Five Minutes Alone…
Ian Thornley
I got my first real six string…
“I was an acoustic, I think it was a Fender. I got it for my 16th birthday or something like that. And it sat in my closet for a year.
I thought, ‘This really hurts my fingertips… I’m not interested.’ I was a piano player before that. It took a friend of mine who knew how to play Stairway To Heaven and I was like, ‘What, really? It’s that easy?! You just put your finger there and there.’ But it wasn’t that easy because you can put your fingers there, but then they start to hurt…”
Just a castaway, an island lost at sea…
“If I was on a desert island with electricity and I could only take one guitar, one amp and one pedal… I’d take a Suhr Hedgehog for sure, maybe a delay pedal… a TC Electronic Flashback also has a looper so then I wouldn’t be so lonely. I could play with myself! As far as a guitar goes, I would probably just take a Suhr Classic, my Fiesta Red one because it has a humbucker in the neck that splits. And it’s got a huge neck. It’s my favourite.”
This is where my heart is…
“[Joining Velvet Revolver] just wouldn’t have been right, because I wasn’t about to do it without a guitar. And I honestly think that’s what they were looking for. It’s just not me and I think Slash knew that. The guys were great and it was still a fun experience… I just wouldn’t be comfortable standing on stage without a guitar. There wasn’t anything weird, it wasn’t like ‘oil and water’, it wasn’t one of those. It was really that they would want a front guy who can run around and whip up the crowd and do that whole thing – more of a Mick, they don’t need another Keith.”
More than a feeling…
“I don’t know how much time I spent on my vibrato but I know I jumped on that early. When I started playing electric guitar that’s one of the things my ears tuned into; all these guys have different vibratos. Knopfler has this fast one, but it’s till very sweet, it’s not like a nervous one and he also does vibrato with his chords. Stevie Ray had one that’s wider but just so thick and a little slow, very soulful. And when you apply the vibrato at the top of the note the whole way through, or at the end of the note… all those things. The quicker you can get dialled into that the better. I remember when I was at Berklee, all the jazz guys would laugh at me, ‘You can always tell these rock guitar players because they always put the vibrato in’. Yep, and I will never stop!”
Somebody check my brain…
“There’s been a lot of strange gigs, but the release party for Secrets was strange by design. We did it in a place called the Live Lab, which is at McMaster University just outside of Toronto. They have a killer neuroscience department there and we had the audience wired up to heart monitors and little motion capture hats in this Live Lab that has something like 78 speakers in it. It has little microphones hanging from the ceiling so we could amplify the sound in the room, not just what was onstage. And then trying to measure people’s temperatures too through a device on their finger. I went in for an EEG and an MRI so it would measure my brain while I was listening to a song or while I was playing a song. And all of this data gets recorded and compared. So that was a weird one, and I felt kind of bad for the audience but at least they weren’t wearing hospital gowns.”
“We had the audience wired up to heart monitors and little motion capture hats”