Plini, I Built The Sky, Jimmy Lardner-Brown, Simon Gardner, each has their own personal spin on what the guitar can be within a heavy context. Add to that list James Norbert Ivanyi.
The first thing you’ll notice in Ivanyi’s playing is his appreciation for the entire life of the note. A lot of players seem to be in a perpetual rush to get to the next note. They don’t necessarily know how to begin a note, how to end it and what to do in between. “Thank you for noticing,” Ivanyi says. “I’m really aware of the techniques that one can use to dress up the note. We all have access to the same notes and frets on the guitar, and operating them is the easiest bit. It’s what you do with the note that matters the most.
“To me, I’m more focused on how I dress that note as opposed to what that note is, so I’ll exploit a range of techniques to get the most out of it according to the interplay with the other notes in the queue. It’s something I think about quite a lot and to this day I spend a lot of time trying to get better at it. A lot of the older-generation players – and some newer generation players as well – rely on feel rather than technical prowess. I look at those players for that and I try to emulate that while trying to bring it over into the modern metal context as best as I can.
“I use this analogy a lot with students of mine,” Ivanyi continues. “There are players who are great guitar operators who maybe need to develop their ear a little bit more. It’s like the first time you sit down at a computer keyboard when you’re a kid and it will take you forever to figure out where certain letters are. Then after a while you can blast away without looking at the keyboard. The guitar can be just like that. People can become great at operating it while there’s still something lacking musically. There’s a lot of that due to the accessibility of the guitar these days.”
Denalavis is the latest in a series of EPs, each of which is recorded at home with a particularly interesting spin on song creation. “I usually have some kind of influence there to help me in songwriting,” Ivanyi says. “Since I’ve been doing these solo EPs it’s been the cover art. Jeff Richardson does the artwork for my records and I try to musically create whatever it is that the picture is saying to me. I always have a big print-out of it there and I write to the artwork. I do all the guitar, bass, keys and arrangements, and it’s all a home job. I’m so into Jeff’s art that I thought it would be really cool to capitalise on how I’m inspired by it, by making music to interpret that instead of internalising it.
For the guitar geeks, Ivanyi’s main guitar is a Suhr Antique S, but live he uses a custom-made Modern model. “I designed it to be nice and dumb. It’s very simple but for the road, it works very well. It’s the black one that most people have seen. I’ve been recording using the Fractal Audio Axe-Fx for most of my recordings. Out on the road I’ve been using the Fractal AX8, which is basically an Axe-Fx built into a floor unit, and that’s been a dream. I can sling it into the overhead on the plane. It’s nice and easy to use.”
