Steve Tibbetts in his own words – on his work and on the new album.

Music Philosophy

Music is as close to magic as we mortals have. Musicians do revel in being thought of as wizards or shamans or conduits or vessels or prophets. News flash: we have no idea what we’re doing.

Music is a twilight language. The job is to translate shadow into sound.

Evaluation

Music is a kind of speech: subtle, ambiguous, mind-to-mind. It could be the most pure and evocative expression of mind. That same ephemeral nature makes it difficult to know how to proceed sometimes. What to change.

Marc Anderson listened and said, “Don’t change it. Yes, I can hear you breathing in the recording. Yes, I hear fretboard sounds when you bend strings. You’re playing with a lot of force and it sounds like you need to.”

Guitar

My guitar tunings drop the low A and E strings down to G and C. That tends to keep all the tunes in the same key. I’m comfortable with that, having spent some time around gamelan ensembles, Tibetan longhorns, court music from Java, Hardangar fiddle from Norway. Most of the world’s music stays in the same key.

There’s not so much concern about getting perfect sound anymore.

I am still reaching for the evocative sound of Sultan Khan.

– Steve Tibbetts