Derek Trucks stands among the most commanding slide guitar players of his generation, known for a style that’s deeply soulful, technically fluid and unmistakably vocal in character.

His foundation was laid early. Before his teens, he was already sharing stages with Buddy Guy and Bob Dylan. By 20, he had joined the Allman Brothers Band, and later co-founded the Tedeschi Trucks Band with his wife, Susan Tedeschi.

Asked how he developed such mastery, Trucks points to several core influences.

“I think it's important to listen to vocalists and have that in mind,” he tells Ultimate Guitar. “It's all ear training, it's all intonation.”

His earliest inspirations were the slide pillars: Elmore James and Duane Allman. From them, he absorbed the fundamentals of lyrical phrasing — the same quality that elevates electric guitarists like David Gilmour..

But the breakthrough came when he turned to Indian classical music.

“Then it was listening to a lot of Indian classical,” he says of his progression. “The sarod is a fretless instrument. That was a great way into the vocalization.”

The sarod’s fluid, gliding phrasing offered Trucks a new expressive vocabulary, one that helped distinguish his guitar style from the slide legends before him.

No figure influenced him more than sarod master Ali Akbar Khan. Trucks first heard Khan at age 14 and called it “a life-changing event.”

“The power of the sound, the dedication and devotion of the musicians — it was so obvious,” Trucks said of Khan's impact upon his death in 2009. “It re-emphasized the belief in what you love about music.

“When I heard the news [of Khan’s death], it was like losing Ray Charles, or John Coltrane, or Charlie Parker, you know? There probably couldn't be two to three musicians like him in the world.”

In a related story, Trucks — along with former Allman Brothers bandmate Warren Haynes — has credited an obscure 1997 album as another game changer for his playing.

Samantha Fish believes the future of blues guitar is in safe hands, as she names a handful of modern players who stand out from the pack.

The Kansas City guitarist, who was championed by the likes of Joe Bonamassa, Slash and Devon Allman as she shredded her way out of the underground scene, has turned her attention to the next generation of players. There are five, she says, who have taken the blues-rock torch and run with it.

“I just got off the road with Christone Kingfish Ingram, and he’s pretty amazing,” she tells Guitar World. Those shows were part of Slash’s S.E.R.P.E.N.T. festival, a touring bill of esteemed players that includes Warren Haynes, Grace Bowers, Larkin Poe, Eric Gales, and plenty others.

“I think Derek Trucks is one of the greatest there is,” she says of her next pick, “not just in blues playing but any playing. He’s an alien.”

Trucks has been playing guitar for the majority of his life, having scored his first playing gig at age 11. He was playing blues clubs with Buddy Guy long before his 13th birthday, and he learned something crucial to performing during those gigs, he revealed last year.

Fish then picked out three other modern blues trailblazers for recognition.

“I like Gary Clark Jr.,” she says. “He’s very tasteful, and he’s got a great tone. (Eric Clapton might be inclined to agree.)

“Eric Gales is incredible,” she adds. “He just blows everybody away. Luther Dickinson is one of my favorite contemporaries, too. He's awesome.”

As for Fish herself, she's credited 10 albums for shaping both her life and her vibrant playing style. Among the more obvious picks — “Who doesn’t have a Rolling Stones record in their top 10?” she asked Guitar Player last year — there's one intriguing outlier: the MC5's Kick out the Jams.

“This record came into my life fairly recently,” she explains. “I started getting hip to the Detroit rock and soul scene while I was making the Chills & Fever album. I was going through something of a musical evolution, just taking everything in, and eventually that led me to Kick Out the Jams.

“They were punk in the very early days, and that’s where my heart is. Once you get into them, though, you’re really into them. This record really affected me at a time when I wanted to feel something in a big way.”

She's also detailed the five most important riffs in her life, saying one R.L. Burnside song proved her musical upbringing and a 250-second masterclass in groove.

Fish also expects contemporary blues players to experiment with the genre and take it to new places. Speaking to Guitar World last August, she spoke of the importance of the blues remaining rebellious and defiant in the face of its critics.

“Even when Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf went electric, which is what we consider to be traditional blues now, they were outsiders. People were saying, ‘This isn’t blues.’ And now it’s our gold standard. It’s the artist’s job to push boundaries and find their voice.

“And, of course, you worry about losing people. You worry about gaining people. That’s the business side of what we do. But at the end of the day, I feel like you have to make art that you can stand by. The rest of it, it kind of sorts itself out.”

The logistics of busy careers are about the only thing that keep Warren Haynes and Derek Trucks apart — and, even then, never for long.

The two have been friends since even before they became the Allman Brothers Band’s final electric guitar tandem circa 2001. North Carolina native Haynes had already served one tenure with the Allmans and was focused on Gov’t Mule, which he founded in 1994 with his late ABB bandmate Allen Woody. Florida-born Trucks, nephew of ABB co-founder Butch Trucks, was working at the same time with his own band.

Together they were credited with bringing back the vintage six-string fire fans associated with Duane Allman and Dickey Betts, and the two saw the band to its conclusion in 2014, with a famous final series of shows at New York’s Beacon Theatre.

Neither has taken his foot off the pedal since. Haynes — who recently issued his signature Gibson Les Paul Standard — has kept busy with Gov’t Mule and solo albums, among other projects. Meanwhile Trucks — who swears by Gibson SGs — and his wife Susan Tedeschi have led their large-scale Tedeschi Trucks Band for the past 15 years.

The two guitarists’ parallel lines have been intersecting more recently of late, however.

Trucks, for instance, co-wrote and played on three tracks for Haynes’ 2024 album, Million Voices Whisper, which included “Real Real Love,” a song Gregg Allman had written but remained incomplete until Haynes put his hand to it. The duo also reunited for a pair of Allman Brothers tribute shows, where they were billed as the Brothers, this past April at New York City’s Madison Square Garden.

Haynes, meanwhile, is featured on “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window” from Tedeschi Trucks’ upcoming Tedeschi Trucks Band and Leon Russell Present: Mad Dogs & Englishmen Revisited (Live at Lockn’). Recorded 10 years ago, the project was also the subject of the 2021 documentary Learning to Live Together: The Return of Mad Dogs & Englishmen.

Both it and Haynes’ The Whisper Sessions, which features stripped-down arrangements of Million Voices Whisper songs, come out September 12. As a result, Tedeschi Trucks and Gov’t Mule — which is celebrating the 30th anniversary of its self-titled debut album — will be on the road together for a half-dozen shows that will surely find them playing next to each other each night.

With all that going on, it seemed like an appropriate time to put Haynes and Trucks together via Zoom — Haynes at home in New York preparing for the Mule run, Trucks on tour in Berkeley, California, but both anticipating their upcoming co-bills.

What should we expect for these six dates in September?

HAYNES We don’t have anything planned. I think there’s gonna be a lot of just hanging and stage sharing and figuring it out night by night and trying to make every night different and memorable. Sky’s the limit as far as what we can do to bring everybody into the fold and what songs we can pull out that we haven’t done.

TRUCKS It’s gonna be a fun run, a great way to kind of dive back in. It’s been a long time since we’ve been on the road and together this way.

HAYNES It’ll kind of force us to think about some stuff that we’ve probably never done, which is what I’m excited about.

There’s a lot of history here, of course. What is the commonality or kindred spirit that you find between yourselves after all this time?

TRUCKS We’ve known each other since I was 10 years old, 11 years old. We have similar backgrounds, similar love of the same music, similar heroes — and ended up in a band together for 15 years, which in 1990 neither one of us thought was likely or even possible. And even when that happened we had already been on tour together with my solo band and Gov’t Mule, playing clubs all over the country for months and months at a time. We just kinda grew up doing this together in a lot of ways.

HAYNES By the time we wound up in the Allman Brothers together, we had already played dozens if not over one hundred times together.

TRUCKS Yeah, and on each other’s records and circling and colliding and circling, and then we ended up in the Allman Brothers together.

When that happened, how did you forge and then evolve that playing relationship?

HAYNES It was a really natural thing at that point. The biggest topic of discussion was who was gonna play which part, because I spent 12 years playing with Dickey and Derek had just spent the last few years playing with Dickey, so we were both kinda taking the same role. And now that Dickey was not in the band we had to figure out how to divvy up the parts in a way that made sense on a song-by-song basis.

TRUCKS I think in a lot of ways that’s when that version of the Allman Brothers Band really came into its own, because we had to reimagine it. It wasn’t one of us in the Duane role and one of us as Dickey; we had to throw all that stuff away, in a way. There are certain tunes where the personality of what Duane played originally was so strong that you want to carry that through, but there were other tunes you could just reimagine entirely. That was kind of fun. I think that’s when we developed our own language as two guitar players.

How has it further evolved outside of the Allman Brothers? What do you do now, playing together, that defines the relationship?

HAYNES A lot of what we do is just unspoken, unrehearsed, looking at each other and kind of knowing what the other one is thinking.

TRUCKS Especially in this last go-round with the Brothers, those last two shows and even working on Warren’s record — I think after all that time away from it, it was even more second nature than it was originally. It was stronger, I think.

HAYNES I think so, too. And it was relaxed. Some of the Allman Brothers music is based around tension, and that’s a good thing. But there’s also this relaxed approach that we took to it that freed it up.

TRUCKS There was so much history between Butch and Dickey and Gregg. There was often an underlying tension that you didn’t even know where it came from. A lot of it started before me and Warren were born.

So how do you get the ferocity without the tension?

TRUCKS There’s other energy you can draw from. You’re thinking about the drum chair that your uncle used to sit in, like, “Motherfucker, you should be back here and fuckin’ banging on these drums, dude!” and turn up a little bit. There’s a lot of stuff that’s happened and there’s a lot of pain in the story of the band. That stuff’s not lost on us. We were there for some of it; Warren was there for a lot of it. There’s a lot to tap into.

HAYNES Miles Davis said in his book that that band with Herbie Hancock and Tony Williams and Wayne Shorter and Ron Carter, that quintet — which is my fuckin’ favorite band of all-time — he said they would play better when they were pissed off. So he would always piss ’em off to make them play better.

But then you wonder, A) what did it sound like when they weren’t pissed off, and B) once that music has been created and you have that music to tap into and to learn from it exists. So once something has been established and it’s a reference point, do you still need the tension?

Both of you have some notable anniversaries this year. It’s 15 years since Tedeschi Trucks became a formal band. And, of course, it’s 30 years for Gov’t Mule this year.

HAYNES And Allen Woody’s been gone 25 years. I still remember when Derek was on tour with us early on and we were playing the House of Blues in New Orleans and Allen Woody walked over to that little record store across the alley and bought the Aubrey Ghent record Can’t Nobody Do Me Like Jesus, and bought three copies — one for himself, one for me and one for you.

It was like, wow! It was like a light bulb coming across our heads. Woody just saw it in there and thought it looked interesting, because Woody liked to play lap steel.

TRUCKS That record changed my life. It changed the way I approach playing the instrument I play. “Amazing Grace” was the one that did it. Then Aubrey Ghent ended up officiating at my wedding.

HAYNES The way he played this riff on the lap steel that sounds just so human, like a woman’s voice. It just gives me some chills thinking about it.

TRUCKS That was a game changer, ’cause at that point I was starting to go down the Ali Akbar Khan path, a lot of Indian classical vocalists, and hearing Aubrey Ghent I was like, “Oh, wait, there’s the same thing! You can take that approach with this music we’re playing.” It was a major light bulb for sure.

HAYNES Me, Derek, Woody, Jaimoe — there’s a circle of 10 or 12 people that were trying to turn each other onto something; “If you’ve never heard this before, you need to check it out.” So there was a lot of cross-pollination going on in that way. It was a way of keeping the ball rolling, keeping the inspiration flowing out there on the road.

Warren Haynes never imagined he would fill the shoes of his childhood hero Duane Allman by playing opposite Dickey Betts in the Allman Brothers band.

Even after he was hired by Betts to play opposite him in his Dickey Betts Band, Haynes had no assumptions about making the sizable leap to the ABB.

“Well, it was intimidating because the Allman Brothers Band was always one of my favorite bands, and I had no expectations of that happening,” the guitarist tells Music Radar in a new interview.

But when it finally happened, he couldn’t have been better prepared.

“I had been playing with Dickey and his band for two or three years, and that really helped condition me for being in the Allman Brothers,” Haynes says. “By the time I joined the Allman Brothers, Dickey and I had been playing for three years, and writing songs together for three years, so we had that initiation period, so to speak, which made it a little easier.”

Haynes was about 27 when Betts called him to help perform backup vocals on his first solo project following the initial breakup of the Allman Brothers Band in 1987. That led to Haynes being hired as Betts’ guitarist for more session work that resulted in the band’s 1988 debut album, Pattern Disruptive. Haynes’ next project was co-writng the title track for Gregg Allman’s solo album Just Before the Bullets Fly.

So when the Allmans decided to regroup in 1989, Haynes had a leg up on the competition. Besides, he already knew how to play opposite Betts, with a fire equal to the older man’s, but in a style that was complementary to it.

“I had three years of standing next to Dickey Betts, in smaller venues,” he says.

What he didn’t expect was that he would be given the room to bring that style to the Allman Brothers Band. Far from wanting a Duane Allman clone to help them relive their glory days or copy the classic Allman–Betts guitar duels, the ABB needed a guitarist who would take them to the next stage in their development.

“They were great about allowing and encouraging everyone to bring their own personality to the music,” Haynes says. “From the very beginning, they never asked me to play more like Duane Allman, or less like Duane Allman. It was always, ‘Be yourself. Play like you.

“Play it however you want to do it,’ knowing that I had this reverence for Duane’s playing, and for the music in general, and that I wasn’t going to go too far away from the feeling and the spirit of the music. But I wanted to make it my own as well.”

Even on the old tunes, Haynes was given room to work his reinvention. Consider “Blue Sky,” the Dickey Betts cut from 1972’s Eat a Peach, one of the last cuts to feature Duane Allman. Unlike Allman, he approached his solo on the song with a slide and a Strat —— as in the performance shown below from the band's 1991 tour — something he says “was strange, because Duane," a devoted Les Paul player, "never played slide on it.

“But that was something that Dickey probably asked me to do for his band — or maybe it was my idea, I don’t know.”

Betts departed the ABB in 2000 as tensions rose to the breaking point, opening the door for Derek Trucks to take on his position after having filled in for Betts in 1999. The Allman Brothers Band hung it up for good in 2014 when Haynes and Trucks announced they were leaving to focus on their own projects.

Today, the Allman Brothers Band is never too far from Haynes heart. His new album, The Whisper Sessions — a stripped-back version of his 2024 studio album, A Million Voices Whisper — finds him paired up again with Trucks for a cover of the ABB hit “Melissa.” The duo also present a reworked version of “Real Real Love,” the unfinished Gregg Allman tune that Haynes brought to its completion for A Million Voices Whisper.

Trucks also appeared on that previous recording of “Real Real Love,” marking the first time the two guitarists made a studio album since the 2003 Allman Brothers Band album, Hittin’ the Note. Haynes told Guitar Player that upon finishing the song, he knew immediately he wanted Trucks on the track. “It just made sense.”

The Whisper Sessions comes out September 12 on Fantasy and can be saved to your preferred streaming service ahead of time.

In related news, Haynes will front his group Gov’t Mule on their 30th anniversary co-headlining tour with the Tedeschi Trucks Band. Visit Warren Haynes for dates and tickets.

Think you’ve heard the most jaw-dropping hardcore blues solos of all time? We don’t think you have until you’ve heard every solo on this list of what we consider the 50 greatest badass blues guitar solos of all time.

Let’s face it: Thousands up thousands of great blues solos have been played on the electric guitar, so you can imagine how daunting it was for us to narrow our selection down to just 50. For starters, we siphoned off more than a dozen artists and solos that have already been so widely celebrated that they hardly need additional mention. After all, who isn't already hip to Clapton's extraordinary solo on "Crossroads" or Jimi's on "Red House"?

We also excluded a few legendary players who were renowned for their acoustic guitar solos, but did little of note once they switched to electric, such as Tampa Red, along with several well-known guitarists that played fantastic electric blues, but didn't really take solos, like John Lee Hooker. And early on we decided not to include seminal acoustic blues players like Robert Johnson, Son House and Blind Willie Johnson, both because their numbers are too great, and because in most cases they played unaccompanied, and therefore didn't "solo" in the same sense as the artists on our list.

After fighting over which guitarists should be included, GP editors Matt Blackett, Art Thompson and Barry Cleveland enlisted additional aid from four blues-savvy contributors — Teja Gerken, Jimmy Leslie, Adam Levy and Michael Ross — and each member of the team was tasked with choosing the particular solo they wanted to spotlight. Whether you hail us as brilliant or bash us as bums, we at least hope that you'll dig reading this as much as we did writing it.

"Ohio" — Dan Auerbach (Black Keys)

Black Keys frontman Dan Auerbach is never flashy, but he's naturally poignant, and the fuzz freak is largely responsible for the past decade's dirty blues resurgence. Auerbach eschews prominent guitar breaks, and almost never strays past the pentatonic box. "I'm not much of a solo guy," he told GP in his February 2012 feature. But I do love 'rips." Auerbach really rips near the end of the single "Ohio," which was released independently from 2010's Brothers. The Akron native's vibrato quivers like the shivers of a cold Midwestern winter. Auerbach eventually engages a wah, induces feedback, and then climbs up the fretboard with flurries of tremolo picking until he reaches a dramatic climax. —J.L.

"Deep Feeling" — Chuck Berry

Even though he recorded for Chess records, home of Muddy Waters and Howling Wolf, Charles Berry is not known as a blues guitarist but rather as one of the inventors of rock and roll. Nevertheless, this instrumental, released as the B-side to "School Day (Ring! Ring! Goes the Bell)," is a straight 12-bar blues. Well, maybe not completely straight, as Chuck throws in a V chord where you don't expect it, and, oh yeah, he performed it on an unusual pedal-steel guitar — thought to be a Gibson Electraharp. The country- style string bends might have been played by anyone, but the wolf-whistle slides are pure Berry. —M.R.

"Stormy Monday" — Dickey Betts (The Allman Brothers Band)

Half of one of the greatest guitar teams of all time, Richard Betts' job description involved going toe-to-toe with the genius of Duane Allman night after night. At Fillmore East, on an evening recorded for posterity, he had the unenviable task of following Duane's incendiary solo on the blues chestnut "Stormy Monday." After Duane comes Greg Allman's jazz waltz organ solo. As the band breaks it down from there, Betts begins his sliding, squeezing and screaming licks that build into a masterpiece of soul, lyricism, intonation and tone that give away nothing to his legendary partner. —M.R.

"Red Dog Speaks" — Elvin Bishop

How about some greasy slide playing over a slow blues in E? That's exactly what Elvin Bishop dishes up on "Red Dog Speaks" (from the album of the same title) and as a bonus, he describes his ax (Red Dog) in the song's lyrics. Want to hear a 1959 Gibson ES-345 Stereo really wail? Wait for Bishop to say, "Speak, Red Dog," and hang tight, as he unleashes a soulful solo that combines fretted notes and fluid slide playing in a relaxed, in-the-pocket manner that puts style and class ahead of showboating. —T.G.

"Albert's Shuffle" — Mike Bloomfield (Mike Bloomfield, Al Kooper & Stephen Stills)

When Michael Bloomfield appeared on the scene with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band in 1964 no one had ever heard guitar playing quite like that, nor did any previous blues album have a printed exhortation to "play this record loud." Indeed, Bloomfield's excitable, ahead-of-the-beat soloing had more to do with rock energy than blues mystery. It wasn't until 1968's Super Session, featuring Bloomfield with Al Kooper and Steven Stills, that Bloomfield settled into this pocket of more traditional blues playing, while retaining the desperate energy that set him apart from the traditionalists, and gave him his distinctive voice in the first place. —M.R.

"Blues Deluxe" — Joe Bonamassa

Bonamassa began his professional career when many lads are being Bar Mitzvahed. His early blues work was that of an impressionist: his solo on "Long Distance Blues" from 2003's Blues Deluxe is Joe doing Eric Clapton. In the decade since, Bonamassa has melded his influences and made them his own, honing a style of diamond precision playing and to-die-for tone. This slow blues from Jeff Beck's first solo record (itself a cover of B.B. King's "Gambler Blues") starts off with three minutes and 50 seconds of soloing that take you from B.B., through Clapton and Eric Johnson, all inflected with a heavy dose of Bonamassa. — M.R.

"Cry" — Doyle Bramhall II

If ever there was a guy to get a handle on the SRV attitude and fire without copping Stevie's licks, it's Doyle Bramhall II. On this slow 12/8 number, Bramhall gets all kinds of righteous Strat tones, including spooky tremolo, clanging semi cleans and a positively massive exploding-amp lead tone. He does a killer, thematic break mid-tune but saves his best stuff for the end of the song. For the outro solo, he coaxes awesome, howling feedback before leaning into his powerful bends that are jam-packed with emotion. His note choices and phrasing as fresh as always, due in part to playing lefty-strung righty, but Bramhall's super-deep pocket might be his greatest asset. —M.B.

"Okle Dokie Stomp" — Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown

You can hear echoes of the big-band era in Brown's recordings from the 1940s and early '50s. It's in the instrumentation— with an ensemble of horns, upright bass, and a drummer driving spang-a-lang on his ride cymbal. Rock-and-roll was about to happen, but hadn't quite. Music from this in-between period is sometimes called "jump blues," and Brown's instrumental "Okie Dolde Stomp" is a first-rate example. T- Bone Walker's influence is apparent here, particularly in a lick that Brown repeats: an up-bent 4 on the third string followed immediately by a 5 on the second string. Still, Gate had his own thing, and it's a whole lot of fun to listen to. —A.L.

"John's Blues" — Roy Buchanan

In 1971 PBS aired a documentary: Introducing Roy Buchanan a.k.a. The World's Greatest Unknown Guitarist, and the world's perception of what a Fender Telecaster could do was forever changed. Buchanan wrenched human cries and animal squeals out of this dead simple guitar design. His style of blues melded James Burton's chicken pickin' with Albert King's expressive bends, definitively illustrating the deep connection between country and blues. It is all here in "John's Blues" from his first record. This is the guitar tone and technique that inspired Danny Gatton, Gary Moore and Jim Campilongo, as well as causing Jeff Beck to dedicate "Cause We've Ended As Lovers" to Buchanan. — M.R.

"When My Train Pulls In" — Gary Clark Jr.

The second flight on the second track from buzz bluesman Gary Clark Jr.'s diverse major-label debut, Blak and Blu, is a gnarly fuzz/ wah solo that kicks off hissing. "We recorded that track first and cut it live in one take," the Epiphone Casino enthusiast revealed in his January 2013 GP cover feature. "I had my Fender Vibro-King, and stomped on all of my pedals for that solo." It peaks when Clark launches into a Chuck Berry–like lick at the 12th fret, and then starts incorporating the G at the 15th fret and the F# at the 14th fret on the high E string. "I'd been experimenting in that range," Clark revealed. "I played that lick over and over to build momentum. We were eager to prove ourselves, and there was an overwhelming sense of 'Let's go for it!’ “ — J.L.

"Feelin' Bad Blues" — Ry Cooder

In interviews over the years, slide guru Cooder has shared some juicy details about his hot-rodded guitars and unusual rigs. It's tempting to tag a particular pickup, compressor or amp when trying to pinpoint the source of his mystical sound, but let's face it — it's a touch thing. That's most apparent in his nakedest recordings, like this laid-back guitar-and-dolceola duet from the Crossroads soundtrack. Cooder has always shunned picks, and this cut shows just how adept he is with his bare hand. Working in open-D tuning, Cooder blurs the line between rhythm and lead. You may be inspired to take up a bottleneck and start practicing — or quit altogether. —A.L.

"Chicken in the Kitchen" — Robert Cray

Though he owes much of his success to a fairly slick, mainstream crossover sound, Robert Cray can play no-holds-barred blues with the best of them. Recorded live, "Chicken in the Kitchen" (on Cookin' in Mobile) not only features some of the most beautiful, sparkly, out-of-phase Strat tone you'll ever hear, it also has not one but two great solos. Number two, especially, is full of incredibly cohesive lines with blindsiding surprises, occasionally getting close enough to the edge that you start worrying whether Cray will make it out alive. —T.G.

"Shake 'Em on Down" — Luther Dickinson (North Mississippi Allstars)

The North Mississippi Allstars lived up to their name when they brought tribal elders R.L. Burnside, Jim Dickinson, and the whole neighborhood to Bonnaroo in 2004, where they documented history in progress. Luther Dickinson pays homage to the past while dragging classic Hill Country blues kicking and screaming into the present via groovy Gibsons, mighty Marshalls, and occasional echo and other effects. He does it to death with a Les Paul in open D on Fred McDowell's "Shake 'Em on Down," which kicks off Hill Country Revue as wickedly as it did the Allstars' debut CD, and, in turn, their career. When Dickinson lays a slide to the treble strings while thumbpicking the bass strings and incorporating optimal open ones, he brings the honeysuckle sweet and the dirty primitive together in glorious harmony. —A.L.

"Blues After Hours" — Hollywood Fats

Fats is one of the more obscure players on our list, but if you've got an appetite for the blues then you really need to put some Fats in your diet. His style was somehow brash and classy all at once. Most frequently seen wielding an ES-335, he was an itinerant sideman who did stints with the Blasters, Muddy Waters and Canned Heat. For raw blues power, though, it's hard to beat his playing with his own Hollywood Fats Band. On the sultry "Blues After Hours" (from Deep on America / Larger Than Life, Vol. 2), he delivers a textbook example of how to build a solo from a humble beginning to a searing climax, and then how to wind it back down for the subsequent vocal verse. —A.L.

"Prison of Love" — Robben Ford

The word "uptown" is sometimes used to describe blues with more jazz-inspired harmonies — chords beyond the common I, IV, and V. Ford can take the blues farther uptown than just about anybody, as this minor-key shuffle from his 1992 record Robben Ford & the Blue Line illustrates so colorfully. He stays in familiar pentatonic territory for the first four bars, and then shades his phrases with canny chromaticism in the next four. He plays even more ear-tweaking lines in the next few measures before taking the express train back downtown for a gritty finish. —A.L.

"The Change in Me" — Eric Gales

Based on a riff that borrows heavily from ZZ Top's "La Grange," Eric Gales' "The Change in Me" is a hard-driving rocker of a tune, and Gales plays highly melodic fills to provide a dynamic counterpoint to the crunchy theme. Demonstrated by several YouTube clips of the song, Gales varies the actual solo considerably from one night to the next, often employing a modern-sounding, delay-drenched high-gain tone and a great ability to allow the solo to alternately breathe and burn. —T.G.

"Bullfrog Blues" — Rory Gallagher

It's no easy task to choose a favorite Rory Gallagher blues solo, but his slide work on "Bullfrog Blues" is a serious contender. Leaving his trademark Strat behind (several YouTube videos show him playing a Gretsch Corvette), Gallagher gets to work in open-A tuning, with a capo on the second fret. The solo itself uses licks in the I, IV and V chord positions at the fifth, seventh and 12th frets, and it isn't unlike Gallagher's acoustic bottleneck work, though a ferocious amount of gain yields one of the meanest electric slide tones that you'll ever encounter. —T.G.

"Please Send Me Someone to Love" — Amos Garrett

In 1974, Amos Garrett's solo on Maria Muldaur's "Midnight at the Oasis" was all over the AM airwaves. It gobsmacked guitarists worldwide with its triple-string bends and unusual phrasing — but the previous year Garrett had already blown minds with his spectacular solo on this Percy Mayfield classic. The Canadian guitarist navigates the changes more like Benny Carter than Albert King. His trademark double-stop bends and large-interval, two-string pull-offs, facilitated by his huge hands, are nothing short of astonishing. The two choruses here are perfectly constructed, and were, in fact, composed. To improvise something this flawless would be superhuman. — M.R.

"Blues Newburg" — Danny Gatton

Danny Gatton had such a great grasp of country, jazz, rockabilly and blues that it's tough to pin down when he was at his bluesiest, but this tour de force is as good a place as any to start. It's got only about one percent of what the guy was capable of, and that means excellent bends on the high and low strings, amazing single-note and chord melody, wicked vibrato, faux pedal-steel licks, blazing runs, breakneck chromatic passages, volume swells, and lots, lots more — all played with impeccable time. Boy, do we miss this guy! —M.B.

"Sure Got Cold After the Rain Fell" — Billy Gibbons (ZZ Top)

Billy G. is one of the finest blues players around, but ZZ Top's boogie-oriented repertoire tends to overshadow a tune like this slow-burn gem from the 1972 album, Rio Grande Mud. The song isn't in the classic 12-bar mold, but Gibbons decorates the 12/8 groove as if it were. Deploying a moderately distorted tone for the licks he plays over a clean arpeggiated rhythm figure, Gibbons shows his usual mastery of note choice and placement, building his solo to create maximum emotion during the song's extended outro. — A.T.

"The Blue" — David Gilmour

You could say David Gilmour has never played anything that wasn't the blues — after all, Pink Floyd was named for blues musicians Pink Anderson and Floyd Council. Gilmour's tone and vibrato have always been touchstones of the modern electric blues sound. Though he played a number of awesome solos with Pink Floyd, "The Blue," from his own 2006 record, Islands, deserves mention for several reasons. Reminiscent of Fleetwood Mac's "Albatross," the solo quickly pushes the envelope with evocative whammy pedal work, which continues throughout, seamlessly woven into classic Gilmour licks delivered with the gorgeous tone and pocket that make him a guitar legend. —M.R.

"Lonesome Dave" — David Grissom

Already astounding when he made the classic Live at Liberty Lunch with Joe Ely in 1990, Grissom has refined his style through the years in stints with Storyville (featuring the SRV rhythm section) and the Dixie Chicks. It is all there in "Lonesome Dave," from his first solo record: the Danny Gatton organ pedal point, the pedal-steel licks (Grissom taught himself to do B-Bender licks without a B-Bender), and the ZZ Top grind. Imagine Bluesbreakers Clapton and Billy Gibbons meet Brent Mason and Albert Lee and you get the idea. Throughout, Grissom's innate taste and musicality let him be jaw dropping without being flashy. —M.R.

"How Blue Can You Get" — Jeff Healey

Healey's blindness and unconventional playing style never hindered his ability to turn in amazing guitar performances, one of many being "How Blue Can You Get" from his posthumous 2008 release, Mess of Blues. Healey burns white hot here, pulling off wickedly fast lines and dramatic bends that defy the physical realities of holding a guitar flat on his lap. And if that's not enough, visit YouTube to also see what a gifted jazz trumpeter Healey was. What an incredible musician! —A.T.

"Blue Guitar" — Earl Hooker

Earl Zebedee Hooker, first cousin to John Lee, recorded this instrumental on May 3, 1961, and It was released the following year. A short time later, Muddy Waters overdubbed vocals onto the track, renamed it "You Shook Me," and released it under his own name. Now a blues staple — covered famously by Page and Beck among many others — Hooker played his immortal slide licks in standard tuning, which was novel for a Chicago blues guitarist at the time. He went on to experiment with echo, wah and other effects, attracting the attention of Jimi Hendrix for one, but this early recording, sans Muddy, showcases one of the most original stylists of all time. —B.C.

"It Hurts Me Too" — Elmore James

No doubt, "Dust My Broom" is slide guitarist James' signature song, but there's so much more mojo to be found in his cover of Tampa Red's "It Hurts Me Too,” if only for his sound. (You can bet your best bottleneck that Ry Cooder has listened to this recording more than a few times.) James takes full advantage of this throaty tone, letting his notes speak in vocal-like phrases. Whatever there is to say in open-D tuning, James says it here, with astounding character and confidence. Blues doesn't get much bluer than this. —A.L.

"Texas" — Eric Johnson

This session for Johnson's 2010 sonically superior release Up Close features guests Jimmie Vaughan and Steve Miller (vocals), who dropped by his studio and inspired him to rise to the occasion. The famously fickle and laborious Strat cat played a '59 Les Paul Standard dubbed "Buddy" through a Fuzz Face and a 100-watt Marshall on the solo—a first-take monster in the moment. Brandishing a sizzling tone and feeding off of Miller's vocal setup, Johnson's searing first solo soars to the heavens. Perfectly timed major thirds sound surprisingly blue, and EJ incorporates just enough diminished and chromatic runs to add spice without pushing too far beyond the boundaries of the blues. —J.L.

"Playing Around" — Lonnie Johnson

Alonzo "Lonnie" Johnson is best known to guitarists for his groundbreaking acoustic six- and 12-string work in the late '20s, including his celebrated duets with jazz guitarist Eddie Lang in 1929, and his 1927 recording "6/88 Glide," featuring what is now widely considered to be the first flatpicked single-note guitar solo. But Johnson's career continued for decades after that, and in 1947 he began playing electric. You'll find great electric solos scattered throughout his subsequent tunes, but the brief but rocking romp on 1949's "Playing Around" notably foreshadows moves that early rockers such as Eddie Cochran, Cliff Gallup and Scotty Moore will explore a few years later. —B.C.

"Born into This" — Wilson T. King

"I was listening to Eddie Hazel on 'Super Stupid' and Jimi's Band of Gypsys when I recorded this," Wilson T. King says, "and I wanted a future blues style of real whiplash out of the bends and tones." Well, he got it, while wielding a '69 Strat with DiMarzio Fast Track pickups played through an early '80s Marshall 2104 2x12 combo cranked way up, and using only his fingers. King is known for pushing the blues envelope in new directions, and this particularly passionate example of that predilection would, no doubt, elicit a big grin from Jimi. —B.C.

"Chief's Blues" — Greg Koch

Although he's known for his monstrous chops, Greg Koch displays tasty restraint for most of this slow blues, and the results are simply delicious. Much as the native people did with the mighty buffalo, Koch uses every part of the scale on these amazing seven minutes, blending major, minor and chromatic lines brilliantly over the changes and milking several notes out of every bend. It's hard to pick the coolest part, but a strong contender would have to be his jarring, pre-bent, triple-stop descending groans. This solo has it all: space, dynamics, humor, sensitivity and bombast, with damn near every lick being of the "must steal" variety. Yes sir! —M.B.

"Wind In Denver" — Sonny Landreth

Louisiana's singular slideman delivers a pinnacle performance on this track that only appears officially on his landmark live recording released in 2005, Grant Street. He tells GP that he achieved the gargantuan stereo tone playing a '66 Strat in open D minor tuning (D, A, D, F, A, D, low to high) through a Matchless HD30 with a 2x12 onstage and a 100-watt Dumble Overdrive Special pushing a 2x12 located offstage in a former freezer storeroom for maximum ambiance. "I was going for that wonderful 'Voodoo Child' vibe that still gets me every time I hear it," Landreth says. Sonny probably has the most evolved technique in slide blues history, and on "Wind in Denver" he delivers a host of hallmarks such fretting notes behind the slide and coaxing heavenly harmonics with a level of unbridled moxy that makes the solo truly monumental. —J.L.

"A Quitter Never Wins" — Jonny Lang

The baddest blues showcase on then teen sensation Jonny Lang's 1997 major-label debut, Lie to Me, is still his showstopper on 2010's Live at the Ryman. In his July 2010 feature he told GP that Albert Collins inspired him to become a Tele player, and Tab Benoit inspired him further. "When I heard his tone I freaked out — the Thinline Tele with humbuckers became the staple for me after that," he said. GP relayed that Lang eventually placed a P90 pickup between the two humbuckers, and he features the classic single-coil during the fiery intro and first solo on Tinsley Ellis' tune at the Ryman. He cuts into the second solo with sheer reckless abandon. —J.L.

"I'm Going Home" — Alvin Lee (Ten Years After)

It's hard to think of Alvin Lee without taking note of his solo in Ten Years After's "I'm Going Home." The band first recorded the song on its 1968 release Undead, and it upped the fast shuffle's octane level during its performance at the Woodstock festival. Playing his iconic "Big Red" 1959 Gibson ES-335, Lee takes the unusual step to start his solo accompanied only by drums for a full 24 bars, playing without the comfort of harmonic guidance from the band. He then proceeds to play one of the most blistering and fluid, Chuck Berry–influenced solos you'll ever come across. —T.G.

"Out of My Mind" — John Mayer

Regardless of whether or not you're into John Mayer's songwriting or vocal style, it's hard to argue with the fact that the guy has chops. Sure, he may not be the most original player to come along, but whether on acoustic, electric, lead or rhythm guitar, he is clearly in command. Eschewing the slick production found on much of his work, Mayer takes a decidedly more raw approach on the live recording of "Out of My Mind" (on Try!), giving his ES-335 a pentatonic workout with great vibrato, slightly overdriven, fat tone, and an excellent climax before resuming his vocal duties. —T.G.

"Still Got the Blues" — Gary Moore

Moore emerged from early British fusion and then spent his career alternating between turning out hard rock and blues records. It would be easy to go with any of his incendiary solos on a straight blues tune, or one of his letter-perfect recreations of Peter Green on Blues for Greeny, but "Still Got the Blues" is pure Moore. Okay, this cycle of fifths progression is not "the blues" per se, but its sharp-five-to-five resolution is blues approved. More importantly, the yearning in the gorgeous melody that Moore milks on the final solo, before tearing the roof of the sucker, is what the blues is all about. —M.R.

"Steroids" — Oz Noy

Oz Noy can get so far outside so quickly that it's easy to think that what he plays is not blues. Despite the funk and fusion elements that he throws in here, the fact is he's playing wild, vibey, blues-on-acid on this tune. We could all add a heaping helping of freshness to our 12-bar playing if we adopted one iota of Noy's phrasing, note choices, or fearlessness that are so abundant on this song. —M.B.

"Three Time Loser" — Bonnie Raitt

While blues and contemporary pop are not always an easy coupling, Raitt has been interlacing the two for decades now with consistently cool results. This track from her 1977 album, Sweet Forgiveness, is a high-water mark. The chord progression here has nothing to do with the customary 12-bar form, but Raitt's supernatural slide work infuses the song with deep blues feeling. Nobody else can make a quarter-tone glissando sound so expansive, and her overdriven Strat tone burns the way whiskey does going down your gullet. Listen close to hear her widen her vibrato and pluck harmonics in the final ride out. Pure swagger. —AL

"Greasy Kid Stuff" — Kid Ramos

Known for his explosive lead work on a Tele or Strat, and the ballsy sound he gets from a Vox AC30 with a stand-alone reverb, Kid Ramos has played with the Fabulous Thunderbirds, Roomful of Blues, James Hannan, and the Mannish Boys. He has also recorded several solo albums, including 2001's Greasy Kid Stuff, where he makes the instrumental title track jump with his fierce attack and fat tone. Check out YouTube to see Ramos tearing it up in a variety of situations, including on a baritone Tele with Los Fabulocos on "Burnin' the Chicken." —AT

"It's My Own Fault" — Otis Rush

Rush takes three solos on this track from the 1967 album Chicago/The Blues/Today!, Vol. 2. His first, in the song's intro, is amazing from the get-go, not because it's a display of guitar fireworks, but precisely because it's not. Phrase by phrase, Rush uses his Epiphone Riviera to masterfully tell a story here. After a couple of vocal verses, he ventures higher up the neck, ramping the thrill factor. His final break is just four stop-time measures to set up the saxophonist's solo, with a staggering impact-to-bar ratio. Rush was a southpaw who played his righty-strung guitar upside down, with the high E on top. This gives his bends an unusual sound because he's pushing the strings where most guitarists would pull, and vice versa. —A.L.

"Blues for Salvador" — Carlos Santana

Santana may not be though of as a blues player per se, and "Blues for Salvador," the title track of his 1987 solo album isn't a standard blues form. But by playing nearly six continuous minutes of intensely bluesy melodic work Santana laid down a masterpiece that helped him win a Grammy in 1989 for "Best Rock Instrumental Performance." Robben Ford later covered the song, and Santana has played it in concert with Buddy Guy, the Wayne Shorter Group and Mexican guitar star Javier Batiz. —A.T.

"Blue on Black" — Kenny Wayne Shepherd

When Louisiana native Kenny Wayne Shepherd broke big while still a teenager in the mid '90s, he was heralded as the next Stevie Ray Vaughan. Of course, nobody is ever the next SRV, but Shepherd's highly rhythmic Southern Strat histrionics clearly owe a debt to Austin's patron guitar player. And like SRV, KWS has a knack for turning stock blues licks into memorable, melodic moments via clever phrasing. You know a player — especially a bluesman — believes he's made a statement when he sticks close to the recorded version of a solo onstage night after night, year after year. "Blue on Black" is case in point. It's hook-laden licks get under your skin and stick in your brain whether it's the original version on 1997's Trouble or 2010's Live! In Chicago. —J.L.

"Three Hundred Pounds of Joy” — Hubert Sumlin

Released as a single on the Chicago-based Chess label in 1963 — with Howlin' Wolf leading the session — this is Sumlin's nonpareil. He plays teasing fills at the top of each verse, with an assured attack and shuddering vibrato, finally launching into his solo midway through the song. He begins with an unusual high-E string bend from the minor 3 up to the 4, falls a few steps back down the minor-pentatonic scale, then repeats the phrase twice more with slight variations. It's a spunky start, and he never relents. In a genre where clichés are an easy pitfall, this is one of the most unique solos ever rendered on a popular recording. —A.L.

"Wild About You Baby" — Hound Dog Taylor

Famously called “the Ramones of the blues" by The Village Voice, Hound Dog Taylor and his band the House Rockers played a ferociously raw kind of boogie blues. Based on the familiar "Dust My Broom" slide riff, "Wild About You Baby" (from Hound Dog Taylor and the House Rockers) is all about a game of call-and-response between the vocals and the guitar. When the time comes for Taylor to solo, he doesn't stray far from the main riff, and his note choices are perfect examples of a solo taking the place of a vocal line. —T.G.

"Slow Blues" — Mick Taylor

Released on Mick Taylor's self-titled post–Rolling Stones solo album, "Slow Blues" is a study in how to avoid mere noodling while essentially blowing for the entire duration of an instrumental track. The fact that "Slow Blues" uses a very cool, modified 12-bar progression with a distinctive bass line and chorused-sounding 13th chords taking the place of an actual melody certainly helps in keeping the tune engaging, but Taylor's throaty, reverb-drenched tone and dynamic playing keep the tune moving forward in a way that is not to be taken for granted in such an extended solo exploration. —T.G.

"Jesus Is Everywhere" — Sister Rosetta Tharpe

Tharpe may not have considered herself a blues artist, favoring gospel songs as she did throughout her career. But when you listen to her live 1964 recording of "Jesus Is Everywhere" — from The Authorized Sister Rosetta Tharpe Collection —the gap between sacred and secular doesn't seem so wide. Armed with a thumbpick, and backed by a bassist and drummer who sound like two thirds of the best rockabilly trio you've ever heard, Tharpe digs in hard on her early '60s SG-style Les Paul Custom. The first half of her solo is relatively straightforward, but when she starts swerving and swooping you'll wonder which way is up. Glory, glory! —A.L.

"Whisky Train" — Robin Tower (Procol Harum)

Like Hendrix, to whom he is overly, if not unfairly, compared, Robin Trower's blues roots run deep. Fifty years into his solo career, he still makes records worth listening to, these days filled with more classic blues tunes than ever. Still, the best example of his rooted playing might be "Whisky Train," a tune he wrote for Procol Harum's fourth album. The song could be considered one long cowbell-driven guitar solo, with Trower riding one of the great guitar riffs over and over, occasionally answering brief Gary Booker vocal sections with short modern blues excursions that preview his style as a solo artist. —M.R.

"I Know" — Derek Trucks (The Derek Trucks Band)

"Nearly everything I do on guitar has a foundation in blues music," says freak of nature Derek Trucks who primarily plays a Gibson SG tuned to open E with a large Dunlop Pyrex slide through a cranked Fender Super Reverb to conjure his signature, liquid fire tone. The way Trucks furthers Duane Allman's electric bottleneck style via Eastern-influenced microtones is mesmerizing. The Derek Trucks Band's 2010 release, Roadsongs, is a supreme document. His "Key to the Highway" solo reaches the highest zenith, but "I Know" is extraordinarily interesting as it progresses from droning raga into a swinging R&B feelgood number with one of the most musical, uplifting major-2 blues solos ever recorded. —J.L.

"Miracles & Demons (Part 2)" — Eddie Turner

A master at creating spooky atmospherics — such as those infusing several Otis Taylor records — Turner is also a funky and hard-rocking psychedelic bluesman in the Hendrix tradition, as evidenced on this track. Rooted in a repeating 6/8 figure played on dual resonators, with Turner's haunting vocals and wicked, wah-inflected, heavily echoed solo intertwining throughout, the tune showcases his ability to simultaneously wail and conjure uncanny sonics via Custom Shop Strats, a '59 tweed Deluxe, a Budda Twinmaster, a Roland RE-301 tape echo and other magical implements. —B.C.

"Tuff Enuff” — Jimmie Vaughan (The Fabulous Thunderbirds)

The other Vaughan is as cool as the other side of the pillow, especially compared to his fire-spitting brother. They both favor Strats, but the similarities pretty much end there. Jimmie rarely plays fast or dirty, and is never flash. He mostly sticks to stabbing single notes within a traditional framework, giving them plenty of space to breathe. Jimmie Vaughan reminds us that less notes can certainly mean more, and the solo on the title track from the Fabulous Thunderbirds' 1986 album, Tuff Enuff, is a shining example. Vaughan doesn't usually do effects, but in this instance shimmering reverb and delay add remarkable depth to his sparse phrasing. It's hard to find better evidence of a pure blues solo building a perfect bridge to a crossover hit. —J.L.

"Call It Stormy Monday" — T-Bone Walker

Chances are, you're not old enough to remember the impact this song made when it was originally released in 1947. (By way of perspective, Clapton was only two years old then, and the first Stratocaster was still seven years off.) So you may listen now and find yourself thinking, What's the big whoop? I've heard other guitarists play that stuff. The big whoop is: Walker invented that stuff. Without his influence, there might've been no B.B. King, no Chuck Berry, and no Gatemouth Brown. Go back to the source and listen, taking note of Walker's rhythmic sophistication. Sure, there are eighth-notes and sixteenths and some triplets. But such subdivisions were never more elastic than in Walker's hands. — A.L.

"Ball and Biscuit" — Jack White (The White Stripes)

Jack White kicked the blues straight in the nuts on "Ball and Biscuit" utilizing a bizarre, ferocious sound the likes of which had never before been heard in the history of America's senior guitar genre. No "real" bluesman would have imagined such blasphemy as a Detroit garage punk playing a plastic guitar (a 1964 Montgomery Ward Airline) with a fuzz-drenched, Whammy-infected tone on a blues romp. White made it his signature tone, and his signature guitar album, Elephant, landed him his first Guitar Player cover story on the June 2003 issue. The bombastic trio of solos throughout White's sideways statement "Ball and Biscuit" play like a blues from hell trilogy. — J.L.

Derek Trucks, who played with Buddy Guy and Bob Dylan before he was a teenager, has enjoyed a storied career. From those early days — when Guy taught him a key lesson about the value of turning down your amp — to his stint with the Allman Brothers Band and beyond, he has been a disciple of open E tuning.

Open tunings have been favored by everyone from Jimmy Page to Tommy Emmanuel. They're extremely versatile, allowing players to escape the restrictions of standard tuning.

Trucks, though, is one of the most prominent names to adopt his preferred open E tuning — E B E G# B E — in which the open strings are tuned to an E major chord. In his recent interview on Chris Shiflett's Shred With Shifty channel, Trucks told the Foo Fighters guitarist — who calls Trucks “the best slide guitar player on earth right now" — why it suits him so well, especially when trading licks with players in more traditional tunings.

Trucks says his early experiences with the tuning saw him “find ways to mimic what you can do in standard tuning.” Then, he says, his horizons were expanded during his time playing in Frog Wings with his uncle, the late Allman Brothers drummer Butch Trucks, and guitarist Jimmy Herring.

“He’s a great guitar player,” Trucks says of Herring, adding, He's a great teacher, too. He was really interested in open E, and he was like, 'We should just get notepads and just write it out.'”

A long, tedious but ultimately liberating exercise followed.

“We would take just different modes, different chords, and write out the neck: ‘Where's this note everywhere on the neck?’ and visualize it. And then you're like, 'Oh shit, there's that chord there.’

“So we have these notebooks from sitting with Jimmy for years, it just kind of opens up a whole world,” he continues. “You put these three notes together anywhere on the neck — it's a version of an E chord. It's just different versions in it. But when you see it, you realize, 'Wow, there's a lot of them.' That opened up that whole world for me. You realize that it's all there.”

Because open E is so close to E standard, Trucks found those patterns were still relevant when playing in his preferred tuning, if only somewhat more difficult .While he has remained loyal to the open tuning for both regular and slide guitar playing, he believes both have their benefits and can work in harmony with each other.

“There's a lot of things that are really easy to do in standard tuning that you just got to get wide fingering in open E," he says. "But the beauty of it is, you end up not falling into the same stuff that most people would. Because what's easy for me is difficult in standard and vice versa. So you just end up playing a little differently.”

He also found it helped him to distinguish his voice as a lead player when sharing the stages with other greats and, in particular, when he’s played in bands with three electric guitar players.

“I noticed that came in handy naturally when I did that tour with Clapton and Doyle [Bramhall II],” Trucks relays. “It was three guitar players in the band, and I'm in open E at all times, Doyle's playing upside down, left-handed, and then Eric is playing in standard.

“So we were kind of never in each other's way, because it was three really different ways. You never fell in the same place; it kind of always spread out in a nice way, just naturally.”

Earlier this year, Trucks reunited with his fellow ABB alumnus Warren Haynes to complete a Greg Allman gem of a song, 20 years after he started writing it.

Haynes spoke to Guitar Player about resurrecting the incomplete track, believing “It just made sense,” that Trucks would play a part.

That followed Trucks' collaboration with Duane Betts on the 2023 single Stare at the Sun, which saw the pairing pay tribute to Betts' late father, Dickey Betts.

Throughout his career, the ever-humble Buddy Guy has used his status as a blues player to help promote the next generation of guitar greats.

Eric Clapton has recalled how seeing Guy's trio in London inspired him to quit the Bluesbreakers and form Cream in 1966. More recent followers of the bluesman include, Quinn Sullivan, who arrived on the scene after backing from Guy at just eight years old, and Christone "Kingfish" Ingram who has shared the stage with Guy on several occasions.

Derek Trucks is the latest guitarist to sing Guy's praises. Like Sullivan, he was gracing stages from a scarily young age and getting support from more experienced hands.

“I was really lucky to play with a lot of my heroes early,” Trucks says during a reflective conversation on the podcast of Foo Fighters guitarist Chris Shiflett. “I started touring at nine or 10 years old, and remember doing shows with Buddy Guy and sitting in with Bob Dylan at 11.”

Indeed, by his 20th birthday, he'd added Joe Walsh and Stephen Stills to that list, having found Gibson SGs to be his preferred six-string.

Asked whether he was shy or boisterous at those early gigs, Trucks replied: “I was reserved naturally so they would have to pull you out of your shell a little bit. Buddy Guy was always great about that. He’d let you know, like, ‘Get your ass out here.’

But his time playing intimate blues clubs with the blues legend proved the most insightful. Guy had yet to see the revival that gave his latter career a shot in the arm, and it was in these low-profile venues Trucks learned something important about being a band leader.

“What I remember about Buddy Guy is that when he wanted to, he would bring the band down to a whisper," Trucks says. "I could hear the amps humming.

“I remember that discipline and that use of dynamics just being a huge thing that went off in my head. It’s powerful when you can bring things down to that level but still hold the intensity. Then, when you take the lid off of it, it’s a big trip that you've taken."

Guy has more than 70 years of playing beneath his fingers, and while he finally retired from touring last year, at 86, his humility is as resonant as ever. He's dedicated his life to the blues, and in that, has been a determination to see its flame still burning bright long after his days are over.

Selwyn Birchwood, who first saw Guy as an impressionable 18-year-old, is another award-winning guitarist — including the Albert King Guitarist of the Year award in 2013 — that he has inspired to greatness.

“Anyone who’s seen Buddy live knows what an incredible showman he is, and it was then and there I said to myself, 'Whatever this music is, this is what I want to learn, and this is what I want to do,'” he told Guitar Player.

Last year, Guy sat down with GP to reflect on his early career, from his first guitars to moving to Chicago and never leaving.

Ask Derek Trucks if he'll ever stop playing Gibson SGs and he'll tell you he's tried substituting other electric guitars without success. "Anytime I would move to another guitar, I would just be annoyed by it," he says in a new interview for Chris Shiflett's Shred with Shifty. "You have to think too hard about it. So I just got stuck with it."

"I played this one for maybe 15, 20, years," Trucks said of his guitar. It is certainly a special instrument — Artist Proof number four of the 2012 Gibson Custom Shop Dickey Betts SG, which was itself a copy of the 1961 SG that Betts gifted to Duane Allman. "Duane's daughter, Galadrielle, gave me this, and it's just a super-light SG. They're all light, but this one's especially light."

But Trucks said it's not just its weight that makes the guitar his favorite. It's also because he's played SGs since he was young. "When I was, I think, 11 or 12, I got my first SG. A Les Paul was too heavy," he explained with a laugh. "I was about 90 pounds."

More importantly, the SG's double cutaways give him easy access to the highest frets. "For playing slide, I think just the access up top is really nice," Trucks says. "And then I think you get comfortable with something, and it becomes a bit second nature."

As Trucks told Guitar Player in 2021, his Artist Proof Dickey Betts SG "has been my main guitar since I got it. I did those last three or four years in the Allman Brothers with it – all those final shows – so it’s kinda been the only guitar I’ve played since I got it.

"I’ve got a Gibson signature model that I’ve played on and off, and for a long time that was the backup guitar I’d use. I also use this guitar in the studio. There is something about it – I can’t put it down. It feels better that this is a gift. I’m into that. And the guitar has a little history to it.”

Trucks recently teamed up with his former Allman Brothers guitar partner, Warren Haynes, for an appearance on Haynes' latest album, Million Voices Whisper. The two men cut the new song "Real Real Love," a tune Haynes wrote from lyrics composed by the late Gregg Allman. Haynes received the lyrics from former Allman Brothers Band manager Bert Holman, who had received them from Paco Zimmer, who had been Allman’s tour manager in the early 1980s. Haynes and Allman had co-written many songs together, which made him the natural choice to turn the lyrics into a new composition. Once Haynes finished writing the song, he immediately knew he wanted Trucks on the track. “It just made sense,” he said.

Million Voices Whisper is Warren Haynes’ fourth solo album in a prolific career that has seen him tour and record with the Allman Brothers Band, Phil Lesh and Gov’t Mule, a band that began as an ABB sound project but recently celebrated its 30^th birthday. On his solo releases, Haynes tends to focus more on songwriting than heavy jams, and that’s largely true again on Million Voices Whisper. But the album’s guitar headline is that Haynes’ longtime Allman Brothers’ partner Derek Trucks appears with him on three tracks. The songs, co-produced by the two guitarists, represent the first studio recordings Haynes and Trucks have made together since the Allman Brothers Band’s 2003 album Hittin’ The Note.

“I always wanted to do one more Allman Brothers studio record but that just wasn't meant to be, though we were close to having enough material to do it,” says Haynes. “We had a handful of original songs that could have been included and there were a couple of covers that we were doing that would have been great to record. For instance, a cool version of [Bob Dylan’s] ‘Blind Willie McTell’ would have been nice.”

That nagging sense of incompletion pushed Haynes to want to record with Trucks for the first time in over 20 years. The two have had numerous live collaborations in the decade since the Allman Brothers played their last show, but it’s hard to believe how long it had been since they recorded together.

“Derek and I have both been busy doing our own things, but the idea of getting together back into the studio at some point has always been in the back of our minds, so it was great to bring that to fruition,” says Haynes.

This collaboration began when Allman Brothers Band manager Bert Holman sent Haynes lyrics for “Real Real Love,” a song Gregg had written but never recorded. Holman had received them from Paco Zimmer, who had worked as Allman’s tour manager in the early 80’s, and knew that Holman would get them to the right person. Because Haynes and Allman had co-written many songs together, Holman trusted the guitarist to handle with proper love and care. Haynes finished writing the song and immediately knew he wanted Trucks on the track. “It just made sense,” says Haynes.

Trucks immediately agreed and the decision to work together on “Real Real Love” led the two guitarists to gather for a writing session at Trucks’ Georgia farm, where they wrote a new collection of songs, two of which appear on Million Voices Whispers. The nine-minute “Hall of Future Saints” includes an extended outro of Trucks and Haynes playing off and inspiring one another. “We left that in because it captures what we figured people want to hear from us,” says Haynes. “It felt so good to be playing together.”

They recorded their guitar parts playing live together with the band, with their amps in separate iso rooms. They left the doors open, says Haynes, because neither guitarist enjoys relying solely on headphones.

“We're able to communicate in a way that is really easy, natural and organic,” says Haynes. “A lot of that is unspoken communication that happens while we're playing because we trust each other's instincts. Even a lot of the arrangements were done on the floor in the moment — things like who’s going to solo where, what changes the solos are going to be across and if we're going to trade back and forth. It was all quick and natural.”

Haynes and Trucks can also be heard in full flight for three hours of full tilt playing on Final Concert 10-28-14, the newly remastered and released three-CD release of the Allman Brothers Band’s final performance. And there could be more studio tracks soon. Haynes says that the pair wrote a few more songs they really like and intend to return to before long.

One can certainly be forgiven for hearing the name Derek Trucks and immediately jumping to thoughts of slide guitar.

He's indisputably one of the world's best blues slide players – those skeptical need only watch the ever-viral clip of him leaving both B.B. King and John Mayer slack-jawed during a live slide workout. But to put the Tedeschi Trucks Band co-leader and latter-day Allman Brothers Band co-six-string-anchor in a blues box, so to speak, would be a grave mistake.

Though the blues is and always has been a huge part of his guitar vocabulary, Trucks has also often been vocal about more far-flung influences, such as qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. The guitarist has also often noted how greatly jazz – its intensity and free spirit – has informed his playing over the decades.

“Everybody in [John] Coltrane’s band had multiple shotguns pointed at everybody else’s face,” Trucks told GP with a laugh in a 2008 interview. “There was just something so relentless and edge-of-the-earth about it. When my band approaches certain tunes, that is what we are trying to do.”

Trucks was a prominent contributor to Guitars, a 2008 album by legendary jazz pianist McCoy Tyner, who played in Coltrane's band throughout the early- and mid-'60s.

In the 2008 GP interview, Trucks reflected on the experience of recording with Tyner and other jazz luminaries on Guitars, revealing how he was kept on his toes by the players he idolized.

“You have [bassist] Ron Carter and [drummer] Jack DeJohnette, who are legends individually, and with McCoy in the room it's a generation deeper,” the guitarist recalled. “I felt like I had my hands tied a little bit because I was playing through a really tiny amp, which was in a different room.

“I tend to not like recording just hearing myself through headphones, but you have to let go and realize that this is a completely different realm,” Trucks continued. “You are playing with acoustic piano and upright bass. Also, anytime you are playing with musicians that you have never played a note with before, the first 20 to 30 percent is just the feeling-out process, learning how people phrase things. And that’s often the beauty of it.

“Sometimes, you get the most inspired moments when you first make those connections, because you get thrown into the deep end and you either sink or swim.”

Allman Brothers Band fans of a certain age may remember Duane Betts as a teenager taking the stage to sit in with his father, Dickey, and the ABB in the mid ’90s. But 30 years later, the younger Betts has been around the block a few times, touring with his father for more than a decade, playing with California folk-rockers Dawes for a stretch, and forming the Allman Betts Band with Devon Allman. Together, they recorded two albums and toured extensively.

But while Betts’ 2018 EP, Sketches of American Music, laid down a marker for him as a solo artist, the just-released Wild & Precious Life (Royal Potato Family) is his proper solo debut.

Recorded to two-inch analog tape at Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks’ Swamp Raga Studio in Jacksonville, Florida, the album features Betts’ “dream team” – guitarist Johnny Stachela, bassist Berry Duane Oakley, keyboardist John Ginty and Tedeschi Trucks Band drummer Tyler Greenwell.

Stachela and Betts continue to expand the impressive guitar team harmony they established in the Allman Betts Band, and are accompanied by guests that include Trucks and Marcus King.

“We tracked everything live and kept whichever takes had the magic,” says Betts, who co-produced the album with Stachela and Ginty. Infused with Americana swagger, the album is a major step forward for Betts in establishing himself as a solo artist infused with, but not frozen by, his family legacy. “You write and record music and just hope it lights a fire in people’s hearts,” he says.

The first thing we hear on the album is the harmonized guitars on “Evergreen.” Was that an intentional statement?

Sort of. I just liked the song. I wrote it with a more standard opening, but my writing partner, Stoll Vaughan, was adamant about putting the harmonies on the front of the song because it was a little more unique, and once we tried it, it felt great.

The song is underpinned by a strong acoustic guitar part. Did you play that?

Yes. I played all the acoustic on a post-World War II Martin D-28, which belonged to my dad and he used a lot for writing. I know he wrote “Seven Turns” on it. I would see him playing that a lot in the early ’90s. It’s just a great-sounding guitar that is very fun to play. Some of the most fun I had was playing acoustic rhythm on “Waiting on a Song” and “Evergreen.”

What were your electrics and amps? And did you use any effects? It sounds pretty clean.

My main guitar was what I play the most onstage, the number-one prototype of my dad’s Gibson goldtop, which they made in 2001. I also played my 1961 Gibson 335 and a 1930s Gibson L-00. I used my mid-’60s Fender Deluxe Reverb and late-’50s Fender Tweed Deluxe. The only effect is a Dandrive Secret Engine fuzz pedal that J.D. Simo gifted me.

Johnny played his 2000 Gibson ’62 LP/SG Custom Shop, which he calls Stormy, my 335 and a 1960s Guild S-50 Jet Star from Derek’s collection, running through a 1960s Silvertone 1448, which is also Derek’s and a mid-’60s Fender Vibrolux Reverb.

Some of the songs recall Highway Call, your dad’s 1974 solo album, particularly the first single, “Waiting on a Song.” Was that a conscious point of reference?

I was passionately interested in having pedal steel on a few songs to capture some authentic old country-rock sounds. That music has a lot of character, with good honest, meaningful songs.

“Waiting on a Song” originally had a dreamier, big rock flow, but I gave it different treatments to see what works, and it became clear it should be an up-tempo, gliding, uplifting song. Once it took that shape, we were absolutely influenced by Highway Call and not afraid of going for that authentic gangster country vibe, which is the best. Of course, it’s not just Highway Call but Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Billy Joe Shaver…

There’s a lot of great stuff in that vein right now. Do you relate to contemporary country?

For sure, the Americana side of things. I love guys like Sturgill Simpson, Tyler Childers and Charley Crockett, and I would love to play with them and be more in that scene, which is really hip.

How did the Allman Betts albums and touring set you up to do this?

I had a lot of fun doing these records and playing all those shows. It just felt like it was time to take this next step. My time with Allman Betts gave me space to get better overall, and more comfortable as a singer onstage – which is a lot different than sitting on your bed singing to your dog with an acoustic guitar!

What’s the status of Allman Betts?

We’re on hiatus, doing other things and occasional shows, at least two this summer.

How did you end up recording at Derek and Susan’s studio?

We were hanging out at a friend’s wedding, where I was a guest and they were performing. I said I was going to make a solo album, and Susan said I should do my record at their place, so I took her up on it. It was just such a comfortable environment. They are such gracious hosts, and the property is really inspiring – on a river, with a lot of beautiful nature. And Bobby Tis, who engineered, is so gifted at what he does.

Derek and Marcus King both play great on “Stare at the Sun” and “Cold Dark World” respectively. How did that happen?

Marcus is a really talented friend, and I knew he would play amazingly on “Cold Dark World.” With Derek, it was established that he would play from the first conversation we had about me recording at their studio. That song title actually came from something he said to me: “Your dad’s a player who’s not afraid to stare directly into the sun.” It only made sense to have him on that one.

“Under the Bali Moon” is a beautiful instrumental. What’s the significance of the title, and can you describe the writing process?

Bali is a beautiful, sacred place, where my wife and I spend time whenever money and our schedules allow. I had an instrumental idea with a lot of parts, and when we got into the studio I wasn’t sure how it was going to work out or if it was right yet. Tyler thought that the coolest part of the song came and went too fast, so he added the beat and made that part more of an emphasis. Then we incorporated all the parts that we had already written and it just came together as you hear it. It’s much more focused and has a fresher sound. He could hear the good parts and grasp what was missing.

“Colors Fade” has a very Dead feel, although the harmony playing echoes western swing and the Allman Brothers. Was that an intentional homage?

It wasn’t conscious, but as we worked up the song, it was apparent that it had a Dead vibe, and we embraced it.

You just played some shows with Phil Lesh. How was that experience?

Phil Lesh is a legend, and it’s an honor to play that music with him and the astounding cast of characters he puts together. It’s a comfortable, friendly vibe, which is good, because it’s also nerve racking – you don’t get the setlist until about 24 hours before the show, and it’s a lot to process. I would be all in to learn the stuff inside out, but there’s a lot of it and it’s not simplistic music.

Duane Betts is currently on tour. Click here for info and tickets.

As genres go, Americana has always been a difficult one to pin down. In taxonomical terms, it’s more a family of genres that includes blues, folk, bluegrass, gospel, jam band, rhythm and blues, and even some styles of rock and roll.

The common threads that bind these disparate forms to Americana are a distinctly rural southern character, and an embrace of traditional instruments and themes that speak to the American experience.

But like America’s own melting pot, these various musical strains have been transformed through exposure and intermingling, changing one another and making Americana a style that is ever evolving.

Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks are prime exponents of this very tradition. They are the driving forces behind the Tedeschi Trucks Band. Since touring together in 2007 as Derek Trucks & Susan Tedeschi’s Soul Stew Revival, they’ve gone on to form one of music’s premier jam bands with their unique blend of blues, rock and soul.

As the group’s guitar slingers, Susan and Derek have a lot of ground to cover, and they do it authentically, steeped as they are in the traditions of southern music. But as with all things Americana, their music reaches beyond its indigenous roots.

Consider, for example, the influence of Indian music on Derek’s gorgeously liquid slide playing. Or, for that matter, take a listen to the Tedeschi Trucks Band’s 2022 opus, I Am the Moon, a four-album set that orbits 12th-century Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi’s Layla and Majnun, a poem that was itself the inspiration for Eric Clapton’s song “Layla.”

It’s an epic project that spans blues, rock, soul, folk and more. And considering that its heroine, Layla, spends her time locked away in a tower, the album has parallels to our experience as of late in the wake of COVID.

Put it all together, and you have a quintessential Americana album – four, to be exact – that speaks to the past and present in a wholly traditional and transformative way, and is among the most breathtaking and ambitious musical creations we’ve heard in recent times.

In this incredible clip from the first of two consecutive appearances at Red Rocks in Morrison, CO, last summer, Tedeschi Trucks Band perform the title track from I Am the Moon: I. Crescent. 

Strapped with a Gibson SG, Derek pulls out one of his greatest slide guitar solos captured on film. With tone, technique and passion in abundance, it is utterly breathtaking to behold.

Tedeschi Trucks Band are slated to appear at Red Rocks again for two nights later this month. Visit the Red Rocks website for tickets and info.

Duane Betts – the son of Allman Brothers Band legend Dickey Betts, and a talented electric guitar player in his own right – is set to release his first solo album, Wild & Precious Life, this summer.

Now, the guitarist has released its second single, an ode to his father – and his guitar playing – titled “Stare At The Sun.” 

For the tune, Betts – who, among a number of other groups, has played in his father's backing band and with Gregg Allman's son Devon in the Allman Betts Band – enlisted the help of someone else who knows a thing or two about Dickey Betts and the Allman Brothers Band, Derek Trucks.

You can hear the guitarists' collaboration below.

“I was inspired by a conversation I’d had with Derek,” Betts said of the song's origins. “He was talking about my father’s guitar playing and he told me, ‘Your dad is one of those players who’s not afraid to stare directly into the sun,’ and I loved that line. I was already working on a new song, and Derek’s sentiment gave the song a center.”

Though vital and modern, “Stare At The Sun” will have a warm familiarity to any Allman Brothers fan – the sweetly melodic twin guitar leads, Trucks' lyrical slides, and even the track's soulful organ work recall the Southern rock pioneers at their best, but never to the point of outright copying the band. 

Wild & Precious Life, incidentally, was also recorded at Swamp Raga studio, which is owned by Trucks and his wife and Tedeschi Trucks Band partner-in-crime, Susan Tedeschi. The album also features Marcus King, and is set for a July 14 release via The Royal Potato Family.

To preorder the album, step right this way.

As surely as Robert Johnson lived the blues, Johnny Winter spent his life in them.

Born albino, Winter discovered early in life that some cultures considered albinos gods, while others abused and ostracized them. It was between these two extremes that Winter found himself throughout his life.

Blessed with talent, he blew minds with his fiery guitar work and had major labels falling over themselves to sign him. He helped advance electric blues into arenas in the late 1960s and early ’70s.

But his career, while marked by flashes of brilliance, was marred by greedy managers, drug addiction and an industry that came to view him as an oddity. What remained through it all was his worship of blues.

Born in Beaumont, Texas, in 1944, Winter began playing guitar at age 11, inspired by blues artists like Muddy Waters and B.B. King. After cutting his first record at 15, he was stuck on a music career.

“That was the most exciting time,” he recalled in 2008. “I made my first record and I started playing in nightclubs, and I had my first drink. All the stuff was brand new, and you could be driving to the gig and hear your record on the radio.”

Winter played clubs throughout Houston and Austin, impressing electric-blues fans with his guitar work, an incendiary meld of rock and blues chops unlike anything heard before.

His break came in December 1968 when he was featured in a Rolling Stone story about the Texas music scene. Major labels came calling, and Winter was soon under contract to Columbia for what was reportedly the largest advance in the recording industry’s history at that time: $600,000.

Soon after, he released Johnny Winter and Second Winter, each helping to establish him as a formidable talent.

As a child, Winter had dreamed of playing with Muddy Waters. He got his chance in 1974 when he and other young blues guitarists joined together in concert with older artists from the Chicago blues scene.

Winter went on to produce a quartet of albums for Waters, earning the elder bluesman Grammy awards and giving his career a well-deserved boost.

Sadly, Winters’ own career suffered over the years. A pair of former managers capitalized on his earlier recordings, earning money from them while Johnny never saw a penny. He dealt with heroin addiction in the 1970s and suffered health ailments in his later years.

He hit his stride again in the 1980s, recording for Alligator Records, and by the mid ’90s he was focused more on performing, where he showed that he’d not lost one bit of his brilliance. A stunning slide player, Winter used a metal slide cut from a pipe purchased at a plumbing supply store.

Perhaps no track demonstrates his furious slide work as well as his cover of Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited,” from Second Winter.

He played many guitars throughout his career but favored Gibson Firebirds, in particular a 1963 Firebird V.

“That first one I ever bought is my favorite because I’ve played it so long and I’ve gotten used to it,” he said. “There’s nothing it can’t do.”

When it came to playing the blues, you could say the same about Johnny Winter. “It’s a living music,” he once said of the genre. “For me, blues is a necessity.”

Order Crossroads Guitar Festival 2007 here.

As musical acts go, the Tedeschi Trucks Band is a large, family-style affair consisting of a dozen of the finest, top-caliber musicians.

At the front of it all is the husband-and-wife team of slide virtuoso Derek Trucks and singer/guitarist Susan Tedeschi.

Now some 12 years into their history, the Tedeschi Trucks Band has just issued a quartet of albums as sprawling and packed with musical virtuosity as the group itself.

Released under the umbrella title I Am the Moon, it consists of 24 new songs, with a total running time of more than two hours, presented in easily digestible servings as I. Crescent, II. Ascension, III. The Fall and IV. Farewell.

This avalanche of new music is the result of a period of feverish creativity, when the band was forced off the road due to the global shutdown in the wake of COVID-19.

The inspiration for the project came after TTB member Mike Mattison suggested the band should read the epic 12th century Persian poem Layla and Majnun, written by Nizami Ganjavi, which inspired “Layla,” the classic-rock tune penned by Eric Clapton.

Connections and coincidences between the song’s history and Trucks’ and Tedeschi’s own backgrounds are many: Trucks was named after Derek and the Dominoes, the banner under which Clapton released Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs on November 9, 1970, the very day Tedeschi was born.

Trucks has worked extensively with Clapton in the past, so his interest in the poem was already piqued.

“I had been meaning to read it for about 15 years,” he tells Guitar Player. “So when Mike proposed the idea, it wasn’t with the idea of making a record; it was more of a nice thought exercise for the whole band to be on the same page, because we were all stuck at home.”

Given the tragic nature of Layla and Majnun and its tale of unrequited love, one might naturally expect I Am the Moon to be a collection of maudlin, downbeat songs.

In fact, it is far from it.

Covering a broad spectrum of blues, soul and gospel, the record explodes with joyful, powerful and positive music.

“The poem details a sense of longing,” Tedeschi explains. “And I think the alternative ways of viewing that desire just seemed to fire up everybody’s imaginations. The songs sound positive even when, sometimes, lyrically, they are perhaps a little dark.”

Naturally, the four records are overflowing with killer guitar playing. Trucks’ slide playing has never sounded so expressive, and on the tracks where he and Tedeschi trade solos, the enthusiasm leaps from the grooves.

“The whole band is really thrilled with what we’ve created,” Tedeschi says, “and I think we all appreciated that this was a special project that we were really able to focus on.”

Trucks concurs. “It came together better than we could ever have hoped for,” he says. “We certainly didn’t think that we were going to write this much music, but we could tell that something special was going on as we were recording.”

Could this project have happened without lockdown and the enforced layoff from touring that it dictated?

DEREK TRUCKS The amount of time that we had available was definitely what allowed us to do this. Another aspect of that is, between us, we’ve been on the road for maybe 20 years without a break, and the fact that we were forced to stop gave us the chance to regenerate our creative spark.

Even though the pandemic and lockdown were really terrible for so many people, it was, ironically, kind of a perfect storm for us as a band.

Given that there is so much new music, did you always envisage that you would release it in stages, over four separate albums?

SUSAN TEDESCHI When we started recording and putting the songs up on the board, we realized that there was way more material than one record’s worth. I think we were all of one mind that the way records used to be made, where a great album would last between 30 and 40 minutes, was a much better approach from an artistic point of view.

It’s such a sweet spot for running time, and you can really focus your attention on the music. I think the CD format is largely to blame for the increasing length of albums, where there was so much more available space. Whereas when records only came out on vinyl, the optimum sound quality was around 20 minutes or so per side. The way we’ve divided it up means each set of songs works perfectly on vinyl.

You already had a big live repertoire. With the new songs added in, what would you be looking at?

TRUCKS It’s about 150 or so. When we did the Beacon Theatre [in New York City] a year ago, we performed about 118 songs over the course of seven shows, and that wasn’t everything we could have played.

TEDESCHI When we’re writing set lists, we run out of space because there’s so many songs we want to play. [laughs] We’ve already done some shows where we played the first record in its entirety, and I think we’ll do that for all four of the albums.

How do you keep so many songs stage-ready?

TRUCKS We use our soundchecks every day as a rehearsal, and we also set up a small rehearsal room at the venues where we can work on ideas and tighten up problematic parts or whatever, just with little amps. When we haven’t done a song for a long time, we need to really kick it around.

Given how many songs you recorded, the sequencing of the albums must have been quite a challenging process, I imagine.

TRUCKS We really spent a lot of time on that. We realized very early on that there was way too much music for a single album. A few more weeks down the line, I asked a good friend of mine, Jud Strickland, if he could sequence the four albums. He really got into the details. 

He had a card for each song with tempos, time signatures, what key it was in and what kind of feel each song had. I’d gotten way too close to the process, so he really managed to pull everything together on that front.

What were your go-to guitars for the albums?

TEDESCHI I used my ’93 Tele a lot. I was planning on using a whole bunch of guitars, but we were literally writing and recording ideas off the floor, live, thinking we might go back and add or redo some parts, but that never happened, and we kept the first versions pretty much as we came up with them on the spot.

That meant that we ended up mostly using the gear that we take out live. I actually played a Gretsch White Falcon a little bit, plus I used a guitar that I stole from Derek that I really love, which is a Custom Shop replica of Eric Clapton’s Beano guitar [as used on the John Mayall’s Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton album].

He had a couple of those made, and he gave one to Derek, but I’ve been playing it a lot. I also used a ’30s Martin 00-17 for a lot of the acoustic work.

TRUCKS I think the vast majority is the B2B [Brother to Brother] Dickey Betts reissue SG. I also used a ’65 Gibson ES-335 and a ’30s L-00. And I played an old National resonator guitar and an old Gibson Roy Smeck as well. 

With the exception of the acoustic guitars, we generally take the guitars on the road that we record with.

What were your amp choices? There are some seriously great tones all over the record.

TEDESCHI I mostly used my Fender ’64 Deluxe Reverb that I’ve had for years. I don’t use much in the way of effects. I have a Vox wah-wah pedal and a Moollon Zeppelin overdrive, but that’s pretty much it.

TRUCKS The main tracking amp for me was a ’64 Fender Deluxe Reverb, which has an incredible sound. I also used a Vibrolux occasionally and a little tweed Deluxe that I used here and there, plus a real old lightning-bolt Supro.

When you’re both working out your respective guitar parts, how much planning goes into who plays what? It must be difficult enough anyway to carve out your own sonic space with such a big band.

TEDESCHI I guess that’s pretty much become an instinctive, organic thing for us now. Of course, we already play so differently from each other, as Derek plays in open E tuning and I’m in standard.

Derek tends to use an SG a lot, so I would instinctively opt for my Tele, for the mix of humbucker and single-coil sounds. We try to avoid both using humbuckers, although the tone of the Beano Les Paul is very different from Derek’s SG, so that is an exception.

Sometime Derek will play all the parts on a particular song for the record if I’m concentrating on the vocals, but then I’ll figure out for the live show how to cover some of those guitar parts.

TRUCKS A lot of it is definitely instinctive at this point. Plus, since I’m in open E, if a song calls for open cowboy chords, that’s already a non-starter for me.

A lot of times it depends on who writes the song. Whoever writes it, the other tends to fold in around that. With so many years behind us now, we have a real instinct for what works. When we do find that something just isn’t working, we’ll really drill down on our parts.

You both have strong individual styles. What do you think is the secret to getting started and finding your own voice on the guitar?

TEDESCHI I think the best start is to find out who you like to listen to and try to play along to their records. For me that was Magic Sam, the three Kings, Otis Rush, Johnny Guitar Watson and T-Bone Walker.

I did five world tours with B.B. King, and I also used to tour with John Lee Hooker, so those experiences were unbeatable in really steeping myself in the traditions and roots of the blues. I learned so much.

When you start to study your favorite records, you begin to hear licks and phrases, which you unconsciously adapt to your own playing. But in doing that, they morph into an essential part of your own vocabulary as a musician.

The next thing you need to do is get up and play live, because that’s where you really forge your own identity. Then you see what does and doesn’t work with an audience, and you learn how to build a solo and the importance of rhythm.

TRUCKS Rhythm is so important. I think when people have blind spots in their music, it’s often due to rhythmic limitations. That’s where listening to great drummers can be inspiring. Playing the guitar isn’t just ripping and playing solos, although that can be incredible fun. [laughs]

TEDESCHI Finding your tone is crucial. That often comes down to experimentation. Make sure everything you play is musical, with a beginning, a middle and an end.

TRUCKS I started out when I was so young, so I was kind of lucky in that regard. By playing and meeting a lot of people and listening to what they were doing and recommending to me, I found things that really moved me. And that was where I drew inspiration from.

The more you listen, the more you find what moves you, and at some point you stumble across combinations that no one’s really come up with before. And that’s the entry point for discovering your own unique thing.

I think the starting point is always to absorb what you love about other people’s playing, because in the end, every player is a combination of their influences. No matter who your guitar heroes are, you always know what they were listening to.

But then the secret to their success is similar to how a great chef tastes food: Those legendary guitarists took their influences and found something in there that spoke to them and allowed their own identity to shine through.

Obviously, Duane Allman and being born into those waters were the starting points for me, followed by Delta blues and the three Kings. But then I really got interested in Indian classical music.

Do you think it’s important to listen to musicians who don’t play the guitar?

TRUCKS Totally. I really love tenor sax players, like Wayne Shorter, John Gilmore and John Coltrane. Things like that became the bedrock for me. People should be open to all areas of music, because you don’t know where inspiration might come from.

What sparked your interest in Indian music?

TRUCKS I got into it through our good friend Colonel Bruce Hampton. A drummer that was playing in his band, Jeff Sipe, turned me on to Pakistani qawwali music and Indian classical music artists like Ali Akbar Khan, who was really the guy for me. I really dove right into it for quite a period.

Later on with Kofi [Burbridge, Tededschi Trucks’ former keyboard player and flautist, who died in 2019], we’d really dig into those scales. I would go sit in on some of Ali Akbar Kahn’s classes at San Rafael in California.

Whenever we were out west, Ali would let us drop in and check things out. To say I studied would maybe be taking it too far, as I didn’t spend enough time, but I definitely did investigate it in depth.

When you started to explore Indian music and discovered the different microtonal subtleties, did you immediately connect that with slide guitar, where the fine microtonal nuances are something that is very particular to slide playing?

TRUCKS Yeah. The fact that I’m essentially playing a fretless instrument and the sarod is a fretless instrument was one of those little epiphanies that you get when you’re exploring music. I realized that, with slide, you’re really singing through your instrument. There are no frets on the human voice.

The melodies are so incredibly strong in a lot of Indian classical music, and that was something that really hit me. What Ali Akbar Khan did was very modal when he was exploring those ragas, and it was almost like the rules changed in mid-melody. It could be based on whether it was an ascending or descending melody.

Things like that just totally captured my imagination and opened up new pathways to expressing myself on the guitar.

Do you feel restricted when you’re not playing slide and you’re working with frets and a more definite sense of where notes sit?

TRUCKS I feel like it just gives me different ways to explore. There’s an Indian electric mandolin player that I listen to a lot, Srinivas, and when you hear him play you can’t even tell that it’s a fretted instrument.

I sometimes think about his approach when I’m playing without a slide. It’s a way to blur the lines between fretted and slide playing.

Did you ever learn solos note-for-note from old records?

TRUCKS Yeah, I definitely borrowed/stole a lot of lines from horn players. [laughs] Any time that I’d hear a phrase or a melody that really pulled my ear, I’d try to work out what they were doing and adapt it for guitar.

I think with horn players and the fact that they’re not playing the guitar, they can come up with ideas and approaches that you hadn’t imagined before.

What’s funny is when you find something like that on the guitar, it’s almost like you’re saying, “Oh yeah? That’s been sitting there on the neck the whole time and I never knew?” [laughs]

TEDESCHI T-Bone Walker’s “Here in the Dark” and “Right Place, Wrong Time” by Otis Rush were two real favorites. But as I said, even though you play what they played, you find that your own personality starts to change the way lines are phrased, and that’s when you start to put your own stamp on ideas that you hear other people play.

I would say playing with Derek has really improved my playing. I realized how dynamic a player he is, and that’s opened my eyes to the idea of being more patient and letting a solo build up.

He can play super loud or pin-drop quiet. It’s all about using dynamics to tell a story. It’s been such fun to play with Derek.

Do you think you brought influences to each other that you hadn’t previously been aware of?

TEDESCHI Definitely. When we first started dating, Derek would kid about how we had brought these new artists to each other. He didn’t know who Magic Sam was, and Derek liked a lot of people that I wasn’t familiar with, like Sun Ra and some really weird and wacky stuff.

The funny thing is that I went to jazz school, and he knows way more than I do about jazz, that’s for sure. [laughs] He can hear something and identify the artist in two seconds, whatever their instrument.

We both liked Wes Montgomery and Grant Green before we met each other.

TRUCKS That was one of the real fun things when we first got together, to explore our mutual likes and trade favorites.

Let’s discuss some of the tracks in detail. “Playing With My Emotions” sounds like you’re trading lines on the solo.

TEDESCHI Yeah, that’s right. That was a really fun one to play. Derek wanted us to both take lines on the solo, and I think it worked out really well. It has a joyful spirit to it.

TRUCKS That’s one of the tunes where we basically wrote it and played it in the studio. The trades were very spontaneous, we just went for the take right there on the floor. We don’t do that a whole lot on our records, so it was nice to get that on the album.

“Yes We Will” sounds like you are both taking a solo as well. There is a flavor of B.B. King’s work with the Crusaders on this one.

TEDESCHI Yes, I take the first one and Derek takes the second one. That is another real bluesy track, like “Playing With My Emotions.” Those two songs really reflected a lot of the live dynamic that Derek and I have, where we will often trade solos or call-and-response guitar lines.

I was definitely always pushing for us to get into more blues as that is such a big part of my roots and also Derek’s, so it’s very much a tribute to B.B. King.

You cover a wide range of styles on the album. A track like “So Long Savior” is a rollicking gospel number. Like many great gospel songs, the bleakness of the lyrics is in opposition to the spirit in which the message is delivered.

TEDESCHI It’s definitely a tribute to gospel music, but the acoustic feel is a little like Bukka White, where Derek plays a line and I sing it back. It is definitely rooted in the call-and-response of gospel music.

“La Di Da” has an interesting rhythmic pulse, and the solo on there is sublime. It is short, yet packs so much emotion and melody. Did you work out what you’d play beforehand?

TRUCKS That was just done live on the floor. Sometimes when you’re tracking, you think the track sounds really good, so I’m not going to leave a space for the solo, I’m just going to go for it, which does put quite a lot of pressure on me, because then I’m thinking that I really hope I don’t blow this, and we all have to start again. [laughs] 

It’s mildly intimidating. You really don’t want to fuck up.

One of the simplest, yet most effective songs is “I Can Feel You Smiling.” The slide solo on there is particularly sublime.

TRUCKS That’s one of my favorite tunes on the record. Again, it kind of played itself. It was another time where I thought I should just go for the solo as we were recording.

The other thing that can be intimidating is when you record a perfect track and leave a space for the solo; then there’s a whole world of pressure to make that solo count. It gives you a lot to live up to. [laughs]

TEDESCHI That is a really beautiful song. It definitely has a mixture of [Malagasy slide guitarist] D’Gary crossed with Dolly Parton. [laughs]

For the band, is the live experience more important than making records?

TRUCKS I think that is where our heads were for a long time. This band is incredible live. I do think that there is something very enjoyable about recording though, and I think that is almost a lost art.

There are times when people don’t spend the time to craft a really great record because they’re rushing to get back on the road. I think the only way you can make a lasting statement is by making great records.

I also think it limits a band if they aren’t creating the best record that they can. Your recorded music is your legacy. That’s what we have for all the great artists who are no longer with us.

As an artist, writing music and finding new things to say is really important. At a certain point, what you see with many acts is that they’re still playing the same songbook forever, and there’s only so much you can say.

The key point, though, is that whenever you bring new material in, it refreshes everything, gets everyone excited and inspired, and takes what we do to another level.

Order I Am the Moon (I. Crescent, II. Ascension, III. The Fall and IV. Farewell) here.

After a few minutes listening to some of Derek Trucks’ astounding slide work, two thoughts usually occur: “How the hell does he do that?” and “Hey, I’m gonna dig that old slide out and give this a go.”

While Derek can’t particularly help with the first question, he’s more than happy to supply the info that he believes you need to come to grips with the uniquely expressive art of slide guitar.

Here are ten of his tops tips for beginners…

1. Let Elmore James be your guide

“For electric slide, Elmore is definitely the entrance point. You could spend years just trying to delve into the nuances of his playing.”

2. Try it fingerstyle

“Definitely experiment with a fingerstyle approach. It gives you so much more control over the sound that you’re creating. 

"You can mute unwanted strings much more easily, and something that players new to slide often struggle with is controlling unwanted noise and notes.”

3. Choose open tunings over standard

“You should really explore open tunings. I started in standard, and I could get some of the stuff that I was hearing, but when somebody turned me on to open E, wow, man! That was like the keys to the kingdom!

“It was all the stuff that I’d been hearing right there. I went for open E over open G because I took a few lessons from a slide player who advised me to try open E. But open G sounds great as well.”

4. Take your string gauge up a notch

“I think going a little heavier makes sense. I use 11, 14, 17, 26, 36 and 46. It works well for me, and since I’m tuned to E, there is quite a bit of tension on some of the strings.”

5. Start with your action a little higher than usual. Once you’ve got the technique down, bring it down as low as it can go

“I think my action is actually pretty low for a slide player, but that’s just from years of doing it. It’s probably as low as you could get it and still play slide.

“For newer players who want to go for a lower action, I’d say that there’s nothing wrong with developing great touch from the outset. 

"Having said that, at the start a little bit of a higher action helps to get a cleaner sound.”

6. For pitch accuracy, trust your ears and get in the groove by listening to music that isn’t played on fretted instruments

“For me, getting accurate pitch has always just been about listening to what I was doing and identifying what was right and what was wrong. 

"I think the secret, if there is one, is to always listen to what you do.

“Make sure that you’re making a sound that you want to hear. Listening is always as important as practicing. Listening to music that isn’t played on a fretted instrument helps get you in the mindset.”

7. Put in your 10,000 hours

“I feel like I was really lucky that I came along at a time when there weren’t any cell phones, so nobody was recording my mistakes and I got the chance to develop out of the spotlight.

“I just played all the time and maybe it’s like that thing about putting in your 10,000 hours, where the more you do it, the better you get.

“The other thing you should do is record yourself and play it back. Listen for what doesn’t sound quite right.”

8. Find the slide that works for you

“You’ll have to experiment to find the slide that’s right for you. I started off on a metal slide playing an acoustic, but the first time I tried glass – a Coricidin medicine bottle – that was the sound I’d been looking for.

“I have my own signature model now. Everything about it is just right. It’s medicinal.” [laughs]

9. As on electric, so on acoustic

“Once you find the slide you like, use it regardless of whether you’re playing electric guitar or acoustic guitar. I use the same slide for everything.

“If I did use something different, it would be more of an experimental thing, but I virtually always use the same slide no matter what guitar I’m playing.”

10. Experiment, and never stop

“I still experiment with slide and standard guitar playing all the time, particularly when I hear a melody somewhere. I’ll try to figure out where it is on the neck.

“Of course, as soon as you think you’ve mastered one thing, something else starts to slip, so you have to go back and sort that out, so you never really master anything. All guitar playing is a work in progress.”

Browse the Tedeschi Trucks Band catalog here.

Derek Trucks is celebrated for his soulful, innovative slide guitar playing, which is characterized by his unique touch, highly refined tone and adventurous note choices.

The guitarist plugs straight into a cranked Fender-style tube amp for natural, organic-sounding gain, but an overdrive pedal can provide similar tones at more reasonable volume levels.

Most often, he uses the bridge pickup on his Gibson SG, softening the sound slightly by rolling back its tone control a little.

Derek is also a fingerstyle player, which lightens the attack of his tone further.

In this lesson, we’ll look at some of the elements of his signature slide playing approaches.

Like many slide players, Derek prefers open tunings (usually open E: low to high, E, B, E, G#, B, E), but the examples in this lesson are presented in standard tuning, for your convenience.

When playing slide, the most important thing is to achieve good intonation (pitch centering). This is done by positioning the slide directly over the fret, not behind it.

Another critical aspect of slide technique is suppressing unwanted notes. This is best done by wearing the slide on either your 2nd, 3rd (best choice) or 4th finger and lightly resting your 1st finger and any others that are behind the slide on the strings, to dampen unwanted sympathetic vibrations.

Use a light touch with both hands and be careful not to “clang” the slide against the frets.

Also, the fingers and palm of the pick hand may be used to mute unplayed strings.

Ex. 1 KEEP TRUCKIN’ ON

The first half of this phrase toggles between targeted chord tones at the 12th fret (E and B) and other E minor pentatonic scale tones at the 10th fret.

In bar 3, we do something similar one octave lower, on the D and G strings at the 9th and 7th frets.

Work on cultivating the vibratos in this example and in the remaining ones, striving for a wide, even shake.

Wiggle the slide the distance of one fret both below and above the target note, in a smooth, even oscillation.

Ex. 2 LINEAR SLIDES

The opening phrase of this example gets to the core of what makes Derek such a great slide player: His ability to seamlessly and accurately shift between notes up and down a single string using linear slides.

Playing this way makes you rely more on your ear and less on familiar visual scale shapes.

Here we’re exploring the A Mixolydian mode (A, B, C # , D, E, F # , G).

Ex. 3 TURN IT AROUND

This example is a stock V - IV - I blues turnaround lick in the key of E (B - A - E).

Remember to use a light touch, and keep the tip of your thumb anchored to the back of the neck roughly opposite your slide as you play, for added stability and control as you repeatedly shift the slide.

The open-string notes in bar 2 follow slide phrases, so you’ll need to slightly “flick” your slide off the string, slightly downward, much like a pull-off.

Ex. 4 SLIPPERY SLIDEY

We change to a slow 12 8 (triplet) blues feel here, in the key of G.

The first phrase is deceptively challenging. You’ll need to accurately nail the 13th-fret C note then quickly move the slide down to the 12th and 10th frets, pausing very briefly to sound the B and A notes.

The old adage of practicing slowly at first is particularly relevant here. 

Ex. 5 GRACE-NOTE SLIDES

Our final example, also played with a triplet feel and in the key of G, shows how to tastefully emulate Derek’s signature use of quick grace-note melodic embellishments.

Sometimes he will briefly and intentionally press the slide down onto the fretboard, instead of letting it “float” along the strings.

We highly recommend that you experiment with this technique to cop Derek’s unique touch.

Browse the Tedeschi Trucks Band catalog here.

Grammy-winning soul rockers Tedeschi Trucks Band – fronted by electric guitar luminaries Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi – have released the third instalment of their epic quadruple album/film series on YouTube.

Ahead of the I Am the Moon. III: the Fall digital and CD release this Friday, July 29th, fans can now stream the album-length companion film from director Alix Lambert.

Taking inspiration from the “Romeo and Juliet of the East” Layla and Majnun poetry, The Fall continues I Am The Moon's themes of passion and despair, with singers/guitarists Susan Tedeschi and Mike Mattison taking the songwriting lead along with keyboardist/singer Gabe Dixon.

The Fall begins with "the vivid hurt and explicit challenge of "Somehow," an easy-rolling groove that soon turns into full-blown soul power," notes David Fricke in his bio notes.

"How many times will you walk away?/How many times is the price I pay too high?" muses Tedeschi in the song’s opening lines…

Appearing in four regular instalments, the I Am the Moon album and film releases have had fans on the edge of their seats in recent months as Tedeschi Trucks Band drip-fed each part in sequence.

Following the release of I Am the Moon: I. Crescent on June 3rd, I Am the Moon: II. Ascension dropped four weeks later on July 1st.

Similarly, this Friday’s release comes a further four weeks on, with the final/fourth part completing the set on August 26th in the form of I Am the Moon: IV. Farewell.

Stay tuned to the Tedeschi Trucks Band YouTube channel for the final film premiere on August 23rd.

Pre-order I Am the Moon: III. The Fall here.

With the pandemic having forced many artists off the road and into the studio we have seen a steady stream of inspired ‘lockdown albums’ in recent months.

And the Tedeschi Trucks Band are no exception. Far from it. Their recent announcement of a substantial quadruple album release titled I Am the Moon currently has fans on the edge of their seats.

Comprising 24 songs spread over four albums, the band’s latest studio project is their most ambitious to date, with Susan Tedeschi reaching for new musical heights alongside slide phenom Derek Trucks.

Arranged into four parts, the first instalment of I Am the Moon will appear as I Am The Moon: I. Crescent on June 3. 

The remaining parts are scheduled to land every four weeks thereafter, as follows: I Am The Moon: II. Ascension on July 1; I Am The Moon: III. The Fall on July 29; and I Am The Moon: IV. Farewell on August 26.

Check out the cool artwork below...

With over two hours of music in the can the idea for a series of four distinct releases arose when, "We started thinking of records we love," recalled Trucks. 

Citing Jimi Hendrix’s groundbreaking 1967 album Axis: Bold as Love as a major source of inspiration the guitarist points out that, “It’s 36 minutes long,” adding, “That’s the way to digest a record.”

In order to allow fans the opportunity to soak up and reflect on I Am the Moon together, a series of companion films directed by Alix Lambert will be unveiled a few days prior to each album release.

You can keep a lookout for those on the Tedeschi Trucks Band YouTube channel.            

Following a suggestion by vocalist Mike Mattison some two year ago, the Tedeschi Trucks Band were inspired to create a fresh interpretation of Nizami Ganjavi’s poem, Layla & Majnun – the same work that inspired the title of Derek and the Dominos’ Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs.

Last year, the Tedeschi Trucks band released a live performace of Clapton's album titled Layla Revisited (Live at Lockn'). Nevertheless, "You always want to do something bigger and thematic,” reflected Trucks. “This is the first time it happened naturally."

Pre-order I Am The Moon: I. Crescent here.

A limited-edition 180g black vinyl Deluxe Box Set featuring all four albums will be available September 9.

Luther Dickinson is always inspirational as a player and as a person. Listening to him makes you want to play better, sound better and be kinder. His benevolent spirit shines through in the music, lyrics, and vocals, regardless of the project.

Constantly sought out, he has been consistently prolific like few others since his primary vessel, the North Mississippi Allstars, started tearing up juke joints a quarter century ago.

Dickinson is an eager collaborator. He teamed up with Robert Randolph for The Word, and spent a few years soaring with Rich Robinson in the Black Crowes. He’s produced Samantha Fish, Otha Turner and the Honey Island Swamp Band.

Wherever he goes, the tones are true and he sounds truly authentic playing an array of roots music, from Creole funk to his forte, Hill Country blues guitar.

Dickinson’s got chops boucoup, but the heart of his appeal is a boatful of soul in every note, and it’s in full effect on the Allstars’ lucky 13th album, Set Sail (New West).

Co-captain Cody Dickinson provides a steady keel on the skins as always, and the other half of the crew is new since 2019’s Grammy-nominated Up and Rolling. Bassist Jesse Williams succeeds Carl Dufrene, who passed away in 2020. Lamar Williams Jr., son of Allman Brothers bassist Lamar Williams, hopped aboard to lend his expressive voice to the chorus that also includes Memphis R&B legend William Bell.

Dickinson delivers some of the slinkiest slide playing of his fruitful career on the epic title track, which sets a mystical course from the get go.

Laced with lovely strings and horns, “Set Sail Part II” takes the journey further out midway through the album’s seamless flow.

The angelic centerpiece “Didn’t We Have a Time” has an introduction of cascading guitar-peggios that sounds like opening heaven’s gate. Listen to its soothing pulse, wistful lyrics and melody and try not to get misty.

The counterbalance to all the soul searching is a gang of bangin’ house parties taking place along the Allstars’ adventure.

Multi-talented Cody contributes the entire rhythm section, including Nile Rodgers–like funk guitar on “See the Moon.”

Luther brings a Crescent City flare to the syncopated staccato riff bouncing throughout “Juicy Juice.”

The tribal tale “Rabbit Foot” summons a spooky cosmic swamp vibe that brings Papa Mali’s version of Isaac Hayes’ “Do Your Thing” to mind.

Luther brought mostly new instruments onboard for what he described as a “transitional record.” He spoke to us upon an early return from another family affair, the Allman Family Revival tour, which had its last four West Coast dates rescheduled to late February due to health and safety protocols.

How did you wind up with such a soulful sound on Set Sail?

It’s hard to know where you stand when the world is constantly moving underneath your feet. We’ve all had time to do some evaluation, and I wanted to leave a message in the music for my daughters in case they ever want to understand where I stood.

Cody, Jesse and I got zoned in on tour right before the pandemic hit. We were hot, and we kept stoking that fire by working on instrumental stuff, flipping files back and forth during quarantine.

Lamar had joined us on the very last night in Atlanta, so Set Sail is a cool extension of where our road trip had ended. I was listening hard to Prince and James Brown, as well as Daft Punk and Tame Impala. Lamar’s vocals accentuated the soul and took it to a whole new level. Luckily, the lyrics were almost done. I’d been working on them for years.

I was also writing the score for a documentary about American terrorist Eric Robert Rudolph called Onward Christian Soldier. That’s where I learned how to improvise to a click track and let the music sort of shape itself until there was something happening.

I grew up trying to write songs, so this way of creating music for film into Apple Logic made my eyes open wide.

How did you develop the two-part title track?

Another big influence was the live footage on YouTube of Bill Withers where he’s on acoustic guitar and the backing band is playing super quiet, but funky and intense. That inspired me, and I got a Baxendale-converted Harmony nylon-string that literally took my breath away when I opened the box.

Playing nylon-string is new to me, and that’s now my favorite guitar. It’s on almost every song and was the genesis of each song. I sat with that Harmony and the lyric book and worked out the arrangements, singing a scratch vocal along to a click track.

On the electric side, I came to a realization. After a lifetime of trying to match amp tremolos to the timing of the track, I recorded direct so I could set the tremolo in Logic to match the tempo. Now it sits right in the groove.

I re-amped the guitar signal by sending it out to my Category 5 amps to get tube tones. We developed a combo called the LD20 and another one that’s more like a little Champ. I use the larger one for cleaner tones and push the smaller one for dirtier tones. Onstage I’ll split the signal to both, often using bigger amps.

There’s a more powerful Cat 5 LD50 head that has an expression pedal for dialing in the tremolo speed, plus an even more powerful LD100, as well as a Lizzys 100-watter that I’ll use in a large venue. I’m done with half-stacks and use 2x12 cabinets now.

In the studio, I used a Coles 4038 ribbon mic on the Harmony nylon-string most of the time, and I’d use Coles to mic amps as well. The electric guitar story on “Set Sail” is kind of hilarious.

How so?

Well for starters, the song is in the key of Bb, which is great for vocals but can be weird on guitar. I didn’t feel like using a capo, so I grabbed my cheap Hondo black Strat-style guitar, like the one Ad-Rock [Adam Horovitz] uses in the Beastie Boys, put it in Spanish G tuning and raised everything a step and a half.

I didn’t want to tune any other guitars up that high. I figured I’d throw a scratch track down to fill up some space, but I was so inspired doing that slide solo and the outro on “Part II.”

My daughter was running around behind me, and following the flow of her spirit always helps me out creatively. It’s my favorite solo I’ve ever recorded.

Cutting that slide track was so casual, quick and fun, but it took me a week to clean up the signal from those cheap single-coil pickups full of buzzing and clicking. Those swells aren’t from a volume pedal, those are all the fades I had to edit in because the attack was so noisy.

The playing is wonderfully out of the box, with lots of interesting phrases and some slippery slide glissandos.

Thinking about the guitar fretboard horizontally can be hipper than thinking about it vertically, because the melody is there. It gives the phrasing a vocal quality like Sacred Steel, as well as players like Fred McDowell, Blind Willie Johnson, George Harrison and like-minded fingerstylist Robby Krieger.

If you can connect your ear and your mind with your heart and your hand playing intervals on one or two strings, then the whole guitar just kind of unlocks itself. It’s easy to think in terms of chords and inversions, scales and positions, but really, it’s all on one string, be it slide or fretting with fingers.

And I’m not sure if there’s much on “Set Sail,” but I’m addicted to playing behind the slide, letting fretted notes pop out to provide something solid you can hang your hat on amidst all the squirrelly slide microtones.

How’d you create the howling swells on the lead guitar track for “Outside”?

 I’m actually just playing with feedback. That’s from a guitar I helped design with Gibson that they call a 330L, which is a fully hollow, long-scale guitar with humbuckers.

It’s a bad mofo for feedback, man. I’m just leaning into the amp, playing very soft and letting the swells blossom not quite all the way, right on the edge. I’ve developed that hollowbody slide sound over my whole career. It’s like Fred McDowell doing Jimi Hendrix whammy bar.

But that throaty, midrange neck pickup sound has literally turned on me. I’ve played loud so long, with so much sustained feedback around 200Hz, that it literally hurts my ears. I can’t take that frequency anymore.

I’ve been changing up my tone for that and other reasons. A lot of the other tones on the record stem from the fact that I’ve fallen in love with the sound of Lollar’s Regal pickups. Those wide-range-style pickups are so clean, chimey, and bell-like that you can hear each note in every chord. It’s such a pretty tone, like a gold foil, but a little more civilized. That is my new sound.

How’d you get so into this new tone?

Steve Selvidge, who plays with the Hold Steady, gave me a Strat-style guitar we call the Godson that he designed using a pair of Lollar Regals, and it turned me out! It’s all over Set Sail.

During quarantine, my friend Chris Roberts and I started making instruments we call Vibratone Guitars with those Lollar Regals. That wide-range sound is based on Fender’s big, beautiful humbucker [from the ’72 Tele Deluxe].

I had a Mexican Fender Thinline that I put Regals in as well, and that’s the platform for one of the Vibratone guitars we’re making. I’ll be taking these guitars on the road as well.

Set Sail represents the transition from my former sound of a hollow Gibson with either P-90s or humbuckers, to this cleaner, chimey tone heard on tunes like “Didn’t We Have a Time.”

That’s in Spanish Bb tuning as well. The way Paul Westerberg uses open G tuning is genius, and that intro was definitely inspired by him. Being tuned up to Bb is similar to when Keith Richards or Robert Johnson would tune to Spanish G and capo up a few frets.

Your father [Jim Dickinson] produced Westerberg, worked with Richards, and introduced you to so many fantastic musicians that schooled you on guitar. You mention on the album how you’re now of similar age to many of them then, and the importance of handing wisdom down. How are you doing that, and who are your favorite young players picking it up?

I’ll start with peers that are a few years younger than me. Colonel Bruce Hampton used to say that Derek Trucks was of the angel race, and my dad would say that [Muscle Shoals keyboardist] Spooner Oldham is an angel.

So I’m a believer in the angel race of humans. But if Derek is an angel, then Duane Betts is a king among men. He knows his dad’s [Dickey Betts] style, he knows Duane [Allman]’s style, and he’s my favorite player to hear do the Jerry Garcia style as well. When he goes into a Dead thing, he’s got such beautiful touch that makes it all his own.

I’d like to mention that this year marks the 10th anniversary of the Roots Rock Revival camp we started with [the late Allman Brothers Band drummer] Butch Trucks. That’s where Brandon “Taz” Niederauer was discovered. He’s got an old soul. He was young when he started, but he’s like a founding member, and I’d be happy if he went on to teach there and carry on that legacy.

Lara Cwass, David Sessions and William Bartumioli are fantastic young players from Roots Rock Revival that have taught me a thing or two. The fire of youth is the fuel for rock and roll, and playing multigenerational music helps keep the fire under your ass.

Asher Belsky is another promising teenage player coming up out on the West Coast. There are so many great guitar players in the younger generation.

It’s exciting! The future of roots rock is in good hands.

Purchase Set Sail here.

On this day, in 1944, blues guitar phenom Johnny Winter was born in Beaumont, Texas. 

Famed the world over for his fiery, virtuosic technique and soulful, strident tone (often courtesy of a Gibson Firebird) he kicked off his decades-long recording career at just 15 years of age.

Honoring his late brother’s musical genius, Edgar Winter will be releasing a tribute album titled Brother Johnny on April 15 via Quarto Valley Records.

Curated by Edgar Winter and producer Ross Hogarth, Brother Johnny retraces the guitarist’s career and evolution as one of the greatest blues artists the world has ever known.

Boasting a stellar line-up of musicians including Joe Bonamassa, Robben Ford, Billy Gibbons, Keb’ Mo’, Steve Lukather, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Derek Trucks, Joe Walsh and Phil X, the album has already attracted much excitement from reviewers. (Word is, it rocks!)

Known for his love of the Rolling Stones, Johnny Winter’s catalog includes covers of “Jumpin' Jack Flash" (from 1971’s Live Johnny Winter And); “Silver Train" and "Let It Bleed" (from 1973’s Still Alive and Well); and “Stray Cat Blues” (from 1974’s Saints & Sinners.)

And in this classic clip from the BBC live music television show The Old Grey Whistle Test, Johnny Winter is on fire as he blazes through a high-octane performance of the Stones’ “Jumpin' Jack Flash" alongside Tin House guitarist Floyd Radford.

Listening to the recording, it’s interesting to be able to clearly hear the differences in sound and compare notes between Johnny Winter’s Gibson Firebird V pickups and the standard/full-size humbuckers of Radford’s Gibson ES-355.

Both are great examples of benchmark blues rock guitar tone.

Pre-order Brother Johnny by Edgar Winter here.

Edgar Winter has unveiled the second single – "Mean Town Blues" – from his forthcoming Brother Johnny album. 

Available via Quarto Valley Records, the new LP is due to be released on April 15 this year and features a stellar line-up of guest musicians.

Among those paying tribute to the late, great bluesman on Brother Johnny are Robben Ford, Billy Gibbons, Keb’ Mo’, Steve Lukather, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Derek Trucks, Joe Walsh and Phil X.

The new single, “Mean Town Blues,” features Joe Bonamassa on slide guitar, Sean Hurley on bass, and Gregg Bissonette on drums.

“To me, this is one of the most important tracks on the album,” said Edgar Winter, “and probably the most difficult to replicate the original feel on.

“I wanted only guitar, bass, and drums, exactly like Johnny’s original blues trio. But I didn’t know of anyone out there who naturally played slide the way Johnny did.

“I thought Joe Bonamassa did such an incredible job with Johnny’s regular guitar style, I wonder if he could do the same thing with the slide? And amazingly, he did it!”

Curated by Edgar Winter and producer Ross Hogarth, Brother Johnny is a sonic celebration of one of the greatest electric blues guitar players in music history.

Retracing Johnny Winter’s evolution as a guitarist, this epic 17-track romp through the years is a touching homage from one brother to another.

Commenting on the song “Mean Town Blues” Edgar Winter said: “If there’s one song that best epitomizes and brings all those elements together to represent the many aspects of who Johnny was in the early days, that song would have to be “Mean Town Blues.”

“Every time I hear it, I think, now that’s Real Johnny Winter. It just captures the essence of everything he was.”

Stream the “Mean Town Blues” single here.

Pre-order Brother Johnny by Edgar Winter here.

Early blues guitar players established techniques, chords and song structures that remain popular today. And while many of the chords and scales owe a debt to earlier forebears, over the decades many artists have put their own stamp on the blues.

Here are some essential pointers when it comes to mastering the basics...

Still Got the Blues Scale?

These four scale shapes are essential for any guitarist looking to expand their arsenal of blues licks. Once you’ve learned them, try playing them all over the fretboard in as many different keys as you can.

Open All Hours

Try out these three open tunings as used by some modern slide guitar greats…

Jack White: Open A
The White Stripes | “Seven Nation Army”

One of the biggest songs of its time saw guitarist Jack White’s guitar tuned to open A. You can play the mega-easy main riff in any tuning – it’s in the chorus where the open tuning comes into its own. Those slide guitar lines wouldn’t be possible in standard.

Derek Trucks: Open E
The Derek Trucks Band | “Sweet Inspiration”

Revered as perhaps the finest slide player of his generation, Trucks’ go-to tuning is open E. One of his tricks is to press down with his slide so you effectively fret the notes. He doesn’t do it all the time but it’s worth experimenting.

Dan Auerbach: Open G
The Black Keys | “Black Door” 

A keen slide-man, the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach demonstrates once again why open tunings are so vital. It’s simply not possible to slide smoothly between chords unless your guitar is tuned to an open voicing of some kind.

Blue Moods

Try these chord shapes for better blues jams…

A7

This simplified version of an ‘E7 shape’ barre chord is great for the sparser sounds of jazz-blues.

D9

The tension in dominant 9th chords makes this shape a great choice for funk grooves and blues jams.

E7

This 7th chord shape is frequently found in fingerstyle folk and blues. It sounds great plugged in or acoustic.

BbDIM7

On its own this diminished 7th chord is pretty out there. As a passing chord between A7 and Bm7 it sounds sophisticated.

BM7

Another simplified barre chord, this minor 7th voicing has a sparser sound, similar to our A7 chord.

Looking for more on essential blues guitar technique? Click here.

Available on CD, vinyl and digitally across all platforms from April 15, Edgar Winter’s talent-packed new album, Brother Johnny, pays tribute to his Firebird-toting blues brother – the late, great Johnny Winter (1944-2014) – with a collection of songs featuring some of the biggest names in the guitar world.

A legend among legends, Johnny Winter’s continued reverence has prompted a sizeable host of well-known guitar players to contribute to the recording. Several years in the making this 17-track collection (which includes two original numbers penned by Edgar Winter) was curated with producer Ross Hogarth in order to demonstrate Johnny Winter’s storied evolution as an artist.

“Many people immediately started trying to convince me to do a Johnny Winter tribute album,” said Edgar, reflecting on the days following his brother’s passing back in 2014. “But I was totally devastated, and the timing just didn't feel right to me. It wasn’t until after I completed the Rock ‘N’ Blues Fest, a tour we were meant to do together with our respective bands, that the idea of a tribute record started to take form.

“There was such an overwhelming outpouring of love and respect for Johnny, I began to realise it was not just business people sensing an opportunity here; it was Johnny's true, loyal, and devoted fans and our fellow musicians, many of whom are on this record, who wanted to see this happen as well.”

Among those featured on Brother Johnny include electric guitar luminaries Joe Bonamassa, Robben Ford, Billy Gibbons, Warren Haynes, Steve Lukather, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Derek Trucks, Joe Walsh, and Phil X.

Kicking off the album’s release Quarto Valley Records has unveiled the “Johnny B. Goode” single – a song that remained in Johnny Winter’s setlist up until the end. Vocals are provided by Winter and Joe Walsh while fellow Texan, John Mellencamp guitarist David Grissom, delivers a dynamite performance of Chuck Berry's timeless rock ‘n’ roll masterpiece.

We recently asked some of the world's top guitar players to choose their favorite solos, albeit with one catch: They had to refrain from the obvious. No Hendrix. No Clapton. No Gilmour, et cetera.

Here’s what Wilco’s electric guitar hero Nels Cline had to say…

1) Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown | “Boogie Uproar” single

GUITARIST: Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown

“Maybe this is cheating, because the phenomenal jump blues wizard plays something like three solos here, and each one is amazing. Obviously coming out of the T-Bone Walker vocabulary, and recorded well before the blues was imitated/subsumed by some of the biggies, Gatemouth infuses his playing with extra fire and facility while adding a dollop of humor along the way (throwing in the ‘Wedding March,’ for example). He seems to be rather overlooked, so here he is in his youthful glory.”

2) Otis Rush | “All Your Love (I Miss Loving)” single

GUITARIST: Otis Rush

“Another blues great who seems overlooked to me at this point in time and whose searing, riveting style obviously had a major impact on the biggies, left-handed wonder Otis Rush, on this monster classic from 1958, stuns me in the very first seconds of this song. Is the intro a solo? Could be. It is still some of the boldest, most stunning guitar I have ever heard.

“Then there is the instrumental break — the classic minor triad arpeggios that could also be one of the greatest solo/riff moments in musical history. But then Otis Rush actually solos, and one can hear the template for blues-based electric guitar for pretty much the entire ’60s to early ’70s and beyond. Like a kind and knowing blow to the heart, Otis Rush captivates me every time I hear this, embodying both the memory of joy and the immediacy of pain.”

3) Tedeschi Trucks Band | “Until You Remember” from 'Revelator'

GUITARIST: Derek Trucks

“This track also has more than one guitar solo. The first one is guitar prodigy Derek Trucks assaying the song’s melody in his inimitable and always astonishing slide style, and the second comes during the song’s coda. I can’t think of many (any?) guitar solos that give me gooseflesh and bring tears to my eyes as often as Derek Trucks’ slide solos do, and every time I hear his playing during the coda of this song, I lose it. Sure, Derek has done a lot of such mind-bending/heart-rending solos, and we all know that he is one of the all-time greats. But this solo just slays me, makes me glad to be alive and able to feel.”

Get Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown’s Boogie Uproar – The Complete Aladdin / Peacock Singles As & Bs 1947-1961 here.

Get the Otis Rush Singles Collection here.

Get the Revelator album by the Tedeschi Trucks Band here.

Derek Trucks’ playing and gear choices are truly judicious. Though he has a signature Gibson SG, live he typically prefers his Gibson Custom Dickey Betts SG, aged by Tom Murphy. That it was a gift from Duane Allman’s daughter lends it a sentimental value and a sense of familial connection.

With his SG and a glass Dunlop slide, he goes straight into his Alessandro custom head and cabs and a Fender Super Reverb. Trucks’ fingerpicking slide style naturally attenuates some of his amp’s gnarly treble, but he’ll constantly work his volume and tone pots in search of the sweet spots. It’s all about feel.

Here are three of the Tedeschi Trucks man’s top axes…

Gibson Custom Dickey Betts SG Artist Proof #4

This guitar is based on a 1961 Gibson SG that belonged to Dickey Betts but was at one point played by Duane Allman. “It was like brother to brother,” Trucks says of the original guitar.

“This is Artist Proof number four. Duane’s daughter, Galadrielle, gave this to me when they copied the SG. They relic’d the heck out of it. It’s an extremely light SG. All of them are. I’ve noticed more and more that if you pick up four or five Les Pauls, it’s usually the light one that’s going to sound the best. So if we’re ever looking for a guitar, that’s one of the things we check out.

“We’ve been messing with the pickups on this one quite a bit, and maybe the volume pots were changed too. We had a pair of PAFs in there for a while, and a friend of ours, Thomas Nilson, wound these pickups. They’re based on a guitar I played called Spot, a ’59 Les Paul [once owned by Joe Bonamassa]. They are unwaxed, unpotted pickups.

 “This has been my main guitar since I got it. I did those last three or four years in the Allman Brothers with it – all those final shows – so it’s kinda been the only guitar I’ve played since I got it. I’ve got a Gibson signature model that I’ve played on and off, and for a long time that was the backup guitar I’d use. I also use this guitar in the studio. There is something about it – I can’t put it down. It feels better that this is a gift. I’m into that. And the guitar has a little history to it.”

Gibson Custom Dickey Betts SG Artist Series

“We wanted a great backup [for the Artist Proof guitar], so we begged Gibson to make another one, and they came around,” Trucks says. “With those guitars, they do a very strict run, and that’s that, so we had to ask them a few times. They even relic’d the guitar the same, with the wear on the neck, but it’s just a little bit of a different finish, and it’s a heavier guitar. I don’t play it as much, that’s for sure. If I break a string [on his Gibson Custom Dickey Betts SG Artist Proof #4], I’ll play this guitar for however long it takes to change a string.”

Trucks says the difference between this electric guitar and the Artist Proof model comes down to feel and tone. “It’s funny,” he notes, “but as similar as they are, they feel and sound entirely different. “I’m always messing with the volume and tone. If it sounds good, the tone will stay put, unless I’m going for an effect, like rolling all of it off and just getting that ‘woman tone,’ or whatever. But I mess with the volume pot quite a bit, and that’s where a lot of the swells and dynamics come from. The top end just never seems to go fully away, which is nice.

It’s funny: So many years into playing an SG and I still have to remind myself: Wait. It’s better at seven-and-a-half or eight than it is diming it. You just think, It’s time to go – floor it! [laughs] Flooring it is eight. Same with the amp. Some nights, the band’s getting loud and you keep turning it up and it’s like, This isn’t helping. It’s better to dial it back. Once you lose that definition and point, you’re just adding to the mud and not getting anything in return. Sometimes when you’re dealing with volume, less is more.”

Silvertone Tuxedo

“This is a fun guitar,” enthuses Trucks. “I capo it at the fifth fret and use it in the studio occasionally. I play it on that tune ‘Down in the Flood’ [from the Derek Trucks Band’s 2009 album, Already Free]. I couldn’t tell you what model it is, but the serial number is X87242. I want to say it’s from the mid ’60s.

“It’s a great-sounding guitar. It’s a slide machine. It’s kind of short scale, but it’s got a great thing going on. I got it maybe 15 years ago – I think I paid about $500 for it. It’s got a huge neck. Playing SGs, I usually like necks that are thin and flat, but there’s something about this guitar. It just makes me want to play ‘porch music.’ [laughs] It feels like a good blues-folk guitar, you know? I love the sound of it, especially quiet. When you crank it up, it’s a pretty gnarly-sounding guitar. It barks.”

Check out the awesome range of Gibson SG Standards – including the SG Standard '61 in Vintage Cherry – available at Guitar Center here.

There comes a time in every guitarist's development when they take an interest in learning slide guitar. It's one of the more unique sounds in the world of guitar, and if you want to make the most of this incredible technique, you'll need one of the best guitar slides.

The classic sustain and tone that distinguishes slide from any other type of guitar sound is also equally unique in how it is achieved. By running a cylinder made from glass, metal - or any other material for that matter - over the strings of our guitars, we can achieve an incredible sound with a smooth, vocal-like quality, and add another voice to our guitar repertoire.

From the outset a slide may feel cumbersome and awkward, which is why equipping yourself with one of the best slides that is comfortable and ergonomic is so crucial – it really can be the difference between great slide tone and almost-unlistenable noise.

There are plenty of different styles of slide, from classic bottle necks, to metal slides that offer a lighter, brighter feel and sound. So whether you’re just starting your slide journey and looking for the best place to set off, or if you’re in the market to upgrade, read on to find the best slides around.

My top picks

Best overall

Joey Landreth is arguably the most exciting new slide guitar player to emerge in recent years. His singing, soulful lead lines, smooth vibrato, and technical prowess are quite something to behold and elevate the art of slide guitar to a whole new level - what is it with the surname Landreth that makes you a slide god?

One thing that helps Joey achieve those soaring tones is his signature Rock Slide - well, that and an insane amount of practice. Rock Slide sure know a thing or two about guitar slides - having produced them since 1999, with many shapes and materials available. Landreth opted for a modified version of the standard small brass slide, elongating it to 2 ⅛". It also features a unique cut-out on the side, which gives your other finger somewhere to rest, making the slide more comfortable and stable.

The increased mass at the tip of the slide also provides enhanced sustain and better balance. So if you are looking for a super versatile, great-sounding, and highly comfortable slide, then look no further than the Rock Slide Joey Landreth Signature Brass Slide.

Best budget

Okay, we know slide guitar isn't exactly easy and the thought of dropping $30 on an expensive bottleneck only to find out it's not for you doesn't make financial sense. Well, luckily, there are more cheap slide options out there than you can shake a stick at, but the Fender Standard steel slide would be our go-to.

This basic steel slide offers a bright attack with plenty of sustain and is brilliant for use on electric guitar. The steel construction means it's robust and durable - and unlike glass, there is no need to worry if you drop it.

If you fancy giving slide ago and need something to get you started, this is probably the best option out there for you.

Best for electric

It's hard to talk about slide guitar and not mention Derek Trucks. What this man can achieve with a glass slide and a Gibson SG is nothing short of magical - for reference, check out the live rendition of Midnight in Harlem by the Tedeschi Trucks Band to see a slide masterclass in action.

For the most part, Trucks can be seen putting a traditional glass slide through its paces, and he isn't often seen without his trusty Dunlop Signature slide on his ring finger.

This glass slide is based on a "medicine bottle" design, with a weighted closed end for increased sustain. Glass provides a soft, smooth tone that is less harsh when compared to brass or chrome. However, it has to be said that this is a rather large slide, so it may not be great for skinny fingers.

Best for acoustic

Taylor Guitars isn't just known for their insanely beautiful looking- and sounding - guitars, but also their environmental endeavors. The Ebony Project set up by Bob Taylor in 2011 saw Taylor Guitars become co-owners of an Ebony mill in Cameroon in an effort to make using this highly prized wood on their guitars more sustainable.

As part of these efforts, Taylor doesn't want to waste a single piece of this gorgeous dark wood if they don't have to, and therefore makes slides out of offcuts of the ebony that would typically be used on the fingerboards or bridges of these stunning guitars - they also make coasters from the wood that is removed from the soundhole. Although, we aren't here to talk about coasters…

As far as tone goes, the ebony slide offers the warmest tone out of all the entries on this list and pairs very nicely with the bright attack of a Taylor guitar. That said, it has nowhere near the amount of sustain found on a glass or metal option.

Best for beginners

If you're just getting started playing slide guitar, then the Ernie Ball Comfort Slide is an excellent option. It provides comfortable performance at a reasonable price point, and is available in three different sizes.

The main benefit to beginners of this EB slide is that soft inner sleeve which grips your finger, providing stable performance. Whereas traditional slides can move around if they don't fit well, the Ernie Ball Comfort Slide isn't going anywhere.

Despite the very modern look, it's actually made out of machine-turned brass, a traditional material for guitar slides. This ensures it delivers a warm sound to your guitar playing, excelling with both electric and acoustic guitars.

Best for blues

So far, we have covered all the main slide food groups - brass, chrome, glass and even wood, and so naturally, the next logical step would be porcelain. If glass slides are smooth and metal is bright, then the porcelain option is the perfect middle ground.

The added weight of a porcelain slide gives you an intense sustain perfect for long-held notes. At the same time, the quick attack makes it a great option for electric players looking to add a new sonic flavor to their playing.

The Dunlop Boneyard slide is a reasonably chunky ceramic slide used by the Aerosmith axeman, and as you'd expect, it generates a tone all of its own. Considering it's relatively low cost, we highly recommend picking up a porcelain slide if you haven't tried one. They are a lot of fun - just don't drop it.

Also consider

For me, the slides above should have most bases covered. That said, I appreciate there's no one size fits all option here, so if you didn't find what you were looking for up to now, here are some more options for your consideration.

How to choose

When it comes to buying a slide, there are a few things you need to consider to ensure you get the most out of your new toy. Below you'll find the answers to a few of the most common questions regarding buying your first guitar slide.

1. Size

This is the one area that only you will be able to tell, as it comes down to how big your fingers are. Most people use their pinky or ring fingers for slide playing, as this allows you to continue playing conventionally with your index and middle fingers. The fit should be pretty snug, whilst remaining comfortable, which means you have plenty of control.

Unlike the majority of guitar products that have standard units of measurements, slides are a little less consistent, with some measuring in mm, whilst others opt for ring sizing – so you may need to measure your fingers to find the best fit.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that depending on the material, certain slides may feel chunkier, for example glass slides are often thicker than their metal counterparts. If you have small hands, a big chunky slide may feel cumbersome.

2. Material

The material of the slide is a very important consideration. Whichever you choose will significantly impact the tone you get out of the slide. Generally speaking, glass will give you a smooth tone.

In contrast, metal slides offer a brighter and more immediate attack. While Ceramic slides sit somewhere in the middle of glass and metal and are thought to be the best of both worlds. Wooden slides - like the Taylor option above - offer a mellow, muted response.

3. Weight

Heavier slides will generally be a little more challenging to manoeuvre, but they will typically have more sustain. A lighter slide will be easier to move, but there is a tradeoff in the sustain, so you may need to find a balance between the two that works for you. If we had to recommend, we would always say to go with comfort first, because it doesn’t matter how much sustain a slide has if you’re struggling to move it around. After all, you can always build up to heavier slides with practice.

Many of the best slides on the market have a weighted end, providing the optimal sustain while keeping overall weight down, which means comfortability is maintained without sacrificing tone, though these will typically be more expensive.

FAQs

How we test

Here at Guitar Player, our team has been using guitar slides for a long time, whether that's testing them for our guides or just when we're playing in our own bands. With a huge number of years using guitar slides in real-world scenarios, you know you can rely on our recommendations.

For a guitar slide to make it into our guides, it needs to be available in a few different sizes. Guitar slides are a very personal thing when it comes to fitting, and because everyone's fingers are different, our first port of call is to ensure the slide in question comes in a variety of sizes, and that we're able to find a size that sits comfortably. It's probably the key factor in what makes a slide great to play, which is why we look at it first.

Next we'll think about the weight of the slide. Again, this is a very personal thing as some guitarists like a light weight and others prefer something with a little more heft. Some slides are also heavier on one end than the other, so this is another key consideration when looking at the best guitar slides.

Finally, we'll look at the material and its effect on the guitar's tone. Different materials have different characteristics, but as to whether or not they're good, that's entirely in the ear of the beholder. Whilst we can remark whether a slide sounds warm or bright, we'll refrain from passing any judgment, instead aiming to provide a clear insight into how it sounds.

Read more on how we test gear and services at Guitar Player.

Related buying guides

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• Peruse our guide to the best Martin guitars
• These are the best Taylor guitars
• Sound smooth with the best Jazz guitars
• Plug in with one of the best guitar cables
• Get the best of both worlds with the best acoustic-electric guitars
• These are the best acoustic guitar strings

As front-woman for the Tedeschi Trucks Band, Susan Tedeschi mines the singular vein of potent blues she became famous for as a solo artist in the late ‘90s. Here are five reasons why she remains a guitar-playing legend…

1. Diversity

Freely mixing the blues with R&B and gospel influences, she has integrated the genre’s diverse strains into a fluid and powerful amalgam of fiery electric guitar work and impassioned vocals.

2. Early Starter

Born and raised in the Boston suburb of Norwell, Tedeschi was influenced by the Mississippi John Hurt and Lightnin’ Hopkins records in her dad’s vinyl collection and the gospel music of the black Baptist churches she attended. She wrote her first songs at 13 before studying at the Berklee College of Music and launching her own band in ’91.

3. Self-Belief

After years of fine-tuning the Susan Tedeschi Band, she burst onto the scene in ‘98 with her major-label debut, Just Won’t Burn. The album earned rave reviews and blazed a trail for a new breed of young female blues artists.

4. Touring

The success of Just Won’t Burn earned her spots on Lilith Fair and opening slots for the likes of B.B. King and the Allman Brothers Band – where she met the group’s slide guitarist, Derek Trucks. The two married in ’01 and soon began touring as the Soul Stew Revival.

5. Originality

In ’10, the couple formed the Tedeschi Trucks Band, where Tedeschi puts her passionate, Janis Joplin-like vocal style and beefy Telecaster tones in the service of the group’s original compositions.

Buy Just Won't Burn by Susan Tedeschi here.

Tedeschi Trucks Band have announced Layla Revisited (Live At LOCKN'), a recording of the band's one-off live performance of Derek & The Dominos' Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs in its entirety.

With the help of Phish's Trey Anastasio and Doyle Bramhall II, the band tackled the classic blues-rock opus at the LOCKN' Festival in Arrington, Virginia on August 24, 2019.

You can check out an excerpt from the performance, “Why Does Love Got To Be So Sad,” below.

Though the live performance closed with "Layla," Layla Revisited ends with Tedeschi and Trucks' unaccompanied studio version of “Thorn Tree In The Garden.” 

“By the time that I started playing guitar, the sound of Duane Allman’s slide was almost an obsession,” Trucks said of Layla. “His playing on Layla is still one of the high-water marks for me. 

"The spirit, the joy, the recklessness, and the inevitability of it. My dad would play that record for me and my brother to fall asleep to and further sear it into my DNA.”

You can check out the cover art and track list of Layla Revisited (Live At LOCKN') below.

Tedeschi Trucks Band – Layla Revisited (Live At LOCKN'):

1. I Looked Away
2. Bell Bottom Blues
3. Keep On Growing
4. Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out
5. I Am Yours
6. Anyday
7. Key To The Highway
8. Tell The Truth
9. Why Does Love Got To Be So Sad?
10. Have You Ever Loved A Woman?
11. Little Wing
12. It’s Too Late
13. Layla
14. Thorn Tree In The Garden (studio)