Jim Hall discusses live versus studio playing.

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Jim Hall discusses acoustic versus electric guitars.

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Jim Hall discusses how often guitar strings need to be replaced.

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Q: “Do you have any preferences for the acoustic or electric guitars? You play the electric on a gig obviously; there are necessities to be heard…”

A: Jim Hall: “I like them. I like them both, and I have a beautiful acoustic guitar that Jimmy Dequisto made for me. You can see some pictures of it on the albums that it looks beautiful and it sounds great. But I also, I enjoy playing the electric guitar. There is something different about that and I like the length of the note that you can get on the electric guitar and I find that useful.”

Interviewer: “Sustaining.”

Jim Hall: “Yeah, sustaining. And sometimes, in some situations, I think, an acoustic guitar, it would be a problem. Just to be heard or to ... Also, obviously, it's a matter of just having played electric guitar for so many years that it becomes part of your vocabulary, a part of your personality. And just a simple thing like the other night at Bourbon Street when you were in, I had some different guitar strings on that were a little heavier than I was used to and they were okay to practice on, I thought it was going to be fine. But when I actually started to try and allegedly express myself with them, I realized I was coming up really short. So that same night, I went back to the room and changed all my strings back to my old ... The company that is making these strings had come up with the ... I had a batch of a couple of dozen sets that really worked well and I was sent these new strings. I'm running out of the old strings, so I had now a couple dozen sets of the new strings that were slightly heavier. So I needed to change it and I just put them on. I thought I’d … well, maybe I'll try it. It might be better in some ways. I thought it might help, actually, or change something that I could take advantage of, but it didn't work out.”