INTRODUCTION
I've been playing guitar since I was 16, so that's a long time! My primary style is blues, with strong influences from other American folk genres. My first blues band originated from the grassroots in Kolam Ayer Community Centre, where a few enthusiasts had a little blues club with regular Saturday afternoon jams. Some of the folks I met there have made a name for themselves on the local and international scene (not gonna drop names to respect their privacy) in a diverse range of genres, and it's fascinating to see where their musical journey has taken them from those days.
That band was called Blues Virus, not the most appropriate name these days but it stuck and we couldn't get rid of it. I played my first gig with them in 2002 and we did lots of Chicago blues, Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy & Junior Wells, bit of Howling Wolf, that sort of thing. We're still at it, doing the odd jam here and there for fun.
My original band is General Lee and we have a 10 song album out on the streaming platforms. We write about Singapore stories, legends and history and our sound is best described as rock and roll, with a bit of blues and country. My blues influence is one of the many facets of our songwriting and the kind of understanding we have on stage and in the studio is one of the things I enjoy most about being a musician.
I also play with Raw Earth, covering the old school blues with some classic rock. That's a lot of fun and we've been to a lot of places, leaving a trail of empty bottles in our wake. Right now, with gigs falling on tough times I've been working on my material as a solo acoustic blues act, occasionally pulling in a harmonica player for extra authenticity.
In my day job I'm an acoustic engineer, so I make things quiet in the day time and make more noise outside office hours to restore balance to this world.
PLAYING STYLE
I started off learning the songs on Eric Clapton's "Unplugged" album, so I owe him a debt of gratitude there. I delved deeper into his influences and that led me down two paths: One to the pioneers of the acoustic style like Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, Lightning Hopkins, Big Bill Broonzy etc and the other to the intense electric sounds of BB/Albert/Freddy King, Buddy Guy, Albert Collins and such.
There's also another path I went down that sort of converges with the earlier two: slide guitar. It can be mournful and hypnotic like Mississippi Fred McDowell or loud and raucous like Elmore James and Hound Dog Taylor, so that's another aspect of the blues with plenty to explore.
I would describe my style as "rhythmic", even in my approach to playing lead. Understanding how the backing and lead parts for the genre work together definitely helps you get better at both. Playing off the rhythm section when it's cooking, even the simplest lines can sound like a whole lot more. I reckon that for most folks, only 20% of your time as a guitar player is soloing; the other 80% is playing rhythm (unless you're Steve Vai or Satriani) and if you can learn to enjoy that, you're going to have fun 100% of the time! In fact, if I had to boil my blues influences down to just one it would Jimmy Rogers, the guitarist who played all those loping riffs on the low strings behind Muddy Waters for the longest time.
Apart from blues, country is another one of my favourites and the core of my style is Travis picking with a thumb pick. Players like Merle Travis, Chet Atkins, Jerry Reed (great actor and comedian too) define that sound for me. Doc Watson, Norman Blake and Tony Rice are my go-to's for bluegrass flat-picking, something else I aspire to.
I don't have a warm-up routine or exercises but I'm usually working on learning something new, so I'll pick up where I left off on the parts I found tricky the last time round. I find that once I roughly figure something out, I can only repeat it so many times before I get frustrated and coming back to it in the next session makes it a lot clearer, almost like the brain needs time to rewire itself. It's a slow process but I gather it's not a competition anyway. These days I'm working on some ragtime, which is tough because the timing is, well...ragged.
MAIN INSTRUMENTS
For gigs where I have to cover the ground between traditional blues and classic rock, my workhorse has been the Telecaster. I have a G&L ASAT and a Fender '85 MIJ which I "Esquired" for fun and never went back. There's a certain charm in the simplicity of one-pickup guitars that forces you to really work with your pick attack, phrasing and tone knob to maximise all avenues to shape your tone.
On that note, when I get to do gigs with more old-school blues on the setlist I use a 50's Gibson ES125, a beat-up big old archtop with a single P90 in the neck position. That sound is just instant "whisky and cigarettes" in one note, there's no other way I can describe it. It can rock hard too; on one occasion I found myself having to use it on an AC/DC song and it was way too much fun to be legal! I hope the Jazz Police don't come knocking on my door...
When I did an acoustic blues duo with a singer at The Old Brown Shoe, I was using my 2001 reissue National Style-O resonator. That thing makes a huge racket and could probably double as a self-defense weapon, I'm looking forward to using it more in future as a solo act.
Special mention also goes out to my 2000-ish Gibson Blueshawk, which I used in Roomful of Blues along Prinsep Street where I cut my teeth at the regular Saturday night blues jams back in the Blues Virus days. This was when smoking in pubs was still allowed so to this day if I sniff it right it can still smell quite funky. I got it from the old Swee Lee in Bras Basah (remember George Han?) and I've never seen another one like it in Singapore, I wonder if anyone out there has another one?
OTHER EQUIPMENT
As an engineer I can't help fiddling with things, and as a consequence I've built and repaired a couple of tube amps. Familiar to most would be a clone of a Fender 5E3 "Tweed" Deluxe, but I'm also partial to quirky old budget-line amps that no one would bother re-issuing these days, so I've built clones of a Stromberg-Carlson AU29, Silvertone 1331 and Magnatone Starlet. The first two use 6SJ7 pre-amp tubes, which you don't see often in production amps today and it definitely gives a different character to the drive compared to the usual 12AX7. Unfortunately I don't get to crank them up much at home and I'm too lazy to lug them to gigs, so it's more of an academic exercise to satisfy my curiosity than anything else.
Other amplifiers I have in my fiddling stash are a Sound City Concord, a Fender Champ 12 (with faux snakeskin covering!) as well as a tiny little Pignose 7-100, the 1997 25th anniversary edition.
I also dabble in other instruments like mandolin (Bill Monroe is the man), banjo and lap steel. I find that working out stuff on another instrument with different tunings can help to clear the mind from guitar saturation as well as inspire new material. You can hear some of them on the General Lee album.
OTHER LOCAL GUITARISTS YOU FIND INTERESTING
Paul Ponnadurai (RIP) was singularly the most talented musician, not just guitarist, to ever walk the streets of Singapore. The '85 MIJ Tele pictured is highly sentimental to me because the last time I ever saw him perform live, he borrowed that guitar and gave it his all that night in spite of his poor health. We shared a love for blues and hillbilly music; he left many memories of mind-blowing singing, picking and musicianship that I'll never forget, along with the words of wisdom he imparted to me.
In the early days of sneaking into Crazy Elephant as a marginally under-aged kid, Robert SK and John Chee were the ones who showed me the blues light, that playing hard-rocking blues wasn't something that could only be done by people in other countries. At the same time, Trevor Jalla and Danny Loong were out there pushing the more urbane side of the blues with Ublues and of course, Danny has since opened up many opportunities in the scene for local musicians, yours truly included.
Francis Chan, who plays bass with me in Raw Earth, is the coolest cat you could ever share a stage with and he works that groove like nobody else can, defying the laws of physical and musical theory by simultaneously holding it down and pushing it along.
Lim Kiang, founding member and bassist of Straydogs, has been rocking since the 60's and still does in his own inimitable fashion. He recently released an album of new originals called "Last Dog Standing", on which I played a couple of numbers and had a great time recording under Patrick Chng and Clement Yang Xi's expert hands and ears.
Between Francis and Kiang, I think the two of them should be the poster boys for active aging.
Noel Ong & David Baptista are two outstanding guitarists in their own right but the way their sound melds into one in Ugly In The Morning and Welcome To The Machine is something else altogether. It's not just a "I play diu-diu-diu, you play jeng-jeng-jeng" kinda thing, they've put in a lot of work to make the whole sound a lot more than the sum of it's parts.
Lastly, he's not primarily known as a guitarist but Matthew Tan deserves a mention for putting Singapore out there on the Nashville stage and the Grand Ole Opry, which is kind of like Glastonbury for country. As a kid I used to listen to his hit song "Singapore Cowboy" on 90.5FM alongside the popular favourites like Kenny Rogers, John Denver etc and that put the thought in my mind at a young age that anyone can play good music and get on the radio.
PHOTO ABOVE
Left: ‘85 E-series Fender MIJ Telecaster, “Esquired” with only bridge pickup.
Centre: ‘50’s Gibson ES125.
Right: 2001 National Style-O Reissue.