Table of contents for March 2022 in Guitar Player

THE SCENE MAY be better known today than the film in which it appears. Midway through Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll, Taylor Hackford’s 1987 documentary about Chuck Berry’s star-studded 60th birthday concert, Keith Richards convinces the guitar icon to let him take the lead on “Carol” during a rehearsal of the 1958 hit song. It was a tune Richards knew well, a Chuck cut that became a staple of the Rolling Stones’ set list in the 1960s. As Keith breaks into the opening riff, Berry stops him to make what seems a minor correction to a double-stop slur near the top of the fourth measure. “That slur is starting right here,” Chuck says as he demonstrates. It takes Keith a few tries before he performs it to Berry’s satisfaction —…

SIXTY-FIVE YEARS ago, 16-year-old Jimmy Luttrell played this guitar with his band on The Ted Mack Amateur Hour, a TV talent-show precursor to America’s Got Talent. Jimmy, who hailed from San Pablo, California, was a prodigy who played guitar, mandolin and violin. He lived with his family in a trailer park, where his practicing was frequently overheard, to the delight of most of his neighbors, in particular one Mr. Wesley Elmore. A fine musician himself and a luthier, Elmore built this double-neck masterpiece, dubbed the Whatchamacallit, and presented it to Jimmy as a gift. Sadly, the guitar was stolen from the band’s VW bus after the Ted Mack appearance. Fifty years later, the guitar’s new owner, unaware of its history, tracked Jimmy down after seeing the faded outline of his…

COUNTLESS GUITARISTS HAVE lifted Chuck Berry’s licks and riffs, which seems only fair, considering that Berry stole some of them himself. But when did it cross the line? Apparently whenever Chuck said so. Here are five thefts from the Berry patch. SURFIN’ U.S.A. The Beach Boys (1963) This Beach Boys hit is essentially Chuck’s “Sweet Little Sixteen” with new lyrics penned by Beach Boys leader Brian Wilson and singer Mike Love, who was uncredited. Wilson liked how Berry’s lyrics named key places in the U.S. and thought a song that gave a shout out to California’s top surf spots could be a hit. “I just took ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’ and rewrote it into something of our own,” Wilson told The Los Angeles Times in 2015. While the Leonard Chess biopic…

I FIRST WITNESSED Mike Stern onstage 31 years ago in his sideman role with Miles Davis at New York’s Avery Fisher Hall back in 1981. This was Miles’ eagerly awaited “comeback” gig after a five-year absence from performing and recording (a period depicted in the 2015 Don Cheadle feature film, Miles Ahead). As Robert Palmer reported the next day in his July 6 New York Times review, “It began promisingly with the trumpeter playing a tartly quizzical muted solo, accompanied by terse, restrained playing from his band. Then, abruptly, Mr. Davis gave a signal and his guitarist, Mike Stern, hit a series of ringing chords. The contrast between Mr. Davis’s refined playing and Mr. Stern’s heavy metal bombast was jarring. But it was the only recurring element in the group’s…

VERTEX EFFE CTS STEEL STRING SUPREME SRV PREAMP If you love the Dumble-derived tones of Stevie Ray Vaughan, Eric Johnson or John Mayer, the Steel String Supreme SRV preamp pedal should be on your list. Designed to function as a preamp, it inherits the level, gain, filter and jazz/rock controls from the Vertex Steel String MkII, and goes even further. The output knob determines your first gain-stage level, and fat shapes the lower midrange for extra thickness and body. Clean offers a parallel blend of your clean and effected signal, and the three-way Bright/Deep mode switch delivers a treble boost in the up position, a bass boost in the down position, and is neutral in the middle. $249. vertexeffects.com BOSS FZ-1W WAZA CRAFT FUZZ Boss analyzed several vintage fuzz circuits…

DESIGNED IN COLLABORATION with Dustin Kensrue, Thrice’s heavy-hitting guitarist and singer, this latest variant in the revamped StingRay series has several notable features, including being tuned D to D to deliver the gutsy crunch that Kensrue often deploys. Along with a stealthy, push-button pickup-wiring scheme, it adds up to a unique Artist model in the MM line. Arriving with a semi-transparent TV Blond satin-polyurethane finish (Dark Satin Tobacco Burst is also available), our review guitar has a double-cutaway body of African okoume, with rounded curves, and it looks sweet with the black-white-black pickguard, chromed control plate, and a hardware complement consisting of a Music Man Modern tremolo with bent-steel saddles and a push-in bar. Strings are pulled to pitch via a set of Schaller M6-IND locking tuners in a four-plus-two…

TUNING TECHNOLOGY REMAINS one of the bright lights in the guitar gear arena, especially on the purely acoustic side, where clip-on tuners rule the roost. D’Addario is always pushing the envelope and has achieved another breakthrough with the Nexxus 360, its first tuner to use a rechargeable lithium battery. Other features include full 360-degree rotation, a flexible pivot point, and a brilliant, bright and colorful LED screen. The Nexxus 360 costs a bit more than similar tuners, but consider that a pair of Duracell lithium coin button batteries runs about six bucks online (and more in a store), and you'll start to realize how much money it can save over the long haul. The Nexxus comes with a USB cable, powers up quickly, and delivers about 24 hours of use…

ERIC GALES’ NEW album, Crown (Provogue Records), is a serious statement of intent. So is its lead-off track, “I Want My Crown,” which features a showdown with blues-rock maestro Joe Bonamassa, who co-produced the record. Some years back, Gales and Bonamassa were teen prodigies, with the kind of chops that the average guitarist could spend a lifetime trying to obtain, but their careers took a different trajectory. Bonamassa’s career has gone from strength to strength, whereas Gales lost direction during years of struggle with substance abuse. “I had been aware of Joe’s progress, and I was a little frustrated that my career hadn’t kept pace, due to a lot of self-destructive behavior,” Gales reflects. “Maybe if I hadn’t taken a left turn when I did, things would have been different.”…

JUNIOR BROWN IS what I would call a bar-band virtuoso. What is that, you might ask? Fair question. To me, it’s an artist who thrives in a 200-capacity (or less) venue, one who, along with putting on a great show, never comes close to taking more than what he gives. Junior Brown is among the elite of this genre. Playing his guit-steel double-neck, a hybrid electric and lap-steel guitar, he delivers showstopping solos and will quote Hendrix at the drop of a hat. His detuning plunges are exciting and feel like a bomb hit the building. And then there is his songwriting. In my opinion Junior Brown is a totally underrated tunesmith. His songs are filled with melody and original hooks, and they breathe characters and scenarios that become real…

DEEP FEELING After School Session (1957) Chuck plays a pedal steel on this slow, bluesy instrumental, and the results are impressive enough to make you wonder what might have happened if he’d kept at it. Here, as in all his standard guitar playing, he demonstrates his supreme gift for melody and expression, using a Fender 400 Hawaiian/Country Western pedal steel guitar that, reportedly, he bought sometime in the 1950s. Diehard fans will recall the lengthy tracking shot of Chuck playing a Fender 400 solo at home that closes Taylor Hackford’s excellent 1987 biopic, Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll. ROCKIN’ AT THE PHILHARMONIC One Dozen Berrys (1957) The influence of both Louis Jordan and Bob Willis are evident on this instrumental, as Chuck plays jazzy licks with a swinging rhythm section,…

RELEASED IN THE arms of superstar John Mayer in 2018, the original Silver Sky model from Paul Reed Smith made a big splash and raised some eyebrows in the process. The notion of this storied maker undertaking an idealized rendition of the time-honored Stratocaster drew gasps from some quarters, but those who played the thing almost universally praised its clever and archetypal PRS-like reworking of the form, and the superb playability, tone and efficiency of the effort. With that in mind, the new SE Silver Sky is set to make big waves of its own. Likewise released with Mayer’s full approval, and with a string of launch events to prove it, the model brings PRS’s creative take on the 25.5-inch-scale, bolt-neck, three-pickup classic to the world of hard-working guitarists at…

VIRTUALLY EVERY EFFECTS maker with a significant lineup offers a compressor of one flavor or another, but for many players this plethora of squeeze options leads not so much to a love-hate relationship with these pedals but more of a “love-meh.” If you’ve tried a compressor or three but haven’t found a need to keep one on your board, chances are this effect's potential benefit to your signal chain, and therefore tone, just hasn’t quite clicked with you yet. On the other hand, if you have maintained one at the front of your chain, there’s a good chance you’re addicted to the thing and it’s always on. This preamble comes by way of laying some groundwork both for the strengths and potential underestimation of the Strymon Compadre. Part of the…