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The 1970s were a time when the great guitar heroes ruled the earth. Legendary 6-string warriors like Jimmy Page, David Gilmour, and Ritchie Blackmore regularly held tens of thousands of fans spellbound in arenas and stadiums across the United States and beyond.

Among those titans stood Robin Trower. His breakthrough album, 1974’s Bridge of Sighs, featuring the FM radio staple “Day of the Eagle,” transformed his power trio into one of the hottest live acts in rock. But it wasn’t just the virtuosity or the riffs that captivated listeners—it was his sound. Vast, emotional and velvety, it moved and churned like a rising tide enveloping the listener.

“We recorded Bridge of Sighs quick—in just a little over two weeks,” Trower recalls to Premier Guitar. “The guitar sound was my invention, but we were very lucky to get Geoff Emerick to engineer it. The studio was quite big, and Geoff just listened while he walked around the room and placed the mics where he thought things sounded best. There was no science—it was just him and his magic set of ears.”

At the time, Emerick was one of the most respected engineers in the world, having worked extensively with the Beatles, and his instinctive approach helped shape the immense, swirling guitar tone that became a defining element of Trower’s music.

The following year, that humungous sound arrived onstage in Stockholm.

On February 3, 1975, Trower, bassist-vocalist James Dewar, and drummer Bill Lordan stepped onto the stage of Stockholm Concert Hall to begin a European tour. The stately 1,770-seat venue—home of the Swedish Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the Nobel Prize ceremonies—was designed for classical music, but its wood-paneled interior gave the trio’s sound an unusual warmth and clarity. What the band didn’t realize was that Swedish Radio was recording the entire performance on a state-of-the-art RKB-branded Nagra eight-track mobile recorder, capturing what would eventually become one of the most celebrated live guitar albums of the decade.

“We were very lucky that tape was rolling that night,” Trower says. “We were performing in a proper concert hall and it sounded fantastic, which inspired us to play in top form. It was very refreshing, because most of the time we were playing in these hockey arenas that sounded awful. We weren’t even aware that they were recording it.”

To Trower’s surprise, a few months later Swedish Radio sent the band a cassette of the broadcast. Like many European broadcasters at the time, the network routinely recorded touring rock acts for its archives. Hearing the power of the performance—and the unusually high quality of the recording—the decision was made to remix the tapes and release them as a live album.

The result surfaced a year later, in March 1976, as Robin Trower Live!, a record that arrived just as the guitarist’s career was reaching its commercial peak. Mixed by Trower and Emerick, the album cracked the Top 10 in the United States and became Trower’s biggest chart success in the U.K., confirming what concert audiences already knew: that the soft-spoken guitarist from Southend had quietly become one of the defining players of the decade.

But despite its reputation among fans, the original Live! album only told part of the story.

The Stockholm concert itself had been considerably reshaped to fit the limitations of a single LP. Of the twelve songs performed that night, only seven were selected for release. Even those tracks were re-sequenced, abandoning the original running order in favor of a set designed to deliver maximum impact across two vinyl sides. The result captured the spirit of the show—but not the full arc of the performance.

“We were very lucky that tape was rolling that night.”

Even the album’s artwork introduced a bit of theatrical sleight of hand. The cover image suggested Trower performing before a vast outdoor stadium crowd—a sea of heads stretching into the distance. In reality, the recording came from a comparatively intimate Scandinavian concert hall.

“It didn’t occur to me at the time,” Trower says when asked about the discrepancy. “There were no photos taken at the gig. The one they used was from a baseball stadium in San Francisco, I believe.”

If the cover leaned toward rock ’n’ roll illusion, the audio carried its own behind-the-scenes adjustments. During the mixing sessions at London’s AIR Studios, Emerick and Trower discovered that Dewar’s vocal microphone had captured substantial spill from the drums and amplifiers onstage, making it unusable. The solution was simple: Dewar re-recorded his vocal tracks in the studio.

“Jimmy sang it all again,” Trower explains matter-of-factly. “He polished it off in about an hour—just ran through it in real time.”

Nearly 50 years later, the new anniversary edition of Live! reveals the full picture for the first time. Remixed by Richard Whittaker from the original tapes, the restored edition presents the entire Stockholm performance exactly as it unfolded that evening—12 songs rather than seven, sequenced in their original order, with Trower’s onstage introductions and the audience’s reactions intact. What once felt like a highlight reel now plays like a complete musical journey.

The difference is striking. The pacing of the show suddenly makes sense. The opening salvo—“Day of the Eagle” followed by “Bridge of Sighs”—builds the atmosphere naturally before the trio moves into material from For Earth Below, which had not yet been released at the time of the concert. Later in the set, the delicate meditation of “Daydream” gives way to the explosive momentum of “Too Rolling Stoned,” a moment when the band shifts into near-punk velocity.

Listening now, what stands out most is the chemistry between the three musicians. Dewar’s bass lines provide both muscle and melody beneath his soulful vocals. Lordan’s drumming drives the music forward with power. And at the center stands Trower himself, shaping vast arcs of spacey atmosphere and psychedelic blues from his Stratocaster. Together, they created a sound that felt far larger than the trio format should allow. And on that winter night in Stockholm, the band was flying.

“If there’s any secret to my tone, it’s that all my guitars have relatively high action and heavier strings.”

So how exactly did Trower achieve that otherworldly sound?

“There was no magic amp or special guitar,” he says. “Almost everything I owned was pretty new. I just went to Manny’s, the legendary guitar shop in New York City, bought a 100-watt Super Lead Marshall, and listened to about six or eight Strats acoustically before settling on a black-and-white one with a maple neck.

“If there’s any secret to my tone, it’s that all my guitars have relatively high action and heavier strings. Back then I played in standard tuning and used .010-gauge strings. It’s all about getting the strings to ring acoustically, and that’s what translates into a great electric sound.”

Effects also played an important role in shaping Trower’s liquid tone. His signal chain typically included a Vox V846 wah, a Shin-ei Uni-Vibe, and a custom-made boost pedal that pushed the signal level before hitting his Marshall. The simple “clean boost” provided a lift for solos without drastically altering the guitar’s character, adding sustain, thickening the Strat’s midrange, and making the Uni-Vibe’s swirling modulation sound even more liquid.

Trower also kept his overall gain surprisingly restrained.

“I usually kept the volume around seven or eight,” he says. “You need to have a little head room. I’m not interested in having too much distortion. My goal is to keep the clarity of the notes and chords and maintain a clear midrange, which is very important to my sound. I tried to avoid creating any mush.”

While Trower is proud of the 50th anniversary edition of Live!, he’s not particularly nostalgic or inclined to dwell on the past. What’s remarkable is that he has continued releasing albums well into his late seventies and early eighties—something very few guitarists from the classic-rock era have managed. In the last decade alone, he has recorded eight albums, including Come and Find Me (2025) and the blistering concert set, One Moment in Time – Live in the USA (2026).

Still, if Trower tends to look forward rather than back, he has no hesitation when it comes to praising the musicians who helped shape his most celebrated work—especially bassist and singer Dewar, who died in 2002 at the age of 59. Dewar was far more than a supporting player in the trio. With his rich, soulful tenor and muscular bass lines, he provided the emotional center of the band’s sound, grounding Trower’s expansive guitar work with a voice that was equal parts blues grit and melodic warmth. Across seven studio albums—from Twice Removed from Yesterday through Victims of the Fury—Dewar emerged as one of the defining vocalists of the 1970s guitar era.

“I’ve always enjoyed the trio format. It forces me to cover a little more ground instrumentally, but in a way, the economy was our secret weapon.”

“I couldn’t have asked for a better collaborator than Jimmy,” Trower says. “He was warm, funny, and never sang a bad note. People always say he’s underrated, and I totally agree. But that probably wouldn’t have been the case if we’d been called the Jimmy Dewar Band,” he adds, with a wry shrug.

Alongside them was drummer Bill Lordan, whose disciplined yet powerful playing completed the chemistry of the group. Lordan, who had previously worked with Sly Stone, brought a precise sense of groove that allowed Trower’s expansive guitar phrasing to breathe, while still driving the music forward with authority. Together, the three musicians created a sound that felt far larger than the trio format might suggest.

For Trower, the stripped-down lineup was never a limitation—it was the very thing that made the band’s sound so powerful. “I’ve always enjoyed the trio format,” he says. “It forces me to cover a little more ground instrumentally, but in a way, the economy was our secret weapon. It was much easier to achieve definition and clarity with just three instruments and a vocal when you played in those big, boomy halls. It would be less of an issue today—the PA systems and monitors are so much better.”

That sense of space and definition is part of what gives Robin Trower Live! its enduring power. Unlike many live albums of the era, which relied on layers of overdubs or heavy post-production polish, the Stockholm recording captures a band operating with remarkable precision and restraint. The trio moves with the ease of musicians who had spent hundreds of nights refining the material onstage, allowing the songs to stretch and breathe without losing their focus.

Years later, Robert Fripp, the famously exacting guitarist of prog-rock pioneers King Crimson, offered a vivid assessment of Trower’s playing during that era. Fripp first encountered Trower while touring the United States in the early 1970s.

“I toured America in 1974 with Ten Years After top of the bill, King Crimson second, and Robin Trower bottom,” Fripp recalled in a 1996 essay penned for the liner notes to a Trower reissue. “The chart positions were the opposite: Ten Years After in the Billboard 160s, Crimson in the 60s, and Trower climbing remorselessly through the Top 20. Nearly every night I went out to listen to him. This was a man who hung himself on the details—the quality of sound, the nuances of each inflection and tearing bend, and the abandonment to the feel of the moment. He saved my life … and later, in England, he even gave me guitar lessons.

“He is one of the very few English guitarists that have mastered bends and wobbles,” Fripp continued. “Not only has he got inside them, with an instinctive knowing of their affective power, but they went to live inside his hands.”

Fripp’s admiration speaks to something many guitarists recognized at the time but rarely articulated so clearly. Trower’s playing was never about speed or flash. Instead, he built his style around touch—wide bends, patient vibrato, and an almost orchestral sense of space that allowed every note to bloom and hang in the air.

That sensibility is all over Robin Trower Live! Nearly half a century on, the sound Trower summoned from a Strat and a Marshall still feels otherworldly. It’s no wonder even Robert Fripp went looking for lessons.

Don’t be fooled. Yes, José González’s mellifluous folk-pop, powered almost exclusively by Spanish acoustic guitars, sounds like it must have been a breeze to make. But if it were, a lot more of it would exist. As things stand, the acclaimed Swedish singer, songwriter, and guitarist (a child of Argentinian parents who emigrated to Scandinavia in the 1970s) has managed to put out just five solo albums in the past 23 years. Because his work is truly a solo production—González plays, sings, and records all the parts either at his home in Gothenburg or in a private studio space nearby—he has nobody to blame for this but himself. And as he explains during a recent Zoom interview with Premier Guitar, a key issue is that he starts the creative process for each of his albums intending to attain a noble ideal, of which he inevitably and invariably falls short.

“The first ambition always is to do everything, the whole album, with one guitar and one voice,” González says. “But then I’ll have a song that I feel will still be good enough for the album [that way] but I’ll just try adding one more guitar, or some vocals, or some clapping, or some looping. It’s cheating,” he acknowledges, “but you know, I’m old enough to not care that much about it. So that becomes part of the new ambition, which is to make it all sound like it was done with just one guitar and one vocal.”

A bemused grin flashes from behind the 47-year-old González’s dark, scraggly beard. “But then I run into another problem,” he continues, “which is that if the album sounds like it was done with just one guitar and one vocal, it’s a bit too homogeneous and boring for many people. So that’s when I start pushing each song in different directions, adding echoes and reverbs, changing the style of guitar playing. When I put my producer’s hat on, then it’s a different ambition: to make the album more interesting.”

​José González’s Gear

Guitars

• Estevé Adalid 11 classical acoustic
• Estevé 9CB classical acoustic (one with spruce top and one with cedar top)
• Loriente Clarita classical acoustic
• Córdoba Rodriguez classical acoustic
• Alhambra classical acoustic

Effects

• Boss OC-3 Super Octave
• Boss GE-7 Equalizer
• Roland RE-201 Space Echo
• Ableton Live software (for live looping)

Strings & Capo

• D’Addario Pro Arté EJ46 Silverplated Wound/Nylon Core
• Shubb C2 capo

Pickups, Mics, & DI

• Fishman Prefix Pro Blend pickups
• Neumann U 67 and SM 69 microphones
• Radial Engineering Firefly tube preamp/DI

Recording Software

• Logic Pro
• Universal Audio plugins, including A-Type Multiband Dynamic Enhancer, EP-34 Tape Echo and Precision De-Esser

Does González foresee a time when he might actually achieve his first ambition of making a literal solo album? “That could happen,” he says. “I don’t know, there’s many things I want to do with life. If I look into my future, when the kids [an eight-year-old daughter and a four-year-old son] are older and they move from home, I might play every day and all of a sudden have 10 songs that are amazing and just put them out on an album like that. But then again, I might just be happy on my porch by the water. And I might not have an audience that wants to see this old dude.”

One has a hard time imagining the latter situation ever coming to pass if González keeps making music that matches the consistent quality of his latest release, Against the Dying of the Light. Like its four predecessors, the new album sounds simple at first, quiet alt-folk spotlighting González’s gentle, reedy voice and mellow nylon-string plucking. But it reveals greater complexity the more closely you listen: in the tricky rhythms that course through each song, derived from West African, Caribbean, and Brazilian sources; in the harmonic richness of the chord progressions; and in the advanced philosophical concepts referenced in the lyrics.

“The first ambition always is to do everything, the whole album, with one guitar and one voice.”

Indeed, Against the Dying… could legitimately be called a concept album—not in the rock-opera sense, but in the more basic definition of a linked group of songs that explore kindred ideas. The album opens with “A Perfect Storm,” which presents a problem: Human consciousness and well-being are threatened by artificial intelligence, algorithms, memes, and other human creations. The implications of that problem are examined more deeply as the album progresses, until 13 songs later, we arrive not at a solution but at an awareness with which a solution might be found—an awareness of our own humanity. The closing song, “Joy,” concludes with these words: “As we cognify everything/We’re still conscious souls/Who can’t help but sing.”

Each song on Against the Dying… flows into the next one naturally, like the evolution of an argument or the telling of a tale. Some of this is the product of post-facto track sequencing, but sometimes González wrote the songs with their order in mind from the start. For example, the lightly skipping “For Every Dusk” is followed by the more introspective “Sheet” because the songs were originally written as two sections of the same composition. The former track, with three subtly interlocking guitar parts, is also the one that strays farthest from its author’s opening play-it-all-on-a-single-instrument mission.

According to González, “For Every Dusk” was composed in a manner similar to the way he writes most of his songs, but ended up sounding different due to certain performance realities. “I always start with guitar,” he says, “and then I start humming. And then I start writing, and when I start writing I do the words and the melodies, partly on their own and partly by sitting with the guitar. That’s the part where I give up sometimes, because I raise the bar a bit too high for myself. With some songs, I’m not able to play that well and sing at the same time. I could sort of lower the bar for the guitar part, but usually I record the guitar separate. ‘For Every Dusk’ was one of those songs. I basically did full takes and felt like they had some highlights, but none of them were good enough, even if I tried to edit them. It sounded way better if I just put two of the takes together [running simultaneously]. Then it sounds like two guitarists hanging out. The guitars are almost playing the same thing, but you get these variations that are nice, and they also sound similar to the music from Mali, where usually a couple of people with guitars are playing.”

“It became obvious that people were liking my acoustic guitar and vocals. That was what I was doing best.”

González has been a fan of Malian music for the past two decades; guitarist Ali Farka Touré and kora player Ballaké Sissoko were his gateway drugs. “Later, I got to hang out with [fellow guitarist] Sidi Touré and Bombino [Omara Moctar] from Niger. It was a pleasure to see how they play, and it’s just fun to jam with that sort of music. And I recently sang on a track for [Saharan “desert blues” band] Tinariwen’s new album—I’m really happy with how that turned out.”

Another highlight of Against the Dying…, “Ay Querida,” features an ear-grabbing alternate tuning. With a nod to legends Joni Mitchell and Nick Drake, the guitarist cranks the low E string of his Estevé Adalid 11 down, way down, to B. That, however, is the song’s only deviation from standard. González employs several similar tunings, all of which share a minimum of retuned strings. “I never retune the A, D, B or high E,” he points out. “It’s only the low E and the G that go down, or up—there are many songs that are E-A-D-A, for example. But it’s fun to have those downtuned songs. The first one that became popular was ‘Far Away,’ that was used in a video game [Red Dead Redemption]. And since then, I have a couple of songs that are in that tuning. They’re really fun to play live, because you have a P.A. with subwoofers, and when you tune down, all of a sudden you’re not playing guitar, you’re playing bass.”

Besides the transglobal rhythms and the altered tunings, the most distinctive elements of González’s guitar style are what he plays (nylon-string acoustics) and how (always with a combination of the flesh and nails on his right-hand fingers, never a pick). That’s the way he played when he first took up the instrument at age 13; he even studied classical guitar for a while in his youth. “I went to a private teacher here in Gothenburg,” he remembers, “and I asked him, ‘Could you teach me jazz guitar?’ He told me, ‘No, I can’t, but I can teach you classical guitar.’ So I started learning all these Spanish classical tunes, like [Francisco Tárrega’s] ‘Recuerdos de la Alhambra,’ [Isaac Albéniz’s] ‘Asturias,’ some Bach even. I went to see my teacher once a month for a couple of years, but it took too much time to learn. So I let that go, but I learned a lot during those years.”

It wasn’t long before González had made a significant stylistic break from his early classical studies. By age 15, he was playing bass in the first of three hardcore punk bands that occupied his spare time for most of the ’90s, eventually switching over to electric guitar. “The hardcore songs weren’t bad,” he says now, “but they weren’t that good, either. And we didn’t have much success with them.” His next band, formed in 1998, was Junip, a trio that reunited him with the classical acoustic in a new indie-rock context: “It became obvious during those years that people were liking my acoustic guitar and vocals. That was what I was doing best.”

“I always start with guitar, and then I start humming. And then I start writing.”

Five years into Junip’s career, González released a solo seven-inch single, which unexpectedly hit No. 4 on the Swedish pop chart. The band proceeded to go on the backburner (though it reconvened for albums in 2010 and 2013), and González dropped his university studies—he’d been working toward a PhD in biochemistry—to focus on music full-time. “All of a sudden, I was famous in Sweden,” he recalls.

And the nylon-string guitar had played a major role in making this happen. “At that point it became a thing for me to not switch to steel-string, even though that would have meant louder sound when we were playing live,” González says. “My sound engineers were trying to get me to play steel-string, but to me that sounded like what everyone else was doing. I wanted to do what I liked, and in a way that wasn’t new either, because in the ’60s and ’70s there were Spanish guitars everywhere, in the folk traditions and the protest singers and the music that I listened to when I was young.”

That vintage sound has informed not only González’s writing and playing but also his approach to recording. Although he works strictly in the digital domain with Logic Pro, he’ll add analog-style ambience to his tracks whenever he deems it necessary—which is most of the time. “I’ll record through a tube amplifier, so I get that distortion that you can’t really take away later,” he says. “After that, I’ll add some saturation in different steps, depending on the type of song, and some tape emulator. And then, one of my favorite things to do is to add noise. The Universal Audio A-Type plugin has a noise generator that’s pretty round in its sound. I’ve got some nice mics—on the new album, I used Neumann’s SM 69 stereo mic a lot—but I don’t want things to be too bright or hi-fi, so I try to make it sound more old-school.”

Add every hour spent looking for just the right kind and amount of tape-style distortion to every hour spent struggling with the relative complexity of guitar arrangements, and you begin to understand why it generally takes five-plus years for a José González album to be completed. And of course, those aren’t the only things that can eat up a lot of time. “I’ll tell my label, ‘The album’s almost done, I have all the demos so I’m gonna start recording soon,’” González says. “So they start booking tours and setting up interviews. But then, you know, life catches on. Someone in the family gets sick, and I’m not rehearsing guitar as much, and then I need another month, or two more months. But eventually,” he concludes with a shrug, “I get to a point where I feel like this is good enough.”

He’s being humble here. For most listeners, José González’s “good enough” is way more than that.

If you phone FU-Tone on a Sunday, there’s a decent chance company president Adam Reiver will be the one who picks up. Even after decades in the industry and building a global customer base, he hasn’t distanced himself from his clients—something that, in the age of AI chatbots, can still catch customers off guard.

“People will call, and they go, ‘Oh my god, is this the guy in the video? Is this Adam? I can’t believe I’m talking to you,’” he tells Premier Guitar. “And I go, ‘I can’t believe I’m talking to you!’”

That interaction captures something elemental about FU-Tone and Reiver: He’s one of us. “I'm just a guitar player like you, or some kid in Kansas, or the guy on the cover of Rolling Stone,” he says.

This connection isn’t just a customer service quirk. It reveals a philosophy at the heart of his brand. From the early days of designing the EVH D-Tuna to the present, this approach has shaped FU-Tone into a tight-knit community of dedicated musicians from all walks of life.

It also explains why so much of what Reiver builds and talks about centers on helping players take full control of their tone—not just upgrading their instruments, but understanding them.

To fully grasp how deeply this mindset is embedded, it helps to look at Reiver’s own journey as a player. His story began at a moment when guitar culture ruled the world, during a shift from traditional sounds into more experimental territory.

“It was around ’81 when I first really found the guitar,” he says. “And if you roll the clock back two or three years from there, it was basically, ‘Do you want a Strat, a Tele, or a Les Paul?’ And then off you go. I didn’t think modding and hot-rodding guitars were a thing.”

Reiver was there at ground zero to witness the shift toward customized superstrats, the rise of early custom-shop brands like Jackson and Charvel, and brand-new horizons in playing technique. Not wasting any time, he jumped in headfirst, becoming fascinated with how he could change, improve, and completely reimagine his favorite instruments.

“My first guitar was like a cheap, $200 Hondo Flying V,” he says with a touch of pride. “But by the time I was done with it, it had a Kahler in there. It had an Invader pickup in the bridge. It had a Mighty Mite triple-coil pickup in the neck. It was like, do anything you could do to just tinker and play with the guitar.”

Just about everyone who’s played electric guitar for any amount of time is familiar with that unexplainable pull to hot-rod their favorite instrument. In Reiver’s case, however, it was more than curiosity. It was a new paradigm. The guitar was not a finished product. It was a platform.

“The advent of FU-Tone was, ‘How do you make this guitar sound better?’”

While other tinkerers of his era pursued those same goals by winding pickups, building guitars, and adding wild finishes, Reiver’s curiosity found its outlet in fabrication. Thanks to his high school’s metal shop, he wasn’t modifying existing parts—he was making new ones.

“I was not a good student, except for that class,” he recalls with a laugh. “I got straight As in metal shop. I liked how you could fabricate parts from an idea in your head. Like, ‘How do we do this? How do we get this idea from here to there?’”

That experience translated directly into how he would later develop products. Even before founding Floyd Upgrades—FU-Tone’s original name—his process was simple and immediate. Draw something, build it, test it, refine it. Still, Reiver admits he’s no machinist.

“I know enough just to be dangerous, just to get myself in trouble. So I contracted with this guy who was a professional machinist. I would literally sketch something on the side of a box and say, ‘Can you make this?’ He would whip it up old-school and bring it back to my office.”

This spirit of experimentation wasn’t just limited to those early years. That same trial-and-error approach still defines FU-Tone products today. Instead of designing in isolation, Reiver works through ideas with the instrument in hand, adjusting based on feel and response. And as with his in-house machinist, he doesn’t work alone.

One of Reiver’s most celebrated “assistants” was Eddie Van Halen himself. Working in a small team alongside Eddie, he helped develop the EVH D-Tuna through a similar cycle of experimentation, providing locking-trem players access to instant drop-D riffage.

“[That process] became a melting pot,” Reiver says. “It would be one of those side-of-the-box conversations. I would say, ‘Well, maybe we should angle it a little, make this longer, make that shorter, make this, do that.’ I would put it on a guitar, and [Ed] would monkey with it, and say, ‘No, no, no. Do this. Do that.’”

Like Reiver, Van Halen used the guitar as a testing ground, emphasizing constant refinement in pursuit of maximizing tone. And their early success only signaled the start for Reiver.

“You know, the advent of FU-Tone was, ‘How do you make this guitar sound better? How can you make this sustain more? How can you make it clearer? How can you make it louder?’ That’s where it came from.”

With tone chasing now an obsession, Reiver turned his attention to a specific piece of hardware, one most players assumed Floyd Rose had already perfected: the tremolo. The way Reiver saw it, the point where the guitar strings terminate in the body was the most important piece of the tonal equation.

“I don’t care if you play rock, metal, death metal, country, or pop—you want to have a good guitar tone.”

“In the beginning, that was the biggest thing, and I started making one product, a 37 millimeter Big Block,” he says. “I was like, ‘Wow! It sustains way more, it sounds better, and it’s more articulate. Okay, I’ll do this.’ I invested $880 to make a run of the blocks, and said, ‘Well, worst-case scenario is I could just give them to my friends, or, you know, sell them online.’”

In theory, the Big Block was exceedingly simple: a larger, heavier brass tremolo block designed to replace the smaller stock versions that came with most locking systems. With its increased mass, it maintained more string vibration, which translated into more sustain and articulation.

The Big Block was a hit, and soon enough, some of the world’s most notorious tone-hound guitarists were spreading the Floyd Upgrades gospel. Reiver realized that if one overlooked component could make that much of an impact, there were probably others.

Soon, he was manufacturing highly regarded double-locking tremolo replacement parts for the most popular trem models available. From titanium fine tuners to the little metal inserts found in each saddle, his theory about the effect of mass on tone proved correct, time and time again.

But while he was gaining users, not everyone was a fan of the moniker: Floyd Upgrades.

“A certain company didn’t like me using part of their name in my little company, and that’s fair enough,” Reiver acknowledges. “But the real blessing in disguise was that I became FU-Tone. And thank god I did, because I ended up going on to do so many other guitar parts and projects that have nothing to do with someone else’s brand.”

With a new name over the office door, FU-Tone was free to innovate and expand much further into the electric guitar market.

“FU-Tone encompasses a lot now,” Reiver says. “I make stop tail bridges. We make Tele parts. I make my own locking tremolos. We make guitars. We even make pickups.”

This relentless expansion is about more than just product lines. From tiny titanium (or brass or copper) saddle inserts to full guitar builds, every FU-Tone offering still reflects Reiver’s original conviction: tone isn't tied to any single component, but to how everything works together. It’s what Reiver has characterized as the “FU-Tone vein of tone.”

“I still pinch myself every day that I get to work with people I looked up to and tried to play like, and now I’m sitting in their living rooms.”

But what is that tone? Reiver explains: “FU-Tone vein of tone means lots of sustain, clarity, and articulation. It’s considering the wood and essence of your guitar, your hands and your playing, and then moving far beyond that.”

That idea shifts the conversation away from chasing specific gear and toward understanding how your instrument actually responds—where every material choice becomes another variable in the final sound. So what can you expect when you swap out your Ibanez Edge tremolo block for a brass or titanium one? What’s the tonal difference in the metals used in their Nancy Wilson-approved acoustic guitar bridge pins? Forever a gear nerd, Reiver’s always happy to explain.

“Brass is big and warm and round. When you think of brass, think of Eddie Van Halen, Warren DeMartini, or a George Lynch-type of sound. Titanium has a lot of sustain, but with a certain level of clarity to it, almost like a layer of glass, with really nice note separation. And copper I find to be very similar to brass, with more of a scooped-out midsection.”

From icons like Nuno Bettencourt and Slash to modern players like Lzzy Hale and Nita Strauss, countless A-listers have credited FU-Tone upgrades with having a meaningful impact on their signature sounds.

But FU-Tone products aren’t just for stars. They’re for all guitar players, and they’re also very DIY-friendly. Reiver swears that if you give him a few minutes and watch one of the company’s detailed how-to YouTube videos, you’ll be customizing your favorite instrument in no time. “If you’ve never done any of this, it can seem very intimidating,” he says. “But if you have the ability to change your own strings, you can do this.”

As a guitarist himself, Reiver knows firsthand how badly a trip to the local “expert” can go—which is exactly why he’s worked to democratize the process.

“I’ll get a guy who will buy some parts and take them to his local guy,” Reiver explains, “and he’ll say the same thing [I always hear]: ‘My guy said…’ And I’m thinking, ‘Here it comes!’ I’ve even gotten on a Zoom with guys and walked them through it. And by the end, they’re better than ‘their guy.’ I tell them, ‘You’ll never pay someone else to do it again [laughs].’”

Personal Zoom calls from a company president aren’t exactly standard practice in this industry. For Reiver, though, that’s the point—growth through relationships, not traditional marketing. “I have a handful of core guys that are all still dear friends to this day,” Reiver says. “But one of the guys who was there in the very beginning was Phil Collen from Def Leppard. After that, my phone would ring, and it would be some big artist, and they would say, ‘Phil has this on his guitar, and said to call you.’”

That kind of connection establishes a level of trust that can’t be manufactured. And for Reiver and the FU-Tone team, it also shapes how those relationships develop.

“These are not clients—they’re friends,” he says. “We’re at each other’s houses. We’re at each other’s events. It’s organic, and it’s real. I still pinch myself every day that I get to work with people I looked up to and tried to play like, and now I’m sitting in their living rooms.” He laughs. “But I play it totally cool.”

With an artist roster that includes Gary Holt (Exodus, Slayer) and Michael Wilton (Queensrÿche), it might be easy to assume FU-Tone is strictly for shredders. But Reiver’s products have found traction with players across genres and styles, and though he’s a rocker himself, he’s consistently surprised by the range of sounds and approaches the broader FU-Tone community brings.

“I’m not a big country fan, but I can tell you, those guys are the most badass musicians,” he says. “We’ll get the guys in Rascal Flatts, Jim Kimball from Reba [McEntire]’s band, Paul Sidoti from Taylor Swift’s band. I don’t care if you play rock, metal, death metal, country, or pop—you want to have a good guitar tone. I’ve been doing this for over 30 years, and that never gets old.”

FU-Tone may operate on a global scale, but it’s still rooted in the same instinct that led a high school kid to start modifying a budget guitar—and the same belief that the best conversations about tone happen one player at a time. Which is why, if you happen to call on a Sunday, you just might end up talking tone with Adam Reiver.

Two-Rock Studio Overdrive Review

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FU-Tone’s Mass Appeal

How Adam Reiver turned an obsession with hardware into one of the guitar industry’s most trusted upgrade brands.

Córdoba Abasi Stage 7 Review

Tosin Abasi gives electric 7-string players a fanned-fret path to classical connections.

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Three parameters, infinite possibilities. Here’s how to make reverb work harder for you.

Reader Guitar of the Month: Beware Headless Kats!

Headstock surgery saves the day on a beautiful but top-heavy Epiphone.

Rig Rundown: Lamb of God’s Mark Morton [2026]

Hot on the heels of their 12th studio record, Into Oblivion, American metal giants Lamb of God tore off across the continent on a tour that took them to Nashville’s Municipal Auditorium. That’s where PG’s Chris Kies reunited with Mark Morton, the band’s lead guitarist and one of the genre’s most influential riffers. In this new Rig Rundown, Morton walked us through the trusty tools he’s taken out on the road this spring.

Warm Audio Introduces the Reamper

Warm Audio, the leading manufacturer of faithful recreations of legendary recording gear and guitar pedals, today announces the release of the Reamper (WA-RA), a creative routing hub built to connect guitar rigs, studio processors, pedals, and DAW workflows in ways previously reserved for complex setups.

Reader: Bill Sumner

Hometown:Las Vegas, NV

Guitar: Epiphone Kat

I’d wanted a hollow or semi-hollow guitar for some time, drawn to the tonal differences relative to solid bodies. A Gibson ES-335 or Epiphone Casino had been on my radar for years, but the 16" body width always gave me pause. The Epiphone Kat, at only 14" wide, made the difference. I also considered the ES-339, but the Kat simply looked better.

Right out of the box, my brand-new Epiphone Kat semi-hollow was absolutely beautiful, very well made, played nicely, and sounded excellent, with surprisingly good pickups. Unfortunately, there were negatives. It was longer than any of my other guitars and felt clumsy to me as a result. The extra length combined with the Grover tuners to induce neck dive. The Kat was heavier than I expected for a semi-hollow. Lastly, it didn’t stay in tune very well. As with any imperfect online purchase, I faced the hassle of returning it, tolerating it, or fixing it.

Almost immediately, my imagination went to work: It’s too bad Epiphone didn’t make a headless version of this guitar, I thought. That would solve all four problems I faced. That led to design questions—how does one convert a conventional guitar to headless, without doing major wood work like routing on that beautiful body?

My partner in exploring the feasibility and execution of this project was Las Vegas luthier and guitar tech Von Schroeder. He confirmed that my headless scheme was technically viable. But actually beheading a brand-new guitar would be a first for him. In the end, I decided it was worth a try.

Our unusual design approach was to keep the existing bridge and nut rather than replacing them. I placed a Hipshot Lowpro headpiece just above the nut to lock the strings, and a Hipshot Headless Bridge replaced the tailpiece. This effectively created a tailpiece with tuners. The final result was a perfectly balanced guitar that’s a delight to play, stays in tune, and is exactly one pound lighter than the original.

Joe Pernice never would have written “It Got Away From Me,” a haunting orchestral-folk ballad from his new album, Sunny, I Was Wrong, if one of the baseball players he coached hadn’t casually tossed out that hooky turn of phrase during a game. By extension, he also never would have collaborated with Jimmy Webb, one of his “all-time songwriting idols,” who plays tasteful piano on the tune. “A kid dropped an infield pop-up,” he tells Premier Guitar. “And as he ran by during the change of innings, I said as a teaching moment, ‘Hey, what happened out there?’ He goes, ‘I don’t know, coach. It just got away from me.’ I was like, ‘Oh, my god.’ I sat down in the dugout and wrote that title in my phone. I was like, ‘That’s a hook I hadn’t known, and there’s a lot of possibility with a line like that.’”

Turns out, you have to be open in order for the gods to gift you a great song—even in such unlikely places. That seems to be a mantra for Pernice, the singer-songwriter best known for his work with the alt-country act Scud Mountain Boys and the long-running indie-pop outfit the Pernice Brothers. He leaves guitars in almost every room of his Toronto home (not the bathroom—yet), picking them up for a meditative strum in case inspiration strikes. He might start a song and whittle away at it for a few years, finally finding the perfect pathway into a melody or lyric. You have to let the song present itself. That seems to be another mantra for Pernice—and that process has never been more apparent than on the gorgeous Sunny, his proper solo debut following a pair of pandemic-era home recordings.

“I go digging,” the Massachusetts native says, breaking down his delicate blend of the literal and abstract. “I’m often trying to learn something about myself, and what I have learned how to do over time is to relax. Before, I’d think, ‘You’re being untrue to this. Blah, blah, blah.’ But if you’re trying to write the most evocative song you can, you have no choice but to try other things. I think I learned that from writing books—you sometimes have to abandon your true story for the better story.”

The way Pernice tells it, an essential part of Sunny’s story is, once again, America’s pastime.

“For years, I coached baseball,” he says. “I had a kid, and I decided I wasn’t going to tour as much. Even though music was always there, for years it wasn’t my main focus. It was being a decent parent and spending time with my kid while he still wanted to spend time with me. When they get to a certain age, they don’t want to spend time with their old man. I get it. He became a freak for baseball and played high-level ball for years, and I got roped into coaching. I think my time away from focusing so hard on music just brought me back to it—I started to get my time back when my son was a certain age, and I think I’d learned a bunch of stuff. I know it sounds clichéd, but I was a different person.”

​Joe Pernice’s Gear

Guitars

• Martin D-15M w/ Fishman Matrix pickup (light strings, detuned one whole step)
• Godin-made La Patrie nylon-string w/ Fishman Matrix pickup (detuned one whole step)
• Early 1970s Gibson Blue Ridge w/ Fishman Matrix pickup (detuned a whole step, guitar is highly modified with a custom bridge, nut, Grover tuners, and re-bracing)
• 1999 stock Fender American Standard Telecaster (medium strings)

Bass

• 1976 Fender Mustang w/ Badass bridge

Amps

• “Older” Fishman Loudbox
• 1998 Fender Deluxe
• Ca. 2000 Ampeg bass amp with a single 15" speaker

Pernice says he became more “chill” as a songwriter, realizing the most ambitious idea isn’t always the best one. So much of his past work, including the Pernice Brothers’ acclaimed 1998 debut, Overcome by Happiness, is defined by clever, classic pop craftsmanship: how the chords and melodies and harmonies unfurl in ways both surprising and instantly satisfying. But with Sunny, I Was Wrong, he wanted to get out of his own head.

“I decided, ‘It doesn’t have to always be so complex,’” he says. “‘You don’t have to always have a middle-eight with a key change. You don’t have to over-produce stuff.’ That opened up a lot of possibilities. I might have been more accepting of songs that were not so complex where, at another point, I might have thought, ‘That’s not original’ or ‘That’s not good.’ I think having been a parent and going through all the shit that involves, good and bad, I was open to being changed. Now I really don’t care. More than ever, I’m just in it for myself.”

Here, with this “solo” branding, he’s also in it by himself—or, at least, largely without the services of the Pernice Brothers (his brother Bob sings on the peaceful title track, and Patrick Berkery plays drums amid the blissful folk-rock sway of “If You Go Back to California”). “Kind of without making a big deal about it, I think my old band is over,” he says. “I can’t really see myself doing a record as Pernice Brothers anymore. I can’t say it will never happen, but I think that’s run its course.”

“I think one of the hardest things to achieve with a record is a sound, a vibe.”

That decision had nothing to do with musicianship. It mostly came down to geography. Since his bandmates are “scattered all over the world,” he says, “it was nearly impossible to get people [together] to record, let alone rehearse a few times to get a sense of the songs.” And with Sunny, Pernice wasn’t interested in remote recording. He wanted the intimate feel of a band playing in real time. “I think one of the hardest things to achieve with a record is a sound, a vibe. There are different ways to get that, but in this situation, I wanted all the people in the same room.”

An opportunity presented itself—once again, in a roundabout way—through family. Pernice’s son, now 20, went to school with the daughter of Barenaked Ladies bassist Jim Creeggan, and the two musicians became friends. “I met Jim not through music but through the school community,” he says. “Jim’s wife has a nonprofit organization and raises money for different causes. Jim has a world-class recording studio, and a few years back he said, ‘My wife is doing a fundraiser. Would you come play a few songs, and I’ll back you up?’” Creeggan suggested they play as a trio, joined by pianist Mike Evin. That lineup sparked something in Pernice: “I always knew Jim was a great player, but that fundraiser put it in the back of my mind. I also knew I was going to use [Mike] because his style spoke to me—it was exactly what I was thinking.”

They all teamed up at Creeggan’s studio, with their core lineup rounded out by drummer Mike Belitsky, best known as a member of Canadian indie-rock band the Sadies. They instantly found a chemistry, reflecting the vast and “vibrant” musical community in Toronto. “I know more musicians here than when I lived in New York City,” Pernice notes. “We started messing around, and it was like, ‘Holy smokes, this sounds really good. We’re getting a thing that I can’t get remotely.’ Before you know it, you’re like, ‘Oh, this is an entirely different project.’”

They achieved exactly what he initially sought: a warm, unfussy, live-ensemble sound with minimal punch-ins. And the actual compositions reflect that energy: melancholy and graceful, full of introspective and imagistic lyrics, dominated sonically by acoustic strumming, adorned with occasional accoutrement like moaning slide guitar (the gentle “I’d Rather Look Away”) and past-sunset pedal-steel. The most notable addition is an airy vocal harmony from Aimee Mann, who adds a touch of elegance to “Deep Into the Dawn.”

“No exaggeration—as soon as I started singing the melody, I started thinking about Aimee Mann,” he says. “I think I have 19 or 20 albums. That single recording is my favorite of any I’ve ever done because it happened exactly as I hoped. I wouldn’t change a thing. To my ear, that one just had it all.”

“I don’t think I used a pick on a single song. It’s all thumb and strummed with my fingers.”

Pernice also has no regrets about the album’s soothing acoustic-guitar sound. “I think it’s just perfect,” he says. “I don’t think I used a pick on a single song. It’s all thumb and strummed with my fingers. We tried to use my nylon-string, but it was just too dark. Jim said, ‘Hey, Ed [Robertson, from Barenaked Ladies] has this no-name, small-body, parlor-size, steel-string acoustic. I’ve used this before. It sounds great. Wanna try it?’ We did, and we were like, ‘Holy shit, it sounds incredible!’ I said to Jim, ‘Will Ed sell this?’ He said, ‘Absolutely not, because I’ve already tried to buy it.’ It’s some ’80s knockoff that just sounds fantastic. I do not exaggerate when I say I couldn’t tell you what brand the guitar is—not only because I’m a luddite, but also because it was nothing of note.”

It’s not that Pernice doesn’t value quality guitars—it’s more that he’s open to any instrument that sounds and feels inspiring, regardless of the brand on the headstock. His collection runs the gamut: a Martin D-15, a Godin nylon-string, and a “weird one-off Gibson” with a Martin top that he got from a friend at a guitar-electronics company. (“It was never meant for human consumption,” he says. “But I’ve consumed it.”)

Another notable piece: a Gibson Blue Ridge with a bolt-on bridge and a fascinating backstory. “In 1978, there was a big blizzard in Massachusetts—it was a state of emergency. There was like four feet of snow. My brother, as a teenager, was hired with his buddies to shovel snow for a week. My late cousin worked in a place called the Record Garage in Cambridge, and they sold guitars, too. He called my brother and said, ‘I have this Gibson that turns out to have been owned by Billy West of Ren & Stimpy fame.’ My brother bought that guitar. I was a bike racer as a teenager and into my early 20s, and at one point I traded a 1987 Cannondale bicycle for the Gibson, and I still have it. I wrote a million songs on that guitar—probably more on that than anything. I learned how to play on that guitar.”

“The lucky thing for me is that picking up a guitar and strumming is a super-attractive event.”

Guitar-wise, nothing much has changed for Pernice in the many years since. He surrounds himself with 6-strings, makes a habit out of strumming around on them, and waits for that a-ha moment. His batting average is clearly excellent, but it’s all about putting in the reps: One ordinary day, he wound up writing five songs, four of which were “keepers” and two of which (“Peace in Our Home,” “Force Feed the Fire”) ultimately made it onto Sunny, I Was Wrong. “The lucky thing for me is that picking up a guitar and strumming is a super-attractive event,” he says. “I don’t have to make myself do it. It’s instant gratification.”

It also leads to surreal moments he still can’t wrap his brain around, like working with Webb on “It Got Away From Me.” After that baseball player planted the initial seed of inspiration, Pernice fleshed out the full song—including a lyrical reference to the Webb-penned 1967 orchestral-pop smash “MacArthur Park.” Pernice sent the track to friend and Webb collaborator Pete Mancini, hoping he’d play it for the maestro himself. He did—and then wound up playing on the piece. “I’m a huge fan,” he says. “He’s like a Beatle to me.”

When he thinks about the journey that song took—from a kid’s casual remark to collaborating with an all-time hero—it makes him realize how strange and beautiful songwriting can be.

“I remember writing that song at my kitchen table,” he says. “I was probably sitting with a cup of coffee in the morning in my underwear. It goes from an idea, to a finished song, to a recording, to having one of your songwriting idols playing on it—and now I’m talking about it to you, a guy I’ve never met. That came from a kid saying something on a baseball field! That kind of stuff always blows my mind: ‘That’s so weird. It came out of nothing.’”

With new computer technologies and AI-driven advancements seemingly everywhere you look, I felt it would be fitting to zero in on digital effects in the pedal world—specifically, which ones most of us have embraced, which ones we continue to avoid, and which ones remain haunted by the ghosts of older tech.

Let’s start with digital effects that are pretty well embraced, and definitionally necessary. The first two that come to mind are audio loopers and clean octave pedals. Looper pedals have been around since the turn of the century, most notably the Boss RC-20. Then a big market splash came from TC Electronic with the Ditto and its subsequent models. These units provided powerful tools for musicians—the ability to lay down an idea and instantly play it back was huge. It still is!

These creative boxes run on digital wizardry—and they have to. The biggest stipulation? Don’t degrade or alter the incoming signal. We gear nerds work hard to craft and maintain the tones we love and rely on. Recording and playing back audio samples demands storage and all manner of digital signal processing (DSP), and most of us understand that—so as long as the audio comes out the way it went in, we’re on board.

Let’s hop over to another widely embraced digital effect: the clean octave. Musicians have been enjoying analog octave-up effects since the late ’60s with the Octavia, analog octave-down since the ’70s courtesy of Mu-Tron and MXR, and then Boss in the ’80s. All of these devices inspired great music, but they shared something else in common: analog limitations. Most notably, an inability to track multiple notes or chords of any real complexity—which is what we mean when we talk about “tracking.” On top of that, they were dependent on fuzz, prone to glitchiness, and often had a mind of their own. None of that is a knock—analog octave circuits remain loved, widely used, and held in high esteem. For a lot of players, the limitations are the appeal.

Clean digital octaves, on the other hand, overcome those shortcomings and can produce clean octaves up and down simultaneously, with minimal tracking or latency issues. No fuzz. Minimal glitchiness. Code is king here, and not something everyone can do—or even wants to do. But the few companies that do it, make octave pedals packed with great sounds and capabilities driven by high-powered DSP. Those that enjoy it really enjoy it. How often have you seen a pedalboard with some type of DigiTech Whammy or Electro-Harmonix POG on it?

So what would be something that’s not embraced in the digital realm? The easy answer is gain—from treble boosts all the way to fuzz boxes. There are several aspects to consider when diagnosing why this is. The first may be that we simply don’t require DSP to make any of the classics that are well-known and well-loved. These were originally made with all analog components, and they still are. A lot of companies, both big and small, offer models of these classic circuits. This leads me to my next point. Players often have an affinity for these, and they become a core part of “their sound.” To further that point, there can be a feeling of uniqueness when it comes to building a pedalboard. Let’s say you were to see 10 different pedalboards, and all of them featured something like a Helix for producing reverb, delay, and amp-modeling sounds. Yes, they’re probably set in different configurations, but they’re all the same mass-produced box. And that’s fine! The uniqueness of a board often comes earlier in the chain, by way of, say, a small-batch, NOS-parts-based germanium fuzz pedal made by some artisan in their basement. That’s something that resonates with that particular player and gives that feeling of having something special to contribute to “their sound”

Even if DSP could reproduce the sounds of a vintage germanium fuzz, it still wouldn't have the swag of a handmade, through-hole version. We guitar players are a group of artists with a connection to cool, tactile components, and a romance with the tech of yesteryear. Artists are also drawn to other creatives and the stories they tell. Coding has its own story and achievements worth celebrating, but it’s less tactile and accessible to most. It can be far easier to understand and appreciate the circuit artist who’s measuring hundreds of transistors, tweaking voltages to an uber-specific value, choosing the right capacitor for the job, and screen printing in a dark basement.

For all these reasons, I think there’s a case to be made for why analog gain pedals aren’t going away—even in a world of digital awesomeness.

Matteo Mancuso doesn’t like to think too much—not when he has a guitar in his hands, which seems to be most of the time. “The less I think, the better,” he says. “I like to be instinctive, especially when I improvise. Most of my music is centered around improvisation, so I need to feel very free. Otherwise, I’ll be second-guessing each move I make and I’ll be judging myself.”

He cites one of his favorite quotes, this one from drummer Vinnie Colaiuta: “Thought is the enemy of flow.” “I agree with that 100 percent,” he says. Which isn’t to suggest that Mancuso can blank his mind entirely. There are times when he’ll stop and listen to where his nimble bandmates—bassist Riccardo Oliva and drummer Gianluca Pellerito—are going, and if they’re headed in a cool direction, he’ll take right off with them. “That’s the beauty of playing with some very creative musicians,” he says. “They’ll usually present you with some good ideas if you just give yourself a moment to listen.”

Conversely, he reasons, should he ever find himself headed down the wrong musical path or boxed in a corner, he can always lay the blame on his bandmates. “That’s the most important part—the band leader never makes a mistake,” he says with a laugh. “It’s always the rhythm section’s fault.”

​Matteo Mancuso’s Gear

Guitars

• Yamaha custom Revstar (with DiMarzio PAF 36th Anniversary humbuckers)
• Yamaha custom Pacifica (with DiMarzio PAF 36th Anniversary humbucker and two DiMarzio Area 61 single-coils)

Amps & Modelers

• Line 6 Helix Stadium XL
• Fractal FM9
• Marshall JCM800
• Mesa/Boogie Mark IIA
• Marshall 4x12 cabinet

Strings, Picks, & Cables

• Dogal strings (.009–.042, for electrics), (.010–.046, for acoustics)
• Fender medium picks
• LAB Audio Technology cables

Things have been moving pretty fast for Mancuso since the release of his knockout 2023 debut album, The Journey, and they’re bound to accelerate even faster now that he’s finally gotten around to issuing a more-than-worthy follow-up, Route 96. His development and swift rise are already becoming the stuff of legend: Born in Palermo, Italy, he picked up the guitar at age 10 and was mentored by his musician father, Vincenzo. His rapacious musical appetite—everything from Angus Young to Django Reinhardt—was equaled by his preternatural skills, and it wasn’t long before he refined a lightning-fast, pickless fingerstyle that left many in the guitar community speechless.

Even before he graduated from music school (he studied jazz guitar at Palermo Conservatory of Music), videos of Mancuso and his one-time trio SNIPS signaled that something big was afoot. The band’s breakneck, chops-a-plenty cover of Pee Wee Ellis’ “The Chicken” went viral (it’s now at over three million views), and soon he was receiving huzzahs and hosannas from some of his idols. Steve Vai called him “the future of electric guitar.” Joe Bonamassa weighed in, saying that Mancuso had “reinvented the instrument.” And Al Di Meola went so far as to write him personally to say, “Matteo, what are you doing? You’re killing us!” In time, the young guitar star would jam—and hold his own—with all three admirers.

The praise has continued from all corners, but Mancuso is doing a good job of keeping his feet on the ground and his head on his shoulders. “I try not to pay too much attention to that stuff,” he says, adding, “but you know, I’m human. The point is, the best judge of what you’re doing is you. Whenever I see people saying these things, I try to keep everything in perspective. I don’t consider myself the best guitar player in the world. Believe me, I know what my strengths and weaknesses are.”

“Most of my music is centered around improvisation, so I need to feel very free.”

Asked to name a few of those weak spots, he answers without hesitation: “I’d like to follow my ear more during improvisations. Sometimes that can be hard if you know a lot of things on the guitar, because you’re relying on muscle memory. Another thing is timing—I always like to work with a metronome. It’s not necessarily a weakness, because I think I have a good feel for time, but it’s something I need to do every day. If you don’t keep up with it, your skills can degenerate pretty quickly. I also like to keep up with comping. I’m soloing most of the time, so it’s good to be able to comp with people.”

Whatever his perceived shortcomings, Mancuso is still operating at a vertiginously high level. He understands that there’s a portion of his audience looking to have their minds blown at every turn, but it hasn’t become a burden. “I guess there’s that ‘wow factor’ in my music, and I know when I’m doing that sort of thing,” he says. “The point is to express myself in a genuine way. I try to catch myself, like when I’m playing a solo and I’m doing everything I know—here’s a crazy tapping section, and here’s an alternate picking section—because I know people will go, ‘Whoa, that’s great.’ The temptation is to force myself to do complicated things, even if there’s no need to. I’m aware of it.”

Because he’s such an accomplished instrumental virtuoso (he can hit ferocious speeds like Di Meola or Van Halen, but also slip into violin-like legato phrasing like Eric Johnson at the drop of a hat), Mancuso’s compositional skills can go overlooked. The Journey offered heavy-duty prog-rock with a classical edge (“Silkroad”), supple-smooth jazz-swing (“Polifemo”), groove-filled jazz blues (“Blues for John”), and metallic rock (“Drop D”). The beauty of it all, and this is one of Mancuso’s greatest strengths, is how he managed to keep each song accessible but not predictable. There seemed to be an unsettled quality in one musical passage to the next, just long enough to keep you on the edge of your seat wondering where he would go next.

“That’s what it’s all about,” he says. “My goal is to always have an element of surprise, that feeling where you don’t always know how a song is developing, but it keeps heading toward something new. That’s what keeps things interesting. I think it’s very hard to achieve, but that’s what I’m trying to do most of the time.”

“My goal is to always have an element of surprise.”

A self-described “lazy guy” when it comes to composing, Mancuso put off thinking about a new album as long as he could. Eventually, his record label put the hammer down and imposed a deadline on him, forcing him to start working on new material. “I don’t even know if I’d have a new album if I didn’t have a deadline,” he says. “I don’t want to be as prolific as my label would like. I just want to play guitar.” Once he got with the program, new tunes started to reveal themselves, and little by little, Mancuso started to have fun with the process. “We played a lot of the new songs on tour, and that made a big difference. We’d been playing the same music for, like, three or four years, so it felt nice to change our setlist.”

One such tune was the aptly named “L.A. Blues One,” an easy-breezy shuffle that showcases the luscious combination of Mancuso’s clean, bell-like rhythm tone and his stinging, elastic soloing. “I really wanted to write something that was missing in our concerts—something simple with a stable groove,” he says. “For so long we’d been playing songs with all of these fast parts, so ‘L.A. Blues One’ is an important change of pace. It’s got a nice vibe, a blues shuffle, and the melody isn’t too busy. It’s a good song for people to settle into.”

By contrast, “Fire and Harmony,” a stunning blend of acoustic flamenco-tinged jazz and ripping electric fusion, has a lot going on, and in less capable hands it could fall apart. But Mancuso stitches each thread together like a master storyteller. “I knew I wanted to do something with both electric and acoustic soloing, so I started to develop the song based on that,” he says. “If you listen to the harmony in the intro, maybe you can hear the inspiration of Frank Gambale. I listened to his album Thunder from Down Under a lot as a kid.”

Thus far, Mancuso hasn’t taken part in a G3 Tour, but the ripsnorting, smart-alecky rocker “Black Centurion” gives you a pretty good idea of what he would sound like duking it out in a finale with Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, and Eric Johnson. “It’s something I always like to do with the more rocking songs—get a catchy riff and take it from there,” he says. “It’s very energetic. I’d say it’s got a Satch vibe.”

The album title, Route 96, refers to the year of Mancuso’s birth, as well as the 96kHz audio sample rate Steve Vai suggested he record at. “Most musicians record at 44 kilohertz, but Steve said that 96 gives better quality,” Mancuso explains. “It’s almost like the frames per second in filmmaking. The more frames you have, the smoother the film will look.”

Through the wonders of remote recording, Vai himself turns up in big, splashy, hi-beam form on the gonzo fusion-rock gem, “Solar Wind.” After laying down the tune’s main rhythms and some elegant leads, Mancuso emailed the file to Vai and waited to see what he would do. “I didn’t tell Steve what I was looking for, and I didn’t give him any kind of restrictions,” he says. “What he sent back was remarkable. It was pretty amazing, because he was touring with the SatchVai Band and BEAT at the time. He’s such a busy guy.”

“I would love to have a pop hit, but I don’t know if I’m able to do it.”

On a pair of bewitching cuts—“Warm Sunset” and “Isla Feliz”—Mancuso dips into a Latin-flavored mode. Both tracks follow the same framework: Start out gentle, then explode in a fireball at the end. Originally, he envisioned “Isla Feliz” as a purely acoustic piece, but he ultimately included sections of distorted electric soloing, while leaving plenty of room for his guest, gypsy-jazz star Antoine Boyer, to do his thing. “I think it’s a great combination—gypsy guitar, electric guitar, classical,” Mancuso says. “I gave Antoine the longer solos because that’s my general philosophy when I invite someone to play on one of my songs. I don’t want them to add just a tiny bit. Besides, you’re buying an album that has me playing lots and lots of solos. I like to keep it fresh.”

Gear-wise, Mancuso relied on his favored Yamaha Revstar and Pacifica custom models that he ran through different amp modeling processors, either a Line 6 Helix Stadium XL or a Fractal FM9. The only time he rocked out on real amps was for the song “Black Centurion,” on which he utilized a Marshall JCM800 for rhythms and a Mesa/Boogie Mark IIA for leads, both of which were paired with a Marshall 4x12 cabinet.

He stresses that the number one factor in his sound is his fingers—or, more precisely, his nails. “If my nails are too short, the sound is too muddy and dark no matter what pickup or amp I use,” he says. “If they’re too long, they get in the way while I’m playing. It’s very important to me that I have the right length to achieve the clarity and attack I like.”

Asked how he deals with chips and breaks, he holds up his right hand and waves around his index, middle, and ring fingers. “You see that? They’re fake,” he says. “I use acrylic nails on those fingers because natural nails don’t last long with an electric guitar. I remember last year they were completely broken, and I had to go to a nail salon in Tucson."

In all likelihood, Mancuso could play with a boxing glove and still come up with some incredible sounds. With his devastating gifts and mastery of so many musical styles, he could very well be the most versatile and fully formed young guitarist on the scene today, a status that affords him a host of options. He could record an all-out metal album and produce a monster. Or he could go pop and really flip people out. He isn’t ruling anything out.

“I would love to have a pop hit, but I don’t know if I’m able to do it,” he says. “The thing is, I’m not able to sing—that’s the key to that kind of success. George Benson is a great example. He made a lot of incredible music—“Breezin’,” “Weekend in L.A.”—but while he could sing, he also had tunes with no singing. There’s just a good song and a good melody. Maybe that’s a direction I’d like to have. The important thing is that I’m free to do the music I want. I’m open to every musical aspect.”

Somatics, a field within body work, originated as a product of a cultural movement in the 18th century that focused on physical activity and strength-building. The principal element of somatics, which has gained prominence in the past decades in wellness culture and therapeutic contexts, is soma. On a surface level, soma is the perceived experience of the body, as distinct from the intellectual response to stimuli in your brain. The divide is easy to grasp. Maybe your brain thinks you’re at ease, but your body sends a different message: It’s tense, shaky, locked up. Our bodies can send us messages that our cerebrum might not be able to parse in the moment. The thought can be unsettling, but it can also be empowering and invigorating to acknowledge that the body can communicate in a way that defies conventional logic and easy explanation.

Somatics can help explain why some bands choose to work at volumes that most people consider dangerous. And they’re especially pertinent when discussing Sunn O))). The American duo of guitarists Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley has been making intoxicatingly loud music since 1997, flanked by a fortress of 100-watt Sunn Model T amplifier heads (the band’s name is self-evident) atop towering stacks of speaker cabinets. They’ve been described as drone metal, noise rock, doom, and ambient, and aside from regular collaborations with vocalists like Attila Csihar and select other heavy-music singers, Sunn O)))’s music is largely instrumental.

“That’s our band practice—hiking in the woods.”—Greg Anderson

Their new, self-titled record certainly is, and there is only one type of instrument present: electric guitar. The album’s six tracks, entirely performed by Anderson and O’Malley, unfurl slowly over the course of roughly 80 minutes; in the most complimentary way, these are not thinking songs—this is music that is perceived and experienced more than it is understood.

Even through headphones, the compositions have a palpable, breathtaking sense of mass and space. Guitar may be the only instrument on the record, but it is not the sole source of sound. Throughout the fourth track, “Mindrolling,” we hear running water, recorded in the woods around Bear Creek Studio in Woodinville, Washington. Just northeast of Seattle, a large window in the studio looks out onto the intoxicating perma-green of the Pacific northwest’s forest. You can feel the environment in Sunn O)))’s tracks. The power chords are as towering and knotted as an ancient Douglas fir; the distortion as enveloping and forgiving as the forest floor; the feedback as deep and powerful as the Pacific. This is music to listen to while lying back, spread-eagled, on a cliff face in a hard, thrilling wind.

For Anderson and O’Malley, though, the record is evidence of something else, something just as sacred. “It’s really, to me, a representation of my relationship with Stephen,” says Anderson. “I get a good feeling listening to it.”

Sunn O))), the band’s 10th LP, arrives seven years after Pyroclasts. That seems like a long time to most people, remarks O’Malley, but he considers those years a natural part of “the arc of the creative process.” The new record, he says, is like a flower that emerged over the years. The duo worked with producer Brad Wood, sleeping in a farmhouse on the same property as Bear Creek Studio, which is itself housed in an old barn. Anderson and O’Malley would wake up, have coffee, then hike for a few hours in the forest nearby. After lunch, they’d meet up with Wood in the barn to work.

Anderson lives in Los Angeles, while O’Malley lives in Paris. When pandemic restrictions on concerts began to loosen, they started playing shows as a duo as a way to mitigate risk: Plenty of international tours had been thwarted, at great financial loss, by sudden changes in regional gathering restrictions. But the two-piece shows quickly became more than a logistical necessity. They felt fresh and open, says O’Malley, and he and Anderson were coming up with new ideas based on the limitations of only having two guitars onstage. “The fundamental ideas of the ensemble instrumentation were all there in the distortion,” says O’Malley. “I felt like I could hear it clearer in that abstract distortion and saturation. So we’ve continued on.”

“Whenever we play as a duo, it’s somewhat nostalgic,” says Anderson. “I didn’t know that there was another path forward from that. It turns out there was, and that’s what we were really excited about capturing on the recording—the development of what the duo had become.”

“The fundamental ideas of the ensemble instrumentation were all there in the distortion.”—Stephen O’Malley

Anderson brings up the idea of shoshin, a Zen Buddhist idea that celebrates having a beginner’s mind for all things in life. In the context of the band’s post-pandemic creativity, it suggested embracing the joy he felt in the first days of the project, such that the entire process—playing as a duo onstage and in the studio, focusing only on his friendship with O’Malley—felt like an embodiment of shoshin. The two of them felt joy, but they also felt newness, and explored it. That’s why they decided to create a new album: to document this unexpected expansion.

There was little creative preparation to be done; songs would be captured in the moment as living, breathing things. Both Anderson and O’Malley have Model Ts stashed around the world, from Los Angeles, to Paris, to Amsterdam. The 100-watt heads all have different personalities, insists O’Malley, not least because of the different voltages between American and European power supplies and how the transformers respond. They shipped Anderson’s collection—including Marshalls, Fenders, Hiwatts, Soldanos, Ampegs, Oranges, and, naturally, Sunns—from California to Bear Creek, and rented cabinets in Seattle. Wood placed mics everywhere: on each speaker of the 4x12s, around the room, even outside the room. In another area, smaller combos—including a Fender Champ, Deluxe, and Twin—were used for re-amping and running tape effects on solos. The variety of perspectives allowed Wood to sculpt the mass of distortion and create the record’s cavernous spatial signature.

Anderson relied on an Electro-Harmonix “Civil War” Big Muff, paired with his Pro Co RAT, and the band’s own signature pedal, the EarthQuaker Devices Life, to generate his guitar’s pillowy, bottomless low-end across the record. He likens rediscovering the might of the Big Muff, after all these years, to smoking pot or having sex for the first time. “That’s kind of the shoshin concept, too,” he notes. “Playing with the joy that you had when you first started playing, and trying to get back to that. That can be applied to many different elements, including combining a Big Muff with the RAT circuit.” O’Malley, meanwhile, has used the same ZVEX Super Hard On since 1997. Beginner’s mind, indeed.

Growing up, Anderson remembers seeing the Melvins in their early days, and the physicality of their gigs’ over-the-top volumes moved him. “That’s why I would follow them around like the Grateful Dead,” says Anderson. The same thing happened when he saw My Bloody Valentine in the early ’90s. “Of course you can hear the music, but to feel it in your bones, that was just something special,” he says. “I had a connection there that I got really addicted to. You can’t really get that on a recording, right?”

Part of the reason the band’s new record is self-titled is because it evokes the feeling of Sunn O))) at its most elemental: Anderson and O’Malley, together in a room, making electrifyingly loud compositions with their electric guitars. When the band first began, they weren’t concerned with playing live. Inspired by that mammoth wall of sound, the idea was to simply get in a room with as many amps as they could manage, get high, and play music together. When they caught on to the physical aspect of the project, they began to think about taking it to the realm of live performance. But that’s not an easy thing to do: The logistics of transporting and operating multiple 100-watt stacks are sticky, and even if you figure out how to do it, there are few venues willing to host such a performance. If a club can’t accommodate Sunn’s backline, or if they require acts to abide by a decibel limit, the band won’t play. (Anderson knows their backline is a lot: “It’s a mountain,” he says.) That can cross out certain cities entirely, but it’s non-negotiable. The volume is part of the band.

“I enjoy the aspect of danger, and I feel like a lot of that has been removed from art and music and film,” says Anderson. “I get it, I understand health and safety, but it also sort of bothers me, because then you’re taking that away from people. There are things that can be done to protect yourself. You’ve taken away that choice and that ability for people to experience it. It’s really loud, but it’s not a painful loud. It’s nearly all low end and low frequencies. There’s not that high, ice-pick, piercing sound in what we do. I equate it more to a warm bath. We’re not trying to damage people’s hearing. It’s not this aggressive moment at all. I understand why it could be interpreted that way, but that’s not the case. To me, the music is very soothing, and I’m grateful that people have gotten that and connected with it.

“It is overwhelming, and to be immersed in that, it does have this kind of comical angle to it sometimes,” Anderson continues. “Oftentimes, Stephen and I will laugh and say, ‘This is insane and amazing that we’re in this right now!’ I think that in itself is a reason to celebrate. It has this kind of celebratory atmosphere to it.”

“I enjoy the aspect of danger, and I feel like a lot of that has been removed from art and music and film. I seek out things that have that edge to it.”—Greg Anderson

Greg Anderson’s Gear

Guitar

• 2005 Gibson Les Paul Deluxe goldtop with black DiMarzio P90 Super Distortion pickups

Amps

• Mid-’70s Sunn Model T
• Sunn 2000S
• Sunn 1200S
• Ampeg SVT “Blueline”

Effects

• Pro Co Turbo RAT (with LM308 chip)
• Electro-Harmonix/Sovtek “Civil War” Big Muff Pi
• EarthQuaker Devices White Light
• EarthQuaker Devices Life Pedal
• Aguilar Octamizer
• Ernie Ball VP JR
• 4-way splitter box

Anderson notes that he and O’Malley have always delighted in pushing the boundaries of their own expectations, to the point of deleting them entirely. That attitude is one of the keys to their longevity. “It sounds cliche, but I keep saying it over and over again, and it’s true: It’s about being open to different possibilities and ideas,” Anderson explains. “That’s why we’ve sustained, and that’s why it continues to be interesting. Every single band in my life that I’ve been involved with had an ending point. But Sunn O))) has transcended a lot of that.”

“Over time, each person grows in innumerable ways and transforms, and their tastes transform, their perception transforms,” says O’Malley. “It’s like you’re constantly shedding possible versions of yourself.” When you rewatch a film that you haven’t seen in five years, it might mean something entirely different to you. “I think that’s one of the strengths of our music, and the longevity of it, too: the openness to not only changing things, but changing the point of view of what it is.”

​Stephen O’Malley’s Gear

Guitars

• Travis Bean “Deo Dei” TB1000A
• Electrical Guitar Company DS Ghost

Amps

• Sunn Model T
• Ampeg SVT
• Fender Twin Reverb
• Fender Champ
• Hiwatt DR103 Custom 100
• 1952 Supro combo

Effects

• Keeley-modded Pro Co RAT
• J. Rockett Audio Designs Archer
• Pete Cornish G-2
• Pete Cornish P-2
• “Ram’s Head” Big Muff clone
• OTO BIM
• OTO BAM
• Roland RE-201
• Fulltone Tube Tape Echo
• EarthQuaker Devices Black Ash
• Bright Onion Active Splitter Pedal with Phase Switching
• ZVEX Effects Super Hard On

So what exactly does “openness” mean? For Anderson and O’Malley, it’s throwing out the “rules” for being a band. They don’t practice; soundchecks before shows are the closest thing they have to rehearsals, and Anderson admits that he despises conventional “band practice.” He casts the idea of practice in a different light. For he and O’Malley, it’s not about strapping on their guitars and going over ideas together. While they were in Illinois to attend a celebration of life for longtime creative collaborator Steve Albini, the two of them went swimming in Lake Michigan. Being present together, at the memorial, going for a swim—that was practice. While they worked on the new record, they took plenty of hikes together in the Washington woods. “That’s our band practice,” says Anderson. “Hiking in the woods.” It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that communing with their surroundings, being present in their bodies, is central to their creative relationship.

“If I remove the word ‘band’ from ‘band practice,’ it makes more sense,” says O’Malley. “It’s the practice of being together. Music is about relationships and interaction.”

O’Malley continues. “I’m not saying going swimming gives me riff ideas, but when you’re in the waves, it’s quite immersive. Being in Illinois, to celebrate the life of a great master who also happened to be a friend, and then taking time to have pleasure by engaging with the ancient lake, it’s pretty powerful.”

Back in 2007, Vermont’s Kyle Thomas recorded an album under his new moniker, King Tuff. It was called Was Dead—as in, King Tuff Was Dead—and Thomas cut it on a Tascam 388, an 8-track reel-to-reel recording and mixing machine. He’d traded in an Ibanez electric to buy the Tascam at a music store in Keene, New Hampshire, in 2003. (Thomas didn’t know it then, but at the same time, his garage-rock contemporaries Ty Segall and the Osees’ John Dwyer were experimenting with the same machines out on the west coast.) He stuck an SM57 on his amp, and hit record. No outboard gear, no processing. It was the heart of the lo-fi revival’s heyday.

Thomas moved to Los Angeles, the heart of the genre’s new American boom, signed to Sub Pop, and released 2012’s King Tuff and 2014’s Black Moon Spell, both collections of unrepentant, gnarly garage-rock music. Then came 2018’s The Other and, in 2023, Smalltown Stardust. These were more manicured, high-fidelity endeavors. The arrangements were softer and slower. Production was clearer and more considered. When it came time to take the albums on tour, Thomas faltered. “When I would play the older songs that were more straightforward rock, it was just so much more fun,” he says. “I wanted to make a record with that in mind: What’s going to be fun to play live?”

Moo, King Tuff’s seventh record, is what he came up with. Recorded before departing Los Angeles for good, Moo is Thomas’ return to the Tascam 388, and to the earworm musical dirt-baggery he first traded in. Opener “Twisted on a Train” announces this proudly. Its an A-major foot stomper, led by the perfectly muffled snap of Thomas’ guitar, that recounts a disturbed, weed-gummy-fueled train ride from Tucson to Los Angeles. The cheap-beers-on-the-beach groove of “Stairway to Nowhere” keeps the ball rolling while Thomas looks back on his years in L.A.: “I’m so tired of spinnin’ my wheels / Negative numbers, dead-end deals / Wined and dined in paradise.”

“I really just wanted to get back to how I used to do things, more DIY,” Thomas says of the recording and release plan (Moo is coming out on his own record label). “I just feel more connected to the work that way, and I feel more connected to the fans if I’m actually giving them something that I made personally.” Vermont is a good place to do things yourself, surrounded by weavers and woodworkers instead of influencers and industry dependents: “It’s nice to be somewhere where not everyone’s trying to make it. I think cities trick people into thinking that you have to be there for shit to happen in your life, and I don’t think it’s true.”

Kyle Thomas’ Gear

Guitars & Bass

1995 Gibson SG Standard (with bolt headstock repair by Reuben Cox)

Rickenbacker 660-12TP

1968 Fender P bass

Amps

Early-’60s brown-panel Fender Deluxe 6G3

Early-’80s Fender Super Champ

Effects

Ceriatone Centuria

Dunlop Cry Baby Q-Zone

Vintage Mu-Tron Phaser

Moog MF Delay

Recording Equipment

Tascam 388

Shure SM57

Reconnecting with the Tascam made Thomas realize how important the machine is to his work. Maybe it’s the tone the Tascam imparts that endears him to it, or maybe it’s the particular workflow it demands. Regardless, working with the 8-track device, Thomas felt like himself again. He didn’t sing his vocals a hundred times and comp the best bits together, or overwork his guitar performances until they were flawless. There’s noises—hissing and buzzing and popping—plus other peculiarities and variances from one riff to the next. “It’s all about the performance and just capturing something, and not doing it to death. You can get good results doing things the new-school way,” he admits. “But you might feel sadder at the end.”

So why did it take so long for Thomas to return to his beloved Tascam? “I finally got it fixed,” he shrugs. “That’s really all it was. It was broken.”

Given his recording philosophies, it probably isn’t a surprise to hear that Thomas doesn’t like players who are “too good”: “It’s boring. I don’t think rock music should be perfect. I think rock music suffers when people make it on the computer and fix everything.” Wipers’ Greg Sage and Dead Moon’s Fred Cole are key inspirations for Thomas, alongside imperfect shredders like Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix. “I like shittier guitar players better than really good ones, usually, or guitar players that are rough around the edges,” he says. “They can be good, but they fuck up a lot.” The continued pull toward imperfection is, of course, colored by Thomas’ estimation of his own playing. “I’m not a slick guitar player, I’m not smooth,” he explains, then grins. “My hands are shaky. They’re like bald eagle talons.” The influence of more polished players like Tom Petty and Mike Campbell are in frame on Moo, too, especially courtesy of a Rickenbacker 660-12TP—Petty’s signature model—that Thomas acquired just before making the record.

“I think rock music suffers when people make it on the computer and fix everything.”

Thomas is an SG player first and foremost, and he’s played his beloved late-’90s Gibson SG Standard, named Jazijoo, for more than two decades. It’s been thrashed and colorfully decorated over the years, and its cracked headstock kept breaking until Reuben Cox, of L.A.’s Old Style Guitar Shop, put the problem to rest—by driving a bolt through the headstock, Frankenstein’s-monster style, to secure it. Because of its fragility, Jazijoo doesn’t come out on the road these days, but teamed up with a Mu-Tron Phaser that Thomas scored in a thrift store for five bucks in the early ’90s, it’s created the King Tuff sound. To round out that pairing on Moo, Thomas borrowed a brown-panel Fender Deluxe 6G3, which handled most of the guitar tones on the record, along with a small Supro combo and an early-’80s Fender Super Champ.

Almost 20 years after Was Dead, Thomas is back living in the forests of Vermont. His neighbors don’t know or really give a shit about his music, and that’s a good thing. “It’s fucking paradise,” Thomas says, straight-faced, on a video call from a room in his home crammed with music gear. “Obviously L.A. is supposed to be paradise, and it is in some ways, but I don’t know. I really missed the seasons. I get ideas and feelings here that I just didn’t have out there. I do love L.A., but I’m a freak from the woods.”

Guitar virtuoso/singer-songwriter Paul Gilbert’s latest release, WROC, a homophone of “rock,” is based on George Washington’s Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour In Company and Conversation. Yes, the George Washington you learned about in middle school—Gilbert’s one of the few people on the planet that can make a history lesson fun!

While Gilbert’s peers in his early metal days were more inclined to doodle pentagrams and flip through the Satanic Bible, Gilbert had vastly different interests. “I read a bunch of Founding Father writings decades ago,” he explains to PG. “I was curious, so I bought the full, thick compendium of everything written by Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington. There are no stories there; instead it’s almost like finding somebody’s emails from hundreds of years ago. That was the first time I came across Washington’s Rules of Civility, and the idea of being more civil, of having better manners, somehow that was appealing to me.”

In February of last year, Gilbert had just wrapped up the final concert of Mr. Big’s “The Big Finale” tour at Tokyo’s storied Budokan, and on the flight home, both inspiration and Rules of Civility struck. “I was thinking, ‘Okay, it’s a new start for me,’ and I was excited about what to do next. I had an internet connection on the plane, and that excitement turned into this conversation with AI,” he recalls. “I couldn’t remember what they were called, I just sort of remembered there were these rules that Washington tried to follow when he was a kid. So I Googled around and asked AI, and refreshed my memory.”

Gilbert and his chatbot then worked in tandem to dissect lyrics out of Washington’s rules. “I said, ‘Take a random Washington rule and turn it into a blues lyric.’ And in three seconds, I got this Washington rule turned into a blues lyric,” he says. Gilbert then proceeded to ask AI to do additional things: Make the chorus repeat more. Find a different Washington rule for the bridge. “I was sort of telling AI what to do. That was my initial process,” he says. “As I went on, I realized it was better if I did it myself, because I know what I want. So then my conversation with AI changed. Instead of having AI do it, I said, ‘AI, give me the list of rules.’ There’s 110 of them, so I said, ‘Put them in order according to length—the short ones first and the longest last.’ That way, when I’m searching around, if I just need a short line, I don’t have to hunt through the whole book.”

Washington’s rules were the perfect springboard for Gilbert. “I love writing from a lyric—it’s so much easier than any other way of songwriting,” he says. “It was maybe the most fun I’ve ever had writing songs in my life. It’s almost escapism—I can get out of myself and enter some other world. I would take [Washington’s] lines and try to make it into a melody. Then once I had that, all the jobs that follow are my favorite jobs. I love finding chords for a melody, I love the balance of repetition—but not too much. You get to that point where it’s like, ‘Okay, that’s too many repeats, I’ve got to pull it back and find, like, a weird note that I haven’t used yet.’ And that will inspire a chord I didn’t think of. That whole craft is something I really have fun with.”

Paul Gilbert’s Gear

Guitars (live)

Ibanez FRM350 Paul Gilbert signature

Ibanez PGM50 Paul Gilbert Signature

1970s Ibanez IC200

Ibanez RS530

Ibanez Custom Shop PGM Paul Gilbert Signature (pink)

1970s Ibanez double neck (set neck version)

Guitars (studio)

Ibanez AS7312

1970s Ibanez 751 acoustic

Amps

1990s Fender Custom Vibrolux Reverb into a Randall isolation cabinet

1960s Fender Vibrolux Reverb as a wedge monitor

Victoria Club Deluxe (turned on for solos as a volume boost)

Effects

Distortion pedals for main amp:

Xotic AC Booster (always on)

JHS Overdrive Preamp

Mojo Hand Colossus

Distortion pedals for solo boost amp:

MXR Distortion+

Xotic AC Booster

Voodoo Labs Pedal Power 2 Plus

Boss LS-2 Line Selector (Gilbert has two: one to switch between distortion and clean, the other to switch on solo boost amp)

“Clean” pedals:

Boss CS-3 Compression Sustainer

Catalinbread Callisto

“Modulation” pedals:

JAM Pedals RetroVibe

MXR Stereo Chorus

Home Brew Electronics THC Three Hound Chorus

Sabbadius Tiny-Vibe

Strings, Picks, Slides & Cables

Ernie Ball Mighty Slinky (.0085–.040; Gilbert replaces the .040 with a .046)

Dunlop Tortex III .73 mm picks

Dunlop 318 Chromed Steel slide

Divine Noise coiled cable

DiMarzio straight cables, patch cables, and speaker cables

In a perfect world, Gilbert would have loved to use Washington’s rules exactly as they were written, but each song went a different way. To turn the rules into songs and make them singable, Gilbert had to resort to some basic rules of songwriting. “The first trick is just to repeat things. Or repeat an ending,” he explains. “Like, ‘If you soak bread in the sauce, let it be no more, let it be no more.’ You sing the last line twice, it becomes more like a song. So a lot of that is, you sing a line and then take the end of it and repeat it. And then once I had the verse, I might grab the book and flip through to find the bridge. Some of the songs are really simple in that I just sort of repeat the same part, but the second verse will have a harmony to it, so that’ll take it to a different direction.”

The chord progressions on some WROC songs like “Orderly and Distinctly” reveal a harmonic palette that stands out among today’s songwriters. When I covered Gilbert’s Great Guitar Escape camp in 2013, the nightly jams featured harmonically rich songs like the Bee Gees’ “How Deep is Your Love,” and ABBA’s “Dancing Queen.” These types of compositions inform Gilbert’s writing style, and their influences can be heard on many of the chord progressions on WROC.

“The idea of being more civil, of having better manners, somehow that was appealing to me.”

“That comes from growing up in the ’60s and ’70s and hearing a lot of piano-composed songs,” he says. “I was listening to Elton John, the Carpenters, Todd Rundgren, Queen, the Beatles, the Beach Boys. And you know, there’s some chords in there. That was the hard thing for me as a kid—and it was really helpful for me to go to school [in 1984 Gilbert enrolled at GIT, now called Musician’s Institute] to learn that stuff, because I was essentially an ear player. I’ve learned by ear mostly. I never had a deep knowledge of harmony until I went to school, and then I started filling in the missing puzzle pieces.”

Gilbert continues, “I remember learning ‘God Only Knows.’ I’m ruminating about the half-diminished chord in that song because it was so important to me. Or another one is, ‘When I Grow Up to Be a Man.’ The opening vocal harmony, I don’t even know what it’s called—I know what it looks like. It’s like a sharp 11 or something. It’s really a crazy chord and it starts the song off. And I don’t necessarily have to know what it’s called—whenever I hear one of those things I know it’s the ‘When I Grow up to Be a Man’ chord. My wife [Emi Gilbert] is amazing at jazz piano, but she began as a classical piano player. So some of the jazz chords are new to her and she’ll be like, ‘What is that?’ Well, there’s that Beach Boys chord. I can spot it. And I think the Beatles were like that. They weren’t trained in the vocabulary of the terminology. But they were really well trained with songs.”

As the songs for WROC started coming together, Gilbert made an interesting, and unfortunate, discovery about AI, his writing partner. “I learned that AI doesn’t always tell you the exact truth. It’ll make stuff up,” he says. He found this out when he did a Google search for a rule he used for a song title—and nothing came up. Gilbert recalls, “I then asked AI, ‘Which Washington rule is this?’ And AI was like, ‘That’s not any Washington rule.’ I said, ‘Well, you gave it to me. You were the one that told me.’ And the response was, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I must have hallucinated.’ So I was searching through this list, and now I know it was about 80 percent correct and 20 percent hallucinated. And that was a good learning experience.”

The lesson? “Always double check your AI, because it’ll just make stuff up,” he says. Nevertheless, one song on the album, “Conscience is the Most Certain Judge” features some of these AI hallucinations—Gilbert kept them because he felt they were still in the correct spirit. He also took poetic license and composed variations with his own words on “Show Yourself Not Glad at the Misfortune of Another.”

WROC, of course, is more than a mere (AI-assisted) history lesson. Since his Racer X days, Gilbert’s fanbase has been heavily populated by guitar geeks that salivate at every 16th-note run he unleashes. As is to be expected, WROC showcases Gilbert’s fiery six-string work. The opener, “Keep Your Feet Firm and Even,” kicks off with characteristic neoclassical licks and harmonized melodic lines. “Maintain a Sweet and Cheerful Countenance,” meanwhile, is built on an incendiary harmonized jazz/fusion and prog-influenced riff in the intro, which leads to a solo that sees Gilbert tearing it up on the slide—a texture he’s been exploring over the past decade.

“I learned that AI doesn’t always tell you the exact truth.”

Gilbert’s slightly unusual guitar setup accommodates both his newfound slide inclinations and his legacy speed-demon licks. While Gilbert’s strings are very light—he uses .0085 for his high-E string (at this year’s NAMM convention, while performing with Steve Morse at the Ernie Ball booth, he even admitted to using .007s on that day)—the guitar’s action is set fairly high. “It’s funny, I did a guitar clinic in Italy where I didn’t bring my own guitar,” he says. “All the students let me use their guitars, so there were, like, ten guitars on a stand. They said, ‘Use any guitar you want,’ and I picked this one up and I hurt myself. Everybody had .010s and low action and, man, I can’t play .010s with low action. I can’t get a grip on the string, and I bend all the time.”

Even though he’s been most often identified throughout his career as a guitar hero, Gilbert’s focus hasn’t been strictly on the guitar. Since King of Clubs, his 1997 debut solo album, his abilities as a lead vocalist have come to the forefront. Gilbert is a charismatic frontman who can belt out songs in a multitude of styles. He readily admits, however, that guitar is still more natural for him. “As a lead singer—which, really, if you want to be a pop musician, singing is very important—my voice always had limitations that my hands didn’t have,” he says. “If I sat down and practiced, you know, I could play this Van Halen thing. Whereas if I practice singing, I still couldn’t sing ‘Oh! Darling’ by the Beatles, no matter how much I practiced.”

Currently, Gilbert’s guitar practice goals are less about mechanics and more about melody. The days of endlessly repeating outside picking exercises with an ever-increasing-in-tempo metronome have taken a backseat to his new obsession with mastering the ability to instantaneously play the melodies he hears in his head on the guitar. Being able to produce a melody on the guitar with the proper inflections is an art that isn’t nearly as easy as it might sound (especially doing it on the spot in real time), even if you can shred scales and arpeggios at supersonic speeds. “It’s funny, right before this interview I was practicing improvising over Gary Moore’s ‘Still Got the Blues,’” he says. “Which has challenging changes, almost like ‘Autumn Leaves.’ To me, that’s a rough, rolling rapid of rocky river to navigate, but I’m getting better at it. Step one is I found all the shapes—the shape for the B half-diminished and for the E7. But then I’m using my eyes to navigate, like, ‘This shape goes into this shape.’ That’s useful to some extent, but it’s not coming from my singer’s voice. So now I sit down and go, ‘Don’t play it if you can’t sing it.’ And I force myself to sing and solo at the same time.

“I’m not great at it yet,” Gilbert continues, “so it’s risky to do it because it does slow everything down. But the more I do it, the better it gets, and there’s a real payoff at the end. But it feels like I’m telling the truth when I really play what was in there. Suddenly everything’s connected and it tells a story.”

Sometimes in a musician’s life, gear design aligns with the needs of the artist. Picture this: It’s 2014. You’re surrounded by several pieces of inadequate and unobtainium looping gear in various states of disrepair, wondering if there will ever be a time when a single device is available to help you meet your ambient, pan-rhythmic, non-band-in-a-box playalong-looping desires. Then, you read about the brand new update to the looper algorithm of the Eventide TimeFactor. Once upon a time, this happened to me.

This was back when, seemingly, the powers that be saw fit to regress looping hardware devices back to the dark ages, as if the Lexicon PCM 42 and original Electro-Harmonix 16 Second Digital Delay had never existed. You’d be hard pressed to know that now, what with the plethora of forward-looking looping and sampling devices available today from the likes of Hologram Electronics, Red Panda, Chase Bliss, Expedition Electronics, Kinotone, and many, many more. But sandwiched right in the time zone between these two eras is where I found the Eventide TimeFactor’s looper algorithm.

The TimeFactor had been out for several years at this point (released, in fact, on my birthday a few years prior to this—how’s that for a sign?). It was marketed primarily as the latest super delay with a variety of dual parallel delay engines available with presets. An Eventide product, there’s no doubt about the sound and build quality of this device. But the looper seemed kind of basic and a bit of an afterthought initially, doing little more than recording and overdubbing. The major update delivered access to options like overdub order, reverse, retriggering, loop windowing, tap tempo (sort of…), and up to two octaves up or down of intervallic scanning and recording—from octaves and fifths to completely smooth linear movement, all mappable to expression pedal and AUX switches.

So, I’d like to make a case for this large-ish piece of hardware, by modern standards, with many knobs and switches, if I may. For the type of music I strive to make, swift access to parameters is essential—with little to no latency and minimal hindrance to making changes. No menu diving to reassign a knob mid-song or mid-improvisation when the fancy strikes.

It’s true that this exact same looper algorithm lives within the Eventide H9. But with only one giant knob and a couple buttons, how can I reasonably be expected to have access to the 13+ parameters available to me at the surface level of the TimeFactor hardware? It’s also true that the H9 has a digital facsimile of the TimeFactor’s hardware available in the tablet app that can control the H9 over Bluetooth, but, unfortunately, the latency introduced is still a … “factor.” (Sorry.) In fact, I think it speaks volumes that one of the best ways the Eventide engineers could come up with to control the parameters of the H9 was to simply replicate the TimeFactor control layout in the tablet app.

“For the type of music I strive to make, swift access to parameters is essential—with little to no latency and minimal hindrance to making changes.”

The TimeFactor also speaks to the priority of immediacy by allowing an expression pedal and (not or) an aux switch for further parameter control. Another great aspect of the design, and one I don’t hear much talk about, is that you can assign two instances of any knob on the unit to an auxiliary switch. If I want to jump between 0 percent and 70 percent decay in my looping overdubs at the click of a switch? No problem, we can make that happen!

Still need convincing? The pristine Eventide tone can be vintage-ified by setting a longer loop length and lowering the bit rate. The instrument/line-level switches on the back panel add further tonal shaping—some players love running that line-level boost into a guitar amp. All of this has kept me from feeling any need to "upgrade" for the past 12 years.

Please allow me to end my love letter to the TimeFactor’s looper with the following: When a legendary company known for great sound and creative devices drops a product like this—one that allows an artist to not only find a way to serve their musical ideas inspired by great guitarist looping effectors like Robert Fripp, Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois, David Torn, Henry Kaiser, Bill Frisell, and Nels Cline, but also builds enough in there to allow any artist to find their own way forward in their music into the future of their own voice—I truly believe they have done an unquestionable service for the good of all creative artists everywhere. And for that, I thank them, heartily!

Michael Hampton’s whole career started with a single song.

As a teen growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, he taught himself to play along with records on just one string. The Temptations’ “Get Ready,” Led Zeppelin’s “Dazed and Confused”—those worked. Then he expanded, adding strings and songs like Kool & the Gang’s “Jungle Boogie” and Edgar Winter Group’s “Frankenstein” to his repertoire. Somewhere in there, he started jamming along with Funkadelic’s 1971 psychedelic guitar opus, “Maggot Brain.”

On the opening track to the band’s album of the same name, guitarist Eddie Hazel defined new boundaries of post-Hendrix fuzz-and-wah-soaked psychedelia. George Clinton’s Echoplex manipulations cranked the mind-melt factor further afield. It moved the young guitarist, and he kept coming back to that song.

By 1974, the band rolled through Cleveland and the 17-year-old had a chance to witness the live P-Funk extravaganza. Around that time, he had been playing music with his cousin, Lige Curry, and “a guy on the east side called Ed Sparks, he was an older guy playing bass,” according to Hampton. Together, they went to catch the show at Public Hall. Afterward, they all ended up with some of the band back at Sparks’ house.

“Ed’s like, ‘Go play “Maggot Brain,”’” Hampton recalls in his soft-spoken voice, “and I just played it til I couldn’t play it no more.”

About two weeks or so later, P-Funk drummer Tiki Fullwood called and invited the teenager to join the band. Driven to the airport by his cousin—who would also go on to join the band in 1978—he recalls, “I took my first plane ride to a sold-out show at the Capital Center in Landover, Maryland. I put my head down and played ‘Maggot Brain.’ Bernie [Worell, the band’s keyboardist] was accompanying me, which helped a lot. They wanted just Bernie and myself to do it. He was good at putting that backdrop behind me so I could solo freely.”

At first, Hampton’s only role in the Parliament-Funkadelic stage show was to play “Maggot Brain.” He eventually learned the whole set, somewhere along the way earning the nickname Kidd Funkadelic. (A recording of Hampton’s “Maggot Brain” from 1978 is included on the CD edition of Funkadelic’s One Nation Under a Groove, showing his soaring, liquid phrasing and searing tone.)

Ever since that first night, Hampton has been a fixture in the P-Funk universe, and the band and its music have been the centerpiece of his musical life. Though he’s done some collaborating beyond P-Funk, his own solo work has maintained an orbit, as can be heard on his 1995 release, P-Funk Guitar Riffs for DJ’s, or on the more solo-minded but still related Heavy Metal Funkason from 1998, which features Curry as co-producer and Clinton on guest vocals. More recently, with drummer Chuck Treece and guitarist PhilipTheArtist (Philip Smith), he’s released music as Punkadelic, which includes original material, but remains reverential in name.

Now, he seems ready to set himself apart. But that might not be a conscious effort. In fact, sitting and talking to Hampton on one of the couches at SoundPlex Studios in South Jersey, just outside of Philadelphia, I get the distinct sense that Hampton makes his way through life by going with the proverbial flow. He takes it as it comes, and for a guy who’s been playing a lot of the same music for decades, he seems surprisingly in the moment, not lingering on the past.

“Since Parliament-Funkadelic is one of the most sampled groups of all time, it’s probably safe to say you’re among the most sampled guitarists around,” I point out. “Do you ever reflect on that?”

“Nah,” he tosses off. “I don’t reflect on it. I’m honored.” He pauses, adding, “It’d be cool if I could get some more sessions or be a fly on the wall at some of these sessions that they do.”

What does get him excited is a lifetime of listening. Hampton cites his musical inspirations off the cuff: Pink Floyd, Herbie Hancock’s solo on “Chameleon,” Kiss—he stops to show me a recent gift from guitarist PhilipTheArtist, the owner of retro-minded Goldfinch Guitars, an LP-style guitar with an Ace Frehley tribute finish. “This was a gift after Ace passed,” he explains. “That’s what’s gonna get me inspired to do more—‘I wanna do something Kiss-like with that guitar’ or whatever.”

“Everything I hear, I want to play.”

He jumps to a host of more recent references—cosmic jazz saxophonist Kamasi Washington, bass futurist MonoNeon, blues phenom Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, and electric blues rocker Joe Bonamassa—then goes more big-picture. “The grooves to a lot of things—it could be commercials—whatever catches my ear, it could be electronica, it could be classical, everything I hear, I want to play.”

Hampton gets stoked thinking about all the music he loves. He mentions Les Paul, then catches himself—“Django … his ass! Man, come on!” It’s a wide musical world, full of inspiration.

It’s not just music itself that gets him going, it’s the instruments as well. Hampton loves to collect guitars, and figures he currently owns around 50 or so. In addition to the Ace Frehley tribute, he’s also brought another recent gift, also from PhilipTheArtist, this one an SG-style guitar with a finish in the style of The Fool—the Gibson once owned by both Eric Clapton and Todd Rundgren. On this one, the iconic angel has been replaced by the Kidd Funkadelic logo from Funkadelic’s 1976 Tales of Kidd Funkadelic.

That guitar made it out with Hampton for some solo band dates to celebrate the release of Into the Public Domain, the first of two EPs plus an LP that he’s releasing. The name is literal: He’ll also be releasing the multitrack files, which can be used royalty free.

It’s a large project with a lot of moving parts and a long cast of collaborators, but it came together at the behest of PhilipTheArtist, who co-produced the record along with Hampton, Joe “the Butcher” Nicolo, and John Schreffler. Recorded at Fort Wolf Studios in Canyon Country, California, and Los Angeles’ Sunset Sound, much of the music was initiated by PhilipTheArtist and Schreffler in order to create something, according to the former, “like if National Geographic or Nova wanted something in the background—not just rock ’n’ roll.”

A song like the off-kilter funky rocker “Steve’s Kadillac” strikes an experimental funny bone that could certainly work in that direction, with warped riffs floating in and out across the groove-centric soundscape. But there is plenty of rockin’ to be found, as on the opening “Fight or Flight” and the title track, where Hampton’s distortion-drenched leads crack the stratosphere wide open and launch into space.

PhilipTheArtist explains that “Technicolor Mobile Home” has roots that reach beyond the studio. “When me and Michael play ‘Hit It and Quit It’ [from Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain] live,” he explains, “there’s a certain way he plays the chorus that is different than the record. That way he plays it evolved into ‘Technicolor Mobile Home,’ then I recorded what I remembered he came up with.”

Hampton remembers the sessions as a laid back affair, where the vibe, from his perspective, was “just do what ya feel.” He recalls, “Phil would call me up from California and say, ‘You got time, Mike?’” If he was available, he’d fly out from his Philly area home. “If I didn’t jump on and do it then, I wasn’t gonna do it,” he says.

“Today, there are some serious issues and it’s like, what am I gonna write to that? Am I gonna write about it? Or not gonna write about it? Or just play?”

Nicolo, a nine-time Grammy winner and co-founder of legendary hip-hop label Ruffhouse Records, assembled the jammy tracks into songs. “I had so many colors of the rainbow to paint with,” he says.

Hampton will follow Into the Public Domain with King Kong, a musical telling of the classic story, and The Kidd. With a preview of rough tracks from the latter, it seems as though the trilogy will showcase just how singular and varied Hampton’s guitar playing is. The early tracks indicate a world that’s all over the sonic map, his still-distinctive guitar fitting right into ’90s ZZ Top-style heavy blues, warped disco funk, soul jazz, and beyond.

Nicolo will release the albums through his SMN Records imprint—a part of his Sound Mind Network, a nonprofit whose “mission is to change the way the world looks at trauma suicide and drug abuse with the arts.” He says the records display Hampton’s “splintered genius” and calls him a “chameleon" who is “so unlike traditional guitar players.”

Hampton is all about the vibe, and that seems to be what makes him such an adaptable player. He gets the vibe, and dives in. It’s an approach that any improvisor knows requires staying in the moment and keeping overthinking at bay, and that’s where Hampton is most natural.

“I like to remain ‘not-knowing,’” he muses. “I like to practice a lot, but at the same time, I want it to be new.” (It’s also the answer he gives when I ask if he likes messing around with pedals, which he doesn’t really get into extensively: “Every time I hook something up, I want it to be brand new.”)

“Staying inspired,” he continues, “it’s just life itself. Today, there are some serious issues and it’s like, what am I gonna write to that? Am I gonna write about it? Or not gonna write about it? Or just play?”

This recent burst of activity is intentional, though; Hampton tells me he’s trying to be more available to new musical things. In this case, it’s been working out. Jams that started some years ago in Philadelphia turned into sessions—he mentions some early jams related to the project at Bam Margera’s house—that led to more sessions and eventually to the L.A. recordings. Throughout, he’s just been trying to be open to saying yes. Where that will lead next is anybody’s guess.

“I like to remain ‘not-knowing.’ I like to practice a lot, but at the same time, I want it to be new.”

If all that sounds like he’s always on to the next thing, that’s only partially true. P-Funk continues to take it to the stage, and when we talk, Hampton is getting ready to head out for a few dates. The group’s large ever-changing lineup has sounded powerful on recent tours. And at the recent Hampton-band live shows in California, the pickup band assembled by PhilipTheArtist opted to stick to versions of P-Funk classics, namely “Butt-to-Butt Resuscitation,” “Red Hot Mama,” “Hit It and Quit it,” and, of course, “Maggot Brain.”

While the classics remain in all parts of his life, Hampton says he hopes to get a live band playing the new material. He adds that when the time comes to play those songs, “I don’t want to know them too well.”

The driving force in Hampton’s camp, it seems—the one making sure this all goes down—is PhilipTheArtist, and he’s passionate about the music. He wants people to hear the breadth of what’s possible. The world knows his work with P-Funk, but he wants Hampton to be heard as an individual. “It’s time for Michael to get out there,” he says. “Every legendary guitar player has a set of solo records and has a sound people can put their finger on. Michael was under-celebrated in that way. It was time.”

What is it about Hampton that has driven this project? “Michael has the ability to give you goosebumps with his playing,” PhilipTheArtist says. “He’s one of those guys who can make you cry or make you smile with his playing.” Or to put it simply, “He just knows how to make you feel something.”

At the beginning of my career, I made a lot of mistakes. The beginning is the time for it. If you’re lucky, and you are surrounded by enough good people (as I thankfully was), you begin to learn what’s important and replace the mental noise with hard work.

Buried in the center of all the mental stuff is, for a lot of bass players, the inevitable pursuit of sound through gear. Sometimes it’s totally justified; other times it’s what has become known as GAS: Gear Acquisition Syndrome.

In those early years, I knew nothing about gear. I had very little of it. Maybe three or four basses and a total of two pedals and a tuner. (The EBS Octabass and a Boss Chorus, for anyone wondering.)

If you know anything about me now, almost 30 years later, you literally can’t move in my studio for pedals. Sometimes I grab a gig bag out of the closet to go to a gig and find a bass inside that I forgot I owned. This isn’t a flex; this is just to highlight how things have changed, how absurd they have become, and to perhaps lend some validity to what I want to talk about today, considering the amount of experience (good and bad) I’ve had with gear.

My good friend Ian Martin Allison, who you may know from Scott’s Bass Lessons or from countless recordings and tours, recently collaborated with Walrus Audio on a preamp/DI, the Mantle. I was fortunate enough to receive an advance unit to check out and give feedback on. I posted an episode of my podcast featuring it, and the outrage at the price point of the Mantle is on a level I haven’t experienced before on my channel.

It’s fascinating to see how far the algorithm has come in terms of brainwashing us into thinking we either need, or deserve, every new thing that is announced, regardless of whether it makes any sense for what we do, and more importantly, regardless of what our personal means are. People look at the price, know they can’t afford it, and immediately accuse the company of greed, all the while having never used it, never been involved in R&D, and with no experience of the artist/brand relationship.

I was very careful on my podcast to highlight the fact that there are a multitude of entry points into the world of preamps, and at $749, this latest one might not be the thing for you, no matter how much FOMO you think you might have or how much you love the way it sounds.

I really like how the Bugatti Chiron looks, and boy would it be a special moment to be able to drive one and experience engineering that is incomprehensible to most of humankind. But the $4-million-plus price tag lets me know it’s not for me, that I should appreciate it from afar, and reminds me my Mazda (at 0.63 percent of the cost) still has four wheels, AC, Bluetooth, and gets me where I need to go in quite some comfort.

“Not only do you probably not need the latest, most expensive thing on the market, you really don’t need to be mad about its price.”

I think the internet has changed the way we bass players chase things like sound, and a healthy dose of awareness could not only save you a ton of money but get you to the thing that is actually right for you. Is it a unit that is $749 (Mantle), $1,400 (Noble Preamp DI), or $449 (JHS Colour Box)? It could well be. If that is the case, and you are a professional who requires high-quality gear that you will actually use, then fantastic. Question asked, question answered.

If your budget doesn’t allow for that right away, definitely try to have the patience to save until it does so that you buy once and cry once. Patience now for a short period of financial pain and a lifetime of happiness with your sound.

Is your budget sub-$300? This is also great information, and you have so many options for bass preamps. I used the EP Booster from Xotic for years. I think I paid $100 for it used and still have it to this day. Want more EQ options and a DI? MXR Bass Preamp at $189. Want an industry-standard DI that will never die? Radial Engineering JDI for $260.

This isn’t a commercial piece for any of the aforementioned companies or products. It’s just a heads up that not only do you probably not need the latest, most expensive thing on the market, you really don’t need to be mad about its price. If we can start asking bigger questions about our own needs and means, we’ll be able to shut out the mental load marketing algorithms place on our decision-making process and live a far more streamlined existence with the absolute best gear for us.

“Any time we make a record, it’s like we’re taking a snapshot of where we’re at that particular time,” says Lamb of God guitarist Mark Morton. “I think it’s inevitable that over the course of your career you start to understand what people respond to and what they don’t. But we’ve never chased the approval of anyone—not critics, not even our fans. We’ve always rallied very strongly around the idea that we’re making music for the five of us in this band. I mean, if we can’t get excited about what we’re doing, how can anybody else?”

For Morton, the process of gearing up for Lamb of God’s 10th studio album, Into Oblivion, involved a period of reflection. After the band (which also includes guitarist Willie Adler, bassist John Campbell, drummer Art Cruz, and singer Randy Blythe) finished their 2024 Ashes of the Wake 20th anniversary tour, he went through the group’s catalog and listened to a number of songs they had never performed live. “That kind of spun me off into thinking, ‘Who was I back then? Where was my head at when I was writing those songs?’” he says.

Morton decided to investigate further, and went down the rabbit hole of bands he listened to some 25 years ago, like Meshuggah, At the Gates, and the Haunted. But he didn’t stop at early 2000s Swedish death metal; he also reconnected with records by local bands from Lamb of God’s hometown of Richmond, Virginia. “I’m talking about Breadwinner and Sliang Laos and some other bands that never got the kind of notoriety they deserved,” he says. His listening binge then segued to old favorites like Fugazi and the Jesus Lizard. He notes, “We have a new song called ‘Sepsis’ that’s like the Jesus Lizard and Sliang Laos spun together in a modern metal song.”

Before hitting the studio with Lamb of God, Morton issued his second solo album, Without the Pain, an engaging and thoughtfully crafted Southern rock-tinged set that featured collaborations with Cody Jinks, Charlie Starr, and Jason Isbell, among others. Coming out the other side, the guitarist felt ready—refreshed and rejuvenated—to reconvene with Lamb of God. “I think longtime bands can only survive if there’s room for members to pursue other opportunities,” he says. “I can get other music out of my system and still allow Lamb of God to maintain its character and personality.”

He doesn’t beat around the bush as to the nature of the band’s identity. “We’re a heavy metal band,” he says. “We make heavy metal records. It’s what I want us to do, and it’s what we want to do. We’re really good at it, and we keep trying to get better. I respect what we’ve done in the past, and I feel obligated to honor our history and help us make something that’s worthy of that body of work.”

Which wasn’t always a walk in the park. The band went through an intense vetting process while writing material for the album, weeding out anything that sounded like reworked versions of songs from their past. “That was the challenge,” Morton says. “If you want to get to a new place, you’ve got to be willing to put the work in, and it can be hard. You listen a lot, rewrite a lot, try new ideas. If something sounded fresh or out of the ordinary, we ran with it. Even if it didn’t pan out, at least we were out of our comfort zone.”

​Mark Morton’s Gear

Guitars

• Gibson Mark Morton Les Paul
• 1969 Gibson Les Paul Custom
• Fender Custom Shop Stratocaster

Amps

• Mesa/Boogie Rectifier Badlander (rhythms)
• Mesa/Boogie Mark IV (solos)

Effects

• Vintage Ibanez Tube Screamer
• Klon Centaur
• “Any delays, choruses, or phasers are done with outboard gear in the mix.”

Strings, Picks, and Cables

• Stringjoy Mark Morton Artist Series
• Dunlop Tortex 1.00 mm
• Mogami cables

The guitarist recalls each band member using a certain word throughout the writing and recording period: stock. “We said that over and over,” he says. “It became our touchstone. We had to be brutal. If something felt stock—a riff, a song, a performance—we’d toss it. You keep listening, and you go, ‘It’s not bad. It’s not broken. There’s no mistakes. But it feels stock.’ Good enough wasn’t good enough. Regular-schmegular wasn’t gonna cut it. It had to be great. So you keep going till you get there.”

Morton embraced self-scrutiny when it came to his own guitar playing. If he found himself playing the same patterns as a result of muscle memory—it’s as typical among musicians as it is with athletes—he sought a new approach. He credits longtime band producer Josh Wilbur for his unsparing, pull-no-punches approach in the studio. “Josh has been with us for close to 20 years, so he knows the work in and out,” the guitarist says. “I’ll play something and he’ll go, ‘How many times have we said this already? This riff feels like it’s been on two other records. Can we say something else?’ A lot of other guitarists would have their pride hurt, but I don’t mind. You have to rally around the perspective that you’re trying to do something of value.”

Morton calls himself a “card-carrying tone chaser,” and to that end, he found what he was looking for years ago and stuck with it. Into Oblivion is brimming with his two-tone approach: For rhythm tracks, he ran his go-to guitars (either a signature Gibson Mark Morton Les Paul or a 1969 Les Paul Custom) through a Mesa/Boogie Rectifier Badlander with a vintage Ibanez Tube Screamer in front (“I put the gain all the way up and the overdrive all the way down”), and for solos he used a Mesa/Boogie Mark IV with a Klon Centaur boost pedal in front. “I didn’t feel the need to try to change my sound for the sake of changing it,” he says. “The self-editing I felt I needed had more to do with my actual playing.”

“If we can’t get excited about what we’re doing, how can anybody else?”

Any band that gets to their 10th album might sound as if they’re coasting, but Lamb of God are full of frenzy on Into Oblivion. As they have from the beginning, they serve up a vicious mix of sledgehammer heavy metal and metal-adjacent subgenres (metalcore, thrash, post-metal, death metal, doom metal), but the beauty of it all lies in their seemingly indefatigable ability to make each song’s wicked grooves and way-out licks sound like inspired bits of improvisation. What’s even more remarkable is that, unlike on their previous album, 2022’s Omens, which was recorded live in the studio, Into Oblivion was tracked in sections, with various band members operating in different locales (Morton cut his guitars at his home studio).

“I don’t think recording live off the floor is the standard anymore, for any band,” the guitarist says. “We enjoyed doing it on the last record, but this time we did things individually, and cool stuff came from it. It’s fun to open up the files and listen to tracks one of the other guys did. It’s like opening presents on Christmas. That’s not to say that everything is a total surprise—we’re all very involved with the writing and pre-production. These are just steps along the way when we’re working independently to bring material in.”

The album’s title track is fiery stuff, built around a pile-driving, high-velocity riff that Morton kicked around in pre-production. “It was one of the last songs we worked on,” he says. “Josh and I were sitting in my studio, and I had a riff that we started building into a song. We actually did speed that up about four bpm,” Morton remembers, “which isn’t huge, but we have to be careful about that kind of thing because tempos have a huge impact on the song.”

“Sepsis” comes on like a volcanic beast from hell. Blythe howls and hollers like he just laid his hand on a smoking cast-iron skillet, and a pummeling guitar-and-bass riff adds knockaround punishment. Mid-song, Morton goes weird and wonderful, ramming the message home with jarring dissonant chords that evoke the styles of the Jesus Lizard’s Duane Denison and indie producer Steve Albini. “I love both those guys,” Morton says. “The Melvins, too—they were huge for us. When we talk about Lamb of God, we have to talk about punk and alternative, but also Slayer and Pantera. All that stuff is vital for us.”

The award for Naming Songs For Exactly What They Sound Like goes to Lamb of God for “Blunt Force Blues,” an overwhelming nod to Vulgar Display of Power-era Pantera that asks the musical question: Why have just one corrosive metal riff when 20 will do? “We all have a hand in the songwriting, but that one is a clear example of Willie Adler’s train of thought,” Morton says. “He has this incredible stream of consciousness that sometimes we have to roll back and sometimes we don’t. It can be a wild ride interpreting what’s inside his head.”

When asked if the band has yet tackled the song live, Morton laughs and says, “No. I might need to bring some notes if we do get to that one.”

“Regular-schmegular wasn’t gonna cut it. It had to be great.”

The band hits the brakes on their high-speed tempos for the somber and atmospheric “El Vacio,” a mini-epic of sorts that’s distinguished by layers of gorgeous, echo-drenched, clean-toned guitar textures. “That one began as a bit of an assignment given to me,” Morton says. “Josh and Randy were out in L.A. doing some vocals and writing, and I got a text from Randy: ‘Hey man, send us something weird. We’ve got great songs, but we need to shake the snow globe. Even if we don’t use it, give me something super out of the box.’”

Morton accepted the assignment as a challenge and came up with “something that feels a little like the Cult from their Love period. It was really different for us, and the band loved it.”

Not every song on Into Oblivion features a guitar solo (Morton has never presented himself as a particularly self-indulgent player), but “Parasocial Christ” is a standout. Amid rugged rhythms, the guitarist shoots lead fireworks, abusing his instrument like it owes him money and even tossing in a heaping helping of old-fashioned dive bombs. “It’s nothing I’ve ever done in my professional career, but I did all that stuff when I was younger,” he says. “I did all the tapping and dive bombing that everybody else was doing. There’s actually a lot of whammy bar stuff on the record, which is entirely attributable to Josh Wilber. Every time we cut a solo, he’d say, ‘Why don’t you do a dive bomb?’ I was like, ‘Did you just discover whammy bars or something? I play Les Pauls, so what are we gonna do?’ He just went, ‘We’ll figure something out.’”

Ultimately, the producer got his wish, and to that end Morton utilized a Fender Custom Shop Stratocaster “super-Stratted” by master builder Mike Shannon. “Whenever you hear a dive bomb, that’s me playing the Strat,” Morton says.

“I didn’t feel the need to try to change my sound for the sake of changing it. The self-editing I felt I needed had more to do with my actual playing.”

Whether he’s detonating dive bombs or digging deep into earth-moving rhythms, Morton burns through it all with the zeal and youthful stamina of someone making his first album. For guitarists seeking pre-album training tips, Morton says simply, “By the time we start tracking a record, we’ve spent months doing pre-production, running through the songs and trying different ideas. At that point, I’m ready to go.”

Pressed further, he admits that there is a bit of a science to the art of capturing the perfect guitar performance. “It can come down to all sorts of things, or even just one thing,” he says. “Am I in a good mood? Am I excited about what I’m doing? Do I feel good physically? Am I undercaffeinated or overcaffeinated? It rarely takes me two days to track a song, but if we have to do something again to get it right, we will. The bottom line is, I try to stay in a good mental space.”

Asked if he has any special tricks for that one, Morton cracks a grin. “Yeah—I turn off social media.”

In the spring of 2020, I found myself quarantined in Nashville, staring at screens for too many hours, with TikTok feeding me an endless scroll of protests, police confrontations, and cities on edge. Meanwhile, right here in Music City, protesters smashed windows along Lower Broadway and set fires near the state Capitol. It felt surreal, chaotic, and unpredictable. The entire world was wondering: What’s going on?

During that time, I rewatched the documentary Standing in the Shadows of Motown. It occurred to me that our current chaos hit exactly half a century after Marvin Gaye captured the same bewilderment in his landmark 1971 single and album. Recorded in the summer of 1970 at Motown’s Hitsville U.S.A. in Detroit, What’s Going On emerged from a man who’d grown weary of the polished pop machine.

Before this, Marvin Gaye was the ideal Motown product: handsome, polite, safe. Hits like “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You),” “Ain’t That Peculiar,” and “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” made him a star. But by 1969, depression had sidelined him. He stopped touring. His brother Frankie returned from Vietnam with haunting stories of war’s toll. Detroit’s streets boiled with police brutality and unrest. Singing only love songs started feeling dishonest.

The spark came on May 15, 1969, when Four Tops member Renaldo “Obie” Benson witnessed police attacking anti-war protesters at Berkeley’s People’s Park on “Bloody Thursday.” Shaken, Benson wondered aloud, “What’s going on here?” Why send kids overseas to die? Why beat them in the streets at home? Back in Detroit, he collaborated with songwriter Al Cleveland on a tune inspired by those questions. Benson pitched it as a love song—about love and understanding—but his bandmates dismissed it as protest. Benson insisted: “I’m not protesting. I want to know what’s going on.”

Motown in the ’60s was a hit factory modeled on Detroit’s auto plants. Berry Gordy ran it with iron discipline: Songwriters cranked out material, producers cut poppy versions, and weekly quality-control meetings decided releases. The goal was to make Black music that white America would embrace—no politics, no anger, no “inside” references. Songs focused on love, heartbreak, dancing—emotional ground that was safe enough to cross racial lines. The Funk Brothers delivered grooves that ruled dance floors with tight time driven with a ubiquitous tambourine, two drummers, and James Jamerson’s funky bass lines. Albums were a collection of singles and filler.

Marvin Gaye thought this song would not fly under the constraints of Gordy, so he booked a late-night session with a core of trusted Funk Brothers—including Jamerson, who, legend has it, was so drunk he had to lay on his back to play, reading charts upside down. Jamerson’s line never really repeats; instead, he weaves chromatic passing tones into a jazz-influenced swing that rarely hits the tonic and never loses the pocket.

“Marvin Gaye’s masterpiece endures because it refuses rage for its own sake.”

The whole vibe of the sessions feels loose, spontaneous, alive. This wasn’t assembly-line Motown; it was personal, socially conscious, adventurous. The song doesn’t shout protest. It asks questions: about war’s human cost, community violence, poverty, ecology. “Mother, mother, there’s too many of you crying / Brother, brother, there’s far too many of you dying.” The refrain—“You know we’ve got to find a way to bring some lovin’ here today”—pleads for compassion without condemnation. Marvin invites reflection, empathy, unity.

When Gaye presented it to Berry Gordy, Gordy called it “the worst thing I ever heard.” It was too political, uncommercial, poorly structured, sonically weird, very un-Motown. Marvin, leveraging his star power, essentially went on strike and refused to record anymore until they released the song. Gordy relented for a single release, expecting it to fail, after which Gaye would fall back in line. Instead, the song soared to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, and No. 1 on the R&B chart. The public connected. Gordy greenlit the full album, shifting Motown toward artist-driven, thematic works. It paved the way for Stevie Wonder’s creative control and proved personal vision could sell.

Now, the question—what’s going on?—feels eerily fresh to me. I’m by nature an optimistic person, and I suspect Marvin Gaye was as well. Otherwise, he would not have jeopardized a wildly successful career to make a statement for change. Marvin Gaye’s masterpiece endures because it refuses rage for its own sake. It calls for love amid chaos, understanding across fractures. “War is not the answer / Only love can conquer hate.” In 1971, it challenged Vietnam and domestic strife. Today, it speaks to endless cycles of conflict, brutality, and disconnection.

Marvin Gaye risked everything to say something true. The result wasn’t just a hit; it was a mirror. Sometimes the most revolutionary act is refusing to look away.

As a single-pickup, hardtail guitar, the Reverend Charger Jr. wears simplicity as a badge of honor. But thanks to excellent execution of practical design updates and a basic player friendliness, it’s not as limited as one might suspect.

Its combination of a single-cutaway body, bolt-on neck, Steelhead P-90-style pickup (designed in-house,) and string-through hardtail bridge brings to mind a cross between a Fender Esquire and a Les Paul Jr. But part of what makes that marriage work is originality that lets the Charger Jr. hint at those two classics while staking out its own territory.

Hot Rod Heart

The solid Korina body (beautifully finished in metallic cherry, with cream binding and a back-sprayed gold pickguard) produces an unplugged tone somewhere between ash and mahogany—warm, but with plenty of snap. The roasted maple neck, topped with a rosewood fingerboard, has a comfortable medium oval profile. It’s a little chunkier than a typical C shape, but far from baseball bat territory.

This review was my first go with roasted maple, and I’m a convert. Smooth to the touch and pleasing to the eye, the wood stood up to very dry New York winter heating that had me refilling my acoustic guitar humidifiers at an alarming rate and finding jagged metal on electrics I’ve had for years. Not the Charger Jr.’s medium-jumbo (.110 x .050) frets, though. They’re fine.

“The Charger Jr.’s Steelhead P-90 delivers purity that’s hard to resist, while offering enough variety to cover roots, punk, and even metal.”

Reverend is great at effectively updating familiar design elements. The bolt-on neck, for instance, attaches with six screws rather than the traditional four—and it is a tight joint. The strings pass through an aluminum ferrule block, up to a Bonite (synthetic bone) nut, and under a cleverly designed 3-string tree, before terminating in Reverend Pin Lock locking tuners. High build quality brings the best out of these intelligent upgrades, making the Charger Jr. a pleasure to play and listen to, with solid tuning stability and consistent tone up, down, and across the neck. The guitar came out of the case with good intonation and low, buzz-free action, too.

At 43 mm (1.69 inches) at the nut and sporting a 12-inch fretboard radius, the 25.5-inch, 22-fret playing surface is a great platform for chords, runs, and bends. Even after deep bends, the guitar stays true and in tune.

Rocks In the Head

While the Jr. has only one pickup, the 3-way switch combines with a very effective treble-bleed volume control and a wide-range tone control to offer an impressive array of tones. The forward switch position (what you would otherwise call the “neck” setting) rolls off treble but preserves more of the Steelhead’s grindy personality than you get by simply turning down the tone knob. At times, it’s almost like a fixed-position wah. The back position offers more cut and spank, and a lot of upper-mid emphasis—reminiscent of a hot Telecaster pickup but with a hint of combined bridge-and-neck jangle. The middle position is my favorite of the three and the most P-90-like. There’s plenty of top-end bite, beefy lows, and a little scoop in the midrange that makes single notes jump and chords fill space.

The Steelhead pickup seems made for my modded Fender Vibro Champ, which can switch between a Bandmaster-style EQ and a raw, tweed Champ-like signal path (no EQ, higher gain). With the Champ’s EQ active, and treble and bass maxed, the Charger’s switching offered three distinct but totally compatible voices. Overdriven, the middle and bridge settings worked best together, and thanks to the treble-bleed volume control, you can mellow the tone out for rhythm without getting lost in a mix. The Champ’s snarly raw mode favored the brighter bridge pickup position alone, with the middle, unadulterated Steelhead sound a close second. Rolling back the Charger Jr.’s volume yields very nice clean tones.

Through an uber-clean SWR bass amp, the switching system still offers impressive variety. The front rhythm position is more effective in this kind of super-clean signal path, and ranges from darkness to twilight depending on the guitar’s tone control position. Where the other two positions scream through the Champ, they pop and chime through the SWR. What’s more, the Reverend’s natural sustain lends these super-clean single notes plenty of presence and body.

In a way, I was most impressed by how the Charger Jr. sounded with my Universal Audio Apollo interface while I was sitting in front of a computer, because the guitar’s low noise floor is remarkable. Noise can make single-coil pickups—and P-90s in particular—a nightmare when running into an interface. But not here. Factor in the guitar’s comfort and tuning stability, and you can imagine why I used the Charger Jr. for composing and recording sessions a lot in recent days.

The Verdict

From the moment it came out of the case, the Charger Jr. felt as comfortable as a broken-in pair of leather gloves. At just less than $1,100, it boasts the materials and build quality of a considerably more expensive instrument. If one pickup seems limiting, the Charger platform is available in other guises with different pickups and different bridges. That said, the Jr.’s Steelhead P-90 delivers purity that’s hard to resist, while offering enough variety to cover roots, punk, and even metal. If you crave simplicity that deviates from Esquire and Les Paul Jr. templates, this Charger is highly recommended.

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Andy Hicks’ path to becoming a guitar craftsman—from overachieving student to Fender Custom Shop Master Builder—can be traced back to age 11 or 12, when a friend introduced him to Nirvana’s In Utero. Hicks had grown up savoring his dad’s eclectic record collection—everything from the Beatles to jazz standards to Black Sabbath. But as he soaked in the noisy strains of songs like “Serve the Servants” and “Scentless Apprentice,” it felt like “something was unlocking” in his brain.

“It was a band my parents didn’t know about,” Hicks recalls. “It was this secret. It’s kind of edgy, so do I tell them about this?’ I remember being nervous: ‘The band is Nirvana, and here’s the album cover [which shows a transparent anatomical mannequin].’ My dad was like, ‘Let’s go buy every record of theirs.’ A couple weeks later, I’ve got the entire discography and t-shirts and everything. I was just so fascinated by Kurt Cobain as an artist, and I was the perfect age for that music to resonate with me.”

But this resonance went even deeper than most kids bewitched by the brooding “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video. In that clip, Hicks happened to notice Cobain was playing a Fender Mustang—not that he knew anything about his future employer as a pre-teen. “That video made me want to play guitar,” he says. “I was like, ‘That looks so cool.’ I knew he played a Fender, but I didn’t know any Fender models or anything. For my birthday, my parents took me to Guitar Center and I got my first: a made-in-Mexico three-tone sunburst Strat. I just fell in love with the guitar.”

In the decades since, Hicks—a former member of the doom-metal band Stygian Crown—has forgotten more about the instrument than most people ever learn. But in a way, his wealth of knowledge hasn’t really altered his perspective all that much, either as a builder or a musician: Instead of chasing trendy guitar gimmicks or seeking out some unattainably perfect tone, he’s just aiming for empowerment.

“My formative years were spent learning how to use my hands to make the sounds I wanted to make,” he says. “Years later, I look back at that as being such a blessing. As a builder, I’m not sucked into the misinformation pool about tone wood and all of these little minute changes to something that people think is gonna make this huge change in the instrument. It’s more, ‘Let me make the best-feeling instrument for you,’ because the tone is ultimately going to come from you. I can’t make you have the tone that you want. That’s freeing as a builder, and I think it’s freeing for the player, too.”

After getting his hands on that first Strat, he was obsessed. But not necessarily with gear. Back at home with his little 25-watt amp, he realized too late that he needed effects pedals to emulate his heroes: “I have this vision of going home and playing ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’” he says. “‘Why doesn’t my guitar sound like that guitar?’” But even after experimenting with “a million” options, he learned a crucial lesson: “After having a distortion pedal, it was like, ‘I still don’t sound like Black Sabbath.’” He eventually found his own path, falling in love with heavy metal and taking any chance he could to practice.

“I wanted the guitar to be as involved in my life as it could possibly be forever,” he says. “In high school, the only guitar class they taught was Introduction to Guitar. I was beyond ‘introduction,’ but I explained to the teacher: ‘I’m just looking for a place where I can come play. If I don’t learn anything new, I’m gonna teach myself stuff. Can I take this class?’ I took it for a semester. When it was over, I said, ‘Can I sign up again?’ He was like, ‘Uh, I guess.’ I took it for two straight years, for four semesters.” That same devotion followed him into college, where he played in bands but also envisioned a life as a teacher and water polo coach. The itch, it turns out, was too strong to not eventually scratch.

“The tone is ultimately going to come from you. I can’t make you have the tone that you want.”

“My roommates would always say, ‘Why aren’t you a music major?’” he recalls. “I knew some music majors, and it sometimes seemed too clinical, the way they would talk about music. I didn’t know if that part of the guitar would give me joy. For a long time, it was, ‘I’ll have some other career, and the guitar will always be there for me to come home and decompress with.’”

He got the push he needed from his future wife. “I came home from work,” he says, “and she told me, ‘I don’t think you love what you’re doing. I think you love guitar. There’s a school in Hollywood [called the Musicians Institute].’ At this point, I was tinkering with guitars all the time. I wanted to make my guitars feel better, and I didn’t have the money to have somebody constantly adjust these things for me, swapping out pickups or whatever. When we came home [from touring the school], I was like, ‘I have to do this.’ I signed up and started there the next semester [in 2009].”

He learned a lot in the Guitar Craft Academy program, focusing six months on the electric guitar and impressing one of the instructors, longtime Fender employee Dave Maddux. “He was the first person to say to me, ‘Judging by the builds you’ve done in school, I think you could make a good go at this,’” Hicks says. “He put me in contact with some people, and when I graduated, I had a job lined up at Jackson Custom Shop, where I shaped necks and did fretwork. That’s been a main focus my whole career: making the neck feel as good as possible.”

He bounced around a bit at Jackson, including a stint on the Fender production line. But these early days were anything but boring: He was only on the job for a few weeks, working on necks for the EVH Wolfgang, when he first met Eddie Van Halen, who was on site with master builders Chip Ellis (Fender) and Mike Shannon (Jackson).

“I wanted the guitar to be as involved in my life as it could possibly be forever.”

“It’s Fender—we have tours all the time,” Hicks says. “This guy comes over, leaning on me, and he looks like some dad wearing a baseball hat. Then I’m like, ‘Oh, Eddie Van Halen is just standing here watching us work.’ The guy I was working with was in the middle of complaining: ‘Man, these stainless steel frets. With just these Wolfgangs, we’ve gotta do 12 stainless steel necks today.’ Eddie [playfully] said something along the lines of, ‘I’m sorry my guitar is such a pain in the butt.’ It was incredible.” (The story has a full-circle coda: Toward the end of Hicks’ run at Jackson, Van Halen held a friends-and-family show at the Forum, and the virtuoso gave +1s to everyone who worked on his guitars. “My dad was sitting next to Tom Morello, telling him that his son made Eddie Van Halen’s guitar,” he says with a laugh. “I had to say, ‘Dad, please stop talking to Tom Morello. And also, I didn’t make his guitar. Chip made his guitar. I make Wolfgang guitars.’ He was so excited to talk to somebody, and he just happened to be talking to Tom Morello.”)

After a couple years at Jackson, Hicks “got noticed a little bit” and made the jump over to the Gretsch Custom Shop, where he earned his stripes as a “guitar detective,” helping with a meticulous recreation of Malcolm Young’s “Salute” Jet. Gretsch initially thought they’d have access to the AC/DC icon’s original axe—but after both Young and his tech suffered health issues, they were left only with photos, dimensional specs, and a lot of question marks.

“There were a lot of things that had been done to it over the years,” Hicks recalls. “It had one pickup in it and three knobs. What do those do? No one could really tell us. During some of my digging, I contacted a guitar shop in Melbourne, Australia, that had it in there before a tour. They took photos of it just for fun, so they sent me a bunch of them. That’s how I learned about the weird tone caps that they had in it—they were like wah-pedal tone caps instead of normal tone caps. It was essentially two master volumes and a tone. That’s the fun stuff of doing an instrument like that.”

“I thought to myself, ‘I don’t know if I’m growing anymore.’ I didn’t like that feeling.”

Hicks grew super comfortable at Gretsch—almost too comfortable. “I thought to myself, ‘I don’t know if I’m growing anymore,’” he says. “I didn’t like that feeling. I didn’t want to wait around anymore to see if it’s going to be my turn.” When he got an offer to run production at the high-end manufacturer James Tyler Guitars, he leapt at the opportunity—finding a mentor in the titular builder, who “ran his shop like a pirate” and followed his gut above all else. “When everyone was doing the roasted necks, he was like, ‘I don’t really like how it sounds, so we’re not doing it,’” he says. “I remember some of his finance guys saying, ‘We can charge more.’ But he didn’t care.” After Tyler’s health took a turn, Hicks wound up running production and building simultaneously, often working two shifts a day to help steer the ship opposite general manager Rich Renken. This was another valuable learning moment, but he felt like there was unfinished business back at his old stomping grounds.

After a serendipitous phone call with Fender’s Ron Thorn, who told him a spot was opening up at the Custom Shop, that feeling only solidified. “As soon as Ron said this, it was like, ‘That’s the thing. I have to know if I can do it,’” Hicks recalls. “I think I left Tyler in good hands, so there were no bad feelings. It was an emotional day, coming in here, being welcomed back. It was an interesting first day, too, because you know everyone’s name. [laughs] It just felt right. It felt like coming home.”

He returned with a wealth of knowledge, but none of it prepared him for one particular build: making a new model for his favorite guitarist of all time, Iron Maiden’s Dave Murray. “It was completely insane,” he says. “They were about to start this multi-year tour and wanted another guitar. I was working really closely with his tech, fine-tuning his model a little bit.” He decked the bridge, adjusted the neck angle, oil-finished the neck—tailoring it as best he could to Murray’s preferences. Despite all that hard work, it was still tense waiting for feedback. “I shipped it off and got an email a couple days later from Dave,” he recalls. “It just said ‘Regarding the guitar’ [in the subject line], and it’s a Schrödinger’s cat situation: ‘I’m gonna open this email, and one of two things happens: He either likes the guitar, and that’s good, or he doesn’t like it, and now what do I do?’ He said how much he loved it. His guitar tech reached out and said it was going to be his number-one for the tour. And now we’ve announced that we’re launching the master-built version of that.”

Hicks once envisioned the guitar dominating his life—and between his day job and his own creative pursuits, that’s pretty much come true. “The bigger balancing act,” he says, “is learning how to turn the guitar off for a little bit when I’m at home with my kids,” he says. Those worlds are colliding even more than usual now, though, as his nine-year-old son is taking guitar lessons. (The kid has access to a pretty sweet setup, too, including Hicks’ Fender Tone Master Pro workstation and Tone Master FR-12 amp. Plus, he’s playing what Hicks calls “the nicest 3/4-scale Squier in the entire world,” after his hours of re-fretting and tweaking.)

Back home at Fender, Hicks is master-building the life he always wanted: “Man,” he says, “it’s been a dream come true.”

Most exciting new innovations in acoustic guitar have to do with the top, like new bracing systems, double tops, etc. This makes sense, because this is the main sound-producing component of the instrument. But a guitar is a whole system of parts that work together to produce sound, and the sides of the guitar play a significant role in this.

From an engineering perspective, there are two functions of guitar sides: first, to hold the structure of the guitar together and bear some of the tension of the strings; second, to transfer vibrations from the top to the back.

Traditional guitar sides are composed of a single layer of wood, which is bent into shape using heat. Then, kerfed liners are used to glue the sides to the top and back. This is the simplest way to construct sides, and it’s also the lightest method, since it involves the least wood. However, a single thin layer of wood is prone to cracking.

That’s not the only downside of traditional acoustic sides. They also absorb some of the energy of the vibrating top and back, which has a damping effect on the guitar, analogous to brake dampers in a car. Damping decreases the loudness and sustain of the guitar. To reduce the amount of damping, guitar sides should be as stiff as possible (without being too heavy) so that they transmit vibrations, rather than absorb them. This is the goal of structured sides.

A logical way to increase the rigidity of the sides is to extend the top and bottom liners, making one big liner that spans the whole depth of the sides. This means the whole area of the side is reinforced, which in effect makes structured sides a type of laminated construct, with two plies. One ply is the outer “show” wood, and the other is the kerf bent piece that lines the inside. In general, lamination increases the rigidity of wood and helps counteract any internal stresses that may be present in one of the plies.

Several builders have contributed to the development of structured sides. Based on my research, the two-ply version was invented by Sheldon Schwartz. Another luthier, Allan Beardsell, then brought the idea to the workshop of Sergei de Jonge. While working at de Jonge’s shop, two founders of the Mile End Guitar Coop (Michael Kennedy and Jeremy Clark) learned about the technique. When they went on to found the coop, they took this technique with them and continued to experiment.

The next evolution was to add a third layer to the sides, thus making them even more stiff. This method was developed by Kennedy and Clark at the coop, and it’s currently the method that most of us in the coop use—the name “structured sides” comes from someone here. There are three plies: the outer show wood, the inner kerf bent layer, and a final thin layer on the inside of the guitar. The outermost and innermost layers are thin, solid pieces of hardwood. The inner kerf component is made of a lighter softwood, like cedar.

The physics of our three-ply sides are comparable to an I-beam. The stiffness of an I-beam comes from the two outer flanges. The middle section doesn’t add much rigidity; it simply holds the two flanges at a distance apart. The greater this distance, the more rigid your sides. Similarly, the inner kerf layer functions as a spacer for the outermost and innermost layers. This makes the sides much stiffer than if the two solid layers were glued directly together, meaning that structured sides have a higher stiffness-to-weight ratio than simply laminated sides. This also means that structured sides make the guitar more efficient by reducing the damping effect of the sides!

As a bonus, structured sides increase durability, doing a better job of supporting the body against the forces of string tension, so the back of the guitar can bear less of this stress. They also protect against side cracks and other damage; it takes a pretty big bump to the side of the guitar to get through all three plies.

Although structured sides were intended for acoustic guitars, I’ve been using the technique to build laminated banjo rims. This makes the banjo significantly lighter than a traditional solid rim. Recently, I built a tackhead banjo that weighed just 3.2 pounds when fully strung up!

All this said, I think there’s still plenty more room to experiment with sides. Maybe another filler material like Nomex could be used instead of the kerf layer. Maybe other instruments, like mandolins or upright basses, could benefit from structured sides? I look forward to seeing what the future holds for this technique!

Q: How do you know when the record is finished?

A: When the budget runs out.

It’s an old studio joke, but it sticks around because it points at something deeper than money. Budgets don’t just limit time—they force commitment. And nowhere is that more obvious than during the recording process, when the record still feels malleable enough to become anything.

That sense of possibility is intoxicating. It’s also dangerous.

I’ve lived this from both sides of the glass—first as a signed artist, aware of how the clock quietly ate into my recording money, and later as a producer watching artists wrestle with the same invisible tension. At some point, the record has to stop being an idea and start being a document.

Early in a tracking session, performances tend to arrive with a kind of clarity that’s hard to manufacture later. Musicians are alert. Intentions are strong. The red light still carries weight. You hear phrasing that commits, dynamics that breathe, and little mistakes that feel wonderfully human. The song is being captured, not negotiated.

Then something subtle shifts. Takes get more refined—and usually safer. Players start listening backward instead of playing forward. Energy gives way to self-correction. Suddenly the band is performing for the playback instead of for the moment. Technically, things may improve, but past a certain point the music begins to suffer. This is the point where the studio can easily stop being a temple of documentation and become a laboratory of doubt.

Unlimited recording time accelerates this process exponentially—especially in home studios. Without constraints, every decision becomes provisional. Mic choices stay “temporary.” Arrangements remain “open.” Performances are endlessly replaced and playlisted rather than committed to. The record never quite becomes real because nothing is allowed to harden into fact.

Some of my favorite records came together quickly and felt almost divinely inevitable. Parts were chosen. Tones and effects were printed. Performances were treated as events, not auditions. Not because they were flawless, but because they told the truth of that moment. And that truth is fragile. Chase it too long and it disappears.

“Records are never finished. They’re just released. The art is knowing when to let them go.”

One of the most useful questions you can pivot to during recording isn’t, “Can we do better?” but rather, “Are we improving the song—or just exhausting it?” Knowing when to ask that question isn’t about a fixed number of takes. It’s a feel. And if the answer isn’t immediately obvious, you’re probably already past the peak.

This is where experience earns its keep—not in knowing how to fix things later, but in knowing when not to defer decisions. Every time you avoid committing during tracking, you push weight downstream. You don’t eliminate risk; you relocate it. And by the time you reach mixing, the cost of that indecision gets paid with interest.

This is why mixing so often becomes the next battlefield. When performances, arrangements, and tones remain unresolved, the mix is forced to carry emotional weight it was never meant to bear. Engineers start chasing balance problems that are really performance problems, and tonal issues that should have been settled at the microphone. Endless tweaks follow—not because the mix is unfinished, but because the record never fully decided what it wanted to be.

Budgets—financial, temporal, or self-imposed—are what can help prevent that drift. They create gravity. They force choices out of the abstract and into the real world. They turn possibility into artifact.

Records aren’t finished when every option has been explored. They’re finished when enough of the right decisions have been made that they far outweigh the remaining ones.

Records are never finished. They’re just released. The art is knowing when to let them go. Until next time, namaste

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