Strange Beautiful Music

by Joe Satriani

  John Cuniberti: He'd done demos at home with a drum machine, and he'd basically write and build his parts and create his sound in a song with these relentless, perfect-time drum machines. But when we first got into a studio and attempted to use a real drummer, the whole thing would fall apart. Joe would say, "Those parts that I'm playing—that picking during my rhythm guitar parts—they don't make sense now when you've got a drummer out there thrashing around. They don't work anymore." So when we started Not of This Earth, I just assumed we were going to use Jeff or some other drummer to play the stuff, but we learned early on that absolutely wasn't going to work. So Joe had basically developed his whole sound style around the fact that everything was more or less locked.

  The decision to go with drum machines was also a sonic decision. John and I had worked together in the studio for five years previous to this with the Squares, and we both had a bad taste in our mouths from trying to get these modern drum sounds. So we thought, to hell with it. Let’s listen to all these bands that are using drum machines. If you remember the New Romantic era, music was coming over from the UK around this time made by bands playing New Wave pop using drum machines, but they had drummers playing along with them as well, playing cymbals and overdubbed percussion. John was well aware of that, and he had produced other bands this way, so he said, "We can do this. We can have Jeff come in and only do the snare drum and the hi-hat for Not of This Earth, and we'll use the kick drum from the machine because it’s very dependable and we can use that as the element that’s always perfect." So we were going into it thinking we wanted part of this to sound like modern rock, as we called it, which was the sound of machines and synths together with guitars. So it was an artistic decision, and it worked with the budget, too!

  John Cuniberti: We soon discovered that these drum machines actually weren't perfectly in time. They would drift, and that became quite problematic. We started to realize it during Surfing, when we started actually using MIDI and computers. We started to realize, "Man, these things just don't feel right. There’s something funny about the feel of this thing." So we really, really, really struggled with it. For Not of This Earth it was a little more straight ahead.

  The drum machine we used for the broader album was an Oberheim DX, and this particular one had chips in it that you could pull out and replace with different kick and snare chips. We had a couple of different snare and kick drums we could use, so we would mostly do kick and snare with the DX. Joe and I (and sometimes Jeff) would write the drum parts, we would record it, and that was it. Then we'd unplug it and put the thing away, and then Joe would play everything against that machine. There was no time code, no MIDI, nothing.

  I remember very clearly one very embarrassing moment when a friend of ours, who went on to be a successful songwriter, came into Studio D at Hyde Street, after we had just done all the bed work for the song "Rubina," and he’s listening to it, and he said, "Wow, that’s really beautiful. How did you do this . . ." I explained how John had engineered some really great stereo recording of Jeff, with John and myself playing random percussion instruments on top of the harmonics guitars, the synth bass, and the drum machine pattern. "That’s really great!" he says. Then he asks, "So you put down time code so you can replace and reprogram the drums later?" And I realized I didn't know what he was saying, and I was kind of embarrassed and just answered, "Oh yeah, yeah yeah . . ." When he left, I asked John, "What’s time code?" And he looked at me like, "I can't believe you don't know what time code is!"

  I realized how naive I was about recording with these machines, because I literally did not know that these machines spit out a code that you could record, and that later you could reprogram the machine, and the time code would instruct the machine to play it in synch with everything else. So when John explained it to me, I asked, "Why didn't we do that?"

  And he said, "Well, there’s two reasons. One, you didn't tell me you wanted to do it because I thought Jeff was going to come in and replace everything, and two, there are some problems with time code." So he advised, "If we're doing these quiet guitar things, we can't have time code sitting on an adjacent track, because you'll hear it."

  John Cuniberti: Another challenge within this process came with the fact that, in those days, drum machines had really terrible cymbals, because a lot of them were just 8-bit. Joe and I recognized very quickly that the cymbals sucked, so Jeff played cymbals on everything. Every song that had a hi-hat or a cymbal crash on it, Jeff played it. We would set up the cymbals, and he would sit there like he was sitting at a drum kit and just whack those cymbals.

  Jeff Campitelli: When we were doing NOTE, Joe had a budget, a tight, tight budget, and of course this was Joe’s baby, and he had for any given number of songs, four, five, or even six guitar overdubs with every little part worked out. So he would work for hours and hours and hours and hours to get the guitar parts just right for each song. Well, when it came time to head in to record, originally the plan was: "Okay, on Thursday night from midnight to 8 A.M., we're going to record the drums for the entire album." And I was thinking, "Oh yeah, Joe and I have been playing together forever. I'll just sit down and start playing drums and we'll play ten songs in a row and the thing will be done."

  That was NOT AT ALL how it wound up working out. I remember one of my drum students had just invested $5,000 in this brand-new Simmons kit, and didn't even know how to use the damn thing, so we borrowed it, brought it in, and originally I didn't even bring a regular drum kit. Joe and I were both thinking we could just use the electric drum sound for something new and exciting. Well, as it worked out, it was like playing on a Formica tabletop: hard, plastic, and no one had any idea how to run the thing, so we couldn't get the sounds right, and the outputs were all plugged in wrong. After a while tensions were running pretty high in the studio. I remember by 2 or 3 A.M., we didn't have anything recorded, and Joe was freaking out because we only had the budget at that point to go on for another day recording drums. So we raided a closet, found a little twenty-inch kick drum without a front head, I threw my jacket inside the drum, and we found a bass pedal, and luckily I'd brought a really good snare drum. So we cranked that up and found a couple of cymbals, and we just basically put together this makeshift kit on the spot! We didn't have any toms, so we tracked the song "Memories." It was just whatever we could do to finish a song that night.

  That full set of Simmons electronic drums was another thing that went wrong with the percussion on Not of This Earth. We brought them in because we had some songs that would use drum machines; we wanted the whole album to have this sort of semisynthetic drum sound, and we couldn't afford to spend all this time miking drums. We needed to be able to plug something in and go with it. But it was such a disaster. I remember the evening Jeff came in to work on the song "Memories," and after hours of trying to get these things to work, we had to abandon it. But I had to record Jeff that day— we had to get it done. So we literally put a drum kit together with drums that were in the building from various different studios, and Jeff somehow—by two or three in the morning—was able to perform on this totally held-together-with-rubber-bands drum kit made up of all different drums and cymbals, and we recorded this beautiful performance for that song. We were so wiped out after that, that we were all like, "Oh, the hell with that, no more live drums!"

  I had the Oberheim drum machine at home, so I wrote as much as I could from the drum machine patterns. Jeff would then "play" the drum machine in the studio. It had dynamically sensitive pads, so a really good drummer like Jeff could become comfortable with it and create cool performances.

  Jeff Campitelli: That experience basically made up the blueprint that Joe decided to follow from there for the rest of the album’s rhythm tracks. It was a real shocker because I didn't want to record that way, but we didn't know how to do it any other way. It wasn't like, "Oh man, we're heading in this amazing direction: We're gonna have the kick drum from the DX, and then Jeff, you're gonna play live snare and overdub some
hi-hat. Then you'll do the tom fills and crashes." So we were just really winging it, and while I was thinking, "Well, of course, I'd rather be playing live drums all at the same time and really giving a good performance," as we went along, the songs were taking on this kind of eerie quality and a life of their own that—being a musician first, and a drummer second—I thought was kind of nice, and inspiring, too. That process defined the sound of the album.

  Once we turned to recording guitar tracks, I think John was fascinated with the fact that he could elicit performances out of me by creating the proper environment in the control room. He was very good at that, from a producer and engineer’s point of view. He was very sensitive to my moods and would try to get me as comfortable as possible to create the proper performance. That’s why I liked being in the control room.

  John Cuniberti: In setting up at Hyde Street Studios to record the album, it made sense, because I'd recorded there a lot with the Squares. So it’s not like it was new to me; I'd been there a lot. I was comfortable working there because I thought it sounded great. Every room sounded like a real recording studio. It had been the original Wally Heider Studios, and great, great records had been recorded there. So when I walked in there I realized, "It’s totally my fault if I can't make this place sound good, because there’s been so many classic albums made here." And I think at the time, coming into the city had sort of bumped up my energy level as well. I was still living in Berkeley then, which was a lot more laid back, so when I'd come into San Francisco—and Hyde Street is in the middle of the Tenderloin, a horrible neighborhood in the city—I enjoyed it. That whole grittiness of interfacing with the city and coming into this building that had four studios running in it. There were a lot of people coming in and out of there, and the next client would always be standing by the door looking at you, wanting you to get out. The attitude there was exciting, and everything that Joe played always sounded amazing and wasn't like anything I'd ever heard before. That was always very exciting to me, too. So when Joe started playing that stuff, I thought, "Oh my God, I've really got my work cut out for me."

  The first solo we were going to do was "Memories," and I remember John was thinking, "I've recorded Joe before: We do a solo, it takes twenty minutes, we're done." So we go to the section, and the song has a long guitar solo, and three and a half hours later, John asks, "Oh my God, Joe, is every solo going to take this long? 'Cause we're going to have a problem with the budget." So this was John’s brain really working very well, while mine was not because I was just completely emotionally involved in the music. All I kept thinking was, "The guitar solo is like the ultimate expression of the song, and that’s what I'm going to put into this record." And of course, John was thinking, "If Joe’s going to take three and a half hours for every one of these guitar solos, then that’s thirty hours or more!"—and I'd given him my checks, so he knew how many hours I had paid for. So once he informed me of this potential problem, I said, "Look, I don't know, sometimes the solos will go quickly, but the guitar solo for each song is going to be the most important statement of the song. So if we have a problem, then we'll deal with it, but I'm not going to skimp on this."

  That was a very important day, because a lot of things happened during the recording of the "Memories" solo where I learned about how John could punch me in to fix certain sections. Then, when I started to hear the artifacts that were created from punch-ins, I liked them, and started to ask John to punch me in to places where I hadn't made mistakes but where I just wanted the sound of the artifact to be part of the solo. He thought I was nuts, but I really loved the effect, so I had him punch me in in all these different places for the effect. I drove him crazy, the poor guy, because I had him punching me in and out in 32nd notes, 64th notes, so he had to sit there and we'd have to go over it dozens of times before I could explain to him exactly where I wanted him to punch. It was pretty nerve-racking for him to have to punch somebody in so precisely. We became quite a team after that record because of his ability to adapt to what I was learning about the studio, how you could punch in and out to create very compelling musical statements.

  John Cuniberti: There were things that would evolve in the studio that would bring something to the song that we didn't expect, and it was a pleasant surprise. Joe always came into the studio very organized and prepared for the day’s events. During the recording process, every night when we finished, he would bring a cassette home with him of what we'd done that day. Joe would then come back the following day with an idea about a new part, or possibly a change to something he had done the day before, or wanting to completely redo something—you would never know. It was always a surprise.

  John, Jeff, and I often reminisce about how we would leave that studio at 3:30 in the morning with the worst indigestion from drinking the studio coffee, which had been burning in the pot for five hours. We were always there between midnight and 8 A.M., because that was when the time was cheap, but it was very stressful working on that schedule. It was also exciting, and even felt musically dangerous at times, because anyone who might have stuck their head in the studio and listened to what we were doing would have said, "Why are you guys wasting your time with this?" None of our music sounded like anything that was popular at the time, so anybody listening from the outside would give us that sort of dismissive look. I think that emboldened us even more and made us feel we were doing something quite unique, and that in the end, we would show everybody because we were doing something quite artistic. That played into how we used all the effects that we had, and made sure we got them recorded, because the guy who ran the studio liked to move equipment around and sell it, so you never knew if the cool gear was going to be there next week.

  John Cuniberti: When Joe first played me what he had in mind, I remember thinking, "I've got to do something now with the sound of everything else to make that work." How do you play something like that, which is truly not of this earth, and just have it go along with a silly little drum machine? How’s that going to work? So I spent a day looking for that drum sound, and we found it on a reverb by EMT, the 251, which looks like R2-D2, it’s a little rolling thing that was fairly rare and stupidly expensive. Dan Alexander, who co-owned the studio and was an audio dealer, just happened to have one in the studio. So this EMT 251 reverb had a switch on it called "Non Linear," and that’s what those drums are on Not of This Earth—it's the kick and snare run through the EMT 251 switched to "Non Linear." Well, Joe and I loved the sound so much, and wanted to feature it, but I was so afraid Dan was going to sell that unit before we were done with the record. Sure enough, when Joe and I came back a week later, the thing was gone! And he said, "Oh man, the reverb’s gone," and I told him, to his relief, "Don't worry, I printed it on two tracks, we still have it." Because that really made the difference. That track would never be as cool if it didn't have that on there.

  The EMT 251 was definitely one of my favorite pieces of outboard gear, first of all because it looked really cool; it had these funny robotic arms with little rubber things around them. It was just the funkiest-looking thing ever. We did a lot of crazy things with that machine. For instance, on "The Enigmatic," where the snare drum comes out of a deep reverb and then is suddenly in front of your face, John manipulated the 251 live while tracking! He was so comfortable with the EMT that he would play it like an instrument. The studio was truly his realm.

  John Cuniberti: "The Enigmatic" was my personal favorite of all the Satriani recordings I have made. We were using the DX drum machine, and Jeff was playing crash cymbals and a huge artillery shell. The song starts with me starting the MTR-90 tape recorder at the same time Jeff hits the brass artillery shell. Because the machine takes time to get up to speed you hear it slide down to pitch. It took me and Jeff a long time to make it work, with Joe wondering what the hell we were doing.

  The progression of guitars I had used through that point began with the Hagstrom guitar. Then I bought a Telecaster that John Riccio found for me in the local class
ifieds. I believe it was a 1968 maple-neck model that somebody had refinished black, and it had a Bigsby vibrato bar on it. I later went into Manhattan and had Charles LoBue and Larry DiMarzio put in a humbucker in the neck position. That became my main guitar through all of those high school bands. Then right at the tail end, I traded it for a Les Paul Deluxe in a private trade, and that became my main guitar until I had more money from all the work I was doing with the disco band. At that point I bought a refinished '54 Fender Stratocaster, and that became my go-to guitar for quite a while. So during that period, from the start of that twelve-year run, I had this Les Paul Deluxe and this Strat. Eventually I got rid of the Les Paul and started building my own Stratocasters with humbuckers in them, because Boogie Bodies had come into existence, so for the first time you could buy separate body parts. I was teaching at Second Hand Guitars then, and through being in that store, I realized I could buy every component and screw together my own guitars.

  So many guitar players of my generation—the easiest one to point to is Eddie Van Halen—grew up loving Hendrix and Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton, all of whom had their Fender period and their Gibson period. And so what did we all do? We wound up creating guitars that were Fenders with Gibson electronics. When Van Halen came out, I felt vindicated, like, "Yeah, here’s someone doing what I've been trying to do, and he’s going to legitimize it for all of us," and that’s what Eddie did. I think that first Van Halen record shocked people because they didn't realize there were thousands upon thousands of guitar players around the world who felt the same way that Eddie did. We wanted a Strat guitar but we also wanted the Gibson sound; we wanted a bar but we also wanted it to be in tune. We had these desires because we'd grown up on the classic rock records, which were a combination of the Fender and Gibson scenes. We were products of all those third-generation electric blues players and we wanted to propel their sound into a new era, but we needed a new piece of gear. And that’s what it was: it was the 25½-inch-scale guitar with the Gibson sound. For me, it just let the melody speak. It gave me the fatter sound I needed because I was playing in the Squares, which was a trio. So I built these two guitars that were sort of retro-looking, because part of our scene was New Wave. I was playing stereo into two Marshalls, a Wall of Sound kind of approach, so I needed that humbucker fatness but I wanted the snappiness of the Fender scale.