A lot of bands are looking to bring something different to their live shows. Lately a lot of bands are planning on playing the entire track list of one of their classic albums, live. I don’t know if it’s to build hype and sell tickets or just to keep things kind of interesting. Whatever the reasoning behind it, I love it and think it’s a great idea. Metal icons Slayer did it with Reign In Blood as well as NWOBHM pioneers, Judas Priest are planning on doing it with British Steel. Mastodon are playing their new album Crack The Skye in it’s entirety, which is an amazing album that should surely be a classic 20 years from now. Hell, it’s already a classic in my opinion.

The latest band to propose the idea is Aerosmith with their 1975 classic album, Toys In The Attic. No solid details have been released or even talked about really. According to Gibson.com guitarist Joe Perry mentioned to VH1 radio’s Dave Basner, that he’d love to play the album in it’s entirety on their upcoming tour with ZZ Top. Tyler still has the pipes and I would love to see that happen. Toys In The Attic has gone platinum 8 times since it’s release 34 years ago.

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ZZ Top has one of those classic vintage guitar sounds that can be very hard to emulate. You can play with your knobs and try to tweak your gain, but it almost seems impossible to capture Billy Gibbons’ tone. Luckily Gibson.com is kind enough to show us how to do it.

When it comes to guitar tone, Gibbons uses what you would expect any rockin’ blues man to have in his arsenal, including Gibson guitars and Marshall amps. He has also been known to use a Fuzz pedal and a couple of other devices too.

For our purposes, in building Gibbons’ ZZ Top guitar tone at a home computer, I am going to go very simple and let the amp do the talking. I’ve said before if you start off with the right amp, you won’t need a bunch of pedals to make your tone sound like you want it to.

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Rock ‘n Roll’s legendary trio ZZ Top has just penned a deal with mastermind Rick Ruben to produce their next album. Their first since 2003’s Mescalero. Ultimate-guitar.com reported that BW&BK spoke with Billy Gibbons about the upcoming album.

“That starts pretty soon,” says Billy. “We just inked a deal with Rick Rubin that will be announced shortly. And I’m sure he’s got plans to make way to drag us off the touring trail back into the studio, which will be a nice excursion.”

Given his reputation for paring things back, would you be moving in the same direction, going for a back to the roots thing? “Could be. Rick and I have been friends for a couple of decades now. And we both like a lot of the same things. And mostly it is that rootsy kind of sense of realism. That’s his genius.”

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