Adrian Legg Tone Quest Report November 2003

Tone Quest Report, November 2003

Welcome to the fourth anniversary issue of TQR! With your blessing, we gratefully continue our celebration of the guitar, guitarists, and all of our nutty, fascinating gear within these pages. We hope this issue will inspire you to think a bit· not such a bad thing, really. Remember ÷ the most significant piece of gear in your personal rig is your imagination!

The featured artists in this special anniversary edition are uniquely gifted in their ability to mine the boundless reaches of the imagination. One is a consummate collaborator ÷ a Grammy-winning songwriter, producer, singer and guitarist with deep roots in Nashville and a genealogy that could have easily become a daunting liability (it didn't.) The other is a delightfully witty Londoner who paints masterpieces with the guitar that defy commercial categorization (which is another way of saying the man is brilliant.) Both deserve your rapt attention for their ability to create inspiring music and wonderfully memorable songs with the guitar. Oh· and they are both hopeless tonefreaks, of course. Enjoy·

Atlanta, 1994 ÷ trolling the CD aisles at Best Buy, seeking something new, as long as it was created with a guitar. Eeeeyow· what's this? Adrian Legg· interesting-looking chap. Clearly a Euro hominid of some kind· Mmmm, he's got an Ovation. There is a mischevious look about him, and he doesn't quite appear to be posing in the CD photos, mind you· I feel as if I've just met an impish faerie that has let himself be caught in the lens of the camera just for giggles and grins, and now he is tugging at my sleeve.

That was Guitars and Other Cathedrals (still a favorite), which was promptly followed by Mrs. Crowe's Blue Waltz. Circumstances being what they were at the time (a long distance romance spanning New York and Atlanta/sometimes San Francisco), I habitually carried Legg music with me on my weekend flights of fancy and learned that no one on the planet plays the guitar quite like Adrian Legg, nor writes music for the guitar quite like Adrian Legg. His mastery of the instrument is relaxed, contemplative, majestic, jaunty and complex, but most important to me is Legg's ability to inspire and amplify the heady anticipation of unlimited possibility that life promises, which is to say, Legg's music is comfort food for the soul (and his tone is absolutely beyond words.) Enough said, we think, so without further embellishment, we give you Adrian Legg·

TQR: Where did you grow up, and was yours a "musical" house?

I was born in London. My parents moved to Cheltenham when I was about four. I was not properly consulted. Both my parents were active in classical music. My father ran a church choir and an amateur choral society, my mother was a singer, and both played the piano. My father played the organ, and was a Licensiate of The Royal College Of Music.

TQR: Oh· then we can assume that you were given formal lessons of some kind·

I sang in the church choir ÷ treble first, then some alto and tenor as my voice broke, with occasional scratchy attempts at the bass. The choir covered the basic four part Hymns Ancient And Modern with occasional descants to confuse things a bit, most of the Kings College repertoire ÷ pretty much everything that was going on in English church choral music. Initially, I suffered the usual torture by violin and piano before I played oboe in a school orchestra and a local youth orchestra.

TQR: When and how were you introduced to the guitar?

As a child the guitar was a no-no, unless I was prepared to undergo classical lessons from a horrifying local old lady. I declined. However, the electric was emerging as forbidden territory, and with a crystal set I could get Radio Luxembourg broadcasting to the UK from mainland Europe. Such listening was largely illicit, and there was a contemporaneous description of it as the Îunder the bedclothes club.' I heard The Shadows, The Ventures, various other guitar band things going on, and one night I heard ãWhamä and it knocked me flat. I never heard it again. I've met Lonnie Mac since, and was very surprised by his high, light tenor voice. I made lots of weird plucked/fretted string instruments from junk timber and bodged parts, and this was barely tolerated by my parents as long as my homework and oboe practice got done.

TQR: What kinds of music did you pursue?

As soon as I got away from home to a boarding school, I got a dreadful cheapy acoustic from a mail order catalogue and some sheet music for a couple of Shadows hits. Then I tried making stuff up, but the instrument really was a hopeless dog.

TQR: How did your early interest develop into a career?

It didn't for quite a long while. I left the school fairly early and moved to London, getting various menial jobs. I landed up in Liverpool, and whilst working at the airport, met a bloke who invited me to join a band. It seemed like a good social opportunity, and turned out to be a country band. This was my first encounter with the form, and I slotted in happily as it used very similar harmonic structures to those I was brought up with. We worked around the Liverpool social clubs ÷ a completely separate environment to the local rock scene. I think my first paid gig was at Linacre Gasworks Social Club. After two years up there, I moved back down to London, which did then and still does now feel totally like home. I felt like an alien in Liverpool.

TQR: How did your choice of instruments evolve?

Learning material from country albums in the Liverpool band turned me on to the steel and banjo, and the other instrumental textures in country music. The big one initially was the pedal steel, and I had to find a way to do a passable imitation of a lot of the solos. This is where my bending style started ÷ hold a couple of strings down and push or pull another. There didn't seem to be anyone else around at the time doing it, so it was a quite haphazard, Îsuck it and see' approach. I suppose other people must have been shooting for it, because eventually I did find other people who I thought sounded like me (laughs). One puzzler for a while was the ending guitar phrase in ãNashville Catsä ÷ I'd been bending the third from above for a long while, but hadn't thought how to do it from underneath. I saw Albert (Lee) do it one night, and a whole load of things fell into place, which you can hear now on ãOld Friendsä on Guitar Bones.

I'd started with an admittedly very ropy acoustic and found it hard to leave the idea of the box behind, so my first working guitar was a non-descript Gretsch Anniversary. It was eventually stolen, and that forced me onto a Tele for a long while, until I dumped it in favour of a cheapo Les Paul copy, which I completely rewired, and to get some money towards a little Martin New Yorker. By that time, I tended to regard an instrument as more of some kind of technical jumping-off point than a finished thing. I went through hell trying to get the regular acoustic on stage. After the NY and a D12-35, there were various other instruments ÷ a Lowden and a Larrivee, among them. Things haven't changed at all, and my own journey took me to the realisation that the acoustic is just that ÷ acoustic. By your dictionary and mine, without electronic or electric enhancement. If we want the electronic enhancement on a guitar built to be an acoustic, we move immediately to a very inefficient and problem-ridden electric guitar. Our predecessors in the dance and jazz bands already dealt with this and invented the electric. What we need is an electric with a different outlook. I resolved the brook would never go through the death by UST/SBT/Magnetic/A Thousand Cuts that destroyed my other nice acoustics, and that I would accept the facts of acoustic and electric life with as good a grace as possible.

TQR: Who were some of your most significant influences and how did they affect you?

Pick any prominent steel player from 20-30 years ago ÷ Weldon Myrick for a double-stopped solo in a Skeeter Davis album track of ãNever Ending Song Of Love,ä Tom Brumley (we did a lot of Buck Owens' tunes), anyone who worked with George Jones, and George Jones himself, for phrasing. Then there'd be a lot of players who never got sleeve credits. Buck Trent left a mark too, and while there was a local Liverpool player who could do double-stopped phrases using a flat pick and middle finger, I had to try to go one better and do triple-stopped with a flat pick and two fingerpicks. That lead into banjo rolls and a basic Travis style from where most of what I do today developed. I think the first thing we did with that banjo roll was to use ãJed Clampettä as a set closer.However, while I could roll through a litany of licks borrowed, stolen and messed up into something new, really, the profound things in music for me have always come as moments. Much as I learn from recordings, and much as they enable me to hear artists I'd never otherwise get to hear, I think there is something crippling in the facility to play what is, after all, a passing moment over and over again. I think a heard, remembered and unrepeatable musical moment grows in the mind like a good fruit tree.

The most subtle and long-lasting influence was probably Jeff Beck, who I heard years ago, before I went to Liverpool, playing with The Yardbirds in the Marquee. I was barely active at all with the guitar then, but his tone stayed with me thereafter and had a huge effect on the way I approached wiring, and helped me later to slowly understand where the similarities in harmonic content between acoustic and electric instruments lie. I've met him a couple of times since then and shared a curry (a peculiarly English bonding experience.) He still has an influence on me. A friend described what he does as a particularly masculine approach to the guitar, which I found interesting. He's capable of producing extraordinary emotional highs, and seems to have made a quite exquisite kind of beauty a part of rock's canon. Sonny Landreth has been a more recent influence ÷ say over the last ten or eleven years. The thing that stopped me dead was not the behind the bar bends, but simply the touch. I heard a sound check at a Guitar Player mag anniversary thrash ÷ just so much chaos until Sonny put the bar on. It was one of those pay attention moments where one holds one's breath and concentrates totally. I heard him do it again in Winnipeg. I think his last album encapsulates the journey blues has made from resonators to clipping vacuum tubes ÷ there's a kind of grandpa to grandson flow in it. But the moments haven't all been guitar ÷ far from it. One was a soprano with English National Opera who hit the absolutely definitive flattened 7th. You know how we all take it for granted ÷ a familiar transition between keys, or a good thing to hang on if we want unresolved tension in rock or blues. This one was where love ended and utter desolation began. Time stopped for a few seconds while the entire audience hung over the abyss.

I heard the Widor Toccata in F in the middle of the night in Wells Cathedral when I was a child. I've heard the big Bach organ fugues live as a child, and I've sat in the middle of orchestras. Much of the music I cut my teeth on happened in big church and cathedral spaces, so I'm used to hearing lots of it floating and bouncing off the walls. Mentally, sound that is important for me happens in spades in big spaces. Orchestral concert halls are drier of course, but sound is still lush and multi-layered. I learned as a child to listen into orchestras to pick out the lines of different instruments, and because of the choir, learned that in western music no note ever exists in isolation. It always has ÷ at least ÷ some harmonic implication, and some most likely direction in which it will eventually move. Thus, I think of music as a dense affair that involves complex relationships, and that seems to me to be as it should be to reflect a life that involves complex relationships. There are things like the Bach unaccompanied cello sonatas, for instance, which are introspective and meditative, but his crowning glory in my humble opinion is the slow movement of the double violin concerto, which is a pas de deux ÷ a profound love affair.

TQR: We have always associated your sound and style with visions of cascading bells, cobblestones, cathedrals, country fairs, and very lucid, lush ren- derings of certain Nashville styles· When did the sound we know today fully materialize, and how?

It started when I got my first Performing Right Society royalty statement showing what one of my first pieces had earned, and I realised other people were serious when they said they liked what I was writing. But the sound is still changing. I thought your photos of my gear might be misleading ÷ I could have dumped it all in another year. Mind you, the synths are getting fascinating now. I'd say that nowadays about twenty percent of a Roland guitar synth nearly works sometimes. I'm headed further into this, and currently really appreciate my audience's good-natured patience. Perhaps the saving grace of the synths is that when they go wrong, it's usually pretty funny. Prior to the synths, which are only a year or so old with me, I tried things with multiple pickups and fx stereo feeds over the years, just trying to get the sound bigger. The dichotomy that triggered everything was that the acoustic sounded complete on its own, but was unusable on stage. The electric could jump through all the blazing hoops on stage, but sounded thin solo· I tried just about everything in the way of piezo bugs ( the early Barcus Berrys and so on, and other less identifiable ones.) Soundhole magnetics just didn't cut it for me, and I still think they honk. There's a huge saga in my life of hacking and cupboards full of last year's failures that went on, culminating in my retreating into the instrument industry in the UK to be a tech. On the way there, I'd won a Guitar Magazine competition for solo acoustic composition and execution, which embarrassed them a little ÷ they didn't think anyone would win both sections, and so both first prizes were identical. I only got one of them. Somehow, I also picked up some solo BBC work for the late night shows when their resident piano player had had a stroke and lost the use of one arm. I was hooked into the country shows as an acoustic rhythm guitarist for all the UK bands who used to come into town to record a session, since I'd written an article in one of the UK country magazines explaining how important rhythm guitar was in country. Naturally enough, some of these players would come to town for a moment of BBC glory and hit all their hottest flash licks whilst neglecting the basics. So the acoustic was doing one or two completely studio-based things, and meanwhile I was earning my bread and butter with the electric around the London Irish and country pubs and clubs. The two instruments and approaches conflicted badly, and I needed a place to hole up for a while. I got hired to do some demos for the UK company that then distributed Marshall and asked to have the guitars they wanted me to use well in advance so I could set them up properly. They didn't do any of that kind of pre-sale setup thing ÷ I don't think any of the UK companies did at that time ÷ so I talked myself into a job looking after all of their guitars. Eventually, I did a lot of R&D, designed circuits for some of the Vox guitars they re-launched, and wrote a book about customising ÷ mainly on wiring ÷ which is still around in some of the US repair shops now. I know Flip Scipio still has his copy, and I think Leroy Aiello in Mandolin Bros still has his. I had to do endorsing artist setups and tweaks, and had a whole warehouse-ful of guitars and parts to play with, plus a small workshop at home.

While I was there, I still had some BBC sessions coming in, and usually I'd take a little Martin down to them, but one day I forgot to take it into work and borrowed an Ovation Glen Campbell from warehouse stock instead. I thought the engineer would want to plug it in, but he miked it and got the cleanest rhythm sound I'd ever had there. That got me interested, and I realised that the pickup, because its structure kept the string pressure off the crystals, would take pretty much any kind of stringing and still give a balanced sound. This was the point where what I do now started. It allowed me to combine elements of electric and acoustic techniques on an instrument that could deliver a near as, dammit, reasonably harmonically rich tone, or at least rich enough to stand up solo, and it allowed me to deliver it (given a few other tweaks) loud enough to do a solo guitar gig sans vocals, in a rowdy bar. I still use that pickup on the guitar Bill made, and it's the reason I put up with the inadequacies of the GK-2A rather than use a piezo system to trigger the synths. The original Delrin saddles were crap, unfortunately, and the radius was way too steep, leaving the first and sixth too low. I don't seem to have been able to get much joy out of the Ovation with mods to it, and the R&D man, who was a good friend, has since left the company shortly after Bill Kaman went. Bill Puplett is planning to get a tool made that would allow us to cut a section to fit over the crystals and the existing silicon rubber fairly simply into a piece of bone, and then we should be able to file the top pretty much anyway we fancy it in terms of intonation and radius.

TQR: How many different tunings do you use?

Ummm· drop D, open D, DADgad, open G, G6, open C, CGDgad, and a few minor variations on those as some pieces go along. I only really got into them when I got

the Keith pegs, apart from drop D, which I used a bit before. Drop D I think Don Rich used with Buck Owens. CGDgbe came out of the same idea of trying to extend the guitar downwards. I like the weight of that 65.4 Hz bottom note, but it takes a good 18" sub to make it work live. I don't think a 15" does it justice. In ãHymn For Jaco,ä the first is also dropped to D for the intro and the end just to get the last bent phrase leading onto the open 1st. You can hear it come back up to E on the peg.

DADgad has been around the UK since Davy Graham got back from Morocco. It's hard to avoid. Open D was a matter of looking for warmth ÷ ãTune For Derrolä was the first complete thing in it. ãThe Irish Girlä was another ÷ it started from a quite rational base. I wanted something warm, hence open D. I wanted something slightly Irish sounding that would extend what I was trying to do in Derrol more melodically. Irish ballads are distinctive melodically in that they'll frequently cover an octave, so I played an arpeggio and there it all was. I just applied basic arrangement ideas to it ÷ play the tune, play the tune without the bass, play the tune in the bass, little bit of a bridge, play the tune and knock off. I met Derrol Adams at a festival in Tonder, Denmark. The band I was there with played a set with him, but I couldn't get in tune without disrupting things, so I just sat through the set. It was extraordinarily peaceful. I think by that time he wasn't expecting to live a lot longer.

CGDgad I got from Joe Gore when he interviewed me for Guitar Player. He got it from El McMeen, who works in it a lot. I think he has some chord windows for it on a website somewhere ÷ a search under his name should turn them up.

G6 I got wrong from listening to Nanci Griffith and misunderstanding how she fingered ãLove At The Five And Dime.ä I wrote Nanci in it to get that kind of texture, and only much later realised she'd done ãFive And Dimeä in open G. Open C I first tried out on an Ovation Longneck just messing around, except that it was more like open B flat. I wrote ãCelandineä in it. I had problems recording it ÷ the low note on my thumb coming back in the cans sounded like a bass player, and I kept stopping to see who it was. There were some half-capo tunings a long while ago. ãPietaä had 6,5,4,and 3 capoed at fret 5 with the fifth dropped a whole tone. ãAfter The Gigä was half-capoed across 6,5,4 and 3 at the 10th fret, 1st and 2nd down a whole tone each, 5th down a whole tone. They came out of thinking vaguely in five-string banjo terms, but it all went off in a different direction. ãBrooklyn Blossomä has a full capo at fret three, and a dog leg capo filed to reach across the first and hold down 2,3, and 4 at fret 5. I started off in A with just the dog leg, but fancied the overall pitch a bit higher. The guitar is in standard tuning. ãGreen Balletä starts off based on a D whole tone scale, but with the 6th tuned down to E flat, which doesn't occur in a D whole tone scale. About halfway through, after a little bridge section, that drops to D and the piece starts to resolve. I've no idea how it came about ÷ it was slightly psychotic but it does cure itself. I haven't played it for ages, so I must be over whatever it was. ãNaive IIä was done with the guitar put out of tune enough to make it unfamiliar ÷ I've no idea what it was. I turned up the echo to something ridiculous, and a Boss PS2 pitch vibrato too high. I only ever played it three times onto tape. The first time was too chaotic, the third time was too organised. The second time went on ãHigh Strung Tall Tales.ä One critic said I'd ãmastered cacophony.ä I hadn't mastered anything, which was the point.

TQR: Where did you find the inspiration for using banjo pegs and those tiny string tensioners?

Bill Keith made them, not me. I wrote about them in ãCustomising Your Electric Guitarä in 1981. Banjo players have been using them for years. I knew about them, but couldn't find them in London. Eventually, when I was working in the instrument industry, I worked at a trade fair, and the company in the booth next to ours had one on their display wall. It turned out I knew more about them than they did at the time, so I successfully scrounged enough to kit out my guitar by the end of the show. Guitar players at that time weren't into them much ÷ more into whammy bars and so on. What I always wanted was some way of pulling the harmonic structure of the acoustic guitar while keeping the flexibility of the electric. It's avoiding issues, to an extent. You know what one of our famous British conductors, Sir Thomas Beecham, said about the English· ãThey don't really like music ÷ they just like the noise it makes.ä Fair enough!

The pickup on this guitar is an Ovation, and it produces quite nice results. There is no pressure sensitivity on the crystal in this pickup. When there is pressure, you restrict its movement. One of the biggest problems with undersaddle

transducers, apart from the frequently quite scratchy tone, is that string-to-string balance can vary. Sometimes this is as a result of the top swelling or shrinking with variations in humidity and temperature and changing the pressure with which the saddle bottom sits on the pick-up along its length. So, however carefully one cuts the saddle slot floor and saddle bottom whilst fitting an undersaddle, and however good a string-to-string balance one achieves on the bench, as soon as the guitar goes off on the road, the saddle slot floor can change along with the guitar's top. It doesn't have to move much for the balance to come apart. But there's more· Frequently, just getting a string balance in the workshop is a hit and miss business. My first contact with Bill Puplett was while I was at Rose Morris (roughly 1978-1983), and at one point we were on the phone every few days chewing the fat over the latest fix or trick. Between us, we were in contact with a lot of players or instrument trade people who were hitting balance problems, and we were both seeing the new miracle cures and pick-ups as they came out and still hit the same old problems. We covered a lot of ground. (I saw some funny stuff, too. Once I saw Richard Thompson doing an acoustic gig plugged into a Passac preamp. Its claim to fame was that it put a lumpy little lift in the bass to imitate soundhole tone. The trouble was, that lump caused feedback, so right after it he had a TC Dual Parametric to take it out again. Bless that TC ÷ it solved more stage problems than anything else in those days.)

I had Takamines to deal with. Then, (I don't know about current or more recent models) steel string Taks had a saddle that sat on top of a row of big cylindrical crystals held in an aluminum trough under the saddle slot,which was cut right through. Under the saddle was a copper strip that made contact with metal caps on top of each crystal. Contact at the other end was made in the trough. These were wired up into the onboard preamp. The pressure of the contact was determined by string pressure, of course. Initially, they also came over with uncomfortably high actions, and there was some quite justified grumbling from Rose Morris' dealers. Lowering the action by the usual method of shaving the bottom of the saddle landed me with balance issues right away. Simply lowering the action altered the way the saddle sat, and if the slot was a little bit loose, the balance could come adrift as the saddle leaned over. Quite often, if there was a big stack of orders going out, the quick fix was to run over the saddle top with a fret crowning file.

The Tak classicals used a more orthodox (well, it's orthodox nowadays) simple undersaddle that sat between the saddle bottom and the saddle slot floor in the bridge. Unfortunately, the cable take-off point at the bass end came through the

folds and wrap of the metal encasing the quite small crystals, and these projections prevented the saddle sitting properly in the slot. It was, effectively, a manufacturing defect in terms of fitness for purpose, because the result was that notes on the 6th string had a very weak fundamental. I could do some tweaks to make a recess around the cable hole through the saddle slot bottom with a veiner chisel, but I never managed to do more than lessen the problem. It went right up the range too. At that time, John Williams had launched Sky. He and Kevin Peek had started off using Ovations with the band, but John didn't like the playing position and switched to Takamines. The Japanese made him a guitar specially, and it came straight from John to my workshop with ÷ guess what? ÷ a weak 6th. So string balance problems have been around since the first undersaddle piezo, and haven't changed in their fundamental nature in the 25 years or so they've been around now. Stick-on bugs have been around commercially in the UK since the little screw-on Barcus-Berrys (nick-named Marcus Welbys over here) I saw in the early seventies, and once again, the feedback vs. level issues haven't changed a bit. One feels the need periodically to say, ãIt's the guitar, stoopid.ä

The Ovation pickup structure is quite different ÷ possibly clumsy aesthetically and in terms of acoustic tradition by comparison, with a regular and more discreet undersaddle. However, it is extremely practical. The crystals (not as big as the original Tak crystals, but many times bigger than the usual undersaddle) sit on wooden rails at the bottom of a metal trough. The bottom contacts are welded on and the rails lift them and the wire clear of the trough bottom. The wire, contacts and crystals are then encased in silicon rubber. The saddles are made as a single piece, slit between strings something like a roof, which sits on the silicon rubber and the trough walls, thus string pressure is not directly on the crystals. There is also a little groove cut into the central underside of the saddle block, and this keeps the saddle well clear of the wire and contacts welded to the top of the crystals. This leave them freer, I think, to respond to mids and lows, and by comparison with regular undersaddles, relatively impervious to variations in string gauge and pressure. They also have a huge output, which can cause distortion with third party preamps. An enthusiastic Legg Standard Whack back then gave attack transient readings close to or on 1 volt on a Fluke peak hold meter, where the same L.S.W. applied to a humbucker gave 600-700 odd mV, and applied to a single coil gave around 400-500mV. Unscientific ÷ but revealing at the time.

For a lot of players who are using an acoustic in support of vocals and who stick with a regular set of bronze mediums or lights, string balance only really becomes an issue when it's way off. However, I haven't found an undersaddle system that will deliver a banjo roll on lighter strings without sounding like a centipede with a wooden leg. That's what puts the Ovation pickup at the core of what I've been trying to do since Î79 or Î80. It'll give me a richer harmonic content than a magnetic, but still allow me to string in any direction I fancy and do very loud banjo rolls until my arms seize up. I haven't heard anything else that will deliver Nashville tuning on stage for right hand rolls. ãHigh Strung Suiteä on High Strung Tall Tales was recorded direct off one, by the way.

The other magnetic pickup was made for me by Steve Blucher at DiMarzio. The trick was, it could be no more than 6 mm deep. I was thinking neodymium for greater sensitivity, but that's apparently not what it's all about, and this pickup is made with AlNiCo 2. It has turned out to be very interesting indeed. The tonal swing from treble side to bass side is enormous ÷ too much to use anywhere near the fingerboard, but put it near the bridge and it has a wonderful sound. It turned all the vintaged-out heads in the Mandolin Bros. workshop when I first tried it out down there (I used to stay with Flip Scipio when he had the apartment upstairs and ran that repair shop ÷ he's an old friend from when he trained at the London College Of Furniture.) Surprisingly, the string balance is very good indeed, and if a crystal died in the Ovation pickup, I could make it through to the end of a tour without too many worries.

The fine tuners on the peghead are taken from the fiddle ÷ actually, from child-size fiddles, where there isn't enough room to get a standard mounting fine tuner between the tail-piece and the bridge. They're made by Wittner (or were, anyway) who make the tuning forks. They're a piece of flat metal folded at right angles at each end, and hooks are cut into the folded sections to hook around the string. The central screw, when tightened, simply pushes against and distorts the string where it runs in between the hooks. A lot of this came from working in country bands, needing to get the steel guitar parts without actually having a steel player. That way, you could go out as a four-piece and get five-piece money. It gives you a passable imitation of a steel pedal change in the right situation, and instant retuning between open G, G6, open D or DADAGAD set the way I use them, but you have to make the right compromise, because every time you shift tension on the string it shifts tension on the neck and the other strings drift a bit. Every tuning is a compromise. You know, for instance, to drop the third a couple of cents flat, because at some point if you drop the sixth or the fifth, the third is going to shoot up a bit. You have to pre-plan the dodges or you can end up with major third intervals going even wider than they are in equal temperament.

I think we look at the guitar so narrowly, sometimes. You have to look at all stringed instruments ( not just the guitar.) I loved the sound that the steel guitar and the banjo made, and I wanted to make those sounds with the guitar. I didn't know any better. It's a lack of training, really. When I was playing the social clubs in Liverpool we would go Îround and listen to each other in our various bands and steal licks, but we'd often get them wrong. We'd come back and work these Îwrong' licks into our set, and because they were wrong, they were new. So these licks all evolved, and you could immediately tell who was playing by their unique licks, because we all fucked up in different ways! (laughing all around.)

TQR: Back to your current guitar ÷ ash and mahogany?

Black walnut, native to this country, and you are wasting it criminally in America. It is superior to maple and mahogany in terms of its resistance to twisting and bending along the grain. The body is swamp ash ÷ quite nice grain following the string line ÷ made out of two pieces that are scooped out before joining. We found that porting the cavity in the treble- side shoulder opened out the treble nicely. I think the unbalanced body shape is interesting. My R&D pal at Ovation had a guitar that had the bass side blistered outwards. The resulting imbalance seemed to be causing a beating across the top that resulted in a very long sustain, but it thinned out the tone badly due to some kind of physical phase cancellation. I got an early Adamas I put together for myself out of a neck from a steel string wreck and the body from a nylon prototype cutaway that John Williams declared vulgar when it was offered to him. Nobody at Rose Morris knew what to do with it after he rejected it ÷ it was ugly, nylon, and non-standard, so I blagged as part of a deal for playing at a trade fair and replaced the neck with the one from the wreck. I repaired the wreck and put the nylon neck on it, and sold it eventually after I finally owned up to having no hope of ever getting it right. I experimented with uneven strutting on it and loads of wiring, but it wasn't until the first black Adamas that Ovation made for me that I really got into it and found I could reproduce the weird sustain/cancellation characteristics of the one D.J. had, and ultimately could tune a compromise between sustain and tonal body by shaving an originally lengthways half-moon-shaped short strut on the treble side. When I put it in, it killed the sustain off completely and gave a thick, short tone. As I shaved the centre down into a valley, the sustain returned and the tone thinned. Some of the bass side struts overhung their footprints at the ends, which I'd hoped would slow the bass side response. I only started on that one really because a stroppy Virgin Airlines stewardess had insisted on its going in the hold from London, and when I got it back in Los Angeles, it had acquired a new rattle.

I got the Roland GR33 Synth initially just for triggering at home, using other synths for layering tracks messing about between score writing software and a Tascam 788, but I was amazed by how soft attack transients really worked with fingerpicking. I had to get it into Sound Diver and tweak it quite a lot ÷ a clumsy process only doable by entire sys dumps into and reloads from the computer, thus involving some guesswork. By comparison with my other synths ÷ a second-hand JV1080 and JV880, a vile Nano Synth and a couple of JV1010's, the GR-33 is clearly quite compromised. The 1010's are a doddle to edit directly from Sound Diver individually, but it isn't keen on seeing two of them at once. Anything with hard attack on the GR-33 and you're screwed, but it does a nice job of sliding in behind the guitar with some of the brass basses, mixing it in with the string bass. It gives it a nice weight. On stage, I use it to pump up the sound a bit, to fill it in ÷ making it bigger ÷ and more of an experience rather than just listening to another bloody guitar player.

TQR: Tell us about your Yamaha AG Stomp preamp ÷ I've never seen one.

It's limited in terms of its range in reverb and echo settings, and there's a lot of not very nice cancellation and hollowness in the chorus/flanger sounds. I suppose a majority of people don't have to get stuff in and out of a gig and a rental car every night, so the issues are different, and I don't mind a few trade-offs for ease of use. All the basic guitar processing happens in the Yamaha. I quite like an amplitude tremolo sometimes, which isn't in there, but for the sake of the functionality of it, the feedback reduction is great ÷ balanced line out, stereo balanced line out, with no signal going through the volume control if one uses an expression pedal. Phil Hilborne thought I'd be able to hear the stepping through 128 levels that he thinks they do, but I haven't noticed it. I can swell up a weepy steel lick without hiccups if I want to, and it sounds OK to me. I'm very impressed with it. It's a very cool unit for EQ and basic ambience. I think the kick-down feedback notches are very useful, and it's possible to go back after the event and reset them manually with a lighter notch. A kick-down in a panic mid-number makes quite a deep cut, but gets one out of trouble. Also, one can set the EQ centres as well as level, so it can be tailored quite nicely for different material. I've found since we first talked that the mike modeling works for me more as an EQ tweak than anything else. I'd probably spend more time with it if there was a Sound Diver patch available ÷ but that's another can of worms that won't run on OSX, and a lot of very annoyed Mac users. It seems synth editing is going to be messy for a while until Apple and E-magic get their now collective arse in gear.

TQR: What are some of your favorite songs to play?

My audience and I seem to have some favourites in common, though I suspect the fact that the audiences like some of them so much means more to me. I get regular calls for ãMrs. Jack's,ä which surprises me sometimes because it seems so English and romantic. ãAnuä works well, and I'm still fond of it. Some of them do drop out of repertoire ÷ it seems it's only possible in the end to maintain so much in decent performable shape, so things go as new pieces come, but it is interesting how a changed synth patch or processor tweak can bring a semi-retired one back to unexpected life. Otherwise, some of the requests come as quite a surprise ÷ enough to remind me that the view from my side of the neck isn't necessarily the whole story. I think what one makes as a musician actually happens in someone else's head.

TQR: How do you develop new songs?

I just do it. I know when it works from peoples' reactions. I know when it doesn't work from their reactions, too. Getting to the point where I know I can get a reaction has been intuitive and empirical. Here's a contemporary influence ÷ I love Laurie Anderson's work ÷ absolutely love it. I loved ãMoby Dickä more than anything for the bold theatricality, and I love the way she delivers her stories ÷ the tragic and the comic in the same sentence. She nails the nature of humanity perfectly. I wish I could do that. For passion ÷ Ann Sophie Mutter doing the Sibelius violin concerto, and with the Trondheim Soloists actually restoring vitality to the clapped-out Four Seasons. There are good reasons to suppose that Vivaldi interfered with underage girls by the way· I am hoping that one day this might be brought to the attention of the philistines at Borders and Barnes and Noble, and they might finally stop playing the most insipid versions they can find, on moral grounds. I'm heartily sick of corporate man pretending to be cultured when he's actually a tone-deaf Pharisee with the colour sense of a bat.

TQR: What's ahead for you Adrian?

I'm still hoping I'll blunder into The Tune that will reveal the secret of life, the universe, and everything. I got the score of Barber's Adagio the other day. I just needed to see it on paper to try to understand how he'd got there. It is utterly simple, and that always seems to be the lesson. The Tune will be simple, and will fall out of a pile of work with no warning. Barber's piece came originally in a string quartet, and there seemed to me in the bit of the concert I caught on the radio absolutely nothing in the prior sections hinting at what was to come in the adagio. Maybe it just suddenly fell on his head. So I keep putzing with the guitar, putzing with the synths, putzing with the score-writing software, trying to make a bigger target on my head so The Tune can fall on it if it wants to.