IT’S WIDELY KNOWN that Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen and Walter Becker were tough taskmasters when it came to the studio, particularly in terms of their session guitarists. The most famous example of thei

A CHIEF CONSIDERATION when playing with a slide is the tuning. Many of our favorite slide players — Elmore James, Duane Allman, Johnny Winter, Derek Trucks — play slide almost exclusively in an open t

CRAFTING AN APPEALING guitar solo for a song is always a creative challenge. There are many different approaches one can take: Do I follow the chord changes so that the notes line up perfectly with th

AS I STATED last month, my favorite band line-up is the guitar-bass-drums power trio. With the guitar being the primary chordal and melodic instrument in the ensemble, there are challenges inherent in

WHEN LENNY KRAVITZ released Circus, his fourth album, in 1995, he was coming off the back of the career-defining, global success of 1993’s Are You Gonna Go My Way. That album — and the single of the s

IF YOU SPEND just 10 minutes listening to the music of the whacked-out, Los Angeles-based psych-punk rockers Frankie and the Witch Fingers, you’ll undoubtedly think, “How on earth does that guitarist