MARTY FRIEDMAN On Developing Your Own Style As A Guitarist: 'It's Very Important To Be Honest With Your Own Taste'

During his September 23 guitar clinic at Kadıköy Sahne in Istanbul, Turkey, former MEGADETH guitarist Marty Friedman spoke about the importance of developing your own sound and style. He said in part (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): " I think as a guitar player, it's easy to see someone who's really good at guitar and wanna play like that — just get good, just get good at guitar. The problem with that is if you really get into that, you start to lose your own personal identity because you're just learning things to make you better on the guitar.

"I think the people that guys like me, maybe, who you can hear their sound, these are guys who don't really try to learn every single thing out there," he explained. "A lot of guitar players, especially when they're younger, think, 'I need to know everything. I need to play like this guy, that guy, this guy, everything.' It's very intimidating. It's more important to me to be very honest with things I care about learning about. I don't wanna waste time, like, for example, pick some… Like Eric Johnson — fantastic, unbelievable guitarist. I can never play like that. So I don't try to learn what he does because there's things that I'm more interested. I just know he's a fantastic player — I respect him — but that doesn't mean that's gonna be part of my musicality.

"You have to be very honest with yourself, each person's personal taste and life experience," Marty added." 'Oh, I love this. I need to learn this,' not just because it's good, just because it means something to you. Those are the things that you need to learn. It's very important to be honest with your own taste. A lot of people think, 'Well, I have to play like Al Di Meola because he's so good and I wanna get good.' Well, no. I could never play like that in a million years. It's very nice technique, but that's his life experiences. Your experience is different. Yours different, different, different. So I think you should be relieved to not think that you have to learn everything. But you have a responsibility to really learn the things you love and learn it well."

The day before his guitar clinic in Istanbul, Marty and his solo band performed as the support act for MEGADETH at the city's Maçka Küçükçiftlik Park venue. Marty did not take the stage with his former band at the show, but he took to his social media right after the gig and wrote: "My band and I had an incredible time playing in Istanbul! … After our show Naoki [Morioka, a member of Marty's Japanese touring band] and I watched as [current MEGADETH guitarist] Teemu [Mäntysaari] absolutely NAILED my solos with ease and MEGADETH tore up the place! We can't wait to come back."

Marty rejoined MEGADETH twice on stage over the course of a six-month period in 2023 — first in February 2023 at Tokyo, Japan's famed Budokan and then in early August 2023 at the Wacken Open Air festival in Wacken, Germany.

At the 2023 Wacken Open Air, Marty performed four songs with MEGADETH: "Trust", "Tornado Of Souls", "Symphony Of Destruction" and "Holy Wars... The Punishment Due".

At Budokan, Friedman came up on stage for three songs toward the end of MEGADETH's main set: "Countdown To Extinction", "Tornado Of Souls" and "Symphony Of Destruction".

Last December, Marty was asked by France's Metal Obs' what it was like to rejoin his former band on stage after more than two decades: "It was good fun — nothing but pure fun. And [it was] wonderful to watch the audience react to it, because it was just a wonderful experience for everybody, especially those of us on stage because the audience was… We did it because we knew that the audience would get something that they can remember, something they can go home with and have a memory. And we just enjoyed it. I enjoyed it a lot."

Regarding what it was like meeting up with MEGADETH leader Dave Mustaine again, Marty said: "It was great. We never really lost touch. But there's never much that we have to talk to each other about, so we don't talk to each other every month or anything. But it's always been friendly, so when the chance came for us to play together, it was just natural."