Strange Beautiful Music

by Joe Satriani

  1. Courtesy of: www.GibsonGuitar.in, The Gibson Interview, May 6, 2011.

  CHAPTER 5 * *

  Twists of Fate — The Joe Satriani EP, 1983-1984

  "Though it’s packed in a plain white cover with the artist’s name in black block letters, this is anything but generic rock and roll. The much-needed clarification that 'every sound on this record was made on an electric guitar' is still hard to believe, especially with the sound effects that begin 'Talk to Me' and the popping 'bass' in 'Dreaming Number Eleven.' Satriani comes highly recommended by guitar wizard Steve Vai. Spacey but melodic and soulful."

  —Guitar Player magazine

  There was a place where we used to rehearse, next to this small publishing operation that did how-to books on just about everything— starting a business, getting a divorce, all kinds of things. We'd stand outside our barn door and have a smoke and drink and check out their Dumpster, which was overflowing with misprinted books. So we'd be standing there laughing at the books with titles like How to Get a Divorce and How to Run a Juice Stand and so forth. One day I spotted a book about starting your own business, so I took it home, read it, and realized I could start my own record company if I wanted to. I thought, "Why am I not doing this?"

  At the time, I remember, I was trading phone calls, letters, and cassettes with Steve Vai, who had been living out in L.A. and working with Frank Zappa. He was obviously having the time of his life working with a genius who understood everything about how to use recording as a medium unto itself. Steve started experimenting with multitrack recording, and those early recordings were so wonderfully bizarre, I just loved them. There were tracks made of vocals sped up and slowed down, unbelievable guitar harmonies, unusual time changes—and of course he was recording with musicians who were absolutely incredible.

  Steve Vai: Back then, I was completely enamored with the idea of sound-on-sound recording, and the moment I had enough money to purchase a 4-track sound-on-sound recorder, I would record stuff all day long. Hanging out with Frank Zappa and watching the way he made his music was paramount. He taught me how to edit analog tape. The entire recording and editing process held infinite possibilities and I would experiment constantly. Recording things backward, sped up, slowed down, overdubs on top of overdubs, using EQs and any effects I could find, building guitar and vocal harmonies that were previously impossible, recording conversations, events, TV commercials, cats screaming— you name it and I'd figure out a way to use it! Then taking that stuff and cutting it up and recording over it, streams of consciousness, bizarre guitar riffs with beautiful and disturbing harmonies, et cetera, et cetera. I could have been the sixth Beatle! It was like every day was Christmas.

  Toward the end of high school, I had inherited another Sony 2-track reel-to-reel tape recorder, and not only would I be making 2-track guitar recordings, demos, and things like that for the band, but my friends and I would also make these goofy comedy recordings that were like the Fireside Theatre. So I remember playing that stuff for Steve when he was a young kid taking lessons, and he of course was fascinated with it. I think Steve has a recording from that machine of the two of us improvising at a guitar lesson. When I left New York and moved to California, I no longer had this tape recorder, but I did take with me all those hours of experience playing with tape recorders, and I kept thinking, "I've got to get back to that one of these days." So fast-forward five years, and I'm in the studio with Jeff Holt (an engineer I'll introduce you to in a moment), thinking, "I remember doing this, and I know you can create fantasies with a tape recorder." Even though we'd made all these demos for the Squares in professional studios, they left me feeling flat. They still just sounded like really great recordings of the band, and I already wasn't really happy with the band, so obviously these recordings didn't mean much to me. But the recordings that I had from my previous life in New York meant much more to me, even though they were really weird sounding. So I had these tapes, and I'd listen to them and think, "That’s just so much more satisfying because it’s so odd," and that brought me to the realization that I needed to make what became the Joe Satriani EP.

  It all started to crystallize: knowing Jeff, taking in Steve’s recordings, listening to stuff by Robert Fripp, Adrian Belew, and the like . . . Plus living in Berkeley, where there certainly were a lot of oddballs that I identified with, exposed me to artists who were producing their own music and going against the commercial trends of the time. All these elements came together and made me realize, "Wow, this is something that’s been part of me since I left New York, and maybe I want to go back to how I started out."

  So I took three or four weeks off from practicing incessantly with the band, and during that break I decided that I would start my own company and record an album. My experience with the Squares was winding down because the conflict in the band was winding up, so it was almost like a knee-jerk reaction: "I'm going to make a record, and I don't want to deal with band politics, so how do I make a record by myself?"

  Musically thinking, I knew there were many artists like Brian Eno, Fripp, and Belew who were all making music that engaged me. I realized I had all this odd music that I suspected would get spoiled by a band, because the drummer would want to rock, the bass player would want to create his or her own riffs, and the "unusualness" of my music would be compromised by being made accessible. I didn't want to be accessible. I knew I had to do something to catch this odd approach to music, but I wasn't sure exactly what that something should be. That’s when I started making phone calls and hooked up with Jeff Holt.

  I'd first met Jeff because he was volunteering to record the Squares. I got to know him and I thought, "I like this guy. I think he’s very talented as an engineer, and he seems to be at the right place at the right time with the right kind of ideas." I felt Jeff fell into this rare category of someone who understood that different bands need to be recorded in different ways. He had his own studio, Likewise Productions, which meant he could do whatever he wanted because he wasn't answering to a studio owner. So I got to know him better when I called him back years later with the idea of doing this solo EP, and he was not only receptive but he also had the inclination to try to pursue it with me. Neither of us knew exactly what we were doing, or how it was going to turn out. But he had a very positive attitude and the engineering chops to improvise with me.

  Jeff Holt: When I was working with a local San Francisco FM rock radio station, "Rockin' the Bay KMEL," I was also writing and recording seven-second sound clips at my studio, Likewise Productions in Oakland, California. The radio station was celebrating its fifth birthday and asked me if I knew any local band that wanted to record a version of "Happy Birthday" to be played at a concert at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley. I figured it'd be a great chance to record my favorite local band. So I had Joe, Jeff, and Andy come in on Thursday, December 8, 1983. We came out of the session with a slick, quick version of "Happy Birthday." Kind of like the Squares meet Van Halen. I remember Joe playing through a Marshall half stack with great tone. Jeff had that fresh pop on the snare and bright cymbals, with Andy through a Countryman direct box. Once we had the sound dialed in we did about seven takes. It was a blast! So when Joe called me up, I was excited about the chance to work with him individually, which stemmed from an admiration standpoint, too, because by that point I was very familiar with his live performance and just really dug his sound. There weren't many guys doing what he was doing, and I definitely knew he was going to be "the guy," so to speak. Joe definitely had that aura about him, so it was all exciting, especially with his concept for the EP because he wanted to create these songs using just the guitar, which meant tapping on his pickups for the kick drum and above the neck for the snare.

  I remember arranging the songs for the EP while sitting on the front stoop of my Ward Street apartment, notebook in hand, asking myself, "Okay, I'm going to produce this album, so what do I want to happen? How does a producer do this? How do they write a script or a storyboard, a musical timeline tha
t is more than a musical manuscript?" I would write out these particular chord progressions with a note for scraping technique, and then I would write, "Kick drum will be Allen wrench on neck pickup for the whole piece," with a note to myself: "When do I record this?"—that would be a note I would write to ask Jeff. Next thing would be, "What do I do for cymbal-type activity?" because I knew I was going to need quarter, eighth, or sixteenth notes to replace the typical hi-hat/ride cymbal pattern. So I'd write a note saying, "Scraping strings over the peghead," or "Cymbal hi-hat simulation." And I would write these little things where they would go for a certain amount of time and stop, and then it would come to a point where I might say, "Guitars coming from reverb abyss to the forefront totally dry and in your face. How do I do that?" You can see how personal this music was. It wasn't like the Squares' stuff where we were aiming toward an idea of a band—this was really strange music that came from inside of me, that I wasn't compromising at all for any reason. So I was ready to lose myself in bringing this sound to life.

  Jeff Holt: On the first day of recording, Joe came in with a notebook full of ideas, and I could see he was just ready for it. It was all new territory for him, being his first one-on-one experience recording in the studio. Still, with Joe, you're dealing with a very adept solo artist. I could see that in the eighties, there was an unwritten law that the engineers and producers should keep the musicians on the other side of the glass, if you will, so that they held the mystique and control of getting musicians to get their sound. Being a musician myself, my theory was that if I can teach these guys about faders and panning knobs, stuff like that, really try to get them involved in their own sound, they would come back to work with me again. And especially with a guy like Joe, he definitely was a sponge, soaking it all in, and he was really interested in knowing what made the transmission of his sound to tape. I felt that was one of the reasons he chose to work with me on this first thing: I gave him total access. I don't know if I was really breaking any unwritten rule, but I felt that by going about it how I did, we had a good working relationship. Even though we were working in a really small studio, there weren't other people around, because this place was in the basement of my house, so it was definitely a private situation where Joe could focus without distraction on his vision for the record.

  It proved a very conducive atmosphere to getting him behind the controls and showing him as much as I knew. It’s amazing how in instances where you work with people of Joe’s talent they wind up teaching you, because they're asking all these questions. Some musicians don't want to know about recording—they get really uncomfortable—but Joe fit right into that role. I know in my case it helped me out a lot because, as an engineer, you're able to perform what an artist wants right there while they're sitting next to you. So I was getting the immediate response of the effect I was putting on because Joe was sitting right there with me in the control room, which was important. He definitely wanted to know as much as he could, and he was the guy listening in the middle of the speakers to the stereo pan, to make sure that imaging was there.

  As we started recording, I remember being really fascinated from day one with the recording process itself, and there were so many times when Jeff would show me something, and I would look at him like a little kid and say, "You mean I can do that?"

  All of this was important because I was learning a lot about how to make some of my crazy ideas a reality based on his experience, and Jeff was open enough to teach me how to do it as if he were teaching another engineer. I think it was necessary for him to understand what it was that I was trying to achieve, and for me to be happy artistically. Likewise, I needed to feel that I could gain control of those engineering elements. So he was there to enlighten me on how to use the studio to complete what I started on the guitar. How could we get the vision from my brain to the guitar to the tape? So as I would come into the studio with these notes, Jeff and I would talk about the song.

  Jeff Holt: From the first day of recording, those conversations were wild. I remember Joe instructing me that the first thing we were going to do was go into the reel of tape, advance it, and flip the reels over. We recorded the backward intro that can be heard on "I Am Become Death." "Wow," I thought, "this is going to be a crazy set of studio sessions!" The record had no live drums or drum machines—the whole idea was Joe would tap with an Allen wrench on his pickup to get the kick drum.

  A word on how an Allen wrench became my drummer: When I worked on music in my apartment, I'd have to play with headphones, so I was sitting there using that 4-track tape recorder. The Kramer Pacer I was playing would go out of tune if you just looked at it, so I was endlessly tuning it with an Allen wrench. Ultimately I'd be sitting there with the headphones on, changing strings or something, and the magnetic pull of the pickup would pull the Allen wrench against it, and I would hear a thump. And I guess that just registered in my head as a cool sound. So I started to play around with that, and it crossed my mind, well, if I've got a thump, how would I make a snare sound? So I'd go looking for some other part of the pickup or something else on the guitar to hit with the wrench. It really started from that.

  When I brought it to Jeff, I said, "Listen to this! I'd like to use it for the kick drum." He said, "Well, okay, how do I control this sound that’s got this huge transient? How do we get it to fit in?" So he looked at it as if it were a guy on the other side of the glass stepping on a kick drum. That’s when I was introduced to how we could use limiting, adjust attack time and threshold, and manipulate equalization so we could carve the sound that we wanted. By muting the high end so the listener would hear the thump of it, and with the right limiting, it would always come in at the right volume. That was the genesis. Accidents sometimes create innovation. Maybe Johnny Cash’s famous dollar bill flew between his guitar strings one day, and he said, "Wow, that sounds cool . . ."

  Like all good engineers, Jeff knew the relationship between the pitch of a note and what frequencies were its most fundamental, and so we were able to get that two-note bom-bom on "Banana Mango" to sound like it was some kind of a Taiko drum or something, but it was actually just me playing a detuned guitar string. That same guitar is on that track playing these beautiful harmonics, a '54 Fender Stratocaster. And as I mentioned earlier, a lot of it came about when Jeff would ask, "What do you want to do next?" I would tell him, but I would also end with a question, like "This is what I wanna do. How do you think we should do it? Should we play it loud? Should we do it quietly?" And he would have to make that decision, because I didn't know anything about microphones, which mics to use, and I'm sure he was thinking, "Well, Joe wants this to eventually be a very low-sounding piece, where there’s a lot of low-end being accentuated from it," so he might suggest to me a different volume level so that he could use a different mic that was better at picking up low frequencies. If it was a really biting, typical lead guitar thing, he might suggest the traditional setup with an SM57 and just go out there and turn it all the way up. Those were the things he had to interpret for me.

  By that point, I also had two guitars for which I had gathered all the pieces from scratch. They were mostly made from Boogie Bodies; one of the guitar necks was an ESP, and the other may have been a Boogie Body neck. As far as the parts I bought, I think I had Seymour Duncan pickups. Bill Knapf did all the wiring, and a local guy did the finishing. Those guitars looked beautiful. Also, toward the last year of the Squares, I bought the Kramer Pacer, which had the very first version of a Floyd Rose vibrato bar. This was a big deal, because in trying to extricate myself from the late sixties and early seventies and really embrace the eighties, I'd gotten rid of playing with a vibrato bar, just as I'd sworn off ever using a wah-wah pedal again. But at this point, I noticed that everyone around me was using this Floyd Rose bar, and I started thinking that maybe there was a way I could use the bar and not just sound like someone who wanted to play like Eddie Van Halen. So Jeff Campitelli and I hit the Guitar Center in S.F. for one of their "midnight madness"
sales, and I picked up the Kramer for about $400. It had all the wrong hardware on it, but I loved the guitar. It really did have a beautiful tone, and I just totally got into the vibrato bar it had. After I'd avoided using the bar for years, it revolutionized my playing style, so obviously that’s all over that first EP.

  Another thing I loved about that guitar was it allowed me to indulge in being the Hendrix freak that I was. I worked on depressing the bar, getting the strings to be slack, bringing notes up, and then connecting them to a fretted note. This was something I'd picked up from Hendrix, who had used it a lot on Electric Lady-land, and specifically on "Machine Gun," so there are little things like that where I'd be paying homage to Hendrix. I noticed that I started trying to make some unusual noises, like taking the bar and pressing it against the strings itself, which would give me all sorts of strange clanking and metallic noises—that was something that I didn't hear anyone else doing at the time and I worked that into different songs.

  Jeff Holt: On the EP, it was very impressive because Joe came in with everything together gear-wise on his end. He came in with a notebook full of ideas and some crazy stomp boxes. We experimented with mic placement on the speaker cabinets to get different tones. I remember he was definitely using a Marshall, and Randy Stapman, the local guitar tech, worked on Joe’s amps and was able to change the bias on the tubes, and it was all about getting the combination of the tubes. So early on, Joe was into maintaining his gear, and he would usually use a couple of half stacks—he never went for the double stack. He had a lot of little stomp boxes—the DS-1, the MXR, stuff like that. He didn't have a tech that set any of that stuff up; it was all me and Joe. He had a van he'd pull into the driveway, and we'd set all his gear up together.