Tabla de contenidos para December 2021 en Guitar Player

IT HAS BEEN said that instant, easy access to centuries of music makes it hard for young artists to find a truly original voice. Apparently, Naia Izumi didn’t get the memo. On the evidence of A Residency in the Los Angeles Area (Sony Masterworks) a fresh, new sound has been created, featuring guitar work that recalls neo-soul, but with a style of comping that incorporates unique chord voicings and string tapping. This personal take on accompaniment is integrated into tunes featuring odd-time sections, hook-laden choruses and a high-voiced singing style that summons the emotional power of blues-legend Skip James. When last interviewed by Guitar Player in 2016, Izumi was in Los Angeles, identifying as female, playing on the street and scuffling day to day. In 2018, now identifying as male,…

“I could be gone sooner than you think.” BY MIDDLE AGE, most people still have most of the items on their bucket lists unchecked. Not so for Joe Bonamassa, but then he got started way early. At the age of 12, back when he could still be called a “wunderkind,” he was already a blues hotshot — “Smokin’” Joe Bonamassa — sharing concert stages with his idols and mentors Danny Gatton and B.B. King. From there, he began burning up the road behind him as fast as he could go. He’s released 15 solo albums, 11 of which hit the number one spot on the Billboard Blues chart. He’s played with Eric Clapton (and held his own). And he’s been nominated for Grammys and routinely tops “Best Blues Guitarist” polls.…

“MY RELATIONSHIP WITH THE GUITAR HAS ALWAYS EBBED AND FLOWED. IT’S A LOVE, LOVE, LOVE, LOVE, LOVE, LITTLE BIT OF HATE, RELATIONSHIP” SAMANTHA FISH IS driving through New Orleans in a race to beat curfew. Sunset will come in a few hours, plunging her adopted city into darkness for the third of several nights to come, and there’s a lot of business to handle before she taps out again. Three days earlier, Fish was preparing to fly home after a gig in Indiana as Hurricane Ida, the fifth most powerful hurricane to ever make landfall in the U.S., struck southeastern Louisiana and effectively shut down New Orleans. “They wouldn’t let anybody fly in or out, so I missed the storm itself, but I came back to see how we did…

Let’s talk about the gear you’ve used throughout the years. What were the amps that you favored early on? Believe it or not, early on I was using Acoustic amps, because they had built-in distortion and, most importantly, channel switching so that I could switch from fuzz to the clean sound I needed for the reggae stuff. I also used Marshalls, but often they were customized by people like Harry Kolbe in New York. Eventually, I started using Mesa/Boogies, and then, by the late ’80s, rack gear with multieffects units and MIDI control. I would just look through the guitar magazines and be like, “I need that! And that!” Most recently, I was using a Boogie Triple Rectifier, which I liked better than the Dual Rectifier, because it had more…

Jack White: Open A The White Stripes – “Seven Nation Army” One of the biggest songs of its time saw guitarist Jack White’s guitar tuned to open A. You can play the mega-easy main riff in any tuning — it’s in the chorus where the open tuning comes into its own. Those slide guitar lines wouldn’t be possible in standard. Derek Trucks: Open E The Derek Trucks Band – “Sweet Inspiration” Revered as perhaps the finest slide player of his generation, Trucks’ go-to tuning is open E. One of his tricks is to press down with his slide so you effectively fret the notes. He doesn’t do it all the time but it’s worth experimenting. Dan Auerbach: Open G The Black Keys – “Black Door” A keen slide-man, the Black…

“ANYTIME I HEAR it, it takes me back to a special time,” Stone Temple Pilots guitarist Dean DeLeo says about “Big Empty,” the rousing country- and blues-tinged alt-rock smash featured on both the soundtrack to the 1994 movie The Crow and Purple, the group’s multi-Platinum album of the same year. “I’ll get in the car with my kids, and every now and then the song comes on. Right away I’m transported to a period that was so beautiful for the band and for each of us personally and professionally.” He adds thoughtfully, “And I’m reminded of Scott a lot,” he says, referring to the group’s late founding singer, Scott Weiland. “These great, melancholic memories come rushing over me. It’s a pretty special song.” GET ON THE BU S Although Stone…

THERE IS NO THING like music made by a great band that’s been together for years. With a wealth of recording and gigging under their belts, the individual members can interact in a way that borders on thought transference. The phenomenon reaches its epitome when paired with the high level of technical facility and harmonic knowledge typical of a jazz ensemble. Sadly, jazz groups that stay together for decades are even rarer than the rock variety. One was Paul Motian’s collaboration with Bill Frisell and Joe Lovano. After two decades, they often sounded like a single organism. Fortunately, another aggregation led by Eivind Aarset is still active. For going on a dozen years, the guitarist — along with bassist Audun Erlien and drummers Wetle Holt and Erland Dahlen — has…

1. THERE ARE TWO WAYS TO SOLO There are two schools of thought to soloing, and I subscribe to both of them. The first is to start slow, low and subtle, and then build to a crescendo. That’s totally fine. Or you could go the other way, like Jeff Beck did on his solo to “Farther Up the Road” from the album The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball. Right from the downbeat, he opens a can of whoop-ass and doesn’t let up. It reminds me of when I would be onstage with Albert Collins in the early ’90s. He’d just rip into a solo at my expense, and it was unrelenting. I’d be like, Wow. This is just crazy good and crazy scary. I see the value of both approaches, but…

“IT SHOULD FEEL LIKE YOU’RE SPEAKING, ESPECIALLY IF YOU’RE A BLUES PLAYER” WITH EACH ALBUM, Samantha Fish finds new places to take her songwriting and guitar playing. That same adventurous spirit also informs how she constructs her solos. Here are her tips for getting started. FIND YOUR ENTRY POINT “I like to do a slow bend, just to kind of bring myself in, because it just gives you that second, that pause. I’ve kind of gotten out of the format of soloing over the exact changes of what I’ve been singing over all the time. Sometimes it’s cool to put the solo in a completely different key or drop it down. We did that a couple times on the new record. It is sort of jarring and shocking, but it…

AMYTHYST KIAH’S MOMENT is happening right now. The fantastic fingerpicker, dynamo singer and profound songwriter defies all sorts of stereotypes, and after playing straightforward folk and rock for a number of years, she has successfully combined them into a singular original style on her Rounder Records debut, Wary + Strange. Kiah’s credits are mounting fast, and she has the skills to back up the buzz. Her composition “Black Myself” won Song of the Year at the Folk Alliance International Awards and was Grammy-nominated for Best American Roots Song in 2019, when she rose to prominence as a member of Our Native Daughters, the African Americana project conceived by new roots music star Rhiannon Giddens. Kiah subsequently signed with Rounder, connected with producer Tony Berg (Squeeze, Andrew Bird, Phoebe Bridgers) and,…

PLAYING BLUES ON an acoustic presents challenges as well as opportunities. It takes more mojo to bend a string or play a stretch chord, and getting great sustain isn’t as easy as adding gain to a signal chain. Using such challenges to your advantage is the name of the game. Here are a few tips and tricks to help you unleash your best blues on a “box” guitar. SLIP SLIDING A WAY Bending strings on a beastly acoustic can be a bitch, so it’s helpful to get a handle on glissando technique, sliding up or down a fret or two to achieve a bending effect. For example, instead of starting on an E played with the first finger at the fifth fret of the second string, and then meeting the…

EVERY GREAT GROUP needs a secret weapon — that singularly talented player whose unique contribution adds a magical, and oftentimes irreplaceable element to its sound. In the case of alt-rock pioneers the Pixies, whose loud-quiet-loud dynamic was famously adopted by bands such as Nirvana, that honorary title goes to guitarist Joey Santiago. He’s the first to admit that his playing style — big on jarring shrieks, abrasive chords and short “anti-solo” outbursts — probably wouldn’t fit most other outfits. And that’s just the way he likes it. “I wanted to be in a weird band, and I got really lucky when I hooked up with Charles,” he says, referring to Pixies frontman and co-guitarist Charles Thompson (a.k.a. Black Francis), whom he met in 1986 while the two attended the University…

JOE BONAMASSA SAYS that in some ways he knows what makes his 1951 NoCaster — nicknamed the Bludgeon — special, and in some ways he doesn’t. “My ’51 NoCaster is basically the best guitar I’ve ever owned in my life,” he says. “I’ve had it for seven years and I’ve probably played 700 shows with it.” He reveals that he found the NoCaster — so called because it was made during the brief period when Fender clipped “Broadcaster” from the headstock decal — at a Guitar Center, where it was hanging on the wall. The moment he walked up to it, he knew he would have the guitar for the rest of his life. Bonamassa and Fender recently announced the re-creation of the Bludgeon in a limited run of 100…

WHEN GARY MILLER graduated from high school in the late 1970s, the Washington, D.C. guitarist — better known as Dr. Know of the seminal hardcore group Bad Brains — was not planning on a lifetime career in rock and roll. “I was going to Maryland University and I wanted to be a doctor,” the 61-year-old says from his home in Kingston, New York, where he is still working to undo some of the effects of a severe stroke he suffered in 2016. “That’s how I got the nickname ‘Dr. Know,’” he adds. Of course Doc, as his bandmates call him, was not to finish his medical studies but to devote his life to his musical craft instead. “That’s how the spirit works,” he says. “It’s like, ‘All right, you boys…

DOES ANYBODY REALLY know what time it is? Everything seems to be taking place in a surreal space-time continuum, but despite pandemic-era factory closings and production suspensions, there continues to be plenty happening on the acoustic manufacturing front. Here is a selection of gear that’s come out recently or is about to drop, just in time for your holiday shopping considerations. 1 BREEDLOVE Eco Collection Breedlove is turning over a new leaf by eliminating the use of clear-cut wood in its 2021 model line. And with the company’s new Eco Collection, players of all piggy-bank sizes can own a solid-top guitar with EcoTonewood back and sides. EcoTonewood technology is a new lamination process designed to integrate three layers in such a way as to avoid the tone-dampening, soft center-core of…

THE LATEST IN Orange’s line of Micro Terror amps is the stomp-box-sized Terror Stamp, a hybrid design that features a tube preamp and a class AB solid-state power amp that can pump 20 watts into your eight- or 16-ohm speaker of choice. The compact steel enclosure measures just 2.4 by 5.4 by 3.9 inches, making the Terror Stamp convenient to stick on a pedalboard, and it has dual master-volume controls, a gain control and a shape knob. The front panel has 1/4-inch jacks for input, send and return, headphone/cab-sim and speaker out, as well as a center-positive input for the included 15VDC power supply. It’s nice that the in-line adapter uses a standard IEC power cord, but if you lose the unit (as I once did for my Micro Terror)…