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Hi and welcome to the guitar practice perfectly film day.
I'm delghted to have here in our studio a very good friend of mine,
a great guitar player Mr Stuart Ryan. Good to be hear and thanks for the invite.
Stuart, it's a pleaseure mate, I can't remember how many years we go back but I remember I was very flattered as you attended a few of my
concerts, and you came to my house
not for a guitar lesson, but to chat to me about composition, which goes to show the kind of dedication you had, even then
to your craft and I felt very honoured and in some ways quite embarrased I took your fee, but there we go all these years on now your one of this
country's most respected guitar player and indeed teachers, but listen, can we go back in time,
tell us about history and how it all started, how old you were when you got your first guitar, all that good stuff.
Sure, I'm thirty five now, so i've been playing guitar for about eighteen months I think!!
Actually I started playing guitar when I was about
twelve going on thirteen and I don't come from a musical family
its not like I have a brother who plays the violin, I dont have brothers or sisters
but I always loved music and my parents loved music, so my early memoties of being in the car with
rock and roll, I grew up with rock and roll, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lewis and all that stuff, and I remember hearing things like the
intro to Jonny be Good, intro to Great Balls of Fire, thinking that's impressive
I did'nt understand it, I was only about four or five, and I used to sing along with all the instrumental sections
So my parents would have these three hour car journeys with a five year old going der, der, der der, der, der,
so you are obviously musical anyway, its in there, that love of music, that sound was always there.
I had a love of it, I remember finding Jerry Lee Lewis's version of Jonny be good
that my parens hd on vinal and I remember putting it on the record player, I was probably about six
and I played the intro 25 times in a row, lifting the arm and putting it back
I did'nt know what a piano was
I just remember thinking, this is great, so I always loved music
and when I got to eleven or twelve I think this is when my parents were thinking
is it going to be football, Is it going to be music
I did'nt really make the school team that often so it wasnt really an option. I can relate to that,
I was always the one at the end, who you going to pick next, the guy with the club foot and then there will be me
so my parents looked at my friends who were getting their first guitars, and they did'nt say to me, would you like a guitar
what happened is quite an interesting story
they looked at a friend of mine who had a guitar, I think he had like a Squire Strat
or something and they thought it may be a nice idea to get him a guitar
so they both independently went to the same shop in Liverpool on the same day , they went to a shop called Rushworth's
and without talking to each other they both looked at a Honner
classical guitar. This is in the days before mobile phones so they couln't actually phone each other and say this is what we are doing
And my dad bought the guitar
and my mum did'nt, and when they both got home
my dad had this Honner classical and my mum said oh that's strange, I was looking at one just like that
today, and my dad said where abouts and she said in Rushworth's in Liverpool
and he said, oh thats where it came from, so they had somehow bought the same guitar and so I remember coming home
from school that day and my dad saying I've got something for you, just wait until you get home and being twelve I though it was comuter games
brilliant I'm going to look forward to this
got home
put me in the living room and said he would be back in just a second
the excitement at this point was unbelievable and then he walked in
not with a Collins but a £50 nylon string Honner
and I think my exact words were what do I want that for and it went in a cupboard
for about 6 months
and it didn't get touched
And then I think there was a combination of factors and my friends at school started to learn the few basic licks and I started listening to music
like Guns and Roses where the guitar was in a four
and i picked it up and somebody showed me
that and we had a family friend who played a bit of surf guitar so he was showing me all these
Oh that's good, show me that again
and yeah it took off from there. You're at the age when you've got time on you hands
Can I just ask you who was the first guitar player that really did it for you, that you thought yeah that's what i want to do, I want to play like that
or create that sound
yeah that's a tricky one, i think
it was probably Slash from Guns and Roses I think
around that time we were listening to Angus Young, Slash, Metatilica the stuff teenage boys in the late 80s early 90s listened to and for me I
think it was slash.
What was the thing that made the transistion from the desire to play the electric guitar to the desire to play the acoustic?
A very good question.
I remember
buying
I must have been about 15 or 16 and my parents bought me an Ovation acoustic guitar from somewhere
in the Midlands, possibly lichfield, it seems to ring a bell
and it was a grey sunburst and it was probably the least sexy guitar
you can possibly imagine but I think it probably tied in with my energy at the time, my image at the time was probably
quite grey with the Blackmegadeath
t-shirt and all this sort of stuff. Yeah if remember rightly Ovation have even today still got this rock and roll connection
a lot of those bands were playing Ovation. Dare I say it I probably sold more Ovation guitars for the company in the late 70s here in the Uk
because it was the only guitar that had a pick up you could actually play at volume
without any noticeable feedback and it kind of sounded like an acoustic. Looking back it sounded like a box with rubber bands on it but
you know
things have moved on. Yes it's true. I think it had a fibre glass body too but I love that guitar
because it had a bowl back it would always do this as well. So that's how I got into acoustic guitar. Now that wasn't finger style
i think that's more about playing the acoustic parts from the pieces I was learning
and I started experimenting with classical guitar just because, and that's sort of how I got into finger style, I had abysmal finger style technique
I used to use my finger and my thumb and did'nt really think about using these other fingers to do those rolling pattens.
That sounds like me, I've never used those other fingers
so I got into the sound of the acoustic guitar from there, but it wasnt until much later that i started seeing
the acoustic guitar as a solo instrument I think what happened when I got to about 19 or 20
I started thinking well how can I acually play solo and I think I mentioned it earlier, I remember,
there was one month
knew Tommy Emmanuel and Martin Taylor and
in pretty much the same month and saw what a revelation solo guitar playing can be,
so I look at my acoustic guitar playing in two phases. I see the phase where iI was just strumming
and playing lead guitar on acoustic and then the proper finger style, and I saw you guys
and all of a sudden it made sense the composition angle made sense, the performance started to
take shape and it all kind of stemmed from what you three were doing. Stuart you must have
developed pretty quickly because that only seemed like last week when I saw you attending my gigs
but I think thats an age thing. We've only got a few more minutes before we run out of tape so
did you ever go for lessons? I had a hand full of lessons, I had a hand full of lessons at school and they ended
when I asked the guy to explain what Van Halen was doing and the poor guy was a classical
teacher. Great classical player but he had no idea what
Van Halen was all about, and then a couple of lessons when I was at university with
a classical guitar teacher again which was interesting, learning a few things
corrected a few finger style issues there but only a handful, the rest of it I learned from the instrument.
So pretty much like me and most of the players I admire were all pretty much self taught, Now listen
we are going to look forward very much to hearing you play solo later on Stuart. I've got loads of
questions I want to ask you about your technique, but thanks for coming and its great to have you here today
at GPP studios.