Australian Guitar

Peter Pik was the resident guitarist at the City Tattersalls Club for ten years from 1995, where he opened for every show. It was here that he supported artists such as Marcia Hines, James Morrison, Russell Morris, Normie Rowe, Don Burrows, Gina Jeff

Wall-of-sound production seems pretty straightforward from the outside, but it’s one of those things that’s easy to do, but difficult to do well. An amateur will just throw a bunch of loud sounds at the wall, but professionals like James Russell from

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In the last issue, I discussed the importance of timing, feel and groove, and looked at various ways to assess the project and deal with the issues at hand. In this one, I’d like to look at the equally critical ‘sister’ issues of tuning and pitching,

If you haven’t seen the Blues Brothers movies, stop what you’re doing and go watch them now. Even if you’re at work. Just go home and do it! The movie pays homage to great blues players from the ‘50s and onwards, and the guitar work you’ll witness fr

Two of the more difficult techniques in guitar soloing are right-hand tapping and string skipping. For this column, I’m going to show you how to play arpeggios licks that incorporate them both! It’s very common for arpeggios to be performed on one st

I recommend to my students that they break up their practice time into four parts. The first area of practice is technique, which is to create a muscle memory of scales, arpeggios, triads and double stops. Muscle memory is crucial if you want to play

When we guitarists get together to talk great unaccompanied solos, there are a few obvious ones. Van Halen’s “Eruption”. Led Zeppelin’s “Heartbreaker”. Extreme’s “Flight Of The Wounded Bumblebee”. But there’s a criminally overlooked one that really d

Though only two EPs deep in their tenure, Moaning Lisa have cemented themselves as a driving force in the future of Australian rock. The crunchy, punk-leaning pummels of Yee Ning Chan are searing at their quietest, fierce and forceful vocals from Cha

A weighty 13 years since he declared he wanted his band, songs and dreams back, Billy Corgan’s wishes have finally been granted: The Smashing Pumpkins (as in, the actual Smashing Pumpkins, not the bastardised rehash Corgan whipped up in ’06) have reu

Eddie Van Halen ignited a custom-guitar revolution when he landed on the scene in ‘78. Yeah, there’s his famous ‘Frankenstein’ parts guitar, which has undergone all sorts of iterations over the years, but that’s just scratching the surface. Eddie too

It’s been interesting to see Fender Musical Instrument Corp juggle its many different guitar brands. In recent years, it appears they’ve really hit the right mix: Fender makes... Well... Fenders. If you want guitar with a hot-rodded Fender feel, you

Travel guitars have become a pretty big thing of late (no pun intended). In their basic form, they’re a smaller version of more familiar guitars and, ironically, take us full circle back to an earlier form of the instrument (before dreadnoughts and 0