Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2024 i Guitar World

THERE WAS JUST too much going on, guitar-wise, during that decade. You can tell — just by looking at my eyes — that I didn’t know if I should buy Maggot Brain by Funkadelic, Zero Time by Tonto’s Expanding Head Band or Starless and Bible Black by King Crimson. And then there was all the choices associated with gear! At the exact moment this photo was taken, I was probably thinking, “Should I invest in a brand-new Gibson S-1 like Ronnie Wood — or should I ignore all the (weird) new guitars and get a secondhand vintage Les Paul like Jimmy Page?” But seriously, the Seventies was (were?) a crazy time for everything we care about — aka guitar-based music and gear — and I hope this issue captures some…

JOHN MAYALL — BRITISH blues patriarch, godfather, progenitor, legend, musical force and every accolade one could ascribe — passed away on July 22 at age 90. Starting in the mid Sixties and continuing throughout his long and illustrious career, Mayall has been nothing less than a blues messiah to generations of listeners. He deserves acknowledgement as a vital figure in the development and ultimate massive popularity of blues and blues/rock music. His prodigious career spanned an incredible seven decades, from the late 1950s till his recent retirement from touring just two years ago in 2022 at age 88. In the mid/late Sixties, his band, the Bluesbreakers, served as an incubator to many of Britain’s most revered blues musicians, as John’s mentorship developed the careers of Eric Clapton, Peter Green, Mick…

WHAT WAS THE greatest guitar solo of the Seventies? How about the best riff? The ultimate guitar album? The decade’s most underappreciated guitarist? Was Happy Days really better than Laverne & Shirley? (Answer: Probably — until the Fonz literally jumped the shark in Season 5, Episode 3; look it up.) Burning questions, all of them — especially the one about Laverne & Shirley. But instead of answering them ourselves, we decided to open things up to a mess of guitar stars, some of whom were already doing their thing 48 years ago, and some who weren’t even born yet. We asked them to answer these 11 questions about the Seventies — and to elaborate wherever they deemed it necessary: 1. Guitarist of the decade 2. Lesser-known ’70s guitar album that…

THEN Pat Travers (1976) The Art of Time Travel (2022) NOW-ISH PAT TRAVERS WILL be the first to tell you that he had a very good time in the 1970s. “It was an incredible decade,” he says. “We played hundreds of shows and traveled everywhere. Yeah, after the gigs, I knew how to have fun — maybe I’d smoke a little and drink a little with the other bands on the bill. But I never trashed my hotel rooms or carried on and did anything too crazy. I always knew my limit.” He laughs. “Maybe that’s why I can remember the Seventies. A lot of people I came up with have no memory of what went down.” During the second half of the Seventies, the Canadian-born singer and guitarist was…

HIS FIRST WITH E.C. 461 Ocean Boulevard (1974) Backless (1978) HIS LAST WITH E.C. ISLANDS IN THE Stream,” “Voulez-Vous,” “Guilty,” “Lay Down Sally.” What do these classic hits have in common? They all feature the tasteful guitar playing of George Terry. Like an East Coast brother of L.A. cats Larry Carlton, Steve Lukather and Dean Parks, “Miami George” had genre-spanning chops, imagination and flair that allowed him to move easily from session to session. Working at Criteria Studios in Miami, mostly with the successful production team of Barry Gibb, Albhy Galuten and Karl Richardson, Terry built a discography that cut a who’s-who swath through Seventies and Eighties pop and rock. As if that didn’t keep him busy enough, Terry also was the second guitarist to Eric Clapton. From 1974 to…

WHEN I THINK back to the Seventies, the famously coined “Me” decade, it seems the only surefire way you could leave audiences awestruck was to strap on a doubleneck guitar. You needed a doubleneck as the showstopper, the ultimate display of onstage one-upmanship. How else could Jimmy Page have handled “The Song Remains the Same” — or Don Felder executed “Hotel California” — without a doubleneck guitar in the picture? But, lest I forget the obvious, this is not a guitar you sit on the couch with. It’s rather unwieldy, not to mention potentially too expensive for most of us. All that aside, I know, for many of you, your inner-rock star longs to own one or have the bragging rights to declare, “I play a doubleneck!” Well, get ready,…

LAST MONTH, WE began looking at ways to apply country and bluegrass picking techniques to a wider variety of musical styles. To illustrate, I presented parts from my tune “Free Range Chicken,” which is a country-flavored tune played with a rock feel, along the lines of the music of Steve Morse and the Dixie Dregs. Steve is one of my biggest influences, and you’ll find no better practitioner of using blazing bluegrass-style flat-picking in a rock or fusion setting. This month, we’ll continue exploring this topic and look at the verse section of “Free Range Chicken,” which is built from dominant 7 arpeggios played in straight 16th notes and articulated with alternate (down-up-down-up) picking. Definitely an alternate-picking workout! FIGURE 1 presents the 16-bar verse. The first eight bars are based…

A GREAT APPROACH to crafting a memorable and musically effective solo is to revisit a melodic hook, theme and/or technique that appeared earlier in the tune. This way, there’s a straight-line connection between the solo and the song itself. Over the previous two columns, I detailed how I play my primary guitar parts in “Way Down Deep.” This month, I’d like to present my approach to soloing over the tune, which involves drawing on its main parts. I like to utilize this borrowing technique in a subtle way, so that the connection between the solo and the song’s previous motifs or themes are more implied than obvious. My use of hybrid picking and open-string drones in the tune’s primary riffs will find their way into the solo lines in a…

Don’t forget these incredible guitarists from New Jersey I thought the piece on New Jersey guitarists was fun [August 2024]. As a resident of Middletown (where they just dedicated a street to “Little” Steven Van Zandt five minutes from my home), can I add an “honorable mentions” list? Besides Little Steven, how about Lou Pallo, who played in Les Paul’s trio for many years? Keith Richards referred to him as “the man of a million chords” (check him out on the Thank You Les CD/ DVD); Jon Herington, who has played with Steely Dan for more than 30 years, and, although he isn’t a shredder, his acoustic playing is highly underrated and has added such a wonderful sound to more songs than you can count — Mr. Paul Simon —…

TUNE-UPSNEWS + NOTES “MY PEDALBOARD IS very simple now — compared to how it used to be. Its purpose is to create a foolproof atmosphere within my live guitar leads with minimal complications so that things that can go wrong won’t. I used to use a Boss Space Echo [RE-202], a Boss Loop Station [RC-5] and a Boss Digital Delay [DD-7], along with a Boss Digital Reverb [RV-5] and a Boss Reverb [RV-6]. The RV-5 was for modulated reverb; the RV-6 was for shimmer. “But now I’ve cut my board way back to just three pedals, all by Boss: a Chromatic Tuner TU-3, a Reverb and a Digital Delay. These pedals create a glassy reverb tone to drench my guitar leads. I use the Modulate setting on my RV-5, with…

“IT WAS THE best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” The preceding quote is the introduction to Charles Dickens’ immortal classic A Tale of Two Cities, set in Paris and London around the time of the French Revolution, but it’s also a pretty damn accurate description of the state of the guitar industry during the Seventies. That decade is commonly disparaged as a depressing era when the industry’s leading manufacturers produced some of their worst guitar models, which is not…

HIS FIRST WITH BOWIE Young Americans (1975) Never Let Me Down (1987) HIS LAST WITH BOWIE BY THE DAWN of the Seventies, though he was only 19, Carlos Alomar, a Puerto Rican-born New York citizen and son of a strict Pentecostal minister, had made a lifetime’s worth of memories. Not only had he regularly dominated the stage at Harlem’s Apollo Theater, but he’d backed Chuck Berry and James Brown and even served as the house band for Sesame Street’s first few episodes before moving on to session work for RCA Studios, which was booming by 1970. Soon, Alomar joined the Main Ingredient, an NYC-based soul and R&B group that had a hit with “Everybody Plays the Fool,” which bolstered Alomar’s cachet, as did a notable guest spot with Ben E.…

I’VE COME TO the realization that I have not yet talked about the “elephant in the room” — my favorite singer/songwriter and guitar player of all time, Eric Clapton. We have to break this up into two columns, because there are many different facets and eras to examine in Eric’s long and storied career. A fun, and perfectly logical, way to split up an investigation into Eric’s playing is to begin with the “Gibson years,” followed by the “Fender years.” From 1965 to around 1970, Eric played Gibson guitars almost exclusively, initiated by his dedication to the Les Paul during his time playing in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers through the inception of Cream in the summer of 1966. Sadly, Mayall passed away on July 23 at age 90, just months before…

“BAD MAN” WORDS AND MUSIC BY ANDREW FULK, MICHAEL WENGREN, DAVID DRAIMAN AND DAN DONEGAN. COPYRIGHT © 2022 WIZARDS DANCING UNDERWATER, ARTIST 101 PUBLISHING GROUP, WC MUSIC CORP. AND MOTHER CULTURE PUBLISHING. ALL RIGHTS FOR WIZARDS DANCING UNDERWATER AND ARTIST 101 PUBLISHING GROUP ADMINISTERED WORLDWIDE BY SONGS OF KOBALT MUSIC PUBLISHING. ALL RIGHTS FOR MOTHER CULTURE PUBLISHING ADMINISTERED BY WC MUSIC CORP. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. USED BY PERMISSION.…

READER ART OF THE MONTH If you’ve created a drawing, painting or sketch of your favorite guitarist and would like to see it in an upcoming issue of Guitar World, email GWSoundingBoard@futurenet.com with a .jpg or screenshot of the image. And (obviously...), please remember to include your name! DEFENDERS of the Faith Domenic Fusca AGE: 54 HOMETOWN: Pittsburgh, PA GUITARS: Gibson R9 and many more Gibsons and Fenders SONGS I’VE BEEN PLAYING: Southern rock GUITAR I WANT MOST: Original 1959 Les Paul Standard Brian Strasmann AGE: 65 HOMETOWN: St. George, UT GUITARS: Epiphone Les Paul Standard, G&L Doheny Tribute SONGS I’VE BEEN PLAYING: Led Zeppelin “Black Dog” and “Ramble On,” Green Day “Basket Case” and “Holiday,” Heart “Barracuda” GUITAR I WANT MOST: Fender Deluxe Reverb Robert Bachmann AGE: 50 HOMETOWN: Brooklyn,…

ON DECEMBER 27, 1969, just a few days before the dawn of the new decade, the music world witnessed an extraordinary changing of the guard as Led Zeppelin II reached Number 1 on the Billboard charts, dethroning the Beatles’ final full-on studio effort, Abbey Road. After hearing Zeppelin vocalist Robert Plant proclaim “I’m gonna give you every inch of my love” on their hit, “Whole Lotta Love,” the Beatles probably realized their days of singing sweet harmonies in an octopus’s garden were numbered. And if the cover of Abbey Road is any evidence, the Fab Four apparently saw no other choice but to immediately vacate their recording studio and march, single file, into the streets of London, never to be heard from again. Zeppelin would go on to dominate the…

LIKE DUSK… Aerosmith (1973) Night in the Ruts (1979) ...TO DAWN IN 1973, THE band who just a few years later would be known as the “Bad Boys from Boston” dropped their debut album, Aerosmith. Its release set off a chain of events that eventually led to their being nicknamed “America’s Greatest Rock and Roll Band.” And while that’s big-time praise — not to mention one hell of a nickname — you have to remember “Dream On” is on that debut album. That said, even though “Dream On” would — eventually — gather more than a billion streams on Spotify alone, it wasn’t enough to catapult Aerosmith to success 51 years ago. In fact, their debut was so lackluster, sales-wise, that Columbia Records was reluctant to give the band a…

HIS FIRST Maxoom (1972) Eye of the Storm (2020) HIS LATEST IF YOU’VE HEARD the cavernous sounds emanating from the 20-second opener to Mahogany Rush’s 1978 Live record, “Introduction,” then you’ve probably caught the vibe of Frank Marino, a Canadian virtuoso whose influence is only rivaled by the shadows cast by his ever-colossal pedalboards. Marino, who was born in Montreal in 1954, easily traversed the genres in the Seventies, laying down hard rock licks as effortlessly as he did blues and psych across records like Maxoom (1972) — recorded when he was just 16 — and Mahogany Rush IV (1976), which — despite being critically panned at the time — is seen as a masterstroke on the backside of songs like “Dragonfly,” which Marino says he “put together in about…

All examples performed with hybrid (pick-and-fingers technique). HELLO, EVERYONE, AND welcome to my new Guitar World column! Over the course of these lessons, I look forward to demonstrating many of my favorite approaches and techniques that I rely on for rhythm guitar and soloing. Stylistically, I’m a big fan of everything from classic Chicago blues to country, western swing, jazz and more, and it has become natural for me to draw on elements of all of these different styles in performance and recording situations. I’d like to begin by offering a cool country/blues-style fingerpicked rhythm guitar part that’s played over a “train beat,” which is so named because of the incessant repeating accents a drummer would play on the snare drum that resemble the “chugging” of pistons on a fast-moving…

“CLOSER TO THE HEART” Rush THIS EARLY RUSH classic begins gently and sweetly, with guitarist Alex Lifeson flatpicking, on a 12-string acoustic, a beautiful sequence of ringing 16th-note arpeggios across the top three or four strings. Throughout the first seven bars, the guitarist frets a series of chord shapes while employing a technique borrowed from bluegrass guitar and mandolin playing known as crosspicking, mostly picking one note per string in a syncopated melodic contour. Akin to a stock fingerpicked “banjo roll,” the melodic picking pattern for the Aadd2 chord in each of the first four bars may be thought of and counted as “1 2 3, 1 2 3, 1 2 3, 1 2 3, 1 2 3 4.” The difference here is that, instead of ascending across the strings…