Mick Taylor Australian tour dates!
Rolling Stones legend Mick Taylor is heading to Oz in 2013 for the first time in 40 years! Taylor recently appeared live on stage with the Stones as part of their 50th anniversary celebrations, and this is going to be an amazing tour. Tickets are on sale December 4, and the dates are at the bottom of this post.
Mick Taylor
The Guitar Legend Returns
Australia 2013
Lennard promotions are proud to present for the first time in 40 years, former Bluesbreaker and Rolling Stone guitar legend Mick Taylor live in Australia in 2013.
Mick Taylor’s fluid blues and jazz infused guitar lines have featured on some of the most important recorded moments in rock history. From his early work with the legendary John Mayall’s Blues Breakers to his work with the biggest band on the planet The Rolling Stones, along with his own solo work and numerous high profile sessions Taylor is renowned for his consummate skill and impeccable taste. 40 years since he last visited Australia with the Stones in 1973 and fresh from his recent anniversary reunion shows with the legendary band, Mick Taylor is coming back with his band of musical heavy hitters to give fans a taste of the fine guitar work that has made the man a musical living legend.
From small beginnings in his native Hertfordshire; Mick found his way into the major league when he stood in for an absent Eric Clapton at a Bluesbreakers’ gig. A year later John Mayall was looking for a guitarist to replace Peter Green, at only 17 Mick joined and was soon touring and recording with Mayall’s legendary blues band.
Following Brian Jones’ departure, Mick came to the attention of the Rolling Stones as a session musician on the Let It Bleed album, although he soon became a permanent replacement playing his first live appearance in front of 250,000 people at their 1969 free concert in Hyde Park. Mick stayed with the Stones for half a decade, contributing his trademark vibrato, slide and songwriting to numerous hit albums including Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers and the influential Exile On Main Street. Having toured the world and recorded some of the key songs of the Stones’ 70s output, it surprised many people when he left to pursue a solo career and was later replaced by Ronnie Wood.
While many people associate him with the Rolling Stones; Mick has worked on soundtracks and film scores, including Nicholas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell To Earth, appeared with Mike Oldfield for performances of Tubular Bells, recorded with Gong, Jack Bruce, Little Feat, Stones associatesNicky Hopkins and Billy Preston and played a major role in the careers of many other musicians.
1979 saw Mick release his first solo material with a self‐titled album mixing rock, jazz and Latinflavoured blues musical styles. During the 80s Mick spent time working with Bob Dylan on notable albums Empire Burlesque and Infidels. He was even present in the studio when Dylan penned the song Blind Willie McTell, which is a live favourite in Mick’s repertoire.
After being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989 with the Stones and the release of the album A Stranger In This Town in 1990, Mick continued to tour heavily. He was alsoworking in the studio and playing live with Carla Olson, added his handprints to Hollywood’s RockWalk in autumn 1998 and continued to write material for A Stone’s Throw which was released in 2000.
In 2003, Mick reunited with John Mayall for his 70th birthday concert in Liverpool along with Eric Clapton. A year later, in late 2004, he joined John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers for a UK theatre tour. The 2010 re‐release of Exile on Main Street has seen Mick contribute additional guitar work to some previously unheard tracks, including the limited release single, Plundered My Soul. Now playing with a line‐up of long‐time friends and musicians, Mick has been performing around the UK, in Europe, Japan and the US, while writing and recording for his next album release.
18th April Governor Hindmarsh Hotel, Adelaide
Moshtix Phone 1300 438 849
19th April Ferntree Gully Hotel, Melbourne
Ticketmaster Phone 136 100
20th April Corner Hotel, Melbourne
Box Office Phone (03)-9427 9198
21st April Corner Hotel, Melbourne
Box Office Phone (03)-9427 9198
23rd April HiFi Bar, Brisbane
Box Office Phone 1300-843 443
24th April Coolangatta Hotel, Coolangatta
Oztix www.oztix.com.au
26th April Lizottes, Newcastle
Box Office Phone (02) 4956 2066 www.newcastle.lizottes.com.au
27th April Metro, Sydney
Ticketek Phone 132 849
Tour information
www.lennardpromotions.com.au & www.facebook.com/lennardpromotions
COOL GEAR ALERT: Ibanez RG8 budget 8-string
See, it’s stuff like this that ensures I remain an Ibanez geek even though I have guitars by a few different brands now. Ibanez has unveiled the RG8, an 8-string addition to their RG Fixed line, available in white or black. It’s a full 27″ 8-string (which comes factory tuned 1D#, 2A#, 3F#, 4C#, 5G#, 6D#, 7A#, 8F) with passive Ibanez humbuckers which will quite easily come out to make way for replacements if you wish to upgrade. That’s what I’m planning to do: I’ve been looking for an 8-string so I could do pickup reviews, but everything’s way out of my non-existent price range. Not these though!
You can read more about the RG8 here, and check out some more pics below. Continue reading
Mesa Boogie pedals!
Wow! Check this out. After decades of making killer amps and preamps (including the pedal-housed V-Twin and Bottle Rocket preamp pedals, if you wanna get technical about it), Mesa Boogie is getting into the pedal biz in a big way. They’re designed and hand-built in Petaluma, California and they’re going to be huge.
There’s the Tone Burst Boost/Overdrive…
There’s the Grid Slammer Overdrive…
There’s the Flux Drive Overdrive…
And the Throttle Box Distortion.
Click on the links to each pedal for more info and demos!
Learn Guitar!
My buddies at Andertons have put together this page which brings together various articles and links related to selecting a beginner guitar and figuring out what to actually learn on it. There are also various guitar starter packs on the page to help you get all your gear together in one spot.
Beginner sets have come a very long way since the days of my old Status Stratocaster copy with a whammy bar that snapped after six months, Marathon MX3 amp that developed a crackle within a year and a dodgy cable that broke after two weeks!
REVIEW: Led Zeppelin – Celebration Day
It’s hard to believe it’s already been five years since the surviving members of Led Zeppelin reunited (with Jason Bonham on drums) for a one-off show at London’s O2 Arena in honour of Atlantic Records exec Ahmet Ertegün. But what’s really hard to believe is that it happened at all. Robert Plant seems to have a love/hate relationship with Zeppelin, proud of the band’s achievements and even willing to revisit them in various forms with Jimmy Page from time to time (the No Quarter album, Walking Into Clarksdale, a few semi-reunion mini sets in the 80s), but never ready to fully commit to anything with the Zeppelin stamp on it. And it doesn’t look like this will be happening again, so Celebration Day is really all you’re likely to get in terms of new music made by Led Zeppelin.
So what have we got here? A whopping sixteen tracks of Zeppelin classics rendered by three of the four guys who made it happen (and a goodly chunk of DNA from the remainder), in CD and DVD/Blu-Ray form. Kicking off with Good Times, Bad Times, Plant gives a kind of wry wink to the opening couplet: “In the days of my youth, I was told what it means to be a man. Now I’ve reached that age I try to do all those things the best I can.” Plant’s starts off a little tentative here, but it doesn’t take him long to find his groove. Page’s guitar is characteristically raw and un-finessed, but that’s part of what makes him so freaking cool. He never needed to stand still and strum away in the background back in the day, and he’s not going to start now. A blisteringly loose but authoritative solo really kicks Good Times, Bad Times into overdrive and the energy level is cranked.
Paul Gilbert: “Enemies (In Jail)”
From Paul’s new album Vibrato
Black Friday!
Here are some Black Friday deals for ya. Important dates are highlighted. If you buy anything after clicking on these links I’ll get a small commission, which helps to pay for site hosting, gear to review, and maybe a beer every now and then.
If you’re viewing this on the main page of the site and you’re not seeing anything, a Wordpress plug-in might be acting up so click here.
Check out all of Guitar Center’s Black Friday Doorbusters!
Take 10% Off a single item $99 or more! Use Coupon Code: NOV10
Shop with Guitar Center for 13% off a single item of $49 or more! Use code SNOW13 at checkout!
New song: “Talk Amongst Yourselves”
Hey! I’ve just popped a new song up on Bandcamp. It started life as a drum beat (you can hear a bit of it in the second half of the solo section) and I decided to chuck a couple of guitars on to see what it sounded like in context. Before I knew it a whole song had tumbled out, lyrics and all. But my singing sucks, so I decided to play the vocal melody on guitar instead. The lyrics are about learning, communicating, reinforcing your opinions with research and discussion, junk like that.
Check it out!
The gear is just a Gibson Les Paul Traditional (thanks, Sky Music!) with Seymour Duncan Seth Lover humbuckers into a Marshall DSL50 mic’d with a Shure SM57. No pedals or anything except for a little wah in a pair of distantly-mixed background guitars.
COOL VIDEO ALERT: Billy Corgan Rig Rundown
Check out Premier Guitar’s Rig Rundown with Billy Corgan – love the stuff about his amp modules and his revelation that he has a Randy Rhoads Marshall. I’m jealous – I love that amp! There’s more info in this article, but here’s the video.
REVIEW: AmpKit Mac
Agile Partners’ AmpKit for iOS won me over. We had a rocky start due to a less-than-optimal guitar/iOS interface I bought that didn’t quite let AmpKit do its thing. But once I upgraded to GuitarJack 2 by Sonoma Wire Works, I was utterly sold, and I realised that AmpKit is so very input dependent that of course it sounds better with a higher quality interface. And I realised that AmpKit does what no other iOS amp sim seems to do, giving you a completely and utterly usable tone right out of the box that you can simply drop into a recording and know it’ll sound great. I’ve used AmpKit on a few recordings, plugging it into my Mbox, but I always thought it’d be great to have AmpKit accessible from within my Mac itself.
And now you can get exactly that! AmpKit Mac is custom-built for OS X 10.7 Lion and 10.8 Mountain Lion, taking advantage new capabilities in OS X. I’ve been playing around with it for a few days and the very first thing that struck me was how perfectly suited the AmpKit interface is for the Mac. Just as it made clever use of the iPad screen to present everything in an easy-to-access way, AmpKit for Mac lays out the virtual guitar rigs logically and usefully. There’s a multi-panel user interface with a main “Stack View” and separate floating panels for Gear, Backing Tracks, Recording, and Metronome. It helps that certain iOS-influenced features are ported over too, including Multi-Touch gestures, Full Screen mode, Sharing via email or AirDrop, and gesture-enabled Quick Look. Continue reading
Aristocrats DVD, plus Guthrie talks Charvel
The Aristocrats – Bryan Beller, Guthrie Govan and Marco Minnemann – are preparing to release their very first live CD and DVD, BOING, We’ll Do It Live!, just in time to awesomize the holidaysfor musicians everywhere. And get this: the 5.1 surround audio mix was done by Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree!
I was lucky enough to catch the Aristocrats’ very first gig back before they even had a name, and I can’t wait to crank the new DVD up to neighbour-enraging levels at home. There’s more info about the DVD below, but before we get to that, Guthrie has shared a few words on the custom Charvel he’s been seen playing recently.
He says:
“Hello! Guthrie here, with a somewhat boring (but apparently necessary!) update… and a pretty picture ;-)
Well… the guitar I’ve been using lately has apparently caused something of a stir in certain sectors of the online community, so I figured it might be helpful if I explained what’s actually going on. Continue reading
VIDEO: Joe Matera – ‘Fallen Angel’
Check out Joe Matera’s video for his song ‘Fallen Angel’ from his album Creature Of Habit. The video was shot on location at Ruine Schaunburg, Austria and in Linz, Austria while Joe was there on tour. Buy the album from Joe’s site.
Hi! I'm Peter Hodgson. I write for Gibson.com, Australian Guitar, Australian Musician, Mixdown Magazine (including my instructional column, 'Unleash Your Inner Rock God,' which has been running since 2007), Blunt, Beat (including their weekly hard rock/metal column Crunch) and The Brag. And I'm Assistant Social Coordinator with Seymour Duncan.
I've been playing guitar since I was 8 years old, and I've been writing for magazines since I was 18. I've also worked as a guitar teacher (up to 50 students a week), a setup tech, a newspaper editor, and I've also dabbled in radio a little bit. I live in Melbourne, Australia, and my hobbies include drinking way too much coffee, and eating way too much Mexican food.
You can check out my guitar playing at Bandcamp or on YouTube, and feel free to email me at iheartguitarblog@gmail.com