G3

The G Spot – The annual G3 shredfest is the hottest place for dazzling displays of guitar virtuosity. This year’s tour mates – Joe Satriani, John Petrucci and Paul Gilbert – sit down to rap about licks, technique and the elusive virtue known as “style”.

By Alan Di Perna

The world’s greatest annual celebration of fretboard wizardry, the G3 Tour also offers ongoing proof that guitar heroes come in all shapes, sizes and sensibilities. This year’s shred fest teams Joe Satriani, John Petrucci and Paul Gilbert, three guys you might never peg as friends or colleagues. Yet they have come together in steel-string brotherhood to present one of the hottest G3s in the tour’s 11-year history. Tall, thin and these days sporting a wispy beard, Gilbert is a reluctant guitar hero. He burst on the scene in the Eighties with cult metal outfit Racer X and in 1988 went on to hit pay dirt with Mr. Big, sharing the instrumental spotlight with bass virtuoso Billy Sheehan while racking up several substantial chart hits. When Gilbert went solo in 1996, he decided to pursue a pop vocal direction, spurning several emphatic and lucrative offers to cut an instrumental disc. His rationale? “Girls will stop coming to my live shows. Girls like singing. I want to sing for them!”

But Gilbert has finally relented. This year he released his solo debut album, Get Out of My Yard, a happy marriage of Paul’s astounding technique, harmonic inventiveness and quirky sense of humor. The jury is still out on how this will impact his female fan base.

In contrast, John Petrucci seems like a guy too obsessed with his fretboard ever to have noticed the existence of girls. His deep dedication to guitar mastery enabled him to defy the notion that prog-rock died out with wide lapels, daisy appliqués and other artifacts of the Seventies. He launched Dream Theater in 1985, and the band has since become the standard bearer of the prog metal scene.

“My band, Dream Theater, we’re not a pop band,” he points out. “You won’t hear us on the radio. Yet we’ve managed to make an impact.”

Well-knit and goateed, Petrucci is the quintessential regular guy from Long Island – friendly and possessed of a quiet humility that belies his status as a man whose lightning legato licks are venerated worldwide. After many successful years with Dream Theater and several collaborative side projects. Petrucci released his own solo instrumental debut CD, Suspended Animation, in 2005. The Berklee grad is a six-time veteran of G3.

And then there’s Joe Satriani, G3’s original architect, the godfather of shred, guitar teacher to Steve Vai and Kirk Hammett – in short, the man who started it all. In 1986, Satch self-released his debut album, Not of This Earth, and – arriving long before the advent of MySpace or even the internet – he and his little homemade album created a groundswell of solo rock guitar instrumental frenzy.

“The term ‘instrumental rock and roll’ didn’t mean anything when I started out,” he says. Today, the genre’s popularity is such that “when I go off on tour,” Satch says, “I could keep going forever, if I wanted, from Bulgaria to the Philippines, Quebec City to Dubai.”

Satriani’s first-ever tour of India is chronicled on his new DVD Satriani Live! His technically dazzling yet highly melodic playing has placed albums like Surfing with the Alien, The Extremist and his latest studio recording. 2006’s Super Colossal, alongside discs by classic rock icons like Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix. The long, dark hair of Satch’s youth is long gone, eclipsed by the guitarist’s now-familiar chrome dome, but his sterling musicianship reigns on.

Once it was possible to dismiss virtuoso instrumental rock as a subgenre, a niche market – something marginal to the mainstream and not really important in the big picture. But here in the MySpace era, there is no more big picture, just a constellation of niche markets. And as the importance of mainstream rock has withered, shred guitar is once again looming large, as witnessed by the virtuosity of metal newcomers like Children of Bodom, Trivium, Lamb of God and Dragonforce. All of which makes G3 more relevant than ever.

While Gilbert, Petrucci and Satriani are very different in their playing styles and personalities, a wondrous alchemy melds all three into a formidable force of nature when they join together for those end-of-the-night G3 jams to play classics by Hendrix, the Stones and others. This same chemistry is highly evident when the three musicians get together to talk guitar. In this Guitar World roundtable discussion, Paul, John and Joe weigh in on licks and lessons, composition, technique. their most dreaded guitar clichés, fave new gear, most valued new metal bands and that elusive musical virtue known as “style.”

Guitar World: An end-of-the-evening jam has become a G3 tradition. So what songs have you been jamming on this time?

Joe Satriani: We started with a big list. Everybody brought in ideas. And we whittled it down to some Hendrix songs – ‘Purple Haze” and ‘Foxey Lady’ and a Stones song that Paul brought in, ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’. We’re also doing ‘Goin’ Down’ [the Don Nix song popularized by the Jeff Beck Group]. Some of the songs lend themselves to being total freak-outs, but ‘Goin’ Down’ has more of a tight arrangement. You get 16 bars for a solo and that’s it. When we’re done killing it, we move on to the next freak-out.

Paul Gilbert: It took me a while to get to the point where I could connect in a jam. Like a lot of guitar players, I tend to be very individual and do my own thing. Also, in the heavy metal world, you tend not to do things that are spontaneous. You rehearse a song and make it perfect so it’s like a military operation. But finally, as a result of giving guitar lessons and having so many different experiences with the guitar, I was able to get into that part of guitar where you can share and communicate with other players. And now we get to do that every night. It’s been great.

John Petrucci: Jamming was a big part of the way I grew up learning to play guitar. I just happened to grow up in a place called King’s Park [Long Island, New York] where everybody played music in my neighborhood. There were so many bands and they were all different. There were guys who were into the Scorpions, guys who were into Rush, guys who were into the Dead or into the blues. And on any given day you could get a call, “Hey John, you wanna do a three-hour blues jam?” That’s how it was for me all through junior high and high school when I was learning guitar and playing in different bands. But since those early days, jamming isn’t something I do much anymore. Because, like Paul said, you have your band and it’s a set thing. You write material and you rehearse it. Don’t get me wrong: Dream Theater does incorporate improvisation into its live shows. But to do what we’re doing on G3 – three guys trading riffs on rock and roll, Hendrix and blues – it really brings me back to those early days. So I’m just smiling the whole time.

GW: Since we’re on the topic of jamming, I thought maybe we could generate a list of the Top Five Rock Guitar Clichés.

JS: The ones we play or the ones we avoid? [laughs] Our own clichés or other people’s?

GW: Oh, other people’s. I’m not asking you to confess your sins.

JS: I think that if you play rock music, the top cliché is that Albert King jumping-off point and returning point.

GW: You mean the lick that Clapton appropriated in ‘Strange Brew’?

JS: All of that. Just the whole minor pentatonic box. We’re all guilty. Albert King’s been completely raided. We took his upside-down architecture and made it into a right-handed thing. [King was a left-handed guitarist who played right-handed guitars in an open D minor tuning.] And everyone just worked off that. That’s the one thing that I’ve always heard, playing with everyone over 11 years of G3. If we share anything, it’s that little Albert King thing that everyone has agreed to steal and never talk about.

PG: I think one of the worst clichés is not stopping. If you’re a rock guitar player, you tend to have a lot of distortion. And if you stop, bad things start happening. The amp starts hissing and buzzing. But if you continue to play, the notes are louder than the noise. So guitar players tend to be the opposite of singers or horn players, who have to breathe. That’s one thing that I’ve always admired about a composition like [Satriani’s] ‘Always with You, Always with Me’: It breathes. There are stops. I think one of the first times I realized this was when I learned the so lo from [Mountain’s] ‘Mississippi Queen,’ one of my favorite heavy metal songs and probably the first heavy metal song I learned in my life. And in the solo on that, there are stops everywhere.

GW: Of course. That’s where the drama is: in the pauses.

JP: I don’t have the ability to stop. [laughs] No idea at all. I play with way too much gain.

GW: Alright, now John has to contribute a cliché to the list.

JP: You mean like a lick type of cliché?

GW: Anything. I’ll share one of mine: inappropriate two-handed tapping. Recently I saw this British Invasion All-Stars show, and the Zombies played ‘Time of the Season.’ Rod Argent does his signature organ solo; then it’s the guitar player’s turn. It wasn’t the Zombies’ original guitar player, incidentally. And the guy, completely inappropriately, starts doing two-handed tapping. For one, he did it poorly. Secondly, it was flagrantly unsuited to the style of the song.

JS: I would have to agree that when two-handed tapping has no compositional value, it really sucks. A lot of us started out doing tapping. but people in the know quickly realized that they didn’t sound like themselves anymore once they started tapping; you just sound like anybody once you start doing that. Eddie Van Halen proved that it’s all about the song. Listen to ‘Eruption.’ That’s a piece of music there. It’s got the tapping thing, but foremost it’s a composition with a message. So you’re right. Tapping is so revealing as being a cheap trick. Not to say we’re beyond cheap thrills!

JP: When we’re jamming and someone does something like that, it’s like hitting a search engine in your head. What do I have left? Where’s my sweep arpeggio move? So whoever starts that, you know the other guys are gonna follow you. “Oh yeah? Look what I got.” But at the other end of the spectrum, you know a cliché that always finds its way into a jam at least once is that Chuck Berry riff. You can’t have a jam without it.

PG: One of the reasons why that riff works is because it’s easy to play in time. One of the curses of the fast guitar player, one that I struggle with, is this: If you learn to play really fast, you can let the drummer take care of the rhythm and tempo of the song. As long as you’re playing most of the right notes. you can whip up and down scales and it sounds fairly exciting. But if you take enough care and time to actually lock into the groove at whatever tempo you’re playing, whether it’s fast or slow, it has so much more emotional and musical impact. I find if I just pick some good eighth or even quarter notes and play them real hard and choose just the right ones, people go, “Oh, these are good vibrations.”

GW: Rhythm gets the hips moving.

PG: So that Chuck Berry riff is one of the best ones musically. It locks in. It’s got a chordal thing going on with two strings barred and another string that’s bending. It’s very guitar-ish, a really useful lick. When I’m teaching, it’s so hard to teach people that the licks that work well in context aren’t necessarily that glamorous out of context.

JP: Right, that’s so true!

PG: I’ve come offstage and realized, The best lick I played tonight is the one that, if I showed it to a student, he’d say, “I really don’t care. I want to learn the one that goes brrrruuurrrr.” Whereas, onstage, that fast lick might thrill the guitar buffs in the first row. But it doesn’t make the neck do this [performs “headbanging” move].

GW: That’s something else I thought we might get into. Can you share some dead-easy guitar moves guaranteed to make the audience whoop and pump their fists in the air?

PG: Hit the ADA flanger pedal. It goes whuuooaahhwuhhooaah. Put your hands in the air.

JP: The Eddie move: play any sort of pinch harmonics really high and then bring the whammy bar down. It’s like the sound of a horse. That always gets a smile. And Joe’s got one that I really love when it sounds like a harmonica. The other day I happened to be listening to a blues station and I said, “Wow, that’s what Joe does. It’s like a harmonica!”

JS: That’s probably my Charlie Musselwhite riff. [Musselwhite is a prominent blues harmonica player.] One of the cool things about playing the guitar is when you have two strings ringing and there’s a little bit of sustain going on, you don’t have to make any effort to stop one string from ringing while you’re picking the other string. That move is just this little minor third interval that I’m bending up to a fifth and a flat seventh, which is what a blues harmonica player does. I got that move just from playing harmonica. I also love that thing harp players do when they use their tongue to break up the notes.

GW: Another topic I thought we might discuss is composition. Paul recently released his first guitar instrumental album ever, and in the press release for the disc, he talks about initially not knowing how to approach writing for the album. In vocal music, you create variety in the second and third verses by changing the lyric. But what do you do with a guitar if there is no vocal or lyrics? Maybe each of you can discuss how you conceptualize when you write instrumentals. Are you thinking verses and choruses? Are you thinking movements?

PG: I’m really interested in this, because I still don’t know what to do!

JP: On a simple level, compositionally, the way I look at music is like jazz: there’s the head [of the song, where the theme is established], there’s the improv and then there’s the head again. That’s the simplest way I can look at it.

JS: It’s always different for me. Every song starts with an inspiration – a story, fantasy or emotion – and it reveals itself as the melody moves. Maybe the melody just wants to charge forward and end up with a resolution, like on ‘Flying in a Blue Dream.’ That’s a long, long melody, and the last few notes are the chorus. There is no chorus in the song per se, but that resolution functions as a chorus. Or maybe it’s a song like ‘Satch Boogie,’ where there is no melody. [laughs] It’s an ensemble part that I’m imitating. Or maybe it is a more traditional structure like ‘Super Colossal.’ where there are verses. a chorus and a solo section that functions like a bridge. taking the song somewhere else.

Sometimes you do realize, “Wow this is gonna need some verses.” Like ‘Summer Song’ was a very big problem that way. The song felt like it wanted three verses, but how was I gonna do three instrumental verses and make each one different? In a situation like that, you just look at your resources: What pedals do you have? Can you play the melody an octave higher or lower? And then there’s just the way you express it. You never know what’s going to work. Some songs thrive on repetition, but others don’t.

PG: Since you’ve made a lot of records, is writing getting easier? Do you find that you’re able to predict the patterns more easily?

JS: If I think that, then later on I realize it was a dangerous assumption. I often find myself having to abandon songs like that at the end of the recording process: we’ve run out of time and money and I still feel like the verse isn’t right. I fret less over solos than over verses. Sometimes I’m afraid of what Paul was talking about earlier: that I’ve filled up too many spaces and it doesn’t sound like a verse anymore. It just sounds like some guitarist playing guitar when the singer wasn’t singing. And I know you can’t have that.

JP: That’s the thing I love about Joe’s music and approach to guitar playing: there’s always some creative and original way that he’s playing the melody. For me, doing solo instrumental work is a changing of hats because I’ve been in Dream Theater for 20 years, and in Dream Theater we all write music collectively. So when I’m writing by myself. I miss that community of five guys being there as a sounding board. But I find myself drawing inspiration from two people in particular: one being Joe and the other being Steve Morse, who’s a big hero of mine. When I hear something of Joe’s as a guitar player, I say, “Wow that was really impressive.” But I love the songs, too. That’s how it is with any classic guitar hero, like Hendrix or Jimmy Page. It’s the music of Hendrix or Led Zeppelin that sticks in your head.

GW: Well, is all that edifying, Paul?

PG: Those things help. Hearing Joe talk about how each song is its own case is reassuring. But I think one of the challenges I had in trying to play instrumentally is that I was used to the conversation that happens between the singer and the guitar player when you’re doing vocal music. The vocalist sings a line, and then the guitar comes in as an answer to that. Even if it’s two guitarists playing together, it’s nice to have that other person speaking, not to just have a monologue. And if it is a monologue, which it is on my record because I’m the only guitar player, you have to compose things in such a way that the musical parts contrast with one another.

On the first couple of songs on my album, I used a flanger and just scratched the strings, simply to have something as a break from the notes. ‘Cause, once again, my habit is I can’t stop. If you look at a transcription of the first couple of songs on the record, it’s all eighth notes, say, and the eighth notes don’t stop. What I like about that is it’s a little bit like Bach. He tends to do that. But as a listener I love to have the rhythms broken up, to have not only eighth notes or only 16th notes, but an artful combination of them. That’s something I want to explore. So I’ve been taking lessons from a very good teacher recently trying to stop this endless stream of notes and create more rhythmic variety.

JP: I think it’s so important what we’re talking about here. There are so many guitar players in the world who can do amazingly frightening things on the guitar, but in the end it’s about the composition. So it’s great to hear Paul talking about what he thinks about and goes through in creating his music: the perfect blend of melody, technique, structure and groove. The fact that he puts so much thought into that is so important. You can’t just get three wankers up there. It has to be interesting.

PG: That would be W3!

JP: In the end it has to move people. People have to connect, or else it’s just a bunch of nothing.

PG: And fortunately, the guitar is such a great instrument for moving people. There’s so much more to it than the notes. You can bend strings and really unpredictable things happen because it is an electric guitar and you’ve got feedback possibilities. I love the organic quality of the guitar and its variety of sounds. It’s such a beautiful instrument. We’ve all been playing a long time and I recently celebrated my 30th anniversary of being a guitar player. So I’m really happy to be on the most maniacal, beautiful, wonderful guitar tour there is: G3.

JS: We should talk about ‘The Echo Song’ from Paul’s new album. I was exhilarated and very depressed when I heard that! When I was working on my last record, one of the things I was really hot on was a song built around repeat echoes and setting the delay in a clever way. I tried really hard for a couple of days and really hated what I’d done. Then I got Paul’s record and I said, “Oh that’s how you do it! You work it out ahead of time.”

PG: You write in a closet-sized apartment in Japan with nothing else to do for three months.

JS: I love that. Part of me is fascinated with how you did it. I’m sure it took a lot of work. But then again, part of that song’s appeal is that it just sounds tossed out, like Paul wasn’t even trying – which, as artists, is what we want. We want it to seem like the music is just flying out of our minds.

JP: It’s like watching a great actor. You don’t want to see the technique. You just want to believe that the guy really is the character he’s meant to be portraying.

GW: What do you guys make of what’s going on in metal now? It seems like there’s a real return of chops guitar. Children of Bodom, Dragonforce, Lamb of God... these guys are really playing at a high level again.

JP: I think it’s great and I also think it’s inevitable. Like it or not, if you’re playing metal at a fast pace, you have to have technique. You can’t fake that double-bass drumming and those 16th notes on the guitar. It’s just inevitable that guys who can play that will work our some interesting instrumental parts and solos. I love it. I’m all about that. The band I’m in, we’re prog-metal, so I love hearing younger bands do it too. The more the merrier.

PG: It’s appealing in an extreme sports kind of way. [laughs] For a long time in the Nineties. the young kids were not into that kind of thing. They were like [whining voice], “Oh, we’re confused by life,” and the Nirvana/Pearl Jam era was upon us. So I’m glad there’s at least some kind of subculture of kids who are into pushing the extremes and trying hard. When I first heard Children of Bodom, I really couldn’t believe it. I thought my old band Racer X were the heaviest. I heard Children of Bodom and said, “No, they arc the heaviest.”

JS: What’s cool for me in listening to those bands is the rhythmic aspect. The rhythmic thing is a reflection of the new message that the new generation needs to hear. In the Nineties, it was a different message. Society just needed to brood on that jangly sort of unorganized sound. It was the same amount of technique, just a different technique. But now the new generation of society needs to hear something else. They need to hear Dragonforce. They need to hear these impossible parts played with finesse and accuracy. That’s what we’re really involved in. It’s sort of like a virus that we all catch.

GW: It is true that the rhythmic complexity is a big part of the appeal.

JS: That’s what separates each era of heavy metal, if you look at it. Just the way the chug is arranged. It’s gotta have a chug in there if it’s gonna be called metal. But the way that Black Sabbath is different from Metallica, and Metallica is different than Dragonforce, is in that rhythmic aspect. It keeps changing.

JP: I love the new style. To me it conveys that those guys have really put a lot of time into doing this. If you hear Disturbed, you know that these guys are taking what they do seriously.

GW: Is there anything in the world of gear that’s turning you guys on?

JS: The gear is so important. That’s why so many players eventually get into equipment design. The creation of the song ‘Super Colossal’ was really about two new things. One was a prototype, five-watt, Class A amp that Peavey turned into the Mini Colossal [the third amp in Joe’s JSX Series with Peavey], which was released at the NAMM show just recently. The other was a pedal called the POG, sent to me by my friend Teddy Rash, who owns music-toys.com. It’s a funky Electro-Harmonix unit: a Polyphonic Octave Generator. I don’t know what it’s trying to do, technically, but what I got it to do was complete my vision of what a song about a giant guitar player would sound like.

JP: There are tons of toys out there, but for me it always comes down to the guitar and the amp. You want a guitar that’s most conducive to playing, that doesn’t present any limitations and stop you from doing anything you want. In fact, it should help you do the things you want to do. I have a new Ernie Ball Music Man signature model; my new incarnation: it’s called the F-1. We made some changes to make it much more friendly to play. There’s more access at the neck joint, and I had them widen the body of the guitar, ‘cause it was feeling like the guitar was a little too small.

PG: For the longest time I was never picky about guitars. But when you have a guitar company making you stuff. you can’t help but focus on small details. So I recently bought a bunch of tools and learned how to measure necks. I took all my favorite guitars and tried to measure the radius of the necks and the scale length. I wanted to figure out. Why do I like these particular guitars? What’s the magic thing? And I found that my best-sounding guitars were ones that had a bigger neck joint, so I incorporated that into the newest signature model guitar that Ibanez made for me.

JP: It’s cool that you don’t use a whammy bar, because it sounds better.

PG: Well, a decent one doesn’t sound bad. But the trouble I had with the bar is, because I’m always muting on the bridge. I’d hurt my little pinkie!

JP: You have to try my guitar. We’ve developed our own custom bridge at Music Man and it takes into account all those things you’re talking about. All the saddles are rounded. There are no sharp edges on it.

PG: I think it had something to do with the Allen screws in my case.

JP: They’re all recessed on mine. And there’s a little stainless-steel cover that’s rounded as well, so that when you rest your hand on the bridge there’s no surface that’s sharp. But I love the frets on your guitar!

PG: They’re tall, skinny ones. I’ve asked Ibanez to put high skinny frets on my last two guitars, but it didn’t feel quite right. It turns out they were the right frets. They were just filing them down too much when they set up the guitar. I think we’ve got it right now. High frets give you almost the feel of a scalloped fretboard. I’ve also had them move my bridge pickup a hair closer to the neck to warmup the sound a little. And the f-holes are a hair smaller on my newest guitar. More understated. [The f-holes on Gilbert’s guitars are painted on and, therefore, strictly cosmetic.]

JP: Some guys play any guitar and they don’t care. They have a collection of vintage guitars and they pull one out. But I need a guitar that fits me like a glove. And the amp is just as important. I use Mesa/Boogies. The latest one I’m playing is the Mark IV, which I played on the new Dream Theater record and I use live. The amp is a huge part of how you’re perceived, how you come across. The amp has its own personality – how it interacts with the pickups. You have to learn that. I look on it as a wild horse that it’s your job to tame. So I’ve learned to ride this amp. and that’s part of my sound, part of the intensity I’m presenting.

PG: I see the start of an ad campaign there! [laughs] But you also have to consider the venue. That’s like a piece of equipment itself, and one not of your choosing. I’ve played gigs in the middle of the woods. I do guitar clinics in Borneo, South America and China. I’ve played in everything from Japanese guitar schools, where everything is carpeted and it’s the driest sound in the world, to Chinese discos, where the P.A. is facing you instead of the audience. Surviving all that has taught me the licks that always work. I’ve got the licks for the echoey venue. I’ve got the licks for the dry venue. And I’ve got the gear as well. As a rock guitar player, the most important part of your gear is how you get the distortion. The distortion enables some of those licks to happen. So I’ve got distortion on the amp and two different distortion units on my pedal board.

GW: Will you actually change what pedals you use based on the venue?

PG: I just always make sure I have a lot of extra distortion pedals ready to go. Because a lot of times I do tours where I don’t know what amp is going to show up. I remember showing up at one place and a Roland Jazz Chorus was my amp. That’s a great amp for clean sounds, but not for what I do. So here I was doing a gig in a mall in Japan where a bunch of people would rather be shopping for clothes, and I’m plugged into a Roland Jazz Chorus amp. And I’m wearing a blue, furry suit with a tail. I’m up there thinking. How can I make this work?

JP: That’s like a nightmare!

GW: One of those classic performance anxiety dreams.

PG: But at the end of the gig, with enough fuzz pedals plugged in, it worked. I think it was the sheer terror. The terror inspired me. Not that I’d want it to happen again.

GW: What about computer amp simulation? Is it there yet?

JS: Hell no! I think the science might be there. But what we’re talking about is the [analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog] converters. In the studio, we record with expensive converters, whether we’re using them with Pro Tools, Radar or whatever. And we all like it. Or at least we’ve all agreed, ‘Well, this is close enough to [analog] tape that the world has moved over to it.’ The same technology is in all those modeling amps and pedals. The problem is the that the converters are no longer the $10,000 ones; they’re maybe 75 cents apiece. So everything has to be shrunk down to a 1 or 2dB dynamic level just to get into the processor. Well, that’s not what guitar playing is about. It’s not a 1 to 2dB dimension. That’s why those things sound like crap.

JP: This comes up all the time in the studio. You’re looking for an EQ for a vocal, a drum or something, and all the Massenburgs [high-end equalization units] are taken up. And someone will say, “Let’s just use the plug-in version. It’s really good.” But how did they make the plug-in? They’re trying to imitate every move that the real piece of gear does. Call me crazy, but I don’t know how they could ever 100 percent simulate what a real amp or a real EQ can do.

PG: But I have to say, the new Pro Tools stuff is so much better than I expected. I still, by far, prefer the amp, but whenever I plug into the computer simulation, it’s like, ‘Well, I’m not gonna use it on the album, but it’s a lot better than I thought it would be.’ So I have to give them a little credit.

JS: I think any piece of gear can do the trick. And you never know what it’s going to be. You look back at a song like [the Sixties garage rock classic] “Louie Louie.” Everything’s wrong with the recording, but there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s a hit. It works because it’s stimulating excitement in society.

PG: I have a question for you guys. Something I’ve been thinking about. I was looking at a review of the first show we did, in Phoenix.

JS: That was your first mistake!

PG: And the review said something like. “Paul Gilbert was jaw-droppingly fast but had no recognizable style.” I’ve had this happen before. I remember doing an interview in Germany and the guy says [fake German accent] “Vy is it, Paul, that Steve Wai, Yngwie Malmsteen. Wiwiam Campbell and Winny Wincent all have style, but you have no style?” So I ask you: What is style? Why don’t I have any? Do I need some? And, damn it, where do I go to get some, so I can get these journalists off my back?

JP: First of all, you have to be of Italian descent.

GW: And you gotta be from Long Island.

JS: When someone comes up with a comment like that, I always think it shows their ignorance. Obviously, they’re underexposed to what it is we are doing and the people who are in our genre. Or they’re just completely misinformed about the art of guitar playing. They just think. Well, he doesn’t sound like Mark Knopfler. He doesn’t sound like Neil Young. He doesn’t sound like anybody!

JP: I think it’s impossible not to have a style. If you’re a human being and you’re playing an instrument. especially guitar, it’s so expressive. As soon as your flesh hits the instrument, something unique occurs.

PG: Well, a classical musician, for example, might not want to have a style. If you’re in a string section with 70 other guys, all playing in unison. you want to band together in that glorious unison sound. And part of me does want that. My parents had classical music going all the time, and I really admired the virtuosity of those musicians: how pure the notes were and how, if they did vibrato, it was always the same. It was a method. It was very robotic in its perfection.

JP: Very disciplined.

PG: Exactly. And when I first heard Jimi Hendrix, the least appealing part for me was the mess. Which I love now. But it took a while for me to love that. So it’s always been this inner battle for me. I always think. If I add some mess, I want it to be purposeful, like the little sprig of something on top of a cheesecake. But it always knocks me for a loop when someone says I have no style. I never even thought about it. I never sat down and said, “Okay, I played these notes, now I’m going to add the style in.”

JP: I’ll tell you right now, hands down, that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. Of course you have a style.

GW: I was talking to a local bass player where I live, and he was telling me, “Oh, I’m taking jazz lessons and I’m correcting all the errors in my playing.” I thought about it and said, “You know, the sum total of my ‘errors’ is what constitutes my style.” Why would anyone want to get rid of that? I think it’s like that for everyone. Style is those human imperfections and idiosyncrasies. Style is the unique way that each one of us gets hold of the instrument, physically and conceptually.

JS: What errors was he talking about?

GW: You know jazz teachers: they tell you not to put your thumb over the fretboard. That kind of shit. “Oh, that’s not the proper finger for that note.”

JS: I had a music teacher who would point out when guitar players had a vibrato that was really like a nervous twitch, rather than an emotional decision to enhance the performance. He loved Johnny Winter, for instance, because he thought that the connection between the vibrato and the soul of the performance was perfect. It was completely natural. But when he would hear other players, he would just stiffen up and bark.

So style is a funny thing. Some people think it’s an accumulation of affectations. But that’s just on the surface. Like when some people try to play the blues, they do funny things with the third, or they think that adopting a certain kind of vibrato is what the blues is about. And of course it’s not. That’s when my teacher would say, “There’s a person who doesn’t have style, but they have affectation.” They’ve just accumulated this mess of stuff, but they can’t get a handle on who they are. What story are they telling?

And I think that there’s an important message there: in order to reach people, a player has to make the effort to want to say something and to say something real. You notice it when someone’s not telling the truth. They can be good or bad technically. It doesn’t seem to matter. What matters is the honesty and integrity of the message.