Al Di Meola on Why Fast Guitarists Fail (and What to Play Instead)

From Dorm Room to Carnegie Hall in One Phone Call

Al Di Meola sat down with Spencer Handley at his home studio for Playback Sessions, and the story he opened with is one of the most improbable origin stories in modern guitar. He was a student at Berklee, obsessed with Return to Forever, and he had just seen the band with Earl Klugh sitting in on a Les Paul through a Marshall (completely out of character for a player known for nylon-string smooth jazz).

Di Meola called a friend back in New Jersey named Michael, an amateur recording engineer and self-described child of Woodstock, and said he would love to play with that band. What Di Meola did not know was that Michael happened to have a tape of him playing with the Barry Miles Quartet on New Year's Eve at a small New Jersey jazz club. Michael had slipped him a tab of acid that night. Di Meola, who had never smoked a cigarette in his life, had no idea what was coming.

It is the best I have ever played in my life. Still to this day. And it was LSD.

Michael tracked down a phone number for Chick Corea's management, got Stanley Clarke's wife Carolyn on the line, and called every single day until somebody listened to the tape. Corea called Di Meola at school. No audition. Two days of rehearsal in New York, then Carnegie Hall on Wednesday night, sold out. He was 19.

His father, who had spent years telling him the old joke about how you get to Carnegie Hall, said it on the way to soundcheck: practice, practice, practice. Di Meola thought to himself, no, acid, acid, acid. He kept that one to himself.

Being Not Ready Is Not a Disqualification

Ask him directly and he will tell you he was not ready. He felt insecure. Imposter syndrome was total. But three things carried him:

• He could read music. He had been reading since he was nine, and Return to Forever demanded it. Bill Connors, a fantastic player, had not been a reader. Reading was the entry fee.
• He had the chops when it was time to solo, even if his ideas were not fully formed yet.
• He had the right attitude. He did not walk in asking about money. He asked what the music needed. Corea specifically named that as the reason he got the gig.

The lesson for anyone waiting to feel ready: the people hiring you are evaluating a different checklist than the one in your head. Fundamentals like reading, time, and a service-first attitude often matter more than having a finished artistic voice.

The Composition Rule: You Can Never Start With a Melody

This is the most quotable idea in the entire conversation, and it is worth sitting with.

You can never start with a melody. Never. I do not know how anyone could ever start with a melody. Because what are you applying it to? Nothing.

Di Meola's argument is about context. A melody floating in space is meaningless. It only becomes a melody once there is harmony underneath it giving it function, tension, and color. So he starts with a chord, a progression, or an ostinato, records it, writes it out, and then hunts for the melody that the harmony is asking for.

He demonstrated this several ways. One piece came from his daughter dancing around the studio, which became a 5/4 ostinato with a nursery-rhyme melody over it. Another came from noodling while watching TV, which he argues is actually a productive state.

I think you come up with things that are not in the norm when you are focused somewhere else, and all of a sudden you are playing something you might normally not play.

How to Apply This in Your Own Writing

• Start every writing session with a harmonic seed: one chord you love, a two-chord vamp, or an ostinato figure.
• Loop it and record it before you try to write anything on top.
• Sing the melody before you play it. Di Meola hums it in his head first, which keeps it from becoming a pattern your fingers already know.
• Notate it. He writes his music out and considers reading music a form of therapy. Writing forces you to commit to decisions.

On harmony specifically, he is not thinking in rigid functional terms. He listens, finds something that sounds good, then deliberately looks for something out. Much of the outside material he demonstrated centered on a seven flat nine sound and its diminished relatives, played with wide interval skips through the arpeggio rather than scalar runs.

The Problem With Modern Shredders

Di Meola is not anti-technique. He came out of a band where velocity was a core value. His critique is about proportion.

What these guys that are playing so far outside lines, they will not find one girl that likes it. It is just guitar players.

He told Matteo Mancuso essentially the same thing: if you do not expand beyond the fast interesting stuff, you will have a room full of guitar players and nobody else. His deeper point is about what listeners actually remember.

Think of the Beatles, you think of a song. Think of Charlie Parker, you think of a song. Think of Weather Report, you think of Heavy Weather. Think of a pure technique player, and you think of the technique. There is no album, no piece, no thing that lodges in a listener's memory.

Return to Forever, in Di Meola's telling, was the number one composition-plus-chops band of the era. Technique existed inside strong compositions, never as a substitute for them. Even Mahavishnu, he suggests, leaned more toward chops than composition by comparison. And he is honest that not everyone has the gift: a lot of people think they are composers, but the material is weak.

The Takeaway

Audit your last five practice sessions. How much time went to velocity, and how much went to writing, arranging, phrasing, or learning repertoire that a non-guitarist would enjoy? If the ratio is lopsided, that is your plateau talking.

Rhythm: The Foot That Never Moves

Di Meola credits a great deal of his identity to rhythm, and specifically to something he developed sitting in high school classrooms in eleventh and twelfth grade, drumming on desktops with his foot holding steady time underneath.

What I was fortunate to have naturally was the ability to hold the quarter note and play against it.

That is playing against the clave. The upper body generates counter rhythms while the foot stays absolutely locked. The moment the foot jumps because of what the hands are doing, you have lost it.

His observation about many players is pointed: a lot of guys are relegated to playing with drummers or percussionists just to stay inside the time. If you cannot generate the grid yourself, you are dependent on someone else supplying it.

He also drew a clean line between feels. Latin music sits one way, rock pushes another, and John McLaughlin's Indian influence pushes ahead in a third way. Part of what made the Guitar Trio work was that he and Paco de Lucia both understood the upbeat, even though Di Meola came from Latin sensibility and Paco came from flamenco.

Practice Ideas

• Set a metronome to quarter notes and tap your foot with it while playing syncopated figures that deliberately contradict the pulse. Film your foot.
• Practice starting phrases on the upbeat rather than the downbeat.
• Try syncopating repertoire you know well. Di Meola noted you can slightly syncopate Beatles material, but do not try it with Bach. His words: it is corny as hell.

Hybrid Picking and Right Hand Detail

For his solo record, Di Meola pushed his hybrid picking further: pick for the bass notes, fingers for the upper voices, giving him a self-contained solo guitar arrangement without a band. When asked how he developed it, the answer was refreshingly unglamorous.

Just by doing it. It was not easy, but one day I just sat down and I just did it.

A few technical details worth stealing:

• He chokes up high on the pick, leaving very little tip exposed for maximum control.
• He attacks at roughly a 45 degree angle rather than flat, which is a large part of the articulation people associate with his sound.
• His pick angle reverses unconsciously when he moves to melodic playing, producing a warmer tone.
• He extends his index finger against the string on high notes to get a squawking, vocal quality.

None of this is a system he sat down and designed. It came from thousands of hours of solving musical problems with his hands.

The Real Villain: Your Phone

Di Meola returns to this theme repeatedly, and it may be his most practical piece of advice.

Cell phones and computers rob us of five, six, seven hours a day. Those five, six, seven hours were used to play and get better.

When the Guitar Trio did its first two month tour, the days between shows were spent in hotel rooms with guitars. There was nothing else to do. He describes recording sessions today where the band finishes a take and everyone runs into the hallway to check their phones while he sits in the control room with the engineer, alone, listening back.

He is careful to say it is not disinterest. It is that networking and the constant pull of connectivity have taken over the attention that used to go into the instrument. His conclusion about the Friday Night in San Francisco era is direct: the interplay, the velocity, total focus, and no cell phones.

Finding Paco, and the Trio That Almost Was Not

The Paco de Lucia connection started in a record shop. Touring Europe, Di Meola hit Spain, heard everyone talking about a new sensation, and bought some albums at El Corte Ingles in Madrid. What he heard was articulation, rhythm, and technique unlike anything he had encountered. He filed it away until he had the nerve to invite Paco onto his second record, Elegant Gypsy.

The Guitar Trio itself was a management idea. An earlier attempt with Larry Coryell had fallen apart. Then Di Meola got a call proposing a trio with Paco and Leo Kottke, which he thought was odd but agreed to. A week later the call came back: how about John McLaughlin instead. The resulting live album sold roughly seven million copies, an unheard of number for an acoustic instrumental record.

The End of Return to Forever

Di Meola tells the story of Romantic Warrior as a production win. He, Lenny White, and Stanley Clarke pushed Corea to spend real time in the studio the way British rock bands did, rather than the two or three day bebop-budget approach of the Polydor records. They got two weeks in the mountains, and Di Meola considers it far and away the best album the band made.

It was also the first of a six record deal that never happened. Corea wanted to add his girlfriend as lead singer. The band and management voted no. Corea broke up the band and handed the contract back to Bruce Lundvall at Columbia personally.

Years later, after Corea formed the Electric Band and made what Di Meola felt was a bid for radio play, Di Meola wrote to him honestly as a fan: I come to you for music that moves me, music with depth. Why did you make this record. Corea did not like it. Di Meola's position stands.

You always have to be cutting edge.

Practical Takeaways for Your Playing

• Write harmony first, melody second. Record a chord loop before you attempt a single melodic idea.
• Learn to read. It was the entry fee for the Return to Forever gig and it is still the fastest way into serious repertoire.
• Lock your foot. If your time falls apart without a drummer, that is the actual problem, not your speed.
• Build a body of work, not a highlight reel. People remember songs and records, not licks.
• Reclaim your hours. The gap between where you are and where you want to be is largely measured in phone time.
• Say yes before you feel ready. Di Meola played Carnegie Hall at 19 knowing he was not there yet. The people who hired him disagreed, and that was enough.

The Lost Tape

The reel-to-reel of that New Year's Eve gig, the performance Di Meola still calls the best playing of his life, is somewhere behind a wall in his studio, and a cassette copy is buried among thousands of others. He has heard it twice, decades ago, and both times his reaction was the same disbelief. He remembers playing things he does not ever remember learning.

If it ever surfaces, it will be one of the more remarkable artifacts in guitar history. Until then, the more useful part of the story is what came after: a career built not on one transcendent night, but on decades of composition, reading, rhythmic discipline, and the refusal to let technique become the whole point.

Want to Find Your Own Plateau

If you have been playing for years and can feel yourself stalling without being able to name why, Sonora offers a free one-on-one Guitar Skills Assessment. In about 50 minutes a coach runs you through an 18 point diagnostic of your playing and you walk away with a written report identifying the two or three things actually holding you back, plus a 30 day practice plan.