When Prince died 10 years ago, on April 21, 2016, he left behind a body of work that testified to his songwriting genius.

Left behind too were some of the musicians who worked alongside him and can testify to his unique artistry, unstoppable work ethic and temperamental nature. Prince was known for drilling his musicians relentlessly, recording music practically nonstop and pushing everyone to be all they could be.

“He single-handedly helped me become the guitar player that I am today,” says Mike Scott, a blazingly skilled electric guitar player who had worked with the rap/R&B duo Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis (among many others) before joining Prince in 1996.

Scott toured extensively with New Power Generation and contributed to the albums Emancipation, Crystal Ball, The Truth and Newpower Soul. As he tells Guitar Player, his lead work was more advanced than Prince’s. “Because I was listening to Return to Forever, Al Di Meola, the Mahavishnu Orchestra and stuff like that,” Scott says.

“But when I would take solos with him onstage, he was like, ‘Man, all those notes don’t mean nothing because they don’t translate in an arena. I’ll hold a high note and have people screaming while you play 100 notes, and nobody’s going to hear what you did.’

“That was one of the most important things he ever told me, and there were so many moments like that and so many things he shared that made me a much better player.”

Scott learned early on that Prince could be a harsh taskmaster. When he followed up Prince’s distortion solo with one of his own, the boss called him out.

“He said, ‘Hey, Mike, I just did a fast song and I took a distortion solo. What do you think I should use: distortion or clean?’ And I said, ‘Well, if you just used distortion in the first solo, then I would go clean.’

“And he goes, ‘That’s right. Don’t ever step on a distortion pedal after I’ve taken a solo. If I take a distortion solo, you take a clean solo.’ So for the rest of the tour, distortion was bad.”

That is until Prince’s rig cut out one night just as he was getting ready to solo on “Purple Rain.”

“So he points at me and shouts, ‘Take a solo,’” Scott recalls, “and I got to rip the shit out of that ‘Purple Rain’ solo once in the whole time I was with him.”

Prince assured him it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

“At the end of the night, he said, ‘Did you enjoy that? You’ll never get to take that solo again!’”

Prince also expected his band to follow his lead at every turn.

“Prince would push you to the limits. Like, if you came in today for a rehearsal, he’d go, ‘I’ve got a new song,’ and we’d learn it. But we probably wouldn’t play it for six months, and he would still expect us to play it just like you learned it today.”

For that matter, he wouldn’t tell the band the set list.

“That made it a challenge and made you have to step up your game, because everything you did had to be on point,” Scott says. “And if you made a mistake, he would look at you and rub his fingers together, and that meant you got docked.

“One time he fined me $1,000. I said, ‘You’ll never fine me again.’ And he never did.

“Although he did dock the whole band once because he went to the bridge too early and we didn’t follow him. He said, ‘I never make mistakes — you all made a mistake by not following me.’ So we all got fined.”

But Scott’s deep work with Prince is evidence that his musicianship was valued. He recalls moments when Prince allowed his admiration to show through.

“Sometimes he’d play something and say, ‘Do a harmony to this.’ And it would blow his mind because I never had to practice that stuff,” Scott says.

“There’s a live video of us playing in London, and he broke the band down and just had me play by myself. I was playing this guitar part that was a combination of my part and his part — and then he changed keys and I was still doing it in two-part harmony. That impressed him.”

Apparently, Prince raved about Scott to others but left the guitarist in the dark.

“When I started working with him in ’96, he had a studio tech named Hans Buff, and when I would go in and record, Hans would later tell me, ‘Man, Prince raves about you. He solos your parts out and he loses his mind.’

“But I never saw any of that. I thought Prince hated my playing because he would always ride me and give me shit. But one day he and I went for a limo ride to an after-show party, and we rode around town trying to find a club to go to.

“That was the first time he and I talked one-on-one. And he said, ‘Mike, you’re a great player and a great musician. If you started believing in that, you would take over the world.’ That was the only time he gave me any kudos.”

Micki Free saw a lot of crazy things during his tenure with Prince in the 1980s. That includes the time he and Prince played two-on-two basketball against Eddie and Charlie Murphy.

Mostly, though, they played music. Free still remembers the 3 a.m. phone call that summoned him to Sunset Sound for a jam session with Prince sometime around 1984.

“It was crazy, man,” he tells Guitar Player. “Prince was not a regular guy, as we all know. His bodyguard called me late at night and said, ‘Prince wants you in the studio.’

“And I’m like, ‘Dude, it’s three in the morning!’

“But he goes, ‘Come down to Sunset Sound. Prince wants you here.’”

Free did as he was told — and when he arrived, the scene inside the studio was surreal. Alongside Prince was jazz legend Miles Davis, who had joined the Purple One and percussionist Sheila E., then recording her debut album with Prince, for an after-hours jam.

“The crazy part about it,” Free says, “was that Prince wanted me to play bass that night. And I’m like, ‘Dude, I can barely play bass.’

“But he goes, ‘Come on. Give me that bottom, Free1’”

Once the session got going, Prince seemed to be everywhere at once.

“He’d jump on drums, then grab his guitar,” Free recalls. “And halfway through the jam I’m just going [very slowly] boom… boom… boom.

“And Prince is like, ‘Uh-uh. Come on, come on. Give me that funk, Micki!’”

Two years later, another call came. This one would lead to a much bigger opportunity.

“Prince flew me out to Paisley Park,” Free says. “I went into the studio and recorded a song called We Can Funk. I sang the song for Prince and then flew back to L.A.”

A week later, the phone rang again.

“Our lawyers got together because Prince wanted me to join his camp and sign to Paisley Park.”

There was just one problem. At the time, Free was still a guitar-playing member of the R&B group Shalamar — and the band’s creator, producer and manager, Dick Griffey, wasn’t eager to let him go.

“He really wasn’t a nice guy,” Free says. “At first he wouldn’t let me out of my contract. Finally he said, ‘Prince is going to have to pay a hefty price, so I’ll let you out of Shalamar.’”

A meeting was arranged with Prince, Griffey, Free and their attorneys.

“We’re sitting in this big conference room,” Free recalls. “Prince is across from me wearing those big sunglasses.”

Prince’s lawyer reviewed the paperwork and slid the contract across the table.

“‘The contract looks good,’ he said. ‘The only thing left is for Dick Griffey to sign Micki over to Paisley Park.’”

Griffey studied the papers for a moment. Then he looked directly at Prince.

“He says, ‘I ain’t fattening up no frogs for no snakes.’ Meaning Micki ain’t going anywhere.”

Griffey stood up and walked out.

“I was almost in tears,” Free says. “Prince’s lawyer gets up and leaves. And now it’s just me and Prince sitting there.”

Prince glanced down over his sunglasses.

“‘Uh-uh.’”

Then he got up and walked out.

“I was brokenhearted,” Free says.

After that, the relationship between the two musicians was never quite the same.

“We weren’t as tight as we used to be,” Free says. “Once Prince became a huge superstar it was more like, ‘Hey, Micki, how you doing?’ instead of hanging out in the clubs like we used to. It really hurt.”

Still, Free says he carries many fond memories of the time they spent together — and credits Prince with teaching him the finer points of funk guitar.

“Prince showed me how to properly play funk guitar,” he says. “The voicings, the feel, the groove — or what he called the ‘groove pocket.’ Before that I was just playing heavy metal and rock chords, slamming A, G and C.

“A lot of guitar players think they’re playing funk, but they aren’t.”

To Free, Prince was a musician of the highest caliber.

“You hear that electric guitar solo he played on ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ at the Rock Hall awards in 2004,” Free says. “He’s totally shredding, but there’s still that bluesy funk soul in it.

“In the ’80s there was a time when all the guitar players were shredding — scales, scales, scales, no heart. I talked about it with Jeff Beck once, and he said, ‘You can sometimes say more with one note than you can with thirty-five.’

“Prince definitely knew that too.”

When Prince died of an accidental drug overdose in April 2016, the world lost one of music’s most singular talents.

While he’s best known as a virtuoso guitarist — just watch his searing electric guitar solo on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” at the 2004 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony — Prince was also a formidable multi-instrumentalist who could command bass, drums and keyboards with equal authority.

But the Purple One had another, far less publicized gift.

Basketball.

And according to guitarist Micki Free, Prince’s skills on the court were astonishing.

“He was like Michael Jordan,” says Free, who played electric guitar with Shalamar and counted Prince among his friends. “He was a freaking amazing basketball player — which shocked everyone.”

Prince’s supposed dominance on the hardwood became part of pop-culture lore thanks to a legendary story told by Charlie Murphy — brother of Eddie Murphy — during a 2004 sketch on Chappelle’s Show. In the segment, “Charlie Murphy’s True Hollywood Stories,” Murphy claimed that in 1984 the five-foot-three Prince schooled him and Eddie in a game of two-on-two.

But was the story exaggerated for laughs?

Free knows the answer — because he was there.

The guitarist had grown close to Prince in the mid ’80s after bonding over guitars, fashion and nightlife. Both musicians shared a taste for flamboyant clothes and late-nightclub hopping.

In 1984, Shalamar had just scored a U.S. Top 20 hit with “Dancing in the Sheets,” which gained even more attention after it appeared on the soundtrack to the film Footloose. The group also contributed “Don’t Get Stopped in Beverly Hills” to the 1984 Eddie Murphy film Beverly Hills Cop, earning Free and the other soundtrack artists a Grammy.

To celebrate the win, Prince invited Free out for a night on the town.

The evening began at a club where Prince — acting as DJ — was spinning tracks and testing his new music on the dance floor.

“We would go to clubs together, or I’d run into him at clubs,” Free recalls. “He’d play songs he was planning to release and watch the crowd to see if people would dance and groove to it.”

That night took an unexpected turn when Eddie and Charlie Murphy arrived. Free and Eddie knew each other from their days in New York City, when Murphy was part of the Saturday Night Live cast.

“Eddie and Charlie show up, and Prince says, ‘Let’s go up to my house in Beverly Hills and hang out,’” Free says.

But once they arrived, Prince had another idea.

“You know Prince was a very short man,” Free says. “But suddenly he goes, ‘Let’s play basketball!’”

The suggestion left the room stunned.

“Eddie looked at me like, What the fuck?” Free recalls. “And I looked at Eddie like, Man, I don’t know what’s going on!”

The Murphy brothers figured they had nothing to worry about. Prince and Free were still dressed for the club in frilly shirts, flashy clothes and high-heeled boots — hardly the attire of intimidating athletes.

“Charlie Murphy goes, ‘Okay, we’re going to call it the Shirts against the Blouses,’” Free says.

Prince’s bodyguard fetched shorts and basketball shoes for Eddie and Charlie. Prince and Free stayed exactly as they were.

“I remember thinking, Oh my God, this is not going to be good.”

The teams squared off.

“Eddie and Charlie were laughing at us,” Free says. “‘Yeah, this will be easy.’”

Then the game started.

“From the first shot, Prince was nothing but net, net, net,” Free says. “I’m looking at Eddie and Eddie’s looking at me like, What the…?”

Prince took over the entire game.

“It was that serious,” Free says. “I didn’t even shoot once. Prince shot everything — and we beat the shit out of them.”

The stunned brothers had no choice but to accept defeat.

“And when we were done, we went inside,” Free adds. “And Prince’s cook personally made us all blueberry pancakes.”

For Free, the story captures something essential about Prince: the seemingly limitless range of his abilities.

“He was singular,” Free says. “There’s no doubt about it. I’ve never jammed with or played with a musician who was quite as good as Prince.

“He played everything, man — and he was good on everything he played.”

Even basketball.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Few guitarists represent the future of blues guitar quite like Christone “Kingfish” Ingram. Recognizing this, Fender has teamed up with the Mississippi-born guitarist, championed by Eric Gales, Buddy Guy and Slash, for a revamp of his 2022 signature Telecaster Deluxe.

In an interview for a promo video, however, Kingfish confessed that he didn’t always like Fender’s second-most famous electric guitar. He says it was Prince, chief among a litany of six-string greats, whose music convinced him to revisit the instrument with a fresh mindset.

“My first Telecaster was a red Squier Affinity Tele,” Kingfish explains after a tour of Fender’s Corona, California, factory, where his new Daphne Blue axe has been crafted. (The model was previously made with a shimmering purple Mississippi Night finish.) “At first I didn’t get the whole Telecaster movement, because I felt like they were too twangy.”

The Tele Deluxe, however, delivered a solution to what he feels is the guitar’s biggest tonal problem: its pickups.

The Fender Telecaster — first produced as the Broadcaster in 1950 — went through several iterations leading up to the development of the Telecaster Deluxe in 1972. Rather than a pair of single-coils, the Deluxe model featured two of Fender’s Wide Range humbuckers, giving it a warmer, thicker and more rounded tone than its standard sibling. (The Tele Thinline, first introduced in 1968, was likewise revised in 1972 with a pair of Wide Range pickups.)

While that tonal change spoke to Kingfish more than any other Tele, he needed another guitarist to convince him to make the leap. He found what he needed in his own record collection.

They include “some of my favorite Telecaster players out there, like Freddie Stone, from Sly & the Family Stone, Prince, Keith Richards, Albert Collins, and of course all of the country players as well, like Danny Gatton and Roy Buchanan,” Kingfish says.

Of all those players, he says Prince was the most influential. Listening to him play, Kingfish says, “I found out how funky these things can get.”

(It should be noted that while Prince played a modified Tele in his early years, he was best known for playing a Hohner Mad Cat Tele-style model, as seen in his celebrated live performance of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." The Mad Cat featured a flamed maple top on an ash body with a walnut strip in the middle, as well as a distinctive-looking leopard-print pickguard.)

Ultimately, it was the sound of those twin Wide Range humbuckers that drew Kingfish not to the Telecaster, but to the Tele Deluxe.

“Coming from traditional blues, I'd always been into players that had a big sound,” he adds. “Then I started to expand my ear and got into guys like Gary Moore, who has that classic overdriven humbucker sound.

“I always wanted that kind of tone — something where I can hit the pedal and everything can be boomy, and I can scale back and be pretty. The pickups do just that. Between that and two Fender Twins, the sound guy is always telling me to turn down!”

Having a signature Telecaster also meant Kingfish could go further and specify his own custom-voiced pickup. “I wanted a sound that could really punch and hit heavy,” he explains. “But being that I come from church, I wanted a guitar that doesn't scream. I can dial back the volume if I want to.”

Speaking to Guitar Player last year to dish out his top tips for guitarists, Kingfish discussed his love of aggressive melodic soloing, the need for his live shows to tell a cohesive story, and the key lessons taken from his time jamming with Buddy Guy.

And in related news, Samantha Fish is the latest blues star to name-drop Kingfish's talents as one of the torchbearers of modern blues.

Since its inception in 1996, Joe Satriani’s G3 tour has seen him lock horns with some of the best guitars in the business. From Steve Vai to Robert Fripp, John Petrucci, and Eric Johnson, Satch has engaged every guitarist on his wish list for each of the G3 tour's jaunts.

But as he's revealed. one guitarist managed to elude him, even though he initially looked ready to make it a reality.

Jeff Beck is arguably the biggest name among the most likely candidates to have not featured on a G3 tour, but that’s not for a lack of trying from the Surfing with the Alien maestro. He says a Beck-powered G3 looked to be on the cards, only for a last-minute change of heart to ruin his plans.

“The one that was so close to really happening was me with Jeff Beck and Billy Gibbons," Satch told the UCR Podcast. "I think we were a week away from actually putting it in ink in the books. It was so close to happening.

"Then, Jeff bailed at the last moment.”

The guitarist tried to use his humility as te reason for pulling out, but Satriani wasn’t convinced that was the real reason.

“He used the excuse that he thought it would be better if we toured with Prince,” he says. “I took that as a really good joke, like, he just didn't want to do it, so he came up with the most ridiculous suggestion.”

Back in 2018, Satriani spoke about his hopes of building a dream G3 line-up of his “heroes,” Eddie Van Halen, Jeff Beck, Brian May and Billy Gibbons, which seems to be the same tour he was alluding to in his UCR Podcast conversation. And what a tour it would have been.

Satriani only crossed paths with the late great twice, so he never felt comfortable enough to ask the burning question and get closure on the real reason for his pivot.

“There was no way for me to ever talk to him about it, like, ‘Why didn't it happen?’” he says. “I've always thought in my mind, ‘Let's call up Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck!’ You know, let's get all of your favorite guitar players out there.”

His theories of why he pulled out center around the generational divide between the two players.

“I could see them just wondering, ‘Who is this kid? We don't know who he is. [He] plays instrumental guitar, who cares.’ So I never really thought it would happen, but I'd ask anyway.”

It’s a strategy that has worked for him before; other players haven’t felt that generational void the same.

“Once in a while, somebody would agree or just show up and say, ‘I want to play,’ like Brian May, Neal Schon, or Robert Fripp,” Satriani adds. “So we've been really fortunate in that respect.”

Fripp joined the G3 tour in 2005, and to this day remains one of the most “interesting characters,” that Satriani has shared the stage with.

“When he joined up, he insisted that he not be listed, and he wanted to play before the show,” he told Guitar Player in 2022. “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.

“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.”

Satriani will link up with Steve Vai, Peter Thorn, and ever-busy bass player Marco Mendoza as part of the SatchVai band later this year.

he's also defended Kurt Cobain's guitar skills and says he wants the next generation of players to wipe the floor with him.

While most effects manufacturers are busy making new or different flavors of familiar effects, Dawner Prince Electronics has carved out its own unique niche. In addition to building a selection of excellent-sounding stompboxes for a range of guitar-friendly effects, the Croatia-based company has created pedals that emulate rare electromechanical effects from a bygone age. Dawner’s Pulse pedal, for example, is an electronic re-creation of Gibson’s early 1970s Maestro Rover RO-1, a compact rotary speaker in a drum-shaped metal container. It’s a left-field choice — the Maestro Rover isn’t exactly well known — but that’s what makes it such a tantalizing choice. And take it from someone who own a Maestro Rover, the Pulse is an amazingly accurate emulation.

Given all that, I was especially keen to try out Dawner’s latest attempt at sonic resurrection, the Boonar Tube Deluxe. It’s a re-creation of the Binson Echorec 2 T7E, an electromechanical four-head delay unit from the 1960s and ‘70s that used a magnetic drum recorder rather than a tape loop. The Echorec 2 is perhaps best known among guitarists as the delay preferred by David Gilmour for much of his career with Pink Floyd.

Dawner Prince have tread in this territory before with their Boonar Multi-Head Drum Delay, a pedal that delivers a highly accurate emulation of the Binson. But the Boonar Tube Deluxe takes the concept much further in its design and control set. Among the changes are a revamped DSP engine for the magnetic drum emulation, a broader and well-chosen control set, a larger and easier to use control panel and — most significantly — the addition of a real subminiature military spec dual-triode vacuum tube in the preamp that feeds the delay circuit.

Before we dig into the features, it should be said that this is an impressive-looking pedal. It’s large — 7.28 by 4.72 by 2.12 inches — and weighs in at a hefty two pounds and six ounces. The glassy black control panel looks sleek and smart, and the sturdy metal chassis is painted in a vintage-looking metallic gold finish that recalls the Binson Echorec 2’s distinctive case. Vents on the front and side panels attest to the presence of a vacuum tube within, and the unit gets quite toasty after it’s been running for a while. Dawner Prince suggests letting the pedal warm up for at least half a minute to get the best results from the tube.

Add in the fact that the pedal is handmade in Croatia using NOS parts, and you have a boutique-quality effect pedal that delivers pro-level audio quality in a package designed for both stage and studio. Let’s take a look at what’s here.

MODES

The first thing to know is that the Boonar Tube Deluxe offers two modes: Repeats and Swell. Think of Repeat as your standard delay mode, with up to four playback heads available. Whereas the Benson Echorec 2 created echoes and multi-tap delays via a 12-position switch that selected playback heads singly or in combination, the Boonar gives you four buttons, each of which can be used to engage or disengage one of the pedal’s four virtual playback heads, for a total of 16 different combinations. These buttons are located on left of the control panel under the legend Playback Heads, and each lights up amber when engaged.

As for Swell, it lets you open a feedback loop from any of the four playback heads, creating a lush bed of shimming repeats that sound like a beautifully suffused cathedral reverb. This effect was present in the Echorec 2 T7E as well, but Dawner has gone a step further by adding a selectable feedback loop for each individual playback head, a feature offered on the later Binson Echorec P.E.603-T. The Swell effects’ four buttons are located under the Playback Heads buttons and likewise light up amber when engaged.

CONTROLS

The top of the unit contains the most relevant performance controls. Starting from the left, the input control governs how much of the vacuum tube preamp’s signal is fed to the record head. At low levels, it produces warm and wooly tones, but crank it higher and you’ll be treated to glorious saturated overdrive from the tube preamp. It’s here that the Boonar’s sonic signature takes shape, and the input control offers plenty of latitude to dial in the exact amount of warmth or crunch you desire.

Next up, the bass/treble control provides control over the delay signal’s tone. It’s subtle, similar to the Binson’s tone control. This is followed by the echo volume knob, which controls the level of the delay signal sent to the pedal’s output.

From here we have a pair of rather unique controls: Length of Swell and Drum Age. The Length of Swell control sets the number of repeats (or length of regeneration) for the heads that have feedback engaged. Similar to analog delays of all variety, turning this control clockwise produces warm, dense feedback as you reach its upper regions and can be driven into self-oscillation. As for Drum Age, it mimics the tone and response characteristics of the Echorec’s mechanical drum as it ages, from “new” (full counterclockwise) to “old” (full clockwise) and everything in between. Lower settings produce brighter and clearer repeats, while turning the dial clockwise rolls of high frequencies, creates blurrier repeats and induces subtle modulation as would be found in the original mechanical units as they age, due to wear on the mechanical parts.

It’s worth noting that the Length of Swell and Drum Age controls are interactive. At “newer” age settings, the Length of Swell control reaches self-oscillation earlier in its rotation because more high frequency content is present in the Drum Age control. Turning Drum Age clockwise rolls off the high end, allowing you to turn Length of Swell further clockwise without inducing feedback.

Finally, there’s a Drum Speed rotary encoder that increases delay from 950ms (on the fourth playback head) to 12ms (on the first) as you turn it clockwise. The knob is stepped, and each notch represents a change of 10ms. You can also press the knob while turning it for finer increments of 1ms.

LEVEL INDICATOR

Like the original Echorec 2 — and many tape recorders of its time — the Boonar uses an EM81 “Magic Eye” vacuum tube to show the level of the input signal. The tube’s “iris” expands and glows brighter as the input level increases, adding a vintage vibe that’s in keeping with its look.

OLED SCREEN

The OLED screen offers plenty of useful information, including delay speed in milliseconds, tap division (1/4, 1/8th, 1/8th-note triplet and 1/16th), preset number and preamp mode (more on this below).

It’s also here that you can dig into what’s packed under the hood. A trio of buttons to the right of the OLED screen let you access, change and save various parameters, including global settings such as True Bypass/Tube Buffer Bypass modes and MIDI channel; presets (you can save up to 16); tap-tempo subdivision and much more. Perhaps the most significant option in here has to do with the preamp mode, where you have a choice of Original and Modern. Original emulates the Binson’s lower output and darker tone, while Modern sounds brighter and more dynamic while being slightly louder.

FOOT SWITCHES

The Boonar Tube Deluxe has two foot switches. The left selects between Swell and Repeat modes, and an accompanying LED glows amber in the former. Additionally, this switch is can be used to load any presets you have saved.

The right foot switch turns the pedal on and off and can be used to call up your favorite preset. You can set the pedal for True Bypass or Tube Buffer Bypass in the global menu. Tube Buffer mode keeps the tube preamp engaged even when the pedal is turned off to retain that warm and dynamic Echorec tube tone. (See “Front Panel” below for additional switching options using the external input jack on the unit’s front panel.)

FRONT PANEL CONNECTIVITY

Along the unit’s front you’ll find the mono input and output jacks, and a wet out for processing the delay signal on its own. Next in line is an external input jack that accepts an expression pedal or the included Clicker remote foot switch. Use the Global Settings menu to determine the function of whichever you plug in here. Optional modes here include Expression Pedal, Tap Tempo Switch, Repeats/Swell Switch and Bypass Switch

The I/Os continue with a MIDI input (the Boonar accepts MIDI CC and Program Change messages, as well as MIDI clock) and a USB mini-B port for future firmware updates. Finally there’s the 12-volt DC 800ma center-negative power input for the included power supply.

IN USE

As you can tell, this is a fully spec’ed delay. In my experience, it’s easily the best Echorec emulation I’ve found. I own the original Boonar Multi-Head pedal and love it. I also have an Italian-made Guru Echosex 2 T7E tube delay pedal, a rather rare Echorec emulation that has been my studio go-to mainly due to its pro-level features and tube tone.

But I have to say the Boonar Tube Deluxe is a game changer. The updates to the DSP engine bring new realism to the effect. And then there’s that tube preamp. As the Boonar’s front end, it performs a good deal of the magic that makes every cascading echo sound alive and three dimensional. The fact that you can use it even when the effect is off is yet another of the pedal’s benefits.

But let’s not downplay the real advantages of the pedal’s large-format design. A pedal like the Boonar Tube Deluxe invites you to grab the knobs and start experimenting, and I jumped right in. One of my favorite tricks was to set the Drum Age full left to the “newest” setting and turn the Length of Swell control to the point of self oscillation. I’d then turn drum age clockwise to attenuate the high frequencies, until the feedback subsided but held steady as an almost violin-like drone. I could then capture the feedback in my looper and use it as a bed for new phrases and riffs. I got hours of pleasure experimenting this way and discovering the different textures that could be created with various settings of the pedal.

Let’s also not forget the new Boonar’s pair of preamp modes, Original and Modern, which deliver two completely different front-end responses. Add in the wealth of global options, switching, 16 onboard presets, advanced MIDI interfacing and bulletproof handbuilt quality, and the Boonar Tube Deluxe is easily the best Binson Echorec emulation available.

Production is limited due to its use of NOS parts, and Boonar Tube Deluxe units are being made available in batches rather than all at once. Given all this, it’s by no means inexpensive, but as premium boutique quality pedals go, it’s well within reason. If you play classic rock, rockabilly, blues, prog or any various flavors of ambient, you’ll find it a delightful addition to your arsenal, and one worth making a fair bit of room for on your pedalboard.

SPECIFICATIONS

CONTACT dawnerprince.com

PRICE $1,199.95

CONTROLS Input control, bass/treble, echo volume, Length of Swell, Drum Age, Drum Speed, Playback Head buttons (4, illuminated), Back buttons (4, illuminated), Menu select (save), up and down navigation buttons

FOOT SWITCHES Swell/Repeats (Preset Load) with status LED (amber for Swell mode); On/Off (Favorite Select) with Status LED (amber for On)

I/O Input, output, wet out, external in for expression pedal or foot switch, USB mini-B port, MIDI In, 12V power in

DIMENSIONS 7.28” x 4.72” x 2.12” (LxWxH)

WEIGHT 2 lb 6 oz

EXTRAS 12-volt DC 800ma center-negative universal adapter, external Clicker switch and USB mini-B cable are included

BUILT Handbuilt in Croatia

Jim DeCola was just 19 years old in 1982, when Eddie Van Halen and Randy Rhoads were the world’s hottest guitar players. He would grow up to become Gibson’s longest-serving master luthier.

But on January 24, 1982, DeCola was just a fresh-faced upstart taking his colleague’s lunch orders when the phone rang. It would prove to be a life-changing call, but initially he thought it was a prank.

“I get the phone call and it’s some guy with a British accent, and I could barely understand what he was saying,” DeCola tells Tone Shop Guitars. It was Ozzy Osbourne, but the luthier had no idea. “I can barely make out Ozzy Osbourne and thought it was just somebody pranking me. And then he said, ‘No, no, Bruce Bolen mentioned I should call you.’

"So then I’m like, 'This is for real.' ”

Bolen was on the marketing team at Chicago Musical Instruments (CMI), which owned Gibson at the time, and his recommendations carried weight. He had good reason to have faith in DeCola. The luthier was three years into the job and had shown his skills fixing tremolo units. Now, Randy Rhoads needed his help.

DeCola traveled to the Rosemont Horizon (now the Allstate Arena) in Illinois, where Ozzy and his band were performing that night. He was promptly presented with the Rhoads' unmistakable polka-dot Sandoval V electric guitar and proceeded to take its tremolo apart.

“What I used to do,” he explains, “was disassemble the tremolo, and I would counter-sink the block and the plate on each side and then de-burr the saddles. Then I would put the screws for the vibrato in a hand drill, and I had a triangle file, and I would file a little notch so it would pivot like a Floyd Rose.”

It's worth noting that, back in ‘82, DeCola had never laid eyes on a Floyd Rose bridge, championed for its ability to pivot both ways, as opposed to the more limited whammy-bar actions of Fender guitars. But he’d come across the two-point tremolo system Leo Fender had created for G&L, similar to the unit employed on contemporary Strats.

Having already tested his methods on Stratocasters, DeCola brought his knowledge and experience to Rhoads’ aid. He would later employ a similar modification to the guitarist's Jackson “Concorde.”

“And then later on, Paul Reed Smith also did that hidden knife edge on his tremolo,” DeCola states.

But at the time he found himself face to face with Rhoads' Sandoval V, he says, "I was just a kid. I didn’t know. But I was possessed — and obsessed.”

DeCola finished his work in time for soundcheck. Rudy Sarzo, who had replaced founding member Bob Daisley the year prior, was on bass, and Tommy Aldridge was on drums. “They did 'Mr. Crowley' without Ozzy for soundcheck,” he recalls. “It was awesome just hearing the band by themselves doing that entire number.”

Rhoads had been impressed by the guitar’s newly solidified tuning, but with the venue's doors open and the support band already announcing themselves onstage, the guitarist had a last-minute request for the teenage luthier.

“We went back to the dressing room and he said, ‘Yeah, it stays in tune great! But if you could make it a little slinkier,’ ” DeCola details.

According to Setlist.fm, the support that night came from Starfighters, a British heavy metal band from Ozzy’s hometown of Birmingham. Their guitarist was Stevie Young, Angus and Malcolm Young’s nephew, who would join his AC/DC in 2014. But DeCola was too busy backstage to watch the opening act.

“I was in the dressing room with Randy and Rudy and Tommy,” he says. “Tommy’s hanging over my shoulder, ‘Hey, what ya doing now? Why you doing that?’ He was really cool.”

While the drummer proved a cool cat, he remembers Rhoads as “a little angel playing for the Prince of Darkness”.

DeCola may have missed Starfighters’ set, but he was able to celebrate a job well done by catching Ozzy's show. More over, he was able to witness the making of an iconic rock photograph in real time.

DeCola was standing immediately behind photographer Paul Natkin as he captured the moment when Ozzy lifted his young prodigy shredder aloft, a grin stretching from ear to ear. The photo would be selected for the cover of the 1987 live album, Tribute.

“I was like five, eight feet behind it,” DeCola beams. “I was right there!”

Bob Daisley, who is currently putting a new band together, has recently recalled how Rhoads got the Ozzy gig, and how a premonition after his audition spoke of the young guitarist's impending greatness.

Meanwhile, Randy’s sister, Kathy, has worked with MXR for the Randy Rhoads Distortion+ pedal. That saw the firm’s pedal boffins open his legendary “chip pan” pedalboard for the first time in decades to extract its tonal magic. The pedal is, fittingly, decked out in a polka-dot finish.

The thorny subject of the greatest guitar solo of all time has long been a fiercely contested debate, probably because every solo is different. How do you compare, say, “Comfortably Numb” with “Crazy Train,” or “Stairway to Heaven” with “Sultans of Swing”? It’s impossible. Still, public opinion ebbs and flows, and we wanted to find out which solos currently rank among our readers as the greatest of them all.

So we ran a poll on GuitarPlayer.com to find out and here we present the results. We’ll take a look at the stories behind the songs and find out just what made those lead guitar breaks so great through conversations with Brian May, Kirk Hammett, Michael Schenker and others.

20. Gary Moore | “Still Got the Blues”

GUITARIST: GARY MOORE (1990)

The definitive blues guitar ballad.

Presented as the title track from his 1990 album, this wistful tune in A minor became Gary Moore’s calling card fairly late in his career, when he reinvented himself as a blues artist. There’s a point in the solo where you can hear the Belfast great switch from the neck humbucker to the bridge on the 1959 Les Paul Standard he nicknamed Stripe and start deviating from its main theme, mainly sticking within the A minor pentatonic scale, with a few notes from the Aeolian and harmonic minor scales.

Moore was plugged into his prototype Marshall JTM-45 reissue head with one of the company’s newly designed Guv’nor distortion pedals out in front. More than 30 years later, this remains one of the most raw and expressive blues tracks, with Moore almost fighting his guitar at points, yet never failing to deliver the goods

19. Metallica | “Fade To Black”

GUITARIST: Kirk Hammett (1984)

Metallica’s first ballad features some of Kirk’s most epic playing.

Recorded at Flemming Rasmussen’s Sweet Silence Studios in Copenhagen in February and March 1984, Ride the Lightning, Metallica’s sophomore album, was more progressive and stylistically greater in scope than the all-out thrash assault of their debut, Kill ’Em All. That change is evident on “Fade to Black,” which features acoustic guitars and a nonstandard structure more akin to the “Stairway to Heaven” school of songcraft. But it is the song’s timeless melodic solo that most vividly signals a stylistic shift in guitarist Kirk Hammett’s playing. And the signature element he employs for the last solo is arpeggios.

“I have been playing that song for so long now,” Kirk tells our sister publication Total Guitar. “For the very last solo, I know how I want to start it, but then I am in an area where I can improvise for 16, 18 or 24 bars, and then [drummer] Lars [Ulrich] will hit a certain fill, which means that it’s up and it’s time for the arpeggio part. And then I just slide right into those arpeggios.” And they are arpeggios played on two strings, Hammett specifies. “When guitar players first started incorporating arpeggios into their playing, before the whole Yngwie sweep-picking thing, arpeggios were played on two strings – not three or four strings,” he explains. “And that was what the vogue was at the time in the 1980s, so I have been playing those for a long time. I use my middle finger just to anchor my position on the neck.”

That’s a great tip from the man who plays the solos. But how should you tackle them yourself? First, there are two essential scales you’ll need to know: the B natural minor scale and the B Phrygian mode, both shown below. These cover you for the entire opening 30 bars, which, let’s face it, is a lot of music, so this is a good reason to learn a couple of shapes if ever there was one.

To make it simpler, most of your time is spent in the natural minor scale. Not until around bar 20 will you find yourself briefly landing on the C note, which appears in the Phrygian mode. The bottom line is that Hammett improvises this part of the solo live – and these are the shapes he uses.

Up next are those two-string arpeggio shapes, and they’re 16th notes – all of them! At 142 bpm, it’s pretty fast, but Hammett doesn’t pick every note, opting to use pull-offs to make those rapid licks easier. It’s definitely something to experiment with and if you’re still struggling, you could try adding in an occasional hammer‑on, too.

18. Steely Dan | “Kid Charlemagne”

GUITARIST: Larry Carlton (1976)

Messin’ with the “Kid.”

Steely Dan’s catalog is filled with remarkable guitar solos, but Larry Carlton’s brilliant work on The Royal Scam’s “Kid Charlemagne” remains the most celebrated. Carlton strings together a series of tasty phrases that follow the underlying chord changes with a blend of inside and outside playing that is technically mind bending and emotionally satisfying.

“I was pretty familiar with the tune, so I just improvised,” he tells Guitar Player. “People think I’m kidding when I say that, like I had worked the solo out beforehand, but I didn’t. It was straight improv, and it worked.” Very well, in fact. Perhaps more has been written about his solo than of the song itself.

Despite the acclaim, Carlton was, and remains, nonplussed. “When the record came out, there was a wonderful review of the tune in Billboard and they raved about the solo,” he says. “I put the record on and listened to it with my wife, and at the end of it I said, ‘I don’t know. It just sounds like me.’”

17. Cream | “Crossroads”

GUITARIST: Eric Clapton (1968)

The finest rock and roll cover of an acoustic blues song.

It started as a blues tune called “Cross Road Blues” by Robert Johnson and became one of the finest examples of natural ability, soulfulness and showmanship from a virtuosic 22-year-old guitarist named Eric Clapton. His reimagining of the song as “Crossroads” further cemented a legacy that by then had earned him the nickname God.

Famously recorded at San Francisco’s Fillmore West venue for supergroup Cream’s Wheels of Fire album, Clapton’s arrangement retains the soul and spirit of Johnson’s original but updates it for a contemporary audience raring to cut loose and be entertained by dazzlingly quick, passionate musicianship.

Remarkably, Clapton is no fan of the performance: He complains that the band lost the “one” in the first verse of his second solo break, thereby throwing off his phrasing. That’s perfectionism for you. For everyone else, this four-minute track remains a source of fascination more than 50 years on.

16. Eric Johnson | “Cliffs Of Dover”

GUITARIST: Eric Johnson (1990)

Heavenly tones from the Texan great.

This instrumental won Eric Johnson a Grammy for its exquisitely tasteful guitar playing and jaw-dropping tones. For the recordings, the Texan musician mainly stuck with his early ’60s ES-335, though he chose to use his 1964 “Virginia” Strat for the opening lead and parts of the main solo. The guitars were fed into a 100-watt Marshall Super Lead, with an Echoplex and BK Butler Tube Driver to help achieve those smooth, violin-like tones and warm sustain.

“I first heard him in 1986 on Live at Austin City Limits,” Joe Bonamassa told us in 2015. “It was ‘Cliffs of Dover,’ and it was just terrifyingly good guitar playing. I wasn’t even sure if it was real! Then I saw him live, and his tones were the best I’d ever heard. I wondered how this guy was getting all of these sounds out of his Strat. I’d never seen anybody have such a forward-thinking rig like that.”

15. Prince | “Purple Rain”

GUITARIST: Prince (1984)

The Purple One’s defining guitar moment.

The epic outro to “Purple Rain” – which takes up nearly two thirds of the song itself – stands out as some of Prince’s finest work on the six-string, wailing away in G minor pentatonic and occasionally including some more modal notes, like the minor 6th. There’s also that repeating motif that dances around the 2nd and minor 3rd intervals.

It’s simple and effective, setting things up for the vocal melody that comes in toward the end. It’s not a busy solo by any means. Rather, the Purple One chose to leave a lot of space in between the lines he played and focus on big hooks instead of monster licks.

Prince would extend the solo for up to 15 minutes in live performance. While there are many great live renditions of this track, his half-time performance for 2007’s Super Bowl in Miami is the stuff of legend. Shredding alone onstage in the middle of a storm, Prince seemed to be living the moment for which this song was written.

14. Deep Purple | “Highway Star”

GUITARIST: Ritchie Blackmore (1972)

Race with devil on English highway.

“I wrote that out note for note about a week before we recorded it,” Ritchie Blackmore said of his remarkable and most definitely memorable solo to “Highway Star.” “And that is one of the only times I have ever done that. I wanted it to sound like someone driving in a fast car, for it to be one of those songs you would listen to while speeding. And I wanted a very definite Bach sound, which is why I wrote it out – and why I played those very rigid arpeggios across that very familiar Bach progression – D minor, G minor, C major, A major. I believe that I was the first person to do that so obviously on the guitar, and I believe that that’s why it stood out and why people have enjoyed it so much.

“Over the years, I’ve always played that solo note for note, but it just got faster and faster onstage because we would drink more and more whisky. [Keyboardist] Jon [Lord] would have to play his already difficult part faster and faster, and he would get very annoyed about it.”

13. Guns N’ Roses | “Sweet Child O’ Mine”

GUITARIST: Slash (1988)

A game of two halves.

Slash’s solo on this Guns N’ Roses breakthrough single is rock guitar at its finest. The first half is laid-back and modal, built around the Eb minor scale with a few major 7ths thrown in for a harmonic-minor flavor. The second half is much more aggressive and bluesy, and sticks mainly to position one of the pentatonic scale an octave up the neck in the same key. The bends feel that much wider and the vibrato more pronounced.

Slash plays the first section on the neck pickup for thickness and warmth before switching over to the bridge for more bite, with his Cry Baby engaged. Perhaps most impressive is his off-the-cuff sense of feel and how he strings it all together, which is the mark of any great guitar solo. Remarkably, although Slash’s riff was responsible for the song’s creation, he wasn’t fond of the song originally. “We were a pretty hard driving band, and that was sort of an uptempo ballady type of a thing,” he said. “So it’s grown on me over the years.”

12. Ozzy Osbourne | “Crazy Train”

GUITARIST: Randy Rhoads (1980)

Fretboard fireworks galore on Ozzy’s Blizzard of Ozz comeback.

The Double-O has often cited Randy Rhoads as the man who saved his career – and when you hear the solo on “Crazy Train,” you understand why. Although Rhoads’ classical- and modal-based approach was far from Tony Iommi’s blues leanings, he was, like Ozzy’s old bandmate, a true inventor.

There’s a section toward the end of this solo that actually sounds like a train squealing off the tracks, thanks to the use of a chromatically ascending trill that then descends in key. Rhoads concludes the solo with a fast-picked F# minor pentatonic phrase before a rapid Aeolian legato run ending with a big bend on the 19th fret.

The shredder performed the solo with his customized Jackson guitar through a Marshall and a couple of 4x12s while sitting in the control room. “We’d plug the guitar directly into the console,” recalls Blizzard of Ozz engineer Max Norman. “We’d preamp it in the console and send it down to the amp from there. That way we could control the amount of gain that hit the amp.”

11. Michael Jackson | “Beat It”

GUITARIST: Eddie Van Halen (1982)

Breathtaking results from an unlikely pairing.

Asked to contribute guitar to Michael Jackson’s Thriller album, Pete Townshend declined but offered a suggestion: How about Eddie Van Halen? Jackson and producer Quincy Jones thought that was a great idea, and got Ed onboard to play the solo to “Beat It.” But after hearing the part where he was asked to solo, the guitarist was unhappy with the chord changes and had the engineer edit the tape to create a new pattern that better suited what he had in mind.

Ed knew Jackson might be surprised and possibly unhappy with his executive decision. “So I warned him before he listened,” he told CNN in 2012. “I said, ‘Look, I changed the middle section of your song.’ Now in my mind, he’s either going to have his bodyguards kick me out for butchering his song, or he’s going to like it. And so he gave it a listen, and he turned to me and went, ‘Wow, thank you so much for having the passion to not just come in and blaze a solo but to actually care about the song and make it better.’” And he did it for free.

10. The Beatles | “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”

GUITARIST: Eric Clapton (1968)

An uncredited Slowhand makes a rare guest appearance with the Fab Four.

By 1968, George Harrison was penning compositions that rivaled those of his bandmates John Lennon and Paul McCartney. “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” was every bit as good as anything his musical partners wrote, but no one could get up the enthusiasm for it, so Harrison invited his pal Eric Clapton to play on the session, knowing it would put the Beatles on good behavior.

Using Harrison’s 1957 “Lucy” Gibson Les Paul through a Fender Deluxe amp, Clapton doesn’t so much mimic the haunting, aching main melody as he creates a harrowing song within a song. His descending bends and release notes, and that inimitable vibrato, are on full display and are appropriately tear-jerking, weaving a dramatic narrative that builds to a shattering climax.

9. Chicago | “25 OR 6 TO 4”

GUITARIST: Terry Kath (1969)

Wah-drenched ecstasy.

This magazine once described Terry Kath’s “25 or 6 to 4” solo as “Wes Montgomery meets Jimi Hendrix,” and it’s a fair point, as Kath was influenced first by jazz and, later, hard rock. As a founding member of the jazz-rock band Chicago, he held down guitar duties for the group until his tragic death from an accidentally self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1978.

Though his superb playing graced many tracks – notably “Introduction” and “Free Form Guitar,” both from the group’s 1969 debut, The Chicago Transit Authority – there’s no denying the power of his soloing on the group’s early hit “25 or 6 to 4.” Kath uses his wah generously to add emotion to his lines, giving them at times a frenetic despair.

Kath most likely played his Gibson SG Standard, as pictured on Chicago Transit Authority’s inner sleeve, using his favored string set, as revealed to GP: the high E string from a tenor set and a standard set for the rest, moved down one string (i.e. high E for the B string, B for the G string, and so on).

8. Lynyrd Skynyrd | “Free Bird”

GUITARIST: Allen Collins (1974)

The Bird is the word.

As it happens, the four-minute-and-24- second guitar solo that closes “Free Bird” was originally added to give singer Ronnie Van Zant a chance to rest his vocal cords during Lynyrd Skynyrd’s relentless performance schedule. At 143 bars long, the solo is far and away the most epic offering here (in fact, it’s 286 bars of recorded music because the whole thing is doubled).

The tune appeared on the group’s eponymous debut album in 1973, and guitarist Allen Collins delivered the lot on his 1964 Gibson Explorer. As Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Gary Rossington once told Guitar World, “The whole long jam was Allen Collins himself. He was bad. He was super bad! He was bad-to-the-bone bad. When we put the solo together, we liked the sound of the two guitars, and I could’ve gone out and played it with him. But the way he was doin’ it, he was just so hot! He just did it once and did it again, and it was done.”

7. Dire Straits | “Sultans Of Swing”

GUITARIST: Mark Knopfler

An understated guitar hero fingerpicks his way to glory.

Right when the world was crowning Eddie Van Halen the new King of Guitar, along came the rather unassuming Mark Knopfler – schooled in rockabilly, blues and jazz – who demonstrated that you didn’t need walls of distortion to turn heads.

Knopfler composed this pub-rock classic on a National steel guitar but thought it sounded “dull” – that is, until he picked up a Stratocaster, at which point the song “came alive.” Using nary a hint of grit on a Fender Twin, he fingerpicks not one but two standout solos.

The first features a lyrical section of elegant, Chet Atkins-style single-note and chordal bends that sigh and swoon with dreamy romanticism. In itself, that would be enough, but the outro solo is the real attention-grabber, on which Knopfler builds to a dazzling set of spitfire 16th-note arpeggios – cleanly played, precise and rousing every time you hear it.

6. The Jimi Hendrix Experience | “All Along The Watchtower”

GUITARIST: Jimi Hendrix (1968)

The greatest solo in a cover version.

This song tops any list of covers that are better than the original. Guitarists invariably refer to it as a Hendrix cover rather than a Bob Dylan original, proof of how much Hendrix made it his own. Jimi’s rhythm playing is astounding, both in the intro and in the deft chord/ melody work of the verses, and of course, there’s the small matter of four guitar solos to consider. The man many refer to as the best of all time makes the most of his Strat and Marshall rig here, but it’s his offering at the 2:20 mark that we’re interested in. Following an opening run of octaves, he gets into his stride with a typically blues-based minor pentatonic approach in C#.

At 2:32, the main solo explodes into a trademark combination of rhythm and lead, plus funky scratching on muted strings. It’s worth playing along with the scratches, trying to keep a loose wrist and consistent down-up strumming. Those few beats alone will teach you a lot about Jimi’s groove and feel.

To get the sound, select a bridge-position single-coil pickup, dial in delay at around 350ms, add compression for sustain and opt for a Vox wah pedal or something similar. You’ll hear the wind begin to howl.

5. Eagles | “Hotel California”

GUITARISTS: Don Felder & Joe Walsh (1977)

Those iconic twin-guitar harmony lines took the Eagles to new heights.

The title track from the Eagles’ fifth album, and without doubt the song the band will be most remembered for, “Hotel California” frequently tops greatest guitar solo polls. The solo begins at 4:20, forming an extended coda, over which guitarists Don Felder and Joe Walsh trade licks before joining together to play those iconic harmonized licks at 5:39.

As it turns out, those harmony lines work in a relatively simple fashion. Felder and Walsh play an arpeggio of every chord, and the harmony is created by one of the guitars always playing one note lower down in the chord. For example, the notes of the Bm chord are B, D and F#, so, if the higher guitar plays an F#, the lower guitar will play a D, and so on.

This nugget of information can take you a long way to mastering those descending arpeggios. We won’t go as far as to say you could easily work it out by ear, but if you know the chords to the song, it’s possible to jam along. And you can’t say that about many of the solos on this list!

4. Queen | “Bohemian Rhapsody”

GUITARIST: Brian May (1975)

It might just be the biggest rock song of all time.

Following Freddie Mercury’s 1991 death and a cameo moment in 1992’s Wayne’s World, “Bohemian Rhapsody” became a trigger point for a worldwide outpouring of affection and respect for Queen. Their renewed popularity would continue into the new millennium as Ben Elton’s We Will Rock You musical and the band’s discovery of a different way to exist behind frontman Adam Lambert brought their music to a new generation.

And “Bohemian Rhapsody”? Unsurprisingly, it’s Queen’s best-known song, and its brief nine-bar solo is a short and sweet musical interlude, bridging the verses to lead into what’s become known as the song’s “operatic section.” Those two words alone should warn you that this song shouldn’t work. There’s no chorus and, aside from two verses, no repetition. But of course it does work, and Brian May’s solo is the perfect melodic break.

His phrasing is loose and natural, moving across the backbeat rather than sticking to a rigidly timed grid. The fastest licks are expressive bursts, rather than repetitive noodling, and his articulate pre-bend and vibrato technique demonstrates his beautiful touch. Somehow, within the confines of the complex structure of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” this solo is made to order.

3. Led Zeppelin | “Stairway To Heaven”

GUITARIST: Jimmy Page (1971)

Heaven-sent soloing.

From the moment Jimmy Page plays the opening run on his ’59 Fender Telecaster, right through to the flurry of notes and the wailing bend that completes it, this is guitar-solo perfection – a masterpiece of composition. Rather than wander aimlessly, Page creates a song within a song.

The opening phrases set the scene, as he adds notes to the pentatonic scale to follow the song’s final chord progression. A rapid mid-solo repeating lick raises the bar before a game of question-and-answer with a haunting overdubbed guitar leads into that last flurry and bend. As we say, it’s all about the composition: licks that track the chord changes, the contour of the melody and the pacing of the widdly bits all take the listener on a journey.

Three takes were recorded (the other two allegedly still survive, presumably locked in a Led Zeppelin vault somewhere), all of them improvised, although Page has reportedly said that he had worked out the opening line. But while we’re all certainly curious to hear those solos, let’s face it: They’re not going to be any better than the one we’ve come to know and love all these years.

2. Van Halen | “Eruption”

GUITARIST: Eddie Van Halen (1978)

Eddie’s iconic solo that shook the world.

With its mix of fast legato hammer‑ons and pull-offs, pinched harmonics, whammy-bar dives and two-hand tapping, Eddie Van Halen’s mind-blowing instrumental guitar solo inspired a generation of guitar heroes. While the tapping gets the attention, his tone, blistering legato and creative note choices are all equally important. Amid all that virtuosity, Eddie still played with joyous rock and roll abandon.

Remarkably, Ed was never completely happy with the released recording. “I didn’t even play it right,” he told Guitar World. “There’s a mistake at the top end of it. Whenever I hear it, I always think, Man, I could’ve played it better.”

His admission aside, the track is a technical opus. The first eight bars are a bluesy affair, whose virtuoso legato licks perhaps recall the mojo of Jimmy Page’s breakdown solo in Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.” It’s a theme Eddie develops over the following eight bars, taking notes from the major and minor pentatonic scales to add chromatics.

His tapping finale is probably one of the least understood solo sections in rock history. Eddie’s taps are not always on the beat, which makes for tricky timing changes as he switches from tapping the first and fourth sextuplet notes to the third and sixth notes. From start to end, “Eruption” is a masterpiece that would take most guitarists a lifetime to perfect.

1. Pink Floyd | “Comfortably Numb”

GUITARIST: David Gilmour (1979)

Gilmour’s greatness comes through in waves.

In a 1992 interview with MTV’s Ray Cokes, Gilmour was asked what he thinks of Keith Richards’ theory that songs, lyrics and guitar solos are “just out there in the air and you sort of grab them.” Gilmour agreed. “I think he’s right. They sort of appear as if they are out there in the air. But I don’t know how they get there.” But the best ones he said, just happen. “The best ones do, but often you work very hard and struggle over them.”

Gilmour's two "Comfortably Numb" solos are certainly among his best, and it’s easy to understand why our readers voted his efforts to be the number-one pick in our poll. But the real question is, which of those two solos qualifies for inclusion? Whichever way you go — and granted, most fans prefer the first solo to the second — there's certainly plenty to justify the song's position at the top.

The tone is legendary. Gilmour’s signal chain consisted of his iconic black Strat, then featuring a DiMarzio FS-1 bridge pickup, into a HiWatt DR103, with the essential EHX Ram’s Head Big Muff pedal. The FS-1’s fatness and the Big Muff’s smoothness leave no hint of the harsh treble that can plague Strats. With some extra help from an MXR Dyna Comp, Gilmour had so much sustain that he could hold notes as long as he wanted. As in his live rig, he combined a WEM 4x12 cab with a Yamaha rotary speaker lower in the mix, to add subtle modulation. The epic delay was added in the mix.

The first solo, in D major, uses the Strat’s neck and bridge pickups together, permitted by a custom switching arrangement. His phrasing here is the more unconventional of the two, with arpeggios and sliding passages. Gilmour’s use of the bar for vibrato – aided by its shortened tremolo arm – again distinguishes him from typical bluesers, inspiring many a fusion player in the process. He rakes into the beginning of many of the phrases, similar to Brian May, extracting all the excitement he can from every note.

By comparison, the outro solo’s licks are more standard, with phrases similar to Hendrix’s. The passages at 4:57 and 5:12 could be from “All Along the Watchtower” or “Foxey Lady,” but in this epic track few listeners would make the connection. It sounds both masterful and improvised at the same time. Gilmour has explained he created this impression by recording five or six takes and compiling the finished solo from the best bits of each. The result is stunningly well written, with a combination of repetition and development that keeps the excitement building for two minutes. The Hendrix-style blues lick returns at 5:27, longer and more intricate than before. The aggressive double-stops first appear at 5:15, and by 5:35 he has turned that idea into a motif.

For the climax, Gilmour shoots up an octave just when it seems he’s wrung every inch of expression from his maple neck. He descends back down the neck, incorporating one of his spectacular three-fret bends on the way, and finishes with another take on that double stop motif. It has all the excitement of an improvised performance, and all the structure of a careful composition.

Both solos share brilliant rhythmic awareness. Gilmour uses triplets, sextuplets, 16th and 32nd notes freely, within the same phrase. And check out the effect at 5:10 when he plays a lick in 16th notes and then immediately repeats and expands in sextuplets. A good solo can have great tone, rhythms, melody or expression, but only a work of rare brilliance features them all to this degree.

Revenge, they say, is best served cold, and in 2004 Prince served up the perfect dish when he played While My Guitar Gently Weeps at that year's Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony.

The guitarist was joined onstage by Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, Steve Winwood, and son-of-a-Beatle Dhani Harrison for the performance. It turns out the guitarist felt slighted by his omission from Rolling Stone’s list of the 100 Greatest Guitar Players Of All Time the year prior and used that anger to fuel his jaw-dropping solo.

As a new report has revealed, Prince’s powerfully emotive solo – hailed by Guitar Player as one of the greatest guitar solos of all time – was seen as an “act of revenge” by the illustrious pop star and multi-instrumentalist, offering fresh context to a standout moment in Prince’s career; itself full of such moments.

“On its face, it’s a supreme expression of Prince’s superiority and bravura,” a New York Times Magazine feature on an epic and exhaustive forthcoming Prince documentary by Ezra Edelman says. “But the film gives it a new context. Questlove, on the screen, talks about his disbelief, the previous year, when Rolling Stone made a list of the 100 greatest guitar players of all time, and Prince was left off it.”

The solo has gone on to be remembered as one of Prince’s most iconic moments, capped by his launching of his guitar into the air and strutting confidently off stage. As the piece later explains, Prince wasn’t quick to forget the slight. Instead, he waited for the opportune moment to exact his retaliation and let his guitar do the talking for him.

“Prince nursed these kinds of slights, and his commandeering of the stage – at an event associated with [founder] Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone – was, in part, an act of revenge,” the piece continues. “There’s spite and aggression in the performance. But there’s also pain – in his wincing face, his apartness: a small, soigné Black man onstage with these rumpled white rockers.”

Of those “rumpled white rockers” that were with him as the iconic moment unfolded, Petty said they knew the solo would very quickly enter hallowed pages of rock n’ roll folklore.

“You see me nodding at him, to say, ‘Go on, go on.’ He just burned it up. You could feel the electricity of ‘something really big’s going down here,’” the late singer-songwriter told The New York Times in 2016, reflecting on the guitarist’s career in the wake of his passing.

It seems the message, though cryptic to the onlooking masses, was received by its intended recipient. Rolling Stone’s latest list, now expanded to 250 to accommodate younger players like Christone ‘Kingfish’ Ingram, Nita Strauss, and Yvette Young, sees Prince ranked at number 14.

That list, however, isn’t without its critics. Eddie Van Halen, Chuck Berry, Jimmy Page, and Jimi Hendrix take the top spots, but luminaries like Gary Moore, and Joe Bonamassa are notable exclusions.

There were also questions as to why some spots went to guitar duos, such as Metallica's James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett (23) and Angus and Malcolm Young (38).

Still, Prince’s legacy, set further alight by that RRHOF performance, saw his Rolling Stone stock eventually rise significantly.

Incredibly, Edelman’s nine-hour documentary may never see the light of day. As per The New York Times Magazine piece, the artist’s estate is trying to block its release. It has concerns that it could tarnish the reputation of Paisley Park, Prince's $10 million multimedia complex in Minneapolis which houses recording studios, soundstages, video editing suites, and beyond.

Meanwhile, Prince's Vox HDC-77 guitar is set to be sold at auction. It has been left untouched since he last played it during his 3rdeyegirl era, having been used at the Montreux Jazz Festival, the Electric Ballroom, and the White House.

Following a quartet of “cloud” models, Prince’s Vox HDC-77 is the latest electric guitar from his collection set to be sold at auction.

A 1994 blue "cloud", a yellow model, his "Blue Angel" six-string, and his iconic “Cloud 3” have sold for a combined $1.9m in recent years, with the “blackburst” Vox estimated to sell for up to £300,000 ($383,000).

A regular on Prince’s stages, including his famed Montreux Jazz Festival set in 2013, it was a regular during the musician’s HitNRun tour, which visited the UK, US, and Canada between 2014-15. Those shows proved to be his final electric performances, with the Piano & Microphone tour concluding shortly before his death in April 2016.

Another HDC-77, this time with an ivory/white finish and a psychedelic body pattern, was also employed during this era, though the "blackburst" seems to have seen more stage time.

Vox launched the guitar in 2010 – a highly contoured body and a three-way switch for its CoAxe pickups to dish out humbucker, single-coil, and P-90-esque tones, were notable features.

3rdeyegirl – made up of guitarist Donna Grantis, bass player Ida Nielsen, and drummer Hannah Welton – had served as his backing band for the HitNRun tour, with the guitar’s last recorded usage at the White House. Prince played it during a special performance for Barack Obama in 2015.

“Cloud” guitars were a notable family of sidekicks during Prince's illustrious career, with other prominent, unorthodox, models including his crazily shaped Schecter custom shop symbol guitar.

But it was Nielsen who had turned him into Vox guitars. The bassist confirmed this with a 2019 tweet that read “I bought one for me, and then he liked it so much that I got one for him, too.”

The guitar has been in Grantis’ private collection until earlier this year, and according to the London-based auction house Sotheby's, the HDC-77 “hasn't been played since Prince last performed with it,” extending a chance for bidders to battle for an unblemished piece of Prince’s history.

The Vox’s sale is part of Sotheby's inaugural Pop Culture auction. It will bring artifacts from the worlds of music, film, and entertainment for the auction block, with three Noel Gallagher-played guitars and a Steinway grand piano that once called Abbey Road Studios its home, also set to be sold.

Bidding takes place online between August 29 and September 12. An in-person exhibition of the listings will take place at London's New Bond Street from September 9.

Visit Sotheby's to learn more about Prince’s Vox HDC-77 and the other artifacts that make up the Pop Culture collection.

Prince slyly told her she was “too funky.” Bruno Mars sent her one of his signature Fender Strats, and Bootsy Collins and Ray Parker Jr. left glowing comments on her Instagram posts.

Guitarists are usually lauded for their soloing prowess, but Ella Feingold doesn’t solo – she doesn’t feel the need. Instead, she weaves magic with her rhythm playing, creating a unique and soulful blend of classic and forward-looking funk guitar that’s fueled by her uncanny sense of time.

In 2022, Feingold received a Grammy participation certificate for her playing on the Record of the Year winner, Leave the Door Open, by Silk Sonic, the R&B duo featuring Mars and singer/rapper Anderson .Paak.

At the time that Mars invited her to perform on their album, An Evening With Silk Sonic (which won four Grammys that year), Feingold had already made a name for herself playing with artists such as Queen Latifah and Erykah Badu. But participating in the project was key to her making it through a challenging period of her life, during which she hadn’t touched her guitar in five years. As we’ll see, there’s more to the story. But first, let’s check out some of Ella’s playing. 

For this lesson, we’ll be selecting from Feingold’s funky trove of Instagram reels. 

Ex. 1 is one of her chill single-note grooves. Note how she creates many interesting musical twists and turns while using just one chord, Bb9. 

The Godfather of Soul, James Brown, was a master of conceiving one-chord grooves and was a major influence on Feingold’s playing. Her use of deadened notes (indicated with Xs) is elemental to funk playing, as they percussively propel the music along, much as a drummer would. 

As it happens, this line of thinking is essential to Feingold’s overall approach. 

“I don’t look at my instrument as a guitar; I look at it as pitched percussion or a drum,” she explains. To deaden notes, simply lift your finger so that it lightly rests on the string, creating a percussive sound when picked. Also contributing to this effect is the guitarist’s use of palm-muting (P.M.), which is performed by lightly resting the pick hand on the bridge, lending an additional muffle to the note attack. 

The sliding trill in bar 1 is really meant to function more as a vibrato; quickly shimmy your fret-hand index finger back and forth between the 6th and 7th frets. You can substitute a traditional vibrato if you’d like, but the “trill vibrato” adds a unique spice here. To seamlessly play the high Bb note that follows, fret it with the base of your index finger, as if creating a barre. Note that Feingold demonstrates the example slowly at 0:35 in the video.

Now 43, Feingold began her career as a working guitarist while a high school sophomore in Swampscott, Massachusetts in the late ’90s. 

“It’d be a Monday night, and I’m supposed to be doing homework, but I’m out playing a club gig,” she recalls. In 2002, after finishing high school, she started her first year at Berklee College of Music, before dropping out during finals week to take advantage of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to study privately with Chalmers “Spanky” Alford, the enormously influential jazz, gospel, and neo-soul guitarist, whom she calls “my favorite musician in the world.” 

Feingold discovered he was teaching at a music store in Alabama, and they would play guitar for each other over the phone. After a few conversations, Alford invited her to his home to spend the week hanging out and playing guitar together. 

“He had a very unique way of playing the instrument,” she recalls. “So I just practiced the things that he showed me, and when I got home to Boston, I was a completely different musician.” 

Feingold’s love for Alford’s style is a major contributor to her sound. During our conversation, she demonstrated one of his unique contributions, which was to incorporate Joe Pass–style jazz voicings with gospel and neo-soul guitar playing. 

Ex. 2a demonstrates a standard gospel-style approach using a simple progression in the key of C major, moving from the I (one) chord, C, to the IV (four), F, and back. 

Ex. 2b, however, presents a more colorful path that “Spanky” might have taken, employing jazz voice leading by adding diminished 7 and major 6/9 chords. Feingold’s deep chordal knowledge and ability to draw from a plethora of different voicings is one hallmark of her playing. 

Feingold believes Alford is part of the reason she shares so much about herself and her music online. “He taught me so much about musical generosity and generosity as a person,” she says. 

Just about every day on her Instagram, Feingold presents bite-sized musical concepts that guitarists can quickly incorporate into their own playing, all while demonstrating a wide variety of approaches to rhythm guitar. 

Ex. 3 is a James Brown–esque groove featuring some “chicken scratch,” the rhythmic strumming of deadened strings associated with another of Feingold’s idols, guitarist Jimmy “Chank” Nolen, who was a mainstay of James Brown’s band in the ’60s and ’70s. 

The dyad (two-note chord) on the downbeat of bar 1 illustrates the old adage “Little things mean a lot.” The small black dot under the note heads here indicates staccato articulation – technically 50 percent of the note’s normal duration. Feingold employs a light palm mute with her pick hand, which shortens the chord’s duration, but here it’s not quite enough. 

After sounding the notes, quickly loosen your fret hand’s grip on the strings so that they break contact with the frets, but without letting go of the strings. If you were to play the example tenuto – that is, with normal, non-staccato note durations – it would lack the desired funkiness and wouldn’t groove with the same oomph. 

In 2005, musical director Rickey Minor (The Tonight Show, American Idol) tapped Feingold to play guitar in Queen Latifah’s band for that year’s Sugar Water Festival tour, which featured a host of major artists, including Erykah Badu and Jill Scott. The guitarist made valuable connections that summer and later worked extensively with Badu. It also led to her auditioning for Prince at his home over two nights, when he gave her the aforementioned kudos.

But later, in 2014, Feingold had what she calls “a falling out with the guitar.” Feeling unhappy and lost while living in Los Angeles, she left her main gig in Badu’s band after eight years for a quieter life in western Massachusetts’ Berkshire mountains. For the next five years, she set guitar aside while making a living as a professional orchestrator and arranger for film and video games, including Destiny (a soundtrack of her orchestrations for the game will be released this summer). 

As Feingold explains, her emotional turmoil stemmed from the fact that she had always known she was a trans woman, but “I didn’t live like that because I didn’t think the world would accept me.” 

Toward the end of her five-year disconnect from guitar, she met Bruno Mars through a mutual friend, and he subsequently asked her to play on the Silk Sonic record. Despite not having played guitar for years, she couldn’t say no to such an opportunity. Throughout the making of the album, she transitioned, and both events contributed to the blossoming of her personal life as well as her relationship with her guitar. 

“I studied a lot of different styles and guitar players, but I never really felt like I had a sound until I transitioned,” she says.”I feel like I just emerged through my instrument by simply being authentic.”

Ex. 4 is another window into Feingold’s expressive style, in which she enjoys seamlessly combining multiple guitar parts into one playable groove. Incorporating a bit more chicken scratching, she creates a chordal rhythmic figure offset by a single-note riff. Note in bar 1 how she uses both deadened and staccato notes on beat 3, demonstrating just how essential these nuances are if you want to play funk guitar authentically.

Her time with Alford convinced Feingold that she wanted to fully understand the essence of how he played. At his recommendation, upon returning to Boston, she joined a Black Pentecostal church, where she immersed herself in gospel music for a full year. 

There were no rehearsals or discussions about the songs with regard to key or form, and no one told her what the chord changes were. Unacquainted with gospel’s rapid-fire chord changes, she had to quickly learn how to “get in where I fit in,” she says. The experience strengthened her intuition. 

“I’m not going to hit every chord that they’re playing,” she explains, “so how do I get inside of this music and contribute something? Some of it was guide tones, sound effects, octaves. It taught me a lot about how to just listen and respond.” 

At the same time, she was playing instrumental jazz/funk music at Boston clubs like Wally’s Jazz Café. Once again, there were no rehearsals, and since there was usually no keyboard player present, she would play rhythm all night. 

Feingold incorporates all sorts of ingenious techniques borrowed from different instruments, like the one she picked up from hearing the legendary bassist James Jamerson on classic Motown records, as shown in Ex. 5. 

As she explains in the corresponding video, the example uses open strings as passing tones, which are especially useful in flat keys, where they’re often non-diatonic (out of key). Playing in the key of Eb major here and with a swing-16ths feel, Feingold starts with a non-diatonic open A note hammered-on to the C# on the 4th fret. 

She then strikes a (diatonic) open D string, followed by a “hammer-on from nowhere” to the Eb on the 5th string. If you replace the open D with the same pitch on the 5th string (5th fret), it would just be a rather conventional-sounding passage, but playing it like this lends the phrase a quirky charm. In this way, Feingold expresses her personality through her rhythm playing in much the same way lead guitar players do when soloing. 

Another key element of Feingold’s style is her uncanny ability to create different feels by playing either slightly “ahead of” or “behind” the beat (the latter is often referred to as playing “in the pocket”). 

When asked how to begin working on this, Feingold pointed to one of her posts explaining how the late Detroit record producer J Dilla would create a behind-the-beat feel with his drum programming. 

Ex. 6 is a nifty single-note riff Feingold uses to concretely convey how to lock into playing a classic J Dilla–style groove, here over D’Angelo’s Feel Like Makin’ Love. Using the accompanying video, play along with her, feeling the time as she does. As the guitarist explains in the on-screen text, she plays the strong beats (1 and 3, where the kick drum hits) directly on the beat and everything in between a bit behind, which you can also think of as “late” or “lazy.”

As Feingold’s personal life flourished, her playing career was also rekindled. Using her arsenal of vintage gear, the guitarist has since performed with a host of major artists, including Alicia Keys, Jay-Z, Common, and the Roots. She is currently working on separate records with Charlie Hunter and Bootsy Collins, while also being known online as a respected teacher, with more than 30,000 followers. 

Like another of her heroes, Fred Rogers, creator of the classic children’s TV series Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, Feingold strives to create an environment (via her Instagram and Patreon) where everyone can come and feel comfortable learning – in her case, how to funk things up. 

Fender’s Princeton amp began life in 1946 as a six-watt, 1x8 combo with a wooden cabinet. It subsequently evolved into more powerful and higher-gain forms through the tweed and brownface eras, before it became the iconic blackface model of 1965, which, with its cleaner sound and addition of spring reverb, made it an amplifier prized by session guitarists and working players alike. 

So, the logical process of evolution means that the Tone Master Princeton Reverb now makes its debut as a digital version of the tube-powered classic, giving players a lighter-weight option in an amp that Fender produces in both versions.

The 12-watt, 1x10 combo on review here only gives its technology away by virtue of a “Tone Master” badge on the lower right corner of the solid-pine cabinet. Otherwise it looks pretty much identical, sporting a classic silver grille, black control panel, and grained black Tolex covering. There are knobs for volume, treble, bass, reverb, speed, and intensity, as well as a jeweled pilot light that glows orange when the amp is on mute and red when it’s ready to rock. 

On the rear are the on and mute toggle switches; a rotary output-power switch with positions for .3, .75, 1.5, 3, 6, and 12 watts; a balanced XLR line out with level control and a cabinet sim switch that provides three different miked-cabinet options; plus a ground-lift switch to nuke hum when connecting to outboard gear.

The Tone Master Princeton weighs less than 19 pounds, which is close to half the weight of a valve-powered version, and it’s more compact than a Deluxe Reverb, making it an ideal grab-and-go amp for a lot of situations. 

Tested with guitars that included a Knaggs Severn Trem SSS, a PRS Dustie Waring signature, and a Gibson/Memphis ’61 ES-335, the little Fender proved to be a toneful amp that had no problem hanging with bass and drums. 

It has an excellent clean sound, and the reverb is spacious, with a nice, smooth decay. The tremolo emulates the rounded volume-modulation of the classic “bias wiggle” circuit and can deliver the pulse over a wide range of speeds. Both effects can be turned on and off with the included foot switch.

The amp performed well on gigs with the single-coil and humbucker guitars, and it sounded good with a Takamine TC-138 acoustic-electric. Sure, it’s arguable whether it has the dynamic qualities and playing feel of a tube-powered Princeton, but I liked how it sounded, and it quickly became my go-to during the course of this review when playing smaller rooms. 

In outdoor spaces, it was very convenient to simply plug a mic cord into the rear-panel XLR, set the cab-sim switch to taste (I generally left it on the first setting) and enjoy how the amp’s balanced tones were available at any level needed through the P.A. 

This also proved handy for keeping stage levels on the low side, because the Tone Master Princeton can get quite loud, even though it’s only 12 watts. This is obviously an area where Fender took pains to emulate the response of a tube output stage.

The Celestion C10R also stays clear and detailed at higher volumes, which is nice when pushing the amp to five or six in high-power mode. On the other side of the coin, an option for playing with less volume is using the power reduction switch to cut the wattage down to size, and the good thing is the sound stays consistently balanced when you throttle down the juice.

The fact that the Tone Master Princeton doesn’t use tubes proved to be a non-issue as I used the amp more and more. It sounds like a Princeton, and that’s really what counts, so I just enjoyed what the amp can do instead of getting sidetracked by how the valve version may have better dynamic feel, or is louder or whatever.

More importantly, the Tone Master’s EQ is easy to dial in for different guitars, it breaks up in a non-harsh way when turned up to six and higher, and there’s enough true-to-form realism here to make the Tone Master Princeton a sweet deal, considering it costs $500 less than a standard Princeton Reverb. All considered, it’s an amp worth auditioning if you’re in the market for a gig-worthy, low-watt combo that punches above its weight class.

Specifications

• Price: $899
• Channels: 1
• Controls: Volume, treble, bass reverb, speed and intensity
• Rear Panel: On/off and on/mute switches, six-position rotary wattage selector (.3, .75, 1.5, 3, 6 and 12 watts)
• Power: 12 watts
• Tubes: N/A
• Speaker: 10 inch Jensen C10R
• Extras: Solid-pine cabinet. USB port for firmware upgrades. Three-position cab-sim IR selector. Balanced XLR out with level control. Ground-lift switch. Cover and two-button foot-switch for reverb/tremolo on-off included
• Weight: 18.7 lbs (tested)
• Built: China

By mid 1968, Tommy James and his group, the Shondells, had enjoyed a string of good-time AM radio singles, like “Hanky Panky,” “I Think We’re Alone Now” and “Mony Mony.”

But after the band returned home from a summer tour, James sensed a sea change was taking place. “FM radio was happening, and singles were being replaced by albums,” he says. “Songs were getting more serious. I realized that we had to move with the times, or else we’d be extinct.”

With that in mind, James and Shondells drummer Peter Lucia Jr. wrote “Crimson and Clover.” The transcendent, psychedelic-pop gem became the band’s biggest hit, spending 16 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 in late 1968 and early 1969, including two weeks at number one.

“Its impact was incredible,” James says. “It gave us the second half of our career.”

Verse After Verse

James began with the idea of combining two of his favorite words, which he thought sounded poetic as a phrase. After playing a concert, he and Lucia retired to their hotel room, where James played a Gibson Hummingbird while Lucia laid down a beat on pillows.

“I played these three ‘backward’ chords – B, F# and E – at the same time I did the lyrics,” James says. “We didn’t have a recorder with us, so we jotted it down on paper.”

They tried a few iterations of the song, one being, as James describes it, “kind of like James Taylor, with acoustic fingerpicking, but it sounded too dreamy, so we toughened it up.”

Within a few hours, they had enough of it sketched out. “It was kind of a funny thing,” James says. “It was verse after verse, which was also the chorus. That was the hook. We knew we could make it work in the studio.”

The Secret Ingredient

“Crimson and Clover” marked James’ debut as the producer of his own material and his introduction to recording in a 16-track studio, which allowed instruments to be kept separate for greater control during mixing.

“Stereo had become the big thing, and we had to keep up,” he says. The song was recorded in just five hours with Lucia, Shondells bassist Mike Vale and James, who played the bulk of the instruments, including the tremolo-laced electric guitar that became the song’s ear-catching sonic signature.

“I did the guitars using a Fender Jazzmaster through an Ampeg Gemini amp,” he recalls. “The tremolo became a crucial element of the song, and I even put it on my vocals for the fade.”

Album buyers were treated to even more ear candy with an extended mix that featured Shondells guitarist Eddie Gray playing steel guitar and wah and fuzz leads over a lengthy solo break.

“Tom, You’re Done”

Once the session was complete, James made a work tape of the song. “I knew it was a hit,” he says. “It was undeniable.”

While visiting the program director at WLS in Chicago, he played him the tape, and people at the station bootlegged it without his knowledge. “I got in my car and I heard, ‘Here’s a world exclusive on WLS.’ They played the freakin’ rough mix! It was crazy.”

By the time James got back to the New York offices of his label, Roulette Records, he had a situation on his hands. “We were afraid we had blown it with the other big Chicago station, WCFL, and we tried to get WLS to stop playing it, but they refused,” he says.

With “Crimson and Clover” lighting up the phones at WLS, Roulette rush-released the rough mix as the single. “I wanted to do a polished final mix, but I guess it was God’s way of telling me ‘Tom, you’re done.’ Several weeks later, we played the song on Ed Sullivan, and the next day it hit number one.”

“Crimson and Clover” went on to sell more than five million copies and has been covered by artists ranging from Joan Jett and the Blackhearts (who hit number seven with their version in 1982) to Cher (as a duet with her son, Elijah Blue).

James professes his love for all the covers he’s heard, but he singles out Prince’s version (which blends in a blast of the Troggs’ “Wild Thing”) as his favorite.

“Prince did such a futuristic treatment of the song,” he says. “His guitar playing on it was out of this world. He was always such a brilliant guitarist. I was really honored by what he did with ‘Crimson and Clover.’”

On this day in 1984, the era-defining Prince film Purple Rain was released. Regarded as one of the decade’s greatest musical films, the Academy Award-winning Purple Rain movie was bolstered by the studio album of the same name released a month prior.

Fast forward 20 years and Prince was once again in the spotlight, gracing the cover Guitar Player’s July 2004 issue having released his multiple Grammy-winning, top-five album Musicology. 

That year, Prince was also inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame where his stunning display of six-string prowess during a rendition of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” is still talked about today.

The following appeared in the July 2004 issue of Guitar Player

This is some year for Prince. With his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (which will long be remembered for the jaw-dropping solo he played on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”), his blistering performance with Beyoncé at the Grammy Awards (the show’s producers hopefully sent him some flowers in appreciation), and the release of Musicology (widely hailed as his best work in a decade), Prince has reclaimed the funk-rock throne.

And who’s going to argue?

Musicology delivers on all fronts with its savvy blend of greasy funk, soaring anthems, sweet ballads, and – who says funk and politics don’t mix? – pointed assessments of George Bush (“Dear Mr. Man”) and the war on terrorism (“Cinnamon Girl”). It’s also loaded with hip guitar. Not that Prince will readily speak about his guitar playing or his gear. During our interview, he was more eager to talk about music education for kids, the record industry, and the flap over decency on the airwaves (“‘Darling Nikki’ was suggestive,” he says, “but it wasn’t nasty”), and the concept behind the new album.

“Musicology is all about music the way it used to be,” says Prince, as we sit in his dressing room at the Mellon Arena in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. “And it’s about getting the music to the people. That’s why everyone who comes to the show gets a copy of the record. The CD is included in the ticket price, and we’re giving out approximately 50,000 copies each week in order to keep increasing the exposure to the new album. Right now, we’re only playing a few songs from Musicology in the show, but that will change as people become more familiar with it.”

Although the massive giveaway seemed like an expensive way to promote an album, Prince disagreed. “It costs nothing to make the CDs,” he says. “And the benefit of having your artistic freedom is that there won’t be anyone forcing you to do a remix or anything else you don’t want to do. I don’t believe in remixing songs that are in the key of life. When the record people get in there and say, ‘Why don’t you do it like this?’ Well, that’s their prerogative if they own the contract. But bands break-up over contracts – just talk to the Eagles about that. I’ve asked record execs why they aren’t under contract with each other, and all I get is, ‘That’s a very funny idea, Prince.’ See, the fight for me has always been about freedom and ownership. It’s simply preposterous to me that someone is going to own your work in perpetuity.”

Prince is probably the most successful independent artist in the music biz, and his desire to be in control of every aspect of his music seems to demand that he also work on his records alone – a habit that seems puzzling considering the pool of talent in his band.

“On some songs, I just like the way I play drums and keys better than anyone I know,” he explains. “My drummer, John Blackwell, can certainly do things I can’t do, but, if I bring him into the studio, there are things he’ll do differently than how I envisioned them. You know, I can’t even play ‘When Doves Cry’ the way I originally envisioned it. It’s like a painting – it is what it is. You know how [legendary director] Billy Wilder got such a seamless quality to his films? It was because he wrote and directed everything himself. It’s the same for me.”

One of the attractions of seeing Prince live is that he plays tons of guitar. At the Pittsburgh show, I witnessed what an absolute shred monster he can be when he kicks on a Boss DS-2 [Turbo Distortion] through his Mesa/Boogie Heartbreaker amp. But Prince is also a masterful rhythm guitarist with a unique funk style.

“I’m always trying to work in the bass notes when I’m playing funk rhythms,” Prince says. “It’s the same way that Freddie Stone [guitarist, Sly and the Family Stone] would always play the same parts as [bassist] Larry Graham, but just a tad higher. Kids don’t learn to play the right way anymore. When the Jackson Five came up, they had to go through Smokey Robinson and the Funk Brothers, and that’s how they got it down. I want to be able to teach that stuff, because kids need to learn these things, and nobody is teaching them the basics.

“See, a lot of cats don’t work on their rhythm enough, and if you don’t have rhythm, you might as well take up needlepoint or something. I can’t stress it enough. The next thing is pitch. That’s universal – you’re either in tune or you ain’t [laughs]. When you get these things down, then you can learn how to solo.

“Guitarists should listen to singers for solo ideas – especially women singers. Women haven’t had a chance to run the world yet, so you still hear the blues in their singing. Try to play one of the runs that Beyoncé or Ella Fitzgerald does and you will surely learn something.”

On the Musicology tour, Prince performs several solo-acoustic songs on a Taylor 612CE Custom – something he hasn’t done since his Live Aid performance in 1986. “I might consider doing an acoustic tour,” he offers. “I liked doing the acoustic performance of ‘Reflection’ [a lovely ballad that has been re-released on Musicology] with Wendy Melvoin on the Tavis Smiley Show. I thought it was the perfect song for Tavis’ show. He’s a friend, and I wanted to do something special for him. I always try to cater to the format I’m playing in. Like for Jay Leno, we’ll play something like ‘The Ballad of Dorothy Parker’ and really jazz it up.”

Over the past several years, Prince has steadily increased the presence of jazz harmony in his sound – which he explored in depth on the jazz-fusion odyssey The Rainbow Children and recalls in a furious interlude on Musicology’s “If Eye Was the Man in Ur Life.” Prince credited Blackwell and keyboardist Renado Neto – both certified jazz-rock mofos on drums and keyboards – for inspiring him to try new ideas.

“I like the audience to be as sophisticated as my music is,” says Prince, “and, sometimes, I’ve had more fun doing challenging things in after-show concerts than playing the hits at the main show. The best players used to play rock and roll. The first time you heard Boston, it was this huge, amazing sound with all that guitar doubling. Same with Brian May – nobody sounded like him. I still think of Return to Forever as a rock band. Those guys could really play, but there ain’t nobody doing that in rock these days.”

With only minutes to spare before showtime, Prince concluded the interview by saying, “When I changed my name back to Prince, I went into intense study of the bible with my friend Larry Graham. It gave me a sense of the world that I didn’t have before. For a long time, I was into living life to its fullest in every way possible – including spending as much time in the studio as I could. And while I still spend so much time in the studio that people say I should be in a 12-step program, at least now I know where I’m headed.

“Any musician who learns everything about their instrument will only know who they are if they spend the time to know God. That’s why I don’t like to talk about gear. People will go out and buy that stuff thinking it’s going to make them sound like me, and that’s not where it’s at. Go get your own stuff and come up with your own sounds. If you need a path to follow, a good place to start is by listening to Ike Turner – he was as tight as they come – or James Brown, who is all about rhythm. Put any colors you’ve learned from Joni Mitchell on top of that, and then you’ve got something!”

What Prince Won’t Talk About

Prince is way more into making music than talking about how he makes it, and, as a result, he seldom divulges the juicy gear details GP readers crave. In fact, responding to my query about the role of compression and EQ in the sparkling direct-into-the board tones he obtains from his ’70s-era Hohner guitar, Prince said: “The idea is to do nothing – it’s all about voltage through the board. I don’t want it limited or compressed, I want to electrify it.”

However, Prince’s rig hasn’t changed much since our January 2000 interview, when guitar tech Takumi helped us diagram his boss’ setup. You can check out that issue for the full story, but here are some basics:

• Guitars: ’70s Hohner, Custom Schecter (“Habibe”), “Cloud” guitar (original made by David Rusan; Prince now plays a Schecter-made version), Ibanez George Benson, Fender Stratocaster (with bridge humbucker and Floyd Rose locking trem).
• Amps: Mesa/Boogie Heartbreaker.
• Speaker Cabinets: Mesa/Boogie Recto 2x12 (loaded with Celestion Vintage 30s).
• Rack Gear: Digital Music MX-8, Roland GP-16, Zoom 9030, Rane ME30, Behringer Denoiser, Furman PL-8, Furman PL-Pro, Furman AR-117.
• Effects Pedals: Boss DS-2 Turbo Distortion, Boss VB-2 Vibrato, Boss DD-3 Digital Delay, Boss FL-2 Flanger, Boss OC-2 Octave, Boss BD-2 Blues Driver, Dunlop Cry Baby wah, Dunlop Rotovibe.

On this day in 1984, Prince released his iconic soundtrack LP Purple Rain. This era-defining R&B funk-pop rocker soon hit the Billboard 200 top spot and remained in the charts for well over two years. The artist’s sixth studio effort is one of the best-selling albums of all time and spawned several top-ten singles, including "When Doves Cry," "Let's Go Crazy" (both number-one smashes), “I Would Die 4 U” and “Purple Rain.”

As Billboard noted: “In 1984, there was only one man in America more popular than Ronald Reagan. His name was Prince, and he was funky.”

Prince has graced the cover of Guitar Player for two exclusive interviews: once in January 2000 and again in July 2004. On both occasions he was interviewed by GP senior editor Art Thompson. 

Here, we take a look at The Artist’s insightful interview from 2000, shortly after the release of the Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic album in November 1999.

The following was originally published in the January 2000 issue of Guitar Player…

The Artist looks wizard-like in the soft glow of Paisley Park’s Studio A. Clad in red satin and seated behind the mammoth SSL console, he cues up some cuts from his new album, Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic. “There’s guitar madness all over this,” he warns, firing up the title track at ear-splitting volume. Destined to be one of the album’s sing-along hits, it features grinding guitar work and a lead melody that sounds as if a snake charmer is playing through a pair of flanged Marshalls.

“I recorded that in 1988,” he quips, pulling down the volume. “It has two guitars going through Leslies. One was the Auerswald [the custom symbol guitar shaped like his unpronounceable name]. It’s made of one piece of wood – and doesn’t have much guts – but if you crank it, it sounds like a car is running over it!”

The preview continues. On “So Far, So Pleased” and “Baby Knows,” I’m pinned to my chair by hurricane-force guitars over pounding rhythms. On “Tangerine,” The Artist deftly picks fingerstyle acoustic over a trippy kick and fretless-bass figure. As the songs unfold, Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic proves to be full of contrasts and revivals for the 41-year-old Artist Formerly Known As Prince. 

It’s the hardest-edged guitar record he has ever made, he performed all of the tracks by himself (something he hasn’t done since the 1982 smash 1999), and it’s his first major-label release since he jettisoned his Warner Bros. contract in 1995 (which involved legally changing his name to a symbol).

There’s more: Production credit on the new album goes to the now returned Prince (apparently The Artist’s fave producer), and there are cameo performances by Sheryl Crow, Ani DiFranco, Chuck D, Gwen Stefani, and Maceo Parker. Explaining why his former personality nixed guest appearances, The Artist revealed, “I’m competitive, and I’ve definitely let my ego control me. But I’ve discovered that when it comes to music, ego has to sit down.” Rave punctuates this collaborative spirit with a cover of Crow’s “Everyday Is a Winding Road” – a track that finds The Artist riffing over hip-hop beats with a stinging attack worthy of Albert King.

Is the notoriously sly funkster really the “brand new kid” he now claims to be? Perhaps. After all, a lot has changed in his world over the last few years. The split with Warner initiated a four-year span in which his only major-label affiliation was a distribution deal with EMI for the album Emancipation. Subsequent releases on his own NPG label – including the five-disc Crystal Ball (which sold more than 250,000 copies at $50 a pop), the EP The New Master (which features seven fresh versions of the hit) and the New Power Generation album Newpower Soul – have been marketed via the Internet.

By all accounts, The Artist has been successful at managing his own affairs. In fact, he talks of owning his masters (the original recordings) with the zeal of someone who’s discovered the secret of eternal youth. But with all the complexities of running an operation the size of Paisley Park, who could blame him for inking a saccharine-sweet deal with a major record company and getting back to doing what he does best – writing and producing cutting-edge funk-rock, and playing awfully good guitar.

As if to underscore this last point, The Artist played a video clip from a recent live performance that showed him shredding like a madman. When the solo ended, he flicked off the VCR and said with a grin, “I just wanted you to see that I can do it live, too.”

Why did you decide to play the majority of instruments on Rave?

I had always planned to revisit my sound. This year felt like the time to do it.

You mentioned coming full circle with your guitar playing. What is exciting you most about guitar now?

Habibe [a custom Schecter guitar], and the doors that metal has opened for harder-edged records.

Do you conceive songs and arrangements in their entirety, or do you play around with the music and lyrics until you get what you want?

I always know what the whole thing is going to sound like. It’s all in here [taps his head], but it’s here, too [points at the console].

Recording hardware is part of the songwriting process?

I use punch-ins and spot-erasing as a compositional style – that’s how I build and edit arrangements and performances. I’m quick enough with the Record button that I can shave a letter off a word. But that’s because I’ve been doing it for 20 years.

How do you create rhythm tracks?

I generally build my tracks one at a time, but sometimes I use the band to get the rhythm down. In a way, it’s more fun to get it out of people. You know, an idea is still yours even if you give it to someone.

Is it easier for you to play all the instruments?

It’s not easier, but when I play all the instruments I’m not as greedy. I’m more greedy when we play live. [laughs]

I like your solo on “Baby Knows.”

I tried to go after Chuck Berry for that one. I think I used my Tele through a small amp. Sheryl Crow played harp on that song – she nailed it in one take.

Who’s playing guitar on “I Love You, But I Don’t Trust You Anymore”?

That’s Ani DiFranco. I showed her the chords to the song, but I didn’t tell her how it actually went. If I’d told her too much, then silence wouldn’t have been one of the sounds.

How did you get such a massive tone on “So Far, So Pleased”?

I ran my guitar through a Boss Vibrato and Flanger. The octave and delay effects are from the Zoom 9030.

Do you double your guitar lines?

A lot of times, I’ll sample a guitar that I’ve recorded, and then overdub the same part with a keyboard. The attack of the keyboard gives guitar lines more impact and punch.

Did you do that on “Man O’ War”?

Yeah. I also had my Cry Baby cracked halfway open for that one.

Do you have any special ways of recording acoustic guitar?

Sometimes I record the guitar and vocals live – just sitting here at the console. That’s how I recorded The Truth [the acoustic-only disc on Crystal Ball].

Speaking of Crystal Ball, how did you get that eerie lead tone in “Animal Kingdom” and the incredible rhythm guitar sound in “Da Bang”?

If I told you, you’d have to die.

Are you still playing the Cloud guitar?

Yeah, but it’s painted blue now.

Who built that guitar?

It was made by David Rusan.

Do some instruments have a more spiritual vibe than others?

I’m spiritual by nature, and I appreciate the time it took someone to make an instrument. It doesn’t matter if it’s a guitar or a synthesizer, someone still had to take the time to make it.

What’s one of the most important qualities for a musician to have?

You have to respect your spiritual base. You have to respect the instrument. The volume and tone of an instrument is so important.

You’ve recently produced albums by Chaka Khan and Larry Graham. Are there any guitarists that you’d like to produce?

Carlos Santana. I love his playing – especially on his early albums.

What guitarists have most influenced your funk rhythm style?

Sonny T. [one of the early members of The Artist’s backup band, New Power Generation], Freddie Stone [Sly Stone’s brother], and Tony Maiden [of Rufus].

How do you create such freedom in your songs without sacrificing the groove?

God gives you everything, and one of those things is freedom.

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

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

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

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

50. Chuck Berry

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

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

Hail! Hail! Rock and roll!

49. Lindsey Buckingham

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

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

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

48. Maybelle Carter

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

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

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

Simple, yet beautifully effective.

47. Catfish Collins

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

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

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

46. Steve Cropper

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

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

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

45. Bo Diddley

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

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

Tell me now, who do you love?

44. Lonnie Donegan

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

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

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

43. Cornell Dupree

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

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

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

42. The Edge

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

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

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

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

41. Don Everly

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

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

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

40. The Funk Brothers

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

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

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

39. João Gilberto

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

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

38. Freddie Green

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

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

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

37. Jim Hall

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

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

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

36. Richie Havens

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

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

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

35. Jimi Hendrix

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

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

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

34. James Hetfield

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

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

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

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

Who are we to argue?

33. Chrissie Hynde

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

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

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

32. Tony Iommi

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

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

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

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

31. Danny Kortchmar

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

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

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

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

30. Alex Lifeson

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

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

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

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

29. Tony Maiden

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

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

28. Bob Marley

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

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

27. Johnny Marr

Is there a guitarist more influential in Brit pop? 

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

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

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

26. Curtis Mayfield

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

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

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

25. Al McKay

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

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

24. Tom Morello

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

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

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

"It’s good enough for James Brown!”

23. Leo Nocentelli

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

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

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

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

22. Jimmy Nolen

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

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

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

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

Thanks Jimmy!

21. Jimmy Page

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

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

20. Joe Pass

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

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

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

19. Les Paul

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

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

18. Joe Perry

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

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

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

17. Prince

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

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

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

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

16. Johnny Ramone

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

Mission accomplished, Johnny. 

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

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

15. Jerry Reed

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

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

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

14. Django Reinhardt

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

Scary. 

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

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

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

13. Tony Rice

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

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

12. Keith Richards

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

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

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

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

11. Nile Rodgers

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

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

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

10. Rudolf Schenker

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

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

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

9. Earl Slick/Carlos Alomar

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

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

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

8. Steve Stevens

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

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

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

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

7. Andy Summers

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

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

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

6. Pete Townshend

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

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

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

5. Eddie Van Halen

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

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

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

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

4. Jimmie Vaughan

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

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

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

3. Alex Weir

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

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

Damn!

2. The Wrecking Crew

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

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

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

1. Malcolm Young

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

No, they haven’t. 

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

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

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

With 1984’s Purple Rain, Prince gave his fans a hint of the shape of things to come. The influence of Jimi Hendrix was writ large everywhere you looked, but never more so than on the title track.

While there was never any doubt about His Purpleness’s killer chops, Purple Rain was the record that really secured his reputation as one of the greats.

One year later, Prince nailed his colors to the psychedelic mast with Around the World in a Day.

But while the music embraced the style, no one would ever mistake the record as the work of anyone other than Prince.

“Paisley Park” was the best example of his signature groove-based vibe married to a spacey retro feel, while “Raspberry Beret” captured the flavor of the Small Faces’ “Itchycoo Park.”

Fans and critics were initially wrong-footed by his deep-dive into ’60s sensibilities, but Prince clearly relished employing a much more rock-focused approach that let him showcase some of his greatest soloing, particularly on “Temptation.”

Although he moved away from the more obviously retro approach, Sign o’ the Times had a couple of tracks that continued his dabblings, particularly “Starfish and Coffee” and “The Cross.”

"Prince was a great guitarist and he was a showman,” ex-New Power Generation guitarist Mike Scott told Guitar Player.

“He knew how to bring a crowd to their knees – so I would color outside the lines. I would take solos that had more theory behind them as opposed to just doing crazy pentatonic stuff like he’d been doing forever.”

Last year, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame released a remastered edit of Prince’s jaw-dropping "While My Guitar Gently Weeps” performance.

Alongside Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, Steve Winwood and Dhani Harrison, Prince steals the show at the 2004 Induction Ceremony with his typically dazzling display of fretboard finesse.

Browse the Prince catalog here.

Operating under the banner of the Paisley Underground, bands like the Three O’Clock, the Rain Parade, the Dream Syndicate and – the movement’s most successful group – the Bangles merged elements of late-1960s jangle rock with the DIY aesthetic and attitude of the then-recent punk movement.

In the spirit of the British Invasion groups who covered classic rock and roll, the Paisley Underground bands were less concerned about fidelity to any classic sensibility and more interested in adding their own interpretation to it.

The Three O’Clock demonstrated range beyond the psych-rock realm, and guitarist Louis Gutierrez pounded out slashing power chords and circular riffs with his Rickenbacker 330 and Fender Telecaster that made the band the most rocking of the scene.

The Dream Syndicate drew influences from the well of New York City acts like the Velvet Underground and Television, something evident on their single “Tell Me When It’s Over.”

But guitarist Steve Wynn could also deliver feedback-drenched jams like “The Days of Wine and Roses” that harkened back to psychedelic’s classic era.

The Rain Parade were the most traditional of the groups. Guitarists David Roback and Matt Piucci laid down lovely arpeggiating melodies in Byrds-like fashion, and their debut album, 1983’s Emergency Third Rail Power Trip, was filled with flourishes of backward guitar, fuzz-tone and tremolo.

In the end it was the Bangles who would make the biggest impression of the Paisley Underground groups.

Guitarists Susanna Hoffs and Vicki Peterson had solid power-pop chops with their respective Rickenbacker 320 and Vox electric guitars.

And while there was little traditionally “psychedelic” about the Bangles, they showed flashes of it early on in songs like “Going Down to Liverpool” (penned by former Soft Boys guitarist Kimberley Rew for his next group, Katrina and the Waves), “Dover Beach” and the Byrds-ian jangle of “Tell Me,” and “Where Were You When I Needed You.”

The Paisley Underground would influence many groups, including the U.K.’s Teardrop Explodes and Echo and the Bunnymen.

But its most significant adherent was Prince, who began to adopt psychedelic elements into his 1980s recordings and even called his label Paisley Park Records.

He eventually signed up the Three O’Clock and wrote the Bangles’ 1986 monster hit “Manic Monday.”

It was the 1960s, and everything was groovy. Musicians pushed the boundaries of sonic expression and experimentation, with guitarists boldly leading the way.

The hallucinogenic effects of mind-altering drugs, most notably LSD, are credited to have contributed to the creation of a new “psychedelic” sound, with guitarists developing a unique and colorful palette of fuzzed-out – and sometimes just plain weird – tones, inspiring generations of players to come.

While we don’t encourage you to indulge in hallucinogenics, we do suggest you grab your guitar, as we begin our adventure into psychedelic guitar playing.

One simply cannot revisit the 1960s without paying tribute to the Beatles, who began as a mop-topped pop quartet, but soon morphed into a psychedelic songwriting juggernaut with multiple iconic album releases spanning 1966 and 1967, including Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Magical Mystery Tour.

On 1966’s Revolver, George Harrison can be heard going into full bizarre mode, adding time-warped backward guitar (lead guitar lines that are recorded and then played backwards during the song) on “I’m Only Sleeping.”

In addition, Indian music’s heavy influence on Harrison and the psychedelic sound in general can be heard in his sitar-like motifs from “She Said She Said,” also from Revolver.

See Ex. 1 for a riff inspired by this song, and pick near your guitar’s bridge to emulate the sitar’s timbre.

Along with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones ventured into this brave new world with album releases like 1967’s Their Satanic Majesties Request, featuring the track “2,000 Light Years from Home.”

After a 40-second intro of some rather terrifying processed atonal piano musings, Keith Richards enters with a palm-muted single-note guitar riff, which sounds as if it could be the persistent ticking of a clock from an imaginary episode of the bizarre 1960s TV series The Twilight Zone. (In fact, a similar guitar line, albeit less rhythmical, appears in the show’s actual theme music.)

No fuzzy tones here – Richards simply goes with an understated clean electric guitar sound, allowing the staccato jabs of his palm-muted notes to do the talking.

See Ex. 2 for a line inspired by this same track.

Try moving it around the neck in various keys and octaves to experience different shades of mystery. 

March 1965 was a monumental month for the up-and-coming British guitarist Jeff Beck. Upon Jimmy Page’s recommendation, Beck was asked to join the Yardbirds, famously replacing Eric Clapton.

Those were big shoes to fill, but Beck did not lack confidence or imagination. And while his stint with the band lasted just 20 months, his influence from this period, as well as his solo career that followed, would be felt by scores of guitarists.

A great example of Beck pushing sonic boundaries can be heard in the Yardbirds’ 1966 single “Over Under Sideways Down.”

Here the guitarist adds a wildly strange melodic motif, which, while initially met with some skepticism by his bandmates, came to be widely regarded as the song’s signature hook.

Beck combines some deft single-string playing with a gnarly tone. See Ex. 3 for a similar line, inspired by this song. 

The next stop on our magical musical tour brings us to the legendary Jimi Hendrix. His trippy songwriting combined R&B-influenced rhythm playing with soaring guitar solos, steeped in blues and drenched in fuzz.

Jimi somehow managed to control, at will, the beast that is amplifier feedback, creating new tripped-out sonic journeys for his audience.

Hendrix regularly summoned, as if by magic, all manner of new sounds from his guitar. With the song “Fire,” from the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s debut 1967 album, Are You Experienced, he introduced himself with a guitar solo consisting of a veritable onslaught of stinging string bends and vibratos.

Ex. 4 brings to mind this face-melter. Note that I’ve added an octave-up doubling effect to further capture Jimi’s sound, as this is something he employed frequently via his Octavia pedal.

This pedal, designed specifically for Jimi by his sound technician, Roger Mayer, doubled every note one octave higher, while adding fuzz. It often sounded as if Jimi’s guitar was tearing apart at the seams.

While discussing Jimi, let’s give a nod to another great guitarist from a later generation who was influenced by Hendrix’s psychedelic sound, namely Prince, whose musical legacy continues to live on despite his untimely death in 2016.

An iconoclast, Prince often fused his R&B/funk/soul foundation with elements of pop, rock, jazz or whatever suited him in the moment.

One of his 19 top-10 hits, the single “When Doves Cry,” off of 1984’s smash album, Purple Rain, went to number one on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, where it stayed for five weeks.

Prince notably played every instrument on the track. The song bursts through the speakers with a virtuosic unaccompanied electric guitar line, which seems to answer the question “What would Jimi Hendrix sound like if he were still alive today – after having taken a trip to Mars?”

Prince tips his hat to the master more directly with his choice of tone, as he employs Hendrix’s signature combination of fuzz and octave doubler.

The entire intro solo is masterfully played, darting around in fits and starts, and Ex. 5 is inspired by Prince’s wicked opening statement.

We return to the 1960s with another purveyor of the psychedelic movement: the San Francisco–based band Jefferson Airplane.

In the classic song “White Rabbit,” from their seminal 1967 release, Surrealistic Pillow, songwriter Grace Slick’s lyrics evoke 1960s drug culture while guitarist Jorma Kaukonen weaves sinewy lines over a brooding rhythm.

Kaukonen accomplishes this by deftly employing an exotic scale, another element of the psychedelic sound. While the song is broadly in the key of A major, the intro and verses center around a chord progression of F# to G, which is technically out of key.

Kaukonen navigates these chords using the 5th mode of harmonic minor, commonly referred to as Phrygian-dominant.

Harmonic minor (1, 2, b3, 4, 5, b6, #7) is nearly identical to natural minor (1, 2, b3, 4, 5, b6, b7), the only difference being its raised 7th scale degree. Note how this creates an unusual augmented 2nd interval (one and one half steps) between the 6th and 7th degrees.

The term “5th mode” simply means that Phrygian-dominant’s root is the 5th degree of the harmonic minor scale. This is the note that will sound like “home.” 

In “White Rabbit,” Kaukonen employs F# Phrygian-dominant (F#, G, A#, B, C#, D, E), the 5th mode of B harmonic minor (B, C#, D, E, F#, G, A#). But you can take off your thinking cap and mellow out to Ex. 6, a trippy line inspired by this song.

Note the aforementioned augmented 2nd interval between the G and A# in the last bar.

Many critics consider the release of the Byrds' 1966 single “Eight Miles High” to be the dawn of the psychedelic era.

Influenced by the music of sitarist Ravi Shankar and jazz saxophonist John Coltrane, it is led by the twang of Roger McGuinn’s signature 12-string Rickenbacker electric.

The song as a whole juxtaposes droning instrumental sections with hauntingly beautiful vocal harmonies in much the same way that McGuinn’s playing ebbs and flows between sitar-like melodies and fiery bursts of single notes.

Ex. 7 is reminiscent of his alternately melodic and frenzied playing throughout the song.

Note that you can use an octaver, set to double an octave higher, to approximate the sound of McGuinn’s 12-string, as I have done here. 

In 1966, along with his brother Sly, guitarist Freddie Stone co-founded the dynamic psychedelic funk ensemble Sly & the Family Stone. 

The band drew inspiration from a myriad of styles – R&B, rock, church music and beyond – and Freddie’s nuanced playing was an integral part of their rhythmic foundation.

But rather than in-your-face raucousness, he preferred to pick his spots, his guitar often peeking out from inside the band to add subtle textures.

For example, in their 1968 hit single “Everyday People,” a cry for racial harmony which still resonates today, Stone interjects just a few fuzzed-out bass notes here and there. They never fully grab the spotlight, but they make an important sonic contribution nonetheless, adding a touch of psychedelia.

In 1969’s “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” the guitarist fires up his wah pedal and alternates between funky strummed 9th chords and staccato single-note phrases.

Ex. 8 is not unlike his approach throughout the song. A master of understatement, Stone could convey so much, often with just a few notes. 

Spanning decades, with some original band members still going strong as Dead and Company, the Grateful Dead’s music inspired an intense devotion from their Deadhead fans, who faithfully followed the band from show to show as they crisscrossed the country.

The band’s songs, often crafted to be long jams when played live, left plenty of room for late master improviser Jerry Garcia to work his magic.

While many of the players above utilized varied and often strange tones, Garcia often chose a simple clean tone for his electric musings, allowing his colorful note choices and imaginative rhythmic sense to hypnotize audiences. 

Ex. 9 is inspired by Garcia’s effortlessly fantastic playing throughout “Dark Star,” the Grateful Dead’s 1968 single, and showcases one rhythm – the quarter-note triplet – throughout the four-bar phrase, with only occasional respites.

Tension is certainly created by the sheer repetition, but more subtly, it is the way its lilting rhythm sits atop and “rubs” against the song’s straight-eighths feel that grabs our attention and keeps us hooked for the duration.

It’s the sort of magic Jerry Garcia could seemingly conjure on demand, night after night.

The 1960s psychedelic movement, spearheaded by a wave of innovative guitarists unafraid to break down traditional norms of playing and tone, directly reflected the tumultuous political and social times they inhabited.

Many more recent iconic bands, such as Red Hot Chili Peppers, Smashing Pumpkins, My Morning Jacket and the Flaming Lips, owe a debt of gratitude to the risks these players took as they created music that often seemed to be the stuff of dreamscapes.

Have a question or comment about this month’s lesson? Feel free to reach out to Jeff Jacobson on Twitter @jjmusicmentor or at jeffjacobson.net.

Jeff offers private guitar and songwriting lessons virtually.

In the world of instantly recognizable custom electric guitars, perhaps none stands out more than the aptly named Cloud that Prince played in the final scenes of the 1984 film Purple Rain.

Luthier Dave Rusan designed and built the Cloud, with its whimsical curves and distinctive prong on the upper bout. 

Rusan grew up in Saint Cloud, Minnesota, and became interested playing guitar as teenager. He says he didn’t think of it as just a musical instrument, however, but as a beautiful and mysterious machine.

“Soon after my dad bought me my second guitar, a Mosrite, I took off the neck and removed the pickguard to see what was going on inside,” he recounts to Guitar Player.

“I started modifying my guitars, but with almost no books to refer to, my efforts were based largely on trial and error. I improved, though, and was soon working on my friend’s guitars. I felt I’d reached a major milestone when I finished my first re-fret.”

Rusan was playing in “decent” bands in the Saint Cloud area, but, seeking to expand his horizons, he moved to Minneapolis to pursue the music scene there. 

“I found better musicians to work with and played all the major clubs,” he says.

“I had the opportunity to do session work at Sound 80, where Bob Dylan and Cat Stevens would do some recording. I also wanted to continue to pursue a career in guitar repair and started contacting music stores in the Minneapolis area.

“However, the owners of these stores were almost all at least a generation older than their customers, who played in rock bands. They had been in business for years, going back at least to the craze for accordions that had been engendered by The Lawrence Welk Show in the 1950s. It was like being in a store owned by your unhip uncle.”

There was one music store that was cool, however, and it changed Rusan’s life.

“Knut-Koupee Music was owned by two guys in their 20s who also played in bands, and it was a fun store and a hangout for rock musicians,” he explains. “I offered to start a repair shop in the basement, which they agreed to, and I soon was working on the guitars of the hippest bands in town, including the Replacements, Hüsker Dü and the Suburbs.

“There was also a young kid, still in high school, who frequently came to the store and was rumored to be super-talented. One day he demonstrated it by riffing on a keyboard with his right hand while hammering a harmony part on a guitar with his left hand.

“About a year later, I heard an even more impressive demonstration when David Z [a.k.a. David Rivkin], a local recording engineer and producer, played a recording on a boom box that he put on the counter. 

"I remember saying, ‘Wow, David, it looks like you discovered the next Earth, Wind and Fire!’ He replied, ‘Nope, it’s all played by that kid with the Afro who always hangs out here.’ The demo I heard that day got Prince a recording contract, and he was on the rise.”

How did you begin working with Prince?

I did some setups and modifications to his Gibson L6S, as well as to an unusual custom bass guitar he’d bought in New York City. But then I got an opportunity to take a sabbatical from my position at Knut-Koupee and work at a store in the U.K.

This was a dream come true, because it was a shop where many major British acts took their instruments for repair. I was soon working on guitars that belonged to the Rolling Stones, the Who and Def Leppard, and I got to spend some time with Gary Moore, Greg Lake and even Randy Rhoads.

Soon after I resumed my job at Knut-Koupee, I saw Prince at the counter talking to one of the owners, Jeff Hill. He told me Prince was going to star in a movie and he needed to have a custom guitar built that would be part of the plot. But it would have to be done quickly, since the movie was already in production.

Although by that time I was a competent repairman, I knew that guitar building is quite a different skill and different tools would be needed to accomplish the task. I contemplated declining the project, but I thought if I didn’t give it a shot, I’d always regret it, so I accepted the challenge.

Did Prince tell you how he wanted the guitar to look?

His instructions were sketchy at best. At the time he often seemed painfully shy and talked as little as possible. He wanted design elements of his custom bass, such as the long horn, incorporated into this custom build, so I used that as my initial inspiration.

He said he wanted it to be white, with gold hardware, and he must have already had some experience with EMG pickups, since he requested them. Otherwise, I was on my own, and all the decisions – such as neck size and shape, fret size and the myriad other things I would have wanted to discuss with him – were left for me to decide.

I felt that the best plan was to make a guitar I would enjoy playing and hope that we both had the same taste.

I spent a lot of time making a step-by-step plan so that I wouldn’t become overwhelmed by the task. Although I had already carved necks, I decided to use a neck from an unfinished guitar that was in the shop and shaped the headstock to my plans.

I decided to make the body of hard-rock maple, because it wasn’t going to be a large guitar that could get heavy, and the hardness of that wood could help it survive the abuse that Prince often inflicted on his stage guitars.

Schaller hardware was top of the line at that time, so I used their bridge and tuners.

Were there any particular problems you had to overcome during the build?

The shop was poorly equipped for guitar building. There were a few items – such as a drill press, a band saw and a router – but none of the smaller specialized tools needed for this job, like chisels, a palm sander and a Foredom rotary tool.

The body carving was quite a task. There have been very few guitars with such a complicated shape, and I had to bring it to life with a Dremel tool and sanding drums powered by a hand drill. I also had a belt sander that had been mounted on its side, which proved to be quite helpful.

I really threw myself into the project, working six days a week for over a month. Then, Tommy Stinson [not the onetime Replacements bassist], who mostly did finishing in the shop, took over to paint it.

Nitrocellulose lacquer was used, which caused some problems, since the shape was hard to spray evenly, and clear buildup in certain areas caused the white to look a bit yellow, especially around the horn.

When the finishing was done, I took over, removing the lacquer from the frets, installing the hardware and electronics and doing the final setup.

How did Prince react when he saw it?

He liked it a lot and used it in the movie’s most important final scene. Prince seemed to enjoy playing the guitar, because he requested two more Clouds for the tour. I later made a fourth one that was given away in London by Warner Records in conjunction with a music-store chain.

Has your business changed over the years and are you still a one-man operation?

I still make these guitars by myself in my workshop. They’re demanding to build for a solid-body instrument, but carving wood into a graceful shape is rewarding, and customers always tell me how much they appreciate them.

The demand really picked up after Prince passed away, and I feel my work helps honor his memory. I’ve sent them all over the world, and my goals now are to achieve the highest level of attention to detail and playability I can muster, while keeping them true as possible to the originals.

It hasn’t been easy, because some of the products have changed or disappeared, but after almost 40 years I can still find a way to make it happen. For example, the Schaller bridge I originally used was discontinued six years ago, so I have friends in Europe and Japan looking for new-old-stock ones.

EMG changed the style of their logo about two years ago, so I had to have a special run commissioned, with the old logo printed on the pickups.

Schaller also changed the logo on their tuners. Luckily, I found a guy on Reverb who had 50 new sets that he’d stored for 20 years, and I bought them all.

Have you updated anything?

One significant change I’ve made to the Clouds is the way that I install the frets. On the first one or two, I fretted them before the finish went on, which is common with painted fingerboards.

This method requires removing the finish from the frets, and it can be difficult to make it look good when the fingerboard surface is a solid color rather than just clear coats. The height of the frets is also diminished by the buildup of the paint between them.

I made at least one for Prince in which I installed the frets over tiny strips of veneer to add to their height. That worked pretty well but was quite labor intensive.

A few years ago I came up with a new method that, to my knowledge, has never been done: I fret the guitar before the finishing is done and bevel and shape the ends of the frets. Then I remove them and polish the ends. After finishing, I clean out the fret slots, reinstall the frets and do the leveling, being careful to center them on the fingerboard and not mar the polished ends.

When I’m done, I have frets that look their best and have smooth, slightly recessed ends due to the extra thickness of the paint.

It’s clearly an improvement over every other method that I’ve tried. But I don’t tell customers about this unless they ask, since some might prefer the method I used on the first guitars, even though the results were inferior.

Order Purple Rain here.

Electric guitar virtuoso Mdou Moctar was 17 when he decided he was going to somehow acquire his own ax. But with guitars in impossibly short supply in his native Niger, the young hopeful set about his quest by building the instrument himself.

With very little in the way of instructions, Moctar constructed his first acoustic guitar from reclaimed wood and metal parts, including brake cables and the key from a sardine can.

Talk about improvisation!

Fast forward to now and Mdou Moctar is one of the most exciting talents in the contemporary guitar world.  

His dazzling display of technique, unique feel and adventurous composition has enthralled audiences across the globe. 

Indeed, Moctar is currently on tour in the U.S. while riding high on the back of his latest release, last year’s Afrique Victime.

Last month, Matador Records released a deluxe digital edition of Afrique Victime that includes nine previously unreleased songs comprising demos and live tracks curated from tour recordings.

Also included is the incredible “Nakanegh Dich."

Recorded in Los Angeles with producer Rob Schnapf (Beck, Elliott Smith) during the Afrique Victime album sessions, this was Moctar’s very first time using a wah pedal.

“At some point, Mdou called Rob into the studio and asked him to control the wah with his foot while Mdou shredded a solo,” explains bassist and producer, Mikey Coltun.

In this amazing clip from 2018, Moctar’s singular talent can be witnessed up close as he performs the track “Tarhatazed” live on KEXP.

While Moctar is known to have been influenced by Prince and Hendrix, his introduction to Eddie Van Halen came more recently during a U.S. tour when he saw an old video of the late guitarist performing.

“After seeing him, I developed my own tapping style,” said Moctar.

Get Afrique Victime here.

Andy McKee is the epitome of solo acoustic excellence, and on his new EP, Symbol (Mythmaker/Cruzen Street), the guitarist embraces his role as one of the planet’s premiere percussive fingerstyle ambassadors.

Three of Symbol’s six songs are covers honoring his most influential heroes, Preston Reed, Billy McLaughlin and Michael Hedges. McKee also conveys reverence for Prince, with whom he toured Australia in 2012, by milking every drop of meaning from “Purple Rain” without uttering a syllable.

McKee’s rendition is actually quite straightforward considering the advanced techniques at his command, and it is majestic in its modesty. He allows the starkly exposed melody to speak for itself, and this version will surely spur other players to give it a shot.

The penultimate track pays homage to McKee’s other obsession, video game music, and he renders the symphonic “Streets of Whiterun” with expansive beauty on harp guitar. The acoustics on Symbol sound deep and lush, which is particularly impressive, considering McKee recorded at home using a single Mojave Audio MA-200 microphone to capture his Greenfield guitars. The album was mixed by solo fingerstylist and former Guitar Masters tour mate Antoine Dufour.

The finale commemorates some of McKee’s favorite movie soundtrack music with a medley of training scene tunes from Rocky IV, which was a formative factor in his lifelong instrumental appreciation. With original composer Vince DiCola playing everything except guitar, it’s a wild sonic sea change, the dramatic nature of which is furthered by McKee’s diametrically different electric guitar style.

It bears no resemblance to his percussive acoustic approach and is instead inspired by shredders such as Joe Satriani and John Petrucci. He even used an Ernie Ball Music Man John Petrucci signature model on “Rocky IV Medley.”

McKee wears his modern acoustic Eagle Scout badge with honor, and he gets truly geeked up talking about instrumental virtuosity of all stripes. But what sets him apart is his pure passion for honest musical expression.

McKee relishes opportunities to preach what he practices. He recently completed his annual Musicarium guitar camp, and is touring with fellow solo acoustic icon and educator Tommy Emmanuel.

McKee’s videos are infinitely popular on YouTube, and he has a relatively new TrueFire channel called “The Joy of Playing,” where eager legions of dedicated disciples can browse a broad selection of video tutorials in which their guru pontificates on everything from gear to technique and influences.

What’s at the heart of your deep appreciation for instrumental music, and why haven’t you cut more fresh studio takes recently?

I sometimes stumble over words, so music has always been a direct way for me to connect with people. But considering all of the insanity that’s been going on in the country over the past four years, what kind of music could I write that would connect?

I felt like I didn’t understand people the way I thought I did. That really shook me and threw me into a tailspin. My whole desire to even try writing music anymore seemed futile.

Was interpreting a few tunes by your heroes essentially a creative way to get your mojo working again?

Yeah, it honestly was a bit. I do have original tunes written, but some of them are just so different, ranging from retro ’80s-inspired electric to very meditative, relaxed music. My manager and I were talking about doing a series of EPs focused on different styles, and then I had the idea to do this covers thing, because I always like to shine a light on the people that inspired me.

Fingerstyle instrumental is such a niche style. Some see it on YouTube or Instagram for the first time and are unaware of the history. I figured that I should do a few of their tunes as well as some others that I’d done live or online but hadn’t recorded and released.

The Prince cover is not a huge surprise, because you toured with him, but it is crazy to find out that you played “Purple Rain” on that tour as a solo opener and he would work you into his band later in his set. How did that happen?

Prince wanted me to do something special to open the show. I found that “Purple Rain” worked well on baritone, so I found the key and lowered it [from B, on the original, to A], as my Greenfield is a baritone lowered a step from normal baritone pitch. The lowest note is A, instead of B, and the tuning is like DADGAD with a suspended fourth, but dropped down so that from low to high the strings are A E A D E A.

I tried to keep it simple, mostly just the melody with a bit of harmonic accompaniment. With that stripped-down presentation, you can hear the melody very directly. I sent Prince my version of “Purple Rain,” and he loved it. To start the show, he had an elevator lift me up through the stage; I’d play “Purple Rain,” and then it would go back down until later. I’d come back up and do a medley with the band.

It ended with us doing “Purple Rain” together, and by that point I’d have an electric guitar. He played the solo. [laughs] His original idea for the stage presentation had me wearing a wild 50-foot cape. But I wasn’t too into that.

How does a guy like you relate to a guy like Prince?

He brought up Joni Mitchell on more than one occasion, and I’m a huge fan as well. There was one point where I tried to relate what I do instrumentally. I do some fancy technical stuff, but I don’t ever want that to be the show – you know, “Hey, look at how badass I am on the guitar!”

I try to use that stuff to write something interesting or beautiful. Like Joni Mitchell, I’m trying to paint a picture or tell you a story, just with the guitar. It’s not necessarily about the theatrics, although sometimes that’s fun.

Did you hear Joni Mitchell just announced the release of a long-lost performance from 1968 recorded by Jimi Hendrix, who brought his reel-toreel machine to the club?

I did. That’s crazy unbelievably wild!

Michael Hedges is a Hendrix-like icon to modern acoustic enthusiasts. What’s the story behind your version of “Ragamuffin”?

I tuned my signature Greenfield to DADGAD, like it is on his original recording. I’d worked on learning that tune by ear several times over the years. When it came time to do this, I thought about getting into the transcription and doing it perfectly correct, but I ultimately decided to go with my own take and play some things slightly more aggressively.

When I discovered Hedges, I was intrigued by his ability on the guitar, but his music seemed like it was from another dimension. It was so powerful. Everything he was saying with the guitar resonated with me 100 percent.

Sadly, he passed away in the car accident [on December 2, 1997] just a few months after I discovered his music, so I never got to see him play live or meet him. But he was transformational in my life, how I approach music, and what you can do with the guitar. He’s a profound influence to this day and I still listen to his albums all the time.

How does Preston Reed figure into your equation of acoustic inspirations?

I originally got into fingerstyle guitar through Preston. I was 16 and playing with high-school friends, doing stuff like Metallica, Iron Maiden and Pantera. My cousin invited me to check out a Washburn clinic with Preston Reed, and I was blown away to see one guy doing so much by playing percussively on a steel-string acoustic.

I was into tapping, because I was trying to learn Eddie Van Halen and Joe Satriani solos, but Preston was using it to help cover all the bases throughout an entire piece of music. I’d never seen anything like it.

His instructional video got me going on modern acoustic guitar. I chose “Chattanooga” because it’s quite sophisticated for that style. There are so many interesting things: a beautiful melody, cool key changes and a sense of forward movement. I played it on my signature Greenfield, and the tuning, from low to high, is B G D G A D.

How about the Billy McLaughlin cover, “Clockshop”?

That’s a quintessential Billy McLaughlin kind of tune. He has an approach to tapping on steel string in altered tunings, using legato pull-offs with the fretting hand to create a flowing sound that’s unmistakably his. Playing that way doesn’t leave a lot of room for chordal work, so you’ve got to have a strong melody and support it with the bass line.

I’ve incorporated that approach to solo guitar composition into my own songs, and my version of “Clockshop” is pretty directly comparable to his with a few little differences. I learned “Clockshop” by ear, listening for open strings, and my version is in the same tuning as his: C G D G A C. I recorded it with my signature Greenfield.

Can you share some insights on how you adapted the video game tune “Streets of Whiterun”?

I’m a big video game dork. That’s my main hobby and entertainment medium. I’ve been a big fan of The Elder Scrolls for many years. Skyrim [the game’s fifth installment] came out about a decade ago. It’s a big, open-world fantasy, with beautiful music that plays throughout as you visit different places.

“Streets of Whiterun” is unbelievably gorgeous. It’s orchestral, so I figured the harp guitar would be my best arrangement tool, because it’s the best route for me to cover really low stuff. The tuning for the guitar is an open E major: E B E G# B E, and the harp is tuned C# F# G# A B G#.

I shot a video of myself playing that tune several years ago, and people loved it on YouTube. I decided to record it as a sort of homage to video game music.

Greenfield Guitars introduced two versions of your signature model in 2020, with the Rylynn being somewhat less expensive, but they’re both major investments. What is the most important aspect for those seeking the Andy McKee sound on a budget?

I can pick up any guitar and play away, as I’m not too particular about things, but I prefer the huge sound of a jumbo body. It’s great for fingerstyle playing because there’s a lot of low end and volume. Of the three main Greenfields I use live and in the studio, two of them are jumbos.

The harp guitar has a unique body shape, but my signature G4.2 and the baritone with the color-shifting paint are both jumbos that can fit in the exact same case. The baritone simply has a longer scale length.

Have you had any pandemic-era epiphanies about being a guitar player right now?

As I grow older, what I look for in music and guitar playing is something that comes across as genuine. It doesn’t have to be flashy or have anything to do with that. There are so many guitar players out there. When you find someone that you can tell is being honest, has dove deep to discover who they really are and expresses it through the guitar, that’s the good stuff. I get a kick out of hearing that these days.

Visit the official website of Andy McKee here.

Acclaimed freelance recording engineer and producer Hans-Martin Buff began his career working as a studio tech at Paisley Park in 1995. He summarily became Prince’s recording engineer and worked on the albums The Gold Experience, Chaos and Disorder, Emancipation, The Vault: Old Friends 4 Sale, and Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic. 

“One of the reasons I got the gig with Prince is because I was young and I was hungry and I was kind of unformed,” Buff says. “And Prince had a specific way of working. It was always, ‘I have an idea that I want to put out. You help me capture it.’ And that’s kind of how it was. With a lot of people I work with these days, I offer sounds that help start the ideas for how a project is going to come together, but with Prince it was never that way. 

“He had the idea, and he would react to good sounds and then have more ideas. The main thing that I did was to not let technology get in his way when he wanted to express himself. I think that was my main job. So part of the deal for me was to organize the place for his ideas and capture them in a comprehensive way.”   

You worked a lot with Prince one on one. What was that like? 

I worked with him every day for four years, and most of the things I did was just him and maybe a guest, if he felt like it. Or they started from some kind of jam with the band or some group of people. 

When I started in ’96, Kat Dyson was in the band, so she played on a lot of things on the album Emancipation, where I did a substantial part. And she also played on “The Truth,” which is kind of a hidden gem that he stuck onto Crystal Ball. 

Kat played on that, and Mike Scott came in as well. I think as far as guitarists, that was it in my day, with the exception of his buddies like Lenny Kravitz or Larry Graham, who did a lot of the bass stuff. But even then, if Prince felt like he had something to say on the bass, he would do it.

Did he like to work quickly in the studio? 

Yes, super fast. I’ve never seen that before or since. The one thing that’s different from any other artist I worked with is that there was never that phase of, “How should I do this?” 

Even accomplished studio guitarists will have to figure out approaches, or noodle about for a while, but Prince never did. He just went for it. He took the guitar and he started recording. Sometimes, of course, he would play something wrong or at the wrong spot, but there was never any fumbling.

How much time would he spend getting sounds? 

With guitars, he would take some time going through a whole song and trying out different things. But, like, with vocals, which for a recording engineer is always a huge thing, he would kick everybody out, including myself, and he’d record what he wanted to record. 

And the most elaborate arrangement wouldn’t take longer than two hours. That’s the longest he’d ever work on the background vocals and everything else. So he was super fast, because it was never about fucking it up. With Prince, it was always, “The first time is it.” And if he didn’t get it the first time, he would do another version. He wouldn’t go back and question himself.

Do you think Prince was able to conceptualize songs in their entirety? 

Well, on “Greatest Romance Ever Sold” [from Rave], he came in with the finished lyrics, and at the end of the day that song was done. So it was pre-formed. But with most of the songs, he built them in the studio. He would start with a basic loop. If there was a Linn Drum – which, toward the end of my tenure, we brought out of the basement – he’d do it himself. 

But usually his drummer/programmer, Kirk Johnson, would program a couple of beats, and then he’d start playing guitar or a keyboard over it, and then he would do vocals and he’d flesh it out. The way Prince worked, the recording was actually the act of writing.

At the tail-end of last week, on September 17, acoustic guitar maestro Andy McKee released Symbol, a six-track EP that served as his first new studio release in almost a decade.

Featuring covers of pieces by some of McKee's biggest musical influences – Michael Hedges, Preston Reed, and Billy McLaughlin among them – the EP is highlighted by a stunning acoustic interpretation of Prince's timeless "Purple Rain."

The cover is a veritable feast of McKee's technical acoustic brilliance – his incredible sense of rhythm, perfectly articulated leads (which take the place of the song's vocal melody), and his breathtaking percussive work. You can check out the track's video below.

McKee's arrangement of this 1984 mega-hit dates back to 2012, when he opened for Prince on his Welcome 2 Australia tour.

“He [Prince] had an idea for me to play something at the start of the show on acoustic guitar,” McKee said in a statement. “I ended up with this arrangement of 'Purple Rain,' which he approved of. He was a staggeringly talented guy, who left us too soon and I feel honored that he liked my music.” 

As we learned from Guitar Player's recent interviews with some of the Purple One's former guitar-slinging bandmates, Prince had incredibly high standards for those who performed his music, and wasn't the most forthcoming with compliments and praise.

This astounding cover deserves both though, and we're glad he thought the same.

1992's Love Symbol album marked the dawn of a new era for Prince. The record's official name was an unpronounceable symbol that Prince would, the following year, adopt as a stage name to protest his treatment by Warner Bros. Records.

Love Symbol's second single was an ultra-funky, hip-hop-infused declaration of intent called "My Name Is Prince," and it was accompanied by a (literally) riotous music video that features, at one point, Prince smashing a Fender Stratocaster.

That very electric guitar, still in pieces to this day, is now being auctioned off by Gotta Have Rock and Roll. 

Little information is available concerning the guitar itself, but from the looks of it, it appears to be a fairly standard hardtail sunburst Strat, complete with your usual trio of single-coils (unclear whether these are standard or custom), pair of tone knobs, master volume control, and five-way blade switch.

Of course, those sonically-inclined specs don't matter much on this particular instrument, which has seemingly remained in the same state of unplayable disarray for the last 29 years. There's no evidence to indicate Prince had previously used the guitar on stage or in the studio prior to his smashing it in the video shoot.

Playable or not, this Stratocaster carries with it a minimum bid of $60,000, and an estimated value of $80,000 - $120,000. Bidding for the guitar – which comes with a certificate of authenticity and a catalog from Barney's, another auction house that previously put the guitar under the hammer – opens on Wednesday, August 11.

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

“Captain” Kirk Douglas is best known for his blazing fretboard work in “hip hop organic jazz” collective The Roots. As house band for The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, The Roots’ stylistic dexterity and dynamic flair demands Kirk pull out all the stops when it comes to tonal versatility. We recently caught up with the man himself to talk inspiration, music gear, and his diverse role as a guitarist.

Although you now have two Gibson signature SGs to your name, you’re also known for playing a vintage Epiphone Crestwood Custom…

I purchased my ’61 Epiphone Crestwood from a store called 30th Street Guitars in Manhattan. Ironically, it’s on 27th Street but it originated on 30th Street. I went in there one day and saw it. I’m a big fan of The Black Crowes and they turned me on to the beauty of natural electric guitar tones and overdrive. Their guitar player at the time – Marc Ford – was playing an Epiphone Crestwood with them. There’s a video for the song "Blackberry" where he's playing one, and I just thought it was the coolest guitar. It’s like the perfect morph of a Gibson and a Stratocaster.

What was cool about it was that somebody had replaced the original vibrato with a regular Les Paul-style [Tune-o-matic] bridge [and stop tailpiece], and the original pickups with Firebird mini humbuckers. It had a great sound, and you didn’t have to be too precious about it. That guitar was with me and served me very well. And then it also took on a life of its own when it found its way into the hands of Prince.

Prince famously trashed your Epiphone Crestwood Custom on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon; what happened to the guitar after that?

When Prince broke my Epiphone, a lot of the fretboard came apart from the neck itself and I had to get that glued back on. But you wouldn’t notice the difference when it was repaired. It sounded every bit as wonderful and every bit as vibey (if not more so than before).

Cara Delevingne once played “Sweet Home Alabama” behind her head using a similar-looking Epiphone on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon…

I believe she borrowed that guitar. After the Prince thing, Epiphone sent me a red version of the Epiphone Crestwood because they were doing reissues of it, and I had it painted in white.

We understand you’re a big fan of 100-watt Marshalls, but what amp do you tend to use on stage with The Roots?

On stage with The Roots, I usually use a Mesa Boogie Stiletto. That was Mesa Boogie’s take on a Marshall. It was Boogie’s EL34 amp, but they discontinued it, I think because it just fell out of fashion. But it’s such a good sounding amp. I’ve done a lot of recordings with it. I really love asking my guitar aficionado friends what kind of amplifier they think it is, and they always assume it’s a vintage Marshall, but then I’m like, “No, it’s actually my Mesa Boogie Stiletto combo that I’m playing at bedroom ‘I don’t want to get evicted from my apartment’-level.” 

I get such a good sound out of it. My latest [Gibson] signature SG sounds really great through that amp. I definitely noticed the difference between the BurstBuckers in that and the ’57 Classic [humbucker] pickups. [Douglas’ 2013 signature Gibson SG is fitted with ’57 Classics.]

Why is guitar gear important to you when it comes to making music?

When it comes to all this stuff, you want to be excited about the guitar and the music you’re making. These guitars are not there for just making comparisons. Of course, it’s fun to make comparisons like, ‘let’s see what this amp sounds like compared to this amp,’ or, ‘this pickup compared to this pickup.’ That’s a fun way to spend time and you kind of do discover things you like. But it’s not necessarily making music. When you’re hungry and you have an apple and an orange, you’ll take either. And you won’t complain, like ‘that sucks because it’s not an orange.’

When you have a fun idea – a riff in your head – and you want to record it, you gravitate towards a guitar that sounds good to your ears, looks good to your eyes, and makes you feel inspired. That’s the fun things about guitars – they come in so many different shapes and colors and there are so many different ways to complement your personality and your music visually as well as sonically. That’s another reason why I’m so attracted to the SG – because of the shape of it, and the associations we have with it like Sister Rosetta Tharpe, AC/DC, and Hendrix. It’s evocative of all those things those players have made you feel.

The Inverness Green vintage custom color finish on your signature SG was an interesting choice...

It’s interesting when you get an opportunity to see an SG in a color you’ve never seen before. It’s like anything else rare, like an albino cat or something. What I love about the other finish (Ebony) is that it stands out in a subtle way. The things that stand out about that guitar are the gold hardware (which, on black, looks very elegant) and I love how you can see the detail in the way the pickguard is cut. It almost looks like a bat wing or something.

I wanted to offer my signature Gibson SG in two colors – one that was striking and unusual for an SG, and another color that spoke to the person who just likes black guitars. With certain outfits it looks great. A lot of the time on The Tonight Show I’ll have to wear a tuxedo. There’s an understated-ness about it but a statement is still being made.

Your latest Gibson signature model SG has a master volume uniquely mounted on the pickguard. Do you tend to ride the volume knob during performances, rather than just flipping between pickups and pedals?

There’s a lot of territory to be explored with that, depending on how you’re running your amp. If you’re using an amp that’s hot and/or loud, you can often get your tone to clean up by way of using your guitar controls. And those tones can have great character. But it’s also a case of, ‘do you have time for that?’ These details might get completely lost if you’re playing in a big band. But if you’re in a band that’s more guitar-based, there’s more space to explore complex tones. Especially with a guitar like [the Gibson Kirk Douglas Signature SG].

How much do you rely on effects pedals?

I rely more on pedals with The Roots. A lot of it is about entertaining – you’re playing to people who have a relationship with the album and the guitar is a small piece of what’s going on in the grand scheme of things. So, it’s more pedal-based with The Roots because it’s about the more obvious and pronounced effects. And also, because I’m running around more on stage, I don’t have time to get into those particulars. The only person that would notice those complexities would be me and me alone. It’s a hip hop group essentially. It’s about the rhythm and drums – it’s rhythm and rhyme – and everything else is supportive of that.

For more information on the Kirk Douglas Signature SG visit Gibson's website.

In the estimation of many great guitarists, the blackface Fender Princeton Reverb is the finest club and studio amp ever created. There’s so much empirical evidence behind that claim that it’s a tough one to knock off its perch. The combo was famously employed in the studio by Clarence White and Tommy Tedesco, who played the main guitar parts on several Beach Boys hits, among countless other recordings, and it is beloved by Telecaster virtuoso Jim Campilongo, whose devotion to it is near-religious.

Duane Allman is purported to have used a Princeton Reverb for his slide parts on Derek and the Dominos’ “Layla,” and the amp’s iconic tone can be heard on a handful of seminal Steely Dan guitar solos. To put it simply, this petite powerhouse has long proved its ability to punch above its weight class.

It’s easy to write off the Princeton Reverb as a smaller, less-overpowering Deluxe Reverb (a club classic in its own right), but there are several differences within the Princeton Reverb circuit that make it something entirely different.

Certainly, the amp has the classic blackface tone circuit, with treble and bass controls sandwiched between the two gain stages provided by its first preamp tube. This configuration is lauded for its ability to enhance a clear, shimmering tone when the amp is kept in the clean zone, and provide great bite and articulation when cranked up.

However, in the Princeton Reverb, the 7025 preamp tube (a rugged 12AX7 equivalent) that’s responsible for those two stages is driven at lower DC voltages than the preamp tubes in larger Fender amps of the era. This lends it a slightly juicier, “browner” tonality and a more tactile response to pick attack, with a little less of the potentially overbearing glassiness of the blackface combos that produce 40 watts or more.

An equally significant splash of secret sauce is found in the Princeton Reverb’s phase inverter, which follows the cathodyne (a.k.a. split-load) topology, with one half of a 12AX7 driving the signal while the second half splits it and inverts the phase of one leg to send it on to the dual 6V6GT output tubes. All other blackface Fenders of the era with two or more output tubes used the more advanced long-tailed-pair phase inverter, a more high-fidelity design, but one that lacked the preceding driver stage.

The Princeton Reverb’s phase inverter, however, was a holdover from the classic tweed-era amps, all of which – aside from the Bassman and the high-powered Twin – featured it. Sonically, this phase inverter breaks up a little earlier than the later circuits and adds a certain textured, midrange-y thickness to the tone even when what we believe we are hearing is still “mostly clean.”

Add together these and other Princeton Reverb peculiarities, push it all through a relatively low-powered output stage into a vintage 10-inch speaker, and you’ve got a guitar amp that’s ready to sing and sustain and let you dig in on dynamic lead parts, all without having to be too loud for the room or the microphone that’s capturing it.

Add the succulent reverb and tremolo, and factor in the convenience of being able to heft it single-handedly onto the subway or front seat of your Fiat 500, and this combo is perfect for any studio or club date. 

It’s worth noting that the reverb-less Princeton amp is also an extremely cool little combo in its own right, although the simpler circuit lacks one of the gain stages that its reverb-bearing sibling boasts, so it has to be pushed harder to achieve its meaty overdrive. When it gets there, though, it can sound glorious in its own slightly different and marginally more controlled way.

Essential Ingredients

• Dual-6V6GT output tubes in fixed bias
• 12AX7, 12AT7 and 7025 preamp tubes
• 5U4GB rectifier tube
• 12 watts output
• Single 10-inch Oxford 10L5 speaker
• Tube-driven tremolo and reverb
• Solid-pine cabinet

The last year and change has seen a number of auctions of custom, Prince-commissioned and -owned "Cloud" guitars. 

An early '90s example built by Minneapolis luthier Kurt Nelson sold at auction in March for nearly $133,000, while the "Blue Angel" Cloud guitar – Prince's main stage instrument from 1984-1993 – sold at auction for an incredible $563,500 last June.

Now, another Prince "Cloud" guitar – this one a 1994 blue model built by Andy Beech – has sold at auction, for $281,250.

Put up for sale by Julien's Auctions as part of its "Music Icons" lot, the guitar features a "Paisley Park" inventory tag on the neck plate, a hard case with a laminated PRN Productions tag, and a pickup cavity signed by Prince’s former guitar tech, Zeke Clark, with the inscription: “Zeke for [love symbol] Prince.”

The guitar was also sold with printed receipts and a tag showing the guitar was flown to London on Northwest Airlines, and was ordered through the N.P.G. pop-up store in London on June 29, 1994.

Another Prince Cloud model – a mid-90s era example built by Schecter – was also sold by Julien's as part of the same lot for $50,000.

For more info on the guitars, stop by juliensauctions.com.

The following is an archival Guitar Player piece.

“I was looking for a Mesa Mark III because I wanted that early Boogie tone, but I never figured I would find a IIC+, much less be able to afford the prices they fetch,” says Ross Davison, owner of the Mesa/Boogie Mark IIC+ amp featured here.

“I went looking around the Twin Cities music stores without much luck until I stopped in at Encore Music in Minneapolis. I knew the owner had some vintage stuff, and after looking around for a while, I spotted this amp under some other heads. 

"I asked the owner about it, and he said it had been in his shop for a long time, but he couldn’t remember where it came from. He said it was a Coliseum model and wanted $1,799 for it.

“That night, I started doing some research on it, and the more research I did, the more the mystery deepened. I just couldn’t figure out what this thing was. About a month later, I decided to go look at it again, and, once I played it, I knew I had to have it. The deal was sealed when the owner said, ‘Give me $1,200, and get it out of my shop. I’m tired of looking at it.’

“I took it directly to Capitol Guitars – the local Mesa dealer in St. Paul – and they did their best to figure out what it was, but to no avail. The only other option left was the Internet. I was going to post some images of the chassis and circuit board, and it was then that I spotted ‘Prince 2’ written in Sharpie under the power-tube retainer clips. 

"I posted the photos on the Mesa forum, and everything took off from there. I was able to confirm that it indeed was one of the IIC+ heads used by Prince.”

Davison sent the amp to Mesa for servicing, where it landed on the bench of Mike Bendinelli, the same Mesa engineer who had his hands on it back in 1984.

“There were three of these 300 series amps,” says Bendinelli. “The original two were Mark IIBs, and this is one of them. They’re all dated 1981, and Prince had them by the time he did the 1999 tour. In 1984, when Prince started the Purple Rain tour, I got a call from his guitar tech, JD. 

"The band was rehearsing in the St. Paul Civic Auditorium, and JD said, ‘We’ve got the same two Mark IIB heads that we’ve been using, but something isn’t working right with them. There’s no power or headroom and Prince isn’t happy.’

“For a couple of days, I went back and forth with JD, and, finally, I just sent out a new 300 series IIC+ head for them to try out. But when they got it, they plugged it into the same setup – including the footswitch cable – which was hooked up to a footswitch for a Mark IIB. 

"Now, when you plug a Mark IIB footswitch into the Lead/Rhythm jack on a IIC+, it turns the lead mode on about halfway, so there’s still no clean sound – which was what Prince wanted, because he mainly got his lead tones from pedals.

“JD called me back a couple of days later and said, ‘It’s still not working, and I’m guitar tech number six. If I don’t get this stuff working in the next couple of days, they’ll be on guitar tech number seven.’

“So I flew back there, and within a couple of minutes, I saw they had two brand new Bag End speaker cabinets with JBLs, and they were wired the stock way in parallel for 4Ω. They were plugging these two 4Ω boxes into the amp, which meant they had a 2Ω load on it. 

"The amp was only putting out 100 watts, and it was all hard and packed down. That was the main problem. The reason they didn’t have a problem before is because Don Batts – who had been Prince’s guitar tech for the 1999 tour – had rewired the speaker cabinets in series, so you had two of them running in series-parallel for an 8Ω load, and it all worked great. They had 180 watts of clean headroom, and it was a big, loud sound onstage.

“We rewired the new cabinets, fixed the footswitch problem, they went through a rehearsal, and everybody breathed a sign of relief when Prince played a 15-minute solo on ‘Purple Rain.’ 

"You should have seen the smiles on the crew! Prince liked the C+ better, because it had a lot more punch and headroom in the preamp. I carried one of the 300 series Mark IIBs home with me, updated it to a C+, and sent it back. So Prince ended up with three C+ heads – one original and two converted.

“When I took this amp out of the cabinet and put it on the bench I went, ‘Oh, there’s an LED drilled into the front panel. I remember doing that.’ They insisted on having a light on the front to tell them what mode the amp was in. I thought that was funny, because if you can’t hear the difference what help is a light going to be? 

"I’m recalling that Prince didn’t use the Lead mode anyway, but his setup back then was definitely a 300 series head with two Bag End sealed-back cabinets loaded with JBLs. It was quite a sound!”

On March 15, 2004, George Harrison was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, an occasion that saw an ad-hoc, all-star band featuring Tom Petty and two other members of The Heartbreakers, Jeff Lynne, Steve Winwood, Dhani Harrison, and Marc Mann pay tribute to the Beatle with a performance of one of his best-known songs, "While My Guitar Gently Weeps."

Noteworthy as that is in and of itself, we probably wouldn't be talking about the performance today had a fellow R&RHOF 2004 inductee, Prince, not guested on it, and taken it to another level.

Ending the tribute with a ferocious, explosive, and powerful three-minute guitar solo, the initially unassuming guest spot became one of Prince's most legendary performances, especially in the wake of his untimely death in 2016.

Now, a new "director's cut" video of the performance – created by Joel Gallen, who directed and produced the original 2004 broadcast – has been released on YouTube. The video, which you can check out below, gives Prince significantly more close-ups, meaning – luckily for us – a closer look at his unbelievable fretwork.

“17 years after this stunning performance by Prince, I finally had the chance to go in and re-edit it slightly – since there were several shots that were bothering me,” Gallen wrote in the video's caption.

“I got rid of all the dissolves and made them all cuts, and added lots more close-ups of Prince during his solo. I think it's better now. Let me know what you think. Joel.”

Of course, one of the performance's greatest mysteries remains the fate of the Tele-style H.S. Anderson Mad Cat Prince used for the solo. Just as he finished, Prince tossed the guitar in the air... only it never came back down.

"I didn’t even see who caught it," Steve Ferrone – who served as the drummer for the fateful performance – told The New York Times in 2016. "I just saw it go up, and I was astonished that it didn’t come back down again.

Some mysteries, it seems, are never meant to be solved...

Last week, we reported that another Prince "Cloud" guitar had gone up for auction.

Initially valued at $60,000, the early '90s-era guitar – built by Minneapolis luthier Kurt Nelson – has sold at an RR Auction-sponsored sale for $132,868.

The guitar features a bright yellow finish, golden hardware, cloud-inspired designs on the horn and headstock, and 18 black Prince symbols on the fretboard and the top of neck.

Additionally, the guitar's battery plate features a “PRN Musical Corp.” label, which is marked “PM 16200.”

The guitar also came with a pearloid guitar pick with the Prince symbol, the original purple hardshell carrying case with a matching plush interior and faux reptile scale exterior, and a detailed letter of provenance from Nelson.

Additionally, it was sold with Nelson’s original clear plastic guitar pattern sheet – with a matching Cloud outline in black felt tip – a Plexiglas cut-out of the upper body, and a yellow handkerchief given to Nelson by Paisley Park to color-match with the guitar.

This isn't the first Prince-owned "Cloud" guitar to fetch big money at auction in recent months. Prince's "Blue Angel" Cloud guitar – his main stage instrument from 1984-1993 – sold for over $563,000 last June.

One of the most prominent guitar auctions of 2020 – and there sure were a lot of them – was that of Prince's "Blue Angel" Cloud guitar, which sold for over $563,000 in June.

Now, another Prince-owned and -played Cloud guitar is going under the auctioneer's hammer. 

Built by Minneapolis luthier Kurt Nelson in the early '90s (after he was commissioned for the job by Prince), the guitar features a bright yellow finish, golden hardware, cloud-inspired designs on the horn and headstock, and 18 black Prince symbols on the fretboard and the top of neck.

Additionally, the guitar's battery plate features a “PRN Musical Corp.” label, which is marked “PM 16200.”

RR Auction – the firm selling the guitar – says that the instrument is in "fine" condition, with a repair to the headstock's uppermost point, a couple small chips to the paint (near the neck pickup and lower bout), some "faint scattered scuffs" on the back, and a few instances of flaking on the interior of the swirl designs.

“There appears to be an extremely small finish chip towards the lower bout and another near pickup," said a condition report from guitar specialist Chris Lamy.

"There is some wear on the frets indicating the guitar has been played. The strings are old and appeared rather fragile and did have some buildup on them, again, indicative this guitar has been played. 

"There is repaired headstock damage to the bass side horn of the headstock and it does not detract or impact playability. I have seen this exact damage on another Cloud and it may just be a weak point on the headstock.” 

The guitar comes with a pearloid guitar pick with the Prince symbol, the original purple hardshell carrying case with a matching plush interior and faux reptile scale exterior, and a detailed letter of provenance from Nelson. Its value is estimated at around $60,000.

It also comes with Nelson’s original clear plastic guitar pattern sheet – with a matching Cloud outline in black felt tip – a Plexiglas cut-out of the upper body, and a yellow handkerchief given to Nelson by Paisley Park to color-match with the guitar.

For more info on the guitar, point your browser on over to rrauction.com.

A number of pieces of gear used onstage by Eddie Van Halen were allegedly stolen from a Nashville storage locker earlier this month. 

According to The Tennessean, thieves took custom Marshall cabinets, vintage Fender and boutique TopHat amplifiers, Ampeg bass cabinets, collectable Sears Silvertone instruments, and more from a locker belonging to guitar tech Zeke Clark.

Clark – who, in addition to his time with Van Halen, has worked with Cheap Trick and Kenny Chesney – had last visited the iStorage unit in late October, and returned last week to find a new lock on the unit. Once he removed it with bolt cutters, he discovered that 20 Marshall 4x12 cabinets, among other pieces of gear, were missing. Clark values the stolen merchandise at at least $50,000.

Van Halen used the Marshalls on his band's 5150 and Monsters of Rock tours, Clark said. Years later, Prince would use them for a number of '90s studio recordings. 

The Metro Nashville Police Department Hermitage precinct has opened an investigation on the theft, though a full inventory of the stolen items has yet to be created.

"This stuff means the world to me," Clark said. "This is part of my life. This is my history. I just want to get it back." 

Prince's long-lost "Blue Angel," his main stage guitar from 1984 - 1993, has been sold for $563,500 at auction.

Sold at Julien's Music Icons auction in Beverly Hills - the same event that saw the world record-breaking $6 million sale of Kurt Cobain's "MTV Unplugged" Martin D-18E - the heavily-worn guitar met its high pre-auction valuation, which had it pegged at $400,000 - $600,000. 

Prince used the guitar during his Purple Rain, Parade, Sign o’ the Times, Lovesexy and Diamonds and Pearls tours, and for the "Cream" and "Get Off" music videos. 

It was also used during the superstar's appearances on Saturday Night Live’s 15th Anniversary Special in 1989, the 1991 MTV Video Music Awards and for his legendary set on the Arsenio Hall Show in 1991.

You can watch him use the guitar for the Arsenio Hall set in the video below.

Remember that 1984 Prince Cloud Guitar that's going up for auction? As it turns out, there's a lot more history to that well-worn guitar than was first thought. 

From the start, it was known that the guitar - one of only a handful of existing, Prince-used Cloud models - had been used onstage extensively by Prince, given the heavy signs of wear and tear on its neck near the headstock.

However, Julien's - the company auctioning the guitar next month - has now revealed that the guitar is in fact Prince's long-lost "Blue Angel," his main stage guitar from 1984 - 1993. 

Prince used the guitar during his Purple Rain, Parade, Sign o’ the Times, Lovesexy and Diamonds and Pearls tours, and for the "Cream" and "Get Off" music videos. 

Additionally, The Purple One used the guitar during his appearances on Saturday Night Live’s 15th Anniversary Special in 1989, the 1991 MTV Video Music Awards and for his legendary set on the Arsenio Hall Show in 1991.

This particular Cloud model has undergone several refinishes, having originally sported a white coat of paint. It has been refinished in peach, light blue and yellow, and currently features an electric blue finish. 

It features Prince's trademark love symbols on the neck and gold hardware, and was built by the O’Hagan Guitar Company, Tommy Stinson, Dave Rusan, Mark Sampson and Barry Haugen. The guitar's strings are no longer attached.

The discovery was made when, following its announcement of the auction, Julien's was contacted by John Woodland, who performs conservation work on Prince’s guitars at his former home, Paisley Park, and had been searching for the long-lost "Blue Angel."

Following this inquiry, Julien’s contacted Westside Medical Imaging in Beverly Hills, who conducted a series of CT scans on the guitar to learn more about its history and construction.

Though originally valued at $100,000 - $200,000, the "Blue Angel" is now valued at $400,000 - $600,000. It will be auctioned - with an oversized Calzone purple guitar road case included - as part of Julien's upcoming Music Icons auction, set to take place June 19 – June 20. 

For more info on the auction, step right on over to juliensauctions.com.

A 1984 Prince signature Cloud guitar is heading to the auction block.

A part of Julien's Auctions' upcoming Music Icons auction, set to take place June 19 – June 20, the guitar was used onstage extensively by Prince, according to Julien's. Though not in ideal condition - there are some fairly heavy signs of wear and tear on the neck near the headstock - this guitar is one of only a handful of original, stage-used Cloud guitars in existence. 

This particular Cloud model features Prince's trademark love symbols on the neck and gold hardware. Like Prince's other Cloud guitars, this model was built by Minneapolis luthier Dave Rusan.

Though the oft-used, heavily-worn guitar doesn't have strings attached, it's nonetheless valued at a cool $100,000-$200,000.

It comes in a Calzone purple case, and is packaged with a printout from Paisley Park of the list of Cloud guitars made for Prince with their corresponding serial numbers. This guitar is the first one on the printout, with a “#1” indicated next to it.

For more info on the auction, step right on over to juliensauctions.com.

In the week after Prince’s death on April 21, 2016, a video of him playing the guitar solo on an all-star version of the Beatles’ “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” with Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne and others was shared repeatedly on social media.

The video comes from the 2004 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremonies, where the song’s writer, George Harrison, was inducted, along with Prince, ZZ Top, Bob Seger, Jackson Browne, Traffic and Fifties doo-wop group the Dells.

We first shared the video in August 2015 and revisited it again in December of that year. In fact, it proved so popular with our readers that we shared it once more in March 2016, as well as after Prince’s death. His solo generates pure excitement, but the crowning touch comes at the end of the song, when Prince takes off his guitar—a Tele-style H.S. Anderson Mad Cat—and throws it up in the air…and it appears never to come down. 

In the days after Prince died, the New York Times ran an article about the performance in which Petty and others who performed with Prince that night shared their memories. According to the paper, the show’s producer, Joel Gallen, asked Prince to play the song’s solos, since he was there to be inducted anyway. But during rehearsals, Marc Mann, who plays guitar with Lynne, took over, knocking out a note-perfect recreation of Eric Clapton’s original mid-song solo.

“And we get to the big end solo,” Gallen says, “and Prince again steps forward to go into the solo, and this guy starts playing that solo too!”

There wasn’t time to get it right, but Prince assured Gallen everything would be fine at the performance. He told the producer to let Mann take the first solo, and he would perform the extended outro solo. “They never rehearsed it, really,” Gallen says. “Never really showed us what he was going to do, and he left, basically telling me, the producer of the show, not to worry.

“And the rest is history. It became one of the most satisfying musical moments in my history of watching and producing live music.”

Though Prince is onstage the entire time, he stands off to the side until the end, when he takes center stage. From that point on, the show is entirely his. His slick stage move at 4:43 and his guitar face at 5:05 are as enjoyable as anything he plays...and he plays up a storm. The smile on the face of Dhani Harrison—George Harrison’s son, who plays acoustic guitar on the number—shows how much he was enjoying Prince’s star-turn on his father’s song.

“You see me nodding at him, to say, ‘Go on, go on,’” Petty said. “I remember I leaned out at him at one point and gave him a ‘This is going great!’ kind of look.

“He just burned it up. You could feel the electricity of ‘something really big’s going down here.’”

But what about that disappearing guitar? Once it leaves Prince’s hands, it never reappears, and the video shows no one catching it. Even Petty’s drummer, Steve Ferrone, remains confused about it—and he was onstage.

“I didn’t even see who caught it,” he says. “I just saw it go up, and I was astonished that it didn’t come back down again.

“Everybody wonders where that guitar went, and I gotta tell you, I was on the stage, and I wonder where it went, too.”