Performance notes

MUSIC FANS KNEW Ozzy Osbourne as the Prince of Darkness or maybe even the Messiah of Metal, but among the hard-rock guitar community, he’ll always be remembered as the Godfather of Heavy Guitar. Thank

LAST MONTH, I talked about how I devised the primary riffs in the title track to my 2023 album Hard Wired, which is played in drop D tuning (low to high: D, A, D, G, B, E). I’d now like to share some

ON JUNE 23, the guitar world lost a true legend — Mick Ralphs of Bad Company and Mott the Hoople fame. He was 81. Besides being an amazing songwriter, Ralphs was a criminally underrated blues/rock gui

The grand parade of lifeless packaging? Far from it, as this much-delayed blockbuster reissue of one of prog’s most fascinating and frustrating albums finally proves.

WHEN I AM composing and arranging music, I like to think as an orchestrator. As the guitarist, I try to represent just about everything that’s in the arrangement — the drum syncopations, horn parts, k

“OOH-WAH-AH-AH-AH-AH!” SHOUTED DISTURBED singer David Draiman in the intro of his band’s signature tune, “Down with the Sickness,” back in 2000. Weird though it sounded at the time, millennial headban