"Well, the good and bad thing about playing with three guitars is that you can't hide. So the audience can hear everything, but you have to be on the ball all the time as a player. When we were playing with the League Of Crafty Guitarists, there were at times 20 players on stage, so you could hide more, but then again, your individual voice didn't come out as much. Another thing we try to do is interact on stage so it isn't just three boring guys sitting there. We try to maintain contact to keep the energy up. And unlike other 'acoustic' bands, we play loud, as the audiences on the Crimson tuor have found out. We've been well received everywhere. We even got standing ovations in Texas that's a real guitar state.

Another aspect of the California Guitar Trio's setup which may surprise listeners is that they're not all amazing sight-readers. Instead they arrange their material the old-fashioned way: by plain hard work.

"We all read a little, though Bert is by far the most advanced, via his classical studies," says Richards. "We actually just work through each piece bar by bar, especially the Beethoven. Actually, that one came together pretty fast, a lot of which has to do with our new tuning. It's C G D A E G, low to high it's sort of a C pentatonic scale."

Gear is an important part of the Trio's sound, too, as reflected in the harpsichord-like tones they occasionally conjure up. Interestingly, they fully reflect Fripp's famous notion of a "small, mobile, intelligent unit" in their stage gear. Instead of individually miking up each guitar, all three players are plugged into one rack unit, which contains a mixer and an array of signal processing gear. From there, a stereo feed goes to the PA system, allowing the band to control all aspects of their sound and effects. Not surprisingly, the California Guitar Trio's sound is superlative, just as it is on their records.

"Sonically it may surprise some, but everything on the record was created by the three acoustic guitars, though we do use electronic effects to create different sounds," states Richards. "There's a song called 'Punta Patri' where I'm using an E-Bow through a fuzzbox to create a distorted, looping sound. I play a little slide on there, too, but it's all done on acoustic guitars. Originally we played Ovations, but now Hideyo is using an Ovation Elite with a hex pickup for his Roland V-Guitar and synth, while Bert and I are experimenting with Taylors. We both use the new 812 models, though Bert's is a thinline that will be marketed as the 812 Custom, I believe. So far, we're extremely impressed, though we plan to keep experimenting with various acoustics. "Then again, just having three acoustics all the time can be wearing, so we're looking into ways to get new tones and sounds into our repertoire. We can go more electronically like Hideyo is doing, or more into pure acoustics. Right now, we essentially straddle the 'acoustic/electric' sound and it works well for us, but in the future, anything's game."

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