Innehållsförteckning för Summer 2022 från Total Guitar

As I write this, the UK is in the middle of a bout of lovely sunny weather. There’s talk of a heatwave. Now, I have friends visiting this weekend. I imagine we’ll sit in the garden and enjoy a beer or two. And I’m fairly certain that at some point my acoustic guitar will be taken out of its case for an al fresco jam session (and yes, I’m fully prepared for the inevitable Wonderwall request – though, now I think of it, where is my capo?). Anyway, I don’t know what it is, but there’s just something about the summer sunshine that makes me want to grab my acoustic and get strumming. As you might imagine then, I’m especially happy about all the great new acoustic music around at…

Given that the Slipknot man has been spotted wielding a Charvel on-and-off since 2021, it may come as no surprise that he has now officially made the jump from Fender to its sister brand, kicking off the arrangement with a new signature model. The Jim Root Signature Pro-Mod San Dimas Style 1 features a mahogany body, graphite-reinforced maple neck with 22 jumbo frets and either maple or ebony fingerboards (both 12”-16” compound radius). The pickups come courtesy of Jim’s signature EMG Daemonum, hooked up to a three-way blade switch and single volume control. Plus there’s a Floyd Rose 1500 Series vibrato. These should be available shortly in Satin White or Satin Black, priced at £1,539.…

Find your videos online at bit.ly/tg361audio MYSTERY TRAIN (1955) Appears at: 0:00–0:34 Tempo: 238 bpm Key/scale: E major Main techniques: Travis picking, simultaneous bass, chords and melody Often cited as the first real rhythm and blues song to be recorded by a white artist, Mystery Train was written by bluesman Junior Parker, but the Presley version is almost twice as fast as Parker’s original. Propelled by just Elvis on vocals and his ‘Sun Sessions’ Martin D-18, with Bill Black on bass and Scotty Moore on electric rhythm and lead, it was a straight live take. Piling on slapback echo, Scotty played the riff – E and A/E, with alternate E octave notes using pick and fingers; cracked out a solo featuring string bends, chord tones and fragments, and more or…

Prog has seen a huge resurgence in recent years and although the roots go back to the 70s with bands like King Crimson, Yes and Rush laying the foundations, modern players are still finding new ways to innovate and push the boundaries of guitar further. In this lesson we’ll look at some of the technical and creative approaches used by some of today’s finest players. As you work through the tab exercises, try to listen out for phrases that sound familiar. Though I haven’t copied any riffs or licks directly, these ideas home in on rhythmic ideas, melodic phrases and playing techniques that are part and parcel of prog guitar today. From the piano-like tapping techniques of Covet and Chon to the technical metal mayhem of Protest The Hero and…

When Kurt Cobain turned up for Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged special in 1993, he had a Fender Twin and a Boss DS-2 distortion in tow. Purists were not impressed, but it’s now the most lauded performance from Unplugged’s original run. In 2021, Tash Sultana showed an even more flagrant disregard for the rules, appearing with such notably not-unplugged devices as a Stratocaster, a Telecaster, and a Whammy pedal. “I had people kicking off about the fact that I was gonna do it very much plugged in,” Tash recalls. “I just thought, ‘Nah, f*ck ‘em.’ I didn’t think about it being unplugged. I just thought this is a television broadcast and I’m gonna bring it.” While it’s too early to say how history will remember Tash’s MTV Unplugged: Live in Melbourne, the…

Maybe it’s the influence of Ed Sheeran over the last decade or so, but the folk scene appears to be in rude health in 2022 – which can only be great news for us guitarists as there’s a wealth of artists to take inspiration from. Whether you’re an aspiring fingerstylist who prefers a ‘traditional’ approach, or if you’re looking to develop some upbeat body-bashing percussive guitar techniques, we’ve got you covered with our straightforward lessons. BOOM! THWACK! TING! Your essential percussive guitar guide… Whether you take inspiration from greats like Michael Hedges and Preston Reed, or if you prefer the current crop of artists like Jon Gomm, Marcin Patrzalek and Alexandr Misko, there’s one common element to percussive guitar: creating pitch-approximate strikes akin to a kick drum, a snare…

Featuring on Lynyrd Skynyrd’s self-titled debut album of 1973, Simple Man is one of the band’s most popular songs, and a favourite in their live set to this day. The song illustrates the band’s ‘keep it simple’ approach to writing and recording, undoubtedly a big part of the reason why their back catalogue still sounds fresh and exciting nearly five decades on. Like many of their tunes, the main riff (which we’ve tabbed below) is based on easy open shapes played with a simple but effective ‘down-up’ picking pattern. Add a cool riff in the interlude (also tabbed), powerchords to drive the chorus, plus a great solo (no, this one’s not as long as Freebird!) and you have the basic formula for Skynyrd’s inimitable Southern rock style. We don’t have…

STRYMON V2 PEDALS 1 Six of Strymon’s classic pedals are getting well-deserved updates with all but the Flint reverb/tremolo getting two additional control knobs to reflect some of the additional functionality here, including new algorithms. All now feature bi-directional MIDI control (for program and CC changes) via a TRS jack and JFET input for improved tone and feel, a mono/stereo input switch and an up-to-date USB-C jack. The bad news is they all cost more than before. £359 www.strymon.net PITCHSLAP 2 “It’s always seemed odd to me that we tend to only take two measurements when we set guitar intonation, often the open string and 12th fret,” says PitchSlap designer Simon Asker. This leaves the process open to errors and we know that if the intonation is out the guitar…

£620 In original PRS-speak, ‘Standard’ typically refers to an all mahogany body and ‘Custom’ is used when a figured maple top is added – the reverse of Gibson’s Les Paul designations. It makes sense of course and dates back to PRS’s original 25” scale, 24-fret guitars. Some 37 years on, Standards only appear in the USA-made S2 line and here in the Indonesianmade SE range. In fact, the start-up SE Standard kicks off the entire PRS electric canon at £590. This new 24-08 version, like the previous SE and Core USA Custom versions, introduces two discrete mini-toggle switches that offer eight sound selections compared to the six of that start-up Standard, hence the name. If that was this guitar’s only USP then you might be wondering why we’re reviewing it.…

“WHEN YOU COMPOSE SOMETHING, IT SHOULD SOUND GOOD IN ITS MOST BARE STATE” In recent years, Polyphia have established themselves as virtuosic disruptors of everything the music world thought it knew about genre classifications. Over the course of their first three albums, the Texas-based shredders have brought metal, trap, rock, funk, and a slew of other influences together to spectacular effect. And now, having recently added nuevo flamenco to their list of stylistic conquests on Playing God – the band’s first new song since 2019 and their first ever to feature nylon-string guitars – Polyphia’s Tim Henson has not only gone unplugged, but he’s taken his nonconformist approach straight into Ibanez’s workshop to develop a bespoke new tool for the job. Cue the TOD10N: a prototype nylon-string signature model for…

To kick things off, we have three exercises designed to improve your fingerstyle technique. We’re talking essential basics here – there’s nothing too challenging to play, but the exercises will help you get used to the core techniques of players as diverse as Chet Atkins, Tommy Emmanuel, and contemporary pop acts like Vance Joy and Passenger. To allow you to concentrate on your picking hand all our examples use the easy to finger open E chord as a foundation. 1 BASIC ‘PIMA’ TECHNIQUE BIT.LY/TG361AUDIO This first example is designed to get all your picking fingers working together. In traditional music notation the picking hand is labeled p for the thumb, then i, m and a for the first, second and third fingers. 2 THE PINCH BIT.LY/TG361AUDIO This example opens with…

By the time Jeff Buckley’s body was tragically dredged from the Mississippi River on 4 June 1997, his collaboration with guitarist/songwriter Gary Lucas had given the world barely a dozen tracks. Most are cult favourites. This one, the song that gave his lone studio album its title, Grace, is a stone cold classic. Lucas explained the recording process to TG in 2011: “We doubled the parts, but mainly on Grace I’m doing this ambient guitar, like at the beginning. First, I did the band track with the band and Jeff playing, then I had a whole session overdubbing space guitar. There are lots of little bits on that song where people don’t know what they are to this day. Well, it’s my guitar. There’s the bit where Jeff sings ‘I’m…

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…

£995 As befits one of the biggest-selling artists of recent times, Ed Sheeran doesn’t just have a single signature guitar: he has a whole range! But Ed’s a pop artist you moan, why on earth would we be interested? The answer to that lies in the title: Sheeran by Lowden. If you didn’t know, George Lowden is unquestionably one of the world’s top acoustic guitar makers – and has been for many decades. While the Sheeran range pares down the ingredients and design, what you’re getting here is a stage-ready electro-acoustic built to the same exacting standards as a pucker Lowden for a fraction of the price. And it’s not made in a hurry in the far east either. No, these guitars are made at Lowden HQ in County Down,…

You may not be familiar with Great Eastern Effects just yet, given that the UK pedal brand only launched last year. But with its second release (following its Champ-in-a-box Small Speaker Overdrive), GEE is turning its attention to our overdrive/amp compatibility. The Design-A-Drive has gain and output controls, but the tone section is where the detail lies. Thanks to its Edge (high frequency) and six-position Width (midrange) controls, it’s possible to tailor your overdrive sound to create the perfect interaction between your pickups, pedal and amp – no more leaving the combinations to chance. The Design-A-Drive is available now, priced at £229. See www.greateasternfx.com for more info.…

HOUND DOG (1956) Elvis’s treatment of Hound Dog is very unlike the 1952 original by Big Mama Thornton, written for her by Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller. The lyrics were altered to reflect Elvis’s gender and to clean up the original’s sexual innuendo. Elvis chose ‘take 28’ of the 31 attempts, but by this time his trusted guitarist Scotty Moore was getting frustrated, so on his second solo – the first is a brilliant spontaneous outing – made a few weird percussive noises and knocked out a couple of random licks. Keith Richards said it sounded like Scotty had thrown the guitar on the floor, picked it up and got the perfect sound. TOO MUCH (1956) This track contains one of Scotty Moore’s most outlandish solos. We’ll let Scotty explain,…

Billy Strings simply one of the most exciting young guitarists in decades. His career has exploded over the last couple of years, as he and his tight-but-loose trio of backing musicians have toured the world, putting on remarkably dynamic shows that blow up anyone’s vision of stodgy bluegrass music. Grounded in the traditional music, Strings, a 29-year-old from western Michigan whose real name is Billy Apostol, starts with bluegrass in his covers and most of his original music, before taking solos on wild flights of fancy, armed with a large pedalboard and no fear of exploring any tone or realm of music, ably supported by his backing trio of Royal Masat (bass), Billy Failing (banjo) and Jarrod Walker (mandolin). “I PRETTY MUCH ABANDONED THE ELECTRIC GUITAR WHEN I WAS 17”…

Here we’re taking a look at two core techniques in blues: slide guitar and fingerstyle. The former can be particularly tricky if you’ve never tried it, but there are some key tips which we’ve outlined below. Perhaps most important is to use an open tuning (we’ve used open G in our tab example). By tuning your guitar’s strings to the notes of a simple major chord, you’re assured of a sound that ‘works’ as you lay the slide over several frets at once. SLIDE GUITAR BASICS 1 Wear your slide on your third finger Use a different finger if you prefer, but the third finger is easiest to control and you can fret notes higher or lower than the slide if you need to. 2 Mute the strings for a…

Let Her Go, Michael Rosenberg’s chart-topping second single from the album All The Little Lights‚ was met with critical acclaim after its release, receiving prestigious nominations and awards, and bringing Passenger to the attention of the likes of Jools Holland and acoustic guitar sensation Ed Sheeran. The song’s delicately folk-tinged sound features a catchy fingerstyle introduction and some breezy strumming throughout. In this Rockschool Grade Two arrangement, the opening chords (bars 1 to 8) provide rhythmic momentum before the chorus strumming at bar 9. You’ll need to experiment with plectrum and fingers in this piece, as the intro, chorus and verse all have slightly different technical requirements. In the opening bars, make sure the open G string rings clearly, particularly under the Dadd11 in bar 2. With the chorus chords…

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 getting hung up on hokey mythology or nonsense marketing speak: we aim to bring you bullsh*t-free opinions on the gear you’re interested in. WE CAN’T BE BOUGHT TG review scores are a true reflection of our experts’ opinion on the product they’ve been testing. You’ll never find a rating in our mag that has been bought and paid for. REAL…