Rebels with a Wah: Five Guitar Anti-Heroes

With the success of video games like Guitar Hero and high-profile memoirs from legends like Slash, the term "guitar hero" is growing increasingly ubiquitous in mainstream culture. While we readily embrace players who can actually, well, play, here we're turning the focus onto the great guitar anti-heroes. In other words, "Paradise City" is classic, but if you haven't played air guitar along to Dinosaur Jr's "Freak Scene," you're missing out on a whole feedback-drenched world of guitar grandeur.

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Recording Guitars: Miking Acoustics, Part 1

Welcome back to Gibson's quick-hit column on techniques for recording guitars. This time let's discuss some basics for recording acoustic guitars, offering a few pointers that are largely very simple but can help you achieve dramatically improved results in many home studios. This is another two-parter that will investigate some more complex acoustic miking techniques next time out.

The first installment of this series discussed the three main types of microphones used for recording electric guitars—dynamics, condensers, and ribbons—and these are all used for recording acoustics, too. Condensers have traditionally been the most popular mics to capture acoustic guitars because of their sensitivity and broad frequency range, which usually includes more prominent and "shimmery" highs than the other two types, something many artists like to hear in their acoustic sound.

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Gibson Tone Tips: Keep Your Tubes Happy

Back in the late 1960s certain factions in the amplifier industry went to great pains to introduce radical, new solid-state guitar amps and to promote them, partly at least, on the premise that they were "sturdier than fragile tube amps." Tubes can be fragile if you don't treat them right, certainly, but look after your tubes and the amp they are in and both should reward you with toneful and trouble-free service. In this installment of Tone Tips, let's look at some easy ways to keep our tubes happy.

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Band Branding 101: The Logo

Nike and Apple understand the importance of an elegant and simple visual icon to represent their company and products, and so do many musical outfits. Some band logos—like the Rolling Stones' famous lips and tongue graphic—have gone on to become pop culture icons in their own right, while other musicians' hallmarks have been used more sparingly. Test your Band Logo IQ by matching the musicians with the designs they've chosen to represent them. Answers and logo details follow.


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Born to Cry: The Deep, Unlikely Blues of the Great Dion DiMucci

In some ways Dion DiMucci's career has come full circle. Few knew, but back when the legendary singer was scoring hits like "Teenager in Love" and "The Wanderer" in the late '50s and early '60s, he was also nurturing a secret love of country blues. In fact, upon first hearing the music of Robert Johnson, in 1959, Dion says he "recognized intuitively that these blues guys were backroad poet geniuses."

Flash forward nearly four decades, and the rock and roll pioneer has himself fully embraced roots music traditions. First, in 2006, he released a stripped-to-the-bones country blues album titled Bronx in Blue. Accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, Dion brought empathy to classics by the likes of Willie Dixon, Lightnin' Hopkins, and yes, Robert Johnson. He also tossed in a couple of worthy blues originals.


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Switchfoot Frontman Jon Foreman Indulges His Soft Side (Free MP3!)

Though Switchfoot frontman Jon Foreman's lyrical propensities have long angled toward the pensive, it's still a little surprising to hear just how completely the arena rocker indulges his softer side on the new Fall and Winter EPs, the first two of his intended set of four seasonally themed projects. As far as rock voices go, Foreman's has always been a tender one, and it served him well as he conceived this collection of acoustic-led material.

Foreman's Switchfoot bandmates urged him, he said, to put to tape the ideas deemed too intimate for the band. The two six-song EPs were recorded quickly and simply, the writing of some new songs completed as they were being recorded. The quick-and-dirty recording process is nearly imperceptible; instead there's a clean, well-shaped simplicity in both discs' production. Also there is the gripping honesty and a continuation of the stylistic adventurousness Switchfoot showed on their last disc, Oh! Gravity.

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Against Me! Wonder Why So Many People Are Against Them

By all accounts, 2007 was pretty kind to Gainesville, Florida punk act Against Me!, and despite some naysayers, the coming year's not looking any worse.

After spending the past decade pounding out the beats in sweaty basements and DIY venues, Against Me!'s major-label debut, New Wave, was heralded as the best album of the year by Spin. Touring relentlessly behind the album, they converted an influx of new fans by sharing the bill with a diverse roster of bands ranging from Fake Problems and Mastodon to Green Day and Foo Fighters.

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Everything Hurts. Even My Hair: Pro Skater Tommy Guerrero Gets His Bearing as a Musician (Free MP3s!)

Time is not kind to professional skaters. For every Tony Hawk, there are countless washed-out ramp stars who are either in jail, hooked on crack, or begging for spare change at Fisherman's Wharf. As far as occupational hazards go, it's right up there with dentistry and truck driving. San Francisco native Tommy Guerrero not only survived a lengthy career in skateboarding—the Police Academy movies made his Santa Cruz crew the Bones Brigade world famous in the '80s—but at 42 he has lasted in the business well past the average expiration date.

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The Essential Doors Albums

Hard to imagine, but had he not died in that bathtub in Paris in 1971, Jim Morrison would be turning 65 this summer. In the years since the singer's untimely demise, interest in the Doors has waned at times, but invariably something comes along (a movie, a book) that kickstarts renewed fascination with the band. During their five-year reign as America's premiere rock group, Ray Manzarek, Robbie Krieger, John Densmore, and Morrison released a series of albums that both embodied and transcended the turbulent spirit of the late '60s. Working with a stylistic palette that ranged from avant-garde theater to primitive electric blues, the band framed Morrison's Dionysian attempts to "break on through" in music that was perfectly suited to the task at hand. The group's essential albums—as described below—testify to the timeless nature of their songs.

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