When Paul Gilbert plays guitar, it is more than an instrument, it is an extension of his being. Few performers can convey the range of emotion Gilbert is capable of. With his upcoming release The Dio Album, out on April 7, he takes it a step further. Yes, the amazing guitar work found on Dio’s classic tracks is there, but Paul channels the iconic frontman’s vocals through his guitar. Recently, Paul took some time to talk about this as well as the upcoming Mr. Big farewell tour.
Please press the PLAY icon below for the MisplacedStraws Conversation with Paul Gilbert –
On playing all instruments (except drums) himself, rather than using other musicians – I think the big advantage about working with other musicians is often they’ve got better ideas than I do, and plus you get the power of several brains as opposed to one. So I would say if I’m coming up with new music, I really like to have other musicians because I’m often maxed out with my mental energy, I’m already using everything I have just to sort of get the basic structure of the song, and so it’s really nice to have some help with the ideas of how the arrangement goes and that sort of thing. But with this for The Dio Album, all that’s done. So I’m just kind of trying to reproduce and perform, I don’t wanna change things too much. I just sort of wanna take the music and be a vessel and run it through my hands and my sensibilities. So for that, I don’t wanna mess with it too much. So I think that it’s nice to do it that way, I do a lot of this stuff myself. Plus, the other thing is I wanted to learn from it. This guitar or this album, I was like the best guitar lesson in the world, and Ronnie James Dio was my teacher, along with (Ritchie) Blackmore, Tony Iommi, Vivian Campbell, and the bass players. I learned so much from learning the Geezer Butler parts and Craig Gruber parts, and Jimmy Bain parts. So at the end of it, I come out of it a richer musician. I’ve got more tools to work with, and I really enjoyed the process of it as well. 1:04

On Dio’s influence on him – When I first heard, the earliest stuff I heard with the Black Sabbath in terms of guitar before, this is Ozzy (Osbourne) era, and it was just all the power chord riffs were so great and the energy, the band was so cool. It seems like the ratio of heavy songs to ballads was heavily tilted towards the heavy, which as a teenager, that was really the valuable thing. At the same time, I was a big Led Zeppelin fan, but I’d buy a Zeppelin album and it would be about 50% heavy stuff and in all the acoustic stuff, but now I love the acoustic stuff, but at the time I’m like, “I wish it was just all heavy”. With Black Sabbath, you’d get a whole album of heavy stuff. It was just satisfying as a teenage metal fan. Later on, when I heard “Neon Knights” on the radio, I didn’t know who it was, even though I was familiar with Sabbath, it was obviously a new singer, I wasn’t that familiar with Dio at the time, and so I just thought it was some new band that was great. I just grabbed me, the sort of passionate operatic, “I’m singing as if my life depended on it”, Dio performance along with this up-tempo riff, just grabbed me really hard. I bought the album, I love the whole album, and then, of course, Mob Rules came out, I played a lot of those songs and the band I was in, so that really grabbed me. As far as why, this is just something that has occurred to me enough where it’s just a vision that I get, I always picture Dio being in some 3000-year-old era, he’s a messenger, he’s been running through the desert to get to the King of Egypt or something, and he almost collapses in front of the king as the messenger to bring this message, and then he has to sing the message, and he sings it like Dio would sing it. Because of that, he made it across the desert, and because he sang it so well, it changes the course of civilization. To me, that’s how important he makes his delivery feel. It’s not casual. When Dio steps to the mic and sings two notes, it’s like, something important, he’s telling me something here, I gotta listen to this. This is like a civilization-changing event because of his delivery. 3:19
On how he recreated Dio’s voice on his guitar – Well, Dio is a great artist to choose for playing instrumental versions because his melodies tend to be dramatic, it’s actually easier to play, well shouldn’t say easy to play, it’s easier to have success with the dramatic melody than it is with a melody that doesn’t move too much. It would be much more challenging to have success with like a Bob Dylan melody, which is much more maybe sitting around one note, that’s gonna be hard to really get across and you’re always gonna be kinda missing the word part of it, and a lot of the pronunciation part of it, and a lot of things that the guitar is not gonna have. But if the melody is really wide-ranging, which Dio does, you’re getting high notes, low notes, a lot of movement, then if you just follow that, you’ve already won half the battle because at least it’s recognizable. Then you put as much style in as you can. There were discoveries I made. I realized that if I do pick harmonics, I can shape the vowel sounds because even though I might not be able to t get an exact word to come out the way a singer would, but I can at least copy if it’s those vowel shapes, I can get that with the pick harmonic a little bit. I found myself using guitars that had less frets, I’ve got some old Ibanez’s that have 21 frets like a Strat. With the less frets, you have, the more room you have to get pick harmonics because you’re not bumping into the edge of the fretboard. So that was a surprise that I never thought of having less frets being an advantage, but for pick harmonics it was, I could just reach more stuff that way. Then just playing horizontally because you have a lot more access to sliding, of course, if you have a slide you can get it, but even with just your finger. I found that my slide playing and my kind of one-finger playing are kind of interchangeable. They sound different. Playing slide has really helped playing without a slide and being able to get something similar. I do find when I play slide, things get a little bit softer, a little bit more swampy, where I can get a little more bite and a little more aggressive without the slide, but I like that contrast. A lot of times I say I would do the real metal slide on the bridge or the intro or just one part of the song and you kinda give it a little contrast, and then I would be playing as if they had a slide, but with my skin, on the rest of the tune. 7:21
On how he picked the songs – I definitely had other songs I was interested in doing, but I think the songs that I didn’t use one more because they had really long instrumental sections. I love “Sign of the Southern Cross”, and I love “Stargazer”, and I love “Light in the Black”, “Gates of Babylon.” Awesome songs, I was considering all of those. Then I started to realize there’s a little bit of vocals and then a long solo, and I want to keep it Dio. I wanted to really aim towards the songs that have a lot of focus on the vocals and so on like “Man On The Silver Mountain”, which is a lot of singing, short solo, that, to me, made more sense for this record, because I’m basically emphasizing the vocals…There’s still instrumental stuff on there, no shortage of solos. Some of those tunes, like “Stargazer” and “Light in the Black”, those two songs take up half a side of an album. In the interest of time, if I pick one of those, I could have had two shorter songs. 11:14
On whether he would do a similar record for another artist – I made a whole list of singers that I want to copy, so it just depends on what mood I’m in. To me, one of the ones that would be amazing would be to do a Van Halen album in its entirety and do all the (David Lee) Roth stuff. I’ve done that a couple of times. One of my last tours I did “Running With the Devil”, and it had the keyboard player playing the guitar part, and I played all the David Lee Roth parts. They’re amazing on guitar because David Lee Roth is doing all these screams and howls and cool blues licks, and it’s really fun to play Dave stuff on there. Just for my own enjoyment, I remember playing the vocal line to “Beautiful Girls”, and that is like a happy drug. I remember when I was learning, it was during the lockdown and there’s like the whole world’s coming to an end, and I was really having a dark day. My mood was terrible, and I started learning it, immediately, it’s like, “I feel great, thank you, David Lee Roth”. I’ve got a list of 30 more. So it’s such a good place to pull from, and I think such a nice contrast to the style of guitar that I grew up with, which I still hang on to it is valuable to me. Playing melodies is really a different set of techniques, different way of visualizing the neck, and a whole different skill set. 13:17
On why it’s important for Mr. Big to do a proper farewell tour – This is not that specific of an answer, but it felt right. Actually, when I did The Dio Album, the same reason, I felt right. What a nice situation to be in where you can choose your job because it feels right. But I really like the idea of doing the whole Lean Into It record (live), that idea got me excited. I love that Nick D’Virgilio is on board. I had jammed with him at Sweet Water where he does a lot of the drum demos, and we did a recording session thing about a year ago, and it just felt so good playing with him. Of course, I was familiar with him before that I’m a big Spock’s Beard fan. His drum or reminded me of Pat Torpey in that if you play a simple groove, it’s just rock solid, but at the same time, you know that if you need some extra stuff, he’s got it. That’s a rare combination, because a lot of times people who have that much technique, they can’t help it, they gotta put a fill in, and he’s just got this just real level head and playing for the song, just makes good choices. He has all the tools for whatever you need. At the same time, he’s an amazing lead singer, which Pat Torpey was as well, and that was a big part of the Mr. Big vocal sound, and just a cool guy, so that to me is really gonna make a difference in making the tour smooth and successful and enjoyable. 15:35
On Nick D’Virgillio taking over on drums – Pat Torpey’s drum parts are deceptively simple. Of course, one of the defining things of prog is having a lot of odd time signatures, and I think the only odd time we have is in “Green Tinted” there’s a little 5/8 part or 5/4 or something, not like we’re a band constantly throwing math into the songs. But the grooves themselves do have a sophistication, and the thing that really impressed me, or more cheered me up, one of the songs that I played with Nick when we jammed was “Last Child” by Aerosmith. I was playing the Steven Tyler parts on guitar. We brought in another guitar player to play the guitar part, I was playing all the vocal lines. After we played it, Nick looked over it and said, “Man, I forgot what a great groove that is”. It was just like he was genuinely thrilled to just do this, Joey Kramer (groove) and I didn’t know what to expect, I thought maybe he’d be going, “Yeah, this is so under my pay grade”, but he was totally into it. That’s the thing, in order to play a simple groove, it’s not only technique, it’s like loving it. I, as a guitar player, do the same thing if I do like the stretchy Chuck Berry, I love that lick. I can play Malcolm Young rhythm guitar parts just going, “This is the most wonderful riff, I just love this”. So I think it’s nice to reach that point as a musician where although you have a lot of ability to do stuff that doesn’t muddle your ability to enjoy just something that’s straightforward and it just works. 17:53
On solo touring plans – Well, I don’t know. The first thing I think about is I gotta find a good heavy metal rhythm guitar player. I have done some arrangements of songs where I kinda shuttle back and forth between the vocal line and then quickly hit the rhythm in the spaces. But I think for the Dio stuff, you kinda need to have both simultaneously, so I’d have to think about who would play rhythm. I haven’t played with rhythm guitar playing a long time. I’d be jealous too because those parts are so cool, I’d be looking over, “How about next song we swap? I love that riff”. 20:20