I mean, you can tell a kid that it’s important to learn from Clapton or Hendrix or whoever, but it’s not going to do them any good if they don’t like that kind of music. When you were teaching guitar, what were some of the things that you instilled in your students?Ī lot of it was just helping them learn how to play the stuff they loved listening to. So you’ve got to know what it is you’re going for, and use the right sounds for it. If you want to write stuff that sounds like Dickey Betts, you’re probably going to want to back off the distortion, and maybe just play straight into the amp. If you write on an acoustic guitar or piano, it’s going to bring out entirely different things, and you’ll write songs that sound like Neil Young or Elton John. If you’re using an overdriven tone, that’s going to bring out certain things. You have to be inspired by things that you’re into, and your technique and sound play right into that. Songwriting is all about creating what it is that turns you on. How do technique and tone factor into your songwriting? When I recently came off the road with Sabbath, I had like 22 days to write songs for the new Black Label album, so that’s what I did every day until we had enough tunes to go in and record. It’s like a daily muscle-building workout, and, sometimes, it leads to coming up with new riffs that turn into songs. The patterns and the picking and all that was just a mindblowing experience for me. My guitar teacher turned me onto McLaughlin, and that was my first time hearing somebody play pentatonics that way. His use of pentatonic scales is just so extreme-even on acoustic-and he’s picking everything.
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