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Pro-Advice

Breaking Benjamin's Keith Wallen

Photo by Courtney Dellafiora

For this month’s question, Breaking Benjamin guitarist Keith Wallen chimes in with reader Benoit Champagne and PG staff on where they’d like to see themselves grow in their musical pursuits.

Question: What’s one area you’d like to improve on in your music?

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Steve Albini in the control room at his Electrical Audio studio in Chicago.

Photo by Kevin Tiongson

Words of wisdom from the legendary engineer, proprietor of Chicago’s Electrical Audio, World Series of Poker champion, and, in the band Shellac, the compass for brutal guitar aesthetics.

“All day every day, we’re grinding it out,” says engineer Steve Albini of his team at Electrical Audio, the Chicago studio he built and has run since 1997. “We’re constantly in session, constantly under fire.”

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The Teisco SD4L is designed with a thick metal plate that attaches the pickups to the body.

In light of our columnist’s hero’s passing, this month’s guitar is an unconventional Teisco model built with plywood and formica.

This month’s column was a little somber for me, because I learned about the passing of one of the most amazing people I’ve ever encountered. Here I sat, watching an actual snowstorm (which is rare these days), and writing about an obscure German guitar, when I got a message from an expat in Japan who learned about the passing of a true legend: Yukichi Iwase. He was one of the early innovators of Japanese instrument making. I’ve written about him a few times before because of his Voice Guitars company and his contribution to the early days of Teisco (he was among the original employees).

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Reader: Kaj “HeGe” Haggman

Hometown: Helsinki, Finland

Guitar: Coffee


HeGe dubbed his guitar “Coffee,” as its color reminds him of an old coffee pot.

When this guitar builder couldn’t find the EVH-style guitar he wanted, his solution was to create one—designed with a quilted maple top and tremolo system inspired by the legend.

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How we listen to music has been changing for more than a century, but since the rise of streaming, musicians are being left behind.

The music industry is leaving brilliant artists high and dry. What do we stand to lose?

Great jazz drummer Milford Graves was an innovator in every sense of the word. The definition of a polymath, he did so many things, from botany to computer science, at such a high level that it was hard for those in the know to think of him as any one thing. However, one little-known thing is that young Milford was also an early pioneer of independent records, meaning he was one of the first musicians to record, press, and release his own. Even lesser known is that he was responsible for introducing John Coltrane, one of the biggest of the jazz names within the major label pantheon, to this idea near the end of Coltrane’s life.

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