British guitar icon Jonny Marr has used his social following to help an American session guitarist recover her lost vintage guitar. But how it ended up in a guitar store several states away is something only FedEx knows.

Based in Western Massachusetts, Ella Feingold, whose resume includes work with Janet Jackson and Bruno Mars, was expecting the delivery of a 1960s Gretsch 6105 hollow-body after purchasing it online. Then it disappeared without a trace.

“FedEx lost my guitar,” she tells her Instagram followers in a newly posted reel. “It was supposed to show up at my house, but it just completely disappeared. It was scanned on the truck; it was like 30 minutes away from my house. Then nothing.”

Hoping to speak to a customer service representative to get to the bottom of the case, Feingold was infuriated to be left dealing with AI chatbots that do little to answer her questions or help her recover the guitar.

Luckily, her friend Marr, who gifted Feingold one of his Signature Special Jaguar guitars last year, stepped in to put some pressure on FedEx and rectify the situation.

Posting on X, he wrote: “So FedEx just loses guitars now? Belonging to renowned guitarist Ella Feingold, too. And one that was scanned and reported to be on the truck? How does that happen? You need to DM her and find her guitar.”

The post may not have had the desired effect in rousing FedEx into action, but given Marr’s status – and 298,000 followers on the platform – the guitar was found by one of his followers: a guitar store over 1,000 miles away. Everyone was very confused.

“I got hit up by a guitar store in Memphis, Tennessee,” Feingold reveals. “They’re like, ‘Hey, a random Gretsch guitar just showed up at our store. We don’t know where it came from, but we saw Johnny Marr’s post, and we’re wondering if this may be your guitar.’

“Don’t ask me how a guitar that was coming to Western Massachusetts somehow ends up in Memphis, Tennessee, of all places.

“I have to thank Johnny Marr, who’s like guitar Batman, who’s a real guitar hero, for finding it,” she adds. “Johnny, I love you, man.”

For FedEx, Feingold opted for some rather more colorful language that we won’t repeat here. The guitar is now making its way to its intended Massachusetts home, but it likely never would have made it there had Marr not stepped in. Now she can get back to being a funk guitar ace.

The former Smiths guitarist is set to sell over 100 guitars from his collection, including six-strings used to record and perform seminal Smiths cuts. But don’t expect to find any satin-finished necks amongst them; his disdain for them runs deep.

Johnny Marr spent much of his career avoiding the guitar-hero label.

As guitarist with the Smiths and throughout his solo career, Marr largely shunned guitar solos, prioritized songs over showmanship and frequently criticized the cult of virtuosity that dominated rock guitar culture in the 1980s.

That philosophy helped make Marr one of the most influential players of his generation. While the Smiths scored 17 hit singles in the 1980s, Marr built the band’s sound around intricate layers of overdubbed guitars, unusual chord voicings and a vast palette of tones. His style drew from the rock ’n’ roll primitivism of the ’60s, the grooves of the ’70s and the bright, chiming textures of the ’80s, creating a sound that inspired countless guitarists.

“I’ve always believed that any instrumentalist is basically just an accompanist to the singer and the words,” Marr told Guitar Player in 1990. “That’s born out of being a fan of records before I was a fan of guitar players. I’m interested in melody, lyrics, and the overall song. I don’t like to waste notes, not even one.”

The guitarist recently made headlines for a different reason, announcing plans to auction nearly 100 acoustic and electric guitars from his personal collection, including instruments used with the Smiths.

Among the highlights is the 1960 Cherry Red Gibson ES-355 that Sire Records founder Seymour Stein bought for Marr to help persuade the Smiths to sign with the label. The guitar is expected to fetch as much as $198,000. Also heading to auction is Marr’s 1982 Rickenbacker 330 Jetglo, which he purchased in 1983 and used on the Smiths’ self-titled debut, including “This Charming Man.” Marr later loaned the guitar to Noel Gallagher, who used it during the recording of Definitely Maybe. It subsequently appeared on the cover of Oasis’s “Supersonic” single.

Speaking to the BBC about the sale, Marr explained, “I didn’t like the idea of my studio space becoming a museum.”

Back in 1990, however, Marr was focused on another subject entirely: the army of guitar shredders dominating magazine covers and guitar-store walls.

“Who was it that said, ‘The reason why all those guitar players play so many notes is because they can’t find the right one?’” he asked Guitar Player in a cover interview. “I like to put the right note in the right place, and my influences have always been those kinds of players. Keith Richards comes to mind, and I really like Nils Lofgren’s soloing, because he’s so melodic. I love John Lennon’s rhythm playing, and George Harrison was an incredible guitarist.”

Marr’s admiration for melody and economy put him at odds with much of the era’s guitar culture.

“There’s a lot of guitar culture that I don’t like at all,” he said. “I find the traditional idea of the guitar hero to be really irrelevant to the 1990s. I don’t think that young people are that impressed with some guy brandishing spandex trousers and a hideously shaped guitar, playing that kind of masturbatory, egotistical noise.

“Being a soloist who wants to just display virtuosity is a dated philosophy, and I don’t think there’s any room for it in pop music. It’s the last stand of late-’60s/early-’70s rockism, and it should have gone a long time ago.”

Despite his criticism of shred culture, Marr made clear he respected players with genuine technical ability.

“I have a healthy respect for guitarists like Joe Satriani and Eddie Van Halen, disciplined players who really know what they’re doing — if you’re going to be a virtuoso, you can’t be hit-and-miss. But I think people like Yngwie Malmsteen should be forgotten as soon as possible, I really do.”

Marr then offered one of the interview’s most provocative observations.

“It’s got very little to do with music, and the ‘I’m the fastest gun in town’ idea is almost like homosexual panic. Nothing against gays, but when players perpetrate this incredibly sexist image of being so macho, I find it suspicious.

“Plus, I can’t do all that stuff, so that’s why I say it’s stupid,” he added with a laugh.

What were the big news events in the world of guitar this week?

More importantly, how much do you remember from what you read?

Find out now! Each Friday, Guitar Player publishes a quiz of recent events related to guitarists, electric guitars and gear, album, singles and more.

Test your knowledge with 20 questions chosen from the week's top headlines. All the questions are multiple choice. See how well you do, then share your results with friends.

In the sea of shred that occupies much of the online guitar sphere, the waves currently being made by Swedish guitarist and producer Rebecca Mardal have rippled far and wide. Mardal paradoxically stands out with her quiet brand of beautifully delicate lo-fi soundscapes — instrumentals interwoven with her deep and lyrical guitar solos, highlighted by her remarkably light touch.

Since just 2020 she has amassed more than 30,000 followers on Instagram and an eye-popping 18 million Spotify streams. Mardal is strikingly prolific. In the first three months of 2025 alone she released a new EP, By the Fire, and, most recently, the lushly ethereal Lord of the Rings–inspired single “Furthest I’ve Been from Home,” which she recorded in her modest home studio.

Her production and arranging skills shine brightly alongside her playing. She crafts her hypnotizingly warm, clean tones using Neural DSP’s Archetype: Corey Wong X plug-in, which has replaced her previous choice, Logic’s free Cool Jazz Combo.

Mardal is one of just three artists selected to be personally mentored by guitar icon Johnny Marr throughout 2025. The program that made it possible is The Bridge, a mentorship initiative launched by Epidemic Sound, a Swedish music company, for which Mardal writes, that licenses it tracks to YouTube creators as well as to online and TV ad makers.

The program kicked off earlier this year in Manchester, England, with Marr mentoring the artists as a group and one on one. Additional individual meetings will be held online and culminate in new music created by the artists.

In a new short film documenting the Manchester event, Marr praises Mardal as “a really soulful guitar player.” At one point, he reviews her newest song, “Lossbyn,” saying it should remain just as it is and calling it “an amazing piece of music.”

“He listened to a few tracks and gave feedback, and I got to play legendary guitars of his,” Mardal tell Guitar Player from her home in Stockholm. “He was such a nice guy. He just kept handing me guitars!”

Marr also presented her with a Giffin guitar neck, autographed to her on the heel. She immediately attached it to her “ride or die” white 2003 Fender American Stratocaster, which she has customized with BJFE pickups made by Lundgren, a Swedish company she swears by.

It’s a long way, both literally and figuratively, from Arvika, the tiny town in Sweden where Mardal grew up. Now 31, she says the path hasn’t always been easy. Her guitar story began at age 11 when Green Day’s American Idiot inspired her to become, surprisingly, a “punk rock girl."

“I got their live DVD, Bullet in a Bible, for Christmas, and that really made me want to pursue playing music for a living,” she said.

The only girl playing guitar in her school, Mardal was initially self-taught and leaned heavily on power chords. She would jam with the guys, but her skills didn't always get the warmest of welcomes.

“They listened to AC/DC and Led Zeppelin, so they had already learned how to solo, and I was far behind.”

But within a year she discovered African-American gospel music on YouTube, and became fascinated by players like Kerry “2 Smooth” Marshall, Glenice Glover and Myles Jasnowski.

“He was the first person I saw who did guitar solos over hip-hop beats, and I just thought that was the coolest thing ever,” Mardal says.

Her first bona fide guitar lessons came at age 15 during the Swedish equivalent of high school, when her instructor not so gently pushed her into studying jazz. “I’m really glad he forced me,” he says. “It gave me an understanding of how chords work.”

Playing chord/melody jazz arrangements also allowed her to develop her deft fingerstyle technique, which she seamlessly incorporates into her playing.

Mardal left Sweden at age 19 to attend London’s now-defunct Tech Music School, and at the same time became the in-house guitarist for an indie hip-hop label, an experience she would come to regret.

“You know how it is in the industry,” she explains. “They talk big. I ended up losing all of my savings.”

After two years, she yearned to escape London and was thrilled to learn she had been accepted to Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, where she received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Music from Sir Paul himself. “He was really down to earth,” she recalls. “He gave me a peck on the cheek.”

From Liverpool, Mardal moved back to Stockholm, sometimes sleeping in the shared music studio she rented. When it wasn’t available, she was forced to bed down in her “old, beat-up” circa-2002 Ford Mondeo. It was around the time of the pandemic and she became very ill, possibly with COVID.

“Sleeping in a freezing car with a fever,” she recalls. “That was horrible.”

But her life changed when she decided — with some trepidation — to release her music online and discovered there were people who actually wanted to listen. "I remember thinking, Oh, shit, I can do this!" she says

Mardal’s compositions are memorable and beautifully chill songs that double as irresistible backing tracks to jam over (“Nothing Ever Changes” from By the Fire is just one example). But it’s her devastatingly light touch on the guitar that’s immediately noticeable.

“Yeah, I’m a light picker. It’s the social anxiety,” she says with a laugh.

But she demonstrates remarkable control over dynamics, the range in volume of a note or chord being played.

“That’s the good thing about playing super soft as your main technique,” she explains, “because it's so easy to get dynamic when you have a soft touch.”

One of Mardal’s fortes is her genuinely emotive way of interpreting melodies, be it her own music or a unique take on a cover, like a lo-fi version of Green Day’s “When I Come Around.”

“I think that's my longing, to be able to sing,” she explains. “I listen to a lot of singers, like Celine Dion. She could sing a line and you never know dynamically where she's going to go with it… Simple melodies [on guitar] can become magic using dynamics.”

While Mardal spends much of her time writing and recording new music, she also currently works part-time at Hellstone Music, a boutique music store in Stockholm chock full of vintage guitars and frequented by greats like Joe Bonamassa and Brad Paisley, both of whom she has met. She also speaks highly of the many musicians she’s met on Instagram with whom she’s collaborated. She simply loves playing.

That much is evident in her short film with Marr. When the guitarist asks about her hopes for the future, Mardal replies earnestly, “I just want to play guitar. Fundamentally, just want to play guitar with a bunch of cool people.”

“Wear it down yourself!”

That's the advice of former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr when it comes to people who prefer satin necks on their electric guitars.

Marr has come out firmly against the continuing trend for satin finish necks. Players love them for having a worn-in feel straight out of the box. Gloss finishes, in contrast, can take years to break in. They can also be perceived as ‘sticky’ in certain situations, especially during live shows, where players tend to sweat.

Satin-finish necks also have less friction, making them the shredder’s neck finish of choice.

Marr, however, isn’t convinced.

“I have to try and talk about the neck without sounding offensive or angry,” he says in the new issue of Guitar World. “Satin finishes: Why? No need. You’re really playing that fast that you need to have a satin neck? Really?”

The guitarist has just finished building two new signature Martin guitars, the imaginatively named M-6 and M-7. As you would expect, both offer gloss necks; there’s no satin in sight.

Speaking in the promo video for the acoustic guitars, he says, “I deliberately chose a gloss neck because I'm a bit old school. I like the idea of getting the guitar like you used to in the '70s and wearing it down yourself. I don't have any issues with the way that it feels.”

Fender and PRS are the two biggest names to embrace the satin-neck trend. Fender even sells stand-alone necks for Stratocasters and Telecasters for those wanting to swap out sticky for sleek.

Aside from that option, a quick search on YouTube brings up a host of instructional videos on sanding down gloss necks, a quick way to get the vintage worn-in neck feel that would otherwise only come from the wear and tear of time. Guitar Player also has a guide on how to achieve smooth relic necks.

On the other hand, Gibson guitars have stayed fairly firmly in the gloss neck camp, seeing it as a high-end finish befitting of its builds.

“A beautiful glossy neck, that was on all the old guitars since time immemorial,” Marr's tells Guitar World. “Your technique is so dazzling, or you’re so uncomfortable putting your hand on that gloss, or you’re so affronted by it that we’ve had to have years of really bad finishes on necks? Wear it down yourself, you lazy sod!”

This isn't the first time Marr has given a rather frank take during an interview. Famously chatting with Guitar Player in 1990, he said that “people like Yngwie Malmsteen should be forgotten as soon as possible,” believing his look-what-I-can-do playing style “has got very little to do with music.”

In that same interview, he brandished “the traditional idea of the guitar hero irrelevant,” but did concede that Eddie Van Halen and Joe Satriani have his respect as they are “disciplined players who really know what they're doing.”

Best not to mention what type of neck finish Eddie typically preferred...

A Fender American Vintage 1962 Reissue Stratocaster formerly owned and used onstage by Johnny Marr is set to be sold at auction. 

The electric guitar is to be auctioned by Gardiner Houlgate alongside the 1980s Mesa Boogie amplifier rig he paired it with for a 1989-90 world tour. They are expected to sell for up to £25,000 and £4,000 respectively. 

Built in 1988, the Strat reissue featured during Marr’s stint in post-punk band The The. Having burst onto the music scene with The Smiths, Marr had a six-month stint with The Pretenders, before joining the post-punk outfit in 1988 as he navigated life after The Smiths. 

Alongside founding member Matt Johnson, he tapped up Nick Lowe bassist James Eller and ex-ABC drummer David Palmer for the band. Together they recorded the album Mind Bomb, which also featured a guest appearance from Sinead O'Connor. 

The record debuted at number four in the UK charts, and the Olympic White Stratocaster starred extensively across the following world tour. 

A live album captured at London's Royal Albert Hall from that tour showcases the guitar doing what it does best. 

Made in the factory that would later become the Fender Custom Shop, it was built to mirror the specs of Marr's favored 1962 Strat, as it had become too valuable to risk touring with. 

It has since been modded by his guitar tech, Phil Powell. EMG pickups were installed to avoid hum issues and, as he told Guitar Player in January 1990, an old-style Precision bass brass knob was also fitted, allowing better grip. 

As that GP feature divulges, by this point in his career, Marr was eager to experiment with new sounds – and the Strat would play a key role. 

“My philosophy has changed slightly,” he said. “I've been making records for eight years, and I wouldn't like to anchor myself down to an attitude I had when I was nineteen. 

“On Mind Bomb, I was getting more into atmospherics and noises, but melodic noises, not just aimless doodling. And I wanted to get into open, wide arrangements with fewer chord changes.”

The guitar’s case was eventually given a brown tag inscribed with 'Blonde Strat EMG pickups' to make it easier to pick out from what was a rapidly growing collection of guitars. 

The guitar is being sold with one of Marr's personal thumb picks and a custom Ernie Ball 'Johnny' plectrum. Various photographs of Marr playing the guitar, as well as the 1990 issue of Guitar Player in which he details the mods, are also included. 

Notably too, the back of the headstock has been signed by the guitarist. 

The rest of that rig, which comprises a Mesa Boogie studio preamp, a Mesa Boogie quad preamp, Simul-Class 295 power amp, and footswitch, is also set to be sold to the highest bidder. 

The amp features hand-marked settings for on-the-fly tone dialing. In the now 34-year-old GP interview, Marr explained how he had “intended to buy a [Mesa Boogie] 400” for the tour. 

However, he found it to have “a cold hi-fi sound,” adding that “the 295 is much more sympathetic to [the] guitar.” 

The auction will take place on September 3. 

Head to Gardiner Houlgate to learn more about what’s set to feature on the auction block.

Although it was Gibson’s first major endorsement-led electric guitar, the Les Paul model failed to set the market on fire during its initial run, from 1952 to ’60. But the thinline semi-hollowbody ES-335 that joined the company’s lineup in 1958 was much closer to an overnight success. 

The seminal semihollow design immediately proved to be one of the world’s most versatile electric guitars, and it has retained that reputation ever since. And just as Gibson had extended the Les Paul range in 1953 with the Custom model, a.k.a. Black Beauty, the company added to the ES lineup in late 1958 with the ES-355, the top model of the range. 

The step up to the ES-355 brought with it changes to the guitar’s electronics — including stereo wiring and a six-position Varitone switch — as well as cosmetics. 

Like the Les Paul Custom, the 355 served up the bling, adding ebony, gold hardware and large fret-marker blocks, rather than the dot inlays of the ES-335 model. Just as the undeniably classy Custom had smartened the look of the base Les Paul model with its dinner-jacket attire and gold hardware, the standard Cherry finish of the debutante ES-355 brought more color to the palette and helped the rest of its adornments really pop. 

Framed by seven-ply body binding, the deep-red translucent finish provided a stunning background for the gold-plated hardware, completing a package that screamed “top shelf” from any angle. 

Sunburst and Natural were introduced as standard finish options in 1960, but for most players, the Cherry finish — which on many examples has faded to a watermelon red — will always be the classic look. 

FANCY BUT FUSSY

The ES-355’s high-end appointments carried on right up the neck, where pearloid-block position markers contrasted with the ebony fingerboard, and to the headstock’s split-diamond inlay. 

Elaborate five-ply binding encircled the enlarged headstock, which was further upgraded with gold Grover Rotomatic tuners as standard and a truss-rod cover engraved (in most instances) with “Stereo.” 

In other regards, the ES-355 had the same construction as the ES-335, which included a body made from laminated maple, a maple center block to help impede feedback and improve sustain and clarity, and a glued-in mahogany neck. 

The use of an ebony fretboard on the ES-355, however, rather than the rosewood of the ES-335 and ES-345, enhanced the guitar’s treble response and gave a little more bite and clarity to the overall tone. It’s a brightness booster that some players don’t feel this model needs, which is why many have favored the standard-issue ES-335 over the years. 

But a big part of that love for the down-market sibling stems from the ES-355’s overly complex electronics, starting with its stereo wiring. Placing the three-way pickup toggle in the front or back position selects the bridge (lead) and neck (rhythm) pickups individually but sends them to different “hot” terminals on the stereo (TRS) output jack. 

With the switch in the middle position, however, both pickups are sent to their respective outputs simultaneously. Either way, the result requires a special Y cable to connect the guitar’s output either to two separate amps or two channels of the same amp (or, ideally in Gibson’s view, one of their own stereo amps, such as the GA-79RVT). 

The ES-355 could also be special-ordered in mono, but most were made with the stereo feature, which a lot of guitarists avoided or converted to mono for ease of use. Bear in mind that Gibson reversed the polarity of the pickups in vintage stereo ES-355s, arguably to enhance the spread of the stereo effect when both were used together. Unless you’re a fan of the out-of-phase Peter Green tone, that’s another modification to factor in. 

In its first three years of existence, the ES-355 came standard with a Bigsby vibrato (very few were made with no Bigsby and a stopbar tailpiece). For 1961–’62, the Bigsby was replaced with the arguably cumbersome sideways vibrola — as seen on our 1962 example featured in this issue — which, in turn, was replaced with a long vibrola with lyre cover plate in 1963. 

Given the potential persnicketiness of any of these vibrato units, players have also sometimes paid a premium for one of the relatively few factory-hardtail vintage ES-355s made in the early years.  

LUXE FOR LESS

The result of all this is that good ES-355s from the late ’50s and early ’60s have often sold for considerably less than comparable ES-335s, despite their elevated cosmetics. Those who dig the model for what it is, though, have often gotten great use out of its special features, and many players have found a lot to love in the Varitone settings, too. 

The ES-355 has appealed to a wide range of notable guitarists over the years, including B.B. King, Chuck Berry, Keith Richards, Alex Lifeson, Otis Rush, Noel Gallagher, Johnny Marr, Tad Kubler from the Hold Steady and Ray Benson from Asleep at the Wheel. All have made hay out of the model’s broad sonic palette. 

Though if you’re mainly drawn to a vintage ES-355 for its looks, it’s reason enough to scratch that itch.

Essential ingredients

• Thinline symmetrical doublecutaway body made from laminated maple with solid-maple center block 
• Seven-ply body binding, five-ply headstock binding 
• Glued-in mahogany neck, 24.75” scale length 
• Ebony fretboard with pearloid block inlays 
• Two humbucking pickups (one PAF, one Patent Number on this example) 
• Six-position Varitone switch and stereo output jack

B.B. King's The Best of the Early Years is available to buy and stream now

Back in January 1990, Guitar Player opened the new decade with a new type of guitar hero on the cover. In fact, said writer and Guitar Player Editor Joe Gore, Johnny Marr had done everything he could to avoid becoming a guitar hero: he avoided guitar solos whenever possible, put songs before showmanship, was subtle in his innovations (not for him posing with a four-necked guitar), violated pop music conventions whenever possible and denounced guitar heroism loudly and frequently.

At the time of this interview, Marr was 25 years old with more than a dozen successful albums to his credit. Marr was the musical director of The Smiths, the most critically acclaimed English band of the 80s. In England, the quartet generated controversy, 17 hit singles, and an endless parade of imitators. In the U.S. the band became a college/underground radio staple and developed a fanatical cult following (a Spin magazine readers poll named the band's The Queen Is Dead the Best Album Of All Time, edging out Sgt. Pepper).

The Smiths' records juxtaposed Marr's vibrant, tuneful pop arrangements with Morrissey's mournful, love-it-or-hate-it voice and witty, politically charged lyrics. Morrissey and Marr wore their record collections on their sleeves, and their influences – Motown, early Stones, and American punk prominent among them – were readily apparent. At the same time, they attacked the sexist, escapist conventions of pop music.

Despite their traditionalist streak, the Smiths developed an utterly original group sound, based largely on Marr's elaborate tapestries of overdubbed guitars. His oddball chord sequences and jarring major/minor clashes were leavened by a Beatles-esque sense of melody and an Olympic-sized palette of guitar tones. Marr's playing embraced the rock primitivism of the 60s, the funky groove of the 70s, and the bright, open-string chimey-ness of the 80s. He may have played a Rickenbacker, but there wasn't a Byrd in sight – it was a whole new angle on jingle-jangle.

In August ‘87, Marr resigned, citing musical and personal reasons and went on to play with Talking Heads, the Pretenders, Bryan Ferry, Paul McCartney, and became a full-time member of The The. Credits since then include Electronic, his band with New Order’s Bernard Sumner, Modest Mouse, The Cribs, Billy Bragg, the Pet Shop Boys, Kirsty MacColl, Beck, Oasis, Pearl Jam and many more. 

No matter what the project, Marr's guitars support the song, not a bloated shred-head ego. Too many "guitar heroes" bludgeon you with flash, but leave you hungry for music. On a Johnny Marr record, the song speaks first, while repeated listenings reveal the richness of the accompaniment.

This month he released a book, Marr's Guitars that chronicles his obsession with guitars and guitar playing. "Guitars have been the obsession of my life," says Marr, "They’ve been a mission and sometimes a lifeline." Back in 1990, he personified a new breed of guitar player…
 

You're not afraid to play simply, if it suits the song.

I've always believed that any instrumentalist is basically just an accompanist to the singer and the words. That's born out of being a fan of records before I was a fan of guitar players. I'm interested in melody, lyrics, and the overall song. I don't like to waste notes, not even one. Who was it that said, "The reason why all those guitar players play so many notes is because they can't find the right one"? I like to put the right note in the right place, and my influences have always been those kinds of players. Keith Richards comes to mind, and I really Like Nils Lofgren's soloing, because he's so melodic. I love John Lennon's rhythm playing, and George Harrison was an incredible guitarist.

There's a lot of guitar culture that I don't like at all. I find the traditional idea of the guitar hero to be really irrelevant to the 1990s. I don't think that young people are that impressed with some guy brandishing Spandex trousers and a hideously shaped guitar, playing that kind of masturbatory, egotistical noise. Being a soloist who wants to just display virtuosity is a dated philosophy, and I don't think there's any room for it in pop music. It's the last stand of late-60s/early-70s rockism, and it should have gone a long time ago.

Judging by the letters we receive, much of our readership is still obsessed with the mythology of the guitar hero.

I get Guitar Player, Guitar World and Guitarist every month, but I just read the equipment and LP reviews. I find most of the interviews absurd, and so anally retentive that they're meaningless. I don't know about America, but here [in the UK], no one has any respect for someone who can play a million notes per minute but can't put together a decent tune that someone can sing to or feel some sort of emotion from. I have a healthy respect for guitarists like Joe Satriani and Eddie Van Halen, disciplined players who really know what they're doing – if you're going to be a virtuoso, you can't be hit-and-miss. But I think people like Yngwie Malmsteen should be forgotten as soon as possible, I really do.

It's got very little to do with music, and the "I'm the fastest gun in town" idea is almost like homosexual panic. Nothing against gays, but when players perpetrate this incredibly sexist image of being so macho, I find it suspicious. Plus, I can't do all that stuff, so that's why I say it's stupid [laughs].

You've often sung the praises of the three-minute pop song, but [The The’s] Mind Bomb features longer songs with expansive arrangements that take some time to unfold.

On Mind Bomb, I was getting more into atmospherics and noises, but melodic noises, not just aimless doodling. And I wanted to get into open, wide arrangements with fewer chord changes.

You've said that one should be able to visualize a song with only a voice and an acoustic guitar. But that hardly applies to an atmospheric soundscape like The The's Good Morning, Beautiful. 

True, but I still think that's a good guideline for a writer to follow. Before attempting any track, I have the overall picture in my head. Even if it doesn't work on an acoustic guitar, at least I could sing all the parts into a Walkman. It's nice to have accidents as a guitar player, but as a writer, I like to know exactly what I'm doing.

But my philosophy has changed slightly. I've been making records for eight years, and I wouldn't like to anchor myself down to an attitude I had when I was nineteen.

How accurate are your visualizations of the finished song? Is it trial and error?

To be honest, the parts that I think will work almost always do. But in the process of gluing one part over another, new parts spring to life. So there is a fair amount of trial and error. I'm into experimentation, but that only feels good once you know you've got a really good song cooking. I don't believe in doodling around, waiting for inspiration to drop through the ceiling.

If I'm not hearing anything, I'll go for a walk for 15 minutes. Actually, I come up with my best melodies away from the guitar, like when I'm in a taxi, or making tea in the studio, hearing the track from down the corridor. The ones I sing before I play them are always my favorites.

You're experimenting more with processed sounds.

The Smiths were quite a purist group, and I was a great believer in traditionalism. Just plugging a Gibson ES-335 into my trusty Fender Bassman or Twin Reverb was romantic. But now I understand that when technology is used by someone with taste, you can have tasteful results.

Whatever makes for a more interesting end result, I'lI use. For example, I've been using the Roland GR-50 guitar synth, and I'm really impressed with that. If technology allows you to come up with an absolute killer part, then it can only be a good thing.

Is there any guitar synth on Mind Bomb?

No, but I find it really inventive, especially if I'm just writing in a hotel on a four-track. I sometimes use the Casio MIDI guitar for that – the onboard sounds are cheesy, but they're good for demo purposes. It's corny to say, but if Hendrix had been around, he would have exploited today's technology for all it was worth, as he did when he was alive, as did The Beatles. Just because they used 8-track in their time doesn't mean that that's what you use nowadays if you want to be as good as The Beatles. But I've still got a healthy respect for traditional guitar playing and a traditional guitar setup.

You're also incorporating more bizarre, unpitched ideas in your playing.

I'm trying to be open to any ideas, so long as they're fairly melodic and they relate to what the singer is singing. I'll try any trick. With The Smiths, I'd take this really loud Telecaster of mine, lay it on top of a Fender Twin Reverb with the vibrato on, and tune it to an open chord. Then I'd drop a knife with a metal handle on it, hitting random strings. I used that on Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before [from Strangeways, Here We Come] for the big "doi-ngs" at the start. And I used it on This Charming Man [from The Smiths], buried beneath about 15 tracks of guitar.

Those dense, overdubbed textures are one of your specialties.

Once I've put a track down, I put on a pair of cans and listen to the track really, really loud. I listen for the things between chord changes, the things that you almost play accidentally moving from one chord to another, and I try to fill in those gaps. I try to glue together those harmonic and melodic overtones, and state the things that you imagine you're hearing. And if there's a sad melody there, I'll find it, even if it's in a major key. I really like melancholic melodies.

Yeah, even though most Smiths tunes are in major keys, the vocal and instrumental melodies often emphasize the interval between 3 and 5, the minor 3rd within the major chord. It's like a sigh.

That's right. And moving up in semitones is really good, too. I've never liked jolly music full-stop, unless it's someone like the Fatback Band.

Even when you were playing a lot of chimey, open-string chords on a Rickenbacker, your playing had a melancholy feel. You avoided all the jingle-jangle cliches.

Well, I've been open to tons and tons of influences. My parents are avid country music fans, and I got into music at an early age. My father played accordion, and he taught me harmonica. Because we were an Irish family, we had parties all the time. I had an uncle who played guitar and sang hits of the day, like Walk Right Back by the Everly Brothers, and I thought that was really cool. 

By the time I was 10 or 11, I started to buy T-Rex records they were the first group I thought of as "mine." Jeepster was the first record I bought. The main riff, which was a complete steal from Howlin' Wolf, got me into playing guitar. At 13 or 14, | started playing more seriously, and I backtracked into Motown. I'd work out the chords, but I'd try to cover the strings, piano, and everything with my right hand, trying to play the whole record on six strings. That's one reason why I'm so chordally-oriented, and why key changes and the strategy of arrangement are really important to me. I was heavily into Smokey Robinson and [Motown songwriters] Holland/Dozier/Holland, because there was only Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple around.

Then I moved from the poor side of Manchester to the most notorious part of the Southside, Wythenshawe, which was full of musicians. It was normal for someone to have a guitar there – on the poor side, if you wanted one, you had to steal it. Billy Duffy, who now plays with The Cult, taught me a few chords, and someone else turned me on to Pentangle and Fairport Convention with Richard Thompson. I started to get into guitar players as such, and when I got into Nils Lofgren, there was no turning back. He had a lot of cool and a lot of flash, but he had respect for the song and melody. Plus he's one of the best white singers l've heard – I could talk about him for years. It was because of him that I started playing with a thumbpick. And I got into the one-note solo from Neil Young's Cinnamon Girl, which I thought was incredible.

Then when I was 13 or 14 – hey, presto! – all the kids at school were getting into punk rock. I was starting to develop a healthy interest in songwriting and good melodies, and then this movement came along. I knew it was pretty cool, but I was too young to appreciate it, because I couldn't get into the clubs and spit on the groups. I was caught between two things.

So you were saddled with some unfashionable influences.

That's exactly what happened. But I had my own thing, and that held me in good stead in the future. It was not very cool to be into the Supremes when you're supposed to be into The Jam. But I did get into the American new wave scene, Patti Smith in particular. When I heard Horses, that changed me quite a lot. Then I got into Television's Marquee Moon and Talking Heads '77. After Patti Smith, I thought, "Great, I can play big, loud chords on a Les Paul through a Fender Twin Reverb, instead of sitting around with an acoustic guitar." I could pick like Bert Jansch, but I wanted to look like Ivan Kraal from the Patti Smith Group. From then on, I didn't look back.

Unlike some darker-sounding post-punk bands, The Smiths stuff had very pretty surfaces, with lots of major 7th and 6th chords.

Reel Around The Fountain was my interpretation of James Taylor's version of Handy Man. I was trying to do a classic melodic pop tune, and it had the worst kind of surface prettiness to it. But at the same time, Joy Division was influencing everybody in England.

That dark element- it wasn't that I wanted to be like them, but they brought out something in the darkness of the overall track. In a sense, Bernard Sumner [of Joy Division, later to become New Order] was one the most influential guitarists and writers of the 80s. There would never have been a U2 or a Cure if it hadn't been for Joy Division.

So where does the jingle-jangle come from?

The Byrds is an obvious answer, and I did like them, but not as much as people make out.

I don't hear a lot of Roger McGuinn in your playing. You never use those open-position add9th-sus4 voicings.

That's good, for a change. Actually, a lot of it comes from Neil Young and Danny Whitten of Crazy Horse, but as if they were in a pop group. And it was George Harrison who influenced me to get a Rickenbacker. Ticket To Ride – what a brilliant song! But most of all, the jingle-jangle came from James Honeyman-Scott of the Pretenders. He was the last important influence on my playing before I went out on my own. The first time I played Kid with the Pretenders, I couldn't believe it. I've used that solo to warm up with every day for years.

Unlike a lot of other jingle-janglers, you didn't rub the listener's nose in your guitars. There's was a lot of depth and mystery to your textures.

Again, that comes from being influenced by groups and records, and not guitar players. For example, [producer] Phil Spector was really important to me, and I like the idea of records, even those with plenty of space, that sound "symphonic." I like the idea of all the players merging into one atmosphere. I tend to hear the record as it will be produced as I'm writing the song, and I hear how the guitars will link together. The Rolling Stones were a big influence in the way the two guitars played off each other. 

And Roxy Music was very important to The Smiths. They always had fantastic intros and outros, and on the eleventh hearing you'd pick out something you'd never heard before. But I must give credit to John Porter, who produced a lot of The Smiths' records. He worked with Roxy Music in the 70s, and he taught me a hell of a lot about guitars. He figured that if everyone spends two days getting drum sounds, why not spend the time on the guitar sounds if you're a guitar group? We spent a lot of time on our sounds, and I still do.

You often tune your entire guitar up a whole step, to F#. Why did you start doing that?

When Morrissey and I started writing, my ideas just sounded too low when we started working on them with the voice. But [Smiths bassist] Andy Rourke didn't play in F#, so all the guitar parts sounded really toppy on the first album, while the vocals were in a low register. It made for an odd sound that really worked. I also use a lot of regular boring open tunings like G, D, and A, and I use Nashville tuning all the time. I've got an Epiphone Coronet with one pickup, and I string it with the high stings from a 12-string set.

It's a really zingy, trebly guitar. I used that on a lot of things that people think are 12-string, like the end of The Headmaster Ritual. I also used it on the studio version of The Draize Train [the B-side of the Panic single], along with two Rickenbackers. I was working with Alan Rogan, the famed English guitar technician. He said, "Well, if you want a Pete Townshend sound, I'II bring down two of Pete's guitars." I don't know whether Pete knows about that!

Did you use thumbpicks with The Smiths?

I played with a flatpick because I thought we needed a Ramones element. But since then, I've gone back to the thumbpick. I wanted something more fluid, and when you have all five right-hand fingers going, your fingers go to progressions you don't even know you're doing. I don't use right-hand nails – I'm a horrible nail-biter. But my fingertips are really hard.

Do you have trouble getting a light strum feel with the heavy plastic of the thumbpick?

I find that's one of the most difficult things. But I try to zing it with my fingers, like an upward flamenco-style stroke. I often hold the thumbpick just like a regular pick, just to get that bright attack. My thumb's quite fast. I use fingers and thumbs for soloing, coming up with parts, or for funky things where l'm sort of slapping. That's what I do on the funky line in Violence Of Truth [on Mind Bomb].

Which records captured the Smiths at their peak?

The Queen Is Dead is certainly the best LP we made, the most focused from start to finish. It was a dark point in my life, but creatively, it made for something really brilliant. I try to take care of myself and live in the real world, but some of my best work has been produced when I wasn't in the real world. Pop music isn't worth killing yourself for, but when you do something extra special, it's almost worth it. Singles-wise, my favorite is How Soon Is Now.

Were you behind The Smiths' eventual move towards more orchestrated, "produced" sounds? Your approach was quite like The Beatles at times.

Musically, the production was my responsibility. But to be fair, it was a 50/50 thing between Morrissey and me. We were completely in sync about which way we should go for each record. But we started to lose that near the end of the last LP, which was another signal to me that we should stop. The White Album [The Beatles] was the strongest influence on us towards the end, things like Cry Baby Cry and I'm So Tired.

Were The Smiths misrepresented to American listeners, who knew the band through their albums rather than their singles?

I'd say so, because singles were one of the most important things that brought us together, a love of the classic 7" pop format. Those were the records I grew up with. A huge facet of what we were about was missed out on, because singles culture is so ineffectual in America. But I thought Louder Than Bombs, the singles compilation, was great.

What did you think of the live album, Rank?

Guitar-wise, I'm not particularly proud of it, partly because I used to be in such panic before I played onstage that I either froze up, or I got so drunk that I was sloppy. That was a combination of natural stage fright and being in the ridiculous position in England of being so scrutinized. I never played as well on tour.

Did you see budding alcoholism as a warning sign about your career with the band?

Yeah, I did, and to be honest, it was more than "budding." I find the "guitar player does tour, is driven to drink" idea very corny, but it could have been a lot worse. It sounds incredibly Guns N' Roses, but The Smiths went through every conceivable rock and roll tragedy: drug busts, police harassment, controversy. We had everything but a death, thank God. That was avoided by us splitting up.

You were luckier than some.

We were smarter than some. Some groups actually start believing they're the Rolling Stones, and that's how they do themselves in.

What prompted the final split?

It was mostly a personal thing. We were working at such a breakneck pace – 50-odd tracks in four years – that I thought I was going to end up repeating myself.

Also, I was frustrated with what people expected me to come up with. By creating your own rules the influences, methods of songwriting, and so on that you allow yourself to use, you end up boxing yourself into a corner of musical politics. And if you step out of that corner, it's immediately called "sell-out." Some "fans" – for want of a better word –  just wanted me to jingle-jangle on my Rickenbacker till I died. But if I have to forsake fame, fortune, and popularity for the experience of being able to play exactly what I want when I want, I'd do it again.

But in the beginning, it was good to be in a group that stood for and against certain things. We were against synthesizers, the Conservative government, groups with names like Orchestral Manoeuvers In The Dark, the English monarchy, cock-rock guitar solos, and the American music scene at the time. We stood for the Englishness of the Kinks, T-Rex, and Roxy Music, the arty quirks that kept those groups from being huge in the U.S. 

We were into the Rolling Stones, the MC5, the Patti Smith Group, Oscar Wilde, [play-wright] Shelagh Delaney, and certain actors. Some things were really important to us, and we made no secret of our obsessions. Morrissey and I wanted to be a modern-day Leiber and Stoller, writing bubblegum backing tracks with intense lyrics. We weren't minimalistic, but we wanted to sound very home-grown, not like a polished major-label group. I'm very proud of everything we did, musically, lyrically, and politically. It was a really great time, but only a fool doesn't know when it's time to stop.

Were you widely scouted when the news of the breakup hit the street?

Lots, and I was quite flattered. But I was so lacking in confidence when I left The Smiths that I was afraid. To be honest, I thought I'd flushed my career down the toilet, but I was gonna have a good time, anyway. But it worked out well. I'm quite happy to keep on turning things down, because the people I'm involved with – The The, Kirsty MacColl and Bernard [Sumner] – are my favorites. I'm very proud of the Kirsty MacColl record. I wrote two of the songs and played on nine tracks. I got a chance to play opposite Robbie Mcintosh and Dave Gilmour.

Why did you feel you weren't the right guitarist for The Pretenders?

It was mainly a question of timing. Chrissie wanted to take a break to write the LP she's working on now, and I was fired up to tour or make a record. The tracks I cut with The Pretenders I regard as a complete success. They were first take, with live vocals and no punch-ins or re-recording. Chrissie is so good that she can inspire a group with her personality and her voice to play the best they've ever played – she's that good as a front person.

I feel very good to have played with Chrissie, but the most important thing was our personal relationship. She helped me through a lot of crap with The Smiths' split, and I'm forever indebted to her.

Did you consciously put aside the Rickenbacker after the Smiths era?

Yeah, I was getting a little tired of the things I was coming up with on it. About '86, I got really into the Les Paul and rediscovered Peter Green. I tried to play less chordally, a little more solo-notey. But the solo on Paint A Vulgar Picture [Strangeways] was done on a Strat.

How did it feel to play a regular single-note solo like that after becoming known as the man who never soloed?

I was really pleased that the first solo as such on a Smiths record was one you could sing. Since then, I've done more wild, wacky fast things; that's going to be more of a feature of my new stuff. I like improvisation in the right place, but I find most solos corny. That "now I'm gonna solo my ass off" attitude is the equivalent of someone just being a loudmouth and talking rubbish. I prefer the idea of a relentless riff that goes around and around, like the line on The Violence Of Truth [Mind Bomb].

So what would you call the non-solo guitar passages on tunes like The Queen Is Dead or Shoplifters Of The World Unite? They deliver the charge you'd expect from a solo, but you don't actually solo.

I think of them as guitar breaks. I like the one in Shoplifters – that was the first time I used harmonized layering. People have said it sounds like Brian May, but I was thinking of stacked Roy Buchanans. For the frenzied wah-wah section on The Queen Is Dead, I was thinking 60s Detroit, like the MC5 and the Stooges.

Nowadays, you seem to be using more dry, un-jangly, funk-type riffs than you did with the Smiths.

I like those overstated guitar parts, like the one on the Fatback Band's Yum, Yum, Gimme Some, which gives you all the rhythmic bits that your body wants to feel. A classic for me is Nile Rodgers' guitar part on Chic's I Want Your Love. All that is born out of an early love for Bo Diddley. That beat is the root of all dance music. When I do sessions and I can't find a way into the track, I look for the Bo Diddley, whether it's half-time or double-time.

That figure runs through all African-derived music.

That's right, and if it doesn't run through it specifically, it does subliminally. Bo Diddley took the bits that you wanted, and hooked them all together in an overstated way. One of the things that attracted me to Bo Diddley early on was my parents' copy of Elvis Presley's Marie's The Name, which has that beat. The Talking Heads called me in specifically because the song Ruby Dear had a Bo Diddley groove – that's incredibly flattering.

You often create odd clashes by superimposing the major and minor modes.

I find a blue note whenever I can. I try to find the poignancy in any kind of lick. Not to get too poetic here, but I find a distinct lack of poignancy in most guitar playing I hear. It's as if people feel that by virtue of being a guitar player, they have to have this swashbuckling, gung-ho approach to music, an overblown, vulgar approach. I'd prefer a few notes played in the right place on one string. For example, I liked the melody at the end of Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before, but it just felt a little too accomplished. I wanted it to sound like a punk player who couldn't play, so I fingered it on one string, right up and down the neck. I could have played it with harmonics or my teeth, or something clever, but the poignancy would have gone out of the melody.

You haven't had any formal theoretical training, yet your harmonic ideas are quite sophisticated.

The older I get, the more I realize that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I try to avoid an overly theoretical approach at all costs. I like putting in parts that I don't understand, parts that just sound good by ear. On the Talking Heads' Cool Water [Naked], for example, I tuned a Gibson ES-335 12-string to an atonal drone against the track at David Byrne's encouragement. I didn't know what the tuning was, so I was playing all kinds of shapes that I never would have gotten into. We miked it acoustically, without an amp. 

I try to avoid thinking about scales, keys, and anything like that. I really like the idea of not knowing what I'm doing. Ultimately, I end up with something more original, a little more from the heart than the head. I know it doesn't work for everyone, but it's convenient for me because I'm quite a lazy person [laughs]. But that's one of the things I'm looking forward to about getting old and grey – I'm going to learn what I'm actually doing. But I think it would be the kiss of death to my songwriting if I did that right now.

At times, your style is reminiscent of African highlife guitar – playing those runs in parallel thirds, for example.

It's an instinctive love of a melody that people find undeniably cute. Another example is The Boy With The Thorn In His Side [The Queen Is Dead]. That was the first time I used a Strat on a record. I got it because I wanted a twangy Hank Marvin sound, but it ended up sounding quite highlify.

And then there was that submerged rockabilly strain.

That comes from a love of Chuck Berry's You Can't Catch Me. I've been trying to capture that same swing I'd better be careful because he'll probably sue me if he reads this. The way he sang against the bass and drums sounded so great to me as a kid. That, plus the soul swing of What'd I Say by Ray Charles. The Stones' 19th Nervous Breakdown is another one. It's a wicked groove - It really kicks. That's where my “rockabillv" influence comes from. Plus, obviously, the Elvis Presley Sun Sessions. Scotty Moore's playing on that is amazing.

You've got a light touch with the whammy bar, when you use it.

I have an up-and-down relationship with the whammy bar. I've been getting into really interesting things with feedback, and I like to use the whammy bar with that. I'm really into false harmonics, like steel players and Nils Lofgren play with thumb-picks. You know, where you touch the string an octave higher than the note you're playing with the left hand? I like to pick a note with the volume turned down, and then swell it right up.

Do you have any tips for generating feedback?

I've started to realize the importance of where my cabinets are placed in relation to where I'm standing. And when I get to a venue that has a wooden stage, I say, "Yeah, great!" especially if it's hollow. But if it's a rubber-covered stage or – God forbid! – carpet, then I'm in trouble. I nearly always keep my little finger on the volume pot, so if I hear the glimmer of something really interesting, I turn the volume right up; if it's not happening, I turn it down and try to find another note. I don't use a volume pedal – it's all volume knob. That's inspired by Roy Buchanan, Nils Lofgren and Jeff Beck.

You're using a lot of wah-wah these days.

I find that I approach it like a tone pot. The "whacka-whacka" sound was already done in the best possible way on Theme From Shaft, and then there's Hendrix, of course. Now, I find myself keeping my foot on it all the time, just letting it out slowly without thinking about it too much. Also, you can leave it on, opened slightly, without even touching it – that gives you a completely different tonal range. The Shoplifters break was the first time that I really discovered that. And if the filter is open in just the right place, you can get a harmonic to sing like a bird.

Is the music you're making with Bernard Sumner heavily sequenced?

Yes. I really like dance music, especially in the classic sense of the Fatback Band, the Ohio Players, and stuff like that. If it's a good song, I'll play alongside machines any day. I'm looking forward to coming to grips with sticking guitars on electro music. Also, it confuses people about what I'm doing, which I'm quite into. I don't believe in painting myself into a corner anymore, and I'm open to any kind of technique. [The Bernard Sumner album became the Electronic album, released in 1991.]

Originally published in Guitar Player, January 1990. Johnny Mar's book, Marr's Guitars, is out now.

Though the Smiths lasted a mere five years, from 1982 to ’87, they may be one of the most influential rock acts of their time. Much of this acclaim stems from the indelible fretwork of guitarist Johnny Marr. 

Influenced by everything and everyone from Motown to Jimi Hendrix to African highlife music, Marr’s playing shifted the focus from the massive blues-based riffs of ’70s rock guitar to a more nuanced approach that combined the chime of ’60s jangle-pop bands with the pared-down musicality of players like Nile Rodgers and Keith Richards.

After the Smiths’ breakup, Marr went on to play with Talking Heads, Billy Bragg and Pet Shop Boys, among others, and launched a successful solo career, influencing guitarists like Jonny Greenwood and Noel Gallagher.

In this lesson, we’ll break down the elements essential to Marr’s eclectic approach, including his use of elements such as open strings, arpeggios, rhythmic syncopation and melodically layered chord progressions.

Since this lesson leans heavily on chord voicings and fretboard movement, be sure to note the picking/strumming and fret-hand fingering prompts included in each of these examples.

Marr's Rhythm Guitar

Being the Smiths’ sole guitarist, Marr had a lot of sonic ground to cover. In the studio, he could overdub multiple guitar parts to achieve the multilayered textures he wanted, but onstage, he had to combine the essence of rhythm and lead textures into his playing (although the Smiths did add a second guitarist on their final tour). 

To do so, Marr would seamlessly meld both lead and rhythm guitar when he played. Part of his genius was in writing rhythm parts that incorporated functional melodies within them, and crafting leads that retained the necessary harmony that a rhythm guitar would normally provide.

Example 1 demonstrates this kind of integrative approach to rhythm guitar. Inspired by the intro to the Smiths’ “Cemetry Gates” (The Queen Is Dead), the example utilizes an upbeat 16th-note rhythm guitar pattern with a simple but catchy melodic motif woven into it. 

We start by playing a standard open C chord before moving into a far less standard Dadd4-9/A (voiced, low to high: A, F#, G, D, E). You make this transition by simply taking the C chord shape and moving it up a whole step (two frets) on the neck while removing your 3rd finger from the A string, leaving it open, along with the G and high E strings. You then head into bar 2 playing an open Gmaj7 chord (voiced G, D, G, B, F#).

As you strum this chord, alternate the high F# note, played at the 2nd fret on the high E string, with the open E note, momentarily transforming the chord to G6 (voiced G, D, G, B, E). Adding this simple but effective melodic motif on top of the chord progression gives an otherwise okay-sounding rhythm part an additional layer of interest.

Informed by one of Marr’s finest solo tunes, “New Town Velocity” (The Messenger), Example 2 delves deeper into this concept. Throughout the figure, you alternate between strumming open chords on the beats and picking out single notes on the eighth-note upbeats, forming a descending melody on top of the chords, all in 1st position. 

These single notes are played above each chord while you hold the lower chord tones.

We begin by strumming Am7 (voiced A, E, G, C) on beat 1, then add the single notes G (high E string, 3rd fret), open high E and D (B string, 3rd fret) on the upbeats – or “and” counts – of beats 2, 3 and 4. From there we switch to an open Em7 chord (voiced E, B, E, G, D) and continue adding high melody notes in a similar fashion. 

In bar 3, we shift the melodic pattern slightly: Over an open G chord, fretted with the 2nd and 3rd fingers on the bottom two strings, we proceed to “walk down” the B string starting from D at the 3rd fret to C at the 1st fret, which we then pull off to the open B note, followed by A on the 2nd fret of the G string. 

In the final bar, we strum the power chord D5/A (voiced A, D, A) for the first two beats, with only the open A note taking the place of the strummed chord on beats 3 and 4, as the melody descends and crosses over to the D string with the notes F and E at the 3rd and 2nd frets.

Two additional hallmarks of Marr’s approach to rhythm guitar are his use of 7th chords and 16th-note syncopations, both of which helped produce the kind of unique, almost jazzy sounds that set the Smiths apart from their rock contemporaries. 

Inspired by the band’s masterpiece “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” (Hatful of Hollow), Example 3 starts with an Emaj7 chord (voiced E, B, D#, G#) strummed in a funky, staccato fashion that evokes the rhythm playing style of one of Marr’s biggest influences, legendary funk and disco pioneer Nile Rodgers.

When strumming, keep your pick hand moving back and forth across the strings in a flowing, unbroken, down-up-down-up motion, even during the rests. (This highly useful technique is called 16th-note pendulum strumming, and it’s the key to making riffs like this groove and feel “in the pocket.”) 

Strum this rhythm through the next two bars as you shift to C7 (voiced C, Bb, E, G), and A6 (voiced A, A, C#, F#). As you enter bar 4, hold on the chord F9 (voiced F, A, Eb, G), then play a funky, sliding triple-stop lick through beats 3 and 4. Barre your 1st finger across the top three strings at the 8th fret, then slide up a whole step to the 10th fret and continue strumming in 16th notes. 

On beat 4, mute the strings by releasing your fret-hand grip on them, letting the index finger gently sit on the strings to keep them from ringing out as you shift back down to the 8th fret on the second 16th note of the final beat.

Once you have these techniques down, it’s time to move on and tackle Marr’s lead sound.

Marr's Arpeggios

Like the Pretenders’ James Honeyman-Scott and Siouxsie and the Banshees’ John McGeoch, Marr rejected the notion that guitar leads needed to be showy and bombastic to be impressive and impactful. 

He played lines as catchy as any of Morrissey’s swooning vocal melodies while providing the harmonic support a rhythm guitarist would normally supply. 

Marr often did this by building his single-note parts around arpeggios – chords broken up into single notes – and using scale tones to melodically stitch everything together. 

Taking cues from the Smiths’ classic, “Still Ill” (The Smiths), Example 4 begins with an arpeggiated open Am7 chord shape, with each chord tone ringing out until you hit the C note on the “and” of beat 4 in bar 1.

From there you play an ascending and descending melodic line based on the A minor pentatonic scale (A, C, D, E, G). In bar 3, slide from F on the D string’s 3rd fret up two frets, to G, which becomes the root of an arpeggiated G major chord (G, B, D), played in eighth notes that ring together and fill out the rest of the bar. 

At the end of bar 4, a couple of legato finger slides are used in conjunction with sliding 6th intervals to create a sweet, slippery-sounding ending to the phrase. The use of triads and dyads in this example is demonstrative of Marr’s melodic approach to chord movement. 

Instead of simply strumming chords, he’ll break them up into single notes and connect them together via melodic phrasing.

Next we will look at the influence of African highlife music on Marr’s playing. Highlife is driven by one or more guitarists playing parts based on syncopated arpeggios and dyads (two-note chords), typically using diatonic 3rds or 6ths. 

Considered by many to be one of the guitarist’s greatest musical achievements with the Smiths, the single “This Charming Man” is the song most heavily influenced by highlife guitar work in his catalog, and features some of Marr’s most technically challenging playing.

Example 5 uses a similarly fashioned highlife-style syncopated uptempo eighth-note feel and arpeggiated approach. 

Note the use of legato finger slides in bars 1, 3 and 4, which lend expressiveness to the figure. When playing this example, also notice the varying articulations and durations indicated for certain notes. 

Some are to be held as long as possible, or played tenuto, as indicated by a horizontal dash over the note, while others are played short, or staccato, indicated by a dot. The push and pull of these two contrasting articulations is the key to achieving the intended feel and phrasing of the example.

Opening Up

Another device Marr loves to utilize is the use of open strings. Example 6 is a flowing eighth-note riff inspired by his playing in “Hand in Glove” (The Smiths), and driven by open-chord arpeggios with shared common tones (tones that are shared between neighboring chords) that ring throughout.

Again, notice how foundational open-chord shapes are held and allowed to ring while being embellished with both open and fretted notes on the higher strings. 

The combination hammer-on and double pull-off in the final bar can be a bit tricky to perform smoothly and cleanly, so practice it slowly at first, using the prescribed fret-hand fingerings and striving to make these slurred notes project loudly and clearly.

Example 7 is inspired by one of the Smiths’ poppiest singles, “Ask.” While this track is notable for featuring a massive number of separate guitar parts intertwining to create an almost orchestral sound, we’ll be focusing on one technique Marr employed to great effect in this song: the open-string pedal point. 

A pedal point is a single note that’s either sustained or rearticulated with a series of chords, arpeggios or melody notes. In this derivative example, you’ll see the open high E string used as the pedal point throughout. 

Notice how two- and three-note fretted chord and/or arpeggio shapes are pitted against the open E note, which enriches both the harmonic color and texture of the line, especially with the Bbadd#11 and G6 arpeggios in bars 3 and 4. 

Also, note the use of economy picking in these bars, which helps make all the string crosses sound and feel smoother than they would if you attempted to use strict alternate picking here. 

Finally, let’s take this open-string idea to its logical conclusion. Example 8 is performed in open D tuning (low to high: D, A, D, F#, A, D) and is a reworking of one of Marr’s greatest musical moments, the main riff from the Smiths’ “The Headmaster Ritual” (Meat Is Murder). 

Here, we’re playing mostly on the bottom three strings and adding color tones at the 3rd and 5th frets to the foundational open D5 chord (voiced D, A, D), with the C note on the 5th string’s 3rd fret providing the minor, or “flatted,” 7th (b7), and the hammered-on G note at the 5th fret on the 4th string supplying the “add4,” which lends an exotic flavor to the part. 

As with some of the previous examples, notice again the sprightly picking pattern and frequent string crosses, which lend rhythmic flair and energy to the figure. Be sure to try playing any of these examples with a capo, placed at various frets, to transpose everything up to a higher and brighter-sounding key, as Marr himself is often inclined to do. 

Visit the Johnny Marr website for tour info, music, merch and more.

In 1982, I was a student at the University of Michigan and working at the Campus Broadcasting Network, which housed the school’s AM and FM radio stations. It was a great place for a young musician to volunteer, not the least because it exposed one to so much new music, often several weeks before it saw commercial release.

Which is how, one summer day that year, I came to hear the rapidly arpeggiating riffs of Peter Buck’s Rickenbacker 360 on R.E.M.’s “Wolves, Lower” from their debut EP, Chronic Town.

I was mesmerized, not simply because it’s such a great riff but also because of the fleetness of its execution. “Is that the right speed?” someone in the studio asked, wondering if the DJ had accidentally set the turntable to 45 rpm. Yeah, it was. For the record, for the time, and certainly for me.

About a year later, in autumn of ’83, I was dating a girl who worked for one of Ann Arbor’s local music promoters. She had the latest music releases before anyone else. One day, she placed a record on her turntable. “Heard this yet?” she asked, dropping the needle.

In a moment, I was treated to the plangent chime of Johnny Marr’s Rickenbacker (tracked alongside an early ’50s Fender Telecaster, as we now know) as it kicked off the Smiths’ second single, “This Charming Man.”

Hooked again.

I think what grabbed me so about Buck and Marr was each man’s talent for melody. Until then, I was accustomed to hearing guitar as a rhythm, riff and solo instrument, but both of these guys approached their music as if they were the lead player on an instrumental record.

Yes, their filigree had to weave along with Michael Stipe’s and Morrissey’s vocals. But – and I say this as a fan of both groups and their lead singers – you could have removed the singing from a lot of those songs and still had a kick-ass record, so beautifully compelling were the melodies that Buck and Marr crafted.

There was nothing like it at the time, but soon there was plenty more worth hearing, as the underground rose and the alternative rock genre took off on both sides of the Atlantic, thanks to the success of R.E.M. and the Smiths.

Marr bought his Rickenbacker in the early ‘80s after he got his first publishing deal. With a few grand lining his pockets he wasted no time in purchasing a Jetglo (black) 330 model.

“I bought the Rickenbacker because I loved the look of it and also because I knew it would make me play in a way that would be good for my writing,” explains Marr in his autobiography, Set The Boy Free.

“The Rickenbacker would make it more difficult to fall into an automatic rock technique, and from a sound point of view it wouldn't be bluesy. It suited me perfectly and it steered me towards writing new songs like “You've Got Everything Now” and “Still Ill.”

While Marr’s first Rickenbacker Capri was a regular 330 model, Buck’s was a Deluxe 360. Both feature dual pickups and can be easily differentiated by their fretboard inlays (330s feature an unbound fingerboard with dots whereas 360s have a bound ‘board with triangular markers).

“I was playing a Telecaster in 1980,” the R.E.M. guitarist told Reverb. “It got stolen out of my house. And there was a little music store in town called Chick Piano; they had a blond Rickenbacker 360 with flatwound strings. That was my main guitar until 1981, when it got stolen.

“I went to a shop in Hartford, Conn. and asked if they had Rickenbackers. They pulled this black 360 out; I played it, and it was in tune. That's the one that's been on every R.E.M. record except the first single, and I bring it to pretty much every session I do.

“It's still the guitar I go to every day. It has real clarity of tone.”

Flatwound strings are one of the ingredients in Buck's standout Rickenbacker tone. As producer Mitch Easter told Music Radar: “That’s what made it all work. Those Rickenbacker pickups sound better the more metal you put over them. And you develop a very deliberate way of playing. That’s what you can hear in his playing. You can hear everything he did. He really mastered it.”

So many guitarists of the late ’70s and ’80s were using the Roland stereo chorus in the studio that it’s sometimes difficult to parse if the sound was coming from an amp (such as the JC-120), a pedal (like the CE-1, CE-2 or CE-3 Chorus Ensemble) or a Dimension D rack unit.

Regardless, “that sound” is all over countless classic recordings from the era.

When used in the studio, the JC-120 provided a meatier rendition of the tone that players had previously achieved by DI’ing their tracks.

As noted by Steve Levine, producer for Culture Club, China Crisis and others, “In the right hands it’s quite a tone palette, you can do a lot with it. It does bridge the gap between being a regular amplifier and a kind of DI’d monster.”

Billy Duffy of the Cult and other projects derived the clean, chorused element of his signature tone from a JC-120, often used in combination with a Marshall JCM800 or other tube amp.

Although the Cult hit “She Sells Sanctuary” has a heavy feel that helped lodge it as a classic rocker amid the British New Wave boom of the mid ’80s, the guitar tone on the song is clear and clean, and slathered with JC-120 chorus.

“The signature sound of the first two Cult albums was the Gretsch and a Roland JC-120,” Duffy explains on BillyDuffy.Com. “The Roland is great for the early, chimey stuff, because of that chorus sound – which I can really only get out of the combos. Some guys get a great sound with just one amp, but I’ve never been able to do it.”

Johnny Marr’s use of chorus with the Smiths was generally pretty subtle, but also an essential ingredient of his sound on many classic tracks.

“The Hand That Rocks the Cradle” and “I Don’t Owe You Anything” from the Smiths’ self-titled debut album reveal a nuanced chorus tone that might have been JC-120, CE-1 or Boss CE-2, while the swirl is a little thicker on songs like “The Headmaster Ritual” and “I Want the One I Can’t Have” from the 1985 follow-up, Meat Is Murder.

Marr turned to that sound again for his latest solo album, 2022’s Fever Dreams, where we hear it prominently on “Receiver,” “Ariel” and other tracks, shining through what is otherwise a denser mix than heard on early Smiths records.

“For this album, I also dug out my old Roland JC-120 Jazz Chorus amp,” he told Rod Brakes in Total Guitar magazine. “Transistor amps have a sonic presence that puts the sound right in your face. It’s sort of an Ennio Morricone sound.”

While Andy Summers’ seminal swirl on early Police hit “Message in a Bottle” is purported to be a combination of pedals, he is also a long-time devotee of the JC-120, and often had one in his touring rig with the band.

“The Roland JC-120 has been a staple in my collection of amplifiers for as long as I can remember,” he told Roland.com, “probably from the day it came out! I have used it on many recordings for its distinctive clarity of sound and always-superior chorus. If I am playing away from home and amps have to be supplied, my first choice is always the JC-120. It is a no-fail amp in just about every situation.”

While it might sound counter-intuitive, heavy metal icons Metallica have often turned to the JC-120 for the clean tones tracked by guitarists James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett.

Several songs on 1988’s …And Justice for All feature the amp, likely heard most prominently on “To Live Is to Die,” but also apparent in the mellower passages of “One” and the intro to the title track.

It’s no surprise, however, that a creative sonic sculptor like Adrian Belew might have fallen in love with the JC-120’s sound, as he did from the very first listen. “I first heard a JC-120 at a casual party in L.A. in 1977,” he told Roland. com. “Someone was playing some chords and noodling around – not very well in fact – but the sound mesmerized me.

“I had never heard an amp sound so pristine and beautiful. There was a shimmering clarity to every note. Then the player turned on the actual stereo chorusing. Wow! What an incredible sound. I nearly fell off my chair! I sat there speechless until I finally asked if I could play through it. Within the first two notes I played, I was madly in love with the JC-120.

“To me, the stereo chorusing and vibrato were the single most beautiful guitar sounds I’d ever heard an amp produce. I was in L.A. at the time rehearsing with Frank Zappa, my first big break in the music business. I told Frank about the amp, and the next day one showed up for us to investigate.

“Frank liked it enough to advance me the money to buy my first JC-120. I still have it ensconced in my studio. I still love it and still record with it.”

Belew’s first prominent use of the JC-120 appeared on the 1978 Zappa classic Sheik Yerbouti, but he also plastered the amp – with and without chorus and vibrato effects – on several tracks of David Bowie’s 1979 album, Lodger, the seminal Talking Heads super-group affair Remain in Light from 1980 and King Crimson’s 1981 smash, Discipline, which reveals that crystal-clear shimmer on Belew’s tour de force “Elephant Talk,” “Frame by Frame,” “Thela Hun Ginjeet,” “The Sheltering Sky” and others.

Visit the Roland website for more information on Jazz Chorus amps.

Click here for info on Boss chorus pedals.

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

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

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

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

50. Chuck Berry

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

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

Hail! Hail! Rock and roll!

49. Lindsey Buckingham

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

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

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

48. Maybelle Carter

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

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

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

Simple, yet beautifully effective.

47. Catfish Collins

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

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

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

46. Steve Cropper

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

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

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

45. Bo Diddley

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

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

Tell me now, who do you love?

44. Lonnie Donegan

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

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

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

43. Cornell Dupree

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

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

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

42. The Edge

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

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

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

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

41. Don Everly

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

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

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

40. The Funk Brothers

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

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

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

39. João Gilberto

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

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

38. Freddie Green

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

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

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

37. Jim Hall

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

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

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

36. Richie Havens

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

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

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

35. Jimi Hendrix

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

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

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

34. James Hetfield

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

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

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

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

Who are we to argue?

33. Chrissie Hynde

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

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

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

32. Tony Iommi

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

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

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

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

31. Danny Kortchmar

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

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

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

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

30. Alex Lifeson

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

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

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

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

29. Tony Maiden

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

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

28. Bob Marley

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

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

27. Johnny Marr

Is there a guitarist more influential in Brit pop? 

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

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

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

26. Curtis Mayfield

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

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

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

25. Al McKay

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

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

24. Tom Morello

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

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

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

"It’s good enough for James Brown!”

23. Leo Nocentelli

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

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

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

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

22. Jimmy Nolen

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

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

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

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

Thanks Jimmy!

21. Jimmy Page

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

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

20. Joe Pass

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

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

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

19. Les Paul

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

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

18. Joe Perry

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

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

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

17. Prince

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

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

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

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

16. Johnny Ramone

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

Mission accomplished, Johnny. 

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

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

15. Jerry Reed

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

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

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

14. Django Reinhardt

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

Scary. 

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

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

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

13. Tony Rice

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

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

12. Keith Richards

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

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

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

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

11. Nile Rodgers

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

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

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

10. Rudolf Schenker

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

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

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

9. Earl Slick/Carlos Alomar

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

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

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

8. Steve Stevens

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

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

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

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

7. Andy Summers

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

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

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

6. Pete Townshend

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

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

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

5. Eddie Van Halen

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

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

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

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

4. Jimmie Vaughan

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

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

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

3. Alex Weir

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

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

Damn!

2. The Wrecking Crew

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

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

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

1. Malcolm Young

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

No, they haven’t. 

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

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

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

When Ted McCarty joined Gibson as CEO in 1948, he immediately set about turning the post-war operation around financially, before pursuing the development of new and exciting electric guitar designs as company President. 

Released in 1949, the single pickup ES-175 is the predecessor of the dual P-90 ES-295 and one of the earliest McCarty ‘golden era’ models. 

Essentially an electrified laminate-body version of the carved spruce top L-4C acoustic model, the mid-priced $175 ES-175 set the template for the $295 ES-295 electric archtop released a few years later in 1952.

Aside from rare exceptions such as the red 1955 example pictured above, the ES-295 is easily distinguished by its all-gold finish (‘all-gold’ aside from headstock face and fingerboard) and clear/cream back-painted pickguard embossed with a gold Gibson Century lap steel-style floral design. 

The ES-295 does, however, have much in common with the ES-175. Sporting unbound f-holes along with a triple-bound top and single-bound back, both the ES-175 and ES-295 measure 16 1/4-inches wide by 3 3/8-inches deep and feature a laminated maple body construction with a sharp Florentine cutaway.

With an unbound headstock featuring mother-of-pearl Gibson logo and crown motif inlays, both models’ single piece mahogany necks have a 24 3/4-inches scale length and join the body at the 14th fret.

In 1955, the ES-295 changed in tandem with the ES-175 from a 19-fret to a 20-fret design; otherwise the instruments’ Brazilian rosewood fingerboards retained the same single-bound, double-parallelogram mother-of-pearl inlay design throughout their production.

The inspiration for the ES-295 was born from an all-gold finish ES-175 which was custom-ordered by Les Paul and completed in late-1951, before being presented to a disabled guitarist. 

In turn, the ES-295 set the mold for the perennially popular dual pickup version of the ES-175, the ES-175D, released in 1953 (although it wasn’t unheard of for people to custom-order dual pickup ES-175s prior to this). 

Les Paul, it seems, expressed a strong preference for gold finishes over Gibson’s traditional sunburst, and with the ES-295 joining Gibson’s line-up in 1952 alongside the Les Paul ‘Goldtop’ Model, the golden era appeared to be truly underway.

With its gold finish, cream-colored P-90s, independent pickup controls, Kluson Deluxe tuners with white plastic keystone buttons, and combination trapeze tailpiece/bridge, the ES-295 is something of an electric hollowbody equivalent of the ’52 Les Paul Model solidbody. 

Indeed, Gibson ambitiously sought to market the ES-295 as such: “This golden beauty is truly a ‘royal’ instrument,” reads a Gibson catalogue. “Tone and action wise, the Gibson ES-295 measures up to its outstanding appearance; this instrument meets the demand for the slick action and sustaining power of a solid body electric in a regular-size acoustic guitar.”

The ES-295 changed very little during its run in Kalamazoo during the '50s. 

Despite sales more than doubling in its second year of production, shipping numbers indicate a steady decline in popularity until it was finally discontinued in 1958. 

Even Scotty Moore and a set of PAF humbuckers introduced in late ’57 couldn’t save it!

We’ve had more than a few momentous anniversaries in 2022. Some of the greatest milestones include 70 years of the Gibson Les Paul; 60 years of Marshall amps; and 60 years of the fuzz pedal (beginning with Maestro’s FZ-1 Fuzz-Tone). 

Also this year, music gear innovator Roland celebrates their 50th anniversary. And where would we be without Roland’s offshoot guitar brand, Boss? Those compact pedals that appeared in 1977, so influential in their design, have since become an icon of the guitar world. 

Famed for their effects pedals, Boss now offers a massive range of gear including amps, guitar synthesizers and accessories. 

And while newer guitar amplifiers like the Katana and Cube ranges have drawn widespread attention in recent years, vintage gearheads will be pleased to discover Roland has just unveiled a limited-edition model of arguably the most iconic amp to come out of Japan: the legendary JC-120 Jazz Chorus.

Appearing with a gorgeous natural cherry wood veneer and open-pore finish, the JC-120 Jazz Chorus Roland 50th Anniversary Limited Edition features a dark grey grille cloth and a commemorative badge individually stamped with the unit’s serial number (xxx/350).

Having remained in production since its release in 1975, the JC-120 Jazz Chorus claims the title of Roland’s longest-running product. Its influence cannot be overstated. In addition to several spinoff amp designs such as the mid-sized JC-40 and ultracompact JC-22, the JC-120 spawned the world’s first chorus pedal.

Putting them on the map as an effects pedal innovator, the CE-1 Chorus Ensemble – the first Boss pedal – was launched in 1976. Famed for its deep, luscious sound, many argue this standalone chorus unit has not been outclassed since its introduction.

Countless guitarists have used the Roland JC-120 over the years. Prized for its clarity, articulation and depth of tone, this solid-state workhorse has served artists as diverse as the Smiths’ Johnny Marr, U2’s the Edge, Muse’s Matthew Bellamy, the Eagles’ Joe Walsh and Hawkwind’s Dave Brock.

A decades-long staple of the stage, the Roland JC-120 is also a go-to amp in the studio. For punchy clean tones it can be hard to beat. And that deep, 3D chorus sound is something to behold when miked in stereo.

We love the look of this version of Roland’s modern classic. But with 350 being released worldwide, you’ll be lucky to get your hands on one.

Roland says the JC-120 Jazz Chorus Roland 50th Anniversary Limited Edition will be available in the U.S. for pre-order from select Boss retailers in December 2022 and in-store in February 2023 priced $1,999.99.

Good luck! 

And congratulations, Roland. Here’s to another half century of music innovation.

Visit the Roland website for more information.

Although his career now spans six decades, and luminaries from former R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck to Silence of the Lambs director Jonathan Demme count among his admirers and collaborators, 69-year-old singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock has never had the sort of mainstream success that would allow him to stop being a very much working musician.

Before the COVID lockdown, the London-born Hitchcock, who now splits his time between the British capital and Nashville, was still averaging almost 100 solo acoustic shows a year, crisscrossing the globe – often with his wife, the singer Emma Swift – to perform for the devoted fans of his often surreal and spidery brand of pop.

“When lockdown came, all the income dried up, so we had to make money somehow,” Hitchcock says. “So we started Patreons and doing our bi-weekly Live From Sweet Home Quarantine internet broadcasts, which was great when there was nowhere else to go and nothing to do.”

The performances – which often featured Swift on backing vocals, as well as appearances by the couple’s two Scottish Fold cats, Tubby and Ringo, a plush Gorilla named the Edge, and Perry the stuffed lobster – kept the couple solvent.

And when he wasn’t preparing for the show, Hitchcock found his isolation to be uniquely productive. “Artistically, it was wonderful,” he says. “It gave me time to do some painting that I never would have gotten to otherwise.

“And of course, it gave me time to start recording Shufflemania!”

Using a Zoom H6 recorder to capture most of his guitars and vocals, Hitchcock then enlisted an impressive group of friends to flesh out the album’s tracks.

Former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr contributes guitars, bass and drums to the ethereal “The Inner Life of Scorpio,” Sean Lennon adds Mellotron, celeste, Hohner Clavinet and more to the cautiously optimistic “One Day (It’s Being Scheduled),” and the Raconteurs’ Brendan Benson and Wilco’s Patrick Sansone also provide valuable assists.

Two members of Hitchcock’s legendary late-’70s group, the Soft Boys, are also on hand: Drummer Morris Windsor flies in vocal harmonies on the aforementioned “One Day…” and guitarist Kimberley Rew (guitarist for Katrina & the Waves and the composer of their hit “Walking on Sunshine”) performs on the darkly humorous “Socrates in Thin Air” and the driving “The Sir Tommy Shovel.”

It’s a typically Hitchcockian combination of tuneful absurdism, existential dread and pure power-pop bliss, one that the singer hopes will bring his fans some measure of solace at a time where the world seems to be perpetually teetering on the brink.

“I’m an anxious person, and maybe my view is skewed 13 percent to the dark side,” Hitchcock states. “But we have pestilence and famine, and you could have nuclear war by Christmas, right?

“And one of the functions of music is to keep people company, to let you know that someone else is there. The records that I listened to as a teenager and could still go back to, like Love’s Forever Changes, or Revolver, or Blonde on Blonde, their main function has always been to be like a voice in my ear going, ’You are not alone. Whatever you feel about life or how sad it is is reflected here.’

“And I suppose that’s the job that I have now, to give people, if not hope, then at least something to believe in.”

Watching your Live from Sweet Home Quarantine broadcasts, it seems like you relied primarily on three acoustic guitars: a British-made Fylde, a Larrivée and a ’60s Gibson Folksinger. Which guitar does what for you?

My first Fylde Olivia, Olivia I, is my absolute go-to guitar. I’ve had it for about 40 years, and I started playing it on the album I Often Dream of Trains. It’s also on the songs “Balloon Man” and “Queen of Eyes.” It’s got a rather wide neck, which I prefer. The other guitars you mentioned I generally use for different tunings.

What are some of your favorite tunings? Did you use any in particular on Shufflemania!?

There are three or four that I use pretty frequently. I’ll often just drop the low E to D, but I also like open G, which is D G D G B D, and DADGAD. On the new record I actually used a variant of DADGAD, D A D G A E, on several songs like “The Man Who Loves the Rain.”

Another one that I made up and like is F G C G C E. You can hear that on the song “Heliotrope’ from my album Moss Elixir. I never play it live, because I can’t put my guitar in that tuning and then go back, and I can’t afford a guitar tech to travel around and do that stuff for me.

And then there’s a lost tuning: I used it on the song “The Green Boy,” from A Star for Bram, and I can’t remember what it was. People have written in suggesting what it might be, but that one’s gone.

Did you use any of those when you were in the Soft Boys?

You know, if I started playing the guitar in 1967, I think I learned to tune it in 1968. Then I got a guitar that was actually in tune in 1969, and I started playing electric seriously with the Soft Boys in 1977.

So I don’t think I put the guitar into open tuning on electric at all. I kept it really straight.

The sinewy interplay that you had in the Soft Boys with the other guitarist, Kimberley Rew, is in full evidence on “Socrates in Thin Air” and “The Sir Tommy Shovel,” the two tracks where he appears on Shufflemania! Did the two of you have to work at developing that kind of musical dialogue?

I think we immediately had a guitar battle, actually! I mean, he was three times better than me, and twice as loud. As I say, Kimberley could drown you out on a tennis racket. [laughs]

Kim was the prodigy genius guitar player in Cambridge in the mid ’70s. When I got to town, everybody said, “Oh, Rew, he’s the best guitar player in Cambridge.” And it took us about two years to get him into the Soft Boys.

Once he was in the band, I just kind of defiantly played in my channel and he played in his. It’s probably a much happier process now.

You once referred to the years 1969 and 1970 as being “the great bullshit years of the guitar,” because players of that era developed an over-reliance on blues tropes. Was that something you were very conscious of avoiding as a young guitar player?

Even by the end of 1967, you had Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton and a few others who were obviously brilliant.

And then you had another 200 people who played like that. And people also realized that they could get a record deal without really having songs. All they had to have was long hair, long jams and, you know, the attitude. So my instinct was just not to bother to try to learn to play like Eric Clapton.

Also, none of the groups I liked best had conventional guitar heroes, but they all had that very incisive playing. People like Barry Melton from Country Joe and the Fish. That band had a rhythm section that weren’t seasoned rock players. It was sort of quite tentative, but they made nice landscapes, and Barry Melton could play some really exciting lead guitar that was a little bit raga-ish.

I also particularly like Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band. I got Trout Mask Replica as an import when I was 15, and it was so expensive that I had to learn to love it. [laughs]

And then there was the Velvet Underground. Lou Reed, when he played lead, would play what we called “torture guitar.”

Davey Lane, who formed the Australian band You Am I, plays on “The Raging Muse.” Those lead parts are very incisive and aggressive, almost reminiscent of the guitars on the Bowie “Berlin Trilogy” albums of the late ’70s.

Oh yeah, yeah. I know what you mean. You mean something off Low. I think the keyboard that my mixer, Charlie Francis, put on it also adds to that. That’s one of my tendencies: If I think something is similar to something else, I make it more so.

I would probably be more of an innovator if I did the opposite. Like, “This song sounds like John Lennon so, let’s put banjo on it!” But I try to the make music I like. And I suppose that some of what I like is so old [laughs] that that’s why you get echoes of the past like that.

Order Shufflemania! by Robyn Hitchcock here.

Although it became one of the hottest guitar amps among pro players from the mid-1970s to the ’80s, the Mesa/Boogie seemed utterly designed to propel the singing, sustainful tone and playing style of Carlos Santana, who adopted it as his amp in the 1970s.

For that matter, Santana literally named the thing.

Mesa/Boogie founder Randall Smith was working as an amp repairman in 1969 in the small San Francisco shop Prune Music when he decided to play a trick on Barry Melton, lead guitarist with Country Joe and the Fish.

Smith gutted Melton’s Fender Princeton, installed a modified 50-watt Fender Bassman-style tube amp, squeezed in a 12-inch speaker and took it to the front of the shop, where Carlos Santana was hanging out.

“He just wailed through that little amp until people were blocking the sidewalk,” Smith later recalled.

“When he stopped playing he turned and said, ‘Shit man. That little thing really boogies!’”

As demand grew, Smith continued modifying Princetons. When the supply dried up, he began making the amps – eventually known as the Boogie Mark I – from the ground up.

The key to the wailing, saturated tone lay in Smith’s chaining together of several tube stages in the preamp, a technique known as “cascading gain,” and under Santana’s fingers the result was sustain that could last for days.

The ‘70s also proved fruitful for Santana on the gear front when he began a collaboration with Japanese guitar building titan Yamaha.

After a somewhat uncomfortable bedding in period (“I sat down with them and said, ‘Look, I can’t play the guitar, man,” Santana told Guitar Player in 1978) the team eventually settled on a design that was not only befitting for a guitarist of Santana's caliber but progressive also.

“I asked them to put a big chunk of metal right where the tailpiece is," recalled Santana. "You hit it and it’s like hitting a grand piano – it really resonates.”

Boasting fine tonewoods and a neck-through construction, along with the tone- and sustain-enhancing T-Cross System and brass Sustain Plate (the aforementioned “big chunk of metal,”) the new SG2000 model firmly established Yamaha as a bona fide pro level guitar builder.

Yamaha guitars were later played by the likes of John McGeoch who famously used an SG1000 with Siouxsie and the Banshees.

More recent proponents of the SG series include Ed O’Brien, Johnny Marr and John Frusciante.

In this 1977 clip, Santana is seen playing his custom built Yamaha with a Mesa/Boogie rig. Evidently, the guitarist is a great deal happier with his instrument by this stage.

“[Yamaha] go out of their way to make good instruments,” he told Guitar Player in the same 1978 interview. “You can feel it when you pick up that guitar.”

In a recent interview with Total Guitar, Johnny Marr shared some fascinating insights into his extensive collaborations with other artists, including his experience of working with John Frusciante during the recording of the Chili Peppers guitarist's 2009 solo album, The Empyrean.

Recorded between 2006 and 2008, The Empyrean is an expansive, soul-searching work that also features Frusciante’s current bandmate Flea, along with multi-instrumentalist Josh Klinghoffer.

“John and I were recording in his house, which was nice,” said Marr. “There’s an almost zen-like stillness about his focus when he’s writing. There’s this underlying honor in what he’s doing. John has an approach to music which is almost sacred.”

The following Guitar Player exclusive is a previously unpublished extract from the same interview with Marr that centered on the release of his latest solo album, Fever Dreams Pts 1 – 4. 

Along the way, Marr talked about some of his most significant studio moments…

What stood out for you about the recording sessions with John Frusciante?

“What was cool about working with John was that it was just me and him. And maybe an engineer. So it really did feel like I was contributing to a solo record. It was nice.

“To make a comparison: when I worked on Beck’s album, Midnite Vultures, that was very much a band scenario – all the band were there all the time and making contributions to any idea that went down. You know, someone might shout out, ‘Why don’t you put the seventh in there?’ or whatever. It felt almost like a clubhouse, which was cool in some ways.

“So with Beck, there was a lot of humor and funny shit going on. But with John, it was quite serious. And I think that affected my approach.”

.

How did you approach writing guitar parts for The Empyrean?

“From what I remember, on almost every song, I put the guitar into a tuning that was sympathetic to the track. So I therefore didn’t know what I was doing. You have to be quite okay with yourself when you do that because you are going to make mistakes and you are going to fumble about a lot.

“If your ego is up and you’re thinking, ‘I have to impress,’ you’re taking your mentality off the music and putting it on yourself and your reputation. Then you’re going to have a bit of a problem. But I don’t mind rocking up to a session and saying, ‘Let me just get my sound.’

“That’s my process. I’ll say, ‘Don’t play me the track. Let me just get my sound and then record what I play.’ So when chord changes or key changes happen, you invariably are going to go off the road, but I don’t care about that because I know I’m good enough.

“I wanted to record my first impressions, and I think it surprised John that I didn’t want to know what the chords were. In fact, I didn’t even want to be in the same concert tuning. I was playing entirely with my ears and not with my mind.”

One of the songs Marr recorded with Frusciante that made it to the final cut is titled "Enough of Me." Listen out for Frusciante's incredible Robert Fripp-inspired solo that starts around 2:35.

90 years ago, Rickenbacker launched the world’s first commercially available electric guitar following the introduction of the game-changing ‘horseshoe’ pickup in 1931. And though much has changed over the years in terms of technology and musical styles, the basic principle of the electric guitar remains the same to this day.

It was a watershed moment for the music industry and pop culture as a whole. Over the decades, Rickenbacker continued to evolve their designs, producing a huge range of instruments including acoustic guitars, jazz guitars, semi-hollowbodies, solidbodies, bass guitars, laps steels, pedal steels, amplifiers and more.

Now, for the first time ever, Rickenbacker’s conclusive history has been captured in fine photographic detail, from the earliest days of the 1930s up to the turn of the millennium.

Created by the Kelly brothers – author Martin Kelly and photographer Paul Kelly – Rickenbacker Guitars: Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fireglo provides readers with a full and detailed account of Rickenbacker guitar evolution that is finally rendered accessible by an easy-to-follow chronological layout.

Much like their previous book, The Golden Age of Fender: 1946-1970 (Cassell Illustrated), The Kelly brothers’ quest to nail the ultimate history of Rickenbacker took them on a journey around the world photographing collections of rare instruments and conducting countless hours of interview.

The result is indeed “definitive,” according to Rickenbacker Chairman and CEO John Hall. A family-run business for many years, his father – F.C. Hall – acquired the firm from Adolph Rickenbacher in 1953 at the dawn of rock ‘n’ roll.

Celebrating the launch of Rickenbacker Guitars: Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fireglo, a special exhibition is being held at Shapero Rare Books in London. Earlier this month, Guitar Player caught up with Hall at a Q&A event held at the prestigious Mayfair bookshop.

“It was a big undertaking for Martin and Paul Kelly,” Hall told us. “Naturally, I was careful about who I would permit access to. The project was initially arranged via Alan Rogan. (The late Alan Rogan was a respected guitar collector/expert who famously worked as Pete Townshend’s guitar tech.)

"He was the one who came to me and said, ‘John, I know these guys. Do you want to do a book? I think they’d be good.’ So I felt comfortable that Martin and Paul were the right people to do the job.

“There’s some amazing information in the book. It fleshed out a lot of details, including some of the stories I knew.”

One such story included in the new Rickenbacker book concerns a young John Lennon who, in 1960, stumbled across what would later be revealed as the first Capri model ever made. Needless to say, the young Beatle’s purchase was a turning point in guitar history.

This truly remarkable tale that bounces back and forth across the pond is told in authoritative detail along with many others in Rickenbacker Guitars: Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fireglo.

Other influential electric guitar players and a bassists featured in the Kelly brothers’ new book include Pete Townshend, Roger McGuinn, Brian Jones, Tom Petty, John Fogerty, Dee Dee Ramone, Paul Weller, Peter Buck, Johnny Marr, Susanna Hoffs, Chris Squire, Lemmy, Geddy Lee and others.

You can order a copy of Rickenbacker Guitars: Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fireglo directly from Phantom Books here.

On this day, in 2004, the music world lost one of its greatest post-punk pioneers, guitarist John McGeoch.

As a member of Magazine, Visage, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Armoury Show and Public Image Ltd, McGeoch was, and still is, regarded as one of the most influential musicians of his generation.

Indeed, Johnny Marr, John Frusciante, Ed O’Brien and countless others have cited him as a major inspiration.

All three guitarists have been pictured with Yamaha SGs in recent times – a style of electric guitar now synonymous with McGeoch.

Scottish-born McGeoch moved to Manchester, England in the mid-‘70s to study art, just as punk rock hit the U.K.

Referred to by McGeoch as a “revolution,” this new music soon became the center of the young guitarist’s life, and in 1977 he formed Magazine with ex-Buzzcocks frontman Howard Devoto.

With Magazine, McGeoch virtually defined the post-punk guitar sound, which he continued to refine with Siouxsie and the Banshees after he joined the band in 1980 for the recording of their third studio album, Kaleidoscope.

The album’s opener, “Happy House,” appeared as a single in March of that year – almost 42 years ago to the day – and was McGeoch’s first release with the Banshees.

Speaking of his new creative venture with vocalist Siouxsie Sioux, McGeoch once told an interviewer, “They invited me along to their rehearsal studio in Camden [in London] and within two days, we'd routined ‘Happy House.’

“They really liked that guitar line, that was the clincher. I was going through a picky phase, as opposed to strumming. ‘Happy House’ was lighter and had more musicality in it. They invited me to join. I was sad leaving Magazine, but the Banshees were so interesting, and it felt like a good move.”

“John McGeoch was my favourite guitarist of all time,” Siouxsie Sioux later commented. “He was into sound in an almost abstract way... He was easily, without a shadow of a doubt, the most creative guitarist the Banshees ever had.”

In the “Happy House” music video, McGeoch’s absence speaks volumes as his beautifully eerie guitar lines embellish the song with the kind of signature tones, textures and melodies that continue to inform guitar players decades down the line.

Don’t miss the new John McGeoch biography titled The Light Pours Out Of Me. It’s due out on June 23, 2022 via Omnibus Press and you can pre-order it here.

This Friday, February 25, Johnny Marr is set to release his fourth studio album as a solo artist. Titled Fever Dreams Pts 1-4 this expansive and sonically adventurous work of 16 tracks came to fruition during the pandemic, though some of the initial ideas were seeded just prior.

“It was time for me to make a new record and I started it just before the pandemic,” reveals Marr, “but I didn’t know I’d be breaking off to do the James Bond movie [No Time to Die.]

“That happened before the lockdown. Days after the music for the Bond movie had finished, we went into lockdown, so I continued writing my record.”

Having just finished his latest collaboration with score composer Hans Zimmer, Marr was on a creative roll and picked up where he left off. Within the confines of his recording studio located in a converted Victorian-era factory in Manchester, England, Marr spent most of his time alone in broad daylight, as depicted on the cover of Fever Dreams Pts 1-4.

“I had the first part of the record pretty much mapped out, so then I just had this expanse of time and space to make it,” he continues.

“I already had most of the first song – “Spirit Power and Soul” – and I’d written “Receiver” while I was on the set of the Bond film. And I had the lyrics for “Lightning People” and bit for “Hideaway Girl.”

“The very first song on the album – “Spirit Power and Soul” – is, on the face of it, a full-on, upbeat, electric banger. But if you took the guitar riff off, it would be missing a big part of the signature of that song. And I think that’s pretty much the same for every song on the record. There’s a signature riff that comes in somewhere.”

Pre-order Fever Dreams Pts 1-4 by Johnny Marr here.

In 1982, I was on friendly terms with Smiths’ guitar maestro Johnny Marr. We met when he was working in a pretty cool, alternative clothing store in Manchester, England, and he recognized me from the band that I was in, Private Sector.

I’d see him in the store, at shows of other bands and some of my own shows, and we used to talk music, of course, and often the guitar in particular. We seemed to have a lot of musical interests in common, but I lost track of Johnny a few months before he formed the Smiths with Morrissey, and we never reconnected after that time.

I remember being very curious to see what his new band would come up with, and when a mutual acquaintance, who had been at one of their earliest live shows at the Ritz, in Manchester, in 1982, recounted what the band sounded like, we were both initially a little nonplussed. Given Morrissey’s long-avowed love of the New York Dolls and Marr’s rock and roll stylings, we had expected something along much more conventional lines.

Of course, the Smiths were anything but conventional, and yet they used the most conventional of formats – a guitar, bass, drums and a vocal – to create something that was extraordinarily unique, and which would influence legions of musicians on both sides of the Atlantic for the next 40 years.

The arrival of the Smiths in 1983, with the release of their debut single, “Hand in Glove,” came at a time when the U.K. music scene was a strangely divided place. At that point there were four weekly music papers: New Musical Express (NME), Sounds, Melody Maker and Record Mirror.

Of the four, Sounds and NME acted as both tastemakers and reflectors of what was current. They divided, fairly neatly, into two camps: Sounds continued to promote punk and its offshoot genre, “Oi” music, and also championed the emerging New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM).

The NME saw itself as defiantly anti what had gone before, ignoring the burgeoning metal scene, and instead decided that anything rock was inherently bad. Several NME journalists started to liberally use the terms rockist and rockism as pejoratively derisory digs at anything a band did that could fall under the traditional rock ethos. Thus, no guitar solos, no guitar riffs, no guitar heroes, no macho posturing, no extravagant stage shows, no rock and roll excess and so on.

Into this divide, any new band would have a tacit understanding that if their face didn’t fit the new orthodoxy at the NME, they would be unlikely to get any coverage.

Of course, Sounds would still cover some bands from the other side of the battlefield, but the lines were drawn. There was no way a band like Iron Maiden, at the forefront of NWOBHM, could ever appear in the NME.

Set against this background, the emergence of the Smiths profoundly unchecked every box on the rockist hit list.

This could surely have been no coincidence. Speaking from my recollections of knowing Marr for some time before he teamed up with Morrissey, he was certainly not prime fodder for becoming a darling of the NME. He was a keen rockabilly and rock and roll fan. Rory Gallagher and Nils Lofgren were two of his biggest heroes, he had more than a passing fondness for Johnny Thunders, and the walls of the clothing store where he worked prior to teaming up with Morrissey were adorned with his posters of the Clash and the Stray Cats.

Marr’s own sense of personal style even saw him looking like a member of those two groups, with his pompadour, leather biker jacket and biker boots.

None of this is to suggest that there was anything fake about his new stance upon forming the Smiths. There was always another side to Marr’s musical loves, particularly an interest in the folk stylings of the likes of Bert Jansch and Davy Graham, traces of which were much easier to detect in his guitar work with the Smiths.

His use of a thumbpick for some years was a self-confessed inspiration from Lofgren’s use of the implement, something which facilitated the latter’s chiming harmonics.

Effectively, Marr selected from his influences those which would most closely ally with what he knew Morrissey would like to hear in his playing, the key elements of which would offset the singer’s nontraditional approach while simultaneously rejecting anything that clashed with the new orthodoxy.

As much as Marr tailored his musical approach to the emerging NME-defined concept of what was hip and happening, he also radically revamped his own personal image, presenting a complete volte-face from ’50s rocker to sensitive ’60s hipster.

Perhaps ironically, Morrissey himself actually embraced a sense of style borrowed heavily from one of his own idols, James Dean. Apparently, Morrissey had a life-sized cardboard cut-out of the tragic film icon on his bedroom wall the first time Marr called round to his house to suggest forming a band.

Johnny Rogan, author of Morrissey and Marr: The Severed Alliance, seen by many as the definitive Smiths’ bio (although it is disliked by Marr and detested by the always more extreme Morrissey), didn’t pick up on Marr’s compliance with the NME new world order. But Rogan did note that Marr had the “unconscious ability to accentuate those elements of his musical taste that coincided with Morrissey’s, while conveniently passing over such infatuations as Rory Gallagher.”

Morrissey himself, in early interviews with the band, made it clear that he was no fan of what had gone before when it came to the role of the guitar in a band, referring to “nasty solos” and stating that the guitar had been “wasted” in the ways that it had been used hitherto in conventional rock music.

The very name of the band, the Smiths, couldn’t be more unassuming and low-key. Apparently suggested by Morrissey, it is a clear indicator that he was also aiming for a sense of something very unlike the expected rock norms, a music that was a reaction to every expected rock and roll trope.

Morrissey himself fit that description perfectly. His vocal stylings recalled no other artist; his lyrics were utterly unlike those of the bands he’d loved growing up.

He projected an ambiguous sexuality that drew in devoted followers of all genders with a completely non-threatening, all-inclusive call for the disaffected who may have felt uncomfortable with the bare-chested bravado of a Robert Plant, but perhaps saw a kindred spirit in the ultimate ’80s alternative-rock icon that Morrissey rapidly became.

Marr may not have been the first alternative-guitar hero to eschew the electric guitar solo. Johnny Ramone instantly springs to mind as a trailblazer on that front, but the buzzsaw blitzkrieg of Ramone’s Mosrite was a one-dimensional blunt instrument, thrilling as it was.

Marr’s nimble, multifaceted approach, shaped by his early attempts to try to cover the bass, guitar and orchestral parts of classic Motown records on his instrument, forged the Smiths’ unique sound.

As much as Rory Gallagher was a hero of his, there is virtually no blues guitar in Marr’s playing in the Smiths. His bright, complex guitar lines – weaving inside each other in multiple layers, while deftly providing a platform for Morrissey’s entirely unconventional vocal stylings and melodies – created a music unlike any of their contemporaries or anything that had gone before.

The hugely influential and important British DJ John Peel, who featured the band on numerous specially recorded sessions for his nightly radio show, succinctly hit the nail on the head when he said that when you listened to the music of the Smiths, it was hard to discern who their influences were, so singular was their sound.

That Marr found a unique approach to the notion of guitar hero, in a climate of revilement for the concept from so many quarters in the U.K. at that time, is a testament to his creative spark and ability to think outside the box without abandoning much of what makes the guitar such a key part of any great pop song.

Effectively, Marr reinvented the guitar solo, substituting layered arpeggios and sliding partial chords for traditional, blues-inflected licks, and swapping rippling, melodic motifs for old-school, pentatonic-based riffery.

The key elements of Marr’s guitar style, and consequently the sound of the Smiths, were built upon his choice of instrument in the early years: the Rickenbacker 330.

It delivered the kind of sonic texture that claimed its own soundspace while, and presumably not accidentally, it didn’t look or sound like the Les Pauls and Strats of classic rock. Once the Smiths had scored some success, Marr obviously felt more comfortable embracing the pariahs of the rockist past, playing a variety of Gibsons and even acknowledging his own rock and roll influences with references to Elvis, Bo Diddley and James Burton on various Smiths tracks. He even reinstated his pompadour.

Marr laid out his philosophy very clearly in an interview with Joe Gore for Guitar Player in January 1990: “There’s a lot of guitar culture that I don’t like at all. I find the traditional idea of the guitar hero to be really irrelevant to the 1990s.

“I don’t think that young people are that impressed with some guy brandishing spandex trousers and a hideously shaped guitar, playing that kind of masturbatory, egotistical noise.

“Being a soloist who just wants to display virtuosity is a dated philosophy, and I don’t think that there’s any room for it in pop music. It’s the last stand of late ’60s/early ’70s rockism, and it should have gone a long time ago.”

Marr went to such lengths to avoid any connection to the traditions of rock guitar playing that he removed the Marshall logo from his 2x10 cabinets.

He was unambiguous when he reiterated to Gore, “We were against cock-rock guitar solos and the American music scene at the time.”

When Marr presented his first songs to Morrissey, as they forged the ingredients of the sonic stew that became the Smiths, he found that he needed to adjust the keys of the ideas he was coming up with, either tuning up a full step or employing a capo at the second fret.

The byproduct of this happy accommodation was a further brightening of his sound, something that became the perfect foil to Morrissey’s lyrical ideas, which could often stray into darkly ambiguous areas.

“This Charming Man,” released in 1983, saw the blueprint for the archetypal Smiths sound coalesce perfectly. Marr’s guitar sparkled and chimed, with elements of African highlife music fighting for space with a touch of what appeared to be Roger McGuinn-inspired Rickenbacker flourishes.

According to Marr in the January 1990 GP interview, “There are about 15 tracks of guitar. People thought the main part was a Rickenbacker, but it was really a ’54 Tele. There are three tracks of acoustic guitar, a backwards guitar with a really long reverb, and the effect of dropping knives on the guitar. That comes in at the end of the chorus.”

That last comment tells you all you need to know about Marr’s relentless search for the perfect tone or means of expressing an idea, no matter how unconventional it might be.

The oft-postulated theory that McGuinn was an influence on Marr’s sound was somewhat dispelled when he told Gore, “I did like the Byrds, but not as much as people make out… The jingle-jangle comes from James Honeyman-Scott of the Pretenders. He was the last important influence on my playing before I went out on my own.”

In 2008, Marr stated in an interview with U.K. magazine Mojo that he came up with the idea for “This Charming Man” after hearing “Walk Out to Winter” by Sire label mates Aztec Camera, a band then plowing a similar furrow to the Smiths with bright jangling guitars and an unconventional approach to the art of the guitar solo. Marr revealed that he had deliberately set out to write a bright, upbeat song and specifically utilized the key of G to facilitate that end, explaining that he would never normally conceive of writing anything in G.

A spin through the Smiths’ back catalog quickly makes it abundantly apparent that Marr and Morrissey had found a way to complement each other in numerous iterations of musical chiaroscuro.

Marr could bring a sense of femininity in his lightness of touch to Morrissey’s new take on masculinity, a simplicity to the complexity of Morrissey’s lyrics. Marr’s guitar glistened like sunshine on water, like church bells chiming and brightly shining, while Morrissey’s lyrics could explore the darkest of themes.

At times it was almost like the summer of love meeting the winter of gloom, although the humor in Morrissey’s lyrics was often overlooked, or perhaps deliberately ignored by critics in their quest to bring down the always controversial spokesman for a generation.

Many of the finest moments of Marr’s work with the Smiths have been dissected and discussed. Marr himself can be found in clips all over YouTube explaining how he found ideas, created sounds and crafted the complex layering of guitars that, ironically, would often sound anything but dense, and instead explode with effervescence.

What is not so often discussed is how much of an influence Morrissey was on the guitarist’s musical approach.

It is worth noting that the four-year age gap between them is a much wider chasm at the age of 18, when Marr teamed up with Morrissey, than it would be in later years. Marr was impressed by Morrissey’s sense of direction, conviction and supreme self-confidence. The sheer chutzpah that the singer brought to the Smiths’ live shows and early TV appearances is what made them instantly memorable, while Marr often looked somewhat ill at ease onstage in the band’s early years.

The studio was where Marr shone brightest and where he could assume more control of the band’s musical direction, but there can be no doubt that Morrissey’s hand was firmly on the rudder.

A case in point was his dislike for “What Difference Does It Make,” one of Marr’s most celebrated guitar constructions, but one the singer thought a little too redolent of the traditional rock that the Smiths sought to usurp.

It was removed from the band’s live sets for a considerable period at Morrissey’s insistence.

In the end it was Marr’s frustration with Morrissey’s conception of what the Smiths should be that caused him to leave the band.

His oft-quoted statement “I didn’t form a band to play Cilla Black covers” makes it clear that Marr didn’t feel he could control where the band was heading. Morrissey’s love of Black and other Brit ’60s popsters was but another facet of his entire stylistic direction.

He unapologetically wore his influences on his sleeve, whereas Marr’s lack of respect for some of the singer’s heroes and heroines lead to a widening of the cracks that had been developing in the band’s unity for some time.

For many, the Smiths simply define the very notion of indie rock, and although there have been numerous bands where the influence of Morrissey and Marr is apparent, none have ever managed to capture the once-in-a-lifetime genius that was the Smiths at their finest.

Their real legacy is their ability to find numerous ways to reinvent the role of the guitar in a band, to challenge all of the accepted traditions of what a pop band could do and to dare to forge an entirely exceptional path through the cliché-strewn landscape of rock and pop history.

They created a new music that used the most time-honored traditional ingredients to deliver songs that defined an era and inspired lifelong, die-hard loyalty in fans around the world, many of whom have gone on to become significant players in the music business themselves.

The final word is best left to Marr, who said in 2020, “Guitar culture had many crimes and criminals. Rock was about virtuosity, and machismo was lurking everywhere. The art of the song had disappeared. I’ve tried to wipe out the memories of poodle-cuts, but the Smiths was definitely a reaction.”

Browse The Smiths catalog here.

Pre-order Johnny Marr’s new solo album Fever Dreams Pts 1-4 here.

As the shy, unassuming guitarist for Blur in the 1990s, Graham Coxon imbued the group’s Brit pop with urgent riffs, glorious leads and hooks that other guitarists would gladly hang entire careers from.

Playing mostly Telecaster electric guitars through Marshalls amplifiers, he uses distortion devastatingly, yet somehow never sounds the same.

Like a shapeshifting wizard, he gives the music exactly what it needs.

Though his work with Blur alone would place him among some of the best alternative rock guitarists around, he’s shown greater diversity in his solo career, where he’s explored lo-fi punk, power pop and even Albion folk.

His playing has earned him raves from producers like Stephen Street, the former knob twiddler for the Smiths who called Johnny Marr and Coxon “among the best guitarists in the world.”

Coxon holds a more modest opinion of his talents.

“I think I’m more in the free-jazz world when it comes to lead playing, and I play physically,” commented the guitarist.

“I like the sound of a guitar being thumped. I’d hear other people making rock albums that sounded really polished, but my records always sound like me – slightly shambolic and about to break. I cover my lack of technical ability with weird noises.”

Browse the Graham Coxon catalog here.

Happy birthday to Bernard Sumner – guitarist and founding member of Joy Division.

During his long and stylistically varied music career Sumner also founded the post-Joy Division band New Order and later collaborated with fellow Mancunian guitar hero Johnny Marr under the moniker Electronic.

Sumner’s first steps into what would later become a ‘serious’ band can be traced back to the heyday of punk when he and fellow Joy Division founder Peter Hook attended the first of the Sex Pistols’ two pivotal gigs at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester, U.K. on June 4, 1976. Though sparsely attended the audience of this monumental show also comprised influential Manchester music figures Pete Shelley (1955-2018) and Morrissey.

Inspired by the Pistols, Sumner and Hook embraced the DIY spirit of punk and began playing together in earnest. Before long they had formed the proto-band Warsaw and by early ’78 were gigging as Joy Division along with drummer Stephen Morris and singer Ian Curtis (1956-1980.)

Later that year, Joy Division attended a ‘battle of the bands’-style event in Manchester where Curtis famously cornered Tony Wilson (1950-2007) – a key figure in the rapidly evolving Manchester music scene. Though Wilson’s television series So It Goes was notable for having featured the Sex Pistols, the Clash and the Buzzcocks it was also short-lived. And Curtis was, to say the least, upset that his band never got the chance to perform on camera before the groundbreaking show aired for the final time in ‘77.

Nevertheless, after Curtis had finished berating Wilson with a string of expletives it was agreed that Joy Division would be the next band to star in his forthcoming What’s On slot on the U.K. region's Granada Reports television show.

In this historical clip, Sumner can be seen playing a Shergold Custom Masquerader electric guitar customized with what appears to be DiMarzio humbuckers. His stark, minimalistic style – underpinned by Joy Division’s cold, driving rhythm section – would prove highly influential as a new generation of post-punk, goth and new wave guitarists emerged.

“I’d say ‘you’ll hear more of them’ but I’ve heard that line so often,” comments Wilson. In fact, with Wilson now firmly on their side Joy Division were invited to appear again. This time, the band performed uniquely energized renditions of their debut single “Transmission” and “She’s Lost Control” from their debut album, Unknown Pleasures (both released in ’79 on Wilson’s iconic Factory Records label.)

Browse the Joy Division catalog here.

On this day, the British folk guitar luminary Bert Jansch (1943-2011) was born in Glasgow, Scotland. While pursuing a career as a solo artist he also collaborated with his roommate and fellow folk guitar hero John Renbourn whom he co-founded the pioneering folk-jazz band Pentangle with in the late ‘60s.

Inspired by American musicians Big Bill Broonzy, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger, Jansch emerged during the British folk revival of the ‘50s and ‘60s as a guitarist to be reckoned with. In a recent interview, Peggy Seeger recalled the advent of the British folk guitar movement as follows:

“Folk music comes from the working class. It’s not a middle-class production. It’s not all just being pumped at us from above, and that really started in the ‘50s. When I came over [to the U.K.], skiffle was on the go and the [ethnomusicologist] Alan Lomax encouraged people to sing their own English songs. So, what happened when English players began to play English songs? That was when we started to see people like Nic Jones and Davey Graham and Bert Jansch investigating how to really play guitar.”

By the ‘60s, Jansch was on the move, earning a crust performing in bars, cafes, and the myriad folk clubs which had sprung up all over the U.K. He also hitched around Europe, paying his way with an acoustic guitar and his voice while busking in the streets.

In 1965, Jansch released his eponymous debut solo album. Simply tracked on a reel-to-reel machine at producer/engineer Bill Leader’s home the tapes were sold to Transatlantic Records for £100, kickstarting Jansch's career as a recording artist.

By the following year, Jansch had already released his third album, Jack Orion, containing his interpretation of “Blackwaterside” – the traditional Irish folk song he had learned from singer Anne Briggs years prior.

Jansch’s version would later be lifted by Jimmy Page, appearing as “Black Mountain Side” on Led Zeppelin’s eponymous 1969 debut LP.

Cited as an inspiration for many others, including Paul Simon, the Smiths' Johnny Marr and Blur’s Graham Coxon, Jansch’s legacy as a guitar hero endures.

“I don’t think Bert will ever be forgotten amongst guitar players,” Coxon told Guitarist magazine. “But even Bert’s fans are of a generation that are getting older now, so it’d be good to get young people into that stuff. Because when you see the young Bert on the telly, and he’s got that rakish kind of look – I bet it’d be really inspiring to a lot of young guitarists to see a player like that.”

Buy Jack Orion and browse other Bert Jansch records here.

“Nobody knows more about electric guitars than Chet Atkins. And nobody makes better guitars than Gretsch.” So said a 1977 magazine ad for the Gretsch 7680 Atkins Super Axe. As it turns out, this guitar actually is special and considerably different from what had become the Gretsch norm. This was the fabled picker’s last build for the company, coming after the Nashville, Tennessean and Country Gentleman models he helped design.

It’s not clear how much of a hand Chet had in the Super Axe. Some suggest the guitar was a collaboration with Duke Kramer, who was Gretsch’s business manager (among other things) at the time. The aforementioned ad quotes Chet as having said, “In all modesty, I think my new Super Axe is the ultimate guitar for the rock guitarist,” but of course he would take credit for a guitar that bears his name. Besides, it’s just ad copy.

Whatever the truth, the Atkins Super Axe is all about sustain. It sports a large but slender solid mahogany body, humbucker-style pickups and, quite unusually, a built-in compressor and phaser that are powered by a nine-volt battery.

Weirdo Factor

For one thing, it doesn’t really look like a Gretsch. That said, it’s strikingly beautiful and sports a familiar clear orange stain, one of three available finishes, along with grey and brown. The solid mahogany body is wide but thin, with thick cream binding on both sides that tapers toward the edge, giving the impression that the front and back are arched. 

While beautiful to look at, it also makes the guitar more comfortable to play and lighter – at about seven pounds – than you might expect, given its size. But the truly weird factor here is the built-in effects. This wasn’t exactly innovative – Vox had done something similar years earlier – but it was decidedly unlike Gretsch.

Playability & Sound

Being a Gretsch, the guitar plays and sounds as great as it looks. The phaser is musical and has blend as well as a depth/speed control. The compressor sounds as good, if not better, than anything available back in the day and stands up to any stompbox compressor I’ve heard. Overall, the Super Axe sounds very, if you will, Nashville-ian in a clean setting, but has great sustain with a distortion box, thanks to the compressor circuit’s sustain control.

The glued-in maple neck is slender and fast and has an ebony fingerboard with cool square inlays and 22 medium-jumbo frets that are neatly dressed into the binding to eliminate sharp edges. The Japanese-made humbucker-style pickups sound nice but not great due to their fairly low output and lack of a distinctive sound. They are governed by just one volume and tone control, presumably to make room for all the other knobs and switches.

The intonatable bridge is a simple one-piece Badass wraparound, and the tuners are German-made high-ratio Schallers that still work as smoothly as the day they were made.

Value

At the time of its release in the late 1970s, the Atkins Super Axe cost close to a thousand dollars, which is what you might have paid for a Les Paul Custom. Today, these beauties command only about $1,500 at auction. That’s a small price to pay for an excellent, American-made vintage guitar.

Why it Rules

Produced for only a year or two, the Gretsch Atkins Super Axe doesn’t sound or look like any other guitar out there, and is light, easy to play and versatile. The effects sound great and are easily accessed from the football-shaped control panel.

Check out more great Gretsch guitars here.