Nash began playing electric guitar when he was about eight years old, and as a slightly older youth living in Nashville, he took lessons from session player Jerry Kimbrough. “Jerry was always trying to get me to read music, teaching me as much as I could stand about chords and harmonic theory,” recalls Nash. “At 12 years old you are not always interested, but I did pick up a lot of it, particularly that you can be academic in the way you approach the instrument without being academic in the way you play it. I come from the camp of not thinking at all when I’m playing, because when I start thinking and trying to understand what I’m doing while I’m doing it, my playing pretty much sucks. I have always looked at music theory like speech—you go to school and learn about grammar, but when you talk you don’t think about any of that.”

Though he has listened closely to acoustic players such as Django Reinhardt and Tony Rice, Nash has not spent much time transcribing them. “I couldn’t play you a Django lick if my life depended on it, but within 20 seconds of hearing him my life was changed,” relates Nash. “There is a way he attacked the instrument and projected himself through it that stands apart from the actual notes. Something about his playing has infused itself into me.” Regarding Rice, Nash says, “What really touched me was the way he played sixteenth-notes with a real lilt to them that drives the songs along.”

On the new Waybacks record, Loaded [Compass], Nash deftly switches from electric string bending to acoustic flatpicking. He relishes the difference between electric and acoustic instruments, and doesn’t attempt to make them feel the same. “I use .010s on my electric and .013s on my acoustic,” says Nash. “It’s no fun playing a Telecaster with .011 gauge strings on it, because it doesn’t have the same kind of twang and bite, and I don’t play the same kind of lines on it. And if you put .011s on an acoustic guitar, it sounds thin, and doesn’t have that low and midrange push that you get on one that’s strung up heavy.”

Nash does encounter technical challenges with this approach, however, mostly to do with the right hand. “I find that going from electric to acoustic while playing live mimics the feeling that you have as the show is building, when you are getting more excited, so it feels natural to hit the guitar a little harder,” he says. “It is harder to switch back to electric, because you have to tell yourself to lighten up or everything is going to sound out of tune and you’ll be missing notes.” Nash also finds that lightening up a little on the acoustic can help. “If there is anything that I am thinking on stage, it is ‘relax,’ because all that excitement and adrenaline can lead to tightness in your shoulders and arms,” he explains. “The worst thing that can happen to me on stage is for my right forearm to get tight. Holding a pick and striking metal strings with grace and beauty is a balancing act between using enough force to get the job done and not using so much that you start to inhibit yourself.”

Fortunately, Nash’s focus on touch keeps him from breaking strings, because he travels with only two guitars: an electric and his ’90 Santa Cruz OM. “I love the feel of the OM, especially standing up playing it,” he says. “I like to feel that I am dominating the instrument, and playing a dreadnought feels like hugging a piano.” The Santa Cruz is fitted with an original L.R. Baggs LB6 pickup, on which the individual elements are embedded into the saddle, and a DPA 4051 lavaliere microphone. “I use the Baggs pickup with tons of distortion at times and it responds really well,” he reveals.

Why tons of distortion? At any given Waybacks show you might hear Zeppelin’s “The Lemon Song” and/or “Ramble On” played on an overdriven acoustic guitar. To do this Nash has evolved a highly modern stage system. The bridge pickup and the mic are wired to a stereo Pendulum endpin jack with phantom power for the mic. A stereo cable carrying the two signals is routed to two channels on a MOTU Traveler Firewire audio interface, then into an Apple Mac PowerBook running Apple Logic Pro. “The beauty of the computer is that I can do anything I want with the signal,” explains Nash. “I can put tremendous EQ on the microphone and leave the pickup totally flat; I can put reverb on the pickup and not the mic, then blend those sounds together; I can send the pickup only to a tuner plug-in; and I can kill the mic while putting an IK Multimedia AmpliTube 2 amp simulator on the pickup with a single MIDI command. With analog gear it was more stuff and more weight and I was still running into things that I couldn’t do.” Nash controls all his sounds with a Rocktron All Access MIDI foot controller, and monitors his and violinist/mandolinist Warren Hood’s vocals and instruments via a signal split-off to his laptop that feeds in-ear monitors.

Nash is quick to concede that all this high-tech control is for his own benefit, to make sure that he is consistently comfortable making music. “When you look into people’s eyes while you are playing, they aren’t concerned with the technicalities of your tone,” he emphasizes. “They are relating to the music and whether you are into it and inspired by it yourself.”

www.myspace.com/jamesnashguitar