Tom Monda plays a Vigier Excalibur Surfreter fretless guitar. He insists it's not as hard to play as it seems. "You just go for it and feel it out," he says.
Monda is a monster who can hang with the shredders, nail intricate multi-finger double-handed hammer-ons, execute impossible lines at top speed and in unison with his band's violinist, employ an array of alternative and hybrid-picking techniques—and play his Vigier Excalibur Surfreter fretless guitar in tune and without breaking a sweat. He is equally at home playing standards in a straight-ahead jazz setting (on those gigs he uses a Gibson ES-335) or blowing through hard-bop classics like “Giant Steps."
Monda started his musical journey as an obsessive listener. As a child he spent hours rummaging through his father's record collection—Zappa, King Crimson, Yes, the Beatles, the Allman Brothers. “I started playing guitar when I was about 14," Monda told Premier Guitar. “Before that it never occurred to me that I could actually play music myself."
But Monda learned fast. His first guitar was a beat-up Epiphone Les Paul. He played in garage bands and gained his musical bearings. He discovered the shredders—Steve Vai, Yngwie Malmsteen, Jason Becker—and practiced for hours and hours every day. He took classical guitar lessons, learned how to read music, and got his first taste of formal music education. He also studied with the then up-and-coming Ron “Bumblefoot" Thal. A few years later he had a bachelor's degree in music, a stream of gigs in disparate styles, and buzz-with-a-bullet with his band, Thank You Scientist.
Premier Guitar caught up with Monda on tour and between gigs to talk about his band's unique way of writing music, their influences, their new album Maps of Non-Existent Places, odd time signatures, gear, and his early days with Bumblefoot.
You studied with Ron “Bumblefoot" Thal when you were a teenager. How did that happen?
I was really into his music. I stumbled upon his solo guitar stuff and I was floored by it because it's so weird and cool. I was studying with a local teacher who knew Ron. He told me a couple of weeks into lessons, “I'm going to send you to Ron." He gave me Ron's contact information and I got in touch with him. I started taking lessons from him and that was a big musical turning point for me. We became friends and remained friends since then—I was 16—he taught me a lot about music and he was an important teacher.
Monda's musical education included learning a little bit of every instrument—and studying guitar with fellow
New Jerseyan Ron “Bumblefoot" Thal.
Was Ron still a local teacher at that point?
He had solo records out and was doing his thing. He was producing a lot of bands but he was still a Jersey guy—a legendary Jersey guy—and he had a sizable following, especially in Europe. But this was way before he joined Guns N' Roses. He kicked my ass into shape about not just wanting to play guitar solos but learning how to write songs, learning about harmony, and all that essential stuff. I studied with him for a couple of years and then I got into jazz seriously. My degree is in music education with a jazz guitar concentration. I studied with a couple of great guitar players in college like Steve Benson and Dave Stryker. I also studied with Vic Juris for a number of years.
Did you study other instruments, too?
Yeah, and I think that was a vital part in shaping the sound of Thank You Scientist. I had to take orchestration classes and I had to learn a little bit on each instrument. Plus playing in jazz combos and doing jazz gigs on the side—writing for a [jazz] ensemble and in that context—I got used to having all those colors. I think that influenced Thank You Scientist in wanting to have all these other instruments that aren't normally in a heavy or semi-heavy rock band.
The instrumentation of the band is definitely unusual. Not so much having the horn section, but having the violin as well. Was that on purpose or did the band evolve that way?
That was on purpose. There was something about bands with violin that I really liked, like Frank Zappa's band with Jean-Luc Ponty, Mahavishnu Orchestra, and a few others. There's something cool about the timbre of electric guitar and violin that I really dig. It just opens up possibilities. We've been exploring the possibilities of the fretless guitar with violin. That's a really cool combination that's got a really unique sound to it because we can do the same kind of slurs, articulations, and cool sliding stuff together.
The Thank You Scientist crew.
Your fretless guitar—the Vigier Surfreter—doesn't have fret markers or lines on the fretboard. Is it hard to find the right notes?
It's actually not that bad! You just go for it and feel it out. You just have to keep your ears open. If you sit with it for a couple of days you'll be like, “Ah, this isn't so scary." Muscle memory and playing other fretless instruments helps as well. I play a Japanese instrument called the shamisen, too, which has no frets and it's got a really weird scale—the instrument is very long and thin—and from playing that I got used to feeling the distance between pitches.
Thank You Scientist doesn't sound like Frank Zappa, but there are a lot of Zappa-isms in your music. Was he a big influence?
I was obsessed with Zappa for a long time. He was one of those turning-point musicians. Everybody can pinpoint some musicians that shaped where they went musically. Through Zappa I got into exploring fusion and classical music. I spent a lot of time picking apart stuff on his records—all the weird musical figures and cool rhythmic stuff. He was definitely a big influence. Aesthetically I don't think we have much in common with him, but there are certainly moments in there that are a nod to Frank.
How do you approach composing for Thank You Scientist's unique instrumentation?
Our writing process is pretty painstaking and I think that is what makes it work. To generalize the way we write tunes, we get together and maybe we'll start with a guitar idea. Someone will say, “This melody will go with that." Someone else will say, “Oh, well this harmony will sound really cool." Someone else will say, “Let's use this chord instead." And it blossoms out from there. A lot of times it starts with a guitar or a vocal idea that I wrote with the singer, or just a riff or a groove, and we throw in our own ideas and pull it every which way and try different possibilities and make sure it's working.
Afterwards we always score everything and that is where we fine-tune everything. We make sure that the horns are doing the right articulations, that everyone is agreeing on the harmonies, dynamics, and all that stuff. Writing it down is a very helpful part in mapping all these acoustic instruments we have in the band. It streamlines the process, it keeps that organic sound, and keeps everybody involved in writing. We function like a regular rock band functions, but we're able to fine-tune afterwards because we write everything out.
Tom Monda's Gear
Guitars
Vigier Excalibur
Vigier Expert
Vigier Excalibur Surfreter Fretless
Uber-modified Parts-o-caster Tele
Gibson ES-335
Amps
Soldano Super Lead Overdrive (SLO-100)
Mesa/Boogie Mark V
Marshall 4x12 with two Celestion G12M Greenback and two G12T-75 speakers
Effects
Boss DD-7 Digital Delay
DigiTech Whammy 5
Line 6 M9
TC Electronic Spark Booster
Red Panda Particle Granular Delay
Booya! Amplifier Services Volume Knob in a Box
Strings and Picks
D'Addario XL115 (.011-.049)
Ernie Ball .013 set on the fretless Surfreter
Dunlop Ultex Jazz III picks
D'Andrea Pro-Plec 1.5 mm teardrop picks for jazz gigs
It's unusual for a rock band to write everything out.
Yeah, it is a little unusual and it definitely makes things easier in the studio. But with more musicians there is more margin for error, especially with the extra acoustic instruments, it's very easy to have little things that you don't realize sneak by. When you write them out you're like, “Oh okay. Maybe I should play the 9th of this chord instead," or whatever. We take care of all that stuff and put it under a microscope afterward. That is very helpful for the process.
When you compose in odd meters, are you thinking “odd meter" or is it more organic?
We don't try to force it. Basically, our thing is if it sounds cool, we do it. A lot of times it ends up being an odd meter but it's never like, “Let's write something in 15." It comes from jamming and throwing cool curve balls at each other, making it fun. Odin [Alvarez], our drummer, is a big part of that process, too. A lot of times we'll come up with a cool odd-time riff and he'll say, “Oooh, maybe it will sound cool if I play this time signature against that on the drums or if I play it straight, like a very Zeppelin-esque four underneath, just lay it down and have this odd-time stuff cycling over the top." We just play with it until we think it sounds really cool—until it's something that we would listen to and think is fun. And a lot of times it ends up being in an odd time signature, but we try to keep it organic. You don't want it to sound like, “How many time signatures can we play in?"
On a “Salesman's Guide to Non-Existence," the bridge section sounds a lot like “Frame by Frame" by King Crimson, from Discipline.
Yeah, that is one of my favorite records. It probably subconsciously seeped in. I love those broken, angular interlocking things that Adrian Belew and Robert Fripp did in '80s-era Crimson. Those Gamelan-type things. I love those. That was definitely a nod to them. No doubt.
On “Feed the Horses," just when the song is getting too weird, you go into this '80s Michael Jackson groove. Where did that come from?
We're all big Michael Jackson fans. I am a big MJ fan and big Prince fan. I remember writing that—it's got all this weirdness at the beginning—so we were like, “Let's throw a curve ball in there. Just go in a completely different direction to that first verse." There's another quote in that tune, too, we also quote “The Chicken" [composed by Pee Wee Ellis and popularized by Jaco Pastorius]. So having the opportunity to sneak in things like that was really cool.
Photo by Chris Anderson
Monda's Tone Toys
Tom Monda's go-to guitars are the Vigier Excalibur, Expert, and Surfreter fretless. Vigier guitars have a dense carbon strip down the middle of the neck instead of a truss rod (the 10/90 neck system). “The neck is dead straight," Monda says. “You can leave it in the cold trailer with all the gear and it won't shift. The intonation won't get screwy. That is a major, major plus: I don't have to fiddle with the truss rod or intonation before a gig." The guitars come equipped with tremolo bridges, but Monda doesn't use them. “I usually put a block in. I do some pedal-steel-type bends where things are ringing with open strings and it's easier to have it blocked off to stay in tune."
In the studio, Monda also uses his Parts-o-caster Tele. “It has a Seymour Duncan Little '59 in the bridge and a Seth Lover in the neck position. It has a lot of random Allparts and Fender parts on it as well. It was my go-to guitar for a long, long time and I used it a lot on Maps."
Monda's amps are the 100-watt Soldano SLO-100 Super Lead Overdrive and a Mesa/Boogie Mark V for backup. He runs both heads through a Marshall 4x12, which Booya! Amplifier Services loaded with two Celestion G12M Greenbacks and two G12T-75s.
His pedalboard is simple. “It's nothing exciting," he said. “I have a DD-7 Boss Digital Delay, a DigiTech Whammy 5, a Line 6 M9, which recently took the place of a DL4, and a TC Electronic Spark Booster, which I use as a clean boost." He also has a Red Panda Particle Granular Delay. His distortion comes from the amp.
Monda strings his fretted guitars with D'Addario .011 sets, and uses Ernie Ball .010 sets on the fretless. “It's just the standard packs. I don't know what the bottom is," he says. “I used to use heavier strings but my hands were taking a beating. I'm always changing my mind about string gauges. I'll pick up a guitar with lighter strings and think, 'Wow, it's so easy to do things.' But the next day I'll pick up a guitar with .011s and think, 'The tone is so much better, I want to play these.' It's that never-ending guitar player thing."
MI’s Guitar Craft program was established in 2000 by school founder/owner Hisatake Shibuya, who also happens to own ESP and Schecter. L.A. boutique guitar builder John Carruthers was tapped as the program’s first director and quickly put together a curriculum with the stated goal of giving students the essential skills needed to build a guitar.
“His whole idea was to teach everything,” says former student and current instructor Lance Alonzo. “It was all about learning how to use the tools, basic woodworking, basic principles of design and fretwork and setup—which is probably the single most important thing that we teach here—and painting. The idea is that when you leave here, you’ll be a competent beginner.”
Roberts, another of the program’s early students, says the program has evolved significantly over the past decade. In the first few years, everything was new and had a laid-back vibe. “It was fairly informal at the time, with small classes. When I was in the program, there were about six people in my class,” he remembers. “Over the years, it’s gotten more popular and the class sizes have expanded. As a result, we now have more formalized classes on specific aspects.”
The curriculum has tightened up as the years have worn on, too, but the basic essence of the program remains rooted in giving students the best opportunity possible to get their hands dirty. “We give as much lecture time as we have to, but the most effective way to learn something is to do it,” Alonzo says. “They’re basically going through a custom-shop environment where they design a one-off. They cut it out, shape it, paint it, and assemble it.”
Building an instrument doesn’t leave much room for error, and students must be meticulous in their daily tasks,
and the faculty must lead by example.
Building Blocks
That hands-on approach isn’t just critical to the learning process: It is the process. “The only way you’re going to get better at doing something is to do it over and over and over again,” Roberts says. “That’s probably one of the hardest things for the students to overcome, because it’s a difficult thing to build an instrument and pull it off well. They’re here to learn how to do this and make their mistakes here and now so that when they go out into the world they won’t make as many. You have to be patient, you have to be open to constructive criticism, and if something doesn’t work out you have to be willing to go back and do it all over again.”
In that respect, building an instrument doesn’t leave much room for error, and students must be meticulous in their daily tasks. “If you’re taking a guitar [performance] class or a bass class and you’re running through a scale and you make a mistake, you can go back and do it all over again,” Roberts explains. “But when you’re building an instrument you have invested hours of your time into something, and if you run it the wrong way through a machine or make a slip with your chisel, that might set you back another several hours of work.”
As daunting as building a guitar from scratch might seem, Roberts insists no prior knowledge is required for a student to succeed. “Some of our best students have no previous experience at all,” he says. “Experience can be kind of a double-edged sword: You might have skill at a particular technique, but you might also have learned how to do something the wrong way. A lot of the time it’s harder to unlearn things that you’ve learned before. So if you do have some experience coming in—and experience is all subjective—we advise students to set aside that experience at the door and try and learn the techniques that we’re teaching here.”
Paul Roberts, current chair of the Musicians Institute Guitar Craft Academy, was a student of the program in the early 2000s and studied under luthier John Carruthers.
Dream Team
To educate the uninitiated, MI has chosen some of the most experienced builders in the business, including Fender mainstay Dave Maddox, who spent 15 years overseeing the company’s Custom Shop and currently heads the team responsible for Fender’s limited-run line. In addition, there are builders from smaller custom outfits, like Isaac Jang, who worked for Westwood Music in Los Angeles for many years, as well as Jaime Sandoval, who worked for Matchless Amplifiers. The academy also regularly brings in an array of guest speakers, such as pickup guru Seymour Duncan, Benedetto Guitars CEO Howard Paul, and Ron Thorn, a custom builder and inlay specialist.
It’s not all woodwork and wiring, however. In addition to the classes in the guitar craft facility, students also take weekly lessons in music theory on MI’s main campus. “You do have to have a certain understanding of music theory and ear training in order to hear how notes relate harmoniously and pick out different tonal characteristics,” Roberts notes. “Being able to lay out a fretboard and set frets and get the intonation right, you have to understand how music works.”
Much like a small factory, the facilities at MI’s Guitar Craft program provide students with every conceivable piece of equipment needed throughout the guitar-making process. “We have a machine shop where we have vertical milling machines, drill presses, edge sanders, pin routers, drum sanders, a thickness sander, a spindle sander, buffing wheels, orbital sanding stations—all the types of tools you’d find in any production facility,” Roberts says. “Most of the stuff is the same make, so these are the types of machinery that the students will be familiar with wherever they go.”
All that being said, the program is not singularly dedicated to mentoring those who hope to work for the big names in the industry. Instructors also give students the tools and skills necessary to later operate independently. “I don’t know if you’d call them alternative construction methods … but something like a pin router is going to run you 9 or 10 thousand dollars. Anything you can do with that you can do with a plunge router or a table router that you can buy at Home Depot for $200. So we have the students use giant machine tools alongside irregular power tools, as well as hand tools like chisels, spokeshaves, and scrapers. They’re going to be familiar with anything they encounter.”
New Paths
One of the more enticing aspects of MI’s Guitar Craft program as opposed to other similar learning environments around the country, according to program chair Roberts, is the freedom afforded to students to design and build truly custom pieces.
According to instructors, the most important thing the MI Guitar Craft Academy teaches students is the basic principles of guitar design, fretwork, setup, and finishing.
“We get some guys that have something really specific in mind,” he says. “I remember a guy who, instead of doing a normal f-hole—if you’ve ever seen the tire-flaps on an 18-wheeler with the lady reclining—he wanted to put in an f-hole of that shape. Some guys will be, like, ‘I wanna build a Telecaster,’ or ‘I wanna build a Strat-style,’ or they want to have a kind of hybrid. We do have templates and stuff like that here for them to use as a starting point, but we also get people who want to build something completely custom.”
Still, the program remains something of a regimented learning environment and, by necessity, there are some restrictions in place to keep students from getting too far away from the basic elements of guitar building. “To borrow an old cliché, you have to learn how to walk before you can run,” Roberts explains. “There are certain things that have to be made in a certain way, like your neck pocket has to have a specific depth, or the overall thickness of the body has to have a certain measurement, or if you’re creating a hollow or chambered guitar you should have a certain amount of material between the chamber and the edge. Other than that, the shape and the design is fairly open. We will direct the student by saying, ‘Hey, this looks weird,’ or ‘If you make something that pointy the paint won’t be able to stick to it.’ But as far as things like number of pickups or control configurations, we don’t have much in the way of restriction.”
The electric guitar courses allow for more design freedom, while the acoustic program’s scope is more limited.
Whatever a student might have in their mind to manufacture, Musicians Institute supplies the hardware and wood they need. “We offer a pretty general variety: alder, swamp ash Indian rosewood, spruce, African mahogany, basswood, walnut, maple—both flame and quilted—and African ebony,” Roberts says. “As part of their electronics class, they’re winding pickups for the instrument that they’ve built as well. They can do humbuckers, Strat single-coils, Tele single-coils, and P-90s.”
MI also has a program for those who prefer to go unplugged, but to avoid learning overlap, the electric course is a prerequisite. “The acoustic program is a little more straightforward,” says Roberts. “It’s only three months, so you literally start building on day one. It’s a bit more hand-tool oriented, with bending irons, all the braces are carved with chisels … it’s a lot more traditional in that sense.”
Another difference between the programs is that, while the electric-guitar program has a lot of leeway in terms of body aesthetics, the acoustic program is more formulaic due to the physics involved with creating a hollow instrument that can withstand all the attendant tensions. “We go over the traditional historic bracing patterns and the difference between high or low X-bracing or how scalloping affects the bracing. But the instruments they build in the acoustic program are all based around a dreadnaught,” Roberts says. “There’s a little less freedom in that particular program because—depending on the size of the guitar, or whether or not it has a cutaway—it’s going to have a completely different type of bracing or curving. So having everyone do something totally different would mean each person would need to have a one-on-one type of class.”
A Launching Point
Overall, the goal of MI’s Guitar Craft program is not to create fully formed guitar manufacturers, but rather to give people the knowledge and cachet to make a go at it as a career. “This is the beginning of a lifelong education,” Roberts notes. Alonzo echoes the sentiment: “The idea is that, when you leave here, you’ll be a beginner but you’ll know what you’re doing.”
Another requirement for building an instrument: patience. When learning how to build, you might have to invest hours of your time into something, yet one slip of the hand can set you back considerably.
To that end, MI has a proven track record of student success. “Since the program has been around, we’ve had people work for Fender, Jackson, G&L, John Suhr, PRS, Yamaha, Ibanez, Tyler, ESP, LSL—almost any large manufacturer you can name has a couple of our graduates working there,” Roberts says. Among the more notable graduates are Rafael Barajas, head painter for the Schecter USA custom shop, Steve Mathers with Collings Guitars, and Hector Villalobos with ESP.
Given that many people don’t get to work in a job they love—for many, work means punching a clock, waiting for the hours to slowly tick by, and collecting a check every couple of weeks—lutherie and guitar maintenance is an increasingly attractive option for a lot of passionate players. “If you have to work, do something you really enjoy,” says Alonzo. “It’s fun work. It’s challenging—sometimes it’s frustrating as hell—but it’s also very rewarding.” For more information on the program, visit mi.edu.
Carruthers posing with Police guitarist Andy Summers who is holding his brand new acoustic built by the former Fender Custom Shop employee and pioneer of the Guitar Craft academy. Photo courtesy of carruthersguitars.com.
John Carruthers: Setting up School
When Musicians Institute founder Hisatake Shibuya began his search for someone to head up the new Guitar Craft program, not many candidates could top the credentials of L.A. luthier John Carruthers. Throughout his nearly 40-year career, Carruthers has worked with many of the biggest brands in the industry, including Fender, Yamaha, Ibanez, Martin, and Gibson, to name a few. “I helped design a lot of the guitars that are out on the market now,” he says, “like the Robben Ford model, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, vintage reissues, the whole acoustic line at Fender and at Yamaha.”
A native of Alberta, Canada, Carruthers first came to Southern California to live with his sister and help her train for the Olympics. A tinkerer at heart, he got a job at Westwood Music doing repairs and customizations for players who either were or would soon be household names. “When I first moved down here, it was the beginning of the rock ’n’ roll era and I did work for the Rolling Stones, the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt. You name it, and I worked on stuff for them at one time or another.”
Originally, Carruthers was brought to MI to teach basic guitar maintenance and repair to students in the guitar performance program, but when the school’s founder decided to go bigger, he was a natural fit to get the expanded program on its feet. “Mr. Shibuya asked me if I was interested in running such a department, and I told him that I would be and I just started doing it,” he recalls. “I started writing the course materials, set up the shop, and got the thing going. I ended up teaching there for 17 years.”
As the program’s popularity grew, so did demands on Carruthers’ time—a fact that prompted him to arrange for former student and employee Paul Roberts to take over. These days Carruthers stays busy doing what he’s always done. “I have my own business with a 10,000-square-foot facility where I do service work and build custom instruments,” he says. “It’s nice having my own shop—if I want to work hard, I can. If I don’t, I don’t have to [laughs].”