Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2021 i Guitar Player

FIFTY YEARS AGO, Pete Townshend conceived of a tale that, in hindsight, was visionary. It told of a future society whose inhabitants had become subservient to a network called the Grid that fed them, provided virtual programming and allowed them to live out their dream lives. The story, which the Who guitarist called Lifehouse, was not about the perils of technology but rather the seduction of pleasure — how it can suck you in and swallow your free will. The personal demons that fueled Townshend’s allegory are detailed in this issue’s cover story, but suffice it to say he was dealing with his own feelings of isolation from his closest creative collaborators, as well as from the Who’s audience, which had grown huge following the success of Tommy, the group’s…

MOLLY MILLER’S DANCE card is usually full. When she’s not touring or recording with artists such as Jason Mraz or the Black Eyed Peas, she’s leading her own outfit called — not coincidentally — the Molly Miller Trio. And that’s on top of her day job running the Guitar Department at the Los Angeles College of Music. When the coronavirus pandemic put the brakes on live shows and in-person learning, Miller took the opportunity to do something she’d been meaning to for far too long: practice the guitar. “I play something like 200 dates a year, so it was great to settle down and just practice on my own,” she says. “I love what I do — sessions and touring. All of that stuff makes me a well-rounded guitarist and…

BACK IN THE pre-internet early ’90s, when I was an obsessed guitar archaeologist digging for great country guitar, local guitar guru Doc West suggested I ask Joe Goldmark (who he knew as the owner of the San Francisco pizza joint Escape from New York Pizza) for a compilation cassette of country guitar. Although I had never met Joe, I left him a message. A week later, his curated country guitar cassette awaited me at his pizza shop. That tape absolutely changed my life. It was an encyclopedia of knowledge that gave me insight into country guitar history during a pre–YouTube era in which locating out-of-print records demanded dutiful searching. As luck would have it, a couple years later Joe was playing in the 10 Gallon Cats, where I had a…

“Playing the melodies on the guitar, I have the freedom to go wherever I want with a song” AXE LEGEND PAUL GILBERT has a long association with Guitar Player. He made his first appearance in these pages in February 1983, at age 16, when he appeared alongside Yngwie Malmsteen in Mike Varney’s “Guitar Spotlight” column. In the late ’80s, he had his own “Terrifying Guitar 101” column, an essential for wannabe shredders in the pre-internet age, when lessons in the guitar magazines, Guitar Player in particular, were saved and pored over for months. In his many instructional home videos, it was apparent Gilbert possessed more than an uncanny facility for hair-raising guitar pyrotechnics and an off-the-wall sense of humor; he also had a gift for being able to simplify the…

FOR THE PAST couple of columns about the post-pandemic return to performance, we’ve focused on guitars, preamps and direct boxes. Now it’s time to address the application of dynamics, specifically compression and overdrive. Compression is one of the most useful but also misunderstood forms of processing in the acoustic-electric universe. Some players think overdrive is only for electric guitars, but that perspective misses the bigger picture. Once an acoustic guitar gets plugged in, it essentially becomes an electric guitar. Everything is on the table. Ultimately, all that matters is stage tone and the sound that comes across to the audience through the P.A. APPLYING COMPRESSION Compression is a dynamic control that smooths out peaks and valleys, raises the overall gain floor and adds a perceived volume increase. Whether or not…

THE POPULARITY OF some electronic effects comes and goes with the flow of musical fashion. Fuzz was all the rage in the ’60s and then virtually disappeared until the ’90s. Vibrato pedals literally vanished for decades. Soon after their inception in the early ’70s, phaser pedals were everywhere — country, rock, R&B…you name it. But in the following decades, they became rare on the ground, a notable exception, of course, being Eddie Van Halen’s penchant for the MXR Phase 90. The sound of phasing seems to be experiencing an upsurge, making it prime time for Greek company Crazy Tube Circuits to release its four-phasers-in-one Cyclone. It includes their take on the aforementioned Phase 90 sound, along with emulations of MXR’s Phase 45, the famous Electro-Harmonix Small Stone and the rarer…

I’M A BIG fan of 12-string electrics, and I’m a big fan of Stratocasters, but I’ve never been a big fan of 12-string Strats. Until now! Paul McEwen, a veteran of the Nashville guitarslinger scene, is also quite a luthier and inventor. Among the guitar mods he offers at Pull Tone Devices are externally mounted B-benders for guitars and even banjos. But what drew me to Paul was his extremely cool 12-string conversion for virtually any six-string guitar, including my 2003 MIM Splattercaster. Since his shop is in Connecticut and I’m in California, we did the transaction through the mail. And, ladies and germs, I am here to tell you, this is a wonderful mod. WEIRDO FACTOR The spin-art design aside, this is a Mexican Fender Custom Shop Strat with…

WHEN THE BEATLES debuted in the United States on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, they helped launch countless bands across the country. Among them, eventually, was the tandem formed by guitarist Nancy Wilson and her singing sister, Ann: Heart. Although they were female in an era of male-dominated groups, they never gave that fact much thought. Certainly, they found no other female acts from which to draw inspiration. “I don’t think there was anyone like us at all,” Nancy says. “Later, we came to learn how much of a novelty we were, and how other people’s preconceptions about women in rock could prejudice the way they viewed us as a band, and me as a guitarist in particular.” By then, the Wilson sisters had influenced countless youngsters to become…

WHETHER YOU’RE A beginner or a pro, or just have some spare cash burning a hole in your pocket, you can a buy a whole lotta guitar these days without breaking the bank. We gave ourselves a budget of $800 and went to see what it would buy at retail. All prices are street or direct, and all models are new for 2021. 1 IBANEZ Artcore Expressionist AMH90 Semi-Hollowbody We tend to associate Ibanez with sleek shred machines like the JEM and RG, but the company has been making impressive inroads into the hollow and semi-hollow markets with its Artcore Series, where it offers jazzier looks and affordable prices. You’d be hard-pressed to find a classier and more versatile example than the Artcore Expressionist AMH90. With a top, back and…

ORANGE IS RENO WNED for its robust British tube-amp sound, and the iconic U.K.-based manufacturer continues to make inroads into the acoustic electronics market with the Orange Acoustic Pedal. This design basically takes what Orange accomplished with its complex and compound Acoustic Pre TC preamp and Crush Acoustic 30 amplifier, and boils the essentials down to a straightforward stomp box. The Acoustic Pedal is a single-ended Class A preamp featuring a parametric midrange with notch filter, a balanced XLR output and a buffered effects loop. The Acoustic Pedal looks quite different from its competition. While most acoustic electronics manufacturers go for a brown, wooden aesthetic, Orange displays its signature color in the form of a psychedelic swirl surrounding six jet-black knobs on a cream-colored box. Traditionalists may scoff, but acoustic…

IT’S NOT SURPRISING that Carl Verheyen’s latest release, Sundial (Cranktone Entertainment), is an adventurous album loaded with world-class guitar playing. That’s a given for this super-picker, who has spent his life as a first-call session player, a solo artist and a long-time member of the British group Supertramp. On Sundial, Verheyen covers everything from rock and ska to funk, Afro-pop and ballads, one of which, “Garfunkel (It Was All Too Real),” is based on a serendipitous event that took place when he was just 15. “I was at a hotel with my parents in Alberta, Canada, when I spotted a grand piano in the lobby and sat down and started playing the intro to ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water,’” Verheyen recalls. “When I got to the big Eb chord, the downbeat…

WITH ITS FUZZY, synth-like octave-up sound, Roger Mayer’s Octavia pedal was one of the most radical guitar effects to emerge in the late 1960s. The pedal was made legendary thanks to its creative use by Jimi Hendrix, but the original device was never commercially produced at the time, existing only as a handful of custom-made units created by its inventor. Mayer’s reluctance to take the pedal into production left the door open for early ’70s imitators like Tycobrahe, a notable copycat who even cadged Mayer’s name for its pedal. As it happens, Mayer’s roots go far deeper into the London music scene of the ’60s, and his electronics training came in a more intense and elite form than that of most experimenters who were cobbling together solid-state effects back in…

“‘BABA O’RILEY’ IS ABOUT THE ABSOLUTE DEVASTATION OF TEENAGERS AT WOODSTOCK. ‘TEENAGE WASTELAND! YES! WE’RE ALL WASTED!’”— PETE TOWNSHEND STANDING BEFORE AN open window on the 24th floor of New York City’s former Navarro Hotel, Pete Townshend fell into the throes of what he calls “a classic, extreme, psychotic, New York anxiety attack.” It was March 1971, and the Who had come to the city on the recommendation of their manager, Kit Lambert, in a last-ditch effort to record a musical project that had been plaguing the guitarist. Lifehouse, as he called it, was the concept album that would surpass Tommy, the Who’s groundbreaking, 1969 rock opera. Since 1966, Townshend had been developing the format, first with his nine-minute mini-opera, “A Quick One, While He’s Away,” and then with the…

IN THE WORLD of rock and pop, the Who have always been, and will likely remain, the kings of the concept album. But while 1969’s Tommy is their most famous, 1971’s abortive Lifehouse their most troubled, and 1973’s Quadrophenia their most ambitious, they were all preceded by an oddity known as The Who Sell Out. Released in 1967, the Who’s third full-length record stands as their first official concept album. Which is odd, considering that, for the most part, it’s no such thing at all. “It didn’t have much of an aim or a theme or a direction,” Who guitarist, primary songwriter, sometime lead singer and overall visionary Pete Townshend admits to Guitar Player. “It was cobbled together very much in the last minute.” And yet, it’s also a triumph…

IN ADDITION TO making her debut solo record this year, Nancy Wilson has become the recipient of her debut Epiphone signature model, the Fanatic. Based on the Nighthawk body shape introduced in 1993, the Fanatic features a mahogany body with a figured maple veneer top, ProBucker humbuckers, a five-way pickup selector, and master volume and tone controls. We asked the designer herself to take us through the model’s background. The Fanatic is based on the Gibson Nighthawk. How did it come to be your signature model? I designed the shape for Gibson when they asked me to come up with a new body style. This was back in the ’80s, but then they changed management shortly after that. I guess they found the old drawings and decided to make the…

IN THIS LE SSON, we’ll examine John Scofield’s instrumental cover of “Mama Tried,” a tune written by country music legend Merle Haggard. This song can be found on Scofield’s 2016 Grammy Award–winning album Country for Old Men, a disc that features a collection of country classics performed in a jazz style. The main goal in this lesson is twofold. First, we will check out Scofield’s interpretation of the melody and examine how he uses specific devices to sculpt a variation on the original. Second, we will investigate how he uses jazz vocabulary to imply sophisticated harmony over the basic chord progression in the solo. The lesson will be divided into two parts, and in this issue we will begin with a discussion on the melody and form. According to Scofield,…

SELDOM DOES AN acoustic-electric advancement come along that has the potential to redefine an iconic company or surprise a veteran editor, but L.R. Baggs’ Voiceprint D.I. is that rare bird. The pedal pairs with an iPhone app designed to enhance acoustic-electric pickup tones via custom filters that mitigate undesirable elements and highlight the guitar’s best qualities. To use it, place an iPhone a few inches away from the guitar and follow the free AcousticLive app’s prompts to play the instrument in various ways. Using the iPhone’s onboard mic as a measurement device, it utilizes the powerful processor to produce a detailed Impulse Response map of the instrument according to your touch. It also “considers” the pickup tone and renders a filter, or Voiceprint, to make that pickup sound more like…