I grew up not really listening to guitar players. Especially when I was studying music, I was just interested in piano players and arrangers and composers; I came to playing in a band from the perspective of someone who never expected to play guitar in a band.
I got a lot more interested in songs that could hold up completely on their own, with just a guitar and voice. For some people that's easy to do, but I find it's really difficult.
Guitar Hero has been so successful that a lot of people were questioning how it was possible to innovate on the most successful franchise of its kind.
I guess my guitar parts are usually precise, but the execution of those parts is downright treacherous, since I'm not very good on guitar.
When I'm writing with just an acoustic guitar, it can be for anyone.
I'm definitely a guitar player, but it's the last thing I listen to in a song, after the singer and the drums.
My mum's family would all get together, with guitars, harmonica, mandolins and upright bass and play old blues and folk songs. That was normal to me.
There is no way that I could pinpoint just one person. When I first started, I was listening to Randy Rogers quite a bit, and I was also pretty big into Josh Grider back then. I remember going to a lot of Kevin Fowler shows early, and Eli Young Band was another one of the groups I listened to a lot of when I was learning to write and play guitar.
People think of songwriting as a very personal thing: A guy gets up there with an acoustic guitar and he sings his heart out, bares his soul.
I met my manager when I was in high school and I just started playing guitar. He came from a line of managing incredible artists. He said instead of opting for the quick fix he wanted me to go out and live my life and get some experience under my belt and keep in touch. It took me a long time to get to where I am but I wouldn't change it for nothing. It's been very valuable. Life happened and then the music came.
I started writing songs when I started learning guitar.
I started playing heavy-metal guitar because that's what I liked. And then I got into classical guitar because it was so technically complicated.
The jam stuff doesn't appeal to me in general. My newfound love for the Dead came from Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia's songwriting, not the elaborate guitar solos. I'm a song person. Once it starts to break out of that structure and become loopy, it's uninteresting to me.
I sit around and play acoustic guitar - usually acoustic, sometimes electric, occasionally piano, but more often guitar, just trying to come up with tunes. Ideas kind of pop into your head.
I was brought up west southwest coast of Scotland and my mother and father had a music shop, and so I was surrounded by pianos and drums and guitars, and music, of course.
I just want to be a better guitar player, really.
I trained as a classical guitarist but that was it.
Pushing myself against my own will really, because some of this stuff is hard. I don't consider myself to be a great guitar player, so pushing myself as a guitar player or pushing myself as a singer, as a performer, and just riding that fine line between being so hard on yourself that it's counter-productive and being so hard on yourself that nothing is ever good enough is what drives me.
In my case, I am improvising with existing sound files. I use an MSP patch that a friend of mine made, and you have to improvise when you use this patch. I don't use a guitar in performance anymore.
It's amazing. It's actually build from old Siemens Telefunken transistors from the 60ties. There is like 10 in there. It's the most powerful distortion you can have. It does not only do distortion, it does so many weird things. You can't control it, it's sound different all the time. But it's an endless source for fantastic sounds. For example the track "Transit" is entirely made with this box. You have to put the guitar sound in. It's like a pedal.
I started playing guitar at the age of 8 or 9 years. Very early, and I was like already into pop music and was just trying to copy what I heard on the radio. And at a very early age I started experimenting with old tape recorders from my parents. I was 11 or 12 at that time and then when I was like 14 or 15 I had a punk band. I made all the classic rock musician's evolutions and then in the early nineties I bought my first sampler and that is how I got into electronic music, because I was able to produce it on my own. That was quite a relief.
I always thought if a guy could play the guitar, he must be something really special.
B.B. King will be remembered for his impressive skills on the guitar, that King defined the blue genre.
I have a couple of nice guitars that I use, but I don't have anything that I collect. I collect a lot of dust in my apartment, if that counts for anything.
The records that I like, they have life and warmth and soul in them. Like the slap back on Scotty Moore's guitar on 'Mystery Train.' You're not gonna get that in a computer. You're gonna want a live room, you're gonna wanna bounce the tape, you're gonna want real musicians, in a room, vibin' off of each other.
