Thank you. Hello. Hello there, thank you very much.
I’m going to stop by telling you that I’m a musician and I travel the world playing concerts. I play that three hundred concerts a year that’s how I make a living. It’s also my calling in life. I’m one of the luckiest people on the planet. I get to make a living doing what I love, and people say “Are you in the music business?” I call it “the happiness business.” I play music and you get happy. That’s what matters to me.
So I was on a long flight in business class, I was hobnobbing at up in business class. And a gentleman beside me starts talking to me, and he says, “So what do you do for a living?”
And I said “I’m a guitar player.”
And he looked at me like I was in the wrong place you know, I should have been downstairs. And he said, “You make a living playing the guitar? Wow! What band do you play with?”
And I said “I don’t. I don’t play with the band, I play solo.”
And he said, “Oh, then you’re a singer.”
I said no. “No, I’m a guitar player.”
But then I started thinking about, you know, I do have a band and the band is me. And I think like a band and that’s what’s different about what I do. I think like a band when I play, and when I write, and when I perform. And that’s how I hear music. I hear it is if it is a band, and I write as if I’m writing for a band.
So I’d like you to meet my band just to get started and that is: my bass player, drummer, I’ve got a rhythm guys as well.
Think of the money I’m saving up here.
And then finally the melody going (playing a phrase from “Blue Moon”) on playing a bridge I think.
Thank you. That’s my one-man band. Thank you. And I wouldn’t be standing up here tonight in playing this way if it wasn’t for a great man by the name of Chet Atkins. And I was about seven years old when I heard him, I was on the road with my family. I’m one of six children and four of us played music, but we were driving along in the car. I tuned in the radio and I heard this song by this American guitar player by the name of Chet Atkins. And what he was doing is something I’m just going to quickly explain to you. With his thumb he was playing the left hand, on the piano would play, the accompaniment, and then with his fingers he was playing the melody and the harmonies. And this is what it sounds like — here is the accompaniment and then here is the melodies. Is that enough? No. I’ll play with it.
So that moment was a galvanizing moment in my life and I heard that sound and I knew he was playing everything at once, and everybody told me, “Oh don’t take any notice to that, it’s a recording trick, you can’t really do that.” But I do somehow I could hear it and I wanted to work it out. And I just kept added, added, and added and listening to Chet Atkins. And I eventually got it. And of course many years later I wrote him a fan letter and we became penpals.
And then by the time when I was in my early twenties I had learned so much of his material, and I taught myself to play in a way that was different from everybody else. And I knew it and I was enjoying it so much it was so much of a challenge and so creative in its own way, and when I eventually got to medium I played for him and he confirmed that I was doing everything right even though I had no training and I still haven’t had any training. I still don’t read or write music but I can write you a song, I just can’t write it down on paper.
So anyway, this style that I developed has helped me to keep my one-man show interesting and to try to come up with new ideas. So in my late teens I started listening to a lot of pop music and trying to come up with arrangements using these techniques — the technique of playing everything at once.
So some tunes by the Beatles make really interesting pieces, and they have become a big part of my repertoire and people love it where you get that: (playing “Day Tripper”) Something like this (playing “Lady Madonna”) So you get the idea, right? Thank you.
And another thing I started doing when I was young was banging on my guitar like a drummer. Because I am a drummer, boys played the drums and loved it. So when we were fortunate enough to have electronics where there’s a microphone inside the guitar, I started: experimenting by playing the guitar like a drum. And so I found these patterns on my fun way of making it sound really interesting. [hitting his guitar’s body like a drum]
Whoa, look at it. And then I started trying to use my imagination and try new things so I got myself a brush and I started doing this. And then I started doing this: with my brush, so I could get. Whoa! Thank you. Thank you very much. This stuff is all in the name of entertainment and making my one-man band interesting from my audience.
There’s another sound and another technique that I use on the guitar, that I first heard Chet Atkins doing. And then a little bit later on a great guitar player who died young, his name is Lenny Breau. And this technique is called cascading harmonics. And it’s not easy to do but it is a beautiful sound. And the reason it’s called cascading, this is kind of like a people describe it like waterfall. So like this. And I use this technique to make my arrangements interesting and create parts of my show that become very intimate with the crowd. And so and some songs like “Somewhere over the Rainbow” or the Beatles’ “Michelle”, where I used this technique. Thank you.
So I use those techniques to make a sound that I never heard anybody else doing, especially here in Australia. But when I started traveling overseas there I noticed that most people over there hadn’t heard it before, and it was a new sound for them. Now these are all things that I got from Chet Atkins. And one of the things that I think I learned the most from him would be the quality of songs that you choose to play. And the other thing was I quickly learned that if I wanted to stand out as a musician, I should play my own songs. So I started writing songs at a very young age, and I spent a lot of time learning the craft of songwriting. Well it’s really one of the parts of my life that I really love the most.
And I want to play you a little bit of a song that I wrote. I read a book called The Journals of Lewis and Clark. And Lewis and Clark were the explorers who discovered the American West and they were led by a young native girl. After I read this book, it challenged me to write a song to describe the American West and the great unknown and constant travel.
Let me play you a little bit of this song. If you want to close your eyes and imagine you’re at the American West that’s what you can do, that’s what songs do, they transport us and take us.
Yeah. Thank you.
Every now and again I come up with an arrangement that involves all quite a lot of my techniques all involved in one song and one of those songs is this song, Classical Gas. All right! Yeah. Thank you. All right.
Now I’m going to read a little bit, because my wife helped me put all this together. And she writes in such a wonderful way, that I decided that I wanted to read a little. So this is what she wrote for me to say to you. A lot of these things that I do could be seen a show pony tricks. But for me the real critics are my fans and my audience. When they laugh at my bad jokes and when they cry at my ballads, and when they share stories that involve my music, it touches my heart so deeply. And I know that I’m doing the right thing. My music has been played at weddings, at funerals, others have learned my songs and make their living playing like I do. My music has brought life to Alzheimer’s patients, willpower to cancer survivors and escape for grieving families, joy to people’s daily drive to work. I hear these stories and I know that music goes beyond what we see, hear and feel. There’s some innate sense that gets triggered by it and no matter how [turned if] you think you are. That’s why we tap a foot when we hear a groove like this. Yeah.
There’s another point that I wanted to make here. And it was one of the things that has enabled me to live the dream life, in other words, do what I really love and achieve my goals. Chet Atkins once told me that I am the most fearless player he’d ever met. And I think that being fearless is a huge part in breaking molds and raising self-belief. I have had many times in my life where people told me that my plans were rubbish, they were crazy that I would fail. But I ignore the critics and I keep working to make my show and my life better and better.
Music brings people together, and I love being a catalyst for it. So I play my shows, I meet my fans as often as I can, I answer their questions on my forum, I read their Facebook comments, I upload videos to YouTube for them to enjoy. I continue to tour around the world and take my one-man band with me. And just remember folks, that life is not a rehearsal. So you better get on with it.
