NAMM 2012: Kenny Wayne Shepherd Interview

By: Brady Lavin

Someone has to represent the new guard of young blues guitarists, and since 1995, Kenny Wayne Shepherd has been carrying the flag with a reckless abandon. All five of his studio albums have topped the Billboard Blues chart, the most recent being 2011’s How I Go, which was the first to feature Kenny himself on vocals along with his usual vocalist Noah Hunt.

With that sort of pedigree, it makes sense that companies like Fender and Agile Partners would want Shepherd to endorse their products, and the NAMM show in Anaheim, California, is the place where the music stars come out and back their favorite toys. Guitar International caught up with Kenny at the Agile Partners booth, where he was demoing their new Ampkit with his Fender Signature guitar.

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Brady Lavin: How do you feel about the atmosphere of the NAMM show as you’re here representing different companies whose products you use?

Kenny Wayne Shepherd: Yeah man, it’s cool. Obviously for me as a musician, the NAMM convention is killer ’cause I get to see all my friends and other people and musicians in the industry all under one roof. I’m a guitar player, so I still get excited about new gear and the new stuff that’s coming out that could potentially inspire a new song in me.

It’s also cool to come and rub shoulders with the fans and meet the people. I mean look, if it wasn’t for the instruments, musicians wouldn’t be who they are, right? So it’s good to come here and see the people behind the scenes who build the instruments or that help create the ideas that come to fruition and help us create our music.

Brady: Let’s talk about Ampkit for a second. You said that new products can inspire new songs and musical ideas; has Ampkit paved the way for any fresh ideas for you?

Kenny Wayne Shepherd: Well for me the Ampkit… the purpose that it serves for me is a practice tool. I’m on the road a lot and there’s a lot of times when I’m in my hotel room, and I want to play guitar. I want to hear it, you know, but I don’t want to disturb the people next door to me. I can’t crank up an amplifier, but I always have my iPad or iPhone. I can just plug in to my iPad and pull up a number of different amp sounds, a whole lot of speaker configurations for cabinets, microphones, effects pedals, a tuner, a metronome, a recording device. All that stuff, right on my iPad waiting to go. Headphones on, rock out all night long and not disturb anybody. For me, that’s really a good tool.

Brady: What kind of capabilities does the recording device have?

Kenny Wayne Shepherd: Well I haven’t explored the full capabilities of it, but you can see here if you hit the record button right there, it counts you down and starts a session so you can [plays a killer heavily distorted blues lick] and then you stop it. You can go back here and find your sessions. You got recordings, session 5, there it is right there, and you can play it back. You can also re-amp it with different sounds [plays the lick back from the iPad with a bright clean guitar tone]. This is killer, man. So, it’s like endless amount of play. And I don’t know if you can stack tracks, ’cause I haven’t gotten that deep into it yet, but just that right there is great.

Brady: Have you used it on stage at all?

Kenny Wayne Shepherd: No, I haven’t. I haven’t had it long enough to really try it on stage, but to be honest with you, when I’m on stage, I prefer tube amps. This is a great practice tool, you know? A great tool for coming up with ideas. When I’m jammin’ out and trying to write a song or something, I can put it down immediately like that and have it for reference.

Brady: Can you talk about your upcoming album?

Kenny Wayne Shepherd: Well, we had a new album come out in August called How I Go, and that’s what we’re touring behind right now, but we go into the studio in February to begin work on the next album. We’re hoping to get the record out, at least getting close to being finished, by the end of this year. We’re on the road all year; we’re going to Australia in April, going to Europe in June and July, also doing the US. So we’re going on the road, but in February we’re planning on going into the studio to begin the recording process.

Brady: Are you gonna be singing on this album like the last one?

Kenny Wayne Shepherd: Yeah, we’ll see. We’re tossing around a lot of ideas, like a traditional blues record or an instrumental record, or a guest artist filled album. We haven’t pulled the trigger on exactly what the next record’s gonna be yet, but I wanna do something a little bit unpredictable.

Brady: Is Noah coming back on the next album?

Kenny Wayne Shepherd: Oh yes, absolutely.

Brady: Do you write before you go into the studio? Or do you get in there and jam stuff out?

Kenny Wayne Shepherd: I write before we get into the studio. I usually write for a couple of months before we go in, like thirty songs or so, and the best songs end up on the record.

Brady Lavin: Do you record all of them and then pick the best ones?

Kenny Wayne Shepherd: Yeah, well we record all the ones that we think are really good, and that’s usually at least twenty or more. Well, we start to record all those, and then we see which ones are the really strong ones and finish those up.

Brady: Is this your Fender Signature Strat?

Kenny Wayne Shepherd: Yeah, this is the Kenny Wayne Shepherd Stratocaster. It’s got a lot of cool features to it. We worked for a year and a half on the sound of these pickups. They’re KWS custom-voiced pickups, Graph Tech® saddles. We got tone knobs wired up to control the tone of all three pickups, jumbo frets, a 12” radius so its nice and flat to play faster, glossy on the front, satin finish on the back for more speed. This is the black with the racing stripes ’cause I’m a car guy, but we have a sunburst and a white also.

Brady: It came out in 2008, right?

Kenny Wayne Shepherd: Yeah, I think it was ’08.

Brady: Since it’s come out, do you mostly just play that guitar?

Kenny Wayne Shepherd: Yeah, I play these for the majority of my show. I actually was meeting up with the guys from Fender last night and talking about doing another edition.

Brady: Maybe we’ll see that at NAMM 2013?

Kenny Wayne Shepherd: Yeah I hope so!

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