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Johnny winter les paul gold top5/16/2023 ![]() ![]() Sometimes I play slide in regular tuning, but not too often." ![]() On his different slide tunings: "Open A and open E. I love it! I don't even have any backup slides." And then I played it for a little while longer and wore that off, and now it's kind of silver. Then I just played and wore that off, and it became kind of shiny black. When I got it, it was dull, gray and real rough. (I went) to a plumbing supply place, got a 12-foot long piece of conduit pipe, cut it into pieces and rounded out one side. I was using test tubes and playing with the back of my wristwatch and everything imaginable. But on my blues stuff, I'm still using my finger some, mostly the first and second finger with the thumb." When I started out with the Chet Atkins' stuff I was using those metal fingerpicks, and they just got in the way, so I quit using them. On his right hand technique: "I don't really think about it. I still got about fifty left, but I'm going to have to quit playing the guitar when I run out, unless I can talk Gibson into making me some more." I bought a hundred of them a couple of years ago because I had so much trouble finding them, and a few months after that, Gibson quit making them. Really, a flat pick would have been a lot better, but I've just been doing it so long, it'd just be too hard to switch. On his use of a thumbpick: "Since I started out playing Chet Atkins' style, I used a thumbpick. We play so much on tour, that usually when I get off the road I don't want to see my guitar for a while anyway." ![]() But pretty much it's just practicing for a reason. It's hard making myself practice 'cause there's not much that I'm interested in learning. Of course, when I start back, it definitely takes a week or so to get back in shape. (These days) I'll go a couple of weeks and never even touch my guitar. Then when I started playing in groups, I didn't practice unless we were having band practice. I guess I played at least six or eight hours a day from the time I started until I was fifteen. ![]() "Every second that I wasn't doing something else that I had to do, I was playing guitar. As to Edgar's jazz, it's fun to listen to but I wouldn't want to live there." He plays his John Coltrane and Dave Brubeck records for me and says, "Now isn't that great?" And then I'll say, "But what is that stuff you're playing for me, man? I don't feel it - I mean, there's feeling in it, but it just sounds like a bunch of notes. On his younger brother's different musical tastes: "Edgar was never into blues. One head and two bottoms, and one head and two bottoms of the Ampeg SVTs." We're using a stack of 100-watt Marshalls. On his amps and amp settings: "Everything on all the way, and all treble and no bass. When I have low action I can't get my finger under the string to push it as well. Just for pushing strings it's important for it to be high. I had it pretty high before I played slide, because I played hard. And so finally I went up on a break and asked him if I could. BB was playing and I wanted to show off, man, so bad. We were the only white people in a club of about 1500 people. On playing with BB King for the first time: "One night, when I was about 18, I went down there. I used to shut my door, and people would come by and say, "What is that music, man? You don't really like that stuff!" I didn't find one other friend that liked blues until I was about 23 or 24." And I said, "It don't have to be that way, though." Of course, they were right." "(My parents) thought that all musicians were either drunks, dope addicts, or sexual perverts of some kind. "I'd listen to those blues records like Bobby Bland and Otis Rush, and I wondered, how could they push those strings, how could they do this? I used a second for the third, a first for the second and an A tenor banjo string for the first. You can find some of everybody's licks in almost everybody's playing, but I tried to make it my own after I got the basic things down." There's nobody that really plays original. I just took what I heard and assimilated it, and I guess it would come out part mine and part everybody else's. "I would just learn how to play a record note-for-note. I would just ask these guys to show me whatever they thought I ought to know." "I never took lessons like to learn how to read music or where to put my fingers. This article is dedicated to Johnny Winter who passed away on Jat age 70. ![]()
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