Question: What would you change about your No. 1 guitar?
Marc Broussard
A: I would change nothing about my No. 1 guitar. It’s a wonderful instrument and has treated me better than I deserve since the day it first touched my hands. If I had to complain about anything, it’s that the Yamaha logo on the headstock fell off at some point so no one knows what my guitar is. Yamaha RevStar for the win! It was a gift from Yamaha back in 2017, along with an acoustic LJ26 and another electric, the AES1500. These three guitars are the best I’ve ever had the honor of playing.
Current obsession: Figuring out how to use AI to write more music. I find I’ve done my best writing to instrumental tracks, but those tracks are often hard to come by and can be expensive. I’m anxious to see if there will be a music generator that produces high-quality tracks for me to write to. Slim pickings out there right now but there’s some obvious promise on the horizon. I wish I could write a song every day, and hopefully, soon, that’ll be a much more tangible goal.
John Bohlinger Nashville Correspondent
A: My main guitar is a prototype of what became the Joe Glaser-designed Gibson Music City Les Paul. I’ve changed pickups three times, painted it twice, and, three or four times, I’ve taken a belt sander to the back, shoulder, and neck heel to make it more comfortable and lighter. I love it, but the malcontent in me is always thinking about different pickups and tweaking the body shape more. I need to just stop.
Current obsession: Trying to let go of the effort and flow. Listen to Mateus Asato: There’s no effort, no struggle, he’s never in a rush, he sings through his instrument.
Kate Koenig Associate Editor
A: My main guitar is my beloved Taylor AD12e. It has a spruce top with a black satin finish, striped ebony back and sides, a natural exposed-wood chamfered edge around the top (in place of binding and purfling), and a blonde streak down the center of the back. Plus, it has a bright, shimmering, delicate tone that perfectly suits fingerpicking, which is what I do! But, if I were to change something about it, it would be the electronics. I just had an L.R. Baggs Anthem SL installed in my Washburn acoustic, and I think the Taylor would benefit from the same.
Current obsession: I’m currently determined to expand my knowledge of alt hip-hop and am working on a playlist of tracks that stand out to me. Some of my favorite collections include Chance the Rapper’s 2013 mixtape, Acid Rap, Ye and Kid Cudi’s 2018 collab, Kids See Ghosts, and A Tribe Called Quest’s 2016 album, We Got It from Here... Thank You 4 Your Service. The third features a sample of Gene Wilder in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory—a bit spooky, as it came out on the heels of the actor’s passing.
Dudu Horta Reader of the Month
A: My dream guitar always was a Standard Les Paul, but they’re very expensive here in Brazil as we can’t import it. My No. 1 Guitar is a 2010 Gibson Les Paul Tribute, and I changed the pickups only. For the neck, I use a BurstBucker Pro that I like for cleans, and the bridge is a Brazilian clone of a ’57 Classic Plus from Malagoli, made from spec. It has crunch for hard rock and bite for soloing stuff. It suits my style really well and gets me next to a Standard tone.
Current obsession: To develop guitar tones mixing analog, digital, modeling, and tubes all together, from using overdrive pedals prior to digital amps, to plugging digital preamps into a small tube combo, and recording line guitars with AmpliTube, looping through outside gear just to make everything that is possible over all guitar mediums. My goal is to teach guitar technology to help people get better-sounding guitars, and the best tones from small solid-state combos to worship shimmer to straight to the console line.
![Rig Rundown: Baroness' John Baizley, Gina Gleason & Nick Jost [2024]](https://www.premierguitar.com/media-library/youtube.jpg?id=53559996&width=600&height=600&quality=85&coordinates=419%2C0%2C141%2C0)
Dojo Columnist Bryran Clark at the helm.
The idea is that multiple small improvements over time will produce big results. Legendary British cycling coach Dave Brailsford called this “the aggregation of marginal gains.” His strategy was simple: Focus on getting one percent better in every area related to riding a bike. Within 10 years, the British cycling team went on 178 World Championship races and won five Tour de France victories and over 60 Olympic gold medals. Kaizen, indeed! I’m still amazed when I get sessions from other engineers who have no color-coded recording session tracks, haphazard organization within the session itself, and haven’t saved multiple versions. These are three problems that are easily solved with a bit of kaizen. Tighten up your belts, the Dojo is now open.
Color differentiation reduces your cognitive load and allows for faster, more efficient recording, editing, mixing, and overall session management.
Diversify Your Color Palette
Color-coding recording session tracks is a powerful tool for visual organization. It’s an essential, non-technical practice that can significantly enhance workflow efficiency and track management. In a typical modern recording session, there can be between 30 and 100 tracks, each representing different instruments, vocals, effects, and other elements. Without a clear organizational strategy, navigating through these tracks can become overwhelming and time-consuming.
By assigning specific colors to different types of tracks, producers and engineers can quickly identify and locate the tracks they need to work on, so establish a consistent color scheme for types of instruments.
Here’s mine:
• Drums are always slate blue.
• Guitars are various shades of green because they’re made from trees (of course, almost everything else is, too, but both guitar and green share the same first letter).
• Bass instruments are always brown (because they’re powerful and can make you brown your trousers).
• Synths and keys are various hues of purple (I think of Prince and “Purple Rain”).
• Vocals are always yellow because when you get lost in the stifling dark caverns of your mix and can’t find your way out, focus on the vocals—they will lead you toward the light.
An example of our columnist’s strict session color coding in his DAW.
Regardless of your choices, color differentiation reduces your cognitive load and allows for faster, more efficient recording, editing, mixing, and overall session management. Moreover, color coding helps in identifying groups of tracks that need to be processed together, such as a drum bus or background vocals, thus making it easier to apply group processing and adjustments.
Your layout of a recording session is another critical factor for maintaining organized and productive workflows. A well-structured session layout ensures that all elements of the recording are easily accessible and logically arranged. My tracks have a consistent order: drums at the top, followed by bass, guitars, keyboards, vocals, and effects. There’s no right way to do this, but whatever you do, be consistent.
“I have an existential map. It has 'You are here' written all over it.” – Steven Wright
Consistency helps individual producers and engineers to work more efficiently, but also facilitates collaboration with others. When multiple people are involved in a project, establish a standardized layout that will allow everyone to quickly understand the session structure, find specific tracks, and contribute without confusion. Also, a clear layout helps minimize mistakes during recording, editing, and mixing, like possibly overlooking important tracks or processing the wrong ones.
Your layout of a recording session is another critical factor for maintaining organized and productive workflows. A well-structured session layout ensures that all elements of the recording are easily accessible and logically arranged. My tracks have a consistent order: drums at the top, followed by bass, guitars, keyboards, vocals, and effects. There’s no right way to do this, but whatever you do, be consistent.
Consistency helps individual producers and engineers to work more efficiently, but also facilitates collaboration with others. When multiple people are involved in a project, establish a standardized layout that will allow everyone to quickly understand the session structure, find specific tracks, and contribute without confusion. Also, a clear layout helps minimize mistakes during recording, editing, and mixing, like possibly overlooking important tracks or processing the wrong ones.
“Waste Not, Want Not”
One of the most important things to always remember is to immediately save a new version the very first time you open a project or session. That way, if something happens, and it will eventually (I’ve even had session data get corrupted on that specific sector of the hard drive), you’ve left the original session alone. Every time you work on the song, or project, save a new version. This practice safeguards the process and ensures project security.
This is also important during the creative phase when trying out different ideas and arrangements. If a new idea doesn't work out, it's easy to revert to a previous version without losing valuable progress. Furthermore, saving versions at critical milestones—such as after recording, editing, and mixing—provides fallback options in case of technical issues or unexpected problems. And lastly, saving versions creates a chronological historical record of the session's development, which is invaluable for reviewing the evolution of the track, project, or entire record!
We can agree that Jerry Garcia’s playing pulled from all directions of the American musical experience to create an unparalleled playing vocabulary that persisted not only at the forefront of the Grateful Dead’s music, where he was most prominent, but also in his solo work with Jerry Garcia Band and in his bluegrass collaborations. Throughout the Dead’s rambling career, the band shapeshifted through various eras, often with very different musical values, giving fan lots to disagree about. What’s the essential stuff? Where should new listeners go to get acquainted before going into live-tape-land? And just how influential were the Dead on modern music?
Grace Bowers has quickly won a reputation for high-energy guitar heroics.
While she appreciates the sentiment, Bowers doesn’t love being called a guitar prodigy, saying it dismisses the eight years she’s put into studying the instrument.
Photo by Cedric Jones
“I was living in California at the time, in a small town outside of San Francisco,” she reflects. “And there’s absolutely no live music there, whatsoever. I didn’t even know any people my age who played an instrument. So, I pretty much had no hope. And I would always dream that I’d be playing on a stage, or just anywhere, honestly. It always felt super unrealistic and like, ‘Oh, that would never happen.’”
When the pandemic hit, the now 18-year-old Bowers was finishing the seventh grade, and the abrupt separation from her peers didn’t exactly help to improve her sense of belonging. Pretty soon, however, things took a major, positive turn: “I started posting videos online, and it got some momentum,” she shares. Gibson took notice, and offered her an endorsement when she was just 14. Then,“We moved to Nashville, and I was playing onstage almost every night.”
The sudden wealth of opportunity that came with the move changed everything. “It was the biggest motivation ever,” she continues. “Made me want to do it more than I ever have [laughs].”
Grace Bower's Gear
One of Bowers’ main guitars is this 1961 Gibson SG Special. She also plays a Murphy Lab version of the model.
Effects
- Analog Man King of Tone
- Wah
- Boost
- Gain
Strings & Picks
- Ernie Ball .010s
- Dunlop 2.0 mm
By now, Bowers’ résumé has gathered more than just moss. Earlier this year, she was recruited by Dolly Parton to perform on Dolly Parton’s Pet Gala; she’s played with Devon Allman, Tyler Childers, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, and Susan Tedeschi; and in August, shared a bill with her first guitar hero, Slash. And, on the tails of all this success, she’s just released her debut album, Wine on Venus.
Produced by John Osborne of the Brothers Osborne, the album is a collection of eight original tracks, written by Bowers in collaboration with her band the Hodge Podge, and one cover—Sly & the Family Stone’s “Dance to the Music.” Although she has been playing for nine years, the grasp Bowers has on her instrument at 18 is rare. She knows just what notes to play and when to play them, saying very much with very little. She also wields a tone that’s just fuzzy enough, just singing enough, and just wailing enough—when she feels like it. Wine on Venus is the perfect showcase of her wisdom on guitar, antecedent to her being even a quarter century of age. It was recorded live in the studio over the span of one week, and Bowers knew going in just which shots she was going to call.
The eight original songs on Wine on Venus were written by Bowers in collaboration with Esther Okai-Tetteh and the rest of her band, the Hodge Podge.
She shares that she’s highly averse to recording in an isolated booth, unable to see the rest of the band—something she’s done a lot as a session guitarist. “Before we went into the studio, I told John, if I’m wearing headphones, it’s over,” she says. “And when we’re playing live, eye contact is one of the most important things. So, the band was live in the room, and then I was outside looking through a window in the control room with John. We put my amp upstairs on this balcony—it’s like a house, the studio—and turned it to 10, and for the entire record, my guitar was recorded in the control room. It was very loud; I’ll tell you that.”
Carving out your own voice as an individual artist in improv-based genres can be a significant challenge, and Bowers kept that in mind. “I’d say [that difficulty comes from] oversaturation. There’s a lot of jam bands out there right now. And don’t get me wrong; I love that kind of music, but what a lot of them lack is songs. When we went into the studio, I wanted to make sure that we wrote songs and didn’t just jam. I was very intentional in the writing process with Esther [Okai-Tetteh, vocalist]—to write catchy hooks and make sure that the lyrics meant something.”
Okai-Tetteh, whose first name is pronounced “Acey,” was Bowers’ primary writing partner in the development of the album’s material. “A lot of it [came together] sitting on my bedroom floor, writing songs every night. She wrote a lot of the [vocal] melody, which is where I struggle. Whereas I wrote all of the music, and then we both collaborated on the lyrics.” The other members of the Hodge Podge, who include keyboardist Joshua Blaylock, drummer Brandon Combs, bassist Eric Fortaleza, and co-guitarist Prince Parker, each fleshed out the arrangements with their own contributions.
Bowers picked up guitar at age 9 after discovering Slash, and fully fell in love with it at 13, after hearing B.B. King for the first time.
Photo by David McClister
Blues guitarists are typically working with the starkest templates (three or four chords) and the most concise vocabulary (the minor pentatonic scale), which, in many albeit honest, dedicated hands, often sound commonplace. But in the best hands, the blues can be some of the most powerful music out there. As Bowers puts it, “The blues comes from your heart, and you’re not just playing it, if that makes sense. I’m not the best at expressing emotions.... It comes out better for me on guitar.”
“As long as I have a very clean-toned amp and my pedalboard, I’m pretty much good to go.”
Bowers owns three different SGs, and her two main choices are her ’61 model with P-90s—“That’s like my baby”—and a newer model with humbuckers. Her pedalboard is a “basic setup,” and she doesn’t know all the names of her pedals off the top of her head. But in classic funk fashion, she does like to employ her wah while playing rhythm parts. As for amps for live shows, she doesn’t yet have her own tour bus, so she’s been relying on backlines. “As long as I have a very clean-toned amp and my pedalboard, I’m pretty much good to go,” she says. Her greatest inspirations on guitar, aside from Slash, are Leslie West, Eddie Hazel, Carlos Santana, and Marc Bolan. “I have a huge Electric Warrior poster above my bed right now,” she tells me.
As for the future, Bowers says she doesn’t really have long-term goals, exactly. “I don’t like to set expectations for myself, because I just want to see where things are going to bring me naturally. I love doing what feels right in the moment.
“Before, I was super shy and didn’t have a lot of confidence,” she continues. “Guitar really helped me build that up, and now I’m doing things that I would have been horrified to do three years ago. It’s definitely helped me come out of my shell.”
YouTube It
In this brief live clip, Grace Bowers breaks down the blues and builds it back up with incredible tone, feel, and taste.
The MXR Layers Pedal blooms with rich, organic sustain that imbues every strum and pluck with resonance and depth. With a versatile suite of controls, this pedal can be as simple or complex as you need. Whether you want to lengthen single notes or generate multi-layered soundscapes rich with ambience, the MXR Layers Pedal will extend the creative potential of your instrument. Pull off chord voicings you never thought possible, compose transcendent melodies, orchestrate harmonic ensembles, create lively stereo pads, and more—all from a standard MXR housing.
MXR Layers Pedal highlights:
- Versatile suite of controls opens new frontiers to plug-and-play maestros and tonal tinkerers alike
- Up to three layers of sustain, each with its own status LED
- Trigger layers with footswitch or playing dynamics
- The Mix knob adjusts the wet signal level; in other words, the volume of your layers
- Trig knob sets the sensitivity of auto-trigger function
- Attack knob adjusts the fade-in time of each layer, while Decay knob sets the fade-out time
- Sub Oct switch adds fat subterranean vibes
- Advanced features such as expression pedal and tap switch control or additional parameter tweaks offer even more intricate customization
- Build richly detailed soundscapes that elevate musical expression to new heights
The MXR Layers Pedal is available now at $219.99 street/$314.27 MSRP from your favorite retailer.
For more information, please visit jimdunlop.com
