Great Interview With Carl Verheyen

I recently was reading an article over at Premier Guitar with guitarist Carl Verheyen.This guy is so cool sounding and apparently a major player in the recording industry as far as being requested for studio dates.His thoughts on playing,equipment and recording was very inspiring,so i thought i would share it with you.
Below are some highlights of the interview by Oscar Jordan.
Carl Verheyen is a guitar chameleon whose whose adaptability puts him in high demand has made him in high demand for everything from TV commercials to major recordings.
"We mic the amp, but we also mic the room. That’s the sound of the guitar and that’s what I want to hear. I’m not a home studio guy. I pretty much just do little demos for myself on an old hard drive recorder, and mic amps and mic acoustic guitars and work out parts, so I rarely have to use a real studio."
"I never use plug-ins, and I always mic an amp no matter what. I like to mic it through some of that old API gear that they have at Sunset Sound, but I’m paying two hundred bucks an hour (laughs) so it’s a little dangerous. You want to be able to listen to it five to ten years from now and say, “Man, this still holds up,” whereas that plug-in stuff may not. "
"I was listening to Greg Howe’s new record and thinking, “Oh man, this guy’s chops are insane!” There are a lot of people on a level that’s pretty high in terms of that. Now it becomes, how do you layer? How do you orchestrate? My concept has always been, “How do I pick who’s going to be Frank Sinatra? Which guy is going to have that main voice?” On those Frank Sinatra records the whole orchestra comes in and it’s beautiful. There’s this huge level of glorious sound. Then Frank comes in and it’s even more glorious!"
"It started to come together with an A/B system. I would say right around 1990 I started putting together that kind of clean and dirty rig. I remember talking to Allan Holdsworth and he said, “You don’t play clean and dirty out of the same speakers do you?” And I said, “Yeah.” He said, “How can you do that? I want a real papery warm sound from my lead tone, like Celestions. From my clean sound I want something a little more bright and pingy.” Then I thought, “Well so do I!” That’s what kind of started me thinking down the road of having two separate rigs."
"When you really get down to it, blues, blues-rock, rock, country, country-rock, bluegrass, jazz, heavy metal, be-bop, all these different styles of music use the same twelve notes. The only difference between the jazz guys is how they ornament the style. They’ll play a certain feel so it’s a rhythmic ornamentation. They’ll play a certain choice of notes so it’s a harmonic thing and a sonic thing. You take that be-bop style of Charlie Parker—it’s really in many cases the mixolydian mode."
"You’ve got to separate your artistic career from your sideman career. Your sideman career is about you being a well-listened craftsman. I was called into a session once where they said, “I need that ZZ Top thing.” That’s Billy Gibbons playing a Les Paul, probably through a little tweed Fender amp. Pinch harmonics… a Texas shuffle is very different than a Chicago shuffle so the sound adjusts, the feel adjusts and here’s my impersonation of Billy Gibbons. That is being a well-listened craftsman, as opposed to an artist. I separate the two in order to make a living. When you are a sideman you’ve got somebody else’s musical vision that you’re trying to bring out. When I’m making my own records it’s my musical vision."
...read on... http://www.premierguitar.com/Magazine/Issue/2009/Jan/Carl_Verheyen_Interview.aspx
website... http://www.carlverheyen.com/