November 16th, 2009 by CME
Them Crooked Vultures have posted YouTube streams of all the tracks from their forthcoming CD. The decision to stream the disc – which hits record stores on November 17 – was apparently made in response to an unauthorized leak of the album.
September 29th, 2009 by Gibson Lifestyle
One way to assess the breadth of Jimi Hendrix’s enduring influence on music is to look at some of the guitarists he’s inspired. Here’s a list of 10 — some obvious, some not — who have not only carried on Jimi’s licks and tricks, but subscribed to his artistic message: “be yourself.”
September 29th, 2009 by Gibson Lifestyle
The name of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s new God & Guns is missing one of the disc’s most important “G’s” — guitars. But they’re only absent in that title, because track-for-track it’s dozen songs feature some of the biggest, brawniest tones in the legendary southern rock band’s 30-plus-years career.
September 29th, 2009 by Gibson Lifestyle
This is a banner year for the wide-armed “Americana” music brand. An Americana category has been added to the Grammy Awards, Elvis Costello followed the duo of Allison Krauss and Robert Plant into the loosely defined genre with his Secret, Profane and Sugarcane, and Billboard published the debut Americana sales chart as part of its first supplement devoted to the category.
September 28th, 2009 by Gibson Lifestyle
Next month the unlikely duo of Son Volt’s Jay Farrar And Death Cab For Cutie’s Benjamin Gibbard will release One Fast Move Or I’m Gone: A Tribute To Big Sur, a collection of twelve songs that were inspired by Jack Kerouac’s legendary 1962 novel Big Sur and will accompany an upcoming documentary of the same name. That got us thinking about other tributes to musical and literary icons, so here’s a quick list of some of the artists who came to mind. If you’ve got any additions, feel free to post them below in the comments section since we just finished our summer reading list.
August 13th, 2009 by CME
Motley Crue will put its annual Crue Fest on ice next year in order to focus on its next album. Speaking to Billboard.com, bassist Nikki Sixx said that when this year’s Crue Fest winds down in about a month, the band will take “quite a bit of time off.”
August 13th, 2009 by CME
Don’t feel bad if you were too young, too broke or too square to make it to the original Woodstock Festival in Bethel, N.Y. way back in 1969. As we’ve recently discovered, most the people that were there can’t remember much about it anyway.
May 21st, 2009 by CME
Tone hounds in the know, especially those who have spent any time chasing great sounds in professional studios, have understood for years that one of the best ways to get a huge-sounding guitar track is to stick a good mic in front of a small tube amp and crank the thing up. These same players rarely use such small amps live, however, so we usually aren’t let in on the secret. Let’s open the door on the live room with the green light on and the tape running, and discover some powerful tones achieved on pint-sized amplifiers.
May 21st, 2009 by Gibson Lifestyle
The ultimate “legendary guitar” is that great instrument that a groundbreaking player latches onto and loves deeply throughout his or her career — devoting the vast bulk of their art to just that one guitar, a six-string with no parallel among its peers, in their estimation at least. With this in mind, Brian May’s “Red Special” has not only been his partner in the vast majority of his noteworthy work, but he himself created it to embody precisely what he was looking for from an instrument.
May 21st, 2009 by Gibson Lifestyle
Upon its release back in 1961 the SG Standard was one of the most radical designs the guitar world had ever seen, and it still makes a bold statement today.