When I first met Tadas, I thought he was a time traveler who arrived to the future with a rusty DeLorean model, one of the long time gone ones. He charged my car’s battery, set up a fire while camping AND played the guitar. As time went by, I realized he is a lot more talented, a rare specimen of the male species.
This dude can create music, record songs and mix the records. He can play multiple instruments – not only the guitar, but also the piano and bass guitar. He can also sing. He’s capable of fixing a guitar and he could name the best guitar models waken up at night, A to Z and in the reverse order. He can take pretty pictures on a film camera and even cook a decent piece of meat. At the same time, he is a very modest and simple person. I truly believe that more people should be aware of his talents and hire him, because the quality he performs things at is top notch. Sometimes even I find it irritating, because he is never content with “good enough”. Anything he does has to be nearly perfected.
We sit and discuss for over one and a half hours. I cannot believe how time flies.
What do you feel when somebody says your name out loud? In other words, what do you want to be remembered by?
If no one says I was a dick. That would be good enough… Seriously, I’m just trying not to be a jerk with people throughout my life. And that has nothing to do with any kind of achievements or big things in life that I probably would consider myself to be associated with in the first place.
I would like to challenge you? What achievements would you like people to remember you by? For example, you are dead and somebody says your name out loud. What would you like to be remembered by?
First of all, should I necessarily be dead for people to remember me?
No, of course not. But, you know, there is a tendency to remember somebody only when they die. It’s almost as if they didn’t exist before. Out of the blue, they start paying a tribute to you. What would you like people to associate your tribute to?
It probably depends on who you ask. I mean, if that is my children, I would want to be remembered as a good father. If it’s the friends of my closest surroundings – the dude who is cool to hang out with. It’s not about achievements. It’s about being a kind person, helping others with whatever they might need.
When somebody tells me your name, what I think of is a guy with a guitar, with a beautiful smile and a soft voice. A nice guy who can play the guitar, who can sing, and who can pursue his things. And that is what turns me on about you.
Thanks. That’s sweet. But I can sometimes be a bit of a tyrant. Especially in things where I have my strong opinion and I’m kind of confident in what I’m doing and others are just bullshitting around.
So you’re a kind of a perfectionist in a way.
I wouldn’t say I’m a perfectionist. It’s more about spending time on a certain activity in the most efficient way. For example – a band’s rehearsal. Well, in the early days four or five people would come together, sit down for two hours, drink beer, chat about everything except what we’d gathered for and then we would do a round of repertoire. We’d finish and declare that it was sort of cool. No retrospective of what actually went wrong, no progress on things we struggled with on our last rehearsal. So you’d spend only one third of your time doing the actual stuff that you had gathered for and you’d just scratch the surface of it. And then you’d agree to meet up again after a week. Just to do the same.
When you get older, you realize that time is limited. Your perspective shifts. You agree to spend ten minutes chit chatting and then you do the things that you’ve gathered for. If we play – we play. We rinse and repeat until things are better than they were previously. Only then we move on with next thing. Thus when you leave, you have some kind of a milestone achieved. You didn’t waste your time. Sometimes you need to push people into that because they start chatting about something else, or they start jamming or just making noise which doesn’t help to focus.
That’s very interesting because you are not you are not the first person that tells me exactly the same thing, just in different words. I heard the same from Ričardas from “Katedra”, for instance. They all seem to be very pissed off with people who waste time.
There’s a joke that goes like that. Three guys meeting in a town and they want to go fishing on Saturday. And one of them says: “nah, my wife lets me drink beer at home”. That applies to other things in life. I mean, that’s just a concept about an activity if you take it quite seriously. If you go to a shooting range, you do the shooting – you don’t go there to eat sandwiches and hot tea or whatever – that’s what hunting is for. You go for an hour or two, you do the drill, come back home and then have do your tea and sandwiches.
But seriously, I’d like to be remembered as someone who was kind and helpful. Perhaps as someone who could give a good suggestion on what guitar to buy or how to fine tune something in the song they were recording, so that it becomes a bit more interesting. I’m not that kind of person who chases fame and fortune.
I’d like to be remembered as someone who was kind and helpful. Perhaps as someone who could give a good suggestion on what guitar to buy or how to fine tune something in the song they were recording.
It’s not a question about fame. It’s a question about remembrance.
Let’s make it even more complicated and reverse the question. I don’t give a fuck about what people will remember me for. What I don’t want to be remembered for is for being a dick or an idiot. I’m not even sure anyone actually lives their lives to achieve something they would be remembered for. People usually do stuff they like. It’s only the aftermath of what they’ve done through their life that becomes something people remember them for.
That’s true. However, if you think about Ville Valo, you would certainly associate “HIM” with his music, with the so called ‘love metal’, with the heartagram.
Yeah, I associate him with “HIM”. Pun intended. I associate him with the band he was playing in, because he was the main singer in the band. But I don’t know of any other of his achievements. l have never been interested with his life. However, if you’d mention Eric Clapton, I’d say he’s a great guitar player. Not that many know that he was a drug addict. After he got sober, he established a rehab center called “Crossroads” that has been working for 40 years now and is very famous in the world.
Eric’s been at the bottom of the pit and he decided to start helping other people, especially other musicians. The rehab center was targeted to his closest friends and closest musicians. There’s even a blues rock festival called “Crossroads” – it has the same name as the rehab center, and the main purpose of the festival is to raise money for it. So if you say Clapton, I say musician, “Crossroads”, fundraising for drug addicts. But it’s an after aftermath. If you asked Eric himself 50 years ago what he wanted people to remember him for, I doubt he would have told you about the “Crossroads”.
Let’s digress. I happen to observe you almost every single day in your natural habitat. Your hands are ALWAYS on a guitar. And right now, as we speak, you’re holding a Gibson SG model in your hands – the red one with the devil horns. And you’re playing the guitar at all times. You don’t even stop when you lie sick on the bed. I wouldn’t be surprised if you even slept with a guitar. However, you happen to have a wife, so maybe that’s why you don’t. What’s so special about the guitar?
It’s a tactile thing. I would call it a way of meditation. Some people knit. Some people just sit and scratch their hair until they get bald. Some people snack all the time or shake their legs, or whatever. It is something that I like to hold and just noodle around. Usually it’s not even actual playing – it’s just moving fingers. This has become like an integral part of my body. It feels natural. And I understand it feels annoying for the people around me if I’m noodling all the time. Seriously, just go to YouTube and try to find interviews with guitar players. 95% of those interviews would be the same: the dude would be just sitting throughout the entire interview unconsciously noodling on the unplugged guitar. That’s the way it is.
Sometimes it just keeps me focused. If I’m sitting and watching some content on YouTube or reading something and I don’t have anything in my hands, I have a hard time to focus, and I will probably just start looking around in five minutes. Doing the same stuff, like reading or watching YouTube or listening for the news and noodling around keeps me focused. Playing an instrument activates a certain part of your brain and that helps if you need to focus. If you’re doing something that you’re not interested in, your brain doesn’t focus. It’s just starts wandering. So if you’re doing something that activates that part of your brain, I guess it helps with the focusing on something you’re doing in parallel.
Okay, so what kind of guitar was your first?
My first acoustic guitar was kind of a gift from my aunt. I was probably 19 or 20 years old when I decided I wanted to learn to play the guitar. One of my close friends actually played the guitar and told me he could teach me. So I needed a tool for that. I needed a guitar, and I started looking for it. Then my father told me that his sister had some sort of old guitar, beaten up stuff… So he called her, we went to her place and got it. Of course, the strings were half of a centimeter high from the fretboard. Everything hurt. The guitar was out of tune, uncomfortable, but it did the job for me to start learning my first chords, my first songs.
The first electric that I’ve played on was some funky stuff from soviet 60s or 70s. My guitar teacher’s father had a couple of old soviet guitars that were playable, so I just tried those out. Later I acquired an old red Czechoslovakian “Jolana Tornado” – a fancy semi-hollow guitar for its era. Couple of years later I sold it to Virgis Stakėnas. I was his computer repair guy at the time and we found out we have some common themes and interests going on. Apparently that guitar model was something very sentimental to him and he just basically asked how he could get that guitar from me. So we made a deal and the guitar has been hanging on the wall in his house since then.
How many guitars do you have right now? Including the acoustic ones.
On this particular day I have six electric guitars and two acoustic ones. The number is not fixed. Some of guitars come, some of guitars go. Probably the biggest amount of guitars I had at a particular moment was ten guitars, including one bass guitar. I think I am really modest on the amount of the guitars. In general, through all of the time that I was into guitars, I’ve circled through 28 electric guitars just to end up on Gibson SG again.
The first electric that I’ve played on was some funky stuff from soviet 60s or 70s. My guitar teacher’s father had a couple of old soviet guitars that were playable, so I just tried those out. Later I acquired an old red Czechoslovakian “Jolana Tornado” – a fancy semi-hollow guitar for its era.
So what is your dream guitar model then? Is it Gibson SG?
It’s not a dream guitar. Actually, I have never considered it to be an interesting model until I played one. And then I said: that’s a weird one, but in a good way. Then there was a chance to get my hands on one of them. I exchanged it to my other guitar – a proper American Fender Stratocaster that I didn’t play much at that time. And then after a couple of rehearsals I understood that this guitar is very versatile and it’s the most comfortable electric guitar among all classic electric models, like stratocasters, telecasters and Les Pauls. That is the one. It is light. It is comfortable. All the frets are easy to access across the neck like no other guitar. And it has a good, classical sound. It sounds bright yet powerful at the same time. It cuts through the mix. It is aggressive when you need that. It is mellow when you want. Last but not least, it has a woman shape with two devil horns and a nice butt.
Not only you play the guitar, you also fix the guitars. And not only for yourself. You do that for other people, for money. When I see you working on frets, it looks like you are in some kind of a meditative state. It seems almost as it’s sacred when I look at you. I was wondering, how did you learn to do that? How come is this process so meditative to you?
Why did I learn that skill in the first place? I was going through a lot of different guitars. And often I felt something wasn’t completely right with most of them. I couldn’t afford “real” stuff like Fender or Gibson guitars at that time -so it was like an entry level or budget level Chinese stuff. Not that they were terribly bad: they just were budget level instruments. I did have an idea why they were not working, but I didn’t have the courage, enough knowledge and tools to make them work or even the basic setups. So I just carried on with whatever I had.
So answering the question why I got into all that guitar tech stuff, it was out of sheer necessity, because for the amount of guitars that I had. I would probably have gone bankrupt by bringing all the guitars to a luthier, be that just a regular setup, a small adjustment, a fret level job, etc.
A couple of years ago I was already involved with a bit more expensive guitars. All of them still had some flaws, bigger or smaller, something that needed to be adjusted so that the guitar would play optimal. When you take one guitar to the luthier, you pay a certain amount of money. Then you bring another guitar to the luthier and pay certain amount of money again only to realize it’s still not done 100% how you wanted or the fixes that need to be done were so small that you could probably have done it yourself if you had the necessary tools. So I bought a set of basic tools and tried it on a couple of my cheaper guitars. It’s not a rocket science. I know how they should feel when they are good. I mean, I’m an engineer by degree. Probably my brain just works that way. I can figure out how things work and I can figure out how to fix them if they don’t. It was the same story with the guitars. I started working on my own guitars. Later on I started taking some guitars from my friends and acquaintances. But for now I do not call or position myself as a luthier, rather a guitar tech. These are very different things.
If somebody needs to fix a guitar or do a basic setup or something, what can you do for them? What are the services that you offer?
I do not have a service offering – it is case by case. If you have a guitar that has some sort of flaws – until it is not a major manufacturer flaw and the guitar just needs to be fine-tuned or requires a full setup – it can be done. It comes down to probably 5 or 6 bullet points that need to be addressed on any guitar. It’s the neck relief, bridge height, intonation, pickup height and how level the frets are. If the manufacturer for any reason did not bother to level the frets – you can do whatever you want and you will not get an optimal feel and action of the strings until you level the frets.
Can you level them out?
Yes, I do simple fret levels. If there’s a very big problem like a skewed neck, it needs woodwork. I just simply don’t have the tools for them because they are quite rare case scenarios.
For example, somebody buys a new electric guitar. And it’s not perfect. They need somebody to take care of it. Can they call you and ask you for help?
Yes, sure. They can call me even prior to buying the guitar. They can call and tell me: ‘I want something like this. Do you have any ideas? What models should I look at?’. I can probably help them spend their money as efficiently as possible. There are a lot of things I’ve tried throughout my life as a musician, as a guitar player, as a guitar tech. Based on that, I can make some sort of suggestions for the people who have less knowledge and the only thing they know is that they just want a red guitar. There is a whole world of options. Let’s discuss them.
They can call me even prior to buying the guitar. They can call and tell me: ‘I want something like this. Do you have any ideas? What models should I look at?’. I can probably help them spend their money as efficiently as possible. There are a lot of things I’ve tried throughout my life as a musician, as a guitar player, as a guitar tech.
If somebody is shy and doesn’t know you but still would like your help, how can they contact you then?
Facebook messenger. Just throw me a message. That’s it. I will answer. I just did that two days ago. Some dude was looking for a specific type of guitar. And it happened that I had exactly the same model he was looking for, and I just chatted with him. It end up with a 1.5 hour discussion: what was he looking for? Maybe he’s looking for a complete guitar. Maybe he’s just looking for a bunch of spare parts so he can assemble the guitar. And then we got into the discussion that it is not feasible. It’s cheaper to buy a used guitar, not to build a new one. I don’t know that guy. He’s a complete stranger to me and I’ve just spent my hour just chatting with him about that kind of stuff, and it was completely okay with me. I like the subject. And it is not always about the money as we understand the world today.
Unless the consultations take a significant amount of my life, I see that as something that I like to talk about with people. If that helps someone – that’s great. However, if someone brings a guitar to me to do a setup, I will take money for that. That’s a paid service. Of course, if you want to take me with you to the guitar shop as a consultant – we can bargain. It could be at no cost if you pick the guitar in the shop and then I’ll do a setup on it afterwards for a certain pay.
I genuinely like being in a guitar shop. I like talking about guitars. I like touching guitars. And as I said, as long as it is not becoming a 9 to 5 job, I’m okay doing that. The guitar shop is just like a little vacation. Like a candy shop. It’s sacred. It’s not always that you go there to buy things. You just go there to check new stuff out. Honestly, the most annoying thing for me while I’m spending my time in the guitar shop is when somebody texts me or calls me and asks if I am done yet. I can spend a week over there if I’m allowed!
Isn’t that consumerism? Spending so much time in a store.
I’m not lusting for the latest guitar model. I’m perfectly fine with finding a 20 or 30 year old cool guitar. It is so much different from getting a new iPhone model. It’s not comparable. It’s like with old cars. There are people who are not sitting in the front of a Volkswagen or or BMW sales shop just because tomorrow a new model is coming out. They’re just roaming from town to town looking in scrapyards for a decent 70s Chevy body, so that they can rebuild that model from scratch.
Let’s switch over from the guitars and give them a rest a little bit. What was it like to live in Šiauliai back in the 2000s? You were not a part of a subculture, as I understand. You were a bit older than me, so you maybe skipped that part. Also, you didn’t live in the south of the of Šiauliai. You actually lived in the northern part of the town. So how did it compare to living in Pietinis?
It’s a bit colder. Although all the morozai live in the south, it’s a little bit colder in north.
I was born in Šiauliai and I’ve lived there for 27 years. I did not belong to any gang. I did not belong to any subculture or to any kind of movement. I was a regular kid who liked the stuff that all the other boys liked. In the winter time I would play hockey on the lake. In the summer I would go fishing at the lake that was a half kilometers away from my home. We also would play basketball, ride our bicycles and do all the regular stuff other boys did.
I don’t recall anyone in my class that would strictly consider themselves metalhead, goth or anything like that. I knew a few girls who listened to “Nirvana” and wore long cardigans. I also knew a couple of guys who listened to “Red Hot Chili Peppers”. It was not a subculture thing at all. Maybe I don’t know simply because I was just not part of it. I was just a regular guy living in a suburban part of the city. That’s it. I went to school, went fishing, and played basketball. When I was 15 years old, I bought my first motorbike. So I was into wondering around in the nature with my motorbike during the day time and fixing it in the garage overnights. These were my teenage years.
What were your main inspirations? What were the bands that you listened to that have inspired you?
I clearly remember the moment and the song that was playing. I was probably two or three years old because I was standing in my crib holding on the rails. It was probably my brother or sister listening to “Foje”. That sound was haunting. It made an impression to me. Of course, because I was so young, I forgot it later on. It was a different kind of music.
There is another little snapshot of my childhood that I can remember so clearly. It was a camp in Tytuvėnai, by the lake where my parents used to go. There was this small club house where they had a sauna, a pool table and there also was music playing outside. I can clearly remember that they were constantly playing a couple of songs from “Hiperbolė”. At home there was a lot of random pop stuff from ‘80s – Italian pop music, Lithuanian pop music like Rondo and etc.
Being around 8-9 years old I would come back from school and play around with my parent’s tape deck. It was some cheap soviet tape deck with “hi-fi” speakers. I remember finding a cassette that my sister bought couple of years prior – soviet “Melodia” copy of some foreign rock record. It had a photo of a lightning storm on the cover. So I just put it on start. It had a very long intro. Some musical things were happening and then there I could hear a thunder. A flute started playing. Then came the guitar part and someone started singing. That record appeared to be a “Dire Straits” album “Love Over Gold” and the first track on that record was “A Telegraph Road”. It’s a nine minutes song that had a four minute instrumental intro and shit went on, and that was like the first non-pop record that I’ve heard that really mesmerised me.
I also had a classmate who liked “Queen” and he was constantly talking about the band “Pink Floyd”. At about the same time my sister and her soon-to-be husband were in town. They were going out and for some reason I went together. I asked if they could buy me some MC of this “Pink Floyd” and they did. It was “The Wall”. We went to a cafe near Rėkyva, by the boat club. They just asked the staff if they could put that tape on the stereo. And then it starts playing. It’s so strange. Someone’s talking. The music is really weird. And then there are a couple of songs that are actual songs. That’s all I can remember from then. Whatever was on that album was weird at first, but somehow interesting. It was totally different from what I’ve heard previously.
Eventually I hung out with the same classmate who was constantly talking about the “Pink Floyd”. I asked if he had anything new, because “The Wall’ was an eighties record. Apparently, they had just released their new album called “The Division Bell”. And just to remind you, “The Division Bell is a 1994 record, so we are talking about 95-96ish years. I inquired if I could get a copy. He told me to buy a blank MC and he’ll just bootlegged it for me (copied from the CD to the tape.)
So in two days I got a tape of “The Division Bell”. I put it on and it goes, and I realize it’s not as weird as “The Wall”. It’s more powerful. In a way, it is simpler. And it’s somehow different. But the shit hit the fan. I was lost into Pink Floyd. Later I got into “Status Quo” for whatever reason. Funny things happen when you are 15.
What about metal music?
Probably the heaviest metal music I’ve ever listened to at that time was “Scorpions”. The old ones, from the 70s. Then, a couple of “Metallica” albums. I realized I didn’t like the trash side of Metallica. I really preferred the ballads like “The Unforgiven”, “Nothing Else Matters”, “Mama Said”.
I didn’t like the trash side of Metallica. I really preferred the ballads like “The Unforgiven”, “Nothing Else Matters”, “Mama Said”.
You’re a man of many talents. You’re also a sound engineer. You produce things, and you also play with the band “Skyders”. You released the latest EP “22”. It was completely self-produced. You recorded the music in your own studio. You did all the mixing and the mastering. What part of this entire process is the most interesting and why?
The whole process is interesting. The phase where you are creating the song: trying to figure out parts, trying to build a skeleton of the song, is particularly interesting. In “Skyders” our vocalist Tomas brings in the text and a sketch of some sort of a melody. Sometimes he hears what we are jamming and then he puts up the words on top of the music.
The process of delivering the song is also fun – when you’re doing the producing work. When you put down your guitar and sit in a chair and don’t participate in the music, then you start really hearing what is going on. You see things from a further perspective. You have to rethink what you’re playing at this particular moment and all of this becomes like sorting a puzzle.
And then it’s the recording phase. It’s more technical, a lot of adjustments come in the recording phase, but because we are recording in our own studio, it’s not a time constraint. We can spend as much time as we like over there. We do adjustments on the go as we record. And I think that’s a good thing. It’s not that intense. When you have all the tracks recorded, you just pull out the mix engineer cap and you do the mixing. You put the track together, so that it ends up as a complete record.
You also play in a few bands (“Skyders” and “Jillion” at the moment). When you play live, how do you decide as a band how to arrange one song with another so that it would vibe with the audience, create an interesting atmosphere? Do you consider that part at all when you create your setlist?
That is an interesting question. We’re considering some things, for instance, how to start the set so that it’s not too powerful, but involving enough. You don’t want to sacrifice your best song as a first one. Then you keep the pace. Of course, you don’t do a several slow songs in a row, so that people don’t get asleep.
So you don’t go, fully ballistic as Jack White. You don’t completely go with the flow. You come up with a setlist, you don’t improvise completely.
We have a set list, yes. However, we have a freedom to play something different or just change the set list if we see that people are bored. If the crowd feels they want to repeat the chorus four times more, you do that. If we see that the set list contains a particular song, but the people are completely tired or too excited, you just either skip it or just move it to another place.
I feel terribly sorry for the bands that set their repertoire backed up by a backing track. That means that their concert on Friday will be exactly the same as it was a month ago in the other place, because they’re limited to what the back track is and they cannot drift one or two notes aside. That is not what the rock’n’roll is about.
What do you wish to the readers?
Be true and consistent to what your real drive and fire of your life is.
Deviant Generation 