"Steve Vai Told Me: 'I Can't Get The Tone You Get Out Of Your Fingers'" - Adrian Vandenberg Reveals the Secrets Behind the Whitesnake Years

Morning, Adrian. Thank you for your time. How are you doing?

Doing great. How about yourself?

Not too bad. I'm enjoying the nice grey skies of England at the moment. Where
are you calling from?

The Netherlands. I'm still in Holland. It's raining as usual. And I got a festival coming up with my band tonight and tomorrow and it's the summer season, so there's lots of festivals all over Europe. This evening it's in the northern part of Holland, called Friesland, which is one of the most northerly provinces. It's gonna be a chilly thing, I suppose, because the weather sucks.

How do you fare in playing in cold weather?

Well, usually it's not my favourite thing. When it's really cold, I mean, today is not too bad, it's gonna be 15 degrees celsius or something, but usually I have a tendency to walk around like Michael Jackson with one glove on my left hand to keep it warm. Once you're on stage, once you're playing and you run around and then it usually turns out to be okay.

I'm sure you have plenty of experience of that indeed. You got the ‘My
Whitesnake Years' tour in the US in August with Mike Mendoza and Vinnie Moore playing some of the Whitesnake material and a variety. Is there any preparation coming up for that, and what's it been like to revisit that material?

We've been doing it with my band for about seven or eight months now, which is a lot of
fun, because before that I hadn't played the material in 30 years, believe it or not. It's pretty eye-opening because, of course, as a human being and as a player you evolve. I look at it slightly different than I used to at the time, in the sense of when we toured the world, playing that kind of material in those days, especially the tour with Steve Vai, and I shared the guitar duties, I felt that I had to prove something, and right now I don't really look at it that way. I feel a lot freer playing it the way I feel it now. That gives me a much more relaxed state of mind when I'm on stage.

I was gonna say, with the revisiting of the material now, with the experience
you've had, what's notable that has changed in terms of actual playing? Do you ever go back to learning this stuff again? Are there moments where you can see the younger Adrian in there trying to get out? Or what's your relationship to the material been?

Interesting question because the biggest difference is basically that since I had this wrist
accident at the time that prevented me from playing on the Slip of the Tongue album. It appeared to be the cause, and I only found out in 1999 that it was due to a car crash that I had in the '80s, which I developed a whiplash at the time, but it wasn't called a whiplash at the time. It was called a pain in the neck. And I had apparently two neck hernias that slowly but surely compressed the nerves that triggers your index finger and your thumb on my right hand. So that made me lose my pick more and more. So I'm teaching myself, and that's how I've played the last few years — I use my nail or nails as picks, basically. I'm blessed with pretty thick nails, so it's an interesting journey because I had to change my technique, which I find fascinating because it gives you a different slant on what you wanna express as a player. I've always been known as a rather melodic
player, and that's apparently something that people call your identity or your trademark, so to speak. This actually made me focus more on that aspect of my playing. Basically coming back to what I tried to explain earlier, I feel freer to play whatever comes up in my mind instead of, "Oh, man, I gotta show people what I can do." That time is long behind me. In the early days with Vandenberg that was more the case, I suppose. But playing with my nails, actually I've really started to like it. It has its limitations of course, because you can't do the really fast stuff that I used to do sometimes. But it opens up other avenues and it also gives me the opportunity to have a different attack on the strings whenever I want it. It can sound a little bit more glassy. And
the funny thing is the second Vandenberg album in 1984, I think it was, I played some of the solos with a coin. That gave a very ferocious attack, and I can replicate that with my nails if I hit the string at a certain angle.

Nice — that's another advantage. It sounds like there's more of a physical
connection to the string, which I guess is far less stuff in between you and the sound.

Exactly. And one of the things that put me on that path was Freddie King, who was one
of the blues players that got me into playing. Freddie King and BB King. Eric Clapton got his style from those guys, and Albert King especially. Stevie Ray Vaughan, all those guys got it from these guys. And I always wondered when I was starting out 16, 17 years old or something how Freddie King got his specific trademark sound. And I found out years later, because there was no YouTube in those days, that he played with his fingers. And of course, my all-time favourite player together with Hendrix is Jeff Beck, and he's been playing with his fingers for ages. And of course Richie Kotzen. There's more players who play like that, so that gave me the courage to slowly but surely change my technique.

Well, I know I understand you're a painter as well, but the metaphor of a brush
and the pick and how you physically play.

Like I mentioned Richie Kotzen and Jeff Beck, they're completely different styles of
player and when we talk about the guitar pick it leads to a certain way of playing that makes people sound, I mean, people still sound unique but similar.

I imagine it gives you a whole different tact in terms of how you approach the
material you've written before, and it's much more unique to you. Do you find there's any riffs that you've had to re-engineer because of that technique?

Absolutely. I have to do more with my left hand obviously for the faster stuff. Which I
did anyway. I did quite a lot of hammer-ons in the early Vandenberg days, because I didn't know that there was another way, basically. My right hand has never really been the most active, even though I did a lot in those days a lot of staccato with the right hand muting whenever I wanted. But some really fast stuff at the time that I did, well, for those days it was really fast, I used a combination of the two. And so since this new technique came up, I do more stuff with the left hand. Hammer-ons and pull-offs and all that stuff. And at the same time what is the
difference, a big difference between how Richie and Jeff Beck play, I really need big rhythm sounds because I love big rhythms, AC/DC, Eddie Van Halen, you name it. I've always loved solid rhythm playing, and so you cannot do that with the flesh of your thumb or like Ritchie has a mellower tone of course because he basically uses his fingers more than his nails as far as I can tell. Jeff Beck too, but Jeff barely plays rhythm. He kind of strums his strings a little bit, but it's mainly single-string stuff that he does. But I need those big rhythms, and also I want that attack in my solos when I need it. So I don't use the flesh of my thumb and index finger basically at all.

Okay. It's all nails.

And again lucky me, I got these thick nails and I put a hardener on it. Especially if you
have a bunch of shows, on a tour or something, then I really need to put the hardener on because when I hit those big, big rhythms, it wears down pretty quickly.

Especially on the lower strings, of course. I guess you never lose guitar picks
now. You don't have to worry about them.

One less thing to worry about.

Get on with the playing.

Adrian Vandenburg: True.

With the tone — I mean, I get the era of Slip of the Tongue, that era of the riffs,
big heavy riffs, huge wall of sound. I'm just assuming that's the Marshall thing, the classic ‘into an amp, out the speaker, through a microphone’ — getting that, translating that heaviness. What gear are you favouring at the moment to help you achieve that?

I'm using the same gear actually. When I fly in for shows, or for the last couple of tours
in the States, what I did together with my guitar tech and front of house engineer was sample my favourite Soldano that Mike Soldano custom made for me, and one of my favourites is an early '70s Plexi. I didn't even take that one on the road because I don't want it to get damaged. But we sampled those two and recreated the balance I used to do when I had that stuff on the road in the Whitesnake days. The combination of a Plexi Marshall and the Soldano — so we sampled it and put it in a... what's the name of the thing again?

The Quad Cortex?

Quad Cortex, yes. So we set the balance how I used to do it on the live shows and in the
studio, and that works out really nice because it's reliable. When you don't have a soundcheck on a festival or whatever or those fly-ins for one show and I don't wanna drag those Plexi Marshalls across the world. When you're in the studio and you put the amps up and I put the Cortex right next to it, there's still a little difference of course in directness of the connection between you and the amps, but in a live situation it's not that big. And for me the main thing is that I feel comfortable playing it, so it loses a little bit of that attack and a little bit of the
directness. But I gain in predictability — I've got my sound always. For the front of house guy, Raymond, it's great. I'm quite happy with it actually.

That's great. How do you monitor that? Because one thing I use a Quad Cortex.
I do some stage shows and there's the in ear options, there's the stage monitor, but some people have an amp as a
kind of slave behind them. How do you prefer to use the Quad Cortex in that sort of situation?

Yeah, I've tried to get used to in-ears. I still find it a little bit too much — it feels like my
amplifiers are in a different room. So I use earplugs and I have my wedges and side fills blasting, because I need to feel of course. You know how it goes. You wanna feel that tone. The wedges and the side fills are blasting, and I have my Marshall cabinets behind me that also have quite a reasonable level. But I always check when we have a soundcheck with my front of house guy that it doesn't bother him because I'd rather have the guitar blaring through the PA than that little tunnel of Marshalls that reaches only the first 20 metres, with the sound getting thinner and thinner. I'm really happy with the sound. The cool thing is that sometimes when we have a non-festival where my sound engineer records it and I can sit in the venue and hear it blast out of the speakers. I
go, "That's my sound. It's pretty cool." I really enjoy touring with it, but whenever I have the chance, for instance when we play Holland or something, I regularly bring my real stuff, you know, the Soldano and one of my Marshalls, to get my feet back on the ground and to see if I can fine-tune the Cortex in the end. Like we talked about before, as a player, you hear that stuff and you feel that different, but in the big picture nobody does. It's more about, as always, what you put onto the strings. One of my biggest eye-openers on that in that respect was when we were rehearsing in 1990, what was it in '92 or something, with the band I had together with Tommy Aldridge, Rudy Sarzo, and Ron Ingebrisken: Manic Eden. It was like a heavy blues rock band. We released one album. When we were rehearsing for the album in Palm Springs, my guitar tech used to work for
Eddie Van Halen, and Eddie and him were golfing in Palm Springs. What else would you do there? You golf, I guess. I don't, but a lot of people do. So Eddie came in with my former guitar tech, Rudy Laren, and Eddie picked up my practice Japanese Stratocaster that I always drag with me. Even without amplification, Eddie picked it up and he did some of his stuff. You could tell it was Eddie. Without an amplifier, just the way he hits the strings and his timing and all that stuff, you go ‘geez’. That's how it is in the end, no matter what you use. I remember reading an interview with Ted Nugent or something, where he asked Eddie, "Can I play your amplifier?" And Eddie said, "Of course. Go ahead." And he said, "Man, I didn't sound like Eddie at all." We all know that that's how it goes, whether it's Brian May or Eddie or Jeff Beck or you name it. The equipment and the guitar is, of course, a means to translate what you express. But no matter how many people take the Eddie Van Halen modification by Jose Arredondo, I know that Mick Mars had all his amplifiers done by Jose and he didn't sound anything like Eddie. That's not how it works. There's a big industry out there of selling people gear so they sound a certain way, but no one can be anyone else but yourself, and that's the ultimate lesson, I guess, here is to lean into that and use the gear  that helps you just get on with the job at the end of the day. That's it.

I was gonna say, with sharing the stage with Steve Vai back in the '80s, if you
don't mind me getting a little bit nostalgic, talking about that difference in sounds, how was that? What was your memory of that like? What was the setup like for you back then, and what was it like having a two guitar attack on stage balancing those types of sounds?

It worked out way better. I was slightly intimidated, of course, because I came out of that,
and I still wasn't completely healed at all actually. But I had a more than six-month treatment to try to get things working a little bit better. Anybody would've been slightly intimidated sharing the stage with Steve. At the same time we both really ended up enjoying it right off the bat because our styles are so extremely different and our sounds are different. Years later, Steve told me that he was more influenced by my playing. He was quite sure that I wouldn’t think so because I had no idea how somebody like Steve would be influenced by my stuff. It’s first of all it's so different. But in the end, when you talk about it among guitar players, you'll have the same
experience. You kind of look differently at other players than those just themselves look at themselves or at other players. So that was quite a surprise when Steve told me that. And he says, "I can't get the tone that you get out of your fingers. I cannot get it out of my style of playing and the way I hit the strings and the amplifiers that I use. I can't get a thick tone that you get." And I thought, "Of course you can," because you as a player know the same thing. You take everything you do because it's normal that that's what you do. You don't even think about it. I play the guitar and I think, "Oh, that's pretty much what I'm trying to do sound-wise or playing-wise." And then somebody like Steve Vai or whoever goes, "I don't know what you're doing." On a different level, I really love to cook and a really good friend of mine is a Michelin star chef. And he says, "I don't dare to make risotto when you make risotto." And I say, "Man, anybody can do this, it's..." And he's been looking at me making my porcini risotto and he says, "I try to do it exactly the same as you and I'm not getting anywhere." And he's a Michelin star chef. I go, "What the fuck? Of course you can." But yeah, it's like any player that I've ever talked to about this, and any player I look up to, basically I look up to any player who does a thing and I go, "Man, that guy's great." Because I don't look at it as a competition because I think you can't compete in expressing emotions because it's a certain guy's emotion. Whenever I talk about it to other players and they talk about the competitive element in it, I go, you can't really say that Eddie Van Halen is a better player than Brian May, for instance. No, they're not. You can't compare those guys. They're so different, and both are like two of the best players, if you want to call it that, of all the players in the last four or five decades. So over the years, I started to feel way more confident about that than I did before when you're like 18, 19 or 20, you feel more competitive. You have to kind of feel it more as, I gotta get into that thing with my kind of playing because I want to play. You want to play all over the world, but I never had the ambition to be like one of the best guitar players, because you can't compare it, and I never did. When I was growing up, Jimi Hendrix up to this day is one of my favourite ones. But at the same time, people like Leslie West and Paul Kossoff and Eddie Van Halen and Brian May and Michael Schenker, there's all these great players that are totally different. So at some point when you grow up a little bit, you think, "It's not a fucking competition. I just want to do what I love and hopefully play all over the world or play as much as I can." And even if it's in your own country or your own town or your own region, you wanna play, you want to get up on stage and make noise with a bunch of great guys and enjoy the hell out of it. That's basically, it's always been my purpose and it still is.

Would you say that that's been a factor of time that has passed and experience to just be comfortable with what you are, and what you have?

I mean, if you're trying, you say about the competitive element, the only way it's gonna work is if I'm trying to be Jeff Beck, I'm gonna fail.

So is that something that you feel it's just come about normally? If you were to
go back to a younger Adrian and be able to come from the future now and tell him to relax maybe about that, what would you say? Would you say that actually some of that nervous energy to get better was useful as well?

I think at a certain age when you start out in the first couple of years, you need that kind
of nervous energy because you wanna get really good. You want to be able to develop a kind of technique, whatever it is, to express what you hear in your mind. But at the same time, whenever young players ask me, "What do you think I should do?" And there's a lot of those, whether it's online or at a gig, my kind of cliche answer is always just try to find your own language because that's what makes it interesting. And when Eddie came on the scene, everybody wanted to be Eddie Van Halen, and they all tried to sound like Eddie Van Halen and use the same techniques, but there is already one Jeff Beck, and there is already one Brian May. It has become more difficult, I suppose, with those guys leading the way to find your own identity because for young
players, they all grow up learning to play through YouTube and you get lessons from the best players there are. If you're not careful, you're gonna sound too much like those guys and why would you. So I think it takes quite a little bit of guts to distance yourself from that and go, "Okay, what do I wanna express with my playing?" Whether you're a writer or a cook or a chef or a painter or whatever, trying to copy people only goes so far because you will never be that person. The same goes for any artist in any field, that at some point you think, "Okay, I got the technique, now what do I wanna say on my instrument?" Do I wanna express the fact that I'm permanently pissed off and play death metal or whatever? In my case, I'm a happy-go-lucky kind of guy, so that
I'm sure it comes across in my playing. And I like melodies. I grew up with my dad and my sister being very accomplished classical piano players. All those melodies bounce around in my head. I listen to blues players and Jimi Hendrix. So for me, it has become one big combination of all the stuff that I grew up with, and at the same time I was not patient enough to learn solos from other guys. I never did because in those days you had to do it with a record, when I was growing up, and putting the needle back and back and back, and you go, "What the f***, I can't do that. I'm not patient enough." So I just played what I heard in my head, and that has become my style over the years, I guess. If you compare it to learning to write or learning to speak in public or painting,
whatever, I think for every young guy getting into one of those fields, there's always that element in your head, "Man, I love this solo from Hendrix," or, "I love that solo from Eddie," or whatever. So subconsciously there's always gonna be that influence. Consciously, however, I really admire every guitar player who actually has the patience to work out a solo that somebody else played. Because I couldn’t. And for me, the biggest award from everything I've tried to do over the last 50 years or something, is whenever a player comes up to me or writes me through social media that he or she has been influenced by my playing. That for me, that's a huge award because I go, "Man, I never realised that.”, because most of the time I still feel like I'm just getting started, and I
hear a player like Nuno Bettencourt, for instance, who told me that I was one of his big influences. I go, "Come on, man." It's such a different level. But then I think back about when I started, and you start somewhere. And when you're a guitar player and you start in the late '70s, like Nuno, for instance, you can get inspired by other players. And in my case, realising that there's players around who have been looking at my stuff and get influenced by it, man, I consider it a huge honour because that's not what I was aware of, basically. I mean, I'm aware of it now, but it's actually relatively recent. Only the last five to ten years I started realising that. But in
the Vandenberg days, I regularly started getting requests from music schools and especially conservatoires that were assuming that I had classical training because I have a lot of classical influences in my playing. They asked me if I would be available for special lessons and special courses. I go, "Man, I cannot read notes. I don't have a f***ing idea what I'm doing because I can't really explain to young players why I'm doing what I do apart from just telling them, well, it comes up in my brain and I figure out, oh, that sounds pretty cool." And then you're done in five minutes. So I can't really do that. They would pay me for something that I would be done in five minutes. I would feel really guilty.

Well, it's kind of a lesson in itself, like I think you mentioned the YouTube era.
If I wanna learn how to play one of your solos, there's probably someone teaching it somewhere, right? I can learn it note for note, and I can have it instantly, but there's that exploration aspect that I think a lot of players may be unfortunately not knowingly missing out on, that kind of struggle of being with your own playing.

And actually that being the catalyst for your personal sound. I agree. The note is basically
just a note. I've heard really great players live or on YouTube play my solo in ‘Here I Go Again’, for instance, and it never has the same feel, and that's the cool thing about it, and that's what we talked about, whether it's Eddie or Brian May or Nuno or whatever. When it doesn't have that particular feel and timing, it's not the same. It's like we all use the same words. We all know the same words. But when a writer writes either a great lyric or a great book or a great story or a newspaper article, whatever, they put the words that we already know into a certain order and you go, “F***, man, that really hits me, that really makes me emotional." Same words. And
for me, that's how I look at guitar solos, too. Whenever I heard, for instance, one of the guitar players in Whitesnake who came after me play my ‘Here I Go Again’ solo — because David wanted those guys to play the solo the same way — and I heard it back and I go, "It's very different. It's the same notes. It's very different." And somebody alerted me to a couple of guys on YouTube who teach that particular solo or the solo in 'Burning Heart’. Apparently those are my two trademark solos for most people. I've never heard anybody play it with the same timing and vibrato and all that stuff the way I did it. I mean, to be honest, that fast run at the end of ‘Here I Go Again’, I don't know what the f*** I was doing. I mean, I know the notes are in place, but I would have a
very hard time figuring it out. And also because I played it with open picking when I didn't have that wrist problem yet. I would really have to slow it down substantially to figure out how I played that run. It's interesting, because I remember doing it. I was in the studio with Keith Olsen, re-recording the guitar parts on ‘Here I Go Again’, and I only had a short time. He said, "Come on, throw a solo on there," and they had a Mesa Boogie amp there that I didn't like, and I had a practice guitar with me, which was like a Japanese Super Strat type of guitar. I barely had time to set a sound. But Keith Olsen is used to studio players and all that stuff. They bring in the stuff and they go, "Eh, eh, eh," done. I go, "Man, that Mesa Boogie sounds really honky for my feeling," because I played on 50-watt Plexis at the time — modded — so I was used to my sound. I was
tweaking the knob a little bit and the engineer said, "Come on, Adrian, we gotta record that solo." I go, "Oh, s**t." I played the solo and I worked it out a little bit, but not the entire thing, just a couple of basic notes how I wanted to start. And I just let it go and they said, "Okay, it's fine." I go, "Well, I need to hear it back." "It's okay. We like it." So that was it.

Wow.

Now I'm haunted with that solo for the rest of my life.

It's funny, man. That's a great moment. That's a cool story as well about that
attitude of we just need to put a solo on this, go with whatever. All the prep—nowadays everyone has the Quad Cortex patch, and they've got the right EQ, and they've sat in their bed composed it, but that is a different. And maybe that's testament to the genius of it. And just to go back to that painting analogy, how the paint stroke is unique in its own expression, and that moment of recording a solo, that's it. That's now captured a moment, which has probably made it irreplaceable or ‘un-recreateable' in that sense. There's some magic in there. Was most of the recording like that? Did you compose any solos? Was there a lot of improvisation?

Sometimes I have an idea, especially when it's a ballad, I think it's possibly more
important. I usually have a couple of ideas that I toss around while I record. And then, one thing I learned from, maybe the first two Vandenberg albums that were recorded in Jimmy Page's studio in England, and the engineer worked with Jimmy Page. On the first night I was in the studio, I thought, "Oh, man, it's Jimmy Page's studio." I walked around and accidentally I found the tape room where all the 24 and 12 tracks of all the Zeppelin albums were neatly stacked on the shelves. And I saw 'Stairway to Heaven’, a couple of 24 tracks. You name it, all the Zeppelin albums. I go, "Holy s**t, this is the Holy Grail. Lock me up in this room. I'll be fine for the next year or so." But the engineer, I asked him, "How did Jimmy work when he recorded solos?" And he said, "What he
usually does is, he records a couple of solos and then he likes this part from this solo and that part from that solo." From those days, that influenced me when I record solos. That's what I usually do. I have a couple of ideas and I record a solo, I record another solo, and I think, "Oh, I like this part. What did I do there?" Sometimes I'm able to figure it out, and other times I don't have the patience to go, "What did I do when I fast run?" And then I kind of combine it at some point. What is interesting in the Vandenberg days and actually still, I've always liked Brian May's approach of reproducing his solos live, me as a Queen fan and Brian May fan. Eddie pretty much stays really close to the solos that he played on the big songs. I usually stay relatively close to what I play on the albums because 99 out of 100 people in the venue are not guitar players or musicians. They
don't care if you go, "Wee, wee, wee, wee," and get a kick out of improvising it. Since I'm such a melodic player, I think it's important to stick pretty close to what I do on the record.

Which is an interesting challenge whenever a record is finished and I go,
"Okay, let's play this and this song live", I have to figure out what I did.

Regularly I think, "What the f***? Why the hell did I do that on that moment?" Even though I apparently like it, otherwise I wouldn't have kept it.

Well, it's also completely natural for you. It's not premeditated. It's probably
something that felt right. It's not I'm gonna throw this lick in because I've learnt this new pattern or something. It's as spontaneous as you can get.

Sometimes it is. Sometimes I think a couple of days before I stumble accidentally on a
cool lick, and then I go, "What did I do? What did I do?" And I try to memorise it, play it a couple of times. And then at some time it's gonna show up when you play something. You said, sometimes I think, "Oh, that would be cool if I can use it somewhere in one of the solos." I think every player will recognise that moment where you go, "That was a pretty cool lick. I wanna use that somewhere." You get excited, you get caught with your hand in the cookie jar when your mom walks in. You go, "But I still want that cookie, no matter what you're gonna say." So yeah, that's how it regularly works.

Nice. Adrian, I'm conscious of your time, and I'd like to ask you one more
question if you've got a few more moments.

Of course.

I'd like to bring us back to the ‘My Whitesnake Years’ Tour. You’re being joined by Vinnie Moore and Mike Mendoza, and I was just curious about the choice of those players, obviously both legendary musicians in their own right. Are they friends? How did this come about, this particular lineup?

It was actually our mutual agent. Our American agent represents Vinnie and Marco. So,
Marco is gonna do a bunch of his own stuff and a bunch of his stuff from Journey, I think. Vinnie is gonna do his own stuff and some UFO stuff or something. I'm gonna do ‘My Whitesnake Years’ and possibly toss in one or two Vandenberg tracks, but since the theme is 'My Whitesnake Years’, it's gonna be 99% stuff from my time with Whitesnake. So yeah, the agent put it together, and I think it's a great thing because Vinnie's and my style are, as everybody knows, pretty far apart. So I'm looking forward to meet him also because we never met. I know Marco pretty well because he supported my band a bunch of times in Holland and so I know Marco. I've never met Vinnie. I'm looking forward to meet him. And I think that Vinnie also played with Rudy Sarzo and Tommy Aldridge in the band somewhere in the '80s also. And of course, I'm looking forward to hearing his UFO stories because UFO was one of the bands I listened to in the early '80s.

That's awesome. It will be fun. It sounds like it's amazing, the career you've got
and the influence you've had, and actually how down to earth you seem to be, and it seems to me that at this stage you've found fresh inspiration in the stuff you've done and keeping it fresh and alive. Then there's meeting, and working with other musicians. There's no ego about who's doing what. There's no competitiveness. It's just a good hangout really. It sounds like that seems to be important. Is it, what keeps you grounded? What keeps you grounded artistically?

Well, the thing is that I feel really privileged that I am allowed to do this and am allowed so by the people who like my music. Because what makes a big difference. Well, first of all, as soon as I was 21 and supposed to be adult, my parents kept telling me up until they got to be 95 years old, that they always described me as a boy trapped in a grown man's body because I have this inherent enthusiasm about everything I do, whether I cook or paint or play music and Mick Jagger described my exact feelings about this. He said, there's two things. One thing, I'm not sure whether he said that, but one thing I read somewhere years ago is, you don't choose music, music chooses you. And every player and musician knows that. The other thing that Jagger said in one of his interviews was, it's basically when people have been asking me, Jagger, ever since I was 30,
"When do you think you're gonna stop?" Because of course he was already loaded when he was 30. And he said, "Well, it's not me who decides to stop, it's the audience. When they stop coming, then it's time to stop." And I never got to the point fortunately because another thing is that I never had the illusion that this was gonna be my job. I went to art college and made a very nice living selling my paintings. Also, I taught art and art history in a high school for about a year and a half, and then I decided to become a graphic artist because I never had the illusion that with rock music that could be my living. So every year I pinch myself in the arm whether it's one of the Vandenberg days or in the Whitesnake days, and still I go, "Man, I got a gig tonight. Fucking great." So it's still the same thing, and there's so many great players around and so many players that I consider way better than what I do. At the same time, what we talked about before, I realise that it's all about what you wanna express. So a player being better than somebody else is such a relative thing. But it does keep me in a very realistic state of mind when I hear great players—whether it's whoever it is, Schenker, Jeff Beck, Billy Gibbons, Brian May, all those players that I really admire. That keeps me definitely very grounded. I go, okay, I'm very happy to be allowed to do what I love doing most. And I'm realistic about that, so yeah. Guitar Interactive: It sounds to me like creativity is the kind of curiosity you were talking about, that kind of enthusiasm about art in general. I mean, you talk about painting and that music. They're really just different mediums of the same movement of making stuff. It takes away all of that me-and-you thing, and it's just more about, hey, this is cool, let's see what happens. Whether it's cooking, or painting, or writing — I always describe it as you're tapping from the same source. I look at cooking as basically combining flavours, and when you're painting, you're combining colours. When you write, you combine words. When you write a song, you combine notes in a certain order and you go, this sounds nice, or it sounds like rubbish. It all has to do with harmony in every sense of the word — harmony in colours, harmony and rhythm in words and sentences. And all that stuff is a very personal thing. That's why you can't really argue about taste. When somebody says, "Well, every music apart from death metal sucks," you go, "No, you can't really say that." Or classical music sucks, or jazz sucks. No, it doesn't. It's not your taste. That's it. And you can get hit emotionally by one note at the right spot with the right timing — Jeff Beck was a master at that. Every time I get chills when I hear certain ballads of his. That song ‘Where Were You,’ or ‘The Veil’ — you go, how is it possible? The same guitar as everybody uses, same amp. His fingers, his musical mind. Amazing.

Well, Adrian, I really appreciate your time. It's been really nice to chat.

Likewise, man. I was thinking we'd be talking about, you know, the Guitar Interactive
stuff.

We did talk about gear, and we talked about the tour stuff. But I loved hearing
just about the unique expression and kind of that confidence in that. I think that's gonna be an inspiring thing for many listeners here, especially with all the Instagram and YouTube and everyone telling you five reasons to play this solo and all this stuff. Actually just be yourself. Stand in your own shoes. That's the lesson I'm taking away from this. But I really appreciate your time, Adrian.

Thank you. Great, man. I really enjoyed our conversation because that, that's one of the
advantages of, for me personally, to be in this business as long as I have, is in the early days, you had interviews with a 20-year-old kid who asked questions that could be very predictable. And right now, fortunately, by far, most of the interviews you have, you have a conversation about something you love and about what drives you. In your case, you're a player, so you know exactly, we know both exactly what we're talking about. And for me, that's one of the big inspirations also. I go, man, what a great job I have. Because you're talking to like-minded people who are passionate about the same thing that you're passionate about, and that makes life great. It's such
a privilege to be able to do this for all of us, basically.

It's so great. Thank you.

I gotta pack my bags, man.

No worries. Take care.

I really enjoyed it, and hopefully we get to shake hands somewhere on the road.

Would be great.

I hope so too.

I hope so too, Adrian. Take care.

Take care, man. See you. Bye-bye.