THE GRISTLE VAULT
Technique. Tone. Theory.
You’ll actually use it. And yes… a fair amount of chaos.
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Inside, Greg walks through the core rhythm approach using a C9 groove, how to move through a blues progression with feel, and a handful of simple tricks that make a part sound big and musical.
From there, he gets into lead playing: not from a “more scales” angle, but how to phrase, leave space, and make it sound like a conversation. The big takeaway: you don’t need a million notes to sound good. A few solid ideas, good time, and the right attitude will take you a long way. |
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This session starts with a straight-up blues, but quickly turns into a deeper look at how to make one guitar sound like a full band.
Greg breaks down how he builds solo arrangements by combining rhythm, bass movement, and lead lines all at once.. pulling from blues, Travis picking, and fingerstyle approaches. Along the way, he shares chord shapes, turnarounds, and little “in-between” ideas that help fill space and keep things sounding full and musical, even when you’re playing alone. The big takeaway: developing your own sound comes from collecting small ideas over time — little licks, chord moves, and textures — and learning how to pull them out naturally when you play. |
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Greg runs through a live clinic covering the gear he travels with, a handful of chord techniques he's picked up from players like James Burton and Robben Ford, and the story behind his composition "Tonus Diabolicus."
You'll see how he builds tones from a single grab-and-go pedal setup, how to use 9th chord bends and harmonized chord-melody lines across a blues scale, and how the "Mahavishnu scale" (a stripped-down Mixolydian) unlocks an exotic sound without a lot of fuss. The Q&A wraps with a straight-talk breakdown of hybrid picking development — banjo rolls, triads, and a lot of honest reps. The big takeaway: almost every cool thing Greg plays traces back to something from someone else and how he mutated it until it became his own. |
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Greg shares his deep admiration for Jeff Beck, what made Beck unlike any other player of his generation, then performs "The Grip," a track he wrote as a direct nod to that influence.
The breakdown covers the hybrid picking mechanics behind the main riff, how Greg uses pinch harmonics and palm-muted bridge tones to get that signature snarl, and the whammy bar and left-hand hammer-on tricks he absorbed from watching Beck up close. The tone breakdown is equally practical: overdrive stacked with a boost and OTS circuit to push into near-fuzz territory. The big takeaway: Beck's most unsettling habits, the slightly sharp bends, the harmonica-like whammy warbles, the unpredictable note choices over changes, are exactly what made him impossible to copy and worth studying anyway. |
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Greg breaks down two of the most requested right-hand techniques in his arsenal, chicken picking and Travis picking, covering both the thumb-and-fingers approach and the pick-and-fingers hybrid method for each.
You'll learn what actually makes a chicken pick (a muted note paired with a popped note, not just string snapping), how to build the coordination between thumb and first finger, and how to eventually transfer that feel to a flat pick setup. The Travis picking section covers the boom-chuck foundation, how to balance volume between pick and fingers, and why slowing it way down is the only honest way to get there. The big takeaway: both techniques live or die on the muted note, and until that |
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Greg walks through a set of practical tools for adding harmonic color to a straight dominant seventh setting, then digs into how open strings can be weaponized in a chicken picking context.
The outside playing section covers chromatic approaches, half-step key substitutions, diminished arpeggios, pentatonic swaps (C minor, B minor, E minor over an A center), and a Mixolydian flat-five idea over the five chord. The open strings section shows how string skipping and hybrid picking with open notes create that cascading country sparkle in keys like G and A, and how landing on a slightly "wrong" open string can actually be the best note in the room. The big takeaway: you don't need to think in scales to play outside, you just need to know where one half step away from home is and trust what your ear tells you to do with it. |
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Greg sits down for a backstage interview during his Italian tour and walks through every piece of his live rig, from his Reverend signature guitars with Fishman Fluence pickups to the Tone King Royalist amp he runs nearly clean at three, with the Kochness Monster Supreme and a boomster keeping the foundation warm.
He covers the modulation options he cycles through live (Univibe, Waterfall as a Leslie substitute, Harmonious Monk), two delays including the preset he uses specifically for Tonus Diabolicus, and why the whole thing fits on one small board. He also touches briefly on the realities of building a music career today and why having a direct line to your audience matters more than chasing a follower count. The big takeaway: a simple, well-chosen rig played at the right volume will always beat a complicated one, and the amp has to sound good on its own before any pedal earns its spot on the board. |
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Greg breaks down "Spank It," a riff he wrote in 1988 that became a cornerstone of his playing, walking through the exact right-hand mechanics that make it work.
The lesson covers the thumb-and-finger approach he used before switching to hybrid picking, how the muted chicken pick note sets up each phrase, the specific chord voicings involved (a seven sharp nine, a D over G, an A13), and how the four and five chord movements are built from the same physical logic as the main riff. It is a tight, practical look at how one deceptively simple idea can generate an entire tune. The big takeaway: the riff sounds wild but it is really just two fingers alternating on adjacent strings, and once that motion is in your hands the rest falls into place. |
