Plus—our latest musical obsessions!
Question: What’s a riff that sounds easy, but is hard to play?
Dominic Miller—Sting
Photo by Christoph Bombart
A: “Angie” by the Rolling Stones. It’s one of those guitar parts that sounds so straightforward (A minor, E7, G, F, C, etc.), yet no one actually plays it correctly.
I was guilty of this, too, until I went forensic with it and discovered all these subtle nuances with every chord—suspended chords, hidden licks, passing bass notes, and more. It’s an exquisite guitar riff placing Keith Richards right up there, in my opinion.
Dominic Miller's Current Obsession:
I probably share my current obsession with most of my contemporaries, namely The Beatles: Get Back documentary. I can’t get my head around how their sound is so perfect, making me think hard about what it takes to make a band gel. It’s chemistry and theirs is #%^ing rocket science as far as I’m concerned because all the elements work so perfectly together, yet in isolation none of the parts sound like anything special. Even the timing and tuning are off a lot of the time. What you end up with is the truth. I envy non-musicians and music fans mostly because they feel the truth more than most musicians do. Perfectionism is the enemy in recording situations. Neil Young’s Harvest is proof of that. A sublime album because it’s just straight-up honest. I was 14 when I first heard it and it spoke to me as it still does now, but if I put my muso hat on it’s all over the place. Kudos to the producers of the era! Takeaway? Next time I’m in a studio, I want to first cut the tracks live, second, don’t obsess about perfect timing and articulation, and last, but not least, make sure we have a good time.
Albert Madariaga—Reader of the Month
A: “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” by Tears for Fears.
Tears For Fears - Everybody Wants To Rule The World (Official Music Video)
The opening riff is easy, sure, but getting the timing and the accents right and keeping it going is a bit challenging.
Albert Madariaga's Current Obsession:
I’m currently obsessed with a new amp head I’m having custom-built by an amp guru in North Texas. He asked me about my favorite tones, the guitars I play, my technique, how I use pedals, and styles of music. When he told me that he believes the best amp for me will be modeled after a specific Dumble (I’m not going to tell which one), it was a “Hell, yeah!” moment. He no longer builds amps for a living and is doing this one-off just for me. Gonna wrap it in purple tolex with a nice accompanying grill cloth then backlight the front panel. I can’t wait!
Jason Shadrick—Associate Editor
A: When I was younger, I had a hell of a time figuring out “Satellite” by Dave Matthews Band.
Dave Matthews Band - Satellite
On the surface, it’s a medium-tempo, single-note riff that sounded as if Andy Summers sat in with Bela Fleck. I distinctly remember when I got the first three notes—all stacked fifths—and felt like I really accomplished something. My real breakthrough was when I saw DMB on MTV. I recorded it on a VHS tape and watched it every morning before school until I could cop Dave’s fingering. I’m still not sure if it’s 100 percent, but it makes a great finger-stretching warm-up.
Jason Shadrick's Current Obsession:
I haven’t been able to stop listening to Tallgrass by Bret and Joslyn Boyer. It’s a collection of old-time folk and traditional tunes masterfully arranged for acoustic guitar and upright bass. Bret has been a friend and guitar hero for nearly 20 years and his inventive playing doesn’t browbeat you with overly complex feats of technical mastery or dense harmony—even though he can play that card when needed. The father-daughter duo’s sole focus is the song, and that approach has become all too rare.
Pete Thorn—Contributing Writer
A: Van Halen, “Beautiful Girls.” This one swings HARD. To get the feel and the duration of the notes correct is a challenge.
Van Halen - Van Halen II - Beautiful Girls
You have to skip between the strings quite a bit and mute the notes just right, both with your left hand and your right, like when he clips short the open E and B strings, as a dyad, “Bang a Gong” style. And when he bounces in the intro from the A-string riff to the A5 dyad on the G and D strings, down to the F# on the low-E string—all tight, groovy, and seamless! It’s got a groove, a swing, a pocket that is super deep. And you have to use your guitar volume knob to clean up in the verses! It’s very dynamic. Such great rhythm guitar playing, interspersed with bursts of Eddie’s super-fun lead stylings! “I’m The One” is another super-deep swung groove that almost no one can play correctly! But I chose “Beautiful Girls” because no one ever mentions it as a “difficult to play” riff, even though I think it really is!
Pete Thorn's Current Obsession:
The new Failure album, Wild Type Droid. They’re always stretching, within the rock genre … they never stagnate. Great songs, mixed with awesome production. I toured with Kellii Scott, the drummer, in a band called Blinker the Star for a while, and he’s one of the grooviest, deep-pocket rock drummers I’ve ever played with. He’s very deliberate with his playing, like Dave Grohl. I love that style of rock drumming. No BS, just POWER. Great fills that support the song. And Ken Andrews is a force to be reckoned with all the way around, as a writer, player, and producer/engineer/mixer. Give it a spin!
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Duane Denison of the Jesus Lizard, EGC Chessie in hands, coaxing some nasty tones from his Hiwatt.
The Jesus Lizard’s sixth album, Blue, served as the band’s final statement from the frontlines of noisy rock for the next 26 years. By the time of their dissolution in 1999, they’d earned a reputation for extreme performances chock full of hard-hitting, machine-like grooves delivered by bassist David Wm. Sims and, at their conclusion, drummer Mac McNeilly, at times aided and at other times punctured by the frontline of guitarist Duane Denison’s incisive, dissonant riffing, and presided over by the cantankerous howl of vocalist David Yow. In the years since, performative, thrilling bands such as Pissed Jeans, METZ, and Idles have built upon the Lizard’s musical foundation.
Denison has kept himself plenty busy over the last couple decades, forming the avant-rock supergroup Tomahawk—with vocalist Mike Patton, bassist Trevor Dunn (both from Mr. Bungle), and drummer John Stanier of Helmet—and alongside various other projects including Th’ Legendary Shack Shakers and Hank Williams III. The Jesus Lizard eventually reunited, but until now have only celebrated their catalog, never releasing new jams.
The Jesus Lizard, from left: bassist David Wm. Sims, singer David Yow, drummer Mac McNeilly, and guitarist Duane Denison.
Photo by Joshua Black Wilkins
Back in 2018, Denison, hanging in a hotel room with Yow, played a riff on his unplugged electric guitar that caught the singer’s ear. That song, called “West Side,” will remain unreleased for now, but Denison explains: “He said, ‘Wow, that’s really good. What is that?’ And I said, ‘It’s just some new thing. Why don’t we do an album?’” From those unassuming beginnings, the Jesus Lizard’s creative juices started flowing.
So, how does a band—especially one who so indelibly captured the ineffable energy of live rock performance—prepare to get a new record together 26 years after their last? Back in their earlier days, the members all lived together in a band house, collectively tending to the creative fire when inspiration struck. All these years later, they reside in different cities, so their process requires sending files back and forth and only meeting up for occasional demo sessions over the course of “three or four years.”
“When the time comes to get more in performance mode, I have a practice space. I go there by myself and crank it up. I turn that amp up and turn the metronome up and play loud.” —Duane Denison
the Jesus Lizard "Alexis Feels Sick"
Distance creates an obstacle to striking while the proverbial iron is hot, but Denison has a method to keep things energized: “Practice loud.” The guitarist professes the importance of practice, in general, and especially with a metronome. “We keep very detailed records of what the beats per minute of these songs are,” he explains. “To me, the way to do it is to run it to a Bluetooth speaker and crank it, and then crank your amp. I play a little at home, but when the time comes to get more in performance mode, I have a practice space. I go there by myself and crank it up. I turn that amp up and turn the metronome up and play loud.”
It’s a proven solution. On Rack—recorded at Patrick Carney’s Audio Eagle studio with producer Paul Allen—the band sound as vigorous as ever, proving they’ve not only remained in step with their younger selves, but they may have surpassed it with faders cranked. “Duane’s approach, both as a guitarist and writer, has an angular and menacing fingerprint that is his own unique style,” explains Allen. “The conviction in his playing that he is known for from his recordings in the ’80s and ’90s is still 100-percent intact and still driving full throttle today.”
“I try to be really, really precise,” he says. “I think we all do when it comes to the basic tracks, especially the rhythm parts. The band has always been this machine-like thing.” Together, they build a tension with Yow’s careening voice. “The vocals tend to be all over the place—in and out of tune, in and out of time,” he points out. “You’ve got this very free thing moving around in the foreground, and then you’ve got this very precise, detailed band playing behind it. That’s why it works.”
Before Rack, the Jesus Lizard hadn’t released a new record since 1998’s Blue.
Denison’s guitar also serves as the foreground foil to Yow’s unhinged raving, as on “Alexis Feels Sick,” where they form a demented harmony, or on the midnight creep of “What If,” where his vibrato-laden melodies bolster the singer’s unsettled, maniacal display. As precise as his riffs might be, his playing doesn’t stay strictly on the grid. On the slow, skulking “Armistice Day,” his percussive chording goes off the rails, giving way to a solo that slices that groove like a chef’s knife through warm butter as he reorganizes rock ’n’ roll histrionics into his own cut-up vocabulary.
“During recording sessions, his first solo takes are usually what we decide to keep,” explains Allen. “Listen to Duane’s guitar solos on Jack White’s ‘Morning, Noon, and Night,’ Tomahawk’s ‘Fatback,’ and ‘Grind’ off Rack. There’s a common ‘contained chaos’ thread among them that sounds like a harmonic Rubik’s cube that could only be solved by Duane.”
“Duane’s approach, both as a guitarist and writer, has an angular and menacing fingerprint that is his own unique style.” —Rack producer Paul Allen
To encapsulate just the right amount of intensity, “I don’t over practice everything,” the guitarist says. Instead, once he’s created a part, “I set it aside and don’t wear it out.” On Rack, it’s obvious not a single kilowatt of musical energy was lost in the rehearsal process.
Denison issues his noisy masterclass with assertive, overdriven tones supporting his dissonant voicings like barbed wire on top of an electric fence. The occasional application of slapback delay adds a threatening aura to his exacting riffage. His tones were just as carefully crafted as the parts he plays, and he relied mostly on his signature Electrical Guitar Company Chessie for the sessions, though a Fender Uptown Strat also appears, as well as a Taylor T5Z, which he chose for its “cleaner, hyper-articulated sound” on “Swan the Dog.” Though he’s been spotted at recent Jesus Lizard shows with a brand-new Powers Electric—he points out he played a demo model and says, “I just couldn’t let go of it,” so he ordered his own—that wasn’t until tracking was complete.
Duane Denison's Gear
Denison wields his Powers Electric at the Blue Room in Nashville last June.
Photo by Doug Coombe
Guitars
- Electrical Guitar Company Chessie
- Fender Uptown Strat
- Taylor T5Z
- Gibson ES-135
- Powers Electric
Amps
- Hiwatt Little J
- Hiwatt 2x12 cab with Fane F75 speakers
- Fender Super-Sonic combo
- Early ’60s Fender Bassman
- Marshall 1987X Plexi Reissue
- Victory Super Sheriff head
- Blackstar HT Stage 60—2 combos in stereo with Celestion Neo Creamback speakers and Mullard tubes
Effects
- Line 6 Helix
- Mantic Flex Pro
- TC Electronic G-Force
- Menatone Red Snapper
Strings and Picks
- Stringjoy Orbiters .0105 and .011 sets
- Dunlop celluloid white medium
- Sun Studios yellow picks
He ran through various amps—Marshalls, a Fender Bassman, two Fender Super-Sonic combos, and a Hiwatt Little J—at Audio Eagle. Live, if he’s not on backline gear, you’ll catch him mostly using 60-watt Blackstar HT Stage 60s loaded with Celestion Neo Creambacks. And while some boxes were stomped, he got most of his effects from a Line 6 Helix. “All of those sounds [in the Helix] are modeled on analog sounds, and you can tweak them endlessly,” he explains. “It’s just so practical and easy.”
The tools have only changed slightly since the band’s earlier days, when he favored Travis Beans and Hiwatts. Though he’s started to prefer higher gain sounds, Allen points out that “his guitar sound has always had teeth with a slightly bright sheen, and still does.”
“Honestly, I don’t think my tone has changed much over the past 30-something years,” Denison says. “I tend to favor a brighter, sharper sound with articulation. Someone sent me a video I had never seen of myself playing in the ’80s. I had a band called Cargo Cult in Austin, Texas. What struck me about it is it didn’t sound terribly different than what I sound like right now as far as the guitar sound and the approach. I don’t know what that tells you—I’m consistent?”
YouTube It
The Jesus Lizard take off at Nashville’s Blue Room this past June with “Hide & Seek” from Rack.
Keith Urban has spent decades traveling the world and topping global country-music charts, and on this episode of Wong Notes, the country-guitar hero tells host Cory Wong how he conquered the world—and what keeps him chasing new sounds on his 6-string via a new record, High, which releases on September 20.
Urban came up as guitarist and singer at the same time, and he details how his playing and singing have always worked as a duet in service of the song: “When I stop singing, [my guitar] wants to say something, and he says it in a different way.” Those traits served him well when he made his move into the American music industry, a story that begins in part with a fateful meeting with a 6-string banjo in a Nashville music store in 1995.
It’s a different world for working musicians now, and Urban weighs in on the state of radio, social media, and podcasts for modern guitarists, but he still believes in word-of-mouth over the algorithm when it comes to discovering exciting new players.
And in case you didn’t know, Keith Urban is a total gearhead. He shares his essential budget stomps and admits he’s a pedal hound, chasing new sounds week in and week out, but what role does new gear play in his routine? Urban puts it simply: “I’m not chasing tone, I’m pursuing inspiration.”
