Riffs: Robot Guitar Award, Malmsteen's New Record, Dean Signs Amott, D'Addario Ph.D

For years, an old upright piano soundboard had sat in the hallway of the tattoo studio where Robin Wattie worked. Wattie, the vocalist and guitarist of Montreal experimental post-rock trio Big Brave, knew it was destined for the garbage dump, but neither she nor any of her coworkers wanted to actually carry it to the curb. Wattie’s bandmate, guitarist Mathieu Ball, had walked by it plenty of times, but one day, he got a notion: It’d be fun to make use of the piano strings still tensed inside the soundboard.