One of the first guitar teachers I ever had was John Tapscott. John was one of the biggest influences on me as far as deciding to make music my profession, and also helping me get a sense of artistic identity. John turned me on to the concept of improvising almost straight away. Just sitting there jamming on a blues progression and playing things totally off the cuff...it was very addictive.
As I grew older, much of the music I was listening to was partly based on this concept. I would be listening to people like Stevie Ray Vaughan, Eddie Van Halen, Joe Satriani and Steve Vai. These people who I have just mentioned have had a huge amount of influence on me musically, and that influence is still a big part of my approach to music many years later. All of them play with a tremendous amount of energy and fire and that’s something I caught on to early on when I was listening to them. They played everything with so much conviction and authority, and you just knew it was totally coming from the heart.
When I was just starting to learn how to improvise, my harmonic resources were pretty much limited to using minor pentatonic scales, and major scales....and my ears. Ultimately, I wasn’t too concerned about how every one of my notes functioned against the chord at hand...I was more concerned about tone, feel, and attitude...and looking cool while doing it. I never felt any inhibitions as a player to try and play beyond what I knew even if it meant sounding like I was falling down the stairs musically.
When I went to Berklee, I like every other student was immersed in learning music theory. We studied chord scales, tensions, upper structures, multi tonic systems, phrasing, polyrhythms, mechanical voicings....blah, blah, blah. Everything had a name for it and I think most of us felt a little overwhelmed with how much there was to know. There’s an expression I’ve heard many times that the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know. What slowly started to happen to me was that fear started to creep into my spirit. Fear of playing a wrong note, fear of losing the form of a tune while performing, or fear of sounding “unhip”. Performing for other people...
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