The only thing I had in my mind [when I was 17 ] was that I was going to be a professional musician. So it was just the right environment.

When we make those guitars we make tons of prototypes, I have all those. And once a guitar has come out there's all different versions and colours and woods and I have all those. There's hundreds of them.

I really rely a lot more on memory. I'm definitely not as good of a sight reader.

If I'm not in an environment where I can record, it's great to be able to write something down, to be able to know how to do that, to be able to write notation. You grab a piece of paper and there it is. It's the cheapest recording equipment you can buy: a piece of manuscript paper and a pencil!

It's hard to answer that from my own perspective because when I'm playing I know where it is coming from and the sources.

I often think about my Music Man guitars being 100 million percent tailored to my needs as a player and how lucky I am.

When we came out, the kind of music that was popular was Nirvana, Soundgarden and Alice In Chains, all that stuff. That was when we released our second album, 'Images And Words', and it was something people werent used to hearing maybe, and it sort of rose above all that somehow, being progressive, or whatever.