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How important is it as a guitarist to be versed in music theory? While knowing your way around the fretboard from a technical standpoint no doubt gives you a stronger roadmap in terms of understanding why certain note choices and chord progressions work together, many high-profile guitarists have made successful careers without knowing lots of theory.

Former All That Remains guitarist Jason Richardson – known for his jaw-dropping shred chops – said last year that knowing music theory is not essential: “I know plenty of players who write the craziest-sounding stuff, and some of them don’t know anything about theory.”

Indeed, some players have been able to mark their stamp on the world of guitar with somewhat limited theory knowledge. Take former Scorpions and UFO guitarist Michael Schenker for example, who tells Guitar World in a new interview that he “doesn’t care about that stuff”.

• READ MORE: Peter Frampton says he likes “the challenge” of playing guitar as his neuromuscular disease gets worse

“I’ve never known about anything technical,” says the guitarist, who released his 13th album with the Michael Schenker Group in October last year.

“When I put a musical sketch together for a song, I can’t say if it’s major or minor. People say I switch between the two, but I don’t know.”

He goes on: “Maybe I play parts of scales, but I don’t know the names of them or the modes or whatever. I just don’t care about that stuff.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Schenker reveals how he comes up with guitar riffs, and how they’re not always with a specific song in mind.

“It’s interesting because when I write riffs, I don’t know what songs they’re for,” he says. “And then I start randomly putting them together. I don’t even look for the best piece of gold, I just start playing something in my collection, and if it works I use it. If it doesn’t, I reach for something else.”

Earlier this year, Michael Schenker revealed why he chose not to join Ozzy Obsourne’s band upon being invited to, following the death of Randy Rhoads in 1982.

“I’ve always believed in doing exactly what I feel like. That’s freedom of expression. If I did something just because it was what people expected, or if I stopped what I was doing because I was blinded by fame and money, that would be selling my soul,” said the guitarist, whose latest MSG album is fittingly called Don’t Sell Your Soul.

In other news, Michael Schenker’s famed 1971 Flying V was recreated earlier this year by the Gibson Custom Shop, and reportedly sold out in a single day.

Listen to Don’t Sell Your Soul below:

The post “I don’t know the names of the modes or whatever. I just don’t care about that stuff”: Why Michael Schenker isn’t interested in becoming an expert in music theory appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

When Brian May revealed that his Red Special was “all over” the soundtrack of the new Masters Of The Universe movie, we knew we were in for a treat. Eternia is riling with killer riffs, fuelling He-Man with the ultimate power of a rock god – and the Queen guitarist was giddy with excitement to offer his services.

Speaking to Polygon, director Travis Knight recalls how he was out-fangirled when meeting the Queen guitarist. While Knight was basking in the “surreal moment” of watching a legend perform on his Red Special, May couldn’t help proving how much he loved He-Man. “At the end of the session, he disappears,” Knight says. “I thought he was just tired, but then he shows up and he’s carrying two giant boxes of He-man toys that he still had in his attic from his son Jimmy.”

• READ MORE: Steve Vai struggled to play Brian May’s Red Special guitar due to its strange neck: “I just remember thinking, ‘I can’t play this thing’”

Despite the toys belonging to his son, May was totally familiar with the He-Man collection. He rallied off the story arcs, character names and lore with ease. “He put them on the ground in his recording studio, pulled out the characters – and he knew who they were,” Knight explains.

“It was a crazy bizarro moment for me to be sitting there with Brian May as he’s talking about Skeletor and Man-E-Faces,” he continues. “It was so weird and also so cool.”

May has posted the moment on his personal Instagram. Alongside Knight, sound designer Sam Okell, and composer Daniel Pemberton, May shows off his his vintage toy collection. And he’s smiling like a kid on Christmas that has got absolutely everything he wanted. “I have the POWER!!!!” he wrote in the caption. “Great joy to work tonight on the scrumptious, brand new He-Man movie.”

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Elsewhere in the Polygon article, Knight explains why enlisting May was so important for the soundtrack. He reveals that a “big musical touchstone” throughout the process was the score of 1980 sci-fi movie Flash Gordon – a score written, performed and produced by Queen.

“I loved Flash Gordon as a kid and I think one of the many reasons was that incredible, iconic score that Queen famously did,” the director says. “It was amazing. It had such joy, such spirit, such theatricality – this operatic, larger than life feel – but it also had real sincerity at its core. And that comes down to those incredible musicians. So Queen was definitely a touchstone for me and Daniel.”

Masters Of The Universe is in cinemas now.

The post Brian May’s playing on the Masters of the Universe soundtrack has a touching personal element: “He shows up carrying two giant boxes of He-Man toys that he still had in his attic” appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

After more than a decade away, Rush are officially back. Returning to the same Californian venue as their fateful 2025 departing gig, Rush’s Fifty Something Tour has kicked off with a bang – and the tour is dutifully honouring their past, their future and the late Neil Peart.

Performing before 18,000 fans in the same venue that hosted their final gig with Peart was always going to be emotional – but Rush did it with class, and even a bit of humour. The evening opened up with a light-hearted poke at how long it’s been since the band has been away; an intro video shows fans creeping through a haunted mansion to find Rush, only to discover them aged and covered in cobwebs.

• READ MORE: Rush have performed for the first time since reforming – and you can watch it right now

On their journey to find Rush, the fans also peek behind doors that show different versions of the band. But it’s not quite what they expect – from a nod to Rush’s 2009 tour intro, which sees the kids of South Park performing as Lil’ Rush, to actors Jason Segel and Paul Rudd reprising their Rush fangirl personas from a 2011 Funny Or Die skit.

After Rush eventually put on some ‘absurdly prophetic robes’, they are symbolically brought back to life. That’s when, onstage, the real Rush appear – and they open with 1977’s Xanadu, a track that, rather fittingly, centres around rebirth and “immortality”.

In the gap since Rush’s final performance in 2015, a lot has happened. Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee have both released solo records, while Lee also released a memoir, My Effin’ Life, in 2023. But the pair sound great together, as if there’s been no time away.

Throughout, new drummer Anika Nilles does do a smashing job on drums. She often causes the crowd to erupt in a wave of clamorous applause for her drum fills, and an online clip of Vital Signs has earned her plenty of praise too. “Geddy and Alex struck gold finding Anika, she’s perfect,” one YouTube commenter writes. “Neil would be proud.”

Though, of course, the absence of drummer Peart is felt. The band go all-in on honouring their late bandmate, dedicating a bittersweet rendition of Bravado to his memory. A series of tribute montages are also shown onscreen throughout the entire evening, making sure Peart’s presence is felt.

Plenty of other great cuts make it onto the setlist. For instance, 1987 track Time Stand Still is performed, with singer Aimee Mann finally performing her vocals live for the first time ever. Three chunks of 2112 are also performed, along with Tom Sawyer and a climactic finale on Working Man.

View a full list of dates for the Fifty Something tour at Rush’s official website.

The post Rush finally kick off their Fifty Something Tour – and they made sure to honour Neil Peart appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Back in 2019, guitar legend Peter Frampton revealed he’d been diagnosed with inclusion body myositis (IBM), a progressive degenerative muscle disease which has since affected his ability to play guitar.

IBM causes gradual muscle deterioration in the arms and legs, and has forced Frampton to rethink the way he plays guitar. But despite his condition, the guitarist remains infectiously optimistic, and even says he enjoys the “challenge”.

• READ MORE: “I was scared to death with the situation I was in”: Peter Frampton explains why the incredible success of Frampton Comes Alive was the “scariest thing”

“I can’t complain about my life at all,” he tells People in a new interview. “Yes, it’s not the most pleasant thing to have. It changes your life. It’s not going to end it, but yeah, it’s a little difficult. But really I’ve gotten used to it, and I like the challenge of being able to do what I do as it progresses.”

After revealing his diagnosis years ago, Peter Frampton announced a farewell tour, anticipating that the disease would render him unable to hit the road any longer. But he continues to tour even now in 2026. And he’s still recording new material, too, having just released his latest album Carry the Light last month.

“I’ve always been very positive,” he continues. “My parents were like that, especially my mother. My feeling about my IBM muscle disease is that I have been dealt some wonderful cards in my life, and life is life and you get some trials and tribulations along the way.”

Indeed, Frampton’s optimism and determination in the face of his disease is nothing short of inspiring.

“People say, ‘Oh, you must be so upset,’ and, yeah, I am,” he recently admitted. “But you can fix the little things.

“But big things never worried me, because the big things you can’t do anything about. If I don’t accept what I have. I’m going to be mad for the rest of my life.”

Listen to Peter Frampton’s new album Carry the Light below:

The post Peter Frampton says he likes “the challenge” of playing guitar as his neuromuscular disease gets worse appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

For many guitar makers, seeing their instruments being played alongside some of the most popular musicians on the planet – and in the hands of their own favourite players – is often an “end goal” kind of deal, or, within the first few years of the brand at least, not something to worry about.

Despite the small size of the operation, and the fact the brand only started in 2020, the eye-catching offset shapes of Fairlane’s flagship models – the Zephyr and Cardinal – can be seen in the hands of everyone from Dallas Green to Beabadoobee, from Ed O’Brien to Daisy Spencer, and many more besides. The full artist roster is absolutely not to be sniffed at, and is notably all a result of word-of-mouth, thanks to the hard graft of the two people behind the brand.

The Fairlane Zephyr on the Guitar.com Cover. Image: Fiona Garden for Guitar.com

Fairlane guitars are made in a south east London workshop by Kevin Williams and Reuben Gotto, both of whom have been involved in the music industry in some way for their whole careers. Williams had always been interested in building – he made his first guitar with his dad when he was 16 – but his career across the music industry was more focused on playing, teching and tour management. He retrained in luthiery in the mid-2010s, and started working as the “main repair guy” for Monty’s Guitars.

“I really enjoyed that,” Williams recalls. “Matt [Gleeson, founder] was great to work for, really supportive and encouraging. I was making guitars at that time, and Matt told me, ‘This stuff is really good – you should be working for yourself.’ But it’s hard to take that plunge when you’re comfortable – guitar-building seemed like a side hustle, a hobby.” But when Covid hit – “usual story,” Williams sighs – Monty’s furloughed him, and the brand decided to leave London. “I didn’t have a job, didn’t know what to do – and that’s where Reuben comes in.”

Gotto was – and is still – on the road as a touring guitar tech for a laundry-list of notable artists. “I had been playing in bands in my early 20s, and then did that thing where you accidentally fall into teching for your mate’s band,” Gotto says, “And then the balance becomes more teching than playing. So I spent a good 15 years out with some amazing artists – I was on the road with Lana Del Rey when the pandemic hit.”

Image: Fiona Garden for Guitar.com

During lockdown, Williams and Gotto found themselves doing guitar repairs at home, working from their kitchen tables. There was no sign of their work slowing down, nor of normalcy returning any time soon – and so they moved their business into a dedicated workshop space.

“We had worked on a prototype, and developed it into something that was a little bit more our own,” Gotto explains. “When people came into the shop for setups and repairs, they’d ask, ‘What’s that weird, cool thing on the wall?’ That led to inquiries as to whether we’d make them for other people. We went deeper down that route – and because our clientele were coming through the workshop from our other lines of work, we were very lucky to have our guitar designs in front of a lot of cool people very quickly. That helped us hone them, and get opinions from people who we trusted to be honest with us.”

“It’s hard to take that plunge when you’re comfortable – guitar-building seemed like a side hustle, a hobby”

Best Of Both

The first prototype (the brand was originally named Providence Guitars) was an early version of the Cardinal – an alternative take on the Non-Reverse Firebird, a style of guitar that Williams had long been, in his words, “obsessed with”.

“As much as I love the Non-Reverse Firebird shape, it has a lot of issues,” he says. “It’s not like you can sit down and play that guitar. And it’s also not that comfortable when you’re stood up. So I wanted to see if we could address some of those issues, and that was the first one I made – even before we had started Fairlane.”

Image: Fiona Garden for Guitar.com

From there, the Cardinal’s set-neck design was reconfigured into a bolt-on – in the process, creating the Zephyr. “It was a challenge, that change,” Williams explains. “The neck approaches the body in a different way, and pushes things down into its own shape, its own whole thing really. So on top of the non-reverse Firebird thing, there’s some offset and Jazzmaster-inspired elements mixed in there too.”

A lot of Fairlane’s design philosophy involves crossing this bridge between Fullerton and Kalamazoo – alongside the hybridised offset looks of the Zephyr and Camino, the guitars mix the scale of a Fender with the fretboard radius of a Gibson. The pickup combinations – bespoke sets made in collaboration with Monty’s Guitars – often mix and match disparate styles in the bridge and neck positions.

Image: Fiona Garden for Guitar.com

“Some of it is knowing what works best for people live and in the studio,” Gotto explains. “We try to combine everything that we think is best about guitars. That’s the beauty of the history of them: you’ve got so much cool stuff to pick from and everything has its merits in different situations.”

“The initial decisions were made purely because we liked those things,” Williams adds. “Rather than trying to go, ‘I think this is what people will want.’ But, what we do see right now is that most people play Fender-style guitars more than they do Gibson-style guitars – that’s just where the world’s at. So people will be more used to that 25.5” scale length. So it was good to incorporate that, and still have the 12” radius for easier bends – it was all about mixing and matching until we found our formula.”

Thanks to the agility of a two-person operation, some playability decisions can be folded in straight away from custom orders. Gotto recalls one from Emily Rosenfeld, guitarist for Chappell Roan, Olivia Rodrigo and more, who visited the workshop and tested a bunch of guitars. “One thing she said was, that when she played open chords, she wanted her hand to be round further, so could we shave a little more off the bottom of the headstock. We tried it, it worked great, and now that’s just our design!”

“When people came into the shop they’d ask, ‘What’s that weird, cool thing on the wall?’”

Organic Produce

Fairlane’s guitars are offered in a range of relic’d options, and indeed many Fairlane players and artists have opted for at the very least lightly-aged guitars – and, in some cases, guitars that look like they’ve been played every day for 50 years. But for Gotto and Williams, ageing an instrument isn’t just about the cool factor. “Whether you like relic’ing or not, the fact that you pick it up and it feels like it has been played, that is what people want,” Williams says. “You can do it without relic’ing, that’s fine, but there’s a place for everything, I think, and I don’t know anyone who’d opt for a totally brand-new guitar rather than something that feels played-in.”

“If you’re playing guitar and it feels like an extension of you, something you’ve been playing for decades – it’s almost this passive thing,” Gotto adds. “Where you don’t even notice the instrument – you don’t feel every fret, you don’t have that gummy, glossy poly paint on the back of the neck. It’s nice to have something that just feels like an extension of you when you’re playing it. But there’s also this really organic experience, the enjoyment of texture and wood – there’s nothing wrong with liking that.”

Image: Fiona Garden for Guitar.com

Relic’d or not, the guitar in particular is obviously a great vector for this more organic experience, and both Gotto and Williams are clearly excited that the guitar as a whole has returned to have such a presence in the mainstream. “I think everyone chases that organic thing, even when it’s within the really solid structure of modern production,” Gotto says. “Everyone’s desperate to inject the human feeling into things, at this point.”

“There is this pushback against AI, as well,” Williams adds. “As much as you can’t avoid it everywhere else, when it comes to AI music, people can hear it, they can feel it – and they will push against it. And one way to do that is to just pick up an instrument and actually play it! I’ve seen the ‘rock’s dead, music’s dead’ cycle so many times – and it never really worries me. Having the other side of the business, doing setups, we can see how many young kids are coming in having just started a band – and getting really excited about being on that path.”

“I don’t know anyone who’d opt for a totally brand-new guitar rather than something that feels played-in”

Good Tempered

Gotto and Williams are clearly passionate about attention to detail, and foregrounding what matters to them and to their players about their guitars. Just as how they’ve picked from all corners of the history of the electric guitar, they both have a wealth of experience in luthiery and teching between them, informing their intentional decisions about things like tonewoods.

“We use a tempered white pine from the Minnesota region,” Williams says. “The first prototypes were made out of pine – it worked really well, it was light, it felt great, but it’s very soft. Going back to having guitars on stages, there was a question of how long they’d survive! So if you temper it, you reduce the moisture, and tighten up the structure – it makes it a little more durable. It’s still a soft wood, but it’ll take a knock. But it also just opens up the sound, too. So it was a choice made initially out of experimentation, and it worked.”

“It’s a really interesting wood,” Gotto adds. “It allows the string vibration to bloom, and kind of move through different vowel sounds as it rings out. I know there’s all this talk of ‘does tonewood matter’ – and everyone wants to have a nice, quotable, one-sentence opinion on where all the sound in an electric guitar comes from, but it just doesn’t work like that! It’s all of these one-percents that you put together and combined, they make a huge difference.”

Image: Fiona Garden for Guitar.com

Fairlane’s straightforward approach to controls comes from a similar place. “Having worked on tours across thousands of shows with bands that have had a dozen or more Jazzmasters – not once have I ever known anyone to turn on the rhythm circuit. They tape them up so they don’t switch to it!”

“We tried to keep everything on that side as minimal and as simple as possible,” Williams explains. “Less wiring inside the guitar, less switching – a clearer, more direct path for the sound. Some people ask for extra bits and bobs, which we’re happy to do, but as a general rule, we try to keep it as straightforward as possible!”

“These days, everyone’s got a pedalboard bigger than their house,” Gotto notes, “so you don’t need so much stuff on the guitar, it’s nice to just have a good starting point for shaping it later.”

“It’s knowing what works best for people live and in the studio. We try to combine everything that we think is best about guitars”

Star Treatment

You might think that having teched for and toured with some of the biggest guitar names on the planet, Gotto and Williams might be used to seeing world-class artists pick up a Fairlane guitar – but their excitement about the success of the brand remains palpable.

“If you were to ask me my favourite bands, they’d be Radiohead and Mogwai,” Gotto says. “And they both have our guitars now! It’s like, ‘Amazing, job done there!’ It’s great when the guitars take on a life of their own, definitely a pinch-yourself moment when that happens.”

“For me, Quicksand was a massive band for me when I was younger,” Williams adds. “And now Walter Schreifels has a Fairlane. So that’s a very satisfying moment, when, for those artists that inspired you, you get to give a little bit back to them – and then they create something on the instrument that you made, and then it inspires other people. It’s kind of mad, that circle, and once you’re in it – it’s amazing.”

Image: Fiona Garden for Guitar.com

Going forward, Gotto and Williams tell me their main focus is keeping up with an ever-growing order book – without compromising on the handmade, custom nature of their operation, or ballooning the price. Fairlanes are notably affordable for UK-made custom instruments, and the intention is to keep them as accessible as possible. “Our own ethics keep us from becoming too wealthy off this!” Gotto laughs.

Both Gotto and Williams are clearly proud of how they’ve built Fairlane – almost entirely through applying themselves the best they can to making great guitars, and getting them into the right people’s hands. “We really enjoy being a company where it feels like a well-kept secret – every guitar we’ve made for someone has resulted in somebody else seeing it and playing it, and then ordering one – and that’s how we’ve progressed,” says Gotto. “There haven’t been any cynical marketing campaigns. Well… not yet!”

Words: Cillian Breathnach
Photography: Fiona Garden
Photography Assistance: Ben Ashton, Hiero Ashton

The post How Fairlane Guitars built a brand beloved by some of the coolest artists on the planet appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Jackson Emmer offers a practical introduction to bluegrass jam etiquette, aimed especially at players attending their first jam session

When you think of the iconic look and sound of an Orange amplifier, chances are you’re probably not thinking about Ed Sheeran, but it seems that the megastar guitarist is about to change that – as he’s soft-launched his first ever signature amplifier with the brand.

• READ MORE: What guitars does Ed Sheeran use? The instruments and gear behind the Mathematics tour

Ed is no stranger to signature gear of course – the guitarist was a Martin artist for years before starting his own guitar brand with Lowden back in 2019. Since then, he’s also partnered with Headrush to build his own Sheeran Looper pedals to enable one-man band approach, and earlier this year he partnered with PRS to release a signature baritone electric with his own artwork on it.

Now, however, he’s completing the set-up by launching his own amp – albeit one that’s squarely aimed at the busking/small acoustic gigs audience.

The tease for the amp happened when Sheeran performed an impromptu outdoor busking gig on the harbour of his hometown of Ipswich, UK on Friday morning. Sheeran teased the gig the night before on Instagram with a Google Maps pin for the location of the gig, and tagged Orange Amps in the post.

Then on Friday, he rocked up with a mic stand, his trusty Sheeran by Lowden guitar and one of the new compact amps in tow. We have no information on the spec of the new amps, but from photos and videos taken of the performance, we can see that it’s an angled cab design, that as you’d expect seems to be comfortable with both guitar and vocals. The amp sports the Sheeran Loopers badge on the top of the classic orange-tolex’d cabinet.

Ed referenced the amp in between performing a short set of his many, many chart-topping hits, saying, “So the reason we’re here is because I used to busk as a kid. And I used to do it just acoustically without an amp. So I’ve made this Orange amp that is a busking amp. And this is the first time I’ve given it a go.”

Interestingly, this isn’t technically Ed’s first signature amplification product. Back in 2024, Sheeran announced portable PA system that was designed for a similar purpose. The Sheeran Busker boasts built-in effects, Bluetooth connectivity, and a three channel mixer – but it is very much more of a PA system than a guitar amp.

While no official news about the Orange amp has been revealed yet, clearly a launch is imminent – Ed had two of the amps with him for the performance, and even gifted one of them to a fan in the crowd who, as the video below shows, was understandably stoked about it.

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Keep an eye on Sheeran Loopers and Orange amps for an official announcement of this amp, or stay tuned to Guitar.com where we’ll have the news as soon as it drops.

 

The post Ed Sheeran debuts his signature Orange guitar amp: and it’s designed for busking “I used to do it without an amp, so I’ve made this one” appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Since the passing of his father Eddie Van Halen in 2020 and the subsequent rise of his band Mammoth in recent years, some fans have been asking Wolfgang Van Halen if he’ll ever play Van Halen songs live. But the multi-instrumentalist has been steadfast in his decision not to dip his toe on that pond.

On many numerous occasions, Wolfgang has addressed the seemingly unending requests for him to dabble in performing Van Halen classics live, every time shutting them down and highlighting his determination to stay true to his own artistic integrity.

• READ MORE: Paul McCartney’s advice to young bands: “Don’t rely too much on gadgetry. Just play it all, learn it all, write it all”

“I’m happy that people are beginning to take me seriously as my own artist and separate me from my family history,” he said in December.

But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t enjoy teasing said fans when the opportunity presents itself…

Like during Mammoth’s 1 April show in Cincinnati, Ohio, when he momentarily made fans believe he was about to give them what they’d been asking for for so long and play a Van Halen classic, only to rickroll them with the first verse and chorus of Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up.

“I always said, ‘Never say never,’ and I think tonight might be fun,” he told the crowd. “I don’t know if I’m gonna keep doing this. Maybe this can just be our little secret.”

Now, in a new interview with 105.7 The Point, Wolfgang reflects on the hilarious April Fools gag.

“If anybody’s been really paying attention, they know that I wouldn’t do anything like entertaining to play a Van Halen song,” he says. “I’ve been very forthright about [not wanting to play Van Halen songs.

“I’d rather bomb playing my own stuff than succeed by shacking up in my dad’s legacy and playing Panama every day. It’s just not what I’m interested in doing. I like to have a little bit more artistic and personal integrity than that.

“And so it was fun to kind of poke at like, ‘I’ve never done this before. This is something that people deserve.’ And you hear people start to get really excited. And then we went into Never Gonna Give You Up. We even got the thumbs up from Rick Astley himself. So at that point nobody else matters to me. He appreciated it, and that’s pretty badass.”

View a list of all of Mammoth’s upcoming tour dates via their official website.

The post “I’d rather bomb playing my own stuff than shack up in my dad’s legacy and play Panama”: Wolfgang Van Halen on why his “artistic and personal integrity” won’t let him play Van Halen material appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

There’s nothing quite like pressing the footswitch on an effects pedal and hearing how your guitar sound is transformed. You can get fuzzes, distortions and overdrives that add gain to your signal, or time-based effects like reverb, delay and chorus that add character and texture, functional pedals including tuners and EQs, and countless other types and sub-types. Awww yeahhh, you might think, after activating each one.

It’s been suggested that guitarists love effects pedals even more than guitars themselves. Don’t get hooked on impulse-buying them, as it’s best to choose carefully, as you can only accumulate so many pedals before you overcomplicate your sound and setup – especially as a rookie guitarist.

To help you set off on the right foot, we’ve ranked ten of the best guitar effects pedals for beginners below. Most of the Guitar.com team are seasoned, callused-in-the-fingertip guitarists, but we were all newbies once, and both of these sides to our experience were factored into our recommendations. Each of the pedals below is just the right mix of great-sounding, fairly priced and technically accessible.

Remember that you’ll need a way to power your pedals. Keen guitarists who are in this for the long haul can save time and effort by getting a power supply that will deliver current to multiple pedals, while 9V batteries are a beginner-friendly choice that will work with most entry-level effects, as long as they’re not mini-pedals.

At a glance:

• Best overdrive for beginners: Boss BD-2 Blues Driver
• Best distortion for beginners: Pro Co RAT 2
• Best tuner for beginners: Behringer TU-300
• Best loop pedal for beginners: TC Electronic Ditto 2
• Best reverb for beginners: Walrus Audio Fundamental Ambient
• Best budget distortion pedal for metal: Teisco Mini Metal
• Best delay for beginners: Earthquaker Devices Silos
• Best chorus for beginners: Catalinbread Wake
• Best effects processor for beginners: Mooer GE-100
• Best budget multi-FX: Gear4Music Guitar Multi-Effects
• Why you can trust Guitar.com

Best overdrive for beginners: Boss BD-2 Blues Driver

This Blues Driver has been a staple overdrive pedal for all sorts of guitarists – not just blues players – since its introduction in 1995. It’ll help make your lead parts cut through beautifully for as long as you play guitar, but it’s a particularly good pick for beginners thanks to its straightforward controls and quintessential overdrive sounds.

There are just three knobs on the top of the pedal to suss out: volume, gain and tone. Using the tone control to adjust the level of treble is the trick to getting a good sound (or a prominent one) out of this classic overdrive.

Best distortion for beginners: Pro Co RAT 2

The RAT 2

From a little added buzz to a thrilling wall of noise, the RAT 2 opens up a world of gnarly sounds via three foolproof knobs. This is often heralded as the definitive distortion pedal, which makes it all the more remarkable that the RAT 2 costs far less than many of its lower-profile rivals.

While the volume and distortion knobs shouldn’t give you too much of a headache (at least not in the figurative sense), it’s worth studying the filter control, as this makes the difference between controlled rock distortion and completely feral fuzz. Either sound is world-beatingly great in the right context.

Best tuner for beginners: Behringer TU-300

Until you’re already Jimi Hendrix, get a tuner pedal so that you can be sure you’re playing in tune. This one’s affordable and effective, with a digital display that tells you which note you’re tuned to, and LED indicators that show whether the string is flat, sharp or perfectly natural.

Behringer is undoubtedly a budget brand, but the quality of its pedals often means they’ll stick around on a guitarist’s pedalboard for years on end. The TU-300 has some features that will come in handy as you branch out musically, including flat, double-flat and chromatic tuning modes, and reference tone adjustment (so you can tweak the definition of an ‘E’).

Best loop pedal for beginners: TC Electronic Ditto 2

A loop pedal can be a brilliant tool for practice and composition, allowing you to capture parts of what you’re playing and then jam along to them as a looping backing track.

The only snag is that loopers are often intimidating for beginners, but this TC Electronic model is as simple as they come, with a clever ‘LoopSnap’ feature that can slightly adjust your loops to rectify errors in timing – not that you’ll make any of those, of course.

Controlling the Ditto 2 is mercifully easy via the multi-functional footswitch on the top, and there’s a level control so that you can adjust the volume of a loop while (or before) you play along to it.

Best reverb for beginners: Walrus Audio Fundamental Ambient

Image: Walrus Audio

Psst… Did you know that reverb is basically the third dimension to your guitar sound? Affordable and feature-packed, the Walrus Audio Fundamental Reverb brings out the joy in exploring this sense of space in your playing, with controls for the reverb duration (‘decay’), tone, and prominence (‘mix’).

There are three reverb types to play around with: ‘Deep’, ‘Lush’ and ‘Haze’. These are aptly named, but they have some nuances that you might not expect. The ‘Deep’ mode adds a lower octave to your sound, fattening up the bass, while ‘Haze’ introduces a dash of distortion. As with any good reverb pedal, much of the fun lies in tweaking the controls to find the sounds you relish.

Best budget distortion pedal for metal: Teisco Mini Metal

Credit: Teisco

This plug-in-and-slay metal distortion pedal from Teisco sounds just as massive as its enclosure is small. Its high-gain sound makes classic rock and metal riffs sound their beastly best, and it’ll also be a great choice for rhythmic chugging, once you’ve gotten the knack of the playing style.

The on-unit controls let you dial up the distortion, adjust the volume and tweak the tone. There’s also a three-position ‘boost’ switch that can give you some extra high-end cut-through, which comes in handy when you’re finding your frequency range at a band practice or gig.

Best delay for beginners: Earthquaker Devices Silos

From The Edge to Omar Rodríguez-López, many guitarists consider delay to be one of the key effects on their pedalboard. This Earthquaker Devices model is both straightforward to use and packed with sounds, and its dedicated tap-tempo footswitch lets you control the timing of repeats by simply pressing to the beat with your foot.

Between the three delay styles bundled into the pedal – analogue, tape and digital – you can probably find the sound in your head (and on some of your favourite songs) via the Silos. This is a slightly more complicated pedal than some of the others featured in this guide, but if you’re in the market for quality delay sounds, this is as accessible as they come.

Best chorus for beginners: Catalinbread Wake

Credit: Catalinbread

Chorus is another fun modulation effect that will colour your playing, a la Kurt Cobain or Johnny Marr. This Catalinbread option gives you plenty of parameters to tweak and comes at a sensible price.

Our correspondent described this as the perfect tonal thickener for lush, atmospheric sounds. There’s certainly depth to its offering, with eight chorus voicings to play around with and octave control that can fill out the low end of your tone. Despite providing all these options, it’s a simple enough pedal for beginners to use, with just the four knobs to get your head around. Hit the footswitch and bliss out.

Best effects processor for beginners: Mooer GE-100

 

A cost-effective and convenient way to access lots of different guitar effects is to get an effects processor, like the Mooer GE100. It’ll take a while to suss it out, but this unit is a valid alternative to effects pedals for beginner guitarists, with 66 effects to explore. Overdrive, chorus, delay, reverb – it’s all here, albeit in less artisanal forms than what you’d tend to hear out of a quality effects pedal.

In addition to its many digital effects, the GE100 has various features that could come in handy for guitar practice, including a loop function, drum machine and scale lessons.

Best budget multi-FX: Gear4Music Guitar Multi-Effects

An even simpler shortcut to enjoying a vast array of effects is to use a mutli-effects pedal, like this super-affordable model from Gear4Music. This unit really is plug-in-and-play, with 36 presets to help you access the full gamut of its modulation effects, plus manual controls enabling you to sculpt each sound.

It’s worth noting that this multi-effects pedal is focused on delay, reverb, chorus, tremolo and a handful of other effects such as noise gating. So, it’s not an all-in-one solution for guitarists who want everything on a single pedal (especially if you need some overdrive or distortion options), but it’s a great way to broaden your sonic horizons at a stroke.

Why You Can Trust Us

Every year, Guitar.com reviews a huge variety of new products – from the biggest launches to cool boutique effects – and our expert guitar reviewers have decades of collective experience, having played everything from Gibson ’59 Les Pauls to the cheapest Squiers.

That means that when you click on a Guitar.com buyer’s guide, you’re getting the benefit of all that experience to help you make the best buying decision for you. What’s more, every guide written on Guitar.com was put together by a guitar obsessive just like you. You can trust that every product recommended in those guides is something that we’d be happy to have in our own rigs.

The post The best guitar pedals for beginners: distortions, tuners and more appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Peter Frampton had already tasted success across his time with Humble Pie, but when he released his revered live album in 1976, Frampton Comes Alive!, a whole new wave of pressure overcame him.

Frampton, who is now 76, has just released a documentary all about his ups and downs with fame, and has been reflecting on the fears that came along with such triumph. He recalls being treated like “a commodity”, and the pressures of following it up with another record of the same success.

• READ MORE: “A Beatle knows who I am? Ridiculous”: Peter Frampton’s response when George Harrison invited him to play on All Things Must Pass

He tells People, “I’ve never been driven by money, only by music and the playing of it. Unfortunately, there was at least one [person], maybe more, that saw me as the golden goose and stopped caring about me and treated me more like a commodity, ‘He’ll do this, he’ll do that.’ I was scared to death with the situation I was in.”

He adds, “When we became the biggest album of all time in America and Canada, that was the scariest thing for me, because it took me six years to write those songs. I’m a perfectionist, and that’s why I wasn’t thrilled with following up the live album at all.”

Frampton ended up following the record with 1977’s I’m In You, which was well received: “I didn’t want to make that album then… [but] I thought, ‘Well, all these people that are advising me, they know much more. They’ve all had big acts.’ And then I suddenly thought, ‘Not as big as me.’ So that’s when I started taking control.”

The pressures didn’t fade, leading to other struggles in Frampton’s life, including a serious car accident in 1978. Fastforward to the present day, Frampton has released his first body of new material in 16 years with the launch of new album Carry The Light last May.

Watch the trailer for his new documentary below:

Find out more about Peter Frampton and his new record via his official website.

The post “I was scared to death with the situation I was in”: Peter Frampton explains why the incredible success of Frampton Comes Alive was the “scariest thing” appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

In the mid 1980s, Rush pivoted to keyboard-heavy records, leaving guitarist Alex Lifeson perplexed as to how he could fit into their music.

It all began with 1982’s Signals, and continued through until 1989 when they returned to a base of guitar work with Presto. According to Lifeson, he felt a little bit resentful towards bandmate Geddy Lee for his decision to implement more keys and synths, but he figured one change could help him cut through and be heard: a new guitar.

• READ MORE: “He would go, ‘What riff?’” Geddy Lee says he had to record all of Rush’s songwriting sessions because Alex Lifeson would forget “great” riffs just minutes after playing them

Speaking to musician and YouTuber Rick Beato, Lifeson looks back on the struggle, and how he overcame it (via Ultimate Guitar): “When we got to the mid-’80s, when we were doing those dense keyboard records, it was really a challenge for me. ’Cause, when we recorded those records, the keyboards went before the guitar.

“I would sit around, waiting, waiting, and waiting to do guitar stuff. And the more keyboard stuff I heard, the more layers, it was almost impossible for me to figure out how am I gonna fit in here. And by the way, I’m the guitar player in this band. What happened?”

He goes on to question, “Did I resent that? Maybe a little bit, but I took it as a challenge, and it became a task. I had to figure out how I was gonna get around this.

“The frequencies occupied by keyboards are similar to heavy guitars, so you can’t really take that approach to fit something in. So, I switched guitars. Instead of playing something like a Les Paul, or a PRS, I got a single-coil active guitar. Now, it was bright, very clear, and it could cut through all of that stuff. And that ended up being the primary guitar sound for those records, because that was the only way I felt I could fit in.”

You can watch the interview below:

Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee will reunite as Rush to commence their Fifty Something world tour this June. Celebrating 50-something years of Rush music, the pair will be joined by drummer Anika Nilles, who will play in place of the late Neil Peart. Lee and Lifeson have said they will pay a nightly tribute to Peart on the tour.

Lee told National Today, “We’ve been talking about certain songs that we feel really, really give us the vision of Neil. Twice a night we will pick a song to play sort of for him and we’ll present a visual tribute behind us, to Neil, whether it be to his lyrics or just to his playing or whatever.”

Find out more information about the Fifty Something tour via the official Rush website.

The post Alex Lifeson admits he felt “resentment” towards Geddy Lee when he began putting more keyboards into Rush’s sound in the ’80s: “The keyboards went before the guitar” appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

If you’re heading to a Pretenders concert anytime soon, you may want to keep your phone firmly in your pocket. Or better still, just forget it exists for a couple of hours – because Chrissie Hynde has made it very clear she’d rather not see it at all.

In a lengthy note shared to social media, the Pretenders frontwoman says there is an “unpleasant fog hanging over the heads of all artists” caused by concertgoers who insist on filming and photographing live shows instead of simply experiencing them in real time.

“Question: What is it with people and their phones?” Hynde writes. “But my real question is: why do people have to film or take pictures at concerts or museums? Why???”

• READ MORE: Paul McCartney’s advice to young bands: “Don’t rely too much on gadgetry. Just play it all, learn it all, write it all”

The singer-guitarist argues that even when artists explicitly ask audiences to put their phones away, those requests are routinely ignored.

“You can plaster a venue with signs requesting ‘No cameras,’ but people don’t respect it. It’s as if people feel entitled, even though the artist clearly has asked them not to do it.”

Hynde also points to Bob Dylan’s well-known phone-free concerts as an example of how difficult such rules are to enforce in practice.

“Bob Dylan ensures that phones are sealed in a bag before a show,” she writes. “You would think an artist of his stature could make a simple request, and the audience would respect it. No chance. People will still sneak in a camera or a phone. It’s like a weird compulsion that people can’t control.”

“It reminds me of monkeys wanking in full view of the people standing around their enclosure, and frankly, in that case, people deserved to be wanked at because monkeys should not be in an enclosure in the first place… However, an artist on a stage?”

“No one seems to understand why artists don’t like it,” Hynde continues. “If you’ve ever had a mosquito buzzing around your head when you’re trying to go to sleep, you will get a vague idea of what it’s like to have people filming your show or taking photos while you’re on stage.”

“If Jesus Christ were to walk into a room, the first thing everyone would do would be to pull out their phone,” she concludes. “Can someone please explain?”

The sentiment isn’t abstract for Hynde either. She recounts a recent moment at the Royal Albert Hall, where she attended Emmylou Harris’ London show after having dinner with the singer – only to find herself seated beside a fan filming the entire performance. When another concertgoer asked him to stop, he simply told them to “Mind your own business.”

Hynde’s latest comments tap into a long-running divide in the music world over phones at gigs.

While some artists, such as Steve Vai, have no issues with fans filming gigs (even describing it as “great”), plenty others – including Jack White and Tool – have scorned the practice and implemented strict no-phone policies in an attempt to preserve the live experience. Kate Bush and Ghost have also both discouraged or restricted device use at shows.

The post “It reminds me of monkeys w**king in full view of the people standing around their enclosure”: Chrissie Hynde slams “entitled” fans who film during concerts appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Josh Klinghoffer feels the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ records made without John Frusciante are slightly disrespected.

Klinghoffer left the Chili Peppers in 2019 when Frusciante, who has been famously on and off within the lineup ever since he joined in 1988, came back to the fold. Klinghoffer first joined the band in 2009, and recorded two albums with them, I’m With You and The Getaway. Guitarist Dave Navarro also filled in for Frusciante from 1993 until 1998.

• READ MORE: Red Hot Chili Peppers sell music catalogue for $300m

Klinghoffer spoke of feeling “creatively stifled” during his time with the band after his departure. These days he’s playing for Pearl Jam and Jane’s Addiction, and is due to release a new solo record, A Drop In The Ocean, under his Pluralone moniker.

In an interview with Guitar World, Klinghoffer is asked if it bothers him that the records he made are overlooked by the band itself: “It’s a funny thing. I guess it’s particular to the way John views the band when he’s not in it, and it makes sense to me. They have enough music that they don’t need to look to some of the other records.

“For anyone who connected with those albums, like One Hot Minute [made with Navarro], or the two I made with them… I imagine it’s a little weird for me to be banished from the catalogue and the live performance.”

He goes on to add, “I guess it’s just something unique to that band, you know? Having such a revolving door there, and such a strong presence in John. He’s kind of the preeminent guitar player, you know? He’s the one who made the work with them where they experienced their global fame…

“They have their thing, their formula. I guess it’s so much more definitive to the main amount of Chili Pepper fans; you know, that’s just what the Chili Peppers are. It’s probably a testament to them that they can step out of that and do a good record with Dave Navarro. I like that record too.”

Klinghoffer concludes, “The records that we made together… The only thing I would say – and I don’t know if it’s spoken or unspoken – is that there’s a little bit of a slight disrespect to the records that aren’t the John records. Once John’s back in the picture, it’s like the other records don’t exist. That’s the only weird thing to me, because those records were important at the time. They were important enough to go and play them around the world.”

Klinghoffer’s new record, A Drop In The Ocean, lands on 12 June.

The post “Once John’s back in the picture, it’s like the other records don’t exist”: Josh Klinghoffer on the “disrespect” given to Red Hot Chili Peppers albums without John Frusciante appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Paul McCartney has cautioned young bands against over-reliance on music-making “gadgetry”, noting that musicians should instead focus on the fundamentals of playing, learning, and songwriting.

Speaking to Apple Music’s Zane Lowe ahead of the release of his new solo album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, the Beatles star shares how different recording conditions once forced musicians to commit to their ideas in ways that are less common today.

• READ MORE: “I like him, but he’s a bit pushy”: What Paul McCartney really thought of Andrew Watt during their early sessions together

Citing the 4-track as an example, McCartney says, “With the four-track, you’ve got to wipe things because there’s only four tracks and you may want to do eight things. You take two tracks where you’ve got, let’s say, drums and bass, and you reduce them to one track, which frees up these tracks so you can keep recording.”

He explains that that added constraint was not a drawback but part of the creative process.

“That’s actually a great thing,” says Macca. “I say to young bands nowadays, don’t rely too much on the sort of gadgetry. Just play it all, learn it all, write it all because it’s better.”

While he remains open to experimentation (“I like odd things. I like tape loops,” says the musician), McCartney notes that there is a difference between using technology as a tool and depending on it as a substitute for musicianship.

“What will happen is a lot of people rely on it,” he says. “So you get records that sound like they’ve been made by gadgets. I don’t like that.”

That said, McCartney also acknowledges that modern conveniences like the smartphone have transformed the way he captures and develops musical ideas. Having a recording device in your pocket at all times, he says, means unfinished songs can be saved instantly and revisited later.

“[In the past] you always had to finish a thing because there was nowhere to put it. You had to put it in your mind. So you had to finish it. So you did.”

“Now I must have over a couple of thousand sketches on my phone because I’ll put it down and think, oh yeah, okay, I’ll come back to that. I’ve saved it. It’s okay,” he says. “Because of the luxury of a phone, if you don’t have long but you got an idea, you’ll put it down.”

Watch the full interview below.

The post Paul McCartney’s advice to young bands: “Don’t rely too much on gadgetry. Just play it all, learn it all, write it all” appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

$349, positivegrid.com

Hands up if you’re sick of hearing about AI? It is the two letters everyone seems to be getting increasingly fed up of here in 2026, as promises of generative AI solving all the world’s problems a year or so back seem to have ended up with a reality where the technology’s primary application seems to be driving your friends to psychosis, rendering your job obsolete or, at best, ensuring that your next phone or laptop is going to cost dramatically more than it should do.

• READ MORE: Blackstar ID:X 50 review: “stands out by knowing exactly what it is, and who it’s for”

Obviously, not everyone feels that way, but if there’s one group of people who seem to be inclined to be even more sceptical about the benefits of large language models than the general population, it’s musicians.

Wholly AI-created music and art is straight up bad, and morally suspect along with it – you won’t find too many real musicians dying on that particular hill – but is it always a bad thing, necessarily? Are we still capable of detaching the useful and non-sketchy uses of machine learning from the attention-grabbing stuff that everyone seems to hate?

All of which is a long-winded way of observing that it’s a pretty interesting time for smart amp king Positive Grid to be launching its first real foray into creating a proper for-purpose gigging guitar amp… and one that has AI quite literally written on the control panel.

The Reactor is that amp, but PG is at pains to point out that the ‘AI’ in this case actually stands for “Amp Intelligence” – and it promises a wholly new way for guitar players to go about crafting their guitar tones…

Image: Adam Gasson

Positive Grid Reactor 50 – what is it?

It’s important to point out right at the top that the Reactor is deliberately and intentionally NOT a Spark product. Positive Grid’s revolutionary smart amp family has spent half a decade building up goodwill amongst the guitar community – and with good cause given how impressive the Spark is and remains as a platform.

The Spark has, on several occasions now, attempted to break away from the confines of bedroom practice – the Spark Cab made any Spark amp gig-ready, while the Spark Edge and Spark Live portable PA systems were designed to cater to whole bands.

The Spark could never fully escape its roots as a pure home practice solution, however, and so it makes sense that Positive Grid has now created a bespoke new platform that combines some of the best bits of both Spark and its BIAS X amp software, and put it into an affordable proper guitar amp.

But, Positive Grid being Positive Grid, they were never going to put out yet another affordable modelling combo into the great Katana-killer bun fight. To their credit, the brand always tries to come to the party with something new and innovative, and in this case it’s the aforementioned Amp Intelligence.

Amp Intelligence is, says PG, “a new type of sound engine that builds guitar tone on demand”. They’re keen to call it an “intelligent tone engine”, but in real terms that’s an AI chatbot that has been trained on over 200 different amplifiers at a component level – gain stages, transformers, bias points, harmonic response; the lot – and can use that in-depth knowledge of how amps work to build a tone for you on demand.

So the theory goes, that knowledge enables you to have a chat with your amp – via the accompanying Reactor smartphone app – describing the tone you want via text, an image or a sound clip. The AI will then analyse what you’ve given it, and spit out some suggested tones that you can then tweak either on the app or using the controls on the amp itself, and save forever. Like most chatbots, Amp Intelligence can apparently learn your preferences sound-wise over time, and so the more you use it, the better it’ll get at creating sounds you like.

Away from the high-tech stuff, the amp itself is impressively kitted out for one in this price point. The base 50-watt version features a 12-inch custom-designed speaker, with switchable power scaling down to 25w and 1w. Round the back you’ll also find a cab-simulated line out, USB-C for direct recording, MIDI, headphone out, power amp input and effects loop. The amp features built-in Bluetooth; both for communicating with the app, and also for streaming music directly to the unit.

Under the hood and away from the AI, you’ll find 24 different onboard amps to choose from, as well as 28 different effects types. The control panel is fully featured in a way that no other PG amp has been before – you can select from six different amp types using a classic Line 6 Spider-style rotary (from Clean to Extreme) or override them by choosing one of eight onboard signal chain presets.

You get full control of your tone stack, plus the ability to tweak the level of whatever effect is in one of the six different effects blocks. If you want hands-free control, the Reactor pairs with optional Reactor Control Bluetooth controller ($149), which offers you full wireless control of your presets, or the ability to run it in stompbox mode – if you run out of battery the switch can be plugged in, so you don’t have to worry about a lack of juice ending your gig.

Positive Grid Reactor Control Bluetooth controller. Image: Adam Gasson

Positive Grid Reactor 50 – build quality and user interface

Upon removing the Reactor from its box, I’m reminded that not every modelling amp can be as back-friendly as the trusty Tone Master Princeton that sits in its usual testing spot – though at 10.4kg, it’s still a good kilo lighter than the Katana 50, though a little heavier than the Blackstar ID:X.

Like all of Positive Grid’s amps, the weight is reflected in a reassuring overall build quality. The wood cabinet feels solid and well put-together, the simple black tolex and black and gold grille cloth are understated and professional, and the control panel is clearly laid out with premium-feeling knobs, switches and buttons.

As I’ve come to expect from Positive Grid, the app connection experience is pretty seamless. I downloaded a test version of the new Reactor app to my iPhone 16 and within a few seconds it had connected the amp and was displaying the signal chain for the preset the amp was currently set to. You can adjust everything in real time both on the app or on the device, and changes are reflected instantly.

We’re 30 years into amp modelling at this point, and so you’d think there wouldn’t really be much to say about the user interface and signal chain given that it’s all rather standardised at this point. Except, for some reason, rather than represent each amp and effect using easily recognisable graphical depictions of said amp – a Tube Screamer, a Marshall amp etc – they’ve opted to use incredibly ugly AI art instead.

Positive Grid Reactor app effects. Image: Guitar.com

For a variety of reasons, this sucks. For one, it sucks that the creative humans at Positive Grid don’t deem the labour of a fellow creative human artist something that’s worth paying for. For another, as a product that’s aimed at newer players, the fact that none of the amps and effects are easily recognisable as themselves makes the whole thing harder to navigate on the fly. Thirdly, they look – and I must allow myself to speak plainly here – total shit. Amps with knobs where knobs would never be, pedals with classic GenAI gibberish written all over them… who wants this?

Anyway, that aside, it’s all pretty straightforward – in fact, if you’ve ever used a Spark amp, the signal chain stuff is basically identical; it’s all very simple.

The app lacks the SmartJam and similar home practice-focused tools of the Spark app, because this is obviously a gig-focused bit of hardware, but you do still get access to the ToneCloud platform, which allows you to search and download user-generated presets. Obviously, I’m reviewing a pre-release demo version, so it’s pretty quiet in there at the moment, but if the Spark version is anything to go by, this could soon become a hugely deep library of sounds.

The last part of the app is the ‘Creator Hub’ and this is the bit where we can delay no further, we must prostrate ourselves at the feet of the Amp Intelligence.

Positive Grid Reactor app Creator Hub. Image: Guitar.com

Positive Grid Reactor 50 – does Amp Intelligence actually work?

Tapping on the Creator Hub takes you to a user interface with four options, displayed with – don’t think you’re getting away that easy – more ugly GenAI art. The options presented let you either describe your tone using text, take a photo of something you want it to create a tone out of, and the ability to upload or record a song for it to analyse.

The text one is probably the one that most of us will go to first, and so it’s where I start first, and instantly I find the hype bumping into the reality of the hardware. Perhaps it’s my fault, but when reading the blurb accompanying Amp Intelligence, I was struck by the claim that “any tone imaginable can be delivered on demand, from the familiar to never-before-heard”. That sounds pretty exciting, doesn’t it? Especially when you combine that with the claim that it has “decoded over 200 amp designs at the circuit level”.

With that in mind, I don’t think it was wholly unreasonable to expect that Amp Intelligence would be able to use that circuit-level knowledge to, y’know… create a new amp sound? One that combined, say, the glassy cleans of a Fender with the full-throated roar of a Marshall? But alas no, despite various attempts to get it to mash up amp circuits in an unholy Frankenstein’s monster of tone, it always just gave me one of those 24 amp models with some EQ or other tools to make it sound like I asked for. The future, eh?

The experience of using the chatbot input will be familiar to anyone who’s tried to get any other kind of AI chatbot to do something mildly tricky. Sometimes it works like a charm and gives you what you want straight away, other times it’s massively wide of the mark.

It has a bad habit (just like BIAS X) of responding to my requests to tweak a tone by adding more stuff to the chain – if I asked it to tweak the tone stack, for example, rather than adjusting the settings on the amp, it seemed to want to always chuck an EQ pedal into the mix.

It also seems to do that thing that anyone who’s used an AI image generator will be familiar with – the more you ask it to tweak a thing, the messier the whole thing gets. In practice, it’s easier just to tweak things yourself once Amp Intelligence has got you most of the way there.

It also occasionally just completely ignores what you’re telling it, then telling me that it had, in fact, done what I asked – HAL style. After the second or third go-around in this situation, it led to me having what effectively amounted to an argument with a guitar amplifier – a situation that edified nobody involved, least of all me.

If you keep things simple and clear, however, it has a pretty good hit-rate for providing usable sounds. It also broadly knows what you’re talking about when it comes to artists, albums and the like. You can raise your own eyebrows about exactly what kind of training data the AI has been gobbling up to be able to do that, but from a user perspective – especially for a beginner-focused product – it’s a really handy tool.

Playing a song into it seems to generate more precise results than talking to the damn thing, and I imagine this would be my preferred means of input were it my daily driver. Clearly having a precise sense of what sound you’re trying to get helps it to deliver a more accurate tone out the other end.

The picture-taking option feels like a bit of a gimmick – it is quite fun to see what it thinks would be an appropriate tone for the various tchotchkes I have scattered around my desk, or indeed the handsome cat that wandered into our kitchen (“a tone that captures his playful, agile character” if you’re interested).

It is actually pretty good if you give it something less random to work with – for instance, if you take a photo of a real amp, it’ll do its best to emulate it. Equally, I was impressed with the tones it would suggest based on a picture of a guitar: I snapped a shot of the Klang DC aluminium-necked guitar Cillian recently reviewed and it suggested a bunch of heavy, doomy tones that would be a perfect companion for it.

The final option is the Fix My Tone – basically, you ask the amp to analyse your current sound, tell it what you don’t like about it, and it suggests helpful ways you could change it. While again, the results were not always flawless, the way that it explains what it’s changing and why I think is super useful if you’re a relative newcomer trying to understand how and why a signal chain sounds the way it does. It helps you understand real-world gear in a way that something like this could obscure – and that’s really useful.

What it isn’t, however, is quick. The blurb claims that the AI will spit out a tone for you in ‘seconds’ and while that’s technically true… it is quite a lot of seconds. Especially for the image prompts, I was waiting a good minute or two for it to come back with something.

That said, I’m using a TestFlight version of an app that is still in development at the time of writing, so I’d hope that when things are fully up and running, they might be able to speed things up.

Image: Adam Gasson

Positive Grid Reactor 50 – sounds

All the talk about apps and Amp Intelligences and what a cat would sound like if he was a signal chain does rather obscure the fairly basic questions that we should be asking about any amp – does it actually sound any good? Well, yes actually – very.

Firstly, let me get this out of the way – for a 50-watt digital combo, this thing is loud – organ-botheringly loud – especially at close range and with the amp running at full power. This is a box that could easily make itself heard in a small band, and it does so with plenty of clarity even with the master volume maxed out. It’s still punchy enough for a lot of people on 25-watt mode, while the one-watt is home practice suitable without being totally weedy – in fact it retains the punch, warmth and character of the amp even at late-night practice volumes.

If you can get past the godawful visual representations of the amps in question, the sounds here are very impressive indeed. They feel like a definite step up from the (very good) sounds found in the Spark amps, and are much closer to the studio-ready tones found in BIAS X – that 12-inch speaker does a nice job of putting them into the world, too.

Another handy bit of tone sculpting comes in the shape of two toggle switches – Heat and Smooth/Push. The former is designed to give you six different degrees of playing feel and harmonics without altering the volume of the amp. In practice this is more noticeable with high-gain tones, and it’s subtle, but a nice one to have.

Smooth/Push is basically a mid control from what I can tell – in push mode it’s sharper and easier to cut through in a mix, smooth is rounder and better suited to rhythm playing. If you’ve used the similarly named control on a Boss Katana you’ll know the deal – it’s a really useful bit of tone-shaping to have at the flick of a switch though.

Image: Adam Gasson

The effects are broadly very good without being totally spectacular – the dirt pedals have always been a strength of PG’s offering and they are the standout performers here. But you’ll find most of the usual suspects represented in some fashion here, though you’re limited to just one dirt, one modulation, one delay etc.

You might find yourself wondering why on earth there’s only one reverb – click on the relevant effects block and it appears that the only option is “studio reverb”. Thankfully, this is just some uncharacteristically bad UX – there are eight different reverb modes hidden on the ‘mode’ switch of the pedal itself that cover the bases of room, hall, plate and chamber. It’s weird to not have a spring reverb in there, though.

You can, however, move the blocks in the signal chain around at your leisure – something that’s not always the case with entry-level amps – and that’s especially useful if you want to use the effects loop. You can plug your board in and stick it anywhere you like in the chain, really opening up the sonic possibilities.

In terms of how well it takes pedals, well… it’s not going to replace the aforementioned Tone Master as my digital pedal platform of choice, but it acquits itself well, even when faced with the glitchiest fuzzes and the most cavernous reverbs.

Image: Adam Gasson

Positive Grid Reactor 50 – should I buy one?

 

There’s a part of me that wishes that the Reactor didn’t build the polarising and variably successful Amp Intelligence stuff so heavily into the marketing razzmatazz, because you sense that it is invariably going to be labelled the “AI amp” and prejudged on that basis.

Because in truth, you could never even glance at the Amp Intelligence section of the companion app, and this would be one of the very best affordable modelling amps on the market.

The sounds are genuinely some of the best in class, the usability and functionality is better than many of the big-hitters in this sector, and it is bloody loud along with it. You could, in the finest traditions of the Spark, spend an afternoon getting your presets set up in the app to your liking, close it down and gig for the rest of your natural life without ever once having to open it again – everything you need to tweak is right there on the amp itself.

But we live in 2026 here, and so the Amp Intelligence thing is very much a key plank of this whole endeavour – no matter how unnecessary it might be for a lot of players. That means that I have no choice but to factor it into my opinions about the product as a whole.

And look… it’s… okay? It’s better than the AI features in Spark, and probably a bit worse than the ones in BIAS X. Most of the time it does a pretty good job of crafting tones for you, and sometimes it makes you pray for the asteroid to hit the earth. Anyone who has had to use an AI chatbot for any kind of serious purpose will understand this feeling.

There is, of course, the ethical elephant in the room. Positive Grid has never provided a satisfactory answer regarding what they’re using to train their AI models with, and there is of course the environmental impact of running LLMs like this. And that’s before we get into what we were talking about up top in this review – that a large swathe of musicians are reflexively hostile to anything that attempts to inject AI into music creation.

It would be a real shame if people wrote the Reactor off on the basis of two letters printed on the control panel, because this is an impressive and serious new contender in the affordable gigging amp world.

Positive Grid Reactor 50 – alternatives

There is perhaps no sector of the guitar amp world more competitive than the one in which the Reactor is wading into. The king of the sector currently is the identically priced Boss Katana-50 Gen 3 ($349 / £269) – it’s simple to use and has a wealth of good onboard sounds. Blackstar’s ID:X 50 ($349 / £289) is an impressive recent attempt to take on the Katana, but if you want something that’s a bit more straightforward and – I cannot stress this enough – comically loud, the all-analogue Orange O-Tone 40 ($399 / £329) is a gig-ready monster. If you like Reactor’s smart amp elements but don’t need the gigging power, the Positive Grid Spark 2 ($349 / £279) is a fantastic home practice tool with less sounds overall, but a much more fleshed-out home-playing experience.

The post Positive Grid Reactor review: does your guitar amp really need an AI chatbot? appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Press Release

Source: ABC PR

July 3 sees the release of one of the most anticipated live albums of the metal year, a full all-format release for Live From The Guild Theatre, recorded almost exactly one year earlier at the onstage launch of L.A. Guns’ most acclaimed album in years, the mighty Leopard Skin.

Rockpit.net described Leopard Skin as “a hook-filled, melody-drenched delight—perfectly mixed and balanced from start to finish. If you’re a diehard rocker who still worships the ’80s glory days, this one’s for you. But don’t get it twisted: this isn’t some nostalgic retread. L.A. Guns aren’t stuck in the past—they’ve evolved naturally, delivering a record that feels fresh while staying true to their roots.”

MetalPlanetMusic.com said the Guns are “still churning out bangers,” and Maximumvolumemusic.com applauded them for still having “a way of sounding filthy.”  In fact, that review continued, “The best thing about L.A. Guns is how unapologetic they are, and ‘Hit and Run’ nails it. ‘We’re just having fun,’ sneers [vocalist Phil Lewis], as only he can.”

It nails it here, too, sliding in between “Hellraisers Ball” and “Like A Drug,” but Live From The Guild Theatre is explosive from start to finish, the Gunners firing off killer versions of fan favorites tracing as far back as the band’s debut album – “Sex Action,” for example, probably hasn’t featured in the repertoire since the eighties, but it’s alive and kickin’ here.

Sophomore set Cocked and Loaded, meanwhile, spits out some of the most powerful shotgun blasts in the band’s entire arsenal – “I Wanna Be Your Man,” “The Ballad of Jayne,” “Rip and Tear,” and the set-ender, “Never Enough.”  And Leopard Skin gets both a triumphant airing and a delirious response.

In fact, longtime vocalist Phil Lewis and the man who put the Guns in L.A. Guns, Tracii Guns, have never sounded better – quite an achievement for a band that’s been tearing up the stages of the world since 1983!  Ace Von Johnson (guitar), Johnny Martin (bass) and Shawn Duncan (drums) complete the line-up.

The first single from the album, “Electric Gypsy” which is now available to stream and download HERE, is another from the self-titled debut, and it sounds as fresh now as it did way back then…drop it into your streaming playlist and it won’t simply wake up the neighbors, it’ll have them hammering on your door, demanding to know what you’re listening to.

Watch the video for “Electric Gypsy” HERE

Yes, you’ll tell them it’s L.A. Guns – who else could it be?  But you can also tell them that it’s not only coming out on CD and vinyl, but there’s a DVD and a cassette.

CD/DVD/VINYL/CASSETTE: https://cleorecs.com/search?q=l.a.+guns+live+from+the+guild+theatre

DIGITAL: https://orcd.co/laguns_livefromtheguildtheatre

Here’s the track listing for LIVE FROM THE GUILD THEATRE:

1. Intro – Taste It

2. Cannonball

3. Electric Gypsy

4. Sex Action

5. Hellraisers Ball

6. Hit and Run

7. Like a Drug

8. Speed

9. One More Reason

10. Theremin Jam

11. Over the Edge

12. Guitar Solo

13. I Wanna Be Your Man

14. Lucky Motherfucker

15. Never Enough

16. The Ballad of Jayne

17. Rip and Tear

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On this week’s Fretboard Journal Podcast, we’re joined by photojournalist and musician Ryan Salm.

When the 2026 World Cup descends on North America, Salm and his group of friends, The Home Team String Band, will hit the road in a converted school bus, visiting match sites to play music and bridge cultural divides.

It’s a fun tale of soccer fans using music to open doors and make friends.

Follow the Home Team String Band and their adventures here:
https://hometeamsoccerbus.com

https://www.instagram.com/hometeamstringband

Join us at our 2026 Fretboard Summit in Chicago for three days of guitar demos, concerts, workshops and podcast tapings with some of our favorite artists: www.fretboardsummit.org.

This year’s Summit has over 80 luthiers and brands showcasing their new and prototype gear!

Subscribe to the Fretboard Journal’s quarterly print magazine: https://shop.fretboardjournal.com/products/fretboard-journal-annual-subscription

We are brought to you by Peghead Nation: https://www.pegheadnation.com
(Get your first month free or $20 off any annual subscription with the promo code FRETBOARD at checkout).

Mike & Mike’s Guitar Bar: https://mmguitarbar.com

The post Podcast 553: Ryan Salm and the Home Team String Band first appeared on Fretboard Journal.

Fender has launched a sprawling new firmware update for its multi-effects guitar processor, the Tone Master Pro.

The update brings an abundance of new amp and cab models plus effects – eight amps, eight cabs and 15 effects, to be precise – as well as a number of new features and “user-friendly enhancements”, including a second page of footswitch button assignments, a new search function and an improved looper.

• READ MORE: “Leo Fender was a technician who admired function and ease of manufacturing; he was not an artist”: guitar brands and Fender trade barbs in legal letters

There’s also a new Strobe Tuner option, a new global setting to enable Tap Tempo for Delays, a range of new footswitch assignment types for EZ Looper, Play/Stop, Record/Overdub and more, a new Song Mode footswitch shortcut, and a redesigned interface for the IR edit screen.

The Tone Master Pro now features over 100 amp and effects models, and over 6,000 Fender-captured impulse responses. A full list of the new amps and effects can be seen below:

Amps

• ’57 Champ
• ’68 Custom Deluxe Reverb
• ’68 Custom Princeton Reverb
• ’65 Twin Custom 15
• Rumble 800
• EVH 5150 III 50W 6L6 Green
• EVH 5150 III 50W 6L6 Blue
• EVH 5150 III 50W 6L6 Red

Cabs

• 1×8 ’57 Champ
• 1×10 ’65 Princeton GB
• 1×10 ’68 Princeton
• 1×12 ’65 Deluxe GB
• 1×12 ’68 Deluxe
• 1×15 Twin Custom
• 1×12 EVH 5150 G12H
• 4×12 British G12H

Effects

• Lightyear – inspired by the Greer Lightspeed
• Pinions – inspired by the Earthquaker Devices Plumes
• Runes – inspired by the Earthquaker Devices Blumes
• Integrator Boost – inspired by the TC Electronic Integrated Preamp
• Grunt – inspired by the Fortin Grind
• Rockbox 100 – inspired by the Scholz R&D Rockman X100 headphone amp
• Step Tremolo – Fender original
• Prismatic Delay – Fender original
• Step Filter Delay – Fender original
• Spectral Reverb – Fender original
• Cirrostratus Reverb – Fender original
• Cirrostratus Synthverb – Fender original
• Seventy Sixer Compressor – inspired by the UA 1176 compressor
• Step Filter – Fender original
• Pitch Sequencer – Fender original

To install the latest firmware update for your Tone Master Pro, follow these steps:

1. Head to fender.com/tonemaster_pro to download the latest firmware.
2. Connect your Tone Master Pro to your computer via USB-C.
3. Hold down the firmware update button for 10 seconds while powering on.
4. Your Tone Master Pro will display a “USB Firmware Update Mode” screen.
5. Drag and drop the downloaded firmware update file onto the “FENDER_AMP” drive on your computer.
6. Your Tone Master Pro will display “Applying Updates” on the screen.
7. Your Tone Master Pro will read “Update Complete” once the firmware update is complete. Then simply restart your Tone Master Pro and you’re good to go.

The Tone Master Pro is available now for £1,589. We gave it a solid 8/10 in our 2023 review. Learn more at Fender.

The post Fender issues firmware update for Tone Master Pro – introducing tonnes of new amp and effects models appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Press Release

Source: ABC PR

Europe release the hook-laden new single, “The Cult of Ignorance,” the second track unveiled from their highly anticipated forthcoming studio album, Come This Madness, set for release on September 25 via Silver Lining Music. Pre-orders are available now.

Driven by an instantly memorable hook and an anthemic chorus, “The Cult of Ignorance” combines undeniable catchiness with a message that resonates in today’s fast-moving world, delivering moments of reflection without losing its positive, feel-good energy.

As well as featuring Europe, the accompanying star-studded video showcases cameos from high-profile friends of the band, including renowned actress Malin Åkerman, former World No. 1 and multiple Grand Slam champion tennis player Stefan Edberg, astronaut Christer Fuglesang,  Howling Pelle (The Hives), Mikael Åkerfeldt and Fredrik Åkesson (Opeth) and E-Type, alongside many other notable personalities from the world of music, film, fashion, sports and science.

“I love this track! It’s a straightforward rock anthem with lyrics reflecting the times we live in, written slightly tongue in cheek” says Europe’s founding member and frontman Joey Tempest. “Mic (keyboards) came to me with this song idea while on tour in South America – I thought it was crazy good! We finished it together and it’s become a real banger! The title was inspired by a phrase coined by author and biochemist Isaac Asimov. It reflects some of the negative tendencies emerging in our world today, though it is written in a slightly light-hearted tone.”

Watch/Listen to “The Cult of Ignorance” here – Video by Patric Ullaeus.

Europe’s new studio album, Come This Madness, signals a powerful new chapter for one of rock’s most enduring acts. Across songs like “One on One,” “The Cult of Ignorance,” and the title track “Come This Madness,” the band channel tension, truth, and raw energy into a record that feels both deeply personal and globally resonant.

Watch and listen to Europe’s recently released and celebrated single, “One on One,” here. The song is accompanied by a cinematic video featuring acclaimed actor Peter Stormare (Fargo, The Big Lebowski, Minority Report, 8MM, Armageddon) and directed by Patric Ullaeus.

Come This Madness was recorded at RMV Studio, the Stockholm-based recording facility founded by Benny Andersson and Ludvig Andersson. The album features special guests Tobias Forge (Ghost) and Mikael Åkerfeldt (Opeth) on backing vocals and was produced by acclaimed producer Tom Dalgety (Ghost, Rammstein, Pixies, The Cult, Opeth), who became a true creative force throughout the process, deeply embedded in the band’s writing and recording, shaping the album’s sound from the ground up. To bring the project to its final stage and complete their vision, the band turned to one of rock’s most respected recording legends Mike Fraser (AC/DC, Van Halen, Metallica, The Cult, Loverboy) to mix the record.

With Come This Madness, Europe deliver a landmark record that finds them fully realized and present, confronting the realities of the modern world with conviction and creativity. Building on the momentum surrounding the album’s release, the band will also embark on an extensive run of live dates, including numerous festival appearances and a major tour to celebrate the 40th anniversary of The Final Countdown. Kicking off in Glasgow on September 30, “The Final Countdown 40th Anniversary Tour” promises to unite the legacy that defined them with the renewed energy, driving them forward today. For a full list of dates and ticket information, please visit: www.europetheband.com

2026 Dates:

6 Jun – North Festival, Maia (PT)

21 Jun – Graspop Metal Meeting, Dessel (BE)

25 Jun – Rock Pod Kameňom Festival, Bela Nad Cirochou (SK)

28 Jun – Retro Trop C, Tilloloy (FR)

5 Jul – Summer Festival Piazza Castello, Marostica (IT)

7 Jul – Cavea-Auditorium Parco della Musica, Roma (IT)

8 Jul – Arena Campo Marte, Brescia (IT)

9 Jul – Villa Bertelli, Forte Dei Marmi (IT)

25 Jul – Son Do Mar Festival, Meaño, Pontevedra (ES)

30 Jul – Wacken Open Air, Wacken (DE)

29 Aug – Stonedead Festival, Newark (GB)

30 Sep – SEC Armadillo, Glasgow (GB)*

2 Oct – Civic Hall, Wolverhampton (GB)*

3 Oct – Eventim Apollo Hammersmith, London (GB)*

5 Oct – Musis Arnhem, Arnhem (NL)*

6 Oct – Olympia, Paris (FR)*

8 Oct – Poble Espanyol, Barcelona (ES)*

9 Oct – Bilbao Arena Mirabilla, Bilbao (ES)*

10 Oct – La Cubierta, Madrid (ES)*

12 Oct – Salle Métropole, Lausanne (CH)*

13 Oct – Volkshaus, Zürich (CH)*

14 Oct – Alcatraz, Milan (IT)*

16 Oct – Liederhalle, Stuttgart (DE)*

17 Oct – Gasometer, Wien (AT)*

19 Oct – Admiralspalast Theater, Berlin (DE)*

20 Oct – COS Torwar, Warszawa (PL)*

22 Oct – Falkoner, Frederiksberg (DK)*

23 Oct – Film Studios, Gothenburg (SE)*

24 Oct – B-K, Stockholm (SE)*

26 Oct – Sentrum Scene, Oslo (NO)*

15 Nov – Malta Metal Weekend, St. Julians (MT)*

21 Nov – Ostravar Aréna, Ostrava (CZ)*

25 Nov – Aalto Hall @ House of Culture, Helsinki (FI)*

27 Nov – John Smith Rock Frozen Paviljonki, Jyväskylä (FI)*

28 Nov – Unholy Winter Festival Joensuu Areena, Joensuu (FI)*

*The Final Countdown 40th Anniversary Tour

Come This Madness album artwork by Storm Studios (Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and Muse).

Come This Madness track listing:

1. One on One
2. The Cult of Ignorance
3. Come This Madness
4. This Time of Year
5. In a Different World
6. Scandinavian Eyes
7. Takin’ It Back
8. In the Absence of Grace
9. The Angels Must Have Flown
10. The Devil’s Back
11. Nothing Can Follow This

Come This Madness will be available on vinyl, CD and digital formats. Pre-orders can be placed HERE

EUROPE are:

Joey Tempest – Lead Vocals

John Norum – Guitars

John Levén – Bass

Mic Michaeli – Keyboards

Ian Haugland – Drums

www.europetheband.com

www.facebook.com/europetheband

www.instagram.com/officialeuropetheband

www.youtube.com/europethebandtv

www.tiktok.com/@europethebandofficial

 

 

With a spherical roof packed with 1.2 million programmable LED puck lights, the Las Vegas Sphere is one of the most innovative live venues on Earth, capable of bringing the most ambitious of artistic visions to life.

But while many artists have been keen to bring their stage show to the Sphere – including Eagles, Metallica, U2 and Dead & Company – others have dismissed the idea out of fear the visuals would take away from their performance as a band.

• READ MORE: Metallica Sphere residency CONFIRMED

Paul Stanley recently revealed why Kiss refused to play at the venue, saying: “You’re not going there to see a band – you’re going to see screens,” adding, “The truth of it is, the Sphere minimises a band.”

And Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson has shared similar scepticism, saying last year: “We just do a lot of stuff: we run around, we go around, and at the Sphere, what’s the point? What’s the point? In fact, what’s the point of even being there, if you’re a band?”

And now, Def Leppard guitarist Phil Collen has spoken to SiriusXM’s Trunk Nation with Eddie Trunk about his views on the Sphere, revealing that he’s attended shows there as a fan, but isn’t sure about Def Leppard’s place on the stage.

“This isn’t a diss or anything,” he says [via Blabbermouth], “but it seems that it’s the Sphere featuring whatever band it is. It could be anyone. And that’s what we’d be a bit scared of. I mean, I’d love to play there – it’d be awesome, it’s incredible, and it’d be a great experience – but I think that people focus on just the production as opposed to the band.

“So we’ll see. I don’t know. I mean, I could be wrong. But, yeah, I’d love to play there, absolutely. We definitely would. So we’ll see.”

Collen confesses he hasn’t seen a rock band at the Sphere, and has only attended the venue to watch The Wizard of Oz.

“It’s fascinating. It’s amazing,” he says. “I just wondered [what it would be like to see a band there], ‘cause I wasn’t quite sure. I haven’t seen a band in there, and that’s always a concern that you’d come out there and it’d be like, ‘Yeah, the Sphere was great. Oh, yeah and I saw U2 or the Eagles there as well,’ type of thing.

“Or it doesn’t matter, whether the whole experience kind of overshadows one or the other. It depends. But, yeah, I guess we’ll find out.”

Metallica will become the first large metal band to play at the Sphere when they arrive for four no-repeat weekends on their Life Burns Faster residency. Learn more at Metallica.com.

The post “This isn’t a diss, but it could be anyone”: Why Phil Collen isn’t convinced by a Def Leppard Sphere residency appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.