Every song is different.
With the right outlook, you can learn to entertain yourself and entertain each other so you can enjoy doing what you're doing. There's obviously gonna be highs and lows, and the trick to it is to be able to maintain composure and stay high even when you're in the lows. That way, when you hit the highs ,it'll be twice as killer.
If you improvise a riff and the crowd immediately reacts to it, you know you're on to something.
Musicians tend to get bored playing the same thing over and over, so I think it's natural to experiment.
A lot of bands whine about the road and how tough it is.
Pantera is the only band I've ever been in, and at the start we used to play covers to make a living.
To get my sound in the studio, I double guitar tracks, and when it gets to the lead parts, the rhythm drops out, just like it's live. I'm very conscious of that.
It kills me when I see some metal band trying to pass themselves off as an 'alternative band.'
My old man was a musician - that's what he did for a living. And like most fathers, occasionally he'd let me visit where he worked. So I started going to his recording studio, and I really dug it.
I would just listen to records and learn what I could, then just roll it over and over and over.
Lessons didn't really work out for me, so I went to the old school, listening to records and learning what I wanted to learn.
Between the record companies being the way they are and the fact that people can just download one song instead of buying a whole album, it's hard to make a good living nowadays.
Washburn built me the guitar that changed my life.
You can tune your guitar funky, and something's gonna come out. There's no secret to it - either you got it, or you don't.
People that love this form of music have loved it from way back - Sabbath, Zeppelin, the early days.
The local dudes who knew that my dad owned a studio would say, 'Ahh, dude is spoiled,' and this and that. But we didn't abuse it at all. I'd always ask if we could use the studio first, and if our dad didn't want us there he would tell us, and that was that. But I definitely tried to get down there as often as I could.
'I'm Broken' was a sound check riff.
Van Halen was a huge influence on me, and 'Eruption' was the song that really leaped off that first Van Halen album.
The first time I heard 'Crazy Train,' I was crashed out in bed, definitely not wanting to get up and go to school, when my brother Vinnie came in and cranked it up.
You can write every song on an album in E and not hurt a thing.
