“I loved that he showed up with a $200 Yamaha guitar”: Timothée Chalamet’s guitar teacher reveals how he prepped the actor to take on Bob Dylan parts
To embody Bob Dylan on screen, Timothée Chalamet had to master more than just the folk legend’s voice and mannerisms – he had to learn his intricate, idiosyncratic guitar style. Fortunately, he had seasoned guitarist Larry Saltzman as his guide.
In a new interview with MusicRadar, Saltzman shares how he prepared Chalamet for his role in A Complete Unknown, breaking down Dylan’s complex playing techniques, right down to the way he used his thumb to fret bass notes.
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The learning process began with an essential tool – the film’s script.
“It happened organically,” Saltzman explains. “First, I had a script, which was essential. I was able to read the script of the movie and I made a list of all the songs that were in the film, and then I started to think about the songs. I was familiar – very familiar – with a lot of them but I have to say I wasn’t specifically familiar with the exact guitar parts and the capo positions, and so many other things.”
To make things more manageable, Saltzman ranked the songs from easiest to most difficult, teaching Chalamet one by one. By the end, the pair worked through 30 or 40 songs together.
“I probably started with [Masters Of War] because maybe it had two chords, E minor and D,” Saltzman says. “He knew one or two chords, one guitar before we started, so you show him the shapes and you show him the strumming patterns.”
“We listened to the record very carefully and we try to be as accurate as we could.”
Given Dylan’s notoriously unconventional style — one Saltzman describes as “idiosyncratic and surprising” — it was crucial for Chalamet to capture even the subtlest quirks.
“Dylan had to be, in this era, until he went electric at the very end of the film, he had to be his own one-man band,” he explains, “and you know what would happen, some new concept would get introduced, and then that concept would appear again two songs later.”
“So I would be able to say to Tim, ‘Remember that thing that we did with the C chord? Hit a C bass note and strum and then we descend into B then an A? He picked out the bassline and strummed along — he’s doing the same thing here but he’s just doing it with G, F#, E minor.’ So it was a cumulative process that built that way.”
Another key detail was Dylan’s preference for using his thumb instead of traditional barre chords – a nuance Chalamet had to replicate.
“We were just trying to be authentic – with good reason! Because authenticity is what’s required here, and the thing that you said about the thumb is exactly right. That would come up over and over again,” says Saltzman. “The D chord, grabbing the F# with the thumb on the sixth string at the second fret.”
“I watched archival footage from the era so that I could see this stuff. Dylan never played an F-shaped barre chord at the first fret the way we would play. He would always play a simple F on the top four strings and grab the bass note with the thumb, but [he] had enough finesse to mute the A string if needed. Authenticity was the name of the game for us.”
Saltzman also reveals the surprisingly modest guitar the actor had brought with him to his lessons.
“When he first came over we used my guitar. I told him, ‘Show up without a guitar. I have a couple of guitars for us.’ Then he went to Guitar Center here in New York, on [West] 14th Street, and he did an incredibly humble thing… He went in there and he bought a $200 Yamaha acoustic guitar.”
Saltzman continues: “I spoke to Jim Mangold, the director, about that. Jim was asking, ‘Does he have a guitar?’ I said, ‘Yeah, he went and bought a $200 Yamaha guitar. And Jim goes, ‘That’s interesting.’ I said, ‘Look, if he shows up with it and I think it’s not appropriate we’ll go shopping and I’ll return it.’”
“Well, he showed up with a $200 Yamaha guitar and you know what? It was very playable and sounded good. And the other thing that was good about it was that you don’t really have to worry about an instrument like that and if it falls over it’s not the end of the world — rather than going out and getting the proper vintage J-45.”
“I loved that he showed up with a $200 guitar. He didn’t show up with a $2,000 guitar and he could have. I just loved that he did that. It’s humble.”
The post “I loved that he showed up with a $200 Yamaha guitar”: Timothée Chalamet’s guitar teacher reveals how he prepped the actor to take on Bob Dylan parts appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
