Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2016 i Guitar Player

IF YOU’RE READING THIS MAGAZINE, YOU ARE likely what Jeff Beck recently stated he no longer wishes to be—a guitar nerd. You can read the full quote in the Community section (p. 13), where I polled some of our Facebook friends to comment on Beck’s little missive. There was also a bit of a Facebook scuffle going on between some industry executives and music journalists who took great delight in lighting up Guitar World and Guitar Player for focusing more on gear than the application of creativity. I respect all of the folks who were tossing stun grenades in the direction of our livelihood, so the commentary hurt just a bit, because: [1] Some of the criticism was from people who admitted they had not consistently read either GP or…

WHILE “NOT PROMOTING” HIS UPCOMING ALBUM TO GUITAR magazines at a listening party in mid April, Jeff Beck was quoted as saying, “Rather than do a guitar-nerd album, I thought, ‘If I don’t change course now, I’ll be stuck with that Guitar World thing, and that’s not where I come from at all.’ Even though I’ve been on about 400 of their front covers, I’m not that person.” Here’s a sampling of what GP’s Facebook hordes had to say… “JB has always marched to his own drum, and that’s what I’ve always liked about him. I’m not really into that whole guitar sub culture thing—it bores me.” —ORION FOOTE “Guitar virtuoso complains about fame for playing technical music. He’s not famous for his experimental tracks—he’s famous for shredding the f**k…

I COMPOSE THE MUSIC FOR the Netflix series, Love. The show is set in Los Angeles, and as I want to underscore the environment with a Latin/Hispanic influence, I often use a family of Mexicanand Spanish-born nylon-string instruments. These include the jarana, requinto, and guitarrón. While the sounds impart an ethnicity, I don’t adhere to pure folk tradition, because I want the music to reflect that Los Angeles is a melting pot. I have two methods. My “layered overdubs” music starts with guitar (or other stringed instrument) in hand while I watch specific scenes and write basic foundations. I record to a Pro Tools session running video in tandem. Then, I overdub layers with other guitars, bass, percussion, keys, or whatever each piece calls for. The “live band” music is…

RECENTLY, I HAD TO MEMORIZE 24 BLACK Sabbath songs for a gig. With two solos per song, and Tony Iommi’s lead style being very different from mine, the pressure was on. I practiced day and night, but I still had days when progress was frustratingly slow. If only I had the opportunity to talk to Jennifer Batten beforehand. While Batten is used to learning large repertoires and difficult parts in minimal time, even she has changed her learning strategy lately. “I used to spend hours jamming material into my brain,” says Batten. “Then, I watched a neuroscience seminar on how the brain processes and stores new information, and this knowledge has really freed me up.” Here are her top five tips for memorizing new and/or challenging material… LIMIT THE TIME…

A SKILL WORTH DEVELOPING AS MUCH as your guitar chops is the fine art of making solid contacts in the music industry. From fumbling around in high school to find a bass player, to working the room at a blacktie event shaking hands with high-powered industry execs, the phrase “It’s who you know” never gets old. Some musicians find the word “networking” to be distasteful—one that conjures up insincerity, overachieving, and making up for talent or hard work. By and large, those who succeed in the music industry attract key people into their lives because they are sincere, ambitious, talented, work hard, and believe in themselves enough to share that belief with others. Networking is the process of letting those of like mind know who you are. Here are a…

SPEND SOME TIME ON YOUTUBE, AND IT SEEMS like you can watch thousands of child prodigies blowing minds. However, none of this diminishes the fact that Rebecca and Megan Lovell—whose band is known as Larkin Poe—started playing classical violin at three and four years old, respectively. Then, they tackled classical piano. That is, until Rebecca moved on to banjo, mandolin, and electric guitar, and Megan took up Dobro and lap-steel. There’s a lot of musical firepower in those still-young hands, but before the sisters could burn up bluegrass and rock stages, they had to break away from their classical training. “We loved making music, but we didn’t necessarily like how formal it was,” says Rebecca. “So after we went to a bluegrass festival, we quit all of our classical lessons.…

WHEN PRINCE ROGERS NELSON LEFT this decidedly unfunky world for the afterlife on April 21, 2016, he left a massive hole in the musical universe that would take several brilliant musicians to even begin to fill. He was so supremely multi-talented that it just plain overwhelmed a lot of people. Consider this: If he had only been a singer, we would be mourning the loss of one of the greatest vocalists of our time. If he never sang and merely sat behind the scenes writing songs, he’d be regarded as a hall of fame tunesmith. As a producer, he defined the sound of a decade or more. If he had simply concentrated on just one of those things, his passing would still be a huge loss. But he did all…

THE USE OF NEIGHBOR TONES IN music can be traced back hundreds of years, to early classical compositions. Neighbor tones are chromatic passing tones performed by approaching a melody, scale, or arpeggio using chromatic half-step movements from below (known as lower neighbor tones), or chromatic half-step movements from above (known as upper neighbor tones). Well, what’s old is new again. You can find this cool performance technique in plenty of guitar music, as numerous guitarists have adapted this idea to the fretboard, including such diverse players as Django Reinhardt, Randy Rhoads, Pat Metheny, and Marty Friedman. The unique sound that neighbor tones deliver, in combination with the fretting-hand fingering challenge they pose, makes them an interesting and useful concept to explore. A great place to start involves outlining the basic…

LONG KNOWN AS ONE OF THE MOST skilled finish artists in the business, Scott Lentz has also been building highly acclaimed electric guitars for some 40 years—the last 20 alongside his son, Scott Jr.—many of which have landed in the hands of discerning players such as Buddy Whittington and Phil X. While Lentz has presented many original designs over the years, and continues to build its own shapes in the DL-90, HSL, and Croydon models, this small shop based in San Marcos, California, is arguably best represented by its finely-wrought homages to classic bolt-neck S- and T-style electrics. This venture was recently taken to new heights with the Lentz’s Reserve and JR Reserve Series. To wit, the JR Reserve S on review here brings together master-built attention to detail, custom…

HERE’S MY SELF-BUILT CLONE—WHICH I’VE NAMED “Soliloquy”—that’s intended to mirror Alex Lifeson’s Gibson ES-355. I love this guitar because of the tone. It can be dirty and nasty, or clearas-a-bell acoustic sounding. It’s kind of heavy, but it plays and sounds so good, that I don’t mind the weight. The white-lacquered body is basswood with a maple top and bottom reclaimed from a 150-year-old house that was being torn down. The neck is maple with a rosewood fretboard and medium-jumbo frets. I installed Guitar Fetish Vintage ’59 pickups, a Bigsby B7-style tremolo, and a Stew-Mac roller bridge. Soliloquy is strung with a .009 set of Ernie Ball Cobalt strings.…

AS AN ACTOR, KIEFER SUTHERLAND IS NO STRANGER to danger. His newest leap into hazardous duty isn’t in a movie script, however—it’s baring his soul throughout his debut album, Down In a Hole (produced by long-time friend and co-founder of Ironworks Records, Jude Cole). Recorded in a small studio located on a farm where he sang out in the elements to avoid vocal bleed into the drums, Sutherland joked he was “probably the only guy singing on a record who was in danger of being attacked by coyotes.” Years before he stepped in front of the cameras, Sutherland became obsessed with guitars, and he ultimately assembled a large and impressive vintage collection. “Some people collect cars, some collect art, and it was guitars for me,” relates Sutherland, who tracked Down…

MOZART CASTRATO ARIAS JOSÉ FELICIANO & ARNO RAUNIG Backed by the Symphony Orchestra of Sofia, Bulgaria, Feliciano accompanies Arno Raunig, a male soprano. The Austrian’s five-octave range is as unique as Feliciano’s bluesy string bends. Andrés Segovia and Charlie Byrd would be proud. —MARK C. DAV I S HOW MUSIC DIES (OR LIVES) IAN BRENNAN Subtitled “Field Recording and the Battle for Democracy in the Arts,” my old SF music buddy not only risks his neck recording in sometimes dangerous places (Rwanda, Malawi, South Sudan), he uses the experience of documenting folk and modern music to pose questions about artistic authenticity. Thought-provoking, heavy, and a must-read for anyone who dares to call themselves an artist. —MM BAPTIST TOWN MIKE ELDRED TRIO Named for a small neighborhood outside of Greenwood, Mississippi,…

AS I MENTIONED IN LAST MONTH’S COLUMN, “WELCOME to My Nightmare” and “Escape” were literally the beginning and end, respectively, of Alice Cooper’s Nightmare, and they were tracked with a different rhythm section. The core band for the rest of the album was pretty much the same group that toured with Lou Reed in 1973, and recorded the live albums Rock n Roll Animal (1974) and Lou Reed Live (1975): Dick Wagner and myself on guitars, Prakash John on bass, and Pentti “Whitey” Glan on drums. The only exception was that keyboardist Ray Colcord was on the Reed tours, but Joey Chirowsky was the keyboard player on Nightmare. Ray co-produced Aerosmith’s Get Your Wings (1975) with Jack Douglas, and later became a very successful film and TV composer. Ray passed…

OF ALL THE INTERVIEWS I’VE DONE IN MY 20-PLUS YEARS on the Guitar Player staff, by far the most intriguing and challenging were the two that I did with Prince. The first was in November 2000, as Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic was nearing its release date. Being invited to talk with Prince—who was still calling himself “the Artist” at the time—was an exciting opportunity to say the least, and to make the most of it we opted to do separate stories for GP and Keyboard magazine. That was the easy part. Things got a little more more problematic as we tried to figure out how to accommodate Prince’s request that no recording devices be used during the interviews. Since neither myself nor Keyboard’s associate editor at the time, Ernie…

IF YOU GO TO ALLMUSIC.COM TO LEARN ABOUT CARL Verheyen’s guitar work, you’ll be blown away. Same with Wikipedia. But here’s what you need to keep in mind: Neither of those notoriously exhaustive sites even scratches the surface of what this super-talented guitarist has done in his career. Sure, they’ll tell you about his work with Supertramp, his body of session work, his solo releases, and his contributions as a guitar instructor, and it’s all awesome. But you won’t necessarily learn about his work on every episode of Cheers, or his killer Django-isms in the movie Ratatouille, or get hip to the fact that he can cover an insane amount of styles, including rock, jazz, country, and blues and bring a fresh, hip sound to all of them. And those…

WE AT GP WERE IMPRESSED WITH the first couple of Knaggs guitars we reviewed back in 2012. Then again, there was no reason not to expect great things from this Marylandbased company founded by Joe Knaggs, former head of design and R&D for PRS, with marketing savant Peter Wolf at his side. But this was a young company even so, and it’s a tough business to break big into. Four years later, Knaggs has clearly broken big, forging a reputation for stellar guitars at a range of price points, and building a roster of major-name players in the process. This issue, we check out three new offerings—all with midrange price points (relative to the Knaggs line anyway) and mid- to lower-level Tier 2 and Tier 3 styling—including the signature model…

“HOW A PLAYER THINKS AFFECTS THEIR whole life on the guitar,” claims Makana. “Slack key philosophy is the opposite of shredding with the fretting hand. It’s all about the picking hand. Fretting is involved, but touching the fretboard kills string resonance. Slack key is all about letting the guitar ring, creating the illusion of multiple guitars.” Makana came to GP’s attention when he narrowly missed snagging top honors at GP’s 2008 Guitar Superstar competition. He stood out from the electric shredders naturally, and his acoustic playing came from a place of soulful tradition. Notable slack key master Sonny Chillingworth taught Makana hand to hand, and Makana has made it his mission to spread the style far from its exotic origin. Makana is also on a mission to clear up common…

HAPPY PLACE Politics, wars, mass shootings, earthquakes, refugees, climate change, mass animal extinctions, starving children, famine, fear, etc. And then my new GP magazine arrives, and for a little while I can escape into a happy world of guitars, stompboxes, amps, reviews, stories, and just plain joy. Thanks a million for a chance to recharge with you guys. You are doing a really cool thing that seriously helps me get through another day. —LEWIS MOCK PROFANITY I love Guitar Player, but I find it a little disconcerting that you’re stuck in the Eisenhower administration when it comes to quoting interviewees. Is there some overriding reason why, in 2016, you still insist on spelling profanity as “sh*t” or “f**k”? I find it a little hard to reconcile the way you “keep…

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WAY BAC K I N 197 2 , MY eldest sister Fran turned me on to Harvey Mandel’s The Snake. I immediately purchased it with my paper route money, so the album has always been around and close to my heart. Guitarist/composer Mandel was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1945, and has been an active and creative musician throughout his long, distinguished career— collaborating with the likes of Canned Heat, the Rolling Stones, Don ”Sugarcane” Harris, Charlie Musselwhite, John Mayall, Henry Kaiser, and Steve Kimock. The instrumental LP, The Snake, was released in 1972 on the Janus Label and was co-produced by Mandel and Canned Heat’s Skip Taylor. They did a great job balancing a multitude of instruments into a distilled audio picture, and, considering this record was released in…

STICKY FRETBOARDS—WE’VE ALL BEEN there: trying to bend notes and sticking halfway through the bend, sliding up to a note only to chatter on the fretboard as you move around. From the repair side there are some precautions we can take to keep the fretboard and the strings slick and fast. As a player there are a number of traditional and non-traditional things you can try. I was inspired to do some research after this recent experience: I was working a gig with Neal Schon, who was opening the show playing with Santana and then closing with Journey— a long, hot, sweaty show. Before he went on, I was handed a plate of sliced salami to set on his amp. Early in his career there was a great deli next…

NEVER ONE TO PLAY IT SAFE, ANA POPOVIC’S Trilogy [ArtisteXclusive Records] is far from just a groovy album title. The Serbian-born blues guitarist actually delivers three different styles (funk, blues, jazz) in three sets, and to do so, she played with three different bands, was guided by three different producers, and recorded in four different studios. Everything was worked out to deliver ultimate authenticity, from the players to the environments, and even her choice of guitars. Perhaps more surprising is her insistence on giving fans a ton of songs to absorb at a time when single downloads appear to be ruling the world of music commerce. Trilogy is separated into three sides (yes, it really is a triple album)—Morning, Mid-Day, and Midnight— and guest artists include heavies such as Joe Bonamassa,…

NO MATTER WHAT THE WEATHER WAS outside, my grandmother usually kept the heat on. Similarly, no matter what the gig is, I usually keep some sort of a delay pedal on. I don’t know if it’s hereditary, but I do know that stompbox and rackmount delays are by far my favorite guitar toys. As an instructor in NYC Guitar School’s Rock Band program, I’ve realized that delay is perhaps the most misunderstood, misused, and underexplored stompbox on many students’ boards. Hopefully this little treatise will demystify newbs while teaching old dawgs a few tricks. Like its name suggests, a delay pedal is a device that delays playback of your guitar signal. This delayed sound is often referred to as the “wet” signal while the original guitar tone is known as…

SHOES WEAR OUT, TIRES WEAR out, and guitar strings wear out. The only difference is that strings usually feel their best around the time when you know you better change them. And while no manufacturer makes strings that feel as broken-in a pair of faded Levis, they all claim that their strings will be louder, clearer, or brighter (often all three), and last much longer than the competition. Manufacturers have put a lot of R&D into their newer string formulations—whether they be cobalt, copper, maraging steel, stainless, aluminum, or the hybrid recipes like nickel bronze, aluminnum bronze, and copper/tin/phosphor—and the truth is that depending on what you want out of your guitar, modern strings can help make it louder, reveal more of what it inherently sounds like, and allow you…

SINGULAR SOUND’S ORIGINAL BEATBUDDY OFFERED guitarists a drum machine in the form of a pedal, and it now has a little brother that’s just as fun and even more compact. Like the original, the BeatBuddy Mini ($149 street) is a foot-controlled personal drummer, but it costs only half the price. The BeatBuddy Mini is totally user friendly, even if you have limited drum machine experience. It isn’t completely handsfree— you have to manually scroll to select genre, song, and tempo—but once those items have been selected, controlling fills, transitions, and starts and stops can all be done by foot. You can also attach the optional Beat-Buddy footswitch ($49 street) to tap tempos or add accents and drum breaks. (Genre, Song, and Tempo selection can also be done via footswitch.) My…

IT’S SIGNIFICANT WHEN A PROMInent manufacturer such as D’Addario launches a new model of acoustic strings because it’s such a rare event. The company has only released a handful of new acoustic strings since introducing its Phosphor Bronze model in 1974, which became an industry standard. So what’s the big new deal? D’Addario claims that Nickel Bronze premium acoustic strings ($12 street) “highlight a guitar’s inner character, allowing your instrument’s natural frequencies to truly shine.” I gave them a thorough test drive on a Taylor 514ce, which notably had a Western Red Cedar top rather than the standard spruce top. The first thing that catches your eye when you put on a Nickel Bronze set is the nickel color, which is a striking visual difference compared to phosphor bronze. This…