“It was extremely humbling. It made me want to get really good at it”: Polyphia's Tim Henson on the challenges he encountered while learning guitar after playing the violin for years

Before Tim Henson changed the progressive metal game with and stretched the very boundaries of guitar playing with his expansive playing style, he began his fledgling music journey playing violin.

“I had started when I was, like, three years old, and I picked up the guitar when I was 10,” Henson reveals in an interview with The Music Zoo. “And I just remember thinking, ‘Oh, that's [referring to the guitar] really similar to a violin. And because I've got seven years of violin, I could probably be pretty good at that.’”

However, as the Polyphia guitarist relates, that wasn't necessarily the case.

“It was extremely humbling, because I wasn't [good], at all, but it made me want to get really good at [guitar]. And because I already knew how to get good at something, it was just like, ‘Okay, well, let me just do the same thing that I did here, practice with consistency, and eventually I got better, until the point where you could call it good.’”

Tim Henson Guitar Clinic: Polyphia Song Playthroughs, Audience Q&A at The Music Zoo! - YouTube

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In the same interview, Henson briefly discussed the making of Polyphia's highly anticipated next record, teasing, “We used to joke about maybe the next record will be a country record [laughs].

“The last record we did felt very much like, ‘How diverse can we make this sound by touching all these different genres?’

“And what we're having a lot of fun with right now is picking one sound – and it's not really one that I can describe to you, because it's some new shit – but going really deep into the sound, rather than kind of a shallow spreading out of the thing. It's just deeper.”

In more Tim Henson news, the virtuoso recently discussed why learning everything by ear is the best thing aspiring guitarists can do.