14th-Century Freakout!

Codex Chantilly: the electrifying page-turner that blew the lid off the perverse musical excesses of the late Middle Ages!

NOTE: I am a known perpetrator of musical hoaxes, but this isn’t one of them. This bizarre composition really is over 600 years old.

As Marsellus Wallace once quipped: “I’m’a get medieval on your […]

Meet the REAL Spiders from Mars!
Bartók on Electric Guitar

Bartók: Smarter than math-rock — and way more violent.

My Bowie fandom is second to none. Yet I’ve always felt a vague sense of disappointment that the Spiders from Mars didn’t really sound much like spiders from Mars.

On the other hand, the fourth movement from Béla Bartók‘s Fourth String Quartet really does […]

The Bass VI Boss

Dang — I wish I had a white turtleneck and a Mosrite electric resophonic!

After some of the long-running contests around here, it was nice having a quickie for a change. San Diego-based steel guitarist Doug Meyer was the first of several readers to correctly identify the four iconic Bass VI riffs in […]

In Search of Ancient Strings

PLUS: New Contest! Name the Classic 6-String Bass Riffs and Win a Seymour Duncan Pickup Booster Pedal!

"We both love candlelight, long walks on the beach, and really expensive old-school strings."

NOTE: The contest is at the bottom of this post. You can skip ahead if you don’t care about rare and expensive […]