Strange Beautiful Music

by Joe Satriani

  Throughout the recording of Engines, what we were doing was manipulating in the box all those guitars and whatever sounds we had. That was basically the cleanest path to be able to work with the sounds that Joe was giving me, going DI, or in the case of the amps, we'd go to the load box, into a mic pre, into the computer, and that would give me the cleanest path to basically go either to a synth—the Korg MS-20 or Minimoog—or into the computer to affect it even more with several plug-ins I had to completely change the sound. So that’s why it was so important to have the sound as direct and pure as we could.

  I was very happy with the album as we were finishing up. I felt we had really made something "new" and creative. But I knew once we took it out on the road to play for people around the world, a big transformation was going to have to happen. I had no intention of going out with a DJ or something like that, but I thought the album would serve as a springboard for doing something totally different with the songs live, which was eventually captured on Live in San Francisco. We did rock-band versions of the songs "Until We Say Goodbye," "Devil’s Slide," and "Borg Sex," and they became "new" again, and were just fantastically fun to play in front of an audience.

  Eric Caudieux: Once we hit the road, the transition to the live stage was really, really easy. What we had to decide was: Do we want to recreate the stuff we did in the studio, or do we want to play as a band? And once the decision was made that we wanted to play as a band, it was easy because everybody played their part and that’s just about it. Obviously the bass played the bass line, and Jeff [Campitelli] had to figure out what the vibe of each song was, and since it was just one guitar, bass, piano/keyboards, and drums, we just played the parts that were needed naturally, so it was far easier than you might think or expect.

  One I'll never, ever tire of is "Engines of Creation," because Joe stays—from a musical standpoint—basically on one note that still has so many different melodic and harmonic variations on that one drum-bass note. Also, if you listen to it, you go through the cycle, but there’s never any conclusion to it, you just want it to go on and on and repeat itself. And every time it comes back, it makes you feel happy—you know it’s coming back and you want it to—it grabs me. The music itself really, really grabs me. He plays those arpeggios over and over, and it doesn't resolve—that’s what it is, I LOVE music that doesn't resolve!

  When Engines finally came out, there were techno fans who started listening to me for the first time, with this record. When they went back and listened to Surfing or Flying, they'd go, "Ooh, what the hell is that? I like this Engines of Creation guy, whoever he is . . ." And it was very interesting. The same thing happened with the 1995 eponymous release—some people thought, "Finally, he’s made something I can listen to," and others thought, "Hey, it’s not Surfing with the Alien or Flying in a Blue Dream . . ." The Extremist did that to a certain degree as well, in that some people missed the drum machines from the earlier records, and others said, "Finally, a record of Joe’s with real drums on it."

  What I learned from Engines is the same thing I knew other artists had learned when they changed directions: You gain some new fans, you lose some old ones, and there’s a dedicated core that appreciates how cool it is that you tried something they weren't expecting. An artist is not supposed to second-guess his or her audience. It really leads to disaster. Just do what you do. Be happy when they like it and move on when they don’t.

  CHAPTER 16 * *

  Strange Beautiful Music — 2002

  "This album is one of his best."

  —UltimateGuitar.com

  Strange Beautiful Music was the first record I made using Pro Tools at home. This allowed me to overcome specific problems I had with demos made on cassettes and laptops, or just writing things on paper. It was a creative renaissance for me. By demoing straight into the computer I could easily pull up and listen to every session I was working on for the record in a matter of seconds. This gave me a clearer understanding of where I was heading with my new music, and it was so much fun! On top of that, each performance could be a potential "keeper" track.

  My producer, John Cuniberti, set me up with the Millennia Media Origin SST-1 mic pre, which included an optical compressor and a parametric EQ. This allowed me the flexibility to record keyboards and bass, along with direct guitar, and to reroute stuff that was done directly. If I wanted to use a real guitar amp, I would run it through a Palmer speaker simulator instead of a speaker cabinet, and sometimes I would run it through the Millennia for effect, too. Other times, I would just go directly into Pro Tools.

  This may sound too technical for some, but for me it’s exciting to share how much more flexibility Pro Tools gave me. I could finally record music all by myself and work without looking at the studio clock, thinking, "Damn, I have to move on to record the bass now." Or not being able to spend any more time on the guitar because the budget won't allow it. The biggest upside of recording at home without a schedule was that if I sat down to do a solo and was not into it, I could just put the guitar down and walk away.

  On another level altogether, my home studio offered an important refuge from all the chaos going on in the music business at that time. I remember a lot of people were fired from Sony during the Strange Beautiful Music sessions, and being able to record whenever I wanted at home helped me focus just on the music itself. Not having to worry about a budget also let me be so much more creative in how I constructed each song.

  I could sit in my studio and keep working on the music, go outside and mow the lawn, go to the market, for a run, or to the beach, then come back and work on the song some more. I could record it in the middle of the night, early in the morning, in the middle of the day; musicians could come by and listen, and I could make my own rough mixes. There was no time and money hanging over my head, and I think that allowed my creativity to be truly unchained.

  While this approach made recording a lot more flexible and freed up money for other things, it also created challenges. My job in the studio was now to function as the record’s producer and engineer as well as the artist. Before, the way it would have worked is I would sit there recording a melody, and maybe John would have said, "Okay, that’s the best you got, Joe. We're done." Then we'd move on to the next song, never to return. Now I could literally record a million performances and never have to throw anything away.

  Digital recording isn't just about making something perfect, though. It encourages spontaneity, which in turn can lead to capturing "once in a lifetime" performances, and it did so throughout Strange Beautiful Music. A great example of that process was "You Saved My Life." I was focusing on my wife and my son, thinking, "Where would I be without these loved ones in my life?" And from there, I was deeply inspired and started composing and tracking right there at home. The end result was an ensemble of guitars playing the melody with changing harmonies. I had never done anything like it before, but it perfectly represented the story I wanted to tell. Having the home studio setup allowed me to be creative on a new, deeper level.

  Eric Caudieux explores early VR technology.

  PHOTO BY JON LUINI

  "Oriental Melody" is a song that has an interesting history. Back in the mid-nineties, I had a black-and-white Apple laptop that had a recording feature on it using its own microphone. I wasn't very computer savvy yet at that point, so I thought this feature was pretty unique! So back then, if I was in a hotel room without my recording gear and got an idea, I recorded it on the laptop. One day when I was working on modes, I played one I just loved, and I wondered why I hadn't written anything around it. So I came up with a riff and recorded just the riff by itself on that laptop. It was a small clip, just eleven seconds, but this little file followed me around with every new computer I had for the next six or seven years. I finally heard the clip years later and realized it used the Oriental scale, so I set about writing an entire song around that short piece of music and "Oriental Melody" was born.

  John Cuniberti: Strange Beautiful Music w
as the first all-Pro Tools session I had done, and the first time Joe and I had made a record that was entirely in digital. I was faced as an engineer with how to manage twenty tracks of guitars once Joe brought them in. That, I think, was the challenge of this record, managing what he had recorded at home. Once Joe was ready to transition into the live studio, we set up at The Plant in Sausalito and structured the recording like the old days, where we would spend two weeks cutting drums and bass and rhythm guitars, and then Joe and I would spend another two or three weeks together doing whatever guitar overdubs he hadn't recorded at home that were still left to track.

  John has always been perceptive enough to notice when I've written a song that’s close to my heart. His approach would be, "What can I do to help enhance this creative experience?" When I'd bring in these unusual performances and tell him, "It may not be the guitar-through-an-amp with a Shure 57 on it in the big room that you want, but it is a performance I will never be able to reproduce," he would understand and respect that. That spirit was on every track of SBM and was part of what made it so different from the records we'd made together up to that point.

  Matt Bissonette: When Joe called me up to come and play with him and Jeff Campitelli on this record, I of course said "Yes!" right away, and brought all my stuff up in my van from L.A. The day before we started, I remember being in downtown San Francisco, and I had fifteen basses in my van, just loaded up, and I turned to get up to the Golden Gate Bridge and my transmission blew out! So I had to be towed over the bridge and buy a new car the day we started, and I just remember thinking, "You gotta be kidding me . . ."

  Before that album, I'd never paired Jeff with Matt before, so I didn't know how it was going to turn out, but once they started jamming together, they discovered they both felt time very much in the same way, which was a great relief. They share a lot of the same influences, too. On Strange Beautiful Music, I gave them the freedom to improvise quite a bit, and that was very important to the feel of the record. I've always found that tapping into a player’s creative nature is where all the good stuff is. A good example of that is "Oriental Melody," where, once again, starting out there were a lot of tracks I'd written and already recorded at home: the keyboards and all the guitars, I believe, and some pretty distorted, funky-sounding guitars. John, Jeff, and Matt really liked the song, though, and really made it shine with their unique ideas and live performances in the studio.

  John Cuniberti: As well as this process was working overall for Joe, I remember we didn't know if we had the record until we mixed it. Back in the 24-track days, once you got done recording on a song, you could have a rough mix in front of you and everyone could go home with it for the night. Today, if we spent all day recording thirty or forty tracks of guitars on Pro Tools, the last thing any of us wanted to do was sit down and start weeding through all the performances just to get a rough mix. You might get a rough mix of something but not really even know what it was. When we were limited to four or five guitar tracks, at the end of the session we could go, "Let’s just use tracks thirteen and fifteen." By contrast, if you have ten guitar tracks, which two do you want to use? How representative will this be of the final product? It really did create in its own way a whole host of new problems, but I know it gave Joe a lot of benefits as well, having the time to create performances he was really happy with when he brought them in for the band to work on.

  Listening back through the songs during mixing, I realized that each represented a special moment in my life. "Starry Night," "What Breaks a Heart," "Mind Storm," "Sleepwalk" with Robert Fripp—all songs very close to my heart. I was also thrilled with songs like "Hill Groove," which had a fresh, funky attitude. It was also the first time I had used a MIDI-guitar interface to record the "organ" performance. It sounds like a funky guy on a B3, but it’s really me improvising on guitar plugged into a Roland MIDI controller with an organ patch dialed up.

  John Cuniberti: I enjoyed making that record partially because of the fact that Joe had a new air of confidence about him—he was more philosophical in his approach to recording. At that point in his career, it seemed like it was more about expression and having fun, and didn't take on the importance that his earlier records seemed to have. During the earlier records, he was really trying to establish himself, build a career, pay his bills, not be rejected by the music community, and by the time we got around to doing this record, he was a rock star. So it was more fun, it was more relaxed, and I really enjoyed making the record as a result. I think Joe was very happy with the album when we were done—it was very different, very powerful, and I think it was a smart move to make the album he did.

  CHAPTER 17 * *

  Is There Love in Space? — 2004

  "One need not know a thing about guitar to appreciate the man’s sense of melody, and that’s really his biggest gift. He may possess flying fingers of gold, but what grabs most ears is the deft way he handles moving songs forward without vocal accompaniment."

  —BlogCritics.org

  Before reuniting with John Cuniberti, Matt Bissonette, and Jeff Campitelli to record Is There Love in Space?, I started recording the new songs at Studio 21, my home studio, trying once again to break my own style down and rebuild it into something new. I was deeper into Pro Tools now and having much more success and fun with it. The new record would feature quite a bit of compositional variety, with lyrical-sounding melodies and more angular-sounding solos— and two vocal tracks!

  At Studio 21, I was using a Korg Triton DAW keyboard, Universal Audio 1176 and LA-2A compressor/limiters, an Empirical Labs EL8S, old API EQs, the Millennia Media STT-1 mic pre, and Palmer speaker simulators. For guitar amps I had an interesting collection: Soldano, Mesa Boogie, Cornford, Vox, Wells, and several vintage Marshalls. Added to that group was my new Peavey JSX prototype head. Everything just started to sound better!

  I was getting into pairing differently tuned or stringed guitars together and creating arrangements that featured the unique nature of those pairings. "Up in Flames," for instance, was a six-string JS1000 with a drop-D tuning, into a Cornford/JS prototype amp, pretty raw and in your face sounding. "Hands in the Air" was a couple of seven-string guitars paired with twelve-string electrics and some slide guitar. "The Souls of Distortion" and "Searching" were also seven-string-based songs.

  With "Souls of Distortion" I wanted to see if I could create a song where the distortion itself had a life of its own. I was trying to imagine a piece of music that when played on piano would sound beautifully simple, but when played on seven-string guitars and plugged into distorted amps would have its sonic message become more mysterious and compelling because of the complex nature of the distortion itself.

  The title track was inspired by a painting that my son, ZZ, had done of what looked like an alien staring straight at you. It was hanging in my studio and I would look at it every time I sat at my keyboard. One day, I was wondering if the concept of love that we know so well here on Earth is recognized elsewhere in the universe. So I looked at ZZ’s alien drawing and wondered how I would describe love to an alien who had no concept of the emotion.

  "Bamboo" was a song I recorded primarily by myself at home, although the idea for the song had first come to me years earlier on the road. I wrote the body of the song while on the Flying in a Blue Dream tour. I was really into doing those two-handed tapping pieces at the time, but the piece never really went anywhere. Years later, I'd come up with this other two-handed tapped arpeggio technique, which you hear as little flourishes in the beginning of the song, but at the time I didn't know what to do with that either. Finally, during the making of this album, I was inspired to take those two elements, put them together, and create a song around them. That included enlisting ZZ one afternoon to use a violin bow on a five-string bass to record the bridge section’s big bass tones. The only thing I didn't record at home was that really strange/beautiful octave-jumping chorus melody. That was done live in the studio using a '64 Fender Bassman amp with my JS1000 going thr
ough a Whammy pedal.

  The song still needed the right ending. One morning, when Jeff Campitelli had just come into the studio, I said, "Just go out there and be funky." So next thing you know, he gave us this slinky, funky performance that brought the whole song together and gave it a proper ending, too. After that, we added a backward guitar solo I had recorded at home, and it all just grooved together beautifully. It was the perfect last song for the record.

  At the start of the album, I knew I wanted to sing on "I Like the Rain." Lyrically, this song was inspired by Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top. I imagined myself playing a character who likes what everybody else doesn't. Billy has changed the way people view the composition of rock music. ZZ Top is an institution, its own genre, and Billy’s playing style is likewise unique. He’s really elevated the art of blues-rock songwriting. No one really comes close. When Jimi Hendrix heard Billy Gibbons back in the day, he said Billy was "the future of music." He got that right!

  Every time I bring a vocal song into the studio, there’s always the chance that it’s just not going to work. I need some sort of trick to get me in the mood, so I sang "I Like the Rain" with a sense of humor, and in character, as I did on "Big Bad Moon." One afternoon my tech, Mike Manning, was pulling up to the studio on his Harley, and I thought how great it'd be to record Mike on his bike for the start of the song. We had him ride up to the side door of The Plant and stuck some microphones out there. He started up the bike, revved it up, and pulled away. That’s what you hear at the start of the song. No samples used there!