It was in 1993 that The Smashing Pumpkins made their big breakthrough with their second album Siamese Dream. It reached the top 10 on the US Billboard 200 and eventually sold in excess of four million copies.

But sudden fame wasn’t easy to handle for the four members of the band – lead vocalist and guitarist Billy Corgan, bassist D'arcy Wretzky, guitarist James Iha and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin. As Chamberlin says: “You have no tools and no skill set how to manage that level of success.”

In a new interview with the Go With Elmo Lovano podcast, Chamberlin looks back on that landmark year and describes his relationship with the most high profile band of that whole era – Nirvana.

“We played with Nirvana probably four or five times,” he says. “They were incredible.”

He recalls having a good connection with fellow drummer Dave Grohl. “We became tight. We had a lot of fun back then.”

But he admits that his interaction with Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain was more problematic.

“You know, I don’t think Kurt really dug me,” Chamberlin says. “I think he kind of stayed away from me back then, because… I was a pretty high octane individual, you know? And I don’t think Kurt really wanted to be around somebody who was resonating at such a high frequency.”

Chamberlin describes Cobain as “very introverted and introspective”.

He adds: “He was always nice to me, and I knew I knew him and Courtney. And we were friendly, but I wouldn’t say we were tight.

“I had a huge respect for him as a musician, and I wanted to be, you know, compassionate – to not be, like, inserting myself into his orbit like everybody else was. Because, honestly, it was like we were all peers. So it wasn’t a big deal.”

The making of Siamese Dream was complicated by difficulties in the personal lives of the four band members, with Chamberlin struggling with substance abuse problems. But this album transformed The Smashing Pumpkins into one of the leading bands of the alternative rock era, with powerful hit songs including Cherub Rock, Disarm, Rocket and Today.

Chamberlin says now that he treated Kurt Cobain with the same respect he afforded to other musicians he admired and toured with, such as Black Francis of the Pixies and J. Masics of Dinosaur Jr.

“There was a lot of people that we held in high regard,” he says, “but they were just in the same circus we were in, right?

“It doesn't matter if you were flying private or you’re taking a van – you’re still in the circus.”

Nirvana’s Bleach-era touring backline is being sold off, offering Kurt Cobain obsessives a rare opportunity to nail the Promethean electric guitar tones that would become the bedrock of the Seattle sound as the rising tide of the grunge revolution swept all before it.

The collection is being sold from tomorrow (10 April) at 5pm UK time via London’s Denmark Street Guitars, based out of Hanks Guitars, which is a place packed with grail-worthy items.

This is where Peter Capaldi found Doctor Who’s “junk shop” Yamaha electric. A few weeks back they had Eric Clapton’s 1939 000-42 acoustic guitar – no, not the MTV Unplugged 000-42 that sold for $4,101,000 as part of the record-breaking Jim Irsay auction, but a “twin” that Slowhand got just for recording.

Indeed, the last time we walked by – en route to speak to Zakk Wylde – there was one of those stunning (and über-rare) Jimmy Page Les Paul Custom Shop replicas calling out from the window. It's that kind of place.

Anyway, back to the Nirvana amps. Given their live-in-a-dive history, might well be quarantined behind some plexiglass – they look like the kind of tube amps that would get a restaurant shut down on a health code violation.

The collection includes Cobain’s black and silver-panelled Fender Twin Reverb combos, all loaded with JBL speakers, plus a Marshall 4x12 speaker cabinet, and bass guitar players aren’t left out either, with Krist Novoselic’s Ampeg SVT head also included.

Cobain’s Bleach tones are one of the gnarliest sounds every committed to tape. Raw, barely tamed yet unusually eminently listenable – certainly when compared with the totally hostile noise-rock engineering of In Utero, when they went all in clang and feedback, and used every bit of Steve Albini’s nous to get a sound to unsettle the mainstream.

Bleach? According to producer Jack Endino, that was his ’67 Fender Twin that had been loaded with a pair of Utah speakers – until Endino fried them. At the time, Cobain had preferred a solid-state Randall, using it on the 1988 recordings with Dale Crover playing drums.

Endino remembers this as a febrile time for the band. Nirvana did not mess about in the studio.

“The first demo I did for Nirvana took five hours and they did 10 songs, and it was recorded and mixed in one afternoon, and then they went and played a show that night,” recalled Endino, speaking to Guitar World in 2022. “That was the one and only show of that era that they played with Dale Crover on the drums, January, 1988. The songs were one take. If a band is really good then all you have to do is get out of their way and make sure the sounds are good, hit ‘record’ and let them do their thing.”

When Cobain’s Randall went in for repair he used Endino’s Twin through a 2x12 cab loaded with a pair of Celestions. This particular guitar amp would assume a certain notoriety.

“In fact, I still have it,” said Endino. “It’s called ‘The Bleach Twin’ because Kurt used it on Bleach. I can tell you Kurt, using my amp on Bleach, was using a Boss DS-1, the orange [distortion] pedal with three knobs. That was his sound in 1989.”

Cobain tracked Bleach with the Mosrite-esque Univox Hi-Flyers, then embarked on Nirvana’s US tour with an Epiphone ET270, using his Randall head through a Bullfrog 4x12. That was in his Bleach-era touring rig for the US. The Boss pedal made it out unscathed, the guitars, not so much.

In Europe, the touring for Bleach was supplied by Protone backline rental in Holland, and comprised the complement of amps being sold via Denmark Street Guitars.

You can register your interest at sales (at) londonvntageguitars.com.

The further the initial impact of the Beatles recedes into history, the higher the prices for Fabs-related memorabilia rise. In the past week we’ve seen a piano that was once used by John Lennon fetched a record-breaking £2.5 million ($3.2 million).

That’s the most for any piece of Beatles-related memorabilia. But then it was the Broadwood upright piano that Lennon used to compose a number of songs for Sgt Pepper, including Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, Being For The Benefit Of Mister Kite! and his section of A Day In The Life.

The piano was sold at Christie’s in New York as part of the Jim Irsay Collection, a group of items that belonged to the billionaire, who owned the American football franchise Indianapolis Colts until he died last year.

Irsay also owned a Ludwig drum kit that Ringo Starr had used both in the studio and live between May 1963 and 1964 – it was the kit he played when the Beatles appeared on the history-making Ed Sullivan show in February ‘64. That went for $2.4 million in the Christie’s auction and a drum head from Ringo’s next Ludwig kit sold for even more: $2.9 million.

However, the highest price at the auction went to an instrument with no connection to the Beatles (not directly, anyway). This was David Gilmour’s Black Strat which went for a whopping £11 million, thus becoming the most expensive guitar ever sold at an auction. Meanwhile, a Fender Mustang that Kurt Cobain used in the iconic Smells Like Teen Spirit video fetched more than £5.2 million.

In a statement, Julien Pradels, the president of Christie's Americas, said: "Lot after lot, we felt like we were making history."

"The Irsay sale did justice to the brilliance of the collector, and the monumental pieces he brought together - iconic objects that tell the story of our culture and our times."

DRUMS WEEK 2025: In 1991, Nirvana released the album that would propel them from burgeoning club-level favourites to The Biggest Band in The World. Nevermind, Nirvana’s major label debut, would apply a sleeper hold to glam/hair metal, knock Michael Jackson’s Bad off the Billboard top spot and kickstart the ‘grunge’ movement that shaped youth culture in every form. The catalyst for the album’s success? Smells Like Teen Spirit.

Released on 10 Sept 1991, it was a slow burn, failing to chart — no surprises there, given that Nirvana were still relative unknowns struggling to pay their rent. But to discover the origins of Dave Grohl’s iconic drum parts, we need to rewind 18 months, before Grohl was even a member of the band.

During early April 1990, Nirvana — Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic and Chad Channing — drove from Olympia, Washington to Madison, Wisconsin to complete a five-day recording session with Butch Vig, then known for his work with Killdozer.

The sessions were scheduled to begin work on Nirvana’s Sub Pop follow-up to Bleach, with nine songs recorded (Breed, Dive, In Bloom, Stay Away, Sappy, Lithium, Here She Comes Now and Polly), before the band headed home with the intention of returning to finish the album’s session.

In the months that followed, however, came big changes. Drummer Chad Channing was out, and Dave Grohl, whose band Scream had broken up, found himself stranded in LA and gig-less when he got word from Melvins frontman, Buzz Osborne that Nirvana were looking for a drummer.

Osborne had previously taken Cobain and Novoselic to watch Scream featuring a young Dave Grohl on drums, hair flailing, battering his kit as if his life depended on it, impressing Cobain and Novoselic.

Buzz connected Grohl with the band — who were about to poach Mudhoney’s Dan Peters — and Grohl flew to Seattle to meet his potential new bandmates. “I remember getting off the plane, and Krist and Kurt meeting me at baggage claim. It was like having the Children of the Corn meeting you at the airport.” Grohl said in a 2018 interview with VisitSeattle.

Meanwhile, Nirvana’s popularity continued to grow, and the prospect of releasing another album with Sub Pop grew less appealing. Instead, Cobain and the band began shopping the ‘Smart Sessions’ tape to major labels, eventually landing with Geffen.

With Vig back on board, planning for recording the album reconvened, with Nirvana continuing to write and rehearse songs in a rented barn/outbuilding in Tacoma, Washington, recording their ideas and progress on a boom box.

Vig recalls receiving a tape from the band with an audio message from Cobain, “Hey Butch, it’s Kurt!” it began, “We’ve got a new drummer, his name is Dave, he’s the best drummer in the world!.”

At that, the recording launches into Smells Like Teen Spirit. “I could hear the riff, but as soon as the drums came in, it just distorted like crazy.” Despite the poor recording — overloading the rudimentary cassette recorder’s built-in mics — Vig knew they were onto something.

This was confirmed when Vig visited Nirvana at their rehearsal room, becoming one of the first people to ever hear the song played live, in the flesh. “They played …Teen Spirit, and it just crushed me how good [Grohl] was, and how good they sounded.” Vig told Howard Stern in 2022.

“I started pacing around the room - usually I take notes but I was just taking it all in. They finished the song and Kurt was like, ‘What do you think, Butch?’. I went ‘Play it again.’”

By the time the band arrived at LA’s Sound City Studios, Nirvana was a tight, well-oiled, and well-rehearsed machine. Sound City had been chosen in part for its low rates.

During an era where studios were rapidly swapping analogue tape machines for the glitzy new digital platform of Pro Tools, Sound City held firm. As well as this, the studio had two more jewels in its crown that appealed to Vig.

First was the live room, previously used to capture the likes of Tom Petty, Fleetwood Mac and Cobain favourite, Neil Young. The former Vox warehouse had a sprinkling of studio magic which lent itself to capturing a great drum room sound - magic which is now available to us as a plugin courtesy of Universal Audio's Sound City software.

Second, was the Neve 8028 console housed within the studio. The desk was one of only four made, loaded with classic Neve mic preamps and 1084 EQ modules. It would later go on to be purchased by Grohl and immortalised, along with Sound City Studios in Grohl’s 2015 documentary of the same name.

“That room at Sound City, it’s like a small gymnasium and it’s almost bulletproof." Vig told us in 2020. "But when you put up those room mics and hear the sound of that room, that’s part of what made that studio sound so good.

“It just had a really awesome tone to it. It was live, but not too splashy, the decay time on the high end of the midrange is very even. It’s the perfect room for drums, really. It also helped that Dave Grohl, one of the most kick-ass drummers in rock and roll was behind the kit!”

For the sessions, Grohl used a Tama Granstar (not Artstar II, as commonly reported), along with some additional gear, which was rented from Ross Garfield’s Drum Doctors company. Included in the hire list was a Ludwig Black Beauty snare, as well as a now-revered Tama Mastercraft Bell Brass snare.

Reissued in 2024, the Tama snare has gone on to become and ‘modern classic’, thanks to its supremely loud, aggressive attack and punchy, full-bodied response employed by the likes of Nirvana, Metallica, Rage Against The Machine and many more.

“It was a pretty simple setup.” Butch Vig told MusicRadar in 2020 of the mics he used to record Grohl’s kit. “I told the engineer that I wanted to default to mics I knew and was used to, so I used an AKG D12 on the kick, I think I used an SM57 on the snare and possibly an AKG 451 underneath.

“We used Sennheiser 421s on the toms, again because I was used to those Sennheiser mics. AKG 414s as the overheads, I had them at Smart and they’re great all-round condensers. I think the secret to that sound, is we had a couple of Neumann U87s [used as room mics] that were probably 15-18 feet back from the kit.”

When it came to mixing Nevermind, veteran mix engineer, Andy Wallace got the call. It’s here where some confusion over the resulting drum sound emerges. The album was recorded and mixed on analogue gear, but that didn’t remove the possibility of bolstering the drum sound with samples.

This now commonplace technique involves blending in additional sounds and elements that are deemed to be lacking from a recording in order to add cut and weight. It’s often misunderstood for editing and straightening out timing fluctuations (there’s no suggestion that Grohl’s drums required ‘fixing’ from a performance standpoint).

The use of samples is something of a staple of Andy Wallace’s mixes, as demonstrated by Rick Beato’s analysis in the video below. While Wallace has never explicitly confirmed whether or not he did or did not use samples to reinforce the sound of Grohl’s kit, he has conceded that there’s a possibility that samples were used to enhance the drum track’s ambient mics, ironic given that Sound City was chosen in-part for its fantastic drum room sound.

Whether he did or didn’t, the benefit of time has gifted us the opportunity to hear Butch Vig’s original mixes as initially submitted to the Geffen. These were included with the 20th Anniversary edition of Nevermind, and are labelled ‘Devonshire Mix’ and allow for interesting comparison.

Sonics aside, though, a huge part of Smells Like Teen Spirit’s hook comes from Grohl’s drum parts. Interestingly, it’s the first — and only song on Nevermind — where the songwriting credits are assigned to all three members of the band rather than Cobain.

Nirvana’s love for The Pixies, complete with the loud-quiet dynamic template informs a huge part of the band’s songwriting approach, something that Cobain wasn’t shy to admit, telling Rolling Stone in 1994, “I connected with that band so heavily that I should have been in that band — or at least a Pixies cover band. We used their sense of dynamics, being soft and quiet and then loud and hard.”

Grohl also maintains that at the core of Nirvana’s songwriting, sat a backbone of simplicity, on more than one occasion likening them to nursery rhymes . “I didn’t throw a bunch of drum fills in there. I tried to keep it as simple as possible.” Grohl says on the Classic Albums: Nevermind documentary. “That was kind of an unspoken rule. We almost wanted them to be like children’s songs.”

This approach is outlined from the get-go, with Grohl’s distinctive flams on the snare seemingly ushering in a simple four-count to casual listeners. But dig a little deeper and you’ll realise that he’s actually playing groups of even 16th-notes between the flams on the snare, bass drum and hi-hats.

Complex? Not really, but play it the layman’s way and it’s clear that the often-overlooked nuances of Grohl’s heavy-hitting, ‘neanderthal’ style require a little attention to discover.

But, as well as the influence of '90s indie-apathy, Grohl sought inspiration from some very different drummers when it comes to some of Smells Like Teen Spirit’s standout drum moments.

“If you listen to Nevermind, I pulled so much stuff from The Gap Band and Cameo, and Tony Thompson, on every one of those songs” Grohl tells Pharrell Williams in his Cradle to Stage series. “The big disco flam… I told Tony Thompson that. He came to my house for a barbecue. I was like, 'Man, I just want to thank you because I owe you so much, I've been ripping you off my whole life.' And he goes, 'I know.'"

There’s a James Brown-level of reliance on a foot-heavy first beat of every bar — accented with dual cymbal crashes — during the syncopated intro and chorus beat, with Grohl laying back beforehand, adding weight, anticipation and above all, groove to each cycle.

It’s a trick also used extensively by Liam Howlett of UK dance-rock titans, The Prodigy when programming and sampling drum parts, and could serve as just part of the reason why Grohl and The Prodigy have shown mutual respect for each others’ work in the past. Check out the drums on the band’s 1996 hit, Firestarter, and you’ll notice some similar traits, not least the Grohl-style quarter-note snare hits that are also present on the outro of Smells Like Teen Spirit.

The verses of Smells Like Teen Spirit demonstrate the Pixies influences, with Grohl removing the busyness of the beat, reverting to ‘2 & 4’ on the snare while the bass drum offers a simple ‘We Will Rock You’ 8th-note pattern, outlining Novoselic’s bassline to create a solid, straighter groove. Crucially, the hi-hats are closed spare a lift on ‘4&’ every fourth time round, adding to the loud/soft contrast.

Moving to the pre-chorus, and the pattern remains the same as the verse for the first half, with the hi-hats lifted open. For the second part, Grohl adds an additional 8th-note on the bass drum, pushing the song towards the chorus before he launches into the iconic machine-gun 16th notes on the snare, punctuated by another big flam.

But underneath one of Grohl’s career standout fills sits another reminder of his sometimes-subtle nuances. Grohl, a huge Beatles fan, employs Ringo-style continuity of the bass drum underneath his hands, keeping an 8th-note pulse underneath the roll.

This serves to keep the momentum of the song driving forward, and while Nirvana were never really a band whose music was intended for dancing, it highlights Grohl’s aptitude for arrangement in order to keep the pace and feel heading towards a crescendo.

So, would Smells Like Teen Spirit have been a success if, say, Chad Channing or Dan Peters had tracked the drums? It’s impossible to know, but obviously Cobain’s riff, melodies and the accompanying video all had their part to play too.

There’s no doubt that Grohl’s part (one of the few on the album that wasn’t cribbed from Chad Channing’s original demo tracks) contains more than a couple of important hooks.

Frankly, with a song where every element combines to create a near-perfect rock song, we’re not sure there’s any use in speculating.

Aaron Rash, the YouTuber and Nirvana tone guru, has solved a mystery that has plagued him for four years – he has identified the electric guitar that Kurt Cobain used on Heart-Shaped Box.

Over the past few years, Rash has gone deep into the rabbit hole in search of Cobain’s tone secrets – particularly on Nirvana’s final studio album, In Utero. Rash has built his own guitars, swapped out speakers. He even got Cobain’s tech Earnie Bailey to help him build the Frankenamp that was used on the recording.

He says he is now working with Bartolini on some electric guitar pickups to help him on this journey. There is much he has learned along the way.

But the Heart-Shaped Box guitar has eluded him. Until now. His latest video reveals all. Why is Rash doing all of this? Part of it is nostalgia.

“When I hear In Utero, it brings me right back to being a kid,” he admits. Part of it is he simply cannot stop doing all of this. The In Utero bug is one he can’t quit. “I think it’s a really beautiful and really gracious, appreciation of this one record, just showing how much it means to you this way,” he says.

But the nostalgia serves a purpose. It’s the smell test. Or in this case, the tone test. For someone who has dedicated significant time and treasure in the pursuit of understanding just how Kurt Cobain arrived at his electric guitar tone – building guitars, engineering the IR packs so you can recreate it at home – this is an essential part of his investigatory tool kit.

And after his last video, in which he called ‘Eureka!’ on his quest to solve the In Utero tone riddle, concluding that it was Phase II Univox Hi-Flier with a mahogany neck, Rash has been doing some reflection, and something smells off.

“I’ll admit. After my last video, I feel kind of stupid, because I’ve made, like, the most compelling love letter about this guitar,” he says. “The more I’ve dug into this guitar after that video, my whole theory on it being the In Utero guitar just started totally falling apart.”

Of all things, what sealed it for Rash was the sound of his Hi-Flier’s tailpiece. It has this sibilant ring to it that is not on the record. “It’s pretty extreme. It gets into the pickups, you can’t get it out,” says Rash as he strums quarter notes to demonstrate it. Rash A/Bs Heart-Shaped Box and Rape Me and concludes it has to be the same guitar. But what make, what model?

Back to the drawing board. Rash fished through his correspondence with the late In Utero producer, Steve Albini, whom he interviewed for his channel in April 2024. He checked his emails with In Utero engineer and Shellac bass guitar player Bob Weston, who said Cobain just played “his normal Fender”.

“Whatever the hell Kurt was actually recording with, it couldn’t have been the Jag or the Hi-Flier,” Rash argues. “Those have long tailpieces, and they ring. So the only short tailpiece guitars would have been the Veleno, the Ferrington, and the Mustang.”

It was not the Veleno. Rash has one. The aluminium-bodied electric is all over In Utero, only it’s not on Heart-Shaped Box. The David Ferrington custom build could be what Weston was referring to but Rash says that doesn’t sound right. “That leaves me with only the Mustang,” says Rash. Luckily, he has heaps of them. Literally, dozens. None of them have sounded right.

Then he had an epiphany. Rash was looking at a photo of Cobain with a Mustang, and where the lacquer and paint had been worn away, the exposed wood held a clue.

“This photo completely changed everything for me,” he says “That’s not Alder. That’s swamp ash.”

Rash admits he has owned 30 to 40 Mustangs in the course of this crazy project. Another one was not going to hurt. Rash ordered himself a swamp ash body to test his theory.

“It finally came, and I put it together, and literally the first chord I hit on it after I put it together just gave me goosebumps,” he says. “It was crazy… Four whole years I was trying to figure that out, and there it was in my hands.”

Does it the body wood make that much of a difference. Rash argues yes. He would not be alone. Paul Reed Smith would argue something similar, too. But Rash acknowledges that his latest epiphany is going to cause some controversy. There are those – such as Nashville-based musician and YouTuber Jim Lill – who quite credibly argue that tonewood has less to do with how a guitar sound.

Rash is undeterred. He says the swamp ash Mustang, i.e. the Heart-Shaped Box Mustang, has “such a woody, really wild voice that the other guitars don’t have”, and that Lill is yet to test swamp ash. To Rash’s ear, the swamp-ash bodied Mustang sounds totally unique. Earnie Bailey agrees. He told Rash that swamp ash was his favourite-sounding tonewood.

Rash might have identified the guitar that Cobain used to track Heart-Shaped Box. He has also opened up another can of worms. One thing is for sure; he isn’t done mining In Utero for all its tone secrets. There is more to come.

You can follow his journey on YouTube, and check out his In Utero and Nevermind IR packs at Aaron Rash.

The Kurt Cobain Unplugged exhibition opened this week at the Royal College of Music Museum in London — which is offering an amazing opportunity for fans to own a piece of rock history.

One lucky person will win a plectrum used by Cobain during Nirvana’s 1993 MTV Unplugged performance.

A prize draw can be entered for £5 via a QR code at the exhibition and can also be entered by anyone online through this link: charityhive.co.uk .

The plectrum is one of three Dunlop picks found inside Cobain’s Martin D-18E guitar case.

The famous guitar — uniquely adapted for his left-handed playing — is on display at the exhibition along with the equally famous olive-green mohair cardigan he wore for the Unplugged show.

In 2020, Cobain’s Martin became the most expensive guitar ever sold at auction, bought for over $6 million by Australian entrepreneur Peter Freedman AM, founder of RØDE Microphones.

The Kurt Cobain Unplugged exhibition, curated by rock journalist Alan di Perna and curator Gabriele Rossi Rognoni, runs until 18 November.

Hey do you fancy purchasing parts of a rusty old van last used sometime in the 1990s? A steering wheel? A side panel? Or maybe a front section? Don’t all rush at once.

These were all parts of the Mel-Van, the beat up vehicle used by grunge band, The Melvins and they are just some of many items of rock-related artefacts at the Julien’s Music Icons auction at the end of this month.

The Melvins weren’t exactly rock legends, no? Ah but their buddy was. The reason for the auction house’s interest in them is that all three items were touched by the hand of Kurt Cobain.

The side panel features a mural featuring the band KISS that was hand-drawn by the Nirvana singer, the steering wheel was held by Cobain’s hands – he drove the Melvins to many of their gigs in the Washington State area - and the front hood section of the van is spray-painted with the words ‘MEAN MACHINE’ and well, it just looks cool.

The side panel with the mural is expected to fetch up to $40,000, the steering wheel up to $4,000 and the front section anywhere between $1,000 and $2,000.

It’s not the most valuable Cobain-related item in the auction though – that is likely to be a Takamine acoustic guitar that the singer played at a recording session in the Netherlands in November 1991. It could fetch anything up to $500,000.

Other notable lots in the Julien’s auction include a Charvel Art Series guitar signed by its owner, Eddie Van Halen, a Foo Fighters Gold Tour Gretsch drumkit as played by both Taylor Hawkins and Dave Grohl and Noel Gallagher’s handwritten lyrics to Wonderwall. There’s also an array of Elvis-related items, including a beer bottle he is supposed to have once drunk out of and a lock of the singer’s hair.

The Julien’s Rock Icons auction takes place at the Hard Rock Cafe in New York on May 30 and 31, but before then there’s a chance to see many of the items on display over this side of the pond. They will be exhibited at the Hard Rock Cafe in Piccadilly Circus from tomorrow (May 9) to May 14. Opening hours are 10am to 11pm and admission is free.

And if you have a spare few thousand and are interested in purchasing any of the actual items in the auction head over to the Julien’s website here.

Depending on whom you ask, people will either tell you that the world’s greatest detective is Sherlock Holmes or Batman, but maybe YouTuber and Nirvana tone obsessive Aaron Rash should be in the conversation, too.

For years, he has been scouring the archives, searching the internet, interviewing primary witnesses in search of the secrets of Kurt Cobain’s electric guitar tone, his white whale the wiry anarchy of the late Nirvana frontman’s In Utero tone.

And now he says he has finally solved the missing piece of the mystery that has consumed him for so long; he knows the exact make and model of Cobain’s guitar on the album.

He bought one for himself, demoed it, and you can hear the fruits of his labour. Mission accomplished: he has effectively reverse-engineered Cobain’s tone, the cleans and the dirt.

“I figured out the mystery,” he says in his latest YouTube video, in which all is revealed. “It’s never been about, like, copying Kurt or his tones or anything like that… I’ve just always wanted to figure out what it was, cause it drove me crazy.”

Crazy or dedication? You decide. A bit of context, Rash went so deep into the rabbit hole he event started building his own guitars, replicating those he thought were used during the 1993 sessions for In Utero, where Nirvana tracked an unfeasibly hostile record under the watchful eye of Steve Albini at Pachyderm Studios, in Cannon Falls, Minnesota.

Initially, Rash followed the breadcrumbs online. Some were helpful. Not all. In a Reddit AMA, Albini said it was the Mustang, Jag, Jagstang hybrid, Univox Hi-Flier, and Albini’s own aluminium Veleno guitar, which was used on Very Ape, Heart-Shaped Box and Rape Me.

Rash knew the Jagstang had yet to be made by that point. But he duly spent the next six months of his life building his own Veleno replica, naming it Kurt, making it available for sale.

He also made a Jagstang and a replica of Cobain’s custom-made Ferrington guitar [below] because at this point, well, in for a penny… “I’ve learned everything from just watching YouTube videos,” he told us of his DIY luthiery.

Rash would interview Albini for a deep dive into the recording process. He befriended Cobain’s guitar tech, Earnie Bailey, who helped lead him to one of his first great epiphanies, the guitar amp behind In Utero clean tones, a super-rare 1974 Fender Quad Reverb, but one with Utah speakers – that was the secret sauce. And Bailey helped Rash build the Plexi-style Frankenamp that was also used on the recording. A solid state Randall Commander II combo was the third amp.

Rash found the exact recording microphones, the amps. He then released an In Utero IR Pack so you can access them via your DAW. He did the same for Nevermind.

Rash created those IR packs at Robert Lang Studios in Seattle, where Nirvana tracked their last ever song, You Know You’re Right, in January 1994. Each video found Rash at the edge of another plot-twist, another detail that had “always baffled” him.

One of those, however, was the electric guitar. Many Mustangs later, Rash’s attention was turned to the Univox Hi-Flier, the “pawnshop” guitar Albini referred to in his AMA, and in Rash’s subsequent conversations with the producer before he passed away in May 2024.

“I knew that Kurt didn’t use the Mustang to record In Utero, at least not all the mean stuff with it,” says Rash. “[Albini] said that Kurt mainly used a Hi-Flier to record all of In Utero, that and the Veleno. And I also have a different email that he wrote me as well. He said, ‘I only remember seeing one Hi-Flier. It had the original pickups with the nickel chrome surrounding. It’s possible there were others, but it was mostly that guitar, his Mustang, and the Veleno from memory.’”

Bailey said it might have been a Phase III Hi-Flier. Rash tried that. He tried a modded Hi-Flier with a humbucker. But it wasn’t until he saw a Phase II online with a mahogany neck and bought it out of desperation that he lucked out. He bought it.

Researching while he waited for it to arrive, Rash learned that Cobain did own a mahogany-necked Phase II Hi-Flier. There were pictures of him playing one at the Roseland Ballroom. The electric guitar pickups were stock.

“Literally all the stars aligned,” says Rash. “I know to you guys this sounds stupid, but for me, I’ve been trying to figure this out for so long. So I think you guys know what this means. There was only one thing left to do.”

And that was to play the thing. It sounds exactly like the record. Rash sounds at a loss in this video. He solved the mystery. But who’s to say that, like another great detective, might turn on his heel and ask, “Just one more thing…”

Well, as Rash alludes to in this video, there will be another video to tell us more about Phase II Hi-Flier pickups. “Simply put, those Phase II pickups are absolutely wild,” he says. “They’re so weird.” Yes, of course, he has already reverse engineered them.

You can get the Nevermind and In Utero IR Packs at Aaron Rash. And follow this story of obsession and learn more (all!?) about how Cobain got his sound at Rash's YouTube channel.

• Meet Aaron Rash: the YouTuber who's got so close to Kurt Cobain's Nirvana tones he's releasing a guitar and In Utero IR pack to share his discoveries

Two strands of Kurt Cobain’s hair are up for auction next month – the same two of six that were sold for over $14,000 back in 2021.

The hairs are part of an auction entitled Punks, Monsters, Smut and Madmen: A Countercultural Cross Section and they’re not the most bizarre item on offer.

That dubious accolade might belong to the blood-stained Y fronts that once belonged to the ultimate shock-rocker GG Allin. Their description reads ‘Signed in blood over the fly and INSCRIBED “Suck my ass it smells” to the reverse side. Stable; one hole near rear inscription; seemingly used; staining.’

Hmm-mm, lovely.

As for the Kurt Cobain’s hairs, well, yes they were previously sold by Iconic Auction four years ago. The description on both list Tessa Osbourne as the person who originally wielded the scissors.

Osbourne reputedly cut Kurt’s hair in Birmingham when Nirvana were over here on tour in 1989. Back then they were an obscure band on Sub Pop records, still very much in the shadows of their more famous labelmates Mudhoney. Which raises the question: did Osbourne have a premonition that Kurt and Nirvana would go on to become one of the most significant bands of their (or any) era? Or did she/does she routinely keep hairs from every client? Which is a bit creepy and strange...isn’t it?

There are other items in the Punks, Monsters, Smut and Madmen list which don’t raise such disturbing questions. There are lyric sheets, posters and vinyl signed by the likes of the Ramones and the Dead Kennedys. You could also – should you have sufficient funds – bid for the shopfront awning from the CBGB gift shop which was situated next to the iconic New York venue.

Better still, you could own an original piece of the venue’s dressing room wall which, as those who visited CGBGs will remember, was covered in hundreds of graffiti-ed names and tags of the many many acts who played there.

If you’re interested in any of this head over to Potter & Potter Auctions here. Live bidding starts on March 6, but absentee bids are now being accepted.

File under ‘Why didn’t they do this years ago?’ Paramount+ has announced that they’ve added a whole tranche of classic MTV Unplugged episodes to their streaming service, some of which haven’t been seen for over 20 years.

This includes over 50 episodes, from seasons 1 to 8 and 10 to 13 of the series, and include performances from the likes of Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, REM, Alanis Morisette, Oasis, Pearl Jam and perhaps the most famous Unplugged of all: Nirvana’s set from November 1993.

As well as Unplugged, Paramount has also got its hands on a whole load of VH1 Storytellers. These are seasons 1 to 9, 11 to 13, 15 and 16 and included in this lot are memorable episodes featuring artists like David Bowie, Foo Fighters, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Alicia Keys, Ringo Starr and Elton John.

The other show in the Paramount dump is CMT Crossroads, which launched back in 2002 and is still going to this day. The concept behind this is that a country star will team up with an artist in another genre and among the episodes available to stream now included ones with Sheryl Crow and Willie Nelson, Stevie Nicks and Lady A, Sting and Vince Gill and Lindsay Buckingham.

So if you’ve got access to Paramount+ that’s your next few months’ viewing sorted then...

You can sign up to Paramount+ here.

Ask any vintage collector and they will tell you that there’s something special about old guitars, their stories, the songs they’ve made – especially acoustic guitars, which age particularly well, sounding better as the years pass and the wood dries out.

But all that mojo stuff, and the power of legend? It doesn’t work every time and not on every player. In an interview with Revolver, Opeth frontman/guitarist Mikael Åkerfeldt revealed that he had recently had the chance to play Kurt Cobain’s “haunted” Martin D-18 at the Martin Museum, Nazareth, Pennsylvania, and even as a Nirvana fan it didn’t strike him as anything special.

“It was very beat up,” said Åkerfeldt. “It didn’t feel that good. There was nothing special about it, other than it had belonged to Kurt.”

Åkerfeldt doesn’t mention it by name but it is most definitely “Grandpa” that he is talking about – a 1953 Martin D-18 that Cobain was given before the touring cycle for Nevermind, which is now one of the star attractions at the Martin Museum.

As the story goes, Nirvana were yet to blow up, and money was tight. Cobain needed an acoustic for their upcoming tour and his friend, the Boston-based indie-folk artist Mary Lou Lord, could help him out, giving him her guitar, Grandpa, for the tour.

Cobain took Grandpa out, the rest was history. Nirvana got big. The guitar was returned to Lord and then Elliott Smith played it when Lord went touring with him.

Åkerfeldt is right. This 1953 D-18 is beat up. That it made it through a Nirvana tour unscathed is a minor miracle in and of itself. The wear and tear on both sides of the soundhole is something you don’t see every day but that’s what happens when it has been played hard by a left-handed guitarist in Cobain and by right-handed guitarists Lord and Smith – not to mention the decades of playing before those two got their hands on it.

That Cobain and Smith died young, some people took on a ghoulish fascination with Grandpa, as though it was cursed. Åkerfeldt was nonplussed by all that.

“Someone told us that guitar was haunted, like people who had that guitar had accidents,” he said. “I’m a Nirvana fan, but it was just a regular guitar to me.”

Åkerfeldt is no stranger to Martin guitars. He started using them with Opeth around the Damnation era, when the Martin replaced his old Seagull acoustic. He used to work in a Stockholm guitar shop that specialised in Martin guitars, making repairs to them, and because the shop was quiet Åkerfeldt would spend his time practising on acoustics.

“I was playing a lot and writing a lot for our second album [Morningrise] and developing my technique as an acoustic guitar player,” he told MusicRadar in 2010. “That’s something that made a lot of difference to me as a songwriter, guitar player and musician overall. The years in that store helped me to develop our sound.”

He might have been unmoved by Cobain’s Grandpa. But he tells Revolver that visiting the Martin HQ was like “visiting the Holy Land” – and there was one Martin he was so old – so valuable – it gave him the heebie-jeebies.

“I played a guitar from the 1800s,” said Åkerfeldt. “I got scared. They held it up to me and I kept backing away. It’s invaluable, you know? I don’t know what the value in money would be, but it’s an artefact. I get nervous around those kinds of things. But I did play it.”

Grandpa is one of the most famous acoustic guitars in the Martin Museum. But how much it would be worth is hard to say.

Cobain’s most famous Martin is the 1959 Martin D-18E that he played on Nirvana’s 1993 MTV Unplugged, which in 2020 became the most valuable guitar ever sold at auction. Australian businessman Peter Freedman, owner of Rode Microphones, paid a $6,010,000 for it.

Behringer's latest release is a clone of the Boss CE-1 Chorus Ensemble pedal, as used by Andy Summers and Joe Satriani. With the original pedal fetching big bucks on the used gear market, it was only a matter of time before Behringer stepped in with its low-cost £69/$79 solution.

"It is, of course, a faithful recreation of the Chorus Ensemble, the very first chorus pedal," says Behringer of its latest pedal release, the Chorus Symphony. The original pedal was released in 1976 and was the first to feature the chorus effect introduced in the company's Roland JC-120 and JC-60 Jazz Chorus amplifiers a year earlier (the latter of which Roland has just released in software form).

Notably, it was also one of the first to include the bucket-brigade (BBD) delay - short delays only previously made possible using tape.

Thanks to those innovations and the likes of Summers (who used the pedal on several Police hits including Message in A Bottle, Walking on the Moon and Don't Stand So Close to Me), and other artists such as Nirvana, Satch and Johnny Marr, the pedal has, like so many other early Roland/Boss products, not only achieved legendary status but exorbitant secondhand prices.

You could be looking at as much as four figures for a battered example of the original pedal, so step forward Behringer in a 'hold my pint' fashion to come up with a clone for a fraction of the cost, just £69/$79.

"I hope that someone gets my… chorus in a pedal," Uli Behringer probably isn't saying right now.

Like the CE-1, Chorus Symphony enables you to select between chorus and vibrato with a footswitch, and has a Chorus Intensity dial to adjust both chorus speed and depth simultaneously. There are separate dials to the right to adjust the same parameters for the vibrato effect.

The pedal has two outputs, so can be used in mono or stereo, and you can also simply use it as a preamp to produce the harmonic saturation as heard on the original Jazz Chorus amps. Tinkering with a dip switch in the Chorus Symphony's innards even lets you bypass this effect, should you wish.

There's more info on the Boss-a-like pedal at the Behringer website and in the video below, in which some Behringer youngsters also produce some decent Police-a-like music.

He has built a replica of Kurt Cobain’s aluminium Veleno guitar. He has compiled a forensically accurate suite of IRs capturing the late Nirvana frontman’s In Utero tone. Now Aaron Rash has unveiled his latest project, The Nevermind Sessions, an IR pack that sounds “identical” to the era-defining electric guitar tones of the Seattle grunge trailblazer’s seminal 1991 album.

Rash is YouTube’s most-authoritative voice on Nirvana guitar tone. In his words, he “started going down the rabbit hole” and what a journey that turned out to be. Along the way he befriended the late Steve Albini, the legendary producer responsible for putting In Utero down on tape.

Albini even lent Rash his Veleno for the project. Nirvana tech Earnie Bailey also helped him fill in the missing pieces, like how Cobain got that clean tone on In Utero from a Frankenstein’d tube amp that was rescued from a dumpster.

One of Rash’s great epiphanies in this archeological survey of Nirvana tone is that your amp’s speaker matters. Like, it really matters, and is the secret sauce to so many of the tones you hear on the records. Rash has gone to some insane lengths to source this gear and to test it. A 13-hour drive to pick up a vintage HiWatt from Seattle? No problem.

This dedication is what makes his YouTube channel essential viewing. It is what makes these IR packs worth checking out. He even recorded The Utero Sessions IR pack at Robert Lang’s studio in Seattle, where Nirvana tracked You Know I’m Right.

Speaking to MusicRadar in January, Rash said this was a learning process. On occasion, the gear seemed to change in real time, with speaker responses and tone changing after being exposed to too much fuzz pedal.

“It’s really weird. So I started taking speakers apart,” he said. “And I’ve actually re-coned a few, which was really, really eye-opening for me. I’ve learned that the tone is in the cone, more so than anything. So I did weird things like taking the cones off of different speakers and putting them on other speakers. It’s really weird stuff but it’s really interesting.”

So what’s in the box? Well, The Nevermind Sessions was another Herculean labour. “It sounds, literally, exactly like the record,” promises Rash. It also ships with a manual that walks you through everything you need to know. “It covers every pedal, every song, how many layers of what is recorded,” says Rash. “It’s super in-depth. It’s super-easy to use.”

Rash has organised all these sounds by song, so if you’re trying to nail that In Bloom rhythm sound you can just load up that IR and it’s there.

Though, one thing to note: the names to the tracks have been changed. You should be able to guess which IR goes with which song. Teenager Spirit? Yes, you guessed it. “I don’t want to get used, obviously, so everything is named a bit differently,” says Rash. “But you’ll know what it means.”

You’ll know how it sounds. Just check out the video, and listen to those opening powerchords to Smells Like Teen Spirit. Sorry, Teenager Spirit. It’s uncanny.

It’s also available now direct from Aaron Rash, priced $49.99. For more, subscribe to Aaron Rash’s YouTube channel.

Foo Fighters guitarist Pat Smear has revealed that his first ever performance with Nirvana did not go as he had planned - and that he wasn’t allowed to go on stage until he changed his guitar.

In a new interview for Premier Guitar, alongside his fellow guitar-playing Foos bandmates Dave Grohl and Chris Shiflett, Smear talks about Nirvana’s appearance on Saturday Night Live in 1993, shortly after he had joined the band.

The guitar that Smear had with him was a 1982 Charvel he had bought in his previous role as a backing musician for German singer-songwriter Nina Hagen.

He recalls: “She [Hagen] had a musical director, and they were snobs, and they hated that there was a f**king punk rocker in their band. They hated it so much. I mean, she didn’t, but the band did, and they’re like, ‘You need to get a good guitar.’ So I end up buying this Charvel.

He continues: “It was gorgeous. I mean, this thing was so pretty. I thought, ‘Okay, now I have a good guitar.’ So we’re doing my first-ever gig with Nirvana - Saturday Night Live. And I’m like, ‘Well, better play my good guitar. I’m gonna play my Charvel.’

“And what I didn’t know at the time – I don't even know if you [referring to Dave Grohl] were involved – but there was a discussion about me and that guitar like, ‘No, no, no, we can’t let him on stage.’”

Instead, for this performance, Smear was given a blue Mosrite Mark V by Nirvana leader Kurt Cobain.

“Kurt ended up giving me this rad f**king guitar, which is not a Charvel.”

In the remainder of his time with Nirvana, Smear played several other guitars that were gifts from Cobain, including a few primarily Fender Stratocasters.

And this particular story has a happy ending. In 2023, Smear returned to the stage of Saturday Night Live with the Foo Fighters and their guest star H.E.R.

“I noticed she was playing a Charvel,” Smear says. “She goes, ‘Yeah!’ [and I said] ‘I have a perfect guitar for you,’ and I sent her that guitar.”

RECORDING WEEK 2024: Recording our drums has never been more accessible, at least when it comes to getting our hands on great drum sets, drum mics, and audio interfaces for the job. But as you might have found out, the gear is only part of the equation: what you do with it is the important bit.

artofdrumming.com has been busy producing tutorials on how to recreate some of the most iconic recorded drum sounds - from The Beatles and Toto to Metallica, Nirvana, Blink 182, and more - and the results are Very Good Indeed.

What’s more, the focus here isn’t on sample replacement or augmenting. The videos cover shell sizes, head choice, tuning and muffling, as well as an overview of the types of mics and placement to recreate the sound.

Here are a few examples from ArtOfDrumming’s YouTube channel. Like what you hear? Check out more by visiting the channel and subscribing.

Phil Collins - In The Air Tonight

Phil’s evergreen air-drumming anthem is like a boomerang that we don’t ever want to stop coming back. It had a resurgence last year, but as well as that unmistakeable fill and tom-laden beat, the track is the perfect example of an iconic drum sound, one that Phil helped invent and would go on to change the sound of recorded drums forever.

Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit

Much has been written about Dave Grohl’s drum sound on the album that made Nirvana the biggest band in the world, including Grohl’s recent admission that he took inspiration from disco with his drum parts on Nevermind.

Sound-wise, there’s the Tama Bell Brass ‘Terminator’ snare, massive rack toms, bass drum tunnel and mixer, Andy Wallace’s apparent use of ambience samples to beef-up the body of the kit. Here, we learn at least two valuable lessons: you don’t need a crazy-expensive cast snare drum to get close to the sound, and, if you have a decent room, you won’t need the samples either.

Metallica - Enter Sandman

Metallica fans might have scoffed at the band’s stylistic left-turn for the Black Album, but thrash or not, there’s no denying that the drum sound is anything short of incredible.

The slower tempos gave space for the thundering drums, which are now unmistakeable for their sharp attack and deep sustain. As demonstrated here, if you can’t afford to decamp for a few months months in an LA studio with Bob Rock, there’s still hope for an almighty drum recoding!

Toto - Rosanna

We know, you’re already tapping out that halftime shuffle on your knees at the mere mention of one of Jeff Porcaro’s finest grooves. But, as well as the perfectly-placed subdivisions and smoothly executed ghosted snare notes, the magic of Rosanna lies in the pristinely recorded drum sound.

With a busy groove, tuning and muffling is everything, and in this video you’ll discover how to get the pitch, attack and sustain just right so that all you have to concentrate on is placing those notes as impeccably as Jeff.

The Beatles - I Wanna Hold Your Hand/Come Together

Like all things Beatles, Ringo’s sound evolved quickly. In this video, ArtOfDrumming shows the contrast in the open, natural sounds captured on I Want To Hold Your Hand, as well as the more experimental, heavily-dampened and close-mic’d sounds from Come Together. Spoiler: you’re going to need some tea towels.

Blink 182 - All The Small Things

Travis Barker took somewhere around eight hours to record his drum parts for Blink 182’s commercial breakthrough, Enema of the State. Not bad for a day at the office considering it almost instantly cemented his place as not only one of the most exciting drummers in punk, but would lay the foundation for him becoming one of the most influential drummers of the last two decades.

Here we find out how to cop some of Travis’s sounds from Enema…and how his seemingly extreme cymbal/tom placement actually helps create part of the sound in the studio.

• Get more recording stories and features at Recording Week 2024 here!

RECORDING WEEK 2024: As both a sound engineer and a musician, it is hard to quantify just how influential Steve Albini has been to me on a creative, technical and philosophical level when it comes to music. Despite recording some truly iconic albums that became a huge part of pop culture history, he always felt like one of us. He had a fiercely independent and DIY spirit that absolutely never broke or wavered in his many decades of working with bands.

He booked his own tours for his band Shellac, who regularly played small venues and interacted with their audience in humorous ways. He hated perceived music industry bullshit with a fierce passion (he considered his wife Heather Whinna an expert detector of it), and only cared about serving the art of those he worked with.

Famously refusing to take royalties on music he recorded and only ever asking for a flat rate – something which applied whether he was working for Nirvana or Raketkanon. He was always accessible to answer questions via e-mail or Twitter, replying to inquiries about his recording techniques in a thorough, matter-of-fact and efficient way. In our small scene, we all know someone who has made a record with him. We are not likely to see someone like him ever again.

With all this in mind, I've picked five of my favourite albums to be engineered by Albini. No mean feat given that he has probably touched more than a thousand records during the course of his life. I've picked my favourite works rather than going right for the best-known ones, and refer to him as an engineer rather than a producer here because that's what he considered himself – a tradesman who specialised in using analogue gear to record a band in a way that captured what they were about.

MONO - Hymn to the Immortal Wind (2009)

Japanese post-rock quartet MONO began their working relationship with Albini on their third album, Walking Cloud and Deep Red Sky, Flag Fluttered and the Sun Shined, but 2009's Hymn to the Immortal Wind is where their partnership really started to flourish.

Albini's organic approach to recording bands helped portray MONO exactly as they are – a hard-touring group at their best when they are playing live. To this day when you hear MONO performing Ashes In The Snow at one of their live shows, you feel the presence of that recording. Because it captured the essence of the band so perfectly. All of the elements are there with a sense of togetherness – nothing stands out as being overdubbed.

Early in the song, you hear a disembodied voice cueing in the guitar – a voice I have always assumed was Albini himself. And it was just kept there to preserve the integrity of what was committed to tape. A small detail I have always loved.

MONO have recorded the majority of their output with him ever since, and their upcoming album Oath may sadly be one of the last things to feature an Albini credit. The footage above shows the band playing a song from Oath at Albini's Electrical Audio studios during the recording of that album.

Jawbreaker - 24 Hour Revenge Therapy (1994)

Taken on during a very hectic period in his life when he was engineering up to 100 records a year, Jawbreaker's third full-length album is the exact kind of thing that Steve Albini excelled at capturing: a no-nonsense, straight-to-the-point power trio writing simple, heartfelt songs.

The recording schedule was notoriously tight, with Jawbreaker taking up residence in the Albini home for a week until tracking was complete. While the band did end up re-recording a couple of songs in California, Albini's touch can be found on the majority of the record, including Do You Still Hate Me? and West Bay Invitational.

As recounted in the 2017 documentary Don't Break Down, Albini originally thought he was being booking by the band Jawbox and was largely unfamiliar with Jawbreaker. There is a very matter-of-fact, hands-off feeling to this record – possibly more noticeably than anything else Albini recorded - but once again, the spirit of the band is fully intact.

In an Interview with Pitchfork in 2017, Albini said about working with Jawbreaker; "The band is doing all the work, I’m sort of part of the equipment." This philosophy is something he has been vocal about over the years, with the engineer essentially saying he wants to be paid like a plumber; do the work, take the fee and move on to something else. He even went uncredited on the original release. The way he preferred it.

Raketkanon - Rktkn#2

Raketkanon only made one of their three albums with Albini; their 2015 sophomore release Rktkn#2. But in my opinion, it is their best one. The music became weirder, goofier and contained more space. Songs like Florent, which goes from dense and impactful before leaning into spacious abstract noise, lend themselves perfectly to Albini's style of recording.

The second track, Nico Van Der Eeken, has a particular impact by just starting with drums alone. Whenever an Albini-engineered record begins with just drums, it is immediately identifiable. There's just a character there that is often mimicked but never matched, due to Albini's incredible live room in Electrical Audio – an instrument in itself and something of a recurring character among his recorded work.

Albini frequently talked in interviews about his drum recording technique, and how applying a 20ms delay to room mics would bring out the life in the drums. You can hear that all over this record.

Nirvana – In Utero (1993)

I've tried to be a little less obvious with my choices so far, but there's absolutely no way you can't mention this one. Nirvana became the biggest band on the planet after the release of Nevermind in 1991, and a lot of attention was on them. That also meant a lot of pressure to follow it up with something even bigger.

Perhaps seeking a way through all this that they were comfortable with, the band looked to Albini to record their third album. Being the legend he was, he took the biggest band in the world and turned them into a noise-rock band.

The guitar sound is noisy and trashy (YouTuber Aaron Rash has done great work investigating Albini and Kurt Cobain's approach here). The core of the band recorded live to retain the maximum impact, and there is a stripped-back, song-first approach with no unnecessary overdubbing or double tracking. Even the lead single, Heart-Shaped Box, has a raw, uncompromising feel to it as a result of Albini's nuts and bolts workflow – and a rather divisive guitar solo amongst the band members.

A song like Scentless Apprentice – which begins with just the drums – really highlights just how incredibly natural yet punchy Albini was able to make a drum kit sound. The recording makes Dave Grohl's hammering drum pattern during that song sound like the singular instrument it is, as opposed to every individual drum sounding like it was recorded in a different stratosphere.

There's a drummer's perspective to the panning of the kit, and the use of room and ambient mics were a core part of obtaining this sound, as was the space in which they were recorded. Albini has always used distance to create depth for drum sounds and there is no finer example than this.

Helmet - Meantime (1992)

It's hard to think of a band more primed to work with Albini than Page Hamilton's band – an outfit that encapsulates everything he was known for recording so expertly. Noisy guitars with janky rhythmic patterns, aggressive drums with bullet-like snare hits and a natural, room-driven sound.

Albini proved once again to be the bane of the commercial industry with this album – a large bidding war had taken place over Helmet, with major labels desperate to get the 'next Nirvana'. Steve didn't care, however, and was just interested in capturing the raw power that the band had and committing it to tape.

The album's lead single, Unsung, has a catchy chorus but descends into a noisy open noted outro with that classic room sound being heavily incorporated. The sharp contrast between the rawness of Albini's original recordings and the mixing of Andy Wallace (who incorporated snare replacement samples) may have irked Albini, but the strange hybrid of sounds actually led to the album sounding more unique and unusual.

This was a very tough list to collate, and there were dozens of records that could have made the cut - Including but not limited to albums by Neurosis, Sunn 0))), Jesus Lizard and Low. Which shows just how much of an important part of the underground Steve Albini was, and what a legacy he will leave behind. Rest in power, Steve.

• Classic Interview: Steve Albini – "A lot of people in my position are opposed to the home-recording of music. They feel like it cheapens what happens in the studio, but I disagree"

• Get more recording stories and features at Recording Week 2024 here!

Now here’s what you call a fresh perspective: in an interview with the London Evening Standard (now a weekly paper called the London Standard) award-winning actress Helen Mirren has said that she feels “sad” that Kurt Cobain died when he did. Why? “Because he never got to see GPS.”

Not the first thing you immediately think of when one’s mind turns to the tragic leader of Nirvana, but there you go.

Helen Mirren is pretty amazed by GPS, it seems: “It’s the most wonderful thing, my little blue spot walking down the street. I just find it completely magical and unbelievable.”

It’s not the first time Mirren has referenced Cobain in an interview. Turns out he’s often on her mind. In an interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2014, she said: “Look at Kurt Cobain - he hardly even saw a computer! The digital stuff that’s going on is so exciting. I’m just so curious about what happens next.”

A year later, she was speaking with Cosmopolitan when she came out with: “I was thinking about Kurt Cobain the other day and he died without knowing the internet, and I’m totally blown away by that.” Then the following year she told the Daily Mail: “If I’d died at 27, the age that Kurt Cobain died in 1994, I’d never have even known there was an internet! Incredible things are happening all the time and I can’t wait to see what comes next.”

So, is Mirren a fan? Or is it just that when she thinks of the huge leaps forward in technology we’ve seen in the past two decades her mind instantly alights upon Nirvana? Why him then and not the many other famous people cut down before their time in 1994 - Ayrton Senna, Bill Hicks, Labour leader John Smith, or Derek Jarman?

Who knows? In the interview Mirren was making the wider point of how fortunate she feels to have made it to the age of 79. “If you’re lucky, you get to be older,” she said. “And then there you are. Oh my God, I’m 79! I never thought I’d be 79. And then you say, OK, well this is it. This is what 79 is. And it’s kind of OK. It’s not brilliant, but it was not that brilliant to be 25 either.”

You could spend weeks, months and even years building the most astonishing, potentially era-defining tracks, but, if you then treat the release process as an afterthought, all your hard work is going to end up reaching nobody.

You might be thinking of deferring this side of things to external promotion agencies, but that doesn't mean that you can shirk on having a solid vision of just what your artist identity is.

The truth is, if you release music in an unbranded, visually inconsistent or generally clumsy way, then people can quickly lose interest, even if your music is legitimately awesome.

Worse than that, they might judge your (superb) music quite differently if you’ve plumped for a Times New Roman artist name and a badly cropped stock photo as your album art.

As the boom in self-releasing artists has increased exponentially over the last decade, so too has the growing requirement for musicians to think about how they present themselves.

In days gone by, it was typically a record label, photographer or manager who would delicately consider and construct an artist’s branding and image. Today, it’s more common for musicians to handle the building of this themselves. This is borne out by the sad truth that labels don’t give many a second glance unless they’ve already proved they can cultivate their own following.

But, if you get this stage right, then why would you need a major label anyway? As data reported by Catapult My Music underlined, independent artists now make up more than one third of the overall music business, and accounted for 50% of Spotify revenue in 2023.

Then there's stories like that of Lauren Spencer Smith, a self-releasing artist whose song Fingers Crossed landed in the top five of the UK chart following it going viral on TikTok. The reality is, that it's entirely possible to achieve major success as a self-releasing artist, and retain 100% of your IP.

Why your artist name is critical

The first consideration is whether you’re going to put out your music just as yourself (i.e. your own name) or have a tailored name that suits your music. Historically, artist names have resonated with the context of the time they first came to prominence, or infer something about their sound.

For example, if you think about the name ‘Pink Floyd’, based on the original style of the band, it perfectly sums up both the psychedelic, subversive nature of their music (‘Pink’) and the sense of playful whimsy that the early incarnation of the band evoked (‘Floyd’).

Many bands, particularly those on the heritage indie spectrum, might give themselves a ‘The’ as the definite article at the start of their name (The Strokes, The Black Keys etc), which implies a classicism, or attachment to a sense of proud lineage, stemming back to the early pioneers of rock and pop, who operated in a more formal age.

Others invoke a state of being, or sensation (Nirvana, Oasis etc) whereas others venerate technology, and allude to the technologically-driven music they create, in their name (Aphex Twin, 808 State, Modeselektor).

The point we’re making here is that choosing a band or artist name shouldn't be choosing a random assortment of words. A good name can play a significant role in communicating your intention to the listener before they’ve heard any of your music.

So, think carefully about the music you make, and the type of artist you want people to believe you are. If your name suggests a story, or raises a question, then all the better.

Beyond what the words of your band or artist name state, there’s also the visual impact of how the name looks. This one is critical, and is so often under-valued in importance. Your name will appear on your releases, your website, your socials platforms and your posters.

The biggest brands on Earth know that this is actually a more essential consideration than the words’ meaning. It’s why short, often-meaningless-but-memorable names become more a visual short-hand for a company or service than mean anything in of themselves (key examples include Nike, Apple, Kodak, Google.)

A big part of the above is the actual design of the name and how it appears as a logo. Design wise, it might be tempting to go minimal, yet often using unusual, little-used fonts, or colour-variations can really make your name stand apart from the rest. There's a superb run-down of some of the typography and design of some legendary acts over on indieground.net.

If you’re not great at graphic design, then it's well worth finding someone who can take your idea and craft some interesting spins. After all, this isn’t just a ‘name’ - it’s your business, and is worth taking the time to get right.

Some of the most recognisable band names in history have managed to become a visual short-hand for their respective genres. Just ask Kiss, Nirvana, The Ramones and, the originators of capitalising on band-branding, The Rolling Stones. All of which have spawned branding that has elevated their names into the world of general street fashion, worn by people who might not even be fans of their music.

But, if you’re just getting your feet off the ground as an artist, the core take-home here is not to just plump for the first thing that comes to mind. Test out some mock cover ideas or mock poster/social media advert ideas with different potential artist names, and see how the visual impact lands. If you’ve got close, honest friends to run it by, then definitely do so.

Getting your artist identity out there

After settling on your artist name, the next stage is to launch your artist presence on social media, and begin the process of building your audience. We'd consider this as a more vital step than even getting your streaming distribution locked down.

After all, if you’re planning on releasing music on the big platforms like Spotify, Apple Music or Tidal, you’re going to want an initial bedrock of listeners (even if they’re just friends and family) which you can gradually build upon.

While the platforms you choose might vary depending on your own personal preferences, we massively recommend you set-up an Instagram business account in the first instance.

According to stats amassed by New Artist Model, 35% of all adult social network users are on Instagram, but 72% of teenagers and 71% of 18-24 year-olds have accounts.This younger demographic is an essential one for music listening exposure and engagement.

You can upload videos in the form of reels, as well as art with audio either embedded into the asset or (once you’ve eventually got streaming platform distribution in-hand) directly attached your stories and posts. Take it from us, it's the easiest way to get immediate reaction to your music.

You're going to want to get set-up for tracking your engagement and directly contact your fans, which an Instagram Business account will provide. Instructions on how to set this up can be found here

Your profile image should be - at least initially - a scaled image of your logo within a 320 x 320 frame. This will be cropped into a circle, so your logo should sit centrally, design-wise. Your bio should be fairly brief, and you should reserve some space to include some critical call to actions, such as links to other pages or videos (when you get to making them, that is).

If you have pre-selected pics of yourself that you want to use for your artist identity socials, then use one of these as the cornerstone of your first post, detailing who you are and the kind of music you make.

If you don’t have any press pics, or want to remain somewhat ambiguous, then think of some more creative ways to visually represent, and tease, your music.

Though it might sound like a slog, spending a few hours with an image editor and your music can be quite an enjoyable process, and synthesising the perfect combination of visuals and music can go a long way to instantly grabbing those passive scrollers.

Turn your early followers into fans

We’re going to take the setting up of alternative social accounts, like Facebook or X, as read. Preferences will vary, but in our own experience of establishing a solo artist social media presence, Instagram tends to deliver the best results, and is a far quicker, compelling and often more creatively stimulating ecosystem to maintain.

A big driver to your posts, external links and videos can be through Instagram Stories. Where you can upload short-form videos, links to your posts/pictures or simply a link to your track (when you’ve got them out there). Having a story each day (containing a call-to-action) will, over-time, accumulate more views, streams and awareness of your output.

If you’re basing your launch as an artist around a specific release (in our case, this was an album) then you can begin promoting yourself with a tease campaign: Fragments of your tracks, intercut with creative imagery (which can be pretty subtle), which give the listener a feel of your sound.

Further ideas to bolster your Instagram feed could consist of:

• Posts about specific gear or tech you use. Why and how you use them.
• Posts about the writing of specific tracks and songs - including clips of bits you’re currently working on.
• Track-by-track descriptions of each track on your album/EP, explaining the background and story behind their making.
• Posts about inspirations, and/or experiences with notable other artists.
• Behind-the-scenes clips of recording certain tracks, or generally at work in your studio.
• And, more broadly, ANY nice or potentially engaging images you take can be co-opted into your artist Instagram page.

While these are all solid content generation ideas for your artist feed, you’re likely to be trumpeting this information into something of a howling void at this stage. But, as your tracks start to gain traction, and your videos start to clock higher views, linking back to your Instagram as the primary source of daily content, will keep engaging and reminding your audience that you exist!

Gaining momentum and teasing tracks

While we’ll delve deeper into the more complicated mechanics of distribution across streaming platforms in an upcoming article, we recommend that the first place you should upload your music is an artist-first platform like SoundCloud, Mixcloud, hearthis.at or Audius.

Unlike the major streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music, these types of platforms allow immediate account creation and the direct uploading of your tracks. You can then share them with anybody you choose.

You can personalise your account with your own branding and, most importantly, engage with other artists in your niche, and beyond. This is a great environment to get direct feedback from other artists and creators, and is the perfect space for making some initial connections that might become vital down the line.

Once you’ve got your SoundCloud (or alternative listening platform) account established, you can start directing your burgeoning Instagram audience to listen to full tracks by posting direct links to individual tracks in your bio, and in stories.

While it might be tempting to upload everything you’re wanting to get out there in one fell swoop, it can be a sure-fire attention-grabber if you try and tease your upcoming track drops over a period of time. Creating a sense of ongoing momentum that will eventually lead to you releasing your work on streaming platforms.

In the next part of this ongoing series, we’ll explore some further ways you can develop your artist identity, and grow your initial audience into a thriving community of fans!

Run DMC rapper Darryl McDaniels has been talking about his struggles with mental health and how he “relates” to Kurt Cobain.

McDaniels, aka DMC, one of the icons of old skool hip hop, was talking as part of the new MSNBC docu-series My Generation. It features interviews and archival footage from celebrity narrators and explores how life was/is for Baby Boomers (born 1946 to 1964), Generation X (1965 to 1981), Millennials (born 1981 to 1996) and Gen Z (born after 1997).

McDaniels fits into the Gen X bracket and during the interview talked about how Nirvana and their music resonated with him. “Nirvana was an honest expression of not being ashamed to put your angst on the front page,” he said of the group. “I relate to Kurt because I was there. Later in my life, I became suicidal. And I’m fortunate to still be here, so I have a responsibility to talk about it.”

“They have a song, ‘Come as You Are’,” he continued. “Come happy and high and jovial, come as depressed as you are. But unless you admit how you feel, whether good or bad, you never heal. We’re all in this together.”

It’s not the first time the rapper has been open about his struggles. In 2016 he published a memoir Ten Ways Not To Commit Suicide, which revealed how low he was feeling during the late 90s and how an unlikely piece of music saved his life.

“I was probably at my suicidal worst in 1997 during a two-week-long tour in Japan,” he wrote.“The only song I listened to then was a soft-pop ballad by Sarah McLachlan called Angel.”

“I cannot overemphasise how important that song was to me in the midst of my depression.

"I thought long and hard about killing myself every day in Japan. I tricked myself into thinking that my family might be better off without me... Whenever I’d listen to Angel, though, I always managed to make my way back from the brink.”

Hey, whatever works. Of course, in addition to battling alcohol addiction during this period, McDaniels would also suffer huge loss – his bandmate, DJ Jam Master Jay (real name Jason Mizell) was murdered in New York in 2002.

It’s one more link to Nirvana – another trio that changed the course of music history but who lost a central band member in tragic circumstances. Thankfully, McDaniels is still very much with us.

YouTuber and polymath Aaron Rash has been on another Nirvana mission – and it's culminated in him buying the same year Mosrite Gospel as Kurt Cobain's own. Most fans know he used a Mosrite, less that is was the main electric guitar used on the band's 1991 breakthrough album Nevermind.

Cobain's left-handed 1966 Mosrite was white, and the story goes that it was stolen from Nirvana's van in mid-May – slap bang in the middle of sessions for the album with Butch Vig in LA. It was never seen again, but it had already played its part in shaping rock history.

As Aaron demonstrates in the video above with the 1966 sunburst model he now owns, the stock Gospel is the Lithium clean guitar – you can hear it. "Another thing that's cool about this guitar is it has naturally chorus-y sound," notes Aaron. "It sounds like a chorus – but there's no chorus."

As the Nirvana historian notes part of what makes this guitar sound unique are its pickups – they feature an 'air coil' rather than a traditional bobbin. 

The magnets are placed underneath the coil with epoxy used under the pickup covers to help cut down on the risk of feedback. And the sounds Aaron demonstrates playing parts from the songs Come As You Are and Drain You (with the forthcoming Nevermind IR pack that's being released to follow up his In Utero one) certainly sound thicker than a P-90 to my ears. And the combo of Mosrite Gospel and Aaron's IR nails the sound!

"It's like I'm sitting here playing Kurt's Gospel through his Nevermind rig – it's crazy, it sounds exactly the same".

Aaron also reveals in the video that he's working on a Bleach IR pack as well as a Nevermind one, and he's "almost" done with the production aluminum guitars he's going to make available. As he explains in our interview from early 2024, they're inspired by the late Steve Albini's Veleno model he loaned to Kurt Cobain that became a key guitar in the tracking of Nirvana's In Utero album. 

"The way that the aluminum guitars are going to work is that I'll probably do runs of 15 at a time," explains Aaron. "They're probably going to sell out really quick because the amount of interest in there has been through the roof."

If that wasn't enough, Aaron has a pedal coming out too – The Engine. It's based on the tones Cobain used on In Utero and some of his home recordings that were provided by a super rare Univox Superfuzz pedal Cobain owned, had stolen (notice the theme) and a replica built by his tech Earnie Bailey. After Aaron built a pedal himself by ear to replicate the 'engine-like' sound it makes, a company is going to mass-produce them for Aaron to sell on his site. 

Keep an eye on aaronrash.com for preorders and to buy the In Utero IR pack now.

PastFX is a guitar effects company out of Brisbane, Australia, that specialises in reproductions of classic stompboxes, and its latest release is one for Nirvana electric guitar tone chasers out there, for anyone looking for a vintage-voiced chorus pedal.

It’s called Kurt’s Cologne, and it is a BBD-driven analogue stereo chorus inspired by the EHX Small Clone, and Kurt Cobain's Nevermind-era tone. This is one for nailing those seasick Come As You Are Tone – but it is not just that. There is a lot more going on here. 

With a three-way decade mode switch, and the Panasonic MN3007 PastFX’s choice of chip, this offers three distinct flavours of Small Clone chorusing from the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s, and there are plenty of options for fine-tuning it.

Unlike the original Small Clones, on which a slider adjusted the depth of the chorusing, here we have an eight-way rotary dial to set the depth, and it is configured to make the original settings easily available. Position 3 on the depth dial gives you the “slide down” position of an original Small Clone. Position 8 gives you the “slide up”.

The Rate control sets the speed of the LFO and interacts with the LED, which will pulse in tie with the LFO. There is also a phase switch that reverses the phase of the second output, and if that’s not all then you also have hi-cut and low-cut switches to further tweak the sound of the effect.

Elsewhere, you’ve got the usual Level control to adjust output volume, while the all important Mix knob sets the balance between the wet processed signal and the input signal. 

Not that we ever advise anyone to touch the trimpots inside of a pedal – it always feels like an exercise in opening Pandora’s Box – but there is an internal trimmer for adjusting the stereo volume. 

You can run this off a regular DC pedalboard power supply at 9V or 18V and PastFX promises low-noise performance from the unit and a current draw of 50mA.

It is priced $299 AUD (approximately £159/$199) and shipping is free to many territories. For more details, head over to PastFX.

If this is the missing piece of your Nevermind-era pedalboard yet you still struggle to cover the more unsanitary tones of In Utero, Nirvana tone guru Aaron Rash’s The Utero Sessions IR Pack should have everything you need in software form. You can read more about Rash’s epic Kurt Cobain tone quest in MusicRadar’s interview with him.

Krist Novoselic has been guesting with a Nirvana tribute band.

The ex-Nirvana bassist joined FooVana, a Portland-based tribute act who play – you guess it – Nirvana and Foo Fighters songs, on stage at Geordie’s Garage in Vancouver last week. He played on versions of Smells Like Teen Spirit, Lithium and Blew, from their 1989 debut album Bleach. It had been the first time Novoselic had played the latter in more than three decades.

FooVana had teased the performance on social media, writing on Facebook: “Get down here to Georgie’s Garage and Grill! Show’s about to start! Oh yeah that’s right… Somebody else is here!!!”

It’s not the first time Novoselic has played Nirvana material recently. When his new band The Bona Fide Band played Cobain’s hometown of Aberdeen, Washington in June they added Love Buzz, a Shocking Blue cover that his old band covered to their setlist.

The Bona Fide Band are part of Novoselic’s campaign for US president. Sounds bizarre, but it’s true. The bassist is part of the Cascade Party, an organisation whose goal is to “build a political organisation which merges with social media.” To get on the presidential ticket in Washington State, the Cascade Party would need to establish themselves as a ‘bona fide’ party by hosting a convention. To publicise this, Novoselic has launched the Bona Fide Band, which are playing a heap of shows around the state – they have dates pencilled in for Tacoma, Yakima and Spokane this week alone.

Unlike Dave Grohl, who has now spent nearly three decades ploughing the same field with Foo Fighters, Novoselic has dipped in and out of music in the 30 years since Nirvana ended. He’s released albums as part of short-lived projects such as Sweet 75 and Eyes Adrift and even joined original Californian punk band Flipper for a while. He’s always been politically engaged though and published a book, Of Grunge And Government: Let’s Fix The Broken Democracy in 2004.

Last year in an NME interview Novoselic revealed that he, Grohl and the other suviving Nirvana member, Pat Smear, occasionally meet up, jam and record the results. “There was a time after Kurt died when I said to myself, ‘I’m never going to play these songs again’, “ he said. “That was part of the grief I went through. We don’t want to overdo it, we try to make it special and be grateful.”

Some time ago, Nirvana superfan Aaron Rash fell down a rabbit hole chasing Kurt Cobain’s wiry and feral In Utero electric guitar tone, and after two years of obsessive development Rash has unveiled an IR pack that allows you to recreate Cobain’s tone at home.

The Utero Sessions IR pack is a labour of love and no small amount of investment on Rash’s part. Over the past years, he has gone through all kinds of amps trying to find the right one that sounds just like the record.

“I have bought and sold probably seven different Quad Reverbs to find the the perfect sounding one, because – news flash – they don’t all sound the same, even with the same speakers,” he says. “They really vary all over the place.”

Finding the right speakers turned into an epic quest in itself. Speaking to MusicRadar in January, Rash said it was less about which guitar amp was used and more about the speakers, especially when it came to articulating the right texture of distortion.

“Every amp is different and it's going to affect the tone,” Rash said. “But I found speakers make the most difference, especially for distortion tones – it’s like night and day. And I’ve always thought about it like this: if you take white noise and you run it through a speaker, every speaker is going to have its own profile – they’re all going to have their own sonic profiles. Distortion is just like white noise really – if you hear it without going through a speaker, it just sounds like trash… The speaker is really important.”

What you get in The Utero Sessions is a very specific speaker, one that was made by Utah specifically for Quad Reverb but rarely found. Not many were made. “With its undersized magnets, and 16 ohm voice coil, nothing else sounds quite like it,” says Rash.

Creating the pack, Rash used the exact same 1940s ribbon mics, with the secret sauce being the room in which the IRs were created. He also used the knowledge from Kurt Cobain’s guitar tech, Earnie Bailey, and In Utero’s producer, the late Steve Albini, who become a mentor for Rash in this quest. When there was much debate about whether there was a Boss DS-1 distortion pedal or a DS-2, Albini confirmed it was the former – and more than that, that Cobain would keep a bunch of them around. 

If you have followed Rash on his YouTube channel, you will know that no stone has been left unturned. He once even made a replica of Albini’s aluminium Veleno guitar that Cobain used to track Heart-Shaped Box and Very Ape.  

“I sourced all the original microphones that were used on the record, preamps… literally everything, and the amount of money that I’ve spent has got to be astronomical,” he says. “I honestly don’t want to know how much I’ve spent to do this, but it’s done! And I am so happy to share it with you guys.”

To use the pack, you will need a software amp guitar plugin. Rash recommends the Softube Vintage Amp Room, but says any sort of Fender Twin Reverb-style of amp pack would work. “The amp’s not really important,” he says. “What’s important is the IR pack.”

Rash offers a step-by-step guide to how to upload the IRs onto your software and get The Utero Sessions up and running. He uses Fractal’s Cab Lab IR loader for the job. 

Watch the video above for an idea of how it sounds and how it works. Head over to Aaron Rash to order. Priced $49.99, The Utero Sessions is available now. Read MusicRadar's interview with Aaron Rash here, where he takes us back to the start of this tone hunt, retracing the steps that brought him here.

The drive-by opinion on Joe Preston – if the casual music fan has heard of him – is that he’s a burly man living in a remote wooded area who once played with the Melvins. And while that’s true, it’s hard fair to someone who, despite his low-key demeanour, is one of the more thundering bassists to come out of the vaunted early-90s grunge scene.

But then again, boiling Preston down to a “grunge bassist” isn’t fair either. Sure, he played with Earth and the Melvins, the latter of which are perpetually lumped in with grunge, but the albums he recorded, Lysol, and Joe Preston, aren’t remotely grunge. Though he did appear on Night Goat, a cut that, funnily enough, did end up on the Melvins grungiest record, Houdini, which Kurt Cobain was involved with. Go figure.

Anyway, after things soured with the Melvins, Preston formed his one-man-band Thrones and went on to play with Sunn O))) and High On Fire. Of course, all of this was before he retreated from the biz. “I’ve been in so many different bands,” Preston tells MusicRadar. “Sometimes, it hasn’t ended all that great, but I’ve also toured so much… it’s hard to remember some of the things I’ve done.”

He may struggle to remember, but his cavernous discography, the only thing that matches his heavier-than-heavy playing, tells a story of a player that’s meant much more to the scene than meets the eye. To this, Preston shrugs, “People remind me about it once in a while.”

He adds: “But there's also the aspect of internet professors that want to correct your experience about what they've read about what your life is like. People have heard of me because of my one or two years in a band, but that was like 10 minutes for me, as opposed to actually playing live with somebody for a long time.”

“I've gotten used to being relegated as extremely unimportant,” he says. “I’ve been involved in all these projects, but I'm not the cool person in them, you know? So, it’s just such a weird thing.”

For now, Preston is lying low. His days of chasing the dream, joining bands, and looking to make big bucks via big albums are over. Preston has talent; if he wanted to, he could find a gig, but at 55, he simply doesn’t want to. “I have agreed to put very little energy into playing shows and only to things that sound fun,” he says. 

“Since I've done that, I feel better,” he insists. “And the shows that I do are a lot more fun. It seems to be working out okay. But maybe I’ll write something, but don't hold your breath. I’m sure not.”

What got you going on bass guitar?

“Basically, I was going to college and hanging out with this girl who wanted me to give her bass lessons, and after a while, I just started playing it more and more. And then, my brother was always trying to get me into bass, but I wasn't having any of it at first, but that eventually changed.”

Once you got rolling, did you have an inclination toward the type of player you wanted to be?

“I would say no, not at all. [laughs] I mean… I was really into punk rock and metal as a kid, and the person who inspired me as a bass player was Mike Dean from Corrosion Of Conformity. But I didn't go into it thinking, 'I’m gonna do this,' or anything like that.”

Can you remember your first bass ?

“I think it was Hondo or something like that, kind of like a [Fender] P-Bass copy. My brother gave me one of those, but unfortunately, that and my first amp are destroyed, but I still have them now.”

What was the local Portland scene like when you started seriously gigging?

“It had a lot going on. Portland had a bunch of different venues, and I got to see Municipal Waste’s first show, or it was definitely like their first week, or something like that. Like, I got to see a lot more once I started going to see bands, and I saw the Melvins when they first started and got to know them really well.”

By the looks of it, your first serious band was Earth. How did you get the gig?

“I had met Dylan [Carlson]; I lived in this apartment building for a while, and I got connected with him and Nirvana when they were first starting. They were all really obsessed with the Melvins, and after I first saw them, I really liked them, too. That’s how I started playing with Earth. I lived up in Oregon, and we would drive up to Olympia and practise for a weekend.”

What are your memories of putting together Extra-Capsular Extraction?

“That was the first time any of us had really been playing in a real studio. I remember we didn’t have any way to tune our instruments between the three of us, so we had to re-tune to each other before the start of each song. [laughs] 

“We also hadn’t been playing live for long, so the songs were kind of uncertain, and if we screwed up, it would derail the entire thing, and we'd have to start over. I remember we kept getting slower and slower, played super loud, and had lots of sustain.”

You toured with Nirvana while with Earth before they got big. What was it like seeing them go through the roof in terms of popularity?

“It was exciting and weird because when things started getting going for them, it all happened quickly, from being broke punk rock guys to being able to buy stupid stuff or whatever. In the spring or summer of '91, we went down there, and they were recording Nevermind.”

“It was just really weird to see them get to that level. I got to be with them when the A&R guys would take them out, and it was really weird because they went from being a band they’d never heard of to wanting to talk to them. It was a weird time because it was the beginning of all this brown-nosing from labels.”

From there, how did you end up joining the Melvins, who you mentioned you’d become friendly with?

“There was no audition, and I already knew them. And I’d gone on tour with Nirvana [with Earth] and stuff. I’d also interviewed them for a magazine I was writing for, so I’d known them for several years by then. 

“But I had just moved to Olympia, and I heard some ruckus outside my house outside in the street, and then on my porch, and it was Kurt and Dave from Nirvana, who had a note for me with a message from Buzz, saying, ‘This is not a joke, call Buzz about playing with the Melvins.’”

I’ve always found it interesting that as grunge was blowing up, after you joined the Melvins, the band recorded a drone record in Lysol.

“I don’t know… that’s just what we had song-wise. I’m sure I want to comment on where that came from, but that’s the new songs we had and what we were working on. I mean… none of this stuff, as far as I could tell, was part of a grand plan. It was just like what you end up working on. But things are so genre-oriented, and there were a lot of weird bands, but there wasn’t this… I’m not sure how to answer that.” 

And then, there were the Kiss parody records, which were meant to be like Kiss’s four solo records from ’78. It’s been said that you weren’t really into it; what was the story behind the Joe Preston record?

“Well, it basically was Buzz [Osborne]'s idea, and we said, ‘That’ll be cool.’ But I was into it as much as any of those guys; I don’t know. I know they’ve said some shit about it, and like, I don’t really care, but I didn’t… it was the first time I actually got to record anything without anybody telling me what I was supposed to be doing.

“I don’t write songs all the time, and he was not happy with how I was putting things together. Like, I didn’t know what to do, so there was just a long song I’d cobbled together from a couple of different songs, but it was kind of going nowhere. Like, we played them once or twice, but the other one was someone else that, in a lot of ways, was mind-blowing, and the first time I got to be completely honest about something. 

In a lot of ways, the Joe Preston Melvins record is a precursor to what you went on to do with Thrones. It must have been refreshing to do that after the Melvins didn’t work out.

“Honestly, it was. After I got kicked out of the Melvins, which I was really not happy about at all, I just kind of stopped. I just wanted to play something different after my experience in the Melvins, and I was like, ‘I really don't want to be told what to do or play." I thought, "Whatever I do, I want to do it alone.’”

How did you end up working with Sunn O))) in the early-2000s?

“A lot of collaborations I've been a part of came from just talking to people interested in striking up a conversation and saying, ‘Hey, we could do this thing.’ It worked out a lot, and I’ve done some surprising things. But we spent a few days hanging out, and they had rough ideas about what they wanted to do. We just said, ‘Let’s see what comes of it,’ and that’s how a lot of things I’ve done happen.

“But with Sunn O))), on the record with the coffin on the cover [Oracle], I ended up coming in, and they just wanted me to do a jackhammer solo on Belülrol Pusztít. We went to Home Depot, rented a fucking jackhammer, and then looked for something that we could go and destroy. [laughs] I ended up doing that because I was the only person in the room who could hold onto it for a while. [laughs]”

What led to you joining High On Fire in 2004?

“I kind of stepped into that one. I had played my last show on a US Thrones tour, and I got this email that said, ‘Hey, George [Rice] quit, we’re looking for a new bass player. We want to talk to you about it.’ And by the time I got home from my last show in Denver, Colorado, two or three days later, there was a CD with some new stuff they were working on and a list of songs they wanted me to learn, and then I flew down.”

What was the chemistry like once you got in the room with the rest of the band?

“At this point, it was like, ‘We didn't even do this record; we’re just about to do a record.’ We started jamming for, I think, four days, but as we were going through stuff, it wasn't clicking right away. We took a break for lunch, and we said, ‘Why don't we just relax?’ And it ended up going well from there.”

What are your memories of recording Blessed Black Wings with High on Fire, which the late Steve Albini produced?

“Recording was really cool. It was with Steve at Electrical Audio; he was awesome to work with. He was a legend. As a person, for me, he has legendary status. I’d already met him several times and actually played with Shellac a couple of times, but getting to be there was such a nice experience.”

What made Steve special, and how did he most impact Blessed Black Wings?

“You know, he was a studio pro, and the people there know what they’re doing, and there was no attitude about it. It went smoothly, and Steve really wanted to help you make the record that you wanted. So, you go in knowing what you want, and luckily for me, all I really wanted to do was play and hang out, so working with him was really pleasurable and comfortable.”

It seems like the vibe within High on Fire was good, so why did you leave?

“After we recorded the album, I never had such a long break as we had after the tour. It was the longest I’d ever had, and two years went by without playing. I'd never had more than two weeks off ever, so two years really dragged me down. By the end of it, I was like, ‘I'm bummed out,’ and there’d be no money, and I just said, ‘I don't think I can do this anymore.’ But we ended on good terms, and working with them was great.” 

You live in a remote area and haven’t been very active in the music scene lately. Are you days of touring the world over? 

“I recently played three shows, but I don’t really play shows anymore. My life has changed radically because of family stuff over the last decade, and touring turned into a pretty stressful thing for me to do. 

“But I had three really good shows and got great feedback from people, which made me think, ‘I have to remember to check my attitude about stuff.’ I have to remember that while I might not like what I’m doing all the time, it might mean something to somebody, and it’s a good thing to spread it around.”

And how about new music?

“No, not really. But my 30th anniversary of doing Thrones – which was pointed out to me – is coming up. I’ve had it be a good and bad thing when bands break up, but it’s pretty difficult to break up when you’re one person. [laughs] And when I write stuff, I go slowly and beat myself up over it, so it’s kind of done; it’s a soft breakup.”

Looking back, as far as gear, what’s been the secret to your distinctive tone?

“Oh, well, I’ve just always had the same gear. I still have it all, though it’s all falling apart. [laughs] I’ve also been a fan of really unpopular multi-effects pedals that are not easy to find, and a lot of them have started to get really expensive. But, like, I’ve used this one cord forever, and I've bought a couple of extras when I find them.”

“I haven’t gotten any new gear for a long time. The magic thing against my need for stuff really is, ‘Oh, I just can’t afford any extra crap at this point.’ I mean, to buy more Sunn Amps at this point would be expensive. They used to be like 200 bucks, and not hard to find, not anymore.”

“At this point in my life, I’m more interested in finding something nobody wants. But gear is really overrated; every time people start talking to me about pedals, string gauges, and shit like that, I really start to tune out.”

Having been through the wringer as you have, do you have any regrets?

“I hate the music industry. Personally, I think it’s the worst thing in the world. But here’s my regret: trying to make a living off playing music. That was the biggest mistake I’ve ever made in my life. It was one of those things where it sapped all the joy out of it for me. So now, it’s difficult for me to pick it up and go, ‘This will be enjoyable.’”

So, what’s your best advice for someone looking to break into the music industry?

“To set your bar low. Like, set your expectations for reward very low. If you do what you like and don't try to do what you’re ‘supposed’ to do, your rewards will be quite a lot. I don't know… I’m saying it all wrong. Just do what you love doing, and make the things you do worthwhile, rather than doing things that you don’t love.”

Earlier this month, the world of recording lost a unique entity when engineer, Steve Albini passed away after suffering a heart attack at his studio, Electrical Audio on 7 May. Once carrying a reputation as outspoken, opinionated, and possibly even curmudgeonly thanks to his refusal to suffer no fools, in later years, the Shellac guitarist, and man who recorded Nirvana, PJ Harvey, The Pixies, Bush and many, many more, frequently opened up about his approach to capturing bands in the studio. 

Luckily for us, there’s plenty of footage to devour online, however many of these are short clips from interviews, rather than hands-on, in-the-studio demonstrations. Perhaps the most definitive documentation of Steve Albini’s studio workflow comes in the form of his session with online recording school, Mix with the Masters, and in tribute to Steve Albini, MWTM has now uploaded Albini’s in-depth video walkthrough to YouTube.

During the near-four-hour video, we’re treated to a comprehensive overview of Albini’s methods for capturing guitars, bass, vocals, and of course, his signature drum sound. It’s punctuated with an all-new Q&A session with Electrical Audio engineer, Greg Norman and longtime collaborator, Tim Midyett.

Captured at La Fabrique studios in the south of France — the man himself walks us through his microphone choice and placement, tips on tuning and dampening drums, while also lifting the lid on some of the ingredients to achieve the ‘Albini sound’.

Drum-wise, just some of the golden nuggets include his preference for double-micing toms (batter and resonant side), his use of Coles 4030/4038 ribbon mics as cymbal ‘spot mics’ rather than capturing a ‘kit snapshot’ in the traditional overhead placement, and why you’ll never hear a hi-hat mic on a Steve Albini-engineered recording.

Albini also details his use of a batter-side, small condenser mic (often a lavalier mic) on the bass drum, in combination with the now-discontinued Beyer Dynamic M380 placed inside the drum. Albini’s favoured ‘kick-in’ mic offers a bi-directional polar pattern, eliminatiing sound from the sides, and minimising the ‘beachball’ effect that can often detract from beefy bass drum sounds.

As well as this, he runs us through some of his distinctive floor-mic methods for capturing room ambience, and the placement of a front, stereo ribbon mic to create the overall stereo image of the drum kit.         

It’s not just the gear, though, Albini also shares tips on using side-chaining and peak-limiting to help minimise bleed between the mics, as well as demonstrating his way of bulking up bass drums at the mixing stage by creating a feedback loop using busses and an outboard EQ. 

Of course, it’s not just drums - there’s a treasure trove of information for anyone looking to capture traditional rock band instrumentation using Albini’s organic ‘sound-in-the-room’ methodology. 

It’s an incredible insight into the workings of an engineer who many consider to have been the last bastion of traditional recording, delivered in Albini’s own inimitable style. It’s not a short video, but we’d urge anyone who has a passing interest in production and engineering to give it a watch, just in case it goes back under lock and key.  

Engineer and musician Steve Albini has died after suffering a heart attack at his Electrical Audio recording studio in Chicago. Staff confirmed the news to Pitchfork earlier today (8 May).

Albini leaves a legacy as one of alternative rock's most respected figures both as a guitarist and vocalist with post-punk bands Big Black, Rapeman and Shellac, but also an influential engineer (he pushed back on the description of 'producer') for bands including Nirvana (In Utero), Pixies (Surfer Rosa), Pj Harvey, Page & Plant and Manic Street Preachers. 

His band Shellac were preparing to release To All Trains next week, their first album in a decade, ith tour dates to follow. Albini only recently appeared in an Electrical Audio 'Gear Dork' video on the Samamp V.A.C. 40. 

Albini never lost touch of this hands-on approach to sharing his studio insight with others; from the perspective that he was himself was still learning and discovering. His engineer's approach to his work with bands was all about capturing, and not trying to change the artists he recorded.

"For my part, I've always seen my job as primarily technical," he told us in 2013. "Where, whatever the band wants to do with the record then my job is to facilitate that."

Albini recently gave an insightful interview with YouTuber Aaron Rash delving further into this side of things when he worked with Nirvana on their 1993 album, In Utero.

• Classic Interview: Steve Albini – "A lot of people in my position are opposed to the home-recording of music. They feel like it cheapens what happens in the studio, but I disagree"

YouTuber Aaron Rash's dedication to the details of Kurt Cobain's guitar tones is beyond reproach. We've already talked in-depth with him about it, but now it emerges In Utero producer Steve Albini is a fan of Aaron's videos too – telling him he's "in awe" of his work. This brings us to the meeting we've been waiting for; Aaron Rash quizzing Steve Albini on the recording of Nirvana's third studio album.

By Aaron's own reckoning, questions for Albini on In Utero during previous interviews rarely dig into the kind of gear detail producers and guitar fans want to know about; mics and guitar amp choices especially. So this is his chance to deliver for Nirvana and Albini fans, and it does that and more.

One revelation that emerges even before the interview begins is Albini sold the Veleno aluminum guitar Cobain used on In Utero (that Rash has used as inspiration for his own design) for a "shit-ton of money" via a dealer and it's now in the Grammy Museum's collection in Cleveland Ohio. So good news for fans wanting to get closer to it. 

The interview above is a must-see for fans, Albini is extremely accommodating and open about an album many people would be tired of being asked about by now. His recall of specific information is also highly impressive, and Aaron's questions invite insight the engineer previously hasn't had a reason to share. 

"I know that I used the RCA BK5, which is a fairly aggressive, raspy-sounding ribbon microphone," he confirms on one of the recording mic choices for capturing Kurt Cobain's guitar cabs.  "I had the Beyerdynamic M130 and the STC 4038s, and I'm not certain but I think I might have brought an RCA 74 with me."

Of course, Aaron has these mics – he's so dedicated to delivering the most accurate IRs for a forthcoming In Utero pack for fans, this kind of detail is part of his M.O. He even calls the RCA 74B "the most amazing guitar mic I've ever used in my entire life".

Albini recently explained his ongoing process of exploring ambient miking for guitars, but back in the 1993 In Utero sessions he was still placing the mic "dead in the middle of the speaker cone". 

"The working distance from the speaker would vary a lot depending on the sound," Albini says. "If it was too thin, I would often move the mic closer, if it was too boomy or bassy I would often move the mic back, so that distance front to back would change a lot but I often put the mic dead centre on the speaker.

"It's rare that I would have more than two microphones as a close mic on the cabinet," Alibi explains of his approach for Cobain's guitars. "I would occasionally have the two close mics and then a room mic. If there were two amps running I would have two mics on one then one mic on another but I rarely do a big array of microphones around a guitar amp. I would rarely put four or five mics around a guitar cab – that's just breeding a scab in my opinion. You just get too many options and then everything sounds like shit and you're not getting anything done. So I tend to limit my options to one or two." 

Albini also shines light on the cab side of Cobain's In Utero setup – Aaron previously detailed his revelation that the late musician used a specific iteration of the already scarce Fender Quad Reverb tube combo to track some of the guitar parts for the album.

"He didn't use any external cabinets with the Quad Reverb," confirms Albini, who also doesn't recall any amp stacking being used during the February 1993 recording sessions at Pachyderm Studios in Minnesota. "It was just the internal speakers and I know the tubes were fucked up on that amp but I want to say that one of the speakers was blown as well."

Some amp model details are still unconfirmed though. 

"He had a Randall amplifier – but I forget which model," adds the engineer of the solid-state combo Cobain brought to the sessions. "It might have been a Switchmaster, or it might have been a Commander. I honestly don't remember.

"He had an amp that he was using on tour that was a Mesa/Boogie preamp and a solid-state power amp," confirms Albini. "And he set that up with a 4x12 in the studio and it sounded like dogshit. It was really just brittle, nasty sound. He was mad, when he set it up – 'You mean this is what I've been playing through?!' It shocked him how bad it sounded.

Another unexpected piece of intel concerns Cobain's love of Boss DS-1 distortion pedals – or more specifically one of them. "He had a bunch of thee DS-1 distortions, and he claimed that all of them were bad except one," reveals Albini. "And I couldn't hear any difference but he could hear a distinct difference between these DS-1 Boss pedals. So had a DS-1 that he used, but I remember him not liking that as much as the Tech 21 SansAmp… that was the principle boost and overdrive sound for him, using that SansAmp pedal."

Albini also reveals two other pedals being in around for guitar tracking. 

"A Memory Man that had the vibrato function or a chorus function." But where and if that appears is unconfirmed. The second is 'Pedal X' and it nearly caused a rift between Cobain and bassist Krist Novoselic.

There was a solo in Heart-Shaped Box and Kurt wanted a really wild sound," explained Albini. "He wanted it to be a really uncontrolled sound that would really sort of snap into that pretty tremolo. For that we used this box that my friend Mr Bill made for me that was ring modulator/overdrive pedal that he caused Mr X, or Pedal X. It was a ring modulator pedal that had an amplifier that could be overdriven in it. At its lowest settings it was a tremolo and at its highest settings it was a ring modulator and anywhere along that path you could turn the gain up and it would overdrive. 

"But it only had an on/off switch, it wasn't like you could turn off the tremolo and then turn on the gain – it was always one or the other. Always on or always off. Kurt played around with it for a while and he came up with this really brittle ratchety sound for that solo and he loved it. 

"Then when he played it for Krist, Krist absolutely hated it. He was like, 'Why are you putting this big smelly turd in the middle of this great song?' He really thought Kurt was trying to sabotage the song. Like, 'Oh you think you've got ma hit here? Let me fuck this up for you so you can't play it on the radio. He thought that was like a strategy of Kurt's but I'm certain it wasn't. Kurt was just enjoying this freak sound."

• Check out the full interview above for lots more insight from Albini on the In Utero sessions, and subscribe to Aaron Rash's YouTube channel for more. And check out our interview with Aaron.

“Out of all of the guitars in the whole world, the Fender Mustang is my favourite.” Kurt Cobain told Guitar World in his final interview with the magazine. At that point (Autumn 1991), Nirvana’s landmark album Nevermind had only just been released, but Cobain, Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl had been flung head first into heavy rotation and promotion.

Just months before, Nirvana made their daytime appearance at the UK’s Reading Festival, where Kurt brandished his black ‘Vandalism’ Fender Strat, and during this time you’d be just as likely to spot him playing the distinctive, heavily-modded ’65 Jaguar, which has a fascinating story in its own right. Indeed, when Nirvana returned to Reading in 1992, they headlined, and the Jag is the electric guitar that took pride of place for the majority of the set.

However, between its release in August and arrival at the top spot on the Billboard charts the following January, the video for Smells Like Teen Spirit clocked up relentless hours of airplay, all of which featured Cobain and his unusual, but extremely cool-looking Fender Competition Mustang. 

It wasn’t his first rodeo with a Mustang; Bleach-era shots, (including the album cover) show Cobain’s first Mustang mainstay, which began life as a stripped-bodied ’Stang that went on to feature a homemade vinyl record scratchplate and a Soundgarden sticker before it had multiple finish changes (white and blue) before finally meeting a similar fate to so many of Cobain’s early guitars. 

Nor would it be his last. When it came time to tour for 1993’s In Utero, Kurt leant heavily on his “favourite” guitars, giving birth to iconic imagery with either a Fiesta Red or Sonic Blue Mustang, and as we’ll discover, creating yet more extension to the gear myth that surrounded a contrary guitar anti-hero who shunned technique and tone in favour of attitude and songwriting, and won.

As Kurt Cobain’s 1969 Competition Mustang from the Smells Like Teen Spirit video sells for $4.5 million via Julien’s Auctions, join us as we delve into the world of Kurt’s most famous Fender Mustangs and discover why they could just be the definitive Cobain guitars.

Fender 1969 Mustang, Competition Burgundy  

In 1969, Fender introduced a number of updates to the Mustang - its student model which launched in 1964 and evolved from the Duo Sonic. As well as changing the body from a slab to include a forearm contour, Fender introduced its Competition colours: three finishes  (Competition Orange, Competition Red and Competition Burgundy), complete with contrasting ‘racing stripes’ across the bass bout of the body, continuing across the back of the guitar.

Kurt Cobain’s Competition Mustang was finished in Competition Burgundy - a confusing title, as for all intents and purposes, it closely resembles Fender’s Lake Placid Blue which is what Kurt’s guitar is often labelled. 

To add to this confusion, the 2012 Fender Kurt Cobain Mustang (a part replica/part umbrella homage to Kurt’s love of the Mustang) was issued in Dark Lake Placid Blue, with a light blue Competition racing stripe included. 

As with many examples of guitars from this period, ageing over time combined with eye-tricking video and stage lighting (in Kurt’s case), and possibly even discrepancies from its original production means that not all Competition Burgundy paint jobs are equal. 

The finish name comes from the addition of a purple tint, most visible around the edges of vintage Competition Mustangs, and as photos have demonstrate, sometimes resulting in an apparent almost-burst effect, or conversely, as is the case with Kurt’s Mustang, a much less prominent, more solid colour. 

In some images, Cobain’s guitar looks turquoise, in others, a much darker blue. Regardless, this additional layer to the finish is what gives Competition Blue/Competition Burgundy its name. 

Kurt bought the guitar from Voltage Guitars in Hollywood. According to Julien’s Auctions the Mustang was purchased at some point between 1990 and 1991, and was used during the recording of Nevermind. As Nirvana were in Los Angeles recording Nevermind at Sound City Studios, it’s most likely that Kurt acquired the Competition Mustang during this time.

Part of Kurt’s attraction to Fender’s short-scale/student models such as the Mustang was their availability combined with often low asking prices. This was long before the vintage guitar boom of today, and it’s important to remember that when Kurt laid eyes on the Competition Mustang, it was only just over 20-years old. 

That’s old enough to be available used, but not necessarily desirable in the landscape of hot-rodded Super Strats, take-your-eye-out angular guitars, or the tone-laden early-era Stratocasters and Les Pauls of classic rock, all of which were in favour at the time.

It would be wrong to call the Competition Mustang rare, but they certainly aren’t guitars you see every day, and what’s more, Kurt’s guitar was a factory-made left-handed version. 

As well as the distinctive finish, rosewood ’board and matching headstock, when Kurt bought the guitar, it was pretty much in its stock state. 

Closer inspection of the Smells Like Teen Spirit video reveals what appears to be the curved profile of the original Mustang bridge, along with what looks like a matching single coil bridge pickup still in place.

Julien’s Auctions states that Kurt’s guitar tech, Earnie Bailey replaced the bridge pickup in early 1992, swapping it for a black Seymour Duncan SHR-1 Hot Rails single coil-sized humbucker.   

The Competition Mustang was clearly (at least at one point) a favourite guitar of Kurt’s. Perhaps it was the combination of the 24” scale and striking looks, or perhaps it was one of his first ‘proper’ guitars after years of playing cheap lefties, pieced-together or reversed right-handed electrics. 

But he chose to play the guitar for the band’s first major label video shoot - while either intentionally or coincidentally wearing a t-shirt that loosely mirrored the colour scheme of the guitar along with the racing stripes - as well as for some of the band’s record release party at Seattle’s Beehive record store.

It’s unclear how closely his acquisition of the Competition Mustang and ’65 Jaguar overlap, but overlap they did. What is known is that the band’s date at the Trees Club in Texas, on 19 October 1991 was an eventful one which features both guitars. 

Handycam footage of the gig makes for slightly awkward watching, as Kurt – beginning the set on the Jaguar – struggles with sound issues throughout. After playing Drain You, he swaps to the Competition Mustang for School, Floyd The Barber, Smells Like Teen Spirit, About a Girl and Polly.

The final chord has barely stopped ringing by the time Kurt has the guitar off his shoulders, and with frustrations at a high begins to bludgeon the mixing desk and its flightcase with the butt of the Mustang, Dave Grohl accenting each thump with a crash cymbal. This is where much of the damage visible to the Competition Mustang’s body, a guitar that Kurt reportedly cherished with kid gloves, was sustained.

By the time he’s finished, the neck is hanging off at almost 45-degrees to the body, and the Competition Mustang suffers one final blow as it’s flung to the stage floor. In an almost symbolic torch-passing, Cobain reinstates the Jaguar, and according to Livenirvana’s excellent resource, the Mustang didn’t appear on stage again until nearly a year later.

But the night wasn’t over yet, and famously, the Trees Club gig was the same date where Cobain, clearly already riled, took umbrage with one of the club’s bouncers while venturing into the crowd via a stage dive, planting him in the head with the body of the Jaguar.

As mentioned above, the Mustang still had its original bridge and vibrato when it came into Kurt’s posession, but Earnie Bailey replaced the bridge for a Stewart MacDonald, then later a Gotoh (reportedly Kurt’s favourite) Tune-O-Matic in preparation for Nirvana’s 1992 dates in Argentina. This swap also saw the introduction of what would become a staple modification Earnie would make to Kurt’s Mustang bridges. 

“I rebuilt the bridge section in a way that would be repeated on his In Utero era Sonic Blue Mustangs.” Earnie tells Julien’s. “It involved replacing the [original Mustang] bridge with a Tune-O-Matic-style bridge, and flipping the tailpiece bar around backwards. From there, several washers were added to the posts that connected the tailpiece to allow it to be tightened down against the plate that it rested on. 

“This modification solved several problems. It disabled the tremolo system and, in the process, increased tuning stability. Reversing the tailpiece itself allowed us to no re-string the guitar in a much easier process, stabilising the tuning while changing the angle in which the string connected to the bridge which would reduce string breakage.

“By tightening the tailpiece down against the plate, it also redirects the string resonance from being absorbed by the tremolo spring and to the body.”

Kurt’s Competition Mustang had a small number of outings after its encounter with the soundboard in Dallas. But while there are very few photos of the band during the recording sessions for In Utero, engineer Steve Albini remembers Kurt using the Mustang, alongside his ’65 Jaguar, an Univox Hi-Flyer, a custom Jaguar/Mustang (which is most likely a Jag-Stang prototype, but possibly Kurt’s custom Ferrington guitar) and Albini’s own Veleno during the sessions. 

Earnie Bailey has also confirmed to Julien’s that the Competition Mustang was one of the guitars he prepared for the In Utero sessions. Since Kurt’s death, the Competition Mustang  has been available for public viewing multiple times: between 2010 and April 2022 it was on display at Seattle’s Museum of Popular Culture (MoPop) and shortly before it was scheduled for auction, was moved to London’s Hard Rock Cafe between 28 April and 3 May 2022.

In Utero-era Mustangs

In 1993, as Nirvana prepared to tour for In Utero, Cobain placed an order with Fender for 10 guitars. At the time Fender’s US Custom Shop had just begun operations, but weren’t yet set up to make left-handed necks. 

The work of building the guitars subsequently fell to Scott Zimmerman, a longtime employee and master builder of Fujigen - the company that made Fender’s Japanese guitars. Zimmerman has been active online in an attempt to clear up some of the confusion surrounding Kurt’s In Utero-era Mustangs, and in addition to this provided Julien’s Auctions with a letter of provenance when one of the Sonic Blue Mustangs (see below) was auctioned in 2019.

“In 1993, I was contacted by a friend who was Fender Guitar’s artist relations manager, about building a left-handed Fender Mustang for Kurt Cobain of the band Nirvana…” the letter begins.

“Fujigen agreed to let me build the guitar, however they asked for an order of more than one guitar. Ten guitars were ordered and the idea was to ship two at a time over a period of months. The guitars were stock ’69 Mustangs, both Fiesta Red and blue.”

“A blue guitar and a Fiesta Red one were shipped in June 1993 to Kurt; two blue ones were shipped in October 1993, and two Fiesta Red ones were shipped in February, 1994. Four more remained at the time of Kurt’s death. They were sold in Japanese music stores as regular guitars without anyone knowing that they were made for Kurt.”

“Your [auction] guitar was shipped on 10/22/93 and is rare, with the small contour body decal on the head. Only the two shipped on 10/22/93 had this…”

Now, Zimmerman’s confirmation details that six Mustangs were sent to Kurt prior to his death, as well as the two Jag-Stangs for which he built the necks, and Fender’s Larry Brooks completed.

The final two guitars were Fiesta Red, meaning that up until two months before he died, Kurt had only received one Fiesta Red Mustang. As Nirvana were still on tour during these months, it’s unlikely that either of these guitars made it into live circulation, and their whereabouts has seemingly been forgotten. 

It’s possible that these have remained in the Cobain estate, or, as we’ll see, that they were among a number of Kurt’s guitars given away by Courtney Love to fans and friends. Finally, as Zimmerman states, the guitars were originally built as stock 1969 Mustang reissues, suggesting that the neck single coils fitted to the Mustangs were also stock Fender pickups.

These guitars have in many ways become as iconic as his Competition Mustang, modified Jaguar and Vandalism Strat due to their heavy use during the band’s final year. Cementing the Mustang’s place in the Cobain gear arsenal was the triumphant MTV Live and Loud concert, where Kurt used his Mustang for almost every song except the dropped-tuned Blew, and set-closer/Nevermind secret track, Endless Nameless (where he swapped to a Strat).

It also gave birth to another common misconception: that Kurt owned and played a white Mustang. The stage lighting once again has a part to play here, as the Sonic Blue under bright, cool lights appears white in some still photos.

The four guitars were eventually routed for bridge humbuckers, and Earnie Bailey implemented the same Tune-O-Matic bridge swap and modifications as the Competition Mustang. The Mustangs also had their pickup slide-toggle switches trimmed so as to avoid being accidentally knocked while being played. 

Each of the guitars were given nicknames, two of which which can be seen in Fender’s behind-the-scenes video above. Fender’s Justin Norvell and Justin Perez were given access to a number of Cobain’s guitars during the development of the Fender Kurt Cobain Mustang (which featured the H/S configuration of the In Utero guitars, but with the option of Competition, Fiesta Red or Sonic Blue finishes).

The Fiesta Red Mustang was nicknamed Oranj-Stang, while Blue Mustang is seen written on masking tape stuck to one of the cases. Collectively, the three Sonic Blue Mustangs have become known as Sky-Stangs (a name given to the guitars by Kurt and Earnie Bailey), with three almost identical, but not-quite-the-same guitars.

As well as being instantly recognisable as a Cobain guitar, the Sky-Stangs have also set the template for DIY mods among Cobain fans. In relation to the Jaguar, with it’s plethora of idiosyncrasies, the Sky-Stang mods are arguably less fiddly to replicate, and used prices of the now-discontinued KC Mustang can often be out of reach. 

Fender 1993 Fiesta Red Mustang (Oranj-Stang) and emergence of new information  

The Fiesta Red Mustang was the first of the Japanese Scott Zimmerman Fenders to get a live airing. There’s every chance you’ve seen photos of its live debut at the pre-Pat Smear Roseland Ballroom gig in July 1993, where Kurt wore his 'Dennis The Menace' red/black striped jumper from the Sliver video, which yet again suggests that perhaps Kurt did think a bit more about his on-stage image than he’d liked to have let on.

The Oranj-Stang would only have been a few weeks old when it made its debut, and as such photos and footage show it in the closest thing to its original condition. The Fiesta Red finish is met by a red tortoise shell scratchplate, and as with the other Mustangs, a rosewood fingerboard.

As-per Zimmerman’s confirmation, the headstock only features the Fender logo decal, but at the time of the Roseland date, it’s possible to make out that Kurt has had what appears to be a Seymour Duncan  JB Jr, single coil-size humbucker fitted in the bridge position.

Fast-forward a few months, and Kurt has begun to incorporate the other Zimmerman Mustangs into Nirvana’s live sets, along with his Jag-Stang. By late 1993, the guitar has had its scratchplate switched for a white Pearloid plate, and the bridge humbucker has been swapped for a black, full-size humbucker (most likely a Seymour Duncan JB in line with the other guitars).

As evidenced by Fender’s behind-the-scenes vault video, an Oranj-Stang has remained in the Cobain estate, but new information received by MusicRadar opens new questions about the history of the Oranj-Stang guitars Cobain used onstage with Nirvana and where at least one of them is now.

In 2023, MusicRadar was contacted by the winner of an auction (who wishes to remain anonymous) that took place a decade ago for a signed Kurt Cobain guitar neck. 

"The story was that the guitar neck was given to a fan by Kurt Cobain's guitar tech on December 30, 1993 after a Nirvana concert at the Great Western Forum Club in Inglewood, California," they told us.

"The neck came with a picture of Kurt singing the guitar and some fan club & crew badges from that night. Prior to the acquisition, I received a picture of the back of the neck and matched some marks from Kurt's picture with marks on the back of the neck. There were multiple perfect matches. Everything looked good so I acquired it."

When the buyer received the neck things took an interesting turn. 

"Then I started researching about the show where the guitar was smashed so I could maybe create a nice memorabilia display with it," they told MusicRadar. "Luckily, the whole 30 December [1993] show at Great Western Forum was available on YouTube [see video clip above where Cobain throws his guitar into the air at the end of the song Blew].  I found the sequence in it where Kurt destroys the guitar but there was a problem: Kurt is destroying a black Fender Strat and the neck [I have] has a vivid red paint mark on it. "

So what neck did they buy in the auction? 

"The neck also had some Japanese inscriptions and the name Scott Zimmerman stamped under the veneer on it so I decided to reach out to him to see if he could provide more information about it," the buyer told us. "He replied with the following: 

'From 1980 until the end of 1984 I was the sole Masterbuilder of prototype and artist guitars at Fender USA. In 1990 I began working for the Fujigen factory here in Matsumoto Japan in the same capacity making Fender Ibanez and other brands. Because the US Fender Custom Shop was not up and running enough to handle the job Fender USA asked Fujigen if I could make a custom left-handed Fender Mustang for Kurt Cobain for them. The president of Fujigen agreed but insisted that it would have to be more than one guitar. 

'Fender USA talked to Kurt and he agreed to 10 guitars to be custom made by me for him, five to be the Sonic Blue, five to be Fiesta Red. I made the ten necks and bodies and we finished and shipped them two at a time. I had shipped a total of six guitars when Kurt died. The remaining four were bought by the Fender Japanese distributor and just dumped into the Japanese market as nothing but lefty Mustangs. 

"The pictures you sent are most certainly one of the guitars sent to Kurt, from the red mark on the heel it was one of the Fiesta red models. There is no doubt, with my name stamp on the heel under the finish and my personal Japanese writing designating which logo decal and what finish to spray on the neck for the paint dept, to follow.'

So it's a Mustang neck from a Fiesta Red model. But how and when it was parted from the body is still unclear. Cobain's usual guitar tech Earnie Bailey wasn't working with the band on the night the neck was believed to have been given to a fan (30 December 1993) so hasn't been able to shed more light on that side of things, according to the buyer. 

Meanwhile, Zimmerman took time to send a follow-up email where he offered the neck's new owner the exact dates of when Cobain's custom Mustangs were shipped to him:

• One Sonic blue and one Fiesta Red Mustang were shipped on 28/6/1993

• Two Sonic Blue Mustangs were shipped on 2/10/1993

• Two Fiesta red Mustangs were shipped on 4/2/1994

From those dates we can see only one Fiesta Red 'Oranj-Stang' guitar could have been in Cobain's possession in the time period when the neck was said to have been signed by Cobain. Is that the guitar the neck comes from? If so, where is the rest of it? Was it even smashed on the 30 December Inglewood show if there's no evidence of it happening onstage? 

The buyer also highlighted that on 4 February Nirvana performed Drain You in Paris, France for the French TV show Nulle Part Ailleurs. The appearance is memorable for a few reasons; the band are wearing shirts, ties and waistcoats and Cobain's guitar cut out during the song's mid-section and he threw it on the floor. The guitar; a Fiesta Red Mustang. Was this one of the second and third Fiesta Red Mustangs that Zimmerman's records show were shipped (does that mean received?) on that exact date? 

There are a lot of questions remaining that can hopefully be answered at some point – if you have any new information to shed light on the broken Oranj-Stang, let us know! 

Fender 1993 Sonic Blue Mustang (Sky-Stang I)

Of the three Sky-Stangs, Kurt’s Sky-Stang I is the most easily, and most commonly spotted In Utero Mustang. 

Thanks to Nirvana’s MTV Live and Loud performance - where the guitar featured almost exclusively - many stills of the In Utero era are of Kurt playing this guitar, but he did also use it more than the other two blue Sky-Stangs.

It is similar in construction to the others: rosewood fingerboard, Sonic Blue finish, red tortoiseshell scratchplate, but as Zimmerman mentions in his online posts, this is one of the guitars that didn’t feature the “Offset Contour Body” decal on the headstock.

The biggest defining feature, though, is that the Sky-Stang I featured a white humbucker in the bridge position rather than the other Sky-Stangs’ black Seymour Duncan JBs.

Given that Kurt had JBs fitted into the other guitar, and what certainly appears to be a JB Junior in the Fiesta Red Oranj-Stang, it’s a fair assumption that this Sky-Stang also featured a JB. 

Kurt’s other favoured bridge humbuckers included a Seymour Duncan Hot Rails, and the DiMarzio Super Distortion fitted in the Jaguar. However, in photos taken during Nirvana’s Live and Loud set where the bridge humbucker is visible, the pole pieces don’t appear to feature a recessed 'dip' in the way that a Super Distortion’s do.   

The Sky-Stang I can be thought of as the quintessential Cobain Mustang, even though the official Fender Kurt Cobain Mustang – along with many DIY replicas – include the black humbucker in the bridge. This guitar remained in Kurt's live arsenal right up to Nirvana's final gig at Munich's Terminal One.

It spent years on display Seattle MoPOP museum as part of the Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses exhibition alongside a treasure trove of Kurt and Nirvana instruments and memorabilia. Then in October 2023 its owner was revealed; Cobain's half-brother Chad Cobain, and he was putting it up for auction, with a portion of the proceeds going towards Kicking The Stigma, The Indianapolis Colts and Irsay Family’s mental health awareness initiative.

Estimated at $1-2 million, we expected it to go for much more in light of the Competition Stripe Mustang's record-breaking auction $4.5 million price and the fact it was one of Cobain's favourite and extensively-used live guitars. But on November 18 2023 it sold for $1,587,500 via Julien's Auctions in Nashville. Still a considerable amount, of course!

The winning bidder wasn't Competition Mustang's current owner Jim Irsay, but Japan-based businessman Mitsuru Sato. But like Irsay – who has taken his famous guitar purchases like the Black Strat on a touring display – it seems he had no plans to hide the guitar away for himself.

“I want to pass on rock to the next generation in a real way," Sato said. "We would like to use this guitar to support the next generation aiming to pursue music. 

Fender 1993 Sonic Blue Mustang (Sky-Stang II/Blue Mustank)

The Sky-Stang II was the guitar used least live by Kurt and it has remained in the Cobain estate vault largely out of the limelight since Kurt’s death. 

But while we say it was played the 'least', we should highlight that the Sky-Stang II definitely did make it on stage, contrary to popular belief.

Nirvana’s show on 2 Dec 1993 in Tallahassee is something of a cross-section of all Kurt’s In Utero-era Mustangs. He begins the set with the Jagstang, moves to the Sky-Stang I before breaking a string during Lithium and finishing the song on the Jag-Stang. 

Next up is Pennyroyal Tea, and Kurt swaps the guitar for a blue Mustang with a black humbucker, once the stage lights change during the song, it’s clear that the guitar he is playing features the distinct scratchplate marking of the Sky-Stang II, suggesting that this guitar was taken on the road as a backup rather than left at home.

What is clear, is that it was produced in the same two-guitar batch mentioned by Scott Zimmerman, and is essentially an identical guitar to the Sky-Stang III.

There is some further documentation of the Sky-Stang II - a large photo of the guitar is featured in the Cobain Unseen book, as well as the video produced by Fender, which focusses mostly on the Sky-Stang. 

Once again the scratchplate is an identifier, with another patch of yellow/orange clearly visible between the bridge pickup and the guitar’s controls. Elsewhere, we can see the “Offset Contour Body” decal on the headstock denoting it is the counterpart to the Sky-Stang III, and the video shows the black Seymour Duncan humbucker in detail.

With the pickup removed from the cavity and turned over, the video reveals a sticker reading JBJ. Seymour Duncan’s labelling system at the time included the first letter of the winder’s last name, and here the additional ‘J’ stands for Maricela Juarez who currently runs the Seymour Duncan Custom Shop. 

Interestingly, the metal backplate of Kurt’s JB is only drilled for six threaded polepieces, whereas later models were drilled under both sides of the humbucker so that the backplates could be used universally between bridge and neck pickups - a small detail which could mean that the pickup was actually produced in the '80s rather than being a brand new pickup.

Fender 1993 Sonic Blue Mustang (Sky-Stang III)

The Sky-Stang III is one of two Sonic Blue Mustangs known to have been used live most often by Cobain. It features a few identifying characteristics. First, it was fitted with a black Seymour Duncan JB humbucker in the bridge position, fitted by Earnie Bailey, which immediately sets it apart from the Sky-Stang I.

Next, it has a noticable patch of yellow/orange in the red tortoiseshell scratchplate, which can be seen between the pickups, just inside the bridge humbucker. Finally, it includes a “Custom Contour Body” decal on the headstock, which Zimmerman confirmed to Julien’s Auctions was only applied to two of the guitars.

The guitar was released from Cobain’s estate a few months after his death when Courtney Love received a letter from then-teenage fan, Bobby Costello. Love replied to the fan’s letter with a handwritten message of her own, as well as gifting him this guitar. 

The letter, which has been circulated online and remained with the guitar reads, “It may shock you, but your letter touched me a lot and this was one of his favourite guitars. When they delivered all of them the other day I felt so horrible. Kurt loved, more than anything, that kids liked his music and I just felt him over my shoulder when I read your letter. Kurt is left handed so you have to have the guitar professionally turned around or simply restring it - good luck. Courtney”.

Photos of Bobby Costello with the guitar show the flightcase, cleary marked as Sky-Stang III. The guitar remained in Costello’s possession for a number of years, but in 2012, Costello posted to a Facebook page named Kurt Cobain Guitars alleging that the guitar was taken without his permission and sold without his consent.

At the time of his post, the guitar was exhibited at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame museum in Cleveland, Ohio, where a fan jumped a security barrier and stole the volume and tone knobs from the guitar (these were replaced by the museum with identical control knobs). 

The Sky-Stang III was later auctioned via Julien’s Auctions in 2019 (the origin of Zimmerman's letter to the auction house) where it fetched a total of $340,00.

• Meet Aaron Rash: the YouTuber who's got so close to Kurt Cobain's Nirvana tones he's releasing a guitar and In Utero IR pack to share his discoveries

In 2011 Total Guitar marked the 20th anniversary of Nevermind with a cover feature on the album, including the story of Kurt Cobain's Jaguar and this interview with drummer Chad Channing, who played on the 1990 demos of Nevermind songs at Butch Vig' and Steve Marker's Smart Studios in Wisconsin before being replaced by Dave Grohl. 

Certain dates will be forever linked to Nevermind. Dates such as its release on 24 September 1991, or 11 January 1992, when it knocked Michael Jackson’s Dangerous off the top of the US Billboard charts. Yet there’s an important time period that’s often overlooked: 2-6 April 1990. 

During this five-day span, singer/guitarist Kurt Cobain, bassist Krist Novoselic and drummer Chad Channing – all of who had played on the band’s 1989 debut Bleach – visited Smart Studios in Madison, Wisconsin.

There, under the watchful eye of producer Butch Vig, they recorded early versions of several songs that would later appear on Nevermind, albeit mostly in re-recorded forms and with Dave Grohl behind the kit. One of Chad’s recordings did make the final version of the album we hear today, though, and on the 20th anniversary of the release of Nevermind, he looked back on this crucial session with us.

When Kurt presented several of the songs that would be on Nevermind, could you tell they were moving in a different direction to Bleach?

“Sometimes, it’s kind of hard to tell. When you’re actually a part of the band, any songs that come up new seem like a natural evolution of things, so to speak. They didn’t seem too far off or different in some ways. Like the song About A Girl – the answer to that in a pop vein, but being a bit mellower, would be Polly or Sappy" [a song recorded for both Nevermind and In Utero, but featured on neither].

How was the working relationship between Butch Vig and Kurt?

“Everybody appeared to be pretty comfortable working with [Vig]. Every time we’d go into the studio, Kurt and Krist always had a certain agenda or something in mind. I was never really one to be up front with putting out ideas and stuff like that. I was always a little bit more in the background… I think they were happy with the end-result recordings. I think we all were. 

As I recall, when they were working on Nevermind, Kurt originally wanted to keep the songs they had already recorded in Madison to put on the record. But Geffen [Records] apparently wanted to redo the whole thing. I guess what they were looking for, being a major label, was something as polished as they could get from the band. 

"So in order to do that, consistency in sound and recording is probably everything. They probably felt it would sound too inconsistent sound-wise, like: ‘Oh, you can definitely tell that’s from a different recording.’”

Several songs that would eventually be re-recorded for Nevermind were first laid down during those Vig sessions, such as In Bloom…

“I liked that song [from] the first time I heard it. Before we left on that tour, we had a rehearsal space in Seattle and Kurt had started playing that song. Obviously, he had worked it out with Krist a little bit and I just jumped right in with what seemed totally natural. What I actually ended up playing on the recording was exactly what I did the first time I ever heard the song. So it’s one of those songs where, for me, it just gelled instantly."

Did you know if In Bloom was about a segment of the audience Nirvana was starting to attract?

“Kurt never really talked about his lyrics much, or what they were even about. I remember once – the only thing about him ever talking about lyrics – we were in this hotel room, and he’s like, ‘I’m trying to come up with some lyrics. Anything that rhymes with this and rhymes with that, whatever words, just throw them out!’ It was sort of a grab bag of ideas, just spewing out words. Apart from that, he was always quiet about it, so I’m not really sure.”

You also worked on Polly…

“I remember back in 2000, or something, when someone alerted me that I actually had a song on Nevermind, and I was thinking, ‘I do? What the heck song is that?’ Then I found out it was Polly. I gave it a listen, and I’m, ‘Right! I remember now.’ There was a small little room in the studio, and it was big enough for just two people and an amp – it was pretty small. They put me in that room with my ride cymbal.

"So it was just me and my ride cymbal, and I listened to this song. Every time that one little cue part or break came up, I hit the ride cymbal. So I hit it like four times – which is all it required, the entire song – and then that was that.”

So that was the recording that appeared on Nevermind?

“It was the actual recording. It was the one song that I guess Kurt said, ‘No, I definitely do not want to redo this.’ And I guess they figured, ‘It doesn’t have a whole lot to it. There’s only a little bit of drums.’”

And an early version of Lithium was recorded during that session…

“I like Lithium too. In all, I was really grooving on all the new stuff. In fact, much of this stuff was so new that I was learning and adapting to the song, the parts and the things I wanted to play as the tour went on. [Many] of the songs we’d recorded were songs that we didn’t have a whole lot of opportunity to play together as a band and rehearse before we went out on tour. 

"I’m sure Kurt and Krist played out the songs, but before we left for tour, for the majority of the songs, we maybe had one or two rehearsals. But by the end, when we got into the studio, I was pretty comfortable with what I was doing. And really, pretty much like In Bloom, a lot of those songs, they just sat right in… A lot of it fell into place really easily.”

Do you take it as a compliment that when the songs were re-recorded, Dave Grohl duplicated many of your drum parts?

“I definitely took it as a compliment. I was pretty honoured; I thought that was really great. There’s a couple of different little subtle things he did … which I thought was cool. 

"But most of them are so miniscule that people comparing the records, unless they were hardcore music [buffs] – I think the average listener wouldn’t even notice that much. 

"The most notable change of any of them was In Bloom: on the main verses of the song, I would just use a single kick thing, and Dave threw in an extra kick. And everything else on that is pretty much identical."

"And then with Breed too, there’s just one part where he began a drum roll fill just a half-measure sooner than I did mine. Everything else aside from that is the same. Like I said, very minor changes that most people might not notice. I thought it was totally cool. I was very honoured that he did that.”

Do you remember what Kurt’s equipment setup was?

“It kind of changed off and on, but I think he still had his Randall [Commander] head. We had a couple of SoundTech cabs for him – they were just two cabs that had 2 x 12s in them each. I remember he would set one up and then he’d set another one up in front of him during shows, or just off to the side, as an extra added monitor for his guitars. I’m pretty sure that’s the same setup that he had.

“He never really ran a lot of stuff. The only thing he had as far as pedals and effects [go] was a Boss DS-1 distortion pedal. But aside from that, it was pretty simplistic. I don’t think he ever had any guitar that he took really good care of… I think it was on tour that we brought a number of guitars for him. 

"One was painted a blueish colour and one was sort of a weird mauve. If one of them got thrashed, he would just pick up the other one, and if it needed any extra parts or guts to it, they’d pull them out of that guitar and stick them in a new body. I’m trying to think which one he had during that session… 

"It wasn’t like Krist: he always had the Black Eagle Ibanez. That was his staple thing all the time. But Kurt went through so many pawnshop-type guitars. It could have been any one of those.”

What do you think of Nevermind?

“The first time I heard that record, Ben Shepherd [Soundgarden’s bassist] came over… Actually, I went over to his place. He had a recording on cassette. He said, ‘This is Nirvana’s new record, you should check it out. It comes out next month,’ or something. He had somehow gotten a copy of it before its release.

"When I heard it, I was like, ‘Oh man, this is friggin’ killer!’ I loved it right off the bat. It’s one of those things where I actually became a Nirvana fan when I was no longer in the band…

"When you’re inside of it, it’s a little different. It’s work and all this kind of stuff. It was kind of refreshing to be able to kick back and go, ‘OK, I can totally listen to it.’ Because any time I hear my own music, I always get in this critic mode. I can’t really relax and hear it for what it is. When I heard that record, I was like, ‘Wow!’

"One, I really liked the record and thought the songs were great. And two, I was like, ‘OK, I can really get into it,’ and it was nice to know that it wasn’t me I was having to listen to!”

• Meet Aaron Rash: the YouTuber who's got so close to Kurt Cobain's Nirvana tones he's releasing a guitar and In Utero IR pack to share his discoveries

Believe the legend and the image that Kurt Cobain presented, and he was the antithesis of a guitar hero – a punk rock purist valuing spirit and a bloody good racket over technical ability.

But as time has taught us, there was a lot more to Kurt Cobain’s playing than the slacker attitude he’d like us to have believed, he not only listened to but loved The Beatles, named a song after Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin and sometimes showed a clarity and precision to his playing that doesn’t come without putting in your 10,000 hours.

But Cobain’s dedication to his craft clearly lay outside of woodshedding guitar histrionics, he was a phenomenal rhythm player, clearly had some lead playing ability, and also experimented sonically, with fascinating results. But his was a bigger picture, plotting out Nirvana’s rise to glory in his journals while half-feigning complete surprise and even resentment at the band’s success – perhaps misdirected frustration at the subsequent attraction of the type of fans his songs derided.

You know the four chords of Smells Like Teen Spirit, the Page-One riff of Come As You Are (which also saw the band sued by Killing Joke), but there’s a lot more to Nirvana for guitar players to absorb than just the big radio hits (although we’ll take a look at a couple of those too). Join us as we pick out some essential listening 

1. Lithium (Nevermind, 1991)

We’re all familiar with Nevermind, either on cassette, CD, vinyl or all three, and while none of the songs from the album should require an introduction (least of all a single), but let’s just take a moment to appreciate the brilliance of lithium. First off is the clean Strat tone, all necky, hollow and, as with many of Nevermind’s clean sounds, slightly watery. Cobain’s glissando rolls between the chords with a plucky tone that we’ve never really managed to recreate, and it’s our first proof of his under-sung rhythm abilities and attention to detail with his guitar playing. 

The bass also highlights Nirvana’s love of The Beatles - the plodding descent overlapping with Kurt’s rhythm part to create a delicious counterpoint that’s (whether by conscious design or not),  straight from the Lennon/McCartney playbook.

Cobain’s guitar sounds on Nevermind were a mix of his Mesa/Boogie Dual Rectifier preamp/Crown power amp into a Marshall 4x12” cab, a Fender Bassman and a Vox AC30. As well as Kurt’s Boss DS-1 distortion pedal, the band and Butch Vig concocted a dirty sound which they nicknamed the Super Grunge - featuring an Electro-Harmonix Big Muff running into the Bassman. “We used an Electro-Harmonix Big Muff fuzz box through a Fender Bassman on Lithium to get that thumpier, darker sound.”, Vig told Guitar World.

Lithium also inadvertently gave birth to the album’s secret track, Endless Nameless, which was born out of Cobain’s frustrations while recording Lithium. After countless re-takes, Cobain launched into the jam, which culminated with the smashing of his Strat in the studio, a tactic that the band would go on to employ frequently at live shows. 

2. Sappy (Various)

Sappy is one of the most interesting ‘other’ songs in the Nirvana canon for various reasons. First is that it emerged during one of Cobain’s purple patches, where the songwriter unstoppably penned earworms. When you’re discounting songs as strong as this from proper releases, you know you’re on a roll. 

And discount it, they did, but not without trying first. As well as Cobain’s home demo of the song, Nirvana made four studio attempts at Sappy between 1990 and 1993: two with Bleach drummer Chad Channing (recorded by Jack Endino between the Bleach and Nevemind sessions, and again for the Smart Sessions with Butch Vig), then twice more with Dave Grohl during the Nevermind and In Utero sessions with Vig and Steve Albini respectively. None of these recordings ever found their way onto a studio album, and the Grohl Nevermind-era session is still yet to be released in any form.

Sappy has the hallmarks of Nirvana - clean into huge distorted power-pop, verse/chorus/verse structure. But it also strays from the layman’s idea of Cobain’s playing - there’s no four-chords-over-two-bars chord progression, instead the changes loosely follow the rhythm of Cobain’s vocal shifts. 

Then there’s the solo. Throughout Cobain’s career he presented the idea that he had little knowledge of the fretboard, and barely any respect for lead playing ability within the context of his band. However glimpses here and there betray this - the fast runs displayed on Nirvana’s cover of Shocking Blue, the well-constructed melodic solos on hits such as Smells Like Teen Spirit and Heart Shaped Box, and probably the best evidence of all, the solos on In Bloom and Breed. 

Cobain had a knack for making his solos from random noises, atonal feedback and seemingly unrehearsed, and most-likely unrepeatable. A comparison of the Smart Session versions to the Nevermind release versions of these two songs confirm that his chaos was indeed composed at times. Sappy follows the same path - albeit more melodic - and while the note choice might be unconventional, it fits Cobain's pattern perfectly. 

3. All Apologies (In Utero, 1993)

Following the monumental success of Nevermind, Nirvana enlisted Steve Albini to record the follow-up, In Utero owing largely to his work with The Pixies on Surfer Rosa, and Cobain’s desire to push back against the radio-ready production of Nevermind. 

Albini’s now-legendary engineering techniques (including extensive ambient microphone placement) resulted in a much more natural sound to the recording than its predecessor, to the point of the album being described as ‘unreleasable’ by Geffen executives, resulting in Albini temporarily withholding the master tapes before REM producer, Scott Litt was called-in to remix Heart-Shaped Box and All Apologies.

There are plenty of versions of All Apologies to immerse yourself in, from the slowed-down, home demo with different lyrics (“What else could I write/I don’t want to fight”) through the In Utero studio version and the masterful performance delivered for Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged recording. 

From a guitar-playing perspective, the droning bass note accompanied by the almost-classical melodic run that makes up the song’s verses and hooks, stands slightly alone in Nirvana’s catalogue. 

Once again, with the help of Kera Schaley’s cello (Lori Goldston would play the part live), Kurt Cobain displays his uncanny ability to make melancholy feel sublime, and while it’s not a Van Halen-level technical display, he also often chose to play the riff live while singing - despite hiring later-era second guitarist Pat Smear specifically to remove pressure from his guitar/vocal role in the band (although he takes a simplified role during the Unplugged performance).

When it shifts to the chorus, All Apologies shows us yet again that Cobain’s insistence on simplicity was core to the Nirvana sound and success, remaining on the G chord for what feels like forever, building the tension with before resolving to the A. Yes, Kurt Cobain wrote a song with a I IV V progression, just not as you might have imagined, turning what could have been a simple cowboy/blues progression into a haunting confessional. And therein lies his genius. 

About A Girl (Bleach, 1989)

“This is off our first record…most people don’t own it.” Cobain announced bluntly before launching into the sublime Unplugged performance of About A Girl. It was a show that had MTV executives in doubt right up to the opening chords, and would set the bar for what could be achieved in the ‘stripped-down’ format. 

No Smells Like Teen Spirit, no celebrity guests. Instead, Cobain dressed the set like a funeral, covered The Vaselines and brought on The Meat Puppets to play songs that nobody had heard of. And it was a career-defining triumph. But About A Girl is important because it was reared long before the hype of Nevermind.

At just $600, Bleach cost almost exactly 100 times less to record than Nevermind, and to many, it’s the quintessential sound of the band with its grinding, heavy, detuned riffs - fuelled by Cobain’s Univox Hi Flier, DS-1 and a Fender Twin belonging to producer, Jack Endino. While there’s plenty of solid guitar work on the album - Blew’s main riff/vocal mirroring, the impossible counter-rhythm of Swap Meet’s guitar against Kurt’s voice, and the bluesy finger twist of Mr Moustache - Cobain’s songwriting style was still to be refined in some ways..

Sticking out from the pounding sludgy-ness of Floyd The Barber and discordant parts of Paper Cuts is About A Girl. Apparently written about Cobain’s then girlfriend Tracey Miranda after she protested that he never featured her as his muse, the ‘I can’t see you every night’ line was presumably not the flattering love song she was looking for (see Clean Up Before She Comes for an even less complementary view). 

The jangly clean sound of the Emin/G intro and verses, met with the sweet chiming backing vocal and, gulp…tambourine give us an early sense of Cobain’s love of pop music that we’d see more of later. A childhood of listening to The Beatles comes flooding out from the guitar parts, giving us a beat combo-style rhythm, a simple melodic solo over the verse and spreading out over the chorus chord progression - itself taking us on a slightly jarring, yet still pleasing key shift - , followed by a build-up leading us into the outro. 

Check out the Unplugged in New York version for a more explicit use of the dominant chords that are implied on the Bleach version. If Lennon and McCartney had grown up in Aberdeen, Washington, we think it would have sounded like this.   

5. School (Bleach, 1989)

As noted above, Bleach was full of heavy riffs, the low-tuned, fuzzed-up sound of Sub Pop bands at the time giving birth to the Grunge moniker. School joins Negative Creep in the stoner section of Nirvana’s catalogue with its hypnotic riff displaying a jerky, syncopated rhythm, capped off with a subtle vibrato on the final note before it erupts into uncharacteristically stadium-like ringing chords of the chorus. 

The solo is another example of Cobain’s classic rock ‘guilty pleasure’, starting with a psychedelic extension to the main riff before going full Woodstock with big bends, and the type of noisy Cobain lead runs that are almost sarcastic in their delivery. The anti-guitar hero showing contempt for big solos by taking one, but choosing to massacre it rather than take it seriously. performing it at both of their triumphant Reading performances, as well as their final ever gig at Munich’s Terminal 1, 1 March 1994.  

• Meet Aaron Rash: the YouTuber who's got so close to Kurt Cobain's Nirvana tones he's releasing a guitar and In Utero IR pack to share his discoveries

Billie Joe Armstrong's live side project The Coverups played London's Garage last night (27 February) and they made their intimate covers gig a very special occasion indeed with a huge set that included Courtney Love joining them for Cheap Trick and Top Petty songs before Armstrong took the mic for a version of Nirvana's Drain You.

Love was in fiery form – and we're hoping this marks a proper comeback to the stage for her musically, though she joked "Grandma did not have her teleprompter" after her first guest appearance of the night on a righteous punk rock reading of Cheap Trick's He's A Whore. In addition to singing on a rendition of Tom Petty's Even The Losers, she later joined the band again for their penultimate song, a cover of Cheap Trick's Surrender. 

Armstrong paid tribute to Love's late husband Kurt Cobain with an excellent version of Drain You, a combination that will be a treat for a lot of former '90s teens out there (myself included). "We're trying to get more contemporary," Armstrong said as he introduced follow-up song in the set, Last Nite, by The Strokes. 

As far back as 1992, Billie Joe Armstrong was proclaiming his love for Nirvana's music and in 2014 likened their impact to the Beatles. 

“You know, the guy just wrote beautiful songs," the Green Day vocalist and guitarist told Alternative Press. "When someone goes that honestly straight to the core of who they are, what they’re feeling, and was able to kind of put it out there, I don’t know, man, it’s amazing.

 “I remember hearing it when Nevermind came out and just thinking, we’ve finally got our Beatles, this era finally got our Beatles, and ever since then it’s never happened again," he added. "That’s what’s interesting. I was always thinking maybe the next 10 years. OK, maybe the next 10 years, OK, maybe. … That was truly the last rock ‘n’ roll revolution.”

The Coverups will play the 100 Club in London on 1 March. Alongside Armstrong, the band features Pinhead Gunpowder's (and Green Day touring managaer) Bill Schneider on bass, Green Day touring guitarist Jason White and the band's audio engineer Chris Duggan on drums. 

While Green Day bassist Mike Dirnt plays guitar in the Coverups he wasn't present at night's show from what we can see. 

The Coverups full setlist for the 27 February show at the Garage was:

A Million Miles Away (The Plimsouls cover)

I Wanna Be Sedated (Ramones cover)

Ready Steady Go (Generation X cover)

I Think We're Alone Now (Tommy James & the Shondells cover)

Message Of Love (Pretenders cover)

Summer Of '69 (Bryan Adams cover)

Walking Out On Love (Paul Collins Beat cover)

I Fought The Law (The Crickets cover)

Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn't've) (Buzzcocks cover)

I'm So Bored With the USA (The Clash cover)

Ziggy Stardust (David Bowie cover)

Dancing With Myself (Generation X cover)

He's A Whore (Cheap Trick cover) (with Courtney Love)

Even The Losers (Tom Petty cover) (with Courtney Love)

Neat Neat Neat (The Damned cover)

Drain You (Nirvana cover)

Last Nite (The Strokes cover)

American Girl (Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers cover)

Love Is For Losers (The Longshot cover)

Fox On The Run (Sweet cover)

Rockaway Beach (Ramones cover)

Should I Stay Or Should I Go (The Clash cover)

Surrender (Cheap Trick cover) (with Courtney Love)

Encore:

Where Eagles Dare (Misfits cover)

I recently talked in-depth with Aaron Rash about his YouTube videos investigating Kurt Cobain's Nirvana guitar tones and the plans he has for some exciting products for other players. But there's been a development since then – and it's a big one. Aaron is now the owner of the Frankensteined tube amp Cobain used for some of the clean tones on In Utero, that was originally rescued from a dumpster.

After his previous videos looked at the Steve Albini-owned aluminum guitar, pedals and the rare Fender Quad Reverb amp that are key elements of In Utero's guitar sounds, there was still a missing piece of the puzzle when it came to the cleans. Now, with the help of Cobain's guitar tech Earnie Bailey, Aaron has it.

"This is a crazy story," he says in the video above as he sits in in Robert Lang's Seattle studio – the place where Nirvana recorded their last session to track You Know You're Right and where Aaron has been capturing IRs for a forthcoming Nirvana pack.

By Aaron's own admission, getting the clean tones for In Utero has proved the biggest challenge in his Nirvana odyssey. "There's something so specific about In Utero and its clean tones that's always baffled me and I've never been able to get it quite right." With the IR pack, the need to solve that side of things became more pressing.

That's where Earnie Bailey has helped, a man who I've found out to be hugely helpful with questions about Kurt's gear (he's also a gifted luthier himself – check out Wire Instruments) Earnie has been supportive of Aarons videos, and became vital identifying the third In Utero amp (the others were the Fender Quad Reverb and solid state Randall Commander II combo) when producer Steve Albini was unable to.

Earnie Bailey was unable to fill in the blank because he knew it could be one of two amps that were involved in the sessions – one of which he had helped to (re)build. Aaron noticed a late '70s HiWatt Custom 100 DR103 in the Nirvana display when it was at the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle – Krist Noveselic's own head he had donated. Earnie confirmed that Krist had mentioned that amp was used on the album, but was unsure of what it was used for exactly as Earnie's repaired 'Frankenstein' plexi Marshall head was also in action for the sessions.

What was unclear is which of the two amps was used for the bass tracks, because the other amp will have been used for some of Kurt's clean guitar tracks. As usual, Aaron planned to use his ears to find the answer. He found the same HiWatt model for sale online in San Francisco but the seller wouldn't ship. So Aaron made the 13-hour drive to collect it from Seattle. That's dedication. And his supportive wife even agreed to go with him.

One problem – it didn't sound right. The HiWatt was used as the bass amp. This is where Earnie's knowledge was invaluable – he told Aaron that Mojotone's British 100 kit – a take on the Plexi with the options for Super Lead or Super Bass variations – was the best way to recreate his Marshall Frankenstein amp. The former Nirvana tech also shared his schematics of the work he'd done to the original Marshall (unclear whether it was a Super Lead or Super Bass)  he'd pulled out of a dumpster, repaired and modded. 

The results of the Frankenamp recreation nailed the tones you can hear on Rape Me and the In Utero session recording of the song Sappy. 

"It's that last 5% I've been trying for so long to get," says Aaron. 

But as Aaron told us, cabs and specifically the speakers in them make a huge different to guitar sounds. Kurt used a 2x12 Sound Tech cab with comparatively large Celestion 70 speakers. Aaron being Aaron, he recreated the cab from scratch because he couldn't find a cab as small as Kurt's original. 

The nicest part of the story? He's named the amp Earnie.  

And this tone odyssey leads to a great place for more than just Aaron and the Nirvana guitar curious; it is another link in the chain that will make Aaron's forthcoming Nirvana In Utero IR pack a comprehensive treatment. 

Check out the whole video above and our interview with Aaron Rash here. 

Born in California, growing up in Texas and now based in Seattle, Aaron Rash is a man of many talents and many of these have benefitted his YouTube channel, where he's gone deeper into Kurt Cobain's Nirvana tones than anyone else we've encountered. "I do a lot of electronics work like building amps, and microphones and preamps and EQs," he tells us via Zoom from his home studio space. "I've been an electronics nerd my whole life. So I spend most of my time doing that."

Although he listened to Nirvana from a young age, Aaron produced hip-hop in Houston for a while – we did say he was multi-talented – and producing a few promo music videos during that period of his life seemed to have honed his obvious skill for cinematography that helps make his guitar videos so engaging. The David Fincher fan shoots and edits all his channel's videos himself, but he admits his high standards can be a double-edged sword.

"I wish I could just pull out a cell phone and get a shot," he tells us. "But now I have to light everything and make it look good so I can continue like the theme that I've kind of set. So it sucks in some ways!"

Aaron's output is even more impressive because he isn't making a living from his YouTube channel and does it purely for the love. And he's amassed close to 48,000 subscribers along the way; many of them dedicated Nirvana fans seeking to understand more about Cobain's sounds.

"I've always loved Nirvana – grew up listening to Nirvana," he reflects. It's a relatable beginning for many from Generation X, for whom the band were a key inspiration in picking up instruments in the first place. But where things take a different turn is Aaron and his wife ended up moving to Seattle, and his interest in the band grew into something else…

"We went and saw his house and all the places, you know all the famous spots. And I don't know what happened to me, man, it just really grew on me. I started listening to them a lot because they were from here and I don't know, this connection happened."

One surprising revelation at this point is Aaron only started to take his guitar playing seriously at this point. " I just wanted to play guitar and see if I could come up with the same kind of sounds. And that's how it all started," he explains. Then Aaron hit the same wall many Nirvana fans do when trying to emulate Cobain's studio and live sounds.

"I realised, ok, if I buy this guitar, it's not going to sound like that," Aaron says. "And I was so confused. And that's when I started going down the rabbit hole of, why does his guitar sound like that? Why is his tone so unique? And it kind of took over. Honestly, I really wanted to figure it out. So that's how it started."

Aaron's investigations and personality make for fascinating viewing – he's great company in conversation too, and exactly the same genial self-effacing guy when we talk on Zoom as he comes across in his videos. Covering everything from playing through Jack Endino's super rare Fender Twin model Cobain used on Bleach to the missing links of the In Utero tone, Aaron's voyage of discovery also ends up teaching a lot of valuable lessons about guitar sounds in general alongside some genuine revelations for Cobain fans. Namely, the speakers matter a lot. 

So join us as we take a deep dive into Kurt Cobain's tones, and the two ambitious projects Aaron has underway that will help more of us recreate them ourselves. 

I think you've got closer than anyone to Kurt Cobain's tones – and people can hear this for themselves in your videos. But the key seems to be that you research with your ears as much as you do with online information. Is that fair to say?

"I've definitely researched with my ears. And that's what sucks because a lot of things you'll read online will say one thing, and then I'll get that one thing and try that. And then I can just tell that it's not the right information out there – the thing doesn't sound like that. And so it's been a lot of trial and error, especially with buying different speakers; Okay, these don't work – sell those. Now let's try these speakers. And doing that with everything until I find what it is [Kurt used].

"I have happy accidents where I just have an 'aha' moment and I try something and then that's it. But rarely does that happen. It takes a lot. A lot of money and time just experimenting."

You actually pointed this out in a video and I think it's important to reiterate. You're not in a privileged position – you're spending your own money because of your love for the music. 

"Yes, I've had to finance all of this gear and stuff. But the cool thing about it is, with things like guitars, what you don't use you can sell and move on. I think a lot of guitar players I talk to, they're always selling a guitar to buy another guitar. Which is what I'm doing. I really want a vintage Jag right now so that is what I'm kind of going crazy over."

Have you got the signature Kurt Cobain Jaguar?

"This is one that I built on my own [shows us a remarkably accurate-looking Cobain Jag). Which is a really cool Jag, but I just really wanted a vintage one. But people will hate me if I route it out and do all the stuff to it. I know, I'll never hear the end of it. But it's something that I really want to do."

Something I went through when I was younger, and I'm sure I'm not alone in this, is you buy a Boss DS-1 and think it will make you sound like Nirvana. Looking back, it felt there was too much hearsay emphasis on the pedals and the guitars Kurt used, when your videos have illustrated what a huge part the speakers played in his sounds. 

"I think people do this with amps too. And I'm not saying that you shouldn't because every amp is different and it's going to affect the tone. But I found speakers make the most difference, especially for distortion tones – it's like night and day. And I've always thought about it like this: if you take white noise and you run it through a speaker, every speaker is going to have its own profile – they're all going to have their own sonic profiles. Distortion is just like white noise really – if you hear it without going through a speaker, it just sounds like trash, you know? And, so the speaker is really important."

It's the last part of the chain.

"Well there's the microphone, which is really important too. Which is another subject I want to get into on the channel. The guy that bought the microphones from Steve Albini that he used on In Utero, he messaged me on Instagram about making a video. But I think he's down in California somewhere. So we have to figure that out. But wouldn't it be cool?"

Very. And in the digital realm IRs are obviously something players can experiment with where they're getting captures of different cab and mic setups. A Nirvana IR pack is you're working on right now, isn't it?

"I've been spending all my time at Robert Lang's. It's a studio here in Seattle where Nirvana recorded You Know You're Right. And a million other awesome records have been recorded there. 

"I became really good friends with Bob, and he's just so willing to help. I've been going up there and I got a crash course on the whole placet. And I'm gonna go up there, probably do it at nighttime when no one's there, so I'll stay out of people's way. But I'm going up there and I'm taking all of his microphones, everything – including the Quad Reverb [Fender amp]. 

"I'm going to just do a million impulse responses and make sure I capture [the gear I have] because I've had weird things happen with speakers where after playing like too much with fuzz, they don't sound the same anymore. It's really weird. So I started taking speakers apart [laughs]. And I've actually re-coned a few, which was really, really eye-opening for me. I've learned that the tone is in the cone, more so than anything. So I did weird things like taking the cones off of different speakers and putting them on other speakers. It's really weird stuff but it's really interesting."

That IR pack is going to be focussed on the In Utero sounds and that album has become a focus for you. And just to rewind back a bit for readers, one of the breakthroughs you made that is documented in your videos is that Kurt used a Fender Quad Reverb amp on the album, which is a rare amp in itself, but he also used the very specific speaker Utah spec iteration of the amp. How did you find out the truth?

"I was talking to Ernie Bailey, who was Kurt's guitar tech, and he was just saying that they went and found it locally somewhere. He was [previously] playing those Fender Super Sixes, that are absolutely massive. He was playing two of those. So he recommended Kurt get a Quad Reverb and I guess he must have really liked it because that's basically what In Utero mainly is. 

"I also talked with Bob Weston, who was the assistant engineer on the sessions, and he told me the same thing. Kurt basically tracked everything live through this Quad Reverb. And then he went back and did some overdubs. But most of that album is just the Quad Reverb really."

Kurt used another rare Fender iteration on Bleach with Jack Endino's unusual spec Fender Twin. Why do you think he gravitated to Fender combos?

"Here's what I think; Twin Reverbs and Quad Reverbs use the same circuit and were designed to be clean. So it was never really designed to distort, like a Marshall head would. But if you push them hard enough, they will distort and break up and they do it in a really nasty kind of way. It just sounds different than if you were to just take a Marshall and then crank it – it's more a mid-rangy, kind of boxy sounding almost. I think of the Quad as a very boxy-sounding amp – it's not high fidelity at all."

I did wonder if Earnie might have seen your videos.

"He said really nice things about my videos. And it's really cool just to be able to have kind of kind of a direct link to someone who knew what was going on. But a lot of the time I just like to talk to him about the Veleno [guitars] or Travis Beans because he's a huge aluminum guitar fan too."

Did he correct you on anything?

"No, but I know I have to have been wrong about some things. I would like to be wrong because it would just be more interesting but I really, really research all this stuff so much and I really put it to the test before I make videos." 

Has talking to the people who were there working with the band been the greatest source of research or do they not tend to remember the specifics?

"Most people don't remember enough specifics. You know, I really wanted to interview Albini and we've talked about it a couple of times, but I know he's so busy. So he said a couple of times that he'd agreed to an interview. But I'm going to ask him the questions that no one else has, like, really technical things I've wanted to know about.

"Anytime I see any In Utero interviews with Steve, people tend to talk about what was the band like, or the business side. But I really to know what the preamp level was set at on the desk – how hard were you hitting the tape? Where? How many mics were on the cab? What mics were on the cab?"

The news that the Ferrington guitar Kurt ordered from Danny Ferrington as a custom guitar in 1992 was used on In Utero was a bit of a surprise. How did you discover that? 

"I wanted to build a Ferrington-style guitar because on a Reddit Ask Me Anything thread, someone had asked Steve [Albini] what guitars Kurt used during the session. And he replied, his Musting, Jag, Univox Hi flyer – which he called a cheap pawnshop guitar. Then he said, a 'Mustang / Jag hybrid guitar', and 'my Veleno'.

"I knew that the Jagstang had not been made yet at that point so there was no way it could have been that –  I think [him and Fender] had just started talking about it at that point. So that's when I got the bright idea – 'Hey, I'm going to try to build one of these Ferringtons. And it was really hard to hunt down the pickups in them. And this is good news actually, I'm glad you asked about this because when I built [the replica] I got a hold of these Bartolini pickups and there was no info anywhere saying, 'These are the Ferrington pickups', I just kind of had to shoot in the dark. 

"And the ones I found sounded exactly like [the original Ferrington] and so Bartolini is now reissuing these pickups because of that. They're about to become available. They're sending me some to do some reviews on and now people are gonna be able to get hold of the pickups which is, in my opinion, probably the most important part of the sound of that Ferrington guitar. Those pickups are unique." 

So that's another way Kurt's tones are now being made accessible to people, but building a replica body in the first place is no small achievement!

"I just went for it. I had a little bit of woodworking experience when I was a kid – when I was 12 I built a boat. It wasn't a really nice boat or anything but I went on the water and I floated. I didn't sink!

"I really like working with wood and building things. I wish that I had a workshop or something. I'd be building a lot more guitars. I'm actually building a Mosrite Mk V – I've been trying to get this done forever. I got the neck done and the body shape cut out, I've just got to finish it. I need this to finish the rest of the Nevermind [video series] stuff.

That is above and beyond! 

"I think a lot of people these days probably are building more guitars and stuff. It's just about I think having the right tools. I've learned everything from just watching YouTube videos."

Nevermind is an album where I've always presumed that it's hard to get the guitar sound because of the layering and production involved, especially compared to Bleach and In Utero. But your videos suggest that's not necessarily the case.

"Especially if you listen to the Devonshire mixes, those are the mixes that Butch Vig, I believe, did on his own and they're not too far off from the Andy Wallace mixes. 

"So there's a couple of tones that have still baffled me. Come As You Are is such a weird tone. But I've heard Butch say several times that Kurt used his Mosrite for that, the MK V. So that's why I'm trying to finish building it because it's got a unique scale length – I think it's 24.5". And the placement of the pickups, it's kind of in a unique situation.

"So I know it's gonna sound really weird when it's done. Apparently though, this is what he used for Come As You Are. I won't be able to prove it yet but I know this; I've had everything else that he used for Nevermind, and I've never been able to totally nail that sound. So that is only thing that's missing."

And Nevermind is also where the 'Holy Grail' cab comes in that you made a video about.

"That is what I figured. And here's the thing, I could be wrong but I've tried so many different speakers and those Pulsonics really nailed the tone of Nevermind. 

"Here's what I heard, and this is just hearsay, so I don't know if this is true or not. But apparently, the Bassman that they rented for Nevermind actually belonged to Mike Ness – the guitarist from Social Distortion. And I think Mike Ness also had a lot of vintage Pulsonic cabs. So there's maybe a possibility that Mike's cab and Bassman went out for Nevermind.

"I wish there was someone we could ask for this info. I saw this somewhere and I don't know if it's true or not. But it makes sense."

You also talk in your videos about the gain stacking approach Kurt used with his pedals and amps – namely the Boss DS-1 then the DS-2 Turbo Distortion with the Tech 21 SansAmp. Can you explain how someone can get started with combining those to get in the territory of some of his sounds?

"With the SansAmp, I think that Kurt always had this second in the chain. And the unique thing about the SansAmp, this was their original one just called the SansAmp, but they make a reissue now called Original that you can buy. These [originals] are kind of expensive, by the way. 

"Anyways, when these were originally designed, they were designed to be an amp simulator. So whatever you run through these, puts its own little sonic signature on this. So if you put a DS-2 in front of it, it's still going to SansAmp it, if that makes sense. Because if you play with a DS-2 Turbo Distortion by itself it's obviously very Turbo Distortion sounding. And I didn't hear much of that on In Utero. And it wasn't until I was really playing around with running it into the SansAmp and doing weird stuff THAT I was able to get certain sounds that I'd never been able to get before. 

"That's kind of when I had this moment – this had to have been what Kurt was doing. And another thing is the Bass mode [on the SansAmp]. For Radio Friendly Unit Shifter – I still want to do a video on that – he was using it in Bass mode. It's uncanny – it sounds exactly the same. So I know he was playing with different modes and using this like a tone box.

"Another thing about the SansAmp is the output is really hot. Remember how I was talking about the Quad Reverb sounding really boxy when you overdrive it? Well, if you really turn this up you can get some insane distortion going on with the Quad distorting with this. So they kind of talk to each other and break up together. Well, it sounds like In Utero – it sounds exactly like it. It was a combination of a lot of stuff but you can't do it without this."

Would you recommend the DS-1 or the DS-2 for a Nirvana fan?

"I like the I like the DS-1 more. I think sounds better. The DS-2 does have a Turbo mode though which is cool. I don't use it, but it's like a really cool mid-boost."

Do you think Kurt ever used the Turbo mode?

"I don't think he did. I think he just used it like the DS-1."

 So they're interchangeable, in a sense?

"They're really interchangeable. I just think the DS-1 sounds a little bit nicer."

What would you advise for amp settings with these pedals – how clean should they run the amp?

"That's the thing, if you listen to a lot of Kurt shows, it really depends. Sometimes he was going really clean. And sometimes you could tell he was just hammering his amp really hard. So I would set everything at around five and then just play with the volume gain on your amp and try it clean and also try distorting with the pedal. 

"There's so many different kinds of weird sounds you can get. I think a lot of people think if you're using a pedal then you shouldn't distort your amp too, but you should – that's when you get really cool tones.

"So I think I think going into an amp and not looking at an amp as a clean platform thing, but just a second gain stage instead. Look at your amp as another pedal, instead of just an amp."

Will your IRs eventually include Nevermind as well as In Utero to help players get closer to these tones?

"I'm going to do it all. I'll tell you this, I've already been messing with some of it. Just some little sample stuff I've done and it's blowing me away. Because I'm getting these kinds of sounds in my computer without doing anything. I'm not mic'ing up an amp or anything – it's so cool. 

"So I'm really excited because I know it's going to work. When you set out to do something you don't know if it's gonna work or not. But I'm super excited. I also am really excited about just having this in a computer – having that sound that you can take anywhere. You can do it live, you can whatever, you know, I think a lot of people are gonna get a lot of use out of it."

What's your favourite guitar that Kurt played?

"Man, that's a hard one. Probably the Mustangs and Jag but I'm really obsessed with the Veleno too but that wasn't Kurt's. I know that Earnie said that towards the end there Kurt started asking a lot about aluminium [guitars]. So I think after using Steve's Veleno he wanted one. They just probably never found him one."

How do you feel about the Jag-Stang?

"I've only played one in Guitar Center. I've not been the biggest, hugest Jag-Stang fan because feel like they didn't finish it exactly how it was supposed to be done. The body shapes are a little skinnier and stuff but if you look at Kurt's sketches of how he wanted it to be, it was quite a different-looking guitar. 

"So I think it would be cool to build a Jag-Stang in the way that he had wanted it done [initially] instead of how it came out. I've seen some people do it on Instagram and it's really cool."

Inevitably they were prototypes that he had.

"He didn't [get to] play it much [onstage]. I would think there were revisions he wanted, like the contours - just on the back, they didn't do that it was just a slab body [Cobain's consistent preferences live seemed to be towards contoured offset-bodied guitars].

"From what I read even I think they were still developing it, but they just never finished it before he passed away."

So we really need to talk about the aluminum guitar you've made, inspired by the Veleno Steve Albini owned that Kurt used to record parts for In Utero. That chambering of the body is very important isn't it?

"Yes, they're hollow body and they have such a unique sound. Gosh, this was so hard to get done – it was so hard to do.

And you had no aluminum guitar to inspect physically?

"That was the thing. I reached out to Steve and asked him if I could come and take his apart, measure it and do all that stuff. And he's like, 'Yeah, have at it'. And then I'd said, 'Okay, should I come at this time?' Then I never heard back from him. So I've gotten close to getting to Steve several times and then I just don't hear from him.

"I know he's busy and he was on tour. He was saying when I reached out, 'I'm on tour. But as soon as I get back in August, you can come by the studio and come look at my Veleno' or whatever. 

"By the way, there's weird stuff surrounding his Veleno. A lot of people confuse and say that the one [Steve] has with P-90s was the one Kurt used. But Steve had told us in an e-mail that Kurt used one with Guild pickups. 

"He owned three Velenos. And Earnie just recently told me that a Travis Bean was there [in the studio during the recording of In Utero] too. I don't think the Travis Bean got used [on the record] but Kurt was playing [around] with the Travis Bean as well. That was news, I'd never heard that before. But I know Albini had a Travis Bean Wedge. So maybe Steve brought it in and Kurt checked it out and chose the Veleno over the Travis Bean."

Were you working from blueprints of the original?

"No, I've just collected a million photos. This is how I built this; I found a photo that was pretty much straightforward. Then I measured the dimensions of the Guild pickup, and then I bought an original Guild pickup and measured it with a caliper. I was able to scale it all out in the computer and I was able to get the dimensions of the guitar and everything that way."

So did you then need to take those specs to a company that specialises in aluminium construction?

I didn't know anything about CAD (Computer Aided Design). That's where you make a [computer generated] model of something to be built. So I called around everywhere saying, 'Hey, I'm trying to build this aluminum guitar, like, can you help me?' No one would return any of my calls. No one wanted any part of it. And then I got this one guy that was like, 'Sure, I'm going to help you make guitars'. 

"So I went and saw him and told him what I wanted to do. And he's like, 'Okay, this is cool. But you've got to make CAD files'. So then I had to figure out how to do that. And then basically make an exact 3D model, which took me around a month to do. I did it on my own. I was originally going to hire somebody, and I just I did it myself."

That's incredible

"Just a lot of work. If you're determined to do anything, you can do anything. You've just got to put your mind to it. 

"So I gave them those CAD files. And away they went. They cranked them out. I made three of these [guitars]."

So the plan is to produce more of them, it's called the Kurt guitar right now and you asked fans to vote on a headstock design? [see the video above]

"You know what though? I have another idea. Let me show you this really quick. And see if I can find it in here. This is what I want to do, but I don't want to get sued [Aaron shows us a new headstock emblem design depicting the In Utero angel outline]. I kind of thought last minute that maybe I shouldn't call it the Kurt.

"With the headstock I was thinking of making the [emblem] a cutout where the light shines through it." 

"The whole reason I've got into this is I've wanted to make these affordable for people. I've tried as hard as I can, where I'm not going to be making much money off of it at all. And aluminum is super expensive right now.

"It's going to be out of some people's price range. And that's what really kind of bums me out because I want everyone to play these. And it's not for a profit thing or anything. I just love it. And I want to share it."

What are you going to do about the pickups?

"So I reached out to Guild actually. I think I can get them done with these Guild pickups – I think they can they can remake them for me. 

"Another option, I think would be cool too is to put a [Semour Duncan] JB in one of these, it would sound crazy. That'd be a nice combination, but I think people are probably going to want to go for accuracy. So I was thinking of maybe having an option where you could choose, when you check out, what you want in it, and I'll put it in there."

Can you tell us about the aluminium neck?

"The frets are nickel and I made this an 11-inch radius like the original radius – early Velenos were 24.5 inch scale. And then they later went to 25-inch scale. So the newer reissue ones are 25 and 12-inch radius. Back when John [Veleno] was making them they were never 12-inch radius. 

"I really nitpicked because I was scared I was gonna spend all this money building this, and then I would get something wrong and it wouldn't sound right or something. I really went crazy on it."

And it's lightweight?

"It's pretty light but the thing is, this one has a flaw of the original - this one has inherited it. You get a bit of neck dive. It's not too bad but it's there."

So this is another new avenue for you, because you're not making much money out of the YouTube channel and you don't currently do paid partnerships. 

"I haven't even wanted to start a Patreon. I've had so many people tell me to do that. And it's just always felt like the wrong thing to do. I don't want to make a Patreon. I understand I need support to keep doing this but another thing with the Patreon is you've got to come up with exclusive content for your Patreon people, and you got to give them information before you give it to anybody else. And it would just be too hard, I think, for me to try to be coming up with exclusive content for Patreon. 

"I'd rather just give all this information out as I learn it, you know, and I'll make money off the IR responses. And hopefully these Veleno-style guitars are going to do well. I don't know how they're going to do and I'm so curious to see what's going to happen."

It's great because there's two very different things here that are equally important for getting closer to Kurt's sounds, and the IRs are very accessible to people.

"What I know is going to happen the moment these IRs come out, everybody's going to share them on their discords, and groups and all that kind of stuff, and it's just gonna get passed around is probably not going to be a hugely profitable thing, but it'll be worth it. But I think a lot of people that want to support the channel will buy the the IR pack."

Absolutely, and the time and work you've put into the project deserves to be recognised and recompensed.

"I really, really enjoy doing YouTube. It's a lot of fun. And I'm just curious to see what's going to happen – where it's gonna go from here. I don't know what it's gonna grow into but I'm really excited."

Are you heading towards the end of your Nirvana chapter with the channel or will you be going back and redoing some of the song deep dives with the information you've learned since?

"I think I'll always be coming back to Nirvana stuff regardless. But I'm going to try to start making other videos. I don't know if I necessarily want to dive down another band's tone or not, or maybe start just going on my own path. We'll just see what happens. But the crazy thing for me is I never thought this channel would have got to where it is even now. So already, for me, this is all beyond cool. Because I thought I would maybe get like 2000 subscribers or something and it just kind of became its own thing. And here I am talking to you."

I'm looking forward to seeing where you go next, and the speaker side of things that you've talked about is really interesting, aside from the Nirvana connections.

"I think it would be a good idea to dive into that and maybe microphones and just other stuff. But I'm always gonna, gonna be doing something that is inspired by Nirvana at least. Even if I'm not making every video a Nirvana video."

• For updates on the releases of the guitar and IR pack, subscribe to the Aaron Rash YouTube channel

Join us for our traditional look back at the news and features that floated your boat this year. This story first appeared in October.

Best of 2023: YouTuber Aaron Rash has completed his obsessive quest to replicate Kurt Cobain’s In Utero electric guitar tone after designing and building a meticulous replica of the all-aluminium Veleno guitar that the late Nirvana frontman borrowed from producer Steve Albini.

No one knows more about Cobain’s raw, urgent and kind of feral tone on In Utero than Rash, except maybe the members of Nirvana themselves and Albini. Even then it is gonna be close. In previous videos, Rash has played through the super-rare Fender Quad Reverb that Cobain used on In Utero, even going so far as to figure out that Cobain’s featured Utah speakers, not the more typically found Oxfords – and Rash duly modded his own Quad tube amp with Utahs to nail the sound. 

His search naturally focused on the guitars. And there was one, above all else, that caught his attention; the aluminium Veleno we hear on tracks such as Very Ape. Back in June, Rash shared the news that he was making a replica, and asked his audience for suggestions on headstock design. 

The sound is not really like anything else. There’s a twang, a gnarly drang to the Veleno’s cleans that has powerchords scratching their way out of the speaker. Now, for most tone quests, you can simply jump online, or head down to a select high-street bricks and mortar store and seek out the gear you need. This was out of the question with the Veleno. 

The price that these command on the second-hand market is astronomical. Rash cites a 1978 model listed on Reverb for $32,500. That’s a serious investment, and says only around 200 were ever made at all. There are reissue Veleno Guitars available for pre-order from the resurrected brand but they cost the best part of $9,000. “I wasn’t going to stop until I got one of these,” says Rash. “The only way I was going to get it was to build it myself.” 

• The story of Kurt Cobain's Fender Jaguar

The all-aluminium builds of Veleno Guitars were the brainchild of John Veleno, a metal craftsman turned luthier, whose creations were played by the likes of David Gilmour, Eric Clapton, Lou Reed, Marc Bolan and of course Steve Albini, whose model Cobain borrowed for the recording sessions at Pachyderm Studios, Minnesota. 

This endeavour has not been without personal cost. It takes time to put YouTube videos together, time spent researching, shooting, editing. Rash says he has gone into debt to fund these projects, and admits that it was all getting to him. But making this video was different. This lustrous doublecut was the light at the end of the tunnel.

“For me, as a musician, to feel like I am making the same video over and over and over again, playing all the same riffs, the same stuff, chasing the same tones, it gets old,” he says. “But then today I’m actually really excited because I have been chasing this sound for so long. It is finally here now.”

• Steve Albini – "A lot of people in my position are opposed to the home-recording of music. They feel like it cheapens what happens in the studio, but I disagree"

And it sounds – and looks – incredible. Its hollow build makes it very light. Furthermore, Rash is going to make these replicas available  for purchase, and he has named this aluminium model Kurt, for obvious reasons.

“It is because of him my life took this crazy, drastic turn and so I feel like it is only right to dedicate it to him,” says Rash, who says this was a fitting way to bring his Nirvana tone obsession to a close. The Kurt will be exactly the same as the replica he made for the video, save for a different headstock. Pre-orders will be open soon. What’s next for Rash? We’ll have to wait and see. 

“It’s actually bittersweet because now I’ll have to find a new tone to chase,” says Rash. Well, there is some good news on that front. There are always more tones to chase. 

As any guitar player will tell you, the next obsession is just around the corner. The rabbit holes only get deeper. And you can follow him down them and learn more about Nirvana guitar tone at Aaron Rash’s YouTube channel.

The 'Sky-Stang I' Japanese HS Fender Mustang Kurt Cobain used extensively on Nirvana's final tour is going up for bidding in November at Julien's Auctions in Nashville, and its current owner – Kurt's half-brother Chad Cobain – sat down with Nirvana guitar tech Earnie Bailey to talk about the guitar in the clip below. Earnie even uses it for a quick play of Serve The Servants.

Cobain used three 1993 Sky-Stangs that were made at Fender's FujiGen factory but the Sky-Stang I was the most extensively used, identified by the white bobbins on its humbucker, while the other two's Seymour Duncan JBs were black. The red tort pickguard also has a distinct yellow V-shape in its pattern.

"I remember when I first saw that, thinking, how did that get past quality control?" notes Earnie as he's reunited with the guitar again in his hands. "Now it's my favourite thing about it."

Earnie also noted how he'd bolt the Mustang tremolo bar down as Cobain didn't use it. Something he was kind enough to illustrate in more detail for us in our in-depth feature on the story of Kurt Cobain's Mustangs. 

The Sky-Stang I was used by Cobain for 53 of the 63 shows Nirvana played on the In Utero tour. It will go up for auction alongside another famous guitar, Eric Clapton's Fool SG, and has an estimate of $1,000,000 – $2,000,000.

Cobain's Competition Stripe Mustang he used in Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit video set a world record for guitar value earlier in 2023 when it sold for $3,975,000.

You can also find out about Nirvana fan Eric of YouTube channel NirvanaGuitars and his incredible experience with the Sky-Stang I in the video above.

The bidding for the guitars takes place at Julien's Auctions in Nashville between 16-18 November at the Hard Rock Cafe in Times Square New York between  6-11 November and Hard Rock Cafe in Nashville 13-17 November. 

More info at Julien's Auctions

If Nirvana fans think all the stories of Nirvana's In Utero sessions have already been told, they might want to give the latest episode of the Conan O'Brien Needs A Friend podcast a listen. It features Dave Grohl, Krist Novoselic and the album's producer/engineer Steve Albini looking back for the album's 30th anniversary, and by his own admission, the latter reveals something for the first time in the press that earned a new level of admiration for Nirvana from him.

"Literally the first thing recorded in the session is the first song on the album, as recorded," Albini says of the one take that delivered Serve The Servants.  It wasn't an anomaly either – the trio were a famously formidable live band by this point and had entered  Pachyderm Studios in Minnesota well-prepared. But unexpected things could still happen.

"There's a thing and so far none of the trainspotters have mentioned this so I don't know if it's really known," Albini begins when discussing album opener Serve The Servants in more detail. "There's a quiet bit of the song and then it kicks into full monty, and we had done a soundcheck of the instruments before they did the take. But [for] the full monty Kurt kicked on an overdrive pedal that he hadn't used in the soundcheck. So when the first loud bit comes in the guitars were pining on the tape machine – like he was about 60db hotter than for the [soundcheck] session.

"So I immediately grabbed those channels and ratcheted them back, so the first  beat of the loud part, the tape machine is slightly overdriving, the channels are in the red and it's base engineering on my part," admits Albini. "By the second or the third beat it was back to normal, but there is this moment, there's this slightly… exploding. But in a conventional setting, just the fact that we went over on that first beat, just the fact that it was the first run-through, just the fact there was this potential scar would have been enough to say, 'Well let's just do it again, that was nice for a first take but let's do it again.' 

"But everyone heard it back and I mentioned there was an overload on this first beat because I wasn't prepared for the overdrive and got it back in line, but everyone heard it in playback and said, 'Fine'. So that's on the record now. Which is the sort of thing that when you're working in budget conditions in sort of grubby studio sessions, that s**t happens all the time and you just live with it, but for a band of their stature and their resources to say, 'Let's go ahead and use the first take it sounds fine – we're not that picky', I thought that was a remarkable display."

From what we know, Kurt Cobain's two pedals in the sessions were the Tech 21 SansAmp and Boss DS-2 Turbo distortion. As fan and musician Aaron Rash's diligent research has shown, these were used in different ways with a rare Fender Quad Reverb loaded with an even rarer speaker spec. So it may have been either pedal he stepped on for what Albini called 'the full monty' part. 

Check out more on that below, and the full Conan podcast episode on Spotify above which features more insight, prank calls to Gene Simmons and Albini even doing an impression of Cobain. 

• “I’ve been chasing this sound for so long and it’s finally here now”: YouTuber spends 6 months making a replica of the aluminium guitar Kurt Cobain used to record In Utero, and it sounds incredible

YouTuber Aaron Rash has completed his obsessive quest to replicate Kurt Cobain’s In Utero electric guitar tone after designing and building a meticulous replica of the all-aluminium Veleno guitar that the late Nirvana frontman borrowed from producer Steve Albini.

No one knows more about Cobain’s raw, urgent and kind of feral tone on In Utero than Rash, except maybe the members of Nirvana themselves and Albini. Even then it is gonna be close. In previous videos, Rash has played through the super-rare Fender Quad Reverb that Cobain used on In Utero, even going so far as to figure out that Cobain’s featured Utah speakers, not the more typically found Oxfords – and Rash duly modded his own Quad tube amp with Utahs to nail the sound. 

His search naturally focused on the guitars. And there was one, above all else, that caught his attention; the aluminium Veleno we hear on tracks such as Very Ape. Back in June, Rash shared the news that he was making a replica, and asked his audience for suggestions on headstock design. 

The sound is not really like anything else. There’s a twang, a gnarly drang to the Veleno’s cleans that has powerchords scratching their way out of the speaker. Now, for most tone quests, you can simply jump online, or head down to a select high-street bricks and mortar store and seek out the gear you need. This was out of the question with the Veleno. 

The price that these command on the second-hand market is astronomical. Rash cites a 1978 model listed on Reverb for $32,500. That’s a serious investment, and says only around 200 were ever made at all. There are reissue Veleno Guitars available for pre-order from the resurrected brand but they cost the best part of $9,000. “I wasn’t going to stop until I got one of these,” says Rash. “The only way I was going to get it was to build it myself.” 

• The story of Kurt Cobain's Fender Jaguar

The all-aluminium builds of Veleno Guitars were the brainchild of John Veleno, a metal craftsman turned luthier, whose creations were played by the likes of David Gilmour, Eric Clapton, Lou Reed, Marc Bolan and of course Steve Albini, whose model Cobain borrowed for the recording sessions at Pachyderm Studios, Minnesota. 

This endeavour has not been without personal cost. It takes time to put YouTube videos together, time spent researching, shooting, editing. Rash says he has gone into debt to fund these projects, and admits that it was all getting to him. But making this video was different. This lustrous doublecut was the light at the end of the tunnel.

“For me, as a musician, to feel like I am making the same video over and over and over again, playing all the same riffs, the same stuff, chasing the same tones, it gets old,” he says. “But then today I’m actually really excited because I have been chasing this sound for so long. It is finally here now.”

• Steve Albini – "A lot of people in my position are opposed to the home-recording of music. They feel like it cheapens what happens in the studio, but I disagree"

And it sounds – and looks – incredible. Its hollow build makes it very light. Furthermore, Rash is going to make these replicas available  for purchase, and he has named this aluminium model Kurt, for obvious reasons.

“It is because of him my life took this crazy, drastic turn and so I feel like it is only right to dedicate it to him,” says Rash, who says this was a fitting way to bring his Nirvana tone obsession to a close. The Kurt will be exactly the same as the replica he made for the video, save for a different headstock. Pre-orders will be open soon. What’s next for Rash? We’ll have to wait and see. 

“It’s actually bittersweet because now I’ll have to find a new tone to chase,” says Rash. Well, there is some good news on that front. There are always more tones to chase. 

As any guitar player will tell you, the next obsession is just around the corner. The rabbit holes only get deeper. And you can follow him down them and learn more about Nirvana guitar tone at Aaron Rash’s YouTube channel.

Much has been said about Nirvana's In Utero sessions with Steve Albini at Pachyderm residential studios in Minnesota, but one musician has never spoken about it. Until now: 30 years on, Kera Schaley has revealed details about her vital cello contributions to the album's songs All Apologies and Dumb. But she wouldn't have appeared on one of them at all if then-boyfriend Albini had his way.

"The funny thing about All Apologies is Steve kept trying to talk [Kurt Cobain] out of putting cello on it," Schaley revealed in an interview with Rolling Stone. "Isn’t that funny? He was going on and on that he shouldn’t put cello on it. And I think I was being snarky, and I was like, “That’s the joy of multi-track recording, I can record it and you can take it out.”  

Luckily the songwriter had the final say. 

"But Kurt and I won in the end, and so I got to play that and that one was really just off the cuff" added Schaley. I" think I only heard it once and then I had some ideas and I started doing stuff. And I think they just kept the jam part, where I was just playing along. And then later on, he loved the deep sound, like the really deep, groaning sound of the low notes. He was like, “Just lay on that for a long time.” And so I just laid on that low note for him. And I got some noise parts in there. I like making noise on the cello, too. And if you listen for some high screeching sounds at the end, that’s me."

It's hard to imagine the In Utero song without those contributions now, but it plays an equally evocative role on Dumb, a song Schaley remembers complimenting Cobain on in the studio.

I remember I heard Dumb and then when Kurt came in, I looked at him and I said, 'This is a really beautiful song.' And I think he might’ve thought that was funny, but, but he was like, 'Thank you.'

"I was only there for two days," the musician explained earlier in the chat. "And it was just me and Kurt and Steve in the studio. And then me and Steve went first so I could listen to the song because I hadn’t heard the songs yet. And so I listened to the songs and I used to come up with parts pretty quickly for songs. And so I showed him what I came up with for the song Dumb, and he was like, 'Yeah, that’s good. Can you also mirror what I’m playing for this guitar line?' 

"I can’t remember if I tuned my cello down a half a step or not, but Kurt jokingly said, “Yeah, all rock songs are in E, we just tune it down a half a step so they sound a little different.” [Laughs.] I’m used to people having very little money and needing to record really fast, I still had that mentality. So it took me like three takes and then I got it. And I’m like, “I’m so sorry.” And he was laughing."

The sessions went so well, Schaley was also asked to contribute to a Dave Grohl composition, Marigold, that would end up being be used as the b-side to the Heart-Shaped Box single. The drummer had previously tracked it at Upland Studios in Aprlington, Virginia in 1991 for his 1992 album Late!, under the pseudonym Pocketwatch. But Schaley was asked to track the Nirvana version.

But despite the experience, she wasn't asked to join the band on the road between 1993 and '94 when they toured the album and played their legendary MTV Unplugged set – the cellist job went to Lori Goldston.

"I think what happened is because of my association with Steve," Shaley explained. "They had a weird thing going on with him after the recording [the band were upset after Albini made comments to the press that Nirvana's label had been trying to meddle in the making of the album]. And so I’m sure they were just like, we don’t want anything to do with her! [Laughs.] Which is sad. Cause I’m actually a really good live performer. I have a lot of fun playing live and I move around a lot, and I would have had fun with them. But it’s okay. I wasn’t that upset."

Read the full interview at Rolling Stone

Nirvana guitar tech Earnie Bailey is the man responsible for the Fender tube amp Kurt Cobain used on Nirvana's In Utero. As fan and Nirvana gear enthusiast Aaron Rash explains in his latest video on the album's gear, the Quad Reverb was a rare find – Fender had only made them between 1972 and '76. The secondhand find in Tacoma would become an essential element of the tones on Nirvana's third studio album.

Cobain had reportedly been running two Fender Fender Super Six two-channel 100-Watt 6x10 combos previously. The Quad still wasn't a done deal for the album, and arrived at Pachyderm studios in Cannnon Falls, Minnesota alongside a number of other amps that were in contention. In Utero technician Bob Weston recalled to Aaron that Cobain spent a day at the studio trying amps out before settling on the Quad Reverb. And it had a distinct feature in its favour. 

As Aaron's diligent research reveals, most Quad Reverbs had the Oxford speakers that were often a go-to for Fender at the time, but a later period run of Quad amps were installed with Utah speakers. A rare amp's super rare 1974 iteration.

Aaron's tone quest lead him to find a Utah speaker for $50 to install in his own Quad Reverb. "The moment I mic'd it sounded exactly like In Utero and that's when I knew Kurt used a Utah Quad Reverb to record In Utero."

The problem was Aaron only had one Utah speaker, his other Quad amps were fitted with the Oxford-made model. The search continued… and eventually Facebook lead him to the Holy Grail.

Check out the full video with Aaron's demonstrations of how close he gets and why the speakers matter so much for the In Utero tone above. It's a valuable illustration of how overlooked speakers often are in shaping our guitar tones. 

The best news for Nirvana fans is Rash is planning to capture the Quad with a Sansamp pedal in a studio to create an IR pack others can download to use. 

Check out Aaron Rash's YouTube channel for more excellent videos. 

YouTuber and luthier Aaron Rash is back with another video Nirvana gear fans need to check out; there's nobody out there who puts as much effort into recreating Kurt Cobain's recorded and live tones. And this time he's had to rethink everything he thought about In Utero's.

We've already reported on Rash's diligent investigations into the Steve Albini-owned Veleno aluminium electric guitar that is a key component to many of the album's guitar tones – including its abrasive clean sounds. He's gone as far as creating his own aluminium design based on it that will be going into production. But what about the rest of the signal chain?

It's no secret that the Tech 21 SansAmp and Boss DS-2 Turbo distortion loomed large over Cobain's tone in this era; he drove fairly clean amps with distortion pedals for his sound. But how these two pedals were used together into a Fender Quad Reverb is frequently misunderstood. Even Rash admits he'd been approaching it wrong, but now after a two year journey he has answers.

"Everyone has the Kurt Cobain 'SansAmp settings' and that's how they set up their SansAmp and then they just play," Rash notes in the video above. "Except Kurt didn't use his SansAmp like that for the album at all. Those settings, maybe he used them live, but for the record that's not how he set it up. The sound of In Utero is actually a combo of the DS-2 going into the Sansamp and both of these different tones are going into the Quad Reverb. And it sounds exactly like the record."

He's right - it does. On Rash's research and tone-shaping journey he found there's two distinct tones Cobain on In Utero created using the two pedals. The first tone bypasses the DS-2 but the Sansamp settings are not the same as the commonly believed Cobain setup. Rash has even dialled in what he thinks are the correct Fender Quad Reverb amp settings – finding that Cobain probably used the 4x12 '70s amp's volume control to distort his tone further into fuzz territory.

"For the second tone Kurt was going into the DS-2 [and the SansAmp] – and this is what I call the Presence Sound V1 because it's got a very bitey aggressive nature," says Rash. An example of this in full flow is the breakneck punk rock of Tourettes. Rash details the settings needed for both pedals in the video above, and the bright switch required on the Fender amp.

He even has the same Randall RG-120 Commander Amp Cobain had but he's convinced it's barely used on the album. "Basically everything is that Quad Reverb for In Utero. I think the Randall might have been used on Scentless Apprentice and maybe a few other small areas of the record. But I totally had it wrong – this Randall is not used much at all. Just know the bulk of everything is the Quad Reverb."

Rash doesn't just know this because he's nailed many of the tones; he had insider information. In Utero technician Bob Weston told Rash that producer Steve Albini "didn't do anything crazy or special" to Cobain's sound – in typical Albini style it was a representation of the sound of the Quad Reverb. Weston also confirmed to Rash the two pedals Cobain settled on after a day trying different gear.

It's to Rash's credit that he admits these discoveries mean his previous In Utero tone recreation videos are "wrong" so he's going to re-do them. And as you'll hear in the video, he really has got closer to anyone we've heard. He's even tackled non-album tracks recorded in the sessions including Sappy and the pummeling I Hate Myself And I Want To Die – the former was recorded a few times by the band over the years and the latter was first included on the 1993 Beavis & Butthead Experience film soundtrack.  

But again, the Veleno-style guitar was a key component to the "hollow boxy" drive sound of the record. And he demonstrates it. But after spending two years chasing this tone, what next?

"It's kind of sad, honestly," admits Rash after reaching his destination. But he's building a Mosrite guitar next! 

Subscribe to Aaron Rash's channel on YouTube and keep up to date. 

You may remember Aaron Rash from our story about him playing Jack Endino's Fender Twin amp that Kurt Cobain used on Nirvana's debut album Bleach. And he's made plenty of other beautifully shot videos on Cobain's tones and gear but this… this could be next level. 

Cobain certainly wasn't averse to borrowing the choice of gear of Nirvana's producers; and he used one of Steve Albini's for the recording of In Utero, alongside his own heavily-modded Fender Jaguar and now infamous, record-breaking 1969 Competition Stripe Mustang. But Albini's guitar was a very different instrument; an aluminum Veleno guitar.

You may be familar with its tones without even knowing it; Heart Shaped Box's hauntingly bleak clean tones, Rape Me's scratchy verses, Very Ape. And it's all over the album's overdubs. 

"It was the most aggressive clean sounding guitar I've heard in my life," marvels Rash. He was hooked. A quest followed with Rash attempting to recreate a number of Cobain's other key guitars from that era. "None of them sounded like the tone I was trying to get." That led to the Veleno all-aluminum guitar.

Buying one now is difficult. John Veleno was a pioneer of aluminum guitars and only produced around 195-200 'original run' examples in the second half of the '70s with prices that can go far north of $20,000 on the vintage market. Why aluminum? It was the material he understood the best. Veleno’s day job in the late '60s was in St. Petersburg, Florida building aluminum electrical housings for NASA space shuttles. Veleno was also a guitarist who gave lessons and brought an engineer and player mindset to his designs. 

Rash sought to make his own aluminum guitar and the video above documents his process.

It was a learning process – all aluminum guitars do not sound the same and Rash was not happy with his first attempt. Veleno's had a very specific chambered design process in the build and it was by studying this that a breakthrough began.

Veleno Guitars is producing Legacy instruments again for $8,599, but the great news for Nirvana fans is Rash now wants to produce his Veleno-influenced design for others to buy and is looking for people's suggestions on headstock designs. 

Find out more at Aaron Rash's YouTube channel 

• The story of Kurt Cobain's Fender Mustang guitars in Nirvana

When Nirvana de-camped 50 miles outside Minneapolis at Pachyderm studio with recording engineer Steve Albini in February 1993 they were already a very big deal thanks to their second album Nevermind. So much so that Albini decided to book the band in under an alias.

“We had to make sure that word didn’t get out," he tells NME in a new interview. "The studio was an independent studio and there was only a small number of people working there. I didn’t really want to trust them with the secret, so I booked the studio on my account under the pseudonym the ‘Simon Ritchie Band’, which was of course Sid Vicious’ real name."

Even the studio's owners didn't know Nirvana was coming until emblazoned flight cases turned up. But despite the band's profile, the producer maintains the sessions were relatively normal.

“There wasn’t anything out of the ordinary about the sessions,” he adds. “I mean, apart from them being extremely famous. I had to do everything I could to keep it under wraps to make sure that we didn’t get overrun by fans and the added nonsense. That was the only thing that was weird about it.”

One unexpected factor was a guitar connection Albini found out that he had with Kurt Cobain – something he didn't even know about until the Nirvana songwriter reminded him.

“When my band Big Black did a farewell tour years before the In Utero sessions, the final show was in some industrial space in Seattle,” Albini remembers. “It was in a weird building with a makeshift stage. It was a cool gig and at the end we smashed up all of our gear. I distinctly recall some kid asking me if he could take a piece of my guitar off the stage and me saying,  ‘Go ahead it's garbage now’.

You can guess where this is heading… 

“Many years later when we were working on In Utero at the studio in Minnesota, Kurt showed me this little piece of this guitar that he had saved. He had brought it with him after all those years. He had been that kid.”

You can watch Albini smash the guitar in question in front of the audience with Cobain during the video above at the 51-minute mark. 

• Classic Interview: Steve Albini – "A lot of people in my position are opposed to the home-recording of music. They feel like it cheapens what happens in the studio, but I disagree"

We love finding out more about the gear behind iconic albums, and some players might be surprised to hear the tube amp in the signal chain for Kurt Cobain's often metallic and sludgy tones on Nirvana's debut Bleach were courtesy of a Fender Twin Reverb owned by producer Jack Endino.

It's still with Endino, now at Soundhouse Studio in Seattle, and Nirvana fan Aaron Rash took a trip out to see and try it for himself.   

Endino's assistant engineer saw Rash's video on recreating the tone to About A Girl from Bleach and reached out to the YouTuber to correct a photo detail in the video; Cobain actually used a Silverface Twin on the song, not a Blackface-era '67 as suggested. He then invited Rash to come and play the amp and meet Endino.

Rash brought his Univox High Flyer guitar with him; a model Endino hadn't seen since Cobain had one for Bleach. The producer then dialled in the controls for Rash to play About A Girl with a DS-1 for the overdriven parts. And there's the sound (accounting for the mic'd cab we hear on the record). With some pointers from Endino on chord voicings, no less! 

"It definitely freaked me out because the moment I played that chord through that amp, I totally got goosebumps," admits Rash. "That was it – that was that sound."

It's not a stock Fender Twin Reverb; Endino modded the amp himself. The producer noted the similarity to the schematic of the Fender Bassman and changed out the phase inverter circuit before the power amp section to make it more like the one in a 100-watt Bassman. But Endino's main mod was increasing some of the coupling caps in size between preamp and the power amp to get a little more low-end. 

The amp has some unusual vents at the size that were there when Endino purchased it in 1983 – and could have come that way from the studio. 

Check out more of Aaron Rash's Nirvana videos at his YouTube channel. 

It's no revelation that the late Mark Lanegan and Kurt Cobain were friends, with a deep respect for each other as musicians. There were plans to take that further in a musical project before Cobain's death in 1994, but a new book suggests their collaboration had already extended to a previously unknown level; Lanegan may have co-writtien a song on Nirvana's breakthrough album Nevermind.

Mark Lanegan's former Queens Of The Stone Age bandmate Nick Olivieri claims in Greg Prato's forthcoming book, 'Lanegan' that the Screaming Trees frontman helped write lyrics for the song alongside Cobain, but was uncredited.

It was a returned favour of sorts for Cobain contributing guitar and vocals to Lanegan's 1990 debut solo album.

“Mark said he wrote some lyrics on Something in the Way with Kurt on Nevermind,” Oliveri tells Prato in the book. “But Kurt had played on some of Mark’s solo stuff, The Winding Sheet. So, instead of getting paid, they just did this thing where, ‘Hey man, I added a lyric on your song and you added a lyric on my song. 

"Let’s just call it even. Whatever happens, happens.’ Little did Mark know, if he would have had publishing on Something In The Way on Nevermind, he would have had a lot of money," adds Olivieri. "I remember him kicking himself in the butt a little bit about that – ‘If I had that ‘Something in the Way’ publishing…””

The two musicians shared a love of blues musician Leadbelly – whose song Where Did You Sleep Last Night? would be immortalised by Nirvana as the closer for their 1993 MTV Unplugged performance. But the duo had already recorded their own take on it before then for The Winding Sheet with Cobain contributing guitar and his Nirvana bandmate Krist Novoselic tracking bass. Cobain also appears on the Lanegan original Down In The Dark from the same album, contributing vocal parts. 

Following Cobain's death, Courtney Love maintained a connection with Lanegan – proactively pushing him to go to rehab, a move that eventually saved his life, according to Lanegan himself in his own 2020 memoir Sing Backwards And Weep. 

"She was directly involved in saving my life," Lanegan told Rolling Stone in an interview about the book in 2020. I had to write about that." Love would end up paying for Lanegan's stay at a rehab facility, even providing him with clothing over the months he was there.

"I remember Courtney leaving me a letter saying, 'Kurt loved you as a big brother and would have wanted you to live. The world needs you to live', he told Rolling Stone. "That was powerful because I hadn’t done any good for anybody in years. Also, I had failed him when he needed me most. I owe her a great, great debt that I can never repay. But I also owe a lot of people that same debt. I always had done the most incredibly shitty things and had the most incredible love from people that I barely knew who have saved me."

The failure Lanegan alludes to is the phonecall Cobain reportedly tried to make to Lanegan sometime before he committed suicide on 5 April 1994. Lanegan didn't answer and spoke openly of the guilt he carried with him in the book.

That may explain Lanegan's actions regarding  the other Nirvana revelation in Prato's book; the singer and his band The Screaming Trees were allegedly offered the unreleased Nirvana song You Know You're Right to record by Love. 

Screaming Trees guitarist Gary Lee Conner recalls in the book that the band went as afar as to learn the song ahead of a potential recording but Lanegan couldn't face singing the lyrics and the idea run aground. Nirvana's version of You Know You're Right, recorded on 30 January 1994 in Seattle and produced by Adam Kaspar, would eventually see the light of day on the 2002 compilation, Nirvana. 

• Mark Lanegan: 9 albums that changed my life - "If any record ever truly saved me, it was this one"

We love modding affordable guitars to play and sound better, sometimes while creating combinations we'll never see from our favourite companies (Fender Firestang / Mustbird anyone?), so when we see other people's projects we're always interested. And David Hilowitz's is going to be of special interest to both Nirvana fans and anyone looking at their Squier and wondering what else they could do with it.

Hilowitz's editing and narration is superb and he explains how Cobain inspired him early on and lusting after the Smells Like Teen Spirit Mustang in his younger years. The same one that sold for a record-breaking $4.5 million in 2022. 

This is a video about going back to that dream, in an affordable way. Like the rest of us, he's open about the stumbles he made with a past project 'punk guitar' '80s Squier Bullet Strat, and how he eventually sold it as he moved on to a real Fender Jazzmaster.

He immediately regretted parting ways with that, and it sent him down the rabbit hole adventure he details in this video; modding himself a Competition Stripe Mustang inspired by Cobain's guitar.

Starting with a $140 Squier version we watch the time lapse steps of Hilowitz's original H/S Mustang dream coming to life and see how to do it ourselves. 

"In the process I've hopefully learned not to be such a gear snob," he explains in the conclusion. "It plays well, it sounds great, it looks really nice – and it says Squier on the headstock. And this time I'm not painting over it."

Check out more of David Hilowitz's videos on his YouTube Channel. 

Rick Beato has done it again and produced another unmissable musician interview – this time with Billy Corgan. A 90-minute deep dive into the recording and songwriting mind of the Smashing Pumpkins chief that touches on the classic songs and iconic producers he's worked with. And early on, he talks guitar solos in particular.

"We didn't feel we were that different, so when people reacted to us almost as if we were heretics or something, it was strange to us," says Corgan on some of the early feedback to the Pumpkins' debut album Gish in 1990. 

"And there was the whole playing solos, which was verboten in alternative circles at the time," he continues. "And if you even think of Kurt [in] Nirvana, he would play ironic solos – they weren't real guitar solos." 

Corgan suggests he was coming at things from a different perspective, even when Beato rightly points out that most of the big alternative / grunge bands of the Pumpkins eras had guitar solos, contrary to the strange idea they were actually anti-solo.

"Kim Thayil would play [solos], but they weren't solos played by people who were necessarily trying to play like Ritchie Blackmore. I was trying to play like Ritchie Blackmore. And my father was a guitar player so I came from that route that if you're going to play a solo, you better play a good solo. There was a pressure [on] me for that."  

We're not sure if that holds true for Jerry Cantrell, who we call 'Grunge Gilmour' around these parts, but the theme of Corgan wearing his classic seventies influences on his sleeve comes up again later in the conversation. Namely two classic Pumpkins tracks that Corgan says contain very clear nods to Rush and The Who, respectively.

"A song like Cherub Rock, that's basically us doing Rush… basically the beginning of Cherub Rock is ripped off from By-Tor And The Snow Dog by Rush… it's a straight rip off of Rush."

When Beato asks him about the tempo mixing in the Pumpkins' Tonight Tonight, Corgan reveals the Townshend influence.

"We saw that as The Who. If you listen to the backing tempo of Tonight Tonight without the strings, it's just like The Who. We're basically doing a poor imitation of The Who."

Aside from the UK shoegaze influences like My Bloody Valentine that Corgan goes into in the interview, he was also one of the only guitarists from the grunge era to namecheck '70s rock players that weren't regarded as 'cool' at the time.  Corgan explains it was a reaction to the claims in some quarters that 1993's breakthrough second album Siamese Dream was 'overproduced.'

"We got a ton of shit in reviews when Siamese came out because it was 'overproduced'," reflects the Chicago musician. "In 1993 terms it meant we were trying too hard… so of course I double down in interviews and said we were trying to do Boston and Queen, which by the way is not something you're supposed to say in alternative circles in 1993.  

"And it was true," Corgan continues, warming to the theme. "Because if I'm gonna make a record, I'm going out like Tom Scholz. I'm not going out like Kurt, I'm going out like Tom Scholz. In my mind, that made sense to me but we took a lot of junk for that because layering guitars wasn't something you were supposed to do, or using strings." 

It's interesting that Corgan should mention Scholtz and Kurt Cobain here because both musicians come up again later. Corgan again repeats his claims from last month that Nirvana and Pumpkins producer Butch Vig was hugely influenced by his sound on Gish for the Nevermind record. And when Vig first played him a preview of Nirvana's second album, he was not only struck by how much Smells Like Teen Spirit sounded like Boston's song More Than A Feeling, but something else too.

"I've told this story a few times but we were sitting with [Butch] on a Wisconsin lake on July 4, whatever the year would have been," remembers Corgan. "He says, 'Do you want to hear the new Nirvana?' He's got a boombox and he presses it, as the sun's going down on a beautiful Wisconsin summer day.

"I had two reactions," continues Corgan. "First of all, he ripped off Boston More Than A Feeling, and then when the song kicked in I looked at Butch and said, 'You ripped off my guitar sound motherf*****'. And he kind of was like, 'I guess I did', because everything he took into that [album] was stuff that I taught him. Butch didn't need me to mic up a cabinet but the way I would layer guitars, Butch was like, 'Oh I'll take that.' 

"So now Nirvana is on the radio 18 seconds and of course every time I hear the guitar I'm like, 'There's my guitar sound'." 

Check out the full interview above, and our own interviews with Corgan, Vig and more below on the Pumpkins' recording history.

Classic interview: Billy Corgan, Jimmy Chamberlin, Butch Vig, Flood and more on the Smashing Pumpkins' recording history

I was lucky to recently visit Seattle and was so inspired I thought for this lesson we'd learn Nirvana's Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle from their In Utero album.

Get the tone 

Kurt used mainly a Mustang or Jaguar for In Utero, but as long as you have a humbucker in bridge position that will get you there. 

I'm actually using a guitar with Firebird-style mini humbuckers by Sunbear Pickups called Sunbirds as they handle gain well and sound great clean. 

You'll be switching between clean and distorted tones throughout and for the dirt I've gone for the Boss DS-1w given Kurt has used the DS-1 a fair bit over the years

Tuning

If you want to play along with the track then you'll need to tune the entire guitar down 1/2 step or by one fret's worth so low to high - Eb/Ab/Db/Gb/Bb/Eb – this may also help any of you vocalists out there hit Kurt's notes! 

Technique tips and video lesson 

Starting out with your clean tone, you'll be playing power chords lightly muted with the occasional slide thrown in. Once you hit the B chord you need to switch on the distortion pedal and then turn it back off again after two bars. The easiest way to achieve this is to keep your foot poised above the pedal. 

The chorus gets meatier by playing power chords on the fifth string but adding the fifth to the root on the E string and for the turnaround you arpeggiate between the B and A chords. 

The middle eight is perhaps the trickiest bit in a fairly easy song, I tend to play the G# with my first, third and fourth fingers and then keeping my little finger where it is I then just flatten my little finger so it covers the sixth fret on the D and G strings, then slide up to the E on the 7th fret. 

That's it so have fun! 

Back in May, the 1969 Competition Stripe Mustang Kurt Cobain used in Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit video sold for a record-breaking $4.5million. While the now-unplayable 1973 Mustang he smashed onstage in 1989 didn't fetch such heights in value, it did go for over its $200,000-$400,000 when it sold at Julien's Auctions Icons And Idols auction in New York on the weekend.

The sunburst model features Cobain's handwritten messages on the body including the line 'If it's illegal to rock and roll, then throw my ass in jail' and sold for $468,000 at the auction, alongside a Boss DS-1 distortion pedal Cobain had used in a 1991 John Peel session.

The right-handed model was played upside down by southpaw Cobain in Bleach-era Nirvana gigs and met its demise as a playable instrument during a performance of the song Blew on July 9, 1989, at Sonic Temple Hall in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, during a tour when Cobain would frequently smash guitars onstage. 

'A few days later on July 15, Sluggo Cawley of the band Hullabaloo became acquainted with Cobain when Nirvana played at Green Street Station in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts,' wrote Julien' Auctions. 'Due to having smashed his sunburst Univox electric guitar two nights earlier (which Julien's Auctions later sold in 2016) Kurt had no guitar that evening and was only able to perform the vocals. 

'Following that performance the band stayed at Sluggo Cawley's apartment, where Kurt noticed a smashed Gibson SG hanging on Sluggo's wall. Kurt offered to trade it for the Fender Mustang he had smashed on July 9th because he thought he could repair the Gibson SG well enough to smash it again later on. Sluggo agreed to the trade and had Cobain inscribe the Mustang, signing as Nirvana, before the band moved on to their next show.'

The Boss DS-1 pedal sold for a whopping $75,000 at the same auction. Cobain had written 'NIRWAHNA' on the top and customised it further with a sticker from the band The Frogs on the bottom. 

The letter of authenticity with the pedal confirms it was used during Nirvana's final session for John Peel's BBC radio show on 3 September, 1991.  The session included a performance of the song Dumb that would feature on In Utero two years later. 

5 songs guitarists need to hear by… Nirvana

The Fender Mustang that Kurt Cobain used in Nirvana’s video for the era-defining hit single Smells Like Teen Spirit has gone up for auction – and it could well be the next million dollar electric guitar.

It is going under the hammer as part of Julien’s Auctions Music Icons three-day event, which sees a veritable cornucopia of gear and ephemera being auctioned. If you are sorted for entry-level Fender guitars, Cobain’s 1965 Dodge Dart, aka ‘Baby Blue’, is also up for grabs.

But this 1969 Fender Mustang, finished in Competition Lake Placid Blue – complete with racing stripe – is one of the defining instruments for a generation of guitar players. The Smells Like Teen Spirit video ushered in a new dawn for popular culture as grunge and alternative rock went mainstream.

Julien’s places a conservative estimate of $600,000 - $800,000 on the Mustang. We are big fans of the painted headstock and would happily pay a premium for one, but the value of this guitar is related to its cultural importance.

For Cobain, the Mustang a perfectly utilitarian choice; cost-effective, compact, lightweight, easily modded/fixed, and last but no means least, he could find a left-handed model. The Mustang in question has been on display at the Experience Music Project in Seattle (now MoPOP Museum of Pop Culture) for the past 12 years.

A portion of the proceeds from the guitar’s sale will go to mental health charity Kicking The Stigma. 

This being a 21st century auction, there are a variety of Nirvana-related NFTs available, including on from Cobain’s tech Earnie Bailey talking about the guitar and its place in music history – this comes with a 360-degree digital representation of the Mustang and is forecasted to fetch between $6,000 and $8,000 – and an NFT of the Smells Like Teen Spirit sweater that Cobain wore in the video. Again, the sweater is digitally represented and accompanied by Cobain’s narration.

Kurt Cobain’s 1959 Martin D-18E acoustic guitar presently holds the world record for the most-expensive guitar sold at auction, edging out David Gilmour’s Black Strat in 2020 when it sold for $6,010,000 at a similar event hosted by Julian’s Auctions.

This year’s Music Icons event commences on Friday 20 May live at the Hard Rock Cafe in New York, and online at Julien’s Auctions.

You never know what you are going to get at a Nirvana memorabilia auction. There are the electric guitars, such as Kurt Cobain's custom-built MIJ Fender Mustang that went for $340,000. But then you've got some weird stuff, like  Kurt Cobain's stage-worn cardigan, which was sold at auction for $334,000.

Iconic Auctions’ Amazing Music Auction (Vol. 1) has that beat, however. Sure, it has some very desirable items on offer; there is Cobain's stage-played Marshall 1960B 4x12 cabinet, as seen on Nirvana's Live And Loud performance.

Alternatively, how about a Stinger S-style electric signed by the whole of Nirvana? It's thought to be the one of the only guitars in existence to be signed by all three members. Well, if that's not your speed, how about six strands of Cobain's hair?

Yes, with a minimum bid of $2,500, there is a lot that offers six strands of the late Nirvana frontman's hair, plus pictures and a COA of course. It's tempting, though we'd argue that you might get a little more use out of the Marshall cab. After all, every great guitar amplifier deserves a good cabinet. This one is pretty special.

Released in 2013 to coincide with the 20th anniversary of In Utero, Nirvana's Live And Loud documented all the sweat and venom of the band's incendiary hometown performance at Seattle's Pier 48, on Pier 48 in Seattle, on 13 December 1993.

This Marshall 1960B was part of the backline that night, and comes stencilled with "K3 Music Bank – Vintage" on the rear, with Cobain's name written faintly on the top right-hand corner of the cab. 

Loaded with Celestion V30s, this is a fully operation cabinet, and was used by Cobain in other Nirvana shows, and, after his passing, by Hole and OPM. The minimum bid is listed at $15,000, and you can hear Cobain demo it below.

As for the signed guitar, the Stinger SXX S-style is finished in baby blue, with black hardware and pickguard, and is signed by Cobain, Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl. Inscribed to Kelly, it is a super-rare, and quite possibly the only guitar to be signed by all three members.

Stinger guitars was founded by C.F. Martin and Co. in 1985 and made under license in South Korea. These Strat-a-likes can be found online for a couple of hundred quid. Bidding starts at $10,000.

As for the specs of the hair. Well, Cobain, a bottle blond, was in Birmingham when the deed was done. We know this because it was documented on camera and included in the listing.

The haircut was performed by Tessa Osbourne in 1989 while Nirvana were touring in support of Bleach. After Cobain died, Osbourne gifted the strands to Seattle artist Nicole DePolo, who writes in the certificate of authenticity that Osbourne and Cobain [pictured below] were friends, and that she was behind Cobain's much-copied look.

”Kurt was known for his bleached blond pageboy,” writes DePolo. ”She’d given him his first one back in October of 1989, just before his image began to circulate throughout the world.”

For piece of mind, the hair has also been certified authentic by John Reznikoff of University Archives, who you might know for his 2014 appearance in the Guinness World Records for owning the world's “Largest Collection of Historic Hair.” 

For more details, see Iconic Auctions.