The Curse

Scott: I don't know when it happened to me... I've always been into sounds but when I was in Tribal Tech it was a real one dimensional role.

I've always been sort of maybe cursed to be the guitar player for keyboard players. I've played with Joe (Zawinul), I've played with Chick (Corea) and I've played for years with Scott Kinsey and when you play with keyboard players your role as a guitar player really gets diminished.

Everybody looks to the keyboards for the sounds and the guitar player is just the guitar player and you have your little sound and maybe at the most you are gonna step at a pedal.

But when you are doing a record with just guitar and you realize how infinite the possibilities are with all the pedals and all the ways you can process the instrument and mutate it then that really becomes a big part of what you do - at least for me it does.

Slave no more

And kind of my objective for the next 10 years is to just keep making guitar albums that challenge keyboard players - to say that I can make a sonic album that's sonically fucking hip and not have 1 note of keyboards on it.

So I'm kind of at war with keyboard players because I've been their little slave for most of my career and I never intend to play with another one on a record anytime soon.

I just really wanna make records where guitar is as sonic and as unusual as possible. I want to create a lot of colors because it's really fun for me.

Wgg: Do you do that mostly with pedals or have you experimented with MIDI, plugins and so forth?

Scott: I have experimented with just about everything and I haven't even started yet, because there's a whole world of stuff that I don't know about but I will get into...

The computer plugin thing is getting really hip and if you mix pedals with that there's just an infinite amount of noises you can make.