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

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

IN A 1992 Guitar World feature that celebrated the release of Spinal Tap’s reunion album, Break Like the Wind, it was reported that lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel had been, at some point during the band’