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“I like to improvise when I’m playing my guitar”

For The Love of A Pedal

By Payel Majumdar

soundplunge_test catches up with Adil Manuel while he gets up and close with his pedals, amps and guitars.

Adil Manuel has his own tinker room. An army of guitars are witness to him playing, as are a dozen pedals plugged in and ready for a tap-o’-the-foot to spring into action. The Honeytone amp is already doing its job. Gibsons look on from another corner; headphones, a Frank Zappa poster, a laptop and guitar-related mantelpieces sitting atop speakers are strewn around the room.

Adil would rather skip the genres he’s boxed into – “Adil’s a rock guitar player, a fusion guitar player, a jazz guitar player – Adil’s just a guitar player, that’s it!”

We corroborate the truth of how he loves to dabble with any kind of music, what with all the pedals present for different purposes. Adil’s diversity even comes across with all the people he has collaborated with in the past decade. Having played for Asphyxia and Metro Rail Project in the late 90s and early 2000s, Adil joined Silk Route in 2003. Over the course of the years, he performed with Shibani Kashyap and Shubha Mudgal apart from playing with Silk Route. He joined Bandish after that, and in 2010, Adil met Vasundhara through a common friend and they started their jazz/fusion band Adil & Vasundhara. Quite the nomad when it comes to musical styles, Adil says, “When I’m playing the guitar I like to improvise.” He tells us he doesn’t have a combination that he sticks to when it comes to which pedal to use when. Adil goes on to explain to us how he uses each of the pedals. “I have two utility pedals here. The first is the guitar tuner basically. Then there is my suppressor…next in line is the Eddy Van Halen phaser. (Adil goes on like an excited child to display how he can get funky with each one of them).

And then finally, “My music and my style is constantly evolving, can’t pinpoint it”. Adil manages to look both like a lost puppy, yet unapologetic while giving sound advice like this, “The idea is that you become one with the machine and have a conversation with it.”

To get to know more about Adil and hear him go all techie about his guitar playing skills, watch him in action here. And to get more than a sneak peak into the indie music scene, log on to soundplunge_test.

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