Strange Beautiful Music

by Joe Satriani

  For the '85 studio sessions, I started plugging my guitars into a Tom Scholz Rockman, which I really liked as a direct amplifier, primarily because my record didn't sound like traditional rock music at the time. I had played through 100-watt Marshalls for a good five years already, and I was getting kind of tired of the straight-ahead guitar-into-a-Marshall approach. My competitors were all doing that—they were in studios with their Marshalls turned all the way up, trying to continue the dream of the late sixties and early seventies. And I thought what would really sound more modern to me, especially if I had some drum tracks that were drum machines, would be to get the guitar into that space as well. So if I've got a drum machine and a synthesizer, how could I get the guitar to sound like it’s coming from the same space as them?

  That’s where the Rockman came in. It sounded like it was coming from the same aural space as the Prophet-5 synthesizer and the Oberheim DX we were using. It made them more mix-able, to my ear, and they presented a more unified sonic sound. We rarely used big amps—we were using very small one- and two-speaker Fender amps for this stuff. The sound seemed to be more easy to place; I liked the fact that it was somewhat compressed, and the drums were very much like that as well, because they were coming from a drum machine and already had a sort of recorded sound.

  John Cuniberti: Throughout the album’s recording, there would be occasions where Joe would need to get close to his amplifier for a particular sound, but it was very rare. Even then, he was using foot pedals for distortion and setting his amp up clean. He never really took to the loud amplifier-standing-in-the-room kind of approach.

  John wasn't always a fan of me using small amps, and I remember there were moments when we would definitely argue back and forth about it, because John had a long history of getting great guitar sounds out of amps, so he was pushing for using mics. I remember I showed up for that record without an amp, and John asked, "What do you mean?" And I said, "I want to use whatever the smallest little amp is you've got," because I was really Mr. Antithesis, and I just didn't want to waste time getting a big rock sound because I thought it would never fit. As we got deeper into recording for the record, I think he understood that sometimes the part would sound better technically if it was played through the Rockman. But other times he would provide me a more upscale path and say, "I know what you want. Let me show you how to do it better," and we'd go direct. He introduced me to going into a vintage mic pre, directly to tape, and then using very expensive signal processors to recreate stereo chorus and delay. So we wound up using that instead of the Rockman. It was a balance, back and forth.

  Along with the Rockman, my go-to traditional amplifier was the Roland JC-120. We used it quite a bit, and I still have that amp; it’s fantastic. It wasn't really great at distorted guitar sounds, because it had this high end that revealed itself as being a transistor amp. But for clean sounds it was excellent, because it had a quick, snappy, transient response in the high end, and it had that unusual, wide stereo chorus effect. It’s a unique acoustic phenomenon, and recording it is tricky, but we got good at it. I found some small silver-faced Fender amps in the closets at Hyde Street that I would borrow sometimes, and if I needed a Marshall, I still had my half stacks.

  John Cuniberti: As far as effects pedals, Joe was primarily playing through his orange Boss DS-1 Distortion pedal and CE-2 Chorus and that was pretty much it. All the echo-delay types of effects—reverbs, chorusing—we did with outboard gear. Typically, I would use a Universal Audio 1176 limiter for rhythm guitars and bass, and a Universal Audio LA-2A limiter for melodies and occasionally solos. Because again, those were limiters you would use for a singer, and since Joe’s phrasing and playing and arranging were that way, I tended to use the same processors as I would if there were people singing. An LA-2A’s not unusual for lead vocals, so of course that’s what I'd use on Joe’s melodies.

  Along with all the guitars, I decided to play all the bass guitars and keyboards on the record. I've played bass for as long as I've played guitar, so composing bass lines has always come naturally. I've written quite a few songs on bass, too. While we were tracking, I remember that recording DI, direct-input, was a new thing for me. Because I'd never been a bass player in the studio, I really didn't know how bass recording was done, so John was saying, "We gotta do DI. We'll get more control over everything, and it’s more mixable." And then for some songs where we needed some sort of distorted element on the bass, we would send another signal out to a bass amp we would borrow and use that Boss OD-1, and then blend the upper frequencies of the distorted bass with the solid, low frequencies of the DI bass.

  John Cuniberti: One really interesting thing I remember about this stage of recording was that there was a lot of experimenting going on with miking. I was a big fan of the AKG C-12A, a really great-sounding microphone. I used that exclusively on Surfing and quite a bit on Not of This Earth. The mic had a very smooth but extended top end; it didn't have the high-frequency bump that an SM57 would, but it also had a really remarkable low frequency. In other words, it had an extended range both on the highs and lows, and was a very wide microphone, but it could also handle the dynamic range of a guitar. It could handle the sound pressure level like a 57 does, but it has a wider dynamic range than that mic, and didn't have that ugly presence peak. That mic could handle anything Joe would be throwing at it from the playing side. The C-12A and the Shure SM57 were the two microphones I used 80 percent of the time.

  Among the many techniques I employed on Not of This Earth was pitch axis theory, which I learned in high school from my music teacher Bill Westcott. It is a compositional technique that was actually developed at the turn of the last century, so this is something that had been around for a long time. I remember Bill saying, "I'm going to teach you this very cool compositional technique," and he sat me down at the piano, and he went, "Watch this: I'll hold this C bass note, and then I play these chords, and each chord will put me in a different key, but it will sound like C 'something' to you . . ." I was fascinated by it, because I thought, "That is the sound I'm hearing in my head." To me it sounded very "rock," because rock songs don't travel around in too many keys, and it was the antithesis of the modern pop music that had been around for fifty years. It was the total opposite of most commercial jazz, but not all jazz, as I learned when I started really listening closely to modern jazz. I realized, "Wow, John Coltrane is using pitch axis theory. Not only is he doing that, but he’s going beyond it with his 'sheets of sound' approach," where in addition to building modes in different keys off of one bass note, he was building modes off of notes outside the key structure as well. He had taken it a step further.

  But that’s not what I was looking for, except for in a song like "The Enigmatic," which has that sort of complete atonal-meetspsycho melodic approach. I was more interested in using the pitch axis where you really could identify with one key bass note, in a rock and R&B sort of fashion. Then all the chords that you put on top would basically put you in different keys. So on Not of This Earth, you have these pounding E eighth notes on the bass, and your audience says, "Okay, we're in the key of E." But the chords on top are saying, "E Lydian, E Minor, E Lydian, E Mixolydian in cyclical form." And I thought, "Well, this gives me great melodic opportunities, I'm not stuck with just the seven notes of one key. I've got seven notes for every different key that I apply on top of this bass note." And I just love that sound, so I applied it to quite a lot of my music.

  With the title track’s sequence of angular, dreamlike chords bouncing back and forth, I knew I wanted sort of a stream-of-consciousness rhythm section behind it. I wanted the rhythm section to sound and feel like it was on its own unstoppable trajectory, with the melodies and solos trading off and embellishing the track at different times. The song, after all, was about someone who was "not of this earth," so everything about the song and the recording had to reflect that.

  As I readied my experimental concepts and techniques for the studio, I knew that I would need help
getting them on tape. During the sessions I would present them to John and he would help me brainstorm a recording plan. He might suggest, "Well, maybe we should change the guitar sound dramatically when we get to this point, go from a faraway to a close-up, or a close-up to a faraway, change the microphones . . ." He would come up with all sorts of ways to answer my desires that were more on the artistic side of things.

  The recording of Not of This Earth had kind of a dramatic ending, too. John’s car had been broken into behind the studio, and while we were mixing the last song, he went out to take a look at it. As he was trying to get the thing in shape so he could drive it, he wound up cutting his hand. So he came back into the studio, his hand was bleeding, he had a Band-Aid on it, and he said, "We need tape." This literally sent us into the garbage pail! We had to pull tape out of the garbage, because we had no more mix tape and needed a long fade-out, and John had to splice it all together with his hand all bloody. It was crazy watching the mix go by, made up of tape of all varying lengths, covered in blood. I was just trying to get the record done, but at the same time I was fascinated that you could make a record with bloody pieces of tape from a garbage pail and still have it sound great! And that’s to John’s credit. I don't know how he pulled it off technically. It was funny because he would always work hard to answer my musical questions, like "How do I get a train noise to go into a double hammer-on whammy thing?" He would just work out how to record and mix it. So when I informed him, "I don't have any more money for another reel of mix tape," he figured out a way to pull tape out of the trash and splice it together.

  The drama continued through the very last song we recorded. I remember we had almost finished the album, and there was a song called "The Last Jam" that was part of that disaster night when the Simmons drums didn't work out. We had a performance from Jeff, but the drums were all distorted, and John refused to put it on the record. I agreed with him—the whole thing just didn't work out. So I said, "We'll do another song," and I went home and wrote this other song. When I brought it in, John said, "Well, we need another reel of tape, or we have to erase that other song." Well, I didn't have any money to buy another reel of tape, which was $150, so I said, "Erase the song, the hell with it." It was a big deal to do that, but these were the decisions you made in the old days with tape. So we simply rolled over that piece of music, recorded this new piece of music that went down pretty easily, and Jeff came in and helped program the drum machine for me, the Oberheim DX.

  We had to do that really fast, because I was late in ending the session, and people were standing at the door with their arms folded, fuming. It was like four o'clock in the afternoon, and I was still trying to do these arpeggios, because I'd told John after we did the main guitar that I wanted to double it, and he was like, "Are you kidding me? How are you going to double that?" And I said, "I know I can do it." Meanwhile the clients are standing there looking at their watches, saying, "Will you guys get out of here?" because they were booked to start at four. So I finished that track, "Driving at Night," with people breathing down my neck.

  Mixing was equally as pressured because, first, from the technical side, we only had so many tracks within a given mix to work with. In those days, it wasn't like Pro Tools, where you have unlimited space for tracking and mixing. When you were dealing with analog tape like we were, you had to have plans. It wasn't like you could just keep going, because you'd run out of tracks very quickly, so everything had to be thought out. Every step of the way, if you got an idea, you had to deal with the problem of space. "Where does it go? How’s it going to be mixed? Is there another way to achieve this idea?" So you always had to be planning.

  We were constantly aware throughout recording that we would be battling the clock right up until the end, so from very early on, if we started going creatively to a place John knew would be unmixable later on, he would say, "We have to pause and make a decision." So if he asked me, "Is there anything else?" and I'd say, "I want to add two more guitar parts," then he would tell me, "Well, then we're going to have to take some of what’s recorded and mix it now into a submix," which meant we had to make a mixing decision because once the tracks were submixed, they couldn't be unmixed and broken out again. That was a dangerous decision, so we didn't do that very often.

  Looking back, I was grateful for John’s ability to get me to economize, and I was very impressed with that from the start of recording all the way through the end of tracking. Instead of saying, "Oh, it would be great to have six guitars," he'd ask, "Why? Let’s figure out a way to get two guitars to do it. Is it the way that you're playing it, or is it the sound, because if we can do it in two that will leave us so much more room." It got me to focus more on how to make each performance on each track really count. I learned from John that if you just fill things up, every new thing you put on may cover the tracks of the previous thing. Again, being the guitar player and the writer, I'm really focused on that main instrument sometimes, but I had to learn how to pull back and pay as much attention to the drum kit as a unit, and the keyboard as a section, and the bass as what it needs—just the way an engineer would look at everything and try to get the whole band to sound good. Since we had no band, the danger was that we'd just start piling one thing on top of another. So, for instance, if we wanted the drums to sound like we were in a big room, that meant we had to hear the room, so we couldn't cover it up. And if I came with a guitar part that on my demo had lots of echo on it, John might say, "You know, if there’s all that echo and delay and stuff on it, it’s going to cover the performances by these other instruments, so let’s start flat and see where we go." So as the track would get built up, I'd begin to see his wisdom about leaving room for the other instruments so the audience could hear their performance, too.

  I have to admit that in those early days, beginning with NOTE and for the first couple of records, it was just so emotionally traumatic to listen to a record when it was done, because I had to really let go. I realized I couldn't mix it anymore, so I had to come to grips with my disappointment in, say, my performance or my writing, or the way I thought the album was going to come out. And I didn't have sophisticated listening gear at home, just average consumer-grade stereo systems, so it was hard for me to know if what we were doing was right. John would call and say, "It sounds great in the studio. I've got this gear at home, and it sounds great." And I'd go, "I can't hear the guitar," or "The guitar’s too loud," and he'd ask what I was listening on, and I'd describe it to him, and he'd say, "You can't evaluate your record if you're listening to it on that crap."

  John Cuniberti: Amazingly, for as much work as it feels like, looking back on it, I would say we probably didn't spend more than two weeks of studio time making Not of This Earth. That was spread out over maybe two or three months because of Joe’s teaching and studio availability, and my schedule, but it went very, very quickly. We only had so much money. Joe had gotten this credit card in the mail with a $5,000 limit on it, and he went, "We're going to keep recording till this thing is full." And I was working for $20 an hour, and getting him studio time for $25 an hour, so we got a lot of studio time for his $5,000, but once the money was gone, the record was done.

  CHAPTER 7 * *

  Relativity

  At the end of recording Not of This Earth, I was $5,000 in debt, the maxed-out limit on my credit card. I couldn't make the payment on it, and I had the credit card company telling me they were handing me over to a collection agency by Friday—and this was a Monday. I remember being at Second Hand Guitars, giving lessons, thinking, "This is really bad, how did I get myself into this?"

  Unbelievably, a lightning bolt of luck struck about a half hour later in the form of a phone call from Steve Wright from the Greg Kihn Band. He sounded panicked. "Joe, it’s Steve. We're recording at Fantasy Studios and our guitar player’s strung out. Would you please help us out? We'll pay you to finish the record, and if you agree to be with the band for the next year, this is how much more we'll pay you just so we c
an get this record and tour off the ground." That call was my saving grace.

  After hanging up, I canceled the rest of my lessons for the day, went right over, and by the end of the afternoon, we had recorded three songs. The manager gave me a couple thousand dollars cash, and then laid out terms for a salary if I decided to join the Greg Kihn Band. I couldn't believe it! The very first thing I did the next morning was call the credit card company and tell them, "I'm sending a check and paying my balance off." Once I paid them, I suddenly found I had a completed album, recorded on my own label, published by my own publishing company, and I was in a band, making a salary, and I didn't have any more credit card debt. In a matter of weeks, my life had totally changed!