Gates, Synyster
10 GLENN TIPTON & KK DOWNING
The Judas Priest members on their pioneering twin-guitar partnership
Glenn Tipton: “We’ve got very different styles and quite different sounds, really, but that’s what helps to create the band’s guitar character. I think if you both have the same sound, one would cancel out the other. If you’ve both got the same style it’s useful when you come to do fast harmonies together, but the fact that we’ve got different styles that work together creates a very strong character. We’re very lucky in that sense.”
KK Downing: “To have all these different combinations of things you could do, like trade off solos, why should one guitar player do all the solos? Glenn might do the solo in the middle of the song but then I might do the solo on the outro. Of course, [when] you’ve got two different players with different techniques and sounds, it adds a massive dimension to a band.
If I go to see a band like Slayer, it’s energising when you see two players.
09 SYNYSTER GATES
The Avenged Sevenfold wizard on scales...
“M y dad always said you can create your own weather. You can create your own root notes and superimpose more progressions over them to get this major/minor tonality with layers of key changes. I love John Williams, Mr Bungle, Danny Elfman, Igor Stravinsky, Maurice Ravel, classical cats and then jazz guys like Allan Holdsworth. Obviously you can’t always be crazy, but it’s about tension and resolution. When you decipher what’s happening, there’s whole tone and augmented shit all over the place. I got into a lot of that stuff on the records. You need to have some theory and understand what the fuck you’re doing. Invent your own scales if you want. If it’s something you’ve never heard before, all the better. It will always lead to something.”