Innehållsförteckning för August 2020 från Guitar World

I KNOW THIS is nuts (and incredibly random), but during ye olde lockdown, my band is recreating — note for note — Ringo Starr’s 1970 country-music album, Beaucoups of Blues, via GarageBand (from our respective homes, of course). I don’t know why we chose to record this obscure, non-hit album from a bygone era, but it really doesn’t matter. The point is, it’s fun and it gives all of us something “musical” to do in this time of cancelled gigs — plus it keeps our skills up. On the surface, you’d think a fairly tame vintage country album (recorded by the ex-Beatles drummer with a crew of Nashville studio pros, including Charlie Daniels, Roy Hus-key Jr. and Pete Drake) would be a breeze to reproduce, but that’s not really the…

REEDSMITH BUILT HIS VERY FIRST GUITAR IN 1975 when he was a student at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Although he was just 19, he realized the only thing he wanted to do was build guitars, and he eventually dropped out of school. When Smith sold the second guitar he ever made — a copy of a double-cutaway late-Fifties Les Paul Junior — to Derek St. Holmes, who was Ted Nugent’s rhythm guitarist at the time, he realized that his dream of becoming a professional luthier could easily become a reality. From the very beginning of PRS Guitars, artists have played an essential role in both the company’s success and the design of its instruments. When Smith established his workshop in an attic at 33 West St. in Annapolis, Maryland,…

Q&A You’ve been friends with your now-band-mates for more than a decade, but now you’re a full member. How does that feel? These are exciting times, and it’s all happening so fast! Life’s a full-circle situation sometimes. The first time I saw Lamb of God was on Gojira’s first-ever tour in America; I remember waiting in line for eight…

THE WHOLE WORLD IS COMING APART at the seams. At least that’s the way it seems in Nashville this week. A T6 tornado tore the hell out of town just as the Coronavirus hit the Volunteer State. Even the President is in Music City today, surveying the damage from Marine Helicopter One, hovering above us as we step into a dark, downtown studio to meet with a local resident – DAVE MUSTAINE. The Apocalypse’s first and second horsemen take a back seat, at least for the moment. Right now, we’re more concerned about Dave’s dog. Oblivious to its diminutive size, the long-haired Chihuahua descends upon us like some high-pitched Hound of Hell, menacingly baring his teeth and threatening to devour our very soul if we step any closer to his…

Keeping You Sane Since 1980! Just wanted to say your magazine has been essential to me, especially in these tough times. Hurricane Maria, a 6.5 earthquake and now Coronavirus. Without your monthly issues, I would drive me and my wife crazy! — Jose Ralat Back in the Game Just a quick note of accolades to GW. I’ve recently returned to music and am putting a band together. Reading the interviews from various artists, established and new ones alike, has been very inspirational to me. Keep up the excellent work, GW! And best energy to all you newbies (and oldies like me) coming off the bench and getting in the game! — James McBride First-Generation Beatles Fan It was nice to see the Beatles on the cover of the April 2020…

IT’S HARDLY A novel statement — or, for that matter, one that’s much open to debate — to say that Tommy Emmanuel, Certified Guitar Player (according to Chet Atkins, at least), is one of music’s greatest acoustic fingerstylists. But when it came to his latest album, The Best of Tommysongs, the 64-year-old Australian artist was less concerned with technique and more preoccupied with tunes. “Rather than trying to focus the world on my abilities, I felt I’d rather have people pay attention to the importance of melody and groove and telling a story,” Emmanuel explains. “So I think the focus of this album is on my songwriting.” Indeed it is. The Best of Tommysongs is, quite literally, a compilation of Emmanuel’s finest and most beloved compositions from the past 30…

“For only two fingers, Django Reinhardt definitely got around the fretboard...” Got my first real six-string My first guitar was a Strat that belonged to my dad. I must have been around eight. [He] taught me a few things, some blues and rock ’n’ roll stuff. Like a lot of players, when I learned the pentatonic scale I was suddenly able to jam along to a lot of my favorite records... That was probably my first big moment on guitar as a kid. Castles made of sand My initial guitar hero was Jimi Hendrix. I saw footage of him playing at Woodstock, I must have been around nine and I thought he sounded amazing. If I could meet any musician from history, it would have to be him. When I…

Got my first real six-string… My mom and dad came home with a Suzuki guitar — it looked a little bit like a Les Paul but kinda not. It didn’t even come with a case, it just arrived in their hands! It didn’t look anything like the guitar I wanted to play and sounded like crap, so I quickly bought a Yamaha RGX. I found an EMG in a music store and carved out the space for it, as well as the battery in the back. It looked shit but sounded great — my first steps on stage were with that guitar! We could be heroes My first guitar hero was Ritchie Blackmore; he could be my favorite songwriter of all time. I’m really lucky, my dad was a metalhead…

WHEN CROWN LANDS guitarist Kevin Comeau was 14, he was a budding punk bassist with “spiky blue hair” who worshipped Green Day and the Clash. Unfortunately, his parents were absolutely fine with his rebellious music. So he did the most punk thing he could think of at the time: he dove headfirst into progressive rock. “At the height of my punk-rock rebellion I discovered my parents’ least-favorite band of all time was Rush, [so] I downloaded A Farewell to Kings,” he says with a laugh. “I remember listening to ‘Xanadu’ for the first time and hearing the birds chirping in the background. I think that’s the first time I discovered what a synthesizer was. Geddy [Lee’s] bass playing is so good, and Alex [Lifeson’s] solo at the end. It changed…

10 GREATEST GUITAR MOMENTS “Chestnut Mare” Untitled (1970) Main Guitarists: Roger McGuinn, Clarence White The guitars, which are everywhere on this track, are the canvas on which the song’s fairly bizarre story is so vibrantly painted; perhaps the high point is the interplay between McGuinn’s Rickenbacker and White’s Martin during the song’s emotional breakdown section. “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season)” Turn! Turn! Turn! (1965) Main Guitarist: Roger McGuinn No other song sums up the Byrds’ early, “America’s Answer to the Beatles” period quite like “Turn! Turn! Turn!” McGuinn’s playing on the track is — for lack of a better pair of words — freakin’ sublime. Note that he’s hybrid picking, playing the melody with downstrokes while providing his own rhythm part in the form of ringing…

THERE IS NO gray area when it comes to Slipknot guitarist Jim Root’s vision for his signature models from Fender. It’s literally black and white. Sure, only black and white finishes for the guitars in one respect, but more importantly, there's equally no gray area in each instrument's concept. If anything, his signature instruments clearly sport the bare minimum to get the job done, and Root undoubtedly loves using Fender’s iconic shapes without any of the bells and whistles associated with their original formulas. His latest signature model, the Fender Jim Root Jazzmaster V4, shows off a more elevated look with block inlays and open-coil pickups, but still remains as stripped down as his other guitars and is designed to deliver in-your-face tone with brute force. FEATURES With classic offset…

“GONNA TAKE YOU right into the danger zone…” Did I just put that song from Top Gun in your head? Yeah, I couldn’t resist, because that’s exactly what I was humming when I decided to pilot myself into the Danger Zone — a colorful two-in-one effect pedal from Wingman FX. The Danger Zone combines analog tremolo and phaser with tactical fighter cockpit graphics and joystick-style controls. But before you dismiss its retro video-game-console looks, everything about the Danger Zone is designed for complete control and engaging functionality, not to mention the fact that its interactive tremolo and phaser effects can be set up for over-the-top chop and sweep or dialed back for more stealth-like modulations. Danger Zone is handbuilt with analog circuitry and features separate Volume, Rate and Depth controls…

STREET PRICE: $1,099 MANUFACTURER: Dean Guitars, deanguitars.com A set of EMG 57-TW/66-TW active humbuckers with coil splitting make their first appearance on a factory production guitar. The dazzling satin turquoise burst finish and burled poplar top provide distinctive, upscale styling. THE BOTTOM LINE If you’re looking for an eye-catching shred machine that plays as good as it looks, the Dean Exile Select delivers on both fronts along with aggressive, classic-voiced tones courtesy of its EMG pickups.…

WHEN IT COMES to improvising, many guitarists often fall into the rut of relying on familiar licks and learned scale patterns and shapes. While having these musical building blocks ingrained into one’s memory is an essential component of building a vocabulary of reliable ideas to draw upon when soloing, no one wants to feel constrained by habitual tendencies. A great way to break free of old playing habits and also discover new musical territory when soloing is to momentarily limit yourself to playing on only one string or a pair or group of adjacent strings. This forces you to abandon familiar patterns and shapes and instead be guided solely by your musical ear and creativity in the spontaneous creation of a melody. Last month, we looked at soloing over a…

HELLO, AND WELCOME to my new column, Acoustic Journey. In this series of monthly lessons, I’d like to demonstrate many of the guitar playing approaches and techniques that I have found to be very useful and rely on the most for both performing and songwriting. Let’s begin with a look at a style of fingerpicking known as clawhammer guitar. I first learned about this style from a guitar player named Michael Stadler out in the San Francisco Bay area. As a teenager, I became very interested in clawhammer banjo, which is a style of banjo playing associated with old-time music and Appalachian string music. I learned to play clawhammer banjo, and while teaching banjo at a music camp in Northern California, I saw there was a class called “Clawhammer Guitar,”…

KILLING JOKE HAD recorded three studio albums before 1982 when Geordie Walker found the Gibson ES-295 hollowbody electric that became his main guitar. Ever since then, the ES-295 has played a prominent role on every subsequent recording he’s made, as it delivered exactly the sound he was looking for. “When you find something that you express yourself through the best — something that is completely your sound — why would you use anything else?” he said in the May 2016 issue of Guitar World. Geordie uses very heavy strings but tunes down a whole step to DGCFAD to make the string tension more comfortable, with the added benefit of making the tone heavier as well. In addition to enhancing the guitar’s resonant twang, the ES-295’s Les Paul wraparound trapeze bridge…

Joel Heidelbaugh AGE: 50 HOMETOWN: Ann Arbor, MI GUITARS: ESP LTD Eclipse with EMG H4/H4A pickups, Les Paul Traditional and Studio, Washburn Paul Stanley PS 2000 SONGS I’VE BEEN PLAYING: Kiss “Black Diamond” (live version), Led Zeppelin “The Ocean,” AC/DC “Have a Drink on Me,” Ted Nugent “Stranglehold” GEAR I WANT MOST: Vintage Les Paul and Flying V Alston Adams AGE: 11 HOMETOWN: Steamboat Springs, CO GUITARS: 1958 Gibson Les Paul Junior, Gibson Flying V, 1960 Fender Stratocaster SONGS I’VE BEEN PLAYING: Chuck Berry “Little Queenie,” Joe Walsh “In the City,” Jimi Hendrix “All Along the Watchtower” GEAR I WANT MOST: Fender Jazzmaster (gray) Gerry Wigmore AGE: 57 HOMETOWN: Ladue, MO GUITARS: Taylor GS MiniHog, Taylor GS Mini Koa, Traveler Guitar UltraLight Electric SONGS I’VE BEEN PLAYING: Bruce Springsteen “Youngstown”…

PHIL DEMMEL’S DEPARTURE from Machine Head in 2018 left the guitarist unsure of his standing within the metal community and questioning his value as a player. Luckily, a quick stint filling in for Gary Holt on a few of Slayer’s last European dates gave Demmel a much-needed jolt of confidence. Joining up with a few old friends for his new BPMD covers project was just as priceless an experience. “I really owe a lot to those three guys for getting me over a hump [with] a lot of self-esteem issues I might’ve been having at the time,” he says. “Just thinking, ‘Hey, these guys believe in you.’ It really helped.” With its former and current members of Overkill, Dream Theater, Vio-Lence and more, BPMD’s pedigree is pure metal royalty, but…

“Staying in between genres is what we’re trying to do. So we have to find a sound that works between the lines … that’s the trickiest thing”— Kristofer Steen SWEDEN’S LONG, COLD winter is no joke. But Refused’s Kristofer Steen is literally laughing when he answers Guitar World’s call on a late November afternoon. “The darkness has descended on Stockholm!” he gleefully exclaims. The guitarist’s surprisingly cheery disposition makes a bit more sense when you consider that Steen’s post-hardcore outfit has entered the grim season on a serious high note. Refused’s fifth album, War Music, was released just a month ago and it’s a rager — packed with 10 politically charged, swaggering anthems of genre-bending punk. The new record has also elicited comparisons to Refused’s 1998 game-changer, The Shape of…

“People will spend $15 on a lunch that lasts half an hour, but they wouldn’t spend that on an album that will last them a lifetime. The value of music has to return or else there will be no music business”— JOEY ZAMPELLA “MUSIC HAS LOST a lot of mystery now with YouTube and the internet,” argues Life of Agony guitarist Joey Zampella, aka Joey Z. “At one time, the only way you knew what a band was like was to see them yourself or buy the home video. What got you excited was the mystery. The newer generation has lost that, and music has lost its value. People will spend $15 on a lunch that lasts half an hour, but they wouldn’t spend that on an album that will…

NOW 24 YEARS INTO A SUCCESSFUL solo career, Mark Knopfler’s material in this era outweighs the music he penned for his former band, Dire Straits, by some margin. Sure, the radio super-hits “Sultans of Swing” and “Money for Nothing” have established the guitarist’s revered place in rock history, and progressive epics like “Telegraph Road,” “Private Investigations” and “Tunnel of Love” prove he has some serious songwriting chops, but his side projects and solo material have seen Knopfler branch out even further as a musician. Knopfler’s ever-expanding musicality embraces a diverse range of stylistic influences. Country, folk, blues, Celtic music and even jazz are standard Knopfler fare these days, with the inevitable rootsy blues-rock core, of course. What remains unchanged throughout is his trademark technique, touch and tone. Playing fingerstyle and…

TRIVIUM’S MATT HEAFY “One of the biggest things for me was getting into Brazilian jujitsu, which taught me what it is to build something from the ground up. I’ve only ever played guitar and sang in Trivium… but getting my butt kicked for three, four, five years in jujitsu and gradually having to realize that you have to put in so much time and practice to get good at something was really instructional” LAMB OF GOD’S MARK MORTON “The other night I learned Larry Carlton’s solo from [Steely Dan’s] ‘Kid Charlemagne.’ I’ve always loved that solo, so I just sat down with it. It’s not so wicked technically, but it’s just different shapes and different kinds of stops and note choices that are outside of my kind of ingrained…

•GUITARS Gibson SG Classic with P90s, 1969 Gibson SG Standard with T-Tops, 1982 Fender Stratocaster, Boisclair Custom Double Neck 12-string guitar/4-string bass •AMPS 1965 Fender Bassman, 1968 Traynor YBA-1, McCormick Custom Combo, Leslie 145 Rotating Speaker •EFFECTS Xotic EP Booster, Zvex Mastotron, Electro-Harmonix POG2, Ibanez TS9 (Keeley mod), Fulltone OCD, MXR Phase 90, Third Man Bumble Buzz, Ideen Tech True Friend Fuzz, Boss CE-2, Roland RE-201 Space Echo •KEYBOARDS Moog Taurus 3, Roland PK5, Moog Minitaur, Roland JX03, Roland VK8M, Nord Electro 4HP, 1972 Moog Minimoog, 1985 Roland JX-8P…

IF YOU’RE A guitar history fanatic, you should recall that the Sabre was originally both a guitar and a bass model introduced by Music Man in the Seventies when the company was run by Leo Fender, Tom Walker and Forrest White. More recently, Ernie Ball Music Man offered Sabre bass models during the Eighties and 2010s. Now the Sabre is back once again, this time as an entirely brand new solidbody electric guitar model which was introduced in 2020 by Ernie Ball Music Man. Like the StingRay guitar model that Ernie Ball Music Man revived back in 2016, the new Sabre guitar is loosely inspired by the original Seventies version, but it features so many improvements as well as the modern Ernie Ball Music Man’s impeccable craftsmanship and attention to…

STREET PRICE: $1,399.99 MANUFACTURER: Fender, fender.com The Jim Root signature Daemonum open-coil EMG active pickups merge boldly assertive tones with clear note-to-note definition. The guitar’s balanced tension makes playability effortless, while the bound ebony fingerboard’s super-flat 12–inch radius removes any chance of fretting out when bending sky-high notes. THE BOTTOM LINE: For all its starkness and simplicity, the Fender Jim Root Jazzmaster V4 is Root’s most refined signature guitar yet — a veritable metal machine with pulverizing tone and fluent ergonomics.…

THERE ARE SO many different models of solidbody electric guitars on the market these days that it can be pretty challenging for a new model to stand out from the crowd. Dean Guitars has specialized in making eye-catching guitars for more than four decades, so it’s little surprise that their new Exile Select series instruments are already generating a buzz, particularly since there’s much more to Dean’s Exile guitars than their looks. The series currently consists of six different models, available in six- or seven-string configurations, with Floyd Rose vibrato or Tune-O-Matic bridges and with natural finish quilted maple tops or a very distinctive burled poplar top with satin turquoise burst finish. We took a look at the six-string Exile Select model with burled poplar/satin turquoise burst and Tuneomatic bridge.…

LAST TIME, WE saw how an augmentation dot placed after a note or rest increases its value, or duration, by 50%. We also learned that its opposite, the diminution dot, also known as the staccato dot, placed directly above or below a note head or tab number, decreases its duration, or sustain, by 50%. Both kinds of dots can be used in some cases to render a simpler, less cluttered visual representation of a rhythm, by eliminating a tie or a rest, which makes something written in sheet music or rhythmic tab easier to read. I’d now like to focus on the sound of the dotted-quarter rhythm, which spans one and one half beats, and look at different ways in which it can be conveyed and repeated with anticipated chord…

OF ALL THE solos I crafted and recorded for the latest Whitesnake album, 2019's Flesh & Blood, the one in the song “Always and Forever” is among the most aggressive and features a variety of my favorite lead playing techniques, including two-finger tapping. For today’s lesson, I’d like to use that solo as a case study in applying that and other cool and useful techniques. The solo is played in the key of F# minor, and the majority of the phrases are based either on the F# blues scale (F#, A, B, C, C#, E) or the F# natural minor scale, which is also known as the F# pure minor scale and the F# Aeolian mode (F#, G#, A, B, C#, D, E). I begin the solo with a pedal-tone…