Guitarist DAVE REFFETT recently caught up with TESTAMENT guitarist Eric Peterson for Guitar World. An excerpt from the interview is available below:

Q: Who are some of your lead guitar influences?

Peterson: "God, there’s a lot of them. My main ones would be MICHAEL SCHENKER and, of course, ULI JON ROTH. I'm talking all old stuff too. You know, records I grew up listening to in high school. Like Entranced and Tokyo Tapes. And FRANK MARINO; he's one of my all-time favorite players. That style -- that's kind of the ballpark where I’m at. It's funny because all of these guitar players I've looked up to, I've never tried to figure out what they do. Alex (Skolnick) has always been the kind of player like that, and I've kind of accepted that, but now there's a whole new twist on everything so I'm kind of rediscovering everything.

Also the early KISS stuff with ACE FREHLEY -- the bluesy stuff he did. A lot of his leads were not that long, but they say so much in those 10 seconds. His solos have great hooks and are so memorable. That's one thing I want to do with mine. Especially on Formation Of Damnation, since my parts aren't that long; I was like, 'Well, what can I do to make them memorable?'

With Frank Marino, I've always been like, 'How did you get that tone?' I recently bought a MARC BOLAN Signature Les Paul, and it's got the standard body with the custom neck and these old '70s PAF’s in it. I thought it was going to be like -- not like a Stratocaster pickup -- like, you plug it into a Marshall and it's twangy and there's no crunch. I didn't think it was going to be like that; I thought it was going to be like the humbucker version of that. It actually sounds like my more modern pickups, like an 81 or an 85 by EMG. Or like a super distortion or whatever. But it was actually up to par and made me go, 'Wow, this PAF pickup sounds great.'

Then at the middle toggle switch, that's where it started sounding like 'Flaming Youth' by KISS. You know, like Ace Frehly, those leads on that record like Rock 'n Roll Over and Destroyer. That tone is just sick. So it's the same with Ace; it's like, 'How did you get that tone?' It's almost like he's got a wah turned on halfway or something. I don't know what the hell's going on, but I’d like to ask him how he got his tone back then.

I always think of pickups for me as for just getting good crunch tones, rhythm crunchy tones. But now that I'm doing leads, I’m kind of messing around with having a little bit more mid-range in my tone, which I did on Formation. I brought up the mids to four or five, halfway. I’ve always been the player that liked to scoop them out to get that wallop."

Go to this location for the complete interview.

As previously reported, Testament have been confirmed as headliner for the 2012 edition of Italy's Total Metal Festival which will take place on July 31st at Lago Del Bosco park in Toritto, Bari, Italy.

Organizer Luigi Pisanello commented: “We've always been proud of The Total Metal Festival because we knew how difficult it was to pull on a real metal festival in southern Italy, but since we have taken the first steps back in 2002, with a timid first Edition based mostly on the underground Italian groups, our goal has been to grow constantly and we already knew that we wanted for the tenth year something totally out of the ordinary and never seen in Southern Italy. Testament is a band that we always thought, from the beginning, but we knew we had to mature and gain experience before. Having them with us for the tenth birthday of the TMF is a dream come true for us and for our growing audience hungry for big events that, here in the South, have always been much more rare compared to the rest of Italy.”

More bands will be announced shortly.

A new festival website will launch soon. For more info visit the festival’s Facebook page.