I'm into sounds, man.

Washburn built me the guitar that changed my life.

I was more influenced by players like Randy Rhoads and Eddie Van Halen than by the guys in southern rock bands.

I would just listen to records and learn what I could, then just roll it over and over and over.

It kills me when I see some metal band trying to pass themselves off as an 'alternative band.'

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.

Pantera is the only band I've ever been in, and at the start we used to play covers to make a living.

I used to skip school and paint my face with Ace Frehley Kiss make-up.

A lot of bands whine about the road and how tough it is.

My old man was a musician - that's what he did for a living. And like most fathers, occasionally he'd let me visit where he worked. So I started going to his recording studio, and I really dug it.

Towards the end with Pantera - although I was never unhappy with the music we were making - it became one-dimensional, and we wanted to open things back up.

If you improvise a riff and the crowd immediately reacts to it, you know you're on to something.

When I tried to play something and screwed up, I'd hear some other note that would come into play. Then I started trying different things to find the beauty in it.

Whenever I feel my chops are slacking, I'll play some wide-stretch trilling exercises and take them up and down the neck as well as across it.

I'm still the same cat I always was.

I was lucky enough to get to see guys like Bugs Henderson, Jimmy Wallace, all those great Texas blues players.

Initially, I just used the guitar as a prop. I'd pose with it in front of a mirror in my Kiss makeup when I was skipping school. Then I figured out how to play the main riff to Deep Purple's 'Smoke on the Water' on just the E string. Next, my old man showed me how to play barre chords, and that's when things started getting really heavy.

Always have a collection of your favorite CDs with you.

When I play live, I jump around like an idiot for an hour-and-a-half or more under a lighting rig that's hotter than hell.

Between the record companies being the way they are and the fact that people can just download one song instead of buying a whole album, it's hard to make a good living nowadays.

My first killer amp was a Sunn Beta Lead. It was solid-state, but that Sunn was incredibly loud. I used to say to my friends, 'Hey, check it out. It's only on two.'

You can write every song on an album in E and not hurt a thing.

To me and my band, guitar riffs are what it's all about. We know that every time we jam on a great riff, we've got a fighting chance of writing a great song!

I got food poisoning in Venezuela, and it sucked!