Jack White spent the night after Stephen Colbert’s final Late Show broadcast helping the former host return to his roots on a tiny Michigan public-access television program.

Twenty-four hours after signing off from The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, the longtime CBS host resurfaced on Only in Monroe, a community-access show in Monroe, Michigan.

“It’s been an excruciating 23 hours without being on TV, so I am grateful to be able to be here on Monroe Community Media before they also get acquired by Paramount,” he said at the start of the broadcast.

White left his electric guitars at home to serve as the night’s musical director, DJ and comic foil.

“You know, you’ve got a lot of equipment over there,” Colbert said, poking fun at White’s spare, retro audio setup. “You left your wax cylinders at home?”

“Yeah,” White deadpanned.

Colbert’s May 22 appearance came with no advance warning. Along with White, the episode featured Detroit rapper Eminem, actor Steve Buscemi and Michigan native Jeff Daniels.

For Colbert, the appearance marked a return engagement. He first hosted Only in Monroe in July 2015, shortly before taking over The Late Show from David Letterman.

He hinted at the comeback during The Late Show’s final broadcast the previous evening.

“Technically our first show in July of 2015 was from a public access station in Monroe, Michigan, for an audience of 12 people,” Colbert told viewers. “Show business being what it is these days, that’s probably where you’ll see me next.”

White played a central role throughout the broadcast. Stationed behind a boom box and reel-to-reel tape deck, he spun recordings that included “96 Tears,” the 1966 garage-rock classic by ? and the Mysterians, the Michigan garage-rock act whose members hailed from Bay City and Saginaw.

Between songs, White and Colbert discussed local Bigfoot sightings and a long-running rivalry between Monroe’s chili-dog establishments. At one point, the pair even shared a chili dog Lady and the Tramp-style.

One of the night’s funniest moments came when Colbert inhaled helium and serenaded White with the White Stripes hit “Fell in Love With a Girl.”

The broadcast also reunited Colbert with Only in Monroe hosts Michelle Baumann and Kaye Lani Rae Rafko Wilson, the former Miss America who helped make the local-access program a cult favorite.

The show concluded with Colbert channeling some post–Late Show aggression by obliterating the Only in Monroe set. “Since they are no longer using this set, it would actually be helpful for me to destroy it,” he explained. “Which is pretty great news because right now, for no particular reason, I would very much like to break something.”

After the set had been reduced to rubble, Colbert joked that he wanted to burn the remains but needed approval from a fire marshal. That’s when Eminem — born Marshall Mathers — appeared in a prerecorded video.

“Stephen, Marshall here,” Mathers said. “You are absolutely clear to burn that mother down, bro.”

Announcing The Late Show’s cancellation last year, Colbert told viewers: “I’ve had the pleasure and the responsibility of sharing what we do every day with you in front of this camera for the last 10 years. It is a fantastic job. I wish somebody else was getting it.”

Colbert hosted The Late Show for a decade after succeeding David Letterman in 2015. Before that, he spent nine years as host of The Colbert Report on Comedy Central.

CBS announced the cancellation of The Late Show in July 2025, citing financial pressures facing the late-night television business. The decision drew scrutiny because it came shortly after Colbert criticized Paramount’s $16 million settlement of a lawsuit brought by Donald Trump while the company was seeking regulatory approval for its merger with Skydance Media. Paramount and CBS denied any political motivation.

Olivia Rodrigo did double duty this past weekend as host and musical guest on Saturday Night Live. And to help get her gig off to a good start, Jack White left her a note of encouragement in her dressing room following his own appearance on the show on April 4.

It was a big week for Rodrigo. In addition to announcing her new tour, she released “Drop Dead,” the lead single from her upcoming album You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love. The song — which Rodrigo performed as a surprise at an open-mic night in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg last week with acoustic guitar accompaniment — became the fourth number one single of her career.

“Drop Dead” debuted at number one, as did the lead singles from her previous two albums, making Rodrigo the first artist to achieve that milestone.

Things only got more exciting as SNL airtime approached. On Friday, during a break from rehearsals at Rockefeller Center in New York City, Rodrigo sat down with Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show, where she revealed the hidden note White had left in her dressing room — one she’d discovered “literally an hour ago.”

After declaring, “I love Jack White — he’s a wonderful person who always stands up for what’s right,” Rodrigo explained how the note came about.

“I was on the phone with him the other day, and I said, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to host SNL,’” she recalled. “And he said, ‘I’m going to leave a note in your dressing room.’ I was like, ‘Ha ha, funny.’ I feel like I’ve maybe said that to someone too and never done it.”

But White followed through.

“While I was in my room this morning, he sent me a text,” said Rodrigo, whose shown her love for rockers who came before her in recent months. “He’s like, ‘Look up! Keep your head up, you’re going to find something.’”

Rodrigo began searching the room in earnest.

“I started tearing apart the SNL dressing room,” she said. “I was taking the ceiling tiles off.”

After an extended hunt, she finally found the note hidden high inside a closet cubbyhole.

Written on a folded sheet of three-hole-punched paper, it read: “Kill it kid. Love, Jack White.”

Rodrigo later shared video of her search — and the moment of discovery — with Fallon, which you can see below.

When people talk about the White Stripes, they usually start with Jack White — the riff architect behind “Seven Nation Army” and the band’s combustible creative force.

But White insists the real magic of the duo came from the quiet figure behind the drums. To him, Meg White wasn’t just his bandmate. She was the band’s “miracle” — a one-in-a-billion presence he has likened to legends such as Jimi Hendrix and Hank Williams.

The White Stripes were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last year, a long-anticipated recognition for a band that reshaped garage rock at the turn of the millennium. Minimal gear, primitive attack, strict red-and-white aesthetics — none of it should have worked at arena scale. Yet it did. And White argues it worked because of Meg.

“People need to realize how shy Meg is,” he told Mojo as the band’s sophomore album, De Stijl, marked its 30th anniversary. “For her to sit down behind the drum kit is insane. But then to get onstage and sing into a microphone? Are you kidding me? It was unbelievable—a miracle, a blessing from above.”

White, who grew up in Detroit absorbing a volatile mix of Blind Willie McTell, Led Zeppelin, The Stooges and Loretta Lynn, has never lacked for confidence in his own ambition. But he credits De Stijl as the moment he realized the band could stretch beyond its raw beginnings.

“I still think De Stijl is one of the most important things I’ve ever done,” he said. “We could have easily just remade the first White Stripes record, but we didn’t feel we had anything to prove to anybody else. It became more about proving to myself that I could do all these things and not just be this one-chord wonder.

“If the band had broken up after the first album, I’d have gone back to work, maybe formed a different band, and never climbed past that stage of songwriting and artistry,” he continued. “De Stijl proved I could take this to other places. But it’s unbelievable that Meg came with me.”

The pair met in high school in 1990 and married six years later. Only after that did Meg begin learning drums on Jack’s kit. Their stripped-down two-piece attack—and the decision to publicly present themselves as siblings, even after divorcing shortly after their self-titled debut — added to the mystique. The contrast between them was immediate: he was loquacious and confrontational; she was reserved, almost stoic.

That dynamic defined the band’s chemistry. When the group dissolved in 2011 amid Meg’s struggles with anxiety, White remained in the spotlight through a steady run of solo records and side projects. Meg retreated almost entirely from public life.

Back in 2014, he defended her quiet nature in an interview with Rolling Stone.

“She’s one of those people who won’t high-five me when I get the touchdown,” he said. “Almost every single moment of the White Stripes was like that. We’d be working in the studio and something amazing would happen. I’m like, ‘Damn, we just broke into a new world right there!’ And Meg’s sitting in silence.”

He recalled something Ringo Starr once said about Elvis Presley—that the Beatles at least had each other to process the madness of fame, while Elvis was alone.

“I was like, ‘Shit — try being in a two-piece where the other person doesn’t talk,’” White added.

But silence, in Meg White’s case, was never absence. It was economy. Her drumming—elemental, unadorned, stubbornly resistant to flash—became the negative space that made Jack White’s guitar sound enormous. The tension between restraint and eruption was the band’s engine.

“People should write books about Meg White,” he told Mojo. “To me, she’s like Hank Williams or Jimi Hendrix. They are one in a billion. One in a billion.”

White has remained prolific in the years since the band’s split, revisiting his playing style after a serious car accident and launching a series of idiosyncratic gear projects, including signature instruments with Fender and experimental hybrid designs tied to the lineage of Eddie Van Halen’s favored luthier.

Yet for all the forward motion, he remains clear-eyed about the past. The mythology of the White Stripes often centers on the frontman and the riff. But according to Jack White himself, the band’s foundation — the improbable, volatile spark that made it all work — was the shy drummer who never chased the spotlight.

The miracle, he says, was Meg.

Jack White is widely regarded as one of rock’s most inventive guitarists — a player who built a career on primal blues riffs, battered pawnshop electrics and a defiantly DIY approach to tone.

What’s less discussed is the moment he was forced to reinvent his own technique.

On July 9, 2003 — his 28th birthday — White was driving through downtown Detroit with his then-girlfriend, actress Renée Zellweger, when another driver made a sudden turn in front of them. The collision deployed White’s airbag — and shattered the index finger on his fretting hand.

“Another motorist made a ‘horrible left turn in front of me,’” he posted to Whitestripes.com. “No chance of escape, air bag, the air near my fingers, devil in my left hand.”

Zellweger was unharmed, but White’s finger suffered a compound fracture.

“I made it through [the] year of rock ’n’ roll death and got off with just a warning,” he added, referencing the so-called 27 Club that includes Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, Brian Jones and other famous musicians who died at that age. .

At the time, the White Stripes were preparing for a major European run and North American dates. Touring was his first concern.

“I was actually trying to play right after the car crash,” he told Guitar Player in 2010. “I was three blocks from my house, and I went right back inside and grabbed my guitar to see if I could play well enough to tour.

“But I couldn’t. I had to cancel all the shows to recover.”

White underwent surgery in which doctors used three screws to rebuild the shattered finger. In a typically uncompromising move, he filmed the procedure and posted it online.

“I wanted [fans] to better understand the complexity of the situation,” he explained. “A bone in the index finger of my fretting hand was shattered, making it absolutely impossible to play guitar. I’ve been instructed by doctors that there is no way I can move my wrist until it is completely healed.”

White’s injury resulted in him wearing a protective glove over the hand, as seen in the video for the White Stripes’ “The Hardest Button to Button.”

However, even after surgery, he never regained full functionality.

“I had to relearn how to play with these three fingers,” he told Guitar Player, holding up his middle and ring fingers and pinkie. “The airbag shattered all the bones in my index finger. It won’t close anymore — that’s as far as I can go,” he said, forming a C shape with his hand.

He explained that, out of necessity, he went about relearning how to shape chords.

“I used to play A minor with my first three fingers, but now I use fingers two through four. My index finger hangs out doing nothing most of the time.

“I can do barre chords with it now, but I can’t play a C, or a D minor with that finger. It’s become dead to me in a lot of ways.”

Whether directly tied to the injury or not, White’s philosophy toward the instrument evolved in the years that followed. In that same Guitar Player interview, he framed playing as combat.

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

But by March 2018, in a cover story with Rolling Stone, the tone had shifted.

“I don’t want to be fighting the guitar anymore,” he said. “I’ve been doing that for 25 years. I’m tired of it. I want the guitar to do what I want it to do now.”

By the time he spoke to Guitar World in June 2022, White had largely moved away from temperamental vintage pawnshop instruments — including his beloved JB Hutto Montgomery Ward Airline guitar — in favor of custom-built models designed for precision and ease.

“I just want to get to the idea as fast as possible,” he said. “I don’t want to have to work around the limitations of the instrument to get the sound that’s in my brain out into the room.”

For a guitarist once defined by friction — cheap gear, raw tone, physical attack — the crash marked more than a detour. It forced a technical reset that ultimately reshaped how one of rock’s most singular players approached the instrument itself. Prince had famously told White to play guitar his own way, but he never knew how far White would have to take that advice.

Some purists believe you shouldn’t mess with classic gear combinations. A Les Paul through a Marshall stack. A treble booster and Vox AC30 à la Brian May or Rory Gallagher. These are the sacred formulas of rock tone.

But Jack White wanted no part of them.

In fact, he says he “decidedly hated” the most iconic electric guitars of all.

Speaking in a new interview with Reverb, White recalled how, as a teenager searching for his own voice, he rejected Stratocasters, Les Pauls and other widely used instruments — not out of rebellion for its own sake, but out of a desire to escape what they represented.

“In my late teens,” he says, “I decidedly hated anything to do with Stratocasters, Les Pauls, [or] any of the common instruments that you see everybody use.

“I thought it’s so overused, and so indicative of ‘white boy blues’ if you had a Stratocaster.

“I would rather try to find something that didn’t have any connotations already thrown on it. So I was attracted to Silvertones and Airlines and things that you just didn’t see on TV or on videos.”

That instinct would help define his sound — and his image.

White instead embraced pawnshop oddities, most famously his fiberglass-bodied 1964 Montgomery Ward Airline Res-O-Glas, which became a key instrument in the breakthrough success of White Stripes.

Its offbeat look and raw tone perfectly matched the band’s stripped-down, anti-establishment ethos — an approach that even Alex Lifeson of Rush has said resonates deeply with him.

At the time, White wasn’t trying to make a statement. He was simply trying to be different.

“In the ’90s, I had a Silvertone guitar in Detroit, I never saw anybody use that guitar,” he says. “I never saw anybody on TV, definitely nobody playing shows or anybody I knew that owned one. So when I was using it, it felt very unique.”

The irony, he later discovered, was that these forgotten guitars had once been everywhere.

“Then you start talking to older people, and it’s like, ‘When I was a kid, that’s all anybody had, was Silvertones.’ Nobody had enough money to pay for a real guitar,” he explains.

“[It’s] different time periods, you know. It’s about trying to find uniqueness, a new voice for yourself. I didn’t wanna use the same tool that everyone else was using.

“I’m glad I did that. I’m glad I had that desire to carve something out. Because once you do that, then you can rewind and put on one of those more common guitars and get something out of it.”

Ironically, White would later come full circle, releasing his own signature Fender Telecaster — albeit one loaded with eccentric features true to his outsider spirit. He’s also continued to pursue unconventional builds, even hiring Eddie Van Halen’s go-to luthier to create a guitar-bass hybrid.

In the same interview, White also revealed that his obsession with unusual gear once led him on an eight-year search for an amplifier he didn’t even know existed. Elsewhere, he’s shared the invaluable advice he received from Prince, and his candid thoughts on what separates rock players from blues guitarists.

Jack White’s penchant for oddball gear is no mystery. He wrote and recorded some of the White Stripes’ biggest songs on a 1964 Montgomery Ward Airline Res-O-Glas guitar. Last year, he enlisted Eddie Van Halen’s longtime luthier to create a custom build that blurs the line between guitar and bass.

But how he tracks down some of his strangest gear choices has been less clear.

Now we have an answer. The recent Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee sat down with Reverb to discuss his approach, revealing the lengths he’s gone to realize the sounds he hears in his head.

Most strikingly, he recalled embarking on an eight-year search for an amplifier he wasn’t even sure existed.

“My favorite thing to do — if I see an old clip of a musician and some equipment behind them — is to try to find out what that equipment is, if I don't know already,” Jack White explains.

“And that can lead to a lot of amazing things, because sometimes you'll find that amp and it's this one company, but this company also made a reverb unit or an echo unit, and then it’s like, ‘Oh, wow, this is a whole new world.’

“The shocking thing to me, having done that since I was a teenager — for 30-plus years — is still finding things that I’ve never heard of.”

White’s discoveries over that three-decade span have been vast and varied. Just the day before the interview was filmed, he stumbled across “some guitar synthesizer from the ’70s” he had never seen before.

“All the shops I've been in, all the bands I've played with, all the studios I've been in, and I have never, ever heard of this. And it's just amazing how often that happens.”

On other occasions, he has pursued gear that was only rumored to exist — searches that could prove long and maddening, as he discovered during his quest for a fabled amplifier.

“In the early days of the White Stripes, I had a 50-watt Silvertone amp,” he continues. “I was speaking to Danny Kroha from [blues-punk band] the Gories, who was in the Demolition Doll Rods at the time. I said, ‘Yes, it's got that crunch, but I don't have reverb on it, so I guess I'm using a Twin Reverb with this Silvertone so I get the crunch and the reverb.’

“And he goes, ‘Well, you should just get a 100-watt Silvertone.’ I was like, ‘They made 100-watt Silvertones?’ I didn't know that, and he goes, ‘Yeah, I think they did.’

“I looked for eight years before I finally walked into a shop and they fucking had a 100-watt Silvertone. I'm like, ‘It's actually real!’ I never saw a drawing or a photograph or an old catalog picture, or someone who had one. Nothing. Everyone just said, ‘I don't know if there is one or not.’”

Today, however, White could have discovered the amp in no time at all.

“Now that's a Google search in two seconds,” he says laughing. “Then at least I know it exists. That would have saved me a lot of stress.”

To prove his point, a quick Google search did indeed reveal that a number of those amps were built in the 1960s, typically with a 12AX7 preamp and 6V6 or 6L6 power tubes. Silvertone made 100-watt heads and combos, and some featured built-in reverb. They were very much modeled off the Fender amps of the time, but distinguished themselves with a dirty, lo-fi sound compared to Blackface Fenders.

Elsewhere, White has shared the advice Prince gave him and outlined the difference between rock and blues guitar players.

Jack White says he only met Prince once, but the guitarist had a key piece of advice for him — and it was something he was already ardently doing.

Aside from their shared love of Telecasters, the pair have plenty in common, with White likely drawing on the Purple One with his perpetual sonic and aesthetic reinventions. Case in point: when he revealed this anecdote to Stephen Colbert, he was sporting striking blue hair to match the look and feel of his fourth studio album, Fear of the Dawn.

White's Third Man Records had pressed an unreleased Prince album, Camille, in 2022. The album, recorded in 1986 but kept a secret for another 36 years, represents the kind of artistry White can deeply relate to.

“It's a record he made under a feminine avatar,” White had told Colbert of the record. “He sped his voice up on a tape machine to sound feminine, and he was going to release the whole album under the guise of Camille. It got on the presses, it had labels, and it was done. At the last second, he changed his mind and told Warner Brothers to cancel.”

It’s fitting then that Prince’s lesser-known alter ego — or alter alter ego, to be more precise — would be brought to light by White, a fellow lover of the weird and a defender of artistic expression. That led Colbert to ask if they’d ever crossed paths.

“I met him one time,” he replies. “It was at an after-party. He was incredibly nice. We talked about guitars a little bit. He told me, ‘No one will ever tell you how you play your guitar, Jack,’ and that was solid advice.”

“Have you ever let anyone tell you how to play your guitar?” Colbert responds.

“No,” is his answer. White’s career has been underpinned by a desire to make cheap guitars cool again, with his red 1964 JB Hutto Montgomery Ward Airline electric the jewel in the crown.

There is, however, a small caveat to White’s answer.

“One of your sound guys told me to turn down earlier,” he laughs. “So…”

Indeed, as Prince told Rolling Stone in 1981, “We do whatever we want, and those who cannot deal with it have a problem within themselves.” Neither artist is the type to be dictated to. And if you crossed Prince, as that magazine found out at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004, he would make you regret it.

White, who has single-handedly helped shift countless Electro-Harmonix POG pedals throughout his career, recently discussed the differences between blues and rock guitarists, and his answers were incredibly illuminating.

He’s also added to his cluster of wild signature Fender gear by going to Van Halen’s favorite luthier for a guitar that combines the best of electric guitar and bass in a wholly unique way. It’s a beast.

At 50, White knows what it takes to impact the musical landscape. From penning one of the most iconic rock songs of the past 30 years to seeing his stripped-back gear ethos echoed by prog titan Alex Lifeson, his influence on modern guitar culture is undeniable.

Yet he remains acutely aware of the trailblazers who came before him — and the groundbreaking work they laid down, providing the foundations on which multiple generations have built.

During a new interview with Dan Rather for AXS TV, White named the Stooges’ self-titled debut album as the greatest rock record ever made. It’s a record he discovered after dumpster diving in Detroit, a unique pastime for the then school boy, but it’s what he says afterwards that really stands out.

“It’s hard when you get into rock and roll because there’s the Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and the Gene Vincent songs that are so important,” he explains. “People don’t realize how important they are and how they just changed the world.

“They changed the world in a kind of flashy way, but also in an underground way where they’re being played in people’s bedrooms and in garages, and there are all these bands that learn from them and pass that on to their kids.”

And as Rather interjects, the rise of Little Richard, who once had Jimi Hendrix in his band, and company also helped soothe race relations in America.

“It’s so interesting historically, because all that music was generated and invented in the American South, which makes sense,” White replies. “There’s so much more tension here in the earlier part of the century, that it really makes sense that all this music could come out of that scenario.

“Because art doesn’t come from comfortable places; art always comes from pain and from struggle. So it makes sense, but what’s even greater is that the rest of the world likes that music, too.”

Indeed, the British blues explosion, which brought the likes of Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck to the fore wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for the Black artists who came before them. And there are countless examples beyond it.

That prompts Rather to ask him what rock and roll, at its very core, is all about. It’s here that White distinguishes key differences between a guitarist who plays the blues and one who cranks an electric guitar to play rock.

“Attitude,” he replies. “Where the blues feels like it’s about the truth, rock and roll for me is about attitude, whether that’s destruction, rebellion or any of those kinds of words.

“When I see a rock and roll band, I don’t want to see them be comfortable onstage. I don’t want to see them be kind to their instruments. I want them to be completely wild and uncontrollable, and I want to witness that, almost like children’s temper tantrums. And that’s what the early days of rock and roll were.

“Every 10 years, the wildness comes out of rock and roll,” White continues. “It gets tapered down. After Little Richard and Elvis, it was instrumental surf bands and the Patti Pages. A lot of the Nashville sound got into more orchestral music from the dirtier sound of renegade country artists. Then we get tired of the polite version and we want it to be wild again.”

Speaking of wild things, last year, Jack White tapped up Eddie Van Halen’s go-to luthier for a crazy guitar design that combines electric guitar and bass strings.

That followed the release of a suite of signature Fender gear that blends “innovation with history,” with the Triplecaster in particular earning admirers such as Kirk Hammett and Brad Paisley.

A few days after the fact, Martin Barre is not yet aware that Jack White name-checked Jethro Tull as an influence during his acceptance speech for the White Stripes’ Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction. But the forebear is nevertheless pleased.

“That’s brilliant,” Barre says when Guitar Player informs him of the shout-out. “He’s great. He’s a great, talented guy. I have a lot of respect for what the White Stripes produced — my family as well.”

But far be it from Barre, of all people — a professed (accurately) “expert on Jethro Tull” — to be surprised by that, or any, accolade.

“I have an immense respect for the brand,” he says from his home in Lancashire, England, overlooking the moors. Given his history — nearly 45 years and 20 albums, including classics such as Aqualung, Thick As a Brick, War Child and more — Barre is right to “sort of picture myself as a flag-bearer, carrying the banner” with his own band since 2013, including a current acoustic tour in the U.K. He’s also released eight albums of his own and contributed to recordings by fellow Tull alumni Mick Abrahams (who he replaced in 1968) and Clive Bunker, as well as Paul McCartney, the late John Wetton and Ten Years After’s Chick Churchill.

“I’m intensely proud of what Jethro Tull was, and Jack White saying that reinforces my belief that we’ve left something behind that’s indelible. People have taken notice and it’s inspired them down the line, and that’s something to be really proud of.”

Barre, 78, has funneled his Tull expertise into a memoir, A Trick of Memory: The Autobiography of Jethro Tull’s Guitarist, just out in the U.K. and due during January in the U.S. The 182-page book takes readers from his early days, growing up poor in Birmingham and being introduced to music by his father, an aspiring professional jazz clarinetist turned engineer, as well as his older sister Jeanne. It traces his journey through the 1960s music scene, playing saxophone and flute as well as electric guitar in R&B bands and encountering the heroes of the day, before joining Tull in 1968 and making his recording debut on the band’s second album, Stand Up.

It’s concisely told, with plenty of details and anecdotes — some positioned as sidebars dubbed “A Tull Tale” — along with appendixes about his favorite Tull songs, performances and venues to play. He also gets into the weeds about his gear, from his first guitar and amp — a Dallas Tuxedo with a Watkins Dominator combo — to a chapter titled “Guitars, Amps and Instruments of Torture.”

So there’s a lot — a whole life, in fact — to talk about before Barre has to depart for his next gig, getting into the stories behind the story he’s told...

Why a book?

I figure everybody has a story, and the worst thing that can happen is you don’t leave that behind and that story’s lost forever. As reluctant as I am to try and pretend that my story’s important, I want it on record. … Not on record, but for those who might be interested in just what happened in the ’50s and the ’60s and the ’70s and how that developed into what and who I am now. That’s why I did it.

What’s the story you wanted to tell?

The book is biased to the earlier part [of his life], and I leave the latter years to the abundant amounts of material that’s online about Tull, with all the facts and figures.

So it’s more about the preamble. In those days every event had the biggest impact, and the people I met had a big impact on me as well. They were formative years, and they’re quite dear to me. I just feel now, later in life, the things that are most important to me are those more private parts.

I’m not a rock star; I’m not a guitar hero. And, every day, to live a very ordinary life where 99 percent of the people I come into contact with either don’t know who I am or don’t care what I do...

There’s evidence, including in the book, that argues otherwise, you know.

[laughs] The achievement is history, you know? I can tell people that I played in Shea Stadium. I can tell people that we did three nights in a row at Madison Square Garden, we played in front of a quarter of a million people at the Isle of Wight, I played onstage at the Royal Albert Hall — and I’m so proud that I was able to do that. I don’t disown it; I’m really proud to have been there and privileged to have done those things. I think about them enough, but I don’t dwell on it.

My personality isn’t rooted in who I was and what I did; it’s rooted in who I am today and what I’m gonna be like tomorrow. What’s important to me is that I play the best I can and give a great performance and the quality of the music is of the highest standard I can produce. That’s my job, and I’m very intense in the way I approach it. But when I close the door at the end of the night, I’m just the guy next door. I don’t live a rock-star life, and I’m quite glad I don’t.

The book is definitely not a tell-all.

I just wanted it to be factual and positive. I think gossip is very frivolous, and it’s very private and subjective. It has no substance to it. The experiences I’ve had are sort of private little events, and I change my mind about them. One day if I think of something that happened as being terrible and how bad it was for me, then another time I may weigh the pros and cons and look at it from a different viewpoint.

I haven’t hidden anything at all, but I haven’t gone into personal relationships to a great degree — and there’s a few things that were redacted, expunged by the people who publish and proofread. There are a few fruity anecdotes that are missing. They’re not forgotten, just maybe something I’ll do another time, maybe a volume 2 when I live on a small island in the South Pacific. [laughs]

You talk about focusing on the early days, and it’s very striking and heartwarming how supportive your family was.

My dad had a tough life, but we were never made aware of it when we were kids. My parents put me and my sister before anything. They sheltered us from whatever things they were going through and gave us the positivity to be able to do what we were able to do.

My dad loved music; that’s what he wanted to do when he was 14, 15 years old and he couldn’t do it because his parents made him go into the family factory at an early age. So his passion was squashed, and he never talked about it. When I threw away my to-be career, my schooling and college to do something frivolous like being a musician, he didn’t say a word.

You write in the book about being blown away watching the guitar player in Mike Sheridan and the Nightriders at a youth club when you were young and then wanting to start playing yourself. What was the allure of guitar back then?

It was my sword. It was my... I could be really poetically, dramatically pretentious and say that like when medieval soldiers would fight for king and country, that sword was their emblem, their strength. That’s what the guitar was for me; it was my way out of what I didn’t like about what I was doing. It was the thing that was going to open up doors, possibly — and I could never know how many or how big those doors were going to be. I just saw it as something I could really put myself into.

I didn’t particularly love music enough to think that, Oh, I have to play music, and the guitar is going to be my instrument to get me on that pathway. I think it was just that guitar was a symbol, if you like, of a bit of freedom.

Were you a natural talent?

Oh no, no. Still not. I work on all my faults every day, and I do every day. I’m so far from being good enough for myself that it’s way off there. [points toward window] If you talk to people who I knew in those days, they always say, “Oh, yeah, you were always playing your guitar,” and I don’t remember it being like that. It was a slow process, ’cause there was no information. There was no YouTube or way to Google how to play “Stairway to Heaven” in two minutes flat. You had to work it out yourself, with no help.

But that’s great. You got to learn the neck of the guitar. Everything was a discovery, and I’ve always said that kids now might be in a place in a year, whereas it’s taken me 20, 30-plus years to get there. But I figured it out myself. I didn’t learn it from a book or a YouTube channel or from a teacher. I figured out chords, scales, all the beautiful relationship between all the elements of music. It became mine. Not somebody else’s.

You had some early and personal experiences with Jimi Hendrix.

I knew of his playing before I met him. We were in Rome playing soul music and some kid came from London to see us play and he had this sort of acetate demo disc. He said, “Have you heard of Jimi Hendrix? Have you heard his new single?” “No, I haven’t.”

So he played it, and it was “Purple Haze.” It was just a demo and I’m listening and I can’t understand how he’s made that sound. It was such a beautiful thing. And, of course, he tried to re-record it and he couldn’t get it any better, so they used the demo. I just remember listening to it, and it was such an alien situation, but it had such an impact on me.

And then you got to share a bill with him.

It was January 1969 and Tull was gonna be the support band with Hendrix onstage, and I’m absolutely terrified. I’d never come into contact with anybody more famous than Ian Anderson. [laughs] And I was in awe of Jethro Tull before I joined them because they were the best band I’d ever seen onstage, but this was a step beyond imagination. Here we are flying to Copenhagen, and that night I’m gonna meet the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and there he was onstage, and he’s kind and humble.

He’s interested in me and we’re talking and he’s this really nice person, and he’s saying, “You know, I really hate my voice.” And I’m like, Is this really Jimi Hendrix?

I didn’t know what to say. I said, “Your voice is unbelievably good,” but he truly hated his voice. It was an early lesson in humility, in him being accessible. He had no baggage. He didn’t have anything but himself to give, and he was beautifully honest. It was inspiring that somebody that good could be so nice. That was my first lesson of many — not all of them learning something positive.

Oh? What were some of those?

I can’t say! [laughs] I’ve met some of my heroes; let’s just say I’ve been disappointed in them. But you learn from everything.

You say that it’s important not to look for influences, lest you wind up just copying something. Explain that philosophy.

Everything that inspired me is music I can’t play, so by default I can’t copy it. It’s something I want to attain and would love to do, but it’s always something a little higher up. Three weeks ago I went to see Billy Strings at the Royal Albert Hall, and between him and his mandolin player — ’cause I love playing mandolin — I was grinning from ear to ear. Some people get depressed when they hear somebody so much better, but I just love the experience.

I’ve always really enjoyed watching somebody do something masterfully well. It inspired me, the need within myself to do better. I’m like, Right, you need to do better. I thought I did, and hearing them proves that.

I go to classical concerts to listen to the flute players, and I take a pair of binoculars and I’m on them the whole night, just loving every second because they’re amazing, amazing musicians, and I’m just a lowly, sort of wanna-be. I want to be a better flute player, and hearing them tells me why I want to be a better flute player.

You acknowledge some influence from Leslie West, however. Why is he an exception?

Yes, he’s very hard to ignore. I loved him to bits, and I think it was his attitude that influenced me more than anything. In that era, sort of very early ’70s, most bands were fairly distant and disconnected. There was a lot of competition and the biggest thing was the support group tried to blow the main act off the stage. That’s what you were trying to accomplish, so it wasn’t the friendliest of atmospheres.

Mountain was the support band, and they didn’t give a shit they were the support band; they were having the time of their lives. They were such a tight unit, so friendly and supportive of each other. You’d watch them onstage and the communication, the smiling, the little things they were doing between them was really special.

And, obviously, his playing was so beautiful — his phrasing and his beautiful pitch and vibrato, understated but yet beautifully performed. I wasn’t going to be Leslie West number two, but some things I did emulate, just learning from it rather than copying. And we became friends, as you do.

Also on the hero front, you write a bit about the cloak-and-dagger of being part of Paul McCartney’s Atlantic Ocean project in 1987. What was that like?

It’s a tricky one because I had to sign an NDA, and I never had or a copy of it, or lost it, so I’m not quite sure what I can say. I had a wonderful week with him. It was magic, the dream of my life come true, and it came at a great time because things were being a little taken for granted in the Tull camp at the time. We were in the middle of doing some album, very immersed in it, and I went to Ian and said, “Oh, I need a week off. There’s something I’d like to do.” And, of course, when I told him it was Paul McCartney… [laughs]

But it was nice for me, and it made me a stronger person because it was a terrifying experience to be in the presence and working for somebody on that level. But he was a fantastic person, just amazing, just full of energy and music never stopped. There are a couple stories — nothing nasty or negative, just sort of slightly amusing. If there’s a volume two [of the memoir] I’ll have to call his manager and say, “Can I tell the story?”

Did you feel any desire in the book to set the record straight about Jethro Tull and how the band worked and your contributions?

No, because if somebody wants to know, they’ll find out. It’s all there to absorb. You can hear everything. You can hear what I played, you can hear what John Evan played. You can hear what Jeffrey [Hammond Hammond] played, what Ian’s playing. There’s always going to be people who don’t like me and what I do and don’t like the fact I’m doing it without Ian, and vice versa. Who’s right? They’re all right, ’cause everybody has their own opinion and are entitled to have it.

What was the creative dynamic and process within Tull? Were you assigned parts or given free rein, or...?

It’s always been a mixture of both. Some things… like “Aqualung,” he wrote the whole riff, and the solo section I wrote, sort of based on the chords of the verse. Thick As a Brick was full of ideas from everybody — a lot from John Evan, who came up with amazing Hammond [organ] parts and ideas we developed into some of the instrumental passages.

So there was no formula. If I came to Ian with some idea he would listen. He would take on board everything that was on offer, and be very fair about it as well. There was no resistance. It was all the mixture of ideas and people working together.

Any favorite anecdotes about a song that developed from one of your ideas that became more than you may be expected?

“Paparazzi” [from Under Wraps] was one. I think later on in the years I was more confident with coming up with big ideas. I was beginning to write more rather than just practice and do a concert appearance. Under Wraps, with me and Peter [-John Vettese] and Ian was just a very enclosed situation where we were constantly thinking up ideas.

One day as we sat there, sort of having a cup of coffee, I said, “Look, I’ve got this riff I’ve written. Do you want to hear it?” “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” So I played it and they loved it, and that became the song. That was great. It was the first Tull song I wrote, and I loved having a bit more in the cooking pot.

Any further insights now, after doing the book, into why things went the way they did with Tull back in 2012?

No. I understand it completely because I had to analyze it for my own benefit. I needed to understand what was happening, why it was happening, how it was happening and put it into perspective. I didn’t want to be the injured party. I didn’t think I deserved to be. I just needed to know my own mind and what it was all about.

And I’m fine. I’m at peace, mentally. I know other guys that have been in Tull and had sort of an abrasive end and didn’t do so well coming to terms with it. It’s a tough business.

You’re kind of the guy keeping the Tull music alive in a way, because you’re pretty constantly out there and the current incarnation is a bit more episodic. Is there an appreciation from the audience that you’re doing it?

I don’t ask for reassurance. My reassurance is walking into a gig and, “Oh, you’re sold out tonight,” and I’m like, “Yeah!” That makes me feel great.

But, yeah, I’ve got a lot of self-belief, and it’s based on how powerful the music can be. I know I’ve got a great band. I know how good they are. But while everybody likes to hear good things, you must never, ever, ever take it to heart 100 percent because for every person that comes up and says, “You’re one of the most underrated guitar players, you are amazing, blah, blah, blah” you’ll get another one who, whether they say it or not, will think the exact opposite. You can’t believe one and not the other; that’s how I deal with it — “Well, that’s nice of you to say. It’s not particularly what I think, but I appreciate that you’re enthusiastic.”

There’s a lot of instrument and equipment detail in the book. Are you a big gearhead?

Less than a lot of people, mentioning no names. I don’t hold numerical values to what I have. I don’t have a valuable collection of guitars. I have maybe 10 vintage, but I love them and they sound great and they play great, and that’s their primary function being in my world. I use them and play them and they do a great job for me, otherwise they wouldn’t be here. None of my guitars are in cupboards; they’re all there to grab. And they come and go; I buy a guitar, sell a guitar, love one, love another more.

Are any of your vintage guitars from all the way back in the day? Do you still have the “Aqualung” guitar or something?

No. I do know where those guitars are, but I don’t miss them. They did a great job, but to be honest I moved on because I found something that did the job better. People say, “You’re completely stupid,” and maybe I am, but that’s what an instrument is to me. You give it a lot, it gives you a lot back, you move on. There’s no snobbery in me.

Are any of those older guitars owned by any one of note?

[shakes head] I’ve heard the names. It’s people who don’t play them; they just know what they’re worth.

What’s coming up for you?

Gigs, of course. I’m booking into 2027. And I want to do a record. I haven’t done a solo record for a long time [since Roads Less Travelled in 2018], so I want to spend a lot of time writing and recording. I’ve got two live albums I want to release as well.

Will we see you across the pond next year, maybe as the book comes out over here?

I’d like to come to America to talk about the book. America’s on hold right now. I’ve been there a lot done a lot of touring... to the detriment of other areas. So I need to redress the balance. I want to sit and think, and I want to come back with something that’s gonna be amazing, because I think it needs to be.

I’ve done a lot of tours with different headings — an Aqualung tour, a 50 years tour, a History of Tull. I need something that’s really going to hit the headlines in the Martin Barre Band world.

Jack White certainly has a penchant for weird and wonderful guitars. Whether proving a point about the viability of cheap and obscure guitars or modding the Telecaster within an inch of its life for his first-ever Fender signature model, the soon-to-be Rock and Roll Hall of Famer doesn't conform to norms.

So to celebrate his 50th birthday, the guitarist turned to Eddie Van Halen’s luthier of choice, Chip Ellis, for an “out of this world” custom build that looks like a White-ified, cartoonish reimagining of a Rickenbacker.

Lovingly named the Ugly Stick, the build is a hybrid blend of electric guitar and bass and is, in fact, the culmination of three decades' of work. It features two lots of three strings, each with a bottom bass string.

This is surely a fine example of creating a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist. The vacant middle saddle also feels like a minor missed opportunity.

“Chip has been working on this for 30-plus years on and off,” White says in an Instagram post that finds him showcasing his new toy with a joyful grin. “I have it tuned to open E on the low and open A on the high strings. But you could do what you want with it.

“The bass strings,” he adds, “are recessed lower than the guitar strings so you can play them all at the same height and same time.

Ellis is a master builder over at Fender, and he was responsible for White’s signature Triplecaster Tele last year. He’d risen to prominence when, upon falling out with Peavey after Joe Satriani signed on as a signature artist, Eddie Van Halen chose him to spearhead his EVH brand. Their first build together launched in 2007.

This new guitar’s unveiling comes a year after White had road tested it in the studio. It ultimately featured on two songs from his 2024 solo LP, No Name — “Number One with a Bullet” and “Terminal Archenemy Endling.”

He adds that it hasn’t made it onto the road yet, but the triple-humbuckered beast might not be confined to the studio forever.

“Thank you so much, Chip. This thing is out of this world,” his post wraps up. “I'm either wishing I had this back in the White Stripes, or I am glad I didn’t!”

The White Stripes’ legacy is set to be immortalized this autumn when the band, alongside Soundgarden, Bad Company and a very anti-Rock Hall Carol Kaye, are set to be inducted.

Speaking to Guitar Player in 2010, White revealed that their biggest hit, “Seven Nation Army”, which is now sung in sports stadiums across the world, came together during a spontaneous soundcheck Down Under.

“I was sound-checking at the Corner Hotel in Australia when that came out,” he says. “I thought about it as a possible James Bond theme, actually. And then I thought, ‘That will never happen!’”

Five years after the song’s release, White collaborated with Alicia Keys on “Another Way to Die,” the theme for the 22nd 007 film, Quantum of Solace. Duran Duran and Amy Winehouse had also been rumored for the film's theme, but the guitarist's success with his alt-rock duo was enough to score him the dream gig.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Fender has announced a trio of signature releases for Jack White, including an amp and two guitars, with White bringing a score of fresh ideas to the table.

The Signature Jack White Collection comprises of a Pano Verb amplifier, a TripleCaster Telecaster, and White’s take on Fender’s innovative Acoustasonic electro-acoustic, called the TripleSonic.

Fender has vowed to bottle the “raw energy and punk rock ethos” that defines White’s career with the collection, which has seen him chalk up 12 Grammy wins and write the most Googled guitar riff ever in Seven Nation Army.

“We found the best of the old, with the best of the new, and mixed innovation with the history of Fender to do something that we think Leo Fender would have been very proud of if he was alive today,” says White.

Adding bursts of yellow to the classic Fender amp visage, the Fender Jack White Pano Verb amp was inspired by White’s vintage Vibrasonic and Vibroverb amps. Crafted in Fender’s Corona, CA factory, its stock features are bolstered by an enhanced stereo reverb and tremolo effects, and is the result of five years of hard work.

By placing the reverb after the pre-amp, White says “it's just beautiful how much energy it has, and the decay goes on forever.” Moreover, there are dedicated Treble and Bass controls for the reverb for personalizing its character as the guitarist goes above and beyond with the combo amp's offerings.

Underneath its silver grill is a unique pairing of 10” and 15” speakers. As White explains, by double mic’ing the amp “you get the deep bassier crunch on the 15”, and you get brighter, glassier tones on the 10”. Your stereo image is just outstanding.”

He adds that the reverb’s Split/Full switch “will blow your mind,” as it allows players to send the reverb through both speakers or just the smaller 10” speaker.

Elsewhere, a drive knob has been installed to boost guitars without distorting while a Middle dial, not always present in Fender amps, stands as another important addition for White.

The amp also boasts the first harmonic tremolo that Fender has done since the early '60s, drawing inspiration from White's '61 Vibrasonic. It comes with Stereo and Mono modes, with the Stereo mode offering a little delay between the two speakers for a “swampy” back and forth between them.

“This was me shooting for the moon of what the ultimate Fender amplifier could be for something really beautiful and unique that Fender's never done before,” White enthuses.

The TripleCaster, White's take on the beloved Telecaster, has received a host of mods. Stocked with a Bigsby vibrato and a trilogy of custom pickups – a Jack White humbucker, Jack White JW-90 single-coil, and Jack White CuNiFe Wide-Range humbucker – it’s full of personal flourishes.

There’s also a Hipshot Xtender DropTuner to quickly change from standard to drop D tunings, a killswitch, and a banjo-style armrest. It’s finished in a sleek Piano Black and its hardware is white.

Following on from Finneas’ signature Acoustasonic models, White’s TripleSonic continues the black and white aesthetic of his TripleCaster with a Satin top and Arctic White touches across its body and soft V-profile neck.

There’s an eye-catching white pickguard and a three-way pickup switch for different tonal voicings curated by the White Stripes man.

“Jack is regarded as a true visionary in the music world, and it has been an incredible journey working with him on developing these products,” says Fender’s Justin Norvell. “The guitars and amplifier reflect his innovative spirit and distinctive sound, and we can't wait for musicians everywhere to experience the unique blend of craftsmanship and creativity that they bring.”

The Jack White Pano Verb amp ($2,999), TripleCaster ($2,999), and TripleSonic Acoustasonic ($2,499) are all available now.

Head to Fender for the full scoop.

Earlier this year, a new study identified the most Googled guitar riff.

At the top of the guitar-store-employee-maddening charts – higher than Whole Lotta Love, Smells Like Teen Spirit, or even Smoke on the Water – was the White Stripes' sports stadium rabble-rouser, Seven Nation Army.

The lead single and track from the Detroit duo's 2003 album, Elephant, Seven Nation Army transformed the White Stripes from cult indie favorites to rock A-listers, and propelled Jack White into the spotlight as one of the era's most forward-thinking players, one who would essentially represent his entire generation in the 2008 guitar hero meeting-of-the-minds, It Might Get Loud.

As is so often the case, the Seven Nation Army riff was a fairly spontaneous creation. Speaking to GP in 2010, White said of the riff's origins, “I was sound-checking at the Corner Hotel in Australia when that came out. I thought about it as a possible James Bond theme, actually.”

White then added with a laugh, “And then I thought, ‘That will never happen’” (In five years' time, White would write Another Way to Die, the theme song for the Bond film Quantum of Solace.)

White cut a striking figure in the guitar universe at the time, wrangling nasty riffs out of, most famously, a red-and-white Airline model that fit perfectly with the band's quirky visuals and color scheme.

That guitar, however, did not see use on Seven Nation Army, for which White relied on another favorite, a Kay hollowbody, tuned to open A. The bassiness of the riff, meanwhile, was achieved via the low-octave setting on his DigiTech Whammy pedal.

Having been inspired to use the Whammy by Rage Against the Machine's Tom Morello, White found it useful even in his pre-White Stripes days, during which he figured out how best to use it in tandem with his other pedalboard perennial of the era, the EHX Big Muff.

Asked about the wild, unorthodox sounds he got with the Whammy, White told GP, “You need a lot of gain and distortion to make that kind of tone. It sounds really wimpy if you don’t have some power behind the note. And you have to put the Whammy after the Big Muff in the signal chain. The power has to be before the octave.

“I actually started using the Whammy because it was a great way to cut through when I was playing in garage-rock bands in Detroit,” he continued. “We were relying on sound guys who didn’t know when to turn you up, so no one’s solos ever stood out. I thought, ‘If I hit the octave higher, there’s no way they’re going to miss me now’ [laughs].”

Jack White’s Third Man Audio has linked up with French pedal specialist Anasounds for the La Grotte – a stompbox that ends his lifelong quest for the perfect analog spring reverb.

After the firm gained huge prominence in the American market, White purchased one of Anasounds’ Elements spring reverb pedals back in 2021 and it was love at first riff.

A desire to collaborate with its makers on a new design – springing off the Elements’ successful template – has resulted in La Grotte, which comes with some major differences to further its tonal goodness.

A mechanical reverb at its core, a three-spring tank is combined with a warm preamp for “a distinct sonic personnalité”. Interestingly, its two-band EQ affects only the reverberated sound, with independent volume settings for dry and wet sounds completing its left-field tweakability.

Two years after his inital Anasounds purchase, White sent off his first draft for La Grotte, and little has changed in the back and forth between the two firms since.

Some fine-tuning was needed to find the right tank and get the right frequencies to shine, with all involved careful not to trigger the spring sound when turning the pedal on. An anti-pop system was the solution, fading the reverb in and out when activated.

Thinking of iconic spring reverbs from Fender and Roland, White deemed a built-in preamp a necessity. Consequently, White and Mancini leant on Anasounds’s expertise, with the resulting circuit offering plenty of headroom but still with the ability to get dirty when pushed.

Players who don’t vibe with White’s preamp sweet spot can find their preferred setting by toying with the pedal’s internal trimpot.

Where the Elements was designed for better highs, La Grotte aims for deeper lows, and the best possible signal-to-noise ratio. It has true and buffered bypass modes, with the reverb trailing off naturally when the buffered mode is used.

A pad allows players to adjust the input level from 0dB to -10dB for those wanting to use the pedal as a studio outboard unit, and the preamp’s “massive volume boost” will “help your tracks come alive”.

The minds behind the La Grotte have extended its application beyond just the electric guitar, too. Its input and output impedance also works with synth, an active bass, and even brass instruments so that musicians of all kind can “benefit from the added soul of an analog spring”.

“It's been a lifetime searching for a small real spring reverb that could be used a stompbox on stage or in the studio,” Jack White reveals.

“The hang-up is that you normally have to use really long springs to get a good sound, making the unit too large. With the La Grotte pedal, it was the addition of the third spring that really brought this sound alive and gave us the ability to have that long decay from a real spring in a small box.

“In addition,” he concludes, “the built-in drive/boost feature you get from the Dry knob is very impressive in how it elevates the signal you are sending to the springs.

Third Man Hardware is no stranger to collaborative releases, having worked with CopperSound Pedals for the Triplegraph digital octave pedal, and budget-friendly firm Donner for the floor space-saving Triple Threat.

The standard La Grotte edition of the pedal will cost $299, a limited-edition, yellow-heavy housing rising to $349. It will be available exclusively from Third Man's Reverb shop.

Visit Anasounds and Third Man Hardware to discover more.

Electro-Harmonix has released the third generation of its groundbreaking POG pedal, a polyphonic octave generator first released in 2005.

By EHX’s own words, the original POG “revolutionized the world of octave pedals,” and quickly became a favorite of Joe Satriani, Jack White, and Jason Isbell, among others.

It was even listed in Guitar Player's Greatest Guitar Pedals of All Time list, where it was called a “bonkers box.”

The pedal impressed with its ability to track single notes and chords with clarity and a lightning-quick response. The second generation, which came in 2009, added features including programmable presets and an attack filter.

Its successor promises to be the “most powerful polyphonic octave generator ever.”

A +5th voice adds a brand-new tonal flavor, joining an arsenal that already includes -2 OCT, -1 OCT, +5TH, +1 OCT, and +2OCT voices.

An expanded preset capacity, rising from eight to 100 – a 1,150% increase – massively boosts the pedal’s practicality, especially in live environments.

Indeed, user-friendly operation has driven many of its updates, with two preset footswitches for up and down – as opposed to a singular footswitch on its predecessor – serving as an especially neat touch, while a 128x32 graphic OLED display, and illuminated side pots and buttons, help navigation on dark stages.

Catering to the increasing number of guitar and bass players who use their POG to split their signal and stretch it into octaves outside their regular range – Royal Blood have been big trendsetters here – a wider array of outputs have been integrated.

The POG3 now offers three 1/4" outputs (left, right, direct out), alongside pan controls to customize the octave voices of both sides of the split signal.

A new Warp mode allows users to either drop or raise their pitch to any note over a two-octave range, and a Freeze mode means players can play over a chord or single-note pad.

EHX has also lifted features from its HOG pedal, a harmonic octave generator. Those include a Gliss mode – presumably named after glissando – for slick, synth-like transitions between chords.

A slight overhaul of the control panel has also been undertaken, with an additional Input Gain control and a Master Volume chief among them.

A Focus control for +1 and +2 OCT modes, and a Multimode Filter with Q and Envelope sweep, round out other smart additions to the pedal some 15 years after it last received some TLC from its creators.

Notably, the pedal now takes the industry-standard 9V power supply, making it even easier to implement onto pedalboards, replacing the 30V requirements of the POG2.

Jason Isbell, who has this year been bestowed with signature Telecaster pickups and a recreation of his beloved “Red Eye” Les Paul, says it's a pedal that everyone should own.

“You have to have a POG if you're gonna play guitar nowadays, cause you can't play guitar unless you have at least one song that has a POG on it,” he joked in a 2019 interview. “It's called the ‘Jack White law’.”

The POG3 is available now and retails at $645.

Head to EHX to learn more.

Combining three analog effects in a small package with a low price tag makes the Triple Threat an outsider among today’s boutique boxes. However, it all makes sense considering that Jack White conceived this sleek little multi-effector for his Third Man Hardware line, partnering with Donner to produce the pedal in China. 

Offered in standard black and limited-edition yellow finishes, the Triple Threat features distortion, phaser, and echo effects that are arranged in right-to-left stompbox order, each of which can be controlled with a trio of small knobs. There’s volume, gain and tone for distortion; level, rate, and depth for phaser; and level, feedback (repeats), and time for echo. 

Yellow rubber surrounds on the knobs make them easy to grip and more identifiable on the black top panel. Even though they’re close together, I didn’t find it a problem to reach down and turn them in live situations. Roughly the size of a TV remote, the aluminum-alloy enclosure has front-mounted input and output jacks, a center-negative jack for the included nine-volt adapter, and an LED above each foot switch to indicate on/off.

With a circuit that delivers quality tones without excessive noise, the Triple Threat’s distortion is easy to dial in for lead and dirty rhythm, and it was responsive to the volume controls on our test guitars, which included an Epiphone Joe Bonamassa 1963 SG Custom and a PRS SE Swamp Ash Special that’s armed with a variety of humbucker and single-coil options. 

The Threat’s gain is in the range of an SD-9 and pedals of that ilk, and there was plenty of output to overdrive the amps we used it with: a Fender Deluxe Reverb and ’48 Dual Professional, and a Vox AC15. 

I liked leaving the distortion on and going between clean and grind by riding the guitar volume, and the pedal’s tone knob could also be turned down quite low for creamy distortion that didn’t sacrifice clarity. The circuit doesn’t impart a lot of midrange color either, which allowed the guitars’ distinctive personalities to come through, even at high gain levels. 

The phaser is a good choice here, and I like how you can set it for stony MXR Phase 90/EHX Small Stone swirl, as well as shimmering sounds that can nudge into chorus and rotary territory, depending on how you set the depth and rate controls. 

The effect has the analog sweetness that’s so vibey and cool when used to round off the highs like Eddie Van Halen would, adding color and meaty texture in doing so. The circuit does suck signal, so it’s nice that there’s a level control you can adjust to keep from losing punch when the phase is kicked on.

The all-essential effect here is echo, and it’s a good one as it’s bone simple and effective, offering warm, tape-style delays that can be dialed in for everything from short, reflective, and slap-back effects to ambient echoes of up to 600ms that fade out with progressively grainy repeats. These can be made to trail on endlessly when you want to create spacey sound effects by manipulating the time and level knobs. 

Note that the latter only adjusts echo volume and does not boost output. Here’s where a dedicated output level control would be handy, although the format would have to expand slightly to accommodate it (in which case, why not add a tuner while you’re at it?).

As it stands, though, the Triple Threat is a cool multi-effector, and an ideal thing to put in your gig bag when you need just a few effects in a package that takes up less floor space than a lot of single-effect pedals. Kudos to Jack White and Donner for creating this great-sounding and affordable piece of hardware that nabs an Editors’ Pick Award. 

Donner Triple Threat – Specifications

CONTACT Third Man Records

PRICES Standard edition $99. Limited edition, $129 

CONTROLS Distortion: volume, gain, tone. Phaser: level, rate, depth. Echo: level, feedback, time

I/O Input, output, 9VDC power jack (adapter included)

FOOT SWITCH Three all-metal on/off foot switches with buffered bypass

EXTRAS Aluminum housing. Soft rubber surrounds on the knobs make them easy to grip

SIZE 7.5” x 2.5” wide x 1.0” tall (LxWxH)

WEIGHT .78 lb

BUILT China

KUDOS Small, elegant design that offers three good-sounding effects 

CONCERNS None

WHEN GUITARIST ERIC JOHANSON was coming up, it wasn’t the slippery slide work of Elmore James and the tones of the blues greats that excited him. Once he began playing at age five, what kept him interested in guitar was the manic rhythm playing of Metallica’s James Hetfield. 

“The rock albums with the big, thundering bass, the drums punching you in the chest and the guitars that sounded huge — that’s what drew me in,” Johanson explains. “Some of my earliest experiences trying to figure out what I was hearing came down to the tones and textures and the sound itself, rather than the notes and chords.” 

Johanson’s obsession with building walls of sound with his guitar never stopped, even as his interests expanded to include blues. For evidence, listen to the tall tones on The Deep and the Dirty (Ruf Records), his fourth and latest album of original music, which are as ferocious and fuzzy as anything in Jack White’s catalog. 

Those tones have been part of his sound all along — like his speaker-shredding blast on “Till We Bleed,” from his 2017 debut, Burn It Down, and the adrenalized tones on “Buried Above Ground,” from 2020’s Below Sea Level — but they’re larger than ever now.

 “I’m working on my sound constantly,” Johanson says. “When I get in the studio, it’s more or less just a snapshot of what I’ve got going on with the rig at that moment. I’m a big fan of that symmetry between the studio setup and the live setup.” 

After starting out in 2010 as a guitarist for acts like Cyril Neville, Johanson signed with Tab Benoit’s Whiskey Bayou Records in 2016 and has worked solo since. 

On 2021’s Covered Tracks volumes one and two, he dug mostly into acoustic instruments as he re-imagined songs by Nine Inch Nails, Chicago, Fiona Apple and the Beatles. But on The Deep and the Dirty, Johanson roars back on electric from the first notes of the opening track, “Don’t Hold Back.” 

“I’m really into the raw experience of the moment,” he says. “I want this explosive kind of energy. There’s something about a really gritty Velcro fuzz that, to me, expresses the emotion I was trying to get across, especially opening up the record like that.”

Given what you’ve said about how rock music affected you as a child, I have to imagine tone remains your primary focus?

I’m really particular about tones, and I always try to get the sounds right with just the guitar and the amp first when recording. You really can’t fix that if it’s not right to begin with. I like a lot of bottom end, so I’m usually running a 4x10 cabinet or a 4x10, plus a 1x12 or 2x12, because I like a full-range sound. 

Once I’ve got a full-range sound going, then I’m usually trying to dial in enough grit to have some sustain and a little bit of natural compression going on without losing the definition or getting too much high end. 

Is having a full-range setup a necessity for you in a trio? 

I think it definitely is. If you’re doing the trio thing, it wouldn’t make sense to have an exclusively top-end sound, because you are covering so much ground. But that also is just what appeals to me. I really don’t like piercing guitar tones that lack bottom end. There are guitar players I like a whole lot, like Freddie King — I love him and can listen to him all the time — but I would never try to seek out his guitar tone. 

My tone knobs are generally set up the middle, with a little tweak one way or another, depending on what it’s sounding like to me in the room. I want to have this natural, warm, full sound, where it can be loud without hurting your ears. 

Is the core of your sound still your Category 5 amplifier? 

That’s the main amp. It’s just one channel, with volume, tone and reverb controls, but I also have a ’66 Fender Deluxe Reverb as the second amp, and they’re pretty much equal in the mix at all times.

On The Deep and the Dirty, we also had an Orange amp for a clean track, just in case, and it did come in handy on some of the fuzzy songs and places where we wanted to bring out more definition. Other than that, it was pretty much just the rig. 

I really like a round sound, so I’ve taken to stacking a couple of overdrives. While I like the sound of the amp just cranked, it doesn’t always respond exactly how you want it to, because it can start to collapse on itself with a non– master volume amp. 

So I’ve gotten into trying out different overdrive pedals and figuring out which ones stay true to the sound of the amp. Fuzz is really a new thing for me. I stayed away from it for a while, just because it’s such a different level of intensity sometimes.

How deep is your overdrive bullpen now? 

The sound of the Category 5 when cranked is great, but I have taken to not running it in a super-overdriven state, partially because I like the punch of the note attack. On a non–master volume amp, when you start to get it to sing, you also lose the percussive attack. You can’t really have both. And the way I’ve been able to dial that in, especially at different volumes and different venues, is to use overdrives. 

The Origin RevivalDRIVE is one pedal I’ve found that’s really good for that. It has a mix control, so depending on the level I’ve got the Cat Five turned to, I can use the mix knob to let through more of the direct guitar or the pedal. 

In front of that, I’ve gone back and forth between a Klon KTR and a Wampler Tumnus Deluxe, which I like because it has a full EQ on it, so you can get those mids under control a little bit. But the KTR is the one I used on this record. I had a gold Klon back in the early 2000s, but I lost it in Hurricane Katrina.

How closely did the themes on The Deep and the Dirty influence your tones? 

The style of music I play is very much about creating in the moment, so every time you play it you’re reinterpreting it live, and it’s different every time. 

I’m getting into those ideas in various places on the record, and certainly the first song, “Don’t Hold Back,” is exactly what I’m talking about. This moment, right now, is all we get. There’s something about the tone that grabs me; the texture of it excites me. 

I’ve learned that I am just about as into sound as I am into music. In other words, the textures and the tones of things. I want the sound of the record to be the sound of the actual guitar rig, versus just recording some old little vintage amp that you only had in the studio that week. I want to feel like I’m hearing the speakers right in front of me.

The Deep and the Dirty by Eric Johanson is out now and available to buy or stream

Of all the characters that feature in tales of blues from the early 1900s, singer and guitarist Son House is one of those most regularly cited by present-day enthusiasts.

In some ways he’s not an obvious choice. He wasn’t the most skilled purveyor of this music, or even the first, but he remains a quietly popular touchstone.

Jack White even named House’s sparse, bewitching a capella number “Grinnin’ in Your Face” as his favorite song.

“By the time I was 18, somebody played me Son House,” White said in the 2008 rock music documentary It Might Get Loud. “That was it for me. This spoke to me in a thousand different ways.

“I didn’t know that you could do that, just singing and clapping. It meant everything about rock and roll, expression, creativity and art. One man against the world, and one song. It didn’t matter that he was clapping off-time, it didn’t matter that it was no instruments being played. All that mattered was the attitude of the song.”

To a degree, Son House simply had longevity on his side. Indeed one of the things that separates him from so many of his peers is the fact that he didn’t die young. Passing away in October 1988, at the ripe old age of 86, he lived on to commit his memory to tape when so many other blues players didn’t.

He was not a guitarist of great technical ability, or even an original pioneer of Delta blues. That accolade sits more comfortably with the earlier likes of Charley Patton, who became something of a travel companion to House, having seen him busking at a station in Mississippi.

But House was a remarkable performer, with one of the most harrowing voices in Mississippi. And he lived to document his legacy on record, setting a precedent for what blues – and, in turn, rock and roll – could be.

Eddie James “Son’” House Jr. was born in Mississippi in 1902. His father was a musician who played the tuba in a band. As a young man, Eddie worked as a manual laborer and preached on the side.

At one point he briefly became a full-time church pastor but continued to be lured by whisky and women. It was a tension that would last throughout much of his life: preaching and liquor, God and the devil, gospel and blues.

Around 1927, he heard slide guitar for the first time and decided to devote his life to blues music.

Like many other blues artists of the day, he suffered during the Great Depression, during which time record sales plummeted and he fell into relative obscurity.

Son House was not rediscovered until the 1960s. “Grinnin’ in Your Face” was recorded and released in 1965, around the same time as his signature song “Death Letter Blues.” The latter track was built on House’s earlier recording “My Black Mama, Part 2” from 1930.

Thanks to televized and audio appearances in the 1970s, his legacy was propelled into the next generation, and beyond.

Order Son House’s Father of the Delta Blues: the Complete 1965 Sessions here.

I was always intrigued by the look of the National Westwood, also known as the Map due to its upper bout, which resembles the U.S. Eastern coastline.

I imagined it would be unwieldy to play, and since the National guitar company practically went out of business in the mid ’60s, examples aren’t easy to find.

Plus, the numerous iterations of the National brand – including Supro, Valpro, Dobro, Airline and Valco – make it difficult to know which brand and model would be best.

I finally bought the Map shown here, which was being restored and modified by my friend Ardy. This electric guitar started out as a single-pickup model 75 but was modified with a second pickup, along with some practical, if not clever rewiring. (Visually, it looks to be a model 77, but that guitar has a third pickup, a piezo, hidden under the bridge.)

Part of the restoration included covering some badly engineered routing and removing bumper stickers, which necessitated the groovy grey pewter refinish.

Weirdo Factor

After the odd body shape, the Westwood’s weirdest aspect is an elegant black headstock with fancy script logo that, nevertheless, is shaped like Gumby’s head.

The guitar was offered in many finishes and was later made of Res-O-Glass, just like the Montgomery Ward Airline guitar Jack White played with the White Stripes. But the rest of this guitar is purely practical and quite musical.

Playability & Sound

Made in Los Angeles, this beauty has a solid maple body and neck with 20 low-profile frets laid into a nice slab of rosewood.

The C-shape neck feels friendly to my small paws, but it took me a while to get used to the nearly flat fingerboard. It was an easy adjustment, though, especially because it plays so darn fast.

The counterintuitive controls are another story. What looks like a three-way pickup selector on the lower bout is actually a three-way tone selector. The knob next to it is a master tone knob. The upper bout contains the volume controls for each pickup and a chicken-head pickup selector.

Don’t have this as a backup to your Les Paul, because the knob layout is more confusing than driving in London.

The hardware includes a screw to adjust the neck angle (why don’t all bolt-ons have this?) and Kluson tuners that still work smoothly.

While the neck pickup is warm, as expected, it can sound funky and skanky with the EQ selections. The bridge pickup is brighter than the neck, but never gets scratchy. 

Clean tone or with distortion, these old single-coils really rock and have a tone unlike any other I’ve heard.

Value

In its time, the Westwood sold for $175 to $225, about the same price as a Fender Stratocaster.

Their resale value hasn’t kept pace with the Strat, however. These beauties are still relatively affordable at $1,500 to $2,500.

Why It Rules

David Bowie, Jack White and Dan Auerbach have played the Westwood, but it’s still obscure enough to look like a custom build. 

It’s also lighter than it looks (7.2 pounds), plays great and sounds unique.

Thanks to Ardy for saving this beauty from the dumpster. Visit Eastwood Guitars to see the company’s great National tributes, and check out the new National Guitar here.

Got a whack job? Feel free to get in touch with me at rtcarleton@gmail.com. Who knows? Maybe I’ll write about it.

***For more on Jack White's favorite gear check out this article on guitars and this one on effects***

Just four days after Eddie Van Halen passed away on October 6, 2020, Jack White performed the title track from his solo album Lazaretto on Saturday Night Live, brandishing his favorite blue customized EVH Wolfgang guitar as a gesture of tribute to the late master.

“I won’t even insult the man’s talent by trying to play one of his songs tonight,” White said prior to the show. “[But] Eddie was very kind to me and saw to it that this guitar was made for me to my specs. Thanks again, Eddie, for this guitar, and rest in peace, sir.”

While some might be surprised to learn that indie-rock’s champion of primal blues lines and the late, lamented heavy rock virtuoso were so sympatico, it makes terrific sense on many levels.

In addition to decades of knocking out album after album of wicked riffs and potent solos, both players have displayed throughout their careers an almost obsessive pursuit of individualism and specialized design in the instruments they’ve played, never content with stock features and aesthetics, always pushing the envelope to make their own guitars more idiosyncratic, versatile and allied with their singular approaches to both technique and tone.

“Eddie was really gratified to learn that Jack was playing the Wolfgang guitars,” says Fender Master Builder Chip Ellis, who oversaw the design of the EVH Wolfgang line, as well as the customizations on White’s specific axes, and has been White’s collaborator on custom designs ever since.

White and Ellis’s latest co-creations, used liberally on White’s newest release – the wide-ranging and explosive guitar showcase Fear of the Dawn (Third Man) – are every bit as unique in form and function as you’d expect.

And although they are unmistakably Fender guitars – including a customized Telecaster and Jazzmaster, and two Acoustasonics – they stray as far from the production models as one could possibly go.

Likewise, on Fear of the Dawn, White strays about as far from mainstream pop and indie rock as one could possibly go, turning in a blistering electric guitar statement that suggests timeless touchstones such as Frank Zappa, Prince, T. Rex, Thin Lizzy and Tom Morello as much as it does the kind of garage psych nuggets on which White built his reputation.

The sounds are outrageous: White’s guitars practically peel the steel off your studio monitors with aggressive, even explosive tones that are anything but manicured, despite the album’s obvious top-tier engineering and mixing.

As a sort of aesthetic palate cleanser, White will also be releasing Entering Heaven Alive, a full-length album of predominately acoustic guitar songs, something he’s more than proved his mettle at already, as evidenced by the lovely collection, Acoustic Recordings, 1998–2016.

As White and his band prepare for his first full tour in more than two years, he sat down with Guitar Player to discuss the methods to the madness behind his creative and fluid approach to recording, writing and modifying both guitars and pedals – including his own Third Man line of effects, which includes the cool Bumble Buzz, Triplegraph and Mantic Flex – and how his tone has evolved from his early days with the White Stripes through his Raconteurs years (with co-frontman Brendon Benson), the Dead Weather and his own unique and often challenging solo albums.

Let’s start with the very unique blue and white Telecaster you’re featured holding in our cover shot this month. It resembles the more copper/orange sparkle Tele you played with the Raconteurs…

This is sort of the next step on from that guitar, which Chip Ellis and I had started working on around the Raconteurs’ last album, before the pandemic. We called it the Three-Wheel Motion Low-Rider Telecaster.

We started with a B-Bender-equipped Telecaster that I received as a Christmas present a few years back, and we just started adding cool elements and features that I’ve been wanting to have added based on my experience playing live over the past couple of solo tours I’ve been doing.

The B-Bender Tele was a great present to get. I’d always wanted one, and we changed the color of it to something more suitable for the color scheme of the Raconteurs, with that orange sparkle finish.

Then the thought was, Okay, as long as we’re repainting it, let’s put some new pickups in it. At that moment in time, I was really into the Fender Lace Sensors for the bridge and then a P-90 in the middle position.

And then we added a neck pickup that was on my brother’s 1972 Fender Telecaster Thinline when I was a kid. I always thought that the bassy-sounding neck pickup on that was really creamy, so I wanted to have that in there.

And then eventually the bridge pickup changed from the Lace Sensor, as well. My wife, [Third Man singer/songwriter/guitarist and session player] Olivia Jean, had gotten a custom guitar from Fender, and [pickup guru] Tim Shaw had made these outstanding Filter’Tron-style pickups for that.

I love Filter’Trons, and I’ve played Gretsch guitars quite a bit, so I really wanted those same types of pickups in my Telecaster.

Sure, if you A/B most Filter’Trons against a lot of the higher-output pickups out there, they don’t compete for gain, but whatever Tim did to make these balance with the output of my other pickups, they’re just really furious Filter’Trons. Tons of bite.

And we’re even considering adding a coil-tap to it next. We did that with the humbucking Lace Sensors I used on the last tour, and that was really interesting at times for adding a bit of extra treble when you need it.

Tell us about this cool B-Bender.

Sure. So, this is not the factory Fender Bender that you’d typically see on a Fender guitar. It’s called a Glaser Bender, and Chip Ellis partially recommended it to me because it’s much lighter than a traditional all-steel B-Bender.

I just wanted to be sure it was as good as the Fender Benders, because I really like those, and this one is great and, like I said, much lighter.

My concern was that with three pickups, and all these extra features, we were going to have to consider going semi-hollow with the Tele body to compensate, but so far so good.

The B-Bender works by pulling down on the guitar from the strap, and it allows you to adjust the bend as far as you want. There’s a little cavity that goes under the neckplate so you can install the Bender mechanism, and another one under the bridgeplate, which is where the B/G Bender “finger” goes.

It works great, really smooth, and can be used as either a B- or a G-Bender.

Now, in the past I always thought you couldn’t have a B-Bender and a Bigsby on the same guitar – you have to pick one. But we figured out that we could have them both, except the Bigsby doesn’t bend the B-string.

On the Tele I used with the Raconteurs, I had a Hip Shot for dropped-D, as well as a B-Bender and a G-Bender, so I began to miss the ability to use the Bigsby on all, or at least most, of the strings.

The armrest is a feature that’s very unique to these guitars. What was the inspiration there? Also, what’s the story behind that kind of robotic-looking segmented tremolo arm?

Well, I started putting armrests on that top back shoulder because many of the Gretsch models I was collecting had them, like the Duo-Jets, and the White Penguin had that sort of banjo armrest.

At first I just thought they were really cool looking, but I began to realize that I do always wear the paint out in that area of the guitar. It’s just a very beautiful and purposeful sort of “form meets function” design element, which also adds to a sense of symmetry with the pickguard.

The tremolo arm you’re looking at was designed by a guy named TK Smith. His company, TK Smith Design & Fabrication, is based out in the Mojave Desert and makes amazing vintage-inspired guitars and electric mandolins, as well as cool vintage-style tone knobs and vibrato arms for Bigsby tailpieces.

So me and Chip just attached it to the Bigsby. To be honest, I just loved the shape and design of it. It was different from the conventional Bigsby arm, but we’ll have to see how it performs in practice. I haven’t really had a chance to use it hard with the band yet.

You’ve always used some form of pitch modulation, including Whammy Pedals, octave fuzzes and Bigsbys. Do you feel like you’re shooting for specific results with those tools, or is it largely a matter of improvising and seeing what comes out?

Definitely the latter. In fact, in a lot of cases, I feel like the vibrato arm and the Whammy Pedal are more in control of what happens than I am. In many ways, I feel like I’m following their lead, rather than the other way around.

For example, the company that makes the Third Man Plasma Coil and Plasma Drive pedals with me – Gamechanger Audio – is also working on a Bigsby in a foot-pedal design. That could be really cool to hear what happens when you use the Bigsby arm and the Bigsby pedal at the same time.

But yeah, to answer your question, I feel like some pedals are great for doing exactly what I want them to, and other pedals are kind of directing me, pointing me in a direction I wouldn’t normally go.

You’ve been exploiting interrupter, or kill, switches for a while now, and most of your guitars have them. What inspired that?

My interrupters do a complete cut of the signal, but I mean, Tom Morello was doing a similar thing back in the ’90s by just turning on and off between two pickups.

And of course, people would do similar things with Les Pauls back in the day, where they’d have one of the pickups’ volumes down, so the pickup selector would act as a kind of kill switch. So it’s nothing new.

All my White Stripes guitars had those sorts of on/off switches on them back in the day, and I enjoyed playing with them, but eventually I thought it would be much easier if we installed them as buttons.

The inspiration for that way of doing it probably comes from when I was using the Fender EVH Wolfgang USA Eddie Van Halen Signature guitars, which have these momentary push-button switches. I’m tempted to put them on all my guitars now.

And it’s not an issue for me with blending two pickups, because I’ve never blended pickups on any guitar I’ve used, not ever. Even my Tele is just three positions, not five. I’ve also got a V-neck on this Tele, made from the whitest maple we could find, because I really don’t like that sort of yellowy maple; I like it to be really white.

I like the V-neck a lot. All the old Gibson acoustics I play, like my 1915 Gibson L-1 [a.k.a. the Robert Johnson model], are V-necks and I really like that. I understand why people wouldn’t like it; it’s hard to play. But I think I like making things a little bit harder on myself, too. So there’s that.

But there’s something appealing about putting a little extra leverage against my thumb off the back of the neck. I hadn’t experienced that before, and I’ve grown to like it a lot. I’m not going to stand here and say, Yeah, that’s the shape I love the most. But I will say that I do get some interesting results from it.

I’ll try it this year on tour and see if after 10 shows I’m still excited by it or if it’s become a hindrance. But my sense now is that it’s actually making me play a little differently.

We’re also experimenting with some scalloping, especially on the higher frets, and we’ll see what that’s like. I dunno. I just kept seeing it on all these Ritchie Blackmore clips I was watching, and I thought it was something I might enjoy.

CooI! We had no idea you were a Ritchie Blackmore fan. That may surprise some people.

Oh, yeah, Blackmore’s great. I especially love mid-period Deep Purple albums like In Rock, Fireball, Made in Japan and Who Do We Think We Are. The second and third Rainbow albums – Rising and Long Live Rock ’n’ Roll – also have some pretty incredible playing on them.

See, like Jimmy Page and Tony Iommi, Blackmore was still blues guitar-based, y’know? A lot of the later players who were more heavy metal go over my head – or maybe I should say under it – because without the strong blues element in there, I begin to lose my connection to the music.

But Page, Iommi and Blackmore are really just the heaviest blues that existed at the time, coming out of the English blues boom of the ’60s and expanding it into this heavier sort of territory.

While we don’t think the term shredder applies to you, you certainly have some speed in those hands, and you’re not afraid to use it.

I like to use speed in short bursts. I try to choose my moments. Like anything, if you use too much of it, it can lose what makes it interesting in the first place.

I also played all the instruments, including drums, on many of these songs, and that kind of led me to begin structuring the song in my head before I ever even picked up a guitar.

Instead of the space for a solo either showing up naturally in a band arrangement or not, I could be very deliberate about it, because I was structuring the song from the drums up. Like, okay, I’m going to open up with something impressive on the guitar and sort of knock the listener on the head, and then I’ll sing a bit, and then come back and do it again.

That opened me up to try some things that maybe in a full-band tracking context I might not have gone after.

Talk about these customized Fender Tele- and Jazzmaster-style Acoustasonics you’re playing. They look rad with those cool blue finishes. But there’s more to your specs on these than just the finish, right?

Yeah, I made some recommendations regarding the range of sounds in them, as well. Y’know, I first started using an Acoustasonic for the last Raconteurs tour.

Since we were going with an orange color scheme for that tour, we borrowed the design idea from one of my Gretsch Rancher Falcon acoustics, the one I named after the actress Claudette Colbert, which has her face engraved on the back by a great tattoo artist in Cincinnati named Kore Flatmo.

Along with the tribute to Claudette, my thought was to try to mix some of the design vibe from those interesting old Fender Antigua finishes from the 1970s, but with the modern Acoustasonic guitars.

As for the sounds, I was lucky enough to be one of the first people to get an Acoustasonic when they first came out, and I brought it straight out on tour with the Raconteurs, so I got to road test it pretty heavily.

And the first thing I asked them was, is there any way we can have fewer choices for sounds? I felt I only needed three sounds: one great electric, one great acoustic and then a sound with both together, because that solved a basic issue with how to play songs of mine that had acoustics and electrics either in different sections of the same track, or sometimes doubling the same parts.

That came in real handy with the Raconteurs. Before that, I’d have to write acoustic sections with a long enough space at the end so I could switch back to electric.

This custom Jazzmaster electric you’ve got in process here looks pretty cool. Any interesting mods happening on that one?

Oh, yeah. So, Dan Mancini, my brilliant guitar tech and mission man, has been working a lot on this one.

A while back, I showed Dan a clip of a guy who had incorporated some sort of synth device into his guitar, and I thought, That’s what I’ve been trying to do for years that I wish we could figure out! I remember speaking to Matt Bellamy of Muse about how he incorporated a Korg Kaoss Pad into his guitar [eventually leading to the Kort Manson MB-1 Matt Bellamy Signature guitar], and I always thought that was a great idea.

So Dan and I began talking, and right now he’s in the process of installing the guts of an Electro-Harmonix Pitchfork pedal into the back of this Jazzmaster. The intermittent switch can turn on the harmonies, but I can also use one of the pots to bend the pitch as well, just like with a Whammy Pedal.

I think Tom Morello may end up getting jealous of this and have to put it on his guitar, too. I’ll have to send him a clip of it and see what he thinks.

Will that have a similar mix of Filter’Trons and P-90s like the Telecaster?

It will have some of the same features as the Tele, but the pickups will be different. I own this incredible Gibson Fort Knox “Skunk Baxter” Firebird that I played with the Raconteurs, and the mini-humbucker pickups on that, which Jim DeCola designed, are just so impressive.

Honestly, it’s almost a shock every time I play it. So Tim Shaw at Fender is working on his own version of that type of mini-humbucker to put into this Jazzmaster.

From your well-documented 1964 JB Hutto Montgomery Ward Airline to your gorgeous Gretsch “Triple Green Machine” to your 1950s Kay Hollowbody to your EVH Wolfgang guitars, you constantly seem to be exploring unusual choices in pursuit of both new sounds and new/old aesthetics. What do you think drives that for you?

I just think it’s cool that there are these moments in your life where you might play through a certain pickup or type of guitar, but maybe it’s at the wrong moment in your life, and somehow you decide, “Nah, that’s not for me.”

And then you revisit it 10 years later, and you’re like, “Oh my God, actually this is great. It just has its own kind of appeal.”

Now, obviously this kind of experience only happens when you’re really deep into the tone thing. Plenty of people wouldn’t know the difference if you played them five different pickups in a row. They’d probably sound exactly the same to them. But when you’re a guitar player, you can really hear how the differences matter and how they influence your playing and tone.

Still, it’s unusual to meet even experienced players or luthiers as ready to flip the script on conventional guitar design as you are. Or as curious about it as you always seem to be.

Well, I’m really curious right now about this Billy Gibbons Gyrock Signature guitar from Wild Customs that’s just come out. It has this crazy roller device that has three pickups loaded in it that you can rotate to choose which pickup you want.

You just spin the drum in there, and you can also pop the pickups out, put different ones in, and it’s very easy to do from the backplate. There’ve been other companies that have tried to do removable pickups and removable pickguards, but it seems like they’ve really figured it out here.

Pretty cool to have three choices of bridge pickup on a drum, so you can literally “roll” from lipstick tube to a humbucker. That would be so cool to have. I dunno. I might get jealous and have to try those out.

So, to answer your question, I guess I just always want to know what’s happenin’! [laughs]

Order Fear of the Dawn here.

Pre-order Entering Heaven Alive here.

Jack White has put his signature style on gear – from its sound to its look. 

As he drops his latest album, Fear of the Dawn, he gives Guitar Player an exclusive look at the electric guitars behind his blue period.

Here are five of the coolest...

1) 1964 “JB Hutto” Montgomery Ward Airline

Made by the Valco company, and distributed via Montgomery Ward department stores from 1958 to 1968, the “JB Hutto” Airline, which originally retailed for only $99, is perhaps White’s most iconic guitar, as it took the lion’s share of the heavy lifting in the band that would be his vehicle to stardom, the White Stripes.

Nicknamed the JB Hutto after the great blues slide guitarist who was its best-known proponent in its day, the Airline’s distinctive fiberglass body and space-age design made it a natural fit for the iconoclastic White, who so elevated the guitar’s public profile that Eastwood began making a fine replica version in 2000, albeit with a chambered mahogany – rather than fiberglass – body.

2) Fender Three-Wheel-Motion Low-Rider Telecaster (Blue)

“The kill switch on the blue Telecaster is a simple momentary switch that we’d used on the EVH Wolfgang Signature Model,” says Fender/EVH Senior Master Builder and Project Engineer Chip Ellis.

“That was one of Ed’s things. I don’t know if it was the first time that Jack had used an interrupter, or kill, switch, but when we sent Jack his first Wolfgang with the kill switch in it, he absolutely loved it.

"We built two custom Wolfgangs for Jack for that first solo tour, and since then, anything that we built for him after that got a kill switch. That’s just become part of Jack’s thing.”

The Tele’s current Thinline Wide Range Humbucker once belonged to Jack’s brother Eddie, who had it on his Thinline.

“I always loved that sound,” White says, “and I thought it would be cool to use my brother’s actual pickup on this guitar.”

3) Fender Three-Wheel-Motion Low-Rider Telecaster (Copper)

“The copper Telecaster was a gift that Jack received,” Ellis says. “It originally had the traditional B-Bender setup – the big one with the giant plate on the back and the huge mechanism, which he loved.

“It was clear that he wanted it to not be the typical Nashville Tele with the B-Bender. He wanted it to be very much his Tele. So there were lots of modifications. We basically hogged out a swimming pool rout in the body and glued in a fresh block of wood.

“We veneered the thing and turned it into something completely different with a Lace Sensor in the bridge position, something P-90-ish in the middle, and a Wide Range Humbucker in the neck. And then he wanted to add a G-Bender and the Hipshot bender for a dropped-D!”

4) Fender Acoustasonic Jazzmaster

“I’m the last guy you’d think would be interested in guitar modeling,” White says, “and even when I first picked up the Fender Acoustasonic, I was still worried that it might sound a little fake. 

"But that technology has come a long way from where it was 20 years ago.”

White’s custom Acoustasonics have pared the available models down to just three, which keeps things simple for him during long shows with lots of moving parts.

“There have been a lot of guitars over the years that have attempted to do both acoustic and electric sounds, but this is the first time I’ve heard a guitar that really does it well,” he tells us. “And it’s practical, especially for my solo catalog that has a lot of electric and acoustic guitars in the same song.

“I used to have to actually write sections with pauses long enough so I could switch from acoustic to electric onstage.”

5) Gretsch G6199 Bill-Bo Jupiter Thunderbird

“This guitar was inspired by seeing Billy Gibbons play one of Bo Diddley’s original Gretsch Jupiter Thunderbird guitars, which Bo had given to Billy,” White explains.

“When I was working on the theme song for the James Bond movie Another Way to Die, with Alicia Keys in 2003, my idea was that we’d play live at some point, and I’d outfit Alicia and myself and the entire band with these guitars, sort of like how Bo and his guitarist The Duchess did back in the day.

“While that never materialized, I ended up using the Billy-Bo for the ‘Another Way to Die’ video, and it then became the theme for my band the Dead Weather. 

"You can even see that this particular Gretsch G6199 Billy-Bo Jupiter Thunderbird has the Bond/Third Man logo on it.”

Order Jack White's new album Fear of the Dawn here.

Straight out of the gate – and we do mean a noise gate – on the opening track “Taking Me Back,” you are met with a small army of pitch-shifted guitar drones that sounds like someone placed an EBow on a Tomahawk missile.

This is followed by a clutch of punchy, fuzz-bomb power chords that almost seem to claw their way through your speakers. (We actually checked ours to make sure they weren’t damaged. They were fine.)

In an age when guitar sounds on many high-profile rock records tend to be buried, overly burnished or just plain boring, Jack White has taken his enviably visceral, sometimes odd sounds to ever more aggressive and idiosyncratic heights.

And his playing is simply wicked, at times exploding out of the speakers like a mad cross between Frank Zappa, Tom Morello and Prince.

His more lyrical blues playing, like on the closing track, “Shedding My Velvet,” has surely never been stronger.

“I’d like to think that Fear of the Dawn is the best guitar playing that I’ve ever done,” White says, hanging out in the Blue Room performance space at Third Man Records in Nashville.

“While mixing it and listening to playback,” he continues, “I felt that I’d done more with guitar on this album than ever.

“I’ve taken my ideas further. I’ve experimented and taken a lot of risks with both my playing and my tone, and even with the dynamics, from very quiet to very, very loud.

“You’re also noticing the sort of ‘If we’re going to do it, let’s do it’ attitude me and the engineers had with the mixing process. Which is to say, if this new part comes in, I want it to come in heavy-duty. I don’t want the guitars off in the distance. I want each riff to be louder than the one before it, than the verse before it.”

Tracking the album, on the other hand, meant being ready for happy accidents and sudden flashes of inspiration.

“Jack works fast when he’s got creative ideas,” engineer Bill Skibbe reveals. “He’s very immediate. You’re not premeditating a lot of it. There’s not a lot of upfront labor going into scrutinizing what kind of head you’re going to use.

“If Jack’s got an idea, we plug into this or that amp as quickly as possible, and find the tone that’s best suited to whatever he’s got in his head.

“From an engineering standpoint, that’s always been my favorite aspect of working with Jack: When it’s time to make it happen, you have to be able to get that sound and tone perfected as quickly as possible.”

In the studio, Skibbe helped set up a semi-circle of amps, including a ’60s-era blackface Fender Vibroverb, a customized vintage RCA tube head and a rare German Echolette B40N head/cab combo.

Skibbe, along with fellow engineer Joshua Smith, exploited a raft of vintage mics for the amps, including RCA BK-5B, 77D and 44BX ribbon mics, Coles ribbon mics and large-diaphragm condensers like the Neumann U67, which Skibbe praises for their “nice midrange bite, which is still a little mellower than a U87.”

The mics, generally set in a close-mic position, if slightly off-axis, typically hit either the vintage preamps in White’s 1920s-era RCA mixing desk, or simply passed through a vintage Neve 1073 EQ/preamp.

To add “a little jump to the sound” during mixing, Skibbe and Smith often printed the guitars with a Universal Audio 1176 and/or Fairchild compressor, and stereo panning effects were used to “create movement if a part sounded a little static.”

“A lot of people think in terms of relative volumes when they’re mixing,” says Skibbe, who is also a mastering engineer, “but the idea here was to keep two simple ideas in mind: movement and depth of field.

“It sounds strange to say, with all the interesting pedals and cool sounds Jack was getting, but actually the overarching idea was really just to keep the sounds as simple as possible, and keep the creative energy in motion.”

Order Fear of the Dawn here.

“There’s this one pedal on [Fear of the Dawn] that I bought because it has a little decal of the Japanese anime figure and ‘vocaloid’ character Hatsune Miku on it, and my son is so into anime and all that stuff,” Jack White says, laughing.

“It’s called the Miku Stomp, by Korg, and the idea is that you play through it and, using vocal synthesis, for each note you play, Hatsune Miku sings a different syllable in Japanese! 

"On the song ‘Into the Twilight,’ I did an entire guitar solo with it. So I guess I can play in Japanese now.”

Quirky and unique pedals are nothing new for White, whose penchant for peculiar pedals began with his iconic use of an original Electro-Harmonix Big Muff Pi – allied with a DigiTech Whammy pedal – during his White Stripes years.

Since then, he has designed and developed his own full line of pedals and other gadgets with small gear manufacturers, distributing them through his Third Man Records and Third Man Hardware companies, based in Detroit and Nashville, and via thirdmanstore.com.

Notable among these are the Third Man Bumble Buzz fuzz pedal, produced in collaboration with Chris Young of Vancouver-based Union Tube & Transistor; the Gamechanger Audio Plasma Coil distortion box; the deliciously weird Third Man Hardware Mantic Flex synth-fuzz; and the CopperSound/Third Man Triplegraph digital octave divider, which features three proprietary, foot-sized telegraph keys, along with an integrated effects loop.

“The Triplegraph and the Bumble Buzz are definitely the heavy hitters on Fear of the Dawn,” White says. “Everything on my current board got used at one time or another, but the Triplegraph, Bumble Buzz and Mantic Flex for sure.

“To be part of the design team for a pedal really changed everything for me because I got to finally express exactly what I want in a pedal.

"To be honest, as unique as it is, I was kind of surprised at what a big hit the Triplegraph has become. We can’t keep it in stock.”

White points to a custom version of the pedal in blue, white and black (see above.)

“On the album, this is what’s making the bass guitar sound like a guitar, or making the guitar sound like a bass,” he explains. 

“It was an interesting process, where I kept checking back to whatever I had written the original riffs on.

“I might write the song with a lower-octave bass sound and then switch the Triplegraph up – flip it to the other side to a higher octave or to a lower octave. 

"This way, regardless of what sound I started off on, this would make me rethink how I wanted to do it.”

White’s touring board is always evolving, but the blue-tinged array for his tour in support of Fear of the Dawn is spectacular for its visual aesthetics as well as its raw power and idiosyncratic sonic colors.

Co-designed by guitar tech Dan Mancini, it’s backed by one of Third Man’s two-level, aircraft-grade aluminum Holeyboard Pedal Boards.

It includes traditional choices, like an MXR Micro Amp boost, a DigiTech Whammy Pedal and a rehoused Russian Big Muff, alongside a gaggle of Third Man Hardware stomps, including the Bumble Buzz, Triplegraph, Mantic Flex and Plasma Coil.

There are a few rare birds, too, like a Honda Sound Works Fab Delay from Japan and a rare ’80s-era Russian-made Spektr-2 Fuzz-Wah (since replaced by a Dunlop 535Q wah), as well as a few smart utility choices, including an ISP Technologies Deci-Mate Micro Decimator noise gate pedal.

Probably not a bad idea to have it slotted in toward the end of your signal chain when you have at least four full-on fuzz destruction devices on your pedalboard.

Order Fear of the Dawn here.

As most fans will agree, never has so mighty a sound been made on so humble an instrument.

But it would be difficult to call Jack White’s 1964 Montgomery Ward Airline Res-O-Glas cheap anymore, after his use of the ’60s catalog fodder sent values and collectibility soaring sky high.

From the start, though, the White Stripes’ ethos was firmly rooted in the power of minimalism, and giving the band’s sparse ingredients room to breathe often translated “less is more” into “less is huge!”

White wasn’t the first guitarist to discover the conversely massive, dynamic tone that an erstwhile cheapo instrument can generate, but when he strapped on his red Res-O-Glas beauty, the guitar world quickly recognized the full achievement of this silk-purse-out-of-sow’s-ear-like conversion.

The fiberglass body, assembly-line construction, and dual Valco single-coil pickups (humbuckerish though they appear) add up to an edgy, characterful snarl, and definitely get the big riffs across.

A big part of this instrument's appeal for White seems to be that it’s not an easy or forgiving electric guitar to play.

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

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

The fact that White’s playing has sent the desirability of such plastic – or fiberglass – guitars off the charts doesn’t change the principle behind the sentiment, and he deserves double credit for once again affirming that the music is in the heart, mind and fingers of the maker, and not the price tag of the instrument.

Browse the White Stripes catalog 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.

The traditional blues players from the 1920s through the ’60s established many popular song structures, chords and guitar techniques. It’s testament to the quality and enduring popularity of these artists that so much of the identity of their playing can still be heard in today’s blues music. 

Less well known is that blues is at the heart of much of the rock and metal that would emerge from the ’70s on – so there’s something for everyone to learn. What more reason do you need to follow our lesson on some core blues basics?

Classic Blues

Get jamming the easy way, with a simple, traditional repeating boogie riff in the style of the great John Lee Hooker (Ex. 1). Based around an A root note, this line can easily be taken through a standard 12-bar blues progression (A - D - E) by shifting the pattern up one string to a “D shape” riff and down one string set for the E chord.

Ex. 2 uses the rhythm and blues groove first popularized by Bo Diddley in his self-titled 1955 single and known today as the “Bo Diddley beat.” It’s been adapted by many artists, including the Rolling Stones in “Not Fade Away,” Bruce Springsteen in “She’s the One” and George Michael in “Faith.”

This catchy groove is all about the rhythm and timing, so strum slowly at first, then try using some other chords you know. To achieve the desired feel, keep your picking hand moving in a continuous, uninterrupted down-up-down-up manner with the underlying 16th-note pulse, even during the rests.

Stevie Ray Vaughan was famed for the shuffle rhythms and ferocious lead work he’d coax from his “Number One” Strat. In Ex. 3, a blues bass line is woven around an open A5 power chord. You get the weight of the chord while the bass line outlines a more sophisticated A7 harmony. Listen to SRV’s “Pride and Joy” and “Rude Mood” for inspiration.

Ex. 4 shows a blues turnaround inspired by Eric Clapton, who adapted Robert Johnson-style changes to electric blues guitar. Playing fingerstyle will help make all the melody notes and the descending bass notes ring out clearly.

Funk-rock blends nicely with blues rhythms, as Jimi Hendrix demonstrated in many of his classic tracks. Ex. 5 is informed by his style and employs one of his favorite chords (the 7#9, often dubbed “the Hendrix chord”) played in both E and C. In the single-note part of the riff, you can pull the 5th-fret G note slightly sharp for an even bluesier flavor.

B.B. King was famed for his soulful touch and his quivering “butterfly” vibrato technique, which is deftly employed with the A note in Ex. 6. To emulate B.B.’s signature sound, aim for a quick wobble of the string but without too much pitch change. Rest the base of your fretting finger on the side of the fretboard then “flutter” your hand around this pivot point to create the vibrato. It’s easier than using pure finger strength, and it’s pure B.B.

In blues circles, a mini sweep across the strings is referred to as a rake. This drag of the pick is more of a percussive effect, so the notes don’t need to be perfectly fretted. You can even mute the strings entirely as you pick, so that the rake notes are pitchless “chucks.” We’ve written picking directions for the rakes here (Ex. 7). Notice how the quarter-tone bend in bar 1 provides a blues edge too.

Playing two notes at once is a great way to thicken up your guitar sound. This is an effective thing to do to help avoid the dreaded “tone dropout” you might experience when soloing in a power trio. Ex. 8 is inspired by John Mayer, and in bar 2 we’re playing a line that descends the B and high E strings in diatonic 3rds strings, sweetly harmonizing the key of A minor.

From Eric Clapton to Joe Bonamassa, great blues guitarists seem to have a never-ending vocabulary of stock phrases, yet they somehow always sound authentic. The key is to use the minor or major pentatonic scale as a foundation and keep your solos simple at first. In Ex. 9, we’re playing a very triplet-y phrase based on the A minor pentatonic scale (A, C, D, E, G) and presenting ideas that can be reimagined in myriad ways.

With some minor pentatonic basics under our belts, we can expand these ideas into something more sophisticated, using fast pentatonic flurries, as demonstrated in Ex. 10. Legendary bluesman Buddy Guy often plays fast flurries of notes, straight from the minor pentatonic scale. That means the shape feels familiar but you’ll be delivering more “angular” phrased licks.

Blues isn’t only about minor keys. Listen to Freddie King’s “Hide Away” and Fleetwood Mac’s “Need Your Love So Bad.” Both of these songs feature extensive use of the major pentatonic scale (intervallically spelled 1, 2, 3, 5, 6). The simple lick shown in Ex. 11 is designed to help get you started with this warm-sounding set of notes. Watch out though. There’s a bluesy minor note in there too – the 5th-fret C, right before the last dyad (two-note chord).

The previous lick hinted at an idea we’re going exploring more fully in our next example – mixing up parallel major and minor pentatonic scales in solos. Why bother? Well, the combination of “happy” major and “serious” minor scales sounds way more sophisticated than sticking to just one or the other. Ex. 12 keeps things simple, but this idea is a key part of blues, so experiment!

21st Century Blues

Whether it’s the fuzz-fuelled lo-fi riffing of the White Stripes and the Black Keys, or the Zeppelin-like hard rock sensibilities of Rival Sons and Greta Van Fleet, it’s fair to say that blues has evolved somewhat in recent years.

Though many of the chords and scales owe a debt to earlier forebears, many bands are putting their own stamp on blues with retro-inspired drive tones and tone-bending effects like octavers and wild fuzz distortions. Here we’re looking at a few of the tricks and riffing tropes of the current generation of blues players.

Dan Auerbach

Spiky fuzz distortion tones have been a big part of the signature retro sounds of the aforementioned bands. The riff shown in Ex. 14 is designed to make good use of a dirt pedal. If you’re using a regular drive pedal, keep the treble high, roll off a little bass and experiment with your amp’s EQ and gain.

From Robert Johnson and Elmore James to Derek Trucks, Gary Clark Jr. and Auerbach, slide guitar has long been at the heart of blues. The simple electric slide lick shown in Ex. 15 will help you develop this tricky technique.

Place your slide on your 3rd or 4th finger and aim directly over the fret you’re playing (not behind it). Use your 1st finger to dampen the strings behind the slide and suppress unwanted string noise and overtones. Additionally, it helps to use your pick hand to mute the strings your not playing on at the moment.

Contemporary bands’ minor pentatonic riffs owe as much to ’70s rock as they do to early blues. The pentatonic riff shown in Ex. 16 could easily be a Black Keys tune, a Led Zeppelin line, or you could slow it down and give it a traditional “Hoochie Coochie Man” treatment. It describes an E minor tonality, so the 6th string can be used as your tonal center to “bounce” the other notes off.

The advent of multi-track recording in the ’70s saw bands double-tracking guitar riffs. In recent years, duos like Royal Blood have used switching systems to recreate the effect in live performances. The layered riff in Ex. 17 is ideal for two guitars.

We take this idea further in Ex. 18. Here, we’re playing a simple melodic line on top of our previous riff. To make sure it stays riffy, we’re following the same rhythm for both lines – no solo widdle here! It’s based on the E minor pentatonic scale (E, G, A, B, D) throughout.

If you’re playing in a guitar-drums duo, White Stripes-style, you’ll need to fill out your sound. Ex. 19 covers plenty of notes to provide a full backing sound, then punctuating them with some fat-sounding power chords. For more weight, think about using an octaver effect as Jack White and Auerbach and Royal Blood’s Mike Kerr might do.

Even simple minor pentatonic licks can kick a song’s proverbial rear end. Ex. 20 demonstrates this with a lick inspired by Auerbach’s fretwork on the Black Keys song “Eagle Birds.”

There’s no use pretending that all vintage guitars were created equal. The build quality of Gibson and Fender electric guitars of the ’50s and early ’60s is celebrated as the epitome of factory-made achievement in the industry, while instruments by Gretsch, Rickenbacker, Guild and others are generally considered quite good. For pure sonic mojo and funky alternative-tone high jinks, though, there are plenty of others worth exploring, and several Harmony models and their brethren are likely at the top of that heap.

Most players today will know of Harmony as the long-running bargain brand amid U.S.-made electric guitars of the golden age. Many, however, are unlikely to be fully aware of the company’s historic place within the industry.

For a time in the early and middle parts of the 20th century, Harmony was one of the largest manufacturers of musical instruments in the world, and the company’s roots extend back to the close of the previous century, having been launched two years before Gibson itself was officially established.

German immigrant Wilhelm J.F. Schultz founded the company in Chicago in 1892, and just 10 years later Harmony was the largest supplier of Supertone-labeled guitars to retailing giant Sears Roebuck, a perpetual force in the dissemination of the humble guitar through the United States (the retailer bought the Harmony company in 1916 and owned it until 1940).

Though never quite top of the industry in terms of quality, Harmony instruments were well-built and generally functional. As such, they were the choice of many hard-working pros over the years. They were also snatched up by beginner and intermediate players, often under the brand name Silvertone, which represented all things music-related for Sears by the 1940s. Not all Silvertones were Harmony-made, however, and the newly independent company also sold its guitars through other stores and distributors.

While the guitars were rarely made from premium woods, and the hardware and setups sometimes made them clunky to play, many Harmony instruments benefited from the inclusion of great DeArmond-made pickups, particularly the varieties of gold-foil pickups that appeared on the Rocket and its archtop and thinline brethren of the late ’50s and ’60s. The cornerstone of the hollow-body lineup, the single-cutaway Rocket was made between 1959 and 1967, when it transmuted into a double-cutaway body, and soon after went off the rails, along with many other Harmonies in the company’s declining years.

Rocket models H53, H54 and H59 had one, two, and three pickups, respectively, while the two-pickup H56 also included a vibrato tailpiece, but the precise specs and components changed through the years, too. From their arrival until around 1964-’65, Harmony Rockets carried the simple Rowe-DeArmond gold-foil S-cover pickups, so-called due to the stylized “S” shape at the center of their chromed outer cover, with an exposed gold-colored insert and no pole pieces.

As detailed in this article these are great-sounding pickups with a juicy, rich tone, good clarity, excellent dynamics, and a decent amount of output to push a tube amp at the edge of breakup. After that, the guitar carried DeArmond gold-foil “mustache” pickups, with a row of adjustable pole pieces at their center and mustache-shaped cutouts in their chrome covers, with red-foil inserts underneath. These have a little less output than the preceding units, but they sound good and remain highly revered.

Other than the DeArmonds, a feature that jumps out on the three-pickup H59 in particular is the imposing arc of six control knobs that followed the treble-side edge of the guitar’s lower bout, comprising one volume and tone for each pickup. The selector switch on this model was also quite imposing: a large, white chicken-head knob on the horn with positions for each pickup individually and all together. The H54 and H56 carried a traditional three-way toggle selector.

The Rocket’s body was crafted from laminated maple, with a bolt-on neck that carried a fingerboard made from some unidentifiable brown wood that was in fact not rosewood, Brazilian or otherwise. Atop this, the thin frets were often somewhat indifferently dressed, too. For the first several years of production, these necks had steel reinforcement rails rather than adjustable truss rods, which were added around the time of the change to mustache pickups. A floating two-piece bridge with wooden saddle, basic trapeze tailpiece and budget three-on-a-plate tuners round out the features.

For all the underwhelming specs, a Harmony Rocket in good condition can sound utterly badass when played with some attitude. The construction and hardware complement elicit a characterful blend of jangle and fatness, which the lustworthy gold-foil pickups translate to anything from thick, buoyant cleans to gritty overdrive, depending on your amp and pedals of choice.

These guitars don’t deliver much in the resonance and sustain department, but they kick out a good amount of compression and a surprisingly sweet, toothsome harmonic shimmer when you dig in and push those gold foils hard. Plenty of serious players have made the Rocket a secret weapon amid all the usual suspects in the pro-guitar arsenal.

Dan Auerbach’s use of Rockets and their brethren with the Black Keys provides an excellent example of what these guitars can do, and Jack White occasionally swapped his Airline for a Rocket during his time with the White Stripes. Otherwise, countless blues guitar players cut their teeth – and often, made their living – on similar Harmony guitars, drawn by their relatively affordable prices. 

Speaking of which, these prices have been driven up on the vintage market in recent years thanks to the above-named associations and others, but an original Rocket, Meteor or other thinline Harmony still won’t break the bank the way a vintage A-list make and model will, and sharp eyes will occasionally spot some real bargains.

Otherwise, the new owner of the Harmony brand – BandLab Technologies, which also owns Heritage Guitars, Mono Cases, Teisco and other brands – has introduced the U.S.-made semi-hollow Comet and reissued three domestically produced solidbody electrics that capture the image of the nonhollow originals, if not the precise makeup of the original Rowe-DeArmond-made pickups.

Essential Ingredients

• Hollow thinline body > Constructed with laminated maple
• Single-cutaway from 1959-’67
• Bolt-on neck
• One, two or three DeArmond gold-foil pickups
• Optional vibrato (on the two-pickup H56 model only)

On this day, in 2005, the guitar world lost one its most groundbreaking and influential artists, Frederick Lincoln Wray, Jr. aka Link Wray. Though Wray released many critically acclaimed recordings throughout the course of his decades-long career he is widely known for his 1958 hit “Rumble.”

A tense, brooding electric guitar instrumental that swings from prowling open chord distortion to a violent outburst of frenetic strumming and back again “Rumble” has often been cited as a missing link between blues and hard rock.

Like many other career-defining tracks such as Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid” and ZZ Top’s “Tush,” Link Wray & His Ray Men’s “Rumble” came together extremely fast – in this case during an impromptu stage request.

While performing at a record hop in Fredericksburg, Virginia in 1957, pioneering rock ‘n’ roll deejay Milt Grant requested Wray and his band play a ‘stroll’ (a popular rockabilly dance of the late ‘50s) in order to introduce the Diamonds – a band who were at the time riding high on the success of their hit “The Stroll.”

Though Wray was not au fait with the number and felt unsure how to kick things off, his younger brother, Doug, quickly sprang into action with a drum beat. Suddenly, inspiration struck like a bolt of lightning and Wray’s iconic Dsus2/E riff was born. 

Spiced up with a cheeky B7 and a descending E minor pentatonic lick it’s the epitome of cowboy chord cool.

Wray’s older brother, Ray, then grabbed the vocal mic and placed it in front of the guitarist’s cranked Premier amp. Saturated in natural distortion and pulsating with tremolo the souped-up sound drove the audience wild.

“The only mic they had back in those days was just the singer’s – they didn’t mic the amps or anything,” recalled Wray. “You couldn’t even hear [bassist] Shorty, and Doug was playing so loud because he was playing with the butt ends of his sticks, so all you could really hear was me and Doug.

“And the kids, they just went ape and were screaming over me… We had to play it about four times for the kids. They kept hollering and screaming, banging on the stage, “Play that weird song! Play that weird song!”

“That weird song” (also referred to by Wray as “Oddball”) was released the following March titled “Rumble.”

Clocking in at just under two-and-a-half minutes, this short, sharp shock of rock was immediately powerful enough to get itself banned on radio – inevitably adding to its kudos and mystique.

Down the line, countless guitar players have been quoted as fans of this game-changing, career-breaking classic, including Bob Dylan (“'Rumble' is the best instrumental ever”) and Pete Townshend ("If it hadn't been for Link Wray and ‘Rumble,' I would have never picked up a guitar.”)

And in this clip from the brilliant 2008 documentary It Might Get Loud, Jimmy Page can be seen listening to this landmark seven-inch immersed in reverence. “I listened to anything with guitar on when I was a kid that was being played,” he tells Jack White and the Edge.

“But the first time I heard “Rumble” – that was something that had so much profound attitude to it… It really does.”

Browse Link Wray's catalog here.

Amid the beginner amps and electric guitars, crazy-but-delightful amp-in-case sets, and other C-list gear that populated the Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalogs of the 1960s, the Silvertone Twin 12 Model 1484 truly looked like a big-boy’s rig.

Set up for use, it was a serious-minded piggyback head-and-cab arrangement, boasting (rather optimistically) 60 watts of power from two big 6L6GC output tubes, and a feature set to rival Fender’s Twin Reverb or (perhaps more comparably, given its output rating) the Pro Reverb combo or later Bandmaster Reverb.

Never mind that its construction was nowhere close to Fender standards – the Twin 12 was an amp every budding 1960s rock and roller could aspire to while noodling through a little one-knob starter combo.

As it happens, these amps have powered some extremely memorable tones in more capable hands. If you doubt that a contraption like this can sound even remotely rock-tastic, check out the fierce sonic assault that both Jack White and Mudhoney’s Steve Turner have churned out through Silvertones over the years.

While Danelectro – which manufactured these amps for Sears at the time – probably imagined guitarists coaxing chimey pop and twangy surf tones from the Twin 12, the generally downgraded design and construction (and we mean that kindly) really works its magic when you crank the hell out of these things, at which point full-scale meltdown mayhem ensues.

For that matter, show it a good fuzz pedal and stand back.

Tone results aside, the Twin 12 is largely the result of compromised components and construction. After all, these things were built to a restricted price point. Nonetheless, it holds together quite marvelously.

The cabinets are made from cheap particleboard, while the speaker baffle is constructed from even thinner fiberboard. Inside the chassis, the circuit is wired together in what is not quite the sloppiest manner we’ve seen, while the parts are crammed together and laid out rather oddly in places.

That said, the transformers are pretty robust, the cabinet contains two highly desirable teal-framed Jensen C12Q speakers, and the amp head stows inside the bottom of the speaker cab for portage. How freakin’ cool is that? In our book, that alone makes up for a lot. That the whole thing has its own raw, mean fat tone is just icing on the cake.

Electronically, the Twin 12 shares a few elements with Fender’s popular blackface amps of the ’60s. In addition to its two-channels-plus-tremolo-and-reverb feature set, the treble and bass controls in the tone stage are sandwiched between two gain stages from the 12AX7 preamp tube in each channel, and the output stage is run in class AB fixed-bias.

The preamp tubes are driven at pretty low voltages, however, which results in a somewhat “browner,” crunchier sound. And despite Sears’ optimistic 60-watt rating, the RMS output is probably closer to around 35 watts, which is not actually much less than some of the lower-powered dual-6L6 Fenders, such as the Pro Reverb, Tremolux and Bandmaster.

Also note that the reverb was woefully insufficient when compared to better examples from the likes of Fender or Ampeg, but it still makes for a nifty lo-fi effect. The tremolo is pretty good, too.

All nitpicking aside, these are just outrageously cool amps by any measure, and even more so if you’re chasing grunge, garage or punk tones. And given the relatively low prices they command in comparison to other desirable, giggable vintage amps, they’re pretty irresistible.

Essential Ingredients

• Piggyback configuration, with head stowed in speaker cab for transport
• Roughly 35 watts output from two 6L6GCs
• Two channels
• Tube-driven reverb and tremolo
• Two Jensen C12Q speakers
• Particleboard construction

While David Lindley could have played the most expensive guitars available, he regularly sported instruments by Teisco, National and EKO, to name a few. 

Since then, many other guitarists – including David Bowie, Jack White and St. Vincent – have followed in Lindley’s footsteps by playing off-brand guitars. 

Heck, even EVH played a ’60s Teisco.

All of which makes you wonder: Could this Japanese-made Norma EG-421 electric guitar help someone find his or her voice?

Weirdo Factor

The shape looks rather familiar, but check out the four volume knobs, four on/off rocker switches, three-position tone switch and additional rhythm/solo rocker switch. That’s a lot of controls by anyone’s standards. But when a guitar has four – yes, four – pickups, an embarrassment of switches may not be the weirdest thing it has going for it.

Playability & Sound

By the late 1960s, most of the guitar companies flooding the U.S. market with entry-level guitars began to figure out how to make a decent guitar and still undercut the American manufacturers. 

Enter the Norma EG-421.

Though some of its parts look similar to Teisco’s, it was made by the Tomba Company in Japan and imported through the Chicago distributor Strum ’n Drum. 

The guitar has a slim steel-reinforced maple neck with a fast 22-fret rosewood fingerboard. The mother-of-pearl neck inlays are shaped like the letter N or Z, depending on your viewpoint. The split pickups look like dominoes, and the headstock is large and stylish.

But of course, the burning question is, How does it sound?

Let’s just say that, when it comes to tone, the Norma EG-421 gives you a lot of choices. The pickups all sound rather thin, but in an interesting way. Each has a dedicated volume knob and kill switch and can be combined with the others in any configuration you want.

That’s where the fun begins.

For instance, turning a pickup’s volume up full and adjusting the volume of an adjacent unit will throw the first pickup out of phase in a grungy sort of way. The rotary tone switch offers three preset EQs that change not only the tone but also the phasing. On top of all that, the rhythm/solo switch can either boost or cut the level, depending on the pickup configuration.

The tremolo works nicely, dropping everything down about a half step. The bridge on this example has been upgraded to a Tune-o-matic style, and the previous owner added two string trees; the original “towel rack” string retainer didn’t offer enough tension for the higher four strings.

With clean tone or slight overdrive, this guitar is sparkly, fun and different. Unfortunately, the pickups are very microphonic and have difficulty at loud volumes.

Value

Back in 1968, this guitar, while not exactly cheap, cost a fraction of what you might have spent on an American guitar with many fewer features. A few years back you might have paid about $400 for one, but now they can fetch upward of $800.

Why it Rules

Like so many guitars, the Norma EG-421 plays great, sounds unique and looks dashing. And if it ends up providing you with your signature sound, so much the better!

There are dedicated music lifers who grind out gig after gig, and then there are musicians who are literally born into the business. Nashville-based singer-songwriter Lillie Mae can lay claim to both. Born with a prodigious musical talent and a busker’s hustle, Lillie Mae Rische could strum a guitar before most kids can write their own names.

She honed her chops on the road, traveling with her family in an RV and performing alongside her parents and siblings at churches and makeshift venues around the country. “My style of playing with a pick just developed around playing live,” she says of her early touring days. “I play this way because I couldn’t keep up, or you could never hear it, so you have to play with a pick as opposed to doing some fingerpicking stuff.”

After the family band split, she and her siblings landed a regular gig under the name Jypsi at Layla’s Honky Tonk on Broadway in Nashville. They inked a seven-album deal with Sony and charted two country singles – “I Don’t Love You Like That” and “Mister Officer” – before the label dropped them.

Lillie Mae kept writing songs and playing live, though, eventually earning a spot in Jack White’s touring band. When it came time to focus on her own songs, White signed her to his Third Man Records.

Lillie Mae’s songwriting is rooted in traditional country music, but on her latest album, Other Girls, she wraps them in surrealistic melodies and high-desert drama. Recorded with producer Dave Cobb and a small circle of family and friends at Nashville’s RCA Studio A, the record finds her leaning into her classic country roots on the yearning shuffle “Blue Heart,” and she channels Led Zeppelin’s “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” on the minor-key “You’ve Got Other Girls for That.”

You were born into a traveling musical family. At what point did they put a guitar in your hands?

I was four when I started playing guitar; I was seven when I started playing fiddle. The first songs I ever learned on guitar were “All I Have to Do Is Dream” by the Everly Brothers and “Sloop John B” by the Beach Boys.

Did you become more proficient on fiddle or guitar first?

Fiddle, for sure. Fiddle was my main instrument. I always played guitar for myself, but I didn’t record on guitar ’til I was 19. My brother is one of the best guitar players alive, and that’s the truth. There was no need for a guitar player in our family outfit growing up, so I just played it for myself.

You busked and had a regular gig on Broadway in Nashville before joining Jack White’s band. How did you land that?

My sister Scarlett and I had been called in for a session. They were looking for a female fiddle player and a female mandolin player, so they called me and asked if I could bring my sister. Jack was working on a soundtrack at the time and Blunderbuss, his first solo album [from 2012]. The first thing that we did was for this soundtrack, but they just kept calling, so we did a bunch of session work over there before they asked if I’d go on tour. And I went on to do the next tour, as well.

When did he first hear the songs that led to you signing with Third Man?

When we first started recording, I was always playing in between stuff, just picking and singing. I think that, in one of the first instances, I was literally writing a song or had just written it, and I was trying to play it back. He overheard it.

That led to your solo record, Forever and Then Some, which had a straight-forward country style, with lots of traditional instruments. What influenced the change in direction on Other Girls?

It just happened naturally. I play with lots of people, and the type of music that I’ve played for ages has a lot of soloing or musical parts. There aren’t any solos on the new album, which is very different for me, so it’s just particular to that album, I think. It’s focused less on musicianship and more on the songwriting, I reckon.

Was there a particular type of album that you were kind of setting out to make?

No, not at all. It never is whatever you expect that you’re going to do. It’s always a little different. I just had a boatload of songs written. Those are just the ones that made the cut, but there was nothing ideal in mind.

What inspires you in your guitar playing?

My favorite type of guitar playing is Chet Atkins-style fingerpicking. I love that stuff. I do a little bit. I cross-pick a lot. I’m not a very good mandolin player, because my wrist doesn’t move very fast, so I started playing that cross-picking style simply because I could never get my wrist to move fast enough to keep up with the fast bluegrass rhythm. I just developed that in-between style. But my heart lies with fingerpicking.

When I really discovered how much I loved guitar, my friend Luke Skidmore, a really amazing fingerstyle picker, sat with me and taught me a lot when I was, like, 16. I recorded with his band on projects for fun. He gave me a Jim Croce album and some other fingerstyle picking stuff, and I remember just sitting there for hours trying to figure it out.

Do you find yourself using that technique for songwriting?

I do a lot at home. I don’t ever do it live. But if I’m at home or something, I play with my thumb. That’s what comes natural to me.

There is some impressive picking on songs like “Golden Year.”

Well, thank you! I wrote it the day before my golden year birthday was over. We were playing at the Refuge, which is an amazing place in Appleton, Wisconsin. Afterward, I remember I was grabbing stuff and carrying it out, and I just heard it. It was like all the parts were being sung to me by angels, and that’s the truth. So I was like, Okay, I’ll find a pen. My brother had just cleared out of his room, and I sat down on his guitar case and wrote it all out. 

But that was one of the songs where all the parts were written with the song, and the ending, especially, was just natural to the song. Usually I write on the guitar, but for this instance I didn’t have an instrument. It just came through me so quickly, I had to get it out. I was just imagining the chords in my head.

What guitars are you partial to playing?

The only guitar that I actually own myself is an old Harmony guitar that was given to me by another friend ages ago when I was 15 or 16. For years, I have played my brother’s Bourgeois. I’ve been playing on my boyfriend’s 1952 Gibson for this whole tour. Actually, when we were recording I was playing that. It’s a little ’52 LG acoustic guitar. 

I played a Martin Civil War reissue on one song, and I just wasn’t in love with it. But Jim Lauderdale dropped a couple of his guitars off at the session, because he knew I didn’t have anything at the time, so he swung over a Collings, a couple different choices to play. So I just played everyone else’s guitars on the album, which is what I’m doing now. That’s always what I do. It’s pretty funny.

You may be the first guitar player I’ve ever spoken to who just plays whatever’s there.

I know. I depend on the grace of other people. My boyfriend has a pretty amazing collection of guitars, so I’m really lucky to just get to be around these wonderful instruments. My dream guitar is a Gibson Byrdland, and hopefully I’ll have one one day. I love that thin neck and short scale, but they’re awful pricey. Maybe I’ll get one when I retire. Or a Hofner. I’m a big fan of Hofner electric guitars.

Order Lillie Mae's Other Girls from Third Man Records here.

Playing blues guitar is as much about attitude as it is technique. If you’re suffering in either department, put some power back into your playing with this advice from electric guitar blues heroes of the past and present.

Stevie Ray Vaughan

“Your sound is in your hands as much as anything. It’s the way you pick and the way you hold the guitar, more than it is the amp or the guitar you use.”

Roy Buchanan

“Use circle picking to play faster. Start by playing with your pick at an angle. Hit the string with one edge of the pick and you’ll find that you’re in position to come back on the upstroke with the opposite edge. Then, alternate pick with a rotating motion in either a clockwise or counterclockwise circle. The pick, while not changing its angle in relation to the string, is circling that area of the string. It’s not done with the wrist, but with the fingers holding the pick.”

Bonnie Raitt

“Incorporate the feel of what someone plays into your style, rather than the actual notes. You just want to nail the emotion of how an artist’s singing and playing is making you feel, and how those feelings transform your own playing.”

Jack White

“If you want to keep things raw, try limiting yourself to only two guitars on a track.”

Rory Gallagher

“You must perform for an audience, because the real crunch happens when you get in front of people. You may discover that some things you played in rehearsal don’t make any sense because you fooled around too much with the frilly stuff and forgot the basic drive of the song. Playing live also teaches you to deal with situations like dropping your pick or breaking a string – as well as forcing you to project.”

Eric Johnson

“Remind yourself that you’re free to feel great instead of reserved or insecure. When you’re feeling good, you’re more apt to take chances onstage, and if you make a bunch of mistakes, it won’t matter. It’s almost like you’re the instrument, and the music is flowing through you like electricity.”

Ry Cooder

“Play a new thing every day. Learning one new passing chord, or a note combination, will get you moving towards something that will serve you later on. Someday, a song will come along that all of those things will relate to.”

Hubert Sumlin

“Take a note from me, put it with your own notes, and make it you.”

John Lee Hooker

“Forget about the fancy chords and just concentrate on a funky beat.”

Jeff Beck

“Overindulgence in anything is wrong – whether it’s practicing 50 hours a day or eating too much food. I’ve tried to keep it so that I’m able to execute the ideas that come out, but practicing too much depresses me. I get good speed, but then I start playing nonsense because I’m not thinking. A good layoff makes me think a lot. It helps me get both things together – the creativity and the speed.”

If you know anything about Jack White, you know he has a taste for all things off-the-beaten-path, zany, and unusual. This unique aesthetic has always permeated his choice of gear, as evidenced most recently by the absolutely wild custom "Three-Wheel-Motion Low Rider Telecaster" he has taken to playing with his band, The Raconteurs, in the past year or so.

Now, White has chronicled the fascinating evolution of the Tele in a video shared on The Raconteurs' YouTube channel, which you can check out above.

Though the guitar was gifted to White as a normal Nashville Tele (fitted with a B-bender, mind you), White quickly handed the guitar off to Chip Ellis at the Fender Custom Shop, with a long list of requests.

Fascinatingly, in addition to the guitar's built-in B-bender – where shifting the strap bends the B string only – the Low Rider Tele has been fitted with an after-market Hipshot B-bender bridge, which adds an additional G and high E bender, plus a switch that drops the low E down to a D, to the equation.

Ellis also outfitted the guitar with a Lace Sensor single coil pickup in the bridge, a humbucker taken from a Fender Telecaster Thinline, and a middle-position P-90. These are controlled by a standard three-way selector switch, but a kill switch – a display of Tom Morello's ever-present influence on White – also comes aboard the guitar. 

As explained at the video's beginning, despite all of those customizations, the guitar is still a work in progress and – in a second iteration – has had its black hardware exchanged with white hardware, an extended Cabronita pickguard added, the aforementioned killswitch moved and the E-bender removed.

You can see the ever-evolving Frankentele in action in The Raconteurs’ Somedays "(I Don’t Feel Like Trying)" music video below.

Jack White and CopperSound Pedals have joined forces to create the Triplegraph, a truly one-of-a-kind digital octave pedal.

Four years in the making, the Triplegraph features three proprietary Morse-code telegraph keys and an integrated auxiliary loop. Anchored by a DSP Blackfin Processor, the pedal triggers an octave down with the left key and an octave up with its right key. The pedal's middle key, meanwhile, activates a killswitch or auxiliary loop.

In Kill mode, the pedal's middle key acts as a momentary killswitch, allowing users to remove their dry signal and attain a fully wet octave up and/or down when used in conjunction with the octave keys.

In the Triplegraph's Auxiliary mode, users can connect some of their other favorite effects in parallel with the octaves via the pedal's send/return jacks, and trigger them in momentary bursts.

Users can also trigger the high and low octaves in parallel with the dry signal when the octave keys are pressed independently, while the octaves themselves track with zero latency, and can be triggered in momentary or latching modes using the pedal's “Loctave” toggle switches.

The CopperSound Pedals Triplegraph is available now - in a matte black finish with a yellow and white print - for $399. 

A limited-edition version of the pedal - featuring an exclusive yellow finish, black and white print, custom steel machined serial badge plate, Certificate of Authenticity signed by White, custom-designed book and a special-edition box - is also available, for $449. It is limited to a run of 100 units.

For more info on the pedal, stop by coppersoundpedals.com.

Jack White and his record label, Third Man Records, have announced a huge online auction of guitar gear.

Aside from stage equipment and assorted personal items - including furniture - from the label’s archives, the auction features a number of electric and acoustic guitars and amplifiers from White's personal collection.

Among the guitars on offer are two EVH Wolfgang models. One was used on White’s 2018 album, Boarding House Reach, and its accompanying tour. It was modified with Lace Sensor pickups and a momentary "interruptor" switch, and was also fitted with a custom wooden banjo arm-rest.

The other Wolfgang is a "base model" that was featured in White’s "Over and Over and Over" video. Painted to match the black and white set, it comes with the original strings (including a broken one) from the video, and even the sneakers White wore in the video.

Other guitars on offer include a Gretsch Triple Jet prototype - used by White for a number of solo and Raconteurs tours - a Framus archtop, a black-and-yellow finished Orpheus and a pink Daisy Rock acoustic autographed and gifted to White by Wanda Jackson.

Amp-wise, Third Man Records is offering some vintage National and Gretsch 6165 combos and other amps that've been used on various Third Man recordings, plus a 15-watt Sonic Machine Factory that White used onstage with the White Stripes.

Weird pedals? This auction's got 'em too, with everything from a Sitori Sonics Swinger, a Celestial Effects Cancer Wah The Fuzz?, a Molten Voltage G-Quencer and a rare Japanese fuzz called the Far East Electric Maboroshi.

Other assorted items set to head under the hammer include drum sets from The White Stripes' "The Hardest Button to Button" video, and stage monitor covers and pedalboards used on tour by the White Stripes.

All items come directly from Third Man Records and have a certificate of authenticity.

The auction is set to take place through Online Nashville Auctions from August 26 at 9 AM CST to August 30 at 9 PM CST. A portion of the proceeds will go to the John Peel Centre, Gideon's Army and the Detroit Phoenix Center.

To view the full lot, stop on by onlinenashvilleauctions.com.

Here's a fun little throwback to the time Robert Plant showed up during Jack White’s set at the 2015 Lollapalooza Argentina festival to perform Led Zeppelin II’s “The Lemon Song.” 

The former Led Zeppelin front man and the blues-loving guitarist were both on the lineup for that year’s festival, and they clearly made good use of the opportunity during White’s headlining performance.

White had included “The Lemon Song” in his sets previously, including at his headlining spot at Bonnaroo 2014.

Surprisingly, however, this occasion marked the first time Plant had sung “The Lemon Song” live since he and Jimmy Page performed together on their 1995 tour.

On that stint, the Led Zeppelin cofounders played the song during their stop in Norway.

Jack White is no shredmeister, and he's not the most melodic guitarist on the planet, either. Yet despite being a less-than-obvious extension of the guitar-god tradition, this scrapper from Detroit has become the heavyweight champion of rock guitar over the past decade. 

The gifted multi-instrumentalist has garnered an astonishing track record of commercial and critical successes by landing a succession of insanely catchy hooks, never compromising his strategy, and matching a wild-eyed knack for sonic ingenuity with sheer intensity.

“I always look at playing guitar as an attack,” says White. “It has to be a fight. Every song, every guitar solo, every note that’s played or written has to be a struggle. It can’t be this wimpy thing where you’re pushed around by the idea, the characters, or the song itself. It’s every player’s job to fight against all of that.”

White has been a soldier for the cause since at least 1997, when he formed the White Stripes with drummer Meg White. Actually, White’s original instrument was the skins, as well. But when he traded his sticks for a Ward’s Airline guitar, and pumped it simultaneously through a vintage Silvertone and a Fender Twin, the duo struck a raw nerve. The White Stripes’ minimalist garage blues was both original and traditional, and the band’s unique sound spawned myriad groups populated by players who were sick of slick audio production and homogenous guitar tones. White embraced his twisted blues roots in a big way on Elephant, which he dubbed his “guitar” album in his June 2003 GP cover story. Elephant’s first cut was a doozy. The bombastic “Seven Nation Army” was an instant rock classic, whose main riff ultimately became a sportsstadium anthem.

When the red, white, and black box that White created for the Stripes got too limiting, he proved he was more than a one-trick pony by appearing in and contributing tracks to the Civil War film, Cold Mountain, and producing— as well as performing on—country legend Loretta Lynn’s lauded comeback album, Van Lear Rose. White enlisted Greenhornes bassist Jack Lawrence and drummer Patrick Keeler for the Lynn sessions, along with fellow Motor City tunesmith Brendan Benson to help engineer. When White and Benson found themselves in need of a rhythm section for a little song they had written together called “Steady As She Goes,” Lawrence and Keeler answered the call once again. In 2006, that song became the debut single from a band that would co-exist with the White Stripes, the Raconteurs.

When the Stripes dropped Get Behind Me Satan in 2005, the deep guitar riff and falsetto vocal of “Blue Orchid” sounded downright demonic, but much of the record featured White on piano and marimba, and not playing big guitar. But 2007’s Icky Thump was aptly named. The title track’s Zeppelin-inspired riffs and plodding bass drum absolutely invited the masses to raise their horned hands in head-banging approval. White then found himself face-to-face with riffmaster Jimmy Page when the two participated in 2009’s It Might Get Loud—an insightful, must-see film directed by Davis Guggenheim (who also directed An Inconvenient Truth) that documents the careers of White, Page, and The Edge.

The White Stripes’ 2007 Canadian tour is featured on Under Great White Northern Lights—a DVD and CD release (also available as a limited-edition box set that contains the DVD and CD and other goodies for die-hard fans) that celebrates the band’s decade of live performing with rip-your-face-off footage of the duo kicking out their most signature jams, as well as impromptu performances shot at unlikely venues such as a bowling alley and a boat.

Meanwhile, White launched a dark and heavy outfit called the Dead Weather. An allstar affair featuring Alison Mosshart (the Kills) out front, Dean Fertita (Queens of the Stone Age) on guitar, and Jack Lawrence on bass, the Dead Weather puts White back where he began—on drums. GP caught up with White before the Dead Weather took the stage for a pair of sold-out shows at the venerable Fillmore auditorium in San Francisco.

It’s unusual to interview you for a Guitar Player cover story when you’re technically the drummer for the Dead Weather tonight.

I’m more of a drummer now than ever before. I play drums throughout the new record, whereas I only played guitar on two or three songs. Dean is the primary guitar player in the Dead Weather, but we all switch instruments regularly. Everybody in the band plays guitar on one track or another.

Still, your sonic imprint is all over the album.

Well, I produced and recorded it in my studio, so the Dead Weather is really part of the Third Man Records sound that has evolved over the last year-and-a-half, since we opened the new headquarters in Nashville. I’ve been attacking things not just as a guitar player, but also as a drummer, and by doing a lot of the production, as well.

You probably have the most identifiable sound of any player over the last decade. Could you talk about your sound, and how you capture it?

I feel as though I’m breaking through something when I play the guitar onstage or in the studio. Like punching through a wall, or trying to climb on top of something, and then destroying it. That’s the goal from plugging in—even if I’m playing a gentle song. Your tone alone can speak volumes for you. You can also make a statement without over-thinking it. It’s hard to relate that to modern guitar players, though, because they put too much gear between their fingers and the amp. Too many players feel their effects are supposed to craft their tone for them. It really comes from the fingers, of course. For example, the idea behind using the Ward’s Airline in the White Stripes was to prove that you don’t need a brand new guitar to have character, to have tone, and to be able to play what you want to play. You can do it with a piece of plastic, or a piece of wood. You see, you can buy a bunch of fancy equipment, but if you don’t have “it” inside you from the get-go, you’re not going to impress anybody.

What’s constant about your approach, even if you’re playing a gentle song?

I always think playing gently is a tactical move. You’re sneaking up, and then you’re going to attack. People are waiting for that. Jeff Beck is a great example. I’m constantly waiting for him to attack his instrument. Blind Willie Johnson is another. I could care less if he’s playing the right notes, or if his guitar’s in tune. Attack and attitude speak volumes.

Can you break down your attack?

For years, I didn’t want to do any downstroking at all. I always wanted to do upstrokes because I got a more striking note every time. I still revert to that technique most of the time when I’m playing. In the White Stripes, though, I started to develop a subconscious style of playing lead and rhythm at the same time—back and forth, back and forth. I started hiding my pick under my finger to switch quickly to fingerpicking, and then back to playing with the pick. I didn’t even realize I was doing it that way for years, because form follows function. If something needs to happen, your body and brain will make it happen. If your pick ends up in your ear, or underneath your eyelid or something, it’s because it needed to happen.

What about your left-hand technique?

The first thing to know about my left hand is that I had to relearn how to play with these three fingers [holds up fingers two, three, and four]. In 2004, I was in a car accident, and the airbag shattered all the bones in my index finger. It won’t close anymore—that’s as far as I can go [makes a “c” shape].

So you can’t literally make a proper barre chord anymore?

I used to play A minor with my first three fingers, but now I use fingers two through four. My index finger hangs out doing nothing most of the time. I can do barre chords with it now, but I can’t play a C, or a D minor with that finger. It’s become dead to me in a lot of ways. The first couple of shows were really rough. I was actually trying to play right after the car crash. I was three blocks from my house, and I went right back inside and grabbed my guitar to see if I could play well enough to tour. But I couldn’t. I had to cancel all the shows to recover. It took many months, and I had to have surgery.

How do you make that sliding sound without using a slide?

I don’t really know what it could be. Maybe I go up to attack the note. Also, I like to manipulate my DigiTech Whammy pedal starting with the low octave. I love low octaves. I’ve always loved playing octaves on the piano, even as a little kid. So when they came out with that pedal, and I heard Tom Morello use it in Rage Against the Machine, I knew I’d finally found an interesting pedal. All I used in the White Stripes for seven years was an Electro-Harmonix Big Muff and the Whammy. So you might be hearing me building up to the note with the pedal.

Okay, how about some actual slide-playing tips?

It’s better to play slide with the pinky finger. That way your first three fingers can mute the strings behind it, and then you don’t get all that metallic rattling. You can focus solely on the note you want, which is more like a pedal-steel technique. A lot of people put it on their middle finger, and they’re missing that idea. You may get better control from one of the thicker fingers, but the pinky’s the way to go if you want to kill all the extraneous noise.

What are you playing tonight with the Dead Weather?

I had all of the Dead Weather’s equipment custom made. I co-designed the drum set with Ludwig. Gretsch painted all the guitars white. I was going to do shows with Alicia Keys and the band for the James Bond theme I was working on [“Another Way to Die” for Quantum of Solace], but I slipped a disc in my neck, so I couldn’t. As a result, all the equipment I had designed was just sitting in my studio. When the Dead Weather started, it was just supposed to be a 7-inch single, but it turned into an album, and then into a band. So I said, “This equipment is already here. We should use it.” The gear ended up influencing the band’s overall color scheme. I play a special-edition Gretsch White Penguin Jupiter Thunderbird. They only made 12 of them, and I found one in Texas. I also got a Gretsch Bo Diddley factory model, and painted it white so that Alicia Keys and I could be like Bo Diddley and the Duchess— his female stage partner. We would both use those guitars on tour to support the James Bond theme. But when I got hurt and I couldn’t do the dates, Alison [Mosshart] ended up taking on that idea. She plays the rectangular Bo Diddley model, and I play the Jupiter Thunderbird—which is also called the “Billy Bo” because Billy Gibbons brought that idea back to Gretsch.

What’s your Dead Weather rig, and how does it compare to the White Stripes rig?

The amp is a Fender Twin Reverb—no Silvertone, like in the White Stripes. Effects-wise, I have a Big Muff and a Whammy just like in the White Stripes. Sometimes, I use a POG pedal. I think I was the first person to record with one on the White Stripes song “Blue Orchid.” Electro-Harmonix sent me one as a present when we were recording Get Behind Me Satan. “Blue Orchid” came out two weeks after the session, so it had to be the first song to feature the POG. I use it to add the first and second octaves below, and one octave above the root note. It’s four of the same note simultaneously. It’s just so heavy. The riff is actually pretty simple, but it’s all about the one. It’s a funk-based idea.

What picks do you prefer?

Any heavy pick, so I can strike the string harder. Anything other than a heavy gauge just feels wrong. I end up throwing it away, and plucking with my fingers.

What brand?

I don’t know. Whatever company can make black ones [laughs].

What kind of strings do you use?

I really don’t know. When I was a teenager, I used GHS strings because I was from Michigan, and they were made in Michigan. I liked the nickel ones because they sounded a little bit different. But I stopped caring when I was 19 or 20 years old. Everyone always asks, “Do you like .009s or .010s?” I have no preference, because I can’t decide if I want to make it easier or harder on myself. I usually choose to make things harder on myself, but I don’t know when it comes to strings. Lighter strings might actually be harder for me to play, because I hit them so hard. I bend them too easily, and break them all the time. I leave it to chance. I always just tell whoever is putting the strings on to do whatever they want. I won’t even notice.

Do you have any endorsements?

No. I have never endorsed a product.

Is that a general life stance?

I feel better about paying for my gear, because I don’t owe anybody any favors. People come up and say, “Here, you can have this guitar for free.” I’ll say, “Okay, thanks.” And they’ll say, “Can we take a picture with you holding it for the Web site?” I’ll just hand it back to them [laughs]. It’s like, “Well, that’s not free then, is it?” Also, most of my favorite brands—such as Silvertone, Airline, Supro, and Bigsby—are gone. I prefer old Gretsch guitars to new ones, but Gretsch still has the best sounding new acoustics and electrics. They have a lot more character and quirkiness than other modern guitars.

What acoustics do you prefer?

Gretsch Ranchers. They are great for live use, because they produce more bass than anything else, and I like a lot of bass in an acoustic guitar.

How do you amplify them?

Playing an acoustic live is very difficult— especially when everyone else in the band is playing electric. It’s very frustrating. I don’t have any advice, other than it’s tough, and the best thing to do is stand really still and put a microphone in front of the soundhole.

Who are the women portrayed on the backs of the Ranchers?

Claudette Colbert is on the orange one I used in the Raconteurs and White Stripes. Rita Hayworth is on the white one you see me carrying around in the Great Northern Lights DVD. The white and gold one I use in the Dead Weather has Veronica Lake on the back. So I’ve got a brunette, a redhead, and a blonde—one for each band. An incredible tattoo artist in Cincinnati, Ohio, named Kore Flatmo did the work for me. I saw the portraits he had done tattooing, and I bought him a really nice wood-burning tool to burn those images into the backs of my guitars.

Can you list the White Stripes guitars over the years?

I had the same three guitars in the White Stripes for about ten years: the Airline, a hollowbody Kay tuned to open A for slide playing, and a red Japanese guitar I used for open-E tuning on a couple of early songs such as “Let’s Build a Home” and “I Fought Piranhas.” Around about 2007, I got a ’57 Gretsch White Penguin, which is really rare.

So it debuts on Icky Thump?

Yeah. I always thought it was a really interesting instrument. One came up for sale in Nashville where I live, and I went and looked at it three times. I just didn’t know if I could justify buying it for a while. Finally, I was with some friends, and I said, “I want to go check that thing out again.” They said, “Alright, this time you’re buying it.”

How does it compare to playing the Airline?

It feels like it’s in the same department. It’s a very strange instrument. It’s more like a machine. The knobs are so clunky. Pickups don’t really sound like that nowadays—guitars don’t really sound like that.

When I saw you at Jazz Fest in New Orleans a couple of years ago, you had a copper-top guitar.

I had a couple of guitars made for the Raconteurs. I designed a Gretsch “Triple Jet” by adding a third pickup to a Double Jet, and putting an MXR Micro Amp inside the guitar. You can instantly get an overdriven sound by clicking on that pickup. You can just plug into an amplifier. If it’s time to play a solo and break out a little more, just click that switch on the guitar. I had everything for that band made out of copper. All the pedals were made of copper. I had a copper microphone, and I had the guitar made of copper. We even went as far as putting copper frets on that guitar—just to see how it sounded. It sounded incredible! But copper is so malleable that the frets wore out after one show.

Why copper?

I’ve always loved elements, and breaking things down to a single element—no other components. Sometimes, I need something to keep myself centered. Having everything in the White Stripes be red, white, and black centers me, and keeps me on that one path. Copper centered me on the Raconteurs.

Is Randy Parsons—the luthier who appeared in It Might Get Loud—still doing your custom work?

Yes. I do a little bit at home in Nashville with some other people, but I send all my custom ideas to him, and he brings them to life.

What’s up with your guitar that has a builtin microphone?

That was created for the Raconteurs, as well. I call it the “Triple Green Machine.” It was based on the “Triple Jet” idea with an MXR Micro Amp wired to the middle pickup, and then I added more and more things. I started with a Gretsch Anniversary Jr., which was the only small hollowbody guitar I could find. I made it a double cutaway instead of a single. I had a Bigsby installed, and I put in an old mute, too. When you pull a lever, the mute comes up and dampens the strings. I also had a light-activated Theremin installed that I could control with my wrist while I was playing. When I lifted my wrist, the Theremin would be added to the sound. I wanted to be able to pull a Green Bullet microphone out of the body, sing into it, and have it retract when I dropped it. Randy found a vacuum cleaner retractor cord for that. He built a fake Green Bullet—a wooden one, because the metal one was too heavy to retract. It took a lot of experimenting. The guitar weighs more than a Les Paul because of all the components!

I’m sorry you didn’t get to do the “Bond band” with Alicia Keys. “Another Way to Die” is the coolest James Bond song since “Live and Let Die.” How did that go down?

I wrote and produced it. She came to Nashville and sang it. We snuck it in at the last second. If they had more time to think, I don’t know that they would have approved the song for the film.

Did you write the song specifically for Quantum of Solace?

Yes. I was given the task to write and produce the song—which has only happened a couple of times since I began writing. I wrote it on piano first. I like to write on other instruments, and then transfer them to guitar.

Did you watch James Bond movies all day to get into the mind frame for “Another Way to Die?”

When I had the track going, and I began adding other elements, I actually did put Goldfinger and Thunderball on a TV screen in the control room with the sound muted—just to watch the figures move. I worked a lot on making it powerful and slow.

From watching the Northern Lights DVD, it looks like you are still using a Silvertone 610 combo and a Fender Twin Reverb.

That’s so I get the crunch and the reverb at the same time. The Silvertone’s reverb is horrible, so I just use it for the thick, Jensen-speaker crunch that only a Silvertone can produce. No other amp can sound like that. I use the Fender for the reverb. It’s the best. A Silvertone and a Fender make a great combination.

How did you get the tone for the ascending riff on “Icky Thump”?

That’s the POG.

How did that part of the track go down in the studio?

That was unusual. I said, “Roll the tape, I just thought of something.” I recorded Meg and myself playing that little five-second section, and then we sliced the tape and edited it in during mixing.

After the last verse and riff on the DVD version, you achieve a sound like a motorcycle revving up. There is also some sick-sounding octave stuff on the solo. How do you play and manipulate your effects to manifest such insane tones?

It all depends on what signal you give to the Whammy as you’re manipulating it. That might have just been a lot of open strings—something like that can really rattle as you’re diving all the way up. But you need a lot of gain and distortion to make that kind of tone. It sounds really wimpy if you don’t have some power behind the note. And you have to put the Whammy after the Big Muff in the signal chain. The power has to be before the octave.

You know, I actually started using the Whammy because it was a great way to cut through when I was playing in garage-rock bands in Detroit. We were relying on sound guys who didn’t know when to turn you up, so no one’s solos ever stood out. I thought, “If I hit the octave higher, there’s no way they’re going to miss me now [laughs].”

You play “Seven Nation Army” on your old Kay hollowbody slide workhorse, tuned to open A. But the song is in the key of E. Correct?

Yes.

How do you achieve the bassy octave riff that kicks off the tune live?

That’s the low-octave setting on the Whammy.

I love hearing the crowd hum along with that song on Under Great White Northern Lights. It may be the most identifiable riff of the past decade. Do you remember writing it?

I was sound-checking at the Corner Hotel in Australia when that came out. I thought about it as a possible James Bond theme, actually. And then I thought, “That will never happen [laughs].”

How does it feel when you’re watching something like a Michigan/Ohio State game, and the marching band and the crowd join together on that riff?

That’s wild. It’s becoming a big soccer chant in Europe. The President of Italy chanted the riff to a crowd when they won the World Cup. That’s really folk music to me—when people don’t know where it came from. That’s the highest compliment.

There’s a moment during It Might Get Loud when Jimmy Page starts playing “Whole Lotta Love,” and you have the look of a giddy ten-year-old kid. What was that like?

It was incredible. My favorite part was when Jimmy, Edge, and I all played “In My Time of Dying” together. You saw three different attacks on the blues, and three different styles of playing slide guitar. It was insightful to see three generations of guitar players attacking the same song—which is actually an old folk song that Led Zeppelin covered. I learned so much from those moments.

So what does it feel like to play with Page?

The overwhelming feeling is that he’s connected to the blues. That’s what put a smile on my face. It made me feel good because I knew that, despite our differences in age and where we came from, we’re both traveling down the same path—the one that heads straight for the blues.

Are you going to make a solo record?

I don’t know. I guess eventually. I always let the music tell me what to do.