Words matter. These are the best Derek Trucks Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
But the Allman Brothers made some great studio records.
I used a ’57 Les Paul on one track, ‘These Walls’, which features Alam Khan on sarod. I tuned it way down because the sarode is naturally in C but I tuned the guitar down to D and he came up to D. It was all a pretty simple setup.
When I had the idea to build a home studio, the purpose was to start making records.
It was pretty surreal because The Allman Brothers’ ‘Eat A Peach’ and ‘Live At The Fillmore East’, and the Eric Clapton ‘Layla’ record was the music I grew up hearing all the time.
It’s always nice with two guitarists in one band to have some contrast.
Slide can sound like the most beautiful woman’s voice.
My grandfather’s from Pinson, Alabama, all the Truckses came from there.
When things come up, you deal with them. However uncomfortable that is, let’s have this discussion right now.
You hope to catch the band on a good night and you hope that it sounds good when you hear the tapes back, and you hope that when you mix it you still have the feeling that you had when you were onstage, but it seems like it never quite works out that way!
When you think about your heroes, it absolutely shapes how you play and who you are.
When you’re co-leading a band with someone whose career is bigger than your own, like with my wife Susan, it’s different. You have to agree on things musically. It took months for it to come together.
When you’re producing your own record, you do your best to be objective and take a step back from it from time to time.
Y’know, you can sit in a room, practise all day, learn your scales and blaze blues riffs: it’s easy to hide behind that. But I think with the slide, it’s a little bit tougher.
He was very sweet, but just his persona was intimidating. He was Gregg Allman. I think a lot of people had that feeling when they met him.
I have only a couple of Super 6s now, but I do have quite a few black-face Fenders around the studio. They all have slightly different character and tone, so I keep collecting them.
George Alessandro in New Jersey builds these great amplifiers. He was working on my Super Reverbs for years and he’s kind of a vintage Marshall specialist. He built this amp and it’s kind of a cross between a Dumble and a Super Reverb but a little juiced up with a little more power.
Well I’ve been playing an SG forever, and I’ve got some other vintage Gibsons I like to use in the studio.
You can’t have the Allman Brothers without Butch Trucks and Gregg Allman. Those are just irreplaceable spirits.
A lot of the gear came out of some of the old studios here in New York City. We picked up a lot of old microphones, reverb tanks, tape machines, so yeah, we try to record the old way, which takes more time and energy, but it certainly feels better when you’re getting to the end of the process of making a record.
People have a tendency – you let your ego get in the way of the big moments.
You hear it in the great musicians, whether it’s a drummer or a horn player or a guitar player – you hear them take those breaths. You can feel that there’s something they’re trying to tell you.
The one thing the Allman Brothers Band does not do is phone it in. They bring it every night and that’s something I draw from.
When you’re improvising, you connect with people in a way you don’t in normal life, strangely.
I remember a festival we did in Denmark with the Clapton band where you suddenly realize it’s an actual band – and you’re on an equal stage playing music together.
But I don’t pretend I earned a Lifetime Achievement Award.
I think on some level, you always carry your first and biggest influences with you, whether it’s the Allman Brothers or Col. Bruce Hampton, people that you learned a huge amount of what you do from. So it’s always there.
I got a picture of me taken next to George Jones. I rarely ask for that, but he’s someone I couldn’t pass up.
We all notice that the nights that are the most magical are the ones where everybody is taking a deep breath and kind of relaxing into it and relying on the people around you.
But every so often we’ll get to this place where everyone in the room is fully focused on what’s happening. You see it happens in sports sometimes, when there’s a really important moment. It’s a great thing when you can get to those places, when you look up you don’t see a bunch of phones out.
I think we appreciate the musicianship we’re surrounded with. Too many bands – it’s an ego trip for the leader.
