Hats off to Carmen Vandenberg of Bones UK, our celebrity Question of the Month respondent.
Question: What is your favorite method of teaching or learning how to play the guitar?
Guest Picker - Carmen Vandenberg, Bones UK
The cover of Soft, Bones UK’s new album, due in mid-September.
A: My favorite method these days (and to be honest, from when I started playing) is to put on my favorite blues records, listen with my eyes closed, and, at the end, see what my brain compartmentalizes and keeps stored away. Then, I try and play back what I heard and what my fingers or brain decided they liked!
Bone UK’s labelmade, Des Rocks.
Obsession: Right now, I am into anyone trying to create sounds that haven’t been made before—bands like Queens of the Stone Age, Jack White, and our labelmate, Des Rocs! There’s a Colombian band called Diamanté Electrico who I’ve been really into recently. Really anyone who’s trying to create innovative and inspiring sounds.
Reader of the Month - Sam C. Schiff.
Sam spent endless hours trying to learn the solo Leslie West played on “Long Red,” off of The Road Goes Ever On.
A: The best way to learn guitar is to listen to some good guitar playing! Put on a record, hear something tasty, and play on repeat until it comes out of your fingers. For me, it was Leslie West playing “Long Red” on the Mountain album, The Road Goes Ever On. I stayed up all night listening to that track until I could match Leslie’s phrasing. I still can’t, no one can, but I learned a lot!
Smith’s own low-wattage amp build.
Obsession: My latest musical obsession is low-wattage tube amps like the 5-watt Fender Champ heard on the Laylaalbum. Crank it up all the way for great tube distortion and sustain, and it’s still not loud enough to wake up the neighbors!
Gear Editor - Charles Saufley
Charles Saufley takes to gear like a duck to water!
A: Learning by ear and feel is most fun for me. I write and free-form jam more than I learn other people’s licks. When I do want to learn something specific, I’ll poke around on YouTube for a demo or a lesson or watch films of a player I like, and then typically mangle that in my own “special” way that yields something else. But I rarely have patience for tabs or notation.
The Grateful Dead’s 1967 debut album.
Obsession: Distorted and overdriven sounds with very little sustain—Keith Richards’ Between the Buttons tones, for example. Jerry Garcia’s plonky tones on the first Grateful Dead LP are another cool, less-fuzzy version of that texture.
Publisher - Jon Levy
A: I’m a primitive beast: The only way I can learn new music is by ear, so it’s a good thing I find that method enjoyable. I’m entirely illiterate with staff notation. Put sheet music in front of me and I’ll stare at it with twitchy, fearful incomprehension like an ape gaping at the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. I’m almost as clueless with tab, but I can follow along with chord charts if I’m under duress.
The two-hit wonders behind the early ’70s soft-rock hits, “Fallin’ in Love” and “Don't Pull Your Love.”
Obsession: Revisiting and learning AM-radio pop hits circa 1966–1972. The Grass Roots, Edison Lighthouse, the Association, the Archies, and Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds—nothing is too cheesy for me to dissect and savor. Yes, I admit I have a serious problem.
In some respects, the newestLes Paul Studio adheres to that philosophy and shares many trademark elements with its Studio forebears. There’s no body binding and a silkscreened, rather than inlaid mother-of-pearl headstock logo, for instance. But Gibson also carefully and cleverly threaded the needle between economy and luxury with this release, including several desirable Les Paul features that have occasionally been excluded from the budget model over the years.
Classic Contours
Most readers with a cursory knowledge of the Les Paul format will know this guitar’s basic specs already: mahogany body with maple top, mahogany set neck, 24.75" scale length, 12" fingerboard radius, and dual humbuckers. The Les Paul Studio hasn’t always followed the Standard’s, um, standard quite so religiously. Studios from the first few years of the model’s existence, for example, were made with alder bodies and slightly thinner than the usual Les Paul depth. The newest version, too, veers from formula a bit by using Gibson’s Ultra Modern weight relief scheme, which slims the guitar’s weight to about 8.5 pounds. The carved maple top, however, is plain and not heavily figured, which keeps costs down. Even so, it looks good under the bright-red gloss nitrocellulose lacquer finish on our cherry sunburst example. (Wine red, ebony, and the striking blueberry burst are also available).
While the binding-free body and less-heavily figured top hint at the Studio’s “affordable” status, Gibson didn’t skimp on dressing up the neck. It has a bound rosewood fretboard with trapezoidal pearloid inlays rather than the dots many early versions featured. For many players, though, the fretboard binding is more than cosmetic—the ever-so-slight extra width also lends a more vintage-like feel, so it’s really nice to have it here. The neck itself is carved to Gibson’s familiar and ubiquitous Slim Taper profile, a shape inspired by early-’60s necks that were generally thinner and flatter than the ’50s profiles.
“Gibson carefully and cleverly threaded the needle between economy and luxury with this release.”
Hardware largely adheres to contemporary norms for all but vintage reissue-style Les Pauls: tune-o-matic bridge, aluminum stopbar tailpiece, Kluson-style Vintage Deluxe tuners with Keystone buttons, and larger strap buttons (yay!). Another feature here that some past Studio models lack is the cream pickguard, which contributes to the ’50s-era aura. There’s also a matching cream toggle switch washer in the included gig bag if you want to add another vintage touch.
Studio Play Date
Under the chrome pickup covers live two wax-potted, alnico 5 Gibson Burstbucker Pros, which average about 8.3k-ohm resistance. They’re wired with a traditional Gibson four-knob complement and three-way switch, but the volume knobs are push-pull controls that enable coil tapping, which broadens the tone palette considerably.
Playability is a high point. The fine setup, smooth fret work, and well-executed binding nibs lend a very visible sense of quality, but you can hear the payoff in the form of the well-balanced, resonant ring when you strum the guitar unplugged. When you turn it up, though, it’s classic Les Paul. Whether I paired it with a Vox-style head and 1x12, a Fender Bassman with a 2x12 cab, or numerous presets on a Fractal FM9, the Studio didn’t yield any negative surprises, but plenty of positive ones.
The Burstbucker Pros have plenty of bite. But most impressive for a Les Paul at this price, is the excellent clarity and articulation you hear along with strong hints of PAF-descendent grit and swirling overtones that lend heft and personality in cleaner amp settings. There’s none of the mud or mid-heavy boominess that you hear in some Les Pauls, even though the characteristically beefy Les Paul overdrive is present in abundance, helped, no doubt, by the slightly hotter-than-vintage-spec Burstbucker Pros. The Studio matches up well with a cranked amp or an overdrive. And while to some ears the Studio might not sound as creamy-complex or lush as high-end, vintage-leaning re-creations of a ’59 Standard, it will crunch, wail, and sing with aggression and civilized authority.
As for the split-coil tones, they don’t sound quite like genuine single-coil pickups, even though Gibson employs the nifty trick of wiring a capacitor in series with the switch leg—dumping the second coil to ground to keep a little girth in the signal. But generally, they will deliver the lighter jangle and chime that some humbuckers struggle with and lend a lot of versatility.The Verdict
From fit and finish, to playability, to sonic virtue and versatility, the new Les Paul Studio is a genuine Gibson USA-made Les Paul that offers a lot of value. It does just about everything a player working within this price range could want from a Les Paul Standard with a load of style to boot.
Gibson Les Paul Studio Electric Guitar - Cherry Sunburst
After decades of 250 road dates a year, Tab Benoit has earned a reputation for high-energy performances at clubs and festivals around the world.
On his new I Hear Thunder, Benoit still proudly plays the Fender Thinline Telecaster he purchased for $400 when he was making his debut album in Texas, 1992’s Nice & Warm. After that heralded release, his eclectic guitar work—which often echoes between classic blues-rock rumble-and-howl, the street-sweetened funk of New Orleans, and Memphis-fueled soul—helped Benoit win a long-term deal with Justice Records. But when the company folded in the late ’90s, his contract and catalog bounced from label to label.
Tab Benoit - "I Hear Thunder"
This bucked against Benoit’s strong desire to fully control his music—one reason he settled on the trio format early in his career. And although his 2011 album, Medicine, won three Blues Music Awards—the genre’s equivalent of Grammys—he stopped recording as a leader because he was bound by the stipulations of a record deal, now over, that he deemed untenable.
“I wanted to make records that reflected exactly how I sounded live and that were done as though we were playing a live concert,” Benoit says. “So, I formed my own label [Whiskey Bayou Records, with partner Reuben Williams] and signed artists whose music was, to me, the real deal, honest and straightforward. I couldn’t do anything on my own, but I could still continue putting out music that had a positive impact on the audience.”
Benoit’s new album, which includes Anders Osborne and George Porter Jr., was recorded in the studio at the guitarist’s home near the bayou in Houma, Louisiana.
Those artists include fellow rootsers Eric McFadden, Damon Fowler, Eric Johanson, Jeff McCarty, and Dash Rip Rock. Benoit also spent plenty of time pursuing his other passion: advocating for issues affecting Louisiana’s wetlands, including those around his native Houma. His 2004 album was titled Wetlands, and shortly after it was issued he founded the Voice of the Wetlands non-profit organization, and later assembled an all-star band that featured New Orleans-music MVPs Cyril Neville, Anders Osborne, George Porter Jr., Big Chief Monk Boudreaux, Johnny Vidacovich, Johnny Sansone, and Waylon Thibodeaux. This ensemble, the Voice of the Wetlands All-Stars, has released multiple CDs and toured.
Essentially, Benoit comes from the bayous, and when it’s time to record, he goes back to them, and to the studio he has in Houma, which he refers to as “the camp.” That’s where I Hear Thunder came to life. “George and Anders came to me and said, ‘Let’s go make some music,” Benoit offers. “So, we went out to the camp. They had some songs—and George and Anders and I go back so many years it was really a treat to put everything together. It only took us a couple of days to do everything we needed to do.”
“George Porter and Anders Osborne and I saw this alligator sitting around the boat where we were writing the entire time. I guess he really liked the song.”
I Hear Thunder has become his first number one on Billboard’s blues chart. Besides the fiery-yet-tight and disciplined guitar work of Benoit and Osborne, the latter also an esteemed songwriter, the album features his longtime rhythm section of bassist Corey Duplechin and drummer Terence Higgins. Bass legend Porter appears on two tracks, “Little Queenie” and “I’m a Write That Down.” Throughout the album, Benoit sings and plays with soul and tremendous energy, plus he handled engineering, mixing, and production.
Once again, that ascribed to his aesthetic. “My main reason for taking on those extra duties was I wanted to make sure that this recording gives the audience kind of a preview of how we’re going to sound live,” he declares. “That’s one of the things that I truly don’t like about a lot of current recordings. I listen to them and then see those guys live and it’s like, ‘Hey, that doesn't sound like what was on the album.’ Play it once or twice and let’s run with it. Don’t overdo it to the point you kill the honesty. All the guys that I love—Lightnin’ Hopkins, Albert King—they played it once, and you better have the tape machine running because they’re only going to give it to you that one time. That’s the spontaneity that you want and need.
“One of the reasons I don’t use a lot of pedals and effects is because I hate gimmicks,” he continues. “ I’m playing for the audience the way that I feel, and my attitude is ‘Let’s plug into the guitar and let it rip. If I make a mistake, so be it. I’m not using Auto-Tune to try and get somebody’s vocal to seem perfect. You think John Lee Hooker cared about Auto-Tune? You’re cheating the audience when you do that stuff.”
Tab Benoit’s Gear
Benoit in 2024 with his trusty 1972 Fender Thinline Telecaster, purchased in 1992 for $400. Note that Benoit is a fingerstyle player.
Photo by Doug Hardesty
Guitar
- 1972 Fender Telecaster Thinline
Amp
- Category 5 Tab Benoit 50-watt combo
Strings
- GHS Boomers (.011–.050)
The I Hear Thunder songs that particularly resonate include the explosive title track, the soulful “Why, Why” and the rollicking “Watching the Gators Roll In,” a song that directly reflected the album’s writing experience and environment. “George and Anders and I saw this alligator sitting around the boat where we were writing the entire time. I guess he really liked the song. He’d be swimming along and responding. That gave it some added punch.” As does Benoit and Osborne’s consistently dynamic guitar work. “I’m not one of these people who want to just run off a string of notes or do a lot of fast playing,” Benoit says. “It has to fit the song, the pace, and most of all, really express what I’m feeling at that particular moment. I think when the audience comes to a show and you play the songs off that album, you’ve got to make it real and make it honest.”
When asked whether he ever tires of touring, Benoit laughs and says, “Absolutely not. At every stop now I see a great mix of people who’ve been with us since the beginning, and then their children or sometimes even their grandchildren. When people come up to you and say how much they enjoy your music, it really does make you feel great. I’ve always seen the live concerts as a way of bringing some joy and happiness to people over a period of time, of helping them forget about whatever problems or issues they might have had coming in, and just to enjoy themselves. At the same time, I get a real thrill and joy from playing for them, and it’s something that I always want the band’s music to do—help bring some happiness and joy to everyone who hears our music.”
YouTube It
Hear Tab Benoit practice the art of slow, soulful, simmering blues on his new I Hear Thunder song “Overdue,” also featuring his well-worn 1972 Telecaster Thinline.
Carlos Santana’s career arc has been a journey. From blowing minds at the far edges of psychedelia at Woodstock to incendiary jazz experimentalism with the likes of John McLaughlin and Alice Coltrane to later becoming a chart-topping star with some of the biggest collaborators in pop and rock, his guitar playing has covered a lot of ground.
On this episode of 100 Guitarists, we’re covering everything about Santana’s playing we can fit in one neat package: How did Santana’s sound evolve? Has any other rock star mentioned John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme on morning network television? Was Supernatural his ultimate gift to the world?
In our new current listening segment, we’re talking about a Bruce Hornsby live record and a recent release from guitarist Stash Wyslouch.
