For over forty years, Phish’s Trey Anastasio has been on a constant quest to push the boundaries of guitar playing just a little further with every record and project he’s involved in – and that, according to Anastasio, sometimes means straying away from the instrument we all know and love when crafting his guitar parts.
“The reason all guitar music sounds the same is because people just put their hands in the same position,” he tells Cory Wong on the Wong Notes podcast. “On a piano, you write melodies and chords. On a guitar, it's built so weird with that one string in the wrong position, and so everybody plays the same crap all the time.
As he succinctly describes it, “It's all the square, the box, the blah, blah, blah.” His solution, which is allegedly on full display in his upcoming material, is writing “all this guitar music on the piano, which is what I used to do in the old days.
“I used to write everything, a lot of stuff, on the piano, and then I'd learn it on the guitar, and then I recorded it. And once it was all recorded, it sounds really melodic and very, very unique – unlike any guitar music I've really heard before.”
Speaking about how his early inspirations shaped his thought process and approach to composition, Anastasio waxes lyrical about how he “loved Brian May. I was just obsessed with Queen. So, Queen, Zeppelin, Fripp, Broadway, classical music, Ravel, and all that kind of added into this.
“I wrote a lot of this stuff on the piano… these chords and these melodies... Brian May and Fripp, that was the [guitar] tone I was going for. I wanted a mid-rangy, sustaining [tone] that sounded like a voice.”
Earlier this year, Anastasio contributed to a stunning rendition of The Beatles' While My Guitar Gently Weeps in New York alongside Peter Frampton and one of the guitar world's fastest-rising stars.
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