Guitar Player

I think there's some truth to that.

But I also find sometimes if you're listening to something and you just close your eyes and just don't look at anything and just listen, my mind goes back to this Michael Bloomfield record that he did for Guitar Player that you can get on CD.

We've talked about it before, I think maybe on the show, but He demonstrates, I don't know, 12 or 14 different guitars and guitar styles.

And he tells you what he's playing through.

So they'll charge, I believe they'll charge something at the door for the band.

Yeah.

I just wanted, on this note though, secondly, I was thinking, when did we see the rise of the sort of, you know, the single guitar player with a looper? Is that a reaction of the...

Well, yeah, that's right.

And in November, I was at Guitar Center and I saw a flyer and it said the Les Paul Tribute Contest.

And it said, put on by Musicians Institute, Guitar Player Magazine, Daddario Strings, Gibson Guitars, presents the Les Paul Tribute Contest.

The winner gets a featuring Guitar Player Magazine, a year's supply of Daddario Strings, a brand new gold top, and blah, blah, blah.

So there was an email where you could send your submission tape.

I didn't have a submission tape, man.

One of the judges was like, he like caught it or something, got pulled up, won the contest, dude.

Sick, sick, sick, sick, sick.

Now I got a brand new Les Paul gold top, all this stuff, right? A featuring guitar player magazine.

The Stauffer guitars, which were where C.F. Martin worked, had that same arrangement.

And there's a great guitar player in the Czech Republic, Pavel Steidl, who plays Paganini and Legnani and all the Northern European kind of progressive, the progenitors of what we call classical guitar.

But it was really in its own era, it was just fingerstyle guitar.

Yeah.

Back in those days, sheet music was the merch.

It was.

And you read about Giuliani, Mauro Giuliani, the great Italian guitar player, ordering sheet music from his publisher to take on the road with

him.

Mersereau is known for pushing the boundaries of stringed instruments.

He's a stellar guitar player who brings deep improvisation into these wild soundscapes that feel both modern and nostalgic.

He's also done some incredibly high-profile studio work alongside some true icons.

Check out his discography.

Like, 'cause pretty quickly, you, you kinda just see, like, oh, there's so many musicians on here.

Mm-hmm.

And then it was like, oh, Steve Vai, Mike Keneally, you know, these guitar players, like, doing this, like, absolutely wild stuff.

So I actually found him through there, and also kind of at the same time of, like, getting into, like, Van Halen or, like, hearing Eruption for the first time when I was, like, I guess probably, like, 12 or 13, and just being like, "I, I never heard a guitar sound like that."

I don't know if you remember these, like in the back of...

I think it was Guitar Player Magazine.

There was an ad for Chiquita guitars.

Do you remember those? The little pointy guitars.

Was published in many magazines around the world.

I wrote a lot for Guitar Player Magazine and Guitar World.

Wrote a few things for Rolling Stone, and back in the day I did some stuff for Cream and Circus.

I wrote for a lot of European magazines, Mojo and Classic Rock, Total Guitar, Guitarist.

I wrote for a Japanese magazine called Player, which was the Japanese equivalent of Guitar Player magazine.

So if you were a guitar nerd, you were going to pick up a copy of Player to find out what kind of strings Gary Moore was using, that type of thing.

I actually wrote for that magazine for 40 years.

There were no bad songs, at least for my little 66, 13-year-old mind.

I think that was something I noticed.

The posters in Guitar Player magazine, his stood out because I was like, his guitar is way different.

Everyone else.

they got these Les Pauls and these Strats, or at that time, these Ibanez, whatever.

Yeah.

No, I like, I love that whole zone.

I read a St. Vincent article recently, or like she was quoted in Guitar Player Magazine, basically saying like, she's like, this one guitar solo is my favorite solo.

If I go to see a band, I don't want to hear somebody's interpretation of it.

And You know, and immediately I was like, oh, this Seymour Duncan guy is cool.

And then I remember seeing an ad in Guitar Player Magazine in the 1980s where it was kind of like talking about, you know, one of the things that helped birth Seymour Duncan pickups.

And it was that Seymour lent his Telecaster to a friend, and they got the high E string caught underneath the bridge pickup.

I guess I should be holding a Tele if I'm going to.