Innehållsförteckning för June 2021 från Guitar Player

ASK GUITAR BUILDER Ignacio “Nacho” Baños why he has such an enduring fascination with the guitars built by Leo Fender in the early 1950s and why his company creates such painstakingly detailed tributes to them and he’s quick to answer. “I’m just a freak,” he says. “I’m very passionate about the things that I love, and I’m just trying to re-create some of the amazing instruments that were made 70 years ago.” Born and raised in Valencia, Spain, Baños became enamored of the Telecaster in his mid teens. “Most of my heroes were playing Teles,” he says. “James Burton with Elvis Presley, Muddy Waters, Albert Collins, Bruce Springsteen, Chris Spedding, Danny Gatton with Robert Gordon… It was the coolest guitar in the world!” Baños purchased his first ’50s Fender, a…

TO CALL JOE BONAMA SSA prolific would be an understatement. In an age where artists can go for years between releases, Bonamassa regularly turns out a couple of albums per annum. Whether they are solo releases, one-off projects, team-ups with esteemed collaborators such as Beth Hart or supergroup outings like Black Country Communion, the constants are Bonamassa’s absolute commitment to excellence and his relentless work ethic. According to Joe, the reason for his prodigious output is simple. “If you’ve got something to say, then say it!” he exclaims. “The cycle of music is much faster now. You can put a record out in May, and in September guys are asking, ‘Have you got anything new?’ We’re releasing preview tracks weeks before the album, which is not the way it used…

HERE’S A WEIRDO you don’t see too often. It’s essentially a no-namer made in Japan from 1964 to 1966 by Zenon. These are most often seen under the Victoria nameplate, which was most likely a marque an American distributor slapped on it, although some examples carry the name Zenon or, more rarely, Zimgar on the headstock. Regardless of the branding, this axe is very cool and sought-after. WEIRDO FACTOR The body is a cross between the off-center V found on the lower bouts of many 1960s Italian guitars (as well as on the über-rare ’60s Fender Bass V) and the upper-bout “tulip” shape of early Rickenbackers. But what grabs most colectors is the multilayered and multicolored pickguard layout, consisting of a triangular brass plate under the red pickup selector knob,…

FINNISH GUITAR MAVERICK Erja Lyytinen has been putting her own spin on the blues for close to two decades, in the process earning a European Guitarist of the Year award, sharing stages with the likes of Carlos Santana and playing to more than 80,000 in her hometown of Helsinki for a televised New Year’s Eve concert. In addition to approaching the blues from a fresh perspective both musically and geographically, she possesses a powerful, emotive voice and a devastating slide technique. It’s no wonder her 2019 autobiography was titled Blueskuningatar (The Blues Queen). You released a live album, Lockdown Live, during the pandemic. How did that work? In Helsinki we had three weeks of total lockdown, and when that time ended, me and my band thought, Okay, let’s get out…

“Listen, real poetry doesn’t say anything; it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through any one that suits you.” — Jim Morrison ON APRIL 7, 1970, the notable publishing firm Simon & Schuster combined two previously selfpublished works by a young American poet and released them under the title, The Lords and The New Creatures. Although the poet’s work was barely known by the public at large, the company evidently decided that his notoriety at his other job — lead singer and lyricist/songwriter for a popular Los Angeles rock band — meant that the book stood a decent chance of selling. Fifty-one years later, The Lords and The New Creatures, by Jim Morrison, has never gone out of print, and sales figures are estimated to…

JOE ROBINSON IS a frighteningly fantastic acoustic and electric player who can leave you contemplating one of two things: quit while you’re behind, or join his quest onward toward ultimate guitar expression. Just turning 30, Robinson is already a seasoned vet of the Guitar Army with Robben Ford and Lee Roy Parnell, and he works regularly with Nashville royals Rodney Crowell and Emmylou Harris as well as his mentor and fellow Australian transplant, Tommy Emmanuel. The prodigiously talented guitarist made a huge splash with his 2009 American debut of acoustic instrumentals, Time Jumpin’, and earned Best New Talent in the 2010 GP Reader’s Poll before turning 20. A huge factor in how Robinson got so good so fast may be his waking up at 4 a.m. to ensure a productive…

POSITIVE NEWS ON the vaccine front has players pumped to play in public again. After a long hiatus, are we ready? Getting together with my group Spirit Hustler for the first time in many moons was interesting on several levels. We had all purchased new gear that we were stoked to show each other, but none of us had mastered it or made the tough choices about what older items might be left behind in favor of the new. We were also understandably rusty. Many of us have work to do before we’re stage-worthy again. Here are a few tips to help you get ready for live action. CHOOSE A WORKHORSE AND PROTECT IT Designate a primary gig guitar. Save the pawnshop prize for the studio and get a reliable…

BORN IN THE earliest years of the fuzz box’s rich history, the Rush Pepbox might be the most legendary fuzz pedal you’ve never heard of… unless you have. It was created in London in 1964 or early ’65 by engineer Pepe Rush as a modification of his first effort, the Fuzzy, itself based roughly on the Maestro Fuzz-Tone that had just set the British pop world on fire via Keith Richards’ signature riff for the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” Rush was himself a notable figure in the gear-and-inventions chapter of the British Invasion, though he has received too little recognition over the years. In addition to building amplifiers and studio electronics in the ’60s, he ran a recording studio and was the engineer behind the Shadows’ original…

Progressive Movement Thanks for a wonderful issue on prog [April 2021]. Finally, some recognition for this often-frownedupon movement. I could never understand the resentment of a movement that gave us so many fantastic musicians (Yes, ELP, Genesis, Gentle Giant…). I’ve often found similar resentment toward the movement of jazz-rock, or fusion as it was later called. Utterly incomprehensible, as it gave us John McLaughlin, the late Chick Corea and a host of incredible musicians. So when will the fusion issue be available? Merci. —PIERRE CARRIER When I started out on guitar, all I wanted was to play some Beatles tunes, and when pop turned into rock, all I needed was to learn some pentatonic stuff in order to be considered a “serious” player in my neighborhood. And suddenly there came…

ATTEND A LIVE show or seek out certain videos featuring Canadian guitarist Ariel Posen (especially the one with him playing Billy Preston’s “Nothing From Nothing”) and you will witness slide and single-note sleight-of-hand that leaves your jaw on the floor. You can get a taste of this on Posen’s version of John Martyn’s “Angeline,” from 2019’s live-in-the-studio Familiar Ground. You’ll find less evidence of that monster soloist on his official studio records, including Headway, his latest, self-released album. But these days, when shredders abound on YouTube, Headway, like Posen’s first album, offers something that is in shorter supply. On those outings you will find a player who crafts perfect guitar parts and tones that serve as both foundation and finishing touches to original tunes, rife with singable melodies, gorgeous vocal…

MOST GUITARISTS WHO have plugged into a whirling, sound-warping, Doppler effect–inducing Fender Vibratone can recall the major impression that playing through a rotary-speaker cabinet made on them. It’s unlikely any compact electronic rendition of the effect will fully satisfy them. The occasionally crosspollinated worlds of vibrato and chorus have been immensely popular with guitarists in their many forms since they first became available. From the late-’60s Univox Uni-Vibe to the mid-’70s Boss CE-1 Chorus Ensemble and today’s contemporary re-creations of those and other beloved analog pedals, each is an electricguitar classic in its own right. But the trail begins with the granddaddy of them all: the Fender Vibratone. Produced from 1967 to 1972, it’s a hulking electromechanical sound swirler that produced what is still the most hypnotic and enveloping version…

BRANDON “TAZ” NIEDERAUER What does blues mean to you? The blues is our American musical roots. It’s an essential building block for most American popular music today. Without the blues, the current musical landscape would look totally different. And, because of that, the blues is as alive as ever. Who are your blues guitar heroes? Elmore James, Muddy Waters, Duane Allman, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Robert Johnson, Eric Gales, Taj Mahal and many more. What was the first blues song or lick you learned? Duane Allman’s opening solo lick on “Stormy Monday” from the Allman Brothers’ At Fillmore East. What do you try to achieve in your own guitar playing to make your style and sound unique? I don’t try to achieve a unique sound. My guitar voice is a…

MYTHS AND MYSTERY pervade nearly everything about the Doors. But at the heart of those myths are real people. And real people are never one-dimensional, are they? The same may be said about the Doors as a collective, and perhaps even more so, as individual men. Transmuting mythology and erotic intrigue into the raw material for a blues-based, jazz-conscious and soul-savvy sound, the Doors distilled an unlikely alchemy of confrontational, cutting-edge pop-rock, experimental theater and potent poetry. That volatile chemistry would explode into public consciousness less than two years after their auspicious first rehearsals by the warm sands of Venice Beach, California, in the early summer of 1965. The mythological motifs, militant stance and nods to both classical and avant-garde theater that singer Jim Morrison weaponized as broadswords in the…

LISTENING TO “NORTH STAR,” the nine-minute-plus opus on Lyle Workman’s record, Uncommon Measures (Blue Canoe Records), you feel like you are hearing the overture to an epic, exciting movie, perhaps one about pirates, cowboys or even a galaxy far, far away. Searing slide guitar slips into sections of skittering strings, and fusion flurries are followed by heralding brass parts. There’s even a drum solo. The miracle is that, like a great movie overture, the disparate elements hang together with an overarching theme. Elsewhere on the album, Workman plays Django-style acoustic, country twang and chiming pop riffs. Is there anything this man can’t play? “If there was any difficult classical guitar, that would be an area I’m least qualified in,” he says. “I would have to spend six months practicing only…

FENDER AND GIBS ON set the standard for arena-rock tones by the mid 1970s, but by then many players were aware that neither company was making them quite like they used to. Norlin-era Les Pauls were but a pale imitation of their late-1950s, PAF-loaded predecessors, and the CBS-owned Fender was at a similar nadir with respect to its ever-popular Stratocaster and Telecaster models. Such lax quality set the stage for Japanese guitar makers to show American guitar players what they could do, with Yamaha chief among them. The company jumped into the fray and blew away all preconceptions of the cheap Asian import in 1976 with the SG2000, a double-cutaway Les Paul–inspired instrument with deluxe construction and appointments. Developed partly in consultation with Carlos Santana, the SG2000 received rave reviews…

IS IT AN A COUSTIC or an electric? Neither? Both? How about all of the above! The third iteration of Fender’s Acoustasonic moves the series forward with fresh sounds, features and colors on the Jazzmaster’s offset body shape while providing the hybrid platform and easy-playing electric neck profile of its predecessors, the Acoustasonic Telecaster and Stratocaster. The Jazzmaster form wears the Acoustasonic aesthetic particularly well, but there’s more to this story than a beautiful new body. Each incarnation of the Acoustasonic offers opportunities to fuel the Fishman-designed Acoustic Engine, which digitally interacts with the body’s unique properties to create a novel tonal palette. Being the largest Acoustasonic so far, the Jazzmaster naturally offers a bit more. For the uninitiated, each Acoustasonic model features three pickups — a piezo under saddle,…

ARGUABLY THE C UTEST cadre in all of the pedal brotherhood, the mini pedal has been with us for several years now. But rarely has anyone packed as much into it as Pigtronix has with its new series of stubby wonders. The company has a strong reputation for instilling its minis, including the Philosopher’s Tone Micro and Octava Micro, with clever features and deep-think designs. Thus, each of the new offerings delivers more than you might expect to find on even a standard-sized pedal. We tested the Constellator Modulated Analog Delay and Space Rip Analog PWM Synthesizer, a pair of four-knob wonders stuffed into small metal enclosures. While the diminutive pedals have no room for a battery, the savings in real estate means you can fit about 30 of them…

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IT’S BEEN 4 3 YEARS since Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees Cheap Trick released their self-titled debut, and on the eve of unveiling their 20th studio offering, In Another World, guitarist Rick Nielsen is all too happy to share the band’s enduring formula for success. “We’ve never progressed and never tried to be something we weren’t,” he says from his home in Rockford, Illinois. New tracks like the chugging, riff-driven “Light up the Fire” and overdriven power-pop number “Here’s Looking at You” indicate that Cheap Trick are wise to stay the musical course. It’s a point of view shared by their longtime collaborator, Nashville-based producer Julian Raymond. “Julian happens to be a big Cheap Trick fan, so he’s heard our records more than we have,” Nielsen says. “We…

I WAS FIRST exposed to Ray Charles in 1965 at age seven, when my Grandpa Henry took me to Reno, Nevada, to see the Harrah’s Car Collection antique-car show, where a vintage 16-cylinder vehicle and other automotive delights awaited us. Before the show, we spent a day off in Reno, and Grandpa Henry, being responsible and loving, made sure I was okay to be dropped off at the casino’s Kiddie Theater while he played Blackjack for a couple of hours. Today, the adventure seems like a dream, in part because the “kiddie” movie was a Ray Charles documentary that largely covered his drug use. The film featured Ray talking about heroin, including the struggles he faced as an addict. I vividly recall a scene in which a hypodermic needle was…

HAILING FROM WAUKESHA, Wisconsin — the home of Les Paul — Jared James Nichols has spent the past few years reigniting the heavy blues-rock fires, strangling his Les Paul into pick-less submission with some of the most incendiary fingerstyle licks in modern blues. “You have to commit and you have to mean every damn note you play,” he says. What led you to the blues?? I came into it through the classic-rock door. I remember being a kid and hearing Zeppelin and Sabbath, and I would hear these licks and the guitar sound and I didn’t know what it was or where it came from. And then when I started to play guitar, I was 15 and someone showed me a VHS tape of Stevie Ray Vaughan — it was…

THE TRACK IS called “Take Me Down Easy,” off of Marc Benno and the Nightcrawlers’ 1973 opus, Crawlin’, very possibly the best blues-rock album of the early 1970s you’ve never heard. Like every track on the album, it features heavyweight singer/guitarist Benno and his band — including noted drummer/singer Doyle Bramhall — knocking out some of the most fluid and sophisticated blues-rock this side of the Allman Brothers and Leon Russell. Indeed, Russell is one of the many artists Benno has collaborated with over the years, along with Rita Coolidge, Eric Clapton, J.J Cale and, of course, the Doors, with whom he recorded four songs, including the title track, at the sessions for L.A.Woman. (Never released by A&M, Benno’s Crawlin’ was finally issued on his own Texasize imprint in 2006.)…

NO ONE KNOWS PETER FR AMPTON’S gear better than his longtime Nashville-based guitar tech, Darren Hurst. We’ll leave it to him to give us the rundown on Peter’s expansive setup from 2019’s Finale: The Farewell Tour. “Peter’s rig seems really complex at first glance, but it is deceptively simple in terms of signal flow,” Darren says. “It’s built on the idea of the shortest and cleanest signal path at all times, and is basically a center dry/left-and-right wet system, designed and built by Mark Snyder. “Peter’s main tone is very simple: It’s a Klon Centaur into a John Suhr clone of a 1970s Marshall JMP [modded by José Arredondo] into a single 4x12 cabinet loaded with Celestion Vintage 30s. There is a second Suhr Marshall clone that serves as a…

LAST MONTH, WE covered triad and 7th-chord arpeggios, focusing on the top three strings. Here, in the conclusion of our two-part lesson, we’ll start with the lower three strings and combine those shapes with the ones we learned last month. And whereas Part 1 focused mostly on triads, we’ll now explore 7th-chord arpeggios in greater depth. As before, there will be lots of exercises and licks, plus we’ll top things off with a full-blown solo. Let’s get going! ROOT-POSITION TRIAD SON THE BOTTOM THREE STRINGS As you’ll recall, in Part 1 we started with an introduction to the three fundamental types, or qualities, of triads that exist within the major scale: major (1, 3, 5), minor (1, b3, 5) and diminished (1, b3, b5). These root-position triads were mapped out…

TAKAMINE HAS LONG been respected for producing superbly crafted acoustic guitars. The company’s new TSP 138C thin-line acoustic-electric will certainly find favor with those looking for an instrument that delivers the sonic performance of a big-bodied flattop but has the nimble feel and playability of a semihollow electric. The TSP 138C navigates the line by offering a thin hollow body with a cutaway, and a fast-playing neck with a profile that will be familiar to fans of late-’60s Gibson ES-335s, and it carries the same 24.75-inch scale length. Our review model arrived with a glossy Tobacco Sunburst finish (see specs for color options) and is an impeccably built and very lightweight guitar with an arched back and upscale appointments that include perfectly rendered multilayer bindings and center stripe, an ivoroid…

INTRODUCED IN 1 964, the tremoloequipped blackface Vibro Champ was a distant cousin of Fender’s Champion 800 and 600 models from the late 1940s, which evolved into the Champ-series amps in their various incarnations during the 1950s. These popular tweed models — which Duane Allman and Eric Clapton famously used on records such as (respectively) Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs and 461 Ocean Boulevard — were produced until 1964 and had the distinction of being the last of Fender’s original tweed amplifiers. In fall 1964, Fender introduced the blackface Champ and Vibro Champ models. Both retained the single 6V6 power tube running in single-ended Class A but added bass and treble controls and a three-knob tone stack, as well as a “vibrato” circuit with speed and intensity controls on…

“I FEEL BLE SSED for having written it,” Buck Dharma says of Blue Öyster Cult’s iconic 1976 hit, “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper.” “I’d like to have five more ‘Reapers,’ but just having one is great.” The hypnotic rocker turned the Long Island–based quintet into arena headliners and propelled their fourth album, Agents of Fortune, to Platinum status. The song has long been revered by guitarists for its immediately recognizable riff, but in 2000 it attained pop-culture status after the legendary “more cowbell” Saturday Night Live skit, starring Will Farrell and Christopher Walken. “I loved it,” enthuses Dharma, BÖC’s lead guitarist and singer. “A couple of the things Will Farrell did on popular artists were pretty brutal, but he was really funny in the cowbell sketch. It was hysterical.” IT’S ALL…