Innehållsförteckning för February 2018 från Total Guitar

By the time you read this, we’ll be a couple of weeks into 2018: all of the usual resolutions have either taken hold, or been cast aside, but there’s one that we think never changes, and that’s getting better at playing. This month, we’ve put together a series of lessons to help you with that, no matter what level your playing is at right now. With our guide, you’ll be able to focus on various areas of your guitar playing and see results quickly. Elsewhere, we’ve lined up the usual mix of tab, artist interviews and gear reviews. Talking of which, in the spirit of the new year, we’ve reviewed the new Trace Elliot Elf: a pocket-size bass amp. This is the first bass product review we’ve featured in TG…

1 “I use a Fender Jazzmaster. You don’t usually associate Fenders with heavier bands, you might think ESP or something like that, but I just really wanted a guitar with some real bite to it. And Fenders are renowned for having that bright, more rocky tone. So that’s why I decided to go with it, something a bit against the norm.” 2 “I wanted something that was very different. I love guitars like ESPs, and even BC Richs as well. But I wanted to rock up with something that was a different so people were like, ‘What’s this band about? What do they sound like?’ Don’t give it away up front, be a dark horse.” 3 “The only thing I modded was putting in a Bare Knuckle Nailbomb pickup. The…

In the 80s and 90s players such as Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jeff Healey and Gary Moore led a new wave of guitarists who took the feel of classic blues artists and fused it with the energy and aggression of rock. Players like Kenny Wayne Shepherd and Eric Johnson took this a step further and today Joe Bonamassa stands atop the blues-rock pile. Inspired by these greats, this month we’ve recorded a rollicking jam track for you to play along to. Our uptempo blues-rocker opens with stabs on an E7#9 chord. This complex chord has a discordant, jazzy sound but has earned its place in rock history as the trademark ‘Jimi Hendrix chord’. The verse riff uses the E minor pentatonic scale and moves between the I and IV (E and…

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 which frets you 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 notation. TG also includes a timestamp to tell you where in the original track you’ll find each example…

“NO STEREOTYPE FITS... AND THEREIN LIES ITS BEAUTY” We need to talk about image. We need to talk about how, rightly or wrongly, we have certain long-held ideas about particular guitars or brands. If you think of a vintage Strat or Les Paul, you might associate it with haggard, blue-collar players who could tell you a tale or two, sonny. Picture a Gibson SG, and you perhaps think of some of the great rock and metal players who’ve wielded one over the years. Think about PRS and things become less obvious. We’re not saying it suffers with an image problem, more that it’s guilty by lack of association with a particular genre or style. Who exactly is a typical PRS player? The old cliche goes that they’re dentist’s guitars, stockpiled…

“THE ‘NASA MEETS STRADIVARIUS’ APPROACH TO FLATTOP DESIGN” There’s a lot in a name for us guitarists; expectations based on our past experiences mean we may well have certain preconceptions when we pick up a Tele, plug into a Marshall head or strum a Martin dreadnought. But when we check out a new name without any of that, the slate is cleaner. Which is where we’re at when this Mayson acoustic arrives. And it’s always good to welcome a new brand, especially one that’s making ambitious claims. The company’s Alex Wang claims to be taking the ‘NASA meets Stradivarius’ approach of acoustic flattop design “all the way back to the designing table, re-inventing each part of the acoustic guitar”. That’s certainly more than we were expecting for the price, but…

CHRIS BIRD This month, Chris tasked TG’s very own prog guru Charlie Griffiths with transcribing and recording backing audio for Queen’s epic Bohemian Rhapsody – opera sections included! Well, Charlie is a huge Queen fan; he even owns a Brian May guitar. Check out his frankly incredible efforts on your Guitar Skills CD. MICHAEL ASTLEY-BROWN Mike limbered up his fingers, adopted his patented ‘speed-picking grimace’ and set about tickling his shred bone this issue. First, he got his hands on one of the most affordable fan-fret guitars on the market before moving on to appraise a batch o’ Satch for this month’s new release reviews. ROB LAING Rob is feeling extra positive about guitar music in 2018, and it’s not just because Tool might release a new album. He talks…

“I SPLIT MY EYE OPEN AS THE GUITAR CRACKED ME IN THE FACE... BUT I DIDN’T STOP PLAYING” I got my first real six string “My very first guitar was a Taylor 514 acoustic when I was 15. I was very into acoustic playing and I liked acoustic bands. I was also into r’n’b and at the time it was about very simple licks. I suppose when you hear the likes of Breakeven you can hear those r’n’b influences. “Even though I’ve grown up in Ireland and I’m used to rock, I liked the R&B licks in the music of Stevie Wonder and Motown. I started to take the guitar more seriously when I was 17 or 18 and it was really to support my songwriting. I never liked riffs…

Guitarists love ‘stupid drummer’ memes, but we’re the butt of a few jokes ourselves. Top of the list? ‘How do you make a guitarist stop playing? Show them some sheet music.’ Although tab is great for showing you where to play on the fretboard and getting the detail of the guitar’s intricate techniques, it’s not so good for sharing written ideas with other musicians. It also doesn’t tell you about rhythm. With this in mind, it’s good to understand the basics of music reading. Even if you never become a demon sight reader, just a small amount of information can take you a long way. WHAT YOU WILL LEARN Learn the lines on the stave Learn the spaces on the stave Read four bars of notation 1 NOTES ON THE…

DAN “I’ve been listening to that band for years, dialling it left to work out all the intricacies in Malcolm Young’s playing. I felt like there was someone else out there that had an important role in a band, without trying to solo or do any flashy stuff. Those full chords when he’d get to the chorus would have so much impact. It’s almost more about the holding back. For the live shows, I worked out where Justin could play little parts of rhythm that would really help the song – where we do that whole Angus and Malcolm thing. It becomes natural, we don’t have to explain anything to each other. The night we got the news I was on stage getting quite teary eyed! He really inspired me…

Released in 1975, this tune from Queen’s aptly-titled A Night At The Opera album features an unconventional structure of an opening ballad, an iconic guitar solo, before breaking down into an operatic section and a hard-rocking riff fest. Due to the diversity of the track you will need to extract a mix of tones from your guitar rig and experiment with dynamics. For the most part our tab follows Brian’s guitar part note for note, but for some sections, such as the opera section, we have created a guitar part. Wherever there are multi-layered harmony guitars, we have followed Brian’s live versions. His lead style is very expressive and lyrical – achieved via controlled vibrato and string bending, so aim for a majestic feel! CHORDS The majority of the major…

This month’s repertoire booster was sung and co-written by the late Ben E King – the lead singer in The Drifters during the late 1950s who quit the band to go solo in 1960. Surely his most iconic song, Stand By Me, has been covered by a long list of artists including Otis Redding, John Lennon and Florence + The Machine. King’s 1961 original is an archetypal, gospel-tinged, r’n’b classic with a double bass riff to die for and lush string arrangements – and it’s great to play. You only need four chords. Granted one is a full barre shape (F#m), but the rest are easy open chords. So this is a great tune to practise if you’re working on barre chords. If you’re finding that F#m chord too much…

GOLDEN ERA Mike Dawes celebrates TG poll win and looks ahead Mike Dawes’s star was already in ascendancy when TG featured him in the Unplugged interview back in issue 297, but things really started taking off after this with his instrumental cover of Metallica’s One going viral (25 million views in just one week!), drawing more ears to an exceptional fingerstyle player. Since then he’s finished the year with another landmark: being voted the Best Acoustic Guitarist In The World Right Now in our MusicRadar.com poll. “‘I’m beyond humbled to have been nominated for this list,” Mike tells us. “I couldn’t have imagined even being selected. Seeing as many of my favourite players and friends were in this poll I do disagree with the result, but it is a huge…

The second single from Snow Patrol’s fourth studio album, Chasing Cars was a huge hit for the band in 2006. Rockschool’s acoustic version is arranged for two guitars – guitar 1 plays the main riff followed by chords; guitar 2 opens with chords before outlining the vocal melody. Part of what makes the melody so striking is its use of notes that aren’t found in the chords. For example, in bar 10 there are three melody notes: C#, G# and A; guitar 1 plays A and E notes. Now, although they aren’t all played at the same time here, A, C# and E sound like an A chord – they’re the notes of an A after all. The G# note adds colour. Similarly in bar 12 the opening C# melody…

The big news from the 2018 SE range is that, for the first time, there are guitars for lefties. In typical PRS style, the reason it took so long for it to include left-handed models is down to perfectionism. It turns out you don’t just flip the machines upside down to make left-handed models. The company could have quite easily outsourced elements of the manufacturing process to third parties to meet demand, but that’s not the PRS way. Instead, PRS developed the specific tooling, techniques and expertise it needed in-house so it could maintain complete control over the quality of the finished product.…

“IT ISN’T GOING TO TURN YOU INTO PLINI OVERNIGHT...” Before you make a frenzied call to your optometrist, we should point out that this latest seven-string from Jackson’s value-for-money X Series is a multi-scale (or fan-fret) guitar, which is something that, until now, you’d have struggled to find in this price range. A multi-scale design has a longer scale length for lower strings and a shorter one for higher strings, making for improved tuning and intonation. This gives the low B the potential to further vibrate and promises to be more comfortable to play too. On to the matter at hand, the DKAF7 MS takes the extended-range Jackson Dinky format and pushes it to its tech-metal limits (an eight-string incarnation is also available). Besides the 647mm-685mm (25.5-27") scale length, the…

The idea of adding extra sustain to a guitar signal has been around since early electric players started toying with sympathetic feedback between amp and guitar, with Jimi Hendrix perhaps being the master of the technique. Indeed, such was the connection between distortion, fuzzboxes and high-volume amps that many pedals, such as the Big Muff, were marketed as ‘sustainers’. With the advent of digital looping, however, it became possible to create infinite loops, although smooth-sounding pads have often been elusive, and many of the best boutique micro-loopers like the Hexe Revolver and MWFX Judder are more used by glitch musicians. Today, we’re putting several units through their paces, from the ubiquitous EBow to the newest challenger, the gorgeous Plus Pedal. EBow £119 ENDLESS POSSIBILITIES The EBow, or Energy Bow is…

Not only are Marmozets duo Jack Bottomley and Sam Macintyre living proof that the UK is still capable of producing great rock bands, when it came to recording Marmozets’ second album, Knowing What You Know Now they (stomp)boxed clever, using their live rigs to cement their identity and it also enables them to recreate their weird and wonderful dynamic on stage. “I fill in the gaps,” explains Jack of their core chemistry. “Sam’s sort of the bricks and I’m the cement in between.” Let’s take a look at the unusual components they’re building the Marmozets sound with... JACK BOTTOMLEY GUITARS ALPHER MAKO ELITE THINLINE 1 “They started making guitars about four years ago and they’ve just moved HQs towards north Yorkshire. I’ve been friends with them for years and they…

1 LEARN STAGECRAFT FROM YOUR HEROES  “I’m a relatively shy person, at least I was when I was a kid. Singing and playing is one thing but having to communicate, for some reason it’s a little jarring. It’s like public speaking, it’s really engaged. But you kind of learn that. I watch my heroes – I watch videos of them and how they perform and their stagecraft. But you’ve got to be yourself too.” 2 CATCH ATTENTION WITH YOUR COVERS  “ We were doing all these blues festivals and we needed something wacky and way off the wall. I was a huge Sabbath fan and they were a blues band for a while so we did War Pigs. And people loved it… well some people really hated it and said,…

01 12 INSPIRING CHORDS… TRACK 23 Build upon major and minor chords with some extensions guaranteed to bring dramatic and interesting sounds to your playing 9th, 11th and 13th extensions These shapes are all played with their root notes at the 3rd fret and use 9th, 11th and 13th extensions to add colour to the core sound of the chord. HEAR IT! JOE PASS AUTUMN LEAVES Jazz legend Joe Pass is a master when it comes to using chords in a melodic way. The trick? Make the highest note of each chord part of your melody line. Chords with open strings These chords include open strings to create rich sounds with close intervals, which would be too tricky to play using only fretted notes. HEAR IT! DREAM THEATER THE SILENT…

Brian famously plays his homemade Red Special guitar equipped with three single-coil pickups, which can be used in a multitude of switchable combinations, including in-phase and out-of-phase options. Add to this the Vox AC30 amp and a treble booster pedal to add gain and you have the core of Brian’s sound. You can approximate the tone with a Strat-type guitar by experimenting with different pickup configurations and subtle changes of your volume knob. You may want to track down an old English sixpence and use it as a pick – a trick long favoured by Brian.…

As one of the first guitarists to play blues on the electric guitar, the great T-Bone Walker would influence legends such as BB King, Chuck Berry, Jimi Hendrix (who emulated his trick of playing with his teeth) and many others. It’s probably fair to say that anyone who has ever played blues on the electric guitar has been (directly or not) influenced by him. This month’s examples are styled after two of Walker’s famous recordings. Firstly, the classic Stormy Monday inspired a slow 12/8 blues, giving lots of space for expressive, loose phrasing. By this we mean feel free to play ahead of or behind the beat – it sounds much more effective than metronomically perfect timing. You’ll be surprised just how ‘out of time’ you can push or pull…

“OCCASIONALLY, IF I’M PLAYING LEAD GUITAR I’LL HIT THE THIRD CHANNEL, BUT I LIKE TO KEEP IT AS RAW AS POSSIBLE” Making the transition from amateur musician to someone who generates a living from their art has always been a difficult journey. The slog of playing local venues doesn’t always pay off, and sometimes the art has to come second to a business plan. But for Joe Francis, aka Winter Mountain, the grind never got him down. “There are times when you think, ‘This is tough, do I really want it?’” he says of the days on the pub circuit. “Sometimes you drive to Scotland for £50 to play to 30 people and you wonder if it’s worth it, but if you can answer ‘yes’ to that question then you’re…

Welcome to the GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome*) Station! Every issue, TG scours the market for the hottest new gear and brings you transparent reviews that you can trust. From the smallest of accessories that make your life easier, to big investments, such as brand new guitars, amps and effects pedals – if it’s worth your attention, you’ll find it here! HOW WE TEST CURATION Our product selection is driven by our love of gear. We select the most exciting products on the market every month to bring you opinions you can trust. FACE-VALUE REVIEWS We’re not gear snobs here at Total Guitar. We judge it on whether it looks good, sounds good and plays well – not by the name on the headstock. NO SNAKE OIL You won’t find us…

GIBSON 2018 LES PAUL TRIBUTE This US-made Les Paul shows that PRS really is squaring up to the big boys by putting its SE Custom in this price bracket. LTD EC-1000 For metal players, ESP has a certain edge. The LTD EC-1000 is a superb solid body with active EMG pickups and is a time-served classic of the genre. EPIPHONE LEE MALIA SIGNATURE LES PAUL ARTISAN Despite bearing the name of one of the UK’s top metal guitarists, this is a versatile beast with coil-splittable Gibson USA pickups.…

There’s something exhilarating about seeing guitar companies take an idea and run with it. This month’s round-up might want for a catchier title, but it has four guitars that embrace the asymmetrical promise of the Gibson’s legendary Firebird and 70s cult favourite RD models and retool it for today’s player. In the case of the Epiphone Joe Bonamassa ‘Treasure’ Firebird-I, today’s player is one of the world’s foremost bluesmen, and his signature ’bird has been engineered from some genuine Gibson DNA that’s been preserved in amber since the 1960s. Then there’s the Hagström Fantomen, a guitar in the mould of the Gibson RD and designed for the Nameless Ghouls of the Swedish metal band Ghost. We have the smooth contours of Bill Kelliher of Mastodon’s LTD Sparrowhawk, a guitar not…

The first song I remember... I Want To Hold Your Hand – The Beatles “When I was growing up my parents listened to The Beatles and old R&B and soul, so there was a lot of Earth, Wind & Fire, Commodores... they would listen to what they called ‘the nice Beatles’ like I Want To Hold Your Hand. I wasn’t allowed to listen to the hippy Beatles, because that was ‘the bad Beatles’. There was a friend of mine who had Sgt Pepper’s, I went over and I remember being like, ‘What the fuck is this shit?’ It was so weird and cool and whacked out, it was really intriguing.” The song that made me want to play… Black Sabbath – Black Sabbath “I was always pretty musical. I always…