Lots of people think it was Jimmy Page who had the first fuzzbox. It wasn't, No! it wasn't me either.
I don't understand why some people will only accept a guitar if it has an instantly recognizable guitar sound. Finding ways to use the same guitar people have been using for 50 years to make sounds that no one has heard before is truly what gets me off.
Currently I'm working with Parker Fly on a new Midi guitar to arrive next year.
If you really stop to think about it, the last really big guitar hero was Eddie Van Halen, and that was back in the '80s - early '80s, you know what I mean? That's a long time ago.
Jeff Beck is my idol .. sometimes he finds notes that I just do not have on my guitar. Frank Zappa's another one .. I loved Frank Zappa ... I do think Van Halen reinvented the guitar ... he's an excellent musician, a shrewd guitarist and as a person he's wonderful.
I listen to other guitar players, yeah. It gives me new concepts and shows me where the instrument is going for the future and it is going some places. There are some musicians who are really putting out a good vibe with new theories. I try and keep up.
When I first played the guitar without plugging it into an amplifier, the people at Fender were blown away. They couldn't believe the sound. I said, 'See, gentlemen, the world is no longer flat.'
A Strat was a thing of wonder .. when I was 14 or 15, the Shadows were a big influence, and they had the first Strats that came to England. I like to play all kinds of guitars, but I wasn't getting the sound I really wanted until I got a Stratocaster
From the classical guitar right through to the furthest electrical experiments and everything in-between, it's amazing what the guitar can actually do. I mean, when one thinks about sounds.
I had been playing single note instruments and I wanted to hear a guitar played as a piano.
The guitar to me, from the classical/gut-string guitar right through to Hendrix, et cetera, has all the range [of sound]. Within those six strings it is incredible what one can get sound-wise. It's just down to imagination, really.
I've been playing for aeons now, but way, way back, I remember Eddie Van Halen came out, and I loved his playing. He was amazing. But then everyone started copying his guitars with Floyds, and I didn't.
There is still a very strong subculture of people who want to do great things on an instrument, and who are stimulated by hearing people who can. That's reassuring. But it's gonna take a person - and I don't know who this is - to come along and reinvent the guitar as a virtuosic instrument in a completely different realm than any of us have done, or anybody else in the past. That's the clincher. Maybe that will happen and maybe it won't.
Almost 15 with music, we have so many guitars that we developed over the years. The latest one is 'The Majesty' guitar, which I'm really proud of.
I started doing all kinds of weird stuff on the guitar, which became part of my playing. I started doing harmonics and tapping on the guitar and pulling off strings and doing all this weird stuff that no one had ever done before.
Every time I listen to Jeff Beck my whole view of guitar changes radically. He's way, way out, doing things you never expect.
I don't use the twang bar anymore. It's become too popular.
I'll try any guitar just to see if it's different in an effort to see if it will lead me anywhere. I'm trying to have a guitar built. What's needed is better instruments, better amplifiers, better hardware for electric music to get better.
The future of the guitar is every bit as important as its past.
When do you suppose the electric guitar was invented? If you thought the 1950s, you'd be wrong. If you can muster a recollection of hearing electric guitar in Lionel Hampton's big band in the 1940s and date it to that decade, you'd still be off - by more than 30 years.
If you're a guitarist, you should not be intimidated by using your instrument as a synthesizer, but you shouldn't feel that you have to own one, either.
