Indholdsfortegnelse for June 2020 i Guitar World

AS OF THIS writing, the coronavirus scare has the entire Future staff, which includes GW, working from home. I’m getting emails about canceled tours, and some PR people are actually writing to tell me that they have nothing to pitch, no music-related news to share. Ozzy Osbourne producer/guitarist Andrew Watt, one of our May 2020 cover stars, just announced that he’s tested positive for coronavirus (“I am laid out in bed chugging Gatorade and using an oxygen machine to give my lungs as much relief as possible”), which really hits home — you know, home, that place where many of us have spent the last few days or weeks. Hopefully, by the time you read this, there’s good news on the horizon. Until then, legions of people, myself included, are…

“IT’S ALL ABOUT one hit — the first hit is everything,” says Japanese singer and guitarist Takamasa Ishihara, better known by his stage name, MIYAVI, when describing his eye- and ear-catching technique of slapping the strings. “Like for a sumo fighter, the first hit is really important for them. That amount of energy and passion … it’s a kind of an explosion of art. For karate or sumo the first contact is really crucial, so to me, I just want to make my own tone with the first contact and have people recognize that’s MIYAVI’s tone right away.” With 13 albums to his name and roots in Japan’s 1990s Visual Kei scene, MIYAVI has certainly carved out a niche in the entertainment world, somehow finding time in between global tours…

• GUITARS (Nuñez) Dunable Cyclops with Bill Lawrence L500L, Fender HH Telecaster with Lace Nitro Hemi pickups, both with Dunlop strings; (Brooks) JML custom guitars, EGC guitars • AMPS (Nuñez) Nuñez Amps Annex MKII head, Nuñez Amps 4x12VL cabinets; (Brooks) 100-watt Marshall JCM800, Nuñez Amps Annex MKII, Nuñez Amps 4x12VL • EFFECTS (Nuñez) Boss TU-3 tuner, Nuñez Amps Tetra-Fet Drive, Nuñez Amps Dual Range Boost, EarthQuaker Devices Arpanoid, MXR Phase 95, Catalinbread Echorec, Digitech DL-8, Digitech RV-7, Boss PN-2; (Brooks) MXR Analog Delay, MXR Phase 90, Nuñez Amps Dual Range Boost…

Q: WHAT AMPS AND EFFECTS ARE YOU USING THESE DAYS? — JASON ALLWOOD Right now I play through two Matchless Clubman 35 brains and speaker cabinets and I also use a Fender Vibro-King. I use the Matchless for the times I use vibrato so that I can have it in stereo, and I use the Vibro-King on its own for certain tunes. Other than that it’s a vibrato unit my guitar tech made for me that he got from the schematic of the original Magnatone so I could have that mono vibrato. A little bit of reverb and that’s it. Q: Why did you call your latest album That’s What I Heard? — K. Fuller Because it’s got a little bit of everything. We did a bunch of covers by…

“If you’re serious about becoming better, you practice at least one hour every day, without fail. Not 58 minutes a day or six hours during the weekend.”TOM MORELLO TALENT. KNOWLEDGE. WISDOM. Everybody possesses these attributes in varying degrees, but let’s face it — who couldn’t use a little more? But is one good without the other? Think about it: You might be a preternaturally gifted guitar player. You pick up the instrument and gorgeous licks simply fly from your fingers. But what if you don’t know the theory behind what you’re playing? Would a little knowledge improve your musicianship? Quite possibly. We can turn that around, of course. What if you’re not blessed with natural ability, but you’re willing to put in the time to learn, to gain knowledge? Through…

STREET PRICES: Adrian Smith SDXM, $499.99; Pro Series Soloist SL2P MAH, $949.99 MANUFACTURER: Jackson, jacksonguitars.com The Adrian Smith SDXM features a full-size Strat-style basswood body, maple neck and pickups in a hum-bucker/single/single configuration. The SDXM has 22 jumbo frets and a slim, C-shaped profile to provide the ideal combination of tone and playability. The Pro Series Soloist SL2P MAH features a sleek 7/8-size mahogany body with poplar burl top, maple neck-through-body design and ebony fretboard. The Soloist’s Seymour Duncan humbuckers (TB-6 bridge, SH-6N neck) provide rich, complex tones with voice-like midrange and wide frequency response. THE BOTTOM LINE The Jackson Adrian Smith SDXM and Pro Series Soloist SL2P MAH are both incredible additions to Jackson’s current line that deliver outstanding value and live up to the company’s storied reputation for…

THE PEAVEY INVECTIVE.120, designed with considerable input from Periphery guitarist Misha Mansoor, is one of the most exciting amp heads to come along in the last few years. As great as that amp is, it may be too much of a good thing as most players these days don’t need 120 watts of output power and prefer smaller, lighter amps that are easier to haul to gigs. Fortunately, Peavey and Mansoor have collaborated on a sequel of sorts — the invective MH, with the MH standing for “mini head.” About half the size and one third the weight of the invective.120, the Peavey invective MH also delivers 100 watts less of output power and cuts more than $1,000 from the price, while retaining most of the bigger invective’s innovative features…

ORANGE PIONEERED THE lunch box amp concept back in 2006 with its acclaimed Tiny Terror head. The company has continued to introduce innovations that have shook the mini amp market ever since, whether packing even more features into the same size package as the original Tiny Terror amp or making even smaller heads, like the Micro Terror and Micro Dark. With the introduction of the Terror Stamp, Orange offers its smallest amp ever — at least in terms of size, packing an incredible 20 watts of output into a pedal-size and configured package. FEATURES While the Orange Terror Stamp looks like a typical distortion pedal, it is actually a genuine amplifier and therefore needs to be used and configured as such. The Terror Stamp shares a similar hybrid tube/solid-state design…

FIVE TO SIX A guide to soloing with major pentatonic and hexatonic scales UNDERSTANDING MAJOR-TYPE SCALES is an essential element in learning to solo on the guitar. The seven-tone major scale, also known as the Ionian mode, contains all intervallic degrees within a given octave; in simple numbers, 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 (8). The specific designations for the major scale are 1 (root note), 2 (major 2nd), 3 (major 3rd), 4 (perfect 4th), 5 (perfect 5th), 6 (major 6th) and 7 (major 7th). The formula that describes the distance, or intervallic measurement, between the successive degrees of the major scale, indicated in whole steps and half steps, is W, W, H, W, W, W, H. That means that there’s a whole step (W), the equivalent of two…

“B.Y.O.B.” System of a Down THIS HARD-DRIVING, ANGST-RIDDEN protest song from the early 2000s features lots of intense and rhythmically dense riffing, courtesy of System of a Down guitarist Daron Malakian, who performs the song in drop-D tuning, transposed down a half step # , or what many guitarists refer to as “drop C ” tuning. Malakian performs “B.Y.O.B.” entirely on his guitar’s bottom three strings and makes great use of the tuning, which enables him to fret root-5th power chords with a single finger on the bottom two strings and smoothly perform intricate riffs with quickly changing chords, such as those in sections C, D, F, G and I. When playing the rapid changes in bars 14, 16 and elsewhere, use whichever fret-hand finger is most convenient for barring…

GUITAR: 1974 Gibson Les Paul Custom with pickup covers removed (bridge pickup), Volume: 10, Tone: 10 AMP: 1972 Fender Twin Reverb combo with Fender P.S. 12 (rebranded Gauss 2841) 12-inch speakers (Vibrato channel, Input 1, Bright: On, Volume: 10, Treble: 9, Middle: 10, Bass: 8, Reverb: 0, Speed: 0, Intensity: 0, Master Volume: 10) EFFECTS: MXR Phase 90 (Speed: 3) STRINGS/TUNING: Unknown, most likely Fender, Gibson or Picato .010-.046/Standard PICK/SLIDE: Unknown, most likely Fender Heavy…

SEND LETTERS TO: Sounding Board, Guitar World/Future, 347 W. 36th St., Suite 1700, New York, NY 10018 or GWSoundingBoard@futurenet.com. All subscription queries must be emailed to guitarworldmag@icnfull.com. Please do not email the Sounding Board with subscription matters. John, Paul and George? Bingo! Hallelujah! The “John, Paul & George’s Guitar Revolution” Guitar World cover story [April 2020] is what many of us wait for (and the reason we continue our subscriptions)! Thanks, GW. We’ve started breathing again! — Thomas Houck What About Epiphone’s Newest Gear? Wow, Guitar World dropped the ball on this one. Epiphone pretty much revamped their whole electric guitar lineup to look a lot more like Gibson and nothing is said by Guitar World. These are great, quality guitars. And most of the Epiphone prices are in line…

1 “In Summary of What I Am” Misery Signals One of my favorite metalcore songs — a perfect blend of melody and heavy. Of Malice and the Magnum Heart is one of my all-time favorite records. 2 “Days of Thunder” The Midnight This song makes me want to drive a race car at 200 mph on the highway with cops chasing me. Fantastic band — hope I get to see them soon. 3 “Rock Is Too Heavy” Owane For all my jazz-heads out there! This song is a ride from start to finish, and it’s incredibly well put together. Yeah Whatever was one of my favorite albums of 2018. 4 “Eat” Promise Breaker I couldn’t stop listening to this song on a flight I took months…

PRIOR TO THE explosion of Swedish death metal onto the international scene in the early Nineties, Sweden had etched its musical heritage onto the world via its most famous export, the sweet pop sounds of ABBA. As the Seventies gave way to the Eighties, new Swedish artists such as Europe and Yngwie Malmsteen would steer the tiny nation’s sonic legacy in a much harder and heavier direction. And with the birth pangs of a darker and extreme sound of metal slowly finding favor with the youth as the decade wore on, Sweden was ripe for the birth of a sound that would go on to become known as the “Sunlight Sound.” The seed that led to the development of the Sunlight Sound was planted in Stockholm in 1988 when a…

IF YOU’VE NEVER heard of Paul Cochrane or his much-sought-after Tim and Timmy pedals, don’t fret; you’re not necessarily supposed to have. Cochrane has no website and a minimal presence on social media, and he pretty much builds his Timmy pedals one at a time, which makes obtaining one something of a challenge. But if you’re a habitual denizen of internet guitar forums, you’ll also know the Timmy pedal routinely shows up on every “top 10 overdrives” list. Why? Cochrane’s creative design of a super-transparent, amp-like overdrive has been in constant demand for armchair tone chasers, let alone notable musicians like Aerosmith’s Brad Whitford and L.A. studio hound Lyle Workman. Luckily, you no longer have to wait to get one because Cochrane partnered with MXR to bring his legendary pedal…

LIST PRICE: $799.99 MANUFACTURER: Peavey, peavey.com A built-in attenuator allows users to set their chosen output to 20-, 5- or 1-watt performance for live, studio or practice applications. Gate, Tight and Boost switches as well as the sophisticated Mic Simulated Direct Interface section provide “big amp” tones and performance. THE BOTTOM LINE: The Peavey invective MH may be about half the physical size and one-fifth as powerful as its big brother, the invective.120, but it certainly delivers equally impressive harmonically complex tones and similar pro features.…

STREET PRICE: $199 MANUFACTURER: Orange Amps, orangeamps.com Two master volume controls allow players to dial in separate rhythm and lead settings and switch between them with the footswitch. The buffered effects loop can be used with any pedal or processor, and the cab sim output can be connected to a live mixing console or studio I/O. THE BOTTOM LINE The Orange Terror Stamp is truly a bona fide 20-watt amp in a pedal format, delivering a huge variety of massive tones while keeping its size, weight and price impressively small.…

LOOKING FOR TROUBLE? How I play the solo in “Trouble Is Your Middle Name“ IN THIS LESSON, I’d like to present the guitar solo I crafted for the new Whitesnake song “Trouble Is Your Middle Name,” as featured on our latest album, Flesh & Blood. The solo features some fluid-sounding multi-finger fretboard tapping, plus some cool chromatic movement and crazy string bending, which I’ll guide you through. blues The scale opening (E, G phrase , A, B b , B is , based D) as played on the in E 12th position. Some of you might be familiar with the rolling legato lick shown in FIGURE 1, which is centered on the G string. I devised a twist on this phrase by replacing the B note with a high E,…

Tom Ashbrook AGE: 53 HOMETOWN: Thousand Oaks, CA GUITARS: Gibson Les Paul Studio/ Standard SONGS I’VE BEEN PLAYING: Ted Nugent “Stranglehold,” Stevie Ray Vaughan “Cold Shot,” Sublime “Santeria” GEAR I WANT MOST: Left-handed Gibson Byrdland Jason Gottstein AGE: 35 HOMETOWN: SCI Camp Hill, PA GUITARS: Ibanez RGMS7, Ibanez JEM Jr. SONGS I’VE BEEN PLAYING: Obscura “Septuagint,” Nevermore “Obsidian Conspiracy” and my own shred interpretations of various classical pieces GEAR I WANT MOST: Custom Carvin seven-string with fanned frets, Fractal Axe-Fx III Ben Salemi AGE: 17 HOMETOWN: Philadelphia, PA GUITARS: Epiphone Les Paul, Squire Stratocaster SONGS I’VE BEEN PLAYING: Coheed and Cambria “Wake Up,” Led Zeppelin “Tangerine” and original songs GEAR I MOST WANT: Fender Custom Shop Strat with Ash body Are you a Defender of the Faith? Send a photo,…

“Slide” sounds as if Led Zeppelin’s “The Ocean” were thrown off of a Miami boardwalk and plunged into the deepest recesses of the city’s sludge scene. “WE’VE HAD A few different guitar players come in. I look over there, and it’s Jon this time,” Torche vocalist/ guitarist Steve Brooks says — in his matter-of-fact way — about seeing founding bass player Jonathan Nuñez on the other side of a six-string whenever they hit the stage. Lineup changes are business as usual for the Miami-formed foursome, but Brooks admits this latest shift has led to the occasional memory lapse: “I’ve got to stop saying he’s my bass player.” While Torche’s latest mud-stomping opus, Admission, is the quartet’s first since Nuñez took over guitar duties from Andrew Elstner in 2017, to say…

when informed that the theme of this issue of GW is “100 Things Every Guitarist Should Know,” Joe Satriani laughs and says, “You should change it to 1,000 things! Every day there’s something new to learn about the guitar. I don’t know if we’re ever going to figure the thing out, and I guess that’s part of the fun.” ¶ Which prompts the question: What does Satriani know about the guitar now that he wishes he knew when he was just starting out? He thinks for a long, thoughtful moment, then offers, “Well, there’s certain technical things about the studio — how when you record a track, something big can wind up sounding small and how something small can wind up sounding big. That’s got a lot to do with microphones,…

A FUNNY THING HAPPENS WHEN you plug in an acoustic: even the most John Denver-loving, “Kumbaya”-humming strummers will suddenly want to play like they’re holding a Charvel San Dimas. It’s something that Fred Greene, vice president of product management at C.F. Martin & Co., has seen time and time again. “I don’t know if it does something psychological or what, but you plug in your guitar, you expect it to play like an electric guitar. You give up all those acoustic features you’d normally come to expect. Obviously, you don’t need all that acoustic volume when you’re plugging it in, and the whole dynamic and the way you play starts to change.” While Martin has a long history of electric/ acoustics with pickups and cutaways, the brand-new SC-13E is unlike…

FORTY YEARS AGO, the very first guitar with the Jackson name on its headstock made its debut — a custom model designed in collaboration with Randy Rhoads called the Concorde. While the company started out as a custom shop with a clientele of artists who could afford to pay more for quality, eventually Jackson started offering production-line models in the Nineties, including an affordable line of import instruments. Today Jackson is bigger than ever, producing 155 different models, which is probably more than the total amount of guitars the company built during an entire year during the early Eighties. Jackson currently offers a comprehensive selection of guitar models that range in price from $150 to $5,300. What is truly remarkable is that the majority of today’s Jackson models (104 of…

STREET PRICE: $129.99 MANUFACTURER: MXR, jimdunlop.com The Clip switch provides three different clipping modes for a range of light to heavy saturation, compression and headroom. The Bass knob cuts low-end frequencies from pre-overdrive signal, while the Treble knob cuts high-end frequencies from post-overdrive signal, offering more versatility in preserving tonal character or dialing in a robust clean boost. THE BOTTOM LINE For all its transparency and responsiveness, the MXR Timmy Overdrive is the most complimentary pedal to any guitar player’s rig for organic overdriven tone.…

WHAT CAN YOU say about a volume pedal? “It smoothly sweeps from no signal to full volume, and it’s great for volume swells.” Review. Over. I jest, but seriously, just when thought you couldn’t improve upon a volume pedal, think again. Ernie Ball has been making some of the most durable, best-selling volume pedals longer than most guitarists reading this review have been alive. They recently released the Ernie Ball VPJR Tuner, a two-in-one pedal that combines a numerical graphic volume display and an onboard digital chromatic tuner on a crystal-clear display screen integrated on the pedal’s treadle. This rugged piece of machinery uses aircraft-grade aluminum for its compact chassis. It features a high-quality discrete buffer circuit, ¼-inch input/ output and FX send/return jacks, a non-slip, super-grip surface on its…

I GOT RHYTHM, PART 4 Eighth-note syncopations PREVIOUSLY, WE LEARNED how a quarter unit note, of which individual is the beats foundational in4 4 meter counting and most songs, can be evenly split, or subdivided, into two eighth notes, which across successive beats are counted “1 and, 2 and, 3 and, 4 and, 1 and, 2 and, 3 and, 4 and,” etc., with the “and” counts being called the eighth-note upbeats. That eighth-note pulse, or “feel,” as musicians like to say, is the heartbeat of rock and roll and popular music in general, and this doubling-up of the basic quarter-note beat offers us an interesting variety of rhythmic possibilities, especially when used in conjunction with ties or rests, including eighth rests, which we learned about in I Got Rhythm, Part…

LEADING ME ON Using leading tones when crafting a melody BOTH IMPROVISING AND composing are states of mind, separate but with the shared goal of creating melodies. But creating melodies is a great mystery! There is no formula for it, just as there is no formula for writing a novel. There are, however, a few tools, or devices, that we can use to make it possible to find melodic angles to the lines we construct, and one particularly useful one is the use of what is called a leading tone, also known as an approach note, which is a note one half step below the “target note,” which is typically the root of the chord. The use of leading tones is something I discovered in studying the counterpoint of Renaissance…

MORE THAN FOUR decades after its initial release as a single in November 1976, “Anarchy in the U.K.” remains the definitive punk rock statement. Johnny Rotten’s vicious snarl and biting lyrics had a lot to do with that, but what really makes the recording so effective is guitarist Steve Jones’ violent and visceral playing, which still sounds as powerful and dangerous today as it did when it first disrupted the mainstream rock establishment during the mid Seventies. One of the key elements of Jones’ distinctively raw tone was his use of a Fender Twin Reverb amp cranked up as loud as it could go. During April and May of 1976, Jones appeared on stage playing through either an HH IC100S head or a Marshall Model 1959 Super Lead (both through…