Prince playing "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" with Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, and Jeff Lynne at George Harrison's induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2004.
To shred or not to shred? Sometimes a little restraint to serve a melody can shine brighter than scorching a solo.
A cop pulls a drunk over and demands that he get out of his car.
The cop says, "Obviously, you've been drinking. I need you to perform a sobriety test."
The drunk, swaying back and forth, answers with a smug slur: "Oh, really? You think I'm drunk, huh? Would a drunk be able to do this?"
The drunk then violently swings his arms above his head as he does a fast, deep knee bend. He then lets out a howl, craps his pants, and falls over in a stinking, moaning heap.
The cops say, "Yes, that's exactly what a drunk would do."
The drunk replies, "I was going for the backflip."
The wildly talented Reggie Bradley Smith told me that joke back when we toured together with country artist Lee Brice. After some of our more adventuresome performances, Reg and I would greet each other with, "I was going for the backflip," as we walked off stage.
Guitarists are left with this difficult balancing act: giving the people what they want while trying to give them something that means more.
This gig was a creative, safe place to stretch and grow as a musician. The rule was stay true to the signature elements of the song, but allow the muse to direct you. This environment made for some amazing shows, giving concertgoers something they'd never seen nor heard before. Admittedly, I did not always stick the landing, but missed notes don't matter. In this age, where so many bands are merely reinforcing prerecorded tracks, it's a beautiful and rare thing to see in the wild: a great band in full flight, listening and playing off each other, truly creating music. To my way of thinking, the "perfect show"is not the one that sounds just like the record—it's an emotionally charged, unique work of art that the audience and band experiences fresh, together.
I've always thought a show needed to be, well … showy. Prime example: Prince's nearly three-minute guitar solo on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," that he performed with Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, and Jeff Lynne at George Harrison's induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. From his legato intro until he tosses his Telecaster in the air and struts off stage, it's an incredible improvised performance under the most high-pressure circumstances imaginable. Although it's got a lot of flash, it's all musical, respectfully paying homage to the Beatles and Clapton's iconic recording, while remaining spontaneous and fun. Prince went for the backflip and stuck the landing.
Prince, Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, Jeff Lynne and others -- "While My Guitar Gently Weeps"
As you may suspect, I'm a doesn't-practice-what-I-preach kind of person. I talk a big game about taking chances with art, trying to create something new, serving the song, etc. In reality, when I'm playing live, I tend to build solos by pulling a few semi-fast, flashy licks I've memorized out of my medium-sized bag. What I should do is try to say something, be melodic, make it more about the song and less about my trying to impress people. I choose showy because I lack the confidence for restraint. I listen to playback of live recordings and hate 75 percent of my solos, because most are clichés strung together. But I'm not alone.
Slash's "November Rain" solo remains one of the most revered in all of rockdom. It's full of emotionally charged whole notes, much like a symphonic piece. Surprisingly, apart from some improvised 2-bar runs at the end of each 8-bar phrase in the outro, it's all easy to play. The hardest part of that solo is the restraint and dedication to melody. A while ago, I saw GNR live and, honestly, it was disappointing. Maybe it was an off night on a long tour, but with the exception of "November Rain" and "Sweet Child o' Mine," where Slash played melodically, most of his solos started and ended with blistering riffs that, although physically impressive, didn't hold my attention.
But Slash is in a difficult position: It's hard to trust in a simple part when you know that people want to see blistering runs. Why? Because that shit is awesome. So, guitarists are left with this difficult balancing act: giving the people what they want while trying to give them something that means more. It's just easier, or perhaps safer, to shred than to try to express something emotional.
My friend Joe Reed played bass with Merle Haggard from 1990 to 1995, when Clint Strong was on guitar. Although people often think of country music as primitive cowboy chords, Joe and Clint are incredibly advanced musicians, with deep jazz leanings. Joe told me, "Clint and I roomed together on the road and would come up with cool alternate changes. It was a very musical gig and Merle didn't mind you going for something cool, but I guess it would get a little too far out and Merle would address the issues saying, 'Boys, when you get so far away from my songs that I can't recognize them, it's time to pull it back'."
That's the challenge: when to stretch, when to pull back, when to go for the backflip, and when to walk a straight line.
The range of clean, dirty, and complex tones available from this high-quality, carefully crafted Dumble modeler make it a formidable studio and performance device.
Fantastic variation in many delicious sounds makes it a bargain. High-quality. Easy to use and customize. Killer studio path to lively, responsive guitar sounds.
Price may be hard for some to swallow if they don’t leverage the whole of its potential.
$399
UAFX Enigmatic ’82 Overdrive Special
uaudio.com
I’ve never played a realDumble. I’d venture most of us haven’t. But given my experiences with James Santiago’s UAFX modeling pedals, most recently theUAFX Lion, I plugged in the new Dumble-inspired UAFX Enigmatic confident I’d taste at least the essence of that very rare elixir. You could argue there is no definitive Dumble sound. Each was customized to some extent for the customer, and they are renowned nearly as much for dynamic responsiveness and flexibility as their singing, complex, clean-to-dirty palettes.
The Enigmatic nails the flexibility, for sure. To my ears, its tone foundation lives somewhere on a sliver of Venn diagram where a black-panel Fender and a 50-watt Hiwatt intersect. It’s alive, dimensional, snappy, sparkly, massive, and, at the right EQ settings, hot and excitable. But the Enigmatic’s powerful EQ and gain controls, multiple virtual cab and mic pairings, rock, jazz, and custom voices, plus additional deep, bright, and presence controls enable you to travel many leagues from that fundamental tone. The customization work you can do in the app enables significant changes in the Enigmatic’s tone profile and responsiveness, too. All these observations are made tracking the Enigmatic straight to a DAW—making the breadth of its personality even more impressive. But the Enigmatic sounds every bit as lively at the front end of an amp, and black-panel Fenders are a primo pairing for its saturation and sparkly attributes. The Enigmatic is nearly $400, which is an investment. But considering the ground I covered in just a few days with it, and the quality and variety of sounds I could conjure with the unit just sitting on my desk, the performance-to-price ratio struck me as very favorable indeed.
A 6L6 power section, tube-driven spring reverb, and a versatile array of line outs make this 1x10 combo an appealing and unique 15-watt alternative.
Supro Montauk 15-watt 1 x 10-inch Tube Combo Amplifier - Blue Rhino Hide Tolex with Silver Grille
The two-in-one “sonic refractor” takes tremolo and wavefolding to radical new depths.
Pros: Huge range of usable sounds. Delicious distortion tones. Broadens your conception of what guitar can be.
Build quirks will turn some users off.
$279
Cosmodio Gravity Well
cosmod.io
Know what a wavefolder does to your guitar signal? If you don’t, that’s okay. I didn’t either until I started messing around with the all-analog Cosmodio Instruments Gravity Well. It’s a dual-effect pedal with a tremolo and wavefolder, the latter more widely used in synthesis that , at a certain threshold, shifts or inverts the direction the wave is traveling—in essence, folding it upon itself. Used together here, they make up what Cosmodio calls a sonic refractor.
Two Plus One
Gravity Well’s design and control set make it a charm to use. Two footswitches engage tremolo and wavefolder independently, and one of three toggle switches swaps the order of the effects. The two 3-way switches toggle different tone and voice options, from darker and thicker to brighter and more aggressive. (Mixing and matching with these two toggles yields great results.)
The wavefolder, which has an all-analog signal path bit a digitally controlled LFO, is controlled by knobs for both gain and volume, which provide enormous dynamic range. The LFO tremolo gets three knobs: speed, depth, and waveform. The first two are self-explanatory, but the latter offers switching between eight different tremolo waveforms. You’ll find standard sawtooth, triangle, square, and sine waves, but Cosmodio also included some wacko shapes: asymmetric swoop, ramp, sample and hold, and random. These weirder forms force truly weird relationships with the pedal, forcing your playing into increasingly unpredictable and bizarre territories.
This is all housed in a trippy, beautifully decorated Hammond 1590BB-sized enclosure, with in/out, expression pedal, and power jacks. I had concerns about the durability of the expression jack because it’s not sealed to its opening with an outer nut and washer, making it feel more susceptible to damage if a cable gets stepped on or jostled near the connection, as well as from moisture. After a look at the interior, though, the build seems sturdy as any I’ve seen.
Splatterhouse Audio
Cosmodio’s claim that the refractor is a “first-of-its-kind” modulation effect is pretty grand, but they have a point in that the wavefolder is rare-ish in the guitar domain and pairing it with tremolo creates some pretty foreign sounds. Barton McGuire, the Massachusetts-based builder behind Cosmodio, released a few videos that demonstrate, visually, how a wavefolder impacts your guitar’s signal—I highly suggest checking them out to understand some of the principles behind the effect (and to see an ’80s Muppet Babies-branded keyboard in action.)
By folding a waveform back on itself, rather than clipping it as a conventional distortion would, the wavefolder section produces colliding, reflecting overtones and harmonics. The resulting distortion is unique: It can sound lo-fi and broken in the low- to mid-gain range, or synthy and extraterrestrial when the gain is dimed. Add in the tremolo, and you’ve got a lot of sonic variables to play with.
Used independently, the tremolo effect is great, but the wavefolder is where the real fun is. With the gain at 12 o’clock, it mimics a vintage 1x10 tube amp cranked to the breaking point by a splatty germanium OD. A soft touch cleans up the signal really nicely, while maintaining the weirdness the wavefolder imparts to its signal. With forceful pick strokes at high gain, it functions like a unique fuzz-distortion hybrid with bizarre alien artifacts punching through the synthy goop.
One forum commenter suggested that the Gravity Well effect is often in charge as much the guitar itself, and that’s spot on at the pedal's extremes. Whatever you expect from your usual playing techniques tends to go out the window —generating instead crumbling, sputtering bursts of blubbering sound. Learning to respond to the pedal in these environments can redefine the guitar as an instrument, and that’s a big part of Gravity Well’s magic.
The Verdict
Gravity Well is the most fun I’ve had with a modulation pedal in a while. It strikes a brilliant balance between adventurous and useful, with a broad range of LFO modulations and a totally excellent oddball distortion. The combination of the two effects yields some of the coolest sounds I’ve heard from an electric guitar, and at $279, it’s a very reasonably priced journey to deeply inspiring corners you probably never expected your 6-string (or bass, or drums, or Muppet Babies Casio EP-10) to lead you to.
Kemper and Zilla announce the immediate availability of Zilla 2x12“ guitar cabs loaded with the acclaimed Kemper Kone speaker.
Zilla offers a variety of customization to the customers. On the dedicated Website, customers can choose material, color/tolex, size, and much more.
The sensation and joy of playing a guitar cabinet
Sometimes, when there’s no PA, there’s just a drumkit and a bass amp. When the creative juices flow and the riffs have to bounce back off the wall - that’s the moment when you long for a powerful guitar cabinet.
A guitar cabinet that provides „that“ well-known feel and gives you that kick-in-the-back experience. Because guitar cabinets can move some serious air. But these days cabinets also have to be comprehensive and modern in terms of being capable of delivering the dynamic and tonal nuances of the KEMPER PROFILER. So here it is: The ZILLA 2 x 12“ upright slant KONE cabinet.
These cabinets are designed in cooperation with the KEMPER sound designers and the great people from Zilla. Beauty is created out of decades of experience in building the finest guitar cabinets for the biggest guitar masters in the UK and the world over, combined with the digital guitar tone wizardry from the KEMPER labs. Loaded with the exquisit Kemper Kone speakers.
Now Kemper and Zilla bring this beautiful and powerful dream team for playing, rehearsing, and performing to the guitar players!
ABOUT THE KEMPER KONE SPEAKERS
The Kemper Kone is a 12“ full range speaker which is exclusively designed by Celestion for KEMPER. By simply activating the PROFILER’s well-known Monitor CabOff function the KEMPER Kone is switched from full-range mode to the Speaker Imprint Mode, which then exactly mimics one of 19 classic guitar speakers.
Since the intelligence of the speaker lies in the DSP of the PROFILER, you will be able to switch individual speaker imprints along with your favorite rigs, without needing to do extensive editing.
The Zilla KEMPER KONE loaded 2x12“ cabinets can be custom designed and ordered for an EU price of £675,- UK price of £775,- and US price of £800,- - all including shipping (excluding taxes outside of the UK).
For more information, please visit kemper-amps.com or zillacabs.com.