The Sixth String and the Sixth Sense: Ray Ray Star Plays What He Feels
A guitar has six strings, and anyone with patience can learn where the notes are. What cannot be taught is the thing great players call feel: the sense of what to play, when to play it, and when to leave a silence alone. Most musicians shrug when asked where it comes from. Ray Ray Star has an answer, and he has built a second calling on it. To a devoted following, the rock guitarist is also known as the Rockstar Psychic.
On paper the two lives could hardly look more different. One belongs to loud rooms and amplifiers, the other to quiet conversation. Ray Ray is an internationally touring guitarist, a record producer and a Josie Music Awards nominee, and he is also an intuitive reader whose sessions have drawn an audience well beyond the music world. Spend a little time with how he works, though, and the two start to look like the same gift pointed in different directions.
Consider what a performer actually does on stage. No set list survives contact with a crowd. A good player reads the room from the first song, sensing when an audience wants to be pushed and when it needs a breath. A guitar solo, at its best, is a string of decisions made faster than thought. Musicians have always relied on something that runs ahead of reasoning. Ray Ray simply calls it by its name and treats it with respect.
A reading and a performance also begin in the same place, which is listening. Before a guitarist can answer a band, he has to hear it. Before Ray Ray can say anything of use to the person sitting across from him, he has to take that person in. People who have sat with him describe the experience less as being read than as being seen. Anyone who has stood in a crowd while a player locked onto exactly what the room was feeling will recognize the description.
The same sensibility runs through the songs. “Ashes Next Door,” which earned him a nomination for Song of the Year – Rock Artist at the 12th Annual Josie Music Awards, and “Slow Motion Fall,” featuring Matt Pascale, both carry titles that belong to an observer. They are the phrases of someone who notices what is happening just out of frame, the trouble on the other side of the wall, the collapse that unfolds too gradually for anyone to stop. That is a writer paying attention to what other people miss.
It is there in his studio work as well. A producer’s real job is to sense what a track needs before anyone can explain why, and to know when a performance is true and when it is only correct. Ray Ray has spent years in that chair with other artists. Call it experience or call it instinct, it is the same faculty he brings to everything else.
None of this asks a listener to believe in anything beyond the five senses. Skeptics are welcome at a rock show. Whatever name you give the thing that guides him, you can hear it in the playing, in the choice of one note over ten, in the way a song turns at the moment it should. The evidence is in the music, and the music does not need a label.
Six strings can be learned by anyone willing to put in the hours. The sixth sense is what makes a room go quiet and lean in. Ray Ray Star has spent a career trusting it, on stage, in the studio and across the table, and it has not steered him wrong yet.
The official website for Ray Ray Star may be found at https://www.rayraystar.com
