I was a kid that grew up listening to The Beatles and The Stones and Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, and I wanted all of that in there. But at the same time, a large part of my playing is Tony Iommi and Billy Gibbons. I'm just a sum total of all of the guitar players that I think were really cool.
Every year that I go out on tour, I think about all the craziest ideas that would be great to go out with, and I think, 'I should see if Jeff Beck wants to join my band for a month or something.'
I love classical music, but I hated classical guitar. But I like flamenco, because there was something else there going on. It wasn't just the notes being thrown at you. And there were certain kinds of jazz that I really liked and other kinds that just went right over my head.
When I started to write music that was completely divorced from any sort of idea of commercial success, the real me started to come out. Normally, a musician in a session for a pop record would have to discard a lot of ideas because they won't fit, because they're not commercial.
It's a funny thing, my relationship with Deep Purple. I already felt the pain and confusion of trying to replace Ritchie Blackmore, which is a difficult thing to have in your head - since the time when you were a kid, that guitar sound and approach is what you associate with Deep Purple.
I worked at a vintage guitar store, and the owner had ties with a lot of Japanese manufacturers and U.S. manufacturers that were beginning to pop up. So I was ordering parts and screwing them together and contacting local luthiers to finish and do frets and things, and I had put together two guitars, a red one and a black one.
Instead of just hammering away at a song, I'll approach it from a million other angles. Sometimes I'll leave all my equipment set up and just turn on the TV for five minutes; sometimes I've gotta get out of the house. I don't think it every really leaves my head.
When we play an outdoor venue, you'll see whole families - boys, girls, men and women - from kids to grandparents who somehow heard the music... Think about how hard it is for artists who can never get a gig at an all-ages gig. Who goes to hear music in bars? People who can get into bars; people who drink.
I just want to play like Jimi Hendrix. I love other forms of music and wish I could play classical piano, or saxophone like John Coltrane, but that will never happen. Because my nature is to play electric guitar really well and to emulate my heroes from the late 1960s.
For a little kid like me, growing up in Carle Place, you put on John Lee Hooker late at night, and it's a different reality. I try to feel that music from the inside out because I was really attracted to it.
Mike is a genius guitar player and keyboard player. I realized that, with this group, I just joined Mike Keneally's band!
Distortion pedals are just fantastic for not only rehearsing quietly but also for all those moments when you are going to play in highly compressed environments like radio, television, or recording against compressed loops.
You couldn't make a Steve Vai. That's a one-in-a-billion type of personality that comes out together with an incredible talent facility. You grow it; you help them grow it. Hopefully, it matures, and they don't hit any roadblocks along the way.
I was a guitar player in a band that had two keyboard players, sometimes two other guitarists, a bass player, and a drummer, four or five singers, and percussion. We did a two-and-a-half hour show where the music spanned from the early Sixties to the present. Whereas the David Lee Roth thing was like, Now. Very big and intense.
What I noticed, in the short time I've been in Chickenfoot, we wound up doing a tour and a live DVD with basically that scoop sound. I was using OD2 for that entire tour. When we went out on this new tour and made the new record, I used the amp in an entirely different way. It was already modified.
I started many years ago using the Boss DS-1 and then graduated to the Satchurator and putting that right into that clean channel, and that sounds great. I've done many tours with that setup. Then we took the next two channels that were part of the JVM sound in channel 1 and made them a little more subtle.
