Indholdsfortegnelse for June 2024 i Total Guitar

PICKUP MUSIC The thought of repetitive exercise doesn’t fill us with joy, but that’s about to change here. It’s obvious that finger strength and dexterity is vital for guitarists. Everything you play depends on those dancing digits doing exactly as they’re told. Unfortunately, often, our fingers aren’t always as nimble as we need – and this is where the 1-2-3-4 workout (aka the spider exercise) comes in. This simple idea spreads your fretting fingers over four adjacent frets, and you play one note after the other. You have four fingers – ‘1-2-3-4’. Even if you’re a seasoned guitarist, it’s worth trying the exercise out. You can also use it as an awesome warm-up exercise, and just a few minutes each day is enough to see serious improvement. The workout is…

INTERVIEW FEEDER When Feeder released Polythene back in 1997, their debut album which produced five singles that remain fan-favourites to this day, the Welsh group were hailed as the UK’s answer to The Smashing Pumpkins. In similar ways to Billy Corgan and co., it was Feeder’s mix of heavy metal and dream pop that made them stand out of the crowd, appealing to rock fans of almost every kind. It’s why, in the decades since, they’ve shared stages with everyone from U2 and The Rolling Stones to Queens Of The Stone Age and Slipknot. Feeder’s new release Black/Red is their first-ever double album – and, much like mid-’90s Smashing Pumpkins twin-masterpiece Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness, it takes listeners on a journey through hard riffing and kaleidoscopic reverie.…

Kerry King’s no-nonsense approach to creating razor-sharp, life-affirming heavy metal has made him one of the world’s most influential players. His work in Slayer with co-guitarist the late Jeff Hanneman set the benchmark for a new kind of murderous noise – sounding thicker and angrier than anything before it. As pioneers of thrash metal in the early ’80s alongside Metallica, Megadeth and a host of other speed-fuelled bands, Slayer would lay the groundwork for the varying waves of metal that followed. When Slayer announced their retirement and played their final show in 2019, Kerry was certainly vocal about not being happy with the decision. “We quit too early,” he reflected. “I hate not playing.” But now he’s back on the horse and doing what he does best, writing riffs heavy…

Not many people can say they’ve had a front row seat to Slash’s creative process in the same way producer Mike Clink has. He was the man at the helm for Guns N’ Roses’ legendary 1987 debut album Appetite For Destruction and the band’s subsequent releases GN’R Lies, Use Your Illusion I and II and The Spaghetti Incident? The partnership would continue through to the 1995 debut full-length from the guitarist’s next band, Slash’s Snakepit, and Clink would also gain recognition for his work with other rock giants including Whitesnake, Megadeth and Mötley Crüe. When Slash announced his solo album Orgy Of The Damned in March, it was revealed that he’d once again teamed up with Clink – someone who helped create his most famous recordings and arguably knew his…

Many of the fuzz, distortion and overdrive pedals released these days are variations on circuitry that has been around for yonks, and the Danelectro Nichols 1966 follows that trend. The big difference, though, is that the particular circuitry here has not been heard for the best part of 50 years. This is no Tone Bender or Fuzz Face knockoff, but rather an original design created in 1966 by a teenaged Steve Ridinger, founder of Foxx pedals, then living in Nichols canyon, LA. The reason the pedal, originally called the Liverpool Fuzz, has now seen the light of day is that Ridinger is in charge at Danelectro and felt a revival was overdue, so the pedal joins Dano’s ‘Vintage’ range which also includes the 3699 Fuzz, a recreation of the Foxx…

F or many of us, pedals supply the constant fix to our perennial case of G.A.S. leakage. Each one offers its own shade for our tonal palette, they don’t take up lots of space, and, unlike buying a new amp or guitar, they don’t have to cost a fortune. But even with this in mind we think that Donner and Jack White’s Third Man Hardware are delivering a potential Bargain Of The Year with the Triple Threat. Based on Donner’s existing Alpha series pedals, the TT bundles three pedals – Distortion, Echo and Phaser – into a single unit. The circuits have been modified from the stock designs to tailor them more to Jack White’s tastes, and what’s more, they’re all-analogue. “It has been my hope for a while to…

When Steve Vai was a 12-year-old student of Joe Satriani, neither of the two budding greats could have predicted the incredible heights their careers would reach. 50 years on, now shred royalty, the pair finally unite for their first official collaboration… beginning with this very track – and we’re looking at the cool whammy barred Phrygian riff that kicks in at 0:27. Start the riff by barring across the highest four strings at the 12th fret. Strum a downstroke and dip your guitar’s trem for a moment, before adding a dash of whammy bar vibrato. Next, play the E and F phrase (shown in our slowed down video play-through) at the 7th and 8th frets; this is repeated three times. Finally, hit open sixth string twice, then use all four…

When Heart kick off their 2024 UK tour at London’s O2 Arena on July 1, it will be not only their first UK appearance in nearly a decade, but their largest ever headline show on these shores. It’s a sign the band’s stock is as high again as it was in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Heart, led as always by sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson, will play a career-spanning setlist from what is now rightly recognised as a catalogue of rock classics. And, as Nancy Wilson tells TG, they have fought for that recognition from the beginning. “We were military brats who figured we wouldn’t take any prisoners. We would just go out and prove it,” Nancy recalls of the band’s formative years in the mid-’70s. “We travelled…

Samantha Fish’s take on contemporary blues is multi-faceted, with elements of bluegrass and country thrown into the mix. Having grown up with Appetite For Destruction on repeat in her car stereo, the invitation to perform on Slash’s S.E.R.P.E.N.T. festival is a dream come true… Looking ahead to the S.E.R.P.E.N.T. tour, how are you planning to make your set stand out? I’d like to think I’m a unique performer. I’m a guitar player, I’m a songwriter, I’m a singer… I do my best to put on a show that takes people on a trip. My show will be different from everyone else’s because I’m me! Nobody else is me and I’m nobody else. I try to win people over with energy. One thing I’m always told is that it’s my live…

ALBUM “THERE’S SOMETHING MAGICAL ABOUT THREE-PART HARMONIES” BATTLESNAKE ARE PUTTING THREE CLASSIC GUITAR RIGS INTO ONE CRAZY HEAVY METAL MELTING POT D escribed by guitarist Ben Frank as “the genetically engineered cyborg super child of Queen, King Gizzard and Judas Priest,” Australia’s Battlesnake are a colourful bunch. On the band’s second LP The Rise And Demise of The Motorsteeple, Ben and fellow guitarists Paul Mason and Daniel Willington are chasing vomit-like fuzz sounds and cranking Marshall amps. The new album was recorded in just 10 days. How was that process? Ben: We actually wrote a fair chunk of it in the studio. We work best as a band when we set a super unrealistic deadline and we have to make it happen. The lead-up to the recording was manic, but…

Annie Clark – aka St. Vincent – is finished, for now at least, with digital guitar tones. “I’ve done enough direct guitar sounds,” she declares. “I wanted to move some air again.” The result helps St. Vincent’s latest album, All Born Screaming, sound extremely human. “It sounds real because it is real,” Annie says of the record’s emotional content, but she could also be talking about the Marshall she used to express some of those emotions. When she wrote this record, Clark explains: “I personally was metabolising inward and outward violence. How do you make sense of the human condition? It’s wild and fraught. I’m lucky in the way I get to try to make sense of everything, by making work that takes chaos and puts it into some kind…

Despite being hailed as modern day shoegaze luminaries, New York-based band DIIV never felt that they became fully immersed in that scene until they wrote and recorded their 2019 album Deceiver. The creation of its follow up, meanwhile, saw the band embark on a four-year challenge to push their sound – and themselves – to new heights by reaffirming what it is that defines the DIIV sound. The result, fourth album Frog In Boiling Water, glistens with evolution and invention; floating yet haunted guitar lines, ethereal textures and weighty introspection permeate its 10 tracks. So, as the band’s tour bus pulled into a suspiciously rain-free Manchester, Total Guitar caught up with guitarists Zachary Cole Smith (known ubiquitously as Cole) and Andrew Bailey to discover how their sonic explorations shaped the…

Blues guitar is a high-risk endeavour. Don’t be fooled into thinking it’s easy or safe just because there are fewer notes in the scale. If you want a safer pursuit, take up whitewater rafting, spelunking or snake milking. An easier way to pass your practice time would be to woodshed, build up speed and throw in some neoclassical tonalities. Stick some compression and delay on it and everyone on TikTok will think you are a genius. But blues is not that. Blues is making more out of less and that leaves a player wholly exposed. Personality counts. Charisma matters. It is like stand-up comedy; you have to tell a story, you have to tell it well, and come the end of it you have to arrive at a punchline. Quarter-tone…