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GALLERY: Lollapalooza 2015

Three days of guitar highlights from Chicago’s world-renowned festival.

This year marks Lollapalooza’s 11th year as a destination festival—its 19th overall—in Chicago’s beautiful Grant Park alongside Lake Michigan. Since its inception, Lolla has tried to serve all music fans with a healthy dose of rock, metal, punk, pop, dance, comedy, hip-hop, and in recent years, has even fully embraced the emergence of EDM (electronic dance music). This year was no different with sets from Tyler the Creator, the Weeknd, Paul McCartney, Metallica, Sturgill Simpson, Black Pistol Fire, Gary Clark Jr., and hundreds more. Premier Guitar was onsite for all three days and here are just some of the guitar-centric highlights. The scene above is the setting sun overlooking downtown Chicago and the Samsung Galaxy main at the beginning of Sir Paul McCartney’s 2.5-hour set on Friday night.

Delicious, dynamic fuzz tones that touch on classic themes without aping them. Excellent quality. Super-cool and useful octave effect.

Can’t mix and match gain modes.

$349

Great Eastern FX Co. Focus Fuzz Deluxe

greateasternfx.com

5
4.5
4.5
4.5

Adding octave, drive, and boost functions to an extraordinary fuzz yields a sum greater than its already extraordinary parts.

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Patterns can be viewed as boring or trite, but a little bit of creativity can turn them into bits of inspiration.

Chops: Intermediate
Theory: Intermediater
Lesson Overview:
• Learn different ways to arrange scales.
• Combine various sequences to create more intersting lines.
• Solidify your technique by practicing unusual groupings of notes. Click here to download a printable PDF of this lesson's notation.
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Neutrik’s Timbre plug, made for toggling between capacitors.

Photo courtesy Neutrik company (https://www.neutrik.com)

This follow-up to May 2025’s column shows you a few basic techniques to inject some capacitance into your rig.

Hello, and welcome back to Mod Garage. This month, we will dive into the details of how to add additional guitar-cable capacitance—the right way. Time to get started!

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MayFly Le Habanero Review

Great versatility in combined EQ controls. Tasty low-gain boost voice. Muscular Fuzz Face-like fuzz voice.

Can be noisy without a lot of treble attenuation. Boost and fuzz order can only be reversed with the internal DIP switch.

$171

May Fly Le Habanero

mayflyaudio.com

4
4
4
4

A fuzz/boost combo that’s as hot as the name suggests, but which offers plenty of smoky, subdued gain shades, too.

Generally speaking, I avoid combo effects. If I fall out of love with one thing, I don’t want to have to ditch another that’s working fine. But recent fixations with spatial economy find me rethinking that relationship. MayFly’s Le Habanero (yes, the Franco/Spanish article/noun mash-up is deliberate) consolidates boost and fuzz in a single pedal. That’s far from an original concept. But the characteristics of both effects make it a particularly effective one here, and the relative flexibility and utility of each gives this combination a lot more potential staying power for the fickle.

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