It accumulates over the years and I've led so many bands of my own now and forced myself into new situations... You would hope that you play better and better - until you just get too feeble to do it anymore.
I think rock records tend to be very expensive.
I've got four or five records in my head at a time that I try to work on and I would like to do a guitar trio record next - since The Police I've mostly made records with keyboards.
I spend a lot of time working as a painter and in my studio I go from upstairs where I paint to downstairs where I play and record, so I get this thing crossing over.
I'm just trying to avoid any sort of generic kind of music - I don't want to do generic jazz or fusion.
In The Police, in a trio situation - which I've come back to now - it's just so wide open that it does actually provide this arena where you can play with a certain freedom.
I'm better for it and I prefer to keep things simple and see what sounds I can get out of my head and hands rather than relying on a sound that someone else created.
I actually think I play better now than I've ever played.
There was a period when I'd just come out of college where I'd been playing classical guitar and I suddenly realised that it wasn't what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
Actually, I think my hands are in the best shape they've ever been in terms of what I can do.
I like to play with someone who can cover a lot of ground and someone with whom you can discuss the language at a reasonable level; otherwise it gets a bit frustrating.
It's hard to avoid the past but one goes forward.
If you're a guitarist, you should not be intimidated by using your instrument as a synthesizer, but you shouldn't feel that you have to own one, either.
For me, the guitar synthesizer is a great writing instrument.
If I'm playing a violin thing, for instance, I tend to respond to that sound with the way I finger.
The most obvious thing you can't do with a guitar synthesizer is to really sound like a guitar.
My favorite sounds are the high, spacey ones that are very ambient.
More recently, I used guitar synthesizer extensively on the two albums I did with Robert Fripp.
It's been very hard for the guitar as a serious synthesizer to compete with keyboards.
If the guitar synthesizer is really going to stand as a synthesizer on its own, it needs to develop a more characteristic sound; I don' think it's gotten there yet.
