[Laurie Monk] Judging from CD Baby http://www.cdbaby.com/Artist/AdamMoore you've been on the guitar scene for quite awhile. Now here at Truth In Shredding we do pride ourselves in finding new guitar talents, so I am surprised it's taken this long to discover your talents. So can you bring us up to speed with your guitar playing history to date, there must have been a lot of hard work learning the trade, for example are you self taught?
[Adam Moore] I've been playing for a long time, nearly twenty years, and making albums for about six years, although previously I've not really taken my career that seriously. I made my first guitar album, Curious Liquid, in 2004 mainly as it seemed like a really fun thing to do. I had all these ideas swimming around my head and my technique was OK, so I just started recording at home until I had enough material for an album.
Curious Liquid was great and I’m still really proud of it, but even just six years ago I didn't have the confidence or knowledge to turn that into a sustainable career. Today, I’m in a far better position to present my idea of what guitar music can be, so that’s what I’m doing.
[Laurie Monk] That's is interesting to hear, I talk to many guitar players who struggle to translate their prodigious talent to a CD, possibly in fear that they are still improving. I am more into recording and delivering a CD as a way of freeing yourself and enabling you to move on and progress. Would you agree?
[Adam Moore] Certainly, composing is more about personal growth and change rather than aiming for some elusive notion of perfection. At least it’s that way for me. Besides, people aren't consistent across their lifetimes. We develop. Our ideas of what is right or perfect change. I’d much rather that my output reflects my life. I can hear the twenty-four year old me in the music on Curious Liquid, I remember the house it was recorded in and the view out of the window.
[Laurie Monk] So after Curious Liquid what did you do?
[Adam Moore] After I made Curious Liquid I actually stopped listening to really technical guitar players altogether and moved onto more understated, song-based music. I made two albums then, Misty Mornings & Market Towns and Endless Clamour, but didn't promote either of them. They were just for me really. Now I've returned to playing guitar in a way that should appeal rather more immediately to your fine audience at Truth in Shredding. I've just released an album called Regent, which I see as shred guitar playing filtered through some rather more subtle song writing processes.
As far as my learning the guitar goes, I think, like most players, I've taught myself the majority of what I know, or at least established for myself how I want to apply what other people have shown me. I've been to various teachers who've helped me enormously and been able to point out what I needed to work on or what I’d misunderstood or where I was causing problems for myself with bad techniques. I've played live in lots of situations too and that’s an important education, everything from little acoustic folk groups to massive pit orchestras. Performing is wonderful fun and can teach you so much if you’re prepared to put yourself in unfamiliar situations.
[Laurie Monk] Did you make use of guitar tuition tapes/DVD's or videos as the trend and easy access to these must surely make the level of technical playing ability more easy to achieve?
[Adam Moore] A few of them, yes. I had John Petrucci’s one and also the Allan Holdsworth one. I got most of my technique from watching other players live or on live footage and just trying to mimic them. Things like the footage of Steve Vai at Expo ’92 in Seville were so instructive, also little snippets of Joe Satriani on The Satch Tapes and such like. I just tried to make my hands look like theirs. They had a kind of fluidity to them that I wanted. I remember a little bit of footage of Vivian Campbell playing with Def Leppard and just the motion of his hands suggested a kind of ease that I wanted to feel. Later on I tried to do the same thing with Robert Fripp’s technique. It was all just ease, lightness and freedom. It’s only in the last year or so I've seen my own playing on video and gotten to see my fingers from the other side as it were. I quite like it. I set a lot of store by what people’s hands look like, even non-musicians, its daft really.
Adam Moore - The Colourless Apple
[Laurie Monk] I understand that you've been teaching guitar since the beginning too. What areas do you tend to focus on and is there any thing you recommend for getting people out of a rut?
[Adam Moore] Yes, I've taught in one form or another since I was fourteen; I've always been drawn to it. Ideally, I want people to enjoy playing guitar and reach whatever goals they have. I show them as many theoretical ideas as possible in the context of music they actually like and encourage people to be as creative as possible. When I give guitar lessons now, they tend to be for more advanced players who feel like they’re stuck in some way. Usually I find that to get out of a rut people have to engineer opportunities to play in ways they can’t at present. If you’re playing in fairly straightforward rock bands and you know your major, minor and pentatonic scales then you've pretty much got it covered, but you’re not necessarily in a position to apply many ideas beyond that. So I suggest that students need to write or find material that will give them the chance to explore some new ideas. For example, I find that harmonising Melodic Minor is a useful next step- working out what scales and chords it gives you. However, if you’re playing Mustang Sally or Sweet Home Alabama in your covers band you’ll never get a chance to use it, so you need to write something that at least uses a Min/Maj tonic chord and so forth…
[Laurie Monk] Laughs... I understand you attended Robert Fripp’s Guitar Craft programme in the USA, UK and Spain. How did that come about and what sort of things did you learn there?
[Adam Moore] When I was about seventeen I read Robert Fripp's forward to The Guitar Handbook. It was really short but everything he said about the guitar and music was revolutionary to me at the time. That got me into King Crimson, which lead me to a Discipline Global Mobile sampler CD called Sometimes God Hides (get it, its wonderful!) which lead me to The League of Crafty Guitarists, which lead me to Guitar Craft itself. I attended Guitar Craft seminars off and on between 2000 and 2007, in the States, Spain and the UK. The Level One course I attended in New Jersey terrified me, it was so intense for a little English boy. I took me four years to get my head around the experience before I could go back. Guitar Craft focused, in part, on how you go about being available to the creative impulse. This means knowing how to conduct yourself such that when music presents itself you can respond with as much craft, or technique, as possible and with as little ego and preconception as possible. The actual playing was pretty serious; all the guitars were tuned to New Standard Tuning (CGDAEG), which has some great possibilities and means you can’t play anything you’ve played before. Everything was played with super-precise alternate picking and with great big triangular picks and just about all the music was in funny times. It's a very unique and difficult experience to describe, but Guitar Craft is completed now, it ceased to exist on 25th March this year, so very few people will ever know what it was like. I'm glad I was around to be even a small part of it.
Its Bbm, Eb Sus2, Dd Sus2 and Eb7. I don't quite pick all of it and use a few pull-offs on the high E string.
Adam Moore - Chocopocalpse Now Arpeggio
[Adam Moore] Yeah, YouTube has definitely helped me in the last year or so. Shred guitar playing just comes across great on film. I've got quite a few fans who know me purely though those little bits of video, probably same as a lot of guys.
When I record videos I record the guitar into Cubase 4 via a Pod and film it at the same time on a cheap little USB flip camera. I then put the video footage onto a video track in Cubase, sync it up by sight, and mix the camera audio in to make it sound more 'live'. So the sound is actually my normal guitar sound with added 'poor' camera audio.
[Laurie Monk] Ah clever... I'd not thought of that... adding room ambiance.
[Adam Moore] I find that if the video has no ambient sound it just feels rather odd, but if there are chair squeaks and pick noises mixed in as well it seems much better meshed and realistic. After that I just top and tail everything in Windows Movie Maker.
[Laurie Monk] I must admit I use Sony Vegas Studio, I knew that Marshall Harrison and Rob Chappers used that and it has some cool output to youtube features... but it's not free. I did get some lessons from the YouTube guru Rob Chappers and as he's shown, it's a great way to get yourself noticed in a positive way.
[Adam Moore] YouTube can turn into a bit of a freak show though, and doesn't really encourage guitar players to focus on music that doesn't look that impressive on camera.
[Laurie Monk] Laughs... but it's great for people like me! Seriously, I always tell guys to focus on the tune and then overlaying that with great improvisation or spectacular chops... Check out Andy James as a fine example of how to do that right.
[Adam Moore] Yeah, Andy can play!
[Laurie Monk] Moving on, do you keep working on your sound or are you happy with where you are?
[Adam Moore] I've tried to find something that suits me and is recognisable as me. I've got a sound I like now which is a Washburn Tonewood Guitar through a Marshall combo. It’s not especially flexible, but it’s starting to sound like me. I like a sound without too much top end and with as little distortion as I can manage.
Adam Moore's Atonal Ramblings on a Dave Martone Track
[Laurie Monk] One of my favourite questions, a lot of people mention their influences, for example I think you've quoted players like Pink Floyd, Steve Vai, Robert Fripp, Mattias 'IA' Eklundh and Freak Kitchen and super guitarist Allan Holdsworth, but what I like to know is the actual music pieces that motivate you to play, can you list out your top tracks?
[Adam Moore] Ooo, good one! Some songs seem to transcend their creators and its funny what makes the great ones in my ears. Before I could play guitar I remember hearing Yellow Christian by It Bites and just thinking it was so beautiful, I had a similar thing with Every Angel by All About Eve, Fortress Around Your Heart by Sting, Uniform of Youth by Mr. Mister and a few others. They’re not massive guitar songs, even the It Bites one, but they had everything I needed. I think when I was about eight or nine I heard Owner of a Lonely Heart by Yes and there’s a bit just after the solo where it drops down to two clear guitars in unison and I was totally transfixed by it. That was a big moment. I wasn't bothered about the solo, just Trevor Rabin playing that little arpeggio figure.
Once I actually started playing I got into all the usual guitar players like Satriani, Van Halen and Vai. I love their rock playing but it was always the clean ones I wanted to play. I used to jam 316 and Cathedral by Eddie Van Halen round and round for ages, they’re just perfect. Also, Sisters and by Steve Vai and Circles by Joe Satriani. After that I discovered Pink Floyd and pretty much stopped playing shred guitar altogether. When people talk about David Gilmour they tend to head straight for Comfortably Numb or something like that, which is great, but there’s a couple of other stunners, like The Final Cut or the slide solo on High Hopes. After that, Beeswing by Richard Thompson, Frame by Frame by King Crimson, Little Bastard by IA, I could go on forever…Actually, one of the most special songs I've heard recently is Chad Wackerman's Hidden Places, I think its got Allan Holdsworth's best performance on it.
[Laurie Monk] Lots of interesting tracks and players there. Holdsworth is my number one player and you are right players like Gilmour just have that added extra ingredient, the soul of guitar. It's what sets apart a terrifying shredder from the musician, the musician captures something extra, a little slice of heaven.
[Adam Moore] Yes, some players are extraordinary to watch for a little while and have spotless light-speed technique, but its very difficult to love what they do. I try not to criticise too much, thought, as its all starts to sound like a case of sour grapes.
[Laurie Monk] As you are producing the material you have creative control. What does this mean for you, are you using home studio tools or do you prefer using professional studio equipment?
[Adam Moore] I use whatever I can get hold of! I have a few nice microphones and a little bit of outboard gear and record everything on my PC. I think my creative process is much more suited to working in my own space and in my own time. Increasingly, I like to let ideas incubate. I’ll come back to working tracks and change bits, add something, take something else out and so forth. It’s harder to do that working with commercial studios. A lot of the music I have under way at the moment is in the form of what I call ‘composer’s demos’. That means I’m not trying to make them sound good, just get the ideas in the right places. So there’ll be a track that has a bridge section wedged in where I haven’t even tried to make the guitars sound the same or smooth over any bad edits. Also, there’ll be guitar solos that were played over one set of chords but I've come back to it six months later and changed them all, so the solo melody is set to a totally different harmony.
You can’t really be that spontaneous if you have to keep driving over to some other studio and calling up the engineer to oversee stuff. Also, it’s free! When it comes to recording material for release then I use professional studios more and more for drums. I just don’t have the resources to do justice to drums in my back room. Purple Circles and Empress in the Beginning from my new album Regent have studio drum recordings over which I overdubbed the other parts. In fact, by the time I was done, some of the parts I recorded were done two years after the drums. There’s a track called Inca on my previous album where a couple of the guitar parts are eight years older that the rest of the recordings. I like that though, I can remember where I was when I recorded those first bits and sort of track it across the years until it got finished somewhere else and in a very different phase of my life. You lose some of the ‘live’ qualities associated with a group of players working live in the studio, but that’s never been what I was looking for with my solo work.
[Laurie Monk] How do you decide when the track is finished, are there any criteria that you use... the danger is you go on forever, refining, rewriting...
[Adam Moore] I'm usually listening for a sense of balance, making sure nothing is there too much, repeated too often or too little, that sort of thing. I get more concerned with structure than anything else. I tend not to get that bothered by mistakes or odd sounding bits in solos, so I only ever do a couple of takes and pick the best one. My natural tendency is to improvise, musically and in life generally, and that doesn't really lend itself to endlessly trying to perfect things. Recorded versions are just ideal-types anyway, I couldn't and wouldn't play a recorded solo the same live. Also, when I'm working at home, eventually I'll want to move on to something else...so I do.
[Laurie Monk] In your compositions are you the sort of guy who is looking to add something new all the time, bigger kicks, fast playing, scarier licks?
[Adam Moore] A couple of times I've added something to a track just because I thought it might scare a few shredders. When I push towards an extreme its usually to try and make something natural and musical out of something really strange or unnatural. I wouldn't say I want to go faster or get heavier or whatever, but if I can make someone love a tune in 13/16 or move someone with a solo harmonised in minor seconds then that gets me going. So I suspect you'll eventually see a trend for really stupidly complicated ideas made palatable. I'm current working on a track that has a four bar loop in 15/16, then 21/16, then 15/16 and then 23/16. If I can make that feel normal then that satisfies my notion of 'extreme'.
[Laurie Monk] Laughs... now that's a nice sequence of odd time signatures! From a guitar point of you are you the finished article or are you still on the trail of gathering new techniques and new ideas?
[Adam Moore] I know so little and every time I learn something it just shows me how much more there is beyond it. One lifetime really isn't enough. When I was much younger a mate of mine who also played guitar asking if I had ‘stopped learning now’ and I remember being completely lost by the notion that learning music was a finite thing. I just assumed you keep going forever. Turns out I was right! As far as technique goes, every time I think I’m getting a handle on the full range of techniques someone comes along and blows all that out of the water. When I heard Freak Guitar, for example, I was so excited because I’d been playing for fifteen years or so, was playing really well and knew what I was doing, but had no idea at all how this guy was making most of the noises he did.
[Laurie Monk] Laughs... it also helps that in IA's case there is a sense of humour behind it all... it just feels like a natural extension to his persona.
The Internet is a double-edged sword. On the one hand there is the ability to get your name out and show people what you can do. But on the other the whole downloading thing has destroyed the market. What's your view on that?
[Adam Moore] We're now in a position where anyone who knows a bit about computers can avoid paying for music if that's what they want to do. All we can do, little independent artists and majors alike, is try to minimise how much people do it. There will always be a sizable element of society who are unable to empathise with the artist and unwilling to pay for recorded music. But this is the society we have created. Where art works are infinity reproducible so they will inevitably become devalued, its human nature to not care about abundant things. By contrast, this same tendency makes us value rare things all the more. A live performance is a rare thing and at the moment we seem to be in a phase where all the money is in live performance because people are willing to pay for it. The way I see it, there’s a great infrastructure in place on the Internet for people to learn about what you do and buy your music, but you still need to connect directly with your audience by playing to them before they’re likely to part with any cash.
[Laurie Monk] Are you the sort of player who is never happy with their work, never convinced that you have the perfect piece, or are you more pragmatic, knowing there are better songs to come?
[Adam Moore] Both really, but I’m quite philosophical about it. Of the music on the four albums I've released I could only claim to be truly happy with maybe half a dozen pieces. If you’re progressing all the time one of the ways you know it is when you start to find things you want to change in the music you've made in the past. I think you need to pin ideas to the earth by putting them into a song in order to move beyond them. Its one way of marking where you've got to. All I can say is that I know everything I've made is the best thing I could have made at the time. Besides, once you finish a song it sort of develops a life of its own and it’s the people who listen to it that decide its future.
Guitar Noize Antishred Adam Moore
[Laurie Monk] Finally can you tell us about your plans following the release of your new CD?
[Adam Moore] Well, Regent has just been released on my own label Evesound (www.evesound.com) and I've put together a band to play some of those pieces plus some of the highlights from my back catalogue. The band is fantastic, they can do anything I can think off, which as a composer is a great thing to have a your disposal. There's Paul Williams on bass, who I've played with for quite a few years now. He's great and has such a great sense of the piece as a whole and makes some really simple but gorgeous choices when we're improvising. Then there's Al Watts on guitar and keyboards. He has to cover all the second guitar parts, some of which are harder than my lead parts, and then I have Matt Dove on drums, whose just so goods its daft. That band can play songs in 13/8 or 11/16 like they're Ba Ba Black Sheep and Happy Birthday. We're going to be playing some pretty complex stuff but with as much attitude and style as we can muster without messing up! I'll be announcing some initial dates on Evesound by mid summer. We'll start in Norwich and work outwards from there. Also, I'd like to do some guitar clinics based around my original material. I haven't worked out how that's going to happen yet, but keep an eye out.
[Laurie Monk] Thanks very much for the time doing this interview it's been really great.
[Adam Moore] Thank very much, I'll look forward to more illuminating posts on Truth in Shredding.
What’s he made so far?
Regent (2010, Evesound Music)
Endless Clamour (2007, Evesound Music)
Misty Mornings and Market Towns (2006, Evesound Music)
Curious Liquid (2004, Evesound Music)
Endless Clamour (2007, Evesound Music)
Misty Mornings and Market Towns (2006, Evesound Music)
Curious Liquid (2004, Evesound Music)
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