Guitar World

EVEN THOUGH THIS issue of Guitar World is already packed with juicy first-person accounts from rockers who knew or “experienced” Jimi Hendrix in ancient times, I’m gonna add two more! The first one is from my 2014 interview with Donovan Leitch. It wa

Thanks for the great article about Jeff Beck [Holiday 2019]. He’s the guitarist I’d most like to sound like. I appreciate the list of his best solos with other artists. There were a couple I hadn’t heard. Thanks for that. If I were doing that list, m

IT’S PRETTY IMPRESSIVE to consider how far the Reverend Guitar company has come over the last 23 years. Starting out in a garage behind a bicycle shop in East Detroit in 1997 where founder Joe Naylor built highly affordable guitars with an unusual po

THE OLD ADAGE “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” has always been a guiding principle for me when it comes reviewing gear, boy, I being proved wrong. Earlier this year, Martin unveiled their brand-new Modern Deluxe series that’s comprised of the D-18,

EDDIE VAN HALEN may have invented the Super Strat way back in the mid Seventies, but for the last three decades he’s focused more upon his own original signature models while letting other companies profit (quite handsomely) from his initial revelato

IN THE PREVIOUS two lessons, we looked at celebrated examples of musically effective ways in which songwriters, when composing in a major key, have borrowed chords, specifically triads, that are generated from its parallel natural minor or harmonic m

ESSENTIAL TO EVERY serious electric guitarist who plays blues, rock, country, and even jazz is a thorough study of string bending and finger vibrato techniques. These cornerstone elements of single-note melody playing afford players the ability to em

UNUSUAL PHRASING IS a subject that I’m very familiar with because my dad, Frank Zappa, was probably the most unusual guitar player I can think of, in terms of taking stock articulation techniques and twisting them around. Additionally, his rhythmic i

IMPROVISATION IS A state of mind, such as composition or interpretation, and it employs the very same musical materials, meaning there is not a set of chords, arpeggios or scales for composition and another for improvisation. This is why, in some cas

TALKING HEADS GUITARISTS David Byrne and Jerry Harrison employed a variety of effective playing techniques to create the wildly dynamic and punchy guitar parts featured in this late-Seventies breakout hit for the band. For example, in the latter half

JOHNNY MARR SAID he wanted the intro to the Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now?” to be as potent and recognizable as “Layla.” But instead of writing a catchy melody or bombastic riff, he took an entirely different approach by crafting a hypnotic, pulsating gro