Innehållsförteckning för September 2025 från Guitar World

WELCOME TO THE September 2025 issue of Guitar World, which — as you might’ve noticed by now — looks a little different. Yes, gang, it was time for a “refresh” (which I’m told isn’t quite as huge and life-altering as a “redesign”). Seriously, before this issue, Guitar World looked essentially the same as it did when I got here way back in April 2011, when Ernest Borgnine, Jack Klugman, Alex Karras and Neil Armstrong still walked among us. That said, please note that one thing that is definitely not a part of the “refresh” is the fact that only two songs (instead of the usual three) are transcribed in this issue. This is an incredibly rare occurrence, the result of Peter Frampton’s “Do You Feel Like We Do” (live) being…

MAYA DELILAH WAS sitting at home when she got the email. For the sixth year in a row, Fender had named a group of artists meant to represent the future of guitar, and Delilah had just found out she was a part of the Fender Next Class of 2024. For a musician who had been slowly building an audience over the past half decade, but had been honing her craft since childhood, it was the realization of a lifelong dream. “Oh my God, it meant so much,” she says. “It was a proper bucket-list thing. I mean, with my Squier, I’ve been playing Fender my whole life and looking up to Fender my whole life. My amp that I’ve always had is a Blues Junior, and, yeah, it was just…

BEHIND AN UNMARKED door in a nondescript West London street, you’ll find the recording studio of the world’s most reluctant rock god. Do this job long enough and you’ll learn to spot the artists who project a carefully cultivated aura of false modesty, often blended with a phoney man-of-the-people vibe. With Mark Knopfler, you can tell, it’s absolutely genuine. Over the course of our interview at the British Grove facility he founded two decades ago, the 75-year-old former leader of Dire Straits will tell us, with unblinking sincerity, that he considers himself a mediocre player who struggled among more capable studio musicians and squirmed every time he was anointed as a guitar hero. We must respectfully disagree with our host, of course. Anyone who followed his band from the South…

GEOGRAPHICALLY, IT’S A long way from the sticky-floored rehearsal spaces of Motor City to the Roman-era cobblestone streets of Bath in southwest England. But it doesn’t take a musicologist to join the dots between Greta Van Fleet’s levee-breaking classic rock and the punchy folk-blues of Ida Mae. The heavy-roots duo — Chris Turpin (guitar) and Stephanie Jean Ward (vocals), who met as students at Bath Spa University and married in 2016 — was born from the rubble of an earlier outfit, Kill It Kid. But since rebranding under the moniker of a vintage Lightnin’ Hopkins tune, Ida Mae have made major ripples, with three albums since 2019 released to ever-noisier acclaim — and three million streams to date for the wiry tremolo stomp of their tune, “Click Click Domino.” Moving…

THIS MONTH, I’D like to talk about the paramount importance of the right, or pick, hand — how it’s the keeper of time and the thing that gives us the groove while we play. I’ll demonstrate some examples and practice tips for you to work on to help develop your strumming technique. When it comes to strumming, I subscribe to the “steady motor” method, keeping my hand in perpetual motion, in an unbroken down-up “pendulum” pattern, most often in a 16th-note rhythm, even when I’m not hitting every 16th note. As shown in FIGURE 1, I’m strumming steady 16ths in an alternating pattern while dampening all of the strings with my fret hand. In FIGURE 2, I apply this strumming technique to a chord progression. Notice that, in bar 1,…

AN ESSENTIAL ELEMENT of playing music is being aware of “where” you’re playing in the beat and how it relates to the groove being laid down by the rhythm section. This concept can be broken up into three approaches: playing behind the beat, playing ahead of the beat or playing squarely on the beat. How a guitar player chooses to interact with the beat, or pulse, will have everything to do with the feeling of the music and the expression being communicated to the listener. This is, of course, true for all instrumentalists, regardless of musical style. When I was first learning to play the music of my biggest hero, Mountain guitarist Leslie West, I was thinking, “Why does it sound different when I play the ‘Mississippi Queen’ intro, as…

The sad loss of the Alarm’s Mike Peters IT WAS WITH great sadness that I learned of the passing of Mike Peters of the Alarm this week after his decades-long struggle with cancer. I had the privilege of meeting Mike several times over the years. From my first encounter as a teen in the Eighties when he helped sneak us into an Alarm show through a back door when we were underage to a quiet conversation after a solo gig late in his career, Mike was always humble and generous with his time. He was a consummate performer. Whether it was a large venue or a small club, he gave his lifeblood and passion to every gig. His strength and positivity transmitted in the lyrics and guitar licks of every…

AFTER HOTEL CALIFORNIA, the Eagles’ massive 1976 album, saw them rise from country rockers to just plain rockers, Don Felder and his bandmates should’ve been on top of the world — but all was not well in paradise. Indeed, the warm smell of colitas was not rising up through the air, and there was a distinct lack of cool wind in the band’s collective hair. Exhaustion, infighting, drugs and alcohol — basically the tropes that were supposed to drag down rock bands, as per Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous — had all but derailed the Eagles. After the supporting tour for Hotel California, they could have stopped — and they should have stopped… for the night (okay, that’s my last “Hotel California” reference!) — but they didn’t. Instead, they hit the…

SEEMINGLY OUT OF nowhere, the Darkness swooped out of Suffolk, England, and onto the international music scene in 2003 with their high-voltage debut, Permission to Land. At a time when hipster bands including the Strokes, the White Stripes and Kings of Leon were making inroads with the alt-rock community, the Darkness were an anathema, wearing loud, glam-influenced outfits and bashing out energetic anthems propelled by white-hot power chord riffs, flashy leads and sometimes ridiculous-sounding falsetto vocals. Many rock fans embraced the exuberance of the anachronistic quartet, composed of frontman Justin Hawkins, his guitarist brother Dan, bassist Frankie Poullain and drummer Ed Graham. But music purists dismissed the Darkness as a parody band, comparing them to Spinal Tap instead of aligning them with their true heroes, Queen and AC/DC. Songs that…

THIS BUSINESS OF naming a band can be a tricky thing — and a little silly sometimes. Greta Van Fleet guitarist Jake Kiszka and Ida Mae guitarist Chris Turpin racked their brains trying to come up with the perfect moniker for the new group they had just formed. Ideas were batted back and forth… but nothing clicked. Finally, in a dramatic bolt of inspiration, Kiszka seized on a word: Marauder. He excitedly texted Turpin, who enthusiastically agreed that the name felt right. But there was just one problem: Kiszka had misspelled the word as “Mirador.” “I was like, ‘mirador’? No, no, I wrote ‘marauder,’” Kiszka says with a laugh. “Then we looked it up, and it said that a mirador is basically a vista or a viewpoint suspended on a…

ARE HANOI ROCKS the most underrated rock band of all time? The Finnish rockers had everything — anthemic songs, an unrivaled live show and a killer guitarist in Andy McCoy. And then there was singer Michael Monroe, the most charismatic, photogenic frontperson, male or female, since Elvis Presley. Taking their cue from the New York Dolls and Johnny Thunders’ Heartbreakers, cut through with the snotty attitude of classic U.K. punk, they distilled their own uniquely potent brand of sleaze-fueled, take-no-prisoners rock ’n’ roll. Hanoi Rocks’ live show reminded you of why you got into music — the adrenaline rush of loud electric guitars through a wall of Marshalls set to stun, and a frontman who had the audience in the palm of his hands. A Hanoi Rocks show was an…

A BIG PART of blues is playing over a “shuffle” groove — a triplet-driven swing-eighths feel with a backbeat (accents on beats 2 and 4) — at various tempos. There are many great shuffle-based tunes. An example of a great slow shuffle is Jimmy Reed’s “Bright Lights, Big City,” and a great uptempo shuffle is Memphis Slim’s “Steppin’ Out,” covered brilliantly by John Mayall with Eric Clapton on the Bluesbreakers’ 1966 album. One of my favorite medium-slow shuffles is Jeff Beck’s “Rock My Plimsoul,” which was featured on his debut album, Truth, and is based on the B.B. King blues classic “Rock Me Baby.” Played in the key of B, the tune’s main riff is similar to bar 1 of FIGURE 1, which is a simple, repetitive motif based on…

PETER FRAMPTON “Do You Feel Like We Do” (live) THIS CLASSIC LIVE performance of a song that Peter Frampton and his band had originally recorded a couple of years earlier (for 1973’s Frampton’s Camel) features the inspired young rock guitarist stretching out on an extended and well-conceived improvisational journey. By the time of this recording, in 1975, for the soon-to-be-released album Frampton Comes Alive!, the arrangement had expanded into a drawn-out (but never boring) showcase for Peter’s lead guitar artistry, melodicism, soulful touch and creative application of dynamics (contrasts in volume, texture and intensity) and effects, namely a Lesie rotary speaker cabinet and, most famously, a talk box, which he uses to meld his guitar and voice and connect with audiences in an engaging way during the song’s quiet breakdown section.…

IT MIGHT BE a gross oversimplification to state that the chorus pedal defined the guitar sound of the Eighties, but the effect did indeed appear on a hell of a lot of recordings during the entire decade by artists from almost every genre, including new wave, alternative, funk, metal, punk, jazz, country and probably even a few blues tracks. Although it wasn’t the only chorus effect around at the time, the Boss CE-2 Chorus pedal played a huge role in the popularity and predominance of this effect during this period. Several chorus effects preceded the Boss CE-2’s introduction in late 1979. Roland’s Jazz Chorus series amps whetted many guitarists’ appetites for the chorus effect, but most players didn’t want to be limited to a particular amp just to use the…

READER ART OF THE MONTH If you’ve created a drawing, painting or sketch of your favorite guitarist and would like to see it in an upcoming issue of Guitar World, email GWSoundingBoard@futurenet.com with a .jpg or screenshot of the image. And (obviously...), please remember to include your name! DEFENDERS OF THE FAITH Phil Hojnoski AGE: 58 HOMETOWN: Bath, NY GUITARS: Lzzy Hale Explorer, Richie Faulkner V, LTD Explorer, Kramer Baretta, Jackson Soloist 7 SONGS I’VE BEEN PLAYING: War of Ages “Through the Flames,” Dokken “It’s Not Love,” Kiss “Forever” and “Never Lose Hope” (an original) GEAR I WANT MOST: Richie Kotzen Fender Telecaster, Ibanez Iceman, Gibson Les Paul Custom (Ace Frehley three-pickup model), Fractal Axe FX3, Marshall stack August George AGE: 30 HOMETOWN: Binghamton, NY GUITARS: ’64 Fender Jazz Bass,…

Guitarist Elliot Easton Guitar 1982 Gibson Custom Shop left-handed Flying V GW Cover Date September 1984 This Interview February 2025 Q Where and when did you buy this guitar? I got it from Gibson. This was when they reintroduced the Korina Flying V [a limited run from 1981 to 1983]. Tim Shaw, who I was working with very closely and who was at Gibson at the time, had it built for me. It was a gorgeous guitar. The funny thing is, to surprise me, in gold lettering, they put my name on the headstock [ just below the Gibson logo] — but they spelled it wrong! They spelled Elliot with two T’s. [Laughs] Q What did you like about it, and did you modify it? I didn’t modify it at…

WHEN TY SEGALL and collaborator Matt Yoka started writing the lyrics to the former’s new and 17th solo album, Possession, the pair set off to present a series of “quintessentially American stories.” To that end, Segall says the record’s acoustic orchestral-punk freakout “Alive” was inspired by the infamously cannibalistic Donner Party case of the mid 19th century before transforming into a broader look at man’s battle against the elements. “Shoplifter,” a slow-building strummer that leads up toward a screaming three-way sax-off and a barbershop vocal section, empathizes with a sticky-fingered character going through economic turmoil — though Segall says he still feels guilty about the candy bar he boosted out of a convenience store when he was a kid. One of its most relatable moments — for some musicians, at…

PROLIFIC SONGWRITER BOB Mould is a reluctant generational icon. Sure, he’s proud of his musical accomplishments and realizes he has been a major inspiration for a wide range of mainstream acts, including Nirvana, Pixies, Weezer and Green Day. He’s well aware that if it weren’t for the open chords and ringing hooks he injected into Minnesota-based Eighties hardcore band Hüsker Dü and later, Sugar, college music and alternative rock might not have evolved in quite the same way. And yet, like some of the groups he has inspired, he doesn’t relish being in the spotlight and cherishes his privacy. “I would not like to think I’ve been difficult. I prefer to think of it as challenging,” Mould says, relaxing at his home in Palm Springs, where he moved in 2020…

IN MY PREVIOUS “Blues You Can Use” columns, I focused on what I consider to be essential rhythm guitar and accompanying single-note patterns that exemplify Chicago-style blues guitar, as heard in the playing of blues greats like Jimmy Rogers, Eddie Taylor, Luther Tucker, and Robert Lockwood Jr. This month, we’ll focus on the “turnarounds” that fall within the last four bars of a standard 12-bar blues progression. To review, the first four bars in a 12-bar blues are either made up of the I (one) chord, which is the home key or “tonic,” or are built from one bar on the I chord, one bar on the IV (four) chord, and then two bars on the I chord. Bars 5 and 6 move to the IV, and bars 7 and…

“DO YOU FEEL LIKE WE DO”, WORDS AND MUSIC BY PETER FRAMPTON, JOHN SIOMOS, RICK WILLS AND MICK GALLAGHER. COPYRIGHT © 1973 ALMO MUSIC CORP., NUAGES ARTISTS MUSIC LTD., UNITED ARTISTS MUSIC LTD. AND ROBBINS MUSIC LTD. COPYRIGHT RENEWED. ALL RIGHTS FOR NUAGES ARTISTS MUSIC LTD. CONTROLLED AND ADMINISTERED BY ALMO MUSIC CORP. ALL RIGHTS FOR UNITED ARTISTS MUSIC LTD. CONTROLLED AND ADMINISTERED BY EMI U CATALOG INC. ALL RIGHTS FOR ROBBINS MUSIC LTD. CONTROLLED AND ADMINISTERED BY GLENWOOD MUSIC CORP. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. USED BY PERMISSION. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF HAL LEONARD LLC.…