Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2021 i Guitar Player

FEW ARE THE guitarists who don’t get a shiver of excitement upon encountering a vintage SG. But for many, the neck-diveinducing imbalance and potentially unstable neck/body joint make it a no-go guitar. Guitarist Matte Henderson had a love-hate relationship with the SG, and he decided to do something about it. He conveyed his desires to British guitar maker Damian Probett, and the results have hit the street in the form of the stunning new SG-Teor. “I always loved SGs,” Henderson tells GP. “Holdsworth, Iommi, Dickey and Duane, Clapton, Ollie Halsall… But I didn’t love the balance issues and unsupported rubber neck inherent in the design. A single-cut SG seemed like a great way to bring some Les Paul Special to the table, while maintaining the depth, contours and full fretboard…

GEORGE BENSON HAS been called the definitive modern jazz guitarist, but he bristles at the mention of such a label. “I don’t make records for jazz critics,” he says. “I make records for the audience. If a song is good, I want to play it. I don’t really care what you call it.” Clearly, his recorded work underscores his expansive and unquenchable musical thirst: Over a 50-plus-year period, he has made both instrumental and vocal-oriented Platinum sellers that span straight-ahead jazz, bebop, swing fusion, pop, rock, R&B and Latin music. Recently, however, the guitar legend surprised even himself when he accepted an invitation to participate in a quarantine-style recording with funk titan Bootsy Collins on a new song called “The Power of the One.” Over a Bootsy-sized, supergalactic groove, and…

I’VE ALWAYS LOVED Vox guitars, no matter what country or decade they’re from. I’m sure it’s because their freaky body designs and easily identifiable sound hearken to the groovy, psychedelic ’60s. In fact, some of my favorite guitars in my collection are made by Vox. But it occurred to me recently that, even with all the different variations it has offered over the years — including solid- and hollowbody models, guitars with organ components or drum machines, and four-, six-, nine and 12-string variants — Vox never made a baritone model. So while cleaning recently, I unearthed some extra forgotten components. I dropped off a box of parts for my friend at Dinette to assemble for me, and behold: It’s the 2020 Teardrop Franken-Bari! WEIRDO FACTOR The teardrop shape has…

“AQUALUNG MARKS THE point at which I had the confidence as a songwriter and as a guitar player to actually pick up and play the guitar and be at the forefront of the band. It’s also the album on which I began to address religious issues in my music, and I think that happened simply because the time was right for it. Addressing religious issues in simplistic pop-rock terms was permissible then. I’d have to disguise some of those sentiments to make it pass muster today. “Aqualung wasn’t a concept album, although a lot of people thought so. The idea came about from a photograph my wife at the time took of a tramp in London. I had feelings of guilt about the homeless, as well as fear and insecurity…

A HALF CENTURY since joining the band with which he will be forever associated, Steve Hackett remains the keeper of the truly progressive Genesis flame while maintaining remarkable success as a solo recording artist and concert draw. His new album, Under a Mediterranean Sky (InsideOut), is his first acoustic effort since 2008’s Tribute, and the orchestral setting is a spectacular platform for his unique approach to the nylon-string. It’s difficult to name another renowned electric player from a famous rock band that is as virtuosic and prolific in the classical realm, which is particularly interesting given that Hackett describes himself as an “instinctive player that never had any guitar lessons.” The self-taught maestro has always been highly respected by guitar zealots and his peers, and among his myriad credits players…

JUST A S THE global pandemic has forced many of us to work remotely, the annual winter NAMM show moved online this past January to showcase the latest gear from the world’s musical instrument manufacturers. The show took place over Believe in Music Week, a special online event created by the NAMM Foundation that featured a mix of comprehensive programming and professional education, as well as an interactive marketplace to connect buyers and sellers, all of it designed to elevate the innovation and inspiration found across the industry while offering support for those affected by Covid. But, of course, it was the gear that got us excited. While we were unable to get our hands on any products this year, we saw and heard plenty of guitars, amps, effects, recording…

FOR ALL THE guitar amplifiers Mike Zaite has created during his more than three decades in the business, the Dr. Z Amplification founder has never delivered a full-on modern, high-gain amp. The CAZ-45 is here to change that. This 45-watt, all-tube monster is a collaboration between Zaite and Alan Phillips of Carol-Ann Amplifiers, who recently stepped away from the game to pursue a career in industrial automation. It’s an original, ground-up design from Phillips’ drawing board, with contributions from Z’s lab, manufactured in full-bore Dr. Z handwired style and primed to rock large. The CAZ-45 sits halfway between an old-school, single-channel lead amp that responds well to your guitar’s volume controls for clean to crunch to overdrive, and a modern-voiced, high-gain fury that slathers gain stage upon gain stage for…

The Hard Stuff I’ve been a subscriber to GP since the early ’70s and must say your February issue featuring Ritchie Blackmore on the cover hit it out of the park! The article on Ritchie and the significance of Deep Purple’s In Rock cannot be understated. Jim Campilongo’s look back at Machine Head was the icing on the cake. But the pièce de résistance was the Joe Bosso article on Grand Funk, along with the history of West Amps. In my teenage years, Grand Funk and West Amps were a force to be reckoned with, so it was wonderful to see both get their due. Hopefully this will inspire more readers to check out one of the greatest jam bands ever! — JOHN SILLAMAN, DAYTON, OH I wanted to say…

DURING THE 1 980s and into the ’90s, Jimmy Rip was one of the hottest session guitarists on the scene, racking up gigs with Mick Jagger, Rod Stewart, Debbie Harry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Willie Nelson, Jack Bruce, Hall and Oates, Mariah Carey and others. So what was it that made the New York–born musician everybody’s go-to guy? He has no idea. “Nobody ever told me what they liked about my playing,” Rip says with a laugh. “Maybe it’s because I’m a pleasant person to have breakfast with. It’s kind of strange. People hire you, but they never really give you compliments. “I think it’s because of my versatility,” he offers after a bit more thought. “I grew up on New York City radio in the ’60s, when you could literally…

MANY TAPE ECHO–LOVING guitarists in America divide themselves between the Maestro Echoplex and Roland Space Echo, while others express affection for esoteric units like the Watkins/WEM Copicat, Binson Echorec or Meazzi Echomatic. But guitarists who have experienced yet another alternative will tell you the best tape-echo effect box on the planet was neither American, Japanese, British nor Italian, but German. The Klemt Echolette S NG51 might be obscure to many players, but that’s no reflection of its quality. Fire up one that’s in good condition and you’ll have some mighty powerful tone enhancement coming your way. The product has its origins with Radio Klempt, a company founded in Olching, near Munich, by Arthur Klemt in the 1930s, to provide sales, repair and maintenance of radios and, later, television sets. In…

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“I CALL IT ‘CHASING MELODIES.’ THERE’S NO WAY TO GET COMFORTABLE, AND I LIKE THAT” AS THE INSTRUMENTAL guitar maverick in Covet, Yvette Young takes a polyphonic, pianistic approach to her instrument. She employs alternate tunings, fingerpicking, two-handed tapping and plenty of effects to put an ethereal and ambient spin on progressive playing. How did you approach your guitar work on Covet’s new record, Technicolor? I occupy this zone in the progressive “shred” guitar world, but I feel like a phony there because I’ve been chasing melodies my whole life. So for this record, I wanted to focus on conveying emotions and telling stories with melodies. It’s definitely a more “wet” record, meaning that I’m using more effects on it. I’m toeing the line between being in this weird post-rock/shoegaze…

The conclusion of our presentation of some musically useful and colorful applications of a familiar scale LAST MONTH, IN Part 1 of this lesson, we looked at the interrelationships between pentatonic scales and the major and natural minor scales and saw how major and minor pentatonics can be repurposed and substituted over various tonal centers to create fresh-sounding melodic ideas that have a familiar feel under your fingers, due to the scale’s “open” structure and easily visualized fretboard shapes. In this second and final installment, we’ll delve into some more appealing applications of this five-note scale and look at ways that it can be used in relative modal tonalities. MODAL IMPLICATIONS It stands to reason that if specific pentatonic scales can be used to represent all the notes of a…

FIRST INTRODUCED IN the 1970s, the Cutlass has stood the test of time as one of Music Man’s preeminent rock guitars. This latest Cutlass is designed in collaboration with Jason Richardson (Chelsea Grin, All That Remains) and is a six-string version of the Cutlass HH seven-string we reviewed in our October 2019 issue. The super-sleek guitar on deck here features an alder body with a buckeye-burl top and a roasted-maple neck wearing a hand-rubbed oil-and-wax finish and topped with a 25.5-inch-scale ebony fingerboard. The neck’s ultra-slim profile and flat 15-inch radius make for a playing surface that’s as fast as an F-16, and the 24 stainlesssteel frets with their perfectly shaped crowns, mirror polish and rounded tips add to the supersonic feel. There’s simply nothing to impede your hand here…

ONE OF THE most exciting revolutions in acoustic amplification is the battery-powered movement, and the latest milestone on that thrilling adventure toward tonal freedom is Fender’s Acoustic Junior GO. Portability is a huge part of the acoustic guitar’s appeal, so the notion of having an über-portable amp to bolster modern troubadour tones makes all the sense in the world. The GO operates on a rechargeable lithium-ion battery that Fender claims operates for five hours at top volume, or 12 at moderate volume. It also features a built-in looper, digital stereo effects, a USB record output, Bluetooth pairing and universal voltage for global use. The Junior GO shares cosmetics with the other new additions to Fender’s Acoustic range, including the standard Acoustic Junior ($379) and the expansive Acoustic SFXII ($599). The…

“IT WAS AN important song in terms of our career, and in many ways it was the perfect introduction of ZZ Top to the world,” Billy Gibbons says of “La Grange.” The romping, gutbucket boogie-blues vamp was the band’s first single to make a dent in the Billboard Hot 100 (reaching Number 41), and it propelled their third album, 1973’s Tres Hombres, into the Top 10. “The genesis and, of course, the heart of the song was that boogie backbeat, which everybody and their brother has learned how to play,” Gibbons says. “Who would have thought that something so simple and severely compressed structure-wise would lead us on such a grand journey? From that cornerstone backbeat, our little song seemed to resonate and catch on with the masses, which has…

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“IF I HAD TO CHOOSE ONE PLAYER WHO HAS INFLUENCED MY OWN PLAYING, IT WOULD HAVE TO BEHENDRIX” AS A COUNTRY music songwriter and frontwoman, Lindsay Ell can sing and perform with the best of them. But as a guitar player, she can mop the floor with half of Nashville. Ell fell in love with the blues as a teenager and toured with Buddy Guy at age 18, then spent much of the next decade honing her chops in bars across Canada and the U.S. before breaking through in Music City with 2017’s The Project and 2020’s Heart Theory (Stony Creek). Here are the top five riffs that influenced her guitar playing. “MOMBASA,” TOMMY EMMANUEL “The first time I saw him play, I was entranced. The way he moved with…

RELEASED ON MGM Records in 1959, Last Recording closed the chapter of Billie Holiday’s amazing career. We still benefit from the influence of her significant contributions, and of all her recorded work, Last Recording is my favorite Billie album. Despite a tumultuous life, Billie somehow survived and found a path that led to singing in a Harlem nightclub, where she was discovered by John Hammond, who was struck by her ability to embellish and improvise a song’s melody. This led to a recording contract, and to her numerous iconic performances. Though she emerged as a major voice in 20th century American jazz, Billie faced the ongoing adversity of prejudice of that era where Whites-only restaurants, bathrooms, hotels and entrances were a part of life in the South and beyond. Her…

“IT WAS A VERY DIFFICULT ALBUM TO MAKE. THERE WERE A LOT OF PROBLEMS” IN THE ANNALS of progressive rock, Jethro Tull’s Aqualung stands apart from much of the meandering music that populates the genre. The album came out 50 years ago, in 1971, a year that also heralded the arrival of other prog-rock classics, such as Yes’s Fragile, Genesis’s Nursery Cryme and Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s Tarkus. And yet, Aqualung has always been an album that any rock-and-roll fan could love. That undoubtedly comes down to Jethro Tull’s singular musical style. While bands like Yes and Genesis were making music that was both classically inspired and often redolent of English pastoral sounds, what separates Tull from so many of their prog contemporaries is that they never forgot they were…

USING DIFFERENT A COUSTIC instruments in unique ways is a big part of what separates prog from the rest of rock music. Generally speaking, traditional American styles don’t mix into a progressive recipe as readily as they do in other classic genres. It’s better to delve back in time and across the Atlantic to find flavors that do. Here are a few style and gear suggestions to help you incorporate acoustic instruments into a tasty prog stew. LOSE THE BLUES. EMBRACE THE CLASSICS Delta blues and folk-revival influences are prominent in practically every other corner of the acoustic-rock arena, but to honor the spirit initiated by prog pioneers such as Rush and Genesis, lose the “Crossroads” licks and “Times They Are A-Changin’” tendencies. Instead, look way back to baroque and…

THE NAME SUPER Bee recalls a famous Mopar muscle car from the late ’60s, but in this case we’re talking about a potent new boutique amplifier from Steve Carr that’s designed to shift through different flavors of blackface Fender tone. The key to the highway here is the Sting rotary switch, which has three positions: 64 (based on Carr’s own ’64 Deluxe Reverb), 68 (classic medium-gain Super Reverb), and 72 (a blackface-style circuit modded to deliver extra drive and distortion). Tone shaping is provided by treble, mid and bass controls, and the amp is equipped with a variable power feature to accommodate practically any performance situation. This reverb-equipped 1x12 hot rod may be focused on specific Fender sounds, but it departs from the Fullerton platform by featuring a pair of…

THE ORIGINAL EPIPHONE double-cutaway solid-body line of guitars — the Wilshire, Coronet and Crestwood — pre-dated the Gibson SG by a couple of years. The line never achieved the popularity or collectability of their Gibson cousins, but the Coronet at least will go down in history as the guitar wielded by Steve Marriott in Humble Pie. The Wilshire’s glory resides in being held by Jimi Hendrix in a famous publicity photo taken when playing in Nashville with Billy Cox. The Crestwood achieved notoriety more recently when Prince borrowed one owned by Captain Kirk Douglas of the Roots, tossed it up in the air, and let it smash on the stage. Gibson has re-released all three, choosing to go with the classic three-on-a-side headstock of the original ’50s models rather than…