Mixed Bag: Bonamassa/Zep, Vai, Metheny, Gilbert

Would you take a lesson from this guy?

It’s Friday! Do you have guitar-squeezin’ in your weekend? Is it part of the plan? It should be if not, even if you have to…squeeze it in. (I wish I could find an amp that I could crank through headphones late at night that would sound like roasting EL84s or EL34s.)

Anyhow, to get your guitar-binge off on the right foot, here are tidbits from four masters of the geetar. Cool (and funny) stuff. Enjoy!

Bonamassa, Bonham, Hughes, ‘Moby Dick’

This is a clip shot at Guitar Center’s most recent Drum Off competition, at which Jason Bonham did a performance – of “Moby Dick.” With him were Joe Bonamassa and Glenn Hughes, and all three are of course part of the band tentatively named Black Country.

I was psyched to hear this clip because I wanted to hear Joe’s raw Marshall Super Lead tone, which he apparently used for the Black Country album. While his tone in this clip is a lot more raw and loose than his normal tone (very cool!), it’s not a Super Lead. Word from his folks is he rented an amp (looks to be a Marshall JCM800 maybe?), but the signal chain was simple: guitar (presumably the Bonamassa signature Les Paul) into a Tube Screamer into the amp.

A very cool performance of Jason sort of playing along with his dad.

A Good Chance to Win a $4K Vai Guitar

We just mentioned the release of Steve Vai’s Where the Other Wild Things Are CD. To promote that release, Steve is giving away a $4,000 Ibanez JEM77 Floral guitar. For a chance to win it, go to the Favored Nations Facebook page and start thinking of a question that you want to ask Steve. He’s going to answer the winner’s question on YouTube and sign the guitar to the winner on camera.

Here's the giveaway guitar (click to see it bigger).

Pretty cool. Even better is that if I’m reading that Facebook page right, looks like there are only 65 comments to that post, so the odds right now of winning the guitar are…1 in 65. Pretty sweet!

Metheny: Too Much Time On His Hands?

I’ll leave that for you to decide. Just take a gander at this vid. Only Pat Metheny could pull this off, and make it interesting!

Gilbert’s Warped Teaching

Paul Gilbert: a great guitarist, a great guy (by all accounts), a great teacher – and a great sense of humor, if you’re wired the same way. Here’s the opening clip from his “Silence Followed By A Deafening Roar” instructional DVD. Somehow I’d never seen this before.

The gear rundown is thorough and…unusual: I like where he finds his picks. Dig the Marshall Rhoads head. I’m starting to want to try one of those Ibanez Firemans (Firemen?).

Category: Joe Bonamassa, Pat Metheny, Paul Gilbert, Steve Vai