes from other performers. The album format is, for all intents and purposes, nonexistent to the average consumer. “A lot of people say the streaming services have saved…

“IT’S THRILLING, AFTER all of this time, to be both making new noises and rediscovering things I found stimulating at a very early age,” Robbie Robertson says. That sentence could conceivably sum up the legendary, songwriter/guitarist’s artistic career. Before the world had discovered Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, John Hammond’s 1965 album, So Many Roads, helped introduce many blues fans to the full glory of the electric guitar. As wielded on that record by Jamie “Robbie” Robertson, the Fender Telecaster became a slashing, piercing sword, eliciting our first thoughts of “What is that, and how do I do it?” Rife with energy and an almost punk attitude, it was an amalgam of twang and deep R&B roots unlike anything we had heard before — the bite of Muddy Waters’ slide…

AT THE BEGINNING of every guitarist’s musical journey, you learn a set of open “cowboy” chords and barre chords — a few major, minor and 7th shapes that set you on your way to playing every song in an “easy guitar” songbook. But where do you go after you’ve exhausted all the possibilities of these stock shapes, and how do you expand on the textures of common progressions to make them sound more interesting? One sure-fire way to do this is to incorporate voice leading into your playing. Voice leading is a musical concept that dates back to the Baroque era of classical music. It involves treating chords not as block shapes that move indifferently from one to another but as groups of individual, single-note “voices” that weave melodically through…

ALTHOUGH MANY VINTAGE Supro guitars are known for having bodies made from alternative materials such as Res-o-Glas, the original Silverwood was billed as the company’s “finest electric” and was one of a handful to receive a solid-wood body to prove the point. This new Silverwood offering follows suit and includes several notable upgrades on the features of its 1960s predecessors, all without losing that distinctive body shape and Valco-grade vibe. Unlike the original, the 1296 Silverwood boasts a glued-in neck made from maple, although the back is finished in a nifty matte black for a toothsome feel, yielding to gloss behind the headstock and just short of the easy-access heel joint. The pau ferro fingerboard features block inlays and is tastefully bound, while the austere semi-Gumby headstock sports only the…

COBBLING TOGETHER TASTY guitar amps out of salvaged gramophones, P.A.s and other tube-fired audio gear of yore is nothing new, but not all such ventures are created equal. Among the most legendary are the handful of amps crafted by Canadian engineer Bernie Raunig several years ago using chassis and transformers pilfered from old Bell & Howell Filmosound projectors. No boutique production-amp maker has taken this platform further than Tony Teixeira. This Canadian maker has earned a sizable reputation for his Tex Bernie model, an amp played by Daniel Lanois, Alex Lifeson, Jeff Tweedy, Brian Adams, Bob Rock and Colin Cripps, among others. Now the Mini EF86 Combo springs from that foundation to add a meaty EF86 pentode preamp tube to the brew, while stuffing it all into a compact cabinet…

Ampli-Firebox Atomic Amps Available Now World-class tube amp modelling and effects in a compact stomp box. Customize up to 9 rigs. Footswitch accesses up to 4 sounds instantly. Free USB editor. XLR and ¼″ outputs. The Ultimate Amp in a Box! MSRP: $299 www.atomicamps.com/amplifirebox Easy Guitar and Ukulele Songbooks Children’s Books - Christian Books - Christmas Books Available Now Full-color, illustrated guitar and ukulele songbooks that make learning fun and easy! Each 130 page book comes complete with a dual format for each song - a separate section for melodies and a separate section for chords. Includes Standard Notation and TAB. MSRP: $24.95 each www.MakeMusicEasy.com info@makemusiceasy.com Lil Luber/Groove Luber/Bench Luber Big Bends LLC Available Now Big Bends LLC is proud to introduce the complete line of Nut SauceTM tuning lubricant…