General Interest

Being the child of a Beatle might come with its perks – musical chops, famous friends, a last name that opens doors – but for Zak Starkey, it also comes with very clear boundaries.

The son of Ringo Starr and drummer at the heart of The Who’s recent firing-and-rehiring drama, Starkey has finally teamed up with fellow Fab offspring Sean Lennon and James McCartney on a new track, after nearly two decades of dodging the prospect.

• READ MORE: “Pete had to go along with it because he’s had 60 years of arguing with Roger”: Zak Starkey reveals why he was fired from The Who

Speaking to The Independent, Starkey explains the reasons behind his reluctance and why the idea of forming a ‘Beatles 2.0’ never appealed to him.

“They’re all like, ‘It could be as big as The Beatles,’” he scoffs. “I said, ‘Do you want to be as big as The Beatles? Don’t you want to go to Waitrose? My dad can’t go to fucking Waitrose, he can’t go and buy a paper or whatever. Do you actually want that? You wanna be as good as The Beatles, but do you want that mania and people bringing babies for you to touch and cure them of cancer and shit?’”

That said, Starkey eventually grew close with his fellow Beatle babies, and when the right track came along for his rock band Mantra of the Cosmos, he reached out to Lennon and McCartney to contribute.

The result is Rip Off, a swirling, psych-folk cut that features Lennon adding “an amazing John Carpenter sort of synth and one line, which is really psychedelic and amazing,” and McCartney contributing vocals and guitar.

The track also arrives on the heels of Mantra of the Cosmos’s Noel Gallagher collab Domino Bones (Gets Dangerous), which the Oasis legend previously described as follows [via The Times]: “It’s Dylan, Dali, Ginsberg and a bit of cosmic jibber-jabber. Add in Bez, who dances on the tunes like Zak plays the drums and Andy Bell plays all things stringed, and you have it”.

The post “Do you want to be as big as The Beatles? Don’t you want to go to Waitrose?” Zak Starkey on why he won’t be in a band with fellow Beatles kids Sean Lennon and James McCartney appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

After years of chart dominance by synths, samples and algorithm-driven pop, guitar music appears to be on the verge of a full-blown comeback. A new generation of fans is discovering the thrill of distortion, riffs and sweat-soaked gigs, and arguably few events could accelerate that resurgence more than the upcoming Oasis reunion.

Gene Gallagher, son of Liam and frontman of indie band Villanelle, is among those who think the moment is ripe.

“People have been deprived of guitar music,” the 23-year-old tells W Magazine. “But now it’s coming back, and everyone’s getting excited about it.”

• READ MORE: “That’s the one I played Wonderwall on!”: How a guitar-smashing bust-up between Liam and Noel Gallagher led to a studio engineer owning an iconic Oasis guitar

Gene, whose band’s first single Hinge arrives later this month, speaks from the frontlines. He and his brother Lennon (who fronts post-rock outfit Automotion) grew up adoring ‘90s grunge, even if their dad wasn’t always on board.

“Heavy guitar music – that’s what I like,” Gene says. “My dad wasn’t fond of the grunge stuff, but I made him come around to it as he got older.”

While streaming trends have favoured hiphop and TikTok-tailored beats for the better part of the past decade, guitar-led music has been steadily creeping back into the cultural mainstream. Acts like Wet Leg, Covet and Yungblud have introduced guitar textures to Gen Z audiences, while legacy sounds from My Bloody Valentine to Nirvana continue to resurface in viral clips and tour merch.

Even Polyphia’s Tim Henson recently weighed in on the shift. “I’d say guitar music got cool!” he told Guitar World earlier this year. “Maybe we had a little to do with that, maybe we didn’t.”

Henson also pointed to Machine Gun Kelly’s genre shift from rapper to chart-topping pop-punk provocateur as a major turning point in bringing the guitar back into the limelight: “Around that time, Eminem did the thing with MGK, and kind of made him switch genres. And then MGK got a number one record with a guitar on the cover, which is really cool,” he said.

As for the Gallagher kids, they’re aware that what fans want from this Oasis tour isn’t just nostalgia but connection.

“So many people want to go with their dad, because he played Oasis in the car when he was driving them to school,” says Gene’s sister Anaïs. “Music is an emotional experience – it’s not just a night out.”

“Gone are the days of fan clubs and seeking out a B-side and buying a magazine because your favorite artist had an interview in there,” she says. “Now there’s less of a community among fans, and I think that people are desperate for that. The Internet can be such a lonely landscape that coming together with others who have a mutual interest in something positive, like music, really benefits people.”

The post “People have been deprived of guitar music, but now it’s coming back”: Liam Gallagher’s son thinks Oasis reunion could kick off a new guitar music boom appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Finding the appropriate way to remember a loved one is a very personal thing, and one guitarist from the UK recently decided to comemorate his late father by having his ashes interred in the neck of his Fender Telecaster so that, in his words, “he will still be with me at all the shows”.

37-year-old Mark Wood, who played in several metal bands including Manchester’s Winterfilleth and now performs with Impurist, says his father, Keith Wood, was not only the person who first taught him to play guitar but also his biggest fan – often travelling across the UK and Europe just to watch him perform.

“Dad was my biggest supporter. He just used to rock up at gigs and we’d just have a beer and a catch up,” he tells the BBC.

• READ MORE: “I do think it’s slightly sad when you see Tescos selling guitar packs”: Lee Anderton on keeping his brick and mortar store alive in the Amazon age

Wood says his father died from a heart attack on Christmas Day 2022 at the age of 68. The loss, he adds, had left a “big hole” in the family. His sister Katie chose to have some of their father’s ashes turned into jewellery, which inspired Mark to find a more musical tribute.

That’s when he approached close friend, fellow musician and one-time Guitar.com DIY columnist Sam Orr, who runs Sam’s Guitars in Chester. Orr also knew Keith personally and agreed to take on the delicate task, despite never having attempted anything like it before.

Working ashes into the dotted inlays on the neck of a guitar “was something that I did not know could be done”, Wood admits.

As for the actual process, Orr began by experimenting on a spare neck, eventually developing a method of mixing the ashes with a special glue to fill the fretboard markers.

“At first, I was just wondering how it would work,” he says. “Then the more I thought about it and did a few test runs on a spare guitar neck I had, I realised it wouldn’t be too difficult to complete it.”

Wood, who was there the entire time, says watching Orr do this “was an emotional experience”: “We put some music on in the background and had a couple of beers and made a thing of it. Sam did the work while the shop was shut and was so caring and careful and really respectful.”

The musician only recently felt ready to play the guitar again, but says the moment he did, “it felt great.”

The first song he played was Ted Nugent’s Stranglehold – a favourite of his dad’s: “He always asked me to play that as a kid,” says Wood, who plans to bring the guitar onstage at his next gig in Hull on 18 July.

“I wish dad was still here but doing this makes me feel like he’s always going to be here with me and you have always got your memories,” he adds. “This way he will still be with me at all the shows and this has given me a sense of closure.”

The post Guitarist gets dad’s ashes interred in the neck of his Telecaster: “This way he will still be with me at all the shows” appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

The techniques used for recording guitar haven’t changed that much over the years. Even though direct recording has been around for a long time, it’s only recently that going direct has become an acceptable option for guitar players. DI sounds were often harsh, brittle and thin-sounding, leading to most players preferring the trusty old method of mic’ing up a speaker cabinet when it came to recording their tones… but then the guitarist from Boston came along and changed things…

• READ MORE: MXR Rockman X100 review – it’s the 80s in a box

Tom Scholz was the founder, guitar player and mastermind behind legendary 70s rockers Boston. But in addition to writing every bit of More Than A Feeling by himself, Scholz was also an MIT-trained engineer – a handy thing to have in your back pocket if the whole ‘write one of the most iconic rock songs of all time’ thing doesn’t work out.

Anyway, in 1982, Scholz designed a quirky little device for his electric guitar that could fit in your hand. It was no bigger than a normal DI box, or the new-at-the-time Sony Walkman portable headphone cassette player. But the tones you could get out of it were larger than life.

This is the story of the Rockman, the device that invented the concept of amp simulation.

Enter Rockman

In truth, the Rockman was far from Scholz’s first guitar-related innovation. He had long used his electronic engineering background to enhance and improve the basement studio he’d created to record much of Boston’s early work.

As the glow of More Than A Feeling faded, he’d even created his own company to bring some of his innovations to life – Scholz Research & Development, Inc.

The first SRD product was another attempt to create a big sound without excessive volume – the Power Soak. The Power Soak was one of the first examples of what we would now call an attenuator. It sat between an amp’s speaker output and the speaker input on a cabinet, and with it, guitarists could drive their amps to get a saturated tube tone without deafening decibel levels.

It was his next innovation that would truly etch Scholz’s name into the history of guitar gear, however – the Rockman. The Rockman, Scholz claimed, could replace $10,000 worth of studio gear and fit in the palm of your hand.

This portable headphone amplifier included four built in amp simulations – two cleans, an overdrive and full distortion – plus effects like stereo chorus and chamber echo.

In an era before digital amp sims and good-sounding solid-state gear, the Rockman was a hugely impressive portable headphone amplifier… but guitar players and studio engineers were about to discover it could be so much more.

Direct Line

This is because not too long after the Rockman debuted, guitarists and recording engineers began to realise that if this little box sounded great through a set of headphones, it might also sound great running straight into a desk.

And so it did – what was intended to be a simple headphone amp offered guitarists a signal direct to a recording console that was packed with crystal cleans, natural harmonics and mid-heavy drive tones. There was even a little onboard compression and analog stereo chorus to enhance the whole package.

The Rockman’s great headphone sounds were something of a revelation for both bedroom players and touring guitarists alike. The latter were especially taken with the ability to warm up practice or warm-up in silence, or record some ideas on the road. Scholz’s efforts were officially validated when he received a Rockman warranty card in the mail from none other than Jeff Beck!

Decades before Line 6’s POD brought compact, digital amp simulation to the masses, Scholz and the Rockman were effectively doing the same thing in an analogy form – it was in many ways the first compact amp modeller.

Breaking The Mould

The Rockman was an innovative piece of gear that offered some key features. It was one of the first devices with realistic solid-state amp simulation. One of the signatures of the circuit is built-in compression, which helps sustain the signal and limit the output from clipping. Chorus and echo effects are stereo, which widens the sound.

With it Scholz blazed the trail for the modern digital hardware and software we have today – even if he’s not a fan of the results. “Don’t get me started on the many shortcomings of digital sound,” says Scholz today.

Going Big

Realising that it could be used as both a recording and practice tool took a little while to catch on, but before long it was being used by big bands who were plugging in the Rockman and causing us to rethink how recorded guitar sound was made.

You can hear it on KISS’ Animalize, ZZ Top’s 1985 release Afterburner, and virtuoso shredder Joe Satriani’s hugely influential debut Surfing with the Alien.

But perhaps the most famous use case is on Def Leppard’s Hysteria – indeed much of the hype for the MXR Rockman pedal’s release has been about the ‘Hysteria in a box’ fun it produces.

The arena-ready sounds of the Rockman were perfect for the vibe the band and producer Mutt Lange were chasing, and it heavily influenced the album’s polished sound. What’s more, for an album that was legendarily tortured and troublesome to create, the Rockman at least mitigated a lot of studio headaches and saved time twisting amplifier controls and moving microphones.

Rock…men?

The Rockman was a smash then, and soon SRD started producing other guitar products based on the original’s innovation. The first of these were the Rockmodules. Released in 1986, these were half-rack mounted breakout boxes of individual circuits from the Rockman. They expanded on the original’s capabilities and features, offered greater flexibility, and easier integration into guitarists’ racks – the Rockman could now rock stadiums with ease.

Rockmodules cashed in on the growing rackmount trend and include the Sustainor and Distortion Generator amplifier simulators, Instrument EQ, Guitar Compressor, Smart Gate, Stereo Chorus, Echo, and Chorus/Delay. There were also the MIDI Octopus and Dual Remote Loop units, all with the efficacy of making it easier for guitarists to fit them into their rigs.

By the late 80s and early 90s digital effects were becoming increasingly popular, and analog gear was considered old tech – the original Rockman was discontinued in the early 90s. In 1995 Scholz Research & Development shut down and the Rockman brand was sold to Jim Dunlop. Scholz registered more than 30 patents over the course of his career, and most of the revenue was donated to charity.

Rockman Til You Dropman

Dunlop has continued to produce Rockman Guitar Ace and Metal Ace portable amps in the decades since the company acquired the rights – and they’ve continued to be popular practice tools even as digital amps have made practice amps more and more impressive and versatile.

Then, at NAMM 2025, MXR debuted a new pedal that revitalized the interest in the Rockman – the X100. A Rockman reborn in pedal form, the X100 offers the same stereo guitar sound, four familiar amp tones, and lush chorusing as the original, but in a form factor that can slot onto any board.

The post How the Rockman revolutionised guitar tone and changed recording forever appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

The dawn of heavy metal was welcomed in by Black Sabbath’s debut record back in 1970 – and the ominous, menacing onslaught was powered by a Laney LA100BL amplifier. To mark the final Black Sabbath Show on 5 July, Tony Iommi is collaborating with Laney to honour the amp that started it all.

Laney’s Black Country Customs Tony Iommi TI100 amp is a testament to Iommi’s 60-year-long relationship with the brand. “Without you [Laney], we wouldn’t be here,” the guitarist reflects. “I wouldn’t use anything else.”

• READ MORE: “When you get to our age, things just go wrong. We’ll probably keel over after two songs!”: Ozzy Osbourne on Black Sabbath’s final show

The amp is a faithful reissue of Iommi’s original TI100 signature released in 2012, an amp that continues to be Iommi’s go-to. While the guitarist plans to use his original TI100 at the Black Sabbath farewell show, a handful of fans will be able to purchase and enjoy Iommi’s preferred amp.

But you’ll have to act fast. Only 50 units were produced, making this reissue an extremely limited edition release.

Handcrafted in Black Country Customs’ UK workshop, the TI100 tube amp comes equipped with everything you need to deliver heavy metal brutality. 8 x 12AX7 loaded preamp tubes are tailor-made for distortion, with 4 x 6L6 power tubes offering 100 watts of powerful output.

The amp also boasts three band EQ, with the addition of specific Volume, Enhance and Presence controls. There’s also twin footswitchable channels, with pre-boost on each channel.

Aesthetically, the cab is the absolute image of blasphemy – exactly as Sabbath would have wanted. The front baffle design is littered with crosses, which glow a demonic red when the amp is in action. It looks like something straight out of a horror movie… essentially, it’s the perfect amp for playing some devilish heavy metal.

Each head is also signed by the guitar legend himself, with an added certificate of authenticity and nifty custom cover. There will also be other Iommi goodies in the box, including postcards, picks and more.

Some people seem to believe Iommi once used a 50-watt Marshall, the guitarist has remained firm on his Laney love affair. In a 2010 interview with MusicRadar, he explains: “I think I was using Marshall early on, and then Laney on the first album… I switched to Laney because they started up around the same time as us, and they’re a Birmingham company.”

Ever since, Laney have stood by Iommi’s side. “Black Sabbath – it started with Laney, and it ends with Laney,” the guitar company says.

The limited run of TI100 signature amps are now available to pre-order for £2,999.

The post “It started with a Laney, it ends with a Laney”: Laney to reissue Tony Iommi signature amp to mark Black Sabbath’s final farewell appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Limp Bizkit guitarist Wes Borland is no stranger to elaborate stage looks, but his latest might be one of his most metal (and meta) yet.

During the band’s final support slot for Metallica’s M72 World Tour in Denver last Friday (28 June), Borland appeared onstage dressed as a skeletal version of ‘80s-era James Hetfield – complete with white high-top sneakers and a “Metal Up Your Ass” t-shirt.

• READ MORE: “There was this Star Wars one going around a week or two ago…”: Metallica has a band member-only group chat for sending memes

The guitarist kept the costume on for Limp Bizkit’s full 10-song set at Empower Field at Mile High, delivering a fittingly theatrical sendoff as they wrapped their run opening for the heavy metal titans on the North American leg of the M72 tour. The group previously shared the stage with Hetfield and co. in cities including Toronto, Nashville, Philadelphia, Tampa, and Santa Clara, alongside fellow openers Ice Nine Kills.

Check out fan-filmed footage of Limp Bizkit’s performance below.

Borland’s Hetfield homage wasn’t entirely out of left field as well. Just two months ago, the guitarist shared a reimagined instrumental version of Metallica’s Orion (from the band’s third album Master of Puppets) on Instagram, writing that he was simply “[h]orsing around and loopidy loopin’” at home that afternoon.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Wes Borland (@thewesborland)

As for Metallica, the M72 World Tour is far from over. Following their 2023-2025 dates across Europe and North America, the band has announced plans to return to Europe in 2026. Stops at Frankfurt, Budapest, Dublin, and London will feature the now-familiar “No Repeat Weekend” format, where two shows in the same city are played with completely different setlists.

Earlier this month, frontman James Hetfield revealed that he’d likely still be “trying to form Metallica” and “looking for a Lars [Ulrich, Metallica drummer and co-founder]” if the band hadn’t existed.

“I’d be roading or working in a studio, hopefully helping make music somehow. Or graphic design,” said Hetfield on The Metallica Report. “I love graphics. I love doing artwork. I also like doing trades stuff – craftsmanship with wood, with metal, building stuff. Maybe that would’ve turned into something, too. But music is a gift I’ve been given, so I’d still be trying to kick some doors down and get into it somehow.”

The post Watch Wes Borland cosplay as a skeletal James Hetfield as Limp Bizkit open for Metallica appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.