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WHEN BOYHOOD MATES NICKNAMED DAVE EVANS “THE EDGE,” IT WAS a good-natured jibe at his angular facial features. Be it prescience or serendipitous coincidence, the moniker has proved the perfect précis for the legendary U2 guitarist’s ...

If You Build It, They Will Come. That's What Uber-Musician Todd Rundgren is counting on. “I figured if I made an album of arena-rock songs, maybe we’d end up playing them in arenas,” he told audiences during our summer ’08 tour, ...

“Flames used to shoot out of my guitar,” says Brad Gillis. Yes, he’s speaking literally. “I found a finger-mounted flash pot at this magic shop in Seattle back in the ’80s, and I attached it to the back of my headstock. At Night Ranger ...

In the late 1960s, rock began to evolve from short pop songs best suited to the lo-fi bandwidth of AM radio and cheesy sounding 45s to higher-fidelity, stereo-ready FM, long-playing albums (a.k.a. LP’s), and increasingly powerful home ...

When learning the keyboard parts for a cover gig, once in a while you come across a certain lick or phrase that is just nasty. Take, for instance, the Earth, Wind & Fire funk classic, “Getaway.” Nailing the groove is a challenge ...

Chord dictionaries are helpful, but they’re certainly no miracle cure for stale voicings and tired chords. If you want to actually learn how to use new grips, you may need a deeper book, such as Mel Bay’s new expanded edition of ...

“Chances are,” wrote the late, great Howard Roberts in the September ’79 GP, “you’ve spent much more time running through scales than practicing interval skips, and, consequently, stepwise lines on adjacent strings predominate ...

“Wild Thing,” “Twist and Shout,” and “Louie Louie,” are among hundreds of famous songs that have employed the workhorse chord progression known as the I-IV-V. In this context, each Roman numeral conveys a chord’s relationship with a ...

It’s a testament to the monumental influence of “Purple Haze” and other landmark Jimi Hendrix tunes that rock guitarists are more likely to refer to the grip in the grid to the right as the “Hendrix chord” than by its proper name, E7#9. ...

As you can see in Ex. 1, the notes A, C, and E—the chord tones that spell an Am triad—can be arranged in myriad ways. One challenge guitarists face is that there are typically several ways to finger the same chord or riff. For instance, ...