"I write very emotional music, and most of the time it's pretty angry," says the reigning queen of shred metal, Nita Strauss. Right now, however, she's the picture of morning contentment. Speaking with Guitar Player via Zoom, the guitarist is happily seated in the back of her tour bus, having wrapped the first date of her Summer Storm solo tour the night before in Nashville. On her lap are her two dogs: Bentley, a Pomeranian Chihuahua mix, and Motley, a Chihuahua mix. Strauss pats their heads and strokes their fur.
"The back lounge of the bus is their little kingdom," she says. "They have everything they need, and they love it when people come by to visit them. They're true little road dogs. I take them out on all of my solo tours. When I'm playing with other people, I have to leave them home, but when I do my shows, I get to set the rules."
It's breakfast time, so Strauss pours some food in a couple of bowls and sets her canine pals down to eat. She smiles as she watches them, then turns her attention back to the subject of music. Playing the guitar and writing music is therapy for me," she says. "I'm typically a pretty happy person. I'm not angry, although I have stress like anybody else. I don't get into fights at the drive-thru. It's interesting, though: When I pick up the guitar, I let it all out and go wherever my creative journey takes me. usually takes me to some aggressive places."
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PRS
PREVIOUSLY PART OF PRS's Maryland-built guitar line, the SE NF3 was recently reissued in the company's offshore-produced SE series. The SE NF3 is so named for its Narrowfield Deep Dish (a.k.a. DD) \"S\" pickups. These unique PRS-design units have deeper bobbins to accommodate more windings and extra metal pieces between the magnets to yield a more powerful \"single-coil\" tone, while remaining noise-free because they are in fact humbuckers. A control set consisting of master volume, tone and a five-way blade switch allows the usual selections of bridge, middle and neck pickups by themselves and the neck-plus-middle and bridge-plus-middle combinations that allow the SE NF3 to veer into Strat-like territory in switch positions two and four.
EPIPHONE
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