Touching Bass With Trey Gunn

* from the pages of GUITAR magazine, March 1996 *

Touching Bass with Trey Gunn

In a perfect world, you could get a job playing in King Crimson just by tooling over to the local employment office, filling out a basic form, and then having a brief interview with Mr. Fripp in personnel. Alas, gaining entrée into the world's most sophisticated noise machine isn't that simple. Trey Gunn, however, managed to gain access to Fripp via Guitar Craft and become a key player in the current Crimson lineup. A Texan now residing in New Mexico, Gunn has augmented Tony Levin's masterful Stick playing by adding a second touch guitar, creating for the King an unusual backbone of double touch guitars.

Trey first picked up the original Stick in 1987 after playing guitar and bass for years, while more recently he's moved on to the touch-guitar creations made by Luthier Mark Warr. You can hear his wild playing on Crimson's recent THRAK and their B'Boom live album, as well as Gunn's almost entirely Stick-driven solo opus, One Thousand Years (Discipline). Here the man discusses the tools of his unusual trade, as well as his growing body of work with Fripp.

"I've played with Robert on his projects with David Sylvian [Damage

and The First Day

], as well as the Robert Fripp String Quintet, which was composed of myself, Robert, and the California Guitar Trio. So I've known him for a while, and when he decided to get Crimson Back together, I landed the gig. As for gear, I used to play straight Chapman Stick, but now with Crimson I'm playing Warr Guitars. I have a Stick-player friend in L.A. who turned me on to Mark Warr, who was making touch guitars. I was a Stick user, and when I saw Mark's guitars I was a little hesitant, because unlike the Stick it has a body, and the neck hangs at a different angle. It's kind of a cross between a Stick and a nice guitar or bass. Mark studied with Mike Tobias of Tobias Guitars, so you can see the exotic wood influence there. It has custom Bartolini pickups, which are very good. Onstage, I just go direct to the board, as do Robert and Tony. You might think that would clean up the sound a bit, but with King Crimson, anything goes. With six players in the band, it gets really

loud up there."

To the article about the California Guitar Trio