Guitar Player Magazine: The Complete Interview; Winter 2010

Guitar Player: Tell me about your formal guitar training and how that has helped facilitate what you’re doing now?

KK: I started playing piano and trumpet when I was 7—playing in the school orchestra. I started taking guitar lessons when I was 12. My father was a professional bassist so he had a band and the guys in his band were always showing me things and I was always taking lessons all through about age 12 through high school and then I became a music major once I got to college. I did my undergrad at Wichita State and it was more of a classical background. They didn’t really have much of a jazz program to speak of. But I loved it because I’ve always loved classical music so it felt really natural for me to be there.

Were you studying classical guitar or mostly piano?

I was doing piano and guitar. I would never try to pass myself off as a pianist. I use it to write. I never write on guitar. I was doing a heavy focus on composition when I was there and then I went to Berklee for two years after that. While I was at Berklee I was also studying with Pat Metheny and that was wonderful. It was just a great period to be at Berklee and to be studying with Pat, although Pat’s only condition for studying with him was that I never tell anybody. It was 20-something years ago so I think it’s probably OK to talk about. But here I was going to Berklee and I couldn’t tell anybody I was studying with Pat.

Why was that?

He didn’t want the publicity. He lived in Cambridge, which is across the river from Boston. He didn’t want people to know that he was teaching anybody so he gave me kind of a stern talking to and said, "I’ll take you on and I’ll teach you but as long as you don’t tell anybody." I said OK. He was great. He was really helpful and frightening at the same time, in a good way though.

What would you say is the single most important thing that you took away from studying with him?

Two things: One was just my time. When I started studying with him, I had been playing professionally at that time for a number of years and I was studying and nobody had ever said you need to work on your time. I always practiced with a metronome and felt like I was paying attention to that. But he was really blunt about it and said your time is just inexcusable. He really got me thinking about time and rhythm in ways that I never had and that made a tremendous impact on me. To this day, I still think about that. It was really interesting. I was on tour back in the fall with Dominic Miller from Sting’s band and one night backstage he says, "Your sense of time is amazing. It’s like stone. It’s like rock solid. It’s just perfect timing." I said thank you but I felt like I really didn’t deserve that but it was nice to hear some feedback. The second thing that was really good from Pat was more of a spiritual/emotional thing. I had met him before I got there (Boston). I had met him in Wichita one time, and we had a conversation. When I first began studying with him, I had just started at Berklee. It was my first semester—early on in my first semester. I was depressed because I felt like all of my teachers are just these monster musicians and everybody walking around there are just these killer musicians. I’m kind of hiding behind furniture and thinking, what am I doing here? When am I doing to be found out, kind of a thing. Pat, I didn’t say anything to him, but I guess he must have picked up on it because at the end of the first night we were at his house and he says, "You probably hear a lot of good guitar players at Berklee." I said, oh yeah. He said, "A lot of guys with great chops."  I said yes. He said, "I want you to completely ignore those guys because they’re not your competition."  I just kind of looked at him and I wasn’t sure what he was getting at. He pointed to himself and he said, "Me. I’m your competition. You just worry about me."  I just really felt a lot better after that because I felt like I could really focus on what mattered and not looking around at everybody else.

You began studying classical composition and then when you were at Berklee were you mostly focused on jazz?

Yes. I was heavily focused on jazz guitar and composition at that time.

So, those two things were merging together already at that point. There were probably lots of points of contact between the two. I was listening to a few tracks from the Unit that were recorded back in 1988, and you were playing relatively straightforward jazz at that point, but still it had something of the emotional feel of your more recent music. Do you consider yourself or your music to be a part of any particular musical tradition, jazz or otherwise?

I don’t think of what I do now as jazz or really having anything to do with it, but that’s just me. I’ve had other people who are big jazz fans tell me they really love it and it’s been played on some jazz radio, which is always really surprising to me. But I tend to think of it going more to a modern classical tradition. I really feel aligned with the composers of the second Viennese school and Bartok and Elliott Carter and those kind of guys, and certainly from the harmonic structural standpoint. I think if you listen to any of the duet stuff or any of the composed pieces, you really aren’t going to hear anything that could be interpreted as jazz harmony and you’re not going to hear a lot of diatonic harmony in those things. It’s not intentional; it’s just how I hear things.

So the jazz harmony is almost subliminal at this point? It’s there somewhere, but not really as a conscious part of your compositional process?

It’s hard for me to say. If you’re hearing that, I can’t tell you you’re not hearing that.

I’m just wondering what happened to it. I don’t hear it. I hear a surprising lack of it given that you studied it so thoroughly. I think it’s kind of interesting.

I don’t feel that influence in it at all. I don’t listen to jazz. I sort of packed up all my jazz records years ago. When I hear it, I still enjoy it. I’m not opposed to it and it’s not that I dislike it, but I just don’t feel like I’m getting anything from it. I feel like I can listen to Bartok string quartets or some Gesualdo pieces and it’s like being in school. I feel just this learning and growth experience just from hearing that.

You said you compose on piano rather than guitar. Is that more for the classical pieces, or do you actually write for the guitar but begin with piano and then play the music on the guitar?

It’s kind of two branches on the same tree. All chamber, solo, and orchestral pieces are composed exclusively piano and I’m going to say most of what I’ve written for guitar had started or even been entirely on piano. At times I try to write on guitar and it ends up sounding like a guitar piece. It doesn’t sound like a composition. It just sounds like a guitar piece. I really can’t stand listening to guitar players that just sound like every other guitar player because all they’ve ever listened to were guitar players. So I’m trying to move out of those boundaries and I just naturally hear and think in more of a pianistic way than a guitar way, so I’m constantly trying to adapt that to what I’m doing and what I’m hearing and what I’m writing and playing. That may be part of why I’ve had the extended range instruments built just because I don’t even hear or think in guitar register.

Muscle memory contributes a lot to why guitar players frequently sound the same when composing on the guitar—just because their hands go to familiar places. Does composing on the piano also extend to, say, the way you practice or the way that you conceptualize what you’re doing on the guitar—helping to keep you from falling into that trap? Because I don’t hear any clichés in your guitar playing. It’s remarkable. I’ve listened to quite a bit of it now.  What do you do in terms of when you’re working out your technique or working out ideas on guitar to avoid that trap?  Is piano an aspect of that?

When I’m practicing, I do a lot of reading out of scores for other instruments. In other words, I’ll sit down and crack open a book of the solo violin pieces by Bach and not play it like you might hear a classical guitarist play it, but like a violinist would play it. In other words, just playing a single line instead of trying to flesh it out in more of a classical guitar way. Just focusing on the line. Or, I often read out of like Bartok piano scores or break open string quartet scores. It’s not that I avoid guitar literature. I mean right now on my music stand I’ve got some Villa-Lobos and some Leo Brouwer pieces open right now. Lately I’ve been reading a lot of Leo Brouwer pieces. But it’s really balanced out because like I said, I do a lot of reading out of piano scores and trying to adapt pianistic chord voicings to guitar. When I practice scale patterns, instead of practicing across the fingerboard, like staying in one position and playing a scale start to finish barely moving out of one position, I’ll do something that maybe starts on a first fret F on the low E string, and ends up at the 13th fret F on the high E string, so that I move across three octaves and back down. So I’m moving across the entire fingerboard instead of just being limited in one position, which is a much more linear sound to me and it really affects your thinking when you start to see the entire fingerboard as one entity instead of like a walled-off first position, second position type thing.

The music on Returning—like on all four of the albums you did with Sandor Szabo—is entirely improvised, yet it sounds very composed and even arranged, especially the way that the parts interact. How is that possible?

I will tell you as much as I know about that process. When we recorded the first album—well, we’ve recorded all of the albums in one day. That’s how well we play together. On the first album, we kind of brought little sketches. We each had little pieces that might be a couple of bars long or maybe I think Sandor had one that was about half a page at one point, but we abandoned that pretty quickly because it just seemed that we were thinking so much alike and we just could almost read the other person that it just felt really natural. Pieces would begin and end in unison. We might discuss it ahead of time like, I’m going to begin this piece in 5/4, give me two bars up front, or we’ll both begin here—you start in this register and I’ll start in this register. So there might be a sentence or two where we talk through something, but that’s really about it. I’ve had a lot of people say to me that they’re really surprised when they find out that those are all improvised pieces because they say that they sound like compositions.

Yes, they absolutely sound like compositions. You started by saying on the first album that’s the way it happened. Did things change as you were moving along, or is it pretty much the same process all the way through?

Things changed during the recording of the first album. We just realized that we didn’t really need anything written and we would just discuss the form or maybe an element of the form, maybe a harmonic structure, yet it wasn’t that rigid. We would talk conceptually about something, but again just two or three sentences—just a quick little sketch what one of us might have in mind. There were a couple of pieces, I think “Solitary Cypress” on the first album that I did with Sandor, I began without telling him what I was going to do so I had an idea in mind and I just started kind of spinning it out in front of him and he just picked it up and ran with it. That was one about which we didn’t have any verbal discussion. There are pieces like that where one of us will just begin.

What does improvisation mean to you? And describe as best you can what’s taking place within you while it’s happening, psychologically or even spiritually. What’s the experience?

I don’t think of it so much as improvisation as I do real time composition. You pick up a score of music and there was a time when that was improvisation. Written printed music is really just frozen improvisation. I really look at what I do as more of real-time composition. When I’m doing pieces solo—I started recording some solo pieces lately—what I’m really thinking about is the form. When I’m working with Sandor really what I’m doing is just listening to him and listening like maybe as a third person and just getting a sense of where that composition is going. Once I have a sense of where it’s going I just stay out of the way and just let it go where it wants to go. I’m not thinking about scales, I’m not thinking about harmonic structures, I’m not thinking about transitional moments or sections in the piece. I’m really just sensing the piece as a whole and letting it go where it wants to go and giving it all the space and nurturing it needs to do that.

You said you’re trying to get out of the way when this is happening. Do you ever feel like whatever it is that allows you to make that connection and have the creative flow happening that your analytical mind—the guy who might sit down with a pencil and paper and work something out or think something through structurally—that part of you is kind of moving slower or behind the curve on this and the creative thing is much faster and is happening at a different rate? Is that what you mean by getting out of the way—not thinking about it too much?

I don’t feel like it’s moving slowly or behind anything. When I’m composing with manuscript paper and a piano and a pencil, I can go as slow as I want and I can be as analytical as I want and I can really get incredibly molecularly analytical about something. Composing in real time is the exact opposite of that. There’s no analysis, at least in the front of my brain—not cognizantly. It’s just listening and reacting and sensing in that moment where things are going and just letting them go in that direction. A couple of authors that I have read have discussed that the writing process when you’re writing anything with characters and I have read two or three authors that have said the same thing. They've stated that a lot of times characters will take on a life of their own and start taking on actions and courses of action and dialogue that the author doesn’t really want them to, but they just kind of take over. I really understand that because a lot of the pieces in their early stages you think you know where it’s going or where you certainly want it to go and by the time you’re done it really had no resemblance to that by the time the piece is complete.

In some of the interviews that I’ve read with both you and Sandor, you talk about the source. It’s a very metaphysical conception of music as sort of already existing somewhere, and you’re in the studio creating a space for it to occupy. That conception is much more in keeping with ancient ideas of music, and how it relates to the social structure, as opposed to the more contemporary idea of music as entertainment, and composing as just crafting catchy tunes or something. Can you talk a little bit about how you conceptualize the source of creativity, and how you connect with it?

I just feel that music comes from somewhere else. I don’t pretend to create it. It kind of ties into what I was saying earlier about staying out of the way of it. I just allow it to come through. There’s a lot of times when I’ll listen back to a master recording, once everything is mixed and mastered, and I’m listening to the final master, there’s a tremendous amount of stuff that I just don’t either recognize or remember playing or things that I don’t even recognize as me. I think that’s part of that. I think it’s coming from somewhere else. It sounds like a very spiritual thing to some people maybe and maybe it is. But I think it’s something that’s not really of this physical plane, if you want to call it that. I think it really comes from somewhere else.

Lazy journalists often employ the term “otherworldly” in a meaningless and clichéd way when they hear something that they can’t immediately comprehend. But in your case, it’s arguably literally true. There is something that’s going on there—there’s something magical that’s happening. I don’t think you can account for this with an easy to understand rational explanation.  But if it’s from another world, then what would it be? Is it something that’s outside of human experience and there’s a point of contact there, which would be more of a spiritual or religious kind of view? Or maybe it is coming from deep within the artist, so it’s a human thing—it’s part of the human experience but maybe taking more of a psychological view, like a Jungian view where you’re gaining access to some deeper realm of experience? Do you have any sense of that? Do you feel like it’s like some other that you’re touching on the outside or is it something that’s coming up from within—or is that even a reasonable question? Is that a false distinction?

I think that’s a fine question. I don’t know that it would be one or the other. It might be everything that you just said and it might be a whole lot of other things too. I live kind of out in the woods in New England and I go for a lot of hikes out in the woods and I just seem to hear things differently when I’m in that element. I don’t just mean hearing nature sounds and animal sounds, but just my whole sense of hearing seems to shift. I think there’s an element of nature that is kind of imbued into what I do. That’s something Sandor and I have actually discussed a few times because he loves hiking and we would record a few pieces and then go for a hike and then come back and work on some more. I think to circle back to what you were saying, I think that source could be God, I think it can be something so deep within the artist that they’re not even aware of it, I think it could be nature, I think it could be chemistry between two or more people. I know I play differently with Sandor than I do on the records with Siegfried, or I play differently with Sandor than I do when I’m working out pieces on my own. A good example is when we were on tour, there were concerts wherein I played a couple of duet pieces with Dominic Miller, and I didn’t play anything with him that I would have played with Sandor. I think that plays into it as well. I think it’s a big question, Barry. I’m not that smart of a guy.

You’ve done a pretty good job of answering similar questions in some of your other interviews so that’s why I thought I would bring that up. It’s hugely interesting to me. It’s something that I think about a lot, so when I have the opportunity to ask those sorts of questions to someone at your level of contact with this, it’s irresistible to me.

Can you tell me about your primary instruments and if you want to limit it to what was used on Returning, —specifically the range and the voice qualities.

I think it’s going to be two separate questions. To address the instruments, nothing that I’m doing involves a standard concert tuned 6-string. I do a lot of practicing on classical guitar but I don’t record with it. I have three sort of main instruments and the fourth one arrived yesterday. We’ll talk about that a bit later if you want. But the three main ones that I use are all part of the Kevin Kastning series that I’ve done with Santa Cruz, specifically with Dan Roberts when he was there. He left about a year ago and started his own company. Dan was really instrumental, between Dan and Richard Hoover (founder and owner of Santa Cruz Guitars), they really made these things happen for me. The first one was the extended Baritone, which is a 6-string instrument but it’s tuned to F#, in other words a whole step above a bass. I’ve also done a lot of retuning it, for “Returning” it was tuned to E, so it was tuned to the same register as the bass. Long scale—28.5 scale. The instrument that I really consider my main instrument is a 12-string version of that—the Santa Cruz. It’s called the DKK-12, which is a 12-string Baritone—a 12-string extended Baritone which is also in F# tuning. So where most Baritones are maybe one or two whole steps below concert pitch, this one’s a full 7th below concert pitch. It might be easier to think of a whole step above a bass. The third one I use is the Alto guitar. It is tuned to A above E so it’s pitched a fourth above a concert pitched guitar and that’s also a 12-string instrument. So those are my really three main instruments and probably the DKK-12 sees most of the action.

Can you tell me about the Contraguitar?

Sure. That’s something about which I started talking to Dan Roberts around four years ago. I’m trying to think of which record we had just finished and I had been really, really living in that lower register for a while and I wanted something that would go lower but not a bass—something that would allow me to have a lower reach but yet still that upper kind of Baritone—that sort of upper cello register sound. So I had been thinking about it and thought about something that was more than six courses so I started to Dan about it—something that would probably be a longer scale than the KK Baritone series and certainly more than six courses. So by the time I started talking to Dan about it, I kind of had most of the basics of it in mind—7 or 8 courses, I had the tuning in mind, I wanted it to go down to E on a bass if not lower and then well up into an alto register on the top end. We talked about it and worked out the details for a tremendously long time, so long that by the time we had really nailed down what it was going to be, Dan had started his own company. So that is a Dan Roberts instrument. At one point he said, ‘what are you going to call it? It’s not a Baritone.’ I had been writing some of wind quintet pieces around this time, and I thought about how a contra bassoon is one octave below the bassoon. So I said for now let’s just call it the Contra guitar because it’s going to start off being an octave lower than guitar. We still call it that. So that’s how the Contra came into being and it arrived yesterday.

How is that guitar going to relate to the other guitars? Is it just one more voice in there, or are you planning to do a lot of exploration on that one and focus on it for a while?

Yeah, I think it’s going to become the main instrument because it has such a tremendous range and it’s really going to take me a while to learn it. It’s a 30-inch scale, the nut width is 3 1/4 inches, and it’s really an entirely new instrument. So right now I have it set up in octave tuning in low E on a bass up to A for the seventh course. As I start getting more acclimated with it, I’ll start using some of my tunings with it. It is just orchestral, just the textures of it, the voicing. Dan is an amazing luthier. He and I have worked on instruments together for about 10 years now. I think this is the 7th or 8th instrument that he has done for me on which we’ve collaborated. He really understands musically what I’m doing and we kind of speak the same language. So if I mention a certain sort of timbre or tonal quality then he knows what I mean. He’s really kind of my unseen partner wherever I go because if it wasn’t for him, and also Richard at Santa Cruz, I feel like I wouldn’t be able to do a lot of what I do because they’ve been so incredibly supportive. Anything I’ve asked them to do, they’ve been really enthusiastic about doing it.

How do you amplify these instruments? Do you just use microphones when you perform or do they have any sort of electronics built into them?

No electronics. In the studio, I’m like a real purist snob that way, everything is just mics and that’s it. On tour there’s a little Audio-Technica clip-on mic the sound crew uses. On the last tour I had a Shure KSM44 out in front of me. So no electronics—just mics.

Do you insist that the house engineers not equalize or compress or otherwise, following the same philosophy you use in the studio?

That’s such a different setting that so I think in that case they’re the expert—they’re the professionals, so I let them do whatever they need to do. And you’re in a different sound environment every night, so the approach changes; what is required changes. We were lucky. Sandor’s been touring with the same crew for many years and they are the best crew I’ve ever worked with. They’re like working with a team of recording engineers every night.

Can you tell me how you record—the mic placement and that sort of detail? And is there any particular wisdom that you’ve gained in terms of how to place the two microphones? How do you capture the extended range of the instruments?

It all comes from mic selection and mic placement. I don’t use any EQ. I think if you’re using EQ, what that really means is you’re either using the wrong mic or you’ve got it set up in the wrong place. Lately I’ve been using a lot of mid-side things but all the stuff with Sandor was done with A/B pairs and stereo pairs on both of us—a pair of Gefells on me, close-miked at the sound hole. I don’t subscribe to aiming at the bridge and the 12th fret thing. That just sounds wrong to me. I’ve tried it, I’ve experiment with it, I’ve been in recording situations where somebody else would set up that way, and it just never sounds natural at all to me. But everything is close-miked. It’s all, like I said, just mic selection and placement. I really like the Gefells. They sound the most natural to me—the most like what I want to hear.

So you just experimented until you find the very best position for everything and then keep it that way.

Yeah. It took me years of experimentation and trial and error and going through different mics. I just love it so I always set up in the same, when it’s in my studio, I always set up in the same way; either it is an A/B pair, or a mid-side setup. We recorded two albums on tour and Sandor was recording in ProTools; we were on location in this old church in Hungary and everything was done with Jecklin disk pairs. That came out beautifully. The first of those two records will be out next year. It was a very different mic setup than I’m used to but it just totally worked for that space.

Describe your right-hand techniques. It sounds like at least on some of the older things, and also maybe on some of the newer ones, that you are using both a pick and your fingers—or is it all just your fingers?

No, on some of that stuff it’s pick and fingers. More recently, it’s moving to all fingers. My right hand technique seems to confound other guitarists and I don’t necessarily mean that in a good way [laughs]. I hold the pick backwards and at kind of a 45 degree angle so I’m not picking directly like you might think of as like a harpsichord where there’s a very direct attack—the pick moving directly across the string and releases the string. I’m using the rounded back edge of the pick held at a really severe angle. I hold it in my thumb and first two fingers. I’m not holding it parallel to the strings at all. I’m just brushing just trying to pull the sound out of the strings with the pick instead of pounding the sound out with the pick. So when I’m using a pick it tends to sound more like fingers than a pick.

So these days you’re playing without a pick at all.

Yes.

Are you using some variation on a classical technique? Describe a little bit about how you use your fingers. Do you use all of them including your pinky?

I do. It’s definitely more of a classical technique. That’s what I’m working on. Playing my classical guitar and reading classical method books, Carcassi, and of course the Leo Browuer etudes are really good to work on my right hand stuff. It just came out of partly the frustration with the pick. First of all there’s no contact with the string. There’s something between you and the string. Again, I keep going back to the piano. On a piano when you play a chord, you’re hearing all the notes at once and on the guitar you don’t always because you tend to strum bass to treble across the strings. But that sound has always kind of bothered me because as a piano player I’ve always voiced all the chords that way and attacked all the chords in this sort of quick arpeggiated kind of manor. It would really start to grate on me after a while. So one thing I can do with all fingers is to just, if I’m playing a 4-note or 5-note chord voicing I can grab all four notes at once and it sounds like a complete harmonic structure instead of four notes sort of one sound after the other, kind of a strum sound. A lot of my lines are pretty angular. I don’t always play a lot of really linear ideas. So there will be wide leaps of an octave or more inside of a line or a phrase. While I can do that with a pick, I can do that a whole lot better with fingers reaching across the spread of four or five strings. It happens much more instantaneously and much more cleanly with fingers.

What about the role of your thumb on your right hand?

Same. It’s just like another finger when I’m using my fingers.

Is what you are doing with your left hand also based in classical technique? You did talk a little bit about how you sometimes approach playing up and down as opposed to across. Is there anything that’s going with your left hand that’s unusual?

A couple of things come to mind. I really got the idea from watching cellists instead of watching guitarists, even though it’s really common with classical guitarists. But at that time I didn’t know it. I was I think still in high school or just out of high school. I was watching cello players. A cellist keeps their thumb in the middle of the back of the neck at all times, which provides tremendous reach with your left fingers. You don’t kind of have this fist where you’re thumb is wrapped over the top of the neck. Your fingers just expand to their complete width. So it opens you up to a whole world of chord voicings that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. So my thumb is always in the back at the center of the neck. I think my hand looks more like a cellist probably than a guitarist. With the Contraguitar, that is not going to work. What I’ve been doing is keeping my thumb either in the lower—instead of behind the center of the neck, it’s almost more behind the treble strings part of the neck.

On the Contra, the width of the neck is such that I find my thumb is either kind of behind the treble strings on the back of the neck or it comes out from behind the neck entirely so that it’s now in the front, or just touching the edge of the fingerboard, at the binding. So to reach the bass notes, my thumb has to come out because the neck is so wide. That has gotten me starting to use my left thumb like another finger in some cases. So I think that’s really going become a part of the technique that the Contra is demanding just because of the physical ramifications of it.

One of your instruments is set up as a fretless guitar. Have you explored fretless guitar playing much?

Yeah. I’ve had a fretless guitar since the early '80s. I have an Ibanez acoustic that I’ve had since I was a kid. It wasn’t getting any use and at the same time I used to teach guitar at a music store and I had borrowed a cello from the store for a couple of weeks. I wouldn’t say I was playing cello because that’s too kind of a term for what I was doing. I was trying to get sounds out of a cello really because I was horrible. But the thing that really spoke to me was just the vocal quality of the cello because it’s obviously fretless. My luthier at the time, who actually still does some of my work—his name is John Barger —a great luthier. He doesn’t build, he just does repair and modifications but just a really gifted man. I took the guitar to him and said I want to make this into a fretless. He pretty much threw me out of his shop because it was unheard of and he just thought it was like blasphemy. Every time I would see him I would mention, when are you going to do the fretless thing and he would just kind of scowl at me. But one day he said, "I was thinking about that and it might be kinda cool." So he converted it to fretless for me, which was in the early '80s, so it’s essentially just a fairly inexpensive Ibanez acoustic with nylon strings because they speak better fretless than steel strings. There are a couple of pieces on some of the things I’ve done with Siegfried that are fretless. In fact, Sieg and I have an album coming early next year and I played fretless on two or three pieces on that record, too.

Are you using it to play microtonal intervals or what’s the application?

No. No microtones, no quarter tones, and really limited chords. You really can’t do chords. You can pull off double stops if you’re really careful. So it’s just like a single note kind of application—just this really beautiful vocal quality to the note that really, really speaks to me. In fact, the upper register of the Contra and the alto are fretless too so I can play the fretless in the upper registers on those as well.

Have you experimented with bowing instruments at all?

No. I keep thinking about that but I really haven’t as yet.

Do you know about the guitar viol?

Yes I do.

That’s an interesting instrument.

Yeah, it’s really cool. Although, I do use wooden spoons sometimes. I’ll finger chords with my left hand but instead of using my right fingers, I’ll have these wooden mixing spoons. So I’ll sort of tap the strings with it; not only do you get all the notes in the chord at once but it’s really a percussive harpsichord kind of sound.

Did you use that on Returning at some point?

I used it on one of those records. I don’t remember which one. Playing live, I’ll do it if the piece calls for it.

What the next step for you as a guitarist and composer?

The next phase is certainly going to involve the Contra because I’ve been moving in that direction for quite a while but I just didn’t have the instrument for it and now I do. That’s going to be insanely demanding technique-wise because, I’ve only had it for a couple of days, but already there’s so much that I’m used to doing and it just doesn’t work on this instrument. So it’s such a whole new world that I’m going to have to learn and it’s an amazing sounding instrument. It’s incredibly loud, very rich, very balanced in all the registers. Dan did an amazing job with it. Sandor and I have two albums recorded that will be out over the next two years and are working on some other things that are going to be a little bit different than we’ve done so far. I’m doing a record coming up with cellist David Darling. We’re going to be doing something in December. And I have a recording project coming up with electric guitarist Mark Wingfield from England.

Will that be improvised music or compositions?

I don’t know. I’m sure it’s going to be a lot of improvisation in it. We’ve just started talking about it. I’m really excited to do that.

Reprinted with permission of Guitar Player Magazine and © 2010 Guitar Player Magazine.