Inhaltsverzeichnis für July 2023 in Guitar Player

I’M RARELY SURPRISED by the response when interviewers, including those for this magazine, ask musicians, “Did you have any idea your record would be a hit.” The answer is almost always “no.” It’s the rare artist who knows when he or she has on a hit on their hands. It’s a question David Gilmour has been asked many times about The Dark Side of the Moon, and while his answer has always been a definitive “no,” he could be excused for saying “yes.” After all, Pink Floyd worked the album on the road through the first five months of 1972 before entering Abbey Road Studios to record it, then continued to tour their magnum opus while putting the finishing touches to tape. From all reports, the fans were ecstatic about what…

THE 1970S WAS a boom time for gear innovation and evolution, during which modulation pedals, in particular, advanced by leaps and bounds. Boss, who would become one of the era’s long-running effects makers, bowed in 1976 with the CE-1 Chorus Ensemble, the most legendary and lushest-sounding chorus pedal, which we looked at in the December 2019 issue. But before Boss was Boss, parent company Roland delivered one of its earliest effects pedals with 1974’s AP-5 Phaser, followed in ’75 by the wild and wonderful Jet Phaser AP-7, featured here. The phrase “greater than the sum of its parts” certainly describes the Jet Phaser. It combined a fuzz-like gain stage with a phaser —in that order — to create a sound attainable from nothing else, unless you include latter-day copies of…

“I LOVE PLAYING music,” Jonny Polonsky says. “To some other people it’s a career. But to me, it’s just my life.” And what a wild, colorful life it’s been so far. After releasing a series of homemade cassette tapes of his own music in the early ’90s, the Chicago-born singer-songwriter was invited by John Zorn to play his New Jewish Music festival in New York City, where, still a teenager, Polonsky was backed by a band featuring Mark Ribot, playing in front of an audience that included soon-to-be fan Jeff Buckley. His solo career kicked off in earnest when super-producer Rick Rubin signed Polonsky to his American Recordings label, which released his acclaimed 1996 debut, Hi My Name Is Jonny. That album, a sharply written and incisive collection of infectious…

ONE MIGHT ESTABLISH the first “session” toward the making of The Dark Side of the Moon as the band meeting at Nick’s place, at which Roger’s idea of a continuous conceptual piece about things that “make people mad” was first sketched out. This was followed by Roger hiding away in his garden shed studio out back of his Islington home and creating a few demos of the material they had collectively begun writing. Next came working on the material through 12 days of rehearsals at Decca Studios in West London, followed by the live-show rehearsals at the Rolling Stones’ 47 Bermondsey Street warehouse and then, innovatively, the touring of the “Eclipse” suite. Inextricably linked with EMI, Abbey Road Studios had at times been state of the art and sometimes not.…

TWO LANDMARK GUITAR releases, both solo debuts, came along within a few months of each other in 1968 to open my youthful ears and blow my 14-year-old mind. And yet, one so completely overshadowed the other as to render it to relative obscurity. I’m referring to the near-simultaneous releases of Jeff Beck’s Truth, which came out on July 29 of that year, and Harvey Mandel’s Cristo Redentor, issued that November. Beck, of course, was already famous, having succeeded Eric Clapton in the wildly popular Yardbirds in 1965 and appeared with the band the following year in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow-Up. He also had major-label backing for his solo debut, courtesy of Epic Records. Mandel had already put in his time on Chicago’s active blues scene, making his recording debut in…

FOR ABOUT FIVE decades, the original Fender Jazzmaster and Jaguar suffered a distinct lack of alternatives for their bridges, the components that many players consider the weak links in their sonic chains. But functional replacements have roared forth in the past several years, the latest of which comes from German maker Kiss My Strings (KMS). Their JAM Advanced Offset Bridge partners a unique saddle design with a sturdy approach to mounting, making it a viable alternative to anything on the market. What’s more, the company has applied a similar approach to a range of compensated Telecaster saddles, for an impressive solution in a field that’s far more crowded. On first blush, the results are encouraging. KMS boasts cutting-edge CNC machining and advanced plating and coating technologies to form high-quality materials.…

ONE OF MY standout New York City experiences was sitting right next to the stage at the Village Vanguard, just a few feet away from Bill Frisell, Joe Lovano and Paul Motian while they played their set. I’d found myself there through serendipitous circumstances. The night before, Bill had come to hear me play at the Living Room. During a break, I heard he might need an amp for his Vanguard gig the next night. I immediately offered my amp to Bill, one of the all-time great guitarists and a super-nice person. I can’t recall if he ended up using my amp, but either way, he put me on the guest list with a seat at the coveted table next to the band. I could’ve reached out and touched Bill’s…

Back in 1994, as Pearl Jam were ascending to the very top of the rock universe, guitarist Stone Gossard teamed up with Regan Hagar, a friend and bandmate in the side project Brad, who had also played drums with fellow Seattle rockers Malfunkshun. Together, they formed Loosegroove Records, a label dedicated to, as Gossard puts it, “signing artists that we loved and wanted to support.” Over the next few years, the small imprint provided a home to a wide range of unique, innovative acts, among them the rock-funk-hip-hop collective Weapon of Choice, the instrumental and experimental Critters Buggin and the then brand-new Queens of the Stone Age, who issued their landmark 1998 self-titled debut through Loosegroove. Not long after, Loosegroove closed its doors. Now, more than 20 years later, Gossard…

SPEAK TO ME Credited to drummer Nick Mason, this sound collage lasts slightly longer than a minute and is an unsettling introduction to the album, fading in slowly and prompting listeners to turn up the volume, only to find the track surging to menacing sound levels in its final 10 seconds. The cut is an overture of sorts, foreshadowing the various sounds — clinking coins, ticking clocks and haunting voices — yet to come over the album’s two sides, all of it over a steady tom-tom (according to David Gilmour) standing in for a heartbeat. Together, they evoke the emotions explored on the album, including fear, anxiety and pressure, as well as birth, time and death. The organ-like tone that groans in toward the end is a piano chord played…

AS PLAYERS, WE tend to hang around in one fretboard position as much as possible before switching to another, and that’s especially true when we play in open position. But mixing positions instantly enriches our possibilities, especially when it comes to getting out of cowboy strumming mode in the lower register. Just the movement of the fretting hand from one position to another offers new rhythmic possibilities, and the harmonic opportunities that come along for the ride are worth the effort. START OPEN AND THEN CLOSE To show how effective combining open and closed chords can be, let’s start with some simple examples. Play an open C cowboy chord. Then slide your first finger up to the fifth fret, with the focus on the second, third and fourth strings, so that…

ON HER JUST-RELEASED EP, The Voices (DistroKid), Los Angeles–based guitarist and singer Angela Petrilli comes on like a true original, delivering smart, tough and soulful blues rock that brims with blood-pounding guitar playing on a set of songs that artfully examines the highs and lows of the human spirit without being obvious or overdrawn. The record is a triumph all right, but it’s one Petrilli hadn’t planned on making. Until 2019, the guitarist was one half of the Americana duo Roses and Cigarettes. On the heels of the release of the group’s second album, Echoes & Silence, Petrilli’s longtime bandmate Jenny Pagliaro passed away from stage 4 breast cancer. While grieving her friend and musical partner, Petrilli didn’t pick up the guitar for months. The very sight of the instrument…

AS A GUITARIST and songwriter who brings pop melodicism to a bombastic rock template, Billy Squier was one of the 1980s’ biggest rock stars. Far from hiding his influences, he wore his Led Zeppelin and Queen reverence proudly on his sleeve. In fact, Squier was described on several occasions as “a one-man Led Zeppelin,” an appellation that Jimmy Page himself seemed to agree with. Squier tells GP about hanging with the Zep guitarist one night in New York City. “We were at the China Club, talking about doing a project together, and he asked me about a song from my album Hear & Now,” Squier recalls. “On the album, there’s a song called ‘Don’t Say You Love Me,’ which has this cool, funky riff that introduces the verses. Jimmy asked…

IT WAS THE 1960s, and guitar makers were duking it out to make a great guitar that had an original look, hoping that the new jukebox hero would play their creation and put them on the map. Yamaha certainly seemed to have the goods. While most guitars that came out of Japan in the 1960s were of mediocre quality, Yamaha’s were anything but. As for the SG-3c shown here, it is exceptional, even by Yamaha’s’ standards. The company began making musical instruments in the late 1800s and started producing guitars in the early 1940s under the Nippon Gakki Co. umbrella, which is where their custom shop is headquartered to this day. Sadly, this model wasn’t played by anyone of note, and Yamaha eliminated it from the company’s product line just…

DAVID GILMOUR NEVER imagined in 1973 that he would still be talking about Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon well into the 21st century. “Longevity in pop music, in terms of me as a 20-whatever — I was a 27-year-old when we did Dark Side of the Moon — was measured in maybe five, possibly 10 years,” he reflected in a rare 2011 interview. “As soon as Roger [Waters] came in with the idea of its central themes of how the pressures of modern life can affect your sanity, it started taking a shape from there on I would say… But that feeling that that we were on to a real magical ‘something’ came a bit later down the line, I think.” And it’s persisted ever since. The Dark…

OF ALL THE guitars David Gilmour has played, none is more famous than the so-called Black Strat. A mongrel of sorts, the instrument made numerous appearances in concert and on Pink Floyd albums, including the solos for The Dark Side of the Moon’s “Money,” The Wall’s “Comfortably Numb” and “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” from Wish You Were Here. Gilmour sold the guitar at auction for a record sum in 2019, but not before our sister publication Guitarist explored its storied life and many mods at Gilmour’s Medina Studio near Brighton, where Phil Taylor, Gilmour’s guitar tech, took the magazine through his studio setup. Gilmour’s journey with the Black Strat began at Manny’s Music store in New York in May 1970 during Pink Floyd’s American tour. Gilmour had, just weeks earlier,…

THANKS IN PART to an elevated design ethos and consistent quality control, the reputation of Reverend Guitars seemed not to suffer in the least when production moved offshore back in 2006, and the willingness of notable artists to keep endorsing creative signature models further attests to that achievement. Both Pete Anderson and Rick Vito already have multiple Reverend guitars in their names, so the release of their new respective Eastsider Custom and Soul Agent models tells us they must still be pleased with founder Joe Naylor’s design stable in Toledo, Ohio, and manufacturing at Mirr Music Ltd. in Korea. Taking extended riffs on existing models, each of these new artist guitars is rife with Reverend’s familiar originality, while they offer specs and features that should appeal to players well outside…

WE ALL NEED a boost from time to time, and the Boost MKII from Vertex Effects is designed to deliver exactly that. This MKII update is a significantly slimmer version of one of the California company’s most popular pedals, reducing its footprint by more than a third while maintaining all the tone and functionality of the original. The fact that it provides a totally transparent boost piqued my interest, but I was hooked when I learned Boost MKII can be controlled by the expression pedal of my choice, allowing me to ride the level like a gas pedal. Anyone who plays a variety of instruments on a gig, and in a range of styles, can testify to the frustration of keeping rhythm volume consistent from guitar to guitar, and lead…