Ex-MEGADETH Guitarist MARTY FRIEDMAN: 'I'm Not Just A Metal Musician'

Italy's Accordo.it recently conducted an interview with former MEGADETH guitarist Marty Friedman. You can now watch the chat below.

Asked what he would have become had he not gotten into heavy metal music, Friedman responded: "I'm not just a metal musician, although metal is maybe what I'm known for. What I love about playing metal is putting metal into music that's not supposed to be metal, like pop music, or ballads, or mixing it with a sax or an acoustic guitar, or something, or a piano. That's kind of, like… It's almost a punk spirit. But I just… Playing aggressive music is the way I play — very strung, emotional music. Sometimes it's metal, sometimes you can't call it metal; you don't know what [label to put on it]."

In other news, Friedman will host a special guitar clinic at Los Angeles' famous music college Musicians Institute exclusively for students and alumni. The clinic will take place at MI's Concert Hall on Tuesday, January 27 from 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.

Marty's latest solo album, "Inferno", sold around 2,100 copies in the United States in its first week of release to debut at position No. 186 on The Billboard 200 chart. The CD was released on May 26, 2014 via Prosthetic Records (except in Japan, where the album was made available through Universal Music). The CD was the 52-year-old musician's first collection of material recorded for the U.S. market since 2003's "Music For Speeding". Among the guest collaborators that appear on the effort are CHILDREN OF BODOM's Alexi Laiho, REVOCATION's Dave Davidson, acoustic flamenco-metal hybridists RODRIGO Y GABRIELA and Friedman's pre-MEGADETH bandmate in CACOPHONY, Jason Becker.

Speaking to Guitar World magazine, Friedman said: Each of the guests on this record took a song from scratch — they would write it and then I would arrange it and add my parts to it. That way we were both invested in it and it's a little bit of a deeper experience."

Friedman described the new album as the most "Marty" record has has done in years. "I figured if I was going to come back to America, I was going to come back big and give people something they want out of me," he told the magazine. "And I know that what they want is not some avant-garde thing. What they want is just the most intense writing and playing I can do."