Norse Guitar Feeds

You don’t need to know Latin, or anything about Salsburg’s past work, to take in ‘Ipsa Corpora.’ It asks only that you listen for 40 uninterrupted minutes.

Ever wondered what Billy Gibbons looks like under that mighty beard? Well, it seems he’s not so sure either. In fact, the entirety of ZZ Top were once offered pretty big bucks to shave their facial hair off on TV – an offer they refused.

Though Gibbons and Dusty Hill were the most bearded of the trio, Frank Beard (more so associated with a moustache, despite the apt surname) was seemingly included in the offer too. Gibbons claims they were offered a whopping one million dollars each.

• READ MORE: “You wake up, lay on the floor and roll around laughing for a couple of minutes”: Sammy Hagar on what it was like selling his tequila company for $80M

Gibbons was asked about the rumour on the Mohr Stories podcast, and said that it was Gillette who offered them the deal, though he claims the company deny ever doing so.

“It’s true. They deny it,” he states. “They wanted us to [for a Super Bowl commercial]. It was a million dollars per man. We called [publicist] Mr. Merlis and I said, ‘Bob, we got this offer.’

“I said, ‘We’ve been offered a million dollars each to shave on TV.’ He said, ‘Well, the money’s good.’ He said, ‘You might as well consider doing it, but I’m not so sure any of you guys know what’s under there.’ So, we passed. We passed and our fans loved it. Word got out,” he says with a smile.

Last year, Gibbons looked back on his first meeting with Dusty Hill, after he was recommended by Frank as a replacement for Billy Ethridge. Gibbons told Rock & Roll High School, “Frank said, ‘Hey, I want to introduce you to Dusty.’ He’s coming over at three this afternoon. Around four o’clock, then five o’clock, no Dusty. At 6pm, I said, ‘Well, where’s this guy Dusty?’ And, I guess around seven o’clock, there’s a knock on the door. I went and opened it, and this guy was standing there.

“He had a gallon jug of wine, and he stepped in and he said, ‘Hey, man, I wanted to let you know, I’m Dusty.’ And with that, he fell on the floor and passed out. This is going to be my guy! But the next day, we picked up, and we started saying, well, ‘Let’s jam a number or two.’ And we wound up three hours on a shuffling speed. And I said, ‘Man, this is going to work.’”

The post Gillette once offered Billy Gibbons $1M to shave his beard – the ZZ Top guitarist’s reason for refusing makes lots of sense appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Should bands predominantly play their greatest hits at live shows? Or should they be free to delve into the deeper cuts of their catalogue and serve fans a show they’re not expecting? It’s a debate that sparks strong opinion on both sides.

On one hand, metal titans including Metallica and Avenged Sevenfold have expressed a disinterest in leaning entirely on the hits during live sets. In 2024, Metallica frontman James Hetfield spoke of the importance of “challenging” fans to enjoy deeper cuts from their catalogue at shows.

• READ MORE: “Next thing you know, I get handed one of Kirk Hammett’s Les Pauls!”: System Of A Down‘s Daron Malakian reflects on filling in for James Hetfield during Metallica‘s Summer Sanitarium tour

“We know that people wanna hear the best stuff, and you gotta challenge them to listen to the new stuff as well,” he said. “Because we certainly don’t wanna be a legacy band that just plays the greatest hits and then that’s it, you know? It’s all part of it.”

But some musicians think playing the hits is important in putting on a good show and having the fans leave happy. In a recent interview with Utah’s 103.5 The Arrow, Mötley Crüe bassist Nikki Sixx hints that during the band’s upcoming summer tour, they’ll be leaning heavily on the hits.

“We get in, and we know the fans want to hear the hits,” Sixx says [via Ultimate Guitar]. “I hate it when a band goes out and doesn’t play their hits. I just remember [David] Bowie doing that, and I was like, ‘He’s one of my favourite artists. I don’t want to go hear a bunch of C and D tracks off of records that I love. I want to hear songs like Rebel Rebel. At that point, he was like, ‘I’m so tired of playing the same songs.’”

Where most artists seem to agree is on playing the hits to keep the fans happy, but also interspersing the setlist with some lesser known tracks, too.

“We’re not tired of playing those hits,” Sixx goes on, “but we are excited about getting into a set list and diving into some songs that we maybe never played, or haven’t played in a long time, and shaking it up.

“If you’re playing a song from the first album, that’s going to dictate a lot of what production looks like, you know? So for us, it’s like this moving creative ball of energy. It’s super exciting.”

Elsewhere, shortly after the release of their latest album Life Is But a Dream… in 2023 – which came seven years after The Stage in 2016 – A7X vocalist M. Shadows explained his stance on staying artistically fresh as opposed to prioritising giving the fans a hit-packed setlist.

“I don’t even know how I’d feel if we had to go up there and play all of our old songs after five years of being off. I would feel like I’m stuck in the mud…

“Not only will bands veer away from new stuff live, because they’re worried – they want that pure energy setlist – but they also start allowing the fanbase to dictate, like ‘I paid money, I wanna see all the hits.’

“There’s bands like Metallica and Iron Maiden that continually play new stuff and reinvent themselves. And it pisses people off, but it allows them to be interested in what they’re doing.”

Meanwhile, Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme isn’t shying away from playing the band’s biggest tracks.

“I understand that I’m always going to play No One Knows because I still like playing that song and that’s something that it’s an agreement with the audience,” he said in 2023. “I assume that this is a part of coming here to see us, and here you go.”

The debate will surely rage on, but what do you think? Should artists cater to the fans and fill their setlists with their biggest tracks? Would you be happy to pay money to see your favourite artist play a set predominantly loaded with deeper cuts?

The post “I don’t want to go hear a bunch of C and D tracks”: Should bands play their biggest hits live? Nikki Sixx thinks so – and here’s why appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Robert Fripp has been reflecting on King Crimson’s most misunderstood album, 1974’s Red.

The seventh album from the band followed successful records like 1969’s In the Court of the Crimson King, 1973’s Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, and Starless and Bible Black, which landed in early 1974. But tensions were bubbling among the band as they began to make Red, and though much more broadly appreciated in retrospect, it became their lowest charting album upon release.

• READ MORE: “My hand would stay numb from the moment I woke up till soundcheck”: Adrian Belew reveals he needed hand surgery after playing King Crimson guitar parts on BEAT tour

The line up at the time consisted of drummer Bill Bruford, vocalist and bassist John Wetton, and Fripp, with violinist David Cross having been voted out of the group. The band ultimately split at the end of 1974 after the launch of Red, and despite its rocky release, it’s regarded by many as a formative proto-metal treasure.

Speaking to Guitar World in its new print edition, Fripp says that “the strength of Red is that the power is in the music”. Looking  back on its conception, he explains, “It was very, very open. But it’s a very difficult and uncomfortable place to be.

“If someone comes in with a pretty well-written piece of music and says, ‘Let’s play this’, then it’s relatively safe and straightforward. But the problem is, when you know what you’re doing, if you know where you’re going, you might get there, and that’s not an interesting place to be. Where you wish to arrive is where you could never possibly know you might be going. But that is a very difficult tension to hold together.”

Fripp also has a pretty accepting stance on Red, and that has seemingly come with time: “I would’ve stayed as an estate agent in Wimborne, Dorset, if I had known the grief that was coming my way. I would have stayed in real estate!” He jokes. “My approach has been, if you read your press, you read all of it. And if you read all my press, there have been — by and large — as many people who hated it as who enjoyed it.”

The post “If I had known the grief that was coming my way, I would have stayed in real estate!”: Robert Fripp on facing the backlash to King Crimson’s Red appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

£160, ghostnoteaudio.uk

The 1980s haven’t been this big since, well, the 1980s. Blame Stranger Things, blame a few viral TikTok videos, blame the ever-shortening cycles of trend repetition engendered by the accelerating death-spiral of western culture under quasi-oligarchical free-market capitalism, but the fact is this: people are using chorus pedals again.

• READ MORE: MXR Rockman X100 review – it’s the 80s in a box

The Ghost Note Audio Swirls, however, is not just a chorus pedal: it’s billed as “an entire 80s rack in a pedal”. That includes two modulation effects, a built-in compressor and true stereo output. Seems like pretty good going for £150 when you consider it’s made in the UK… and has a radical shape-shifting trick thrown in.

Image: Press

Ghost Note Audio Swirls – what is it?

You might want an introduction to Ghost Note first. Based in West Sussex, this maker of guitar pedals, studio gear and software plugins recently launched a range of three digital stompboxes called the Daedalus Series, of which the Swirls is one. Or is it, in a sense, all three?

Because you see, the Swirls, the 3 Bit Fuzz (a bitcrusher) and the Amverb (a rack-style stereo reverb) are all built on the same hardware platform – and if you want to change one of them into another, all you have to do is download the firmware and pipe it in via USB-C. Interchangeable faceplates are £20 each, but the firmware is free.

I tested out the brain-swap process and it worked without any issues… so here goes with a couple of micro-reviews: the bitcrusher is excellent, offering tight yet belligerent fuzz with lots of control over the EQ; and the reverb is equally nice but, a little weirdly, not suitable for use with guitar amps.

And what was the other one? Oh yeah, the Swirls! Inspired by old rackmount devices, specifically the Dyno-My-Piano Tri Stereo Chorus, this is a pedal for people who like their modulation rich and syrupy enough to serve for dessert at a Roman orgy. It includes a ‘detune’ effect that can be added to the main three-channel chorus and controlled separately, plus a compressor that Ghost Note describes as “very fast and aggressive”. It has mono and stereo ins and outs, and can store two user presets.

Image: Press

Ghost Note Audio Swirls – is it easy to use?

It doesn’t look easy to use, does it? Not for those of us who generally like our chorus pedals with a maximum of two knobs and maybe, if we’re feeling really extravagant, a switch for vibrato mode. And indeed, this is a tricky stomper to navigate at first.

The key is to see the six knobs as two lines of three: the top row controls the main chorus, and the bottom row is for the detune effect. Secondary functions are accessed by holding down the button in the middle: now the top row gives control over the left, centre and right channels of the chorus, and the bottom row runs the compressor.

In summary, this is not your Boss CE-2. But the good news is, it should be able to do a whole lot more than any basic chorus pedal…

Image: Press

Ghost Note Audio Swirls – what does it sound like?

It’s tough to break the sound of the Swirls down into its constituent parts, because the overall effect is such a seamlessly integrated audio concoction. The short version is that it sounds every bit as retro-tastically sweet and shiny as you might hope.

By modern chorus standards you might find it ever so slightly cold in tonality, because the emphasis here is all on the shimmering trebly sheen. The two modulation types are broadly similar in character, except that the detune has a much less pronounced ‘wave’ effect, but the real magic happens when you mix them together… and then press the stereo button.

With any chorus pedal, you can get a nice stereo effect by sending a dry signal to a second amp; what you get from the Swirls’ dual outputs, though, is a sense of scale and immersion that’s on a whole different level. It can sound like the Cocteau Twins, it can sound almost like a Leslie speaker, and it can sound so overwhelmingly luscious that after a while you start to feel a bit queasy.

And the compressor? It will add a gentle thump to the transients if you want it to, but mostly it just does what compressors do best: making everything seem louder than it really is. And is this context, that just means more lushness and more hugeness.

Image: Press

Ghost Note Audio Swirls – should I buy it?

The Swirls prodded my nostalgia glands much more forcefully than I was expecting it to. It did also remind me of why I ended up getting sick – quite literally – of the chorus effect, but that’s not the pedal’s fault: you just need to show some restraint when working with this kind of ultra-sweetness.

For simply adding a bit of wobble to a clean guitar, there are simpler options that will do just as well or better – and without generating anything like as much background hiss. But if you want to go all-in on the whole immersive 80s thing, this is where it lives.

Ghost Note Audio Swirls alternatives

A couple of other options for that extra-swirly multi-chorus effect are the Eventide TriceraChorus ($279/£249) and Free The Tone Tri Avatar (¥39,500/£269). Or if you really want to feel like a time-traveller from 1984, try the combined chorus, compression and distortion of the MXR Rockman X100 ($245.99/£249.99).

The post Ghost Note Audio Swirls review – much more than a chorus pedal appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

As we gather ’round the fire and stare at the ashes of what used to be the record business, I’m reminded of Nick Hornby’s 1995 novel (and later, movie) High Fidelity. In one iconic speech straight from the book, John Cusack says: “But the most important thing is … what you like, not what you’re like. Books, records, films—these things matter. Call me shallow, it’s the fuckin’ truth.”

Commercial record stores first appeared in the 1920s, but mass marketing did not kick in until 1948, when Columbia invented the 33 1/3 rpm long-playing (LP) record, and 1949, when RCA countered with the 45 rpm single.

In the mid 1950s, rock ’n’ roll exploded with Elvis, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard, and records were everywhere. By the time I came along in the ’60s and ’70s, even in remote Montana, our grocery store, pharmacy, and gas station all had a record section. There were also several dedicated record stores around town where you could hang out, listen to music, and occasionally buy records, black light posters, rock ’n’ roll t-shirts, and even a bong, if you wanted. By 1999, global recorded-music revenue crested at roughly $40 billion, with CDs costing a stiff 18 bucks. We were buying the same albums we already owned on vinyl, just shinier. From the first commercial phonograph cylinders in the early 1900s to the absolute peak in 1999, the whole glorious scam ran 100 years; shorter than the Ottoman Empire, longer than MySpace. But not by much.

Then two things happened almost simultaneously: Shawn Fanning gave every dorm-room genius the power to copy anything, and Steve Jobs sold us the radical idea that maybe we didn’t need “Smells Like Teen Spirit” permanently welded to 12 other tracks. Napster lit the fuse; iTunes handed us the à la carte menu.

But the big bad record labels didn’t die. Rather, they molted. They stopped selling plastic and started renting you the same songs forever, ten bucks a month, please and thank you. Today, streaming constitutes 84 percent of U.S. recorded-music revenue. Your Spotify subscription gets carved up like a pizza: the platform keeps about 30 percent for servers and the like, the rights holders split the remaining 70 percent, and the label—owner of the master recording—walks away with roughly 55 percent of the total pool before the artist sees a dime. Same old middlemen, new religion.

Labels began to diversify like a hedge fund. Sync licensing is the golden ticket now—one 30-second needle-drop in a Netflix trailer can out-earn a billion streams. Performance royalties still trickle in every time your song plays in an Applebee’s. Weirdly, vinyl in 2024 finally outsold CDs in units. Labels press lavender-swirl limited editions for $300 a pop and the superfans line up like it’s 1973. The game isn’t dead; it just learned to stop relying on a single point of failure.

“One 30-second needle-drop in a Netflix trailer can out-earn a billion streams.”

Record labels today operate like venture capitalists: professional gamblers who bet other people’s money on startups that usually have no revenue, no profits, and a 70–90 percent chance of going to zero. The job is to find the one or two out of 100 that become Airbnb, Uber, or Jelly Roll. Write and record your songs, work social media, put money and time into promotion to get on playlists, play gigs, and, if you’re talented and lucky enough to stand out amongst the crowd of wannabes, a label will message you on Insta and maybe roll the dice on your project.

Will the major label disappear? Please. Labels survived Napster, survived the CD crash, survived having to pretend they like mumble rap, shoegaze, and Hillbilly Vanilli. They’ll just keep evolving into something that looks less like a record company and more like a private-equity firm. The next decade will be about superfans and algorithms. Exclusive fan clubs, direct-to-consumer box sets, virtual meet-and-greets where you pay 50 bucks to watch an artist unmute himself on Zoom—labels will own that if the indies don’t get there first. And AI? It’s already picking singles, buying ads, and probably writing half the choruses you hate but can’t stop humming.

Meanwhile the indies will keep carving out the weird corners—hyper-specific genres, local scenes, anything too prickly for the algorithmic blender. The pie is bigger, the slices are thinner, and nobody’s starving unless they’re lazy.

So yeah, the era of walking into Tower Records with a crumpled 20-dollar bill and walking out with physical proof you love something is deader than disco. But the labels? They just changed their wardrobe and learned to live on micro-transactions and attention.

For artists wanting to be stars, the music industry, like the rest of the world, has the mega rich, the struggling poor, and not a lot in the middle. But if you have talent and an instrument, you can always find a way to monetize it. You might survive by busking or living from a tip jar in a bar, but you will survive. Personally, if I have music and my basic needs met, I’m cool.

Prior to the release of 2001’s Toxicity, System Of A Down were scrambling to make their mark on heavy metal. When Metallica offered them a support slot on their 2000 Summer Sanitarium tour, it was the perfect opportunity to reach new audiences – and it would even see Daron Malakian temporarily joining the world’s biggest metal band – onstage at least.

When the Summer Sanitarium tour kicked off in June, all was well. However, on 7 July, Metallica’s James Hetfield was injured in a jet ski accident right before a show, leaving him unable to perform. “They didn’t know what to do, because James wasn’t there,” Malakian tells Rick Rubin on his Tetragrammaton podcast.

Rather than cancelling the tour, Metallica enlisted the help of their support acts. “Jason Newsted was singing, and then they brought the guys from Korn on and they [covered a] Cheech & Chong song,” he recalls.

• READ MORE: Trivium’s Matt Heafy names the five up-and-coming metal bands everyone needs to watch in 2026

Seeing fellow openers Korn up onstage, Malakian thought he’d try his luck. He knew “a lot of [Metallica’s] shit”, and he was adamant that his guitar tech should communicate this detail to Metallica’s team. “My tech goes and talks to their guitar tech,” he explains. “Then my tech comes back like, ‘All right, come with me.’”

“Next thing you know… I get handed a Les Paul,” he continues. “I think it was one of Kirk Hammett’s Les Pauls. And [Metallica’s guitar tech] is like, ‘All right. Go.’”

Up until that point, Malakian hadn’t properly met Metallica. System Of A Down were the first openers of the evening, and there had been no opportunity to meet the stars of the tour. “I met Metallica on stage playing with them,” he reveals. “I’d never met them before – we were the first band. Nobody knows us.”

“You gotta understand – our band’s not big yet,” he emphasises. “I’m still a kid – I’m 22 years old! I can’t even believe that we’re even allowed to open up for Metallica. So this is all new to me.”

Suddenly, Malakian finds himself out on stage with his metal heroes. “I turn and I’m, like, ‘Hey – it’s Lars, it’s Kirk, it’s Jason Newsted,’” he says. “They’re, like, ‘What do you know?’ I go, ‘I don’t know… Master Of Puppets?’”

And, just like that, the band are counting in to perform one of Metallica’s biggest hits – but, without frontman Hetfield around, Malakian had a burning question on his mind. “I’m up there with Metallica playing Master Of Puppets in front of 60,000 people… and I’m, like, ‘Who’s gonna sing?’” the guitarist recalls.

Quickly, Malakian decides who is going to sing: him. “I said, ‘Fuck it, I’ll go sing!’” he explains. “And I sang. You would think we’d rehearsed it, but we didn’t rehearse it. And I didn’t even know it was gonna happen! And it happened.”

The fateful day was even captured on film, and you can see the band deliberating on-stage. Someone else even gets picked out of the crowd to perform with the band first, before Metallica decide to boot him off and invite Malakian out instead. Then, the System Of A Down guitarist and vocalist absolutely smashes it.

As he puts it, it was a true ‘pinch me’ moment. “I’m up there, and I’m playing Metallica with Metallica, in front of an audience where I would’ve been in the fucking cheap seats just three years ago,” he says.

The impromptu performance was so good that Metallica even asked Malakian to keep performing with them until Hetfield was well again. “I got off stage, and next thing you know, [Metallica’s team] are coming to me like, ‘Hey, James isn’t gonna be able to play for a few nights, [the band] want you to play with them,’” he explains.

Suddenly, Malakian was moving his suitcase out of a shoddy tour bus and into Metallica’s private jet. “They were, like, ‘Hey, get your shit from your bus, because you’re flying on the private jet with us now,” he recalls. “Oh, man. I’ll never forget it.”

Malakian went on to perform with the band for the following few dates. On 8 July, Malakian was even joined by bandmate Serj Tankian to help Metallica perform Mastertarium, as well as Korn’s Jonathan Davis emerging to perform One.

“Even though my band is where we’re at right now, it still brings goosebumps that I had a chance to experience that at that point of my career,” he concludes.

This year, System Of A Down are set to embark on a European arena tour, which will see them playing two nights at London’s Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in July. For more information, head to the band’s website.

The post “Next thing you know, I get handed one of Kirk Hammett’s Les Pauls!”: System Of A Down‘s Daron Malakian reflects on filling in for James Hetfield during Metallica‘s Summer Sanitarium tour appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Brazilian guitar virtuoso Mateus Asato has announced he’s ending his decade-long professional relationship with Suhr.

The quintessential social media guitar star, Asato has been with Suhr since 2013, launching a number of signature models with the brand since.

• READ MORE: “I know now that it’s not about competition”: Mateus Asato is ready to be an artist

“After 12 years of a very successful partnership, I’ve decided to part ways [with] my professional relationship with Suhr Guitars,” Asato writes in a new Instagram post. “My deepest gratitude to Mr. John, Kevin, Aura and Katelyn Suhr for everything you’ve done to me as a musician and person…

“Thank you so much Felipe Raposo [Brazilian Suhr Guitars representative] for being the bridge that started all of this,” he goes on (translated from Portuguese).

“And the biggest thanks to all Suhr employees who made this company so special and one of the greatest brands [in the] history of this instrument I passionately love. History was made. I will never forget this journey we built.”

View this post on Instagram

At the time of writing, it’s unclear where the 31-year-old will go next, but the move coincides with the imminent release of his debut album, which is expected some time in early 2026. So might we see a new partnership announcement with another guitar maker some time in the coming days or weeks?

Despite cultivating a million-strong following on Instagram – and a vibrant, decade-plus career working with A-list musicians including Bruno Mars, Jessie J, John Petrucci and Joe Satriani – Asato is still yet to release an album. But one is on the way, and soon.

Asato – the guitarist’s debut full-length outing – features singles Cryin’ and The Breakup Song, which can be heard below:

 

The road hasn’t always been plain sailing for Mateus Asato, who famously announced a hiatus from social media back in 2021 citing burnout, saying he had felt like a “rat in a maze”.

“It’s been 10 years of a lot of doubts and questions… and some identity crises about who I am in terms of music,” Asato told Guitar.com last year. 

“The album is definitely a journey through all the sides of Mateus. The Mateus who’s a sideman, Mateus as the Instagram boy, and then the Mateus that got more mature over the years. Who developed a different vision regarding music, regarding how I see guitar.”

The post Mateus Asato ends decade-long partnership with Suhr: “I will never forget this journey we built” appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Fender Musical Instruments Corporation (FMIC) today announced that its Board of Directors has appointed Edward “Bud” Cole as Chief Executive Officer and member of the FMIC Board of Directors. Cole will serve as CEO-Designate effective January 19, 2026, and will officially assume the CEO role on February 16, 2026. He succeeds Andy Mooney, who will retire from the company following a decade of transformative growth and innovation.

Cole currently serves as President of Fender Asia Pacific (APAC) and brings a multi-decade global career across consumer, lifestyle, luxury, and FMCG brands to the role. During his decade-long tenure at FMIC, Cole has shaped some of the company’s most significant growth initiatives, leading the expansion of Fender’s business across 14 countries in the APAC region.

A bilingual English/Japanese speaker and seasoned global operator, Cole has played a pivotal role in strengthening Fender’s presence worldwide, including launching Fender’s APAC headquarters in Tokyo and establishing full regional commercial and operational capabilities; building robust direct-to-dealer operations in Australia, resulting in a significant increase in efficiency, brand control, and distribution performance; and expanding Fender into mainland China and Korea, including developing direct-to-consumer (DTC) capability through e-commerce and driving long-term growth strategies across the region.

He also spearheaded the creation of the world’s first Fender Flagship retail experience in Harajuku, Tokyo, redefining Fender’s brick-and-mortar retail presence and consumer immersion, and developed a robust artist ecosystem across the APAC region, driving successful product innovation, including multiple Made-in-Japan launches that became standout global performers and strengthened Fender’s cultural influence and credibility throughout the region.

Before joining FMIC, Cole held senior leadership roles across several global lifestyle, luxury, and consumer brands — including Pernod Ricard, LVMH, QVC, and Ralph Lauren — where he led commercial expansion, brand development, and regional strategy across international markets. A visionary, who has conducted business in more than 60 countries, Cole’s global perspective has been shaped by a multi-decade career building and managing world-class brands at scale.

“Bud has been one of the most impactful leaders within our organization,” Mark Fukunaga, Executive Chairman of the FMIC Board. “He has a deep understanding of the Fender brand, our global players, and the commercial and operational foundation required to propel us into the future. His track record of building teams, expanding markets, and elevating Fender’s presence around the world makes him uniquely qualified to lead the next chapter of growth. On behalf of the Board, I also want to thank Andy Mooney for his leadership over the past decade and for the significant contributions he has made to the company.”

Since joining Fender in 2015, CEO Andy Mooney has more than doubled the size of the company and extended Fender’s worldwide leadership in the Musical Instruments category. Mooney championed product and marketing innovation at Fender and led the company's successful entry into subscription based digital software.

“Leading Fender has been a highlight of my career,” said Andy Mooney. “I'm deeply grateful for the creativity and commitment of the Fender teams around the world and proud of what we’ve accomplished. I’m excited to pass the baton on to Bud and confident that under his leadership, Fender will continue to inspire players for generations to come.”

A lifelong musician, Cole bought his first electric guitar — a Fender Made-in-Japan 1969 Thinline® Telecaster® reissue — as a teenager and still plays it today. His personal connection to Fender’s legacy and to the player community continues to shape his approach to leadership.

“To lead Fender is the honor of a lifetime,” said Edward “Bud” Cole. “This brand has been a part of my life since childhood, and I’m committed to ensuring Fender continues to empower players everywhere, from beginners picking up their first guitar to the artists shaping the sound of today and tomorrow. Together with our global teams, partners, and loyal community of players, we will write the next era of Fender’s history.”

Cole’s appointment marks the beginning of a new chapter for Fender as the company continues to expand its global footprint, deepen its commitment to players, and shape the future of music worldwide.

BzzzzKill has announced the launch of the Players Series, a new streamlined version of its innovative hum-reduction device engineered for Stratocaster-style guitars. Built around the same Smart Noise Reduction Coil™ architecture introduced in the company's debut product, the Players Series brings buzz-free single-coil performance to a wider audience with a modern, cost-efficient construction.

At $99 USD, the Players Series sells for approximately half the cost of the original BzzzzKill model. The Players Series virtually eliminates 60-cycle hum (50Hz in UK/EU) across all pickup positions while preserving the natural dynamics and clarity that define Strat-style tone. Like the original model released in 2025, installation is non-invasive, requires no power source, and leaves the guitar’s value intact. Installation remains fully reversible – no routing, active electronics, or pickup replacement needed.

Alongside the new Players Series, BzzzzKill is officially naming its original model the Custom Series. Built with hand-assembled vulcanized fibre flatwork, steel rods, and vintage-consistent cloth pullback wiring, the Custom Series remains the preferred choice for performing musicians, recording artists, and

custom builders, including Fender Custom Shop co-founder John Page, who is now integrating Custom Series BzzzzKills into his latest Artist Series Stratocasters.

BzzzzKill’s Players Series offers the same noise-reducing purpose in a modern, streamlined build featuring a precision-formed PETG structure and durable rubber-jacket wiring. Both series maintain compatibility with existing effects chains and operate passively in all pickup positions.

“We designed the Players Series to broaden access without compromising what makes BzzzzKill so special,” says inventor and co-founder Richard Moreton. “My greatest hope when I developed the original BzzzzKill was to bring it to every Strat player,” says Moreton. “I'm happy to see the Players Series taking us closer to that goal.”

With strong demand from guitarists worldwide, BzzzzKill is now preparing Players Series versions for Telecaster and other popular single-coil formats. As with current models, installation will remain fully reversible and will not require rerouting, active electronics, or pickup replacement.

The BzzzzKill Player Series carries a street price of $99. For more information visit www.bzzzzkill.com.

Singer-songwriter Jason Sinay, maybe best known for his work alongside Mike Campbell in Dirty Knobs, joins us to talk about the most foundational rock ’n’ roll guitarist of them all, the man who started the ball rolling, Chuck Berry. When it comes to his guitar playing, his influence can be heard across all styles. Without his licks, his songs, his vocal phrasing, who knows what path the electric guitar would have taken!

While we’re at it, we get some cool Keith Richards and Neil Young stories from Jason, and we dream about what it would be like to have those guys step onto our own stage.

Thanks to our sponsor!

This Episode Brought to You By: www.premierguitar.com

gibson.com

Fender has appointed Edward “Bud” Cole as its new CEO, with outgoing CEO Andy Mooney retiring after a decade in the top job.

Cole is set to serve as CEO-Designate from 19 January, and will officially assume the role of CEO when Mooney steps down on 16 February 2026.

A bilingual English/Japanese speaker, Edward “Bud” Cole has served as President of Fender Asia Pacific (APAC) for over 10 years, and overseen some of the company’s most significant growth initiatives, leading the expansion of the Fender business into 14 countries across the APAC region.

• READ MORE: Fender unveils its first consumer headphones and speakers – including wireless cans with up to 100 hours of battery life

During his tenure at FMIC (Fender Musical Instruments Corporation), Cole – who has previously worked in commercial expansion, brand development and strategy at luxury brands including Ralph Lauren and Pernod Ricard – was the brains behind the opening of Fender’s APAC headquarters and flagship store in Tokyo, Japan.

With the flagship store – still, at the time of writing, Fender’s only dedicated retail space in the world – Cole sought to redefine the brand’s approach to “brick-and-mortar retail presence and consumer immersion”.

Outgoing CEO Andy Mooney hinted when the store opened in 2023 that it could herald the opening of more Fender brick-and-mortar stores, saying, “The Tokyo store perhaps will be used as a model to create franchise retail throughout Southeast Asia.”

And now that the Tokyo store’s mastermind Edward “Bud” Cole is in charge of the company’s global operations, might we even see physical Fender stores opening up outside of the Asia Pacific region? Only time will tell…

Credit: Fender Japan

Elsewhere during Cole’s time as President of Fender Asia Pacific, he has helped establish full regional commercial and operational capabilities, built “robust” direct-to-dealer operations in Australia, overseen the expansion of Fender into mainland China and Korea, and helped develop the brand’s direct-to-consumer capability through e-commerce.

Cole has also played a pivotal role in numerous Made-in-Japan launches, which have helped strengthen Fender’s cultural influence and credibility throughout the Asia Pacific region.

“Bud has been one of the most impactful leaders within our organisation,” says Mark Fukunaga, Executive Chairman of the FMIC Board.

“He has a deep understanding of the Fender brand, our global players, and the commercial and operational foundation required to propel us into the future. His track record of building teams, expanding markets, and elevating Fender’s presence around the world makes him uniquely qualified to lead the next chapter of growth.

“On behalf of the Board, I also want to thank Andy Mooney for his leadership over the past decade and for the significant contributions he has made to the company.”

“Leading Fender has been a highlight of my career,” says outgoing CEO Andy Mooney. “I’m deeply grateful for the creativity and commitment of the Fender teams around the world and proud of what we’ve accomplished. I’m excited to pass the baton on to Bud and confident that under his leadership, Fender will continue to inspire players for generations to come.”

Aside from being a deeply accomplished businessman with decades of experience, Edward “Bud” Cole is also a lifelong musician, having bought his first electric guitar – a Made-in-Japan 1969 Thinline Telecaster reissue – as a teenager, and still owning it today.

Credit: Naoki Tsuruta

As Cole tells Guitar World in a new interview, he actually tried – and failed – to get a job as a PR assistant at Fender straight out of college. “My very first real job interview out of college was with Fender as a PR assistant,” he says. “I didn’t get the job!” He says that now he’s about to step into the role of CEO of the whole company, “everything really has come full circle for me”.

“To lead Fender is the honour of a lifetime,” he says. “This brand has been a part of my life since childhood, and I’m committed to ensuring Fender continues to empower players everywhere, from beginners picking up their first guitar to the artists shaping the sound of today and tomorrow. Together with our global teams, partners, and loyal community of players, we will write the next era of Fender’s history.”

Learn more at Fender.

The post “The honour of a lifetime”: Fender appoints Edward “Bud” Cole as new CEO, as Andy Mooney announces retirement appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Led Zeppelin bass player John Paul Jones is auctioning off a trove of studio-used equipment, saying he no longer needs it and he’d rather it fall into the hands of musicians who will put it to good use.

Heading up the collection is a Guild Thunderbass amplifier, which Jones used with Them Crooked Vultures, and ended up leaving to sit at Foo Fighters frontman/former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl’s house.

John Paul Jones was a member of Them Crooked Vultures alongside Grohl and Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme.

• READ MORE: “You wake up, lay on the floor and roll around laughing for a couple of minutes”: Sammy Hagar on what it was like selling his tequila company for $80M

According to Soundgas – the auctioneer in charge of the sale – the amp currently has blown speakers after “someone borrowed it”. It says it will “check and report back”. Otherwise, the amp is said to be in “good overall condition” aside from some road wear and other visible marks. The amp is estimated to sell for between £1,200 and £1,400.

Credit: Soundgas

The collection spans well beyond guitar and bass gear though; other items include a pair of Yamaha NS-10M speakers, a Simmons SDS V electronic drum kit, a rare ‘60s Arbiter Soundimension echo unit, and a pair of Akai digital samplers, among a bunch of other rack-mount effects units.

Soundgas points out that none of the items in the auction have a connection to JPJ’s time in Led Zeppelin, and are instead taken from his own private studio.

“John is still very active musically – writing, recording, and performing – but no longer requires so much studio equipment – most of which he has owned from new,” Soundgas writes.

“He feels it should be in the hands of people who will put it to good use, so it is offered here without formal provenance, with the intention that it continues to be used as intended.”

You can take a look at all the items available over at Soundgas.

The post Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones is auctioning off a bunch of studio gear – including a blown amp he left at Dave Grohl’s house appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Last year, Iron Maiden’s Adrian Smith claimed that only a “tiny percentage” of musicians are able to live off of music alone. A 2023 study suggested the same, revealing almost half of UK artists struggle to earn from their music, often only raking in an average of £14,000 a year. Even Sammy Hagar used to stress over money – that is, until he sold his tequila company Cabo Wabo.

In a new interview with Classic Rock, the ex-Van Halen star reflects on how rock ‘n’ roll alone wasn’t enough to ensure his financial stability. In his case, selling off 80% of his tequila brand was how he earned the big bucks. “I sold my tequila company for 80 million dollars…” he recalls. “That money changed my life.”

• READ MORE: How Wheatus distorted an acoustic guitar to make Teenage Dirtbag an early 2000s classic

Despite earning a respectable amount through music, Hagar claims that the explains that the deal allowed him to stop worrying about money. “With music you’re always insecure,” he explains. “You’re always thinking: ‘Well I’m rich now, but it could all end tomorrow.’ I grew up poor. I didn’t ever want to be poor again.”

Hagar first launched the tequila company back in 1996, nurturing it for 11 years before selling a majority of his shares to Gruppo Campari in 2007. He would later go on to sell his remaining 20% of the company in 2010 for a further $11 million.

For most people, $80 million is an inconceivable amount of money. When the first sum of $80 million was deposited into Hagar’s bank account, he explains how it felt surreal. “I’ll tell you what it feels like to wake up with $80 million in the bank… you wake up, you get out of bed, you lay on the floor and you roll around laughing for a couple of minutes,” he says.

“Then you get up and take a piss and have your coffee… and then you roll around on the floor laughing for a couple more minutes,” he continues. “And you think: ‘How the fuck did I do that?’”

Of course, a hefty sum in your bank account can result in acquiring more expensive tastes. “I like Ferraris, I like a nice house and fine wines,” Hagar explains. “I couldn’t live the way I’m still living right now if it hadn’t been for that [deal].’

He expands on his love of Ferraris elsewhere in the interview, notably reminiscing on when he “was driving to Lake Tahoe and doing a hundred and sixty miles per hour in my LaFerrari”.

This indulgent love of fast cars has been a persistent theme in Hagar’s life. Even before making it big, the musician was indulging in the rush of high speeds. “Before I wrote the song I Can’t Drive 55, I had 34 speeding tickets and my license taken away three times and was paying $135,000 a year for insurance – and that was in 1984!” he explained on his 2024 AETV biography special.

Of course, fame has helped cut back on the speeding ticket front. “I’ve been stopped by the cops for driving too fast, but they always let me off because I’m Sammy Hagar,” he tells Classic Rock. “I’ve been stopped 40 times, maybe more, and I’ve had two tickets.”

Despite his expensive lifestyle, Hagar hasn’t forgotten where he came from. He formed the Hagar Family Foundation in 2008, and, to this day, continues to support numerous charities and donate to local foodbanks while touring.

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The post “You wake up, lay on the floor and roll around laughing for a couple of minutes”: Sammy Hagar on what it was like selling his tequila company for $80M appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Often, the only way to help another person understand what you’re getting at is to show them something. And that’s how Dry Cleaning’s Tom Dowse ended up playing Botch’s classic mathcore face-melter We Are The Romans to Wales’ leading psych-pop auteur Cate Le Bon, who was producing the band’s new record Secret Love at the bucolic Black Box studio in the Loire Valley. Her immediate response? “Nah, absolutely not,” Dowse recalls with a laugh.

• READ MORE: How Wheatus distorted an acoustic guitar to make Teenage Dirtbag an early 2000s classic

But the guitarist soon found that Le Bon has earned her rep as someone who isn’t out to put limits on things. Soon, she was reconfiguring the spirit of Dave Knudson’s gear madness into something that would make sense in Dry Cleaning’s world of oddball melody and guitar skronk. “There’s one track on We Are The Romans where he used four DL-4s playing into each other,” Dowse says. “But I tried to do it with a Boss DD-3, using the hold function. I was making separate loops and then we went back into the control room and chopped them up really brutally.”

You can hear the fruits of this particular labour in a guitar breakdown following the second chorus of Rocks, a song that neatly encapsulates Secret Love’s abrasive spirit by being both furiously hooky and ferociously weird. “Each bar is completely isolated from the last one,” Dowse elaborates. “It’s a hard cut. Cate put a lot of effort into making it work, and it did work. She could have shut that down, but she let me have a go.”

Having broken out with the sardonic post-punk of 2021’s New Long Leg, Dry Cleaning have continually reframed their ambitions. On Secret Love we see more of what makes them tick than ever before, with Florence Shaw’s peerlessly droll spoken-word running alongside Todd Rundgren-esque piano stabs, Richard Dawson-adjacent fingerpicking, brittle no wave leads and the dangerously danceable interplay between drummer Nick Buxton and bassist Lewis Maynard.

Image: Max Miechowski

They have arrived at this point by allowing even more of themselves to bubble to the surface in hours-long writing sessions that sound from the outside like egalitarian jams. “We’re all equal songwriters,” Dowse observes. “You don’t have a dominant person, you explore what you’re interested in.”

As reliant as they are on the chemistry that exists between the band’s four members, though, they’re not insular. Secret Love is as much about finding other voices that might create a new harmony, leading them to ditch their Peckham rehearsal space for a spell demoing ideas at Jeff Tweedy’s Chicago studio the Loft, where they crossed paths with Le Bon during her stint producing Wilco’s Cousin record.

“One of the things we tried to do there was play a bit more casually,” Dowse says. “The way Tom Schick, the engineer, works is that everything is always mic’d up. Jeff goes there every day to write. I was thinking, ‘While we’re working this out, I’ll sketch it.’ Tom had captured all of it, even incidental things, and he pieced it together really quickly. By the time you’d put the guitar down, he’d mixed it, and you’re like, ‘Fuck, that sounds really good.’ Usually, you’d bug out on mistakes – I’m not a very technical guitarist, I’m quite sloppy – but this is the first time I realised those are the good bits. I really thought about that when we were working with Cate.”

Once they’d left Chicago, there were different itches to scratch. “You’re working with the engineer’s taste, and I wanted to go much more extreme,” is how Dowse puts it. That’s how Dry Cleaning ended up in Dublin, throwing things at Sonic Studios’ walls with the help of Gilla Band’s Alan Duggan and Daniel Fox. “We had a song called Blood,” he recalls. “It starts with a jangly guitar – Johnny Marr is a huge influence – but we couldn’t get it to go anywhere.

“Gilla Band pushed to get an industrial edge on the drums. I thought they’d probably shred all the guitars and start again, but they didn’t. They focused on the drums and made a palette that’s really different to what the guitars are doing. Once they did, things started to open up. Cate heard that and really liked it, and it seeped into a lot of other songs.”

Image: Max Miechowski

Alongside taking that spirit over to France with them, Dowse sought out a guitar that he’d first encountered in Chicago to make the trip. “Between Jeff and the rest of the band there are about 600 electric guitars and hundreds of acoustic guitars, and they’re all accessible,” Dowse says of his time at the Loft.

“Racks and racks of pedals, all these amps. I sat in Nels Cline’s chair playing one of Jeff’s custom SGs or his olive green ES-335s. The one that really caught me, though, was a Danelectro 1449. He had two lipstick pickups in it. I played that so much. It was a bit of a lightning bolt moment – these crap sounds sat really well with everything else.”

In particular, they took up room where Dowse might have immediately turned to his SG in the past. “A lot of the heavier riffs were done through a ‘70s Hi-Watt with an Expandora I bought in Japan,” Dowse says. “This is the third version of it, which is the best one. When you put that through a Hi-Watt with those shitty lipsticks and a guitar that is basically plastic, it sounded so good.

“For a lot of the harsher sounds, Cate was very keen for me not to use my SG. Usually, we went to the Danelectro so it kept a bit of crapness, it wasn’t too macho or something. I think she was really keen for it not to be really hench. It had to be more unhinged.”

Throughout the course of our chat, Dowse reels off influences with the speed and zeal of someone who really, truly loves this stuff. On the unhinged end of the spectrum there’s the dystopian punk of Helios Creed’s work in Chrome, on the noisy front there’s a deep love of Kevin Shields and My Bloody Valentine. But there are a few that stick out when he thinks of Secret Love – read on to discover the five formative guitar sounds that drove the record.

The trashy brilliance of Moses Brown and Peace De Résistance

“A big influence was Berlin-period Bowie, Lou Reed, all those characters. That bit of glam distortion with a chimey guitar over the top, even an acoustic, that’s really bummed out. There’s an album Lullaby for the Debris by a guy called Moses Brown, who has a project called Peace De Résistance. We listened to that a lot, just for how loose and trashy it was. I used my Laney AOR 50 quite a lot for that kind of thing. He seems like a good amalgam, he was in a post-punk band from Texas called Institute that was inspiring, and then he’s gone down this Lou Reed route. That was a big touchstone.”

Jimi Hendrix’s take on The Star-Spangled Banner

“I wanted a really fucked sound. I was thinking a lot about Jimi Hendrix playing The Star-Spangled Banner, and how fucking crazy it was. I put that performance of guitar up there with any 20th century artistic gesture. I immediately think of those Jasper Johns paintings of the American flag, covered in this thick, gloopy paint. It’s not a patriotic thing he was doing. He was criticising Vietnam. He was a vet, you know? He’s criticising America by doing that solo. I just love how expressive that was. That made me up my game on Hit My Head All Day. I wanted something that had more space in it.”

The weirdo listenability of Guided By Voices

“When we wrote Joy, I was thinking a lot about Guided By Voices. There’s a guitar-pop sound that they did, like an approximation of the British Invasion bands. It was so immediate. If you think about their songs, they’re like a minute long — they get straight to the point. I can hear the Kinks in it, and I absolutely love the Kinks. There’s an album called Half Smiles of the Decomposed, it’s got Girls of Wild Strawberries on it. I wanted Joy to be like that. I wanted this refreshing-sounding chord sequence, even those little licks in the chorus. Actually, for once, I wanted to write something that sounded fun, something that’ll work at a festival.”

Tuning into the Rolling Stones

“The one [big] thing for me as a guitarist over the past five years is finally understanding the Stones. Nick said that he thought I sounded the most Keith on My Soul Half Pint and Cruise Ship Designer. I’m trying to think, ‘What would Keith do?’ Other than the drugs, obviously. What I noticed was that he’s like a party started on the guitar but once he gets going it’s very even-sounding. There are no peaks and troughs, and that’s why he works so well with Mick Taylor. Even when Mick does a ripping solo, it doesn’t jump out of the mix. The song starts, they get a vibe going, and you don’t want it to stop. I was listening to Sticky Fingers — I think that’s their best record — and on Can’t You Hear Me Knocking it’s got those toasted valves. I had my Champ with me. It’s not as good as those ones but that’s definitely something I was going for.”

Anarcho-punk’s unusual chords

“The thing I like about anarcho-punk is they use much weirder chords, they’re not doing the straightforward punk of the time. Icons of Filth have a song called Mentally Murdered and it’s drier, you know? I think what’s happened to hardcore and punk as production has gone on is that it’s lost a little bit of that. Early ‘80s hardcore, like Bad Brains and SS Decontrol, it’s like Keith Richards joined those bands, just how dry it sounds. You have to play hard. There’s no studio trickery in it. I like modern hardcore, but it doesn’t have quite the same character.”

Dry Cleaning’s Secret Love is out on January 9 through 4AD.

The post From playing Botch to Cate Le Bon to finally understanding the Stones, the oddball guitar story of Dry Cleaning’s new album, Secret Love appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

By: Rick Landers

PART 1

PART 2

Guitar International and the masterful singer-songwriter, producer, author and music historian-presenter, Rod MacDonald, continue our conversation about Rod’s music career, including challenges, lessons learned, and reinventing or re-strategizing his approach to changes in the music business and life.

If you missed the beginning of our conversation, please go to PART 1 HERE!

“Politics, passion, and a sense of humor” The Village Voice

“A poet with a lot on his mind who has never allowed himself to make points at the expense of making music.” Boston Globe

“MacDonald’s songs combine poetic vision and journalistic insight.” Dirty Linen

CHECK OUT ROD’S 2026 CALENDAR! 

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Rod MacDonald: I’m the president of the Greenwich Village Folk Festival, LLC, but I think that the music that I actually compose and record is much more contemporary and diverse than folk music. As folk music is seen by most people, it’s a very finite kind of thing, even the folk music world. So within the folk music world, for example, I see the playlists of folk DJs. There’s a bulletin board where the folk DJs all publish what they play.

I look at it, I subscribe to it, I’m interested. Part of my job with booking the Greenwich Village Folk Festival is to pay attention to who’s getting hurt around the country. And it’s mostly limited to a very finite kind of sound. Sparse, acoustic rural in a way. And very little of what I actually do would fit that playlist. But because I’m not on a corporate record label, most of the other outlets aren’t available on a certain level.

Things like Spotify is actually a godsend to someone like me. Even if you’re not marketed or promoted by any big corporation, people can still stumble on your music and hear it. So I guess that I feel that a part of me is involved with folk music, but it certainly doesn’t describe all of what I do.

But, I do like folk music as a vehicle for song. And I think that some of the best songs that I hear come from people who are somewhat similar to myself, folk singers that love contemporary music as well.

Rick: I was reading about folk music and a term that I had not seen before for that genre is Folk Adjacent. Have you heard of that before?

Rod MacDonald: Folk adjacent?

Rick: Yeah.

Rod MacDonald: No, I haven’t, but it’s not a bad idea.

Starting in about April of 2020, I played every Sunday night for a year and a half. And after I’d been doing it for a little while, I started thinking, well, I really should play some new songs. So, I started trying to write a song each week. And some of them stuck. Some of ’em were pretty good, I thought timely, and that gave me a lot of new material for the cd. And then when we started working by May of 2022, when we started the actual recording process, I had, I don’t know, 10 or 15 songs to work from.

I teach a music history course in a big lifelong learning program here in Florida, for seniors. It’s the biggest lifelong learning program in the United States. It’s kind of the very first big one. And I’ve been the music Americana instructor since 2006, and I do lectures on famous musicians.

And it’s almost a given that almost every artist who’s been hugely successful runs into a situation where they want to expand their palette and the people that are their financial apparatus, the record labels, the managers, all tell them, “Oh, you can’t do it.” Even their audience, I mean, Dylan is a famous example of somebody who actually had to endure a couple of years of boos from his own audience to get where he wanted to go.

But, it’s not really unusual at all. Ray Charles started out doing R&B for Atlantic Records, and then they didn’t want him to do what he wanted to do, which was to do country music his way. He loved country music, but he wanted to play it his way. So, he changed record labels and had the biggest hits of his career. The music history is full of examples of artists who wanted to be more than they were pigeonholed as.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And I’m sure that’s true of many of the singer songwriters in folk music; that folk is kind of an umbrella term. And yet, Mark Moss, the editor of Sing Out magazine, who is a good friend of mine, once said that the one thing he wasn’t interested in for Sing Out was singer songwriters who couldn’t afford a band. He said, “Just because you’re playing solo doesn’t make it folk music. “And I think he was totally right, that that’s true.

But at the same time, it also means, “Where are you going? Where are you going to go if you’re going to play this music?” Because if you’re not on a commercial record label that’s going to support your musical aspirations, you’re going to have to figure it out yourself.

And then you have to find your audience. And so what you often have is people like myself who record with a full band, but when we go out on tour, we pretty much play solo. Or I go out a lot with Mark Dan playing bass, and we’re pretty good. We’re a pretty good act. But you don’t get to hear, we don’t present my albums’ (songs) the way they sound, when you play them.

Rick: And I don’t think people should expect you to sound like your albums when you’re out playing solo.

Rod MacDonald: Well, it’s a good thing if they don’t, because for the most part, they’re not going to get it.

Rick: And you also have to split the pie with four or five other people, so you end up with hardly anything. So, how do you survive with the band? Pretty different type of thing.

Rod MacDonald: Yeah, and I played with a band in the late 1970s. I played regularly with a band from about 1976 to the late Eighties around New York City. I played with a band, and at one point we would go up and play weekends in Hartford in this big club for hundreds of people about once a month. And those are really fun times. But, as you get a little older traveling around in a van, everybody’s got their lives, people get married, have kids.

The idea of driving around the country, sleeping in the back of a van with the amps and speakers all around me, no, I’m not going to do that at this point in my life. So, I record the way I aspire to record the versions of the songs that I would really love to hear and then take them out and play them, what I jokingly refer to as the Lonesome Rod Show.

Sometimes, I just go out and sing the songs with my guitar. I think for the most part, the audiences that come to see me are okay with that. Every once in a while when I get to play with other musicians, people kind of go like, “Whoa, that’s a whole other side of you!”  Sometimes they’ll say, “We didn’t even know that that existed.”

I’ll say, “Geeze, I’ve been playing and listening to rock and roll and band music all my life. It’s not really that big a stretch.  You have to have a group of people that are willing to work to get the music together, to rehearse it, to learn it.

I do concerts here in South Florida for the Lifelong Learning Program a couple times a year, and we’ll take an artist’s entire catalog and boil it and teach it, learn it, learn it in three rehearsals, and then play it in front of hundreds of people a couple of times. We’ve done a huge array of music doing that. We’ve done The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Dylan, Paul Simon, and Art Garfunkel. We did a concert of Eric Clapton and Jimmy Buffett and Van Morrison Tunes.

Last year, this past year. We did Gordon Lightfoot and Jimmy Buffett with a full band, five piece band, and it’s really fun. It’s kind of like… almost a fantasy. You’ve loved this music all your life. We’re going to pay you enough to learn it and play it a couple times. But, I wouldn’t want to go on the road and do it necessarily. even I got offered. We did a Leonard Cohen show and it was really wonderful. I love Leonard Cohen’s songs, and also a lot of the musical arrangements to his songs are really beautiful.

At this point in my life, it’s not what I want to do, but I enjoyed doing that concert

Rick: And you’ve got plenty of songs at this point to go on the road and play for two or three hours without a problem, I would think.

Rod MacDonald: Yeah, but the problem is,  can’t you draw enough people to pay a band?

Rick: True. That’s true.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Rod MacDonald: I’m not a young guy hustling into the music business. I’m not signed to a label. I don’t have promotion people and the “Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man”, follow me around and any of that kind of stuff anymore. I  kind of gave that up years ago and have been on my own.

So, the idea that I’d go to Detroit and Chicago and Omaha and Seattle and draw a big enough crowd to be able to pay a band to do all that, it would take a real businessman to organize that and I’m not that guy.

Rick: And to get a label, from what I understand it, you’re a lawyer, so you’d probably be able to understand the lingo in the contracts. I think having a label, I’m not sure is such a great thing. I interviewed a guy who was picked up in a new RV and I knew he hadn’t had a great paying job and he ended up owing his label a ton of money.

Rod MacDonald: I’ve talked to some guys that have ended up in that position of owing their record company a lot of money. I never ended up in that position, fortunately, and I have done okay. I have a fairly modest career, but I think it’s okay.

Somebody asked me recently on a radio interview, how I feel about that and I said, “Well, I’ve never had to go to rehab. I’m not divorced. There’s some benefits to staying within yourself. On the other hand, you always dream of your music reaching more people than are available on a person to person basis. And hopefully some people who read this interview will say, “Hey, I’d like to check this guy out.”  That’s a good thing.

Rick: Yeah. Well what about synching? Have you had any songs that have been in movies or commercials? There seems to be some bucks there.

Rod MacDonald: I suppose there are. The fact is that I don’t really spend a lot of time on the business end of this stuff. If there’s a fault in my career, that’s probably it, that I’m not a very aggressive business person. I don’t go out and look for those opportunities. I just don’t, don’t have time. I don’t want to spend my time doing that. So I guess either you can call it laziness or lack of engagement. I mean, I get emails every day, on how to navigate the new digital wilderness, “Sign up for this service and we’ll do this for you, sign up for that, blah, blah, blah.”

But basically, every once in a while I’ve tried one or two of those on a trial basis and they don’t really do any of those things. What they do is tell you a lot of things that you should do, which I just don’t have the time and ability to navigate my way through 550 Spotify playlists on an individual basis, trying to get my music heard.

If I could send it to 550 playlists in one blast, I would, or I have maybe, and that’s probably where I am getting air played, but I just don’t want to sit there and spend my day writing emails to 550 people or anything like that.

Rick: But what you do with your time has to be, since you’re a singer songwriter, you’ve written at least one book that I know of and you put on a presentations, workshops, whatever. So I would say you do have the discipline, but your discipline is really sort of vectored into actually having several revenue streams.

Rod MacDonald: My dad was an older dad and had started to decline health-wise and I wanted to help my mom take care of him. My dad did not want to leave home and go into a facility just because of his health.

Still very cognizant and he didn’t want to leave my mom, but she couldn’t take care of him physically. And I had been living with my wife, Nicole. We weren’t married yet, but we had been together for almost a year and we decided to move to Florida together and take care of my dad. But, then that meant getting off the road.

I’d been on the road for about 10 years by that time, driving around the country in a rental car, playing concerts. I had an agent. I was on Shaky records. I kind of gave all that up. I was on an upward trajectory probably career wise, but I gave all that up and I don’t regret it. I think it was a good thing to do. It’s given me a more normal life and probably less visibility as an artist, but it’s been a good thing to do.

And so I had to figure out how to make a living without being on the road, because you can only play your own songs in the town you live in so many times a year, you really can’t do that. So I learned. So I started doing a bunch of different things and at Lifelong Learning, being an instructor there came to me from playing this one club I was playing. I played with an Irish trio sometimes part-time here in South Florida.

I still do actually. I’ve been working with this same woman for 30 years and we were at that time playing like 40 weekends a year at this one Irish club, which was a pretty good gig and paid well. And they never objected if I sang one of my songs, any of my songs. So it was an okay situation. Then this woman came in and I didn’t even know there was a Lifelong Learning program. She said that there was, and she would like to introduce me to the director of it.

I went and met that person and then the next thing I knew they were asking me to teach a class. And that’s turned into very steady work and really interesting work, a lot of research and a lot of video editing. But I have learned a tremendous amount from it about artists that I’ve admired and music that I’ve always loved.

And one of the things that was really cool about it was the director of the program said, “We don’t want you just to teach what you already know. What we like our instructors to do is to take a general field that they’re well versed in. Then pick specific topics that they’d like, to know more about themselves.

Rick: Good idea.

Rod MacDonald: And go out and do the research and you’ll still be enthusiastic. So, you’ll bring that enthusiasm to your classes. Interesting. And so I do that and I’ve gone out and done lectures on probably a couple hundred different artists, including People that I always kind of loved but never really had the chance to learn that much about. And it’s really great.

And it’s also led to a lot of other situations where private communities will call me up and say, “Can you come do a lecture for us?” And I’ll say, “Okay, what do you want me to do a lecture about?” And they’ll look at the list of the lectures that I’ve already prepared and they’ll pick a couple topics and I’ll go talk to them and show ’em the videos that I’ve prepared. I’ll go talk to ’em for an hour and a half. And that’s led to another kind of income stream. So, I’ve been able to support my family by doing these diverse things. And then I still do, I don’t know, 50 nights a year of my own songs probably, which is fun too.

BONUS VIDEO “HEAL THE WORLD”

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you missed the beginning of our conversation, please go to PART 1 HERE!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Peterson introduces StroboVUE

Boutique effects company Nuclear Audio has introduced their debut pedal: the Fission Drive is two drives in one pedal, each acting on different parts of your guitar or bass signal.

With the Fission Drive you can split your signal into highs and lows at a frequency you select, then drive them each separately – from subtle breakup to thick distortion. Apply separate outboard effects to each channel using the independent effects loops. Use the recombined signal from the output jack or just use the send jacks from the effects loops to drive separate rigs – or use all three.

Nuclear Audio’s unique approach to clipping, not based on any previous circuits, smoothly and dynamically transitions between clean, soft clipping, and hard clipping, providing unparalleled responsiveness and dynamics while maintaining exceptional clarity.

Fission Drive highlights include:

• Separate drives for highs and lows, each with their own gain and level controls
• High/Low gain switch on each drive channel
• Control the frequency where the high and low channels are divided
• Post-drive effects loop send/return jacks for each channel
• Notch switch enables an aggressive scoop at the selected split frequency
• True bypass on/off stomp switch

The Nuclear Audio Fission Drive is available now for $300 street price from www.nuclear-audio.com and select retailers.

To get to a level of guitar proficiency possessed by blues maestro Marcus King, you’d think you’d have to be practicing around the clock. But as King tells Guitar World in its new print issue, he actually prefers to play just about anything else – while at home, at least.

The 29-year-old ace explains that guitar playing is so deeply rooted within him that playing other instruments is actually beneficial when he comes back to his main instrument.

• READ MORE: “It’s not puppet show Megadeth”: Megadeth’s final tour won’t feature appearances by the band’s many former members

“When I’m at home, I don’t like to touch the guitar,” he says. “I play a lot of piano, which I write on. Or I’ll sit and I’ll play my pedal steel guitar or my fiddle, banjo, ukulele – anything but the guitar. If I do pick up a guitar, it’s a gut-string, fretless number.

“The guitar is something that I’m so familiar with. It’s like riding a bike or speaking the English language. If I moved abroad and only spoke Spanish for six months, it’s not like I would forget how to speak English. Guitar is so deeply rooted in me.”

It’s certainly true that taking time out of any creative endeavour often means you come back to it with a refreshed creative spark. Marcus King explains that the idea of being a musician first – not just a guitarist – was instilled in him by a book by bass virtuoso Victor Wooten.

“I like to play different instruments, and it helps my playing when I go back to the guitar. I read Victor Wooten’s book [The Music Lesson] and he harped on about the importance of being a musician, not a bass player, and I’ve always been influenced by that idea.

“It’s a holy experience to be able to sit at a guitar and say exactly what I have on my mind.”

Marcus King’s latest album Darling Blue arrived last year. Check out its lead single Honky Tonk Hell below.

The post “Anything but the guitar”: Marcus King claims he never plays guitar at home – and thinks it makes him a better musician appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Dave Mustaine didn’t think he’d make it this far. Not the 40 years, not the 17 albums, certainly not the moment he’d be sitting down to talk about Megadeth’s final studio record. But here we are, more than four decades removed from that first gig at Ruthie’s Inn in Berkeley, California (February 17, 1984, to be exact), where the ceiling was so low “you could touch it from the stage,” and Mustaine was still figuring out if he even wanted to be a singer.

Could he have imagined that, in 2025, Megadeth would still be his band? “I didn’t think I was gonna live this long, honestly,” Mustaine admits during a video call, his voice still recovering from a bout of bronchitis that plagued him throughout a recent tour of Europe and the U.K. with Disturbed. Now 64, he’s dealing with health challenges that would have sidelined most musicians years ago—throat cancer, a “fused” neck, radial nerve damage in his arm. But he’s still here, still playing, still shredding. And that first Megadeth show is etched in his memory with remarkable clarity. “The history of that band was, we liked to party,” he recalls. “Ruthie’s was also a jazz club, so we had that temptation running through the band.” They played with drummer Lee Rausch—“I don’t know what happened to Lee, he was a good kid”—that night, and the lineup was still in flux. On guitar alongside Mustaine was Kerry King, on loan from Slayer, and Mustaine hadn’t even fully committed to singing yet. That decision didn’t come until bassist Dave Ellefson asked him why he wasn’t handling vocals. “I said, ‘Because I don’t want to—and that should be good enough for you,’” Mustaine recalls with a laugh. “But I also didn’t wanna hurt the guy’s feelings, ’cause Dave was younger and looked up to me. So I said, ‘Okay, I’ll try it.’ In a weird way, I have David Ellefson to thank for my singing career.”

Fast forward through the decades—through 1986’s Peace Sells... But Who’s Buying?, through 1990’s Rust In Peace, through 12 Grammy nominations and one win, through lineup changes and personal demons conquered—and Mustaine finds himself at an unexpected crossroads. The band’s latest album, simply titled Megadeth, will mark their 17th and final studio effort.

The decision wasn’t made lightly, and it wasn’t made in a single moment. “I would still keep going if I was not battling these things,” Mustaine explains, referring to his ongoing health struggles. “But I just don’t want to go out onstage when I’m not my best. There were many nights on the Disturbed tour where I was in full-blown bronchitis, hopped up on antibiotics and steroids to get rid of the inflammation. That doesn’t feel good. I’m not a guy that likes being sick.”

“I didn’t think I was gonna live this long, honestly.”

The recording process itself proved physically grueling. Working with producer Chris Rakestraw at various points throughout 2024, Mustaine and his current lineup—virtuosic Finnish guitarist Teemu Mäntysaari, Belgian drummer Dirk Verbeuren, and bassist James LoMenzo—did sessions in marathon stretches. “We did about four weeks straight, 12-hour days,” Mustaine recalls. “And I told my management, ‘I don’t know how much longer I can do this.’ My hands were throbbing and my back was hurting from sitting up for that long. What I remember during some of those sessions was torture, when they make people sit for long periods of time.”

Yet despite the physical toll—and the weightiness of knowing this would be Megadeth’s final statement—there was an openness and fluidity to the sessions. The songs were numbered rather than titled during recording—“Tipping Point,” the album’s explosive opener, was “song number nine”—because Mustaine changed titles so many times. “Going into the studio, I don’t really ever have a plan,” he says. “I have songs and we go in to record them, but I think open-mindedness going into the studio has been really good for us. A lot of times you’ll be working on a song and you’ll get an idea, and then you’ll have a completely different song come out of it.”

STUDIO GEAR

Guitars

• Gibson Dave Mustaine Flying V EXP
• Gibson Flying V with Evertune bridge

Amps

• Marshall JVM410HJS Joe Satriani Edition
• Marshall 1960DM Dave Mustaine 4x12 cabinet
• Mesa Boogie 4x12 cabinet
• Neve Brent Averill 1272 preamp (no EQ, no FX)

Effects

• TWA Chemical Z overdrive
• MXR Phase 90
• MXR Flanger
• Fortin ZUUL+ noise gate
• Source Audio EQ2
• Peterson StroboStomp HD tuner
• Peterson StroboRack tuner
• Korg DTR-1 rackmount tuner

Picks & Strings

• Dunlop medium picks
• Gibson Dave Mustaine strings, signature gauge (.010-.052)

That openness extended to his bandmates. “Dirk wrote music. James wrote music. Teemu wrote music,” Mustaine notes. “Even our producer chimed in a couple times. Good producers are supposed to do that.” The democratic approach reflects both his confidence in his current lineup and his recognition that fresh perspectives keep the music vital. “I believe with James and Dirk and Teemu’s ideas, this record had a lot of really fresh ideas. Obviously I have my fingerprints on it, but we’re a band.”

The album’s 11 tracks find Megadeth operating with deadly precision—economical, direct, savage. “Tipping Point” kicks off with a blistering guitar solo that gives way to Mustaine’s unmistakable snarl. “I Don’t Care” channels punk fury into defiant aggression. “Let There Be Shred” celebrates guitar virtuosity with mythic, apocalyptic imagery about thrash metal’s birth—a “Mount Olympus kind of thing,” as Mustaine puts it—while cuts like “I Am War” and “Made to Kill” deliver the technical thrash assault the band has honed across four decades.

For Mustaine, the division of labor between himself and Mäntysaari came down to serving the song. “If the rhythm’s really difficult, I’ll usually play the rhythm and let my guitarist do the solo,” he explains. “And if the rhythm’s really easy, I’ll let them do the rhythm and me solo. A lot of that is because these guys are all virtuosos and I’m self-taught, so there’s a limit to what I know how to do. A lot of what my soloing is, is just statements. We could be listening to a really beautiful solo, and then I’m gonna come and stomp through your gardens with combat boots.”

He points to the solo in “Let There Be Shred” as an example. “It’s kind of a hippie solo,” he says. “Teemu’s shredding, and then you go into this kind of slow-motion riff in the middle of the song. And I felt that having a burning solo over that part would be wrong because the rhythm was a really cool rhythm. A lot of times when people play solos, they think the solo’s more important than the song.”

It’s a philosophy Mustaine has carried throughout his career, one rooted in his identity as what he calls “a guitarist that sings” rather than a rhythm player or lead guitarist. “The term ‘rhythm guitar player’ seems a little diminishing for me,” he says. “I love the riff.”

And how committed is he to that principle? When asked what he sees as Megadeth’s main contribution to metal over the decades, he doesn’t hesitate: “Riffs.” It’s the riff—more than the solos, more than the hooks, more than even his distinctive snarl of a voice—that defines the band’s legacy in his mind.

“Sometimes you just want to hear something that makes you wanna kick trash cans over.”

That riff-centric approach announced itself the very first time Mustaine plugged in with his pre-Megadeth band, Metallica. “When I went to Norwalk [California] the day that I met James Hetfield and [original Metallica bassist] Ron McGovney, I didn’t know what was gonna happen,” he reflects. “Nobody did. But I had my style, and it was based around the riff.”

That style made an immediate impression. “I went in there and I didn’t have any Marshalls yet because I was just starting to get serious. I had these Risson amps—they were tan, so from the moment I set up my stack, I was different. I plugged in my guitar and I started warming up, and I kept warming up and warming up. And I finally said, ‘Where the fuck are these guys?’ I set my guitar down and switched my amp to standby. And then I went out there and I said, ‘Man, where’s my audition?’ They said, ‘You got the gig.’ So I got my job just by warming up.”

That period of time proved to be the crucible when thrash metal’s DNA was forged. When Hetfield picked up a guitar at a subsequent rehearsal—they’d been working with a second guitarist who showed up to a gig at the Whisky a Go Go, “in Def-Leppard-circa-’86 clothes, with a giant feather in his ear”—Mustaine was floored. “It blew my mind because he was so good. I kind of thought, where were you when we were auditioning a second guitar player? He was as good as he is today. James is a masterful guitarist.”

The fact that two musicians who would essentially define thrash guitar—the palm-muted down-picking fury, the intricate riffing, the speed and precision—were sitting in the same room together as teenagers remains remarkable. “I hear influences on everything,” Mustaine says. “I’ll be listening to a TV show and somebody will be playing the soundtrack, and it’s either copying a lick from me or from Metallica. I just take it all in stride. I feel very honored to have been able to make a name for myself.”

That history—and Mustaine’s complex, decades-long relationship with Metallica following his dismissal in April 1983—informs one of Megadeth’s most surprising inclusions: a version of Metallica’s “Ride the Lightning,” which Mustaine co-wrote with Hetfield, Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, and late Metallica bassist Cliff Burton.

“As I come full circle on the career of a lifetime, the decision to include ‘Ride the Lightning,’ a song I co-wrote with James, Lars, and Cliff, was to pay my respects to where my career first started,” Mustaine explains. “It showcases the spider riffing and the grunting fretting—you fret a G flat power chord and you slide up into the G—technique that I brought [to the band]. I thought it was just a great way to pay my respects to James and Lars and to close the circle.”

Does he consider his take on “Lightning” a cover version? “No, because I wrote the song too. I think other people will say that, but if you’re asking me, I don’t think it’s a cover song. When we played it for people who are fans of that band and that song, the consensus has been that we did a fitting homage. I think we did it at least as good.” He pauses. “It’s a little faster.”

The album closes with “The Last Note,” perhaps Mustaine’s most introspective song—a reflection on career’s end that acknowledges both the cost and the glory. “They gave me gold, they gave me a name / But every deal was signed in blood and flames,” he sings, before delivering a final testament: “I came, I ruled, now I disappear.” Yet Mustaine insists he’s not dwelling on endings. “I’m at a place in my life right now where I’ve been reflective, but not too much,” he says. “I do have days full of satisfaction, a lot of contentment with everything that’s going on.”

As for the tools that helped forge this final statement, Mustaine has come full circle. After years playing various Flying Vs, he’s now a Gibson ambassador, wielding a signature model that he describes with genuine reverence. The collaboration, he says, enabled him to dial in exactly what he desired—the right pickup configuration, the electrical schematic for his knob placement, a neck that’s very different from the standard Gibson Flying V. “Flying Vs are the most popular guitar in music,” he notes. “When people think of rock bands, they always draw one guy with a Flying V. I grew up loving the V, and to be [Gibson’s] number-one guy right now with it—the guitar is a monster.”

That monster will get plenty of use in the years ahead. Megadeth’s farewell tour will extend well into the future—Mustaine estimates three to five years of dates to properly close out Megadeth’s legacy, including runs supporting Iron Maiden and headlining with Anthrax and Exodus in support. “[Exodus guitarist] Gary Holt and I are like this,” Mustaine says, holding up crossed fingers. “Blood. He’s actually my oldest friend in the music business besides the guys in Metallica.”

“The term ‘rhythm guitar player’ seems a little diminishing for me. I love the riff.”

But he’s already gaming out how to handle that final show. “I was joking around and I said to my management, you should book the tour and then have a couple fake shows listed at the end. So I’ll do the last show thinking there’s still a few more to go, and then you’ll tell me that was it. And I’ll punch you in the face instead of breaking down and sobbing on stage.”

End it in anger instead of sadness? “Yeah,” he says with a laugh. “It’s more ‘Dave.’”

It’s quintessential Mustaine, wrapping emotion in, to use his words, a combat boot. From that first show at Ruthie’s Inn (where Mustaine wielded a pretty killer natural-finish BC Rich Bich that was later stolen) through countless tours and lineup changes, through personal and professional battles, he’s persevered. Does he wonder if younger musicians understand his place in metal history, the role he played in shaping thrash? “I don’t really know how much modern musicians know,” he admits. “If they’re influenced by a band that was influenced by a band that was influenced by me or Metallica, do they know the story? But I’m okay with myself, so I don’t feel the necessity to have people sing my praises. I’m really comfortable with who I am.” He laughs. “A freckle-faced redhead. You don’t think I was picked on growing up?”

For now, though, Mustaine is very much still here, and still vital. The hands may throb and the voice may rasp, but the fire that drove a red-haired kid to pick up a guitar and create a sound no one had heard before still burns. Megadeth delivers on that fire. “Sometimes you just want to hear something that makes you wanna fuck or fight, you know?” he says with a laugh. “Something that just makes you wanna kick trash cans over.”

As for that final show, whenever it arrives, Mustaine will walk offstage knowing he gave everything he had. And whether or not his management actually pulls off those fake extra gigs he joked about, there likely won’t be anger or tears—just gratitude for what was. “I’m really blessed,” he says. “And I’ve loved every moment of this.”