Arianna Powell

Biography

Arianna Powell is the lead guitarist in Olivia Rodrigo's touring band, and over the past few years she has quietly become one of the most watched guitar players in pop. Rodrigo wanted a show with real solos in it, roughly seven of them a night, and Powell is the one delivering them: Floyd Rose dives, tapping runs, harmonized leads, and a stage presence that has a generation of teenagers looking up what a Charvel is. Before that gig she had already logged years as a first-call touring guitarist in Los Angeles with Halsey, Nick Jonas, the Black Eyed Peas, Chris Brown, and Dua Lipa, and Guitar Player put her on its list of fifty sensational female guitarists.

She grew up in Pen Argyl, Pennsylvania, a small Slate Belt borough near Allentown, with a father who fingerpicked folk songs and kept Bob Dylan, Gordon Lightfoot, and Ramblin' Jack Elliott on the turntable. A stack of Go-Go's records and, of all things, the movie Josie and the Pussycats convinced her that a girl could be the one playing the guitar. Jennifer Batten and Susan Tedeschi confirmed it. She studied jazz guitar at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, originally planning to teach, and spent her college years transcribing Johnny Smith and Joe Pass chord melodies while playing wedding bands and stand-in gigs around the city.

Pittsburgh led to Los Angeles, partly because a wedding-band colleague had moved out west and partly because she had read about how Bibi McGill built a career there. Powell's own advice for that period is blunt: it is not who you know, it is who knows you. She showed up at the Baked Potato jam sessions week after week, and one of those nights produced the connection that put her on a Nick Jonas tour. The Black Eyed Peas, Chris Brown, and Halsey followed, and then the call from Rodrigo's camp, with music director Stacy Jones building a band around two guitarists, Powell and Daisy Spencer. Her first show with Rodrigo was on Saturday Night Live, which is a rough way to start and a good sign of how quickly she was trusted.

The gem in her story is that Rodrigo's only note to her about the guitar parts has ever been to be more virtuosic. So the Sour and Guts tours turned into a nightly guitar clinic, with Powell adding her own tapping passages and whammy dives to the arrangements. At Glastonbury in June 2025 she found out during a rehearsal in Nashville that Robert Smith of The Cure would be joining the set, and by her own account she started crying on the spot. Away from the arena she is a serious chord-melody player, arranging pop, gospel, and jazz tunes for solo guitar and teaching those arrangements through Pickup Music and Sonora under her handle, guitarianna.

Legendary Performance

Glastonbury Pyramid Stage headline set with Olivia Rodrigo and Robert Smith

June 29, 2025 · Pyramid Stage, Glastonbury Festival, Worthy Farm, Pilton, England

Olivia Rodrigo's Sunday night headline set on the Pyramid Stage closed Glastonbury 2025, and for the guitar players in the crowd the story of the night was the woman on stage left. Rodrigo's show is built around big rock moments, and Arianna Powell carried them: the crunching intro to "bad idea right?", the whammy-bar theatrics in "obsessed", the harmonized runs in "all-american bitch", and a run of solos that would not sound out of place on a Van Halen bootleg. This was a pop star's headline slot, and it was also the biggest audience a working session guitarist had played to all year, broadcast live by the BBC.

The moment that made the night was the guest. During rehearsals in Nashville a couple of weeks earlier, Powell learned that Robert Smith of The Cure would join the set, and she has said she started crying when she heard. On the night, Smith walked out for "Friday I'm in Love" and "Just Like Heaven", two songs whose guitar parts Powell had grown up adoring, and she got to play them next to the man who wrote them. Smith had spent the afternoon with his dressing room door open for the band and told them it was just another show, and that calm carried into the performance.

What matters about this gig is what it represents. Powell had already toured with Halsey, Nick Jonas, and the Black Eyed Peas, but Rodrigo's show gave her something rare in modern pop, a mandate to actually play. Rodrigo's standing note to her is to be more virtuosic, and the Glastonbury set was that instruction on the biggest stage the festival has. It is the performance people will point to when they explain why so many teenagers picked up a Charvel in 2025.

Gear

Charvel SoCal HSH with Floyd Rose (plus Jackson Soloist)

Known for: Olivia Rodrigo Sour and Guts tours, Glastonbury 2025

The guitar that defines the Olivia Rodrigo era for Powell is a Charvel SoCal with an HSH pickup layout and a Floyd Rose, the pointy-headstock, hot-rodded kind of instrument that spent decades stuck in the hard rock and metal aisle. Rodrigo's music borrows freely from pop-punk and nineties alternative, and the show needs real dive bombs, flutters, and squeals, which means a locking tremolo is not optional. Powell pairs the Charvel with a Jackson Soloist with an ebony fingerboard and its own Floyd, which was the guitar in her hands at Glastonbury and BST Hyde Park in 2025. Seeing those instruments on a pop stage, played by a woman, has done more to reintroduce them to a young audience than any ad campaign could.

Her collection is broader than the shred guitars suggest. Earlier in her touring career she leaned on PRS and Suhr instruments, and her personal favorites include a Shell Pink Fender Custom Shop 1963 Telecaster and a Gibson ES-339 that get used for the jazz and chord-melody side of her playing. For the Rodrigo tour she also carries a Gretsch Silver Falcon for the shimmery clean and jangle parts, a Gibson Dove acoustic, and a Fender Acoustasonic Jazzmaster that lets her switch between acoustic and electric tones within a song without changing guitars.

Kemper Profiler (Friedman BE-50 and Two-Rock Traditional profiles), Victory VC35 The Copper Deluxe

Known for: arena-consistent tones across the Olivia Rodrigo tours

Powell's stage rig is built for consistency across arena tours, so a Kemper profiler is the heart of it. Every amp tone the show needs is profiled, and the effects, including the whammy pitch shifting that stands in for a dedicated pedal, live inside it, which keeps her sound identical whether she is at a festival or on a late-night TV stage. The profiles come from real amplifiers she owns and loves: a Friedman BE-50 for the saturated British rock tones behind the heavy songs, and a Two-Rock Traditional for the big, clean, three-dimensional sounds. She is also a Victory Amps artist and plays a VC35 The Copper Deluxe through a Copper 212 cabinet, an amp she describes as warm and balanced, with powerful bass and sparkly highs. In her Pittsburgh and early LA years the backline was more often a Fender Twin or a Hot Rod Deluxe, and that clean, headroom-first Fender character still shows up in her chord-melody work.

Kemper whammy pitch shift, delay, reverb, chorus

Because the Kemper handles the heavy lifting, Powell's effects are chosen for what the songs actually need rather than for board real estate. The signature move is the whammy, run as a pitch-shift block inside the profiler, which gives Rodrigo's set its dive-bomb and octave-up screams without a floor unit. Around it sit the usual pop-tour essentials: delay and reverb for the shimmering clean parts, a chorus for the nineties alternative flavor, and gain staging pulled from the Friedman profiles for the solos. The philosophy is the same one she brought to earlier tours, where she has said her job is to add energy and life to tracks, so the signal chain is tuned to make every part cut, not to show off a pedal collection.

Signature Technique

Chord-Melody Harmony Meets Floyd Rose Shred

Arianna Powell's playing sits at an unusual intersection: a jazz guitar education, a decade of pop sideman discipline, and a shred vocabulary she gets to unleash nightly. Her foundation is harmonic. At Duquesne she transcribed Johnny Smith and Joe Pass chord-melody arrangements, learning to harmonize a melody with moving chord voicings on the top strings, and that remains the backbone of her solo arrangements of pop, gospel, and jazz tunes. She thinks in chords first, which is why her lead lines outline the changes so clearly even when they are fast.

On the Olivia Rodrigo tour the lead vocabulary is unapologetically classic. Two-hand tapping runs that she wrote into the arrangements herself, whammy-bar dives and flutters on the Floyd Rose, pinch harmonics, harmonized dual-guitar lines with co-guitarist Daisy Spencer, and pentatonic phrasing with wide, controlled vibrato lifted from her heroes Brian May, David Gilmour, and Eddie Van Halen. The influence of Jennifer Batten is audible in how comfortably she moves between the flashy tapped passages and the melodic statements around them.

The part that separates her from a pure shredder is rhythm and restraint. Powell spent years in bands where the guitar was there to add energy and life to a track without stepping on a vocal, and she can drop from a fiery solo into a laid-back groove, a clean arpeggiated figure, or a jangly Gretsch part without changing her feel. She favors dynamics over density, choosing the one bend or the one tapped run that lifts a chorus rather than filling every bar.

Her influence is showing up in real time. Rodrigo's audience is young and largely female, and a good portion of it is now watching a woman play a pointy Charvel through a wall of gain and deciding to do the same. Combine that with her teaching work on chord-melody arranging, and Powell is shaping how the next generation both hears and studies the instrument.