Innehållsförteckning för February 2024 från Guitar Player

I’M SURE I’VE told you this before, but with more than five years of Guitar Player under my belt, I can’t be completely certain. Besides, this issue’s cover story is a good reason to tell it again. Roughly 10 years ago, Guitar Aficionado ran a story about George Harrison’s guitar collection. I was the publication’s managing editor at the time. For the page showing George’s Gibson J-160E — the acoustic-electric he played on many of the group’s early songs — we included a photo of George and John Lennon holding their Gibsons. As the story goes, Harrison and Lennon bought their matching Jumbos at the same time and eventually, perhaps accidentally, swapped them. Lennon’s was stolen in late 1963 and presumed lost forever by the time our issue came out. That changed…

THE WAY ALTER BRIDGE guitar virtuoso Mark Tremonti sees it, you can never know too many cool licks. “A great guitar lick is like part of your personality,” he says. “It shows something about you. It’s almost like your vocabulary. And just like no two people are the same, no two guitar licks are alike. There’s always something a little unique about each one.” Whenever he’s around another guitarist, Tremonti makes it a point to soak up some new licks. “I come right out and say, ‘Give me your two or three favorite, most useful licks,’” he says. “By that I mean not the hardest, most technical thing you can play; just show me the things that you play all the time, even the ones you don’t think about. It’s…

IF YOU’VE PLAYED fingerstyle, rockabilly, the Beatles’ “Blackbird” or Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide,” you’re familiar with Mr. Merle Travis. Merle defined alternating-bass guitar, pioneered the design of the solidbody electric, played a key role in shaping rockabilly guitar and handed his stylistic torch to the likes of Chet Atkins and Lenny Breau, who both brought his style to new heights and discoveries. Despite this, I’ve taught Travis picking at least 500 times, and whenever I’ve asked a student, “Do you know who Merle Travis is?” I’ve never heard, “Yes!” Well, ladies and gentlemen, Walkin’ the Strings is Merle Travis. Capitol released it in 1960, drawing its tunes from a selection of casual and intimate solo recordings he made for radio broadcast beginning in the mid 1940s. Despite its cover showing the…

GEORGE HARRISON’S 1965 RICKENBACKER 360/12 STOLEN: Circa September 1966, possibly London GEORGE HARRISON WAS the owner of two Rickenbacker 360/12 12-strings, both gifts to the Beatles guitarist. He received the first — allegedly the second ever made — from Rickenbacker president Francis C. Hall on February 8, 1964, after rehearsals for the group’s Ed Sullivan Show appearance, and went on to make it an integral part of the early Beatles sound on A Hard Day’s Night. The second was gifted to him by Minneapolis music store B Sharp Music, prior to the Beatles’ August 21, 1965 show at Old Met Stadium. After learning from another visiting Liverpool rock band, the Remo Four, that Harrison might like the guitar, the shop custom ordered it for him. The guitar featured Rickenbacker’s newly…

THERE’S ONE PARTICULAR Eddie Van Halen quote that has stayed with me since I first read it as a kid in the November 1978 issue of Guitar Player. It was Eddie’s first appearance in the magazine, and then–assistant editor Jas Obrecht was trying to figure out just what made this legend-to-be tick. “Sometimes people think I’m spacing off, but really I’m not,” Eddie explained to him. “I am always thinking of riffs and melodies.” Here, the guitarist was likely referring to the time he spent away from the guitar. “I am always thinking music,” he would add. But what if we applied this same approach to the time we spend with our guitar, so as to actively explore, or “practice,” our creativity? Sure, it can seem more comfortable to practice…

FENDER IS GOING all in on hybrid guitars, and the company’s new Highway Series additions are designed to bring more of the masses to the hybrid table. The Highway Series is clearly aimed at players who are hybrid curious but want something more along the lines of a traditional acoustic than Fender’s groundbreaking, yet polarizing, Acoustasonic Series. Highway Series guitars are thinline acoustics featuring a specially designed Fishman Fluence Acoustic magnetic soundhole pickup. They promise electric playability with acoustic tone via a more straightforward and streamlined system than the DSP-driven Acoustasonic, at a nicer price point and with a more conventional aesthetic. The Highway Series consists of two models, Parlor and Dreadnought, each available in mahogany or mahogany with a solid Sitka spruce top. Our review units were an all-mahogany…

DOES LYLE WORKMAN have one of the most apt surnames, or what? Since making his debut in 1986 with the Bay Area–based band Bourgeois Tagg, the versatile guitarist has been one of the most in-demand players around, recording and/or touring with the likes of Sting, Beck, Todd Rundgren, Michael Bublé, Sarah McLachlan, Bryan Adams, Sheryl Crow and Frank Black. And that’s just scratching the surface of his credits. When he’s not collaborating with top stars, Workman has an enviable second day job as a film composer, having scored numerous Judd Apatow pictures, such as The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Superbad and Get Him to the Greek. “I’ve always wanted to play with rock bands and make records, but film scoring came out of left field,” Workman says. “I met a film executive…

IT SAYS “KIMBERLY” on the headstock, so why does it look more like a Teisco? But if it’s a Teisco, why does it play and sound so nice and look so cool? Because, technically, this guitar is neither a Kimberly nor a Teisco. It was actually made in the Kawai factory shortly after the company purchased Teisco and its different nameplates circa 1967. In fact, most collectors of Teisco guitars know the late-’60s specimens will likely play better than the average department store guitar. Even so, the name game for ’60s-era Japanese and European guitars gets tricky due to the many brands that wholesalers and importers attached to their models. For example, this Deluxe is often referred to as the Bison because it resembles the English made Burns Bison, which…

AS A GUITAR-OBSESSED teenager in Winnipeg, Canada, in the late 1950s, Randy Bachman would make weekly Saturday pilgrimages to the local music store, Winnipeg Piano, which is where he met two lifelong friends. One was another budding area musician named Neil Young; the other, a used 1957 Gretsch 6120 Chet Atkins Hollow Body electric guitar that would become his closest and most treasured musical companion. “Neil lived on one side of town, I lived on the other, and we would both take the bus downtown and look in the window of Winnipeg Piano at this guitar and go, ‘Man, if we could ever play that…,’” Bachman, now 80, recalls. “We had seen Duane Eddy play ‘Rebel Rouser’ with a 6120 on American Bandstand, but that was black-and-white TV, right? So…

PAUL RODGERS CAN certainly keep a secret. Little did anyone know until this past autumn that he spent much of the previous seven years dealing with serious health issues that nearly killed him. As his wife Cynthia Kereluk Rodgers tells Guitar Player, his problems began in 2016 with a near-fatal heart attack. “We caught his would-be widow-maker heart attack before it actually happened,” she recalls. “He had a stent put in. We got to the hospital with 10 minutes to spare, and we’re lucky we got there.” The scare was followed by a period in which Rodgers had 11 TIAs — transient ischemic attacks — “which were really sneaky,” Cynthia explains. “We didn’t know that they were TIAs. He’d just have a bad headache, or he felt like the band was…

GIBSON’S ICONIC BLACK Beauty, the Les Paul Custom, has long represented top-flight elegance in the solidbody electric guitar. Yet as it evolved from its origins as a black-tie-worthy accessory for the dinnerclub set, it proved its versatility in the hands of some heavy rockers too. Guitar star and inventor Les Paul said on several occasions that when he sat down with Gibson in the early 1950s to devise the revolutionary instrument that would carry his name, he envisioned two versions of the Les Paul Model: a standard iteration with a goldtop finish and nickel-plated hardware, and a custom model that would be the crème de la crème. This Les Paul Custom would be dressed in formal wear, like the tux a jazz artist might put on for a major performance. The…

ALTHOUGH MANY GENRES — metal, jazz and classical, to name a few — embrace the fluidity and erudition of the guitarists who top their respective fields, punk and indie rock have always had an uneasy relationship with formal training and technical mastery. Isn’t it easier to break the rules if you don’t know them in the first place? Can authenticity, innocence and raw emotion survive in a player who spends too much time in the woodshed? In short, can you be cool and go to school? For Mary Timony, studying jazz and classical guitar in a specialized high-school program and college provided her with the ability to make artistic decisions with an intent unfettered by limitations. It’s a talent the Washington, D.C., native has exercised since the early ’90s while…

MOST FANS KNOW it simply as “the Beatle bass.” To Paul McCartney, it’s “the Ancient One,” the instrument that dates back to the guitarist’s musical rebirth as a bassist, at age 19. The 1961 Höfner 500/1 violin bass is the first bass guitar he owned and the one he played as he helped lead the Fab Four to international fame in 1962 and ’63. Its round, resonant tone was the indelible pulse that drove the group’s earliest hits, from “Love Me Do” to “Please Please Me” to “I Saw Her Standing There,” where McCartney nimbly plucked out the arpeggiating riff he lifted from Chuck Berry’s 1961 B-side “I’m Talking About You.” With a shape as distinctive as the early Beatles’ mop-top haircuts, the 500/1 became McCartney’s signature instrument. To this…

WHILE SOME GUITARISTS are adept at tweaking their tones through a variety of effects from song to song, Israel-born fusion maverick Oz Noy is like a virtuoso tap dancer on his pedalboard, meticulously coloring with tones and textures, often from bar to bar. It’s an intuitive skill that he’s developed since moving to New York in 1996, the sonic equivalent of an unassisted triple play in baseball. Growing up in the ’80s in Tel Aviv, Noy gravitated toward American jazz and blues, as well as a bevy of shredders that includes Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, Eric Johnson, Richie Kotzen and Greg Howe. He came to New York as an experienced pro, having held down a regular TV gig and performed numerous studio sessions around Tel Aviv. Rather than bursting on…

“THESE FOUR GUITARS represent a lot,” Richard Hoover explains. “Everything that has happened to me, everything I believe in, the people with whom I have been associated, et cetera. I want to promote certain concepts, because there is too much bias against them.” Whether he’s dispelling myths about wood, championing small body styles or epitomizing boutique success without compromising ethics, Hoover is a wellspring of know-how. His top passion topics include acoustic physics, the rich history of how we got to today’s guitars and how to manifest a brighter future with better guitars for everyone. The captain and his elite crew are leading by example and pouring lifetimes of experience into the Vault Series, from which he will display four models — the D 7882, H13 1854, FF 311 and OM 6134…

EPIPHONE’S LATEST LIMITED edition release focuses on a particular 1963 Gibson SG Custom that was special-ordered and obviously treasured by its original owner and is now part of Joe Bonamassa’s collection of prized vintage guitars. Finished in Dark Cherry Red to match the rare color worn by the original guitar, the JB 1963 SG Custom features a mahogany body and a glued-in neck that’s carved in a SlimTaper C profile that melds into a smoothly contoured heel unique to this guitar. As such, the playing feel is very comfortable and bending strings is glassy smooth, courtesy of an ebony fingerboard with 22 medium-jumbo frets that offer even crowns, a silky polish and nicely beveled tips. A white Graph Tech nut with rounded corners enhances it all and helps make the guitar…

ONE OF THE more intriguing items Martin introduced at NAMM ’23 was a little acoustic-electric bass that seemed ideal for guitar players interested in doing a bit of bottom end grooving without the heft or freight of a full-scale bass and requisite amp. The DJR-10E isn’t even the size of a full dreadnought — it’s a Junior — and the street price is pretty junior as well. That wouldn’t mean much if it didn’t play or sound good, so I made sure to put my hands and ears on it at the show. The first impression was impressive, so a second look was surely in order. The DJR-10E is available in natural spruce or sunburst, and the ‘burst looked a bit more beautiful to these eyes, so that was the…

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