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A Conversation with Willy Porter (continued)
PM: Are there things, musical or otherwise, that you haven't attempted yet that you might like to try?
WP: Yeah, man, I want to study music.
PM: Really?
WP: Yeah. I just really want to learn a lot more. I would love to play some jazz. I'd love to have a more global understanding of theory and what makes a great song great in terms of its construction.
PM: How would you do it? Get a mentor, go to school, read a book?
WP: A little bit of each, I think. I started studying with this great guitar player named Greg Koch. He lives in town, he's one of my neighbors. And he's just breathtaking, man. I mean, he's like the main Fender clinician internationally now. And what this guy can do... But he's also real down-to-earth. And we sit and pick a little, and he just says, "Here's this harmonic thing, let's throw it over these changes." And it's great. He sort of demystifies things. Whereas I used to think it was poison to the creative process to know too much, now I want to learn as much as I can.
PM: When somebody's there to demystify, now, that's valuable.
WP: So that's my quest, to remain a student. And in every walk, try to expand that.
PM: Yeah. You mentioned Fender, are they your guitar company du jour, or do you have several axe companies?
WP: I've just been working with them of late. And we've built a couple guitars together, a Valencia that I'm playing, which is this acoustic axe that's just amazing.
PM: The Valencia.
WP: Yeah. Fender owns Guild now, so I've been working with the folks at Guild at lot.
PM: You're playing a baritone, by the sounds of it, right?
WP: No, that's a standard, that's a regular axe.
PM: I mean, there was a note--I heard a G-sharp. How low do you have it tuned?
WP: It's medium gauged strings, and then on the low E-string it's down to, say, F-sharp on a couple tunes--
PM: Damn! Down to F-sharp.
WP: Yeah, it's pretty flappy down there, but--
[laughter]
WP: It's a good surfboard, man.
PM: I like the way you make it sound. I can't believe that it's not a baritone guitar.
WP: Well, I have a baritone, but I just haven't really figured out how to drive that car. I'm not so solid on that technique: you gotta use a lot of right hand string muting and stuff.
PM: Why is that?
WP: Partly because to chord with it, at least with the one that I have, it just becomes too much sub information, so there's not enough note articulation and too much of a spike in certain frequency ranges. It's almost like trying to chord on a bass.
PM: Right.
WP: You can do little diatonic things, but you can't really get beyond that. And so I'm just kind of trying to figure that thing out. It's such a cool axe. You know who makes great use of it is Keller Williams.
PM: Oh, really?
WP: Yeah. Have you heard him?
PM: I've seen him recently, in the square here at Vanderbilt one night. He was doing his looping thing, and so I went down and checked it out. That's crazy, man. [Looping is a technique where certain gear is required. "On the fly," you record one part, play it back and play and record a second part along with it, and so on, up to four or five parts, usually.]
WP: Yeah, he's pretty nuts, isn't he?
[laughter]
PM: I mean, his playing didn't exactly blow me away, but his showmanship was off the scale.
WP: To be honest with you, I haven't seen him live except for one thing that we did. We played 3rd & Lindsley for WRLT one time. [WRLT is the AAA Nashville station.] And he was playing a baritone, and I thought, "Man, he's getting a killer sound." It was a heavy Kottke kind of a thing going on. But it was just great control.
PM: You ever get into the whole looping trip?
WP: Yeah, I actually have quite a bit. I used to be into it a few years back, and recently I've just started again. I'm a big Laurie Anderson fan. So for me it's got to be outside of just the stuff where I'm playing the rhythm part and now I'm going to solo. Lately I've been doing stuff where I have different character voices and stuff within a song--
PM: [laughs]
WP: --or within, like, a sketch, and then they come back. So I'm sampling my voice and doing other stuff like that with it. And it's been cool. I'm just scratching the surface of it, but it's a lot of fun. And that's why I consciously have not gone and seen Keller Williams! Because I know if I go and see him, I'll be like, "Oh, now I know what I can do."
PM: [laughs]
WP: There are some things you've got to avoid, as a player, to maintain your own thing.
[laughter] continue
