James Byrd is one of the hottest talents out there on the metal scene at present. Having seen somewhat of a renaissance of his career thanks to his last 2 albums, the stunning symphonic metal of 'Anthem' and 'Flying Beyond The 9'. Byrd's career looks to be back on track after years of neglect and malpractice by unscrupulous record labels. Not only is James releasing quality albums but is also the designer and builder of the most original and innovative guitars to have seen light in decades. Virtuosity One caught with Byrd for chat on his career, design skills and future plans - enjoy.

Thanks for agreeing to this interview. Let start bang up to date, what are you currently up to?
I just finished producing and playing on a track for Lion Music’s “Beyond Inspiration - a Tribute to Uli Roth”, and I’m writing music for my new album.

Lion Music have just released the Uli Jon Roth tribute "Beyond Inspiration" (see review), what track did you cover?
“Still So Many Lives Away”. “Cover” doesn’t really describe the way I played the song.

Generally tribute albums are full of artists playing tracks note for note to the original, what approach did you take with your track?
I made a lot of changes to the vocals and guitar parts and treated the song as though it were new. I didn’t change the guitar parts because they needed changing; the solos Uli played were particularly brilliant on that track in my opinion. But the way I feel about it is that there’s just no point in creating a carbon copy of any song. Why bother? Why not just enjoy the original then? So I tried to bring some new elements to the song and let it find it’s other possible colors through my impressions of its spirit of intent.

Uli is quite an enigmatic musician, what appeals about his playing to you?
I became interested in Uli originally because his concepts were similar to my own; Hendrix and classical music. I think that as people, we are either attracted to opposites or those very much like ourselves. The same thing holds for the arts I think, and it’s difficult not to like what someone else does if it’s similar in spirit to what you do.

Your last solo album was last years 'Anthem', how was the response to it and whats your impressions of it now looking back?
It’s really difficult to gauge the “success” of a particular album in all the areas such a concept can cover. There’s always sales, but that depends on many factors. According to my label, sales of Anthem were less than its predecessor “flying beyond the 9”. Was it because it wasn’t as good? I doubt it really. But I have no way of knowing that because so many things changed after September 11th, the promotion levels by the label of that album being among them. Reviews were good. I think it’s a good sounding album in terms of production, and I think I played well. It was a reactionary album in terms of the content, and that is always a risk. But you know, I can’t really think about any of this stuff when I’m making an album. I have to just go with what I feel at the time and be sincere, and I think it’s a passionate sincere album, and in a lot of ways is better than flying beyond the 9.

The symphonic metal approach featured on Anthem and Flying Beyond The 9 is highly original, what made your style progress to this genre after the more classic metal/neo-classical sound heard on previous albums?
The short answer is because I could. I had always wanted to pursue composing for many instruments and to build symphonic support for my music, but until I possessed a certain degree of technology and the ability to use it, I really couldn’t achieve it as I’d wanted. Having over a thousand samples of different instruments and an ability to edit them became reasonable only recently.

Is this the style you are going to head in for your next album?
I will definitely use those elements, but I think as in anything else one learns, I’ll become better at it.

Michael Flatters is the vocalist on your last 2 albums, he has gained an excellent reputation from these albums. How did you find Michael?
I met him through another vocalist named Steve Benito. I got hold of Steve to see if he was interested in singing on flying beyond the 9. He was very involved in theatre and acting and recommended I contact Michael, who at one time was one of his vocal students, as well as being a guy who’d been around the Portland music scene as a vocalist on a professional level. Michael knew who I was and had been a fan of Fifth Angel, so we were coming from the same musical directions.

You have released 2 instrumental albums. Octoglomerate and Son Of Man are both two albums in the guitar instrumental genre that really portray an artists vision and are not a collection of "look what I can do" solos...they are real songs. What "vision" did you have when doing those albums?
You know that saying a picture is worth a thousand words? Well, those two albums were pictures I painted. And I still re-live every mental image I had when composing the music when I hear it. But for people to know what it all was is not necessary or even desirable from my perspective. I think People should be able to interpret art and music for themselves.

Son Of Man is now out of print and fetches high prices on ebay, will it ever see the light of day again?
I can’t answer that at this point.

Shrapnel Records obviously have an agenda with not re-releasing your past works despite obvious demand. I know that you have suffered at their, shall we say, shady business practices, do you care to elaborate?
I’m going to try to keep my answer as short as possible here. I’ve elaborated about it already a couple of times, and really, I take no joy in recounting bad experiences. But the short, really short version is this: If someone advances you X amount of dollars for your work, and then intentionally doesn’t actually reproduce enough of it for you to repay the advance, but does offer enough copies of it to make themselves a nice profit, you have been screwed. When the album Son of Man came out, I had good press up the wazoo. I had major visibility in all the right areas on nothing more than word of mouth, and Shrapnel did everything they could to crush album sales; they refused to acknowledge the immediate success of the album by placing ads, and they allowed the absurdly small first pressings to sell out immediately without pressing more to meet demand. Now why would anyone logically do that? Because they didn’t want to pay me, and the way they had me by the proverbial short-hairs, was that they cross-collateralized all my supposed “debt” to them. That mean that whatever I still “owed” them on any album in my catalogue, they made me repay from the proceeds of any album of mine they sold. They deliberately and effectively stopped any album sales of mine that would have repaid the phony debts. They also actually increased the size of those debts over time. My debt to the label for the first Atlantis Rising album went up about 35 percent from where it started over the years. They were even deducting portions of their own phone bills and the cost of postage stamps from my account to keep me in red ink. The long and short of it is that I considered it criminal, I still consider it criminal, and if by chance they don’t enjoy my telling the truth about them, I have a long standing offer for them to come to Seattle and sue me for saying it. It’s been almost nine years and I haven’t seen them set a foot here and the reason is self-evident.

Onto a more positive note, 1998's Crimes Of Virtuosity saw your first album away from Shrapnel. That album is a very aggressive guitar intensive with superb variety throughout. Was the aggressive nature of the album somewhat of a reaction to all that had on gone on during the earlier part of your career?
Yes. It seemed like I was caught in a sticky trap forever, and once I was free, I was glad to be free, and more than a little angry about my experience.

You then moved to Lion Music for the subsequent releases, your career now has much more profile and the albums released on the label so far have in turn not only increased your profile but also your reputation as a musician and composer. Does having a more positive working environment (record label) mean a more productive and satisfying end product?
Yes. They did very well for me on promotions of Flying Beyond The 9”, the first album I did for them. As I said, a lot changed after September 11th in the economy. Things were not so rosy for the next album, “Anthem”. Right now though they’ve given me enough support on the album I’m working on so that I will be able to make the album I felt I wanted to make. Ken Mary is playing drums for me again for the first time in thirteen years now. I can only hope that the label doesn’t drop the ball on promoting the new album after I’ve delivered it to them. Wait and see is where it stands.

You are highly thought of by Yngwie Malmsteen, and also by Frank Marino who has since gone on to be a very good friend of yours. How far back does your history with Frank go?
I met Frank 1993. It still amazes me that we became such good friends when I think about it. If you had known me at age 16, you’d understand it because to me, and also all my musically minded friends he was an absolute guitar idol. I learned so much about playing his records it’s not even funny.

Will we ever see collaboration between yourself and Frank?
I don’t know, I’d love to do it. Logistics and schedules have probably been in the way with his touring schedules and the fact that we live as far apart as two people can live, with him being in Montreal and me in Seattle. We’re also both very musically reclusive in a way, being guys who lock themselves in the studio for long periods, and we’re both really involved in every detail of our productions right down to mastering. Mind you, I haven’t actually seen Frank since the first night I met him in 1993! Our friendship has been maintained by telephone and Internet conversation. I’m also a good friend of his associate Wild Willy Parsons who takes care of Internet promotions for Frank, and who helped me launch JAMESBYRD.COM.

If we can I would like to talk a little about Fifth Angel. The self titled debut album from 1984 is considered as the originator of the Melodic Power Metal movement, but it all ended acrimoniously with you being ousted from the band you formed after one album. I know you covered this topic in depth at rockreunion but that website is now defunct and interview no longer available online, so if you like feel free to use virtuosityone.com as the outlet to lay to rest the story of what happened.
Really, I hope you understand this, but at this point, I’d rather stick pins in my eyes than to go over that again.

Not many people know that Kendall Bechtal your replacement in Fifth Angel sung on the album Crimes Of Virtuosity under the name Kendall Torey, how did this come about?
It’s an ironic story. Kendall had never known the circumstances under which I’d left Fifth Angel or that I was the one who’d originally put the band together. He was a really good guitar player, and the band told him that I had quit to do other things. He and I didn’t know each other, so he had no reason to believe he was being lied to, so he just assumed it was true. I was in Michael Lord Productions recording the Atlantis Rising album when the studio control room phone rang, It was Kendall Bechtal and he said he wanted to meet me. It was a really uncomfortable moment for me actually. I knew who he was and it was immediately obvious to me that he had no idea what had gone on in Fifth Angel or why I was gone. He introduced himself, said he loved my guitar playing on the album, and asked me if he could come down and meet me, and if I wouldn’t mind showing him how some of the solos were played. Talk about weirdness. So I resisted any temptation to anger because it was obvious to me that none of it was his fault, and he seemed like a very nice guy. He came down to the session and we talked. I liked him right away and it was clear to me that he was a good guy who just happened to have stumbled into my former job. That’s how I met him.

He and I had been friends for years before he ended up as the lead vocalist on my “Crimes of Virtuosity” album, and that too has a strange angle to it. All the years we knew each other after that, he’d never said a word to me about being able to sing! I was without a vocalist following my final album to Shrapnel (The Apocalypse Chime), and I was doing some preliminary writing and recording of demos in my studio for a new album. I had a song I was working on, and I really wanted to hear the vocal parts I had written. Well, I was hanging out with Kendall and I just said “Hey, I’ve been working on a song and I really want to just hear what the vocal line I wrote sounds like, by any chance can you sing at all? Even a little bit would help if you can”. So he comes over, I play him the melody on my guitar and hand him the lyrics, he opens his mouth, and I was nearly on the floor! It reminded me of that joke about the kid who’s never spoken a word in 5 years who says, “The soup is cold”; and they say “why haven’t you talked in all this time?…..And he says because the soup wasn’t cold”. So that’s how Kendall came to sing on Crimes of Virtuosity.

What’s your gear setup and what have you learnt about gear and recording over the years?
I play guitars that I designed, built, and nationally patented, and there’s lots of information on my web site. My amplifier is a stock 50 watt Marshall plexi, and I use a rare Marshall speaker cabinet from 1966 with 8 Celestion ten inch speakers. The only other gear is a DOD250 overdrive pedal, and a Jim Dunlop original model Cry Baby pedal. I use custom GHS string sets that run from 009 to 050. As for recording, I use an ADK tube microphone and record straight to disk.

I don’t use anything other than my guitar, the amp, and the DOD250 pedal. I just add a bit of reverb at the mixing desk when I mix the finished music.

For the last couple of albums you have played your own guitar, designed and built by yourself, can you tell us a little about the history of the instrument and why its the guitar of choice for you?
For decades I played Fender Strats and Strat type guitars with single coil pickups. I had a full endorsement with Fender during the 1990’s. The Stratocaster was really the only guitar that had the range and clarity I wanted in an instrument, but it was far from perfect. In the mid 1990’s I had an epiphany of sorts and thought to myself “I have enough engineering, design, and fabrication background to design a better guitar”. The actual design was natural for me because the other guitar I had liked that wasn’t a Fender, was the Flying V. I liked the shape, and the fact that there wasn’t this lower body horn that my wrist ran into when I played at the last frets. So it began as a hybrid of sorts, but it soon became it’s own thing as I altered the shape and balance of the design to truly fit my hands and body. I also had invaluable support from a man who became a very dear friend of mine; Lynn Ellsworth of Boogie Body Guitar fame. I designed templates, and he brought me raw bodies and necks to work with to finalize the design. Over the years I built 14 instruments, each one a slight improvement over the previous one, and finally, I applied for and received 4 national design and trademark patents and on my efforts.

I doubt any other guitar player has put that level of personal commitment and effort into an all-new design for a guitar since Les Paul began with “The log”. I personally built several of these instruments on special order from guitarists in the Seattle area over the years, and I just delivered what I believe will be my final personally built instrument last week to a customer who already had one and had to have another. They were hardly inexpensive when I was building them this way, and my goal is to get the Byrd™ Super Avianti ® guitar into the market at a price that is comparable to Fender. I am working towards mass production of the Byrd™ Super Avianti® Balance Compensated Wing® guitars and it’s not been a simple project. It’s looking as though I’ll be able to achieve it in the coming year as I am currently in conference with two major guitar factories regarding it. There is additional information about the features and design on my web site at http://www.jamesbyrd.com, and as the manufacturing side of my undertaking progresses, there will eventually be much more information there.

Thank you James for a very informative interview, its been fun, is there anything else you would like to add before we close?
I think we’ve covered it, thanks Andy!