Trends in music come and go, and former Ozzy Osbourne guitarist Brad Gillis believes that the electric guitar needed grunge music to shake up the scene.

The Honolulu-born guitarist was drafted into the Prince of Darkness' band in the wake of Randy Rhoads' passing. Rudy Sarzo says Ozzy Osbourne would have died if they hadn’t carried on quickly after Rhoads' death.

His brief stint in the band is immortalized on the 1982 live album, “Speak of the Devil”, and he built on the platform with Night Ranger throughout the rest of the decade. As the ‘90s dawned, he felt that a decade littered with power ballads needed to end.

“It was a whole new ball game,” he tells 101 WRIF. “A lot of it was kind of downer music, [but] it got a little too prissy with '80s rock n' roll. [There were] too many love songs back in the '80s.”

In particular, Gillis was drawn to the gritted heaviness of the grunge movement – spearheaded by Nirvana, Soundgarden, and Alice In Chains.

“I grasped a lot of these new bands, and I was into them because it was a whole new style of music,” he says. “As it progressed in the '90s, things got a lot better, I felt.”

The legacy of those bands, and Nirvana especially, cannot be overstated. The two most expensive guitars to have ever sold at auction were Kurt Cobain’s. The pair outsold David Gilmour’s Black Strat, John Lennon's Help! 12-string Framus Hootenanny, and plenty more big hitters beyond it. Those bands reflected a whole new generation.

For those married to the ‘80s shred scene, grunge bands were often sneered at for their simplistic soloing styles. Joe Satriani recently came to Cobain’s defence in that regard, calling him a “great guitar player,” and Gillis has echoed those sentiments, stressing the need for change.

“When that happened, any rock n' roll musician was wondering, ‘What's going to happen with good old rock n' roll?’ And things kind of died,” he reflects. “I think guitar solos got to a point that they were just so crazy and [had] too many notes, that backing it down to simplify the new styles and sound with the Nirvanas, really just kind of set up a new regime. And then we just noticed little by little rock n' roll coming back into fashion.”

Gillis echoes similar comments by session legend Tim Pierce, who said that Kurt Cobain's arrival on the scene helped him become the “perfect studio musician,” by skewing the music landscape. Guitar pyrotechnics were out.

Gillis has also looked back on the moment the Ozzy gig began to feel real.

“I was up really late on a Saturday night with a... ‘new friend.’ and I get this call at seven in the morning,” he says. “‘Hello Bradley, this is Sharon Osbourne, Ozzy's manager. We'd like to fly you to New York for an audition.’ I thought someone was screwing with me. I didn't believe this would ever even happen.”

Sharon then passed the phone to Ozzy to convince him this wasn't a hoax, and the singer had said, “I'd like you to grab a pen and paper and write these songs down.”

“I started shaking,” Gillis remembers, “I was thinking this could be real! I had to learn 19 songs. When I flew to New York, I was given two live cassettes from a few months earlier.”

The cassettes had mixes taken directly from the soundboard, so that Gillis could “hear Randy clearly.

“Sharon set me up with a boom box, and an amplifier, and I'd sit in my room all day and learn by ear,” he adds.

The guitarist would hold down the fort in the band until Jake E. Lee was chosen as Ozzy’s second full-time guitarist, and 37 years after he left the band, the pair mended their relationship at the Back To The Beginning concert. Lee went on to reveal the final words Ozzy ever said to him during a touching tribute.

Aaron Rash's tireless Nirvana obsession has seen him pour over every facet of the band's 1993 album, In Utero.

After years of searching, he's now found his Holy Grail: the exact make and model of electric guitar Kurt Cobain used to track the album's dirty guitar tones.

For years, the guitarist has been running down rabbit holes in a bid to uncover every secret about the grunge icon's third and final album. He has worked closely with producer Steve Albini to ensure his re-creations are unflinchingly accurate.

Rash's tone-searching efforts have always been exhaustive, as his comments on the release of his In Utero impulse response pack revealed last summer.

“I have bought and sold probably seven different [Fender] Quad Reverbs to find the perfect-sounding one, because — news flash — they don’t all sound the same, even with the same speakers,” he had said of his painstaking process. “They really vary all over the place. The amount of money that I’ve spent has got to be astronomical.”

Knowing the exact guitar Cobain used for the record represents the last piece in the puzzle. But getting there was no easy task, and the expected answer — "a Fender Mustang" — proved incorrect.

“I figured out the mystery,” he exclaims in his latest YouTube video documenting the saga. Ever since I started playing guitar a little bit over three years ago, I've had a million Mustangs on my YouTube channel. And it's because I wanted to learn how to get this really specific tone from In Utero."

But the newbie guitar player would soon learn the nuance of tone.

“In the beginning, I thought it would be so easy, I just play a Mustang and, boom! — I would have that sound,” he admits. “I started playing all these guitars. I ended up collecting them all, trying tirelessly to get this tone of In Utero.”

Thus began his quest to reverse engineer the album’s gritty-souding guitar parts — what he calls Cobain's "mean" tones — and the cleans, too.

“It’s never been about copying Kurt or his tones,” he adds. “I’ve just always wanted to figure out what it was, 'cause it drove me crazy.”

His search even saw him building guitars that closely replicated Cobain's own Mustang, as he followed the breadcrumbs of information online.

Then he discovered a post from Albini in a Reddit forum that confirmed the guitars used on the album: a Mustang, a Jaguar, Cobain's Jagstang hybrid, a “pawnshop” Univox Hi-Flier and Albini’s own aluminum Veleno guitar, heard on “Very Ape,” “Heart-Shaped Box,” and “Rape Me.”

Befriending Cobain's guitar tech, Earnie Bailey, also revealed a golden piece of information: the rare 1974 Fender Quad Reverb used for the album's lean tones was an outlier from the pack, as it was built with Utah speakers.

But Rash’s biggest breakthrough came when he pivoted his attention away from the Mustang to the Univox Hi-Flier.

“I knew that Kurt didn’t use the Mustang to record In Utero, at least not all the 'mean' stuff with it,” he tells MusicRadar. “[Albini] said that Kurt mainly used a Hi-Flier to record — that and the Veleno.

“I also have a different email that he wrote me as well. He said, ‘I only remember seeing one Hi-Flier. It had the original pickups with the nickel chrome surrounding. It’s possible there were others, but it was mostly that guitar, his Mustang, and the Veleno from memory.’”

Bailey had suggested that the mysterious guitar might have been a Phase III model, which proved a fruitless and expensive detour.

Then a Phase II model with a mahogany fretboard appeared for sale online. He bought it and while waiting for the shipment to arrive found images of Cobain playing a Phase II Hi-Flier with a mahogany fretboard at New York City's Roseland Ballroom.

When it arrived, he played it. It was the sound he'd hoped to hear.

“Literally all the stars aligned,” Rash says with a smile. “I know to you guys this sounds stupid, but I’ve been trying to figure this out for so long. So I think you guys know what this means.”

The guitar, like Cobain's, had stock pickups, which proved a quintessential chapter in Rash's story.

Rash suggests he'll serve up another video to tell more about Phase II Hi-Flier pickups.

“Simply put, those Phase II pickups are absolutely wild,” he says. “They’re so weird.”

And in case you were wondering — he's already dissected them to find out what makes them so special.

Few session guitarists have as many notches in their belt as Tim Pierce. The PRS artist has lent his talents to records by Michael Jackson, Phil Collins, Crowded House, Hans Zimmer, Celine Dion, the Goo Goo Dolls and a dizzyingly diverse array beyond them.

He's been hard at it since featuring on Bertín Osborne's 1974 LP, Acuérdate de Mí, and during that time, he's seen the music industry change exponentially. One of the most notable changes came in the wake of Nirvana’s success in the early ‘90s. And he’s incredibly grateful for it.

By its very nature, session work is incredibly cutthroat. As musical styles and trends fall in and out of fashion — often in the blink of an eye — players can find their calling card no longer desired as producers scramble for their next hit record.

Pierce was nearly two decades deep when the '90s rolled around. He'd already proved an indispensable name in the phone books of producers and record label execs. Still, he felt the shifting landscape at the hands of Cobain’s against-the-grain success. Thankfully, it fell in his favor.

“I think it was when Nirvana showed up, the environment shifted to where I was the perfect studio musician," Pierce tells The Zak Kuhn Show. "Because I was the guy who could sound a little less polished, a little more like a band guy, but I could reliably deliver all the parts. It's just perseverance and time that brought me into the fold.”

The ‘80s, was an era in which Randy Rhoads, Eddie Van Halen and acrobatic shredding were in vogue. Everyone wanted to dazzle and take the guitar to new heights. Grunge brought that to an end in favor of a more rough-and-ready musicality.

“When Nirvana showed up, and that changing of the guard happened, that's when I really started working it,” Piece continues. “They wanted guitar players to throw surprises, and you did not have to be perfect as a guitar player. So that's one thing that helped.”

While some players see Kurt Cobain as no better than an average guitarist, Joe Satriani has recently come to the defense of his talents. He believes Cobain doesn’t get his dues as a guitarist, going to lengths to explain why he was underrated.

As for Pierce, despite feeling that his warts and all playing style was winning him new gigs, he was far less humble when it came to the gear. Speaking about his 50-year career with Guitar Player, he explained why he needed to travel with as many guitars as possible.

“We had quite an arms race in our neighborhood,” he explains. “People would go, ‘Okay, that sounds good, but do you have a Fender Jazzmaster? Do you have an old Tele? How about an old Supro baritone? Say, what acoustics do you have?’ If I didn't bring everything and they asked for something, I’d have this sinking feeling because I wanted to say yes to every request. It was endless.”

Hector Tellez Jr. is pinching himself. Just a few years ago, the guitarist and singer was in an uphill battle to find a receptive audience for his hard-driving brand of blues rock in his native Cuba. Fast-forward to today: He’s relocated to Nashville, signed with an American manager and recorded a dynamite debut album, The Great Unknown (Mono Mundo Recordings/Thirty Tigers), on which he’s joined by two Rock and Roll Hall of Famers: R.E.M.’s Peter Buck and Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic. “This is the kind of thing that only happens in dreams,” Tellez says. “You never actually think that it’s possible.”

While laying down tracks for the album, Tellez told his producer, Barrett Martin (known for his work with the Screaming Trees and Mad Season), that he wanted to play bass. “I gave it a shot, but I quickly realized that I’m not a bass player,” he says. “Barrett said he wanted to send the tracks to Krist Novoselic, and then he mentioned Peter Buck playing some guitar, as well. I thought, There’s no way they’ll play on my album; they’re legendary dudes. But they both immediately said, ‘We love these songs and want to play on them.’ I was floored.”

Together and separately, Buck and Novoselic perform on the lion’s share of tracks on The Great Unknown, but the star of the show is Tellez himself, who emerges as a major talent. A powerhouse vocalist (he sings mostly in English), he’s also a dynamic guitarist: His fiery wah solos on the stoner-rock bruiser “Shiny Blue Jellyfish” and the walloping grunge gem “Leave Me Lowdown” are just two examples.

But he has other stylistic arrows in his quiver. “Lonely Road” (featuring Buck on mandolin) is a poignant rootsy vehicle for his aching blues leads, and the ’70s-flavored soul groover “Ten Million Ways” finds him deftly channeling Nile Rodgers’ ace rhythm hand.

“The album is everything I could have hoped for,” Tellez says. “Barrett is such a brilliant producer and a wonderful collaborator, and I can’t say enough about Peter and Krist. This is the kind of music I always wanted to make. It wasn’t going to happen for me in Cuba, so I had to come to America. It’s been an incredible experience.”

What are the differences between the music scenes in Cuba and the U.S.?

The most popular music in Cuba is salsa and, I guess, what you would call the Cuban versions of bossa nova and jazz. Plus, Cuba is a Spanish-speaking country, and I always wanted to write and sing rock and roll songs in English. All the music I listened to as a kid was classic rock that came from America and England. Of course, America has all kinds of music, but it’s still steeped in rock and blues.

How did you learn to play guitar?

My dad gave me a nylon-string Takamine. Funnily enough, I’m left-handed, but my dad told me to play righty, which I did. As I got into blues and rock, I knew I needed a steel-string guitar so I could do bends. I got a Squier, and I played and played. I like Stratocaster-shaped guitars, so that’s what I’ve stuck with.

When I started out, there was no YouTube or internet; it was all cassettes. I have an older brother, and he gave me a tape that said “Muddy Waters Greatest Hits” on it. It had all the good stuff on it. To me, there was a straight line from Muddy Waters to all the classic rock and alternative music I liked. So that’s what I played: blues, rock, classic rock, metal. I loved it all.

How did you go about leaving Cuba for Nashville?

I played in clubs all over Cuba from the age of 19 until I was 28. But there was no reaction to my original songs; the people wanted to hear covers. I really didn’t think about coming to the States – it seemed undoable. That’s when Betty Malo heard me in one of the clubs in Cuba. She’s a manager, and her husband is Raul Malo, from the Mavericks. Betty got what I was doing. She gave me her card, but I was like, “Whatever.” I didn’t follow up.

Two months later, she contacted me, and she was really serious. She and her husband helped me with all my papers, and they got me to the States. They really believed in what I was doing. Because of Betty, my demos got to Barrett Martin, and things went from there. Before you knew it, I was making a record in real studios.

Peter Buck does a fair number of guest spots on other records, but Krist Novoselic not so much.

Not really. Barrett warned me about both guys: “Be prepared for it not to happen. These guys don’t do it for money. They only do stuff if they like the music.” Both guys are such amazing musicians, and they’re very spontaneous. They caught what I was doing very quickly. When you meet them and you see how they work, you realize why they’re legends. They bring so much musicality with them.

Did you give them any musical directions, and was that weird?

It was so weird. Krist sat down in front of me with his huge Gibson bass, and he said, “I was listening to the songs. Is this what you want me to play? If not, tell me what you want.” So we started jamming. I had a hard time telling them what to do because I didn’t want to bruise their egos, but they didn’t care. They wanted me to direct them.

They both play on “Silver Blue Jellyfish.” Were they together live in the studio with you?

That was done with multi-tracking. I did guitars, drums and vocals in Nashville, and we did bass and harmony guitars in Seattle. They were together with me in the studio. Peter came up with harmony guitar lines to the main riff. One take was all he needed.

You play a number of wild wah solos on the record.

I like using a wah. I used to listen to Steve Vai, Joe Satriani and Yngwie Malmsteen. I didn’t have a pedal with me. Barrett wanted wah on some solos, so he bought me one as a gift. I went through a Leslie, too. That sounded awesome.

“Todo Lo Entendi” is one of the songs sung in Spanish. It’s got a nice, economical guitar solo. Is that Peter?

That’s him. He came in with a vintage ES-335 12-string, and he just went for it. He played the riff and solo on the 12-string. He instinctively knew what to do. He played mandolin on a few cuts. It was really something. I’d sit there and go, “Yep. That’s Peter Buck.” [laughs]

What kinds of guitars did you use?

I played my Strat with two humbuckers. I got it in Cuba and I love it. All my guitar heroes – Clapton, Hendrix, Stevie Ray, Jeff Beck – they’re all Strat guys. I also used an Epiphone 335, and Barrett brought in a Gretsch for me to use. Most of the solos were on my Strat.

I’m curious. How did you not ask Peter and Krist a million questions about R.E.M. and Nirvana?

[laughs] The first thing I did was play “Teen Spirit” in front of Krist. He said, “I think I know that song,” and he started to play it with me. Same thing with Peter. I played “Losing My Religion,” and he said, “I know that one.” So we played it together. How many people can say they got to do that? [laughs]

The roots of American guitar builder CF Martin & Company can be traced back several generations to the early 1800s. The story in America began in 1833, when Christian Frederick Martin Sr (son of German cabinet maker Johann Georg Martin and former apprentice of renowned Viennese guitar builder Johann Stauffer) emigrated to New York City. That same year, he set up shop and founded CF Martin & Co, before relocating to Nazareth, Pennsylvania in the late 1830s, where the company continues to thrive

Few guitar builders can claim to be as crucial an influence on the history of popular culture as Martin. Remaining at the forefront of guitar evolution since the mid-1800s with innovations such as X-bracing, larger body sizes, steel strings and 14-fret necks, Martin has endured as an industry leader, while the guitar continued to gain in popularity over the years with different musical styles emerging.

Although numerous benchmark Martin designs have stood the test of time with their understated elegance and world-class tone, spanning multiple music genres, the 18-series of acoustic guitars stands out for many as the classic embodiment of the instrument.

“Style 18s first appeared in the 1850s, before the U.S. Civil War,” Martin’s museum and archives specialist, Jason Ahner, tells us, “and at that point, they had a rosewood back and sides. Although, nowadays, most people think of 18s as having a mahogany back and sides, they didn’t change to mahogany until 1917, at a time when large manufacturers – mostly out of Chicago – were buildings thousands of guitars a year. Martin was trying to compete against the likes of Lyon & Healy, who built Washburn guitars, and I think because mahogany was cheaper than rosewood, it was a way to build some more competitively priced models, but it would have been what we refer to as ‘genuine mahogany’ sourced mainly from Central and South America.

“From the 1870s up until the 1910s, every guitar Martin was building had a rosewood back and sides – they weren’t using mahogany at all during that period. But if we go further back to ledgers from the 1850s and 1860s, we find guitars that had a mahogany back and sides with wholesale prices from $13, along with [rosewood] Style 18 guitars that cost $18 wholesale. That’s where Martin got the ‘18’ from. What we now call the ‘level of ornamentation’ originally referred to the wholesale price in dollars.

“I’ve seen 13s, 14s, 15s and 16s in our sales ledgers from that period that were mostly smaller mahogany guitars with very simple appointments, and the vast majority of them would still have [Spanish-style] fan bracing. Even 17s were fan-braced up until the turn of the 20th century, but once you got into a Style 18, you see that most of them have X-bracing.”

Designed by CF Martin Sr in the early days of the company, Martin’s revolutionary X-bracing system was a first for the acoustic guitar and is still in use today. “CF Martin Sr was experimenting with bracing in the late-1830s/early 1840s,” says Jason. 

“The [Stauffer-style] guitars he learned to build in Vienna tended to be ladder-braced, and when he started emulating the designs of the Spanish guitar builders he began using fan-bracing. We think one of the issues that came up when he was trying to use pin bridges with fan-bracing was that he’d drill into the braces – and then he’d have to pull everything apart, fix the brace and put everything back together again.

“What we do know about CF Martin Sr is that he was a perfectionist when it came to building, so we see him experimenting with bracing patterns quite a bit, and then in 1843 the first guitar with braces arranged in an X-pattern appears. It was built for an extremely popular Spanish guitarist that came to the U.S. in 1841 named Madame de Goñi. We can only assume that [Martin] liked it structurally because he could use a pin bridge without hitting the brace and he really liked the tone of the guitar – otherwise he wouldn’t have stuck with it!”

Like so many other breakthroughs in guitar evolution, the X-bracing system was notable for its ability to help improve the instrument’s volume. “X-bracing helped give the guitar more volume – even with the gut-string models of the time, it gave the guitar more of a punch,” says Jason. “If you play the Madame de Goñi guitar we have in our museum collection and compare it to a fan-braced model from around the same time, you’ll find it’s a noticeably louder instrument. And that would have been perfect for her because she was playing large venues at the time.

“Little did CF [Martin] Sr know that, around 80 years later when Martin really starts getting involved in steel strings, X-bracing would be the perfect pattern for a steel-string guitar. It just so happened that it worked. And it still works. It’s very hard to improve upon that design, and that’s why we still use it today.”

In its ongoing pursuit for greater volume following the introduction of X-bracing, Martin developed two larger bodied variants – sizes 0 and 00 – during the 1850s.

“The larger the instrument is, the more volume and low-end you’re going to get from it,” says Jason. “Early on, we see that everybody had what’s commonly referred to as a ‘parlor’ guitar – so-called because the guitar was mostly an instrument played by women as a form of entertainment in the parlors of their homes. It’s a bit of a loose term but, personally, I would say that anything below an 0 size [i.e., sizes 1, 2, 2½, 3, 4 and 5] would be a parlor guitar.

“But as the guitar grew in popularity, it started being played in larger venues and so the size of the guitars started growing. Martin built the first 0 size guitar in 1854, then you see the first 00 in sales ledgers in 1858. Prior to that, a size 1 was the largest model, which is what the Madame de Goñi guitar is, so we can see the demand for larger guitars was really starting to happen from then onwards.”

Throughout the late 1800s and early 1910s, guitar players increasingly broke away from the confines of the home parlor and became a prominent voice in band settings, orchestras and banjo/mandolin clubs. While seeking to be heard among the more strident-sounding metal-stringed fretted instruments, the guitarist’s need for additional volume was met by Martin with further advancements in guitar design.

“The first 000 appeared in 1902, as did the first steel-string that Martin built – a special order 00-21,” says Jason. “But Martin didn’t get into producing guitars with steel strings on a regular basis until the 1910s. Hawaiian music was huge at that time and that’s when Martin started building Hawaiian-style guitars with steel strings. After that, they would offer a guitar three different ways: with gut strings for classical playing; with steel strings for classical playing; and with steel strings for Hawaiian playing.”

Ultimately, steel strings became so popular that in 1923 they became the standard option for Style 18 guitars, while gut-stringed versions were referred to special orders. By the late 1920s, this became the norm for most other Martin styles, marking a new turning point in the history of the company.

“And then the Dreadnought arrived in 1916,” says Jason. “Originally, Martin only built Dreadnought models for the Oliver Ditson Company – the 222 and the 111, which was pretty similar to what would later become a D-18 [via the experimental D-1 model], because it had a spruce top with a mahogany back and sides. In 1931, after Ditson went out of business, Martin started building the Dreadnought under their own name.

“Early on, the Dreadnoughts didn’t do that great because they were still the large 12-fret models with the thick neck. They had a 1 7/8[-inch] nut width and there was really no fingerboard radius, so it was kind of a classical fingerboard on a big steel-string guitar. 

"But in 1934, Martin changed the design to the 14-fret neck and from there we really see the Dreadnought models take off. Martin had been building smaller guitars with 14-fret necks since the arrival of the OM-28 [in 1929], and they had 14-fret 0-18s, some with sunburst tops, in 1932. That became the standard very quickly. By 1934, Martin had switched over the majority of their line up to 14-fret necks.”

With mahogany backs and sides, spruce tops, X-bracing, steel strings, larger bodies and 14-fret necks, Martin’s 18-series had finally arrived in the form of what many see as an archetypal American acoustic guitar.

“As far as the 18-series goes, if you want the most balanced sound you can get, then you’re going to want an 0-18,” says Jason, “While a 00-18 is going to have a little extra volume and bass, and a 000-18 even more so, if you’re really looking for maximum volume and bass response, then you’ll want a D-18. That’s why the early country and bluegrass players gravitated towards Martin – players needed the most out of their instrument.

“The D-18 and the D-28 are both workhorse guitars when it comes to the history of popular music, but I think what really set the D-18 apart for a lot of players is that, although it was always a cheaper model, after a while people learned how well it records and how good it sounds live. 

"Personally, I prefer a mahogany Dreadnought. Mahogany is less prone to feedback than rosewood. Because it’s not as dense, you’re not getting as much low-end, which is really where the feedback problems occur. And, to my ears, a D-18 records better. I think they sound a little more focused than a rosewood guitar and I can separate the notes a lot easier.

“There are tons of guitar players who have used 18s throughout the history of popular music. Bob Dylan used an 0-18 and a 000-18, as did Steve Earle. Elizabeth Cotten, Muddy Waters and Steve Howe played 00-18s. Woodie Guthrie and Martin Carthy played 000-18s, as did Elvis originally, then on his Sun Sessions he played a D-18. Gordon Lightfoot, Clarence White and David Crosby all played a D-18.

"We have Kurt Cobain’s [1953] D-18 in our museum. He nicknamed it ‘Grandpa’. It’s old and beat-up. And then there’s the [1959] D-18E he played on the MTV Unplugged show. After the folk boom of the ‘50s and ‘60s, Martin sales were down in the late ‘70s and through the ‘80s, but we saw things take off in the ‘90s when the MTV Unplugged shows aired.”

In more recent years, Martin has continued to build 18-series guitars by hand in time-honored tradition by taking inspiration from its golden-era production years of the 1930s and ‘40s.

“The sound factor is what makes golden era 18-series Martin guitars so attractive,” says Jason. “I think part of that did come down to the use of ebony for the fingerboard and bridge. 

"Martin moved away from it for decades. Although it wasn’t recorded until 1940, you see the smaller 18s changing from ebony to rosewood fingerboards and bridges in the late 1930s, followed by the D-18s in 1946, but we went back to an ebony fingerboard and bridge, along with the earlier-style forward-shifted scalloped braces, on the D-18s in 2012. It’s been very well received and, since that time, we’ve started building the 0-18 and 00-18 again.

“We’ve had a lot of success with our 18-series over the years, and many players still look at those as the go to guitar when it comes to an acoustic.”

With thanks to CF Martin & Company, Vintage ‘n’ Rare Guitars in Bath, U.K., and Graham Firth.

Lead Belly was born Huddie Ledbetter in 1885 in Mooringsport, Louisiana, close to Caddo Lake, a tranquil spot far removed from the bright city lights of Shreveport, the nearest big town.

His parents were farmers, and by all accounts Huddie was a tough kid who was able to pick more cotton than anyone else.

He quickly came to like women, corn liquor and trouble in about equal proportions. He liked hanging out in Shreveport’s red-light district, and by the age of 16 had not only gained an enviable reputation for his sexual prowess but also heard the barrel-house piano players, whose walking-bass figures would become a trademark of his own powerful rhythmic style.

By the age of 33, Lead Belly had mastered the 12-string guitar, met up with Blind Lemon Jefferson and become a regular performer at local dances and fish fries.

But he soon ran into serious trouble.

After an assault conviction, he spent a year on a chain gang, from which he escaped. He subsequently adopted the name Walter Boyd.

At about the same time that the United States entered the First World War, Walter Boyd was with two friends on his way to a dance. After an altercation over a girl, one of the men drew a pistol, but Boyd shot him in the head before he could use it.

Six months later, in 1918, he was sent to Shaw State Prison with a 30-year sentence.

In a remarkable streak of luck – something that seemed to characterize his entire life – Lead Belly, as he was now known, charmed his way out of prison after serving only seven years by writing a song about the prison governor, Pat Neff.

But Lead Belly’s temper soon got the better of him again, and by 1930 he was behind bars once more, this time in Louisiana’s Angola prison, for attempted murder.

Incredibly, history would quickly repeat itself. In 1933, John Lomax arrived at Angola looking to record the songs of the inmates for the Library of Congress. 

Once again, Lead Belly sang a suitably ingratiating song he’d composed about the governor, and the next year he was released.

He lived a colorful life, but Lead Belly’s real claim to a place in rock history is his repertoire of songs, from cowboy ballads like “Out on the Western Plain” (covered by Rory Gallagher) to his takes on the old English ballad “Gallows Pole” (immortalized by Led Zeppelin), “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” (covered by Nirvana) and “Black Betty” (adopted by Ram Jam).

His final performance was a concert at Carnegie Hall in 1949. He died that year, aged 61.

Order The Definitive Lead Belly here.

The 1969 Fender Mustang electric guitar that Kurt Cobain used in the iconic music video for Nirvana's smash hit, "Smells Like Teen Spirit," has sold at auction for a whopping $4.5 million.

The eye-watering price tag makes it the second most valuable guitar ever sold at auction, beneath only another Cobain guitar – the heavily-modified Martin D-18E acoustic guitar the late Nirvana frontman used during the band's 1993 MTV Unplugged performance. That particular six-string was sold in June 2020 for $6,010,000.

Having gone under the hammer over the weekend (May 22), as part of Julien’s Auctions’ Music Icons sale, the Mustang obliterated its pre-sale estimated value of $600,000 – $800,000. It was sold to Indianapolis Colts owner – and noted collector of valuable guitars – Jim Irsay.

The Lake Placid Blue Mustang was used by Cobain for a number of prominent Nirvana live performances – including the band's show at the Tree Club in Dallas in 1991 and their 1993 set at the Hollywood Rock Festival in Rio de Janeiro. At the Dallas show, Cobain is said to have smashed the Mustang on a mixing board, resulting in a broken neck joint that was later repaired.

Its most memorable turn though, was its appearance in the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" music video, which – with relentless play on MTV – made Nirvana overnight superstars.

A portion of the proceeds from the sale of the guitar – which was previously displayed at Seattle's Museum of Pop Culture – are set to be donated by the Cobain family to Irsay's mental health-focused Kicking the Stigma initiative.

“I am thrilled to preserve and protect another piece of American culture that changed the way we looked at world,” Jim Irsay said of his purchase in a statement. “The fact that a portion of the proceeds will go toward our effort to kick the stigma surrounding mental health makes this acquisition even more special to me.”

For more info on the guitar, visit juliensauctions.com.

Over a remarkable 40-year career as a member of the bands Hüsker Dü and Sugar, and as a solo artist, Bob Mould has garnered his fair share of huzzahs and hosannas. 

His aggressive and highly dramatic signature guitar style was famously admired – and emulated – by bands like the Pixies and Nirvana, among others, and a number of his albums have topped critics’ polls and “greatest records of all time” lists.

All of which the 61-year-old singer-songwriter and guitarist takes with healthy doses of humility and perspective.

“I think I’m the same as any musician,” he says. “I’m grateful when anyone pays attention to the work I do, let alone when colleagues or other people make such wonderful comments about it.

“To me, it all goes back to when I heard the first Ramones album and thought, Wow, anybody can do this. That’s no slight to the Ramones; I’m just talking about the simplicity and beauty of it.

“To go from that day to today, talking about ‘greatest albums of all time’ – that’s quite a leap and a stretch.”

Abrasive and bruising guitar work has long dominated Mould’s oeuvre, although there have been fascinating detours into introspective, acoustic guitar-based songs and even a dalliance with electronic music.

“I like to try new things occasionally, particularly if I’ve stayed at one thing too long,” he explains, “but I always seem to come back to a sound that I adopted back in my youth.”

At the center of it all is his artful, muscular rhythm guitar playing – earth-moving stuff crafted from equal parts British Invasion (Pete Townshend looms large here) and New York punk.

“I’m pretty comfortable saying that I excel at rhythm guitar,” he says, “even more so as I get older and age affects the way that I play and the fury I put into it.”

Mould points out that a strong, economical rhythmic sense was essential in his early Hüsker Dü days.

“We were a three-piece, so automatically I had to cover a lot of sonic ground, even when I was taking a solo,” he says. “That began to inform my songwriting, knowing that I could only solo a certain way.

“That’s something Townshend did with the Who. Suddenly you’re writing a lot in E, A, D, G and B – keys where you can build chord structures and still have the I chord or the IV or V chord resonating as you’re playing a solo.

“You write to fit your playing.”

Throughout his Hüsker Dü years, Mould played a Flying V-shaped Ibanez Rocket Roll that he purchased on a whim at a music store.

“I was a big New York Dolls fan, and this store had a poster of Syl Sylvain playing a Rocket Roll,” he recalls. “I looked at the poster, turned around and saw the very same guitar on sale. I was like, ‘I’ll take that one.’”

At the end of Hüsker Dü, Mould began playing Fender Stratocasters. His first was a similar impulse buy, but it led to a decades-long association with the model.

“I walked into a music store and saw this blue Strat. I asked the guy if I could play it, and he said, ‘Sure. What kind of amp do you want to put it through?’ I said, ‘No, no, I don’t need an amp. I just want to check the guitar out.’ And within 15 seconds of playing it, I knew it was the guitar.”

He underscores this point. “Anybody who’s looking to buy an electric guitar, don’t worry about the electric part. Pick up the guitar and play a few chords unamped. You’ll know right away if it has something to say. You’ll know if it feels right.

“You can deal with pickups and knobs and things later. Concentrate on the wood of the guitar. If it feels good and sounds good unamped, you can figure out the rest.”

Here, Mould discusses five songs from his brilliant career…

1) Hüsker Dü | “Something I Learned Today” from 'Zen Arcade' (1984)

“We were prolific. I mean, we were writing constantly. We were in this cycle in that you write enough songs to have what you think is an album. Then you record the album and wait a few months for it to come out. Then you tour to show people these new songs in the live setting.

“When you finish the tour, you write new songs to record a new album, and you keep repeating that.

“‘Something I Learned Today’ was a great opener for Zen Arcade. Technically, that first-position B chord could be described as a hallmark chord of mine. I think I’ve exhausted every possible permutation of how you could write an entire song without ever moving off of that chord.

“This song is a perfect example of that, where I’ve basically frozen the D and G strings in that first-position B, and I’m playing the bass part on the two lower strings. I do all of that without ever moving from that position.

“I could also leave the high B and sometimes sneak in the high E completely open, and I’ve got the two middle strings frozen as the foundation of the chord.

“At the same time, I can walk all of the chord changes around with the lower two strings. So that’s the hallmark. I’ve lost count of how many songs I’ve written in the position.”

2) Hüsker Dü | “Celebrated Summer” from 'New Day Rising' (1985)

“It was a pretty logical extension of the pop sensibility that we started showing on Metal Circus [the group’s 1983 E.P.].

“There was some melodic stuff on that album, but on New Day Rising we amplified those moments and began to move away from the augmented dissonant songs and hardcore songs, like we did on some of the Zen Arcade stuff.

“I hope it wasn’t a stretch or a surprise. I thought it made sense for the band.

“In the middle of the song, there’s a break in which I played a 12-string acoustic. Very Townshend. The whole idea of the song – that sort of triumphant, thematic longing for last summer, or looking forward to next summer – felt like a Townshend idea circa Quadrophenia or Tommy.

“To have a complete acoustic break and return to electric fury, and then another denouement – it was more sophisticated than what we had done before. We had used acoustics previously, like on ‘Never Talking to You Again,’ which is one of [drummer/singer] Grant Hart’s greatest songs.

“That was all acoustic. Soon we were going back and forth. We’d have an electric guitar part and an acoustic part. It was an evolution of two things we used to do separately.”

3) Bob Mould (solo) | “Sunspots” from 'Workbook' (1989)

“After a while, Hüsker Dü had difficulties, and eventually the difficulties got to the point where it was time for the band to end. I moved to a farm in Northern Minnesota and spent a year in isolation. All I did was feed chickens and relearn how to play the guitar.

“I would become a different type of musician. I didn’t want to start another band that sounded like Hüsker Dü. I wanted to have my own identity, so I started listening to different types of music – Celtic music and Appalachian folk music.

“I had just bought my first Strat, which is still my go-to guitar. From the maple neck and the contour of the body, versus the rosewood neck on the Ibanez ‘Flying V’ and the shape of the guitar – it all led me to approach the guitar differently.

“I don’t remember when, how or why I wrote ‘Sunspots.’ I was probably just messing around with neoclassical motifs and trying to learn how to fingerpick. In some ways, the song was really a lesson I gave myself.

“It was a wonderful gift and a great fortune to have a song like this to announce myself to the world, because it was such a stark contrast and a sharp break from what people may have expected.

“They probably bought the album thinking, Oh, he’s going to come out with fury and anger and vindication. And it was the quietest of moments.”

4) Sugar | “If I Can’t Change Your Mind” from 'Copper Blue' (1992)

“I started messing with things like alternate tunings and capos. On this song, I capo the neck at the third fret, so it moves what would normally be a cowboy D chord to a cowboy F.

“The song has been written so many times before. If this were ‘My Sweet Lord’ for me, I would be fearing a lawsuit from the people who wrote ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight.’

“We recorded the song with my co-producer and co-engineer, Lou Giordano. Typically, I produce my own work and look to my engineers for critiques of performance and things like that.

“But on this song, Lou said to me, ‘Don’t you think that guitar solo is a little short?’ He started counting it out and said, ‘It’s only eight bars. It’s really beautiful, but it goes by so quickly. Shouldn’t you stretch that out?’ And I was like, ‘Mmm... Nah. It’s a pop song. Economical – get in, get out, and let’s get home as quick as possible.’

“Lou really wanted me to double the length, but I was trying to be mindful of pop sensibilities.

“The words are very poignant and heartfelt. And yeah, for somebody who tends to write from the glass half-empty side of things to have a song where the glass is much fuller than half is always a blessing for me.

“When I get a happy one, I’ll gladly take it.”

5) Bob Mould (solo) | “Next Generation” from 'Blue Hearts' (2020)

“‘Next Generation’ is aspirational. As I was writing those words in 2019, we were deep in the dark times.

“I realized that I wanted to look back at those moments in 1983, for instance, when the government and religion conspired to make my life a living hell; that along with feeling that same kind of marginalization being put upon me and anybody who wasn’t a rich white hetero male with some kind of weird power in government.

"All of that ended up being Zen Arcade.

“With this song and almost all the Blue Hearts album, those old tunes said to me, ‘Man, you did all of that with nothing. Go back and take a look at how you did it, not by copying it but just by going back and reflecting on how simple it is to affect change when you really believe in what you’re doing and saying.’

“So I’m taking those feelings from 1983 and updating them in an age-appropriate and society-appropriate way for what we were facing in 2019 and 2020. It was like, ‘How do we rectify this?’

“Structurally, the song hits my other sweet spot. It’s not first-position B; it’s first-position G, whether it’s open nut or wherever the capo lands.

“As I get older, that chord has sort of become my recliner and a good book. First-position G – it all starts and ends there. I’ll just pick up a guitar and start playing, like I did in my first days, and I’ll land on that chord.

“It’s amazing how many songs you can write with it.”

Browse Bob Mould's catalog here.

On this day in 1994, Nirvana played their final show. A little over a month later, the world would receive the devastating news that Kurt Cobain had passed away aged 27.

While this tragedy may have signaled the end of a groundbreaking period in music history, Cobain’s era-defining legacy lives on as generations of electric guitar players continue to find inspiration in his life’s work.

In addition to audio and music videos, some of Nirvana’s best live footage can be found on the band’s official YouTube channel.

Such gems include cuts from the iconic MTV Unplugged concert released in 1994; the Live and Loud video recorded in Seattle in 1993; the unforgettable appearance at the UK’s Reading Festival in 1992; and the Live At the Paramount show recorded in Seattle in 1991.

Also available are clips from the Terminal Einz show filmed on March 1, 1994 – including an explosive performance of “Drain You” from Nirvana’s watershed 1991 album Nevermind. 

Although he was diagnosed with bronchitis and laryngitis, Cobain’s voice remains strong throughout this rendition of a song he once described as a personal favorite.

Commenting on “Drain You,” Cobain told Rolling Stone he thought the song was, “as good as ‘Teen Spirit.’ I love the lyrics, and I never get tired of playing it.”

“Drain You” is believed to feature the most guitar overdubs on Nevermind. 

In the 2005 film Classic Albums: Nirvana – Nevermind, producer Butch Vig explains how the song’s five-track “orchestral” guitar sound was achieved using a combination of Mesa/Boogie and Fender Bassman amps along with a “super grunge” pedal/Bassman combination.

According to Vig, however, Cobain was somewhat reluctant when it came to recording multiple overdubs. 

He therefore had to use some 'creative psychology' in order to convince the guitarist he needed to repeat performances, claiming previous takes weren't captured properly or that the tuning was off.

“I don’t know how I got Kurt to do all those guitars,” says Vig. “I think I was lying, basically... He thought he was doing the same part and, meanwhile, I just kept putting him to new tracks.”

Get Nevermind on vinyl here.

Much has been made of Nirvana’s timing, mostly how the dive-bombing and strutting hair-metal din that had wailed from L.A. since the second half of the 1980s was decisively silenced by 1991’s Nevermind.

That was a great story for music journalists covering the impact of the band’s second album and the emergence of Seattle’s grunge scene as a whole at the time. But the deeper truth for many guitar players offers something more than merely pitting subgenres of rock against each other.

For a generation of players, Kurt Cobain emerged as a worldwide star at a crucial point in their development.

When you’re first coming to grips with the guitar, the sheer enormity of possibilities can be the very thing that drives you away. Kurt’s songs offered accessibility for budding guitarists, with an energy and force we could aspire to, and be inspired by.

And his intense live performances with bassist Krist Novoselic, drummer Dave Grohl – and later, second guitarist Pat Smear – proved the point.

He was not an overnight sensation. How many guitar players ever are? The instrument takes time and dedication.

Kurt served his time, taking the first tentative steps in his bedroom in Aberdeen, Washington with the electric guitar his uncle Chuck had given him for his 14th birthday; taking a month of guitar lessons and learning his first riff (AC/DC’s “Back in Black”); and roughing it in a freezing van in North America touring Nirvana’s debut, Bleach.

It was the pursuit of a dream to communicate his music to others.

But misconceptions about his guitar playing remain. Kurt Cobain didn’t kill off the solo, and he wasn’t guitar’s revolutionary anti-hero.

Instead, the energy and immediacy of his talent brought an integrity back to the mainstream that cut to the very heart of what makes rock and roll such a visceral force.

“His playing was misunderstood,” notes Earnie Bailey, the guitar tech who worked closely with Kurt through much of his Nirvana touring career.

“He was more advanced than he revealed, and his minimalist playing was more about subtracting the notes and clichés he disliked and working with what’s left.”

That remainder adds up to a compelling legacy.

Just as Cobain was inspired by everyone from Buzz Osborne to Ace Frehley and Black Francis, there are countless players he inspired, and there continues to be.

Almost 30 years after his passing, that influence resonates as much as every power chord and discordant lead on Nirvana’s records.

Buy the Nevermind 30th Anniversary Super Deluxe box set here.

Two decades after Kurt Cobain redefined mainstream rock with his raw, uncompromising songwriting and anti-guitar hero way of playing guitar, a left-handed guitarist and art school student in Hobart, Australia, took inspiration from his example.

Courtney Barnett knew the rock music of several eras, thanks to a neighbor’s mixtapes, and her own modest CD collection consisted mainly of Nirvana albums.

While playing right-handed guitars upside down at first (due to the unavailability of good lefty guitars), she developed a unique way of playing rhythm and lead with her thumb and fingers, since she didn’t like the sound of a pick against the strings.

By the early 2010s, Barnett was playing in bands and appearing as a co-writer and guitarist on recordings by local singer-songwriters.

After a stint as a slide guitarist and co-lead singer in the psych-country-folk group Immigrant Union (you can hear her on their sophomore album, Anyway), Barnett released her debut EP, I’ve Got a Friend Called Emily Ferris in 2012 on Milk! Records, a label she cofounded with fellow artist and then-partner Jen Cloher.

The 34-year-old’s widely eclectic take on indie rock can be gleaned from a playlist of influential songs she curated for a streaming service for many years following those first band experiences.

Her selections show a wide tapestry of musical input, ranging from her parents’ favorite jazz singers to the ’90s bands of her generation, like the Lemonheads, EMF, Pavement and the Breeders, as well as Jimi Hendrix, Yoko Ono, PJ Harvey, Leonard Cohen, Sonic Youth, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Patti Smith and Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings.

Barnett signed with Marathon Artists in 2013 and combined her first EP with a new collection of songs as The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas.

Momentum quickly built. The international music press picked different tracks as their “favorite of the week,” while Barnett got booked on American late-night TV shows and landed a slot at the Coachella festival.

Her 2015 debut album, Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, became her commercial breakthrough and was lauded as a rock – not indie-rock – classic.

Her infectious songs were a meeting of uncompromising noise rock and American roots music, combining an exhilarating mix of sharp stream-of-consciousness lyrics and humor, delivered in an instantly recognizable half-singing vocal that sometimes recalls Lou Reed.

The album was accompanied by a series of fun music videos that revealed a self-deprecating artist who also played many of the album’s fills and solos on her black Telecaster.

You don’t see that too often, and people welcomed her with fervor.

It’s not hard to grasp what intense adulation can do to a person who suffers from anxiety and depression, as well as to their art, where it can be tempting to keep giving the audience the musical identity that they love, but that you are starting to outgrow.

And so Barnett started to expand her ways of expression on her 2018 follow-up, Tell Me How You Really Feel. This new direction is also noticeable on her new album, Things Take Time, Take Time, a lockdown memento born of change and calamity.

Barnett was struggling following her breakup with Cloher, the pandemic lockdown and the terrifying Australian bushfires of 2019-2020, known colloquially as the Black Summer.

When a friend suggested she make a list of what she looked forward to, Barnett gave it a try, focusing on small things: a cup of coffee, sunrise. That, in turn, gave birth to the songs on Things Take Time, Take Time, a collection of sprawling songs built from the minutiae of everyday things.

To record it, Barnett chose a studio that was new to her – Golden Retriever in Sydney – and worked without her usual gear or her band featuring bassist Bones Slone, drummer Dave Mudie and guitarist Dan Luscombe.

Instead, she created and coproduced the record with Warpaint drummer Stella Mozgawa, who had previously performed on Barnett’s 2017 collaboration with guitarist Kurt Vile, Lotta Sea Lice.

“Maybe that was a subconscious effort to push myself out of my comfort zones and try something different,” Barnett says of her decision to work amid so many changes. “I wanted to work with Stella again, and the timing was perfect because both of us were in the same country. If the pandemic hadn’t been there, we would’ve been busy with our other projects.”

The time is ripe for Barnett to enjoy a resurgence.

She’s the subject of director Danny Cohen’s brand-new documentary, Anonymous Club, which offers insights into the creative process and struggles of an artist Cohen refers to as an anti-influencer, a recluse acclaimed by audiences, and a strong female performer in conflict with herself.

We recently spoke to Barnett in Los Angeles, as she was kicking off her recent U.S. tour together with Sloane and Mozgawa.

Is surprise an important component to your music?

Not so much trying to surprise other people, but I think embracing the spontaneity. I’ve often gotten the majority of the song ready, where I know what it’s gonna do, but there are always bits that I don’t have planned.

Normally it’s things like guitar solos. A lot of the time, I leave them until the last minute to see what happens. Often, it’s that first thing you do that ends up being the best one. And every time I try to overdub a better guitar part or solo, it never has that same energy.

I think that’s what I try to capture; sometimes that’s what that slightly deranged thing is. There might be wrong notes and small things that aren’t completely right, but it captures a certain energy, and I try to trust that first-thought mentality.

“Small Poppies” [from Sometimes I Sit…] is a great song filled with beautiful ’50s retro guitar references, even though they also have that twist.

That is actually my friend Dan Luscombe who played on the song. I played pretty minimal rhythm guitar on it. Dan played on my first few albums, and I listened to that song the other day. His guitar playing on it is so incredible.

But after I finished that album and was ready to go on tour, I found out that he couldn’t join me, so I had to learn all of his amazing parts and all these different skills. It really pushed me as a guitar player, and I find him to be really inspiring.

How did you develop your playing style? Were there any influences, choices, or decisions on what not to do? We’re thinking of St. Vincent, who once said in an interview that she really tries to avoid playing “muscle memory licks.”

It’s hard to see what my own style is, because it’s what I know and what I’ve figured out over the years.

The muscle memory comment is a really good one, because I think it’s easy to fall into that comfort zone. I guess I try to keep myself on the edge of it, so that I’m not too comfortable but always learning new things.

Part of my style is playing rhythm and lead at the same time. I was 18 when I started my solo career shows; I played acoustic guitar and had to bridge this gap between rhythm and lead.

Over the years, as I started bands, I always tried to get a second guitarist to do the lead bits, but I’ve played as a three-piece for so much of my musical career that I had to learn how to blend the two out of necessity.

How would you describe your guitar aesthetic?

I would probably avoid doing that. It’s a combination of lots of ideas and trying to find the perfect blend of everything.

On Things Take Time, Take Time, you’ve moved away from the rock songs with punchy hooks and the feedback-driven solos that made your debut album a huge hit with fans and critics. This work is a lot more low-key, with a warm and comforting sound palette that mirrors the ruminating lyrics you’ve written. What brought about this new direction?

Over years of playing live, I’ve recognized that one of my safety fallbacks was to use a lot of distortion pedals: When in doubt, just make a big noise. And I recognized that it started to feel a little bit lazy and repetitive.

Obviously, it’s fun to do that, and a lot of the songs called for it. But – thinking of that thing St. Vincent said – I was looking for different angles: different ways to show emotions and find dynamics in the songs.

It’s easy to rely on the same tricks in songwriting or in the studio. I wasn’t trying to change patterns completely but just be aware when something came up that felt familiar and try a different way.

How did you and Stella work out the song arrangements?

For this album, we tried to use different instruments, and when things were sounding familiar or just a bit same-same, we would mix them up.

I only took one electric guitar into the studio, my sunburst Fender Jag [Kurt Cobain model with stock pickups]. I always get the best sounds out of that guitar. I also used a lot of acoustic guitar [a custom Maton] to thicken up guitar parts.

But a couple of times, we’d work on a song that sounded like it had too much guitar, and so I’d take the guitar totally out of it, highlight a Wurlitzer [electric piano] or something else instead, and replay the song from that angle. And that created a sonic space that allowed the lyrics to breathe differently.

You used a drum machine and percussion instruments, and throughout the album one can hear these little rhythmic accents popping up in the songs. It seems like they’re a central part of the arrangements because they sound like hooks, but in an understated way.

Yeah, I wanted that to be a feature. It created a meditative, repetitive feel that would build over the course of the songs. A big part of this album is the percussion, and a lot of the rhythms are the equivalent of a riff or a refrain. I thought it’d be so cool to find a different approach instead of using a melodic guitar riff or piano line.

Stella is an amazing drummer and percussionist. The rhythms might sound simple at first, until you tune into all the little things happening and realize how complicated it is, without being over the top.

You once said in an interview that you look for left-field sounds to make things interesting in headphones. Did that apply to this album as well?

I mean, always. That’s the fun part of recording. Doing the weird things, like banging a case against the floor and affecting sounds in ways that we aren’t used to hearing.

On my last album, I recorded the sound of my kettle boiling [on “Hopefullessness,” which also features a great feedback-driven solo]. It comes in halfway through the song and slowly creeps up and up like a weird, anxiety-inducing, drone sound.

On this album, we did a lot of field recordings. I’m not sure they made it onto the album, but they were inspiring to capture and hear. On one part of a song, I played my guitar with a cello bow to create a droning, synthy string sound.

Parts of your album are about healing after a breakup, and one of the songs, “Here’s the Thing,” has an instrumental passage that feels very cinematic and blue. It has lush rhythm guitars and these otherworldly-sounding notes that are floating above the chords. Is that a vocal or a guitar?

That’s actually the song with the cello bow. There are strings underneath it, and sometimes they sound like trumpets. It was just a weird frequency. But that main melodic door-bell type of sound that you’re referring to is an Omnichord [an electronic autoharp-synthesizer] that we had in the studio.

We messed around for quite a while, trying to find the right sound and the right idea, and then we probably put it through some effects as well just to make it more wobbly, like it was underwater.

What amps and effects did you use on the album?

I didn’t take any gear with me besides my electric guitar. I know I used the studio’s Mesa/Boogie and Roland Jazz Chorus [JC-120] amps. I also didn’t have my usual pedals, which forced me out of my comfort zone.

I used their [Death by Audio] Reverberation pedal a lot, and the [Electro-Harmonix] POG for the chorusy, wavy and wobbly sounds. The studio also had a vintage vibrato pedal and some overdrives that I used.

Are all your songs and solos created through inspiration by just staying open to whatever comes, or do you ever set up any sort of framework?

No, it’s normally pretty feel-based. I try to just trust that instinct and feeling.

You’re known for your lyrics, which tend to be conversational, often with a dry or wry sense of humor, and full of great observations about people and mundane things. Do lyrics inform your guitar playing in any way?

It happens sometimes. It’s fun to find the emotional match. In “Take It Day by Day,” which is a bass-driven song, the lyrics are slightly playful and cheeky, and the guitar kind of matches that. The bass is a little bit overdriven and bratty. When the guitars and the synths do the riff [sings a staccato melody], it also has a bratty quality to it.

You also went to a visual arts school when you were 18 to 20 years old, and you’re often involved in the making of your music videos and album cover art. How does art influence your music?

The visual stuff and music inspire each other. Just like the power of silence in music, there’s the power of negative space in visual art. It all overlaps, and there’s no formula. It all depends on the song and the moment.

And when one creative avenue dries up, it’s good to explore another one until the ground gets more fertile again.

Exactly.

Danny Cohen has made a documentary about you called Anonymous Club, where he followed you on the road for a couple of years. How did you connect?

Danny is a really good friend of mine, and he’s made a couple of my video clips. He came on tour with me pretty much from the album cycle for Tell Me How You Really Feel. He was on and off tours around the world, and made this really beautiful and pretty simple film.

What did you talk about, and what was the filming experience like for you?

We talked a lot about the art-making process and the fears behind being an artist. There was so much deep and personal stuff. So even if there was some confronting, for the most part it was an interesting process.

Browse Courtney Barnett's catalog here.

Every great group needs a secret weapon – that singularly talented player whose unique contribution adds a magical, and oftentimes irreplaceable element to its sound. 

In the case of alt-rock pioneers the Pixies, whose loud-quiet-loud dynamic was famously adopted by bands such as Nirvana, that honorary title goes to guitarist Joey Santiago.

“I wanted to be in a weird band, and I got really lucky when I hooked up with Charles,” he says, referring to Pixies frontman co-guitarist Charles Thompson (a.k.a. Black Francis), whom he met in 1986 while the two attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

“He’s got a wacky personality, and he understood right from the start where I was coming from. I made it very clear that I hated guitar solos. I still do. You hear these guys noodling around and playing fast. It’s like listening to somebody type. That wasn’t for me, and Charles agreed we wouldn’t have it in our band.”

Oddly enough, Santiago, who started playing at age nine, calls jazz guitar legend Wes Montgomery – no stranger to solos – one of his biggest influences. He’s also a huge fan of Brian May and Elliot Easton.

So what gives? “With those guitarists, there was always a storyline running through their playing,” Santiago says. “I always heard a lyricism in their solos. There was a narrative in the way their notes followed the chords. It wasn’t random.”

He also cites Jimi Hendrix as a prime source of inspiration. “He was the whole package. He could play incredible solos, but he worked with strange sounds and feedback. It was all very emotional and intuitive.”

In his earliest days as a player, Santiago used to rely on his own intuition when coming up with electric guitar parts, but he then adopted a more formulaic approach that, in his view, served him well. “On those first few Pixies albums, I wrote my parts out on paper,” he says.

“That had its uses. I could kind of look at it and weigh my options. Lately, though, I’ve gone back to just trusting my gut and my ears. I think I discover more things by reacting on the spot rather than plotting everything out. I rely on vibe now. I think it lends more immediacy to what I do.”

One thing that’s not apt to change, however, is his choice of guitars. He’s a Les Paul man through and through (his two main models are a ’57 reissue with a Bigsby and a 1960 goldtop).

“When the band started, I was playing an Ovation Viper,” he recalls. “Then Charles picked up a Telecaster, which is bright and great for rhythm, so I needed something to serve as a contrast. The Les Paul was the right call. It’s chunky and warm, and when you put that alongside a Tele, you’ve got a classic combination.”

1) “Gigantic” from Surfer Rosa (1988)

“We had this song kicking around for a while. Charles had the riff, and then he came with the chorus. He had [bassist] Kim [Deal] write the lyrics. The chorus goes, ‘Gigantic, gigantic, gigantic, a big, big love.’ Originally, it was going to end with ‘a big, big mall’ – you know, as in a shopping mall. That didn’t sound as good as ‘big, big love,’ so we went with the second idea.

“I’ve always loved playing around with feedback, so on this song I did all sorts of squalls. I drew from a couple of influences. I remember seeing footage of Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock, when he did the ‘Star-Spangled Banner.’ The way he worked with feedback was awesome.

“Also, there were these moments in Blue Öyster Cult’s ‘Don’t Fear the Reaper’ when it almost sounds like an EBow – this one long note that just sustains like crazy. Brilliant stuff. I drew from those things and just went for a cool sound approach.

“At the end of the song, we went for the huge wall of sound. Live, it would go on forever. Sometimes I would play just one note. To me, it was like comedy: ‘How long is he going to do that? Oh, wow… He’s still playing that same note.’ It would border on the ridiculous, and I’d be like, Yep, that’s all I’m gonna do here. It didn’t take us any time at all to record the track in the studio. We’d played it live so much that we knew what we were doing.”

2) “Where Is My Mind?” from Surfer Rosa (1988)

“Charles and I ordered Vietnamese food, and he showed me the song. At this point, I was working with paper and visuals. I wrote down the chords and said, ‘Okay, I see what’s happening. This is what it is.’ I played it once, and then I stopped and said, ‘Yep, this is the one.’ And Charles said, ‘Yeah, that sounds great. Let’s go with it.’

“I did a really cool, stinging lick on my Les Paul. I always knew I was going to play that. It’s this unison string thing where I flatten the notes, kind of Chuck Berry style. That was the only element I wanted on the song. I came up with that right in Charles’ apartment, after we had lunch.

The solo is very blues – total minor pentatonic scale. The chords are major, but the solo is minor. That makes it sound kind of weird. To be honest, and because I’m not a liar, I didn’t know that I was playing a minor scale at the time. I just have what you’d call ‘Jesus ears’ – very forgiving.

“We didn’t know that it was going to be a big fan favorite. We never had that kind of vision. Over time, however, it’s the one song we have to play live a lot, every night, or people want their money back. The bus will get tipped over, we’ll get death threats and lawsuits – all that. So we play it.”

3) “Here Comes Your Man” from Doolittle (1989)

“This one was around for a while, as well. Charles had that riff since he was a kid. I think he even played it on piano. We recorded a version for our demo, the Purple Tape, that was slower and more country-ish. [The so-called Purple Tape is the band’s original 17-track demo tape recorded at Fort Apache Studios in Boston in March 1987.] Everybody loved the song and thought it would be a hit. We liked it, too, but we were alternative snobs, so we were hesitant to put it out. It stuck out like a sore thumb.

“In the end, we just said, ‘Screw it. Let’s just do it.’ We recorded it with [producer] Gil Norton, who knew it was a very palatable song. We did the backing track without Charles. For some reason, he wasn’t around.

“At the start, I played the ‘Hendrix chord’ – it’s like what he used on ‘Purple Haze.’ I thought it made the opening sound like that first chord in ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ – very jarring. For the riff, I remember trying out a bunch of different guitars – a Jaguar, a Tele, a Les Paul. Then we paired the Tele with a 12-string Rick, and that sounded good. We put a lot of thought into it. There was real production on the song.

“We got an invitation to do The Arsenio Hall Show, which was a big deal. I wanted to play our song ‘Tame,’ because that’s how we wanted to be introduced to such a large audience. Our tour manager came to us and said they wanted us to play ‘Here Comes Your Man,’ and I said, ‘That doesn’t sound like a very friendly host, making us do stuff.’ I insisted on ‘Tame,’ and the show people said, ‘No, thank you.’ So that’s how it went.”

4) “Monkey Gone To Heaven” from Doolittle (1989)

“Back in the day, I didn’t have a phone. Charles would try to reach me but couldn’t. He’d come over and I’d buzz him in, and he’d say, ‘Joe, you’ve got to get a phone.’ One day, he had a guitar with him. He played the opening chord sequence and sang, ‘If man is five and the devil is six,’ and he was kind of laughing. I listened and said, ‘All right, that’s funny.’ I think I had a hangover at the time.

“We didn’t play it live before we recorded it; it was all done in the studio with Gil Norton. It’s such a simple but clever song, although it keeps going with the same progression, so you have to be hyper-aware to make things interesting.

"At one point, Gil said we had to come up with some guitar melodies, so we decided to do a dumbed-down version of the Allman Brothers, with dual-harmony solos.

“That’s our classic combination of the Les Paul and the Tele. I liked the idea of a harmony lead and thought it was funny, but there’s that part where Charles says, ‘Rock me, Joe!’ I was like, I don’t know about that.

“I have to be honest: I hate playing the song live. The fans demand it. I still don’t get why people love it. The song makes me feel uncomfortable. Maybe it’s supposed to make people feel that way, but I don’t like feeling uncomfortable. I probably don’t like the ‘Rock me, Joe’ part, hearing my name.”

5) “Hey” from Doolittle (1989)

“This is actually one of our first songs. We had just started the band, and I visited Charles at the Cape, where he lived. We had our guitars and started working on it. It was very exciting. I even came up with the solo right there. It was trying to write itself. I found this one note, a siren-like sound. It was the kind of thing where other people would say, ‘That’s a good place to start,’ but my attitude was, ‘That’s a good place to stop. I think I’ve found it.’

“My guitar approach always stayed the same on the song. I would be kind of quiet. I’d flip the switch to the bridge setting with the volume low and a little bit of the tone rolled off. Then I’d switch it up and play the solo by going back to the lead pickup and wailing on that thing.

“It’s a little dynamic. You know when someone’s whispering and your ear just keeps getting drawn in? That was the whole idea. In the studio, I nailed it right off. Then whole thing was live, and we did it in one take.

“The song is very soulful – the rhythm patterns and Charles’ vocal delivery. He always had that kind of thing. I think he said that he once did ‘In the Midnight Hour’ by Wilson Pickett in high school. I don’t know if it was, like, a talent show, but I remember he said he did it, and people were very impressed.”

Browse the Pixies catalog here.

On this day in 1993, Nirvana recorded their iconic MTV Unplugged studio performance in New York.

The corresponding live album – MTV Unplugged in New York – was released roughly a year later following Kurt Cobain’s tragic death on April 5, 1994, debuting at the US Billboard 200 number one spot.

This essential long-player has since clocked up millions of sales, making it one of the most influential live albums in recent times while helping to re-popularize the acoustic guitar.

“At that time, Nirvana was probably the biggest band in the US,” C. F. Martin & Co’s Museum and Archives Specialist, Jason Ahner, told Guitarist magazine. “After the folk boom of the '50s and '60s, Martin sales were down in the late-'70s and through the '80s, but we really saw things taking off in the '90s when the MTV Unplugged shows aired.”

While Cobain’s 1953 Martin D-18 (lovingly dubbed ‘Grandpa’) remains in the Martin Museum the 1959 Martin D-18E he used on the MTV Unplugged recordings – an electrified version of the workhorse dreadnought produced for a very short time in the late ‘50s – was sold for a record sum of $6,010,000 last year.

In 1993, who would have known that the guitar Cobain was playing would later smash the world auction record of $3,975,000 held by David Gilmour’s Black Strat?

“This guy representing Lead Belly’s estate wants to sell me Lead Belly’s guitar for $500,000,” says Cobain as he introduces “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” – Nirvana’s final number of the set.  “I even asked David Geffen personally if he’d buy it for me and he wouldn’t do it.”

Although Cobain credits Lead Belly (1888-1949) for Nirvana’s version of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” according to famed ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax the blues legend learned the traditional American song from folk revivalist Cecil Sharp in 1917.

Lead Belly is known to have recorded several versions appearing under alternative titles including “In The Pines” and “Black Girl.”

Cobain’s MTV Unplugged rendition is haunting. A poignant mix of pain and beauty it is testimony to what greatness can be achieved with little more than an acoustic guitar, some simple chords, and a voice.

Buy Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York here.

As one of the more affordable “genuine vintage Fender guitars” in the ’80s and ’90s, Mustangs were snapped up and hot-rodded by punk, grunge, indie-rock and alt-rock players who were in search of punchier, more powerful sounds than the original, fairly weak single-coil pickups could provide.

As a result, the model roared back into popularity. However, an original Mustang – such as our featured instrument from ’66 – can be an excellent and expressive guitar before you inflict a single tweak upon it.

The Mustang was unveiled in 1964 at the tail end of Fender’s pre-CBS years in an effort to upgrade the company’s beginner and student lines. Previously, in 1956, Fender unveiled its scaled-down, single-pickup Musicmaster and dual-pickup Duo-Sonic models to capture the business of young players hot for this new rock and roll fad.

These models quickly became gateway guitars to more grown-up Fenders. Each had a 22 1/2–inch scale length that was shorter than anything Fender had yet produced in a Spanish-electric. These short-scale models are sometimes referred to as “three-quarter-scale” guitars, but they’re closer to nine-tenths the size of a standard Fender model from the day.

A slight reworking of the body style and electronics delivered both the hardtail Duo-Sonic II and vibrato-equipped Mustang in ’64, and although both were also still available in the shorter 22 1/2–inch scale length early on, the 24-inch scale quickly became more popular for both models.

The body represented another slight departure for Fender, both in its more compact and streamlined size and shape and in the poplar wood that was most often used for its construction. The neck was the standard bolt-on Fender configuration of one-piece maple with a rosewood fingerboard and generally feels superbly comfortable in the hand.

Both were made in two different widths, too, as measured at the nut and indicated by a letter code found alongside the date stamped on the neck’s heel: “A” indicated a narrower 1 7/16–inch width, while “B” signaled the more standard, and more desirable, 1 5/8 inches.

The Mustang vibrato was an entirely new contraption, with a sprung tailpiece unit and separate rocking bridge, all mounted to the same base plate (with much of the workings hanging underneath).

New, too, were the electronics. The pickups were made similarly to the Stratocaster’s but were entirely covered, with no pole pieces showing, and often tended to be a little weaker.

Each was wired through its own three-way slider switch, which provided not only “on” and “off” positions but also an out-of-phase setting in relation to the other pickup when both were on and the switches set in opposite directions.

Original Mustangs of 1964–’68 vintage were offered in white, blue and red finishes similar to Fender’s Olympic White, Daphne Blue and Dakota Red, although they were never officially named as such.

The Competition Series Mustangs, which featured diagonal racing stripes and forearm and rib cage contours, were introduced in 1968 and fetch about 30 percent more on the vintage market today. This is purely due to their cosmetics, as ’64–’66 Mustangs can be perfectly excellent electric guitars.

The Mustang remained in regular production until 1982, when ownership shake-ups at Fender induced a lot of changes. It was back by demand in reissue form in 1990. For examples in the hands of pros, check out Kurt Cobain’s frequent use of a battered Mustang (often with bridge humbucker added), David Byrne with early Talking Heads or Matthew Healey of the 1975, among many others.

Thanks to Olivia’s Vintage Guitars for showing us this wonderful 1966 Fender Mustang.

Juliana Hatfield is best known for her alt-rock hits “My Sister” and “Spin the Bottle,” both from the Juliana Hatfield Three’s 1993 album, Become What You Are, and for her stint in the Lemonheads the previous year, when she played bass on It’s a Shame About Ray.

Those who jumped ship when the ’90s faded have missed a lot. In back-to-back releases like Beautiful Creature and Total System Failure, Hatfield expressed her love of pop songcraft and grimy blasts of distortion, respectively, a dichotomy she wields masterfully.

“I’m just trying to express who I truly am, and I’m a very conflicted person,” she says. “Even with my moods I’m like that. I go back and forth, and I’m always trying to figure out who I am and how to integrate my authentic self into one whole self. My music is just an expression of that.”

You’re known as a guitar player and songwriter, but you studied piano at Berklee College of Music before taking up bass. How did those experiences feed into the type of music you make?

I think that people with unique voices are born with those voices, so I don’t know how much Berklee helped me as a songwriter. It definitely helped me open up my ears – helped me to listen more carefully and more closely.

I never really paid much attention to how the different elements in a song were working together. I was not well-versed in the language and with theory. All the ear training and learning to distinguish intervals and chords really helped me communicate to other musicians.

Were you already playing guitar at that point?

I was getting really burned out on playing piano, but I used my piano-playing background to get into Berklee. I don’t think they would have admitted me otherwise, because I had no vocal training and no guitar training.

For one semester I studied jazz piano intensively. I learned how to comp and how to read a lead sheet, which ended up being really helpful to me later on. After that one semester, I could notate my songs, and now when I’m in the studio and I want to put a keyboard on a track, I can write myself a little lead sheet and play off of that.

Then I started studying voice at Berklee, because I had never had any voice lessons. At the same time I was starting my first band, the Blake Babies, and I was very new at playing guitar.

On 2019’s Weird, you layer elements like fuzzy riffs and solos onto a foundation of clean, articulate playing, which is also something you’ve done on earlier albums. Are you drawn to the opposite natures of those sounds?

They’re just little moments that are really exciting to me. Like on [1995’s] Only Everything, I really loved the solo on “Simplicity Is Beautiful.” I think it’s a couple of solos on top of each other. I was trying to capture that kind of feeling that a J. Mascis [of Dinosaur Jr] solo captures. It’s definitely not the same kind of dexterity with my fingers, but that was just a great moment for me.

There are a lot of really cool guitar moments on that album, like how the solo in “Dumb Fun” develops. I think in the beginning of the song I was trying to be like Kurt Cobain, playing the vocal melody on the guitar like in “Come as You Are.” Then I went off in different directions, and it just became this really fun thing.

You’ve done several side projects, like the I Don’t Cares with Paul Westerberg and Minor Alps with Matthew Caws of Nada Surf. What drives you to collaborate?

Emotional instability, I guess. What drives anyone who has obsessive-compulsive leanings? I can’t stop writing songs, and I have too many, so I have to find other people to record with so people don’t get barraged with too many Juliana Hatfield records.

Plus, Matthew Caws is one of my favorite singers and songwriters. To be able to work with him was kind of like a dream, you know? If I’m going to have an opportunity like that, I’ll definitely go for it.

What about Paul Westerberg? Were you a Replacements fan early on?

Yeah. Huge Replacements fan. A long time ago in the ’90s, Paul and I were supposed to do a tour together. He was doing a tour for one of his solo albums, but he threw out his back and had to cancel the tour, so that never happened, but we were in touch.

He had tons and tons of songs recorded. Some of them were just so great, and I would say, “Why don’t people know this song? Let’s work on this.”

You reissued your solo debut, Hey Babe, on vinyl. Does it feel different to pick up a guitar and write songs now than it did back then?

It does and it doesn’t. I mean, I still do it the same way. It’s still just me alone in a room with an acoustic guitar. But I’m less miserable now. I’m not so focused on my own anguish in my songs. I think my subject matter has shifted a little bit away from myself. I’m not as anguished as a songwriter. I’m more confident, maybe. I don’t know if that makes my work better or worse. Some people want their artists to be tortured and suicidal.

Check out Juliana Hatfield’s latest album – Blood – here.

On September 24, 1991, Nirvana dropped their game changing sophomore long-player, Nevermind. Music would never be the same again. Elevating the band from underground sensation to global phenomenon, the cultural impact of Nevermind made seismic waves that resonate today.

Beginning November 12, Geffen/UMe are celebrating this monumental album by releasing a digitally remastered version of the original Nevermind tapes. Also included within the various reissue formats will be 70 previously unreleased tracks (from a total of 94 audio and video tracks.)

While a standard digital/CD and single disc vinyl with bonus 7-inch will be available, hardcore Nirvana fans and completists may be interested in the forthcoming Nevermind Super Deluxe Editions. These will be available in both vinyl and CD+Blu-ray formats, as follows:

Vinyl

• 8LPs
• 180-gram black vinyl, all in premium tip-on jackets
• New 7-inch (A-side: “Endless, Nameless”/B-side: “Even In His Youth” and “Aneurysm”)

CD+Blu-ray

• 5 CDs
• Blu-ray: Live in Amsterdam, Netherlands (remastered audio & video in HD)

These Nevermind Super Deluxe Editions contain four newly remastered live shows, including: Live in Amsterdam, Netherlands (Paradiso club, November 25, 1991); Live in Del Mar, California (Pat O’Brien Pavilion, December 28, 1991); Live in Melbourne, Australia for triple j (The Palace in St. Kilda, February 1, 1992); and Live in Tokyo, Japan (Nakano Sunplaza, February 19, 1992).

Pre-order your copy of Nirvana’s Nevermind (30th Anniversary) here.

If you are able, cast your mind back to 1991 and you may remember a slew of albums appearing within weeks of each other that would forever change the course of music.

There was, of course, Nirvana’s Nevermind and Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Blood Sugar Sex Magik (September 24); Guns N’ Roses' Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II (both released on September 17); and Metallica’s eponymous ‘Black Album’ (August 12). Not to mention the debut albums Leisure by Blur and Pretty on the Inside by Hole (August 26 and September 17, respectively).

And on this day, in the middle of 1991’s soundtrack peak, arrived Pearl Jam’s debut album, Ten. Five years later, the band would release their fourth studio album, No Code, also on August 27.

In celebration of these classic albums, Pearl Jam have today released newly remixed state-of-the-art digital-only editions of Ten and No Code. Both the 30th anniversary digital edition of Ten and 25th anniversary digital edition of No Code have been mixed by producer/sound engineer Josh Evans in state-of-the-art Dolby Atmos and Sony 360 Reality Audio for an an immersive sonic experience.

"These two albums sound amazing in the immersive format," said Evans. "For Ten, the goal was to create the best version of the record, bigger, wider and higher fidelity; now, it actually sounds as great coming out of your speakers as it does in your memory of hearing it the first time.

“25 years ahead of its time, No Code almost sounds like it was intended to be an immersive album; experimental layers, nuance and raw aggression are all amplified and expanded in a simultaneously bigger and more intimate experience."

Later today (5pm PT) a free streaming event kicks off on Pearl Jam’s YouTube, Facebook, and nugs.net. Presented by Pearl Jam’s fan community Ten Club this free stream showcases Pearl Jam performing No Code live in its entirety.

The legendary 1959 Martin D-18E used by Kurt Cobain for Nirvana's 1993 MTV Unplugged performance has sold at auction for over $6 million.

The ultra-rare acoustic was purchased, with a bid of $6,010,000, by Australian businessman and RØDE Microphones owner Peter Freedman during the Julien's Auctions Music Icons auction held in Beverly Hills, CA last week.

The astonishing sum of money makes it by a wide margin the most expensive guitar ever sold at auction, smashing the previous world record of $3,975,000, set by David Gilmour’s 1969 Black Strat last June.

The seventh of only 302 D-18E Martin guitars to be built, the guitar features a Bartolini pickup added by Cobain, and was sold with its original hardshell case - complete with a half-used pack of Martin guitar strings, three picks and Cobain's suede bag, which is decorated with a miniature silver spoon, fork and knife.

For his part, Freedman says that - rather than locking the guitar away - he will exhibit the guitar in galleries and art spaces around the world, putting all of the proceeds towards the performing arts. 

“It’s a big deal. I didn’t even buy it for me,” he told the PA news agency.

“I paid for it but I’m going to use it to highlight the plight of artists worldwide by touring it around, and then I’m going to sell it and use the dough for that as well, later.

“Musicians and artists have supported my family since the ’60s. We’ve been in that game forever so I’ve been very lucky with RØDE and I’ve been able to give away lots of money, quite a few mill.”

The Martin, rumored to be the last guitar Cobain ever played, had been gifted by Cobain's daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, to her ex-husband, Isaiah Silva, during their marriage.

The legendary 1959 Martin D-18E used by Kurt Cobain for Nirvana's 1993 MTV Unplugged performance is going up for auction.

Left by Cobain's daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, to her ex-husband, Isaiah Silva, as part of the couple's divorce settlement, the ultra-rare guitar is being valued at over a million dollars.

The seventh of only 302 D-18Es built by Martin, the guitar is being auctioned off by Julien’s as part of its Music Icons auction, which is set to take place in Beverly Hills, CA on June 19 and June 20. 

Featuring a Bartolini pickup added by Cobain, the D-18E will be sold with its original hardshell case, complete with a half-used pack of Martin guitar strings, three picks and Cobain's suede bag, which is decorated with a miniature silver spoon, fork and knife.

The Martin guitar, rumored to be the last guitar Cobain ever played, can be viewed at the Hard Rock Cafe in London’s Piccadilly Circus from May 15 - May 31 and then at Julien’s Auctions Gallery in Beverly Hills from June 15 - June 19.

If the guitar indeed sells for a million, it would be the third most expensive acoustic guitar ever sold, behind only John Lennon's $2.4 million Gibson J-160E and David Gilmour's 1969 Wish You Were Here Martin D-35. 

For more info on the auction, and this guitar, stop by juliensauctions.com.