Deep Purple guitarist Simon McBride says he was given complete freedom to be himself when he joined the band. Even so, there are certain parts of the group's iconic catalog he daren't change.

The Irishman — who had previously worked with Purple vocalist Ian Gillan, keyboardist Don Airey and drummer Ian Paice on various side projects — was handpicked as Steve Morse's successor in 2022. He initially joined as a stand-in while Morse took a leave of absence to care for his ill wife, before eventually becoming the band's full-time guitarist.

McBride's transition into Deep Purple has been notably smooth. His blues-based style has made him an immediate fit within the group's sound.

"We had a fantastic 20-odd years with Steve Morse, who is a magnificent player," Gillan told Planet Rock last month. "Steve's roots are in southern rock, and that's a bit more languid than our style. So when Simon came in, [we were] back in business. It's like 1970s Purple with modern touches."

Speaking to Guitar Interactive as the band prepares to release SPLAT!, their second album with McBride, the guitarist says he was handed the keys to the Deep Purple Lamborghini with "zero pressure" to emulate any of the players who came before him.

"The only pressure came from me," he says with a laugh. "When I first started, I was only stepping in for Steve. I was just a session dude. When I became part of the band, they didn't want another Ritchie Blackmore, they didn't want another Steve Morse or Tommy Bolin.

"They said, 'You're here because of you. We don't want you to sound like Steve, we don't want you to sound like Ritchie. We've done that.' It was great to hear."

Even so, McBride says joining a band with more than five decades of history requires a certain amount of restraint.

"Obviously, when you join a band like Deep Purple with such a history of songs and great guitarists, you have to be respectful," he says. "There's certain things I can't change, like 'Highway Star' — I think if I changed the solo on that I would probably get shot."

He learned just how attached audiences are to some of those classic guitar parts while performing in South America.

"I remember playing in South America, there were 65,000 people, and the first song was 'Highway Star,'" he recalls. "I go for the solo, and 65,000 people sang that solo back to me, so I was like, 'Thank God I didn't change that fucking thing!'

"You have to appreciate that certain solos are little constructed pieces of music within a song. There are other songs where you can change and improvise; there are parts of the 'Smoke on the Water' solo I love, and there are parts where I mix it up a bit."

McBride appreciates that there are more than five decades of history behind Deep Purple. While he is mindful of preserving some of the band's most celebrated moments, he also knows he can't lose himself in the process.

"If you try to play like somebody else, you'll never ever truly be yourself as a player — you'll end up just being a clone," he says. "It's one of the reasons I don't play a Strat. As soon as I pick up a Strat, I instantly want to play Stevie Ray Vaughan or Jimi Hendrix."

Instead, McBride typically plays a PRS 408, a guitar that helps distinguish him from the players who came before him.

Elsewhere, Blackmore recently reflected on the night Christopher Cross filled in for him in Deep Purple, while David Coverdale has spoken about the "uncomfortable spiral downward" that marked Tommy Bolin's brief tenure in the band.

As Deep Purple began their first U.S. tour in August 1970, guitarist Ritchie Blackmore was miserable. Stricken by a mysterious illness — one that doctors said had afflicted another rock guitar hero just weeks earlier — and desperately homesick, he spent the night of one Texas show confined to a hospital bed. And he was almost relieved.

The band had crossed the Atlantic to support their thunderous fourth album, Deep Purple in Rock. But when Blackmore fell ill, a young local guitarist named Christopher Cross briefly entered Deep Purple folklore by stepping in for a single night at the Jam Factory in San Antonio, Texas.

“I had a canker sore in my mouth under my tongue; I couldn't eat, I couldn't speak,” Blackmore recalled of the episode (via Ultimate Classic Rock). “I was miserable about that, and I wasn't happy about being on tour in America. The places we played were so far apart. I had no idea where I was. I wasn't in my comfort zone, and I kind of missed England.”

Cross later suggested the illness may have been a reaction to flu shots the band had been advised to take before their first American tour. Perhaps — though whatever was ailing Blackmore left doctors baffled.

“I remember being very miserable, and I was walking down the corridor with Jon Lord to go to the show, and then I felt very dizzy,” Blackmore recalled. “I grabbed hold of Jon, and he kept me walking. Then I fell down, and they took me to the hospital. They didn't know what it was. I think it was just pure misery. They kept giving me shots.

“The doctors would say, ‘Where's the pain? What do you feel?’” he continued. “I'd go, ‘I don't know. I'm just so miserable.’ It was interesting — they said the week before they'd had Keith Richards in for a similar kind of experience, which I wondered about.”

Fortunately, San Antonio had a capable stand-in. At the time, Cross — still performing under his birth name, Chris Geppert — played in the local covers band Flash and idolized Blackmore.

As Guitar Player has previously reported, concert promoter Joe Miller knew of the young guitarist’s abilities. With his familiarity with Deep Purple’s material, Cross became the logical emergency replacement.

“Joe — who was kind of managing me at the time — said, ‘You know, there's this guitarist in town who's a big fan of Ritchie's, and he could probably step in,’” Cross recalled.

According to Cross, Ian Gillan — whose first stint with Deep Purple later ended as his relationship with Blackmore deteriorated — was the only band member reluctant about the idea. Curiously, however, Lord would later claim the episode never happened.

“I came down, and I had a Flying V and long hair, and I'm this big Ritchie fan,” Cross said. “We played the songs that I knew, and then we jammed some blues. It was a great moment for me. And when they left town, I went to the airport and got to meet Ritchie, and he thanked me for covering for him.”

According to Setlist.fm, the show included newly released songs such as “Speed King,” “Child in Time,” and “Mandrake Root,” along with covers of the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black” and Little Richard’s “Lucille” — a song the band would perform with George Harrison 14 years later.

“I just stayed in the hotel being miserable and Deep Purple went on and did the show with Christopher Cross,” Blackmore said. “Luckily they played, because it's a terrible feeling when you're sick on the road and you let everybody down — the audience, the crew, the band. Nobody wants to be sick on the road.

“I can get quite depressed,” added the guitarist, who has been recovering at home following recent health scares. “And I was very depressed at the time, being in America and knowing I'd be there for three months before I got back to England.”

Elsewhere, Blackmore has reflected on rebuilding his friendship with Lord before the keyboardist’s death in 2012, while former Deep Purple singer David Coverdale has discussed the “downward spiral” surrounding the band’s decision to replace Blackmore in the mid-’70s.

Ritchie Blackmore recently grabbed headlines with a surprise livestream Q&A in which he shared a notably pessimistic view of guitar players.

What received considerably less attention were his thoughtful reflections on the late virtuoso Eddie Van Halen, whom he remembers as both extraordinarily gifted and strikingly modest.

“[He was] very humble, almost too humble,” Blackmore says. “He would often come backstage at our shows and go, ‘You don’t want to talk to me, because I’m nobody,’ and I could never understand why he would say that. He always used to underestimate himself. He basically reinvented the guitar with his hammer-on technique.”

Blackmore says he particularly admired Van Halen’s intuitive approach to the instrument. While he described Joe Satriani and Steve Morse — who joined Deep Purple following Blackmore’s 1993 departure — as “fantastic players,” he suggested that technical perfection does not necessarily equate to the highest level of musical expression.

“If you’re always playing the correct notes, there’s something wrong,” he says. “You’re not searching, you’re not reaching for anything.”

Van Halen, he adds, does not fall into that category.

Blackmore believes Eddie’s sensitive nature sometimes made it difficult for him to find common ground with the older guard of guitar greats, including himself and Eric Clapton. Van Halen was heavily inspired by Clapton and was hurt when he was rejected by him.

“Unfortunately for Eddie, he was too sensitive,” Blackmore says. “And of course the business brought him down. He started drinking because he needed to drink to socialize. He was very sensitive, and I can relate to that.”

Blackmore says much the same about Randy Rhoads, the late guitarist for Ozzy Osbourne. Although many pitted Rhoads against Van Halen for the title of world’s greatest guitar player, their rivalry was largely fictional. As Blackmore sees it, both guitarists were cut from the same cloth.

“He was almost like Eddie Van Halen; very similar attitude, very humble, which I always appreciate when I talk to people,” Blackmore says. “There’s no reason to be conceited about music.”

Blackmore has been in a particularly chatty mood lately. In addition to his online Q&A, the guitarist recently gave Guitar Player an extensive interview about his time in Rainbow to promote the new box set Rainbow — The Temple of the King 1975–1976, a nine-disc collection of recordings from his post–Deep Purple group.

During the conversation, he also reflected on his relationship with Jon Lord, describing the late keyboardist as “my best friend in the band.”

Former Deep Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore has surprised his fans by going live on Instagram for an impromptu Q&A session, during which he recalled an amusing anecdote about his friendship with Tommy Bolin.

Bolin became the successor to Blackmore’s Deep Purple throne in 1975. David Coverdale, a fan of his work with Billy Cobham, was instrumental in his hiring, and he struck up a friendship with bassist Glenn Hughes as the band segued into a more funk-driven sound on Come Taste the Band.

Blackmore hasn’t always spoken kindly of Deep Purple’s other lead guitar players. Yet in this new Q&A, filmed as he recovers from a health scare that saw Blackmore’s Night’s recent tour postponed, he bucks the trend.

“He was such a nice guy that I couldn't believe he was a guitar player,” he says of Bolin, “because most guitar players aren't nice people.

“I would go around his house, and we'd often have fun just talking to each other. There was never ever any envy, no competition whatsoever.”

Like most, Blackmore is said to have first heard Bolin's playing on Billy Cobham's Spectrum album, while keyboardist Jon Lord is said to have been “entranced” by his playing. He had the looks to boot, too. Hughes, who was driven to his Deep Purple audition by David Bowie, picked up on that immediately.

“I saw this guy with green and purple hair,” he recalls (via Guitar Interactive Magazine). “I whispered in his ear, ‘If you don't get the gig, you're coming back to my house tonight.’”

Bolin had his admirers. But one thing did strike Ritchie Blackmore about his fellow virtuoso and friend.

“I said to Tommy once, ‘When did you last change your strings?’ ‘cause they were so caked in dirt and grit. And he looked at me, like, ‘I should change them?’” he recalls. “And I said, ‘Well, yeah.’ And he said, ‘Well, probably about five years ago.’ He was a brilliant player, a great player, but he never changed his guitar strings!”

Blackmore, speaking to Guitar Player recently, said he became disillusioned with life in the band because the rest of the group had priorities elsewhere. He would go on to form Rainbow with Ronnie James Dio. Billy Corgan once said that Blackmore was one of the best soloists in history, but was destined not to get the credit he deserves because “he's such a dick.”

The rock pantheon is full of talented but notoriously difficult musicians — Axl Rose, Pete Townshend, Lou Reed, Gene Simmons, and the Gallagher brothers among them.

And then there’s Ritchie Blackmore. He was the driving force behind Ian Gillan and Roger Glover’s departure from Deep Purple and famously dismissed everyone from Rainbow’s original lineup except Ronnie James Dio.

As Blackmore once told Guitar Player about his string of firings. “I’ve never fired anyone from Rainbow who was doing a really good job. Let’s keep it at that.”

Yet one bandmate managed to earn and keep Blackmore’s respect: Jon Lord, Deep Purple’s founding keyboardist.

Blackmore first met Lord through Chris Curtis, drummer for the British band The Searchers. Curtis was assembling a group that would later become Deep Purple — although his eccentricities were immediately apparent.

“He said, ‘We have Jon Lord,’ and I asked, ‘Who’s on bass?’ He said, ‘I am.’ So I said, ‘Who’s on drums?’ and he said again, ‘I am.’ Then he added, ‘I’m also playing first guitar — you’re second guitar.’

“That’s how Deep Purple started,” Blackmore recalled with a laugh.

“I said to Jon, ‘This Chris Curtis… he’s a bit of a strange guy, right?’ and Jon just said, ‘Yes.’ From then on, Jon was probably my best friend in the band.”

Blackmore admired Lord’s warmth and charm.

“He was a very affable man. He had a talent for getting along with everybody. If someone asked, ‘Jon, how are you today?,’ he’d always answer, ‘Absolutely fabulous, old chap!’ Whereas my answer would be, ‘I’m in various stages of deterioration.’ So we clicked — black and white.”

During the early ’70s, Deep Purple lived at Deeves Hall, a supposedly haunted house in Hertfordshire, and later stayed at Clearwell Castle while recording Burn (1973–74). Blackmore remembered those long nights vividly.

“We stayed up quite late because we were both too scared to go to bed — the place was haunted, supposedly — so we’d stay up writing songs.”

He also admired Lord’s deep musical knowledge and gift for orchestration — though that, ironically, is what caused tension between them.

“I felt he was giving too much effort to his orchestrated pieces, which I didn’t particularly like playing,” Blackmore said. “We had a big row. I told him if he didn’t spend so much time writing for the orchestra, we’d have more songs to play together for the band.”

Their falling out lasted six months before they reconciled.

“Toward the end of his life, we were very close,” Blackmore said. “We would often go out to dinner — my wife Candice, Jon, and me.”

When Jon Lord died in 2012, Blackmore was deeply affected.

“It hit me more than I thought it would,” he admitted. He went on to write ‘Carry On… Jon’ in tribute.

“It was very difficult to play that particular tune on stage without becoming emotional,” Blackmore said. “This is for Jon.”

Most guitarists slow down as they get older.

But most guitarists aren’t Steve Morse.

The former Deep Purple guitarist spends his days fixing tractors, cutting hay, flying airplanes and maintaining the 56-acre farm he calls home. The routine sounds exhausting, but he says it actually fuels his creativity.

Speaking to Premier Guitar while promoting Triangulation — the first Steve Morse Band album in 16 years and his first new music since leaving Deep Purple in 2022 — the 71-year-old reflected on the surprisingly busy life he leads away from the stage.

“I fly all the time,” he says. “I’ve never stopped flying.”

Morse has stepped away from the music industry twice before, seeking distance from the chaos and burnout that can come with a life onstage.

When his pioneering jazz-fusion outfit Dixie Dregs broke up in 1981, he traded guitars for heavy machinery, with his days spent running bulldozers and cutting hay.

Music eventually pulled him back. The Steve Morse Band gave him a new outlet when Capricorn Records offered him the freedom to record whatever he wanted, entirely on his own terms.

But the grind of the industry caught up with him again. Burned out, Morse left music once more and pursued another lifelong passion: aviation. He trained as a commercial airline pilot before being lured back onto the stage when Lynyrd Skynyrd invited him to join their lineup.

These days, Morse still balances playing the electric guitar with the practical realities of running a working farm — one that even has its own small runway.

“I think it’s very important, because you have more to say with the music if you have a life outside of it,” he says.

Much of that life revolves around keeping aging machinery running.

“The biggest part of my extracurricular thing is fixing stuff because I’ve got old hay equipment and old machines, and I have to learn the systems for each one,” he explains. “So a lot of my life is spent looking for manuals, finding sources for parts, learning hydraulics and learning the way electrical systems work so I can basically fix everything.”

It’s demanding work.

“I work all day, basically,” Morse says. “I don’t wake up early, but when I do wake up, I just go straight outside and start working until dark. Then I’ll work on music after dinner.”

For many musicians, that kind of schedule might stifle creativity. For Morse, it has the opposite effect.

“I think it’s super important, because when I’m doing laps in the tractor, cutting weeds or whatever, I’m thinking about stuff,” he says. “Melodies and parts come to mind that I’ve been working on recently, and I just kick them around.”

His curiosity extends well beyond guitars.

“When I’m at a gig and I walk by and see a guy welding something in the back, I stop and ask questions: How are you doing that? Did you preheat that? Does that make it crack?” he says. “I’m a student of everything.”

In recent years, Morse has also had to adapt physically. He continues to battle severe arthritis in his right-hand wrist — a condition so serious that a sports doctor once laughed when he said he intended to keep playing guitar.

Instead of stopping, Morse modified his guitar and continues adjusting his playing style, often day by day, to stay onstage.

The determination mirrors the resilience that has defined much of his career, including his nearly three-decade tenure in Deep Purple, where he stepped into the formidable role once held by Ritchie Blackmore.

Even there, Morse says creative frustrations were common. At one point, he estimated that about 95 percent of his ideas were rejected by the band. But one sympathetic bandmate appreciated his more unusual compositions, allowing a handful of Morse’s more adventurous ideas to slip onto Deep Purple records.

“It's interesting to note that Jim Marshall didn't know much about amplifiers,” Ritchie Blackmore says. “And yet he knew how to design something that caught on like crazy. This is a similar situation with Leo Fender, who never played a guitar.”

Blackmore knows something about the gear created by Marshall and Fender. After all, he played Marshall amps throughout his tenures with Deep Purple and Rainbow, and he’s used Fender Stratocaster guitars for nearly his entire career, including today with Blackmore’s Night.

But he never thought either man built the perfect gear.

Consider Fender. Blackmore doesn’t like the standard fretboard, preferring scalloped frets. It all goes back to a teenage experience.

“I was playing an old classical guitar back when I was 15, and I liked the feel of the scalloped neck — the concave wood,” he says. “When I was about 19 or 20, I started sandpapering down the fretboard in between the frets, and it felt better.

“It’s three days of scalloping with tape over the frets. Then I take the tape off the frets and have it re-lacquered.

“I think it’s an obvious thing to do,” he adds. “I’m surprised all electric guitars don't have naturally concave wood in between the frets.”

And then there’s Marshall, whose amplifiers never pleased Blackmore in their stock form.

“I didn't like the sound of the regular Marshall — it was too mellow and too muted,” he says. “Jimi Hendrix always had trouble with the transformers blowing up if you pushed the amp too hard.”

So Blackmore set about fixing the problem. If Marshall didn’t know much about amplifiers, he would talk to the people who did.

“I used to go to the factory in Bletchley to speak to Ken Flegg and Ken Bran, and I'd try to get them to give me more distorted treble on the output side,” he explains. “I’d go into a soundproofed room to test the amps — which still didn't stop the women who worked in the factory from saying they couldn't work or concentrate with me playing so loud.

“They ended up building an extra output stage on the 200-watt Marshall, which took the wattage up to 280 watts. At that point, I basically had the loudest amp ever made by Marshall. They said if I told anyone, they would deny it, because they didn't want to have to make any more like that. I think I caused them a bit of grief.”

Blackmore got the amp he asked for: the loudest Marshall ever made. Flegg and Bran added an extra output stage to a Marshall Major — a 200-watt monster designed around four KT88 output tubes — raising the wattage to 280.

It may have been powerful, but it still wasn’t quite enough in the tone department. Blackmore wanted more bottom end without additional dirt. Where a guitarist today might use a compression pedal to add girth without distortion, Blackmore achieved the same effect by using an Akai tape deck as a preamp.

“I liked the fact that it fattened up the sound without distorting it too much. It was really just an old tape deck that was lying around the house. I thought it would be a waste not to use it.”

When asked to describe the perfect guitar tone, the typically loquacious guitarist was illustrative and to the point.

“The combination of an owl meeting a bumblebee in mid-flight.”

In other words, the perfect blend of warm midrange and biting edge. Blackmore’s classic electric tone was always heavy but not heavily distorted — the result of a simple sonic formula.

“Just a bit of overdrive. Then, I turn all the treble off, have a bit of middle, and turn the bass off.”

Blackmore, now 80, was recently honored with the 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Guitar Museum. The award, announced February 23, 2026, recognizes his 60-year career as a founding member of Deep Purple and Rainbow, as well as his work with Blackmore’s Night.

When Steve Morse left Deep Purple in 2022, he had logged more time with the group than any other guitar player.

But perhaps familiarity really does breed contempt: Morse says several members of the band were more than happy to see the back of him.

The Dixie Dregs founder enjoyed side quests with Kansas and Lynyrd Skynyrd before he joined Purple in 1994, just as Ritchie Blackmore’s second spell in the band came to an end. After eight studio albums with the British hard rockers, he departed when his wife fell ill with aggressive Stage 4 cancer.

As Morse recently revealed, his time in Deep Purple was marked by frustration over his tendency toward virtuoso fusion playing, which took the group a step away from the blues-meets-classical roots they formed with Blackmore. He's said that 95 percent of the ideas he presented to the group were dismissed.

Morse now tells Guitar Interactive Magazine he believes his band mates were glad to see him go and that he can't imagine performing with them again even for a one-off event.

“I think if the band felt differently, I would feel differently,” he says. “But I think that there's a couple of guys in the band that were really glad for me to be gone, because they were sort of heading back to their roots and wanted just to be a rock band, and ‘don't give me any of that fancy crap.’

“When you look at me as a writer, I definitely give you that fancy crap,” he says, laughing. “I can't help it.

Deep Purple seems to have found what they want in Morse's replacement, Irishman Simon McBride, who is another blues-centric player, and a fine one at that.

“So I think the band's happier the way they are,” Morse adds, “and it would be kind of a step back for them to wanna do something like that. They're happier and better off, and I think it’s the same here.”

Vocalist Ian Gillan said as much last summer.

“Simon is a fantastic contributor to the band,” he told Made in Metal last summer (via Blabbermouth). “It's one of the best things that could have happened.”

“He's changed things quite a lot,” he said in another interview two years prior. “He's a catalyst; we feel very relaxed with Simon's style of playing. It's very compatible with the way we started. It's very straightforward; the platforms are simple, and the virtuosity is on top.”

Reading between the lines, it's easy to see why Morse hints at there being more disharmony during his reign than the fact that he stuck around for 28 years lets on. The comments on McBride’s playing, and of its simplicity, also feel like a veiled dig at Morse’s inability to do likewise.

Talking of his successor, Blackmore called Morse a “fantastic” guitarist, but suggested he played more from the head than the heart, which he felt was to his detriment.

Morse is back on familiar ground with his namesake trio. He’s got a new album out in Triangulation and is back on the road to celebrate it. This, despite his ongoing struggles with arthritis, which means he has to change up his playing style daily. It’s also rendered one of his more virtuoso songs unplayable.

Across his 28 years with Deep Purple, Steve Morse became the band’s longest-serving guitarist. However, the creative impact he had on the British rock giants wasn’t as big as many would believe.

The fusion ace joined the group in 1994 to replace founding riffer Ritchie Blackmore, who had returned to the band after leaving in 1975 to form Rainbow. Deep Purple had hired Joe Satriani for a year of touring before Morse was sworn in, and though his fretboard mastery made him a tour de force onstage, his role was diminished when it came to composing songs.

“My job with Purple became providing ideas for the writing sessions, and one out of 20 might get used,” he tells MusicRadar. “Ninety-five percent of the time I was hearing, ‘That’s not going to work.’”

When he joined, the band was fronted by vocalist Ian Gillan, who was serving a second spell with the group after a clash of egos with Blackmore forced him to depart in 1973. The group was rounded out by bass guitarist Roger Glover, drummer Ian Paice and keyboard maverick Jon Lord.

It was in Lord that Morse found a kindred spirit to make his ideas work with the band.

“Jon was the guy who listened to my ideas and thoughtfully added to them, rather than just saying, ‘That doesn’t sound like Purple,’” Morse says. “When Jon was around, he would hear something and say, ‘That’s a little bit left field, but what if we do this?’ And he would play it with a slight twist.”

He recalls a time writing 1996's Purpendicular, when the rest of the band had stopped to drink tea. As the band's only American, he kept on playing, and at one point, Lord placed his cup down, turned to Morse and said, “Ah, that’s something there.”

It sounds like the rest of the group were a little more conservative regarding the Deep Purple sound, doubling down on an identity forged by Morse's predecessor. Blackmore himself, speaking in a now-taken-down video on YouTube in 2018, didn't exactly give Satriani and Morse a glowing review, despite praising their talents.

“Joe Satriani is a brilliant player, but I never see him really searching for notes. I never hear him playing a wrong note,” Blackmore said. “Jimi Hendrix used to play lots of wrong notes because he was searching all the time… ‘Where the hell is that correct note?!’ And when he did find that right note, wow, that was incredible.

“But if you’re always playing the correct notes, there’s something wrong; you’re not searching, you’re not reaching for anything. That’s not to say that he isn’t a very brilliant player. It's the same thing with Steve Morse, a fantastic player.

“Certain people play from the heart, and other people play from the head,” he concluded. “I prefer a ‘heart’ player. If I hear someone really technical running up and down the fingerboard, I can hear that for a couple of minutes, then I start to get bored.”

In related news, Morse reveals that he broke his wrist on the eve of a tour with the band, forcing him to modify his guitar to aid his shredding.

And as he battles his arthritis issues with ingenuity, he's also given Guitar Player readers top tips for keeping your cool when the going gets tough, something he certainly had to do in that moment.

Ritchie Blackmore is widely credited as the man who intertwined the booming rock and roll movement of the late ‘60s with classical music flavors, but he’s moved to dismiss that. He said he got the idea from a gimmick band he saw as a teenager.

His iconic riff for “Smoke on the Water” — arguably the most famous guitar riff in all of rock — is proof of just how well he married the two. He says the riff, which is built off of finger-picked parallel fourths, draws closely from a masterpiece of the classical era: Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 5.

“I owe him a lot of money,” the guitarist once joked.

So while Blackmore’s work with Deep Purple — most successfully with the Mark II era of the band — popularized the fusion of styles and very much made it his own, he doesn’t want to take the credit for the idea.

“When I was 15, there was this incredible band that came to the South Wall Community Center,” he says in a newly uploaded YouTube video. “They were called Nero and the Gladiators, all dressed up as Romans in togas and what have you.”

Formed in 1960 by keyboard player Mike O'Neil, who assumed the role of Nero, the band scored minor hits with rocked-up versions of "Entrance of the Gladiators," composed by Julius Fučík in 1897, and Edvard Grieg's 1875 orchestral work "In the Hall of the Mountain King."

It was the latter that led Blackmore to his epiphany.

“That's where I got my inspiration from,” he explains. “Some people think that I kind of started that craze, but they were the first. I saw them, and I was just overwhelmed.

“They were great showmen,” he continues. “I'll never forget that experience. I was open-mouthed watching this rock playing of classical pieces, and to me, it made much more sense than Chuck Berry playing ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’. All of a sudden, it was, ‘Yeah, this is where I want to go.’

“I thought Tony Harvey’s guitar playing was incredible. He was a big influence on me.”

Talking to Guitar World in 1991, Blackmore went into more detail about how this revelation helped him find his identity as a guitarist, in particular on electric guitar. As a player, he was coming up in the thick of a huge blues movement in the U.K., but it didn’t quite resonate with him the same as it was for two other local guitarists who would rise to prominence alongside him: Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton, from whom he bought his first Strat.

“I was never sure what I wanted to be,” he reflected. “I found the blues too limiting. Classical, on the other hand, was always too disciplined. I was always playing between the two, stuck in a musical no-man's land.

“I'm not good enough, technically, to be a classical musician,” he added, “I lack discipline,” hence why he has always seen his sound with Deep Purple as a simplified take on classical tonalities.

But his forays into classical guitar, he had told Guitar Player 18 years earlier, taught him things that playing the blues didn't.

“I learned how to use my little finger,” he explained. “A lot of blues guitarists play with only three fingers, so they can’t figure out certain runs that require the use of their little fingers.

“I would say that it shows up most in the music I write. For example, the chord progression in the ‘Highway Star’ solo is a Bach progression.”

But he wasn’t purely lifting from concertos and overtures. His own personality was embedded in what he coaxed out of his Stratocaster’s fretboard.

“The classical influence is always there, but I don’t intentionally use it that much,” he added. “I play a lot of single notes, and that’s not classical.”

Blackmore is currently at home recovering from a recent health scare that brought an abrupt end to his latest tour with Blackmore's Night, the renaissance-folk act he performs in with his wife, Candice Night.

Meanwhile, Queen guitarist Brian May has described Blackmore as a “fireball,” saying he affected him like no other player.

The career of journeyman guitarist Steve Morse has been defined by constant invention. From his work with the Dixie Dregs to becoming Deep Purple’s longest-serving guitarist during a 28-year stint — and later adapting his technique to combat arthritis — Morse has consistently found new ways to push the envelope.

In his new appearance on the No Cover Charge podcast, Morse demonstrates his innovative employment of the tone knob to create frequency modulation effects.

“Are you doing a wah effect with the tone knob?” asks eagle-eyed host Tyler Larson, who also runs the YouTube channel Music is Win.

“Yeah,” Morse replied before demonstrating what is a simple-but-genius technique via some smooth blues playing. It really does sound like a wah pedal, and it's achieved by anchoring his fourth finger on the tone knob while playing for an optimized economy of movement.

“Turn it off, hit the note, and turn it on,” Morse says, explaining the technique. The rolling motion essentially helps mimic the motion of a wah's envelope filter effect. In the video clip, he can also be seen switching to the volume dial a couple of times for slight volume swells that he uses to introduce certain phrases.

The position of the tone knob also has a pretty big impact on how easy or hard it is to execute the technique. On Morse’s Music Man signature guitar, the control knobs are in proximity to the strings, but Larson finds it’s far more challenging to nail on a Gibson 335 as the controls are far less accessible in relation to the strings.

It’s certainly a handy technique to have in your arsenal, especially when you find yourself in a jam sans pedalboard.

It also shares a parallel with Eric Clapton’s infamous woman tone, which generates its magic by rolling the tone knob all the way off. Together, they are prime examples of how versatile guitars can be without needing extraneous tools like overdrive and chorus pedals to alter their character. Joe Bonamassa's viral guitar lesson video also proves that.

Morse has just released Triangulation, his first album with the Steve Morse Band in 16 years, and his first album since leaving Deep Purple three years ago.

“The 'Tri' part of the title comes from the tritone interval that's used in the basic guitar riff," Morse says of the album's title track.

The album features guest performances from Eric Johnson and John Petrucci, and ends with a collaboration with his son, Kevin. “Taken by an Angel” was written for his late wife's funeral; it was her battle with cancer that prompted him to leave Deep Purple, opening the door for his successor, Simon McBride.

The record also features a song called “Tumeni Partz,” a tongue-in-cheek sequel to one of his greatest ever songs.

Yet if it weren’t for Lynyrd Skynyrd, Morse would have left music behind decades ago. He retired from music to become a commercial airline pilot in the late '80s. But the chance to get onstage with the southern rock legends brought him back to his passion for the electric guitar.

With that in mind, Morse recently spoke to Guitar Player to offer his advice on how to keep your love for guitar burning when the going gets tough, leaning into a lifetime of playing to aid players who may find themselves in positions similar to those he’s regularly found himself in.

There’s no denying Jimi Hendrix changed the electric guitar game. But long before he ventured from New York City to London — where he sent shockwaves through the blues scene and nearly ended Jeff Beck’s career — another player sparked a revolution in the mind of future Queen guitarist Brian May.

May was in his early 20s by the end of the 1960s. Although Rory Gallagher would have the greatest influence on his guitar tone — inspiring him to adopt two hugely important pieces of gear into his rig — it was another British blues rock great who showed him what was possible with his instrument.

“He was incredible, nobody could play like that in those days,” May says of Deep Purple linchpin Ritchie Blackmore.

For May — who made his comments in the 2015 documentary The Ritchie Blackmore Story — it was the “wild and untamed” way Blackmore played that affected him most.

“It's hard to imagine,” he says. “It’s like going back to the time before there were wheels. People did not play like that in those days; you were looking at people who played jazz and were very safe and rather mellow.”

Blackmore's weapon of choice throughout the '60s was a 1961 Gibson ES-335, a guitar thrust upon him by future amp maker Jim Marshall,. That was the instrument with which he launched Deep Purple, and May was there right at the start of the journey, falling in love with their 1968 debut album, Shades of Deep Purple, while attending college.

Even then, Blackmore's reputation preceded him.

“Ritchie Blackmore already was a legend,” May explains. “I was together with [future Queen drummer] Roger [Taylor] at that point, and Roger had worked alongside Ritchie in his previous groups down in Cornwall.

“And Ritchie was a figure of mystery and wonder. He was able to play very fast, very accurately, and very passionately. He’s wanging the guitar all over the place, he’s using the tremolo bar, and making the whole thing into a completely different instrument.

“Ritchie came along and he's a fireball,” May continues. “He was beyond belief. His technique was incredible. Where that came from, I have no idea. And this was before Hendrix. Ritchie is a great creator and originator of the wild electric guitar.”

And yet, even with Blackmore’s sizable reputation, Deep Purple’s first few records had only middling success. It was only with the second line-up and the 1970 album In Rock that their fortunes began to turn. Coincidentally, it was the first record on which Blackmore played a Fender Strat, having made the switch after striking a deal with Eric Clapton’s roadie for one of Slowhand’s unused models.

The Mark II line-up came to a head with Blackmore as egos clashed. Although Blackmore had stuck around for a few more albums, he'd join forces with Ronnie James Dio in Rainbow before deciding life in the band wasn't what he'd expected.

Blackmore is now back out on the road after a series of health scares cast doubt on his future earlier this year. His rock days may be long behind him, but the impact he's had on the guitar world is still being felt.

Steve Morse is currently back on the road with the Steve Morse Band, using all his know-how to combat ongoing arthritis issues in his right wrist. To help his cause, he’s modified both his guitar and his playing style, allowing him to continue playing and enjoying it, despite his ongoing struggles.

But it’s not the first time he’s been forced down that road.

As Morse revealed in an interview with Rick Beato at the start of this year, the Dixie Dregs and former Kansas and Deep Purple guitarist no longer has cartilage in his picking hand wrist, a painful side effect of tireless practice and gigging. He says the condition was so bad that, when he approached a sports doctor for help, he was practically laughed out of his office.

“Rather than roll over and die,” he had said, “I'm like, 'No, I still wanna play.'”

A quarter of a century earlier, he was faced with a similar test, albeit one that was entirely his own making. In the summer of 2000, while messing around on a skateboard, Morse fell and broke his left wrist. He had a Deep Purple tour looming, on which the Dixie Dregs were the support act. He had double duty every night.

Thinking ahead, Morse asked his osteopath for a cast that did little to inhibit his movement. As he reveals to MusicRadar, Morse also modified his Ernie Ball Music Man Steve Morse signature in a way that was almost impossible to see.

“I couldn’t reach some of the notes on the neck with the cast on,” he explains. “So I got a grinder and cut down the heel of it to help facilitate that.”

As for the neck plate?

"I took the steel plate off and ground that down, and well,” Morse confirms.

Footage of the band’s breathless performance at Montreux — where they returned last year for a rather literal cover of “Smoke on the Water” — shows that reaching those higher frets for his tasty guitar solos was pretty easy.

Luckily, Morse was no novice to electric guitar surgery. His first mod came before he was even a teenager, and his Stratocaster was the victim.

“A friend of mine had one of the first fuzz boxes. It was more like a battery-operated preamp, but it plugged right into the guitar,” he told MusicRadar in 2012. “I couldn’t plug it into the recessed jack, so I took a piece of an outlet box that had a hole drilled into it, and I put the jack on that.

“The fuzz sounded pretty cool, I must say,” he added, “especially to an 11- or 12-year-old kid.”

Previously, Morse has sat down with Guitar Player to empower readers with his five go-to ideas for playing and writing. Back in January, he explained how players can keep their cool when the going gets tough — such as when you break your wrist right before touring with one of the world's most iconic rock bands.

Deep Purple were rendered speechless when, in a Munich hotel in March 1975, Ritchie Blackmore announced he was leaving the band he'd co-founded seven years earlier.

In retrospect, it made sense that the guitar virtuoso should want to move on. Having fought tooth and nail to emerge as the leader of the hard-rock act, he was ready to put together a new group of his own, where his authority would be established from the get-go.

Because if there was one thing Ritchie Blackmore wanted, it was control.

He'd grabbed it in Deep Purple by unseating Ian Gillan, their second singer, with whom they’d enjoyed breakthrough success with hits like "Highway Star" and “Smoke on the Water.”

“He was, as they say, an alpha guy. So was I,” Blackmore later recalled. “He wanted to control, I wanted to control. So we butted heads because of that.”

Once Gillan quit, Blackmore wasted no time dismissing bassist Roger Glover. To replace them, he chose: a then-unknown singer by the name of David Coverdale and bassist Glenn Hughes. But Blackmore's choices backfired on him. Coverdale and Hughes brought funk and soul influences to the group's music that, ultimately, drove the guitarist away.

He turned to Ronnie James Dio and his band, Elf, for his next endeavor, Rainbow. The band’s 1975 debut, Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow, received mixed response, however — Rolling Stone said Blackmore sounded “listless and bored” and highlighted the anonymity of his fellow bandmates.

Perhaps the criticism cut deep. Soon after its release, Blackmore took a tight grip on the band. He fired everyone except Dio, and hired drummer Cozy Powell, bass guitarist Jimmy Bain and keyboardist Tony Carey.

“Ritchie was the boss of the band,” Dio told Radio Trent in Nottingham in 1981 (via Ultimate Guitar). “I mean, there's just no two ways about it. I wouldn't delude myself into thinking that, even though he and I did form that band as an equal partnership. We were 50/50 members of that band. We wrote all the material together, 50/50. We shared in the profits and expenses, 50/50.”

Even so, Dio said, “His opinions and his judgment had to be respected. I did respect Ritchie's opinions and judgment, but it was not a very democratic situation at all.”

Of the new members, Powell had the biggest name, having already spent several years in Jeff Beck’s band and his own group Hammer, which featured the talents of future Whitesnake guitarist Bernie Marsden.

“When Cozy came in, there started to be a lot of jockeying for position,” Dio said. “We always knew who number one was, and I was number two, 'till Cozy came in and Cozy and I went, 'Who's going to be number two?’

“It was more what Ritchie wanted to do, and the rest of us kind of grumbled and moaned. But we did it.”

By 1979, as the band came off a performance at the Reading Festival and the release of their fourth album, Down to Earth, their carousel of member changes was garnering considerable attention.

By that point, Dio was out and Graham Bonnet was fronting the group, Don Airey was on keyboards, and Blackmore's former Deep Purple bandmate Roger Glover — the very bassist he had pushed out, along with Ian Gillan — was holding down the low end. Blackmore and Powell were the only mainstays.

After joking that none of the ex-members could make a proper cup of tea, Powell told one interviewer that “Ritchie and I have got certain standards. If musicians in the band don't give 110 percent, they're booted out rather sharply.

“It's a very competitive business,” he added. “You've got bands coming up all the time that are trying to blow you off.”

Blackmore was more blunt later that year when Sounds asked about the firings of his former bandmates.

“If they were good enough, they'd still be in the band,” he grumbled.

Blackmore wasn’t a figure to be trifled. Many players had to learn that the hard way.

In related news, Blackmore has put recent health issues behind him and is headed back out on the road.

It took a while for Ritchie Blackmore to get the right mix of musicians in Deep Purple. After releasing three albums in two years, the group evolved into its Mark II lineup, which yielded the band’s biggest successes.

But Blackmore knew the group’s classic line-up was doomed long before their personnel changed for a second time. It was either that or the band split.

Deep Purple originally formed as a heavy psychedelic group featuring Blackmore, vocalist Rod Evans, bassist Nick Simper, keyboardist Jon Lord, and drummer Ian Paice, the only founding member who remains today. Blackmore started out the band playing a Gibson ES-335 sold to him by amp builder Jim Marshall, who was just a humble store owner at the time. The guitarist eventually switched to Fender Stratocasters when he bought one of Eric Clapton’s for £60.

By then, Deep Purple was shifting into its Mark II version, featuring Blackmore, Lord and Paice alongside bassist Roger Glover and singer Ian Gillan. This brought about a harder rock sound heard on groundbreaking records like In Rock, Fireball and Machine Head.

But behind the band's success, the relationship between Blackmore and Gillan began to sour.

“He was, as they say, an alpha guy. So was I,” Blackmore recalled in the 2015 documentary, The Ritchie Blackmore Story. “He wanted to control, I wanted to control. So we buted heads because of that

“We still respected each other, but we never got on. We just couldn't be in the same room. That was the problem,” he explains. “We weren't speaking, and it was just not going anywhere. I wasn't speaking to him; he wasn't speaking to me. We weren't being creative.”

The pair knew that one of them had to go or the band would meet a less-than-amicable end. Ultimately, it was Gillan who fell on his sword. Blackmore says the singer agreed to leave 18 months in advance.

The writing of the line-up’s last record, Who Do We Think We Are, was born during this tumultuous period.

“In the last year of the band’s life, I don’t think Ritchie or Ian Gillan spoke one word to each other,” Glover once told the BBC. “They became two poles, because the more one would do it, the more the other would do it. And the more one got away with it, the more the other one was determined he was going to get away with it.”

The growing tension and silence between the two musicians, coupled with a string of band-wide illnesses and fatigue, plagued its creation. The album was recorded, like its predecessor, using the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio. Blackmore pushed for a return to their bluesy roots, having felt Machine Head was too commercial-sounding for his liking.

The record was a success, even with the dwindling harmony behind the scenes. It broke the top five in the U.K. charts, and peaked at 15 in the U.S.

Alhough the band had to shake up its personnel to survive, Lord was left to ponder what might have been.

“It was the biggest shame in rock and roll,” he said (via Ultimate Classic Rock). “God knows what we would have become over the next three or four years.”

Elsewhere, Blackmore has reflected on the chaos of writing “Smoke on the Water,” with the recording session inspired by a casino fire, and recording taking place while police tried to break into the studio after receiving noise complaints.

And his wife, Candice Night, has detailed the health issues that are currently preventing the guitarist from touring.

Deep Purple's 1973 hit "Smoke on the Water" is more than the band's biggest song — it's a guitar anthem that inspired countless budding musicians to pick up an electric guitar. Since its release, it's become one of the most iconic riffs in rock history, been forbidden from being played in numerous guitar shops, and grown into a cultural phenomenon.

Evidence of that last claim can be found in the very city where the song was recorded in 1971, two years prior to its release.

“The last time we were in Montreux, there were signs by the lake reading: 'No smoking on the water,'” Deep Purple bassist Roger Glover tells The Guardian. The band actually played a very literal version of the song during a recent visit to the Swiss city, which nestles at the foot of the Alps.

The song's creation has become part of rock and roll folklore. As has been documented many times, Deep Purple were set to record their 1972 album, Machine Head, at the Montreux casino's theater in December 1971 after it closed down for the winter. But at the last concert of the season, featuring Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, an audience member fired a flare gun that set the ceiling on fire and burned down the venue.

“It was pretty horrendous and frightening,” Blackmore recalls in an episode of Tales From the Tavern on his YouTube channel. “We were watching Frank, and we all had to get out of the building. Frank turned around and said, ‘I don't want people to panic,’ and with that, he jumped out of the window! The whole place burned down in 20 minutes.”

With nowhere to record, Deep Purple settled into a local Montreux theater, the Pavilion, which is where "Smoke on the Water" came into being with its famous guitar riff.

As Blackmore recalls, his goal was to keep things simple.

“I was always looking for a very simple riff to play,” he says. “I'd heard the Kinks play ‘You Really Got Me’, and the Stones were playing ‘Satisfaction,’ so I felt there was a commercial element of, if you want to be heard, you have to keep it simple.”

Although the riff is written in the blues scale and harmonized in parallel fourths, Blackmore claims he wrote it by tapping into his love of classical music. According to the guitarist, the famous passage is an interpretation of Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 5. "I owe him a lot of money," the guitarist says. To perform it, he cast aside his guitar picks and opted to fingerpick instead.

Deep Purple were tracking the session using the Rolling Stones' Mobile Recording Unit — a storied piece of gear immortalized in the song's lyrics — when they had unexpected visitors.

“The police were banging on the door because we were making so much noise,” Blackmore says with a smile.

They completed the recording with assistance from their road crew. As Paice explains to The Guardian, “The roadies managed to hold the doors shut until we’d finished the take.”

“Luckily, we had a master take, and that was given to Ian Gillan to write the lyrics,” Blackmore continues.

“I didn't think it would be a hit, it was just something that Ian and I banged out on the spur of the moment. We were just having fun.”

However, the version of the track that made it onto the band’s sixth album, Machine Head, wasn’t the one they sent to the label.

“Warner Bros. in Los Angeles loved it but said it was too long for the radio, so unbeknownst to us, one of their engineers cut it down to four minutes,” Paice recalls. “The rest is history, as they say.”

Meanwhile, the band had begun playing the song on tour, as captured on the live album Made in Japan, and developed it even further.

“We’d been playing it for a year and had found all these little nooks and crannies to explore,” Paice explains. “The audience did the hand claps in time with the riff. Ian had trouble hearing through the monitors that night in Osaka, so at the end he says that wonderful line: ‘I want everything louder than everything else!’”

“Montreux has always been special to us because of what happened,” Glover concludes. “I never get tired of playing the song. Someone once said it’s like having a button that you press to make the audience go nuts.”

Meanwhile, Simon McBride, the band’s current lead guitarist, says many guitarists play the riff incorrectly and has revealed why Blackmore’s unique approach to the riff was so fundamental to its success.

And while we're on the subject of classic rock riffs, Dweezil Zappa has lamented the lack of riffs in modern music.

And in related news, Candice Night has also spoken about Blackmore’s ongoing health issues and when he can be expected to grace the stage again.

This interview originally appeared in the December 1996 issue of Guitar Player under the title "Mistreated: Will Ritchie Blackmore Ever Get His Due?"

Deep inside a German castle, Ritchie Blackmore sits at a long table, dressed in medieval garb and clutching a goblet of mead. A group of minstrels skips into the dining chamber, playing a motley assortment of Renaissance instruments — crumhorns, sackbuts, rackets, regals, and hurdy-gurdies.

Transfixed by the otherworldly music and 16th-century setting, the Rainbow and former Deep Purple guitarist — a legend to thousands of aspiring virtuosos — experiences a sudden epiphany.

"This is what I want to do! I don't want to be plugged into a Marshall anymore!" he laughs, recalling the event later over a cold Beck's at a plush Manhattan hotel. "I actually said to them, 'Do you want a guitar player?' They said, 'No, we already have a lute player.' I was crushed."

It wouldn't be the first time Blackmore's been excluded from an elite musical club. While the trinity of Beck, Clapton and Page are roundly hailed as the Big Three of British rock guitar, mentions of Blackmore are usually reserved for the B-list, with a faint muttering about his infamous arrogance and a quip about "Smoke on the Water" inspiring 25 years of garage-band cacophony. Tell that to Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins. "Pound for pound, he's one of the best soloists in history," Corgan says, "but he's such a dick that he'll probably never get the credit he deserves."

Okay, so Ritchie's been less than enchanting to certain individuals over the years. Miles Davis was no milquetoast either.

The facts: Despite his protestations to the contrary, Eddie Van Halen — perhaps the most influential post-Hendrix lead guitarist of the late '70s and '80s — owes far more to Blackmore's vocabulary than he does to Eric Clapton's, his professed main influence. Think about it: Rapidly ascending or descending triplet patterns, aggressive pick dynamics and quasi-Spanish phrasing, diatonic neoclassical runs, a beady and compressed high-gain sustain, stacked fourth double-stops over meaty, open-hat grooves, shrieking whammy bar growls, a screaming singer — the basic seeds of shred were sown by Blackmore and brought to full bloom by Eddie's original renegade vision. Not even Hendrix turns up in Van Halen's post-blues metal the way Blackmore does, and that goes double for Yngwie Malmsteen, Steve Morse (Ritchie's replacement in the new Deep Purple), Vinnie Moore, Randy Rhoads, Michael Schenker and many others.

While the rest of England's future guitar gods were listening to Chicago blues records in the mid '60s, Blackmore had already studied classical technique, played with Gene Vincent and Jerry Lee Lewis, and was doing extensive session work with producer Joe Meek and the Outlaws. He was also woodshedding with records by Chet Atkins, James Burton and Cliff Gallup. He admired Albert Lee's fiery finesse and dug the ferocious chops and cool attitude of Gypsy jazz giant Django Reinhardt. Instrumental Deep Purple tracks like "Wring That Neck," "Lazy" and "Mandrake Root" were born of virtuoso guitar traditions that relied on motifs, syncopation and long runs — not just licks and turnarounds — that most young guitarists of the era simply didn't grasp.

With jazz-informed drummer Ian Paice, it's little wonder Purple swung relentlessly on live ' 70s albums like the historic Made in Japan, which effortlessly melds space rock, boogie, jump blues, rockabilly and MC5-style protopunk. Delivered with monstrous chops, passion and high drama, Blackmore's cascading sextuplets on "Child in Time" married country bop and jump jazz with a new brand of hard rock vocabulary, creating a blueprint for the next generation of an1bitious players. With Rainbow he'd push the classical connection even further, with epic tracks like "Sixteenth Century Greensleeves" snd "Stargazer.''

Blackmore may well deserve his reputation. He's a maverick, loner and practical joker who revels in gratuitous dissension. Claiming that singer Ian Gillan's attitude was becoming increasingly unprofessional and his voice "completely shot," Blackmore quit Deep Purple a year ago. (The classic Mark II lineup had re-formed in '85 and released several albums, including the excellent Perfect Strangers.) The 51-year-old has fired up Rainbow once again — albeit with completely different sidemen — on the new, heavily gothic Stranger in Us All, which delivers a refreshingly lyrical and laid-back lead approach.

In the market for a good 12-string, Blackmore, a fan of Adrian Legg and Leo Kottke, is also recording an acoustic album of Renaissance-inspired originals with his fiancée, Candice Night. Articulate, circumspect, and soft-spoken, Blackmore's a true eccentric who holds regular séances at his Long Island home, "practically lives" at Renaissance fairs, and maintains a surprisingly humble, even insecure, attitude toward his own electric guitar legacy.

"Music is an intangible force," he says as the lobby clock strikes midnight. "I'm still trying to master it, so telling someone else my views is like the blind leading the blind."

You have a long-standing reputation as being difficult and hard to work with.

My whole thing comes from Django Reinhardt. He's my hero, not just because of his playing, but because he was such an awkward bastard. It was brilliant how he would be scheduled to be onstage, and he'd still be in bed in a local hotel. And when they'd go to the hotel to get him, he'd have 20 people in the room with campfires going. He'd get paid an exorbitant amount and then take a taxi from Paris to Lyon, which is hundreds of miles.

Reading about that was so refreshing. I hate show biz. I hate people who confine themselves to the system. Why does everyone have to do the right interview at the right time, be on the right program, be politically correct, say the right things and be at the right parties? That gets up my nose. Why can't I just play the guitar? It's all I want to do. Why do I have to be in this video? Why do I have to say nice things to the record company president? Why can't we have more Django Reinhardts going, "Fuck everybody. I'll turn up when I feel like turning up." It's unfortunate that people like that usually end up penniless, compared to all the not-so-great musicians who know how to manipulate the music business and take it for everything it's worth.

Does it bother you that you're not given the same credit as Beck, Clapton, or Page?

No. I'm an introvert, as my father would say. I tend to be very withdrawn. I don't sell myself. I don't think Jeff Beck does either. I think Jimmy Page does and Eric does. They tend to push themselves out there a bit more, although they're all great people. A lot more falls on Eric because he can sing well, and Pagey is such a great writer and producer. Jeff is probably one of my favorite players. This man just hits notes and you think, How come that note's not on my guitar? And he gets this incredible sustain for no reason. He's so fresh, so un-show business. That's what I love about Jeff.

With all due respect to Page, I've always felt that Zeppelin was never as strong a live band as Purple, mainly because they didn't swing.

I agree with that, because Bonzo wasn't a swinging drummer. He was very good, but he was a lead-footed drummer. Ian Paice is a swing-type drummer, a jazzy, Buddy Rich-type drummer — skip-bop-bop-bop-bop. Also, Jon Lord was very inspired by Jimmy Smith and Graham Bond, who was the big thing in English jazz at the time.

You were one of the first rockers to play very long lines.

That's an interesting point. Pagey once asked me, "Where do you get all those runs from?" I developed it from Les Paul, Jimmy Bryant, Chet Atkins and Wes Montgomery. I wasn't listening to rock when I started out. The Beatles were around, but no one took that seriously — except for billions of record buyers! They're still a great band, but you couldn't learn anything instrumentally from them — pretty little tunes, though.

I was very into country music from '63 to '66: Jimmy Bryant and Speedy West, Chet and Don Rich, the guitarist from Buck Owens and the Buckaroos. In fact, when I first came to America in 1968, I thought it was a bit like taking coal to Newcastle. There are so many good players over here, why are we going to America? When people would tell me I played really well, I'd say, "You've got all these guys in Nashville who could burn me off the face of this earth." The response was, "Well, we don't listen to those people." Why not? "Well, that's country. They don't play rock."

Chet Atkins was my big idol. I used to try to copy his stuff. Back in '64 I learned Jimmy Bryant's "Arkansas Traveler." I played it for people just to show off. And of course I loved Gene Vincent's guitar player, Cliff Gallup, who was just phenomenal — another creative man who didn't play by the rules."

Who were your favorite blues players?

Shuggie Otis was the best player I’d ever heard. His father was Johnny Otis. He was only 14 at the time that he played most of his great solos. He had a very similar style to Mick Taylor, another favorite of mine — never throws away a note, and always that vibrato. I get a little lazy with my vibrato sometimes. It’s easy for me to play fast. I have to tell myself to slow down and say something: “Don’t just exercise, and remember the vibrato.” I always find that a good vibrato, like a B.B. King vibrato, is much easier to play, whereas a slow vibrato is more difficult. So I go for the slow vibrato just to punish myself.

Were you and Albert Lee friends or competitors in London in the ’60s?

I couldn’t compete with Albert — he was too good. I met Albert around 1962, the first time I went to London when I was around 16. I was a local boy from a very quiet village called Heston; I’ve since found out that Jimmy Page is from Heston, but I didn’t know him then. I’d never been to a nightclub before so I was a bit overwhelmed. The Ricky Barnes Band was playing, and their guitar player was Albert. He was playing a black Les Paul and he was just incredible. I didn’t know where his notes were coming from. It was such complicated, tasteful, brilliant stuff. I was like, “Oh, dear. If this is what I’ve got to compete with, I might as well hang it up. It’s all over.”

He was only a year older than me, so I was devastated. I went home with my tail between my legs. Luckily, not too many people played like Albert. I got friendly with Albert after a while, and I did an LP with him and my old teacher Big Jim Sullivan called Green Bullfrog.

Were your parents supportive of your career?

They were very supportive. When I was 11 years old, my father said, “I bought this guitar for you, and if you don’t learn it, I’m going to smack it across your head.” He sent me to lessons and said, “You’re going to learn to do this properly.” It was strange because the teacher was teaching me things like diminished and augmented chords, and I couldn’t even play a major chord yet. I was like, “What’s this all about? I just want to strum a guitar and show off. I don’t want to know about diminished chords.”

My dad worked at the airport as a draftsman, and he was very analytical. My mother was completely the opposite: “Just let him have fun.” My father helped me out in learning the guitar, because he was so mathematical. I’d say, “Dad, how do you play these notes?” He didn’t play an instrument, but he would work it out for me.

Do you still scallop the frets on your Strats?

Up to about the seventh fret, I sandpaper the frets very little. But up to about the 15th fret I get quite deep. Actually, I have two Fender Custom Shop models coming out. One of the models is something I designed myself. The whole thing is solid, not separate neck and body. I believe that the guitar resonates much better that way. It has two pickups, not three, very big frets and a scalloped neck. A lot of Fenders have such thin frets — very spidery. My neck will be one and a half inches at the nut and two inches at the 12th fret. Fender was telling me that Yngwie’s model doesn’t sell very well because of the scalloped neck. I said, “Yeah, but if we’re going to make a Ritchie Blackmore model, it has to be scalloped.” So they reluctantly scalloped it a bit, though I scallop it quite a bit more. But the result is very close to what I like.

Are you still a devoted Marshall man?

I use Engl amps now, built in Austria, and I have my own Ritchie Blackmore model. I first tried one when I needed a small amp to play with my friends, and I couldn’t believe how good it was. I asked a roadie of mine if we could get a deal, and he said, “No, the guy’s not interested in a deal. You’ll have to pay full price.” I was like, “I’m not going to pay full price for it.”

But after playing with it for a month, I said, “Okay, okay, I’ll pay full price.” That’s what I use on the entire new LP. And the head is only 50 watts. I was so sick of playing through my 280-watt Marshalls.

What’s the story behind those souped-up heads?

I wanted to use Marshall amps because they looked great and Jimi Hendrix and the Cream played them. At the time, I was still using a Vox AC30 with my Gibson 335. I knew Jim Marshall as a drum teacher who used to teach Mitch Mitchell, who, incidentally, worked in Marshall’s shop — Marshall’s of Ealing, near London. Pagey used to go in there a lot too. I told Jim that Hendrix using his amplifiers would make him huge worldwide. He said, “Hendrix — he’s the guy with the afro, right? Yeah, he’s doing well.” It didn’t quite click in. And Hendrix was paying for those amps, as were the Cream.

Ken Bran was the guy that really built the amps — Marshall just designed the speaker cabs and the look. I said to Ken, “I want to hear this really loud — that’s how we play.” He took me to a soundproof room, but it was still so loud that all the people on the assembly line—about 50 of them — would stop working and complain to Jim Marshall, “We’re not working with that racket.” I’d be playing for hours: “More treble!” Ken would literally be there with a soldering iron, taking out resistors. “More bass!” I told them I wasn’t happy with the sound. “There’s no sustain in your amps — no body.” “They’re good enough for Hendrix and Clapton.” “Yeah, but I want some sustain.”

I knew a bit about amplification. I used to work in radio at the airport. I told them that what it needed was an extra output stage, so they built extra output valves into it. After a while they explained that my amp was now 280 true watts, not American watts. This is equivalent to 600 watts.

Of course they said, “If anyone comes in here and asks for a Ritchie Blackmore amplifier, we’re going to tell them it’s stock Marshall, because we never want to do this again. You’ve put us through hell!”

Do you always solo with the neck pickup?
No. I change my settings probably 20 times during a solo. I like the inflections of different pickups. I’ll whip back the toggle switch to the treble pickup within one second of getting into a solo, and then back again.

Your sound is always so fat, though. It has the character of a single-coil, but the weight of a double. Is that just a function of cranking your amp?

It’s my preamp, which is an old souped-up Aiwa reel-to-reel tape recorder that I originally used as a tape delay. I had it lying around the house in 1970 and I thought, What can I do with this? In those days you made everything count. It has an input and output stage, so I plugged into it and noticed that it gave me a fatter sound—about a three-watt boost. I used it from that day on. If I don’t use it, the sound is too shrill. It seems to calm the sound down and get more midrange. It drives people nuts on the road — it breaks down all the time because it’s so antiquated.

I had a new one made to identical specs, but I could hear a difference. That’s the sound I’m used to, and I find it very difficult to play without it. I just thought it was a normal tape deck, but now it’s become this little soul on the side of the stage. It’s like my little friend. It waves to me. Nobody would dream of having that today. “Hey man, you could have 14 pedals that do that.” “Yeah, but are they old souls?”

When Christopher Cross came out of nowhere to score big time with his 1979 self-titled debut album, many assumed he was an overnight sensation. At the 23rd Annual Grammy Awards held in February 1981, Cross would take home five Grammys for the disc including, for the first time ever, four of the most prestigious awards: Record of the Year and Song of the Year (both for the single “Sailing”), Album of the Year and Best New Artist.

Despite his status as an overnight sensation, Cross had journeyed 10 years to reach that night — from his early days as an up-and-coming electric guitar player with killer chops to his sudden ascension to the top of the 1980s’ soft-rock genre… or as it’s known today, yacht rock.

Remarkably, Cross’s underrated guitar playing talents have always taken a back seat to his songwriting. Yet upon closer inspection, his output occasionally reveals his proficiency on the instrument. While the dulcet tones of “Sailing” might make listeners overlook his guitar skills, it’s hard to miss the face-melting guitar solo on the outro to Cross’s 1980 hit “Ride Like the Wind” (although you may wish they’d mixed it a tad louder).

Remarkably, there’s one guitarist who was aware of Cross’s talents long before nearly everyone else: Ritchie Blackmore.

In August 1970, Blackmore and his then-current group Deep Purple arrived in the U.S. on a tour that launched at the Jam Factory in San Antonio, Texas, Cross’s hometown. Cross, then working under his birth name, Chris Geppert, was one of the hottest guitarists on the local scene, a long-haired, heavy-music loving axeman who played in a covers band called Flash.

Cross was also a huge Deep Purple fan with a strong knowledge of the group’s catalog. All of which made him a shoe-in when Blackmore suffered a reaction to a flu shot and took ill prior to the performance.

"It was their very first show in the United States ever and someone advised them to get flu shots,” Cross told author Greg Prato in his 2018 book, The Yacht Rock Book: The Oral History of the Soft, Smooth Sounds of the 70s and 80s. “So, they did, and Ritchie Blackmore got very sick.”

The promoter behind the show, Joe Miller, was also friendly with Cross. “And Joe Miller — who was kind of managing me at the time — said, 'You know, there's this guitarist in town who's a big fan of Ritchie's and he could probably step in,’” Cross recalled.

Although Deep Purple frontman Ian Gillan was reportedly against it, the rest of the band had no objections. It didn’t hurt that Cross and his band had opened for Led Zeppelin just one year prior. He had even purchased Jimmy Page’s HiWatt amp head and a 4x12 cabinet for $700.

"So I came down, and I had a Flying V and long hair, and I'm this big Ritchie fan,” Cross continued. “So, we played the songs that I knew and then we jammed some blues.

“It was a great moment for me. And then, when they left town, I went to the airport and got to meet Ritchie, and he thanked me for covering for him."

Years later, Cross learned that Deep Purple’s keyboardist, the late Jon Lord, denied it ever happened.

“Max Vaccaro, who runs the [Eagle Rock Records] label, says he mentioned the story to Jon Lord, and Jon Lord said that never happened, ever,” Cross recalled. “So Max Vaccaro was kind of like, 'I think you're bullshitting.’”

Fortunately, Cross knew the Austin-based guitarist whose band opened for Deep Purple that night: Eric Johnson. The blues guitarist was all of 15 at the time his band Mariani supported Purple. It was there that Johnson and Cross first met, and Johnson recalls the date quite well today.

“Ritchie Blackmore had gotten sick and was unable to play the gig,” he confirms to Guitar Player. “An 18-year-old guitarist who lived in San Antonio was an avid Deep Purple fan and knew their songs. He was hired to fill in for Ritchie that night.

“That was the first time I met Christopher Cross. He showed up at the gig and asked me if he could use my amp. He played a Flying V and was quite the rocker! We’ve been good friends ever since.”

Cross continued to refine his guitar playing skills over the ensuing decade by paying his dues on the tough live circuit. He would often be found jamming the blues with fellow Texans Billy Gibbons and Stevie Ray Vaughan. In fact, Cross was the previous owner of Vaughan’s iconic Number One Fender Stratocaster, having traded it at Ray Hennig’s Heart of Texas music shop in Austin for a Les Paul because he wanted a guitar with a ballsier sound.

Johnson, meanwhile, continued to cross paths with Cross and would later guest on a track from Cross’s self-titled 1979 debut album. Containing the hits “Sailing” and “Ride Like the Wind,” Christopher Cross would provide the guitarist with his well-earned breakthrough

As for that burning outro solo on “Ride Like the Wind,” Cross nearly gave the spot away to a couple of hired guns: top-notch session guitar supremos Jay Graydon and Larry Carlton, who’d been hired to assist on the album. However, the album’s producer, Michael Omartian, had witnessed Cross’s six-string wizardry and suggested he perform instead.

Although he was reluctant to expose his playing skills after being around such accomplished guitarists, Cross eventually gave in and plugged his ’59 Gibson Les Paul Standard straight into a Dumble amp and laid down a blistering guitar solo in one take. Not too bad for a guy who popular culture remembers today as a yacht rock kingpin.

Guitar legend Ritchie Blackmore suffered a heart attack a year and a half year ago and has been warned not to travel by air, his wife, Candice Night, says.

Night, who performs with the former Deep Purple and Rainbow guitarist in their renaissance rock band Blackmore’s Night, says Blackmore has six coronary stents, indicating the rock guitar legend has coronary artery disease.

He will turn 80 on April 14.

News of Blackmore's health was shared when Night spoke with Dawn Osborne of TotalRock about Blackmore’s Night returning to Europe for live shows.

"As far as flying anywhere right now, Ritchie has actually been told by his cardiologist not to get in a plane,” Night says. “He had a heart attack about a year and a half ago. He's got six stents. And I can't believe he's gonna be 80 on April 14th, which is crazy.

"But he doesn't look it, still doesn't act it. But eventually medical things wind up catching up with you. So we've gotta make sure we keep him happy and healthy.”

Night adds that the guitarist is also suffering from gout and arthritis, while dealing with back problems.

“So it's getting harder for him — it's tricky,” she says. “But, hey, I've seen people younger than him in wheelchairs onstage doing what they do.”

While Night says she understands why Blackmore wouldn’t want fans to see him in a wheelchair, “I would think people would just be happy to be under the same roof with him and listen to him play whatever he comes up with,” she says.

Ages have passed since Blackmore was among the reigning guitar champions of rock. As Deep Purple’s axman, he was known for flaying his Fender Stratocaster around the stage in extended bouts of guitar destruction.

Blackmore also became known as one of rock’s loudest guitarists, due in no small part to his use of a specially modified Marshall amplifier. Although he was no fan of Marshall amps, he appreciated the volume he could coax from them, and had the company place the electronics from his much-loved Vox AC30 into a Marshall Major head and tweak its output from 200 to 280 watts.

Blackmore subsequently went on to form Rainbow, the heavy metal group he regrouped in 2015 for a series of live shows that marked the guitarist’s return to rock after years playing with Blackmore’s Night. Blackmore formed the renaissance-rock group with Night in 1997. Although best known for his electric guitar work, Blackmore also performs on acoustic guitar and various renaissance-era strings instruments with the act.

He is not the only guitarist whose health issues are affecting his career. Rockabilly guitar great Brian Setzer revealed in February that an autoimmune disease has left him unable to play guitar, although he said recently that he is “getting better day by day.”

Peter Frampton, meanwhile, is dealing with Inclusion Body Myositis (IBM), a degenerative order, that he's been battling for the past 10 years. The guitarist made a surprise visit to the Martin Guitar booth at NAMM 2025, where he revealed he will tour and record in 2025 as his health allows.

In a recent interview with Guitar Player, while discussing the 10 albums that changed his life, Joe Bonamassa had kind words for Steve Morse. “I really hold Steve Morse in such high regard,” he said.

“Not only as a player but as a good, humble guy. Unfortunately, he doesn’t get named in the same sentences as a lot of other players of that era, like Eddie Van Halen, Allan Holdsworth and Bill Nelson. He’s the last to be named or not named at all.”

Turns out that Joe B. was right. As Morse himself checked in with GP, his affable personality and endless humility were apparent from the hump. After some 50 years making music, the 70-year-old guitarist remains unpretentious and clear-eyed about the art of playing guitar.

“It’s a never-ending struggle,” Morse admits. “But when you look at anything worth doing, there’s always going to be struggles.”

“It’s like a NASCAR race,” he continues. “There are guys on the pit crew struggling to keep things reliable, but everything is always deteriorating. As a musician, my skills and technique will deteriorate, so I always have to replenish them. It’s a constant struggle; it’s never going to change.”

It’s not all bad, of course, and Morse still loves the game. “The joy of creating music and playing music is a constant,” he beams. “It’s always great. It’s like, ‘Okay, we had a terrible gig,’ but you can have a great gig under the same conditions. It’s about fighting for it and finding balance.

“I started off as an annoying teenager with an electric guitar,” he laughs. “I slowly transformed to the place I’m at now, where I’m humbled and impressed by anybody willing to work hard and play a great solo,”

Starting with your Dixie Dregs days, what were the biggest challenges you faced while on the road, and how did you overcome them?

In the early days, the sound systems weren’t that good. Some places just had a P.A. for a vocalist, and we didn’t have one. So these places wouldn’t have enough inputs and headroom to mic everything. We got this idea to have everybody play through two sound sources — basically, two cabinets. We had two Leslies, two bass cabinets and two guitar cabinets, which, for the most part, allowed us to play shows without monitors.

Did you find that to be reliable?

The only reason that fell apart was that it was similar to the mutually assured destruction of nuclear power that was written about in the ‘60s, where everybody had the ability to destroy the world. And that was supposed to deter things because that meant that if anybody acted up, they’d get blown up.

With our equipment wars, all it took was one person playing a little bit too loud for another band member on the other side of the stage to turn up their equipment. The person that turned up loud to begin with would hear more of that instrument on their side of the stage, so they’d turn up again. That made us revert to a traditional band setup and letting everyone be the loudest thing.

Was there a specific turning point for you regarding your personal equipment on the road?

When I came across the idea of muting the output of the speakers. That was before there were power attenuators that went between the speaker and the amp. I tried running higher impedance on the speakers by putting them in series, and I employed a cover for the speakers — basically, anything thick that I could cover the speakers with. By doing that, I could turn the amp up enough to get the tube saturation I was looking for.

Once you joined Kansas, how did your challenges on the road change?

With Kansas, we had a team, including roadies, so my interaction with my equipment was about finding a place and a volume for me to fit in. At the time, the vocals were loud through the side fills, and that’s when I started using earplugs for every show because I was next to that side.

This is around the time you started using Engl equipment, right?

Yes. I started using Engl front cabinets and putting them on their side so the two 12s would be pointed in one direction. The other two 12s would be pointed in a slightly different direction, rather than being pointed up at my head. That gave me a little bit more headroom, and I could hear myself without the monitors.

A lot of players are fine with sound through the monitors. Why was that an issue for you?

For some reason, to me, when I hear a guitar through monitors, it sounds like it has a little bit too much presence. Unless I hear the whole band through the monitors, it seems like the guitar doesn’t fit in sonically. So I try to limit the monitors as much as possible so that I get more ambient sound.

In those early days, was there ever a time when you felt like you failed onstage?

Yeah. Those times are what I referred to as “normal shows.” [laughs] Music has always been challenging enough that, at some point in the show, you miss something that you know you can play.

How do you overcome that?

You just have to keep going. The good thing about playing music day in and day out is it keeps you very humble. I got to a point where I just accepted the fact that when I play a solo, the best score I can get is 75 precent. Well, that’s the best average performance; I can play a horrible solo, and sometimes I play a great solo. But the average of that is 75 percent.

Has that ever impacted your ability to enjoy yourself onstage?

It’s still fun for me. If you’re enjoying yourself onstage, that sense of excitement, — and in a small way some risk taking — conveys something to the audience. To this day, when I play a show, there’s a point where I screw up, and I just work around it and immediately fix it. I’ll hit a wrong note or mess up a chord change, and I’ll take those wrong notes, bend it in one or two ways, and it’ll fit.

What were some of the biggest challenges you faced shifting from Kansas to Deep Purple?

My first encounter with Deep Purple was a really good jam session, and my first encounter with Kansas was a writing session. Those were different things, but they were the things that I connected on with each band. With Kansas, it was more about writing, but with Purple, it was about the feel of everybody improvising, listening and reading each other’s minds. With Purple, that connection grew very organically.

Did you need a whole new setup to cover Ritchie Blackmore’s parts?

I eventually changed the amplifiers four times before I ended up going with Engl. When I first started with Purple, I was using a 5150 setup. I used that through the [1996] Purpendicular album. That setup worked fine, but the gear needed to be turned up in order for the type of distortion I needed to convey the notes. The search began to find a rounder tone with more impact. That led me to the Marshall Jubilee to the Marshall 2000 series to Engl.

What made Engl Amps perfect for Deep Purple?

At the time, I liked some of the characteristics, but I really wanted to make some changes. Luckily, the designer started bringing prototypes to the shows with breakout boards attached to the amps that let me adjust the tone centers of the tone controls. It was awesome. That begat my signature amp.

What’s the most significant stumbling block for any guitar player trying to survive in a rock band on the road?

Oh, boy. To ensure success within a band, you have to give respect. If the lobby call is at 10 a.m., you need to be there at 10 a.m. the latest, and be prepared. You better learn your parts and really learn the arrangements before soundcheck so you can work on sound changes and figure out what pickups you’ll use and whatever else.

When you’re in a band, you’re on a team, just like a football player. It takes a whole team to do well before you’re going to be a great band. Every minute of your life needs to be spent becoming a better player. It goes back to basics; if you have a road crew, treat them with respect, help them when you can, and realize they’re just like you; they’re just doing a different job.

What challenges do you face today on the road, and how do they differ from your early days?

The equipment is just better and more reliable. And with digital tuners, things are better right off the bat. Usually, you have fewer excuses for screwing up. [laughs] Things are easier, I think, than they’ve ever been on the equipment front.

So what’s not easier?

What’s not easier is getting the gig experience that we got back in the ’60s and ’70s. I always want to support anybody who’s doing live music because we need to keep that alive, to give young people a chance to develop their craft. Nothing can take the place of live performances for honing your art. Nothing can be as exciting as a live performance from a listening standpoint.

Ritchie Blackmore may be considered one of the definitive rock and roll Stratocaster players, but it wasn’t until 1970’s earth-rattling masterpiece In Rock that the Fender model found its way onto Deep Purple records.

Before then, Blackmore’s weapon of choice — from his pre-Purple instrumental group, the Outlaws, through to the band’s early shows and recordings — was a 1961 Gibson ES-335.

But it appears the choice wasn’t entirely his own.

As Blackmore explains in the latest episode of his Tales from the Tavern YouTube series, he was interested in buying a Gretsch Jet Firebird when a very persuasive salesman disabused him of that idea.

That man was none other than famed amp maker Jim Marshall, who at the time ran a music store in London's Hanwell borough.

“I went there with the intention of buying a Gretsch Jet Firebird,” Blackmore reminisces. “After half an hour of a sales pitch, he said, 'Forget the Gretsch. That's a toy compared to the 335.' I went, 'But I want the Gretsch. I love the Jet Firebird.' He said, 'You'll appreciate the 335 Gibson much more later in life.' So I walked out with a Gibson!”

Marshall's powers of persuasion went beyond his electric guitar pitch. He also convinced Blackmore to buy an amp. As a result, the guitarist says, “I was left with next to nothing to live on for the week!”

Marshall’s store was situated near the infamous Ealing Club where Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Brian Jones met, leading to the formation of the Rolling Stones. It would be a little while longer before Marshall redefined the amplifier world with his namesake brand.

“Jim was a very affable kind of guy,” Blackmore says. “He knew nothing about amplifiers, yet it's funny to see today, every band has got a Marshall amplifier, and that was built in the beginning by someone who knew nothing about amplifiers.

“He was a drum teacher,” the guitarist continues. “I always find that slightly amusing!”

The ES-335 would go on to feature in the video for Deep Purple's "Child In Time."

It wouldn't be the last time someone influenced Blackmore's guitar-buying habits. By the late 1960s, the ES-335's neck was becoming bowed and he began looking for a replacement. He found what he wanted in 1969 when one of Eric Clapton's roadies, with a black Strat in hand, stopped by the house Blackmore shared with the rest of Deep Purple. He bought the Strat, which had belonged to Clapton, and went on to own many more (and even obliterate a fair few).

Blackmore wouldn't meet Slowhand for another four years when, in 1973, he accidentally gave his fellow Strat-lover a rude awakening at 3 a.m. The guitarist had cranked a Marshall stack (Jim Marshall strikes again!) to protest construction work that had been going on in the hotel. He had no idea Clapton was fast asleep in the room next door.

Another episode of Tales From the Tavern saw Blackmore remembering the time George Harrison sheepishly asked if he could join Deep Purple on stage, and play one of Blackmore's Strats in the process. Even though Blackmore butchered the Little Richard cover they played, he says the Beatle was having so much fun, he didn't notice.

The thorny subject of the greatest guitar solo of all time has long been a fiercely contested debate, probably because every solo is different. How do you compare, say, “Comfortably Numb” with “Crazy Train,” or “Stairway to Heaven” with “Sultans of Swing”? It’s impossible. Still, public opinion ebbs and flows, and we wanted to find out which solos currently rank among our readers as the greatest of them all.

So we ran a poll on GuitarPlayer.com to find out and here we present the results. We’ll take a look at the stories behind the songs and find out just what made those lead guitar breaks so great through conversations with Brian May, Kirk Hammett, Michael Schenker and others.

20. Gary Moore | “Still Got the Blues”

GUITARIST: GARY MOORE (1990)

The definitive blues guitar ballad.

Presented as the title track from his 1990 album, this wistful tune in A minor became Gary Moore’s calling card fairly late in his career, when he reinvented himself as a blues artist. There’s a point in the solo where you can hear the Belfast great switch from the neck humbucker to the bridge on the 1959 Les Paul Standard he nicknamed Stripe and start deviating from its main theme, mainly sticking within the A minor pentatonic scale, with a few notes from the Aeolian and harmonic minor scales.

Moore was plugged into his prototype Marshall JTM-45 reissue head with one of the company’s newly designed Guv’nor distortion pedals out in front. More than 30 years later, this remains one of the most raw and expressive blues tracks, with Moore almost fighting his guitar at points, yet never failing to deliver the goods

19. Metallica | “Fade To Black”

GUITARIST: Kirk Hammett (1984)

Metallica’s first ballad features some of Kirk’s most epic playing.

Recorded at Flemming Rasmussen’s Sweet Silence Studios in Copenhagen in February and March 1984, Ride the Lightning, Metallica’s sophomore album, was more progressive and stylistically greater in scope than the all-out thrash assault of their debut, Kill ’Em All. That change is evident on “Fade to Black,” which features acoustic guitars and a nonstandard structure more akin to the “Stairway to Heaven” school of songcraft. But it is the song’s timeless melodic solo that most vividly signals a stylistic shift in guitarist Kirk Hammett’s playing. And the signature element he employs for the last solo is arpeggios.

“I have been playing that song for so long now,” Kirk tells our sister publication Total Guitar. “For the very last solo, I know how I want to start it, but then I am in an area where I can improvise for 16, 18 or 24 bars, and then [drummer] Lars [Ulrich] will hit a certain fill, which means that it’s up and it’s time for the arpeggio part. And then I just slide right into those arpeggios.” And they are arpeggios played on two strings, Hammett specifies. “When guitar players first started incorporating arpeggios into their playing, before the whole Yngwie sweep-picking thing, arpeggios were played on two strings – not three or four strings,” he explains. “And that was what the vogue was at the time in the 1980s, so I have been playing those for a long time. I use my middle finger just to anchor my position on the neck.”

That’s a great tip from the man who plays the solos. But how should you tackle them yourself? First, there are two essential scales you’ll need to know: the B natural minor scale and the B Phrygian mode, both shown below. These cover you for the entire opening 30 bars, which, let’s face it, is a lot of music, so this is a good reason to learn a couple of shapes if ever there was one.

To make it simpler, most of your time is spent in the natural minor scale. Not until around bar 20 will you find yourself briefly landing on the C note, which appears in the Phrygian mode. The bottom line is that Hammett improvises this part of the solo live – and these are the shapes he uses.

Up next are those two-string arpeggio shapes, and they’re 16th notes – all of them! At 142 bpm, it’s pretty fast, but Hammett doesn’t pick every note, opting to use pull-offs to make those rapid licks easier. It’s definitely something to experiment with and if you’re still struggling, you could try adding in an occasional hammer‑on, too.

18. Steely Dan | “Kid Charlemagne”

GUITARIST: Larry Carlton (1976)

Messin’ with the “Kid.”

Steely Dan’s catalog is filled with remarkable guitar solos, but Larry Carlton’s brilliant work on The Royal Scam’s “Kid Charlemagne” remains the most celebrated. Carlton strings together a series of tasty phrases that follow the underlying chord changes with a blend of inside and outside playing that is technically mind bending and emotionally satisfying.

“I was pretty familiar with the tune, so I just improvised,” he tells Guitar Player. “People think I’m kidding when I say that, like I had worked the solo out beforehand, but I didn’t. It was straight improv, and it worked.” Very well, in fact. Perhaps more has been written about his solo than of the song itself.

Despite the acclaim, Carlton was, and remains, nonplussed. “When the record came out, there was a wonderful review of the tune in Billboard and they raved about the solo,” he says. “I put the record on and listened to it with my wife, and at the end of it I said, ‘I don’t know. It just sounds like me.’”

17. Cream | “Crossroads”

GUITARIST: Eric Clapton (1968)

The finest rock and roll cover of an acoustic blues song.

It started as a blues tune called “Cross Road Blues” by Robert Johnson and became one of the finest examples of natural ability, soulfulness and showmanship from a virtuosic 22-year-old guitarist named Eric Clapton. His reimagining of the song as “Crossroads” further cemented a legacy that by then had earned him the nickname God.

Famously recorded at San Francisco’s Fillmore West venue for supergroup Cream’s Wheels of Fire album, Clapton’s arrangement retains the soul and spirit of Johnson’s original but updates it for a contemporary audience raring to cut loose and be entertained by dazzlingly quick, passionate musicianship.

Remarkably, Clapton is no fan of the performance: He complains that the band lost the “one” in the first verse of his second solo break, thereby throwing off his phrasing. That’s perfectionism for you. For everyone else, this four-minute track remains a source of fascination more than 50 years on.

16. Eric Johnson | “Cliffs Of Dover”

GUITARIST: Eric Johnson (1990)

Heavenly tones from the Texan great.

This instrumental won Eric Johnson a Grammy for its exquisitely tasteful guitar playing and jaw-dropping tones. For the recordings, the Texan musician mainly stuck with his early ’60s ES-335, though he chose to use his 1964 “Virginia” Strat for the opening lead and parts of the main solo. The guitars were fed into a 100-watt Marshall Super Lead, with an Echoplex and BK Butler Tube Driver to help achieve those smooth, violin-like tones and warm sustain.

“I first heard him in 1986 on Live at Austin City Limits,” Joe Bonamassa told us in 2015. “It was ‘Cliffs of Dover,’ and it was just terrifyingly good guitar playing. I wasn’t even sure if it was real! Then I saw him live, and his tones were the best I’d ever heard. I wondered how this guy was getting all of these sounds out of his Strat. I’d never seen anybody have such a forward-thinking rig like that.”

15. Prince | “Purple Rain”

GUITARIST: Prince (1984)

The Purple One’s defining guitar moment.

The epic outro to “Purple Rain” – which takes up nearly two thirds of the song itself – stands out as some of Prince’s finest work on the six-string, wailing away in G minor pentatonic and occasionally including some more modal notes, like the minor 6th. There’s also that repeating motif that dances around the 2nd and minor 3rd intervals.

It’s simple and effective, setting things up for the vocal melody that comes in toward the end. It’s not a busy solo by any means. Rather, the Purple One chose to leave a lot of space in between the lines he played and focus on big hooks instead of monster licks.

Prince would extend the solo for up to 15 minutes in live performance. While there are many great live renditions of this track, his half-time performance for 2007’s Super Bowl in Miami is the stuff of legend. Shredding alone onstage in the middle of a storm, Prince seemed to be living the moment for which this song was written.

14. Deep Purple | “Highway Star”

GUITARIST: Ritchie Blackmore (1972)

Race with devil on English highway.

“I wrote that out note for note about a week before we recorded it,” Ritchie Blackmore said of his remarkable and most definitely memorable solo to “Highway Star.” “And that is one of the only times I have ever done that. I wanted it to sound like someone driving in a fast car, for it to be one of those songs you would listen to while speeding. And I wanted a very definite Bach sound, which is why I wrote it out – and why I played those very rigid arpeggios across that very familiar Bach progression – D minor, G minor, C major, A major. I believe that I was the first person to do that so obviously on the guitar, and I believe that that’s why it stood out and why people have enjoyed it so much.

“Over the years, I’ve always played that solo note for note, but it just got faster and faster onstage because we would drink more and more whisky. [Keyboardist] Jon [Lord] would have to play his already difficult part faster and faster, and he would get very annoyed about it.”

13. Guns N’ Roses | “Sweet Child O’ Mine”

GUITARIST: Slash (1988)

A game of two halves.

Slash’s solo on this Guns N’ Roses breakthrough single is rock guitar at its finest. The first half is laid-back and modal, built around the Eb minor scale with a few major 7ths thrown in for a harmonic-minor flavor. The second half is much more aggressive and bluesy, and sticks mainly to position one of the pentatonic scale an octave up the neck in the same key. The bends feel that much wider and the vibrato more pronounced.

Slash plays the first section on the neck pickup for thickness and warmth before switching over to the bridge for more bite, with his Cry Baby engaged. Perhaps most impressive is his off-the-cuff sense of feel and how he strings it all together, which is the mark of any great guitar solo. Remarkably, although Slash’s riff was responsible for the song’s creation, he wasn’t fond of the song originally. “We were a pretty hard driving band, and that was sort of an uptempo ballady type of a thing,” he said. “So it’s grown on me over the years.”

12. Ozzy Osbourne | “Crazy Train”

GUITARIST: Randy Rhoads (1980)

Fretboard fireworks galore on Ozzy’s Blizzard of Ozz comeback.

The Double-O has often cited Randy Rhoads as the man who saved his career – and when you hear the solo on “Crazy Train,” you understand why. Although Rhoads’ classical- and modal-based approach was far from Tony Iommi’s blues leanings, he was, like Ozzy’s old bandmate, a true inventor.

There’s a section toward the end of this solo that actually sounds like a train squealing off the tracks, thanks to the use of a chromatically ascending trill that then descends in key. Rhoads concludes the solo with a fast-picked F# minor pentatonic phrase before a rapid Aeolian legato run ending with a big bend on the 19th fret.

The shredder performed the solo with his customized Jackson guitar through a Marshall and a couple of 4x12s while sitting in the control room. “We’d plug the guitar directly into the console,” recalls Blizzard of Ozz engineer Max Norman. “We’d preamp it in the console and send it down to the amp from there. That way we could control the amount of gain that hit the amp.”

11. Michael Jackson | “Beat It”

GUITARIST: Eddie Van Halen (1982)

Breathtaking results from an unlikely pairing.

Asked to contribute guitar to Michael Jackson’s Thriller album, Pete Townshend declined but offered a suggestion: How about Eddie Van Halen? Jackson and producer Quincy Jones thought that was a great idea, and got Ed onboard to play the solo to “Beat It.” But after hearing the part where he was asked to solo, the guitarist was unhappy with the chord changes and had the engineer edit the tape to create a new pattern that better suited what he had in mind.

Ed knew Jackson might be surprised and possibly unhappy with his executive decision. “So I warned him before he listened,” he told CNN in 2012. “I said, ‘Look, I changed the middle section of your song.’ Now in my mind, he’s either going to have his bodyguards kick me out for butchering his song, or he’s going to like it. And so he gave it a listen, and he turned to me and went, ‘Wow, thank you so much for having the passion to not just come in and blaze a solo but to actually care about the song and make it better.’” And he did it for free.

10. The Beatles | “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”

GUITARIST: Eric Clapton (1968)

An uncredited Slowhand makes a rare guest appearance with the Fab Four.

By 1968, George Harrison was penning compositions that rivaled those of his bandmates John Lennon and Paul McCartney. “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” was every bit as good as anything his musical partners wrote, but no one could get up the enthusiasm for it, so Harrison invited his pal Eric Clapton to play on the session, knowing it would put the Beatles on good behavior.

Using Harrison’s 1957 “Lucy” Gibson Les Paul through a Fender Deluxe amp, Clapton doesn’t so much mimic the haunting, aching main melody as he creates a harrowing song within a song. His descending bends and release notes, and that inimitable vibrato, are on full display and are appropriately tear-jerking, weaving a dramatic narrative that builds to a shattering climax.

9. Chicago | “25 OR 6 TO 4”

GUITARIST: Terry Kath (1969)

Wah-drenched ecstasy.

This magazine once described Terry Kath’s “25 or 6 to 4” solo as “Wes Montgomery meets Jimi Hendrix,” and it’s a fair point, as Kath was influenced first by jazz and, later, hard rock. As a founding member of the jazz-rock band Chicago, he held down guitar duties for the group until his tragic death from an accidentally self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1978.

Though his superb playing graced many tracks – notably “Introduction” and “Free Form Guitar,” both from the group’s 1969 debut, The Chicago Transit Authority – there’s no denying the power of his soloing on the group’s early hit “25 or 6 to 4.” Kath uses his wah generously to add emotion to his lines, giving them at times a frenetic despair.

Kath most likely played his Gibson SG Standard, as pictured on Chicago Transit Authority’s inner sleeve, using his favored string set, as revealed to GP: the high E string from a tenor set and a standard set for the rest, moved down one string (i.e. high E for the B string, B for the G string, and so on).

8. Lynyrd Skynyrd | “Free Bird”

GUITARIST: Allen Collins (1974)

The Bird is the word.

As it happens, the four-minute-and-24- second guitar solo that closes “Free Bird” was originally added to give singer Ronnie Van Zant a chance to rest his vocal cords during Lynyrd Skynyrd’s relentless performance schedule. At 143 bars long, the solo is far and away the most epic offering here (in fact, it’s 286 bars of recorded music because the whole thing is doubled).

The tune appeared on the group’s eponymous debut album in 1973, and guitarist Allen Collins delivered the lot on his 1964 Gibson Explorer. As Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Gary Rossington once told Guitar World, “The whole long jam was Allen Collins himself. He was bad. He was super bad! He was bad-to-the-bone bad. When we put the solo together, we liked the sound of the two guitars, and I could’ve gone out and played it with him. But the way he was doin’ it, he was just so hot! He just did it once and did it again, and it was done.”

7. Dire Straits | “Sultans Of Swing”

GUITARIST: Mark Knopfler

An understated guitar hero fingerpicks his way to glory.

Right when the world was crowning Eddie Van Halen the new King of Guitar, along came the rather unassuming Mark Knopfler – schooled in rockabilly, blues and jazz – who demonstrated that you didn’t need walls of distortion to turn heads.

Knopfler composed this pub-rock classic on a National steel guitar but thought it sounded “dull” – that is, until he picked up a Stratocaster, at which point the song “came alive.” Using nary a hint of grit on a Fender Twin, he fingerpicks not one but two standout solos.

The first features a lyrical section of elegant, Chet Atkins-style single-note and chordal bends that sigh and swoon with dreamy romanticism. In itself, that would be enough, but the outro solo is the real attention-grabber, on which Knopfler builds to a dazzling set of spitfire 16th-note arpeggios – cleanly played, precise and rousing every time you hear it.

6. The Jimi Hendrix Experience | “All Along The Watchtower”

GUITARIST: Jimi Hendrix (1968)

The greatest solo in a cover version.

This song tops any list of covers that are better than the original. Guitarists invariably refer to it as a Hendrix cover rather than a Bob Dylan original, proof of how much Hendrix made it his own. Jimi’s rhythm playing is astounding, both in the intro and in the deft chord/ melody work of the verses, and of course, there’s the small matter of four guitar solos to consider. The man many refer to as the best of all time makes the most of his Strat and Marshall rig here, but it’s his offering at the 2:20 mark that we’re interested in. Following an opening run of octaves, he gets into his stride with a typically blues-based minor pentatonic approach in C#.

At 2:32, the main solo explodes into a trademark combination of rhythm and lead, plus funky scratching on muted strings. It’s worth playing along with the scratches, trying to keep a loose wrist and consistent down-up strumming. Those few beats alone will teach you a lot about Jimi’s groove and feel.

To get the sound, select a bridge-position single-coil pickup, dial in delay at around 350ms, add compression for sustain and opt for a Vox wah pedal or something similar. You’ll hear the wind begin to howl.

5. Eagles | “Hotel California”

GUITARISTS: Don Felder & Joe Walsh (1977)

Those iconic twin-guitar harmony lines took the Eagles to new heights.

The title track from the Eagles’ fifth album, and without doubt the song the band will be most remembered for, “Hotel California” frequently tops greatest guitar solo polls. The solo begins at 4:20, forming an extended coda, over which guitarists Don Felder and Joe Walsh trade licks before joining together to play those iconic harmonized licks at 5:39.

As it turns out, those harmony lines work in a relatively simple fashion. Felder and Walsh play an arpeggio of every chord, and the harmony is created by one of the guitars always playing one note lower down in the chord. For example, the notes of the Bm chord are B, D and F#, so, if the higher guitar plays an F#, the lower guitar will play a D, and so on.

This nugget of information can take you a long way to mastering those descending arpeggios. We won’t go as far as to say you could easily work it out by ear, but if you know the chords to the song, it’s possible to jam along. And you can’t say that about many of the solos on this list!

4. Queen | “Bohemian Rhapsody”

GUITARIST: Brian May (1975)

It might just be the biggest rock song of all time.

Following Freddie Mercury’s 1991 death and a cameo moment in 1992’s Wayne’s World, “Bohemian Rhapsody” became a trigger point for a worldwide outpouring of affection and respect for Queen. Their renewed popularity would continue into the new millennium as Ben Elton’s We Will Rock You musical and the band’s discovery of a different way to exist behind frontman Adam Lambert brought their music to a new generation.

And “Bohemian Rhapsody”? Unsurprisingly, it’s Queen’s best-known song, and its brief nine-bar solo is a short and sweet musical interlude, bridging the verses to lead into what’s become known as the song’s “operatic section.” Those two words alone should warn you that this song shouldn’t work. There’s no chorus and, aside from two verses, no repetition. But of course it does work, and Brian May’s solo is the perfect melodic break.

His phrasing is loose and natural, moving across the backbeat rather than sticking to a rigidly timed grid. The fastest licks are expressive bursts, rather than repetitive noodling, and his articulate pre-bend and vibrato technique demonstrates his beautiful touch. Somehow, within the confines of the complex structure of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” this solo is made to order.

3. Led Zeppelin | “Stairway To Heaven”

GUITARIST: Jimmy Page (1971)

Heaven-sent soloing.

From the moment Jimmy Page plays the opening run on his ’59 Fender Telecaster, right through to the flurry of notes and the wailing bend that completes it, this is guitar-solo perfection – a masterpiece of composition. Rather than wander aimlessly, Page creates a song within a song.

The opening phrases set the scene, as he adds notes to the pentatonic scale to follow the song’s final chord progression. A rapid mid-solo repeating lick raises the bar before a game of question-and-answer with a haunting overdubbed guitar leads into that last flurry and bend. As we say, it’s all about the composition: licks that track the chord changes, the contour of the melody and the pacing of the widdly bits all take the listener on a journey.

Three takes were recorded (the other two allegedly still survive, presumably locked in a Led Zeppelin vault somewhere), all of them improvised, although Page has reportedly said that he had worked out the opening line. But while we’re all certainly curious to hear those solos, let’s face it: They’re not going to be any better than the one we’ve come to know and love all these years.

2. Van Halen | “Eruption”

GUITARIST: Eddie Van Halen (1978)

Eddie’s iconic solo that shook the world.

With its mix of fast legato hammer‑ons and pull-offs, pinched harmonics, whammy-bar dives and two-hand tapping, Eddie Van Halen’s mind-blowing instrumental guitar solo inspired a generation of guitar heroes. While the tapping gets the attention, his tone, blistering legato and creative note choices are all equally important. Amid all that virtuosity, Eddie still played with joyous rock and roll abandon.

Remarkably, Ed was never completely happy with the released recording. “I didn’t even play it right,” he told Guitar World. “There’s a mistake at the top end of it. Whenever I hear it, I always think, Man, I could’ve played it better.”

His admission aside, the track is a technical opus. The first eight bars are a bluesy affair, whose virtuoso legato licks perhaps recall the mojo of Jimmy Page’s breakdown solo in Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.” It’s a theme Eddie develops over the following eight bars, taking notes from the major and minor pentatonic scales to add chromatics.

His tapping finale is probably one of the least understood solo sections in rock history. Eddie’s taps are not always on the beat, which makes for tricky timing changes as he switches from tapping the first and fourth sextuplet notes to the third and sixth notes. From start to end, “Eruption” is a masterpiece that would take most guitarists a lifetime to perfect.

1. Pink Floyd | “Comfortably Numb”

GUITARIST: David Gilmour (1979)

Gilmour’s greatness comes through in waves.

In a 1992 interview with MTV’s Ray Cokes, Gilmour was asked what he thinks of Keith Richards’ theory that songs, lyrics and guitar solos are “just out there in the air and you sort of grab them.” Gilmour agreed. “I think he’s right. They sort of appear as if they are out there in the air. But I don’t know how they get there.” But the best ones he said, just happen. “The best ones do, but often you work very hard and struggle over them.”

Gilmour's two "Comfortably Numb" solos are certainly among his best, and it’s easy to understand why our readers voted his efforts to be the number-one pick in our poll. But the real question is, which of those two solos qualifies for inclusion? Whichever way you go — and granted, most fans prefer the first solo to the second — there's certainly plenty to justify the song's position at the top.

The tone is legendary. Gilmour’s signal chain consisted of his iconic black Strat, then featuring a DiMarzio FS-1 bridge pickup, into a HiWatt DR103, with the essential EHX Ram’s Head Big Muff pedal. The FS-1’s fatness and the Big Muff’s smoothness leave no hint of the harsh treble that can plague Strats. With some extra help from an MXR Dyna Comp, Gilmour had so much sustain that he could hold notes as long as he wanted. As in his live rig, he combined a WEM 4x12 cab with a Yamaha rotary speaker lower in the mix, to add subtle modulation. The epic delay was added in the mix.

The first solo, in D major, uses the Strat’s neck and bridge pickups together, permitted by a custom switching arrangement. His phrasing here is the more unconventional of the two, with arpeggios and sliding passages. Gilmour’s use of the bar for vibrato – aided by its shortened tremolo arm – again distinguishes him from typical bluesers, inspiring many a fusion player in the process. He rakes into the beginning of many of the phrases, similar to Brian May, extracting all the excitement he can from every note.

By comparison, the outro solo’s licks are more standard, with phrases similar to Hendrix’s. The passages at 4:57 and 5:12 could be from “All Along the Watchtower” or “Foxey Lady,” but in this epic track few listeners would make the connection. It sounds both masterful and improvised at the same time. Gilmour has explained he created this impression by recording five or six takes and compiling the finished solo from the best bits of each. The result is stunningly well written, with a combination of repetition and development that keeps the excitement building for two minutes. The Hendrix-style blues lick returns at 5:27, longer and more intricate than before. The aggressive double-stops first appear at 5:15, and by 5:35 he has turned that idea into a motif.

For the climax, Gilmour shoots up an octave just when it seems he’s wrung every inch of expression from his maple neck. He descends back down the neck, incorporating one of his spectacular three-fret bends on the way, and finishes with another take on that double stop motif. It has all the excitement of an improvised performance, and all the structure of a careful composition.

Both solos share brilliant rhythmic awareness. Gilmour uses triplets, sextuplets, 16th and 32nd notes freely, within the same phrase. And check out the effect at 5:10 when he plays a lick in 16th notes and then immediately repeats and expands in sextuplets. A good solo can have great tone, rhythms, melody or expression, but only a work of rare brilliance features them all to this degree.

Ritchie Blackmore says jamming Little Richard’s "Lucille" with George Harrison was “overwhelming” and recalls that the former Beatle politely asked if he could play his guitar.

In the latest installment of his YouTube series, Tales From The Tavern — in which the former Deep Purple guitarist regales fans with anecdotes from his more than half a century at the heart of British rock and roll — Blackmore looks back on the time he traded licks with Harrison in 1984. It happened during an Australian tour in support of Deep Purple MkII's album Perfect Strangers.

“He was friends with Jon Lord and Ian Paice. He lived just down the road,” Blackmore recalls, as he sits with a classical acoustic guitar on his lap. “He was over in Australia when we were there as Deep Purple, and he said to me very politely, 'Can I get up onstage with you and use your guitar?' I said, 'Of course.' I was flattered.”

“Sure enough, we all got up onstage and we did the old rock and roll number 'Lucille,' by Little Richard.”

Although it's grainy, footage of the performance captures an electric energy onstage, with the pair trading solos with aplomb.

“We had a good time.” Blackmore continues. “He was a very nice man, very serious, and very complimentary. It was very overwhelming to play with a Beatle. I mean, there'll never be another band like the Beatles.”

Harrison had all but retired from music two years prior to the performance following the release of his 10th solo album, Gone Troppo. He would go on to describe himself as “peaceseeker, gardener, and ex-celeb,” thereby making his Deep Purple cameo even more intriguing.

Blackmore has discussed the fabled jam before, saying, "I was playing the wrong key and everything, but it didn't seem to matter".

In the new video, Blackmore goes on to say that he “absolutely loved” the Beatles’ early material, highlighting "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "From Me to You" for their “fantastic…simple melodies."

“George was very modest,” he concludes. “A very quiet man. I noticed onstage that he had big feet, because he was tapping out the rhythm. I looked down at one point and thought, My god, he has big feet! George was great.”

Blackmore’s new video series kicked off with a story involving him using Marshall stacks to protest against hotel maintenance works at 3 a.m., and waking up Eric Clapton in the process.

In related news, Harrison's Hamburg-era Futurama guitar, which can be heard on the Fab Four's earliest recordings, with Tony Sheridan, will head to auction next month. Purchased in 1958 from the same Liverpool music store where John Lennon got his first Vox amp, it was the closest thing he could get to a Stratocaster, the model he wanted thanks to Buddy Holly. At the time Stratocasters were not available in the U.K.

Stratocasters were first made available in the UK in 1959, and it wasn't until 1963 that they made their way to Ireland. Rory Gallagher's iconic road-worn Strat is thought to be the first to make it onto Irish soil.

You can watch the Deep Purple–George Harrison jam below.

Simon McBride joined Deep Purple in 2022, off the back of an established career as a blues solo artist and as a touring member of Don Airey’s solo band.

So, by replacing the outgoing Steve Morse and becoming the band’s fourth permanent guitarist, he busied himself with understanding the band’s guitar parts intimately.

While he had little issue with the bulk of it – indeed, Morse said he “nailed” the gig – there was one tricky little Ritchie Blackmore lick that had him stumped for a while.

“Most of it is actually not too bad,” he told Ultimate Guitar. “There's one little lick which annoyed me for a long, long time, it's in Lazy. I don't play the same solo he plays; Lazy is one of those songs where I feel I can just improvise a bit more and have fun with it.

“But there's this one lick he does in it, and I said, ‘I have to play that.’ And it's a bitch of a lick,” he expands.

“It's not ultrafast. It's just that there's a lot of chromatic stuff in it and slides in a very tight space, within three or four frets, and that's it. So that, to me, is the hardest thing about playing Purple.”

Blackmore wasn’t necessarily known as a particularly speedy or technical player, and McBride acknowledges that. But he’s been quick to praise his melodic sensibilities.

“Even Highway Star, the fast part in that, it's fast, but it's not John Petrucci from Dream Theater or something ridiculously fast, but it fits the song.

"Everything else that he played was more just melodies. Ritchie played for the song most of the time. But yeah, that lick in Lazy – that still haunts me every night when I come up to it. I'm like, ‘Oh shit, don't screw it up!’”

Guesting on Guitar Player's No Guitar is Safe podcast in 2022, McBride, who host Jude Gold called “a cold-blooded killer on guitar,” countered those who felt Morse wasn’t the right man for Deep Purple.

He believes Morse was the perfect replacement for Blackmore “because he was different. So sometimes when I play his stuff, it's not something I'd normally play, but it's cool to do. As a guitarist, you're always looking for new challenges. He's from the era of giants with Paul Gilbert and Satriani. You've gotta love him.”

Speaking to Guitar World that same year, he spoke about his leftfield approach to learning some of Morse’s parts, particularly the unison lead lines he’d share with keyboardist Don Airey.

“To learn things, I don’t necessarily pick up the guitar for the first two weeks; I’ll just sit and listen to the songs over and over until I’m sick of listening to them. When I actually sit down with the guitar, I like to be able to nearly play it already just from familiarity, knowing the chords and what positions they’re being played in.”

He continued, “I don’t think there’s too much that will be challenging for me. It’s mainly just remembering all the parts as a whole. It’s not like just learning a normal set with standard issue songs, which are verse/chorus/verse/chorus/solo and done. They have all these alternate endings and, as you said, those mad sections with unison lines.”

Deep Purple recently gave a very literal performance of Smoke on the Water – a song McBride says many guitarists are playing wrong. They played the song on the wakers of Lake Geneva in Montreux, where the song has its origins, with smoke billowing out from behind them.

Deep Purple have delivered their most literal performance of Smoke on the Water, churning out the track’s peerless riff on a stage erected over Lake Geneva, with fire and smoke pluming into the skyline behind them.

The British rock icons, who will release their 23rd studio album, =1, later this month, marked their 10th appearance at the Montreux Jazz Festival in style over the weekend (July 8), helping give the festival’s new stage, erected over the lake, an apt baptism of fire.

Talking to The Standard, the band’s evergreen bass player Roger Glover reflected on the incidents that preceded the song’s birth, and how the track may never have existed if it weren’t for Frank Zappa and a flare gun.

It was 1971 and the band had chosen a Montreux casino to record their sixth album, Machine Head, taking advantage of the Rolling Stones’ mobile studio.

The evening before recording started, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention were in town, entertaining a packed crowd at the casino’s theater. As the keyboard solo of King Kong moved through the gears, a flare gun was fired at the ceiling. The venue went up like a tinderbox, taking the band’s equipment with it.

“It burned all afternoon, all evening, all through the night,” Glover remembers. “We went and looked at it the next morning, and there it was, gone. It was a frightening thing.

“The following morning, I was in my room alone and I woke up with those words on my lips, and I said them out to an empty room. And then I kind of really woke up and I said, ‘What did I just say? Smoke on the water?’ No idea what it meant. I mentioned it to Ian [Gillan] and he said, ‘Yeah, sounds like a drug song. Better not do that.’”

Speaking previously to Classic Rock, Ritchie Blackmore had said the song was put together haphazardly.

“It was made up in the spur of the moment,” he said. “I just threw it together with Ian Paice. Roger Glover joined in. We went outside to the mobile unit and were listening back to one of the takes, and there was some hammering on the door.

“It was the local police, and they were trying to stop the whole thing because it was so loud.

“We knew that they were coming to close everything down. We said to Martin Birch, our engineer: ‘Let’s see if we have a take.’ So they were outside hammering and taking out their guns.”

Ritchie Blackmore claims that the riff was adapted from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, with a Hornby-Skewes Treble Booster unit used to produce a more biting top end and a subtle touch of distortion to the riff's genre-defining tone.

While knowing the song is a rite of passage for electric guitar players, Simon McBride, who joined the band in 2022, once explained to Guitar Player why many guitarists play it wrong.

In 2021, readers of Total Guitar and Guitar World magazines voted it the fourth-greatest riff of all time, with Led Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love claiming the top spot.

The following is an excerpt from Martin K. Webb’s piece in the July/August 1973 issue of Guitar Player.

Ritchie Blackmore, lead guitarist and co-founder of Deep Purple, was born in Weston-super-Mare, England. 

Emerging to fame in America in 1968 with the hit single Hush, Deep Purple have appeared with the Royal Philharmonic at London’s Albert Hall, faced 4,000 rioting fans in Stuttgart, and been smuggled out of a concert hall in Iceland in a paddy wagon. 

Blackmore’s first guitar was a secondhand Spanish type, which he has since replaced with Stratocasters and Gibsons.

Did you ever have lessons?

“I had classical lessons for a year. That helped, because I learned how to use my little finger. A lot of blues guitarists play with only three fingers, so they can’t figure out certain runs that require the use of their little fingers.“

Besides getting you to use your little finger, has classical training affected your playing in any other way?

“I would say that it shows up most in the music I write. For example, the chord progression in the Highway Star solo – Bm, to a Db, to a C, to a G – is a Bach progression. The classical influence is always there somewhat, but I don’t intentionally use it that much really. I play a lot of single notes, and that’s not classical.“

How do you rate Steve Howe, as far as putting almost strict classical stylings into a rock context?

“He’s very good at it, but he’s not the kind of guitarist I can listen to. He’s very good at runs, but I don’t like that type of playing much.“

Did you ever do much work in record sessions?

“When I was about 17. Some of the work was a drag, but some of it was interesting. Session work makes you more strict. You can’t hit notes all over the place. You’ve got to make each one really count. 

“When you’re recording, if you’re not really clean in your playing, it sounds like a mess. You may think you sound fabulous on stage, but when you hear yourself played back on record, it’s just disastrous most of the time. If you can play well in the studio, you can play well on stage.“

How did you come to use your tremolo bar so much?

“I liked the way Hendrix used his tremolo – though I don’t think I use it the same way. A lot of guitarists think that a tremolo arm is for someone who can’t play a hand vibrato, but the tremolo arm gives a different vibrato altogether. 

“It affects whole chords. I can do the old hand vibrato just fine, but I like attacking the strings and getting all those sounds. You can get a lot of aggression out with a tremolo arm.”

You do a lot of hammering-on, and you frequently put your pick in your mouth and play with your fingers.

“I also play with my feet [laughs]. I use my fingers for different sounds and effects. But I actually play very lightly. That’s from the days when I used to use banjo strings. When I did a solo they sounded fine, but when it was over, I’d find the strings would be out of tune. So I started playing lighter out of necessity.”

How loud is your amp?

“Full up. Learning to play the guitar is one thing, but learning to play with a big amplifier is a different thing altogether. It’s like trying to control an elephant.”

Deep Purple have had their fair share of lineup changes since their formation in 1968 – however, for one night only in 1984, their rock family tree even extended to The Beatles, as George Harrison joined them on stage to perform the Little Richard classic Lucille in Sydney, Australia.

Although the camera angle is far from ideal, the fact that footage exists of Ritchie Blackmore trading licks with George Harrison – the latter armed with Blackmore's Olympic White 1974 Fender Stratocaster, no less – alone makes the video below a must-watch.

Harrison had all but retired from music following the 1982 release of his tenth studio album Gone Troppo, which underperformed commercially (it was his only post-Beatles record not to hit the US top 20), describing himself in a 1982 interview as “a middle-aged ex-popstar” and a “peaceseeker, gardener, and ex-celeb.”

However, while on an extended holiday in Australia, the ex-Beatle caught the bug to get back on stage with a little help from his friends. “They're my neighbors – two of them, Jon [Lord] and Ian [Paice],” Harrison explained in a 1987 interview. “I've known them now for probably eight or nine years. They were so famous in the '70s, but I got to know them in the period after they'd broken up before they reformed. So, I never knew their music.”

Harrison had reportedly grown disinterested in current music trends at the time, and had become more reclusive. With his interests mainly outside of music, he'd even refused to promote Gone Troppo. 

“I'd heard this one thing about Smoke on the Water or something like that. I'd never actually seen them. I'd heard that they're in the Guinness Book of Records for being the loudest group in the world,” Harrison said, referring to the band's 1972 London Rainbow Theatre gig, a now-infamous show that reportedly saw audience members passing out due to band’s 117 dB attack. 

“I was in Australia at the time, and they happened to be doing a concert in Sydney. So, I thought I'd go and check them out, get my earplugs, and go and see them.”

Harrison seemed skeptical of Deep Purple at the time – referring to their achievements in sound pressure levels and stage antics – however, he clearly enjoyed and respected their music enough to accept the band's offer to (briefly) join them on stage.

“I really enjoyed the show,” says Harrison. “I sat on the stage for part of the show behind the loudspeakers, and then I walked down and sat right in the center of the hall, and it wasn't too loud. It was really funny. I liked it. I thought Ian, who's my neighbor, is such a good drummer – Jon Lord, rocking his organ. And Ian Gillan, he's just a scream.”

The Beatles had to cut their live performance days short in 1966, largely because the technology of the time struggled to propel the band's hits over the hoards of screaming fans. It's hard not to imagine that Harrison would have loved some of Purple's sonic firepower for those Shea Stadium shows...

On how he ended up joining Deep Purple for the final number, Harrison explains, “They said, 'Here's the guitar, come on.' So I just went on. I was playing the wrong key and everything, but it didn't seem to matter.”

Indeed, Harrison would make only a handful of further onstage appearances until his death in 2001 – typically mini-sets for charity or tribute concerts.

Harrison's most recent posthumous contribution to music can be found on The Beatles' latest release, Now and Then. The single, first worked on by Harrison, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr in the mid-1990s, lay dormant and unfinished until film director Peter Jackson and his team helped to rescue Lennon's voice from a rough 1977 demo tape. It is being billed as the final track to feature performances from all four Beatles.

No gaff tape marks on the stage are necessary for Simon McBride – he always remembers where the sweet spot is. Alone under the lights for his big guitar cadenza each night with Deep Purple – and just after kicking on a Tube Screamer to make his white-hot electric guitar tone a few degrees hotter – he moves to that invisible X, hits a single note high up on the fretboard, and, with zero vibrato, gets it to sustain infinitely. When a shimmering overtone emerges from within the sound, the endless note becomes all the more prismatic. It grabs your ears the way a laser beam shooting up into the night sky attracts your eyes.

It’s an old trick, but, after watching McBride do it flawlessly at 16 different arenas all over Europe last fall (I was playing with the support band, Jefferson Starship), I can report that I’ve never seen anyone do it more hypnotically. It’s mesmerizing. Rather than seeming gimmicky, it comes off as heartfelt and part of a grander musical statement.

Next, McBride suddenly jumps up to a high-altitude F-major scale pattern, and, starting on the highest A on the highest string, blazes down an octave and a half of the shape as fast as possible, repeating the dazzling maneuver again up a half step, and then again up another half step, and so on. The notes whiz by faster than tracer bullets. It’s thrilling to experience, and it incites roars of delight from each new audience.

Standing at the monitor board after taking in McBride’s many guitar solos each night, Donny Baldwin – the veteran, multi-Platinum drummer in my band – turned to me and said, “Damn, that dude plays with so much emotion!” I agree. Whether McBride is playing slowly or quickly, I still feel each note. If you still think of Steve Morse as “the new guy” in Deep Purple – even though the brilliant Dregs guitarist’s tenure in the iconic rock band was, at 28 years, far longer than that of founding guitarist Ritchie Blackmore – you’re forgiven. There may still be a few guitar fans who haven’t yet heard that Morse announced his retirement from Deep Purple last summer to help his wife, Janine, through ongoing chemotherapy treatments as she confronts stage IV cancer.

The new new guy is Simon McBride. Hailing from Belfast, the Irish guitar hero was already established before joining Deep Purple, with multiple solo albums and videos released under his own name. (Want to hear a spectacular fuzz guitar break? Listen to McBride engage his Vahlbruch Octavia pedal on “Kingdoms,” from his latest solo album, The Fighter.) McBride had also proved his worth to the Purple camp by touring and recording with two legendary members of the band, keyboardist Don Airey and singer Ian Gillan, long before they ever knew they might need to enlist him for Purple.

“Two-thousand-twenty-two was weird but also wonderful,” McBride says of the year he officially joined forces with the British rock titans. “At first I was sort of subbing in for Steve, but when they said he was stepping away and asked me to join, I said, ‘I’ll think about it.’” He laughs. “No, I actually immediately said, ‘Yes.’”

Of all the guitarists you’ve seen perform in your lifetime, who most blew you away with the sheer level of emotion in their playing?

It’s got to be Gary Moore. Gary was a massive influence on me, starting when I was a kid. Obviously, he was from Belfast too, but when I was about 10 years old and my dad took me to see him, it inspired me to go, “I want to do that.” He played with such aggression and passion, and I think from learning all his stuff over the years it’s a natural thing that comes out in me, too. I have to thank Gary for that.

There are so many Gary Moore songs that a lot of people don’t really listen to, because he was so popular for his blues thing, as that’s what really broke him and made him massive. But people forget the heavier stuff, like Corridors of Power. He has so many brilliant albums, all of them full of great riffs.

What’s your philosophy on getting a kick-ass hard-rock guitar sound in an arena?

It’s about having teeth. I do have a lot of modern gadgets like, for example, the [Neural DSP] QuadCortex, which I use in the studio and think is great. But live, I’m that old-school kind of a player who is used to having a fire-breathing dragon – a wall of Marshalls – shouting at me.

I started using Engl stuff when I joined Purple, and it’s great. I used Steve [Morse]’s heads for a while, and they’re great, but while that amp suits Steve, it is a bit more compressed and high-gain than what I prefer. Plus, there are too many buttons on it for me. I’m a very simple guy. I’m like, “Just give me my bass, mid, treble, gain and volume.” Done.

So the guys at Engl tweaked a head for me to have more aggressiveness, especially around the high mids, because that’s how a guitar frequency cuts through. Once you start sucking the mids out of your sound, you lose the guitar, whether you’re playing a small club, an arena or a stadium – especially in a band like Purple, where you’re competing with [Airey’s] Hammond running through two Leslies and a Marshall, which has a similar frequency range as your guitar.

One modern development, though, is that I now run my stage rig in stereo, and for that I blame COVID, because for two years I was sitting in my home studio playing in stereo through my studio monitors. When live gigs started happening again and I plugged in my mono setup, I was like, “This is not gonna work.” [laughs] I now run a simple left/right setup with stereo effects courtesy of TC Electronic Plethora and Boss Space Echo pedals. I also tried the wet/dry/wet thing, but it wasn’t for me.

You get an amazing spectrum of sounds from that Paul Reed Smith with the f-hole. [McBride has played a red-finished custom PRS 408 and now has one in gray.]

Yeah, I had it made for me about nine years ago. It’s basically a PRS 408, which they stopped making – maybe because the pickups had slightly odd shapes, which meant people couldn’t swap them out easily if they wanted to. But I love the 408’s design. It’s very versatile. You have a three-way toggle selector, plus two little switches that split each humbucker. And it cleans up brilliantly through a proper valve amp. I think there’s a capacitor in there that helps it get a little brighter when you roll the volume back. People always ask me why I don’t have a tone knob on the guitar, and I’m like, “I haven’t used a tone knob in 25 years, so what do I need one for?”

There’s an exciting moment in “Hush” each night where you and Don trade licks back and forth and really seem to be pushing each other. It’s a total head-cutting duel.

Oh, yeah, every night it’s a full-on battle. It’s great because at that point it’s just me and Don, with only Ian [Paice]’s drums behind us, so we can drift in and out of stuff and go wherever we want, musically. Don has told me, “It’s 14-1 to you, Simon,” but I don’t know. Every night I have to try harder, because he comes down to soundcheck each day and practices, coming up with ideas to try and screw me up. [laughs] Really, it’s just fun. We’re just having a jam and having a laugh. We just love doing it.

Is there a secret to kicking off “Smoke on the Water” each night? Any pressure when you’re starting off what is possibly the world’s most famous guitar riff?

At the moment, no. But the first time I did it I was very nervous, because that was with Ian Gillan in front of about 10,000 people. But it’s such a simple riff. The main secret is just giving it the right tempo. Then Don kicks in with the Hammond playing the same thing, Roger kicks in with the bass, and it’s just a wall of power. Some people overcomplicate the “Smoke” riff by playing it like a guitar player – you know, they throw vibrato and other things into it – but then the riff loses its essence. You just have to keep it simple. There are plenty of other places in the set for me to try new things.

People always ask me, “Do you have freedom to improvise in Deep Purple?” The answer is yes. But there are certain things you just have to play as they were recorded, like Blackmore’s solo on “Highway Star.” It would be very arrogant of me to think that I can do better than that. That’s a brilliant solo. It’s iconic.

If you still think of Steve Morse as “the new guy” in Deep Purple – even though the brilliant Dregs guitarist’s tenure in the iconic rock band was, at 28 years, far longer than that of founding guitarist Ritchie Blackmore – you’re forgiven.

The new new guy is Simon McBride.

Hailing from Belfast, the Irish guitar hero was already established before joining Deep Purple, with multiple solo albums and videos released under his own name.

In our October issue, McBride talks to us about how his fire-breathing tube tones power a new era of Deep Purple, the enduring influence of Gary Moore, and what it’s like performing one of the most iconic riffs in hard-rock history, “Smoke on the Water.”

We asked McBride if he felt any pressure kicking off Deep Purple’s epic number. “At the moment, no,” he told us. “But the first time I did it I was very nervous, because that was with Ian Gillan in front of about 10,000 people. But it’s such a simple riff. The main secret is just giving it the right tempo. Then Don kicks in with the Hammond playing the same thing, Roger kicks in with the bass, and it’s just a wall of power.

“Some people overcomplicate the ‘Smoke’ riff by playing it like a guitar player – you know, they throw vibrato and other things into it – but then the riff loses its essence. You just have to keep it simple.

“There are plenty of other places in the set for me to try new things. People always ask me, ‘Do you have freedom to improvise in Deep Purple?’ The answer is yes. But there are certain things you just have to play as they were recorded, like Blackmore’s solo on ‘Highway Star.’ 

"It would be very arrogant of me to think that I can do better than that. That’s a brilliant solo. It’s iconic.”

Read the rest of Simon McBride’s revealing interview in the October issue of Guitar Player, out now!

I find it hard to imagine 1972 was 50 years ago.

This is in large part due to the fact that I was born on June 5th of that monumental leap year. What? You didn’t know 1972 is the longest year by the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) standard? With the added day, plus two seconds, the six-string purveyors of the day took full advantage of the extra time on both electric guitars and acoustic guitars.

As this new decade was still revving its engines, rock and roll was expanding in 1972. With the guitar at the forefront, there was glam rock, shock rock, prog rock, southern rock and even jazz rock. What’s more, there was the further development of soft rock and heavy metal alongside the burgeoning reggae and country rock genres.

Also on the rise was a reverence for the album format. Thanks to my older brother Louis and his well-fortified stereo system, our Jersey Shore home was consistently shaking at the rafters with all the rock 1972 had to offer. I soaked it all in from my very beginnings.

All things considered, it’s safe to say I was born into this collection of essential guitar moments from 1972.

Let There Be Rock

By the second year of the tumultuous 1970s, the world of rock had expanded into subsets that celebrated everything from platform shoes and glitter to fake blood and guillotines, and even included electrified southern-fried country and blues.

This trifecta of disparate approaches garnered a worthy collection of guitar moments, starting with David Bowie’s fab The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. 

Bowie’s brilliance is matched by the prodigious playing of guitarist Mick Ronson.

Ex. 1 shows something similar to Ronson’s opening salvo in “Ziggy Stardust,” where open chords and arpeggiation patterns combine to make the prototypical glam-rock arena riff.

Shifting to the dark side, Ex. 2 takes its cue from the title track of Alice Cooper’s School’s Out, highlighting the vibe of the incendiary E Dorian riff played by shock-rock stalwarts Glen Buxton and Michael Bruce.

Completing the trio is an iteration of the Am riff of “One Way Out” (Ex. 3), from the Allman Brothers Band’s quintessential southern rock album Eat a Peach, courtesy of Duane Allman and Dickey Betts.

All three original tunes are as celebrated today as they were in 1972, from arenas to local watering holes.

Opening Lines

The ’70s was the decade of Detroit Iron, when nearly everyone drove a hot rod. If they weren’t cranking an eight-track, they were listening to an FM rock station, which was in the beginning stages of a transformation to the album-oriented rock (AOR) format.

Nothing had you leaning over to pump up the volume faster than a great guitar intro. Elliott Randall’s opening A major pentatonic licks in the Steely Dan FM staple “Reelin’ In the Years,” from Can’t Buy a Thrill, was a top contender.

Ex. 4 is inspired by and loosely based on this classic intro solo.

Ex. 5 brings to mind the dreamy relative major and minor arpeggios and modulating bends immortalized in that track.

Another classic is the unforgettable opening of the Bowie-penned glam-rock anthem “All the Young Dudes,” recorded by Mott the Hoople.

These are just two of the many songs that reeled you in from the first notes and entertained every type of rock apostle, both young and old, as they cruised America’s highways.

Hammer of the Gods

Two of the three bands considered the creators of heavy metal released records in 1972. With Led Zeppelin between Led Zeppelin IV and Houses of the Holy, the void was filled by Black Sabbath’s Vol. 4 and Deep Purple’s Machine Head.

Ex. 6 closely illustrates what Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi laid down on Vol.4’s “Snowblind,” with his signature power chording and speaker-melting gain in check.

As for Deep Purple’s Ritchie Blackmore, he was in his creative prime at the time that the group dropped its magnum opus, Machine Head. Much like Zep’s fourth outing, Machine Head featured timeless tunes that have proven their longevity to this day, including the venerable “Smoke on the Water.”

While the opening riff has ascended into a ubiquitity for rock guitarists the world over, Ritchie’s fiery solo over a power chord backdrop in the key of G minor showcases such signature Blackmore-isms as pre- (or “ghost”) bends, adjacent-string rolls and 16th-note linear flurries.

This is all on display in Ex. 7, which presents a reworking of some key licks from this solo.

Though in its infancy at the time, metal began with these pioneering bands and with albums and moments like these.

Everyone is Experienced

But 1972 wasn’t all about high-gain licks and riffs. The influence of Jimi Hendrix, who died in 1970, was felt across the guitar pantheon. Indicative of the time were a pair of low-gain opening riffs from two different worlds but in no less capable hands.

Ex. 8 is patterned after a moment from one of prog rock’s most endearing releases, Close to the Edge, where perpetual ambassador Steve Howe threw down biting Hendrix-like chordal comping ideas in the key of E minor at the top of “Siberian Khatru.”

Ex. 9 offers a taste of the kind of dynamic-duo guitar work of the Doobie Brothers’ Tom Johnston and Patrick Simmons on the endearing hit “Listen To the Music,” a moment that still motivates muscle-car drivers of yore to turn up the volume at the first hammer-on into that E/G# triad.

Groove Collective

But cleaner tones and booty-shaking grooves were also heard in 1972, thanks to the impact of a Jamaican film called The Harder They Come, which starred musician Jimmy Cliff. While the movie was released to much fanfare (on the very same day I started my journey to 50), it was the film’s soundtrack that made history, as it’s widely regarded as the world’s introduction to reggae.

Ex. 10 is inspired by the infectious opening groove heard in the Cliff classic “You Can Get It If You Really Want,” which features hallmark reggae rhythm guitar approaches with its tightly voiced top-string triads, anchored to the upbeat and treated with some staccato phrasing.

Back on the mainland, James Brown and Al Green were creating some of their most significant works. The Godfather of Soul put Hearlon “Cheese” Martin’s lock-tight precision into the limelight with “Get On the Good Foot” from the album of the same name.

An homage to Martin’s hypnotic single-note staccato phrasing is paid in Ex. 11.

Adding to the title tracks explored, the beloved gem from Al Green’s Let’s Stay Together features the sultry guitar of work of Mabon “Teenie” Hodges perfectly nested between Green’s enthralling vocal performance.

Looking at Ex. 12 reveals a remodeling of four bars from this treasured work.

Unplugged

Although the era of the chimerical Les Paul/Marshall monster had fully arrived by 1972, it didn’t quell the acoustic guitar’s substantial presence, which had solidified in the 1960s.

In fact, acoustic guitars were behind some of the most successful single releases of the year, including Paul Simon’s controversial “Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard,” America’s mesmerizing “Ventura Highway” and soft-rock troubadours Seals and Crofts’ irresistible “Summer Breeze.”

The main themes of all three songs have been reinterpreted in Examples 13–15.

Aside from Simon’s syncopated voice-led triads, the other two riffs make ample use of the acoustic guitar’s penchant for open strings.

Not to be outdone by his American counterparts, Canadian-born Neil Young released the best-selling record of the year with Harvest, which boasted the number one hit “Heart of Gold.”

A rendition of the perfectly sparse presentation of Em and D chords is found in Ex. 16.

Outro

With countless guitar moments still to gush over, it’s important to note that 1972 was also brimming with superbly constructed albums that had massive impact and further bolstered the emerging AOR radio format.

The year delivered classics that featured now-mythic guitarist pairings, including the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. (Keith Richards and Mick Taylor), Jethro Tull’s Thick As a Brick (Martin Barre and Ian Anderson), Genesis’s Foxtrot (Steve Hackett and Mike Rutherford), and the Eagles’ self-titled debut (Bernie Leadon and Glenn Frey), which helped bring country rock to prominence.

Before the year was out, Deep Purple went on to release the Made in Japan live album, and Stevie Wonder released his own pair with Music of My Mind and the seminal Talking Book.

The latter gave the world the funk-rock classic “Superstition,” which features a punchy Hohner Clavinet keyboard riff that has been appropriated by guitarists in countless cover bands.

If all these moments and genre births are any indication of the benefits to an augmented leap year, I say bring on the next one UTC.

If you like in-depth interviews with great guitar players AND you like to hear them play, then you need to listen to our No Guitar Is Safe podcast.

Presented by Guitar Player and hosted by Jude Gold, No Guitar Is Safe is free to listen to at your leisure on iTunes, Spotify, Soundcloud, or wherever you get your podcasts.

With over 150 episodes uploaded there’s plenty to get your teeth into.

Ready to “fly the ‘copter” all the way to Germany? 

Well, being that Jude Gold was just on tour with Jefferson Starship opening shows for Deep Purple all over Europe (so cool!), you know there was NO WAY he was not going to land an interview with their brilliant new guitarist, Simon McBride.

This exciting episode takes us all the way to Oberhausen, Germany, for an inspiring backstage guitar hang with the Irish six-string virtuoso, where, in a side room at the town’s Rudolf Weber-Arena (FKA the König-Pilsener-Arena) Simon plugs in his custom Paul Reed Smith.

Here, he demonstrates many of the captivating electric guitar approaches employed each night on stage with his legendary bandmates – Ian Gillan, Ian Paice, Roger Glover, and Don Airey.

Simon also reflects on what it means to take over the guitar chair from longtime Deep Purple guitarist Steve Morse – who, after 28 years in the band, stepped down earlier this year.

Elsewhere, the maestro reveals what it’s like follow in the footsteps of Deep Purple’s founding guitarist, Ritchie Blackmore; trade licks each night with the band’s formidable keyboardist, his good friend Don Airey; and start off one of the world's most iconic guitar songs each night, "Smoke on the Water."

Thank you for listening!

Visit the Deep Purple website for news and tour info.

Almost as disturbing as Tommy Bolin’s death itself (on December 4, 1976) was the fact that the 25-year-old musician's fatal drug overdose occurred just when he was emerging as a noted guitarist in progressive rock and jazz-rock circles.

After being summoned to fill the shoes of first Joe Walsh in James Gang and later Ritchie Blackmore in Deep Purple, Bolin could have easily been saddled with the title of 'best replacement guitarist.'

But his less publicized musical history reveals a journeyman musician whose versatility was matched by a restlessness to work and learn, the end result crystallizing into Bolin's own electric guitar style.

Born in Sioux City, Iowa, Bolin dropped out of high school at sixteen, and migrated to Denver where he formed a band called Zephyr in 1968. 

He recorded on two of the group's three albums: their eponymous 1969 debut and 1971's Going Back to Colorado.

After serving a blues guitar apprenticeship on the road with Albert King for a year, he made his way to New York and its budding jazz-rock scene in 1973.

His reputation had expanded to the point where Billy Cobham picked him for the session work on Spectrum, the drummer's noted solo debut that Jeff Beck often credits as a major influence in sparking his jazz pursuits.

Months later, Joe Walsh recommended Tommy for the lead slot in James Gang. He appeared on two of the group's albums in the one year he was with the band: Bang in 1973 and Miami in 1974.

In mid-summer of 1975, Bolin replaced Blackmore in Deep Purple, co-writing seven of the tunes on their Come Taste The Band LP.

Realizing perhaps that in his work with these two bands, coupled with a solo effort (Teaser), he'd written 33 songs in four albums, Bolin signed with Columbia to pursue his own career.

He had been touring with his own band following the release of his LP Private Eyes when he was found dead in a Miami hotel room.

The following interview extract was conducted on October 7, just two months before his death, and originally appeared in the March 1977 issue of Guitar Player…

What did you learn from playing behind Albert King?

I learned a lot about lead; learned that you don't have to blow your cookies in the first bar.

At that time, I was playing everything I knew when I took a lead. And he said, "Man, just say it all with one note."

He taught me that it was much harder to be simple than to be complicated during solos. If you blow your cookies in the first bar, you have nowhere to go.

Blues is really good that way. It teaches you to develop coherent solos, because the form you're playing over is so basic. You have to develop leads that go someplace.

The neatest compliment I ever got was when I was playing with Albert King at an indoor concert in Boulder, Colorado. He used to let me take solos, and I was very into playing that day.

After the concert he came up to me and said, " You got me today, but I'll get you tomorrow."

I really respect him. He's a beautiful player.

Why all the interest in so many styles, and how did you handle them all?

They were just gigs that came up. I'd rather work than not. I was very lucky to be able to play in all those extremes.

It was difficult following a guy like Ritchie Blackmore. When someone is the focal point of a group like he was, it's very hard to replace them. After a while, it just got to be pointless.

The way I got involved in jazz-rock was through a flute player named Jeremy Steig. He played on the second Zephyr album.

He showed me various jazz relationships and put them into a rock perspective, and then through him I met a lot of New York people like Cobham and [keyboardist] Jan Hammer.

Cobham called me for the Spectrum session, and I said, "I don't know how to read, man." He said it was okay.

So I went to the studio, and he handed me a chart. I told him again I didn't again I didn't know how to read, so we had a day of rehearsal, then cut the album in two days.

In rehearsal I'd just find out the changes – for example, Am to D9 to G6 to E13 – and play around those chords and changes.

I learned quite a bit through those people. You can't help but learn. All the different styles I've played have really helped me as a guitarist and helped me develop my own way of playing.

I have my own style, but it's different for each kind of music. There are certain little characteristic things every player has.

Browse the Tommy Bolin catalog here.

On April 6, 1974, Deep Purple appeared at the historic California Jam music festival in Ontario, California along with Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Black Sabbath, Black Oak Arkansas, Seals and Crofts, Eagles, Earth, Wind & Fire and Rare Earth.

Attracting an audience of somewhere in the region of a quarter million music fans, this mammoth event was broadcast by ABC, while Deep Purple’s performance was later released on the newly introduced VHS video cassette format.

Deep Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore was already wary of playing festivals when he was approached about performing at the upcoming Cal Jam event.

“I said, ‘No thanks, I’m not interested in any more festivals,’” recounted Blackmore. “They’re a nightmare. They always will be.

“There’s always complete catastrophe backstage. Nothing ever goes right. You’re always on late, or early. The billing is all wrong. It’s just awful.”

Despite his aversions, however, the guitarist eventually yielded to pressure and reluctantly agreed

Albeit with some important caveats.

Crucially, Deep Purple were to hit the stage at dusk when the stage lights were first switched on.

Blackmore considered this to be of paramount importance due to the impact it would have on the band’s audience.

Alas, while relaxing in the privacy of his caravan, Blackmore’s dreams of a dramatic sundown appearance were shattered with a premature stage call in broad daylight.

“That got me riled up,” he recalled. “I’m seething at this point.”

One of the fieriest performances in music history then ensued, with Blackmore smashing his Stratocaster into a stage camera in the midst of destroying his rig.

Quite literally adding fuel to the fire, one of Blackmore’s roadies agreed to pour petrol onto his amp – the idea being Deep Purple would finish their Cal Jam appearance in a blaze of glory.

Unfortunately, the improvised pyrotechnics were significantly more intense than expected and the ensuing explosion blew a hole in the stage.

“[Deep Purple drummer Ian] Paice’s glasses got blown off,” recalled Blackmore, adding, “It made a cameraman temporarily deaf.

“It looked great, but it was just overkill. I didn't realise it was going to just explode. It was supposed to catch fire, but it just went boom!”

While Blackmore was lucky to avoid serious injury, he was also fortunate enough to evade arrest.

As police moved in, he made his escape by helicopter in true rockstar style.

Buy Deep Purple: Live in California '74 here.

Steve Morse makes every note count. One moment he soars across the fingerboard with amazing speed, and in the next lulls his listeners with slow, poignant phrases.

In the early '80s, during his Dixie Dregs years, the Deep Purple guitarist shared some fantastic tips that many electric guitar and acoustic guitar players will no doubt still find useful.

We've had a rummage through the Guitar Player vault to bring you five of his finest...

1. Warming Up

"The important part about warming up is not to do it too hard right at the beginning – do it slow and easy, then work up. You want to get your muscles warmed up, and then let them relax and loosen up. Then go and do it some more. 

"In three to five minutes you can get warmed up enough to break for about 30 seconds or a minute. Then you can practice for as long as you want, as long as you mix it up. Don't do too much of one thing."

2. Learn to Walk Before Running

"I practice [new lines and techniques] slow 80% of the time, and then 20% of the time try to do it for speed. It's important to try to do it at speed, but keep going back to slow where you can play it perfectly. 

"If you play it all slowly, then you won't have the experience of doing it fast. If you do it all fast, you'll make too many mistakes and be sloppy."

3. Scale It Up

"I do all the major scale modes in three different positions, starting with my index, 2nd, 3rd, or 4th finger on the tonic. For any scale or mode, there's at least three different ways you can finger it starting on the same note and still stretch no more then one fret between your fingers.

"Say the A major scale on the 5th fret. If you start with your 1st finger, the 1st finger plays every note that falls on the 5th fret. The 2nd finger plays every note on the 6th fret, the 3rd finger every note on the 7th fret, and your pinkie plays every note on the 9th fret. There isn't any on the 8th, so the pinkie plays a one-fret stretch.

"Then do the same thing, only start with your 2nd finger on the tonic. In this case there are no stretches at all because your 1st finger goes down to the 4th fret. You go across and it all fits. When you start with your pinkie, you stretch on one fret.

"Those little stretches shouldn't affect you because you do them all the time when you play, anyway. I do scales up and down the neck, starting picking up, starting picking down."

4. First Cut Is the Deepest

"My approach to soloing is just play naturally and take takes. When you get one that sounds good, keep it. Go ahead and get another one that sounds good, and keep that. Sort of figure out what it is about it that sounds good – why does it feel good?

"If there's a way to make it better by changing a little bit more, do it. Otherwise, just keep one of the good ones. As most people will probably agree, your best solos generally come out of your first five to ten takes. A lot of times the very first ones will be some of the best."

5. The Show Must Go On

"My confidence will depend on how well my playing is at that moment. If the set's been going good, I'll keep playing better. If it's bad, I'll be trying a bit too hard to make up for it and I might keep making mistakes.

"This is on an introspective level, though. I have to emphasize that while this is happening, I still have a good time onstage. I don't make faces or throw down my guitar. I just keep on smiling because people have come to hear the band.

"Our first responsibility is to them, and I try to keep my own hypercritical attitude away from the audience because I don't think they want to see that."

We recently asked some of the guitar world’s best-known players to name their favorite lesser-known guitar solos. Here’s what Zepparella axe slinger Gretchen Menn had to say…

1) Deep Purple | “Sometimes I Feel Like Screaming”

From Purpendicular (1996)

GUITARIST: Steve Morse

“This is so tasteful and melodic, with a few bursts of chromaticism that are unmistakably Steve Morse. The solo soars, sighs and reflects on the song’s main instrumental theme.”

2) Daniele Gottardo | “Hansel and Gretel”

From Non Temperato (2014)

GUITARIST: Daniele Gottardo

“There are a handful of solos that consistently make me shake my head and laugh because they’re just that amazing. This one is at the top of that list for me. You wouldn’t realize what lies ahead by hearing the first few minutes of this composition for electric guitar and chamber orchestra.”

3) Django Reinhardt | “Minor Swing”

GUITARIST: Django Reinhardt

“Although this is perhaps the most iconic of all gypsy jazz guitar tunes and solos, it’s on my list because guitarists of any genre should be able to readily appreciate Django’s brilliance – the variety of his melodic ideas, the impeccability of his rhythmic sense, the formability of his improvisatory skills and his complete and utter musical fluency.”

Pick up a copy of The Essential Django Reinhardt here.

Black Sabbath may have ended their career with (sans drummer Bill Ward) their best-known, classic lineup of Ozzy Osbourne, electric guitar riff-master Tony Iommi, and bassist Geezer Butler in 2017.

In the decades prior, however, the heavy metal pioneers went through a lot of drastic lineup changes. Though the band's music often shifted to accommodate the different strengths of those members who came and went – the vastly different, but equally powerful vocal styles of Ozzy Osbourne and Ronnie James Dio for instance – rarely did it get as much of a jolt as it did when Dio left the group in 1982 and was replaced by then-former Deep Purple frontman Ian Gillan. 

Gillan's bluesy singing and wry lyrics were a tremendous departure from Osbourne and Dio's respective styles as frontmen, to put it mildly, and polarized longtime Sabbath aficionados. Though the Gillan/Sabbath partnership ended after just one album (1983's Born Again), it did give us the unique spectacle of the godfathers of heavy metal covering one of hard rock's other giants.

During the Gillan-fronted tour in support of Born Again, Sabbath took to playing the song for which Gillan is most known, Deep Purple's iconic "Smoke On the Water," as an encore. According to setlist.fm, Black Sabbath played the song 60 times during the tour, which stretched from 1983-1984. You can hear a recording from that tour above.

The Born Again tour is not only notable in Sabbath lore for this cover, however. This, you see, was the tour where the group ordered a soon-to-be-infamous "Stonehenge" set. 

Intending for it to be 15 feet tall, the band accidentally put in an order for a 15 meter set. The end product ended up causing the band no end of grief, leading them to cancel several shows due to their inability to fit the whole thing onstage.

If this sounds similar to the struggles of another legendary British hard-rock outfit, you're on to something...

Steve Morse has defined himself as one of music’s most versatile shredders, not only through his work with Deep Purple but also with the Dixie Dregs and the Steve Morse Band, where he’s demonstrated his talent for crafting inspiring instrumental fusion and rock guitar songs. What does it take to write a successful guitar instrumental? We asked, and he answered.

What is it about guitar instrumentals that appeals to you?

The main thing is that the guitar can control the mood and energy. It’s totally a composed creation mixed with some improvised soloing. Vocals are very expressive, and the electric guitar can be too when you use a wide range of attack, tone, vibrato, bends and so on.

What can an instrumental provide a listener that a vocal song can’t?

Less repetition, for one thing. In songs, the music often stays the same for three rounds of verses. Instrumentals work better when there’s always something changing, or when you add more parts to them.

How do you start writing one?

I use a combination of experimentation, inspiration and transcribing what’s in my head.

Do you try to retain a typical song structure?

Usually not. I tend to revisit the melody with some changes at the end. That said, the typical song format can work fine if you include some changes on each verse.

When it comes to writing guitar melodies, is it useful to study a vocalist’s approach?

I think it’s good to study horn melodies and vocal melodies. Vocalists tend to use many different techniques, and guitarists can always learn from trying to sing a melody.

How do you keep a solo performance interesting over a long stretch?

I use a variety of tones or attack, changing from a mono to a more polyphonic approach, or changing the density of the notes in different sections. I’ll change effects for different parts, too.

Do you ever adopt the approach of “start low and slow, and finish high and fast”?

I wouldn’t say that’s a feature that I always use. However, I have often used the approach of adding more and more melodies as overdubs to the ending section to make the sound more dense.

Do you have any favorite keys or tempos?

Keys? Any that might allow some open strings to be used in voicings of chords. Tempos? No favorites, but sometimes I limit the tempo if it is very technical, of course.

Do you find it easier to write in minor or major keys?

I change to the relative major or minor so much within a song that it doesn’t make much difference. Some of my more metal friends hate that I often use major-key melodies and chords. They sound “too happy.” If anything I play makes somebody happy, I’m fine with that! But seriously, I use major too much to ever be embraced as a legit hard-rock guitarist.

Any favorite modes?

Mixolydian and Dorian seem to come up a lot in my stuff!

What about modulations into new keys?

I always try to do it, because it seems to freshen everything up sonically. It can be very corny, though, if it’s done as a huge deal and uses a big Broadway-style turnaround.

Does the backing band have to work differently than it would on a vocal song?

Yes. For example, the bass often doubles lines or takes over my original riff while I add a melody or harmony.

What are your thoughts on harmonizing?

Don’t just stay with diatonic harmony that follows the exact contour of the melody. Let it take some jumps to 6ths, 5ths, 4ths, as well as the usual 3rds.

What guitar instrumentals have inspired you?

Eric Johnson’s “Cliffs of Dover” and Joe Satriani’s “Satch Boogie” come to mind. My earlier influences were the Allman Brothers’ “Jessica,” Jeff Beck’s “Ain’t Superstitious” and the Ventures’ “Walk Don’t Run.”

Infamously strummed using fifths in guitar stores for decades, Ritchie Blackmore’s “Smoke On the Water” riff (adapted from Beethoven’s “Fifth Symphony” according to the Deep Purple guitarist) is one of the most memorable and anthemic electric guitar moments in the entire history of hard rock.

Tracked during the sessions for Deep Purple’s 1972 Machine Head album Blackmore managed to glean this touchstone tone by plucking (rather than strumming) double-stop fourths using a large-headstock CBS-era maple ‘board Fender Stratocaster.

While he was using both Marshall and Vox amps at the time, a Hornby-Skewes Treble Booster unit was also employed to produce a more biting top end and a subtle touch of distortion. Interestingly, the band’s keys player, Jon Lord, also used a Hornby-Skewes Treble Booster in tandem with a Marshall amp to thicken the already harmonically rich tones of “Smoke On the Water.”

Recorded using a mobile studio belonging to The Rolling Stones, the bulk of the guitar tracks were cut in an empty theater in Switzerland, giving the sound a unique ambience. Having been moved on by the local police for making too much noise, however, the band set up again in an empty hotel where Blackmore then cut his solo using a Stratocaster neck pickup with his amp isolated in a separate space.

For some instant Ritchie Blackmore-inspired tones take a look at Catalinbread’s new Dreamcoat and Skewer pedals.

Buy Deep Purple’s Machine Head here.

Deep Purple in Rock is many things, but subtle is not one of them. Within literally seconds of listening to it, you’re blasted by Ian Paice’s frantic, slippery drums, Jon Lord’s braying organ, and, of course, Ritchie Blackmore’s indelible guitar riffing and loopy tremolo flourishes. 

Along the way, singer Ian Gillan references and rearranges rock’s DNA (“‘Good golly!’ said little Miss Molly/When she was rocking in the house of blue light!”), punctuating his Little Richard and Elvis Presley–inspired lyrics with ridiculously piercing and forceful shrieks and wails. For that matter, the frenzied rhythm, developed by bassist Roger Glover, emulates Jimi Hendrix’s “Fire.” 

From there, we’re through two verses and choruses and on to bearing witness to a classic Lord–Blackmore organ-guitar battle. And we’re only a minute into the record. The song we’re listening to is called “Speed King,” and it’s a wild and breathless launch to In Rock. 

It’s also completely in line with what ensues over the next 40 minutes or so. From the snaky, metallized grind of “Bloodsucker” to the breakneck gallop of “Flight of the Rat,” the monolithic guitar-organ groove of “Into the Fire,” and the thundering “Hard Lovin’ Man,” the album is a relentless sonic juggernaut, its massive and over-the-top sound reflected in both the album title and the Mount Rushmore–aping cover art. 

In fact, the only moment where Purple drive the music with anything less than the pedal fully floored is the 10-minute epic “Child in Time.” And given the fact that Gillan refuses to sing this one onstage anymore due to the practically inhuman vocal demands (there’s also an explosive, elongated Blackmore solo that many consider one of his best), this might be the most intense track of all.  

“If it’s not dramatic or exciting, it has no place on this album,” Blackmore once said of In Rock, and we’d be loath to disagree. There’s nary a moment on the record that isn’t a full-on white-knuckled experience.

But we’d also add the word heavy to the first part of Blackmore’s statement. Because even today, 50 years after its original release, In Rock is a testament to just how intense (and, per Ritchie, dramatic and exciting) guitar-based rock and roll can be. A half-century ago? It sounded positively revolutionary.

The album arrived at a turning point in popular music culture. The ’60s were, chronologically and spiritually, over. Woodstock had given way to Altamont, the Beatles were on the brink of breakup, and free love and the hippie dream had morphed into something darker and less idealized.

There were heavy bands, but many of them – Cream, Jimi Hendrix, Vanilla Fudge, Blue Cheer – were either dissolved or on their last legs. Into this moment stepped three British acts – Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Deep Purple – that would push hard rock to new extremes and influence the generations of bands that were to follow.

By 1970, Zeppelin had established themselves as the preeminent hard-rock outfit, with two blockbuster albums under their belt and a third brewing that would delve more deeply into the band's folk and acoustic roots.

Black Sabbath, meanwhile, were crafting a doomy and downtuned sound that, paired with Ozzy Osbourne’s desperate wail and an overall exaggerated evil atmosphere, established the template for heavy metal going forward. And then there was Purple. By 1970, they were already, by the relatively brief lifespan of rock bands at the time, something of a veteran act.

They had released three albums – 1968’s Shades of Deep Purple and The Book of Taliesyn and the following year’s Deep Purple – and scored hits (at least in the U.S., where they were bigger than in their native U.K.) with covers of Neil Diamond’s “Kentucky Woman,” Ike & Tina Turner’s “River Deep – Mountain High,” and, most notably, Joe South’s “Hush,” which climbed to Number Four in the U.S. in the summer of ’68.

Of course, while that band was very much Deep Purple, it was not the decibel-defying, instrument-destroying, amp-exploding act that laid waste to arena and festival stages throughout the early and mid ’70s.

Nor was the Ritchie Blackmore of this Deep Purple the wild-eyed-but-cool-as-ice Fender Stratocaster–wielding, neoclassical-guitar-pioneering, whammy-bar-abusing six-string hero he would come to be praised as. That all began, unequivocally, with In Rock.

Back in 1968, however, Deep Purple were a fledging act led by Blackmore and Lord, the latter a classically trained pianist who had already logged years of recording, performing, and session work (he claimed to have played organ on the Kinks’ 1964 hit single “You Really Got Me”).

Blackmore, for his part, had spent time with a variety of acts, including the Outlaws, Neil Christian, and the outrageous “horror-rocker” Screaming Lord Sutch.

He also worked as a session guitarist around London and had, in his younger days, taken lessons from British session ace Big Jim Sullivan, who lived near Blackmore and was at one point in the mid ’60s considered the top session man on the circuit alongside the likes of Jimmy Page.

“He was teaching me classical – Bach, and things like that – and he was teaching me to read better than I was,” Blackmore said of Sullivan. Like Page and many other British guitarists of the time, Blackmore cut his teeth on a wide variety of sounds and musical styles. He once called 1950s British teen idol and skiffle player Tommy Steele his “first hero.”

Seeing Steele on a TV show titled Six Five Special, Blackmore recalled saying to himself, “That’s what I want to do: I want to jump around with a guitar like Tommy Steele does. I don’t want to play it, necessarily. I just want to jump around with it, like he did.”

From there, Blackmore dove deep into guitar, immersing himself both in classical forms as well as in the playing of Hank Marvin, Les Paul, Django Reinhardt, Wes Montgomery, Scotty Moore, and Cliff Gallup.

His style, he said, “developed through sheer practice. When I was attending school, I was constantly practicing mentally. Then I would rush home and practice until the early hours. I would practice about five hours a day. I was obsessed with playing.”

By 1967 Blackmore, with his ever-present Gibson ES-335, had made a name for himself around London both as a performer (Screaming Lord Sutch, he said, “pulled me out front and demanded I jump around and act stupid”) and session man (“It was funny sometimes to hear yourself on perhaps eight out of 10 records being played on the radio”).

He was doing an extended stint gigging in Hamburg when he received a call to come back to England to audition for a burgeoning project conceived by British drummer Chris Curtis named Roundabout, which also included Jon Lord among its ranks. Curtis soon exited the project, and the band was rebuilt around Blackmore and Lord, who had found common ground upon meeting.

“Jon and I both had classical leanings,” Blackmore said. “He more so than I, so we had something in common immediately.” Eventually they added bassist Nick Simper and, after some musical chairs, singer Rod Evans and drummer Ian Paice, who had played together in a band called the Maze.

It is this lineup that began gigging as Roundabout, and, soon enough, as Deep Purple, after Blackmore suggested they rename the band after his grandmother’s favorite song, a 1930s-era standard that had been covered by various big-band and pop artists over the decades.

But there was also another consideration: “There were lots of ‘color’ bands around – Moody Blues, Pink Floyd, et cetera,” Blackmore explained. “Colors were in!”

By the summer of ’68, the new band had released its debut, Shades of Deep Purple, on EMI in the U.K. and Tetragrammaton Records (a brand-new label co-founded by comedian Bill Cosby) in the U.S., and notched a quick hit in the latter region with their organ-forward version of “Hush.”

Over the course of Shades and their next two records, Purple veered between pop, blues, rock, psychedelia, ballads, and baroque elements, without quite managing to carve out a distinct sound. Blackmore has acknowledged as much.

“I’m not particularly proud of the first three records,” he admitted. “They seem to be meandering all over the place. We didn’t really have a niche and we didn’t quite know where we were going.” 

Unsure of their musical footing, facing declining sales after “Hush” and dealing with the demise of Tetragrammaton, which went broke and folded soon after the release of Deep Purple, the group knew a change was in order.

Inspired in part by Zeppelin, Blackmore and Lord opted to take Purple in a heavier, more hard-rocking direction, and got Paice onboard with the idea. Their singer and bassist were less agreeable.

“We thought that Rod and Nick had gone about as far as they could,” Paice said. “We decided that if it was going to be a break, it was going to be a substantial one to refocus the band to look forward, to break this feeling of stagnation.”

Which is exactly what they did with the addition of leather-lunged vocalist Ian Gillan and bassist Roger Glover, both of whom hailed from British band Episode Six. Like Purple, Episode Six had struggled to break through to a wider audience. And like their soon-to-be bandmates, Gillan and Glover had grown tired of waiting for it to happen.

Thus, the classic Purple lineup, henceforth known as Deep Purple Mark II, was born. And while the intention all along had been to go in a heavier direction, ironically, the first fruits of their labors – the rather tame 1969 single “Hallelujah,” followed by the Jon Lord–spearheaded live classical album Concerto for Group and Orchestra – were quite the opposite. Blackmore, for one, was not amused.

In the wake of Concerto, “The split between the musical side of Jon and the harder side of Ritchie came to a head,” Paice said. “Concerto for Group and Orchestra was Jon Lord’s baby,” Glover observed. “People were confused about what kind of band we were. Subsequently, Blackmore firmly stepped up and changed the band’s identity into a jamming, hard-rocking force.”

The result of that step-up was In Rock. “That record was sort of a response to the one we did with the orchestra,” Blackmore said. “I wanted to do a loud, hard-rock record. And I was thinking, This record better make it, because I was afraid that if it didn’t we were going to be stuck playing with orchestras for the rest of our lives.”

With In Rock, Blackmore recalled, “Ian Gillan and Roger Glover had come in, so that gave us new blood. I found my niche being much heavier music and playing with more sustain on the amplifier – that sort of thing. We consciously sat down and said, ‘Let’s have a go at being really heavy.’”

But before the heavy new Purple hit the studio, they hit the road. Much of the material that would feature on In Rock was worked up onstage by the nascent lineup.

A bootleg from an August 1969 gig at Amsterdam’s Paradiso – only the band’s seventh gig with Gillan and Glover – shows early versions of “Speed King” (then titled “Kneel and Pray”) and “Child in Time” were already in the set. A review of the gig described the chaos of those formative days, noting that, during the former song, “the whole stage seems to be in a state of general mayhem.”

But the stage was also paramount to the development and eventual sound of In Rock. Said Gillan, “If you’re going to write about In Rock, you’ve got to combine the making of the album with the live performances. They were so much more important than the actual making of the record. Making records is almost an inconvenience, because you have to compromise in the studio.”

And while the combination of new members sparked a surge in writing – Gillan once remarked that he didn’t even know how “Speed King” happened – Glover also singled out Blackmore for being particularly inspired at the time.

“Ritchie wasn’t just the guitar player,” the bassist said. “He was a brilliant innovator. Things he wrote defy description. He was a magnetic, dynamic writer. I don’t think he could have done it in a vacuum by himself; it did require the rest of us. But I’ll certainly give him his due. He was the motivating character in the band.”

While In Rock serves as a showcase for every member of Deep Purple, it is without a doubt Blackmore who makes the biggest impression.

While his riffing and rhythm playing is rock solid and infused with plenty of attitude and aggression (“Bloodsucker” practically verges on heavy metal), it is in his lead work that the guitarist truly shines, mixing classical-tinged technique (the explosive triplet pattern that caps the dramatic “Child in Time” solo), deft, intricate runs (“Flight of the Rat”), insane whammy-bar warbles and plunges (“Bloodsucker”), and barely controlled noise (“Hard Lovin’ Man”) into an approach that manages to sound both studiously technical and completely unhinged. Blackmore was clearly, as intended, taking his playing in a harder-edged direction.

But there was more to his stylistic shift on In Rock than merely changing up his approach. Just as significantly, he also overhauled his gear. Around this time, the guitarist traded his stalwart ES-335 for a new number-one guitar, a Fender Stratocaster.

“I liked the way Hendrix’s Strat looked,” he explained. “A Strat has got that rock kind of look. So the visual thing attracted me first, even though it was an upside-down Strat in Hendrix’s case. I thought, I must try one of those someday.”

As for where he got his first Strat? “I knew Eric Clapton’s roadie. He was a friend of ours. And I think Eric had given him one of his Strats as a present. Probably because Eric didn’t want it. I think it had a slightly bowed neck, which was making the action pretty high. [The roadie] said, ‘I’ll sell it to you for £60.’ So Eric Clapton’s throwaway Strat came in handy for me.”

Blackmore used both the Fender and the Gibson on In Rock – “Child in Time” and “Flight of the Rat,” at least, are Blackmore on the ES-335. But it is the Strat, and in particular the guitar’s tremolo, that would come to dominate his sound.

“I changed to a Stratocaster because the sound had an edge to it that I really liked. But it was much harder to get used to,” he said, noting, “when you’re playing a humbucking pickup, you’ve got that fat sound, and it’s quite forgiving. But when you play with Fender pickups, they are so thin and mean and edgy and hard. And every note counts; you can’t fake a note.”

While the Strat didn’t allow Blackmore room to “fake a note,” it did make it possible for him to bend, bow, wobble, and whammy the heck out of them.

Which, of course, Blackmore did, making extreme trem abuse a cornerstone of his playing beginning on In Rock, and then throughout the rest of his ’70s work with Purple. To be sure, Blackmore was hardly polite in his approach to the whammy bar. Rather, he said, “I went crazy with it. I used to have quarter-inch [vibrato] bars made for me because I’d keep snapping the normal kind.

My repairman would look at me strangely and say, ‘What are you doing to these tremolo bars?’ Finally, he gave me this gigantic tremolo arm made of half an inch of solid iron and said, ‘Here. If you break this thing, I don’t wanna know about it!’

“About three weeks later,” Blackmore continued, “I went back. He looked at me and said, ‘No – you haven’t.’ And I said, ‘Yes I have.’ In graphic detail, I explained to him how I would twirl the guitar around the bar, throw it to the floor, put my foot on it and pull the bar off with two hands. He was a bit of a purist, so he wasn’t amused.”

Blackmore’s whammy bar makes itself known less than 20 seconds into In Rock, with a loopy dip signaling the first chorus (and every subsequent one) of “Speed King.”

But he really leans into the bar on tracks like “Bloodsucker” and, in particular, the tour de force finale, “Hard Lovin’ Man,” which closes with roughly a minute and a half of pure six-string guitar mayhem, with Blackmore unleashing shredding licks as he pummels his tremolo, violently scrapes his strings, and conjures all manner of screaming feedback.

His bandmates, seemingly unable to keep up, eventually drop out of the mix, then return and drop out again, leaving Blackmore to finish the song – and the record – on his own, going out in a hail of guitar screeches and moans and white noise.

It is a literally show-stopping end to the record, and stands as arguably one of the most beautifully unhinged recorded guitar moments of the era. “One of the engineers who originally worked on that album was this stuffy bloke who didn’t like rock and roll music,” Blackmore recalled.

“While I was recording the solo on that song, I got this urge and started rubbing the guitar up and down the doorway of the control room to get all that wild guitar noise. So this bloke looks at me, and he’s got this expression on his face as if I’d lost my mind.” Of course, Blackmore could also be subtle and nimble when the part called for it.

Take the long break in “Child in Time,” which sees him building something of a composition within a composition, his solo beginning with round-toned, bluesy phrases accented with moaning note bends, before gradually picking up speed, taking on a biting, snarling sound and exploding in a flurry of classical arpeggios.

It’s one of his most celebrated and complex solos, and what’s more, Blackmore said years later, he would sometimes play it much faster onstage.

The only problem, he admitted, “was coming into that part at the end of the guitar solo that the band would do in unison. You can only play that so fast – unless you start tapping, which I don’t do, out of principle. It’s just an A minor arpeggio, but it’s all downstrokes. You try and play that really fast after you’ve had 10 scotches!”

Then there’s “Living Wreck,” where he constructs his solo almost entirely of long, vibratoed notes played in phrases that slowly make their way up the fretboard to reach a climactic end. The result is a passage that sounds almost violin-like in tone and texture, and contrasts with the distorted organ bleats that otherwise characterize the song.

That push and pull between Lord’s organ and Blackmore’s guitar, it’s worth noting, would become a key component of Purple’s sound. And once again, it all began on In Rock.

As Roger Glover once explained, “Jon played the blues when he was young, and that gave him a solid foundation, because when he played hard in Deep Purple, he was able to match Blackmore’s massive guitar sound and transform the organ from a polite instrument and stand toe-to-toe with a guitarist as overpowering as Blackmore.” 

One way Lord did that, Glover continued, was by “abusing his instrument and sticking it through a Marshall instead of a Leslie to make it scream.”

Which was useful, as Blackmore tended to play loud. “I’ve always played every amp I’ve ever had full up, because rock and roll is supposed to be played loud,” he told Guitar Player in 1973. “Also, keeping the amp up is how you get your sustain. I turn down on the guitar for dynamics.”

Blackmore has always been a bit cagey when it comes to discussing his exact amp setup back in the day, though it is common knowledge that in the early ’70s he was fond of both Vox and Marshall units.

Eventually, he moved on to Marshall Majors, which he had modded with an extra output stage to give the amp “a fatter sound, a bit more distorted,” he said. 

“This extra output stage basically made the 200-watt into a 280-watt. So for the first probably five years of Deep Purple – ’70 to ’75 – I did have the loudest amp in the world.” No matter what amp he was using, however, a mainstay of Blackmore’s rig in those days was the Hornby-Skewes treble booster.

“That is the sound I always used, coupled with the Vox or the Marshall,” he said. “For a while, Jon Lord used the Hornby-Skewes and Marshall for his organ as well. We were looking for a distorted organ sound and I said, ‘Why don’t we plug your organ through my Hornby-Skewes and into my amp and see how an organ sounds like that?’ So we did it, and of course he loved the sound.”

And what’s not to love, really? The massive sound that Deep Purple forged on In Rock, and then carried through on subsequent early ’70s masterpieces like Fireball and Machine Head, would inspire and spawn literally generations of hard-rock and heavy-metal bands.

One future guitar hero who found it impossible to look away from Blackmore was virtuoso neoclassical shredder Yngwie Malmsteen, who is clearly indebted to the Purple man in terms of sound, style, and even choice of instrument. In a call with Guitar Player, he was eager to testify to the greatness of Blackmore and the band on In Rock.

As a child growing up in Sweden, Malmsteen said, “Hearing In Rock was like taking a brick and just shoving it right in your head. It’s heavy, it’s fast, it’s technical, it’s sick. It’s a really, really aggressive sound. ‘Flight of the Rat,’ ‘Child in Time,’ ‘Into the Fire’… It’s timeless. It’s ridiculous.” 

Following In Rock, Deep Purple, of course, went on to experience greater highs (there’s that little Machine Head ditty “Smoke on the Water” for one), and also incredible lows.

To the latter point, there is the rift that has lasted for decades between Blackmore – who now focuses primarily on acoustic Renaissance music, as well as occasionally playing with his reunited post-Purple act, Rainbow – and his former bandmates.

In fact, when Purple were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Blackmore, depending on who is telling the story, either declined or was prevented from standing alongside them to accept the honor.

As Glover said in a 2018 interview, “He can be difficult to work with, but he is even more difficult to live with. Blackmore is a very unique character, and in the early days we had fantastic times and wrote great songs.”

Indeed they did, and many of Purple’s greatest are collected on In Rock, which, 50 years on, is still as alluring, mesmerizing, and flat-out overwhelming as ever. It’s the album, as Blackmore has said, where “everything clicked” for Deep Purple.

Or, as Malmsteen says, “It’s the one where they go full out the most. Everybody talks about Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, and I love those bands, too. But In Rock is heavier and more metal than any of the other guys. 

"It was just, ‘Turn everything up and play as fast and as loud and as much as you can!’” He laughs. “I was eight years old when I heard it, and it messed with my head forever. Because I still do that!”

I loved Ritchie Blackmore when I was a young guitarist, and I still do. His solos were uniquely inventive, and he often incorporated harmonic minor scales, along with piercing string bends and a vibrato-bar assault that was all his own and could sound otherworldly and supersonic. 

Most importantly, his solos were mini compositions that were great musical adventures. As a guitarist, he was a great storyteller with a lot to say, and he does on Deep Purple’s Machine Head. 

Released in 1972 on the Purple label in the U.K. (and on the Warner Bros. label in the U.S.), it’s the group’s sixth studio album and the third to feature the Mark II lineup of Blackmore, Ian Gillan, Roger Glover, Jon Lord, and Ian Paice.  

Its hit “Smoke on the Water” is, I think, the perfect rock song. It recounts Deep Purple’s attempt to make Machine Head in Switzerland at the Montreux Casino and how they were forced to record at the nearly empty Montreux Grand Hotel after a flare ignited a massive fire at the Casino and burned it down.

The song’s riff is a fixture in my DNA: The arrangement is stellar, patient, and direct, and the chorus and harmony are beautiful. I love Blackmore's solo, and to my ears, he’s the star of the show in a star-studded galaxy. Employing his version of “woman tone,” he dances over the changes until digging in fervently at the solo’s end.

I always listen in wonder at how he ends the solo prematurely, allowing the main riff to be heard clearly. It’s like he’s giving us time to contemplate what we’ve just heard with a post-solo intermission. But Machine Head has many other standout tracks. “Space Truckin’” is a great composition that employs modulations and spirited, eventful playing.

As I approach retirement age, I don’t sink my teeth into lyrics like, “We always had a ball on Mars, meeting all the groovy people,” but Blackmore's solo and the instrumental composition stand up over time. “Highway Star” is one of the LP’s little masterpieces. Jon Lord’s organ solo invokes a Bach influence, and vocalist Ian Gillan tells the story wonderfully as we strap in for Mr. Blackmore’s iconic solo.

Double-tracked and big as a house, it is required listening for any rock guitarist. Blackmore's grand finale ends this terrific solo with his trademark mauling of the vibrato bar.

“Pictures of Home” is another Blackmore showpiece, with a fantastic main solo and another timelessly wonderful one on the outro. It all makes me wonder if he’s underrated by today’s crop of guitarists.

Deep Purple’s riff rock occasionally tries too hard to be clever, but I continue to appreciate Machine Head because every note Blackmore plays on it is perfect.

When the song needs some assistance, he jumps off the bench and raises the real estate tenfold. Check out his solo on “Maybe I’m a Leo.” The song isn’t a masterpiece, yet Ritchie’s solo is a must-hear as he nails the changes and finishes his phrases with tremolo-bar earthquakes. It displays earthy, superb craftsmanship.

When I was learning to play and listening to the guitar heroes of the day, nobody played or behaved like Ritchie Blackmore. He was always dressed in black and appeared on the brink of explosive annoyance. I remember reading that, while dining at a four-star restaurant, he was unsatisfied with the steak and threw it across the room at the chef.

That’s when I wanted to read about rock stars. They were unhinged, self-destructive, on the brink of madness. Personally, I’d love to be shocked and challenged by musicians. There’s a lot to be pissed about, and I’d love to see it expressed.

Me? I’m not going to do it. I’m concerned with being an adult, trying to improve my skills, and hopefully making something beautiful. Likewise, Ritchie Blackmore plays acoustic Renaissance-style music with his wife, Candice Night, in Blackmore’s Night. He’s earned that right, and he’s still great.

But when Blackmore played guitar all those years back, he brought 100 percent of what may have been an abnormal chemical imbalance and played every note like his life depended on it. The Deep Purple–era Blackmore was an incredible artist and never boring. Thank you, Ritchie, for everything.

• Look for Jim Campilongo and Luca Benedetti’s new release, Two Guitars, at cityhallrecords.com on CD and vinyl.

You may have never heard of a group called Roundabout, but you certainly have heard them perform under the name with which they became famous: Deep Purple.

On April 20, 1968 the group played its first show as Deep Purple, at a gig in Taastrup, Denmark.

It was guitarist Ritchie Blackmore who suggested the new name, taking a cue from his grandmother, of all people. One of her favorite tunes was “Deep Purple,” a song written by Peter DeRose and Mitchell Parish that became a 1933 hit for Paul Whiteman and his orchestra.

According to Blackmore, whenever he told his grandmother that Roundabout had a show, she would ask if they were going to play “Deep Purple.” Apparently, the idea took root, and Blackmore convinced the band to adopt the moniker.

Blackmore hasn’t performed with Deep Purple since the mid Nineties. Beginning in 1997, he took his music in a different direction entirely by teaming up with Candice Night in the folk-rock duo Blackmore’s Night.

Which brings us to the video below. It’s an interesting document in which Blackmore, along with Night, talks about several of his guitars, including instruments that he used with Deep Purple and with Rainbow, the rock band he led from 1975 to 1984, 1993 to 1997 and from 2015 to the present day. Among the guitars shown are his main Fender Stratocaster that he says he’s played for the past 30 years.

In the video, Blackmore talks about scalloping his fretboards, a process that takes him three days to achieve. Take a look.

Steve Morse has a long history with Guitar Player. Back in 1981, readers voted Dixie Dregs’ Industry Standard the year’s Best Guitar Album, while Morse himself received Best Overall Guitarist, an accolade he won for five years in a row, at which point he entered the Guitar Player Gallery of Greats. 

In 1984, “The Introduction,” the title track from his solo debut album, was featured on our flexi disc Soundpage, giving readers a chance to enjoy his unique combination of melodic invention and insane chops. 

It was the age of shred, and Morse was ahead of the game, thanks to his success with the Dregs, who combined southern rock, fusion and prog in a distinctive sonic stew. In our present age of socially conscious rebranding, it’s interesting to recall why the Dregs dropped Dixie from their name. 

“Audiences thought we were some kind of Dixieland jazz band,” Morse explains. “We were just three kids coming up with band names as a joke, and we thought the Dixie Dregs sounded funny. None of us were even from the South.”

Morse’s solo career really took off with “Tumeni Notes,” from his third solo album, 1989’s High Tension Wires. The track is a master class in alternate picking, on which he displays the face-melting speed most players can achieve only with sweep picking.

By then, he’d been a member of Kansas, which he joined in 1985. Since 1994, Morse has been in Deep Purple, who have just released Whoosh! (earMUSIC), a collection of thoughtful and inventive songs that take their lyrical cue from today’s world and the direction in which it’s headed, without ever sounding preachy or sanctimonious. 

On the new record, Morse’s playing is as invigorating as ever, and while he suffers from arthritis, it’s had no discernible effect on his ability to weave his signature lines in and out of Deep Purple’s distinctive sound. 

“It’s in my family,” he says of his arthritis. “There’s no doubt that all my years of playing have made it worse, but I’ve adapted my technique to deal with it. The most difficult has been trying to pick from the elbow rather than the wrist. 

“Most of my technical practice is designed to perfect that. I go through a show pretty well now, though at times there is lot of pain that requires pharmaceuticals. I tried a treatment of blood-sucking mosquitos yesterday,” he says, laughing. “But it didn’t seem to help!” 

Like other performing acts, Deep Purple have been sidelined by Covid-19 and the worldwide shutdown of live music. 

“We’ve lost 18 months of work,” Morse laments. “We’ve only played one show this year. It is so bad for so many artists who have depended on their live income. For a lot of people, royalties don’t help much, even when they’re getting them. You look at Spotify and you’d need a computer to work out what percentage of one percent your royalty check would be.” 

In addition to Deep Purple, Morse has continued to work with his Flying Colors side project, which released its third studio album, Third Degree, last year, and has just issued the new live album Third Stage: Live in London. He has also periodically revisited the Dregs, both to tour and record. 

Given his long career and numerous bands, we were curious to see which five tracks Morse considers among his most important.

“Take it off the Top“ – Dixie Dregs ('What If,' 1978)

“I was working on an idea for a song, and I realized that I wanted to compose more parts for it, rather than have a lot of improvisation. When the verse came in, it had a lot of power chords, and the idea was to start with the rock riff in E. 

“I was trying to simplify my writing a bit, but then I slipped back into the more complex route, just like somebody falling off the wagon. [laughs] The song has a bit of southern rock, fusion… You know, that mixture that is kinda like the Dregs’ philosophy.  

“I can’t really help that, because I don’t see any real distinctions between styles. I basically play a style of music that I call ‘tonal music.’ I don’t write in atonal styles. Others might say it is different styles, but I’d probably say that they’re sub-styles.

“There’s a lot of commonality between disparate musical genres. For example, church organ music and the chord progressions in a lot of heavy songs have a lot in common. On the first part of the song, I’m choking the pick with my fingers and moving back up the low-E string to generate those harmonics. It’s a subtle effect, but I think it makes listeners sit up and pay attention.”

“Night Meets Light“ – Dixie Dregs ('What If,' 1978)

“This song marks the first time I ever composed a piece following nothing but the melody. A lot of times I think of chords and melody together, but not for this. It was a bit like a violin piece or something, where I was chasing the melody and I ended up with some interesting arpeggiated parts and some very confusing timing. 

“When I was finished and I analyzed it, I thought, Oh boy! [laughs] The timing sometimes changes from one bar to the next. I tried to fix it and make it more regular, but it sounded dumb.  

“Back when we cut this track, we used to play shows for a percentage of the door. At the time, we were up in the mountains of Virginia, about 700 miles from home, and we were broke. It was a week before our next gig, which we hoped would pay enough to get us back home. 

“We were staying in some cabins that were usually used for skiers; it was out of season, so no one was there, and we could stay all week for free. We were so poor that Steve Davidowski, our keyboard player, was catching grasshoppers to eat. [laughs]

“While we waited for the gig, we set up all of our gear and played each day. I showed the song to the guys, and we kept working on it. It went through a period of evolution and refinement, which caused them some frustration. They’d say, ‘That’s not how you played it a few minutes ago!’ And I’d say, ‘I’m refining it!’” [laughs]

“Tumeni Notes” – Steve Morse ('High Tension Wires,' 1989)

“When I was learning to play classical guitar, I played through a lot of traditional studies. They would concentrate on left-hand position, right-hand technique or whatever, and I used those concepts to find ways to home in on things that I felt needed work in my own playing. 

“I still write my own studies to fix possible weak links in my playing, and that’s how ‘Tumeni Notes’ evolved. I was trying to improve my one-note-per-string skipping technique with the pick, and the B section – where it goes to C sus and then G/C – remains the hardest thing I’ve ever written. 

“When you write something, you play it over and over to get the right combination to please your ear, and at that point it didn’t seem like it was impossible to play. The piece fit me like a glove, performance-wise. Now it is like a death trap. [laughs] It particularly exacerbates my wrist problems.

“At that time, I twisted my wrist and picked in an arc, which enabled me to get accuracy and speed, and I could mute and unmute with the palm of my hand, which made it exceptionally clean. Now it’s different. I have to use the traditional non-arcing technique. I still have speed, but I can’t jump between the strings as easily.”

“Hereafter” – Dixie Dregs ('Dregs of the Earth,' 1980)

“Almost everything on this could be played as a solo classical guitar piece, with the melody on top of the chords. It was very intently through-composed. I really like the chordal movement in it. All the chords have slight suspensions, and a lot of them have inner moving voices as it changes. 

“I like the way the melody and harmony run through at the same time in some places. I think there’s a lot of Celtic influence in my playing from my grandfather being a Cajun fiddler; I think there are many similarities between the two styles.  

“I also listened to and played a lot of traditional music, like John Dowland lute pieces and Bach transcriptions for classical guitar. Those influences really come through on ‘Hereafter,’ which, to my ears, has quite an ancient feel about it at times. 

“I definitely gravitate to Renaissance-period music, where so much lute music has been transcribed for classical guitar. I actually played it on acoustic 12-string, which is very difficult to keep in tune with the moving voices.”

”Man Alive” – Deep Purple ('Whoosh!,' 2020)

“Some of the suspensions in the chords require very long stretches to get those different voicings, which are a key part of the sound. They’re not terribly unworkable positions, but it’s definitely a big difference from the traditional thumb-over-the-neck rock power-chord grips. 

“The solo on this is an attempt to play something different from what I would normally do. Bob Ezrin, the producer, didn’t like the jazzy overtones that I was bringing to it. He wanted me to go for something simple. I was playing his cheap Danelectro/Sears baritone guitar, which has strings like radio antennas. [laughs] 

“The good thing about long, high-tension strings is that it’s really easy to get artificial harmonics, and they ring very true. It forced me to keep the solo slow and simple.  

“A guitar that compels you to play differently really helps you concentrate on the music. I used artificial harmonics on almost every note. It stands out in my mind as a weird combination of things that make it a little different from the rest of my work on the new album.”

• Deep Purple's new album, Whoosh!, is out now on EARMUSIC.