Christopher Lee is badass. Count Dooku. Sauruman. Dracula. The dude is so metal he makes Ronnie James Dio look like Rainbow Brite, and Rainbow Brite look like Strawberry Shortcake. Check out this press release about his new symphonic metal album. That’s rude, dude’s 87 and he’s releasing a metal album. Think you’ll be that hardcore at 87? Prolly not. Because Christopher Lee is badass.

Legendary actor Christopher Lee, who has appeared in such cinematic milestones as “Lord Of The Rings”, “Star Wars”, “The Man with the Golden Gun” and “Dracula”, was recently interviewed by Metal Express Radio’s U.K.-based reporter Mick Burgess about Lee’s forthcoming album, “Charlemagne”. You can now listen to the 12-minute chat at this location.

A concept effort with original words and symphonic metal music, “Charlemagne” will be released on March 15 via via Charlemagne Productions Ltd.

Composer Marco Sabiu, best known for his collaborations with Kylie Minogue, TAKE THAT, Pavarotti and Morricone, has created a truly epic canvas by introducing modern metal symphonies, in a style which resembles a movie score. Marie-Claire Calvet, a graduate from Bristol University, transports the listener into “The Dark Ages”, with a very powerful storyline and mesmerizing lyrics. A full orchestra, heavy metal musicians, choir and special guest vocalists bring the legend of Charlemagne to life.

The Carandinis, Lee’s maternal ancestors, were given the right to bear the coat of arms of the Holy Roman Empire by the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. Through his Carandini ancestors, Christopher Lee has a direct link to Charlemagne, and has decided for the first time in his life to pay homage to his distinguished ancestor, who is credited as The Father of Europe.

Lee, 87, has previously collaborated with MANOWAR and RHAPSODY OF FIRE.

For more information, visit www.myspace.com/charlemagnemusical.

I’m not sure when it happened. Some time between chaining a few distortion pedals and a graphic EQ together for pure evil Dimebag Darrell tone when I was 16, and my 27^th birthday or thereabouts, I started to hear the call. Quiet at first, maybe a little distant and muffled, but definitely there. It got louder over the years, and increasingly raspier and sharper. Then before I knew it, there it was:

Fuzz.

I’m not sure why I hadn’t thought of it before. Maybe it was because I spent my teens in an era where amp distortion was king, and even pedal distortion was relatively frowned upon as being synthetic. Maybe it was because I thought of fuzz as, to paraphrase Dethklok, ‘grandpa’s distortion.’ But whatever mental roadblock was coming between me and glorious fuzz gradually started to shift, and now I can’t get enough of those little germanium or silicon-chipped wonders.

My first indication that I was becoming a true analog fuzz hound was when I bought, of all things, a Boss GT-8 digital processor, and found myself dwelling more and more upon the fuzz effects rather than all the other cool stuff the pedal did. A little while later an MXR Classic 108 Fuzz drifted across my desk to review for Mixdown Magazine, and I was instantly in love. You can read that review here to see what I mean. A little while after that I was lucky enough to be loaned a seemingly unstoppable succession of Roger Mayer fuzz pedals to review for Australian Guitar magazine, and I guess that’s when my love of the fuzz really kicked in. As you may know, Roger Mayer is famous for designing pedals for such legendary guitarists as Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page, and if anyone knows their way around a fuzz pedal, it be he.

It’s interesting that parallel to this discovery, I’ve also found myself winding back my amp’s gain control. I used to be an ‘amp gain on 10, and with some kind of distortion or overdrive pedal’ guy, but over the last few years I’ve found my gain control has crept back to about 4 on my Marshall DSL50 (on the regular lead channel, not the ‘ultra’ one), and if I need a little more gain I’ve been stomping on a clean boost pedal (an MXR/Custom Audio Electronics Boost/OD). So on one hand I’m favouring a cleaner, drier tone, more controllable and on the other I’m getting right down into the buzzy, fuzzy, fizzy, farty, gritty world of old school fuzz. Weird!

So now my fuzz arsenal includes two pedals: a Jim Dunlop Jimi Hendrix Octave Fuzz (which sounds a little harsh and edgy, in the best possible way) and the ultra-fat, ultra vibey Way Huge Swollen Pickle MK II. Hopefully I’ll add more fuzz pedals to this batch – I’d love a Jimi Hendrix Fuzz Face, a Vox Tone-Bender, a Roger Mayer Axis and Stone X, a Z.Vex Fuzz Factory and maybe a Fender Blender. I’m also kinda entertaining the idea of getting out the soldering iron and trying to build one from scratch some day, but I don’t know if that’s gonna happen any time soon. All I know is that while fuzz was around for almost 50 years before I got around to seriously checking it out, I now can’t picture my playing future without it. Funny how that happens.

It’s a scientific fact that Extreme’s ‘Saudades de Rock’ was one of the best albums of 2008. Of course I missed out on seeing the resulting tour because I had the ridiculous audacity to be born in Australia and the scarcity of bank account to not have moved to the US a decade ago. But at least I can kinda pretend I was there with the forthcoming Extreme live CD and DVD!

Reunited Massachusetts hard rockers EXTREME will release the “Take Us Alive” live CD and DVD on April 23 in Europe and May 4 in the U.S. via Frontiers Records.

In 2008, following a 13-year hiatus, EXTREME returned to the stage for its “Take Us Alive” world tour, which encompassed 75 cities and multiple continents in support of the band’s new record, “Saudades de Rock”.

This recording captures EXTREME at the peak of its game with a renewed enthusiasm led by Gary Cherone’s spellbinding stage performance and powerful vocals, Nuno Bettencourt’s ferocious guitar, Pat Badger’s flawless bass and Kevin Figueiredo’s pounding drums and spot-on back-up vocals.

This brilliant performance was recorded on the last night of their tour at the House of Blues on August 8, 2009 in EXTREME’s hometown of Boston.

“We wanted to do something really special for our hometown fans that were there for us since the beginning… the club days,” states Nuno. “It was the last night of the tour and we couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate than by bringing it back to where it all started… Boston.”

The concert showcases material from all five EXTREME albums and exhibits the band’s broad stylistic abilities. Features include a blistering rendition of the LED ZEPPELIN-minded “Comfortably Dumb”, the scorching “Play With Me”, the funked-up “Cupid’s Dead” as well as the anthemic “Get The Funk Out”. Songs like EXTREME’s #1 hit “More Than Words” and the Top 5 single “Hole Hearted” highlight the crowds enthusiasm and loyal support their fan base has had for this beloved foursome.

“As much as we enjoy recording, for me, I’ve always loved playing live for the fans,” Cherone says. “We couldn’t wait to get out there and play for our fans.”

The DVD will contain four unreleased bonus videos from “Saudades de Rock” — “King of the Ladies”, “Interface”, “Run” and “Ghost”. The clips were produced by Nuno Bettencourt.

“This DVD/CD is a culmination of all the years we played together and the chemistry the four of us put out live,” explains Bettencourt.

“Take Us Alive” concert track listing:

01. Decadence Dance
02. Comfortably Dumb
03. Rest in Peace
04. It’s a Monster
05. Star
06. Tell me Something I Don’t Know
07. Medley – Kid Ego / Little Girls / Teacher’s Pet
08. Play With Me
09. Midnight Express
10. More Than Words
11. Ghost
12. Cupid’s Dead
13. Take us Alive
14. Flight of the Wounded Bumblebee
15. Get the Funk Out
16. Am I Ever Gonna Change
17. Hole Hearted

Bonus music videos (DVD only)

18. King of the Ladies
19. Interface
20. Run
21. Ghost

Check out this sweet new triple single coil Ibanez JS that Joe Satriani’s been playing on the current Experience Hendrix tour. 

Cool huh? Joe seems to be getting a bit more adventurous with his pickup choices in recent years, with the switch to DiMarzio MoJoe and PAF Joe signature humbuckers as well as the ProTrack in the neck position of his new 24-fret Ibanez JS2400. Wonder if this was made just to play up the Hendrix vibe of the tour, or if we’ll see it on the racks at our local guitar stores in the not too distant future.

EXPERIENCE HENDRIX DATES

March ‘10

04 Thu Arlington Theater Santa Barbara, CA US 

05 Fri Gibson Amphitheater Los Angeles, CA US

06 Sat The Joint @ Hard Rock Las Vegas, NV US 

07 Sun Ikeda Theater Mesa, AZ US   

09 Tue Table Mountain Fresno, CA US 

10 Wed Warfield Theater San Francisco, CA US   

11 Thu Warfield Theater San Francisco, CA US 

12 Fri Silver Legacy Reno, NV US 

14 Sun Paramount Theatre Denver, CO US 

15 Mon Stiefel Theatre For The Performing Arts Salina, KS US 

16 Tue Uptown Theater Kansas City, MO US 

17 Wed Orpheum Theater Minneapolis, MN US 

18 Thu Chicago Theatre Chicago, IL US 

20 Sat Fox Theatre St. Louis, MO US 

21 Sun Riverside Theater Milwaukee, WI US 

23 Tue Civic Theatre Akron, OH US 

24 Wed Wellmont Theatre Montclair, NJ US 

25 Thu Count Basie Theatre Red Bank, NJ US 

27 Sat Fox Theatre Atlanta, GA US 

28 Sun Durham Performing Arts Center Durham, NC US 

LINK: Satriani.com

Karma County’s Brendan Gallagher
The Open Tuning Chord Book For Guitar

First published in 1994, and now in it’s third edition through Music Sales/Wise Publications, The Open Tuning Chord Book For Guitar gives guitarists working in standard tuning a basic introduction into open tune playing.

Though commonly used for slide playing, open tunings have become increasingly popular for their unusual and rich voicings. The book contains chord shapes for over 300 chords in the two most popular tunings – Vastopol (or Open D) and Spanish (or Open G) – with a page per key. For example, turn to page 17 and there are twelve chords in Open D tuning in the key of G – major, minor, 6th, dom 7th, diminished, augmented, minor 6th, major 7th, minor 7th, 7th sus 4, 7th flat 9 and 11th.

“I’ve been dabbling in open tuning since I picked up the guitar in 1970 and the various chords I use in Open D & Open G have become second nature but for a lot of guitarists learning a swag of new chord shapes can be a bit inhibiting” Brendan Gallagher commented. “So I thought I’d sit down one day and set out my favourite shapes in a book form. Luckily for me at the time (1994) my older brother Tim asked me to mind his second hand tool shop for a couple of weeks. Only a few customers came in each day so I spent the whole time working on this book. Thanks big bro!”

The Open Tuning Chord Book For Guitar also includes a short history of the origin of open tuning, tips on tuning and string set up, a glossary of favourite chords and recommended listening plus music scores for four songs using open tuning chord shapes. It’s shape 30 cm x 10cm (12 inches x 4 inches) makes it a snug fit in the neck of a standard guitar case.

The Open Tuning Chord Book For Guitar is now available in-stores or from www.musicroom.com.au or www.brendangallagher.com.au

“What a super book, this is such fun. I could use this for the next album.” David Bowie

“The ‘Open Tuning Chord Book for Guitar’ is a wonderful introduction to the world of altered tunings. Different guitar tunings really open up the textural possibilities of the guitar and Brendan’s book does a great job of presenting these different textures in a very organized and fun way. It’s sure to breath new life into your playing!” Lee Ritenour

“I have being playing for 50 years and there is always something new that somebody can show me.” Arlo Guthrie

“Inspiring… Brendan Gallagher’s Open Tuning Guitar Chord Book will introduce guitarists to a whole new palette of sounds. An essential companion for anyone interested in exploring the possibilities of the guitar.” Amanda Brown (The Go-Betweens)

“Releases the shackles of standard tuning and it’s obvious from the first page that it has been written by someone who really plays.” Mark Lizotte a.k.a. Diesel

“Either he or I better have good lawyers ‘cause I’m gonna steal every fuckin’ thing he’s got!” Tim Rogers (You Am I)

Brendan Gallagher Biography

Brendan Gallagher’s distinctive guitar playing has graced recordings by David Bowie, Jimmy Little, Kylie Minogue, Karma County, Paul Mac, King Curly, Dave McCormack & The Polaroids, Lyall Adonis, The Dead Marines & more. A guitarist for nearly 40 years some say he was born with a guitar in his hands.

He has produced or co-produced over 20 albums, including two ARIA (Australian Grammies) award winners – Jimmy Little’s instant Australian classic Messenger (1999) and Karma County’s Into The Land Of Promise (2000). His songs have appeared in films like Summersault, Clubland & The Boys Are Back and TV shows like Sea Change & City Homicide. In 2009 he wrote and produced the original score for Aussie feature film Subdivision.

Brendan is best known as singer/guitarist with Karma County. Over the last 15 years the band have released five albums and toured around the world. As a songwriter he has written perennial radio favourites like Postcard, Secret Country, Love Sublime, Dexter & Sinistra. Karma County’s double album retrospective Headland was released through Vitamin Records in 2008.

In September 2006 Brendan released his debut solo album On Eve St, it was voted one of the top 25 albums of 2006 for the Australian Music Prize (AMP). In September 2009 he followed up with his second solo album Tooraloo & Tender.

My Ibanez Talman on dbTwang

www.dbTwang.com is a cool idea where guitar players can extensively profile their personal guitars online – or in other words boast about their axes to other geeks who will appreciate it, instead of when I bail people up at parties and tell them all about the Super 58s in my Ibanez Talman.

What I like about dbtwang is that you can really go into detail about your guitar, right down to the control layout, pickups, frets, modifications, all that cool stuff. Then you can search the database for similar guitars.

Another cool feature is that you can follow guitars in much the same way you would follow somebody on Twitter. And I guess you can see if Fender John Mayer Stratocasters put their foot in it the way the real John Mayer does.

I’ve put a few of my guitars on there and I’ll be adding more soon (That’s the aforementioned Ibanez Talman in the screenshot up there).

Here’s a great video which will take you though the nuts and bolts of the site.

You may remember my recent tour of the Taylor Guitars factory in El Cajon, California, and how I was fortunate enough to meet Bob Taylor himself during my visit. There were a million questions I would love to have asked him at the time, and a few million more that popped into my head after I left. Flash forward a few weeks and Bob was only too happy to have a chat about all things guitar.

Let’s go back to the beginning: how did you start building guitars?

When I was a kid, I knew how to make stuff. I made my bicycle, I made my skateboard. When I was 16 I wanted a guitar, so I made one in high school wood shop. And halfway through making that guitar it was like, “Bang! I’m making guitars! That’s what I’m gonna do, because I love this.” And that’s how I got started. I started the company when I was 19 years old with my partner Kurt Listug (pictured with Bob below) when I was 19 years old and he was 21. We started selling guitars to people in San Diego. We both were working at a little hippie custom guitar shop and the guy who owned it decided to sell it. I was 18 when I started working at this place. It was kind of a co-op of a shop. He decided to sell it so we put together $3,000 to pay off his bills, and took over his rent. We got a band saw and a planer and a table saw and a little pile of wood and some 2X4 work benches and we started building guitars.

Bob Taylor in 1975

What was that first guitar like?

The very first guitar I made? It was the shape of my friend’s Yamaha FG-something-or-other. And I had this guitar made by a Japanese company called Coronet – they make woodwind instruments but I had this cheap guitar, bought it for 36 bucks. I didn’t realise it then but it was a copy of a Gibson Dove. I’d never seen a Gibson, never seen a Martin – never even heard of Martin actually – didn’t know about any guitars that were available anywhere at all. I didn’t know any of that. So I copied the peg-head off my Coronet guitar, which turned out to be a Gibson. I copied the body off his Yamaha. I read a book called Irvin Sloan’s Classic Guitar Construction: it was the only book available there. So I made this 12-string, steel-string guitar to the shape of a Yamaha body and a Coronet/Gibson peghead, 12-string with a Spanish-style slipped in to the sides neck joint… it was a mess! A complete mess! But it all came together and it played! It was pretty exciting. Made two more the next year in wood shop: made two guitars and a banjo when I was a senior, then I got out of high school and started making guitars, and that’s what I’ve done my whole life.

It’s always been my dream that some day, when I retire, I’ll build guitars. I used to be a repair tech at a music store and it was fun but I’d really love to build guitars from scratch.

I think it’s an easier pursuit than being a repair tech. Really, if you just start making a guitar it seems kinda overwhelming, in a way, but it’s kinda one piece at a time and you build on what you’re doing. If you’re a repair tech you’re kinda having to figure out a way to undo something that’s already wrong. There’s so much backwards progress before you go forward. That’s why I always enjoy building.

 Could you tell us how you incorporate modern technology into your guitar building?

Bob Taylor and Kurt Listug

If you go all the way back to my very first guitar, I’d get to a certain point and I’d make a tool to do it. Like for example: it’s time to bend the sides. What to do? Well, you need to make a bending iron, cos you’re not going to bend sides without one. And, y’know, now it’s time to cut a rosette. Alright, well let me set up a drill press, and I’ll set up a fly cutter, and I’ll make a rosette. So for my first guitar, I made tools. A lot of luthiers collect five, six, seven luthier tools and go ‘okay, I’m done,’ and to them anything past that is not making guitars any more. And I reject that notion totally and completely! Machines, machine tools, processes, fixtures, all of this, they’re fabulous in the life of anybody making anything. It’d be almost impossible today to be any kind of graphic artist if you aren’t using computers to do it. You’re going to print things on a computer, you’re going to put things in the computer and do your colour. Unless all you are is a painter, but if you’re going to live in the real world and contribute art into the world of graphics, or even journalism – you just don’t do that on a typewriter any more! So, at any rate, if you just get down to the philosophy of it, I’m the guitar maker who wants to spend as much time building my method of construction as I do building my guitars. As I began making those first guitars, I never made a guitar without spending an equal amount of time: if I spent 40 hours making a guitar, I easily spent 40 hours making some type of tool or fixture or aid for the construction of the guitar that I could then use for the next guitar. And eventually you get to where you’re producing pretty good guitars and you’ve got this nice little shop full of specialised tools to be able to do that. And gosh, guitars are hard to make, and the reason you make them by hand is because there are not really many machines that can do that kind of a thing. When you shape a surfboard, you shape it by hand, because for a machine to shape a surfboard with the different kinds of curves you want is pretty complex. There really isn’t anything between somebody doing it by hand with a surform, and a five-axis CNC robot. You know what i mean? There’s not a stop between those places. There’s not some kind of tool that gets the nuances in there, because it’s such an aerofoil-type design. It’s an aesthetic/scientific design to get a good surfboard. And guitar necks are that way, and guitar shapes are that way. The defining surfaces of guitar shapes are aesthetic, not really mathematical. The mathematical equation for a guitar shape is really complex. So it’s really easier to just go at it by hand, just look at a block of wood, get some spoke shaves and files and just do it, because your body and your mind can do that thing.

Well, around 1989 the world changed when computer-aided design arrived on personal computers, and three-axis mills had reached a point where a common guy with a small factory like mine, you know, 30 people making a couple thousand guitars a year, could afford something like that. And all those tools leapfrogged all the furniture tooling that people tried to adapt to guitar building for years. You know, a bunch of crappy guitars made with these machines that are like a big hard piece of metal that don’t do anything except cut a curve, you know? Well, a guitar neck isn’t a curve – a guitar neck is really complex! It’s like a propeller or a surfboard. It’s not an easy thing to do! And some kind of simple, cast iron woodworking machine that they made for a hundred years doesn’t do the job. So those machines really sort of gave the factory guitar a bad name. But people said ‘Well, it’s because they’re machine-made.’ Well, maybe it was. But then all of a sudden machines were available that can do a surfboard, can do a guitar neck – can do all of that! And the minute they were available, I was using that stuff. There was no spiritual or emotional conflict in me at all. It was, ‘This is what I’ve been waiting for and I’m diving in with both feet as fast as I can, and I don’t care what anybody thinks about it because this is the future of guitar building.’ So I went there really quickly and got into that type of thing. It’s an interesting discussion for guitar enthusiasts. I think the baseline people are starting with is, ‘factory guitars = crappy. Handmade guitars = good. How can we reconcile this? Let’s ask Bob about it!’ And the difference is, modern tools work like people’s hands. They’re so articulate. The sky’s the limit. If you can figure out how to hold the part, the tool can cut your part. You’ve got to figure out how to draw it – that’s not easy – but with all the computer-aided design, I mean, look at a movie like Avatar: that’s all computer generated. And so generating the shape of a guitar neck in a computer is really simple now, whereas 20 years ago it would have taken a math major in trigonometry to be able to put together the code. Now you just draw pictures, and you can see on your computer screen what your neck shape is going to look like, and that produces code.

From there, the machinery companies continued to develop things, and one day these little tiny lasers appeared. Little things made for cutting paper, making ornaments, etching things, making little parts out of thin woods. I bought my first one to make a rosette on a Baby Taylor. That’s all it did. I thought ‘If this is all I can ever do, it’s worth buying a laser. But I predict that it’s gonna open the floodgates for things that we can do in the future.’ Which is exactly what it did. We make parts on the laser that you can’t even conceive of making with any kind of traditional hand tool. So if you look at chunks of history in my guitar-making career, which is almost 40 years now – 35 with Taylor and a few years of making guitars as a kid before that – it kinda goes like this: make a guitar by hand because that’s how you get it done. Make some fixtures to get some things done, to make marks, follow shapes and that kind of thing, then finish all of the tricky stuff by hand. Then use CNC computer-aided equipment to mimic all those hand moves and all those hand designs. And then, after 15 years of that, maybe 10 years, we started with our NT neck, the design we use now. And that’s when the sky blew open for us, because that’s when we gained so much experience and expertise at our newfound way of manufacturing, that no longer did we mimic the design of handbuilt guitars, but we exploited our machines to within an inch of their lives to make guitars that we can’t dream of making by hand because they’re just too complex. So in other words, you start out with these kind of machines as a labor buddy, to get some work done, and you end up using these machines – or we have – to make guitars that you can’t make any other way.

So the technology ends up freeing your creativity.

Oh it totally frees your creativity because with what we do now, well, you can think of an idea but if you know, at that first thought, that there’s no way you could make that part, you just move on to another thought. But now we can think of something and go, ‘Wait just a darn minute… we could make that part! Wow, wouldn’t it be awesome if we had a little tiny thin patch of spruce underneath the top and it had eight thousandth of an inch slots cut most of the way through it in a feathered position so when the spruce expands and contracts those slots can open up and close with it?’ You know? You go, ‘Man, we’ve never been able to do anything like that before!’ That would be one ridiculous little example, but it’s life-changing!

The new Taylor tremolo bridge

One of the innovations I really dug at NAMM was the new trem on the SolidBody. What can you tell me about that?

We had two trem design contests here at work. I put an engineer on each one… well, it wasn’t really a contest, there wasn’t a winner or loser, but… one trem, we just sat down and said ‘We’re gonna use a traditional spring on a fulcrum and we’re going to really think about that.’ Both of the trems had to carry the aesthetic of the original bridge we’d designed – we had to get that thing into a trem. So we started working on the spring portion. We changed fulcrum points and balance points. We moved the fulcrum weight down on the bridge a lot farther than it traditionally is. And the other one was a cam design that was really, really tricky. It was something that could probably make an incredible bridge, but it’d probably take us five more years of development. Both engineers worked on trems full-time for months, and in the end just a spring tremolo, like has been used traditionally but sort of redone in our way, won out because it felt like a guitar and felt like what people were used to. And it works really well. It’s got a beautiful silky glidiness to it, it stays in tune… we weren’t really looking for a dive-bomb trem, but it turns out you can really do that with this. But we just wanted a trem.

What was the genesis of the SolidBody?

Well, we have to go through a little bit of history but we developed the NT neck, which allowed us to take the neck on and off the guitar. The time came when we decided, if we’re ever going to get anywhere with acoustic guitar pickups, we’re going to have to make them ourselves. It was at that point that we decided to ask Rupert Neve to teach us what he knew about magnetics, transformers and real analog sound. We developed those pickups and all of a sudden we looked underneath the fretboard and thought ‘Hey, we could hide a pickup underneath here.’ And we did that. Now, to make magnetic pickups sound acoustic, we had to think differently about magnetics. Now a lot of people think that a magnetic pickup has to sound like an electric guitar, but they aren’t thinking that a microphone is a magnetic pickup, or a phonograph needle is a magnetic pickup. Well, that led to our T5, and because we were thinking of magnetics in a different way than just winding a Strat or Les Paul pickup, during that process we found out things that could be different when you make them into an electric guitar. We have a different kind of philosophy. We made the T5 and it was a smashing success. It was just a great guitar. And as we were working on some new versions of T5s to make them a little more electric, we came up with a couple of pickups and we played them and it was like, ‘Holy Moses! These things sound good! I guess we have to build a guitar around them!’ So really, the love of guitar making is what drives everything in this factory. It drives all the experimentation, all the products that get to market. It’s never like, oh we’re analysing that there’s a hole in the market here… okay, we have a hundred models of guitar and we’re trying to cover all price ranges, but when we’re making new things it’s just for the love of the instrument. So that guitar, the SolidBody, was born out of pickups that we loved the sound of, and we thought we had something to offer with our pickups. We know we can make a guitar, y’know, the guitar part’s easy. But I’m not going to make a guitar with a Gotoh bridge or a branded pickup. We’re not gonna do that. When we started making acoustic guitars we never made Martins and we never made Gibsons, we just made Taylors. Everything about our guitars are unique. They’re uniquely Taylor and we knew that if we ever did solid bodies it’d be the same way. So we never really did, until it came to pass that we had a pickup. We weren’t trying to go there, we just …got there!

The thing that really grabbed me about the SolidBody that I reviewed was the clarity of the pickups. There was so much detail – in fact it reminded me of the amount of detail you hear when just playing an electric guitar unplugged on the couch, which is one of my favourite things in the world.

It’s interesting, this idea of having high fidelity in pickups, because the thing is, everybody is figuring out how to get a lot of output with very few windings. In other words, we know that low impedance pickups sound better, so people make low impedance pickups and put preamps in, or they want more output from their pickups so they put in a bunch of windings, and that muddies everything up. To get pickups that have high fidelity with very few wraps, that’s the goal. Cracking that code is really where people want to go. And David Hossler figured out how to do it. We have very few wraps, and we have tonnes of output. And what you get with all of that is fidelity. A lot of people think that high fidelity means clean, but that’s not true: there’s fidelity in a distorted sound too. So we’re just trying to get frequencies to come through in a beautiful way. And tone is a beautiful thing. There’s pleasing tone and there’s un-pleasing tone. It’s kind of like, there are pleasing tastes and pleasing smells, and pleasing photographs and paintings, and there are UN-pleasing versions of every single one of those! And a lot of that is innate in people. There’s certainly taste, but I tell you what, there is a difference between something that’s pleasing and something that’s unpleasing. People tend to respond to nice fidelity. There are rich overtones and harmonics that the human ear just likes. There are scientists who have analysed it and they say there are some harmonics which make people want to turn their head, and they get a little headache, and there are others that make you want to lean your head towards the music. And those are the tones that we’re looking for!

The Taylor baritone 8-string

The baritone 8-string is another really innovative idea.

Yeah, it was our 35th anniversary last year, and we thought we’d have some 35th anniversary guitars, but what’s going to be the big thing? And we decided that the big thing was going to be a bunch of little things. The big thing would be making a few guitars of all these different varieties of guitars people have asked for. ‘When are you gonna make a 12-fret guitar? When are you gonna make a parlour guitar? When are you gonna make a baritone? When are you gonna make a 9-string?’ ‘NEVER!’ (laughs) ‘We’ll never do that! Because you don’t deserve my time!’ (laughs) You know what I mean? ‘It’s too much work!’ Then we thought, okay, it’s time. We’ll call it ‘tooling light’ – not stuff that’s for big production, but stuff we could make a few guitars out of. The baritone required a new fret scale, a longer neck… there’s a boatload of tooling just to make that guitar, to make a legitimate version of that guitar. Since we’re not making guitars with a file and a handsaw any more, we have to tell our machines how to make it, and that really means an army of guys going at it until we have all the tooling for it. And that’s kind of the disadvantage in making guitars the way we do. It’s like Volkswagen coming out with a new model. They have to tool the factory for it. They can’t just take a hammer and start banging on some sheet metal until they come up with what they want. So, we built the tooling for the baritone. We made the 6-string and it was cool. But meanwhile over on the other side we’re making this 9-string guitar and putting strings in different places, and we found that the three doubled strings really need to be in the middle, not on the top. Then we thought ‘Gosh, what it this thing was a 9-string, wouldn’t that be neat?’ Of course, that was too much. ‘Okay, let’s take a string off.’ It was just that kind of a thing! That’s exactly how we got there. I played that baritone and said ‘let’s make a 9-string out of that.’ And we played that and I go ‘it’s one too many strings, let’s just try the D and the G’… or whatever those notes would be. I’m not smart enough to transpose that five frets down. But those two middle strings, we played it and it was like, ‘Aaah! We’re home! It was like a 3-point landing on something that seemed like we must be brilliant! Because this low guitar that could wear you out and make you weary after playing it for a couple of songs, all of a sudden had tonal ranges in the normal guitar spectrum, because those two octave strings carried the guitar up to where a guitar should be, which is really, it’s not a baritone instrument, it’s really more of a tenor instrument. It’s up there where people think music should be made. And it kind of feels like you’ve got an organ, especially when you plug it in. It’s got that low sound. A lot of people have noticed that at church they don’t play organ any more, they play bass guitar, but I’m like, ‘Ooh, this could be the organ back in church! Plug this baby in and get those low notes!’ But the nice thing about it is it’s not dry and it’s not low. A baritone guitar goes down and kinda takes you down with it after a few songs, you know what I mean? It’s just too low! But the baritone 8-string’s not too low because it’s got two more strings and they’re right in the middle. You can play on them, you can play around them, you can accentuate them, you can de-accentuate them, you can strum them, you can fingerstyle them. And it seems like anybody that plays guitar gets on that and says ‘Oh, I know how to use this! I know just what I want to do!’ When you play it, it sort of comes naturally, how to employ what it can do. And that’s why people are excited about it: because it offers something truly new.

LINK: Taylor Guitars

Testament's Eric Peterson

Check out the killer range of straps in the Rock N Roll series from Heavy Leather NYC . I posted about these on Twitter a couple of weeks ago (click here to follow me on Twitter if you’re not already). Me, I’d love a ‘Burnt Offerings’ (as favoured by Testament’s Eric Peterson) for my Ibanez UV777BK 7-string. Couldn’t you just see that going great with the aggressive angles of the Universe?

Heavy Leather’s straps aren’t cheap but why would you cut corners on something that will stop your guitar from hitting the stage with a thud, and will help you look cool too?

What’s your favourite? What guitar would you put it with?

LINK: Heavy Leather NYC

Burnt Offerings

Wild Horses

Ballroom Blitz

Blackjack

Wild Things

Badlands

For Those About To Rock

Aaah, Rob Zombie. There’s hasn’t been a more prolific musician/filmmaker since… well, since the 80s when David Lee Roth claimed Van Halen were getting up to all sorts of adults-only hi-jinx on video. Interestingly, like Roth and his reunion with Van Halen, Zombie has also looked to the past to define his present. Nope, he’s not reforming White Zombie, at least not any time soon: rather, this album is a sequel to 1997’s ‘Hellbilly Deluxe.’

‘Jesus Frankenstein’ opens with a riff that my ears hear as a nod to Black Sabbath, followed by ANOTHER nod-to-Sabbath riff, before John 5 unleashes an epic, mournful note of doom from the deep (check it out, between 1:28-1:29 – something about that one note is just so friggin’ cool!). Finally – almost 2 minutes into the song – the slightly bluesy, totally rocking’ main riff kicks in. The syncopated riffage in the verse actually sounds a little like Dream Theater. There’s a bit of a Sabbath vibe in ‘Sick Bubblegum’ as well, or maybe ‘No More Tears’-era Ozzy. Cool! Yet at the same time, for all the ’sounds like this’ and ’sounds like that’ comparisons flung about by this reviewer, the results are unmistakably Zombie.

‘Mars Needs Women’ includes more bluesy playing from John 5 (this time on acoustic) before morphing into another stomping, Ozzy-esque rocker. Oh and ‘Virgin Witch’ also sounds like something by Sabbath, especially with the clanging church bells at the start. And yet again it still sounds like Zombie. Seriously dude, every track on this album has at least some element which makes me think “Well… I love Ozzy but his best work sure hasn’t been included on his last three albums… maybe Rob Zombie’s the heir apparent to that sound now…’ If we ever see Zombie hurling himself off quad bikes, biting the heads off stuff and living in a house overrun by a litter of pomeranians, we’ll know I’m right.

Of course, being a Rob Zombie recording there are all sorts of samples, sound effects and ear candy. It all adds to the colour and spectacle, and makes it kinda hard to treat Hellbilly Deluxe 2 as background music. It demands either your complete attention or maybe to share your attention with the highway as you blast along in your converted dune buggy.

Ok, back to the songs. I dig the tom-tom assault on ‘Werewolf, Baby’ and the slinky, slidey flair added by John 5. In fact, Mr 5 is really kicking ass with the rhythm guitars on this album. He’s known as such a phenomenal soloist that it’s kinda easy to forget the intensity of the muscular riffage he unleashes throughout his work with Zombie and with Marilyn Manson.

‘Death And Destiny Inside The Dream Factory’ reaches back to early 70s glam of the Bowie/Bolan variety – I don’t know if you could picture Rob Zombie in skintight, spangly lycra with a red rooster mullet, but you don’t really need to picture it because you can hear it here. Or at least, a Star Wars cantina bar version of it.

‘Burn’ has a killer downtuned riff that kinda sounds like Tool if they get drunk on the wine Maynard makes these days and started grooving on the dancefloor. There’s also a great 70s-style pentatonic riff section which must be loads of fun to play, followed by more John 5 slide work. I haven’t heard this much slide guitar on a metal album since… wait, I’ve never heard this much slide on a metal album. The song itself probably isn’t one of the standouts but the idea was worth exploring.

‘Cease To Exist’ has another sample-heavy intro followed by an almost shuffling groove – truly this album is space blues for the year 3000, and this track is like Pink Floyd got gothed up for Halloween and forgot to dress back down to civvies again on November 1.

‘Werewolf Women Of The SS’ – Now there’s a song that writes itself. I dig this one for its energy and overall outrageousness, even if it kinda leans on a similar chord progression to ‘Death And Destiny.’ Cool guitar solo with lots of true melody and composition.

Finally we come to ‘The Man Who Laughs’. Pretty fast, rockin’ song to end on, and it’d make a great gig opener. It’s hard to pinpoint what I dig so much about this one – I think I’m just a sucker for those symphonic strings over the top of such a straightforward metal riff. In all honesty I think a better vocal melody could have been found for the chorus – it’s kinda a letdown compared to the rest of the song – but meh, I forgive them this time because the rest of the song is so cool. Did I mention there’s a drum solo? Cos there’s a drum solo.

This is a tricky time for Rob Zombie. With his increasingly successful film career, he can’t afford to take too much time out from that in order to tend to his music career, so he has to really make each musical moment count. There are some great standout moments on this CD, and while some of the songwriting is a bit derivative and some of the tracks are verging on filler, it’s still a pretty strong effort that will hopefully keep Zombie at his current level of success so he will continue staging those huge stage shows full of robots and monsters and stuff.

Hellbilly Deluxe 2 is out now on Roadrunner.

You probably know the story of Lag by now: luthier Michel Chavarria began hand-crafting electric guitars in southern France 25 years ago, finally releasing his designs to the world at large in 2005 when he felt offshore guitar mass production had caught up with his quality standards. Korg USA has recently taken up distribution of Lag, so you’re bound to see them in the lands of a lot more players in the very near future.

YOU DON’T HAVE TO PUT ON THE RED LIGHT
The RM1000MBL sits near the top of the RM model family tree. It has lush accoutrements like genuine Dimarzio pickups, a lubricated graphite nut, and a solid bookmatched African mahogany body.

The body shape reminds me of a Les Paul Junior or Scott Ian’s Washburn signature model. It’s a rounded double cutaway affair with just enough mass to put some muscle behind your playing, but small and light enough to be your main workhorse on stage all night.

The Canadian hard rock maple set neck is mated to the body in what Lag calls an “ergonomic junction.” In truth is this is so damn ergonomic I thought it was a neck-through.

The Roxane has 22 silver-nickel medium Jim Dunlop frets, while the luxury African Ebony fretboard is inlayed with mother of pearl compressed block designs which echo the sharp edges of the cross logo motif on the headstock (which is also stamped into the back of the tuners).

The strings pass through the body through teardrop-shaped routes, and while the finishing of the teardrops may be a little scruffy, I couldn’t find anything else to fault with the guitar’s construction at all.

ENTER THE TONE ZONE
The Dimarzio Tone Zone has long been one of my favourite pickups – I have it in several axes, both 6 and 7 string – and its inclusion here is very welcome. It’s a naturally full sounding pickup, with a rich, vowel-like midrange, massive thick bass and just the right amount of treble cut. In a mahogany guitar it sounds absolutely huge. The tone seems to transform between playing chords on the low frets and solos up high, because the pickup has such a broad frequency response that it’s able to draw the best out of whatever note or phrasing you throw at it. In the Roxanne the Tone Zone wrenches pinch harmonics out with ease, and sounds chunky and defined.

The Dimarzio Norton pickup in the neck position is known as a round, flutey sounding pickup, favoured by the likes of John Petrucci of Dream Theater, and allegedly somewhat similar to the neck pickup of the famed Ernie Ball Music Man Edward Van Halen guitar. Roxane adds more flexibility by way of push-pull pots on each pickup’s volume pot, splitting each humbucker into a single coil. It especially sounded great in single coil mode with light overdrive with both pickups on.

Playability is, in a word, stunning, with a silky smooth feel that just begs you to play faster and not be shy about it.

I WON’T SHARE YOU WITH ANOTHER BOY
The Roxane lived up to my expectations, and then some. It combines lightning fast playability and world class tone, and like the other models Lag offers, you know you’re buying something just a little bit different and unique.

LINKS: LagGuitars.com.au (Australia), LagGuitars.com (USA), LagGuitars.co.uk (UK)