Innehållsförteckning för September 2023 från Guitar World

VOL. 44 | NO. 9 | SEPTEMBER 2023 WELCOMES... AND FAREWELLS I HEREBY WELCOME Sophie Lloyd to the GW cover club. It’s a joy to watch — or to witness — guitarists spring up, basically out of nowhere, to achieve such high levels of acclaim in this, um, interesting modern age of ours. I joined GW in 2011, and I’ve witnessed a few bright careers in the making, including GW cover stars Billy Strings, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, Jake Kiszka, Rob Scallon and Wolfgang Van Halen (although, hmmm, Wolf did share a GW cover with this dad in 2008). BTW, I’d add the amazing Nita Strauss to this list, but she was definitely doing her thing before 2011. Back to Sophie: Somewhere in Joe Bosso’s interview, Lloyd says, “People always say,…

POLISH GUITAR VIRTUOSO, multi-instrumentalist and producer Jakub Żytecki has solidified his position as a trailblazer in progressive guitar music with a brilliant new album, Remind Me. The shred-meets-ambient specialist also teases an eight-string signature model and reveals why it’s time to rip it up like his teen hero once more. Q: What’s the one guitar you couldn’t live without? It’s probably the one I recorded most of the album with — the Mayones they built for me. It’s an offset model, a bit different from their catalog. It’s inspired by the Fender Jaguar, so it’s got this Kurt Cobainish shape. I actually received that guitar as an eight-string version recently. I haven’t shown anybody, but it’s something we’re working on, and there’s going to be the signature coming this year.…

Ever SINCE THEIR formation in 1990, Swedish metallers Opeth have been no strangers to wild experimentation and unexpected detours into the creative leftfield. Even their 1995 Orchid debut showcased a bunch of musicians who simply refused to exist within the usual confines of death metal — borrowing elements from long-distant worlds such as jazz and classical and then fusing it all together into something greater than the sum of its parts. But even the band themselves would admit that 2003’s Damnation album — a 43-minute love letter to their vintage progressive rock influences — was something they never quite saw in their own destiny. After breaking out of the underground and making their mark internationally with the Steven Wilson-produced Blackwater Park in 2001, the Stockholm-based quartet now had the world’s…

JAKE KISZKA WAS born to rock. And since shuttering onto the scene back in 2017 with his band, Greta Van Fleet, he’s done just that. Of course, it hasn’t always been easy, considering the band is perpetually labeled as Led Zeppelin clones. But no matter; throughout three stellar records, the Frankenmuth, Michigan rockers have kicked all preconceived notions square in the teeth, leaving gain-drenched trails of destruction in their wake. As for Kiszka, he’s soft-spoken and unassuming. Upon dialing in with him, it was immediately apparent he’s not the sort of six-stringer worried about accolades and hyper-commercialism. No, Kiszka is the spiritual type who wields his trusty Gibson SG as a sacred talisman through which he channels otherworldly notes, gargantuan chords and chugging riffs. And what of those Zeppelin comparisons?…

“THE SECOND THERE WAS SOME SORT OF DRAMA, FINGERS IMMEDIATELY POINTED AT ME” EVERYTHING WAS GOING SO WELL for Sophie Lloyd. The 27-year-old British guitarist had recently completed her first tours of the U.S. and Europe as part of rap-rocker Machine Gun Kelly’s band. It was a heady time for Lloyd, who, despite her sizable following on YouTube and Instagram, had previously only played club and pub gigs around the U.K. before signing on for Kelly’s Mainstream Sellout tour in the spring of 2022. Now she was playing big-time venues — Madison Square Garden, Wembley Arena, even the odd stadium or two — and she was “going down a smash.” And then it all seemed to go a bit wonky. In February of this year, Lloyd’s name was suddenly in…

TODAY, WE CONTINUE our “guitar safari” with a look at one of my favorite axes, the Gibson ES-345. The 345 and 355 are famous for their stereo pickup configuration and Varitone circuit, which is a six-position control with a rotary knob that allows you to switch between different predetermined frequency scoops, altering the EQ of the highs, mids and lows. I will get more into these variables in a moment. The guitar in hand today is a 1959 ES-345 in a rare blonde finish. This particular guitar was found in a barn outside of Oakland, California, and made its way to me! I’ll go through the many different sounds one can get from this incredible instrument, using a stereo cable plugged straight into a 1963 Fender Vibroverb. To me, this…

“WILL OF THE PEOPLE” Muse MUSE MASTERMIND Matt Bellamy used both his go-to Manson guitar and early Eighties Fender Telecaster to track this popular new song’s simple but highly effective and super catchy six-string parts. Also employing fuzz distortion and octave doubling effects (both an octave above and below), the crafty guitarist achieves a huge, Godzilla-like tone that fills out the sonic spectrum in an exciting way and carries the song, which is essentially built around two very basic and repetitive bass-line-type single-note riffs. Before playing any notes, Bellamy establishes the song’s infectious triplet-based shuffle groove in the intro by strumming his bottom three strings in a lopsided swing-eighths rhythm — “long-short-long-short” — while using fret-hand muting to prevent any notes from sounding, resulting in a pitchless, percussive attack. Indicated…

STAY CONNECTED WITH GUITAR WORLD ON AND GET THE LATEST GUITAR NEWS, INSIDER UPDATES, STAFF REPORTS AND MORE! Kneelin’ down before Neil Giraldo I just wanted to say thanks for featuring Neil Giraldo in the July 2023 issue. I’m from the same town that “Spyder” is originally from (Parma, Ohio). I even went to the same high school, Parma Senior High School, although we were decades apart (I’m an ’04 grad). I’ve always admired his technique and iconic solos. Growing up I thought, “If that dude can play guitar that well and make it big, maybe so can I.” Our alma mater is going to be bulldozed in a few months, which sucks, but I really enjoyed reading about Neil’s audition with Pat Benatar and the band’s early years. Thanks…

IT’S BEEN A wild few years for Marcin Patrzalek. The Polish guitarist, who goes by just his first name on his myriad popular social media accounts, has risen to become the Big Thing in classical guitar, enjoying crossover success virtually unparalleled in that world, culminating with his recent acquisition of the biggest symbol of having “made it”: his very own signature guitar. The floppy-haired guitarist rose to fame through videos of his flamboyant and percussive acoustic guitar techniques: he strums, picks, taps and slaps all while treating his instrument just as much as a drum set as a guitar. It’s an approach that has well-positioned Marcin in the current music industry zeitgeist, where visual panache is as important, if not more so, than the actual music. (Case in point: Marcin…

Q: JOHN PRIMER ON JOINING MUDDY WATERS’ BAND “Being sideman to Willie Dixon in late ’79 helped a lot, but being with Muddy was a whole different thing. I had only been in Willie’s band for maybe six months, and we were playing in Mexico City, and that’s where Muddy heard me play, which would be around 1980. After that show, Q: Muddy asked Willie about me and said, ‘My whole band just quit. Who was that young man you’ve got playing up there with you?’ Willie said, ‘Ah, that’s John Primer. He’s pretty good, he can play a thing or two.’ “I guess Muddy must have liked what he heard ’cause he said to Willie, ‘Well, that man sure knows my music. I’d like to have him in my…

GRETA VAN FLEET are perpetually compared to the likes of Led Zeppelin. And while guitarist Jake Kiszka won’t deny those influences, he’s more than eager to help peel back the onion in terms of what makes the darlings of Michigan tick. We’ll let him take it from here. “It’s a difficult thing because, yeah, we are influenced by Zeppelin, the blues and a ton of British Invasion bands; there’s no denying that. We’ve heard it for years and been asked about it, but like we’ve always said, it’s not as if we set out to be them. “But instead of just saying that, I’d point people to our other influences…” NATIVE AMERICAN MUSIC “This is something I’ve never really talked about before, but we’re big fans of Native American music.…

THE MELDING OF genres is always a tricky bit of fun. And when it comes to rock and pop, no two genres seem to pair better. To that end, ever since Michael Jackson solicited Eddie Van Halen’s and Steve Lukather’s services for Thriller (1982), blazing ax-slingers stepping into the world of bubbly pop has become nothing short of commonplace. While the idea is no longer novel, in the present day, many six-string heroes continue to lend their licks to various icons of pop music. Be it the G.O.A.T., Eddie Van Halen, eternal M.V.P. Nuno Bettencourt, perpetual hurricane in motion Nita Strauss or the effervescent new kid on the block, Sophie Lloyd, it seems these two worlds shall continue to collide. With that in mind, here’s a handy guide to 10…

LITERALLY DOZENS OF great acoustic guitars are available these days if you have around $1,000 to spend. While newer companies that specialize in entry level models offer some good choices, I often recommend considering a guitar built by a company with a decent history that also offers a selection of instruments extending well into higher price ranges due to experience and “trickle down” quality factors. The new Furch Violet D-SM ticks those boxes, coming from a company with more than four decades of history building guitars in the Czech Republic. Furch opened a U.S.-based distribution facility in Nashville in 2019, making their craftsmanship readily available to American players. FEATURES The Furch Violet D-SM has the timeless square-shoulder dreadnought body shape and is built from classic tonewoods that include an A-grade…

OVER THE NEXT two columns, I’d like to discuss my guitar solo in “Welcome Home,” a tune I had written and recorded for the 2016 Andy Timmons Band album, Theme From a Perfect World. The solo is played over what is basically a repeating four-bar, three-chord progression, but the approach I took for the solo was to craft lines that are melodic and hooky and played in an emotive, expressive way, while also targeting elements of the chords, so that the melody clearly dictates, or describes, the underlying progression. The solo is played in the key of E and is 32 bars long. FIGURE 1 shows the first 16 bars, starting with a two-bar pick-up of D, sounded with the open D string and an F# note, fretted on the…

“I WAS JADED, BUT THEN I FELL BACK IN LOVE WITH THE ART OF SOLOING” SEVENDUST rhythm guitarist John Connolly was loving the sound of the band’s Truth Killer album as they were tracking it in Florida last summer. It’s easy to understand why; the veteran Atlanta hard rockers’ 14th full-length consistently brings the boom through a series of chunked-out, darkly detuned progressions. But the guitarist also recalls one particular moment — a couple of days after he’d locked in a bombastic, inverted bend motif for the record’s “Love and Hate” — where things got a little weird. As bassist Vince Hornsby began laying down the low end for producer Michael “Elvis” Baskette, a bewildered Connolly noticed the piece had accidentally devolved into a tonal nightmare. “I walked in and…

IT’S 3:05 P.M. ON A FRIDAY. I’M WAITING FOR A CALL from Vito Bratta. He’s late. Five minutes late, to be exact. But considering it’s taken years of knocking, followed by an additional three weeks of scheduling back and forth via email, to gain entry into the proverbial Casa di Vito… what’s a few minutes more? A few nervous sips of Johnny Walker Blue later, at around 3:10 p.m., my trusty iPhone 10XR buzzes with anticipation; I’d used that old iPhone for countless interviews prior, but this one is different. The number scrolling across the screen is one I didn’t recognize. I mutter to myself, “That’s gotta be Vito...” It is. “Sorry I’m late, man. I was dialing the wrong number for the last 10 minutes,” Bratta sheepishly says. “It’s…

HELLO, GW READERS! IN THIS exclusive lesson, I’d like to go over my guitar parts and solo in “Do or Die,” a song from my upcoming album, Imposter Syndrome. But first I want to thank GuitarWorld.com readers for voting “Do or Die” the second-best guitar solo of 2022! “Do or Die” features vocalist Nathan James, an incredible singer who’s also a very good friend of mine. The song took off right out of the gate, and it’s now at 1.9 million views on YouTube. Again, thank you to everyone for the incredible, enthusiastic response and support! The success of “Do or Die” was so crazy, because the song came out at the very end of 2022 and was the first single I’d released in ages. For it to do so…

THERE ARE LOADS of guitars in black or white, red and blue, or a cornucopia of sunbursts and natural wood finishes. But somehow, when I stumble across a guitar that’s screaming with a loud, bright neon finish, I easily succumb to my inner urge to take that guitar out for a fleet-fingered ride for all to see. And that’s exactly how I rolled when I test-drove the new Jackson Guitars X Series Dinky DK3XR HSS in a blaring Caution Yellow finish with neon pink pickups. Say what you will, but my temerity to strap on such an outrageous instrument is boundless. This X Series Dinky DK3XR is indeed a fast and loud guitar, and I’ll joyride this V12 Lambo-equivalent as my next six-string companion for as long as I can.…

ONE OF THE coolest sounds is that of a melody that's harmonized, either on the same instrument or another. Many are well-familiar with the dual lead lines heard in the Allman Brothers Band songs “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” “Whipping Post” and “Blue Sky,” the Beatles’ “And Your Bird Can Sing,” Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys Are Back in Town,” Steely Dan’s “Reelin’ In the Years,” Iron Maiden’s “The Trooper” and many other songs. In this lesson, I’ll demonstrate ways in which you can to add a harmonized line on top of single-note melody. Let’s first lay down a repeating rhythm part that we'll then stack the guitar harmonies on top of. FIGURE 1 presents a two-bar rhythm part that’s played in the key of E and in the style of…

LAST MONTH, WE began our investigation into ways in which to incorporate diminished ideas into a blues solo. Our examples were based on a standard 12-bar blues progression in the key of A, and we made it from the I (one) chord, A6, to the IV (four) chord, D7, and back. This month, let’s continue by heading from the I chord to the V (five), E7, and back, using diminished 7 chord shapes, which I’ll refer to simply as diminished, as harmonic-melodic “bridges” between the primary chords. As shown in FIGURE 1, I’m transitioning from A6 to E7 using Ebdim7 as a bridge. A great thing about a diminished chord is that any of its four notes may be considered the root. For example, the notes A, Eb, Gb (F#)…

DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY FOR musicians has advanced significantly since the first relatively affordable digital delays emerged in the early Eighties. So why have so many studios and guitarists refused to give up their Roland SDE-3000 rackmount units, which came out 40 years ago in 1983? The SDE-3000 remained a permanent fixture in the stage racks of Eddie Van Halen and Steve Vai from 1985 onwards, and it instantly became a legendary effect found in Bob Bradshaw racks built for studio guitarists Steve Lukather, Michael Landau and Dann Huff. World class producer/engineer/mixer Bob Clearmountain still frequently uses the 3000 on vocal recordings, and Eric Clapton, Neil Young and dozens of other pros have relied upon the 3000 at various stages of their careers. After the model’s discontinuation in 1985 when Roland released…