Tabla de contenidos para February 2022 en Guitar Player

ROCK FANS MAY have first heard the name Andrew Watt when he was announced as the guitarist, songwriter and producer behind Ozzy Osbourne’s most recent studio album, 2020’s Ordinary Man. But the 31-year-old phenom has been a major player in the music world for years before he connected with Ozz. Although he cut his teeth as a rock guitarist, both as a solo artist and playing alongside Glenn Hughes and Jason Bonham in the short-lived supergroup California Breed, Watt has also been responsible for some of pop’s biggest smashes from the likes of Post Malone, Shawn Mendes, Camila Cabello, Justin Bieber, 5 Seconds of Summer and others. For Ordinary Man, he assembled a supergroup that included Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan and Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith…

THE FIRST URGENT stirrings of alternative rock aren’t hard to find. Just look for the loudest, noisiest or most iconoclastic bands making a scene in the underground of rock and roll’s early years. Long before the term “alternative rock” came into popular use, there existed a strain of guitar groups united in their disregard for convention and commercial acceptance. The earliest prototypes can be found in 1960s garage rock acts like the Seeds and the Standells, whose use of feedback, distortion and inexpert playing laid the groundwork for rock’s anti-conventional future genres. A few, like the Velvet Underground and the Stooges, took the music to experimental extremes on albums that remain touchstones for guitarists who have followed. By the late 1970s, New York City’s art rock scene brought us Television,…

“WE’RE LIKE BLUES from another planet… like rock music for aliens,” Richard Lloyd once said of his groundbreaking New York City art-rock group, Television. “Ahmet Ertegun didn’t want to sign us to Atlantic Records because he claimed we didn’t play ‘Earth Music.’ I think he was right.” The key to Television’s otherworldly approach was the guitar interplay between Lloyd and Tom Verlaine. Lloyd called their relationship as guitarists “telepathic,” and indeed there is a conversation, if not an elaborate dance, taking place in their best work together: Lloyd’s trenchant, Hendrix-inspired serpentine solos, performed on his ’61 Fender Stratocaster, and Verlaine’s slower, blues-inflected lead work, onto which he applied his 1958 Fender Jazzmaster’s tremolo. They met in the early 1970s while playing in Greenwich Village clubs. “I saw Tom play and…

TWENTY YEARS HAVE passed since the Strokes released their debut, This Is It, so it’s easy to forget the album’s impact on alternative rock and guitar tone. As the Strokes’ guitar tandem, Albert Hammond Jr. and Nick Valensi blur the lines between rhythm and lead with their angular playing and twin single-note lines. Valensi has favored hollowbody electrics like the Epiphone Riviera, while Hammond prefers his 1985 ’70s-reissue Fender Stratocaster in Olympic White. These went into a minimalist setup involving Fender DeVille combos, played loud with a little breakup. Played without accompaniment, such brightness would be pure ice pick, but as a complement to Julian Casablancas’s slightly nasal, kinda over it vocal delivery, it has proven exquisite. At once they were referencing the treble-forward jangle of classic American indie and…

“OF ALL THE songs I’ve written, this one sure has legs,” singer-guitarist Dave Pirner says about “Runaway Train,” the 1992 lush rock ballad that briefly turned his cult-favorite alternative punk band, Soul Asylum, into multi-Platinum stars. “It’s hard to understand why one song out of hundreds that I’ve written still gets played on the radio so much,” he says. “But to a lot of people, it’s a special song, so it’s not for me to have a say in the matter. The song belongs to everybody.” SOUL SEARCH By the end of the 1980s, Soul Asylum were facing difficult times. Having released a string of critically hailed indie albums, they signed with A&M Records and issued three discs that failed to sell. To make matters worse, Pirner was suffering from…

FROM MARIO MACCAFERRI’S injection-molded plastic guitars of the 1950s to Dan Armstrong’s late-’60s Lucite guitars and basses, and Gibson’s 1980 Sonex line, the use of alternative materials in cutting-edge luthiery is nothing new. While none of those adventures stayed the course, however, AVA’s high-end guitars made from advanced carbon fiber aim to turn the page on the industry’s use of endangered materials. It might be antithetical to say carbon fiber has long been the material of the future, but that seemingly contradictory status abides in the guitar world. While the stuff has been accepted for use in everything from racing bikes to wind-turbine blades to aerospace applications, it has yet to replace traditional woods in the hearts and minds of guitarists, despite the previous and ongoing efforts of adventurous makers…

MANY GUITARISTS WILL decry the Velvet Underground’s lack of guitar expertise, but there is no avoiding the group’s impact on alternative rock or its guitarists. Perhaps no album of theirs is as important in this regard as their first and most influential, 1967’s The Velvet Underground & Nico. Beyond its music and anti-establishment production, the disc gave us the band’s guitar tandem of Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison. As players go, they couldn’t be further apart. Reed was the bombastic one, drawing shrieks, squawks and drones from his guitar and creating at times a dense ambience of noise that could be an agitated precursor to the haunting drone of shoegaze. Check out his jagged lead work on “Run, Run, Run,” the exotic drones on “All Tomorrow’s Parties” or the cacophonous…

“THEIR ATTITUDE WAS, ‘WE’RE A REAL BAND. WE WRITE OUR OWN SONGS.’ THAT WAS DIFFERENT” Before it was alternative rock, it was post-punk, and before that it was garage rock. For a brief period in the early ’80s, however, the preferred nomenclature was college rock, and the undisputed kings of the scene were R.E.M. “Sometimes terms can be such funny things,” says Mitch Easter, the North Carolina–based producer and musician who guided the sessions for R.E.M.’s first four recordings. “College rock — we never took that one seriously. We just thought, Oh, college stations are playing the music? That’s good. It wasn’t something we really bothered ourselves with.” By 1980, Easter was already something of a happening music figure in and around his hometown of Winston-Salem. He had played guitar…

ROBERT SMITH (THE CURE) THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN. IN THE CURE’S videos, he was traditionally seen without a guitar, leaving the impression that former coguitarist Porl Thompson was behind the group’s densely shimmering six-string magic. But Robert Smith is an excellent guitarist who’s applied his colorful tones and melodies to the group’s songs in the studio. “Even people who are quite close to the band are surprised to learn that I played the solo on ‘The Edge of the Deep Green Sea,’” he told Guitar Player in 1990. “Everyone would immediately assume it’s Porl.” While many of the Cure’s detractors have probably let Smith’s personal flamboyance divert their attention from the band’s phenomenal pop craftsmanship and stylistic range, as their gargantuan worldwide following proves, the Cure combine sublime pop and…

NNIE CLARK IS perhaps the most beguiling guitarist to emerge in the past 20 years. The artist known as St. Vincent makes music that is a collision of adept, otherworldly guitar arrangements and propulsive electronica, a mix that has made her a leading light of the alt-rock movement’s genre-subverting strain. A Berklee grad inspired to learn guitar by grunge acts like Nirvana and Soundgarden, Clark debuted her genre-bending approach on 2007’s Marry Me, kicking off a career that has had its fair share of success and critical acclaim. Her 2014 St. Vincent brought her a Grammy Award for Best Alternative Album (the first won by a solo female artist in 20 years). She seems poised to repeat that with her latest release, 2021’s Daddy’s Home. The Grammy-nominated album was recorded…

BACK IN 1996, while perusing an issue of Guitar for the Practicing Musician magazine, I stumbled upon a lesson called the “The Warp Refraction Principle” by columnist Jon Finn. An esteemed player, author and Berklee College of Music professor, Finn is obviously a fellow avid sci-fi fan and knew how to draw me in with that title. In that gem of a lesson, Jon explained that the guitar fretboard is divided into two separate and similarly ordered universes. The line between them is drawn by a lone interval within the five pairs of adjacent strings produced by standard tuning: (low to high) E, A, D, G, B, E. In examining each adjacentstring pair, you’ll observe that all but one are a perfect 4th, or two and one half steps, apart —…

BRITISH BLUES GUITARIST Joanne Shaw Taylor’s new record is called The Blues Album (KTBA Records), which might cause her fans to scratch their heads a bit: Weren’t her seven previous releases blues albums? “They were, but in a way they were not,” Taylor says. “When I think of the blues, I think of Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters, and my own music has strayed a bit from that kind of thing, especially songs that I write. So when I decided to do a covers album, I went for things that were more traditional, and the album title just seemed appropriate.” Taylor’s choices for covers might be more in the straight-up blues lane, but she didn’t opt for tried-and-true selections. The 11 sparkling cuts include mostly rare gems by the likes…

ON JUNE 14, 1998, the prodigal son came home. When the Red Hot Chili Peppers walked onstage at the Tibetan Freedom Concert at Washington DC’s RFK Stadium, it was with guitarist John Frusciante, the man who had deserted them mid-tour six years earlier and spent the ensuing period in a full-blown drug hell. It was Frusciante’s highest-profile appearance since reconnecting with his estranged bandmates earlier that year. But this was more than a reunion: It signified the return of man who had journeyed to the brink of death. The band played just three songs that night: “Give It Away,” “Under the Bridge” and “The Power of Equality.” But the truncated setlist didn’t matter. What mattered was that the band and Frusciante had emerged from a decade of drama intact. The…

AS THE DRIVING force behind the White Stripes, White rebooted the blues for the post-grunge era. The ethos was simple: Take drummer Meg’s kit, one beat-up amplifier and a barely in-tune guitar, and let it rip. The group’s thudding mix of blues, punk and metal (“I don’t trust anybody who doesn’t like Led Zeppelin,” White once declared) laid the groundwork for his eclectic career. Since the Stripes parted ways, he’s branched out with the more poporiented Raconteurs and the goth-blues supergroup the Dead Weather, as well as with his own solo releases. His life and work remain heavy with dizzying musical ideas, all of which he undertakes and performs with a passion that draws his audience to his obsession. “There aren’t that many things left that haven’t already been done,…

EVERY MUSICIAN NEEDS at least one good mic, and the more flexible it is, the better. Shure’s hybrid USB/XLR MV7 checks a ton of boxes, but musicians might overlook a unit with “Podcast Microphone” written right on the box. That would be an unfortunate oversight considering the versatility of this powerful digital/analog tool. The MV7 can act as its own interface when connected directly to a computer or iOS device, triggering an impressive modern feature set that’s controllable both on the mic and with expanded features via the ShurePlus Motiv desk-top app. The MV7 can also be used traditionally and was designed with a nod to a Shure icon, the legendary SM7. The SM7 sounds more refined than the company’s ubiquitous SM57, yet it’s not as fragile and expensive as…