Stories related to: guitar

There are those tunes driven by the rhythm section, but nothing lights a fire in the blood quite like the power of the perfect guitar riff. Thus, Rolling Stone suggests its favorite guitar anthems, hitting all stops between BB King and King Crimson. The top five: Johnny B. Goode : Chuck Berry's "true story about how playing music on a guitar can change your life forever." Purple Haze : How Jimi Hendrix "opened a new age of expression." More »

Eddie Van Halen took time out from touring to ruminate on the band and his guitar virtuosity with Rolling Stone . Turns out, the Van Halen brothers actually started out on opposite instruments: “I bought myself a drum kit, and my mom convinced my brother Alex to take flamenco-guitar lessons. I had a paper route to pay for the drum kit.” More »

Grunge is passé, but the market for its collectibles isn’t, reports Portfolio . Nostalgia plays a big role in determining what's hot, and prices on items of baby boomer vintage, even from the likes of the Fab Four, are starting to drop. Meanwhile, the demand for Gen X artifacts—skateboards, Star Wars figurines, old video games—is on the rise.  More »

One less thing is standing between you and a perfect jam session: tuning your electric guitar. A newly launched battery-powered compact device that mounts on the instrument's body is accurate to within 2% of a note, reports the Seattle Post-Intelligencer . "It's just a dream, being able to pick up the guitar and see whether it's in tune or tune it quickly," says a beta user. More »

Acclaimed guitarist Jeff Healey died of cancer at 41 yesterday after battling the disease throughout his life, the Globe and Mail reports. Healey, who lost his eyesight as a child to retinoblastoma, a rare form of cancer, sold more than a million albums in the US, racking up hits such as “Angel Eyes,” “See the Light,” and a cover of the Beatles' "While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” More »

In order to beat the video game "Guitar Hero III," you have to outplay a virtual version of legendary guitarist Slash. If you can't quite cut it, don't feel so bad—the real Slash can't, either. "I just actually played it for the first time last night," the former Guns 'N' Roses guitarist tells the Seattle Times . "I'm terrible." More »

Gibson's new guitar can't quite play itself, but it offers musicians the next best thing—it tunes itself. The legendary guitar maker is introducing a robotic tuner on a high-end version of its classic Les Paul instrument. Start strumming, and the device tunes to one of six presets in 10 seconds. “It's a cool idea," says one musician. "Nobody likes tuning." More »

Six Organs of Admittance’s latest guitar-based record, Shelter From the Ash, is another masterpiece, applying “polish” to trademark “drones, more atomized sounds (and) acoustic finger-picking,” writes Matthew Wuethrich of Dusted. It’s a triumphant gamble to clean up the band's space-age sounds—which have typically succeeded by virtue of their “unfinished quality”—and the band’s “most cohesive record yet.” More »

Queen guitarist Brian May dropped his academic pursuits to tour the globe as a young rock star, but after 36 years he has finally handed in his PhD thesis, which he began researching in 1972. The 60-year-old aspiring astrophysicist delivered a 48,000-word study on "zodiacal dust clouds" to Imperial College in London today, the BBC reports. More »