All's a Chord 6: 1997

From: GFINK@ONCOMDIS.ON.CA

When you recorded "Mood for a Day", did you use fingernails the way a classical guitarist would?

"No. I used my fingertips and hardly any nail at all. That's because I always have my fingernails cut back quite a lot. Just a tiny bit of nail I noticed here and there on the flamenco strums, obviously with big downbeats the nail came into play a little bit."

From: Kirk Mathison

What guitars are you taking on tour with you? Are you bringing anything out for the first time?

"I should be using, or might be using--I'm trying to avoid using is another expression I could say--fourteen guitars on this tour. I'm aided by a very experienced and very nice guitar roadie called Shooz, and Shooz is a very good helper and so I can use quite a multiple of guitars provided he knows what's going on as well as I do, which he does at the moment. So we're using fourteen guitars, I think five of them are acoustic: 12-string, Spanish, two 6-strings--one for solo spot, one on the stand--and then the Portuguese guitar. I'm using the sitar guitar, the Fender steel, the 175, the Gibson stereo, Fender Stratocaster, Fender Telecaster, and I have a Les Paul on standby as a spare guitar, and also the Steinberger came out the other day, but that's maybe for later addition. So we've got a lot of things happening in the guitar department so it's quite busy.

"Any for the first time…the Scharpach's never been out on tour with Yes I don't think--that's the other six string that I play. But other than that most are guitars that are well tried and tested by me, and I like all the guitars I'm using at the present time."

From: Nick Zales

Do you think Yes will ever tour "in the round" again? I thought those tours were very dynamic by having the band spinning around all the time. What was is like for you? Which type of stage do you prefer when playing with Yes?

"I'd love to tour in the round again, that would be most exciting. Yes has got to build the arena situation a little bit more and maybe that would be our logical solution assuming we achieve that, and that is that we would be best suited to go back to a round stage and work on that because it's so individual, so unique, and allowed everybody's personalities to flower a bit more, and certainly it was more like theatre than a normal stage which I liked also because everything was more animated because people were closer. I hope Yes will tour [with it], I liked it immensely. I would prefer to play on that anytime. A couple of things that it was like for me was that I liked going round--sometimes in the early days the first one we had jolted and that's very difficult for a guitarist because you're standing there with a sense of balance and suddenly you get jolted round, so that was rather disappointing in the early days. But I learned to swing with the punches as they say. And my steel used to wobble and my guitars used to fall over [laughs]. But the things I liked about it was that it was a real open space, there was no hiding and no escaping, the fact that you were there, so it was true performance because every time we walked on there and until we walked off you had to be in a performance mode. So long live the round stage."

From: Tom Gaudet

Steve, I always wondered how you went to vegetarianism and meditation. I guess it was in the TALES period... Recently I read a book called "Voluntary Simplicity" by Duane Elgin and it's about trying to find new ways of living in connection with the environment. In a sense I think you were one the first explorator with Yes to experiment in that way.

I would like to know how it began and now 25 years later what do you think about this period of your life, do you still live that way?

"It started in about 1972 when Eddie Offord was coproducing FRAGILE, and he was getting into this health kick and I liked it too. I was quite interested in being a vegetarian, not too pushy, but then I decided to become a vegetarian--that isn't really a story I can go into exactly why, it has to do with a chicken and a town called New York [laughs]. About then I stopped eating meat and we were sort of whole food eaters in the family. Then we found macrobiotics which was Japanese, and 25 years on I think it was a very wise move and I'm very pleased I did it. I think it's helped me to think more meditatively about the body and mind. Regular meditation is a good idea and can have benefits that are very subtle…it starts a sort of instant thing that you sense as an experience but then as you practice meditation it becomes more of a part of your life as opposed to a particular event that you think you're going to have. So good food and good thoughts go together. Like mood, and food, they go together because they create one another."

From:  Eddie Lee

How's the CD-ROM project coming along? I can hardly wait for it! It will be just like having you as a private tutor teaching me how to play the guitar. I picked up the guitar several years ago all because of you!

"We've done a particularly stylized musical approach where I do performances, three angle camera show finger movements, they're looking at the conversation that I had with them, so we've done quite a lot of preparation on the video so far. It's not complete but it's being constructed. We're more probably looking at sometime early next year."

From: Ilker Yucel

To Steve Howe, I'm 16 years old and a fan of the classics. I have been playing for almost two years and I own a Fender strat.

For some time I have been attempting to get a certain sound out of my strat similar to the one you had in Tempus Fugit. Was that a combination of the keyboards and the guitar?

"Geoff [Downes] and I worked closely on that together, but having said that the guitar was my original Stratocaster, it was a '64 Stratocaster and it was through a couple of Fender amps, and it had plenty of different kinds of reverb going for it in as far as delays, as well as reverb, but the guitar is presented in many different ways: sometimes it's dry, and it's playing rhythm guitar, other times whizzing about, playing with most probably what I remember, and what I would do today, would be to use my Big Muff, it's got the kind of distortion you can control the tone of to such of a degree where it becomes kind of pleasantly nice and not just a screaming noise. I play with just a powerful Fender Twin sound and the Strat and the amps would up a lot. That's primarily what it is.

"There are one or two gimmicks on it, Alan White had a company called Survival Projects and they made a device of which they only made two--Brian May got one, I got one--it was a weird box where you push the pedals up and down and the guitar went 'weeEEEEE', jumped the octive. That's on 'Tempus Fugit' near the end, the whole track is played on a Strat really, there's really just one guitar playing on any one time. Geoff harmonizes with me on the very very fast riff that's great fun to play. It's all that kind of sound, lots of chords in it which is something that Geoff and I, the two of us together used to cook up a lot of chords, so there are a heck of a lot of chords in it. But the sound is that Strat with the Twin."

Also the sustained D at the end of the intro, how did you get that sound? Thank you and good luck to you in your musical future.

"The way I got that sustain was to have that sound--the Strat, the Twin, the distortion, the spins, the reverb, and then I played a harmonic, and then I pushed the tremolo arm up and down, and when I hit the harmonic it's kind of louder than all the other notes and it flies into the reverb and the delays and the distortion, so it's a real mess but it sounds great."

From: Paul Downing

Thanks for creating a forum where I and other fans can voice our compliments, opinions, and concepts.

One thing I have noticed about your style of playing is that you tend to keep away from traditional rock/blues cord structures in favor of classical, jazz and many other styles and influences. When creating a song or melody do you intentionally think to add creative elements in or is it something that comes natural to you?

"When I become part of the song, whether I'm playing somebody else's song or playing on one of my songs [it comes naturally], but if I'm writing say with Yes or something there will be a design sense where you're gonna have some sort of break because a guitar break can be quite an explosive idea and it gives a guitarist an idea to twist things up bit and that's something I like very much. So certainly I would always want to include that and I do the same thing in instrumentals that I write where I tend to have a lot of structure and I like to know the guitar can do this, and then I get tired of that, decide the hell with this, I want to have something where I can just have a vehicle, where the top line isn't structured. So there is a balance of quite a lot of structure but enough improvisation. Improvisation's always got to be given the structure to have an event on, and my advice is always to go for something at the front more than anywhere else because it's starting on a good footing, and that doesn't mean to say starting at 100%, it might be good always to start a solo from a perspective of being improvisation, from not having to capture the ear but sort of find the place to be heard in the music and that's a great way to start a solo."

Another highly melodious guitarist that I respect is Mike Keneally who played on the Yes tribute CD and has a few solo CDs in his own right. Have you listened to anything from him, if so what is your opinion? Thanks for the music!

"Part of tribute CD myself I did listen to all of it and I heard some good and some scary things [laughs] on there, but of course I heard Steve Morse and also what Patrick [Moraz] did with 'Soon'. But I don't remember that particular player, he wasn't singled out to me."

From: maestro@softcom.net

In your 'educated' eyes, in this world today, if you were just starting out as a guitarist, and if you felt that you had a 'special gift' to share, knowing what you know about the 'real music biz', what and how would you go about constructing a plan of success?

"I try to give myself five headings. The first one is make sure you can play and you've got a strong belief in your music that isn't blind faith but it's actually about you understanding a mixture of reality and unreality which music is. The next stage would be to learn how to communicate with other people through your music, because if you can't do that then you won't be able to work with other people. The third thing is to start playing in front of people so that can start to see and you learn quickly what works and what doesn't work, providing you're not fooling yourself. Then the fourth stage is really get aggressive, get in a band, forge your way through to get a group established until it feels like this is the beginning of a career. The fifth thing, the most dangerous step, is when you have really got something to offer that you can capitalize and benefit front that and not just in the musical, the health of being a musician, of playing music, but actually benefit from it by not either flitting away or allowing others to flit it away for you and find that you're left with nothing. So the fifth thing is the most important really because as you get older you want some kind of security and a musician can't have normal security but we can formulate some sense of structure around ourselves, and that costs money and means you don't give it to somebody else or don't just waste it but invest it in your own music, your instruments, in your time in your studio, and watch that part of it. If you get to stage five you're doing great bur remember you can blow it at any of those stages."

From: jc Harris

I would like to know the precise source of the repeating sound effect which immediately precedes the return of the 'South Side of the Sky' theme near the end of the piece. This is fades in as the piano theme/blowing wind fades out and last about 5-6 seconds. It sounds like sandpaper or some machine playing sixteenth notes.

"To be perfectly honest I can't remember. That was one of the most fabulous tracks Yes ever did in the studio and we could never play that on stage, never seemed to play that right. It was very much about sound, much more about the position of the things and of course we were getting more into stereo. 'South Side' was an epic song but it was based around suck a rocking driving thing. But that sound in those day it could have been a feedback that was happening, so it could be a delay thing…if I heard it I might have a clue."

Did Yes play it after FRAGILE?

"Very very rarely. I think we tried it occasionally in rehearsals and maybe once or twice on the stage, as it went down or came back but it was a more or less forgotten song and we kind of lost in a way the art of how to play that song. It wasn't an easy one to play oddly enough even though it sounds like we're just having a good time, funny it poses such problems because we never seemed to decide to play all the middle and all the vocals were difficult to sing, there was a whole positioning thing about it being very orchestrated and a rock strong the next minute, so it was a whirly sort of number."

From: Vic Johansen

Besides the obvious Yes compositions, one of my favorite recordings in recent years was your work with Paul Sutin on VOYAGERS. Will your next recording with Paul be in a similar vein or will you be exploring a newer direction?

"Already compiled we've got WHITE MOUNTAIN which is a few tracks from VOYAGES and a few tracks from SERAPHIM and six new tracks. It's Paul Sutin and I and we haven't yet done the right deal on it, so we're waiting to do that quite soon, maybe early next year. But we can't release everything at once!"

Also, will any of your upcoming recordings with Yes feature any work with the Coral Electric Sitar? I've always admired the way you've used the Coral and other varied instruments to provide flavor to your recordings.

"Luckily for you there's plenty of Coral sitar on KEYS TO ASCENSION Volume 2, the 45 minutes of studio tracks, there's plenty of sitar guitar on there, and also on OPEN YOUR EYES, the forthcoming Yes studio adventure, was also heavily used on the title track and on numerous other tracks. So, yeah, I still like playing this guitar, and I use it on stage on a stand that comes out of my mic stand. They're great guitars."