Gilad Weiss Interview
Below is the transcript of my interview with Gilad Weiss, who takes us on a visit to his music studio and improvises on several of his instruments, including the fretless guitar, and some of the instruements from Turkey and Central Asia, such as the kopuz, the baglama and the Turkmenistani dutar. He also spoke to me about his duo project with the Anatolian kamanche player Melisa Yildirim and we’re including a track from their beautiful album, which is linked in the show notes for this episode along with Gilad’s album Improvisations on Fretless Guitar Volume 1, and the ways to connect with Gilad. He shared his valuable insights about teaching music, and teaching the guitar, improvisation and interesting details about the modes and tuning systems for the various instruments he demonstrates. This episode has a lot of improvised music; Gilad spent much of the interview with an instrument in his hand; please use the detailed timestamps to navigate the episode, which like all my episodes you can either watch on my YouTube or listen to on all the podcast platforms: https://www.leahroseman.com/episodes/gilad-weiss
Gilad Weiss (00:00:15):
(music) I wouldn't consider myself anyone who represents the music, but I just love the instruments. So I am just trying to find my sound on the instrument with respecting the aesthetical elements of it, but to learn all the repertoire of all of this, especially for someone like me who cannot learn repertoire, it would be pointless. So I just try to find my voice using these instruments.
Leah Roseman (00:00:42):
Hi, you're listening to Conversations with Musicians with Leah Roseman. This podcast strives to inspire you through the personal stories of a diversity of musicians with in-depth conversations and great music that reveal the depth and breadth to a life and music. Gilad Weiss takes us on a visit to his music studio and improvises on several of his instruments, including the fretless guitar and some of the instruments from Turkey and Central Asia such as the kopuz, the baglama and the Turkmenistani dutar. He also spoke to me about his duo project with the Anatolian kamanche player Melisa Yildirim and we’re including a track from their beautiful album, which is linked in the show notes for this episode along with Gilad’s album Improvisations on Fretless Guitar Volume 1, and the ways to connect with Gilad. He shared his valuable insights about teaching music, and teaching the guitar, improvisation and interesting details about the modes and tuning systems for the various instruments he demonstrates. This episode has a lot of improvised music. Gilad spent much of the interview with an instrument in his hand. Please use the detailed timestamps to navigate the episode, which like all my episodes, you can either watch on my YouTube or listen to on all the podcast platforms. Before we jump into our conversation, I wanted to let you know that you can support this independent podcast through a beautiful collection of merch with a very cool, unique and expressive design from artist Steffi Kelly. You'll find that link in the description of the episode. This weekly podcast is in season four, and I send out an email newsletter where you can get access to exclusive information about upcoming guests. Have a look at the description of this episode where you'll find all the links, including the merch store and also the support link to buy me a coffee.
(00:02:24):
So, hi Gilad. Thanks so much for joining me here today.
Gilad Weiss (00:02:27):
Hi, thank you for having me. Very nice.
Leah Roseman (00:02:30):
I haven't had anyone on the series playing Turkish instruments, which is a big part of what you do.
Gilad Weiss (00:02:37):
Yes, I didn't know that you didn't have, it's quite a big part of what I do. Yes.
Leah Roseman (00:02:46):
As the Fretless guitar as well.
Gilad Weiss (00:02:48):
Yeah. Although I wouldn't consider myself as someone who's playing Turkish music in a general sense.
Leah Roseman (00:02:57):
Yeah. Well, I know you have so many instruments and I am not sure where to start, and I know you're willing to play some music for us today. What are you playing the most these days?
Gilad Weiss (00:03:10):
Mostly I'm playing a combination of, I have lots of instruments, but I perceive them as one. They're all just one sort of instrument, which is for me, a string, and I always tell people that I move strings. That's my catchphrase, and technically as what I do, I just move strings. And recently I've been playing the more historical versions of the saz and those that converse with what might be argued is where the origin of it is, which is Central Asia, modern day Iran Turkmenistan, these kind of places. So I would probably mostly be playing today the Tambur or Dutar or but in inspired by those traditions you might say that sound. So mostly that and electric guitar actually, it kind of has to do with fingernails, which I don't have at the moment. Some instruments, I used to have long fingernails and at some point I cut them. I tried to play baroque lute and I could never really regrow them. I always start to feel like they're annoying me at some point. So I'm trying to reach a balance where I can have both fingernails and no fingernails at the same time.
Leah Roseman (00:04:51):
Yeah. I was going to ask you about the fingernails because it is such an issue if you're playing certain styles like classical guitar and it came up, I interviewed a lutenist and we discussed how she feels people have to lose the fingernails. So when you say both, are they sort of a little long or just the idea of playing the style?
Gilad Weiss (00:05:08):
So first of all, there was a time when I initially cut my fingernails that I used. I don't know if they called prosthetics, I think they're called prosthetics. It's like what usually they put before they make the gel
(00:05:26):
And I just glued them and actually there are a couple of tracks in my albums played that way, and it did save me in a bunch of concerts in those times because when your nails are long and you cut them for the first time, it's a shock. It's very hard to deal with that. First of all, you have the actual technical difficulty and then you have the perceived volume difficulty. It's more a psychological thing, so you're used to having a big sound which you take for granted because of the nails, and then you suddenly lose it and everything feels so bad until I reach a point where I kind of try to, I grow this side a little bit longer than that side, and I adopt a more of a lute position, which is this, it's called thumb in which the thump remains inside and there's a thumb out, which is where you get the classical position.
Leah Roseman (00:06:31):
We didn't discuss if you want to include a track from that album in this.
Gilad Weiss (00:06:34):
Sure. Everything. Yeah, whatever you want, you can put Late Night is the best. Actually, I tried to relearn late night before Covid. A friend of mine told me, let's make a video for this, and I said, it's an improvisation, I can't play it again. He said, learn it, and he's like a very good filmmaker and I did. I transcribed a quarter of it and then Covid hit, so everything was canceled and I didn't continue.
Leah Roseman (00:07:06):
This is Late Night from Improvisations on Fretless guitar, Volume 1. You'll find the link to that album in the show notes of this podcast. (music)
(00:11:50):
So this fretless guitar you're holding, I know that originally you sort of just ripped some frets off a guitar when you started, but so is this the first real instrument you were playing?
Gilad Weiss (00:12:01):
No, actually my first guitar was one that I just pulled the frets out. I saw a video by Erkan Oğur, very famous and good Turkish musician, and I noticed the Fretless. It wasn't the first time I saw Fretless guitar, but it was the first time I saw it being implemented in a sensible way, which sounded good because after you take out the fret, you are left with a huge action because you had frets before. Now you have the action of having the fret and the actual fret distance and you kind of really want to take the strings as low as you possibly can.
(00:12:48):
And I immediately did that, went to the guitar tech that I used to go to. He helped me get the action lower. And then after some time when I noticed that, yeah, I'm starting to like it, I'm getting the hang of it. I even posted one video that became viral back in 2012 where things could go viral organically on YouTube. And then I contacted Erkan, I met him in a workshop and he connected me with his guitar builder who built me my first guitar. I had several years with that. It was geared towards being useful on stage, therefore it had an even lower sound that Fretless would have, which is probably one of the lowest sounding instruments you can get in terms of volume. And then after some years I just went to repair my guitar and I told myself, don't look at other guitars, don't look at other guitars, don't look at other guitars. And I just saw this, and I just had to take it, try it, and that was it. And this became my favorite guitar. This was back in 2017.
Leah Roseman (00:14:06):
So your album Improvisations on Fretless guitar, which is how I discovered you that was on this guitar.
Gilad Weiss (00:14:12):
Yeah, everything.
Leah Roseman (00:14:14):
Well, it's such a beautiful album. I've enjoyed listening to it so many times.
Gilad Weiss (00:14:17):
Thank you very much. It's very nice to hear because for me it doesn't feel like anything too special.
Leah Roseman (00:14:26):
Do you want to play something for us now? (music)
Gilad Weiss (00:16:29):
Something like this.
Leah Roseman (00:16:30):
So beautiful. Thank you. You know what I said, I haven't had any Turkish instruments. Of course, I featured the oud, I did an episode with the Egyptian musician, Ali Omar El-Farouk, and he did talk about going to Turkey to get his oud and relationship with Turkish music to Arabic music. And I know in fact you have an album with a kamancheh player. So I had a Kurdish kamancheh player and he talked about the differences between the kamancheh in Turkey and in Iran and Kurdistan. So, similar. Do you want to speak about that project a little bit?
Gilad Weiss (00:17:08):
Yeah, of course. So it's with Melisa, Melisa Yildirim, who is, she was born in Istanbul, lived there up until recently and now she's I think in Norway right now or maybe Finland doing some academics and stuff. We met in a music festival in Turkey 2015 I think it was, and we just connected. We had a nice connection between us as friends and at some point I told her, let's just make an album. Maybe even she said it, I can't really recall, but one of our main thought, I mean you used to play so much together anyway, whenever I come to Istanbul. So it was just logical to try to do it at some point and I really wanted like stripped down sounds. As you can tell by my solo album, I prefer that than large productions as I always feel like an instrument is like all the orchestra in and of itself, it's the entire production.
(00:18:24):
Maybe this will change, who knows? And I wanted it to remain like a duo album. The texture of the sound is this duo thing. She liked the idea and what we did is she came here to my house over in Israel and we just spent three weeks here writing everything together and arranging everything together. Then going back to Istanbul for the studio time where we recorded it and we kind of did it in two sessions. Like I recorded all the guitars first when she was in the studio listening to everything, all the work and mentally supporting everything. And then we switched. She did the second, all the kemanche part, and I would do the mental support this time and there maybe a little bit additions here and there, small stuff. For example, there are points where I'm just holding some arpeggio and improvising on a different channel, but we try to minimize that as much as we could. And we also, at the end of the track, there are two tracks from a previous recording session that we made. It's Dugit and Meçhûl and the last two parts, which were done with my old fretless by the way, before I had this one. And we had our friend Adam, who is a very, very good musician, plays some tambur. It was actually very nice. I really liked that album and I really enjoyed that.
(00:20:03):
We made everything from the beginning together, which is very rare now in my experience. Usually people have things that are already ready and they just send you the links and you have to listen to it. And I find this kind of work style very disconnected, almost cold. I would say. There are things that you cannot know that might work until you actually try them. And sometimes the dynamic is the thing that will determine whether or not it did work or did not work. And trying to work over a recording with it. You cannot control the dynamic. It might be musical dynamic and it might be more a spiritual dynamic, you might say abstract dynamic. But the fact is that it wouldn't work with the recording, but it will work between in reality. So for me it's important.
Leah Roseman (00:21:08):
I'm curious, Gilad, why you in the recording recorded separately, since you could have done it live together? Was it just the quality of sound?
Gilad Weiss (00:21:15):
The main problem is that this instrument is kind of risky and there's two types of risks. One is the intonation thing, which we can put aside, and the other is the recording risk, which is having leakage of other sound. The studio where we went to didn't have separate booths and it's very nice studio, but it's not a huge studio where you can record in two different booths without any sound leakage. And we just had to make this decision and I felt that anyway, I would probably choose this because you can have a better, even though you're not playing together, I would still think it's a better connection than playing behind a wall and maybe a glass or something. So I would probably make that choice anyway. And you have to be practical also. So basically trying to record things is being strategic. You have to think a strategy general or whatever. And for example, I will tell you a little secret, there is the first song, so there's the part that opens. It's like something like this, if you recall, and this phrase, it's very nice, I can play it, of course I can play it live and stuff, but I made the decision in the studio to play it like this.
(00:23:07):
So I didn't play this note. I left it blank and the reason was I preferred to do it like this and then just over up this and save on studio time, then probably messing it up too much and having to going through punch ins and maybe again and again. So I deliberately took this decision because I knew that this is a kind of a, how can you say, a risky point, because a very small thing can change your orientation and send your finger the wrong direction with just a little bit more force. And as you might know from violin, the higher the frequency gets, the less room you have for intonation deviation. So it was just a strategic decision to save on some studio time and not to get frustrated with it because I don't mind, for me, the most important thing is to have a right feeling in the recording or the performance, and I would rather do that than trying to make another take and another take and another take, which for me just kills the feeling. The sixth take is not as energetic as the first take usually. So I just made, I didn't even try to do it right. I just told him, okay, look, I'm going to do something. You open another channel, and I just did it like that.
Leah Roseman (00:24:36):
Yeah. This is Windmill, the third composition on this beautiful album with Melisa Yildirim and Gilad Weiss. You'll find their website linked in the show notes of this podcast. (music)
(00:28:11):
Your first trip to Turkey was 2013 and you met the instrument maker, I don't know, I can pronounce his name,
Gilad Weiss (00:28:21):
Engin Topuzkanamış
Leah Roseman (00:28:22):
That,
Gilad Weiss (00:28:23):
Yes. It was back in 2013. Yes.
Leah Roseman (00:28:29):
So you met him online and you decided to order instruments?
Gilad Weiss (00:28:33):
Yeah, I mean, as I said earlier, I posted a video of me playing Fretless guitar in 2012. It was way before social media was as, how would you say,
Leah Roseman (00:28:51):
Toxic
Gilad Weiss (00:28:54):
Between toxic, common. Most people still didn't have social media
(00:29:01):
In that time, I believe definitely not older people like my parents or it was still a rather fringe thing, even though starting to get mainstream, but it was still kind of free and nice and you could do anything you want. I mean, of course also because of that it was also extra toxic, but that's a different thing. So I just posted that video and it got quite viral, relatively speaking, and lots of people from Turkey saw me and they started writing me and I befriended some of them and I'm not sure if from that video I spotted this guy again on Facebook and we became friends. We didn't really talk too much, just I saw some photos of him with cats and building instruments and I said, okay, it's a good combination.
(00:30:01):
And probably I recall that I also sent him a message and he was not super nice to me. We laugh about it right now, Engin, says it's not true. I say, that's how I recall. He answered, but not super nicely. And then he saw a photo of me with Erkan from the workshop and they suddenly, it's like, oh, why? How are you? And that's our inside joke kind of thing. But we became friends and I started learning about people who's the most renowned kopuz builder and this kind of thing, but my feeling was to ask him to build for me and he told me, look, I'm amateur. I'm not a professional builder. You should talk to this or that guy for amateur. I said, sorry for professional. And I said, no, I don't mind. Just it's okay. My feeling says I should do this.
(00:30:53):
And I think I just thought it's something extra than just ordering an instrument. It's like creating a connection, creating friendship, something like that. And indeed that's what happened. So a little bit after that I went there with another friend and we took the instruments and since then we've been friends and I've been frequently visiting as much as I can. Hopefully I could go again soon. Right now it's a bit difficult, but I did order some instruments, so that's a good sign because I felt maybe I can't order now, I should wait or something, but I did order and for me it's like an optimistic thing
Leah Roseman (00:31:45):
And you speak Turkish,
Gilad Weiss (00:31:47):
I fake speak Turkish, I can speak a little bit. I just need the other party to realize that I'm not the best of speakers and they should lower their level for me. If they do that, I can manage. Unfortunately, I couldn't just stay there since I started going, I always had to come and go, come and go. And I believe if I were to stay there all this time, I would probably be fluent by now. But these gaps, they do something.
Leah Roseman (00:32:18):
Yeah. Did you happen to watch the Netflix series of The Club?
Gilad Weiss (00:32:25):
No, I'm not big on,
Leah Roseman (00:32:27):
Yeah, it's in Turkish and I really think it's great. It's based on, there's a Jewish story and it's the political turmoil in the fifties, sixties in Turkey, and there's a lot of great music and it's based on a true story actually.
Gilad Weiss (00:32:46):
Is it spoken in Turkish also?
Leah Roseman (00:32:48):
It's all in Turkish.
Gilad Weiss (00:32:51):
I'll check on it. I didn't.
Leah Roseman (00:32:53):
So just having heard so much Turkish in that show, of course I wanted to learn Turkish even though I have no reason. It's such a different language and so beautiful.
Gilad Weiss (00:33:02):
Yeah, I think it's actually not a very hard language. Once you set your mind to learning it to read, you can learn to read Turkish in 15 minutes because there's no exceptions. Every time you see a type of letter, it's always that sound, all the vows are always the same sounds. There's no instances like K knife, k knight or this kind of things. What you see is what you read. So reading is actually very easy, and then there's the actual understanding, which is harder of course.
Leah Roseman (00:33:37):
So do you want to show us some of the Turkish instruments you got there?
Gilad Weiss (00:33:40):
Yeah, of course. This is not the same kopuz that he built me the first time. This one was later made maybe two or three years later when I needed one to reach a C sharp in the main tonic, and it just became my mostly used one. So this is what they call today kopuz. Some people are very upset that it's being called kopuz because they say kopuz was a different instrument and it was popularized by both Erkan Oğur and Ramazan Güngör years earlier. They say it's mistakenly called, this way. I don't put myself in those fights, I just say what is easiest for me, which is kopuz, in this case, which is a form of tambur actually, I think all of these instruments are basically tambur. The main thing that I kind of noticed from reading about it and hearing some stuff, lectures and all this, and this word tambur also moved on to become like tambura, tanpura became Tambourine in the west, which is a drum, which is interesting because I also realized after some time that originally these instruments tambur, the dutar, this kind of stuff, they weren't being played with drums. It's not a thing historically, and it kind of makes sense when you realize how low volume they are. I was always wondering how can a guy play tambur, and this guy with this huge drum, he's like boom, boom, boom, hard hitting it. I believe now that this is probably the answer that it's a modern thing where you can record two different things and mix them together.
(00:35:42):
One is very loud, one is very soft, and it can happen. It's one of the benefits of the recording work. So the tuning is like the middle string is the lowest in tune now it's on C sharp. This string is a fourth above it, which makes it F sharp. And this string is higher than the middle string. So it's basically a re-entrant tuning, this is E in this case, this tuning was popularized by Erkar Oğur, the guy I'm speaking about all the time. Some people say it's his invention. He says, no, it's just a normal tuning. And he's probably right because it's a fourth based tuning. Putting the third here makes it interesting because what you can do is you can have rolling sounds (music) or so you can play harp sounding scale runs and the older style is to play more this.(music)
(00:38:21):
So what's nice about this, this tuning too is that you get the second, which is a very nice thing to have when you play (music) and your ears starts to open up to cluster chords as not being dissonant and actually being consonant, which is if you want to get down to more theoretical stuff. It's very interesting in my opinion. To me, the perception kind of shifted. The consonant chords are the dissonant. Now the dissonant ones are consonant. That's why I changed this definition to in how can I translate it? Actually I never thought about it. Interest and bored. You get interested by something and then it gets boring. So you change it and then this thing is now interesting and then it gets a little boring and then you change that. So it's not about clashing of tonalities, it's more about this like these two feelings.
Leah Roseman (00:39:37):
I was wondering the mode you're just playing in.
Gilad Weiss (00:39:39):
So because of this tuning, the way I perceive it, each tuning kind of carries its own, you might say harmonic, DNA, and there are things that you can do with it and there are things that you probably can't or things that are easier or less easy. So the most common scale to play on a given Turkish instruments such as this or the normal Baglama, which is tuned a little bit different, tuned in a way that this string is now the tonic. This string is still lower, but it's lower by a second. So the second is between these two, and this one is a fifth from the middle string or a fourth from this string. So you kind of have a mixture of the fourth and fifth tunings, which historically is probably the two most early tunings you can find. And you play it in a position that if you see saz players, you might probably see in this kind of thing. I can also show it in a second, but this tuning kind of changes everything and you do get kind of a minor chord out of it (music), which you probably don't want to use too often. Look, this would be considered dissonant and this is the consonant version of it.(music) So let's say if you just hold something and sing over it, it would probably be this one rather than this one. It doesn't mean that this is not usable, of course, especially if you are playing a different type of music, you can use chords of course, but me aesthetically, I would probably not want to linger over this one too long. So you have a one, you have comma second because you can have it.
(00:41:40):
You have the minor third which you can play here, and you can play it one bass string and then you have a fourth and you have a fifth, and then you have either the comma raised sixth or the normal sixth, depends on what motion you are making right now. Then you have the minus seven and again the one, so basically it's called husayni. Usually probably the most common scale you will hear in this music, I perceive it as being a mixture of Aeolian and Dorian. Sometimes Phrygian comes inside. Also it can happen, kind of depends on if the instrument allows it or not. And I don't know if you ever heard about it, but I read somewhere that probably Dorian was the most used scale in the past, especially in church music. And it kind of makes sense. I mean it's a Palomdromic scale. The piano is, I mean they probably thought of Dorian when they put D in the middle and everything else palendromic to it. I read about it in, what's the name, book's, name, Harmonic Experience, Matieu something, Matieu, Matieu something like that. And I also read a rebuttal of that book, which only agreed with this. So it was very interesting to see. It's very common to play this scale. (music) So I am trying to mix both techniques like the one that can do this(music) and the one that can (music).
(00:43:58):
So this is kopuz. I can show you the normally tuned one. So this is, it is called kisa sap baglama. "Balama" is what usually people say Baglama, just the G silent kisa sap means that the neck is short. It's a short necked version. There's a longer necked version. It doesn't necessarily mean that the instrument is actually shorter or larger. It's like the scale length, the amount of frets you would get.
(00:44:36):
So my kopuz is visibly smaller, however, it's a long necked instrument and this is visibly bigger, but it's a short neck instrument. Okay, here the tuning is, as I said, so you have this one, usually the tonic. Traditionally this is perceived as the tonic. There's a new modern way of playing it. Well, this is the tonic, but this is the tonic usually. So if this is the tonic, that's the second below it, and that's a fourth above it. And these two strings interact as a fifth. These two strings interact as a fourth, which is very nice actually. (music) Usually it's played like this (music) and it is a very modern style of playing.(music) I'm sorry,(music)
Gilad Weiss (00:46:07):
That's old style(music), this is (music0
Leah Roseman (00:46:21):
Kind of thing.
(00:46:23):
Hi, just a quick break from the episode.You may be also interested in my episodes with Lutenist Liz Pallett, guitarists including masters Derek Gripper, Daniel Ramjattan, or Marc van Vugt, along with many episodes featuring traditional and improvised music from around the world. It’s a joy to be able to bring these meaningful conversations to you, but this project costs me quite a bit of money and lots of time; please support this series through either my merchandise store or on my Ko-fi page; you’ll find the links in the show notes. For the merch, it features a unique design by artist Steffi Kelly and you can browse clothes, phone cases, notebooks, water bottles and more. You’ll also find the links to sign up for my newsletter where you’ll get access to exclusive information about upcoming guests. Please check out my back catalogue, with weekly episodes going back to 2021. Now back to Gilad Weiss.
(00:47:15):
So Gilad, some people are listening to the podcast version and they can't see what you're doing. And I want to understand, so you're stopping the string with your plucking hand to make different notes as well as making
Gilad Weiss (00:47:26):
This stopping thing?
Leah Roseman (00:47:28):
Yeah,
Gilad Weiss (00:47:29):
It's like I would finger something with my left hand probably, and then I just tap, it's kind of like the Eddie Van Halen thing. I'm not the best one in this kind of thing. Players made this technique the main thing, and they are playing Bach pieces. So this is my right hand and I can also move my left hand at the same time try to do, and the interaction between them, usually you would probably want to arrange something or compose it to be able to control it. However, I also try to be able to, I am trying to work on being able to improvise in this way freely, which is what I'm doing now just because of podcast stuff, probably I can do it better, but that's what we get now. And if you notice like this small phrase (music), it's like the DNA of all of this music. It repeats everywhere. I call it, in my world, I call it the Dorian Cadence. We should probably (Music) , you can use the microtones (music).
Leah Roseman (00:50:01):
So in terms of those microtones, are the frets there or you're just sort of bending a little bit?
Gilad Weiss (00:50:07):
No, here you have frets. You can see it, you from this side. Some people arrange differently. I arrange it differently. I can show it on Kopuz better because Kopuz is more of my main instrument. I would feel much more comfortable doing a gig with kopuz than this. So I move over here, you can see this set of frets. I move them over here. Originally people use it over the,
(00:50:37):
And they don't really use it very rarely. I use it here to get this fa diez sound, and I say fa diez as in a movable solfège fashion. So whatever you tune to this right now I'm C charp, but we call it la. It's just movable style. So it'll be, (music) and so this fa diez, which I say fi by the way, I can have it here too, so I could have done it.(music) And this small shift in position opens up different possibilities. Something I couldn't do. I mean I can do it like this, which sounds a bit different.
(00:51:52):
So each position kind of gives you a different nuanced sound, which is what I like when I'm thinking of these things. What I wanted to say is that I believe the microtones is a very new thing. I don't believe they're very old. And when I say old, I mean old, not old, 1950s, I mean centuries ago. And probably the reason is the more you look at other instruments from other cultures, you see no frets in them. Now, I might be wrong on that because it kind of depends on what exactly you look after and which sources you trust. And some people might say that the reason that dutar don't have microtones is because of the Soviets, but I don't think it's true. But for example, if you take the Iranian tambur, the Persian Tambur, Kurdish tambur, there's a more real name for it, but I forgot there's no frets on the dutar, like micro frets. I mean there's no micro frets on tambur. I believe it's a later edition. Now, it doesn't mean that micro microtones weren't used. Of course they were used because you have fretless instruments at the same time and you have the voice.
(00:53:17):
But there is an inherent problem with having micro frets, which they're trying to solve these days. With the Microtonal guitar, if you saw maybe there's a Turkish guy called Tolgahan Çoğulu, and they are having rails where you can individually move the frets. Because what happens is if I would want on a normal Baglama here, I cannot show it. But on a normal Baglama, you have a situation where if you want the natural second, the one that sounds nicest, you have to move the microfret very high and then you have a problem because you can't play the fifth without it being so narrow, almost impossible to use. So on instruments that uses a plane, like a neck thinking, like one string playing, thinking it might have a drone string and another string, which is just one string, and you don't fret the other string over there. You can do it to some extent, but once you start to have different levels and you want to use all of them, you have to compensate. There's nothing else you can do. And the more strings you add that are tuned differently, the less natural intervals you can really have because those strings have overtones and the overtones are not necessarily conforming to this idea.
(00:54:49):
And it's kind of like guitar players who like to tune the B string slightly lower because it's a third, which is much nicer sounding open. But then you're left with a fretboard that has frets designed for it not to be tuned like that. And you're left with a big problem on the fretless. I can actually do it and I sometimes do it. So this tuning I played in the beginning. This time I didn't do it, but I sometimes tune it tuned D flat G dfl, G, D flat, E flat G, sorry, E flat G, E flat G, which is a major third. So I sometimes tune the major third with the overtone. And I have a natural , which is much nicer, but I need to remember it when I'm playing and adjust my perceptual fretboard to it. It can get,
(00:55:49):
I can show you for example, tambur. So this guy, as you can see, no micro frets, but I did lower the third to be more harmonic. (music)
Leah Roseman (00:56:58):
Beautiful. I love the sound of that instrument.
Gilad Weiss (00:56:59):
Yeah, this one's very nice. It's very therapeutic. The reason probably there are times where I play only this one. The reason is that when you do this motion, something is like the world is okay,(music) nothing like this.
Leah Roseman (00:58:34):
Love it. I wanted to ask you about your sort of daily practice of improvisation.
Gilad Weiss (00:58:41):
Yes, it's what I do.
Leah Roseman (00:58:44):
Yeah,
Gilad Weiss (00:58:46):
Just maybe I can show the dutar for a second. I think it's also very nice instrument. Actually. This one, in terms of the physicality of the instrument is my favorite. Holding it, you feel very important. It's much more heavy. They deliberately make it like that. And the frets are metal, which,
Leah Roseman (00:59:09):
Sorry, which one is this? Which instrument?
Gilad Weiss (00:59:11):
This is the Turkmenistani dutar. It comes from Turkmenistan. There's also a big portion of, there's a big rather big minority of Turkmenistani people in Iran. So some people in Iran play that too. I'm not sure. I think this one specifically came from Turkmenistan. It was a kind of operation. It's around 40 to 50 years old. That's why it's black. They start their life like this color. The frets are metal. And it's very interesting because I used to believe, oh, it's metal and it means it's probably more modern, more advanced until I held it in my hand and I realized, wait, there was metal in the middle ages. Probably the guy who made it went on to forge a sword right after that or something. So I do believe this is probably more ancient. I mean it's definitely more ancient, but it resembles all the versions in my opinion. And I actually really like this instrument. This one is usually played without fingernails. The tambur usually is played with fingernails and it's tuned the fourth. And it's more common to think of it as an upside down fifth actually, where the tonic is not this one, but rather this one. So then remember when I said remember, recall this phrase this Dorian cadence. So it's almost like if you open a dutar video, something like this (music)
(01:02:35):
Like it's very, at first I was very rhythmical, but then I became disjointed. I think the music sounds more like the second part usually, and when you're improvising, it's quite easy to do because you can just do whatever comes out and be at peace with it. The most amazing thing is when you see to many people play this kind of random sounding music, but together it's very interesting.
(01:03:01):
So I wouldn't consider myself anyone who represents the music, but I just love the instruments. So I am just trying to find my sound on the instrument with respecting the aesthetical elements of it. My perhaps, I wouldn't say limitation, like orientation, I would not play as if it's a normal guitar like chords and stuff like this. I mean you can't really with these things, but to learn all the repertoire of all of this, especially for someone like me who cannot learn repertoire, it would be pointless. So I just try to find my voice using these instruments, try to, it's kind of reducing myself inside the instrument is how I feel it kind of
Leah Roseman (01:04:05):
To be at one with the instrument,
Gilad Weiss (01:04:06):
Something like this. Yeah,
Leah Roseman (01:04:08):
Yeah. Well, I wanted to ask you, you started playing blues and rock and really influenced by American music when you were a teenager.
Gilad Weiss (01:04:18):
Yeah, Pink Floyd was, my god, I probably listened to just Pink Floyd for seven years of my life. I'm this type, if there's something I like, I would just experience it over and over again. I watched the movie Hair for every day for a whole year when I was like seven, that probably explained something. And up until this day, by the way, I listened to the soundtrack when I have long drives and stuff like that, the bass playing over there is amazing. It's like all the bass you need in one album is over there. Yeah, it started from rock music probably I would say most psychedelic blues is probably better to say psychedelic in the early Pink Floyd sense, not the modern sense, but I was always niche. It's probably my, I don't know if it might be subconscious or anything, but even when I played rock, I only knew niche things or liked the niche things much more. And even in Pink Floyd, my favorite Floyd album is More, which is a very vague, almost unknown soundtrack that they made in, I think it was 69. And I don't know if it's maybe deliberate, maybe subconscious or something. Just that's the pattern I noticed along the years.
Leah Roseman (01:06:00):
But I was curious, growing up in Israel, I mean you had in the air you would've heard a lot of Arabic music and Judeo Arabic music. Do you think that entered your subconscious a bit?
Gilad Weiss (01:06:12):
Maybe. But there is, it really depends on your upbringings, your surroundings. But where I was we for a while, I mean we kind of tried to disassociate ourselves from these kind of things and be more cool in the American sense of cool. So listening more to rock and these kind of things. And I'm mixed. I'm half Libyan and half Ashkenazi, so I didn't really have a strong traditional influence coming from either side of my family, which kind of left me as a blank slate. But you would find lots of people here or from Yemen ancestry, from Morocco ancestry that they have this experience and phenomena much stronger than I, where they were resentful to the old tradition that they came from to later on rediscover it and find how amazing it is. By the way, it's something that many Turkish friends of mine told me about the Turkey over there that they also had this kind of thing. So I'm guessing it's probably a common phenomenon around the world that people kind of try to be different than who they are. I mean, I do have that to some extent. Anyway, I'm very interested in Turkish stuff and different stuff. I rarely look at Israeli stuff, as you might say.
(01:08:00):
And not because of any resent or something like that, it's just, I dunno, probably fantasizing personality type. But yeah, were a little bit more resentful to it. I did notice, however, early on that I had the ability to mimic that music quite fast. I mean to a point where it kind of made me at first even more resentful to it. Like, oh, look how cheesy it is. I can just do it like this and it's as if I'm doing it. But we say here it hits you in the upside down, it catches you off guard. At some point you suddenly realize that, oh wait, this thing that I wasn't really open to, it's probably much more interesting than I initially thought. And then you start to find yourself being drawn to it. More and more. Turkish music, however, is less common here, apart from Arabic, which is the Turkish music that influenced from Arabic music and pop and this kind of thing. But the Tuku, which is the folk music of Anatolia, you might say it's actually quite rare here. It's not very common, although I see interest rising with younger generation, which is very nice because after this soul searching and trying to find different music, naturally I kind of gravitated towards that sound. I was looking for many things, but when I heard those sounds, I immediately liked it.
(01:09:51):
But yeah, definitely the mixture you have of different ethnicities and ancestors here, especially these days after the internet revolution and suddenly things that weren't supposed to be cool by whoever decides what's cool are becoming cool. Because there was a moment in time where organic exposure was much more free, so you suddenly noticed things that in the past you didn't even know existed, which is very nice thing.
Leah Roseman (01:10:31):
So you had mentioned going to study with Erkan Ogur. This was at the Crete Musical Labyrinth the first time.
Gilad Weiss (01:10:38):
Yeah,
Leah Roseman (01:10:40):
I'm just asking. I interviewed Kelly Thoma on this podcast, so people might
Gilad Weiss (01:10:45):
It was there, yes. Was there for three years in 2012. Yes. 20 12, 20 13 and 2014, I went to all three of them and then I stopped going because what happened is that usually I prefer to go to Turkey in the summers.
Leah Roseman (01:11:07):
And you teach a lot.
Gilad Weiss (01:11:10):
Yes.
Leah Roseman (01:11:11):
So I was just curious about your approach to teaching.
Gilad Weiss (01:11:15):
I would say I'm a better teacher than I'm a player actually. And probably the main reason is I also suffer from Imposter syndrome like many people do, I believe, at least I know what it means. And I can also tell my students about this phenomenon, which is interesting. I just talked about it in the last class we had. However, I do have confidence. I mean, I have confidence also of my playing, but it was a very, how can you say it? It was an empirically focused confidence. I listened to enough people whom I trust that told me, okay, you are good. And I just said, okay, I can conclude that I'm good in some way, maybe however, for teaching, I have it a more natural confidence of my ability probably because I went through the phases quite late and I could to some extent document it in my brain while going through it.
(01:12:26):
So I remember lots of hardships, which I found that I'm able to help at least a certain type of students with those hardships still being monetized in my mind. So there are things that I don't take for granted or things that I can kind of relate to some difficulty that certain student has because I'm a very, very, very theoretically focused person. I can talk about theory for weeks, and I wasn't like that all the time. I was this intuition guy, I don't want to learn, I don't want to know notes. I reading music will kill my creativity, these kind of things. And I just realized at some point that I probably have to change that. And I kind of remember the process so I can help other people. And I also really enjoy, I have some students who were kind of believing that they were late to the train, you know what I mean? Older age never really made it probably the first people to fall for the play guitar in five sessions, two shapes to play every song kind of thing. And what I do is I just convinced them that actually it was all a big lie, you might say like a big misconception.
(01:14:16):
Music theory is not rocket science. It's not really a very complex thing, especially fundamental theory. I don't mean analyzing Mozart pieces. I mean the very basic stuff of, and I just convinced them that their biggest gamble is to just try to for once, really try to learn that. And I see some results and it's very satisfying. This is for me, this is really satisfying to see someone who believe that that's it not for me in this lifetime. Suddenly seeing them improvising a mode on one string while playing a bass note, it's really rewarding. And that's real music. I mean also tell them things like that. We are so used to think that there is a certain way to play a certain thing. And if you only play on one string, it's not enough. It's not considered, no, it's music. You make an album like that. It's good music.
Leah Roseman (01:15:25):
Do you teach online as well as in person?
Gilad Weiss (01:15:27):
Yes. Yes. There's some things you can't do online, although there are some things that are easier online. Sometimes discussing the theory is probably even easier online while improvising together is a bit hard.
Leah Roseman (01:15:51):
Unfortunately
Gilad Weiss (01:15:53):
Couldn't go
Leah Roseman (01:15:53):
Back and forth, but not,
Gilad Weiss (01:15:54):
Yeah, some people say there is some technology that can make it happen. I couldn't find it.
Leah Roseman (01:16:05):
It does exist, but we can get into it, maybe apart from the podcast, I interviewed someone during the pandemic. Her husband had this thing called Syncspace, and it used, I can't remember the audio thing now. It existed before and I've tried it. It's audio only and they reduce the lag. So it's almost not there.
Gilad Weiss (01:16:26):
Yeah, I think one of my students from America found something like that too. But you need the visuals too. Just the audio is a bit problematic because in the case of teaching someone, it's very important that they see you. Body language is so important. By the way, I am a proponent. Proponent is a person who is in favor of, right?
Leah Roseman (01:16:52):
Yes.
Gilad Weiss (01:16:52):
I'm a proponent of this idea of watching people play. Some people are like, oh, real music is just so we listen to it. What are the times when we just listen to albums and these kind of things, which is nice. It was nice times. But that was the anomaly of the music world, listening to music that comes out of nowhere in your room. Like in the past, you couldn't hear any music without seeing the person plays. And there is something about watching a person plays that is actually adding to the experience, in my opinion. And also if you wanted to learn and improve yourself and these kind of things, watching on the body language, the movements, the positions, of course, but I mean even extra to that. So without visuals, I think it loses a significant element. Perhaps with time it can be resolved in some way. However, I do believe that for online students, the theoretical thing can be enough. There are some guidance that you can give on how to try to improvise by yourself, which is always nicer, by the way. But
Leah Roseman (01:18:16):
Yeah, what I'd asked you before about your improvisation practice daily, I was kind of curious, is there any framework you use or any kind of plan?
Gilad Weiss (01:18:25):
So first of all, I believe that improvisation is real time composition. I read it somewhere and just make a lot of sense. Of course, you always have this thing that when you are alone at night and just playing to yourself, you'll play the most amazing things. The moment you press the record button, your ability kind of goes this way. If you're on a podcast, it goes that way. So these things are totally normal. I even discussed them with other players that I look up to and confirmed it for myself. So you want to always improve yourself to a way that even with the most stressful environment, you are still in a good enough level. So that's the, it's kind of like you have this bar and this bar, this is you alone and this is you under stress. You want to just make both of them grow.
(01:19:27):
And so as someone who came from this, oh, I just want to play my feelings, my intuition, I don't want theory, I don't want to notes. I make the complete inverse of that. And I started to really focus on those things that are the big no-nos for person type A. So at some point in life, I asked myself, what happens if I take the chromatic exercise that you're supposed to be doing and really do it for two or three hours a day? What happens? I heard people say, you should do it as a kid. I used to do it, but just so I can finish it and do the next thing, play the chords and play the songs. And I used an interesting experience when I was in India and my friends convinced me to go. I said, I don't want to be in a place where you go to rave parties all the time and I'm left alone.
(01:20:32):
And he said, no, no, we'll not go. And we got there and they went all the time. So I was alone. So that's when I tried it. And then I just kind of, every morning I would wake up and just do this. I would just play chromatic exercises and first without even metronome and later on with metronome, this kind of things. And I kind of got addicted to it, to playing the chromatic exercise to a sense that I said to myself, okay, you managed to pass that barrier and play the chromatic exercise. What about music? And then I realized that you don't need to, I mean, you go to rehab in order to
Leah Roseman (01:21:16):
Recover,
Gilad Weiss (01:21:17):
Not recover, but we have the word in Hebrew, so I can't find the equivalent to kick off the habits of doing the chromatic exercise. What you need to do is you need to trade them with something that carries more music with it.
(01:21:32):
I took the modes and I started practicing them as if they are the chromatic exercise right now. Now, I strongly believe that this saying a scale is not music. No, A scale is music. It's enough. You can play a scale and it can be musical. It's up to you to make it musical. You can't blame the scale for it not being musical. So I call this entire philosophy like fall in love with the gray. That's the way I term it. The gray is all those things that we don't like, those things that we want to skip ahead, that everyone told us that that's not enough to be music. Once you fall in love with this and you find yourself really doing chromatic exercise because you have a desire to do it, not because you think it'll give you something after you go on this road, that eventually starts to make almost everything you will do.
(01:22:34):
And improvisation, it can be even very insignificant things because probably every composition school will tell you that not every melody that you write needs to be the biggest masterpiece of the world. Sometimes the very simple things that are already proven to be working. So it's kind of like the same philosophy when you take an instrument. You don't need to immediately play like playing something that will just drop the heads of everyone around. You sometimes just need to play something very basic, and that's enough. It gets you going. Of course, I always tell myself these things too, because once I press the record, I feel like I need to play the most amazing thing right now. And also with recording, no, it's also you can record something that is not the most amazing thing, just a slow piece of music. Okay, so this is, you might say the tonal material part of realizing that music is there, it's there already, the scale, it carries the music and there is the time element, which is the rhythm part. And probably the best, the most significant day of my life was a day where I just opened my Facebook. And a friend of mine who is a guitar teacher, he used to write experiences from his lesson, and I would sometimes read them. And then he wrote something and it was a little bit on the, how can you say, the bad advice kind of stuff.
(01:24:15):
He wrote something like, this student was here and we talked about rhythm. And I told him, rhythm, you don't count the rhythm. You feel it something. It's ingrained in you. You must feel it. It must be a part of you. And I looked at it and I got agitated. I was like, no, I don't like this. So I sat down, I took my kopuz, I put my kopuz on my left, and I started counting out loud. I just counted out loud without playing any note. I just used ten eight in that day. So it can be more interesting. And I just counted, I dunno, for minutes, and it sounds funny, minutes it's not. But no, try count out loud for minutes, like five minutes. It's not very easy. And then after some time, I just played one note over the one and I kept on going and I just kept on counting. And that's when I started implementing counting out loud while improvising. And it's actually very interesting because most people will tell you, no, it's a big no-No, you shouldn't do it. You should feel, you should. So I reversed everything and I brought myself, it's like you don't need to work on feeling. You have it. You are a human, you have feelings. And if feelings live here at the top of the, so counting the robotic stuff, I call it the robot, by the way. We like the robot. We want to build the robot. So the thing is, you need to take this guy over here.
(01:25:50):
And if you don't do it very mechanically at first, because it cannot be any other way, you will never be able to do it. You'll actually compensate and bring this down over here. You just imagine that you're not doing that. It's basically kind of lots of opposites things. I have lots of these expressions. One of them is like the ear is the enemy, which I like most people say, oh, just use your ears. Just listen. Just, yeah. But what if you can't hear these things? What if you are not secure? What if you are not confident? What if you are biased? We are used to hear stuff that works on certain type of music, but we are not used to hear stuff that works on other types of music. So when I first started engaging with melodic minor, it sounded like the most illogical thing to my ears.
(01:26:44):
And I tried to implement it in places where the YouTube teachers will tell you, oh, this is where you can use melodic minor over the two five in minor. And the chord, that is a major seventh chord with a sharpened fifth. That's where melodic minor will work in that context. But what's the model sound of melodic minor? So what solved that for me is that I kind of realized that over the guitar, I mean this can lead to the tuning things. I like to have open strings available where the harmonic field of the guitar exists. I realize the D harmonic, sorry, melodic minor utilizes all the open strings. It's the only one that does that. So I just started playing over the melodic minor and I started to teach my ear, how this scale sounds. So I used the technical thing, the theoretical thing, to teach me the sound.
(01:27:56):
If I would've relied on my ear, I could never have learned it. I saw Julian Lage, whom I really like talks about this concept also in a workshop that he gave that Pat Metheny told him, no, no, no, don't play this. This is very guitaristic. You should play from your hearing. And he said, I love Pat Metheny's the biggest thing. But I didn't agree with him on this thing. And then he did a crazy quote and said, what if I want to play this chord? And all the class kind of laughed because this chord means something. It is a nice sound, but you could never imagine it. Probably.
Leah Roseman (01:28:35):
You had mentioned at the beginning that you were playing a lot of electric guitar these days, and I've seen some of your videos where you have the double neck electric guitar.
Gilad Weiss (01:28:42):
Yes. This one would be harder to fetch right now. Sorry, both. I don't keep all my instruments open at the same time because then you have option paralysis and also it kind of needs some adjustments, some fixing. So I couldn't use it right now. But yeah, there is the double neck, basically it's just a normal guitar with an added fretless neck, which is a little bit more, I mean, kind of depends. I a hundred times prefer classical guitar for fretless, than electric guitar. But these days I prefer electric guitar to classical guitar. So everything is always confusing in my world.
Leah Roseman (01:29:35):
And do you also have an eight string guitar? Do you still have that?
Gilad Weiss (01:29:38):
No, I sold it.
Leah Roseman (01:29:39):
Okay.
Gilad Weiss (01:29:40):
Yeah, it was a multi-scale guitar where the frets are crooked. So each string maintains a certain amount of string tension, and I didn't like it. It was a nice guitar, but I would've preferred it to be normal because I wanted to make re-entrant strings. I like re-entrant concepts. This is where a string,
Leah Roseman (01:30:11):
The higher string
Gilad Weiss (01:30:12):
Is. It's just, it can be anything, but it means that they don't go according to the order of pitch. So you might have a high string and then a low string, and then a high string and then low. So it's very nice. It's kind of reverses things
(01:30:26):
Because of my approach to guitar, the way I see it, I can play a lefty guitar without, I just understand how it works. So I can take a lefty guitar and just play strings upside down immediately, and I like to do it to lefty guitarists. If I meet them, I kind of like, can I borrow and say, no, it's lefty. You can't play it. I say, no, it's okay. Then I try, and I would say also a big proponent of everything I do is kind of like, how can I say it without sounding too dramatic? Teaching the chords, you might say, I believe the biggest sickness of, at least my generation in learning guitar, is thinking that chords are the fundamentals of guitar. They're not only, they're not fundamentals of guitar, they're not fundamentals of music. Also, they are like three notes at a time, and they might be fundamental to music that is using common practice, tonal harmony stuff, which also in that context, you can always change the chords and reharmonize stuff.
(01:31:42):
But the problem with guitar is that they made it the fundamental of trying to learn the guitar. So basically you kind of learn positions and shapes, and you also associate fingerings to it, which is another level of problem. I have advanced students who can already see much more of the guitar who are still succumbing to the fingering element. If you change their fingering, something in the perception gets lost. And so ditching the chords is a very important part. For me. The Fretless guitar was the biggest helper in this, because when you come from that, when you learn that so early on and you kind of base your entire perception of music around it, not by choice, but by believing that that's what you should do, it's very hard to step out of it, actually. So even when I was advancing with my own studies, before I took the Fretless guitar would still shut my brain down when doing a chord to know which all the notes and the tensions to the connection to the perceived tonic or whatever, that only the fretless really released me from that, because I wanted to play chords on the fretless.
(01:33:09):
I wanted to play harmonic stuff, and now you have to be very discriminate. You need to choose which notes you want off that chord. Suddenly the one in the five, you're like, wait. It's very hard to fret them. It's very hard to intonate them. Maybe I should just skip the fifth. And you make this choice from a sonic auditory perception, not from a book told me, oh, you should skip the fifth, because the fifth is the first overtone of the one. So it didn't come from that. It came from a real desire to succeed in doing something. So that was a big relief. Of course, I'm not saying that chords are not important. They are very important. It's just that they're not fundamental levels of the building that we want to build of the construct. I call it construct. So there's basis and there's a construct, and you should put the energy in the basis and chords are not basis.
Leah Roseman (01:34:18):
Well, if any listeners want to try to have lessons with you, of course your website will be linked. And in terms of your music, you have a lot on your beautiful YouTube channel,
Gilad Weiss (01:34:27):
Preferably. So my website is not working. I decided to shut it Facebook and Instagram, and even YouTube, someone, if they can comment on the YouTube,
Leah Roseman (01:34:40):
Okay, we'll be linking that.
Gilad Weiss (01:34:41):
Yeah, that's better. But
Leah Roseman (01:34:44):
I was curious about recording. Are you going to put out another album on some of these instruments you played today?
Gilad Weiss (01:34:49):
Yeah. So the first album, the solo improvisation, if you notice, is called Volume one.
Leah Roseman (01:34:54):
Yeah.
Gilad Weiss (01:34:54):
The reason was to stress myself to make the volume 2. I want to do that. The more instruments you have, you really need to manage your time. And I'm very bad at it. I can sit for hours playing tambur and forget everything, but it'll happen hopefully. And if not in this way, I would probably just book a studio and just go and do it over there if I notice that it doesn't happen. Because the first one, I always, what happened is I just wanted to practice recording myself and sharing it, because first of all, something changes when you're recording. You're not playing the same and you need to practice it so you can overcome it. Then after you record something, you'll probably feel that it's bullshit. It's very bad, and it's probably not, and you need to just throw it out there and just let it exist.
(01:35:57):
So that was my main thinking behind that. And every couple of days I would do it and I would just share it. And all throughout this time, I said to myself one day, probably my dream was to make an album with only fretless guitar from beginning to end. I even said this to Erkan one time when we were in Crete. I told him, Erkan, my dream is that you make an album with just fretless guitar, and I could listen to you playing the Fretless guitar and without anything else. And he said, that's you. And I said, what do you mean? He said, you should do it. He said, yeah, you know what, maybe, and while I was doing this recording thing, when I practiced recording and sharing, I was told to myself, one day I'll go to the studio and I'll just make an album like this, blah, blah, blah. Until I just realized, wait, I actually have the album ready already. It's just those videos. I just need to master them together and make this out nicer. That's what I did. I actually missed that those times. It's very nice time. And I did everything here with my very low grade recording gear, which I like to sound more than higher grade gear that I sometimes, yeah, hopefully I will not be lazy, and I will do that. But my main problem is I'm addicted to playing, actually.
Leah Roseman (01:37:19):
Yeah, you're far from lazy, obviously.
Gilad Weiss (01:37:21):
Yeah. I mean, you might say it's, yeah, it's not laziness, but I'm really addicted to playing. Sometimes I tell this to people and they don't really understand what I mean, and what I mean is I'm addicted to playing. If I'm not playing a couple of hours, I feel like crave craving and I need to feel myself doing this thing. And oftentimes recording is like 10% playing, 90% clicking, and I have a problem with that. So that's what I'm trying to work on these days. Be more productive in that sense.
Leah Roseman (01:38:04):
Why not just let it record you for two hours and see what comes of it?
Gilad Weiss (01:38:08):
That's an approach I thought about. I might try it. There's some secrets, which perhaps if I reveal here, I often watch YouTube while I'm playing, so I would have to not watch the YouTube while I'm playing. Actually, some improvisations that I did share with electric guitar, I was actually watching YouTube while playing them, but with electric guitar, it doesn't pick up the sound. So I could do that. I joke about it. I can do it less, but it's actually a good thing to do. I tell my students, sometimes you should be able to play while engaging in other things if it's talking to someone. Watching. It all started from what we used to call football practicing,
(01:39:02):
Which is you practice the guitar while watching football, and the reason it's football is because you don't have to be so engaged in it. You just wait for the goals to come. But then I found out that I can just watch lectures and do the same thing. So I found myself watching lectures and this kind of thing while I'm doing it, and that's another reason why I can't watch TV shows series, TV series. You asked me about if I watch the Netflix, and I said, oh, probably not, because I rarely watch TV shows, and that's the reason it's harder to play while watching them. But yeah, you're right. I mean, I should try to incorporate, there's another problem with recording all the time, and it's that still I would need to listen to it later. I would need to sort it out. The longer you record, the longer you need to spend later without playing. So it's a balance. I'm still trying to understand.
Leah Roseman (01:40:09):
Yeah,
Gilad Weiss (01:40:13):
I believe that I will solve it pretty soon, hopefully.
Leah Roseman (01:40:17):
Good. I look forward to that.
Gilad Weiss (01:40:19):
Yeah, I need to make the second album. I listened again to my album a while ago after a long time that I didn't listen, and it's really nice actually. And it's funny because it was a hundred percent improvised and long time passed. I really hear it with fresh ears. It doesn't feel to me like I played it. Do you know what I mean? And it's really nice. Some things I listen to and I'm like, wow, we have a word. It's a Arabic word. It's like, good on you. I think it's a very nice word. I'm listening. I'm like, oh, okay. Sounds very good.
Leah Roseman (01:40:59):
So thanks so much for this today. Really appreciate it.
Gilad Weiss (01:41:03):
My pleasure. Thank you for the interest and the time.
Leah Roseman (01:41:08):
I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please share this with your friends and check out episodes you may have missed at leahroseman.com. If you could buy me a coffee to support this series, that would be wonderful. Or you can browse the collection of merch with a very cool, unique and expressive design from artist Steffi Kelly with notebooks, mugs, shirts, phone cases and more. I'm an independent podcaster and I really do need the help of my listeners. All the links are in the show notes. Have a wonderful week.
