Tristan Klein: guitar9 interview

Dan McAvinchey: Tristan, when did you first get interested in guitar, and how did you learn and progress as a player?

Tristan Klein: My father is a guitar player. He was a session man for some famous singers in the '60s, then he moved and started a guitar school. But he never gave me any lessons. He just let me make my own way. The house was always full of instruments so I started with the drums and the piano when I was 7. Later on, after my parents got divorced, we moved to a house where playing drums was not possible and the old piano just died so I started to play guitar. I was about 12 when i got my first guitar, an acoustic, then my dad bought me an electric guitar and that was the begining of my obsession!

I used to play every day after school. I was so passionate! Two things hepled me a lot: CDs from my dad's collection, everything from Holdsworth to SRV, and changing gear as much as possible. New sounds always inspired me so much. For the rest, I was just sitting with my guitar and playing an enormous solo for hours. I never used tabs or tried to reproduce licks from CDs... to me, freedom is the key.


Dan McAvinchey: Let's get into your latest CD "Universal Mojo", released by Grooveyard Records. How did you come up with the concept and songs for the CD?

Tristan Klein: The concept of the CD was simple. Joe Romagnola from Grooveyard Records told me to "improvise within deep blues-based grooves to give your musical expression and guitar language a lot of freedom" based around the strength of strong, powerful and inventive riffage. All,or most, of the solos were improvised. Many of them are even one shot and first takes on the majority of my demo tracks.

From there we had to develop songs from the demo ideas. I record a lot of short samples every year, sometimes for my sponsors (PRS, T-rex and more), sometimes to test some new equipment and configurations, and sometimes for my own personal enjoyment. Joe had the idea to check out all those short sample demo clips and find the potential songs inside. They were just grooves with solos in them so, from there, I had to find themes and build structures to transform them into compositions. Some were easy, some were not, but the idea is great because once again, I had a lot of inspirational freedom and we took the time to experiment. That method is totally new to me but it really worked to fully develop the songs for the "Universal Mojo" disc.

full interview