The last time I touched on Bon Jovi for my Lockdown Lead Guitar series on YouTube I said if I covered anything by the band again it’d either be some classic Jovi from the 80s or something more up to date focusing on Phil X’s playing – and that’s what we have here.
While it’s a pretty short excerpt, the solo delivers what the song requires and gives an otherwise very commercial radio friendly pop/rock song a little bit of flair.
Phil X’s approach to tone is a but different from his predecessor with a preference for P90 pickups and a bit less gain – as I didn’t have a P90 equipped guitar handy I decided to use my Harley Benton TE 90 FLT – with it’s humbucking Filter-tron style pickups it sits in a tonal middle ground between more single coils and traditional humbuckers.
Like the Slash example from a few weeks ago, I used the Amped Roots plugin from ML Soundlab (get your copy here) instead of mic’ing an amp and speaker cabinet – and I’m sure my neighbours appreciated it.