“The further I’m away from it, the more intense it is when I get with it”: Why Eric Gales rarely touches a guitar offstage
For most guitarists, the idea of not touching their instrument for weeks – let alone months – would sound like a nightmare. For Eric Gales though, it’s exactly the point.
In a recent conversation with Rick Beato, the blues-rock virtuoso explains why he almost never “engages” with a guitar unless he’s on tour or in the studio, and how stepping away actually makes his playing more powerful when it counts.
READ MORE: Eric Gales downplays those who praise him as the best guitarist in the business: “I turn on YouTube or Instagram and see some of the baddest players in the world!”
“The first and foremost thing that I do is completely get [my head] out of the way,” Gales explains. “The more that I don’t think about it, the more fluent and expressive it will be for me. There’s no pre-setup, no thought…”
That mindset also extends to how he prepares for shows – or, more accurately, how he doesn’t.
“A lot of artists, before the show, they’re backstage, finger warming up and this and that. I don’t do any of that,” he says. “If I’m not on tour or doing a session or anything like that, it’s very rare that I engage with a guitar at all. It could be weeks, months go by that I haven’t touched the guitar.”
On the rare occasions he does pick one up at home, it’s usually prompted by something he’s heard rather than any sense of routine. “I might have heard a commercial on TV that sparked my [interest],” he explains. “Or I heard somebody do a riff on social media.”
Those moments, he adds, aren’t about practice so much as self-challenge. “Can I mimic that?” says Gales. “Just to kind of challenge myself – to see if I still got the learning mechanism that I had when I was a kid. And only in those times it’d be when I would pick up a guitar or anything like that.”
In fact, Gales says he’s more likely to sit at a drum kit or keyboard than reach for a guitar in his spare time. While he admits some players may find that hard to believe, the distance, for him, is entirely intentional.
“The further I’m away from it, the more intense it is when I get with it,” says Gales, noting, however, that it’s not an approach he’d recommend to beginners.
For Gales, the source of his playing isn’t technical preparation at all, but something far deeper and more personal.
“I have a source that I tap into that I believe wholeheartedly that comes from a location far above my head,” he says. “I’m able to tap into [it] any time of the day, no matter what time zone, no matter what continent, no matter what place in time. It doesn’t matter.”
“It’s an intense, insanely deep amount of pain that I play from every single night,” Gales continues. “But I wouldn’t have it any other way, because if the result is there’s some person out there that has gained some sort of revelation or some sort of inspiration from something that I played through the pain that I’m playing it from – and it helped them out – then that was well worth the pain that I went through to make that happen.”
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
