Innehållsförteckning för November 2021 från Guitar Player

A SIMPLE CONVERSATION STARTER like “How are you?” usually elicits a response along the lines of “I’m good.” So it’s comforting — and not a little surprising — when Alex Lifeson, sounding cheery and robust, and maybe a little bit relieved, says, “I’m excellent.” Understandably, this isn’t the reaction one might expect to hear from the guitarist given the difficult circumstances of the past year and a half. Compounding the Covid pandemic that has affected the world as a whole (forcing musicians, like everyone, to become virtual recluses), Lifeson was dealt a much harsher and more devastatingly personal blow in January 2020, when his dear friend and Rush bandmate Neil Peart passed away from glioblastoma. Five years before, Rush had called it quits as a touring band after the drummer…

EDWARD VAN HALEN rarely participated in musical projects outside of his namesake band, but when he did, it often involved his fellow guitarist and good friend Steve Lukather. The two both played on Michael Jackson’s mega-hit “Beat It” (although their parts were recorded separately); Ed appeared on two of Lukather’s solo albums; and he joined Lukather and George Harrison onstage on December 14, 1992, for the Jeff Pocaro tribute concert, which was broadcast on KLOS-FM and later released as a live album. “We were friends for 40-plus years,” Lukather says. “We went through life together — all the good times, bad times, ridiculous times, sad times, the whole shit. We were much more than just guitar pals. I adored the man as a human being.” The first record that the two…

EARL SLICK CAN remember the last gig he played — right off the top of his head. “It was March 7th, 2020, with [former Sex Pistols bassist] Glen Matlock, in London,” he says. “Ever since then, I’ve been mostly on my own, like everybody. And let me tell you, you tend to go a little batty with so much free time on your hands.” The veteran guitarist hasn’t exactly done nothing during the past year, and he says the period of relative isolation has been a blessing. It’s given him time to work on a memoir, which he says he’s close to finishing (“You keep thinking you’re close to being done, and then you go, Oh, wait, there’s that other thing!”), and it afforded him a clear chunk of time to…

I’VE BEEN PLAYING the guitar and studying music for over three decades. Throughout my time spent woodshedding in the name of mastering various scales and all their various modes, one scale in particular traditionally vexed me. After years of trying to harness the potential of this Voldemort-like “scale that must not be named” (not yet) with otherwise successful methods, I realized I had to change my approach. I needed a new reality, one that entailed re-examining the importance of naming conventions, embracing enharmonic equivalents (different names for the same pitch) and, perhaps the most jarring, using chords to inform my learning of a scale. I speak of the altered scale, which is the seventh mode of the melodic minor scale. Now, it’s our standard practice to spell out a scale’s intervallic…

“OUT OF THE hits that I’ve had, I can’t underestimate its importance,” Peter Frampton says of “Do You Feel Like We Do.” Originally released as a six-minute studio cut on the guitarist’s second solo album, 1973’s Frampton’s Camel, the song became an instant classic thanks to the epic 14-minute version on his epochal 1976 live album, Frampton Comes Alive! “That’s the version that helped break things wide open,” he says. “It sort of worked as the trailer for both the album and my concerts. ‘You want to know what Peter Frampton sounds like live? Listen to this!’” “WOKE UP THIS MORNING…” In preparation for Frampton’s Camel, Frampton assembled a band consisting of keyboardist Mick Gallagher, bassist Rick Wills and drummer John Siomos. “We did a lot of jamming back then,” he…

ASK BILLY ROWE when his love for building guitars began and he’ll take you all the way back to his San Francisco high school in 1980. “I was a big Van Halen fan,” Rowe explains. “And Eddie was the guy of my generation who took guitars and reconfigured them to what he wanted or what he thought was cool. So I was always into tinkering with guitars, ever since I started playing. “Then, in woodshop class, I decided to make one. I bought a block of wood at a hardwood shop in the East Bay, cut it, did the whole nine yards. I built a star guitar out of swamp ash. And that’s where it started.” Still, it took many years before Rowe became a guitar builder. First he had…

ANDY McKEE IS the epitome of solo acoustic excellence, and on his new album, Symbol (Mythmaker/Cruzen Street), the guitarist embraces his role as one of the planet’s premiere percussive fingerstyle ambassadors. Three of Symbol’s six songs are covers honoring his most influential heroes, Preston Reed, Billy McLaughlin and Michael Hedges. McKee also conveys reverence for Prince, with whom he toured Australia in 2012, by milking every drop of meaning from “Purple Rain” without uttering a syllable. McKee’s rendition is actually quite straightforward considering the advanced techniques at his command, and it is majestic in its modesty. He allows the starkly exposed melody to speak for itself, and this version will surely spur other players to give it a shot. The penultimate track pays homage to McKee’s other obsession, video game music,…

PLAYING BLUES ON an acoustic guitar is as natural as the sun in the sky. After all, that’s how the thing got started. In the modern era, some acoustics are built for blues and some aren’t. An instrument that requires a little elbow grease is generally a good thing, and unless one seeks a contemporary sound, a vintage instrument or one designed along traditional lines adds an air of authenticity. The choice of strings can make a significant difference in tone and playability. Here are some historical insights and musings on how to choose a blues box and the strings to make it sing. ORIGINS AND CONSIDERATIONS A blues acoustic doesn’t have to be fancy unless you need a snappy guitar to play sophisticated licks. Consider “Catfish” Keith. He plays a…

VICTORY AMPS AND their chief designer, Martin Kidd, have enjoyed a sterling reputation for high-quality British-made boutique amplifiers for nearly a decade. From their stunning aesthetics to the careful selection of tubes, transformers, speakers and voicings, there are reasons Victory amplifiers like The Duchess V40, The Sheriff 22 and the VC35 The Copper Deluxe have won over players like Guthrie Govan, Richie Kotzen, Joe Gore and Chris Buck. Built (and generally priced) for pros, Victory’s goods surely belong in the top echelon of modern-day amp makers. That said, being a notable maker of Class A tube amplifiers in the age of modelers and profilers may not be the most mixed portfolio an amp company could have. It’s perhaps to address this new market that Victory last year added The Duchess…

WHEN YNGWIE MALMSTEEN spoke with Guitar Player earlier this year to reveal how he composed “Far Beyond the Sun,” his signature song, it was clear that his love for the 1984 track was practically eclipsed by his enthusiasm for his latest creation, Parabellum (Music Theories Recordings). “It is extremely neoclassical,” he said of the new album. “People will think I’ve lost my mind. It is like my Concerto” — 1998’s Concerto Suite for Electric Guitar and Orchestra in E Flat Minor Op.1 — “but metal. I went totally over the top.” Malmsteen has often liked to joke that as far as he is concerned, “more is more,” and the new album exemplifies that philosophy in spades. “What is exciting is when something comes to me, makes me think, Wow! and then…

FOR MORE THAN 10 years, David Kowalski has been building and repairing tube amps in McAllen, Texas, just across the Rio Grande — and the U.S. border — from Reynosa, Mexico. Fairly recently, he came up with his own big idea in the form of the tiny Dark Gene micro amplifier. Available in Red and Green models, the Dark Gene puts out a diminutive 0.5 watt into your choice of four-to 16-ohm cabinet, and is voiced and gained-up to sound huge in spirit, if not in decibels. Mini and micro amps have become a popular way to achieve cranked-up tube amp fury without overwhelming volume. Unlike some of the mass-manufactured mini amps that have hit the market in recent years, the Dark Genes are hand-wired in genuine point-to-point style. A…

WITH THE QUEST for modern metal tones becoming an ever-more-refined adventure, Eminence has thrown down the gauntlet with the new DV-77 Mick Thomson Signature model. Designed in collaboration with the Slipknot guitarist and Mike Smith of Omega Ampworks, the DV-77 uses Eminence’s popular CV-75 (think of the earlier English Vintage 30 platform) as a springboard to recalibrate the formula for an ideal aggressive, yet balanced heavy rock performance. While accepting that plenty of guitarists achieve their speaker sounds in the virtual realm these days, Eminence-Digital has almost simultaneously released the DV-7–laden Metal IR Pack, a selection of metal-minded impulse responses created by Kristian Kohle of Kohlekeller Studio in Germany. We tested the actual and virtual to see how they performed. Though its foundation lies in existing technology, Eminence tells us…