* from the pages of GUITAR magazine, March 1996 *
{Page #3 of 4}
This is one of the reasons behind Guitar Craft, his school for aspiring guitarists, as well as his own guitar tuning, which he feels is superior to concert tuning.
"I came up with the tuning while sweating in a sauna in the Apple Health Club on Bleecker Street (in Manhattan), sometime in September 1983, around half past 10. The tuning just came right into my head as a set of colors, going from right to left: C G D A E G, low to high."
Does he use it exclusively? "Yes."
Has he adapted older Crimson material to play in the new tuning? "Yes."
Has he ever considered using other tunings, like D A D G A D? "I don't use them, so I don't discuss them."
Well, then, what makes his standard tuning any better than E A D G B E?
"With the new standard tuning, you have to know more or less what you're doing. You can't lie back on cliché. You have to think about it. There comes a point where the musical vocabulary that you develop has to be true to your musical voice, and this is the tuning that speaks to my musical voice. It works for me."
But what's wrong with standard tuning, anyway? This gets a rise from Fripp 
finally.
"The new standard tuning has a reason. But E A D G B E? It's arbitrary. It's arbitrary!" he yells. "Who came up with a tuning like that? And why? Probably because tightening gut strings any more would make them snap."
His tuning and subsequent putting it into practice was created during his sabbatical between Crimson lineups 4 and 5. (Crimson now has had as many Mach versions as Deep Purple.) It is interesting to note that Fripp has done some of his most interesting work between Crimson incarnations. He was in the studio with David Bowie, Andy Summers and Brian Eno in the 1980s. He undertook a bizarre recording partnership in the 1970s with Daryl Hall of Hall & Oates which was supposed to produce a trilogy of records, but it never materialized (only 1979's Sacred Songs was released). His most important sabbatical achievement, however, has been Guitar Craft. Simply, Guitar Craft is the teaching of guitar as an apprenticed discipline, learning from the master (Fripp) all the essential techniques of guitar playing. It is not about what to play, it is about how to play. Sitting properly and holding the pick and guitar neck properly are basic ingredients of Guitar Craft [see our Al Stewart sidebar... -ed.], as is a heightened awareness of self (through philosophy and even public humiliation). For Fripp, the world may have produced some marvelous guitar players, but by and large they have been pretty sloppy.
