Strange Beautiful Music

by Joe Satriani

  Working with an artist like Joe, who doesn't have a singer, your role as a producer changes in terms of what you pay attention to because there’s a lot more guitar layering. So there will be some rhythm parts put on there, and then the melody/ lead guitar sort of becomes the vocal. We had to make sure with each sound of the guitars that they were not going to keep building up the sound on top of each other. To do that, we had to make sure they left room and space for the other guitar parts to work, and for that melody guitar to come up in the middle, front end of the mix and still really sing.

  It is my method to create a unique voice to play the melody. If a singer had a radically different song he was about to sing, an engineer would use a different kind of microphone, or surround the vocal performance with a unique set of equalization, limiting, compression, reverb, delays, and so forth . . . It all creates a vibe that eventually transports the listener and delivers that extra magic. The sound of the vocal also carries with it a message. Since I don't have lyrics, I need to put more emphasis on that sound to create a kind of "voice." Every song’s melody winds up with its own voice that is not duplicated on any other song on the album. I'm searching for that perfect tone that allows me to tell the song’s unique story.

  A good example of that process in play on Crystal Planet would be "Love Thing," because the lengths that we went to just to record that beautiful love song were insane. It took months, four or five different recordings, using different key signatures, and different musicians and instrumentation. We finally ended up using three acoustic guitars for the rhythms, all tuned to an open E. I used my 1948 Martin 000-21 that had had its intonation adjusted by Buzz Feiten, specifically for the open-E tuning.

  Another new approach we explored on Crystal Planet was digital editor Eric Caudieux’s involvement in the tracking. Since I was trying to add "techno" elements to the sound and feel of the record, I asked Eric to work up some techno versions of the songs using loops and that sort of thing. We then would monitor those backing tracks in our headphones as we recorded our "real" performances. Crazy idea, but it worked: We were energized by hearing all that extra musical information in our ears as we explored each take. Eventually, we used a very small amount of those modern textures in the final mixes, but their effect was evident in our performances. The song "Raspberry Jam Delta-V" is a good example of the synergy we accomplished with this approach.

  As we wrapped up tracking on "Crystal Planet," John Cuniberti had just finished refitting the new Coast Recording studio, which was a large facility originally operating as the San Francisco Recording Academy. John put a Neve console in the control room and it sounded so beautiful! Upon returning from our G3 Euro Tour we were able to book time in the studio and commence mixing. The studio itself had a lot to do with the sound of the album—it’s very fat and "Neve" sounding. I told Mike I wanted this album to sound really great on headphones, too, so we were listening to every mix carefully through speakers as well as using the headphone amp in the Neve console, which was a fun way to mix.

  No matter what the techniques I've highlighted on a studio album, I've always done my best to keep them fresh and updated. When I look back on Crystal Planet now, of course, it’s 2014 and I just can't believe we got it done! And I'm so happy we stuck to our artistic guns, so to speak, didn't change anything, and just followed our creative impulses and made the record we wanted to make. Because when all the dust settled and the anxiety of the moment was behind us, the record stood tall on its own artistic integrity.

  I should also mention that in early 1996, I decided to shave my head while we were on the Joe Satriani tour. I'd appeared that way on the subsequent G3 live DVD, but the Crystal Planet album cover was my first studio project to be promoted with that new, bold look. It was a moment of reinvention, and an interesting way to announce the next stage of my career.

  CHAPTER 15 * *

  Engines of Creation —2000

  "Engines of Creation . . . blended electronica with rock guitar elements without losing that characteristic Satriani sound."

  —Premier Guitar magazine

  After Crystal Planet, I was coming out of a whole period where there had been a lot of live work, so I was personally feeling, "Okay, after all that, I've been about as live as I want to get for a while. What can I do that’s totally different?" I wanted my next record to represent the ULTIMATE radical shift in terms of how my audience heard my music.

  The millennium was coming and the big question was, "What’s going to happen?" I saw that society was shifting to an online life in a HUGE way, and I wanted to do something where I felt like I was jumping into the future, and part of that had to do with thinking that I shouldn't record in a studio or even with a band. I approached Epic/Sony with three ideas for the next album: a "classical" record with my guitar on top of an orchestra, a straight-ahead rock 'n' roll record, or a techno record. I had enough material written to get moving on any one of those ideas.

  Sony said, "We'd LOVE a techno record," and that felt like the right direction to head in to me as well. My new coproducer/ engineer, Eric Caudieux, and I decided as part of that departure to record this album entirely "in the box." In other words, we'd do it all on Pro Tools in his living room: no studio, no other musicians, we were going to do it all ourselves. It was exciting! First of all, Eric was a fantastic guitar player and a composer himself, so it was really great to work with a musician of his caliber who could understand exactly what I was going through, from my fingertips all the way to what I was aiming for compositionally and conceptually with the technology.

  Eric Caudieux: When Joe and I started writing together for Engines of Creation, there weren't many loops involved, so I composed the beats that you hear on the record. It was pretty much Joe’s music that dictated what I did, and the ideas for the beats would come when Joe played me his demos or something live in my living room. For instance, with the title track, I remember Joe played me the arpeggio part on the guitar live, and I came up with the rest based off what he played.

  A good example of our writing process for that album is the song "Borg Sex." I gave Eric a drum groove with a completely atonal keyboard improvisation on top. There was no guitar on the demo! "This is about a female and a male borg having sex," I said to Eric. "This is like conversation, foreplay." That was all I had. Eric said, "Whoa, how do we get this thing going?"

  Eric Caudieux: That song became one of my favorites from the record, and was probably one of the first one or two that we did as well. When we started that track, we had no clue where we were going, because it hadn't been done before as far as I can recall, for a rock musician to do a song like that. With "Borg Sex," I remember Joe gave me a melody line, and I remember just taking that and doubling, quadrupling it, putting it out of phase and then putting it back till that melody line opens wide and makes you feel funny in the stomach. I knew I wanted a ton of dynamics, because usually you hear machine music and it’s just one thing that goes from top to finish, and that’s about it. So I wanted basically a machine record that sounded live, and I had so much fun with that one.

  The studio was in a house right in Laurel Canyon. There was a gigantic living room with crazy tall ceilings where I put all my gear and setup. There was a tracking room for the drums upstairs, which we didn't use because everything was machines, and I had a tracking room for the amps, which we didn't use because again it was all in the box, but we worked in the living room primarily. I had set it up that way because I'd always thought the problem with any studio for anybody who collects gear is not having the gear right there: when you can't look at it, you forget about it. I also remember I'd gone out to IKEA and they had a shitload of shoe racks, small ones for small shoes and big ones for big-ass boots. Since we had small pedals and big pedals, I placed them accordingly so you could literally look at them all, grab whatever pedal you wanted, and try it at any time. It worked great, and there were loads of amplifiers used, just no speakers—we had amplifiers galore.

  I remem
ber Eric’s living room was completely taken over by every kind of amp and pedal you could think of. He had purchased a couple of hanging shoe racks, except instead of shoes there were effects pedals inside each compartment. I was like a kid in a candy store! This alternative recording environment gave a boost to our creative approach to each song. On "Borg Sex," for example, we put together the strangest combination of effects pedals just to see if we could get the guitar to be the "male borg." Then we'd set up another configuration to be the "female borg." We were making it up as we went along, with Eric encouraging me to just freely improvise. Anything I played was going to be saved and we could manipulate it in any way we wanted. If anything, we had a bit too much freedom, but we were sort of intoxicated with this idea that we were not recording a conventional album. We were fully embracing the idea of recording and mixing "in the box" without any other musicians, in a living room in Laurel Canyon.

  The sessions were so different from the way I usually worked. Sometimes we'd create right in the moment, and with other songs, Eric would ask me to leave him alone for three days so he could construct the drums, bass, keyboards, create original samples— anything we had discussed that was going to be the "band" around my guitar performances. He encouraged me to trust the process because he knew my history was to record in a more conventional manner. He kept telling me, "It’s gonna work, you'll see."

  Eric Caudieux’s Studio City living room filled with amps, guitars, and keyboards in '99

  PHOTO BY JOE SATRIANI

  Because Eric was a musician, he could listen to a demo of a song, then create a version of that song electronically. That’s when he was ready for me to listen. I'd fly down, plug in my guitar, and start to record over his grooves, keyboard pads, and bass lines. We had Neve preamps, a GML mic pre, and a '64 Fender Bassman head that wound up being used 50 percent of the time. My guitar went into an amp, which would then go into a Palmer speaker simulator, and from there into a Neve mic pre, and from there right into Pro Tools. Sometimes we'd use a Hafler Triple Giant, which was a 4-channel guitar preamp. You hear a lot of that on "Borg Sex" in the intensity of the distortion.

  Most of the time, I used my JS Chrome Boy and Black Dog guitars. We also used a '58 Fender Strat quite a bit. As far as pedals, we were using the Electro-Harmonix Micro Synth, Dunlop Cry Baby wah-wah pedals, Fulltone pedals, and the DigiTech Whammy pedal quite often.

  As we started seeing these ideas come to life, I started to realize how much flexibility is inherent in that kind of creative process. It changed my whole approach to tracking. For instance, there was no reason to put down guides like you usually would for a drummer or bass player, just to give them an idea of what’s going on in the song. I realized that I could make it up as I went along. I would come up with twelve different performances in one afternoon and each could be going in a new direction. We could have a Brazilian approach, a techno approach, a heavy rock approach, and a blues approach, and we could just sit back, relax, and pick or combine the ones we thought sounded the most interesting. The difference was, when you have a band in a studio and it’s costing you $4,000 or $5,000 a day, you'd better have your mind made up about what you want people to play. Here we had removed the element of time and money from the recording process, so I wasn't paying to record an album by the hour. I didn't have to settle on a band’s performance each afternoon. We could build the tracks over a period of months, changing them and letting them evolve, which was fantastic.

  Compositionally, each song was built differently. I'd decided to work with a new piece of gear this time around, the Kurzweil K2000, a digital audio workstation (DAW) keyboard with these beautiful sounds in it. I'm not a keyboard player primarily, but whenever the mood struck me, I would turn that keyboard on, push RECORD, and just improvise. The DAW made it so easy and fun, so I started to use the keyboard as a writing tool for some of the songs, especially "Borg Sex," "Until We Say Goodbye," "Champagne?," "Attack," and "Slow and Easy." Some of those keyboard performances wound up on the final recordings, too. Once I realized how simple it was, I could email Eric a MIDI file that he could open up and assign almost any sound to it he wanted. I could also send Eric a little audio file to cue him to the kind of sounds I was looking for.

  The album’s title, Engines of Creation, came from skimming an article in Time magazine. At one point, the writer paraphrased K. Eric Drexler’s book title, Engines of Creation, in his piece. Unaware that it was Drexler’s book title, I wrote it down in one of my production books. Months later I came upon it and realized I had to write a song around it. I just thought it was such a beautiful phrase, and it was the perfect title to represent this trance/techno record I was working on.

  Eric Caudieux: I composed beats for the record based off the moods of Joe’s original compositions, so if a song was more joyful, then the beat would be more that kind of upbeat thing; if it was a little more mournful, then we'd go more for that kind of vibe. With that album, we did all the little tricks you could do in the box at that time: doubling, tripling, quadrupling, anything you could get to create the thickness, the detuning stuff, sticking it left/right, and creating that weird out-of-phase what-the-hell-is-going-on kind of vibe!

  When we were putting beats together for the record, I was experimenting with different ways of getting rhythmically inspired. We were using Eric’s own loops a lot and I was also experimenting with the sequencing software program Reason. We took advantage of digital editing to get away from the sound of just a guy playing his guitar in a studio. Everything had to sound edited to a degree. So if I was going to play rhythm guitar, Eric was not going to ask me to play something for an hour; he would instead ask me to play something for thirty seconds and then we'd go and make our own sample from my performance. That way, the repetition would have an effect on the overall sound and vibe. Then I would perform the solos and the melodies in the traditional way. Those would be the live elements, but we wanted the background tracks to have that sort of cut-and-paste, looped quality to them.

  "Devil’s Slide" was a great example of machine gun-style synergy between the rhythm track and guitars. On a rock record, the ensemble parts would be a lot looser, but I wanted to make it sound completely automated. So Eric would trim and edit each guitar harmony part, so together they would be completely diabolical sounding. We wanted the guitars to be one with the automated loops. That meant everything had to get chopped into pieces so it sounded very robotic.

  With "Attack," the entire track was recorded on my K2000 first, and then the architecture of it and some of the sounds were transferred to the master template in Eric’s Pro Tools session. We'd synched Pro Tools and Logic together on two separate machines. The challenge for us was to see how we could create a guitar sound that could mimic the keyboard sound. We used a Moog Moogerfooger filter pedal for the main effect, then used either the SansAmp, the '64 Fender Bassman, or the Hafler Triple Giant. It was something that was just an entirely different way of saying, "This is a melody—dig this!" The juxtaposition of the song’s sections is quite unusual in that I'd written this dreamy breakdown piece that was used for the solo. I was thinking that in the middle of a fierce battle, there’s a moment when time seems to stop, or go into slow motion, and the warrior is having a moment of clarity, a moment of spiritual searching of some kind. I wanted that breakdown to suggest some sort of dream state.

  In a completely different way, with "The Power Cosmic 2000— Part II," my approach in that solo was something that mystified even Eric at the time. "What are you doing?" he asked me. "I can't follow this." There was a chord progression in my head, but I didn't want anybody to hear it! I kept changing the scales that revolved around the key note of C that had this techno-bass thing going. I was playing five or six different scales but changing them deliberately at certain times. That was something I hadn't heard anybody do before in the context of a trance/techno song, and certainly I hadn't done anything like it on any of my records before.

  The idea behind having "Parts I and
II" was to complete something I'd recorded for a Guitar Player Soundpage back in 1987. The original "Part I" contained the main chord progression played as cascading, eleven-note arpeggios, with no melody on top. I updated it and composed a melody to be played over the main chord progression. I wanted to write a more futuristic-sounding "Part II," so I started with a loop on Reason and sent that off to Eric. We then used the loop as the driving force underneath the melody and chord sequence of "Part II." Once Eric had laid out the song’s master template, we "flew in" my cassette demo’s melody, recorded with a Zoom, for the new "Part I," then added melody and solo guitars over the new sections. The new guitar sounds on that were created using a Fulltone Ultimate Octave pedal, and two Whammy pedals as well, one going an octave lower and one an octave higher. It’s one of my favorite guitar tones. It’s just so beautiful and complex.

  Eric Caudieux: "Power Cosmic Part I" was different from the rest of the album because the melody was on a cassette that Joe gave me. The big challenge with this one was that he told me he could never repeat it, with the sound he'd used. I took the cassette, cleaned it up a little, and just programmed some stuff around it for "Part I." For "Part II," we were working with a different challenge entirely, because the solo was three different parts that he played all at once: one Whammy up, one Whammy down, all going through Neve mic pres, and the guitar going directly distorted through a Neve mic pre. For the solo in "Part II," he played one solo, then another. By the time we got to solo number twenty-five, we wound up listening back to the first solo he'd laid down, and it was beautiful and wound up being the keeper take.