To guitar players of a certain generation, it may be hard to accept the following solos as ‘overlooked.’ After all, these songs were mostly hits by superstar acts—it’s difficult to imagine them not having a serious impact on anyone playing guitar back when the songs were new. But for some reason, in the years that followed, these solos would rarely come up in conversations amongst aspiring guitarists.

There is so much great new gear at the show this year that it is difficult to choose favorites, but here is a tiny sampling of pedals that caught my ear:

I arrived at the show later than expected, as my plane was delayed leaving San Francisco due to Air Force 2 and the vice president. We sat on the runway for 45 minutes as Mr. Biden's 21-car motorcade played through.

My ears are still ringing from four days of NAMM, but wow, what a gear adventure it was this year! I checked out a lot of guitars, amps, effects, and accessories, and here are some things that stood out to me

 

AXL USA Bulldog axlguitars.com/al1090.html

Ampeg Reverberocket ampeg.com

Bedell LE LEOH-54-2   bedellguitars.com

Boss GT-100 rolandconnect.com

Budda Amp Baby Budda budda.com

Blue Microphones Mikey external mic for iPhone/Pad/Touch bluemic.com

Dunlop Joe Bonamassa Signature Crybabyjimdunlop.com

Fender Select Series guitars fender.com

Fishman Triple Play Wireless Guitar Controller fishman.com

Fender Pawnshop Series Excelsior and Greta amplifiers fender.com

Peavey AT-200 Self Tuning Guitar peavey.com

Line 6 StageSource Lt3 speaker and StageScape M20d mixer line6.com

PRS P22 Piezo Guitar prsguitars.com

Universal Audio Apollo High Resolution Interface uaudio.com

Vox...

Art Thompson and Michael Molenda are on their way to the 2012 Winter NAMM show, to be followed by Matt Blackett and Barry Cleveland on Thursday. Stay tuned for GP's coverage of all of the action from the show floor and beyond.

A Very Happy New Year to one and all!

With the plethora of new gear making its way to the marketplace, I felt it appropriate to share my personal thoughts/feelings about some of the tools I've come across that have made noticeable impressions on me.

Have you ever thought about how great it would be to spend a few years getting your chops together at Berklee College of Music, only to realize that for logistical, time, or financial reasons it wasn’t likely to happen?

Well, while getting a full-on education at the school’s Boston campus may be out of your reach for whatever reason, you might be able to at least partially satisfy your education cravings by taking advantage of Berklee’s extensive offering of online courses, which may be taken individually or as part of a degree program.

I remember times when I was younger and used to practice many, many hours a day (I wish I had the time to still do that now). I would feel like I can really play and then go and do a gig and none of what I practiced came out, or, even worse, I would feel I played very badly and wouldn’t understand how it is that after all those hours of hard work I still sucked. Well, here’s my theory:

The song shuffle function in iTunes is one of the coolest features of the application because I end up listening to a lot of songs that I normally wouldn’t seek out in a listening session.  A few nights ago, I was traveling home from a gig and several different songs came up in my iTunes that sparked an excursion into the jungle of the last couple decades of shredding, gained up riffage, and metal.

 

Metal has become such a broad term and the tracks discussed below certainly run the spectrum of metal.  A lot of bands that used to be considered “metal” have been reclassified as rock by a lot of modern listeners.  I think this is largely due to how the genre has progressively become heavier and heavier as the decades have rolled over.  Certain characteristics within the music and time periods have created sub-genres of metal, (like glam-metal, grindcore, metalcore, Nu metal, speed metal, thrash metal, death metal, mathcore, etc.) which is great for classifying different bands more accurately.  All of...

I had the very good fortune to receive reissues of the entire Pink Floyd catalog, including"Experience" editions of Wish You Were Here and The Dark Side of the Moon (thought, alas, not the big "Immersion" box sets).