Steel Notes Magazine Spring 2017 | Page 90

Steel Notes Magazine Spring 2017 Italy Luca Cerardi Interview with Chris Poland This month I present another interview with one of the guitarist who changed the way to play heavy metal and one of the ones who let me push to play rock in my life: Chris Poland. I had also the pleasure to have him in my Not Over Yet project and it was awesome to talk about himself, is way to play, his love for music and the way he could and can play between fusion and metal, his days with Megadeth, his friendship with Nick Menza and his long running project Ohm. What I was thinking then was that by constantly doing those exercises, I would have eventually been able to play the instrument for real. Of course, playing is one thing and writing a song is a totally different thing. I didn’t actually write one until I was a teenager. What do you feel when you play the guitar? I focus on what the songs are giving me in that moment and I try to affect the crowd as a consequence of that. As Satriani also said, it’s about trying to convey feelings and the interpretation of the song to all the people in front of me. When did you realize that you wanted to play the guitar? And when did you realize that you could actually be a professional guitarist? I was young when I realized I wanted to be a guitarist, before I was even in a band. I remember getting my favorite records at the time (like Led Zeppelin) and I was trying to hit those notes. 90 Steel Notes Magazine www.steelnotesmagazine.com The turning points were many in my career. However, I think the most important one was when I left Megadeth. Right after that I actually started to play the guitar all the time. With Megadeth, we were in our 20s, we did not have a lot of songs to play, and even the records we made did not sound professional, given the equipment at the time. Who knows how everything would have sounded, had the equipment been different. So all along, with