MusicRadar

Buckingham is back to his best

View in gallery

Tell me about the Rick Turner guitar, your mainstay instrument. When did you start using it and what do you like about it?

"It was brought to me probably after Rumours and during the making of Tusk. Its funny, because I don't play with a pick, and before joining the band I had used a Telecaster which was appropriate for my playing style, and yet the Telecaster didn't blend with the existing sound of Fleetwood Mac - the fatness of Christine and John's instruments. So I had to switch over to a Les Paul to get the tone that seemed to work. A Les Paul is not a very good fingerpicking guitar, though, so I asked Rick to make me something that was somehow a cross between a Les Paul and a Telecaster. The guitar he came up with delivered in every area and it's worked for me since."

"I don't practice per se. I learned to play on my own, taught myself how to play. I've never really had a lesson and I don't read music."

On the song Time Precious Time your fingerpicking is unbelievable. Are there any particular exercises you practice?

"I don't practice per se. I learned to play on my own, taught myself how to play. I've never really had a lesson and I don't read music. So all the stuff that I do doesn't come from the normal set of disciplines that they teach you where you sit down and run through scales for a particular number of minutes a day.

"I'm not that knowledgeable with the guitar - I just find ways that are pretty creative, but it's all within the framework and the limitations of what I can do. As they say, it's not what you got, it's what you do with what you got.

"On that song, the actual finger pattern of the right hand is just an arpeggio back and forth between the thumb and three fingers. It sounds like a waterfall to me - that was the idea, at least. In order to get that, I had to find a tuning that was specifically geared towards the notes that I wanted to use and then to find the new thumb notes that needed to be used with those, which were a root and a fourth.

"I figured out a tuning that was more or less open so I didn't have to do a lot of fretting. And then I taught myself the positions all the way up and down the neck that would that would get to those things. It was an interesting exercise."

Some of the sounds on the album recall the edgy production techniques from Tusk (1979). Your fascination at the time with punk and new wave was a very big deal. Did that have a negative impact on the band?

"Yes and no. I always made the joke that I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when Warner Brothers first put Tusk on and listened to it in their boardroom as a follow-up to Rumours. That was an interesting, defining moment for me. The idea of subverting the formula that led to the success of Rumours, because clearly we were poised to follow that same formula to try and recreate the same success.

Around the web: