by Joe Satriani
—MTV/AllMusicGuide.com
For many years I've owned a beautiful-sounding Petrof upright piano made in the Czech Republic, and it’s been very good to me. Whenever I sit down early in the morning and start playing, a song comes out. One day, I sat down and wrote an intriguing chord sequence and quickly jotted it down on a piece of paper with the title "It’s a Mystery." That word mystery kept haunting me, so I looked up the word’s etymology online. The word musterion came up, which led me to a very interesting story about the Apostle Paul traveling to Greece to spread the word of his Messiah, Jesus. According to the story, Paul took the Greek word musterion, which actually had a negative connotation to it, and flipped it around to suit his purposes. He would tell prospective followers, "You can't understand these stories I'm telling you now because you've not yet received the musterion. Once you've received the musterion, then the secret of God’s message will be revealed to you." When the English translation for the King James Bible was done, the translators had no word for musterion, so they translated it as mystery.
Top row: Mike Manning, Jeff Campitelli, Eric Caudieux, Matt Bissonette, and Mike Boden. Bottom row: Me and John Cuniberti. The Plant, '07.
PHOTO BY JON LUINI
Today we say, "The mystery of faith," but that’s completely misconstruing what Paul’s original message was. Having grown up Roman Catholic, I thought the story was outrageous. How come I never learned this in Catholic school? But what really interested me was how a word could be so powerful. I knew then that I wanted to use the phrase "Musterion of Rock" in the next album title and, in a humorous way, suggest that you have to receive a musician’s "musterion" to be able to hear the real message behind their music. I was also toying with the idea of using "Professor Satchafunkilus" as the title, but in the end found the two titles together were better than either one alone.
I saw Professor Satchafunkilus and the Musterion of Rock as an opportunity to try different things. Some of that had to do with performing in different parts of the world on tour. For instance, we wound up in Istanbul for four days and our promoters were so kind as to guide us through the city, showing us the best of what it had to offer. One of the promoters gave me some şik Veysel records because he had a feeling I'd love his music. I'd never heard of him, but when I played those CDs back home, I remember thinking how beautiful this music was. It’s folk music from the Turkish countryside sung in the old Anatolian language. I didn't know what the words meant, but that freed me up to just associate with the songs in a more musical way. I came up with a story imagining that Veysel would have traveled to Spain at some point and would have been influenced by Andalusian music as well as some heavy rock, too. I tried to keep it in the harmonic framework that his music often centers on, the Dorian mode. The guitar performance on the album was recorded in one take at my home studio. Jeff and Matt improvised around it later on when we got together at The Plant studios.
For "I Just Wanna Rock," I got an idea about a robot that starts to gain consciousness, goes out for a walk, and comes across a small rock concert happening in a park. The robot asks people at the show what their purpose is because he literally doesn't understand what’s happening. Everyone in the audience tells the robot, "I just wanna rock." As he learns more about the process, he finally sings, "I wanna learn how to rock with you," but his voice changes from his distorted robot voice to one with a more humanlike quality. I know that sounds crazy, but it’s just how I think about these things when I'm writing!
I recorded the vocals using an old 57 microphone I had at home that I put through Low-Fi, Sci-Fi, and SansAmp plug-ins. I recorded myself maybe three times and stacked the vocals so it would sound tight. When I brought it into the studio, the plan was to record it with better equipment so it would sound better. I spent about an hour in front of a great microphone doing the same thing I'd done at home, but we could not get it to sound anywhere near as good, so we went with the takes I'd recorded at home.
I originally wrote "Out of the Sunrise" years earlier for the Crystal Planet record. It started out on a piece of paper because I didn't demo anything when I wrote for that album. I hadn't written enough of it, but I remember just loving the whole vibe of the piece. It was about trying to capture that moment when you stay up all night and watch the sunrise. Very often it’s a cathartic experience where you gain some sort of insight about who you are and your life in general.
"Professor Satchafunkilus" came about while I was driving ZZ to a friend’s house. We were listening to the hip-hop artist Mos Def when ZZ said, "You should try doing something like this sometime." From there, we started talking about how interesting it is that some artists like Mos Def have this cool feel that just sounds so musical, even outside of the lyrical message that he’s giving. We talked about how different the song would be if you removed that special personality from the track—it wouldn't really hold up. From there the conversation turned into "How would I, as a guitar instrumentalist, approach this style of song and add some compositional weight to replace that special personality?" In that scenario, you wouldn't have lyrics or the attitude and message of the rapper. So the idea started from a brief conversation as we were driving in the car, listening, and having a good time, but it made a big impression on me, because I immediately drove home after I dropped ZZ off and started to record what became "Professor Satchafunkilus."
I'd already recorded most of "Professor Satchafunkilus" by the time ZZ got home later that evening. I played some of it for him and then suggested, "I think you should play sax on this." He was just learning how to play the instrument with the high school jazz band, so one night after he finished his homework, I set up a mic in my studio and said, "Just play some random riffs for me, whatever you want, and keep it in this particular kind of a key, and then I'm going to fly it in later." So he just started blowing some licks. I wound up using one or two and placed them at the beginning of the song and put some delays on it, and I had him do it again later in the song. Then he gave me a long, foghorn kind of a tone for the breakdown section. He’s so used to me making music every day that there’s no ceremony around making music at home. He just walked over from his skate ramps, through the door into my studio, picked up his sax, and played.
After I got ZZ on there, it was interesting because the song itself had a long jam at the end with this electric piano part, and I remember thinking, "Oh, it would be great to have this long improvisation at the end where more of the 'familiar' Joe starts to come out." Then we worked on it for an hour or so, and although I put down a bunch of solos, I remember just not liking it and decided to edit it out of the song entirely. We just cut the whole third solo section out, and suddenly the song really didn't have a solo at all. Instead, it ended with ZZ playing a few riffs, and when he heard it, John thought, "Wow, that’s really weird. He’s got to have a guitar solo in it 'cause it’s Joe," but I was thinking, "No, this is really what Professor Satchafunkilus would do, because he’s already made his statement. His statement is the entire funky-guitar ensemble throughout the song—he doesn't need a solo!"
Matt Bissonette: It seems natural that ZZ would be playing on Joe’s albums, and making albums with Joe was really becoming a family affair by this point. We got closer and closer after another record and another tour, and all the drama that comes with the road, and becoming closer friends through dealing together with all the good and bad of that kind of life. So you just kind of realize that you've become a friend where you know somebody’s personality, the good side and bad side, and know what to do. With certain people i've played on records with over the years as a hired gun, you don't really get to know that side of them, but with Joe, as time went on, I kind of knew what he was going after and what was going to work and what wasn't going to work on a record.
John Cuniberti: Shortly after the Strange Beautiful Music album, the whole atmosphere started changing. Joe started recording more stuff at home and using less and less studio time, which dramatically cut down on his overhead. I woul
d say it was 75 percent for artistic reasons, but if he records 50 percent of his guitars at home, he’s probably saved $20,000. For that kind of money, you can buy some pretty sweet gear, versus coming to the studio and paying a thousand dollars a day. We'd had discussions even before then about how he could take the $20,000 we'd need to record those guitars and go buy three great mic preamps and some EQs, and then sit at home working for a month on the parts, or as long as he needed. When he started to make that pro Tools transition, it was kind of a no-brainer for him.
I had a guy come in and tune his room with an equalizer to get it more sonically together. In reorienting him in his room, we redid the acoustics of the room and I had the room retuned for him, which was probably the biggest change we made because acoustically, one of the problems in his project room was, first, it wasn't a big room to begin with. He had a lot of gear in there, of course, and he had his platinum and gold records hanging on the walls, photographs, all these highly reflective surfaces. Joe was never really happy with the way the room sounded, and I told him, "We have to really get this room acoustically better, because you're never going to get it right with all these reflective surfaces."
He asked me to come up with a plan, so I went in and measured the room and came up with a solution for both absorption and reflective types of treatments. We put bass traps into all the corners, and we took down all the reflective surfaces. There was a large window on one side that we covered, and because the room is a rectangle, I changed his orientation so the length of the room was to his back now, and put him one-third of the way into the room—which mathematically is what you're supposed to do for the best acoustics.
When an artist goes into the studio, everything is about time and money. The musicians you hired need direction right then and there, because if you have a band, they want to know what to play. Every hour you're there is more than what seems logical, and every day when you walk out of the studio, you know you've just spent thousands of dollars. You wonder if you got anything that you're actually going to use. Now, things have gotten to the point where you can tweak a room in your home so that it sounds almost as good as an actual recording studio.
Right before I started the project, I had a local engineer, Leff Lefferts from Cutting Edge Audio Group, come in and tell me what upgrades I needed to make. He’s worked at The Plant, and currently works at Skywalker Sound as a sound designer for Lucasfilm, so he knows his stuff. When Pro Tools made the leap into HD, I changed my system. I also had my studio tweaked by Manny LaCarrubba from Sausalito Audio, who analyzed the room’s sound with computer programs and then adjusted it and made suggestions. I was still using my Genelec speakers, which are highly detailed and polished sounding. They're the opposite of, let’s say, NS10s, which throw out a lot of midrange.
I was using an old Marshall SE100 as my main speaker simulator, which meant I was going guitar into amplifier into Marshall SE100 into Pro Tools directly, or through the STT-1 if I wanted to shape it with some EQ or optical compressor. Additionally, the SE100 has some really clever ways of simulating a microphone being right at the cone, at a slight angle, or at a big angle. I like using the 30- and 60-degree angles—off axis, they call it—and it worked pretty well. It really does sound like an amp being miked up by a 57, so that setup worked in my room. As far as guitars, I was using the Ibanez JS1200 and the JS1000 most of the time. What mattered more than the equipment by that point was that another two years had gone by where I continued getting more proficient at recording with Pro Tools in general.
John Cuniberti: Joe’s become such a competent sound engineer in his own right that there’s a lot less pressure on him during recording. When I go over to Joe’s studio and see how he’s got his system hooked up, it’s an interesting way of doing it because he’s not coming from a technical background. He’s more experimental with the way he goes about it. He can walk into the studio with performances that have been edited and feel and sound the way he envisioned them. Back when the studio clock was running, we could go two or three days and not get a guitar performance and/or sound that he was really happy with. So he’s eliminated all that by doing it at home, and he’s feeling more comfortable and confident about his parts. There’s not this anxiety about it, because the problem was that if he wasn't playing something the way he believed it should be played, the band would be playing to that subpar performance. Then if Joe decided to throw his parts out, what the other guys played with him had to be scrapped, too. So whenever we're making a record, he’s kind of splitting roles, and it’s got to be tough producing your own instrumental guitar record, because that’s a ridiculous amount of pressure that I personally wouldn't want to have.
When you're producing, you've got to make some decisions ahead of time just to try to get things done, but when you're out there with your instrument strapped on, you just feel like it’s more natural to change direction based on what you feel in your gut is the right thing to do at the time.
Matt Bissonette: Joe does a lot of the legwork, and like any great producer has always been remarkably composed and relaxed under the circumstances. As we recorded Professor Satch live in the studio, I remember there was more time spent screwing around because we were getting the work done faster. It takes the pressure off when you're on a budget to know the songs are in the bag, and he got more relaxed and was not so much stressing about the little stuff, and just kind of grew like everybody grows, and knew what to sweat and what not to sweat. So toward the end, Jeff and I were just dying laughing half the time about whatever the situation was, and it was just really relaxed. That said, Joe throughout the years has always definitely known what he wants, and he’s got no qualms about telling you if something isn't working. As a producer he'll let you know, and that’s his job.
The lines Matt creates between chord changes are just very unique. He’s a great bass player for all the obvious reasons, but I think the particular thing that always struck me as very unique to Matt Bissonette is his actual creativity in writing connective bass lines. He won't necessarily look at a chord and then put notes in between. That would be your average bass player’s approach. Instead, Matt will somehow look to the third, the fourth, the sixth chord down the line, and he'll make a determination as to what is the real important landing point. Then he'll create a bass line that arcs over a few chords and lands on one you weren't expecting. He continually surprises me as a player.
John Cuniberti: The kind of music Joe wants to make is highly technical yet has to have a feeling and soul to it. How do you put soul into something so technical? He’s been able to walk that fine line. When Joe’s working with a band, he wants to know what each of these guys is going to do to make this a better record.
A good example of that interplay was the recording of "Andalusia," where the acoustic rhythm guitars that begin and go all the way through the song were recorded at home via DI. The solo at the beginning was played on a Sexauer Pernambuco acoustic guitar, and was recorded at The Plant. The song’s electric solo required an unusual approach—I already had "Asik Veysel," which was a first take of this total compositional solo kind of thing, and then when I got to "Andalusia," I thought, "Well, okay, this is similar in the way that it’s another long song that’s got another long solo in it, so I need to come up with a different way of doing it." The guys had a demo solo that they were listening to while tracking that gave them the idea of the arc of the piece, how long it would last, and the intensity of it. Then I had an idea.
When I got to the studio one morning around 11 A.M. , John was already there with assistant Mike Boden and editor Eric Caudieux, and I said, "Here’s my plan: I want to record ten solos. However, the song is seven minutes long, so if you think about it, to do ten solos and tune up in between each one, we're talking an hour and a half of constant playing." So then I suggested, "I'm going to play these ten solos in a row and then I'm going to leave for a few hours. You guys listen to the solos, and if you hear one you like or want to 'comp' a few of them together, y
ou can do that. Just don't tell me what you did."
So I just went crazy, ten solos: BAM, BAM, BAM, BAM, tuning up in between takes, and when I finished, my left hand and arm felt like they were going to fall off! So I left for a couple hours and when I got back, they were all looking at me funny, like, "Oh, you're going to love this." So they played me the whole solo, and I thought, "That is really great," but I literally did NOT remember what I'd played. So it almost sounded like someone else had played it, some other "Joe." I just knew that I went in there and sort of went crazy ten times in a row. I think they may have comped the solo, but I can't really tell you what bits from which takes they took. In the end, though, it was a successful experiment in producing myself, and we got a very emotional and powerful solo out of it.
I've never recorded acoustic guitars with microphones at home— I'm always plugged in. There’s a lot of extraneous noise at home: phones, dogs, street noise, and the risk that somebody could walk in right as you're playing your best stuff. Also, to use a mic at home is pointless because I can't hear the sound the way my producer, John, can hear it while standing right in front of me. That’s the way you need to be miked, by someone who’s standing in front of you, not someone who’s leaning over the guitar. Another thing we did differently with this record compared with past band-oriented records was mix the entire record "in the box," not using the studio console.
John Cuniberti: The beauty of my home setup by that point was that when Joe called me and said something like, "Hey, can you bring my solo on 'Out of the Sunrise' down a dB?," I could do that for him in ten minutes. Then I could send him back that mix within an hour for him to approve. By contrast, if he'd wanted to do that on a console, I would have had to call The Plant, book a session, be sure that everything was thoroughly documented—all the outboard gear in the room, all the patch points, all the cabling—recall everything in the console, which would take me and the assistant engineer probably an hour to do. Then once we got the mix up, we'd need to compare it to the first mix, then continually work on it until we'd gotten it as close as we could to the original, but in truth, it’s never going to be exactly the same. Only then could I make the change for him. Not only is that a pain, but it costs $2,000. Joe loved this new immediacy, being able to just pick up the phone, and so mixing the whole record here at home for him was an easy sell. When he came to my studio and sat down with me on my system, we were doing just fine-tuning. It was fairly painless and effortless.