Innehållsförteckning för April 2016 från Total Guitar

Blues is simple, right? Well, not entirely. Properly nailing it is way more than just running up and down the same minor pentatonic shape for 12 bars. At the heart of pretty much all rock-based guitar playing sits the blues, and this month we’re going to help you play it better. From nailing those fiddly little tricks used by the masters, to mastering authentic 12-bar chord shapes, and incorporating the classic licks of the blues legends. Of course, this stuff isn’t just confined to blues jams, you can apply it to loads of different styles! Elsewhere in this month’s issue, we catch up with Gaslight Anthem frontman, Brian Fallon as he embarks on his first ‘proper’ solo album, and our songwriting theme continues with Jason Isbell – who just picked…

Meet Kelvin Jones. He’s going to be famous. The 20 year-old Stevenage songwriter picked-up guitar five years back, but broke through when his track, Call You Home, caught the attention of Reddit in February 2014 and had a million YouTube views overnight. “It was like winning the lottery when you haven’t bought a ticket,” laughs Kelvin. “It was just so surreal. It was only like a year after that I was like, ‘Holy crap… that happened!’” Combining a direct Noel Gallagher-esque style of songwriting, with an innate pop appeal absorbed from Michael Jackson and John Mayer, Kelvin’s debut, Stop The Moment, is packed with to-the-point tunes. “In my opinion that’s where you should come from when you write,” reckons Kelvin. “‘I want to say something and here it is.’” It’s…

“IT’S A relatively new acquisition for me, I decided to treat myself to a guitar to have at home. When I tour I have a pair of Gibson Hummingbirds, which are great and they take a battering and all the rest of it, but this is a step above I’d say.” “I WAS quite surprised that I ended up with a Country Western of all the Gibson range. I was looking at maybe getting an old Dove, or one of the original Hummingbirds – that seemed like it would be more up my street. But there was something about this guitar when I started playing it that leaped out and grabbed me. It has a really nice full-bodied tone to it. I’ve been learning a lot of bluegrass flatpicking lately…

GRRRETSCH! I’ve never been that bothered by Gretsch guitars, then I saw your last issue while in the supermarket. First, what a great looking cover! A lady, Michael Jackson and David Bowie? I nearly dropped my can of Heinz in my hurry to the checkout! I mainly play indie and rock stuff, and loads of my favourite bands use semi-acoustics, so I’ve been thinking of adding an Epiphone Dot to my Squier Tele, but that Gretsch really caught my eye. I always thought they were big hollow guitars that fed back and were played by people with too much hair gel who spent all their time talking about old American cars. But your magazine changed my mind. This time next week I’ll be the proud owner of the Streamliner G2622T…

We guitarists have almost limitless scale shapes at our disposal but creating more choice can be a daunting prospect if you’re new to blues. These five useful shapes are designed to help develop your approach to blues and perhaps add a bit more sophistication to your playing. We’ve presented all of these shapes in the key of G so try moving them to other fretboard positions to play in different keys. TRACK 33 It’s easy to get stuck in a ‘box’ type shape in one position, so this wider approach to the scale that takes its name from blues can inspire many new approaches to improvising. The finger positions and changes can be tricky so make sure to practise slowly and try making up solo ideas using shorter sections of…

While he’ll be touring Incarnate with Killswitch, Adam Dutkiewicz’s death metal project will finally see the light of day, seven years after it was conceived while he toured the USA alongside Cannibal Corpse and The Black Dahlia Murder as part of the now-defunct Mayhem Festival. “I just remember every day we were doing a signing right when Cannibal hit the stage,” he says. “We were in a signing tent and all you could hear was this monstrous voice. I thought, ‘Jesus Christ listen to that guy’s fucking throat’.” Through a typically hilarious imitation of George ‘Corpsegrinder’ Fisher, Adam explains how this daily lesson in extremity resulted in a collaboration that will obviously split fans of both camps, but excite those open-minded enough to welcome the melding of styles. “We’re going…

It was the sight of rocker Buddy Holly holding his Sunburst Fender Stratocaster that fuelled young America’s love affair with the electric guitar in the 50s. For most kids however, owning a Fender was an impossible dream so many turned to the Sears Roebuck & Company catalogue (or that of Montgomery Ward, the source of Jack White’s iconic red and white Airline “JB Hutto” model he made so iconic in The White Stripes). Sears had been selling musical instruments via its catalogue for years and its pages reflected current trends: for example, ukuleles and mandolins in 1915, banjos in the 1920s and so on. By the mid-50s, electric guitars were all the rage and Sears sourced affordable American-built models from Danelectro in New Jersey, Harmony in Chicago, and rebranded them…

THE story of AMT Electronics began in the Soviet Union in the early 1980s, when engineer Sergei Marichev developed an interest in music. Frustrated at the lack of quality musical equipment available behind the Iron Curtain at the time, Marichev set out to build high-spec electronics using his own knowledge and expertise. Three decades later, his company still operates from the city of Omsk, West Siberia. Under our scrutiny on this occasion are the Legend Amps B2 and O2, a pair of dirt-delivering, amplifier-aping preamps, plus the true bypass RY-1 Reverberry Digital Reverb and similarly spec’d SY-1 Stutterfly Digital Delay pedal. While AMT once specialised in ultra-compact stompboxes, our four units come in a standard-size metal case topped with a robust on/off foot switch, with the option to power with…

KORG GRIPTUNE Gripping stuff IT JUST wouldn’t be a new year without a new Korg clip-on tuner, and as ever, the Japanese tech giant hasn’t disappointed. The petite GripTune headstock tuner promises “casual yet precise” tuning, with +/- 1 cent tuning accuracy and a highly visible display screen despite its ultra-compact design. Weighing in at just 13 grams, even the most finicky of players are unlikely to notice this clip-on on their headstock, while the screen’s adjustable angle ensures it’s easy to see what you’re doing. What’s more, the GripTune can attach to just about any guitar and also features an auto power-off function. (£14.39, www.korg.com ) ORANGE ‘O’ EDITION HEADPHONES Amp up your ’phones FIRST MARSHALL, and now Orange is making a serious play for the…

CHRIS BIRD THIS month, after flagging a ride down to the crossroads for inspiration, ‘Blind Lemon’ Bird and ’Sonny Boy’ Steve Allsworth put together this month’s blues cover feature. Coincidentally, Chris’ playing has suddenly improved. We’re just hoping he hasn’t made any Faustian pacts to get there… JOSH GARDNER TWICE. That’s how many times has Josh’s 1970s Marshall combo been on the front of TG in recent years. And yet not once have they asked the man himself to lend his modelling skills to the cover of your favourite guitar magazine. He’s starting to take it a bit personally now, to be honest… ROB LAING ROB and his dictaphone have been chasing down a variety of artists to help Total Guitar live up to its name; Jason Isbell, Slipknot and…

EXCEPTIONAL EXCELLENT GOOD FOR FANS OF POOR Deftones GORE It’s surely not coincidental that Deftones’ songs often mirror the ebb and flow within their ranks. Reports that Stephen Carpenter’s creative involvement here was more minimal compared to the relative band harmony that birthed Diamond Eyes and Koi No Yokan leave this Chino Moreno-driven album offering less immediate gratification than its predecessors, but presents their most diverse collection yet. Carpenter’s eight-string still creates churning bottom-end slabs for Acid Hologram and the title track to build on, and his rhythm sound anchors this album’s explorations to a welcome sense of familiarity; often allowing the two guitarists’ visions to coexist. Even what initially seems to be the trademark Deftones grind of Doomed User blends in the twist of a traditional heavy metal riff.…

Each of these easy lead guitar techniques has been distilled from the styles of many of the most important blues artists such as Stevie Ray Vaughan, BB King, Albert King, Jimi Hendrix, and more. All these players use many of the same techniques and ideas and this is at the heart of learning and developing your blues playing style: learn the basic licks and phrases and then make them your own. Gradually, you’ll start to notice them peppered throughout the recorded history of blues and beyond. Finally, remember to never be afraid of playing a blues cliché, since they only became that way purely because they sounded great in the first place. TRICK 1 Quarter-tone bends TRACK 15 This essential trick will help bring life to ordinary fretted notes. It’s…

The object of any turnaround is to take a chord progression back to the start. Sure, you can just finish the basic progression and go back to the start if you like, but the turnaround mixes things up and gives a bit of movement at the end of the sequence. Turnarounds usually take up the last two bars (although the exact number of bars can vary) and most often they leave the progression hanging on the V chord. In more complex music you’ll often hear two contrary melodies, for example where the bass line goes up in pitch and the top melody descends, and this is often achieved by more than one instrument. Follow our three examples to see how it all works. Turnaround #1 TRACK 39 THIS SIMPLE ascending…

It’s all in the hands… “The main ingredients are having a set of hands that know what to do with a piece of plank and some wire bolted across it! Once you’ve got the hands, that’s the beginning of it.” Pedals are no substitute… “Joe’s very much into the purity of his instruments and his amplifiers. He has great equipment. I love the distortion of an overdriven amp or the cleanliness of a loud clean amplifier. Pedals don’t do it for me. Pedals and modelling amps are just substitutes for the real thing.” Use the room… “I don’t use many room mics… but the room is important because I like it to be comfortable. I love Grand Victor because it’s not a pristine room. It’s a ‘fuck you’ studio, in…

“My secret is using the cheapest, thinnest picks I can find for acoustics. Most people use hard picks and forget it’s a light instrument – you should not be hammering that thing. The harder you hit the acoustic, the less sound is coming out of it. I think the best recording of any acoustic is on the early Pink Floyd records, particularly Wish You Were Here. I don’t care what anyone says, that’s the best acoustic sound in the world. Gilmour’s not slamming his guitar, it’s a gentle strum and that’s the trick. A light touch. You can get trills and pull-offs in there, like doing rhythm but also playing leads at the same time and accompanying yourself.”…

There’s a number of unwritten rock rules any aspiring guitarist may need to acknowledge during their quest to make it, and some of them are quite depressing. First up, have a stage persona that consists of always playing it cool, holding back your enthusiasm and maintaining a healthy dose of cynicism at all times. Secondly, if you haven’t made it anywhere near big by the age of 30 you’re unfortunately going to need to make that rent-paying day job a priority. And finally, if you’re band has the word ‘Beach’ in their name, then you automatically suck. James Alex either didn’t get the memos on any of those, or if he did he gave them the finger. “There was this band that said if you had beach in your name…

TRACY CHAPMAN – FAST CAR Fast Car is played with a capo at the 2nd fret, which means that the ‘open’ strings are now situated at the 2nd fret and they sound a tone higher than standard tuning. The first two chords in the riff use the open C and G shapes you probably already know, but, due to the capo, they produce the sound of D and A chords. The next two chords are F#m and Eadd11, which are played higher up the neck and include ‘open’ (or, more to the point, capo’d) strings to produce a pleasing sound that rings out against the high fretted notes. For all four chords use your thumb to pick the bass notes on the fifth and sixth strings and let them ring…

Seagull doesn’t do gimmicks, it just makes guitars rather well HEADSTOCK THE headstock is quite narrow, but allows straight string pull over the nut to the tuners, which can help tuning, especially if you use a lot of dropped or altered tunings. We also get a quality Tusq nut, new-design tuners and even new company logo! PREAMP UNDER the saddle is a new- design EPM transducer, while the small-footprint preamp includes a fast, accurate tuner, two-band – treble and bass – EQ, plus volume. It gets the job done nicely BODY THE new-for-2016 Burnt Umber finish has a real old-school look. We’re not sure if it quite matches that modernistic headstock, but maybe that’s just us! AT A GLANCE TOP: Solid cedar BACK & SIDES: Laminated wild cherry NECK: Maple…

ARGUABLY their best known song, Sharp Dressed Man was taken from ZZ Top’s commercial breakthrough album, 1983’s Eliminator, which propelled them from a not so well known blues band to international superstars. The two solos in particular are dripping with Muddy Waters-inspired bluesy doublestops and quarter-tone bends. Guitarist/vocalist Billy Gibbons played the first solo using a slide. if you plan to do the same, make sure to position your slide directly over the frets for accurate pitching. Wear your slide on your third finger and use your first and second fingers for additional string muting. One particularly tricky aspect of Gibbons’ lead style is his use of pick and fingers-style ‘hybrid’ picking, most notably after bar 21 of the outro. The idea is to allow you to pick notes on…

HALF THE World Away was originally released as a B-side to the single, Whatever in 1994, but became perhaps Oasis’ best-known non-album track when it was used as the theme music to the long-running BBC sitcom, The Royle Family. The recording is a stripped down affair with Noel Gallagher providing the vocals, guitar and drums, and Paul ‘Bonehead’ Arthurs playing acoustic guitar and keyboards. As the chord progression and top-line melody are so strong, the song is ideally suited to a solo acoustic guitar and vocal arrangement. We’ve tabbed out the electric guitar part from the first verse, starting at 0:11 where it is played in its purest form without any variations. The strummed acoustic guitar follows exactly the same rhythm as the picked electric arpeggios so the…

WHAT IS TAB? TAB is short for tablature, a notational system used to give detailed information as to where notes should be played on the fretboard. Tab appears underneath conventional music notation as six horizontal lines that represent the strings of the guitar, from the sixth (thick) string at the bottom to the first (thin) string at the top. On these lines, numbers represent the frets where you should place your fingers. For example, an A note on the 2nd fret, third string, will be shown as a number ‘2’ on the third line down on the tab. Unfretted strings are shown with a ‘0’. The key and time signatures are shown in the traditional notation. TG also includes a timestamp to tell you where in the original track you’ll…

10. Johnny Cash – The Muppet Show (1980) Before the critical reevaluation of his genius in the 2000s, the Man In Black took the work where he found it. In 1980, that meant a barndance skit on The Muppet Show, with Cash puffing into twin harmonicas and canoodling with Miss Piggy (who tells him to “comb his hair”). 9. The Darkness – ZingZillas (2012) Back in 2012, sleep-deprived new dad Dan Hawkins signed up his band for the music-themed CBeebies show. “Since becoming a dad,” he reasoned, “I’ve often found my sanity being saved after sleepless nights by watching ZingZillas…” 8. Gene Simmons – The Mike Douglas Show (1974) The Mike Douglas Show was pure US daytime TV…

THAT’S A WRAP! I have noticed in some recent issues a number of shredders have what looks like a velcro watch strap wrapped around the strings at the headstock. What are they and what is the purpose of these straps? Is it just a shredder thing or could it be handy in other styles? MARTIN THORPE, via email You’re talking about a string mute, Martin. Indeed these are very popular with shredders, who use them to cut down on string noise as they’re blistering up and down the fretboard. Gruv Gear FretWraps are a common example and will set you back about a tenner, but if you want to try it on the cheap, get yourself a hairband. It needs to be thick enough to mute the strings, but…

HBC SCOT HENDERSON, JEFF BERLIN AND DENNIS CHAMBERS “Listen to their version of [Billy Cobham song] Stratus on that record; they just kill it. You can’t get better than that. There’s just so many ideas and concepts just within Henderson going off when he’s improvising. It’s like jumping off a top stair and landing on his feet at the bottom. There’s a lot to digest, there’s definitely a lot to chew on for guitar fans as far as information goes.”…

IF YOU think of slide as just something for blues, you’re missing out. Something More Than Free’s songs 24 Frames, Speed Trap Town and the cinematic outro to Children Of Children show Jason demonstrating just how effective slide guitar can be in a rock and acoustic context. “It was something that appealed to me very early on just because of the vocal quality; the micro tones you can find,” says Jason. “You can be very emotive and expressive when you don’t have to worry about frets.” But it all started with a pocket knife… On a knife edge… “My grandad played lap slide with the back of a pocket knife, so my first exposure to that was definitely in a blues setting. He was more of a gospel musician but…

TRACKS 23-32 Here we’re looking at some variations on basic ‘7’ chords (E7, A7 and so on). The more sophisticated sound of these chords will take you way beyond basic blues and closer to jazz-blues. Our examples are based on a B root note but they are all moveable shapes so playing them in different positions on the fretboard changes the pitch but keeps the chord type the becomes same. For B example b 9. B9 played one fret higher is C9. B9 played one fret lower 12-BAR BLUES GENERATOR Learn the most important chord progression in the most important keys and you’ll always know where you are in a 12-bar blues jam THE MOST common chord progression is known as a ‘12-bar blues’, which, predictably is 12 bars long…

“Kevin was like, ‘You have to trust me that I have your best interests in mind’” “I had this Epiphone FT-45 Cortez 1964 that a very generous fan gifted to me at the end of 2014 and it had a DeArmond pickup. He wouldn’t take any money for it so I gave him a bobble-head and a bunch of T-shirts and other stuff! It’s one of the nicest sounding acoustic guitars I own! When we were doing This Train, we were looking for a sound that was a little different. I tried the Tele and the Tele was too bright, the Les Paul was too dark and the Gretsch didn’t work at all. So I picked up the FT-45 Cortez plugged it into the two high-powered Twins and the Bassmans.…

It captures much of what made the original model so attractive BLENDER WITH both pickups engaged, the Blender knob enables you to sweep between the two, creating a wide spread of unique sounds DUNCAN DESIGNED SILVERTONE has spec’d a pair of great-sounding mini-humbuckers for its 1423 reboot. They come wrapped in Gretsch Filter’Tron-style covers BRIDGE UNLIKE the original ’59 model 1423, the new Silvertone features an anchored Tone-O-Matic bridge that is fully adjustable for height and intonation AT A GLANCE BODY: Mahogany NECK: Mahogany, bolt-on SCALE: 629mm (24.75") FINGERBOARD: Rosewod, 317.5mm (12.5") radius FRETS: 20 medium nickel silver PICKUPS: 2x Duncan Designed mini-humbuckers CONTROLS: 2x volume, 2x tone, Blender, rotary three-way pickup selector switch HARDWARE: Chrome Tone-O-Matic bridge, trapeze tailpiece and vintage Kluson-style tuners LEFT-HANDED: No FINISH: Red Silver Flake…

WHEN YOU’RE learning to play any musical instrument, it’s essential to develop an ear for rhythm, pitch and harmony. Rhythm refers to the pulse and timing of music; pitch is how high or low the individual notes sound; and harmony is about relationships between notes played at the same time, for example, in a chord. RGT’s Preliminary Grade includes a selection of aural tests that assess your ability to maintain a tempo, recognise a time signature, identify the higher or lower of two notes, and recognise major and minor chords – listening skills that will help you jam with other musicians, compose your own music and simply be a better guitarist. Our lesson takes you through some of RGT’s listening tests. We’ve written them out in guitar tab for you…