TRIVIUM are out on the Metal Hammer Trespass America Tour this summer and Gibson guitars caught up with frontman and guitarist Matt Heafy a few hours before the band’s show in San Antonio, Texas. Heafy even dished the dirt on his upcoming signature Epiphone. Check out the interview below:

You’ve been playing guitar since you were a little tyke! Tell me about your first guitar.

I got a couple of start-up guitars at first. There are pictures of me when I was three or four months old in Japan with Steinberger guitars. [Laughs] But, my first real guitar was a Gibson Les Paul Custom, and it’s the same guitar that I used to track our new record and numerous other records.

You’re working on a signature Epiphone. How close are you to finishing the model?

Well, I have the newest prototype right here, and pretty soon, I’ll be getting the final prototype. I’ve been using the latest prototype live on the Trespass Tour. There’s a lot of excitement building online for it. I posted some photos in Instagram, and they’re gotten the most comments of any other photos.

What elements were important to you when putting together your signature Epiphone?

The big thing, for me, is that I need to be able to use it live. And I want the same guitar I play live and in the studio to be the same one you can buy in the store. Affordability was also big for me. We have a lot of young fans just starting off, and they can’t go in and afford the custom guitars. So, I wanted it to play as close to the classic, original Les Paul, and I want the people who buy it to be getting the exact same thing they see in videos and live on stage, verses a different metal or grade.

What makes Gibson and Epiphone guitars special?

With the biggest guitar companies, you see big pop and country bands using them, so a lot of those genres use Gibsons, but for me, I’ve tried every brand out there and kept coming back to my first real guitar: a Gibson Les Paul Custom. I remember it was my dad’s dream before he even had a son to have a son who was a Gibson Les Paul Custom player! Nothing else works. When we first came out, we weren’t being endorsed by any company, but I played Gibsons because it was all I knew. Then, I went to a different guitar company for a year, and I didn’t play the same and it didn’t look right on me.

Gibson guitars embody everything I want. Every time I try another band friend of mine’s guitar, I just can’t play on it as well. I always come back to Gibsons and Epiphones. It’s the kind of thing where the brand chooses the player! Guys like Zakk Wylde, Slash, Jimmy Page – the brand screams them.

You’re out on the Trespass America Tour this summer, which features Five Finger Death Punch, the return of Jesse Leach with Killswitch Engage, Pop Evil and others. How’s the tour going?

It’s great! This year has been a busy year for us. Eleven months out of 12, we’ve been on tour this year. We’ve been touring Europe playing for anywhere from 15,000 to 100,000 people per day! Later on this year, we’re going to tour South America, Europe and the U.K., so it’s been really busy.

What is it about Trespass and the groups on there that makes it a good fit for Trivium?

For us, being a strong live act and having our thing down right now, it’s been perfect. Killswitch Engage has their original singer back, and that’s an iconic reason to come to this tour. They’re one of my favorites of all time. Five Finger Death Punch are a really great, and they’re bringing out great metal bands. They’re a metal band that radio is really playing, so they could have gone with a bill of rock radio bands, but they really went with a great lineup of metal bands. We’re a live band. That’s what we’ve always done best, and that’s what we do, so it’s been great.

You’re currently touring with your latest album, In Waves. I read that you guys spent an extra long time working on it.

Yeah, we started writing the record before the record previous to it came out! It’s the same thing for our upcoming record. We’re already writing the new album. We’re always being creative and take advantage of that when it’s there, as opposed to waiting for writing time. So, for In Waves, we spent six to eight months writing songs and demoing. We recorded for two to three months, but all the prep work is what made it special.

What are your thoughts on the current state of metal music?

You know, being able to tour all around the world and seeing what’s going on is interesting. Metal was discovered by Black Sabbath, and it’s never gone away. Something that does go in and out are the splinter genres of metal. In the early 2000s, there was metal-core, and then death-core. What’s nice about metal is it’s always there. In the U.S. and U.K., I think metal is in an odd spot. It’s looked at as a genre of music and less as a lifestyle and lifelong commitment. It’s beyond music to us. It’s a lifestyle to us. When you look European vs. American festivals, there is nothing like a European metal fest over here. In Europe, you’ll have 100,000 people who are pure metal fans, and it’s paradise for someone into metal. Sometime, I hope that mentality starts making its way back in here.

Click here to keep up to date with all things Gibson and Matt’s upcoming signature guitar!

Click here to pick up a copy of TRIVIUM’s latest album ‘In Waves’.

Our friends at Roadrunner US caught up with BLACK STONE CHERRY frontman Chris Robertson on the phone to find out what fans can expect from the band on their current US tour, why he thinks the band go down so well in the UK, the latest single ‘In My Blood’ and much more. See what he had to say below:

You guys are launching a headlining tour; have you noticed your audiences growing more rapidly on this album?

Yeah, man. We’ve been successful in Europe and especially the UK, but it seems like finally, with this album, we’ve broadened our horizons enough and gotten a bigger fan base—and a different fan base—than what we used to have. There’s actually girls showing up to our shows, which is awesome. I mean, playing to a sausagefest every night, it doesn’t really get your mojo flowin’. [laughs]

What can fans expect on this tour—are you putting new songs into the set, or doing any surprise covers?

We’ll be doing stuff off all three albums. We’ve been doing a cover of “Rocky Mountain Way” by Joe Walsh since way before Godsmack ever recorded it, so we still do that sometimes, and we do some Muddy Waters stuff—if we’re gonna do a cover, most of the time…we’ve done a few contemporary covers, but for the most part, we tend to do older stuff that people may or may not recognize. “Rocky Mountain Way” is probably the first song we’ve ever covered live, other than “Can’t You See” by the Marshall Tucker Band, which we did on the last record, where people know the song. Because not that many people in our age demographic and our fan base demographic know the words to old Muddy Waters songs. So when you play a Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf song, they’re like, “I don’t know what this is, but it’s kinda cool.” So you never know what to expect, and we haven’t rehearsed for the tour or anything; what happens is, the first day we get out we’ll end up making the set list and going over a couple of songs, and that’ll be what we do for the whole tour, pretty much.

You must be able to see the impact of “In My Blood”—did you know that song was going to be big even as you were working on it?

Man, that’s a funny story. We were doing pre-production in L.A., and Zac Maloy, who we wrote “White Trash Millionaire” with, sent us a song called “In My Blood,” and we loved the title immediately, being good ol’ Southern boys, but the song was almost like someone had written a song about us, rather than us writing a song called “In My Blood.” So what we did is took the title and just kinda ran with it, rewrote the music and the lyrics, literally rewrote the entire song in about 15-20 minutes. And everybody could feel that it had something about it from the minute we played it. I remember Ron Burman, our old A&R guy, he wanted to hear the song so badly that I had to sing and play it to him over speakerphone. But he was blown away when he heard it. It’s our most successful song to date, so we’re really happy that we wrote that song and every other song on the record as well.

You guys changed your working methods on this last album, and kinda got out of your comfort zone. Do you think that’ll influence what you do next?

You gotta take chances. You gotta learn from everything. We got to write with co-writers like Dave Bassett, who’s written the majority of the last two Shinedown albums with Brent [Name] and the other guys in the band, and Marti Frederiksen, who’s worked with Aerosmith, or Rick Wiseman, who’s written mainly country songs in his career—we’re very lucky, and we’ll take the experiences we had on this last cycle and know or have a good idea of how to structure songs, but I think we want to get back to basics when we start writing again. Back to just the four of us in the practice house and not really having to worry too much about anything. Just going in there and playing the songs that we write, and that’s pretty much it, man.

You recently completed a sold-out UK tour—why do you think Southern rock is so popular there?

You know, I think the biggest thing is that all the media for rock ’n’ roll hasn’t gone away over there. You still have TV stations that are strictly rock ’n’ roll music videos, you still have print magazines that cover everything from soft rock to heavy metal, and I think rock ’n’ roll is in some ways still more alive over there. The biggest thing is, people still come out to concerts there. It doesn’t matter what night of the week it is, people are still gonna come out, night after night. We did 14 shows in the UK and they all sold out, over 36,000 tickets sold, in one small area.

You can pick up a copy of BLACK STONE CHERRY’s latest album ‘Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea’ by clicking here.

Dailymotion will be exclusively screening Bloodstock Open Air metal music festival live, globally, from 9th – 12th August for any of you lot who aren’t able to make it. This is especially exciting for MACHINE HEAD fans as the band’s full set will be available. You will be able to watch the stream below or by clicking here.

Click here to pick up a copy of MACHINE HEAD’s latest album ‘Unto The Locust’.

MusicRadar have just announce that at 7pm UK-time tomorrow (8 August) ALTER BRIDGE guitarist Mark Tremonti will be taking over the new MusicRadar Guitars Twitter feed (@MRadarGuitars) in order to answer your questions live!

Maybe you want to know how Mark warms-up before shows, how he keeps track of his songwriting ideas, his gear recommendations, or ask his advice about developing your playing technique. Or, perhaps you want to know what it feels like to win a Grammy, why he set up his Fret12 tuitional site, or what it’s like to jam with shred-king Michael Angelo Batio?

How it works

This is a Twitter take-over, so if you’ve got something you want to ask, just make sure that you’re online and following the @MRadarGuitars Twitter by 7pm BST (2pm EDT, 11am PDT) on 8 August.

When the hour comes, start sending your questions to @MRadarGuitars and it will be up to Mark to decide which ones he wants to answer and reply to them as they come in.

Click here to find out more on MusicRadar’s website.

LAMB OF GOD frontman Randy Blythe has released a statement about his current situation and time in jail. You can read that statement below:

Greetings. This is D. Randall Blythe, checking in from my beloved hometown of Richmond, VA, United States of America. I was recently released on bail from Pankr

FaceCulture have spoken to MACHINE HEAD bassist Adam Duce and in true FaceCulture style, the interview is a long one in 5 parts so get comfy when you watch the clips! In the interview Adam talks about attending a reform school, the early days of MACHINE HEAD, writing music, the pressures of being in a band and much more. It’s an insightful series of clips and you can watch all five of them below!

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

Part 5:

Click here to pick up a copy of MACHINE HEAD’s latest album ‘Unto The Locust’.

LAMB OF GOD frontman Randy Blythe is back on US soil! He was greeted by a fans during his stop over in NYC and he posted a picture with a fan called Lia along with the following message on his Instagram account:

“I apologize for my absence. I had an unexpectedly lengthy layover in the Czech Republic. This lovely young woman named Lia came to the NYC airport just to say ‘Randy, I’m glad you’re home.’ WHAT A SWEETHEART! Her boyfriend Gary had to work so we called him on his cell. WE HAVE AWESOME FANS! How rad to be greeted by one for my layover in NYC- soon I’ll be home in RVA (Virginia) – thanks for your good thoughts & prayers- I’ll release a statement soon. Yee-haw and God bless the U.S.A.!!!!!!!!!”

We’ll update you with further news as we have it. Click here to keep up to date with all things LAMB OF GOD.

You can pick up a copy of the band’s latest album ‘Resolution’ by pointing your mouse in this direction.

Interviews From The Edge recently conducted an interview with THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA vocalist Mike Hranica during the Rockstar Energy Drink Mayhem Festival and they spoke about being ‘the most well-known unknown band’, getting signed, playing live, recording ‘Dead Throne’ with Adam D from KILLSWITCH ENGAGE and much more. Check it out below:

We have sifted through all of the photos that you guys sent in for our SLIPKNOT ‘Antennas To Hell‘ photo book and although we were struggling to pick the best 20 photos, we think we have selected 20 that show true maggot dedication. These are by no means the best as they were all bloody brilliant but these photos moved us / caught our eye and we hope you like them as much as we do. The maggot memory photo book winners as follows – click the names to see each photo:

allforthemind
blaxican1212
goosejr9
igsix
ravennoir
denis_phelan
hayjack76
jrrotting
natalia7x
silvestrerojas
sicredleader
emmycarter
ghoul_scout616
blakewarford
kyr6996_sic_6
revenantmedia
brurocha13
velvetscroutm
chloe_slipknot
Belk83

AT THE SKYLINES are currently on the Scream It Like You Mean It tour in the US and whilst on the road the guys have been setting up a tent to meet and greet with fans and perform impromtu acoustic sets. Check out a clip of them performing acoustic versions of ‘143 Princess’ and ‘Turbulence’ below:

Watch this space for more details on when the AT THE SKYLINES album will be released!