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Artist
Gretchen Menn
12+ albums
rockinstrumentalProgressive rockguitarguitar virtuoso
about
Apart from demolishing her mother’s violin with Pete Townshend-like vehemence at age three, Gretchen’s passion for all things guitar didn't fully surface until her early teenage years. It was under the tutelage of classical guitarist Phillip DeFremery, a student of Andrés Segovia, that Gretchen began her path on the instrument. Her father, noted writer and former editor-in-chief of Guitar Player magazine, Don Menn, was quick to point her in the direction of the greats as soon as she expressed interest in guitar. While earning a degree in music at Smith College, Gretchen’s adventurous approach to her education would foreshadow her approach to the guitar. She convinced a professor to allow her to launch a special studies project on the intricate and unclassifiable music of Frank Zappa. Her analyses of “The Sheik Yerbouti Tango” and “The Girl in the Magnesium Dress” showed a love for epic, melodic, genre-shattering rock and roll composition that would manifest later in her original instrumentals. After college, Gretchen began heavily incorporating her love of rock guitar into her daily regime, the only hitch being that the music of her rock gods, Steve Morse, Eric Johnson, and Frank Zappa, wasn’t exactly Guitar 101. (Luckily, Gretchen has always relished challenges, and the more daring the guitarist, the more likely it is she has set out to reverse engineer some of the magic.) She also began considering her career path, and how she might prevent a situation she sought to avoid
