Innehållsförteckning för August 2022 från Guitar Player

BLUEGRASS BELONGS TO a long tradition, but having the weight of history on its shoulders does not preclude it from existing as a radical art form. This musical style — light on its feet, effervescent, joyous, and occasionally elegiac and melancholy — is woven from many cultures and voices that bring something to the party, and do so with a sound that welcomes all. That, too, is true of the players and their abilities. There’s a virtuosic element to the bluegrass rank-and-file, among whom we’ll find latter-day phenoms in the likes of Billy Strings and Molly Tuttle — players whose technical prowess brings lightning into a largely acoustic space. But if you know three chords and can count to four, chances are you can play along too. And Tuttle says…

THE SHRED SUMMIT “HOW DOES ANYBODY PLAY GUITAR LIKE THAT?” Dream Theater guitarist and main man John Petrucci says, recalling his reaction when he first heard the music of Steve Morse. “It was the wildest, most incredible stuff I had ever heard. There are moments that you can pinpoint and say they were truly life-changing, and for me, hearing Steve Morse play guitar was one of them.” It was the mid ’80s and Petrucci was a metal-crazed high schooler and budding guitarist big on Metallica, Iron Maiden and Ozzy Osbourne. “I spent most of my free time practicing, and I thought I was getting pretty good,” he says. “I could play a lot of the stuff by my heroes pretty well.” One day, a friend’s older brother gave Petrucci a mixtape…

JEFF BAXTER HAS been known to play a range of different guitars over his career. Among the more unlikely models he’s wielded is a Burns Bison that he purchased “for 25 bucks and a six-pack of Bud,” he tells Guitar Player. As it turns out, that very guitar made an appearance when Baxter performed on disco queen Donna Summer’s Giorgio Moroder–produced 1979 album, Bad Girls, including his solo on the hit single “Hot Stuff.” “I didn’t really want to do the same old stuff,” Baxter explains, “so when Giorgio said that I could play whatever I wanted, I said that was fine with me. I showed up with my Burns Bison. I heard the track, went in and played the solo. I came out and said, ‘What do you think?’…

“I’VE NEVER DONE AN ACOUSTIC INTERVIEW BEFORE, AND WHEN I THOUGHT ABOUT IT, I WAS LIKE, ‘OH, MY GOD, THAT’S WHERE IT ALL STARTED’” IT’S RARE TO get Trey Anastasio acoustic or alone, let alone both. He’s traditionally a social creature, one who is most at home jamming with his rock quartet, Phish, or leading his long-standing Trey Anastasio Band, which features a full horn section. It’s even more exceptional to get him on the phone. Anastasio eschews interviews and hasn’t been in these pages for ages. Over nearly four decades, we’ve enjoyed his playful, graceful musicality in myriad contexts, in which the lion’s share of his guitar work has been performed on electric guitar. But Trey’s times have been a-changin’. In 2017, he began delving into the essence of…

AFTER JOINING THE solid-body revolution with the Les Paul in 1952, Gibson ramped up with impressive speed to meet the forward-looking sounds and styles of the rock and roll era. Just five years on from that introduction, the Kalamazoo-based company was designing and prototyping some of the most revolutionary electric guitars to hit the market, and company president Ted McCarty was very much at the helm of the effort. McCarty was hired as Gibson’s CEO in 1948, promoted to vice president in 1949 and, in 1950, advanced to the role of president, a position he held until his departure in 1966. Throughout his tenure, however, McCarty functioned as far more than an administrative executive. He’d earned an engineering degree from the University of Cincinnati and was never afraid to step…

LIKE A PAINTER’S brush stroke or an author’s turn of phrase, every great guitarist has a signature touch, which is a confluence of many factors, from musical influences and equipment choices to all aspects of technique. But at the most granular level of anyone’s playing you’ll find one crucial element: their unique approaches to note articulation. Articulation is the musical term for the way you attack an individual note or chord, as well as the way you connect one note to another. Examples of guitar articulations include picking with a downstroke or upstroke (each of which sounds a little different), fingerpicking, thumbpicking, palm muting, staccato phrasing (cutting a note’s durations short) and legato techniques, such as hammering-on, pulling-off and tapping. Combined with other expressive elements involving the fret hand, such as…

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A SMALL COTERIE of guitarists like Vince Gill, John Mayer, George Benson and Bonnie Raitt hit the show-biz trifecta: instrumental wizardry, vocal virtuosity and, it must be said, good looks. Add advanced songwriting skills and that list gets even smaller. Canadian Joey Landreth is among the few who possess all four attributes. He crafts harmonically interesting songs with great pop hooks, sings them like a soulful angel, and couches them in guitar textures and slide solos that have made him a poster boy for the six-string worship set. And yes, he is a handsome devil. Landreth’s command of harmony originates with his father, a singer-songwriter and bass player for hire who started his son on guitar. “He was into heavily harmonic music,” Landreth says. “I was learning VI-II-V-I turnaround variations…

THROUGHOUT Jeff “Skunk” Baxter’s storied career, various theories — some fairly tame, others pretty outrageous — have been floated as to the etymology of his famous nickname. In the annals of juicy rock and roll secrets, this one is a biggie. When asked if he would choose the occasion of this Guitar Player interview to make some news, the guitarist lets out a good-natured laugh. “Not a chance,” he says. “A girl’s gotta have some secrets, right? “There seems to be a lot of interest in this little tidbit,” he adds after some reflection. “And all I can say is, the answer will be revealed one day in my book. Not before.” Whenever that book arrives, it will no doubt feature an extensive index to list even a portion of…

IN AN INCREDIBLE career that spans nearly 50 years, John Scofield long ago established himself as one of the Big Three of modern jazz guitar, along with his colleagues Pat Metheny and Bill Frisell. But unlike those players and many others, he had never made a solo record. As Scofield tells Guitar Player, “That’s not what I do.” Instead, over more than 40 albums as a band leader, Scofield has led a number of lineups through a career marked by many unpredictable changes. He played advanced post-bop jazz from the late ’70s to the early ’80s, explored funk during his mid-to-late 1980s Gramavision years (a period that overlapped with his high-exposure tenure with Miles Davis), and trod jazzier terrain during his time with Blue Note, from 1990 to 1995. There…

THERE’S NOTHING MORE rewarding than when technique and artistry come together creatively. Interviewing players from across the musical universe for 20 years has provided unique opportunities for me to learn from some incredibly artistic technicians, and for the past half decade I’ve been funneling lessons learned into Spirit Hustler’s debut album. Learning fingerstyle slapping and plucking was a core breakthrough that led me to a lot of the most interesting material. I can’t think of another player that does this exactly, so I’m happy to share this revelation with you. INSIDE FINGERSTYLE SLAP I began messing with slap-and-pop technique by copping funk-bass licks on guitar, which is a great way to start. Acoustic offers more percussiveness and room to operate, so it’s generally better than electric. Simply use heavy strings and…

AS MUCH AS tube amplifiers rule for tone, dynamic feel and raw punch, many players enjoy the benefits of modeling amps with their ability to deliver a multitude of sounds, not to mention their affordability and lighter weight. One of the newest contenders in the modeling arena is the Line 6 Catalyst series combos that include a 60-watt 1x12, a 200-watt 2x12 and the 100-watt 1x12 featured in this review. On first glimpse, the Catalyst 100 looks no more complex than a typical tube combo, with its top-mounted knobs and an open-back cabinet covered in grained black vinyl. As you’d expect from a Line 6 product, it packs a ton of technology under the hood, and user-friendliness must have been high on the list of design goals. The amp selector…

JOAN JETT IS unequivocal about “Bad Reputation,” the rebellious pop-punk anthem that kicked off her post-Runaways career in 1980. “I love the song and am very proud of it,” she says. “It’s the basis for everything I do because it tells the truth. Too many people held this negative view of me because I played electric guitar. They said I was mean because of how I looked. I had this supposed ‘bad reputation’ because I was doing exactly what I wanted to do. It’s what my parents told me I could do, and I believed them. I addressed it all in the song.” OWNING HER STORY Following the breakup of the Runaways in 1979, Jett, along with her manager, Kenny Laguna, and producer Ritchie Cordell, set about recording her debut…