Re: The Well #14 - Welcome to WahWah World!
Tagging along with the last couple sentences of your last post, do you feel your style is an amalgamation of other player's styles, but with your personal spin on it?
- Keith
I think it would be very rare for any player to emerge without a set of influences, even if those influences may be hard to distinguish once they have developed their voice. In the case of Eric Johnson, I think his influences are actually more obvious than his own style. Not taking anything away from his brilliance as a player, but I think he may have struggled with that to some extent. There will occasionally be guys like Fripp who are just right into the oddball stuff and are deliberately taking on the role as pioneers. Then, in turn they will influence somebody else, like Adrian Belew, to follow them down that path.
I'm not any sort of pioneer. I am definitely, as you put it, an amalgamation of my influences, but injected into that is my heart, my life, my sense of humor and my spirit. In the same way that we may each find different words to convey the same meaning, drawing them from the entire vocabulary at our disposal, we each have a unique fingerprint that can, if we allow it to and if we take the steps to develop it, speak through a musical instrument. It is my personal belief that a musician's playing can only be an extension of their personality. I believe that you can
hear when a player is a "left brain" kind of guy, you can hear when someone is a mathematician rather than a poet, and you can hear when they have really known emotional pain, as opposed to mimicking it. You could probably make a list of the obvious ones to you, and through a little investigation into their lives, discover that you were right on the money, every time.
I think the points made by the guitarists you mentioned were very accurate. I would add to it that each of us might actively pursue anything that we hear that naturally grabs our attention, and study it. Even if you hear one lick, or one bend, or one style of vibrato that makes you stand up and take notice, or get goose bumps, any kind of sign, study it. Get inside it and find out how it works, why it works. Take that element and absorb it, and then work it into your vocabulary. It will sound different when you speak it, but that's the whole point, because now it is you who is speaking it. It's like "I heard a new word today, and I can't wait to use it in a sentence!"
Here's a story. When I was in my late teens, I first heard an Australian guitarist named Ian Moss, from an unbelievably good band called Cold Chisel. My whole world stopped. This guy was like a composite of all my favourite players. I could hear Hendrix, Beck, Blackmore and Kossoff all coming out of this guy, but with his own distinctive colour. I studied him, closely. I would watch clips of him on TV and copy the way his fingers moved, the way he held his left hand on the neck. I played everything of his that I could understand, and was totally in awe of all that I couldn't. A few years later, the band I was in got the opportunity to support Cold Chisel, several times, and I would sit through their soundchecks, and right through the gig, just trained on his hands.
Ten years later, The Truth were doing their first gig in Sydney. We had just come from seeing Living Colour at another venue, and we were pumped. We get to our gig. Packed house. Half way through the second song, I look out into the crowd to see....Ian Moss. I thought ok, I can either just soil myself now and skulk offstage, or just step up and do my thing. I chose the latter. About 45 minutes into our set, this 7 foot tall African American comes up to the stage and says "My boys wanna play!" I thought, whoever your boys are, they can do whatever they want. It was Living Colour, or at least Corey Glover, Will Calhoun and Doug Wimbish. Lucky for me, Vernon had gone back to the hotel. So they get up and we play a bunch of Stevie Wonder tunes and some soul and funk stuff, the jam ends up going for 45 minutes. When I finally get offstage, the first person who comes up to me is Ian Moss. He says "That was really good." I said "Yeah, how about that, Living Colour." He said, "Nah, not that, you guys. I really liked your playing." Before I could think straight, I had said "Yeah, well I'm not surprised you liked it, I've ripped off everything you ever played!"
What a dumbass. But at least I was honest!
Cheers.................................wahwah
