Norse Guitar Feeds

Last year, King Crimson legend Robert Fripp suffered a heart attack while travelling to Italy to attend one of his Guitar Craft courses. 

While recovery involved multiple surgeries to insert stents, he’s now doing much better, and in a new interview with Uncut, reveals the impressive extent of his current physical fitness.

“Today, I look on it as a benevolent redirection of my life,” he says. “I go to the gym regularly. I’m deadlifting currently, at best, 120 kilograms, bench pressing 75 kilograms, doing squatting with weights, stretching, balancing, yoga.”

Fripp asserts: “I haven’t been this healthy or present within myself in decades, perhaps ever.”

• READ MORE: Kenny’s Music launches the Live Room – with a Dutch auction format that could land you your next guitar at a crazy low price

Shortly following the heart attack, Robert Fripp told the story – funny in the circumstances – of how a hospital orderly inexplicably shaved his testicles.

“I was in A&E not knowing what was going on – and an orderly came along and shaved my balls!” he said. Now, in the new Uncut interview, he explains further what happened…

“I was in A&E, they hooked me up to a monitor, and the next step was this dear man turned up and shaved my balls,” Fripp recalls. “I thought, ‘Well, if this is something to do with my heart, why is he shaving my balls?’”

Fripp goes on to explain his remarkably quick recovery following the surgery, which saw him back to business just days later.

“At midnight they wheeled me off, and I had an emergency operation to insert a stent. There was also a trifurcated artery, so I went back in on Monday for an additional stent, and then on Thursday, I joined the course.”

As for whether he ever found out why his balls were being shaved, Fripp says that remains shrouded in mystery.

“The man shaving my balls didn’t tell me,” he says. “Very few of the staff spoke English, which led to one or two funny moments, like me taking my pants down for inspection by a matronly nurse, who was actually asking what I wanted for lunch.”

Recently, Steve Vai recalled his difficulty in learning Robert Fripp’s guitar parts for BEAT. “Once I started putting my fingers to the actual parts, I realised that they’re booby-trapped,” he said. 

“They’re Robert Fripp parts. And he has a unique technique that he developed his entire life, through vision and discipline. And I have a totally different technique.”

The post “The man didn’t tell me!”: Robert Fripp still doesn’t know why hospital staff shaved his balls when he had a heart attack appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Fender’s Precision Bass turns 75 this year, and its milestone birthday is being honoured by a trio of fresh, limited edition models. The 75th Anniversary Precision Bass Collection captures the retro feel of the Precision Bass and gives it a modern twist, a reimagining of the game-changing instrument whilst also showing how bass production has advanced in recent years.

The collection offers three tiers of Precision Bass inspiration, spanning from the most loyal recreation of the original 1951 bass to Fender’s most quirky, contemporary adaptation.

For collectors and purists keen for the closest re-invention, the 75th Anniversary American The Vintage II 1951 Precision Bass is the one for you. Coming in at £2,699, this model’s swamp ash body and nitrocellulose lacquer finish has a truly vintage feel to it. It also boats a single coil Precision Bass pickup, just like the original model, primed to serve up some authentic ‘50’s tones.

• READ MORE: This is how your guitar’s truss rod actually works – and here’s what you’re doing wrong with it

The model boasts a 1-piece maple neck and 7.25″ radius fingerboard with vintage frets, as well as vintage reverse gear bass tuners, and a single-ply black phenolic pickguard. And it’s all wrapped up in a vintage-style tweed case, as a final cherry on-top of the nostalgia pie.

That’s where things start to take a more modern turn. The 75th Anniversary American PJ is the “P-Bass at its most finessed”, according to Fender. Sitting at £2,549, the model boasts a flame maple top, rolled fingerboard edges, and a “super natural” satin finish. It also throws in a Fender Jazz Bass pickup, mingling more modern Fender bass innovation into the classic instrument.

The cheapest of the bunch also comes as the most advanced take on the Precision Bass to date. Costing just £999, Fender brands the 75th Anniversary American Player II Precision Bass as a “testament to the power of modern day Fender craftsmanship”. It comes fitted with Thunderbolt Precision Bass pickups to really add a rich, velvety feel to your low ends while maintaining clarity and punch. It’s also got a 4-saddle bridge with single-groove steel saddles, open-gear tuning machines, and a 4-ply pearloid pickguard with chrome hardware.

Alongside the dazzling new tech, the bass also boasts its own sparkle, thanks to its resonant alder body finished off with a Diamond Dust Sparkle.

To further mark the Precision Bass’ birthday, Fender is also releasing the four-part Lowdown On The Low End series, featuring interviews features with musicians who have loved the Precision Bass over the years. From Lee Sklar, to Rancid punk icon Matt Freeman, to Black Sabbath legend Geezer Butler, plenty of musicians have stepped in to share their thoughts on the Precision Barr.

“I tried other basses, but nothing had the balance of a P-bass,” Butler praises in his interview. “It becomes part of you.”

To find out more, head to Fender.

The post Fender celebrates 75 years of the P-Bass with the 75th Anniversary Precision Bass Collection appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

After being too intimidated to perform at a Van Halen tribute event in 2021, Joe Satriani finally rose to the challenge of performing Eddie Van Halen’s riffs in 2023 to join Sammy Hagar’s Best Of All Worlds project. But Satriani has been putting in a hard graft every day since, even consulting YouTube tutorials to fine-tune his Van Halen chops.

While Hagar has since praised Satriani for “doing Eddie right”, that wouldn’t have been the case without YouTube’s talented guitarists. “One thing that really helped me was this amazing community, these guitar players of all ages dedicating so many hours to figuring out exactly how Ed played a lot of these songs,” he admits in conversation with Andy Guitar [via Blabbermouth].

• READ MORE: “We did call, he just didn’t answer”: Alex Van Halen pushes back against the narrative that Michael Anthony wasn’t told he was being replaced in Van Halen

While the guitarist started out by emulating the original recordings, “using [his] ear to get the chords and arrangements”, that was just “the easy part”. The real challenge was capturing Eddie’s personality, adding that extra flare. “The hard part is the quirky fingering string choices,” he says.

That’s where YouTube came in. “After I learned the song, I’d go and I’d spend an hour or two on YouTube just watching how other people address this immense problem of trying to emulate Ed’s playing,” he explains. “You can’t capture the magic, but you can get pretty close to the fingering, and some players are better than others.”

As Satriani consulted countless hours of YouTube content, it was like a way of passing and comparing notes on Eddie’s technique. “It was just great for me to sit across from the screen and just go, ‘Okay, he’s doing that on the first three strings, but this guy’s doing it on the third string, and she’s doing it somewhere else…’” he explains.

“Every guitar player [has their] own pluses and minuses, and it might be speed, timing, touch, tone, intonation… there are areas where we’re kind of deficient, let’s say, than the next player,” Satriani continues. “You have to kind of come up against that and [think] ‘Well, how do I measure up in that particular area, and how do I work around it?’”

Of course, there was also a case of seeing some guitarist’s playing preferences to see how they add their own flavour to Eddie’s tone. He points to Bon Jovi guitarist Phil X in particular. “There are players out there… who will play great Van Halen songs without any vibrato bar,” he says. “It reminds you that the spirit is sometimes more important than just imitating the part that might be.”

While purists might not enjoy a quirky take on Eddie’s riffs, Satriani points to the man himself: “Well, Ed played it differently every single time. He shocked you at how he would just forget about some part or purposely not play it the way it is on the record. He’d just replace it with something you never expected. And you loved it anyway! You have to keep that in mind.”

Since 2024, The Best Of All Worlds’ project has been touring and breathing new life into Van Halen classics. And the tour is still going strong, with plans to hit the UK this summer. The unit recently shared that they would be downscaling their tour from arenas to more intimate mid-sized venues. They’ll be kicking things off in Wolverhampton on 6 July, before closing off in London’s 3,800-cap British Airways ARC for a trio of dates on the 9th, 11th and 12th July.

You can grab tickets to the Best Of All Worlds tour now.

The post “After I learned the song, I’d spend an hour or two on YouTube”: How the online guitar community helped Joe Satriani nail Eddie Van Halen’s riffs appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

[Editor’s note: Kenny’s Music is now owned by Vista Musical Instruments, which, like Guitar.com, is part of the Caldecott Music Group.]

Following the acquisition of Scottish musical instruments retailer Kenny’s Music by Vista Musical Instruments in February this year, the brand is unveiling the next phase of its relaunch with its new Live Room, an innovative shopping experience which might make your dream guitar a whole lot more affordable.

Essentially, the all-new Kenny’s Live Room launches with a Dutch auction format – meaning each item starts at its highest price, falling automatically every three minutes, meaning you can lock in and claim your instrument when the price feels right.

• READ MORE: Stella – the legendary guitar brand championed by BB King, Elvis and Kurt Cobain – has been revived by Harmony with a new line of parlor acoustics

The Kenny’s Live Room will host such auctions every Tuesday and Friday from 6pm UK time, with a curated selection of new and used instruments and gear up for grabs from the likes of Heritage Guitars, Fender, Martin, Harmony, MONO and more.

The new instrument buying format is designed, Kenny’s says, to “make finding your next instrument as exciting as playing it”.

The brand also reveals that more innovative live formats will be rolled out to “open up more ways for musicians and creators to discover tools to fuel their passion”.

“The Kenny’s Music Live Room is about more than just great deals,” says David Nam, Managing Director of Vista Musical Instruments. “Our goal is to bring a new sense of excitement to buying gear online, combining timing, transparency, and the thrill of locking in the right deal before someone else does.”

He goes on: “This is just the beginning of the new shopping experiences we’re building for the Kenny’s Music community.”

Each item bought via the Kenny’s Music Live Room comes with next-working-day delivery and a 14-day returns policy, and is fully inspected by the Kenny’s team.

To get a sense of the potential you stand to save in the Kenny’s Live Room, the latest listing saw a Marshall Origin ORI20C 20W tube combo amp – normally retailing around £500 – sell for just £59… 

Head to Kenny’s Music now to find out more.

The post Kenny’s Music launches the Live Room – with a Dutch auction format that could land you your next guitar at a crazy low price appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

$229/£169, blackstar.com

I remember the first time I played a Blackstar Fly 3. It would have been around 2014, not long after the British amp maker launched their revolutionary mini-sized practice amp, and within about 30 seconds of plugging one in, you knew that Blackstar had done something remarkable.

• READ MORE: Teaching Machines FuzzBillion review: is this the most ambitious and unique dirt pedal ever made?

Because this was a mini-amp that – through clever physical and digital engineering – sounded remarkably big. Credibly big. So big that for bedroom players, you could make the argument that this teeny marvel was all the amp you needed to practice at home, and sound good doing it.

I lost count of the number of times I recommended friends buy a Fly over the following few years, and not one of them was disappointed. Then, about five years ago, the Fly started to feel like it was being left behind. The arrival of Positive Grid’s game-changing Spark family of amps kicked off an arms race to see how much tech and functionality could be squeezed into a practice amp – the smart amp sector was born.

And while the Fly 3 remained a quality option, and other arrivals like the ID:Core Beam and Beam Solo showed that Blackstar was moving forward, you did get the sense that the brand was playing catch-up.

That is, until now. Because Blackstar has just dropped the Beam Mini, and while it might look like a spiritual successor to the Fly 3, under the hood it might very well represent the next great evolutionary leap for smart amps.

Blackstar Beam Mini – what is it?

Let’s get the spec stuff out of the way up top. The Beam Mini is a 2x 12-watt stereo practice amplifier with a pair of full-range two-inch custom drivers alongside two passive bass radiators, all somehow squeezed into an acoustically-tuned cabinet that’s roughly the same size as a can of Coke.

Inside, you’ll find a modelling amp that offers component-level modelled sounds for 12 onboard guitar amps (six Blackstar, five generic), a trio of bass amps and an acoustic amp. You also get Blackstar’s impressive CabRig speaker and mic emulation for all these amps, plus 35 effects divided into six blocks (three pre-fx, three post-fx). It’s all powered by the same Beam app that was used for the Beam Solo, and as you’d expect for a modern practice amp, you can also stream music wirelessly, and there’s also a USB-C out and 3.5mm headphone jack for silent practice and for plugging in a headset mic, so you can sing and play at the same time.

So far, so ‘smart amp in 2026’ right? Well, this is where things get really interesting. The Beam Mini is the first amp that supports Neural Amp Modelling from Tone 3000. For those not in the know, NAM is effectively an open-source, free-to-use amp profiling technology allowing you to create remarkably accurate digital captures of real amps in the same way that Kemper, Neural DSP, Line 6 and others do.

Various digital and pedal-based products have started to incorporate NAM in recent years, but it’s never before been seen on an actual amplifier. So when I say that it has 12 onboard guitar amps up top, well, in reality it’s more than that – a LOT more.

The demo version that I’m using to test the hardware has over 100 real-world full-rig amp captures available, but the Tone 3000 website features over 2,000 – with more being added all the time.

Another eyebrow-raising feature is one that is not quite there yet, but it’s exciting. The Beam Mini also plans to integrate with Moises – the AI-powered stem separation app, which allows you to adjust the levels of instruments and vocals in any piece of recorded music. This means you can strip the guitar track out of your favourite songs to play along to. It’s a very cool idea, and the potential benefits of that for a practice amp are pretty obvious, but Blackstar hasn’t managed to get it fully integrated for launch. I’ve got a demo version to try out, but Blackstar’s head of products Alex Gee says the finished version will be available hopefully by the end of the summer.

Blackstar Beam Mini – build quality

Taking the Beam Mini out of its box, there’s a reassuring heft to the thing. It’s not heavy to the point where you’d think twice before chucking it in a backpack, tipping the scales at 733g/1.6lbs, but it doesn’t feel flimsy or insubstantial, which is always a good thing when you’re going to plug a cable into it.

The Mini is covered in a rubber outer shell with a classic tolex pattern on it. It’s very similar to the covering on the Positive Grid Spark GO, or (and the ex-Bletchley people at Blackstar probably won’t appreciate me saying this) Marshall’s current generation of portable Bluetooth speakers. As a device that’s designed to do both, though, that’s no bad thing. The Mini is also IP66-rated for dust and water resistance – that means you won’t have a good time if you drop it in a pool or in the sea, but it’s not gonna freak out if you drop it in the sand or it gets splashed.

The top of the unit contains the XpressFX control panel – this is effectively a large knob combined with a white LED bar, and a selection of buttons to select the various parameters – patch, gain, EQ, FX and volume. You can load up to five preset amp and effects chains onto the Mini’s hardware, and you swap between them by hitting the patch button and then selecting your patch, which is reflected by the position of the LEDs on the bar.

Candidly, I do not love this. It works well enough, but the whole XpressFX thing feels a bit form over function. I found it wasn’t always immediately clear which of the five LED segments you’re actually on, making it a bit of a crap-shoot when it came to switching patches, that’s if I even managed to switch the patch at all. Because the same knob controls adjusting everything, on multiple occasions I found myself switching the patch or dialling down the gain when I wanted to adjust the volume, for example.

It looks very pretty, no arguments there, but I wish they’d just stuck a bunch of old-school knobs on there instead – it would certainly have made the whole thing more intuitive. One thing I do like is that if you hold down the volume button, the onboard tuner activates – meaning you don’t have to delve into the app menu to find it.

If the control panel seems like it’s lacking a bit of common sense, the same can’t be said for the placement of the jack plug. The absolute bane of any small amp is how easy it tends to be to tip them over with an indelicate tug on the cable. Because the jacks are generally on the top, it’s basically an invitation for them to tip over and take a tumble onto the floor.

It’s amazing that nobody thought of this sooner, because the Beam Mini’s solution is elegant and brilliant. The jack plug is relocated to the bottom edge of the amp, on the right-hand side. Combined with that rubbery, grippy coating, it meant that throughout my review period I never once sent the amp crashing to the floor.

Blackstar Beam Mini – usability

A smart amp lives and dies on the strength of its app, and mercifully, the Beam’s is a good one. It connects to the Beam Mini from my iPhone in a matter of seconds, and presents a simple and straightforward GUI – the tabs are laid out straightforwardly with separate tabs for pre-fx, amp, post-fx, CabRig and a music tab.

The latter features a bunch of backing tracks and lessons curated by Blackstar, and using the search function you can also use YouTube to find songs, backing tracks and the like to play over. Disappointingly, unlike the Spark app, you can’t natively integrate Apple Music or Spotify into the app itself, but provided you’ve connected your phone via Bluetooth audio, you can simply stream it from its respective app and it’ll come through the Beam regardless.

The app also features the ability to record natively (though you’ll need to connect your phone via USB-C manually to the unit) as well as a community hub where you can search through a load of user-generated presets. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the tones on offer here don’t have the depth and breadth that Positive Grid’s Spark does (they’ve got half a decade’s head start after all), and most of them at launch appear to be from Blackstar artists and ones from various influencers that the brand has collaborated with on the launch. The potential is here, though, for it to become a truly useful database.

And of course, the onboard sounds are just part of the magic here – the NAM captures open up a huge other realm of sonic possibility, and accessing them is a doddle. To audition a capture, you simply select the amp tab and scroll down in the list to the Tone 3000 tab at the bottom, where you’re redirected to a page that offers a list of all the available amps. The Beam Mini is limited to downloading just ‘complete rigs’, so that’s all you can see here, and for the pre-release version I was testing I had about 50 to choose from – the full library is available for final users.

Once you’ve chosen a rig, simply tap the download button and you can audition it live on the Beam Mini (as you can with any tweaks to the signal chain on the app). One thing to note is that when you load a NAM capture, the CabRig tab disappears as the capture includes its own cab simulation, and you’ll also notice that the pre-fx tab (which contains drive pedals, boosts etc) is slimmed down to just a noise gate.

This is a little disappointing, for sure – who doesn’t want to have a dirt pedal in front of their amp? But Gee explains that it’s simply a matter of processing power. In order to be able to accurately render the Tone 3000 captures, sacrifices had to be made, and given that most captures offer clean and various levels of dirty options, the team felt that retaining the likes of delay, reverb and modulation post-fx was more important. Gee isn’t ruling out them managing to squeeze enough out of the hardware to change this in a future firmware update, but for now we have to live with the rigs as they are.

Something else that we can look to the future of, but with a clearer roadmap, is the Moises integration. As mentioned, it’s not likely to be ready for public consumption until August, but I was provided with a beta version to experiment with. Blackstar is at pains to point out that the final version may not look like this, the current iteration requires you to download a separate Moises app, and then connect to the Beam Mini via USB.

Once you’ve done that and opened the app, you simply start playing a song from your phone, open the Moises app, and you can adjust the levels of vocals and guitar to your liking. It’s a little Heath Robinson, for sure, but it works extremely well in practice – if they can streamline it in the next few months, it’s going to be a hugely powerful practise tool, and a killer addition to the Beam Mini’s arsenal that will put it in competition with JBL’s recent BandBox Solo to some degree.

Blackstar Beam Mini – sounds

The most surprising thing about the Beam Mini straight out of the gate is how loud it is. I thought I’d struggle to find a better-sounding mini-amp than the Spark GO, but despite being only a tiny amount larger than PG’s most portable option, the power, projection and bass response here feels like a significant upgrade. Sonically it’s closer to the much bigger (and more expensive outside the US) Spark Mini than the Go, and that’s a massive feather in the Beam’s cap.

Any practice amp lives and dies on the strength of its modelled sounds, however, and so that’s where we must go first and foremost – starting with the onboard, component-level modelled sounds.

It’s a truth of the modelling game going all the way back to the venerable Line 6 POD that digital recreations tend to be better at emulating very heavy tones, or very clean tones, and the ones in between are where things tend to get a bit variable.

With that in mind, my first port of call is the St James and Artisan models from Blackstar’s own stable – and I’m instantly impressed by how authentic they sound. Especially in the context of these tiny two-inch speakers, there’s a warmth and organic grit to the sound as you edge the virtual amps into breakup that’s really impressive.

It’s the same across the board really – including the non-Blackstar amps. The cleans have lovely realistic overtones, the heavy tones have plenty of squish and punch without getting too fizzy… it’s all rather good. Even if you find a sound that doesn’t quite live up to your expectations, the breadth of sounds here, from both Blackstar’s own stable and the sound-alike “Ampton” range means there’s almost certainly a sound you will like just around the corner.

Your sonic options are further enhanced by the CabRig tech, and with six different cabinet options to choose from, plus the ability to add a dynamic, condenser, or ribbon mic – in addition to the more organic ‘in the room mode’ – there’s lots to play with. I’ve been very impressed with CabRig in the past, but I must say the mic sounds here aren’t the most organic – most of the time I found myself sticking with the room option instead. The ability in this mode to add some of that realistic ambience really helps to elevate things given the unavoidably small size of the Beam Mini, it’s a real sound-enhancer.

Slightly less impressive overall are the onboard effects. Some of the fuzz sounds are a bit too tinny to be really enjoyable, the overdrives are pretty thin without adding some dirt and heft from the amp side, and the spring reverb could do with a bit more breadth in its sound. While furrowing my brow, I do have to remind myself that these are the built-in effects on a practice amp, but such is the quality everywhere else, you tend to notice the little things that aren’t quite as good.

Finally, let’s talk about the main event – the Tone 3000 captures. In short, this feature alone is plenty of reason for you to stick your current practice amp on Reverb and buy one of these immediately. I’ve been using various Neural DSP devices into a FRFR mini cab as my home practice solution for a few years now. It’s probably a bit OTT, but I’ll happily admit to becoming spoiled by the sheer quality, fidelity and accuracy – both in sound and in function – of captures versus traditional modelling.

Believe me then, when I tell you how remarkable it is to hear something that’s so very close to the quality of those high-end captures emanating from an amp that costs less than half of what the cheapest Cortex device does, and can fit in your pocket if you’re embracing baggy jeans.

Whether you’re picking a classic Fender Deluxe Reverb, a Tone King Imperial, an EVH5150 or a Marshall JCM 800, these things sound real in the most basic sense. They’re the best sounds I’ve ever heard coming out of a practice amp, and they make the various compromises in signal chain fall by the wayside within a few notes of playing. Seriously, they’re that good.

Blackstar Beam Mini – should I buy one?

For all the above reasons, the Beam Mini feels like a new benchmark for practice amps. Like the Positive Grid Spark did half a decade ago, this brings something new to the party that is hugely compelling – in this case the remarkable fidelity and quality of the Neural Amp Modeller captures, and the massive potential of the Moises integration to transform your practice experience.

It would have been easy for Blackstar to try and emulate the things that have made the Spark a success – the AI tuition gubbins, the live-streaming integration, all that jazz – but it’s entirely to the brand’s credit that they’ve offered something different, but equally compelling. This is the new best practice solution for guitarists.

Blackstar Beam Mini – alternatives

The Positive Grid Spark GO ($139/£99) is similarly tiny and sounds really great – if you’re in the US it’s also significantly cheaper. The JBL Bandbox Solo ($249/£199) has built-in Bluetooth stem separation onboard; its guitar sounds don’t come anywhere near those on the Beam Mini, however. If you want a great-sounding mini amp without the need to get your smartphone involved, Laney’s Prism ($149/£99) is a really good option.

The post Blackstar Beam Mini review: “a new benchmark for practice amps” appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

“It has to be more about the music than about myself.”

Jimmy “Scratch” James is explaining his approach to guitar from his home in Seattle. It’s one of several conversations we have over a few weeks, on FaceTime and by phone. “I play the guitar like a drum,” he adds, “and even though he was a bass player, not a guitar player, I think about [legendary Motown bassist] James Jamerson a lot.”

“Nobody ever forced older music on me,” he continues. “But that old music—James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Sly Stone—it’s like being at your grandma’s table, and she serves you food that sticks to your ribs. You can go to a drive-through, and that food may look good, but it’s not gonna stick to your ribs the way your grandmother’s food is gonna do. That’s what it’s like listening to those old records.”

It’s been almost a quarter century since the retro-soul movement took root, with record labels like Daptone, Colemine, and Big Crown bringing artists like Sharon Jones, Charles Bradley, and Lee Fields to listeners’ ears; sounds first pioneered more than 60 years ago in places like Memphis, Muscle Shoals, and Detroit. But Jimmy James is a modern-day part of that revival.

Soul and funk place a strong emphasis on the ensemble rather than the individual, so it’s rare for a guitar player to stand out within those genres. But two instrumental bands out of Seattle, True Loves and Parlor Greens, have provided breakout space for James, who may be the retro-soul scene’s first guitar hero. Indeed, the nickname “Scratch” is a reference to rhythm guitar players of the past who brought a percussive beat to their fretwork—musicians like Nile Rodgers of Chic and, before him, Jimmy Nolen of James Brown’s band.

“I gave myself that nickname as an homage to them,” James explains, “But people just call me Jimmy.”

The difference between Parlor Greens and True Loves, Jimmy explains during a call on a rare day off from gigging, “is like the difference between Motown and Stax.” I’ve asked him why he needs two full-time bands. “In the True Loves, we have a horn section, so it’s more groovy that way, like a pop thing. Parlor Greens is an organ trio, and since there are only three of us, I naturally have more sonic space there. I’ve been with True Loves longer, but I love the two bands equally.”

James, now 45, is a double threat on guitar. He’s a rhythm player who “scratches” deep in the pocket of the groove but who’s also able to explode into psychedelic lead-guitar thunder reminiscent of his fellow Seattleite, Jimi Hendrix, who was a big influence on him.

“The thing I love about Hendrix,” James tells me, “and also jazz guys like John Coltrane, Louis Armstrong, and Charlie Parker, is they took risks. I remember Hendrix once, in 1969, went on The Dick Cavett Show and said, ‘The reason I make mistakes is because I’m trying new things.’ I respected him, and he represented freedom to me. They all tried new things. But Hendrix was always expanding. Every time I heard him, I felt like I was going into another dimension, another galaxy.”

“That old music, it’s like being at your grandma’s table, and she serves you food that sticks to your ribs.”

It was during middle school that James’ late older sister first played “Purple Haze” for him. “Let me tell you, that scared me—I never heard anything like it,” James remembers. “I thought it was heavy metal at the time, because my sister was listening to a lot of Metallica then. So I thought Hendrix was current at that time. Of course, I later found out.”

A native of the Holly Park section of South Seattle, James has no spouse or children. He lives to play, and he walks the earth with four ghosts looking over his shoulder.

“My family is all gone—my grandmother, my mother, and my two sisters,” he explains. “They were Leola, Marie, Regina, and Chelsea. They were all musicians, and they all had a profound impact on me. My grandmother was a singer and a championship jitterbugger. My mother was a vocalist, and she sang in a local group called the Champelles. This was the mid ’60s. They opened up for Johnnie Taylor, Solomon Burke, and the Sweet Inspirations. That group had Whitney Houston’s mother, Cissy, in it. My oldest sister, Regina, she was a pianist and flutist. The younger of my sisters, Chelsea, was a drummer, and she played in a band in Seattle in the ’90s called Tribal Therapy. Chelsea used to say to me, ‘Pocket and tempo are everything. Stay out of the way and play the part that fits the song.’

“They’re all gone now,” James says wistfully. “Everything I do is still for them, and it always will be. I started out as a drummer, around the sixth grade, because that’s what my sister played. But then I heard Motown guitar lines like ‘My Girl,’ which was played by Robert White. And I heard Eddie Willis playing the guitar line on ‘I Second That Emotion,’ and I loved that. My mom helped me move the drums that I had over to a friend’s house so we could play. He was playing guitar, but we swapped instruments, and as soon as I started playing some open notes, fooling around on the guitar, I realized that that’s what I was into.”

James’ mother bought him an acoustic guitar in those early days. “I started picking things up off of records, Chuck Berry, B.B. King, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker,” he recalls. “But I also liked folk music. And I liked soul. The first rhythm and blues thing I learned how to play was ‘Mustang Sally.’ Then, in high school, I was in the band, and most high school bands play jazz, but we were more into Kool & the Gang and James Brown. And I couldn’t read music. The horns could read music, but we just had to pick it up and figure out which notes went together.

Jimmy “Scratch” James’ Gear List

Guitars:

1964 Silvertone 1454

1995 Squier Stratocaster

2019 Fender Custom Shop Tele

2022 Fender Custom Shop Stratocaster

Fender ’62 Jazzmaster Reissue

1980 Guild X-170 Archtop

1960s Harmony Rocket

Amps:

Fender Hot Rod Deluxe

Peavey Delta Blues

Templo Devices Nomad 50 Watt Battery Amp

Strings, Picks, & Cables:

D’Addario flatwound strings

Ernie Ball roundwound strings

“Super heavy” picks

Lava cables

“I remember one time I got a bad grade, and my mother took my guitar away. Man, I whimpered, and I cried, and later she told me, ‘That’s when I knew how badly you wanted to play, you never moped like that over anything else.’ I just could not think of anything else; I just wanted to play guitar. I felt safe in the music, I just knew I wanted to play.”

On the road today, James totes two main axes. One is a 1964 red Silvertone that he picked up about 16 years ago at Georgetown Music in Seattle. It has a stock single-coil gold-foil pickup in the neck position, but the bridge pickup is an old Epiphone humbucker that was installed when Seattle luthier Chris Lomba was rehabbing the guitar.

“We bought that instrument from some guy, really for parts,” Lomba recalls on the phone. At the time, Lomba was the resident luthier and guitar tech at Georgetown, where James was a frequent customer. “I remember pulling things out of the scrap pile and just putting it together for Jimmy. And we put in new frets and a new bridge,” Lomba remembers. “The Epiphone pickup in the bridge position was just something we had lying around, like a spare. The amazing thing about that Silvertone is really how much he loves it. Jimmy believes in that guitar 100 percent, and he’s always concerned about its well being.”

“I don’t really mess around with pedals, because I like the sound of the guitar just how it is.”

James’ other go-to axe is a 1995 Mexico-built Squier Stratocaster that his mother purchased for him. Resources in the family were stretched thin, and his mom worked overtime six days a week to make sure her son got the instrument.

“She didn’t need to do that; it was hard for us financially. But we went to a place called American Music so that I could get some fresh strings for another guitar, and I was eyeing that Stratocaster in the store and trying to play it cool; I didn’t want her to notice how much I was looking at it,” James recalls. “Finally, she said to me, ‘You really want that guitar, don’t you? Go ahead and put it up on the counter, you never ask me for nothing. I’ll figure it out.’ I miss my mother; she’s been gone for four years now. I named that Stratocaster ‘Bessie’ for my favorite blues singer, Bessie Smith.”

I ask James how he’s processed so much loss in his life, and he tells me, “I just play through it. I wish they were here. I wish they could see what I’ve done and where I’ve gone around the world to play my guitar. We were all close through music. And playing music is the closest I’ll be to them.”

Watching Jimmy James play through it is to experience an artist conjure his apparitions; it’s a guitar seance onstage. His solos flow as though he’s lighting candles to illuminate a spectral pathway back to the here and now for his lost family. When Jimmy James opens that door, his facial expression becomes otherworldly—his jaw drops agape, silently mouthing the notes ringing through his pickups as he frets them. His wailing, full-step bends soar towards the heavens. He’s playing for his ghosts.

James is precise and articulate, tending to pick each note, avoiding hammer-ons and pull-offs unless the solo cries out for it. His tone is clean and stompbox-free; his guitar cable runs straight to his amp. When he is ready to open this ethereal portal in a solo, he strides over to the amplifier and quickly flips an overdrive switch. It’s all the crunch he needs.

“I don’t really mess around with pedals,” James explains. “Sometimes, if it’s a very powerful amp and there’s too much headroom for it to break up, I’ll put something in front of it. But very rarely, because I like the sound of the guitar just how it is.”

Parlor Greens recently dropped a new record, Emeralds. The last track, “Queen of My Heart,” is James' homage to his late mother. The recording contains the last words she ever spoke to him, in a video selfie sent to his phone shortly before she passed. His guitar leads cry out in an emotional letting-go, a projection of the hurt in Jimmy James’ soul.

“James Jamerson once told his son, ‘If you don’t feel it, don’t play it,’” James relates to me. “That’s how I approach it. Oscar Wilde said something, too: ‘You can only be yourself, because everyone else is taken.’ That’s what it is. If you take Jimi Hendrix’s guitar and hand it to B.B. King, and you take B.B.’s guitar and put it on Jimi Hendrix, they are still gonna sound like themselves. And my mother instilled that in me. She’d tell me, ‘Have a sound! When you hear a Motown track, you know it’s Motown before the words even hit.’”

I comment to Jimmy that, for a 45-year-old man, a guy who grew up in Seattle during the peak of grunge, his spirit feels pretty old. He explains that listening to that classic music from the ’60s and ’70s is what shaped him.

“When I was young, I would hear things like Johnnie Taylor’s ‘Who’s Makin’ Love,’ or ‘California Dreamin’’ by the Mamas & the Papas,” James reminisces. “Musically and lyrically, all that stuff spoke to me. My friends didn’t get it. They’d say, ‘Why are you listening to that grandparents' music?’ But I loved the lyrics and how there was a story to be told. And when you think about the blues, it’s the foundation. So it all felt grounded to me; that older stuff has a deep conviction to it. You can listen to it and know that they worked very hard, and it came from deep within.

“Sometimes I do feel like I was born at the wrong time. But after my mother passed, I had a dream. I came to her, and I said, ‘Mom, what’s the point of my living? Why can’t I be with you all? We could be a family again. And in this dream, she said to me, ‘Don’t be anxious for nothing, baby. You got better things coming your way. Just you wait.’ And she always had that wisdom. Music can change a lot of things.”

You can now hear one of the last guitar solos Brent Hinds ever recorded, thanks to a newly released collaboration with Marcus King that has surfaced online.

The late Mastodon guitarist’s work appears on Red Door, a track featured on the expanded edition of King’s Darlin’ Blue/No Room For Blue release. News of Hinds’ involvement was shared by Banker Guitars, who posted behind-the-scenes photos from the recording sessions alongside a tribute to the guitarist.

• READ MORE: “If we have disagreements, I’m able to send him to his room”: Tom Morello on working with his son, Roman

Hinds – best known for his decades-long run with Mastodon – died in a motorcycle accident in Atlanta last August, just months after departing the band earlier that year. Since then, it’s been revealed that there’s a sizable archive of unheard material left behind by the guitarist, with Banker Guitars suggesting the Marcus King collaboration sits among the very last recordings he completed.

“For those who may not know, this song you are listening to has one of the last guitar solos Brent Hinds recorded,” the company writes on Instagram.

“He slept on the living room couch for a week (or two, whose counting) with The Marcus King Band at the house they rented down in Macon, Georgia, while they were writing and recording their latest record, Darlin’ Blue at the legendary Capricorn Studios,” the post states.

Red Door ultimately became part of the expanded double-disc edition of the album, which chronicles King’s sobriety journey.

“Red Door was one that Brent collaborated on and performed on,” Banker explains, “Ever the stubborn perfectionist, he managed to do 278 takes before landing on the one he liked best. These are some photos I took while hanging out and watching it all unfold for a couple of days.”

The collaboration also continues a long-running partnership between Hinds and King. Back in 2020, the pair teamed up for a livestream performance of a Black Sabbath classic, while King later paid tribute to Hinds following his death last year.

Following Hinds’ passing, Canadian prog virtuoso Nick Johnston stepped into the guitarist role for Mastodon’s live lineup, and is expected to appear on the band’s next studio album.

View this post on Instagram

The post Hear one of the “last guitar solos” Brent Hinds recorded on Marcus King’s new track: “He managed to do 278 takes before landing on the one he liked best” appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Ernie Ball Music Man has unveiled the new John Petrucci Majesty Premium Select collection – a high-spec evolution of the prog metal titan’s long-running signature electric guitar lineup, now available in 6-, 7- and 8-string configurations.

Designed in collaboration with the Dream Theater guitarist, the Majesty Premium Select line has been shaped by Petrucci’s decades of touring and studio experience, and is said to bring players the “highest level of tone, precision, and versatility”.

• READ MORE: “The world doesn’t need another Tele or Strat clone – it just doesn’t”: Why Guitar Center is launching its own guitar brand that’s “meaningfully better and differentiated”

Across the lineup, the guitars pair a mahogany neck-through-body design with alder wings and a thick maple top – a combination EBMM says delivers “exceptional depth, sustain, and articulation” while retaining the clarity needed to cut through any mix.

The Majesty Premium Select also packs in the sort of premium appointments fans have come to expect from Petrucci’s flagship models. There’s a 24-fret ebony fingerboard fitted with stainless steel frets, glow-in-the-dark side markers for low-light stages, Schaller locking tuners, and a piezo-equipped Music Man floating tremolo system capable of blending electric and acoustic-style tones.

Electronics come courtesy of Petrucci’s signature DiMarzio Rainmaker and Dreamcatcher humbuckers, while stereo and mono output options allow for more flexible live and studio routing setups. Players also get an onboard 20+dB gain boost for instant lead tones and extra tonal firepower on demand.

As EBMM puts it, the collection is aimed at “progressive rock and metal players, recording artists, and touring guitarists who want a high-output, articulate instrument with both magnetic and acoustic (piezo) tonal options in a single guitar.”

The collection is available in five finishes – Carnelian Red, Ka’anapali Dream, Mystic Dream, Purple Nebula II and Strawberry Moon – with pricing set at $4,999 for the 6-string model, $5,199 for the 7-string, and $5,399 for the 8-string version.

For more information, head to Music Man.

The post More precision, more versatility, more everything: John Petrucci’s Ernie Ball Music Man signature range gets the luxury treatment with the new Majesty Premium Select collection appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Earlier this month, the Greta Van Fleet left their fandom in shambles after posting a cryptic “thank you” message on social media, which led many to believe the band might be calling it quits.

A few days later, the Michigan quartet moved quickly to shut that speculation down with a studio clip captioned “We’re back, baby!”, showing the members working on new material and confirming they were still very much active.

Now, the group have followed that up with an even more concrete statement of intent: a one-off intimate show at New York City’s Bowery Ballroom on 27 May.

• READ MORE: What’s the point of painting a guitar anyway? And does it make any difference to the sound?

The 600-capacity venue marks a dramatic step down in scale from their previous New York headline show at Madison Square Garden, offering fans a rare chance to see the band in a much smaller setting.

Tickets will be sold in person only at the Bowery Ballroom box office from 26 May at 9am ET, priced at $20 with a strict two-ticket limit per person.

The show will be Greta Van Fleet’s first live performance since wrapping their 2024 tour in support of their most recent album, 2023’s Starcatcher.

View this post on Instagram

In related news, Greta Van Fleet guitarist Jake Kiszka has recently partnered with Gibson on a limited-edition production run SG Standard modelled after his well-worn 1961 Les Paul SG.

Handcrafted in Nashville and released in strictly limited numbers, the model pays tribute to Kiszka’s “Beloved” guitar, capturing its double-cutaway design and vintage-spec details.

Recalling the moment he discovered the instrument while the band were still early in their career, Kiszka said, “It was maybe a decade ago now, about 10 years ago, Greta Van Fleet was leaving Michigan for the first time…I was looking through all these guitars, and we were trying to pick up some gear if we could, some serious, good gear.”

“I stumbled upon this one,” he continued, “I was just immediately mesmerised. Immediately, from the first strum, it was like a lightning bolt just hit me from above.”

The post Greta Van Fleet calm breakup rumours with $20 New York City show announcement appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

I recently had an argument with a friend who was remodeling their kitchen, and they decided to paint over their beautiful hickory cupboards. As a longtime woodworker, I love the look of woodgrains. Each piece is unique and has character – painting over it with a solid latex color seemed to me to be a real shame.

• READ MORE: This is how your guitar’s truss rod actually works – and here’s what you’re doing wrong with it

But then I had to catch myself – I don’t love the look of wood so much that I’ve stripped all my guitars back to the grain, have I? I love the look of a guitar with a stunning colourful finish on it, but should I? The whole argument brought to light one question I had never actually asked myself… what’s the point of painting guitars, anyway?

Wood is beautiful. A nicely figured slab of maple or a clean piece of swamp ash is arguably prettier than anything you could spray over it. So why do the overwhelming majority of guitars leaving factories today get finished in something that obscures this entirely, or at the very least buries it under a thick coat of clear lacquer?

The short answer is that a guitar finish does three jobs at once – protection, looks, and, arguably, tone – and the industry has been tweaking the balance between those three since long before most of us ever plucked a string.

The Boring Answer

Let’s start with the boring answer, which also happens to be the most important one. Wood moves. A guitar body is organic material, and left to its own devices it’ll absorb moisture from the air and from your hands, warp with humidity, and gradually soak up every drop of beer sweat that lands on it.

A finish seals it. Whether we’re talking about a thick coat of polyester on a modern Squier or a wafer-thin layer of nitrocellulose lacquer on a Custom Shop Strat, the coating is a barrier against moisture, dust, skin oils, UV light, and the general indignities of being played.

Guitar finishes as a category have evolved in roughly chronological order – from barely-there oils and shellacs that protected very little but preserved the wood’s feel; to French polish, which Martin used for more than a century; to nitrocellulose lacquers starting in the 1920s and ’30s; to polyurethane and polyester from the late 1960s onward. Each step up the chain trades something. Thinner finishes let the wood breathe and feel more organic under your hand but scratch easily and age quickly. Thicker ones form a glossy armor that shrugs off pretty much anything you throw at it.

Hiding Place

The second reason for painting a guitar is one the marketing department won’t put on the spec sheet. Paint hides things. Bodies, especially at the affordable end of the market, are often made from multi-piece blanks, woods with inconsistent grain, or cuts that wouldn’t look particularly impressive under a transparent finish.

An opaque color – Fiesta Red, Olympic White, Surf Green – does the double duty of looking fantastic and politely ignoring whatever’s happening underneath. This is why you’ll occasionally see an old refinished Fender stripped bare to reveal a body that was clearly never meant for the spotlight. A solid color lets a manufacturer use more of what comes in the door.

Standing Out

Which brings us to the third reason: identity. When Leo Fender started offering custom colors in the mid-1950s, he wasn’t being precious about tonewoods – he was looking at car dealerships. Detroit’s postwar boom had turned the automobile into a symbol of personal style, and the paint codes pouring out of DuPont’s catalog offered a shortcut to that same glamour.

Fender’s custom colors were, quite literally, car paints. Fiesta Red came from Ford. Lake Placid Blue from Cadillac. Daphne Blue, also Cadillac. Sonic Blue was lifted from a ’56 Cadillac color chart. In fact, Fender’s only truly in-house mixes during the 1950s and ’60s were sunburst, blond, and eventually Candy Apple Red – everything else was borrowed from the automotive world, mixed by DuPont under the Duco (nitrocellulose) and Lucite (acrylic) brand names, and sprayed onto guitar bodies at a five percent upcharge.

The Real Impact

Which leaves the question everyone wants answered: does paint actually affect the sound of a guitar? I would imagine that this is the section of the article that will inspire the most debate because for decades now, musicians have been divided on it.

The traditional claim – that nitrocellulose lets the wood “breathe” and therefore resonate better – is mostly myth, at least on solidbody electrics. What actually matters is thickness. A thin finish, whether it’s nitro or a carefully-applied poly, interferes less with the wood’s vibration than a thick one.

Early poly finishes on Fenders and other production guitars were laid on heavily because it was cheaper and more efficient, and those thick plastic coatings probably did dampen things a bit. According to most luthiers I’ve spoken to, modern polys, applied in properly thin layers, are largely indistinguishable from nitro in practice.

On an acoustic, where the top’s vibration is the whole engine of the sound, finish thickness matters a lot more – which is why Martin spent more than a hundred years using shellac and why boutique builders still obsess over the thinnest lacquer they can get away with.

On a solidbody, though, the finish’s effect is minor compared to the pickups, the wood itself, the strings, and your hands. That’s why the long-running “nitro sounds better” debate is mostly about feel and aesthetics. Nitrocellulose checks, yellows, and wears into the patina vintage buyers chase. Polyurethane and polyester stay looking brand new for decades. Both ideas are completely defensible.

Personal Preference

Personally, when I build necks out of roasted maple, I don’t finish them unless it’s requested. I use a combination of wax and oil to protect the neck – but that has to be re-applied a couple of times per year. I do like the feel of it, but the real reason I do that is that I customize the neck shape to the player, and if at any point the neck needs to be reshaped, I can do it without having to reapply a finish that needs to cure. So even the decision not to use poly or nitro has a practical purpose, not necessarily a tonal one.

So when someone asks what the point of painting a guitar is, the honest answer is all of it, at the same time. It keeps the wood alive. It hides what you don’t want to see. It signals the brand, the era, and the player you want to be associated with. And then, in some small percentage of cases, it might even nudge the tone – though far less than the folklore suggests. The next time you pick up a guitar and admire the finish, you’re not just looking at a coat of paint. You’re looking at a century of trade-offs between chemistry, craftsmanship, and the car industry.

The post What’s the point of painting a guitar anyway? And does it make any difference to the sound? appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Fuzz is one of those effects that I love to hear but struggle to make it fit in my playing.

Over the years, I’ve tried a lot of different fuzz pedals. Like most guitar players that start chasing fuzz tones, I began by exploring the “classic” circuits and the countless variations that builders have created around them. I started out trying some Fuzz Face variants, then went through some Big Muff derivatives, and then finally tried out some Tone Bender circuits.

Each type of fuzz circuit has its own distinct personality. Fuzz Face-style pedals tend to have a raw, open sound that responds well to your guitar’s volume knob. Tone Bender-style fuzzes generally sound more aggressive and cutting, with a bit more midrange character. And then there’s the Big Muff, which has a smoother texture to the sound, but also sounds huge.

For a long time, I preferred the Big Muff sound as it seems better for riffing and playing chords. This circuit doesn’t seem to get as harsh as the Fuzz Face circuit can sometimes get. I ended up really liking the EarthQuaker Devices Hoof Fuzz for Big Muff sounds, which as I understand it is based off of Dan Auerbach’s Russian Big Muff. It sounds great and has a lot of midrange flexibility thanks to the Shift knob.

The downside to the Big Muff circuit is that it doesn’t clean up like the Fuzz Face, and there’s definitely something about the glassy character of a Fuzz Face with the guitar volume knob turned down. That led me to keep searching.

When I wanted to try the Tone Bender circuit, I ended up trying a Basic Audio Scarab Deluxe fuzz, which is based on the Tone Bender MKII circuit. I’ve found it to be an extremely flexible fuzz. However, I found it also didn’t clean up like I wanted. But, this one is probably my favorite Tone Bender variant.

I tried a number of Fuzz Face variants, but never really found one that I loved. The Skreddy Lunar Module Mini Deluxe is a nice variant, but I never felt like it captured the Fuzz Face tones I was going for. What were those tones? I wasn’t really even sure, but I kept looking.

What I’ve finally settled on is the Kingtone miniFuzz v2. It’s a Fuzz Face variant, but, in my opinion with all the options it has, I’ve been able to get it to sound like a nice in-between fuzz. That is, to me I can tweak it so that it sits in the middle between a Fuzz Face and a Big Muff. It sounds smoother than the traditional Fuzz Faces I’ve played, but can also clean up well.

I don’t know if my search for fuzz will ever be over, but for now I’ve been happy with the miniFuzz for quite a while.

Chaos Audio – the innovative guitar gear brand behind the compact multi-FX Stratus pedal, which we gave a strong 8/10 in our review last year – has launched its new AI FX Builder, a platform which allows guitarists to describe the tone they want in a text prompt and bring it to life in seconds.

Text-to-tone audio platforms have been cropping up with greater frequency in the last year or so, with Positive Grid launching its AI-enabled BIAS X platform in September, as well as smaller projects like the FUKKAUDIO browser-based text-to-tone generator.

• READ MORE: I tried using an AI-powered amp and effects suite to create my guitar sound for me – here’s what happened

Now, Chaos Audio throws its hat into the ring, with a text-to-tone generator of its own, AI FX Builder.

Each text prompt yields a unique effect, enabling guitarists and musicians to build out their effects libraries with “unprecedented ease and speed”, the company says.

Additionally, users have full access to the FAUST code used by AI FX Builder, enabling them to edit, learn from or rewrite code if they wish. Chaos Audio reassures users that they retain “unlimited rights to the code” and are free to use it on their own hardware, in commercial products or as a starting point for their own designs.

“Vocalists, violinists, guitar players, trumpet players or others, prompt the AI FX Builder by typing in a description of their desired effect, and watch it come to life,” says Chaos Audio founder and CEO Landon McCoy. “Now, your gear listens to you, not the other way around.”

He goes on: “The platform is not an artist. It doesn’t generate music or artwork or replace a musician’s creativity. You describe what you want, evaluate the result, design the interface and decide whether it’s good enough.”

In terms of pricing, AI FX Builder is available on a monthly subscription of $9.99 per month for 20 AI builds per month, or $29.99/month for 80 AI builds per month. You can also buy packs of AI builds if you wish not to commit to a monthly subscription, with 10 builds for $9.99, 30 for $24.99 and 100 for $49.99.

Learn more at Chaos Audio.

The post This new AI FX Builder from Chaos Audio might just change the way you craft your tone appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

At just 15 years of age, Tom Morello’s son Roman has developed into quite the formidable guitar player. Back in 2023, the young musician borrowed the 1982 Fender ‘Sendero Luminoso’ Telecaster his father used on Killing in the Name to play the track during a Rage Against the Machine soundcheck.

Though stealing him away from Fortnite to play guitar was initially a difficult task, Roman Morello ultimately fell in love with the guitar, and his father last year admitted that he’s now the “rhythm guitar player in the household”: “I just play some chord progressions, and he shreds over it,” he said.

• READ MORE: Deep Purple guitarist says Smoke on the Water is a “challenging” song to play: “It is easy technically, but it’s not easy to play”

And in a new interview with Guitar World magazine, Tom Morello reveals his son has become a “collaborative partner” on a number of his recent projects.

“That’s something I’m most excited about, continuing the collaboration with my son, Roman, who has become quite a technical guitarist. He’s been a collaborative partner on a couple of songs, and that will continue. [laughs]

“One of my favourite parts about working with Roman is that if we have disagreements, I’m able to send him to his room!”

Elsewhere in the interview, the guitarist explains the sheer number of requests he gets from other artists looking for him to add his characteristic chops to their music, but says being a father often gets in the way.

“It happens all day,” he says. “I do a lot of it, too. I’ve donated guitar solos to younger bands. They’re fans of Rage Against the Machine of Audioslave, and they want me on their songs.”

As for why he can’t help out every band that comes across his desk, he goes on: “Hey, I’ve got a lot going on! These days, I’m driving my kids to a lot of high school baseball games.”

Recently, Tom Morello teamed up with metalcore stalwarts Beartooth to contribute music to the latest update of Final Fantasy XIV.

Listen to Everything Burns below:

The post “If we have disagreements, I’m able to send him to his room”: Tom Morello on working with his son, Roman appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Ad feature with Taylor Guitars

Throughout his long and illustrious musical career, it’s safe to say that Ben Harper has come to understand when he’s going to connect with an instrument. “It never takes me longer than three chords to know if I’m gonna spend a lifetime with a guitar or not,” the Grammy-winning musician explains.

For nearly a decade now, the acoustic guitars that have inspired Harper most of all have had Taylor inlaid in the headstock. Harper was also an early convert to the more vintage-accented charms of the Gold Label Collection, which launched last year. He was road-testing the GL Grand Pacific body shape before it even launched, and so it’s perhaps no surprise that Gold Label’s spirit of artist collaboration has now birthed Taylor’s first ever Ben Harper signature model.

What’s interesting even if you aren’t a fan of Harper, however, is that just like how Trey Hensley’s 2025 signature model paved the way for the first ever Gold Label dreadnought-sized guitar, this new instrument adds a familiar but different silhouette to the line, and it’s one that everyone should pay attention to.

Concert Pitch

It’s not an exaggeration to say that the Grand Concert body shape changed everything for Taylor guitars. When Bob Taylor designed the shape in 1984, he did so to cater to the needs of a new generation of adventurous and dynamic acoustic fingerstyle players.

These players needed something that was not only a little smaller than traditional shapes to enable them to fully explore the guitar’s wider neck, but they also needed an instrument that reduced the boomy overtones, and offered a brighter, clearer overall sound.

The Grand Concert quickly became Taylor’s defining instrument and informed much of the boundary-pushing evolution that the brand embarked on over the following decades. For many players, the Grand Concert remains the defining example of what sets Taylor apart from more traditional guitar brands.

Gold Standard

The Grand Concert-sized Gold Label 512e, then, is a very interesting guitar to add to the range – especially given that Gold Label guitars have generally been focused on bigger-bodied instruments. For players who prefer a more compact instrument, like Harper, the 512e is a godsend – though it does reimagine Taylor’s smallest full-size guitar in some interesting ways.

Visually, the most notable thing about this guitar versus most of the Grand Concert guitars you’ll see is the lack of a cutaway – something that was virtually unheard of with GCs past, but ties the whole Gold Label Collection together.

That isn’t the only place the 512e adds some extra air inside, however – the Gold Label Grand Concert follows its Grand Pacific stablemate in adding a little extra depth to the body. Now, don’t worry – this is still a svelte and comfortable instrument. But it’s one that –  combined with the classic spruce/mahogany tonewood pairing and Fanned V-Class bracing – offers a warm and woody midrange voice that combines a strong fundamental focus with impressive articulation and no shortage of power across the frequency spectrum.

Common Goals

When you pair this mature and refined sonic voice with the Grand Concert’s more compact scale length, you get an instrument that is as effortless to play as any Taylor guitar on the market. And thanks to the inclusion of the revolutionary Action Control Neck, you can tailor your playing experience in seconds – without even having to retune.

The Action Control Neck has recently brought its impressive adjustability to the Next Generation Grand Auditorium guitars, and so it’s fitting that a piece of technology developed from that range has in turn found its way into the Ben Harper 512e. While standard-line 512e guitars spec the same impressive LR Baggs Element VTC pickup, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Harper has been charmed by the simplicity of the brand new Claria pickup system.

“Incredible guitarists have struggled with the bridge saddle pickup,” Harper explains. “This is the first pickup that sounds as good as my favorite acoustic guitar heroes without the dog and pony show. You plug it in, one input, a DI, house, and it blooms.”

For Harper, the 512e has clearly been a dream project – but it’s also one that further expands the design and tonal palette of the Gold Label range to cater to even more players. That’s something that’s great news for every acoustic guitarist. “If I could dream up a way to be in collaboration and communion with a guitar maker,” Harper enthuses. “This would be it”

Find out more about the 512e and the entire Gold Label Collection at Taylor Guitars

The post How Taylor reimagined the Grand Concert for its Gold Label line – with the help of Ben Harper appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Following on from its legal victory regarding the Stratocaster trademark in March, a law firm claiming to represent Fender Musical Instruments Corporation has reportedly sent cease and desist orders to a variety of guitar makers demanding they stop producing instruments that use the Stratocaster design.

In March 2026, Fender scored a default judgement against Chinese-based Yiwu Philharmonic Musical Instruments Co in the Düsseldorf Regional Court in Germany, that set out that the Strat was no longer a simple trademark, but “a copyrighted work of applied art”.

While this default judgement was made because Yiwu Philharmonic Musical Instruments Co failed to turn up for the trial in question, and only covers instruments sold or imported into the European Union, it seems Fender may have wasted no time in beginning to use this ruling to attempt to police the use of the Strat body shape more overtly.

Guitar.com understands that in recent weeks, multiple guitar makers have received letters from the law firm Bird & Bird, informing them of the EU ruling, and demanding that as a result, the brands in question cease producing guitars that use the Strat body shape, recall and destroy any existing unsold inventory, provide sales data on how many of these instruments have been sold, and provide financial restitution for damages and legal fees.

What’s been alleged to have been said?

Guitar.com has seen a redacted version of the letter seemingly sent by Bird & Bird on behalf of Fender to one anonymous guitar company, which has also been shared with other outlets and guitar influencers. The letter appears to lay out Fender’s position on the design of the Stratocaster being a unique, artistic creation developed by Leo Fender in the 1950s, and the various ways in which the guitar’s body shape was more than simply functional practical design.

The letter then appears to lay out Fender’s position thusly:

“It has come to our client’s attention that you are marketing electric guitars under the brand [REDACTED]… instanced by the model [REDACTED]… 

“The design of the body of these guitars is nearly identical to the design of the body our [sic] client’s ‘Stratocaster’ guitars. They are in particular not less similar to the Stratocaster guitars than the guitars which were subject of the Düsseldorf judgment. 

“You are therefore infringing our client’s copyright in the Stratocaster body shape. As a consequence, our client has claims against you to cease and desist from further marketing such guitars, disclosure of information about your sales and marketing, damages, destruction of the infringing products, recall of the infringing products, and reimbursement of our legal fees.”

The letter then appears to go on to set out Fender’s position on the Stratocaster body shape, and how it has changed in light of the EU ruling:

“We appreciate that copies of our client’s famous ‘Stratocaster’ have been in the market before. However, with the judgment of the Court of Düsseldorf, it is now clear that our client has a copyright to the shape of the ‘Stratocaster’ guitar body, and that copies of these guitar body [sic] constitute copyright infringement. 

“Our client is resolved to assert its rights and will enforce them consistently in order to keep the market free of infringing copies of the ‘Stratocaster’ body shape. Your company, as well as any other manufacturer of copies of the ‘Stratocaster’, will of course be able to continue to market electric guitars which are sufficiently distinct from the “Stratocaster”.

“Our client therefore insists that you immediately stop manufacturing, marketing, selling and producing the infringing products and confirm this to us [by] 25 May 2026. If you confirm that you will comply with our client’s claims, our client would in turn be prepared to make concessions in relation to their claims for e.g. damages, and also possibly in relation to phase-out and transition periods.

“However, should you fail to respond accordingly within the deadline, we will advise our client to commence the required further judicial steps against you without further hesitation.”

How is the guitar world reacting?

Notably, even though this is an EU judgement, at least one of the companies that has received these letters is based in the USA. LSL Instruments – a boutique, family-run guitar company based in California – is currently the only brand to have publicly revealed that they’ve received this cease and desist.

The brand launched a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for legal fees over the weekend, and has currently raised over $7,000. Guitar.com reached out directly to LSL about the situation, and they provided a short statement in response, as well as pointing us to a blog laying out the brand’s position.

“We appreciate all the support shown directly to us and to the entire boutique guitar world,” the statement read. “To every builder affected by this, we want them to know that we are thinking about them and support them in spirit.”

LSL’s blog explained the reason for their fundraising efforts, and the potential impact legal action would have on the brand.

“We received demands from Fender Musical Instruments to stop selling, recall and destroy all Saticoy guitars worldwide,” it read. “We make less than 500 guitars a year, while Fender makes 500,000. Our small business poses no threat to them in any way whatsoever yet here we are.”

“If we fight this solely on our own. There is a very good chance we could be bankrupted, out of business quickly, and we are not alone in this position.”

While there has been speculation across the online guitar space about other brands that may have been sent these letters, currently LSL is the only brand who have publicly claimed they have been sent one.

How does this affect the wider guitar industry?

Back in 2009, Fender lost a high-profile US case when the brand attempted to file trademarks for the Stratocaster, Telecaster and P-Bass body shapes. At the time the filing was protested by a group of other guitar makers, who ultimately succeeded in having the trademarks cancelled.

In the years since, it was widely assumed that this defeat – following on from Gibson’s 2005 loss in a lawsuit against PRS in 2005 – gave other builders the freedom to use classic body shapes, provided that they didn’t infringe on things like headstock shape.

However, Gibson’s protracted but ultimately successful battle against Dean Guitars over the Flying V body shape showed that the big brands still have the ability to win these cases in the right circumstances.

When the ruling was made, Fender put out a press statement, including quotes from Aarash Darroodi, General Counsel & Chief Administrative Officer Fender Musical Instruments Corporation, stating that the case: “reinforces our commitment to originality, supports fair competition, and helps ensure that when players encounter these iconic Fender guitar shapes, they can trust the craftsmanship, quality, and heritage behind them.”

The Fender ruling, crucially, was NOT a trademark dispute – Fender and Gibson have both lost trademark cases on their body shapes in the EU in years past – but sought to reframe the Strat’s body shape as an artistic work, subject to copyright, instead.

Furthermore, while the Dusseldorf ruling only impacts guitars sold in or imported into the European Union, the global nature of the industry means that Fender is using this ruling to try to enforce their claims on any brands that do business in the EU.

The bigger question is how robust the original ruling will turn out to be. As we explained in our initial analysis of the Dusseldorf case, it’s standard procedure for the court to side with the plaintiff when the defendant does not appear in court.

But the default nature of the judgement means that Fender’s claims – the language of which it is seemingly now using to pursue enforcement against other brands – have not yet faced any legal counterarguments in court. That said, Yiwu Philharmonic Musical Instruments Co does not appear to have taken any steps to have the judgment set aside.

In that original statement, Fender was keen to stress that, “the ruling does not restrict innovation or healthy competition within the guitar industry but rather that it represents targeted enforcement against clear cases of infringement”.

These alleged legal letters appear to set out exactly what Fender believes is classed as “clear infringement” – it remains to be seen whether LSL or any of the other allegedly impacted brands will be able to test this in court.

Guitar.com has reached out to Fender for comment on the accuracy and authenticity of the legal documents that we’ve seen – but they had not replied by time of publication. 

The post Fender reportedly demands boutique builders stop making Stratocaster-style guitars: this is what it means for the industry appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

The world’s first generative AI guitar is here, and lets users generate original songs, play any track, and learn through guided gameplay without any prior musical training.

Made by music technology company TemPolor, which is focused on making music creation “more accessible through AI-powered instruments and interactive design”, the Melo-D guitar is its flagship product, and combines generative AI and guided play with a patented foldable design for portability.

• READ MORE: Answered: more technical guitar questions you were too afraid to ask

Melo-D has a built-in 2.4-inch LCD touchscreen and functions alongside an external app. Using TemPolor’s proprietary TemPolor.AI engine, it can transform humming into guitar solos and generate complete original songs with lyrics from text inputs.

Users can also paste a song link or upload an audio file, and Melo-D will transcribe it into fingerstyle tabs or chord charts in under 60 seconds, with on-screen guidance and light-up strings to help beginners play with no music theory required. You can see how it works in the videos below:

“Our goal with Melo-D was to lower the barrier between inspiration and creation,” says Jason Jia, founder of TemPolor. “We wanted to build an instrument that feels approachable to beginners, useful to creators, and exciting from the very first interaction, whether someone is playing, learning, or generating a completely original song.”

The guitar is soon to launch on Kickstarter, and early backers will have access to a Super Early Bird price before full retail availability.

To find out more, head over to the TemPolor Kickstarter page.

The post The “world’s first generative AI guitar” is about to launch on Kickstarter appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Following the death of Neil Peart in 2020, drummers were in a bleak ‘Rush’ to pick up the phone and ask whether the band were looking for a replacement. While Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee have since recruited Anika Nilles to fill in on drums for their comeback tour, the pair stand by the fact the “bombardment” was inappropriate.

In a new chat with Guitar World, Lee reflects on how insulting it was to receive a wave of drumming applications while still mourning his late bandmate. “There were many other drummers who reached out to me in the aftermath of Neil’s passing that were pushing themselves, and that was so distasteful to me,” he says. “It was completely inappropriate timing.”

• READ MORE: “Twice a night we’ll pick a song to play for him”: Geddy Lee reveals how Rush will pay tribute to Neil Peart on reunion tour

Of course, not everyone was quick to reach out. Many amazing drummers held back, because they respected that Rush needed time to handle their grief. “People who are close to us – good friends that are successful drummers – would never [have tried to do] something like that,” Lee explains. “They have too much respect, not only for Neil and for the situation.”

“They were grieving as well, so they wouldn’t be so selfish as to say something inappropriate like that,” he adds.

Back in 2024, Lee also admitted on Strombo’s Lit that those “inappropriate” drummers got put in his “little black book” of people he didn’t want to work with in the future. “I was, like, ‘Whoa, that’s just so inappropriate right now,’” Lee said. “Dude, wait two months. At least two months.…”

Last year, the world was shocked to discover Rush would be reuniting for their massive Fifty Something tour, along with new drummer, Anika Nilles. Elsewhere in the Guitar World interview, Lee explains why Nilles was the perfect fit: “When Al and I finally said, “Okay, I guess we’re getting serious. Who’s going to sit in that impossible seat?” How do you ask someone to replace a guy who’s irreplaceable? It’s daunting… [but] she brought a lot to the table.”

“More than her chops, more than her guts and her willingness to sit in that hot seat, she brought an intelligence and a story,” he continues. “I love her story. This is someone who grew up in Germany in a family of musicians. Her dad was a drummer. She played drums her entire life. She doesn’t even remember the first time she picked up sticks. It’s who she is.”

While Peart’s family has given Nilles their blessing, Rush are also certain that she has more than proven her worth. “The fans love her right now, but they’re going to scrutinise her, and she’s up for it,” Lee says.

The post “That was distasteful to me”: Geddy Lee confirms “many” drummers contacted him following Neil Peart’s death offering to join Rush appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

It’s bread and butter for Guitar Center goers, and the kryptonite of employees who work at those same stores. As far as all-time ubiquitous riffs go, Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water is right up there with Sweet Child O’ Mine, Seven Nation Army and Enter Sandman.

But while it may seem like one of the easier riffs you could bust out to impress – or infuriate – your fellow shoppers, Deep Purple guitarist Simon McBride says it’s actually deceptively difficult to get right.

• READ MORE: “The world doesn’t need another Tele or Strat clone – it just doesn’t”: Why Guitar Center is launching its own guitar brand that’s “meaningfully better and differentiated”

In a new interview with the dopeYEAH talk podcast, McBride – who joined the legendary rock outfit in 2022, replacing Steve Morse – explains why Smoke on the Water isn’t quite as simple as many deem it to be.

“Generally, the most challenging ones are the simple ones, like Smoke on the Water,” he says [via Blabbermouth].

“People always say, ‘Ah, it’s easy.’ It is easy technically, but it’s not easy to play. It’s like any of this stuff. It’s the delivery, it’s the force of how you play it, it’s your timing. It’s what not to play. A lot of guitar players, when they play the riff of Smoke on the Water, they play it like a guitarist. They wanna add stuff to it. They wanna vibrato it. They wanna do this.

“But the beauty of the riff of Smoke on the Water is its simplicity… So being disciplined enough just to – don’t play anything else, just what’s there. ‘Cause when you’re standing there, and I start the riff, and then Don joins me, then Roger joins me, this explosion of power comes out, which you would not get if I was fiddling around with it, or Don was. It’s the four of us just doing this riff, and it’s like, ‘Oh, God, here we go.’”

Elsewhere in the interview, McBride reflects on how the simplicity of a lot of Deep Purple’s most timeless songs has contributed to their success.

“The thing is with the Purple stuff, it’s not overly complicated, but that’s the beauty of it, and that’s why it was so successful,” he says. “Smoke on the Water is three chords, really. And all the great songs, even Perfect Strangers, it’s two or three chords. So it is quite simple.”

Smoke on the Water remains one of the top riffs heard in Guitar Center stores, as was recently revealed by CEO Gabe Dalporto in an interview with Rolling Stone. He revealed Metallica’s Master of Puppets also gets a large degree of sonic real estate, as does Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, and even Tool’s Schism.

The post Deep Purple guitarist says Smoke on the Water is a “challenging” song to play: “It is easy technically, but it’s not easy to play” appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.