Excerpt from James Byrd's Biography: James Byrd is perhaps the player out of all in the rock guitar genre that should be more renowned than he is. His reputation by those that are familiar with his work is at the top echelon of the genre and he has the honour of being the only guitarist Yngwie has given an uncompensated endorsement to, calling Byrd, "One of the best European sounding guitarists I have heard in years, he definitely has 'the vision' and aims for each note and makes it count." “Guitar For The Practising Magazine (now known as Guitar One) listed Byrd in their one-off feature "The 10 best guitarists you have never heard".
James Byrd has one of the purest tones you will hear and his work screams quality. His guitar work showcases what the instrument is capable of in the right hands with his immense note choice, clean speed picking, superb vibrato and original phrasing. Byrd is the consummate “players player."

So now that you armed with that bit of knowledge, here is my interview with a guitarist who I rate highly as a musician and player...having originally appeared in the mid '80s with with the group Fifth Angel, James Byrd moved on to front James Byrd's Atlantis Rising and continues on to this day as a solo artists.

John: Greeting James, thanks for taking the time to talk with me.
James: Thank you, my pleasure John.

The third reason is that the timing was right due to a lot of really bad stuff that went down with me and members of the band for the last couple of years that have precluded me from completing a new album. First, my keyboardist and engineer Brian, was stricken with throat cancer. It was really bad and he had to undergo radiation and chemotherapy, and in the end, the treatments severely damaged his hearing. He survived, and is slowly getting his hearing back.

Then my father had a major heart attack in July of 2004. I spent the next four months putting 3,000 miles on my car to be with him every other day, but in the end, he passed away from it in October. Everything has been pretty much upside down and left me emotionally drained, but I was also still working on getting my guitar company off the ground, so what little time I had left to me, went into that. So the re-release hopefully fills a gap in my release schedule and gives me some time to re-group.

Finally, there was an additional track which had never been released by a label, which was recorded in the same studio immediately before Crimes of Virtuosity in the winter of 1996, which tied in with the album artistically, and I thought it completed the album in an important way.

John: Were you involved with the re-mastering of Crimes of Virtuosity?
James: I re-mixed the album – as I said - almost immediately after it was sent to the Japanese in 1997. The re-mixes were mastered by Ken Lee (Journey, Blue Oyster Cult, Starship etc.) of Rocket Labs in San Francisco. You’ll have to ask Lion Music if they did anything more to it after I sent them all the mixes.

John: Besides the additional bonus tracks, were there any other major changes to the re-release?
James: Only the packaging.

John: Now I am a big fan of the Apocalypse Chime. I can remember when I bought it (this was the first James Byrd release I had purchased) and with Robert Mason on vocals (Lynch Mob fame) it was very comfortable to listen to and I was instantly won over by your guitar playing and songwriting. I have also read that you where unhappy with the final mix. Why not re -elease Apocalypse Chime mixed the way you originally felt it should be mixed?
James: The mixes were truly horrible. Shrapnel released the album but it wasn’t licensed to them, it was made under contract. I’m sure they’d assert that they own the album if I re-released it.

John: I first sought out your musical releases after reading about you in Guitar For the Practicing Musician. Before then you had been in the group Fifth Angel, a very progressive outfit for the time. Was it hard to transition from a band member to solo artist?
James: No, it was a major relief to be honest. I had been in a lot of bands before that, but that one really was a gigantic pain in the ass, or more specifically, one of the people was. The terms under which I left were most unhappy, but in the end, aside from what I still consider to be an ethically unconscionable betrayal of our partnership agreement, I found the increased responsibility of being a solo artist no where near as difficult as dealing with out of control egos.

John: Yngwie endorsed your work at this point, which was a first for him. Do you remember how you felt when you learned this?
James: Shocked really. Let’s face it — he had never had very much good to say about other guitarists up until that point, especially anyone who’d recorded for Shrapnel. Mike Varney is a guy who’d spent his life as an A&R trying to undo his loss of Yngwie’s signature on a recording contract, with dozens of wanna-be neo-classical guitarists. I was pretty surprised as a guy – stuck- on his label that Yngwie would like what I was about, but he really did.

John: Both Yngwie and you are good friends now; can we ever expect a joint effort between the two of you? I think that would be a very cool project.
James: I’d be up for it.

John: As an artist you are a bit reclusive, choosing to record and release music and not tour. Do you feel you are missing out on potential fans?
James: Well, please let me answer by what I’m not missing out on; my family, time to write and record, tendonitis that’s been under control for a long time after major hand surgery in 1990, and being able to broaden my horizons into musical instrument design. Touring is something people either love or they hate, but you’ve got to do it to find out. I toured for several years prior to Fifth Angel, and I was all up for touring with that and major label backing before everything went to hell. But really, at this point, I’m doing what I want to do, and going broke trying to tour just doesn’t seem attractive to me. To tour and not have it suck, you’re either going to owe a major record company a great deal of money as they put out the money to support you, or you’ve already succeeded on a big enough level to have paid it back, and to sustain your tour on radio play. I’ve been offered some interesting slots in other bands over the years, and in some cases, they were fairly well known bands. But the whole “rock star” thing is something that just isn’t burning inside me like it was when I was 23. I don’t idolize rock stars any more. Les Paul is my hero now. Some day, God willing, my hair will be gray. Les Paul never lost his dignity by beating his head on the wall. I love guitar, and I love making music. But the days of being motivated by the chance to ride in a limo and have women under the table at the Rainbow, heady though they were, are not something one tries to attain or re-attain after a certain point. I’m loving my work on bringing these guitars to market and just playing what I want to play when I want to play it. It’s not easy, but it’s fresh and interesting and I see that multi-role path as my own now.

John: How has Lion Music treated you? Being a European label, does the logistics make it difficult?
James: They’ve been great. No, no problems. Digital technologies and e-mail are wonderful solutions to distance. I actually sent them the tracks for Crimes of Virtuosity over the internet.

John: There is an aspect of Christian themes to previous releases and lyrics to some your songs. Is this an exploration of finding yourself through avenues of faith or display of you own convictions?
James: My own convictions mostly but a bit of both. I’ve actually grown really hostile to much of what presents itself as “Christianity” of late. It’s so mean spirited and divisive; I don’t like it at all. Yes, I believe in God. But you know, some of these evangelicals, they’re so intrusive and judgmental; they ask you “Are you saved”? Hey, that’s a damn good question for God isn’t it? “Go ask him and have him give me a call,” is what I usually tell them. So that’s a really loaded question for me, and I get it all the time from people who seem to want me to say “Oh yeah, I’m saved and God wrote my new album.” It just gets on my nerves to be honest. I try to write good music that means something to me, and I hope it will mean something to others as well. And yes, for me it’s very spiritual. But it’s not religious, and there is a difference. But I don’t like being put into a box by anyone or told what I can or can’t say. It was a running battle between myself and Mike Varney when I was on his label: “You can’t say that, I won’t put it out unless you change that word.” It made me mad as hell, and in my book, he’s one of the most unethical people I’ve ever met, so it was beyond ironic to me that he wanted to put me under his “moral microscope.” Music and words are things which ultimately reside in the ears and mind of the beholder. For me, they are, or at their best, should be spiritual. But I can’t bring myself to fit that into a context to suit someone else’s idea of what is spiritual. When I made the album “Son of Man,” one of the points I was really making, was made by using religious titles, to music without words. If you’re actually spiritual the manifestation of spirit is beyond mere words. Handel’s Messiah either moves you or it doesn’t, but attaching a sermon isn’t going to make it better.

John: Through all the bad events (Fifth Angel and Shrapnel for example) in your career have you managed to see any positives from those experiences?
James: Well you know, no matter how bad something feels, if it teaches you not to hit your thumb with a hammer a second time, you’ve learned something. And my experiences apart from that one have been really positive with the musicians I’ve worked with. When you’re young, you may have instincts, but you haven’t yet really learned to listen to them. Experience is a positive, even when it’s negative, as long as you learn from it.

John: Where there any special moments (that you remember) from your time spent in Fifth Angel?
James: Honestly, I’d have to be sarcastic. How about this one; being told I’d be immediately fired if I accepted an offer to do a solo instrumental guitar album on the side, and this was right after our drummer left to tour with Alice Cooper. That’s the kind of egotistical garbage it was all about, and really, I just found the whole experience overwhelmingly negative.

John: Let’s talk about your line of guitars, Byrd Guitars Super Avianti ®. What drove you to such a drastic step of creating your own guitar versus having one of your endorsers create your ideal guitar for you?
James: I wanted something that no one made. The guitar industry is incredibly stagnant. Think about it; if the auto industry were like the guitar industry, everyone would be driving cars which hadn’t changed in more than 50 years. Now don’t get me wrong, these things have a lot going for them or they wouldn’t still be around. But in my mind, it seemed that no one was approaching improving the instrument intelligently. Oh there have been some radical guitars, but they’ve been pretty silly, and none of them were actually better sounding and playing; just radical. Is that someone’s idea of an improvement? To make a guitar without a headstock? What the hell does that accomplish? Or to make guitars out of plastic? No thank you. So what I wanted to do, was design a new guitar that was traditional in the important ways, but which was ergonomic and performance based, and one in which all the little things added up into something that was as good as a guitar could be and greater than the sum of it’s parts. The world certainly doesn’t need yet another copy of a Fender Strat in my opinion, but there really was room for something designed by a real player, based on some engineering know-how. A lot of people don’t know this, but Leo Fender couldn’t play a note on guitar. He was a radio technician. He did get some very good advice from players when he developed the Stratocaster or it never would have sold well, but that was a different era in terms of HOW people played guitar. Almost no one ever ventured beyond the fifth fret in 1954. People used wound G strings. That Fender has never actually succeeded in selling something new successfully in all these decades only convinced me that someone needed to try.

John: What are the factors that make the Super Avianti ® dramatically different from the typical guitars made today?
James: I really wouldn’t say that any one thing is dramatically different. Taken as a whole, it is unique, but it’s really very traditional; 3 pickups, 25.5 inch scale, made from good woods. It has a pickguard which rather than being screwed ON to the top of the guitar, sits IN the face of the guitar absolutely flush like an inlay. It’s made from a material called Acrylite which is much harder than typical pickguard material. It seemed to make a difference in the sound. A bit more sparkle on the top end. Is this radical? I don’t know. But it’s nice not to have an unneeded edge protruding on the face of the instrument and it looks much nicer. The body shape is unique; I put the longer wing of the ‘V’ on the bottom to make the guitar balance and not interfere with the right arm. I also did something some might consider unusual; I chose to run the grain of the body wood at an angle parallel to the lower bout. I did this to get the maximum length of grain, running from the neck joint, to the tip of the lower wing which is longer. The result is a fuller bottom end to the sound. Wood fibers are like little “tubes”; sound travels down them. The longer they are, the lower the resonant frequency. I don’t think anyone in recent memory, has put the kind of time and effort and thought into this kind of stuff, to make an electric guitar that’s 10 percent better in every area so that it adds up to a 100 percent better guitar.

You see, so many of the guitars on the market today, they’re just what they are for no real reason. Some one maybe doodles something “space age” and a marketing department says “Oh the kids will like that.” My guitar has nothing to do with that approach; every single element of the design, is to make the thing play better and sound better. My headstock is different because hundreds of hours spent playing prototype after prototype, resulted in a larger headstock than my initial prototype because it sounded a bit better. I came up with a left handed tuner array on the four higher strings because it worked better; it gave a straight pull, it made the tremelo more efficient by giving a much greater range on the high ‘E’ string, and it eliminated the need for string trees which cause tuning problems. So my guitar was really developed and evolved as opposed to just being different to be different.

John: The body is flipped V-style (similar to an unflipped Jackson Randy Rhoads guitar), why that body shape? Could you have done the same things with a traditional strat design?
James: No. The problem with the strat is the “horns;” if you try to move into the classical position – to play a barred sweep arpeggio for example - your left wrist literally bangs into the body horn unless you pull back and bend your wrist. My foremost consideration was comfort and fingerboard access over any other consideration. Now a lot of ‘V’ shaped guitars aren’t even thought out for that; they have the body extending well up to the 16th fret in some cases.
I designed an off-set neck joint to fit the hand perfectly, and to be entirely clear of the last fret. It’s a bolt on neck because they just sound better, but that was done from a fresh sheet of paper as well; I use five recessed bolts, no metal plate, and the heel is blended in to the neck more like a neck through guitar.

The other really good thing about a ‘V’ shape is tone; you have very little mass where the neck attaches, which also happen to coincide with where vibrating strings, are moving the hardest. Because there is less mass there, it’s easier to “move” the body into resonance there. It gives you more bottom end, and the wings being behind the bridge, their increased mass tends to reflect string energy back, and gives you increased sustain and volume. For decades, people have assumed that heavy guitars like a Les Paul, have more sustain. It’s not a universally applicable bit of dogma; WHERE that weight is, and isn’t, matters a lot. My guitars are very light and made to resonate. The sustain is better than guitars weighing literally twice as much, and they’re loud and resonant. Now you mentioned the Randy Rhoads guitar, and to me, this is a really good example of a design with no sense to it from either an engineering perspective, or a playing perspective. It’s a very unbalanced instrument, always wanting to flop over towards the floor, and those points would make more sense on a weapon than on something that in my opinion, should feel and fit like a good pair of jeans. The neck joint has the body extending a considerable distance into the playing area, and the controls are not placed within immediate reach while playing. In short, it’s one of those things that just doesn’t make sense to me as anything other than a styling exercise. I find it kind of strange the way these things work out sometimes. Like the Stratocaster headstock; that was also backwards from an engineering standpoint. You’ve got almost 8 inches of high ‘E’ string behind the nut. As a result, the tremelo will barely move the high ‘E’ string a half step when pushed all the way down. Hendrix didn’t play upside down Fenders because it was comfortable, it wasn’t. But without that “backwards” headstock, he wouldn’t have sounded like himself a good deal of the time. All those lovely little chord melodies with tremelo vibrato applied gently sound a bit different with a backwards headstock; the strings move in better relative pitch.

John: Will a string through design ever be an option? How about a Floyd Rose style tremolo?
James: People can order just about any bridge they want, including a string-through hard tail. If someone wants a Floyd Rose, we’ll do that too, but I’ll certainly try to talk them out of it first. I used to use Floyd Rose bridges, and they definitely keep you in tune. But there’s a terrible price in terms of tone in my opinion, and there are ways to stay in tune without one; the right tuners – not locking, but split shaft style and low mass - wrapped with the correct number of wraps, a well lubricated nut or a graphite nut (that’s what I use), and a properly installed 6 point tremelo, will take unbelievable abuse and come back in tune. But everything has to be done right. My guitars are designed so that all a player has to do, is know how to install a set of strings on the tuners correctly, and they stay in remarkable tune without a locking tremelo. So in short, I think the Floyd Rose was a brilliant bit of engineering that solved a problem that had a better overall solution through other areas.

John: Are you looking for financial sponsor to help promote and publicize your guitars?
James: I was, and for a time, I was certain I had one. I spent some time “shopping” the guitar. Fender said “It’s really a neat guitar but it doesn’t fit in with our current marketing plans.” Gibson wouldn’t even meet with me or accept a submission for review. One company said they loved it, but their development budget for the year was filled. Finally, a South Korean factory owner who heard about me from a fan in New York who worked with one of his luthiers contacted me. It ended up wasting almost two years of my time and money. Long story short, he said he wanted to produce my guitars, showed me that he indeed had factories all over the world producing guitars for some of the biggest names in the business, and promised to send me a sample of my guitar in 3 months. After 3 meetings where he wrote down every detail, he took sample materials and parts, and photos back to South Korea. 3 months turned into almost two years of broken promises by them, and they kept trying to get me to eliminate features or change elements of the design to accord with their assembly line. When they finally sent me the sample, everything was wrong. They said they didn’t want to produce the inlayed pick guard. They just didn’t grasp that I didn’t go to all this trouble, to make a guitar like everyone else did. So I took what little money I had left at that point, and I went to people here, and had all the component shapes programmed into code to run CNC machines to make my parts, and set up my manufacturing here in Washington State. I oversee everything, and everything is exactly what I want, right down to the last screw. What it comes down to now is this; Sure, I’d love backing. But not if my instrument is going to end up compromised for production. Most people are entirely unaware, that multiple “brands” of guitars from different companies, are all actually made by the same people, on the same assembly lines, taking parts and hardware from common bins. All that actually separates most of these guitars, is the shape, and choice of wood.

John: If someone wanted more information about your guitars where would they go to find it?
James: http://www.byrdguitars.com

John: OK, James what musician’s have influenced you the most?
James: Hendrix, Blackmore (who I still adore to this day), Al DiMiola, Michael Schenker, Paganini, John McLaughlin, Jan Hammer, Jan Akkerman, Johnny Winter, Lee Ritenhour, Uli Roth, Frank Marino, to name just a few.

John: What type of music and CDs would I find in your current music collection?
James: Non-current! Hendrix, Blackmore’s Night, Frank Marino…..

John: Analog or digital, what are your thoughts?
James: Digital has improved so much. That’s probably just another way of saying analog to be honest. Analog is expensive, digital is very inexpensive by comparison.
Now this may not mean anything to a platinum major label artist, but it sure means something to a guitarist making music not bound for the pop charts, and working on a limited budget. I love analog, you really can’t beat it. If you’re very lucky, and chose wisely with digital, you may come close to it. But the reality of analog is resolution; it’s down to the atomic level. Digital is a series of wave form snap shots, followed by interpolation and wave form synthesis. It will never be the equal of analog technically, and to be perceived as being as accurate, the sample rate would have to be somewhere around 400k with a word length of 48 bits. We still are no where near that with 24 bit 96k, and 16 bit 44.1k CD’s are almost stone age in terms of resolution. I know too much about this stuff; the more you know, the less happy you are. If I had a spare half million dollars to spend on recording equipment, you can bet it wouldn’t be anything but a Studer and a nice old console with Neve designed channel strips. This stuff is expensive for a reason you know.

John: The neo-classical genre has gotten stale. Even Yngwie hasn’t strayed from the genre he helped to pioneer and bring to the forefront of metal. How have you managed to evolve past the clichés and take your vision into the symphonic realm?
James: Have I? I only know that I’m never very happy with my work. If I have, maybe that’s why. I really go out of my way not to repeat myself because I’m very judgmental about it, and I’m truly my own worst critic. I don’t even want to listen to my own albums when they’re done. I only find it annoying to hear something that I’ve already done. For me, the joy in making an album is those moments when something new goes down, and when it all comes together the first time. After that I feel like I just need to move on. It’s probably a curse because the sense of satisfaction is so fleeting.

John: For those aspiring to have a career as a musician, what kind of advice would you give?
James: That’s hard really. At least without being a hypocrite. I sure wouldn’t listen to advice when I was young. If I had, I’d never have pursued music. Everyone’s different, but I guess the one thing everyone has in common, is the capacity for growth. Try not to plant yourself in places you won’t grow as an artist if that’s what you want to be. If you’re wanting to become a millionaire playing music, you’d better ask someone else.

John: For those learning to play the guitar, where would point them to, to gain a solid background in music?
James: Everything good. To become a good musician, you have to recognize good music from bad. Most of it isn’t good at all, in fact it’s awful. How do you recognize good music? Maybe that is really the gift in the beginning. There is nothing I was listening to when I was 11 years old that I still don’t find absolutely brilliant today. The stuff I gravitated to has stood the test of time. It’s really a very difficult question to answer John. All my friends were buying Led Zeppelin albums when I was a kid, and I was the guy saying “but that guitarist is terrible! Here check out Frank Marino!” They thought I was out of my mind. I wasn’t, to this day, I think Page was a sloppy, tinny, hack of a guitarist, and had he been my role model, I’d probably be a sloppy tinny hack of a guitarist myself. Maybe some people wonder why I went out of my way to bag on Kirk Hammet. That’s why. I’d never have said a word about the guy had he not decided he should “teach”, and in a publication dedicated to guitar no less. There’s a very good example of why this is a hard question to answer without offending someone. But that’s how it is, and if we’re going to be honest, someone somewhere isn’t going to understand it. Someone who thinks Kirk Hammet is their guitar God probably doesn’t have much of a future as a great guitarist. If they had ears to begin with, they’d pick another hero. “We become what we behold” is a saying, and I think it’s true. But to the basics, if you have the ability to recognize correct pitch and time, that alone ought to clear out about 99 percent of the guitarist’s one might listen to, from any consideration. These two things are not subjective, and the fact is, most guitarists playing rock, have neither. You almost never hear guitar solos in the new rock that’s coming out these days. It’s probably a good thing, given that so few guitarists can play good solos. Good examples of a couple of great guitarists who don’t play fast or a lot of notes, but who sound really good, are Angus Young, and David Gilmore. There is a lot more to good technique than how many notes you can play per minute, and recognizing that is a very good beginning. Anyone can learn to play a lot of notes quickly, given enough practice. But are they “musical”? One good note is better than a hundred bad ones. I would definitely recommend that aspiring guitarists record themselves and LISTEN. I can remember being 12 years old, and recording hour after hour of myself playing on an old ¼ inch reel to reel tape machine my Father had. You have to be able to identify the flaws in your playing to fix them. Ideally, you should hear what’s going on while you’re playing. The tape recorder is a way to make certain that what you think you’re hearing while your playing, is accurate. I used to play along with records, learning the solos note for note. I was extremely critical, and found that when I was right on, my playing doubled the albums parts so well, that it seemed to disappear. I would record this stuff and listen back. That is how you become self-aware, and you should expect it to be painful sometimes if you’re doing it right.

John: When can we expect a new James Byrd release? What direction will your next release take?
James: When it’s done. I don’t mean to be glib, but the way I work just isn’t compatible with viewing an album as a construction project. I have to feel it and get inside it. It’s been a challenging two years that’s really made it difficult to want to put my emotions into an album. Sometimes it’s just too much, and you don’t want to go there because you’re trying to put things back together. The long drawn out death of my father over four months was the most horrible thing I’ve ever witnessed in my life. We were extremely close. I don’t want to get into the details of it publicly. But I’ve needed to take a break for a while because being emotionally “open” and honest in my music, is the only way I know how to be, and right now, I just don’t want to be.

John: Anything I didn’t ask that you may want your fans to know?
James: No, I think you asked some good questions.

John: James thanks for taking time to do this interview. I look forward to hearing new material from you soon. Hopefully one if these days I can test run one of your guitars and see what it’s like myself. Please keep Hardrock Haven updated on all your current endeavors. You have friends here.
James: Thanks John, you’re very kind, I really appreciate it.

Visit James Byrd at http://www.jamesbyrd.com or check out his guitars here