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© Matt Miller

Massachusetts metalcore pioneers Converge have been tearing up stages the world over for two decades now, bringing a rare kind of intensity both live and on record.

At the heart of this is guitarist Kurt Ballou, a creative and technically gifted player whose unique approach to what metal guitar should sound like gives the band a sound of raw, messy ferocity.

Guitarist spoke to Kurt just before their superb latest album, Axe To Fall was released, and we talked tone, amps, a passionate defence of EMG pickups and making albums like French fries. Read it all here, only on Guitarist.co.uk.

Let's start at the beginning; what made you want to learn to play the guitar?

Well originally I wanted to play bass, and a friend of me also wanted to play bass, and we wanted to start a band together. So we made this pact that whoever saved up enough money to buy a bass first got to be the bass player and the other guy had to play guitar!

So that's how I got into the guitar. I mean, I was into music before that, I played saxophone and clarinet earlier in life. My Dad sorta played guitar, so there was always a guitar laying around the house that I could pick up and play from time to time, but I didn't really like playing it until I got into rock music when I was around 16 or so and I started messing around with my dad's guitar.

You mentioned playing sax and clarinet. Do you believe that this musical background has had an impact on the complexity and unusual nature of Converge's music?

Yeah definitely, I have some musical training and probably a lot of people who play rock music haven't. I think there's a lot of plagiarism that goes on in music, and I've just been plagiarising from sources people don't really know about – my jazz and classical roots.

I think that music has accents; the way you learn to speak your language is reflected in the accent you develop. While that may change over time, it still forms the foundation of how you communicate and forms your vocabulary.

I started playing music when I was about 10, so my early musical vocabulary was developed through those wind instruments and playing in a school band. So my early interpretation of punk and hardcore was filtered through my musical understanding of classical and jazz.

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