These videos and audio files are bonus content related to the October 2014 issue of Guitar World. For the full range of interviews, features, tabs and more, pick up the new issue on newsstands now or at the Guitar World Online Store:
http://guitarworld.myshopify.com/collections/guitar-world/products/guitar-world-october-14-stevie-ray-vaughan
Hey, kids, I’m back! Did you miss me? Don’t answer that. Here I am, back in the glorious Guitar World studios in Bakersfield, California.
Why am I back? Uh…to teach you how to rock, that’s why! I’m also here to talk about the brand-new Steel Panther album, All You Can Eat, which you are no doubt listening to right now! I came back just so that I could teach you how to play some of the incredible riffs on our new record, and I’d like to start with the song “If I Was the King.”
This song is pretty basic rock and roll in that just about everything in it is based on either the minor pentatonic scale or the blues scale—the biggest scales in rock, right? These scales come in handy.
Don’t just practice the Phrygian and Mixolydian modes—you should be basing everything on the blues and minor pentatonic scales. You might not listen to B.B. King very much, but everything he played is the foundation for all that Testament and Megadeth stuff you listen to, and it’s the foundation of Steel Panther’s music too.