TOBY SUMMERFIELD: My name is Toby Summerfield. I’m a guitar player and bass player in Chicago.

[RUPERT PERFORMING]

TOBY SUMMERFIELD: Most of my experience with the guitar is with trumpet players. I don't know if it’s my own playing or just having with trumpet players a lot but I feel like there’s a timbral sympathy between the guitar and the trumpet. Saxophone too. I think a lot of the sort of effect, extended technique stuff on saxophones and trumpets are to emulate guitar sounds and the vice versa, you know, distortion pedals and compression pedals are to get real long notes like a saxophone or a trumpet and then wah wah pedals. I guess it’s really all guitar imitating those instruments, isn’t it? But now it’s sort of all reversed like playing with a really overblown sound on a saxophone or a trumpet makes you sound “distorted” or like playing through a mute that’s been loose or playing through like a piece of metal or a pie plate or whatever.

[RUPERT PERFORMING]

TOBY SUMMERFIELD: There can be a lot of marrying of sounds between a guitar and a trumpet. It works really well together. The ranges are sympathetic and the sounds can be really nice.

The hardest thing for me was that playing with a trumpet player for the first time real intensively is when I understood how badly intoned guitars are. Not even like just they’re hard to get in tune, which is not so much that if you can hear it you can put it in tune and you can learn and learn how to do it better all the time. But if I play a major chord, the third is not the same note that the trumpet player was playing when I play that chord, so I had to figure out these voicings for chords, ways to make it so that the trumpet would sit sweetly with the guitar, and they have to do the same thing. They kind of have to come over to me. It’s different than playing in an orchestra. It’s different than playing with a piano player. And when I first was doing it, I didn't know anything, any of that, so I would play a chord and that would sound really terrible, and I would have to figure out a different way to play the chord so the note wouldn’t sound so terrible.

He would always probably turn to me and say, “Are we playing the same note?” and I was sort of dealing with that. So, in the band that I’m playing in now, it’s guitar, trumpet, and drums just called Rupert with Jaimie Branch and Marc Riordan, that band -- I think Jaimie has a -- is getting an easier version of me because I’ve played with a trumpet player for so long before that. She doesn’t have to go through all that growing pains.