With an Australian tour running from Hobart to Melbourne early next year, here’s a look at the guitars, amps and desert tunings behind the Tuareg band’s sound.
Ibrahim Ag Alhabib built his first guitar out of an oil can, a stick and a length of bicycle brake cable. He was a boy in the refugee camps of southern Algeria at the time, and he’d just seen a cowboy strumming a guitar in a western film. Close to half a century after he founded Tinariwen, the band still plays with that make-do spirit, running long, circling guitar lines through whatever Fenders, Gibsons and Epiphones happen to be on hand.
Their guitars have mostly been off-the-rack solid bodies and their amps have been workhorse clean combos. The sound comes from the way they play: thumbs holding down a drone while the fingers hammer at open strings, and rhythm guitars that can sit on one chord for an entire song. Guitarist Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni once described the band’s whole approach to the instrument as “We discover guitar.”
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The oil can guitar
Ag Alhabib has described that first instrument as an oil can, a stick and some bicycle brake cable. In another telling, credited to Ag Alhousseyni, it was a plastic water can and fishing wire, and bassist Eyadou Ag Leche has put it as a can, a metal string and a piece of wood. Whatever it was made of, Ag Alhabib taught himself old Tuareg songs, Arabic pop and Malian blues on it with no teacher and no idea of standard tuning, and you can still hear that self-taught logic in the band’s records.
Fender Stratocaster
Ag Alhabib and his bandmates went through military training in Libya in the 1980s, and when fighting broke out in Mali in 1990, he joined the rebellion. The Observer’s Peter Culshaw asked whether he’d gone to war with a Kalashnikov over one shoulder and a Stratocaster over the other. Ag Alhabib’s reply was “That’s exactly what happened.”
Decades on, Alhassane Ag Touhami has played a sea-foam green Stratocaster on stage. Ag Alhabib’s lead style suits a bright single coil down to the ground, because he hammers on individual open strings rather than bending them. Younger Tuareg players have picked up the same habit, and Niger’s Mdou Moctar is rarely seen without a Strat.
Ibrahim Ag Alhabib’s Les Pauls
For all the Strat lore, Ag Alhabib has spent a lot of his touring life on Les Pauls. At a 2006 show in Minneapolis, he played an Epiphone Les Paul on a stage set up on a Persian rug. Fans have since spotted him on both an Epiphone Les Paul Standard and a Les Paul Studio. A later live review caught him on a black Gibson Les Paul with pearl inlays, playing muted rhythmic chops that opened up into tight, wiry leads.
His more recent go-to is a James Trussart Steel Top in a Les Paul shape. Trussart, a French-born builder working in Los Angeles, makes metal-bodied guitars with rusted and engraved finishes. They look like they’ve already done a few years in the Sahara before they leave the workshop.
Fender Toronado
At that same Minneapolis gig, the “wailing” lead guitar was a Fender Toronado, alongside a purple Danelectro. Fender’s offset model paired twin humbuckers with a shorter, Gibson-style scale. Ag Alhabib was still playing a red one on stage in 2011, and it sits somewhere between his Les Pauls and the band’s Strats.
Acoustic guitars
Tinariwen have always moved between electric and acoustic sets, and that 2006 show opened with an amplified acoustic before the electrics came out. Ag Alhousseyni has been seen on stage with a single-cutaway Martin. The band went almost entirely unplugged for Tassili, recording it in November 2010 in the Tassili n’Ajjer national park in south-east Algeria. They hauled a heavy load of recording equipment into a desert canyon and kept the generator far enough from the main tent that the mics wouldn’t pick it up. Wilco’s Nels Cline turned up on the opening track, “Imidiwan Ma Tenam”.
Amps and tunings
At the 2006 show, a Fender Twin Reverb and a Roland combo sat behind the band, both set clean. At a workshop in Chicago, Ag Alhousseyni showed one approach in standard tuning, built on the E minor pentatonic. His thumb plucked the low E as a drone while his fingers hammered on and pulled off at the second fret of the A, D and G strings. In his other tuning, the low E goes up to G.
In the rhythm parts, one player will often hold a single chord for a whole song, thumbing the A string and following it with a quick, muted strum across the rest. Meanwhile the lead player sings and answers his own lines on guitar. As Ag Leche told Reverb, “We don’t do solos. This is our second voice.”
Recording
Tinariwen recorded Amadjar in the open desert of Mauritania in October 2018. The band played under a tent while producer Patrick Votan’s team ran a makeshift control room from a camper van, usually working from early evening until midnight. Amatssou was meant to happen at Jack White’s studio in Nashville with Daniel Lanois producing, but the pandemic scuppered that. Tinariwen recorded in a tent in Algeria instead, while Lanois added pedal steel and piano from Los Angeles and Fats Kaplin sent pedal steel, fiddle and banjo from Nashville.
Their tenth album, Hoggar, came out in March on the band’s own Wedge label, with José González and Sudanese singer and oud player Sulafa Elyas among its guests. Tinariwen tour Australia in February and March next year, starting at Hobart’s Odeon on 26 February. The next night they play a free double-headliner in Fed Square’s Main Square as part of Open Air at the Square. They share the bill with Altın Gün, the Amsterdam psych-rock band who mix microtonal folk with synth grooves and are touring their 2026 album Garip.
From there the band heads through Sydney, Brisbane and Byron Bay before a big Labour Day long weekend split between two festivals. On one side is Golden Plains at the Meredith Supernatural Amphitheatre (6 to 8 March), where they share the bill with Geese, Underworld and Peter Garrett & The Alter Egos. On the other are two days at WOMADelaide. The tour finishes with two nights at Melbourne’s Northcote Theatre on 10 and 11 March, and the second show was added after the first sold out.
Learn more about the band’s Australian dates here
