My Guitar Hero

this video is sponsored by nebula Tim pierce the man really needs no introduction but with credits like his it would be a shame not to Tracy Chapman Joe Cocker meatloaf Rod Stewart Elton John Michael Jackson Brew spring scen Phil Collins Madonna Don Henley Santana Miley Cyrus and Lana Del re to name just a few originally from Albuquerque New Mexico Tim moved to LA at the age of 20 quickly picking up work as a touring IST with Rick Springfield before leaving life on the road in favor of session work not only has Tim been one of the music industry's essential session players ever since he's absolutely crushing the YouTube game sharing his wisdom and technique for players all over the world Tim very kindly invited me to his house in LA to talk about his forthcoming performance at the Grammys we talk about preparing for an 80 song set list dealing with pressure how I should prep for my forthcoming tour him playing with Bob Dylan his pedal board setups his guitars the LA super Strat and much more I found this conversation fascinating and I think you will too I really felt like it would be a crime to cut any of it out so I've included chapters for ease of reference I hope you enjoy this is the world's most versatile guitarist Tim Pier I I do riffs all the time [Music] it's so cool to hear you play in person [Music] thanks there we go I've got it looking pretty good well talk me through everything and and tell me how you're preparing for the Grammys so I first did this gig a number of years ago and I shouldn't be doing it because I don't really read well enough to do it but the musical director is a friend of mine and he has always allowed me the option of getting the stuff in advance and learning it but like any entertainment industry Endeavor everything comes at the last minute so I actually gave it up a couple of years ago and gave it to a friend of mine who's an amazing reader but I tried to give it up this year but I think chj for some reason he wanted me back and he said okay what's it going to take for you to do this and I said okay because it's 80 songs maybe even 90 ultimately but because it's 80 songs I said okay give me 40 songs four weeks in advance 20 songs two weeks in advance and the other 20 a week in advance he's done better than that he's given me most of the songs uh two weeks in advance so I did get 40 songs a month in advance and now I've gotten 20 more songs so I've gotten most of them and it's made it a breeze because I have to memorize then I do use the charts as kind of maps but the guys that I work with on this all the other guys they pretty much sight read it it's just a skill I never you know I never learned so no judgment either way but but I'm happy to be doing it having to have the stuff in advance but it's a lot of learning and the charts are beautiful and what happens is we do a play on When anybody wins an award they come up and we play a song in the style of the category of the music so it might be something from South America it might be something for Metallica it might be something country it might be something from Africa these are all categories that are all over the world because these are the working class Grammys in the prime time show they only do like eight or 10 Awards our show is in the afternoon and they give away all the awards to the people in all of the smaller categories country producer of the Year Americana record of the Year Spoken Word album you know uh World music you know it's countless categories best engineering on any record you know so it's all this really important stuff and these actually in some ways are more important than the big ones because these change people's careers if you win a Grammy then you can take it forever and use it to get a better fee at a gig or whatever you know what I'm talking about so anyway that's the thing so these are the charts and we get them in advance and then when we get to the gig they'll be a book so I just scroll down it's print song There's a jazz song Robert Palmer song Hendrick a Latin song Amigo uh calonia that's a BB King song carousel by Mr bu bungle that's a really obscure song it's really hard to play uh oddly Crazy Train by Aussie uh Osborne uh it's just it's every style there possibly could be jamming uh by Bob Marley let's look at that some really fun stuff and it's great the the great thing is that when somebody has to walk a long way you get to really play the song for a long time if they're right next to the stage and they come right up then you get cut off really quickly so it's a Showbiz gig I'll say one last thing about it um get up on I think that's James Brown yeah so it's really fun stuff and what I'll do is I'll memorize it and then when I see the chart I go oh I remember how that sounds now one thing that that chch is brilliant about there's a DJ sitting there and before we play the song he runs the first two bars of every song in our headphones so you're if you're trying to guess what does that really feel like lrange by easy top and they play it and the drummer and everybody knows in your in ears oh that's the feel and then you look at the chart you remember what you played and it's rock solid brilliant brilliant so yeah so what I do is I put the mp3s over here and I play the MP3 I look at the chart and I just go through and memorize and memorize now some of the things are more demanding than others like I have to play the beginning of Sweet Child of Mine by uh uh guns and& roses [Music] okay so when I practice this once I start it I never stop it because I'm not going to have the option of playing this in front of the auditorium by myself at the beginning of the song and stopping it so when I practice it I don't allow myself to stop even if I make a mistake because I know that's the discipline I need when I get there and I try and turn my mind off so that's when you're exposed and you're playing something where every note has to be right [Music] oh but see that's cold when we're on the gig I'll have time while the previous person is accepting the award I'll look at the chart I'll go through it I'll turn my mind off I'll breathe deep and then when they call it out and I have to play this by myself with a high hat for front of the audience I'll be good wow can I describe you as the most versatile guitarist in the world because 80 songs I mean are there any other gigs like this this is it no you're the most versatile guitarist in the world the most versatile job probably out there with the most amount of pressure it yeah it's you you rise to it and you you breathe deep and you prepare basically and like something like that you you make it second nature and then you have to realize if there is a note that's out of place keep going it's going to be okay it's fine yeah you have to let it go otherwise it will then Ricochet won't it and then Ru the rest of your performance I mean this is amazing I have I have the the um I have a tour in September I haven't toured in a while I definitely haven't done a headline tour of this it's not huge tour by any means but it is going to require between 20 two or 25 songs a night I haven't sort of whittel down the set list acoustic set to begin with then full band um sort of run through of the album and everything give me advice on how to prepare for that because that's all I'm focused on this year like although I want to write other songs I know what that show needs to be and it's it's my sort of mini version of this it's it's already sort of Weighing on my mind being like you should have that set in stone you should have it repeated a hundred times full show before you even get to band rehearsals by myself because I can you know play Sing same time in front of a mirror every day is that useful or is there any other sort of advice that's exactly how I would do it the other thing comes down to stamina because a lot of us when we it's it comes down to Seasons if you're in a season where you're writing creating you don't necessarily have the stamina to be a live performer I'll give you an example during the pandemic Don W called me up and he said hey you want to go over to Bob Dillan and run some songs with them and I went that's yeah it's scary but yeah okay so I was hired in that particular situation to be early Bob Dylan Strummer so don wanted me to be Bob Dylan from the 60s and just strum and so what I did I thought okay I don't this is co I don't know if I have the stamina to play acoustic guitar start to finish back toback song after song I made sure that I could play all the songs we had chosen without stopping and I made sure that I had the stamina to do like 12 or 13 of them in a row because that's what we're going to do we're going to run these really really fast and so I built up the stamina so I would start running things make sure you play from beginning to end I would film it and then I would do some family and friends concerts if you have 10 people there five people family and friends and and then you'll feel the nerves you'll feel the pacing if you tell a joke or an anecdote you'll feel how that lays film that then I think you'll be good so it's stamina family and friends repetition basically family and friends oh my God I hadn't I hadn't really thought of that because I will say it's a different position now that I can't go out and gig like I used to where I do the pub gigs although actually that was a different level of stamina that I used to have that I do not have anymore and yeah I kind of wanted to go back and do those 4our Pub sets to get the St back to then find an hour and a half set easy it' be easy in comparison um but that's amazing yeah just just use the word stamina and make sure that you can you can get through the body of work we ended up recording 30 songs with Bob Dylan over the course of six weeks and they were easy sessions in a way and very the hardest thing was he would give us a list of songs to work on and then we'd get there and it would be six different songs and we had prepared and literally he would be playing the new song as we're learning it and charting it off our iPhones from the record that's on Spotify and we're going like this he's already playing it and it's like you know like he's famous for not having any any patience so it was it was harrowing in that regard but uh it was it was easy in the in that the sessions were short and the songs were you know it was all of his like really really famous songs we were just doing different ways so but I I really worked on the stamina of strumming the acoustic guitar because it's not my forte Don always Don was always hired me for that because he liked the way it felt you know it's like having a second drummer there he likes Don always liked the way I went [Music] like it's a simple thing but it's trustworthy so that was my role but muscling an acoustic guitar and doing all the songs back to back I just made sure I had the stamina okay so I spent a big part of my life with a giant pedal board building station in my garage and I used to listen to this rock radio station and every night I would go and rebuild and redesign pedal boards because I realized when I had the pro build the pedal board for me I wanted to change it the minute I got it back so I'd have to cut all the stuff and rewire stuff so at a certain point I started building them myself so I do that these days I mean a lot of people do this is built for the gig and there's a couple of things I really like about it uh uh so I just these are actually loops that activate the pedals and I can actually program it to do different scenes too so this going to be a scene with three different petals three different ones here three different ones here so I can go from like a very dry Rock sound to a very dreamy Ambient sound just with the flick of a button so I'll just walk through these really quickly this is the karma od10 it's a clone of the Nobles OD odr 1 that I use and a lot of Nashville guys use was lucky to have that pedal but this this is a modern version of it this is like a copy of the most tortion which is another famous Nashville pedal equalizer this pedal that rocket made for me 10 years ago they put the glasses on it I just took this out of storage it's actually sounds really good and it's a really good High Gain tone for leads then on Loop five I have it's kind of a you know jack of all trades line six HD Stomp and then uh six is the tremolo tremolo is one of my favorite basic things on Loop seven another one of these another one of these HD Stomps and The Lex stman which is a Leslie pedal and the thing about Leslie with the guitar I don't know if you experienced this but it's the emotion of going from slow to fast in the middle of a phrase I'm just going to demonstrate it for you really quickly so if you take your [Music] foot to me the whole ball game is if it's constantly speeding up and slowing down and if you watch a great Hammond player that's what they're doing it's they're constantly turning it on and off so it speeds up and slows down and I never leave it on fast for too long that's the narcotic thing when it it it slows down and speeds up all the time so that has to be right up front so I can get my foot and and manipulate it but the best thing about this pedal board is these two EXP PR pedals they're hooked up to a delay in a Reverb so I can start out something dry and if I'm playing a phrase with my foot I can bring in the delay and then take it away same with the [Music] Reverb and then then if I want to do both I just put my foot in the [Music] middle it's so fun when you're playing a lead in [Music] particular just bring stuff in and out make it wet make it dry anywhere in between so that's what I really enjoy about this pedal board and then finally the greatest new tuner the canvas and I'm not endorsed by these guys or anything it's just I really love [Music] it and I can put it sideways and change the screen to where it works sideways and then I guess you can put your favorite photo on it too which I haven't done yet but yeah so I'm excited about this pedal board it's going to be great for the show the only other thing is I'm going to have to use a WWA for a couple of the songs which I hate doing but I'm going to add a Wawa to the side of it so some of the old school R&B requires W I do this pretty often I'll build a pedal board for a particular gig but it's the pedal board that that I end up using for the next year you know so I have I'm looking at the entire landscape so these new line six pedals are very easy very practical uh you don't need the manual that you don't have to menu dive and they can get all the phasers and they can get tremolos and DeLay So these two pedals alone can get pretty much everything that I can get from these so they're like uh you know hammers they're like you know allpurpose things so that's why they're there if I need a phaser for some old '70s song I can dial it up here if I need you know some Chorus for a police song I can dial it up here just really quickly easily so that takes care of all the you know Myriad of sounds that that might be identified with a genre from the 70s ' 80s or 90s and then the other stuff like a tremolo for me a tremolo is really really one of the most important things because they very few things that actually read to an audience in a situation it's a lot less than you might think tremolo Reverb delay those are sometimes the only things an audience hears if you have phaser or chorus on something they're not that that aware of it but tremolo toy is really important Reaver is important delay is important and then all the drive pedals so the way this works is the first four Loops are Drive pedals different levels of gain uh including really high [Applause] gain for leads right and then you know less gain gain here less gain here so different shadings of gain and then here on five I have my first jack of all trades and then here on six I have the tremolo which as I said and this is the Tom bukovac mod so it's momentary so I I can set it so I just turn it on and off with my foot just by pressing it down and lifting up and then these last two Loops are delay and Reverb and there's another line six pedal there so this is all the wetness so here's how it works Drive pedals then there's a volume pedal so I'm constantly hiding noise with the volume pedal and then all the ambient stuff all the stuff that spills over all the delay and Reverb happen after the volume pedal so to your question you get obsessed you have to dial back that Obsession you have to be practical because you only have so much real estate and you have ultimately you have to just use stuff that works and sometimes it's it's not the most glamorous stuff or the most esoteric stuff um so you your obsession hits reality and you constantly when you're building one of these things the obsession is hitting reality the whole time and you work something out that's practical and useful but maybe has a little bit of uh sophistication and a little bit of uh flare to it are you oh yeah you sticking to one guitar no okay so tell me about your guitar okay so for this gig I will bring two stratic casters and I'll bring this Heritage and I'll bring my new Taylor acoustic every year it's different you don't need a lot of things but I mean if you're going to do Stevie rayon which we do and we're going to do Hendrick which we do I have to use the neck pickup on a strat there's only one way so I'll bring two reliable strats one for all of that stuff and one as a backup in case I break a string then I'll bring this guitar because I love it Heritage made it for me and it's kind of a bespoke instrument that we spent a year on so I'll use this for you know any any Almond Brothers any you know anything that's you know that requires you know a less Paul style guitar and then the tailor it's this amazing 514 CE Builder Edition that is ergonomic it has the greatest pickup in the world and it plays like a dream it plays like an electric guitar and they just came out with this thing you know not not that long ago I'm wild about it and so that'll be the acoustic cuz I will have to plug in and strum acoustic on a couple of songs more than a couple actually and so that will be the four guitars I'll take to this gig will you be running the acoustic through this pedal board or we have a split you just yeah they've already asked there's there will be a line when I get to the stage there'll be a line coming from a direct box to plug into my acoustic that they'll do a line check on and it'll come into my in ears so yeah they'll that wired up will you have a separate you know like a tuner for that or yeah you it's on my list I have a list so I don't forget anything I want to get a couple of really really robust new clip on tuners for for the acoustic one and then a backup as opposed to Pedal yeah because I won't be going through the pedal board that acoustic guitar will be on a line hooked up ready to go and that line will be muted by the sound mixer so I'll sit there and I'll tune it up and then we'll go okay so to avoid you maybe being on mute when you're not meant to be or you know anything else going wrong you've giving me an idea it would be great to have a floor tuner with a mute on it that's maybe is what you use it would be great to have this tuner one of these canvas tuners or something like it where you click the button and it mutes it they need to send you another one you're right I actually bought it well they need to they need to reimburse you and then give you another but you just worked it out for me I'm going to get I actually have a couple of corgs I think where if I when I hit the button it goes on mute yeah you just you just worked it out for me that's because you do this for a living that's the best compliment I've ever said to no it's just just the panic because of having an electric rig um obviously yeah you don't want to run an acoustic through this unless you have like literally you know one of those fancy Splitters and then you run it through your tuna or you know whatever I can but usually I like to keep them separate yeah and they want it separate too they want the acoustic to be just the one sound I I know I know this the powers that be at the Grammys one sound what is the one sound for acoustic just died with their own Reverb on yeah exactly and maybe some compression maybe some noise reduction but yeah eqed the the sound mixer will will go oh I like that but it's not bright enough and it'll brighten it and that's it and then maybe a Noise Gate which they love too would a Noise Gate that is soft at the front in the back end so it doesn't ever cut cut off anything maybe not though but yeah it's just and then the pickup on that guitar is exquisite the the it sounds like a mik acoustic and then with the two strats that you're taking anything very special okay the Strat cachers I'll take will be super strats they'll be the LA Studio Strat that's you know that I think they're both going to have humbuckers in here so if I need to switch to a heavy metal tone it'll do a reasonable fact simile of that that but it it it's more about the neck pickup and anything Hendrick or SRV or funk you know if we do a John Mayor song or you know the Funkadelics or James Brown it might be better to have a strat than you know certainly this guitar but they will be um super strats in the sense they'll be the LA you know with the the uh compound radius neck very easy to play and maybe even noisess pickups one of them so they'll be like the studio kind of Strat from the80s that's been brought forward to now so yeah there'll be Boutique super strats both of them yeah when I say super Strat this is a pretty good example this is this is the 80s dream now I got this guitar in the '90s I've had it for that long and it's actually a bit of a collector's item at this point the James Tyler uh this is very close to what they call the Dan Huff Edition and it's got a mid boost in it so you can press this button and it'll fill out the mid-range if you're doing a screaming solo up here and yet you can play the the you know out of phase funk you can do the C Reon thing or you can go down here and do the this is all stuff we have to do you know one after the other so and then you can you can hit this let's see if the battery is [Music] good yeah it it makes a solo let me go to I think that's number four what this mid boost does is it makes the notes thicker when you're up high you can turn it down pins out a little bit turn it up it fills [Music] out it's it's really designed for single note soloing uh with high gain so it's pretty cool this is 80s Perfection with the the la super Strat can you give like a breakdown of exactly what that means okay so I moved to LA in 1979 and the super Strat was just beginning first time I saw it was at a robin Ford gig Robin Ford's rhythm guitar guitar player that night was Michael landow and you know he was already really famous I couldn't believe my luck to see Robin Ford with Mike landow in the background but Michael low was playing something I'd never seen before it was a strat where he had routed out the bridge pickup and put a hucker in not only that it had a Floyd Rose system on it and when we found out about the Floyd Rose I mean I I must have waited six months for mine because you could actually keep the guitar perfectly in tune and use the Floyd Rose so the first Super strats had a few defining features they had the humbucker you know put in you had to destroy some wood to get this this pickup in it had the Floyd Rose and then they put base uh Frets on it so the Frets were really wide and you could Bend strings so those are some of the things that define the super Strat in the80s and then you could do dive bombs like Eddie Van Halen if you had your Bridge pickup you could get the full heavy sound right back here you stay perfectly in tune and you could do You Know chords even I mean the the thing I like about a vibr arm a tremolo arm mostly is just massaging the chords a little bit well you could do that all day long with the Floyd Rose so it was the Floyd Rose the humburger at the bridge and the massive Frets on the neck perfect that's amazing I didn't know about the base Frets yeah that's insane yeah and they still do it to this day that you know they the Frets that we all use are based on that original thing where they would take Bas Frets and pop them in cuz then all of a sudden you're you're just wow I can really Bend for days and it's so easy to play and wow okay um you don't happen to have that kind of instrument in this room well that's what this is no I do with the Floyd Rose yeah yeah yeah I can find one so the jumbo fret these days is basically the descendant of putting bass Frets in a guitar these massive Frets that allow you to bend like crazy this has jumbo Frets this is a '90s version of the 8S guitar this is the guitar I used to use in the '90s all the time has the Floyd Rose this assembly has been traded out probably half a dozen times if not more just for different tone changes uh it's got the Floyd Rose so but to me the whole ball game is just taking a chord and some Ambience Maybe that's what I love about the Floyd because it stays in tune and then if you want to I mean we didn't used to be able to do that so when it happened it was like a whole new world in the 80s but this this was my first super Strat one last thing about this this was the era when these custom finishes were everywhere and I just was sick of them so I actually I had Tom make me this and I said no finish on the wood just seal it and I never looked back so I still I love this guitar how's it sound to it too beautiful with the guitar changes and the 80 songs obviously the set list isn't in your hands whereas as if you were up on the stage by yourself and it was your show you would probably like avoid too many guitar changes are you going to be changing guitar every single song no uh there will be one moment that'll be so impractical I might even have to change in the middle of a song and Dean Parks will be sitting there covering for me there's two guitar players so you're right when you say how do you know when to change well there's always a point when wow that couldn't be more inconvenient I have to go from a heavy metal sound to acoustic guitar and I have to be ready to play the acoustic guitar at the end of the song there'll be a moment like that for sure and what you'll do is you'll let the rest of the band play Dean Parks will be playing his beautiful part and you'll just kind of like ease into a change I'll change as little as possible but I will have to play acoustic guitar there'll be a couple of performances uh lafy is going to play and um Brandy Clark's going to play and those I think for me one's going to be kind of a jazzy tone I'll get that maybe out of a strat or my Heritage and then the lafy song uh I'll play acoustic on so yeah the set list will dictate you just have to plan ahead and be sneaky this video has been sponsored by nebula nebula is a creator-owned streaming service yes I co-own it with a number of amazing peers it's the home of smart thoughtful videos podcasts and exclusive content from your favorite creators like me Adam Neely Amy Niti Charles Cornell and polyic to name just a few and it's not just music either check out my second Channel proof of sweat for weekly videos about my personal fitness journey or my nebula original the freedom of failure whether you are into history documentaries gaming or productivity there's something perfect for you so subscribing to nebula is a great way of supporting your favorite creators it just allows us to make exclusive or extended videos that just wouldn't work on YouTube I upload my videos to nebula first for early birds so sign up for an annual 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Channel: Mary Spender

Views: 120,777

Keywords: mary spender, interview, guitar, tim pierce, guitar lesson, pedal board, iris, gimme shelter, pedalboard, runaway, prs, tonex, rig rundown, jimi hendrix, steely dan, jimmy page, andy timmons, tips, top tips, acoustic, taylor, taylor acoustic

Id: CJSVXhuEj6Y

Length: 31min 31sec (1891 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 23 2024