The Steve Hunt Interview - Playing With Allan Holdsworth

From Allan Holdsworth Information Center

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZClkvwrH0c

    • RB:** Hey, everybody, I'm Rick Beato. On today's Sounding Off, keyboardist Steve Hunt. Steve played with Allan Holdsworth for nearly 10 years, and he's here today to talk with me about it. It's coming up next!

Everybody, welcome to Sounding Off. Our guest today is Steve Hunt. He's a keyboardist who's played with one of the greatest guitarists of all time, Allan Holdsworth. For how many years, Steve?

    • SH:** Almost 10 years—nine years I was in the band, something like that.
    • RB:** A lot of people want to know what that was like, playing in a band with Allan for years.
    • SH:** Well, it's funny. I actually, since Allan passed away sadly a few weeks ago, a lot of people have been asking me that. And I've always said, playing on stage with Allan, of course, it's a thrill, and it's amazing. It's the pinnacle of my life, and it's a dream come true. But it's really a no-win situation because I'll take a solo first, and maybe it's not so bad, you know, maybe it's good. But then Allan solos, and he just obliterates, you know? Allan is the only guitar player that can compete with keyboard players and outplay them. It's usually the opposite way—it's usually the keyboard players dominate the guitar players, except for him, right?

And then, or the other scenario is he takes the solo first, and then I've got to follow that, which is... so it's really a no-win situation.

    • RB:** And you're right about that. He has this kind of technique and facility and playing... I kind of relate it maybe like the way it might have been with Liszt or Chopin back in the day, where this new technique just came from a few people. And on piano now, it's pretty standard to have—if you don't have that kind of technique, or if you do have that technique, it's not such a big deal, you know? Everybody kind of can play arpeggios and scales on the piano. But I think when Allan was doing it, and the way he was doing it at the time in the '70s and '80s, it was relatively a new thing for that instrument.
    • SH:** Sure.
    • RB:** So he's sort of... to me, sort of like the Liszt of our time, you know?
    • SH:** Yeah.
    • RB:** And nowadays, as you can see through YouTube, just about every young guitar player has this kind of facility. Whether they're really doing something musical like Allan did, that's a whole another...
    • SH:** Well, that's really where the devil's in the details, right, with that?
    • RB:** Exactly. So, but it was an amazing... Well, like I was talking to Jimmy Johnson after Allan passed, and he said that it was quite a ride that we were able to take in Allan's world, as he put it, you know, because all of us—Gary Husband, Jimmy Johnson, Skúli [Sverrisson], Chad Wackerman—the core band that we had during that time, we were just tagging along for Allan's ride through the galaxies, you know? And it was quite a ride. Personally, I mean, I learned so much just playing with him and listening to him play. And the very little that he did talk about—he didn't talk about music much. So sometimes I'd get more about how Allan played and his thinking from other people talking about it than I did from actually Allan, because he never would talk about it, you know.
    • RB:** So what would he talk about when you guys were on tour?
    • SH:** Oh, we'd talk about funny stories or road stories. He was quite the ale drinker, from being from Bradford, England. I don't drink at all, but I can tell you everything there is about beer—how it's made, what the ingredients are, and whether it's good or bad—because we went to the pubs a lot. Especially when we were in England and Germany, we talked about beer. And he was a cyclist, too, so he loved to cycle, so we talked about that. We just talked about all kinds of things, and usually never music, you know. On the van rides, we wouldn't even listen to music much. Especially he didn't want to listen to his own music, so we could never put in an Allan Holdsworth tape or anything like that. Every once in a while, he would kind of pipe up a little bit. But when we were on stage and we were playing music, then he was 150% music. It was all about the music; it was all about the playing.

And funny thing, sometimes he would ask me about scales, you know, which blew me away! I'm like, "Wait a minute, this is Allan Holdsworth asking me about a scale?" You know? So we can talk about that later, but yeah, we didn't talk much about the actual music or about his approach either, you know. So I just learned mostly just from listening to him and playing his music, trying to understand how he thought to play through those types of changes he played and wrote. So it was different.

    • RB:** Speaking of how he played through those changes, your version of "Funnels" that you did on Facebook was so beautiful. To me, it was the best tribute that I heard. It was unbelievable, so beautiful.
    • SH:** It was a very emotional, tough night, and I was up all night. Then I just started playing, and then I just decided to record one take of it. I didn't really think, and then I posted it up. I was definitely emotional during that time, but oh, I appreciate that. Thanks!
    • RB:** Yeah, I mean, really, really beautiful. On *Atavachron*, were there even keyboards on that tune, or was he comping for himself?
    • SH:** I think Alan Pasqua is on the track "Atavachron," and Billy Childs played the solo that's on "Funnels."
    • RB:** Okay. Was like a little flute, DX7 flute sound or something like that.
    • SH:** Uh, but most of the synths you hear on that record is from him playing his SynthAxe, which is triggering mostly Oberheim, Yamaha DX-type instruments, and some samplers. He got into using samplers like bassoon samples and trombone samples later on, you know. But yeah, most of the synths you hear on those records is him playing SynthAxe sounds, you know.
    • RB:** Now, when you played with him and you're playing synthesizer, how would you divide up who played what? Because he would have his sounds, but he wouldn't be comping for himself. Would you use a different sound, or would you use a similar sound to comp for him?
    • SH:** Well, where I met Allan was... I was actually on a Stanley Clarke tour. This was in '87. I was on a tour with Stanley, and Allan's band with Chad and Chad's brother was opening up for us. They were the opening act, you know, and that's how I got to meet Allan. I was like super excited about that!

But anyway, the way I started playing with him is the tunes that he played SynthAxe on—say, like "Pud Wud" or "Looking Glass"—he would play the head and stuff. And then when they soloed, there would be no chords, like there are on the record. So he actually recorded the chords on a cassette tape back then on one track, and the other track was a click—was a tambourine click track that Chad had to play to. So they had a little monitor, and they really hated it because he couldn't take an extra chorus, and Chad had to play the whole tune. And if they were off just by a click, the whole thing was a disaster.

So all my stuff would be set up, and that's when he said, "Hey, do you want to play during our set on these tunes where I [play synth], so we don't have to use that bleeping cassette click track?"

And I said, "Sure!" You know, I was like...

So he wrote out some changes, and basically he would play the head at that time. He would play the heads, and then when he would solo, I would come in with my chord sounds—whatever I had at the time, you know. I had Oberheims, Rolands, all that kind of stuff. And so I would come in with pads and that kind of thing.

When I joined his band later, I guess my sounds had a little more keyboard-oriented sounds in it, although we never used like piano and Rhodes sounds—it was more synth. But we sort of just divided the sounds up. And then shortly after that, I think 1989 was the last time he took that on the road, because it was just a pain—like, tons of Oberheim cases and racks of stuff, and all the SynthAxe gear. And so I had most of the sounds in my DX7s and Oberheims, so I would just combine... After '89, I would just do all the stuff that was on the record, and he relearned everything on guitar, which is amazing! Because some of those tunes are tuned in fifths, like "Looking Glass" and "Non-Brewed Condiment," and then he had to relearn it on a fourths guitar. Actually, he had a double-neck guitar built that had a fifths neck on it and then a regular fourths neck.

    • RB:** Wait, so on "Non-Brewed Condiment," when he plays the head on synth and doubles it with guitar, is the guitar tuned in fifths on that, then?
    • SH:** It could have been, because when he quit taking the SynthAxe, he learned it, and he showed me the stretches. I guess on fifths, I mean, I don't know much about guitar, but it would be like a violin—it would be easier to play all those kind of big interval jumps like that. So he showed me what he had to do to get that line out, and it was like these big... oh, it's insane, big stretches, you know! And crazy, crazy stuff. But he said he figured it out, and so he just put away that double-neck guitar because he hated that too, and he just relearned everything on fourths on those two tunes, you know.

I know there were a lot of comments when he had the SynthAxe—people couldn't tell who was soloing, because we just kind of used almost the same sounds. People thought I got my sounds from him, but it's just the fact that we used the same... I loved Oberheim and all those organic kind of woodwind sounds that Joe Zawinul loved, and Allan was... he loved the saxophone, and his favorite sound was actually the bassoon. If you listen to *Sand*, on that he did a bassoon sample. He loved bassoon and oboe, and he loved those sounds. And Joe Zawinul was sort of the same way—he loved these kind of organic, acoustic sounds, but done with synthesizers. So I think we just sort of had the same mindset in everything.

And so it was a little confusing to some audience members, like, "Who's playing what?"

    • RB:** Well, I saw you guys play. I saw Allan play many times over the years, and I never could tell who was playing what. I mean, I could tell when he was playing with his guitar sound, but you know, I saw him play with the SynthAxe a bunch of times, too, and I was always thinking, "Who's playing what?" I know when he's soloing because you can see him soloing, but other than that, it's like, "Yeah, who's playing what?"
    • SH:** Yeah. So I would try to incorporate some different sounds, like I had some voice sounds in there and different things, and more like keyboard-oriented sounds. But yeah, it was interesting. But that group was mostly synth sounds, you know. So I rarely played... Every once in a while, I'd use sort of a piano-type sound with an Oberheim to do solos and different things. But I loved that kind of playing, you know. I mean, nowadays I do more things with Fender Rhodes and acoustic piano and traditional things, but I loved that back then because I came from the '70s of playing synths, and Joe Zawinul, and Herbie—that was sort of my world then. But that was kind of the explosion of all the different synthesizers happening during the '80s. All the new things that came out, there were all these new sounds that people could use. It must have been really exciting.
    • RB:** Yeah, it was!
    • SH:** The Oberheim... I was lucky enough to come from the '70s, so I still understood about how the ADSR, the filters, and all that stuff worked a little bit. I took a course when I was going to Berklee about that—ARP 2600 and all those patch cords. I can't do it now, although I have plugins on my live rig and my studio rig. But in the '80s, they kind of got away from that, and everything was sort of incorporated into the synth with... and it was harder to program with like one little screen.
    • RB:** Oh, yeah, it was tough!
    • SH:** So I like it now. I'm back to using all my plugins that have all the Oberheim, Minimoog, and ARP stuff, so now I'm kind of back to programming sounds again, which is cool.
    • RB:** Do you use plugins in a DAW when you do that? You use soft synths that way?
    • SH:** Yeah, so I built this thing called the Hackintosh—I don't know if you know...
    • RB:** Oh, of course!
    • SH:** ...and then I loaded it up full of MainStage and Logic, full of plugins and third-party plugins or some of their own stuff. I really love it. I have two keyboards, which is a bottom 88 weighted keyboard and a top Arturia 61-note, more of a synth thing. But with MainStage, I can control... I can do whatever I want to either of those keyboards, split them or double them up.

And now I have like a vocoder I hook up to it, and I found an old Yamaha breath controller that I had when I bought my KX88 for my studio. This guy gave me the breath controller, but I never really used it. And I found on the back of my Arturia that there's... I was down there, and there's a plug that said "Breath Controller." And I was like, "Oh, my God!" And I plugged it in, and now I have a breath controller! So when I went out to California and played with Allan just recently, I pulled that out. I didn't tell him I had it. I started playing, and he was slipping out that I had that breath controller that he used to use, you know! And so it has that same kind of organic horn kind of sound to it, which I love.

If you know about playing keyboards as you do, if you try to play a smooth line with velocity, it doesn't work—no, you get accents that pop out, and it's not very musical, you know. So now with that breath controller, you can really do your crescendos and all that kind of stuff. So I hooked it up—I found this way to hook it up to a filter and all this stuff.

Anyway, yeah, so I use this, and I have my Fender Rhodes on it with this Line 6 USB pedal. I found that I can turn off ring modulators, Leslie pedals, wah-wahs, and delays. So basically, I've gone all the way back to the '70s with all the '70s instruments, but it's all in this computer that I built in MainStage. So I'm having fun! And I set up all the knobs so I can tweak the filters, sort of like the old days. So it's old, but new, you know.

    • RB:** Well, and then it doesn't break down like the old days, and you can save all the sounds, right?
    • SH:** I was telling... I used to have an OB-X, the original. It was the original one right after that big one that Lyle Mays used, and Oberheim put together this OB-X. It had four cards in it, and by the middle of that tour, I had to take the screws off the side because in the middle of the gig, I'd have to lift it up and push the cards down, put it back down, and finish!

People don't realize the things that keyboard players would go through back then. I see all these kids with the old vintage stuff, and I'm like, "I've been there, I've done that. I'm not going back!" On Minimoogs, the contacts were dirty, and then the note would just take off with the voltage! It was insane, you know. But now you see all the guys with the vintage stuff, and they're having fun with it, which is cool. But I'm like, "I'm not going back to that!"

So I have my little briefcase, which is my computer, and my Arturia keyboard. I travel around the world with that—it's great.

    • RB:** So when you were playing Allan's music, what would the charts look like? Would everything be memorized, or how would you notate this? Would he notate this stuff, or would you, if like a lead sheet...?
    • SH:** Yeah, he had no charts whatsoever—never a chart! Well, the way he described it, he doesn't "read dots," is what he said. "I can't read those dots." So he didn't know treble or bass clef dots with rhythmic values.

And the other weird thing—I know a lot of Holdsworth fans know this—he didn't notate harmony and chords the way we would do it, because I went to Berklee or whatever. So there was no minor 7th, or lydian, or whatever. He had sort of his own notation, so I basically had to ask him about the scale he was doing, and then I would have to recalculate, like, "Oh, okay, that's a C minor 7 flat 6," or "that's F minor with a major 7th," or whatever. And then I would just have my page, and I would just jot down whatever I thought it was.

The interesting thing is, if you know how Allan writes music, it's not written in a particular meter. So he never... I mean, there are some songs that are just maybe 4/4 or whatever, or 3/4, but a lot of times there were meter changes within it just for whatever, you know. He just said, "Oh, this needs to last longer," or "this needs to go shorter," or whatever. Or sometimes an anticipation would actually become the downbeat, things like that, you know.

And so there were all these little time changes throughout, so I never even notated any of that. So if you saw my cheat sheets, it would just basically be letters and maybe a symbol that I would come up with for what I thought the chord was. Or some of them, I didn't even know what to call it, so every once in a while you'd see a series of letters with a slash and a bass note, you know. And then I'd have to ask him, "What scale are you thinking?"

He goes, "Well, maybe it's this..."

And that's basically it! He was a great leader in the sense that he never even told you what to play. So he would show you the voicing, he would show you the way he played it, and then that was basically the end. There were no charts, and we just kind of...

Actually, I have... this is my "Atavachron" sheet, if you want to see what I'm talking about. Wow, and it's just a bunch of letters! And then there's one section where I just put the A pedal, and I knew the little lick that went there, and then the solo changes—I would just put the chord changes down. So as far as how the tune was played, I just did it. It's all memorization, essentially, right?

    • SH:** Yeah, it was just like... and I really love that kind of...
    • RB:** I mean, you can do it with a trio or a quartet. I guess if you had a larger group, it'd be a little more difficult to do it with this music.
    • SH:** The other thing, too, is like, we never even talked about those time changes I talked to you about. So one time I went to Gary Husband because I was curious about a section and how he counted it, and I realized we were on kind of different pages as far as where the "one" was and where the "and" was. So I just kind of ended the conversation, and we never talked about timing again—never, you know!

So I would just do this thing where, you know, I knew how the tune goes, and if I had to hold, I knew how many counts I had to hold before I went to the next thing. Like "Looking Glass" is a good example of that—I know it's kind of in 3/4, but I don't actually know what it is.

And there was a tune... actually, I just downloaded someone's—it may be "House of Mirrors"—and I downloaded a chart of it, and I didn't realize there were so many time changes in the whole song, you know, little odds and ends of stuff. And so I was really... and then I couldn't read it! I was trying to read the transcription, and I couldn't read it because that's not the way I counted it, I guess, or something.

    • RB:** That is so fascinating.
    • SH:** It's really an interesting way. And the other interesting thing, too, is he would basically... if you kind of know how he thinks, he thinks mostly in scales. I've heard you talk about that, too. It's like he doesn't think of actual chords—and as a disclaimer, I don't know this for a fact, because this is my impression of it, because he would never talk about it, like I said—but he would think of more like scales, I think, you know?
    • RB:** Yeah.
    • SH:** And then he had these structures, and then he had the melody, and he would harmonize within these structures within the melody and the scale. So he would never notate like, "Oh, this is a C minor 7 to an A-flat major 7," or whatever. It would just be this structure in this scale to this structure in this scale.

And then the really cool thing I thought was brilliant is he would go to the bass player—whoever it was, Jimmy Johnson, Skúli, or Dave Carpenter at the end—and he would play him these structures, and then he'd have them figure out what the root was, you know?

I was talking to Jeff Berlin one time, and I interviewed Jeff—this actually wasn't part of the interview, this was just him telling me one time that when he worked on *Road Games*, basically Allan just showed him the chords, and he would figure out what the bass notes were.

    • RB:** Yeah, that's kind of the way he... I think that's the way he thought.
    • SH:** And when we did the *Wardenclyffe Tower* album, that album was done in such a weird way because the genesis of it is... on *Secrets*, there was one track he did with Chad Wackerman. And the way they did the track was Chad played some kind of drum machine thing, and then there were some chords on a synthesizer, and then Allan played his solo over it. He played his solo first, and then they went to the studio, and Chad and Jimmy (or whoever played bass on that track) did the Rhythm Section, and they finished it that way.

So when we did *Wardenclyffe Tower*, he thought that's the way he wanted to do the whole record. So when we did that record, all I played to was this really crazy drum machine that had no specific 1-2-3-4, just this rhythm that could go over any time signature, and his SynthAxe chord that he came up with for the tune. And then I would have to lay all my parts on top of that, and I would solo over that. There's no drums, there's no bass, and I would do all my solos!

So I had to figure out what the chord structure was, what scale I thought it was. And I was sort of really nervous because when Jimmy came and put his bass stuff on it, I mean, all you need is some kind of different bass note, and the scale changes, of course! And I thought, "Okay, this is the scale I've soloed over, but what's going to happen in the regular...?"

Luckily, there were no major differences, but I was a little nervous about that. But I think that's a beautiful way to do it, and Jimmy would come up probably with notes that maybe Allan wouldn't come up with, you know? And I think he loved that fact.

He gave me that same kind of freedom, you know: "This is my structure, this is a scale." But I would come up with some other structures that I would hear, and he was totally fine with it, and a different bass note. And it really became a beautiful thing. I think it gives the musician that freedom and creativity to create within that world, you know.

Whereas, every time I came back to Boston after those tours and working with him, it's not that it was bad, just I was back into a world of structure, you know: "Here's the chart, it's this beat, it goes in this time signature, and you have to count it this way, and this is the chord, and this is your voicing you have to play, and there's the bass note," you know!

It was... but you know, I had to go between those two worlds, you know.

    • RB:** Okay, so when you guys were passing around recordings, was it ADAT you were working off of?
    • SH:** Yeah, well, I guess when we did *Secrets*, yeah... I think I didn't have my studio then, but somehow I did...
    • RB:** You wouldn't be sending 2-inch tape around, would you?
    • SH:** No, I didn't have that, and Allan didn't have that either. In the '80s, I guess there were ADATs, right? So I might have had some ADATs or something like that. And so I think that's what I started with—some ADATs. On "Joshua," I tracked "Joshua"—I did all my tracks here in my house, and then I sent him the tracks. And then he put them on 2-inch, and then he went to a studio, and Vinnie Colaiuta and Jimmy Johnson played on top of that.

I don't think I ever sent them charts either. And there's a great story about that—I don't know if you know that tune "Joshua," but Vinnie Colaiuta played on that track. So they played one day, and then I was actually in LA the next day, and I came to the studio with Allan, and he goes, "Oh, you've got to check this out, man!"

So I guess Vinnie laid down his track for that tune, the first take. And then he listened to it, and he goes, "Oh, I think I want to do that again."

And Allan goes, "You know, this is 2-inch, so either erase it..." And Allan goes, "You know, I think let's save that just in case."

So they saved it, and then he did another track where he played a lot less—he just thought he played too much, you know. And then Vinnie said, "Oh yeah, that's the track I want to use."

And so the next day I came, and me and Allan were listening to it, and we listened to the first take, and we were just blown away! Like, "Oh, my God, this is..."

And then Allan said, "I think we're going to have to do an override here." And so on the record, we actually used the first take that Vinnie played on that, and it's just amazing, you know, the way he played over all that stuff, and it turned out to be a beautiful track.

But yeah, I think we used to send stuff like that, like ADATs. And that track that's on my record, "Ring It Out," Chad was living in Australia, so it was cool—he just sent an ADAT, and then I sent one to Allan and he did his track, and then Skúli was living in New York. So we never saw each other, and we just... yeah, that was probably the first time that people were able to do that, was during that period.

    • RB:** I mean, nowadays you can send anything, but before then, you'd have to send a 2-inch tape, really, if you're going to do overdubs.
    • SH:** You had to find a studio that had a 2-inch. So during that time, it was a new world, and it turned out really well. Now, like you say, I do records for people all over the world I've never met. They send it on Dropbox, I send it back, the record comes out, they pay me through PayPal, and it's all said and done, you know! It's a great world. I mean, it's great to be able to get together, too, but you know, it's a new world with this new technology.
    • RB:** So when you're playing over "Funnels," for example, you have these sections that are slash chords that move around. What is your concept when you're soloing over these kind of things? How do you think of... do you think of scales? Do you solo over the triads? What do you think of when you're soloing?
    • SH:** Yeah, there's one section of that tune that's really... I actually... that's one section I talked to Allan to find out what he's thinking. It's where he has these kind of slash chords that you're talking about. The main part of the tune, as far as scales, is pretty normal. The interesting thing would be sometimes you would come up with a set of scales that go over these structures, and some nights it would work, and then other nights you feel like you're playing the wrong notes. And he had the same feeling! He's like... so he'd ask me, "What are you playing over this?" you know.

The one section that goes... because the melody chord is just a constant structure that goes over the D, the C, the E-flat, and the G. So it's kind of like D minor, C minor, but is it D minor with the E-flat, or is it D minor with the E, you know, sometimes? And so, those kind of things... and you had to realize that it really depended on where your line was coming from and where it was going, whether you played a certain scale or another. It was very subtle in that sense.

Those were kind of normal; the other section... other sections I was talking about, all those things, I could see some kind of scales, and he thought kind of diminished in that section, which was a little hard for me to see in there. But I could see how you can see the diminished part in there with the F over A-flat. But I started... on that section, I started doing this thing where I was working out these three-triad kind of things, like F triad, A-flat triad, A triad, and you turn it into that scale, and it kind of incorporates all those triads. And so I would just stop thinking about all those things moving, and play, you know, and think more in those kind of groups of triads, and it seemed to work, you know. I got through them! And that whole thing shifts down like a fourth, I think, and it repeats that same section.

But you know, a lot of the scales in his music are basically pretty normal—it's either going to be a Lydian scale or an Aeolian mode-type thing or something, because he would just... no matter what the chord was, he would just think kind of one scale, no matter what the root was. That's why I think it uncluttered his mind to not have to think about what all the roots are. If you wind up with the same scale over three chords, you know... so if you have F minor 7, which we call Dorian, and A-flat Lydian, and then going to, I don't know, E-flat major, it's all the same scale. So instead of thinking, he would just put down, I think, the symbol he would put for F Dorian. And if the roots changed, but it's the same scale, he's like, "I'm still in the same scale," so he wouldn't think about the roots so much, you know. So that was an interesting way to think about playing over changes.

The way his changes move are so beautiful, and they just make so much sense. I was telling somebody the other day, they actually have built-in lines formed between them! Because if you can make the scales... they just seem to flow effortlessly, and you wind up coming up with some really beautiful lines just by making the changes in the scale from his movements, you know. I've played over people's tunes before, like they sent it to me, "Oh, I need you to play over this song," you know, and they're writing in a Holdsworth manner, and I can't make anything work because it's kind of random. It just goes to this chord for no reason, and they may think they're sounding like Holdsworth, but it's very difficult to make the line work, you know. And that's when I started realizing how genius he was, because the chords weren't random.

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