Category Archives: News

Many European and North American bands will cross the Atlantic to play shows far away from home. Bigger bands even commonly tour Asia and South America. How many many bands have you heard about that have played shows in North Korea, Pakistan and Iraq? Jason Carter hails originally from Britian and over his lifetime developed…

Recently we were lucky enough to snag some time with Alex Skolnick (while he took a break in a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf) to talk about Testament, Alex Skolnick Trio, tone, technique, gear and just general life stuff. Alex fielded questions on Facebook from our fans, and here’s an edited transcript of the questions…

Greg Hetson, “the Geordie Howe of Punk”, has been a staple of the L.A. punk scene since 1979. Hetson got his start playing in the influential Red Kross, leaving in ’80 to form the Circle Jerks (featured in The Decline of Western Civilization Vol. I). Since 1984, Hetson has split his time between Bad Religion,…

Blending folk and metal together into a cohesive unit is a challenging task for anyone, let alone the bass player left to keep it all together. We caught up with Niclas Etelävuori from Amorphis and talked about the new album, his process of creating his bass lines, and more.

Every now and then, friends come over with complaints about their guitar: the tone is wrong, the playability is off, tuning stability issues and sometimes even cosmetic issues are brought to my attention. I’m happy to address all issues, but some issues are so easy to solve that I think it’s wise to write this…

When describing tone, many guitar players use a myriad of terms to describe the sonic qualities they perceive  I want to take a closer look at some of those terms and try to explain what they mean. It is worth mentioning that most terms relate to ‘feel’; the feel a pickup gives you is crucial…

D-TAR is a sister company of Seymour Duncan, and consist of partners Rick Turner, co-founder of and luthier to the stars, and Seymour Duncan, the electric pickup maker. D-TAR stands for Duncan-Turner Acoustic Research and focuses on acoustic guitar products like pickups and preamps. The Mama Bear is sort of a specialized digital preamp and direct box for acoustic guitar, but it really does much more than that.

Ask someone about their favorite heavy metal bands and it shouldn’t take long to hear Lamb of God. Since their founding in 1990 by Willie Adler, his brother Chris, Randy Blythe, Mark Morton and John Campbell, they’ve put out six studio albums and continued to tour around the world even despite recent troubles in the…

I think Randy Jackson said it best, when he said “Ha! Slapping, the ketchup of the bass world!” and it rings true. Walk into any music store and you will usually hear SOMEONE slapping away on a bass (and in full disclosure, sometimes that’s been this guy). It’s fun, relatively simple and while there are…

One often-overlooked factor in the feel and playability of a guitar is the frets. There are various properties of the frets that can really change how the guitar plays. Let’s have a look at some of them, and what they mean for your guitar’s playability.