No formal lessons, my older brother plays and he showed me some stuff to get me started. I just kinda took it from there, spent a lot of time learning parts off records by ear…. lots of old Beatles and Yes stuff.

How important is a knowledge of theory and sight reading in your job?

In Nashville where I live it’s not very important at all…I can’t read a single note of music and it hasn’t slowed me down one bit. If I lived in LA or NYC it would be much more important to read, because of all the jingle and soundtrack session work there.

Obviously as a studio player you have to be able to cover a lot of ground tone wise. I’ve seen pics of various rigs with you using pedals, rack gear, multiple heads (bogner, matchless, marshall etc). Does that change regularly? Do you take everything to a session and work from there or?

You’re a fan of vintage guitars?

Absolutely. I’ve been buying, selling and playing old guitars since I was about 19. I’ve managed to hold on to some really fantastic guitars over the years that I’m very lucky to own. The top of the heap no doubt being a blonde 1960 ES-335 – one of only 209 blonde dot necks ever made! It’s a truly magic instrument on all levels.

In regards to session playing –

What’s the breakdown of reading sessions or notated/set parts as opposed to being asked to just play something that suits the track? And do you always know in advance what will be required?

In Nashville you rarely ever get to hear anything in advance. Like I said before there is no sight reading to deal with we just use “number charts”. These spell out the chord changes by relative intervals, it’s very handy because you can change keys without having to rewrite your chart.
No one ever writes out specific parts for you to play – your job as a session guitar player in Nashville is to come up with hooky guitar parts on the fly, in an attempt to make something interesting out of songs that usually have very little harmonic content or unique chord progressions written into them and it can be very difficult at times.

Is there any full band live tracking or just overdubs?

We usually track with a full band and then I usually go in later and spend a couple days on each record doing guitar overdubs after the fact. I really enjoy that part (ESPECIALLY when I have a great engineer to work with), most of the producers that hire me give me a lot creative freedom in the overdubbing process. The engineer, in my opinion is without a doubt THE most important guy on the whole session – he can make or break any musical situation. There simply is no group of top notch musicians in the world that can overcome a terrible engineer and I’ve been on so many sessions that have been destroyed by incompetent engineers, it’s truly heartbreaking. Adversely, when you get a great engineer everything is just SO easy – it’s like going to a nice resort spa or something.

Do you have a home studio? Ever work from home and ftp sessions?

I do have a studio but I’m usually too busy working in other places to ever use it and I’ve never done an ftp session.

You obviously do your majority of work in Nashville. Do you ever work in other areas – LA, New York etc? Any differences between the recording scenes?

Having worked with a huge list of great artists, a lot of guitar players get drawn to you work with Keith Urban and Dann Huff. With them being great players in their own right it must be interesting to work in those situations and hear what they’ve played and then lay down your own stuff?

Lastly, when will your Myspace blog ‘Session Man’ be transformed into a big budget Hollywood style Blockbuster with fast cars, sassy girls and the general frivolity and hijinks that the session world is no doubt associated with?

I’m praying that all will heal and I’ll be able to get back to my normal sloppy self eventually.

About Nick Brown

I’m a guitarist currently residing in Melbourne, Australia although I grew up in the small but awesome town of Yinnar (go on Google it!!!). I do a number of different gigs as well as teaching and writing for magazines such as Mixdown and Australian Guitar. I’m a huge music fan (rock/pop/jazz/fusion/latin/country/blues etc) and love (trying) to keep up to date with new gear (pedals/amps/guitars/players). Feel free to email me or checkout my MySpace!