Welcome to Guitar Player magazine - The complete acoustic and electric guitar package

FEW KNEW WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN Leslie West and his new band Mountain took the stage on day two of Woodstock '69, but by the time their set ended, a new star was born. Rock's original Big Man (West once tipped the scales at over 265 lbs) slaamed ..

People who only read Jerry Reed’s obits in the mainstream press might only know that Reed was a charismatic musician who branched out into acting and shared the big screen with such box office draws as Burt Reynolds and Adam Sandler. Well, ...

“Unless your time is absolutely on,” reminded Charlie Hunter in the August ’03 GP, “you’re a burden to anyone sharing the stage with you.” One way to strengthen your groove, Hunter suggested, is to practice the lively salsa vamps known ...

If You Build It, They Will Come. That's What Uber-Musician Todd Rundgren is counting on. “I figured if I made an album of arena-rock songs, maybe we’d end up playing them in arenas,” he told audiences during our summer ’08 tour, ...

You don’t have to attend Chicago’s Bloom School of Jazz to learn some of the hipster progressions taught between its walls.

When learning the keyboard parts for a cover gig, once in a while you come across a certain lick or phrase that is just nasty. Take, for instance, the Earth, Wind & Fire funk classic, “Getaway.” Nailing the groove is a challenge ...

Chord dictionaries are helpful, but they’re certainly no miracle cure for stale voicings and tired chords. If you want to actually learn how to use new grips, you may need a deeper book, such as Mel Bay’s new expanded edition of ...

Ask most guitarists how to play the chord made famous by “Purple Haze,” and they’ll likely strum the E7#9 grip known informally the world over as “the Hendrix chord.”

Newbie rockers often make two mistakes when trying to replicate the power of Malcolm Young’s thundering progressions: They assume the AC/DC rhythm king uses tons of distortion, and that he regularly employs barre chords.

“Wild Thing,” “Twist and Shout,” and “Louie Louie,” are among hundreds of famous songs that have employed the workhorse chord progression known as the I-IV-V. In this context, each Roman numeral conveys a chord’s relationship with a ...