The blooming Nashville guitar ace details how a single bent note caught her ear, unlocking a masterclass in blues from one of the genre's groundbreakers.
Before you can run, you gotta walk, and playing guitar is no different. This year, big names like Doug Aldrich, Devin Townsend, Andy Timmons, Eva Gardner, Matt Heafy, and others detail their earliest, biggest influences.
The envoy of evil honors Tony Iommi's ominous opening odyssey that is a foreboding fight between light and dark that ultimately sparked several subgenres of metal.
The All That Remains shredster details two technically challenging riffs that leveled-up his playing and he shouts out the latter for springboarding him into 7-strings.
The heavy metal maven details how music made more sense to him after digesting the swift Swedes coupling of "raw, intense screaming vocals with such beautiful guitar melodies."
The 6-string foil for Grace VanderWaal and Mayer Hawthorne was mesmerized by the guitar god's dexterous orchestration and explains why the song is great for teaching solo-guitar compositions.
The once Strapping Young Lad chronicles the "pinnacle moment" with the Glenn Tipton and K.K. Downing riff that helped him earn "social collateral" and he became "moderately accepted" with schoolmates.
Initially intimidated, the French rocker slowly worked out the Southern-fried chicken pickin’ guitar crash course and picked up multiple techniques—hammer-ons, pull-offs, ghost notes, double-stops, and open strings—that still feed her need for speed.
Rocker Laura Cox is a born southpaw, but damn right she can country pick with the best of them—using the typical right-handed guitar setup and approach. In this new episode of PG’s Hooked, Laura rip on Brad Paisley’s fleet-fingered riffs to his song “The Nervous Breakdown,” an instrumental from his 1999 debut album Who Needs Pictures. The tune helped define Paisley’s identity as a player to be reckoned with. But no Tele for Cox. She burns it up on an Epiphone Cornet.
Laura recounts that when she first heard the tune, “It was so fast I thought I would never be able to play it.” But then she decoded Paisley’s approach and learned that he was using multiple techniques to make it easier to execute: hammer-ons, pull-offs, ghost notes, double-stops, open strings, and a helping of Southern-fried chicken pickin’. In short, it’s all in the fretboard hand, as she explains.
The once Strapping Young Lad chronicles the "pinnacle moment" with the Glenn Tipton and K.K. Downing riff that helped him earn "social collateral" and he became "moderately accepted" with schoolmates.
Warning: Devin Townsend says he hasn’t played the riff in Judas Priest’s “The Sentinel” “for enough years that it may be dubious.” But that’s hard to believe when he delivers the soaring line that’s the hook from this Defenders of the Faith (1984) track. Townsend describes his initial discovery of the song as “one of those pinnacle moments.” He also opens up about being a misfit kid, and tells a great story about overhearing older kids in band class talking about guitar—and how that riff suddenly made him one of those “cool kids” … almost.
It’s the guitar, he says, “that made me at least moderately accepted, and that still holds true to this day.” He also takes a lick at Fastway’s “Say What You Will,” a hard-strutting blues-based riff, and Priest’s “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’.” But perhaps the biggest revelation is that the first riff he fell in love with was from Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues.” And yes, he does play it, plus the galloping rhythm. His next biggie was Motörhead’s “Motörhead.” “But none of that, my friends,” he adds, “compared to the social collateral or being able to impress a bunch of goofy 16-year-old with a Judas Priest riff, so I will be eternally indebted to this riff.”
And more news for Townsend’s fans: the Canadian prog-rocker will be mounting an extensive European tour in the spring, behind his 2022 album Lightwork, a compendium of tunes he wrote and recorded under pandemic lockdown—which also has a counterpart in the demos and B-sides release Nightwork. Townsend notes that Lightwork was consciously written about taking a hard look at where we are as people after a profound time in history and then taking real care to focus our future energies on what is truly important to us in light of that. Friends, health, family, creativity, time off, not running from the fear, not allowing other people’s expectations to define us, creative freedom and self-care. “Doing the difficult work to begin to know who we truly are, makes it so that during periods of unrest, we can maintain a certain degree of peace,” he relates.
The envoy of evil honors Tony Iommi's ominous opening odyssey that is a foreboding fight between light and dark that ultimately sparked several subgenres of metal.
Steve Reis's Does It Doom? website features guitar lessons and gear demos in the stoner, doom, and sludge metal genres.
On his YouTube channel you will find weekly breakdowns of your favorite stoner, doom, and sludge metal songs; demos of badass doom gear; and the occasional dip into music theory and other guitar related items. His passion is to help you learn and understand songs by your favorite doom metal artists in hopes that it will leave you with a better understanding of the genre as a whole, and a greater ability to write killer songs of your own.
