Innehållsförteckning för January 2026 från Guitar World

AS I WROTE in this space exactly one year ago, we like to get an early start on our annual end-of-year issue. Therefore — out of necessity — a lot of these stories were put together in late September and throughout October, including our annual “the biggest guitar news of the year” feature (page 28). But, to prove how alive, dynamic and inherently interesting “guitar land” is, I’ve had to update our news feature — literally on the page — almost every day as our printer deadline approaches. Whether it’s the sale of Eddie Van Halen’s “Kramer Ad” guitar, the Stray Cats’ tour cancellation, Gibson/Epiphone’s new Back to the Future ES-345s, Nigel Tufnel’s new Marshall amp or who knows what else, it seems there’s always something going on. Of course,…

A COMMONLY UTTERED warning is “Never meet your heroes,” but Ace Frehley is a hero I met on many occasions — and I'm thankful I did. Even though he met countless people, he always greeted me with a big smile and a loud, “Hey, I know this guy! How’s it going, Nick?” He also made me laugh — a lot. He was a truly funny guy, not to mention a master storyteller. The first few times I met Ace, I was either wearing my “Guitar World journalist” or “Marshall Amplification Artist Relations” hat. Then we became friends — a priceless gift that still blows me away. The fact that I was also fortunate enough to play rhythm guitar on "Parasite" and "Cold Gin" on stage alongside Ace at a couple…

AFTER QUITTING KISS in 1982 due to his heavy drinking, drug use and stifled creativity, Ace Frehley was seen as a liability in the music industry. He thought leaving Kiss would be fruitful, but things hadn’t gone to plan. Despite his influential guitar style, swagger, showmanship and songwriting ability, no record company would touch him. By 1984, Frehley had begun to sober up. He connected with bassist John Regan, guitarist Richie Scarlet and drummer Anton Fig (who had played drums on Frehley’s ’78 solo record and Kiss’s Dynasty and Unmasked) and formed what would become Frehley’s Comet. Frehley also had tunes. Regan and Scarlet helped him refine songs like “Breakout,” which dated back to Frehley’s Kiss days and had been co-written by Kiss drummer Eric Carr. But that wasn’t all,…

FORTY YEARS AGO, Maryland native Paul Reed Smith took a chance on starting his own guitar company with no idea how things would pan out. It’s a good thing he chose to roll the dice. He’s since become one of the world’s most respected builders — someone whose creations encapsulate the very notion of a well-crafted and custom-made boutique instrument. Early on, he’d made guitars for Peter Frampton, Al Di Meola and Carlos Santana, and having witnessed firsthand how well his innovations had been working out for them, he launched PRS Guitars at the 1985 NAMM Show, debuting the newly designed Custom 24. It’d be fair to say a lot has happened over the four decades since then, with top-shelf musicians like John Mayer, Orianthi and John McLaughlin signing up…

IT’S SAFE TO say Tosin Abasi is already one of this century’s key progressive players. This is someone who has made his name through pushing the boundaries of the electric guitar. Whether he’s thumping, tapping, performing impossibly dextrous clean fingerstyle passages, shredding like a man possessed or churning out brain-breaking low-register metal riffs, Abasi has spent the past two decades rightly hailed as one of the geniuses of modern guitar. Such a player requires a special instrument, and Abasi’s latest weapon of choice is the Kaizen, which was developed with Music Man. It’s a bold offset design, all angles and points, with fanned frets for balanced tension, proprietary pickups and custom shop build quality in a range of vivid colors. It’s not a cheap electric guitar — but can those…

IN LAST MONTH’S column, I talked about how using open G tuning (low to high: D, G, D, G, B, D) has inspired me to find my own musical and compositional voice as a guitarist and craft some cool and unique chord riffs and slide parts. To illustrate, I detailed how I play the intro and the main riff from the Blackberry Smoke song “Ain’t Much Left of Me.” This month, I’d like to provide some additional examples of the benefits of playing in open G tuning, by sharing how I play other sections of the tune, including the slide guitar solo. The verse section is built from stop-time chord hits on G, followed by F/C to C and then G to F/G to C/E, accentuated by the band with…

“THREE SIX FIVE” WORDS AND MUSIC ERIC BASS AND BRENTON SMITH. COPYRIGHT ©2024 ECHO BRAVO MUSIC LLC, EMI BLACKWOOD MUSIC INC. AND DRIVEN BY MUSIC. ALL RIGHTS FOR ECHO BRAVO MUISC LLC ADMINISTERED BY BMG RIGHTS MANAGEMENT (US) LLC. ALL RIGHTS FOR EMI BLACKWOOD MUSIC INC. AND DRIVEN BY MUSIC ADMINISTERED BY SONY MUSIC PUBLISHING (US) LLC, 424 CHURCH STREET, SUITE 1200, NASHVILLE, TN 37219. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. USED BY PERMISSION. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF HAL LEONARD LLC.…

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 Billy Gwalthney AGE: 60 HOMETOWN: Philadelphia, PA GUITARS: 2020 Gibson Les Paul Classic, ’88 Charvel 3DR, ‘65 Gibson ES120T, Kramer Assault LP SONGS I’VE BEEN PLAYING: Van Halen “Everybody Wants Some,” Led Zeppelin “Tangerine,” Dream Theater “A Change of Seasons” GEAR I WANT MOST: Ernie Ball Music Man John Petrucci Majesty, Neural DSP Quad Cortex Roger Rhodes AGE: 62 HOMETOWN: Madison, WV GUITARS: Fender Player Stratocaster, 2013 Gibson Les Paul Traditional, Martin GPCPA5K, Squier Classic Vibe Telecaster, Epiphone…

ONE OF OUR favorite Ace Frehley quotes is something he told us last year: “If I’d known I was going to influence thousands of guitar players, I woulda practiced more!” He was joking, of course, but there’s an element of truth to the Spaceman’s words. No one ever could’ve accused Ace, a free-spirited (and, in his youth), hard-partying type, of being meticulous when it came to his playing. The Spaceman was more of a grip-it-and-rip-it guy. “I’m always flattered when people tell me I influenced them,” Frehley told GW in September 2024. “I’ve had so many players come up to me and say, ‘You are the reason I play guitar,’ and I’m always like, ‘Wow…’” To Frehley’s point, everyone from John 5 to Marty Friedman to Richie Kotzen to Tom…

YOU WON’T ALWAYS know when the Guitar World editorial conclave is in session to determine the magazine’s top 20 guitar players of any given year, but as the internet might put it, there will be signs. The heavy traffic to and from the office, as Grubhub delivery drivers beat a path to the door. The lights, always on, reveal hunched, anxious figures — some staffers taken to chewing aspirin and sipping bourbon to cope with the anxiety at the prospect of leaving out Tony Iommi, who played his final show with Black Sabbath and reissued his signature humbuckers via Gibson, or Yvette Young, whose Ibanez Talman met Superman on a movie soundtrack, developed a signature pedal with Walrus Audio and is helping emo kids sleep with music. We feel bad…

HISTORICALLY, FENDER LIKES to change or refresh its ranges every four or five years, and here, the new American Professional Classic range replaces the American Performer models we first saw in 2019. The new range covers a lot of ground. Along with our featured Strat there’s an HSS version, a Tele, a “Hot Shot” variant that blends in some Strat, plus Jazzmaster and Jaguar offsets and a trio of bass models. Made in Corona, California, these new models, like the out-going Performers, are the start-up USA guitars. While certain USA-made brands’ start-up models can come across as not quite finished, that’s not the impression here. In its opulent Faded Firemist Gold, the overall attention to detail of this new Stratocaster is — not least at this price point — very…

IN THIS LESSON, I’d like to talk about how to solo and create harmonized melody lines utilizing dyads, which many guitarists refer to as “double-stops.” Although, technically, the term double-stop means two strings held down with a single finger, it is widely used to refer to any two notes sounded together. The most commonly used dyads/double-stops on the guitar are pairs of notes that are a 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th or octave apart. A great example of how I use double-stops can be heard on the new Fearless Flyers song “Anaheim.” If you’re familiar with my music, you know that a big part of my sound is harmonizing pentatonic scales. For example, as demonstrated in FIGURE 1, I’m playing the D major pentatonic scale (D, E, F #, A, B)…

MY FAVORITE ENSEMBLE to play in is the power trio. With only three instruments — electric guitar, bass and drum kit — there’s so much freedom to explore concepts like space, time and dynamic range. There is something really special that can happen when three musicians are playing off of each other and interacting in real time. Think of all the adventurous, exciting moments you’ve heard in the recordings of the great rock guitar/bass/drums lineups, such as the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Cream, Mountain, Rush, Led Zeppelin, the Who, Free and others. One of the ways I like to take advantage of what the power trio lineup affords me as a guitar player is when we are in improvisation mode, expanding away from an established song structure in order to venture…

NEWS OF ACE Frehley’s passing on October 16 wasn’t just a shock to the Kiss Army, but to the rock and guitar communities. After all, this was a man who had survived car crashes, police chases, addiction, relapse and two tumultuous stints in the Hottest Band in the World, Kiss. The general thought was that the guitarist, affectionately known as “Space Ace,” would live forever… or at least longer than a mere 74 years. What’s more, if he were going to be taken out, surely it wouldn’t come at the hands of not one but two seemingly innocuous falls in his home studio, right? Wrong. As Frehley told Guitar World in 2024, he had experienced balance issues throughout his entire guitar-playing life. “I’m mostly a guitar-into-an-amp type of player,” he…

1 Marshall Modified Amplifiers $3,449-$3,849, marshall.com WE ALL KNOW Marshall amps have played a huge part in some of the greatest guitar albums ever made, but it’s worth noting that a small portion of these genre-defining tones were produced by circuits that had been modded in some way or another, and therefore could no longer be considered “stock.” Slash, for example, used a JMP 1959 Super Lead modded by Frank Levi on Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction. Another big name in the Marshall mod universe was José Arredondo, the now-deceased tech who customized heads for Eddie Van Halen, Mick Mars and James Hetfield. Until this point, however, the U.K. amp company had largely stuck to their guns and chosen not to acknowledge that certain players were enjoying tones that…

LAST MONTH, I spoke about writing heavy-sounding riffs, which is what I’m tasked with when working with Black Country Communion, featuring Glenn Hughes on bass and vocals, Jason Bonham on drums and Derek Sherinian on keyboards. The music of this band is very much inspired by the classic recordings of bands like Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Free, Mountain and others. When approaching writing a heavy riff, sometimes simplicity wins the day. Our namesake song, “Black Country,” was written by accident. I was at Glenn’s house — we’ve written all our songs in the same writing room so far, with me playing a guitar through an old Epiphone amp. We were just talking and wrapping up the day, and without any thought I began playing the riff in FIGURE 1, which…

SHINEDOWN “Three Six Five” RELEASED AS A single, ahead of Shinedown’s upcoming eighth studio album, this simple, well-crafted song, whichwas no doubt at least partially inspired by Def Leppard’s “Hysteria” and U2’s “With or Without You,” has guitarist Zach Myers flatpicking eighth notes with a clean bridge-pickup tone, laying down a repeating eight-bar pattern of ringing chordal arpeggios (see Rhy. Fig. 1, bar 1) that share three common tones, with only the bass note changing every two bars. Notice Myers’ use of his open G string throughout, which, paired with the F note on the D string’s 4th fret, lends the part a bright, twangy shimmer and also creates a beautifully dissonant minor-2nd (half-step) interval that’s sandwiched between the highest and lowest notes of each chord. When forming each chord…