Innehållsförteckning för October 2021 från Guitar World

IN THIS ISSUE’S cover feature, John Mayer talks about how much he worshipped Eric Clapton when he was in high school (Obviously, I mean when John was in high school — not Eric!). And he doesn’t mean Bluesbreakers-, Cream- or Derek and the Dominos-era Clapton; he loved contemporary, late-Eighties Clapton, the Clapton who recorded 1989’s Journeyman. “It all has to do with how old you were when it hit you,” Mayer says. And when I was in high school, it was Pretending. It was Bad Love. It was ‘Running on Faith.’ If you liked guitar and you liked Eric Clapton, that’s what he was playing if you went to go see him at the New Haven Coliseum.” I love the Connecticut reference, because I saw Clapton on the same tour…

1 “Heart in Hand” Opeth They do a ton of stuff right. Songs and technical prowess that never seems forced or like they’re trying to solve a math problem. So good! 2 “Lifeboat Serenade” Jimmy Herring Jimmy is about as good as it gets: emotional, melodic, with a rich vocabulary that’s always used to serve the tune. The man is a musical giant, and all must bow down before him. 3 “Greenwich Mean” Wayne Krantz If there’s a guitar player with a better time feel — or someone who is boldly marching to the beat of their own drummer more than Wayne Krantz — I need to be made aware. 4 “One Armed Bandit” Jaga Jazzist This feels…

“I think it’s proof that you can’t kill the guitar” FEW GUITARISTS ARE willing to scorch their fretboard like Bernth. As a longtime session shredder and YouTube guitar personality, the Austrian virtuoso naturally has a handle on warp-speed sweeps and tapping techniques, but when it came to promoting Elevation, his first instrumental solo album, one video upload found Bernth literally lighting up a prized Ibanez with a series of blowtorches to prove his point on the unwavering resilience of guitar music. “Maybe it was a bit dramatic, but it was a statement about all these articles that were going around, every single one of them saying ‘guitar music is dead! Nobody cares about guitar, especially shred guitar,’” Bernth says. Though the instrument’s finish bubbled and cracked against the flames, what’s…

“Western music took harmony to the highest level with Schoenberg and other classical composers. In India, they wound up taking melody to the absolute highest level. With the Imrat guitar, I can incorporate both of these traditions in my playing”— TODD MOSBY WITH ROOTS IN jazz, folk and Indian classical music, guitarist Todd Mosby is eclectic, to say the least. In the mid Nineties, he found himself in need of an axe that could accommodate the techniques and compositional ideas he’d drawn from both his Eastern and Western influences. As a result, he co-designed a unique hybrid instrument he calls the Imrat guitar, which combines elements of the guitar and Indian instruments such as the sitar and rudra veena. It can be heard on Mosby’s most recent album, Aerial Views,…

“The rock-star attitude is, ‘I’m the best, here’s my music. Nobody is better than me.’ A modern attitude would be, ‘This is what I’m able to do now, [so] here are all the tracks.’ I’m sure somebody’s going to come up with an incredible idea…” “IMPROVISING WHILE READING THE COMMENTS IS MY new late-night practice routine.” This is a somewhat comical but certainly zeitgeist-tapping caption to a recent Instagram post from shred king-cum-social media influencer Kiko Loureiro. The accompanying video is the kicker. If you’re a longtime fan of Loureiro — who first rose up in the Nineties with Brazilian metal icons Angra — you know his painfully scrunched brow has nothing to do with his chromatic waggling, or the outsized bends he’s stretching across the sunburst Ibanez AZ on…

AT ONE POINT or another, every guitarist has debated what makes a “perfect” guitar solo. And earlier this year, Guitar World’s sister publication, Total Guitar, set out to answer this question once and for all. Using information gleaned from GW’s poll of the 50 greatest guitar solos of all time to examine common attributes, Total Guitar crunched the data (tempo, key, pitch range, melodic content, “shrediness,” etc.) and, voilà — unveiled to the world the first scientifically verified perfect guitar solo. But is there truly a formula for crafting a guitar lead that will achieve maximum impact with a listener? We asked John Mayer, as much a master of the superb, show-stopping solo as anyone playing the instrument today, for his opinion. And while he not surprisingly let out a…

“The Originals are the guitars that ignited hair-sprayed hard rock and metal heads all over the world in the Eighties. It’s a bit of a passion project for me because I love all of that” — Gibson CMO Cesar Gueikian “It’s about going back and recreating those models, but with upgraded appointments. We’re not necessarily saying, ‘Okay, what was the exact volume pot that was used in 1984?,’ but more like, ‘How was that guitar built? What was it meant to do and how can we recreate that vibe?’ ” — Cesar Gueikian…

“THE GREAT THING ABOUT DOING INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC IS THAT IT’S UNDERSTOOD EVERYWHERE” » PERUVIAN METAL SENSATION Charlie Parra may be a rising guitar hero on these shores, but in his homeland he’s already a bona fide star — so much so that in 2016 he became the first South American guitarist to earn a Kramer signature model, with the release of the Candy Apple Red-finished Charlie Parra Nite-V Plus. Now, the 35-year-old shred master and YouTube star — he leads the punk/metal act Difonia as well as his own solo band, has supported artists like Slash and the Cult on tour and runs a YouTube channel with more than 160 million views — has collaborated with the brand on a second signature design, the new Charlie Parra Vanguard. Like Parra’s…

THE UNSHAKABLE FEALTY many a guitarist has for their favorite dirt device is a hard thing to shatter. No doubt, when a new type of gain pedal emerges, it’s an uphill battle to persuade these stompbox stalwarts to be open-minded and eschew any skepticism. And understandably, I get that most of the latest drives are — more or less — variations of the iconic “Screamer” ilk. However, every so often, a contemporary overdrive comes along that is unlike anything else and is so convincingly good in nailing the sound of a tube amp roaring at full-tilt that it becomes apparent we may have a new best-in-class. That accolade, as far as I’m concerned, goes to the Origin Effects RD Compact Hot Rod, a condensed and hot-rodded version of their award-winning…

DURING THE LATE Seventies and early Eighties, a few recording engineers discovered that they could create thick, rich, realistic-sounding chorus effects with excellent clarity using the micro pitch shifting capabilities of Eventide Harmonizers. This method became a secret weapon of L.A.’s “Bradshaw Bunch” studio guitarists (Bob Bradshaw rack enthusiasts like Dan Huff, Mike Landau and Steve Lukather) as well as Eddie Van Halen, but due to the expense of multiple Eventide Harmonizer units it remained off limits to most players until Eventide introduced the PitchFactor and H9 pedals. Like Eventide’s recent Blackhole and UltraTap pedals, the MicroPitch Delay takes a focused (and affordable) approach to provide highly beloved Eventide effects for players who want that elusive Eventide sound but don’t need a full assortment of algorithms. The MicroPitch Delay also…

THE STRIPPED-DOWN appeal of the EVH Striped Series of guitars will most likely never lose its enduring popularity for Van Halen fans and players alike. Even the many iterations of the Wolfgang series adopted by numerous artists continues to grow by leaps and bounds. But if you ask me, I’ve been digging the EVH 5150 Series Standard guitar, which combines the very best attributes of Eddie Van Halen’s famed “5150” guitar along with the refined tones of Eddie’s innovatively designed Wolfgang guitars. As much as I loved my first VH-approved guitar when I was a youngster (a 1984 Kramer Baretta), having just one pickup and a volume control severely limited my tonal possibilities — because, hey, I’m no Eddie Van Halen. Thankfully, the new EVH 5150 Series Standard guitar expands…

SLIDE ON! Anatomy of a slide solo in open E tuning, part 1 SLIDE GUITAR IS a technique that just about every guitar player I’ve ever known has been fascinated by. Unlike the sounds that are created by fretting notes conventionally, with the fingers, a hard, smooth object, called a slide, is instead pressed against the strings. As with conventional fretting, shortening or lengthening the distance between the slide and the guitar’s bridge will make the notes sound either higher or lower in pitch. The big difference is that using a slide takes the frets out of the equation; one can place the slide on a string, pick the string and then glide the slide up and down its length to change the pitch in a seamless glissando, akin to…

GYPSY SOUL Articulation, dynamics and detail, and how to play “Electric Gypsy,” part 2 LAST MONTH, I began our examination of the main guitar part in my song “Electric Gypsy,” which is my tribute to Jimi Hendrix that I originally recorded for my 1994 album, Ear Ecstasy. In breaking down this part, three things come to mind as being of the utmost importance: articulation, dynamics and detail. Let’s take a closer look at how these three elements of musical expression reveal themselves in “Electric Gypsy.” Once you’ve gone over the basic lick and are familiar with the sequence of the phrases, as well as the melodic and chordal relationships between them, you can then zero-in on what I consider essential elements that give the song a sense of musicality. “The…

“REDEMPTION” Joe Bonamassa THE TITLE TRACK from Joe Bonamassa’s 2018 studio album, this earthy, downtempo song features the guitarist in a serious, soul-searching mood, with swampy, drop-D-tuned acoustic and electric riffs, impassioned vocals and a fiery guitar solo. (The three-part female background vocals are great too!) Joe makes great use of a slide in the song’s repeating two-bar intro riff, crafting a haunting low-register melody that’s based on the D minor pentatonic scale (D, F, G, A, C), with the added B note at the end of bar 2 implying a warm-sounding G/B chord and adding a D Dorian-mode flavor (D, E, F, G, A, B, C) to the phrase. Notice how the guitarist swoops into certain notes from below, which is a highly expressive decorative embellishment and a slide…

“If there’s one thing I hate, it’s virtuosity for its own sake”— DUANE DENISON OVER THE PAST 20 years, indie supergroup Tomahawk have released five albums — not bad considering the chaotic schedules of the band’s four members: Faith No More vocalist Mike Patton, Jesus Lizard guitarist Duane Denison, John Zorn drummer bassist Trevor Dunn and ex-Helmet and Battles drummer John Stanier. While Tomahawk are widely considered another offbeat vehicle for the eternally active Patton, the primary songwriter for the band is Denison, a schooled guitarist whose specialty is heterogeneous, sometimes schizophrenic-sounding songs. “I like to find a balance between things that are noisy and aggressive and things that have more space and more sparseness,” Denison says. “When I hear a lot of hard, heavy stuff that’s relentlessly dense and…

KATATONIA WERE CREATIVELY spent as they entered 2018, and for the first time since forming in Stockholm in 1991, they knew they had to put the band on pause. While on hiatus, vocalist Jonas Renske and guitarist Anders Nyström channeled their energies into a brutal death metal LP with side-project Bloodbath; Renske had also started writing songs on his own, some with a more electronic edge. But just as he was set to enter the studio with a new team of collaborators, he pumped the brakes on what was meant to be his solo debut and brought the tracks back to musical life-partner Nyström. The result is City Burials, Katatonia’s latest formula-defying studio album.   Nyström says that adapting Renske’s solo material for Katatonia also meant that the guitarist didn’t contribute…

LAST YEAR, BILLY F. Gibbons found himself with a lot of time on his hands. Like most musicians, the sudden cancellation of touring hit the ZZ Top guitarist hard, so he was wide open to drummer Matt Sorums suggestion they get together a California High Desert near Joshua Tree National Park to kick around some ideas with guitarist Austin Hanks. The three of them had also worked on Gibbons’ 2018 album, Big Bad Blues. “The sessions started with what we suspected would be a 30-minute have-a-look-around-the-studio, and we walked in and didn’t leave for three months,” Gibbons says. The result is Hardware, Gibbons’ third solo album in six years. Unlike the previous two, which leaned heavily on blues and Latin music, this one is almost all original material that leans…

IN MARCH 2020, TIM McILRATH WAS heading straight for what he calls a “post-album emotional collapse” — and then the pandemic hit. The Rise Against singer and guitarist had just wrapped work on his long-running Chicago political punk crew’s ninth record, Nowhere Generation, and he was ready to retreat into a dark room with blackout curtains and not see anyone for a while.” So when Illinois issued its stay-at-home orders, McIlrath’s plans weren’t quite as upended as many other folks across the country. “I turned the TV on and they’re like, ‘You can’t go outside and do anything,’” he recalls. “I was like, ‘That’s cool — that’s what I was planning on doing anyway.’ [Laughs] So the world falling apart dovetailed nicely with my calendar!” It’s April 2021 when Guitar…

“YOU HIT THE GAS ON THAT THING AND IT’S FULL-ON” » DAVE “SNAKE” SABO’S history with Kramer stretches back decades, to when the company was based in Neptune, New Jersey, in the 1980s, and Sabo’s band, Skid Row, was still a few years away from achieving multi-platinum success with their self-titled debut and hard-rock anthems like “Youth Gone Wild” and “18 and Life.” At the time, Sabo was holding down a day job at Garden State Music, a guitar shop roughly a half hour south of Neptune in Toms River, New Jersey, and playing with an early version of the Skids. “We started working with Kramer and they were so receptive of us,” Sabo recalls. Skid Row didn’t have a record deal or anything. We were just a band from…

THE GOOD NEWS is that the quality of entry level guitars has improved dramatically in recent years. Many marquee USA brands now offer alternative lines produced overseas that benefit greatly from the know-how that went into producing a company’s flagship models. Even though these import brand guitars often cost significantly less than their upmarket counterparts, many offer similar playability and performance that will please all but the most critically discerning players. Two new models with street prices less than $600 recently introduced by Sterling by Music Man — the Mariposa and Cutlass CT50HSS — show just how much the gap between entry level and flagship guitars have narrowed in recent years. Both instruments provide features like roasted maple necks, locking tuners and custom designed pickups usually found on much more…

STREET PRICE: $390 MANUFACTURER: Origin Effects, origineffects.com The Post-Drive EQ switch and ADJ knob voices the pedal to match your amp, along with a P/AMP setting when using a power amp, recording interface, DI or mixer. The More/Pres control affects negative feedback in the output stage and can modify the breakup characteristics or respond similarly to a Presence knob. THE BOTTOM LINE The Origin Effects RD Compact Hot Rod is an unparalleled hot-rodded overdrive stompbox with nuanced complexity and response for dialing in super-detailed tube-like amp tones that are downright mesmeric.…

STREET PRICE: $279 MANUFACTURER: Eventide, eventideaudio.com Pitch A shifts the left channel from 0 to +50 cents while Pitch B shifts the right channel from 0 to -50 cents to create lush stereo soundscapes. The six knobs are toggled between primary and secondary functions for adjusting pitch shift and delay settings, respectively. THE BOTTOM LINE: From the “secret sauce” chorus effects of L.A. studio pros and industry standard delays to wild new sounds waiting for discovery, the Eventide Micro-Pitch Delay provides a wealth of exciting and useful effects.…

I GOT RHYTHM, PART 21 Groovin’ in 12/8 meter NOW THAT WE understand how triplets work — three equally spaced notes played across one beat, or two beats, or half a beat — I’d like to talk about a widely used triplet-based meter, 12/8, and cite some well-known examples of songs that embody what musicians refer to as “the groove” 12/8 approach to counting and notating rhythms. In the same way that 4/4 signifies four quarter notes per bar, 12/8 indicates 12 eighth notes, which are beamed in four three-note just like eighth-note triplets in 4/4. There are, however, a couple of differences in the way the beats are counted and written in 12/8, which in certain situations makes it preferable to using 4/4. In 4/4, you would either count…

ORBITING IN C MAJOR Hybrid picking, and how to play “Luna Girl” “LUNA GIRL” IS the opening track on my latest album, From the Up’Nah, which I recorded with my group, the Koch Marshall Trio, featuring Toby Marshall on keyboards and my son Dylan on drums and percussion. The main riff in this song is crafted from a melodic line played in tandem with pedal tones while additionally adding bass notes underneath the melodic information. Like most guitar players, I can deliver this type of musical mayhem on the guitar by incorporating hybrid picking, wherein, generally speaking, the notes on the lower strings — the “bass notes” — are downpicked with the plectrum while the notes on the higher strings are fingerpicked. The majority of the tune’s initial primary riff…

ALTHOUGH THE DOORS were formed less than a year before recording their debut album at Sunset Sound in August and September 1966, the band quickly developed its unique sound and advanced chops from playing four to five sets a day during a residency at London Fog and as the house band at the Whisky A Go Go on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip. Guitarist Robby Krieger immediately earned praise for his sophisticated, jazz-inspired playing, a style that he remarkably developed quickly after making the transition from acoustic flamenco and folk to electric, also about a year before recording The Doors. After the band’s debut single, “Break On Through,” failed to do just that, the Doors released “Light My Fire” as a follow-up, which quickly shot up the charts before hitting Number One…

EVERY GUITAR PLAYER, AT SOME point in his or her life, has put serious thought into owning a hollow or semi-hollow electric. It’s a perfectly understandable inclination; visually, there’s a lot going on, thanks to their oversized bodies, ample curves and eye-catching f-holes. Then, of course, there are the tonal differences to solidbody electrics, which are often considered thicker and more direct, though less open, airy and dynamic. And while semi-acoustics — a term that, confusingly, includes semi-hollow and hollowbody guitars — have often been regarded as jazz or blues instruments, these guitars have been wielded by players in just about every genre. Mastodon’s Brent Hinds has been spotted playing a Gibson B.B. King Lucille, while Nirvana/Foo Fighters legend Dave Grohl and much-missed Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell went so far…

STREET PRICES: Mariposa $549.99, Cutlass CT50HSS $499.99 MANUFACTURER: Sterling by Music Man, sterlingbymusicman.com Both models feature necks crafted from roasted maple that provides the lively tone and strength of a vintage, aged neck. The Mariposa has two custom artist humbucking pickups wired to individual volume controls to provide natural variations in treble response when set at different levels. The Cutlass CT50HSS has a bridge humbucker and neck and middle single-coil pickups that provide a wide range of tones from hard rock roar to funk and country spank. Locking tuners keep the vintage-style tremolo in perfect tune even after performing deep dives. THE BOTTOM LINE: In addition to being impressively close to their much more expensive Music Man counterparts, the Sterling Mariposa and Cutlass CT50HSS are outstanding, versatile instruments that far…