Interview for "Wood & Steel"
by James Jensen 1997
JJ: What is your yearly itinerary like?
CP: I'm almost embarrassed to say that its four to five months a year. I used to be on the road 6 to 7 months, but it has slowly shrunk each of the last several years so I think that last year I was only out about 120 to 130 days. The difference is that I might have had only 2 days off where I used to go out for 200 days but had 10 to 20% of those off. I have gotten much more connected with the presenters of the concerts as well as the growing number of authorized Taylor dealers, which allows me to fill in days off with clinics. I am doing close to the same amount of work, but in two fewer months! I don't feel as much like the road warrior as I used to, because I used to go out for 8 weeks and I'd have ten thousand miles on the car. The first trip I made with Harvey Reid I left my home in Salt Lake in February and showed back up in early May. That trip took me from home to the west coast, to the east coast, and back. Now that was definitely my road warrior phase.
JJ: How have the Taylor clinics changed over the years?
CP: The initial clinics were so "seat of the pants" that they happened almost organically. I was out "beating the drum" for Taylor just by playing the guitars, and eventually we got a simple poster from the factory. But about five years ago TJ Baden decided to upgrade the clinics, and then when John D'Agostino was hired, the clinics really took off, and of course there are more dealers now, and better ones.
JJ: What would a dealer get from a Taylor clinic with Chris Proctor, and what kind of support does Taylor offer?
CP: This would not just be true of mine, but any of the clinicians. Taylor prints up flyers, and John and Amy mail press kits to the local media. The artist supplies the names of the local press which he gets from the store and John's data base is growing as well. The package that the media get includes a mug shot, description of the clinic, dates and times etc. The little articles that get run in the local papers based on the press kits sent out represent something that I could never do in the way of advance work, and really help with attendance because it doesn't matter how good the clinic is if nobody shows up.
JJ: Do you try to schedule clinics prior to concerts so you can draw people from the clinic to the show?
CP: In the perfect world you do a concert, and hopefully dazzle the audience and intrigue all the guitar players , making them leave with a lot of unanswered questions. Then you do a clinic the next day and then answer the questions in that environment when the interchange can be much more personal. That doesn't happen everywhere, and in fact you might be traveling between concerts and the clinic is the only appearance you will make in an area. I do two types of clinics: one has a lot more music to it when I'm not playing in the area, and the other one presupposes that many of them have seen you play so you don't have to play a bunch of tunes to earn your credibility and prompt questions.
JJ: Is there a certain amount of times you need to leave between clinics at the same store?
CP: You know it's odd , but you can go to the same store three or four years in a row and not see anybody from earlier years. I was sensitive to that at first, because, for example, I was up at A sharp Music in Renton Washington three or four times , but it's always new people so I got over the worries that I would have to come up with something new to say that they hadn't heard. If there is enough of a musical aspect to your workshop , even those people who have heard you talk about slide, or twelve strings, or whatever, will want to hear a new tune. The fact is , however, that their seems to be an incredible turnover in attendance from year to year.
JJ: Your career has been fairly steady before and through the "big guitar years" of the Windham Hill era which saw many players come and go rather rapidly, what do you owe your longevity to?
CP: I kind of divide the music industry into two sections. There is the Pop section, which means popularity I guess, and then there is Art music which would be classical, and what I hope many of us do with the fingerstyle guitar. Instrumental guitar is a craft which doesn't have a hugely fluctuating popularity, it's a niche which will support an artist well enough to make a living if they polish their craft and they work hard.
JJ: Leo Kottke told me that he felt one of the keys to his longevity was viewing himself firstly as a performer and several notches down the list came "recording artist".
CP: I agree with that , the recording is a way to keep communicating with your audience when you're not there, but it won't replace it. Your career is showing up and doing clinics or concerts for a hundred people in an art gallery somewhere, and doing it again the next night somewhere else for anybody interested enough to come out. I don't know how well you could write without the constant audience feedback, I think Leo's right, recording is a secondary priority to getting out there and keeping it going.
JJ: Does the audience feedback and the ability to make a living doing what you love , justify the grueling schedule you have had to maintain, because in the Pop side of the music business the feeling is always if you keep plugging away you will get that big record, and you know that will more than likely never happen in this genre.
CP: Yes, that's true that the feeling over there is you put in your dues and there is this brass ring. The difference is that in this genre, this is it James, and if this isn't enough for you get another line of work because this is how it's going to be. If you like it , great but if you are gonna feel cheated because something bigger didn't come along ....
JJ: Do you think that's why some players , and good ones at that, disappear after a couple of records?
CP: I think that's true, and you and I know people who have tried to grab for the brass ring to the detriment of their longer career. Fifteen years ago I drove to Kicking Mule Records to see Ed Denson with a three song demo tape, feeling as though using the mail would be a waste of time I showed up in this town with 50 people in the middle of nowhere hoping he would let me make a record, and he did. That was one of those pivotal moments in my life. It's not a pivotal moment if someone from Acme Records offers me the big contract, I probably wouldn't fit in or enjoy it anyway. You have to love it to do this because if you don't it would be a horrible way to make a living, and pretty inefficient.
JJ: With a few rare exceptions there seems to be less competition and more a spirit of cooperation within this niche, would you agree?
CP: That's true, and I'll expand on that. There is not a lot of competitive ego, we are more allies than competitors, if someone is back east playing a show right now, I hope they are doing well because they are turning people on to acoustic guitar, and will help build an audience for me when I play there.
JJ: We finally have a Chris Proctor instructional video available through Homespun Videos, can you give us some background on it, and tell us what that business means to your career?
CP: When you do a workshop you go through a town , make a presentation, and your gone for at least a year. Even if somebody gets a lot of information from your workshop, one week later they have forgotten most of it. I think this is another example of NAMM show synergy because the Taylor booth (Proctor for years has performed for Taylor at NAMM shows) has always been next to Homespun Videos and I always liked their work so I eventually approached them with the idea. I felt like the catalog they offered went from beginning fingerpicking directly to the style of Preston Reed without much to bridge the gap. I decided to approach my video from that angle, and other than hating to watch myself on video I like how it came out. I think it makes my workshop more three dimensional, and gives the opportunity for the interested person to go over it several times. It sells real well at workshops, and although I am not a big marketing person I am slowly realizing the value in these type of projects.
JJ: It doesn't seem like you are a prolific composer but it seems to me you are very deliberate writer, can you detail the creation of your guitar pieces for us?
CP: I think that composition is more of a mental than physical process, and when I watch players I'm looking to see that their hands are doing something hard for them, and I mean something other than what falls under them like rock guitarists playing pentatonic leads in boxes that they have memorized. Fingerstyle playing features a right hand which plays two or three lines at once which is cool but to play music you hear in your head requires things not obvious to the left hand. I try to avoid repetition, and I remember something you wrote about Peter Finger using the EBEGAD tuning in several different keys, and that got my attention because that is a kind of tuning where your not going to just play a root, four , and five chord and flail away with your right hand. I tuned one of my guitars to it and kept it around for a couple of months until I negotiated some chords out of it and finally came out with two completely different tunes in that tuning, and a third is on the way. I also got tired of playing in tunings once and tried to find keys in standard tuning with an open tuning feel, and came across C#m that gives you a lot of open strings, and sounds very ethereal. These kind of challenges help me grow and learn , and if I can write a tune every month or two I feel incredibly prolific, so when I see people like Leo Kottke putting out new material every year I am stunned, amazed. Another great learning trick is to every so often arrange an existing tune, because you can't change a Beatle song to make it easy to play, you are stuck with the melody.
JJ: Is the composing for you a process of whole songs coming out or a hammer and nail kind of creation?
CP: Definitely the later, you usually get ten to twenty seconds as a gift when you're noodling around , and then you have to build a song. You are taking this germ of an idea and building a song around it, and you have to ask yourself if the fragment you have is the beginning, or the middle, and if it's the middle, and how do I get to this? That to me is the craft aspect which can take months some times.
JJ: It seems to me that the great player/ composers of this genre that use open tunings , very often play in keys other than the tuning itself.
CP: Yes, and a great example would be open G where by playing in D gives you the big open G as the four chord, with an easy five chord. I have recorded a couple of Irish jigs on my new record using that technique. I also like to play in open Gm in the key of BbM which is the relative major.
JJ: You also use a "third hand capo", which adds one more element to the mix.
CP: Using it in the Esus4 position (the capo stops the 5th, 4th, and 3rd strings at the second fret) it gives you a kind of DADGAD feel, but you are still in standard tuning. It is kind of a weird hybrid between standard and open tunings, and I am surprised it's not more popular because a lot of people who don't want to retune can really give themselves a lot of possibilities very easily. This is kind of a touchy-feely thing, but I think that every tuning has certain physical and emotional characteristics which I think you have to sit and mess with so as a writer you know what its capable of doing well. I like to use the third hand capo a lot when I'm using the Ebow because I can get the drone strings in the bass and still get the melody going on the higher strings.
JJ: Using as many tunings as you do is it something you have to consider when putting together a set list?
CP: You do, there is a lot of repercussions to using all those tunings. You end up with a lot of guitars, which isn't a bad thing, but do you take them all on the road with you? I took an extra couple of guitars on the road last May, and I liked it because I could play any song I wanted basically whenever. But the added problems of getting a good sound out of several instruments on stage is more laborious as is basic travel. I love all the different colors and choices but I don't love having to learn the fingerboard in ten or fifteen tunings. There is no doubt that you can't read or improvise as well when you are not concentrating on just one or two tunings, but the tone colors are so seductive, and the ideas you get from the qualities of the tunings are so seductive that I'd have a hard time limiting it, so I'm living with the down side and relearning basic C chords in these tunings. I didn't really get to the question though, and yes it does control the sets, and you do have to play a song that is in a tuning relatively close to the one used in the song before. I tend to either start high and go low, standard tuning down to C, or low to high. It is safer to go from high to low for string breakage.
JJ: The new record has a wonderful tone, after years of playing with fingerpicks you are using a new kind of pick.
CP: I use the Alaska Pics which felt odd at first, but I worked with them because I thought they had potential. They are a plastic pick that wraps around from the back of your finger and your nail acts as a backstop for them. You get a much more natural sounding attack with your finger striking the string and following it across before the pick catches it. It is a much more nail-like sounding attack with the advantage of them being replaceable and removable. I have tried everything and I feel this is the best compromise for me and I love being able to contact the strings again with my flesh. I also used some Schoeps mics from Germany which I had been wanting to use for a long time. I also recorded some of the songs on an older Koa wood Taylor, which was the first Grand Concert model to leave the Taylor factory, and three with a Brazilian, and three tunes with the Indian Rosewood Grand Concert that I tour with. I try to match up songs with guitars and the Irish Jig just worked great with the Koa. That guitar has gotten brighter over the years, which is hard to believe.
JJ: You don't seem to reinvent yourself with your releases as much as refine a style which is very identifiable as you, would you say that's a fair assessment?
CP: I am not really the one to judge, it's really hard to be objective about your own music and particularly a brand new release, but your right in that it's not a radical departure. This is what I do; I write guitar pieces, perform them for people, and then record when I think I have some good ones, and I hope I'm getting better at it.