Category Archives: The Player’s Room

Five Finger Death Punch is hot off the release of their fifth full length release in just seven years, The Wrong Side of Heaven and the Righteous Side of Hell, Volume 2,  and are currently busy banging heads across the entire Earth. Even with his extremely busy schedule, Five Finger Death Punch’s fleet-fingered lead guitarist Jason…

There was a time directly preceding the age of the Internet where the music video was just as important of an expression of creativity as the song itself. In many cases a good music video could cause a good song to become a hit thanks to avenues like MTV which would then put it into heavy rotation.

When I was younger, I absolutely refused to play with pedals: stompboxes, distortions, overdrives, boosters: anything that would make your amp go to ’11.’ I simply didn’t want to understand why you should or would use them. “I always chose my amps based on their ability to crunch and the voice of the overdrive, so why bother,” I thought. “Wanna have more distortion? Crank up the gain pot of your amp. Not enough gain? Wrong amp!” It was that simple for me. My turn-around point came somewhere last year. I saw more players use the backline of a venue or the house PA with a bunch of pedals in front of them, and sometimes with a tiny 15 watt tube amp with a nice clean sound. I couldn’t see why that approach had benefits until I borrowed a few pedals to see how that worked. So, let’s take a look at how stompboxes worked for me.

Howdy folks – Johnny Hawthorn here giving a little insight on what to prepare and look out for when you get called into the studio for a recording session (even if you are just going in to record some songs with your band). Time is one of the critical factors usually when recording and the…

A common phrase is that there’s no account for taste, and rightfully so. I used to be fond of the more ‘traditional’ heavy metal and hard rock styles, loaded with postproduction processing and a lot of thick production. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with a good deal of Queen, the Darkness or Iron Maiden every…

Scales by themselves are not much more than finger exercises. However, you can unlock the sound of each and every scale by learning to use what chords to use them over. The secret to this arcane knowledge is in the scale itself. This article focuses on a very popular but certainly very strange sounding scale, the melodic minor, and how we can figure out some chords to play behind our rockin’ solos.

When Leo Fender designed and released his Stratocaster in the early 1950s, I doubt he could have been aware of the design standards he would set for the years to come. His asymmetrical Stratocaster was soon followed by the Jaguar, Jazzmaster, Coronado and many others. These guitars were as different as possible but had (at least) one common denominator: their body shape was very asymmetrical, yielding a very comfortable guitar! I wish to take a moment to highlight these guitars’ differences, unique features and tonal characteristics!

It’s getting to be that time of year again, and people who are friends (or co-workers) with guitarists get nervous. What to give?

We learned in a previous article about the benefits of substituting one chord for another. For one, it makes playing rhythm (what guitarists play most of the time) non-repetitive and exciting. Eventually, as we learn more and more chord forms, it makes rhythm playing as thrilling as soloing.  As our groovy new harmonic sophistication reaches…

Are you a bass player in a band that features guitarists who play 7-string or 8-string guitars? This is becoming more and more of an issue lately. And I should know: I’ve been playing 7-string guitars for about ten years now, and about a month ago I finally made the leap to 8-strings via an…