Table of contents for October 2023 in Guitar Player

NITA STRAUSS HAS been one of the more extraordinary guitarists to explode on the scene in recent years. In 2016, just two years after Alice Cooper hired her to replace departing axe woman Orianthi, Nita became the first female guitarist to have her own Ibanez signature model, the JIVA10. Two years after that, she launched a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign for her debut album, Controlled Chaos, meeting her target within two hours and eventually raising eight times her goal. Few guitarists have managed to generate so much excitement in so little time. Needless to say, when Nita announced the release of her new, sophomore album, The Call of the Void, we were eager to bring her back for her second Guitar Player cover to discuss her approach to career and…

NO GAFF TAPE marks on the stage are necessary for Simon McBride — he always remembers where the sweet spot is. Alone under the lights for his big guitar cadenza each night with Deep Purple — and just after kicking on a Tube Screamer to make his white-hot guitar tone a few degrees hotter — he moves to that invisible X, hits a single note high up on the fretboard, and, with zero vibrato, gets it to sustain infinitely. When a shimmering overtone emerges from within the sound, the endless note becomes all the more prismatic. It grabs your ears the way a laser beam shooting up into the night sky attracts your eyes. It’s an old trick, but, after watching McBride do it flawlessly at 16 different arenas all…

GUITARISTS OLD ENOUGH to have had their early exposure to the instrument through mail-order catalogs are likely to remember the outsized presence of Carvin guitars, amplifiers and PA systems. As a kid in the early ’80s, I was drawn to order my first Carvin catalog by an ad in the back of Guitar Player. I never did order anything significant, other than a replacement pickup for my Yamaha SG-2000 (Carvin declared its 22-pole M22 humbucker to be the hottest pickup available at the time). By then Carvin was no small operation, manufacturing 600 guitars a month on essentially a custom-order basis, and selling them direct to the consumer. The company had evolved out of much humbler origins that dated back as far as those of its California neighbor, Fender. Founder…

“I write very emotional music, and most of the time it’s pretty angry,” says the reigning queen of shred metal, Nita Strauss. Right now, however, she’s the picture of morning contentment. Speaking with Guitar Player via Zoom, the guitarist is happily seated in the back of her tour bus, having wrapped the first date of her Summer Storm solo tour the night before in Nashville. On her lap are her two dogs: Bentley, a Pomeranian Chihuahua mix, and Motley, a Chihuahua mix. Strauss pats their heads and strokes their fur. “The back lounge of the bus is their little kingdom,” she says. “They have everything they need, and they love it when people come by to visit them. They’re true little road dogs. I take them out on all of…

“IT WAS A time of spreading our wings, a wonderful project where we went to the ends of the Earth to do it,” Yes guitarist Steve Howe recalls of Tales From Topographic Oceans, the epic double-vinyl concept album the group released in 1973. Fifty years on, the record remains an important milestone in Yes history for the guitarist. “There was often a feeling that disaster was almost about to strike, but we got there in the end. You have to account for Tales in our history to properly talk about what Yes achieved, because it was quite exceptional. I don’t think we’d be the same group without it.” Most certainly they wouldn’t. Following on the heels of the critically and commercially successful albums Fragile, Close to the Edge and Yessongs,…

IF THERE’S A home where any true acoustic aficionado would dream to reside, it’s Gary Brewer’s House of Axes. Brewer is best known as the leader of the long-thriving Kentucky Ramblers, a family band whose 2020 release, 40th Anniversary Celebration, spent 16 weeks at number one on the Billboard Bluegrass Albums Chart, was the number-three best-selling project overall in 2021, and landed between releases by Ariana Grande and Rob Zombie on the Top Current Albums Sales year-end chart. Brewer is quite a character, who prefers colorful clothes and refers to his high-octane Americana as “Brewgrass,” but he’s as legit as they come, with the history and testimony to prove it. Brewer’s grandfather worked with the original Carter Family in the ’20s, and the Brewer family is now a six-generation musical…

WHEN GIBSON UNVEILED the Flying V and Explorer in its Modernist Series in 1958, their radical designs quickly proved the very definition of “ahead of their time.” Gibson president Ted McCarty and his team concocted the sharp angles and space-age looks to conquer the rock and roll revolution, but not too many notable artists were bold enough to embrace the daring styles, and relatively few were sold before the models were deleted from the catalog after 1960. Today, most see these Modernist designs as having been aimed at musical styles that were yet to be born. After the Flying V’s 1967 reissue (and further iterations that followed in the ’70s), and the Explorer’s 1976 re-introduction after rock-leaning competitors began adopting the shape, these models quickly secured their iconic status in…

FAST-RISING BLUES POWERHOUSE Brooke Mason (a.k.a. Eddie 9V) remembers a great piece of advice he got after a gig. “Somebody came up to me and said, ‘Just breathe, man. You gotta look like you enjoy playing the guitar.’ “I thought about it, and I realized that I tend to hold my breath when I’m soloing,” he continues. “It’s like I’m caught up in this tense emotional state. Make no mistake: playing shows is hard work, and there’s a lot of stress involved. I like a certain amount of fight and danger when I play, but on the other hand, I should enjoy it more, too. I need to be in the moment when I’m playing, particularly when I’m soloing. So yeah, I need to breathe.” Currently on tour to promote…

WHEN I WAS still in high school, my friends and I were driving around in my ’62 Ford Fairlane “Woody” (that had no wood), all the while smoking weed like it was our last day on Earth. I’m surely not advocating marijuana, but my buddies and I were primed for the Julian Priester Pepo Mtoto Love, Love experience. While we were cruising around listening to the eclectic Bay Area jazz radio station KRE, the jazz trombonist and composer’s Love, Love started coming through the car speakers at the perfect time. Transfixed, with mouths agape, we listened to the pulsating hypnotic bass and drums that supported the ethereal sounds — beautiful, ambitious, at times kinda evil and almost even bordering on pornagraphic. I had the feeling that Love, Love had found…

FROM HIS DAYS as an artist with the ’60s band Harpers Bizarre to his multi-Platinum hit-making forays producing Van Halen, the Doobie Brothers, Aerosmith, Cheap Trick and Montrose, Ted Templeman has always been content to let the music do the talking. But through all his many adventures, no one artist has had quite the impact that Van Halen did. In addition to signing the band to a contract with Warner Bros. Records, Templeman nurtured them through the making of their 1978 self-titled debut album and continued with the group through its most successful era. In the following interview, Templeman reflects on how he first heard Van Halen and what went down during the preparation and creation of their ground-breaking debut record, an album that introduced Eddie Van Halen to the…

FISHMAN JOINS THE revolution for effects tailored to acoustic guitars with four AFX Mini pedals. They include the Pocket Blender AB/Y mixer, the Broken Record looper/sampler, the Pro EQ Mini preamp and equalizer and the AcoustiVerb reverb. Each pedal is voiced to play nice with acoustic amplification, something that Fishman, manufacturer of the venerable Loudbox, knows a thing or two about. The AFX Mini concept provides powerful 32-bit processing in a durable aluminum enclosure that has a footprint less than two inches wide, under four inches deep and not quite two inches tall. On the surface, each pedal is relatively straightforward, but there’s a lot more under the hood. AFX effects process in parallel, meaning the effected signal runs alongside the pure direct signal, not on top of it. The…

CONSIDERING HOW SO many reverb pedals today feature no fewer than five or six varieties of the effect, it’s refreshing whenever someone comes out with a stomp box that keeps the number down to just a few essentials. Consider EarthQuaker Devices’ new Ledges Tri-Dimensional Reverberation Machine, which offers Room, Hall and Plate reverbs. What, no spring reverb, you’re probably thinking? I figure the omission is fine since guitarists who use spring reverb will probably already have it in their amp. But EarthQuaker’s uncommon approach goes beyond its choice of ambience effects, because Ledges’ three reverb modes are interconnected to deliver the effect’s full spectrum. Room’s longest setting is Hall’s shortest, while Hall’s longest setting is Plate’s shortest. Within each mode’s range are infinite options, from boxy at Room’s shortest setting,…

TALKING TO A rock star usually isn’t rocket science. Unless you’re talking to Brian May — er, that would be Dr. Brian May to you. The Queen guitarist — who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II — is a bona fide PhD astrophysicist. He was studying at London’s Imperial College as his group was forming and launching in the early 1970s, then returned to his education in the mid ’00s, receiving the advanced degree in May 2008. Since then, he’s been as active in the scientific realm as he is in music. “I do stereo-photography for various unmanned missions to the objects in the solar system,” he tells GP via Zoom from his home in England. “So I’m hooked into various NASA and ESA [European Space Agency] missions, which is…

GROWING UP THE son of Bucky Pizzarelli, John Pizzarelli had quite an advantage over the other kids in his Paterson, New Jersey, neighborhood who wanted to pick up the instrument in the wake of the Beatles and the British Invasion. After all, Bucky was house guitarist in the Tonight Show band during the Johnny Carson years, and a ubiquitous session player through the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, recording with everyone from Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra and Rosemary Clooney to Benny Goodman, Zoot Sims, Lionel Hampton, Stephane Grappelli, Gerry Mulligan and Buddy Rich. He even appeared on classic pop recordings by Roberta Flack, Aretha Franklin, Anita Baker, Carly Simon, Judy Collins, the Drifters, and Dion and the Belmonts. “John had a rock and roll band as a teenager,” the late Bucky…

TALK SHOP WITH Gary Brewer for a few minutes and one thing rings clear as a bell: There is rhyme and reason behind everything on his mind. And that mind is full of wisdom acquired over more than four decades playing bluegrass professionally, as well as know-how handed down from his dad and his grandfather, whose tenure in the original Carter Family band dates back to the early ’20s. When GP went deep with Brewer on his new acoustic guitar concept project, House of Axes (see page 68), he went into the weeds on playing with a pick. Here, we share his knowledge and advice on the subject. ORGANIC ISSUES Real tortoiseshell picks were the thing back in the day, and I used to use them years and years ago.…