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Hooked

Before you can run, you gotta walk, and playing guitar is no different. This year, big names like Doug Aldrich, Devin Townsend, Andy Timmons, Eva Gardner, Matt Heafy, and others detail their earliest, biggest influences.

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Now the world’s best-known 6-string duo, Gabriela Quintero and Rodrigo Sánchez have long-reaching roots that extend from metal to Irish folk music and distill into their unique take on nylon-string-acoustic-guitar music.

Photo by Ebru Yildiz

On their new album, In Between Thoughts… A New World, the acoustic duo goes half-electric, plumbs programmed beats, adds slide guitar, and explores nondualism—following a creative path that opened due to the Covid shutdown.

Grammy Award-winning guitar virtuosi Rodrigo y Gabriela started recording what would become their latest album, In Between Thoughts… A New World, in February 2021. At the time, crafting a new album wasn’t the catalyst for making new music. They really just wanted to write, jam, and record without an agenda while locked down during the pandemic.

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Laura Cox on Brad Paisley's "The Nervous Breakdown" | Hooked

Initially intimidated, the French rocker slowly worked out the Southern-fried chicken pickin’ guitar crash course and picked up multiple techniques—hammer-ons, pull-offs, ghost notes, double-stops, and open strings—that still feed her need for speed.

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Devin Townsend on Judas Priest's "The Sentinel" | Hooked

The once Strapping Young Lad chronicles the "pinnacle moment" with the Glenn Tipton and K.K. Downing riff that helped him earn "social collateral" and he became "moderately accepted" with schoolmates.

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Does It Doom?'s Steve Reis on Black Sabbath's "Black Sabbath" | Hooked

The envoy of evil honors Tony Iommi's ominous opening odyssey that is a foreboding fight between light and dark that ultimately sparked several subgenres of metal.

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