Would you take a lesson from this guy?

It’s Friday! Do you have guitar-squeezin’ in your weekend? Is it part of the plan? It should be if not, even if you have to…squeeze it in. (I wish I could find an amp that I could crank through headphones late at night that would sound like roasting EL84s or EL34s.)

Anyhow, to get your guitar-binge off on the right foot, here are tidbits from four masters of the geetar. Cool (and funny) stuff. Enjoy!

Bonamassa, Bonham, Hughes, ‘Moby Dick’

This is a clip shot at Guitar Center’s most recent Drum Off competition, at which Jason Bonham did a performance – of “Moby Dick.” With him were Joe Bonamassa and Glenn Hughes, and all three are of course part of the band tentatively named Black Country.

I was psyched to hear this clip because I wanted to hear Joe’s raw Marshall Super Lead tone, which he apparently used for the Black Country album. While his tone in this clip is a lot more raw and loose than his normal tone (very cool!), it’s not a Super Lead. Word from his folks is he rented an amp (looks to be a Marshall JCM800 maybe?), but the signal chain was simple: guitar (presumably the Bonamassa signature Les Paul) into a Tube Screamer into the amp.

A very cool performance of Jason sort of playing along with his dad.

A Good Chance to Win a $4K Vai Guitar

We just mentioned the release of Steve Vai’s Where the Other Wild Things Are CD. To promote that release, Steve is giving away a $4,000 Ibanez JEM77 Floral guitar. For a chance to win it, go to the Favored Nations Facebook page and start thinking of a question that you want to ask Steve. He’s going to answer the winner’s question on YouTube and sign the guitar to the winner on camera.

Here's the giveaway guitar (click to see it bigger).

Pretty cool. Even better is that if I’m reading that Facebook page right, looks like there are only 65 comments to that post, so the odds right now of winning the guitar are…1 in 65. Pretty sweet!

Metheny: Too Much Time On His Hands?

I’ll leave that for you to decide. Just take a gander at this vid. Only Pat Metheny could pull this off, and make it interesting!

Gilbert’s Warped Teaching

Paul Gilbert: a great guitarist, a great guy (by all accounts), a great teacher – and a great sense of humor, if you’re wired the same way. Here’s the opening clip from his “Silence Followed By A Deafening Roar” instructional DVD. Somehow I’d never seen this before.

The gear rundown is thorough and…unusual: I like where he finds his picks. Dig the Marshall Rhoads head. I’m starting to want to try one of those Ibanez Firemans (Firemen?).

Here's a pic from the clinic, taken by an unknown fan.

If you heard Paul Gilbert in Racer X in the ’80s, he was shredding. In Mr. Big in the ’90s he was playing poppy, but still managing to shred. On his solo albums he shreds, but not all the time.

So for many of you, Paul Gilbert may = “shred.” But I think the best thing about him, besides his gargantuan chops and incredible musical vocabulary (and his apparent humility), is his ability to teach in a fun way. So even if you don’t dig his playing or his tone, usually there’s always something to learn from the guy – as recently uploaded Guitar Center YouTube vids demonstrate.

In the following vids he talks about coming up with cool riffs, notably using rhythm. That is great advice and seems a bit at odds with the 16th- and 64th-note shredding thing – which, again, may be his rep but isn’t all he does or can do.

The pedal-board vid is kind of interesting, especially when he stomps on the Xotic Effects RC-Booster for the “Man on a Silver Mountain” riff. That’s the only pedal I heard that I immediately wanted to try (must…resist…). Well, maybe that crazy Airplane Flanger too.

More interesting is the beginning of the vid of him playing the Pat Travers tune “Snortin’ Whiskey” – or as GC spells it, “Snortin Whiskey Drinkin Cocanie,” with “cocanie” I assume being pronounced like the salmon…?!

Anyhow, the beginning is interesting because he talks about the Marshall Vintage Modern amp, which is his amp of choice right now. The VM has been panned about as much as loved, so it’s interesting to hear his comments, however brief. And in keeping with his ability and desire to educate, Paul talks about how the two preamps help him get the sound and “beef” he wants courtesy of the “bassy” and “trebly” overdrive knobs in the preamp.

Hope you enjoy.

Using Rhythm to Write

More on Writing

His Pedal Board

On the Marshall VM and “Snortin’ Whiskey”

Notable

> The guitar he’s playing is his signature Ibanez Fireman – which is what you name an Iceman that is flipped upside down. It’s a limited-edition korina body and neck guitar, and the pickups are DiMarzio Area ’67s, which are stacked (humbucking) single coils. For the full specs on the guitar, click here to go to that page on the Ibanez site.

Tone-wise, my favorites are the Wizard amps – I believe Wizards are made by Angus Young’s roadie and are sometimes used by Angus live – and Michael Lee Firkins’ Tele sound (see the link at bottom because the vid can’t be embedded).

Playing-wise, Johnny Hiland is a monster. I wish we could see his fingers in the vid, but not sure if it would help much.

It’s also cool to hear how Paul Gilbert’s new three single-coil “flipped” Iceman guitar was inspired by WoodyTone master Frank Marino.
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Johnny Hiland – About all you can say about this one is, “holy crap!” Check out the galloping horse and dirt bike noises about halfway through. That’s also about the best PRS sound I’ve ever heard.

Steve Vai talking about his new Legacy II amp.

Paul Gilbert on his new signature guitar.

Wizard Modern Classic amp, two-parter:

Big Jim Wright on the Hammond B-3 (’nuff said).

Michael Lee Firkins doing some Jeff Beckish stuff, and then with a mean Tele sound. Criminally, the video craps out only a minute or so into Firkins’ slide rendition of Voodoo Child. Go to the bottom menu of this page, and scroll down (a video about the Yngwie Malmsteen “Play Loud” replica also is there).

Reminds me a lot of Extreme, so Nuno Bettencourt obviously borrowed liberally from Pat.

Back in the day Pat used a Gibson Melody Maker with full-size Gibson humbuckers. In an old guitar Player interview he said, “Melody Makers are great guitars because they stay in tune, and you can bend the necks and do all kinds of things to them. I don’t like wham-o bars [vibrate bars] because the tuning problem just drives me up the wall, so I just got into bending the necks.”

His guitars were strung with Dean Markley 9s, and did not have any tone controls. “I basically just have two volume controls, one for each pickup,” he said. “I set the rhythm volume at 8, the lead volume at 10. The 8 setting seems to drop the guitar down quite a bit in volume, and it also changes the sound slightly. You lose a lot of your top end. But then if I back it down even more for some real quiet stuff, down to about 2 or 3, it seems that the top end comes back again. I don’t know why.”

On his effects chain, he said: “First I have the Phase 100. I’ve had the controls sawed off it with a hacksaw because I got fed up with either knocking them with my foot or having people readjust them. They have slots in them and can only be changed with a screwdriver. I set the phase cancellation control on the left to the most extreme setting, clicked all the way to the right. I run the speed about a little right of midway position. I’ve had this effect for about three-and-a-half years.

“From there I go into an MXR Blue Box, which adds a second pitch two octaves lower than the note you hit. I set the output control up full, and I vary the blend control between having it full right, so it gives me almost a distortion box sound, and blending it with the lower octave. You can’t play real, real fast with that thing at all because it’s just so noisy, fuzzy. I use that for real slow, sort of growly things on the low strings. It only works well in conjunction with a phaser; you really have to have the two together.

“After that 1 go to the Cry Baby wah-wah.

“[When] I come out of the pedalboard [I] go to a 50-watt Marshall, out of the 50-watt Marshall to two Maestro Echoplexes. I adjust one for whatever the tune is; usually it’s sort of on a long repeat. The next one is set on a real fast repeat, the closest one I can get. And that goes from there into my A/DA flanger so I in effect flange my echo repeats as well. So if I hit something, I’m not only flanging what I’m playing at the time, but also the repeats, so you get a spacey, ethereal sound. But because the repeats only go into the two 100-watt Marshalls I use, I get a nice stereo effect on-stage, especially on the real short delay. I also go into a Leslie, but that’s a separate output from the pedalboard. That’s on all the time; it’s just part of the overall sound I get.”

Wow. Sounds similar to Edward Van Halen’s re-amping technique to me (this interview was done in 1980).

Pat added that he also used a 100-watt Altair power attenuator.

Now Pat plays a PRS through a Marshall JCM 900 (yes, 9, not 8!), plus he has several rack effects that can be seen here. Doesn’t sound like it would be Woody at all, but in his hands it is, as you will see and hear below.

Pat’s website is www.pattravers.com.

Here’s another good, recent version — possibly better — but it can’t be embedded.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpQ2BjtdMvM

Here’s Paul Gilbert and Nuno Bettencourt doing a version of the tune:

As an aside, I saw Paul on what I believe was the most recent G3 tour, in NYC. His tone was awesome, his playing was awesome, his band was awesome. Was his tone woody? I can’t say a wholehearted yes, but it was clear and raw. No processing, unlike John Petrucci of Dream Theater, who was the second guitarists in that show (Paul opened, Satch closed).

Regardless of your opinion of Paul’s tone, he’s awesome.