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Rig Rundown: Brothers Osborne

Country music’s leading guitar tandem shows us how they mix vintage axes and boutique pedals with high-powered amps and just a little bit of digital magic.

John’s main guitar is this T-style axe loaded with a B-bender. The neck is from 1968 and had been refretted with large stainless steel wire. Matney USA Custom Benders took the neck and added it to one of their own poplar bodies. The neck sports a Lollar Tele Special in the bridge and a Lollar Royal T in the neck. An Emerson Custom wiring harness and D’Addario .010–.046 strings rounds everything out.

D'Addario Humidipack:https://ddar.io/GetHumidipak

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Bryan in a presidential pose before some of the boards at Blackbird Studio.

Photo by Kate Koenig

Take it from English cyclist Sir Dave Brailsford: With an all-encompassing approach to improving the marginal aspects of your methods, you can get quite the payoff on the quality of your endeavors. And that goes for recording, too.

Technology is a strange bedfellow in the arts. We’re either dazzled or disenchanted, love it or hate it, and the drive behind it all is a relentless need to gain a slight competitive edge on our own creativity—at least that’s how I think of it. Last month I wrote about the benefits of using a modeling microphone on a single source. This month, I want to expand that to a larger format.

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Despite his early personal history in elementary school orchestra, Bohlinger says, “Classical musicians are a bit of a mystery to me, and probably most guitarists.”

Does the guitar player’s mind have the patience and focus of a classical musician, or are we on another tip altogether?

The first time I really played music was in fourth grade in my elementary school orchestra. Although I played terribly and was just one tiny cog in a huge musical machine—second to last chair in the second violin section out of 30 kids—being part of these incredible, interwoven melodies was a genuinely moving experience, regardless of how bad it must have sounded. But despite the personal history, classical musicians are a bit of a mystery to me, and probably most guitarists.

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Why Randy Rhoads Makes Chris Shiflett Cry
- YouTube

Your esteemed hosts of the 100 Guitarists podcast have been listening to Randy Rhoads’s body of work since they learned the word “pentatonic.” His short discography with Ozzy Osbourne has been emblazoned on both of our fingertips, and we’ve each put in our hours working out everything from the “Crazy Train” riff to the fingerpicked intro to “Diary of a Madman.” But in our extended Premier Guitar fam, we have an expert who’s been studying Randy’s licks since longer than either of us have been alive.

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Always the drummer, Grohl thinks of the Foos’ approach to guitar parts as different limbs. Shiflett handles the 8th-note movement, Grohl pounds on the backbeats, and Smear simply crushes the downbeat. The result has shaped stadium rock for decades.

For the first time, Dave Grohl, Pat Smear, and Chris Shiflett discuss their shared 6-string history, breakdown some Foos riffs, and give insight on 30 years of rock and roll.

Over the past 30 years, Foo Fighters have become one of the most influential and important bands in rock and roll. Through countless gigs from clubs and theaters to arenas and stadiums, the trio of Dave Grohl, Pat Smear, and Chris Shiflett have developed a vocabulary that at this point comes together naturally. It’s a shared language that is always present but rarely (if ever) discussed. Until now.

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