Vid: Ty Goes Through His Current Rig!
In terms of Ty Tabor’s “transitional” gear, I won’t go into the gory details here, but for a long while – including King’s X’s latest album, XV – Ty used Yamaha guitars: the Les Paul-like AES series (mostly the 920), and two signature models, one of which had a [...]

If you don’t know who Ty Tabor is, or haven’t heard King’s X’s music, please do your ears a favor and buy every King’s X CD right now. Seriously.
At the risk of sounding like an uber-fan, King’s X is one of the best American rock bands ever. And although it seems like there’s some sort [...]

Re-Bias While Playing, Blood on His Guitars…
Performing Musician recently posted an interview with Michael Kaye, who is Pete Townshend’s amp/electonics tech and is a guitar tech for other bands (Springsteen, Bon Jovi, others): Alan Rogan has been Pete’s guitar tech since 1977.
“Alan takes care of Pete’s guitars — the tuning, the guitar changes, the strings, [...]

The middle and right photos above were recently posted on David Lee Roth’s website. Seems obvious they’re from the Van Halen I photo shoot that gave us Ed and the freshly striped Franky guitar on the album cover (left photo).
So for gear heads, this raises some interesting questions:

I tripped over this great video of Brian May playing his solo in “It’s Late.” It’s really amazing how Edward Van Halen-esque it is, and it’s interesting that Brian didn’t pursue the right-hand hammer-on technique and didn’t see the possibilities in it that Ed did. From watching the vid, seems like Brian feels that way [...]

…But Still No Intel About Joe and Peavey

Is Joe Satriani a Marshall man now? Has he forsaken Peavey or not? To bring you up to speed, here’s a brief, recent history of Joe Satriani’s amps:

Following is from a 1973 interview of Brian May that was in “a guitar magazine” (unnamed) shortly after Queen’s self-titled first album came out: Thanks to BrianMayWorld.com for preserving it. In the first part of the interview he talks about his Red Special guitar, but then he talks about his AC30s and effects. Here are [...]

Didn’t Play Stock LPs, Hated the SG, Tried to Get Zep Back Together?
After Les Paul died last week, several sites posted tributes to him. Ultimate-guitar.com had an interesting series of articles, all by Steve Rosen, which are excerpted here but are worth a full read.
Les Paul was a brilliant guy, an innovator well beyond the [...]

Pre-Show Clinic, Bogner Now in Rig

Someone got it wrong.
Either Chuck Berry misread the divine inspiration he got, or a couple of young parents in upstate New York picked the wrong name for their son.
I’m betting Chuck was mistaken because after seeing Joe Bonamassa Wednesday night at the Bergen Performing Arts Center in New Jersey, there’s [...]

It’s tough to pin down the Aerosmith guys as far as what guitars were used when because they definitely didn’t stick with any one instrument too long, even during any given concert. But amp-wise, after Toys they switched over to the new-at-the-time Music Man amps which had 6L6 power tubes (like Fenders) but solid-state preamps.

The tune ‘Outer Space’ from Ace Frehley’s new album Anomaly (out next month) is available for a listen (below), and sounds like classic Ace. It starts out with ‘2000 Man’-like chugging, the vocals of course have Ace’s signature sort of “wavy” style and the lead is backward, like the lead in ‘Speedin’ Back to My [...]

With Aerosmith touring and all the pre-tour talk about playing the Toys in the Attic album live, I wanted to try to nail down what gear Joe Perry and Brad Whitford were using on Toys. Well, good luck: This one has been tough to track down.

There’s been a lot of stuff written about, said about and speculated about regarding Edward Van Halen’s mind-blowing, world-altering Van Halen I setup. Was he running “slaved” amps (one amp into another), was he using some sort of boost and/or distortion pedal, etc.
If you read hard and don’t fall prey to speculation (which is tough!), [...]