Greg Howe: dinosaur rock interview

News:
05-03-2009:
Another good interview.... another taster...

Howe:

I don’t think it’s something you can deliberately try to get. It’s something you have to be open to, and to be willing to not sound like anyone else. I think there are a lot of great players who will never necessarily go down in history because they don’t have their own thing. They’ve been good at mimicking. But I think what is important is that you hear something, acknowledge it for how great it is, and at the same time acknowledge that copying it directly will not benefit you in any way.



When I was young I could mimic Eddie Van Halen. When I say mimic I don’t mean just play the notes, but the same exact vibrato, tone and nuances. Even if I played an improvised solo I would have all those nuances and it would sound like him playing, so I really decided I had to stop listening to him and be open a lot of things. I had to be open to incorporating a lot of different things and really it was a process of a lot of different influences that lead to a unique thing. It’s like taking a lot of different flavours and putting them into one soup bowl and eventually you come up with a unique flavour that doesn’t taste like any specific thing, but has its own flavour because of all these different things, he explains.

full interview