Tommy Ermolli: ytse jam interview

On this album, I just let all my main guitar-oriented influences come out. The style of the album is, as you say, more straight-forward: main riffs, themes and solos," begins Ermolli," You know, you won't find weird soundscapes or jazz-rock eight fingers tapping. Obviously there are some virtuostic passages and I didn't play just pentatonic scales, but what I mostly wanted to deliver a music that you can remember. That's my main goal when I write music."

The album itself began after a tragic even ensued, where the track "Magic" was the first tune written - after that, the rest of the album came out as a 'personal challenge' as the guitarist explains, "I wanted to see if I could write an entire album on my own. The other songs didn't have a specific inspiration. I tried to convey all my guitar influences and use them to make some songs of mine. Surely I wrote many minutes of music, but are they any good? Let me know!"

His influences spread across the board of many different shred-meisters, he even has a particular influence for his acoustic playing, "On the electric guitar, I am mostly inspired by John Petrucci, Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, Eric Johnson, Paul Gilbert, & Andy Timmons - but the list is infinite. On the acoustic guitar my reference is the awesome Tommy Emmanuel, but I don't think you can hear his style in the few acoustic moments of the album as he's incomparable to any other guitar player, in my opinion."

full interview