Can you go into your background, and exactly how you started out with the guitar?
I started playing when I was ten. I went to a Catholic school and so I started playing guitar there and in church…what got me started was I was in 6th grade and there was some big church service, and they took me out of class to play guitar, and every one of the grades came in and practiced, and I played guitar all day for each of the classes…. so I thought that was pretty cool. One, I got out of class, and two, I got to play guitar all day…and that was grueling, from eight o’clock to three o’clock…so then I got an electric guitar and they wouldn’t let me play that in church…
The devil music!
Right! So I went to high school and got into band. I played viola in the orchestra and won a national school orchestra award for a couple years in a row, got out, studied guitar at San Diego State, and for a couple years taught music at elementary schools. I didn’t’ have enough time to really practice and my teacher, Bill Coleman, had been in he Air Force Band. So I call up the guitar player in the Navy band and he said “come on down and listen to the band”. So I went and it was this huge theater, these guys are dressed up in civilian clothes, they have all the equipment in the world that the government can buy— I mean four piece horn section, the keyboard has four keyboards stacked on top of each other, and they’re just rockin’ out! So it’s about 10:30 when they finished and they say “We’re done for the day. When we don’t do this, we go out on the road, playing concerts, and then we take Mondays off”. And I was like, “that doesn’t sound so bad!” And he was like: “You have to go through boot camp, so volunteer for the choir and you get out of a lot of marching”. So they put me in charge of the choir, and no one wanted to do anything so I just played the blues on the piano in a couple of keys. Boot camp really helped my piano chops.
A long path…
Yeah…then I went back to school studied jazz guitar and electronic music, digital audio editing….went to Mira Costa college, got a degree in audio engineering and live sound production, ran the sound at Triple Espresso downtown …it was the longest running play in San Diego, and I did sound design for a bunch of plays, wrote music for plays, so for example in the play if they open the door to hell, what’s that supposed to sound like? It was fun. Then I started doing commercials and feature films….
Were those sound effects, or music?
Well it depends, some were sound effects…
On one film I did called “The Five Stages of Beer”, the sound person didn’t show up for the shoot and so they just had different people hold the microphone. And so there are two
people sitting at a bar and a bartender and behind the bartender is a refrigerator. The microphone is pointing at the bartender and when the two people at the bar talk, they should turn it, right? But they didn’t. So now it’s pointing at the refrigerator and the people that are on camera are not on the mic. And so I got the job of “make it sound like these three people are having a conversation”. “Take out the refrigerator and make these guys sound louder.” It was a slow process…! Then the guy who owns this store [Moonlight Music] calls me up and says “Hey, do you want to work here?” So now I teach piano, guitar, violin, banjo, bass, and ukulele.
Is there a high demand for ukulele?!
No, I don’t have any students for that now, but they come in now and then…
So what do you think about age when it comes to learning guitar? I only started at 19 and I wish I started earlier, like 10 or something…so when do you think is the best time to start?
The best time to start an instrument is between three and ten years old, because your brain is still absorbing language. Now I’ve had some 3 and 4 year old students and developmentally, it can be difficult to get them focused to do something. Some didn’t have the motor skills, but other ones with older brother and sisters pick it up more quickly. One kid who was four would watch his seven year old brother play and imitate. He would play with both hands, sing the pitch and say the name of the note while he played and it wasn’t hard for him.
Do you think he was especially gifted, or do you think anyone has this potential within them?
I think everyone has some ability to do something in music. There are a few exceptions such as those with neurological conditions like amusia— some people are tone deaf. They can’t hear a distinction in pitches…let me recommend a couple of great books, one is called Musicophilia, written by a neuroscientist, and its all kind of wild stories about how music is in your life and the processes by which the brain works….like this one guy, he was a surgeon and gets struck by lightning and all of a sudden decides to become a classical concert pianist, and he does. He never studied music before; it just rewired his brain…
Now some people just don’t have rhythm. White people are historically known to be arrhythmic, to be dorks, but most people can learn to strum a couple of chords and learn a few songs. And if you’re interested, you can take it as far as you want. With guitar, I don’t remember who said it, but they said, the instrument is so simple that you can sit down and learn a song in a half an hour, but it’s so complex that it will take you a whole lifetime to master it. So everyone can fit somewhere on that spectrum.
I’ve had kids who’ve come in for six months and I want tell their parents, “I think you’re just wasting your money”, but I didn’t say anything…and a couple of those kids turned out to be the best players. And so I never judge about someone’s ability even when it seems like they can’t do it because of their persistence. ..
If you’re an adult and you start to play violin and it’s not going well and you hate the sound, you’re going to give it up. With guitar, it’s easier to not sound so bad. One of my improvisation teachers in college had a first line in his book: “anything that’s worth doing well is worth doing badly”. So if you’re learning to improvise, you kind of suck in the beginning….I’ve had guys come in and in a year they learn 3, maybe 4 songs but that’s ok. High powered attorneys that are busy and are just like “hey I’m busy, I just want to learn something”. Then something happens. After people spend enough time and become familiar with the instrument, something happens… have you seen those century plants. They just sit there. Then when they have a flower, it shoots up like 12 feet into the air….something happens after you spend a while playing simple songs. You go, “you know, I want to try this other thing”. If you do it everyday, just a little everyday, it doesn’t matter how much…..
Like you go down to Dog Beach and you see the sand and put your hand out and it’s like just one or two grains of sand, nothing. But underneath is a pile of sand as big as house. The same thing happens if you just do something every day…
If a person has to be told to practice everyday then that person may not have the fires of someone who picks it up naturally…
Everyone who picks up naturally gets to the point where they’re like “I'm playing the same old shit.” What am I doing? The novelty wears off. And so how do you get inspired?
You say you should play everyday, but it’s also what you play. Where is the tradeoff between studying theory and learning some quick and easy songs?
What’s the point of music anyway? I don’t think I can answer that question. What is the point of music?
Hmmm…. To combat silence? To fill the void, the abyss?
Ha ha, in the book, “The Singing Neanderthals,” they mention this. What is the evolutionary advantage of music? You have to read the book to find out, it’s fascinating! But getting back to your question: you should just pick up your guitar…what is important is to play from the heart. Everyone comes in and wants to play a song they heard on the radio and if it’s on the radio, it’s probably not too hard because popular things are simple things. Like this:
[Plays a complicated song on guitar]
No one knows that tune.
And then
[Plays a simple song]
Everybody knows that one, and they’re both by the same guy.
Elegant beauty is simple…
Neil Young said he looks for musicians that can play simply and well and not have an attitude and look down upon you, and that eliminates 99% of musicians. What really sticks with you? So you should practice what you like. If you like simple things it might stimulate you to learn more. If you want to learn scales and it’s like drudgery and you hate it, then that’s work….
That’s not the answer I was expecting. I thought a guitar teacher would say you should learn the fundamentals and not spend too much time on just songs…
Well if we can agree that music is a language, and it’s a form of communication then you think back on how you learned a language….you just listened. And you babble and gurgle and eventually learn to form the sounds, and it’s the same with music…If it’s work you’re not doing the right thing. You don’t work the guitar; you play it….Sometimes I’ll only play one song for six months. I’ll give you an example:
[Plays a complicated and melodious song]
So if you master that one song, you learn all those other aspects of playing guitar. All these subtleties. Just take one song, simple or complicated, and play that song perfectly. Every time I play that I think of something I can add to it…I was practicing for Guitar Wars— a big competition—, and I won with that song. And it is tough competition…
After you have all these nuances, no one notices any one thing by itself, but together, there’s a quality that is indescribable, hypermusical, and everyone stands up and says “that was great!” There’s a playfulness that has to be there with music.
How important is it to have formal instruction? Nowadays there’s so much stuff on the internet, people can just piece together a bunch of random things.
Well I download tabs everyday and every tab I download, I fix. They’re not uploaded by guys of high professional caliber. Now there’s a bunch of ways to play something, but there’s almost always one best way that is elegant and beautiful.
For example:
[plays “Anarchy in the UK” in a complicated way and then in a simple way. ]
So you have this tab and tens of thousands of people playing it that way because they found it on the internet instead of having someone who is a professional go, “you know, though the notes are technically correct, there’s a better way to play it” So you should have a teacher with an education, someone who has studied with other people.
This brings me to what I call the law of laziness. Everyone who comes in at some point has to learn this law. When people watch me perform, they say it looks so effortless.
Now if you have to push down on the string and lift up, you have to do two things. If you’re playing a gig you have to play how many notes? Thousands. So the idea is if your hand is relaxed your finger moves back by itself. If I say you have to try to have the most ergonomic position so you can optimize all your efforts and be the most efficient at what you do, no one wants to hear that. But if I say “if you want to be a guitar player, you have to be extremely lazy”, that’s what they want to hear.
[Plays star spangled banner in a clunky way]
[Then in an elegant way without much hand movement]
So if you have more energy, you’ll be able to do more things. You’ll never be able to do that if you’re making all these herky-jerky motions. How do you strum? Robert Fripp says the side of your fingernail and your thumb are together and you only move your elbow. If you’re moving your wrist, the sine wave of the motion has these extra things in it and is not as precise.
Can you talk about your songwriting process?
One of my teachers said “good composers borrow, great composers steal” and its very true. Find something that you love, learn it exactly.
Say Blackbird by the Beatles— a lot of people learn that tune. So I download 22 versions of it and I have my own way of playing it that nobody does. I love doing arrangements.
[plays]
Some people hear that and say ‘what is that?’ and its so unexpected. So the more you listen to, the more inspiration you have….
