Strange Beautiful Music

by Joe Satriani

  With a song like "Circles," I'm using dyads to create a harmonized melody against an exotic rhythm section that shifts gears suddenly with Jeff Campitelli’s amazing footwork on the kick drum. It’s a crazy arrangement that was a lot of fun to work out in the studio. DI guitars for the main melody, amped-up rhythm guitars combined with the Rockman for the solo. For me, it was a new way of combining melody, rhythm, and harmony to create a memorable hook. The trippy ending with all the swirling percussion and sound effects completes the song’s fantasy.

  I was sixteen or seventeen years old when I came up with the two opening chords for "Lords of Karma." I had returned home from partying on a Saturday night and couldn't sleep. It was an hour before dawn, and I was sitting on my bed playing the guitar when I wrote those two chords, repeating back to back. Two things happened: I was writing down everything I was feeling at that moment about what those chords represented to me, and night was fading—you could tell the sun was going to rise in about an hour or so. So my young musical brain at the time was saying, "I think no one’s ever put these two chords together before." I sorted through my musical mind but couldn't recall borrowing those chords from anybody or find them in my memory of any rock, jazz, or classical compositions.

  "Wow," I thought, "you've just created something nobody’s done before, those two chords as a cyclical chord progression." It represented my take on the pitch-axis style, where each chord changes the key, but I was still using A as my bass note, my main key note. The chords: A (no 3rd) add +4 to A 13 sus4 (no 9th). The keys I built off of the chords were A Lydian and A Mixolydian, respectively. That fascination stayed with me for over a decade, but I couldn't write a song around these chords to save my life, so when I was getting ready to record Surfing with the Alien, I said, "You're finally going to finish this song!" It just flowed out. That song is very special to me. Every time I play that chord sequence it brings me back to that place— being home, the sun coming up, guitar in hand, having a profoundly creative moment.

  Back then, critics would really focus their energy on the lead player, who had all the chops. What I wanted on Surfing with the Alien was a record that had the instruments sounding as if they were played by an actual band with a unified vision, so you didn't have everyone trying to show off their fusion chops, or whatever school of playing they were coming from. When I look at the techniques on the record, I feel like I made a conscious effort to pull back, to tell you the truth. On the title track, for example, the rhythm guitars are very straight-ahead rock 'n' roll rhythm guitars, and I'm doing Chuck Berry licks and Hendrix-y things. They wanted you to do that "over the top" rock guitar thing at that time, but I wanted to be different. I wanted to use more space, stronger phrasing. That’s what I heard in the music I grew up with. Jimi Hendrix and Keith Richards are masters of that. They came up with these great riffs and solos that you remember forever. It’s not a matter of filling every space; it’s picking your moments. That was an important lesson I put into making Surfing.

  I also worked hard trying to innovate song structure. Take "Satch Boogie" with its pitch-axis-meets-two-hand-tapping chord sequence. From a compositional point of view, the song starts off as a swing piece, turns into a rock boogie jam, then breaks down to a half-time beat with a pitch axis composition stuck in the middle of it. It’s got the weirdest bridge ever, too! I started with what was very popular at the time, a very Van Halen-like two-hand tapping technique, but I did something very different with it by playing a chord sequence that veers way outside the rock idiom.

  The visionary Cliff Cultreri and me at a platinum award presentation dinner

  There were things on Surfing that we thought were really groundbreaking for its time. John’s use of nonlinear reverb and the FS-1 Cyclosonic Panner for 3-D imaging of sound I thought was quite unique. The way we used sampled instruments to enhance sections of songs like "Hill of the Skull," "Circles," "Lords of Karma," "Midnight," and "Surfing." These were things you wouldn't normally find on a rock 'n' roll guitar album. We were trying to make this something extremely fresh and artistic, and I suppose that’s the best way to explain it in the fewest words.

  John Cuniberti: Every time Joe picked up the guitar and started playing it, I heard something new. I don't think I ever took it for granted, but it was absolutely stunning how he could just continually pick up a guitar, play it, and produce music that you'd never heard played like that before. The chord changes he would pick and the way he would construct music was unlike anything I'd ever heard. So I was always excited to hear what he had to play; everything was always a surprise, especially with the material he brought in for this new LP. I've never known where he gets that stuff from—what are those chord changes he’s playing, what key is that in? I was always mystified by him musically.

  There was a lot of planning when it came to how each song on the album was supposed to sound. John Cuniberti wanted to make sure that everything sounded unique and specific for each song. He was great at finding the sweet spot out of any amp’s speaker, too. "Crushing Day" and its triple-tracked rhythm guitar sound is a good example of that. A song like "Hill of the Skull" has at least six electric guitars on it, using one Marshall head daisy-chained into another, really loud, very distorted. There was literally nothing else on the album that was recorded like that. Similarly, if you take the first three songs, "Surfing," "Ice 9," and "Crushing Day," each of those was recorded quite differently in terms of what amps and stomp boxes were used. Back in those days, "the team" was me, John Cuniberti, Jeff Campitelli, and Bongo Bob Smith. John and I were the principals, but Jeff and Bongo had a big influence on Surfing as well.

  John Cuniberti: Joe was comfortable with the strict time of the drum machine, because up till then he always worked in a band with a drummer and wrote and played music that worked in a band-type scenario. Once he found a drum machine and started playing to that, he completely changed the way he wrote music. It opened up the door for him to do all sorts of very interesting things rhythmically, where if the guy was throwing a big fill in or changing the pattern on the hi-hat, it kind of made Joe compositionally change what he would have to play.

  Bongo Bob’s musicianship had accelerated and gone into this new era of programming where he could play an SP-12 drum machine with his fingers and make it sound like it had more feel than a real drummer! His body was very musical, and yet his head could also get into the programming aspect of music, which was great. He had a university degree in ethnic percussion, but he also knew his way around the latest technology, either synthesizers or drum machines or the latest cutting-edge samplers. He could come in and program the drum machine with great feel, and then add some African percussion on top of that.

  Bongo Bob Smith: At the time, I was working as a drum programmer for the biggest producer in the world, Narada Michael Walden, and we were doing what I call the crap of the eighties, but doing it very well, from Whitney Houston to Lionel Richie. I wouldn't say it was crap so much as it was not a musician’s kind of music. I was doing that by day, so when Joe came to me saying, "I have this idea for this record . . ." to me, it was like, "Oh my God, I would just LoVE to be a part of that," because it just sounded really interesting. I'm a percussionist, so I had studied African, Cuban, Brazilian percussion, the migration of rhythms out of Africa into the Americas, and that was my life. So the idea of what sound could do and what rhythm could do to a particular song was very, very important to me. I think my biggest contribution was, "How far can I go to stay out of the way? To what depths can I go here to stay out of the way?" Because NOBODY has ever said, "Wow, those drums on Surfing with the Alien, those are amazing." [laughs]

  They've never been spoken, those words, and I applaud that, because the idea with what Joe had set out to do with the drums was to have them support what the guitar was doing. The simplicity was very important because it really propels the guitar. It made his guitar bigger than life because everything else—the keyboards, the bass and drums—are just so simple around it. So as w
e recorded, we were thinking, "How are we going to make this stuff really speak and how can we contribute when there’s no singer?" Because up until that point, I had always been taught, "You're here to support the singer," and in the world of production—from back then until now—any great producer’s going to sit there and ask, "How am I going to get this piece of music to fit around the singer? How do I sculpt this?" And in our case, the singer was the lead melody, so we were trying to always inspire that.

  I wasn't playing perfectly to the machines. I was dancing around them. Bob pointed that out to me one day. The curious effect it created was a "hook"—it drew you into the music. The drum machine "performances" actually had this very interesting quality that made the music more listenable in a modern, cinematic way, and when you removed them, there was some sort of charm that evaporated. I couldn't figure that out at first, because all of our instincts were to have a live guy playing drums, but the live kit would somehow make the music sound less special. At the same time, there were other songs where it was so obviously better, like with "Satch Boogie" or "Circles." For the songs on Surfing where Jeff did wind up playing live drums, it sounded amazing. So what we wound up with was a lot of songs where the drum parts were essentially a hybrid of live and programmed.

  John Cuniberti: Initially, Joe and I would get together with Bob, play him the demo, and then talk about what a real drummer might play, and where the fill might be. And if there was going to be a fill, what kind of fill is it, and when does he come off the hi-hat, when does he hit a cymbal, all that stuff. Joe approved all the drum parts, but he wasn't a drummer, and so was happy to have the assistance of a real drummer who could come in and program the machine to play like a real drummer would play it, but with this real strict groove and time that was necessary for him to be able to play these songs the way he envisioned them being played. We'd made what was, in my opinion, the brave decision to dive headfirst into MIDI and computer-generated drum machines.

  So what we did was Joe and I would huddle with Bob around his computer, and we'd lay out what we believed to be the drum performance, and that was based off Joe’s demo, what he heard for the song, and how complicated he wanted to be. I would decide on the samples we were gonna use and what Jeff was ultimately going to have to play, because again, I never liked the cymbal sound and wanted Jeff to play hi-hat and smash cymbals to get a sense of fidelity. Once that was done, we would book the studio, and Bob and I would go in there, and I would take all these outputs from our tape drum machine samplers and plug them into mic pres and EQs and get them printed, and get the whole drum performance printed. It wouldn't include Jeff’s performances, as those would come later, but we would have computer-generated brass for guide tracks for Jeff to hear later and know where to put them.

  John Cuniberti and me at Hyde Street in '87. . . shirts tucked in!

  PHOTO BY JON SIEVERT

  Bongo Bob: Alongside Joe and John Cuniberti, Jeff Campitelli and I worked together in the studio in kind of a backward way from what was traditional to the times in that it wasn't, let’s say, him playing a drum set and then me playing, let’s say, percussion or bringing in the drum loop. The way we worked, he actually came in and laid down his live drum parts as overdubs on top of the drum machine part, from drum fills to whatever he wanted to add to the groove, and then together we would both spice it up with cymbal hits to different other little percussion bits where we were trying to add to the collective.

  John Cuniberti: Because the drums back then were being generated by computer, we were always given eight or ten tracks, then other tracks were set aside for rhythms, others for melodies and solos. So when we started a song, I would pull out a track sheet, and go, "Okay, give me an idea of what you hear in this song, how many tracks you're thinking about, et cetera, so I can start laying this thing out." Because I didn't want to run out of tracks and get to a point where I had to say, "We don't have any tracks for that because I did those last two guitars in stereo." I kind of needed to know ahead of time what he had in mind track-wise—how many guitar parts he heard, if he was going to add a keyboard, if the harmonies were going to be one- or three-part—and the track sheets would be laid out more or less the same. So as we'd work through the project, there would always be a couple of empty tracks until there weren't any, and there were times when we'd get to a point where we were filled up, and I had to start moving some things around. Then I would print all these drum parts. Once it was all printed, then Joe would start to build the project. He oftentimes would pull out a bass and play a bass track. More times than not he would lay a guitar track and just to be sure the thing was feeling right—if he got through the thing and it still felt good to him, and he liked the way it sounded—then we would move on to other tracks till we'd finally built the song up. That process could take a day or it could take a week; it just kind of depended on the song and how evolved it was by the time he arrived at the studio, and then what happened as we recorded the song.

  I knew that I had to be flexible, because there were some great ideas that John would have after listening to me play for a bit. Also, we would work on the parts of these songs—the bass part, the drum part, the first rhythm, the second rhythm, the keyboard—for hours before we would get to any kind of solo part.

  John Cuniberti: Joe was always in the control room when he recorded, and from then on throughout his career, he spent most of his time in the control room with just him and the engineer, one on one, just layering his guitar tracks. As he tracked, we'd lay a drum machine down first, and then he'd play either a rhythm guitar part of some kind or bass, and then we'd build the tracks up like you would any rhythm section. He'd do rhythms, then bass, then melody, and then there might be some clean guitars that come in during the bridges or choruses, and we'd build it all up until it got to the point where it was time for the lead singer, so to speak, which in Joe’s case would be the melody guitar. I would say he’s stayed loyal to that structure throughout his career. When Joe and I worked on guitar overdubs, generally the rhythms pretty much stayed what they were in the demo. If the arrangement called for a solo, he would have worked on something at least stylistically ahead of time, so that he knew where on the neck he wanted to play and what technique he wanted to showcase for a particular solo, and he basically would know more or less how he wanted it to end up.

  We wanted every song to have its own vibe and unique juxtaposition of instruments. It wasn't going to be about Joe and his guitar technique. It was going to be about the songs, their melodies and their arrangements, the guitar tones, the use of outboard gear, and the technique of recording—bringing the art of engineering and mixing to a higher level, making a record that you could listen to top to bottom and walk away from with a feeling that you'd just been blown away.

  John Cuniberti: When we would listen to his demos, or when we would start recording a track, a lot of times I would be inspired by what I heard. So for instance, with "Always with Me, Always with You," I thought, "The simplest we can make this, the better," so let’s not have a drummer playing a drum part; let’s just keep it super simple. Other songs might have a vibe to them, a sound that would inspire us to do more reverbs or delays. So a lot of times the music Joe would play would inspire me to do studio tricks, and then the studio tricks would in turn inspire him to play differently. So it was kind of a circular, organic process we would go through. So from Not of This Earth through Surfing and really all the way up through Flying in a Blue Dream, it was highly experimental. Joe didn't really know what these records were going to sound like till they were done, and neither did I. I had a lot of free rein to do a lot of screwy things to the sound, and Joe allowed me the freedom to try anything I wanted. He may not have always liked it, and if he didn't, I would dump it and try something else. But I had a lot of latitude.

  Once we laid a rhythm track down, and maybe he had played a melody or a solo, he might say, "Something’s missing. It would be nice maybe if there were these other guitars playing this other
part. Give me a track, let me try something." A lot of times, he would come in and start playing, and I would make suggestions like, "It’s too bright or too muddy, maybe we should make it more ambient. Let’s put this delay on it . . ." Then he would start playing a solo a little differently because he was actually playing now to the sound that we then created in the studio, which of course was something he couldn't do at home.

  My ideas would build a song over the course of a couple of weeks. If we were spending a week on the rhythm section, the next week we would do rhythm guitars, and then we'd rent a keyboard for a couple of days. The solos didn't get on the album until maybe a month or two later. By then, I'd had a lot of time to both think about what I wanted to play and to just react. So as I was listening to a rough mix of the guitar, bass, and drums, no melody or solo, I'd start to imagine, "Wouldn't it be great if the solo did something like this?" So I'd go into the session and maybe say, "John, this solo is going to be very in time, very structured," like "Crushing Day." For the solo on "Echo," I might have said, "I don't know what I'm going to do here, but it’s going to have me starting and stopping, playing long phrases and using some open spaces."