Tosin Abasi

Guitar playing for me is a way to express myself through one of the most expressive instruments I think we have and to try to put my stamp on an instrument that's super iconic.

I think the first time guitar was on my radar was MTV. It was bands like Nirvana, and Guns N' Roses, and Pearl Jam. I think there was something about the guitar that was distinctly counter culture and being a teenager, being into things like skateboarding and comic books. I think the guitar was an extension of youthful pursuits. Bands had an energy of avoiding the mainstream and being kind of authentic to themselves. I just found it attractive as a young kid, you know?

It's cool.

It's literally cool. The guitar was cool. It's funny because I was in the school orchestra and I was playing the clarinet. The guitar was so much cooler than the clarinet, and I think that probably had a lot to do with it.

When I started learning the guitar, I didn't learn to read music at all. I kind of treated it as a completely different approach, learning things by ear, trying to play your favorite band's music and stuff like that. So it felt way more personal. I had a little band with friends in the sixth grade and we covered Nirvana at the talent show. It was fun practicing after school and finally getting to the gig, and it was really exciting and it felt decidedly different than playing like a recital. You know what I mean? Like a lot cooler. And yeah, there was a sense of accomplishment and... There weren't a ton of kids starting their own bands. Technically, you're playing adult music and it just felt like kind of badass to be able to learn a tune by air and hang your guitar low and just play something loud. You know what I mean?

Yeah, I did find that these small rewards by learning whether it was a new riff or a new scale, your experience of not being able to do it and then maybe a week later you totally can do it, that sort of dopamine hit of like achieving the small victory, it became really addictive. So I kind of got addicted to getting better because I found that there was these small victories that kept piling up.

I quickly realized that if I could move a barre chord around, I could play all my favorite Bush, and Nirvana, and Weezer songs. And so this was when radio was still king and we had a classic rock station, and I would hear things like Rush, and Van Halen, and Hendrix, and that's when I started to be like, "Okay, I want to learn some of that stuff." So then Halen was a big moment where I felt like it was quite a few steps beyond rock guitar into this other territory, but it still had that edge of just like a loud rock guitarist, but there was a precision and a type of intelligence to the playing that I wasn't hearing in all of the other stuff.

So I had an older brother who was playing the drums and it was the older brother effect where he would get into cool stuff and show me, and he bought a Modern Drummer VHS. It was a Modern Drumming Festival. I believe Mike Portnoy had done a feature on that, and it kind of opened the door to Dream Theater. So then I discovered John Petrucci.

What was cool was at a music store in the area called Chuck Levin's Washington Music Center, and I was that kid who'd go in and try expensive gear that I couldn't afford, and I'm sure they knew, but they were cool with it. I don't know, I guess maybe they could tell I was serious about playing, so they would show me these hot licks and REH videos, like Frank Gambale, and Greg Howe, and Paul Gilbert. So I'd come in and they'd be like, "You should buy this instructional video." I kind of learned about a lot of the sort of late-'80s, early-'90s shredder hair metal guys through these hot lick videos, and that's when I started to obsess over technique itself.

It's funny because the guitar is obviously a creative tool of expression, and so music doesn't have to be difficult, but it also was a personal pursuit to get better at guitar, and I found that my desire to get better kind of steered me in the direction of music that had guitar players who were using advanced technique. That started to be a lot of the rock and metal guys. If your desire is to have even more complexity, the progressive metal and progressive rock, this is where these guitars had an opportunity to actually put these techniques and concepts into their music and they weren't gatekept because it needed to be a traditional song form. As a learning guitarist, progressive metal and even the guys who were doing just straight-up instrumental rock, like Vai and Satch, as a young guitarist, that was the perfect space to expand what I thought was possible on the instrument.

I would say my first real band was a band called PSI. The co-guitar player in my band, Javier Reyes, was the singer of that band at the time. They existed and they were looking for a guitarist, and I saw an ad in the paper. I was 16 or 17 and they were all a bit older. They were able to get into bars and stuff like that. They seemed like a real band to me, and it was kind of like, "I wonder if I could play with these guys." It was cool, definitely cool to cut my teeth with some older players, and it kind of pushed me further into metal because the sound that they had defined was very Sepultura, Slayer. That was heavier than what I was listening to at the time. Also, Javier was already playing seven-string guitar, and so he exposed me to that and then it became kind of like my main guitar.

We toured and kind of played locally for a few years. We eventually broke up. And there was another band from the sort of DC, Maryland, Virginia area called Reflux, and they were doing some regional touring. I ended up becoming friends with Ash, the lead singer, who now owns Sumerian Records, actually. They were looking for a guitarist, so when PSI broke up, I ended up joining Reflux and kind of became the primary songwriter in that band. That's where I started to merge some of the heavier elements from PSI with some of the more progressive stuff and advanced guitar technique I've been working on. So Reflux ended up signing to Prosthetic Records. I feel like I started to get some recognition as a guitar player. Ended up with Ibanez endorsement, and things started to feel real, more professional.

Toured with Reflux for a bit. Eventually I started to feel frustrated with some of my gaps in theory on the guitar. I was primarily self-taught and there was a heavy focus on technique, but I didn't have a ton of music theory, so I ended up going to the Atlanta Institute of Music. That's when I started to get a little bit exposed to a classical guitar and jazz as well.

Through the Atlanta Institute of Music and the stuff I learned there, I ended up without a band, but Prosthetic Records, our previous band Reflex, we had an album left on our contract that wasn't recorded, and so Prosthetic was like, "Hey, well, do you want to basically fulfill this last part of the contract? You could do a solo album." And I didn't want to do a solo album as much as I wanted to do a band that was more in line with bands like Liquid Tension Experiment, where every member of the band is kind of a virtuoso in their own right and the songs themselves are vehicles for really cool complex musical ideas as opposed to like the Tosin Abasi experience where I just solo a bunch over a rock beat. So I took them up on that offer and kind of conceived of Animals as Leaders, which was my sort of, it's not a solo product, but I was like the progenitor, and that was the birth of Animals as Leaders effectively, which I'm currently still in.

It's funny because I'd always seen the Ernie Ball string packs, and I would turn it over and see the list of endorsers and it was just the most insane list of guitar players. But I somehow never really played them. It was a few years ago that I think I tried the, might've been the Cobalts, which is kind of like an interesting introduction, but I really dug the texture of the string. I tried some Paradigms and I was hooked. It's a combination of string feel with how the string ages when you're touring and recording a lot. I also don't love changing guitar strings on my own if I don't have to, so there's things like longevity and the consistency of the sound over time and just the actual feel. You know, when you notice a string, you're like, "Whoa, what strings are on this?" Yeah, I think for me it was the Paradigms. That was like, "Man, I like these."

What's motivating about the guitar is how dynamic it is. There's so many different styles of guitar playing, and I think we're in a really cool period of guitar culture where I see a lot of young players who have insane technique. I mean, they're able to pull from this rich history of guitar playing and there's almost unfettered access to it because of the internet. It's been really inspiring to see newer players just killing it on the instrument.

It's also inspiring to have a body of work as like Animals as Leaders and to have fans who still want to see us perform. So that keeps me inspired. Every time we go out and perform, I'm always surprised by the energy and positivity, and it's cool. It's cool being an influence to other guitar players, and it's cool having this reciprocal relationship with fan.

Apparently, I am a maximalist when it comes to songwriting. It reminds me of food where you could have sushi or you could have some sort of like vindaloo curry that has like 30 ingredients in it. There is a harmony with all those ingredients even though there's a lot going on, or there's a purity with maybe having three or four ingredients. For whatever reason, I have gravitated towards songs that have a degree of musical complexity and sonic density. I can't explain it. I think it's just what I want to hear. It's how I've decided I am expressing myself. So in the words of Yngwie Malmsteen, more is more.

The right guitar makes you want to pick it up and play it. It's cool that there's this tradition of guitar, but there's still ways in which the instrument itself is evolving, whether it's through extended range or throwing different effects at it. The palette is pretty limitless.

So I don't really do the thing where like I have a break-up and then I write a sad song or something like that. I think there are a lot of great sources for that sentiment in music. I think what I'm interested in doing is providing emotional experiences that seem to be shades as opposed to distinct colors. Through harmony, you can really combine notes in a way that pull at people in novel. It produces novel emotional responses. So part of the freedom of having no singers, you can play melodies that maybe wouldn't make sense for the human voice to sing, but you can use your guitar for that and you can use harmonic content that also wouldn't make sense for... You don't hear human singing in melodic minor that often, or harmonic major. There's tonalities that are available in instrumental music that I think are maybe not quite as appropriate with a singer. I really try to combine this harmonic content so that when you are listening to it, it takes you somewhere and it's hard to describe where you are. Ideally, it feels like you're on a different planet.

There's a degree of escapism that I'm into. I used to read a lot of science fiction and speculative fiction, and I just want to provide novel emotional experiences that aren't readily available elsewhere.

I think writing my own music had always been partially emulating some of my favorite songwriters and favorite bands, and then there's a percentage of original contribution, like what I would add, whether it's combining elements that aren't always readily combined or filling in the spaces through my influences, just trying to put my stamp on it. I found that because I was obsessing on getting better at guitar, I definitely wanted to incorporate a lot of the concepts I was learning. So I found that a lot of the advanced technique stuff was relegated to a guitar solo, so you'd have a normal song and then there'd be a guitar solo, but discovering certain bands and certain players, you kind of got exposed to songs that weren't traditional. I really liked with progressive metal Liquid Tension Experiment, like King Crimson, Dream Theater, even some of the Pat Metheny band stuff. There was an opportunity to reinterpret what a song could be, and there was no rules, and in fact, you were encouraged to incorporate a lot of musical complexity.

And for some reason, I've always found musical complexity stimulating. I've never been much of a traditionalist. I mean, I love Stevie Ray Vaughan, but I definitely spent more time trying to sound like Yngwie Malmsteen. You know what I mean?

I've had a lot of good moments. If you had a time machine and you asked me to write stuff down that I never thought would happen type thing, but touring with Vai, and Zakk Wylde, and Yngwie, and Nuno, or playing with Meshuggah or even touring with them, or having my own signature guitar or designing guitar with Music Man, or having my own guitar brand, I'd say these are probably the landmark experiences.