“They know how weird I am – so it wouldn’t surprise them!”: Pat Metheny gets Ibanez to send him “cheap” guitars for DIY projects – but keeps them on the down-low
It’s not every day a guitar company’s signature artist asks for cheap versions of his own model… just to tinker with them. Between launching his record label and releasing a new album, 71-year-old jazz icon Pat Metheny has found a decidedly unusual way to spend his downtime: transforming inexpensive versions of his signature guitar into private works of art.
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Speaking in the latest issue of Prog magazine, Metheny – who recently launched Uniquity Music and released his new studio album, Side-Eye III+ – gives a rare peek into his quirky hobby, explaining how these modest instruments become one-of-a-kind creations.
“I get Ibanez to send me these cheap, $400 PM358, the budget version of my signature model, and tell them not to put any finish on them,” the guitarist explains. “Then I set about them with a wood burner in various ways.”
As Metheny notes, the results are never meant for a stage or store display – they exist purely for his amusement. Asked if Ibanez knows what he’s getting up to with their guitars behind the scenes, he laughs: “They know how weird I actually am, so it probably wouldn’t surprise them.”
“I paint too; I do a lot of odd stuff. But I have no interest in sharing my artistic output with anyone.”
Elsewhere in the chat, Metheny turns his attention to the hot button topic of AI in music, describing the technology as “part of this wonderful array of tools we musicians have available in the 21st century” despite the anxieties surrounding it at large.
When asked if he worries about AI mimicking his music, Metheny shrugs.
“They’ve already done it. But if I type my name in then what I hear back is… well, they can’t really cop a lot of that stuff yet. OK, there’s a threat to the paying-the-rent part of music for sure. The guys who write muzak – man, they’re done. But I got into music so that I can understand it more, and there’s no shortcut to understanding harmony and counterpoint and improvisation.”
He sums it up philosophically: “The key thing about AI is that it’s still searching and there’s something missing. It’s like if you ask a musician to define ‘soul’, or you ask a neuroscientist to define ‘consciousness’. They can’t do it.”
Listen to Metheny’s latest album Side-Eye III+ below.
The post “They know how weird I am – so it wouldn’t surprise them!”: Pat Metheny gets Ibanez to send him “cheap” guitars for DIY projects – but keeps them on the down-low appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
