Innehållsförteckning för December 2025 från Guitar World

THE AREN’T MANY bands who get bigger and more culturally significant 30-plus years after their golden era. But there is Oasis. The band’s nearly impossible-to-fathom reunion was one of GuitarWorld.com’s biggest stories last year. And, as someone who sort of fell under their spell since their 2009 implosion (mostly the result of my 2011 and 2015 interactions with the clever, ever-cool and damn funny Noel Gallagher), there was no way I was gonna miss their August 31 show at the massive MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. Here are my three big takeaways from that night: + Noel played some mouthwateringly beautiful Gibson guitars, and the drool really started gushing when said axes showed up on the stage’s twin five-story-tall Jumbotrons. I counted three Les Pauls (one of them is pictured…

The GW guide to some of this year’s greatest blues and blues-rock albums and personalities THE RUMOR WAS that Buddy Guy planned to retire — and considering that he’s pushing 90, no one would blame him — but it seems that, despite Guy’s age, rumors of his retreat were, well, premature. Still, that doesn’t mean he isn’t feeling his age. “I’m gonna tell you like I tell everybody else; if I tell you I’m doing all right, I’d be lying,” Guy says. “When you get to this age, everything gets to be aching. But other than that, I guess I’m doing okay. If you live to my age, your muscles and everything else aches. I was told in my twenties, ‘Wait till you get to my age,’ so I knew…

SLASH WAS THERE when, in the aftermath of Guns N’ Roses’ 1987 debut album, Appetite for Destruction, the band suddenly exploded onto a chaotic arc from Sunset Strip hopefuls to one of the biggest, most debauched rock acts on the planet — so it’s hard to imagine anything phasing him. But when the guitar maestro considers how far GN’R has come since his and bassist Duff McKagan’s return in 2016, his mind is clearly blown. As he tells Guitar World, “It really trips me out that all of this has happened.” From the outside looking in, of course, Slash’s return to the GN’R fold seemed inevitable. Behind the scenes, though, he and GN’R vocalist and leader Axl Rose barely spoke after the guitarist left the band in 1996, let alone…

“ACE OF ACES” is the debut track from the 2018 self-titled EP by the Fearless Flyers, which is a side project from the band Vulfpeck that consists of me, guitarist Mark Lettieri, bassist Joe Dart and drummer Nate Smith. This track all started from a melodic line I had written. Jack Stratton, our producer, had compiled a handful of live performance clips of each of us in the band playing and said, “Let’s work on these musical concepts as different things. We’ll use Cory’s line as the anchor then try to come up with four different sections of playing over one chord.” I’ve seen people cover the tune, and one thing most get wrong about it is they’re not intentional about the sections in the way they should be. The…

LAST MONTH, I demonstrated my approach to soloing over the song ”Hard Wired,” originally released on my 2023 self-titled album. We began with the breakdown section, over which I play simple lines over the D - F - G chord progression before moving into the heavy D minor pentatonic-based (D, F, G, A, C) “theme riff,” over which the main solo is played. Once that riff is established, I begin the proper solo with some Jimi Hendrix-inspired dominant 7 triads that are tremolo-picked and slid up and down the neck, à la “Voodoo Child (Slight Return).” In this lesson, I’d like to discuss what I play next and why. After that, I love to utilize unison bends, which are inspired by players like Ted Nugent, Pat Travers and Johnny Winter.…

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. Please remember to include your name! Some people don’t. Red Hot ’n’ Smokin’ SRV BY SHARON PASCUAL, PETERBOROUGH, U.K. This is my hand-painted “Red Hot ’n’ Smokin’ Stevie Ray Vaughan” resin model, which I completed in July. I loved every second of painting this much-loved Texan guitarist who I only discovered in 2023 while flicking through YouTube! DEFENDERS OF THE FAITH Doug Dickeson AGE: 72 HOMETOWN: Lincoln, NE GUITARS: 27 total, including Fender, PRS, Carvin, Martin, Godin, Takamine, Epiphone, Strandberg and others SONGS I’VE BEEN PLAYING: Zach Bryan “Something in…

IN THE LAST 25 years, Joe Bonamassa has dropped 16 studio records. That’s a lot of music, meaning it’s hard to keep things fresh — and his latest, Breakthrough, despite its title, doesn’t even try to break new ground. The truth is, it doesn’t have to; it just needs to reflect the type of music Bonamassa likes to create, which tends to rub about half the hardcore blues community the wrong way — not that Bonamassa cares. “What I interpret the blues as is different from what other people interpret the blues as,” he says. “I’m long past the point of caring. There’s nothing I can do to change people’s opinions about me, nor do I wish to.” That’s not to say Bonamassa is on the losing end of the…

THE ERIC GALES we know today is undoubtedly a product of his environment growing up. In this case, as fate would have it, we’re talking about an incredibly musical family. Older brothers Manuel and Eugene guided his journey on guitar from the age of four, giving him the kind of blues education that can’t be bought. By the time he was 10, he was already being labeled a prodigy, landing a major record deal in his mid-teens before eventually becoming one of the modern era’s greatest blues guitarists. Manuel also made a big impression on the circuit, from performing in Albert King’s band and touring with Buddy Guy to cutting records with Double Trouble, Stevie Ray Vaughan’s rhythm section. However, tragedy struck in 2002 when the singer/guitarist — better known…

AFTER SLASH AND Duff McKagan exited Guns N’ Roses in the mid-Nineties, things went kinda sideways for a bit. The band kept rolling, but it was host to a cavalcade of guitar players, from Buckethead to Paul Tobias to Robin Finck to DJ Ashba to Ron “Bumblefoot” Thal. As you can imagine, all that change did not give rise to new music. It’s not that Axl Rose wasn’t writing tunes; it’s just that honing them proved… difficult. But things shifted for the better — on the guitar side, at least — when Richard Fortus, who at the time was touring with Enrique Iglesias, was drafted into Guns in 2002. Fortus brought immediate stability to a situation that was anything but stable. Twenty-three years later, GN’R is still wreaking havoc on…

THOUGH NOT OBVIOUSLY thought of in this way, the Gibson ES-350 is a great instrument to use for rock rhythm guitar playing. With its hollow body and two-pickup design, it’s similar to the Gretsch 6120, which Pete Townshend used nearly exclusively for the guitar parts on the Who’s seminal Who’s Next album. Those gigantic rhythm guitars you hear on “Won’t Get Fooled Again” and “Baba O’Riley” were, surprisingly, recorded by Pete on a 1959 Gretsch 6120. I will often use the ES-350 in the same manner. The necks on these guitars are skinny and narrow, so the strings are actually a little closer together, as compared to other Gibsons, and it features “narrow-spaced” PAF pickups, wherein the screws are closer together. These guitars may not be for everyone, but they’re…

I MET BRENT HINDS a few years ago at a Mastodon gig. For some reason, he was standing next to me at the public bar, waiting in line to buy a drink, rather than staying out of sight backstage, so I introduced myself as a writer for Guitar World’s sister magazine, Total Guitar, and bought him a beer and a shot. We talked briefly before he headed backstage, but I couldn’t quite figure him out. My impression was that he was a bit of an introvert, perhaps not that good with new people — someone who saved his flamboyance for the stage. In his personality, Hinds — who died August 20 in a traffic collision in Atlanta at age 51 — was rather like the music of Mastodon. Their eight…

FORTUNE HASN’T JUST been smiling on blues rocker Samantha Fish lately — it’s been sending her long-stemmed roses and leaving love notes on her windshield. The Missouri-born guitarist/vocalist grabbed the top spot on Billboard’s blues chart in 2023 for Death Wish Blues (a collaboration with Jesse Dayton), and 2024 found her opening for the Rolling Stones and joining forces with Slash on the latter musician’s multi-artist blues tour, the S.E.R.P.E.N.T. Festival. Fish bottled some of that magic on her most recent release, Paper Doll. She and her road bandmates — keyboardist Mickey Finn, bassist Ron Johnson and drummer Jamie Douglass — recorded the album between gigs on tour. “For the record to come out when we wanted it to come out, recording on the road was really the only choice,…

FOR PAT FAHERTY of Canyon Lights, starting at the source is the only way forward. When the former GA-20 frontman listens to the blues, more often than not it’s going to be originators like Hound Dog Taylor or T-Bone Walker. And when he reaches for inspiration to create the riffs behind his new band’s rolling early Seventies rumble, he’s coming from the same place as guys like Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton. “All of those guitar players who started the concept of the guitar riff, they were learning comping before the style even existed,” Faherty says. “They were learning to back up the melody, not take over the melody with their guitar playing. I think what helps me for Canyon Lights is that the riffs come from the comping style…

LAST MONTH, I discussed the role of the turnaround in a 12-bar blues. To review, the turnaround occurs in the last two bars of the progression. Its function is to set up the return to the beginning of the form by providing a “wrap up” to the musical ideas of the previous 12-bar section. Every blues guitar great uses turnarounds masterfully, and many have their own signature turnaround phrases. Turnarounds can also be used to add tension between the I (one) chord and the IV (four), or when moving from any one of the three chords in a I - IV - V (one-four-five) progression to the next. It’s very useful to learn as many of the “tried and true” turnarounds that exist in blues music, but you should also…

DURING THE MID-EIGHTIES, Ibanez became stuck in a rut. Although the company’s guitars sold pretty well, they were rapidly losing market share to up-and-coming competitors like Charvel/Jackson, Hamer, B.C. Rich and particularly Kramer. Ibanez’s super Strat (Blazer and Roadstar) and pointy DT, Rocket Roll and X series models failed to generate more than moderate excitement, even with endorsements from heavy hitters like Phil Collen, Allan Holdsworth and Steve Lukather. Some of the problems were external, like a weakening dollar that made Japanese import guitars less of a bargain, but Ibanez also failed to keep up with guitar design trends that were changing rapidly. Hoping to avert disaster, Ibanez’s Japanese leadership looked to their U.S.-based distributors to develop new model designs, engaging the West Coast subsidiary Chesbro in a friendly competition…