Tim Henson Answers the Internet

There's a reason guitar teachers hate him and fourteen-year-olds worship him. When WIRED handed Tim Henson a pile of questions from the internet, the answers read less like tech support and more like a manifesto for what guitar means after the shred wars ended.

Start with the term he has to keep apologising for. "Boomer bends is a term coined by Rick Beato," Henson explains, "and it describes a very specific guitar bending lick commonly used in music from the 60s and 70s — the age of the baby boomer." Then the mischief: "The more twang you give it and the more like old guy you make it sound, the more boomer it is, I suppose. We didn't make that term in an offensive way… I think a lot of baby boomers got upset at that term, but that's all right."

For a player this technical, his test for a great solo is disarmingly simple. "For me — how memorable the solo is, and if you can sing the solo," he says. "I think the guitar solo from Bohemian Rhapsody is one of the best guitar solos of all time. If you can sing with it, it's more memorable than just a bunch of notes scattered."

Read that again from the man whose band gets accused of playing nothing but scattered notes. Polyphia's whole trick is that the runs are singable — you leave the show humming the arpeggios.

Asked whether expensive guitars are a scam, Henson gives the most honest gear answer printed this year: "You can find really really great guitars with what I call mojo — those instruments just have a great feeling. You can find those for under five hundred dollars." After that, he says, the thousand-to-fifteen-hundred mark buys you a good intermediate instrument, "and after two thousand dollars and up is where you're going to find really well-crafted guitars — they're intonated better."

He demonstrates by checking intonation on camera — 12th-fret harmonic against the fretted note — the kind of thirty-second lesson that would take a magazine a full page of diagrams.

And the riff that humbles him? Not metal at all. "John Mayer's Neon doesn't sound that difficult, and then you watch him play it… he frets the root of the chords with his thumb and then plays regular chords all the way up there. It's just truly a difficult thing to play — especially if you do not have large hands."

The internet came for tech support. It left with the thesis of this magazine: the new virtuosity isn't about playing more. It's about playing what sticks.