Innholdsfortegnelse for Vol. 148 i Australian Guitar

GENE SIMMONS WANTS ACE FREHLEY FOR KISS’ END OF THE ROAD TOUR Gene Simmons has once again invited former Kiss guitarist Ace Frehley to play with the band during their ongoing farewell End of the Road World Tour. In a tweet marking Frehley’s 71st birthday on April 27, Simmons wrote that the “invitations still stand”, inviting him to “jump up on stage with us for encores”. “The fans would love it, ” he added. Frehley co-founded Kiss in 1973 with current members Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley, and former drummer Peter Criss. His initial tenure lasted almost 10 years, before he left the band in 1982. He rejoined in 1996, and left again in 2002, following the conclusion of what was originally planned to me the band’s farewell tour. Since…

BOB VYLAN Price Of Life GHOST THEATRE Politics have been a staple of great punk since the genre’s very inception, but as the 2020s see the world descend into a flavour of chaos we couldn’t have imagined 30 years ago, bands need to do much more than just rage against the machine – they need to f***ing destroy it. Over a soundscape oscillating between belting, grit-laden punk guitars and punchy, bass-inflected hip-hop beats, Bob Vylan take a fierce first step on their incendiary second album. The London duo show no mercy in their lyrical attacks on capitalists, royalists, racists and the general scourge of right-wing regressivism, all while delivering sharp and moshable tunes that’ll keep stuck in your head for weeks on end. ELIZA & THE DELUSIONALS Now And Then…

WHERE TARWIN MEADOWS GIPPSLAND, VICTORIA WHEN FRIDAY MARCH 11TH AND SATURDAY 12TH, 2022 For the first time in UNIFY’s eight-year history (notwithstanding, of course, the cancelled ‘21 edition), rain didn’t strike the ground once all weekend. It was odd – we’d become accustomed to flooded tents and muddy moshes – but you’d nary hear a complaint. It wasn’t overbearingly hot, either – it was like the gods of weather had felt sympathy for us (a welcomed change from their usual spite), having gone two full years without a heavy music festival of this caliber, and as such offered us the optimal atmosphere for peak mosh brilliance. Perfect weather wasn’t the only thing different about this year’s Gathering. It felt a little more laidback, compared to the typically turbulent UNIFYs of years past.…

Some aspects of electric guitar playing are so totally established as orthodoxy that they seem almost immune to change: standard tuning is a de facto, er, standard – open chords, powerchords and ‘blues box’ scale shapes, too. Like a goldfish and the water it lives in, we don’t really question their existence. So it came as a bit of a shock to some in August 2021 when Polyphia’s Tim Henson innocently related to music YouTuber Rick Beato that he rejects conventional string bending techniques of the ‘Boomer’ generation “because it’s gonna sound like that era”. Henson intended no disrespect (he actually paid homage to his heroes Jimi Hendrix and Black Sabbath) but in a conversation ostensibly about ‘modern’ guitar, Tim made it clear that he’s most interested in new approaches…

Q For my next challenge I’m looking to upgrade my relatively new PRS SE Starla Stoptail to see if I can make a good guitar better. What’s your advice? John, via email A Firstly, I think you’ve made a good choice. The SE Starla Stoptail is a good lightweight single-cut guitar that is really quite a blank canvas in many ways. It’s not trying to be a slab-bodied Les Paul, like a Special, and with its simple dual-humbucker, three-way lever switch, master volume and tone – all mounted on that large scratchplate – pickup swaps and improved wiring, and so on, are all easy to do. Priced at $1,199 for 2022 (although you may get lucky and find it cheaper in-store), the SE Starla is slightly more expensive than the…

Getting a good acoustic guitar tone isn’t as simple as just plugging in and turning up; it requires a careful understanding of how EQ frequencies interact and function in a band. With that in mind, here are 10 top tips, divided into recording and live sound. Your six-string never sounded so good… RECORDING EQ TIPS 1. LOSE THE LOWS Regardless of mic, you’ll probably want to lose everything below 50Hz, then sweep up from there to get rid of the rumble but keep the depth you desire. The busier the mix, the more excess bass will be an issue. Much above 100Hz and you’ll be losing too much if cut completely. 2. TRIM THE LOWER-MIDS If your mic is booming or ‘woofing’ a little bit around the soundhole, cutting frequencies…

PRICE: $549 / $499 Once you discover the bevy of stompboxes Fender has brought to the effects party since 2018, you may wonder, where was my invitation? Well, I say it’s never too late to get in on the action, because two of them – the Marine Layer Reverb and the Pugilist Distortion – seem to have noticeably struck a chord among many players in the know. But now Fender has decided to take a “more the merrier” approach to this shindig by releasing the Dual Marine Layer Reverb and Duel Pugilist Distortion. Both duplicate the original pedals’ control sets (combined with unique options and special features) for two independent settings or voicings that you can footswitch between in a single dual-format stompbox, proving it’s much better to double your…

Way back in 2020 Faith released the Blue Moon Neptune, an exotic acoustic that had a shelf-load of virtues in the tonal stakes. With this newer acoustic guitar we’ve travelled a few planets closer to the sun, but the basic concept is really very similar. The Neptune introduced us to figured mango as a body wood, a theme that is continued here. Obviously this is a new voice in the acoustic field and, tone being a desperately subjective thing to describe, we’ll turn to Faith’s official voice on the matter. “It is not as loud and punchy as rosewood nor as straightforwardly mellow as mahogany, yet it bears its own distinctive warmth… the overall tone could be described as dark and moody.” We’d certainly agree that the deep-blue hue of…

“ Honestly, I didn’t have any idea it would be a hit, let alone a song that has endured for decades, ” singer and guitarist Rick Springfield says about ‘Jessie’s Girl, ’ the pop-rock ear-candy smash from his 1981 album, Working Class Dog, that propelled him to international stardom. “When I wrote it, I thought it was a good album song, that was about it. When radio stations started playing it and it became this giant hit, I was as amazed as anybody.” MOOT SUIT By the late ’70s, the Australian-born Springfield (he was born in the western Sydney suburb of Guildford, but lived in Broadmeadow, Victoria for most of his childhood) had issued a couple of albums that failed to chart. After a move to L.A., he concentrated on…

GOOD THANKS THEY ARE A Novocastrian pop-punk quartet hellbent on getting fists raised and vocal cords wrung – a mission they never fail to accomplish with four-chord belters as honest as they are anthemic. YOU’LL DIG THEM IF YOU LIKE Alex Lahey, Tigers Jaw and Teenage Joans. YOU SHOULD CHECK OUT ‘Yes Sir’, a catchy and cathartic middle finger to crusty old dudes in the scene that try to rob young female artists of their agency. Dropped back in April, it marks some-what of comeback for Good Thanks; 2018 saw the band come out swinging with a four-track EP, Two Bottles In, and they followed it up a year later with the explosive single ‘Be Like Them’. But like most up-and-coming bands lacking the privilege to power on without shows,…

BLOC PARTY Alpha Games INFECTIOUS / BMG Six years in the making, Bloc Party had a whole damn lot of ground to cover on their sixth full-length effort – personal, political and cultural – so it’s no surprise that Alpha Games is a record that, while very dense, feels strikingly human. It oscillates between warmness and chaos, with frontman Kele Okereke wearing his heart on his sleeve in each bewitching tale of love, sex, betrayal and enmity. It veers well into melodramatic territory, but that’s trademark Bloc Party – and here, moreso than ever, their theatricality never feels campy. As always, Okereke’s tenor is very character-driven: at times he’s snarky, quippy and edgy, at others smoky and swaggering, and in a few standout moments, heartfelt and raw. The band match…

Before the pandemic hit, Body Type were en route to hit indie-rock superstardom not just in Australia, but in every continent they could step foot. They formed in 2016 at the very onset of their musical journeys: singer Sophie McComish had only just started learning guitar, and drummer Cecil Coleman could hardly keep a beat, but unfaltering enthusiasm brought them together for a handful of casual jams. Via mutual friends came McComish’s counterpart, fellow singer-strummer Annabel Blackman, and bass queen Georgia Wilkinson-Derums – and by the time they’d chiseled out the tracings of a signature sound, they’d already won over the world. Punctuated by two EPs – simply branded EP1 and EP2 – Body Type’s early years were defined by gigs at SXSW in the States and the Great Escape…

No bands spur tours more off-the-rails than those in Australian metalcore. The 2000s were defined by sprawling, months-long road tours with back-to-back shows in 20-plus towns, a good deal of which would read like gibberish to the everyday city slicker. In the 2010s, there evolved somewhat of an unspoken contest between the bands, to see who could reel in the most insane supports. This led to a trend where, thanks to selffunded runs and the power of the internet, up-and-coming acts could make a name for themselves by headlining over (much more popular) international bands, using those names on the poster as the tour’s primary selling points. Thanks in no short part to the COVID-19 pandemic, those batshit mental tours came to a fiery death at the turn of the…

“Black Summer” “THROUGH ALL THE time that I wasn’t in the Red Hot Chili Peppers, there were only a few years that I was even using guitar in my music. But I kept on practicing, because practicing is something I do to stimulate the brain in interesting ways. I still hadn’t written any songs, though. But now the possibility of me rejoining the band came into the air when Flea started talking to me about it, and so I picked up my guitar and I went, ‘Hmmm… I wonder if I can still write a rock song?’ Because my whole sense of melody had switched to a completely different vocabulary. “My memory of it is that I picked up my guitar and ‘Black Summer’ came out. I wrote the initial…

Although funk can be traced back to the early days of James Brown, like all styles, it has evolved a lot over the last 60 years. With an increasing body of great rhythm guitar players on the live circuit as well as well as online, there’s never been greater abundance of talent and innovation, that’s constantly pushing stylistic boundaries. Within this evolution, funk has crossed over into other styles such as RnB, neo-soul, fusion, gospel, and many more guitarists are becoming switched on to the beauty of using a clean sound and really working on rhythm and harmony. At its heart, classic funk is all about syncopation, space and generally static/simple chords. The crossover into neo-soul and gospel largely retains this element of syncopation and rhythm but tends to use…

Launched roughly a decade ago, designed by engineers Cosmos Lyles and Paul Dowd, the EverTune bridge is a device that uses a spring and lever system to maintain string tension – offering a whole new level of tuning stability for guitar players. The aftermarket upgrade has proven to be particularly popular with metal guitarists who tune down, with the likes Devin Townsend and Trivium’s Matt Heafy singing its praises for almost singlehandedly fixing all their tuning issues. Models for T-style and G-style six-stings to ones for seven and eight-strings range from $295 to $395 (US prices) in price and sold direct through the company’s website. “All our guitars are now fitted with EverTune bridges, which has saved us a lot of time, ” notes Munky. “It was an invention long…

When Warpaint convened in 2019, there was a plan. As guitarist Theresa Wayman recalls: “We were all anxious to record an album the way we used to when we were starting, together in the rehearsal space just writing and jamming and playing things over and over, really honing songs.” At first, this plan went swimmingly. In the earliest stages, the band set to work at drummer Stella Mozgawa’s home studio. “The best moment was when we got together in the first stages of writing, ” Theresa says. “We all came in with some tracks we had started. We put those on and started learning them, bringing them to life. It was an ecstatic moment.” From there, they moved to a pro studio, Rancho De La Luna, in Joshua Tree, that…

IN THE WORLD of instantly recognizable custom guitars, perhaps none stands out more than the aptly named Cloud that Prince played in the final scenes of the 1984 film Purple Rain. Luthier Dave Rusan designed and built the Cloud, with its whimsical curves and distinctive prong on the upper bout. Rusan grew up in Saint Cloud, Minnesota, and became interested playing guitar as teenager. He says he didn’t think of it as just a musical instrument, however, but as a beautiful and mysterious machine. “Soon after my dad bought me my second guitar, a Mosrite, I took off the neck and removed the pickguard to see what was going on inside, ” he recounts. “I started modifying my guitars, but with almost no books to refer to, my efforts were…

John Porter is the British record producer responsible for work on a wide range of classic material, including Bryan Ferry, Billy Bragg, Missy Higgins, Killing Joke, The Cat Empire and, of course, The Smiths. Below, Porter describes the exacting –and ocassionally tense – work that went into recording The Smiths’ classic song How Soon Is Now? How did How Soon Is Now first come about? We were in JAM Studios [recording William, It Was Really Nothing and Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want]. By that time, we had a good process. Johnny [Marr] and I had a musical connection, a good short-hand. It didn’t take us long to get things into shape. We still had another day or two, so I said, ‘Well what else you got?’…

BOSS is the king of stompboxes, but when it comes to multi-effects, there has been room for improvement. While the sounds are exemplary, the effects giant’s GT interface can feel a little complex and difficult to work with compared with its contemporary competitors. Can the company’s first touchscreen-enabled floor processor change that? The short answer is yes: setting up patches on the GX-100 feels noticeably more streamlined than previous BOSS offerings. When editing parameters, you can either tap and use the quick-adjust pots along the bottom, or move to knob mode, where all parameters are shown on screen – besides dialling in sounds, it’s seriously handy for setting up the pedal’s myriad footswitch assign and MIDI control functions, as well. Even if you might still need to refer to the…

Originally conceived by Fender designer Josh Hurst, the Meteora model first appeared in the initial Parallel Universe range and was released late in 2018. That release featured the body we see here but with more Tele-style pickups and appointments. According to Fender, Josh “wanted to make something that was revolutionary while also recalling Fender’s rich history”. “To introduce something so unique to Fender, ” Josh commented at the time, “you have to introduce it in a familiar package.” The following year things had changed and the Meteora HH made a return in the lower-cost Alternate Reality Series. This time around it featured a less heritage-style design with twin (Player Series) humbuckers, a tune-o-matic bridge and through-body stringing. Now, for 2022, it’s back as a regular model in the upmarket Player…

ADAM JOHNSTONE + FERGUS SINCLAIR HAILS FROM NAARM/MELBOURNE, VIC PLAYS IN ROMERO SOUNDS LIKEPOST-2AM PUNK BAR ANTHEMS LATEST DROP TURN IT ON! (LP OUT NOW VIA COOL DEATH / FEEL IT / EMI) What’s your current go-to guitar? Johnstone: My current go-to is my American Fender Jazzmaster AVRI ‘62. I’d played a couple of friends’ Jazzmasters in the studio and they always felt so smooth to me, plus I’d always loved that Jazzmaster tone. Previously I’d been playing a Fender Jaguar, which I also still love very much. When some friends pulled together to get me a new guitar for a birthday, I knew exactly what I was going for, and it’s been the guitar I pick up first ever since. How did you initially fall in love with the…

Though he’s best known for his role as a rollicking, larger-than-life rockstar in The Living End, Chris Cheney is much more than those big punk-pop hooks and rockabilly swagger. Never has that been more clear than on his debut solo album, The Storm Before The Calm – a sprawling, soulbaring affair that paints Cheney as more of a lowkey singer-songwriter than a mosh-starved rock dog eager to get fists pumping. It explores a lighter side of his musicality – dabbling in folk, blues, country and Americana – with a more ardent focus on the poetic, rather than the punchy. More than anything, it’s a poignant deep-dive into Cheney’s psyche, tackling themes of mental health, substance abuse, the loss of his father, and marital woes. Australian Guitar caught up with Cheney…

With their jaunty and jangly second album, Sideways To New Italy, it felt like Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever had struck gold. Though its inopportune timing meant a fractured touring cycle – the record dropped in June of 2020, after all – it was a critical darling, and debuted at #4 on the ARIA Charts. It’s clear to see why, too: while it retained the band’s loose and lax energy, it felt tight and considered in ways their debut, 2018’s Hope Downs, didn’t. It was a sharply written, summery indie-rock album soaked in good vibes: the kind of release we all needed in that chaotic middle chunk of 2020. Endless Rooms, by contrast, feels like it was informed by that chaos – it’s a little gloomier, more unhinged and psychedelic. ‘The…

IN THIS CANDID CONVERSATION, JOHN FRUSCIANTE EXPOUNDS ON THE BENEFITS OF KICKING YOUR EGO TO THE CURB, TRUSTING YOURSELF AS A PLAYER, RELIGIOUSLY MEMORISING CHARLIE CHRISTIAN’S GUITAR SOLOS, AND HOW THE PIECES FELL INTO PLACE FOR HIS RETURN TO THE RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS “I think that at the beginning of my time in the band, I had my mind too much on trying to impress people, and I wasn’t trusting myself enough” JOHN FRUSCIANTE WAS JUST 18 WHEN HE WAS OFFERED THE GUITAR slot in the Red Hot Chili Peppers. By that time, he had spent years honing his skills on the instrument, immersing himself in the playing of Hendrix, Beck and Page; Eddie Van Halen and Randy Rhoads; Steve Howe, Steve Hackett and Steve Vai; Frank Zappa and…

Fender and its sub-brand Squier are two of the biggest names in the world of guitar and bass. But what are the differences between the two? And which one is right for your setup and budget? Many of the guitars and basses produced by these two industry titans look the same, and in some cases actually sound very similar too. In this article we’ll explain the differences between Squier and Fender, and how that can help you make a decision when buying a new instrument. From Strats and Teles, to Precision basses, Jazzmasters and beyond, we’ll explore the differences in sound between Squier and Fender, the build quality and feel you get for your money, as well as the history of the two brands. Let’s dive straight in with some…

Some years ago I was asked why I played a PRS guitar. “Because it plays and stays in tune, ” was my reply. Over three decades later, while many makers have been influenced and inspired by PRS, not all have paid attention. There are a colossal number of guitars that leave factories all over the world that don’t play – let alone stay – in tune. Most, but certainly not all, have vibratos often based on designs that date back to the 50s. Two of my favourites, Fender’s offset Jazz-master/Jaguar type and the good ol’ Bigsby, might appear very different, and while in design they are, in function they’re very similar. Both are two-piece designs in that, unlike the futuristic Stratocaster vibrato, they have a separate bridge in front of…

Best known for its microphones, Shure is also a significant player in the world of studio headphones, both in the consumer and pro audio sectors. Shure’s redesigned SRH440A and SRH840A edge towards the former category, but are still competitively priced. Both sets of cans are designed to be more comfortable and durable than their predecessors, while looking a bit nicer, too. They’re easy to tell apart; the SRH840As – which are on test here – differentiate themselves with some nice gold lettering on the backs of the earcups, along with gold bolts and stitching. A good job, too, we say – if you’re paying more for a set of headphones, you don’t want them being confused with the cheaper model… The SRH840As’ packaging screams functionality rather than ‘lifestyle’ – it…

IK Multimedia, the maker of the long-established AmpliTube guitar amp and effects emulation software, has introduced a series of four X-Gear pedals. There’s one each for modulation, reverb and delay, and the X-Drive, for drive, distortion, fuzz and so on. The X-Gear pedals have the same three-footswitch form factor with mono and stereo connectivity and full MIDI implementation. Each has 16 algorithms and up to 300 savable presets that can be managed with the included librarian app and used in AmpliTube 5. In addition, the necessary USB computer connection lets the pedal function as an audio interface for recording, with or without cab sim. While basically preset-based, the pedals have physical knobs to quickly adjust the main controls, while several more are accessed with a push-and-turn parameter knob. Presets and…

Whatever our (or your) feelings are about the validity of the Silver Sky – PRS’s cover version of an absolute Fender classic in collaboration with John Mayer – it’s very hard to argue with the instrument we have in front of us. While the USA Silver Sky sits more than comfortably alongside Fender’s top-of-the-line production models, not to mention virtually every other high-end bolt-on, this new SE version is simply one of the finest examples of large-production guitar making we can recall. This is certainly a very close rendering of the USA model, but there are numerous differences necessary to bring the guitar in at its downsized price point. First off, its specification tells us the body here is poplar – not alder like the USA guitar – though you…

Carl Martin is known for some pretty decent overdrive pedals, in particular the Plexitone. The Panama’s Brit tones probably owe a lot to that pedal, as well as to the classic amp that inspired it, of course. You get the standard Gain, Level and Tone knobs here, but the unique feature of this pedal is the Damping knob, which is designed to tighten up the sound. Basically, it works on the bottom-end, and turning it from its fully counterclockwise position will start to reduce any woofiness for an altogether leaner, more aggressive sound. There’s a wide range of tones available here, from a clean boost through all levels of amp-like drive to high-gain with plenty of sustain. The Tone knob is very effective in matching the pedal’s tone to your…