Paul Gilbert has spent years adapting to hearing loss. Now, he says it’s changed the way he plays guitar for the better.

The former Racer X and Mr. Big virtuoso has lived with tinnitus and high-frequency hearing loss for more than a decade, but rather than letting it limit him, he’s developed what he calls an “inner melodic generator” — the ability to hear music in his head before he plays it.

“One of the things that hearing loss has helped me develop is what I call my inner melodic generator, and anybody can test out that part of your brain,” Gilbert tells American Musical Supply. “Take something really familiar like your own name, and say it to yourself without making any sound; you can hear it in your head. You know what it sounds like, and you can do that with melodies.”

For Gilbert, that’s become the key to improvisation.

“Having to refine that ability to hear music without sound, when I improvise, I can match that up,” he says. “I can hear the sound in my head, and then, if I can play it accurately, that’s just about the best musical experience I’ve ever had.”

It’s a very different approach from the one that made Gilbert famous.

“When I was a kid,” he says, “I wouldn’t do that as much. I learned the fingering patterns that I needed, and I’d buzz through them; it was a fiery approach. More and more, my guitar has taken on the role of singer, and man, when I get it right, it’s a glorious time to exist.”

Gilbert — whose latest album, WROC, came out February 2026 — first spoke publicly about his tinnitus around 2010 after years of playing his electric guitars through cranked tube amps. The condition left him with persistent ringing in his ears and significant high-frequency hearing loss, creating challenges that still affect him onstage.

“When things get to a certain volume, everything sounds out of tune to me,” he explains. “It’s a mystery, because no one else hears it. I’ve asked people in the audience, and they’re like, ‘No, dude, it sounds great.’ But I’m there suffering, thinking, ‘I think we’re really out.’

“Then of course, I watch the YouTube footage that a fan shot, and it sounds fantastic. So I’m in this world of hallucination.”

The problem is especially noticeable in smaller venues.

“It’s a small room with a low ceiling, so all low-end frequencies load up,” he says. “The thing I did do, which actually helped a lot, was that, because I tend to sing in a lower register, I redid a lot of my chord voicings in the higher register, so my voice isn’t fighting. I’m not singing the same note that I’m playing.

“I tend to be playing higher, jangly chords, and that’s more challenging for my brain because I’m not used to those voicings,” he adds. “I’m used to playing low chunky stuff, or even something like a cowboy C. A lot of my poppier, janglier songs that are on the WROC album have a big cowboy C chord. And boy, those chords, for some reason, are just sour. So if I play it at the eighth fret without the bass note, it seems to clean it up nicely.”

Gilbert’s willingness to rethink something as fundamental as his chord voicings reflects the way he’s approached hearing loss in general. Rather than fighting what his ears can no longer do, he’s learned to rely more heavily on the music he hears internally.

It’s an unlikely evolution for one of rock’s most celebrated shredders — a guitarist whose early career was built on blazing technique, from Racer X to Mr. Big, and who nearly landed an audition with Ozzy Osbourne at just 15 years old.

His hearing may not be what it once was, but Gilbert has discovered that some of his most important musical development has happened after the damage was done.

As a bassist’s bassist, Billy Sheehan has, not surprisingly, played with an assortment of similarly accomplished electric guitarists — from Dave Constantino in his first band, Talas, to Mike (K.) Krompass in his current group, the Fell.

The Buffalo native was, most famously, part of former Van Halen frontman David Lee Roth’s band on his first solo album, Eat ’Em and Smile, and the accompanying tour, with Steve Vai on both. He formed Mr. Big after that with Paul Gilbert and has also logged time with Explorer’s Club, Niacin, the Winery Dogs (with Richie Kotzen), Sons of the Apollo (with Ron “Bumblefoot” Thal) and more. You’ll also find him on Kotzen’s solo albums and on recordings with Terry Bozzio, Tony MacAlpine, Michael Kocab and others.

“I’ve just started to create a catalog of everyone I’ve recorded with, and what songs I did, and it’s going to be gargantuan,” Sheehan tells us with a laugh via Zoom from his home studio in Nashville. “It’s a Herculean task. It’s a reminder of all the great players I’ve been fortunate enough to work with… ’cause you never really stop and think about it all at once. You look at it all together and it’s just, like, ‘Wow…’”

Sheehan is just as excited about the Fell, which also includes frontman Toby Rand and drummer Nick Chiarore. The hard-hitting quartet started about 10 years ago, according to Sheehan, and released its first EP, Killswitch, last October. A full album is on the horizon, too, giving Sheehan another entry for his bulging résumé.

“I’ve just gotta play,” he explains. “I want to play. I’ll play till I can’t play, or until my playing isn’t as good as it should be. But I feel like I’m still improving every single day, so to be out playing is very important to me. And having the opportunity to have the Fell and make more music has just been great.”

That said, we tapped Sheehan for a personally guided trip through his past and the guitarists he’s shared stage and studio time with.

Steve Vai

“I got him in the David Lee Roth band. The original idea was Steve Stevens, but he was busy with Billy Idol and wisely decided to stay with him. I told Dave I know another Steve, ’cause at the time my band Talas was on Relativity Records out of New York City, and Steve was also on that label and we’d talked about doing something together before the Roth thing happened.

“Steve, because of his association with Frank Zappa, had a sense of humor about his playing, which was very important for the Roth band. I was into Zappa in my early years as well. Being into Zappa will do things to you — in a good way. It was impossibly complicated music, and I learned how to dissect it and play it.

“I didn’t end up playing music like that, but that lesson was great, and Steve and I can sit down and recite side two of Live at the Fillmore together. Zappa. That had a lot to do with his playing. His guitar playing became kind of quirky. He had all the fundamentals very, very down, then added the quirkiness from the Zappa thing.

“So Vai came in and was just awesome, a great, great player. So he was in and we had a great time putting that Eat ’Em and Smile tour together. And he’s such a dedicated player. We’d be in the dressing room before the show and he’d be there for hours, just working on stuff, head down for hours at a time before every show, pretty much. That also shows how much he cares about the audience, too, ’cause you want to do the absolute best for them all the time. Steve is definitely in that club.

“And on the road we had a blast. Some things changed after that, and I left the band, but I’m forever thankful to David. He was a huge help in my career, and I learned so much. It was a real Ph.D. in Showbiz 101.

“I did some of Steve’s solo tours, and it was always a blast. We had so much fun on those tours — no nonsense, no drugs, drinking, disrespectful rock star bullshit. We were all just legitimately having fun, and it was like a 24-hour comedy show. There was a lot of mutual respect in the bands I played in with Steve. I have nothing but great things to say.”

Paul Gilbert

“Paul came to see me play in Talas when he was a kid, still a teenager. We were playing in Pittsburgh once, and I remember a tall guy in the audience; the stage was only about this high — there wasn’t any space between the stage and the crowd — and Paul was standing in front of me.

“I did my very first bass guitar clinic in Pittsburgh, and Paul was there. Then we started having opening acts and we wanted to help promote the local scene, so we’d hire an opening act from the city we were playing. And one of the bands that opened up for us was Paul’s band — ‘Oh, that’s that tall kid!’

“We became acquaintances, and when he moved out to L.A. I’d go see him at the Musicians Institute. One night I judged this contest at Gazzarri’s and there he was, and I told the other judges, ‘Watch this guy…’

“When it came time to put Mr. Big together, I thought Paul would be a great addition to it. I talked with Pat Torpey first, then got Paul, then found our singer [Eric Martin]. I watched Paul grow from a really great and competent guitarist, which he already was, into a consummate musician who knows so much — great songwriter, singer, performer, entertainer.

“He’s the whole package. But when we were starting Mr. Big it was his very beginning in that, and I watched him grow through the years. I’m very, very proud of what he’s accomplished for himself — and he’s a sweet, wonderful guy as well.”

Richie Kotzen

“One of the reasons I wanted to do the Winery Dogs was to let the world know about Richie, ’cause he’s so great, yet somehow wasn’t hugely famous, which I think is an abomination. I wanted people to hear him sing and play and write, ’cause he’s great. And he’s another wonderful guy, just a great, hardworking player dedicated to his craft.

“He’s way more bluesy and less of a, let’s say, technician, but his technical abilities are more influenced by jazz from that brief stint he had with Stanley Clarke. I hear that a lot in his playing. One of the first things we did, I could hear, like, the pads of a saxophone. There was no sax, but he phrased it so expertly that you can almost hear the same kind of pads, which is a really cool aspect of his playing.”

Steve Lukather

“I’ve known Steve and seen him and hung with him a lot of times. Great guy. So he came in to do the solo on ‘Things Ain’t Like They Used to Be’ [on 2000’s Niacin album, Deep] — Glenn Hughes sang on it — and Steve just flew in from somewhere. He was probably jet-lagged, and his gear showed up and we played him a little bit of the song. It got to the solo part and he played this solo off the top of his head — just picked up his guitar and played it. Didn’t think it through or plan anything.

“Then we spent three hours trying to top it before we finally said, ‘Let’s just use the first thing,’ ’cause it was so good. To me that spoke volumes about his capabilities; he just came in and, bang, it’s done. We were foolish enough to think we should get something different. Sometimes you’ve gotta let an artist do his thing, and with Steve I’ll tell anybody, ‘Just let him do it. I guarantee you’re gonna be happy.’”

Ron “Bumblefoot” Thal

“What a genius player. I don’t know when I met him initially — I think in L.A. at some of the jams he was around — but I’ve known him for years and years and years. He is a supremely capable and competent musician. That fretless double-neck — he kills on that thing. It’s very unique; it sounds very much like a slide guitar, the way he phrases some of his passages on that. It’s just brilliant.

“I don’t know if there’s a better player out there, and he’s another wonderful, sweet, giving, honest, righteous human being, which is very important. He knows all the Talas songs, which I think is pretty cool. I took that as a great compliment that he knew about Talas and could play the songs.”

Jake E. Lee has given fans a peek behind his tonal curtain in a new rig rundown video, but one pedal has caught the eye above the rest. It’s a fuzz pedal with mysterious origins and a famous previous owner.

After making his name in Ratt, Lee would succeed the late Randy Rhoads as Ozzy Osbourne’s second full-time guitarist, getting the job over George Lynch in brutal fashion. He played on two records – Bark At The Moon (1983) and The Ultimate Sin (1986) – before his relationship with the Prince of Darkness began to erode.

He’s recently stated that his attempts to broaden the singer’s sound were quashed with Ozzy saying, “That’s not Ozzy, that’s jazz. Go back and write me something else!”

Now touring with his band, Red Dragon Cartel, Lee has two fuzzes on his pedalboard, with the first, Prescription Electronics Experience pedal, in place for wild, Hendrix-like fuzz tones. Paired with his infamous "Whitey" Charvel Super Strat, it sounds like Velcro on gravel. That pedal boasts a colorful, hippie-coded orange-and-blue aesthetic that nods to its ‘60s origins, with a modified Fuzz Face circuit.

Its stablemate, in that respect, couldn't be more different. It's free of any swish design elements, with a rough metal casing and stick-on labels for its Volume, Blend, and Drive dials. There also looks to be what's left of an old sticker or label beneath its sole footswitch.

“I don't know a lot about that one,” he tells Premier Guitar. “I don't know who made it. I remember I was in Cowtown Guitars in Las Vegas, I saw it, and I said, ‘What the hell is that?’ and they said, ‘Paul Gilbert traded that in for something else.’”

Then, with a nonchalant shrug, he says, “It's a fuzz... it does a lot of weird stuff.”

Buying it was an impulse purchase, that much he admits. Yet it's found a home on his pedalboard, between the Experience fuzz and a Boss tuner.

“I like that it's a mystery,” he returns. “Sometimes it'll do something I don't expect, and I like that. [If you want more information] Paul Gilbert's gonna have to tell you, and I bet even he doesn't remember. But both fuzz pedals are germanium transistor-based, which is why I place them before my tuner, which acts as a buffer [to boost the signal].

“When you buffer germanium fuzzes, they sound like crap; they don't react the same to your volume.”

So what pedal is it? A user in the comments section for the video says they made the pedal and that it’s actually called the P.G. Spectron Fuzz.

The commenter is Shinichi Suzuki (not to be confused with the violinist of the same name), a Japanese engineer and CEO of Shin's Music. By the looks of it, he gives all his pedals the same sticky label treatment. Although the pedal isn't listed on his website, its name likely refers to Gilbert himself, suggesting it might have been a custom order.

In related news, Lee has opened up on his appearance at Back to the Beginning, a show which saw him bury the hatchet with Ozzy after nearly 40 years apart. Ozzy, though, was quick to send his love when news of Lee being shot in Las Vegas in 2024 broke, and Lee had jumped through hoops to recover in time for the gig.

Four of Paul Gilbert’s guitars have been stolen in Frankfurt, Germany, with the esteemed guiatist asking fans to keep a look out for them.

The four guitars taken include a purple Ibanez FRM300 – a Paul Gilbert signature, complete with a makeshift slide-holder on the lower horn.

Released in 2021, it features specially-wound DiMarzio PG-13 mini-humbuckers, controllable by a five-way pickup selector switch, plus volume and tone knobs. The guitarist also unveiled signature 0.50mm-gauge picks around the same time.

Two Ibanez PGM models, yellow with black faux f-holes, and black with gold furnishings, and a Godin Multiac Steel Duet Ambiance electric-acoustic guitar, are the other three to have been stolen.

Gilbert, taking to Instagram to alert his followers of the theft, says he will post their serial numbers soon to help identify the already very-identifiable instruments.

“STOLEN GUITAR ALERT! These 4 guitars were stolen in Frankfurt, Germany today,” his post reads. “Please keep an eye out for them, and DM me, or write to paulvsgodzilla@paulgilbert.com if you have any information,” he says.

As the old adage goes, the show must go on, and Gilbert has extended his thanks to Ibanez for getting the guitarist new instruments to play for the remainder of his tour.

The theft certainly reinforces the importance of guitar players photographing the serial numbers on all their guitars, making it far easier to be reunited with them if they are ever stolen.

In other Gilbert news, the guitarist recently created custom presets for the newly-unveiled Positive Grid Spark 2 modeling amp, and was also recently bestowed with a new signature Fireman. Notably, the update of his reverse Iceman build includes a world first – a magnet on the lower horn for effortless slide storage.

The invention allows for on-the-fly switching between out-and-out shredding and slide playing, a playing style he told Guitar Player helped him reach a new melodic range.

Reiterating Gilbert’s plea, if readers discover any information regarding the stolen guitars, contact paulvsgodzilla@paulgilbert.com or message the guitarist on Instagram, @paulgilbert_official.

Young guitar prodigy Matteo Mancsuo, who has fans in many guitar greats including Steve Vai, Joe Bonamassa, and Dweezil Zappa, has released a brand new song in honor of Paul Gilbert.

The aptly named Paul Position is the first solo release from the Sicilian guitarist since his critically acclaimed debut album, The Journey.

A tribute to Paul Gilbert’s tasteful shredding style, Gilbert's spirit oozes through the song's licks, but there are plenty of Mancuso's own peer-dazzling tricks on display.

He says he penned the song “some days after receiving this wonderful baritone guitar from Bacci.”

Bacci Guitars is based in Tuscany, Italy. The firm's luthier, Bruno Bacci, has previously built guitars for Mark Lettieri and Cory Wong.

Rightfully, Mancuso's made the most of the low end it provides with a Tosin Abasi-inspired chugging section that he executes with a bass-esque right-hand walking technique.

That section prefaces a razor-sharp blues-fusion solo where Mancuso leans further into Gilbert’s influence.

“I was inspired by one of my favorite players, Mr. Paul Gilbert,” Mancuso said, adding, “You may recognize some of his signature licks in the solo section.”

The guitarist silkily blends fusion, rock, flamenco, classical, and blues styles under his fingers – with his finger-picking approach heavily influenced by Jeff Beck, Lenny Breau, and Phil deGruy.

Mancuso first came to fame on YouTube and, since releasing The Journey, his stock has continued to rise.

Steve Vai said “the evolution of the guitar is firmly secure” in his hands. Al Di Meola said he is “light-years ahead” of his peers, while Joe Bonamassa reflected that he had “not seen anyone reinvent like this since Stanley Jordan.”

He has since graced the covers of Guitar Techniques and Total Guitar magazines, with the former hailing him as “the hottest guitarist on the planet.”

It's not the first time Mancuso has paid tribute to one of his guitar heroes with an original composition. Speaking to Guitar Player late last year, he revealed that his song, Blues For John, is a tribute to John McLaughlin.

“John McLaughlin is a perfect example of mixing technique with beautiful compositions,” he believes. “It is one of my favorite tunes on the album, because the solo section tells through guitar my story to the blues, starting from the bebop clean stuff of Pat Martino, Wes Montgomery, and George Benson, then moving into the more blues-rock players like Joe Bonamassa and Eric Johnson, with distortion tone.”

My experience as an instructor has taught me that lots of the elements of guitar playing I take for granted are missing from the techniques of many of my students. And, I think that a lot of times when someone says, “They have good technique, but there’s something missing,” what’s missing actually is part of the technique. 

Here are three things that beginners and remedial players should watch for when developing their skill sets.

One Great Note

Having good technique involves mastering many elements, including intonation, vibrato, and dynamics, along with an awareness of things like time and key – which provide musical context and allow you to make good note choices. If you ignore these elements, it inevitably leads to disaster. 

As a teacher, it's my job to focus on all of these things over time without overwhelming the student, so that eventually they can play one note that sounds great. If you can get one note to sound great, you can get all of your notes to sound great.

Start with a Slow Shuffle

My students generally want to learn to play fast, and, for me, the most important step in learning to play fast is being able to play a slow shuffle really well. For starters, the bass line in Rocky Mountain Way is just a single repeating note, but the volume and the dynamics vary, and it's that quiet/loud, quiet/loud that creates the sound of the shuffle. 

Many good things come from learning to control note volume with your pick, and that’s impossible to do at quick tempos when starting out. So, while playing a shuffle at a slow tempo, first try using just upstrokes, or just downstrokes. Then, try alternate picking, with the upstroke being a little louder than the downstroke, and vice versa. 

When playing slowly, you can really pay attention to your strokes to make sure they are right, slowly building that technique into a habit. Once a technique becomes habit, it will be a powerful tool at any tempo.

Be the Metronome

Although sometimes people get good results with a metronome, most of the time they don’t, and that’s because the metronome can’t yell, ‘Hey, you’re drifting’ when you go off tempo. So, I always recommend stomping your foot, which makes you the metronome. 

That way, you develop the ability to generate your own rhythm and tempo, and you’ll have to have that inner metronome going if you want to play with a band, or to play anything in a musical context.

Once upon a time, your favorite guitar virtuosos were novices, honing their chops and struggling through the same challenges and problems every beginning guitarist goes through.

Well, what if they could tell you what roadblocks they encountered and how they got around them?

Better still, what if they could provide you with their very own exercises designed to build chops in that particular area?

It would be awesome. And that’s exactly what this lesson is all about.

Here, Steve Vai, Mark Tremonti, Joe Bonamassa, Mike Stern, Yngwie Malmsteen, Paul Gilbert, Alex Skolnick, Joe Satriani and Eric Johnson share stories about their own efforts to build their chops and provide you with short exercises that will help you develop relevant techniques.

So grab your guitar and get ready to build your chops with the best players in the business.

STEVE VAI

"I would get extremely disciplinarian with myself when it came to building chops. When I would sit down to practice a lick, like the one here, I’d tell myself, 'Until you can play this lick properly, you will not get up, eat, go to sleep.' 

"That’s a pretty intense thing for a 14-year-old boy to do – it’s a reflection of a psychological imperfection, actually, or a crack in the cosmic eggshell. I was very intense about it. 

"I don’t need to sit and practice for 10 hours a day anymore, but I do try to be as proficient as possible."

MARK TREMONTI

"The exercise that helped my alternate picking the most was one I got from the first Paul Gilbert video, Intense Rock. That helped me to get that upstroke across strings really tight, so I could flow through three-notes-per-string scale patterns ascending. 

"Problem is, I became twice as good ascending scales as I was descending, so I then had to work in both directions to get my upstrokes and downstrokes equal. 

"It’s important that you practice it in both directions."

JOE BONAMASSA

"As a singer, you warm up and then warm down, and I like to think of the guitar in the same way. And if you’re playing four-hour gigs, like I do, you often wake up the next day with cramped-up hands and fingers. 

"So, to get the cobwebs out, I like to use what I call the 'Andy Summers Exercise.' I play a three-string sus2 shape moving up the neck, hitting all the natural roots in the key of C, and then repeat it on the accidental roots – the sharps and flats. I also do it with the roots on the 5th string. 

"Doing the exercise in this manner, rather than just chromatically, makes you pay attention a bit more, and keeps you from just mindlessly noodling."

MIKE STERN

"When I was 22 in 1975, I was doing gigs with Blood, Sweat & Tears where we were playing really fast tunes, and I was trying to play more like Jim Hall and float over the time. But then Jaco Pastorius said to me, 'Man you’re going really slow and trying to hear everything you play, which is great, but at this point you’re ready to ‘hit up against the time’' – or play eighth and 16th notes right with the time.

"So I went back and practiced playing a tune like, say, “Donna Lee,” with a metronome, and each day I’d click up the metronome a bit. Another thing I did was take classical pieces and, as an exercise, play them way faster than they’re supposed to be played.

"This one here, in G minor, is from Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for Violin, and there’s no set fingering. I know a lot of cats who worked out of this book – John Scofield, Pat Metheny, Steve Vai. The thing is, if you’re gonna work on your chops, don’t just do a scalar exercise. Technique by itself is kind of useless, but when you include it with musical ideas, it makes sense.

"And remember, with chops all you can do is develop your potential. But what’s beautiful about music is that someone’s style or voice is defined as much by what they can’t do as what they can do. Some people can’t play fast, so they play more melodically. 

"I dig melodic playing, but I also dig the excitement in John Coltrane’s or Michael Brecker’s playing – it’s an obvious thing that people can relate to. West Montgomery, even, liked to work on his speed. He felt that it added variety to his phrasing. And it did."

YNGWIE MALMSTEEN

"Years ago, I recorded a band rehearsal on a slow tape machine, and when I listened to it the next day [on a machine at proper speed], I went, 'Man! That’s fast!' I didn’t realize that something was wrong with the machine. 

"After that, I started playing everything a lot faster. Like, if there was something I was originally playing legato, I’d want to be able to play it was alternate picking as well, completely coordinated and clean."

PAUL GILBERT

"I played for about eight years without having any significant picking technique. It was all hammer-ons and pull-offs. For me, what it took was learning to use the metronome – slowing a repeating lick down to where I could do it perfectly, then gradually speeding it up. I learned a really simple six-note picking lick on one string, and within a couple weeks I could play it really fast.

"But the hardest thing about fast picking is to go from string to string, so to improve at crossing the strings I practiced this one here, which gets progressively trickier with each section."

ALEX SKOLNICK

"The biggest thing that’s helped me has been learning licks off records, as opposed to playing exercises from books. And over the years, I’ve developed quite a few licks into exercises.

"One of the first was from Al Di Meola’s “Race with the Devil on Spanish Highway,” from Elegant Gypsy – the fast lick that everybody plays. It was very challenging, so I divided it into sections. 

"The first descends in a quintuplet pattern [A G F# E D]; the next one is a four-note group [F# E D C#]. To expand the exercise, you can move the entire pattern up to the next note, B, and use the same rhythm pattern. Keep going up the scale, playing either the quintuplet alone or whole lick, and move it up and down as well as across the fretboard."

JOE SATRIANI

"When you’re hammering on and pulling off, it’s all about accuracy, not brute force – you really have to pay attention to the way your fingers are moving. For instance, when I put my finger down on a string, do I feel that I have put it in the most efficient spot possible? Should the string be a little more in the center of my fingertip, or a little off to its side?

"I used to find the perfect spot to hammer on and pull off – both on my finger and on the fretboard – and then focus all my energy on the movement required to get there. 

"Doing that freed me up to really start whipping my fingers around in a musical rhythm."

ERIC JOHNSON

"The most important thing I’ve done for my chops is that I’ve always worked on my picking and fretting at the same time, so that whatever I play, it’s really clean. 

"You can work on this with whatever you’re playing – it’s just a process of fretting a note right, picking the string right, and muting in all the right places. 

"The key is to make sure you’re in sync, and if you are, the result is a nice, pure sound that really projects."

On April 7, guitar virtuoso Paul Gilbert will release The Dio Album – a collection of inspired instrumental covers that pays tribute to legendary heavy metal vocalist Ronnie James Dio (1942-2010.)

After randomly spotting a Dio baseball cap while out driving his car, Gilbert was suddenly struck with inspiration (it can come from anywhere!) and the Mr. Big/Racer X maestro quickly formulated a plan. 

Ambitious in scope, he decided he was going to make a series of recordings channelling the singer’s energy through the electric guitar.

Honoring Dio’s prolific career as one of the greatest metal singers of all time, The Dio Album spans classic tracks from the catalog of Rainbow and Black Sabbath, as well as the vocalist’s solo work.

One of the LP’s highlights is a cover of Black Sabbath’s “Neon Knights” – the opening track from 1980’s Heaven and Hell where Dio made his recording debut having replaced original singer Ozzy Osbourne the previous year.

“When I first heard ‘Neon Knights’ on the radio when I was a kid, I didn't I didn't know it was Black Sabbath,” recalls Gilbert. “But I knew about Black Sabbath: I was already a Black Sabbath fan and I'd been playing their songs for a couple of years. And then when that song came on the radio it was like, What is this band?

“To me with Ronnie's voice in there, it was so different than Ozzy that I didn't really didn't recognise the band. But I managed to track down the album and I just loved it. And that sort of began my Dio journey.”

Doing justice to Dio’s world-famous vocals is already a challenge, but Gilbert also needed to walk in the footsteps of three guitar greats: Tony Iommi (Black Sabbath), Ritchie Blackmore (Rainbow) and Vivian Campbell (Dio.)

“Playing all these metal riffs like “Stand Up and Shout”, “Neon Knights” and “Kill the King” gave me serious chills,” says Paul. “The guitar parts of Ritchie, Tony and Vivian brought no small number of goosebumps.

“These amazing riffs are the steel girders of the songs, upon which everything else rests.”

During a recent interview with GP’s sibling mag in the U.K., Guitarist, Gilbert revealed The Dio Album is the product of a lifelong interest in singing.

“Although my job is being a guitar player, I've always focused my ear on the vocals just as much. Before I ever played guitar, I really wanted to be a singer – I just never really felt that I had the equipment for it. And with guitar, my fingers would often work pretty well. So I went with what I could do well, rather than necessarily what I wanted, or what I liked the most. And, you know, guitar isn't a bad second!

“I have made some attempts at being a lead singer. And it is hard, at least for me – it really is like a physical battle, and I lose pretty much every time! So to be able to have those obstacles removed, suddenly all the high notes are there.

“And the challenge is no longer that physical challenge of 'Can I hit the high note?' It's more a challenge of 'Can I hear the details well enough and find them on the guitar to be able to get the emotions across and not have it sound real square?' And that to me is a wonderful journey.”

Pre-order Paul Gilbert’s The Dio Album here.

Jimi Hendrix has gone down in history as one of the most significant musicians of the 20th century. Even today, over 50 years on from his death, his influence on the electric guitar is still profoundly felt. 

For many he was the ultimate electric guitarist. Hendrix was a musical visionary, a virtuoso, and an incendiary live performer (literally), accomplished songwriter and a skilled wordsmith. He was perceived as a social and cultural icon, lauded by both music fans and by his not insubstantial peers and followers.

We asked an array of phenomenal guitarists about the influence that Hendrix had on their own guitar development and music in general. So enjoy this special tribute to a master as some of the greatest guitarists in the world explain what Jimi means to them. 

Starring, in alphabetical order: Jan Akkerman, Jennifer Batten, Joe Bonamassa, Kirk Fletcher, Marty Friedman, Eric Gales, Brett Garsed, Paul Gilbert, David Grissom, Steve Hackett, Allen Hinds, Greg Koch, Michael Landau, Ronni Le Tekro, Steve Lukather, Hank Marvin, John McLaughlin, Steve Morse, Oz Noy, Orianthi, Uli Jon Roth, Joe Satriani, Kim Simmonds, Andy Timmons, Walter Trout and Carl Verheyen.

But which one of them isn't even a Hendrix fan?

JAN AKKERMAN

JAN AKKERMAN

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

I think he was a great musician and showman, but I had very different influences like Django Reinhardt, Wes Montgomery or the first rock pioneers, and all different styles because I used to play the accordion when I was six years old. So in short, NO second-hand blues licks. 

So in the beginning I didn’t pay too much attention. I did like "Hey Joe" and "The Wind Cries Mary" as compositions, but didn’t think much of it until I hooked up with Joachim Kuhn, a monster keyboard player and friend and totally into free jazz and a big fan of Hendrix. He emphasised the freedom of Jimi’s playing, which I loved, also especially the albums Electric Ladyland and Axis: Bold As Love. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

His style was very expressive to say the least. It is difficult to describe his technique because he didn’t care for that. I liked his tone on the Stratocaster. I like the sound of single-coils like Fender or my Gretsch White Falcon. One of the reasons I couldn’t play a Fender is because the controls are always in the way. Jimi didn’t have that problem because he played upside-down so the volume pot was on the other side of the guitar. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why? 

I still like "Hey Joe," "Spanish Castle Magic," etc, but I heard some experimental stuff which was pretty out as well. All in all he was one of the greatest artists in any scene. 

JENNIFER BATTEN

JENNIFER BATTEN 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

He represented a movement in electric guitar of breaking the boundaries of what had gone before, and challenging expectations in the role of the guitarist in a band. With his presence the guitar’s potential became adventurous, dangerous, exciting, and wild. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar? 

He brought a renewed creativity as to what was possible with guitar effects, harmonic composition, tremolo bar use, and manhandling the instrument for a totally new level of entertaining engagement. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

My favourite Hendrix moment was going to a double or triple bill movie of all Hendrix films. It was total immersion when I was a young teen. My parents wouldn’t let me go see him live at my age, when my sisters went and saw a double bill with Jimi and Joplin. So it was as close as I could get. I’m sure that was a chunk of inspiration that pushed my desire along to continue down the guitar rabbit hole. 

JOE BONAMASSA

JOE BONAMASSA 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

Jimi Hendrix meant the world to generations. He was the total package. Player, showman and writer. As innovative and revolutionary as his playing was it’s the songs that stand the test of time. Great guitar playing needs a vehicle for it to do that. Jimi has great songs... period. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

Jimi brought fire... He used his guitar as a weapon. Up until that point only Buddy Guy had weaponised the electric guitar. It was visceral and almost terrifying to listen to and watch as a young kid in his formative years. Beautiful tone, phrasing and use of chords. Game changer. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

Jimi at Monterey... Black 1965 Fender Strat, a Marshall stack and a blackface Fender Showman amp covering Bob Dylan’s "Like A Rolling Stone." A life-changing moment for those lucky enough to witness it in person, and life changing for me. 

KIRK FLETCHER

KIRK FLETCHER 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

Jimi Hendrix has meant many things. When I was a kid I saw Hendrix as an amazing guitarist both in and out of the studio. A sonic genius way ahead of his time. His command of sound with this deep understanding of soul. 

As I grew older I started thinking about how he came up with his guitar parts and his lyrics, and also studio techniques. And then for myself becoming a songwriter, it made me view his work in another light. When I listen to Are You Experienced the man could write a song three minutes long, like "Purple Haze" or "The Wind Cries Mary," and it’s still played somewhere on radio to this day. 

Imaginative storytelling lyrics with the most beautiful melodic guitar in a three-minute pop song? I mean, wow! 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

I feel he brought a whole new language to the guitar. His command of playing and blending so many styles and influences. There are so many branches to the Hendrix tree. For rock guitarists you have his use of the whammy bar and overdrive. 

I feel that the great funk movement of the 70s, groups like Funkadelic, were definitely inspired by Hendrix. I feel he wrote the book on funk-rock guitar soloing. His use of double- stops and rhythm guitar is a whole language. His melodic phrasing on ballads. It would be difficult for me to think of a music world without Jimi Hendrix’s contributions. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

Picking one Hendrix song is like saying which one of your kids you love the most! I would say "Are You Experienced." I mean that song is from the first LP. It has poetic, lyrical content. Completely amazingly orchestrated guitar parts. And it still sounds so fresh to my ears. 

I think I love that album so much because I have often dreamed about hearing it when it first came out in 67. It’s like that great line in that Joan Baez song Diamonds And Rust: “You burst on the scene already a legend!” 

MARTY FRIEDMAN

MARTY FRIEDMAN 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

When I was a kid, I was a massive fan of Uli Roth, Frank Marino and Robin Trower. I loved their playing and learned so much of it, inside and out. I was told that those guys were heavily influenced by Hendrix, so I checked him out. 

I understood the connection, but Hendrix just sounded very weak and undeveloped compared to those guys. Kind of like being used to an iPhone 11 and then someone tells you that if it weren’t for the iPhone 1, there would be no iPhone 11. This is true, and very important. But I’d still rather use an iPhone 11, figuratively speaking, especially as a teenager discovering music. 

I wasn’t there in the 60s when he did the things that inspired literally all of my guitar heroes. So I just never ‘got’ it. I was never into hippie, psychedelic, druggy mind-altering motifs in music so there was just never anything about him that attracted me to his music. How I filtered these same elements out of Trower’s and Marino’s music is anyone’s guess. Had I been around when Hendrix came out I might have felt differently. 

So even though I certainly know, respect and admire his monumental influence on music and great musicians, his music never connected to me personally. 

Recently I was on a long flight and listened to a huge collection of Hendrix to try to find something that I could get excited about. Believe it or not, I still couldn’t hear what everyone else is hearing. Maybe I’m missing something. 

People have this magical unconditional love for the guy, which is fantastic, but they never seem to point me towards some great piece of music that I need to hear from him. I’m always open to suggestions. I feel like it’s in the ‘you had to be there’ category.

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

He brought so many great things to the guitar. Fashion, charisma, beautiful noise, aggressive blues playing like never before, wonderful angelic clean chord voicings, wild showmanship, and was an early innovator in experimentation with guitar sounds. 

You have to respect these things. He was a pioneer and was the first to do a lot of guitar things that are taken for granted 50 years later. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

In my first band, Deuce, we covered "Purple Haze" and I sang and played it. You can believe this or not, but I had never heard Hendrix at this point. The Mahogany Rush Live album was on loop in my world at the time, and could not have cared less that most of that album was cover songs. 

I adored Marino (still do) and when I discovered him, I probably got the same feeling that many guys in the 60s got when they discovered Hendrix. It’s all good. 

ERIC GALES

ERIC GALES 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

It's hard to sum up. But what I can say is that he brought to the world things that had never been explored in music, period, and also the guitar. He was a major influence on every guitarist in the world that came after him and even during him. That was a domino effect that added to a lot of others’ styles, that led to them carrying on the inspiration and influence. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

He brought things to the guitar that even still today leaves great minds puzzled. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

It’s hard to give a single answer as to what’s my favourite Hendrix song. But I’d have to say my earliest memory of "May This Be Love" was and still is one of the songs that emotionally moved me, even as a young lad. And as I said it still does. 

BRETT GARSED

BRETT GARSED 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

My older brother had the Isle Of Wight album and also the Woodstock soundtrack which I was listening to before I even attempted to play the guitar. So Jimi was feeding the urge to give it a go. 

I went on to learn the version of "All Along The Watchtower" from the live album note for note, and was astonished when I heard the studio version with all the overdubs. The live version sounded massive to me and it was incredible to think it was just three musicians creating that wall of sound. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

The obvious things are the authentic R&B influences and his experimentation with effects which he pretty much set the standard for. The level of musicality that he achieved using the simplest of tools is still a high bar that most players strive for. 

But, the thing that astounded me was the way he intertwined his voice with his guitar playing, almost creating a third instrument. He had total independence between what he was playing and what he was singing, and the two would weave in and out of each other, sometimes in harmony, unison or total counterpoint. It’s an incredibly difficult skill to develop and, once again, Jimi had it mastered. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

It’s Jimi’s performance of "The Star Spangled Banner" from Woodstock. Not because I listen to it constantly for enjoyment but because of what it taught me about the power of music and sound to make an emotional statement. 

At first I was intrigued with the feedback, whammy bar divebombs and just the overall pyrotechnics of it, but when I discovered that the whammy bar was imitating actual bombs and inside the other sounds were machine gun fire and people screaming, I learned that he was superimposing a song of national pride over the horror of the Vietnam war and all conflict in general.

I never listened to that song the same way again and it became so much more powerful to me, as did the man who created it. 

PAUL GILBERT

PAUL GILBERT 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

Jimi’s rock songs grabbed me first. I liked "Foxy Lady," "Purple Haze," "Spanish Castle Magic," and "Crosstown Traffic." My uncle Jimi (who changed the spelling of his name to match Hendrix), recommended an album called War Heroes. I bought that, and listened to an instrumental called "Midnight" a lot. 

My parents also had a live record from the Monterey Pop Festival. One side was Otis Redding. The other side was Jimi. So I heard Jimi’s live versions of "Like A Rolling Stone," "Rock Me Baby," and "Wild Thing." 

When I was around 12, my mom took me to a midnight movie showing the Jimi Hendrix documentary. The clip of Jimi playing "Rock Me Baby" at Monterey was one of those breakthrough moments, when I suddenly ‘got it’. 

As time went on, I started to love Jimi’s rhythm playing with a cleaner sound as well. "Wait Until Tomorrow," "Castles Made Of Sand," and the intro of "Bold As Love" are all so beautiful. 

Now that I’m older, I love to listen to Jimi as an improviser. He was fearless, soulful, melodic, angry, gentle, and seemed to be singing through the guitar. Sure, there were some noises and ‘wrong’ notes. But when you blast a hole in the side of a mountain, some boulders are gonna fall. And he was ‘chopping it down with the edge of his hand’. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

He brought a voice to guitar. He used enough volume and distortion to make the guitar sustain in the way that a human voice can. And he brought the elements of expression that a voice has; sliding, bending, contrasts of volume, texture, and length, and the best vibrato anyone had heard in 1966. 

Traditional guitar was NOT built to do this. The guitar is designed more like a lute, where chords are fretted, and the strings are plucked. It’s sort of a portable harpsichord, and the great fingerpickers from Segovia to Chet Atkins, played it masterfully like that. 

B.B. King, Otis Rush, Freddie King, and other early electric blues players certainly opened the door for what Jimi did. But Jimi’s songs, live performances, and use of sustain, took the guitar ‘as a voice’ into sounds that made everything before him seem outdated. 

Jimi said, “And you’ll never hear surf music again.” And when you hear the guitar intro of The Beach Boys’ "Surfin’ USA," it sounds pretty stiff, compared to the world that Jimi created. 

I still love The Beach Boys, and I don’t mind when guitar players play guitar like a guitar. But I must admit that a good portion of my time is spent trying to get my guitar to sing, like Jimi did. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

The first that comes to mind is "Killing Floor" live from Monterey Pop. It was Jimi’s chance to win an audience in the USA, and he was in competition with The Who. 

With that much pressure and adrenaline, most players would get thrown off balance. But Jimi launches into his opening number like a rocket. His aim is perfect. He is painting with a big brush, but still achieving detail. 

I can just imagine Pete Townshend watching in the wings, and thinking ‘Holy #$%!’ And Jimi hasn’t even turned on his distortion pedal yet. Look out! 

DAVID GRISSOM

DAVID GRISSOM 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

I was in junior high deep into The Stones and Beatles when I got Hendrix In The West. It was like finding the Holy Grail. I immediately got a wah-wah and obsessed on the live version of "Voodoo Chile" until I got close to copping some of it. 

I dreamed of having a Stratocaster and dug into the studio albums. Just as important to me was being inspired to discover Jimi’s influences. I was lucky to take lessons from a guy who turned me onto the three Kings and helped me connect the dots to Jimi. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

I think he changed electric guitar playing the same way Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker changed jazz. He drew from a very deep well. Not only was his playing mind blowing, he wrote really great innovative songs that covered a huge range of styles, tones, and dynamics. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

How do you pick just one? On the more intense side of things, the studio version of "Spanish Castle Magic" slays me. The moment that nearly brings me to tears every time I hear it is the solo on "May This Be Love." I love that softer, melodic side of Jimi. 

STEVE HACKETT

STEVE HACKETT 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

Initially I thought he came across with a rare animal power, but when you look more closely, his lyrics are full of poetry. Sometimes the words are very dark with lots of references to imminent death and allusions to the next world. He played like a reanimated zombie, with a haunting otherworldly aspect. 

His showmanship seemed to come naturally to him. No-one ever moved as gracefully with the guitar in hand, as if he possessed this extra electric limb. I feel it was his fluidity as well as his innovation and risk-taking that impressed and influenced me. His playing was heady stuff for me as an aspiring teenage rocker. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

Hendrix was a bluesman with a very big difference. I knew his guitar tech, Eric Barrett, who said that Jimi played through feedback constantly, like a weapon permanently set on stun. The spacecraft aspect of his playing was hugely inspiring. He was always going to take you on a trip to some uncharted part of the universe. His playing skirts the limits of earthly experience. It’s virtually a shamanic inner journey. 

He also brought many production ideas to the guitar. Somehow you feel at Woodstock that he was trying to register his protest at the falling bombs on Vietnam, managing to say as much with his guitar as other protest songs had done with words. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

I think "Purple Haze" is my favourite Hendrix song. It’s a very cleverly written tune, and is full of unexpected twists. It defines the term psychedelic. Both the angular guitar riff and the opening dissonant chords give you that feeling of Iron Man Cometh. 

But there’s vulnerability too in the lyric, with the idea 
of confusion running through it. Although "Purple Haze" is a short song, he often played it live with extended moments which sometimes literally did "kiss the sky," to quote the lyric. 

His impact on music was huge. A man who didn’t need a light show. For me it was just enough to watch the alchemy of his fingers, his dexterity and the way he danced with his instrument. 

ALLEN HINDS

ALLEN HINDS 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

I remember my older brothers and sisters buying Are You Experienced. First thing was, “holy crap, this is the coolest guy I’ve ever seen”, so the nostalgia factor is high. He could play really well and I fell in love with the songs. Even though I loved the Beatles, he was the first guitarist I wanted to emulate. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

He brought a Marshall amp and psychedelic sensibility to the blues and R&B. I suspect even to him the acceleration of volume and feedback with amplification was overwhelming. I think he was just holding on for dear life, in a great way. No one had heard anything like that before! 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

For the playing alone I love Band Of Gypsys the most. Listen to his solo in "Machine Gun." He was so creative. You could extract some of his improvised phrases and make complete song melodies. 

He was like a jazz player in that sense and could create something from nothing. You just waited on the edge of your seat for the next burst of emotion. Still the very best! 

Some confuse his curiosity and adventurism as sloppy at times, but I don’t hear that at all; he was searching and going where no man had gone before. 

Just imagine if he were here now! 

GREG KOCH

GREG KOCH 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

Jimi was and is my main inspiration. He was a true innovator as a guitarist, songwriter, performer and purveyor of sonic mayhem. My chordal approach as well as blues playing is heavily influenced by Jimi’s. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

Of course the way he manipulated the whammy bar, or Mr Wiggles as I like to say, along with feedback and his creative use of effects from the Octavia to the Uni-Vibe greatly expanded the emotive range of the electric guitar. 

His greasy blues phrasing and extraordinary rhythm playing really has left an indelible mark on everyone since. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

It’s hard to narrow it down to one. Let’s just say if I had to bring one record to a desert island it would be Axis: Bold As Love. 

MICHAEL LANDAU

MICHAEL LANDAU 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

I first heard the song "Purple Haze" when I was eight years old. We were driving around in my mother’s car and when it came on the radio it scared me to death. But after I heard the song a few times, it started to have a calming affect on me and I couldn’t get enough of it. 

His music and his guitar playing demonstrated all of the different sides of human emotion in such a beautiful way. His influence has always been enormous. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

He reinvented it, plain and simple. He showed everyone a completely new and fresh approach to playing techniques and sonic possibilities that had never been done before. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

"Castles Made Of Sand" would be one of my many favourites. Here Jimi was mixing R&B style guitar playing with abbreviated jazz voicings as only he had done, and the tone was just so raw and beautiful. The sentiment of the lyrics on that song are beautiful as well... it’s almost like a nursery rhyme, but for grown-ups. 

I also love the out-take of "Blue Suede Shoes" from the Loose Ends record. You can really hear the joy, the energy, and the fun he was having with Buddy Miles in the studio. Such a great moment. 

RONNI LE TEKRO

RONNI LE TEKRO 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

I started playing the electric guitar in 1976, just a few years after Jimi passed away. At the time 1970 seemed like 100 years ago, being 13 myself. My uncle gave me "The Wind Cries Mary." It was a revelation. 

I loved his voice, playing and image from day one. Later, when I was able to hear more material I instantly understood that Jimi was one of a kind. His ability to push the guitar into new landscapes stunned me and has been a big inspiration. Especially his extensive and abusive use of the vib-bar as well as implementing large doses of feedback. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

Jimi revolutionised the electric guitar. Still I haven’t heard another guitar player with such rhythmical feeling. His solos and playing are so incorporated into his compositions. It’s reaching a higher dimension when you play, sing and compose like that. He was driving the band to magical heights. 

My favourite line-up must be with Mitchell and Redding. Those guys certainly knew how to play freely on the highest level. It sounds like it’s out of control. 

I love that Jimi also gave all guitar players a warning about what could happen to you if you indulge in chemical drugs. Some didn’t take the warning, unfortunately. They sensed that drugs where the driving force in Jimi’s music, but like Jimi they couldn’t handle it. 

His image and live performances inspired and inspires most of us. That being said, I have always been trying to create my own sound and way of playing the guitar. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

My favourite song is "The Wind Cries Mary," simply because it was the first track I ever listened to. It’s something about that song that still gives me the shivers. The production is so full of life and feeling. I think his opening guitar line has probably been copied a million times. 

Of his live performances my favourite is Isle Of Wight festival. You can sense it’s getting closer to the end but little did Jimi know. He is delivering a show out of hell. 

Later I learned to love Frank Marino and the Mahogany Rush. I think he is the guitar player that developed and carried Jimi’s legacy the best. Check out "King Bee" from his Live album. I think Jimi would have been proud.

STEVE LUKATHER

STEVE LUKATHER 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

It was the aftershock of the Beatles changing the world, then an alien came and landed on our planet to give those that understood, the truth. All that before he was 27 years old. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

A total reinvention of the possibilities. He could make a statement with his use of feedback and amazing use of chords and R&B stylings which he made his own. Very loudly! It’s like nothing else. I’m not sure anyone could make an impact like that afterwards. 

EVH did but he was not on a cultural level because Jimi was part of the 60s anti- establishment scene. Black man with a white band accepted by everyone but I never saw colour, just the sound. It was a colossal sound; the anger and intensity of "Machine Gun" through to the softness of "The Wind Cries Mary."

Goodness knows what he could have gone on to have done!

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

Impossible. They are all a huge part of my growing up. Kids today might not ‘get it’ but remember this was 1966! NOTHING like it had happened before or indeed after it. 

HANK MARVIN

HANK MARVIN 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

It was probably early 1967 when I first heard the Jimi Hendrix Experience. They were performing their first single, "Hey Joe," on Top Of The Pops and, as we say in the weather bureau, I was blown away. 

I loved Jimi’s guitar solo, blues but not as we know it and with so much feeling. Jimi opened the door to a whole new world of guitar playing. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

I’m not aware of anyone before Jimi using feedback in the way he did, or using the whammy bar to create effects so extreme that it probably contributed to global warming. 

He also showed the music world that the electric guitar could be played with the teeth, used as a fireplace and in the right hands be a wonderfully expressive instrument. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

The opening riff on "Purple Haze" is hard to beat, but then there’s the live version of "Red House" on Hendrix in the West. I love those deceptive bends. 

JOHN McLAUGHLIN

JOHN McLAUGHLIN 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

Jimi changed the electric guitar forever. I was exposed to the acoustic guitar playing of Muddy Waters at the age of 11, and it was revolutionary. Jimi started a revolution 25 years later. Now while I was exposed to Muddy, Bill Broonzy and other great blues players at an early age, I got captured by jazz from 15 years old. But on hearing Jimi for the first time, I heard a guitar being played in a way I’d never heard before. 

At the same time I could hear the profound influence of Muddy Waters not only in the playing but in Jimi’s singing. It was completely new and yet I could hear the history behind his playing. 

I mention my love of jazz but there’s a connection to Jimi here. Jimi revolutionised the sound of the guitar using distortion to bring in harmonics; by the mid 1960s, John Coltrane began to bring in harmonics into his sound and, while the two styles of Coltrane and Jimi are really diverse, there is something very deep that connects them. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

By renewing the influences of the great Mississippi blues players, Jimi brought history up to date with a concept that was not only contemporary, but remains contemporary today. 

There are great musicians who have a powerful impact on other musicians, but to create a new concept of playing is even more significant. I think it’s safe to say that the concept Jimi introduced, changed the way of playing the guitar for all time. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

My favourite piece from Jimi is his interpretation of "The Star Spangled Banner." With a guitar, an amp and a wah-wah pedal, he created not only the most amazing interpretation of the American National Anthem, full of irony, but the most powerful anti-war piece of music I’ve heard to this day. 

STEVE MORSE

STEVE MORSE 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

I loved the way that he created mind-bending, unreal atmospheres with his studio recordings; the backwards solos, the echo effects, Rotovibe, wah-wah, octave box, slide effects, whammy bar, etc. 

I was just a young teenager and I just wanted to play "Purple Haze" and "You Experience" solos upstairs in my room with my amp cranked up to get feedback. That is partly how I developed an approach where I mute all the strings but the one I am playing, in order to limit the feedback only to the string I wanted. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

All the previously mentioned sounds (backwards solos, echo effects, Rotovibe, wah-wah, octave box, slide effects, whammy bar, etc), but also strong phrasing, soulful, powerful bends, and melodic rhythm playing. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

That would be "Are You Experienced." In fact, I wrote a ‘in the style of Hendrix’ piece called "Well, I Have” as a tribute. The ending part has the backwards solo too! 

OZ NOY

OZ NOY

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

Hendrix is the most influential and important electric guitarist that ever lived. His tone, touch, energy, musicality and fire to me are what rock-blues electric guitar is. I loved Hendrix’s songwriting, and his sense of rhythm influenced so many guitar players in all different styles of music from rock to funk to R&B to gospel. 

Also, to me he is one of the greatest blues players to ever lived, as every time he played a slow blues it was special. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

He opened the doors to electric guitar in such a huge way, that I don’t think anybody has more influence on the instrument than he did. The tone of both his rhythm and lead guitar is still untouchable. His soloing was obviously amazing, the depth of his blues roots mixed with this new-age rock feel using very loud amps that created a lot of sustain. 

I don’t think any of that existed before him, and if it did it wasn’t on such an extreme level. He was also a very special rhythm guitar player. The use of wah-wah, fuzz and Univibe set the bar for those sounds to this day, really. 

Hendrix didn’t only change music, he changed our culture! 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

"Castles Made Of Sand." I also love the intro and the actual song and the guitar tone of "Spanish Castle Magic." I love the rhythm guitar playing; it’s hard to choose one! 

ORIANTHI

ORIANTHI 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

The first time I heard Jimi Hendrix was when my dad put on the Woodstock video. I was 11 years old. I was blown away. The freedom in his playing and the sounds he created inspired me so much. He was such a force. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

He opened people’s minds. He was an innovator and was constantly searching. He made the guitar sound like no other. He changed the way people heard it. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

"The Star Spangled Banner" from Woodstock. It’s just an amazing moment. I also love the acoustic performance of "My Train A Coming."

My favourite tune is "Voodoo Chile" though. I cover it a lot. 

ULI JON ROTH

ULI JON ROTH 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

Jimi was my most important influence, artistically speaking, when I was younger. I can’t even begin to put into words how much I have learned and soaked up from that man. 

To this day, his music doesn’t get old, but always sounds fresh and incredibly alive. His contribution to the world of guitar playing and rock music is unbelievably important. Of all the people in rock music, Jimi was simply the most unique and most visionary. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

He brought a completely new approach, both in terms of playing as well as forging a sound which had never been heard before. His playing was always so much more than ‘just’ guitar playing, though. 

There was always something deeper, something more meaningful, something mysterious behind the notes. He was one of the great inspired artists of all time, and because of that he will be remembered forever. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

There are so many moments that are totally inspired and unique, but if I have to pick one, it would be Axis: Bold As Love. It doesn’t get better than that. 

JOE SATRIANI

JOE SATRIANI 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

Jimi’s heart and soul were evident on everything he played. This had the most profound effect on me as a young player. I still get the feeling that he surrendered himself to the music every time he performed. 

For Jimi, every song was a unique opportunity for expression, exploration and exposition. Even though he was a true showman, he still strove for something new, honest and ‘of the moment’. 

His skills as an improvisor were spellbinding, and convinced me as a young musician that that very skill had to be part of my life’s pursuit. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

He showed us that the electric guitar could be played with far more expressiveness than previously attempted. 

He innovated with his fingers, hands, and his whole mind and body on every song he played. 

He proved that the sound of the guitar was a vastly larger tool for musical story telling. 

He showed us that you could play like a virtuoso without reminding the audience of anything that sounded like scales and exercises. 

I could go on... 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

Every time someone asks me this question I find a new answer. The problem is, I love all of Jimi’s songs! For sheer groundbreaking electric guitar brilliance it has to be "Machine Gun" from the Band Of Gypsys: Live At the Fillmore. For sheer beauty maybe it’s May This Be Love or 1983 (A Merman I Should Turn To Be). 

But, I can’t ignore the magic captured on film at the Monterey Pop Festival when Jimi talks to the audience and introduces the Bob Dylan song "Like A Rolling Stone," and then proceeds to reinvent it, elevate it, and destroy it, along with his guitar! 

His innocence, boldness, naivety, audacity, musicianship, showmanship, are all gloriously on display in this once-in-a-lifetime and beautifully captured moment. 

KIM SIMMONS

KIM SIMMONS (Savoy Brown) 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

Jimi made me focus on who I wanted to be as a guitarist. He was so flamboyant and multi-faceted that I knew I couldn’t compete on that level, so I had to look within and find my own personality and style. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

Jimi’s guitar playing was Arabesque. It was a mixture of rock, blues, gospel and jazz. He brought a sensuality to the instrument that we hadn’t seen before. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

"Foxy Lady" comes immediately to mind. It was on his 1967 debut album and the song brings back happy memories of London in that time period. 

ANDY TIMMONS

ANDY TIMMONS 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

Jimi’s life and music are a continuous source of inspiration and encouragement to explore growth and creativity in a most loving and spiritual way. His true beauty of character emanated through his guitar and his songwriting. Jimi also spoke with the same beauty and eloquence with which he played his guitar and wrote his poetic music. 

I encourage you to seek out interviews and documentaries to learn more about the incredible human Jimi was. And is!

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

I think we largely take for granted much of Hendrix’s innovation in technique and tone today. You have to consider what he did, when he did it. Think about the other music that was happening in late 1966 and early 1967! 

His masterful command of chordal embellishment, his incredibly soulful bending, his array of tones, his control of feedback, his use of the vibrato bar, his ferocious and charismatic live performances. 

All of these elements were certainly beginning to be implemented by other performers and players, but nobody had put it all together in such a highly developed fashion like Jimi. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

Though I have many favourites ("Freedom," "Angel," "May This Be Love"), "All Along The Watchtower" has always stood out as a really special Hendrix recording. It’s at once dark yet beautiful, haunting yet uplifting. An incredible reading of his hero Bob Dylan’s beautiful lyric, Bob’s precedent gives Jimi even more confidence vocally. The guitar tones and incredibly melodic soloing take you into the stratosphere! 

All that being said, my favourite moment was easy to pick. His performance of "The Star Spangled Banner" at Woodstock is legendary on so many levels: the tone, approach and arrangement, the protest of the war, the sombreness and finally the beautiful love of his country despite its deep flaws. 

The moment? Check out the melody that magically appears at 2:10 in the midst of chaos, anguish, air raids, bombs, missiles and terror. Almost like permutated taps. Sombre yet hopeful. 

WALTER TROUT

WALTER TROUT 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

It’s monumental. He took electric guitar playing to an entirely new place. I was 15 and this friend of mine said, I have this album by this new guy, Jimi Hendrix, come on over. I was into Michael Bloomfield and Scotty Moore and James Burton, and I went over and he put on the first Hendrix album. I said, “It doesn’t even sound like a guitar, this is the worst shit I ever heard!” 

Then I realised he’d taken what the rest of the world knows about the electric guitar further than anyone had ever taken it. And to this day he’s my favourite guitarist. But it was so new that it was shocking to hear it. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

He was huge once I came around to what he was doing. I had to listen to "Red House" before I realised he’s playing the blues. Even though he was pushing the limits, everything he was doing was based in blues, and R&B and soul music. 

He’s putting it all together and playing it through an electric guitar like no one had ever done before. I think Jeff Beck is the world’s greatest living guitar player, but Jimi was the ultimate. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

My favourite track is "Voodoo Child." But I mean the long slow jam version, not the "Slight Return" that everyone plays ad nauseam, every club band. But with that slow blues version, everyone is in the studio and they’re just having this great blues jam.

 Steve Winwood is on Hammond B3 I think, and they just do this long, slow, 14-minute blues jam. For me, his guitar playing on there is the ultimate of everything that he ever did. 

CARL VERHEYEN

CARL VERHEYEN 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

Jimi Hendrix is a huge influence on my rhythm guitar playing. His concepts and chord voicings have saved me countless times in the studio when searching for a part. All you have to do is learn these five songs: "The Wind Cries Mary," "Castles Made Of Sand," "Electric Ladyland," "Bold As Love," and of course "Little Wing." 

You’ll see that his rhythm licks in D Major are the same as the ones he uses for the relative Minor which is Bm. Learn the rhythm licks and study this Major-Minor concept and you’ll be a much better rhythm guitar player. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar? 

Jimi was a pivotal musician in the 20th century. Besides his R&B training with Little Richard’s Upsetters, he draws on the Delta blues players’ deeply moving tradition of acoustic blues. That tradition migrates up the river to Chicago where players like Muddy Waters electrify it, and one-chord Delta blues songs become Catfish Blues and Two Trains Running in Muddy’s band. 

When Hendrix arrives on the scene mid-century, he turns them into psychedelic rave-ups like "Voodoo Chile" and "Machine Gun," thus carrying the tradition into mainstream rock. Obviously his use of distortion, effects and recording techniques were huge breakthroughs for the electric guitar, but I believe his contribution to popular music will be remembered equally for its deep roots in American blues. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why? 

It’s really hard to pick one because I love "May This Be Love" as much as "Who Knows" from Band Of Gypsies. But the long version of Voodoo Chile stands out for me because Jimi is baring his soul on this record. Tuned down a whole step, his huge Strat sound completely fills the room. 

When I recorded with Jimi’s engineer Eddie Kramer a few years ago, I asked him how he got that sound on this ‘live in the studio’ recording. Eddie said, “That was Jimi’s amp bleeding into all the mics: Steve Winwood’s Leslie cabinet mic, Mitch Mitchell’s drum overheads, Jack Casady’s bass amp mic, and the vocal mic.” I said, “Weren’t you worried about phasing issues?” He replied, “We got lucky!” 

I hold this up as one of the greatest Stratocaster sounds of all time. Very lucky indeed! 

Originally published in Guitar Techniques issue 314. Subscribe to Guitar Techniques in print or digital.

Back in December 2020, Paul Gilbert sold his one-of-a-kind, custom-built 1987 Ibanez “Ice-Stroyer” on Reverb.com for $16,000.

Gilbert parted ways with the electric guitar to assist his former bandmate, Racer X bassist Juan Alderete, and his family with the significant medical expenses they incurred after Alderete was involved in a serious bicycle accident that left him with a traumatic brain injury, a fractured clavicle, and a spinal fracture. 

Commissioned by Gilbert in 1987, the guitar was reportedly supposed to be merely a pink Destroyer. However, Ibanez – feeling that Gilbert would want unrestricted access to the upper reaches of the fretboard – built Gilbert the top half of a Destroyer, but cut the bottom half of the body like one of the company's Iceman guitars. 

“This Ibanez Ice-Stroyer was built by the Ibanez Custom Shop in Bensalem, PA in 1987,” Gilbert explained in 2020. “Only two were made. This pink one, for me. And an orange one for Bruce Bouillet. I used this guitar for live Racer X shows, for Mr. Big recordings, and on Mr. Big tours.

“Over the years, I changed the bridge to a fixed bridge, moved the location of the toggle switch, and had a DiMarzio Tone Zone and a DiMarzio single coil pickup installed," he continued. 

"The back of the guitar has sushi stickers that I got on my first tour of Japan with Mr. Big back in 1989. And my signature on the headstock is back when I was still signing in script. The tall frets are in excellent condition, and the guitar plays and sounds great!”

Listed by Nashville's Rumble Seat Music, the guitar – which can be seen on the cover of Racer X's 1988 live album, Extreme Volume Live – is said to be in "excellent" condition. It can be purchased now for $18,500.

To view the full listing, point your browser over to reverb.com.

By the mid-1990s, Joe Satriani had things pretty much sewn up career-wise. Four of his six studio albums had gone either Gold or Platinum, and his touring dance card was filled for much of any given year.

But despite his spectacular success, something had started to feel a little...off. He wasn’t having the kind of fun he had imagined years before, when he was a budding guitarist dreaming about rock stardom.

“I thought there would be more camaraderie among other players than what I was experiencing,” he says. “As a teenager, I had this idea of what things would be like if I ever hit it big. There would be parties, and I’d get to hang out with my guitar friends. We’d jam and talk about music all night long – that kind of thing.

“Instead, the opposite was true: I was isolated. I would go on tour and play the same set, and then I’d go back to my hotel room and be on my own. I’d have 100 shows in front of me, and then I’d have to make another record and do it all over again.”

Satriani wanted to shake things up, but he didn’t quite know how. And then it hit him: He would create a new kind of show, one that celebrated the communal spirit of electric guitar playing that he craved.

“Nobody was really doing anything of the kind,” he says. “You had blues and reggae festivals. You’d see disco revivals and things like that. Lollapalooza had just started up. But there was nothing really that spoke to guitarists.”

It’s no coincidence that, at that time, interest in guitar was entering a slump from which it would take years to recover.

Starting in the late 1980s, rap and hip-hop had grown in popularity, and were the dominant forms of popular music as the century careened toward its conclusion. Youngsters had become more interested in the power of two turntables and a microphone than in the trenchant blast of a Les Paul cranked through a Marshall stack.

It was still too early to see the lean years that would come, when guitar heroes’ relevance would dim, but Satch’s desire for a guitarist-led event would prove timely.

“I wanted to stand shoulder to shoulder with my friends and peers,” he recalls. “And so I thought, Well, nobody else is doing it, so I’ll do it.”

Satriani met with his management team and laid out his grand vision of a traveling show featuring himself and two other guitarists (hence the “G3” moniker), with each player performing an hour-long set followed by a three-way jam.

Once his managers were sold on the idea, the hard part began: convincing booking agents and concert promoters of the package’s validity. “We were breaking the rules that everybody had been taught over the years,” Satriani explains.

“Promoters around the world, and especially in the U.S., like to keep guitarists’ itineraries separated, for business reasons. They don’t want to dilute the market. But I always thought this format would be energizing, because it went against the trends. I always knew it could work.”

Since its first run in 1996, G3 has become the longest-running guitar-centric tour of its kind. All in all, Satriani has taken the show on 18 treks across the U.S., Europe, South America, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

Along with Satch himself, the tour has featured guitarists such as John Petrucci, Robert Fripp, Steve Morse, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Steve Lukather, Yngwie Malmsteen, Michael Schenker, Uli Jon Roth, Paul Gilbert, Al Di Meola, Adrian Legg, Phil Collen and the Aristocrats.

But none of it would have happened had G3’s maiden voyage not connected with audiences.

Satriani knew his first package had to pack a wallop, and his dream lineup – a triple-headline bill he shared with his close friend and one-time guitar pupil Steve Vai, along with Texas guitar star Eric Johnson – was a no-brainer.

“I really didn’t have to think about it,” he says. “I wanted to do it with them, and that was all there was to it. I knew we could all shine together onstage.” Vai and Johnson required no arm twisting.

“I said yes immediately,” Vai says. “The second Joe told me about what he wanted to do, I was in. And it superseded other plans I may have had, because the concept felt fresh. Plus, it was something that I thought was needed in the guitar community at the time. The idea was just fantastic.”

Says Johnson, “I felt the same way. It sounded like a novel idea at the time. I remember my manager said, ‘I like this. It sounds really different and cool.’”

Some 25 years on, the first G3 tour and its subsequent editions remain a singular achievement in the world of guitar. Coincidentally, all three of the tour’s founding members are currently releasing albums and planning tours. We thought it was the perfect opportunity to ask them to reminisce about their experiences together and to fantasize what another run might look like.

It was important to me to keep the spirit of guitar music alive no matter what new style of music was becoming popular. I wanted more interaction with great players, and I knew the audience wanted the same. So I took the bull by the horns.

By the late ’90s, it was evident that guitar-based music was losing popularity as rap and hip-hop became the dominant genres. Joe, did you have a premonition that the guitar was in danger of losing some of its relevance when you launched G3 in 1996, just a few years before?

JOE SATRIANI I was more focused on what I felt the fans were craving, and what I too was craving: more fun with the guitar. Having been a performing musician since I was 14 years old, I knew that styles would change and society would simply change channels, so I wasn’t phased by what was happening in the mid-to-late ’90s.

It was important to me to keep the spirit of guitar music alive no matter what new style of music was becoming popular. I wanted more interaction with great players, and I knew the audience wanted the same. So I took the bull by the horns.          

Eric, as everybody knows, Joe and Steve share a long history. When you signed up for G3, did you feel like you had to break the ice with two guys who knew each other so well?

ERIC JOHNSON Well, maybe a little bit, but they were always affable and made me feel comfortable right away. Obviously, Joe and Steve grew up together, and I wasn’t a part of that. But I was totally aware of both of them and their music. I respected them and knew what they were about. I was welcomed very warmly, and that made it very easy to be a part of G3.

Joe and Steve, did you feel like you had to bring Eric into the fold, or were you two like, “Oh, he’ll figure it out”?

SATRIANI I knew it would be fine. I never thought that we had to coach each other. We were all of the same mind: “Isn’t this going to be amazing?” Then at the end of the night, when we start playing together, our attitude was, Let’s just wing it and see what happens! And I can’t tell you how excited I was every night to be destroyed by these two guitar players.

STEVE VAI Come on! [laughs]

SATRIANI It’s true. It was so much fun, because it’s one thing when somebody destroys you onstage like that, and you’re right next to them and you can see how they do it. It’s a life-learning experience. I loved that, and it’s something I’ve always loved about every G3. There’s nothing like it. You can’t replicate it in any other way.

VAI To answer the question you asked about having Eric: Yes, Joe and I have a friendship that goes way back, a very rich, wonderful friendship throughout our lives. We’ve been joined at the hip since I was 12. [laughs]

So to do G3, and to know that Eric was going to do it, too, I was immediately thrilled. Bringing Eric into the fold, it never felt like Joe and I were a group and there was an outsider. We were all very present in the moment. We were three accomplished, mutually respectful players really looking to raise the bar for ourselves and for the guitar.

I know for me, every time I get on a stage with really accomplished, inspired players, it’s impossible not to expand my own potential. Like Joe says, when you’re standing next to these guys, they push you and challenge you. You have to raise your bar because they’re doing it. That’s the feeling you get when it’s your turn. It’s very inspiring, and it’s nice.

Some of my favorite onstage moments were when the three of us were playing together and listening to one another. It’s a very intimate space, and nobody is Joe, Steve or Eric. It’s just this environment of listening and responding.

Joe, during those first G3 tours, did you have a sense that you were keeping the spirit of guitar virtuosity alive at a time when it was in short supply? Did that have an impact on the shows, either in your commitment to keep doing them or in who you brought along on tour?

SATRIANI The G3 stage was the one place where you could play any way you wished. There were no boundaries. You could overdo it, or you could underplay it and be subtle. You could stand still, you could sit like Robert Fripp, or you could bring your own rock and roll circus to the stage.

I encouraged my fellow players to try anything and everything every night. We would support, echo and sometimes challenge each others’ improvisational tangents. Virtuosity on the guitar comes in many forms, and there’s no reason they can’t be celebrated right next to each other.

There have been three other tours with this lineup. When you tour, does it feel like “the band is back together”? Like you’re the Three Amigos.

SATRIANI “The Three Amigos” – I like that. [laughs] I think we should launch another tour once the world opens up a bit. It would be interesting to see where we’ve been musically. We can come back and trade our secrets once again.

JOHNSON Yeah, yeah!

VAI I’m down.

JOHNSON We could wear those Mexican outfits like [Chevy Chase, Martin Short and Steve Martin] did in The Three Amigos. At least for the encore. [laughs]

Joe, when you put together other iterations, did you ever ask Steve or Eric who they wanted to come along as the third guitarist?

SATRIANI Well, it’s a complicated thing putting G3 together, because my responsibility is both creating and selling the package. It starts a year before we want to hit the road. There are a number of scenarios that we have to float to all the different promoters to get a consensus of what they will agree is worthy of the invitation, because you can only play if you’re invited. You don’t just show up.

That means that we come up with Plans A, B, C, D, E, F and G, and then we see what the reaction is. Part of the music business is pretty cruel. It’s numbers and statistics. It’s always been about ticket sales, but back then it was a lot about radio. These days, the social media thing is really a big deal. It’s the first thing promoters do: They see if you’re trending on TikTok or Instagram. They need to determine if they want to take the risk.

That’s how that starts. And, of course, there’s a fine line between sticking to your guns about what you really want to do and listening to the feedback you get from your promoters. There’s no way to know who should be the third guy in Eastern Europe versus Canada, so you’ve got to talk to the promoters to see what they think and what suggestions they might have. Sometimes they’re good ones, and sometimes you’re scratching your head going, “Really?”

It’s difficult. It’s a very long period, and we have to be extremely quiet and discreet about it until we’ve distilled all this advice and feedback. Then we put out the invitations and reach out to the players that have risen to the top of the list, and we have to see what they say. Some players don’t want to play with other guitarists.

I suppose that’s true.

SATRIANI Yeah. I think there are fearless players out there, and then there are people who are still very guarded. I think that’s the defining difference. These gentlemen here are fearless and totally confident, and they just want to make their audience happy. That’s what you want. You don’t want any other baggage coming onstage.

I imagine sometimes choosing the third guitarist feels very easy and natural, but are there instances when you’ve thought, I don’t know how this is going to work?

SATRIANI Well, one of the most interesting characters was Robert Fripp, beyond a doubt. When he joined up, he insisted that he not be listed, and he wanted to play before the show. He said, “Look, don’t turn the lights on. I’m going to sit behind all the amps, and I’m going to play music as people walk into the venue and find their seats. And don’t mention my name.” It’s what he wanted to do.

Sometimes [bassist] Stu Hamm would play with him unannounced. He’d just come out, sit right next to Robert and he’d play along, or some of the other guys would play. It was really quite beautiful. Robert is such a wonderful human being and an incredible musician. We did a couple of other tours together, just me, Steve and Robert playing blues guitar or something. It was hysterical, and he was fearless about that. He was Robert Fripp to the very end.

JOHNSON Well, I was actually thinking of Robert Fripp when Joe mentioned him, because it was like, Wow, that’s different! He was definitely coming from left field, I think. But it was beautiful and cool. People really enjoyed it, too. I thought it sounded great. A lot of people told me, “Hey, have you heard Robert play with the G3 thing?” They thought it was great.

For the encore jams, you three have played “Red House,” “Goin’ Down” and “My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama.” How do you guys come up with those songs?

SATRIANI We start emailing each other about what would be a fun song. I think I put it to the guys that we should pick songs that weren’t our own but were somehow connected to us in some way. They would be songs that the audience would recognize and that would celebrate the guitar.

It wasn’t about one of the participants’ new single or something like that. We had to drop all that pretense that we were there to sell our new thing. I think the Zappa song was Steve’s suggestion. He brought that in, and it was great. It turned into one we did over and over again through the years.

VAI Joe would always reach out for suggestions, and there were many, many songs we’d toss out. Some of them would be head-scratchers, but I always relied on Joe to decipher it all, feel through it and pick what the final jam songs would be.

That went for everything – routing, position in the set, where you’re standing onstage. It was always diplomatic, but there’s a practical sensibility that needs to be exercised in all of these things. And that was Joe, because he’s got the tools.

Joe and Steve, you’ve done a number of G3s with John Petrucci as the third guitarist. Eric, I think you played on one tour with John. Is that right?

JOHNSON I did, yeah, in South America. John Petrucci’s amazing. I’m more familiar with him now, and his drummer, Mike Mangini. You know how there are certain groups that you don’t know their whole deal? Even though they’re almost a parallel track as yours, it’s not somebody you really listen to that much, but you still knew they were great.

I wasn’t familiar with John at first, but I was really blown away by him. It was kind of funny, though, because when I first met Mike Mangini, I didn’t know who he was. I asked him, “Are you down here teching for the band?”

VAI I remember that.

JOHNSON Then I heard him play, and I was like, “Oh, my God.” I should say that teching’s no different than playing. I think I embarrassed myself, because I didn’t know who he was. It was a bummer, because I was never able to get to know him; I think I made him feel awkward.

But he was such a fabulous drummer, and John was remarkable. They had a whole different thing going on, with the way they broke up time signatures and stuff. It was just amazing. I got schooled on that during the tour, not unlike the G3s that I did with Joe and Steve. It was like taking lessons every single night.

This is for all of you: How did your G3 experiences impact your feelings about the other two guys here?

SATRIANI Whoa… There have been so many moments when I would stand on the side of the stage watching Steve and Eric play, and then I’d look out at the audience and think, Do they have any idea how amazing this thing is? When are they ever going to see this again?” [Satriani’s cell phone rings] Oh, sorry about that. It’s my agent calling.

JOHNSON He’s saying, “Come on. Book a G3 tour!” [laughs]

SATRIANI And make it snappy! [mutes his phone] Like I said, there were so many moments. For me, in those private moments, standing there and watching them play, it was beyond remarkable. They truly felt the music, and that’s very inspiring. And then to see what they did to the audience, lifting them up, raising their spirits. It just makes you think, We’re doing the right thing.

JOHNSON With Joe, I was really shocked at his precision, virtuosity and sound. Every single night, he would nail everything, unlike somebody else who might be talking. [laughs] Obviously, his records are beautiful, but he plays that stuff live to a T. His touch, his fingering… truly outstanding. He would just nail it all the way.

And then there’s Steve – this organic guitar orchestra. From comedy to sadness, he packs in all these different emotions, and they go way beyond guitar sounds. That blew my mind. It was just such a hemisphere of learning for me.

How about you, Steve?

VAI With Joe and Eric, I already knew of their excellence. You know, I can be a sloppy, visceral performer. I always enjoy what I do, but there’s a little part of me that says, “You can be better. You can be more concise. You can be clearer and cleaner.”

So when I’d get onstage with these guys, that’s what I recognized. Seeing them perform, I saw the presentation of a whole piece of music that was immaculate. No disrespect to any other G3 performer, but if I go back to listen to any G3 record, I go right to Eric’s performance of “Manhattan,” which is flawless.

Every night I would watch him, and beyond being absolutely entertained by a musician at the height of his potential, I would always feel like, Steve, you’ve got to do more of that. He was inspired and performed beautifully from beginning to end.

And, of course, that’s Joe’s middle name. You know how many times I’ve seen him perform? [laughs] Every time he gives you this incredible presentation. What he offers you is beautiful. The song is respected, and it’s mastered completely.

You get as much out of it as the audience.

VAI Oh yeah. When I see these guys do what they do, I could be depressed or I could be inspired. And they always inspired me. I knew how they could perform. But what was interesting for me was putting a microscope on myself.

If anything, I’ve always been a bit of a pretentious rock star. [Joe and Eric laugh] It’s true – you guys know it. And that was exorcized out of me a bit. When you work with guys like this – because they’re humble, and they’re excellent – it’s fun and educational to get your ass kicked.

We were friends before, and we’re friends after. What more could you ask for?

Order Joe Satriani/Eric Johnson/Steve Vai: G3 Live In Concert here.

Visit the Joe Satriani website for more info on G3.

Axe legend Paul Gilbert has a long association with Guitar Player. He made his first appearance in these pages in February 1983, at age 16, when he appeared alongside Yngwie Malmsteen in Mike Varney’s “Guitar Spotlight” column. 

In the late ’80s, he had his own “Terrifying Guitar 101” column, an essential for wannabe shredders in the pre-internet age, when lessons in the guitar magazines, Guitar Player in particular, were saved and pored over for months. 

In his many instructional home videos, it was apparent Gilbert possessed more than an uncanny facility for hair-raising guitar pyrotechnics and an off-the-wall sense of humor; he also had a gift for being able to simplify the most complex of topics. 

Gilbert is still very much involved in guitar instruction and posts more than 1,000 videos a year for students in his online guitar school at artistworks.com. Having released a couple of albums with Racer X in ’86 and ’87 (compulsory listening for shred heads), he hooked up with Billy Sheehan in ’89 and found international mainstream success with Mr. Big. 

Ironically, their biggest hit, the 1991 acoustic ballad, “To Be With You,” featured one of his simplest guitar solos. After Gilbert left Mr. Big in 1999 (he rejoined in 2009), he went on to forge a career as a solo artist, releasing a string of critically acclaimed records, many featuring his vocals as well as showcasing his unparalleled axework.

Gilbert’s latest release, Werewolves of Portland (Mascot Label Group), is an all-instrumental affair. Indeed, the melodies are so strong, a vocalist would be superfluous. Such was true of his previous record, 2019’s Behold Electric Guitar, and it’s a direction he seems set to continue with, as he reveals in our wide-ranging discussion about his current modus operandi.

How did you record during lockdown? Did you use a band in the studio or work remotely?

My initial idea was to do it live in the studio with a band, like I did for Behold Electric Guitar, but because of lockdown, all my plans went out the window. 

I wasn’t sure what to do, so I took time off and concentrated on my school, but I was concerned that I had to do something about the record, so I finally decided to play everything myself. I had no idea if that would work. I love playing drums but that doesn’t mean I’m necessarily good enough.

I discussed it with Kevin Hahn, who engineered it, and we agreed to try it at Opal Studios in Portland. We agreed that if there was something that didn’t work, we could bring somebody in. In the end, we only needed to use someone for a snare buzz roll. Otherwise, it was all me, and it was really fun to do it all myself.

There is a very upbeat, commercial feel to the album, with hooky parts all over every song. 

I think the fact that I had a lot more time to write because the whole schedule was pushed back might well have been a factor, and I’m almost glad that it was. I had ideas, and I would have been relying on band members to help arrange things, but because I had an extra six months to work on the record, I was able to think a lot more about melodies. 

Plus, after the last tour I started to get a lot more comfortable with the idea of playing melodies on guitar. That may seem like a simple idea, but to me that is a huge change in philosophy from where I began as a guitar player. I always thought melody was the singer’s job. 

The players that I grew up idolizing and copying weren’t playing melodies in their solos the way Boston might have approached a solo. I was coming more from the athletic guys, like Van Halen, Yngwie, and even Jimmy Page, who tended to play solos that weren’t just based on the melody of the song.

The other thing that scared me away from melody was Muzak, which younger readers may not remember. There was actually a company called Muzak that made horrible background music where they replaced the singer with a guitar line and very often ruined the song by playing the melody in a sterile way. 

I think that influenced me to believe that a guitar couldn’t play the melody with the same emotional intensity as the singer. I started to change my way of thinking after I did a tour way back in 2007 with Joe Satriani, where he played a whole show with guitar melodies. It made me re-evaluate the way that I viewed the instrument.

Does the fact that this record and the last were all-instrumental mean you aren’t planning to make vocal albums?

Playing melodies on guitar has changed my views of vocals, as a lot of limitations are taken away. I have no fear of the high notes and a better appreciation for the low notes. I would hardly ever choose one of my own melodies to reproduce as a guitar line, as the vocals don’t go very far. 

If you take something like “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” by Elton John, he’s all over the place, with huge interval jumps in the melodies, and that’s really fun to reproduce on an instrument. It’s hard for me to travel a lot melodically with my voice, as I don’t have much of a range. With the melodic limitations removed by playing the melodies on the guitar, I have the freedom to go wherever I want with a song.

There is a lot of slide guitar all over the record, although rarely in the typical blues-lick approach. Does slide give you a better way to express yourself?

Slide guitar really opens up the door to expressing emotion in a melody. I never sounded good with slide for the longest time, until I had a slide that was too big for my third finger. I put it on my second finger, and my slide playing instantly transformed – the vibrato, the tuning, and my expression. 

I’d never spent much time on slide, but at that point I started working on “Mercedes Benz” by Janis Joplin and “Blackbird” by the Beatles, really trying to capture the nuances of the way they were singing, with the slide playing the melody. That led me to find my own voice. As a music fan, I’ve always listened to singers more than just guitarists. 

There are so many great vocal melodies, and recently my goal became to be able to play any melody that I hear in my head, pretty much instantaneously. Think of the kazoo. You could give that to anybody and they could play something like “Happy Birthday,” or any popular melody, without any musical skill whatsoever, and you’d instantly know what they were playing.

I realized that, as a guitarist, that is actually quite a difficult skill to master. And I realized that, even after 40 years and being recognized as a shred monster, I couldn’t actually do it – I could work it out after a few moments, but not instantly. At first I thought it was kind of funny, but then I thought it was actually a tragedy. [laughs]

So I started to go through melodies in my head – maybe the Beach Boys or Elton John or someone – and try to reproduce them on the guitar. Slide is a fantastic way to do that, because you tend to work horizontally, on one string, so you can find the melody without getting into scale patterns and familiar left-hand fingerings.

Having a slide on your left hand limits your speed. Does that make you – or allow you to – look for other ways to generate intensity and emotion? 

You can’t play a million miles an hour with slide, but most melodies aren’t that fast anyway. What happens is that I become very aware of who is playing. And by that I mean, Are my fingers playing, or is my inner melodic generator playing? Am I playing something that I actually hear in my head, or am I just letting my fingers run around the fretboard? 

I like both things. I’ve spent a lot of time letting my fingers run around the fretboard, and I can stir up some excitement by doing that. I also really like, and find it really satisfying, to have a melody in my head come out as I’m playing, without working it out.

To me that is what true improvisation is. In my inner mind, I tend not to hear a wall of shred – I hear melodies. But I still do love to play fast of course. Slide makes the vibrato sound different, and it gives me another voice.

Making an instrumental record, there is no human singer, so perhaps the slide can be a singer’s voice, and then the solo can be the lead guitar player part, and I can create that conversation between the two voices rather than having the one level going through the whole song.

The opening of “Hello! North Dakota!” has a real Brian May vibe, before the main tune kicks in. 

I looked up the state anthem for North Dakota and did, as you say, work out a Brian May–style arrangement. It turned out that the music was based on a piece from Haydn. In the main part of the song, I really embraced the idea of feel and tempo changes. 

In fact, I did that on many of the songs, much more than I have ever done it in the past. It’s a challenge to make those changes as a one-man band. I had to plan in advance with the click track and make sure it had smooth transitions in terms of radical tempo changes. We spent a lot of time getting the click tracks right for each song, before a note was recorded.

You often play melodies that sound like they are actual lyrics. “My Goodness” is a strong example of that. 

That actually had a set of lyrics, as did most of the songs. There will be a booklet with the CD that will have all the lyrics printed in it. The line here was, “My goodness, goodness me, I’m seeing everything I never thought I’d see.” 

It’s much easier to write an instrumental piece when there’s a lyric that serves as a guideline for the melodies. It lets me have strange, embarrassing, unfinished lyrics as well. [laughs] Nobody is going to hear them sung, and sometimes a lyric fragment can jumpstart the melody, and it can find its own way after that.

“I Wanna Cry” kicks off with a non-blues guitar line before shifting into a traditional blues groove, and then morphs again into a Hendrix-like funk blues. What lies behind that constantly shifting concept?

I always try to start a song off with something that will grab a listener’s attention enough to keep them listening. 

I think my go-to technique for an intro is to play some kind of fancy guitar licks, and when I was sequencing the record it was hard, because so many songs started off with some kind of 16th-note phrase or fast guitar part, and I was getting tired of it.

This was initially a blues melody with lyrics, but I was wondering what I could do with it so that it’s not just playing a 12-bar blues, which has been done a lot. I felt like I needed to add some twists to it to break it up.

“Meaningful” brings a very distinct change of pace and feel to the album. 

That was the first track I recorded for it. It was slow enough that I could see how playing the drums would work out, almost like a test for the whole process. I had a lot of lyrics for this one. 

The melody has some really long notes, which are way easier to do on guitar than with my voice. [laughs] I really loved this when I finished it. It moved me in exactly the way that it should. 

Playing bass on this was pretty challenging, as there was so much harmonic movement; I wasn’t able to sit on the root. For most of the songs on this album, I had to take that melodic approach, as there was so much going on harmonically.

Did you use anything new guitar-wise for the record?

I brought a lot of guitars to the studio, including my signature models, but I think the main difference was that recently I’ve been buying a bunch of vintage Ibanez guitars from the early ’80s.

One of my favorites is a Roadstar II; it has a very Strat-like maple neck, 21 frets, and a non-locking tremolo. When I use that whammy bar, it feels like the first Van Halen album to me, when he was still using a stock whammy. The feel of the guitar was so much like that Van Halen feel that I found it very inspiring.

What did you use amp-wise? 

I wanted to record sitting next to the amps, because you hear more resonance. I used a one-watt Marshall and a Fender Princeton Reverb, and I had them in the control room with me. 

I ran them clean and got my overdriven sounds from pedals. I had a big collection of effects units, but particularly important were my JHS PG14 signature distortion pedal, a TC Electronic MojoMojo overdrive, and a Supro Drive. And occasionally I used an MXR Phase 100 and a Cry Baby.

Since the start of your career, you’ve been involved in teaching, and you currently run your online guitar school on artistworks.com. What does teaching do for your own playing? 

A lot of the riffs that I use to connect melodic ideas in my songs are inspired by my teaching. All the lessons that I do in my online school are basically four-bar phrases that I’ll come up with to help a student with a specific problem, be it alternate picking or whatever. It shows them how to apply the idea to music, rather than just an abstract exercise. 

A lot of times I come up with phrases that I really like and that I think sound very cool, so at the end of every week I’ll go through all of the ideas and pick out my own personal “greatest hits,” and then put them on the computer. Then, if I need a part, I can scroll through hundreds of ideas. There is a heavy riff in “North Dakota” that came from trying to teach a student about syncopation.

What are the most common problems that students have, and how do you help them find their own voice?

The most common problem is how to hold the guitar. [laughs] I see so many students hold it like a classical guitar, which is fine if you’re going to play classical guitar, but if you’re going to play rock music, you need to get your thumb wrapped over the top of the neck. That’s how you’re going to get a big vibrato. 

The next thing is that students need to develop a really indestructible sense of time. It’s maybe boring to hear people talk about that, but if you can stomp your foot the way a drummer would play a hi-hat, and then play in time, that’s how you’re going to feel it. There is an initial learning curve, much like a drummer has, as you’re trying to play two distinctive rhythms together separately from each other.

Once you nail that, every drummer you ever play with will have a big smile, because you’ve locked into the rhythm, and the audience will have a big smile because everything you play will sound focused, and it feels really good to you as a player when everything is tied together rhythmically.

I want to teach people to be musicians. The biggest compliment I can get from students is when they say that after spending time at my school they hear music differently, in a deeper and more profound way.

What’s coming up next for you? 

I’m busy with my school, almost daily in fact, seven days a week. I’m making video lessons, and that’s been a lifesaver during lockdown, as I can stay in touch with people, and it’s kept me from going insane. 

I enjoy writing music now more than I ever did in my life, now that I’m writing as a singer with melodies, rather than letting my left hand dictate things. I’ve got a guitar camp coming up in July that I’m hoping will still happen, although the future is harder to predict than ever. 

My school is online, so that isn’t really going to be affected by whatever might happen when live music eventually returns. I’ve been excited to find a way to record an album where the only other person who needed to be there was an engineer, so that’s given me a lot to think about, going forward.

• Werewolves of Portland is out now via Mascot Label Group.

COVID-19, for well over a year, did away with live music in most of the world. Confined mostly to their homes, guitarists came to lean on their home setups as not just a useful tool, but an absolute necessity for recording, writing, demoing, teaching, learning, and streaming during pandemic times.

With that in mind, a few months ago, we contacted eight guitar heroes from the worlds of blues, jazz, metal, prog, and more and asked them about their home rigs – what's in them, how they use them, and how they want to improve them. 

Alex Skolnick

He's played with thrash-metal titans Testament and the jazz-leaning Alex Skolnick Trio, but he’s also led the acoustic-based Alex Skolnick’s Planetary Coalition of artists from around the world and has his own podcast, Moods & Modes. 

The Brooklyn-based musician took us inside his home studio, which is always primed for those moments when inspiration strikes.   

What’s your home rig’s main purpose?  

Mainly recording and songwriting. For woodshedding, I’ll usually just play through an amp or acoustically. If inspiration strikes, I’ll hit “record” on the iPhone or Zoom H8 MP3 recorder.   

What’s in it? 

• Recording: Apple MacBook Pro OS Catalina running Logic ProX 10.6.2, with an IK Multimedia Axe I/O interface and iLoud speakers, and a Fishman Platinum Pro EQ/DI analog preamp for acoustic guitar with pickup and electric bass  
• Electric guitar tone options: Kemper Profiler, IK Multimedia AmpliTube 5. Zoom G11 multieffects processor, mic’d Fender 1960 Super and Fender 1968 “drip edge” Vibrolux  
• Mics: Shure SM57, Sennheiser MD 421, Studio Projects C1 (vocals and acoustic guitar without pickup), Røde Procaster (for podcasting)
• Other: TC Electronic 2290 digital delay, Alesis V49 keyboard/MIDI controller, Toontrack Superior Drummer 3 software  

How did you come to choose this gear?

I had a ProTools rig for a number of years. I found it was hard to keep up with the updates, and whenever I’d get a new computer, it was complete disruption. 

Once I tried Logic Pro, I liked the feel. It has a user-friendly quality, similar to Garage Band, but on the same professional level of ProTools. I also didn’t have the disruption I’d had before, since it’s an Apple product. 

IK Multimedia has been very supportive, having me design a series of presets for AmpliTube 5, which is really “next level.” I have a few interfaces, all good, but their Axe I/O has noticeable quality, and the IK Multimedia Z-Tone DI helps dial in the signal. 

The Kemper unit is something that Testament adopted for live shows, encouraged by our sound engineer for its consistency. Since there’s a learning curve, I was a bit reliant on my tech and just thought of it as my live rig for metal sounds. Yet once I took it home and found my away around it, I was shocked at all the options, tone-wise and effects-wise.

I’ve used it on the majority of “quarantine video” tracks in 2020 and 2021. All the other gear was either acquired over the years, received through a recommendation, or sent for me to try out and approved.

Do you have a favorite piece of gear? 

I’ve developed an addiction to the Kemper. I know it well, and when I need a sound, I know how to find it. 

What’s the best thing about your setup? 

My system is organized in a way that makes it relatively easy for me to switch in and out of different projects with minimal distraction. 

What would you like to change or add to it? 

I’m getting to the point where I really need to upgrade my machine. Some of my recent projects have been very dense. They’ve included a full drum kit (rather than all the drums bounced), and projects with 10 or more musicians. I own a condo in Brooklyn and one of the trade-offs of living in the city is less space, hence my sticking with a laptop. But I feel a desktop beckoning.

Richie Kotzen

In addition to being a monster guitar player, Richie Kotzen is a prodigious songwriter. Beyond serving as the primary songwriter during his stints with Mr. Big and Poison, he’s released more than 20 solo albums – including 2020’s 50 for 50 set, which celebrated his 50th birthday – as well as a trio of discs with the Winery Dogs. As he reveals below, his home rig is rarely ever turned off.   

What’s your home rig’s main purpose?  

To make my records and occasionally record other folks. Although my setup has been relocated on three separate occasions, the actual gear has been used to record most of my music, including the Mr. Big album Actual Size, as well as both Winery Dog albums and 50 for 50. 

When it was out of my home, it was part of a public recording studio I used to own called Headroom. Gene Simmons, among other well-respected folks, recorded there. Since then, I moved the gear back into my home and trimmed down some of the components I found unnecessary for my own personal use. 

What’s in it? 

As far as gear, I’ve got preamps and various compressors from Manley, API, Neve, Focusrite, and ADL, to name a few. I’ve got some vintage Neumann and AKG microphones as well. 

I don’t really use much EQ when I record, because for me it’s primarily about the microphone placement, and the preamp and compression. Of course, using Neve or API preamps plays a major role in making it easier to get tone. My favorite compressor is my Anthony DeMaria Labs C/L 1000 or the 1500 if I’m recording something in stereo.

How did you come to choose this gear? 

I started making records at a very young age and I was always curious why recording engineers would select specific gear for certain recording applications. I would always ask questions, so I learned very quickly what I liked, and that’s what I went out and bought when I put together my recording setup many years ago. 

In earlier times, I had an MCI 24-track machine with 16-track heads on it. It sounded great, but it was a pain in the ass to deal with. Once Pro Tools came out, I switched over and never looked back.

Do you have a favorite piece? 

My pair of vintage Neve 1073 mic preamps. These are the real deal, racked by Dan Alexander in San Francisco.

What’s the latest addition to your rig? 

For my 50th birthday, Larry DiMarzio gave me an amazing preamp made by a company called Inward Connections. I believe the company goes under Tree Audio now. This thing sounds fantastic and is very similar to my API mic pre amps which I love.

What’s the best thing about your setup?

It’s designed for my style of recording and my needs. I usually end up playing everything myself on my records, and my setup is such that every instrument is always mic’d up and ready to go.

What would you like to change or add?

The drum live room is down a flight of stairs. To compensate for that, I have a large monitor in it and a keyboard with a mouse next to my drum set, which is tied into the control-room computer. It’s great because I can fully run my Pro Tools from behind the drums without having to run to the control room every time I want to fix or change something.

Paul Gilbert

From his mid-1980s years with Racer X through his 1990s tenure with Mr. Big, Paul Gilbert established himself as one of the great guitar virtuosos of the era. 

In addition to releasing his latest solo album, Werewolves of Portland, he’s continued to issue loads of video lessons for students of his online guitar school, all of which make steady use of his home rig. Paul eschewed our questionnaire to provide his own rig tour.   

“I built a small pedalboard that I keep near my main computer desk. I use it to practice, write songs, do Zoom/Skype interviews, and record into Pro Tools. The selection of pedals changes sometimes, but my JHS PG-14 overdrive is usually front and center. The EarthQuaker Devices Dispatch Master is nice because I can get both reverb and delay without taking up a lot of space. 

“The MXR Phase 100 makes me feel like Johnny Winter. And the Catalinbread Callisto chorus is for vintage Rush-style riffs. I send this into a Marshall JTM1C running clean. I keep my favorite Ibanez Fireman guitars nearby and my iPhone for recording song ideas quickly. 

“On the other side of my desk, I keep a 1978 Ibanez Artist hollowbody. It’s loud enough acoustically that I can hear it without using an amp. So when I need to quickly figure out a song or try out an idea, this is the guitar I grab. 

“In back of my desk is my Ibanez miKro double-neck and my cat. I think you can see why these are important. The other room in my studio is where I shoot videos for my online rock guitar school at Artistworks. Lately I’ve been running amps in stereo, as the TC Electronic Arena reverb, Alter Ego delay, and MXR Stereo Chorus all sound great with a stereo spread. 

“I’ve got two Marshall Bluesbreaker combo amps. I love these amps, but when I’m sitting really close to the transformers, it creates some hum, so I’m actually using a Marshall JTM1C, and a Marshall JTM45 head (running into one of the speakers on the Bluesbreaker), both far enough away from me to prevent hum. I’ve got GIK acoustic panels covering most of the other walls to deaden the sound. This is really important to help keep things focused, especially in small rooms. 

“I built a larger pedalboard for this room. My prototype signature MojoMojo overdrive by TC Electronic (same as the factory model, except it’s purple and has a switch that goes to 11) is on most of the time. I use the JHS PG-14 to add more sustain and to tailor the pick attack. I’ve been testing out an experimental Dunlop Cry Baby Junior wah-wah that has an external bypass switch. 

“This switching system is a lot easier for me (especially sitting down), compared to the standard foot switch. The pedal that looks like a hockey puck is a Peterman Puck’N Stompa – a hockey puck, modified to sound like a bass drum, when you stomp on it. This plugs into my mixer and allows me to keep time with my left foot. 

“Recently, I set up another small pedalboard for my TC Electronic Ditto Looper. I use the One Control 1 Loop Box as an A/B switcher. This sends my guitar to the Ditto Looper to record the audio loop. The Ditto goes out to a Roland Micro Cube amp. After the loop is recorded, I switch back to my main stereo Marshall rig for the solos.”

Myles Kennedy

In a typical year, Myles Kennedy would have been busy in his roles as singer and guitarist for Alter Bridge and as vocalist for Slash’s backup band, Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators. But since lockdown, he’s had time to work in his home studio, where he created demos for his new solo album, The Ides of March.   

What’s your home rig’s main purpose?  

Woodshedding, songwriting, recording. I have two rigs placed strategically to keep me inspired no matter where I am.   

What’s in them? 

In my loud room, I have a Diezel Schmidt and Paul Amp into a 2x12 cabinet with Tone Tubby speakers. Sometimes, when I want a tweed vibe, I’ll plug into the ’58 Fender Deluxe. 

In my writing/demo room, the main go-to is a Universal Audio Apollo x4 interface. I use the Diezel VH4 and ’55 Fender Deluxe amp plug-ins for late-night recording. I’ll fire up my ’53 Fender Super Amp when I want to play loud enough to freak out the neighborhood.   

How did you come to choose this gear?

I discovered Diezel amps while we were making the the second Alter Bridge record in 2007. I integrated their amps into my home rigs for writing in that realm, but for my solo material the older Fender tweeds hit the mark.

For demos, the Universal Audio interface can’t be beat. I started using it last year while writing The Ides of March. I retired most all of my outboard gear once I realized how effective the plug-ins are.

Do you have a favorite piece? 

My ’58 Deluxe sounds stunningly good. I also love the Diezel Schmidt. It’s like a Vox AC30 on steroids. 

What’s the latest addition? 

PRS just sent me a prototype for a new take on a classic amp. It’s a beast. I wish I could tell you more. 

What’s the best thing about your rig?

It’s relatively simple. I’m just trying to keep the tone intact without compromising it by using too many pedals before hitting the amp. 

What would you like to change or add? 

I think I’m going to have to build a studio outside of my living environment – a real man cave with tacky velvet Elvis posters, lava lamps, and assorted arcade games surrounding an API console. 

How much use did it get this past year? 

A ton. There was nothing else to do but write and play music. I haven’t been this productive in years.’

Ron 'Bumblefoot' Thal

Beyond his high-profile stint with Guns N’ Roses from 2006 to 2014, Ron “Bumblefoot” Thal has distinguished himself in the hard-rock supergroups Art of Anarchy and Sons of Apollo, and in his lengthy and diverse solo career. 

In addition, he writes TV jingles, theme songs, and background music. Needless to say, this mad professor’s home lab gets regular use.   

What’s your home rig’s main purpose?  

Mostly songwriting and recording, but also plenty of mixing and mastering, teaching – all things music. It’s a second house I got about 20 years ago for the purpose of having a studio where artists could stay while they work, and I’ve made great use of it over the years. 

It’s an unusual studio. It has a Swiss Cheese room (to match my old Swiss Cheese guitar) with 3-D holes in the walls, and a big yard that grows berries every summer. 

What’s in the studio? 

I have some nice outboard gear but have slowly become in-the-box, which allows me to work from other locations. At the studio, it’s a PC with Steinberg Cubase and WaveLab. I have a lot of audio interfaces – Prism Orpheus, IK Multimedia Axe I/O – but I mainly use a Focusrite 18i8 linked to a Focusrite 18i20 (both 3rd-gen) when doing live drums. 

On the road, I bring a Focusrite 2i2 and a PC laptop with Cubase and WaveLab. I have lots of Shure and Sennheiser dynamic mics, Audio-Technica and AKG condenser mics, Cascade ribbon mics, lots of Line 6 Vetta heads and Engl heads, an old Marshall head, Engl and Marshall cabinets, TC Electronic stompboxes, and lots of custom effects – a Morley switchless wah, a G7th capo, glass and metal slides, thimbles... and a kazoo! Plus Vigier electric guitars and Cort acoustic guitars all over the place. 

How did you come to choose this gear? 

The equipment built up over decades of recording and touring. There are many memories and events connected to every piece of gear. 

Do you have a favorite piece? 

That would have to be the Vigier signature series DoubleBfoot fretted/fretless double-neck guitar. That’s my main piece of gear. Next in line is the Line 6 Helix Native plug-in. I get every possible guitar tone I could imagine, and it adds so much to the writing and production. The song “Planetary Lockdown” that I released last year wouldn’t have happened if not for the features in the Helix. 

What’s the latest addition to your rig? 

TC Electronic makes a hand-held string sustainer called Aeon. I’ve been using that a ton with the fretless, and I love it! 

What’s the best thing about your setup? 

The drum room. It’s 11-by-22, with nine-foot walls and a ceiling that slopes up to 15 feet. It’s a loud room and gets great reflections that bring the drums to life. Lots of tone and energy. You can’t fake that with artificial reverb on close mics. You need the full reflections. 

What would you like to change or add? 

I’d like to remove gear that I no longer use and find a home for them where they’ll be used and not collect dust.

John Petrucci

As Dream Theater’s virtuoso guitarist, John Petrucci is one of rock and progressive metal’s most inspiring axe men. Beyond his own recent solo disc and a new one from Liquid Tension Experiment, he’s been at work on Dream Theater’s next album. 

Given his busy schedule, it’s small wonder his “home” rig is a fully outfitted studio a mere 20-minute drive from his house.   

What’s your rig’s main purpose?  

Writing, recording, and producing records as well as rehearsing, press, promotion, and so on.    

What’s in it? 

• Guitars and amps: Ernie Ball Music Man John Petrucci Majesty guitars, Mesa/Boogie John Petrucci JP-2C amplifiers  
• Recording: Pro Tools, RND Shelford channels, and RND 5024, RND D8 and Black Lion Audio B12 preamps
• Monitors: KRK V8, Adam A7X, Ex Machina Quasar, sE Electronics Munro Egg  
• Mics: Mojave 301, Royer 121, Shure SM7B, Shure KSM353, Sennheiser MD 421, Audio-Technica ATM450, sE V2, and Audio-Technica AE2500   

How did you come to choose this gear? 

Virtually all of the gear in this studio has been chosen by Dream Theater engineer James “Jimmy T” Meslin. 

Do you have a favorite piece? 

The RND Shelford channels have proven to be crucial in this setup. They are extremely versatile and the key to capturing great recording tone from multiple instrument sources. Having said that, without my signature guitars and amps, I’d have nothing to capture! 

What’s the best thing about your setup? 

The space itself is incredible and perfectly conducive to creativity and productivity.

What would you like to change or add? 

I’d like to increase the size of studio’s live room and add a more elaborate photo/video studio.

Marty Friedman

Since 2003, the former Megadeth guitarist has been flourishing in Japan, where he’s just released Tokyo Jukebox 3, the third installment in his series of albums featuring instrumental covers of Japanese songs. 

As he explains, his home rig plays a crucial role in helping him develop his ideas and performance before he records the tracks in earnest.  

What’s your home rig’s main purpose?  

It’s strictly for pre-production purposes. Its the simplest, barest-bones setup, but it has all that’s necessary for laying down ideas or tracking and editing demos.  

What’s in it? 

A MacBook Pro, GarageBand, Blackstar Fly speakers, Korg microKEY air; IK Multimedia AXE I/O interface, AmpliTube 5 and Modo Drum; Mooer GE300 amp-modeling processor and Hornet digital-modeling combo, Maxon Auto Filter, my Jackson MF-1, and a few other guitars and basses.   

How did you come to choose this gear?  

The simplest easy-to-use, good-sounding gear is all I care about in the demo process, so that’s what I try to choose. 

What’s the latest addition to it? 

AmpliTube 5. Sonically, I think it’s much better than 4, and that was super already.  

What’s the best thing about your rig? 

When I’m playing, writing, recording, or performing, I don’t want to think about anything other than the content of the music. This is especially true at the idea stage and the demo process, which is what I use this rig for. 

I don’t need lots of tonal options at this stage. If I have an idea, I press “record,” and it’s done. Occasionally, I’ll fall in love with some lucky mojo that happened on a phrase from one of my home demos, and I’ll slip it into a recording, but that’s rare.  

One good thing about working this way is that, before actual tracking, I’ll have recorded many demos, in every structure, tempo, and key imaginable. So by the time I’m doing the real recording, I’ve decided exactly what I want to do, and I know the material so well that the focus of the actual recording session is purely a performance of material that I am very comfortable with, thanks to having done all the home demos.

Sonny Landreth

The slide guitar wizard has been called the King of Slydeco for the zydeco influence that runs through his work. 

Combining right-hand techniques of picking, tapping, and slapping, with left-hand moves like fretting behind the slide, Landreth is a virtuoso like no other. Here’s what he uses to keep in practice, write songs, and make demos.   

What’s your home rig’s main purpose?  

It’s my little one-stop, multifunction station for practicing, fleshing-out songs, trying out new gear, and recording tracks that’ll help jumpstart the next album in a real studio with my engineer, Tony Daigle. It also gives me an off-the-clock, stress-free way to work on other artists’ projects, too.  

What’s in it? 

Though I keep a lot of gear handy, I basically start with the same tried-and-true drive section on my pedalboard that I use onstage: guitar signal into a Demeter Fuzzulator for boosting solos, then to a Hermida Mosferatu, Analog Man Comp, and Voodoo Lab Giggity preamp/EQ pedal combination. 

From there I go into whichever of my amp heads I wanna use with a Universal Audio OX Amp Top Box or a Dumble 2x12 cab, depending on which neighbors are home. Or I’ll change things up with a profile I’ve tweaked to as near the quantum level as I can get. Kemper, Fractal Audio, or Line 6 – they’re all ridiculously good. 

Next in line is my mic pre and EQ before hitting a Demeter VTCL-2 tube comp/limiter in front of the iMac. Monitoring the whole shebang is an ART SLA-1 power amp that fires up a pair of Yamaha NS-10 speakers. I’m still running an earlier version of ProTools with a Digidesign Command 8 controller. Works for me and still more than good enough to make the cut sonically.

How did you come to choose this gear?  

Oh, man, lots of trial and error. And I’ve been lucky. All the years in studios and on the road exposed me to a lot of stuff and gave me the opportunities to discover and experiment with it all. The main thing for me is that each piece of gear in the chain – pickups, pedals, outboard gear, whatever – has to make a difference and contribute directly to the best sound I can get 

Do you have a favorite piece?  

That would be the vintage API lunchbox that the late, great Brent Averill put together for me back in 1994. It has two 312 mic cards and two 550A EQs. My producer, R.S. Field, turned me on to him and API way back then, and it’s been a blessing. I think anything sounds great through it, but I’ve always found the midrange clarity and chime it gives my electric guitars to be extra special. 

What’s the latest addition to your home setup? 

I recently got the compact version of the SlideRIG dual-comp pedal from Origin Effects. That’s really cool, and I used it for a track on Dion DiMucci’s new album in the works. 

What’s the best thing about your home rig? 

Accessibility. It’s literally part of my bedroom in a loft, so, for better and for worse, it’s right there. 

What would you like to change or add? 

I’ll eventually have to upgrade to a new computer, but I’m in no rush. Otherwise – and I can’t believe I’m saying this – I’m really happy with what I have. But there’s always something else around the corner to check out. That’s part of the fun... and the torture.

TC Electronic has teamed up with Paul Gilbert to create a new signature edition of its MojoMojo overdrive pedal.

Gilbert's signature MojoMojo is largely the same as the original, but for two key differences. For one, the original drive unit's burgundy finish has been replaced by a purple one. Second, the original's Voice switch has been swapped out for an "Eleven" switch.

“Paul always uses the same settings on his MojoMojo, which meant there was no need for the additional Voice switch found on the original version," explained TC Electronic's Paul Robert Scott in a press release.

“Instead, we went for an Eleven switch that engages a massive gain boost for even more drive and attack, taking it to, well, eleven! On top of that, you can add stepped-up circuit board voltage that increases both headroom and dynamics significantly.”

Otherwise, the original MojoMojo's control layout and true bypass functionality remain the same.

A price and release date for the TC Electronic Paul Gilbert signature MojoMojo overdrive pedal have yet to be announced as of press time.

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

Paul Gilbert has released Werewolves of Portland, the title track from his upcoming 16th studio album.

The song's accompanying music video sees Gilbert serve up a platter of impressive guitar licks – which span silky alternate picking lines, tasty slides and soaring bends – cut between footage of him and his six-year-old son Marlon howling at the moon. Watch it below: 

“Werewolves of Portland is actually two songs, put together,” Gilbert says. “The first song is based on a short lyric, ‘I've got to look out for the werewolves... I'll take a deep breath... ah-whoo!’ which allows me to play some dramatic slide guitar. 

“The second song was originally titled Dad Metal. It's full of fast guitar riffs, percussive picking, and modulating dominant sus4 arpeggios. This section is very busy musically, so I was happy to join it with the sustaining ‘ah-whoo’ howling part for contrast. I played a melodic blues guitar solo, with some jazz chord changes in the middle, to let the song breathe even more.”

Gilbert also recalls drafting his son in to bring some extra energy to the Werewolves of Portland music video.

“I brought the idea of ‘Dad Metal’ to life by having my 6-year-old son, Marlon, play guitar [and] drums, and dance together with me. Marlon brought great energy (and mischief, in general) to the video, and I tried my best to keep up with him. I'll admit that my legs were sore for about two weeks after the shoot. Dancing is hard!”

He continues: “I decided to play my Ibanez double neck guitar for the silhouette sections of the video, and Ibanez built a matching double neck – in two days – for my son to use. He could barely lift it, but he tried his best! It's an awesome guitar, that I plan on using myself, at least until he's old enough to play it.”

Werewolves of Portland is the third single from Gilbert's upcoming album of the same name, following the scorching Argument About Pie and the equally blistering A Thunderous Ovation Shook the Columns.

The album is set to feature a wealth of six-strings from Gilbert's personal collection, too.

“I've been collecting vintage Ibanez guitars lately, too,” he says. “I brought some models from the '70s, '80s, and '90s like the Ibanez Artist, Roadstar II and Ghostrider. I also brought and modified a '60s Epiphone Olympic. I used to play those in the early days of Racer X, so it was fun to have a guitar that reminded me of my early shredder style.”

Check out Werewolves of Portland's full tracklisting below:

1. Hello North Dakota!
2. My Goodness
3. Werewolves of Portland
4. Professorship At The Leningrad Conservatory
5. Argument About Pie
6. Meaningful
7. I Wanna Cry (Even Though I Ain't Sad)
8. A Thunderous Ovation Shook The Columns
9. Problem-Solving People
10. (You Would Not be Able To Handle) What I Handle Everyday

Paul Gilbert is busy prepping the release of his upcoming 16th solo studio album, Werewolves Of Portland.

Back in March – upon his announcement of the album – Gilbert premiered its first single, "Argument About Pie," the music video for which, it turns out, inspired some unique signature guitar picks from the maestro's friends at Jim Dunlop.

“Tortex has crafted some 'Pie Baby'' picks from some of my drawings from the 'Argument About Pie' video," Gilbert wrote of the picks on Instagram. ".050mm has my favorite tone and thwap.”

Gilbert first revealed his affinity for (much) thinner picks in an interview with Ultimate Guitar last summer, citing the fact that he kept running out of heavier picks as the original catalyst for the switch.

"What actually happened was that I ran out of heavy ones," Gilbert said. "I had a box of heavy-gauge picks and I ran out of those, so I went a step lighter, and I ran out of those, so I started using the thin ones. 

"Pick scrapes are so ferocious on a thin pick – that in itself almost makes it worth it. That, and the more I got used to it, the more I found myself strumming acoustic-style through the solos.

"Kind of like when Hendrix would do 'Killing Floor.' There are solos going on but he's not picking individual strings, he's just banging away. So thin picks are good for that stuff."

Paul Gilbert has premiered a new song, "A Thunderous Ovation Shook the Columns."

The second single from the guitar legend's upcoming 16th solo studio album, Werewolves Of Portland, the song was inspired by composer Dimitri Shostakovich.

Of the song's title, Gilbert said that it's "a line that I saw when I was reading about the audience’s reaction to the debut performance of Shostakovich’s 5th Symphony. They liked his symphony! So, fortunately, did Joseph Stalin, who had made no secret that he did not approve of some of Shostakovich’s earlier music, and that he'd better write something more pro-state, or be sent off to a 'work' camp in Siberia."

You can check the tune out below.

Recorded at Opal Studio in Portland with co-producer and engineer Kevin Hahn, Werewolves of Portland is set for a June 4 release via The Players Club. Notably, it features Gilbert – who didn't want to wait until the end of the COVID-19 pandemic to record the album – on every single instrument.

You can examine Werewolves of Portland's cover art and track list below.

To preorder the album, step right this way.

Paul Gilbert – Werewolves of Portland:

1. Hello North Dakota
2. My Goodness
3. Werewolves Of Portland
4. Professorship At The Leningrad Conservatory
5. Argument About Pie
6. Meaningful
7. I Wanna Cry
8. A Thunderous Ovation Shook The Columns
9. Problem-Solving People
10. (You Would Not Be Able To Handle) What I Handle Everyday

Paul Gilbert has announced his 16th solo studio album, Werewolves Of Portland.

Recorded at Opal Studio in Portland with co-producer and engineer Kevin Hahn, the album is set for a June 4 release via The Players Club. Notably, it features Gilbert – who didn't want to wait until the end of the COVID-19 pandemic to record the album – on every single instrument.

You can check out the amusing animated video for the album's lead single, "Argument About Pie," below.

As for the gear he used for the album, Gilbert said "I mostly used my Ibanez Fireman guitars. I've been collecting vintage Ibanez guitars lately, too.

"I brought some models from the '70s, '80s, and '90s like the Ibanez Artist, Roadstar II, and Ghostrider. I also brought and modified a '60s Epiphone Olympic. I used to play those in the early days of Racer X, so it was fun to have a guitar that reminded me of my early shredder style."

You can examine Werewolves of Portland's cover art and track list below.

To preorder the album, step right this way.

Paul Gilbert – Werewolves of Portland:

1. Hello North Dakota
2. My Goodness
3. Werewolves Of Portland
4. Professorship At The Leningrad Conservatory
5. Argument About Pie
6. Meaningful
7. I Wanna Cry
8. A Thunderous Ovation Shook The Colums
9. Problem-Solving People
10. (You Would Not Be Able To Handle) What I Handle Everyday

Ibanez has unveiled its latest Paul Gilbert signature model, the FRM300.

Built with a three-piece okoume/maple set-in neck and solid okoume body, the guitar sports a bound ebony fretboard with a 24.75" scale length. Also aboard are a Gibraltar Performer bridge and Quik Change III tailpiece, for quicker string changes.

Sounds come by way of the guitar's DiMarzio PG-13 mini-humbuckers, which Ibanez says were specifically wound for Gilbert. These are controlled by a five-way pickup selector switch, plus volume and tone knobs.

The Ibanez Paul Gilbert signature FRM300 is available now – in a Purple finish – for $1,099.99.

For more info on the guitar, stop by ibanez.com.

In January of this year, Juan Alderete – a veteran bassist who's played with The Mars Volta and Marilyn Manson, and co-founded Racer X – was involved in a serious bicycle accident that left him with a traumatic brain injury, a fractured clavicle, and a spinal fracture. 

A GoFundMe page – set up in the wake of the accident to help Alderete and his family with their significant medical expenses – has since raised over $200,000. 

Now, Alderete's former Racer X bandmate, Paul Gilbert, has chipped in, selling an ultra-rare pink 1987 Ibanez "Ice-Stroyer" (an Iceman/Destroyer hybrid) on Reverb.com for $16,000.

All proceeds from the guitar will go toward Alderete's expenses.

“This Ibanez 'Ice-Stroyer’ was built by the Ibanez Custom Shop in Bensalem, PA in 1987,” Gilbert said. “Only two were made. This pink one, for me. And an orange one for Bruce Bouillet. I used this guitar for live Racer X shows, for Mr. Big recordings, and on Mr. Big tours.

“Over the years, I changed the bridge to a fixed bridge, moved the location of the toggle switch, and had a DiMarzio Tone Zone and a DiMarzio single coil pickup installed. The back of the guitar has sushi stickers that I got on my first tour of Japan with Mr. Big back in 1989. And my signature on the headstock is back when I was still signing in script. The tall frets are in excellent condition, and the guitar plays and sounds great!

“I will be donating the proceeds from this guitar to Juan Alderete to support his recovery from his injuries from his bicycle accident earlier this year," Gilbert continued. 

"I co-founded Racer X with Juan. He is a great friend, a great musician, and was instrumental to my career both musically and in the business. He got me out of practicing in my bedroom, and onto the stage! Thank you for your support, and enjoy this amazing guitar from a great era!”

You can visit Alderete's GoFundMe page here.

Aside from being an absolutely unbelievable player in his own right, Paul Gilbert also happens to be a uniquely gifted guitar teacher.

His words of wisdom on everything from technique to gear to live performance hold a great deal of weight, so when he was recently asked about his views on guitarists - particularly on YouTube - who become incredibly skilled at an incredibly young age, his response piqued our interest.

"Well, I do a lot of teaching so I see those kids on YouTube and I see a trend that, to me, is really dangerous,” Gilbert told Ultimate Guitar.

"I grew up idolizing Jimmy Page and Alex Lifeson and guys who wore their guitars really low. So I did too. All my garage bands as a teenager, I was playing a Les Paul and I had it down by my knees, and you develop a certain technique of how you hold your guitar when you do that.

"I think a lot of people now are trying to fit into their little rectangle [on their computer screen], so their guitars keep getting higher and I see a lot of people holding their guitar like a classical guitar.

"If you want to have strong '70s vibrato like Brian May, Uli Jon Roth, Eddie Van Halen, Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, of course – all the cast from back then, you have to hold the guitar a certain way with your thumb over [the neck]," Gilbert maintains.

"Most of the cats I see these days have their thumb behind [the neck]... It's kind of a funny arcane thing for me to get a bee in my bonnet about, but it is what it is. It's probably nice for people with small hands. I have these great big hands, so I can still reach stuff even when my thumb is over.”

Gilbert also discussed his career highlights, saying "The most exciting day in my guitar career was when I learned how to do the Jimmy Page lick [from "Heartbreaker"]. You wouldn't believe how many people cannot put vibrato on that E note – it's unbelievably rare.

"I'm over 50," he added. "I'm self-aware enough to know that it's okay – not everybody has to be Jimmy Page. Sometimes I wish that everybody was." 

How could anyone resist an overdrive/distortion pedal that promises a “bonus feature” of Paul Gilbert’s talent, countless years of experience and boyish charm? The PG-14 is certainly a cutie, with its light-blue housing and Japanese-tennis-shoe graphic. And then comes the talent and experience stuff, beginning with a complement of six controls (four pink and two black) for precisely dialing-in OD tones. It’s all pretty self explanatory, with the drive, volume and tone controls being familiar friends of pedals past and present.

However, you also have a push control that determines how hard the input of the circuit is, shall we say, “pushed,” thus affecting the drive control as it’s turned either right (more) or left (less). The tone control does its brightening/darkening thing as you’d expect, and without any pronounced hump in the frequencies, but the PG-14 twists it up with a mid knob that controls the gain of the midrange frequencies, and a mid freq control that selects the range of midrange frequencies (from 400Hz to 7.5kHz) that the mid knob adjusts.

Plugged into 1x12 tube combos — a Carr Rambler and a Fender Deluxe Reverb — and tested with a mix of humbucker and single-coil guitars, the PG-14 proved to be one of the nicest overdrives I’ve played when it comes to getting the midrange just where you want it for killer distortion tones. Just set the tone control where it sounds right for best top-to-bottom balance, and use the mid knob as needed to increase gain and add thickness, juiciness and sustain.

From there, the mid freq control lets you emphasize the middle frequencies across a wide range. If you want more bite, dial it clockwise to let the high-mids brighten the punch, adding slice where it’s needed to make humbuckers jump out of the mix. Want more growl from single-coils? Turn it the other way and groove on how the low mids fill out and fatten up the tone. And again, subtle tweaks of the mid knob brings everything into focus. Beautiful!

On the OD side, the drive and push controls work in tandem to provide a righteous variety of OD tones that are amp-like in feel and respond well to touch and guitar settings. I’d say the voicing lands on the British side of the distortion pond, but more important is how shapeable the FET-based preamp circuit is in response to EQ and gain settings.

You should note that the push control has to be turned up a bit to pass any signal, and it’s an effective tone shaper that provides smoother OD tones when kept on the low side, and more aggressive sounds, along with a sizable boost in gain, when turned up. Whether you want creamy blues tones, badass hard-rock and alt-country sounds that sparkle with glass-splintering intensity, or molten shred tones with great saturation, sustain and definition, it’s all here with a twist of the knob.

Specifications

CONTACT jhspedals.com
PRICE $199 street

CONTROLS Volume, drive, push, tone, mid, mid freq
I/O Input and output jacks, power jack for 9-volt DC supply (not included)
BUILT USA

This interview and lesson was originally published in 2006.

In 1986, Racer X made their recording debut, Street Lethal, an album featuring the impossibly dexterous string-skipping and razor-sharp speed picking of guitarist Paul Gilbert. In a matter of months, the band’s chopsy, often humorous performances made them a sensation in Los Angeles clubs. The exposure eventually led to Gilbert’s pairing, in 1988, with former David Lee Roth bassist Billy Sheehan in Mr. Big. Over the next decade, the two balanced pop-rock songcraft with single-string feats of strength on songs like “Addicted to That Rush,” “Green-Tinted Sixties Mind” and the #1 single “To Be With You.”

Since leaving Mr. Big in 1998, Gilbert has waxed a handful of solo albums but oddly they’ve emphasized his vocals and roots-rock influences more than his guitar antics - even though he ranks right alongside Yngwie, Vai and Satch in the shred pantheon.

It’s only now, with his exciting new album, Get Out of My Yard, that he’s released an entirely instrumental record.

Why did he wait so long?

“I don’t really like instrumental guitar music,” Gilbert admits, “and I rarely listen to it. I liked ‘Satch Boogie’ and the instrumentals Rush did, but players who gave up on being in bands to focus on guitar didn’t interest me as a fan. I like my guitar players with singers: Eddie Van Halen with David Lee Roth, Randy Rhoads with Ozzy, Jimmy Page with Robert Plant. So when I became a solo artist, I wanted to be a singer, too - still have intense guitar, but in the context of a band.

“At the same time,” he continues, “because I am a guitar player, I have ideas that don’t necessarily fit the format of ‘vocal’ music. So I figured that, before I condemn all-instrumental guitar music, I should at least give it a try - see if I could make a record that not just guitar players but also regular rock fans would enjoy.””

The album’s title reflects Gilbert’s musical mindset: “Guitar players tend to be territorial and competitive. So it’s a bit of me wanting to claim my own piece of the art form - to yell at everybody else, in a tongue-in-cheek way, ‘Get out of my yard! I’m doing it my way!’”

Gilbert wastes no time making this statement, opening Get Out of My Yard with a blistering unaccompanied guitar solo. While this particular track might scare off those with a low tolerance for notes, the album as a whole is firmly rooted in rock - from roots to progressive, punk to metal - due largely to Gilbert’s writing process.

“Sometimes I’d think of a band and fantasize about joining it,” he says. “ ‘Full Tank,’ for instance, is almost like my audition song for the Black Crowes. I did the same thing with ‘Hurry Up,’ which is very influenced by Rush.”

Thanks to a rare hole in Gilbert’s schedule (he’s recently married, and spends much of his time in Japan, where he serves as honorary dean of the country’s eight Musicians Institute branches), we were able to rap with him about his new record, and even hit him up for a monster lesson. Read on for a feast of pick-melting, tendon-tearing moves, as well as some more nuanced approaches and even a few riff-writing concepts.

You’ve said that you made an all-instrumen­tal CD because you wanted to unveil “kick­ ass guitar licks no one has heard yet!” Can you walk us through some?

I could demonstrate “Get Out of My Yard,” using my friend Mike [Elsner] as the human capo. I’ve got three E strings [tuned in octaves, on the lower neck of his Ibanez custom double-neck] and a capo at the 8th fret, and I start with a C minor arpeg­gio with a tapped slide on top [FIGURE 1]. I kick in a delay after that, to loop it, and then I go into the moving-capo part.

FIGURE 1

I also used the three E-string idea for “Three Es for Edward,” which has a lot of open-string licks [FIGURE 2]. Arpeggios are easy with this tuning, but chords get pretty tough!

FIGURE 2

There’s also a ton of new stuff in “The Echo Song” [FIGURE 3]. The whole secret is the dotted-eighth-note setting on the delay, which I got from Pat Travers and Pat Thrall. I’m only playing 8th notes, but when you hit the delay, everything gets twice as fast.

FIGURE 3

That’s a cool effect. How about a few more never-before-heard licks? 

Another new thing I did was build chords out of the harmonic minor scale, like in “The Curse of Castle Dragon” [FIGURE 4]. That’s A harmonic minor [A-B-C-D-E-F-G#], based in E.

FIGURE 4

That song also has some fast picking [FIGURE 5]. With most fast-picking stuff, you’re also moving your left hand in time with your right. This is half and half; the end is all picking, on one note.

FIGURE 5

There’s a new way to play arpeggios on that song too. Originally, I took an E5 power chord, played the notes separately, and harmonized it up the E minor pentatonic scale [FIGURE 6].

FIGURE 6

Then I applied that idea to an E minor triad, where I’m using only the notes E–G–B [FIGURE 7]. Once I’d done that with E minor, I tried it with major and diminished as well.

FIGURE 7

There’s also a cool new lick in the solo of “Rusty Old Boat” - a D arpeggio using the exact same fingering in different octaves [FIGURE 8]. I hardly ever sweep arpeggios - I’m always figuring out other ways to get that sound.

FIGURE 8

And people often confuse your string-skipping arpeggios for sweep picking.

Yeah. Something like this [FIGURE 9] sounds a lot like straight-up sweep picking, but it’s not.

FIGURE 9

With string skip­ping, it’s best to start simple - build up some licks where you go between neighboring strings, like this one in A minor [FIGURE 10A]. The trick is in the picking pattern, and the hammer-ons and pull-offs. Now I’ll use the same technique, but with a wider stretch, and skip some strings [FIGURE 10B]. The result is a nice, wide-sounding arpeggio.

FIGURES 10A–B

How do you incorporate those techniques into triad arpeggios?

There’s a bunch, like these in E minor [FIGURES 11A–B], and this very difficult lick [FIGURE 12].

FIGURES 11A–B

FIGURE 12

But just starting at the lowest note and going to the highest note isn’t the only thing you can do with arpeggios. I did a lot of exploring with E minor triads in relation to open strings, to play off how the guitar is tuned [FIGURE 13].

FIGURE 13

There are also a lot of string-skipping triad arpeggios in the Haydn Symphony [No. 88 Finale] I did on this album [FIGURE 14].

FIGURE 14

You also play some ferocious blues-rock licks on songs like “Hurry Up” and “Full Tank!" Are some of these new as well? 

One of the blues licks I just learned - I can’t believe I didn’t know it all this time - involves bending a string and, while it’s bent, switching to the next string, which will be pre-bent, and bringing it back down [FIGURE 15]. I did something like that in “Hurry Up” [FIGURE 16]. It’s that “falling down’’ kind of sound, with­ out the whammy bar. “Hurry Up” is actually my favorite song on this album.

FIGURE 15

FIGURE 16

The main riff starts in the key of E, but then I transpose it up a minor 3rd, to G, for a more “open’’ sound [FIGURE 17]. On the album in general, I tried to do more open-string stuff, because that’s unique to the guitar.

FIGURE 17

You’re doing some incredibly fast picking at the end of “Full Tank!’ What’s happening there?

That’s basically me going nuts in G major [FIGURE 18].

FIGURE 18

The whole trick is the slide with your pinkie, which puts you in position for the next lick. There’s a really basic speed-picking lick I do over and over in the breakdown of “Straight Though the Telephone Pole.” It’s almost like an exercise - and I apologize for that - but it’s still exciting [FIGURE 19]. That’s alternate picking, starting with a downstroke and heading up the E minor scale at three notes per string - one of the best ways to practice picking.

FIGURE 19

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