It’s three years yesterday (February 24) since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, and to mark that sad anniversary, U2 have shared a message and a piece of music in support of the country and its leader, President Zelenskyy.

You can see the Instagram message below. In it, Bono reads out My Friendly Epistle, a poem by Taras Shevchenko, accompanied by piano. The singer said that he and The Edge had previously sent the recording to Zelenskyy himself in 2022, shortly after the initial invasion.

“All who believe in freedom and sense the jeopardy we Europeans now find ourselves in are not sleeping easily on this, the third anniversary of the invasion,” he wrote in the caption. “More to say about this and other bewilderments later.”

U2 have rarely been shy of taking a stand when it comes to human rights. Recently, Bono penned an op-ed in The Atlantic magazine in which outlined his thoughts on how to achieve freedom “in every part of the world where health and humanity are at risk”.

Bono wrote about the idea of ‘freedom’, how it has meant different things across time and across nations and how the need for freedom has been expressed continuously in music.

“When we rock stars talk about freedom, we more often mean libertinism than liberation, but growing up in the Ireland of the ’60s, that had its place too,” he wrote. “We were mad for freedoms we didn’t have: political freedom, religious freedom, and (most definitely) sexual freedom.

“Rock and roll promised a freedom that could not be contained or silenced, an international language of liberation… In U2, we wanted our song Pride (In the Name of Love) to sound like the freedom we were campaigning for in our work with Amnesty International. That’s how insufferable we were.”

The article appeared just before the singer was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Joe Biden in January, the highest civilian honour in the US, for being “a pioneering activist against AIDS and poverty.”

Meanwhile, the Ukraine war moves into its fourth year after a week which has seen talks in Saudi Arabia between Russia and President Trump to end the conflict, talks which Ukraine was excluded from.

We already knew that U2 are working on new material, but it sounds like we might be hearing some of it sooner than we thought.

That’s what The Edge seemed to be suggesting when he made an appearance on the Sodajerk on Songwriting podcast. “There might be a new song happening very soon, which you’ll hear about, “ he said. “Can’t say any more than that. We’re in a great place creatively.”

The 63-year-old guitarist also said that he has started to present finished lyrics to his three bandmates - Bono, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr – so they don’t waste time on tracks that are “never gonna work”.

“I sort of tricked myself,” he said. “I was going, ‘OK, this is for The Edge solo album, so… you can’t be, like, leaving these things half finished. It doesn’t have to have finished lyrics, but it needs to really hang together. And that extra discipline, I think, has been very useful.”

He added: “So, I’ve been just working on so much material, and I hope, now that we’re doing some U2 sessions with that material, it looks like it’s paying off in that we sort of know, ‘Yeah, that one really does have some potential here.’ And we still might end up… changing it around a lot, but we’re not gonna be wasting our time on an idea that was never gonna work.”

The Edge also hinted heavily that the band are looking to tour sooner rather than later. “We’re hoping to get to do some shows,” he said. “Because, you know, we did the Vegas run, which was fantastic, but we didn’t get to see much of the world. And… we’re looking forward to hooking up with our fans where they live, as opposed to them having to come to us.”

Other than the 2023-24 Las Vegas Sphere residency, U2 haven’t played live since before the pandemic. And aside from a one-off single in 2023, Atomic City, there has been no new new material since 2017’s Songs Of Experience album.

Instead the band have concentrated on archive projects – the ‘reimagining’ of their back catalogue that was Songs Of Surrender and last year’s re-packaging of How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, which included a so-called ‘shadow’ album of offcuts, entitled How To Reassemble An Atomic Bomb.

In an interview with Jo Whiley on Radio 2 last November, The Edge described the new music the band were working on as “some crazy kind of sci-fi Irish folk music”. He also said that they were working with “some beautiful Irish musicians” and their old confrère Brian Eno.

Join us for our traditional look back at the news and features that floated your boat this year.

Best of 2024: U2 were already a big deal in 1984 - 1983's War LP and its global tour, which also spawned the band's well-regarded live album Under a Blood Red Sky, had made the Irish band one of the world's hottest, if not hippest, tickets.

But it was The Unforgettable Fire that pointed the way to the band's record-breaking future as Steve Lillywhite's upfront rock production gave way to Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno's more nuanced soundscapes.

Eno, in particular, seems to have struck a career-chord with The Edge during the album's Slane Castle sessions. "He's not a great keyboard player, he doesn't write great songs really, he doesn't have the craft that say Bowie has to write a song, or Paul McCartney,” he told One-Two Testing magazine in 1984.

"His engineering and technical abilities are limited as well. In fact, he knows very little about an awful lot, but it's how he applies that knowledge.

"I suppose it's down to confidence, too."

That pragmatic creativity was something The Edge took confidence and inspiration from, as he'd told Hot Press the year before:"I could see how Eno had shaped his career not around any one particular overriding talent but through a collection of, I suppose you would say second-rate, abilities.

"But the way he used them, that he'd been so determined to follow the areas in music he found stimulating to create a career - that must be totally unique.

"Now I don't think I'm a particularly talented guitar virtuoso. My talent if it's anything is my approach to the guitar by the use of effects, by non-acceptance of the usual approaches to the guitar".

There were other, similarly pragmatic forces behind the U2 man's signature style, which was well in place pre-Eno, though.

Back with One-Two Testing: "My guitar style has always been the product really of the rest of the group. Adam is a very ostentatious sort of person, y'know, very extravagant, so when he started playing bass he wasn't interested in taking the bottom end of the sound spectrum at all.

"He wanted to be right up there in the mid-ranges, so his bass sounds were always extremely full with a lot of top end — very different to say Simple Minds or any of the other bands around that era, the Bunnymen or anybody like that.

"In order to give the group any sort of clarity, therefore, I had to stay away from the bottom end of the guitar as much as I could. So I tended to work around those high chords, that ringing sound...

"So when we started writing our own songs it just developed, this style of using high chords with that sort of ringing quality, not particularly rhythmic but more just a harmonic wash over little hook lines picked out within the songs, essentially very much as it is now.

"Then we started making a bit of money on gigs so I bought an echo unit and various other boxes, and most of the other boxes I discarded very quickly. I hate effects, the kind of things that jump out at you."

"I'm not an incredibly versatile guitar player, but I've made best use of what limited talents I have. I think my talent is possibly applying my abilities in a new way, so that could be production, it could be songwriting, it could be guitar playing, it could be anything. I enjoyed Eno because I could see he did that as well."

Read more

• The Edge on recording U2's Love Is Blindness: "I poured everything into this guitar solo… I was in tears"
• "Nothing much happens for the first eight or ten hours. Just trust that it's going to work out”: Classic Brian Eno interview reveals how he really produced ambient music

Apparently U2 are working on new music. In an interview with Jo Whiley last night on Radio 2 no less an authority than The Edge confirmed that the band and Brian Eno are busy on what he described as “crazy sci fi Irish folk music”.

The mind boggles. Anyhow, the key thing is that they are on it. These last few years have been lean times for U2 fans (at least in Europe). Aside from one standalone single, they haven’t released any new music since 2017’s Songs Of Experience album.

Instead there has been a succession of retrospective projects – the ‘re-imagining’ of their back catalogue that was Songs Of Surrender, Bono’s memoir and more recently what they’re describing as the “shadow” album to 2004’s How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, cunningly titled How To Reassemble An Atomic Bomb.

That’s released on Friday and is what The Edge was ostensibly promoting on Whiley’s show. Conversation naturally turned to recent activities – the band’s Sphere residency and Larry Mullen’s current fitness (the drummer sat out their run at the Sphere).

“We’ve got him in the studio,” the guitarist said. “He’s good, he’s taking it easy but he’s back in the saddle on the drums still doing some recording with us and so we’ll be doing a bit more of that before the end of the year.”

“And then Bono and I are working on some crazy kind of sci-fi Irish folk music,” he continued, “which could end up becoming a part of the new U2 album, we’re not sure yet we’ll see. Part of our kind of process is to go so widely away from, off track, and then sort of the process of bringing things back on track is kind of how you get sort of unique sounding music…

"We have Brian Eno involved. And a bunch of, you know some beautiful, Irish musicians, you know so incredibly talented.”

Eno and U2 haven’t worked together since 2009’s No Line On The Horizon. The years since have been difficult – artistically, at least - for the band. After years of over-thinking and procrastination they finally released the follow up Songs Of Innocence in September 2014, as a free download – famously it popped up one morning on every Apple device on the planet. Arguably, the band have yet to recover from what’s commonly regarded as one of the 21st Century’s most notorious PR disasters. Fans will be hoping that by engaging with Eno once more – he co-produced their hugely successful run of albums from The Unforgettable Fire onwards - U2 might yet rediscover their creative mojo.

John Entwistle’s bass solo on The Who’s My Generation remains one of the greatest of all time - not to mention one of the first in rock history - but his friend Rick Wakeman has revealed that it became a bit of an albatross for him.

Discussing his own organ solo on Yes’s Close To The Edge with YouTuber Rick Beato, Wakeman cites what he calls the ‘John Entwistle My Generation syndrome’, and goes on to explain what that means.

“The bass solo in My Generation is one of the classic bass things of all time,” says Wakeman. “And John said it was the bane of his life. He said, ‘because it was a solo.’

“‘We're in the studio,’ he said, ‘I did it and that was it.’ It became a huge hit and he said ‘then we go out and we're playing, and it comes to my bit, so I do a solo,’ and people would come and go, ‘played that wrong.’ And he said, ‘No, I didn't, it's a solo,’ and [they’d say] ‘played it wrong. You didn't play it right.’ And he said it happened so many times.

“Even reviewers said, ‘such a shame that John played the bass bit wrong.’ So he said, ‘One day I went, fuck it. I sat in the hotel with my bass and a little Pignose amp, and I learned what I’d played. That was the only way.’

“It’s interesting, sometimes, when a solo actually becomes a part. It becomes a part. It becomes a part of the music. It's no longer a solo.”

Wakeman seems to be implying that he considers a solo to be something that’s improvised in the moment. However, when it ends up on an album and people expect you to recreate it, note for note, it becomes something else.

“I had that a little bit with the Close To The Edge thing, because I had to learn it,” he says. “It was all right. You know, these things happen, but the truth of the matter is, there is no such thing as a solo on record. It doesn't exist. It's a feeling of that time. It becomes fixed in time.”

• How to play synth solos like Rick Wakeman

Elsewhere in the interview, Wakeman also discusses his friend Elton John, and suggests that his skills in certain musical areas have partially obscured his talent in another.

“One of the things that people forget about Elton John is, because he's such an amazing songwriter and the singer - what a good player,” he says. “He's a great player. He's a really good player, but it sort of gets lost a bit because of his singing and the songwriting.”

U2's astounding recent residency at the newly constructed Las Vegas Sphere was not only a visual spectacle; the immersive 40 live dates were also a showcase for the futuristic spherical venue’s revolutionary live sound capabilities, harnessing beam forming and wave-field synthesis technology.

But behind such a notably audacious live event, at the world’s biggest spherical building, came years of preparation. In an interview for U2.com, the band’s long-standing live sound engineer, Joe O’Herlihy, shared the preparation he undertook to integrate the band’s setup into the mind-boggling new space, and remembers being blown away by the results: “The sound in The Sphere is absolutely phenomenal,” said Joe, who has been on the road with the band for over 40 years.

O’Herlihy shared that Bono began thinking about the then in-development Sphere – and its Immersive Sound System, developed by Berlin company Holoplot – in August 2021. “[Bono asked] if I could go over to Berlin and see if I could break it.” Joe said, of the system. “That has been my brief since year dot. To be perfectly honest, I tried my level best and I couldn’t break it.”

“I went to Leipzig, to the Congress Messe where there was an exhibition of the sound system – the first time they’d put together sixty of these boxes. They had industry types like myself give it a listen. I was scheduled to have a brief demo, but I was so enthused by the whole thing that I actually stayed for the week.”

This incredible setup, dubbed the 'Sphere Immersive Sound' system, is based on Holoplot’s X1 Matrix Array of speakers and encompasses 1,586 fixed speakers, with 300 mobile modules. 99% of which are hidden from view behind the venue's colossal wraparound video screen. The system offers vast control over the sound dispersion in both horizontal and vertical fields. Overall, it comprises 167,000 speaker drivers, amps and processing channels.

Joe brought multitracks of numerous different U2 recordings from various venue types, including outdoor stadiums, the Sydney Cricket Ground and an indoor dome in Seoul, Korea. “I did that to get an idea of the sonic value of all of those. We also played the biggest arena in the world, (the Phillipene Arena in Manilla.)”

These multitracks gave Joe various acoustic situations to work with, but when it came to stress testing the system that promised ‘perfect acoustics’ he was astounded “I ran extremely loud and I ran extremely hard to see if I could break it or now. The sub-bass and all of that energy was second-to-none.”

Joe dubbed the resulting sound a “low-end heaven” which, when delivered at full-pelt gave unprecedented results. “You have to take into consideration that this system was brand new, and hadn’t been used any venue anywhere, so it was a big chance to take. But things like the vocal intelligibility of Bono’s voice… it was almost like he was singing [close to your face]. You feel up-close and personal.”

Coming out of that initial test, Joe wrote Bono and The Edge an email, “My opening line was, ‘this is going to be quite a biblical report’, because this is what happened. My parting shot on it was – 'you guys definitely have to the best the first band into the The Sphere, because this is the future.'”

Thankfully the band agreed with Joe's assessment and U2’s Achtung Baby Live residency spanned an extended run of 40 concerts between 29 September 2023 to 2 March of this year, pulling in over 663,000 people. The concerts were a phenomenal success, and sold both the concept of the venue (which also utilises a 16k resolution wraparound LED video screen to provide a fully immersive experience for concert-goers). It would become the fourth highest grossing concert residency of all time. “We’ve always pushed and pushed, and [decided] we were going to be the first,” said Joe.

Further residencies at The Sphere have included Phrish, Dead & Company and – currently – The Eagles, who have extended their residency until February 2025.

U2 albums have long involved drawn-out sessions and an excess of material – a lot of it hears the light of day but enough from 2004's How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb's sessions to birth a whole 10-track record; How To Re-Assemble An Atomic Bomb.

How To Dismantle… was very much a continuation of U2 leaning into the calling cards they'd rediscovered on 2000's All That You Can't Leave Behind – especially what Edge called his 'Coca-Cola' guitar sound. You know, chiming delay propelling big anthems. 

While that may have elicited sighs from fans of Pop and Zooropa's more experimental spirit, U2 do anthemic well, sometimes very well, and How To Re-Assemble An Atomic Bomb's double A-side taster affirms that.

Country Mile is a solid one, but not quite at the level of a City Of Blinding Lights. Picture Of You (X+W) initially feels like a rawer take on the Dublin band's dynamic with the Edge's garage riff, but it takes off into a more majestic space. It also references the How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb lyric that inspired the album's title, suggesting it must have been close to making the cut.

 “The sessions for How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb were such a creative period for the band, we were exploring so many song ideas in the studio," says the Edge. "We were inspired to revisit our early music influences, and it was a time of deep personal introspection for Bono who was attempting to process - dismantle - the death of his father.

"For this anniversary edition I went into my personal archive to see if there were any unreleased gems and I hit the jackpot," the guitarist adds. "We chose ten that really spoke to us. Although at the time we left these songs to one side, with the benefit of hindsight we recognize that our initial instincts about them being contenders for the album were right, we were onto something."

How To Re-Assemble An Atomic Bomb will be released on 29 November exclusively for Record Store Day Black Friday alongside a digital release. A week before the How To Dismantle… record itself will be released as a remastered 20th anniversary edition. 

"What you’re getting on this shadow album is that raw energy of discovery," says the Edge. "The visceral impact of the music, a sonic narrative, a moment in time, the exploration and interaction of four musicians playing together in a room… this is the pure U2 drop.”

Tracklisting for How To Re-Assemble An Atomic Bomb:

1.         Picture Of You (X+W)

2.         Evidence Of Life

3.         Luckiest Man In The World

4.         Treason

5.         I Don't Wanna See You Smile

6.         Country Mile

7.         Happiness

8.         Are We Gonna Wait Forever?

9.         Theme From The Batman

10.       All Because Of You 

While Treason, Evidence Of Life, Country Mile and Happiness have never been heard before outside the band's inner circle;  Luckiest Man In The World leaked online almost 20 years ago under its working title Mercy.  - familiar to fans under its working title ‘Mercy’, an early demo of which was leaked online almost 20 years ago. The other five are newly remastered songs – Picture Of You (X+W), I Don't Wanna See You Smile, Are We Gonna Wait Forever?, Theme From The Batman and All Because Of You 2 – are 'all collected together for the first time to mark the 20th anniversary of How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb.

Fans will notice that All Because of You is a song on the final album, so this could be a different take on it. 

The remastered How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb (20th Anniversary Edition) will be released on Vinyl 8LP Super Deluxe Collectors Boxset (Limited Edition); Vinyl 2LP; Exclusive D2C 2LP Black & Red Ink Spot Vinyl (Limited Edition); 5CD Super Deluxe Collectors Boxset (Limited Edition); CD; and Exclusive Red & Black Cassette (Limited Edition). 

The digital releases include HTDAAB remastered (12 tracks); and HTDAAB & HTRAAB (22 tracks). How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb (Re-Assemble Edition) – featuring both How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb + How To Re-Assemble An Atomic Bomb - will be available as a dual digital release on 22 November.

Preorder here

• "It was totally, totally nuts": The Edge was so impressed with Universal Audio's Lion '68 amp pedal, he didn't just add it to his rig – it changed the tone for his intro to U2's Las Vegas Sphere gigs

U2 are set to release a new concert movie shot during their residency at Sphere last year. The one catch? For the moment you can only see it...at the Sphere.

V-U2 will be screened exclusively at the futuristic Las Vegas venue from September 5. The film is the first to be shot using the ‘Big Sky’ camera system, which Sphere Entertainment has itself developed. This footage will appear on the venue’s 160,000-square-foot LED screen in high-definition audio. There are even so-called ‘haptic’ seats, which vibrate to the sound of the music. 

The film’s co-director is also one of the stars. The Edge was the man in charge, alongside his wife Morleigh Steinberg. Indeed he jokes in the trailer below: “After all these years, I get to see a U2 show.”

“The goal was to give the immersive moviegoers as close to the live U2:UV concert experience as possible - and then some,” the guitarist said in a statement. “I’ve never seen a U2 show. I’m so relieved I caught a great one.”

“We knew all the tremendous capabilities of the technology, but we didn’t know what to expect from the process of making this film,” added Steinberg, who has previously worked with the band, directing their Staring at the Sun video. “The work became a true collaboration between band, artists, producers, and technology teams. The end result is a cinematic experience that transports viewers into the energy and beauty of the live show.”

Tickets aren’t cheap though. They start at $100, and subscribers to U2.com and Sphere ‘Inner Circle’ members are first in the queue. There’s no news yet as to whether the film will be screened at similar venues around the world.

The band’s Sphere residency won rave reviews last autumn and proved so successful that a succession of big names have since lined up to play the innovative arena, including Dead And Company, The Eagles and Phish. U2’s run of shows were notable for being the first time in over forty years that the band have played without drummer Larry Mullen Jr, who was still recovering from a neck injury at the time.

U2 are said to be working on a new album, though last November Bono said in an interview with Mojo that the record was “somewhat tied” to Mullen’s ongoing recovery. The band haven’t released an album of brand new material since Songs Of Experience in 2017.

Tore Mogensen and James Santiago head the team at Universal Audio that has big ambitions. They knew their effects and amp modelling pedals belonged on huge stages as well as in homes and rehearsal rooms, what they may not have imagined was that one of the best-known and most fastidious tone-hound guitarists in the world would embrace what they had worked on so enthusiastically.

MusicRadar has already heard from the Edge himself about why he chose to use Universal Audio's UAFX Ruby '63, Woodrow '55 and Dream '65 amp modelling pedals to replace the tube amps in his rig and supply Vox AC30, Fender Tweed Deluxe and Deluxe Reverb tones for U2's sets at the cutting edge Sphere venue in Las Vegas that have helped to change the perception on what is possible to achieve with live music in the audio and visual realms. What we didn't know was there was more.

By the end of the band's residency at the Sphere, Edge and his longtime tech Dallas Schoo had added a fourth UAFX amp emulation pedal; the Lion '68 – recreating Marshall Plexi Super Lead and Super Bass tones. Not only that, its sound had inspired him to swap out a vital tone in the set's intro that was traditionally covered by the AC30, and then Ruby '63 pedal.

For the first time we have the inside perspective from Tore and James on the news that brought their whole project with UA into sharp focus. 

"I have not talked about it all but I did see one of the last shows at Sphere," James tells us as part of an in-depth MusicRadar interview. "And I did go under the stage to meet with the guys right before showtime. They're like, 'You're here, come under this'. The venue was packed, crowded all the way to the front. So they snuck me under the stage right there, about 20 minutes before they went on, to show me the setup."

What struck Sound and Product Designer James wasn't just the setup but how it was being used. 

"I know I can't share any pictures or anything, but they showed me this little rack that basically had shelves that just had Rubys, Lions, Dream – every one of our pedals was on a shelf," James remembers. "Dallas was like, 'We use every one of these and when you watch the show tonight, the opening song, which is the Zoo Station intro that Edge plays to start the concert – that's the Lion pedal. He's not even using the Ruby. He loves the Marshall sound right now. We just got it this morning. And he was into it. He put it in the rig today.'"

The sense of pride was enriched further by how enthusiastic Schoo was about the pedals being added to the rig.

"They were just so excited to have consistent tones and for Dallas it was he got to not be pummelled by the amps, because under the stage used to be where the amps were," says James. "He had to live in this world of just the amps hitting his head and the craziness of keeping a whole locker room full of amps under a stage running during a show. He was so happy, he said: 'It's so great down here. Look at the shelves, and it works perfectly'".

"Then meeting the front-of-house engineer and then just seeing the show was great, because you saw what he had," James tells us. "And we talked about MIDI – Edge has a lot of programmed changes, a lot of timed delays. So he had this crazy amount of rack delays and post-effects stuff. And he goes, "I'm using the pedals exactly like I use the amps", because all he did was get rid of the amps and that cable that would have gone to multiple AC-30s and Tweed Deluxes just went into the pedals as a drop-in replacement for the rig. That's what we're doing."

It was the ultimate scenario of what James and Tore had envisioned when they were tasked with developing Universal Audio's amp pedals.  

"I was shocked to see it because that's what we wanted with someone," admits James. "And we had these discussions, me and Tore saying, 'We want somebody that if they had their pedalboard and their backline at a gig and if the amp went down, they could just take that cable, plug it into one of these pedals and it will do the exact same thing and go straight to house'. That's what they did. 

"And in fact, it was a full circle moment because I had talked to some of the [other UA] guys before we even did the stuff. So it was like, 'Hey, remember that thing you talked about trying to do? You did it and the pedals are here tonight, and they're onstage and you're about to see them go live in 10 minutes go live.

"It was a real live version of what Tore was hoping would happen, when this idea came up but he pushed us through to get this sort of team together to make these amp pedals."

Back in November 2023, MusicRadar reached out to the Edge after reports surfaced that he'd added UAFX amp pedals to his rig. He confirmed to us that was indeed the case and they'd replaced his usual backline of vintage amps for the Las Vegas shows.

"For various reasons at the Sphere I decided to switch from amplifiers to digital amp emulators," the U2 guitarist told MusicRadar. "I'm using UA Ruby, Dream and Woodrow amp pedals with some Fractal Axe-FX units handling additional amp emulation and FX. 

"When you introduce radio leads and all the electronics involved it's never the same as a simple guitar into amp tone so it's a case of high-level complexity to make it sound simple,” Edge added. 

While UA's amp pedals have provided a solution that's seemingly without compromise for Edge, it's really interesting to hear how the Lion '68 actually inspired a change in the sound of Zoo Station live.

"It was totally, totally nuts," says James. "And then you realise that he talks to his other buddies and then you get a call from Joe Walsh going, 'Hey, man, I was talking to the Edge and he said I should try these pedals.' And then that guy talked to John Mayer. And then you realise all these guitar nerds talk to each other. Bob Weir talks to Mayer. That's how the natural growth happens. Because you can't just make somebody like a product or a sound. 

"I think any one of us know the same thing where you have a friend and they say, 'You should try this pedal', or, 'You should borrow mine and check it out'. And that natural growth of tone nerds sharing cool ideas and new products.

Check out our full interview with James and Tore as we talk about the process of developing amp pedals, the challenges so far and why they see them as passing the torch of classic amp sounds for a new generation to enjoy. 

This interview is a deep, detailed dive into the journey of Universal Audio and its guitar pedal adventure. Which is exactly what it needs to be because that's how UA Sound/Product Designer James Santiago, Product Manager Tore Mogensen and their teams approach the process of emulating vintage amps, cabs and effects. 

Universal Audio's history as a hardware company that went into software, before developing guitar hardware makes them an unusual proposition. That last stage started with the Ox Amp Top Box and was one founded on very clear ideas and grand ambitions.

It's led to where UA are now; one of the top names in amps and effects modelling, with much more planned.  

"I think in general we wanted to do the same thing that I think we do with pretty much all our products," says Tore of the UA perspective on entering the guitar hardware market. "With a few exceptions, a lot of what UA does is to really try to recapture the golden era of music equipment, dating back to the '50s and '60s, and later – to try to capture that with an accuracy that hasn't really been done before. And obviously, along the way, to provide some solutions for for musicians that haven't been available to them before. 

"I started right after Ox came out at UA," Tore explains of his move from TC Electronic to the Californian company after 16 years. It was more James's project than mine, but it was about really taking a very long, hard look at everything – speakers, microphones, everything that sort of goes into recording guitar – the speakers and microphones once you get out of the amp. Then providing a solution that basically makes it possible for any guitar player to get amazing recorded guitar, once you get out of the amp."

James Santiago knows amps – the more you speak with him and Tore, the more you're reminded of just how passionate and deep their knowledge of this side of the signal chain is. They're a professional team at UA but also musicians with decades of playing experience on stages and in studios. They're also the kind of unashamed gear nerds we feel right at home with. But it emerges they're just the tip of a very large guitar-shaped iceberg at UA. 

James:  "What people don't realise is that the building is full of guitar players," says James. "All the way down to to Bill [Putnam Jr, Universal Audio CEO] who restarted the company with his father's earlier innovations; he's a guitar player. You go to his house, and he's got a '60s ES-335 on the wall. He's got Strats, he loves Les Paul's – he plays jazz music and rock and pop. He's a guitar-playing nerd, honestly. And every other engineer or marketing guy's got guitars. So it was it seemed like a natural progression at some point for everyone to go, 'Well, we can make a guitar product'. 

Ox was the vital first step. It filled a need while staying true to UA's roots as a trusted studio equipment innovator, and it had to be embraced by recordists who were looking for a way to capture amps that was not just easier but delivered great results. 

"It's one thing to say that the studio environment goes from large format Neve consoles and tape machines," adds James. "And then you've got these plugins that can emulate that and great, I can take that home. What you can't do is still turn on a 100-watt Marshall at home, because you're going to rattle the neighbours. And it's not going to sound right unless it's on 10 or seven and an ungodly volume."

James was seen as the key figure UA needed to solve that conundrum.

"I was talking with Bill at some point and he said, 'You should think about coming to work for us'. Well, 'Yeah, but you're not making any guitar products. It's all studio stuff."

"We talked about this idea because I had all these Marshalls isolated in another room so I wouldn't piss off my neighbours," laughs James. "And then we started asking, 'What if we could do this? What if we could bring the UA workflow and get the old analogue historic sounds out of your guitar amps?' Get into this environment where it was fun and creative?"

This fun and creative emphasis is central to the UA guitar division's ethos, but the idea of Ox was about looking at the signal chain, not just the amp. And that bigger-picture perspective on guitar sound would eventually filter down into the effects and then amp emulation pedals that would come later when the UAFX line began to roll out in 2021 with the Golden Reverberator, Starlight Echo Station and Astra Modulation Machine. 

This industry-leading attention to accuracy in modelling that had become a hallmark of UA's plugins would now be showcased and explored in a more tangible way with pedals. Along with a curative and accessible approach to giving players the best examples of classic sounds.  

"I would say there's a lot of mystery behind the sound once it leaves your guitar cabinet," reasons James. "You know, it's one thing to be a guitar nerd and to love pedals and amps and guitars. But then there's this whole other science and creative force behind people who can take your sound and know how to EQ it. 

"Put the right microphone on it, use the room, compress it, blend the post effects… it's almost a whole other part of your brain to do that. So that product for us gave us the ability to give it the UA treatment of, let's make the studio workflow easy and fun and get to these historic sounds. And thankfully, it worked."

James doesn't say this lightly – the success of Ox wasn't a foregone conclusion by any means.  

"It was pretty dicey for a while during research and development," he admits. "How do we really do this and make this fun and easy? Because I just wanted to be able to use my Marshall and put it on seven, and all of a sudden make it sound like it was 1968 Cream or 1970s, '80s – from Nirvana to Jimi Hendrix and everything. And I think once we realised it worked, we probably should continue to do this. And then we entered into the world of bringing in someone like Tore who's got experience on the other side of that."

Tore Mogensen had already carved an impressive path in the field of guitar effects with TC Electronic in his home country of Denmark. During his tenure there were huge successes at the company including the development of the PolyTune and the equally forward-thinking concept of Toneprints that enabled the player to customise and expand their TC pedal via smartphone connection. 

TC Electronic's refocus on pedals again with series like the Flashback Delay and Hall Of Fame Reverb was embraced by players. So Tore's move to UA in 2018 to join James signaled a deeper investment from the company that went beyond the studio setup. The next stage was affirming UA as a go-to brand for guitar players. Not a simple step. 

"I think there's a real trust with brands," says James. "I have certain brands I trust – I like Fenders, I like Gibsons – I have certain pedals I like. You trust the brand, and you trust that company and its sound design. We've reached a point where a lot of people have known Tore for ages. Tore is legendary on forums, you know – there's a whole myth about Tore, the Pedal Jesus and the guy who does all this stuff."

But beneath the online identities are two people who are like the rest of us in a fundamental way – they love guitar. And they wanted to create gear they would use too. 

"We're all into this," agrees James. "Because we want to do something innovative and do something our heroes might have used, or some forward-thinking sound. And there's a real love behind it. And not just that we should make guitar products, there was never just a thing on a sheet." 

"I think it's a really good point that James made," adds Tore. "When you start out with a company, a lot of times what you do is start something that you're passionate about, and then you build that company. And then at some point, it's like, oh, we've got to grow, or we've got to expand our market or our customer share, or whatever it is. That's so not the case here, even though it's been 20 years in or 15 years in before really starting to make guitar products here."

The question then isn't why UA started making pedals, but perhaps why it took them so long. 

"As James said, it's ridiculous going to UA and seeing how many guitar players there is," Tore tells us. "And the funny thing is, once COVID hit and everybody went back home and we're communicating on Zoom, it became even more obvious. 

"Typically you'd be at the office you'd go in and you'd see one of the engineers have a guitar or two or you'd see one of the sales guys but then you watch everybody at home on Zoom. And it's just guitars everywhere you see.

"I worked at a few places in the music industry before and James certainly has as well, but I've never seen that amount of guitar players just permeated through the entire company."

Were you conscious about trying to bring players into the digital world who may have been previously turned off?

Tore: "Yeah, that's very much a conscious decision. Starting with Ox, but definitely also the pedals, there are two things. There's a conscious decision to ask what do we think the customer group tha trying to appeal to would like, but there's also just the other part of what would I like, what would James like?

"As much as I can appreciate the benefits and sort of the flexibility of a lot of the more feature-rich, multi-effects and digital products that are out there, honestly I just hate to use them. I think at the end of the day, what I really like when I have to work with gear is that I want to have fun, and I want to get inspired and I don't get inspired if I have to look at this display and browse through 19 pages of parameters.

"So we very much made a conscious decision to make the products fairly simple. Also sometimes take some hard but educated guesses on behalf of the customer in terms of what they want. 

"Again, you can look at Ox and say, 'Well, you have six rigs on the front. It's not 1000. It's not like there are 10 or 100 different Marshall cabinets. We try to make sure that the ones that are there are the best ones, and that they sound great. 

"But if your thing is, oh, I want to have four different or 10 or 20 different Greenback cabinets, you're not gonna get that with our products. The same thing goes for the amp pedals. You know, when we put cabinets and speakers into those, we try to pick the ones where they sort of make sense for that amp. 

"You're not going to find some sort of metal cabinet that you can put on your Tweed Deluxe because, at least to us, it doesn't make sense – even though it might sound good, you never know. But that's where we sort of try to keep things simple and easier for the customer."

The idea of option paralysis is a real issue for some players with gear now – especially in the modelling realm. And it feels with your amp pedals you changed the conversation and introduced this idea of focusing on modelling one thing, but very deeply and accurately. Have you noticed the influence that approach had elsewhere in the market?

Tore: "Yeah, I think we can see it a little bit. There are some other companies that try to look in our direction. And I think a lot of that came from, obviously, the simplicity of it. 

"The other thing just came from the fact that, and again not to point fingers at other companies – there are plenty of companies that do awesome stuff out there, but I always felt that it was kind of weird that if I go to a Tweed Deluxe emulation product from somebody, for example, and it has like a bass, middle and treble controls. I know Tweed Deluxes and that's not on my Tweed Deluxe. It might be nice to have a Tweed Deluxe that did that, but that's not where I came from. 

"I like to know that whatever I do and however I turn the knob I can sort of expect the same thing that I would get from the real product. And that's one of the real benefits of having one pedal do one thing – you can emulate the product down to a tee and not add or miss stuff that would have been in the original product or the original amp."

James: "I think when we're even when we're developing things, it can get very complicated. But towards the end of developing stuff, I can't wait until I get to stop messing with the 1,000 things I'm changing, just so I can turn it on and move the volume knob and have it do the right thing. 

"Because I kind of don't care about the 10 or 20 other things I might be able to do with it. If it just acts like the real amp, and I move the tone control here and put this here and put a silly little green overdrive in front of it, and it reacts like my real gear, I can go back to playing guitar and not worrying, does this sound right?

"Because I think maybe most guitar players are always looking at gear like, is it me or is it the gear? Can I trust what I'm hearing and that it's going to work?  

"None of this stuff shares anything when we make an amp model – it's not just the previous model tweaked for some other oddball things. Everything is actually a unique DSP engineer, it's completely from the ground up, so none of this shares anything. It's completely unique from top to bottom. 

"So anytime we plug into the Ruby pedal or the Dream pedal, different people worked on them with the different code. But I know when I plug into that pedal, even if I'm having a bad day, and I feel like I'm not playing very well, I can trust that the amp sounds right. 

"Maybe some other guitar players have that too; 'I don't sound good today', and it's probably not the gear. Sometimes it's you. And it at least we can calmly say, if you have that speaker with that amp setting, that's the right sound. Maybe it's not the right guitar, maybe you're not hitting it hard enough that day or something. And sometimes I find with other pieces of gear, I struggle to get the tones out of it. If I would reference something, it's not doing the right thing or it doesn't feel right. 

"And I don't know if there are any bad tones, there are just tones that don't work for you or don't work for a specific project you're doing. So hopefully when we put these products out, and someone is real fan of that British AC-30 sound, they'll use our stuff they'll go, 'Oh, that does all the good and the bad stuff those amps do'. 

"I think the one thing hopefully we're having an influence on is people realising that, unless you include all the weird quirks that these amps had, you can't clean them up too much – it has to have all the bad stuff too. Because sometimes the bad things about those amps at a certain setting is what makes the other settings brilliant. 

"Like, 'Oh this amp's really shrill at this setting'. Yes, but that shrillness becomes air and glassiness when you clean it up. And that becomes the greatest sound – maybe the U2 sound is that glassy clean sound that doesn't good at nine. It probably doesn't if you're trying to play metal. But what's bad for one thing makes another setting great. 

"We don't just model any vintage amp – we have to go find 10 examples of them because not all vintage gear is great either. And sometimes you have to call your friends and say, 'Want to come over and listen to a bunch of stuff, then pick the best one out of this pile?' So it's a slow process. 

"It's the care we take choosing each microphone too – a vintage mic, and we'll have a set too. So it's always this pile of stuff to find what is the best SM57 and the best use U-67. Along with the best Celestion Greenback we could find and the best set of tubes that could go in the Marshall. 

"I won't even tell you the pile of tubes I've got sitting in my office…. It has to be Mullard [capacitors] and it's got to be a British tube – it's got to have the real stuff. We get really freaky about all of it. And if anything, hopefully we can get people to appreciate all the little things that go along with vintage gear."

One thing that's been really interesting with digital modelling, and particularly these amp pedals is how they illustrate the importance of cabs and speakers as possibly the most overlooked part of the signal chain. Players can instantly audition different speakers in the pedal. How do you guys get together and select what speaker emulations end up on the pedals? Is there a trusted group of people?

James: "It's usually Tore and myself who take the lead, because I think we've both been around long enough that if somebody talks to us about a specific amp, it's always gonna be, 'Yeah, that amp really needs this V-type 30-watt speaker, we've got to make sure that's in there."

Tore: "There are certain amps where it's almost like a no-brainer, right? So if you take a Plexi Marshall, you've got to have your 25-watt Greenbacks, you've got to have your 30-watt Greenbacks. And then you start asking, what could be interesting as well? And that's where the discussions come in – there are lot of those. 

"Honestly, there's also a lot of trial and error. We're working on a new project right now, and I can't tell you what it is, but there is a little bit of discussion of what should those last couple of cabinets be. Because there's really only a couple that are like the no-brainers, and then what would be cool? What would sort of give us a different sound that could be useful? 

"I think the same thing goes for the combo amps as well where for some of them, there are no-brainers. So if you take the Dream, for example, it's a Deluxe Reverb so you've got to have an Oxford in there. But then you start talking. So James is like, 'I know that a lot of those LA studio guys put Greenbacks in the Deluxe Reverb'. Oh, cool, we've got to have that. And then all the Stevie Ray Vaughan fans most definitely want a 4x10 Super Reverb kind of thing going, and we know that the John Mayer types would like more of a 2 x 12 Dumble-ish kind of thing. 

"But then there are the Grateful Deadheads – of which Bill our owner is definitely one. So he wouldn't have seen us ship that pedal without a 2x12 JBL combination in there. So a lot of a lot of times, it's more like, yeah this just makes total sense. A few times, there is a little bit more discussion about what would be nice to have on top of the ones that that we need to have."

James: "The painful part comes because some of the speakers we talked about have to be of a certain vintage era, and then it becomes the issue of chasing 30 – 40-year-old speakers. So it becomes this game of eBay, Reverb, every local LA vintage store and my own stash of stuff. Then, ok,  which one of these specific Greenback 25s into specific cabs actually sounds good with that head.

"It is interesting where one cab is great on the 50-watt '71 Super Lead, but on that '68 one, I like this other cab a little better. That becomes the painful part of auditioning cabs. And I do have notes where I listen to each one, and I have a grading system, even with my own stuff when I get a new cab. I listened to each one of the four speakers with certain playing styles and certain microphones. And then I spend a couple of days evaluating and then I'll go back once my ears are rested and listen to the sessions. 

"You have to pick which one really sounds good, and what I've found is no 4x12 has a set of speakers that all sound the same – each one of them is doing something a little different. I will tell you that it took me forever to find a good vintage, new old stock EVM-12L that we used for the Dream. They're heavy speakers too, and I had to have the certain early '80s ones. 

"I can't tell you how many times I went down to my local USPS. I'd get speakers and they wouldn't be stock – somebody re-coned it, and used rubber cement to fix the tear. And it's like, no, I need new old stock. And not only that, maybe it's one that's been broken in a little bit and sounds good. Because I would put it in the real amp. 

"I'd lose a day, getting one, trying it, putting it in the Deluxe and miking it to find it sounds terrible. Take it out, buy another one. And that's painful. But I think that also shows you have to work on the real gear like it's yours – and sometimes they are my amps. I'm trying to find that speaker that I could take to a session and say, 'This is the real thing.' 

"All of these things that we put into pedals actually exist. So if you said, 'Hey, can you bring the amp with that speaker in it and really make it sound like that?' I 100%? can. If you call me and Tore we can grab all that stuff, show up somewhere, put the mic on it, and if you put the pedal against that, you likely would not be able to tell difference. Because it really does exist."

Tore: "Just to chime in – the EVs are not that bad but some of the other speakers are not really designed to play that loud. You want to find the perfect set of Greenbacks, and just crank a Marshall all the way up –  because we emulate the cone cry and everything. So when we need to we need to blast through, you also run the risk of just blowing speakers up that you just spent a fortune on on eBay to get the perfect vintage sample. So that's a whole other part of that that's happened a few times in the past."

James: "I have definitely borrowed gear from some friends that had better sounding gear than I owned or we bought. And I can give you one good one that most people don't know. The Marshall Lion pedal was a hard one because I really wanted us to have a specific '68 cabinet. And to have the Tolex ripped off of it like Van Halen used to do back in the day. And that was a big ask. 

"I was sitting around with a buddy and said I really needed a '68 stock and it would be cool if it was Van Halenized – the Tolex ripped off is supposed to make a difference. He said, 'I have one of those and you can take it'. That's one of those weird things where sometimes our asks are a little quirky. 

"As Tore said, we put a specific era of JBL in the Dream pedal. And it wasn't just that it had to be that model. I went and found an actual '68 amp that they called the Drip Edge Silverface Twin that had the original F version logo of the JBLs that went in those, that supposedly was the first time Jerry [Garcia] started using Twin Reverbs. 

"So I went on the hunt in Los Angeles to find the '68 Drip Edge JBL officially installed set, just to find one I could put in the Deluxe amp [we modelled]. Because why not do it right? If somebody gave you a corporate card and said, 'Go buy some cool gear' –that sounds like an awesome job!"

Gear forums can obviously be interesting places for opinion and critique, and UA staff are active on them – they're reading and responding to some questions that come up. But looking back on the UAFX pedal releases so far, there's been a common criticism about the lack of MIDI. How do you feel about that now – do you think that the MIDI crowd is a vocal minority, or is it something that you are possibly reconsidering in the future?

Tore: "To be honest, I think to a certain degree that the MIDI community is sort of a very vocal minority. When we designed the pedals originally, I actually spent a bunch of time, mostly on The Gear Page, going through… there are certain threads where people basically just post pictures of their pedalboards. 

"So I was just going through it and looking at how many people actually use MIDI out of all these boards that you see. I think they're probably up to thread number 20. And they get filled up, so they have to start a new one. So it's literally thousands and thousands of posts and thousands of pictures of pedalboards. And [MIDI] was very much a minority. 

"With that said, it's definitely on the rise. It's definitely something that's happening more. People are getting more used to buying, say a GigRig or a [Voodoo Lab] Commander kind of thing. Or even using a multi-effects unit to control additional pedals. So I'm not saying that it's not a valid comment. 

"I think our thought with these pedals was that, as we talked about before, they're supposed to be simple, they're not giving you a million different options. 

"So there's a certain point when you have a product without a screen on it. There would be no problem for us to basically have a row of LEDs and you get seven segments and say, you get 100 presets. But there's no way to tell what setting you're on. And I find that at some point, it just gets too confusing. 

"Whereas if you have two sounds that you can switch between and you know what they are that's, at least to me, that's very reassuring. I'm not stepping through preset number nine and then have no idea whether it's one thing or another. 

"I think if we were ever to do anything bigger than what we're doing right now, we will probably add MIDI to that. But that would also entail that there would be some way to actually have a little bit more visibility about, what is this sound about? Where are the knob positions? If it was an amp pedal, what cabinet have I chosen? Is there a boost on or not? 

"If you're just having something that's simply a pedal, at least to me, it becomes too hard to remember and sort of confusing more than actually helping."

The Bluetooth-enabled pedals use the UAFX Control app to access features and some artist and factory preset sounds. You've released it for iOS and Android – does that pose a challenge with the different versions of Android on smartphones being rolled out at different times?

Tore: "In numerous ways, to be honest. So obviously, there's the constant churn of just making sure that everything works with the latest version of whatever. And the challenges with Apple and Android are actually two different ones. 

"The problem with Android is that there are so many different versions, there's so many different implementations that being able to sort of promise that you can support everything is not really feasible. We have to pick our poison and basically say that these are the models we support. And then with everybody else we have a pretty good feeling that it'll work as well. 

There might be some quirks and there might even be some phones that will not work. So that's sort of the plethora of the Android universe makes that hard. The problem in the Apple universe is more that Apple is very… they're not shy of changing things that potentially could break things or would entail engineers like us and people tied into their sort of ecosystem having to spend like six months getting something to work.

"Often you don't really get an alert in due time. So that's definitely an ongoing thing. Right after this we have our weekly app meeting where we go through all these things. So those are two things. 

"The last thing that's just tricky, and that's a whole other thing, is just the Bluetooth sort of implementation. And we're aware that Bluetooth for us hasn't been working ideally, to be honest. It's not really an excuse, per se, but it's something that a lot of companies sort of dabble in. I have a lot of products from other companies, for all sorts of stuff, where Bluetooth is something that sometimes works, and sometimes it's a little bit more tricky. And that's something that we continuously work on improving. Basically to make sure that people can access their pedal and do the tweaks that they want to do. 

"As cool as it is to have that ability to be able to deep dive, have presets, tweak pedals more deeply than you could on the [physical] product itself, it's definitely a pretty big chunk of the development. And typically when you put out a pedal, it's like, oh, we finally did it, it's done. Let's move on to the next thing. 

"With the app side of things, it's very different. You have to constantly be on your toes and keep churning on it."

Another awkward question now – the lack of headphone output on the amp pedals, was it ever a consideration to have them and is it something you now regret not including?

Tore: "I don't necessarily think that we regret not including it, because it was very much a decision from the get-go. And honestly, part of it was more of a consideration about how people would use it, I know that some guitar players like to do more of the vintage style. James is like that where he will put all his pedals in front – all his delays and reverbs in front of the amp. But I do the opposite, I always like to crank my amps quite a bit. I'll get most of my dirt from the amp. 

"So, if you do that, and then you have your delays and reverbs afterward, it really doesn't make any sense to have a headphone out on your on your amp pedal, because you'll be playing without your delay and reverb. So there is a little bit of that. Whereas if you have a separate solution, if you need that, you can put it anywhere you want to put a little headphone in there, or headphone preamp wherever you want to afterward. 

"The other part is also just the fact that the platform is not really born with that and it would be really, really hard for us to fit it in there without making it quite a bit bigger. And also quite a bit more expensive. Which at the end of the day would get back to the to the customers in terms of how much the product would cost.

"With that said you can actually, if you really wanted to, and we tried it, it's not the ideal solution, but if you plug in two quarter-inch jacks and then to stereo headphones you can actually play through the pedals. They have enough power, it's not going to blast your ears to death but it's it's going to be loud enough for you to jam at home I think. So there is there is a possibility but it's not the ideal solution. I totally get that."

I've found mini modelling amps like the Spark Go are a good workaround too, with the amp set to a flat response.  

James: "Headphones are just not that much fun, honestly, unless you're being quiet. We've had this discussion with players who just want to practice and then musicians who use the fancier version of which are essentially custom moulded in-ears, because you need to play on a quiet stage. It's just not a whole lot of fun unless you really have to have that. 

"For me, if I do have to use headphones, which is very rare, I try not to only because you damage your ears typically with headphones without noticing it because you turn up louder than you think you are. So I try not to do that I'd rather use monitors very quietly. 

"I always ended up having to sub-mix something because I was always wanting to practice over something, which means I really needed to take that also to a little mixer and then mix in a little iPod player or my laptop sound, so my headphones could actually hear the thing I needed to practice on top of with the guitar. 

"I can't really just plug into my pedalboard because I still need to get something to work so I can practice to or learn somebody's songs. So I found that that was one of the things where I don't really miss it, because when I always had to learn a song I needed to mix [the guitar signal and streamed audio track] into in-ears or headphones. So again, if we were to do we'd have to make a whole lot of crazy changes so it would actually be useful.

"I hate to say but I've been down that road before, where you're like, man, once you do a little bit of something, you need to take it all the way and finish it. Because you can't just give people a quarter of that feature, then it just looks like a bad feature. Well, you gave me a headphone out, but why can't I use my phone and turn the Bluetooth in the other direction to stream a song into there? And that's a different product. 

"You mentioned the Go product –  so there are products that do that really well where you can stream to a boombox, get a decent guitar tone and just practice. Nothing wrong with that, but it is a different thing. That's a practice tool as opposed to, this my recording and gig tool. And so sometimes they're not the same. 

"So I do feel that when someone's like, 'Oh, man, I have to use this other thing in my hotel room'. It's like, 'Dude, I'm bummed for you too. But here's 25 bucks. Let's go to Amazon and order you a little headphone amp'. And that's a terrible thing to say out loud. I'm sorry."

That's a fair point, and the pedals are good for playing at low volumes at home too. But as you say, these are completely viable solutions for recording and playing live. With that in mind, what have been your proudest moments learning about players using them – The Edge using them with U2 at the Las Vegas Sphere must be right up there? 

Tore: "The Edge is a big one."

James: "I have not talked about it all but I did see one of the last shows at Sphere. And I did go under the stage to meet with the guys right before showtime. They're like, 'You're here, come under this'. The venue was packed, crowded all the way to the front. So they snuck me under the stage right there, about 20 minutes before they went on, to show me the setup. 

"I know I can't share any pictures or anything, but they showed me this little rack that basically had shelves that just had Rubys, Lions, Dream – every one of our pedals was on a shelf. Dallas [Schoo, Edge's tech] was like, 'We use every one of these and when you watch the show tonight, the opening song which is the Zoo Station intro that Edge plays to start the concert – that's the Lion pedal. He's not even using the Ruby. He loves the Marshall sound right now. We just got it this morning. And he was into it. He put it in the rig today.'

"And they were just so excited to have consistent tones that were in for Dallas it was he got to not be pummelled by the amp, because under the stage used to be where the amps were. He had to live in this world of just the amps hitting his head and the craziness of keeping a whole locker room full of amps under a stage running during a show. He was so happy: 'It's so great down here. Look at the shelves and it works perfectly'. 

"Then meeting the front-of-house engineer and then just seeing the show was great, because you saw what he had. And we talked about MIDI – Edge has a lot of programmed changes, a lot of timed delays. So he had this crazy amount of rack delays and post-effects stuff. And he goes, "I'm using the pedals exactly like I use the amps," because all he did was get rid of the amps and that cable that would have gone to multiple AC-30s and Twead Deluxes just went into the pedals as a drop-in replacement for the rig. That's what we're doing. 

"And I was shocked to see it because that's what we wanted with someone. And we had these discussions, me and Tore saying, 'We want somebody that if they had their pedalboard and their backline at a gig and if the amp went down, they could just take that cable, plug it into one of these pedals and it will do the exact same thing and go straight to house. That's what they did. And in fact, it was a full circle moment because I had talked to some of the [other UA] guys before we even did the stuff. So it was like, 'Hey, remember that thing you talked about trying to do? You did it and the pedals are here tonight, and they're onstage and you're about to see them go live in 10 minutes go live and that along with and so that was in toward great idea.

"It was a real live version of what Tore was hoping would happen, when this idea came up but he pushed us through to get this sort of team together to make these amp pedals."

It's incredible that the Lion has actually inspired The Edge to change his amp choice on Zoo Station.

James: "It was totally, totally nuts. And then you realise that he talks to his other buddies and then you get a call from Joe Walsh going, 'Hey, man, I was talking to the Edge and he said I should try these pedals.' And then that guy, talked to John Mayer. And then you realise all these guitar nerds talk to each other. Bob Weir talks to Mayer. That's how the natural growth happens. Because you can't just make somebody like a product or a sound. And I think any one of us know the same thing where you have a friend and they say, 'You should try this pedal', or, 'You should borrow mine and check it out'. And that natural growth of tone nerds sharing cool ideas and new products.

"I started seeing that happen with that crew of folks, or the technicians on those tours telling other techs, 'Dude, you need to get one of these'. And we've started to notice that when we get calls going, 'Hey, I was talking to this guy's tech and he said, I should use this in my thing. And we have a TV show we're going to do when we have to have a quiet stage, can we try the Lion thing and try the Ruby thing?' 

"It's really nice to finally see – the people that we thought were the benchmark when we were working on the pedals. The Ruby has to sound like the Edge, Tom Petty and Rory Gallagher – all these vintage players, and then you start seeing some of those actual players using the product. It's very weird."

The tube Vs modelling debate seems to be a bit of a distraction now. It's really about what's suitable for the situation you're in as a player.

James: "That is the exact thing. And this was another discussion. Some of these players who have basically created these classic tones, benchmark tones, they [think], in the financial and the physicality of, 'Well, I can't take this amount of gear to a gig, well, I can't be this loud on stage'.
"These players can be any volume they want, can buy any gear they want – they can take anything they want to a gig. That's what freaked me out too. We're like, 'Man, you can use real amps, you can use anything you want, and you're still using the pedal'. Even that kind of messes with my mind. 

"They have all this gear, they can throw it on a plane and fly it to the middle of nowhere and do a show and no one would bat an eye. So that's when you realise for some of these players, they got that sound because when you look at it, they were experimenting and chasing the tone in their head and whatever the best tool for them to get that tone was what won. 

"With these players now some of this is vintage stuff now, but at the time, it meant like someone like the Edge was using the newest Eventide Harmonizers that were brand new in the '80s and '70s. Or the early bucket brigade Memory Man delay that was new in 1977, whatever. 

"They were searching – they were using those new tools. Now they're vintage, but then they weren't, so you realise this is their mindset – they have this tone. And if this gets them there, they'll use whatever whether it has a tube in it, a chip, a transistor – it doesn't actually matter. Because to them, writing a great song and having a great guitar sound that's inspiring will always be the winning part of that. 

"I've had to learn from that too. I'm sitting here with a sunburst Stratocaster – ooh, I'll play better because it's sunburst. It's got a maple neck and it looks cool. Then you realise like, well for me, is it the best-sounding one? Maybe not, but I feel better. 

"Sometimes you have to disconnect the look of the gear because sometimes you hear with your eyes – ooh it's vintage, oooh it looks pretty. These people don't care. How many people used the Whammy? Edge is one of the first guys to grab a Whammy and use it. That was a brand-new product. Some of these players did groundbreaking stuff already are still trying to do that. And doing that. 

"So I feel very lucky that somebody's willing to try a broken down tube amp that's hiding in this high technology little box that we put together. Essentially these amps are falling apart. And you might have said earlier Rob that there are a lot of people who have heard the sounds but will never have the chance, or haven't had the chance to use the real thing. Because it's very rare to walk into the guitar store or even have a friend that said, 'Hey, I've got a really good working AC-30 Top Boost from 1963'. To find one that's in working order, that doesn't have the speakers replaced or isn't going to fry after 10 minutes, it's becoming harder and harder to find that. So I even feel bad. I wish everyone could sit in a room with vintage AC30s or vintage Plexi Marshalls and have that experience, and a lot of people won't – I'm happy we're trying to do that."

Tore: "Obviously, we're extremely thrilled that sort of the highest profile players choose to use our products and choose to use it over 'the real thing' for various reasons. But I think the other part of that, which James also sort of touched upon, is as you can probably tell, James and I are pretty passionate about this thing and vintage gear, the whole history and everything about this whole sort of ecosystem that we're talking about. But there's a lot of young folks out there who don't really know all that much about it. 

"So for us, one thing is the amazement that somebody like the Edge, who has been playing AC30s forever, actually thinks that our model of an AC30 is good enough for him to play at the Sphere – that's mind-blowing. But for me, there's sort of an education of bringing the baton along to a newer generation and saying, yeah we know that modern amps are also great. I'm not saying that everything has to sound like the old stuff. But there is something about these old amplifiers, or these old delays, or these old reverbs that help define an era. 

"For better or worse, they also help define the sounds that we know in our head, because it's really hard to explain sounds. What's that sound? Well, it's sort of chimey. And it's sort of mid-rangey, and it has a little bit of a piercing treble, but it's not too much. And people go, 'Yeah, I don't quite get it.' Well, it's an AC30. And then people say, 'Oh, I know what you mean'. So, for better or worse, we all use these vintage pieces of gear as reference points for what sound is. Even modern amps. What's a Friedman? Well, it's sort of like a Marshall with some extra stuff added and some changes. But at the end of the day, it's sort of a Marshall. 

"So it becomes easier for people to talk about sound because we have these common reference points. And being able to do these pedals at this level of accuracy and quite honestly, stupid nerdery – at least if you look at it from just sheer time spend and effort perspective. 

"You know, being able to do this with this level of detail, honestly makes me proud because I feel like we're passing a little bit of music history along to younger people who might not have ever tried or had the chance to play a Plexi Marshall cranked all the way up, with an Echoplex in front of it and a vintage 10-band EQ – all these things that went into some of these classic sounds that we all know and love."

I think the form factor is really important too – and being able to focus on one amp with its controls. It's akin to having an album instead of a massive choice on Spotify. To really explore that one thing and appreciate its versatility – I found that especially with the Dream. 

James: "What's odd is when you play that pedal I just think about how that specific amp [that it models] is real, it sounds just like that pedal and literally came from a collection 10 minutes from my house called Norms Rare Guitars –  the famous guitar store. And again, everything has a story. You're playing an amp that was a session guy's – he wouldn't tell me who, but a session guy's in the '70s that Norm had bought and he was hiding it in his store, in his back closet. I said, 'I need the best Deluxe Reverb. He said, 'You really need the best one? Because I've got one back here you should hear'.  

"It was hiding back there amongst all these '59 Les Paul's and '50s Strats – all this expensive gear. He pulled it out and I played it in the store on ten. That had the best clean, the best lead… and the pedals all have this little history of finding the gear, trying it out having friends play it. And so I'm always happy to tell someone like me, 'Trust me that if you had a room full of these amps, you probably would have said, 'Well, I don't need those other nine. That's the one'. And that's the excitement we get. 

"I like grabbing the pedal and playing going, 'I know that's the right amp'. And I remember that amp, and it's doing the right thing. So that's the excitement, and I like the tone and the form factor; treble here, volume here, reverb. Cool. I'm done – time to play some guitar. So I'm happy you had that same experience, because it's fun for me to hear that."

Do you feel or know that you're at the end of an era for the pedals now, and on the precipice of another stage – can you tell us anything about the the vision is for the future?

Tore: "I think that there are still amps out there that we would love to do. I think that, without going into too much detail, and you can't see it, but I have this little pedalboard – a little Pedal Train – with all four amp pedals sitting here. And it's like the greatest hits of '60s guitar tones. It's ridiculous. And it's so much fun doing little sessions. Before I'd end up probably just playing everything through my Super Reverb down here. But now it's like, 'Oh, maybe I should actually put a little AC30 in here for a little bit'. Creatively, it's a lot of fun. 

"But at the same time, there are definitely still amps out there that I think that we would need to say that we've fulfilled the archetype sort of collection of killer guitar tones. You can always keep adding more, but there are definitely a few that I still feel, maybe not from like a product standpoint, but almost more from a music standpoint – what are what are classic guitar tones?  The sound of the '90s or the sound of the early 2000s, or whatever it is. And without going into detail, there are definitely still amps we're missing. 

"We're missing a few from different eras…  I don't think we've hit the ceiling of what we can do and what we want to do on this platform yet for sure."

James: "If you ask me, Is there stuff coming? I can't tell you. But I can parenthetical out a wink. Because as long as I'm still working here, and Tore is, there's always going to be stuff coming and we're going to try to push the envelope. I'm just saying things are getting interesting. Very interesting right now with where we're going."

And the road is open with regards to future effects pedals too?

Tore: "Most definitely."

James: "Absolutely."

Are you never say never when it comes to a Universal Audio big box unit like the Neural Quad Cortex? 

Tore: "We don't want to say never, ever. And there are certainly a lot of interesting aspects to having something like that. It's not something that's in the immediate future. Again, honestly, this is not trying to point fingers at other companies, but if we just look at the sheer processing power of what's in one of these amp pedals, and you sort of compare it to some of the high-end multi-effects products that are on the market now, they certainly have more processing power than we do. But they also run multiple amps, sometimes in wet/dry/wet setups with two different reverbs that they can toggle between in any given sort of rig or scene or whatever they call it. Multiple delays – basically full pedalboards with multi-setup amps all running at the same time.

"They need to be able to run at the same time too, because preset changes take too much [time] for a Helix or an Axe-FX or a Quad Cortex or whatever it is. So, the way most people use these now is that you build a scene or a rig, and you stay on that. The only time you change is if there's a song change, and you need something radically different. But typically you'd stay within that one scene, and just run everything within that. Quite honestly, our algorithms are so detailed, and they take up so much space that we could never run anything that we do on the multi-effect product platforms that are there right now. 

"So for us to do that would require a much more powerful processor to even start thinking about something like that. Otherwise, the other option would be to drastically scale down on the details of the algorithm. And with that comes scaling down on the quality of the algorithm and the sounds, and we don't want to do that."

James: "There was a running joke for a while when we first started this. Our previous UAD platform, it still runs on a SHARC processor. And typically when people run plugins, if you have a really expensive plugin, you have to eat the whole shark – you can run so many things off the shark. And as we were early developing, working with our guy Dave Berners, who's the doctor [algorithm co-designer for Universal Audio's entire plug-in line] said, 'I think I got the first Tweed Deluxe running – we just need six SHARCS. And then he was actually serious. And then as we developed it was, 'It's running – but four sharks'. 

"It's engineering humour but to do it right you basically say, well, how much processing power do I have? Because I'm going to use every single thread of that thing. I'm going to use everything we can. And that's the real pain of it. Any one of us would like one of these boxes – throw it all in one giant box. It sounds like fun, honestly. Then comes the reality of, yeah, but then it would be like $4,000 and it would be crazy. 

"But yeah, you can never say never. I'm looking forward to the next 2,3,4 years – how we can innovate as platforms change. Even things like an ARM processor – the compute power. There are the physics and law of how you design these chips, and every three years things double in speed and get half as expensive to create. So even right now, in three years, who knows where we'll be, and what what amazing processor is going to come out that will let us run all this stuff that just barely fits on what we can get right now. I'm excited to see where we land as well, honestly." 

• For more information about the Universal Audio UAFX range, visit uaudio.com

The Edge has dug deep into his electric guitar collection to donate one of his out of production – and ergo super collectible – signature Stratocasters for a charity auction raising money for critical healthcare services in Los Angeles.

A longtime supporter of the Venice Family Clinic, the Edge will see his guitar sold alongside a trio of UAFX’s MusicRadar-approved amp emulator pedals, with the lot expected to raise upwards of $75,000. The bidding currently stands at $30,000 and closes tomorrow, 11 May.

Launched in 2016, the Edge’s signature Strat was based on his 1973 black Strat but refreshed with a number of modern updates. The Edge did not want to create a replica, and yet, with that headstock size, it nailed the look, and it would nail the tones, too. 

It was wired up with a pair of Fender Custom Shop Fat ‘50s single-coil electric guitar pickups at the middle and neck positions, with a DiMarzio FS-1 at the bridge, just like the Edge’s original.

In short, it was a crowd-pleaser, and sold like hot cakes, with Noel Gallagher famously among its fans. Now discontinued, you’ll be hard pressed to find one anyway.

This one is being sold with its original hardshell guitar case. The Edge has signed the back of the headstock, and if there’s any wear and tear on it then it is the sort of wear that adds value to the instrument because it will be from the Edge playing the guitar. This was one he used at home and in the studio.

The UAFX Amp Emulation pedals are not to be sniffed at either. This is serious kit. They include the Dream ’65 Reverb Amplifier, Ruby ’63 Top Boost Amplifier, Woodrow ’55 Instrument Amplifier, and altogether that bundle would set you back $1,200 new.

And if you’re looking to put together a rig for replicating the Edge’s tones then you can put that Vox AC30 tube amp back in the loft because he recently swapped to UAFX for his live sounds at the Irish rock legends’ residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas.

“For various reasons at the Sphere I decided to switch from amplifiers to digital amp emulators,” the Edge told MusicRadar in November 2023. “When you introduce radio leads and all the electronics involved it's never the same as a simple guitar into amp tone so it’s a case of high-level complexity to make it sound simple.”

The Edge’s patronage of the UAFX line is quite the endorsement. There were surely high-fives and fist bumps at the Universal Audio HQ when the news broke that he was using them, but outwardly the company was keeping it cool, keeping it together.

“Edge has bought most/all of our pedals,” it said in a statement. “He’s also shared his feelings with us directly, but we are not using it to promote specifically, out of respect for him.”

You can check out this listing and more at the Venice Family Clinic auction. 

When you think of U2, and The Edge specifically, you often think of huge soundscapes, a wall of guitars and enough delay to drown a stadium full of screaming fans…. But what happens when you turn the delay pedals off?

Underneath the delay-soaked guitar lines are a bunch of very interesting chord choices by the Edge. In his quest to fill as much sonic space as he can, he often employs interesting chord voicings to try and cover more ground. 

In this lesson we’re going to check out four interesting and unusual chords that The Edge used in some of U2's biggest songs… and one they wrote for another icon to sing.

C#m7b5

Did you know that Bono and The Edge wrote the theme song form 1995’s James Bond movie Goldeneye, which was sung by Tina Turner?

Technically, there is no guitar in this, but if there was, a C#m7b5 chord would appear in the chorus of the song. If you decide to cover this on guitar, you’ll need to learn this diminished chord.

G/B

This chord appears in the verse of the song Where The Streets Have No Name. Through the verse The Edge is playing a muted 16th note pattern, but every so often he throws in a little section of this chord played in a funky manner.

This chord could also be viewed as a Bm#5.

Badd4

In the second verse of the song Pride (In The Name of Love), Edge breaks into an arpeggiated chord pattern. The first chord you hear in that pattern is the Badd4. 

This chord is based around a regular six-string major barre chord, but the B and E strings and left to ring open. 

This shape can be moved to other rooted chords along the Low E, but they won’t all function as add4 chords. The open strings will change the interval make up.

D6no5

In the chorus of Bullet the Blue Sky this D6no5 chord makes an appearance. The added B note at the top makes it a D6, but the absence of the 5 interval on the A string is interesting. The Edge would often pull out intervals to create space in the mix for other instruments.

You could also view this chord as a Bmin triad with a D in the bass, making it Bm/D.

• The Edge: "I'd like to be the vanguard of this resurgence of guitars!"

We don't think it's a knowing song choice considering the guitar gear involved, but it might as well be. U2 has released pro (read: full bells, whistles and drone) footage performing Achtung Baby hit Even Better Than The Real Thing at the Las Vegas Sphere as the band resumes their residency there. And we now know there's no tube amps involved.

What we're hearing from the Edge below is his Rickenbacker 350 Jetglo through Universal Audio's UAFX amp emulator pedals with the Fractal Axe-FX for effects – ditto in the clip of The Fly below that. As the guitarist confirmed to MusicRadar last year, he's using the Dream '65, Ruby '63 and Woodrow '55 pedals to cover the Fender Deluxe, Vox AC30 and Fender Tweed tones through his Vegas sets. And who knows, maybe he's even added the new Lion '68 for some Marshall Super Lead thrills by now!

"For various reasons at the Sphere I decided to switch from amplifiers to digital amp emulators," the U2 guitarist told MusicRadar when we reached out following speculation online. "I'm using UA Ruby, Dream and Woodrow amp pedals with some Fractal Axe-FX units handling additional amp emulation and FX. 

"When you introduce radio leads and all the electronics involved it's never the same as a simple guitar into amp tone so it's a case of high-level complexity to make it sound simple,” he added. 

Will this kind of amp and effects modelling be part of the Edge's rig for other venues going forward? Time will tell, either way, we think it's a safe bet he'll always have spectacular tones. 

Update: The Edge has now confirmed to MusicRadar that he is using Universal Audio's UAFX Ruby '63, Dream '65 and Woodrow '55 amp modelling pedals for U2's Las Vegas Sphere shows.

"For various reasons at the Sphere I decided to switch from amplifiers to digital amp emulators," the U2 guitarist told MusicRadar when we reached out following speculation online. "I'm using UA Ruby, Dream and Woodrow amp pedals with some Fractal Axe-FX units handling additional amp emulation and FX. 

"When you introduce radio leads and all the electronics involved it's never the same as a simple guitar into amp tone so it's a case of high-level complexity to make it sound simple,” he added with regards to the reasons behind the switch.

The move for 2023's most high-profile rock shows is a huge vote of confidence in the work UAFX's Senior Product Designer James Santiago and his team have done with the Universal Audio's line of digital modelling amp pedals. 

“We heard the news and are so proud to see UAFX pedals gracing some very high profile stages lately,” James told MusicRadar. “We believe these are the first amp emulation pedals that really get tube tone right. So it’s very rewarding to see them inspiring legendary artists.”

The Edge is notoriously particular about every element of his rig, from his huge rack of 43 guitars on tours to his effects and vintage amps. The move to amp modelling pedals is a huge statement about their validity on the world's biggest stages.

The Edge's amp requirements have always been very specific. On the band's 2009 MusicRadar visited Dallas Schoo, Edge's tech since 1986, on the road in New York and found him using his ever-present 1964 AC30 from '64, '58 Fender Deluxe with a Vox speaker and a '57 Deluxe with a Jensen speaker, rare mid-'50s Fender Harvard with another Vox speaker and early '70s Vox amps as backups." 

The UAFX Woodrow, Ruby and Dream pedals are based on the Fender 5E3 Deluxe Tweed from 1955, Vox AC30 and AC30 Top Boost models and the 1965 Fender Deluxe Reverb, respectively.  

The reports that the guitarist had moved to UAFX pedals for the Las Vegas Sphere shows first came after a fan posted a grainy shot of the U2 legend's rack from a distance that seemed to show the amp pedals and posted them on The Gear Page, while a pic of his pedalboard had blank spaces where the previous tube amps would have been labelled. That whole thread has since been removed from The Gear Page. 

Over on the official Universal Audio forums, a representative confirmed that the guitarist is a fan of its pedals.

"Edge has bought most/all of our pedals. He's also shared his feelings with us directly, but we are not using it to promote specifically, out of respect for him."

We already know this wouldn't be the first time the guitarist has performed with modelling amps – Fender CEO Andy Mooney revealed to us that The Edge used the company's Tone Master amps for a TV performance.

"I had an interesting conversation with Edge and his guitar tech Dallas [Schoo], it was during the Joshua Tree [anniversary] tour, and I went backstage with him when he was in LA and he was showing me the setup. Live he's playing through four tiny amps; two fenders and two Voxs, 130 effects pedals; all of them analogue. And 23 different guitars, because this is how he rolls," said Mooney. 

"Each song was a very precise combination of a guitar set exactly to the same volume, tone control, and from the 130 pedals, these 15 are going to be used on this song. So that's great when you're on tour and you have massive rigs to kind of carry from venue to venue. But the next night they were playing Jimmy Kimmel Live. And he said, "I can't take this to Jimmy Kimmel Live." So there he used modelling amps. And he goes, 'It's not the same, it's absolutely not the same'. But it's close enough. And it's the only practical way to perform in that type of venue."

Our reviews of the Woodrow '55, Ruby '63 and Dream '65 pedals remarked on how UA's modelling was setting a new standard for the digital detail of tube amps being captured. The recent release of the UAFX Lion '68 Super Lead, based on capturing three iterations of Marshall Plexi heads, aims to continue that great work. 

The pedals offer up to six different classic speaker emulations alongside reverb, boost and replications of the amp's and their controls. In the case of the Ruby, there are the original and Top Boost interactions of the AC30. 

• Universal Audio UAFX Woodrow '55, Ruby '63 and Dream '65 amp pedals review

Bono caused a stir last year when he admitted on The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast that he turned “scarlet” with embarrassment whenever a U2 song came on the radio because he didn’t like his vocals.

“The band sound incredible,” said Bono. “Though I just found the voice very strained and kind of not macho, and my Irish macho was kind of strained by that. I’ve only became a singer, like, recently! And maybe it hasn’t happened yet for some people’s ears, and I understand that. [Laughs]”

According to Bono, the late Robert Palmer once approached bassist Adam Clayton in the ‘80s and undiplomatically told him to take U2’s songs down a few keys, adding, “He’d do himself a favour, his voice a favour, and he’d do us all a favour who have to listen to him.” Charming.

Back in the early days, on material such as Pride (In The Name Of Love), U2 were just going for it. Bono says he was singing “out of his body”. It was only when listening to Joey Ramone that he realised he didn’t need to go for so much power.

But Bono is not alone in arriving at an epiphany with his vocals. In the new cover feature of Guitar Player, his six-string lieutenant the Edge admitted it had never occurred to the band before that they could have written for the singer in the first place and it could have served everyone better. 

“Bono kicked up a pretty serious media furore recently when he admitted that some of his early vocal recordings were a source of a certain amount of embarrassment for him,” said the Edge. “You can hear the strain in his voice. Mind you, it never even occurred to us in those days to lower the key to better fit his range. Today, with each arrangement, we were able to go, ‘Where do you want to pitch this one?’”

With the Edge’s voice operating in a similar register to Bono’s, working that out was easy, and proved that even after selling over 175 million albums and booking out residencies at the new immersive Sphere venue in Las Vegas to celebrate Achtung Baby, there are still songwriting lessons to be learned with each passing release.

“I was able to take some good guesses for what would work for him,” said the Edge. “It was like tailoring the songs to suit him as a singer… That was the ultimate goal: to serve the song by serving the singer.”

As for the singer, who else could have worked with that early U2 material better? Maybe Bono having to reach for the notes is what gives the tracks their energy. 

Either way, Bono is in a good place was far as the Edge is concerned, with the frontman a “better interpreter of songs than he’s ever been”.

The Edge also said U2 have “a lot of great material in the pipeline”, and hinted at a return to an electric guitar-driven sound. “I’m finding myself for the first time in a little while getting very excited about the electric guitar again,“ he said.

U2 have just released a mellow acoustic reworking of 40 of their songs with Songs Of Surrender but it sounds like the band's impending Achtung Baby Las Vegas residency must have inspired them. The Edge says has a big guitar statement simmering on his creative hob for their next album. What Bono has already suggested will be a "noisy, uncompromising, unreasonable guitar album."

“We are turning the amps on," The Edge confirmed to Mojo magazine. "I certainly think the rock that we all grew up with as 16- and 17-year-olds, that rawness of those Patti Smith, Iggy Pop records… that kind of power is something we would love to connect back into.”

The guitarist also explained the genesis for this creative push; "The lockdown was a very creative period for me, just in composing music. I don't want to jinx ourselves... but there's a lot of great material waiting," he said. "I think the guitar is coming back. I really feel it. And I would like to be part of that."

Now that's an interesting statement – what does he mean by "the guitar is coming back"?

"I'd like to be the vanguard of this resurgence of guitars!" continued The Edge enthusiastically. "Don't get me wrong - talking to people I know who work at Fender, they're selling more guitars now than they've ever sold. But in terms of popular culture, there's been a drift away from the instrument, it would be fair to say."

He's talking about the charts, we assume. "And I think that pendulum is going to start swinging in the other direction," he continued. "Because it's such an incredibly expressive instrument. The few bands that are using it well, it's still fresh."

And the guitarist is clearly keeping tabs on what's going on out there, though he doesn't name specific artists. "To not have any ear for what's relevant within the culture is just being out of touch," says Edge. "You can do stuff that's completely against the grain, but you still want to know where the grain is. I think about it in terms of the flow of a river - if you're not in the flow, you're part of an oxbow lake. And I want to be part of the flow."

Bono is notorious for making claims about U2 albums that never really come to fruition - remember the 'club' album he was (Larry) mulling over back in 2010? But the Edge is a man of fewer words, and we don't think he'd say these things lightly when it comes to where the band will head next – and his claims of an impending guitar revival are not new. 

Some will scoff at U2 having a part of any such thing at this stage in the game, but we like seeing a guitar icon still excited by the instrument's possibilities. 

To mark the release of U2’s Songs Of Surrender, a studio album that revisits some 40 tracks from the band’s catalogue and reworks them as more intimate arrangements, Bono and the Edge dropped by NPR for a very special Tiny Desk concert. 

They performed a quartet of tracks on acoustic guitar – all from 2000’s All You Can’t Leave Behind – accompanied only by the voices of a teen choir from the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. All of which is very much in keeping with the ethos behind Songs Of Surrender. 

The Edge alternates between a Martin D-18 and a 000-18 tuned in open E throughout, and appears to be running both of them mic’d up and through an Orange Crush 35T guitar amp – an unorthodox choice of amplification but for a compact show in an office, why not? No need to get too precious with the tones, and the Crush 35T is one of the best combos you can get for £229 street. 

It gives the power chords in A Beautiful Day a bit of great, just what it needs. Besides, this was an occasion that is all about finding the chords and making do and having fun. “All these years trying to avoid a desk job but actually it’s really [okay]. I love it,” joked the Edge. “I’m getting into it.”

For a pair of artists who defined the arena and stadium rock show in the early ‘90s with giga-watt multi-media presentations, this live performance was a change of pace, and clearly a welcome one. On record or on the stage, U2’s sound can be high-concept and a work of spectacle. But this was a chance to show how their songwriting can be upscaled or downscaled to accommodate different interpretations. 

In MusicRadar’s lesson 5 ways to play like the Edge, the focus is on electric guitar, and on his famous man-and-machine approach to the delay pedal, dialling in dotted eighth notes for his signature sound, adding overdrive to delay for those crispy arpeggios that punctuate so many of his compositions. 

Songs Of Surrender, which serves as a companion piece to Bono’s memoir, goes easy on the percussion, and stripping everything back to build upon the foundations of the song. But there is still synth. There’s still the sheen of a box-office production even if that gloss is applied to something more ambient. But here, these tracks are all acoustic. 

A Beautiful Day is followed by In A Little While, the first time the track has been ever performed acoustically, and Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of, before the duo close the set out with Walk On, which is dedicated to the people of Ukraine.

“We were sitting around a year ago, the Edge and I, and we were working on these songs, which are now called Songs Of Surrender, and they are reimaginings, reworkings or early U2 songs – reimagined for the moment we are in,” says Bono “And the moment we were in that day, a war was breaking out in Ukraine, and a stand-up comedian was standing up to the bully that was Vladimir Putin. Standing up for freedom. So we rewrote our song, Walk On, for him and for the upstanding people of Ukraine, and we are going to play it for you now.”

Songs Of Surrender is out now via Interscope.

U2 are one of the few bands of their generation who are still intact with the original lineup, and still touring. In fact, they are one of the very huge bands in that rarified club now. But even they have their moments.

“The fact that bands can stay together at all is a kind of miracle,” The Edge told the Telegraph in a new interview. “I think we’ve been bound by common goals: the sense that you are here to serve, and make the world a better place.”

But surely he and the band's larger-than-life frontman Bono must have had a few creative (and non-creative) tussles over the years? 

“Of course Bono gets too much for me sometimes!” he admitted, laughing – and possibly remembering the incident detailed in the video below. “I’m sure I drive him mad, as well. If that wasn’t the case, I think we would be doing a disservice to each other, because it’s in the realm where we push each other, challenge each other, annoy the hell out of each other, that you know there’s something going on. If you never get to that place, dude, you don’t really have a proper ­creative relationship.”

One thing that isn't a laughing matter is the news that for the first time (apart from one 1993 ZOO TV tour show in Australia when Adam Clayton couldn't make it) U2 will have had to replace a member onstage; drummer and founding linchpin Larry Mullen Jr will not be playing their Las Vegas Achtung Baby residency this Autumn.

“No one is more disappointed than us that Larry won’t be joining us in Vegas,” says Edge of the dates that have already been delayed since 2021 to open the Nevada city's ambitious new Sphere venue. “We made a commitment,” says Edge. “In the history of U2, you can count the shows we’ve missed on the fingers of one hand.” 

Mullen is sitting out the dates as he recovers from surgery required after the years of touring with the band have taken their toll. His temporary replacement will be Dutch band Krezip's Bram van den Berg.

“We’re lucky to have him. He’s a powerhouse,” says Edge. “The people who are going to miss Larry the most, I think, will be Bono, Adam and myself. It’ll be strange to turn around and not see him behind us after all these years. But the shows will be amazing.”

The band are also looking ahead beyond their new mellow collection of reworked songs, Songs Of Surrender. “I’m not sure U2 are going to turn into AC/DC exactly," Edge warns, tempering expectations fuelled by Bono recently that he might pull an Angus Young on the next album. 

"I’ll still be trying to find ways to use the instrument that are new and unfamiliar. But I’m absolutely convinced that the guitar is going to be front and centre within mainstream music culture in a year or two, and I want to be part of that revival.”

• The Edge's guitar rig: "Edge is very guitar-specific – last night he used 21 different guitars for 24 songs"

U2 frontman Bono has revealed that the Irish stadium-rock institution wants to strip their sound back to record a full-on electric guitar album inspired by AC/DC’s pared down rock approach – and he suggests Mutt Lange as a producer. 

Speaking to the New York Times, Bono said that a “progressive rock virus” had crept into the band’s sound with the experimental No Line On The Horizon, so much so that he saw albums such as 2014’s Songs Of Innocence and its follow-up, Songs Of Experience, released in 2017, as correctives that restored U2’s songwriting equilibrium.

“We all make mistakes,” he said. “The progressive-rock virus gets in, and we needed a vaccine. The discipline of our songwriting, the thing that made U2 – top-line melody, clear thoughts – had gone.

“With the band, I was like, this is not what we do, and we can only do that experimental stuff if we have the songwriting chops. So we went to songwriting school, and we’re back and we’re good! Over those two albums, Songs Of Innocence and Experience, our songwriting returned.”

Songs Of Innocence and …Experience were a change of pace for U2. Regular collaborator Brian Eno was out, and in came a cast of high-profile producers including Danger Mouse, Paul Epworth, Ryan Tedder, Andy Barlow and Steve Lilywhite. But Bono believes U2’s rehabilitation is still some way short. What’s needed now is a rock ’n’ roll album – “a fuck-off rock ’n’ roll album”.

• Classic U2 interview: "Edge is very guitar-specific – last night he used 21 different guitars for 24 songs"

“Now we need to put the firepower of rock ’n’ roll back,” Bono said. “I don’t know who is going to make our fuck-off rock ’n’ roll album. You almost want an AC/DC, you want Mutt Lange. The approach. The discipline. The songwriting discipline. That’s what we want.”

The idea of U2 making an AC/DC-inspired album is a tantalising prospect. It would be unlikely that the Edge would decommission his battery of delay pedals for the occasion, but a stripped-down rock album would be quite the palate cleanser for a band who has often pursued sonic maximalism in its sound. With Mutt Lange onboard, you can bet there will be plenty of occasions in which Larry Mullen Jr’s snare drum has the mix to itself as it punctuates the beat. 

While Lange has been out of rotation as AC/DC’s go-to producer since 1986’s Who Made Who – with Brendan O’Brien an ever-present in the control room since 2008’s Black Ice – he has kept himself busy, most recently working with Bryan Adams on So Happy It Hurts. Would Lange be available? Would Lange be up for it?

He might need to be ready, because Bono says he wants to put this “noisy, uncompromising, unreasonable guitar album” out before the long-mooted Songs Of Ascent gets an airing. And Songs Of Ascent, he insists, is nearly finished, with 20 songs ready to go.

Even his detractors surely have to admit Bono has a way with words, and the new extracts from his forthcoming memoirs vividly conjure the major events of his past; Live Aid, conquering American stadiums, U2's first gathering in Larry Mullen Jr's kitchen… and the things that didn't go so well, including their decision to partner with Apple in 2014 and give all iTunes users their album Songs Of Innocence. Whether they wanted it or not.

The band convinced Apple CEO Tim Cook of the plan to give away their then-new album. Instead of the option to download for free, users would find it in their iTunes libraries in an unprecedented move for an artist. 

"If just getting our music to people who like our music was the idea, that was a good idea,' writes Bobo in an extract published by the Guardian. "But if the idea was getting our music to people who might not have had a remote interest in our music, maybe there might be some pushback. But what was the worst that could happen? It would be like junk mail. Wouldn’t it? Like taking our bottle of milk and leaving it on the doorstep of every house in the neighbourhood.

"On 9 September 2014, we didn’t just put our bottle of milk at the door but in every fridge in every house in town," he continues. "In some cases we poured it on to the good people’s cornflakes. And some people like to pour their own milk. And others are lactose intolerant.

But as well as taking the experiment with good humour, Bono is always willing to take the blame for the hostility that came from iTunes users. 

'I take full responsibility. Not Guy O, not Edge, not Adam, not Larry, not Tim Cook, not Eddy Cue," states the singer. "I’d thought if we could just put our music within reach of people, they might choose to reach out toward it. Not quite.'

For some detractors, the combination of U2 and Apple was unpalatable – and certainly not punk rock. Bono seems very much aware of this in hindsight.

'At first I thought this was just an internet squall," he writes. 'We were Santa Claus and we’d knocked a few bricks out as we went down the chimney with our bag of songs. But quite quickly we realised we’d bumped into a serious discussion about the access of big tech to our lives. The part of me that will always be punk rock thought this was exactly what the Clash would do. Subversive. But subversive is hard to claim when you’re working with a company that’s about to be the biggest on Earth.'

The blowback would have a pretty profound effect on the band – and there would be no more stunts from U2 again… for now. 

'We’d learned a lesson, but we’d have to be careful where we would tread for some time,' he concludes. 'It was not just a banana skin. It was a landmine.'

With such brouhaha it's sometimes easy to forget that U2 were once a bunch of school kids trying to get something started. In Larry Mullen Jr's kitchen, no less.

Bono was one of the hopefuls who responded to fellow Mount Temple pupil Mullen's school notice board advert for 'Drummer seeks musicians to form band.' 

'All How casually our destiny arrives,' reflects Bono in the book. All four future members of U2 were part of the throng that gathered in the drummer's kitchen for the first 'rehearsal'. 

'On that first Wednesday after school it felt as if no one was in tune but Larry, who appeared quite at home around all this metallic chaos. Well, he was at home. It was his kitchen. Everything I still love about Larry’s playing was present then – the primal power of the tom-toms, the boot in the stomach of the kick drum, the snap and slap of the snare drum as it bounced off windows and walls. This indoor thunder, I thought, will bring the whole house down.'

Bono also recalls the other two young gentleman who would become part of his destiny; 'Adam Clayton was there on bass. I couldn’t quite make out what he was playing, but he looked the part. David Evans, whom no one had yet named the Edge, had the coolest aura of anybody. He didn’t have to be in tune with anyone else, because he was in tune with himself.'

But there were other budding Dublin musicians too who wouldn't go on to form The Hype, the band that was to become U2, after Radiators From Space singer Steve Averill suggested the moniker for them. 

'In the room briefly was our friend Neil McCormick’s brother, Ivan, Larry’s friend Peter Martin, who owned a pristine white Telecaster replica that looked as if it had just come from the shop window (he was happy enough to lend it to me, but was probably not so happy about my fingers bleeding all over it),' continues Bono, 'and David Evans’s older brother, Dik, a well-known brainbox. 

'Dik and Dave were so clever that they built an electric guitar from scratch. So clever that they used to try to blow each other up with chemistry experiments and, according to their nextdoor neighbour Shane Fogerty, did blow up the Evans garden shed one day. They had a reputation as weirdos – pleasant weirdos, but weirdos nonetheless.'

• Read the full extract over at The Guardian. Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story by Bono published by Cornerstone on 1 November