Carlos Santana: “I like being squirted in the face by music because it makes me feel alive”
Aside from his other-worldly chops, Carlos Santana has a deeply spiritual connection to his guitar playing.
With an illustrious career now spanning 60 years, the Mexican-American guitarist has won 10 grammy awards and sold over 100 million albums worldwide, and he credits this success with making listeners feel what’s coming from his soul as a guitar player.
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He explains that to best convey emotion and soul, guitarists should practice improvisation.
“Anybody can practice scales up and down,” he explains in the new issue of Guitar World. “But there’s something about coming down a water slide. You don’t know how you’re going to land; it might be on your head or on your feet. That’s what happens when you deviate from the melody.”
In Santana’s view, a guitarist should seek to evoke the same emotions in a listener as a vocalist would.
“I don’t care who you are, whether you are Al Di Meola or not, I’d recommend this to any guitar player. If you spend even one day learning how to play and phrase like those lady soul singers, you will become a better musician. This is the truth. This is genuinely the most important part of the interview – right now.
“The only thing people will remember about your music is how you made them feel. They are not going to remember all the fast scales and ‘Look at what I can do!’ moments. But they will remember those three notes that made the hairs stand on the back of the neck and tears come out of their eyes, even if they don’t know why. That’s a whole other element, one I call spirit. Some people don’t know how to play with spirit, heart and soul.”
Santana explains that choosing the right notes when constructing a melody is “like putting your fingers in water and sprinkling someone’s face with water, or if you take a spoon to grapefruit and it squirts”.
“Those are the good notes,” he explains. “A lot of people don’t know how to squirt their best notes!”
“I learned this stuff from Buddy Guy, B.B. King, Albert King and Freddie King. If you don’t know how to squirt, everything is contained, and it can get boring after a while. I like being squirted in the face by music because it makes me feel alive.
He concludes: “The goal of any guitar player, whatever the style may be – from funk and flamenco to heavy metal – is to make the listener feel alive. A good guitar solo should sound like an orgasm. I can hear it in Eddie Van Halen’s playing, and the same goes for Jimi Hendrix. I live for the juicy notes.”
In the same interview, Carlos Santana reveals he once had a dream in which Stevie Ray Vaughan visited him and told him to convince his brother Jimmie to borrow his Dumble amp.
“He wanted to utilise my body and hands because he missed playing guitar,” he says.
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
