Innehållsförteckning för September 2019 från Total Guitar

Without a doubt my favourite thing about Total Guitar is learning from the musicians we speak to. I’ve gone away from every single interview I’ve ever done or read here with something to inspire me or learn from. We talk to a wide range of players and nothing beats the insights of their experiences – in a studio, onstage or writing a song in a hotel room late at night. They’ve all made mistakes and won hard-fought victories so when they share their knowledge it’s great to pass that on to you so we can all benefit from it. And we’ve gone all-out with it in this issue, trawling a treasure trove of interviews for the most valuable and varied insights to inspire you. We’re also taking inspiration from Slipknot…

Dan Donegan has A, B, C and D rigs. There are backups for everything. One gets the suspicion that in some vacuum-sealed flight case backstage there’s even a Dan Donegan clone, to be animated in case of emergencies. Hey, with all this pyro onstage – and, folks, there is a piano on fire – that’s just being prudent. Besides, this readiness is just part of Donegan’s ferocious work ethic. Guitar-wise, his rig is simple. He uses his stock off-the-shelf signature Schecter in various finishes. Amps? Bogner and Egnater. Nice. But the rack – a rig built at Best-Tronics, Illinois, by his tech Jeremy Jayson – is quite something. They don’t call it the Mothership for nothing. Of course, with his Fractal, Donegan says he has what he needs for effects…

“I learned some songs that I liked to cross-pick with, White Freightliner Blues in particular. I learned that one, and then wanted to play it really fast, so working up the solos and the rhythm part on that one really pushed my cross-picking. I remember transcribing some David Grier solos, and there’s a lot of cross-picking there as well, so that helped me get more comfortable with skipping strings because he’ll play a low note on the sixth string and then cross-pick on some high strings. It’s really all over the place. So [my picking technique] was a combination of things: I didn’t really do many exercises and drills, it was just learning songs and tunes.” MOLLY TUTTLE TRACK 17 The idea here is to give an impression of fingerstyle…

“You know, a lot of people, they hear the players they like and they want to emulate them, and they’re like, ‘Okay, this player uses a Dual Rectifier with some delay, and maybe a compressor, and some other things’. And what that does is, well, the compressor will even out your volume and it’ll make the attack the same so that your legato pops out more without having to really fine-tune it, and then the delay will cover up your missing notes and that will also improve your legato. So if you go to a different amp with less gain and less compression, and not as wet a delay, you can actually hear what your playing sounds like, and I think that’s how you start to understand how to get…

“If you play blues for a living, work on country. If you play jazz for a living, work on blues. If you play country for a living, work on blues and jazz. And so on – if you play heavy metal, work on jazz and country. “Ultimately, what you don’t want to be is a one-dimensional player. There are plenty of guys out there who can play their music and their music alone, but if you invite them to play something else, they won’t know where to start. They don’t have any other kind of musical vocabulary. “Maybe that’s fine for some players, but for most guys, they’re missing out by limiting themselves to only one style. Think about this, too: if you do check out some other genres and…

“One thing that really helped me is learning how to do the same runs starting with an upstroke as well as a downstroke. If you’re playing two-notes-per-string, that will make every note the opposite of how you played it before, and will eventually help you break free as a player that is able to do either. Look at the great bluegrass players: they can just go wild and it doesn’t matter how they start their runs. “If you get to the point where you are free to do either, that’s when it’ll start to feel more like breathing. I’m still working on that – I still struggle. It’s a hard point to reach, but bluegrass guys like George Vincent make it look effortless. That guy just wails through his lines!…

“Lately, I’ve been improvising and have found it’s really important to know the language of intervals, which is the relationship between each note. If you look at the pentatonic scale, it’s important to know how each one relates to your key centre. Find out where your 3rds are all over the neck; don’t think of them as ‘C’ or whatever – think of them as your minor 3rds. Those become your colours, and soon you’ll find there’s your blue, there’s your yellow and so on. Improvising is so important for creating melodies. It’s a bad habit for guitarists to simply just play scales in order; it’s much cooler to hear melodies with wider intervals. “A good example of this would be The Beatles’ guitar solo on the song Birthday: the…

“Focus on simple phrasing, but when you do so, make sure that you hit pitch when you bend notes. Also, work on your vibrato technique, making sure that it’s got a nice singing quality to it. A big part of people’s signature sound is how they use vibrato. “Every time you play guitar, spend a good hour improvising and working on your bending and vibrato. Playing to a metronome is stale and not very helpful; try improvising to a backing track.” MARK TREMONTI 1 TRACK 35 Our Tremonti style example is designed to focus on string bending and vibrato. As with much of Mark’s playing, this example is tuned down to C# standard, so you may find a heavier set of strings easier to handle, or you may ‘over-cook’ it!…

“I’ve always liked that sound, especially the fourth [pickup position on a Strat]. When I was a kid, that was my favourite sound on the guitar; it’s even, it’s smooth, it has chimeyness but it still has bass. It’s the most colourful selection on the Strat. “Sort of in the centre of the fretboard; that sort of [sings root, 2nd, 5th], the one, the two and the five. I think that’s sort of my signature [sings again, cycles around]. “Everyone has those favourite things. The other thing I’ve heard people do and I think, ‘Oh, that’s maybe ’cos of me,’ is that close minor 9, like a major 7 thing [sings again], then if you smack it on the guitar, the percussive thing – that might be my doing.” JOHN…

Before going on to world domination with Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page was a go-to session guitarist during the mid-1960s, playing on records by artists as diverse as The Kinks, Marianne Faithfull, The Who, Petula Clark and Van Morrison. By the time he joined the Yardbirds alongside Jeff Beck in 1966, he was a well-known face on the music scene, eventually recruiting the Zeppelin supergroup line-up after the band disintegrated around him. Jimmy is associated with a variety of guitar tones, particularly when recording, but his best known live rig is surely the Gibson ’59 Les Paul/ Marshall 1959 SLP stack combination, which would fuel Zeppelin’s fat-sounding, colossally loud stage setup. Still, don’t be discouraged if you don’t own either of these – most solid-body humbucker-equipped guitars will suffice for a…

When you think about it, we spend a lot of our guitar-playing lives tuning the damn thing. You pick up your instrument, it’s (one of) the first things you do. You stomp on your tuner pedal regularly mid-gig to fiddle with the machineheads. And when you’re recording, you may well be tweaking not only for every take, but also for different positions on the fretboard, depending on how well your guitar intonates. “THE CLARITY ON EXTENDED CHORDS IS JUST INCREDIBLE” The EverTune bridge system was introduced in 2010 to save tuning frustrations. Each string has its own spring and lever, and the individual saddles move back and forth to compensate for changes in tension on the strings – as opposed to tremolo systems, which have a shared spring and lever…

TYPE: Digital modelling guitar combo OUTPUT: 120 watts SPEAKER: 1 x 12" plus HF tweeter VALVES: none CONTROLS: Drive/ Comp level, bass/FX1 level, mid/FX2 level, treble/FX3 level, volume/reverb level, loop start/stop, home, edit/save, tap tempo, master volume SOCKETS: Guitar in, headphones/line out, stereo XLR line out on rear, aux in, footswitch in, USB x 2 for editing and recording on Mac, PC, iOS, and Android devices WEIGHT: 12.7kg DIMENSIONS: 520mm (w) x 489mm (h) x 271mm (d) CONTACT: Yamaha Guitar Group www.line6.com…

If some of you are still miffed at Gibson following recent events, it would be foolish to take it out on the guitars. Gibsons are iconic for a good reason and, well, just look at them! We came. We saw… We strummed. We’re happy to report that the build quality, playability, spec sheets, not to mention the reasonable price tags, are all at the level where Gibson need to be. There’s a lesson here. If you want to lure us away from the competition, to make us “play authentic”, drop the videos and concentrate on building guitars that we can’t resist. SG STANDARD LES PAUL TRIBUTE LES PAUL SPECIAL TRIBUTE DC…

CHRIS BIRD Our contributors never fail to deliver knockout audio, but Phil Capone’s recording of A Hard Day’s Night, complete with authentic 12-string Rickenbacker licks, really impressed TG’s tuition editor. “I hadn’t realised Harrison’s solo was pitch-shifted though,” says Chris. Find out more on p88, where you’ll find a song sheet and that contentious solo tabbed. MICHAEL ASTLEY-BROWN Our gear guru has set sail for Stateside online waters, joining Guitar World andGuitar Player as Digital Editor-in-Chief. He’ll still pop up from time to time, but his prepubescent mug won’t appear every issue. He bids us a tearful goodbye: “As someone who grew up with TG, it’s been an honour and a privilege to serve you.” JOBY SESSIONS We’re confident in calling Mr Sessions a team member here – his history…

1 “I think this is a 1969 or 1967 reissue made in 2002, so not that old, 17 years now… so I guess that is kind of old. I bought this when I was 18; I’ve had it for 16 years and I love this Explorer because I feel like I kind of got lucky with it – with that particular year, because I have another Explorer that’s 2008 and it feels totally different to this one.” 2 “It’s really light which is killer because having a heavy guitar, in my opinion, really sucks. So it feels really agile and manoeuvrable.” 3 “I originally wanted an ebony Explorer like this because I think Dave Grohl was using one of these when he was touring The Colour And The Shapewhich is…

Z.Vex Effects is perhaps the original weirdo boutique pedal maker, and their reputation can be traced back almost entirely to this one appropriately eccentric pedal. So, what is it and how did it come about? Well, as far as we can tell, circuit bending was a major driving force behind the unusual controls of the Fuzz Factory, seeing as at least two controls alter the bias of transistors in the circuit. The core of the Fuzz Factory is superficially pretty similar to a modded Fuzz Face, and the Fuzz Factory likewise uses NOS germanium transistors to get its unique sound. THE FUZZ FACTORY LOOKS TO CREATE INSPIRATION FROM SERENDIPITY, FROM NOISES, SQUEAKS AND OSCILLATION Germanium transistors are noisy, sensitive to heat, and often more unstable than silicon transistors if biased…

When we meet Tom Morello he’s sat on a leather sofa in the green room backstage at Bristol’s Ashton Gate Stadium with a setlist on the table in front of him. He’s supporting Muse here tonight and as we shake hands our eyes dart across the room and fix on two familiar sights. We’re guitar lovers so can’t suppress a smile when we spot Arm The Homeless and the Sendero Luminoso Tele, the two instruments that have played an integral part in Morello’s greatest music since the early 90s. But the man who has stood as a member of Rage Against The Machine, Audioslave, Street Sweeper Social Club, Prophets Of Rage and even the E Street Band over the years is now touring under his own name for the first…

We feel privileged here at TG Towers to have interviewed hundreds of guitar greats over the years, most offering advice and, frankly, great wisdom that could potentially change the way you play the humble six-string. With that in mind, this month we’ve chosen 30 of our favourite slices of inspiration from recent times so you can learn from the stars in their own words. There’s a mix of rhythm and lead techniques and inspiring ideas to help you develop your playing and branch out into new musical pastures. Grab your guitar and let’s rock! ON YOUR DISC Find audio tracks for every example on your Guitar Skills CD…

“The tuning usually facilitates the finger patterns that one will make. When we did the drop D tuning in the early days we’d always go to that fifth chord [powerchord] position with one finger holding down the E, A and D strings. We stay away from that now because it would bore us. But in the early days we did that with Flower and Beyond The Wheel. Now in drop D we do other things, but when you plug in with drop D you tend to make that pattern, like in standard tuning you make the regular Ramones position. In the open C and D position you have a lot of droning strings, unison chords and all kinds of interesting patterns – we used to call droning strings sympathetic notes,…

“Put on a slow song, like a ballad – I use things like Alone by Heart or Bed Of Roses by Bon Jovi for improvisation. Anything with easy chords and not 200bpm shredding at full force. It’s important to understand the modes and the way the fretboard moves within itself. “I’m a self-taught guitarist, but I still know the modes. I might struggle to remember G Mixolydian on command, but if I’m in minor, you better believe I know what scales to ascend or descend to. Whatever scales you use often, you should know them up and down. You can start working more notes in later. “Use every weapon possible to make your playing as fluid as you can. Improvise slowly in that key and break each scale into bite-size…

“Use the metronome for a lot of your practice and start with tempos you can pull off without much strain, and then you increase it from there. I honestly believe the metronome is central to producing good technique. “There’s a point where any student has to make sure they are being musical in how they practise. 16th notes aren’t the only subdivisions that matter! “Start doing cycles of five, quintuplets, or triplets in four-note scale fragments. That will displace every fourth note and help you tap into polymetric ideas that you can later use when playing over odd-meter music or whenever you want your phrasing to run over the bar.” TOSIN ABASI TRACK 33 Simplifying Tosin’s idea here and sticking with a six-string guitar, our lick is formed of three…

With its simple arrangement of hard-rocking open chords, the lead single from AC/DC’s Black Ice album, Rock ’N’ Roll Train, is reminiscent of the late 70s Highway To Hell era. As with most ’DC tunes, there’s an emphasis on powerchords and simple harmony. Rockschool’s arrangement shortens the intro and simplifies the verse to repeat the same two-bar figure – the original alternates between ending on D/A and A5 chords. Don’t add too much distortion. Both Angus and Malcolm Young’s guitar tones break up round the edges and aren’t fully distorted. Mute any idle strings with your fretting hand so your pick hand can dig in and you can concentrate on timing. Angus uses down-up style alternate picking whereas Malcolm takes more of a downpicked approach. Try playing the intro, verse…

AUK and USA number one hit for The Beatles in the summer of 1964, A Hard Day’s Night was taken from the album of the same name and also featured heavily in the Fab Four’s first movie release called, yep you guessed it, A Hard Day’s Night. This was a golden age of British pop when the 60s were swinging and Beatlemania was in full bloom. All of the chords you’ll be playing are easy open shapes apart from the Bm barre chord you’ll need to play during the bridge. But don’t let this put you off; it’s a fairly easy five-string shape. If you do struggle, ditch the barre and play only the four highest strings – problem solved! And, if you’re already pretty good with the chord shapes…

Setting up an EverTune requires you to adjust each string’s spring using an included 2.5mm hex key to get your desired tuning into what EverTune calls Zone 2 – its active, functioning sweet spot. When you bend a string, it actually goes outside of Zone 2, but otherwise, the saddle is constantly moving with the string to keep it in check. The traditional machineheads adjust the tension of the string, so you can tweak how easy it is to alter the pitch when bending, and even set it so bending a string doesn’t change the pitch at all, as the saddle moves with it! It’s a bizarre sensation, but for recording aggressive guitars – where your pick attack might send a string out – it’s a godsend, and makes for…

Yamaha is doing more than most right now to get its acoustics into the hands of a wider range of players. From its Transacoustic models with onboard reverb and chorus, the compact travel-friendly CSFs and the recent FGs that mix vintage and cutting edge preamps, we’ve been really impressed by the company’s diversity – and that includes price. The new Storia series was a surprise announcement and seems to be aiming for the heart of the casual house player with stylish look and a wallet-friendly price point. Except we found more than we bargained for. “THAT CERTAIN SPARKLE AND RESONANCE IN THE HIGH-END” There are three numbered models with different finishes in the Storia line. Same price point for all but we took to this II more readily. It’s got…

Since around 1982, Gibson has been weight-relieving its Les Paul models. That decade saw a shift in guitar fashion to lightweight pointy stuff with Floyd Rose vibratos and lollipop thin necks. Before Gibson began this method of construction, it wasn’t unusual to find Les Paul Standards and Customs tipping the scales at well over 4.5kg (10 pounds). Why are we telling you this? Well, at 3.5kg (7.9lb) the 2019 Modern Collection Tribute model you see before you is probably the lightest Les Paul we’ve ever lifted. The Tribute comes with what Gibson describe as “Ultra-Modern Weight Relief”. This means that the mahogany back has a series of chambers cut into it before the guitar’s maple cap is glued in place. The idea is you get a guitar that sounds like…

Though some people mix up flange with other types of modulation, it’s a very specific effect that was originally created by placing a finger on a running tape machine to slow down the playback of the recording slightly, and mixing that with a dry source of the same sound – you can hear it on many classic psychedelic recordings. Obviously this wasn’t the most practical thing to do in every situation, not least because lugging two tape machines around wasn’t possible, so as soon as compact delays became a reality, flanging was not far behind, using delay lines to warp the guitar signal. There’s more than one way to get your flange fix though, so we’ve gathered together some recent favourites, from vintage vibes to modern madness… Carl Martin Classic…

The first song I can remember noticing… Thundercats – Bernard Hoffer “The theme tune to ThunderCats is a fucking song, right? It’s got lyrics – most of them are the word ‘thunder’ – but it’s still a song. Bernard Hoffer did the music and he’s got like a rock ’n’ roll band with ripping guitars and a brass section. It’s a crime that it’s never been officially released.” The first song that I learned to play… (Everything I Do) I Do It For You – Bryan Adams “I remember my cousin Matthew, who later was in a really great band called The Fallout Trust, had this big Casio keyboard and programmed in the backing track, so I could inflict it on my family. I’d give concerts that were just that…

1 E BLUES SCALE Make sure to learn this much used blues scale shape. the Played dissonant over the B E b note root note, gives the scale its dark and edgy sound. 2 E BLUES SCALE UP ONE OCTAVE Move the shape up 12 frets (aka an octave) to another area of the fretboard to try out your blues scale lead ideas. You’ll need to use more fingers for this shape though! 3 G BLUES SCALE WITH INTERVALS Using the same shape as before at different frets shows you how you can move the blues shown scale to intervals a different here pitch (1 b 3 . We 4 b ’ve 5 5 b 7) instead of notes (G B b C D b D F)…

’SENDERO LUMINOSO’ 1982 FENDER TELECASTER STANDARD “This one was my roommate Scott Tracy's, god rest his soul, he was a Hollywood musician and we were roommates for about five years. Maynard [James Keenan] from Tool taught me how to do drop D tuning, I was over at his apartment, which all the Seattle bands were doing at the time. But I couldn’t do it on [Arm The Homeless] because that one had a locking nut on it. My roommate had a Telecaster that could do it; I had an extra Marshall head and we had a prisoner exchange. [Scott] was a really great musician, had a band called Liquid Jesus who had a deal on MCA and he was one of the great woulda/coulda/shoulda artists and he passed away some…

“When I pick up the guitar… I want to be the drummer. I’ve always loved playing drums, so it’s kind of what I’m doing on the guitar. I love syncopation, just unique drum beats so I’ve always incorporated that in. The percussiveness and the downpicking, that’s something that just came through competition, really. ‘Hey, these guys are faster; I’m going to be faster!’. Goofy guy stuff like that, but at the end of the day it has its own sound. It’s like hitting a drum, it really is. There have obviously been influences that have shaped it somewhat. Listening to Scorpions… [Rudolph Schenker], I like that he’s just the rhythm guy. He’s not trying to be everything and he’s the best at what he did. At the time he was…

“I was talking to Paul Gilbert not long ago, actually, and he mentioned the ability to simply play in time. I don’t think it’s a strong thing with a lot of the younger guitar players I see. “Don’t get a metronome, because they’re pretty boring and you’ll naturally get disinterested using them. A drum machine is a good substitute – look on GarageBand or Logic; you can get all that shit for free nowadays. “Try to focus on being in time, whether you play rhythm or lead. It needs to be solid half notes, quarter notes, eighth notes. I see a lot of kids rushing and dragging when they play live. We had a guy get up with us the other day – we do it all the time because…

“I’m someone who grew up with 70s rock like Led Zeppelin, and in order to play that, you needed two incredibly important tools. One is thick calluses, which you can only get from bending strings up and down. That’s a physical tool and you need that on all fingers. “Also, the thumb should hang off the neck [ie, over the fretboard – Ed] almost all the time to give you something to pull against. Take advantage of the fact you’re a human rather than a chimpanzee or an animal that can’t grip things. Don’t play like your cat; play like a human! Look at Jimi Hendrix: his hands were more on top of the neck than underneath. Not only does that give you strong bending and vibrato, it also helps…

“The way that I write is I just put my fingers wherever it sounds good; it sounds silly, but when I’m writing, I’m not thinking about the theory or chord shapes or anything like that. I just follow the notes where they wanna go, and it definitely pulls me into some odd directions sometimes. “So I guess maybe once in a while I’ll write something or play something, and then someone else will go, ‘Oh, it would be much easier if you just played it like this,’ and show me a totally different way to play it that is much easier to execute, because it’s probably the more correct way that it should be done. But because I’m not thinking about it like that, I just don’t make many of…

“This might sound counterintuitive, but it’s not. If you find yourself stuck playing the same pentatonic shape over and over, don’t try to fight it. Don’t try to get out of your box – expand it. Add things to that box and let it become something new. “If you’re comfortable playing in a certain way, that’s not the worst thing in the world, as long as you keep challenging yourself and letting new things happen. Pretty soon the box that feels constricting will become bigger and bigger, and you’ll find that you’re capable of so much more than you thought. “That pentatonic shape? Add a note a fret before the first note of each string, almost as a grace note for a lead-in. Already you’re playing something new, and you…

“Another thing worth experimenting with, which I started doing many years ago, is using the Lydian #5 scale. It’s a whole different neighbourhood, yet the houses are kinda the same. It’s from the melodic minor scale, as is the Lydian dominant scale, but they all sound different. “It’s miraculous how different modes open up completely different worlds, yet they’re all the same notes from the parent scale. When you start altering tonalities and start using these other scales, you have the other modes connected to them. “Understanding and experimenting will add to your arsenal of creative tools, which means more colours for your paintings. They will help deepen your creativity when it comes to atmospheres.” STEVE VAI 2 TRACK 39 The Lydian #5 mode simply sharpens the 5th interval in…

Featuring on the Foo Fighters’ 2017 album Concrete And Gold, Run is primarily rhythm guitar-based, centring around arpeggios, powerchords and a neat open-string bending riff. Multiple guitars are layered up by guitarists Dave Grohl, Chris Shiflett and Pat Smear, so, in our tab, we’ve given you a flavour of the most important parts. For example, the pre-chorus includes the core backing chords, a string bending line and an octave melody; we’ve tabbed each approach – if you’re jamming with friends try playing them all together! Run is in 4/4 time but each section has a different groove. The intro has a triplet feel over the 4/4 backbeat, so when the heavy riff enters and the high energy drums kick in, it gives the effect of a faster tempo. By contrast…

Over the last couple of decades, bands like The Kills and Band Of Skulls have fused traditional blues-rock with indie, mixing Zeppelin- and Sabbathesque pentatonic riffs with the energetic, catchy lines of bands like Pixies and REM. This month’s track is a great opportunity to try all aspects of this contemporary sonic blend. The verse uses a simple driving riff that’s easy to play and to solo over. The chorus follows a more traditional indie progression that’ll make your tried and tested blues scale licks sound instantly more melodic than pure blues chords would. Aim to create catchy parts that you can remember once you have finished playing them. Repeating simple, short phrases is a good way to get started. Finally, the bridge employs chord voicings that recall classic 80s…

“I’M LOOKING FOR SIMPLICITY BUT ALSO SOME SORT OF ATMOSPHERE” The term ‘releasing music’ is more poignant than we first realise. As a songwriter, it’s an exciting time, but it’s also akin to sending your offspring out into the wild. When we talk to Fionn Regan in early July, the Irish singer-songwriter is watching the tentative steps of newly released single Collar Of Fur – the first taste of sixth album Cala. “It feels like the whole thing is a wheel,” he says. “There’s different phases. I think the way that music resonates to people when they listen to it, that’s how the whole wheel turns, you know?” Regan often talks like this, in metaphors and unfinished riddles, as if he has one ear on this astral plane fielding your…

1 RUACH POCKET GUITAR STAND This foldaway, hardwood stand promises to fit right in your back pocket, all ready to be flipped open whenever you need it. When folded up, the Pocket Guitar Stand resembles some kind of hipster stapler, but it easily opens up to provide a secure stand-up base for your electric or acoustic guitar. There are heavy-duty dots for support, stainless steel hinges, and non-slip rubber feet to protect the base. It’s available in mahogany and walnut finishes. (from £59, ruach-music.com) 2 STAR SINGER SLIDES Guitar slides come in a variety of materials, but we’re betting you’ve never seen any quite like this. Star Singer Slides utilises a secret crackle glaze technique to not only give its hand-made ceramic slides a unique look, but also improve their…

“ONE OF THE BEST MODELLING AMPS WE’VE EVER HEARD” When it comes to digital modelling, some of us are happy to spend hours tinkering with parameters, while others just want a bunch of great sounds, ready to go out of the box, with a manual that reads: ‘Switch on here, plug in here, GO.’ Line 6’s new Mk II version of the Spider V promises to cater for both extremes, with only a few subtle hints to the monster technology lurking behind its elegantly understated control panel. Familiar-looking dual-purpose controls illuminate in white for basic amp functions and colour for the Spider V MkII’s effects levels. There’s a small mono display with buttons for home, edit and save functions, together with controls for the built-in looper and metronome/drum machine. Toward…

Like the other two guitars here, the Les Paul Special Tribute DC is based on a classic from Gibson’s illustrious back catalogue. The Special was originally launched in 1955 as a single-cut budget guitar for novices and the skint. By 1958, it was rebooted as a double-cutaway with a slab mahogany body and a pair of P-90 single-coil pickups. Our 2019 Special is based around those late 1950s guitars. The wraparound bridge/tailpiece is pure vintage cool, as are the white button vintage tuners. The body is true to type, cut from a slab of mahogany. Original Specials and the various vintage reissues currently offered by Gibson have mahogany necks. Our Tribute however, is packing a length of maple topped with a 305mm (12") radius rosewood ’board. In common with the…

On their most recent tours, Animals As Leaders’ mercurial frontman Tosin Abasi has ditched the Axe-Fx so beloved of his fellow djentlemen, and switched back to an old-school pedalboard into a tube amp. With Tosin starting his own guitar company, it makes sense that a foray into pedals wouldn’t be far behind. METAL IS A MIDRANGE GAME AND THE BASS WAS PRONOUNCED ENOUGH The Pathos is a high-gain drive with a three-band EQ and a voicing switch offering a darker and brighter option. In our testing, we found that the ‘smooth’, or dark setting, didn’t really get a look in. Metal is kind of a midrange game, and we found that the bass was pronounced enough that dialling it right back to about 10 o’clock was required for a bridge…