“95 PER CENT OF TONE IS IN THE PLAYER”
How Eric Gales is taking one of electric guitar’s oldest art forms and reimagining it for a new generation
The blues has been appropriated by every style of popular music but maybe it’s time for pop culture to repay the favour. Maybe it’s time for the blues to consume those styles and put them in a different context. If so, Eric Gales is the man to do it. Born in Memphis, Tennessee, he is a player of catholic tastes and an uncanny ear for incorporating alien styles back into the realm of electric blues. With each passing release, it’s like he is redesigning the future of the art form, augmenting it with licks and phrases gleaned from funk, jazz, rock, Eric Johnson, Andrés Segovia – from whomever catches his attention.
Gales’ new studio LP, Crown
- produced by blues-rock’s premier production duo Joe Bonamassa and Josh Smith - is an eclectic piece of work that torpedos the received wisdom that blues exists only inside a I-IV-V progression. It’s iconoclastic. There’s a hip-hop sensibility to how Gales deploys his styles, like he has a channel switcher. This is the record you play to those who say the blues is an archeological musical endeavour, that the best music has already been made. But what goes into a style like this?
Raw Ingredients
If mastering Eric Gales’ flamboyant playing style is a task akin to scaling Everest in a pair of Dunlop Green Flash, it is some consolation knowing that amassing a rig to give you a Raw Dawg tone is eminently more achievable. Gales’ sound on record is all spanky Strat-style cleans, meticulous, detailed, with a raunchy, juicy overdrive when he engages blues-rock mode and takes aim for the centre of the sun. Crown was recorded with his signature Magneto RD-3 S-style electric going into a tried and trusted setup.
“I used my signature amps, the DV Mark Eric Gales Raw Dawg model, 250-watts,” he says. “[A Dunlop] Cry Baby, distortion, Xotic boost/drive, MXR Raw Dawg boost, Tech21 [Boost D.L.A. Analog Delay Emulator] delay, and that’s it. It’s been pretty much the same for the past few years.”
All of this is readily available. Okay, the Magneto is niche, but any Stratstyle guitar will do. The DV Raw Dawg head retails for £399, the stack for £859, but pick any Us-voiced amp with sweet cleans, plenty headroom and a nice reverb and you’re good to go. Like B.B. King before him, Gales has gravitated to solid-state amps in recent times. Certainly, cheaper than the Tone Kings he used to run, and also better for any of us looking to get a good tone at home without having to crank a tube amp and send the cat into hiding.
Once you’ve found a bouncy elastic clean, add some boost or drive to taste. Again, nothing on Gales’ pedalboard is too niche, and his signature MXR
FASTANDLOOSE
“Everything is spontaneous,” Gales says. “Nothing is rehearsed...”
overdrive is medium-hot on the gain scale with a pronounced midrange.
“I use my overdrive as a boost, and just to give me a little bit more edge,” says Gales. “That’s it. Tone is important. It goes with all of it. But I believe that ninety-five per cent of tone is in the player, so there are things that are out there that can help enhance, and there are some things out there that can take away. It’s about finding that happy medium.”
The upside down
All that talk of gear is one thing, but we can’t let it pass without mention of something more fundamental to how Gales approaches the guitar; that is, he is a left-handed player who plays a right-handed guitar flipped over. Wait, what’s the big deal, you ask, but bear in mind, Gales doesn’t restring it for its alternate dexterity. His high E is where we’d normally find our low E. That won’t necessarily affect his note choice but it is sure to factor in how he is connecting with those notes.
You are what you eat
There’s no great secret to Gales’ polyglot guitar style, but there is a little mystery. When asked, he tries to put his finger on it. In the past he has described himself as a guitar player who just happens to be good at the blues, and that seems an accurate description. But what is key is how his understanding of
different musical styles is brought to bear on his songwriting. Gales will listen to anything, and when inspiration hits him, he’ll go home and learn that style until it is part of his vocabulary.
“It doesn’t matter what style of music it is,” he says. “If I am inspired, I’ll go home and start working on whatever it was, and then, later on, it’ll manifest itself in a show or something like that. It’s a combination of everything that I like, and that is definitely going to come out in everything that I do. The more you learn, the more you can expand.”
As a result, you’ll put on a track like
I Want My Crown and he’ll be working a funk guitar part, while Death Of Me has a classical interlude that sounds like it could have come from a Danny Elfman film score. “Due to my knowledge that I have gained through the years of many different styles, I am able to tap into any given style at any given time,” says Gales. “It all just depends on what kind of feel that I have got going on in that day.”
taking blues beyond the box
Gales might be a maverick but there is no blues-rock player on the planet who doesn’t put the minor pentatonic scale to work. The question is how you do it without it sounding stale and predictable. Gales’ approach might be instinctive but there is a method to it. He will break up predictable note patterns, and play fast groups of five and alternate them with groups of four. This keeps it unpredictable, but it also gives his flashier lead guitar breaks a vocal quality, with those note groupings assuming a similar rhythm and meter to a soul vocal line.
Besides splitting up his phrasing into different patterns, Gales will alternately run up and down the same scale shape, building tension and occasionally throwing in a passing note before resolving it in a gigantic bend. Those bends can be hard to execute but he tunes down half-a-step and that can make your guitar a little slinkier. “There’s a little bit more wiggle,” says Gales. “And it’s easier on my voice.”
The devil is in the detail
There’s no style of guitar that is more dependent on a player’s stylistic fingerprint than the blues. Often it’s not what you play, it is how you play it. As with his note groupings, Gales will take familiar elements of the blues – minor pentatonics, blues scales – but make them his own with a trick back full of bends, vibrato and ingenious slides that not only shift the pitch but also the rhythm of the lick.
“You just have to find yourself, man, and that’s a search that’s individual to your own DNA,” says Gales. “There is an element of the blues that I think is going to be incorporated with everything that I do, and that’s just who I am. What I think makes me who I am is all the different influences that I throw in there on top of it. That’s it, man. It’s each individual finding their own particular DNA. No one can copy anyone else’s DNA. Once you submit yourself, you are on the way.”
Play on the edge
If you have watched Gales’ recent solo when jamming When My Train Comes In with Gary Clark Jr. onstage, you’ll know what we mean by playing on the edge. And you’ll know what Gales means when he says those different styles and the way he expresses him is simply what comes to him in the moment. That solo is the Rosetta Stone to understanding Gales’ style. It’s like he is challenging the guitar to find a wrong note, to throw him off the track. But there’s a casual virtuosity to his playing; as though he recognises the danger but deep down trusts his chops.
When you position yourself like that, not knowing what’s coming next, then neither does the audience, and that can make a performance transcendent.
“I like that,” says Gales. “Everything is spontaneous, spur of the moment; soloing, songwriting, performing, showmanship... Nothing is rehearsed. I have found a comfortability with not knowing what’s going to happen until it happens. That’s the type of model that has become very comfortable for me, and this is not something that works for everybody but it works for me.
“You’ve got to be confident. It is not the time to be afraid or hesitant, so once you have acquired all the influences that you feel have formed who you are, then you can do whatever it is that your heart is telling you to do.”
“I AM ABLE TO TAP INTO ANY GIVEN STYLE AT ANY GIVEN TIME”