Australian Guitar

Fender has partnered with audio tech company Mobile Fidelity Electronics (MoFi) for its first-ever turntable, the PrecisionDeck. Limited to only 1,000 units worldwide, the new turntable has a shape designed by Fender Master Builder Yuriy Shishkov, is

HAILS FROM BRISBANE, QLD PLAYS IN DREAM DALI SOUNDS LIKEHEADY, LABYRINTHINE STONER-POP LATEST DROP “LET HER BE” (SINGLE OUT NOW VIA SUNNY ISLAND) What’s your current go-to guitar? I’ve had a few brands and types of guitars in the past – and I would l

Dave Murray is laughing at our question, and, honestly, we can’t really blame him. We’ve connected with the Iron Maiden guitarist to discuss his iconic metal band’s new record, Senjutsu. It’s an epic double album bursting with complex, head-spinning

The new album from New Orleans blues-rocker Samantha Fish, Faster, doesn’t sound like it was created during a dark time in history. With a slinky, devious opening riff and a flirtatious vow to “make your heart beat faster,” Fish lets us know from not

It was just five years ago when Amyl And The Sniffers (a play on the name of frontwoman Amy Taylor, and an underground sex shop owner’s drug of choice) first burst to life. The quartet wrote, recorded and laid their seal of approval on their debut EP

For the better part of a decade, Christone Ingram has been a rising prodigy in the Delta blues scene, stunning audiences with his mastery of licks popularised by King and others. As he grew as a player, thanks to lessons at the Delta Blues Museum in

Thick, thundering riffs, monstrous breakdowns, and a voice that soars with such impenetrable might, it could instil the fear of God in God himself. For most of us familiar with the Canuck multihyphenate, these are first sounds our minds would conjure

For John Petrucci, the question isn’t so much, “What did you do during the pandemic?” Rather, it’s, “What didn’t you do?” Ever since global lockdowns kept musicians of every stripe off the road for much of 2020 and well into this year, the Dream Thea

Cutting her teeth on the bustling streets of Melbourne, it was her warm, honeyed folkiness and labyrinthine poetry that gave Courtney Barnett her most ardent supporters. Becoming an international indie-rock stalwart seemingly overnight, she cranked u

For most people, time stood still throughout much of 2020, with the initial wave of the COVID pandemic restricting us to our homes. Jerry Cantrell was no exception – in virtual lockdown, the legendary Alice In Chains frontman was forced to stay close

Second albums have a tendency to make or break bands. Oftentimes, an outfit’s sophomore effort will be the record that really galvanises their chemistry, with amplified energy and calculated confidence. But sometimes it can be the record that totally

Grunge is back, baby! And while it may be the gloomy, suburban streets of Seattle that it first took off, there’s a decent argument to be made for Canberra as the genre’s new hotspot. Case in point: Moaning Lisa. It was 2016 when the quartet first bu

Breaking out at the peak of the playlist age, Parcels earned their crust with a slate of snappy indie-pop songs tailored for the dancefloor. And of course they did – just a year after minting their debut EP (2015’s Clockscared), the Byron-native quin

When the post-hardcore icons Quicksand made their cataclysmic comeback in 2012, fans couldn’t have imagined how intense and eruptive their first album in over two decades would be. But 2017’s Interiors was the definitive distillation of everything th

When it’s put to Tom DeLonge that the new Angels & Airwaves record, Lifeforms, is easily their most sonically and tonally expansive music to date, he seems genuinely pleased and nods back in wholehearted agreement. “Thank you so much,” he smiles, tal

Tom Morello had big plans for 2020 – first and foremost, a world tour with a reunited Rage Against The Machine that would’ve seen him rocking stages from Pittsburgh to Prague, Kansas City to Krakow. Instead, like all of us, he was stuck at home. “Pre

When Yngwie Malmsteen spoke with Guitar Player earlier this year to reveal how he composed “Far Beyond The Sun”, his signature song, it was clear that his love for the 1984 track was practically eclipsed by his enthusiasm for his latest creation, Par

After the Philly-based indie lords in The War On Drugs won a Grammy – taking home the token for Best Rock Album with their 2017 opus, A Deeper Understanding – it makes sense that they’d spend a little more time than usual simmering away on the next r

When director Peter Jackson unveiled the preview of his documentary series The Beatles: Get Back this past winter, fans were dazzled by the sight of the Fab Four’s smiling faces – and with good reason. The film is a document of the group’s notoriousl

Politically charged punk-rock is no recent invention, and in the social and cultural climates of 2021, the genre thrives like it never has before – for good reason. It’s easy to see Melbourne trio Mod Con as just one star in an ever-expanding, seemin

Green Day have always been first and foremost a punk band, but it’s also true that the spiky-haired three-piece don’t always fit within the genre’s confines. 2004’s “Wake Me Up When September Ends” is a case in point, showcasing the band’s more progr

One of the Foo Fighters’ biggest tracks to date, “Everlong” was first released on their second album, The Colour And The Shape. The version we’ll be looking at in this issue, however, is the stripped down acoustic recording from the band’s Greatest H

Nirvana’s world-beating 1991 album Nevermind turned rock music on its head, featuring alt-rock anthems that harnessed the energy and frustration of 90s youth. Released after the astonishing Smells Like Teen Spirit, the album’s second single “Come As

TTo quote the opening line of Porcupine Tree’s “Time Flies”, Steven Wilson was “born in ’67, the year of Sgt. Pepper’. Indeed, Wilson’s playing style is strongly rooted in The Beatles’ brand of psychedelic art-rock, with further influences ranging fr

Anyone who has studied chord theory will confirm that the basis of a major or minor chord is the triad of root, 3rd (or b3rd) and 5th. Once we start altering or extending chords, though, the picture becomes slightly less clear. A sharp or flat 5th de

Sometimes it’s good to change things up and try a different guitar, or even a different instrument entirely. This frees you from habits that may have become traps, and forces you to think consciously about the simplest things. The approach we’ll take

Certain chords can really evoke moods beyond the major equals happy, minor equals sad premise. If you’ve ever played or heard the Lydian mode, you’ll know the fundamental difference that raising the fourth degree of the regular major scale by a semit

One of the most insightful pieces of advice any musician can be given is: it’s not what you play, it’s how you play it. On the guitar this is particularly pertinent, given its ability to produce different tones depending on the way the string is stru

If your next gig is your first in a while (and let’s face it, if you’re reading this in 2021, it probably is!), there’s a good chance your rig is going to need a little attention. Perhaps you’re one of the many new musicians who took up guitar playin

The history of guitar synths is a story that goes back decades. When manufacturers started integrating synthesiser concepts with the guitar, it vastly extended the capabilities of the instrument and opened up a new universe of sounds. So, let’s dive

Whether or not you consider the Gibson Les Paul a “signature model”, there’ve been some truly revolutionary artist-inspired gear lines over the years – some models even becoming the most popular guitars in a manufacturer’s line. Just look at the MXR

In most cases, the guitar solo serves as a major component in classic rock and metal songs. Think “Comfortably Numb”, “Bohemian Rhapsody”, “Free Bird”… But there have been cases in which classic tunes in the rock canon have gone solo-less. Now of cou

The world of the guitar is not one: it is multiple. Each style, whether it is rock, jazz, flamenco or folk, has its own uses and its own playing modes, but also its own instrument (amplified or dry guitars, cutaway or non-cutaway, half-body or quarte

When I began writing for Guitar World in 2001, the job expectedly required a great deal of research, fact checking, etc. And the internet was really only a few years old. As I searched for details about various gear and artists, I frequently saw fans

Most guitarists who have plugged into a whirling, sound-warping, Doppler effect-inducing Fender Vibratone can recall the major impression that playing through a rotary-speaker cabinet made on them. It’s unlikely any compact electronic rendition of th

Any discussion of pedalboard power supplies has to come with the disclaimer that they are hardly the shiniest or most fun thing you can buy for your rig. Nevertheless, apart from a decent distortion, delay and guitar tuner, they’re the most important

The audio waveforms shown in DAWs and other audio tools map amplitude changes over time, which is easy for a computer to create and easy for a human to read. They say nothing about the frequency content within a sound, though. This is where spectral

Getting ready for my return to playing live, I realise I need to spend a bit of time giving my gigging guitars some love. Now, it’s not like I’m Dallas Schoo and I’ve got The Edge on the phone saying he needs his 20-something gigging guitars all rest

It wasn’t a fun, easy record to make,” says producer Bob Rock, speaking of Metallica’s self-titled fifth studio LP, popularly known as the Black Album. “Sure, we had some laughs, but things were difficult. I told the guys when we were done that I’d n

There are countless ways you can upgrade your home recording studio. From big ticket items like a new laptop or instrument, through to small inexpensive items which make life a bit easier. In this guide to cheap home studio upgrades, we’re going to c

When Gibson recognised the power (and growing popularity) of Martin’s D series guitars, they set about designing their own big-bodied acoustic (slightly wider, of course) and, in 1931, produced the Jumbo model (later called the Advanced Jumbo) which

Power supplies are up there with cables and straps as items that are not particularly exciting, but extremely important. Sure, it’s not as fun to get all excited about isolated power supplies as it is to fight over whether Les Pauls are any good – bu

Some claim that cheap cables treated with care will do everything an audiophile requires of them. Others are in the “you get what you pay for” camp. In the competitive gear marketplace, every product requires its own assessment – snake-oil salesmen r

We’ve taken a look at a couple of Eventide pedals that offer a dedicated version of the company’s signature effects. Now it’s the turn of the UltraTap, which follows the MicroPitch. This series has now been given a name – the dot9 – presumably as the

First up is the Noventa Stratocaster, which at a glance offers us the familiar shape of a Strat with P-90 pickups. There’s the alder body in the classic double=cut silhouette, with a 21-fret maple neck. To traditionalists, that’s where the Strat defi

In addition to offering a panoply of popular digital and tube amplifiers, Fender’s amp team has been firing on all cylinders by keenly re-envisioning many of their legendary tube amps, much less some overlooked original models. Speaking of which, gui

Outside of the mainstream, we’d argue some of the most exciting guitar riffs of the past decade have their roots in the math and post-rock spectrum. From Yvette Young’s singular fingerstyle in Covet to the masterful looped phrases of Giraffes? Giraff