What I play with.
The gear list is short and unimpressive. The influences list is long and impossible to repay.
A steel-string acoustic. Bare fingers. Almost no pedals, almost no effects. What you hear is mostly the wood, the strings, and whatever I had left in me that night.
I record on a phone. I edit on a laptop. The room is usually quiet because everyone else is asleep. That's the part I want to keep — the smallness. If the recordings ever start sounding like a studio, I'll know I've taken a wrong turn.
"Fingerstyle is a kind of honesty — there's only you, and what your hands can actually do."
I keep coming back to Paul Gilbert, even though I almost never plug into anything electric. It's not about the speed. It's that he treats the guitar like it's fun. Like the whole instrument is a playground built for one person. That spirit shows up, very faintly, in even the most quiet acoustic piece I play. It's the secret ingredient I can't fully explain.
The people I quietly stole from.
No one plays alone. These are the players whose voices live somewhere in mine — some loud, some so faint I had to listen for them.
If any of these names lit something up for you — we'll get along just fine.