★ Troy Van Leeuwen and A Perfect Circle Memories

Readers of this guitar blog may have detected that I have a bias toward melodic guitar music, especially when artistically pulled off by complex bands such as A Perfect Circle. Unfortunately, APC is no more and Billy Howerdel has moved on to his somewhat lackluster project ASHES dIVIDE...But this old interview with Billy's former axemate Troy Van Leeuwen hearkens back to the good ol' days of Mer De Noms. In it, Troy talks about APC's unique guitar sound.




This sound has much to do with APC's use of open string chords further up the neck -- a usage which gives dreamy, droning tones..Try it yourself! If you tune down to C# standard (Billy Howerdel's popular tuning), put on some reverb and delay and play random arpeggios with open strings you can't help but sound like APC.