Ty also has a few other projects coming out. He just finished Winery, which is slowcore and sad, if anyone is into bands like Codeine, Duster, and Blue Tile Lounge.



Which musician has been most influential for you?



Meeting Pete from Invalids was a big one. Actually, Invalids was the first math rock band Ty showed me. I have always really respected Pete musically. When we played shows with them, it was pretty surreal.



The way he approaches guitar and music in general is unique. Although it’s music being played on guitar, it’s all written in tablature beforehand, a songwriting technique that gives a whole new meaning to what it means to be good at guitar. Traditionally, one would practice scales and arpeggios, learn classic solos, etc., but his approach is different. He writes hard stuff—stuff that he can’t necessarily play when he writes it—but then he gets to that point by practicing.



The idea that open tunings is a form of “cheating” used to really influence the way I saw music. Hearing awesome bands that used them shook that for me and was very liberating. Growing up as a dyslexic person, even taking music lessons was difficult for me, especially learning notation. It was difficult to translate things written on paper into my head, then into my hand, then onto the guitar—something in that connection didn’t work as well as it did with other people. So it was a frustrating learning process in the beginning.



When I first started writing my own stuff, though, it clicked. I realized that just because I couldn’t read well or play what other people were playing didn’t mean I couldn’t be good at music. I was accustomed to a very standardized way of learning, and nobody really helped me break out of that until I started taking fingerstyle lessons with a guitarist named Stevie Coyle.



Pete opened it up for me too. Stepping away from the standard was scary, as all the “checkpoints” for learning are already set up in that system—there’s a set way to improve. Stepping away from that was like swimming in the Pacific ocean. But ultimately, it was a lot more rewarding.



Your mother is a musician. Did that influence or affect your relationship with music?



Music was never an expectation for me, though my mom encouraged it for sure. Growing up, it was basically a part of life for me, whether I enjoyed it or not. I don’t think I really wanted to do music for myself, though, until I started listening to Green Day. My parents got me a guitar, and I would throw on distortion and try to learn tablature from the Internet. I genuinely did find my own way to music. 14 was when I decided it’s something that I really wanted to do.



Tell me about your guitar tuning. How did you experiment before you got to this point?



I experimented with some alternate tunings before I arrived at the current Floral tuning. I had friends who wrote in DADFAD, for example, and I gave those a shot.



Before Berklee, I studied bass with Mike Finely, a serious shredder. Though that wasn’t necessarily my wheelhouse, this guy really was the best. One day, I stumbled upon a guitar in his closet and asked him about the tuning. He said it was CGCGCG—what his brother Jimmy Finely used to play in. Later, I decided to mess around with it, but a string popped off. So I tuned it down a half step.



I decided to stick with that tuning until I exhausted it. To this day, I still haven’t exhausted it. The unique thing about a guitar (or any stringed instrument) is being able to articulate with open strings through pull offs and hammer ons, an element that is not present in mallet or reed instruments. I wanted to maximize that, to truly make “guitar music,” if that makes sense. This tuning has been my most effective way to do that. Anything I can do on guitar, I can do even better with this tuning.



How did moving away from the Bay affect Floral?



Before I left, we could practice whenever, and it was all very lax. I think moving away actually formalized it, as it forced us to think about if we actually wanted to continue. I was only back in the Bay for certain, short periods of time, so we had to plan really well and book shows in advance.



Leaving actually really broadened our horizons—any attention we got actually happened after I left the Bay. We didn’t put out our first EP until my first year of college.



All the songs out right now were actually written before I left the Bay. We just finished a new song, and we had to figure out how to write because our old process was so reliant on being able to see and play with each other at any time.

