As I got to know Todd better I also got to know bits and pieces of his history. Before moving to the Berkshires, he’d been in the Atlanta area, playing the music scene. One day a man answered an ad Todd had run in the paper looking for a fiddle player for a band he was putting together. Todd and the fiddler hit it off immediately and became close friends as well as band mates. The fiddle player had just moved to Atlanta as part of his new job, reporting for the Wall Street Journal. His name was Daniel Pearl.

In one of those odd twists of fate, Todd eventually ended up moving to the Berkshires, where only a relatively short time earlier, Danny had been living and working for the local paper. Danny had also been very active on the Berkshire music scene, playing in a number of bands.

Four years ago, Todd organized the first “FODfest,” “FOD” being an acronym for “Friends of Danny.” These concerts sought to celebrate not only Danny’s life, but also his music and his belief in the power of music and words to break down barriers and create harmony in the world.

This year’s event will tour both coasts and involve well over two hundred musicians, many of whom only knew Danny by reputation.

I’d like to thank Todd personally, not only for taking the time out of his incredibly busy schedule, but also for inviting me to participate in this magical musical event. You can find this year’s FODfest schedule up on the “News” page of the Guitar Noise Forums.

Q: FODfest is now in its fourth year and certainly has evolved quite a bit from the very first one. Can you take us back to 2005 and tell us a little bit about your initial ideas? What motivated you to do all this in the first place? Did you envision, even back then, the growth of FODfest from a single, local event to the nationwide tour it’s become? How did all this happen so fast?

Todd: Well, 2005 and 2006 were both very last minute, very informal backyard concerts at my house.  I had been doing stuff for Daniel Pearl World Music Days from the onset with my radio show and it just took me a few years to get around to doing something live.  It was always in the cards.  I just never had the time.  But four years ago, I said to myself “screw it.  I HAVE to do this and there’s never going to be a good time”.  So I just called up a few friends, emailed a bunch of folks, and three days later had a party.  The next year I planned a whopping two weeks in advance.  And then my friend Dave Keehn, who was Danny’s good friend too (we all played in a band together) flew up from Atlanta to be there for it, even with just two weeks’ notice, and that’s what sort of sealed it for me, what made me take that next step.  If Dave was willing to come up on a moment’s notice for this thing, I figured there must be something to it.  Something that needed to be shared on a broader level.  It was always in the bigger picture, but its one thing to talk about doing something and another to actually do it.  So in January of 2007, I started planning the first FODfest tour, which would take place that October and include seven cities in eight days from Atlanta to Memphis and up the east coast.

But what really motivated me to do this goes back way before 2005.  Back to the day Danny was murdered. Ever since I was a kid I’ve been allured as much to the power of music as the music itself.  This was something Danny and I used to talk about – music’s power to bring about change.  People like Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Woody Guthrie – they were all proof in the pudding.  And when Danny died, I vowed to myself that I would harness that power so that nobody ever forgot who he was and the things that he stood for. From the get go, even as last minute and throw together as it may have been, I envisioned FODfest as a BIG event.  Bigger than it’s been, and bigger than it is now.  FODfest is about connecting people through music, regardless of their walk of life.  I want it to reach as many people as it possibly can.  Sure, its happened fast, but it still has a long, long way to go.  We’re going to be here for a long time.

Q: Logistically, FODfest must be quite a challenge. As producer, how far ahead are you planning? Is FODfest 2009 already being worked out? When do you get a chance to sit back and enjoy all of this?

Todd: Well, logistically, this thing is really a nightmare, to be perfectly honest.  This year’s tour will include up to seventeen shows in seventeen days on the east and west coasts and involve upward of two hundred and fifty musicians.  The performance format is unique combining elements of a jam session, song swap, and concert into one in an acoustic setting.  It’s not one that everybody understands right off the bat, musicians and clubs alike, and so it takes some explaining.  Early on I realized the importance of recording and filming the concerts so people could see it in action even if they’d never been to a FODfest show.

FODfest has become a full time job for me, and an unpaid one at that.  I started working on this year’s tour in November, three weeks after last year’s tour ended.  Plans are already in motion for FODfest ‘09, and booking will start in January and hopefully be completed by the end of March to allow us to have a full six months to coordinate musicians and properly promote.  As for the fun, sure it can be stressful especially the few months leading up to the tour, but seeing the way folks respond to what we are doing makes it all worth it.  That’s the fun part.  That’s the rewarding part.

Q: As a performer whose toured more than his fair share of miles, does touring with FODfest make you at all nostalgic? Do you get the desire to get back out on the road as a touring musician?

Todd: I was pretty young when I started touring.  That was a long time ago.  Before kids, before there was a business to run, all that.  Sure I miss it.  Do I miss the long, late nights, the driving in the wee hours of the morning, the crappy food, and sleeping on strangers’ floors?  Well, okay, maybe a little.  But not enough to get out there in the same way at this point in my life.  I’d love to start touring again, but it would have to be more in line with where I’m at in my life these days.

Q: What have been the highpoints of FODfest to you? Any particular standout moments?

Todd: Caroline Aiken, Malcolm Holcolmb, the Ottoman Empire reunion, getting to play with Michael Lorant & Sheila Doyle of Big Fish Ensemble.  Finally getting into Elvis’ birthplace in Tupelo, Mississippi.  But most importantly connecting with people and connecting people with one another through music.  That’s what FODfest is all about.  It’s what music is all about.  And it’s what Danny Pearl was all about.

Q: And, on top of all this, you’re finishing up your latest CD! Can you tell us a little about it?

Todd: Well, actually it’s been done since May.  Mixed, mastered, the whole nine yards except for the packaging of it – a testament to how all consuming FODfest has become.  Ironically, this is a very dark album.  Easily the darkest thing I’ve ever done, which is in contract to the uplifting vibe of FODfest.  The new CD is called “The Thirteenth Step”.  It’s a theme album, essentially.  And the theme is addiction, something that strikes very close to home for me.  What I’ve learned about addiction is that there are really only two possible outcomes of it.  Either you truly kick your habit for the rest of your life and you go on living.  Or you don’t, and it kills you, be it by overdose or just long term abuse catching up with your body.  That’s the thirteenth step, either one of those definitive outcomes.  Musically, the CD is different from anything I’ve done, too.  It’s very layered, which I’ve done a lot of before, but in a completely different way, building mostly from a dense forest of electric guitar tracks.  I put a great band together for it and I’m really pleased with the way it came out.

Q: As a songwriter, you’ve certainly written songs that cross over many genre lines. Is that something you do naturally? Does producing and recording other artists inspire your own work?

Todd: Mixing up genres is something I’ve always done, but never really set out to do.  I think it’s more a result of my own varied musical tastes.  I love bluegrass and the blues and jazz, but I could never be a bluegrass, blues, or jazz head who listens to nothing but those styles of music. I’d just burn out on it. Producing other artists probably does inspire my own work, but in a more subtle way.  As producer, you tend to find yourself injecting your own style into an artist’s sound, so in that sense I don’t think the role allows you to be influenced by their work.  But the trick is to not get trapped in that mindset and to keep yourself open to what you can learn from the artist you are producing.  I am working on an album right now by a fantastic songwriter and I am really learning a lot about my own writing from producing her songs.

Q: You are someone who has lived in the music business pretty much all his life. What words of advice would you give to someone who says he or she wants to make a living in music?

Todd: Well, as somebody who didn’t heed the advice of others who told me not to quit my day job, I suppose it would be hypocritical of me to say “don’t quit your day job”.  But I will say this, having other skills that you can bring into the picture can help immensely and better your odds at really making your living at music.  I am lucky enough to have strong organizational skills, a must to survive in this business, but a lot of musicians don’t possess those.  I suppose it’s a right brain/ left brain kind of thing.  It’s okay if you don’t.  Just figure out what your strengths are.  Maybe you’ve got a good eye and can do your own graphic design work.  Not only can you create your own marketing materials, but you could start doing it for others and earn some money in the process.  Or maybe you are good with people and can start teaching to help generate some dollars.  The key is you’ve got to have your fingers in a lot of pies to make it work, and you’ve got to be willing to work your butt off more than the average person who goes to a day job and works for somebody else.  The large majority of us are not going to be the next Jason Mraz or Norah Jones.  So you’ve got to be creative in how you bring the dollars in a way that still keeps you in music.  And the bottom line is never stop believing in yourself.  Anything is possible if you believe it is.  And just keep at it.  I’ve been doing music since I was eighteen, and as far as I’ve come, I’ve still got a long way to go.  It never ends, but if you just keep your eye on the prize you get there little by little.

Eager to help, Bailey offered to jump in a cab and take it to be fixed. Pastorius took it from him and proceeded to make the bass sing. Bailey says he realized that Jaco knew every aspect of that bass; including every dead spot, every buzz, and every place he needed to dig in to get the sound he wanted. Not only did Pastorius know how to play that bass, he knew how to make good music with it.

“A lot of people are into playing, but not as much into music,” says Bailey, who is known for his solo records, playing on over 1000 recordings as a studio musician, and on numerous tours with pop mega star Madonna, and of course, succeeding Pastorius as bassist for the jazz/fusion group Weather Report. Weather Report keyboardist and co-founder Joe Zawinul remains one of Bailey’s mentors. He explains, “Zawinul was never concerned with how much chops someone had, it was always about the quality of the music. There’s a big difference between playing and making music.”

Bailey says he’s seen some phenomenal players do unbelievable things on the bass when they are on stage by themselves, but notices that in many cases he doesn’t see them as part of a rhythm section. Bailey remarks, “A lot of guys are amazing players, but don’t necessarily make quality music. The most important thing all the time for me and the people I work with is that the music feels and sounds good.”

“In order to make music that sounds good, you don’t necessarily have to be the most technically advanced player,” says Bailey. He says an overall musical sense and concern for the quality of the music can be much more important than virtuoso performances in many cases. Bailey advises, “Use what you have to make something interesting. There are plenty of musicians out there that may not have the most chops, but they know how to command the stage – and rock the house. Guys who can do that AND have lots of talent, knowledge and ability, now those are my kind of guys!”

If your goal is to be a first-rate player like Bailey, however, he says it’s absolutely essential to know what you’re doing. “You have to study your instrument until it’s second nature. When you hear chord changes and modulations, you can’t be guessing – you have to know where to go without hesitation. Anything that’s put in front of you – you need to be able to handle – immediately! That’s what separates the top players from everyone else.”

Bailey should know. He played his first gig three weeks after he got his first bass – he was 15. “I’ve always been a studious person. I came home from school and spread my books out and did my homework before I went outside. I read the encyclopedia. When it came to music, I wasn’t satisfied just knowing the bass line; I also wanted to know the chords and harmony. My dad, a master composer, arranger, producer and saxophonist, had a jazz collection of guys like Oscar Peterson and Ray Brown and I used to ask him, ‘Why did Ray Brown play this note?’ and he’d tell me, ‘Well that’s a flat 9.’ I’ve always been inquisitive, and I’m still that way, to this day. There are still a whole bunch of things I think I could do better.”

Bailey notes that even after 30 years of playing, if he doesn’t touch the bass for one day, his flow isn’t the same. “I noticed that if I play for just 10 or 15 minutes per day it keeps me connected to the instrument. If I don’t stay in touch with the bass, it might take me a whole set before I feel my flow is good. Practice gives you a natural connection to the instrument.”

When Bailey practices, he says he plays a combination of things; solo studies (currently, he’s working on a Bach piece) then he may groove for an hour, then maybe do some bebop soloing, or play some old R&B or rock bass lines. “I’m always trying to improve the quality of my playing – the sound, touch and feel. I’m always thinking about feel. As I’m playing the bass line, my head is moving to the groove – just as much as if I’m on stage. I’m thinking, ‘How long do I hold this note, should I leave a space? Should I play them perfectly even, or play one note with vibrato, and the next with no vibrato’?”

That said, Bailey acknowledges that depending on what someone wants out of playing the bass, it may not be necessary for them to practice all day, every day. He says players should determine what they want to be, and do what it takes to get there.

“I once taught a woman who ended up playing bass in a big rock band. I played Stanley Clarke’s School Days for her and she said, ‘I don’t want to play like that.’ She spent all day working on music – but it was writing songs. She wanted to be good enough to write good bass lines and to not have to search around all day to figure out where the song was going. She was very clear on what she wanted out of it, and I think that’s key.”

And most importantly, Bailey advises, don’t give up. He says developing skills takes time and consistent effort. Again, Bailey should know. He recalls a recent gig he played in New York, on Long Island. After the gig, a man came up to him, said excitedly, “Wow I really like how you play the bass – I’ve never heard anyone do what you’re doing. You should really stick with it, you really have a future in this business.”

Victor Bailey recently completed a new CD with the trio CBW – with Larry Coryell and Lenny White. Bailey says the new CD, recorded for Chesky Records, will contain jazz, rock, funk, fusion, “a little of everything.” Keep an eye on VictorBailey.com for details of upcoming concerts and tours.

As his new line is launching, I got in touch with him and asked him to answer some questions for us as far as building guitars goes.

Guitar Noise-When it comes time to design a new model, how do you go about it? What elements do you think about?

Alan Garcia-Torre-The elements are first of all a question of price range. Where do we want to be? After that we decide on the look we want. That also depends on one’s own construction capability. The sound quality is something else, it comes from the choice in harmony table.

GN-Could you take us through the overall process of constructing a guitar?

AGT-First is the choice of woods, that’s very important to position oneself at the level one has chosen.

Then comes the construction of the neck, molding on the shape of the sides, building of the bottom of the body, of the table with the gluing of the bars and the rosace, gluing of the neck on the sides, gluing of the table and the bottom onto the sides, installationg of borders, gluing of the fretboard, installation of the frets, of the neck.

Then the shooting of the varnish in fine layers with drying and sanding between each layer (at least three) and polishing.

There’s also the hand varnish, reserved to high-end guitares because it’s so long to do. It’s a varnish that penetrates better, but is, unfortunately, more fragile.

GN-How long does it take to construct one guitar?

AGT-Serial or not, it takes between three weeks and a month.

GN-From the moment when you decide to make a new model until it’s ready to ship, how much time has passed?

AGT-It’s quite variable. I’d say between six months and a year.

GN-Is there a lot of (if any) trial and error in the construction of a new model?

AGT-Yes, there are many trials to do to get what we want, but there again it’s quite variable. For my guitars, there were 12 trials.

GN-Please explain the importance of the woods used to construct a guitar.

AGT-The first thing is to have dry wood. Apart from some high-end luthiers who still have ancient woods, current woods are kiln-dried, which is certainly not as good, but indispensible for serial construction. It allows still to limit humidity to 5%. The wood of the table is primordial; it determines 90% of the sound of the guitare. We generally use Spruce or Cedar which each have their qualities and their problems, it’s a question of a person’s taste.

For the body, a nice pallissandre is generally appreciated.

For the neck, we use cedro or mahogany (rarer) and for the fingerboard, ebony. It’s possible to use other woods for lower-end guitars, it’s always a question of price since in the end, you have to sell them!

GN-A Classical guitar and an guitar (for metal strings) have

different constructions (different size necks, etc.) Why can’t a classical guitar be designed like an acoustic and vice-versa?

AGT-A guitar with steel strings and one with nylon strings exert a different tension; the table must therefore be reinforced differently, these guitars are therefore not interchangeable.

GN-One thing I’ve always wondered about: the shape of acoustic guitars. Except for cutaways, the basic model, shape, width, etc. is always the same. Would it be possible to construct an acoustic or classical guitar with a radically different shape that would still sound good?

AGT-It’s all in the definition of ‘good sound’. If it’s the sound of good modern guitars, you can’t change anything. Any modification in shape or material brings on a change in sound and that perturbs guitarists quite a lot (I have 15 years experience dealing with that problem!) It depends a lot also about celebrity guitarists playing a particular model.

GN-Since the early 20th Century, when the modern guitar came about, what have been the major innovations?

AGT-The modern guitar dates back to 1860 (the first Torres). It’s mostly in improvements of existing techniques. Construction remains, basically, the same as it was back then. I’m of course not talking about the electric guitar.

There was also the creation of polyurethane varnish and nylon strings around 1940, an important progress with previous strings.

GN-Considering the scarcity and price of good quality woods nowadays, where do you look to for materials to replace woods? Are you satisfied with them?

AGT-There’s a whole series of new materials possible for constructing guitars, but does it please guitarists? Maybe if you cover them with wood (which is already being done). But wood remains the most appreciated material for construction.

For satisfaction, it’s once again a matter of individual taste.

GN-When do you consider a guitar finished?

AGT-When the strings make it vibrate!

GN-With new guitars you construct, do you “lose” a few? mistakes in construction, bad wood, etc.

AGT-There’s no loss, at least not in small series. I’m not really familiar with factory building. The woods are well-known and there’s little difference between one guitar and the next withing the same category. The adjustment of the bridge for height and tension on the strings is extremely important for the fell and for the volume level.

Editor’s Note: Please accept in advance any mistakes I’ve made in either writing out the French or goofing on the English translation! And those of you with good bilingual skills, please feel free to write me and let me know what to correct! – David

You can find the original French Q&A here.

Guitar Noise staffer Alan Green managed to get Dave to take a little time to answer some questions about his new CD, Songbook, songwriting in general and the influences different artists have had on his writing.

GN: There is a definite Joni Mitchell feel in the opening track, and some Beach Boy harmonies later. What were your early influences and have they changed as a result of your studies?

DS: I got into Joni Mitchell pretty late (in the late 1990’s), picking up vinyl copies of her albums at car boots and record fairs. She’s one of the greats and I’ve tried to make up for lost time by listening to her a lot. However, I can’t say she is has been an influence upon what I do necessarily (even though I’m delighted if someone might think she could be!).

Beach Boys. Well, again…I like the album Smiley Smile. I suppose if they’ve had an influence on me. This has been the result of being influenced by a band or artist who have been influenced by them first! 10cc, for instance.

My very early influences would stem from the music played in the house by my parents and older sisters. Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Stones, The Who and Pink Floyd to name a few although I’m simplifying it a great deal there as you can imagine. I was a strange kid at school. I liked Chic and Earth, Wind and Fire as much as The Police and The Stranglers. It’s quite acceptable for kids to like anything now but in my day, the seventies, you were seen as a poof if you didn’t just like the same heaviest, nastiest band that all the other kids liked. Later, I got into bands like Rush. Then heavily into Frank Zappa. Then a little later I caught up with XTC’s back catalogue. Those are the ones that spring to mind today. Although there was so much else I could have mentioned (as with anyone’s love of music).

I don’t think my influences have changed as a result of my studies. Though, I know my approach to working has!! I’m far more disciplined than I was…put it that way!

GN: With Muse increasingly prominent these days, a lot of attention is being focussed on the West Country. How strong is the music scene there?

DS: I’d like to think there’s more focus and more opportunity for people in the West Country to be heard. I remember the buzz around Muse before they jumped up a rung or two and made it big. And Joss Stone seemed to just appear out of nowhere.

Generally, things progress rather slowly down here but I’ve come across (and personally know) some very talented people from round these parts. So it’s only a matter or time before there are more stars and starlets from the area.

GN: How many instruments do you play?

DS: Piano is my first instrument. In the past, my role in bands has always been ‘the keyboard player’ and rightly so while there were people like my good friend, Arthur Cook, to play guitar!

All the songs on Songbook were made so purely for guitar (deliberately so to maintain the same sound world throughout) but I’m currently making up for it by working at the piano again for the next album.

I still intend to do a lot on guitar though. Steel-string, nylon-string…also the Nashville tuning which really proved effective on the recent songs.

I love playing bass. Just bought a new Yamaha five-string and the Bass Pod so I’ll be using those on the next album, I should think!

I’ll sit behind the drums if the seat’s free and there’s no other drummer about. But I wouldn’t say I’d join a band to sit there full-time or anything like that! I have about three different patterns I can muster reasonably.

GN: What would be your typical stage setup?

DS: Well…an answer to this could prompt a long sober reply if I’m not careful. Suffice to say, I’m not gigging any of the material on Songbook. I wouldn’t even like to say ‘watch this space’ because I don’t plan on doing it. Now, this could be like shooting myself in the foot with a view to getting the songs heard and selling copies of the album. BUT, as well as having misgivings about my own live performance these days, it’s evident to anyone who listens to the album that so many compromises would have to be made to produce it live. I didn’t make the album with any plan to play it live afterwards. I wanted it to be heard as it is on CD (and still do!). I know this is not a common or shared view amongst musicians but that’s the way I see my own work these days. I’ve never played or sung to my best in a live situation. I much prefer recording, getting it right with no pressure and with a nice hot cup of tea to sip from after a good take.

GN: What’s your approach to songwriting?

DS: I’d like to think there’s more going on in my head than just ‘here’s the verse, here’s another, now a chorus’ etc. I’m sure, for instance, my sidestep into composing concert pieces has had some impact somewhere upon my approach to songs.

I’m going to have to go back in history for a moment.

As a child, I started at the piano by dabbling, like so many do, without any intention of writing ’songs’. I’ve still got recordings of about thirty or so pieces from that time (precious only to me, I suppose). Some of them are still the best things I’ve ever done (maybe I should give up now!).

Anyway, I remember all of those pieces developed by just playing, playing and playing…leaving it, coming back later, and adding the next bit.

Later, when I took along some notated pieces to a composition tutor at an interview for a music course, I was asked, “do you compose at the piano?” (er, yes) and “do you make it up as you go along?” (er, yes, again). While I studied composition there, I tore myself away from the piano to compose once an idea was taking shape. Also, I got into drawing up plans for pieces and an altogether more adult way of composing, or so it seemed. Composing a longer work for orchestra got me into the idea of using film structure as a template. That intrigued me for a while.

When recently, say in the last five years, I got back into writing on guitar and I found songs would just start forming naturally. A chord structure would suggest a melody, a melody would suggest certain vowel sounds to be sung, those vowel sounds would become words, and so on. That’s pretty much the way the songs on ‘Songbook’ have come together.

I’ve always been a ‘music rather than lyrics’ fan so yes, it’s the music first!! I wouldn’t come up with a poetic gem like Joni then put music to it. That feels odd to me. But, having said that, I won’t settle for any old words and I worked very hard on the lyrics for the songs on ‘Songbook’. In fact, I’ve said so much about what I really think of things (rather than going ‘ooh baby, I wanna love you all night along’) that I’m not sure what I have left to say for the next album.

Something’ll come along, I’m sure (that’s been the basic approach up to now!).

GN: “I was asked, “do you compose at the piano?” (er, yes) and “do you make it up as you go along?” (er, yes, again).”

A number of our readers – me included – will be thinking “so, what’s wrong with that?”. If there was just one tip you could share about composing a song or an instrumental piece, what would it be?

DS: Composing at the piano suits me fine, of course. But when the benefits of working away from an instrument were introduced to me it made a lot of sense. If I’m writing something for piano I’ll pretty much stay sat at one for the whole process BUT it’s when you’re writing for orchestra, string quartet or wind quintet (you name it) of course, that it makes sense for me to sit elsewhere and extend the ideas with a pencil and paper with a violin (or whatever it is) playing in my head instead. It’s so easy, otherwise, to get stuck on the piano enjoying its own distinctive sounds when you’re meant to be writing for an instrument for a completely different sound world. Plus the lines you compose for an instrument (other than piano, of course) end up just playing the notes that fit comfortably under the composer’s fingers on a piano. Oddly enough, there are plenty of examples in the orchestral repertoire that show evidence of this…famous chunks of Stravinsky’s ‘Rite Of Spring’ for instance…but, it’s healthy to have an orchestra operate differently than that sometimes!! So, I had to get used to it and allow the sound of a string quartet playing REAL pizzicato in my head rather than plonk around on a keyboard using Bank 1 Preset 14: Pizzicato Strings or whatever the patch would have been.

I’m not sure that’s the most important tip I can think of…but it’s pretty important, that one. You feel liberated when you do all that and get an exciting result. Mind you, that’s writing for orchestras and ensembles for the concert hall!

Guitarist Mark Summers agreed to share his thought on the album and on his own career. Mark is a great guy and has a lot of interesting things to say. So, rather than go on and on about him, here is what he has to say:

Guitar Noise: First off, Let me congratulate you on an excellent album. Tell me a bit about it.

Mark Summers: Well, Thanks for the kudos. The album was just released a couple of months ago and we have had some really nice reviews and some pretty good sales thus far. We tracked it in a matter of about 8 months if memory serves me correct. We titled it REDEMPTION because of the the fact that there are some tunes on here that were written quite a while ago that we felt needed to be recorded the way they were intended.

GN: Was that 8 months straight recording?

MS:No. If you put it in consecutive days I would guess we had about 2-3 weeks of recording and a week to mix. We pretty much had an idea of arrangements and what we were after before we ever mic’d anything up. We took our time, knocking out a couple at a time after all the drum tracks were thrown down.

GN: I hear mutiple tones on the disc. What amps/guitars did you use for the sessions?

MS:For amps I used my 100 watt Marshall Dual Reverb, my 50 watt VHT, my Fender Princeton Stereo Chorus for some clean tracks, and of course my Randall RM100. They are going through either a 4×12 Marshall bottom or Randall 2×12 cabs w/ Vintage 30s. For guitars, it’s one of the following: My Strat, Les Paul, Wolfgang or an old Melody Maker that I used on a couple of rhythm tracks.

GN: Quite an array of guitars. Do you use them all live?

MS:No. Basically my main guitars are my Wolfgangs. I have 2 first year Wolfs. A Tobacco Quilt and a black one. Both Archtops.

GN: Why 1st years? Are they different?

MS:To me they are. I’ve played a boatload of them and they are the best ones produced. Not that the quality slacked off…. I just think they play better than the others. The USA Peavey Wolfgang is the best production guitar on the market in my opinion. Lo and behold, it looks as though that’s coming to an end now if everything I hear is true with Ed and Peavey parting ways. That figures… anyway I also play my Natural Ash Strat, too. It’s a great playing Strat …. but not the one that’s on the disc. Those are basically what I use live.

GN: I’ve read that you cite some influences as EVH, Pat Travers and Kim Mitchell. Quite a mix.

MS:Yeah, PT has been a huge influence on my playing over the years. I saw him when he 1st came over the pond after PUTTIN’ IT STRAIGHT came out with Mars and Tommy Aldredge. What an awesome 3 piece band. I’ve gone to see him about 15-16 times over the years. He’s probably the most influential person you’ll hear in my playing. Well maybe Ed, too. You have to realize that I was a sophomore in high school when the 1st Van Halen record was released. How it could it not be an influence on someone at that time. And Kim Mitchell, what can you say other than he’s such a phenomenal player. It’s just too bad he never really toured the states and got the recognition he so deserved.

GN: Describe your set-up. Does it stay the same?

MS:It used to change moreso than it does now. I pretty much keep the same live set-up. The RM100 with an outboard multi-effects unit, a tuner and a gate to keep it quiet, especially in the studio. I also use a Morley Bad Horsie Wah on the pedalboard. Pretty basic.

GN: Did you record anything direct or mic’d?

MS:Everything on this album has a mic on it…. a Shure 57 positioned a little off-center right up on the grill cloth. Is there any other mic to use on guitar?

GN: How did the Randall endorsement come about and what gear are you currently using from them?

MS:No big secret. I sent a letter to Randall with a bio and some different projects I’ve worked on. They took a listen, checked my credentials and the rest is history. Doug (Reynolds) and Dave (Karon) have always been there to help. That’s the only endorsement I’ve gone after, for I was so impressed with the amp. I should probably go after a string deal… Hey Mr. Markley…

GN: With the RM100, you have your choice of changing pre-amp modules, correct?

MS:Exactly. It was designed for Randall by Bruce Egnator and the simplicity of it is a major advantage. I currently use the PLEXI, BROWN and TOP BOOST modules although I have others that I throw in quite often. A lot of people associate Randall with the heavier type of music, but this amp is definitely for the versatile player. All tube and midi capable.

GN: Your session work is quite varied. Will you do anything?

MS:Anything… no. A lot of things… yes. I usually talk with a client before committing to get a feel for what they expect and what they’re after. I’ve turned away from things that I could’ve done simply because either the client didn’t have a clue what they were after or I didn’t feel I was the right man for the job. The studio is a very demanding environment and you are usually under the gun to get it right and get it right fairly quick. I know my limitations and I don’t get into situations that are unfair to me or the client. On the other hand, being under the gun sometimes draws things out of one’s self that you didn’t think you had in you. I just like to enjoy what I do if I can, enough said…

GN: Do you enjoy the studio as much as live playing.

MS:No way… Live playing affords you the luxury of making a mistake and it’s gone forever. Not so in the studio. That’s one reason I appreciate the session players who do it all the time. Guys like Dan Huff (applause). He’s finally gotten some long overdue recognition outside of the people “in the know” that he so deserves.

GN:Your solos all seem to flow in and out of the rhythm passages nicely. Do you work them out ahead of time or do most of them come off-the-cuff?

MS:It just depends. Sometimes I’ll have something in mind and it works out fine. Other times it might not come off as I had hoped it would and we have also cut some tracks where I just said to push the button and see what materializes. Sometimes that’s a very refreshing approach. There’s actually quite a few of those types of tracks on the disc.

GN:When did you first start playing? Was guitar your first instrument?

MS:Oh, yes. I was about 7 when I got my 1st guitar. It was a 3/4 scale Gibson acoustic. I still have it, actually.

GN:You used to be a radio DJ, tell us about that.

MS:That was during a time when I had suffered a severe finger injury on my left hand. It just kept me close to music.

GN:Have you had formal instruction in theory or playing?

MS:No, unfortunately I am self taught. If I had it to do over again, I would have gone to school for some basic understandings of theory. It would have saved me a lot of head scratching over the years.

GN:Yes, believe me, I know what you’re saying. What is your take on the some of the players today?

MS:There’s just so many great players today. It’s really quite refreshing after going through the dark ages… you know, the late 80s and 90s. The guitar just kinda got lost in the mix. Leads were non-existent in a lot of work, if there was a guitar at all.

GN:Who are some of the players that you admire now?

MS:I am just a huge fan of Joe Bonamassa. The guy can do it all. There are so many great players out there today that it’s hard to pick. I am just a huge fan of good music (and great guitar playing). Johnny Hiland just smokes, too. And John Petrucci ….

GN:How do you define success?

MS:Are you doing what you want to do? Personally, I am in a great situation. Our singer (Todd Joos) owns Cellar Records. We write and record our own music, we have our own publishing and distribution. What more can you want in terms of artistic freedom. Am I rich doing this? No. If it was about the money, I would never have chosen this occupation.

GN:If you were only allowed to have 5 Albums or CD’s on a deserted island, which 5 would it be?

MS:It wouldn’t matter anyway …. the batteries would go dead and there I’d sit with my favorite Cds and no way of listening. Just let me have my wife and an acoustic guitar with extra sets of strings. And some soap, toothbrush, toilet paper…

Sheryl just got back from Europe this past week and was kind enough to answer a few questions for us at Guitar Noise. I think that you’ll find her insights into jazz and songwriting to be both helpful and enlightening. Be sure to check out our reviews of The Power of Three as well as Bull’s Eye, her latest release and keep up with all her shows at her own website, www.SherylBailey.com.

GN: I hope you don’t mind my starting with two questions you’ve probably heard way too many times! First, why did you take up guitar in the first place and then why jazz guitar? Who were your influences and role models starting out? How about now?

SB: Like most 13 year olds, I wanted to be a rock star – I was into “classic rock” and heavy metal: Black Sabbath, Cream, Hendrix, Robin Trower, Van Halen, AC-DC – I had a basement band, and I would teach everyone the parts to the songs and sing ….Today I still love all of those bands and my friend and mentor, Jack Wilkins, Johnny Smith, Grant Green, Wes, and of course Pat Martino.

GN: Following in that vein, what sort of education, if any, did you have in this field?

SB: I was self-taught until about the age of 16, when I started studying with a jazz guitarist, John Maione – he taught at Pitt University – we worked on Joe Pass solos, Charlie Christian, Jimmy Raney, Carl Kress – really the foundation of jazz guitar – later I studied with Mark Koch, then one year with Joe Negri – after that I went to Berklee College of Music in Boston, and studied with a whole bunch of great cats up there; Brett Wilmott, Jon Damian, Bruce Arnold, and Ed Tomassi

GN: People are, of course, going to ask about your equipment. What guitar are you favoring these days? Amp? How do get that wonderfully clean tone you use on your CDs?

SB: I play a Yamaha SA 1500 – a pygmy 335 -Yamaha gave it to me when I was on tour in Japan with Richard Bona – it’s a proto-type, it’s quirky and I love it. I just started using the Clarus 2R by Acoustic Image, w/ a 12″ Raezor’s Edge Extended Range cabinet, which I’m also digging because it’s soooo clean, loud and it doesn’t color your guitar’s natural tone….on my discs I used my old workhorse Tech 21 Trademark 60….my tone comes from my right hand technique, not so much the gear – I’ve developed a feather-light touch that let’s the strings ring out and get the most sound and dynamic.

GN: The Sheryl Bailey 3 seems to be an incredibly empathic group. You, Gary and Ian work so well together. How did the group form and what did it take to get to the level of playing together you all share today?

SB: I had been hearing an organ trio setting in my head that I wanted to write for, but I didn’t have the right players – I wanted to extend the Grant Green/Larry Young/Elvin Jones path – not go on the groove organ trio path, but the modern jazz organ trio path. I met Ian by playing some far-out trio gigs with tenor sax genius, George Garzone (no bass!), and I knew Ian was my drummer (he even studied with Elvin as a kid). Gary had just moved to town, and I had heard of him from everyone – I put together a session, shortly after the tragedy in NYC – as a form of healing, I guess – the chemistry was instant, so I got on the phone and started booking rooms in the city. I try to book the band once a month, so we keep in rapport, and keep the momentum going – we rehearse maybe twice a year, mostly we just let it happen on the gig. I believe that we all feel time in the same way, so we have a natural way that we phrase together – also, we have listened to and admired a lot of the same music coming up, so we have a common ground to improvise with each other on. I really want to produce a live-in-a-club record next, because the stuff we do on the bandstand is so heavy!

GN: How important is that empathy, the ability to listen to each other, to take a musical idea, add your own little twist to it and then pass it on? How does one go about learning to develop this skill?

SB: Listening is everything to improvising. Ultimately, you want to hear the band as if you’re floating above it, listening to how each part blends – there’s no ego involved – you do what the music asks of you – nothing more, nothing less. There are lots of conceptual ideas to work on listening deeper, but a simple place to start is meditation away from your axe, just learning how to clear your head of your ego and thoughts, and just hear how much sound there is in silence.

GN: Could you take a moment to talk about songwriting? What goes into the writing of one of your pieces? How much of it is a set idea and how much of it springs from group improvisation? How do you decide what makes a good song, that is, one worth working on and getting played and recorded?

SB: All of the tunes on my records were written in one sitting – anywhere from 15 minutes to 2 hours – that’s my rule, open your ears, your heart and start writing, no judgment – those are always the keepers. I write constantly, and not everyone of them is a keeper – for me the ones that stay in the book are ones the are easy to play – the melodies and harmonies have a natural flow, even though the forms might be odd – the listener and the players should be enjoying themselves, not concentrating on how difficult the music is. I’m not attached to the outcome of the tune, so if it’s not a strong tune, I toss it and keep moving – that what seems to work for me.

GN: How did you get hooked up with some of the folks you’ve been working with lately like David Krakauer, Richard Bona, Gary Thomas and KJ Denhert? What types of influence have they had in your recent work? And what sort of influence do you think you give them in turn?

SB: All of the cool gigs I’ve ever gotten came to me, in a funny way, just by being out there and trying to play my best. I love all types of music, and I love the challenge of trying to play in the Klezmer style, or African 6/8, or scream on a fusion/funk vamp – music is really a language, so it’s just trying to get with the different accents and nuances of style, just like you would learn to speak different languages. I’m often surprised at the variety of artists that call on me, but I know they are seeking my jazz ears to lend to their music, so I am always humbled and honored to lend my style to their unique musics.

GN: Some of our readers may have met you as a teacher at the National Guitar Workshop, among the other places where you turn up as an instructor. What things do you feel are essential for someone aspiring to play jazz to learn? Besides your own book (and please do mention it!), what other sources do you recommend?

SB: The most essential quality in a jazz musician is one’s sense of groove – time. Listening to a lot of jazz is also important to get the “sound of jazz” in your ear, and also, your heart. If you treat jazz as a science experiment, it will always sound like that – falling in love with the music is the key to open the door. That being lesson one – jazz challenges one to understand harmony and how harmony relates to melody. I’m a bit fanatical about harmonic clarity – meaning, really making the changes clear in your melodic line. A great line is one that can stand on it’s own, and the harmony accompanying it is clearly understood. Bach and Bebop are based on the same principles. The Bach Inventions are simply melodic lines that generate harmony – that’s what the jazz line is all about.

My book has come from subjects I’ve worked on with students, mapping out II-V-I arpeggios, simple re-harm studies, drop two voicings, some ideas for altered dom7 voicings and lines – it’s certainly not the ultimate guide – I’m always developing it too. I think the essential books are The Charlie Parker Omnibook, Joe Viola’s Technique of The

Saxophone, Brett Wilmotts’ Chord Voicing Book, The Barry Galbraith Comping Series, and Mick Goodrick’s Advancing Guitarist.

GN: Speaking of books, I’ve read that a transcription of your solo in Old Blues New Blues will be part of a new book from Hal Leonard. How did that come about and how do you feel about the honor of being included in the book?

SB: It will be a part of Mel Bay’s Anthology of Jazz Masters vol. IV – it features nine other contemporary guitarists – a cd and transcription. This was another situation I basically walked into. It will be interesting to see what I played transcribed – I probably can’t sight read it! It feels good to start to get included with my colleagues – hopefully the beginning of more fun stuff!!

GN: What other projects can we expect from you in the upcoming year?

SB: I just returned from France with David Krakauer to record his upcoming disc for Lable Bleu, and we will be touring though out the year – CD release at Joe’s Pub in April, and at Citte de la Musique in Paris in May. I’m working on booking a tour in Europe for myself, and the West Coast with “The Three”, and I’m putting together a book on reharmonizing II-V’s for Mel Bay – mostly, I’d love to start working on producing a live DVD of the band for the next outing – I already have the music written – I have a prayer out that someone with vision will be interested in taking the production out of my hands on this one, for a change – either way, it’s a project I know will be killer and successful!

GN: And finally, any last words of advice for the fledgling jazz guitar player?

SB: Keep the faith and belief in what you are attempting to do. Being an artist in these times is more important than ever – we are the peace makers and innovators, and therefore not a part of the force of destruction and ignorance that is seeking to destroy human culture and life on this planet. Thanks for this wonderful opportunity to share my thoughts with you and your audience!

Peace

-sb

Even if you’re not a fan of Jethro Tull, this is one guitarist you want to get to know; a very nice man who took time out of his busy schedule to talk to us. Read and learn. Learn from the best!

Guitar Noise: You joined Jethro Tull on their second album.

Martin Barre: Yes. I replaced a guitarist called MacAbrahams. That was in December 1968.

GN: So it’s been quite a long ride. Do you still enjoy it?

MB: Well I enjoy playing and that carries me through everything. It’s a good job for a guitar player; there’s a lot of interest there, there’s a lot to get your teeth into. The music is always challenging. It’s a good gig for a guitar player.

GN: With a lot of guitarists, you notice that as they grow older, their playing seems to suffer. For some guitarists, it’s just the opposite; it just keeps on getting better. After seeing you on stage last year, I can say that you fall into the latter category. Your playing blew me away.

MB: There’s a passion there and I think it would be pretty hard to disguise if it wasn’t there; I’d have to be honest with myself. If I wasn’t playing better every year, I would stop doing it. I would hate to be up there and not offer something to the audience that wasn’t better than what I was doing the year before.

For some, they’re just paraphrasing what they did in the past. I wouldn’t want to do that. I have to have the confidence to be up there doing my best and nothing else will do, really.

GN: You know, I would pick up my guitar and play Aqualung and think I had it pretty well. Until I saw you play it… There are lots of barre chords in there.

MB: It’s not hard to play…

GN: After seeing you play it, I’m not of that opinion anymore…

MB: (laughs) As guitar playing goes, it’s not a hard gig. It’s not normal music because it’s being written from a whole different approach; there’s a very un-guitar approach to it, the chords are different, the voicing is different, the scales are unusual. It’s not predictable. It’s good because it’s not what you’d call guitar-band music.

I make sure that I’m in top form (laughs). I want to be up there playing all the time!

GN: Yes, well the whole music scene has changed. Musician’s aren’t performing the way they used to be when you started.

MB: It’s very competitive now. Everyday of your life you’re competing with a whole bunch of people. Thirty years ago, there weren’t that many people to compete with. Now there are a lot of talented guitar players out there and every day you’re competing for your job and you’re competing for your reputation and your place in the market with all these other players.

It gets harder and harder so I practice every day; there’s no way I could afford not to do it. All the young players have lots of energy, so I work on my energy and I work on my fitness, mentally and physically. I believe you have to have an edge.

But then again, I love playing, I love the instrument. I don’t have to work incredibly hard because I have all those years experience and that counts for a lot. But then again I still make sure that I’m in the best position.

GN: You’re not one of those guys who are thinking about retiring next year…

MB: Noooo! Not at all. I will never stop playing, whether it’s my own music or Jethro Tull or something else. I’m very broad-minded. I can adapt to anything, so ultimately I’ll keep playing, whether it’s in clubs, auditoriums, big stages, it doesn’t matter to me. As long as I’m able to write music and to record music, I will fight very hard to do that.

GN: I’m glad to hear that! I was wondering, in regards to such tracks as Aqualung and Thick As A Brick – without considering what the fans want to hear, do you still like playing those songs or would you like to go out and just play new material or songs that you’ve basically never played live?

MB: Sure, I would. Some of the songs are unusual and are not played very often because of the reaction. And the whole thing about playing live is the reaction of the audience. You have to have that; the musicians are feeding the audience. If you play all the music that you love but that the audience doesn’t love, (laughing) it’s going to wear pretty thin… So it’s always about the compromise and the balance. There’s always a better performance of Aqualung. I never get tired of playing it; there’s always a more precision-performance to be done. I sort of go different places in the solo to make it fresh every night so that there’s no feeling of repetition night after night after night. I try to approach it on a one-off basis. Every night I play it as if it were the first gig (laughs) or the last gig. You have to be that way.

GN: I think that’s the right attitude. Some people go on night after night and just play automatically.

MB: I couldn’t do that. I think there’s a lot to be said about simplicity. I get a lot of pleasure out of playing in a simple manner and that can be more demanding. You take Thick As A Brick, that’s very easy to play for me, but I get a lot of enjoyment out of playing such a simple piece of music, and playing it well. That can be very demanding.

GN: In Jethro Tull, you’re in a rather unique situation playing with another soloist who isn’t a guitarist. How do you manage playing so that he can get his flute solos in and you can get your guitar solos in?

MB: It works out rather well. The area the flute plays in is different from the area the guitar plays in. I have a lot of space and I quite like it. I saw Matchbox 20 a few weeks ago. That’s a band I quite like and I focused on the guitarist, and everything he did, he did really well. Everything from playing the solos to playing really good rhythm guitar. He did it really well and I could appreciate that.

I think that’s kind of like my role. Whether I’m playing a difficult chord or a very rhythmic part, then that’s as demanding as a solo would be. I never let up and I take pride in every note I play.

GN: That’s a very healthy attitude and probably why you’re still one of the great names out there.

MB: It’s the way I look at music. I like to listen beyond the top line, I like to listen beyond the solo. You can listen to one piece twenty or fifty times and there’s always something new because there’s so much in there.

GN: I apologize for this question, but I enjoy asking it… If you were offered the “big” contract, short 3-4 minute commercial songs, no more long, difficult songs. Would you sign?

MB: And not be allowed to do anything else? (laughing)

GN: Exactly.

MB: I can do anything and I do a lot of things where I don’t get paid any money at all. I go out and play with local bands, I play on other people’s albums and I don’t ask for any money. So I wouldn’t do it for the money, but I’d probably do it just to do something different. I would actually like to be in Faith Hill’s band.

GN: Okay…

MB: Not because there would be a lot of money (laughs), although that would be quite nice, but because it would be quite challenging for me to do. If I were offered the chance, I would do most things, as long as there’s a lot for me to do. If it were a demanding job, I would do it for that reason.

GN: It almost makes me want to ask you to play on my album…

MB: Did I say that I do things for free? (laughs)

Money isn’t the criteria. On the one hand I have to run a household, maintain a family. All these things cost money. But playing music is what I love doing and being paid is just a bonus.

GN: It’s the reality of living, that’s all.

MB: Yes, but it doesn’t interfere with what I love doing. The big pay is just a bonus. Sometimes we go out on the road and we’ll play India or South America or Israel or Turkey or Russia, we make very little money; barely enough to cover expenses. But we love doing it. We just go out and say, “Let’s have fun! Let’s play for some people who’ve never seen us before.” And generally they just really appreciate you being there.

And then suddenly you get subsidized for the big North American tours and the big European tours… It all sort of flattens out. You don’t have to make money. If we get offered a gig that sound fun or exciting, we’ll just go out and do it. As long as we don’t lose money.

It’s something we always did which is different from other bands. We like to do unusual things. We’ll go out and play territories where other people can’t be bothered to play because there’s no money. Like Moscow…

GN: It must be a different reaction over there?

MB: Yeah. It’s nice to meet different people and to see their attitude. And traveling is a bonus too. You get to see places you wouldn’t normally go to.

GN: There was an article published in Montreal last year from a popular journalist who said that rock music should only be played by twenty-year olds. That musicians in their fifties and sixties should retire because they have nothing important to say. He specifically mentioned a few bands that should retire. One of them was Jethro Tull. What would you answer to something like that?

MB: From somebody who’s a journalist, that’s an incredibly naive statement. It sounds like something you would have read thirty years ago. I don’t think anybody who would’ve read something like that would’ve taken any notice of it. I think he’s doing himself more harm than the people he’s talking about.

The Stones, Peter Gabriel, Dire Straits, The Eagles… there are so many bands from my era that’re still on the road, and people still enjoy them. I think nothing more need be said.

GN: Are you happy with your new album?

MB: Yes, but I don’t want to say too much. I want you to listen to it and say… whatever…

(*Note: Please read the review of Martin Barre’s Stage Left here.)

I read the comments on my website (www.martinbarre.com). Obviously they’re all buyers, but the comments are all quite positive.

It’s quite centered on the guitar, but I left space for everything, that way it’s not too guitar…

If you are not familiar with Adrian Legg, allow me to describe to you what kind of player he is. First of all, he is unlike any guitarist you have ever heard. He uses various tunings and quite often changes tunings mid-song. He may be described as a finger style player, meaning he chooses to use his fingers rather than a pick. He generally plays solo. When I saw him back when I was teaching in LA he played an Ovation acoustic but now he plays a guitar that has the harmonic characteristics of an acoustic guitar but is really an electric guitar. He is one of the few guitarists that you could describe as a technical wizard but still has the uncanny ability to write tender and touching music, definitely a lost art. Adrian has been Voted “Guitarist of the Decade” by Guitarist magazine and also was the winner for Best Acoustic Fingerstyle Guitarist for 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996 in the Guitar Player’s Reader’s Poll.

Let me share what I learned from Adrian with you as we traveled around Japan together. These are some of the answers I got to the many questions I asked along the way from Tokyo to Fukuoka. Oh yeah, I should warn you, this interview is in retrospect so you will have to replace my New York vernacular with his British one for his answers to get the full gentlemanly effect:

Chris: You use various techniques like the Banjo roll and artificial harmonics to get some interesting effects. What’s your view on technique?

Adrian: Technique is just like a bicycle. It simply gets you to your destination.

Chris: How often do you practice?

Adrian: I tend to practice a great deal before recording a new CD and before a tour and take it easy after the fact. I took a year off to fish once.

Chris: Who would you suggest the aspiring guitarist listen too?

Adrian: Listen to the other stringed instruments. When I started out, I was mostly listening to the Banjo and Pedal Steel players. I also absolutely love the Bach double violin concerto.

Chris: Your guitar is one of the most unique guitars I’ve ever seen. It looks like an electric but sounds like an acoustic. It has a small soundhole, not on the front, but on the treble-side cutaway. Can you tell me a little about the guitar?

Adrian: There are several reasons I got away from the typical acoustic guitar for touring: One reason is The Boeing 777. It has an overhead bin of only 37.5 inches making it impossible to hold a guitar. I needed a guitar that would fit in the overhead bin. The other reason is that amplification can create serious problems with straight acoustic guitars. I had the sound chamber considerably reduced to work at the kinds of levels needed for live performances. The soundhole is in the treble-side cutaway, and is flared to maximize the out of phase coupling of the sound chamber. This lifts treble response and opens out the high end harmonics very attractively. The body is made of swamp ash and the neck is Black Walnut, which worked so well for the Ovation Adamas. The fingerboard is ebony. The bridge is a standard Ovation bridge in black walnut, and the pick-up, also an Ovation.

Chris: Who made the guitar for you?

Adrian: Bill Puplett in England.

Chris: Who makes the Banjo tuners you use?

Adrian: They are made by Bill Keith at the Beacon Banjo Company in Woodstock, NY, USA. The Banjo tuners allow you to change tunings quickly between or during songs. Guitarists are always amazed by the mid-song tuning changes but Banjo players have been doing it for years.

Contact Info:
Bill Keith
Beacon Banjo Company
PO Box 597
Woodstock
NY 12498

Chris: You use open C, G, and D tunings quite often, are there any other tunings that you are particularly fond of?

Adrian: I also like the DADGAD tuning. Although not a typical Celtic tuning, it lends itself to Celtic music quite well. Not having either a minor or major 3rd in the tuning, it has an ambiguous tonality that I like.

Chris: Is there any history behind the DADGAD tuning?

Adrian: I did a workshop at a Canadian folk festival a few years ago with John Renbourn. He told the story then that I’ve heard before; the story is that Davey Graham went to Morocco, and hung out with some of the local oud players. He found that the only way he could play along with them was to tune his guitar to DADGAD. He brought the tuning back to England, and it’s been around ever since.

Chris: What exactly is an oud?

Adrian: The oud is an interesting instrument. It’s a round back fretless cousin of the lute, and its fretlessness allows those gorgeous Arabic scales.

Chris: Other than getting fed some of the strangest food I could think of, how did you enjoy your brief stay in Japan?

Adrian: I was utterly charmed by the Japanese people and was very happy there. I found it creatively stimulating. I’ll be looking forward to next year.

Examples and Exercises to try

These are a few examples of Adrian’s techniques taken from some of the songs from his newest CD, Guitar Bones.

The Banjo Roll - Typically used in Bluegrass music, the Banjo Roll is a right hand fingerstyle technique usually used by Banjo Players. As well as using it to get a typical bluegrass effect, Adrian also uses this technique in ballads. Check out the first four bars of “St. Mary’s.” Your thumb should play the bass notes on the 6th, 5th and 4th strings plus the 3rd string notes. Your index and middle finger will play the 2nd and 3rd string notes. Keep in mind, although a ballad, you have to arpeggiate the notes at a pretty good tempo to get the effect. To get this technique down, keep repeating the following four bars slowly and gradually get it up to the proper tempo. Let the notes ring out as long as possible:

Open Strings – The next example from the opening cut, “Uncle Adrian” on the “Guitar Bones” CD shows how Adrian incorporates open strings into various phrases. As in the previous example, let the notes ring out as long as possible to get the desired effect:

Pedal Steel Effects – Adrian mimics a pedal steel in “Old Friends.” The notation may be a little difficult to understand without a good idea of what the song sounds like. I would suggest a good listen first:

If you are not familiar with Adrian Legg’s music yet, you don’t know what you are missing. I don’t know too many solo players that can hold an audience’s attention for a whole concert and Adrian is one of the few, a true guitar pioneer and a gentleman.

Check out these related links:
Adrian Legg: http://www.adrianlegg.com

Oud: http://www.kairarecords.com/oudpage/Oud.htm

Until next time…

GN: You’ve been in the music business for forty years…

JI: I know. Frightening, isn’t it?

GN: While a lot of people looking to get into the business tend to look at “success” as being like some chart topping diva, you prove on a daily basis that there is indeed a way for the thoughtful songwriter/performer to be a success as well. Does this surprise you?

JI: Frankly, it surprises me that I can still earn a living doing something I love. It astounds me that old fans have hung in this long.

But I think a lot of it has to do with how a person defines “success.” When I was a kid, that meant having a hit record. Now it means earning a living without having to compromise.

GN: Do you feel that many people don’t realize that there are a lot of ways to be involved in the music industry?

JI: I don’t know that that many people care about becoming involved in the music industry in the first place!

GN: What do you feel are the best ways for young hopefuls to find out more about getting involved in aspects such as sound engineering, producing and tour work?

JI: That’s three separate questions. For engineering, there seem to be a lot of schools cropping up – but my experience, and that of most of the lead engineers I work with, is that all most of the schools teach you is software usage. That can’t take the place of knowing where to put a bass mic. If I were an engineer starting out, I’d apprentice at a studio; sweep floors, work the desk, do whatever.

For a producer, there are a lot of different roads; a lot of great producers come out of engineering. Jeff Balding and Marc Moreau, who co-produced my next studio album with me, are both first and foremost engineers – but in addition to great ears and great chops, each has the ability to focus on the whole picture. You can also get into it by having a small home studio and offering to “produce” and record anyone and everyone you can shove in there. Or you can go the songwriter route, again with a home studio, and make demos so good that people start asking you to produce.

For tour work, there’s nothing like coming up through the ranks. Depending on your goal (road manager? sound engineer? performer?), you’d start by hauling equipment, or doing monitors, or whatever you could get.

GN: As a songwriter, you’ve covered a wide range of styles (I think most people are stunned to find you had a number one disco hit!). When you’re writing, how do you determine what sort of song you’re going to write?

JI: I don’t even think about it, frankly, unless I’m on assignment. Obviously, if I’m writing a song for a motion picture about surrealist painters, I’m probably not going to write a country song. But I usually let the song dictate what it becomes. I’m a big believer in the marriage of talent and craft; Stella Adler always said “Trust your talent”, and I do, infinitely.

But I also trust my craft to see me through the rough spots.

GN: Your writing has always been very personal and thought provoking. Do you feel that there is a place in the music industry for writers such as yourself?

JI: There must be, because I make a better living now than I did ten years ago…

GN: What advice would you give to fledgling songwriters as to how to make their own voice and then bring that voice to an audience?

JI: I think that’s a two-fold problem:

1. If you’re going to survive in the arts, you have to have your own voice, be it as a painter, singer, actor.

2. The entertainment industry doesn’t like anything too different from what’s currently successful.

So the issue becomes: do you want a long-term career, or a short burst? For long term, you’ll need your own style. For short term, you won’t.

HOWEVER… I’m not sure you can create your own “voice”. Every singer I know with a distinctive sound, one where you immediately go “Oh, that’s Ella!” or “Oh, that’s Dylan”, didn’t do a damn thing to create it. You’re either born with it, or not.

I do notice that most of us with distinctive “voices” started out imitating people we admired, but we couldn’t do it. Same with guitar playing – I once complained to Chet Atkins that I couldn’t play like everyone else, because my hands weren’t big enough. He chuckled and said “Honey, that’s why you’re a unique guitarist. No one else on earth plays like you – and that’s because you never were able to play like them!”

GN: For most of the eighties, you actually stopped recording and instead worked on becoming a better writer. Can you tell us what led to that decision and how you got yourself back to a place where you were happy with what you wrote?

JI: The decision was easy, though in retrospect it was probably stupid as well. I don’t know if I did the right thing; if I had stayed on tour, doing 200 dates a year, my writing would have continued going down the gurgler. And I’ve always protected my writing, first above all. But I probably could have taken less extended time off, and kept up my monetary value to promoters and record companies. Then again, I’m not sure I would have known how to juggle both lives back then.

I decided to stop because I wasn’t writing well. I spent the next five or six years studying other arts – things that wouldn’t require me to be front and center. Took ballet, which was good because I’m awful at it; it was healthy for me to do something I loved but would never be good at, just because I loved it. People tend to forget that art is not just for professionals; the purpose of art is to delight, to allow us to enjoy ourselves. That’s why I encourage people to play, just for the fun and satisfaction of it.

I took acting with Stella Adler, and script interpretation, which opened up new worlds to me as a songwriter. Did a lot of imagination exercises, a lot of body work, which gave me more confidence when I played. Ditto studying directing with Chao Shao Lin (Peking Opera Company) and Jose Quintero – that allowed me to see the stage from without, for the first time. Not as a performer, but as a director. It vastly improved my own stage show, even solo.

I “got myself back” by stepping outside my box; turned a right angle to everything I’d ever done, and went to Nashville to co-write. I probably learned more about songwriting in 6 months of co-writing here than I had in the previous 20+ years. And I began writing songs I loved, like “Some Peoples’ Lives”.

GN: While a lot of people are familiar with songs like “Society’s Child” and “At Seventeen,” few people are aware of the incredibly humorous side of your writing, such as songs like “Boots Like Emmy Lou’s” and “Cosmopolitan Girl.” Does it delight you to perform songs like these? How do you react to your audience finding a whole new unexpected side of you that you always knew was there?

JI: I obviously enjoy performing humorous songs, in part because audiences don’t expect them. Flipping into something like “These Boots Were Made for Walking” as an encore puts a nice capper on the evening. And funny songs are very, very hard to write; you can’t settle for just one funny bit, it has to continue and build on itself, over and over again, until you reach the final funny bit.

GN: In the liner notes of your latest album, Janis Ian Live: Working Without A Net, you make some very poignant comments concerning “performing.” How did you develop this perspective?

JI: I guess it just came with the years. I really don’t know. I try to stay balanced; that’s about it!

GN: Speaking of performing, I also suspect that very few people are aware of what an incredibly talented guitarist you are!

JI: I think people (guitarists and guitar magazines included) tend to discount women, first, and acoustic players, second. I solo so outside the box, for an acoustic guitarist, that there’s really nowhere for me to fit.

GN: Was this always the case or have you been constantly working at getting better at the guitar?

JI: I took a quantum leap about 10 years ago, for two reasons: I injured my left hand and can no longer play piano, which forced me to spend more time with the guitar, and I began performing without a band, which forced me to take more solos.

GN: Do you feel it’s important for a songwriter to be fairly adept at her (or his) instrument of choice?

JI: I think it’s important to be able to play what you write, what you hear in your head. Beyond that, I think for young songwriters it’s actually dangerous to become too adept; you begin writing for the guitar part, not for the song. The song has to lead.

GN: From your very insightful articles on Internet downloads (which can be found at JanisIan.com) it seems that, although your position is justified, it is also at odds with the rest of the industry. Do you think more artists feel the way you do but might be afraid to offend the powers that be?

JI: I KNOW they do, because they tell me so. I’m also very encouraged by the emergence of iTunes and E-music, which I think is a huge step in the right direction.

GN: Do you think there is a way to get artists to pool their resources and force the labels to change their policies?

JI: Unfortunately, I don’t think so. There are always a dozen artists standing behind you, waiting for your slot, and we’re all aware of that. It would take someone of great, great dedication to organize a songwriter’s union, for instance, or a recording artist’s union that would solely deal with the problems of recording artists. I haven’t seen anyone like that emerge.

GN: What projects are you currently working on?

JI: Well, this year we created the live double CD, we just finished mastering and finalizing the artwork for the new studio album, and I co-edited a book of stories by famous science fiction writers based on my lyrics… so it was an intense year!

Right now we’re working on the annual holiday website sale, where we knock all the CD’s we can down to $5.00, and the proceeds go to charity.

In early January, we’ll be posting a massive effort we’re calling “The Making Of An Album”, which will walk fans through the creation of the new studio album. We’ll be putting online everything from draft versions of the songs – both written and in MP3 format – to rough mixes, studio chatter, and worktapes.

Then in February we leave on the road, and that’s pretty much where we’ll be for the rest of the year. We’re covering the US, Europe, and hopefully Japan next year.

GN: Finally (at least for now), how do you feel about bringing your new (or relatively new) songs to people? Everyone comes, I’m sure to hear “Jesse” and “Stars” and such, but you’ve got such great new songs on your albums like “Hunger” and “god & the fbi.” Are you pleased when people request the new songs as they do the older ones?

JI: I’m pleased by both. Honestly, I really am amazed that anyone at all would come to my shows. That they’d know some of the songs is just icing on the cake! And I’m old enough now to understand that over the past decades, I’ve created a nice body of work – so it doesn’t much matter to me any more whether the songs are new ones or old ones. They’re all my songs, after all.

I caught up with Roine, a man very much concerned with the beauty of music and asked him a few questions which he kindly answered.

Guitar Noise: Foremost on people’s minds, I think, when they hear of the Flower Kings is where did the name come from?

Roine Stolt: It was back in 1993 and I had a strong urge to record a prog rock album again, just like I did in the late 70’s, and perhaps to start a prog band. I was writing down a list of names I liked and “The Flower Kings” was simply the best of them. I like it because it sounds so positive and have a slight flavor of the Hippie era around 67′.

GN: The Flower Kings started from your solo album The Flower King. Could you expand on this?

RS: We were asked to play a festival in Sweden on August 20th 1994, just two months after the album was released. I accepted and asked a few friends to join me, including drummer Jaime Salazar from the album.

My brother Michael joined on bass, long time friend Tomas Bodin on keyboard and two other musicians playing guitars on a few tracks. The gig wasn’t that bad . . . or it seemed like we could actually pull off some sort of show with the material so we continued slowly.

Then after the next record we started getting more gig offers. So that the snowball effect was unavoidable we realized after Retropolis that we sort of struck gold and Flower Kings became one of the pioneers and main attractions of the new wave of prog. It slowly became a “business”.

GN: Sweden seems to be producing many great artists lately, is there something in the water? What is, in your opinion, the reason why so many great new artists are coming from Sweden?

RS: It’s probably just because we have good music education and the standard of living permit parents to help buy synths or guitars for their children or just send them to piano or flute lessons. Also we have access to lots of music on CD and on the radio and TV plus there have been fairly much of live music in clubs.

GN: Tell us of your own background. What is your musical background? (Training, formal lessons, etc).

RS: I have NO formal training. I just started listening to records and copy phrases from guys like Hendrix, Peter Green, Carlos Santana, George Wadenius, Robin Trower and others. Then I have learned from listening to ALL kinds of music. I have a good feeling of analyzing music and details so hat has helped me tremendously.

GN: How old were you when you started playing?

RS: I started picking up the guitar at 13. I learned a few chords from a friend and then moved on rapidly churning Deep Purple riffs, then over to Zappa and Robert Fripp.

GN: How old were you when you wrote your first song and why did you start writing your own songs?

RS: Must have been around 14 or 15, I simply hated the idea of writing because everybody else did and besides I loved creating all those weird LP sleeves with imaginary group names.

GN: When did you decide you wanted to be a professional musician?

RS: I never had a realistic plan on being a musician; I could never imagine that when playing in School bands. I sort of stumbled into it, when I was 17 and met a drummer who was in “Ura Kaipa,” a Keyboard based trio that was to be Kaipa when I joined and we rapidly became a full working unit that toured more than 120 gigs a year, plus national radio and TV live shows, recording on the DECCA label.

GN: Do you view recording an album as work or as pleasure?

RS: Both !!

A pleasant work perhaps, but it can get a bit boring when there is all those tiny details that just GOT to be trimmed to perfection. And the rat race trying to outdo ourselves or to outdo our contemporary progfellows.

I think I enjoy most the initial basic track recordings plus the mixing. The in-between things can get boring.

GN: Why is it, do you think, that major labels don’t pick up on a band like the Flower Kings when it’s so obvious you’ve built a huge fan base?

RS: They cannot see the potential. They would probably not recognize a new U2, Sting or Bowie if they walked by. They cannot see basic things like songwriting potential or “quality.” the way I see it.

Flower Kings could never get big as in the 70’s but I’m sure we could easily reach ten times more audience if we had a proper backing from a major label. In a different field, just look at Eva Cassidy and the fact she never got signed by a major label, it’s ridiculous and a f ng crime.

GN: The Flower Kings are famous for the long songs (and thank you very much for doing these!). In all honesty, if a major label wanted to sign you, would you be willing to stop making these long songs in order to “fit” into their own criteria?

RS: NO, we’d probably just cut them into pieces carefully, label it as shorter songs by doing minor cross-fades or such. So then they will have fifteen songs instead of four on a CD and everybody will be happy.

I’d be happy doing shorter songs and hitting a more catchy tone, however we’ll never trade the variations, quality and the fantasy, that’s our trademarks. I DO want to reach out, but with dignity.

GN: When one goes to the Flower Kings website it seems that the guys are always touring or involved in some project or another. When do you find time to record albums?

RS: We just start in a good period and then go on until everyone has done their overdubs etc. It’s not a big problem. We all have computer-based studios, working on EMAGIC software and can work independently.

GN: Do you tend to write and arrange the albums ahead of time or is a lot of it done directly in the studio upon recording?

RS: Both. I write new music to fit the idea of what a new album should be, but also I always have a bank of unrecorded songs or ideas, I just scan to see what would fit the selection and the path we’re going.

If it doesn’t fit Flower Kings if may go on a Transatlantic CD or a Kaipa CD or the other way ’round.

GN: It seems that the sound of the band has been evolving quite a bit. Space Revolver sounded to me like a cross between Genesis and XTC while Unfold the Future, although still has that Genesis like quality, sounds like the album Yes are dreaming of doing. One wonders upon listening to it if Jon Anderson might actually be angry at you for doing what Yes seem unable to do anymore. What is your ultimate goal in the Flower Kings sound?

RS: Thanks, never heard anyone compare us to XTC; that’s cool. About Unfold . . . Well people think like you, that this is what YES should be doing; daring music with much complexity AND beauty. In a way I agree but I fear they are on another path and I still think they do great music and Magnification had a great production too, so had the Symphonic Live DVD.

And I cannot possibly see why Jon Anderson should be “angry” at Flower Kings for making the music we do, maybe just a bit tired of all the fans that want to give him or other Yes member Flower Kings CD’s.

I think Yes are perfectly happy with what they do, on the other hand I’ve many times joked about that I’d love to produce a YES record for them in a “true 70’s style” and I mean true progressive, not The Ladder type of production, although I liked it.

For the Flower Kings the goal is to make the ultimate entertainment and excitement, a record filled with the ultimate in complex polyrhythm, riffing and the absolute beauty in melody and symphonic arrangement.

We’re working on it.

GN: About Transatlantic. Now that Neil Morse is busy on non-music quests, does that mean that Transatlantic is finished?

RS: Transatlantic is on ice right now, we still have a DVD and Live CD release later this year. “Live In Europe.” I’d be happy to do another CD with Transatlantic but I think it’s up to Neal as we hardly can do it with a replacement, he’s such a big part of the overall sound and his voice cannot be replaced.

GN: I have to ask about the guitars (we are Guitar Noise). The guitars Daniel (Gildenlöw of Pain of Salvation who was accompanying the band) and you had during the Montreal show had a distinctive shape. What brand are they?

RS: They are Parker Fly guitars; they’re made in USA in the Boston Area. They are extremely light- weight guitars made of selected wood with a carbon layer to strengthen the neck and back of guitar.

They have a carbon fret board and stainless steel frets. In addition to the designed DiMarzio pickups there is a Fishman bridge piezo system for a total non feedback acoustic system and an active mixer for magnetic and piezo.

They have designed a tremolo bar that’s quite good. All in all an expensive but very good guitar. The other guitars I use in recordings are basically old Gibson guitars and Rickenbacker for 12 strings. My amps are Vox,Tech 21 Marshall, with Marshall 4×12″ cabinets.

GN: What are your thoughts about these guitars?

RS: They are friiikin’ awesome!!! And for free.

Indigenous drew critical acclaim in 1997 with their independently released debut CD titled Things We Do. Since then, they’ve grown their following through steady touring and recording, releasing five CDs in total. Their most recent CD, simply entitled Indigenous, was released in 2003 and is their strongest recording to date.

Mato’s scorching lead guitar work and soulful deep-pitched vocals are showcased on every tune and can evoke a wide variety of emotions and intensity. His soloing is particularly impressive, demonstrating his complete command of the wah-wah pedal’s power to infuse melodic phrases with a stunning vocal-like quality. He extracts a wide pallet of tones from his Fender Stratocasters. His chords range from chime-y clean, through medium grit, to full-on crunch during rhythm work and his single lines can howl with power tube saturation, quack with a pronounced mid range, or purr with silky smoothness.

Mato graciously agreed to chat with Guitar Noise contributor Bill Cozzo to talk about recording the band’s latest CD, his guitars and amps, playing live, and aspects of the band’s career from early beginnings to playing with legends.

Bill Cozzo: Congratulations on the latest CD. I know that you recorded it mostly ‘live’ as opposed to building up the songs one instrument at a time. Did you set aside time to write and rehearse for it?

Mato Nanji: Thanks. Yeah, we had a couple of songs written already so we went in and kinda broke the ice a little bit and recorded those right away. After that, we had a bunch of other ideas, so we sat down and worked out the rest of the songs with our producers the Davey Brothers. They ended up co-writing a few of the songs with us too.

bc: Do you write when you’re on the road?

MN: Yeah, yeah. A lot of times when we’re doing sound check I get different ideas for songs, or even when I’m playing live, once in a while I get an idea from something I’m jamming.

bc: How do you pick covers that you decide to do, like “Shame, Shame, Shame”?

MN: That was actually our producers, the Davey brothers’ idea. They wanted us to do a cover of something like an old blues track. It was something that we haven’t done in the past, so we decided on that track because it was one that everyone liked. I’m a pretty big Jimmy Reed fan.

bc: Do you ever see yourself getting into instrumentals in different styles like Stevie Ray Vaughn or Eric Johnson?

MN: We’ve done a little bit of that, we did a couple instrumentals on our first two recordings but on this record we strictly went for just songs. I’m not quite sure how that happened. (chuckles)

bc: What are some of your thoughts about recording layer-by-layer versus keeping it mostly live ?

MN: It’s cool both ways. When you do it layer by layer you can get a great drum track and layer over it until your happy with it. When you go in and setup like we do live and just basically jam it out, it’s a lot of fun.

bc: Talk about working with your co-producers, the Davey brothers. What did they bring to the process?

MN: I think a lot of getting that live feel was them coming in and helping us capture that vibe. I really like the way Jesse Davey captured the guitar tone that I got on the record. In the past, it was kinda hard for me to capture the guitar tone that I wanted and he really helped me out with that. Basically, what I did was just set up the way I do live. Well, maybe with a few more amps than usual (laughs). We went through every amp and got a different tone and mixed them. A lot of times, (the final sound) was mixed all together.

bc: The first single from the new CD, “C’mon Suzie”, has mixes a cool, modern vibe with the more traditional blues rock sound of the other tunes on the CD. How did that come about?

MN: Actually, that song was written by an English Band that I met the Davey brothers through, called the Hoax. They’re a really great blues rock band. They had written the song but never got a chance to release it. I really liked it, so I thought “Shoot we can cover that. It’s one of my favorite songs that they did, so I thought we could give it a shot”.

bc: A lot of Guitar Noise readers are relatively new to guitar. Talk a little about how you learned from your father. Did he show you chord fingerings and scale patterns and finger exercises and stuff?

MN: yeah my dad basically taught me how. Actually, when I first started out trying to play guitar the hardest thing I had a problem with was trying to keep it in tune, you know? (laughs). That was the toughest thing for me. After a while he kinda got me through that and showed me the simplest way to tune it. Then he started teaching me more chords. He was really into a lot of different kinds of music – some jazzier stuff, and blues. He could go to a song that I was trying to learn and listen to it once and be able to play it. Just like that, pick it up right away. With me, even now, it takes me a while to kinda pick up on things (laughs)

bc: What are your thoughts on learning to read, write, theory, scales modes arpeggios, etc …

MN: I haven’t really learned that way. I never really learned to read music or write it. I just learned it all by ear. That’s kinda the way my dad taught me. I think it’s a little more of a different vibe if you learn it that way. You get a lot more of the feel, I guess of what’s goin’ on. At least, that’s what I’ve noticed. He also said “If you learn it that way, you’ll never forget it. (chuckles) It’s in your blood”.

bc: Tell me about some of your early gigs. Were you playing for large groups of people? Where you playing mostly covers or originals??

MN: I think the very first gig we did was mostly in front of families and friends.. we did mostly covers back then. We did some Santana, some Hendrix. Actually we even did a few Ventures songs. We did all kinds of stuff. We did some Lonnie Mack. It was a pretty wide range. Back then, when we first started doing the shows, my dad told us right from the beginning to start writing our own stuff. One of the first songs I ever wrote was “Things We Do” back when I was 17 or 18.

bc: Tell me about what it’s like playing with family. What does it bring to the recordings and the lives shows as opposed to guys who just form up a band with people they meet, or friends?

MN: Yeah, I’d say that it’s a lot different. Even from the beginning when we were just first starting out playing together it felt really comfortable right away. A lot of times when you play with other people you have to build that comfort together. From the beginning, there was something there, you never could see or explain what it is, but you can feel it. Even now when we go out to play we never have a set list we just get up there and kinda go with the flow.

bc: What are some of you favorite memories of playing with superstars like BB King, Carlos Santana, Dave Matthews. Besides the thrill of it that any fan would feel, what is the experience like on a musical level?

MN: It’s just totally awesome. Just being able to see B.B. King every night, getting the chance to get on the bus and talk to him a little bit was really great. His thing that he always said was “Just stay high on the music. That’s what it’s all about”. And then playing with Santana was really awesome. Realizing that this is one of the guys I grew up listening to, and learning from, and then seeing him right there, trading licks with him back and forth was a lot of fun.

bc: Let’s talk “tech” a little bit. Are your guitars and amps modified or stock?

MN: My Strats are modified a little bit. I’ve been swapping out different kinds of pickups, trying them out, trying different tones. Right now I have Texas Specials, which I think are pretty cool. Who knows, I might try something else (chuckles).

The amps are all stock. I’ve got an old Fender 75 that’s one of my main amps. It’s an amp head and I play it through a Matchless cabinet with four 12″ speakers. It sounds pretty awesome. It’s one of my favorites. I think the guy who made that amp only made it for one year, and then he went on to make Rivera amps. I still have the old Super Reverbs and the new Vibroverb that they modified after Stevie Ray Vaughn’s Vibroverb. I really like that, with the 15″ speaker. I also use a Mesa Boogie once in a while for the clean sounds. I’ve been using a new Marshall JCM 2000 and I really like it. Sometimes I use it for an in between overdrive sound, and it also sounds real good on the clean channel too. I like to try out different amps to see what kinds of different tones I can get out of them.

bc: Talk a little about singing and playing at the same time.

MN: (starts laughing)

bc: Does it come natural for you or does it take practice?

MN: (still chuckling) It takes a lot of work for me. I’m still working at it. For some of these newer tunes, it was tough in the beginning to get ‘em down. Of course, in the studio, you just lay ‘em down live then you go back and do the vocal track. But even now, it’s a real job … (laughs) to keep that rhythm going and to sing.

bc: Are you mindful of that when you’re writing, to not put a lick in the middle of a verse that you’ll have to sing over?

MN: yeah, I try not to get ‘em too intertwined so I won’t have to (laughing)

bc: Do you use the Internet much for things related to music?

MN: A little bit. I’ve been getting into it a little more lately. My sister (Indigenous’s drummer, Wanbdi) has really got it down way better than I do so a lot of times I’ll just go to her and she’ll look things up for me. I’ve bought some pedals over the Internet and on E-Bay.

cc: Do you have any thoughts on music sharing across the Internet?

MN: Yeah, it’s a bit tough because I see both sides of it. You have musicians like us, just like everyone else, who want to go out there and make a living. But in a way I think it’s also kinda cool to get some new fans that might be interested in what we do. So while it’s good to get our music out there, we’d also like to make a little something out of it. Hopefully they’ll come up with something that works for everybody.

bc: Talk a little about the differences for you in playing smaller clubs, larger concerts, and outdoor festivals?

MN: Well, I like the outdoor stuff when you get a good festival going on and a lot of people there. You get a pretty cool vibe. But on the other hand, I also really like the more intimate clubs with 200 to 400 people packed in there all jamming together. I like both ways actually (chuckles). Each kind of show has its own kind of energy that I like to take in and then turn around and give right back through my playing.

bc: About 20 yrs ago, David Bowie tapped Stevie Ray Vaughn, who was then relatively unknown, for a recording and tour sideman gig that set SRV on the path to superstardom. If some multi platinum star offered you a similar gig today, would you do it?

MN: I guess it would be fun to play with them on the record. But I really dig playing with my family. It’s a lot of fun and it feels like we’re really starting to get going, especially with the new record. It’s getting released in Europe, which is the first time for us. So for right now, this is what I want to do for as long as I can. But maybe if I get a little older and somebody decides they want me to hang around (chuckles) and play with them a bit it’d be fun.

bc: If not music, what career path would you have taken?

MN: (pauses and then chuckles) I don’t really know. Maybe something weird, like a lawyer (laughs). I probably would’ve gone to school.

bc: Well that wraps it up. Thank you very much for taking the time to talk today. Best wishes for continued success with the latest CD and tour.

MN: Thanks a lot

Mato is a very easygoing guy to talk to. He is generous with his time and he had no hint of a ‘rock star’ attitude. With his skills, dedication, and positive attitude, one can only hope that the future holds wonderful things for, and from, this rising star of the guitar world. Guitar Noise readers are heartily encouraged to catch Indigenous live this summer on their tour dates throughout the Midwestern USA, to check out their website, and have a listen to their CDs.

GN: Can you describe how the songwriting process works for you?

J: For me, in most cases, I hear melodies first, and the challenge is often to capture them, either by singing them or playing them on piano, and then to be open to what they are communicating lyrically. I’m someone who hears a lot of music streaming through and it’s a matter of receiving it. (I do a lot of humming — it probably drives people crazy.) I’ve heard other songwriters talk about being the recipient of songs that seem to be swirling through the ether. It seems like the songwriter’s task is to take dictation — and stay out of the way — or maybe let yourself be run over by it, smack dab in the way! Some of my songs were poems that I set to music, like Breathing Underwater and 2 Days in July. Other times, Brad (Brad Allen is producer, guitarist, songwriter) brings me chords and I listen to them over and over until I discover a melody that seems to be lurking with them, as with Good Thing. Or he’ll have full-blown songs, finished entities within their own right, that I add my own melody lines on top of, and write lyrics, such as with Intersection. Sometimes I’ll sing or play a melody for years before the words come, as with Meet You There, based on a poem by the Sufi poet, Rumi.

GN: Have you ever dealt with a time when you just couldn’t find the inspiration to write? What did you do about it?

J: I can only think of a few instances where I had to force myself to write — usually if someone requests a song for a certain occasion or something like that. Art on demand. I don’t enjoy that kind of writing. I normally don’t worry if I go through a period where I am not writing. In fact, it seems to come in waves. Sometimes, I’ll have a half-dozen songs in various states of being, written in my notebook. At other times, I’m just living, which is a necessary step in the writing process. John Prine once said “pain writes”. For me “love writes” and so if I’m lucky enough to be living and feeling deeply, especially with love, then the faucet is more easily turned on.

GN: You have an interesting mix of instruments in a lot of your numbers: violin, mandolin, all sorts of percussion, acoustic/electric guitar and keyboards. Does this affect your songwriting? I mean do you think of the final sound in the initial stages of writing a song?

J: I think Brad thinks about it more than I do, since, for one, he is a multi-instrumentalist, but also because he is the primary producer. When we are working on a song in the studio, we both hear particular instruments or sounds that seem to want to be a part of the song. But because I primarily hear melodies, or feel my way around the piano, and think in terms of the meaning of the lyrics when writing, I don’t think that much about instrumentation, at least not initially.

GN: I see you write as a team on a number of your songs. How does that work? Or is this a Lennon-McCartney thing, (or is it McCartney-Lennon now)?

J: The more we write together, the more we seem to be writing together! What used to be clear cut — I’ll write the lyrics and melody, you write the chords, or something like that — is now more of a merge. There may come a point where we do the Juskus/Allen thing (or is that Allen/Juskus?). On our first project, mostly because I was so shy, working with such an accomplished musician as Brad, and because the writing process is so personal for me, I had to be alone to write. Brad and I live about 35 miles from one another, so there’s that long drive home — on the Washington Beltway, which can be quite a journey! I’ve written several songs, notebook in my lap, on that Beltway! Or he’d give me a CD of something he was working on and I’d play it in my car or at home, working separately, and then go back into the studio and share what I had come up with. It’s been interesting watching the evolution of our writing process. I think we are a lot more comfortable with each other now, and we really like what each other does, what we each offer the music.

GN: I was trying to classify your musical style and the best I could come up with was Alternative folk/jazz -Mediterranean- Middle Eastern- Flamenco – American Indian influenced music. There must be a better description than that. Do you have one? Where the heck will they put the CD at Tower Records?

J: We have CDs in Tower Records! In the Pop section! Right there with Britney Spears and Michael Jackson. Classifying music is getting more and more difficult, which is probably not a bad thing. There is a lot of fusion going on, and with it, the potential for more interesting music. Record company executives don’t always see it like that though! When describing our music, I often call it “Progressive Folk”, mostly because we end up playing a lot of “folk” venues, but we often hear the comment that our audiences are surprised by our jazzy sound. They don’t expect to hear the variety of influences that show up in our music. This probably comes from the fact that Brad is a jazz-based player, as is Willard Morris, our violinist, both well-schooled, as well, in progressive rock. I was influenced early on by folk and classical music, because that’s what was played in my home growing up. And all three of us have had interest in eastern philosophy, oriental cultures, and such. So our sound is a merge of all these factors.

GN: So how do you write music for so many different flavors and styles?

J: I have to say that, most of the time, that is the farthest thing from my mind. I usually make no attempt to have a certain sound on a particular song. I have one song that has not yet been released — one of the first ones we recorded together — that is about addiction, but the piano part sounds sort of Chinese! There is no connection, at least not consciously, at all. It just rolled out that way! On the other hand, Within Your Fire, was inspired by the Hindu god Krishna, and I wanted an Indian sound. Brad was able to bring that about — teaching himself tablas and fooling around with sitar sounds. The result was exactly what I envisioned — and more.

GN: Joanne, forgive me for the list, but here is some of the recognition you’ve received:

Never Be the Same finalist in Women of MP3.com’s “Song of the Year” contest

Birthday Silver Prize Winner, Adult Contemporary Music, Mid-Atlantic Song Contest.

Washington Area Music Association, “Wammie” Award Nominee “Best Contemporary Folk Vocalist”, “Best Contemporary Folk Duo/Group” (Near Oblivion), and “Best Debut Album”.

..and to top it off, the Washington Post just picked Birthday as one of it’s top 10 MP3s of 2002.

So do you ever find yourself prone to fits of giggles, pinch me if I’m dreaming kind of stuff? How do you follow up on a list like that?

J: I’ve been very grateful for the attention we’ve gotten. I try to make sure it’s not really about that, though. We write because we love to write; we feel compelled to write. When people like it or are inspired by it, then that is an added bonus. It feels great to share what we do and have it well-received. The reality, though, is that you have to go after those accolades. Especially now, when there are SO MANY musicians vying for performance opportunities and record contracts and public attention. We do work hard in the PR department!

GN: Joanne, Who are your vocal influences?

J: At the top of my list of influences — both in songwriting and vocally — is Joni Mitchell. And one of my favorite vocalists is the British/Indian singer Sheila Chandra, who has an amazingly open and natural voice and who does quite a bit of experimentation, which I admire. I love the old folkies Judy Collins and Joan Baez, and used to copy their singing styles when I was barely old enough to talk! My biggest vocal influence right now is my vocal coach, the wonderful bluegrass singer Dede Wyland.

GN: You all have played some big venues, like Merriweather Post Pavilion here in the DC area. We often get questions about dealing with stage fright in our forums. For our readers just venturing out into the world of open mic, do you have any words of wisdom? Do you all still get stage fright? How do you deal with it?

J: Stage fright used to be a big problem for me, and it kept me from performing for years. There were a couple of things that helped. There is a book called The Confident Performer by David Roland. And the comedic-folk singer Christine Lavin has some great tips about performance in general on her site (http://www.christinelavin.com/tips.html) that helped me as well. The most useful thing for me is making sure I center myself before I perform, stretching and relaxing and breathing and remembering this isn’t about me! If I don’t take the time to get grounded, I can really feel the difference. The best remedy is doing lots of performing. Even if I go a few weeks without a performance, I can feel the difference; some of the momentum is lost. Eric Clapton is quoted as saying that “To play sober, to play straight, is like going to the dentist.” He said that you may be extremely nervous until the actual thing is taking place, and then you call on some reserve inside you which is just waiting. Once you get past the first couple of songs, you’ve broken the ice for yourself and everyone else. (He said this in 1994, even after years of performing!) It’s also true that a little nervous energy can be fuel for a good performance.

GN: So what’s next for you?

J: We are working on our second CD and I’m very excited about that. It is our intention to have the CD out before the end of 2003. We continue to perform, expanding now beyond the DC/Baltimore area, playing more in New York and other areas, and playing more festivals. In the future, we’d also like to add some visual components, multi-media kinds of things, to our shows. It would be nice to have our performances be more than just an auditory experience. We did a show called “Sound & Vision” at the Knitting Factory in New York recently that combined visual art, poetry and music. I’m also working with a new songwriting partner — a Swami in California! We are taking his poetry, and works from some ancient Indian devotional poets and putting them to music, as well as taking some of the many gorgeous Bengali and South Indian devotional tunes and creating new English translations for them. Brad, Willard and I recently did our first performance with the Swami at an Interfaith Center to much acclaim.

If you’d like to find out more about the Joanne Juskus Band, go to:

http://www.joannejuskusmusic.com/

Don’t miss the Guitar Noise review of Joanne Juskus.

Anyway, one recent lunch break found me doing some innocent dreaming among the high-end guitars. “Hey, what is that? Think I’ll give that one a try.”

About 45 minutes of Zen guitar later I realized I did still have a job and if I wanted to keep it I better get back. You know I’m rarely at a loss for words, but playing this guitar did it. It’s truly an emotional experience. If you want to know why people buy high end guitars, just go play a Huss and Dalton. You won’t be able to describe it to anyone else either, but at least you’ll know.

So I looked up the amazing guitar I was playing on the Web that afternoon.

http://www.hussanddalton.com

You can see it right there on the home page. Much to my surprise I also found out that Huss and Dalton is about two hours south of me in Staunton, Virginia. Don’t pronounce the “u” or they’ll have you pegged as an outsider. It’s Stan-ton.

I called up and spoke to Jeff Huss. We set up an appointment for some Q&A and a shop tour.

Heading down through the heart of old Shenandoah isn’t so much a trip of distance as it is of time. No, not to settler days. But maybe roll back 40 or 50 years off the odometer.

After 45 minutes of driving from Alexandria, Virginia, civilization quickly fades from view. Before you notice what’s happening, the road stops being flat and starts to undulate like the little kids’ roller coaster at the amusement park. You are entering the foothills of the Appalachians.

Out the driver’s side window, (the left one here in the U.S.), the mountains start to rise like a giant room divider. All the junk you don’t want your guests to see is stored behind it. You begin to feel separated from your recent past.

Through the other window you see in the distance the green checkerboard of pasture, with the occasional sprinkling of tiny dots of all black cows. Barns so old their wooden skeletons show through holes in the skin, replace fast food restaurants.

A stream meanders up beside the road and runs by what’s left of the stone walls of a mill. Its waterwheel is long since gone, no longer able to supply grain to the trains that no longer stop there anyway. The train tracks keep me company for a while, tracing the highway, or maybe the highway traces them. I get the unpleasant feeling of watching your own demise; long ago the highway was mocking the train tracks, knowing 18-wheelers would soon replace the train. Still, the tracks run on to nowhere in particular.

Grain silos pop up now and then like giant metallic mushrooms after a spring rain.

Now the mountains are on both sides of you, protecting and guiding you forward, blocking out the rest of the world. You have arrived.

Huss and Dalton guitars are made in a non-descript brick building just south of Staunton.

From the outside there’s no hint of the majestic guitars built inside.

Jeff Huss greeted me at the door and after getting settled we get to the questions.

Guitar Noise: When did you start building guitars?

Jeff: I started out building banjos for Stelling, for about nine years. I built my first guitar there on nights and weekends. After Geoff Stelling heard it, he wanted one. So I built one for him. A customer heard Geoff’s and wanted one. So I started building guitars for Stelling. Then I decided to build them for myself, so I left Stelling and set up shop in my garage.

GN: You started building guitars as a hobby. Now that you build them for a living, is the thrill gone?

Jeff: No. Pretty much the same feeling seeing a guitar completed

GN: How many different models of your guitars do you sell?

Jeff: Currently we have about 15 different models with many options available.

GN: How many guitars do you produce?

Jeff: We make about 20-25 a month now with about six in production at a time.

GN: Do you use computers in your construction?

Jeff: Just this here (at the front desk), which keeps track of inventory and invoices. The guitars are all hand made.

GN: How do you decide what new features you incorporate into your guitars? Do you do research and development, so to speak?

Jeff: Right now our efforts are concentrated on being efficient while making the same consistently good guitar.

GN: I hadn’t thought of that, but if someone hears one and likes it, they want to be able to buy one that sounds just like it.

Jeff: That’s right. It’s a trade off. You want to make your own guitar, but you don’t want to be too unique or people will say, “That doesn’t look

like my dad’s Martin.”

GN: But you do have a unique feature that I really like. Tell us about the radiused top.

Jeff: The top of most “flat top” guitars is under a lot of stress from the pull of the strings. This pull pre-stresses the top and can deform the top. Our guitar bodies, bracing and top are radiused to take advantage of the strength of the dome and to reduce the pre-stress.

GN: And that makes for a better sounding guitar.

Jeff: (laughing): It makes for a different sound. A Martin sounds like a Martin because that’s the way it’s built. Our radiused tops, besides being stronger, get a significant boost in mid-range tones and that makes a more balanced guitar.

GN: What is the most time consuming aspect of building your guitars?

Jeff: The finishing takes probably 30% of the construction time. You have to be able to hang a Huss and Dalton on the wall next to high end Martins and Breedloves.

GN: Does building in the Shenandoah’s have any drawbacks?

Jeff: Perception is a hard thing to change. We get reviews that say the Huss and Dalton is a great, driving Bluegrass guitar, and it is. But it’s more than that. It’s like saying the Lowden is good for Celtic music because it’s built in Ireland.

GN: You are about to make guitar number 1,000. Do you ever step back and shake your head in disbelief?

Jeff: (laughs) All the time.

GN: What’s the latest and greatest in guitars now? What’s the thing to look for?

Jeff: Australian Blackwood.

GN: Why’s that?

Jeff: One of our guys says it’s like Koa with balls.

GN: Last question. What do you play?

Jeff: (laughs again) A factory second.

For more info on Huss and Dalton, their unbelievable guitars, and where you can buy one, go to:

http://www.hussanddalton.com

To see Acoustic Guitar Magazine’s review “Ten Top Flight Dreadnoughts,” which includes the H&D D-RH:

http://www.acousticguitar.com/issues/ag107/feature107.html

Let me just say as I close, if you are in the market for a high end Martin, Taylor, Breedlove, etc. you owe it to yourself to track down a Huss and Dalton before you make your choice.

Behind the console, he produced Pendragon’s masterpiece The Masquerade Overture and the upcoming album by John Wetton. I haven’t heard that album yet, but rumour has it that it’s Wetton’s best solo album and that it rivals with some of his albums with Asia and King Crimson. I’m sure Karl Groom is at least partly responsible for this.

Guitar Noise: The first time I heard of you was on “The Masquerade Overture,” which I still think is one of the greatest albums ever made.

Karl Groom: It seemed to be a very popular album for some reason. It doubled in sales any other Pendragon album. There must be something on it (laughs).

Nick (Barett of Pendragon) was pretty happy with it. We had a long time to do it. Our albums, you know, lower budget, we spend six months making them. We simply don’t care how long it takes. We just want to make a good album.

Pretty often, the bands that I produce, they have a budget and they have to finish in six to eight weeks. There’s nothing wrong with that, but at the same time it doesn’t give you the satisfaction of getting it just right.

I really enjoyed making that album and in the end; there’s the result.

GN: One of the things that really amazed me with that album is that with the quality of the musicians and with the quality of the material, it would have been very easy to go overboard and put layer upon layer of useless tracks.

KG: I can remember in the mix stage actually taking things out. You’re probably right there (laughs). It’s usually keyboards. With Progressive music you tend to build songs by sequencing keyboards and rehash them together. It makes it a lot easier to listen back and know what you’re doing. As a result, when you’re putting those together, you tend to put more keyboards than it needs because there’s no guitars there or vocals there to fill the space.

Too often in Progressive music you get layer upon layer of pads and no room left over for anything else. Keyboards are a very important part of that music, but too much of them and it just becomes one great big pad. I made the mistake myself! (laughs)

GN: Live and learn!

KG: Yeah! Well you have to make a few albums before you start making a good one.

GN: That’s a great comment. It’s a fact, but I think too many people don’t realize this.

KG: It’s quite easy to study the technical aspects and figure out what you’re doing. But it’s not just a technical thing, it’s really a judgement thing. I’ll take an album and before I put it on CD I’ll take a week off and see what I can do to change it. Out of the studio environment, it becomes much more obvious what mistakes you’ve made, what things need to be changed. When you sit there for hour after hour of mixing, after a while it just becomes a wall of noise. If you take it away and put it in a cheap system in the car or at home you often find out immediately which things stand out and make a judgement then.

GN: How does producing your own album compare to producing somebody else’s?

KG: I think it’s a lot harder when it’s your own baby; you work too hard at it. And the best production ideas come from other people’s music, rather irritatingly! (laughs) It’s the reason why in Threshold, Richard works with me as well. I’ll maybe take some time off while he’s doing some vocals and keyboards and we can make better judgements that way. When you’re working on someone else’s music, you can sit back and make a good call while when you’re recording yourself and listening to yourself, you can’t make the best call.

It’s all a case of experience. Every time you do an album, you think “Well, I could of done this or that better.” You always get new ideas for how you can improve the next album.

GN: The Threshold albums I’ve found have been evolving from one to the next.

KG: I think the writing’s been improving. And the equipment for recording’s been getting better as technology goes forward. And I think since we’ve had Mac in the band, we’ve found a sound which is our own. The last three albums stand out for me as being more complete. We’ve weeded out the songs that didn’t work on albums and gone forward and hope we haven’t wasted a slot for a good song on an album.

Before, we couldn’t always agree with each other and would sometimes include a song just to keep someone happy. Now we got a very focused idea on what we want to do and the album has to hold together as a whole, a collection of songs.

And we structure it so that the dynamics of the album follow from the beginning to the end and we don’t think about it as: “Here’s a song and it’s just one of the songs on the album.” We think about the album and how it goes from beginning to end.

GN: I have to admit that at first, when I received Hypothetical, I didn’t give it a fair listen, thinking it was just a heavy metal album. The review copy I received had no credits on it, so I didn’t know who was in the band. My review of it was, thinking back, unfair as I didn’t listen to it enough. But since Psychedelicatessen and Critical Mass (note: this is the latest release from the band), I’ve taken it back out and I’ve been playing it almost daily. It’s almost as good as “Critical Mass”. It has a lot of great material, in particular “Narcissus”.

KG: Long song! (laughs) A lot of work in the arrangement process.

One of the problems in this area is that there may not be a media. Because the songs are complex and it takes a few listens to get into it and that may be why it’s not so mainstream and people can’t immediately latch onto an album.

From my point of view that’s an advantage. I usually find that the album’s that take me a little while to get into are the ones that will last me for years. Whereas music for the media comes and goes. You find that after a few months you put it away and never listen to it again.

Like you said, too many metal bands lack melody. Once you’ve heard the production, you’ve heard two songs and you put it away. You never get past the first couple of songs.

GN: That was the case with bands like Iron Maiden; seemed you were always listening to the same song. It gets pointless.

KG: Yeah and it’s one of the reasons I got into music like Genesis when I was really into metal. Because the melodies kind of weave in and out and the arrangements are complex and there’s obviously a lot of thought that goes into the music. That’s what we decided when we started the band; we liked these two different styles and we were going to blend them.

There wasn’t any thing called Progressive-Metal when we started and we didn’t think we would get signed. We didn’t think anyone would be interested in it. So when GEP signed us at the time, we were flabbergasted! (laughs) It wasn’t something we planned on doing. Then, all of a sudden, this whole thing came forward. Queensryche became more popular and Dream Theatre became public and they had to find some kind of phrase to name the media. But Threshold were the first to do this kind of music. Before Dream Theatre and all the others.

GN: I don’t like the term Progressive-Metal myself.

KG: No, but they have to have some kind of sign to hang over it when handling the reviews. I also think, like you say, that Progressive-Metal doesn’t necessarily indicate what the band’s about.

GN: Yeah. You get a band like Pain of Salvation who are classified into the same category as you guys and there music sounds nothing like yours. (Note: this is not intended as a sour note toward Pain of Salvation who are a great band in their own rights.)

KG: Especially their first album… It’s kind of half-Funk, half-Metal. We’ve done quite a lot of stuff with them. We were in America with them last year. We did a whole European tour with them three years ago also. Friendly guys. Very nice guys, like to have a good time.

GN: Any plans to tour North America?

KG: We were in South America last year and that went really well. We plan on going back there. We were in North America last year and we thought we didn’t have any sort of real fans in America, but there were 1,500 people there and we were absolutely amazed!

You never really know what to expect and we thought… (laughs) this could go over really badly, but it went over fantastic. I think the guys at InsideOut America are trying to organize something.

GN: One question I’ve always wanted to ask a British Progressive musician. Historically, there has never been a famous British composer. There were good composers like Walton, but no famous ones. As Progressive Rock has its roots in Classical music, how is it it’s the British who keep coming up with this incredible music?

KG: I think of Progressive music as a way to freely compose, so I guess it is linked, but I never really came from that background. I learned to play the piano really early then stopped playing. I wasn’t really interested. Then just started listening to Rock music.

I just see the Progressive thing as a real freedom to express yourself because there’s no limitations on the arrangements. The length of the song can be two minutes or it can be twenty minutes; you can just go wherever you want without the confines of strict arrangement lines. It’s something that really appeals to me.

But I still wanted the kick of metal, something to give it some real aggression when you need it.

GN: As a guitarist, your gear is rather basic?

KG: I’ve got a lot of gear in the studio, but it just tends to get in the way. I find that when people buy new gear they tend to program it or adjust it to make it sound like their old gear. So I figure I just bust a valve now and again… (laughs)

A lot of it’s in your head and I just keep trying to come up with new ideas in terms of playing. Once you’ve got the tone that you’re looking for I don’t think it’s logical to start changing it.

I’m really interested in the playing and coming up with new ideas. And I’m not a great one for practicing. I find when I sit down to practice, like before a tour, I end up writing more songs instead… (laughs) I get really bored with that sort of thing…

GN: Upcoming for Threshold is the new acoustic album?

KG: Yeah. We finished all the recording, I’m getting down to the mixing now. It’s basically a fan club album. It’s something we wanted to do and the label lets us do things like that every now and again. We can’t do it opposite a studio album, but we can do things like the odd live album and now this acoustic sessions thing.

It’s something we wanted to do because the singer we have now wasn’t on the first three albums. So half the songs are from the first three albums and we reworked them. It’s when I saw Bryan Adams doing an acoustic performance on MTV I thought why should acoustic be just acoustic guitars? Why can’t you have acoustic drums and acoustic bass?

We always fancied having a go at something like that because you can do it with different arrangements. And the acoustic sound is fresh and it gives it a different dimension.

It something we wanted to do. Obviously it won’t sell like the studio albums but we had a chance to put it across so now we’re there.

GN: You never know, it could become huge.

KG: (laughs) We’re not allowed to distribute it. We can only sell it from the website according to the terms of the contract. It’s a fan club album really.

Note: Stay tuned to Guitar Noise as we’ll let you know when it becomes available and we will have a review of it. You can also check Threshold’s website for more information.

Karl Groom’s gear

’80’s Sharpell Guitar, Marshall Amp with Quattro-verb, Marshall 4 x 12 cabinet

Rebekah and Victoria graciously agreed to answer a few questions to give us some insight into how they do what they do.

Guitar Noise – Can you describe how the songwriting process works for each of you?

Rebekah – I’m a relatively new songwriter and so far I have found my process to be consistently inconsistent. The first few songs I wrote were just lyrics and then I tried to put a tune to them. I find it very easy to write lyrics that way but very difficult to wrap a tune around it. I suppose in the beginning I had so much I wanted to say that the lyrics were most important. Now, although I still have something to say, I find I alter the method. Some of my better songs came when I imagined just one phrase of words and music together in my head and built a song around them. Sometimes I’ll just noodle around on the guitar or piano and find chords that sound interesting. Usually when I do that I start singing random sentences. It can be as obscure as “The dystrophy of you is inevitable now” or as ridiculous as “where’s the mail, where’s the mail, where’s the mail”

Victoria – Most of the time, it starts off with me trying to practice the guitar. Then I find some new chord or progression of chords that I’ve never played before. The sound usually evokes some sort of emotional response and a lyric line comes into my mind. More lyrics come, I can usually write the first verse or chorus fairly easily. Then I leave it alone for a couple of days. I think about what it is I want to say, I clarify it in my mind and work on it bit by bit over the next few days or weeks. A few songs took me a few years to finish.

GN – Have you ever dealt with a time when you just couldn’t find the inspiration to write? What did you do about it?

Victoria – I’ve encountered those times on several different occasions. It’s usually because my life is too busy and hectic. I don’t force myself to write during these times. I find that when there is more time a whole bunch of ideas come out and I go through a writing frenzy for a while. My dry spells have been known to last for 2 years at a time, but I don’t stress about it because I know that the floodgates will open again.

Rebekah – Yes. And again, yes. It was really starting to bother me until I heard an interview of, I think it was, Trace Atkins and he said “Not every song is going to be a home run. Sometimes you just have to get up to the plate” That really calmed me down. When there is REALLY no inspiration I go to a huge pile of half written songs filled with half written lyrics and see if I can find anything worth working on. The problem is that I usually only come away with poems that way. Victoria and I sort of made a pact that we would only write when something meaningful came to us and we’ve kept to it so far. If we really get stuck, I think we’ll try writing together and see what happens. In any event, I find that a good long commute home on a sunny day will always lead to introspection and eventually something resembling a song.

GN – So you just got back from the Kerville Folk Festival in Texas and you’re off to the Falcon Ridge Festival in July, do you still get stage fright? Do you have any words of advice for our readers who might be going to an open mike for the first time?

Rebekah – I am a very nervous performer. I am never fully at ease before a show or on stage. The two things that unnerve me the most are mike/amplification fears, and not being well rehearsed enough. These are the two pieces of advice that I can relay to open-mike singers. If you are very well practiced, you will feel much more at ease when you get up on stage.

Practice a lot more than you think you should. When you’re playing your song and you forget a guitar chord or two, being well rehearsed will allow you to find where you are and correct yourself instead of completely loosing it.

Also, take your time before you start your song. Are you REALLY comfortable? Is the mike too high or low, are you in tune? Take your time making sure that you’re set up well and you will be more comfortable. In general, open-miking is one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do but it’s the only way to move ahead. It’s like pulling off a band-aid. Just do it! I find that if you are real and honest with your audience “Wow this is out of tune…” they will respond with interest.

Victoria – The day I stop getting stage fright will be the day I die. It’s my way of knowing I’m alive.

For my first open mic, I didn’t let anyone know that I was doing it. I figured that if I totally bombed then at least it would be in front of people that I’d never see again. It took me 10 years of playing in my bedroom before I got the nerve to play out in the public…I wouldn’t recommend this though to other aspiring singer songwriters, just get out there and give it your best shot, you have nothing to lose. Who cares if a whole bunch of people you’ll never see again laugh at you and you never know they may not laugh; they may clap!

GN – On your website you write “Where has the melody gone?” Can you elaborate a little on what you mean by that? And while you’re at it, what do you think makes a good melody?

Victoria – It just seems that the trend in music for the past ten years has been to have one melody line that is repeated over and over. I try to let my emotions come out in different ways throughout a song. I can’t say what makes a good melody for everyone. For me, it’s just a tune that sticks in my mind and makes me hum it when I’m doing the dishes or whatever.

Rebekah – The trend in music now seems to be finding a phrase or a chord progression and repeating it often. More like speak-singing. A lot of trills, a lot of embellishment, a lot of really great vocal riffs. Songs today seem to be more like that than the long languid songs of the seventies a la Carpenters, James Taylor, Carly Simon, Jim Croce, even some of the power ballads of the eighties.

Our songs seem to be a little more melodic and reminiscent of an earlier time. I think what makes a good melody is a lot of variation. Some notes high (Victoria is really good at that) and some low. Most important, it’s a song someone can hum a few seconds, hours, days after hearing it. A song someone can sing well who doesn’t have such a great voice.

GN – What happened to “Arrabella York?” (a song they performed). I really liked it, especially the rhythmic quality of the verses. Why wasn’t it included on the CD? How did you make that decision?

Victoria – We decided to save “Arrabella York” for our second CD, which we are presently recording. It is part of a trilogy of songs that I wrote and so we chose not to split them up.

GN – What’s next for Molly Pitcher?

Rebekah – More of the same. Documenting life and love melodically, recording it for posterity, finding people who enjoy it and singing for them. We will be going on a tour of the northeast this summer so we’re really looking forward to that. Mostly, we just feel grateful to have found each other and we probably will bask in that till we’re old and gray.

Victoria – We’re organizing a mini tour for this summer and like I mentioned before, we’re recording our second CD.

GN – Any parting words or suggestions for our readers?

Victoria – Don’t sit in your room for ten years.

Rebekah – All songs are valid. Some of my worst songs have gotten recognition, and some of my best ignored. Just be honest. It takes real courage.

I spoke to the guys, frontman Russell Allen, bassist Mike LePond, drummer Jason Rullo and keyboardist Michael Pinnella, before the show and found them to be extremely friendly and certainly out for a good time.

A-J: This is your first North American tour, tonight’s the first show. How are you feeling?

Russell: We feel great! It’s good to be playing at home.

A-J: How does a band from New Jersey end up doing most of their tours in Europe?

Mike: I think America hasn’t gotten behind this kind of music that we’re playing yet. But I think over the next year or two this kind of music is going to come over to America and we’ll be able to play more often.

Russell: We started in Japan. We worked our way all the way back to this side of the planet.

A-J: It’s a different perspective, but as long as it works…

Russell: We’re not the first ones to do that. Other bands have done it also. But it’s exciting, you know; we’re finally at home. There’s a special night that’s coming up and that we’re really looking forward to (Note: the New York City show). We’ll be playing for families and friends.

Here we were talking about the way information does not always get circulated correctly. Even to us media people…

Russell: Never trust anything that’s not on our website. If it’s not on our website, it’s not official.

Rick Rolland was supposed to be singing in my place tonight. That was the big rumour going on about four months ago. (turning to Mike:) Rick Rolland, wasn’t that the name?

Mike: Yeah. And Humpty Dumpty.

Then they did a bit of a song and dance number. I think they were looking forward to going onstage…We all had a big laugh.

A-J: What’s the next step?

Russell: We’re going to South America. Then there’ll be Japan.

A-J: Very busy.

Russell: Yeah. Busiest we’ve ever been. Which is cool.

Mike: We’re not complaining.

Russell: We’re not complaining. We’re very happy to be performing so much.

A-J: I heard that the new album (The Odyssey) is doing well.

Russell: Yeah. From every market, we’re getting great numbers. In Quebec, our distributor here has just told us that the album is really kicking ass.

Mike: That’s a good sign. That’s what we need to hear so we can get back out here. We just want to get out there and tread some water and show that we’re serious.

A-J: There are a few technical problems downstairs…

Jason: comments unprintable. Everyone laughing. We haven’t even had a sound check!

A-J: Are you going to get one?

Jason: No, we’re not.

A-J (sarcastically): That’s good…

Mike: Yeah. There’s been a few problems, but they’re going to be ironed out.

Russell: We’ll make it work out.

A-J: I think the crowd’s going to be understanding.

All: Yeah.

Russell: I remember one night in Germany. We were playing at this club and there was this pole right in the middle of the stage.

Michael (Pinnella): It held the stage together.

Mike: It kept the roof from falling.

Russell: Yeah. So I had to sing around it. I felt like a go-go dancer.

I’ll skip the next few details…

Russell: You know what? I remember that that night was great.

Mike: It was. It was a good night. There was a lot of energy, the place was packed.

Russell: We’ve been in all sorts of environments. Tonight, we’re just going to treat it like a festival: go up there and give it all you’ve got.

Mike: That’s what we do all the time.

A-J: Anything in particular you wish to promote?

All: The album!

Jason: And the fact that we’re out here playing.

Mike: We’ll be touring across North America and we’re going to have a good time.

Russell: Yeah, we’ll have a great time!

The show:

First, as anyone who was there will tell you; there were technical difficulties. However, as I was there during the sound check, I can assure you that these difficulties had absolutely nothing at all to do with Symphony X. In the end, they never even got to do a sound check.

So, in light of this, the technical difficulties were easily forgivable. And they were forgiven as the crowd just went wild during the band’s performance. Starting a tour with a sold-out show will certainly help, but this band certainly knows how to take care of an audience. I’ve rarely seen a band perform with such enthusiasm and work so hard to win an audience: mission accomplished!

The part that everybody disliked was that they could only stay on for 40 minutes. After every song, the crowd would raise their arms and yell: Sym-pho-ny until the next song got underway.

It was a great evening overall.

And because the band would have liked to play longer in Montreal, and because of the technical difficulties, they’ve rescheduled a show for February 23rd, 2003. This time they will be headlining. Unfortunately, as it’s still unofficial, I can’t tell you who the opening act will be. All I can say is that they’re on the same label as Symphony X and that I’ve reviewed two of their albums. It will be a great evening and I, for one, shall certainly be there.

Planet X is made up of Virgil Donati on drums, Derek Sherinian (Dream Theatre) on keyboards and Tony MacAlpine on Guitars. This band of musicians’ musicians is certainly one that knows how to have a good time and please an audience at the same time.

The music was played to perfection, the versions differing a little from the studio versions, especially with the interactions between MacAlpine and Sherinian, continuously exchanging solos and attempting, in all friendliness, to one-up the other. Certainly, the (sold-out) crowd appreciated every moment.

The material covered their first two albums, Universe and Moonbabies and also included a track from the next album which is due, unfortunately, only next year.

I had the privilege to sit down with Tony and Derek after the show. (And Derek’s girl friend also joined us…) It was a lot of fun, everyone was in high spirits. I’ll spare you some of the conversation, but here are the highlights of it:

A-J: First of all guys, great show!

Derek and Tony: Thank you.

A-J: How has the tour been going so far?

Derek: It’s been going great! Tonight was exceptionally great. The other shows have been great as well and we’re just having a great time!

We’re having a good time playing the music, bringing it to life.

Tony: I’ll tell you one thing, it’s cold out here! (Note: it was about 0 Celsius or 32 Fahrenheit.)

A-J: The album’s doing well also?

Derek: Moonbabies? Yes. We’re very pleased with what the response has been. We’re looking forward to play some other countries next year. But one thing we found. Montreal is our hottest place to play in North America. We’re just happy with how the fans are responding.

A-J: Are you happy with the album overall?

Derek: We’re very happy and it’s fun to go out and to make it come alive.

A-J (to Derek): Do you miss Dream Theatre at all?

Derek (smiling): No, not really. I’m quite content playing with the musicians I’ve been playing with since my departure. They’re all great guys (Dream Theatre), I wish them the best.

A-J (to Tony): You use an overall simple gear set-up. (See bottom for a list of Tony’s gear.)

Tony: Yeah, but I like it better that way.

A-J: The 7th string on those guitars, do you really need it?

Tony: Sure, I use it a lot. It’s redefined the way I look at the guitar.

A-J: I like the way the two of you interact on stage.

It’s at this moment that Tony decided to have a bit of fun at my expense, but… you had to be there.

Derek: We improvise a lot. We have our basic lines worked out, but we like to push further every night.

A-J: Certainly makes for a great evening!

The band will be playing the following dates:

11.30 Detroit
12.01 Chicago
12.02 St Paul
12.04 Denver
12.06 Seattle
12.07 Portland
12.08 San Francisco
12.09 San Juan Capistrano
12.10 Phoenix

Tony MacAlpine’s gear
- two 100 watt legacy heads, on 50 watt mode
- TC-747 carbon-string guitars
- Specially made George Denis Wah pedal
- Boss volume pedal
- TCR digital delay unit

But, lest you think that she’s someone who has just magically popped into the music world, think again. Linda picked up the guitar at four years old and has been involved in music ever since.

LT’s playing has taken her all over the world, playing with standout jazz saxophonist Kirk Whalum, Japan’s pop superstar Namie Amuro and Tracy Chapman, just to name a few. Last year, she released her first solo CD, Pulse (of which you can read the Guitar Noise review), a joyous celebration of her funk and R&B roots fused with a healthy dose of jazz and blues. If you love instrumental guitar pieces, then you will definitely want this CD in your collection.

When I first approached LT with the thought of doing an interview for Guitar Noise, I had a lot of things to ask, and that quickly turned into a lot more! Linda has graciously agreed to answer questions on all sorts of topics that I think will be of interest to you. For this segment, I thought it best to start with some general introductions to her background, her songwriting and current projects. In future segments, we’ll be covering soloing and improvisation, recording, producing, songwriting and other aspects of making a career in music.

And so, without further adieu, here are today’s five questions:

GN: While a lot of people now know you because of your work on Whose Line Is It Anyway, you’ve actually been in the music business for quite some time. Could you give us some insight as to how you developed such a great feel for both funk and jazz?

Thanks for the props! I’ve always dug funk and R&B. I guess jazz came a little later. As a kid I spent virtually all of my time playing along with EW&F, Isley Bros., Ohio Players, Gap Band, etc., etc. I only regret that I didn’t start earlier – my teachers were trying to instill theory instead of groove. Whassup with that?

So I worked out the rhythm stuff with the groove bands, the single-line stuff and voicing stuff with the (at that time) current R&B artists like Evelyn King, and Luther and Jeffrey and all the Quincy productions. For soloing, I pretty much stuck with BB King. “Live At The Regal” is pretty much all you’ll ever need to know about playing the guitar, or playing any instrument for that matter. That album is a study in communication.

Which is probably why my soloing tends to be more short-phrased and rhythmic. I hear things rhythmically first, so that tends to be where I start my approach. From there, I’m just trying to find the one note that will say the right thing.

My interest in jazz came much later, despite several attempts to ‘get it’ in high school and college. I like the harmonic stretches, the structure plays and regrouping. It’s certainly more freeing than pop music, although sometimes I miss the parameters of pop. Frankly, I think it’s just as difficult to hold a groove for five minutes on one chord than to noodle a bunch of scary scales. I guess I like to play the scary scales over the groove. That’s a fun marriage.

GN: You’ve certainly played with people from many diverse musical styles. Did you have to learn to change your own style when playing with someone more “folkish” like Tracy Chapman or more “pop” like Namie Amuro (and how on earth did you ever hook up with her, anyway)? Or were you able to bring your own stylings into the mix? How much say does a backing musician have in this type of work?

In a pop situation, when you’re a sideman touring for an artist, the job is to play their music their way. The sideman’s personal style isn’t really relevant, unless it’s specifically requested. Quite frankly, when people are playing my music, I want them to start with the album. If we take off from there, that’s cool, but I have to trust them first. Make sure they know where I’m coming from and where I’m trying to go.

I’ve never toured with an artist who didn’t want the sideman to start with the album. Learn the parts just like the record, use sounds as similar as you can, and play it just like the album. There are exceptions to every rule, but let the artist tell you otherwise.

I met Namie Amuro’s MD through a good friend of mine, Kiki Ebsen, whom I’ve toured with several times. It was an amazing gig: Namie is as big in Japan as NSync is here. We were doing stadium tours with a huge stage show, dancers, lasers, tons of techs (ah…the good ol’ days), the works. Great gig! Talk about a specific gig – there were so many guitar tracks on her albums, and basically Carlos Rios and myself would just divide ‘em up and play as many as we could.

GN: Do you feel your experience in supporting other artists helped you when you approached other musicians to assist you with your projects, such as your CD, Pulse?

Absolutely! Being a sideman should be required experience for being a solo artist. Being able to see the artist-sideman relationship from both sides is really helpful. I think I gained a lot of empathy for the front man’s role once I started hiring people for my own projects.

GN: Touching upon your songwriting, how much of it stems from improvisation and how much of it is methodically planned before anyone else even hears it? I guess I’m asking how you go about writing your songs like, say, Baby Blue?

Writing different styles requires different tools. In all cases, I need to decide what I want the song to say. Is this a groove tune that’s going to make people shake, or is this a tune that’s going to make the listener think, or smile, or hang on for dear life? I guess the one thing I always want to do, no matter what style, is make the listener feel comfortable enough to trust me. So if I dip and swoop, they’ll follow along because I’ve already shown them that we’re going home again.

Several of the songs from Pulse were inspired by what I was studying at the time. NY Garden, for example, was a play on Coltrane changes, the minor thirds moving up and down. I wanted to combine the floating quality of that kind of progression with the unwavering foundation of funk.

Baby Blue was a different story. Wasn’t quite as scientific. I wrote the first part very quickly. It was just one of those wonderful moments when you should be practicing, but you’re writing instead. But I wanted the bluesy part to take off, in a way that blues progressions don’t usually do. That’s how the second part happened. The best way for me to get from A to B is to put down the guitar and just start humming something. That is actually how I do most of my writing now, just start humming. It works for me; I don’t have to be in front of a computer, or have an instrument in my hands.

GN: What sort of projects are you currently working on and are you still performing live?

Currently, I’m spending most of my time scoring for film. It’s a whole different way of thinking, and I’m really enjoying the challenge. There’s a technical side to composing for film that I’ve never encountered before, such as frequently shifting time signatures and tempos to accommodate different scenes. It’s a different world, but very satisfying.

I’m also producing and composing for other artists. I’m working with Glenys Rogers, an amazing singer. She’s got a deep, rich alto, and her vibe is somewhere along the lines of India Aire, or Macy. We’ll be playing in LA late in July, in promotion of her second album. Watch her website for more details.

Originally conceived and published in the 1980s, Fretboard Logic is Bill Edwards’ gift to the guitar world. Currently it is the best selling guitar book on both Amazon.com and GuitarNoise.com That is no small feat for a self published book in an industry seemingly dominated by giants like Mel Bay and Hal Leonard.

Fretboard Logic is different from other guitar method books because it only deals with guitar. Most guitar books delve into music theory applying to other instruments and all music in general. Bill’s book approaches things from a unique “guitar-thinking” perspective. In it, the author lays down the reasoning for the guitar’s unique tuning system of EADGBE. Learning to play guitar using the CAGED sequence taught in this book seriously reduces the learning curve. Today the Fretboard Logic series includes three volumes and a series of instructional videos.

As well as being the author of one of the best guitar books to date, Bill has also done gigs as an inventor, teacher and music store owner.

Last week I had the chance to ask Bill some questions about his teaching method, his books and himself. I also snuck in a few questions that tie in with this month’s topic on Guitar Noise soloing and improvisation. As well as getting a peak inside the psyche of a guitar teacher, it was worth it to chat with the guy who wrote the book that has been called “the operator’s manual that should have come with your guitar.”

Guitar Noise: Firstly, can you tell us a bit about yourself? How did you get into music and the guitar especially? What were you doing before you taught guitar?

Bill Edwards: I was about 6 or 7, and playing outside, and my mother just came up out of nowhere and asked me if I wanted to take piano lessons. It seems unlikely, but I distinctly remember having one of those moments that we’ve all had where time just kind of stretches a bit. Usually I made up my mind about things instantly, but not this time. I couldn’t come up with a reason either do or not do this thing. I hesitated and then said “Sure.” The teacher was the proverbial “little old lady down the street,” I remember the one thing she always stressed was “proper -roll the Rs please – technique.” (Another thing she always stressed was the furniture, since, at 285, technically she wasn’t “little.” Let’s just say she left a lasting impression on us both and leave it at that.)

My older brother Steve, was the guitarist in our family. For his benefit, the family went to a concert featuring guitarist Andres Segovia, and I was blown away more than anyone else. The image – still vivid – was one of “dancing fingers.” It was a lasting introduction to the possibilities of the guitar. After that, I constantly bugged my brother to show me stuff he was learning from his teacher. Face it, if you’re a guy at a certain age, the guitar is just so much more where it’s at than the piano or anything else. I found myself playing it more, even though after years of practice, I sounded much better on a keyboard than a fretboard. I liked listening to records and trying to figure out how to play what I was hearing. It was like working on a three dimensional moving puzzle. Having already invested so much time and effort learning to read standard notation on the piano, learning by ear on the guitar was like starting all over playing a whole new kind of ball game.

So a few years pass and I go on a date to a Led Zeppelin concert. At one point, the rest of the band left the stage and Page sat down by himself on stage and again, I was the person in the audience who was most blown away. All this, naturally, led to a series of garage bands. As time went on, I became aware that music became increasingly more influential – even transformational. It had the power to change the world. After high school, I started college with no particular direction in mind and just decided – to my parent’s horror – that I’d just as soon spend my life doing something I truly enjoyed, as joining the rat race doing a job I hated like everyone else, just for the sake of a paycheck. I played in bands at night and took classes in the day. It sounds funny now, but the university I attended (USF) did not have a guitar department at the time, so it was back to the piano. So now I sucked at the keyboard and played pretty well on the fretboard. Plus, in music school, everyone ranked you by how well you played, period. One of my pickin’ pals was leaving his teaching job at a local music store to hit the road, and I applied for his position and got it. Since the band thing at night was so unstable, the teaching thing in the day helped pay the bills. This combination lasted for years until I bought the store at which I had been teaching.

GN: What originally inspired you to write Fretboard Logic and how did the sequels come about?

BE: When I started teaching, I asked my friend Dave for any tips on how to approach his students. Dave, a very amusing guy, says “Help the little monsters? You can’t help the monsters. Fear the monsters. I just string em’ along as long as possible. When I can’t dazzle em with brilliance I baffle em with bullshit.” As I said, Dave was a funny guy (and a great flatpicker too). Well, anyway that was my expectation going in. But the reality was a little different. The reality was that every week, these dedicated, earnest, bright-eyed, hard-working little kids would trudge into the studio banging their giant guitars against doorways, walls and cases, and for 30 of the shortest minutes you can imagine, would hang on my every word. They’d laugh at my stupid jokes, and worst of all, when I’d play stuff for them, their little mouths would hang open. So the reality was that I fell like a ton of bricks for the little monsters and actually started casting about for ways to help them over their guitar hurdles, which were many. My boss – the guy who owned the store at the time – wanted me to use the books he stocked. So I tried using the usual stuff, Mel Bay, Alfreds, etc., and the kids who didn’t quit said stuff like “What did I ever do to you?” and “You think I’m gonna play this for my friends? I could get beat up for that.” The classic one for this was the kid who came in to his first lesson dreaming of “Eruption” by Van Halen and went out playin “Go Tell Aunt Rhody.” Oh yeah, I cured him. He’s probably an accountant now.

What they wanted was pretty much the same thing yet different. They wanted me to show them how to play stuff they liked and which would impress their friends, but the style and content varied from student to student. By now I had a pretty good ear, so I’d listen to their tapes, figure out the parts and then show it to them. Keep in mind that each student had different needs and abilities. In general, some wanted to be lead playing shredders, some wanted to learn instrumentals and some wanted to sing and play along. The music styles and guitar types spanned the gamut. I made up my mind to completely support the choices of each individual student and not force them into areas of my own personal strengths or preferences (as, I suspect, is usually the case). As they would get into a piece, I’d try to sneak in explanations for how things worked in terms of music theory, etc. I constantly used positive reinforcement and I lavished praise without reservation. It is a powerful teaching tool. I also had a signature style. By that I mean I had posters of all the most famous guitarists on the walls of my studio and I faked their autographs saying stuff like “Thanks for teaching me everything I know. Signed Edward Van Halen” or my personal favorite “Thanks for a lesson I’ll never forget. Signed Nancy Wilson.” I used to get big smiles and funny looks when new students sat down and looked around the room the first time. Interestingly, those lines got blurred later on after I met Mr. Van Halen and Ms. Wilson, but that’s another story or two.

This goes on for years and I’ve got this huge student schedule. After I while I suggest to some of my advanced students that they need to graduate to a better teacher. Some of them were incredibly talented. So nothing happens and I’m going, hmmmm. What’s the deal here? First I can’t keep em’ and now I can’t get rid of em. It finally dawns on me that they’ve got it too easy. They’re using me like a pack animal to figure out the hard stuff and spoon feed it to em, the monsters. So I decide OK, fine, I’ll show em how I figure out stuff by ear and they can learn to do this on their own. This is where things got interesting, and by interesting I mean weird, frustrating and embarrassing, because the more I tried to explain things, the more I realized that I lacked the ability to verbalize what I’d been doing more or less automatically whenever I’d figure out gtr parts. They say you never really know a subject until you teach it to someone else. Well, the flip side is that you can also find out how well you don’t know a subject when you start to explain it to someone else. So when words fail, one of the things we can do is draw pictures. I went home and sat down to “draw an explanation” of the things I was thinking about when I tried to figure out parts. So I’m at home and illustrating these diagrams, and after hours of drawing, all of a sudden these patterns fell together like – BAM! – for the first time in all my years of teaching, playing and taking lessons. It was like getting hit by the proverbial thunderbolt. I jumped out of my chair and stomped around the room banging my head saying “Boy you are too stupid to live.” It had been right there – literally under my nose for all those years and I’d failed to recognize it. It was at that moment I got my first glimpse of the pattern organization of the fretboard which exists independent of music. This happens on the guitar and no other instrument. I finished my drawings, but I also realized that I would be unable to reduce it to a single page or chart or poster. It would take a small book to explain it in detail. Later on, as a side project during my retailing and inventing days, I attempted to put it into book form using an early 8 bit command line computer. Ugh. The result was a disappointing mess. When the first Macintosh computers came out in 1984 and 85′, and I saw how you could control the graphics, fonts, scaling, etc., and have on screen WYSIWYG. I realized that was the tool I needed to make the book convey the message. In developing the book I decided to incorporate a split page format – half text and half graphics – whenever possible to help get the ideas across verbally and visually for people who are more right-brained and left-brained.

After I finished the book, I felt confident that I had something that was unique in the field of guitar methods. Remember, I’d been through many different methods myself and with my students, and I’d also bought thousands of books for my store. My book was clean, narrowly focused, and well organized. Plus, no one could dispute the accuracy of the content. At the time I had no intentions of opening up the cans of worms that the other areas of musical development involved. No sir – way too messy. Anyway I’ve got this store to run. My readers had other ideas however, and I was persuaded by the same positive reinforcement and praise that I’d been using on the little monsters for years. It took about a year and a half to come up with a way of building on the first volume (without wrecking it), and about a year and a half to get it written. Vol. III took even longer. The videos? Forget about it. The equipment wasn’t even available at the time unless you had a Hollywood budget or were willing to settle for cheesy production values.

GN: As you have said, most instructional guitar books fall into three categories: popular arrangements, methods and reference books. Where does Fretboard Logic fit in all of this? How is your book or method different from others?

BE: It is a method, but it differs because it is a guitar-oriented approach. It treats the guitar as if it were different from every other instrument ever designed. In general, most guitar books talk a little bit about a lot of different subjects and wind up not nailing any one thing down substantively. The thread of continuity holding the subject matter together is merely the author’s personal experiences and preferences. An entire category of beginner guitar books simply copy beginner piano books, and don’t acknowledge the guitar’s unusual characteristics. Plus they publish music examples which are typically 75-100 years out of date for copyright reasons. These are prescriptions for failure somewhere down the line. Fretboard Logic takes the position that there are “constants” and “variables” in a guitarist’s learning curve. Also, there are certain things you need to know first, then second, third and so on. This is termed the “building block” theory of learning, to which I subscribe. “Constants” are those things which won’t change regardless of a student’s personal preferences. Fretboard Logic acknowledges the unique qualities of the instrument as the one thing which all the other learning events have in common. Therefore it is the first place to start. Doing so gives the guitarist a “place” to put everything he or she is learning. It eliminates the “put this finger here and put that finger there” type of thinking which seems to pervade the industry. After the issues dealing with the instrument are mastered, the next set of constants are those on the music side of the equation: the tone groups. Typically, these are learned either by rote memorization or by the guesswork method. Fretboard Logic teaches these constants in the context of the pattern organization of the fretboard outlined in book one, eliminating guesswork and rote. I’m reminded of an early Macintosh commercial where they dropped all these huge manuals in a two or three foot stack beside an IBM PC computer and the little Mac manual gently wafts down beside the Mac. Learning chords, scales and arpeggios can be a very similar similar experience. Hundreds of pages and thousands of diagrams of chords, followed by thousands of diagrams of scales, followed by… News flash: our brains don’t work that way. So when it comes time to actually use these things to produce something worth listening to, the student has to keep relearning the basics by rote and winds up with a monkey-see, monkey-do mentality which holds them back from enjoying the next phase: the variables.

The variables come into play when one begins to apply the constants to the style of music or type of guitar the individual prefers. They are termed “variables” since they will vary from person to person – different guitar types, techniques, goals, etc. What is interesting is that we are all on a kind of “spectrum” of experience as guitar players. In general, when we start out, we tend to play or “copy” the music of others. As we get better, it is only natural to start to investigate and find out what makes it tick. This is an analytical process and the Analytical end of our experiential spectrum. Later on, as we progress, it is only natural that we begin to develop our own ideas, our own musical statements and expressions. This, of course, is the Creative end of our experiential spectrum. What I think is interesting, is that both ends of the spectrum require pretty much the same tools, materials and resources – just approached differently. That is where Vol. III and the Videos come in. They are designed to approach the variables from either perspective. Volume III is non-linear. Instead, it provides a menu of options for each player to choose from to take his or her interests in the exact right direction for their needs. The material is also media-specific. Whereas the book is excellent for organization, detail and illustration, the video tape is ideal for demonstrating ideas in action. One video is organized from the Creative perspective, and the other from the Analytical point of view. One focuses one the fretboard and the other discusses the tone groups. One uses lead playing as the genre and the other uses instrumentals, and so on.

I like to use the metaphor of the five blind men and the elephant for people who are learning to play guitar. Starting out, most people only see the parts of the fretboard “elephant.” Fretboard Logic shows the beast in its entirety and lets the student apply these concepts to the music style and guitar type of their own choosing.

GN: Fretboard Logic is the top selling guitar book both on Amazon.com and GuitarNoise.com. To what do you attribute its success? Are you at all surprised?

BE: It’s the payoffs… Ok, well, one side of me wants to say that it’s the accuracy of the content and flexibility in the application of ideas in different playing situations. Plus, it also shaves a good deal of time off the learning curve. Another side wants to say that learning doesn’t have to be torture. It can actually be fun, and when it works and is fun, people respond.

Based on my teaching experiences, I learned to respect my student’s preferences. Fretboard Logic does not dictate these to the reader. It supports each individual’s choices and only requires that they use six strings tuned EADGBE, or standard tuning. From my reader’s feedback, it seems that the method fills in a lot of gaps in people’s understanding. This can be very liberating. It also helps them get to a place where they can understand other authors and teachers better.

Am I surprised? Well, I put my mind, heart and soul into two other very difficult long term projects around the same time as Fretboard Logic: my retail store and my Finger-Tite Locking Nut inventions. Both failed for reasons having less to do with the success of the design, than with the idiosyncrasies of the legal system. That the books held up is only surprising in that everyone’s expectation, mine included, were that the other two projects would be successful since I’d worked so hard.

GN: You are in fact the guy who stumbled across the reasoning behind the fretboard’s unique tuning system and came up with the CAGED sequence. Was it like penicillin and an accidental discovery? Can you shed some light on how you came up with it all?

BE: Oops. Well, that isn’t exactly accurate. The first half, OK, but someone invented this tuning many years ago – about 500 years, as best as I can estimate from my own research. Second, parts of the pattern organization have been recognized by various others throughout the years. The chordal aspect had been termed the CAGED System before I was born. My primary contribution has been to recognize the entirety of the pattern organization resulting from the guitar’s unique tuning. Secondarily, I’ve developed a method for approaching the tasks of learning tone groups without guesswork or rote by building upon the framework established in the first book. It’s funny, but I’m certain that even now, 12 years after FLII was written, that in the classrooms of the most prestigious colleges and universities in the world, they still teach chords, scales and arpeggios as if a fretboard were not much different from a keyboard. I’ve been waiting for that time when my early students and readers become college professors and correct this by incorporating Fretboard Logic into their curriculum(s).

GN: Fretboard Logic is loaded with testimonials from readers. What is the most memorable letter or comment you have ever received?

BE: To be honest they are all, well, pretty heartwarming, but there are a couple that popped into my head when I read your question: I received a phone call from a guitarist many years ago, and we got to talking and hit it off, as guitarists often do, and he said matter of factly, “you know you’re going to change the way the guitar is taught forever.” That had never occurred to me before. It sent chills down my spine. Time stretched. Later on someone said I should get some kind of Nobel prize. Heh. That also had never occurred to me before. Not freekin’ likely, but it sure made my day. Needless to say, I enjoy hearing from my readers.

GN: Realizing that people’s tastes in music change, what music are you into at the moment? What do you listen to and play?

BE: As you can probably guess, I play different types of guitars. Two electrics and two acoustics – a custom Performance Strat and a parts Tele, plus a Martin dreadnought and a nylon string cutaway. On the Strat, among others, I play some Eric Johnson pieces, some Malmsteen, Satriani, and, of course Van Halen. I plan to relearn some Randy Rhoads stuff since I was a big fan of his. On the Tele I do some Hellecasters, of course, Jerry Reed, Steve Morse and so on. The nylon string gets some Bach, Tarrega, Lucona, Villa-Lobos etc. On the steel string I do some Chet, a lovely arrangement by Ed Gerhard and some Doc Watson and Tony Rice flat pickin stuff. I’m also a fan of guitarist Muriel Anderson, who is one of Chet Atkins’ protégés. I do some originals and some of my own arrangements on each as well. I’ve noticed that I play a lot of #2 cuts. For some reason, record producers like to put the hot instrumentals in the second spot on a disc.

GN: You also hold the patent for the Finger Tite Locking Nut. What exactly is that and what is the story there?

BE: The horror… the horror. This is a truly long story. In a moment of weakness, I actually attempted to relate it to a reporter for the Wall Street Journal who was doing an invention story several years ago. I spent hours relating the story in minute detail. Later when I read it, he’d got so many facts wrong that I realized that it was too complicated unless you happened to already know the principles and what they do or did. Just the names of the parties involved – Kramer, Kahler, Schaller, Fender, Yamaha, blah blah… they tend to get mushed together if you’re not in the biz. Suffice it to say that I got screwed blued and tattooed by several industry heavyweights. The device was an improvement on the Floyd Rose locking nut, which I’d dealt with as a frequent repair item in my store. Everyone stripped out the hex screws, or lost the 3 mm wrenches and went nuts because the very thing supposed to keep their gtrs in tune kept them from tuning up. The Finger-Tite Locking Nut was a cam lever operated device designed to eliminate the wrenches, but clamp the strings securely. Again, the idiosyncrasies (and costs) of the legal system defeated this nice little niche product. I spent two years of overtime working out different designs and shapes before I found one that worked. About ten or fifteen companies liked the idea so much they decided to make their own – invariably half-assed – version. In the end they “poisoned the well” of consumer opinion about mine, which was the one that actually worked correctly. I remember my little booth at NAMM and people coming by after having bought the crappy copies and saying “Those things don’t work.” It was a terrible experience. It hurt me and my family badly.

Postscript: I thought it was all behind me when one day about a year or two ago, I get a call from a customer regarding Fretboard Logic. He said “By the way, I’m Gary Kahler’s son. Ever heard of him?” My throat clamped up and I actually started choking and actually couldn’t speak until I got some water. Issues? Hey – I bought a subscription.

GN: As a teacher you no doubt respond to a lot of student’s questions concerning what path they should take. What sort of guidance to you give to those who want to become professionals? And what about those who see guitar as a lifelong hobby?

BE: I try to make them focus on the distinction between treating the guitar and music primarily as a source of income or recreation. Doing both is possible, but not likely. All good players will come to the fork in the road when they have to make a decision to either play for pay or keep it as a hobby and earn money other ways. I try to get students to anticipate this so they can prepare for, among other things, the wrath and/or disappointment of their parents, the likelihood they will make substandard wages and the near certainty that they will always be temporarily employed, i.e.., in search of new venues, bandmates, trends, etc. Some of my own students had loads of talent, but had very poor social skills, and were often functionally illiterate about business. Some of the least neurotic people I know simply keep music as a hobby. But here’s the thing: playing guitar professionally is truly a calling. Can you imagine there never having been a Chet Atkins or Eddie Van Halen or Andres Segovia or Jimmy Page or … ?

GN: Do you have any advice of your own when it comes to buying a guitar?

BE: Yes. Take along an “expert” to annoy the sales help. I’m a big fan of playability and affordability. Once the basics are there – straight (correct) neck, flat face (no bowing), low action, light strings, etc., it’s about personal tastes and preferences. Some guitars just seem to speak to you. They say stuff like “If you don’t buy me right this minute I shall gently weep…” Over the years I’ve learned not to fall in love with my guitars. Why? All my guitars eventually get stolen, so I don’t own any collectibles. Also, I’ve taken the precaution of winding crime scene tape around them so they will be easy to identify in a line up. (This also works visually when I’m doing Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumble Bee.)

GN: Improvising on the guitar is such a difficult area of music to teach. What advice or tips do you have about improvising?

BE: This is the main focus of Video I. Without revealing too much, I will say that it isn’t enough to simply attempt to play the right notes against the right chord(s). Along the same lines, you can’t speed up a scale and improve it significantly. Knowing the available notes is merely the first step, and that is a function of knowing the fretboard and a few other things. Fretboard Logic teaches that you have to have two separate, equally important goals: 1) Create interest, and 2) Define the style. To do these, you have to put more and different balls in the air as you are playing. In Volume III, the reader is provided with a Menu of options from which to choose in order to accomplish these important goals. For example, in the category of Sonics, if you choose distortion reverb and compression, you better not be trying to convey, say Jazz or Bluegrass, because you’ve made a wrong choice in that area. On the other hand, if you wanted to create a rock or metal solo, you’re part the way there. If you choose to use heavy distortion for example, you should also concentrate your tonal choices in the areas of intervals and triads, because 7ths, 9ths and extended chords combined with square waves will create unintelligible mush. As the Video progresses, it demonstrates this “recipe” approach to creating interest and defining the style, step by step, but with more and more fretboard demands as the tape progresses.

GN: Also regarding improvisation, given your extensive knowledge of the CAGED system of the fretboard, what inherent strengths or advantages does this system offer students for improvising? What are the limitations?

BE: It gives them control over the first stage in the process: knowing what notes are available and where they are. Knowing all the pattern types gives each player the control over that tonal minefield, so he or she can concentrate on other, more important issues. Since this area was the most often requested by my own students, I decided to use lead playing as the vehicle in Video One to convey the subject matter in Book One. When people are watching the video and playing along, they get introduced to the different areas of involvement which will help them to add things of interest to their playing.

Guitarists have a tendency to sound “scaley” when they first begin to improvise. This results from the way they practice to learn their forms and positions. Fretboard Logic tries to get them past this type of thinking on to more musical and stylistic considerations, by adding elements one by one, so they are able to hear the effect each different element has on the whole solo. It is a very liberating approach. Plus the video includes jam tracks where yours truly fades out and let the students take over and experiment against different styles. I struggled to find the right balance so that players of different levels would feel comfortable with the demands being placed on them. Whenever there was a doubt, I just opted for whatever was the most fun.

GN: What role does your website www.billedwards.com play? Do you have any plans to teach students online?

BE: I’m eternally grateful to Tim Berners-Lee for his magnificent gift to the world. What an intellect. The web has been wonderful for our business, as it has for so many others. All the search engines are able to find both Fretboard Logic and Bill Edwards Publishing, so anyone who hears of us through word of mouth can go right to the source in a few keystrokes. I tried a Google search for the first time a while ago, and about 1600 hits came up in about a half a second. We receive orders from all over the world, which was unthinkable not that long ago.

Our site has our complete Catalog with detailed descriptions of our current product line (10 books, 3 videos and 2 display stands), a Feedback page, a FAQ page, Standard and Secure Order forms for both Customers and Dealers, a Teacher and Student Registry and a Links page. I’m contemplating a web based tutoring page, but that is in the early stages. We are planning a Summer Workshop for guitarists interested in an intensive weekend training session.

GN: Do you have any recommended resources for guitar, such as websites or other authors?

That is a question with too many answers. The easy answer is: sure, read and listen to everything. I’m going to let each person decide this for themselves without my recommendations getting in the way. It sounds like I’m copping out, but I feel the same way about it as I do about letting students choose their own music to work on. The choices we make either help us more or less to achieve our goals. Only by making increasingly better choices will we come increasingly closer to achieving them.

GN: There is already a plethora of music books and methods out there. Will you continue developing and releasing your own? What other projects are you involved in or planning at the moment?

BE: OK thanks for asking. I’m half way through Applied Music Theory, which is a music theory correspondence and internet course in ten parts. It starts from bare basics and develops rapidly. It will complement Fretboard Logic perfectly for students who are serious about guitar and plan to take it to higher levels. I also have a framework for an interactive version of Fretboard Logic tentatively entitled “Guitar Lab” which will incorporate elements of the books, videos, clinics and workshops into an interactive CD/DVD format. I’ve also got plans for a third video in the Fretboard Logic series, for our more advanced students.

GN: Thanks for taking the time to speak with us.

If you have never thought about or heard music from mainland China before you may be in for a surprise. As you might expect from a country with as long a history as China there are many forms of traditional music. Recent years of reform and openness have made a door for all sorts of different genres of music. Many western styles of music have already arrived in China, sometimes note for note, with the only difference being the words are sung in Chinese. The latest generation of musicians grew up listening to as much blues and rock from the west as they did traditional forms of music from home. It was only a matter of time before bands started to meld the new western influences with the deeper Chinese roots to create something different.

One such band is the Beijing band Evening News (wan jian xin wen in Chinese.) Last year they released their first album which is home to several different genres of music. The ten songs finely mix blues, rock and folk with a touch of traditional Chinese music. The sound, as you might expect, is all their own.

In a recent interview Xiao Yiping and Leng Jie told me about making music in China, their approach to songwriting and how traditional Chinese instruments fit into their songs.

Guitar Noise: Most of our readers are from outside of China. Could you say something about putting out an album in China? How does a band get signed to a record company in China and what are some of the ins and outs of working with a label?

Evening News: In China, it’s very hard to and get an album out, unless you’re signed to a record company, and then the company will pay the expenses for the recording. Evening News got together with a friend, Tutu, who has a recording studio, so we were able to use the studio for free to record our album, then we sold it to a music production company.

GN: How did the band meet and come together?

EN: We were all friends years ago, and got together to play music and mess around, then we started practicing more seriously and began writing songs.

GN: How did you make your first steps as professional musicians?

EN: After we finished high school, we all got involved with various bands and also played with our own band. We were professionals, earning our bread (rice) from music at an early age.

GN: What would be your advice to someone who is just starting out?

EN: Music is your life and your “heart” — you should really live life to the fullest, then your music will be “full” too

GN: What are your main sources of inspiration?

EN: Our inspiration comes from the pains and struggles and joys of life (mostly pain and struggle – you tend to remember it more clearly)

GN: How do you deal with lack of inspiration?

EN: We just hang out, don’t write anything, read, mess around…

GN: Are there any songwriting techniques or methods you would like to share with our readers?

EN: (Xiao Yi Ping) Sometimes I get a strong feeling about something and within that feeling there’s music – I try to catch hold of the sounds and feelings. I sometimes write the melody first, sometimes the words.

GN: How old were you when you started playing guitar?

EN: (Xiao Yi Ping & Leng Jie) We started playing guitar at age 15/16.

GN: Do you have any musical influences, for the guitar and songwriting?

EN: Western rock and blues, as well as traditional Chinese music.

GN: Did you take lessons or did you learn by yourself?

EN: Nobody learns entirely on their own – we learned from other people, watched how they played and listened to a lot of guitar, then practiced like crazy all day for years.

GN: Do you spend a lot of hours practicing the guitar?

EN: No, now we just write songs all day.

GN: In mainland China there is a lot of interest in pop and punk, but not a lot of support for “guitar bands.” Is there a place in the developing Chinese market for bands that want to go ahead and make their own style of music regardless of whether it fits into a genre or not?

EN: The market for different kinds of bands is changing and there are more chances for bands like ours.

GN: How do you describe your own music? How do you feel about the songs you write?

EN: Our music doesn’t really fit into a particular category, but it’s mainly rock/folk/ with trad Chinese mixed in… At the moment, the songs we write are very “real” – written from the heart, but we lack maturity – that has a lot to do with the fact that we don’t get together for practice very often. But our songs are pretty good anyway, they’re not rubbish.

GN: Some of the most interesting songs on your album are the ones that use some traditional Chinese instruments, the “suona” and the “ma tou qin” (Horse Head Violin). How do these instruments fit into your songs from a songwriting point of view?

EN: (Xiao Yi Ping) When I write the songs, when they’re forming in my head, some of the songs have a very strong “Chinese” feeling, so we add in the traditional instruments where they feel right.

GN: Can you say something about the “ma tou qin” violin and the way it is played?

EN: The matouqin is an ancient traditional Mongolian instrument that is usually played by old men; using the matouqin in our music, we hope to go beyond Mongolian tradition and break through with new melodies — but then again, sometimes that seems irrelevant, because those old guys have perfected the art of matouqin playing already.

GN: Can you say something about the “suona”?

EN: The sounds produced by the suona immediately make us think of “Yellow Earth” – the colour of Chinese soil, representing our nation, our culture and traditions…..but to most foreigners, it probably just sounds like cats in heat.

Special thanks to Rick Curnutt for the photos.

Kelly Richey is a blues-rock guitarist who has been compared to Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan, for her amazing guitar leads. She has been mentioned in the Guitar Forums as a female artist with great ability. Her new album, Sending Me Angels is a must check out. Her website www.kellyrichey.com allows you to listen to a few tracks from that album, as well as tracks from previous albums. Unfortunately for me, Kelly is currently touring in a part of the US that precludes my hearing her live. However, I thoroughly enjoyed her new album, and was able to catch Kelly for an interview between her busy road trip schedule and her rehearsals. She shared so much wisdom that I’ve divided our time into two separate interviews. For Kelly’s viewpoint on learning the guitar, teaching music, electric vs. acoustic, and practicing music read on! For Kelly’s viewpoint on her career in writing, performing and playing music, stay tuned for the next installment. Kelly was generous enough to share the chords to one of her originals I Gotta Move, with me, which I’ll put in a lesson as the third part of our showcase on Kelly Richey.

Laura Lasley: I read on your website that you practiced 12 hours a day as a teen. When did you start playing the guitar?

Kelly: I started playing the guitar when I was 15. I grew up playing piano and my mom was a classically trained pianist and there was a piano in our living room. I played from the time I could touch the keys. When they started giving me piano lessons, that’s when I started not liking the piano. Because I’m dyslexic my ears serve me really well, but having to read sheet music is a drag. Then they had to force me to practice and it was this major…

LL: Torture?

Kelly: Fight. “You have to practice the piano before you can go out and play”.

LL: More torture.

Kelly: I love the piano and I’m glad that I had the training. It would have been great if it could have been a little bit different.

LL: A lot of people have learned to play the piano first. I played classical piano for 12 years; I was tortured too. When reading music, I know I think about notes on a keyboard even when I’m playing guitar (instead of seeing notes on the frets). Can you read music and translate that to frets?

Kelly: My experience from taking piano lessons is where I draw my strength when I teach guitar. I don’t want people to have a bad experience with music. I teach theory with the piano to my guitar students because you can visually see theory. If my lessons were an art class and I said, “kids go home and draw me a picture of a major scale”, whoever comes back with a picture of a piano wins the prize. You can see theory on a piano. When you play the piano you have to re-finger every key that you’re in. So that’s the advantage of being on the guitar. One size fits all. I try to make students see that. That way they can visually see where music is going and they can also visually see on their guitars. And the “CAGED” system is a kind of a way of mapping out the neck of the guitar where it’s somewhat like a piano where you start getting some vision.

I started taking guitar lessons right away when I got my first guitar. Within a couple of years I began to teach as well. So I’ve taught almost my whole career. I like to get kids playing. I think it’s really important. Some people have said that I kind of teach a Suzuki method of guitar instruction. I want people to listen to what they’re doing and I want them to play it. Some kids can handle theory and I’ll give them theory. Some kids can’t. But it’s kinda like having a car. You have to be able to check the engine, the tires, check your oil.

LL: Yes, absolutely!

Kelly: Unfortunately though, when I started playing the piano, I was bogged down with theory, and I just wanted to play the piano!

LL: I know. When you picked up the guitar, did you find it was one of those, like, love at first sight things?

Kelly: Actually I first got a set of drums. My next door neighbor had a set of drums and I used to go over there and beat on them all the time. Finally he said, “Kelly, why don’t you take this home with you?”

LL: As in, “You use them more than I do?”

Kelly: Well I thought he was being nice, but I really think he was saying “Get out of here!” And after a couple of months, my dad said, “You need to get rid of the drums, I’ll buy you anything you want!” I said, “I want an electric guitar.” So we got a Sears guitar and the smallest amp you could find. And after three months I went through three of them. Three guitars. They just fell apart I played them so much. There was just something about guitar that clicked for me.

LL: A lot of people get hooked when they pick it up, it’s such a lyrical instrument you get obsessed with it.

Kelly: I was very obsessed with it! And I didn’t set it down! I slept with it, I took it to school. If I went to the grocery store I walked to the grocery store with it.

LL: I love that part in your website about taking your guitar to school with you. There are some places where they would throw you out of school for bringing your guitar with you!

Kelly: Well, they did disconnect all the outlets on the outside of the school building; they did everything that they could…

LL: You had an electric first?

Kelly: Yes, I started out on the electric. I played for at least a year before I even owned an acoustic.

LL: Wow!

Kelly: Most girls tend to start on acoustics. I think times have evolved and the electric guitar has become a little bit more important to girls.

LL: When I started to take lessons, the teacher had told me that the acoustic was better to learn on. Acoustics are more difficult to play because of the action and the strings being heavier and so forth. If you master the acoustic, you will fly through the electric.

Kelly: It really is a lot easier on the electric. Also it annoys me when the parents buy kids these outrageously expensive guitars to learn on. Get them something that they are going to have to work to get a sound out of. Let them buy their first nice guitar.

LL: Make them work for it!

Kelly: Yeah, I’m not being a slave driver or anything like that. Every situation is different. My parents spoiled me a lot. When they got me my first nice guitar and they said “Now you’re on your own”. They provided me with a vehicle. They helped me a lot when it came to touring. But if you want a guitar and you want gear, that’s yours. Don’t ever ask for that. They paid for my guitar lessons and saw to it that I had a decent instrument to play.

LL: I think that’s one of the things that we’re always harping on Guitarnoise since we try to help aspiring guitarists. We get a lot of beginner questions. You don’t have to go out and buy a major rig that some famous dude has.

Kelly: Go get something and learn how to play it.

LL: Go get a used one.

Kelly: Yeah!

LL: Get a new set of strings, strings are cheap and learn to restring your own instrument. Get a tuner, and GO!

Kelly: Learn to listen. That’s what people forget to do; they forget to listen. Of course, there are lots of guitar players out there. The guitar gods of the 60’s and 70’s, there just seemed to be more people that Played. Today we have computerized music so available to us that it’s kind of gotten…

LL: Too much tech?

Kelly: Well, computerized has become acceptable, as if it’s equivalent to playing an instrument. I don’t want to say one method is better or worse, because art is subject to interpretation and everybody has a right to their own opinion. But I sure do like to see actual musicians playing their actual music.

LL: We went to see Isaac Hayes recently. The biggest disappointment about the performance was finding out that all those beautiful horns you remember from the album are actually played by 3 keyboards. 3 Korg Tritons, doing the work. I’m thinking, both my kids play saxophone. Why don’t you have a sax player up there? It’s because it costs more to have a huge brass section.

Kelly: It comes down to cost.

LL: It does, unfortunately. It’s sad, I agree with you. There is nothing like the original music with genuine instruments. I think that really comes through in your music. It’s music.

Kelly: I’ve kept it simple and I’ve kept it three pieces.

LL: It’s real instruments, real people and real emotions.

Kelly: When I went into the city, I said to the guys, “Y’all, I have to pull this off three piece, so we’re going to do a record that represents that and we’re going embellish in a way that complements.”

LL: Exactly. You can use the tech, don’t get me wrong.

Kelly: I would love to have keyboards if I could afford it! One day I will, but right now, we recorded a record where I don’t have to use keyboards.

LL: That’s great. From our earlier conversation it sounds like you also enjoy the teaching that you do. I think that’s really great that you teach! It’s wonderful that you are sharing your talent with others.

Kelly: I love to teach! (OK, Guitarnoise students in the Cincinnati area, don’t all call Kelly at once.)

LL: That’s great!

Kelly: I’ve got probably about 30 students that I cram into 2 ½ days.

LL: Oh, Gosh! How does that work with touring and everything else you do?

Kelly: It’s hard. I’m crazy, though.

LL: Your students understand?

Kelly: Yes. Usually I’m available 3 weeks out of every month. A lot of my adult students take one lesson every other week. Adults can’t go at the pace kids do, because kids don’t have lives yet. Kids aren’t going to work. Not that school isn’t a big responsibility, but when you’re a kid, you have some luxuries that you don’t have as an adult.

Have you ever thought that maybe you should just pack in that guitar and give it all up? We all have those thoughts sometimes.

A little while ago I received a double CD from a band called Glass. The album had the odd title No Stranger to the Skies and I had never heard of the band. Being one of those people who like to go through a booklet from cover to cover, the first thing that struck me was the interior montage of pictures, studio sheets and others paraphernalia from the seventies. This of course piqued my curiosity. If this band was from the seventies, how was it I’d never heard of them before?

As I listened to the music, my first thoughts were that it was seventies-inspired, but it sounded quite fresh, not dated. The music was well written and well delivered. So I had to have a talk with the people behind it.

Glass is a three-piece band, composed of brothers Jeff (bass) and Greg (keyboards and bass pedals) Sherman and Jerry Cook on drums. I had the immense pleasure of chatting with both brothers (Jerry unfortunately being unavailable at the time). The conversation was the most pleasant I ever had with people I’ve never met before. These are very friendly people taking life the right way and who told me a very inspiring story. A story about never giving up. A story about three guys who worked hard and waited a long time but who are now reaping the fruits of their labor; No Stranger to the Skies has been critically acclaimed everywhere. And it’s about time!

Here is their story.

Glass ‘grew up’ as almost all bands did in the ’60s. Jeff formed what was to become Glass in Port Townsend, Washington, a small town about 50 miles away from Seattle, when he was 13 years old with several school friends. After several years and several personnel changes, the band lineup was himself, Jerry Cook on drums and his younger brother Greg on organ and bass pedals. “Our repertoire was not unlike other bands of the day, a mixture of popular music of the time, including The Beatles, The Byrds, The Doors, The Who, etc.”, says Jeff.

The watershed moment came on September 6, 1968, when Jeff, Jerry and Greg attended the Jimi Hendrix concert in Seattle, Washington. One of the backup acts on that night was the British band The Soft Machine. “The three of us were inspired by The Soft Machine’s performance, including the fact that they didn’t have a guitar player, something that seemed to be a requisite for all bands in the ’60s. Within months, the band stopped playing the usual popular fare at local dance halls, renamed itself ‘Glass’, and started writing our own original music.” Jeff moved from electric guitar to electric bass, and the keyboards/bass/drums sound of ‘Glass’ was born.

“The decision to drop vocals and go all instrumental was not a single conscious decision, but resulted more from a series of decisions made by the band over a period of several years.” These were decisions concerning the direction that the band’s songwriting was taking. In the beginning, Jeff was the main songwriter, composing almost all of their material. He was also the only vocalist in the band during those years. Naturally, many of the songs he wrote were for vocals and guitar.

“Over the next few years, several major changes happened in the creative forces driving Glass. One was the emergence of Greg, whose songwriting was solely in the instrumental vein, as an equal songwriting partner.” Also, their music took on more of a symphonic sound, opening itself up to a variety of influences, including Classical and Jazz. “It was during this time when we wrote the 30-minute symphonic concept piece Broken Oars.”

I asked them how was it that it took so long for your music to come out on CD?

“Good question”, says Jeff, never at a loss for words (all delivered with a very contagious humour). “The answer is somewhat complex. First, you need to understand the time frame that all the music on the CD was created in. The earliest tracks on the CD (from the piece titled Broken Oars) was created and recorded in 1973. The latest track, For Ursula Major and Sirius the Dog Star, was recorded in 1977.” Two years after they officially disbanded. Almost all of these pieces were long symphonic recordings.

“Compact disks didn’t exist back then, neither did the technology for creating inexpensive, self-produced recordings with a relatively low number of pressings. Furthermore, the greatest invention of the information age, the Internet, was not accessible to the public then. This lead to a situation where in order to sell any substantial number of a record release (the formats then were vinyl and cassette), you needed to tour constantly, and you needed to have lots of radio airplay. In a classic “Catch-22″ situation, the majority of radio stations would not play music from a band unless they were signed to a major record contract.” For a band such as Glass, who did not play hundreds of live tour dates a year, and whose music was far too esoteric to be played by any major radio stations of the day, “the situation was bleak”. Although it was seriously considered, in the end, it was deemed unfeasible to bear the cost of having an album pressed at that time.

Another technological change that made the CD possible was the digital revolution. In the ’70s, all recording was done with analog equipment. “The masters that comprise the Glass archives are all studio masters in the form of reels of tape. Some are mixed-down to 1/4″ tape, while others remain in the original 2″ multi-track format. It’s a known fact that this form of tape deteriorates after years of storage. When Glass decided that the project was going to go forward, one of the first chores was to transfer all the recordings to digital format. During this process, It was a concern that the tapes may be damaged, or even worse, ruined. Fortunately, neither of those things happened.” With the music safely converted to digital, it was then easier, faster, and ultimately cheaper to go into the studio and work with the original recording to get it releasable.

In 1975, Glass decided that they should try their luck on the European market. “It was decided collectively by the members of Glass that we might have better luck soliciting the broader attention of “The Music Industry” powers-that-be if we somehow could get the band to Europe. After all most of our musical influences (i.e. The Soft Machine, ELP etc) called Europe their home.” A demo tape of new material was written and recorded in the spring of 1975 in Seattle, Washington. “With long-time soundman Erik Poulsen behind the board, we laid down three complex tracks in two days. That demo then became our latest offering and the core around which “The Plan” to move the band to the homeland of it’s musical forefathers.”

“In retrospect, the naiveté with which this plan was developed seemed almost childish.” (I tend to disagree with Jeff on this particular point, there’s nothing childish in attempting to attain a hard to reach goal. I further believe they should be commended for the effort of trying to get the band into a new market – A-J.) But one must bear in mind when reading this that by this point the band had existed for some six years creating their own music and self-funding entire lives around it. “Beyond the basic need to survive, we were starting to need outside confirmation that there was even a place for us in the financially viable music world. We were in for a huge awakening…” In the summer of 1975, armed with a dozen reel-to-reel copies of what would later come to be known as the HHR Tape (named for the Holden Hamilton and Roberts studio where it was recorded) and some newly printed promotional packets, Jeff and Erik Poulsen departed for England and Denmark respectively. As quixotic as this unfolding tale may sound, both Jeff and Erik were able to get some sympathetic ears to listen to the fruits of our labor. “In London, I was even able to track down famed Soft Machine producer Sean Murphy. It was he who informed me that not only was it unlikely a British management company or label would be forthcoming with the estimated $20,000 advance Glass had figured it would take to move themselves and their families to Europe, but also that the economic climate in England (and Europe for the most part) was such that all the music producers, personal agents and managers were endeavoring to break their acts in The States. In fact, the US was looked at by promoters there as the Mecca of success to be “pilgrimaged” to until your artists either became a household word or, like the original lineup of Soft Machine did (after two extended tours supporting Jimi Hendrix), disband in disgust. In short, they thought we were nuts!”

Six weeks after he had landed, Jeff returned to the US with some new contacts (should Glass ever happen to make it England on their own) and some vague promises by promoters to “listen to anything new we might want to send their way”. Erik returned some weeks later with similar results. In short – the people that heard the Glass HHR Tape were impressed but there was just no money anywhere to embark on the kind of enterprise Glass had envisioned as a result of the trip. “We ended up further in debt and disillusionment. The idea that perhaps someone wasn’t going to “discover us” now loomed as a very real possibility in the peripheral of the bands collective insecurity.”

I asked them what prompted them to take the old recordings and release them 25 years later. “Despite the fact that the band was in essence in a deep freeze, there was always some level of interest in “doing something” with the recordings, especially by myself”, says Jeff. “When the World Wide Web came along and we discovered that there was a burgeoning Progressive music scene fueled by the Internet, it provided the needed impetus to start the long process of getting the tapes to CD. It was also helped along by the fact that the three members of the band are more than casual friends.” Two are brothers, and the third is a lifelong friend whom the two Sherman brothers grew up next door to in Port Townsend. This lifelong friendship was instrumental in keeping the communication flowing. “And that communication was essential in keeping the project alive.”

We spoke about the critics of the album, as they have all been quite good. I was wondering how it felt to read these critics now. “As you can expect, it feels very good! The Pacific Northwest has never been a hotbed of progressive music, and when the band was playing back in the ’70s, we were quite used to the fact that our music was not going to be attractive to the average music fan on the street, and even less likely to be reviewed. (We did score a couple of in-print reviews in the University of Washington student newspaper “The Daily”, largely because our hometown friend Bill Cartmel was an editor on the staff).” As any progressive musician has undoubtedly learned, you develop a thick skin to deal with the lack of acceptance by the average music fan. Glass was no exception. “We basically reached the point where we were creating music to satisfy ourselves and ourselves alone. When you do this, you run the risk of appearing to be arrogant, but it really is not that. It’s simply the fact that we had to reach the point in our own minds where we knew the music we were creating was good, and valid, and we didn’t need to hear from an outside source to validate that fact.

“To read the reviews now, many, many years after the music was created, and read how well it is received only fills one with a sense of destiny – the realization that there is a time for everything, and everything has it’s time. In hindsight, it’s easy to say that Glass simply was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Fortunately, we stayed with our creative vision instead of abandoning it.”

We discussed the fact that No Stranger to the Skies is a double album and a lot of people consider that a risk for a debut album. “After reviewing the volume of music we had, the choice was a simple one. In fact, at one point we were considering a four-CD boxed set. The biggest reason that didn’t happen was that the cost was very prohibitive. As far as risk, the biggest risk you are taking is whether the thing is going to sell enough copies to make a financial profit, and profit was never the motivation for doing it in the first place.” And that is obvious throughout their music.

There are still more of the old recordings. Recordings those of us who have heard No Stranger to the Skies would very much like to hear. As we discussed this, there was a very interesting exchange between Jeff and Greg. A very friendly exchange, mind you, but one which made me smile. “Once we decided that it was going to be a two CD set, the hardest task was deciding what music was going to be left off of the CDs. There is a difference of opinion (friendly comments from Greg) within the band on the ‘releasability’ of some of the older material. From a songwriting standpoint, it’s all very strong, and the musicianship is strong also. In fact, some of the early musicianship is stunning. The issues that are in debate have to due with the recording quality. Some of the recordings are pretty crude recordings. It is a matter of where do you draw the line.

“We also are dealing with the issue that up to this point, the progressive world really hasn’t heard what Glass can do now, in the year 2002. For the first time in twenty years, at BajaProg 2002, Glass played twenty minutes of new material. Due to the clever arranging of drummer Jerry Cook, it was intertwined into the older music seamlessly, so most of the audience probably didn’t even realize that it was new. At some point, we want to be considered for the music we are creating in the present, not for the great music that was created in the past.

“We don’t want to further the notion that we are riding on the coattails of past successes, from a songwriting standpoint. We probably have 7 or 8 CDs worth of unreleased material from long ago that keeps calling to us from it’s place in the closet, but, both songwriters (Greg and Jeff) also continue to write new material.

We talked about upcoming live ventures. Good news on that front! “We are in the process of planning a small tour of small venues in the Pacific Northwest (from Portland, OR up to Bellingham, WA.”

And for the near future? When can we expect a new album from Glass? “Glass is currently rehearsing new material in their rehearsal studio in Seattle, WA, with a tentative time frame for release around September of this year.” Mark it on your calendars. Meanwhile, if you haven’t already done so, get No Stranger to the Skies (NSTTS). “The current plan is to release it on Relentless Pursuit Records (our own label), with worldwide distribution handled by various other distributors.”

Here’s a bit from the last email I received from Jeff:

Back from BajaProg and refreshed! We blew them away my friend!

I’m sure they did!

After listening to Byrd’s Flying Beyond the 9 album, I felt I had to talk to this guy. The quality of the songs and this guy’s guitar skills made him an excellent candidate for an interview at Guitar Noise.

The Album

Guitar Noise: Flying Beyond the 9 is an original title, but what is the actual significance of the title? (Why the “9″?)

James Byrd: I had the album mostly finished except for final mixing and mastering in the fall of 1999. The title is reference to all of the Y2K hysteria and a play on my name. It was just a way of saying that I’m still Flying Beyond the 9 in 1999.

GN: You describe your sound as Symphonic Metal for the New Age. Do you actually mean a blend of Symphony, Metal and New Age music?

JB: No, I wouldn’t say new age music. Although I’ve heard some so called new age music that I thought was quite nice to listen to, I don’t actually listen to much music at all. The album’s lyrical content is loosely centered around millennial events, and the sub title is a general descriptive. Obviously there is a heavy symphonic element in the 70 + tracks of backing orchestration, and I needed to convey that unlike all my previous works, there was a shift in approach to the album. All my previous albums had made use of layers of guitars as a groundwork, and “Flying Beyond the 9″ was a turn of direction to putting my guitar into a more concise context where it was not “competing” with itself.

GN: One of the nice things about it is that although you are quite a talented guitarist, the album is not overwhelmingly guitar. You leave a lot of place for the other instruments (contrary to other guitarists who would tend to bury everything with their guitar prowess). Are you searching for a balance between instruments?

JB: Absolutely. My previous album (James Byrd’s Atlantis Rising Crimes of Virtuosity) was both a water mark, and a turning point for me musically. I felt I had taken over the top guitar about as far as it interested me in a traditional heavy metal context. A lot of it was frustration at not having a wider voice harmonically in terms of instrumentation I’m not a keyboard player, so it was an album where intensity alone was the focal point in terms of production. But again, I began to see my guitar as competing with itself, and I began to hear in my mind the vision of a sound where the guitar was contextual, and as a result of that, it actually had more impact, not less. It was hearing some original Van Halen songs from their first album on my car radio in 1998 that made me re think my approach. It just hit me that one guitar could sound bigger than half a dozen, and I decided to par back my tracks to just a single rhythm guitar, and my solos. I leave space because space should only be filled when it’s called for and makes the music better.

I suppose that there does come a point in one’s musical development when they’re comfortable with who they are musically, and I felt that. “What is there to “prove” really?” That you can play a gazillion notes for an extended time? I’ve never had an interest in the “gun slinger” mentality of shred. I just want to communicate with music, and the guitar is my instrument, but so are many other instruments when I compose and my keyboardist creates the scores I present. So I feel free to express myself through all of the music and words, and this too tends to keep the focus musical as opposed to gymnastic.

GN: Avianti Suite. As this piece is Opus 1, No. 63, how many of these classical pieces have you composed?

JB: Six actually. In 1996 I recorded a concerto for guitar and symphony orchestra. It had the traditional 3 movements. This was actually a couple of years before Yngwie did it. At that point in time, I did not have a record company behind me and I managed to finish only the first movement before running out of money. I was not able to find funding to finish the work to the standard I wanted, so the tapes just sat for four years gathering dust. In 2000, I joined MP3.com and at the end of the summer, I found the master of No. 46 Mvt 1 (Byrd’s Bolero) on the shelf and thought “why not?”, and I uploaded it onto MP3.com. The track can be heard here.

The other two movements were never finished, but I haven’t forgotten about them. I may dig them up and finish some day. The other pieces are also unreleased and also not finished recordings, but the music is complete in my head and always there.

GN: (as a follow up to the previous question) Do you intend to release an album of classical pieces like this?

JB: I would love to do this from a purely artistic perspective. But the economics make it very difficult to do. Yngwie (Malmsteen) got according to what he told me, nearly half a million dollars to produce his concerto in 1998. I’m nowhere close to having that kind of support to make albums, and even if I were to spend a tiny fraction of that amount to produce an entirely classical work, apart from some obsessed guitar fanatics, there really isn’t enough of a commercial demand to facilitate it.

GN: Do you feel the response to the album has been up to your expectations?

JB: Well, I was naturally hoping it would be well received. My expectations have been exceeded in terms of critical acclaim by reviewers. Out of 40 or 50 reviews, I only found 3 or 4 that were actually negative, and the majority were absolutely stellar. I definitely don’t ignore what is said about my work by fans and reviewers when it’s criticized. If I read twenty reviews, and 15 of them said something negative about the same aspect of the music or production, I would take it to heart and try to be honest with myself. So when I release an album, I do my best to meet my own expectations, but I am pretty reserved about any conclusions until I see a bigger picture from the response. It’s very easy to develop tunnel vision when putting your heart into an album. It’s inevitable really. So the positive response to “Flying Beyond the 9″ has been very gratifying.

Playing Skills

GN: When did you start playing the guitar?

JB: I can’t remember not having a guitar of some kind around. But September 18th 1970 the day Hendrix died was the day I got serious and devoted myself to really learning to play theinstrument. Yngwie also cites the same day as I’m sure tens of thousands of kids who saw Hendrix on the evening news for the first time also do.

GN: Did you take lessons or teach yourself?

JB: I have a cousin who was a very accomplished musician and band leader during the 70’s who taught me how to tune the guitar, and he gave me about half a dozen lessons where he showed me bar chords. I had the old Mel Bay self instruction books with chord diagrams too. Other than that, I was self disciplined and self taught. I used to play along with records and learn the solos note for note. I was extremely meticulous opinionated about who I listened to and learned from, and very dedicated to not only leaning the notes, but duplicating every nuance of phrasing and vibrato. I played along with albums by Hendrix, Deep Purple, Frank Marino and Mahogany Rush, UFO, Al DiMiola, Django Reinhardt, B.B. King, even Peter Frampton.

GN: As you were learning the instrument, what were the difficulties that arose? What did you find was easiest to learn and what was more difficult?

JB: I was always intent on developing the hand strength and string control to make one note sound expressive. From the time I was 13 years old, having an even, controlled vibrato was an obsession. I would spend hours on end developing this alone. My first models for what I considered the single most important aspect of expression, were Paul Kossof of Free, and Jimi Hendrix. I didn’t really care about any other aspect of playing if I couldn’t master the string itself as a single expressive vehicle. And my efforts finally satisfied me by the time I was 14. I had a fully matured vibrato by this time, and then I moved on to learning more about scales and music.

GN: What were the difficulties in adapting Classical techniques to the electric guitar?

JB: Well, if by classical techniques you mean classical guitar technique, I don’t play with a classical guitar technique because I use a pick. The most difficult aspect of translating classical music however, depends on the source you’re deriving from or studying. I listened to a lot of violin concertos. The two difficulties with translating solos played on the violin to the guitar, are that of scale length and tuning. Violinists generally or often play four notes per string in solos and cadenzas. The guitar’s scale length being longer, and the intervalic off set between the G and B strings, tend to make playing fluid sounding 4 note groups difficult. The geography of theguitar itself, encourages triplets. The longer scale length also means that three note arpeggios on a single string which is natural on the violin become very difficult on the guitar unless one uses finger tapping which I don’t care for. So for me, the challenge of playing lines which are classically derivative, is to overcome the limitations imposed by the geography of the guitar. I’ve developed a lot of unorthodox fingerings and approaches to scales as a result. Hearing Paganini’s 24 caprices when I was 18 and reading about his focus on single string playing was very helpful. I eliminated many of the guitar’s hostility to four note phrasing by adapting scalar ascents and descents to only one string, and then learned that I could eliminate the “over the string” jumps with the pick, and also tie into scale string changes at many more points on the fingerboard if I stopped looking at the neck from a guitarists point of view. This freed me up to also begin listening to many other instruments like piano and clarinet for phrases which became possible when the pattern “box” was not the center of my thinking.

GN: There isn’t much Classical music which has been written especially for the guitar (as compared to piano, violin or other more “traditional” instruments). What are your feelings on thesubject?

JB: Well, if I was a classical guitarist who depended upon existing repertoire to make music, it would bother me. But I’m not, so it doesn’t have much impact to be honest.

GN: What sort of gear do you use?

JB: I have a 1966 Marshall 50 watt plexi head and 8X10 speaker cabinet. It’s all stock except for having a safety fuse added across the mains, and having some of the pre wires physically re routed to reduce noise. I use a DOD overdrive 250 pedal and a Jim Dunlop Cry Baby. That’s the extent of my rig.

GN: Do you have any particular techniques that you would wish to share with our readers?

JB: It’s probably impossible to translate something as subtle as technique into words. I would just say that to listen and learn music from instruments other than the guitar is invaluable to developing an ability to find productive technique.

GN: If you were teaching the guitar to a beginner, where would you start and why?

JB: I would probably be inclined to begin with listening to music and developing an ability to hear the finer points of what constitutes both good, and amateurish playing. I think an ability to recognize correct pitch and time is a prerequisite to being able to play well. Assuming one has a gift for music in the first place, it’s critical to be capable of self evaluation, so I think that’s the first order of business. As far as actual physical technique, I don’t think it matters as long as it’s working for you. Technique should be the result of listening critically, and making adjustments that facilitate a good musical result. I can’t think of his name at the moment, but there is a blind blues rock guitarist (Editor: Jeff Healey) who plays the guitar on his lap with his right hand fingering the notes from above. He has wonderful sound and musicality, yet his “technique” is literally backwards from the rest of the world. What it shows it that he developed his technique with his ears, not a book or a teacher, and whatever you want to call it, it’s good technique because it allows him to convey his music as he feels it. So I have to say, I’m not really much of a believer in the idea that you can actually teach anyone anything. What I believe, is that if someone has the right mindset, there is nothing that they can’t teach themselves. Even if one has a “teacher”, they are still responsible for teaching themselves aren’t they?

GN: What would be your recommendations to another guitarist wishing to improve his/her skills?

JB: Listen to yourself. Record your own playing at every opportunity and listen critically. Be willing to make difficult changes to your physical approach to the instrument when you run up against problems that need work. Once you know how to play something perfectly, forget it and move on. Challenge yourself by concentrating on what needs improvement, not what does not.

Byrd guitars

GN: With the variety of different models of guitars with so much difference in hardware, why would someone want to make his own guitars?

JB: It’s all a part of thinking outside the box. Why should I be satisfied playing a guitar designed 50 years ago by a radio repairman who wasn’t a guitar player? Because it’s popular or some rock star plays one? I’m not bagging on Fender, there was a lot that was very right with the Stratocaster, and I chose to incorporate those positives into the design of my patented Byrd Super Avianti Guitars®. But in 27 years of playing the things, one can’t avoid finding the inherent design faults if they think about it. It was a bloody lot of work to design and patent an instrument from a brand new beginning, and it’s certainly not worth it for most people to invest that much time, energy, and money to do it. But I was in the position of a unique set of personal skills for a musician who wanted to do this. I worked in the automotive field for many years with metal fabrication and shaping skills, and prototype development and pattern making as well as many other abilities needed to design and build parts and assemblies were a second profession I depended on as an independent recording artist not making sums playing music. So for me, I just got it in my head that I really didn’t have to subject myself to the whims of others in the guitar industry about what I was playing, and I took it on to have a better guitar than I could buy.

GN: What distinguishes a Byrd guitar from another guitar?

JB: Apart from the 25.5 inch scale length and 3 single coil pickups derived from the Stratocaster, everything. It doesn’t look like any other guitar out there, and it’s actual shape is derived from ergonomics and physics. The body shape is a general “V” shape, but it is asymmetrical, and the asymmetry is backwards from other asymmetrical “V” shaped guitars like the Randy Roads models by Charvel for example . There is reason behind every element of the instrument’s shape, and in this case, it was a question of addressing two issues: First, by putting the longer of the two wings as the lower wing as opposed to the upper wing, the physical balance of the guitar is maintained by compensating for the routing out of the control cavities. I was granted a nation registered trade mark on the phrase “balance compensated wing®” for this design. Now the guitar does not “flop” towards the floor as other “V” shaped guitars will do on the strap. It balances perfectly. The shorter upper wing of the body also results in greater player comfort because the upper wing is no longer forcing the players arm forward unnaturally. So this shape, was arrived at by experience and logic. The body design allows complete access to the very last fret, and this was also very important in a guitar designed not to hinder the player.

The Byrd Super Avianti® guitars also feature a precision inlayed electronics assembly as opposed to the old “just screw the pick guard on top of the guitar and call it good” designs that have graced every other guitar on the market. I wanted a playing surface devoid of unnecessary sharp edges and protrusions, and this was again, “outside the box” thinking to actually sink the entire assembly into a precision carved recess in the face of the instrument. Sure a guitar doesn’t have to be made this way, but if you want to design something that’s a bit better, I thought it should be. The fit is so close, it almost looks painted on.

The neck joint of my guitars are also completely unique. I prefer bolt on necks. Personal experience convinced me that all arguments about “quality” aside, bolt on neck guitars definitely sound better than their set neck counterparts. I could go into the physics of glue barriers as they pertain to acoustical resonance’s, but I won’t. But what the set neck guitars did have going for them, was player comfort. So I designed a 5 bolt neck joint that was off set to fit the players hand as it’s shaped, and was contoured more like a glued in neck by blending it’s shape into the neck. I got rid of the cold metal neck plate, and counter sunk the neck’s bolts sothe player never feels them. The patented headstock design on my guitars is also rooted entirely in function. It combines the advantages of a left handed tuner array on the D thru E strings, andeliminates the requirement for string trees to keep the strings in the nut slots. During my Fender years, I had had my guitars made by them for me with left handed necks. A left handed tunerarray creates less disparity in string tension between the strings. It decreases the disparity in tremolo range between the highest and lowest strings. But when you’ve got all six on the sameside, it requires either string trees, or non traditional tuning machines to keep enough pressure on the nut. The 2 on the bass side, and four on the treble side placement of my design is the best all around layout for balancing the various considerations of string tension and tuning stability. This element of my design enabled me to stop using Floyd Rose tremolos on my guitars becausethey stay in tune without them. The tone is markedly better without the Floyd.

There are many other unique design developments in my guitars like U.D.C. fingerboard scalloping. If someone wants to know about all the features, they can go to http://www.JamesByrd.com and scroll down to the Byrd Guitars logo on the front page. I’m not actively taking orders for instruments right now due to a severe back injury I suffered in May, but I am interested in hearing from any manufacturers who would be interested in attaining a license to produce these multi patented guitars for wider distribution.

Byrd “Flying Beyond the 9″ soundclips and album can be found at Guitar9 music and Lion Music.

Thank you very much for your interest in my music and my guitars A.J.

And, she’s a very talented songwriter. Michelle’s new album, Marked for Madness has just been released. For this occasion, Michelle has answered some questions for us.

Her answers are honest and come from the heart. Probably the most personal interview I’ve ever had the pleasure to conduct. Enter her world.

Guitar Noise: Could you tell us a little of your background?

Michelle Young: I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and at age 5 moved to Dunlap Tennessee, which was a very small town. I’ve been singing since before age five, and when I was nine years old I took a few piano lessons – that’s where I learned to read music. I quit practicing (got tired of the same old primary songs) but picked up the piano again when I was 15, being inspired by some singer/songwriters in school. I started writing my own music, playing in bands, and competing in talent shows, and when I was 17 I moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee to attend college. I continued playing in bands, and took voice lessons for a couple of years, but my life was really changed when I joined the band “Glass Hammer”, and I entered the world of progressive music. I released my first solo album, “Song of the Siren”, in 1996 on Naosha Records, a label I created specifically for releasing my own material, and have recorded on over 14 albums so far in my career. Finally, my second album, “Marked For Madness”, is poised for release on September 24, 2001.

GN: Marked for Madness is an interesting title (as much for the album as for the song). Could you tell us a little more about it?

MY: This image was the original cover for “MFM”, and I believe it speaks volumes. It’s always reminded me of a Clive Barker book cover, and sometimes I feel like I could be living in one of his stories too. My life can be very fantastical in both good and bad ways. Of course, I’m not the only one who has lived a very crazy life – that’s why I believe that many people will relate to this album. We all have dramatic things happen to us that can help shape our personalities, whether we understand that or not. This album is as much of a social statement as it is autobiographical – especially if you consider the song “Melissa’s Demise”, which is based on an article I read in the newspaper about a girl who was killed by a classmate. He told the police the reason he killed her was “Nobody liked her…” And living in that kind of society, as we all do, who cannot be prone to madness? We’re all judged every day by the people around us, sometimes before they’ve even met us, and most of the time before they’ve really gotten to know us. The song itself contains dream images, some of which are re-occurring themes in my dreams …”men in coats with guns in tote”…I can’t tell how many times I’ve been hunted down in my dreams…I don’t try to over-analyze my dreams though, because then I WOULD go crazy. In general, “MFM” is much darker than my first album, but I was careful to place a thread of hope throughout the album, because we have to keep hope in our lives if we are going to continue to exist.

GN: You have quite an impressive list of personnel on this album (Clive Nolan (Pendragon, Arena), Peter Gee (Pendragon), Peter Banks (Yes), Karl Groom, Doane Perry (Jethro Tull)). How did you come up with such a lineup?

MY: I first met Clive in 1997 at ProgFest in California. I had met Paul Wrightson there also, who at the time was singing for Arena, and he heard my album and said “Clive has got to hear this! He’ll want to work with you.” Well, Paul introduced us at the festival, but it wasn’t until Clive returned home to England and actually listened to “Song of the Siren” that he called, and we had our first conversation. It seems he’d been looking several years for a voice like mine to work with, and we were finally brought together. The funny thing is, I had no idea of Clive’s status in the progressive community when we first started working together. I did, however, really like what I heard of his work, and just knew that our talents would compliment each other very well.

During my subsequent visits to England I met Peter Gee, who lives in the same house as Clive, and Karl Groom, who works with Clive at Thin Ice. I have nothing but high praise for these gentlemen, both personally and professionally, and I’m very happy to have them involved with “MFM”.

During one of the visits to England, I met Pete Banks at the studio. Clive was compiling some material for an album Pete has since released, and we hit it off very well. He’s a great guy, and during our conversations he said something like “Well, if you ever need me to do some guitar parts for you, just let me know”. How could I turn that down? He brought his beautiful new bride to the recording session, and we had a great day in the studio.

I first met Doane when I drove to Baltimore, Maryland to see my first Jethro Tull show. Ian had seen an article on me in Progression Magazine and had Kenny, his production manager, to call me and get a copy of “Song of the Siren”. Ian really liked it, and during our brief correspondence I decided to catch them on the road. I was backstage after the show when I met Doane. We talked for a while, and I realized that he also liked to do other projects, so I gave him a “Song of the Siren”, and eventually got my nerve up to write and ask him if he’d be interested in working with me. I didn’t hear from him, and didn’t even see him until the next Tull concert I caught – but my fears of getting the brush off were totally unfounded. When he saw me he smiled and gave me a big hug, and said that he loved the album, and would definitely be interested in working with me. We immediately started talking equipment compatibility, because we knew the chances of us being in the studio at the same time were very slim. In fact, he did his drum parts in California, then sent them to me. I am so grateful to have had his input on this album.

GN: How was it working with such an ensemble?

MY: It was exciting to have such talented players working with me…but, it was a long, drawn out process. It took four or five years to get everything recorded because I had to coordinate my schedule with Clive’s (one of the busiest people on the planet), and between the two of us we had to coordinate the rest of the recording. I have to say that I’ve learned a lot from working with these people – I consider them to be absolutely some of the best in their fields!

GN: “Toujours ensemble” features you singing in French, where did that idea come from?

MY: I’ve always loved studying foreign languages, particularly French. (While in college I sang in several different languages, and I found it very alluring.) As fate would have it, during a trip to Paris I met a young musician/singer/songwriterfrom Quebec, and we eventually recorded music together on his first solo album. When I wrote “Toujours Ensemble” I wanted to express that even being on the other side of the world, speaking two different languages, we could say the same thing, and always be together in the music. Music has a very strong bonding power, and has brought millions of people together all over the world. That’s the reason I wanted to end the album with this song – I want to touch people’s lives in a positive way, and always be there with them in the music. By the way, I did have some help from a very nice Frenchman in making sure my French was correct in the song. Thanks Denis!

GN: Was the end result similar to your expectations?

MY: Wow…..that’s a hard question, because I wasn’t sure what to expect. I tried to go into this experience with an open mind. By handing the producer’s hat over to Clive, and just being co- producer, I had to stand back and just watch things happen. I could put my input in at any time, and of course I surely did, but I tried to let Clive do his job without much hindrance. Many of the sounds are very different than the demos that I brought in, but some of them are still very similar. Overall I can say that I’m thrilled with the results – they were just as I expected in that they are much better than I would have done alone.

Making MFM has been an exciting, long and trying process – not for the feint of heart. But, it’s also been very rewarding, like another dream come true. I always liken making an album to childbirth (I don’t have any children of my own, so my songs and my instruments become my children). There is the conception of the idea, the gestation period of producing the album (usually with complications), and at the end there is the birth of a beautiful child that you will have to live with for the rest of your life – even if it’s not perfect. And that is what I have to pass on to the world, that will hopefully exist long after I’m gone.

GN: You have obviously been influenced by Kate Bush. Could you expand on that?

MY: I first started listening to Kate Bush in 1986, and kept listening all the way up to “Hounds of Love”. I used to love to sing along with the first album – it was great for warming up my voice for my voice lessons – plus, it was nice because I could sound so much like her. But, there was a deeper appeal – the expressiveness of her vocal techniques was something I deeply craved and was in tune with. I love to use the same exaggerations in the voice, and the same sense of extremities (low to high pitches, deep rumbles to soft sighs … variation is the key). I guess in a way, that style of singing is very theatrical – deeply sensitive but hard hitting at the same time…and that’s me – full of extremes!

I don’t actually try to sound like Kate, but the comparisons are inevitable (and that’s a high class voice to be compared to). Hopefully people will see a much broader range of my voice on “MFM”, and will start classifying my voice in a place of it’s own. Who knows…maybe someday someone will say “that girl sounds a lot like Michelle Young” – then I’ll know my individuality has been recognized.

GN: Do you find it more difficult as a woman in a male-dominated art, to make it or does this, instead, play in your favour?

MY: Whew, this can be for or against you, depending on the situation. There was a time where I wouldn’t pick up a tambourine in public because I didn’t want to be classified as the stereo- typical singer. I wanted people to know that there is much more to me, and to give me the respect I deserve. I guess at that time I felt I had to prove myself…but now, as people see that there is more to me, I’m not as sensitive to that. But, if you were to see me just singing on stage, how would you know that I play several instruments, write, engineer, produce, etc…? Of course, I have always been fortunate to gain respect as an entertainer/vocalist by people that have seen me perform live – I just don’t want to be thought of as “just a singer”. God has given me more talent than that, and I do my best to use it. Would it surprise you to know that I have been called the “fluff factor” for one band I was with (by one of the band members) – they didn’t care if I picked up an instrument or not, they just wanted me to sing in the band because I was female and would draw males in to listen. And that’s not an isolated case.

I’ve found that it is also very difficult sometimes to be female and the label owner too. I know certain men that have not taken me seriously because I was female…but, in the end, the victory is mine because I am succeeding. I work very, very hard – most people I know and work with see that, and respect it.

I guess being female can initially open some doors or draw attention that wouldn’t normally be given if you were “just another guy” in this business. But people, especially of the caliber that I’ve been working with, don’t work with you just because you’re “pretty”. If they don’t see a talent there that they appreciate, it’s not going to happen. Sometimes I have to remind myself of that (or my friends will remind me), because I tend to underestimate or downplay what I’ve done…in fact, sometimes when I listen to my music, I almost feel like a stranger listening – like that was someone else…how could that be me? Oh, and I guess that’s part of the madness too.

One thing I would like to see improve in the future is more artists, both male and female (especially in the progressive field) reaching out to each other for work and/or friendships. I have been very fortunate to have made some wonderful friends in the music industry, but sometimes we get lost in our own careers and we forget to reach out. Of course, there is the fact that you have to have a pretty strong personality to survive in this business, and sometimes people with strong personalities tend to be loners – and extremely busy (not much time for a social life in general). But, I still dream of “peace, love and happiness” – I mean, we’re all in this together. I don’t believe we’re necessarily in direct competition with each other. If everyone in the world only had enough money to buy one CD a year, then yes – that’d be competition…..but, as it is, we’re just making available to the public a vast treasure of music for their listening enjoyment.

GN: Do you find that some people take you less seriously because you’re a woman?

MY: Again, sometimes that is the case, but usually when people see my determination and my “where there’s a will there’s a way” attitude, they start to realize I’m serious, and therefore will take me more seriously – especially when they can see that I don’t just talk, I “do”.

GN: Progressive Rock is a style of music which generally tends to attract men. How is it you found your way to the genre?

MY: I had started a photography and recording studio around 1990/1991, and I was asked to do the photography for the first Glass Hammer album, “Journey of the Dunadan”. They heard my voice and realized I could sing, and decided to bring me in on the project, even though it was mostly finished. I did many backing vocals, and a few more prominent parts (Piper Kirk was already involved in the project). When I first heard the music, and realized I was going to be involved with the album, I was on cloud nine solid for two weeks! I was so impressed by the quality of the music these guys were doing – and I was allowed to do many strange and experimental things in the studio, aside from the regular backing parts. I was hooked! I wound up joining Glass Hammer for a total of three albums, and performed with them live. But, in 1996, I released my first solo album, and that was pretty much where our paths diverged. I have to say that one reason I love the “progressive genre” is that you can be as creative as you want, and there are no real restrictions. Also, there’s a standard of quality that is usually higher than in other formats you’ll find. That doesn’t mean I don’t like or appreciate other styles of music – quite the contrary! But, I believe I have found a home for my music, where people are more willing to embrace the unusual, and my voice can be used to it’s fullest capacity.

Bjørn’s genre reminds me of that of a young Mike Oldfield. Very talented, with his music saying all that needs to be said. A great musician and composer, Bjørn is certainly an artist you will want to know.

In our exclusive interview with him, he tells us more about his career and direction. Don’t forget to visit his site at www.lynnemusic.com.

Guitar Noise: Could you tell us a little about your background, influences?

Bjørn Lynne: I guess I was influenced first of all by the fact that my dad was a music fan who always bought records and introduced me to 70’s bands like ELO, Genesis and many others. The music fascinated me and I would often spend entire afternoons just listening to this stuff. When I grew up I got into sympho-rock bands like Genesis (obviously), Yes, Rush, Marillion, King Crimson, Gentle Giant, etc. I used all my money on buying CDs and I had hundreds and hundreds of CDs with both super famous bands and acts like Queen, Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, Prince etc., but also a lot of quite unknown stuff like Rupert Hine (a major influence on me), Eloy, and dozens of other bands. Then I had a big jazzy period when I bought tons of jazz CDs, but it was a passing phase. :-) In the later years I have been listening to a lot progressive rock and I guess right now my favorite bands would be Dream Theater, Spocks Beard, Flower Kings, Discipline, Liquid Tension Experiment etc.

GN: Has the move to the UK made it easier for you, career-wise?

BL: Yes, I think so. There aren’t a lot of people in Norway, and everything is on a small scale. If nothing else, being in the UK has made it easier for me to get in touch with record labels and network with other musicians.

GN: You seem to be very productive, yet one would think that the sort of concepts you produce would take time. How long do you work on preparing an album?

BL: Well, I do it full time. And I don’t mean like some full time bands who record their album in 6 weeks, then go on tour for 3 months, and then spend 2 years playing golf before they get together again. It usually takes me about 12-18 months to do an album, although some of my projects overlap – i.e. I can sometimes start on a new, unrelated project before I’ve finished the previous one. So when my latest electronica CD was released, my next sympho-rock album was already well underway. And so on.

You can actually get quite a lot done if you work on it 8-12 hours every day and only take a couple of weeks off every year. Don’t believe the hype when the guys from Yes (or whoever) try to tell you that it took them 5 years to make an album. In actual fact, they spent 4 1/2 years fannying about with their expensive cars and walking around art museums, and then 6 months – max! – to do the album.

GN: Do your songs end up being different once recorded than the way you had originally written them?

BL: Not really. When I write a song I usually have a pretty good idea what I want it to sound like, and although I experiment along the way, it’s very rare that I end up with something completely different. However, there are times when I don’t even write a song first, I just start recording. I may tinker with the guitar and come up with a little intro. Then I’ll record that intro, right then and there. And while listening to it, it may trigger some new ideas, which I again try to record straight away. This becomes the “sketch” of the song, and if necessary I’ll go back and re-record some parts, but the majority of it will stay. In these cases, the writing and recording is one seamless process. However, most of the time, I write the piece first, and then start recording it without experimenting too much.

GN: The Timura Trilogy. Could you tell us why you set out to record this trilogy?

BL: The Timura Trilogy is a series of 3 CDs of “fantasy” style symhonic rock, a bit medieval inspired. The idea first came to me when I was reading the fantasy novel “Wizard of the Winds” many years ago, and I got really inspired to write some music for some of the characters and events in the story. Having done that, I kinda kept going because I enjoyed it. 5 years later I had finished a trilogy of albums featuring all my best music, and it felt like a great personal achievement. The 3 CDs in the Timura Trilogy are “Wizard of the Winds”, “Wolves of the Gods” and “The Gods Awaken”, and together they represent about 5 years of work on my part. It feels great to have finished it, and I’m not afraid to say I’m very proud of the end result.

GN: Was it difficult to get the author’s aproval?

BL: No, it wasn’t. I contacted the author Allan Cole personally and sent him some of the first music I did for the project. He loved the music and was as enthusiastic as I was throughout the whole thing. He became a big fan, and is probably my only famous fan. (laugh)

GN: Being multi-talented the way you are (guitars, bass, keyboards, percussion), > I imagine that by the time you bring in more musicians, the tracks must be quite complete?

BL: That’s right. By the time I bring in the guest musicians, the whole basic structure of the song is already there, and most of it is recorded. There are “gaps” where I want the guest musicians to play, and they fill these gaps. But unless the guest musician has asked for it, I try not to tell them what to play. I ask them to put their own style on their solos, to play what they feel is right. However the violinist and flautist are exceptions to this, because they ask me for the score and simply play, note for note, what I’ve written down for them.

GN: How old were you when you first started playing the guitar?

BL: I was very old! I guess about 26. I have only played guitar for about 4 years. Before that, I only played keys and drums, and used other musicians for all guitar work.

GN: Did you find it difficult to learn?

BL: No, I wouldn’t say it was difficult. But it would be wrong of me to assume that I “know” how to play guitar. I will always consider myself a beginner on the guitar, but I get by. I’m a long, long way from being a great guitarist.

GN: Which model guitars do you play and why? (What do you like about those specific models?)

BL: My first guitar was a Squier Fender Strat. I just walked into a guitar shop and said “I’d like to buy a cheap guitar, and some kind of “guitar for absolute beginners book”, please!”, and they gave me the Squier. I still have it, and use it occasionally. Actually, despite being cheap, it’s not that bad. My other guitar is a Gibson Les Paul, which has a warmer, rounder sound. I also have a Crafter acoustic with a “jumbo” size body, and my bass is a Yamaha active 5-string.

GN: Could you tell us more about your sound? (Effects, etc)

BL: I record everything straight to harddisk using Cakwalk SONAR software. I have a Wavecenter sound card with 10 digital outputs connected to a digital mixing desk, and another analog mixing desk that I use as a submixer for all synth- and related stuff. Even though I record to harddisk instead of tape, I try to keep things as “live” as possible. I deliberately stay away from too much “tweaking” inside the software. If there are minor glitches or timing problems, I leave them like they are. And if there are more serious problems, I hit “delete” and record again. I program the drum patterns when I write, but these are replaced by real played drums later. I bring in the drummer, and we do a marathon session where we record all the drums for a whole album, in a few days. I also try to add a lot of live percussion, I’ve got stacks of percussive things like shakers, tamborines, congas, bongos, djembe drum, sticks, bells, etc.

GN: About the future. What are your current plans for upcoming albums?

BL: I’m not sure yet. I’m writing some new material with a more “spacey” or “sci-fi” feel to it, but on the other hand, I’m also still writing some nature-inspired, acoustic fantasy sympho-rock stuff. The two types of songs probably won’t fit together on the same album. So I don’t know yet, what my next one will be. I’ll just keep writing and recording for a few months and see how it goes. For the last 5 years I have always known exactly what was needed, I had to write this-and-that for so-and-so project. So now it feels good to just write without preconceptions, just let the music go where it wants to, and see what happens.

GN: Have you found that moving to Proximity Records has been beneficial for your career?

BL: It’s hard to say. Both Proximity and my previous label Cyclops are small labels. It probably doesn’t make a whole lot of difference sales-wise. But I went to Proximity Records now, because the guy who runs it is a good personal friend of mine, and I know he works very hard and is very enthusiastic. I’m still on very good terms with Cyclops Records, the split was completely amicable. They are carrying my new CD as a distributor, and we are good friends.

GN: Does your MP3 site help a lot toward having your music better known?

BL: Yes, I think it does. It doesn’t lead to many direct sales (I’ve never seen an artist on mp3.com who actually sell a lot of CDs through that site), but I like to think that it leads to new fans and helps to add to the long-term fan base.

GN: Any plans for live shows?

BL: Not at this time. With me playing 90% of the stuff myself, the only way this could be done live would be (a) to set up a sequencer or backing tape, and just play along with it, or (b) put a big band together. The first option definitely a no-no for me, because I’ve seen those kinds of gigs where some guy sits and plays along with a tape, and I think it’s really really sad and embarrassing. So that’s definitely off. The other option is a possibility, and I’ve played in bands in the past, but I’m thinking it would take a lot of time and energy to get a band together, learn all the songs (and most musicians are probably not too keen on just joining a band and playing somebody else’s songs, without having any writing influence), and rehearse until everybody knows everything. The amount of sheer work that would go into this would mean that I would have to sacrifice other things, like writing new music, trying to promote the music, record new ideas, connect with the guest musicians, and so on. So anyway, for the time being, I don’t have any plans to do any live gigs.

GN: Any plans for Soundtracks?

BL: I would always be interested in soundtrack work. I have done some small bits and pieces, but nothing major. Should the opportunity come along, I would welcome it.

While I enjoy The Green World, my family’s favorite Dar album is The Honesty Room; her debut album. This summer, our intrepid Other Side correspondent, Laura Lasley, was able to catch Dar for an interview in a Manhattan diner.

Laura Lasley: What kind of guitar do you like to play and why?

DAR: I’ve been playing a steel string guitar for 15 years. I learned on nylon. My first steel string guitar was one that my mom got for $50 at a tag sale, called a Favilla. When I started going to open mikes, I was told to get rid of my Favilla. So I got a series of guitars. One was really bad because it was too big. It was a Guild Jumbo, the big thing that belonged to Naomi Judd.

LL: Well, you’re a petite person.

DAR: Yes, but when I was trading mine in, there was a 6′4″ guy bringing his Jumbo back; he was saying that his back hurt from playing. Mostly I try to go for the smallest guitar possible with the biggest sound. What I have now is sort of a medium sized guitar.

LL: What kind do you play now?

DAR: It’s called Huss & Dalton (website) and they’re from Virginia. They’re just starting out and they are great!

LL: I find that because my hands aren’t really big, when I pick up an acoustic guitar and try to play a barre chord, I’m not always able to. I know a lot of women have that problem. I’ve also found that one of the challenges is finding something that you can play without putting out your back!

DAR: I think it’s something that you should take very seriously, buying a guitar. You should definitely take your comfort into consideration. Worst case scenario, you buy a guitar and you realize that you don’t really want to pick it up and play it because it makes you feel uncomfortable and your hands can’t make the chords. You need to take that seriously. Don’t just think “I must be bad at playing guitar.” You need to trade that guitar in for another.

LL: You started to play on a nylon string guitar. What inspired you to pick up the guitar? Did someone in your family have one?

DAR: Well, in the fourth grade, we were told that it was a good idea to start an instrument. I remember my sister Meredith coming home from elementary school in tears, and she wouldn’t tell us why, and when my mom left the room she said “I got a violin!”

I tried clarinet, and it didn’t work out for me. It’s a fabulous instrument and I remember that our teacher was really cute, and he had to wear a dress because he was playing in the pit orchestra for Cabaret, so that was very exciting. I decided that clarinet wasn’t for me, and my Mom said, “Do you want to play the guitar like your sister Julie?” Julie is my older sister, who I really looked up to, and I said yes even though my mind said no, because I could never be as good as Julie. There was just no way, ’cause she really was up there with the Parthenon.

And yet, it’s funny, you might wonder if it’s one of those things that’s meant to be, because there I was, getting lessons before I even knew what was happening. The great thing about guitar is that you can sing, which I like to do. I could sing after learning just two chords, and they weren’t even the full chords. It was like the two finger version of the C and the one finger version of G. But you could still sing Go Tell Aunt Rhody. That was encouraging, to be able to do so much with so little. That encouraged me on, and I had good teachers, who I did not think were good at the time. I didn’t realize what they were pulling on me. They were teaching me the basics that I work off of today. I remember working with one woman for two years, who didn’t think I practiced. I remember her telling me, “I’m going to have to tell your mother that you don’t practice.” Even though I may not have practiced as much as I should have, what I learned was great. I ended up taking four years of lessons.

LL: I remember learning classical piano, and having zero basis in chord theory, which is why, as an adult learning to play guitar, I find that to be more of a challenge. Did you feel that your teachers taught you to visualize where the notes are, or do you learn more by sound?

DAR: I learned the basic families of chords. I have to say, my mind did not take me to a much more curious place, so I really worked within the families of chords and that was instilled in me early on. If you’re playing a C, it goes with an F and a G. It’s a 1-4-5, but I never learned it like that. And to this day, if someone says, “How about a 4, or a 5?” I just, oh, I die! I’m a natural harmonizer, so I do a lot by ear.

LL: I’m really glad to hear you say that, because I’m embarrassed when I’m playing with other people and they get picky about chord patterns. And there I am, sitting there trying to figure the pattern out; I don’t want to look like a dork!

DAR: I’ve sung harmony with the Indigo Girls and with Joan Baez and Bonnie Raitt. I was petrified each time that one of them was going to say, “How about just throwing in a 4 there?” I think maybe Bonnie Raitt did say something like that, and I thought, “I could just die. My legitimacy is completely over.” Actually, those artists don’t really talk that way. It’s more what sounds good, what sounds bad, what sound’s kind of lucky, what accommodates our voices. I would say that I wished I’d learned the piano because there is crossover between piano and guitar. I feel like if I knew both of them, I could use the crossover, the synergy…

LL: There’s still time….

DAR: You know, one of the worst pieces of advice I ever got, the worst discouragement I ever experienced was when I was 17. I told my music teacher that I wanted to take piano and he said, “You’re 17, it might not be too late.”

LL: You’re kidding!

DAR: Well, the thing is, as a youngest child, the idea of being a late bloomer was horrible. Of course at 34, I embrace blooming at all. But at 17, the idea of being behind the curve from the get-go was so humiliating that I didn’t start. So I have been very apprehensive about starting the piano. But some day…

My guitar teacher has taught me how to read music, but not to sight sing. Somebody tried to teach me to sight sing and I wish I’d done that, but I never pursued that.

LL: You mentioned playing, singing with a lot of famous, inspirational female artists, some of whom are people that I look up to. Who are some of your favorite artists, the people that inspire you to both sing and write music?

DAR: Joni Mitchell is someone who introduced a full colorful palette of emotions and subjects into her songs, and she also brought this whole different scale into her music. Before, everybody was playing chords like blues, greens and yellows, and she suddenly brings turquoise, mauve and really subtle colors. It’s hard not to admire all the subtlety and creativity. A part of me says, “Wow, that’s really great!”

I feel encouraged by the people that can write really great songs with three chords, like John Prine. People who do stuff that you can play around a campfire.

I would say that somebody who can hit the balance between the two is Paul Simon. His stuff is so beautifully arranged, which means sometimes very simple variations on plain old chords and sometimes very, very elaborate arrangements. The way that he orchestrates a set of chords, which can be simple chords, really makes a point. He’s not afraid to play it simple, I think. So that’s my role model.

LL: I read an article about you, or maybe a review for The Green World, which said that you don’t peg yourself necessarily as one type of singer or another. It seems that people in the music industry are interested in putting people in genres; you’re pop, you’re folk, you’re country, you’re rock. I’ve seen you quoted as saying “’60’s folk rock was my original muse and the folk audience-people who listen to music off the beaten track fostered my career. I definitely don’t want to abandon the genre but I also need to make sure I’m Dar Williams first.” Where do you feel the roots are, for the music that you write and play?

DAR: There’s one pick that I’ve used a lot and I’m trying to avoid it now but it’s called the Travis Pick.

It’s a very classic folk chord pattern. When I use that, even if I’m singing a song about New Wave performance art or something the song will still have that sound of folk music. Using simple arpeggiations, which just means you pluck the notes instead of strumming them, it sounds very folky. Playing on an acoustic guitar is something that is originally a folky thing. Because I don’t do a lot of orchestration, chromatic or very fancy stuff, again that has a ring of folk music to it, as does an emphasis on lyrics more than arrangement. So all of those things sort of bring my music back to at least the simplicity of folk music. The subjects of my songs really range.

LL: I’ve noticed that.

DAR: It’s also really fun to go into a studio and have other people play all sorts of whacked out instruments and do whatever they want. I have no problem with that because my heart is really with theater. And conceptualized art, just where people push the envelope.

LL: I know that you started out in theater. Obviously you’ve done very well doing solo guitar shows. How did the transition come about and what made you decide to pursue music instead of theatre?

DAR: It’s so funny, I don’t know how I thought I could be a folk singer, because I didn’t know there was a resurgence of this very off-the-beaten-track music, this thing called folk music. It’s great! I was out of college, and I was in Cambridge. I was writing plays, working at an opera company and writing some songs. I was interested in directing opera, singing folk music or writing plays.

LL: Pick one!

DAR: Yes. The opera was very romantic, very great. I realized quickly that I didn’t want to direct because, like acting, there is a lot of maintenance for very few slots and the field is very competitive. The people who were prepared to become directors were people who had been listening to opera since they were 2, and knew the whole libretto of the operas. I was a stage manager at the opera company, and I missed singing. I started taking voice lessons from a hippie who said, “Are you interested in opera or folk?” She told me to sing something for her, and I sang her a song called “The Coming of the Roads” (by Billy Ed Wheeler) She got all choked up and told me to pursue folk music. She gave me the names of all the coffee houses that she sang at in the early ’70’s that are still around. They were all open mike, you pay $2 to get in.

LL: So this wonderful person basically said, ” I think you’re really good at this and why don’t you go for it?”

DAR: Yes. It took me many months to act on her suggestion. A friend of mine, a guy who started playing guitar in college and loved it so much that he was 10 times better at it than I was, said, “Come with me to the Naked City coffee house.” It was one of the ones my voice teacher recommended so I went. I remember I didn’t play that night, and he did. And I was like, “Whoa! My friend just got up sang whatever wanted to.” The next week I decided I was going to play and sing.

I realized pretty quickly that as a playwright, you have to become your own producer, director, actor, stage manager, props mistress in order to succeed. Whereas as a musician, you could write a song and jump up on the stage that night. So it was really the path of least resistance.

At that time there was an incredible proliferation of open mikes. I think that you need that experience if you’re 20 or 22 years old, as I was. I wanted to get better, because I was bad! There I was with my Favilla, my stage fright and my cotton mouth, my bad diction and my falsetto, which was so different than my chest voice. I had all this work to do, and this crowd of passive, aggressive, competitive, heart of gold good people were giving me advice that I needed and did not need, pushing me along to find out who I was as a performer.

So that’s what I ended up doing, and I left the playwriting behind at some point. I wrote half a play, read some of it for some friends, and they said “We’ve no idea what this play is about.” So I continued with music, and the music just got better and better.

LL: It sounds to me, a little bit like the old joke, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?: Practice, practice, practice.” With the folk circuit, it’s playing coffee houses: playing, playing, playing. Do you find yourself practicing a lot now? Along with the practicing, how do you get yourself ‘up’ for shows?

DAR: It’s mostly vocal warm ups. It’s good to get your hands on a guitar before you play, but that usually happens for the sound check. Ideally, you play the night before and as you play, you re-learn whatever you need to learn. Usually I play three or four shows in a row so I’m automatically warmed up.

I pick up the guitar to write songs, not to practice the ones that I have already played before, because I’ve played them a million times. But that said, I want to take this fall off to pursue some projects, one of which is to take more lessons. I’d like to ask someone to help me orchestrate and arrange the songs that I’ve already written, to give them a little more subtlety.

LL: I’m delighted to hear you say that. You’re at the stage where you have a career, you have albums out, and you have great fan base. It’s wonderful to know that even with all that you’ve accomplished, you’d like to take more lessons. So many people ask me, “do you think lessons would be a good thing?” I think you can always learn more about the guitar. It’s really refreshing to hear an artist of your caliber say that.

DAR: Well that’s nice to hear! I keep on feeling that people are going to catch up to my secret, which is that I could have practiced more and I could have been a lot better than I am. At some point I hear artists starting to sound repetitive. These are people that I like and their songs are very good, but their style becomes very predictable. And then there’s people like Paul Simon. What’s great about what he did with Graceland was that you assume that he made this huge disciplined move to learn. You see him in a smoking jacket, with a pipe, in a library learning about world music. Actually, he was given a tape of an African band by a friend. He listened to it in traffic on the LIE (Long Island Expressway) from what I hear. I’m assuming it was Manhattan to Long Island traffic.

LL: That’s a lot of traffic.

DAR: So he became completely obsessed with this tape. His passion led him on a path of inquiry, and that’s what you hope for. When you hear a new kind of music , you may think, “Wow, I could never play that.” Then somebody comes along and says, “Yes you can,” or “Here’s how you can do it.” You learn the new music in synergy with that. Learning new things helps you find new voices to play with, new lyrics and new rhythms to play with. It’s very inspiring. Sometimes people will buy a new guitar so they will continue to be inspired. Sometimes people take a few lessons and again with guitar, I think that it takes very little to yield very new ideas. And if I had my dream, I would , someone would touch me with a magic wand and I would become completely impassioned about learning all sorts of things I could about the guitar. I’m in love with words, and I’m in love with voices and the guitar is this magic carpet that allows me to use both of those. I’m incredibly indebted and I love my guitar.

LL: When you you write your songs, do you find that you have a melody poking around first. Or since you love words, do you find that the lyrics come first, and you build a melody around them? I guess this is really the eternal question, “How do you write a song?” What’s your particular method?

DAR: Well, there’s three things. There’s words, there’s melody and then there’s chords. It’s kind of catch-as-catch-can. Ideally what happens is that a phrase with a melody pops into my head and then I write a song to justify what that phrase is. For instance, this line came into my head, “If I wrote you, if I wrote you, if I wrote you, you would not write me again.” I wrote a whole song to explain what that chorus meant.

Sometimes, I’ll pick up the guitar and futz around, and I may not know the names of the chords, but I’ll futz around up or down the neck. I’ll evoke some mood and the mood will be a rainy day or a kind of feeling. I’ll follow the feeling and that will lead to a melody. The melody will have a feeling and certain images attach themselves. If you don’t push yourself, it’s pretty helpful.

I wrote a song about these potheads; I didn’t think I was going to write it. It was sort of earnest (also in a Travis pick) and folky but I didn’t just want it to be about some maid cutting her own throat at the banks of the Ohio. So I decided to write this tragic song about these people involved in a pro-hemp movement; him because he’s a pothead and she because she’s earnest about conservation (“The Pointless, Yet Poignant, Crisis of a Co-Ed” on Mortal City). I followed the idea further and further, the characters delineated themselves and suddenly I had a whole song. The more playful the better in my experience. The more pressure I can take off myself, the better. I also try to encourage myself to hope for the next highest standard of …

LL: Evolution.

DAR: Yeah, I encourage myself to wish for evolution.

LL: One of our [family's] favorite songs is “When I Was a Boy.” I would love to hear what the inspiration for that particular song is.

DAR: Well, it was definitely a thing that came into my head, the line “when I was a boy.” Actually, it’s interesting, there’s a Beatles song with the exact same melody of the line “when I was a boy.”

LL: Really!

DAR: It’s in the song “She Says,” so that is probably where the inspiration came from. The line was “when I was a boy, when I was a boy”. And I thought ouch! The feminists are going to say, “Why couldn’t you be that way when you were a girl?” But I wasn’t like a boy, I was a boy. So there was grit to stick to that strong line. I was describing how I was a boy, and then I was trying to decide how to end the song. I thought the song was going to be a whole thing about women in the world, but I realized it’s just not a feminist song. It’s not a song about women, it’s a song about children. So that’s why the ending is “when I was a girl.” And that’s what made all the difference. Because if it was turning into a feminist manifesto, it would have been really heavy. It would have been like that rib that they put on the car in the Flintstones, and the whole car falls over! It would have been that rib.

LL: It’s a wonderful song! As you listen, you remember those feelings. When I was a little girl, I was a boy, I played, I did this. And the ending is so endearing, when this man says “when I was a girl.” It’s a wonderful story to tell and it’s also an empathetic type of a song.

DAR: I’m very glad that was the effect, because I think there is a lot of empathy between men and women, and they want to share, but they get polarized by these debates. I didn’t want to feel that I was arguing against men, especially since men get shafted so much by their roles. Actually a lot of women that I speak to who would have been the separatists, they feel sorry for men. They don’t feel like men are the enemy, they feel like men are the victims of these roles.

LL: In performance, sometimes you perform solo and sometimes with a band. How do feel that the energy, the synergy is different? I’m sure it must feel very different for you.

DAR: Well, I think that when I’m solo, I get to feel a little more like a Lily Tomlin. In doing a one woman show, all of the aspects of my weird character kind of come out in one place or another. Whereas with a band, the goal is to hit your mark, do your thing, pull it off, land, and wait for the score from the East German judges.

LL: So in some respects, the solo performances are more about your personality and yourself. Playing with band is more of a “we’re all in it together” experience; the team has to pass the baton and get to the finish line!

DAR: Right, it’s a lot more about getting it up on its feet and running, and creating a spectacle or a phenomenon as opposed to endearing yourself to the audience.

LL: Do you prefer one or the other?

DAR: I like them both. I like them both a lot. I think that actually it’s less time to set up when you’re solo, so I guess I prefer that!

LL: Music, not necessarily folk music, but a lot of performance music, has been seen as predominately a male dominated field. Do you feel you’re treated any differently when you perform or when you produce albums? Because of your gender do you feel there is any kind of difference in treatment, or you’re pretty much able to move forward?

DAR: I don’t think there’s any difference for me, for a few reasons. One is that I have been, unfortunately, (and this is changing a lot so I don’t want to be a role model here) a bit of a girly girl. I really have let men be tech heads, while I say, “Ooh, look at that fancy knob, how does that work?” So I have subordinated myself to that. However, as a performer, you get to be a performer no matter what. It’s not like you get to tell your story any less on stage because you’re a woman. Once you’re on the stage, you can do what you want. Women have more money now, than in the last 20 years. Women who have disposable incomes are saying, “I don’t think I want to go see a movie called Thor, honey. I don’t think I want to see a movie called Rambo or Total Disaster. I think I’d like to see a story about women at a beach house talking and drinking too much wine.” And I think that women want to hear women’s stories. So actually, if anything, this career fits a market that has left a lot of men I know saying, “Damn it, if only I was a woman, I would really be cooking.” So actually I’ve gotten preferential treatment.

LL: Do you find that there are women in the technical side of music as well?

DAR: Yes. They have a whole different perspective. When women go into sound and light, they are really good, they are bringing a new perspective. Often they haven’t lost their high end hearing.

LL: So one of the reasons you end up hiring male technicians, is mostly because it’s still mostly men in the field, but when you find good women…

DAR: They’re great! And often they are seen as the tops of their field. One of the women I worked with in lighting, Jennifer Tipton, is a very famous lighting designer. I think there is something about the palette and perspective that women bring. All these people that I’ve worked with, sound people, are men and you just have to have a touch, a sensitivity about what they do, to be really good. It can’t be what we call “a guy thing”. That’s it’s just levers or knobs or an on and off switch. I think men like the technical part, but you’ve got to have a sensitivity to awaken the potential of all this knowledge.

LL: Talking about performance, for anyone who’s ever done any public speaking, or performed the fifth grade school play, there can be a whole lot of stage fright. There you are, all by yourself, on a stage with just a guitar, and a mike, that hopefully works. Does that bother you?

DAR: Well, I get tense before shows and I’ve come to understand that is a variation of stage fright. But I don’t feel the kind of stage fright, where I think I’m going to throw up before I get on stage. The two years when I was doing open mikes, I got something called cotton mouth, which means your mouth goes completely dry and you don’t know what’s about to come out of your mouth. I remember on a Friday the 13th, I was so angry at somebody who had dumped me and I got up on stage without any pre-conceived notion of what I was supposed to sound like. I made some joke about something that was irreverent and unplanned, and I didn’t throw it out like this big “do you like me” thing, it was more like, I was just sort of shooting from the hip, and it was very successful. And that’s when I learned that the act of being yourself is the act that I was trying to perfect. Being yourself means that you filter out the things that are truly uncomfortable to say onstage. There is wiggle room between what’s uncomfortable and what’s comfortable. Talking about being in therapy for X number of years turned out to be easy. But at one point I talked about something I’d said in therapy, just before the concert, and that wasn’t OK. Talking about whether or not I’m in therapy now is not a comfortable topic. Ragging on a teacher who really deserved it was not hard. Ragging on a teacher when I knew what some of her troubles were, that is, ragging on somebody without qualifiers, without some compassion is not okay.

LL: You tell a lot of stories when you perform. You seem very comfortable in front of the microphone and sharing vignettes about your life.

DAR: What’s great is that you discover that there are all these things that you can talk about that seem like they are taboo, and you go “why?” It’s fun to figure out what your personal comfort zone is, and to figure out what are the clichés, the PMS sort of clichés. But it’s really all about figuring out how to be yourself onstage and it’s not about perfecting being somebody else. That was THE day that everything changed.

LL: That’s wonderful! I think it’s inspirational to hear for other people who are just starting to do that. It sounds like once you felt comfortable inside your own skin, then you could just go out and be yourself.

DAR: Well, I don’t know if I felt more comfortable, but after that day, no cotton mouth, no more horror about what was about to happen on the stage. Starting to take voice lessons also helped because I was better able to predict that no matter what came out of my mouth, it would be ok, at least.

LL: One last question. The Internet has seen an incredible proliferation of web sites, like the beautiful web page promoting your new album. There are also a lot of enthusiastic fans out there making sites. How do think that’s helped in terms of communicating your song, your music out there? How do you feel about the whole Internet thing?

DAR: Awesome. It’s interesting. People say, “Well, I’ll just launch my career on the Internet.” I don’t think that that’s the way to do it. You have to draw attention to yourself in some other way.

Really, there is nothing like a record label to make the right phone calls, get the right publicity, put it all together, put it out, distribute it, get it into stores. Record labels are justifiably maligned, justifiably criticized. But they also do the work they say they are going to do, if they care about you, which my label does. So my label and I are in a partnership. I tour. I do the interviews that I’m set up to do. I put up my hair very nice for the publicity shots, shave my armpits even. I’m generous to them. And they, in turn, are really good at getting stuff in stores.

That said, the Internet facilitates and furthers my agenda. Especially when I was starting out and I had some attention. I played one concert for five people at a large showcase one weekend. One of the people in the audience was the head of this Folk Digest. Another was into writing the folk DJ list, for presenters of folk music on radio shows. My name was all over the Internet after that weekend and I went on a tour a month later and because of the Internet, I had five more people at every concert than I would have had otherwise. I did a house concert at one radio presenter’s house. I did a diner concert at one radio presenter’s home diner in Wisconsin and did one café concert for somebody who had set it up through the Internet. And there were 20 extra people there, writing down my set list. So it was very good, it created my career. It turned my touring in my Honda for three months from a totally money-losing venture, to…

LL: Paying gas money?

DAR: Right, right, right! And the Internet allows hook ups for people, so if a person has a market near Chicago, and then something in Nashville, suddenly they have a Louisville concert, a Memphis concert, and a Nashville concert. You wouldn’t necessarily need a record label, if you’re living hand-to-mouth successfully, traveling the country. It’s a huge amplifier for non commercial ventures. And it’s very, very important for a lot of friends of mine.

LL: Dar, thank you so much for speaking with me. I really appreciate your taking the time out of your busy touring schedule to talk! Good luck with the tour and your song writing and recording. I’m looking forward to seeing you in concert in this area, and looking forward to the next album.

More can be found about Dar @ her website: www.darwilliams.com

Later I rediscovered him through more of the Earth Band’s music, as well as through other works. One of the most notable was Jeff Wayne’s The War of the Worlds. But also, I heard him leading for Alan Parsons, as well as for his own albums.

I’ve had the honor of having a conversation with Chris, and discovered a very nice person, a man who knows his place, but doesn’t let it get to his head.

Chris started off by reviewing his career. “I joined Manfred Mann’s Earth Band in 1974, and stayed with them until 1997, on and off. I started on the album that had “Blinded by the Light“, which is the song that most people seem to remember when referring to Manfred Mann.

“Then, from 79 to 83 I was in a band called Night. We had a hit with the song “Hot Summer Nights,” which you still hear on the radio.”

Chris has had a very busy career, writing, doing albums, playing concerts, working with such artists as “Ozzy Osbourne, right through to the Doobie Brothers.”

Then there was SAS. Rather than actual touring, SAS played individual gigs. “We’d have three or four different singers, and the musicians that were around us. Each show was unique.”

I asked him about the Alan Parsons session. “It was an interesting experience. It was his (Alan Parsons) first work without Eric Woolfson. It was on the album “Try Anything Once“. The touring was fine, we went to Brazil and around South America, I’d never been there, so that was interesting.

“At first, the show was simply too long. So we had to shorten it, get other hits. They had never been on tour. So they learned that what’s important in the studio is not always important on the road. And what’s important on the road is not always important in the studio. So once we taught them that, everything was fine.”

Having worked with so many people (Manfred Mann, Alan Parsons, Jeff Wayne, Steve Hackett, Ozzy Osbourne, the Doobie Brothers, etc), I asked him whether he was ever in a situation where all he was thinking about was getting out of there.

“I would’ve got the hell out of there. Actually, there was one situation where I did get the hell out of there. At the end of the day, I told them I wasn’t returning the next day. I felt like they were wasting their money.”

About writing for others, I asked him whether people ask him for songs he’s already written or do they want him to write specifically for them. “Trying to write for someone else usually ends up something else. It’s better to give them something I’ve already written.”

Of course, one cannot talk to Chris without discussing Jeff Wayne’s “The War of the Worlds” album. He had nothing but praise about Jeff Wayne and his whole experience with him.

“Jeff Wayne is one of the most talented producer’s in the world! Doing that album, to me, was like being part of rock history. And it was! The album sold eight million copies! And it probably still sells about a half a million copies a year.”

He says that Jeff Wayne worked him harder than anybody else ever has. “I spent the day doing the vocals and, just as I thought I’d done it perfectly, Jeff told me that the next day he wanted to do it all over again, to double-track it!

“He’s such a tremendous person! I can’t say enough of that good album.

“Jeff is such an incredibly talented guy! I was working on another project with him. It was called “Spartacus“. We spent four years working on it. Jeff actually spent eight years on it. Anthony Hopkins was narrating it. Then Sony came in and decided they didn’t like the vocals. They got some unknowns in on it and probably spent more money on the launch than on the whole project.”

To my question about his not being too enthused about Sony (what have I been saying all this time?), his reply was quite direct. “Of course I don’t like them! They wasted four years of my life and eight years of Jeff’s life.”

However, Chris does have a copy of the album as it was, with his vocals. Unfortunately, we cannot hear it…

Now it’s his new album, the first one since 1992. Too long, if you ask me. But then again, he is busy.

But, overall, with such a career, has it been rewarding? “It has, it has! Now I’m sitting down and concentrating on myself.”

Is he really? I wouldn’t have expected him to be a selfish person. He told me he’s going to England for a few weeks. His son is starting his exams. Chris is going over there, just to help him study.

And that’s the way music should be done. Unfortunately, this wouldn’t work with a major label. But the result is one incredible album, in all fairness, one of the best ones I’ve ever heard. I absolutely wanted to talk to someone from the band to find out more about it and about them. Also to find out what their future plans were.

So I had an interesting phone conversation with Malcolm Smith, the band’s guitarist. Also, I contacted vocalist and lyricist, John Mabry, to find out more about the album’s interesting concept.

Guitar Noise: You guys started off as a Genesis tribute band, didn’t you?

Malcolm Smith: We did a lot of the great, old Genesis material, focusing on their music up to “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.” We ended up having about three hours of material and we performed it a couple of times. It was a lot of fun.

Having played that music so long and in such depth it’s hard for me to listen to it now, since I listened to it so much when we practiced it. We did some of the theatrics, but it was the music that we were able to get the feel for.

GN: You have the Hackett style down to a T.

MS: Well, it’s not from any design, of course, it’s just what I used to listen to a lot. I really love that sound with the volume pedal. I also listened to a lot of Camel and a lot of Yes, and others. I’d say my three favourite guitarists, in no order, are Steve Hackett, Steve Howe, and Steve Morse. For some reason they’re all named Steve, don’t know why…

Hackett was one of the first guys who did the volume pedal technique. He was also, by many accounts, the first to do a hammer-on. Anyway, he uses the volume pedal to great effect. I especially like the big fat, heavily over-driven sound, but with no attack that I get by using the volume pedal. It’s almost a synthesized kind of sound. It makes for a very different kind of guitar sound, when you don’t have that sharp attack. It’s helped me to make my guitar a more expressive instrument. I’m really able to put more emotion into certain notes that way. I listened to the Hackett style a lot as I was learning to play, so I just naturally incorporated it into my sound. I use it as a volume control as well.

What’s also fun to do with the volume pedal is use it with clean chords. Again it has a very different sound. And trying to do it with harmonics, sounds come out that you never would have expected. So it provides this other colour that you can play with to try and make the most expressive sound possible and to try and get a variety of sounds.

GN: It’s a nice thing to have a concept album.

MS: Yeah. Our great vocalist and lyricist, John Mabry, he just took the bull by the horns and came up with this cool concept that brought the whole CD together. John also wrote the two more acoustic-style songs on the CD. It was nice to do a concept album; it’s sort of a progressive rock tradition to do at least one!

I think our next CD probably won’t be a concept album. With Starfooted, the concept was sort of a big deal that came to the forefront of the creative process when John started writing the lyrics, you know, and it just developed that way naturally.

GN: The sound is very Genesis-like in a way. Not like what Genesis sounded like, but what they would sound like today had (Peter) Gabriel and (Steve) Hackett stayed.

MS: That’s quite a compliment, and perhaps true because Genesis is certainly an important part of our influence. As Metaphor’s main composer, I had a lot of this old Genesis-type stuff just built up inside of me for the past twenty or thirty years that I really wanted to put into a CD. Everything I enjoyed and loved in progressive rock came out with this CD. But this music represents only the beginning of the band’s musical development.

We’re working on the new CD right now and I believe it’s a bit of a departure from our traditional Genesis-influenced sound, simply because we are progressing and maturing musically as a band. It’s somewhat different and I think that listeners will be appreciative of this progression in our music.

Our stuff, I think it’s kind of honest music with that Genesis feel to it. It’s original in its concept and in its execution. We’ve really shown that we have our own ideas. And we’re moving on them.

(Talking about Galileo Records)

MS: Galileo is a great independent record company, run by Patrick Becker in Switzerland. They’re very supportive of progressive music. They’re not too worried-like the rest of us in progressive rock-they’re not too worried about making a lot of money. They’re just concerned with helping progressive music get out to the world. And they do an excellent job of it.

They have a good variety of quality progressive rock on their roster, and we’re happy to be part of Galileo.

GN: Any plans for any shows in the near future or are you concentrating on the album?

MS: We’re just setting up for the next recording. We all have our real lives and our jobs, so we aren’t able at this point to rehearse enough to give shows. Our main goal is to work on the material for the new album. Our secondary goal is to keep the old stuff alive. We definitely want to play live. We’re willing to finance it ourselves and put together a good show. But it’s a matter of a lack of time.

GN: Peter Gee of Pendragon mentioned last year that only a few months earlier had Nick Barrett left his bread run.

MS: Yeah, it’s next to impossible to actually make a living in progressive rock. I’d say there are three tiers in progressive rock: Tier one, aside from the dinosaurs (bands like Genesis, ELP, and Yes) has bands like The Flower Kings, Spock’s Beard, and a few others which apparently manage to make a living by doing a lot of shows, releasing a lot of great, great material. Then there’s the second tier with bands that do a few shows, sell pretty well, and maybe break even financially. And then (laughing) there’s us: few or no performances, some sales, but certainly not breaking even monetarily! I think there are a LOT of prog rock bands with us in that third tier!

But the CD has done pretty well. It’s sold a couple of thousand copies worldwide and that’s not bad. Much of the distribution was set up through the Internet, which gets it great exposure to potential customers.

GN: I have a feeling, with all these bands and all these labels, that this music could be coming back.

MS: I hope you’re right! I’d say there are more progressive rock bands out there now than there were in its heyday. In many ways, with modern home and studio recording technology and the Internet, it’s perhaps easier to create and distribute the music, assuming the song writing and execution talent is there.

GN: A lot of this stuff could play on the radio and it would be really huge.

MS: Yes, Spock’s Beard could do that.

GN: And The Flower Kings.

MS: They could really crossover. Not an issue for Metaphor!

If nothing else about our music, I can say that it’s done without compromise and consequently there is virtually no chance we’ll get commercial radio play or hit the big (or even medium!) time. Obviously we’re not even trying to put out music that will necessarily sell. We’re just trying to make music that is interesting and sounds good to us. If people like it, then that’s great.

I’ll tell you what: If we only sold a hundred copies of that album, the band would still be here and we’d still write and record music. It’s nice that people like it, we’ve gotten a lot of great reviews, but I’m not going to change the music to try to appeal to an audience, even a prog rock audience. That lack of concern with any notion of commercial viability is part of the essence of creative music, anyway.

GN: It’s a great attitude.

MS: Oh yeah! Not very profitable, but…

GN: It’s good for us who listen to it. I notice on the CD that you used a guitar synthesizer.

MS: Yes, I have a Roland GR-09, not the most current generation, it’s one generation back. I use the guitar synth mostly to color the guitar sound.

A lot of times you’ll hear the synthesized sound in sync with the guitar part. For instance, on the CD, every time you hear a marimba in unison with the guitar, that’s the guitar synthesizer.

Whenever you hear a twelve-string guitar or nylon string guitar on the CD, that’s the synthesizer. There’s also GR-09 cello at the beginning of track number 3, “Starfooted in a Garden of Cans.” Other times you’ll hear a bell-tone, or a choir sound, or an organ in unison with the guitar, and those are all guitar synth as well. So, I try to mix up the sounds quite a bit.

There are some parts where I use the synthesizer sound alone for a melody. It’s been a nice addition. I do have to restrain myself sometimes. There’s so much you can do with it, you could go overboard easily with it. Some would probably say I have gone overboard, as I do use a fair amount of it.

Of course, almost all of the synthesizer sounds you hear are from our great keyboardist Marc Spooner, who also writes some wonderful material for Metaphor.

GN: There are a lot of time changes on the album and I was wondering how you manage to do it with your drummer if you play any of this stuff direct?

MS: I think what it amounts to is the musicians need to get the feel for it. Initially when I write some material, for example, there is a bare-bones arrangement that’s there, along with the less-common time signatures. Then the band works those out using tapes and written scores, and the arrangement comes together. We count the parts out and figure it out, and it usually works.

But the main point is getting a feel for it and going along with that feel. Then it becomes a more natural thing to play. After rehearsing it for a while and going with that feel, it becomes very natural and fun to go through the interesting time signatures.

We purposely use a lot of time changes. In my material I like to try and provide some surprises. I want to turn the music in a few different directions, go around some unexpected corners, and a lot of that is in the time-changes and other dynamics. So the band gets together and we count it out if we need to. We all have tapes and practice it, and I print out the score for those that want it. Our drummer, Bob Koehler, often likes to see it in writing. He’s a very good musician, and knows music theory maybe better than anyone else in the band. So I often print the stuff out for him and he gets a sense of “Oh, that’s what I’m doing!”

A way of making our new material more interesting is having the keyboards, the guitar, and the drums going in different time signatures while the drums might do a straight 4/4. This gives you the polyrhythmic aspect which is becoming more a part of our sound in the new material.

The bass player featured on the CD, Jim Post, incidentally, is not the same guy we have now. He was great, but moved too far away to rehearse. Our new guy, Jim Anderson, has fit in extremely well. He was able to pick up the old stuff without missing a beat, and contributes greatly to the new material, so we’re really lucky to have him.

GN: The next CD will be with Galileo?

MS: Most likely, I don’t see any changes in that respect. The new stuff is being rehearsed right now and it’s coming along well. Parts of it are a bit more technical. And it also has more rhythmic changes in the time signatures. Sort of stretches our ability to play in the time changes. It’s fun to try and do, and I’m very excited about putting this new stuff on CD.

* I emailed John Mabry and asked him to expand on the concept of the album. Here is his response:

Starfooted tells the story of the Gnostic myth (according to THE APOCRYPHON OF JOHN, a 3rd century Gnostic scripture discovered in a cave at Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945). We’re not espousing any religion or anything, we’re just telling the story. And, this isn’t your standard religious fare!

According to the Gnostics, God is the bad guy, the snake is the good guy, and we are all living on a prison planet guarded over by evil angels where we reincarnate perpetually. Those who discover the secret (that the creator is actually a twisted son of a bitch who wants to keep us enslaved, and what’s more, wants to be worshiped and praised for it!) have a chance to escape this dire world, and be rejoined with the true God in the world of Light.

Starfooted renders this rich, disturbing religious fantasy as a progressive rock opera. It’s a template for life in postmodernism. Like Sophia (a character in the story), we have found ourselves lost in relativistic chaos, and have often made a mess of things in trying to impose order. Samael (another character, A-J) and his Archons represent the multinational corporations and politicians; pretenders to the throne of the world, trying to keep us ignorant of our true plight and coerce us politically, religiously, and morally.

On the surface Starfooted tells the story of the myth straight, from the descent of Sophia into matter, to the escape of a modern-day neo-Gnostic into the glory of the Pleroma. Just beneath the surface, though, we’re saying a lot about life for the world’s first generation to truly internalize a post-modern perspective.

Tommy Shaw started his professional career in 1975 with Styx, a week before the band started it’s tour, following the departure of John Curelewski.

During those years, Styx’s album Cornerstone was the biggest selling album of 1979… and 1980. Their following album, Paradise Theatre, is apparently the top selling pop-rock album of all time.

Through several solo albums, and a stint with The Damn Yankees, Tommy is now back with Styx. They released the album Brave New World and have just completed a world tour.

Tommy was kind enough to take some time off his busy schedule and answer many questions for us. Official Tommy Shaw site

Songwriting

Guitar Noise: How long have you been writing songs?

Tommy Shaw: I wrote my first song around age 5. It was called India Was The Town That I Was Born In. I didn’t know much about geography at the time…

GN: What is (are) your main inspiration?

TS: I get inspired when the music strikes a feeling in me. Something will happen when a guitar chord or piano or any instrument creates a certain mood that resonates with this feeling. When a song gets its legs and begins to come to me, this is the euphoric hook that keeps me wanting to continue.

GN: When recording an album, do you use songs that were specifically written for the album or do you use songs that have been written at other times, perhaps years earlier?

TS: I don’t like looking back, when there are new songs reflecting your life and spirit at the time. The times we have recycled songs on STYX albums, it has usually resulted in songs I never listen to. They feel like outsiders to me, or like some other agenda has snuck its way into the creative process.

I have some songs that I love dearly which never got the attention they merited, but I am still reluctant to re-record them.

GN: Do you write at a regular pace or were there moments in your career where you have written more or less?

TS: Historically I don’t write on tour. There is so much to do day in and day out when you are on the road that there are not enough hours in the day to focus on creating new songs. I like to totally immerse myself in writing once we are finished touring, getting numerous songs started and having them completely saturate up my subconscious so that I work on them even when I am sleeping. I look at it as harnessing an obsessive characteristic in a way that becomes very positive.

GN: Early on your sound was more folkish. Was this difficult when writing songs with harder rockers such as James Young and Ted Nugent?

TS: If you listen to High Enough you will still hear that gospel thing there. I was born in Alabama and my first live music experiences were in church and every Sunday we watched regional gospel groups like The Happy Goodman Family on television singing their hearts out. I have always been a sucker for the big upbeat chorus…

GN: Do you look for different methods of writing your songs?

TS: The way I look at it, ANYTHING that get a song to start coming to you is good. Whether it is piano, guitar, mandolin, drum grooves, whatever. It is all about being open and paying attention to the music in your head. I think most people have original music playing in their heads from time to time. It is getting it from there to where you can play it for someone else that makes you a “songwriter.”

GN: A common question among the visitors to Guitar Noise: How do you resolve the issue of lack of inspiration?

TS: You stop trying to force it, relax, walk away and don’t sweat it. It is there. You just need to let it happen and not be too hard on yourself.

GN: How important is songwriting in your life?

TS: Songwriting is the other weight on the opposite side of the scale from touring. They balance me out creatively. I feel like I have the greatest life an artist could dream of. Tour until you feel you have made your mark. Write new music. Record an album. Start the cycle all over again. Somewhere in there have a life outside of the career, but let’s face it, this IS a fantastic life, so there is little motivation to make a great escape.

GN: Are there any techniques, methods, etc, that help you that you would like to share with the visitors to Guitar Noise?

TS: Practice. When it stops being fun, stop.

Overall career

GN: Do you find it difficult to work with a small label rather than with a major label?

TS: I have had the honor of working with the best people in the industry from day one at A&M, to a short stop at Atlantic, three albums on Warner Brothers, and now CMC. They represent the “business” side of the “Music Business” and so there have always been times where we butted heads philosophically. Art vs. Biz. CMC, although smaller than these labels, has been instrumental in restarting STYX in an age where radio is not as receptive as it once was.

Tom Lipsky has found a way to sell STYX records in very ingenious ways, including a television concert with REO (Speedwagon) to promote our upcoming Arch Allies, Live At Riverport CD. We have a great working relationship that looks at the right here right now realities of the “business” today. Working together to push STYX forward has ALWAYS been something we take seriously, but I think we have a very good reputation in our past as well as present business relationships. We are not afraid to get into the trenches to move STYX along.

GN: Do smaller labels give you more liberty to do what you want?

TS: So far, I have never been in a situation where the labile dictated anything in the area of music and creative aspects. STYX has always been more than capable and any outside input has never been suggested. This includes our present relationship at CMC.

GN: You have been to the top. There is obviously no need to go on as a recording artist. Why do you do so?

TS: I wrote songs all my life, where anyone wanted to hear them or not. There have been times when people showered money and media upon my partners and me. There are songs I have recorded that only a handful of people bought. At no time did I ever consider the payday. How can you? This is something that happens AFTER you write and record the songs. It is a crapshoot. The creative part is fulfilling, affirming all in itself. To suggest that a writer or recording artist should ever stop is like suggesting an Olympic track star should remove his legs because he doesn’t compete in the 100 yard dash any more. Success is fickled, but creativity is a gift.

GN: You came into Styx after they had finished recording their first album on a major label and only two weeks before the band went on tour. This obviously did not give you much preparation time. Was it very hard work to be ready on time for the tour?

TS: Not at all. They sent me home with a stack of albums and a list of songs to learn. I had less than a week. We rehearsed one night and hit the road. I was SO full of adrenaline and 23 year-old excitement, I needed no help being motivated. The band was fit and ready for the job that lay ahead. It was so much fun that the pressure was hardly noticed.

GN: After Styx, you have also been a member of the Damn Yankees with Ted Nugent. Was it a major change in context or was it similar with your previous band experience?

TS: Michael Cartellone and I had been working together already for quite a while. Ted (Nugent) was the first to come into the band with Michael and me. We hit it off immediately, penning Come Again on our first day. Jack (Blades) was the last Yankee to come into the band and he crystallized the chemistry. Once he arrived, we were a complete band, not comparing ourselves to our previous incarnations, but instantly becoming fully engulfed in our own unique chemistry. A total departure from the STYX experience.

GN: You have recorded several solo albums, but have come back to working within bands. Do you prefer the band setting?

TS: I love the idea of stepping out of the band situation into a solo world with no boundaries, no expectations where nothing is out of bounds. STYX has a style which we all appreciate, and there is an unspoken awareness of how far we can push the envelope without becoming unrecognizable. Damn Yankees is a guitar band. Keyboards are a big No No and so we create all the sounds on electric and acoustic guitars. In the solo World, at least in MY solo world, I feel free to work with Alison Krauss on one song, Jerry Goodman on the next and Ted Nugent on another. Artistic freedom and Opportunity has been a gift in my life which I cherish and have great reverence and gratitude for.

GN: You have often been viewed by the female fans of Styx as a heartthrob. Have you ever felt that this may have kept some people from viewing the overall quality of your material?

TS: There may have been a time many years ago when I was on the cover of 16 Magazine with other teen stars when that seemed a threat, but I never really fit in there when push came to shove. The real teen idols capitalized on the real teen appeal they had and I quickly faded back to the guitar player/singer in STYX. I got older and the teen thing quickly became just a passing phase. You never see me on those “Teen Age Heart Throbs: Where Are They Now” shows.

GN: There is a new law in the US stating that once an artist records a song for a label, he loses his rights to re-record or perform the song if signed with another label. How does this make you feel?

TS: I am not sure which law you are referring to. When you sign with a label, they do insist upon certain rights, and if you have a competent attorney, your rights will be protected. We (Damn Yankees) recently parted ways with Sony/Portrait after recording a Damn Yankees CD of new material because we simply were not able to make ourselves available enough to make the kind of record we all wanted to. While we will not be able to use the recordings we made for this project, the songs remain ours to rerecord at some other time when we are all more available and can focus solely on Damn Yankees. Make sure you know what you are signing when you sign a recording contract.

GN: What prompted your return with Styx?

TS: Timing is everything. Damn Yankees had taken a break. Actually we had been dropped by the new Warner Brother’s brass who decided to get rid of the older acts and sign only new ones. The Goo Goo Dolls we the best of that new regime’s signings. So suddenly I was available, not looking at a Damn Yankees recording project OR a tour.

Jack Blades and I had recorded and released Ambition and it had run its course with the new Warner Bros. team. When JY (James Young) called me, it was synchronicity. We had tried for several years to get STYX back together, but at that time Dennis (DeYoung) was never available so no matter how hard we pushed, it never materialized. That was when Damn Yankees entered the picture. The Yanks were ready to happen and took minimal effort.

So now STYX was ready to happen. Everyone was available and in the right spirit. It was amazingly simple to put together. A couple of phone calls and an airline ticket to Chicago and we were in business again.

GN: Having three lead vocalists that share the spotlight in Styx, has this ever made you feel like you weren’t given all the space you wanted?

TS: Because I am a guitarist/singer, as is JY and Dennis was a keyboardist/singer, we didn’t suffer from LSD (lead singer disease) so it felt like a powerful force which set us apart from the pack.

GN: Knowing what you now know, if you had a chance to start over, would you?

TS: Yes, without hesitation. Yes Yes Yes.

The guitar

GN: Although you can really release the power of the electric, you can also have a smooth touch on an acoustic guitar. How do you compare both?

TS: The electric guitar is almost unlimited in what it can produce sonically. It is the most powerful instrument that exists. It even has sexual power that is difficult to explain, but ask anyone who has wielded one on a big stage. Bizarre. The acoustic is a much more introspective instrument, requiring nothing more than a pick to get going. It evokes a much different type of music and when melded into a rock medium with other electric instruments it gives a wonderful texture which to this day has not been artificially recreated. Playing both opens most every creative door imaginable.

GN: Which do you prefer, overall, the electric guitar or the acoustic guitar?

TS: I really love the twanginess of the Telecaster, and the balls of a Les Paul. PRS has a deep world of dynamics that I love. Acoustically I am a Taylor guitar guy. I LOVE their woody sweet sound. They have swept me away since the day Gunnar and Matthew Nelson let me play theirs at a songwriting festival in Bali in 1994. I couldn’t wait to get back to America to get one for myself.

GN: How old were you when you started playing?

TS: When I was 9 a friend of my older brother Danny left a tenor (4 string) acoustic at our house overnight. I had admired my neighbor’s dad’s Silvertone electric, but never had the chance to sit alone with one. I snuck out on our front stoop and taught myself to play Ghost Riders In The Sky.

My life was forever changed.

GN: Did you take courses or learn by yourself?

TS: I took a couple of lessons from a man named Mr. Car, who taught at the school I went to, but most of the students in the class were there because their mothers had made them enroll and the music being taught was VERY boring. I had much more fun and success teaching myself to play Beatles songs and soon gave up instruction for self-teaching.

GN: Do you spend a lot of hours practicing the guitar?

TS: Not any more. I get hours a week performing live. I would benefit if I did practice, there is no doubt. But there are so many things I must do behind the scenes that have to do with STYX’s career plans that I simply do not have the time. I have a couple of Acoustics on the bus and so does Glen (Burtnik) so we are constantly diddling around with ideas and riffs, but it is not like the rudimentary practicing of scales that the speed demons do. I have never been a speedster on the guitar. Just not my way.

GN: A common questions from readers who play the guitar and sing: How do you go about combining playing a complicated guitar piece while doing lead vocals?

TS: This takes lots of practice (by that I mean doing it live) and concentration to do well. But when you perform on a regular basis, you have the opportunity to attack different areas, bars at a time and work on them, constantly improving

upon them. You would be amazed at the chats we have regarding such things after shows on the way to the next town. Sometimes it feels like we are doing a thesis on some songs, examining them microscopically.

GN: Does playing in the same band as guitarists like James Young and Ted Nugent require a lot of adjustment to your own style?

TS: I constantly focus on JY’s playing to blend with him. Same with Nugent. Part of being in a band. You have to meld. You have to be in harmony. As a result you learn a lot about what makes the other players tick. I have been lucky to be in the midst of such legends.

GN: Do you use a specific guitar for writing and a specific guitar for practicing at home?

TS: I use the first guitar I can get my hands on.

You may not know JY by name, but you may have seen him play the keyboard with John Wetton or Bonnie Tyler. An accomplished musician and great songwriter, JY has played with some of the best.

This week, another look into the independent market with John Young.

Questionnaire 1: Songwriting

Guitar Noise: How long have you been writing songs?

John Young: I’ve been writing songs since my late teens…

GN: What is (are) your main inspiration?

JY: My main inspiration keyboard wise was Patrick Moraz …songwriting wise John Wetton.

GN: When recording an album, do you use songs that were specifically written for the album or do you use songs that have been written at other times, perhaps years earlier?

JY: I tend to write for my own records at the time so to speak. I don’t like dragging up old stuff.

GN: What problems occur when you write songs?

JY: That requires a very large piece of paper! So I’ll be concise, Generally the main problem in the early years especially was finishing something John Wetton really helped here.

You have to stick at it to finish something, the first rush of inspiration usually only gives you a verse or a chorus…the rest takes a little longer!

GN: You work with progressive bands, yet you’ve also worked with the likes of Bonnie Tyler. Do you write specifically progressive songs or does it matter to you?

JY: No I’m not a big fan of the progressive word.. I write in my own style if sometimes it’s a little proggy then so be it. I use a Quality Control check …if it makes the hair stand up on the back of my arms ..it’s in!

GN: Does improvisation play an important role in your songwriting techniques?

JY: Completely, improvisation is everything to me.

GN: Do you look for different methods of writing your songs?

JY: No, I always start by improvising and they just arrive they gradually take form then they turn into a video (in my head) then the lyrics come too. It seems to work so I don’t argue with it…I never hum a tune and write it down.

GN: A common question among the visitors to Guitar Noise: How do you resolve the issue of lack of inspiration?

JY: So far touch wood inspiration has not been a problem…getting a record deal ..now that’s another question.

GN: Do you ever see yourself, at some time in the future, not writing songs?

JY: Not at present

GN: You have written for other people. What are your thoughts on the subject?

JY: When I write for other people I try to write to their strengths, it’s not difficult with John Wetton because I think we understand each other so well. The only problem is I did a solo show the other day and this guy came up to me afterwards told me it was a great show…and did I do any of my own material?!!!

GN: What are your thoughts on co-writing?

JY: I enjoy co‑writing for other peoples projects. I prefer writing on my own for my own stuff.

GN: Are there any techniques, methods, etc, that help you that you would like to share with the visitors to Guitarnoise?

JY: Only try and be yourself.. in this day and age with so many pop and rock schools it’s too easy to sound similar to your compatriots.

Questionnaire 2: The Independent Artists

GN: What was your original reason for going independent?

JY: I rang a record company and the first question they asked me was how old are you? I’ve studied music since I was 5 if that doesn’t mean anything to a record company ..then why bother. If you want to be a doctor and you apply to your local hospital I doubt that their main concern would be your age!

GN: You have recently been working with Qango (with John Wetton, David Kilminster, Carl Palmer). Since the band has members that have sold millions of records through the years, why is it that no label is interested in picking-up such a project?

JY: I think in England especially there is little regard for pedigree. I spoke to a guy from a major the other day their target market is 12‑14 years old I guess that says everything.

GN: Writing songs, recording albums, the live shows, promoting, must be a full-time job. How do you cope with all this?

JY: Happily!

GN: Would you be willing to sacrifice the absolute control you now have over your material in exchange for a lucrative contract with a major label?

JY: I like the sound of the word lucrative it rarely appears in my world!

GN: Do the pressures you face ever make you feel like just stopping?

JY: My music teacher from the Cathedral Choir School in Liverpool told me most great composers only achieve true fame once they’ve shed this mortal coil.

I’ll keep plodding on for the time being. I just missed the 70’s musically just like Dave Kilminster, Tom Lang and other great musicians of this time we have to play a supporting role to the musicians of that time and hope that one day rather than just being employed by this business someone somewhere will actually want to listen to our product…still hope springs eternal.

GN: What would be your advice to someone who wants to embark on the independent adventure?

JY: If you believe in musical integrity it’s probably the only option you have.

GN: Is there a measure of respect and support among independent artists?

JY: Not to any great extent, the musical styles are too diverse and the jungle telegraph is only in it’s infancy.

GN: What problems do you face when dealing with distributors?

JY: I do my own distribution at present.

GN: Booking agents you approach may not know of you due to the fact that you are independent. Has this ever caused problems with booking?

JY: If you mean in terms of gigs..yes it can ..if you want to get a useful support show then the record company involved with the main artist will usually dictate who else is on the bill.

GN: The fans respond positively to your music. Does this make the adventure worthwhile?

JY: Yes, some of the responses I get are wonderful it really makes it worthwhile when your music can become a part of someone’s life.

GN: Do you personally feel that there is really a chance for the independents to make a significant mark on the whole recording industry and perhaps change it?

JY: Yes as the net grows perceptions should change. The main problem is that people are just not as inquisitive as they were about music in the 70’s. In those days you’d check out all and sundry just to see where people were at musically.

Nowadays mainly due to media over exposure most people go along with the force feeding applied by the major pop stations it’s sad but this situation has to change…one day.