“I play two hours a day. Three is too much, isn’t it?”: Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel on the secret of guitar practice
Back in 1984, Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel shattered the limits of rock and roll with an amp that cranked all the way up to 11. Now, over 40 years later, he’s back for Spinal Tap II: The End Continues. The (mock) documentary sees the group reuniting after 15 years – and Tufnel’s got some advice for guitarists everywhere.
Speaking to Guitar World, the now 77-year-old fictional rocker insists that the secret to keeping your chops in order is consistency. “I play two hours a day,” he says. “Three is too much, isn’t it? I like to take a walk in the morning with Moira [his partner]. I come back, have a little breakfast, and then I sit down and play. It’s not exactly two hours, but it’s normally two hours. Then I go to the cheese shop.”
READ MORE: Eddie and Alex Van Halen thought This Is Spinal Tap “wasn’t funny” because it was too true to life
While the legendary Tufnel now runs a cheese ship, he insists he still plays his instrument “every day” and he’s still “learning” new tricks, too. “I play differently than I once played, and I’m learning,” he explains. “I used to play a lot of fast solo things, but now I’m listening in a different way to a spacious way of playing, which is more long notes.”
It’s quite a reserved approach to the instrument, considering some of Tufnel’s peers. In a recent chat with The Smashing Pumpkin’s Billy Corgan, Steve Vai recently admitted that he’d play for 9 hours every day if he could. “It becomes sort of like an addiction,” he said. “My schedule back [when I was young]… I was happy if I got nine hours a day. I was very neurotic, very myopic.”
“It just had such a pull, such an attraction, such an interest. Such a joy,” he continued. “The funny thing was, it didn’t feel like discipline… It was a passion. Passion is a much more powerful engine of creation than discipline.”
Two hours works just fine for Tufnel, however. And he’s still advancing as a guitarist, learning to work with new effects and advancements in technology to aid his approach to guitar. “There are lots of pedals that people have done in the last years that are quite extraordinary,” he reflects. “I do a little work on them… I take them apart, and I do a little fooling around with wires and stuff like that to get the sound I’d like.”
“Lots of times I break them because I don’t really know how to do that work,” he admits. “I haven’t been trained, but it’s interesting to open things up, see all the wires and move them about a bit.”
One of the most significant shifts over the last 41 years comes in the form of Tufnel’s new infinity Marshall amp. “Marshall has made for me an amplifier, the head, and if you look at the dials, it now goes to Infinity. Just think about that for a moment. Think about infinity – oh, my God, that’s literally infinity,” Tufnel says.
“Lots of times I break them because I don’t really know how to do that work. I haven’t been trained, but it’s interesting to open things up, see all the wires and move them about a bit.”
The new Spinal Tap II: The End Continues follows the group’s reunion for one final blow-out gig – and it even featured the likes of Elton John, the legend singing on a live rendition of 2009’s Stonehenge.
The decision to document the final show came after a “long discussion” with the band and director Marty DiBergi. “Marty made a case that it made sense for us to do this new thing, which is us coming together again for a reunion,” Tufnel explains. “I haven’t seen the lads for 15 years… and besides that, we had a legal obligation to do one more show.”
Spinal Tap II: The End Continues lands on 12 September.
The post “I play two hours a day. Three is too much, isn’t it?”: Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel on the secret of guitar practice appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
