Premier Guitar features affiliate links to help support our content. We may earn a commission on any affiliated purchases.

Gallery: Shaky Knees 2019

Good news, folks: Guitar is alive and well! PG headed south to Atlanta for three days to celebrate performances (and gather guitar details) from Beck, Gary Clark Jr., Tame Impala, Tyler Childers, Incubus, the Struts, Cage the Elephant, Tash Sultana, and more!

Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker

Tame Impala mastermind takes it all in during the beginning of “Let It Happen” that started the band’s buoyant set. Parker is seen here using bandmate Jay Watson’s Squier J Mascis Jazzmaster that’s been outfitted with a Roland GR-55 synth pickup. In a 2015 interview with PG, Parker had this to say about the guitar-pickup combo: “I used that a lot on the album, actually. It was a cheap shortcut to doing something I love: making a guitar sound not like a guitar. I’ve always been obsessed with tricking people into thinking that a guitar is actually a synth. I used to do it with octave pedals and different types of auto-filters and stuff, and then I’d play the instrument in a different way to make it sound like it’s not a guitar. So, when I started getting into guitar synths, it made it all too easy. It’s a Roland GR-55, and a lot of the presets are totally nasty. They’re almost stuck between a metal guitar and a saxophone. A lot of the presets Roland offers are terrible. But if you start from scratch building your own patches and then combine them with cool effects and outboard stuff, it starts to sound really cool.”

Handcrafted in the USA, the JEL-50 features 50 watts of all-tube power, two channels, and a transparent effects loop. The JEL-212 Cab is loaded with Celestion Creamback speakers.

Read MoreShow less

The Boss GX-10 Multi-FX Processor offers 23 guitar amps, nine bass amps, and 170 effects for versatile sound creation.

Read MoreShow less
Photo by Andy Sapp

Blackberry Smoke will embark on their Rattle, Ramble and Roll Tour in 2025, featuring stops at Worcester’s Palladium, Burlington’s The Flynn, New Orleans’ The Fillmore, Austin’s ACL Live at the Moody Theater, among many others.

Read MoreShow less

Chat Pile—from left, Cap’n Ron, Raygun Busch, Stin, and Luther Manhole—are at the crest of a new wave of angry American guitar music.

Photo by Bayley Hanes

On their second full-length record, the Oklahoma City noise-rock band prove that angry music isn’t going anywhere.

Listening to Oklahoma City band Chat Pile is thrilling in the same way watching a particularly transgressive or unflinching horror movie is. Their music has a lot in common with the unsettling, avant-garde throat-singing of Inuit artist Tanya Tagaq: In the absence of an immediate narrative and overt lyrics in favor of fragmented, thematic collages of phrases and energies, we’re confronted with a subconscious, cellular sense of discomfort, one that compels our imagination to fill in some of the blanks. That can get scary.

Read MoreShow less