Interview to..... Jaye Foucher

Interview by Roberto Guarnieri

Tell me something about your first experience with guitar....
When I was 17 years old I had a month during the summer where I was not working or going to school, and I decided to learn to play the guitar during this free time. I had been playing piano since the age of 7 but had wanted to learn to play guitar for many years. We had an old nylon-string classical guitar in the house, and I taught myself to play chords by looking at chord diagrams on some of the sheet music I had. Within a few weeks I wanted to learn more, so I started taking lessons with a local guitar teacher. Less than a month later I bought an inexpensive electric guitar and small amp. By the end of that summer I was learning solos and rock songs, and knew that playing guitar was what I wanted to do with my life.

There was some particular cd that has influenced you and why?
I would say Dream Theater's Images and Words CD influenced me more than anything else has. For many years I had been really focused on the neo-classical guitar playing style, but had started to move away from that on my own. When I heard DT's cd with their odd time signatures and the jazz/fusion-influenced style of John Petrucci I was totally intrigued.

As woman, have you found more difficulties in music business?
Absolutely. There was a lot of skepticism about women in rock back when I first started. Now it is not so uncommon to see women rockers, but 15 years ago there were hardly any female rock guitarists, and those that were out there were not all that great at soloing. My goal was to change that. But I had to put up with a lot of people telling me that girls would never be able to play as well as or as fast as the male guitarists out there. And people would automatically assume I was in or should be in an all-girl band, as if women weren't good enough to play alongside men. But a lot has changed over the years, and now it is much more accepted to be a woman rock guitarist, and I very rarely ever come across the type of prejudice and disbelief that I saw back when I first started. There have also been a lot of advantages to being a woman though. I've had opportunities that I may not have gotten just because I was a woman, and I know I've gotten more media attention because of it. Being a woman in a male-dominated field made me stand-out in the crowd of thousands of guitarists. So for all the difficulties I've faced, I've always been able to see the benefits of being a woman guitarist and I've used those to help me succeed.

What about Jennifer Batten?
Jennifer has done wonders for helping to boost the image of women guitarists. I admire her both for her playing skills and the fact that she also overcame the same type of difficulties and prejudices that I faced.

You are the chief of Guitarappalooza, one of the most important reality > on internet, how you decide to promote some guitarists?

I honestly came up with the idea merely to promote my own music. I wanted to expand my fanbase by combining my mailing list with the mailing lists of other instrumental rock guitarists. So I came up with a plan that allowed 6 of us guitarists to combine mailing lists and put out 1 single newsletter that featured all of us. The initial 6 guitarists that were involved were myself, Neil Zaza, Alex Skolnick, Jon Finn, Joe Bochar and Jennifer Batten. In the second issue Andy Timmons and Ron Thal joined us. After we put out the 3rd issue of the newsletter we were gaining so much interest from other guitarists wishing to join that we decided to switch from mailing a print newsletter to doing a webzine so that we could add as many guitarists as we wanted without worrying about the size of the newsletter growing too large and unmanageable. After that, it just took off!

I think that the scene of instrumental guitar is more various respect 10 years ago.
Yes I agree. It is also more underground than it was back in the 1980's and 90's. There is still a market for instrumental guitar music, but it is much harder to succeed at it. The internet, of course, has helped out a great deal in keeping the instrumental music scene alive.

About your cd's, which message are you trying to explain?
I don't really think about giving people a message with my music... when I'm writing I'm simply thinking about writing tunes that people enjoy listening to. That's really my only goal for the music: create a song that is enjoyable to listen to with a melody that makes the listener feel something -- whether it is sadness, excitement, joy, etc.

The duality between tecnique and feeling is old as the world, what is your opinion?
I've always been of the opinion that you can be a technical player and still play with feeling. I think it's a lot easier to become a technical player than it is to learn to play with feeling, however, so I think a lot of players get really good technically but don't ever learn the feeling part. Very few players are both, but I definately think it can be done. Look at John Petrucci: there's a player who has amazing technical abilities but whose solos are FULL of feeling.Recently i have worked with Jeff Kollman and Neil Zaza, two guitarists > with a great feeling. I'm not familiar with Jeff Kollman, but Neil is indeed a great guitarist and songwriter. Neil is another example of someone who has great technical ability but also plays with a lot of feeling.

Returning to you cd's, is there some particular composition you love better than others?
I think my absolute favorite is "What Comes Around" on the second album.It's my favorite to play and to listen to.

How many copies could sell now in USA a very good instrumental cd?
It all depends on distribution and advertising budget. If you had good distribution, your cds were in major record stores, you were able to get on some sort of tour as an opening act, and you had a really good advertising budget and were able to get the word out and get some airplay then I think you could sell 3000-5000 cds. But for those of us without major distribution or major advertising budgets, the best we can hope for is maybe 1,000 over a period of a couple of years.

I have seen that a lot of guitarists are more into fusion tunes than in > the past, why?
Well if you want to be challenged technically and mentally as a rock guitar player and you don't want to play the neo-classical style, which in my opinion is outdated and overdone, then you would naturally turn to the other styles of music that are technically, mentally, and physically challenging -- jazz and fusion -- and incorporate those styles into your rock playing.

What is your opinion about magazines like Guitar Player and Guitar World ?
You forgot Guitar One! I think all of those magazines are important to guitarists, both in keeping a person up to date on what is happening in the music/guitar scene, what equipment is current and out there, and all 3 magazines help to teach guitarists new techniques and songs. I did a lot of learning from guitar magazines in my early years as a player. And I'll still use the transcriptions they provide if I want to learn a particular song... I can certainly learn a song by ear if I want to, but if someone else has already done the work for me I'm just as happy to learn it from tablature!!

Is there now a guitarist that you think could be eexplode on very high levels very soon?
I wish I could answer that but I can't. Frankly, I think the days of great guitar players exploding onto the music scene at a high level of exposure are over at this point. These days the guitarists you see featured on the front of guitar magazines aren't guitar hero material, or at least not what I'd consider to be guitar heros. They're good at what they do, but they're certainly no Nuno or George [Lynch] or Eddie [Van Halen]. And I think it'll be some time yet before the music scene turns around and guitarists who've spent years learning to be great players are once again admired for their playing skills.