Andy Summers

If you're a guitarist, you should not be intimidated by using your instrument as a synthesizer, but you shouldn't feel that you have to own one, either.

What I wanted to do was play the guitar but I don't like instrumental rock. I think it is tripe.

I don't like playing standards. I like to do my own cutting edge work.

I don't have a great nostalgia for the past.

I was totally into jazz in my teens.

I think rock records tend to be very expensive.

I would like to play with electronic keyboards again.

It is not very practical in today's world when you tour all over the place having a big band.

Of course the playing is important but writing and the establishing of what you are going for is prime too.

If the guitar synthesizer is really going to stand as a synthesizer on its own, it needs to develop a more characteristic sound; I don' think it's gotten there yet.

It's been very hard for the guitar as a serious synthesizer to compete with keyboards.

More recently, I used guitar synthesizer extensively on the two albums I did with Robert Fripp.

The most obvious thing you can't do with a guitar synthesizer is to really sound like a guitar.

If I'm playing a violin thing, for instance, I tend to respond to that sound with the way I finger.

For me, the guitar synthesizer is a great writing instrument.

I've got four or five records in my head at a time that I try to work on and I would like to do a guitar trio record next - since The Police I've mostly made records with keyboards.

It's hard to avoid the past but one goes forward.

I like to play with someone who can cover a lot of ground and someone with whom you can discuss the language at a reasonable level; otherwise it gets a bit frustrating.

It accumulates over the years and I've led so many bands of my own now and forced myself into new situations... You would hope that you play better and better - until you just get too feeble to do it anymore.

Actually, I think my hands are in the best shape they've ever been in terms of what I can do.

There was a period when I'd just come out of college where I'd been playing classical guitar and I suddenly realised that it wasn't what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

I actually think I play better now than I've ever played.

I'm better for it and I prefer to keep things simple and see what sounds I can get out of my head and hands rather than relying on a sound that someone else created.

In The Police, in a trio situation - which I've come back to now - it's just so wide open that it does actually provide this arena where you can play with a certain freedom.

I'm just trying to avoid any sort of generic kind of music - I don't want to do generic jazz or fusion.