Ace Nashville luthier Joe Glaser and his crew reveal their recipes for maximum chime and jangle.
A handful of musicians have built their careers around the 12-string guitar—Lead Belly, Leo Kottke, and Roger McGuinn come to mind—but for most guitarists, an electric or acoustic 12-string is a specialty instrument to be hauled out when a song needs a little extra jangle. As such, 12-string guitars get a smaller part of a player’s setup budget and are rarely checked, despite the fact that they may suffer more from string tension issues than their 6-string siblings. That’s too bad, because when a 12-string’s action is too high or it’s not set up correctly, it feels twice as hard to play.
With a good setup, a 12-string can sound magical. If you have one, or are considering acquiring one, you’ll benefit from understanding some of the factors that contribute to this instrument’s sonic mojo. If you’re not accomplished at setting up a guitar—or game to learn how—we suggest you seek the services of a professional to work on your instrument. However, armed with a little knowledge, the proper tools, and a bit of patience, you can achieve excellent results doing your own basic setup and maintenance. At the very least, understanding the setup process will help you identify a good tech.
Also—and this is important—if you’re shopping for a used 12-string, knowing how to recognize and identify potential setup issues will help you make an informed buying decision, and potentially save you a lot of money.
When it comes to deciding on how to space the strings at the nut, 12-string guitars require extra thought: You have to deal with the space between the two strings within each pair, and, of course, the spacing of the pairs themselves across the fretboard.
Just as with a 6-string guitar, bass, banjo, or mandolin, 12-string setup can be divided into playability and intonation. On the playability side, there is no one-size-fits-all approach, and through experience, guitarists need to discover their personal comfort zones. At Glaser Instruments we typically tell people that for good tone and a wide dynamic range, your setup should be as high as you can manage to play comfortably, yet as low as necessary to keep you wanting to play that instrument. The playability part of setup is personal, but, for the most part, tuning is more absolute. (Some session players have their own intonation formulas, but that’s a subject for another day.)
Because there’s no one “correct” way to set up a guitar, we’re simply going to share a few things we’ve learned in the last 35 years—proven techniques that work for us and our clients. To illustrate these concepts, we’ve chosen two guitars: a 1965 Rickenbacker 360/12 and a ’65 Guild F-212. The latter belongs to producer Bob Ezrin, whose credits include Peter Gabriel, Alice Cooper, Pink Floyd, Kiss, Lou Reed, and Phish. This Guild has added jangle to countless tracks, so chances are you’ve actually heard it.
Each guitar needed some work to play and sound its best, so we’ll take you through what we did and describe how we approached those procedures and why. Some setup issues are common to both 6- and 12-string instruments and have been already covered in Premier Guitar, so instead of rehashing them here, we’ll link you to them. In this article, we’ll focus on considerations that are unique to 12-string setup.
Wrangling the Ric
Photo 1— On this Ric’s original nut, string spacing between the pairs is inconsistent. Also, notice how the two strings in the 1st unison pair are closer together than in the 2nd unison. This nut will be replaced to improve playability.
Photo by Andy Ellis
If you’ve played a 12-string, you know that typically the top two pairs are tuned in unison, while the lowest four pairs are tuned in octaves. On most 12-string guitars, the octave pairs are configured so each high octave string precedes its low octave mate when you strum down across the strings toward the floor.
But on a Rickenbacker 12, this convention is reversed. On string pairs 6-4, the low octave comes first, followed by the high octave, and this idiosyncratic stringing has a subtle sonic effect on chords and riffs. Rest assured the setup principles we’ll discuss here apply to any electric 12, regardless of which way the octave pairs are arranged. We mention the Ric stringing in case you haven’t yet had the pleasure of playing one—don’t freak out when you see it!
Typically the gauges for a light electric 12-string set are .046w/.026w, .036w/.018, .026w/.012, .017/.008, .013./013, and .010/.010, moving from the 6th to the 1st pairs. The “w” indicates a wound string, so as you can see, this means two of the octave pairs—the 5th and 4th—have a mix of wound and plain wire. As we’ll see in a moment, combining radically different string construction and thickness creates unique intonation challenges, and this applies to both electric and acoustic 12s.
Truss rod adjustment. Setups always start with a quick overview and then a truss rod adjustment, if needed. We want a little relief or “bow”—about a business card’s thickness—located around the 6th or 7th fret. As with all things guitar, there is no right or wrong, and while the laws of physics pertain to string rattle and intonation, personal preference ultimately rules. In general, the lighter your attack, the straighter the neck and the lower the action can be.
The Ric’s owner uses a regular light gauge set and plays with a light touch, so we checked the relief and tightened the dual truss rods slightly, reducing the amount of bow by a small amount. [For details on how to adjust a truss rod, read “Time for a Neck Adjustment?” and “Demystifying Truss Rod Tools.”]
String spacing at the nut. While initially inspecting our project Ric, we noticed that the strings weren’t correctly spaced at the nut (Photo 1), so we decided to cut a new one. To preserve the original look, we opted for black synthetic nut material.
Tip: It’s not uncommon to encounter oddball string spacing on an older 12-string, so be sure to check this when buying a used model.
When it comes to deciding on how to space the strings at the nut, 12-string guitars require extra thought: You have to deal with the space between the two strings within each pair, and, of course, the spacing of the pairs themselves across the fretboard. Remember, except for the two unisons, the strings are gauged very differently within each pair, and getting them to look good and feel right is more than twice as complicated as cutting a standard 6-string nut.
If you’re shopping for a used 12-string, knowing how to recognize and identify potential setup issues will help you make an informed buying decision, and potentially save you a lot of money.
There are several different versions of “correct” nut spacing and, as with all things, it boils down to a personal choice based on feel. At our shop we use a computer-controlled Plek machine to cut nut slots because of its speed and accuracy. But machines have to be programmed by humans, so let’s look at the decisions we make when programming our Plek. By the way, these are the same decisions we’d make if we were doing this work by hand—the way we did for years before acquiring the Plek.
As with cutting a 6-string nut, our first step for this Ric was to place the outside strings—a .010 and the .046—where they feel best along the neck edges. The goal is to have these outer strings spaced as widely apart as possible for easy chording, but not so far out that they fall off the neck while playing. Where you place the outside strings depends on how the neck is shaped and how the fret ends are cut and beveled.
Next, we placed the inside unison 1st string where it feels good to fret, which is essentially as close to its mate as possible without causing the two to crash together when they’re plucked with a medium-hard attack. Many 12-string players will tell you that a certain amount of string-against-string “chatter” is actually part of what gives the 12-string guitar its unique chime, so you don’t have to completely eliminate this. A space between the unisons of about .070" is typical. That’s approximately the thickness of a quarter, which makes a great low-tech calibrator.
Now, using the Ric’s outside bass string (.046) and the inside treble (.010) as guides, we located the remaining “main” strings, in this case, the .013, .017, .026w, and .036w (the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th strings, respectively).
There are different formulas for spacing these main strings: equal center-to-center, equal space between strings, or a hybrid of these two approaches. Essentially, hybrid spacing uses equal distances from the closest edge of the smaller string to the center of the adjacent larger one, moving from the treble side toward the bass.
Before we had a Plek machine at our shop, we used a special formula to calculate our hybrid spacing. But now, there’s an easier way: You can use an inexpensive String Spacing Rule from Stewart-MacDonald to quickly do the job—no math required. [You can watch a video on how to use this tool at stewmac.com.]
Once you’ve located and marked the four main strings on the nut, it’s time to place each string’s pitch mate. Again, the first consideration is feel, although .070" is a good starting point for the space between each pair.
Photo 2 — The string spacing is noticeably off at the bridge, not only within the pairs themselves, but also between them. Compare the 4th, 3rd, and 2nd courses, for example.
Photo by Andy Ellis.
Cutting nut slots. The string slot depth adjustment is done with nut files that correspond to string gauge. String slotting in the nut is very important for comfort, sound, and tuning. Slots left too high will impede playability and make the first position notes sound sharp when they’re fretted. But if you cut the slots too low, the strings will rattle when played open. [For an in-depth explanation of how to remove an old nut and carve a new one, read “How to Convert a Flattop to Nashville Tuning.”]
When filing the proper depth of the string slots on a 12-string nut, keep in mind that the bottoms of the slots should be cut so each string clears the 1st fret by the same amount. Again, we’re dealing with very different gauges in each octave pair. On a 12-string guitar, you might assume that keeping the tops of the strings level in each pair would make it more comfortable to play—and this is true. But by doing so, the lighter-gauge string would have more distance to travel to contact the top of the fret, and this can pull them noticeably out of tune.
At our shop we cut slots so a string clears the 1st fret by a few thousandths of an inch more than it would clear the 2nd fret if held down at the 1st fret. As you might imagine, this is a subject that generates lots of debate, and you can find online tutorials supporting a variety of theories—some good, some baloney.
Dealing with the saddles. The next thing we look at is the bridge. We saw that on this Ric, the string spacing was uneven by any standard (Photo 2). This is one of the most important aspects of playability. If the strings aren’t evenly laid out, it gets hard to differentiate between the pairs, which can cause confusion when you’re playing.
Also, the string radius across the bridge was uneven and didn’t match the fretboard radius. For optimal playability, you want the string saddles to follow the curve of the frets.
And that’s not all: Unlike some electric 12-string guitars, this Ric doesn’t have individual saddles for each string, but instead uses a single aluminum saddle for each pair. This can make it impossible to correctly intonate strings with very different gauges, such as within the 6th course with its .046 low E and .026 high octave.
Photo 3 — Cut from an aluminum bar, this custom saddle has been drilled and tapped for its intonation screw and is now ready to be shaped with a file.
Photo by Andy Ellis
To fix these problems, we decided to replace several saddles with new ones we’d fabricate from aluminum bars (Photo 3).
Finding the intonation points. After cutting the saddle blanks, and drilling and tapping the holes for each saddle’s intonation screw, we installed the new saddles on the bridge and strung everything up to pitch. Because of their disparate gauges, some string pairs need different points of contact on their shared saddle, so our next step was to manually file these in. But how do you find each string’s unique intonation point?
Photo 4 — Using pieces of a thick plain string to determine unique intonation points on the saddle shared by the
6th-course octave pairs.
Photo by Andy Ellis
Here’s our simple trick: First we cut two short lengths from a thick plain string, and then placed one of these lengths between each string and the saddle (Photo 4). After tuning to pitch, we checked the intonation with a precision electronic tuner, moving the string pieces forward or backward—like you would with individually adjustable saddles. Once we were satisfied with the intonation, we marked the spots on the saddle to give us an idea of how to shape the top with a file.
Photo 5 — Individual intonation points have now been filed into this 6th-course saddle.
Photo by Andy Ellis
Next we removed the new saddle, put it in a small vise, and filed away each side so the point of string contact matched the marks we’d made previously (Photo 5). Any minor intonation adjustments can be made after the saddle is on the guitar and we’re doing the final setup.
Photo 6 — Now installed in the bridge, the new 6th-course saddle is ready for final slotting and shaping.
Photo by Andy Ellis
Photo 6 shows the new 6th-string saddle installed on the bridge.
Photo 7 — Using a digital caliper to measure the gap between strings in each pair.
Photo by Andy Ellis
String spacing at the bridge. With the replacement saddles installed, we could now correct the string spacing at this end of the guitar. After positioning the two outside strings to leave sufficient playing clearance along the edge of the fretboard, we set the inside unison 1st string, and then placed the other four main strings using the hybrid formula described earlier. Once the main strings were in place, we positioned the paired strings. This process is similar to spacing the strings at the nut, except at the bridge, the separation within each pair is slightly wider—typically about .080" (Photo 7).
On this Ric, some strings were not spaced correctly from the start, so we had to “migrate” a few slots on the old saddles that we kept. You do this by first filing slightly deeper slots in the correct position and then removing material from the top of the affected saddles to eliminate the old marks. This requires patience and a steady hand. Remember, you can raise the bridge slightly to compensate for filing off a small amount of the saddle.
As you position the string pairs on the saddles, take time to visually confirm that they stay perpendicular to the frets as they travel along the neck to their nut slots.
Photo 8 — With a radius gauge, you can check if the saddles match the curve of the fretboard and determine how deep to file each saddle slot.
Photo by Andy Ellis
To determine the depth of the final saddle slots, we first measured the fretboard with a radius gauge at the 1st, 12th, and 19th frets. This Ric had a 10" radius at all three locations, so we put a 10" radius in the bridge saddles too. Many of the strings were not in this curve (Photo 8), so using the same files as on the nut, we deepened slots where needed and achieved our target radius, using the radius gauge to check our work.
Final adjustments. Every guitar is different in terms of setup. Depending on the fret plane and neck stiffness, some guitars will allow you to set the action very low. Most players prefer to have 12-string action set a little lower than on a 6-string, so it’s not a struggle to fret the guitar, given all the additional string tension. Fortunately, this Ric allowed us to go quite low because the neck was stiff and quite consistent without any major dips or humps.
This Ric’s bridge operates much like a Tune-o-matic, so we set the action at the 12th fret by raising or lowering each side of the bridge, the way you would on a Les Paul. After that, we readjusted the intonation by moving each of the six shared saddles back and forth, again as you would on a Tune-o-matic. [To understand the principles behind intonating an electric guitar, read “How to Set Up a Fender Stratocaster” and “How to Install a New Tune-o-matic Bridge.”]
As a final step, we checked the tuning at the nut. First, we carefully tuned the “beats” out of each open pair, and then checked each string at frets 1 and 2. These fretted notes should look good on a tuner—maybe a tad sharp under finger tension—but still produce beatless unisons and octaves. This can take some work, including some very gentle final filing of the nut slots to make sure the strings all leave from the very front edge of the nut.
Next, we checked intonation again at the 12th fret, this time comparing the open strings to the fretted notes, looking for any beating in the fretted pairs. As expected, we needed to make small adjustments with the file to position a few strings to the front or back of the shared saddle until all of them were perfectly in tune.
Photo 9 — Ah! Now the strings are spaced evenly at the bridge, the saddles are radiused and intonated, and all sharp edges have been filed smooth and polished. This Ric is ready to rock.
Photo by Andy Ellis
With the radius, action, and intonation squared away, we had one last task: Round and polish the saddles to remove any sharp edges (Photo 9).
Test drive. It’s worth mentioning that an instrument might be nicely intonated in the clinical context of a shop bench, but not be so sweet in the reality of a gig or session. Guitarists may have different opinions about intonation—in fact, some studio players prefer to tune the pairs slightly off to produce a cool chorusing effect. For that reason, the last phase of a good setup requires spending time with the instrument’s owner, patiently putting the guitar through its paces and tweaking to suit. If you’re doing your own setup on an electric 12, allow yourself time to dial everything in before you pronounce the guitar ready for prime time.
Finessing the F-212
Photo 10 — After having its neck reset, our project Guild F-212 is secured with clamps while the glue dries.
Photo by Andy Ellis
The first step in setting up an acoustic 12-string is to determine whether or not it can be set up at all. The increased string tension applied by the extra strings takes a toll on an acoustic, literally reshaping the instrument over time. Often the neck pulls forward and the soundboard bellies up, and as a result, the action becomes unplayable. Lowering the saddle may solve the problem in the short term, but if this incremental collapsing continues, ultimately the neck will need to be removed and reinserted into the body at a new angle. Called a neck reset, this is a job for an experienced professional.
Tip: When buying a used acoustic, you need to determine if a neck reset is required. Because it costs hundreds of dollars, a neck reset is a key factor in negotiating the selling price.
Assessing an acoustic 12. Here’s how you can evaluate the instrument’s condition. First, the neck should have a small amount of relief between the nut and body joint. Put a 12-string capo at the 1st fret, then press and hold the 6th-string pair at the fret where the neck joins the body. At around the 7th fret, peer between the bottom of the 6th-string pair and the top of the frets. Ideally, you want to see a small gap. Using your free hand (remember to keep pressing the strings against the frets where the neck joins the body), tap the paired strings against the frets to help you gauge the size of the gap. Repeat this on the 1st pair to estimate relief on the treble side of the fretboard.
For the electric Ric, we were looking for a gap approximately the thickness of a business card. On an acoustic with thicker strings, you might want a slightly larger gap, but the business card is a good starting point. If there’s too much relief—the gap is too large—the truss rod needs to be tightened.
Tip: Many 12-string guitarists tune down a half-step or even a whole-step below standard. Dropped tuning makes the strings easier to fret, reduces strain on the neck and body, and makes a 12-string sound huge.
If this doesn’t straighten the neck enough, you’ll need to check the neck angle or forward pitch in relation to the body. For guitars with bolt-on necks, this angle can be adjusted quite easily, usually with a shim. But on guitars with glued-in or “set” necks—this applies to most acoustic guitars—changing the neck angle is an involved procedure best left to a qualified repair person.
To evaluate the neck angle, first test out the action by playing up and down the fretboard. If the instrument feels reasonably playable and the neck is fairly straight, then check how much of the saddle is exposed at the bridge. A visible 1/8" (.125) of saddle is ideal. A bit more is okay, but 1/16" or less can create trouble. It’s probably a sign that the saddle has already been lowered, and it doesn’t leave you any more leeway to reduce the action. A shallow saddle profile typically indicates a neck reset is required, and that was the case with our project F-212. Photo 10 gives you an idea of what this entails.
But let’s assume you can control the relief with the truss rod and you have enough available saddle height to adjust the action. The next order of business is to confirm the nut is in good shape. As we saw with the Ric, string spacing on a 12-string is particularly tricky because you’re dealing with distances within the string pairs and also between them. And remember, to avoid intonation problems, the bottoms of all the strings need to be a uniform height from the 1st fret.
Photo 11 — This nut looks good. As on an electric 12, the bottoms of all the open strings should sit at a
consistent height above the 1st fret.
Photo by Andy Ellis
On our Guild F-212, the nut looked fine (Photo 11), so we didn’t have to replace or modify it. But if the string spacing or slot depth is off on your acoustic 12’s nut, review the concepts and procedures we just covered for the Ric, and apply them to your flattop.
Intonating the saddle. As with any acoustic guitar, the placement of the saddle in the bridge is critical for good intonation as you play higher up the neck. Theoretically, saddle placement is twice the distance from the nut to the 12th fret, but a guitar with its saddle placed there will play increasingly sharp as you fret in higher positions, so saddle “compensation” is necessary. This means moving the point where the string sits on the saddle back away from the neck by a small amount.This amount can vary according to string gauge and action, but a good average is 4/32" (0.125) at the 1st string and 7/32" (0.219) at the 6th, measured from the middle of the saddle slot.
There are two common saddle widths for most steel-string acoustics, whether 6- or 12-string. The narrower one is approximately 3/32" (0.093), and this allows scant room for adjusting the contact point of each string. The other common width is 1/8" (0.125), and this allows slightly more room to adjust each string’s vibrating length.
Many 12-string guitarists tune down a half-step or even a whole-step below standard. Dropped tuning makes the strings easier to fret, reduces strain on the neck and body, and makes a 12-string sound huge.
One intonation option is to widen the saddle slot and install a saddle with a width of 1/4" or more, which would give considerably more room to adjust the contact point for each string. This was not uncommon in the ’70s, but today most players consider it overkill because of the cost, small gain in tuning accuracy, and negative impact on an instrument’s value.
On many guitars, the contact point for the string as it comes up from its bridge pin toward the soundhole is the center of the saddle or slightly forward from the center. However, with a small file and a bit of patience, you can achieve more accurate intonation by shifting this contact point. And that’s what we decided to do for this F-212—create a new bone saddle and adjust the contact points to improve the tuning within the constraints of the 1/8" saddle width. This is a reversible mod, and that’s an important consideration for a vintage guitar—especially one with such a rich recorded legacy as this Guild.
Tip: For years, memorable music has been made on non-intonated acoustic 12s. So unless the intonation is really bothering you, consider keeping a non-intonated saddle on your guitar.
Knowing where to place the contact points on a 12-string saddle comes from years of experience—it’s not something that’s easily described in an article because so much depends on the guitar, the strings, and the player.
Photo 12 — This new bone saddle blank has been shaped, fitted, and radiused, and is now ready to be intonated.
Photo by Andy Ellis
That said, the basic steps go like this: First you fit and radius a new bone blank (Photo 12). While it’s still seated in the saddle slot, pencil perpendicular lines across the saddle to mark where each string emerges through the bridge pin holes to contact the saddle.
Next, along the top of the saddle and parallel to it, pencil in the contact points where the different strings will rest. The 1st and 2nd unison pairs will sit much like the single 1st and 2nd strings do on a 6-string—the 1st pair will be forward, the 2nd pair as far back as possible, essentially resting on the rear edge of the saddle.
Then pencil in the contact points for the four lower strings of each octave pair. Again, these points will resemble the pattern of a 6-string guitar, which has its 3rd string sitting forward on the front (soundhole) edge, and strings 4, 5, and 6 respectively shifting slightly back away from the neck toward the bridge pins.
The high strings in each octave pair typically sit further back on the saddle than their lower mates. The octave 3rd string (high G, in standard tuning), sits at the rear edge, and the 4th, 5th, and 6th octaves gradually shift forward, with the octave 6th sitting perhaps about center on the saddle.
Photo 13 — The bone saddle in the process of being filed and intonated. We’re looking at the rear of the saddle, so the bass strings are to the left, and the treble strings to the right. The perpendicular pencil marks to the left indicate where each string will cross the saddle from the bridge pin holes, while the marks along the top of the saddle indicate the unique resting point for each string. The unisons will have the same contact points, but the strings in each octave pair will sit at different positions, relative to the front and rear of the saddle.
Photo by Andy Ellis
Once you’ve made your marks, remove the saddle and start filing away the material around each pencil mark to create a ridge for the string to rest on. Photo 13 shows a saddle in the process of being shaped, with string pairs 6-1 running from left to right. As you file, be careful not to remove the pencil marks on the top of the saddle. They are your guides, and should remain on your saddle until the final polishing.
After carving the contact points, radius the top of the saddle to match the fretboard curve, and using very fine abrasive paper, polish out the file and pencil marks. Install the saddle, string up, and check the action.
Photo 14 — The finished intonated saddle. Notice the different contact points for the strings within each octave pair. The 3rd course illustrates this quite dramatically: The high G rests toward the rear of the saddle, while the low G
sits closer to the front.
Photo by Andy Ellis
Photo 14 shows the finished saddle installed in the Guild’s bridge. If you look carefully, you can see many of these contact points and how they differ within the octave pairs. Again, this is simply an example of what worked well for our particular F-212, but it illustrates a fairly standard acoustic 12 arrangement.
If the action needs to be lowered, remove the saddle and sand down its flat bottom. Proceed very slowly. Even though it’s a hassle to repeatedly restring, tune, and check the action, that’s still a lot less work than having to start from scratch because you sanded off too much of the bottom. Once you have the action where you want it, blow the dust off the guitar, give it a polish, and start basking in its glorious chime.
Special thanks to Bob Ezrin for loaning us his 1965 Guild F-212 and EM2’s Mark Montgomery for letting us rework his ’65 Rickenbacker 360/12.
[Updated 3/24/22]
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There's a lot of musical gold inside the scales.
Intermediate
Intermediate
• Develop a deeper improvisational vocabulary.
• Combine pentatonic scales to create new colors.
• Understand the beauty of diatonic harmony.Improvising over one chord for long stretches of time can be a musician's best friend or worst nightmare. With no harmonic variation, we are left to generate interest through our lines, phrasing, and creativity. When I started learning to improvise, a minor 7 chord and a Dorian mode were the only sounds that I wanted to hear at the time. I found it tremendously helpful to have the harmony stay in one spot while I mined for new ideas to play. Playing over a static chord was crucial in developing my sense of time and phrasing.
The following is the first improvisational device I ever came across. I want to say I got it from a Frank Gambale book. The idea is that there are three minor pentatonic scales "hiding" in any given major scale. If we're in the key of C (C–D–E–F–G–A–B) we can pluck out the D, E, and A minor pentatonic scales. If we frame them over a Dm7 chord, they give us different five-note combinations of the D Dorian mode. In short, we are building minor pentatonic scales off the 2, 3, and 6 of the C major scale.
Viewing this through the lens of D minor (a sibling of C major and the tonal center for this lesson), D minor pentatonic gives us the 1–b3–4–5–b7, E minor pentatonic gives us 2–4–5–6–1, and A minor pentatonic gives us 5–b7–1–2–4. This means you can use your favorite pentatonic licks in three different locations and there are three different sounds we can tap into from the same structure.
If you smashed all of them together, you would get the D Dorian scale (D–E–F–G–A–B–C) with notes in common between the D, E, and A minor pentatonic scales. Ex. 1 uses all three scales, so you can hear the different colors each one creates over the chord.
Ex. 1
Ex. 2 is how I improvise with them, usually weaving in and out using different positional shapes.
Ex. 2
The next idea is one I stole from a guitarist who often came into a music store I worked at. On the surface, it's very easy: Just take two triads (in our example it will be Dm and C) and ping-pong between them. The D minor triad (D–F–A) gives us 1–b3–5, which is very much rooted in the chord, and the C major triad (C–E–G) gives us the b7–9–4, which is much floatier. Also, if you smash these two triads together, you get 1–2–b3–4–5–b7, which is a minor pentatonic scale with an added 2 (or 9). Eric Johnson uses this sound all the time. Ex. 3 is the lick I stole years ago.
Ex. 3
Ex. 4 is how I would improvise with this concept. Many different fingerings work with these, so experiment until you find a layout that's comfortable for your own playing.
Ex. 4
If two triads work, why not seven? This next approach will take all the triads in the key of C (C–Dm–Em–F–G–Am–Bdim) and use them over a Dm7 chord (Ex. 5). Each triad highlights different three-note combinations from the Dorian scale, and all of them sound different. Triads are clear structures that sound strong to our ears, and they can generate nice linear interest when played over one chord. Once again, all of this is 100% inside the scale. Ex. 5 is how each triad sounds over the track, and Ex. 6 is my attempt to improvise with them.
Ex. 5
Ex. 6
If we could find all these possibilities with triads, it's logical to make the structure a little bigger and take a similar approach with 7 chords, or in this case, arpeggios. Naturally, all the diatonic chords will work, but I'll limit this next idea to just Dm7, Fmaj7, Am7, and Cmaj7. I love this approach because as you move further away from the Dm7 shape, each new structure takes out a chord tone and replaces it with an extension. I notice that I usually come up with different lines when I'm thinking about different chord shapes, and this approach is a decent way to facilitate that. Ex. 7 is a good way to get these under your fingers. Just ascend one shape, shift into the next shape on the highest string, then descend and shift to the next on the lowest string.
Ex. 7
Ex. 8 is my improvisation using all four shapes and sounds, but I lean pretty heavily on the Am7.
Ex. 8
This last concept has kept me busy on the fretboard for the last five years or so. Check it out: You can take any idea that works over Dm7 and move the other diatonic chords. The result is six variations of your original lick. In Ex. 9 I play a line that is 4–1–b3–5 over Dm7 and then walk it through the other chords in the key. These notes are still in the key of C, but it sounds drastically different from playing a scale.
Ex. 9
In Ex. 10, I try to think about the shapes from the previous example, but I break up the note order in a random but fun way. The ending line is random but felt good, so I left it in.
Ex. 10
While all these concepts have been presented over a minor chord, you can just as easily apply them to any chord quality, and they work just as well in harmonic or melodic minor. Rewarding sounds are available right inside the harmony, and I am still discovering new ideas through these concepts after many years.
Though the above ideas won't necessarily be appropriate for every style or situation, they will work in quite a few. Developing any approach to the point that it becomes a natural extension of your playing takes considerable work and patience, so just enjoy the process, experiment, and let your ear guide you to the sounds you like. Even over just one chord, there is always something new to find.
The high priest of prog-metal guitar, John Petrucci, is still finding new territory on his instrument.
The legendary progressive-metal guitarist details the darkness—and the renewed camaraderie—that led to his band Dream Theater’s 16th full-length record, Parasomnia.
Some very important events happened in John Petrucci’s life in 2024. He celebrated an enormous milestone with his bandmates in prog-metal behemoth Dream Theater: They’ve been a band for 40 years. Many bands aren’t destined to last a single decade, let alone four. It’s a titanic personal and artistic achievement. And yet, that anniversary paled in significance next to another major development: The band wrote and created a new full-length record with founding drummer Mike Portnoy, who had been absent from Dream Theater since 2010.
The news of Portnoy’s reunion with Dream Theater rocked the metal world. Over the years, whiffs of acrimony and hurt feelings suggested Portnoy’s return to the band might be a pipe dream. But in October 2023, the band revealed that they had all independently reconciled with Portnoy, a process that culminated backstage at New York’s Beacon Theater in 2022. Portnoy attended Dream Theater’s show at the venue and met up with the band afterward. It was the first time he’d seen vocalist James Labrie in 10 years. Within seconds, 13 years melted away in the warmth of camaraderie.
“The gear was all set up and we sat there and started playing. It was magic. It was like we never missed a beat.”
A few months after the announcement of Portnoy’s return, he and bandmates Labrie, Petrucci, bassist John Myung, and keyboardist Jordan Rudess convened at the recently renovated Dream Theater HQ, their longtime creative hideout and recording studio in Long Island, to begin to create new music. Petrucci, speaking over the phone from Brazil during Dream Theater’s December 2024 tour, remembers that period fondly. “From the moment that we all stepped in the studio in February, the gear was all set up and we sat there and started playing,” he says. “It was magic. It was like we never missed a beat.”
After shaking off the cobwebs, the first song they wrote together was “Night Terror”—“if that gives you any indication of the energy and vibe and mood that we were in,” quips Petrucci. It’s heavy, riffy, aggressive, and progressive, a capsule of 13 years in just shy of 10 minutes. “We let that all out in the first couple of weeks of just being together,” Petrucci continues. “It was wonderful and the creative juices just flowed the way they always did. There was great brotherly chemistry between all of us.”
Last year, Dream Theater celebrated their ruby anniversary as a band. Four decades on, they’re still exploring the dark corners of what happens when we sleep.
The band continued to create together as they’d always done. They had some concrete ideas: They wanted to make a concept album, and it had to be heavy and riff-centric. Petrucci, who produced the record, was intrigued by parasomnia, a medical concept which refers broadly to any unusual sleep pattern, like sleepwalking, nightmares, insomnia, sleep paralysis, and more. He hadn’t experienced those nocturnal issues (the worst he deals with is snoring), but he began deep research into them. A path had opened up. “That creative part of me just wakes up, and then that turns into it also being musically creative, lyrically creative, visually creative,” says Petrucci.
This is how Parasomnia, Dream Theater’s 16th studio record, came to exist. Engineered and mixed by Andy Sneap, the concept album comprises a collection of suites and vignettes that center on various sleep disturbances, opening with “In the Arms of Morpheus,” a slowly building soundscape that sets the scene for all that follows. It soundtracks someone getting ready for bed and falling asleep, and just as they’re drifting into a dreamstate, a musical theme starts to creep in. It heightens and gets weird before exploding into the full chaos that gives way to “Night Terror,” the nine-minute-plus epic. Petrucci’s playing on this song alone is staggering: There’s the classic, open-string beginner riff, then vintage, hyper, ’80s-metal single-note melody work, then a truly brain-melting, lightning-fast solo that leaves your jaw open.
True to Dream Theater lineage, there are pieces of the record that feel ready to soundtrack alien drag races on Mars next to swanky sections of jazzy, hard-rocking funk-blues, like on “A Broken Man.” Petrucci slips in and out of modes and scales like a chameleon changing its colors, each sounding as lived-in and natural as the last. His fingers just seem to know where to go. His only reprieve is the funereal interlude “Are We Dreaming?” which prepares us for the power ballad “Bend the Clock” and the devastating, scorched earth closer: “The Shadow Man Incident.”
Parasomnia is Dream Theater’s 16th studio record, and their first since reuniting with founding drummer Mike Portnoy.
“It’s wacky,” says Petrucci about the phenomena behind that song’s title. If you’re not familiar, “the shadow man” is a colloquial name given to a figure that appears during some episodes of sleep paralysis. People around the world have reported a similar apparition visiting them while they’re experiencing sleep paralysis—but there’s no scientific consensus for what causes the similar visions.
“There’s something in the human brain that is unaccounted for or whatever that must be producing that, that repeated experience,” continues Petrucci. “You start doing all this research and going down rabbit holes online. You’re like, ‘Wow, for centuries, in every culture and civilization, the same thing has been happening. What is this?’ It definitely explores the depths of the human mind, but it reminds me of any sort of topic that holds your interest in a weird way, like UFOs. A song like ‘The Shadow Man Incident’ is a long, epic piece of music that gives you the backdrop and license to go into storytelling more.”
The goal was to take that storytelling beyond the normal confines of an LP—or, at least, what we think of as an LP in the streaming age. “What we decided to do was to make the album kind of like a Dark Side of the Moon listening experience,” explains Petrucci. “Our hope is that people will get this record, turn down the lights, get together with some friends for a drink or whatever you do, and just listen to the whole thing like you’re watching a movie. It’s supposed to be an experience.”Petrucci even studied the music of composers like John Williams to get a bead on how to create epic, cinematic feelings in music. He displayed his research to his bandmates in the form of creative direction for certain songs, likening the process to scoring a film. “The album or song topic presents certain imagery, and you want the music to match that imagery, so you have those tools in your toolbox, like, ‘Okay, I know what kind of chord movement or chordal sounds or modal things I can do that are going to make that,’ and it’s going to create that flavor as opposed to just going in and writing in the typical way that you would if you didn’t have that knowledge ahead of time.”
“With Mike rejoining the band, I wanted to lean into the nostalgic aspect in some of the recording process.”
A part of that soundscaping is what Petrucci describes as “ear candy”: spoken-word passages, or sound effects like clocks ticking and alarms ringing. These elements help build a more profound, immersive listen, but they only work if the songs are good, says Petrucci. “You can have all these sound connections and overdubs and voices, but if the songs suck, it’s not going to mean anything. No one’s going to want to listen to it.”
Knowing that the record would deal with all things eerie and creepy, Petrucci wanted to explore what types of tonalities could unsettle the listening experience. “For ‘Night Terror,’ I use the super Phrygian mode, which is like a mode of the Hungarian minor which has a very unresolved sound that creates a lot of tension,” he says. He also experimented with constructs like the Prometheus and Tristan chords. “That gives you that dreamy weird thing you hear in ‘In the Arms of Morpheus.’ That first 8-string chord is this crazy chord of all tritones that just makes it sound like you’re in a nightmare right away.”
Petrucci, pictured here shredding in November 1994, broke out plenty of classic gear for the recording of Parasomnia to mark the reunion with Portnoy.
Photo by Frank White
Petrucci called on a range of tools old and new to bring Parasomnia to life. “With Mike rejoining the band, I wanted to lean into the nostalgic aspect in some of the recording process,” he explains. He used his 6-, 7-, and 8-string Ernie Ball Music Man Majesty guitars, in a spread of different tunings. He used his Mesa/Boogie JP-2C on everything except the record’s solos. For those, he busted out his old Mesas—a Mark III, IV, and IIC+ among them—for a shootout and wound up choosing the IIC+ that he used on old Dream Theater records (plus his own solo release, Suspended Animation). A Roland Jazz Chorus even clocked in for some cleans—a page Petrucci took from James Hetfield’s book.
The nostalgia didn’t end there. The band reached out to recording engineer Doug Oberkircher, who engineered all of the band’s records from 1992’s Images and Words through 2003’s Train of Thought, to purchase the Neve preamp used on those albums. All the guitars on Parasomnia were recorded through that preamp.
In many ways, a production this grand and intricate is familiar territory for the band. Petrucci and Dream Theater obviously have a penchant for art that is narrative, theatrical, and grand. But Parasomnia is specially weighted with circumstance and time.John Petrucci's Gear
Petrucci and Dream Theater have managed an incredible feat: They’re just as excited about their music now as they were when they were teenagers.
Photo by Ekaterina Gorbacheva
Guitars
- Various Ernie Ball Music Man The Majesty 6-, 7-, and 8-string guitars with DiMarzio Dreamcatcher and Rainmaker pickups
Amps
- Mesa/Boogie JP-2C (rhythm parts)
- Vintage Mesa/Boogie Mark II C+ Simul-Class (lead parts)
- Roland JC-120 (clean parts)
- Mesa/Boogie 4x12 Rectifier Traditional Straight cabinet
Effects
- MXR Bass Compressor
- Boss CE-2W
- Boss DC-2W
- TC Electronic Dreamscape
- TC Electronic TC 2290
- TC Electronic Corona Chorus+
- MXR Stereo Chorus
- Keeley Blues Disorder
- Dunlop JP95 John Petrucci Signature Cry Baby Wah
- MXR Custom Audio Electronics MC403 Power System
Recording
- Neve 1093 Pre/EQ
- API 3124MV
- Solid State Logic PURE DRIVE OCTO
- sE Electronics VR2 + Mojave Audio MA-D (rhythm parts)
- sE Electronics SE4400a + Royer Labs R-121 (lead parts)
- Royer Labs R-121 in stereo (clean parts)
- sE Electronics RNR1 (mid room)
- sE Electronics RNT in OMNI (far room)
- Waves H-Delay Analog Delay Plugin
- Soundtoys EchoBoy
- Soundtoys MicroShift
- Soundtoys Crystallizer
- D16 Group Audio Software Repeater
- Valhalla DSP VintageVerb Plugin
- Valhalla DSP ValhallaRoom Reverb Plugin
- Radial ProRMP
- Radial J48
- EBow
Strings & Picks
- John Petrucci signature Dunlops
- Ernie Ball .10 gauge electric sets
“John Myung and I met when we were in middle school, so we were like 12, and I remember everything about us playing together, going over to each other’s houses after school and playing every Iron Maiden song there ever was, going to Berklee and meeting Mike when we were 18, forming the band,” says Petrucci. “Here we are, it’s 40 years later. How the hell does that happen? But the great thing is to still be playing with my brothers and my buddies, and still making music together that we’re just as excited about as we were when we were 18. It’s all we ever wanted to do.”
All of this history isn’t just window dressing. It comes out in Petrucci’s playing, too: It’s all one, long story. “By the time I was 16 or 17, I had a handle on the kind of style of player I wanted to be, and those original elements are still there and will always be there,” says Petrucci. “But now, 40 years later, there’s still new things coming in. Even on the new album, there’s things I never did before. We’re playing these shows and I’m trying to master this stuff live in front of an audience and see if I can pull it off under pressure. The challenge of it is just as much as it was when I was a teenager. I love it.
“It’s a continuing experiment,” Petrucci continues. “As you develop new techniques and go down new roads of playing, all of a sudden you realize you abandoned some older techniques, then you go back and rediscover those things, and through the process of rediscovering the old things you used to do, all of a sudden you could do some stuff that you never were able to do before. It’s like something that’s living. It’s a living experiment of guitar playing. It’s just forever inspiring.”
YouTube It
Last year marked Dream Theater’s 40th anniversary as a band, and the official Dream Theater fan club caught up with the group before their gig in Oslo to see how they brought the milestone tour to life.
Fifteen watts that sits in a unique tone space and offers modern signal routing options.
A distinct alternative to the most popular 1x10 combos. Muscular and thick for a 1x10 at many settings. Pairs easily with single-coils and humbuckers. Cool looks.
Tone stack could be more rangeful.
$999
Supro Montauk
supro.com
When you imagine an ideal creative space, what do you see? A loft? A barn? A cabin far from distraction? Reveling in such visions is inspiration and a beautiful escape. Reality for most of us, though, is different. We’re lucky to have a corner in the kitchen or a converted closet to make music in. Still, there’s a romance and sense of possibility in these modest spaces, and the 15-watt, 1x10, all-tubeSupro Montauk is an amplifier well suited to this kind of place. It enlivens cramped corners with its classy, colorful appearance. It’s compact. It’s also potent enough to sound and respond like a bigger amp in a small room.
The Montauk works in tight quarters for reasons other than size, though—with three pre-power-section outputs that can route dry signal, all-wet signal from the amp’s spring reverb, or a mixture of both to a DAW or power amplifier.
Different Stripes and Spacious Places
Vintage Supro amps are modestly lovely things. The China-made Montauk doesn’t adhere toold Supro style motifs in the strictest sense. Its white skunk stripe is more commonly seen on black Supro combos from the late 1950s, while the blue “rhino hide” vinyl evokes Supros from the following decade. But the Montauk’s handsome looks make a cramped corner look a lot less dour. It looks pretty cool on a stage, too, but the Montauk attribute most likely to please performing guitarists is the small size (17.75" x 16.5" x 7.5") and light weight (29 pounds), which, if you tote your guitar in a gig bag and keep your other stuff to a minimum, facilitates magical one-trip load ins.
Keen-eyed Supro-spotters noting the Montauk’s weight and dimensions might spy the similarities to another 1x10 Supro combo,the Amulet. A casual comparison of the two amps might suggest that the Montauk is, more-or-less, an Amulet without tremolo and power scaling. They share the same tube complement, including a relatively uncommon 1x6L6 power section. But while the Montauk lacks the Amulet’s tremolo, the Montauk’s spring reverb features level and dwell controls rather than the Amulet’s single reverb-level knob.
“High reverb levels and low dwell settings evoke a small, reflective room with metallic overtones from the spring sprinkled on top—leaving ghostly ambience in the wake of strong, defined transient tones.”
If you use reverb a lot and in varying levels of intensity, you’ll appreciate the extra flexibility. High reverb levels and low dwell settings evoke a small, reflective room with metallic overtones from the spring sprinkled on top—leaving ghostly ambience in the wake of strong, defined transient tones. There are many shades of this subtle texture to explore, and it’s a great sound and solution for those who find the spring reverbs in Fender amps (which feature no dwell control) an all-or-nothing proposition. For those who like to get deep in the pipeline, though, the dwell offers room to roam. Mixing high level and dwell settings blunts the amp’s touch sensitivity a bit, and at 15 watts you trade headroom for natural compression, compounding the fogginess of these aggressive settings. A Twin Reverb it ain’t. But there is texture aplenty to play with.
A Long, Wide Strand
Admirably, the Montauk speaks in many voices when paired with a guitar alone. The EQ sits most naturally and alive with treble and bass in the noon-to-2-o’clock region, and a slight midrange lean adds welcome punch. Even the amp’s trebliest realms afford you a lot of expressive headroom if you have enough range and sensitivity in your guitar volume and tone pots. Interactions between the gain and master output controls yield scads of different tone color, too. Generally, I preferred high gain settings, which add a firecracker edge to maximum guitar volume settings and preserve touch and pick response at attenuated guitar volume and tone levels.
If working with the Montauk in this fashion feels natural, you’ll need very few pedals. But it’s a good fit for many effects. A Fuzz Face sounded nasty without collapsing into spitty junk, and the Klon-ish Electro-Harmonix Soul Food added muscle and character in its clean-boost guise and at grittier gain levels. There’s plenty of headroom for exploring nuance and complexity in delays and modulations. It also pairs happily with a wide range of guitars and pickups: Every time I thought a Telecaster was a perfect fit, I’d plug in an SG with PAFs and drift away in Mick Taylor/Stones bliss.
The Verdict
Because the gain, master, tone, and reverb controls are fairly interactive, it took me a minute to suss out the Montauk’s best and sweetest tones. But by the time I was through with this review, I found many sweet spots that fill the spaces between Vox and Fender templates. There’s also raunch in abundance when you turn it up. It’s tempting to view the Montauk as a competitor to the Fender Princeton and Vox AC15. At a thousand bucks, it’s $400 dollars less than the Mexico-made Princeton ’68 Custom and $170 more than the AC15, also made in China. In purely tone terms, though, it represents a real alternative to those stalwarts. I’d be more than happy to see one in a backline, provided I wasn’t trying to rise above a Geezer Butler/Bill Ward rhythm section. And with its capacity for routing to other amps and recording consoles in many intriguing configurations, it succeeds in being a genuinely interesting combination of vintage style and sound and home-studio utility—all without adding a single digital or solid-state component to the mix.
Watch the official video documenting the sold-out event at House of Blues in Anaheim. Join Paul Reed Smith and special guests as they toast to quality and excellence in guitar craftsmanship.
PRS Guitars today released the official video documenting the full night of performances at their 40th Anniversary celebration, held January 24th in conjunction with the 2025 NAMM (The National Association of Music Merchants) Show. The sold-out, private event took place at House of Blues in Anaheim, California and featured performances by PRS artists Randy Bowland, Curt Chambers, David Grissom, Jon Jourdan, Howard Leese, Mark Lettieri Group, Herman Li, John Mayer, Orianthi, Tim Pierce, Noah Robertson, Shantaia, Philip Sayce, and Dany Villarreal, along with Paul Reed Smith and his Eightlock band.
“What a night! Big thanks to everyone who came out to support us: retailers, distributors, vendors, content creators, industry friends, and especially the artists. I loved every second. We are so pleased to share the whole night now on this video,” said Paul Reed Smith, Founder & Managing General Partner of PRS Guitars. “I couldn’t be more proud to still be here 40 years later.”
With nearly 1,400 of the who’s who in the musical instrument industry in attendance, the night ended with a thoughtful toast from PRS Signature Artist John Mayer, who reflected on 40 years of PRS Guitars and the quality that sets the brand apart. “The guitars are great. You can’t last 40 years if the guitars aren’t great,” said Mayer. “Many of you started hearing about PRS the same way I did, which is you would talk about PRS and someone would say ‘They’re too nice.’ What’s too nice for a guitar? What, you want that special vibe that only tuning every song can give you on stage? You want that grit just like your heroes … bad intonation? The product is incredible.”