Few legacy bands can boast final albums as strong as Rush’s Snakes & Arrows and Clockwork Angels. The one-two of modern prog gems saw them bowing out of their recording career in style, but beyond their long-playing epics and extra-heavy guitar sounds, there was a surprise reunion happening behind the scenes.

The band had teamed up with producer Nick Raskulinecz after 2002’s lukewarm Vapor Trails, and for 2007’s Snakes & Arrows, they descended on Grandmaster Studios in Los Angeles.

Raskulinecz, who has also worked with Foo Fighters, Alice in Chains, and Deftones, was eager to tap into the spirit of old-school Rush on albums. Lifeson adopted an acoustic-guitar-first approach after a chat with David Gilmour on Snakes…, and then, in 2012’s Clockwork Angels, the band returned to their concept album format, as heard on their cosmic song suite “2112”.

“As a Rush fan, I know what kind of record I wanted Rush to make, and I had a pretty good idea of what the other Rush fans wanted, too,” Raskulinecz told Rick Beato last year.

Their relationship, he says, began with a cold open: an ambitious Raskulinecz emailed the group to “see if they’d be interested in working with some young American kid,” but by then they’d already started working with someone else. Weeks later, that partnership had soured, and the door was opened to him.

For Raskulinecz, tapping into the vintage Rush sound meant rekindling the flames of one of their most important pieces of gear in the 1970s and early '80s. Then the strangest coincidence happened.

As Rush embraced a new, synth-powered era in the 1980s, bassist and vocalist Geddy Lee embraced the Moog Taurus pedals, a foot-controlled synth, as he looked to juggle playing several instruments at once.

“Taurus opened up so many possibilities for me, and it opened up this way of looking at what I do,” he told Moog in 2012. “Originally, I started to use it to fill out the bass when I played rhythm guitar on my double-neck guitar; I didn’t want to lose the sound of the bass. But they also had the ability to create other synth-y sounds, so we started playing around with that on songs like ‘Xanadu’ to add more melody in our music. It set us on a whole tangent.”

But after 1982’s Signals, they fell out of favor in Rush’s studio experiments. Fast forward 30 years, and those pedals were embedded in Raskulinecz’s mind.

“When you hear them come in, it adds a low-end bump, but [when I suggested using Taurus pedals on Clockwork Angels], they didn’t have any,” he reveals. “We had to rent Taurus pedals from a Toronto rental company. We get them shipped, and they’re their pedals.

“Geddy’s down on the floor looking at them, and he’s like, ‘That’s our modded switch,’ because he had a mute mod switch on his. So, we rented the pedals they used on the old albums and tours.

“The band were psyched,” he adds. “Those were elements that I was able to bring to the table, not to rip off or copy, but for it to feel [like Rush]. Just like on Clockwork Angels, we homage ‘Bastille Day’, ‘Anthem’, and like four or five other songs on parts because I’m like, ‘Dudes, don’t be scared to do that. Those are your riffs!”

Speaking to MusicRadar in 2012, Raskulinecz noted that, for Clockwork Angels, they swapped from “the original T-1s that they had in the ‘70s” to the newer T-3s.

“Let me tell you,” he beamed, “the new version kicks ass!”

As the band continues their highly anticipated reunion tour – which has recently hit a series of minor setbacks – Lee isn’t ruling out writing more music together. But they have to survive the tour first, though.

Elsewhere, guitarist Alex Lifeson has reflected on why he chose Gibsons over PRS during a crucial moment in his career.

Rush's reunion tour has barely begun, and already the band have been forced to postpone multiple shows. It's an unwelcome reminder of another difficult stretch nearly 50 years ago, when Alex Lifeson suffered a finger injury that derailed part of the Hemispheres tour just as Rush were becoming one of rock's biggest live attractions.

After their first show in Fort Worth since returning from an 11-year hiatus was postponed due to travel restrictions, two more shows have been rescheduled after bass guitarist and vocalist Geddy Lee contracted laryngitis and bronchitis.

“This is incredibly disappointing for all of us,” the band said in a statement. “We know many of you have made travel plans and have been counting down the days to these shows. Please know this decision was not made lightly. After more than 50 years of touring, we’ve always believed that if we’re going to step on stage, we owe you the very best performance we can give — and right now, that simply isn’t possible.”

As the statement suggests, Rush have never taken canceling shows lightly. But there was one other memorable occasion when injury forced the band off the road. In 1979, while touring Hemispheres, Lifeson broke the ring finger on his fretting hand, leading to three canceled European dates just before one of the biggest festival appearances of the band’s career.

The opening Paris show was canceled after the venue caught fire shortly before the concert, forcing the band to reroute through Belgium. Worse was still to come.

Lifeson brushed off both the injury and its cause, saying simply, “I was foolish, and I hit it,” as seen in the footage below. But the band’s press manager offered a far more colorful explanation, claiming the guitarist trapped his finger between the bed and the mattress while spending time alone with his wife — a story that has raised eyebrows ever since.

Whatever actually happened, the cancellations gave Lifeson the best chance of recovering in time for Pinkpop, where Rush shared the bill with The Police, Dire Straits, Elvis Costello, Peter Tosh and the Average White Band before a crowd of roughly 50,000.

Remarkably, there was little sign the guitarist was hampered. During a blistering performance of “La Villa Strangiato” — later considered strong enough for release on a live album — Lifeson tore through one of Rush’s most technically demanding pieces. At the start of the performance, however, Lee couldn’t resist pointing to the heavily bandaged hand.

“This finger canceled three shows on this tour,” he tells the crowd.

Lifeson had undergone a procedure to prevent mallet finger, an injury in which damage to the extensor tendon causes the fingertip to droop. Even so, Pinkpop wasn’t finished testing the band.

“One of our roadies jumped over a concrete wall with the firm idea that the ground behind it was at equal height,” Lee later recalled via 2112.net. “He didn’t know that the level was split and fell 30 feet downstairs and broke both his feet. He was immediately carried off to the hospital. We missed him very badly during the show because we had a man short on stage.”

The performance has since become one of the defining live documents of Rush’s classic era, making the circumstances surrounding it all the more remarkable.

Lifeson, meanwhile, is no stranger to playing through adversity. The guitarist has spent the past two decades managing psoriatic arthritis, which causes chronic pain and inflammation. He’s previously said that if fans notice him shaking out his hands during concerts, it’s simply part of managing the condition.

Lee’s illness has temporarily sidelined Rush’s long-awaited return to the road. But compared with the chaos of the Hemispheres tour — fires, broken fingers and canceled shows — it’s another reminder that even one of rock’s most reliable live bands hasn’t always been able to outrun bad luck.

Alex Lifeson’s sonic evolution is etched into the gear he’s used on records and onstage. After launching Rush’s debut album with a 1968 Gibson ES-335, he steadily upgraded his arsenal. By the late 1970s, he had acquired a 1974 Les Paul and “Whitey” — his legendary, custom-built 1976 Alpine White Gibson ES-355 electric.

But by the time the 1990s rolled around, following a decade of experimenting with heavily modified Fender Stratocasters, Lifeson transitioned to PRS. In addition to creating a custom acoustic, he leaned heavily on modified CE24 models, frequently utilizing piezo pickups to handle the band’s complex acoustic-to-electric transitions live.

Years later, Lifeson reflected on what that era taught him about the two legendary guitar manufacturers. Speaking to Guitar Player, he admitted that PRS held a clear advantage when it came to out-of-the-box perfection:

“I don’t think you can beat a PRS for workmanship. You open the case, and the guitar is perfectly in tune and perfectly set up. I can’t say the same about Gibson. I’ve had to work on all my Gibsons — they require a fair bit of upkeep and maintenance.”

Yet, by the 2000s, Lifeson’s PRS era faded, and he returned almost exclusively to the Gibson family. Despite the structural reliability of a PRS, Lifeson realized that high maintenance was a small price to pay for a definitive sound.

“I love the way Gibsons sound,” he concluded. “I think the Gibsons sound better than the PRS guitars do.”

It didn’t hurt that Gibson had won his heart long before he ever encountered a tuning stability issue. When Lifeson first received his 1976 ES-355, the instrument instantly transcended being a mere tool of the trade.

“I remember opening the case for the first time, and the truss-rod cover had my name on it,” Lifeson recalled. “That blew me away. I almost started crying.”

That emotional bond translated into musical history. Whitey became Lifeson’s definitive voice, stamped across 12 consecutive Rush studio albums—spanning from A Farewell to Kings (1977) to Test for Echo (1996). It anchored the band’s live sets for nearly 40 years, starring in iconic music videos like “Tom Sawyer” and “Show Don’t Tell” before finally retiring after the R40 tour in 2015.

In 2022, Lifeson made the bittersweet decision to part with the original instrument, selling it at a charity auction for a staggering $384,000. For years, fans assumed the legendary Alpine White semi-hollow body would remain locked away in a private collection.

However, the timing for a revival couldn’t be better. As Rush return to the road, Epiphone has officially launched the Alex Lifeson 1976 ES-355 Reissue as part of its premium Inspired by Gibson Custom line. Equipped with a classic gold Maestro Vibrola tailpiece, USA-made Gibson T-Type humbuckers, and the mandatory multi-position Varitone switch, the reissue mirrors the exact cosmetic and structural appointments of the multi-ply maple-and-poplar masterpiece.

Complete with Lifeson’s name engraved on the truss-rod cover—just like the original that brought him to tears in 1976 — the new reissue proves to everyday players that some classic sounds are well worth the upkeep.

Geddy Lee knows some Rush fans will never accept the band’s decision to continue without late drummer Neil Peart. What impresses him most, however, is that Anika Nilles was willing to take on the challenge in the first place.

Speaking with Rick Beato, Lee defended Rush’s choice of Nilles for the band’s Fifty Something tour, calling the German drummer “an amazing talent” who brings “something fresh” to the group’s music.

“She’s got the right attitude,” Lee said. “She works hard, and she loves to play the same way we love to play.”

According to Lee, Nilles wasn’t selected after a lengthy search. In fact, she was the only drummer Rush seriously considered. Recommended by a member of Jeff Beck’s touring crew, Nilles first caught Lee’s attention for a potential solo project before discussions about the power trio’s return began.

“We’re very lucky, because she’s the only drummer we thought of,” Lee said.

Lee acknowledged that some fans wanted Rush to recruit a more famous drummer, but believes Nilles was the right fit. He also praised her willingness to face inevitable comparisons to Peart.

“Some people will never forgive us for going on with somebody else, and she has the guts to sit in that seat,” Lee said. “That’s not a small thing; that’s a huge thing.”

He stressed that bringing in a new drummer does nothing to diminish Peart’s legacy.

“When you hear her talk about Neil, she really understands and appreciates his greatness,” Lee said. “None of this that happens is diminishing his greatness by one iota.”

Preparing for the tour has presented a different challenge than Rush faced with Peart. Rather than working on new material, Lee and Alex Lifeson have been teaching Nilles how to navigate four decades of Rush’s famously intricate catalog. And that’s while Lee and Lifeson re-learn their own bass and electric guitar parts.

Although the drummer admits to having a “yikes” moment when playing their hit “Tom Sawyer,” Lee said that when everything clicks, the rewards are obvious.

“When all the tumblers fall into place, and she gets the vibe, and we’re just playing and smiling, it’s like, ‘This is going to be so much fun.’”

Rush launches its Fifty Something tour June 7 at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles, the same venue where the band appeared to play its final show 11 years ago.

Geddy Lee says his first real bass amp was a dream come true — until he and Alex Lifeson realized they had no idea how they were going to get the massive thing home.

Long before he was playing arenas and writing progressive-rock epics with the power trio Rush, Lee was a teenager with big ideas about the sound he wanted as a bass guitar player. Those ambitions led him to a hulking Traynor tube head with a twin 15-inch cabinet.

“When I could afford enough, I could afford a Traynor amp,” Lee tells Rick Beato in a new interview.

Made in Canada, Traynor built amps using circuitry inspired by Marshall and Fender designs, but at a lower price point, making them accessible to young players like Lee.

“I was probably 15 or 16,” Lee says. “I was working in my mother’s discount variety store on the weekends, and she advanced me a few Saturdays’ worth of money.

“I went down to a local shop in Toronto on a cold winter night with my best pal at the time, Alex Živojinović” — better known today as Alex Lifeson — “and I bought this Traynor head that had a twin 15-inch cabinet.”

But once the deal was done, reality set in: they had no plan for how to get it home.

“We kind of looked at each other,” Lee chuckles. “It was like, ‘How the fuck are we going to get this home?!’ We never even thought of that. We had to take the subway and the bus. It was quite a scene.”

The situation didn’t get any easier when they reached their stop.

“We got off at the bus stop, and it was really icy. And thank goodness it was icy because we pushed the amp — and the head.”

“How much were you guys laughing?” Beato interjects.

“We were not laughing,” Lee replies. “We were freezing. And we were pushing this fucking amp three blocks to my house.”

When they finally got it home, Lee set the amp up in his bedroom and discovered a different kind of excitement — the sound and smell of real gear coming to life.

“I remember the fantastic aroma when you turn on an amp for the first time, as the tubes heat up,” he says. “I couldn't sleep all night. I was so excited just looking at the light on the amp.”

At the time, Lee was playing a Fender Precision Bass and chasing the tone of his early heroes, including Chris Squire of Yes, as well as Jack Bruce and John Entwistle.

“I always dreamed of being able to play like Chris Squire,” Lee says. “He was one of my first bass heroes. But there was something about his playing — his facility, his tone — that just moved me and made me want that sound.”

Like many young players, Lee tried to copy his heroes at first. Eventually he realized the process doesn’t quite work that way.

“I never got his tone,” he says. “Only he sounds like Chris Squire. But I did my approximation of it. And when you add your version of your hero's sound, your experience, your particular idiosyncratic style of play and your heart, hopefully you end up with your own sound. I think that’s how a musician becomes themselves.”

Lee would later modify that original Precision Bass into his famous “Space Bass,” reshaping it into the distinctive teardrop-style instrument that became one of his trademarks onstage.

“I kinda destroyed the P Bass,” he says with a smile, “but it's still with us.”

Lee and Lifeson are currently preparing to return to the road with Rush for the first time since the death of drummer Neil Peart, with Anika Nilles on drums and Loren Gold on keyboards. The tour opens June 7 at the Kia Forum, the same venue where the band made what appeared to be its final bow in 2015. The band has not ruled out new music once the tour is completed.

As Rush prepares to embark on their first tour in 11 years, Geddy Lee has recalled his favorite memory of touring with Alex Lifeson, and it involves a mistake the guitarist isn’t likely to recreate any time soon.

Lee says he served Lifeson an ultimatum to get Rush back together, with former Jeff Beck drummer Anika Nilles chosen as the successor to the late Neil Peart’s drum throne. The new-look lineup, completed by former Who keyboardist Loren Gold, made its debut at the Juno Awards last month.

During a recent interview with Chris Lord (see below), Lee was asked to recall his funniest touring experience.

“That's a tough one, because there are so many crazy moments to choose from,” he says. So, to get himself out of a tight spot, he leans on an anecdote included in his memoir, My Effin' Life.

“We were in Manchester, and we had a two-night gig there,” Lee goes on. “After the first night, we went back to the bar in our hotel. Alex had been under a little bit of strain because he had had a son the year before, and I think he was feeling very homesick to be with his kid. So he challenged our 6’ 11” stage manager to a cognac drinking contest.”

Given that Lifeson's eldest son was born in 1970, while the guitarist was just 17, the story likely takes place circa 1978, a year after the birth of his second son. That suggests the band was touring Hemispheres at the time.

“After about 12 shots of cognac, he broke a glass in the bar, and so our road manager and touring manager both escorted him to his room,” Lee continues.

Lifeson, however, wasn’t quite ready to go to bed.

“He would not be contained! When we went into the elevator to go to the room to say good night for the evening, the elevator doors opened, and out he came on a room service cart” – and he was headed for the bar.

“Chaos ensued for the next couple of hours,” says Geddy.

What Lee fails to mention here is that, as per his memoir, Lifeson was very scantily clad at the time. Their tour manager had also been nicknamed ‘Lurch’ – a reference to the Addams family’s towering butler – so it’s no mystery that Lifeson, 11 inches shorter, couldn’t keep up with his shot-necking abilities.

Lifeson was also prone to having bad dreams on tour, which he’d regularly share with his bandmates – and often in the dead of night. That helped inspire one of Rush’s most ambitious songs, and one they were determined to record in one take.

Lee, meanwhile, has teased the possibility of the new Rush lineup recording new music, so long as they survive next year’s globe-trotting tour, while Robin Trower has namedropped the band as he makes his claim for power trios being the best setup for rock bands.

A new-look Rush have made an early comeback to the stage ahead of their hotly-anticipated reunion tour, tearing through one of their first-ever songs at the 2026 Juno Awards.

The band, which now sees guitarist Alex Lifeson and bass player Geddy Lee supplemented by former Jeff Beck drummer Anika Nilles and former Who keyboardist Loren Gold, marked their first appearance since their final show with late drummer Neil Peart in 2015.

Lifeson and Lee have linked up since that show, which brought the R40 tour to an end at the Kia Forum in LA. They performed Rush classics with Dave Grohl at the Taylor Hawkins tribute shows in 2022 and made a surprise appearance at a Gordon Lightfoot tribute show two years later.

But this is the first time the Canadian duo has reunited as Rush-proper; something many felt was impossible after Peart’s passing in 2020.

The prog rock legends sent the TD Coliseum in Hamilton, Ontario, into a frenzy as they rolled back the years, performing “Finding My Way” at the Juno Awards. The Canadian showcase has been kind to the band over the year, having claimed 10 wins from 41 nominations, and it felt like a fitting place for their resurrection.

For the performance, Lifeson wielded a Goldtop Gibson Les Paul, with Lee opting for a green Fender Jazz. And it was a spritely showing, too, while videos of the band over the years played on screens behind them.

Moreover, playing the first song from their first album, a release that led to an eye-opening tour with Rory Gallagher, was a poignant way to signal their second coming.

Speaking at the event, Lee told the press the song choice was management’s idea, but Lifeson, ever the comic, offered an alternative narrative, saying: “It’s the only song we know how to play!”

“Neil is irreplaceable,” Lee returns, “and if he had something to say to us right now, he'd probably say, ‘You guys are idiots!’ But, you know, music lives beyond tragedy, beyond anything that can happen in your life.

“One thing we've learned over the last 10 years is that music is still a part of us, and so to play it now with someone as young and exciting as Annika is just another tribute to him. I think he'd be very pleased with our choice of drummer, and I think he would have a bit of a smirk on his face and thumbs up.”

On the night, the group, vitally, sounded nothing like the “bad tribute band” that Lifeson had said he and Lee represented when they began jamming again in 2024.

Yet, while news of their weekly meetups was met with excitement in the prog and rock fandoms, there was little evidence to suggest a reunion would happen at first. Lee has since admitted that he served his lifelong friend an ultimatum – “We’re either doing this, or we’re not,” he had said – as he looked to revive one of rock’s greatest bands in a timely fashion.

Nilles, who the band was introduced to by their tech after they spent time on the road with her during her days as Jeff Beck’s heartbeat, has huge shoes to fill. The early signs are extremely promising.

She’s also extremely sensitive to Peart’s legacy and towering reputation, even doubting that she could tackle a Rush classic during an early rehearsal.

Rush's comeback tour, which loosely coincides with their 50th anniversary, kicks off at the Kia Forum, where they took their final bow some 11 years ago, on June 6, before dates across the US and Canada. They'll also play South America and Europe in 2027, with Lee suggesting that new music is a possibility, provided the band survives their upcoming live shows.

Meanwhile, Lifeson has reflected on how his love of Jimmy Page inspired a 2112 hit, and how bizarre dreams were the genesis of some of Rush's most monumental tracks.

“We really fell in love with Led Zeppelin,” Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson once said. “Jimmy Page was probably the biggest influence on me. I loved everything that he represented — his style, the looseness of his playing. I learned an awful lot from him.”

Page’s influence extended well beyond Lifeson’s guitar approach. As the guitarist has noted, Kashmir directly inspired “Passage to Bangkok,” a deep cut from Rush’s prog landmark, 2112.

Page famously described the polyrhythmic drive of “Kashmir” as a “great hypnotic beast,” and its Eastern tonalities, coupled with interlocking rhythmic pulses, sparked something in Rush as they set about writing their most ambitious record to date.

For understandable reasons, the 20-minute title suite — the work that transformed them from a blues-rooted band (their first tour saw them opening for Rory Gallagher) into progressive-rock heavyweights — tends to dominate discussion of 2112. But the album’s second side is filled with concise, sharply defined songs that reveal a different dimension of the band. Among them, “Passage to Bangkok” offered Lifeson the opportunity to channel his own interpretation of “Kashmir.”

“Alex Lifeson said the music was inspired by ‘Kashmir,’” notes author Daniel Bukszpan. “That song influenced a lot of musicians at the time, who were essentially thinking, ‘We need our own Middle Eastern–flavored epic.’”

“Passage to Bangkok,” however, is no direct replica. At under four minutes, it’s far more concise. Bukszpan points instead to Stargazer by Rainbow as a closer parallel to Zeppelin’s sprawling approach. The broader point stands: Zeppelin had expanded rock’s sonic vocabulary, and Rush — ever eager to experiment — seized the opportunity to explore those new textures in their own way.

Placed after the conceptual density of 2112’s first side, the track also provides a tonal shift.

“It has a more exotic melody, so it creates a kind of break from what precedes it,” Bukszpan explains. “Side one is so heavy, both musically and conceptually. Then you flip the record, and here’s something looser — essentially a song about getting high.”

“It’s about a fun little journey to all the good places you could go to have a puff,” Lifeson said in an interview with High Times magazine (via Ultimate Guitar). “We. “We thought it would be fun to write a song about that, and Neil [Peart] handled it in a very eloquent way.

“That song was probably written in a farmhouse, on an acoustic guitar, in front of a small cassette recorder. We’d sketch ideas like that and then take them down to the basement to rehearse.”

Lifeson’s connection to Page dates back to 1969, when he first saw Led Zeppelin perform in Toronto.

“I waited in line for 15 hours,” he recalled. “We were sitting on the floor, just a few rows back from Jimmy. I was completely blown away. I wanted to look like him, play like him — be him. If there was one person I ever wanted to meet, it was Jimmy Page, but I never thought I’d get the chance.”

He finally did in the mid-1990s, when he and Rush bassist Geddy Lee met Page and Robert Plant backstage during their No Quarter Tour stop in Toronto.

Now, decades later, Lifeson is once again looking forward. With renewed activity in the Rush camp thanks to the addition of drummer Anika Nilles — and even the possibility of new music — the long arc of influence that began with “Kashmir” may yet echo into another chapter.

Rush may have found the surprise successor to Neil Peart’s drum throne, but she nearly balked at playing one of their biggest songs.

With guitarist Alex Lifeson and bassist/frontman Geddy Lee exploring a possible reunion, the progressive-rock giants have turned to German fusion drummer Anika Nilles, a left-field choice to step into the role once held by the late Neil Peart.

But when it came time to tackle Rush’s towering 1981 classic “Tom Sawyer,” even the seasoned virtuoso had a moment of hesitation.

Rush’s decision to retire after their 2015 R40 tour was largely driven by Peart. Speaking to Rolling Stone at the time, Lifeson said the drummer — who died of cancer in 2020 — had found it “increasingly difficult” to perform at the level he expected of himself. The anniversary run was intended as a dignified farewell.

Yet the band’s surviving members appear far from finished. After Lee presented Lifeson with a now-or-never ultimatum, the duo committed to reviving Rush.

They sought out Nilles after a recommendation from Lee’s guitar tech, who had worked with her while she was touring with Jeff Beck. Her background outside the traditional progressive-rock sphere offered a useful degree of separation from Rush’s past, something the duo welcomed.

Lifeson had previously revealed that countless drummers contacted them about replacing Peart just “minutes” after his death. Nilles’ unexpected appointment proved a more thoughtful antidote.

Still, stepping into Rush’s world — and, particularly, their catalog — came with its own pressures.

“It’s really fun to watch Anika as she starts to know the songs,” Lee said in an interview with Planet Rock. “It’s one thing to play it for the first time and work out what parts have to be, essentially, Neil Peart’s parts — and what parts she can make her own.

“That has been wonderful to watch, and really exciting for Al and I, because now she doesn’t have to think about it. She’s just grooving out.”

But the learning curve wasn’t always smooth.

“She didn’t know our music very well. She knew a couple of the big songs. And of course, every drummer on Earth knew Neil and his reputation,” Lee continued. “She knew ‘Tom Sawyer,’ and when we were going to play it for the first time, she just stopped and said, ‘Yikes. I don’t know if I want to play this one.’”

Released on Rush’s landmark 1981 album Moving Pictures, the track became one of the band’s defining songs and a permanent fixture of their live shows. For the recording, Lee famously swapped his usual Rickenbacker 4001 for a pawn-shop Fender Jazz Bass, while Lifeson later admitted he essentially “winged” the guitar solo — preferring spontaneity to the sterility that can come from endless retakes.

The single reached number. 44 on the Billboard Hot 100 and 25 in the U.K., but those numbers barely capture the song’s cultural impact — or the pressure it places on any drummer attempting to fill Peart’s shoes.

“She was kind of nervous because of the importance of that,” Lee said. “But we talked through it, we worked through it. The fills were not the hardest part for her — she could play those no problem. It’s the feel — sitting in that groove that the song has.

“She’s clued in now. It’s really lovely to see.”

Meanwhile, Lee has not ruled out the possibility of writing new music with Lifeson. They have also recruited keyboardist Loren Gold — who has previously toured with the Who’s Roger Daltrey and with Don Felder — to handle additional parts live and free Lee from some of the multitasking he juggled in Rush’s classic lineup.

For now, Lee frames any future tour as a celebration of Rush’s legacy. But if the chemistry holds, the band’s unexpected second chapter may yet produce something more.

Lifeson, for his part, has already found solace in reflecting on his late bandmate, recently describing the “serene, peaceful” process of writing a tribute song to Peart, an experience that helped him through what he called a deeply “difficult” time.

Rush’s reunion has become one of progressive rock’s biggest stories in years. Guitarist Alex Lifeson and bass guitarist Geddy Lee have credited their six-decade friendship for the band’s rebirth, six years after the death of drummer Neil Peart.

But how did they find their way back to performing as Rush?

As the pair explain in a new interview, it began with weekly jam sessions — a simple return to the dynamic that first brought them together as teenagers.

“When we first met in junior high school, we sat beside each other, and we laughed,” Lee tells The Guardian. “He’s the funniest guy I’ve ever known, and I make him laugh, too. Everybody wants to have a bestie like this guy.

“When we were in junior high, we would get together and play,” Lee adds. “Music was what drove us as buddies.”

From those early rehearsals, the band evolved from budding hard rockers into progressive-rock pioneers. An early tour supporting Rory Gallagher proved formative for Lifeson’s development, and the trio soon moved beyond their early nods to Led Zeppelin and The Beatles to forge a distinctly original sound.

When Rush left the stage at the Los Angeles Forum in August 2015, however, it appeared to be the end. Peart had already made clear his desire to retire from touring before the R40 farewell run began, and his death from brain cancer five years later seemed to close the door definitively.

In the years that followed, Lifeson and Lee continued to meet and play. But when they tried revisiting Rush material, reality hit hard.

“We were so bad,” Lifeson admits.

They had briefly discussed regrouping after appearing with Dave Grohl at the 2022 Taylor Hawkins Tribute Concert. Plans were floated, but Lifeson ultimately stepped back.

When the idea resurfaced, Lee forced a decision.

“I told Al: ‘Look, we’re either doing this or we’re not doing it. I can’t talk about it every two years,’” he says. “Because time marches on, and I don’t know how much time we have. So if we’re going to do it, we do it now. If we don’t, fine — let’s just not talk about it.”

This time, Lifeson was in.

The next challenge was finding a drummer capable of honoring Peart’s legacy while bringing something new. They turned to 42-year-old jazz-fusion player Anika Nilles, who came recommended after working on a Jeff Beck tour. A five-day audition was arranged — and it nearly fell apart.

“The first four days were up and down; she was nervous, she was jet-lagged, and we were unsure,” Lee recalls. “We had a little chat before the last day — ‘I don’t know, Al, is this going to work?’”

They weighed her strengths — her work ethic, her “deep knowledge and deep technical ability” — and agreed not to make a hasty call.

On day five, everything changed.

“She just fucking nailed it,” Lee says.

“She suddenly understood what we were talking about that whole week — not about the technical aspect, but about the stuff in between the big stuff that Neil was just so amazing at,” Lifeson adds. “Those internal dynamics that only another drummer can understand. And it clicked in her.”

There’s also a sense that Lifeson has returned reinvigorated. His time away from Rush — particularly through his work with Envy of None — rekindled his love of guitar solos and exploratory playing.

Now, as the band prepares a comeback world tour spanning three continents, talk has turned to new music. In an interview with Louder, the pair revealed they’re rehearsing 40 songs for the upcoming Fifty Something tour, allowing them to vary the set list nightly.

Elsewhere, Lifeson has told Guitar Player about the group’s most complex compositions — and the strange dreams that once fueled their creativity.

For a band that once seemed finished, the story has come full circle — not through grand design, but through laughter, friendship and a return to the simple act of playing together.

One of 2025’s most surprising music stories was that Rush surviving members Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee were heading back out on the road with Anika Nilles behind the drum kit. In a new interview, their bass-playing frontman has now suggested studio time could follow their now-extended tour.

The Canadian prog rock giants retired in 2015 upon the conclusion of their R40 Live Tour, in celebration of four decades together. A little less than five years later, drummer and chief lyricist Neil Peart passed away after a battle with glioblastoma, a rare and aggressive form of brain cancer. His death seemed to confirm Rush were finished.

Then, in January 2025, Lifeson revealed that he and Lee had been meeting up for weekly jams, but downplayed any reunion hopes.

Perhaps those sessions lit a spark. By October, the duo were announcing that Rush was back in business. As Lee said upon announcing their upcoming tour, “Alex and I have done some serious soul searching and come to the decision that we fucking miss it.”

Cue the left-field appointment of former Jeff Beck drummer Anika Nilles, whom Lee calls “remarkable.”

Their initial 12-date tour has now been extended to meet surging demand, and Lee, speaking to MusicRadar , has hinted at what lies ahead for Rush beyond their comeback shows.

“My intent, before we got into this celebration of Rush’s history, was to put some music together," Geddy explains. “Now, I assumed I would be doing that on my own, not with Alex, but when we started jamming, I started seeing the possibility of doing something with Alex. But all of that went on hold now because there's too much work to do for this tour to even think about that.

“But,” he adds, “if we manage to survive the tour and go back to Canada and have a rest, who knows what'll happen. I suspect some music will eventually come out.

“It would be fun to see what [Anika] can do in a creative situation. But it's all speculation until it isn't, so…”

For Lee, it would represent his first significant musical release since Rush’s final album, Clockwork Angels, in 2012. Lifeson, though, found a second wind with Envy of None, whom he formed with Coney Hatch bassist Andy Curran, producer/engineer Alfio “Alf” Annibalini, and young singer-songwriter Maiah Wynne.

The guitarist says he “bloomed” on their second LP, Stygian Waves, which also saw him embracing digital amps and falling back in love with guitar solos.

Speaking to Guitar Player last year ahead of Rush's return to the stage, Lifeson recalled writing their most complicated song and the dreams that helped inspire his music.

In related news, Epiphone has announced a reissue of Lifeson's workhorse ES-355, "Whitey", a guitar that's featured on every Rush album. He's also said that he still owns and records with his first-ever guitar, despite its humble $57 price tag.

“I feel like I'm so blessed by having this instrument and knowing what to do with it and always exploring when I play,” Alex Lifeson says on a Zoom call with Guitar Player. “I play around three hours a day, every day. I don't play scales. I don't practice riffs. I just play, and whatever comes out of my brain at that moment is what I'm going to do at that moment. I feel really fortunate to have that ability and have that passion and desire at my age to keep going.”

He pauses and smiles.

“So long as these don't get too swollen,” he says, pointing to his fingers, “I should be fine.”

He’ll certainly need to be in his best shape, now that Lifeson and Geddy Lee are re-forming Rush for a 2026 tour. The news that the duo are reuniting — announced at an invite-only gathering of 150 fans, media and dignitaries at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame's Foster Theater on October 5 — has taken the music world by surprise. While Lifeson had let it be known that the two lifelong friends still meet every week to jam, he swore off the possibility of a Rush reunion following the 2020 death of drummer Neil Peart.

For that matter, Lifeson was dismayed to find he was sorely out of practice when it came to tackling the very songs he helped create and make famous over Rush’s nearly 50-year history.

“It’s funny because we sound like a really bad tribute band for the first three or four run-throughs on these things,” he told Rolling Stone about his jams with Lee. “It’s, Oh, my god, what did I play there? Why did I make that so hard?”

But now that the group is back — with Anika Nilles sitting in the drummer’s chair — Lifeson will have to be back in shape for the shows that follow.

That may require playing some of Rush’s most complicated songs, including “La Villa Strangiato,” the nine-and-a-half-minute centerpiece to their 1978 album Hemispheres. As Lifeson tells us, the oddly named song not only showcased the group’s growing expansive sound — it also demonstrated their musical endurance when they cut it in just one take.

“We wanted to write a big piece that was made up of many smaller pieces, obviously,” he recalls. “It was recorded at Rockfield Studios in Monmouth, Wales. We had rented a farmhouse for a month before recording, just down the road from the studio, and we were there working every day and night to get that Hemispheres record together.

“We had the time to do it and the inclination, so we worked on those little bits and started glueing them together and more and more and more until we sort of developed the whole thing. It was quite cool because we recorded it all basically in one take.”

But once wasn't enough.

“And then we wanted to record it a second time, but because it's a long song and we didn't have enough tape, we just taped over the first take that we did. And if you listen, very carefully in the solo section, you can hear the print-through of the original solo underneath. You can hear the ghosting notes in there, which is kind of cool.”

As for that rather unwieldy song title, it’s been well documented that Lifeson’s wild dreams have frequently served as the titles for the band's works. In a 1978 interview with U.K. music weekly Sounds, Peart revealed how Lifeson would experience, “some of the most bizarre bad dreams, especially when we’re away touring on the road.

“He’ll wake up either Geddy or me with a phone call in the middle of the night and start telling us all about these terrible dreams he's been having. When you're barely conscious, some of the stories he comes up with can be quite mind-blowing."

Lifeson laughs when Peart’s quotes are read to him.

“My dreams are very vivid,” he admits, “and I used to share my dreams with my band mates all the time. They would end up falling down laughing or shaking heads in disbelief.

“So the dreams became sort of ideas to drive the music, but mostly it was for the titles of the different pieces, like the ‘The Waltz of the Shreves’ and all of those different names that we had for those pieces in ‘La Villa Strangiato.’”

As Lifeson goes on to explain, “La Villa Strangiato” wasn’t the group’s first attempt at recording a lengthy piece in one take. They’d done it one year earlier during the recording sessions for 1977’s A Farewell to Kings album.

“It was when we were recording ‘Xanadu,’ the first song for that album,” Lifeson says. “While the engineer set up, we dicked around until we got the sounds we wanted.

“Then it was time to lay the song down and we played it from beginning to end with all the parts in one take. And that’s the take that’s on the record.

“And the engineer, it blew his mind. He couldn't believe it. He said, ‘How do you go in the studio and record an 11-minute song in one take? It’s perfect. How do you do it?’ In all fairness, we’d been rehearsing it for quite a while. We played it at the tail end of the previous tour, just in a couple of gigs, but we were rehearsing it and were well prepared when we went into the studio.

“So it wasn’t that much of a stretch to put the whole song down in one take. Everything — the solo, all the parts, both me and Ged playing double-necks.”

An array of electric and acoustic guitars, running the gamut from Gibson ES-335s and Les Pauls to Fender Telecasters, and a Godin Lerxst Limelight form the crux of Lifeson’s vast guitar collection today, along with favored amps that include Lerxsts, Marshalls and Mesa-Boogies. Yet, he says it’s the Roland JC-120, first acquired back in the 1970s, that holds a special place in his heart.

“That Roland Jazz Chorus JC-120 had just come out, so I got one,” he recalls. “And I would be in the studio whenever I had any free time, have a little puff and sit in front of that thing and just play for hours and just get right into the swirling chorus sound that I fell in love with, and used way too much over the years.”

During his five-decade stint with Rush, Lifeson, Lee and Peart always took the path less travelled, exploring and pushing the sonic boundaries of what was possible within the confines of Rush, allowing the power trio to stand head and shoulders above their contemporaries. In the aftermath of Peart’s death, Lifeson spent much time in reflection, dealing with not only the drummer’s passing but also the group’s end, all of which dampened his desire to play music again.

He rekindled that passion with Envy of None, the quartet Lifeson created with singer Maiah Wynne, bassist Andy Curran and co-guitarist Alfio Annibalini. Over its two-album span, the band proved a godsend, reawakening Lifeson’s passion for making new music. Apparently it also helped him change his mind about retiring Rush.

So did Lee. At the October 5 event, Lifeson said the bassist approached him with some “big ideas,” which led to them jamming again.

“And the more we started rehearsing and playing, the more I just fell in love with the idea of playing again.”

Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee have announced that Rush will be back on tour in 2026.

After saying for years that the band had ended with the 2020 death of Neil Peart, the guitarist and bassist announced on October 5 that they are back in business.

The group’s new drummer is Anika Nilles, an award-winning German composer and producer with four solo albums who previously toured with Jeff Beck.

Dubbed Fifty Something, the tour is being described as a “celebration of Rush’s music, legacy, and the life of late drummer and lyricist Neil Peart.” It kicks off with two nights at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles on June 7 and 9, and continues with visits to a total of seven cities in North America.

“It’s been over 10 years since Alex and I have performed the music of Rush alongside our fallen bandmate and friend Neil,” bass guitarist Lee said in a press release. “A lifetime’s worth of songs that we had put our cumulative hearts and souls into writing, recording and playing together onstage.

“And so, after all that has gone down since that last show, Alex and I have done some serious soul searching and come to the decision that we fucking miss it, and that it’s time for a celebration of 50-something years of RUSH music.

“So in 2026 my BFF Lerxst (aka Alex Lifeson) and I are going to hit the road once again to pay tribute to our past and to Neil by performing a vast selection of RUSH songs in a handful of cities. No small task, because as we all know Neil was irreplaceable.

“Yet life is full of surprises,” he continued, “and we have been introduced to another remarkable person; an incredible drummer and musician who is adding another chapter to our story while continuing her own fascinating musical journey. Her name is Anika Nilles, and we could not be more excited to introduce her to our loyal and dedicated Rush fanbase, whom, we know, will give her every chance to live up to that near impossible role.

“Before we hit the stage, we also hope to add another musician or two to expand our sound a wee bit and free up Alex and I, in order to show off some of our new fancy dance steps. … Lerxst, Anika and myself, along with many of our longstanding crew members have been hard at work rehearsing and designing the kind of Rush show you’ve grown accustomed to expect from us. We dearly hope you will come along and help us celebrate our history together.”

The sudden news was dropped at a top-secret private event on Sunday night, October 5, at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. During a Q&A, Lifeson and Lee were responding to a fan question about future performances when Lee made the surprising admission.

“I kind of think that we should tour next year,” he said.

Lifeson — who has been busy these past few years with his new group, Envy of None — revealed late last year that the two remaining Rush friends had been jamming weekly, but he cautioned that there were no plans to re-form Rush.

Lee touched on the difficulty of replacing the drummer when he spoke on Sunday night.

“It was a very sad time, and it took time for us to even contemplate,” he said, adding, “And how do you replace someone who is irreplaceable?”

But it turned out that their casual jams were an impetus to get the group back in action.

“We were laughing so hard, and we were enjoying it so much, and it was almost like playing those songs dispelled the dark clouds,” Lee said.

Lifeson said he was looking forward to relearning the group’s material after so many years. He added that his and Lee's weekly sessions showed him how much he missed playing — and how difficult it was to get his playing back in shape, considering the complex electric guitar lines that run throughout the group's catalog.

“To be challenged with that again was really, really exciting,” he said. “And the more we started rehearsing and playing, the more I just fell in love with the idea of playing again.”

The duo said the shows will last more than two hours and pay tribute to Peart

“Our idea was not to try to be Rush 2.0,” he says, “to pay homage to our music, pay homage to our lost brother, represent the songs and celebrate the songs.”

The tour itinerary is as follows:

Sun Jun 7, Los Angeles, CA Kia Forum
Tue Jun 9, Los Angeles, CA Kia Forum
Thu Jun 18, Mexico City, MX Palacio de los Deportes
Wed Jun 24, Fort Worth, TX Dickies Arena
Fri Jun 26, Fort Worth, TX Dickies Arena
Thu Jul 16, Chicago, IL United Center
Sat Jul 18, Chicago, IL United Center
Tue Jul 28, New York, NY Madison Square Garden
Thu Jul 30, New York, NY Madison Square Garden
Fri Aug 7, Toronto, ON Scotiabank Arena
Sun Aug 9, Toronto, ON Scotiabank Arena
Thu Sep 17, Cleveland, OH Rocket Arena

Alex Lifeson entered a new chapter in his life and career with the launch of his group Envy of None in 2022. It came on the heels of some serious losses, in particular, the death in early 2020 from brain cancer of his lifetime colleague and dear friend, drummer Neil Peart. And with him, the wildly popular band that he and Peart, with bass guitarist and singer Geddy Lee, forged and fostered for 50 years — Rush.

“I didn’t want to play guitar or work at all, really, for a long time after Neil passed away,” Lifeson says. “After the first anniversary, I felt it was time to come out of the grieving process.”

That, in turn, led to the creation of Envy of None, the quartet Lifeson created with singer Maiah Wynne, bassist Andy Curran and co-guitarist Alfio Annibalini. The group’s 2022 self-titled debut marked a fresh start in Lifeson’s long career.

But one track on the record holds a deep connection to Lifeson’s former band and the process of letting it go: “Western Sunset.” As Lifeson told Guitar Player, he wrote it in memory of Peart.

“That song came about around the time we all found out that Neil was ill,” he says, sitting in his home studio in Toronto, surrounded by vintage preamps, high-wattage amps and a few dozen electric guitars, including the Gibson ES-335 he blazed to fame with in the 1970s.

“I was visiting with him and I was sitting on his balcony in Santa Monica. He had a little balcony off his office and he'd go out there every so often and have a smoke. There were times in the afternoon where the sun was setting, and there was this particular time when the sun was setting through the trees, filtering through the branches and the leaves, and far off we could see the ocean and the hills of Malibu.

“It really struck me that there's this closure in a sunset. It's the end of a day, and sure, tomorrow a new day begins. But the sunset marks the end of one day, and that day is not going to be there anymore.

“That thought occupied me for some time. And I just thought it was such a serene, peaceful moment, at a time when we were dealing with something that was very painful and difficult. That really stayed with me.

“When I started working on the song, I thought about the whole idea of a western sunset, being there in California with Neil and watching the sun set. I wanted to try to re-create the serenity, calmness and peace that I felt in that moment. As the song developed, that was the key thing in my mind”

To record “Western Sunset,” Lifeson says he played one of his custom PRS Angelus acoustics.

“They made me a few with different woods and various depths and body styles. I miked it with, I believe, an Earthworks SR25 microphone, which is great, and that went through a Neve 1073 preamp/EQ into the Universal Audio 1176, and from there into my Universal Audio Apollo x4 interface, and into Apple Logic Pro, which is my main recording platform.”

Lifeson says that in writing the acoustic guitar part, he endeavored to reflect the tranquility of that moment in California on Peart’s balcony.

“I wanted the acoustic guitar line to be warm and connective; not complicated, but just sweet and setting the stage for your attention,” he says. “And then once the rest of the track comes in, it's all about the melody of that string arrangement Johnny Dinklage created for it, a beautiful, subtle string arrangement.

“Everything is subtle in it: the drums using only brushes, a simple bass line. All of those things combined to make a very peaceful, very visual kind of music.

“As for the song itself, it's a very personal thing, obviously. It was something that [sighs] … I don't know if I felt I needed to do it, but I felt I wanted to do it. And I’m glad that I did.”

For many players, their first guitar is something of a throwaway instrument. There may be great sentimental value attached to it, but those guitars, be they electric or acoustic, are usually cheap, introductory models. As players progress, new and better gear usually takes its place.

While that has certainly been true for Alex Lifeson, the Rush icon never gave up on his first guitar. Nearly 50 years since his parents bought him the cheap Japanese electric guitar, it still has a role to play in the music he writes with his new group, Envy of None.

“There are definitely go-to’s that I prioritize, but I also just like grabbing something that I don’t think is the ‘right’ thing and seeing how that works,” he says in Guitar World’s latest print issue.

“I have the first guitar I ever owned, which my parents bought for me in 1967 for $57. It’s just a cheap Japanese guitar that I had refinished. I pull it up for some things. It’s kind of like a Jack White sensibility, like, ‘I’ll take this crappy guitar and see what happens.’”

He admits that the process doesn’t always bear fruit, but that willingness to experiment is half the reason he’s had such a successful career. Indeed, his Hentor Sportscaster was the result of his tonal and gear-based curiosity. It started life as a humble Stratocaster and morphed into one of his most iconic guitars.

“I replaced the bridge single-coil with a Gibson humbucker, reversed the input jack for easier access, and added a Floyd Rose tremolo to replace the Fender tremolo,” he explains. “I'm more of a humbucker guy, I always have been. Fenders are very, very useful, single-coils are very, very useful, and I've always had them. [But] there were limitations to the Fender.”

Taking a leaf or two from Jack White’s book, Lifeson used a range of guitars on Envy of None's sessions for their second album, Stygian Wavz, just to see if there was magic to be found. Granted, it’s not worked wonders in this instance.

“So far, I haven’t had much success, to be honest,” he says, laughing. “But you get what I’m saying. Sometimes, I’ll go for a P90; I’m not normally inclined in that way with guitars, but now I realize that tonality is what it’s all about. I create different tones.”

Indeed, White, who is included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's class of 2025 alongside Soundgarden and Carol Kaye, made cheap guitars cool again with his approach to electrics with the White Stripes.

None prove his point more than his quirky Airline Res-O-Glas "JB Hutto" guitar; one angular in shape and featuring a fiberglass body and edgy (some may say scratchy) dual Valco single-coil pickups. Notably, it was his first guitar.

“I always look at playing guitar as an attack,” he told Guitar Player in 2010. “It has to be a fight. Every song, every guitar solo, every note that’s played or written has to be a struggle.

“The idea behind using the Ward’s Airline in the White Stripes was to prove that you don’t need a brand-new guitar to have character, to have tone, and to be able to play what you want to play. You can do it with a piece of plastic.”

Blues maestro Kenny Wayne Shepherd follows a similar train of thought. He believes all players should start on a “crappy” guitar — whether that then stays by their side moving forwards or not is up to them.

“When you start with a crappy guitar, it begins the cycle of gear addiction,” he told Total Guitar last year. “You appreciate it, but you long for a better instrument. It gives you a level of appreciation because you started with humble beginnings, and then when you make it to the top of the guitar mountain you've appreciated every step along the way and what it took to get there.”

Lifeson may not have had huge success peppering his first guitar on Envy of None’s new record, but his trying is a testament to a snobbishness-free mindset that always guitarists should take when it comes to gear.

Alex Lifeson questions the intent of shred-happy Instagram guitarists and has opened up about his diminishing relationship with the guitar solo.

In his early days, tasty solos were regularly peppered across Rush’s technical epics having stolen a key technique from Rory Gallagher to aid his cause. The trait continued into the band’s heyday as they learned to balance their prog-rock ambitions with more radio-friendly songwriting but the amount of solos he injected into each new Rush record slowly began to shrink.

“Towards the end with Rush, I soloed a lot less,” he tells the Prog Report. “I love doing them, but if I don't feel that they have a real intended position in a song. Unless you're doing something for the song, it's just a little 'faffy.' It's just kind of showing off.”

Indeed, the ever-changing guitar landscape seems to play a role in his equally shifting feelings. The guitar solo died something of a death in the ‘90s and early ‘00s when nu-metal blew up.

Dave Mustaine recently sneered that was because those bands “couldn’t do solos.” But they’ve since made a comeback, in part through the rock revivalists that followed in their wake, and now social media is taking shred to a whole other place.

The fad hasn't gone unnoticed by Lifeson.

“You can go on Instagram and see a thousand amazing guitar players who can play like crazy,” he says. “But is there soul in it? Is there a purpose to it other than just being flashy?”

Fittingly, he uses a new trend-breaking track by his group Envy of None as an example of purpose that practically forces a solo to happen, rather merely being there to show that his aging fingers can still produce fireworks.

“With 'The Story,' we left that place for something, and we figured, probably a solo. But when the part that comes right after it, when that started to be built up, tracked up, it became the most important part of the song for me,” he states.

“So the solo's purpose had to be leading into that and an ascending solo that comes to a crescendo, and then that part comes in, where you drive the point of the song home, is really what it's all about.

“The solo is just doing this little job of setting Maiah [Wynne, vocalist] up to deliver that last line and that signature little riff that comes in, in that part.

“That's the high point of the song for me,” he echoes. “It's getting to it and how to achieve it. And I treat all the solos on the record like that.”

Indeed, solos are now plural: with Envy of None’s 2025 sophomore, Stygian Wavz, Lifeson found himself warming to big lead guitar moments once more.

“I was surprised to hear more solos than I thought I put on the record,” he admits. “But I really enjoyed it, and it got me thinking about doing that again. I think I'm distinctive in how I create solos. So why not? I think that's a strength that I should be more aware of.”

Speaking to Guitar Player about "Stygian Wavz", Lifeson reveals that it changed his perspective of both what Envy of None is, and the gear he's open to experimenting with.

"I always said this is a musical project with four musicians," he continues. "But when I got the masters back and I heard the sequenced tracks all finished, I thought, Omigod — we're a band!'

“This is unified. That is the impression I think this record gives, and that's the big difference between the first one and the second one."

And while he hasn't turned his back on tube amps — it wouldn't be a wise move when his gear brand, Lerxst, sells them — he was left gushing about what his signature IK Multimedia TONEX and Universal Audio pedals can bring to the party.

"They sound amazing," he says. "They don't sound like plug-ins; they sound like real amps. It's a whole new generation in sound. There's nothing lacking.”

He's also revealed that he and Geddy Lee were “bombarded” by requests from drummers to resurrect Rush in the wake of Neil Peart's passing. He has, however, brandished those attempts at worming into a new chapter of the band's legacy as ill-thought.

“I don't know what some of these people were thinking,” he reflects.

Lifeson also revealed that he and Lee regularly jam together, but sound like a tribute band. Rush won’t be returning anytime soon.

Rush made 19 studio albums in the group’s 38 years as a recording act. And Alex Lifeson says each was memorable in its own way.

There was Caress of Steel, the 1975 album that saw the band pursue a more prog-rock direction, with disastrous results.

"That record didn't do very well," Lifeson told Guitar Player, who says its commercial failure led them to call their subsequent road trek the Down the Tubes Tour.

And there was its followup, 2112, the commercial breakthrough that came about after Rush decided to embrace, rather than retreat from, their prog leanings.

“We thought, Listen, we're gonna do what we're gonna do,’” Lifeson explained. “‘If it crashes and burns, so be it. At least we stuck to our guns, and did it the way we thought we should.’”

But Lifeson says no record was as much fun to make as the group’s eighth album, 1981’s Moving Pictures. Featuring long-running fan favorites like “Tom Sawyer” and “Limelight,” the album became Rush’s biggest seller in the U.S. and reached number three on the charts. Naturally, it went to number one in the band’s home country of Canada.

As Lifeson tells Fox News 4 San Antonio, the joy of making the album was down to the nearly perfect circumstances under which it was made at Le Studio in Morin-Heights, Quebec.

"We did a lot of records at Le Studio,” he says. 'Moving Pictures was the most fun record we ever made. It was such a great energy and a great vibe.”

The album was recorded over October to November, 1980, during a brutal cold snap.

“It was winter — it was a very cold winter as well. When I say 'very cold', I mean minus 30, minus 40. You'd have a week of that kind of weather. But it was still a lot of fun to work there. We would snowshoe or cross country ski to the studio. I generally drove over [laughs], but it was part of that whole Canadian experience, the Great North."

The trio entered the studio with their song’s written and rehearsed. Some of those tracks were composed during the band’s 10-month tour for 1980’s Permanent Waves. The group had been trying out their new ideas at soundcheck and were eager to get back to the studio to commit them to tape.

Although they had planned to record and release a live album, and had even mapped out a two-year plan for their career, Rush scrapped everything and retreated to Stony Lake, Ontario to write new material. Lifeson called the decision the most important they made in Rush’s history since choosing to follow a more progressive rock direction on 2112.

When it came time to record Moving Pictures, Lifeson played Fender Stratocasters modified with Floyd Rose locking trems and Bill Lawrence humbuckers in the bridge position, playing them through Marshall combos.

"When we started working on 'Moving Pictures', everything came along just so effortlessly,” he explains. “We were well prepared, we'd written all the material, we knew what we were doing. We went in, we got sounds.”

For the first time, the group employed digital recording technology, which was just beginning to catch on in professional recording studios.

“We did things a little differently,” Lifeson says. “We actually mixed it down on digital, which was one of the first Sony digital machines. Compared to modern digital, that thing was a Model T. But the record sounds great. So, so long as you get the results."

One of his favorite memories is of recording the angry mob voices for the opening to the album track “Witch Hunt.”

"We were down in the parking area," he recalls. "They set up mics and we were the mob crowd in the background in 'Witch Hunt' in the opening.

"And if you listen carefully, you can hear us laughing because we'd had a few drinks and we were screaming and yelling about the most ridiculous things as a mob. But some of the things that we were saying are totally unrelated to anything.

“But it was such a feel-good record, making Moving Pictures."

An instant commercial success upon it release on February 12, 1981, the album went on to earn a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Instrumental Recording on behalf of the track “XYZ.” The group would go on to tour the album, during which they would for a time be supported by Rory Gallagher, whom Lifeson had befriended years before when Rush opened for the blues guitarist.

Rush would go on to enjoy another 34 years as a band. These days, Lifeson can be found playing guitar with his new group, Envy of None, which has just released its second album, Stygian Wavz.

As Lifeson told Guitar Player, the experience of performing with his new group has been a happy one, particularly during this album, which saw him embrace soloing in a way he hadn’t since his days with Rush.

"I bloomed on this record,” he told Guitar Player. “I let myself go a little more which is a good thing, 'cause I tend to hold back and be tentative with a lot of things. And on this record I just let go, and there was a new confidence and I had a better, clearer picture of what we wanted to create as a band."

In related news, Lifeson has revealed that he and Rush bassist Geddy Lee still get together every week to jam. But he’s warned fans not to get too excited about an eventual Rush reunion.

“Al and I are lifelong friends. We jam together once in a while, it’s true,” he offered. “That’s all I want to say about that right now.”

After nearly half a century of envelope-pushing and genre-defying music, the curtain fell on Rush for the final time on August 1, 2015, at the 16,000-capacity Los Angeles Forum.

Speaking to Classic Rock as the band’s final tour rolled into life, Alex Lifeson painted a very different picture of what life in the band’s early days was like, pointing to a show that made them think they’d made it big, before being brought crashing down to Earth.

In June 1974, several months after the band released their self-titled debut album, the Canadian trio were presented with their first big gig, supporting the New York Dolls as the glam-rockers' tour hit Toronto. For Lifeson, still only 19, it felt like a seismic moment.

“It was an old burlesque theater, pretty run down and crappy,” he recalls, “but to us it might as well have been Wembley.”

Rush hadn't waded fully into progressive waters; they were still pushing a very Led Zeppelin–inspired sound. Still, they found it difficult to get themselves before the right audiences, as early shows with Aerosmith, Thin Lizzy and glam rock megastars Kiss attest. The New York Dolls gig, which predated those shows, left the band and audience a little perplexed.

“That crowd was excited to see the New York Dolls; not so much a local heavy metal band,” Lifeson says with a laugh. “But it was exciting being around the Dolls. Watching them backstage, it was all what you would expect. They were all drunk before they got onstage. They had girls back there. It was a whole rock and roll scene. We were typically Canadian and shy and stayed out of their way.”

The high of the performance soon ended in rather humbling fashion for the guitarist.

“After that gig, I was hitch-hiking home with a friend of mine,” he continues. “I had my guitar with me. This couple picked me up, and we were chatting, and they said they’d been to the Dolls show at the Victory and they said ‘Yeah, they were great, but the opening act, God, they sucked.’

“The guy’s girlfriend turned back and saw the guitar, and saw me, and her face just kind of froze. It was silent in the car, and I felt so crestfallen. I said: ‘We’ll get out at the next block, please.’ I got out of the car, and I wanted to throw my guitar away. That was the first really bad review that we got!”

However, Lifeson’s other comments seem to suggest that the moment toughened him up a little and helped the band sharpen their competitive edge.

“You played with so many different bands on these two- or three-act shows. You wanted to blow the other guy off the stage and be that much better,” he says. “I remember we played with Heart once. This was very early, maybe 1975. It was at the Stanley Warner Theatre in Pittsburgh.

“There was so much talk about Heart and the Wilson sisters. We were really looking forward to meeting them. We were backstage, and [Heart guitarist] Roger Fisher said to me, ‘We’re gonna blow you guys off the stage tonight, you just watch.’ And I thought, Wow, what a weird thing to say. But I think I played that much harder that night.”

Several months after that ill-fated New York Dolls show, the soon-to-be prog giants got their first big break, touring their homeland with Rory Gallagher.

“Playing with Rory was a real treat,” Lifeson later reflected. “We were 20 years old — this was our first tour. It was exciting, but we didn't know our place.”

Rubbing shoulders with the Irish bluesman proved an education for Lifeson, who soon lifted one of his prized techniques and dropped it in his own playing.

“He had this way of getting harmonics from a guitar pick by just picking in a certain way and I'd never heard anyone do that ever,” he said. “I heard it all over his stuff, and I thought, Wow, what an effective thing to do. I employ the little trick in all my stuff all the time, and I learned it directly from him.”

Lifeson is keeping busy with life after Rush, having just released his second album with Envy of None. Its writing saw him returning to guitar solos and embracing digital modelling amps for the first time.

“I bloomed on this record,” he told Guitar Player last month. “I just let go, and there was a new confidence and I had a better, clearer picture of what we wanted to create as a band."

It takes a lot of hard work to make it in the music business, as well as plenty of luck.

But sometimes it just takes a little help from the government to get you on your way.

That’s what Rush bandmates Alex Lifeson, Geddy Lee and drummer John Rutsey discovered in 1971, when the Ontario government lowered the drinking age from 21 to 18. The teenagers had been confined to playing high school dances, banned from the clubs due to their young age.

The change in drinking laws in 1971 changed all that.

“That was the year that we just turned 18,” Lifeson tells Q with Tom Power. “And we went from playing high school dances once, maybe twice a month if we were lucky, to playing six nights a week and some matinees on Saturdays, for week after week after week.”

“All those clubs popped up: the Abbey Road, Piccadilly Tube, Gas Works, Larry’s Hideaway. So you went from playing a week at one place to a week at another to another. You constantly played. And that’s really so important in the early stages, when you’re learning your stuff.”

But Rush weren’t just playing other band’s songs. They were writing their own originals and presenting them to the audiences.

“We spent a lot of time writing music every chance we had,” Lifeson says. “We did all that stuff, and we were very dedicated to what we were doing.”

That commitment caused problems for Lifeson with his parents, who fought against his desire to pursue a career in music with his electric guitar rather than go to university. Their tense combat was revealed in a 1973 Canadian documentary Come On Children, which explored the generation gap between parents raised in more conservative times and their children, who were influenced by changes in norms brought about by the 1960s cultural revolution.

“I don’t see why I have to go through all the bullshit of high school to learn music,” the teenage Alex says to his parents at one point.

As Lifeson reveals today, he had a firm resolution to see what he could accomplish with his talents.

“I really had a belief in myself: If this music thing doesn’t work out, well then I’ll do something else,” he says. “I’ll work with my dad as a plumber’s assistant or whatever. But I really believed that this was going to work out. I never worried about it in the early days.”

Of course it did work out, and Rush enjoyed a long career with drummer Neil Peart taking over from Rutsey in 1974, although they had trouble early on finding their groove. As Lifeson has revealed, the success of 1975’s Fly by Night was followed by the disappointment of Caress of Steel.

"That record didn't do very well," Lifeson acknowledges. “People didn't respond to it.

"I remember playing Caress for Paul Stanley when we were touring with Kiss. We played it, and he had such a look on his face, like 'What the hell is this?' He started smiling and nodding, 'this is great guys...,' then nodding and quickly leaving.

"We were quite disappointed with that, because we thought we'd made something really, really special.”

Rush found their groove with the next album, 2112, and continued strong until the end. Lifeson and Geddy Lee still meet every week to jam.

In addition, Lifeson is enjoying success with his new group, Envy of None, which has just released its second album, Stygian Wavz. After feeling reluctant to call themselves a band with their first record, the group found their groove on Stygian Wavz.

“I bloomed on this record,” Lifeson says. “I let myself go a little more which is a good thing, 'cause I tend to hold back and be tentative with a lot of things. And on this record I just let go, and there was a new confidence and I had a better, clearer picture of what we wanted to create as a band."

Long before he was known as the guitarist in Rush, Alex Lifeson was seen onscreen arguing with his parents about his future in the 1973 Canadian documentary Come On Children.

Created by Canadian filmmaker Allan King, the movie is a document from an era when social scientists were exploring the generation gap between parents raised in more conservative times and their children, who were influenced by changes in norms brought about by the 1960s cultural revolution.

King’s film follows a group of kids, aged 13 to 19, who live together on a farm without adult supervision to see how they manage.

Lifeson, known then by his birth name, Alex Živojinović, is shown in one scene arguing with his visiting parents about his desire to pursue music. At the time, he was about 17 and had invested some three years into Rush, the group he founded in 1968 with his friend drummer John Rutsey and original bass guitar player and vocalist Jeff Jones, who would soon be replaced by Lifeson’s high school pal Geddy Lee.

“I don’t want to make a bunch of money,” Alex says at one point. “Like, if I make a lot of money, that’s great. But I’m not gonna go to university and get a big degree… I don’t wanna drive around in a big car and get people to go, ‘Hey, there goes Alex! He’s loaded with money, and wow, he’s really set himself up great!’

“I don’t see why I have to go through all the bullshit of high school to learn music,” the teenage Alex continues. “I’m just gonna hang around and feel it for a while. And then I’ll learn it."

Asked how he's feeling at the moment, Alex replies, "Right now, I feel a little angry… I notice a lot of parents have this great difficulty in listening to their kids, and it is so true. I’m just saying it would be so great if parents just sat down and listened to what kids say.”

“I have said to you, Alex,” counters his father, “and I remember exactly: I want you to be free, to expand. I don’t want you to grow up with a fear, or some terror, of anything. What do you want? That’s what I want to know, really.”

Lifeson, of course, ultimately succeeded in his goal. After sticking it out on the Ontario music scene, Rush released their self-titled debut album in 1974 on their own label, Moon Records. Soon after the group signed with Mercury Records and released 1974’s Fly by Night, the album that put them on the map.

Along the way, Lifeson not only made great music, he also established himself as a guitar hero, inspired by players like Rory Gallagher, whom he befriended over a couple of tours, and Jimmy Page, whom he met in the mid 1990s.

Forty years on, in 2015, Rush called it quits, but not before selling tens of millions of records and being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2013.

As for Lifeson, he’s a celebrated guitarist with a signature model electric guitar, Epiphone Alex Lifeson Les Paul Axcess Standard.

He’s also a member of Envy of None, whose second album, Stygian Wavz, comes out March 28. As Lifeson tells Guitar Player, he was initially reluctant to present Envy of None as his new group, as it felt more like a project. But the band’s latest album changed all that.

"Maybe I held back a bit," he says. "I didn't want to be in another band. I was already in one band my whole life, and I wasn't ready to be in another band. I always think of a band as this unit that goes out and travels and works and plays live and all that — maybe that was the difference.

"But now I'm saying that we function as a band and we think conceptually as a band, and I don't feel that conflict anymore."

When Envy of None released its self-titled debut album two years ago, Alex Lifeson was loath to acknowledge it as a band.

And now — with a follow-up, Stygian Wavz, coming on March 28 — he confesses that wasn't an accident.

"I always said this is a musical project with four musicians. It's not really a band," Lifeson tells Guitar Player via Zoom, seated in front of a wall of guitars in his home studio in Toronto. "But when I got the masters back and I heard the sequenced tracks all finished, I thought, Omigod — we're a band!'

“This is more than a little project with a bunch of people. This is unified. This sounds like a band. That is the impression I think this record gives, and that's the big difference between the first one and the second one."

Lifeson can be forgiven for his tentative view of Envy of None, of course. After nearly 47 active years in Rush, and the crushing death of drummer Neil Peart during January of 2020, one can understand his hesitation to embrace the idea of a full band again.

"Maybe I held back a bit," Lifeson notes. "I didn't want to be in another band. I was already in one band my whole life, and I wasn't ready to be in another band. I always think of a band as this unit that goes out and travels and works and plays live and all that — maybe that was the difference.

"But now I'm saying that we function as a band and we think conceptually as a band, and I don't feel that conflict anymore."

And Lifeson is correct to consider Stygian Wavz as a more complete band expression than its predecessor.

Envy of None is actually the fusion of two musical endeavors linked to former Coney Hatch bassist Andy Curran. He and Lifeson began working "casually" on new music shortly after Rush's 2015 farewell tour, without a stated purpose. Two instrumental tracks, "Kabul Blues" and "Spy Horse," were released via Lifeson's web site to help promote a new signature Les Paul Standard for Epiphone.

At the same time, however, Curran met Portland, Oregon vocalist and songwriter Maiah Wynne, who won a Zoom mentorship session with Curran through a music contest. He soon brought her into the fold with Lifeson as well as guitarist/keyboardist Alfio Annibalini.

"When I heard Maiah's voice on the first material, I could hear her voice on all the material that we were working on," Lifeson recalls. "I just knew there was something that was really strong there.

“Then it shifted gears. It was no longer a casual project of working on a few songs for a possible EP. It became an album project, and we wanted to make it meatier in that sense."

The group released Envy of None album and the subsequent 2023 EP That Was Then without touring, in a bid to tamp down expectations. Lifeson says work began on Stygian Wavz almost immediately after the first one,” and the growth he felt in the group was exponential.

"It brought us closer together as musical unit," he says. "I love the first album, but this one is more solid to me. Maia matured so much in these last couple of years as a singer, as a songwriter, as a lyricist — all of those things. I have so much respect for her musical energy and the way she writes and the way she thinks, and as a singer — omigod — she's just blossomed.

"She's become my muse. the two of us have a particular relationship in this band where we send stuff back and forth constantly, and we're constantly updating, tweaking, because something one of us does will inspire the other to go to the next step. That's a great way to work."

Lifeson, in fact, sounds particularly unbound on Stygian Wavz’ nine tracks, driving the fat groove rock of the opening "Not Dead Yet," exploring Middle Eastern textures in the title track, building textured layers in "Raindrops," playfully dropping a reference to the Beatles' "Day Tripper" into "Thrill of the Chase" and lacing hot solos throughout the album. He is decidedly more present here, immediately identifiable at time (the solo on "The Story," for instance), and at other times pushes himself in fresh directions.

"I think on the first record I didn't want to be show-offy, so there weren't very many solos," Lifeson explains. "I think I tried to create a guitar presence that was sort of an anti-guitar presence, almost like the guitar was sounding like a completely different instrument, which was challenging and fun for me to do, definitely.

"But I think on this one I felt more confident I could stretch out as a guitarist. There are solos on this record. I'd been kind of moving away from soloing — I don't know why, 'cause I think I'm a decent soloist and I love playing solos. And my mentality in constructing solos is it's all in service of the song; I want to make the solo not some flashy, crazy thing, but something that speaks to the songs. And with this music being so cinematic and ambient, it gave me so much more room to do that.

"So I guess, in a way, I bloomed on this record. I let myself go a little more which is a good thing, 'cause I tend to hold back and be tentative with a lot of things. And on this record I just let go, and there was a new confidence and I had a better, clearer picture of what we wanted to create as a band."

Lifeson certainly has the tools to do that with, and he's happy to show them as he pivots the Zoom camera around to show what's in the "pretty good toolbox" arrayed around him.

There are, of course, the custom electric guitars that bear his name, like his signature Les Paul Axcess as well as the Les Pauls and ES-335s he's been playing since the early days of Rush, and the Godin's Lerxst acoustic models. Some PRS, Fender Telecasters and a Rickenbacker 12-string are also in the mix, as well as "my myriad of acoustics" — Loucins, Martins, Ovations and Gibsons among them — that could fill a small music shop in their own right. A Godin oud makes an appearance on Stygian Wavz’ title track.

Where it gets really interesting, Lifeson notes, is in the realm of effects and amplification — much of which sits to his left in the studio.

"I have all my analog compressors and my beautiful Neves — the 1173s and some other Neves," he says. A Mesa/Boogie Mark V head and a single, 12-inch Celestion cabinet were "primary" for his sound on the new album, while he gushes about his signature IK Multimedia TONEX and Universal Audio pedals.

"They sound amazing," Lifeson says. "They don't sound like plug-ins; they sound like real amps. They've managed to nail the bottom end that was always lacking with plug-ins and really get what an amp sounds like through a speaker cabinet. It's a whole new generation in sound. There's nothing lacking."

And, he adds, there's no shortage of possibilities within this "toolbox." "I like the trial and error part a lot," he says, casting a fond look at the gear pile. "I enhanced the experience with a little cannabis, usually, and I then spend hours going through this gear, because it's so much fun to experiment and hear these things and mess around. That's where I came from, and to this day — at my age, sixty-eleven, if better — I still like to explore all that stuff.

"So it's not ever boring. It's maybe a little time consuming — time-wasting, sometimes — but it's all part of the fun of being a musician and playing in a band."

At this juncture the four Envy of None members have only been in the same room a handful of times, according to Lifeson, but the band talks about playing live "all the time. We would love to do it. In our minds we see the gig in a nice, comfortable, small theater with a nice light show and two albums of really cinematic, trippy, atmospheric music. It would be fantastic."

Economics, of course, play a part in any decision, and even though Lifeson remembers that Rush lost money during its first four years of touring there's no such appetite to repeat that with Envy of None.

"So we're gonna wait," he says. “If the record takes off and does well, and if there's interest there from promoters, maybe we could work something out. It would be awesome."

In the meantime Lifeson says Envy of None will start thinking about album three. One song from the Stygian Wavz session was started but "put on the back burner" as the album was being finished, and while there's no other material around yet he's confident more is in the offing.

"We work like we're in a pyramid; we keep going back and forth until we put the top cap on, and then we know we're done," Lifeson explains. "The last time Maia was here we talked about all kinds of things that we wanted to accomplish, but she likes to work independently, like me, no one else in the room. It's difficult to focus on something if you've got people around you telling you what their ideas are, too, and Maia's the same about how she works. So we'll go back to our own spaces and start to come up with ideas and build from there."

Rush already had one album under their belt when they went into Toronto Sound studio at the end of 1974 to record their sophomore set, Fly by Night. But the Canadian trio's endeavors 50 years ago marked what guitarist Alex Lifeson considers "a new start" for the band.

That year, 1975, featured not one but two impactful studio albums for Rush. Caress of Steel followed Fly by Night's Valentine's Day release by just nine months. It was a one-two punch that put the band on a new creative path and solidified its stature, providing beacons for where Rush would be headed. Key to that was Caress of Steel's side-long, six-part opus, "The Fountain of Lamneth,” which set a benchmark for the following year's triumphant 2112.

"For us it was quite a departure," Lifeson tells us via Zoom from his studio in Toronto ahead of Rush 50, a new 50-track compilation (out March 21) that includes both studio and live takes of the two albums' favorites such as "Anthem," "Fly by Night” and “By-Tor & the Snow Dog."

"We were stretching ourselves more and trying to find somewhere that we wanted to go as a band,” Lifeson explains.

That was made all the more impressive by the fact that, as Lifeson notes, "we were playing 250 shows a year back then. We would be out for three months, come home for a few days and then go back out. I think we spent a couple weeks in the studio on each of those albums. We didn't have much time."

Rush's self-titled 1974 debut and the tour to support it brought about many of the changes the trio would enact for its 1975 releases. The first was the arrival of co-producer Terry Brown late in the making of Rush.

"He saved the first record," Lifeson remembers. "The original mix of the first record was diabolical. It was horrible. We had an in-house engineer/producer, and he mixed it in, I think, two nights or one night or something, and it was terribly disappointing. And we had a couple songs on it that we hated, that we were talked into putting on 'cause they were more 'commercial,’ and all of this crap.

"So we went to Terry and asked if he could remix the record and make it sound more like a rock record rather than this dinky piece of crap that the other guy did. He had the pedigree we wanted. He was English, he came from a very robust musical family environment.

“We went back in to add some things and drop those crappy songs we hated and put in a couple newer songs. And that whole experience with Terry was so comfortable. We didn't work more than a week with him remixing and adding some new songs. It was really the perfect relationship for us. He had great ideas and we could trust him and leave stuff with him. It was a really great, balanced environment."

By the time they made Fly by Night, Lifeson and singer-bassist Geddy Lee were joined by Neil Peart, who came onboard in July 1974, during the Rush tour, to replace founding drummer John Rutsey. In addition to his impressive chops, Peart brought his skills as a lyricist. He dipped into the philosophy of novelist Ayn Rand for "Anthem" and created the multi-pronged fantasy battle in "By-Tor & the Snow Dog.”

“After touring for three or four months with Neil, we were so excited to go in the studio and make a record together," Lifeson says. "This was very fresh, very exciting."

Rush had some fairly lengthy tunes under their belt by this point. Rush tracks like "Working Man" and "Here Again" pushed past the seven-minute mark, while Fly by Night's "By-Tor and the Snow Dog” exceeded eight and a half minutes. The group would exceed those lengths on their next album, Caress of Steel. “The Necromancer” ran for 12 and a half minutes, while “The Fountain of Lamneth” extended to 20 minutes. The musical explorations also became more virtuosic and sophisticated, built on suite-like arrangements with intricate parts and changes.

"I think at the time it was just such a progressive rock thing to do these long, conceptual pieces," Lifeson explains. "We were fans of [the Who’s] Tommy. maybe not quite so much of Quadrophenia, and of course Pink Floyd with the way they were creating their records, Genesis with their long, conceptual pieces…

“That's the world we were in at the time. It was always in our blood, I think, to make records that way, more symphonic in concept with longer movements and moving within that context. It's a nice way to approach it."

At the time, of course, Lifeson did not have the arsenal of instruments and other gear that now decks out the wall and floor space of his studio. He owned a Gibson ES-335 semihollow and a 1970 Les Paul Standard electric guitar (he borrowed an acoustic guitar for the sessions), and was using Marshall amplifiers.

"Eventually I started turning things around,” he explains. “Hi-Watt, then back to Marshall and back and forth to other things."

But Lifeson adds that he did not feel at all limited by the smaller "tool box" at his disposal.

"I was getting so many different tones, even then," he notes. "I would think that if you ask any guitarist about their tone, it's not just one tone but a lot of tones. You can have a trademark tone, certainly, like David Gilmour does. But I hear things different for different songs and different ideas. Lyrics inform me, what the bass line is... All that stuff inspired me to mess around with my tone.

"I pulled back my volume on the guitar to around seven for the rhythm kind of playing, then up full for solos. I kind of relied on my hands and the guitar to create the kind of tone I wanted — cleaner. dirtier, whatever. Now, of course, you have so many tools you can create any kind of tones, but I've always really enjoyed that whole discovery of tone, and I was trying out a lot of things on those albums."

Unfortunately, the musical growth wasn’t always successful. The extended arrangements on tracks like “The Fountain of Lamneth" and “The Necromancer" were "something very new to us," Lifeson remembers. "It was, 'How do we put that together?' We were really feeling ourselves out. We were young and just trying to find the direction with that record."

Not everybody liked it at the time, however. Reviews were mixed, and radio stations who had warmed to Fly by Night didn't find Caress of Steel as accessible.

"That record didn't do very well," Lifeson acknowledges. Rush even called its subsequent road trek the Down the Tubes Tour because of the album’s commercial failure.

"People didn't respond to it. I remember playing Caress for Paul Stanley when we were touring with Kiss," Lifeson says. "We played it, and he had such a look on his face, like 'What the hell is this?' He started smiling and nodding, 'this is great guys...,' then nodding and quickly leaving.

"We were quite disappointed with that, because we thought we'd made something really, really special.”

But their frustration with Steel’s failure pushed them harder on their next album, 1976’s 2112.

“That's what really informed 2112. We were just doing the same thing we did with 'The Fountain of Lamneth,' but we were more pissed-off,” Lifeson reveals. “It was, 'We're gonna do this, and if it doesn't happen we'll just go home and get jobs, I guess. At least we'll go down in flames, fighting.”

2112 did indeed right the course — eventually, as it took awhile to gain momentum — and Rush maintained a steady and ambitious course until it ceased in 2017, with more side-long and conceptual work throughout.

"We were always about exploring and changing," Lifeson explains. "We didn’t really want to be just one thing. We always wanted to move forward from the last thing we did. that was part of that whole mindset."

Brown remained the band's "fourth member" through 1982's Signals and remains a friend, working on remixes for archival releases. Lifeson and Lee have remained best friends since Peart's death in 2020. They’ve performed together at special events — the South Park 25th Anniversary Concert and the Taylor Hawkins tribute concerts, both in 2022 — and still jam with one another, privately. Lee told Rush's story in his 2023 memoir My Effin' Life (his next book, 72 Stories, is due out June 10), Lifeson is part of the band Envy of None, whose second album, Stygian Waves, comes out March 28.

"I go over to Geddy’s house quite often," Lifeson says. "We're just gonna jam and cuck around. We wind up sitting on the couch and drinking coffee and laughing. That's our relationship, best buds.

“We'll always play together. We'll always do something musical together, I think. It doesn't matter whether people hear it or not."

Alex Lifeson has explained what he feels are the “limitations” of the Fender Stratocaster while detailing the crucial mods he made to get his models firing for Rush.

Typically, Lifeson is known as a Les Paul guy, but he’s from one a one-model-player. Throughout his career, he has reached for a variety of six-strings to ensure that Rush’s discography was as colorful as possible, and the Strat has played a role in one of his most famed electric guitars.

The Canadian accepts that single-coil Strats will always be a “useful” tool in any guitarist’s arsenal, but he was left looking for more from his in the late ‘70s. That led to some crucial changes that saw its tailor-made successor dominate the band’s ‘80s output.

His Strat started life as a backup for the Gibson 335 that was primarily used for tracks like “Anthem”’s 7/8 fury and “La Villa Strangiato”’s twisting adventurism.

“The story begins in 1978 when I modified a Fender Stratocaster that I purchased new,” he explains to Guitar World. “I replaced the bridge single-coil with a Gibson humbucker, reversed the input jack for easier access, and added a Floyd Rose tremolo to replace the Fender tremolo. I used this guitar as a spare primarily and started using it increasingly for the Floyd Rose.”

Fleshing out the context of the Strat’s bastardization, he told Ultimate Guitar: “You know, I'm more of a humbucker guy, I always have been. Fenders are very, very useful, single-coils are very, very useful, and I've always had them. But I needed a backup for my 335 at the time.

“I owned a 1956 Strat in 1973 as a backup to the ES-335,” he adds. “It made me think and play differently... and it sounded great.”

But this newly purchased Strat left him wanting more.

“There were limitations to the Fender,” Lifeson explains. “The vibrato arm's range wasn't that great. It was a character that I didn't want. I wanted something that moved more.

“So I remember routing it and installing that thing when we were on tour in England. I think there are photos floating around with me actually working in the dressing room, putting that guitar together.

That led to the birth of the Hentor Sportscaster, which itself wasn’t a Strat-proper, but echoed the good parts of his modded Strat, and eliminated the bad.

“I commissioned Veneman Music to build a replica incorporating a shark neck, Floyd Rose, and Bill Lawrence L500 pickup,” he continues. “This was the Hentor Sportscaster. This became the model for the Lerxst Limelight." Lifeson’s new signature guitar with Godin.

“I used the Hentor on a lot of recordings and particularly liked it for soloing,” he says of the guitar’s legacy. “One standout recording is the solo from ‘Limelight’ – [hence the Lerxst’s name]. It was the perfect selection to create the soulful, elastic and unstable character for the solo of that song.”

Meanwhile, Lifeson has revealed he and Geddy Lee are “bombarded” with offers from drummers desperate to fill Neil Peart's vacant drum stool, but he's in no mood to entertain them,.

Peart, a vital songwriting force in the band, died in 2020. Though the band had already retired, it looked to be the definitive end for the prog legends. But that didn’t stop an army of drummers chancing their arm.

“After Neil passed, it didn't take more than a few minutes before we started getting emails from all kinds of drummers who wanted to audition for the band,” he says. “[They were] thinking that we were just gonna replace somebody that we played with for 40 years who wrote all the lyrics for our music.

“We're bombarded by it all the time. I don't know what some of these people were thinking.”

His comments come after revealing how he and Geddy, who still live minutes away from one another, regularly jam and have been recording their sessions. However, he believes they sound like “a really bad tribute band” and simply sees their time together as a way to keep sharp.

Lifeson's priorities seem to lie with Lerxst and his new band, Envy of None.

When Rush ended their 40-year journey, Alex Lifeson decided he was going to spend his time working on his solo career.

Instead, he teamed up with the musicians in the Canadian/American band Envy of None, which will release their much-anticipated second album, Stygian Wavz, on March 14. The group has recently issued the album’s first singles, "Not Dead Yet" and "Under the Stars.”

It must feel a little like déjà vu for Lifeson, considering that he was releasing Rush’s own sophomore album, Fly by Night, 50 years ago this past February. Back then, he was still developing his electric guitar style, having learned an important lesson in playing pinch harmonics first-hand from Rory Gallagher.

Given his past success and fame, Lifeson must feel a great deal more security this time around. As he told Guitar Player in 2004, Rush had no expectation they’d be a going concern in the 21st century, let along the 1980s, when they were releasing their second album.

“I was surprised to even be around that long,” he revealed. “I remember saying in 1974, when we started our first American tour, that if we could get five years out of this thing it would be quite remarkable. That was about the extent of a band's longevity at the time.”

The group endured a big moment of vulnerability in 1975 when they released their third album, Caress of Steel. Coming after the moderate success of Fly by Night, the album saw them move away from a blues-based sound of their previous albums and head in a more prog-rock direction with songs that included “The Necromancer” and "The Fountain of Lamneth.”

Caress of Steel proved to be a commercial disaster, however, threatening the group's future. Still, Lifeson sees it as something of a proving ground.

“We were very proud of Caress of Steel,” Lifeson said. “We were experimenting with a lot of things: writing more extended songs, doing a whole theme on an album side, and so on. The record wasn't a great commercial success, but artistically it was — to us, at least. We were exploring and taking pretty big steps for the time.

“But management was concerned. Our record label, Mercury, was concerned, and I remember them thinking that it was probably wisest to take a couple steps back and do a record that was more like our first album with shorter, straight-ahead rock songs.

“We thought, Listen, we're gonna do what we're gonna do. If it crashes and burns, so be it. At least we stuck to our guns, and did it the way we thought we should.”

Their fortitude paid off with their next album, 2112. Released in 1976, the album saw Rush merge the longer prog aspects of Caress of Steel with a group of shorter hard rock-oriented tunes, which were relegated to the album’s side two. The result was the group’s commercial breakthrough in the United States.

“The concept of 2112 came up, and it was our way of fighting against the establishment and stating our creative independence,” Lifeson says. “I figured that if it didn't work, I could get a job if I had to.

“Of course, that record came out, and it was instantly successful. It spoke to a lot of our fans, and, consequently, I think the record company thought, You know what? These guys are doing what they think is right, so let's give them their space and hope for the best."

Lifeson said the era was right for that kind of experimentation, in part because record companies were more inclined to nurture groups rather than view them as commercial properties.

“Record companies have become speculators, rather than developers,” he said in 2004. “Nowadays, you have to come in with a completed record, and it's released on spec. If it instantly does okay, you might get a deal. If it doesn't, you'll get dropped.

“When we got our deal in '74, it was for five records. We were a young, unknown band. The record company looked at it like, ‘Let them work their stuff out for the first couple of records, and, hopefully, when the third record hits and is successful, then we've got two more records to capitalize on that success.’ Opportunities like ours just don't seem to be around anymore.”

During his Rush tenure, Lifeson was often seen with a white Gibson ES-355TD, a guitar he used on almost every Rush album and frequently employed in performance. He recalled the pain of auctioning the guitar in 2022 as he culled his collection, calling it “probably one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done in my life."

Although Rush broke up in 2015, Lifeson recently revealed that he and bassist Geddy Lee still get together every week to jam. And despite his fame, Lifeson proved he is still a fan at heart when it comes to some guitarists, as when he had the thrill of a lifetime to meet his hero Jimmy Page in 1996.

Rush were progressive-rock pioneers, but beneath the layers of mind-boggling time signature changes and maze-like song structures, they were a blues band. And for guitarist Alex Lifeson, few blues guitarists captured his imagination like Rory Gallagher did.

Lifeson says Eric Clapton was another he’d obsess over in his early playing days, citing Slowhand's work on Cream's "Spoonful" as the first guitar solo he ever learned to play. Jimmy Page was another — Lifeson said “he was everything I hoped he would be,” when the pair finally crossed paths.

But Gallagher holds an extra special place in his heart.

Lifeson says he stumbled upon the Irish guitarist's work when Gallagher was in Taste, his pre-solo career outfit. He recalls being “really impressed” by what he heard.

“It was blues-based,” Lifeson tells the Gallagher's YouTube channel. “But he was in a lot of ways a great rock guitarist. He had so much energy in his playing; he wasn't a typical blues player.

“His style,” he adds, “was all of his own. It was a reflection of his soul, truly. And his vocals and guitar playing together made for this really, really special thing that very few people have.”

Before Rush were selling out arenas, they were cutting their teeth as a support act alongside heavy hitters like Aerosmith, Thin Lizzy, and — perhaps most strangely — Kiss.

The Canadian outfit released their debut record in March 1974, and by that fall were embarking on their first-ever tour as the opener on a three-band bill headlined by Gallagher.

“Playing with Rory was a real treat,” Lifeson reminisces. “In the fall of 1974, we were 20 years old — this was our first tour. It was exciting, but we didn't know our place. We were trying to stay in the background and be as polite as possible and not be a bunch of dicks basically.

“Right from the get-go, Rory and the band were so hospitable and accommodating,” he continues. “I would watch Rory every night and go back to the dressing room and just play. I was so inspired.

"Honest to god, his soul was just amazing. To see him close his eyes and lose himself in his guitar playing was truly remarkable. There's a purity to it.”

Fast forward six years and the tables had turned. The success of Moving Pictures' — today regarded as one of the greatest prog albums ever made — had catapulted Rush to the top of the bill. This time, Rory would support them.

“Things were really going gangbuster for us, and there was an offer of Rory to open for a tour, and we were absolutely all over it,” Lifeson says smiling. “That's when I really got to know him. We spent a lot of free time together. On a day off we would sit and talk for hours, and maybe drink a little bit too much.”

Family and politics became two bonding points. Gallagher spoke about growing up during the Troubles in Ireland, while Lifeson, of Yugoslavian heritage, saw parallels with the struggles his ancestors faced. Hearing this, Gallagher bought him a copy of Irish novelist Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman.

“He said, ‘You've got to read this. He's a great satirist. It gives you an eye for that Irish humor!’ I read the book and I got back to him days later, I guess, and said I really enjoyed it.

“We had a bit of a break,” Lifeson continues. “He went back to Ireland and then came back to North America and bought me the whole series of books.

“It wasn't just about the music. He was so thoughtful and considerate to other people. He was such a wonderful person. Never mind his talents and skills, he was just a really great man”

Lifeson drew influence from Gallagher “from a very early time,” and says he was “honored” to have spent two tours with his idol. That first tour, in 1974, proved particularly fruitful for a young Lifeson, during which he learned one key trick from Gallagher that was subsequently heard all over Rush's extensive back catalog.

“He had this way of getting harmonics from a guitar pick by just picking in a certain way and I'd never heard anyone do that ever. I heard it all over his stuff,” he reflects. “And I thought, Wow, what an effective thing to do. I employ the little trick in all my stuff all the time, and I learned it directly from him.”

While Lifeson doesn't elaborate on this point, Gallagher's technique was pinch harmonics, a picking style which Leslie West, as he revealed to Guitar Player in 1972.

Gallagher passed in 1995 and his gear had been under the charge of his family, who loaned it to museums and musicians, up until last year. There was outrage at first when the Gallgher family announced the sale of his iconic, time-beat ‘61 Stratocaster, with campaigns launched to keep it in Ireland as a symbol of the country’s cultural heritage.

It sold for a staggering $1.16 million and was then donated to the National Museum of Ireland, where it is expected to remain.

The Irish blues icon was honored with a statue in Belfast, Northern Ireland earlier this year. However, one key detail appeared to be wrong.

Meanwhile, Alex Lifeson is busy with his Lerxst gear brand. He recently reissued his famous Hentor Sportcaster as the Grace. In April, he will also release his second album with his new band Envy of None.

Although Alex Lifeson cites many influences on his playing — including Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend and Steve Hackett — the biggest is, without a doubt, Jimmy Page. Here Lifeson tells Guitar Player about meeting the electric guitar player who once called Rush "One of the young bands that I like."

"I saw Led Zeppelin in Toronto in 1969 after waiting in line for 15 hours,” Lifeson recalls. “We sat on the floor in front of Jimmy, about three people back. I was so impressed. I wanted to look like him, and play like him, and be just like him. If there was any single person I ever wanted to meet, it was him, but I never thought I would have the opportunity.”

That changed in the mid 1990s, when Page and Robert Plant began touring together as Page and Plant following the release of their Platinum-selling live album, No Quarter. Some time prior to that, Rush bassist Geddy Lee met Plant while in Morocco, as he describes in the video clip below. When the Page and Plant tour landed in Toronto, Geddy and Lifeson were on the guest list.

"Robert invited us to the Page/Plant show in Toronto,” Lifeson continues. “When we went backstage, Jimmy came into the room, and I started shaking. I was that excited. He was so sweet, and so charming and engaging. It was incredible.”

Lifeson had recently put out his 1996 solo album, Victor, and brought along a copy to give to Page.

“I built up the nerve to give it to him,” he recalls. “I had written in it that he was such an inspiration, and that his influence was all over the record. I said, 'I hope you don't mind, but this is my solo record and I'd like you to have it.' He stood up and gave me a hug and thanked me. We walked down to the stage with them, and they had set up a couple of chairs for us by the [monitor mixing] board. Jimmy kept looking over and smiling at me when he would play these great signature parts.

“He played so well. Just incredible. I was like kid. I can picture the dressing room, with Robert sitting across from me and Jimmy sitting to my left asking me questions. I can take myself right back there, and it just feels great.

“You meet your hero, and he's a hero! He was everything I hoped he would be. I'll never ever forget that."

As Lifeson has explained to Guitar Player on previous occasions, he gives special props to Pete Townshend for inspiring him both as a rhythm guitarist and as a songwriter. Townshend is himself known to declare himself rock's finest strummer, having said, "There's no one to touch me." His influence on Lifeson, Lee and the late Rush drummer Neil Peart played out when the group recorded their 2004 EP Feedback, featuring covers of songs by 1960s groups that were influential to the band, including the Who's 1970 single "The Seeker." .

“When Geddy and I were going through a list of influential songs that we were going to do for Feedback, I realized how much of Pete was in my playing,” Lifeson says. “That's how I learned to play rhythm guitar. In a three-piece band, you really have to be aware of your rhythm playing. It's all about how you fill in the space, and how you move in and out of the melodies, especially with a rhythm section like Geddy and Neil.

“And I just learned so much from Pete. He's such a great strummer — so unique. His style of soloing was so effective, and he was the only guy who could make an acoustic guitar sound heavier than a Les Paul. He's such a well-rounded, fantastic guitarist, as well as a fabulous songwriter.

Lifeson adds that Townshend’s progressive-rock approach to songwriting informed his own, particularly during the era of 2112 and Hemispheres.

“Absolutely. We learned a lot about songwriting from them,” he says. “I think you can be influenced by someone, and not sound anything like them. There are bands like Porcupine Tree that cite Rush as a major influence. They don't sound like us, but I hear it in their arranging and their dynamics.”

And when it comes to the guitarists he’s toured with over the years, Lifeson said a few players stand out in his mind.

“A great bill was UFO and Rush. We had such a ride together,” he says. “Michael Schenker and I got along so well. What I remember most about Michael was showing up for soundcheck at 4:00, and Michael would already be there, warming up for a couple of hours. He would play constantly. There was always so much passion in his playing."

He likewise praised Steve Morse, who recently told Guitar Player how he manages to stay in love with guitar playing after so many years.

“Steve Morse is one of the nicest people I've ever met. He's another guy where we'd be onstage doing soundcheck, and he'd be walking around the arena practicing incessantly. He's an incredible musician. He's such a great player that he deserves more.

Lifeson also weighed in on Eric Johnson, who recently spoke of his friendship with fellow Austinite, the late Stevie Ray Vaughan.

“Eric Johnson did two tours with us," Lifeson noted. "I used to go watch him play almost every night. What struck me most was the beautiful sensibility in his playing —so warm and complete and articulate. And the guy is just nuts with his tone. I've always loved his guitar playing.”

In related news, Lifeson recently revealed that he and Lee still get together and jam on a weekly basis. While they record their sessions, Lifeson says they have no plans to make another run together as Rush.

"Once a week I go to Ged’s — it’s in the calendar — keep my fingers moving, play Rush stuff, new jams," he told Classic Rock. “We do record it, but I couldn’t even begin to tell you where it’ll go.”

The death of Rush drummer Neil Peart on January 7, 2020, was untimely. For Rush fans, the loss was compounded by the obvious fact that a band reunion was no longer possible. The group had called it quits in 2015, following a 40-year career.

The news may be looking a smidgen more hopeful for them, however. Guitarist Alex Lifeson has revealed that his relationship with bass player and vocalist Geddy Lee is as strong as ever and that the duo continue to jam and record together.

The two men haven't exactly been strangers onstage in recent years. They performed with Dave Grohl at the Taylor Hawkins tribute concert at Wembley Stadium in September 2002. In May 2024, they appeared as L+L at a tribute show to their fellow Canadian, the late Gordon Lightfoot. Lifeson also made a guest appearance during Lee’s My Effin Life book tour in 2023.

But Lifeson's latest reveal is the first time we've heard about the two men getting together on a regular basis.

Lifeson told Classic Rock their sessions are planned. "Once a week I go to Ged’s – it’s in the calendar – keep my fingers moving, play Rush stuff, new jams," he said.

“We do record it,” he confirms, “but I couldn’t even begin to tell you where it’ll go.”

Speaking to Rolling Stone, Lifeson said their initial jams sounded like “a really bad tribute band for the first three or four run-throughs.

“Then muscle memory kicks in, and we’re having a ball doing it. It’s good for the fingers,” he continued. “We’re together in a room like we’ve always been."

However, Lifeson was resolute that their new work would not lead to a new version of Rush. "There’s no chance that we’re going to get a drummer and go back on the road as the rebirth of Rush or something like that,” he told Rolling Stone.

Lee, too, has also said little about it.

“Al and I are lifelong friends. We jam together once in a while, it’s true,” he admits. “That’s all I want to say about that right now.”

The two musicians had talked highly about their time returning to the stage with Grohl for a second Hawkins tribute in L.A., with Tool's Danny Carey on drums. The drummer has since performed in Beat, the King Crimson legacy band featuring Adrian Belew, Steve Vai and bassist Tony Levin.

Sadly, Lifeson and Lee are not looking to resurrect the band that had bowed out across a 35-date R40 tour in 2015.

“After those two gigs and the months of prep Ged and I went through, I was excited by the response and to be in the dressing room again with so many fellow artists in Wembley and L.A. I respected and felt a kinship towards,” Lifeson says. “But after a few weeks, that wore off and it occurred to me that, despite all the pain of loss, Rush went out on a high note, playing as well as ever with one of our best stage shows on R40," the group's final tour.

“I guess I’d rather be remembered for that legacy than returning as the top Rush tribute band.”

For those wanting to hear new music from one of prog rock’s greatest electric guitar players, Lifeson released two new songs, "Not Dead Yet" and "Under the Stars" with his band Envy of None last year. A new album is slated for spring 2025.

As he neared the end of recording his first solo album, Hiding in Plain Sight, Chris Herin was approached by the Laser's Edge Records owner Ken Golden with a question.

"He said, 'You've got all these guitar players on here. Did you do any of your own soloing?' " the Michigan-based Herin recalls with a laugh. "I said, ‘Well, you bring up a good point.' I didn't end up doing a whole lot of soloing on this. I'm mostly there as a songwriter, and I play almost all of the rhythm guitars and different fills and embellishments.

"I guess you could say I got a bit carried away bringing all the guitar players for all the lead work."

But it's an impressive corps Herin assembled for the 11-song set — one that might lead some to wonder how this guy who has limited (but not unsubstantial) stature get all these people to play on his album.

Hiding in Plain Sight — co-produced by Herin and Terry Brown (Rush, Cutting Crew, Fates Warning) — features contributions by the likes of Peter Frampton, Rush's Alex Lifeson, Jethro Tull alumnus Martin Barre, Kim Mitchell and Crown Lands' Kevin Comeau. In all more than 30 musicians are part of the project, including a cadre of vocalists ("I'm not much of a singer," Herin confesses) and other instrumentalists.

"I'm certainly one of the luckiest guys when it comes to being able to enlist so many fabulous musicians — not just the marquee-value guys but some of the other guitarists and drummers who aren't elevated into the stratosphere end of the general public's awareness," says Herin.

Herin isn't exactly unknown. He's the cofounder of the Detroit prog quartet Tiles, a group that's been in existence since 1993 and is one of the first bands signed to Germany's InsideOut Music. Tiles earned international acclaim with its six studio albums but went on hiatus during 2018 after singer Paul Rarick retired, giving Herin an opening to do something on his own.

"Over the years I've demoed songs with Terry as they cropped up," he says, "and I wanted to memorialize them so they didn't slip through my fingers. These songs had been developed up to a certain point with guitar parts, bass parts, some placeholder drum patterns, and I could kind of hum the melody lines. I thought, Well, jeez, these songs are fairly well developed, and I liked them all. So I thought, Let's finish these off and put them out to the public."

Fans of Tiles — and of Discipline, another Detroit band Herin works with — might be surprised by the results. While prog and what he calls "melodic rock songs" are the core of Hiding in Plain Sight, the material stretches in a few different directions, whether it's the straightforward mainstream rock of "The Heart of You" (which features Frampton), the elegiac madrigal of "Living in the Night" or the jazzy touches of the album-closing "White Dandelion."

"I didn't feel like I needed to stick really close to what I had written with Tiles," explains Herin, who played primarily his 1990 Paul Reed Smith with the occasional Fender Stratocaster and Telecaster and Gibson ES-335 for "a nice blend of tonality." He used a Mesa/Boogie 2/Ninety power amp with a Boogie TriAxis preamp and a John Petrucci signature head, as well as a Mesa TA15 with an open-back cabinet when he was working at Brown's studio in northern Ontario.

"I think it was just natural the way the songs came out," Herin continues. "I looked at the variation in the compositions as a good thing, and hopefully people will like that variety."

The guests, meanwhile, came from a combination of "my associations and Terry's connections," according to Herin, and the two "recruited people and kind of aligned them with the style of songs and what we felt would be suitable for their contribution." Lifeson says Brown contacted him during April 2019 and delivered his work by September of that year. "Chris is a well-rounded player, and his songwriting has a nice balance of instrumental and vocal pace that accommodates atmospheric layers of instrumentation," Lifeson says. "It was a pleasure for me to add to his work."

And Herin was happy to showcase what he felt was some different kind of playing from Lifeson on "Second Ending."

"He's not playing a solo and he's not playing power chords," Herin notes. "He's doing acoustic guitars and a whole tapestry of atmospheric soundscapes, and they sound really, remarkably beautiful."

For his part, Lifeson explains that, "I prefer to keep a relatively low profile when I'm guesting on another artist's work and look to provide a fuller background to their arrangement. I concentrated on the choruses and layered electric and acoustic guitars with an ambient approach." Herin says he's planning to create some alternate mixes "that focus on Alex's soundscapes and texture and will be a different experience to the entire band approach."

Brown also reached out to Frampton, who, like many of the album's contributors was struck by Herin's lyrics drawn from his late father's battle with Alzheimer's disease during the 2000s. "The unfortunate thing is almost everybody who participated had some close family member that has suffered from dementia or Alzheimer's," says Herin, who will donate some proceeds from Hiding in Plain Sight's sales to Alzheimer's charities. But having the newly minted Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee onboard for "The Heart of You" was a particular thrill, he adds.

"I've been a Peter Frampton fan for 40-plus years, so it was just so fun to have him participate," Herin says. "It's a pretty catchy pop-rock song, and he's got such an identifiable melodic sense, besides his touch and phrasing. He provided a little lead guitar in the intro and then the re-intro, and of course the solo. We left him a lot of space to stretch out on the ride out of the song, too.

"It was just so fun to hear his track all by itself and the effects he used. For a guy that's been around for a long time it was so great to see just how enthused he was in getting the sound he wanted, the effects he used, the microphone and the setting. He and Terry went back and forth and talked about the technicalities of that approach, which was pretty fascinating."

Barre, meanwhile, was full of surprises for "The Darkest Hour," a track that reunited him with longtime Tull drummer Doane Perry for the first time in more than a dozen years.

"Doane had already done his drum parts, so Martin was immediately kind of intrigued," Herin says. "I just asked if he would do a guitar solo in the middle of the song...and when we got it back from Martin he did the guitar solo but also did a bunch of great mandolin, additional electric rhythm guitars and, to our surprise, all of a sudden there's flute parts!” In addition to his guitar talents, Barre is an able flutist, saxophonist and mandolin player. “He clearly kept his flute skills up all these years.

"The one thing I can say about Martin, besides the uniqueness of his style, is he is playing just jumps right out at you. It has that presence...and it just took the song and elevated it with the energy that he brings through his playing."

For his part, Barre says that, "I love that I was given free rein on the track and gave it the full MB treatment — mandolin, flutes, floating guitar chords and a melodic solo. Essentially it's a great song, and I thought, Don't fuck it up!"

Herin has several songs he worked on for Hiding in Plain Sight but didn't include on the album, and he won't rule out the possibility of another solo effort. But his next move is "getting the Tiles machine back together" with drummer Mark Evans and bassist Jeff Whittle. Two epic-length tracks have been written so far, Herin says, and he doesn't expect it to be long before the proverbial LP's worth of tunes will be in hand.

"As this project was wrapping up I started to feel the energy to get back to writing, so I've got this huge backlog of ideas that just come popping out of your head," says Herin, joking that since he's "on the older end of the spectrum" he still uses a hand-held cassette recorder capture those. "We do need to take a different approach to the vocal chair; maybe now that I've seen what it takes to bring in guests that might be a new and viable approach that never used to be there, so there are some exciting possibilities."

Rush’s surviving members, guitarist Alex Lifeson and bassist Geddy Lee, made a surprise appearance at a Gordon Lightfoot tribute concert in Toronto last week (May 23), putting a progressive spin on his track, The Way I Feel.

The event at Toronto’s Massey Hall celebrated the music and legacy of the Canadian singer-songwriter, a year after his passing at the age of 84. 

The identity of the Rush men was kept secret in the lead-up to the event, with their performance billed under the red herring name of “L+L.” The rouse was given up, to the delight of the audience, as they joined the Canadian alt-country band Blue Rodeo on stage. 

They ran through a Rush-ified version of Lightfoot’s 1966 track, with the pair singling it out for its ability to be molded to their iconic playing styles.   

“It was important for us to pay tribute to Gordon,” Lee told Variety after their set. “Not being folk or pop artists, Alex and I were looking for one of Gordon’s songs that might better suit our style of play and we found that in The Way I Feel. Its structure was loose and more open to interpretation than many of his more popular tunes.” 

He went on to reveal that Lightfoot's daughter, Meredith [Moon], had reacted to the performance by saying, “Leave it to Rush to make The Way I Feel sound prog.’” 

To that, Lee joked, “I think we succeeded.” 

Lifeson donned his PRS SE Alex Lifeson Thinline signature acoustic guitar for the song before they returned to the stage for an ensemble version of Lightfoot’s Summerside of Life on a packed-out stage.

While Lifeson may be putting his energy into his Lerxst gear brand nowadays, this isn’t the first time the pair have taken to the stage since the untimely passing of drummer Neil Peart. 

They tore through some classic Rush tracks with Dave Grohl at the Taylor Hawkins tribute concert in 2022, with Lifeson also recently revealing that he and Lee have been jamming together. Lifeson, though, played down claims Rush could return to the stage, saying, “We sound like a really bad tribute band.” 

To explore Alex Lifeson’s hugely influential playing style, check out Guitar Player’s guide to his genius chord voicings. 

Perhaps the most accurate and astute observation of Rush’s sound I’ve ever heard came from my then-seven-year-old daughter, Sofia.

Upon hearing their classic track “The Spirit of Radio” for the first time, she concluded, “It sounds like they’re playing three songs at once… but in a good way!”

Sofia seemed to get to the heart of the Canadian trio’s appeal – namely, their ability to seamlessly blend complexity with unbridled visceral thrill by combining elements of prog rock, heavy metal and new wave into a unique and evolving style.

From their 1974 self-titled debut album until their unofficial “retirement” in 2015 – following the triumphant Clockwork Angels album – Rush have cultivated and maintained an intensely loyal and growing fan base.

They are a particular favorite among musicians, who seem exceptionally captivated with the artistry and elite ninja-level chops of drummer Neil Peart, bassist/keyboardist/vocalist Geddy Lee and guitarist Alex Lifeson.

Despite being scorned by critics and ignored by radio for the majority of their career, Rush packed hockey arenas worldwide.

Over the course of their career, they notched 24 Gold, 14 Platinum and three multi-Platinum album awards.

However, the most undeniable evidence of their status as a “people’s band” came in 2013, when they were voted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by a two-to-one margin over their nearest competitor.

Rush started out as a power-chord-and blues scale-driven rock trio, but their sound grew in its ambition and complexity as the group began experimenting with odd-meter grooves, extended song forms, keyboards, Moog Taurus pedals, acoustic instruments, sequencers and literary lyrical themes.

At their creative best, they were able to transcend the limits of the guitar-bass-drums power-trio format and alchemize into an expansive, multilayered orchestral sound that’s breathtaking in both ambition and execution.

Lifeson’s complex and clever chord work are at the heart of this amazing engine.

Not content with pedestrian open chord shapes, barre chords and power chords, he regularly sought out lush and uncommon voicings.

Taking a page from the Pete Townshend rhythm guitar playbook, Lifeson would emulate closed-voiced keyboard-style triads by fretting on the high strings.

Ex. 1a offers three of his favorite grips based on the top three strings of moveable open A, E and D shapes.

Ex. 1b is reminiscent of the build-up in “Discovery” from “2112” (2112), the bridge of “Red Barchetta” (Moving Pictures) and the chordal riff just before the verses in “Freewill” (Permanent Waves).

This example dynamically juxtaposes these three shapes up and down the neck against a palm-muted open-D-string pedal point.

Another hallmark of the Lifeson lexicon is his liberal use of static open strings in chord shapes that he shifts up and down the neck.

The Dadd4/2 in Ex. 2a is simply an open C chord shape shifted up two frets, while including the open G and high E strings.

Add a rolling arpeggiation pattern with the pick hand and a modulation up a minor third (three frets’ distance) to Fmaj7add2, as shown in Ex. 2b, to experience some of the melodicism of Rush ballads like “Tears” (2112) and “Different Strings” (Permanent Waves).

Ex. 3a illustrates some of Lifeson’s other favorite go-to chord voicings, specifically, moveable fretted shapes with the two highest strings open (E5add#4 and F#7add4) and sus2 power chords with the root on the fifth or fourth string (Esus2 and the Asus2/E).

By substituting these voicings for stock barre chords, Lifeson is able to enhance and intensify the harmonic depth and appeal of his chord work.

Dig how a basic E-F#-A-B chord pattern gets blasted into hyperspace in Ex. 3b by simply sliding the E-shape voicing of the F#7add4 chord up the neck against the open B and E strings in bars 3 and 4, and by then substituting the sus2 shapes for the second pass through the four-bar progression, beginning in bar 5.

These kinds of clever chordal tactics can be heard on the verses to “Xanadu,” (A Farewell to Kings) and “The Spirit of Radio” (Permanent Waves), as well as the “Prelude” to “Cygnus X-I Book II: Hemispheres” (Hemispheres).

The E5add#4 and F#7add4 chords also figure very prominently in the chorus of “Limelight” (Moving Pictures).

Ex. 4a demonstrates some of Lifeson’s varied arsenal of chord voicings on the three lowest strings.

For many guitarists, the basic root-fifth-octave power chord is the default low-string grip, but ever the explorer, Lifeson also incorporates root-5-major 7 (the Fmaj7sus2) and root-3-major 7 (the Gmaj7) voicings as well.

Even when grabbing a standard-issue power chord, he will often enliven it by adding an open G string (the Fsus2).

After familiarizing yourself with these chord shapes, play through Ex. 4b which, although it isn’t based on any one particular Rush song, contains elements of the first half of “Cygnus X-1 Book II: Hemispheres” (Hemispheres), the verses in “New World Man” (Signals) and the main figure of “No One at the Bridge” (Caress of Steel).

Notice the pedaling on the open G string throughout.

The A7add4 grip in Ex. 5a isn’t exactly what Lifeson plays during the instrumental interlude in “The Trees” (Hemispheres), but it occupies the same harmonic space.

Ex. 5b, an arpeggiation of this chord, is an example of how Rush would effectively juxtapose lilting harmonic figures against jagged, odd-meter rhythmic motifs, exemplified here in 7/4 meter.

In many Rush songs, Lifeson would often hang tight on an ostinato (repeating) figure while Lee created tension by shifting bass notes underneath it, as illustrated in Ex. 5c. (Hint: in the actual version of “The Trees,” the band is grooving in 5/4 meter, and Lee plays the bass notes G, A, G and D for a measure each.)

For our final example, let’s explore how Lifeson uses a fifth-string-root B5 chord as a jump-off point for I-IV-V-Vim-based chord progressions (E-A-B-C#m) in the key of E.

Familiarize yourself with the grips shown in Ex.6a, then arpeggiate them, as demonstrated in Ex. 6b.

The “trick” here is to keep your fourth finger “planted” on the B note on the G string’s fourth fret throughout and sound the open B note, as well.

Played as arpeggios, these voicings are evocative of Lifeson’s intro riff to “Time Stand Still” (Hold Your Fire) and the verses to “Clockwork Angels” (Clockwork Angels).

Additionally, if you strum the B5, Asus2 and E5 chords against a 7/4 groove you’ll get the chordal riff just before the verses in “Limelight” (Moving Pictures).

Aside from his harmonic innovations, Lifeson is a sonic explorer.

While his “signature sound” is arguably a Gibson cranked through Hughes & Kettner heads, much of his clean tone sparkle on earlier records was tracked with a Roland JC-120 amp.

Try playing these examples with a clean or slightly overdriven tone with lots of chorus and ambient delay.

More important than copying Lifeson’s licks or tone is being inspired by his exploratory spirit and dedication to his and his band’s artistic vision.

He is truly one of the greats.

It's pretty simple really: Whatever style of music you play if your rhythm stinks, you stink. And deserving or not, guitarists have a reputation for having less-than-perfect time.

But it’s not as if perfect meter makes you a perfect rhythm player. There’s something else. Something elusive. A swing, a feel, or a groove – you know it when you hear it, or feel it. Each player on this list has “it,” regardless of genre, and if there’s one lesson all of these players espouse it’s never take rhythm for granted. Ever.

Deciding who made the list was not easy, however. In fact, at times it seemed downright impossible. What was eventually agreed upon was that the players included had to have a visceral impact on the music via their rhythm chops. Good riffs alone weren’t enough. An artist’s influence was also factored in, as many players on this list single-handedly changed the course of music with their guitar and a groove.

As this list proves, rhythm guitar encompasses a multitude of musical disciplines. There isn’t one “right” way to play rhythm, but there is one truism: If it feels good, it is good.

50. Chuck Berry

Chuck Berry changed the rhythmic landscape of popular music forever. And his unique sense of groove and pocket is much deeper than it may seem upon first listen, as sideman extraordinaire and all around badass player Rick Vito pointed out in GP: “On many of his tunes, such as ‘Carol,’ ‘Little Queenie,’ and ‘Johnny B. Goode,’ you’ll find Chuck playing a rhythm that is a cross between an eighth-note downstroke shuffle and a straight eighth-note rock feel. But he changed the accents of the shuffle so that it mixed those two feels and made the groove jump and swing more.” 

In the end, the boundless energy and utter timelessness of Berry’s music speaks for itself. As does the fact that without him there would be no Beatles, no Stones, and maybe no rock and roll. 

Hail! Hail! Rock and roll!

49. Lindsey Buckingham

“I want to make the big picture as interesting as possible,” says Buckingham, who has merged pop songcraft and stellar guitar like few ever have. In fact, Buckingham strives for making everything he plays absolutely essential to the tune. His unbelievably inventive rhythm approach combines a wickedly precise right hand, propulsive fingerstyle figures that are informed by banjo rolls, and an attention to groove detail that can’t be denied. 

His ability to make multiple, and different, rhythm guitar parts work seamlessly in a tune (like on all of Rumours), is as classy as classy gets. 

LB is an incredible stylist whose sense of time was honed on Chet Atkins and Merle Travis – i.e. never lazy.

48. Maybelle Carter

To call Carter’s patented “Carter Scratch” rhythm guitar is selling it short – her style not only provided melody, harmony, and rhythm to the music of the Carter Family, it also laid the blueprint for all of country and folk music to come.

“I love Mother Maybelle’s playing,” Marty Stuart told GP. “I thought she had the most beautiful touch I have ever heard.” 

Equipped with her Gibson L-5, Carter would fill out the tunes by putting a melody on the bass strings with her thumb while alternating the chords on the treble strings with her index finger. 

Simple, yet beautifully effective.

47. Catfish Collins

As a member of the J.B.s, backing up James Brown, Collins’ work is featured on the classics “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine” and “Soul Power,” among many others. Also dig the killin’ instrumentals “The Grunt,” and “These Are the J.B.s.” 

Collins was with the Godfather of Soul for less than a year, eventually joining his brother Bootsy on Funkadelic’s 1972 album America Eats Its Young. He eventually played on a slew of Parliament albums (that’s Collins on the righteous funk anthem, “Flash Light.”) too. 

Sadly, Collins passed away in 2010, but he left a hell of a funky legacy with his classic, greasy take on funk guitar.

46. Steve Cropper

“A lot of people have asked me why I didn’t solo more,” said Steve Cropper in 1994. “All I could ever say was that, when I solo, I miss my rhythm too much.” 

Perhaps the ultimate team player, Cropper’s rhythm method displays a funkiness that transcends simple sixteenth-note chord chanks or overtly syncopated figures. Instead, Cropper’s weapon of choice is a sensei-like sense of when to strike with the perfect chord voicing, lick, or, well, nothing. 

“Otis Redding was a big influence on me,” said Cropper. “He made me think and play a lot more simply, so that different notes would really count dynamically – find a hole and plant something in there that means something.”

45. Bo Diddley

The only player on the list who actually has a rhythm named after him, Diddley – unlike a lot of guitarists – never worked as a sideman. “I always had my own group, he said. “I never played sideman for nobody.” 

With some of the funkiest tones known to man, Diddley relied on his mutated rumba, often chucking chord changes altogether and putting all of his chips down on the groove. Classic sides such as “I’m a Man” and “Hey Bo Diddley” sound as fresh now as the day they were cut. 

Tell me now, who do you love?

44. Lonnie Donegan

Many players on this list were instigators of a revolution, but it would be tough to find an artist who was on the ground floor of a bigger uprising than Donegan, as he inspired an entire generation of British kids to pick up a guitar and pound away on three chords. 

Arguably rhythm guitar playing in its purest form, Donegan popularized skiffle – a hopped up mixture of swing jazz, blues, and folk with a driving acoustic guitar serving as the engine to make it go. 

It’s not hard to imagine teenagers such as John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and Pete Townshend completely losing their minds upon hearing Donegan’s “Rock Island Line” for the very first time.

43. Cornell Dupree

“I’ll push my groove button and groove,” said the late, great Dupree, who passed away in 2011. Dupree played with more people than he could even remember – from Streisand to Ringo and Midler to Miles – but he’s most famous for his work with Aretha Franklin (Live at the Fillmore, and Amazing Grace are particularly savory), Donny Hathaway’s Live, and Dupree’s personal fave, King Curtis’ Live at the Fillmore West. 

Dupree’s signature rhythmic style was supple, exhibiting equal parts gritty funkiness and understated elegance. His ethos was “less is more.” 

If you have something to say, say it, and if you don’t, stay out of the way.

42. The Edge

Harmonic, rhythmic, and textural, The Edge is a triple threat of rhythm guitar goodness. On U2’s earlier records, such as Boy and War, he blew minds with his chimey echoes and efficient chord voicings, which packed an Ali-sized punch when combined with his huge sense of pocket and clockwork right hand. 

As the years wore on, his playing still exhibited the same elements, but on an even grander scale with The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree. 

As the ’90s dawned, The Edge began hammering out distorted slabs of aggro power chording and getting funkier. “Rock and roll started out as dance music, but somewhere along the way it lost its hips,” he told GP in 2000. “The emergence of hiphop and dance culture upped the ante in the rhythm department – and there’s no going back. 

"Listeners aren’t going to accept lazy rhythms anymore.”

41. Don Everly

When Keith Richards name checks you as having a profound influence on his rhythm style, well, you’re pretty damn influential. 

The Everly Brothers’ breathtaking harmonies soared over a bed of ingenious guitar playing that was based around Don’s clever intros and driving rhythms. “I tried to make my guitar sound like a drum – a rock and roll instrument for rhythm and rhythm fills,” he said. 

Another arrow in the Everly quiver was open tunings. “I couldn’t figure out why Bo Diddley sounded the way he did,” said Everly. “Chet Atkins told me he thought he may be in open tuning, and he was right. So I began using open tunings like G, and that made us sound like three guitars instead of two.”

40. The Funk Brothers

Robert White, Eddie Willis, and Joe Messina were the main 6-string components of Motown’s house band in the label’s heyday from the late ’50s to the early ’70s. An incredible string of hits – “My Girl,” “My Cherie Amour,” “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” “Let’s Get it On,” to name but a few – weren’t just the product of amazing songwriters, they were also due to the arrangements the three guitarists played, and the care they took in crafting their parts. 

The group would meticulously work out their voicings, dividing the neck up to avoid muddying the arrangements. “Everybody knew his given job,” explains White. “Mine was rhythm, Eddie would play a bluesy fill, and Joe would usually read something or play backbeats.” 

Says Willis, “Joe was ‘king of the backbeats.’ Pianist/bandleader Earl Van Dyke swears that he never heard Messina miss a backbeat during his entire Motown career!”

39. João Gilberto

Gilberto is one of, if not the architect of bossa nova. Dig into any of the legendary guitarist/eccentric’s titles, especially his seminal late-’50s and early-’60s recordings, and you’ll find wonderfully understated rhythm playing that, even at its most subdued, undulates with a sexy, swaying groove. 

The tricky syncopations of Gilberto’s vocal melodies and his fingerpicked rhythms are a marvel, as he makes it all sound so completely effortless.

38. Freddie Green

“If you pruned the tree of jazz, Freddie Green would be the only person left,” says Jim Hall. “If you listen to one guitarist, study the way he plays rhythm with Count Basie.” 

Green was a master of making the guitar sink in the rhythm section. His use of two- and three-note voicings exclusively let the harmonically dense horn arrangements speak, yet allowed Green to add to the already formidable swing with his trademark fourto- the-bar rhythmic pulse. 

Green also chose to play unamplified. “It blends better with the bass and piano,” he told GP. Much of Green’s classic Basie work was done with Epiphone Emperor, Stromberg Master 400, and Gretsch Eldorado models.

37. Jim Hall

Hall’s playing has always rendered labels meaningless. His groundbreaking work with Bill Evans, Ella Fitzgerald, and Ben Webster shows his modern approach to harmony and sympathetic ear for playing in a group. 

“I learned from Jimmy Giuffre," he said, "who has a very compositional approach to performing jazz – that a group should be in an evolving state like a mobile, with each player acting and reacting as the music is taking shape.” 

To find new chord voicings, Hall turned readers on to this pearl in ’83: “Sometimes I’ll take two voices and either take them through a tune like “Body and Soul,” or play them against a pedal tone, like open A for instance. You can get some interesting things if you try to get the notes going in different directions.”

36. Richie Havens

His impassioned performance at Woodstock alone would be enough to ensure Havens’ place in the rhythm guitar Hall of Fame. And although the late guitarist had a very successful career since the day he opened the 1969 festival, Havens’ performance there did give the world its first “peak” at a guy with a moving, all-in, passionate acoustic rhythm guitar style. 

“I play so hard that I used to go through a guitar every year-anda- half,” he told GP. “To me, playing guitar is just part of getting the song across – it’s not really about being a great guitar player. 

"I don’t even know what I’m doing. I’m filling in the spaces I have to in order to be able to sing a song the way I really feel it.”

35. Jimi Hendrix

A school unto itself, Hendrix’s rhythm playing in many ways feels like an even deeper ocean than his astounding soloing. 

From “The Wind Cries Mary” and “May This Be Love” from Are You Experienced to his beautiful rhythm work on “Little Wing, “Castles Made of Sand,” and “Bold as Love” from Axis: Bold as Love, Hendrix rolled his Curtis Mayfield-inspired chordal movement and tasty flourishes into a style all his own. 

The culmination of that style comes on Electric Ladyland’s title track, which finds Hendrix expounding even further on the sultry double-stop slides and bubbling trills that connect the spacey, at times ambiguous, but always beautiful chord sequence.

34. James Hetfield

Metallica are one of the most influential metal bands ever, and Hetfield’s sound is the hugest part of that, which is really saying something. 

From the beginning with Kill Em’ All, Hetfield’s right-hand precision, speed, and power would set a standard that all aspiring metal rhythm guys would struggle to match. 

“Maybe it’s the German in me,” says Hetfield, “but I always want the rhythms to be precise. It’s hard to escape. It’s how I play.” 

The other thing that Hetfield popularized was the way to get the maximum heaviness out of riffs. “Downpicking is the key!” he exclaims. “It’s tighter sounding and a lot chunkier.” 

Who are we to argue?

33. Chrissie Hynde

With a punk rock attack and a melodic songwriting streak a mile wide, Hynde not only provides the emotional heft behind her tunes, she relishes the role of rhythm guitarist as ringleader. 

“I’m not a great player, but I make sure I surround myself with great players who’ll do their best work when they’re with me,” she explains. “I’ve got the vision, and all I can do is lead my band to glory. I’m the scrappy punk element,” she continues. 

“Sometimes if the playing gets too good, it can lack a certain something. You could hand a guitar to 50 players and the guy who started playing three months ago might play ‘Louie Louie’ better than Eric Clapton!”

32. Tony Iommi

The architect of all things heavy, Iommi fired the shot heard ’round the world with one simple, evil, and impossibly slow riff – “Black Sabbath,” from the band’s earth-shaking eponymous debut. 

From there it was one classic after another (“War Pigs,” “Iron Man,” Sweet Leaf,” “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath,” etc.) on which Iommi continued to deliver on the promise he made on that first Sabbath record. 

But as the band evolved post-Ozzy, Iommi’s rhythm playing and songwriting evolved as well. The lead off track from Heaven and Hell, “Neon Knights,” served to put the world on notice that Iommi was much more than a sludgy doomsday riff machine – he was ready to put some speed behind his riffs. 

The title track to Mob Rules is also a killer, as is “The Sign of the Southern Cross,” where Iommi’s use of space makes his entry riffs extra punishing.

31. Danny Kortchmar

“It’s much easier to play a screamer solo over a heavy groove than it is to make that groove,” insists Kortchmar, who, aside from being an accomplished soloist, songwriter, and producer, was a rhythm specialist. 

Kootch found his way onto records by a who’s-who of heavy hitters including James Taylor, Carole King, Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, Don Henley, and Bonnie Raitt. 

Back in 1983, Kortchmar wrote a story in GP, In Defense of Rhythm Guitar. “A good rhythm guitarist will inspire people in the band to play better,” he said. “We can’t have a world full of guys playing screaming solos – there have to be guys who can play songs, who can play rhythm guitar.” 

As a pro’s pro, Kortchmar also dropped some science on how to get your feel together: “The interplay between people is what makes music, and that’s something you can’t practice at home. You have to get out in the world and do it.”

30. Alex Lifeson

“I’ve tried to develop a style that combines broad arpeggios and suspended chords,” explained Lifeson. “They’ve been my two main target areas. Suspensions have been my trick for many years to make a trio sound big.” 

Not very often are you treated to a body of rhythm work like Lifeson’s, from classic riff rock (“Working Man”) through heavy prog (“Xanadu”) onto the textural ’80s and ’90s, deftly riding the heavier sonic zeitgeist all the way to the present. 

Along the way, Lifeson has also incorporated more feels into his vernacular as well, including reggae (Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures) and funk (Roll the Bones). 

Lifeson has done it all, and never at the expense of his own personal voice.

29. Tony Maiden

During their heyday in the ’70s, Rufus ruled the funk roost. And although lead vocalist Chaka Khan got most of the cheese, Maiden was in the engine room corralling jazzy changes into seemingly simple funky guitar parts that outlined the tunes perfectly, without ever taking your ear away from the vocal. 

In fact, Maiden enhanced everything around him. His playing throughout the classic “Sweet Thing” is dead sexy from the start, with an intro that is a textbook example of sultry sophisti-funk guitar.

28. Bob Marley

Music doesn’t get much more rhythmic than Marley’s, and any guitarist with a genuine interest in adding the reggae flavor to their palette would be well served to study what Marley and his cohorts Peter Tosh, Junior Marvin, and Early “Chinna” Smith committed to wax. 

Always restrained, never stiff sounding, and every upbeat skank the perfect note length (a skill really worth honing for all styles of rhythm guitar), Marley’s oeuvre is a lesson in rhythmic meditation.

27. Johnny Marr

Is there a guitarist more influential in Brit pop? 

Marr’s work with the Smiths showed the way for countless pop guitarists in the ’80s, ’90s, and beyond as he wrangled jangle and extended clean-toned arpeggios with a steadily grooving right-hand that would be equally at home in a dance band. 

Marr is also a master of using multiple guitars to create one big propulsive behemoth, with every part, lick, and chime accounted for. “I’ve always believed that any instrumentalist is basically just an accompanist to the singer and the words,” he said. “That’s borne out of being a fan of records before I was a fan of guitar players – I’m interested in melody, lyrics, and the overall song. 

"I don’t like to waste notes, not even one.”

26. Curtis Mayfield

Mayfield is one of a handful of players on this list who basically invented a style. His ultra-lyrical comping connects chord changes in wonderfully inventive ways, with slippery double-stops and octaves and fleeting hammer-ons, while never overshadowing the bigger musical message. 

“Because I play with my fingers and play a chord along with the melody, my style suggests two guitars and the little melodic movements are just part of it,” Mayfield told GP. 

Mayfield, who played exclusively in open F# tuning, was also a master of sublime wah, using it to accentuate parts and add textures.

25. Al McKay

One of the most visible purveyors of Jimmy Nolen-style funk guitar, McKay bolstered Earth, Wind & Fire’s sound throughout the ’70s on hits such as “Shining Star,” “Sing a Song,” and “Saturday Night.” 

The lefty sports an uncanny knack for seamlessly intertwining funky, palm-muted single-note lines and finger-tight chordal work (the intro to “September,” being one example which was cut with a Telecaster sporting a neckposition humbucker), all the while navigating the tune’s changes and staying out of the way of the dense horn, string, and vocal arrangements.

24. Tom Morello

“When it comes to riffage, I’m all about the 1st and 3rd fingers and the 3rd and 5th frets – the same two strings on the same dots.” That’s how Morello describes his slabs of powerful pentatonic plundering on all of Rage Against the Machine’s classic sides. 

Morello’s mojo lies in the fact that he doesn’t use a ton of distortion, and he doesn’t tune down to silly extremes. His means to an end is a relentless dedication to the downbeat – the one. 

“In all the music that’s richly satisfying to me,” says Morello, “the ones are huge and unrelenting. It’s not really a rule, but you’d be a fool to stray from it. 

"It’s good enough for James Brown!”

23. Leo Nocentelli

Aside from Jimmy Nolen, arguably no guitarist has had as big effect on funk guitar as Nocentelli. A master of staccato, single-note funk, and stinging, brash chords, Nocentelli deftly bobs and weaves in and around the Meters’ impossibly funky grooves. 

It’s no wonder the likes of Jimmy Page, Paul McCartney, and the Rolling Stones (who had the Meters open up for them on their 1975 tour) were huge fans of New Orleans’ funkiest export. 

Armed with a Fender Starcaster (although he did cut the group’s most popular tune, “Cissy Strut,” with a Gibson ES-175), Nocentelli has a funky sixth sense for knowing when to tightly double a bass line or when to latch onto (or dance around) the drummer’s syncopated hi-hat pattern. 

Aside from the Meters’ classic tracks, Nocentelli and the Meters can also be heard on Patti LaBelle’s “Lady Marmalade” and Robert Palmer’s Sneakin’ Sally Through the Alley.

22. Jimmy Nolen

The Godfather of funk guitar. Beginning with a single sixteenth-note break on James Brown’s “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” Nolen defined the funk guitar style, both rhythmically and harmonically, with simple two- and three-note chord voicings. 

“I started developing that when I played with Johnny Otis back in the ’50s,” said Nolen, who used a Gibson ES-175 and a Gibson Switchmaster on his first recordings with Brown, before moving to a Les Paul Recording and a Japanese- made Fresher Straighter Strat copy. 

“See, we used to play with so many different drummers – some were good but some were lazy. So I used to just try and play and keep my rhythm going as much like a drum as I could.” 

For more of Nolen’s pioneering style, dig “Cold Sweat,” “There Was a Time,” “Give It Up or Turn It Loose,” and “Say It Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud.” 

Thanks Jimmy!

21. Jimmy Page

As much as he is remembered for being a heavy riff architect, much of Page’s rhythmic identity is based in ’50s rock and roll from influences such as Scotty Moore, James Burton, and Cliff Gallup. He also rolled a major wild card into his style, the whirling feel of Les Paul. 

When you throw all of that in with a hefty acoustic jones stoned on British Isles folk, an uncanny ear for modal tunings, and a good dose of riff thuggery (Johnny Ramone worshipped Page’s “Communication Breakdown” assault), you end up with one of the electric guitar’s most defining voices.

20. Joe Pass

An amazing solo guitarist and accompanist, Pass exhibited musical sophistication and sensitivity that are yet to be paralleled, including connecting the melodic dots with remarkable voice leading and walking bass lines. 

Pass’s four duet albums with Ella Fitzgerald are must haves (Take Love Easy, Fitzgerald and Pass…Again, Speak Love, and Easy Living), as are his series of Virtuoso recordings. 

“The best way to get the jazz feel,” says Pass, “is to play along with records or a group. It’s something you have to learn to inherently feel.”

19. Les Paul

Danny Gatton is one of the few guitarists that actually tried to cop Paul’s chops, and Jeff Beck did a full-scale tribute to the Great Man at the Iridium in New York City in 2010 – but nearly every guitarist from George Barnes to Jimmy Page acknowledges a debt of some sort to Paul. 

His mastery of jazz harmony and dizzying melody lines notwithstanding, Paul’s echo-enhanced, Django-influenced rhythmic foundations on unstoppable pop juggernauts such as “How High the Moon” and “Tiger Rag” shaped the course of commercial music for nearly a decade, and provided the template for slapback styles from rockabilly to country to surf and beyond.

18. Joe Perry

Although Perry’s classic work with Aerosmith operated squarely in the blues/rock vein, he never sounded clichéd or staid. With healthy dollops of Jimmy Page’s single-note funkiness, as well as some dirty Keith Richards chordal attitude, Perry rolled his influences into an inventive, grooving style that transcends simple classification. 

Perry’s willingness to mix in filthy tones only enhanced his funk factor (“Get It Up” from Draw the Line is just nasty), and his use of 6-string bass on “Back in the Saddle” and “Draw the Line” showed that he was always willing to think outside the blues box. 

“Your sense of groove has a lot to do with the guys you’re playing with,” Perry told GP. “If they’re really holding it down, you can float on top of it and drive the groove.”

17. Prince

“A lot of cats don’t work on their rhythm enough,” said Prince to GP in 2004. “And if you don’t have rhythm, you might as well take up needlepoint or something.” 

One listen to any of Prince’s tracks, from 1979’s Prince to 2016's Hit n Run Phase Two and it’s clear that the dude’s knitting skills probably sucked. 

“I’m always trying to work the bass notes when I’m playing funk rhythms,” he says, “the same way Freddie Stone from Sly and the Family Stone used to do it.” 

Prince’s rhythm style may be based on classic funk conventions, but his clever juxtaposition of tones and effects, as well as his undeniable rock rhythm chops, are a big reason why he’s such a heavy hitter.

16. Johnny Ramone

“I always wanted the guitar to sound like energy coming out of the amplifier,” said Ramone in ’85. “Not even like music or chords. I just wanted that energy.” 

Mission accomplished, Johnny. 

With his Mosrite plugged into a Marshall stack and a sledgehammer right-hand attack, Ramone wrote the book on punk guitar. “I was influenced by the New York Dolls, T. Rex, and Slade, but I can’t play any of their songs,” he said. “I can only play Ramones songs and the few covers that we do. 

"I just like to play punk rock, and that’s it – real loud rock and roll – no slow songs or soft songs.”

15. Jerry Reed

Being a hotshot session guy and an accomplished songwriter doesn’t hurt when it comes to having an evolved rhythm style. 

Reed’s rhythm guitar approach encompassed Atkins and stanky backwoods funk – the intro to “Guitar Man” being an excellent example of the former, and “Amos Moses” a superb specimen of the latter.

His playing on “Good Night, Irene” (from ’73’s Hot A’ Mighty) is a textbook example of a rhythm performance that acts as a solo, an accompaniment, and a hook as he flaunts hybrid picking chops mixed with hip chord grips and bends that would be comical if they weren’t so killer.

14. Django Reinhardt

If you can tear your ear away from his dazzling soloing long enough, you realize that Reinhardt’s rhythm chops are just as impressive. 

Scary. 

His relentless swing utilizes the ultra-percussive “la pompe” strumming technique which makes the drummerless ensemble swing with a steamroller intensity, pushing the soloist to greater improvisational heights. 

Pull out your metronome, get a chart for “Minor Swing,” and get crackin’. Then, work your way up to the much quicker “Limehouse Blues.” 

You may not aspire to play Gypsy jazz, but working on these tunes is a blast and a guaranteed groove enhancer.

13. Tony Rice

Long ago, Rice was considered the heir apparent to his late mentor, Clarence White. It didn’t take long, however, for Rice to forge his own identity, due in large part to the fact that he started to bring very nontraditional harmony to bluegrass music. 

Counting George Benson, Wes Montgomery, and Joni Mitchell as influences, Rice’s concept of time (he credits Dave Brubek’s “Take Five” for turning him onto odd time signatures) and colorful chord palette (he often cites Jerry Reed as having an influence on some of his dense, close-interval chords), coupled with his uncanny variations on simple rhythm patterns, have made him the bluegrass guitarist for a generation.

12. Keith Richards

Rock and roll’s high priest of groove, Richards’ lifetime of work with the Rolling Stones stands as a sonic monument to the hip-shaking power of rhythm guitar. 

His use of open-G tuning on nearly everything he’s done since the late ’60s spawned a style and sound that is still being imitated. “With open tunings, you can get a drone going so you have the effect of two chords playing against each other,” he told GP. “It’s a big sound.” 

Richards’ other contribution to the rock rhythm lexicon is the way he views the interplay between two guitars. “Rather than going for the separation of guitars, we try to get them to start to sound at a point where it doesn’t matter which guitar is doing what,” he explains. 

“They leap and weave through each other, so it becomes unimportant whether you’re listening to the rhythm or the lead because in actual effect, as a guitarist, you’re in the other player’s head, and he’s in yours.”

11. Nile Rodgers

“I really developed my style while playing jazz standards like ‘So What’ with my guitar teacher in a club,” says Rodgers. “He was comping in the traditional way, and I thought, ‘What am I going to do? He’s got it covered.’ So I tried to fill in the holes, swinging it like a drummer, and the whole club went ‘Whew! That is funky!’” 

The rest is history as Rodgers went on to cut some of the most groovin’ guitar playing known to man with Chic. 

His signature funkiness on “Le Freak” and “Good Times” have frustrated many a weekend warrior, as the riffs seem so simple, but getting them to sound and feel as good as Rodgers does, well, that’s the trick now, isn’t it?

10. Rudolf Schenker

“When something is in the pocket, it drives me,” says Schenker. “It gives me an outstanding power, like I’m surfing on a wave. When the groove isn’t right, I feel lost a little bit. It’s very hard work and it’s somehow not fun anymore.” 

Suffice to say, the groove is important to Schenker, who – aside from possessing one of the best combinations of savage tone and feel in the history of metal – has written some of the most timeless riffs as well. 

“I don’t care about the technical stuff,” he says. “What’s important to me is the attitude, the drive, and the feeling.”

9. Earl Slick/Carlos Alomar

“David Bowie’s Station to Station was the first time Carlos and I really zeroed in on how we should play together,” says Slick. “We mixed my rock thing in with Carlos’ funk thing and I think we came up with a pretty unique guitar combination – two guys who don’t play anything alike making it work.” 

Indeed. Slick and Alomar provided Bowie some legitimate funk and attitude during his Thin White Duke phase, creating chattering rhythmic figures (Alomar) and snarling chord bursts (Slick). 

Dig “Golden Years” and “Stay” from Station to Station for proof, and if that doesn’t convince you, listen to “Fame” from Young Americans. Oh my.

8. Steve Stevens

“I think of songs as environments, or little movies,” said Stevens in 1989. “And that usually dictates the sound I go for and the playing approach I take.” With Billy Idol in the ’80s, Stevens packed a cornucopia of rhythmic goodness into three-minute pop tunes better than anyone. His use of textures, noise, and good old-fashioned groove proved to be an unbeatable combination. 

“My playing reflects more of the English R&B sound,” says Stevens, distancing himself from ’80s texturalists such as Andy Summers and The Edge. “We’re similar to an extent, but I do it in Day-Glo! I play with a much more distorted sound.” 

As for his killer time and ability to hit the right chord at exactly the right time, Stevens says it’s simple: “Have a singer who will beat the piss out of you if you don’t stay in the pocket – that’s how I learned. 

"Billy Idol made me realize that technique is there as a secret weapon. If the guitar is full-on all the time, that’s pretty damn boring.”

7. Andy Summers

Sonically, Summers is possibly the most influential player on this list. His frothy chorus and dubapproved delays became irreplaceable cogs in the Police’s machine. But dig deeper and you find Summers’ grasp of reggae feels, as well as his propensity to extend chords (giving even the simplest progression, a modern makeover), were also a huge part of his sound. 

“I used to be in bands with keyboard players where we had to always watch out for what the other guy was doing harmonically, because there would be conflict,” he explains. 

“I didn’t have that restriction in the Police, so I could stretch chords out and make my rhythm parts more orchestral.”

6. Pete Townshend

To call Townshend’s rhythmic contributions to rock guitar “huge” doesn’t even begin to describe the influence he has had. Yet, it’s not as if he inspired a legion of Townshend sound-alikes. His style – which boasts an incredible right-hand strumming technique – has remained intensely singular and attached to the tunes that embody it. 

Townshend possess the ninja-like skill of knowing when one big chord will not only do the job, it’s big enough to be the hook (see “Won’t Get Fooled Again”). Those are some onions, my friend. 

More than anyone, Townshend has also shown how high an art form rhythm guitar can become in a rock and roll band.

5. Eddie Van Halen

Although his solos were fodder for nearly every guitarist growing up in the late ’70s/early ’80s, Van Halen’s rhythm work never got quite as much attention, which is a damn shame because there’s gold in them there riffs! 

You had your vicious metal chuggers (“Romeo Delight,” Light Up the Sky,” “D.O.A.”), some pretty stuff (the woefully underrated “Secrets”), and the weird (“Sinners Swing,” “House of Pain”). 

VH’s rhythm work was oftentimes just as gonzo as his solos, frequently exhibiting the same careening racecar vibe, and he didn’t necessarily come from a certain “school” of rhythm guitar. 

Like his soloing, his rhythm playing was intensely personal (the intro to “5150” is a textbook example of this) and seemingly easy to grasp on the surface, but once you dive in, you find there’s a lot to digest.

4. Jimmie Vaughan

Although he could certainly solo with the best of the blues cats, Vaughan’s calling card in the shred-heavy ’80s was as a blues rhythm specialist. 

“When I started out playing guitar, all I wanted to do was play that Jimmy Reed groove – it just feels real good,” Vaughan told GP. “Then I made it my business to figure out the guitar interplay between Reed and his co-guitarist Eddie Taylor. I tell you what, it sounds real easy when you first hear it, but listen closely. The way they lock and form that deep groove is not easy. It’s a whole other thing.” 

The same could be said for Vaughan’s rhythm work, as he makes it seem so easy – the sign of a true master.

3. Alex Weir

As part of the Brothers Johnson and Talking Heads, Weir was the ultimate funky ringer. This was especially true in Talking Heads, as evidenced by the epic concert film, Stop Making Sense. 

Working over a Music Man Sabre, Weir’s contributions to the Heads’ collective funk cannot be underestimated. “This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody)” and his impossibly dope comping on “Burning Down the House” are as infectious as they are musical, and his guitar interplay with David Byrne on “Big Business/I Zimbra” is a clinic in relentless sixteenthnote funk. 

Damn!

2. The Wrecking Crew

This loose-knit collective of musicians played on a plethora of ’60s and early-’70s hits by everyone from the Carpenters to the Beach Boys to Simon & Garfunkel to the Monkees – the list goes on and on. And everybody knows you don’t get huge, timeless hits with lousy rhythm guitar work, right? 

The roster of guitarists in the Wrecking Crew goes from giants of jazz such as Barney Kessel and Howard Roberts to studio rats Tommy Tedesco and Carol Kaye to arranger/guitarists such as Al Casey and Billy Strange – all master sight-readers with impeccable feel. 

Cats such as Glen Campbell, Louie Shelton, Jerry Cole, and Mike Deasy (among others) could be counted on to deliver the snazzy new rock and roll rhythms of the day – noise that guys like Kessel and Tedesco hated – but they loved the paychecks!

1. Malcolm Young

Has anyone personified the role of a rhythm guitarist in a rock band better than Malcolm Young? 

No, they haven’t. 

In AC/DC, not only did he play some of the most swaggering, swinging, balls-to-the-wall rock and roll guitar ever, he did it with zero solos. Young knew exactly what his role was as a rhythm guitarist in a rock and roll band, and he thrived in it. 

“Learning an instrument has to be natural,” he said. “If you stop to think about playing, the feeling just goes.” Feel was always behind what Young did. Without it, he would be just a dude strumming chords. 

“It probably has something to do with the attitude I put into it. I don’t think what I do is hard, really. If it doesn’t swing, it doesn’t mean a thing. That’s about it.”

The first of two star-studded tribute shows for the late Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins took place on Saturday, September 3, with members of Queen, AC/DC, Metallica and more converging upon a packed Wembley Arena, in London.

There were many highlights. Just think of AC/DC frontman Brian Johnson performing “Back in Black” and “Let There Be Rock” alongside the Foo Fighters, with Metallica’s Lars Ulrich on drums; it’s the sort of thing that would hitherto have been bar room talk, an idle ‘What if…’ conversation. Here, it actually happened, with Dave Grohl, Pat Smear and Chris Shiflett teaming up on one of the classic electric guitar riffs of all time.

Stuart Copeland of the Police joined Grohl and company to play “Next to You” and “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic.” Liam Gallagher fronted the Foos for a couple of Oasis covers, and then there was Wolfgang Van Halen, Justin Hawkins, Dave Grohl, and Josh Freese jamming Van Halen’s “On Fire” and “Hot for Teacher.” 

But for many, the poignant sight of Rush’s Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson onstage with Dave Grohl on drums, occupying the late Neil Peart’s stool and applying his big-hitting style to “2112 Part 1: Overture” and “Working Man” – captured in the fan-shot footage above – was the performance of the night. 

At least, in the fantasy band stakes, it doesn’t get much better. Geddy Lee's voice was on point. Grohl's style might be altogether different to Peart's but there's something to be said for his power on a night like this – he gives the tracks a defiant, celebratory feel. 

Rush and the Foo Fighters go way back. Hawkins, in particular, was a super-fan. Speaking to Louder about the influence of the Canadian trio’s 1980 album, Permanent Waves, Hawkins explained the appeal of a band whose prog sensibilities augmented radio friendly rock for a generation of fans like him.

“‘The Spirit of Radio’ really changed a lot of people’s perceptions of Rush,” Hawkins said. “It was a huge radio hit and I love that it’s unashamedly a great, great pop song. I absolutely still don’t get the intro at all, the time signature or how it’s counted. I’ve tried to understand it by slowing the tune down, but it’s just not within the parameters of the things I do.”

Just because Hawkins – and many others – could not understand the physics of how the song worked, did not affect its appeal. This, argued Hawkins, was the magic of Rush’s songwriting.

“How many bands can do something that fucked up and interesting and yet make it totally understandable to a non-musician?” he said. “Rush showed that they could fuck music up and still make great pop songs!”

In 2013, Dave Grohl and Taylor Hawkins inducted Rush into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. That night, the Foos performed “2112 Part 1: Overture” – in costume no less.

The Taylor Hawkins Tribute Concert was livestreamed and broadcast across various platforms. You can watch it on demand on Paramount+, which offers a seven-day free trial. 

A number of fan-shot videos on YouTube offers a flavor of the sort of action you’ll be in for, with Grohl’s two-song stint with Rush followed by David Bowie drummer Omar Hakim taking over for “YYZ”, which you can watch in the video above.

It was that sort of night. A night when Queen, the Pretenders, James Gang and Them Crooked Vultures assembled to pay tribute to a fallen peer, raise money for charity, and remind everyone of the power of rock ’n’ roll to put on such super-sized pop-cultural events as this.

Last Friday (May 20), in partnership with Julien’s Auctions, Rush electric guitar legend Alex Lifeson put a number of his most beloved electric and acoustic guitars up for auction.

The extensive auction – the proceeds from which Lifeson said would be donated to charity – featured a number of Lifeson's most oft-used instruments, including the snow-white Gibson ES-355 he used on almost every Rush album and for innumerable Rush performances.

After 13 bids, that ES-355 ended up selling for an even $384,000, well above its original estimated value of $300,000.

In a recent interview with Guitar Magazine, Lifeson said that – of the guitars he sold – the ES-355 was the most difficult to part ways with.

"That [the ES-355TD] was the last one that was left," Lifeson said. "I was sitting in our mudroom, just off our garage, while the removal truck was waiting. I sat there with that case in between my legs and, maybe it sounds a little corny, but I was talking to it. 

"I was reminiscing about gigs that we did together and kissing the bubble wrap. But I know that, with the funds I’m hoping to raise, it gives it all another life and helps other people, and in some cases gives people another chance at life. Why wouldn’t you do that?"

A custom-built 1980 Hentor Sportscaster – used by Lifeson extensively during the recording of Rush's Grace Under Pressure album and for the "Limelight" solo – also fetched a princely sum, selling for $187,500. 

The Sportscaster also appears in the "Vital Signs," "Countdown," and "The Enemy Within" music videos.

Also going for six figures was the 1976 Gibson Dove (sold for $128,000) that Lifeson used to write the Rush classic "Closer to the Heart" and the 1991 PRS CE 24 (sold for $112,500) that served as Lifeson's main touring guitar in the 1990s.

For more info on all of the Lifeson guitars that went under the hammer, visit juliensauctions.com.

Back in March, Rush electric guitar hero Alex Lifeson announced that he was putting a number of electric and acoustic guitars from his extensive collection up for auction.

The extensive auction – the proceeds from which will be donated to charity – includes some of Lifeson's favorite, most oft-used guitars, including the snow-white Gibson ES-355TD he used on almost every Rush album and for countless Rush performances.

In a new interview with Guitar Magazine, Lifeson went into detail about the process of saying goodbye to some of his most beloved guitars, calling it "probably one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done in my life."

"My wife and I, we’re at a stage in our life where we just feel like we have too much stuff and we’re trying to get a little leaner," Lifeson explained. "I’m auctioning off the bulk of my guitar collection for charity. I’m looking forward to that. 

"It was probably one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done in my life; it was so emotionally difficult packing those guitars up. I cleaned them, polished them, did string changes. I made sure every single one was in tune when it went back in the case, and then I kissed it goodbye."

The ES-355TD, Lifeson added, was particularly hard to bid farewell to. 

"That [the ES-355TD] was the last one that was left," Lifeson said. "I was sitting in our mudroom, just off our garage, while the removal truck was waiting. I sat there with that case in between my legs and, maybe it sounds a little corny, but I was talking to it. 

"I was reminiscing about gigs that we did together and kissing the bubble wrap. But I know that, with the funds I’m hoping to raise, it gives it all another life and helps other people, and in some cases gives people another chance at life. Why wouldn’t you do that?"

Lifeson has been looking to the future in other ways of late, too.

Last year, he released a new, lower-cost version of his signature Les Paul with Epiphone, while last month saw the release of the self-titled debut album from Envy of None, the band he recently formed with bassist Andy Curran, vocalist Maiah Wynne, and guitarist Alfio Annibalini.

Rush have announced a massive, Super Deluxe reissue of their landmark 1981 album, Moving Pictures.

A celebration of the album's recent 40th anniversary, the reissue will be available in single-LP, five-LP, and three-CD editions, as well as a Super Deluxe edition, which comes with three CDs, a Blu-Ray Audio disc, and five LPs.

Notably, the Super Deluxe, five-LP, and three-CD editions feature Live In YYZ 1981, a previously unreleased, 19-song live set recorded at the band’s March 25, 1981 performance at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto. 

You can check out an unboxing video for the reissue – which is set for an April 15 release via UMe/Mercury/Anthem – below.

In addition to the music, the Moving Pictures Super Deluxe edition will also feature a 44-page hardcover book with unreleased photos and new artwork by the record's original designer, Hugh Syme, plus new illustrations for each song. Liner notes by a number of rock luminaries – Kim Thayil, Les Claypool, Taylor Hawkins, Bill Kelliher, and Neil Sanderson among them – are also included in the book.

There's a host of other memorabilia in the Super Deluxe edition as well, including a Red Barchetta model car, two Neil Peart signature MP40 drumsticks, two metal-embossed guitar picks (one each with Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson's respective signatures), and plenty of merch from the band's 1981 world tour.

The reissue will also be available in two digital editions – one deluxe, with the original remastered album and the '81 Maple Leaf Gardens set, and a remastered version of the original album.

To preorder any version of the 40th anniversary edition of Moving Pictures, step right this way.

When Rage Against The Machine were forced to reschedule their 2020 reunion tour to 2021 – and then to 2022 – Tom Morello found himself at home for the longest sustained period of his adult life.

While dealing with family demands, the guitarist also experienced something he had encountered before: a seemingly incurable case of writer’s block. “It was a drought in my head, like, ‘I’ve got nothing,’” he says. “For the first four months or so, I was completely uninspired.”

A breakthrough came from an unlikely source, however, when Morello read a Kanye West interview in which the rapper boasted about recording vocals for a new album straight to his iPhone.

Taking the same approach, Morello set his phone on a folding chair in front of a Marshall half-stack, started playing riffs and assorted noises, and before he knew it, the spark of creativity had returned.

“It sounded great,” he says. “I began sending these riffs and licks to producers and artists around the world, and that was the genesis for my new record.”

The Atlas Underground Fire (Mom+Pop Music) is Morello’s follow-up to his 2018 solo album, The Atlas Underground, and like that set it’s a collaborative affair, only this time all the recordings were done remotely (the only exception being a 2014 live version of “Highway to Hell” recorded in Australia and featuring Bruce Springsteen and Eddie Vedder).

Its diverse mix of guest artists includes Bring Me the Horizon, Chris Stapleton, Phantogram, Damian Marley, Sama’ Abdulhadi and others, with a range of musical styles that incorporates blazing rock, transfixing dream pop, modern country, crushing EDM and more.

Morello’s daredevil, transcendent approach to guitar playing is as fierce as ever. The album brims with superhero riffs, hellfire shredding and all sorts of sonic wackiness, and he maintains that he hasn’t even begun to unlock the instrument’s potential.

“I firmly believe that the electric guitar has a future, not just a past,” he says. “And that future is going to require thinking outside of the box and not just retreading the same old ground hoping for different results.

“That’s why on these Atlas Underground records I really look to try to forge an alloy between my Marshall stack, big riffs, crazy guitar sounds and futuristic bass drops. The idea is that the electric guitar has a lot of room to grow, and I’m trying to prove it on this record.”

Even though you hold the position that there’s still so much to do on the guitar, are you sometimes surprised by how many players tend to be traditionalists? Do you feel like they’re stuck in one lane?

I don’t know if it’s so much being stuck in a lane. It’s really just loving the tradition of the instrument. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, and they should enjoy it. For me, the excitement comes not from just hearing familiar sounds but also from creating sounds previously unknown to mankind.

I spent my first, whatever, 10 years of being a musician learning the Eddie Van Halen and Randy Rhoads solos. I did my 10,000 hours of chromatic scales. 

It was really at the onset of Rage Against the Machine when I started self-identifying as the DJ in the band and started looking at the instrument in different ways, trying to forge a unique, artistic vocabulary on a tried-and-true instrument.

At first, did you have producers and engineers tapping your wrist – “We don’t do that.” We imagine it was fun for you to upset the apple cart.

That is absolutely correct. The first record I made prior to Rage Against the Machine was with a band called Lock Up. I remember I was just in the fledgling stages of figuring out stuff to do with the toggle switch, and the producer hated it. 

He was like, “That’s getting in the way of the guitar solo.” And I thought, Maybe that is the guitar solo. There was an internal voice telling me to follow my dreams, but there was this external voice saying, "Crush those dreams in the nest.”

On the new album, you recorded your guitars to your phone. You hadn’t done that before?

Maybe with voicemails, to keep track of ideas, but the idea that “this is the take that’s going on the record” never occurred to me. I’ve got to thank Kanye for that.

Obviously, there were sonic limitations to that approach, but it seems as if you embraced them and used them to your advantage.

Exactly. I mean, listen to the record – those guitars sound like kick-ass electric guitars. The one thing I liked about the process was how it changed the whole creative formula. 

Rather than there being four guys in a room looking at each other writing a song, it was me alone every day with my phone going, “What’s the plan for today?” It may be an F-sharp day. It may be a drop-D day or a crazy R2D2 noises day.

You do get some incredible sounds on your phone recordings. Your track with Damian Marley, “The Achilles List,” is a real speaker ripper.

[laughs] Yeah, yeah. There was no science to the process. I remember once my engineer and producer friend Carl [Restivo], who I was sending stuff to, he was like, “Could you just move the phone back a few inches?” I’m like, “I’ll try to remember that tomorrow, man.”

How did your version of “Highway to Hell” with Bruce Springsteen and Eddie Vedder come about?

I was on tour with the E Street Band in Australia, filling in for Steve Van Zandt, and we were in Perth, the birthplace of Bon Scott. I was going to pay my respects to his grave in the Perth Cemetery. It was nighttime, and I couldn’t find his grave – there are no eternal flames burning.

From out of the distance comes this motorbike, and there was this heavyset dude with a German World War II helmet on and a T-shirt that read “I Don’t Give a Shit, But If I Did, You’re the One I’d Give It To.” I’m like, “That guy’s going to know where Bon Scott’s grave is.” [laughs]

Sure enough, he led me right there. I paid my respects, went back to the hotel bar and saw Bruce Springsteen. I said, “Do you think there’s any way that the circle of the E Street Band and the circle of AC/DC might overlap?” And he was like, “Never thought about that before,” but he went upstairs and thought about it.

We began rehearsing “Highway to Hell” at soundchecks, and then we found ourselves in this huge Melbourne soccer stadium with 80,000 people. Eddie Vedder happened to be at the show; he came down to see Bruce.

A lightbulb went off. I knocked on Bruce’s dressing room door and said, “We’re in Australia, where AC/DC is king, where ‘Highway to Hell’ is the unofficial national anthem of rock and roll liberation. What if we open the show with ‘Highway to Hell’ with Eddie Vedder?” And he was like, “That sounds like a pretty good idea.”

We did it, and it was an apex moment in the history of live rock and roll.

Are you surprised that Bruce isn’t given his due as a guitar player? He’s a phenomenal guitarist.

A great guitar player. I would single out Darkness on the Edge of Town as some of my favorite guitar work. Tone, feeling, melodic choice. It’s one of my favorite guitar records.

It was awesome doing guitar duels with Bruce. I had to learn 250 songs before going on tour with him, and we played songs outside of that. It can be a song he played in a bar in 1972. Just off top of his head knows it. He’s a human jukebox.

Your track with Phantogram, “Driving to Texas,” is gorgeous. Not many people would picture you fitting into what we call “dream pop.”

I worked with Josh from Phantogram on a song on the last Atlas Underground record. He and Sarah, his partner in Phantogram, reached out and wanted to do a song this past year. I was like, “I would love to.”

I love their production and their sort haunting, left-of-center, spooky vibe – “Where’s that going to take my guitar playing?” It took it in this kind of crazy, ethereal place. The solo at the end feels like this avenging angel coming down to pass judgment on the protagonist one way or the other.

Your track with Chris Stapleton sounds like taking Dylan into the 21st century. You mix these wild, spacey guitar sounds with country…

Chris is a great guy. I met him at the Chris Cornell Memorial show. We got on a Zoom call to write a song together. He’s in Nashville, I’m here, and we just spent the first two hours talking about what it’s like trying to keep the grandmas alive and keep the kids from going crazy.

That therapeutic conversation became the basis for “The War Inside.” He reminds me of Chris Cornell in a number of ways. He has this effortless ability to craft great melody out of thin air.

You’ve talked about your “misfit toys” guitar collection. Did some of them make it onto this album?

Absolutely. Each day I would pick one of those misfit toys, bring it down and maybe randomly decide, We’re going to use a delay and my $50 Kay guitar today. Then I’d just see what comes out, and who does that get sent to?

The Arm the Homeless guitar is all over it. The drop-D Tele is on it. So is my $50 Kay, my first guitar ever. It’s loud and proud on the record. The Audioslave guitar, which used to be the Budweiser guitar until I burned off the lacquer, that makes an appearance.

The Jimmy Page double-neck is on there, although I only used the six-string part. The baritone guitar I used for “Hold the Line” with Grandson [the pseudonym of Canadian-American Jordan Benjamin]. Most of the solos are played with the Arm the Homeless guitar, and then the rhythm tracks were just on whatever guitar I happened to choose on that day.

A lot of guitarists dream of owning ’59 sunbursts and the like. You don’t seem like you were ever that guy.

I’m not that guy at all. I will tell you, when making records with Brendan O’Brien in the past, because he is that guy, he would bring stuff from his studio and I would always be like, “It’s just a frigging Stratocaster, dude.” But then I’d think, “It actually does sound super good.” [laughs] If you like super good.

We spoke with Alex Lifeson recently, and he told us that you had invited both him and Kirk Hammett to perform on one of your new tracks. We assumed it would be on this album.

It’s a great song, and it will most definitely see the light of day. I ran into Kirk at a non-rock-and-roll-related event, and we hadn’t seen each other in years. I got to thinking, Wouldn’t it be awesome to do something?

I thought about who would be the third member of that triangle, and then I thought about Alex Lifeson, who is one of my favorite guitar players. So I reached out to him. It’s full-on head-cutting.

Given the times we live in, are you planning to return to your protest singer alter ego, the Nightwatchman?

At some point in the future, the Nightwatchman will rear his head. Right now, this process has been so liberating, and it’s been a life raft of hope during a time of anxiety. I’ve been in the bunker making these songs, and now at last people get to hear it.

Pick up a copy of Tom Morello's The Atlas Underground Fire here.

Despite the ongoing pandemic 2021 was a fabulous year for gear. With many exciting and innovative products appearing over the last 12 months we guitar players have been spoilt for choice. 

Here are some of the top picks from team GP…

Gibson Custom Shop Murphy Lab Les Paul, ES-335 and ES-355 Guitars

A revitalized Gibson introduced its Murphy Lab extension of the Custom Shop early in 2021, and that thrillingly accurate backward glance proved one of the more exciting new developments from a big-name maker in quite some time.

Tom Murphy has long been recognized as a leading practitioner of the art of aging Gibson guitars, and if someone had told us the 1959 Les Paul Heavy Aged, 1959 ES-355 Light Aged, and 1961 ES-335 Ultra-Light Aged we were sent for testing were rare under-the-bed vintage finds we wouldn’t have thought twice.

And not only did they look great, but Custom Shop build quality ensure they also played superbly and sounded authentic. Stellar stuff. DH

Orange Acoustic Pedal

This is an ideal preamp and flexible D.I. for acoustic guitar rockers after an amp-like tone. It simply makes any acoustic-electric guitar sound bigger and bolder without having to fuss with a bunch of complicated controls.

The main event is the very sculptable midrange along with the requisite bass and treble controls. Tweak them a bit for different applications or instruments, but most players can probably pretty much set ’em and forget ’em.

I was miffed about no mute or bypass button at first but needed a mutable tuner in line anyway. Once the ample-sounding Orange Acoustic Pedal tone colors the signal chain, going without it sounds black and white. JL

Reverend Gristle 90

Guitarist Greg Koch went off-road when creating a follow-up to his signature Tele-centric Gristlemaste, and the result is the Gristle 90, a mashup of Fender and Gibson attributes that features a korina body that’s chambered under the pickguard and has a Firebird-style raised center section, and a three-piece korina set-neck topped with a 24 3/4-inch scale, 22-fret ebony fingerboard.

Steering things further into Gibson territory, the Gristle 90 has a Bigsby vibrato and a Tune-o-matic bridge, and it sports a pair of P-90 pickups – specifically, Fishman Fluence Gristle 90s, which were voiced by Koch and crew for this guitar. They feed volume and tone controls – the latter with a push-pull switch for a Peter Green-type out-of-phase sound – along with a pushbutton midrange boost and a three-way selector.

The Gristle 90 is a great playing and superb sounding guitar that combines classic and cutting-edge technologies to create a T-styler like no other. AT

Mesa Badlander

Derived from a long line of high-gain Mesa Rectifier amplifiers, this EL34-powered two-channel 100-watt head (also available in combo, rack-mount and 50-watt versions) delivers an astounding range of tones courtesy of Mesa’s 3 Mode Channel Cloning system that provides independent switching of the Clean, Crunch and Crush modes on each channel, each of which offers different gain and voicing options.

Dialing in righteous clean and overdriven tones is facilitated by the independent gain, master and EQ controls, and there’s a front-panel switch to select 100-, 50- or 20-watt operation (all class A/B), a tube-buffered series FX loop, a trio of speaker jacks and a bias switch to configure the amp for EL34 or 6L6 power tubes.

The features are extensive, but one of the most significant is the Cab Clone IR, a cab-simulator/reactive load with eight Mesa miked-cabinet IRs that can also be loaded with IRs of your choice. It adds up to a magnificently well-endowed amp that’s also an amazing deal. AT

Epiphone USA Casino

This updated and revitalized USA Casino – the first built in the U.S. since 1971 – absolutely nails what makes the iconic hollow-body Casino great: from big, bold British jangle and punch to sexy, syrupy P-90 jazz guitar and blues guitar tones.

The solid mahogany, 22-fret, rounded-C neck is topped with an Indian rosewood fingerboard, and with its three-ply maple/poplar/maple top, Gibson ABR-1 Tune-o-matic bridge and thinline trapeze tailpiece, it’s a contoured classic in either Royal Tan or Vintage Sunburst nitro finishes.

While it may cost a pretty penny compared to the Asia-made Epiphone Casinos of even a few years ago, the USA Casino is worth the investment, bringing the model back to the premium U.S.-made dream machine it was always meant to be. JVR

Boss OC-5 Octave

The OC-5 builds on the legacy of the OC-2, introduced 40 years ago, with a spot-on re-creation of the original monophonic pedal as well as a Poly mode that delivers the OC-3’s chord-loving goodness.

It ups the ante with a +1 octave control that adds definition and chime to guitar lines, and a -2 octave that in Poly mode becomes a range control for the -1 octave, allowing you to place the sub on just the root of the chord or over all the notes being played.

Boss’s latest tracking technology delivers lightning-fast, glitch-free performance, producing a natural sound and feel even on bends and vibrato. Better still, its suboctave sounds more natural than that of its predecessors. CS

Eventide Micropitch Delay

The MicroPitch Delay is a stereo delay with controls to independently adjust pitch for the left and right channels, as well as pitch-modulation capabilities courtesy of an LFO, and an envelope that responds dynamically to your playing.

The little red box is awesome for delay, chorus and doubling effects, but that is just the tip of this iceberg. The secondary mod parameter lets you choose from three types of pitch modulation: via LFO, via envelope to raise pitch, and via envelope to lower pitch. These last two methods are great for creating dynamically responsive pitch shifts.

It’s also terrific for creating syrupy chorus and ascending and descending delays via picking dynamics. I found that, at its core, the MicroPitch Delay is a fantastic “always-on” sonic enhancer in my signal chain. CS

Fender American Professional Jazzmaster II

If you’re like us, you’ve wanted a Jazzmaster for years. What held you back was those notoriously wonky vibrato tailpieces and the humpy 7.5-inch neck radius. Well, the American Professional II is for you, with a redesigned Panorama tremolo system that gives you all the bending room of a Strat, updated V-Mod II pickups, and – finally! – a more comfortable rounded-C neck shape, with a modern 9.5-inch neck radius. Hallelujah!

The V-Mod II single-coil pickups kick indie ass, too: clear, punchy and articulate, with a coil-tap option for a beefier sound out of that previously thin bridge pup in most Jazzers. With the American Professional II, Fender has given us all the Jazzmaster’s cool character, with absolutely zero trade-offs. JVR

Epiphone “Inspired by Gibson” Hummingbird

Comparable in nearly every detail to its much-pricier U.S.-made Gibson counterpart, the new made-in-China Epiphone Hummingbird features that classic square-shouldered dreadnought shape, a solid Sitka Spruce top, solid-mahogany back and sides, Indian Laurel reverse-belly bridge with bone saddle, tortoise shell pickguard with Hummingbird and floral graphics, a glued-in, tapered dovetail neck joint, quarter-sawn spruce bracing, ivory-and-black six- and four-ply binding and an Aged Gloss finish.

Specs aside, it just plays and sounds great, with a 24.72-inch-scale mahogany neck with rounded-C profile, a 12-inch radius, and a lovely Indian laurel fingerboard. Finally, a Hummingbird for the rest of us. JVR

ESP MH-1000 Deluxe Evertune

An Editors’ Pick Award mysteriously went missing from this review when it appeared in the November 2021 issue, but the MH-1000 Deluxe Evertune certainly earned one.

This beautifully made guitar offers righteous playability thanks to its three-piece set-thru maple neck with a thin U shape and a 25.5-inch-scale Macassar ebony fingerboard carrying 24 mirror-polished, stainless-steel frets. The guitar swings a pair of active EMG pickups – a 60T W-R in the neck position and an 81 in the bridge slot – and the tone knob pulls for split-coil action.

As the name denotes, this version of the MH-1000 Deluxe features an Evertune bridge that provides rock-solid tuning stability and unprecedented intonation accuracy, and can be easily adjusted for the desired string-bending response. The Evertune is a game changer and the MH-1000 Deluxe an ideal platform to showcase its abilities. AT

Orange Terror Stamp

Perfect for mounting on a pedalboard, this potent little amplifier is a hybrid design that uses a 12AX7 tube in the preamp driving a 20-watt solid-state power section. A single foot-switch toggles between volume 1 and volume 2 controls, and there’s a Shape knob for EQ-ing sounds and a master gain control. The speaker output can handle 8- and 16-ohm loads, and there’s an FX loop and a cab-simulated output for recording, headphones or feeding a FOH mixer.

The Terror Stamp has a wide gain range and its British-flavored distortion is killer for everything from blues guitar to hard rock. It’s a great pedal to keep in the gig-bag in case your main amp goes down, or as a full-time amplifier for players who want to reduce the amount of gear they carry to the gig. AT

Neural DSP Quad Cortex Floor Modeler

When it comes to the industry-leading amp modelers, guitarists have stopped debating whether they sound like the real thing and just started using them. In doing so, many have developed strong loyalties to their DSP delivery unit of choice, which led to some ruffled feathers and muddied waters when plug-in designer Neural DSP unveiled this Quad Cortex floor unit.

Boasting an extremely intuitive interface with touch screen and combination rotary-knob-foot-switch gizmos and the ability to capture and reproduce any amp, drive pedal or cab you throw at it, the main takeaway is that the Quad Cortex simply sounds astoundingly good, immediately establishing it as a serious contender for anything out there. DH

Origin Effects RevivalDrive Compact

When you notice that your pals have the same new overdrive pedal on their boards, you know something is up. With its amp-like circuit design and chewy, touch-responsive sag and bloom, the original RevivalDrive caused a massive stir a few years back, but it’s a big pedal. The RevivalDrive Compact packs that same spongy saturation into a fly-rig-approved form factor, and does it sound good.

Is it the “tube amp-style signal path with Class A preamp”? Or maybe the “long-tail pair phase inverter” or the “reactive overdrive design”? It’s those things, plus EQ options for single-coil or double-coil pickups and a wet/dry control so you can blend your amp’s preamp gain with the RevivalDrive’s tailored gain structure.

Put away your ideas about what an overdrive pedal sounds like, and pull out your wallet. JVR

EarthQuaker Devices Astral Destiny Reverb

EarthQuaker’s line of out-of-this-world ambience pedals grew this year with Astral Destiny, a mind-blowing box that serves up eight types of ambience with and some without octave effects. These huge-sounding reverbs include chorus modulation that makes them sound ethereal or haunting, shimmer effects for upper and lower octaves, and high and low octave effects.

All this, plus a regenerating tail for creating reverbs of extended length at pitch or fifth above, as well as upward and downward pitch bending. Astral Destiny is a welcome new tone enhancer and an inspiring effect for guitarists who seek uncommon reverbs. CS

K-Line Springfield

Just when you concluded that everyone and his or her second cousin is making reproduction S-style, bolt-neck, 25.5-inch-scale guitars, along comes one to remind you how magical this 67-year-old recipe can still be when cooked up very, very well.

Chris Kroenlein’s Springfield model wowed us for its superb playability, authentically played-in feel, resonant and lightweight woods, lusciously aged nitro Lake Placid Blue finish (non-aged available), and trenchant tones.

From the archetypally Stratty mix of bright, glassy, snappy, and quacky, to muscular, rich, and multi-dimensional, it’s the compelling and inspiring performer many players believe they’ll find only in a vintage example costing much, much more. DH

L.R. Baggs Voiceprint Acoustic D.I.

Released in fall 2020 with a significant firmware update in 2021, the Voiceprint D.I. is one of the most innovative products released during the pandemic era. Using Impulse Response signal processing and harnessing the power of an iPhone or Apple Watch via the AcousticLive app, Voiceprint conjures a custom filter designed to augment/replace the pickup signal based on a quick demo performance, essentially creating the best version of your favorite instrument for amplification.

That “Voiceprint” then lives in the pedal and can be further sculpted using the app to adjust EQ or volume, reduce feedback or vary the blend. Store up to 99 Voiceprints for an entire acoustic guitar arsenal. JL

Fender Acoustic Junior GO

This little bugger sounds surprisingly toneful and does pretty much anything a troubadour might imagine. The GO’s got a bevy of effects including a built-in looper, plus Bluetooth connectivity that comes in handy for pumping backing tracks or simply rocking out to tunes sent over from a phone.

Dual guitar/vocal channels with identical setups are easy to understand and operate. A perfectly portable compact brown box housing a powerful rechargeable lithium-ion battery is the GO’s coup de grace.

Robust enough to turn any patch of nature into a stage, it was even the main amplifier for all of the acoustic instruments and even some of the electric ones at our Burning Man camp! JL

Epiphone Alex Lifeson Les Paul Standard Access

Here’s an all-around axe if there ever was one, and it’s attainable to practically anyone serious about acquiring a total tone machine. First, it’s a gorgeous, utterly playable and ergonomically excellent Les Paul with push/pull coil-tap capability on both humbuckers. Second, it’s got a piezo pickup in the Floyd Rose-style, whammy-friendly locking Graph Tech Ghost Tremolo Bridge, and that signal can either be separated via a second output jack, or summed with the magnetic signal in the primary output.

Remarkably, Epiphone and Lifeson realized this dream machine for under a grand. AT

Matchless Laurel Canyon Reverb 1x12

California amp maker Matchless has been at the forefront of the boutique scene since 1989, but the Laurel Canyon and its sibling Coldwater Canyon are the first production models it has released with 6V6 output tubes – to which we say it’s about time!

Announced prior to this past year but put on hold review-wise due to pandemic-related constraints, the Laurel Canyon quickly proved that the high-quality, point-to-point Matchless formula applies equally well to American-voiced designs, while also establishing a new 20-watt club combo to beat.

 From lush blooming chime, to biting mid-rich twang to snarling lead tones, all with outstanding reverb slathered over, it’s impressively versatile and a real joy to play. DH

Way Huge Atreides Analog Weirding Module

Atreides is a stellar reimagination of the short-lived but influential 1980 Electro-Harmonix Mini Synthesizer that Eddie Van Halen used to great effect on Fair Warning tracks like “Sunday Afternoon in the Park” and “One Foot Out the Door.”

A guitar synth, envelope filter, fuzz circuit, phaser, and sub-octave device all in one, pimped out with seven satisfying sliders for sensitivity, brightness, phaser rate, and more, it’s sure to help evoke the hallucinogenic “spice” that brings visions and messianic dreams to its Dune namesake, Paul Atreides. JVR

Carr Super Bee

Dressed in natty two-tone covering and designed to deliver three different flavors of blackface-Fender tone, the Super Bee has a rotary Sting switch that selects “64” (based on Steve Carr’s personal ’64 Deluxe Reverb), “68” (a classic Super Reverb) and “72” (a blackface circuit modded for extra overdrive).

Powering this point-to-point wired amp is a pair of 6BM8 tubes that combine a high-gain triode and a power pentode in one glass package. The pair produce 10 watts, which can be throttled down to two watts via the attenuator switch or all the way down to a whisper with the attenuator knob. Two 12AX7s and a 12AT7 handle the EQ (treble, bass, middle) and drive/recovery duties for the lush and enveloping reverb.

The Super Bee offers a cool selection of sounds that range from rich Deluxe Reverb flavors to midrange-forward Super Reverb clean and overdriven tones to gnarly distortion from the 72 setting that’s so dynamic and touch responsive you could play an entire gig on this mode alone. AT

Taylor Grand Theater 811E & K21E

Depending on your perspective, these are either two of the best little big guitars or big little guitars of 2021. Taylor notched out a nice niche between a short scale travel-sized axe and a full scale small-bodied instrument, then made it super playable by lowering the string tension for a remarkably relaxed feel that’s perfect for the beach, the boat or the back porch. C-Class cantilevered bracing helps the Grand Theater’s tone belie its diminutive box, and onboard ES2 electronics make it truly gig-worthy. JL

Damian Probett SG-Teor Guitar

With a diverse background in carpentry and joinery, aircraft tool making and the building of engines for racing motorcycles, London-based luthier Damian Probett shouldn’t have much trouble pulling off a meticulously well-crafted electric guitar – and he most definitely did not on evidence of the SG-Teor that graced GP’s New & Cool pages early in 2021.

Partly inspired by a “what if?” wish list from American guitarist Matte Henderson, Probett captured the spirit and overall sound of a vintage SG in a single-cutaway design that improved balance, eliminated neck-dive and “rubber neck” tuning-wobble issues, and enhanced sonic stability and sustain in the process. The result is a stunning performance tool that’s all the more versatile thanks to stealthy split-coil pickup switching. DH

The introduction of the Epiphone Alex Lifeson Les Paul Axcess Standard is big news for Rush fans because it makes their hero’s signature model much more accessible than its premium Gibson predecessor, introduced a decade ago.

In the spirit of Epiphone and Gibson’s modern hand-in-glove coordination and the mother company’s longstanding relationship with one of rock’s premier players, this Epiphone represents a career’s worth of considerations and innovations.

Primary among them is the instrument’s tonal versatility. In addition to the coil-splitting capabilities of both magnetic pickups, it features a piezo bridge pickup that can either be accessed by means of a dedicated second output jack or summed with the magnetic pickups into the primary output.

As Lifeson explains to Guitar Player, this unique pickup configuration developed from his desire for an elegant solution to using an acoustic guitar onstage. “Switching from electric to acoustic was always cumbersome, and an acoustic on a stand became a beacon for uncontrollable feedback, particularly in acoustic parts repeated throughout the song,” he says.

“I really needed to have a more stable platform. Incorporating the piezo pickup on an electric guitar did that, as well as allow me to blend in the piezo, adding another dimension to the live guitar character.”

Visually, this guitar is a badass. The flame maple veneer on its carved Viceroy Brown-finished maple top conjures the vibe of a vintage Gibson Les Paul, albeit not quite as fancy. Appointments include four golden top-hat control knobs, trapezoid fretboard inlays, keystone tuners, cream binding all around, a set-neck glued into a solid mahogany body, and Lifeson’s signature etched in the truss-rod cover.

Beyond the pickup configuration, Lifeson-specific features include a Floyd Rose locking vibrato system and a neck profile built to his personal specs – “moderate, not too thick and not too thin.”

Sling it over your shoulder and, yeah, it’s heavy, but not particularly so for a Les Paul. A slight scarf cutaway on the top back makes it feel cozy against one’s belly, while a sculpted cutaway at the base of the neck allows for more comfortable playing in the upper registers.

The neck is full without being too plump, and the fretboard feels nice and smooth all the way up and down. The factory setup was spot-on as well, and while the action seemed almost too easy at first, there was no buzz or splat to be found.

Shred away in the short rows and every note on each string is actually usable. Power chords and barre chords in the middle range come readily, and cowboy chords in open position have fantastic jangle.

The Floyd Rose-style double-locking vibrato keeps everything in tune while facilitating the deep dives and sky-high lifts of Lifeson’s playing that can only be achieved with such a serious system. All that extra metal brings some brightness, sure, but that’s part of the signature sound too.

Speaking of which, the tonal diversity on tap is astounding. The Axcess Standard has Epiphone’s Ceramic Pro humbucker in the neck position and a ProBucker 3 near the bridge, and both can be split into single-coil mode with a lift of the corresponding push/pull volume knob.

In humbucker mode, the neck pickup is girthy and the lead pickup is edgy. In combination, they complement each other to create a copacetic middle ground.

The coil splitting proved to be versatile. When playing in the lower register with the neck pickup, and using a bit of gain from a Blackstone Mosfet Overdrive into a 1966 Fender Super Pro, we found the sound a bit fizzy, but splitting the coil cleared it up.

Doing the same with the lead pickup took the tone into funky treble territory. When combined, the two pickups coil-tapped all the way to slinky town. These units don’t sound as crystal clear and powerful as the Gibson Burstbuckers included on Epiphone’s Limited Edition 1959 Les Paul Standard, but they do deliver a fine PAF vibe and sound that’s similar to the Burstbuckers with the volume knobs dialed back a bit.

The most unique feature is the piezo acoustic sound that comes courtesy of the Graph Tech Ghost Tremolo Bridge. The Ghost is engaged or disengaged by pulling or pushing what would have been the second tone knob. Here it acts as a blend control for bringing in or out the desired amount of acoustic sound.

Isolating the signal via the second output jack and feeding it to an Orange Acoustic Pedal through an L.R.Baggs Synapse Personal P.A., we found it delivered a decent acoustic rock tone that sounded believable when “Closer to the Heart” was played.

It possesses the full low end and top articulation that piezos do best. Blend that with the magnetics’ fantastic middle range, and it’s the best of both worlds. And the controls are easier to manage than one might suspect.

The trickiest aspect of mastering the Epiphone Alex Lifeson Axcess is working the vibrato bar while having the piezo pickup engaged. There’s a reason these features aren’t often offered together. Those piezos are located right in the individual bridge saddles, so they pick up every rattle of a shaking vibrato arm.

The bridge piezos convey the rattle much more than the magnetic pickups in the body do, so the workaround is to be judicious with the whammy when the acoustic sound is prominent, and then dial that back when you want to go wild.

The Epiphone Alex Lifeson Axcess delivers a whole lotta bang for the buck, with tons of features packed into the Les Paul platform. We can’t think of another guitar that delivers such a diverse tonal range, easy playability, comfort, impressive looks and quality craftsmanship for under a grand.

Specifications

• NUT: Floyd Rose R4 locking nut, 1 11/16” wide
• NECK: Set mahogany, Axcess contour heel, 24.72” scale, Lifeson profile
• FRETBOARD: Bound Indian laurel, 12” radius, large dot inlays, trapezoid inlays
• FRETS: 22 medium-jumbo
• TUNERS: Epiphone Deluxe with keystone buttons
• BODY: Solid mahogany back with comfortcarve belly scarf plus carved maple top with AAA flame maple veneer
• BRIDGE: Graph Tech Ghost Tremolo
• PICKUPS: Epiphone Ceramic Pro (neck), Epiphone ProBucker 3 (bridge) Graph Tech Ghost Piezo (bridge saddles)
• FACTORY: STRINGS Epiphone .010–.046
• CONTROLS: Three-way switch, neck and bridge volume knobs each with push/pull coil split; piezo volume knob with push/pull on/off; master tone
• WEIGHT: 9 lbs
• BUILT: China

Head over to Epiphone for more info.

If only they knew then what we know now. Well, it certainly seems as if a teenage Alex Lifeson did as he debates his future career in music with his parents. It’s a conversation many a guitar player (and parents of guitar players!) will be familiar with...

“I don’t see why I have to go through all the bullshit of high school to learn music,” he argues, bristling with frustration. “I’m just gonna hang around and feel it for a while. And then I’ll learn it… Right now, I feel a little angry… I notice a lot of parents have this great difficulty in listening to their kids.”

“I have said to you, Alex,” counters his father, “and I remember exactly: “I want you to be free, to expand.” I don’t want you to grow up with a fear, or some terror, of anything. What do you want? That’s what I want to know, really.”

Determined to succeed, Lifeson ultimately fulfilled his destiny. Having co-founded Rush in 1968, the guitarist persevered on the local gig circuit while the band put out their eponymous debut album on their own label, Moon Records, in 1974. Before long, Rush had signed to Mercury Records and their journey as Canada’s premier prog rock group really began to take off.

Decades later and Rush's album sales stand in the tens of millions. They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2013.

These days, with a new band project and signature model to his name – the fantastic Epiphone Alex Lifeson Les Paul Axcess Standard – Lifeson’s career in music shows no sign of slowing down. Few have the opportunity to look back on their formative years in as much detail, but this clip from Canadian film maker Allan King’s 1973 documentary Come on Children provides a rare glimpse into the past – and future – of one of music’s most influential electric guitar players.

Buy Rush here.

One of the most popular classical guitarists, and a successful pop crossover artist, Liona Boyd has been hailed by no less than Andrés Segovia and Chet Atkins for her musical virtuosity. Here are five reasons she is an acoustic guitar legend…

1. Masterful Education

Born in London in 1949, and raised in Canada, Boyd began playing guitar at 13 and quickly excelled on the instrument. While a student at the Guitar Society of Toronto, she studied with classical guitar greats like Segovia, Julian Bream, Narciso Yepes and Alexandre Lagoya. 

“Segovia told me I was playing too fast… Julian Bream helped me with Bach… Lagoya, of course, concentrated more on tone,” Boyd told Guitar Player in 2006. “But the one thing all of these masters provided more than anything else was inspiration. It wasn’t just technical advice – they would get me fired up.”

2. Collaboration

Unusually for a classical guitarist, Boyd took an interest in popular music genres early in her career and has frequently performed with rock and folk artists. In the 1970s, she was Gordon Lightfoot’s opening act on a successful tour that saw her play in sold-out ice hockey arenas. 

A performance in Nashville brought her to the attention of Atkins, and, together with John Knowles and John Pell, they recorded the country/classical crossover album The First Nashville Guitar Quartet in 1979. Boyd has also recorded with Eric Clapton, David Gilmour, Alex Lifeson and Rik Emmett, among others.

3. Off the Beaten Track

Boyd has occasionally performed in uncommon settings. In 1975, she went on the road in British Columbia and Yukon, where she paid her dues touring in frigid temperatures and playing for appreciative crowds “in all the remote, snowbound communities of northwest Canada,” she writes in her 1998 memoir, In My Own Key: My Life in Love and Music. 

With Atkins’ help, she landed an appearance on the NBC morning news/talk show Today early in her career. Most unusually, during O.J. Simpson’s 1995 murder trial, Boyd performed in a federal courthouse to entertain “bored-stiff jurors” at the request of the presiding judge, Lance Ito.

4. Diversity

After recording in the classical genre for many years, Boyd began exploring Latin, jazz, easy-listening and new age music starting in the mid 1990s. Her 2002 release, Camino Latino, showed off her talents as an interpreter and composer of Latin styles and saw her performing with guitarists like Al Di Meola, Steve Morse, and Strunz and Farah.

5. Adaptability

Following the release of Camino Latino, Boyd was diagnosed with focal dystonia, a neurological condition that causes involuntary muscle contractions and abnormal postures. To compensate, she developed her songwriting and vocal skills and performed less-demanding guitar arrangements. 

Her later albums – including 2009’s Seven Journeys: Music for the Soul and Imagination and 2015’s Relaxing Guitar for Insomnia, Dreaming and Romance – have leaned increasingly toward a mix of classical and new age.

In all, Boyd has racked up five Gold and three Platinum albums over her career and earned five Juno awards, Canada’s Grammy equivalent. She’s also a five-time winner of the Guitar Player Readers’ Poll for Best Classical Guitarist and has been inducted into the magazine’s Gallery of Greats.

A couple of weeks ago, Alex Lifeson unveiled a new, Epiphone version of his signature Les Paul Axcess Standard.

Buried within the news of the well-appointed, affordable signature model was the unveiling of two new instrumental tracks from the legendary Rush guitarist, "Kabul Blues" and "Spy House."

Apparently though, that's not the only new music Lifeson has in the pipeline.

In a recent interview with Sweetwater, Lifeson revealed that he, former Coney Hatch bassist Andy Curran, and singer-songwriter Maiah Wynne have just about finished a new album that will be released under the name Envy of None.

“Andy approached me about four years ago, shortly after the last Rush tour, about adding some guitar on some of the things he was doing,” Lifeson revealed when asked about the project's origins. “I did that. A few months later, he sent another one, and did that.

“Then we started getting more serious, and then we found a great singer, Maiah Wynne. So we’ve basically done an album’s worth of material that we hope to release sometime soon. I’m really excited about that.”

When asked when the music might see the light of day, Lifeson said, “We’re just working on that part. All the music is recorded. We are mixing currently. We’re in a good place, but it is very challenging. 

“The industry is so, so very different than it was certainly 10 years ago, never mind last year. We’ll see. Hopefully late summer, early fall we might have something. But we are very, very excited about it. It’s pretty cool stuff, I think.”

Speaking to Ultimate Classic Rock about the project, Curran said, “There’s some beautiful guitar that he’s [Lifeson] played all over it – but full transparency, it’s not Rush and it’s not Coney Hatch. 

“It’s like, if you can picture maybe Massive Attack with a little bit of some electronic stuff with Nine Inch Nails influences, with this beautiful voice and some very, very dark, heavy sounds. That’s kind of what this project sounds like.”

While we wait for Envy of None's debut, you can check out excerpts from "Kabul Blues" and "Spy House" in a new commemorative video, Alex Lifeson and Gibson – A 50 Year Ride, below.

Epiphone has teamed up with Alex Lifeson to create a new, lower-cost version of the Rush legend's signature Les Paul Axcess Standard.

The guitar features a mahogany body with a AAA flame maple veneer, a large belly carve, and a sculpted Axcess heel. Its mahogany neck, meanwhile, features a slimmer "Lifeson profile" and an Indian laurel fingerboard with trapezoid inlays and 22 medium-jumbo frets. 

• Our pick of the best Epiphone Les Pauls available today

The guitar is headlined, however, by a Floyd Rose-style Graph Tech Ghost double-locking vibrato that's itself outfitted with a modular piezo system in each saddle for converting string vibrations to amplified acoustic tones. This piezo system also means the guitar is fitted with two outputs.

Pickups-wise, there's an Epiphone Ceramic Pro humbucker at the neck and ProBucker 3 at the bridge, controlled by a shoulder-mounted three-way pickup selector, plus individual volume controls – both equipped with coil-splitting capabilities via a push/pull feature – for both humbuckers. 

Additionally, there's a master tone control and a piezo volume control – also a push/pull operation – for switching the system on and off. The piezo signal can also be blended with the humbuckers for greater tonal versatility.

“The introduction of the Epiphone Alex Lifeson Axcess model based on my Gibson Les Paul Axcess model has all the same attributes and characteristics that I desired so much when we originally designed it,” Lifeson said in a statement.

“The look, the sound, the playability and the utility – it’s all there for the player at any level. I’m very proud of this guitar.”

To celebrate the occasion of the guitar's release, Lifeson also released two new instrumental tracks – "Kabul Blues" and "Spy House." You can hear them in a new commemorative video, Alex Lifeson and Gibson – A 50 Year Ride, below.

The Epiphone Alex Lifeson Les Paul Axcess is available now – in a Viceroy Brown finish – for $899.

For more info on the guitar, stop by epiphone.com.

For more than five decades, prog rock has been the cradle from which guitar virtuosity has crawled forth.

Here, in their own words, more than 20 pioneering prog-rock guitarists share insights into their craft.

Frank Zappa

“The history of pop music has a habit of telling us who we really are – ’cause if we weren’t that way, we wouldn’t have spent billions of dollars on those records, would we? 

“After careful training by media and merchandising people, the entire population (even guitar players) has been transmuted into a reasonably well-groomed, odor-free, consumer-amoeba which is kept alive only to service manufacturers and lives its life by the motto: ‘Biggest, fastest, loudest is most and best.’”

Listen To: “Watermelon in Easter Hay“

Robert Fripp (King Crimson)

“Originally, the [Frippertronics] system was introduced to me by Brian Eno. I worked with him on it for the piece of music that became No Pussyfooting. I began working on it on my own in June and July 1977, when I was living in New York. Frippertronics as such went public for the first time in February 1978 at the Kitchen [a New York City arts and performance gallery], where I was giving a solo concert. 

“I needed a name for it, so I came up with ‘Frippertronics’ because it was silly. Then it went very, very public in 1979 with a four-month solo tour – two months in Europe and two in America. And it was there, actually in front of people – in record shops, pizza parlors, record offices, small cinemas, museums, all matter of places – that I began to learn to work with it pretty well. 

“I would run the tape back and improvise on top of it. The original form was with two Revox tape recorders, but now I’m working with the Electro-Harmonix 16 Second Digital Delay. It was advertised as a Fripp in the Box. It’s far smaller, quicker, and easier to set up than two Revoxes, although the sounds one gets are quite different.”

Listen To: Let the Power Fall (Robert Fripp)  

Martin Barre (Jethro Tull)

“I learnt my lesson in 1967. I was in a studio doing a session for Eric Burdon and we were doing the backing track. Jeff Beck wandered in. We were in awe. When we finished the track, he picked up an old amp and guitar in the corner of the studio, plugged in and sounded amazing. 

“And it was Jeff Beck that produced that sound, not a particular amp or pedals. It was purely him. He was totally in control. He could’ve reproduced that anywhere in the world in any circumstances. That’s what I’m always aiming for.”  

Listen To: “Aqualung”

John McLaughlin (Mahavishnu Orchestra)

“Sometimes I can’t actually sit down and write music. I have to wait until I hear something. That’s why I like my iPhone: I get an idea and I can sing it directly into my phone, and it’s archived. 

“It might be just a melody, or it might be an idea I have for a particular chord progression, or it might just be a rhythmical idea. So I actually do so much with my iPhone and my voice. Who knows where I might be? I’m not necessarily going to be home when I get an idea, and if I don’t record it, it’s gone.”  

Listen To: “Birds of Fire”

Jan Akkerman (Focus)

“Focus is for me one of the few groups who know how to catalyze love for music and voice. We get into the theatrics strictly through the music, like with ‘Hocus Pocus.’ I want to reach the people with pure beauty. I want to make pure music.”

Listen To: “Sylvia”

Todd Rundgren (Utopia)

“Mahavishnu Orchestra was a revelation to us, so we started composing long, polymodal polyrhythmic marathons with bits of vocal and occasionally something that sounded like a song…. 

“We were comparing ourselves individually to our various heroes as well as to each other, and I developed a whole new relationship with the guitar. The material was structured in a way that left long passages without vocals and an uninterrupted focus on the instrument. For fleeting moments, I could channel the inner mounting flame.”

Listen To: “The Ikon“

Steve Hackett (Genesis, GTR)

“In Genesis, I was always writing solos. There were a few improvised ones, but there were not that many because there was always such an emphasis on writing with the Genesis team. I think I probably erred more on the side of blues than any of the other guys in the band. 

“I did always have the ability to be able to go into a blues. And I still do. It’s something you can share onstage with somebody else’s band, and I often have, where I don’t know the tune but I just wing it as a blues player. It’s stood me in very good stead.”  

Listen To: “Fifty Miles from the North Pole” 

Mike Oldfield

“When I listen back to Tubular Bells and Hergest Ridge, it sounds like yesterday. For a start, I use all five fingernails on my right hand, not a plectrum, so I get a very pure sound. That’s why people don’t seem to see me as a guitar player. 

“When there’s a video of me, I don’t look like I’m doing very much. I use violin vibrato. I can only think of Robert Fripp, who also uses that. And I often play just one note with a lot of power to start a melody.”

Listen To: “Ommadawn”

Steve Howe (Yes, GTR, Asia)

“I’ve always put [prog-rock] down to a post-psychedelia reinvention of rock music, because it had already got churned up quite a lot in psychedelic times, but I think it got broader then, and orchestral spirits came into it. I think what was great about [Yes, Pink Floyd, Genesis, King Crimson, and Led Zeppelin] was that each one of its members had a different story that they wanted to bring into the group. 

“I wanted to bring my writing into the band – my guitar ideas, my chordal ideas and songs. Bill [Bruford] wasn’t going to play 4/4, you know? He always knew what was appropriate, but he also knew what Bill Bruford would do with it.”  

Listen To: “Siberian Khatru” (Yes)

Steve Hillage (Khang, Gong, System 7)

“I was nine when I got my first guitar – a little acoustic with steel strings. I learned to play with a pick, and by the time I was 12 I’d got quite good. My first electric guitar was a Watkins Rapier, then finally I managed to get a Fender Stratocaster – my first pro guitar – in ’67. I think it was either a ’62 or a ’63. 

“I gradually found my own thing through a long series of experimentations with tape recorders, and later on I started getting into tape echo and various echo boxes. That’s how I really developed my personal sound and style.”  

Listen To: “The Glorious Om Riff” (Steve Hillage)

Alex Lifeson (Rush)

“I feel [my vibrato] is one of the more outstanding characteristics of my playing. I’m heavily influenced by Jimmy Page, and he has a fantastic vibrato. It’s so loose and so emotional. So as vibrato bars got better, I really wanted to create a subtlety in the right hand with the bar that matched my left hand. 

“I would push the left hand a little more, and I would ease off on the right hand. Of course, I did a lot of dive-bomb stuff in the ’80s, but I always wanted to have a very subtle vibrato on the whammy bar. It takes time, but it’s a very emotional thing. And very effective.”

Listen To: “La Villa Strangiato”

Allan Holdsworth

“I’ll just experiment with different voicings. What I usually do is just try to find the kind of voicings of particular chords that I like, and turn them around. I don’t like the sound of conventional guitar voicings. I love listening to jazz guitar – I listened to it a lot when I was younger, because my father introduced me to it. 

“But I very quickly tired of the sound of the chord voicings. I just decided that if I was going to get some chord things together that I might as well play some other voicings, instead of the kind of Jazz Book One or Jazz Book Two or Jazz Book Ten types of chords.” 

Listen To: “Metal Fatigue”

Tosin Abasi (Animals As Leaders)

“I would say the pure definition of progressive is to create new things. So advancing the scope of a genre – or the expression within a genre – is to be progressive. The minute you try to define what you’re doing is when you put limitations on yourself. I’m looking outside metal for my inspiration right now. That’s not to say that I don’t love my influences, because I do. But I want to keep moving.” 

Listen To: “Tempting Time”

Steven Wilson (Porcupine Tree)

“This idea of being ‘progressive’ is misleading. I don’t like the word, anyway. I certainly don’t like the word prog. There’s nothing on anyone’s record that you cannot relate back to something from the past. I am aware of that, and I kinda embrace it. 

“What we’re doing is trying to invest that musical vocabulary with enough musical personality that it still sounds fresh. For [Wilson's 2015 solo album Hand.Cannot.Erase.], I would say it’s conceptual rock music, with all the implications that may or may not have.”  

Listen To: “The Raven That Refused to Sing” 

Steve Morse (Dixie Dregs, Kansas, Deep Purple)

“To become a good guitarist, you have to be open to things. When I first played with Al Di Meola, I asked how he sounded so percussive. We switched picks and there was a difference, so I changed from nylon to celluloid for the rest of the tour. 

“I’d love to get to know Jeff Beck and see if he really is pulling it out of nowhere, which is how it seems. It feels like he’s really improvising and making art through his guitar.”  

Listen To: “Tumeni Notes”

Steve Rothery (Marillion)

“I fell in love with Genesis after I heard ‘The Knife’ on Alan Freeman’s Saturday Rock Show. After that, I discovered Camel, Yes, King Crimson.... For me, there’s only good and bad in music. Labels are meaningless. 

"The true meaning of progressive is music without any self-imposed boundaries. It’s having the freedom to work outside the constraints of conventional song structure, almost like a soundtrack-type approach to creating songs.”

Listen To: “Grendel”

Dweezil Zappa

“I love the sound of microtonal instruments. On Via Zammata, I played the oud and a Godin Glissentar. I’m inspired by a variety of Eastern styles, including Indian, Turkish, Arabic, and Bulgarian. 

“I even recorded some music by the Bulgarian Women’s Choir. The tunes I chose have resonated with me since my dad took me to one of their concerts. I orchestrated them for guitar in a way that pays homage to Brian May.”   

Listen To: “Funky 15”

Alan Morse (Spock's Beard)

“When I saw Yes, I felt like they incorporated everything I loved about music into one thing. I saw them play live when I was 12, opening up for Black Sabbath in Los Angeles, and they really changed my mind. I was raised with all this classical music and some jazz, and I loved the power of rock and felt like Yes particularly embodied everything that I loved about music.”  

Listen To: “The Man Behind the Curtain”

Omar Rodríguez-López (The Mars Volta)

“From a fretboard perspective, I work with shapes rather than patterns. I’m useless at running through scales, but I’m good at arranging my thoughts into geometric shapes and creating chords and melodies out of them. Thoughts have shapes, just like tones – they have waveforms. 

“You can translate the shapes of thoughts and emotions through your hands onto the fretboard. With experience, you start relating the shape of your hand on the fretboard to certain geometric shapes that enter your mind when you’re hearing those sounds or having those feelings. You hear people use shapes to describe things all the time, such as, ‘That guy is a square,’ or ‘This sound is really round.’”  

Listen To: “Eriatarka”

Mike Keneally

“I decided a good discipline exercise would be to learn all the guitar parts on all the Gentle Giant albums. It turned out to be very valuable. But even more valuable was the time spent learning from Zappa’s discs. 

“I managed to develop a pretty good memory by playing stuff off of them. One of Frank’s names for me was Evelyn Wood [of speed-reading course fame], because of my unusual amount of comprehension and fast recognition of patterns. I can read music, but I don’t sightread it.”  

Listen To: “Lightnin’ Roy”

Guthrie Govan

“I think the best way to become comfortable with odd time signatures is to not think of them as odd. You just have to develop a natural feel for the contour of the bar in any given time signature, so you can sense when the ‘one’ will return without having to do any literal counting. 

“However daunting the top number in the time signature may appear, there’s generally an underlying framework, so it’s helpful to focus on finding the most prominent pulses within each bar, which are generally separated by smaller, more manageable numbers, like 3 and 4.” 

Listen To: “Sevens”

Sometimes referred to as “high strung,” Nashville tuning is primarily a studio trick that harkens back to the golden age of Music City session pluckers. 

It’s been used on oodles of recordings, and not only country tracks: Nashville tuning provides the high chime on the Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses,” Rush’s “Natural Science,” and Pink Floyd’s “Hey You,” to name a few songs from the rock pantheon. The tuning has a kind of magic mystique worthy of exploration.

Get Set Up

Nashville tuning is like standard tuning, except for the higher octaves used for strings four through six. Traditionally this has been accomplished by applying the higher-pitched strings of a 12-string set to any guitar. The top two strings within each pair of a 12-string set are interchangeable, as they are designed to ring out in unison like a mandolin. 

Tune them to standard E and B respectively. They are typically a bit lighter than the gauges in a six-string set. Strings three through six will be much lighter because they were designed to be the higher-octave partners to the lower-pitched four. Tune them as such, an octave above standard, to G, D, A, and E, respectively. 

These days, custom sets are available such as D’Addario’s EJ38H High Strung/Nashville Tuning Phosphor Bronze pack (.010, .014, .009, .012, .018, .027).

High-Wire Acts

The traditional trick is to record a part on a six-string, and then double it in Nashville tuning to simulate a 12-string. You might ask, “Hey, couldn’t I simply cut a single track on a 12-string”? Well, lucky you if you own a 12-string, but a single track of that is still not as cool.

Doubling a six-string track in Nashville provides a more severe chorus effect, creates less clutter in the low end, and opens up new panoramic and processing possibilities. And while simulating a 12-string may be the primary application, plenty of precious guitar parts have been created and tracked by simply using a single guitar in Nashville tuning.

Tonal Sopranos

Chime and clarity with copious amounts of springy string ring are the tonal hallmarks Nashville tuning provides. A Nashville-style string set is clustered more closely together in pitch than a standard string set, so chord voicings can take on a keyboard-like quality. Furthermore, the acoustic guitar itself can adopt attributes associated with other instruments. 

Applying a capo or utilizing an alternate tuning can help conjure tones more akin to a mandolin, five-string banjo, and even a soprano ukulele in re-entrant tuning (where the strings aren’t in order from lowest to highest pitch, or vice versa). 

David Gilmour is said to have applied the latter concept quite literally to a variation of Nashville tuning on the iconic intro to Pink Floyd’s “Hey You” by using a second E string in the sixth slot. High-strung modal tunings can facilitate fantastic exotic acoustic tones.

Which Box Is Best?

Martin’s Sting Mini size 5 terz guitar prototype is one of the more interesting modern guitars in its museum. It was only tuned up a step and a half when I played it, yet the piccolo-like tone achieved via a high-strung small box was stunning. Nashville tuning takes that combo to new heights. 

If you’ve got a travel guitar or a parlor style, give it a go. Common logic says that larger guitars don’t provide as much “pop,” and intonation issues may arise, but there are no real rules on the road to Nashville. 

In his September 2018 Frets feature, Alex Lifeson said that he simply removes the wound strings from his Martin 12-string, and that he’ll use it for almost anything. “I actually recorded a track for John Mayall using only the Nashville-tuned Martin because I didn’t want to do the standard blues thing,” he explained.

Once you’ve got a Nashville-tuned acoustic, creativity is bound to flow and outside-the-box ideas will present themselves. What kinds of high-wire acts might facilitate brilliant tonal feats in your hands? There’s only one way to find out. String up, let your fingers flow freely, and see where Nashville tuning takes you.

A few years back, John Petrucci went out for a drive with the folks from Cosmo Music. In the resulting Rockstars in Cars video, the Dream Theater guitarist talked about his favorite solo to play live, his mix of technical and emotional guitar playing, and more.

Best question in the video: “Desert island chord: You got one chord you can play forever. What is it?”

“It’s the opening chord from Hemispheres by Rush,” Petrucci replies. “It’s the F sharp major with the added 4th and the flat 7. That should really be named ‘the Alex Lifeson Chord,’ because he invented that.”

Hemispheres was Rush’s sixth studio album and featured “Cygnus X-1 Book II: Hemispheres” as its opening track. The chord is shown above, while the video of the track can be seen below, along with the full Rockstars in Cars video.