Rush guitar icon Alex Lifeson spoke with Ultimate Classic Rock and revealed that he recently discovered a brilliant new practice regimen to keep his chops up: playing Rush songs with former bandmate Geddy Lee. It's something they hadn't done regularly in nearly a decade, as Rush played their final show in 2015 and called it quits after the death of drummer Neil Peart in January 2020. 

Lifeson: "We decided that we would play some Rush songs. Because, you know, we haven’t played these songs in 10 years. We started that a couple of weeks ago. We get together one day a week over at his place. We just picked some Rush songs and we started playing them and we sound like a really, really bad Rush tribute band."

"Trying to figure out the songs, I'm thinking, 'Why did we write that so difficult? Why is this so hard to play?' After about three run-throughs of all of these songs, muscle memory kicks in and your hand just goes to where it goes. You sort of get out of the way and you play and you go, 'Thank God, I did make this simpler than it felt.'"

Read the complete Ultimate Classic Rock report here.

Just a few months after the successful launch of the By-Tor overdrive/boost pedal, Alex Lifeson and Lerxst have announced their next pedal collaboration, The Snow Dog.

The Snow Dog is an octave fuzz that utilizes the Lerxst two-in-one pedal format to provide a versatile array of modern and vintage fuzz sounds with a footswitchable upper octave effect. The Snow Dog is available now for $295 as a limited-run of 500 pedals available exclusively through the Lerxst Reverb Store, and also includes a tour pass signed by Alex.

“I use distortion, fuzz, and overdrive pedals and plug-ins when I'm looking for that kind of specific sound for the projects I work on and am having fun with both the By-Tor and Snow Dog pedals,” Alex says. “But it's the Snow Dog that really screams. It can produce the most horrific fuzz in the Universe!”

Learn more here, and check out the Snow Dog in action in this demo video by Andy Martin: