Indholdsfortegnelse for September 2024 i Guitar World

IN THE MONTHS ahead, you’ll probably notice a bit more turnover in terms of our columnists in the back of the mag. This is purely (and obviously) to keep things fresh and interesting. We added David Grissom a couple of issues ago, and this issue sees the arrival of Andy Wood (Rascal Flatts, Sebastian Bach), a guy who’s the very embodiment of the concept of “professional guitarist.” Of course, as is often the case in life, the arrival of one Andy means the farewell of another, and Andy Aledort’s In Deep column (which has been a GW mainstay since before I got here in 2011) is taking a breather. Don’t worry — our Andy isn’t going anywhere! He’s still an associate editor at GW, and his presence can be felt…

JAKE DREYER CAN see the mauve aura enveloping Sounds of the Forgotten, the newest album from his melodic metal project, Witherfall. What’s more, each record occupies a different emotional and tonal spectrum of the rainbow. “We think in colors when it comes down to the music, which is kind of strange. But to us, this sounds like a purple record,” Dreyer says of his group’s collective, feels-based synesthesia. “When I was in music school, people were able to associate intervals with colors, which is fucking wild. I’m not there yet. I just get the vibes of the song.” Dreyer’s work within this latest palette can be quite regal. His royal violet solo sections on “They Will Let You Down” and “Insidious” are fit with micro-sized, mega-layered and joyfully jarring harmonies…

“I’VE PUSHED A lot of boundaries on this [album] and surpassed any of the guitar playing I’ve done before,” Marty Friedman tells Guitar World about Drama, his new record. “If you want to talk on a guitar level, it’s — without question — the deepest dive into my playing that I’ve ever done.” That’s some next-level thinking from the former Megadeth and Cacophony guitarist who’s been putting out solo albums since the late Eighties. And although those words shouldn’t exactly surprise you if you’ve followed along with Friedman’s career, it still takes balls to say it. But listening to Drama, one can’t help but think Friedman might be onto something. “The amount of energy, effort, love and ‘putting myself out there’ that goes into a record like Drama — it’s…

“ONE OF THE GREAT THINGS ABOUT BLUES IS THE STORIES THAT IT TELLS, ESPECIALLY FOR PEOPLE WHO ARE STRUGGLING” BACK IN NOVEMBER 2023, SLASH had just completed six months of touring with Guns N’ Roses, a jaunt that took the band everywhere from Budapest and Tel Aviv to Abu Dhabi and Oslo, and then wrapped with yet another run of stadium dates across the U.S. Heading into the holidays, the 58-year-old guitarist was staring down an eight-week break before returning to Europe for a long headlining run with his other band, Slash Featuring Myles Kennedy & the Conspirators. And so, he did what most of us would do at that moment: take a breather and enjoy some well-earned rest and relaxation. We’re kidding, of course. What Slash actually did was…

COVER STORYSLASHS Blues BALL “PEOPLE WERE SAYING, ‘THIS ISN’T BLUES.’ AND NOW IT’S OUR GOLD STANDARD” SAMANTHA FISH FIRST came to mainstream attention as part of a trio of artists on the 2011 Girls with Guitars record, but over the past decade or so she has proven to be a more singular — and much less easy to pigeonhole — talent. Over the course of seven studio albums, first for German indie label Ruf and more recently for blues and roots powerhouse Rounder, Fish has carved out a style that marries high-octane blues with raucous rock ’n’ roll, pop, country, punk, hip-hop and other sounds. Binding it all together are her commanding vocals and tasty, melodic guitar work, attributes that have over the years garnered a sizable audience that counts…

EDWARD VAN HALEN named his Wolfgang model signature guitars after his son. Now that Wolf has conceived his own EVH signature guitar, the SA-126 Special, he has returned the tribute by naming the model number after Edward’s January 26 birthdate. Representing a new chapter in the evolution and future of the EVH brand, the SA-126 Special is Wolfgang Van Halen’s brain child and the company’s first guitar developed without input from Ed, although the elder Van Halen’s spirit is present in the meticulous attention to detail in every aspect of the guitar’s design. Like Ed did with the original EVH Wolfgang, Wolf subjected the SA-126 to a prolonged period of rigorous road testing, playing a variety of prototypes with his band Mammoth WVH. It took more than two years for…

COLUMNS MELODIC MUSE THIS MONTH, I’D like to continue exploring musically effective approaches to soloing over the 16-bar progression we’ve utilized for the last two columns, which is in the key of E minor: Em - A7 - Em - A7 - Cmaj7 - B7b9 - Cmaj - B7b9. For this month’s improvised solo, I’ll incorporate some string bending, along with a little bit of chromaticism. FIGURE 1 presents the solo, which ends with an additional bar that resolves the final phrase back on the tonic chord, Em. The majority of the phrases are based on the E minor pentatonic scale (E, G, A, B, D), starting with a pickup into bar 1. As always, my goal is to create strong, “hooky”-sounding melodies delivered with expressive, vocal-like articulations. The legato sound…

BACK IN 1958, when the first Gibson Explorer guitars appeared on the market, there was no heavy metal, hard rock, Marshall stacks or overdrive pedals. Distortion was something that amp manufacturers and players generally frowned upon, embraced only by a handful of hooligans and raucous rebels. Gibson president Ted McCarty conceived the Explorer’s design as a modern, space age-inspired competitor to the Stratocaster, but its radical sharp-angled “arrowhead” (on the earliest version) and “hockey stick” headstock shapes and pointy geometric body that resembled Thor’s lightning bolt were just a little too futuristic for musicians who still considered crew cuts and suit jackets the height of rock ’n’ roll fashion. Although the Gibson Flying V, which was introduced at the same time, found a small but devoted cult of players during…

Why no Kerry King transcription? Imagine how excited I was to receive my most recent Guitar World magazine [July 2024] and discover Kerry King on the cover! In times past, GW made it a practice to include at least one transcribed song from the cover artist/band. This practice appears to have gone by the wayside, as the King issue includes such gems as the Who’s “Pure and Easy” and the backyard barbeque staple “Running on Empty” by Jackson Browne. It would be awesome if GW could return to the old days when a reader could not only read about the artist/band, but also learn one of their most influential pieces. Just a thought. — Ransom Boynton [Ed.’s note: Gang — all’s I can say is (as I’ve said here before),…

NEW BANDS RARELY strike gold from the jump; assembling the right players can be tricky, and the timing and mood are a big part of the magic. But the chemistry between guitarist Jimmy James and his bandmates in Parlor Greens exploded the first time they got in a room together. “I think it was the same night we flew in,” James says. “A groove started happening, and the next thing you know, [it became] ‘West Memphis.’ You catch a certain vibe, and there it is.” James and his bandmates — organist Adam Scone and drummer Tim Carman — connected through their record label and consummated the whole soulful affair in a Loveland, Ohio, studio. That opening improvisation turned into “West Memphis,” a highlight on the resulting debut album, In Green…

The GEAR HUNTER SINCE BEING FOUNDED 17 years ago in the English town of Northampton, Blackstar has gone on to become one of the most fiercely innovative amplification companies in the music trade. They manufacture a whole range of products that cater for just about every need, from the kind of practice units touring musicians use in backstage dressing rooms to high-performance metal machines. You’ll find their logo in living rooms, bedrooms and stages of every kind, and with good reason. In recent years they’ve launched the highly successful St. James series, which made headlines for being the lightest tube amps ever made, and the 100-watt Amped floor units, which are engineered to replace conventional heads and combos. These latest developments coincide with the introduction of the high-definition IRs in their CabRig…

IF YOU HAVEN’T noticed, Slash is literally busier than ever before. And we’re not just talking about his ongoing Gun N’ Roses duties, his Capital One commercial, his new Orgy of the Damned album or his S.E.R.P.E.N.T. Festival. We’re talking about guest appearances, people. Since 2023, Slash has appeared on a whole lotta tracks — and it’s not by accident. As he says elsewhere in this issue, “I’m really not good at just sort of sitting around and spinning my wheels. I can do it for a few hours or a day, but I can’t go weeks like that. My mind would go crazy.” Yeah, no kidding. Based on the volume of side hustling Slash has done lately, his inability to sit still checks out. Here’s a quick guide to…

SOUNDCHECK SOME MIGHT FIND it curious, but one of the more interesting — and hottest — guitar trends is rubber-bridge guitars. The idea behind it boils down to fashioning a bridge or a strip made of rubber to dampen the tone of a guitar in order to project a softly muted sound that’s instantly alluring. The idea isn’t exactly new; a few aftermarket hardware companies have offered rubber bridges and dampeners for that muted texture for basses and electric guitars. However, prior to the pandemic, an Angeleno luthier named Reuben Cox had been outfitting numerous acoustics with rubber-bridge builds that landed in the hands of some of the most recognized alt-rock darlings, including Phoebe Bridgers and Jeff Tweedy. These artists, among others, recorded many notable chart-topping hits and brooding album…

COLUMNS THE WOODSHED HELLO EVERYONE, AND welcome to my first Guitar World column! I’d like to start off with an essential element of musical understanding, which is the knowledge of intervals. To illustrate, I’ll cite a passage from my song “Believe,” from my new album, Charisma. An interval is the distance between two notes, measured in half steps and whole steps. “Believe” offers a great way to examine intervallic relationships, as there’s a repeating, droning root note throughout the opening melody, and it’s helpful to be aware of the intervallic relationship between the root and each individual melody note. FIGURE 1 shows how I kick off the tune, with a three-bar vamp on Dsus2 setting up the introduction of the melody. Bars 4-8 show the initial melody that’s played over…

COLUMNS LONE STAR EVOLUTION THIS MONTH, I’D like to discuss the tune “Way Down Deep,” the title track from my third album, released in 2011. A live version of the song also appears on 2014’s How It Feels to Fly. “Way Down Deep” is built from similar hybrid picking and drone string techniques that I demonstrated for “Lucy G.” in my first two columns. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, hybrid picking is an indispensable technique for me; without it, I couldn’t play half of my songs or improvise the way I prefer to. I listened to a lot of bluegrass when I was younger and still practice a lot on acoustic. Two of my primary bluegrass influences are Norman Blake and Doc Watson, and both…

TRADITIONAL PATHS TO rock ’n’ roll stardom — such as blockbuster album sales and sold-out tours — may have become less and less common in our post-everything world, but Towa Bird isn’t worried. She’s busy punching her own ticket to the top. Over the past few years, the breakout TikTok guitarist has ridden a wave of online celebrity to a major-label record deal, an appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers and a scorching performance on Olivia Rodrigo’s Disney+ documentary, Olivia Rodrigo: driving home 2 u. Now, with her debut album, American Hero, the 25-year-old guitarist is finding new ways to use her instrument in popular music by pulling from her classic-rock roots. “I can’t really think of any current guitar heroes that I have,” she says from her home…

ON THE STRENGTH of the old-guard revival (Ride, Slowdive, Drop Nineteens and My Bloody Valentine), a new wave of shoegazers is upon us. One such band is Austin-based outfit Blushing, led by vocalist and guitarist Michelle Soto. Soto recently beamed in with GW to dig into working with Ride’s Mark Gardener and former Smashing Pumpkins guitarist Jeff Schroeder on Blushing’s new record, Sugarcoat, and her love for a particularly tasty (and durable) Fender Johnny Marr Jaguar. Q: Ride’s Mark Gardener mastered Sugarcoat. How did that impact the guitars? We started talking to Mark in 2021 when we worked together on our last album, Possessions, and we instantly clicked. Mark dialed our sound in at his Oxford studio and gave the album a polished cohesiveness that lets the sparkle and grit…

PERSONALITIES KISS’S NON-MAKEUP era is often relegated to “persona non grata” status — at least for original-lineup diehards. But things were different for Kiss fans growing up without Ace Frehley — as they only knew Bruce Kulick. Of course, before Kulick, there was Vinnie Vincent, who some fans say “saved Kiss.” And then there was star-crossed shredder Mark St. John, who Kulick replaced. But the truth is that despite Frehley’s iconic foundational licks, Vincent’s cult following and St. John’s… well, never mind about him… without Kulick holding down the fort as the lead guitarist of rock’s most bombastic band between 1984 and 1996, Kiss wouldn’t have had a house to bring down thereafter, let alone a non-makeup era to forsake. “When I came into Kiss, I wasn’t asked to imitate…

SOME THINGS ARE just meant to go together — like peanut butter and chocolate, or Bennifer. You could add Lamb of God and Mastodon to that list of perfect pairings. Though they’re two very different bands — the former a precision thrash force with a penchant for groove, the latter a Southern-fried psych trip of percussive prog — both shot to prominence in the early ’00s while redefining the American metal landscape. Sure enough, they’ve been prolific vanguards for heavy music ever since. This summer, they’re looking back to their gloriously pummeling past through the joint Ashes of Leviathan arena tour — a 20th-anniversary celebration of Lamb of God’s powerfully political Ashes of the Wake and Mastodon’s massive-sounding Moby Dick tribute, Leviathan. In true happenstance, both now-iconic albums managed to…

FROM HIS EARLIEST days with Guns N’ Roses, it was clear that’s Slash’s lead guitar style — be it the direct, deep-in-the-pocket pentatonic licks and gritty double-stop bends of “Welcome to the Jungle” or the emotive, vocal-like phrasings that characterized “Sweet Child O’ Mine — was heavily steeped in the blues. And yet, he came up in a time and place — 1980s Los Angeles, to be exact — when hard rock had largely eschewed those stylistic hallmarks in favor of an acrobatic and highly technical approach that emphasized speed and flash over feel and, sometimes, taste. Or, as Slash puts it, “There were a ton of, you know, tremolo-bar fucking fiends going around.” He laughs. “But that never really spoke to me. I was just doing my own thing…

“PEARLY GATES, OUR LONG-STANDING FAVE-RAVE SIX-STRING, ENTERED THE STUDIO TO DO THAT RIGHTEOUS THING” WHEN IT CAME time for Slash to send out invites to the sonic party that would become Orgy of the Damned, his new blues-covers album, there was at least one obvious choice: Billy Gibbons. The well-traveled Texan has been shaking, baking and barbecuing the blues — with or without ZZ Top — since the late Sixties. On top of all that, the Slash/Gibbons friendship dates back to the days when ZZ Top’s Afterburner and GN’R’s Appetite for Destruction duked it out on the shelves at Tower Records on the corner of Sunset and Horn in North Hollywood. As is always the case, the famous Texan showed up at Slash’s behest — expertly geared-up and raring to…

COLUMNS TALES FROM NERDVILLE THIS MONTH’S “TOOL of the Trade” is a guitar I really love, the 1957 Les Paul Junior. The most well known user of this instrument was Mountain guitarist Leslie West, who was universally beloved for having one of the heaviest guitar tones of all time. But there are many different sounds, both ultra clean and distorted, that this instrument can provide, making it a perfect choice for just about any type of guitar-based music. I treat the Les Paul Junior like a Fender Esquire, in that you can get a ton of different sounds out of a simple guitar fitted with one pickup, one volume control and one tone control. In the case of the Junior, it is fitted with a P90, which is a large,…

“MIDNIGHT TRAIN TO MEMPHIS” WORDS AND MUSIC BY CHRIS STAPLETON AND MIKE HENDERSON. © 2005, 2006, 2017 WC MUSIC CORP., SPIRIT CATALOG HOLDINGS, S.A.R.L., NEW SEA GAYLE MUSIC, SONY MUSIC PUBLISHING (US) LLC AND SONGS OF DIVER DANN MUSIC. ALL RIGHTS FOR SPIRIT CATALOG HOLDINGS, S.A.R.L. CONTROLLED AND ADMINISTERED BY SPIRIT TWO NASHVILLE. ALL RIGHTS FOR NEW SEA GAYLE MUSIC ADMINISTERED BY CLEARBOX RIGHTS. ALL RIGHTS FOR SONY MUSIC PUBLISHING (US) LLC AND SONGS OF DIVER DANN MUSIC ADMINISTERED BY SONY MUSIC PUBLISHING (US) LLC, 424 CHURCH STREET, SUITE 1200, NASHVILLE, TN 37219. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. USED BY PERMISSION. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF HAL LEONARD LLC.…

“JESSICA” The Allman Brothers Band WRITTEN AND RECORDED in the wake of the tragic, untimely deaths of guitarist Duane Allman and bassist Berry Oakley, this upbeat, triumphant-sounding country-rock instrumental represents one of the late Dickey Betts’ finest moments as a guitarist, composer and de facto bandleader. Betts conceived the tune’s main theme, which begins in bar 8, as a tribute to the great gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, who, due to a childhood injury, only had the use of his first two fret-hand fingers. The melody during this section is indeed playable using only these two digits, with a couple of position shifts required. When bending the D note at the 10th fret on the high E string up a whole step to E, in bars 9, 17 and elsewhere,…