THE SIX STRING SHED
Hal Rodriguez
Interview with Richie Kotzen
June 25th, 2014
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In this post, triple threat singer, songwriter, and shredder extraordinaire Richie Kotzen talks to me about The Winery Dogs, improvising, and songwriting. Thanks to Richie, Amanda Cagan, and Andrew King for making this possible. For more on the band, visit TheWineryDogs.com andpurchase their self-titled debut album on iTunes. Photos by Markus Cuff and Travis Shinn.
Your legato technique is one of the best around and I’ve heard you say you used to study Allan Holdsworth in the beginning. Could you describe the evolution of your style as a guitarist?
Richie Kotzen: Well, it’s kind of funny, because when I used to talk about influences, I would name guys that would inspire me to play and move forward, but I was never the guitar player that learned solos note for note. When I was a teenager, I was really into Van Halen and a lot of my guitar player friends could play “Eruption” flawlessly, but I couldn’t. I never learned it. I tried to figure out some things, but then I would just move on from that.
As far as how my style evolved, initially I gravitated towards things that were easy to me. For whatever reason, it might just be my physical makeup, like the size of my hands, legato came easier to me. So it evolved quicker and became it’s own thing that helped me formulate a style when I was 17 or 18. Then as I grew as a person, I started to realize the reason I play guitar is not to master any techniques, but to create music. So I started to focus on that as a singer and wrote songs where I could still play guitar and have fun with solos, but also had something to sing that had to do with me personally, my perspective, and my life experiences. The creative aspect of writing music became my focus as a musician. There are a lot of guys out there that are amazing technicians and play perfectly. Unfortunately, a lot of them don’t really create music that most people want to listen to. I can appreciate the technical side, but at a certain point, there’s got to be a reason to develop it. You develop a skill set in order to execute what you want to create, and that’s my focus.
From transcribing a lot of your solos, I notice you often play sequences of major 7 and minor 7 arpeggios instead of just sticking to a scale. Could you explain your concept of using arpeggios while soloing?
RK: At this stage of the game, it’s so built into how I hear and play, that it’s really just an instinctual thing. In an arpeggio, you’re just spelling out the individual notes that make up the chord that you’re playing over and there’s different levels of that. If you’re playing over a G major chord, for example, you can play an E minor arpeggio. But really, I rely on my ear. If you play a wrong note, the right note is only a half step away, up or down.
It’s important to not look at the instrument in terms of patterns, but as available notes. You have the whole neck at your disposal, but a lot of guys get caught up in playing one little section of the neck because they’re thinking in terms of the pentatonic box, for example. Those notes in the pentatonic scale are all over the guitar. There is a sense of patterns, of course, that’s how you get muscle memory. You learn the pentatonic scale in every position, but then you forget about it. It becomes instinctual muscle memory and you know where those notes are all over the guitar. Then you can stop thinking in terms of patterns, and start thinking in terms of individual note sequences laid out across the entire neck, not just in a little box.
Is it true that when you joined Stanley Clarke’s band, Vertu, he made you learn John Coltrane’s solo in “Giant Steps” on guitar?
RK: I remember as an exercise, I did learn maybe six or seven choruses of Coltrane’s solo for the purposes of opening up my ears and connecting what I was hearing to my hands. That was a really good exercise. It was a long time ago, but I never learned the rest of the song or played it live. What I did was dissect Coltrane’s playing and sit for hours playing along with his solo. There were songs on Vertu where I had to play over chord changes that were foreign to my ear, so learning the solo in “Giant Steps” helped my improvisations.
The ability to analyze a Coltrane solo and apply that to playing over changes means you have a deep grasp of music theory. Were you self taught in that area?
RK: Yes and no. I had two different guitar instructors when I was very young, so I learned the foundations of theory and harmony. But it’s one of those things, “You learn it to forget it”. As a musician, you don’t want to be playing a solo thinking in terms of scales and patterns. You want to be free of thought and you want to be connected to the instrument and the music. That’s the ultimate goal. I call it a bridge and what that bridge is doing is connecting the internal self to the exterior, which is the instrument. You want to make that connection so that the music comes through you when you’re playing, so that you’re a conduit, not a machine that spits out math equations. In my opinion, the musicians that have affected us the most are the ones that found that bridge. Theory is a good tool to explain the how and why something works, but it’s my belief that when someone is playing something musical, the last thing on their minds is the theory of it. It’s the feeling of it, their ears, and their ability to respond to what’s happening around them.
Can you pinpoint the time when you found that bridge?
RK: Yeah, I think it happened in my twenties. I started to make that connection and from then on, it just kind of grew. I made a solo record during that time called Mother Head’s Family Reunion, and I felt I was connected and playing really well.
On The Winery Dogs, you and bass virtuoso Billy Sheehan play a lot of high speed lines in unison. Could you describe some things you’ve learned from him as a musician from this experience?
RK: Well, a lot of interesting things happen when we do those unison lines. On the record, I had written certain lines into the songs and there were other lines that Billy wrote, which came out of improvisation. In the song “Not Hopeless” for example, at the end of Billy’s improvised bass solo, there’s a line he plays with a unique tapping technique that he invented. I wanted to double it, but I didn’t have that technique in my repertoire, so I came up with a way to use open strings and fingerpicking. Similarly, Billy had to figure out how to double the lines I wrote using his techniques. So we ended up with unison lines that are unique because they weren’t executed the same way.
Working with a progressive rock drummer like Mike Portnoy, did it challenge you to make any adjustments to your playing style or the way you arranged your vocals?
RK: Well, in the making of the record, there were definitely things I had to do. It’s about finding room and space. Both Mike and Billy allow me space to do what I do so I can be at my best, and at the same time, I allow space for them. Maybe there were times when I was playing rhythm guitar that I could have played something with more movement, but because of what they were playing, I just played whole notes and kept a foundation for them, and they do the same for me. Especially live, when I’m improvising my solos, I can depend on them to support me so I can build something. That’s kind of the key to improvising. It’s being able to listen and make room for people.
I’ve read that you come up with solos by just improvising over a whole song and then picking out parts that stand out. Did you take the same approach on The Winery Dogs?
RK: I don’t necessarily improvise over an entire song. When the solo section comes up, I usually go for it and see what happens. Now, that is a long process. Sometimes, you go for it and you nail something, and you go back and say, “That felt really good, but there’s one little section where I bent a note a little sharp. Let me punch in and fix that”. Sometimes, I just like the beginning of a solo I played, but then I start hearing melodies over the chords and I want the solo to go somewhere different.
Now, I can’t always physically play what I’m hearing, so in those moments I might have to sit there for five or ten minutes and figure out, “What am I hearing in my head? Where are those notes on the neck? How do I play them efficiently?” Then, I’ll go back and try to record it. That for me, is how I find myself actually practicing these days. I don’t really wake up in the morning, pick up the guitar, and start practicing things I already know. It usually comes in a situation where I’m recording and I hear something very clearly in my head that I can’t physically do. But that’s not the kind of practicing a beginner can do, because they’re not at that level. As a beginner, you have to do things like learn your scales and play with a metronome to learn to play in time.
You’re a prolific songwriter that releases an album every year. How do you deal with breaking out of ruts and find new inspiration?
RK: Well, that’s a good question because every person that writes goes through that. For me, I got to a point where I realized that there is no such thing as writer’s block. In other words, a song will be written when it needs to be written. Now, this is only going to be a true philosophy for someone that has years of experience writing songs. But once you’ve gotten to the point where you’ve written songs that you feel accurately represent you emotionally and that are translatable to people, you know what that feels like. I’ll be specific. Years ago, I think it was in ’97, I wrote a song called, “What Is”. I’m not saying it’s a great song or not, because that’s not for me to say. But what I will say is that “What Is” literally wrote itself. Lyrics, music, and melody literally came to me all at once. I’ve had maybe 10 or 15 songs that happened like that for me, so I know what that feels like. If you have an idea for a song, all you have is just an idea. At some point, when the song is meant to be written and you connect with it, the whole song will be written.
For me, the proof to that is this: I’m making a record now and although I do have some new songs that I wrote, I also went back and listened to old song ideas I never finished. I found ideas that I really liked and some of these things were 10 years old. Now, all of a sudden, I had a clear picture of where they needed to go, lyrically and harmonically, and I finished a couple of them. So if you allow yourself to not have that kind of pressure on you, it’s surprising when the inspiration comes. Now, the real key is knowing what to do when you have that inspiration and knowing how to follow through and complete a song. That comes from years of experience writing.
One last thing I will say for me personally, is that I need a balance. For example, I can’t just be on the road for months at a time. I get to the point where I start to hate it because there’s a monotony to it. Also, I can’t just be in the studio for a year on end because it becomes a labouring process. The minute you start to feel that, your work is going to suffer, because you’re not going to be inspired. And for the kind of work that we do, you need that inspiration for your music to really make a difference.
Hal Rodriguez is a Toronto based musician, transcriber, teacher, and published writer. For Skype lessons and transcription services, he can be contacted athalromusic@gmail.com. You can also follow him on Twitter @halwit, onyoutube.com/halromusic, and at guitartreats.blogspot.ca
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