JM: It's an interval instrument. It's just pure—it's a calculator. It looks to me a little bit—it is a keyboard.
CR: Right.
JM: It's an abacus to me, you know. I mean, it's still where I would go to show someone how music works, I wouldn't show them on a guitar. It is the very graphic.
CR: You would show them on a piano, not on a guitar, how the music works?
JM: Yes. It's a graphical representation of —
CR: How good a piano player are you?
JM: I'm really good in the key of C. [Laughter] Because with a guitar player —
CR: Yes.
JM: The guitar is instantly transposable, right? So the guitar has this transposable geometry. Learn a scale here, you just move it up and the key moves. A piano becomes relative to the sharps and flats, you can't put a capo on a piano. The best thing I can do is use a digital piano and just go and transpose it up and play a different key, but I'm still playing in the key of C. So I grew up very quickly going, okay, this goes bum, bum, bum, and this goes ding, ding, ding. And then you start to subdivide it.
CR: Yes.
JM: And you can—it's a calculator. [humming] That sounds nice, bing, that's a triad. So I knew early enough what that was.
CR: But it's all self-learned?
JM: For the most part, yes. It is self-learned when I was younger from sitting at a piano and just sort of working that out, a little bit of a guitar lessons when I was a kid.