Scott Tennant is a world-renowned classical guitarist, composer, author, and professor. He is a founding member of the GRAMMY Award-winning Los Angeles Guitar Quartet and currently teaches at the USC Thornton School of Music as the classical guitar Chair. Tennant is also the author of Pumping Nylon, the leading technique and practice handbook for all classical guitarists.
Interview conducted and condensed by Nathan Park
Q. How did you first get into music, and what are some of your earliest experiences?
A.There was always music in my house. We were always playing records and recorded music in the house through radio and television. This was back in the late 60s– you had Leonard Bernstein talking about music and lots of stuff. I guess I started music before I even started lessons because I always wanted to learn and play. Then my parents bought my brother and I these toy guitars but we would break them because they were plastic. So eventually, when I was six, I got my first real guitar at Christmas and immediately started lessons on this steel-string acoustic guitar. From there, it just progressed, right, so at eleven I started classical lessons and started playing concerts, and then I just never stopped.
Q. Often I see many students simply “go through the motions”– they’ll be practicing and playing in performances, but they’re not really finding a connection with music. Was there a specific moment or teacher that helped spark your genuine love of music? How can students discover their own enjoyment of music as well?
A. Well, I started because I wanted to. I had to convince my parents, right? So they didn’t make me do anything– in fact, they told me they’d immediately sell my guitar if I didn’t practice! For me, it was my first teacher in a music store near me. I had these books from Mel Bay and Alfred and they had these classical melodies– like Tchaikovsky and Strauss Waltzes, little themes from the Nutcracker Suite. I really loved that stuff and I asked my teacher what kind of music it was. I knew what country was, I knew what rock and roll was, but I was like what is this? And she said that it was classical music. And that was it right there. I was probably seven or eight years old and I immediately started getting books at the store to read through at home. I wanted to know more, to explore this classical music thing. And I loved it– I realized that there was this thing called classical guitar.
Q. About Guitar Heroes, your album with LAGQ (Los Angeles Guitar Quartet)– how did digital production, mixing, and editing, play a role in the finished product? Can you walk me through the technical side of that album, and how the sound of the guitar may have benefited from the process?
A. We’ve been really fortunate to always have been recorded by a record company. We never had to buy mics or anything like that. Even before that, we were recording on a different label– we booked the dates and chose the repertoire and then the record company would get a space for us. Normally it was a church or studio or something. And they have a producer and an engineer– the engineer is running all the tech stuff and the producer is there watching the music as you play. He tells you if you have to redo a measure or re-record a section. So in this way, we can focus only on playing– we don’t have to keep track of mistakes. And so when the whole session is done, when we’ve recorded everything, they take all the recordings afterwards and go edit them. We approve everything or we make corrections on our own. They recorrect it, and then after that they do the final edit and it goes into the mixing stage. After it is mastered, it’s ready to go to print either on a CD or through streaming.
Q. So, if you wanted to redo a certain measure, for example, can they simply combine two different takes?
A. Yeah, if you’re doing a session, like for a TV commercial, they can punch you in. So you start a couple of bars before your cue and then the engineer hits a button, it unmutes your microphone, and then he mutes it back. Those are called patches and those are generally okay for non featured stuff like in the background of TV or films. But if you’re doing a feature, like when it’s all you and people are going to be listening to you specifically, you literally re-record the whole thing. So again, you’ll back up a couple of measures and do it again– and then if it was good enough, you go on. If it wasn’t, you have to do it again. You just keep re-recording that section. They take care of it later in editing.
Q. Have you had a lot of experience with arranging and composing for LAGQ? Were you involved in original LAGQ arrangements or even solo works?
A. Yeah, we all arranged– Bill Kanengiser, I would say, arguably did the bulk of the arranging for us. Andy York wrote us a lot of pieces and gosh, I don’t know. We played a new piece of his every season. I did write a piece for us called Celtic Fair, and Bill wrote us a couple of pieces. John and Matt never wrote, but we all arranged and contributed. We almost always had an original composition every concert.
Q. Where did you and the other members of LAGQ find inspiration when composing and arranging music?
A. First of all, you really have to want to play a piece on your instrument whenever you’re trying to arrange for the classical guitar. There are some pieces that just are not going to work, simply because the guitar doesn’t have sustain– we have plucks. Our general rule is if we individually hear something we want to try, we’ll arrange it and read it through in order to determine if the piece sounds just as good or better on guitar. If it doesn’t, we scrap it.
Q. Are there certain career paths musicians and students can try to look forward to?
A. Everybody wants to go out on stage to be a big star, right. Frankly, things are changing so rapidly– they’ve changed a lot just in the last five to ten years and since I was a student. When I was a student, you needed to make demo tapes. But now, if you want to be a performer, you have to make some good recordings and videos on YouTube. People go to YouTube– if somebody is thinking of hiring you, they look on YouTube; or you have your website or Facebook. Essentially they want to see videos and content. The other thing you can do generally is teaching, because I think everybody’s got to expect to teach at some point. First of all, it’s work, but it’s also giving back. People are going to want to know how to do what you do, and at some point it’s just kind of an obligation to kind of give back.
And then there’s the music industry. That’s changed a lot. You don’t have to work in the studio now. People make decent money going around recording people’s student recitals and bigger events– just being a sound person, or tech for a larger gig. Then there’s music education. There’s public school, there’s junior college, there’s university, there’s music store music. All kinds of levels of teaching. In the music industry thing I already mentioned, it’s important to be willing to play with other people [in a group] because people are less and less interested in solo performances now. They want to hear a combination, and the more interesting, the better.
Q. About your guitar handbook Pumping Nylon– why did you decide to write a guitar handbook, and how did you start that project?
A. It started because I was compiling all of these different sheets of exercises and stuff for my students and they were all just mixed up in a pile. I had to Xerox them because I didn’t even have a laptop computer at the time to put them in. So it was all handwritten and given out to students– and I got tired of that. Soon I did a workshop at the National Guitar Summer Workshop in Connecticut where we did a workshop called Pumping Nylon. And it was big– I mean there were probably 100 people in the room. It was a big success. After that, I approached a couple of publishers saying, can I publish this, because I have all this stuff? I just wanted to publish it to give to my students– I mean, I didn’t think it would sell. And so one publisher said yes. It took me almost two years to complete everything and to turn it in.
Q. How did you begin to approach and record with guitar labels? Was there management that helped you with that or did you just go out and just email as many people as you can?
A. We did have management from pretty early on, but again, it was because we had already recorded some content to give to people, like on a cassette. We [LAGQ] just kind of saturated the area, meaning the Western US, driving back and forth so people knew about us. The first big label was Delos, and we did several recordings for them. They were local, and I don’t know if they approached us or we approached them, I honestly can’t remember. They were focused on doing any group in LA who was doing pretty well. So we got onto Delos pretty easily and then once that started to peter out, we just sent around what they call an EPK (electronic press kit). First we were working with Sony and then Telarc. But then the record companies started streaming music and record companies who didn’t jump on board died out.
Q. It seems like social media and YouTube are both really powerful methods of advertisement.
A. People are just doing their own thing now. And that’s why people are going for followers on social media because with followers that’s free advertising. I mean, they just get the word out. And even if, let’s say somebody has a million followers, if everybody bought a CD, can you imagine how much money that is? But to make money on streaming, it doesn’t just automatically appear. You have to register your label, your name, anything that you write. You have to pay into either BMI or ASCAP if you want to do other people’s stuff. The rule is basically 70 years after their death, you can start recording and it becomes public domain. It’s a big thing. I mean, people have gotten sued. A restaurant I used to play at every week got taken down because they sent an agent and I was playing the Beatles! You have to pay and make sure that you’re all set up to get paid. There are people out there who scour the Internet, collect streaming data, count it up, and then whatever your contract is with them, you get 10% of 17% or something. Twice a year, they’re supposed to send you a payment somehow. That’s called sound exchange. And you have to be really specific because if you don’t upload the information on a particular recording or publication, you don’t get money. You have to be very specific and exact. Wording in contracts is very tricky– you really need a lawyer to help you. There are entertainment lawyers out there. That’s another area of music, by the way. There’s a lot of people going to entertainment law, music copyright law, music law, and they do everything they can. Record labels may pay artists as little as possible– and that’s why you always hear on the news about this artist speaking out against this company or this publishing company.
Q. Now that you’re teaching a lot more than performing, how do the two experiences differ? Has it changed your view on music? Have you grown a new skill set for teaching specifically?
A. I was always teaching, even when I was touring a lot, and of course, I’m retired from the quartet now after 42 years, but I still play a lot less because I don’t want to play as much in public. Teaching has always been at the forefront of my creative side. It is a creative outlet, and I’ve always really enjoyed teaching– and I’ve always been fairly good at it. Some people have a hard time explaining how they play to a student, and it’s not always easy to say how you do something. I’ve always found that kind of a challenge just to break things down. I only teach what I know and that’s worked for me. I think everybody should too. I don’t think you should try to teach beyond your physical ability or knowledge. But yeah, for me, it hasn’t changed much at all in terms of my outlook. It’s just another creative outlet.
