Allan Holdsworth NYC The Cutting Room - September 13 - 2014

Here is the complete, cleaned-up transcript from the Allan Holdsworth masterclass/Q&A event at The Cutting Room in New York City (September 13, 2014), with speaker identifiers included:

Allan Holdsworth: Live at The Cutting Room, NYC (Sept 13, 2014) [00:02] Allan Holdsworth: ...go your own way and leave a trend, you know, so it's like kind of like that for me, so.

[00:07] Interviewer: So, don't you think that that's a—I mean, I know you don't like that word for yourself—but like a culture, that's kind of a form of genius, because—

[00:11] Allan Holdsworth: No, I'm a genius, I'm dumb as hell. No...

[00:15] Interviewer: No, I mean, okay, well, we'll leave you, but it's a form of genius for someone to not have a reference point, to take something somewhere else that no one else has really taken it to. And those guys did that, and I don't know whether—I mean, I guess it just comes from some innate something within them, but I think your playing comes really deep within you that no one—no one can emulate, probably something I hate or something.

[00:43] Interviewer: All right, I'll stop complimenting you.

[00:48] Interviewer: So there was no kind of like "aha" moment where you go, "Okay, well, now I'm really up to something"?

[00:52] Allan Holdsworth: No, there's never been an "aha" moment. I'm still waiting, you know? I mean, it's that's one cool thing about being really old, which I am, is that the only cool thing about being old is I woke up today.

[01:09] Interviewer: That's inspirational.

[01:11] Allan Holdsworth: Well, it is, I can go buy another...

[01:17] Interviewer: I don't want to dominate the questions. Anybody in the audience would ask something that—anybody out there?

[01:25] Audience Member 1: I'd like to follow up on what you brought up. So, you're suggesting that this idea that the creative groundbreaking of someone like [Coltrane?] is innate, but his practice routine was legendary—oh, from like the—like the scales, well known for his practicing routine and how many hundreds of thousands of hours go into exploring scales, technique, etc. So, how much of it is craft? I mean, you know, did you go—just because you put the work in, did Coltrane go farther because he put the work in?

[01:59] Allan Holdsworth: Probably, I mean, I don't think you get anything for nothing, you know? Like, uh, yeah, I just—I just figured out a way that I wanted to, uh, work on my own, you know, and study things on my own. And then I figured out that I wasn't sure about the guitar with the—with the way that notation was for the guitar. Now, you know, you get to an altered dominant chord, I go like, "It's got five different names," and my dad says, "Yes, because you don't play the piano and you can never play all the notes. You're only playing four notes at a time," which is true, you know? Most guitar chords only contain four notes, which don't even really spell out the chords. So, that's when I decided that I was going to look at the whole thing differently. So I quit looking at anything from the root up, which is what kind of players used to do. So I just—I just kind of figured out a way to, uh, to, um, like write down all the—I wanted to figure out every possible scale without buying a book. So I did, and I cataloged them all, and I have them all. Obviously, I can't remember hardly any of them because there's thousands of them, but, uh, it was a unique experience to work on it, and I did work on it, you know? I'm lazy now, but I'm old, but I—I wasn't so lazy when I was younger.

[03:16] Audience Member 1: So when you were younger, how—how much per day do you think you practiced?

[03:22] Allan Holdsworth: Well, I played, you know, every day. I never had a strict, uh, practice thing. I—I would—well, I'd have like three things. One would be just like working on something that I didn't know, and then the other thing would be like trying to figure out how to, you know, work on chords or whatever, scales. And the third thing would be just improvising. I just noodle. So those are the only three things I did, but I did it every day. Sometimes I'd spend more time noodling, and other times I spend a lot of time working on stuff I didn't know or trying to figure out how to play certain scales in certain positions.

[04:02] Audience Member 1: Were you playing like cover bands doing cover music at all, or like—

[04:08] Allan Holdsworth: Oh, sure, I played top 40 bands for years. It was—it was cool. It was a little bit better—a little bit better than the bike shop.

[04:17] Interviewer: That's right, you're also like bike cycling like 80 miles a day or something, right?

[04:22] Allan Holdsworth: Yeah, in the old days, but I quit that one was fat. So if you get a bike, ride it.

[04:30] Audience Member 2: Well, that kind of leads into the chords thing. So how did you—how do you approach—because obviously lots of people, myself included in this room, you can't play some of the chords you actually play because they're so extended.

[04:41] Allan Holdsworth: Actually, because my only—my only teacher, actually the only teacher I ever had, was my dad, and he played the piano. So when—when he would play chords, it would always be voiced differently than the guitar, even though later on himself became pretty good guitar player. He could play like beautiful chord things on the guitar. He didn't have a lot of chops, but it didn't matter. He had a lot of harmonic chops, which is better, actually. But, um, so, but then a lot of the chords that you showed me, they were kind of like close-voiced. So I—I just came up—I just grew up with that, so that was normal for me. So I never learned the normal, you know, little short bunched-up chords really. So they were always a little bit more extended. So I think it just came—it was just an accident. My dad obviously didn't play the guitar, but he was able to open up a whole another world for me with the guitar, but I didn't know—I was ignorant to the fact that I was doing that, anything that was any different than anybody else. I thought everybody else would do this.

[05:48] Audience Member 2: So you never looked back and said, "Oh, this is—I'm not hearing anybody doing this, what I do now"?

[05:53] Allan Holdsworth: Not really, no. I was just—because I always heard of the guys that I thought were really amazing and stuff, so no, I just kept going, just kept looking, kept fishing, you know? Kept digging. You got to dig.

[06:06] Audience Member 2: So how did the, uh, tone evolution come about? Just the kind of ever-evolving chasing the tone?

[06:13] Allan Holdsworth: Well, that's never—that's kind of a never-ending story.

[06:17] Audience Member 2: How did it first start?

[06:22] Allan Holdsworth: No, I just wanted to—I just wanted to play like long notes, and, uh, so I started, like everybody else, kind of using distortion. But the problem with that is that it's kind of ugly, you know? A lot of times the distortion is really ugly. So it's been a big battle for me. I've been trying to find a way to make the distortion sound not so ugly, to try to kind of make it prettier. It's kind of hard, though. You need a lot of makeup. But—but it's kind of, I don't know, not—not with gear so much, but just the way you—just the way of thinking about it. And it's not really always gear, but, uh, the gear helps you just look for stuff that you like. And I just tried to get the sound that was not so gnarly or whatever. And, you know, to some people it might be too dark, or, you know, but, uh, I—it's not—it's never done. It's not—I haven't got there yet. I'm just still working on it. So as long as I keep waking up, I'll keep working.

[07:20] Interviewer: Question? You have a question? Just raise your hand. I'll start with this gentleman right here.

[07:34] Audience Member 3: Okay, uh, this is actually going back to the chords. If I remember correctly, I know you played violin on your, uh, IOU record, and I think you said in an interview like around '82 that you were tuning in fifths sometimes. So I was curious as to whether any of your recorded output is in fifths, or is it all standard stuff and you just did the fifth thing at home privately to explore the voicings, or what?

[07:58] Allan Holdsworth: No, the only time I, uh, tuned anything in fifths besides the violin—because I like that tuning, but it's kind of gnarly on chords, but you know, it kind of limited—was with the SynthAxe, because it was easy to do. So I could—I could, uh, tune in straight fourths, which is my—which is, if I was starting to learn to play the guitar today and somebody gave me a guitar today, I'd tune it in straight fourths without a doubt, just—just like a six-string bass, boom! Because to find that B string is a pain, and, uh, it's not necessary because you play—you know, there's only a few of us like go around bashing out power chords anymore. You don't need that anyway. So if I was to learn again—it's just that I spent so many years trying to beat the B string that I can't go and unbeat it [laughs]. It's a song title, because otherwise, you know, it'd be easy, you know? Any voicing on any set of fourths is the same, exactly the same. But you go, "Wait a minute, that B string!"

[09:07] Audience Member 3: So are any of the SynthAxe tunes in fifths on the record?

[09:12] Allan Holdsworth: Yes, yes, they are, yeah. Uh, but I figured out how to play them in fourths too, because that was one of the things—that was one of my, uh, pet projects, was I liked to figure out if I could play the same thing in fifths as fourths. And actually, most of the time you can, except for the SynthAxe had kind of unlimited range, so some of the low notes they—they weren't available, you know? So, but like "Looking Glass," I wrote that in fifths, and "Number" was in fifths.

[09:38] Audience Member 3: But you can play it on a regular guitar? You can play the same thing on the guitar? And the solos are in standard, or did you—

[09:49] Allan Holdsworth: The solo on "Number" on the—when I used the SynthAxe, that was in fifths because I was trying to—I was just trying to play a fake violin. But otherwise, no, on the guitar I just use a regular tuning. As much as I'd like to change it, I always end up dropping back. I've tried it, but failed miserably.

[10:15] Interviewer: Over here.

[10:20] Audience Member 4: Alan, back to, uh, the tone, the search for the tone. Um, you know, you were saying that the distortion—I think I've heard you say it's sort of a necessary evil, and maybe not distortion, but boost of some kind to get the sustain that you're looking for. How do you actually—how do you actually do it? What's your, uh, the signal chain? Guitar to what to what to what for, say, the lead sound?

[10:43] Allan Holdsworth: Well, with the lead sound, usually I find it—first of all, you got to find like an amplifier that you kind of like the sound of. You find one that you like, you know? There's a lot of really nasty amplifiers out there, but if you find one that you like, and then I—I'd kind of work with that. And being as I had a little bit of an electronic background, I—I used to build my own load boxes, which I could manipulate and sound a little more—they would just take the power amp section of any kind of tube amp and turn it into a line-level signal. Then I could EQ it and then just put it into a big giant power amp to the speaker cabinets and run it really quiet. So it would be the original amplifier might be really like—it looked like it was really loud, you know, like it was on 11, but the actual output would be very low. And I just try to work on just finding an amp that I really like the sound of, and then just try to manipulate it a little bit. And I—I usually use a—like I used to like to use a—like the pickups on my guitars are really low output. They're like the original '59s which are made by Seymour Duncan that he makes for me specially, and they're just like the original '59 pickup. And then, uh, so I use a little booster pedal and then go right into the amp, so I'm just kind of juicing the amp, but without a high-power pickup. Because those old pickups were—didn't have much of an output, pretty low, but they had a really cool sound, and they didn't have big magnets, so they wouldn't suck on the strings. So when you got thin strings like I use, if you got a magnet that's really powerful, it stops the strings from vibrating. So I'd rather have a less powerful magnet and then kind of boost it a little bit later down the chain so it didn't affect the strings. That's why I usually like single-pickup guitars for that reason.

[12:44] Audience Member 4: So as far as the—your what you were explaining there, when you went from, I guess, sort of a power soak kind of thing into a power amp, is that what you do live, or do you just use—

[12:56] Allan Holdsworth: No, not so much live. I mean, I've done that live, yeah, sure. But because of the, you know, because of how we have to travel now and we can't take so much stuff, I've just been using like pedals and stuff, you know, just to—just—just to make—just to make it easier. Uh, but it's—it's not the way I'd really like it to be, but it's the way that the economy has turned it into. So I generally don't use exactly the same stuff that I would use in the studio.

[13:21] Audience Member 4: So your basic—I don't even know where I'm looking because that light's so bright. Maybe pointing to the audience... So why then essentially is—similar, as your guitar goes into a boost of some kind and then right into the amp?

[13:44] Allan Holdsworth: I usually go wet/dry because I—I never—I was never—I never found an amplifier that could do anything but—I mean everything, I should say. So I—I like always split the sound into like—the clean sound is easy, you know? Clean sound, I love it. The DI is easy, but the lead sound's always a bit of a problem because I'm always like looking for the, you know, questing for the tone or whatever. So it's a little bit more difficult. I just usually wire the guitar up and one of them goes into the 20-watt amp, the other one goes into 30-watt amp, and then I have two separate sets of stereo. So it's like four—four speakers with stereo clean, stereo rhythm. Otherwise, it's pretty—that's it pretty much. I could do it with two power amps and four, you know, like two stereo—two stereo cabinets and two power amps, essentially.

[14:41] Interviewer: Thought this was a question.

[14:48] Audience Member 5: First of all, I'd like to thank you and salute you for the beauty and integrity of what you bring to the table as a musician. And then, uh, if I may, a couple of questions. One, uh, what would you do if you taught an ensemble of young aspiring musicians in the art of improvisation? What are some of the things that—that you would tell them?

[15:13] Allan Holdsworth: I don't know. I don't know the answer to that question. I really don't know, you know? I'm trying to figure it out. That's the weird thing is like you see like people who are teachers and they're like, "How can you teach anything if you don't know anything?" You know? So I don't know anything about music. I'm still trying to figure it out. It's so deep and so far, and it goes so, you know, it goes so far beyond. It's like, who am I to know anything about anything? I don't know anything about music, nothing. So how could I teach anybody anything when I don't know anything? I refuse.

[15:49] Interviewer: Would I be allowed to rephrase—

[15:52] Audience Member 5: Yes, sir.

[15:54] Interviewer: He didn't really mean that. It's like Frank Zappa said, you know, like, "Do you have any advice for young aspiring musicians?" He goes, "Yeah, take out a burial life franchise."

[16:09] Audience Member 5: Well, how about this: What do you look for when you're improvising with other musicians? What are the things that—you know, if you don't want to talk generally, then what are the things that, you know, that you get you going coming from other musicians? And what do you try to give them musically in order to have—

[16:25] Allan Holdsworth: Well, I just try to screw up as little as possible, of course, number one. And then, uh, just like if you're working with the guys that I've been very, very fortunate enough to work with—because I have actually worked with some of the greatest players in the world, in my opinion, you know—uh, so I've been very fortunate in that way. And I just like to kind of try to—try to do my best. And—and when you work with somebody, you know, like the guys I'm going to be working with next week or whatever, you know, there's like this—kind of this like organic thing that happens, because I can't put it into words. The very first time I played with Gary Husband, he was probably 19 years old, I was 27 at the time, so I was just a user too. But I remember when I first played with him, it was just like, "Wait a minute, what's going on here?" I felt like somebody had like connected us just with a wire. It was just like, "How does he know?" And then—then you get like all of the guys that I worked with, not just some of them, but with—a good example of other guys, like Jimmy Johnson. It's the same thing. He will do things and you just go like, "Where—where did that come from?" And it's like he instinctively knew that there was going to be a hole. How can you know there's going to be a hole, you know? How can he possibly know that this is going to go that way or whatever? It's just—I—you know, it's just like trying to play with the guys that you love to play with. And the list that I play with, really amazing musicians, is huge, and 99.9% of them all had that for me, you know? I would be the one that was probably letting them down more than the other way around, you know? Just, um, that's all. You just—you don't know what's going to happen. You just get on stage, you start playing, you see what happens. It's like Las Vegas, you don't know, we're probably going to lose.

[18:25] Interviewer: Anybody else? So we're having problems seeing some. If you drop that light a little bit that way, yeah, that would be awesome. I'll be able to see a little bit of—or maybe put some lights down that way. Oh, there you go, that's better, thank you.

[18:55] Audience Member 6: Yes, sir. My question is, um, I'm a bit of a tone chaser myself. I've spent the better part of 20 years buying different amplifiers, pedals, effects, and so on. And, uh, when direct solutions came out like Line 6, I thought, since I'm in an apartment and I can't really drive my neighbors nuts all the time, I tried using those, but the tone was never right and it always sounded fake. Recently I bought an Axe-Fx II, which is a much more expensive modeler, but it's getting me really close. Do you see yourself using some of these new direct devices that go direct to PA and have, you know, emulators rather than using amps, because it simplifies—I got rid of all my pedals, all my amps, everything, and I just go direct now.

[19:38] Allan Holdsworth: No, I do, absolutely, you know? And that's a great unit, too. That's a—a wonderful unit. I actually have one of those. It's great, it's really great. Um, it allows you to do—yeah, it takes away all the—all the stuff that you have on the stage, you know? You just plug right in the PA or whatever. No, it's great. All right, I—I think he's coming, but then—then he'll be, you know, at the end of the day, it's just like somebody, you know, maybe in 20 years' time, if there's still—if we're still—not me, but if the planet's still here, then somebody—some guy's going to go like, "Oh, look what I found in my garage: a 50-watt Marshall and a 4x12 cabinet! Check that out!" But I always say, yeah, it's—it's convenient, and you know, you use what you use, and it won't—it won't stop the music. That's the beauty of it, is it won't—it won't stop you from creating really great music. It doesn't matter really. It's just up to you, it's not up to the gear, you know? It's just a tool. It's like I've got a wrench to fix my car, that's how I think about the guitar. It's not even a—I just think of it like a—a little connection that I have between me and the world of music. It's not—it could be a trumpet, or, you know, if you're a mechanic, it could be something else. It doesn't matter. Just, uh, if you're able to create music with whatever you have, you know, then that's all you need. So the technology is great in—in that respect, but you know, there's always something to be said for, you know, I still like old, uh, two-inch analog tape machines, but, you know, that's just me.

[21:20] Audience Member 6: So do you use that when you play live?

[21:23] Allan Holdsworth: Yeah, so you just go direct into the PA?

[21:25] Audience Member 6: Go direct, that sounds great. And for a stage monitor, I just use one 1x12 so it's full range. I was just wondering if you saw yourself using some solutions like that in the future.

[21:37] Allan Holdsworth: I was thinking about it, you know, because I get—you know, to give me a little rash about all the stuff I carry around, so it saved me from carrying anything. I just have one cabinet, that unit that goes direct to the house, and that's it.

[21:49] Audience Member 6: Yeah, oh, nice. Thank you.

[22:00] Audience Member 7: Hi. On one of your DVDs you talk about—encourage—about visualizing, coming back to practicing, which really struck me. And, uh, usually music education, you don't hear too many people talk about that. I think it's the DVD with Steve Hunt and Gary Husband playing, and then in between you were talking, and you just said, "You know, just—encourage basically the people who watch the video," like in this case me, "to say, you know, just, uh, just visualize what you—you know, things, you imagine things on your guitar, and one day they will come out and realize themselves." And I—I just, um, if you go to a regular music education, you go to college, you know, they tell you use the scales and do this and do that. It's very intellectual, and, uh, personally just recently, you know, when I watched that DVD, which I got two years ago—little late, but, uh—you hear people like Victor Wooten talk about visualizing things, and I think it's an essential element of music education. And my question to you is, um, how you—how you found out that it was an essential element to your practice and your playing? And, uh, you know, it takes a lot of patience, and I think consistency in visualizing. And I just admire the fact that you mentioned it and also obviously never gave up on visualizing. Is it just something you said, "Oh, you know, let me do this over and over again," or did you really have a concept and you saw some results and then you would branch out more in that question?

[23:44] Allan Holdsworth: Oh, like that was a long question! Oh, sorry. No, no, it's fine, sorry about that. No, no, it's fine. Um, but yeah, visualizing and stuff is really—was really important to me, because, uh, you know, being as a person that can almost see—um, you know, that's how I first started, uh, figuring out like, uh, how I wanted to catalog my own like scales and try to work on things after I stopped working with—with my dad. And when my dad passed away, I kind of—I just decided I wanted to look at it a little bit differently, and I started working on little formulas of my own. And then I—I thought, "Okay, well, I'm going to catalog every single possible combination of—of scales in one octave, in two octaves, in three octaves." When you get past two octaves, it gets really rough, but I would—but I started with one, and that's how I—that's how I kind of started. I go like, "I'm not going to worry about the names. I'm going to name them myself later." So I just took—all you do is you circle one, whatever key it's in, it doesn't matter, because it's going to replicate itself times 12, whatever. So I would just take one, and in this case, I chose the note D for good reason, actually. And then I would just take that note would always remain the same, then I'd go like 1 through 12, now we go 1, 2, 3. How many notes do you want? 5? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5? 1, 2, 3, 4, 6? 1, 2, 3, 4, 7? 1, 2, 3, 4, 8? Until I'd done all of them. And I ended up with a pile of papers like this. And then anything that had more than four semitones in a straight row, I just discarded them or put them in a separate file. So it was very visual for me—for me. So like when I look at the guitar, I see—it's like looking at, for me, it's like looking at an abacus machine. It's like I—I can actually see the distance between the intervals. Oh, it's this two half-steps, whole step, half-step, or whatever. And when I look at the guitar, I go, "Oh, yeah, that's what—" And then when I—when I look at the guitar, that's what I see. So there's this particular chord that—that's what I see, it's just like I see all of those what I call available notes. And it's just intervalic permutation recognition, that's what I call it. It's just like a way of looking at the distance between particular—so it's very visual. I don't know if that helps you at all.

[26:07] Audience Member 7: Yeah, yeah, no, it's good. I'm very mathematical.

[26:12] Allan Holdsworth: Well, yeah, the formula is mathematical, absolutely. But then when you come to play it, you have to let go of all that, and then you have to figure out how you're going to use it. So then you have to play, then you have to try to figure out how to make music, you know? So I screw up all the time, you know, obviously.

[26:30] Audience Member 7: So when you're knee-deep in a solo, are you seeing anything? Like, are you seeing the guitar, or like—

[26:39] Allan Holdsworth: There's nothing. I just hear the harmony, and I hear—some of it's by, you know, some of it's by listening, some of it's visual, and then you just kind of merge—merge the two. You have to use whatever resource you have, so I—I use them all the time because I need them all, otherwise I'll be eating cheese.

[26:56] Interviewer: I once read a great quote by Pat Metheny when he was first learning how to improvise. He would used to think about doing the laundry every time the solo came up, it would distract him from actually thinking about what he had to play.

[27:07] Allan Holdsworth: Of course, it's good to get—it's good to, if you get too—I made the mistake many, many years ago of, uh, trying to—I thought it was a good thing at the time and I realized it wasn't. Well, I tried to think ahead, so I'd be—I'd be playing something and I'd be thinking like two or three chords ahead. And then while I was here at this point in time, I go, "What's that chord?" because I couldn't remember at that space in time. When I got there, I couldn't remember it. So I stopped doing that and I just started going in the moment, so just like, yeah, not thinking what's going to happen down the road, and I just stay like in the minute, and usually it saved me. It was better. I thought it was good for me to start thinking ahead, but it didn't work—not for me.

[27:57] Audience Member 8: Um, so that—that's actually really interesting insight about, and you know, I've read a lot of interviews when you talk about how you—you worked out the mathematical formulas, and then of course there's a question then how you apply it in a musical way, and you talk about how you're, quote-unquote, just trying to juggle the notes in an original way. Um, but I was actually interested in a different aspect that I think, uh, I noticed in some of when some of your improvised solos, where it seems like you're actually not really following the changes and more employing these devices that, uh, you know, may not necessarily address the changes per se, but are—are used very musical in—in the course of the improvisation.

[28:51] Allan Holdsworth: Oh, you're talking about a line. A line is just a way to get from point A to point B or whatever. And the thing is, I do—I do always think about the changes, great, you know? I try as hard as I can, you know, I'm not really that great at it, but the thing is, I always think about that. But at the same time, I think about making connections and trying to make musical connections that won't make—that won't kind of kind of be that they'll fall over each other until you get to where you're going. It's just like—but that's the beauty of improvising, because the thing is, one of—one of the things I noticed about some other guys that I know is that—with no names—is that like they have like this bunch of things, and they like what you classify guitar players call them as licks. And then they string licks together, so there's lick A, lick B, or whatever, and they go like, "Oh, I've used this, and this is a way to get to that." And I think if you're using a lick, you're really not improvising at all. So I—I always think about trying to—trying to improvise without, you know, without falling back on something that you already played before. I mean, we all do, obviously, and stylistically that's going to happen anyway, because I can only do what I can do. I can't—I can't be any better than what I am today, you know? I can't do anymore. But at the same time, uh, to get from point A to point B, you can be real static about it, or you can just try to juggle it. And—and that's one of the things that I was always fascinated with when I first heard Pat Martino, was that he had a—he had a like really, really beautiful way of like kind of—kind of going from one place to another, which was not very obvious, and it was beautiful, you know? Uh, so he was an inspiration. I never copied anything that he did, but I was inspired by that, and it made me look into how to get from one chord to another without actually being, you know, without just going like [demonstrates]. So I don't know if that answers your question or not.

[30:52] Audience Member 8: It has answered, because I think in your case it's not, uh, memorized lines in the sense of, you know, note-for-note, and you kind of—

[31:04] Allan Holdsworth: No, they're not memorized. If they were memorized, it wouldn't be an improvisation, would it?

[31:10] Audience Member 8: But there are—but there are instances where you can tell that it's the same, uh, finger pattern maybe applied to different notes.

[31:18] Allan Holdsworth: Well, that's true too. I mean, that's true of any instrument. If you look at the piano, you could say, "Well, you see, oh, that guy did this." So you can't get away from that, I mean, if you look at the—even if you look at the music, if you even if you look at notes written down in Nicholas Slonimsky's book or whatever, no matter how complicated it is, you'll see something, and you might again, you know? It's like, I don't know how you get away from that. It's just like trying to—it's just trying to use everything and drag it back in and try to put it out in a way that works in that particular moment in time. And it may not, you know? It's just a—I mean, that's—that's the beauty of improvisation for me, is it's like a—you've always got to be ready to fall on your butt, you know? I mean, Gary Husband said something to me—and I was complaining because I'm always complaining about how—how I sucked so—and he goes like, "Well, man, you can't expect to keep digging all that shit and not get some of it on your face, you know?" So there's truth, you know, I mean, there's some truth in that. If you play it safe all the time, then you'll never make a mistake and everything will be smooth jazz [laughs]. Just joking.

[32:38] Audience Member 9: If I can follow up with that regarding "Dodgy Boat," and I hate to ask you about one specific song, but to me, you know, when I try to turn people on to your music, you—that's usually a song—oh, okay, that's usually a song that I'll go for because it's really kind of accessible, you know, in my opinion.

[32:53] Allan Holdsworth: Well, I didn't write that, that's why!

[32:54] Audience Member 9: Oh, you didn't really? Okay, so—so that explains everything! You see, it's accessible, I didn't write it.

[33:02] Audience Member 9: Was that a—was that a draw, or was that something someone put in front of you and said, "Here, this is what—"

[33:05] Allan Holdsworth: No, it was—the tune was written by Steve Hunt, the really tremendous—that is to me one of your finest guitar solos, and I threw my back out trying to figure out the second half of it. I don't know if it's in your head, but that to me—for anybody else here, that is, you know, to me just one of the best songs ever written, and the fact your name's on it is great too.

[33:28] Allan Holdsworth: Oh, you just—just write it, it's called Steve, that's all I care about.

[33:35] Audience Member 10: Um, I'm curious, how is your approach different to soloing in the studio versus, uh, you know, in the live situation?

[33:44] Allan Holdsworth: Well, it's actually—it's actually the same, but if I—if I screw up, I can fix it, that's the only difference.

[33:51] Audience Member 10: So just to follow up on that, um, one could argue that your studio albums and the official live recordings that you've released have a different character to them, and some—some people would say that they like the live albums. At any rate, are you planning on releasing more live recordings in the future?

[34:15] Allan Holdsworth: Yeah, but I—my focus right now is finishing, you know, I have kind of been out of circulation with albums, you know, because I've been moving around a lot in my personal life. But the thing is, so I actually have like three albums that are unfinished, right? And what I want to do is finish the very last one, because that's the—that's where it is now. So I want to finish that, so that's my focus right now. So I'm more concerned with that than anything else at this point in time. I don't even know—is that's because I can't see because of the light, so if I'm not looking at you, I'm sorry, I can't—I can't see. But, um, yeah, it's just like I—I want to finish that, and, uh, if we do a live album later on, then sure, no problem. But I'd still like to do this studio record first because it's been like 14 years since I did a studio record, so I'm kind of getting really anxious. And I might not wake up, you know, so there's always that as an issue of it.

[35:19] Interviewer: Another question here? Just once again, just raise your hands and I'll definitely make my way towards them. Glad you're all enthusiastic. So, I'll get to this gentleman here, then you'll get to—

[35:38] Audience Member 11: Uh, what I wanted to ask you was, um, you know, you played a lot of the '70s fusion stuff, yes sir, which as you remember a lot of—on a lot of records was a lot of spooks, and then everybody would suddenly do the big unison, you know, kind of thing. There's some of that on the records, it's all over the place. And off the top of my head, I mean like other than the first lick of "Rogue Tales," your music doesn't have any of that in it. And even from like the IOU record, there was none of that. So, well, I tried to stay away from it. Is it—is it because—is it because of the stuff you were trying to do with chords, your your take on chords, that inspired the tunes to not be based on that stuff as and 16th-note groups or whatever?

[36:24] Allan Holdsworth: Yeah, it was. I just—it just seemed like everything else, you know? Every time I had a fusion record, was, "Okay, well, thinking of shaking down," I didn't want to do that. I just wanted to—I kind of wanted to get away from it. Just like someone like—when I was—when I first started growing up, I played the—I was playing in the blues band and then—no, I played the blues for years, really. And then I spent the rest of my life trying to avoid it. So, yeah, I did. I deliberately avoided it. There's very few tunes that I've written that have like kind of serious heads in them. There's a couple, but most of them, no. It wasn't about that for me. It was mostly about trying to write a really nice vehicle for improvisation and some nice harmony and some nice chords, and it was more about that than just, you know, because essentially anybody can learn how to play like a tricky dick line, you know? If you sit down there long enough, you can learn it, but then what? It doesn't mean you're going to be able to play a good solo. It doesn't mean anything. So it was kind of—there's something about that kind of fusion thing that kind of—kind of left me feeling like empty. So I—I stayed away from it. I tried to.

[37:39] Audience Member 11: And what about the—about the, I think you said something a minute ago about D being a really good starting pitch for a root, and you were digging on—

[37:45] Allan Holdsworth: Oh, yeah, yeah, well, I can—I can explain that in a minute. I won't forget. Get back to that one, I think we'll get to the—Yeah, okay.

[38:01] Audience Member 12: So, um, I—I'm hugely inspired by you as a composer. And what I noticed about you is, like a lot of—I was listening to, um, Strauss's Four Last Songs with a friend one time, and then I listened to some of your music after that, and I kind of noticed, you know, like the similar in a way between like the two things. Okay. Um, sort of like how like how they move harmonically between the two. And what I was wondering is, did you—did you take—did you like, um, did you ever try to play along with that stuff and like figure it out, or did you kind of just like listen to it so much that it kind of went into you by osmosis in a way?

[38:49] Allan Holdsworth: Yeah, probably more that way. I—I never analyzed anything. I never really analyzed anything except for what it is I'm—you know, like personally, you know, and then I work on that, like I'm really trying to figure out something. If there's something I want to know, then I'll try to figure it out. But if it's something someone else did, then no, I just kind of take it how it's presented to me. And now I'm hearing—and even though you mentioned that composer, I was probably most influenced by Ravel and Debussy were my biggest kind of, you know? Then of course Bartók was kind of—that's Stravinsky. So those four guys were the probably the people that have kind of got into my head somehow sideways, you know? And, uh, I didn't ever analyze anything. It was just that, like, I just found it to be extremely beautiful, and I—I guess it somehow finds its way into your heart somehow, and then it comes out in music, I guess.

[39:53] Audience Member 12: And also, when you were—this is a little bit, I guess, unrelated, kind of back to scales, when you were really compiling all the scales together, did you try to like—did you try to like sing what you would play and stuff too, or like really try to like internalize the sound of what you were playing just so you could hear—

[40:12] Allan Holdsworth: Not when I was cataloging, no. Not when I was cataloging, because then it was more like a—it was a science experiment, you know? But, but later on, then obviously half of those went into the pile—pile Z, which would never be used. And then—then when I got to the other ones, I got to be able to recognize it because just by the intervals, the distance between the intervals and the sound. And I just hear a scale, and then you can pull out all of these chords from the scale. So I kind of almost did it backwards, instead of trying to find out what—what scale goes with it, it was kind of backwards for me. I was like, "How many chords can I find in this one scale?" I don't know if that helps.

[41:07] Audience Member 13: One question over—let's say that hypothetically, or maybe you do have an iPod, what would be on Holdsworth's iPod today? Like what are some of the things that you listen to?

[41:21] Allan Holdsworth: Nothing I've ever done. [Laughs] Yeah, that's a good question. You know, to be honest, as I've gotten older, I don't listen to music that much anymore. I listen to, uh, like, you know, because I'm obviously surrounded by musicians, I work with them all the time, so they're always playing music, and I just go with them. I just like, somebody goes, "Oh, check out this guy or check out that guy," and I just—I just listen to it. But typically when I'm on my own, I don't listen to music much.

[41:51] Interviewer: You got a question over here? Okay, but—

[41:56] Allan Holdsworth: That was then, not now, you know? I mean, like my dad did the same thing, you know? As my dad got older, he kept—he was always listening to music, and then as he got older, he kind of—I don't know, I don't know why, he just kind of stopped.

[42:12] Audience Member 14: Sure. In the few instances, uh, acoustic guitar on record—I think most people in this room have thoroughly enjoyed it—any ideas to revisit that, or do you want to do an acoustic guitar album again?

[42:27] Allan Holdsworth: Yeah, I do. I'd like to—I'd like to get—there's a guy in San Diego makes these Selmer-Maccaferri replicas, I'd like to get on one of those, but not to do the Django thing, at all, but I just love the way those guitars sound and they're so, you know, distinctive-sounding guitars. I'd like to, uh, get one and try to do something other than Django on it, you know? But, yeah, I would. But typically I don't—because I don't play as much. Like when—when we go on the road, I'd never take one, so you know, if I need a few more beer tokens or whatever, I end up selling my acoustic guitar or an amplifier. So that's like—that's why I don't have one right now. But, yes, I would, I would like to do something.

[43:21] Audience Member 15: Alan, one of the most interesting things for me about your music is your compositions. And there are two things in particular that are fascinating to me. One is that when you're repeating a melody, there are often instances where the melody comes back in a different key than it started in. And the other is the blowing changes not being the same as the chord changes for the melody. And I was just wondering where that, uh, inspiration came from and how you started messing around with that.

[43:54] Allan Holdsworth: Well, it came from, like I guess, kind of listening to classical music, and I was always fascinated with—I've always been fascinated with modulation and modulating something, you know, keep—keep the thing like moving. So, you know, it's a pain in the butt to play over because it's moving all the time. But the thing that I like about it is one of the key things is trying to find a way to make it sound like it didn't change, but then it—then when you try to analyze it, you go like, "Oh, wait a minute, that's not in the same key. It's here." So, but—but it's just trying to make it so you don't hear that. So it's like a seamless transition, even though it kind of morphs back to where it started from. I mean, one example for me was—sometimes it takes me a long time to finish a piece of music, and sometimes it's really quick. Like, I remember on, I think it's on None Too Soon, I wrote a tune called "Sphere of Innocence"—I don't know what album it's on, but I wrote the, uh, the tune really in a very short space of time, except I couldn't get it to go back to—I couldn't get it to modulate. And it took—even though the basic tune was written in like a few hours, it took me six months to finish it, to get to where you couldn't hear it, you couldn't hear the key change back. So I was always fascinated with modulation. I guess that comes from listening to a lot of classical music, but it's always fascinated me. I really love that about music, so like if somebody listens to the tune, they'll go, "Oh, yeah, I know that melody." And then if you try to actually play it later, you go like, "Wait a minute, it's not in the same key. It's changed like maybe two or three times without really noticing it." It's like a little magic puzzle, I like that.

[44:50] Audience Member 15: And then the tunes like, uh, "Looking Glass," where the chord changes for the soloing are different than the—the head, um, is that—how do you go about approaching that?

[45:58] Allan Holdsworth: Well, what I usually do is I—I'll take a section of the head. It will usually be related, almost always. It'll be—I'll take a certain section of it. In that tune, for example, a lot of the solo changes are from the middle part of the head, and then I'll just kind of modify it and morph it until it—till it gets back to square one, and then we go back into the head. And that head's interesting because it's in two different keys and there's two different tempos in each key, but, uh, so it's just like a—yeah, just like a little modulation morph. I like those. And there's only a few tunes that I wrote where the head and the changes are the same, you know? I have done that actually. Like "Funnels" was one example. Trying to think of another one, I can't think of one right now. "Proto-Cosmos"—yeah, there's a few of them where the—it's like a traditional tune where the head and the changes are exactly the same.

[46:58] Audience Member 15: Thank you.

[46:59] Allan Holdsworth: You're welcome. Thank you.

[47:12] Audience Member 16: How—how do you go about, uh, picking a group? Because I noticed you play with different bass players, different drummers. Is there any approach to that where you decide, "I want to play with this person"?

[47:29] Allan Holdsworth: Yeah, usually it's—usually like I'll, uh, hear somebody play and I go, "I really like that guy." And it's just as simple as that. I go, "You want to play drums?" or "You want to play keys?" They go, "Okay, fine." If they don't, "Oh, sorry," but that's usually what—

[47:47] Audience Member 16: But when you did say—when you did Metal Fatigue and you had a vocalist, uh-huh, did you decide, "I don't want to have a vocalist anymore, I'm just going to do straight ahead jazz"?

[47:57] Allan Holdsworth: Well, it wasn't straight ahead, instrumental—instrumental, yeah. Yeah, I just decided it was—I love Paul—I met Paul Williams, a singer in that band, when I was with Tempest in 1972. So we played together in that band, and that's how I met him. But I always—I always loved his singing. I thought it was great. It's a very powerful kind of bluesy voice. I—I really liked him. And then, uh—uh, I came—I was living in this, uh, in the US for a while and then went back to England. And I was living in this apartment thing, and then I was looking across the street and we're like, "Wait a minute, that's Paul Williams!" And he was living in the apartment opposite, so I—I just asked him, "I can get this band together with Gary Husband and Paul [Carmichael?]. Do you want to sing?" He goes, "Yeah." So—so that's how that happened. But then, to answer your question, after the—after the, uh, Metal Fatigue album, I just decided that I didn't want to—I wanted to break away from the vocal thing. Not because I didn't love him—he was a wonderful guy and a great singer, as far as I'm told—but I just didn't want to do any vocals anymore. I didn't like it. I didn't trade him in, you know? It was just like I just kind of decided to drop the vocals, so I just wanted to do something else. And right at that time, I just kind of discovered the SynthAxe, which was a mystery to me at that time. I got better at it later on, I mean, [T Lavitz?] and I was struggling with it for a while, but by the time we got to Sand and Secrets I kind of figured it out a little bit. But that—but that's why it was. No, it wasn't—I just decided I didn't want to use the vocals anymore.

[49:43] Audience Member 16: Decided, or just it didn't fit? It wasn't what you wanted to do?

[49:51] Allan Holdsworth: No, I just—it was not what I wanted. I wanted to move in a different direction without the vocals.

[49:59] Audience Member 17: One more question over here, and I'll get back to you. Hi, Alan, it's good to see you.

[50:06] Allan Holdsworth: Hey, oh, there you are, how are you?

[50:08] Audience Member 17: I'm very good, thanks. Uh, a quick question. I was like, um, a lot of times, mostly on your records, we hear you playing over what a lot of people would refer to as, um, non-functional harmony. But you—you have this one record called None Too Soon where we actually get to hear you play over, you know, um, I guess functional harmony, you know, 2-5-1 progressions. I was wondering when you were—when you were developing that record, what was your strategy for—for kind of coping with like the, you know, kind of, you know, "How Deep Is the Ocean" standards and you know—I mean, you—you did mention your, you know, intervalic, uh, permutations and all that.

[50:43] Allan Holdsworth: Well, I—I just treated it like it was God's idea. Absolute piano player on that record, Gordon Beck, who sadly is no longer with us, but, uh, he was a really great friend of mine. And, uh, it was his idea. He goes, "Oh, you know, you're playing all this esoteric bullshit. Why don't—why don't you just like try to play some—play with some tunes that people know?" And it didn't make any difference, it still sucked [laughs]. But the thing was, in answer to your question, I just did—I just viewed it the same way. I just took each one of those tunes as if it was an original piece of music, because I didn't—you know, even though I grew up listening to that music, I was never actually actively involved in playing like standards and stuff. So what I would do is I just take like "How Deep Is the Ocean," I go, "What are the chords?" These are the chords, these are the scales, and I just play on it. But I—I didn't have a formula for it. There was no formula for it. I just played it as if it was some guy just written the original tune. So for me, it wasn't "How Deep Is the Ocean," it was just some original tune that I'd never heard before. Great, wonderful, thank you.

[51:53] Interviewer: This side. I'll come right back to some fresh faces over here.

[52:01] Audience Member 18: Intermission! I wanted to ask, how do you communicate your composition with your band if it's always interchanging?

[52:10] Allan Holdsworth: We're going to get to that. I'm going to tie it in. Actually, that's a good thing. Usually, uh, I just play it for them. Just play it. I just play the music, that's it. And just like—just like the old days, I never write anything out for—I write stuff out for myself just so I can remember, you know, my own stuff. I never write—write out any chords or anything. I make my own charts, but they're usually just for the scales and stuff, but I usually—all the chord stuff I memorize. But usually I just play the tune to them. I go, "This is how it goes," you know, and they usually just learn it in phrases, you know?

[52:50] Interviewer: That's a good segue into the—into the chord chart. You want to just talk about that a second?

[52:56] Allan Holdsworth: Good lord. So, that's what my charts look like. It doesn't matter, I can't answer any questions about those. I mean, I can—I know what it means, but it's kind of—it just—it just came from just like kind of studying on my own and not—not learning anything that was traditional in any way. When my father passed away, uh, which was a long time ago, I just started kind of working on stuff on my own, so I ended up just devising my own—trying to figure out my own methods and my own ways to figure out things. So I—I figured out a way to write scales and a way to memorize them and a way to, you know, so—uh, when I—when I look at one of those charts, it makes perfect sense to me. What's X? Well, X is easy, it came from a, you know, like if you take like a simple—the basic, how it started was X stands for experiment, actually, because it was just an experiment like if—if somebody makes an experimental fire and the serial number goes X something. So it was just an experiment, so I just started looking at all the intervals and I—and I think, "Okay, let me look at just the basic C major scale." So I just take the C major and like, "Hey, where's—where's the bottom of that scale for you like on a harmonic compass?" And you're like, "Is it F Lydian like George Russell? Is it—" and all the notes, they don't—they don't kind of line up. And then when I got to D, it was like, "Oh, yeah, now all the—" Do you have that other one? I'm sorry.

[54:43] Interviewer: Yeah, that's all right.

[54:44] Allan Holdsworth: But then I realized that when I—when I got to D, that it was perfectly symmetrical. It was like looking at this little compass, so it was just like—people could see, like you probably can't see this, but it was just like it's perfectly symmetrical. If you start on C, it's kind of wonky. Any other way, you go like F Lydian is kind of not symmetrical. But when I got to D, I went, "Oh, yeah, it's perfect, it's symmetrical. All the interval distances are perfectly symmetrical." So I go, "I can remember that." So I just use that as a base, so I took the X to mean X just applied to any key I wanted it to. And then I just started cataloging scales, and so that's what—that's what that means, basically. There's a lot of other symbols too that don't really mean much to anybody else, but and it really doesn't matter, because it's what comes out in the end. What's on paper is not really—it's not like when some guys playing like "Giant Steps" backwards, it's not like they hand the audience a chart and say, "Oh, he fucked up, you know?" It's just like it's only a way of remembering. It's a way I can remember it, you know?

[55:50] Interviewer: But you talk—you told me a fascinating thing which I never really thought of, is that I mean you don't see like C major and A minor related, like you think of the second mode is not related to C major in my opinion.

[56:06] Allan Holdsworth: Well, I mean, modern classical music, you know, modern music, yeah, they don't even contain the same notes.

[56:12] Interviewer: So explain that a little bit to them, I think.

[56:17] Allan Holdsworth: Well, if you play like a regular A minor scale, which is like a G major scale, it's not the same notes as a C major scale. The only one that has the same notes, the second chord is the D minor, so it's exactly the same notes. But it's just how I came to learn it, you know? It's like it's just my own opinion, it's not—I'm not passing it off.

[56:35] Interviewer: So in those though, right, you were telling me that the, uh, so like F would be, or say C Lydian, that is like a B-flat, right?

[56:45] Allan Holdsworth: Yeah, it's B-flat.

[56:49] Interviewer: Well, for you, it would be B-flat, yeah, but that's not the root, that's just a way of identifying the distance between all of those.

[56:55] Allan Holdsworth: So there's no top and the bottom, it's just like a big circle. I mean, that's how—that's how I see it.

[57:01] Interviewer: I think that's pretty mind-blowing for most—certainly for me.

[57:08] Interviewer: Question? Can we get a beer up here? Yes, we can! Oh, they did it! It's a miracle! Oh, my God, service! [Cheers]

[57:27] Allan Holdsworth: Delicious.

[57:31] Audience Member 19: Alan, uh, I—I guess I have a sort of a general question. I mean, from all the—all the questions that everybody's asked today sort of covers, you know, really almost the whole gamut of what's involved with guitar playing. You're—you're obviously a great player, you're an unbelievable composer. I think nobody in this room is not blown away by everything that—that you've managed to put together over the years, and we're certainly all inspired by it. Have you—and I know you've—I think everybody in this room also knows that you've done a number of, uh, DVDs or videos, instructional and otherwise, over the years. To pick up your comment, I think we all would be incredibly interested in a further explanation of his theory, such as they may be. Do you have any plans to do anything like that in the future, maybe—maybe working with some, uh, guitar teacher to sort of help you, you know, articulate?

[58:31] Allan Holdsworth: Yeah, a little bit like—Chunk? Okay, yeah, I mean, I know I would love it, and I think every guitar player who exists in the United States and in the world would probably buy it, I think, and just really benefit from it incredibly. So if—if you're looking for a suggestion about a project to do, that's—

[58:49] Interviewer: Well, I have to interject a second. We're—Alan's going to be part of a PledgeMusic campaign soon that we're going to roll out, and one of the ideas that Alan had was to actually, you know, maybe over months release a chapter at a time about his concepts of music, which I think would be, you know, privy to only the PledgeMusic people. And I think that's a fantastic idea.

[59:06] Audience Member 19: Is that one humans will understand, or is this going to be—

[59:13] Allan Holdsworth: For me, it was just like if I was to try to sit down and do that, it would be too time-consuming for me. It would take—you know, I'm trying to finish three records I haven't finished for 10 years. It's like I don't have time to sit down and do—do like a, you know, a book thing or anything. But if I could do it in bits, you know, because it's easier to do something in—in like pieces, so I could start with a, you know, like the beginning or whatever. And like you were suggesting, uh, work with somebody who could translate it into—there's a—there's a guy at Berklee that I talked to about doing that too. He was interested in trying to take like what—what my concept or whatever and try to translate it in a way that makes it so it's readily easily understandable, and then it—it's not as crazy as it looks, actually.

[06:01] Audience Member 19: But is it Tim Miller?

[06:06] Allan Holdsworth: No, no, it's not. It's a—one of the big cheese guys. It's not—Tim's great, by the way.

[10:18] Audience Member 20: And then, um, going back to what you said about, uh, the standard tuning of the guitar and how the B string always drove you nuts—

[10:27] Allan Holdsworth: Well, it doesn't drive me nuts now, but it used to.

[10:28] Audience Member 20: But it used to. I come from a bass-playing world. I started out life as a bass player, so everything was in a world of perfect fourths. And when I got into guitar playing, that B string always annoyed me. Sure. But as you did, I—I struggled with it, but I figured out patterns that worked, and I—and I worked around it. Recently when the eight-string guitars came out, I noticed that everybody was using a standard six-string tuning on the top six, and they just have two bass strings, and sometimes they just tune that to a fifth and just have a bar chord on the bottom. What I've done is I took a standard drop B-flat tuning and put that in the middle of the guitar. So I have a fourth, an F below, a fourth below, and a fourth above. My standard style tuning is in the middle of an eight-string, and that seemed to work for me. Now I can get chords that seem, you know, physically impossible. My question is, do—do you see yourself as using extended-range guitars in the future? Because I'd really love to see an eight-string version of something headless, because everything Carvin's making right now is gigantic and has a huge headstock. Do you see yourself using extended ranges, because you talk about using different tunings? That's—that's an instrument where you could really experiment with lots of different tunings.

[01:01:42] Allan Holdsworth: Well, I've—I've used extended-range guitars before, actually, quite a lot. I had like three—like baritone guitars, like huge guitars. Like, I always took a 25-and-a-half-inch scale to be the norm. So then the guitar builder, a guy called Bill DeLap, who built these guitars for me—we just, instead of trying to add strings, you just add frets. So, um, the headless version of the biggest one I had was probably about this tall, and it only went down to A, but the first fret was like this big [laughs]. But boy, did that thing sound amazing! And I used it on a couple of albums. I think I used it on Sphere, I think I used it a lot mostly on Secrets. I think, uh—so it's an extended range, but I didn't have more strings. No, I can't deal with six strings. Okay, I don't think I'm ever going to get past six, personally. But—but I love the way it sounded better to me than adding another string of the same scale length. Because when the strings get lower, they start sounding sounding like kind of dumpy, you know? They don't have the same—whereas when you go this way, they can still use like a really skinny string and just like sing like crazy. And that's the other thing on the A string—the frets, you know, they're—they're huge for playing bar chords on the bottom, they're 29-scale. So right, I think this was 32—that's 32-inch scale, like as big as a regular bass, but it only had six strings on it. So it was cool, but it sounded amazing. I had three of them, and they all had names, kind of thing. "Boris" was the little one, "Boris's dad" was the big one, never mind. No, they were—they were great, they were great. Unfortunately, uh, I don't have them anymore. I just kind of quit. I just decided I wanted to go back to just trying to figure out how to play the banjo. I was praying for an eight-string Holdsworth, but I guess it's not going to be built.

[01:03:51] Interviewer: We have a question over here.

[01:03:56] Audience Member 21: What does it feel like to tour?

[01:04:00] Allan Holdsworth: Uh, really tiring. Probably not for you, though, you probably love it, you probably dig it. It's—it's, uh—it's not what it seems, you know? It's like, uh, when you go on the road, it's like nice. You get—people think, you know, you—it's like a little mini-vacation, but it's actually not. It's kind of usually a lot of work. You never get to see anything. You just go, you get to the hotel, and you got the sound check, you do the gig, you got the hotel, you get in the bus, and you drive away. So you don't really see too much. Uh, but sometimes people think it's like kind of like an endless vacation. I wish it was, because I think it was—oh, I shouldn't mention any names—one of my buddies, his wife said to him, "Oh, you have a recreational occupation." So he goes, "Come on the road with [us], we'll throw you in the back of the truck," like that, you know? But you know, actually she did come out for a few days and she went home. It's not much fun, actually. The playing is—the music's great, I mean, you get to play and that's nice. But you know, but I enjoyed it more when I was younger, and you're—you're obviously a—a young man, so you probably dig it. I don't—I don't dig it so much anymore.

[01:05:16] Audience Member 22: I got a question. It's a multi-dimensional question. It's one of my favorite songs. It's a non-brewing condiment [“Non-Brewed Condiment”], and it contains the—the melody is, I think it's the only one that contains a melody that reflects your vocabulary, when—similar, the melody of the song has the same vocabulary of when you improvise. And also the harmony, I noticed that you play these amazing, uh, voicings, but the bass is—is playing a—different, uh—I mean, you're not playing the—the bass on the—on your chords. So the question—my question would be like, did you, uh, write the chords first and then play a melody that would go with the chords, or you just wrote the melody first and then you harmonize it? And the bass note of the chords is like—like you just imagine it, or you kind of like first play the—the bassline and then harmonize it? Those three questions.

[01:06:31] Allan Holdsworth: Okay. The bassline, that's actually a fifth below the bottom of my chord in each instance. And then the, uh—I wrote the chords first. I came up with a chord sequence, and then I wrote the melody on top of it. I just kind of kept playing the chord and I kind of recorded that, and I just tried to figure out a melody to fit with it, you know? So, and that's what happened.

[01:06:50] Audience Member 22: I have to say that when I—I cannot drive listening to that song because my face frowns with excitement [laughs].

[01:07:04] Allan Holdsworth: I don't know if that answers the question.

[01:07:07] Audience Member 23: Hi. Um, I know earlier you talked about Charlie Christian up here, and—oh, there you go, I'm sorry, the light, I can't see.

[01:07:18] Allan Holdsworth: No, it's cool, man.

[01:07:20] Audience Member 23: Um, and you mentioned Pat Martino, yes. And recently, for a general question, Tim, I was wondering if you could talk about, you know, maybe other guitar players, contemporaries of yours that have—uh, influenced you and your playing?

[01:07:33] Allan Holdsworth: Well, actually, I've been influenced by anybody that I've ever heard. I can go down the street and hear a top 40 band and be influenced by the guitar player or anybody in the band. I get influenced by everyone. Uh, sometimes in a good way, and sometimes not, but either way it's still an—it's something that happens, you know? Even from the beginning, you know, with Charlie Christian, Django Reinhardt, Jimmy Raney, Wes Montgomery, all the guys up to [Frank] Gambale, John McLaughlin—the names of the list that goes on and on and on, you know? [Al] Di Meola, [John] Scofield, all these guys, they're all amazing, they all do something different. And, uh, and I'm—I'm inspired by all of them. I listen to it, you know, and it's great. And I just go, "Oh, how do you do that?" And then, uh, I just carry on, you know? It's just like—I don't just listen to the guitar. My—I think one of the best things that I did for me, in my own opinion, is that I didn't really listen to a lot of guitar players. I mean, I did, because that's how—the way I mentioned them, but—but they weren't the focus of my listening. I mentioned them because they were all really tremendous guitar players and unbelievable musicians, but a lot of the time I listened to other instruments. Michael Brecker would kill me, man. That guy is just ridiculous, and, uh, yeah, I don't know, I still haven't got over that, I still can't believe it, he's not here. But, yeah, so I listen—I listen to a lot. I'm influenced by everything I do, you know, not just guitar players. I catch a lot from other people who play other instruments.

[01:09:16] Audience Member 23: How about—have you got Joe Satriani or Steve Vai, people who hold you in high regard?

[01:09:23] Allan Holdsworth: Amazing, they're great, tremendous.

[01:09:27] Audience Member 23: And they think the same of you. I mean, that you're—you're an influence to them. That's kind of—kind of cool.

[01:09:34] Allan Holdsworth: Yeah, I'm—that's—that's really kind of them to—to do that. Same, you know, I—I'm fans of theirs too, you know? Eric Johnson, all the [?] fans, tremendous. Just thank you.

[01:09:50] Interviewer: John McLaughlin has a great quote about Alan. He says, "If I—if I knew what he was doing, I'd steal everything."

[01:10:05] Allan Holdsworth: He's—he's something else, I tell you.

[01:10:10] Interviewer: I had a question about rhythm. Is it over here? Oh, there you are, yeah.

[01:10:17] Audience Member 24: Um, how about rhythm? Did that come naturally to you? I mean, if you don't listen to—you know, if I listen to your heads and the whole rhythm section, it's very complex. Is that, um, something which came naturally to you, or is it something you—you had to work on? And or any—any aspects of rhythm did you ever make—

[01:10:37] Allan Holdsworth: Yeah, that's a really great question, actually, because I have a similar thing with time as that, because, uh, as far as I'm concerned, everything's in one. A subdivision of one. And how small is the one? And so, you know, I—I go through this all the time, like I just played with Virgil [Donati], you know, and he's like meticulous about kind of counting stuff and making it all like—kind of figuring it all out, you know? And most of the drummers that I play with do, uh, but for me, I—everything is in a phrase. It's a phrase, it's just like if I—if I write a tune, it's a certain phrase. Then when it gets to the end of the phrase, I go, "Oh, no, it's some—" most of the time when I write a piece of music, it's not in time at all. There is no time, it's kind of like just floats. And I go like, "Okay, if I want to play this with the guys, what am I going to do with it?" Okay, I have to figure out how to time. So then what I'll do is I will try and group it in phrases. I go like, "Ah, that bar's too long, this one's too short, it doesn't sound right, it's not flowing the way I want it." What I'll do is typically is I'll have a count that's twice as fast as the tempo of the tune, so it's 1-2-3-4, like each one of those is a one for me. So then when I get to the end of the phrase, typically where that chord lands is a new one for me, but for the drummer it's not a new one. So when he writes his own chart—because I can't write the charts for the drums—he will actually go, "Oh, that's an odd bar," you know, it's a 7/8 bar or whatever, and they'll write it down and notate it. But for me, they're just phrases. It's just like, uh, yeah, 4/4 is kind of ugly, you know? It's like [Frank Zappa] said, "You don't talk in 4/4, it's like—" You just—you just kind of do a phrase, you get to the end of the phrase, and you go like, "Okay, well, that sounds good," or "Well, that's too long." By how long? Well, by one. But how small is the one? You know? So I—I never count anything in—in terms of like—like traditional counting. Everything for me is I count it in one, it's just like a big series of ones, and this chord falls here and this one falls here. So I, you know, so I'm really dumb. I'm kind of—I don't—everything I do is like not right.

[01:13:14] Interviewer: There you go. I mean, to me, that's the downfall of progressive music and—and a lot of the fusion stuff, is it's kind of like, "Okay, now we have to write a song in seven, we have to do something in nine," it's like they hit you over the head with it. And your music doesn't have that element in it at all, even though there's lots of odd bars in there, but I don't know, you don't feel that they're moving in that way. It's predictable, so I get to the end of the phrase, and that's one. Get to another one, it's easy, it's a beautiful thing. We have another question up front.

[01:13:51] Audience Member 25: Hi, um—oh, okay, uh, you worked with Austin Peralta for a short time before he unfortunately died. Um, what was he like to work with? And did you—he—he's pretty—he became a pretty big deal in the electronic scene with stuff, and, uh, was there ever projects?

[01:14:22] Allan Holdsworth: Yeah, absolutely, there was. [Pauses, gets emotional] It's kind of hard for me to talk about, sorry. It's just—this lovely little kid, 21. Amazing piano player, wonderful guy. This great little kid, had no ego, nothing. Just an amazing piano player. Uh, I loved the guy, and I didn't really know him that well. I really got to hang out with him for a tour or whatever, but, uh, I really like the guy. Amazing musician. It's really sad, sorry. And no, he—he actually played on a track on my new album. And what I was going to do is I was going to that particular track—I was going to pull it off when he played his solo and re-orchestrate it and just like kind of not have it just be a solo on the record, but have it be, uh, you know, make something special about it just for him. Just kind of rearrange the harmony a little bit and so pull him off of that one too, and make a special piece just for him. So, uh, yeah, I'm sorry, man. No, he was—jeez, we, you know, he had his 21st birthday when we were in India. Great, sorry.

[01:16:03] Interviewer: We hit the front sides. Anyone in the back? I probably missed, or anyone in the middle have any questions? Time for—take a—if you had pursued an alternative career, can you conjecture as to what that would have been?

[01:16:29] Allan Holdsworth: Yeah, it would probably be electronics, because I like electronic—electronics are plumbing, one. I think they're both related, don't you? And, uh, electronics, I think it's always fascinating me. I love all that squiggly stuff and trying to figure out how to get this to go here and this to go there. Just—it's really like plumbing, it really is.

[01:16:52] Audience Member 26: But you were an avid cyclist, though, right? You toyed the idea of being—

[01:16:59] Allan Holdsworth: No, I used to—I used to cycle a lot, and I raced a lot when I was younger and when I was skinny. And then I quit riding and I got fat, there you go, right? And I bought a bike just recently, so we'll see what happens.

[01:17:13] Audience Member 26: You told me for a long time you used to ride like 80 miles a day or something, right?

[01:17:18] Allan Holdsworth: Crazy, yeah, I did. When I was in England, I rode 80 miles a day almost every day.

[01:17:24] Audience Member 26: Impressive.

[01:17:25] Allan Holdsworth: Thank you. Sorry, so it's electrician—no, not an electrician, electronic engineer or lover.

[01:17:32] Interviewer: Anybody else? Question here? No.

[01:17:39] Audience Member 27: Hi, uh, I have a question about your legato technique, and specifically once you mentioned that you don't like how [?] sound on guitar, and you—you came up with your own way to do this. So can you elaborate a bit?

[01:17:53] Allan Holdsworth: Yeah, it's so—it's like a—so instead of pulling off, you just kind of lift your finger. It's almost like each one's a new—a new hammer. So instead of—because there's a—I think it was just like a—when you deflect the string sidewards, it kind of meows, it's like I didn't like that. So—so I quit doing that. So I just would like, if there's a new note below, you tap that one. So it's like—it's like a hammer-on in reverse.

[01:18:27] Audience Member 28: Also, what's amazing to me, Alan, is that most guitar—almost every guitar player has string noise when they take solos. There's—there's no—[?]

[01:18:40] Allan Holdsworth: Well, I—I try really hard to make it, you know, I've always been a fanatic with when it comes to noise of any kind, but, uh, you know, even with my gear, you know, like with amps and stuff, I—I hate if it makes any noise.

[01:18:57] Audience Member 28: But I mean, you don't hear any when you're playing, you don't hear any movement between your fingers moving, which is very impossible, actually, other than for you.

[01:19:06] Allan Holdsworth: I just try to make it quiet. We just keep trying.

[01:19:14] Interviewer: We should—we should have a question for you. How about the world of touring? And we'll let Alan off the hook for a minute. Touring is, you know, as Alan said, it's not easy, you know, because as Alan said, like everybody thinks it's nice to go from one place to other place, from other country to other country, but it's kind of tiring, you know, especially, you know, if you are doing long tours. And, uh, one of the things that, uh, kind of when I came out—came like to Alan's life in in booking tours, like one thing that I understand for all that, you know, we cannot like do those kind of crazy tours, like especially in Europe, like, you know, people are booking you like one day you are playing in Portugal, and next day in Russia, then go to Greece, then go to Ireland. That's impossible, you know, because then, you know, you don't have time to sleep and, uh, and relax and and and enjoy. And then, you know, then we—we were we started working on this kind of schedules that itinerary, maybe compromising some better gigs just in order to make it nice in terms of itinerary that there are no long drives between the cities. But still, even though they are short rides between the—How do you find life on the road these days?

[01:20:28] Audience Member 29: What's that?

[01:20:30] Interviewer: Arduous? Tiring?

[01:20:32] Audience Member 29: You find—we have—I loved it right here, so he just got done right with my family. It's—it's stressful for sure, especially if you're here, but it's all worth it. Do you guys book yourselves? That's why you do it in the first place, right? With the right music and right people, how do you fail? Sorry, you can't fail with the right music and right people. It's always a good time, actually.

[01:21:02] Interviewer: That's true. Actually, I have one question for over here.

[01:21:08] Audience Member 30: Unrelated question, um, you talked before when, uh, there was a question about tone about basically finding, uh, the amps—an amp that you like. And some of my favorite tones were, I guess, early '90s [?] Hard Hat Area, None Too Soon. Could you briefly outline which were mostly used maybe on those albums?

[01:21:35] Allan Holdsworth: Yeah, actually that's—I have a really great memory for every amp I've ever used on any song or any record. So which track in particular?

[01:21:48] Audience Member 30: "City Nights."

[01:21:49] Allan Holdsworth: "City Nights" was a Boogie Mark III. "Dodgy Boat"—you said it was a 50 Caliber in Guitar World? No, they printed it then, yeah. No, it was not, because I remember probably on "City Nights" I actually struggled with that because I started using that amp and I go like, "I don't like it," but I'd already started the solo so I couldn't finish it with another amp. So that's why I know that's what it was. So I don't know who I told, but that was not right. It was a Mark III with all the knobs pulled out and everything, it's crazy. I don't—that was the last time I ever used it. Were there other Boogies that were used in that period? Yeah, no, my favorite one was the—the Boogie they called—it was the Dual Rectifier, yeah. I had a couple of those, I thought they were amazing, I still do. I think they're very happy about it, the Boogie Dual Rectifier, the original one, you know? Because some of the new ones don't even have a rectifier tube. So that was the whole point of having a rectifier tube, was you need a rectifier for each pair of output tubes. So there was, uh, two of those, that's why it's called a Dual Rectifier. But some of the new ones don't even have a rectifier tube in them at all. But, uh, that was a really good amp. I use that on a lot of that stuff.

[01:23:16] Audience Member 30: So what makes you decide to not—to move on from that amp?

[01:23:21] Allan Holdsworth: Just traveling. It was like I couldn't take them on the road, so it got complicated for me to take them on the road, you know? Because you have to case them up, pull all the tubes out, you know, pack it all up, ship it, you know?

[01:23:36] Interviewer: His idea, right? The Dual Rectifier in the Axe-Fx II is really, really good. Yeah, no, that's—that's a good way to go. Anybody else? I think we're getting towards the, uh, the basket moment, the pumpkin basket, yeah. We have a few more—maybe one more question. One more question.

[01:23:56] Audience Member 31: I'm good.

[01:23:58] Interviewer: Well, I'll ask. I got, um—back to "Dodgy Boat," sorry. The main solo, your main solo in that, was—was that one take or edited? And if it was edited, please don't answer.

[01:24:13] Allan Holdsworth: No, what I do is I do actually multiple solos. I—and then I pick one. Okay. But still, it's one take. It's not edited together. One—it's one, most of the time it is. But sometimes I'll, you know, if—if there's something I didn't like, I'll take it out. But, uh, what I—what I like to do is just do more than one solo. I'll do like hundreds of them and then, uh—don't like any of them anyway, so I just [laughs]. Worst.

[01:24:46] Audience Member 32: I have a question. Uh, you mentioned the SynthAxe, and I think probably everybody in this room is familiar with the work you've done. Are—have you explored anything sort of to try to replace that technology, like maybe the Starr Labs MIDI controller or something like that?

[01:25:03] Allan Holdsworth: Yeah, I have a—I have one of his, uh, Starr Labs—a friend of mine, a good friend of mine, and he made this one that looks like a—it's not like a guitar, it's more like a keyboard. It's like a two-dimensional keyboard, and it has two necks on it. You play it flat like a pedal steel. So I have one of those, I've been trying to figure that out. It's actually not that—not that hard, because you know where the notes are. And the beautiful thing about it is you can play more than one note on a—on a hypothetical string. So you can play a bunch of chords on one string. It's really great, you know? So you got—so it's like a three-dimensional keyboard. It's like the three-dimensional chess from Star Trek.

[01:25:39] Audience Member 32: How do you find his—his controller? They're like buttons, right?

[01:25:43] Allan Holdsworth: They're buttons. But I—I never could play the guitar—I can play the guitar, but I have a—I just got hold of a couple of the—my second favorite one from the SynthAxe was the—the Yamaha G100, you know, the one that works on the [?]—that thing is great. So I have a couple of those now. When my SynthAxe kind of dies eventually, which it will, but it might live longer than those, but, um, I love that. It's great, and it's kind of small, and the frets are just like a regular guitar. It looks like a Strat, you know, kind of this little thing. And, uh, it tracks really great. It's, uh, I like it. So that's my backup right now. But the thing about the SynthAxe that was killer was the—the beauty of it really was the keys, having that set of keys on top, you know, the strings and the keys. That was pure genius, whoever thought—the guy, the original SynthAxe guy. So he, um—he was a keyboard player himself, so each one of the string—each one of the buttons corresponding to an open string. So you play a chord, you can take your hand off, get the next chord, and grab it. So it's seamless, like it, so you can play more seamlessly than a regular guitar player. You join the chords together, which is really a great, beautiful thing about that instrument. I'll miss it when it's done. Still there, I've got one working one.

[01:31:19] Audience Member 32: Sorry, do you use it on your new records?

[01:31:21] Allan Holdsworth: Yeah, I've used it on everything, somewhere. It's always on. It always sticks in there somewhere.

[01:31:28] Audience Member 33: Alan, I just had a question about back in the '70s. You played with UK. Did you enjoy playing in that type of jazz-rock experience?

[01:31:43] Allan Holdsworth: I really enjoyed like working—I really enjoyed working on the record, you know, because I, uh, yeah, I enjoyed that. But then when it got to be the live thing, I didn't dig it so much, because, uh, just because all the guys are great guys, I love all of them, they're all really great guys. So there was no problem with that, it wasn't anything personal. Just, you know, Eddie [Jobson] used to like to—everything to be just like the record, and he wanted everybody to play the same solo every night. And like I can't do that, because I don't know what I did last night, you know? It's just—I—it was just like an improvisation for me. So I—I can't remember them, and that's supposedly what I thought improvising meant. Well, it still does, but he liked it differently. And he—on his own, you know, his own choice, he chose to play the same pretty much the same solo every night. So no, I didn't have as much fun live, but I enjoyed working with the band and I enjoyed the, uh, making the records. Same with Bill [Bruford], only Bill was great because Bill wouldn't, you know, he didn't dictate to me that I had to do anything that was like that, you know? I could play whatever I wanted, otherwise. And, uh, so that was nice. But I mean, I would have probably still stayed with Bill a lot longer except for the fact that I—I got this hankering to play with Gary Husband, and Gary Husband and start my own band with Gary. So I ended up leaving Bill to do that. But, um, yeah, no, I—I enjoyed it, it was good.

[01:32:19] Audience Member 33: When was the last time you listened to that UK album?

[01:32:22] Allan Holdsworth: I don't know, about 20 years ago. A long time ago.

[01:32:27] Audience Member 33: How was it working with Dave Stewart?

[01:32:30] Allan Holdsworth: Oh, Dave's great. I love Dave, he's a really sweet guy. Hey, you know, one of the things that we always talk about, like, you know, when people get things wrong, which we—we haven't kind of discussed that in this—I'm surprised, actually, but it never came out, the funny story aspect of things. But, uh, we had a trip, you know, everybody makes mistakes on posters, but there's one poster I think we were in Spain, and it was the only time I've seen every single guy in the band's name wrong. It was really great. It was Bill Bruford, Stewart Dave [Dave Stewart?], [Percy] Jones, [Bill] Bruford, and Allan Holdsworth with two L's in Holdsworth. So they managed to screw up every single guy's name! It was funny. Usually there's one, you know, you usually catch one guy get the most—well, the most common mistake that people spell your name with only one L, that's the most common mistake, even, you know. But that's okay, that's okay, they put the two L's in the last name.

[01:33:38] Interviewer: I think we're good. I think everybody—all they want to ask—all right, we needed a drum roll for this. Okay, so this is the guitar raffle from the pumpkin basket. I am—yes, I get to do that. Although you made me feel guilty, the right guys would win. I should state that not everybody—people were able to do this and not be here, so the winner could possibly not be here. Again, all of our tickets are—no, they bought their tickets, so we don't know which one. You'll have to flip her, I would bought the ticket, Charles. I was actually checking, is it really—we have to see who is it. Oh, that's too bad, he's not here. You got to take it for me, I'm a fan, believe it or not! [Laughs] Yes, oh, that's awesome. Well, okay, so you'll be taking this home, and does he want it—Alan will autograph it, or does he autograph it? Okay, we can. Awesome. All right, next.

[01:35:01] Interviewer: So now we have the, uh—you want to talk a little bit about the pedal, what it does, so people know?

[01:35:10] Allan Holdsworth: Yeah, actually this pedal is like kind of neat, because it's—it's kind of a half—it's like two pedals in one, because I used to use these guys' pedals for a while, and, um, they made this one for me, and actually it's two pedals in one. It's like one half of it is a boost pedal, and the other half of it is just like a regular kind of distortion pedal. And they're cascadable, so you can pass one onto the other, you can use them individually or separate. Just like, basically, like two pedals in one, like a little distortion pedal or just a clean boost pedal, and you can stack them either way. So, all right, you choose somebody.

[01:36:01] Interviewer: Close my eyes. Oh, that's a good name, I like that: Benedict Zalinskis. We'll give it to you after, okay? Okay, great, thanks.

[01:36:26] Interviewer: All right, now we have, uh—Alan is a Cubase user. This is Cubase 7 full version, okay? I don't know if you guys use Cubase, but great program, one of my favorites. Lot of people are here, it's really good. Let's pick up somebody—they're going to think we rigged it or something. Alfredo Kovisburg! All right, all right, awesome. Well, there you go, everybody's here.

[01:37:29] Interviewer: Okay, so the reading tickets, right—that's the tricky part, you know? We have to, you know, if you pick up somebody that is not, you know, disclaimers, we have to keep going until we get somebody in the area, unless those people want to buy first class ticket—first class ticket from Indonesia, Japan, or Brazil, you know? All right, all right, so this is, uh, two tickets for next Monday night, right? Monday night 8 p.m. I don't want to look. Sam Gizerfredo Collinsburg! Holy smokes! Can you play lottery ticket for me like that? That's crazy! Excellent.

[01:39:41] Interviewer: All right, okay, so that's—that's pretty much. We have, uh, sets of La Bella strings for everybody. Alan will sign photos, we have photos for everyone. Um, maybe you should take like a little kind of 10 minutes break?

[01:40:54] Allan Holdsworth: Yeah, we could take a 10-minute break, everybody, and then come back and just do like a meet-and-greet at the end.

[01:41:10] Interviewer: That's good. Thank you, everybody, this was great. Thank you so much.

(Following a brief break / instrumental soundcheck segment)

[01:48:09] Allan Holdsworth: I also like to say something. It's like a—I'm really not good at this kind of thing, you know? Uh, I would be happy to take everybody in this room's phone number and go up and hang with them in the bar for a minute, you know, like at some point in the future. You know, it's like—I—I feel really bad, you know? I—I don't deserve it, you know? I—I want to thank you so much for—for—for being here. We love you. I don't know, honest to God, I don't know why you guys do this, but—

[01:48:53] Interviewer: No, thank you, Alan. I—I love you all, and I want to thank you for—for being here.

[01:49:00] Allan Holdsworth: Well, thank you, it's our pleasure. But I'm not really good, you know? This is how we get—we get to get back to you all. All I want to do is—all I want to do is try to learn how to play the guitar.

[01:49:15] Interviewer: You did pretty well at that.

[01:49:21] Allan Holdsworth: I can't figure it out. I suck.

[01:49:25] Interviewer: Wait a second. I think I'm pretty good, so if you suck, what does that make me?

[01:49:27] Allan Holdsworth: That's it [laughs].