Guitar Playerの March 2024 の目次

I SEE THIS page as a place to introduce the issue you hold and tell you something about how it came together. That’s my usual approach, but this month, while I sit here on the first week of a new year, I’d like to share a few things that are on my mind about Guitar Player’s past year and the one that is to come. We Had a Great Year: All things considered, 2023 was terrific for Guitar Player. Subscriptions, which have been especially strong in recent years, continued to grow (and, I’m happy to say, we’re hearing fewer complaints about missed issues, duplicated subscriptions and the like). Most encouraging, our newsstand sales remained nearly flat in a year when overall U.S. magazine sales were down 15 percent on average.…

LOOKING AT GIBSON’S new Falcon 5 and Falcon 20 combos last month [see New & Cool, February 2024] got me thinking about one of the company’s last great classic 1960s amps, the GA-79RVT stereo combo. If you were a guitarist in the early years of that decade, the GA-79RVT was the way to go, especially if you had a fancy new ES-355 stereo guitar to plug into it. Gibson’s embrace of stereo arrived at the same time that the hi-fi community was adopting stereophonic sound for the home market. Gibson’s stereo guitars sent the signals from an electric guitar’s neck and bridge pickups to separate channels of an amp designed to reproduce each signal independently. Of course, this isn’t really “stereo” reproduction, which is intended to create a fuller and more…

AS BLACKBERRY SMOKE recorded their eighth studio album, Be Right Here (3 Legged Records/Thirty Tigers), the sessions developed a greater sense of gravity and intensity. The cause? Drummer Brit Turner was battling brain cancer. But as guitarist Charlie Starr says, Turner’s illness had the effect of making the sessions at Nashville’s famed RCA Studio A more fun and memorable. “It was so good for us to be making music with Brit as he was undergoing treatment,” Starr says. “I think that whole thing really brought us closer, just knowing that one of our brothers needed love and support. I think it gave the record some urgency.” The band “always records live,” Starr says, but usually with the drummer in a different room. In this case, however, producer Dave Cobb pushed them…

An essential listen has to be Joe’s 1964 album For Django, featuring tunes written by or associated with Django Reinhardt. Although influenced by the Gypsy jazz legend, Joe made no attempt to emulate him, and this album is considered, in its own right, to be one of the greatest jazz guitar records ever made. Another recommended album is Virtuoso, a solo record released in 1974. Pass went on to make four volumes under that title, and while they’re all worth a listen, there’s something extra special about volume one. Finally, there is 1976’s Fitzgerald & Pass… Again, Pass’s second album in duet with Ella Fitzgerald. It’s a masterclass in understated accompaniment, with his fabulous and inventive guitar weaving in, out and around Ella’s beautiful vocals.…

WHEN SOLOING OVER a standard 12-bar blues progression, you can improvise solely using the blues scale and come away sounding great. But there’s one bar in the progression that requires you to make a choice — the lone appearance of the V (five) chord in bar 9. (This chord can also appear in bar 12, as part of a turnaround, but for this lesson we’ll mostly focus on bar 9.) Here it’s a case where not making a choice and relying solely on the blues scale actually is a choice, and a valid one at that, as we’ll see. Of course, many blues greats have their own pet ways of addressing the V chord, and the goal of this lesson is to illustrate and present a few easy ways to…

IF IT SEEMS like the big acoustic manufacturers are diversifying product lines to break stereotypes and compete on multiple fronts, that’s because they are. It’s been more than a minute since one could concisely say a Martin is like this, a Taylor is like that, and a Gibson is like so. Historical lines continue to blur as Martin makes another new wave outside of its traditional pond with the GPCE Inception Maple. The guitar isn’t as radical as Martin’s SC, but it is another major move toward the high-performance acoustic-electric market, which historically wasn’t a big part of the company’s bag. Shoot, a cutaway used to be considered outrageous. The introduction of the cavernously cutaway SC in 2020 and its subsequent popularity ushered in a new era for America’s oldest…

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PETE ANDERSON MADE his name as a hotshot Telemaster and successful producer with Dwight Yoakam when their first album, Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc., became a double-Platinum smash in 1986. The pair had been working together for two years, finding success with new-wave audiences and roots fans alike, helped by opening slots for the likes of the Blasters and Los Lobos. Yoakam’s back-to-basics approach eschewed all the trappings that country had fallen into by the 1980s. He was looking back at the golden age of the honky-tonks, taking the Bakersfield vibe from Buck Owens and supercharging it with the punch and drive of the new-wave bands he’d been supporting. A huge part of Yoakam’s success was down to the mind-bending skills of Anderson, who took the art of country guitar to…

I RECALL MY first guitar lessons at Bronstein Music in South San Francisco with Bunnie Gregoire. She was hip, way hipper than I was. So when she brought the George Van Eps Method for Guitar books for me to study. I was not pleased. All I wanted to learn was “Spoonful” from Cream’s Wheels of Fire. As with most things Bunnie tried to teach me, it took decades for me to realize how right she was. Better late then never. George Van Eps’ My Guitar album was released on Capitol Records in 1966 and was his third record as a leader. Van Eps isn’t the household name it deserves to be. Among other things, he pioneered seven-string guitar, employing a standard six-string tuning with the seventh string tuned down a…

Charlie Starr GUITARS 1964 Gibson ES-335, 1964 Gibson ES-330, 1958 Fender Telecaster, 1963 Fender Esquire, 1962 Fender Esquire Custom, 1956 Gibson Les Paul Junior (at left), 1958 Gibson LP Junior, 1967 Rickenbacker Rose Morris 330, 1950 Martin D-28, 1952 Martin D-18, 1955 Gibson J-45 AMPS 1965 Fender Champ, early ’60s Magnatone Troubadour, early ’60s Supro Super, late-’60s Vox Defiant, Leslie cabinet EFFECTS ’90s Menatone Red Snapper, ’70s Echoplex EP-3, Analogman King of Tone, Analogman SunFace, Klon KTR Benji Shanks GUITARS 1960 Gibson Les Paul Junior, 1955 Fender Strat, 1965 Gibson Firebird III, 1967 Gibson ES-125, Gibson Les Paul R9 (Historic Makeovers), Gibson goldtop F-5 mandolin AMPS 1965 Fender Vibro Champ EFFECTS Cry Baby wah, Klon Centaur silver, MXR Phase 45 and Phase 100, Echoplex EP-3, Fulltone Supa-Trem, Analogman Astro Tone…

Joe Pass played a Gibson ES-175 for most of his career, although two signature models carry his name. The Ibanez JP20, in production from 1980 until 1990, was loosely based on a D’Aquisto Excel that he also liked to play. However, Pass didn’t prefer it to his beloved 175, saying, “They pay me to play it and I get a free replacement if it gets beaten up.” His signature model that is most well known is the Epiphone Joe Pass Emperor, shown here, which was produced shortly before his death in 1994. Although discontinued in 2015, it was for many years one of the best entry-level archtops money could buy.…

INTRODUCED NEARLY 10 YEARS ago, the original Royalist was the first amp from Tone King dedicated entirely to classic British tones. Prior to that — both under the sole stewardship of founder Mark Bartel, from 1993 to the early ’00s, and during much of his association with Premier Builder’s Guild, from around 2010 to 2016 — most Tone King models offered one American-voiced clean channel and another with a tweed-meets-Marshall dirt tone. Boutique Amplifiers Distribution (BAD), which has owned the brand since 2016, has brought noteworthy updates to all remaining models in the lineup, and the Royalist MkIII is the latest to get the treatment. The result expands the amp’s functionality while retaining the basic premise, resulting in a circuit that applies its 1964–’70 Marshall-derived sonic template across a more versatile…

HE SWAM AMONG great white sharks, drove race cars, taught kindergarten and college, and worked as a radio DJ, newscaster and TV producer. He was the CEO of a sheet music company, directed a public relations agency, owned a scuba company and served as a project coordinator for the National Trust of the Cayman Islands. He wrote and edited several books and bylined over a thousand freelance articles. To the world at large, though, Jim Crockett will be best remembered as the visionary founder of the modern guitar magazine. Becoming publisher of GPI Publications in 1971, Jim orchestrated the rise of Guitar Player; founded Frets, Keyboard, and Drums and Drumming magazines; and oversaw the creation of the company’s books, records and newsletters divisions. He was the force behind the annual…

BRITISH GUITARIST BILLY Morrison estimates that he wasted a good 15 years of his life shooting drugs. “I loved the Sex Pistols and Johnny Thunders, and I went down that route,” he says. “But most people get the music career first and then blow their money on drugs. I did it backward.” By the mid ’90s, Morrison was facing the end. He weighed 120 pounds and was homeless. He’d been stabbed and no one seemed to care. Even his friends had abandoned him. One night, he found himself crouching behind a garbage can in London, trying to shoot heroin into collapsed veins. “That’s when I finally saw the light,” he says. “I said, ‘I’m done with this. I’m going to get clean and have the career I always wanted in…

BIG THINGS WERE expected of Soundgarden back in 1989. The Seattle-based hard-rock quartet consisting of guitarist-singer Chris Cornell, lead guitarist Kim Thayil, bassist Hiro Yamamoto and drummer Matt Cameron were already being cited as pioneers of a new sound called “grunge,” one that blended the aesthetics of heavy metal, punk and alternative rock. After releasing the EPs Screaming Life and Fopp on the Sub Pop label, and a debut album, Ultramega OK, on SST, the band had signed a major-label deal with A&M Records. But commercial success didn’t come quickly or easily for Soundgarden. Their first album for A&M, 1989’s Louder Than Love, earned glowing reviews, and college radio stations jumped on hard-driving tracks like “Loud Love” and “Hands All Over.” But the record stalled at number 108 on Billboard, and…

JOE PASS WAS born Joseph Anthony Jacobi Passalacqua to Sicilian immigrants in New Jersey on January 13, 1929. He acquired his first guitar at the age of nine after being captivated by country legend Gene Autry’s appearance in the 1940 movie Ride, Tenderfoot, Ride. It wasn’t long before young Joe’s interest became an obsession, and he would practice for two hours before school and two hours after, then devote another four more hours to the instrument after dinner, before going to bed. His father drove him relentlessly and would ask his young son to work out — on the spot — any tune that happened to be on the radio. He also encouraged him to embellish melodies as he heard them. At the time, Joe didn’t know what improvising was.…

WATCHING LUCA STRICAGNOLI play live feels almost like a sporting event where one witnesses a well-trained musical athlete performing extraordinary feats of virtuosity. It’s obvious to anyone that he is no ordinary guitar player. I took visiting family members to see him play at Freight & Salvage in Berkeley, California, confident that even though a solo acoustic performance wasn’t exactly their bag, Stricagnoli’s octopus-armed execution of familiar covers would win them over. Mission accomplished. Everyone was floored. By now we’ve all seen some amazing percussive fingerstyle arrangements for solo acoustic, both live and on YouTube, the arena that brought the genre to the masses. It’s been nearly two decades since CandyRat Records recording artists, spearheaded by Andy McKee, blew up the internet. Akin to the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show,…

FENDER’S RECENTLY INTRODUCED Vintera II series features classic colors, accurately replicated pickups and periodcorrect neck shapes. Produced in Fender’s Ensenada, Mexico, factory, the line comprises Stratocasters and Telecasters from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s; a ’50s Jazzmaster; ’70s Jaguar and Mustang models and several basses from the same decades. For this review, I received guitars from three consecutive decades — a ’50s Jazzmaster, a ’60s Telecaster and a ’70s Mustang — which were tested with a trio of Fender amps (a Deluxe Reverb, a ’48 Dual Professional and a Tone Master Princeton Reverb) and several grind pedals, including the new UAFX Lion ’68 Super Lead. ’50s JAZZMASTER Introduced in 1958, the Jazzmaster was presented as a flagship model for jazz players, but when that plan didn’t go as expected, it…

FEW TUBE-AMP MAKERS have embraced the “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” ethos like Friedman, which notably allows use of its brand name in Fractal’s amp models, among others. Founder Dave Friedman and his team have already proven their ability to design and market traditional all-tube guitar amps that address guitarists’ needs for classic sounds wrapped in contemporary performance capabilities, and now the IR-X preamp and IR pedal finds the maker elbowing sideways into the digital amplification realm, while still working to its established strengths. The IR-X is a dual-tube, two-channel, amp-voiced preamp that loads three speaker-cabinet impulse responses (IRs) per channel to enable a fully miked-up stack sound that can be DI’d to the front-of-house or your recording setup. Two 12AX7 tubes running at high voltage deliver all…