Frank Gambale has got a lot going on. If you think your plate is full, try this on for size: New CD (Raison D'etre) just released, embarking on a European Summer Tour with the Chick Corea Elektric Band, a new Yamaha Guitar design, and a patent on a new tuning system. Oh, did I mention those classes he teaches at the LA Music Academy? And that thing about moving (after ten years) from the Hollywood Hills to Palm Springs? And by the way, he's got thirty minutes for lunch — so hope you don't mind if he talks with his mouth full. The amazing thing was that he didn't talk with his mouth full. He's just fast. And driven, obviously. It's easy to see why the Mr. Speed Picker is an inspiration to fledgling guitar players worldwide. He lives for that instrument, knows it inside and out and is happy to let everyone in on the secrets. You just have to keep up, that's all. He even volunteered to help check for typos before this interview was put up on the website. Of course, I didn't take him up on that one, figuring he could use that time to record another CD or invent a guitar that can fly.

Oh, good. I'm glad you like it.

The title is French, and it means "reason to be."

Well, the guitar really is my reason to be. And I invented a new guitar tuning [the Gambale Guitar Nouveau] about seven months ago. It only took me about 40 years to figure this out. I have been a piano player since I was about seventeen, and I've always been absolutely envious with the liberty that keyboard players have to put notes together. I mean, they can play a cluster with one hand — things for them that are much closer together are farther apart on the guitar. I love those close voicings, and I write a lot of music on piano, and recently I've been doing a lot of trio recording, and I get frustrated because I'm not using keyboard players anymore, and I used to write a lot of music where I would give the keyboard players very specific voicings to play - voicings that I couldn't play on the guitar. And I would be the melody instrument against the keyboard. But in a trio — guitar, bass, drums — you're it, pretty much.

A large number of voicings that I want to play — that I understand harmonically — I can't do. It was frustrating. But I found a way, using a virtual guitar that you could really pre-set different tunings. And I stumbled across one that is extremely practical. This is the good thing about it. Most tunings, you know, ultimate tuning have existed for a long time with guitar, but the problem with those is that you might learn one or two songs, but you really have to relearn all of your chord vocabulary because the pitches change. This is why I was so excited about it and thought I would try and patent it. You don't have to relearn any vocabulary, yet the notes come out differently. You can still play a D chord and it comes out as the major triad, but the pitches are different.

It's this tuning for the first time. I divided the album into part one and part two, and part one is all the new tuning. I just wanted to deliver some new sounds.

It was really a compliment getting Billy Cobham on the record. I had been working with [him] over the past year and a half or so. He's a legend in the drum world, and one of my favorite records of all time was his first solo album called Spectrum. And I've been playing in a group of his called New Spectrum which plays his Spectrum music. I thought I'd ask him to do it, and we flew him out from Switzerland, where he lives. And the bass player on the record [Ric Fierabracci] is now playing with Chick Corea. I recommended him for the gig and Chick really liked him a lot.

Yes. That's why God invented websites.

I don't care. I don't make music for financial gain. And that's the difference. I make music as art, and I could not care less if I make a penny or not on the record. I like to sell enough to cover my costs because I have my own little record company Wombat Records, and I have distribution through what is basically the parent arm of Tower Records, called Bayside, and they do a reasonable job of getting stuff out there. But it's a very different kind of music you make when you take the financial aspect out of it.

Those A&R people you talk about — they don't have any right to tell someone who has been playing and recording for forty years whether it's good or not. To me that's putting the cart before the horse. I love the fact that record companies are struggling now because artists are waking up and realizing they don't need these guys to make music anymore. With the internet and downloading and what have you — I'm about to have all of my music on my website available for downloading. There won't be distribution anymore — that's where it's heading.

I don't want someone telling me what I can and can't record. I do a lot of things for money, a lot of various things to make a living, and recording is a very small part of my income. I've made too many records to have any grandiose expectations. It's a very limited market for the music I do. But I do it because they're artistic statements, a guitarist's statements — that will stand for a long time.

It's really for my own music and for other recordings that I have been on. For example, Tony Muschamp, a dear friend of mine, a wonderful bass player that I had met in music school, lives in London, and I played on every track on an album that I had encouraged him to do. He released it in England and I said, "You should release it in America too." So, I licensed it under Wombat. Because I'm on every song, you know? So, I've got about three albums like that. Another one is a duet record I did with Maurizio Colonna, a very famous Italian guitar player, that was only available in Italy.

[Laughs] Yes, I'm cranking out the miles. I may need to trade myself in for a new model. I'm going out with Chick Corea and the Elektric Band. I can't tell you what an honor it is to play with Chick Corea. Since I was thirteen years old, I dreamed of working with Chick Corea. All of my friends were listening to Led Zeppelin and I was listening to Chick Corea. I'd be telling them, "You're missing this great thing." And I knew I was headed on a different path.

Anyway, we start off in Montreal and then go over to Europe and perform there throughout the summer at all the summer festivals, which is incredible — beautiful venues, first class all the way. And we have an Elektric Band record coming out in August which I think is a real Grammy Award contender. I've won Grammys and had a couple of nominations with Chick Corea.

Yes. We'll be playing music from the record. It's called To The Stars.

I thought you were going to say my picking technique. Because I created a little monster there. I'm widely regarded as the person who took speed picking and made it viable. Everybody knows Eddie Van Halen and his contribution to the tapping technique. In the same regard, I'm considered the guy who brought speed picking to the public - the guitar public.

Well, guitar players could maybe play one little tiny phrase. Charlie Christian to Wes Montgomery, the great lineage of guitar players. George Benson even did it a little bit. But it was something that was just kind of laying on the ground, until I came around. The popular opinion was that it just didn't work as a fully borne technique. People thought you couldn't play it in time, etc. But to me there is a huge difference between the impossible and the very, very difficult. If something is impossible — well, first of all, I'll challenge it, and I'll figure out why it's impossible. I mean, everything is impossible. I turn on an Apple computer, and I say, "This is impossible! How does it work?!" Heck if I know. It just does, you know? You have to believe that anything is possible. Someone just hasn't seen a different avenue. There's always another way to solve it.

Well, I worked my ass off to do it. If you talked to my brothers, they would tell you how many hours I would practice and play. But I started doing it when I was about fourteen or fifteen. If you were playing one note per string — from low to high — why would you want to go up and down with your right hand? It just makes much more sense to brush across the strings. I got it to the point where every time I went from one string to the next string, the picking direction was the same. And that's basically what it is. If you've got a note going from one string to the next string, those two notes can be played with a flowing stroke instead of going down and then up for the next one. See, most people think that going alternate, which is going up-down, up-down, religiously is the way the guitar should be played. Now, that works for some things, but not for everything, just as speed picking doesn't work for everything either. But it is a great enabler.

The first thing you realize — and I've done it twice now — but you realize how difficult it is to come up with anything new. You don't want to make something terribly, radically stupid looking. Guitar players in general are terribly conservative.

No. It's tradition more than anything else. If a guitar isn't a Les Paul or a Stratocaster or at least a Gibson or Fender or maybe a Paul Reed Smith, it can't be good. And that's like living with your head in the sand, you know? It's stupid. But that's how guitar players are. They're still using tubes for amps. Tubes! [Laughs] That's like using a steam powered computer. It's stupid. People will argue. Actually, they won't even argue because they won't listen to anything to the contrary when it comes to guitar amps. Tubes equals tone — great tone.
To me, that's not absolutely true. There are amps that don't have a tube in them that [are] wonderful as well.
So, getting over the conservatism, when designing a product for a company, you want it to be able to sell. You can't throw out tradition completely. So, with this new Yamaha, I wanted it to look cool, look beautiful, but I went with a pretty traditional shape. I love the symmetry. I love to look at beautiful, classic cars. I had an E-type Jaguar...

No, I didn't. Could've. That's a good idea. But you only have to play it — it doesn't have to go fast. If I was designing the Jaguar, maybe... I remember looking at the E-type Jag. I had a '68 Series 1. You see them in the museums all over the place because it's an incredible piece of beauty, you know? You can see beauty in metal, wood, pieces of machinery. I do. I would walk around that car constantly and look at every angle, and it would look beautiful from every angle and that's very, very rare in a car. So I wanted this guitar to look beautiful from every angle, so I was really paying attention to symmetry.

It takes a long time. We knocked out about three prototypes. Some interesting, creative things went on in that guitar. It wasn't just me, of course. There's a guy Dave Cervantes, who was one of the engineers at Yamaha. They have a little design shop in North Hollywood. I would just tell him what I wanted and he would make it. I'd say, "It's gonna have this, it's gonna have that."

I want them to grow in a beautiful environment where people actually care about their progress. It's still small enough where we can get to know people by name. They're not just a number. And it's a very logical and clear, methodical program to follow.

I think organization is the key. That's what I wanted to do differently. In some ways, it's better to have one person write most of the program, rather that having a whole bunch of people. At least for the core classes, the most important stuff — like harmony and theory and sight reading, improvisation — the technique classes. They really need to be played out the whole year in a logical progression. When you've got different people writing this that come from different places, I think it ends up diluting the vision to some degree. However, when we hire other teachers, we end up giving them pretty much carte blanche to teach whatever they want to teach because it is important for students to get other perspectives. Not one person has the only perspective on music. There's a million ways to look at music, but at least they have the fundamentals very clear from start to finish — at least the way I see them.

Really?

I'm a firm believer in hard work, honesty, truth — all those things that, you know... I'm not looking for compliments. I just want to do a good job. This school is very important to me. I've put a lot of time and energy into it. You gotta lead by example, and I'm hoping that my presence here attracts the kind of people I want to have here. A lot of people I've chosen to teach are friends and people I've known for years and respect. And it's a mutual respect. It's all about the music. I don't need a lot of egos, and they're all just really wonderful people here. And they don't have to be here. None of us has to be here. We do it because we love it, and we care about the next generation of musicians.

Yeah. It's still filtering in because we're a young school. But there are some kids who have had some chart success, if you use that as a measure of success. My measure of success is very different, and I make that clear with them. My measure of success as a musician is being able to feed yourself and put a roof over your head. I don't care if that means playing in a Holiday Inn seven nights a week or being at the top of the charts. It's still better than bagging groceries.

Yeah. Most people go to work. We call it "playing." You should have fun playing.