EP 5: Will McNicol on Composing, Tone, and Orchestral Collaborations in Fingerstyle Guitar

Jesse Paliotto (00:09)
Hello everyone and welcome to the Guitar Journal, a podcast where we love to talk about making music, particularly through the lens of fingerstyle guitar. I'm your host, Jesse Paliotto, and I love bringing the best of the music community to you here on the Guitar Journal podcast. I'm really pumped because today we have with us Mr. Will McNicol. Will is a classical fingerstyle guitarist, composer and educator. He's won a whole host of awards, if I can say that straight, for his classical and fingerstyle guitar playing. Also composed for solo guitar, bands and orchestra, which

intrigues me and hopefully we can talk about today. And he's also released music under his own name as well as a lot of stuff in TV and advertising. He also runs workshops and clinics and tours worldwide. He's just an incredible and incredibly busy guitarist. So we'll just want to say thank you for being on podcast today. So pumped to talk for a

Will (00:56)
Thanks Jesse, it's a pleasure to be here man, thanks for inviting me.

Jesse Paliotto (00:59)
Absolutely.

Maybe what would be just kind of some quick background for folks is can you talk a little bit about how you develop your own guitar playing? I think there might be quite a bit of classical there in the background, but just kind of curious kind of that quick overview of like, how did you get to what you play and how you play today?

Will (01:17)
Of course, so Whistle Stop Tour would be that I started playing when I was six years old, and that was fairly die-hard classical, and I stuck with that for many, years. I still love it. But then when I was in my teenage years, I started composing my own music, having had some quite inspiring experiences going to see some wonderful guitarists at gigs.

Jesse Paliotto (01:24)
yeah.

Will (01:39)
and it just opened my mind to the possibilities of the acoustic guitar in general, Because up until that point I had the kind of idea of what classical guitar was, I had the idea of what acoustic guitar is and electric guitar, and they all had their own kind of individual identities. But then I started seeing some players, I mean one that jumps out to me is the fantastic Italian acoustic guitarist, Antonio Fortuni, who is described...

as the Jimi Hendrix of acoustic guitar, right? So, and he'll be up there playing nylon string acoustic guitar and steel string acoustic guitar in the same gig with some wonderful other musicians from all over the world. And it just blew my mind. I was like, so there's this whole world of how you can take these influences, blend them up and create something that is really quite unique. And that kind of excited me to be honest, because up until that point, I hadn't really appreciated that that was available to me. And that started the competition.

journey and that has kind of ended up with where I am now because I carried on with the classical stuff quite a lot. I took it all the way through the the training kind of systems that we have here in the UK which is like grades one through eight and then diplomas which take you up kind of through what they would describe as like university or college level stuff.

Jesse Paliotto (02:41)
Mm-hmm.

Sure.

Will (02:56)
And I really enjoyed that, but alongside it, I was writing my own music and that's where I really found a bit of a passion, to be honest. It was where I felt like I could take ownership a little bit more over the music that I was playing and creating. And that compositional stuff that I was working on ended up with me gigging with that music from my teenage years and just slowly but surely...

Jesse Paliotto (03:09)
Mm.

Will (03:22)
building a little bit of a circuit over here in the UK for performing. But when I started performing out at just kind of gigs, I was mostly playing my own stuff and kind of building a little bit of a thing based around that and it's just developed since then really.

Jesse Paliotto (03:39)
Yeah, was kind of curious, you know, how much of your repertoire, sorry, I can't talk today. How much of your repertoire even today involves any of the classical background, or do you kind of tend to play mostly original compositions or even all original?

Will (03:53)
I think that the classical thing is part of my DNA as a guitarist really and it's funny where I've ended up playing more steel string these days but I went through a phase of playing nylon string and steel strings in gigs and I would play a mixture of my own work and other people's work some of the classical repertoire quite a lot of South American stuff actually from that world because I just love that stuff

But from a technical point of view, a lot of my technique, particularly my right hand, my picking hand is kind of...

built around the classical stuff and people who are in the know recognise it pretty much immediately. It is quite funny whether it be the long nails or whether it be the slightly higher wrist position or whatever it might be that they're okay, he's playing steel string like a classical player. And that's what I've ended up really enjoying doing. It's certainly the case that I've tried to build my career on my own work but I've always loved learning music by other people. I find it very inspiring.

I find it really, really enjoyable. And whether that's kind of classical or contemporary or South American or wherever it or whatever it is, it will always be part of what I do. But I guess my career has been built around my own work.

Jesse Paliotto (05:09)
Yeah, that's awesome. And with kind of having the classical influence come through and you're playing, talking with somebody the other day and they were talking about, know, the emphasis in classical guitar a lot is in tone production, as opposed to where in rock it might be more in groove or in jazz, it might be more in like, you know, obviously improvisational work and note selection. But like you can hear somebody play it when they just hit that beautiful tone, you're like, okay, they worked on that. That especially on an acoustic or nylon string where it is so much in the hand or almost.

Will (05:20)
yeah.

Sure.

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I think that it's an interesting thing because I think about it quite a lot these days about the differences in how one approaches the learning of guitar because there's so many different ways you can do it. you from a classical point of view, I still remember my very first lesson was all to do with just how to kind of walk on one string with just two fingers, just one note and just getting a nice sound out of it.

Jesse Paliotto (05:49)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Will (06:04)
and that's interesting because on acoustic guitar you might come at it from a completely different point of view. It might just be able to get some chords down and get some song playing down or whatever. That's the kind of traditional thing that you might associate with acoustic steel string.

Jesse Paliotto (06:12)
Yes.

Will (06:19)
And what I've ended up being really fascinated with is that world in between the two and how the two kind of meet because I think that both worlds can learn a lot from one another. I was fascinated by the fact that in my classical training so little attention was given to chords in general, right? So you could end up playing quite a lot of advanced material.

Jesse Paliotto (06:23)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Hmm. Yeah, that's interesting.

Will (06:41)
But then you asked me to play like a certain chord or whatever. Well, I got thrown into situations where I had to play in like a show band, for example, and it was all chord charts. And I was like, man, I don't know what to do. You know, even though I was at quite a high level with the classical, the training doesn't really cover that. And that's the thing, you know, each avenue will have holes in it.

Jesse Paliotto (06:50)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Will (07:02)
But on the other side, the acoustic guitar, it can be very chord based. So then you can kind of think, well, how can you learn from that? How can one inform the other? And you mentioned a great thing earlier about tone production, right? And I'm really into the idea that the steel string can give you just as much enjoyment from that aspect as classical guitar can. And I think it's really...

Jesse Paliotto (07:13)
Yeah.

Will (07:26)
kind of underappreciated in the steel string world in the same way, right? So I try and just kind of in my teaching, I suppose, and in my own work, I get really excited about that and try and and share it because it's just the acoustic guitar and the steel strings are is capable of just such the most wonderful textures and sounds. If you spend a little bit of time working on it. And it's just the fact that the steel string vibe, I suppose.

Jesse Paliotto (07:38)
Yeah.

Will (07:54)
It just doesn't give as much emphasis to that in the same way that does in classical. But there's no reason why it shouldn't, you know. There's no reason why it shouldn't. So it's just an interesting thing just kind of going to people, oh, have you considered, you know, your hand position? Have you considered...

nails or no nails or where you're playing with your right hand, how you're attacking the string, know, the angle you're playing at and all of these things and nine times out of ten when I'm in I'm running workshops with predominantly steel string players they'll have their thing that they do with their picking hand and that will be it.

Like there won't be much variety in there necessarily. But then when you start just putting in these little ideas of like, did you know you could do this? Classical players sometimes do this and they're like, man, that's cool. And all of a sudden you just end up with, I suppose, greater breadth in terms of tone than you did before. And I think that can kind of be...

basically build into any style of playing that you're into, that be blues or more contemporary fingerstyle, percussive stuff, whatever it is, it all matters when it comes down to the tone production. So yeah, I'm quite into that kind of thing.

Jesse Paliotto (09:02)
Yeah.

Yeah, it's hard to disentangle. You know, we all have this issue where like your experience, you tend to extrapolate to that's how the world has developed, which may not be true. My experience of this may be how the world's developed. feel like probably several decades ago, you came to acoustic guitar and you were the guy who was strumming in the band or you played electric where you actually were working on individual note based stuff. And I know that there was Simon and Garfunkel. There's a lot of finger picking from that side. But like the emphasis over again, this is just my personal experience. So take it with a huge grain of salt.

Will (09:19)
Mm-hmm.

Jesse Paliotto (09:32)
In the past few decades, there's been such a development of the fingerstyle guitar kind of repertoire techniques, online education. It's like very eye-opening, like, I can actually get these different sounds. I can use a thumb pick for some songs and flesh on the thumb for other songs. I could use lute-like picking with the thumb behind the fingers or I could do it the other. Like there's just so much more availability. don't know if that's, you know, that's probably partly driven just by the availability of information and

to be exposed to that. But yeah, there's so much more dynamics that I feel like people are getting out of the guitar. It's pretty incredible.

Will (10:08)
man, I massively and you're bang on. I mean think the development that the acoustic guitar has gone through over the last kind of couple of decades is absolutely enormous. Not just in terms of the players and the, as you say, the repertoire and the compositions and the technique and it being seen, I suppose, as a concert instrument, as a solo concert instrument, all of a sudden.

Jesse Paliotto (10:28)
Yeah, yep.

Will (10:32)
And not only that, but also like the actual instrument itself, you know, and all the builders that have kind of come up and like the kind of exciting thing is there's just so much going on in terms of steel string building now.

Jesse Paliotto (10:38)
True, good point, yeah.

Yeah.

Will (10:46)
that I don't think was quite as common a couple of decades ago. It's just, there's lots of exciting stuff happening there. And also, built in that direction as well, people who are trying to create these acoustic guitars that do the same job as a classical, as a standalone instrument, right? And that can deliver the breadth of sound and the kind of tonal production that puts it into the same arena as what classical guitar has kind of been.

kind of seen as being, as that's the instrument that can hold its own as a solo thing. So yeah, it's been a really exciting time. I've I've just, I mean, I've loved seeing it happen, know, at starting quite young and discovering these players and discovering these builders and seeing it all develop. It's tremendously exciting. I don't think there's, I think it's just all pretty wonderful actually, to be honest.

Jesse Paliotto (11:20)
Yeah, that's a great point.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I wanted to ask about composition. You mentioned it, you kind of breezed over it earlier when you said like, I started making my own music. And then that's kind of where, you know, lot of my kind of interest went. How did you get started in composition? Was it very natural? Like you're just like, yeah, I came up with this thing. Or was it very structured and formal? Or how did you get into that?

Will (12:04)
It certainly wasn't structured or formal. It was very much a case of messing about. And I mentioned that guitarist Antonio Fortunioni, right? And that was this little spark after I saw him for the first time. And I was like, okay, the guitar can do so much and I don't know how to do that. So it was a case of begging my parents for a steel string guitar and then me sitting down and figuring stuff out. Because back then...

Jesse Paliotto (12:06)
You

Yeah.

Will (12:33)
there weren't the resources that are available now. And I just enjoyed sitting down with the guitar, knowing what Antonio had done, then discovering all the other players in that all coming other tremendously influential steel string players. you're thinking about people like Michael Hedges.

their contemporaries and people like Eric Roche, Thomas Lieb in the UK there was a great guitarist called Stuart Ryan who's still a very good friend of mine and all of these people just you know were doing things with the steel string guitar that was really exciting to me but I didn't know how to do it really. So my earliest compositions even though I didn't actively think about this at the time I was just playing around and trying to discover and really enjoying the process of going that's cool.

They were basically studies. They were ways of trying to understand the instrument and creating these little ideas and go, that's how could do that. Or what if I tried this classical thing on the steel string? How would that work? So it's very exploratory. There wasn't much direction behind it. It was just about trying to have fun. And I would lose hours and hours and hours of my time in a way that I had never had with the guitar before. I always really enjoyed the classical thing.

Jesse Paliotto (13:19)
Yeah.

Will (13:45)
but that was very structured and it was very much, this is what you do and this is what you do next and this is what you do next. It was like very tailored in that direction. Whereas suddenly I was like, there's no one telling me what to do. There's no plan here. And that was really exciting and quite liberating. And then slowly but surely I was like, okay, well this is now becoming something. And I would very early on once I had a piece, I would maybe try and play it at a school concert, maybe try and record it.

Jesse Paliotto (13:57)
Mm-hmm.

Will (14:12)
in the most terrible way possible. earliest recordings were literally, got the DI, just the cable straight out of the guitar, straight out into the microphone in. I just got one of those little converters, you know, like straight into my computer and just played. And so as a result, the recordings were pretty brutal. But I really loved the process. It was just fun. And it was one of those things where there was no end goal, really. It was just,

Jesse Paliotto (14:22)
Yeah.

Yes.

Will (14:42)
It was just something that I really, really loved. And because I loved it, I kept doing it. And over time, I started realising that I could create actual fully formed compositions that could then be packaged up into some kind of performance or recording or whatever. And then I'd create CDs all just done myself and then just get out gigging and show it all off and...

hand out a few CDs or try and sell a few CDs and just the whole process was just very very exciting. You do a gig and then someone being in the audience and go hey man that was pretty cool do you want to come and do this gig and then the network starts slowly kind of fanning out and you meet these wonderful people who make things happen.

Jesse Paliotto (15:21)
Yeah.

Will (15:28)
and you just get kind of swept up by it and just get kind of slightly addicted to it. And that inspires you more to keep creating really. So that was it. But there was an interesting thing though, which I often talk about with students is like, when I started recording my own work and listening to it back in the early days, something quite concerning happened. And I was like, I actually don't love listening to this. Like I love playing it, but I don't love listening to it.

Jesse Paliotto (15:52)
Interesting. Yeah.

Will (15:57)
And that started me on this kind of journey of, I suppose you could call it just refining it a bit. Because I guess, yeah, guess it was to do with the fact that I suppose I was almost just trying to throw everything in the kitchen sink at stuff. Almost trying to prove myself as a player. You know, it was all quite flash. It was all quite visual. You know, I was doing all sorts of kind of...

Jesse Paliotto (16:04)
Yeah, what do you do with that? Yeah.

Will (16:21)
know fretboard pyrotechnics and kind of percussive work and all the techniques all the time was like more more more and as a result the compositions themselves were very very dense they were very I don't know they just were a bit much so then you kind of go back and you listen to it and you think okay well that

Jesse Paliotto (16:25)
Interesting.

Yeah.

Will (16:41)
Someone actually commented, they said, I think you've got about three or four pieces worth of music in that tune. So then it's a case of kind of just stripping things out and going, okay, let's think more from a compositional point of view rather than a guitarist point of view. What kind of music am I actually trying to create here? And that path set me up for the development that I've gone on for many years since then of just trying to create pieces of music that are not only enjoyable to play, but also really enjoyable to listen to.

Jesse Paliotto (16:48)
Ha ha.

Yeah.

Will (17:11)
and that's where I suppose the classical tone production thing came back in again in a bigger way trying to create a sound that I just loved hearing when I listened to it back and that was yeah that was an interesting part of the process for me and something that I always think is worth doing if you're going down this route is a lot of the work happens without your guitar in your hands you know you've got to record listen think and feel it a bit and then go back to the guitar and

Jesse Paliotto (17:16)
Mm.

Will (17:39)
see how you can kind of boil all of that down onto the instrument.

Jesse Paliotto (17:43)
That is that's so fascinating because it makes several things you're kind of prompting in my own mind, one of which is, you know, there's this theme for me around music, but definitely all art. think writing definitely I've, you know, heard writers talk about this where the role of editing is so important to creative work where, you know, it's it's the old kill your darling's phrase or all these things where you like as a creative person, you come up with so many ideas and they're all out there and you want to use them all. And you're so proud of them all.

Will (18:04)
Big time.

Jesse Paliotto (18:13)
and they all seem great and yet really at the end of the day what makes something go from mediocre to good is really great editing like removing so much stuff, tailoring, doing all the work to like and that's where I for myself I feel like so much of composition can start to feel less, it can start to have obstacles where you say oh this is so fun to come up with but I gotta sit here for a couple hours now and like whittle it down and like really think through what's gonna communicate and watch how this is just flash. So that's one thing I had my,

Will (18:20)
Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (18:43)
sparking my mind. The other is that, you know, with fingerstyle guitar, maybe part of this has been YouTube being such a way that most people have kind of engaged with a lot of it is there is a visual element to it where it's the spectacle of somebody being able to pull off these things as a single person on a guitar. And so to disentangle that and say, you know, as a performance aspect, that's cool. But as a compositional aspect, that may not be helpful. Like that actually may be taking away from just the

Will (18:54)
through all there is.

Jesse Paliotto (19:13)
of the melody or a clear structure that people can really engage with. Yeah, so that's a very interesting perspective.

Will (19:18)
Yeah.

Yeah, man. mean, you pointed onto it really well there. mean, I guitarists are quite notoriously bad at what you're saying, you know, about kind of stripping things out and being comfortable with space. You know, it tends to be more notes. Throw all of the notes at it. So it's quite nice to kind of be inspired by, you know,

Jesse Paliotto (19:34)
Yeah.

Will (19:45)
things that aren't in the guitar world, you you listen to kind of orchestral compositions or particularly piano compositions, you know, where, you know, space is such an important part of it all. And then you can bring that back into the pot and that can be really, really valuable. And I guess the other thing that makes this challenging is just having the artistic intuition to know what to do, because you end up with, as you say, a lot of ideas, a lot of things that could go in, lot of things that could be developed.

Jesse Paliotto (19:51)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Will (20:14)
but what should be and what should stay and what shouldn't and all of those kind of artistic decisions that need to be made. That's challenging, that's hard and that takes a bit of time to develop that ability to have confidence in your creative intuition, you know? And it was something...

Jesse Paliotto (20:27)
How do you get there? Is

it all intuitive or is there, how did you process that?

Will (20:33)
Well, I think composition, in all the different parts of it, is a skill that you can develop, right? And just in the same way as you develop the skill of playing guitar in the first place, you can develop the skill of composition as well. And I talk about this with students, I've got this kind of process that I go through when I'm composing, which can really help.

just keep it moving forward, prevent you getting stuck in ruts or going around in circles. I call it the four hats, right? So you've got these four head spaces that you can occupy. I mean, this is what works for me, obviously. You can approach composition in any way, but for me, you have these four hats, It's the guitarist, the composer, the arranger, and the artist, right? And if you can kind of pick from those four,

and they can inform one another and they can help you move forward. So for example, the guitarist hat, right? You can call upon all of the knowledge you have as a guitarist to help you compose. And that's amazing. Like you learn so much as a guitarist and people never give themselves enough credit for that. Because so often I talk to students, they think, I'm not ready to compose yet. I feel like I need to learn more. I need to learn more theory or I need to learn more guitar pieces or whatever it might be. And...

we're not particularly good, I think, as humans of actually kind of celebrating what's good about ourselves. Like, it's always like focused on the, I can't do that, I can't do that. like, actually, what can you do? And as a guitarist, you end up learning a huge amount. So you've got to, you know, make the most of that and celebrate it and be inspired by it. And you can, whether it be techniques or chords or scales or whatever it might be, like you have a plethora of things to call upon.

Jesse Paliotto (21:56)
Right, right.

Will (22:14)
And then there's the composer hat where you start bringing in these abilities to kind of capture something in music. I mean, for me, it's all about images and scenes or atmospheres that I'm trying to boil down. How would that sound? How can I get that thing, that feeling, that image into music? And then you can call upon other elements of composing like, know, things like structure, for example, or how to harmonize, all of these kinds of things. That's a skill set which is really lovely to have. Then you have the arranger.

Jesse Paliotto (22:25)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Will (22:42)
which is the ability to take what you've created and really fully explore it. I liken it to this thing that is a big deal in the acoustic guitar world, which is arranging pop songs or jazz standards for fingerstyle guitar, right? You've taken a piece of music that exists in one kind of format, if you like, and you try and boil it down onto the guitar. But you can do that with your own music.

Jesse Paliotto (22:54)
Mm-hmm.

Will (23:07)
Like you can, once you've created something on the guitar, like it's quite helpful to occupy the headspace of almost thinking, what if I hadn't written that? Like what if that was something that I've been given the task of arranging, what would I do with it? You know, how could I re-voice things? How could I throw things around? So it's about how you would actually arrange your own piece of music. So once you've developed a melody, remember that melody can be anywhere. You can throw it all over the place. It doesn't have to be stuck in that one place. And then finally the artist.

Jesse Paliotto (23:14)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Will (23:35)
is what we were just talking about there, that intuition, that ability to set out and go, yes, this is what I'm trying to achieve. So having some kind of intention behind the piece, I think, can sometimes help. It gives it direction. So for example, for me, it's quite often to do with capturing something in music. So will be maybe an image or an experience. And then everything can boil back down through that. Is what I'm creating serving the artistic purpose of what's going on? And if it's not, then maybe it does.

Jesse Paliotto (23:44)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Will (24:05)
belongs on the cutting room floor for another day. And the artistic element, I suppose, as well, kind of factors into just what you're...

Jesse Paliotto (24:07)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Will (24:14)
trying to be as a musician, like who you are as a musician and what you're trying to put across from yourself and that then kind of boils down into developing your own sound I suppose and it's always lovely isn't it when you hear a player and all you need to hear is the first few notes of a recording and you think that's that guy because they just have that something unique about them. So basically those four head spaces kind of interact with one another whilst I'm composing and they all help

Jesse Paliotto (24:30)
Yeah. Yeah.

That's a really interesting

kind of mental model for it. That's great.

Will (24:48)
Yeah, I think some of my students have kind of found it quite helpful. I mean, it's a very personal thing, right? But it's quite helpful, I think, to have a few tools available to you to help you on your way. And that's certainly something that helps me on my way. As soon as I get stuck, I'll just think, OK, well, let's now look at it from a different perspective. Let's look at it from the artistic perspective or the arranger perspective.

Jesse Paliotto (25:05)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Will (25:12)
or whatever, you know, so that can be really helpful. And it takes time, I mean, it's taken me years and years and years, like to get to a point where, and look, and it's not, I'm not done either, you obviously, it's a lifelong thing, never-ending journey kind of vibe. And that's part of the fun of it as well, for sure.

Jesse Paliotto (25:19)
Right.

There's a guitarist, Antoine Dufour. I think he's Belgian, forgive me Mr. Dufour if I've got you wrong there. But he had done an album a number of years ago that I thought was really interesting because he's an amazing fingerstyle guitar player. A couple of his tunes like I just love. But he did a double album where he did his compositions, normal fingerstyle arrangement or normal, know, just solo fingerstyle arrangements on disc one. And then he turned them into electronics songs on disc two.

Will (25:37)
Mmm.

Very cool.

Jesse Paliotto (26:02)
So no guitar at all, but just really kind of what you were saying there for a second about what would this look like if I didn't have, if I wasn't restricted on the guitar, I could put the melody here, I could make the drum, the percussive stuff into its own beat. then, so it was a very kind of like interesting study, like, that's like a total insight into his, how his brain would approach doing that extract, the kind of reverse arranging or that reverse guitar process.

Will (26:13)
Yeah.

Yeah,

I love that and I think that's kind of the thing of being quite excited by the fact that once you've created a piece of music, even if it's being created on the guitar, that music now exists, you know, and it can exist in so many different ways.

Jesse Paliotto (26:32)
Mm-hmm.

Will (26:38)
it doesn't have to just live on the guitar in the same way as you can arrange a pop song for acoustic guitar which never necessarily had acoustic guitar in it in the first place for example. It can exist on the acoustic guitar, it can exist in full orchestra, it can exist in brass band, it could exist in like as you say an electronic context. It's kind of cool to be aware of that fact because it can... Yeah exactly that's what it is.

Jesse Paliotto (27:02)
Is that what Innotet is? The Innotet...

Okay, because I think the penny dropped for me or whatever that phrase is. I was looking through some of your recordings and listening to some stuff and realized that maybe all of the songs on the Innotet are actually previous compositions. They've just been scored. Is that right? Okay.

Will (27:19)
Yeah, exactly that.

So yeah, mean the inner-tet thing was always based around my love of strings, basically, know, string sections and string quartets, and how I always just yearned for that sound when I was composing myself. Like the guitar's a great thing, right? But...

it ain't a cello, you know, and it's just like, man, I just need that or whatever, a violin or viola. And it just gives such a different texture to pieces of music, right? So when I was at university,

Jesse Paliotto (27:44)
Yeah.

Will (27:57)
I started playing around with kind of writing for orchestra and string quartet. And I really enjoyed it, you know, and I got the opportunity to play with, you the university orchestra, something that I'd written. By the way, nerve wracking moment, right, which is maybe not not often talked about. Well, maybe it is, but it was it was a nerve wracking for me anyway, was when I'd got this kind of full orchestra score done of one of my pieces, I don't know all myself, I was really excited about it. And then the conductor was like, right, okay, let's do it. Let's do it. Let's get let's get

Jesse Paliotto (28:11)
Yeah.

Will (28:27)
into the rehearsal room and we'll play it. And then I was stood at the front with the conductor, sea of musicians, all with the scores that I'd produced. And I hadn't anticipated it, right? It wasn't a part of the process that I had been aware of, really naively, I suppose, that there'll be all these musicians looking at the parts that I'd written. And the thing that was really killer about it was like, me as an acoustic guitarist have written a part.

for let's say trombone and they're now looking at it. And I'm just thinking to myself, my God, what are they thinking? They might be thinking about this trombone, like who the hell is this guy? What is this part? This isn't a trombone part. for example, because yeah, exactly. Yeah, well that's the problem, man. I this is the thing. And that was what I became acutely aware of is the skill of orchestration and arranging for certain groups of instruments, right? Because I really loved it and we had fun and we played the piece and it was great. And I did the same with a string quartet there.

Jesse Paliotto (28:55)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's not how this works. My instrument can't even do this.

Will (29:23)
together that I'd put together but I was always aware of the fact that I was not one of these players. I did not play violin, viola or cello and I don't have a wealth of experience of writing for those instruments specifically. So when I was doing my own arrangements of the pieces that I'd written I'd have the guitar school that I'd done and then I'd have the ability to kind of basically split that across the

Jesse Paliotto (29:40)
Mm-hmm.

Will (29:51)
the parts for the strings, But what I was doing always was, in my mind, very route one. It was very much just like, effectively, with a few little tweaks here and there, it's the guitar for strings. So as a result, when we did it and we were on this plan, was like, yeah, it's cool, but it's just not.

Jesse Paliotto (30:06)
Right.

Will (30:14)
doesn't have that magic behind it, you know, I feel like the potential is not being realised because of my limitations. And I, this is that as a skill takes years to develop and I'm like, I'm just not, I'm not going to be that because I've got all this other stuff going on. I can't. So fast forward a few years. And after I graduated, I was playing up at the Ullapool guitar festival in the Highlands of Scotland. And I met a wonderful musician by the name of Innis Watson.

Jesse Paliotto (30:16)
Right.

Will (30:43)
who's a great guitarist, a great fiddle player, and a great arranger. And we had a few pints at the pub, and I started talking to him about this idea that I had about string arrangements of my stuff, because I always just, I had these ideas in my head, they just weren't coming out, because I just lacked the ability. And he was like, yeah man, let's just give it a try. So we picked a piece of mine to kind of...

Jesse Paliotto (30:49)
Interesting.

Will (31:10)
give it a try. He assembled like a super group of Scottish string players to make it happen. And when he sent me the first drafts of his arrangement of it, I was like, oh man, dude, this is just completely blowing my mind because not only was he taking the ideas that I had in my head and realising them, he was adding in so many of his own because he knew what the strings could do. Like, it wasn't like just the fact that violins can do this.

Jesse Paliotto (31:25)
wow.

Will (31:38)
Viola can do this, cello can do that. When they come together, this is what they can do. And that kind of knowledge and ability and creative thought and that collaboration, I suppose, was just one of the best feelings. And when we got that recorded and performed it for the first time, mean, was like spine tingling stuff for me. I was completely smitten by the process. And I was like, right, okay, it's album time. Do you know what I mean? So we recorded volume one.

Jesse Paliotto (31:59)
Yeah. Yeah.

I

Will (32:07)
which was back in... Oh, yeah, at the end of 2018 for release in 2019. We performed at the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020, and then obvious things happened. And then we revisited after about five years, Volume 2, which is the album that's very recently come out. And the whole process, like with regarding to the arranging, the rehearsal, the recording, the mixing, the...

Jesse Paliotto (32:25)
Mm-hmm.

Will (32:36)
mastering all of it was just an absolute joy. It really, really was like proper musical dream come true for me because it was just, it's lovely to have that little musical itch that you need to scratch and you finally get to scratch it. It's just like, yes, it's kind of coming to fruition and achieving things that I didn't think were possible musically, you know, because all of the musicians and within us were just lifting it always.

Jesse Paliotto (32:47)
Mm-hmm.

Will (33:05)
ever higher which was just wonderful.

Jesse Paliotto (33:07)
I've got a couple of questions with the process, because this is fascinating to me. That is an itch I have had as well. think, like, especially something about the acoustic guitar, it's already this natural acoustic element. You kind of feel like you're in an infinity with the string section. You're like, hey, we both have hollow bodies with resonant things and strings, right? I'm just, you know, we're kind of like you just you just naturally feel like this could orchestrate. could be bigger. So but it sounds like from a from a

process there is the arranging which You had kind of your classical training I assumed to kind of go back on and do that But then in this really helped take that to the next level There's accessing musicians who could do it well, which he had contacts when you take that into actually like we're gonna record it What is that process like is it simply we just show up at a studio one day I've hired them for a daily rate I put sheet music in front of them. They read it cold and and that's it or is there more iteration to that? Can you just

Will (33:43)
Mm-hmm.

Jesse Paliotto (34:06)
I'm just really curious, what did that really look like in that executions phase?

Will (34:10)
Yeah, so the arranging process took several months up to a year to get the pieces into shape. then when we got up to the studio, just like we did with Volume One, made it very, I thought a very important part of it was that the process was not, as you say, like just here are the dots, play, and then go. Even though that's very efficient and cheaper, it kind of misses out on so much potential, right?

So we had days of rehearsing before we hit the red button, you know, and that rehearsing was not just being able to play it because they can play it. It's like, it's not, that's not the issue here. It's about kind of exploring, trying things out, going, well, what if this, what if that? Everyone was able to put in their own ideas and it would be simple things. It would be like, someone's saying, I reckon this could be done as a harmonic on, you know, vinyl or I think that this texture could be really, really nice. Or I think that this

Jesse Paliotto (34:58)
you

Will (35:07)
this should be thrown up the octave or whatever it might be. It would just be a very kind of collaborative process there. So we'd a load of ideas from a day of rehearsing and we'd have our laptops open with Sibelius up with the scores and everything. Everyone's making notes and then Ines and I at the end of the day would go to the pub.

and we'd sit down with a few pints and we'd work through the ideas that had come to the fore and we'd go, well, what about this? What about that? And actually formalise them, I suppose. And then we'd go back the next day, rehearse a few more tunes, try out some of the ideas that we had formalised, and over that period of time, you end up with...

Jesse Paliotto (35:34)
Interesting.

Will (35:51)
basically just the best version of what it could be because everyone's been able to kind of put their own personality into it and some of my my favorite moments on the album came from that came from those little ideas things that I was never in a million years of thought of like they just wouldn't have been on my radar and they they get thrown into the pot and they just become moments of magic and if you just were if you just had the dots and you put them in front of someone to go play that

Jesse Paliotto (36:11)
Yeah.

Will (36:19)
you'd end up with a very nice result at the end of the day. But that was not what the intention of this project was all about. And I guess we come back to that word again, don't we? And it was like, we had a very clear idea about what we wanted this project to be. Innis and I knew how we wanted to go about it. And that's kind of quite nice. And I think it's quite important in a way, particularly with a project as expansive as this one and as complicated as this one.

It's quite nice to have some kind of a plan of action and knowing what you're aiming for and how the process can help you achieve that. If you just go in and just go, okay, let's see what happens. You could end up with something that is nowhere near what it could be, I suppose. And that process, then even in recording, you record these takes and as you will know, like, you know.

Jesse Paliotto (36:54)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Will (37:12)
one take will feel different to the other and you think, oh, I wonder why. And then you're going to dig into it you think, oh, OK, that's why. Let's explore that a bit further. And.

Jesse Paliotto (37:20)
Was that similarly

like an iterative process where you were doing multiple recordings or by the time you got to that phase, it kind of just doing a couple and you kind of got it fairly quick? How did that go?

Will (37:31)
We did quite a lot of recordings. and we'd do the thing where, I mean, we had this wonderful engineer who's dear friends with all of us, with his cans on, and he was making notes as well. And we would be like, okay. Because Innis and I were kind of operating as...

the producer role in this, but it's a bit tricky when you're actually playing to fully occupy that headspace. So Andrea, who was on the other side of the glass, was also a producer and he was helping with that. So we'd record a few, we'd go into the studio room and just listen and just make notes. And again, everyone had their just, you know.

Jesse Paliotto (37:51)
But yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Will (38:11)
It's a bit more modern these days, obviously. Everyone had their iPads out, sketching things and going, well, this was good. This needs doing again. the thing that made it really another one of the intentions behind this project is we never wanted it to sound like it was just acoustic guitar with strings backing it up.

Jesse Paliotto (38:29)
Right.

Will (38:30)
I just,

we wanted the acoustic guitar to feel like it was part of the ensemble, like on equal footing with everyone else. So sometimes the acoustic guitar comes to the fore, sometimes the strings come to the fore. Like it wanted to have its own identity. It's not just the acoustic guitar with strings. In a way that would be quite easy. Like it would be just like, crank the acoustic guitar up, have some lovely chords under the bottom from the strings, jobs are good, right? But this was way more intricate than that.

And as a result, not just the content of the arrangements, but how they were played, how they were recorded, how they were mixed, all the rest of it was really, important so that you got that balance right. And yeah, I'm really, really happy with how it all came together and what the end result was. was, yeah, just a joy. And it was just fun, man. It's just fun.

Jesse Paliotto (39:07)
Mm.

Yeah.

I know when you were saying like, went, know, and I go back to the pub, have a couple pints and go for notes. I'm like, that just sounds like an awesome day. Like, I'm just hanging out with musicians. Right?

Will (39:26)
Yo dude! man, I I spent

two weeks up in Glasgow right, Ines and I lived together in a flat for that two weeks and

It was just like what I loved about it, right? As I get older, you know, I've got a family and everything else. Like these experiences where you can just dedicate your entire self to one thing. Like that is increasingly rare, right? It's always like, got to do this, got to do that, got to do that. Like you end up with a scatterbrain because of all the different things going on in life. But like the fact that I was literally away two weeks, all like everything, I just lived and breathed.

Jesse Paliotto (39:46)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Will (40:05)
that process. I wasn't doing any other work. I wasn't doing anything else. It was just that. like even in the mixing stage, which happened like after a day off up there, we do a day of mixing, I'd put my headphones on, I'd walk around the streets of Glasgow at night, listening, making notes, and having a few whiskeys. And it was just like, the whole thing was just, yeah, an absolute delight. I feel extremely fortunate and

happy to have been able to do it to be honest because it was just, as an entire experience it was great and I think that comes out in the recording as well.

Jesse Paliotto (40:40)
Yeah,

yeah, it is such an increasingly rare thing. I was working on something last night on a guitar and very focused for a while. And it's like, this is just so unusual just to sit and turn everything off and just dial everything into a very small focused space and just do that one thing. When you had finished the recording, how long did it take you, by the way, to do the actual recording? Is it a few days or a couple weeks?

Will (41:04)
Yeah,

was like the whole process was about two weeks. Not with mastering. Basically we had, I think it was three days of rehearsing and then five days of recording and then three days of mixing, I think. Yeah, exactly. yeah, yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (41:18)
Okay.

Okay, so that was that two week period that you guys were up and about. Okay.

And then the, you ever perform with those musicians? Like have you, so did you guys go and take that show on the road, so to speak?

Will (41:30)
Yeah.

Yeah, I mean it's a challenging project to take on the road. That was not the end goal. It was basically like a really lovely added bonus to be able to. But taking a string quartet and a guitarist on the road is an incredibly expensive thing to do.

Jesse Paliotto (41:37)
Yeah.

RIP.

Will (41:51)
the gigs that I would usually be doing as a solo acoustic guitarist are obviously of a certain level in terms of budget and everything else. So really the gigs that we were doing were festivals where they had a budget and they could make that happen. for stuff like Celtic Connections up in Scotland and the Ollipool Guitar Festival. And there was talk in 2019 and the beginning of 2020 about expanding upon that and we were getting quite close to the idea of doing that.

Jesse Paliotto (41:58)
you

Will (42:19)
But then obviously with the pandemic, they kind of shelved all of that. And since the pandemic as well, you know, I've now got two kids and everything's going to moved on a bit. so we'll be back again performing next year up at the Alapel Guitar Festival because that's the kind of spiritual home of the project, if you like. And it's a lovely gig. It feels like coming home in a way. And it's...

Jesse Paliotto (42:28)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Will (42:43)
As I say, the idea behind the project was not for it to be a live project really, that was not what I had in mind. The idea was really it was a recording project that just was able to create tracks that really fulfilled...

everything that I wanted from a musical point of view. So I mean it really was a kind of a passion project over many many years but I'm thrilled with the results and hey we'll see what happens you know if the opportunity to get a tour together comes around and we get funding and whatever else it is then I wouldn't I certainly wouldn't say no but it's not something that I'm actively pursuing at the moment for you know numerous reasons I'm just enjoying the I've been enjoying the recording element to be honest with this one.

Jesse Paliotto (43:03)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. And it's such a, I was talking with a guitar player, Adam Rafferty. I'm not sure if you're familiar with him and he's, he's a phenomenal player. He'd come out of a jazz background. And so he was telling the story a little bit of kind of the other dynamic where he had been touring with the trio and going to a solo fingerstyle was such a, so much easier to tour because taking the group on the road, paying for everything, organizing it, getting dates, you know, that is, I think like an attraction for a lot of fingerstyle guitar players is like,

Will (43:33)
Mmm. Yeah, yeah.

Mm.

Jesse Paliotto (43:57)
I just have to coordinate me getting to the gig. And if a paycheck comes in, it just goes to me. That's nice, too. And and still for you to go into this project, it very much goes the other way. Like, yeah, I'm having to manage all this. I'm having to pay for all this. I'm having to coordinate a lot of the logistics, even like what you said when you were recording with them, that you're trying to play your own part, which I think is what you meant while listening to this group and managing kind of music production process overall. And that's just a lot to keep.

Will (44:00)
Yeah man, big time.

Mm. Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (44:27)
tabs on, especially when you're doing something very intense and intricate with your own instrument.

Will (44:28)
Yeah.

It certainly is, man, it certainly is. And you're right, mean, it's... At the end of the day, I mean, business is a massive part of this, right? And the only reason we were able to do volume two off of volume one is because volume one, you know, allowed volume two to happen, if you like, which was great. But the other nice thing from a business point of view is that the pieces of music, because they started as solo pieces...

that's how they get toured. I in it's just like, I tour them as solos and I go, by the way, if you'd like to hear this with string quartet, here's the disc or the vinyl. Like it's so it's kind of, there was some, not necessarily that that was like, fun to do with my mind when I was doing it, but it's just, those are considerations, you know, like how would you communicate your music? How do you make, at the end of the day, like how do you make money out of it? Like, and making money out of touring with a string quartet.

Jesse Paliotto (45:00)
Well, you can still do them. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Will (45:27)
I mean it's a big ask and it would have to be really heavily funded and that's a whole kettle of fish that I just don't have the time or mental capacity for at the moment. So for now, as I say, the pieces of music for me, now they have like multiple personalities, like they have their solo kind of guitar element to them and they have their string quartet element to them and...

Jesse Paliotto (45:46)
Right. Yeah.

that are remixes.

Will (45:55)
Yeah,

basically, yeah, that's it. That's it. And I quite like that. yeah, circling back to what we had said a while ago, like it is that thing of reimagining your own music and knowing what you want to achieve with that. I mean, I did another track in a very different kind of ensemble based thing where I had a piece of music which I written on the acoustic guitar which was inspired by...

Jesse Paliotto (46:08)
Mm-hmm, yeah.

Will (46:19)
kind of horn sections, know, like of like funky horn section stuff. And I was like, man, another little musical itch. I want to do it with a horn section. So I did like that, but there was no, I wasn't like, I'm going to tour the horn section. It was just like, this just has to be done. And it was just such good fun. And that's a really weird instrumentation, you know, like kind of acoustic guitar with like, you know.

Jesse Paliotto (46:21)
Okay.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Will (46:45)
saxophones trumpet and trombone but it's just I just I really like that part of the process is like once you've written something knowing that it's not done like there it has life in so many different contexts if you want it to you know

Jesse Paliotto (46:59)
Right. Well, it's a really random question. Do you ever produce music that is strictly through the computer, so to speak? Like, because I can imagine saying like, I want to write something for horns. I can go get a horn library. I can make it pretty good. I can sit here for two days with the keyboard and figure out how to do this. But I don't know if you do that or if it seems like you gravitate very much towards I want real instruments. I want this thing to actually have human beings at the wheel, so to speak.

Will (47:15)
Yeah?

I have dabbled in that kind of thing, right? I remember getting a commission with someone who was like, acoustic guitar and clarinet, and I was like, popping the clarinet part in via a library and everything else. I don't not enjoy it, but I love collaboration. And I think that...

Jesse Paliotto (47:33)
you

Mm-hmm.

Will (47:48)
The thing that really excites me is working with people who live and breathe whatever the world is that I want to work around, you know? And that was the same with Innotet, was the same with that little horn collaboration. Again, it comes back to, you know, yes, I can get the dots on the page, I could do something with it, but it would just be not as good.

Jesse Paliotto (48:06)
Yeah.

Will (48:10)
as it could be because it's just, so I suppose that's where my focus has been. I just love working with other people. Maybe it's just a symptom of the fact that I've built my career being a solo guitarist. I just need more people around me. Yeah, exactly. After all the years of like traveling on my own and like just having hours in the car or on trains or on planes on my own, it's just like, please let's work together.

Jesse Paliotto (48:12)
Yeah.

If I'm going to do something different, it's going to be with people, not just more of myself at a keyboard.

That's such a good point. I love collaboration too, because I feel like that is part of the essence of music, not to be melodramatic about it, but that it is communication. Like this is about people, like this isn't just isolation. Even like one of the thoughts that was on my mind when you were talking about your composition process is you were kind of really, I don't think you were trying to do this, but almost kind of doing away with a myth that people can have that writing music is some solitary loan.

Will (48:51)
Big zone.

Jesse Paliotto (49:09)
Process you're in the you know in the attic by yourself furiously scribbling as opposed to kind of what you described Which was this iterative process with people contributing and you get to this thing which you You say that out loud and you're like, of course, it's like that mean all the great bands like yeah, you've got sting like saying this is how I'm gonna write the song But you got like Copeland in the background making the drums It is a collaborative process like this is all the great music people have listened to for so long and so the that was a really weird example, sorry about that, but the

Will (49:31)
Amen.

I don't know,

it works.

Jesse Paliotto (49:38)
But the

collaborative element, I think, is not just enjoyable, it's also fundamental to doing good music. I think that's the point I'm trying to

Will (49:51)
Yeah, I think so.

Yeah, I think you're right. another thing that I do even with my own solo stuff is if I'm working on a single release or an album release or whatever, I will work with someone on that with a production role. Like for example, I did an album called Dragonflies, Frogs and Bumblebees. And I asked Clive Carroll, who's an exceptional acoustic and classical guitarist, in many ways...

big inspiration to me from the point of view of bringing classical to acoustic as he does that kind of absolutely brilliantly. And the collaborative element in that in terms of producer was way before the recording phase. It was getting into the room and he was very generous of his time and we spent hours together going through the tracks of the album, me playing them and him just giving suggestions and ideas both compositionally and from a point of view of interpretation.

Jesse Paliotto (50:46)
Mm-hmm.

Will (50:46)
and

preventing me from going, those things prevent me from getting tunnel vision, I suppose. You can end up focusing on things if you're just left to your own devices, which are just, you know, like not necessarily all that important.

Jesse Paliotto (50:53)
Yeah.

Will (51:02)
They seem so, but you need to have someone going, no, no. Don't worry about that. Come on, zoom out, zoom out, and just think about it. Have you tried this? Have you tried that? And it's all about just having ideas, different pairs of ears that you trust to help develop. again, I just encourage my students all the time to just...

Jesse Paliotto (51:06)
Hahaha!

Yeah.

Will (51:23)
in whatever they're interested in, just get another pair of ears involved and develop that relationship with someone where you can kind of just share the process a bit because it can be a solitary endeavor, you know, when you're practicing away on your own and you're composing on your own or whatever. And one of the things that I've developed over...

The pandemic was a thing called the college, which is part of my kind of tutoring element, I suppose. And it was kind of built around the idea of bringing together like-minded people from all over the world who may not have as much of an outlet or as many people around them, because it is a niche interest, right? Like it's a niche thing. You might not be in a geographical location which has a load of people that love acoustic fingerstyle guitar. but you if you...

Jesse Paliotto (52:00)
Mm-hmm.

Will (52:10)
zoom out to the whole globe, there's loads. And you bring them together and you share that a little bit. And whether it be like playing in an open mic on zoom or practicing together or doing a bit of a workshop or whatever, it just builds that community thing. It's the thing that I love about workshops, know, getting people together in a room and

you learn as much from the other students as you do from whoever's leading it, because it's just all of this, you add up the years of experience in the room, and it's just like this absolute goldmine of experiences and music and avenues to explore. And you can sometimes feel when you're just on your own, practicing a way and playing a way, you can lack a bit of that, so it's nice to have it if you can.

Jesse Paliotto (52:52)
Can you talk a little bit about some of your educational stuff? I think maybe you could talk even a little bit more about what the college is specifically. And then it sounds like you also do workshops and some in-person stuff. Maybe you could talk a little bit just around what you do educationally. That might be interesting for some folks who want to connect with you more.

Will (53:06)
Yeah, of course.

Absolutely, I love teaching. I really do, in all its different guises really. I kind of loved it before I actively did it because I was attending workshops a lot when I was younger. And just the experience of being in a workshop and being guided and being inspired by someone, just was like, oh man, I'd love to be able to do that one day myself because I got so much from it. And the idea of being able to facilitate that for other people was really exciting.

Well first of all the workshop thing, I mean I've done workshops for many many years in various different iterations whether they be like one dayers or little one hour ones before gigs or more expansive ones across like a whole week and whatever it is I love running them.

Jesse Paliotto (53:49)
Mm-hmm.

Will (53:54)
I love every element of it. love planning them, I love getting the material together, I love being in the space because it presents interesting challenges. You get this group of guitarists in the room together who are all different. Like of course they are, and they'll be at all of the different ability levels, broadly speaking.

Jesse Paliotto (54:04)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Will (54:16)
most of what I do isn't geared to absolute beginners, but that kind of intermediate, it's just really hard to categorise. It's so hard to categorise yourself, are you beginner, intermediate or advanced? It's very difficult. And obviously it's a whole gradient, So you end up with a lot of players in a room who some people will be great at one thing, maybe not so good at the other, and then the other will be the flip side of that.

Jesse Paliotto (54:24)
Yeah, it's a very broad category.

Yeah.

Will (54:43)
And what you have to do is create an experience for these people who, which will give them so much, whether it be inspiration or new pieces or new techniques or new compositional ideas, whatever. So I love that process of thinking, like, what material would work here? What would an advanced player get a lot from that also, like an early intermediate, would be able to get in on and get a lot of value out of and not be intimidated by? So there's that kind of sweet spot in terms of what you're talking about.

which can be an interesting challenge to find, but really satisfying when you get it. The college is like an online platform that I put together via my website during COVID. And it was something that had always been on my mind for quite a while, but I never had the time to do it. And then all of a sudden I looked at my diary at the beginning of 2020 and I was like, everything's been canceled. So yeah, exactly. So let's make this happen finally. And the idea was it's supposed to kind of...

Jesse Paliotto (55:27)
Mm.

Yeah. I got time.

Will (55:40)
offer absolutely everything that I do in as kind of digestible way as possible whilst also building a bit of community, right? So it encompasses basically every single bit of music that I've ever written and the scores behind them, videos behind them, talking about the inspirations of them, but also lots of tuition-based stuff, whether that be kind of technical or more just kind of...

Jesse Paliotto (56:00)
Mm-hmm.

Will (56:04)
I have this part of it which is called musings where we just talk about certain musical things which I think are worth talking about. could be anything from like what happens in a practice room to things like dynamics. know, it's very, very broad. It might come a few courses in there as well like composition courses up there. There's like levels where you can kind of work through a kind of semi-graded system of like certain pieces and exercises. So it presents like this whole and there's the community element as well which is

Like we meet on Zoom regularly throughout the month for various different things. The big one is the Zoom meet where we'll get together and we will basically workshop stuff, talk about what everyone's working on, hear like an open mic so like people perform and we, you know, get special guests along as well to perform and talk which is just the best. I love it.

Jesse Paliotto (56:36)
Mm-hmm.

nice.

Will (57:03)
You get people from all over the globe, various different time zones, some more bleary eyed than others, rocking up and having a great time with that. We have the clinic, which is basically a drop in where if someone has a question or something they're struggling with, they can just drop in into the Zoom and just talk about it and try and get something and go, okay, that's a new angle, which I will lead it. But if there's other people there, they will also throw in their experiences because nine times out of 10, if you're going through something with the guitar,

Jesse Paliotto (57:08)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Will (57:33)
someone else has gone through it or was going through it at the same time, know, so it's just like sharing that is really fun. And then we have this interesting thing which we started this year, which is called Practice Club, which is based around the idea of like, what is like, what is practice, you know, and is it like, how do you approach it? Because it's a big thing, of course, like it's a massive part of the journey as a musician is your practice and

Jesse Paliotto (57:35)
for sure.

Yeah, I love this because this

is actually one of the questions I wanted to ask you about is like what do you think is a good practice routine or are there recommendations? And I imagine what you do with practice club embodies that.

Will (58:11)
Yeah, I mean, I think the thing about practice club was to do with sharing it a bit because practices, as we discussed, can be a very solitary thing. And in Zoom, we do, people will log in via Zoom and we'll just start it off by just talking about what we're gonna be practicing. So everyone will have a different thing that we'll be working on at the time and that we are, gonna try and do this, I'm gonna try and do that. We might talk about some approaches to that, like some things they might be trying in the practice session. And then...

Everyone mutes their microphones but keeps their cameras on and they just practice. And it's an interesting kind of psychological thing that happens at that point. Because what happens is that obviously when you're practicing in normal kind of in real life, I suppose, you can't practice in the same room as someone else who's practicing. It is.

Jesse Paliotto (58:43)
Yep.

Will (59:02)
impractical and deeply annoying if you were going to go down that route, right? But then all of a sudden this opportunity presents itself where you can, kind of. And what happens is that you're practicing away. And one thing that can happen in the practice room is you can drift, right? You can just kind of, you have an idea like, I'm going to do this and then you're like, oh, whatever. You noodle away and suddenly your time's gone. But what happens is, and this is what people have remarked upon, is like, they'll be practicing away. They'll look up and they'll see everyone else practicing away.

Jesse Paliotto (59:31)
Yeah.

Will (59:32)
and

it kind of keeps them focused and kind of engaged with it. So it kind of becomes this weird but kind of cool way of looking at it. And you see someone and like, let's see you see someone who's practicing when they're getting really into it. And you think, yeah, all right, let's go for it. So it just is kind of an interesting thing. And then at the end, we talk about it and we're gonna go like.

Jesse Paliotto (59:34)
Thank

Yeah.

Yeah.

Will (59:55)
you know, what was good about that, what worked, what did you discover, et cetera, et cetera. So it's kind of like a slightly, I suppose it's like a slightly active thing in the sense that you're really talking about what you're gonna do, talk about what you did, and then you kind of experience in a kind of interesting way that other people going through it at the same time. And it's a weird one, man, because it was like...

Jesse Paliotto (1:00:09)
Yeah.

I love that. That's so great.

Will (1:00:21)
It felt kind of when I first kind of was thinking about it, I was like, I think this could be cool. But I think it's also kind of weird. Because of the whole thing of like just having people muted, and just playing, you know, and not engaging with one another in Zoom, you know, usually Zoom, or like anything like this is about engaging with other people kind of actively in that way. But just having a load of people just muted up and just playing guitar, just felt a bit odd. Do you know what I mean? Like, it was just like, is this good?

Jesse Paliotto (1:00:30)
Yeah.

Well, yeah. Like, what are we doing?

Will (1:00:46)
But you gotta try things, Nothing would get done if someone just was like, nah, well, it's too weird. Let's just shelve it.

Jesse Paliotto (1:00:53)
Yeah, right. It reminds me

it feels exactly like like in university you go to the library to study. just you want the environment focuses you. No one's interacting. Everybody's just doing their thing, but somehow it makes you focus.

Will (1:01:00)
Well, that's a good point actually. Yeah, actually

that's a really, really good comparison actually. I hadn't thought about it like that, but you're right. I mean, that's kind of what it is. what people who've, you know, look, it's obviously everyone works differently. It's not necessarily for everyone, but for those who've really kind of worked with it well, they just say like, it's actually kind of quite miraculous what it gives them.

in terms of energy, enthusiasm for that specific amount of time. Because that's the other thing, like, it's in the diary. Like, and that's a fun thing, because practice is like where people just run out of time, don't you? Like, when do I practice? Like, life is busy. You have it in the diary, you log in, and you know you have that amount of time. And someone once said in the other, in one the other day, actually, where they were like, what I love about this practice session that we do in the college, these practice clubs, is that because I'm practicing on Zoom,

Jesse Paliotto (1:01:33)
Yeah. Yes.

Will (1:01:55)
my wife doesn't disturb me. But in my other practice sessions, she'll happily just barge on in and say, would you mind this or what about that, you know, so it's very disruptive. But in this because you know, headphones are on people on the screen, you know, open the door, but like, leave them alone. So it's funny the kind of benefits that come out of it.

Jesse Paliotto (1:01:58)
Yes. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's the serious. Yeah.

I would substitute my kids for the wife, yes, like my kids would like, just, dad's on a call, can't go in there.

Will (1:02:22)
Exactly, man. And it's kind of funny. So I'm really glad I tried it. And it's got legs. it's been really enjoyable. And for me as well. I'll practice away myself. And I'll talk to people about what I'm doing and what I'm trying to do.

Jesse Paliotto (1:02:38)
I love that. It's also very

validating as a guitar player. I would imagine I've obviously haven't participated in these, but the I know like psychologically it's especially if you're playing solo, if you're not playing professionally, so you're largely playing as an amateur at home or as a hobby or whatever. It's very like it kind of happens in the side and it almost doesn't feel like it's validated as part of your day sometimes, which is a bit more of a psychological emotional approach to it.

Will (1:03:01)
Mmm.

Jesse Paliotto (1:03:03)
But you're like, I do the things at work, which, I get paid for. I do the things with family, which I, you know, that's all relational. That's great. And then I go sit in my room or in the garage and I play for 45 minutes and who cares? Like, but that, and that can be, that can kind of wear on you, but to be in an environment where like, you know, like I'm part of a group doing this, there's that validation that we're all doing this together. You know, I can get on camera afterwards and talk about what I learned. Like this has been a process that you get that sort of feedback loop with.

Will (1:03:23)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (1:03:31)
That all feels very cool. I love this. I hadn't heard of somebody doing this. This is a great idea.

Will (1:03:36)
Thanks man, it's been a fun one and I've really enjoyed. And this is the thing about the college, it's developed over years through talking with people and through having these ideas. And it's just as with everything, it's collaborative. it's just, I will just try my best if someone has an idea to make it happen. If someone suggests, could you do something on this? Then I'll create a video or whatever. And every month there's new content that goes up. And it's just, yeah, it's become, I didn't know what it was gonna be when I first.

started it, you never do with these things, but it's become one of the most enjoyable parts of what I do. It's just a really, really fun thing that I've... yeah, it's a good one. And the special guests as well have been so inspiring. We had all sorts come along. So that's one kind of really fun part of the kind of teaching thing that I do. The other thing that I've done recently as well is like, just on that music stand over there, I kind of released a book on exactly what we were doing with classical and acoustic.

It's called expressive fingerstyle guitar techniques and it's basically trying to give the fingerstyle guitarists, steel string players, a...

Jesse Paliotto (1:04:34)
cool.

Will (1:04:44)
way of helping develop musical expression to their playing in a kind of way that is inspired and informed from the classical world but really relevant to the steel string fingerstyle world. So will be just talking about things like tone, dynamic, articulation, phrasing, all of these things, how to make your pieces really musically rich, breathe life into them. And it's all just like lots of musical examples, like full study pieces in there to try this stuff out. hopefully, and the idea is that you

practice this stuff, you develop the abilities that you need to kind of create this expression. And the end goal, I suppose, is that it becomes natural, because that's what musical expression, I think, should be at the end of the day. It should be natural. It should just flow. But I think the only way it can is if you have the ability for that to happen, right? So it's a book designed to give you the ability to hopefully get you to the point where you can...

you know, get that musical expression to be like an integral natural part of your playing rather than things being just kind of... There it is. Like it's... Yeah, exactly. It's just... You just throw it out. It's very kind of monodynamic, monotextual, monotonal. It's like, there's the piece of music. It's like, well, you could get a lot more out of that. Like really a lot. And if you think about the players that you love listening to and how they draw you in...

Jesse Paliotto (1:05:48)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, on or off.

Mm-hmm.

Will (1:06:12)
It's all the other stuff, It's all the other stuff. It's all that magic touch that you get with all of these elements of expression. So that's what that book is. And there's another one that I've got coming out in February, is kind of related to it, but gearing it towards scales specifically. Because scales get a bad rap, And the publishing company Fundamental Changes, who did this one with me.

Jesse Paliotto (1:06:31)
interesting.

Yeah. Yeah.

Will (1:06:41)
the editor said, do you fancy doing a book on scales? And I was like, my initial reaction was no, thank you. But then I was like, you know what, actually, that's the problem. And I want to address that. So this.

Jesse Paliotto (1:06:56)
How do you approach

it differently? I agree, a scale book you're like, if I know my scales, I feel like I'm done and I want to work on something else. How do you change that?

Will (1:07:06)
Yeah, so it's a good question and that was what kind of went around my mind a lot when I was in the process of getting this book together. And for me, my experience of learning scales at the beginning was through the classical thing and you were given reams and reams of scales to diligently learn and memorize and then the examiner, when you go into the exam, would give you a selection of them to play from memory and then that was it. They were never talked about again.

Jesse Paliotto (1:07:17)
Mm-hmm.

Will (1:07:33)
and you go to the next book and you get reams and reams and reams and you learn them all diligently and you look like you develop some elements of fable knowledge through that, you develop your technique, helpful stuff. But the scales themselves remained kind of static entities with no real musical home. They were just on the page and that was it. When I started composing, scales took on a completely different kind of personality to me.

Jesse Paliotto (1:07:48)
Mm-hmm.

Will (1:07:58)
they gave me so much in terms of possibility of what I could do. So for me, one of the things that I love about scales on the guitar is that you can learn the fretboard and you can play them in such beautiful ways if you think about how you voice them. So it's not just route one box shape. You can get these wonderful cascades when you do like strings that kind of cross strings and interest, sorry, scales that cross strings in interesting ways. You can use them as vehicles to create melodies. So there's a bit of that in there.

Jesse Paliotto (1:08:13)
Right.

Mm-hmm.

Will (1:08:28)
as vehicles to develop your attention to detail in terms of articulation, tone, and dynamic. and then they also, the thing that was really interesting to me is they feature obviously all the time in all the music that we listen to, that we don't necessarily think about the fact that, that's a scale or whatever. And they feature beautifully in a lot of fingerstyle repertoire.

Jesse Paliotto (1:08:34)
Mm-hmm.

Will (1:08:54)
but you're not going well, that's a scale. So it's like, the book is basically giving you like a scale, it played in an interesting way.

Jesse Paliotto (1:08:56)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Will (1:09:04)
like maybe not a root one way, you can then use that to, for example, do something like how do you extend that? How do you expand your fingerboard knowledge? But then very quickly, as soon as possible, it's being used in actual music. So there'd be like, this is how this scale has informed the creation of this little bit of fingerstyle guitar playing, right? So you hear these scales in amongst the kind of textures that you would hear in fingerstyle, whether it be like basic complements and chord harmony, you've used them creatively, right? And then when it will come to

Jesse Paliotto (1:09:16)
Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Will (1:09:34)
playing for example like you learn the scale shape you learn how to articulate it really really well and then you learn how to how a melody can be derived from that and then you play it and you add all that lovely detail to it so it's kind of just taking the scale thing but getting musical satisfaction and like relevance to it like as soon as possible rather than it being like here's a whole list learn these and go on your way

Jesse Paliotto (1:09:54)
Yeah.

Will (1:10:03)
It's like, learn this, but let's really dig into it and let's see what we can actually get from this. Because we can get a lot from it. We can get technique, we can get fretboard knowledge, we can get articulation, and we can get creativity in terms of fingerstyle playing. So it just is trying to really get every ounce of music out of the scales that you learn rather than just sticking on the page, gathering dust.

Jesse Paliotto (1:10:07)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah,

it, I, you know, it'd be interesting. I don't know if you did this, this might be not kind of the way you learn intervals, but I remember learning intervals and trying to memorize the sounds and you would kind of like associate an interval with a famous piece of music to learn. It's like the, like a minor six interval is like Marian's theme.

Will (1:10:45)
Okay, yeah, yeah, I know exactly what you mean. Yeah. Yeah

Jesse Paliotto (1:10:46)
And so you can, okay, that's my understanding. But

like scales, but interesting, like where are famous places that a scales used? Because they are everywhere that the building blocks of melodies. And so like, there's gonna be places where you're like, which is like an arpeggio. And so you'd be like, okay, so that's an arpeggio. And I could identify that. But is there stuff for scalar movement and everything that would help you be like, this is especially like it.

Will (1:11:04)
Yeah

that's what that is.

Jesse Paliotto (1:11:11)
in my head's a little bit in like a jazz world where people really struggle with modes and how are they applicable. But you show up in places where you're like, they're using that note instead of this other one to get this different effect in this melody. That's how you would use it. I just make my brain fire on a few different cylinders than normal here.

Will (1:11:23)
Mm.

Yeah,

that's kind of it, isn't it? It's the idea of just being able to take that knowledge and kind of just take it to that next step and actually apply it in the real musical world where it's actually enjoyable because I think particularly in the fingerstyle guitar world, scales really suffer. I don't think that many fingerstyle players...

Well, certainly, you know, when I've been running workshops, you I'm talking about them, most people be like, I don't really play scales, because in the fingerstyle world, they are quite abstract things, because in the repertoire that you're playing, or like the way that you're kind of...

Jesse Paliotto (1:11:55)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Will (1:12:05)
getting your guitar playing out there isn't necessarily feeling very scale based. It's not necessarily a very improvisation heavy thing like you would find in jazz. Obviously there's the tune playing of flat picking that is much more scale based but in the fingerstyle world it's not so much. It's very... Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (1:12:21)
It's very reductionist. you have to like

fingerstyle is often about doing multiple things at once, not about just doing one thing. Like I'm just going to play this scale and as a fingerstyle like I need stuff with it. I need a bass note or some ringing notes.

Will (1:12:25)
Yeah.

Dude, I mean,

absolutely, man. I couldn't have said it better myself. And I actually did a really fun recording project at the beginning of this year, which was exactly that. One note at a time. They were tunes, beautifully orchestrated around them. But my playing...

Jesse Paliotto (1:12:47)
gotcha.

Yeah.

Will (1:12:50)
I was playing fingerstyle, but it was one note at a time. And that went into this book because I was like, it gives you this wonderful opportunity to work on the fundamentals because you get these fingerstyle players and you can play wonderfully kind of complicated textual things. But can you nail a melody? Like, can you just play a tune? But like really play it because other instruments, that's their whole thing, like one note at a time. And they do it so well because of the attention to detail thing. Fingerstyle guitarists are like,

Jesse Paliotto (1:13:13)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Will (1:13:20)
or God, no, no, no, no, no, no, Yeah, like Travis Picking, can we do bit of that? It's kind of like, well, yeah, it's a nice skill to develop because obviously everything you do feeds into everything you do, right? And to develop that fundamental ability to kind of get a really, really nicely sounding kind of tune, that one note at a time vibe.

Jesse Paliotto (1:13:21)
feel so exposed.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Will (1:13:41)
It's really fun, so there's a bit of that in the book as well, of course, and then how that kind of features into pieces. then, yeah, I guess that's it, because I get the overall kind of direction of fingerstyle playing is very repertoire driven. It's like, want to learn this piece, oh, that's a cool tune, I want to learn that.

So it's trying to keep it relevant to that, you because that is what most fingerstyle players are all about. They want to play the cool tune or arrange the song that they want to arrange in a fingerstyle way. I get it. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that at all. But I think scales can be a part of that if they're looked at in the right way, rather than just like reams of them that you just kind of fairly mindlessly go through, you know. So, yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (1:14:18)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

That's so much teaching material. It seems like quite a bit of your time must be into that, because developing books and stuff, is that time consuming or is it fairly? Yeah.

Will (1:14:39)
It is time consuming. Yeah, it

is. It's time consuming until it's not. And then like, so you kind of you end up putting in a huge amount of time into the creation of the book, and then it's done. And then and then it's like, you just it just does its thing, you know, which is an interesting thing. And then obviously, from a business perspective, it's like, yes, there's a there's the upfront time. But then it's just, you hope that it's successful, and it's just then it's ticking over, do you know what mean? So like, it is it is time consuming, but it is

Jesse Paliotto (1:14:49)
right.

Will (1:15:08)
again it comes back to what you enjoy and I really enjoy the challenge of it because it's a fun thing to do.

thinking about how is someone going to be using this book? What is the most valuable thing for someone else to get from this? And I guess with both of these books, they're books that I kind of wish I had, like genuinely, like I wish I had them when I was learning at a certain phase because it's going to take me a long time to get to where those books are and I'm hoping that they might just fast forward that process a little bit for a few people. And certainly the response from the first one's been really positive and I'm really

Jesse Paliotto (1:15:28)
Yeah, right.

Yeah.

Will (1:15:45)
pleased that people are getting a lot from it because I think there's a lot of legs in that in the fingerstyle guitar world to be honest. think there's still a lot more of that kind of shared experience between the classical and acoustic that can go on and inform both for sure.

Jesse Paliotto (1:15:58)
Mm-hmm.

I that. I know we're getting up on time a little bit here. I had a couple quick questions I thought I could hit you with at the end. These are just, I mean, they don't have to be quick. If you want to do long answers, you can do long answers. But I just wanted to ask a couple quick things we could wrap up on and start to maybe close in just a few minutes. so let me take a left turn. Sorry for the hard left on this. But what are you listening to right now?

Will (1:16:07)
Of course. Short Jesse.

No, I'll do my best.

Jesse Paliotto (1:16:26)
I don't know if you do Spotify or Apple Music or if you're a vinyl person, whatever, but what's on your playlist or on your in your player right now?

Will (1:16:33)
So I do use Spotify and I know that's contentious amongst musicians but that's a whole other topic which we won't get into but I listen to, and this may be surprising based on the conversations that we've been having, but I listen to an awful lot of electronic music and the reason for that is because I like to listen to music to kind of switch off a bit and

Jesse Paliotto (1:16:38)
Yeah.

right on.

Mm-hmm.

Will (1:17:01)
When I listen to, I mean love listening to all sorts of chords and I love listening to a lot of piano works and I obviously love listening to guitar works as well but I find it quite hard sometimes to kind of switch off of that because my brain's a little bit too, what are they doing there? What's that? that's cool. So it starts slipping into work.

Jesse Paliotto (1:17:14)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Will (1:17:22)
like before I know it, know, so my brain's kind of on. But to switch off, I like listening to electronic music. There's artists like, um, Caribou, Fortet, um, those guys. Yeah, yeah. And what I love about that is I can switch off to that because I can appreciate it for the music and I'm not analysing it, like, too much. I love the textures of it, like, massively, and I can just, like...

Jesse Paliotto (1:17:26)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. I love Forte.

Yeah, I was gonna say four,

10 sort of defies analysis to some degree too. I don't know caribou as well, although I know of them, like the, at some point you're like, just enjoy it. Just lean back and enjoy it. You're not. Yeah.

Will (1:17:49)
yeah. Yeah.

I mean totally man, totally

and that's what I love about it, it just allows me to just kind of not worry about it. like, I don't want to get into the weeds about how this was created, I don't want to know, I don't want to take a look behind that curtain, I don't care man, what you've created is just fantastic, I love it, I just want to listen to it. So that's the kind of thing that I can listen to to like properly unwind and that will be whilst I'm doing other bits and bobs. If I'm working I just can't listen to stuff that's gonna kind of

Jesse Paliotto (1:18:15)
Yeah.

Will (1:18:22)
trigger my brain to go, like, and that's kind of cool now, you know, do you know what I mean? So like, that's the kind of thing that I would be listening to a lot. You know, and what I'm listening to at the moment just for kind of, kind of sake of unwinding, I suppose.

Jesse Paliotto (1:18:36)
I love it. Are there any new musicians that you've discovered recently or old musicians that maybe you knew about but you've just kind of recently discovered and started digging? Anybody that's kind of like, I'm super into this person.

Will (1:18:47)
Oh, good one. I'm trying to think about this. I kind of want to give a shout out to kind of some of the guitarists that I know who are kind of really just doing great work at the moment because they are kind of new. like, for example, like there's a great German guitarist called Zunke Meinen, who I just think, I mean, we've gigged together and we've done quite a bit together and he's working so...

Jesse Paliotto (1:18:56)
Yeah, do it.

Will (1:19:10)
so hard, like so brilliantly and he's just from a compositional perspective and a playing perspective he's just I feel like he's kind of out there on his own like to be honest like he's just he's doing this wonderful wonderful thing he also loves collaborative work so I'm not sure have you come across him yourself at all no yeah Zunkerweinen Zunker which is an interesting name right so it's the it's S O with the two dots is that that umlaut I can't I'm not quite sure

Jesse Paliotto (1:19:25)
Yeah. No. Say his name again.

yeah. Yeah.

Will (1:19:39)
Anyway,

over the dots, N-K-E, Minen. Or you can spell it the S-O-E, N-K-E. Pronounce it kind of zunker. I'm not German, so I'm not getting it perfect, but that's kind of the vibe.

Jesse Paliotto (1:19:42)
Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Will (1:19:53)
And yeah, he's just doing fantastic, fantastic work. His guitar playing is just second to none, but the thing that really excites me about him, and this is the thing that really gets me going actually in the guitar world specifically, is the kind of the original music thing. People who are cultivating their own sound and like...

digging into it and I think Zunga is doing a really really great job with that. It's an exciting time actually before that kind of thing in the acoustic guitar world at the moment. Some brilliant players composing a lot which I love because there is and there has been a big focus towards arranging in the acoustic guitar world and that's how a lot of the acoustic fingerstyle guitar world has really exploded is via arrangements which is great like don't get me wrong I love it brilliant brilliant stuff and a real art to that as well but

Jesse Paliotto (1:20:29)
Yeah.

Yeah, that's a point. Yeah.

Will (1:20:42)
That's never got me quite as excited as hearing something which is just an original composition by someone who you just go, man. That is just so fresh and interesting and like nothing else. I get a real kick out of that.

Jesse Paliotto (1:20:49)
Mm-hmm.

The it's interesting the arranging. I know I was doing quick questions, but I'm veering chasing that comment you just made a little bit because I don't know if I've ever thought about it so starkly that. Fingerstyle guitar, especially over the last couple of decades that I've really engaged with it, has been so arrangement driven. I think that's because you take like Michael Hedges and you take the average person and there's a wide gulf between the ability for somebody to really appreciate that. They're like, what the heck is going on with this dude?

Will (1:21:03)
No, let's do it. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Jesse Paliotto (1:21:28)
He's just going nuts on guitar playing stuff that I don't understand. And all I want to listen to is Stevie Wonder. Like, come on. And so I feel like what fingerstyle guitar players have done in order to bridge that gap has been like, well, what if I play this song that you love, but I do it with the Michael Hedges craziness and techniques, but you recognize it, right? And then you can actually show it for a gig and get people who will listen rather than just look crazy at you.

Will (1:21:31)
Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

You're totally right, man. It's a way into the world, isn't it? It's a way to make it accessible. And it's the way that's going to really explode the popularity of that particular type of guitar playing. And as I say, I think it's fantastic. I mean, I'm, from my own personal point of view, like the thing that excited me right at the word go, right when I got that first spark, like Antonio...

Jesse Paliotto (1:21:55)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Will (1:22:16)
he wasn't doing arrangements, he was doing his thing. They were his pieces and I just got such a kick out of it. And it's not like I'm saying like that, arrangements aren't valid or they're not good or whatever. They totally are and I love that side of the guitar as well and I've done plenty of arrangements myself but for me personally, the thing that's always given me a kick is just hearing something which is completely new.

Jesse Paliotto (1:22:19)
Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Will (1:22:42)
And I don't think there's anything quite like it. Even going to gigs, mean, obviously the thing is you usually go to gigs to see the acts that you know, and you want to hear the songs that you know, and I get that. But some of my favourite gigging experiences have been seeing bands or acts or artists where I've never heard them before, and they blow my mind. those are the moments that I will always remember. I think there's something really special about that. yeah, so when a guitarist comes along who's doing something which I think is really unique and quite original,

Jesse Paliotto (1:22:48)
Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah.

Will (1:23:12)
and doing it so well I'm like yeah that's cool I get a kick out of that.

Jesse Paliotto (1:23:15)
Yeah,

the one that's blown my mind a little bit right now in the the world of German fingerstyle guitar players is Wolfgang Mötschbühl.

Will (1:23:25)
okay, that rings a bell. I'm not sure if I know too much of his stuff though, actually. I think I've seen a few videos.

Jesse Paliotto (1:23:30)
He's worth checking out for sure. Great player and I there's a lot of different genres. He's got a recording, I'm gonna mess it up, but I think it's Etudes. I'm not getting the whole title of the album correctly. I'll throw it in the show notes for anybody who wants to look later, but he's doing original stuff and it's just great. You're just like, oh yeah, this is fresh, it's new, it's interesting, it's technically amazing, but also just really cool sounding.

Will (1:23:42)
Yeah, nice one.

Mm.

Yeah man, mean I'll definitely check that out because that is, yeah that's great. Yeah so it's another example isn't it, it's just quite an exciting time for the acoustic guitar, the fingerstyle guitar because there's just so much good stuff going on out there and you know some people would be going down the road of saying maybe it's getting bit saturated or whatever but I'm like bring it on man, there's enough room for everyone here. So I think it's great, I think it's great.

Jesse Paliotto (1:24:07)
So much.

Yeah.

Yeah, very much so. Alright,

so last quick hit question. If you could buy any guitar, piece of gear, money's no object, but you're like, I would actually like to really get one of these. Is there anything that you would run out and grab today? This is a very gear nerd question.

Will (1:24:37)
I would love... yeah,

totally, totally. mean, this isn't going to be acoustic guitar, actually. It's actually going to be electric guitar, funnily enough, because I'm very fortunate with my acoustic guitars and I don't feel like I need too much more in that regard. But there's an electric guitar builder called Verso Instruments in Germany and they build the most fascinating, wonderfully designed electrics.

Jesse Paliotto (1:24:45)
Okay.

Will (1:25:04)
they are kind of like a sheet metal curved body with magnetic pickups which are literally magnetized to the body so you can actually move them.

So you can have different Verso instruments. Yeah, and you look at them and you go that's mad like it's just like one of those one of those designs you think that's just bonkers But I just I love the design of them I love that kind of interesting innovation when it comes to pickups Where you can kind of literally do whatever the hell you want with them You could put them under the strings you could put them partially under the strings You can move them wherever you want because they're just magnetized to the thing you can fully customize the setup They're all custom-built and I've been having kind of like

Jesse Paliotto (1:25:17)
Interesting. What's this called? Verso? Okay.

Yeah.

Will (1:25:46)
looking at them on and off for ages and myself and Tom Sands who's the guitar who built the guitar that I play most frequently at the moment, we share a bit of a love over that particular brand and we're like man...

Jesse Paliotto (1:26:00)
That seems like

a potential disaster waiting to happen at a live show. Like you accidentally knock your pick up.

Will (1:26:06)
Dude yeah exactly so

I mean I'm just all of that just factors into I'm just I just want one I just want I want to experience that I want to I want to just kind of feel what it's all about you know because I see them I just think dude that's just so cool so it's something quite left field it's quite different right but I just I like the

I like the design element, I like the slightly quirky approach to that process because we talked about how acoustic builders have exploded, obviously electric builders have as well, and you have quite a lot more freedom I think in the electric guitar world to do absolutely bonkers stuff. And I think that those ones, just immediately grabbed me as both being pretty beautifully designed things.

Jesse Paliotto (1:26:39)
Yeah, totally.

Will (1:26:51)
but with a really interesting and unique kind of angle on that particular thing of get like pickups and the freedom that you have with them. that's what I would be commissioning straight away if I had all the money, yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (1:27:04)
I love it. You're encouraging me a little bit, maybe not in good

way. I'm in the LA area and so in a few weeks we've got NAMM, which is the big kind of premier music gear show happening just a couple hours south of me. And I'm always like, are you gonna go down to it? I'm like, I don't know, it's kind of crazy. But the cool thing about it always is the highlight for me is checking out all the, they have like usually one section that is like independent luthiers. And so they'll just do like their most

Will (1:27:11)
Yeah. of course. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Mm.

Jesse Paliotto (1:27:33)
brilliant work and they get like a little table and they can show three guitars and you see super cool stuff or you get people that just have nuts designs that this is their chance to show it off and it's always really interesting what people do.

Will (1:27:40)
Yeah, I love it.

I think that's fascinating, I those big shows, they're cool for that, right? And we've got a few, obviously not on the same scale as NAMM over here in the UK, but we're also doing like a really little something-something here for the luthier community in the UK. Myself and Tom and a few other luthiers have banded together to kind of create a kind of gathering to kind of give people the opportunity for that because...

Yeah, you touched on it, they're individual luthier. There's not as many opportunities to showcase their work in that way. And yeah, we've organised a little thing called String Break next spring.

Jesse Paliotto (1:28:12)
Mm-hmm.

nice. I love that. That's

great branding.

Will (1:28:26)
courtesy of Tom there, is brilliant. And yeah, the idea was just kind of getting a load of builders together, a few musicians together, and then get all the punters in. And it's a very kind of relaxing, it's being held at a brewery. beer will be flowing and it's gonna be a really relaxed, very chilled thing, but a nice way to celebrate that particular element of like the unique things that the individual luthiers can bring to the table.

Jesse Paliotto (1:28:52)
That's one of the primary. I don't know what's right way to frame this, but like obstacles I run into with with good guitars is where do you see them and then what do you try them? You don't. It's very hard to have even in being in LA. It's very hard to have access to a lot of stuff and then even this display down at NAMM that's going to happen in a few weeks. Can't try him. And so if you were seriously like I would imagine from the luthiers perspective, that's a major gap is like how do I get serious players?

Will (1:29:01)
Yeah, big time.

Right.

Jesse Paliotto (1:29:18)
to engage with my guitar and actually realize how great it is. So like what you guys are doing, that sounds amazing. I think those types of opportunities, I wish there were more of them. That's so cool.

Will (1:29:22)
Mmm.

Yeah,

totally man. We hope that this will be the first of many of that kind of thing and that hopefully more will pop up. Because that's the thing, I get asked questions all the time about guitars. You know, from people who are saying, oh what do you think of this, what do you think of that? And my go-to response is the most unhelpful one for so many people, which is like...

you gotta go and play them man, you gotta go and play them like I can't there's only so much I can say there's only so many recordings you can listen to and I'm not going to be telling you what to buy man like okay I don't want that responsibility like so yeah exactly so you gotta go and play them but then but then they come up with like well how and it is it's true like I'm sorry it's really hard I know I get it like it's is not easy to come by so these events are at least a little bit of a way of having a little beacon to kind of

Jesse Paliotto (1:29:56)
Yeah. Then you're to hate me when you don't like it six months from now.

Will (1:30:16)
know, gather around to hopefully take off quite a few in one go and there will be an emphasis on people trying these instruments and having a quiet space to go where you can kind of actually have some time with them and try and understand what they're all about. So yeah, hopefully more of this will start appearing all over the place to help service that really like booming part of the industry really is pretty exciting.

Jesse Paliotto (1:30:42)
Yeah, I love that idea. If I could go book a bunch of like 15 minute trials, like, I'm going to try out this whatever Bozendorfer. Yeah, yeah. Just like I'm there all day, man. Keep the beer coming and I'm ready to go. So as we just kind of wrap up here, Will, where should people if they want to connect with you online, any places that they should go find you?

Will (1:30:48)
That would be sick, man, wouldn't it? It would be like a guitar nerd's dream, wouldn't it?

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, look, I think my website wouldn't be a bad starting place. WillMcNichol.co.uk. I'll just pop my name into Google, it'll be up there. And then obviously the usual kind of social media kind of machines that are around that I'm kind of on like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube as well, of course. So, you know, I'm certainly easily found if you want to find me. Let's put it that way. So yeah, but I think that if you want to really

to really dig in a bit, then the website's probably the place to go because everything is there. That's on my website, yeah, and all the information's there. You navigate to that very, easily. And you'll see the courses up there and do online tuition, like one-to-ones on Zoom and things like that. Like I say, everything is via the website, so that would be the easiest place, the one-stop shop.

Jesse Paliotto (1:31:43)
To join the college, how do you do that? OK.

Excellent. It's been so great to chat, man. I wish we had another hour. I have so many more ideas, questions, thoughts. Any final words or anything you want to leave folks with? Otherwise we can wrap up.

Will (1:32:07)
Yeah

Well, I just wanted to say how much I've enjoyed it, Jesse. I really appreciate it. Some really, really lovely conversations to dig into. And thanks so much for inviting me to be a part of this. I really do appreciate it,

Jesse Paliotto (1:32:26)
Absolutely,

absolutely. Thanks everyone for joining us. I'm your host Jesse Paliotto and I love talking about making music here on the Guitar Journal. Yeah, thanks everybody. Thanks Will and we'll catch you guys all next time.