Indholdsfortegnelse for August 2020 i Guitar Player

WHILE HE’S MOST closely associated with the 1959 sunburst Les Paul Standards and 100-watt Marshalls that he employed both onstage and in the studio for the majority of Led Zeppelin’s mighty reign, Jimmy Page used an altogether different bit of kit to record the group’s landmark 1969 self-titled debut. The guitarist’s ax of choice for Led Zeppelin was a stock 1959 Fender Telecaster that had been gifted to him by fast friend (and fellow ex-Yardbird) Jeff Beck. That historic guitar has recently been commemorated with a Fender signature model, complete with a reproduction of the mystical Sundragon painting that Page applied to the instrument after receiving it. Unlike the Telecaster, which Page used on Zeppelin’s early tours, and which can therefore be seen in a number of videos, the late-1950s…

AMERICAN GUITAR AFICIONADOS have known about Austrian guitarist Wolfgang Muthspiel for nearly 30 years, going back to his two-year tenure in Gary Burton’s band during the early ’90s and his own acclaimed 1991 debut on Antilles records, the Burton-produced The Promise. That record featured the potent lineup of tenor saxophonist Bob Berg, pianist Richie Beirach, bassist John Patitucci and drummer Peter Erskine. Muthspiel followed in 1992 with the more biting Black and Blue on Polygram before he joined drummer Paul Motian’s Electric Bebop Band in 1994 and bassist Marc Johnson’s Right Brain Patrol in 1996. He returned back home to Vienna in 2002 and started up his own Material Records label. Muthspiel’s reputation as a master improviser with an uncanny ability to cast a six-string spell was enhanced by a…

YOU MAY BE wondering why I’m writing about a bass this month. In my defense, I know a lot of guitarists write and record music at home, and some of us even take a shot at playing a bass part to demo new songs for our bandmates. Unfortunately, the necks on modern basses are huge, and the frets so far apart. Back in the ’60s, European musical instrument makers like Hofner, Framus, Hagstrom and Eko (which manufactured Vox guitars and basses in Italy from 1965 forward) made basses with necks so skinny, they felt more like a cello than a bass. This semihollow-body 1968 Vox Sidewinder Bass IV, model V272, has one of the narrowest necks made. I find that, after playing guitar, I can easily use it to jam…

When the SG/Les Paul appeared in 1961, there were two models. The Standard ($265) had a pair of humbuckers, two controls per pickup, crown inlays in a bound rosewood fingerboard and a sideways-action vibrato. The Custom ($395) was the top-of-the-line model, with gold hardware, three humbuckers, a bound ebony fingerboard and a bound headstock. GIbson added the Junior ($147.50, single-pickup) and Special ($210, dual-pickup) later that year. In addition to unbound rosewood fingerboards with dot inlays, they featured a one-piece wraparound bridge/tailpiece and P-90s. Gibson tweaked the design over the coming years, and in 1966 gave the Custom and Standard an enlarged pickguard, which held the pickups, rather than having them mounted directly to the body.…

IN A GUITARIST’S life, few things are as fun and gratifying as jamming out on a 12-bar blues progression with a friend, a band or even by yourself. And sure, the soloing part is a blast, but as with many different musical styles, your primary role in blues is in most cases to accompany a singer or other featured instrumentalist who is playing a melody. So if you’re feeling limited by your blues comping (chord, or rhythm guitar, playing) ability and vocabulary and are searching for inspiration in those areas, this lesson presents a variety of tried-and-true chords, riff patterns and fills that will help fortify your blues comping arsenal. All of these can be applied to various tempos, grooves and playing scenarios, so grab your favorite axe and let’s…

THE BROADCASTER OF 1950 was a revolutionary and innovative guitar that featured a solid ash body, a fast-playing bolt-on maple neck and a pair of single-coil pickups, all cleverly incorporated into a sleek package designed to be easy to mass produce. The only problem was the name: Gretsch already had a drum kit called the Broadkaster. Fender summarily deleted “Broadcaster” from the headstock decal, and after a short period of selling the guitar with just Fender on the headstock (commonly known as a Nocaster), the company found a permanent and fortuitous solution in the more modern-sounding name Telecaster. Seventy years on, Fender is celebrating this important chapter in guitar history with the 70th Anniversary Broadcaster, a limited-edition replica that will be produced for 2020 only. The model features an ash…

PARLORS WENT OUT of style ages ago, but parlor guitars have remained in vogue for good reasons. Generally defined by having a small body with a narrow waist, coupled to a full-size neck (or close to it), parlor guitars can be a delight to play, yielding a compact, midrange-focused tone that projects well and sounds sweet and articulate. They can be ideal for situations that don’t require the low-end muscle and volume of a jumbo or dreadnought. PRS recently introduced its entrant to the parlor game with the Tonare Parlor SE P20 and P20E models, which are identical except for the Fishman GT1 electronics installed on the E version. The P20E arrived with a Vintage Mahogany satin finish (also available in Black Top and Charcoal) and is representative of the…

Raid Our Stash! Whether you need a tone-enhancing buffer or more gain for soloing, the Teisco Boost is a versatile pedal that can do it all. Modeled after a vintage preamp, the Boost is loaded with a field-effect transistor (FET) for softer, more organic clipping, and it can run at either nine or 24 volts for added headroom. There’s also an EQ profile switch with three settings for additional tone shaping. To get this pedal on your board, send an email with the word “Boost” in the subject line to stash.raid@gmail.com, and you just might win! The deadline is July 27, 2020. Please note that all gear is “as is.” Hail, Weezer! Thanks for the great interview with Rivers Cuomo [June 2020]. I haven’t listened to Fates Warning in years,…

OVER A TWO-DECADE, Thursday-night residency at New York City’s legendary 55 Bar, Wayne Krantz developed one of the most distinctive voices on the electric guitar. His highly syncopated, chord-based approach employs a Strat-style guitar set to the clean, “out-of-phase” tone of the bridge and middle pickups together. However, it’s his brilliantly creative, funky and often dissonant improvisations for which he is known best. Whether performing with one of his trios at 55 Bar, or on tour as KCL, with drummer Keith Carlock and bassist Tim Lefebvre, Krantz puts on an improv performance as nimble as that of a tightrope walker. But when it came to making his latest album, Write Out Your Head (Bandcamp), Krantz decided to switch gears and put out a record that was entirely composed. He had…

FUZZ PEDALS STORMED the stompbox scene in the mid to late ’60s, and many of them went on to become sought-after classics. For fans of the aggressive germanium fuzz tones that could be wrought from those early units, there’s nothing quite like the Sola Sound Tone Bender and its many variations offered by companies like Marshall, Vox, Carlsbro and Park, to name a few. The Tone Bender’s circuit became massively popular, and over the next years its design rapidly evolved, making for a tangled and winding history that is intertwined with some of the most formative music made in the U.K. from the mid 1960s to the early ’70s. The pedal itself was the brainchild of brothers Larry and Joe Macari, proprietors of the fabled Macari’s Musical Exchange on Denmark…

CHRISSIE HYNDE HAS always been clear-eyed about her life’s path. “Someone once asked, ‘What would you be doing if you weren’t in a band?,’” the 68-year-old Pretenders leader tells Guitar Player. “And the answer is, ‘I’d be in a band.’” She laughs. “That sort of sums that up, you know?” Indeed it does. And it also makes the newest release from the Pretenders, Hate for Sale (BMG), all the more special. Not only is it a rocking, raucous record, it’s also Hynde’s first offering with her full touring band, which includes guitarist James Walbourne, bassist Nick Wilkinson and returning original drummer Martin Chambers. “I’ve done what I’ve done over the years,” Hynde says, referring to her two solo albums, 2014’s Stockholm and 2019’s Valve Bone Woe, as well as the…

A YEAR HAS passed since my friend and fellow aging regional rock guitarist John Dougherty called me out of the blue and asked when I might be coming up his way, to Collinsville, Oklahoma. I said I had no plans but could come up if he needed me. He then explained that he had a guitar he wanted to give me. I was, to say the least, surprised, and asked if we could meet the next morning at the local mom-and-pop diner on Main Street around 11:30. He said that would be fine, and we hung up. En route to my appointment, I was fearful of what exactly he might give me. I’d known him to be an avid collector of fine guitars ever since his career as a drug…

EVER SINCE BUD Isaacs attached a pedal to his electric lap steel guitar and crafted the iconic intro to Webb Pierce’s 1956 hit “Slowly,” the sound of a metal steel pressed against a guitar’s strings has become synonymous with country music. Since then, the pedal steel guitar — the lap steel’s cousin — has become an essential instrument within the genre. For those unfamiliar with this marvelous invention, the pedal steel guitar (hereafter referred to simply as the pedal steel) is an electric guitar-like instrument with one or two necks fixed to a tabletop, and featuring anywhere from eight to 14 strings. It’s played not by fretting and strumming but by fingerpicking the strings, using a thumbpick and metal fingerpicks, and sliding a smooth, solid metal bar, known as the…

EVER SINCE VASTLY improved amp-modeling units started proving themselves able to cut it onstage with big and small acts alike, guitarists have been searching for the best ways of making those digital simulations that sound so dynamic and accurate in recorded tracks feel something like traditional amps in the live environment. Sure, they deliver superb tone — and an infinite variety thereof — through studio monitors or front-of-house (FOH) P.A. and onstage monitors, but where’s that thumping, breathing, cab-in-the-room grunt that we’ve come to know and love from traditional amp-and-cab rigs? Many modeler players have also employed full-range flat-response (FRFR) backline speakers to reproduce the broad frequency range that one of the many popular digital alternatives dishes out, but some find those hi-fi-like rigs cold and sterile in person. Others…

LOOPERS HAVE BECOME so popular that it’s no longer unusual to see them in live performance. Traditionally, they’ve been employed to create ambient works in the styles of avant-garde guitarists like David Torn and Robert Fripp, but a generation of new artists have begun using them for traditional composition work, both at home and onstage for impressive on-the-fly songcraft. It’s this latter group for whom the new Pigtronix Infinity 2 double looper was designed. It’s based on the original Infinity Looper, which became a favorite of many guitarists for its wealth of features and a switching system that made nailing rhythmic loops easier than most. Infinity 2 crams a number of those features into a more compact, streamlined user interface that’s a stunning piece of industrial design. Like its predecessor,…

“IT’S A VERY funny song in a way,” Al Di Meola says of “Race with Devil on Spanish Highway,” the jazz-rock masterpiece from his landmark 1977 album, Elegant Gypsy. “By that I mean the way it’s been perceived and written about is a little strange.” As Di Meola explains, he’s read articles in which the song has been labeled proto-shred, a term that rubs him the wrong way. “It’s that word shred that I’m not crazy about,” he explains. “It just feels so limiting and certainly not a good way to describe what I do, because a lot of shredders aren’t known as good songwriters — they’re just going off on the guitar. I come from a compositional background. Even when I played with Return to Forever, we emphasized writing,…

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EVEN BEFORE RELEASING Trouble, his 2016 debut album, Hamish Anderson had toured the globe, making buzz-generating appearances at major festivals and opening for B.B. King at the legend’s last performance. Around the time of Trouble’s release, Gary Clark Jr. was impressed enough to cite the then 25-year-old native of Melbourne, Australia, as a guitarist to watch. Read about Anderson and you’re likely to see him described as a blues guitarist. Listen to him, however, and you’ll discover that his blues is less concerned with 12-bar forms and pentatonic improvisation and much more in tune with the genre’s original form: a spiritual melding of artist and instrument, alchemized to tell heartfelt and unflinchingly truthful stories about life, love and loss. “I’ve always been attracted to music that juxtaposes blues with another genre,”…

I MET AND interviewed German jazz guitarist Susan Weinert while I was on tour in Europe in 2005. She showed up for the interview with her husband and musical partner, Martin Weinert. Susan’s laidback, friendly attitude immediately put me at ease. It was one of my favorite and most memorable experiences talking to another guitar player. I always wanted to catch up again and was considering reaching out as I was putting this column together. To my shock, I learned Susan passed away from cancer on March 2 of this year. Susan was a beautiful jazz guitarist, composer and human being. To read more about her and purchase her music, visit susanweinert.com. When did you start playing guitar? At the age of seven. I went to a classical player. He…

IMAGINE IT’S 1960 and you’re working for Gibson in Kalamazoo, Michigan. You’re sitting at a table with other employees looking at what will one day become the Holy Grail of electric guitars: the sunburst Les Paul Standard from the period 1958 to 1960. It has Honduran mahogany, big-leaf maple, Brazilian rosewood and PAF humbucking pickups. It is timeless and achingly beautiful. But the financial picture for this guitar isn’t pretty. The company revived the Les Paul with humbucking pickups in 1957, and again in ’58 with the sunburst finish. Sales peaked in 1959, but you’ve shipped fewer than 1,800 ’Bursts in all. Your biggest-selling guitars are the lower-priced slab-bodied Les Paul Junior and Melody Maker. What’s more, you’re doubling the size of your factory and need to get it working…

ONCE IN A while, a recording enters the ears and strikes deep through the heart as natural, acoustic instruments channel profound life experience into musical art. Alain Johannes’ new album, Hum (Ipecac), has such an effect. Though Johannes may not have an instantly recognizable name, many readers will be familiar with him from his performance and production work with Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell, Eagles of Death Metal, Queens of the Stone Age, Them Crooked Vultures, numerous film soundtracks and Eleven, the influential band he co-piloted with his wife, Natasha Shneider, who succumbed to cancer in 2008. Their contribution to Cornell’s 1999 solo debut, Euphoria Morning, cannot be overstated, and fans of that record will readily recognize Johannes’ musical and vocal sensibilities upon hearing Hum. He summoned Cornell and Shneider’s spirits for…

THE OPPOSABLE DIGIT sticking out from our human hands is a miracle of evolution essential to playing any guitar style, especially fingerstyle acoustic. Dropping the standard pick allows the thumb to work in myriad ways that can help make your playing as unique as your fingerprint. Free your thumb and fabulous fingerstyle will follow. Here are five tips to help you along. 1. GET EDUCATED The standard method of playing with an “educated thumb” requires the ability to keep a rudimentary bass line going on the lower strings while plucking out a syncopated melody on the treble strings. Check out the music of “Mississippi” John Hurt or Chet Atkins for source material. Use a thumbpick for stronger attack, the thumbnail for a medium attack or the fleshy tip of the…

FISHMAN IS RENO WNED for creating fine acoustic-electric sounds, but its greatest asset may be listening. Recognizing how modern acoustic guitarists are increasingly incorporating percussive playing into their styles, Fishman has answered the call for more guitar-body response with its Acoustic PowerTap series. The line consists of two dual-element formats: the PowerTap Earth and PowerTap Infinity. Both feature the new Tap soundboard body sensor that affixes to the bridgeplate, and they include a stereo adaptor to split the signals from the pickup and sensor. PowerTap Earth couples Tap with a Rare Earth Humbucker active magnetic soundhole pickup, while the PowerTap Infinity pairs it with a Matrix Infinity pickup and preamp system. Fishman sent a PRS SE AX20E equipped with the PowerTap Earth and a Guild OM-150CE bearing the PowerTap Infinity.…

THE STORY OF the 3699 Fuzz begins with the Tone Machine octave/fuzz, which was one of a series of pedals Danelectro owner Steve Ridinger created in the early 1970s for his SoCal-based stomp-box company, Foxx. It was a fierce-sounding pedal, with volume, sustain and fuzz (tone) controls, a toggle switch to turn the octave on and off, and a unique velour treatment on the housing that came in red, black and purple and was, reportedly, a pain to apply. Time-travel forward a half century and Danelectro has introduced an updated version of the Tone Machine bearing the moniker 3699. It’s significant for no other reason than it represents the last four digits of the phone number Foxx was randomly assigned back in the ’70s, which coincidently spelled FOXX. Pretty strange.…