I love Robert Fripp. You know what I really appreciate about Robert Fripp? He always dresses appropriately for the occasion. When he's on stage, he's a Dapper Dan.
I have a lot of guitar heroes I guess, some of them are female and some of them are male. Robert Fripp is one of them, and Marc Ribot, that's another guitar hero.
If the guitar synthesizer is really going to stand as a synthesizer on its own, it needs to develop a more characteristic sound; I don' think it's gotten there yet.
Robert Fripp and I will be recording another LP very soon. It should be even more monotonous than the first one!
There is far more sensitivity in acoustic guitar players than could ever be compared to any synthesizer. That's a personal point of view but that's the way I see it. I think that's what it's all about. The drive, the fire, the passion - it all comes out on the guitar.
The most obvious thing you can't do with a guitar synthesizer is to really sound like a guitar.
That's the way I've always been, between the albums: For two- or three-year gaps I wouldn't pick up a guitar. And when I don't pick up a guitar for a year or two, that's when the songs fall out.
I felt I had nothing more to say. Everything would have had to be a replay of the previous two or three albums, and that decided me to stop. What bothered me most was not playing guitar at all anymore. I felt I had no more contact with the instrument. It was just a piece of wood to me. I even thought music had definitely left me. After fourteen albums, there may be an overload phase, a sort of lassitude.
I've always been fascinated with sound, since I was a little kid when my mother Dorothy Dean took me to my first piano lesson. Later on, my guitar, bass guitar, and synthesizer were my secret weapons.
I played a guitar with a file, and a synthesizer.
I became a member of the faculty at Northwestern University in 1965 but did not complete my thesis until two years later at a graduate ceremony at which Carnegie Institute of Technology became Carnegie-Mellon University. At Northwestern, I was mentored by the 'three Bobs:' Robert Eisner, Robert Strotz and Robert Clower.
Like my best friend, I asked for drums for Christmas, and got them. But when he moved on to guitar, I realized two things: (1) guitar is a much more expressive instrument, (2) way more girls pay attention to guitar players than to drummers.
For me, the guitar synthesizer is a great writing instrument.
I did albums for Cash Money. I didn't do singles - I did whole albums for Cash Money - and at the end of the day, I'm saying I wasn't paid for albums, so its like you're doing 10 songs, and somebody pays you for 1.
My guitar is a 1934 National Trojan. They call it a resonator, which is the guitar guys played in the honky-tonks before amplification. It's very loud. It's the type of guitar that Son House and Robert Johnson played.
It's been very hard for the guitar as a serious synthesizer to compete with keyboards.