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You can muck around with different guitars for certain bits, but you have to have your own sound. That's your benchmark, that's your sound. I also play a Black Beauty. It sounds amazing.

I'm making a record that's half stripped down acoustic which is the way I perform a lot and half of it is very produced. It's really hard to keep music simple but I was trying to keep it simple and focus on one or two instruments and vocals.

I got it into my head that I had somewhat neglected the guitar, and then I did a record called 'Arena,' and it was not a particularly bad record - it wasn't a bad record at all, but it was built around a certain concept, which is a guitar quartet, with a little bit of augmentation here and there.

In recording, you're trying to make something work sonically - getting the right inflection on the right guitar sound - and maybe a part that would be musically great doesn't sound as cool. On paper, though, it's all stripped back. The musical idea is the one that wins.

To get my sound in the studio, I double guitar tracks, and when it gets to the lead parts, the rhythm drops out, just like it's live. I'm very conscious of that.

You can get so many sounds out of one record. Every record can be used in some way.

Radiohead and Our Lady Peace are doing the seven layers of guitar, and I kind of jumped on that before anyone else did.

My first two records are so simply constructed. The reason isn't because I wanted to make simple music. It's because I don't really have the chops.

I've got four or five records in my head at a time that I try to work on and I would like to do a guitar trio record next - since The Police I've mostly made records with keyboards.

I've always recorded the same way. I put down as many ideas as I have, then strip them away at the mixdown. It's better to have too much music than not enough.