Finneas O’Connell, the songwriter and producer who’s probably still best known for being Billie Eilish’s brother and collaborator, has named his five favourite guitarists, and he’s made some interesting choices.

Talking to Consequence, he picked out five very melodic players, three of whom have instantly recognisable styles.

First of all there’s Nile Rodgers, who Finneas describes as “a super important” guitarist. “This is demonstrating my age, or lack of age, but I was really introduced to Nile Rodgers by way of Daft Punk when the Random Access Memories album came out, and then retroactively learned that he was a genius musician and a genius producer also. But what a guitarist.”

Then there’s George Harrison: “He provided such unbelievable, beautiful guitar work, especially in a band with Paul and John, who could be the other two great guitar players on this list."

They're not, though, as Finneas also includes Red Hot Chili Peppers' John Frusciante: “He has written such deeply musical, memorable parts on the guitar," he says.

He also names two female players. Annie Clark aka St Vincent is “writing the hookiest, most ferocious parts,” he says, and then there's Leslie Feist, a singer-songwriter who has never really received many props for her guitar work.

“She’s really a guitar hero of mine,” says Finneas. “She’s such an emotive player, I kind of can’t believe how complicated the parts she’s playing are all while she’s singing. She’s so cool and I’ve always been really impressed by her.”

Maybe he can relate. Like her, Finneas is a somewhat underrated guitarist, though there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary, of his clean, understated style on both his sister’s and his own albums.

Whatever, he’s certainly humble about it: “I don’t think of myself, nor does anyone else think of me, as a particularly extraordinary guitar player,” he told Consequence.

The Fender Custom Shop has teamed up with John Frusciante to create a stunning replica of the Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist’s battle-scarred and much loved 1962 Stratocaster, recreating every “ding and dent” of the original on its 3-Color Sunburst finish.

Designed and put together by Master Builder Paul Weller, this limited edition signature guitar is the Custom Shop showing off, honouring one of Fender’s most high-profile Strat icons on the model’s 70th anniversary.

There are several headline items here, not least that finish. No matter where you stand on the business of relic’d guitars, the job that has been done on this one is uncanny; it would be fascinating to see if Frusciante or his bandmates could tell the difference. Weller says a “ton of work” went into this high-end replica.

“Frusciantes’ Strat is right up there with the most iconic Fenders of all time,” he says. “Being able to work on his first-ever signature model was a true privilege. Recreating this instrument’s many beautiful imperfections was no easy feat, but behind every ding and dent is a story and it’s our job to make sure that this guitar’s narrative is told in full, stunning detail.”

The Strat features a two-piece alder body that will grab all the focus when it comes to the pictures but we would bet good money that it will be the neck that will live long in any guitarist’s mind who is lucky enough to play this. Setting aside Frusciante’s wear and tear, this is first and foremost a 2024 replica of a 1962 Strat, which in many Strat fancier’s opinion was the model’s golden year.

As such, the neck has fashioned from rift-sawn maple and shaped into an early ‘60s style Oval “C” shape. This is topped with a 7.25” radius slab-style fingerboard of AAA rosewood fingerboard, inlaid with white dots and featuring 21 narrow-tall frets. Waller says it is a delight.

“The whole team is tremendously proud of how this thing plays,” he says. “The neck has that singular worn in quality that is usually only attainable with a pre-owned vintage guitar and the Abby hand-wound pickups really speak to Frusciante’s expressive, crystalline tone.”

The electric guitar pickups Waller speaks of are a ‘60s Strat single-coil set that has been hand-wound by the “Queen of Tone” Abigail Ybarra, who first started working at Fender in 1956. According to this 2017 interview with She Shreds, Ybarra retired in 2013. It’s hard to see how you could get a more vintage-accurate ‘60s pickup than getting the guru who made them the first time around to make them.

This trio of single-coils is wired to a five-way switch – so it’s not exactly just as a ’62 Strat would be configured – and there is also an Ilitch Electronics hum-cancelling system in the circuit so that you can go bananas with your pedalboard without the background noise.

Elsewhere, there are vintage-style tuners and synchronized tremolo, a bone nut, a wing string tree with metal spacer. Inside the guitar case you will find a COA. The Fender Custom Shop Masterbuilt John Frusciante Stratocaster is priced $20,000.

Hmm... We might just have to wait and see if Fender release a Mexican-built version like they did with Mike McCready’s Strat. For more details, head over to the Fender Custom Shop.

Brendan O'Brien's CV as a producer, engineer and mixer reads as a who's-who of rock in the last 30 years. He's a crucial figure in the discographies of Pearl Jam, Bruce Springsteen, Stone Temple Pilots and Red Hot Chili Peppers especially, and engineered the latter's masterpiece, Blood Sugar Sex Magik. Until now he's rarely spoken about any of his work. But Rick Beato has put that right. 

In a rare in-depth three-hour interview with the YouTuber, O'Brien dug into his remarkable history working with artists in studios around the US. And we got some revelations; including what is really going on in the iconic John Frusciante intro for RHCP's Under The Bridge. 

Rick Rubin is credited as the producer of the 1991 album, and requested O'Brien as engineer for the sessions with Frusciante, Anthony Kiedis, Flea and Chad Smith.  "This is the way I've always worked," explains O'Brien of his role. "When you're in a studio making records, and things are different in different situations, but when you're a producer with an engineer, in my mind the engineer kind of runs the sessions. They handle the assistants, they handle the organisation and everything… I've got to deal with the artist, and sometimes be the dream crusher – that's part of your job sometimes."

O'Brien had worked on the Black Crowes' Shake Your Money Maker but wasn't yet a big name in engineer circles when he walked into The Mansion in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles that was formerly rented by Harry Houdini (and is now owned by Rubin). In fact, Rubin had neglected to even introduce O'Brien to the Chili Peppers beforehand.

As a results, in addition to the undertaking of bringing a working studio setup into a house, there were personal challenges to overcome. 

"It started off a little nervous because Rick was not always great at introducing people," O'Brien remembers. "I literally showed up on the first day and [they're asking], 'Where's Rick?' – 'He'll be here when it's ready, we've got to get this all working first.'

"An intro would have been nice. So they kind of hated me right away – not Flea and Chad, but John and Anthony didn't like me right away. I won them over soon, but it took a minute."

Things soon turned around, and the sessions ended up being "fun". They worked with the layout of the house; cabs were mic'd downstairs with amps upstairs, but when it came to adding an intro onto Under The Bridge after it had been recorded, Frusiante's tone was different enough that it had players wondering for years. It turns out it was an acoustic guitar compression setup, but for the guitarist's 1966 Jaguar.

 "I think his rig was maybe a 57 and maybe a mic a little further away," O'Brien says of the setup for most of the Blood Sugar sessions. "It wasn't anything complicated. I would tell anybody that great guitar tones are the player. You can have a great rig and everything miked up a special way… if the guitar player's got no tone, it's not going to sound very good. 

"You can just throw a 57 or any kind of mic that works in front of a good amp, with a good player and a little EQ – it's going to sound great."

It became clear to O'Brien early on that he was dealing with a gifted guitarist with John Frusciante, but the Under The Bridge intro required a different setup. 

"We'd done the song already, that intro was done later," explains O'Brien. "And there's an edit there, and I can't remember how I did the edit. But I remember it was John or one of the other guys said, 'We've got this intro we want to put on this song'. We'd already done the song, and he wants to play it free hand – there's no time code."

The workaround was O'Brien had Frusciante play and let the first chord of the song's verse ring out to sustain at the end of the intro and join the new and existing track. "Then we went back on the original tape, on the same track we did it on and I said, 'Play the last two chords into it so the cut works', and it worked.

The notable compression on this clean intro came about for a very specific reason - it was something being used elsewhere, but setup for acoustic guitar at the time. "We had this little setup that ended up working for everything – I don't know why, and it became kind of a thing," recalls O'Brien. "It was a [Neumann U] 87 and it went through one of the Neves and an LA-2A [Teletronix compressor] and I would rarely touch it. He had, it might have been a little Music Man amp or a little Fender that he played it on and we put that in front of it.

"It's overcompressed because it had been set up for an acoustic guitar."

The core is Frusciante's performance though. "I remember being super-impressed with him," says O'Brien. "I didn't really know anything about them beforehand… I didn't have any history with them. But one of the first things we did, the first couple of days we worked [I thought], that guy knows his parts, they sound great. He seems kind of all over the place but this thing [his guitar] is spot on. He was eight them with Flea. Those three guys together – and Anthony too. That was one of the first times he was really singing more than rapping, and he's fearless."

Check out the full interview above where Brendan O'Brien talks producing Pearl Jam, Springsteen, engineering The Black Crowes and mixing Soundgarden's Superunknown.

In this episode of our signature artist chords series we're focussing on a player whose inventive approaches to rhythm work are sometimes overlooked, and we're delighted to see John Frusciante bringing that creativity back with the Red Hot Chili Peppers following his return to the band in 2019. 

G

John Frusciante’s chord style is heavily influenced by Jimi Hendrix and one of the features of his playing is thumbing the 6th string root note. One cool benefit of this is that it frees up the fourth finger, which you can use to add melodic notes on the highest three strings.

Am add9

Here is a minor alternative to a thumbed root note chord. Here the fourth finger is adding a 9th interval to the Am triad, but you can experiment by moving that note to other tones in the minor pentatonic or Dorian mode.

E9

Also known as the James Brown chord, this funky shape brings to mind percussive playing in songs such as Suck My Kiss or By The Way. Experiment with changing the pressure on the strings to alternate between percussive mutes and the full chord.

Dmaj7

The Maj7 is a warm, rich sounding chord which crops up in Under The Bridge. Adding the Major 7 interval to the Major triad evokes classy jazz vibes. Make sure each note rings clean by keeping your fingers arched and out of the way of the adjacent string.

Four John Mayer chords to try 

As you’re learning guitar, you’ll hopefully hear other musicians talking about triads – it means they're privy to a key of chord knowledge that unlocks a world of creativity in your playing. And today you can learn it too.  

Triads are great ways to change up what you do with chords and add a new level of interest to your guitar playing, and in this lesson with chord boxes and video we’re going to dig into what they are and look at three great ways you can start using them today. 

What are triads and how can we get them from chords? 

A triad is a chord that has been distilled down to three notes. The bare essentials of that particular chord. 

In this lesson we’re going to be using an A major and A minor barre chord and extracting triads from these chords:

Even though these are chords that sit across all 6 strings of the guitar, there are only 3 different notes inside of each chord. These notes are referred to by their interval number in music theory, which is 1 3 5 for the major chord and 1 b3 5 for the minor chord. 

The triads we’re going to be looking at are made up of those three intervals. We are going to be removing all the duplicate notes from the chord.

You can find the first major triad that we’ll be using on the D, G and B strings:

To turn this into a minor triad you just flatten the 3rd which in this position is the note on the G string. This turns the triad into a minor triad:

There are also triads in this lesson that sit on the G, B and E strings. In the first triad, the lowest note of each triad is the root of the chord, but in these triads, the lowest note is the 3rd. These are known as inversions. This is when you have the same three notes of a chord but they are stacked in a different order.

All these triads are derived from the 6 string major and minor chords. There are triads all over the guitar, but when you’re new to triads, this is the easiest place to start. Start with triads that come from familiar chord shapes and then as you develop your knowledge, you can expand your triad use all around the fretboard.

1. Using triads to frame existing chord progressions

If you’re writing your own songs, or you play in a two-guitar band, triads are a great way to add some additional layers to your chord progressions.

In the video above you will see a simple chord progression made up of A, D and E chords. This idea applies to any progression regardless of complexity, but when you start integrating triads into your writing process it’s best to start simple to get a handle on the concept.

Using the triads, you can strum the chord progression with triads to add a layer in a higher register, or you can arpeggiate the triads to add some melodic movement over the top of the progression.

2. Using triads for funk 

Triads are perfect for playing funk!

When you start to play funk, each instrument occupies a specific frequency range in the sonic spectrum, while leaving room for the other instruments. The low end in a funk mix is typically occupied by the bass, and the lower mids can be occupied by the brass and horns.

The guitar does not take the lead role in funk, it becomes more of a rhythmic instrument with the occasional single-note line. Most funk guitar players will keep the rhythm tight and choppy without overplaying.

So when playing funk, you want to avoid doing full chords so you don’t creep into the frequency space of the other instruments.

This is what makes using triads an essential part of this style. Start playing funk rhythms with the higher triads on the G, B and E strings and leave the low end for other instruments in the mix. With these triads, you can do a few cool things to spice up your funk rhythms. 

The first is to do a semitone slide into the triad. Wherever the triad you’re playing is, start one fret lower and slide into your target chord on the start of your rhythmic phrase.

You can also experiment with chord extensions by using a free finger to add other notes in and out of the chord as you rhythmically play. There are theoretical ways to work out the correct notes, but in the early stages of using triads just experiment with the idea and let your ears tell you what sounds good.

3. Using triads for Hendrix/Mayer/Frusciante-style rhythm guitar

If you’re a fan of Jimi Hendrix, John Mayer or John Frusciante, you will no doubt have witnessed their approach to rhythm guitar. This method uses triads but with the addition of the thumb playing the root note on the low E string.

This is a great way to add the additional low-end reinforcement of a full chord while still removing some notes to free up some sonic space. The other major advantage to this, similar to the funk approach, is having a finger free to add some melodic lines and extensions over the top.

The triads look like this:

Once you’ve got your hands comfortable with these shapes, you can then use your little finger to start adding notes around the chords from the major or minor pentatonic scales based on the chord. 

This works across entire chord progressions. There is an example piece in the attached video using A, F#m, D and E all played with triad shapes and added lead notes over the top.

• Learn the ultimate Jimi Hendrix rhythm guitar chord lesson

As guitar players, we can learn so much from our idols. Our ultimate goal is to find our own sound and create something unique, but along the way we can pick up a few helpful pieces of advice from some of the greatest in the game.

In this lesson we’re going to check out five signature guitar techniques that you can learn from five iconic guitar players. Each of the guitar tricks we learn are things that each of the mentioned players have become known for, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use them in your own way. Use these techniques and ideas as building blocks when creating something of your own.

John Frusciante funk riffing

John Frusciante is best known for his many tenures as the guitarist in the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Through the bands career, Frusciante has shown many difference angles to his playing, from Hendrix-inspired fuzzy leads to stunning chord work, but what he’s best known for his is ability to hold down a tight funk groove.

This funk riff is inspired by his frantic style of playing. The riff is made up of muted triplets which are broken out of to add double-stop accents or lead line embellishments. 

Before starting this, it’s important to get used to playing the muted triplets as tight as you can, consistent rhythm is very important in this style.

The lead embellishments in this example are simple phrases from the D minor pentatonic scale, you can improve your own licks in this style to give it a different flavour.

 Jeff Beck tremolo slide effect

The late, great Jeff Beck was known for many things, one of those was his expressive use of the guitars tremolo system. This lick is a Jeff Beck-style lick that emulates the sound of a slide guitar phrase.  The bar is used to simulate the sound of sliding in and out of notes, but also moving from one note to another and pitch matching.

The lick, on paper, looks like it’s just three notes, but the finesse comes into play with how you control the tremolo arm.

For the first note, you want to slightly dip the bar and bring it back to pitch as you slide into the 8th fret on the B string, this simulates the sound of a slide going to it’s note. 

The next part is using the bar to move from one note to a set target note. Play the 6th fret on the B and dip the bar slightly until the pitch of the string hits that of the 5th fret.

The final part is a slide to the 7 on the G. You’ll already be in a position with the bar dipped, so jump your finger to the G, slide up and let the bar return to it’s starting position and add plenty of tremolo arm vibrato.

John Mayer triad chords

If you’ve ever felt bored of your chord progressions, this tip is a great one to break out of that box. This is a great concept on how to get more mileage out of your chords. While this is something John Mayer is known for, this can also be considered to be a Jimi Hendrix style technique which is likely where John Mayer got this from.

This approach involves taking your regular six-string major and minor barre chords and breaking them out into smaller, triad chords on the G, B and E strings. This removes the high E and A string from the chord, freeing up more sonic space and just focusing on the key elements of a major or minor chord.

In this approach, you also use your thumb to reach other the top of the neck and play the root note.

Once you’ve got this chord style under your fingers, you can then extend the chord by barring the high E with your index finger, or using your now free little finger to add some melodic notes around the chord. 

If you’re playing a major chord, the notes you can add should come from the major pentatonic, and if playing a minor chord use the Minor Pentatonic scale.

Dave Mustaine spider chords

Megadeth’s Dave Mustaine is a thrash metal pioneer. He was one of the earliest archiects of this style of metal and has contributed some of the genres most iconic albums, songs and riffs. This technique is something Mustaine uses to enable fast, cross-string power chord movements without needing to shift your entire hand.

This technique will give your fretting hand fingers a stretching workout. 

Be sure to use your index finger and ring finger for the power chords rooted on the A string. Once you play that power chord, you keep those fingers in place while using the middle and little fingers to stretch over and play a power chord on the Low E string.

This is a really great technique for quick power chord changes across two different strings.

Eddie Van Halen two-handed tapping

This is quite possibly the most borrowed technique from a guitar legend, but it’s an essential one for most rock guitar players to know. If you’ve never borrowed or stolen any tapping licks from the Eddie Van Halen school of guitar playing, now is the time to start!

Two-hand tapping looks impressive and it sounds way more difficult than it actually is. Think of this like an extended pull off. 

Your fretting hand, in this example is just doing a constant pull off from the 8th to the 5th fret of the B string. With your picking hand, instead of picking the string, you’re tapping a higher note from the scale, in this case the 12th and 13th frets on the B string.

The tapped finger pulls off to the fretting hands 8th fret, which pulls off to the 5th fret.

This technique can be used with any scale, anywhere on the guitar, experiment with this and see where it fits your playing style.

Any guitar players out there who are worried about finding their own voice on the instrument can look to John Frusciante for inspiration, and not just because the Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist is one of the best players of his generation; he has been there, too, and recently admitted that it was only when the band recorded their breakthrough album Blood Sugar Sex Magik that he found his identity as a guitarist.

Frusciante was guesting on RHCP bassist Flea’s This Little Light podcast, and the honesty and frankness of the conversation made a case for bandmates to interview each other more often. 

He told Flea how a guitar teacher telling him he was no good on guitar left a scar. He spoke of just how deep his obsession with Adrian Belew went. It wasn’t just a case of wanting to sound like him. Frusciante said he wanted to look like him, too, and was willing to take drastic action, telling his mother that he was going to shave his eyebrows so they looked more like Belew’s. And his hero’s receding hairline? Well, that could be a new look for him.

“I told her, ‘I think I’m going to shave my head so it goes back like his does right here.’ She’s like, ‘He’s going, bald, y’know!?’” said Frusciante, with a laugh at the ridiculousness. “But I liked the way that looked! I just wanted to be Adrian Belew.”

Steve Vai, another idol, did have thick eyebrows, so that was okay. And Frusciante's obsessions did have its advantages. He learned all Belew’s stuff. He got into Vai in a big way. He spent all day playing Frank Zappa covers with a keyboardist and drummer to develop an understanding of polyrhythms. All this added to his musical vocabulary. The problem was he didn't have an identity of his own.

“I used to attach myself to these other guitar players like Adrian Belew, and Steve Vai after him, and that became my identity,” he says. “Thank God they were people who had a lot of depth to them, and were people who instilled something really positive in me. But I didn’t have any vision of myself.”

When he joined the Red Hot Chili Peppers at the age of 18, Frusciante knew how to play but not what he wanted to play as a guitarist.

“I was so nervous I was just depending on my energy,” he said. “There was a fight or flight mode kind of thing. I didn’t know who I was or what I had to say, what I could contribute to the band. I just knew to put every ounce of energy, play every note like I mean it, play every note like it’s my last. Just stick to the feeling of the band that I loved.”

It was only after the touring for Mother’s Milk had finished that Frusciante had the opportunity to think about what he wanted to do on the guitar, that he found an identity with the instrument. He credits a few things for that. 

One was having a conversation with his stepbrother that helped him see the world in a more positive light. Another was connecting with Syd Barrett’s songwriting. But then the big epiphany arrived when he got Television’s Marquee Moon, and Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd’s soloing styles changed how he looked at the electric guitar. When it came time to work on Blood Sugar Sex Magik, he knew just what to do.

“When we started writing it that I just relaxed,” he said. “I got into that Television Marquee Moon album and I heard how powerful guitar soloing could be that didn’t depend on having a thick distorted kind of tone, that you could say a lot by playing really simply and almost in a feminine sort of way. Somehow, I had missed that album, and when I got it it made a huge impression on me.”

Revisiting a Rolling Stones classic also taught him a valuable lesson. Keith Richards’ solo, tracked in the summer of 1968, at Olympic Studios, in London, demonstrated that guitar playing didn’t need to be perfect to be perfect 

“I was listening to the Stones one day, I was listening to Sympathy For The Devil, and I was like, ‘No guitar solo’s better than that. That is as great a guitar solo as a guitar solo could be.’ Listening to what he was doing, and how sloppy it was, I just threw everything out the window,” he said. 

You can check out the full conversation between Frusciante and Flea above. And subscribe to the This Little Light podcast here. Flea’s previous guests have included Stewart Copeland, Tenacious D and Margo Price.

Flea's latest guest on his podcast is none other than his Red Hot Chili Peppers bandmate John Frusciante. And he digs deeper into the guitarist's formative pre-RHCP years as a player than any interview we've seen before. 

At one point Frusciante explains that he had one goal after moving to California as a teenager; to become the best guitar he could be by the age of 18. This leads Flea to ask what players were inspiring the young 13-year-old Frusciante and why. His answers explain a lot about his mature mindset as a player back then… 

"For me, a real big one was Adrian Belew," explains Frusciante. "I read an article about him in Guitar World magazine when I was 12 and he'd come out with his first solo album, Lone Rhino. The article about him was so interesting because he was describing these different hand techniques and these ways of using effects. He was into sound. I'd read all these interviews with different people and he talked differently than other people talked because his primary concern was to make the guitar sound in these different ways. He could imitate the sound of elephants, he could imitate the sound of seagulls; he could imitate the sound of a rhinosaurus. He could make the sound of a whale. I never heard someone talk about the guitar like this. And he was into the guitar synthesizer that Roland had out at that time – the GR-300.  

"He had a very unorthodox approach to the instrument and I got very excited about that and then just proceeded to learn everything there was of him; buy every record. He played with David Bowie, he played with Talking Heads, he played with Frank Zappa, and King Crimson too. So they became my favourite band and he was my favourite guitarist and it was that way for quite a while. I'd had the initial period of learning about the progressive guitarists; Steve Howe and the '60s guitarists like Jeff Beck, Cream and Jimi Hendrix, but Adrian Belew was somebody current who really seemed to be taking the guitar in new directions that those people had. So I just wanted to be exactly like him. I would buy effects that he'd bought and I would learn how to make the kind of sounds that he made.

"He really knew how to make a note mean something," Frusciante adds. "He was a big one for me, definitely at the ages of 13 / 14."

Inevitably, the teenager would also pitch Belew's bandmate against him in his mind for the coveted top spot. 

"I'd change my perspective sometimes because [Adrian Belew] and Robert Fripp were the two guitarists in King Crimson at that time," explains Frusciante. So I had a couple of friends who I turned on to music and we would talk about who was a better guitar player than who and so forth. And at one point I remember saying to one of these kids, 'I decided that Robert Fripp is better than Adrian Belew'… I started to see Robert Fripp could do all these things Adrian Belew couldn't do.  

"Robert Fripp is an amazing guitar player – those ideas of one person being better than another, they were just in the air for me at that time. I think I saw through it to some degree. They were really big for me and when they broke up that was a hard thing for me. I was really depressed about King Crimson breaking up in '84."

Things also took a bleak turn for the young Frusciante's guitar lessons around that time. "I was trying to figure out what kind of guitar player I was supposed to be," he remembers. "I had this feeling that I am going to be a guitar player one day, in a band and all that stuff, but when you're 14/15 years old there's the question in your mind of, what do I have to say? Steve Vai says this, Jeff Beck says this and Robert Fripp says this, Pat Smear says this… what is going to be the thing that I have to say to people? At that time in the '80s it seemed there were two schools of guitar, the way I looked at it. There were what I called textural guitar players and either flashy or speed guitar players. There was Eddie Van Halen who I love and Steve Vai who I'd started to get into, but basically there were people who played fast and there were people who did more interesting things with sound; Adrian Belew,  Warren Cuccurullo, Andy Summers from The Police. 

"I'd kind of lost track of what was going on in LA music. I didn't know the Minutemen – I didn't know some of the great guitar playing that was going on in LA at that point.. I was more looking at the big picture of guitar players. So I was trying to find out, do I want to be one of these flashy players or do I want to concentrate on being a textural guitar player. It was on my mind a lot of the time and I don't know how long it went on, maybe a few months. But I felt like I'd come to a crossroads and I had to figure this out."

This crossroads lead to a new guitar teacher for the teenage Frusciante.

"My mom met a guy at a health food store and she told him what a great guitar player her son was. And he said, 'I'll try to teach him and maybe he should be teaching me if he's as good as you say he is. But I'll see him.' So I went to this guy's house and I had these great recordings of me, very Adrian Belew / Robert Fripp-inspired four-track recordings I'd made. I played him a couple of these recordings I'd made… I was playing in the way I should have been, I was on the right path. This guy said, 'Let me see you play a blues scale as fast as you can.'  And I played a blues scale as fast as I could and he said, 'That's not fast, you're not a good guitarist. That noise you're making on your recordings is ok but if you can't play a fast blues scale, you can't go around telling people you're a good guitarist.'

Somewhere out there there's a (probably former) guitar teacher who must feel pretty silly. But for Frusciante, this negative experience became a crucial moment. 

"I asked him, 'Who do you think is a good guitarist?' He said, 'Tommy Bolin and Steve Vai'. I'd read about Steve Vai but hadn't heard him and this guy gave me the album Flex-Able, which is Steve Vai's first solo record that he put out himself, and I took the record home with me. He said I could borrow it. But I never went to this guy again. The feeling of being told I wasn't a good guitar player was about the worst feeling I could imagine and I was just going to make sure no one was going to say that to me again. There's always going to be people that don't like your guitar playing so you have to get used to it and be alright with people not liking you, but the fact that he said it so matter of factly, he wasn't trying to insult me, I made up my mind that nobody was going to be able to say that to me again."

Frusciante also enjoyed the Steve Vai album he got out of the experience and it lead him down a rabbit hole. "It was a very strange album with all kinds of variety – every song was different from the next," he reflects on Vai's debut. "The guitar approach was completely different from song to song. So that became my benchmark. I'd already started to get into some of Frank Zappa's music but I knew that steve Vai had been in his band playing guitar, and it was around that time that Frank Zappa and Steve Vai became my favourite thing. 

"I think I'm about 16 at this point and I just started learning every complicated Frank Zappa piece of instrumental music that he'd written. Learning everything from Steve Vai – I got live tapes of Steve Vai that nobody had ever heard, I had friends and we all traded Frank Zappa live tapes and I probably had six or seven live tapes of Steve Vai with the little club band he had back then. I would spend all my time memorising this stuff and learning how to play it."

Check out the full interview above. 

• Classic interview: John Frusciante – "The only album I remember feeling totally and completely confident on 100 per cent was By The Way, and I wasn’t actually challenging myself on that album"

What is a record producer? You will get a different answer according to who you ask, but it's clear Rick Rubin is on the arrangement side of the role – sometimes moving in and out of a band's studio sessions to offer his insight into song structure before an artist even gets to the stage of soundscaping. And it looks like that side of Rubin's talents affected a young John Frusciante's guitar playing in profound way. 

"It really comes from trying to figure out what I can do that makes Flea and Chad sound as good as they can," Frusciante tells Guitar Player in its new cover story of his often minimal approach to parts in songs such as Eddie and Shoot Me A Smile from current album Return Of The Dream Canteen, as well as classics such as Scar Tissue, Californication and Otherside from the very late '90s.

”Back in the time of [1989 album] Mother’s Milk, I was trying to fill up more space and it just sounded too busy," Frusciante says of the origins of the shift to the sparser approach he applies to some Red Hot Chili Peppers songs. 

"It wasn’t as busy as Flea, but Flea has a way of being busy on the bass that never sounds too busy. It always sounds like he’s doing what he’s doing in support of the song. I felt after making that record that I wasn’t supporting the songs and my bandmates as well as I could have."

That shift began on the follow-up record, when Rubin entered as producer and the results gave the band a global breakthrough.

"Another thing there was that Rick Rubin, when he started producing us at the Blood Sugar time, he kept adding ideas to the arrangements," explains Frusciante. "Like, 'Have no guitar for the first verse,' or, 'Have no bass for the second verse.' He came from this hip-hop experience, so he was essentially muting the instruments in certain sections. 

That was inspiring for me, because I was already going in the direction of playing less and seeing how much better that made the band sound as a whole. So I just got to a point where I really saw the musical value of space of all types, whether it’s the distance between one point in the bar line and another point in the bar line, or the distance between two sounds, in terms of using wide intervals or creating a chord out of me playing one note on my guitar and Flea playing one note on his bass. It just seemed to make the band feel more whole. And to be honest, the other guys liked it when I started playing that way, and I felt supported."

Frusciante also elaborates on how he uses intervals in his dynamic with Flea so effectively.

"I think a lot of people play guitar a certain way, and it may be because they’re just playing with bass players who play simple root-note bass lines. But because Flea plays in such an interesting way, I think of intervals not only as the relationship between two notes on my instrument but as the relationship between what I’m doing and what he’s doing.

Take something like the intro to By The Way or the verses of Otherside: I’m not thinking of my guitar as the centre of it; I’m thinking of my guitar as a portion of it. I’m thinking of the pitch of Flea’s bass line and the pitch of my guitar. If Flea’s playing a note and I’m playing a note, we’ve got a two-note chord right there. And the interval is the space between that. 

"So then it’s like, 'How can I move in a way that’s different from how he’s moving?' If he goes down, maybe I go up. And we start creating different little harmony things where we imply chords without either of us playing the whole chord, that kind of thing. Or there’s things like Scar Tissue, where I’m doing those wide, two-note intervals on my own, but I’m really thinking of it as two separate parts."

• Check out the full Frusciante cover interview in the new issue of Guitar Player magazine – on sale now here.

Classic interview: John Frusciante – "The only album I remember feeling totally and completely confident on 100 per cent was By The Way, and I wasn’t actually challenging myself on that album"

Red Hot Chili Peppers have released a new music video accompanying their latest single, Tippa My Tongue.

Taken from the forthcoming album Return of the Dream Canteen – due out on 14th October – the Rick Rubin-produced track is quintessential Chili Peppers, driven by a deep funk groove and laced with a hefty dose of acid rock.

Featuring trippy animation by Julien Calemard and Thami Nabil, the band’s latest vid is a psychedelic extravaganza and was directed by Malia James with creative direction by guitarist John Frusciante’s girlfriend, Marcia Pinna aka Aura T-09.

Return of the Dream Canteen follows up this year’s Unlimited Love album and was announced by the band during a live concert in Denver, Colorado last month.

It was a surprise for fans, many of whom didn’t expect the news so soon after Red Hot Chili Peppers’ latest album release.

However, Frusciante had previously alluded to the prospect of more new material during an interview with Total Guitar.

“Before we knew it, we had way more songs than we’d ever written for a record before,” he recalled, adding, “I definitely feel like we saved some of the best stuff for the potential next album.”

Speaking of their new album, a band statement on the Red Hot Chili Peppers website reads:

“We went in search of ourselves as the band that we have somehow always been. Just for the fun of it we jammed and learned some old songs. Before long we started the mysterious process of building new songs. A beautiful bit of chemistry meddling that had befriended us hundreds of times along the way…

“When all was said and done, our moody love for each other and the magic of music had gifted us with more songs than we knew what to do with. Well we figured it out. 2 double albums released back to back.”

Pre-order Return of the Dream Canteen here.