Indice dei contenuti per April 2022 in Guitar Player

WE TEND TO celebrate performers in these pages, but innovations in gear have been the principle drivers in the development and evolution of music. Prior to the 18th century, the harpsichord was the instrument most used by composers in Europe, but its volume range and articulation were limited. Around 1700, Bartolomeo Cristofori invented the pianoforte. Cristofori put his instrument’s selling point in its name, which means soft-loud. The new colors offered by the pianoforte completely changed music composition by giving composers and performers new means of expression. Pianos could be built large enough to be heard within an ensemble, allowing orchestras and concert halls to become larger. The concept of music, and piano’s role in it, were forever altered. The guitar underwent a similar evolution in the 1930s when the…

THE GUITAR PLAYERS who most influenced Browan Lollar serve as bookends of a sort. In style and tone, the guitarist for horn-heavy soul purveyors St. Paul and the Broken Bones hangs out somewhere between Steve Cropper and Radiohead, and never more so than on his band’s latest album, The Alien Coast (ATO). “I’m so impressed with somebody like [Radiohead’s] Jonny Greenwood or Ed O’Brien, because those guys were guitar players in the biggest band on Earth,” he explains. “Then they were like, ‘We don’t want to be a guitar band anymore; we want to be an electronic band.’” Lollar says he and his bandmates can relate, although he’s reluctant to make the comparison. “Our band is sort of at the same point, where we’re like, ‘We don’t want to make…

One of the most sensational jazz guitarists of his era, Charlie Christian greatly influenced the evolution of the electric guitar, and particularly the sound of jazz guitar. In 1937, he was playing piano in Oklahoma City when he met Count Basie’s guitarist, Eddie Durham, himself credited as being one of the first to record with an amplified guitar. Durham convinced Christian to get a Gibson ES-150 electric hollowbody, which was 16 inches wide and had a 24 ¾–inch scale mahogany neck, solid mahogany back and sides with a solid spruce top, and a single blade pickup (later dubbed the Charlie Christian pickup). Priced at $150, the guitar came with a matching amplifier, the EH-150, which had a single 10-inch speaker and developed 15-watts via (in the Style 2 version of…

It started as a novelty effect for a WWII-era talking puppet and became the ear-grabbing sound behind some of the 1970s’ biggest rock hits. But while it achieved its greatest popularity in the early part of that decade thanks to Bob Heil, the talk box existed in a variety of forms long before he brought his device to market. It was Alvino Rey who first popularized, if not invented, the effect in the late 1930s, using a throat contact mic to make his steel guitar speak. Rey had the mic wired in reverse to act as a speaker and fed his amplified signal into it. As he performed, his wife, Luise, stood offstage, wearing the device and mouthing the words to the song as Rey’s steel guitar tones emerged from…

The buzzy riff on the Rolling Stones’ 1965 hit “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” is deeply engrained in guitar lore, but its creator, Keith Richards, conceived of it as a brass arrangement. “I’d already heard the riff in my head the way Otis Redding did it later, thinking, This is gonna be the horn line,” he recalled. When it came time to record the song, Richards plugged his Gibson Firebird VII into a Gibson Maestro FZ-1A Fuzz-Tone to sketch out the part for a later brass overdub, but the sound was so novel that they decided to release the cut as is. Said Richards, “That’s the sound that caught everybody’s imagination.” Introduced in 1962, the wedgeshaped FZ-1A had front-mounted attack and volume knobs and housed a circuit with three…

FRANK ZAPPA WAS A demanding composer and performer, and behind his notoriously complex music was a signature guitar tone crafted to his exacting standards with active circuits. As his son Dweezil told Guitar Player, “It’s really about having the right midrange, and being able to get controllable feedback at will. Frank devised a way to make that happen by fitting his guitars with onboard preamps that put drastic EQ control at his fingertips and kicked out a ridiculous amount of boost — up to 18dB.” Perhaps no guitar of Frank’s was as outfitted for EQ tweaking as his custom-made Performance solidbody, used on his last tour, in 1988. In addition to concentric tone controls, it sports parametric filter circuits on screwdriver adjustable trimpots. “One trimpot is dedicated to frequencies from…

Guitarists’ fascination with digital loopers over the past decade has its roots in the 1970s ambient work of King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp and ambient pioneer Brian Eno, who had an idea for a music system that, he said, “once set in motion will create music for you.” Eno’s concept was itself recycled from avant-grade composer Terry Riley’s Time Lag Accumulator, a tape delay/feedback system that used two Revox reel-to-reel-tape recorders. The tape supply reel was placed on the first deck, in Record mode, and the take-up reel on the second, in Playback mode, with the tape threaded between the two machines and the output of the second deck fed back to the input of the first. The result was both a delay of several seconds, depending on the distance…

Having scored Platinum recordselling success with his band Boston, MIT-trained engineer Tom Scholz poured the proceeds into Scholz Research & Development in 1980 to create and build music tech products. First came the Power Soak power attenuator that delivered precise control over a rig’s global volume. But it was Scholz’s follow-up that revolutionized guitar tone in the 1980s. “In 1982 there was no way to practice high-power rock guitar quietly,” he explained in a 2020 Facebook post. “What I needed was a way to get that maxed-out overdrive sound in headphones.” Scholz also needed to make the device small enough to fit in a guitar case, and affordable. Using Sony’s then-popular, portable Walkman cassette players as his model, Scholz created a stereo headphone amp that featured an amp simulator comprising…

JOHN McLAUGHLIN’S NEW album, Liberation Time, is his response to the tribulations of the past two years, in a world turned upside down by Covid. With the cancellation of two tours, and finding himself with time on his hands in Monaco, where he has lived for many years, McLaughlin was, by his own admission, starting to go crazy. Out of his frustration came inspiration, and he started to create a collection of positive, upbeat and joyful tracks that were a celebration of life. Indeed, joy is something central to McLaughlin’s existence. Inspired by nature and life, he finds positivity in the wonders of the universe. That optimistic and grateful attitude is expressed perfectly on an album that contains some of the guitar master’s most direct and affecting music. No stranger…

AS ONE OF today’s most innovative and creative jazz fusion guitarists, Israeliborn Oz Noy has developed an exciting playing style by blending the sophistication of jazz with the raw energy of rock, blues and funk. In this lesson, we’ll look at Oz’s solo in his instrumental cover of the mid-’60s classic “She’s Not There” by the Zombies. This funky and evocative arrangement appears on his 2020 release Snapdragon and showcases his creative and highly appealing jazz fusion-style soloing on a simple pop chord progression. The solo is played in the key of A minor, and while the majority of it is blues based, there are plenty of harmonically inventive twists and turns along the way. The transcription presented herein spans the entire solo, which is 32 bars long and begins at…

A WELL-CARED-FOR GUITAR that shows the “patina of age, with finish checking, oxidation on the metal parts, and discoloration of the plastic.” That’s how Fender describes a Journeyman Relic instrument in its extensive line of Custom Shop made-to-order guitars. This is precisely the spirit in which Fender and Guitar Center have collaborated on the Limited-Edition Double-Bound Stratocaster Journeyman Relic, a guitar that has been carefully massaged to walk the line between custom and vintage. Based on a 1960 Strat, the Journeyman is a showpiece, with an Aged Aztek Gold nitrocellulose-lacquer finish that’s been convincingly weather-checked to exude the appearance of having been carried from clubs to freezing cold vans for years. The effect is also available in the Aged hues of Candy, Tangerine, Sherwood Green Metallic, Lake Placid Blue and…

LIFT THE LID on an Eastman Guitar like the T64/v and T184MX models reviewed this issue (see page 82), and questions about their origins will probably go right out the window the moment you take the instrument from the case. Just as companies like Yamaha, Ibanez, Aria and others helped to establish a new high-quality reputation for Japanese-made guitars in the 1970s and ’80s, Eastman Musical Instruments has shown for several years that guitars made in their Beijing workshop can rival any large-shop producers for quality, tone and playability. Founded as Eastman Strings in 1992 by Chinese flutistturned-entrepreneur and Boston University graduate Quian Ni, the company was launched on its fine hand-crafted violins, violas and cellos, and has been making a wide range of acclaimed acoustic and electric guitars since 2004.…

HAILED AS THE King of the Surf Guitar, Dick Dale was an avid surfer, whose musical expression was informed by the roil and tumble of the experience. “Surf music is a heavy machine-gun staccato picking style to represent the power of Mother Nature, of our earth, of our ocean,” he told The New York Times in 1994. Anyone who saw him perform or heard his hits “Let’s Go Trippin’”, “Jungle Fever,” or “Miserlou” will know how fully he succeeded in the effort. Dale was pummeling his Stratocaster with his band the Del-Tones to crowds of 2,000 to 3,000 surfer-stomping teens in 1961 and ’62 when he found his existing Fender amps imploding under the pressure. Fender had unveiled its Showman head and cab in 1960, but Dale called Leo to…

ALTHOUGH IT BECAME one of the hottest amps among pro guitarists from the mid 1970s to the ’80s, the Mesa/Boogie seemed utterly designed to propel the singing, sustainful tone and playing style of Carlos Santana, who adopted it as his amp in the 1970s. For that matter, Santana literally named the thing. Mesa/Boogie founder Randall Smith was working as an amp repairman in 1969 in the small San Francisco shop Prune Music when he decided to play a trick on Barry Melton, lead guitarist with Country Joe and the Fish. Smith gutted Melton’s Fender Princeton, installed a modified 50-watt Bassman-style amp, squeezed in a 12-inch speaker and took it to the front of the shop, where Carlos Santana was hanging out. “He just wailed through that little amp until people…

The quest for violin-like attack and endless sustain seems to have found its apotheosis in this magical magnet. Created by Fernandes, the Sustainer generates a magnetic field that causes a guitar’s strings to vibrate, resulting in infinite, controllable sustain. But while predecessors like the Gizmotron and EBow were devised as a means to mimic orchestral strings, the Sustainer’s powerful tone has helped it find an audience with shredders, like Steve Vai, who described the pickup’s effect on his playing as giving it “a whole new dimension. As a matter of fact, it’s sort of a dimension of slow motion. I actually can play long slow notes now.” Vai equipped several of his signature guitars with Sustainers, including FLO (a 77FP JEM transformed to 7VWH spec), FLO III (a basswood Ibanez…

A YEAR BEFORE BOB DYLAN went electric with a Tobacco ’burst Fender Stratocaster at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, a bluesman who hadn’t recorded and had rarely performed since the 1930s stunned the festival’s crowd of 15,000 spectators with an electrifying performance of his own. Just weeks earlier, Nehemiah Curtis “Skip” James had been recovering from cancer treatments in a Tunica, Mississippi hospital when John Fahey and two friends tracked down the 61-year-old legend and persuaded him to play again. His re-emergence came during the 1960s blues revival at a time that also saw the “rediscovery” of Bukka White, Son House, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Mississippi John Hurt and others, who played to new audiences and scored record deals. Armed only with an acoustic guitar and a microphone, Skip James captivated…

RICK LAIRD, BASSIST with the original Mahavishnu Orchestra, died in July 2021 from cancer, aged 80. In 2019, Prog magazine’s Sid Smith spoke to him about his life and music. In this excerpt from an unpublished article, Laird discusses the early days of the John McLaughlin–fronted band and the recording of their incendiary debut album, The Inner Mounting Flame. “I was in London in 1971 and I got a call from John,” Laird said. “We knew each other from our time playing with Brian Auger in the ’60s. He said he wanted me to come out and join a band he was forming. He sent me a couple of plane tickets for me and my wife, and off I went. We rehearsed for probably two months, three or four days a…

LIKE OTHER PLAYERS from across the musical universe, I’ve been engrossed in director Peter Jackson’s epic documentary culled from the sessions that yielded the Beatles’ Let It Be. Revelations abound, though they are fewer on the acoustic side, as the group’s original goal was to create a live rock and roll show. That wound up being the infamous rooftop concert at Apple Corps headquarters in London. The mass of material created during the sessions can be divided into two camps: the electric rooftop rockers, and the softer melodic goodness that didn’t fit squarely into that box. There are a lot of lessons to be learned from the film, but perhaps most interesting is how the album’s unplugged tunes came to be. WE CAN WORK IT OUT… OR CAN WE? The…

SINCE THE 1990S Mackie, a company founded in America’s rugged Northwest, has been designing great-sounding and reliable audio products for musicians. A good part of their success can be attributed to the thoughtful design of mixers and loudspeakers that deliver both professional quality and portability. With the debut of their new line of Thrash-powered loudspeakers, Mackie has attempted to address perhaps the most challenging constraint to producing great audio — doing it on a budget. Thrash promises more for a fraction of what other professional powered loudspeakers cost. I tested the Thrash215 against Mackie’s claim that this entry-level powered speaker could function as a good P.A. for solo/duo performance or as a monitor, with enough power for a small- or medium-sized gig. Since I was performing, I was concerned enough…

IMET HIM in 1994 through a good mutual friend, the late great Stephen Bruton. Stephen had been raving about the Dumble amps he’d played out in Los Angeles, bought an Overdrive Special (ODS) and then brought it to Grant Street Dancehall in Lafayette, Louisiana, where we had a gig booked. He insisted that I try it out at soundcheck, so I did and was instantly hooked. Then, prompted by Stephen’s word on my behalf, Alexander called me out of the blue while I was in the studio recording South of I-10. He was very courteous and most complimentary about one of my albums and invited me to come out to his place so that I could try out some of his amps. I was in and out of Los Angeles…

MIKE McCREADY’S CLASSIC rockand blues-influenced soloing has been part of Pearl Jam’s signature sound since they formed under the name Mookie Blaylock in Seattle, in 1990. Signing to Epic Records the following year, they changed their name and released their debut album, Ten, a breakthough that generated three hit singles — “Alive,” “Even Flow” and “Jeremy” — and established the band as a major force in the ’90s music scene. Pearl Jam developed a sound contemporaneous with the burgeoning grunge movement, yet they were unafraid to reference elements of classic rock in their arrangements. Playing alongside rhythm and co-lead guitarist Stone Gossard, McCready brought elements of Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan and David Gilmour without ever resorting to slavishly ripping off their licks. Pearl Jam have always maintained a high degree…

As Gene Parsons recalled, it was at a 1967 session that inspiration struck for creation of the B-Bender, a mechanical device that pulls a guitar’s B string a step sharp to facilitate the weeping sound of a pedal steel. Parsons and guitarist Clarence White would both join the Byrds’ ever-changing lineup the following year as drummer and guitarist, respectively. But on this day they were performing on sessions for a neverreleased album by country artists Vern and Rex Gosdin when White needed an extra hand to bend a string — likely the B or high E — behind the nut as he played a harmonic. “And then he wanted to do it at the second position and the third position,” recalled Parsons, a multiinstrumentalist who played guitar, banjo, pedal steel…

He doesn’t get the credit bestowed on legends like Les Paul and Eddie Van Halen, but the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia was key to the development of the custom guitar industry. And he was using rack-mounted amps and effects in the mid 1970s, 10 years before the heyday of rack rigs. As Chris Gill revealed in Guitar Aficionado’s May/June 2014 issue, Garcia started out in the 1960s playing a variety of production models. By the 1970s, however, he found off-the-shelf guitars unsuited to his need for a broader tonal palette. And while most guitarists were happy to switch guitars during a set, Garcia preferred to play just one. It was Rick Turner at Alembic who, in 1970, gave Garcia his first custom guitar, featuring a mahogany and walnut body of…

While the music world was looking to electronic means of reshaping guitar tone in the late 1960s, two young pioneering musicians were seeking a more mechanical route. Kevin Godley and Lol Creme would find fame and fortune in the 1970s as the drummer and guitarist, respectively, for the British art-rock quartet 10cc. But in 1969, several years before they found international fame with the 10cc track “I’m Not in Love,” Godley and Creme, along with future band members Graham Gouldman and Eric Stewart, were running Strawberry Studios in England, where they wrote and demoed songs for other performers. In need of a string section for one tune, Godley and Creme pondered whether it were possible to make a guitar sound like an orchestral stringed instrument. “We began thinking that maybe…

The Parker Fly had its share of devotees, including Adrian Belew, Vernon Reid, Joe Satriani and Joni Mitchell. But few exploited the tonal possibilities of Ken Parker’s groundbreaking axe as Reeves Gabrels did during his tenure with David Bowie. He also had the benefit of playing it well before its 1993 debut. “I knew Ken Parker from when I worked for Fishman in Boston, back when it was a two-man operation,” Gabrels told Guitar Moderne. “Ken would give me a prototype and say, ‘See if you can break this. Tell me what’s wrong with it.’” There was certainly much to like about Parker’s eclectic take on the electric. Sporting a carbon/epoxy exoskeleton over a wood core, it weighed about four pounds and had magnetic and piezo pickups, whose signals could…

INVENTED IN 1969 by Greg Heet, the EBow was another device for electric guitar that, like the Gizmotron, attempted to emulate the sound of orchestral strings by producing infinite sustain. While the Gizmotron worked mechanically, the EBow did its thing electronically, using an inductive string driver to form a feedback circuit that would create continuous vibrations when pressed against a guitar string. Early adopters include Blondie’s Chris Stein, Blue Öyster Cult’s Buck Dharma (who used it to create the sustaining note that ends his solo on “Don’t Fear the Reaper”) and Bill Nelson, who many consider to be the EBow master. It was Nelson who introduced it to the guitarist who made the greatest impression with it: Stuart Adamson of the Skids and, later, Big Country. While it’s often thought…

As most fans will agree, never has so mighty a sound been made on so humble an instrument. But it would be difficult to call Jack White’s 1964 Montgomery Ward Airline Res-O-Glas cheap anymore, after his use of the ’60s catalog fodder sent values and collectibility soaring sky high. From the start, though, the White Stripes’ ethos was firmly rooted in the power of minimalism, and giving the band’s sparse ingredients room to breathe often translated “less is more” into “less is huge!” White wasn’t the first guitarist to discover the conversely massive, dynamic tone that an erstwhile cheapo instrument can generate, but when he strapped on his red Res-O-Glas beauty, the guitar world quickly recognized the full achievement of this silk-purse-out-of-sow’s-ear-like conversion. The fiberglass body, assembly-line construction, and dual…

As the modern ukulele craze rages on, with major manufacturers offering more models than ever, its explosive origin can be traced back to a Hawaiian maestro who remains the instrument’s most recognizable face and primary ambassador. Jake Shimabukuro has been the preeminent four-stringer on the planet since the millennium flip, and his luminous light has brought tons of attention to the ukulele, not only from aspiring four-stringers but also from oodles of six-stringers looking to rock some uke on the side. Heavenly artists from across the musical universe respect Shimabukuro, and an astronomical collection collaborated with him on Jake & Friends (Mascot). Guitarists share a lot in common with ukulele players, but real collaborations between true stars from the two camps are few and far between. One might encounter an…

BOASTING A REPUTATION that grows year upon year, the Eastman String Company has long defied any “budget-brand” preconceptions normally heaped upon Chinese-made guitars, delivering instruments that punch well above their weight for build quality, tone and playability (see the “Meet Your Maker” interview with two of the company’s prime movers on page 24). Suffice it to say the guitars reviewed this month, a T64/v and T184MX, prove a couple of great cases in point. Each displays how this maker eschews the copy-and-clone approach, taking inspiration from classic forms while thoughtfully seeking to improve the designs in the process. Both instruments were tested through a Deluxe Reverb and a Friedman Mini Dirty Shirley combo, with JHS Bonsai and Tsakalis Six overdrives for dirt. T64/V The T64/v we looked at is primarily…

“A LOT OF our songs are very complicated, but this is one of our most straightforward tunes,” says Steve Morse, speaking about “Take It Off the Top,” the high-octane, fun and frisky prog-rock instrumental that kicked off the Dixie Dregs’ second album, 1978’s What If. “At the time, our road manager said to us, ‘It’s good to finally hear you play straight-up rock and roll for a change.’ I was trying to be as to the point as possible, but leave it to me to throw in a bunch of stuff that destroyed any chance at commercial success.” Even though What If failed to ascend higher than number 182 on the Billboard Hot 100, “Take It Off the Top” became an instant favorite among Dixie Dregs devotees. As Morse notes,…