The Guitar World of Richie Sambora ::Richie Sambora News ::antiMusic.com

The Guitar World of Richie Sambora

05/31/2013
. (Gibson) Richie Sambora is responsible for writing some of the best-known rock songs of the past thirty years, together with Jon Bon Jovi. Sambora's fast bluesy solos and infectious riffing is half the fun at a Bon Jovi show. Richie, who is attending to a private matter, won't be on stage with Jon and the boys when Bon Jovi tour Europe this month. Here we present some interesting thoughts from Sambora on guitar playing, song writing, and music in general.

In an interview with Guitar.com in 2000, around the time Bon Jovi released their album Crush, Richie talked about his first guitar: "A $10 guitar that was returned to E.J. Corvettes, which used to be a big department store in New Jersey. My dad used to work there part-time in the music department and he brought it home for me one day."

Sambora talked about how he learned to play guitar in an interview with M Music & Musicians Magazine: "I approached it a bit backward. I would put on something like the Live Johnny Winter And album�which has lots of fast lead solos�and try to move my fingers as fast as I thought he was playing. I didn't know which notes I was playing; I was just trying to get the same type of phrasing. I did that for a long time with lots of different albums. That created a kind of muscle memory in my hands. By the time I tried to actually put notes to what I was doing, I was already pretty good."

Even though Sambora is self-taught according to the previous quote, he revealed in the same interview that he has recently started taking guitar lessons: "I walked into Norman's Rare Guitars in L.A., and there was a guy playing acoustic guitar. He sounded like two players at once. I asked how he was doing that, and he started showing me all these alternative tunings. He turned out to be [former Wings guitarist] Laurence Juber. I said, 'Would you teach me how to do that?' It was fingerstyle playing that had passed me by when I was learning to play. So I took my first guitar lesson at the age of 53. I'm still taking lessons from him. It's been a gas." A lot more.

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