Fingerstyle acoustic guitar is a hard game. It’s possibly the most exposed, intricate form of guitar to perform in front of an audience. There’s no safety net, no band to carry some of the weight of expectation or mask mistakes. So it’s unsurprising that Pierre Bensusan has spent a fair bit of time thinking about the deep questions of what connects a guitarist to an audience and what conjures magic from the thin air of solo performance.
Half a century on from the start of his career with the brilliant folk album Pres De Paris, Pierre believes that summoning perfect poise and concentration when playing guitar are hard disciplines to master – but that it is the duty of every guitarist to try to let nerves and ego fall by the wayside when you play, so the music can truly and fully come to life.
As he sits down to a cup of coffee in the Guitarist studio – he didn’t sleep well the night before – Pierre says that the mundane cares of daily life are a recurrent enemy to what a touring musician can achieve on stage, if you let them be.
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“I guess this is the work,” he reflects. “To travel, to have to deal with all the aggravation of being away from home. Having to go through all kinds of little things, such as driving long distances, parking, dealing with aggravations and stuff, in order to be in a venue and play music for people.
“And when people come, of course, you give your best – you have to be at your top every time, and so you cannot let any grain of sand come and destabilise this,” he says.
“So, for me, everything else is just building momentum for that to happen. Whatever happens, it has to be recycled and transformed into pure energy…. touring life is full of so many little details, which are absolutely nothing to do with a pure rendition of the music when it happens. And yet it feels like if you succeed well to go through all of those, the music is going to be better.”
As a solo fingerstyle guitarist, do you think you have to be uniquely present and focused on your performance in a way that might not be necessary in a band?
I don’t know. I think you have to be present. You play one note, whatever you do… even if you play in a band, you have to be present. You have to be present listening to what other people play, how they interact with the music, how they expect you to interact with it… So I think presence is the key. If you are not present, you lean towards chaos as soon as you start thinking about something – that’s it, you’re no longer in the moment.
But when you are a solo performer, whatever the instrument, it is even more crucial [for you to be present in the moment]. Because it’s only you who is making this music. This music needs 200 per cent of you. But the balance is extremely subtle between being present but not being overwhelmingly present.
If you are too present and you make yourself too important, you hide the music. So, for me, a musician serves an intention, serves a continuum, serves a storytelling through music. And, of course, you need to be listening carefully to what you play.
In fact, you need to be a listener – a big-time listener. There is not much difference between you listening and the person in front [in the audience] listening. We are two listeners – and the person listening is also very creative. Because, in fact, when I play for myself, I play for myself; there is only me and the music.
But when we are together [as performer and audience] we share this intimacy, I hear the music and I understand that it’s far more, it’s going much further than just my moves to make that music happen. You should never play without listening to what you play – there is no reason why you should play if you don’t listen. What’s the point?
But all my moves, I look at them with a microscope before each sequence, the geography of where my fingers and hands are on my fretboard. The geography of my right hand touching the strings, where they are, how they touch…
All those little things can be slightly nuanced to make a sound richer by just where you touch, how you work on the sustain of a note, how you express that note.
Do you use vibrato? Or do you have the note just stand straight? Because no vibrato is also an effect – too much vibrato is a way to hide something, and it’s too much sometimes. So the effects need to remain effects, but something neutral with no vibrato is also very beautiful.
For me, music needs the experience of being shared to understand what it takes to go from you to another person – to create that bond without intruding
So this is a thing, you know. How do you make the music stay and then be shared by people without intruding as an ego? And so I think when you play for people, this is when you understand a lot of those things; you understand them better than when you play for yourself.
For me, music needs the experience of being shared to understand what it takes to go from you to another person – to create that bond without intruding. And so that’s why playing for people is part of my progression and evolution. I’ve learned so much.
And also, when you play for yourself, you can stop any time. When you’re recording in the studio, you can stop any time. And to know that you can stop already dictates something in the dynamic. But when you’re on stage, the only reason that I will stop will be because my guitar is so out of tune that I have to stop and tune. But now I stop between each song and I tune my guitar again, and I take the time to tune before each song.
In this era of on-demand digital entertainment, it’s easy to forget that an audience contributes directly to a live performance, through their engagement and emotional response; it’s not just a passive thing.
People are part of the music. In fact, they make the music. They let this music enter and they start to process what they hear, so they take advantage of the person playing to start creating something, and so the music becomes a pretext to get to a state of being that is going to allow this person to open up completely.
What’s the point to do something perfect if it’s made by a machine, right? Why should I feel anything? But this is a live performance, it is still one of the very last things where people are people – people come to see and they get what they see
So, you know, the beginning of a concert is very important. People come and they are not aligned [with the performance] at first. They come from their reality, from work or whatever, they talk with friends, and then the music starts. They need time to be receptive.
All of that is important, especially nowadays with artificial intelligence. What’s the point to do something perfect if it’s made by a machine, right? Why should I feel anything? But this is a live performance, it is still one of the very last things where people are people – people come to see and they get what they see, it’s all there. There are no secrets, nothing hidden. What you hear is what you see, and it’s made for you.
It’s like a cooking recipe by a chef who is working very hard for all the taste to be there for the people who are going to appreciate the meal, to really have the best possible [experience] – and that’s why I didn’t feel those 51 years go by.
Each concert is very different for me and I do play notes that… try to capture what I hear at the moment, and I really try to play what I hear. It’s not always the case. Sometimes I go back to what I know for security, and I try to enhance that in the most beautiful way possible. But when I can incarnate what I hear, this is when I really am the happiest man.
When playing solo fingerstyle guitar, it’s really hard not to let conscious thoughts intrude as you play – the part of your brain that vocalises self-criticism if you scuff a note or play something slightly wrong can really upset the flow.
That thought could lead to losing it. To shut the mind from thinking… this is something that every one of us is trying to [achieve]. How do we stop thinking, even when we go to bed? How do we stop thinking and let sleep come? The mind is always late… the attention, the reaction are, in fact, the instant thing.
So when we play there is no time for thinking. The thinking comes before, maybe like when you are away from your instrument and you start imagining the music. I don’t even know if it’s a thought or if it is a very active mental vision, not even mental, but something you hear inside of you. It’s not mute, it’s very rich, you know?
I do compose a lot by just imagining music and by imagining where that music could go… and this is the beginning, for me, of the creative and compositional process: that I identify a journey and then when I take my guitar, I go back to that journey and try to make it on the guitar – to make it playable.
And so if I have an idea I will record it or I will write it down in [such] a way that it can be played. But all my ideas have to be there as well – and it also has to be doable physically. It has to be playable. Very often I end up writing music that I have no idea how to play. But I think that technique [when used properly] becomes completely invisible. The technique is a tool, so you need a lot of technique, you need a lot of expertise, you need a lot of ability to make that technique become invisible, in order to just let the music be…
And I’m sometimes thinking, ‘Is there an artificial intelligence that could just listen to my thoughts and put them on paper, so I can hear them?’ In fact, no. It’s going to be my work – that’s what is going to make it happen, all my short lifetime. So there is no time to lose, really. Especially now, 51 years on, I need to see what is essential. I cannot lose time.
You’re known for pushing the boundaries of what is possible with the DADGAD tuning. How did you first discover it?
Well, I mean, I found it on my own when I was 13 or 14 – I played guitar before in standard tuning and sang and even wrote lyrics and songs.
When I found DADGAD, it was a time when I started to listen to Alan Stivell playing the harp and then from him I went to listen to Irish music but also British folk music, Steeleye Span, Fairport, Martin Carthy, Dick Gaughan, Nic Jones. Some of my friends were into Merle Travis and Chet Atkins, but I also played bluegrass – and I loved Doc Watson and Joan Baez and Dylan and Cat Stevens and Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell.
I’m self-taught, so I was free. And I like that freedom; I don’t like people to tell me what I should do. But I learned [the value of taking] advice later in my life. Can you help me? Can you inspire me? What is the next move? And so, of course, that’s different… but then I came from piano and I already had a lot of information that helped me to really love music.
I knew from a very early age that my life was going to be in music, since I was 12 years old. I knew that I would be playing full-time, so I didn’t deviate. And today I’m just on the same road that I [embarked on] when I was six, when I started to play piano.
No-one told me, ‘Oh no, you should not play in different tunings,’ you know? Some self-taught guys did it and they were playing beautiful stuff that was very interesting. For me, it was always obvious that I should try different tunings.
There was a Martin Carthy tuning, which I tried, and I even played a couple things with that tuning, but after a while I found DADGAD and it spoke to my North African roots, my Jewish roots… you know, it opens things. And that taught me especially to work on melodies or phrasing without having to worry about chords because of the three Ds – the drone and everything – so that really spoke to me.
It’s like a relationship. You meet someone and at the very beginning you see what is obvious. But what is less obvious, you will have to work hard [to reveal].
I think some people like to play because they are creating a zone of comfort, and it’s great. We need to reach that zone – but that zone of comfort is very short, it is a very short pleasure
You will have to really want to deepen that relationship. Some people like to stay at the surface, but they are afraid to deepen things because deepening means to put yourself in danger. And I think some people like to play because they are creating a zone of comfort, and it’s great. We need to reach that zone – but that zone of comfort is very short, it is a very short pleasure, in fact.
It doesn’t last long and so you always go from one zone to another zone to another zone, and in order to go from one zone to next, you have to study. I think studying is beautiful, you know? Studying means deepening, to go into the core of things, into the heart of the things. I cannot explain where music comes from. I don’t explain where my inspiration comes from. I have no idea. I haven’t learned it. I’m listening, and I’m very grateful and I’m lucky – but that means a lot of responsibility and a lot of work.
To go back to your question about guitar technique, I never try to impress people. I try to tell a story with sound and that story requires dynamics, and so I can look at music with a microscope to see how those dynamics work, and it requires a lot of introspection on the technique – that I need to do this, or I need to touch the guitar like that – and then I expand my technique and my vocabulary every time I’m confronted with a technicality that I do not master, and there are a lot of those. I try to understand what it takes and I confront myself, and I win because there is no choice.
