Pat Metheny’s first instrument was the trumpet, and his older brother Mike taught him to play it. By the time he was a teenager the guitar had taken over, and by the early 1980s he was one of the best-known guitarists in jazz.
In October 1981, the Pat Metheny Group went into the Power Station in New York to record Offramp. Metheny brought a new piece of kit with him: a Roland GR-300 guitar synthesiser, which Roland had launched the year before. It was the first time he had used a guitar synth on a studio album.
On “Are You Going With Me?”, an 8:47 piece he wrote with keyboardist Lyle Mays, Metheny took the long second solo on the synth. What came out of the speakers sounded more like a trumpet than a guitar, climbing higher and higher over a steady Latin groove.
He had been explaining the attraction to interviewers since the instrument arrived. “I can do all my sort of sliding kind of horn lines and they really come out intact,” he told Forte magazine in 1981.
A couple of years later, a live version of that solo reached a 13-year-old pianist who would grow up to record with Metheny himself. That story is at the end.
A song sketched on a Synclavier
“Are You Going With Me?” started with a different machine. Metheny wrote in the Pat Metheny Songbook that the idea came to him on a summer walk in the woods, and that he worked it out at home on a Synclavier, an early digital synthesiser. It was the first piece he wrote on it.
The Synclavier stayed in the finished track. “‘Are You Going With Me,’ one of our most popular songs, the basic groove part of that is played by the Synclavier,” Metheny told John Diliberto of Music Technology in 1989.
The arrangement is simple on paper: a handful of chords repeating over that Synclavier groove, with Steve Rodby on bass and Danny Gottlieb on drums. The new voice was Naná Vasconcelos, the Brazilian percussionist and singer who had worked with Metheny and Mays on their duo album As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls. On Offramp he joined the Group, and his percussion gives the song much of its Brazilian lilt.
Lyle Mays takes the first solo, a melody on a synth patch that sounds like a harmonica. Then Metheny comes in, and stays for most of the second half.
The box that wasn’t MIDI
The GR-300 is a floor unit that sits at the guitarist’s feet. It reads each string separately through a special six-way pickup mounted near the bridge of a dedicated Roland guitar, and gives every string its own analogue oscillator. The guitar connects to the box by a thick 24-pin cable.
Metheny plays his from a Roland G-303 controller guitar, and has done for decades. He described the GR-300 to Reverb as “the blue box”, and stressed how old-fashioned its insides are. “It is not MIDI, it is not digital,” he said.
In practice it offers very few sounds. “It’s basically one sound that you can sort of turn the filter up and down on,” Metheny told Music Technology. That one sound became his.
Thinking like a trumpet player
In the Reverb interview Metheny said the instrument let him think less like a guitarist and more about phrasing that came from being an early, and by his own description pretty bad, trumpet player.
It also opened up the top of the range, where a normal guitar thins out. “With the Roland I can genuinely hang out up there,” he said. On “Are You Going With Me?” the solo builds slowly in that high register, with long held notes and slides between them that a guitar played normally can’t sustain.
He liked the edge too. In the same 1981 Forte interview he said the synth let him play angular lines with “a certain rough edge to it that I’ve never felt comfortable getting on a regular guitar.”
Start with: Offramp (ECM, 1982). Listen for the moment Metheny’s solo enters after Mays’s harmonica-like melody: the attack is soft, almost breathy, and the notes bend into each other the way a trumpeter’s would.
A number one and the group’s first Grammy
ECM released Offramp in May 1982. It went to No. 1 on Billboard‘s jazz albums chart and reached No. 50 on the Billboard 200.
At the Grammys in February 1983, Offramp won Best Jazz Fusion Performance, beating records by Weather Report, David Sanborn, Spyro Gyra and Tom Scott. It was the first Grammy for the Pat Metheny Group.
The double album Travels, taped on the band’s 1982 American tour and released in 1983, includes a 9:19 “Are You Going With Me?”. It won the same Grammy category the following year.
Then try: Travels (ECM, recorded 1982, released 1983). The GR-300 solo is longer and rougher live, and the crowd reaction when it reaches the top is part of the recording.
Holding his own against Ornette Coleman
Metheny kept finding new places for the sound. On Song X (1986), his collaboration with Ornette Coleman, the GR-300 lets him hold his own against Coleman’s alto saxophone and a battery of drums.
For something different: Song X (Geffen, 1986). The same horn-like tone pushed into free jazz, sounding more like a second saxophone than a trumpet.
The 13-year-old who heard Travels
When Brad Mehldau was 13, a friend played him the Travels version of “Are You Going With Me?”. Mehldau later called it a life-changing moment.
In 2006 Mehldau and Metheny released the duo album Metheny Mehldau on Nonesuch, the pianist recording with the guitarist whose solo had stopped him in his tracks as a teenager.
Still in the rig after four decades
Pat Metheny learned trumpet first and switched to guitar. He wrote “Are You Going With Me?” with Lyle Mays on a Synclavier, recorded it at the Power Station in October 1981, and played its long solo on a GR-300 guitar synthesiser. Offramp topped the jazz chart and won the group its first Grammy.
Roland stopped making the GR-300 in the mid-1980s. Metheny never gave it up: the blue box and his G-303 guitar were still in his touring rig in 2023.
For more on Metheny, see our 10 best Pat Metheny albums and the stories behind his best-known tunes in our guide to Pat Metheny songs. He and Mays also played in Joni Mitchell’s 1979 touring band, and he features among the greatest fusion guitarists.
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Which do you prefer on “Are You Going With Me?”: the studio solo on Offramp, or the longer live one on Travels?
