My first real real guitar I had was a Charvel, model 1 and that was when I was 15, I think, I got that.

I'm just kind of more, like, I'm gonna take every day as it comes and that's gonna be good enough for me.

Music is like wine, it ages beautifully - and if you spend enough time you can just sit there and listen to it entirely differently.

I'd rather be creative and be artistic and be able to play intricate music that moves and really takes you on a journey.

I think that the only goals that we try to set for ourselves is to evolve musically.

You could say, 'Oh, we're gonna write the heaviest album of all time' or 'We're gonna write an album that sounds like 'Iowa.'' Even if we set out to try to do so, it would never compare. We're not those people anymore, we're not that band anymore.

Don't get me wrong - I'm still way into the metal, but I've been listening to different things like Radiohead, Portishead, Bjork, and Queens of the Stone Age.

Well, basically Corey and I were in Stone Sour before we joined Slipknot.

We considered all sorts of names - everything from Tarantula Bomb to Superego to Section 8. Some of them were already taken, and some of them were kind of campy sounding. So we just decided to stick with Stone Sour. After all, what's in a name?

I love 'Mad Max' and 'The Road Warrior,' in particular - those movies are very close to my soul, you know what I mean?!

You know, 'Mad Max' and 'The Road Warrior' was part of my childhood, and that's why I'm so close to it. I remember seeing those movies at a drive-in theater with my parents when I was very young.

You spend 20 years doing something and when you're not doing it, it's hard to figure out what it is you're made of. Am I the guitarist in Slipknot and that is it, or do I have more dimensions than that?

I'll admit that I don't have a lot of discipline when it comes to practicing. I'm not the type of guy who sits at home with a metronome and runs through scales and stuff like that. But I do go through phases when I'll be more diligent, and I notice that warming up and working on some patterns will make my playing cleaner.

I've seen the Tortilla Guy hashtag when I'm going through my Instagram and all of that and I think it's pretty funny. It's weird because I've met this guy before, I know who he is, but he's really kind of elusive, even around our camp. I've had some people tell me, 'Don't tell us who he is. We're having fun trying to figure it out!'

I can never look at anything I do subjectively - whether it's a Stone Sour record or a Slipknot record, I can never really have my own opinion of it, 'cos in my opinion it's all crap.

I love Stone Sour. I love the music that we created. and it was a fun ride. But if I'm going to sacrifice all of my free time and my life for something, it has to be something that I a thousand-percent believe in, and something where I have a thousand-percent communication with everyone involved. And that something is Slipknot.

With all the different guys in the band and all the different ideas of what's what, it's hard to get everybody on the same page sometimes. We are a very tight brotherhood, but we never know what we're going to do.

Well that's probably what'll end up happening: a load of really good musicians who can't afford to be in bands, who have to have day jobs, you know what I mean? And then that's when you start losing a lot of the live touring bands.

My approach in 1999 was basically to play what I had, that was all I could do. At the time I was broke. I think I only had one guitar, a flametop green Jackson and I had these DC-10 Mesa Boogie heads. I think I had a cheap Shure wireless.

Every time we go into the studio and use a different engineer or producer I try to look, listen and learn their approach. That has helped with the gear I look for to use live and in the studio.

Sometimes, hindsight is 20/20. Sometimes it takes another situation to kind of make you look back at a different situation and really see how good you had it, you know?

The masks, for us, are more of a way to present ourselves live, you know?

Iowa,' for me, I hated doing that album - it wasn't a good experience for me.

We're just kind of dark as humans, generally.