Guitar Playerの Holiday 2022 の目次

“I LISTENED TO MYSELF ON A RECORD, AND I WAS KIND OF CRUSHED. I WAS TRYING TO SHOW OFF TOO MUCH” I LEARN SO much from other players,” says acoustic guitarist extraordinaire Tommy Emmanuel. Emphasizing that point, he lets us in on a little secret: “I even steal from them.” He laughs. “No, really, it’s what we do, all of us. You have to have your antenna up all the time. If I spend a few minutes with people like Jeff Pearson or Steve Vai, they’ll do things that just knock me out. Before you know it, I’m playing the same licks, but I make them mine. And that’s okay. It’s part of the musical dialog we have as musicians.” Although he’s recorded dozens of albums of his own material,…

Back in April 2022, the Red Hot Chili Peppers released Unlimited Love, their 12th studio effort and, more significantly, their first with John Frusciante, arguably their most fan-beloved guitarist, in more than 15 years. IF SOME LISTENERS felt like they had waited a lifetime for this reunion album — and it’s quite possible that a few younger ones actually had — they didn’t have to hang on too much longer for the next one. Rather, here we are just a handful of months later, and the Chilis — which also include singer Anthony Kiedis, bassist Flea and drummer Chad Smith — have now followed up the 17-track, hour-plus Unlimited Love with the similarly 17-track, hour-plus Return of the Dream Canteen (Warner Records). The new record is culled from material recorded…

I FIND IT hard to imagine 1972 was 50 years ago. This is in large part due to the fact that I was born on June 5th of that monumental leap year. What? You didn’t know 1972 is the longest year by the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) standard? With the added day, plus two seconds, the six-string purveyors of the day took full advantage of the extra time on both electric and acoustic guitars. As this new decade was still revving its engines, rock and roll was expanding in 1972. With the guitar at the forefront, there was glam rock, shock rock, prog rock, southern rock and even jazz rock. What’s more, there was the further development of soft rock and heavy metal alongside the burgeoning reggae and country rock…

SMALL AMPS THAT kick ass are always welcome, and PRS just made it a whole lot easier to enjoy what their bigger HDRX 50-and 100-watt amps have to offer by introducing the new HDRX 20. It’s a smaller and lighter version of the behemoth 100-watt head that PRS based on a particular Marshall Super Lead amplifier used by Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock and which now resides in Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture. I tested the HDRX in the July 2022 issue, and at the time it was hinted that a lower-powered version would eventually be offered. Naturally, the reaction here was: bring it on! Right off the bat, the HDRX 20 threw me a curve. I expected to see EL84 or 6V6 output tubes, because they’re so ubiquitous to amps…

SIGNATURE MODEL ELECTRIC guitars with aged finishes have been around for a while, but I had not encountered a relic’ed signature acoustic until Martin announced the D-28 Rich Robinson at the 2022 NAMM Show. The model designed to capture every nuance of the 1954 D-28 handed down to the guitarist by his father, Stanley Robinson, a working musician during the ’50s and ’60s who played it at the Grand Ole Opry as well as on tour in the folk outfit the Appalachians. When he was a teenager, Robinson used the instrument to conjure the Black Crowes’ signature acoustic tune, “She Talks to Angels,” and he went on to write scores of classic Crowes, Magpie Salute and solo tunes on the historic dreadnought. Robinson has dubbed its re-creation the Appalachian. “If…

THERE ARE “HIT” songs and there are “big” songs. Hit songs are popular for a while and resonate most with the young-adult music listeners of the era. Big songs — like “Shout,” “Sweet Caroline” and “Don’t Stop Believin’,” to name a few — stick around for generations, transcend music trends, become part of our pop culture lexicon, and are must-plays at parties, clubs and public celebrations. Big songs light up a room and get everyone from your nephew to your great-grandma singing along. The Killers’ “Mr. Brightside” is a big song. Written by guitarist Dave Keuning with Brandon Flowers, the group’s lead vocalist/keyboardist, the 2003 modern-rock track has sold several million copies, been streamed hundreds of millions of times, topped numerous readers’ polls, appeared in multiple films and been adopted…

“IT WAS TORTUOUS TO MAKE, BUT NONE OF OUR ALBUMS HAVE FELT EASY, FOR ONE REASON OR ANOTHER” BILLY DUFFEY THE CULT IT WAS 1984 when Billy Duffy defined his own idea of the indie guitar hero on the Cult’s debut album, Dreamtime. Playing a Gretsch White Falcon through a Roland JC-120, with a judicious use of delay and chorus, Duffy created epic soundscapes. It was but a prelude to the group’s next album, their 1985 commercial breakthrough, Love, where Duffy eschewed traditional blues-rock stylings for an approach that combined open drone strings and densely layered guitars. His sweeping aural pictures were the perfect backdrop for singer Ian Astbury’s thoughtful lyrical approach. The intervening years have seen the Cult adopt more of a hard rock approach, but for those who…

WARM AUDIO IS known best for its high-end tube and solid-state studio equipment and microphones. But the Austin-based company has also produced a growing number of replica stompboxes that include the Jet Phaser, Foxy Tone Box (i.e. Foxx Tone Machine), and the new Centavo and Warmdrive pedals on review here. These two boxes clone a pair of famed ’90s designs, namely the Klon Centaur and the Hermida Audio Zendrive. Like the original Centaur, the Centavo has a large custom-cast “champagne” enclosure and black pointer knobs for gain, treble and output. The input, output and nine-volt adapter jacks are on the back, along with a mod slider switch that provides extended low-frequency response in the up position. Removing two screws is all it takes to remove the thick aluminum bottom plate…

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“HARMONY AND MELODY ARE JUST THINGS I’VE ALWAYS BEEN OBSESSED WITH” “I WANT ALL my songs to work acoustically,” Robert De Leo explains. “When it comes to songwriting, that’s essentially where everything starts out for me.” As bassist, co-founder and primary songwriter with Stone Temple Pilots, De Leo is responsible for penning some of the most rhapsodic modern-rock anthems of the past few decades including “Plush,” “Interstate Love Song,” “Down,” and “Between the Lines.” But behind the driving rhythms and pulsing guitar riffs, the band always displayed a keen sense of melody and sophisticated harmonic and sonic twists that distinguished them from most of their peers. Other songs such as “Wonderful,” “Hello It’s Late,” “Cinnamon” and “Glide” showed De Leo to be a learned student of ’60s and ’70s psychedelic…

MADISON CUNNINGHAM ACED her way through the whole “sophomore slump” thing in fine form with her second album, 2019’s Who Are You Now. That sublime set of musically adventurous and startlingly personal songs enchanted music fans and critics alike, and went on to earn the iconoclastic singer-guitarist a Grammy nomination for Best Americana Album. Music is therapy for the 25-year-old California native, and as suggested by the title of her sumptuous new album, Revealer (Verve Forecast), songwriting is her way of making sense of feelings. “I actually had the title right at the beginning,” she explains, “so in many ways it was something of a guiding principle for me. As the songs came into form, the word sort of magnified itself as a through-line. I began to think of a…

“BONNIE RAITT’S SLIDE PLAYING WAS A REVELATION ABOUT ALL THE THINGS I NEEDED TO WORK ON AND LEARN” RORY BLOCK REMAINS one of the premier purveyors of acoustic blues. In addition to honors received over her lengthy career, she won the Blues Foundation’s prestigious Koko Taylor Award for Traditional Female Blues Artist in 2021 as well as the 2019 Blues Music Award for Acoustic Artist of the Year. Taylor herself called her “Little Miss Dynamite.” Block loves to commemorate her heroes and predecessors, and to celebrate female empowerment. She’s recorded a host of tribute albums that pay homage to everyone from Robert Johnson to Bukka White to Bessie Smith. On Ain’t Nobody Worried (Stony Plain), the third volume in her “Power Women of the Blues,” she takes a slightly different…

THE SUNN LIFE Pedal is a collaboration between Akron-based effects manufacturer EarthQuaker Devices and the Seattle ambient metal band Sunn O))). It effectively reproduces the sound created when the group’s guitarists slam their multiple stacks of vintage 100-watt Sunn amps with excessive fuzz, overdrive, octave and boost, creating a demonic wall like no other. Now in its third incarnation, the Life Pedal has been modified to re-create the analog octave effect from a vintage Shin-Ei FY2 fuzz and FY6 octave-fuzz into a white-face RAT distortion, with a MOSFET booster following, to allow plenty of amp slamming from a single pedal. The controls can be a hair confusing, since, in the spirit of many old pedals, they don’t follow a logical right-to-left order. Amplitude, far left, is the output for the…

“IT WAS ABOUT fucking time!” R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck exclaims on recalling the group finally achieving its first U.S Top 10 hit with 1987’s “The One I Love.” “In America, it was like radio stations just weren’t interested in whatever we did. It was never the right thing. But we sold a lot of records, and that single definitely changed the way the world perceived us. And all of a sudden, our audiences doubled.” NOT LOVE, ACTUALLY It had been a long hard slog for the altrockers, who formed in 1980 and released four albums prior to 1987’s Document, which included “The One I Love.” Buck recalls coming up with the riff while on his front porch, noodling around on his guitar. “I remember just sitting there and playing almost the…