Thanks for taking some time to talk with Tape Op. You got this new record which I've been enjoying. It's sort of different than your past work!
Yeah, very different.
So this new record's called Look, and it's based around the old Roland guitar synths from the '70s.
Yes, that's right. Are you familiar with those?
Well, I'm familiar with them via John Abercrombie and Pat Metheny [records], but beyond that, not much.
That was sort of, I don't know if you'd say directly or indirectly, responsible for my introduction to them. Indirectly, because I was hanging out with my good friend James Valentine who's a guitar player. He grew up in Nebraska. He and his guitar teacher in Nebraska were massive Pat Metheny fans growing up. One day when I was at James's house, he had received this big package, and it was this guitar synth system that belonged to his guitar teacher in Nebraska. He kind of gave me the backstory on its relevance to their bond over being Pat Metheny fans. As he's unboxing it and setting it up and telling me about it, I just sort of assumed that the sound of the guitar synth is just sort of synonymous with the Pat Metheny records. As soon as we plugged it in and started playing it, it became apparent that this is actually a much broader palette of sounds that are capable of coming out of this synth. Even passing the guitar back and forth between James and I, it would sound completely different without changing any of the settings on the synth and the guitar. That was the spark that led me down the obsession with all the models of guitar synthesizers that they were making. I just kind of went on a crawl.
Can you explain what it is? You have an actual guitar that you're playing, and then there's a brain. Can you describe for people who don't really understand what this is? It's not like you're playing a synthesizer so-to-speak.
No, that's right. There's still a lot of it that's mysterious to me, but I'll do my best at the risk of getting some things wrong. As I understand it, it's a fully-functional normal guitar. It doesn't involve MIDI or anything like that. There's a pickup back by the bridge that I believe is called a transducer pickup. It seems like each string has its own proprietary transducer. The transducer converts whatever magnetic energy it's reading off of the string into some sort of language that the analog synth engine, of which there are six, one corresponding to each guitar string, the analog synth engine then understands and will generate an oscillation or just a synthesizer tone. Somebody once told me that the engine is very similar to that of a Juno, but I don't exactly know what that means. I do know that the tracking of guitar synths is much better than anything I've played with MIDI guitars. Even later models of the Roland synthesizer stuff. When I was a kid, I had a VG-8 system growing up, so I could do all that stuff like make your guitar sound like a sitar and program alternate tunings without actually changing the tuning of a guitar. I think it does borrow a lot of the technology from this pickup, but they turned it into something you could put into any guitar as an aftermarket thing. The guitar synths from the '70s I used like the GR-300 and the GR-50 and the GR-500, that sort of synthesizer functionality is much more integral to the entirety of the guitar. The controls, the knobs and what not, all pertain to different things, different controls on the brain itself. There's like attack time, envelope, and kind of an LFO modulation. There's no pre-sets. It's not like you can scroll through a bunch of sounds. If you get something cool, you better take a picture of it with your iPhone, because it's often times really hard to dial back up, at least for me it is.
These things are incredibly hard to find. I forget who I was having a conversation with, but they were saying that there's nobody who repairs them anymore to my knowledge, and Pat Metheny just searches the Internet for them and buys all of them because he uses them frequently.
I'd believe it. Like I said, man, I was having a conversation with somebody and they pointed out what the name for this is. It's some sort of an awareness phenomenon, but once you become aware of something, you start noticing it everywhere. Once I became aware of the synth guitars, I was definitely on Reverb and eBay kind of scouring the Internet to try to find the best deal and most complete package. Sometimes you'd find the guitar without the brain or vice-versa. The other issue that I found is that while there's a pretty extensive, well, the manual that came with them is pretty extensive, but it doesn't get into troubleshooting that much. Like, for example, if there's a bum note on the neck of a guitar, and by bum note, I mean like if you have a slightly raised fret somewhere on the neck, and it causes the adjacent frets to come into contact with the string when you depress that note, usually on a guitar it'll just kind of sound like fret buzz, but on the synth guitar, it can really make the thing go kind of crazy. You know, like make it pick up a completely different note. They're kind of a dangerous thing. I mean, to use it live, the way that Pat Metheny does is pretty brave. In my experience, they do have a mind of their own. It's part of the reason why I don't plan on doing any live shows for this record, because the only way to approach it would be to just come up with a completely different show, which sounds fun, but the thing you're talking about where nobody's around to fix them, we would just guess and check every time something funky starts to happen. The weather will make the guitar change a little bit. The wood will shift and stuff, and it'll get all out of whack. I don't know how deep I want to get into the synth guitar world, because it might be diminishing returns as far as being able to perform with them live. With the rarity of them, they might become really expensive, and then there's another reason not to tour with them anymore.
My understanding is that as you were exploring and learning the instrument, you were recording, and you have some great people who are collaborators on the record. What was the span of what you ended up releasing?
My engineer Joseph Lorge and I went into a studio in town here called Boulevard for a week just to explore the different synths that I'd gotten at that point. The reason why we went into the studio to do it was because so much of the potential, at least for me, when I started to get excited about these, was in applications for the studio. For example, you've got discrete outs for the bottom-end, the polyphonic section, and the monophonic sort of melodic section for one of the synths, the GR-500. What that means is from a single guitar performance, you can more or less isolate different strings and send them to different chains and process them differently. While that's pretty exciting in terms of sending all those to different amps and different effects, the potential for what you can do with recording that stuff, and how you process the different signals, that was really where my head was going with it early on. We just went into the studio to explore the gear a little bit. On one of the days, there was about a 45 minute stretch of just going deep in drop-D on one of the synths. I was just sort of improvising and tweaking knobs and doing stuff. When we went back and started to comb through some of the stuff, that particular stretch of music seemed to really jump out. There were some really beautiful magic things that happened that would be really hard to try to recreate. I got the idea to embellish it a little bit and kind of take a queue from some of the things that sounded like they were in there. It was sort of like one of those magic eye paintings, where you think you hear a French horn coming in in one spot, and then that kind of sounds like a boat pulling in, like the fog horn of a boat that's coming in to dock or something like that. There were these little moments that would appear in the music from the synth guitar, and we tried to elaborate on them and double down on them in some instances, actually adding wind instruments or some string pads and vocals and things like that. It was so much fun. Everybody who came in to participate on the record basically just took that idea and ran with it. They would elaborate on things that they were hearing in the music, not just stuff that I was hearing. It really came to life once we started to collaborate, once I started to collaborate on it with all those different players and musicians.
That's a really fun concept to let the machine dictate. Obviously you were driving the boat, but those are particularly unpredictable at times, is my understanding. I've never actually played one, but like you were saying, sometimes the thing can just go haywire or start creating its own music. That's such a fun concept, to let the things that happened circumstantially start to dictate what elements are brought out of the music. So that's really fun, and it will be interesting for people to listen for as they're listening to the recording.
Yeah. In some instances, we tried to weave everything into one big piece of fabric so it's not overtly discernible what's what. But you know, it definitely feels like an orchestra from some other planet of invented instruments. Like you know that scene in Star Wars where they go into that bar and it's Jabba the Hutt, like his mob hangout, and there's that band playing? It's like the concert hall downtown from that bar, like a bunch of aliens caught like a distant broadcast of some Wagner and were like oh, we could do this! They kind of half-ass some turn-of-the-century German music from earth.
You bring up an interesting point.
Aliens?
Yeah, the aliens. So this record was pretty much made by aliens is what you're saying.
I mean, are we not aliens? Is this really toast that I'm eating?
Yeah, I'm not sure! I can't see it, so maybe you ate toast and maybe you didn't eat toast?
Who's to say anybody can see it? Who's to say that I can see it?
You do bring up an interesting point. I wanted to talk to you about your production philosophy in general. A lot of people get pigeonholed into oh, he's a rock producer, he's a hip-hop producer, and Blake Mills' name is on a lot of different sort of records, from John Legend to Alabama Shakes . When you're in the room with somebody, are these the sorts of things that you're open to? I think I've already given the answer, but I think that's a really open way and it's allowing you the opportunity to work on a lot of different things, because you are not walking into the room doing quote "Blake Mills".
I think there have been times where there's music or projects I would have love to have been a part of that are really fun but in my heart I know are not really relevant. My tendencies will probably not help to get that artist closer to what they want out of a particular record or out of their career or something like that. There's plenty of stuff I'm not appropriate for. That said, I've grown up being a devoted fan to a lot of different kinds of music from a lot of different parts of the world. At a certain age, I remember when I was 14, this was definitely happening, but probably for a few years after that even. I was starting to come into the age where I was falling in love with rock music. I was familiar with songs like "Street Fighting Man" and "Under Pressure". I'd heard those recordings growing up, but then like there was something that changed. Being able to appreciate those songs and the spirit of I guess, for lack of a better term, rock music, I don't know, the energy of it became relevant to me as a 14-year-old kid. I didn't know how to reconcile that with my love for Indian classical music or music from West Africa. Things that I had been playing, I kind of felt like they were, like it was an alter-ego. I was embarrassed about it. I was embarrassed about some of the music I liked. Not for liking it, just because when I was in one house, I would just shield, I would hide my affinity for the other stuff away somewhere. Then I don't know, maybe around the time I was 17 or somewhere in there, I started to realize that some musicians I really loved like Derek Trucks and John Scofield, those are definitely the two guitar players, are the best examples of guys who embraced the eclecticism of their backgrounds and how music can actually disregard a lot of the barriers and differences between one form and another. It was big for me. It's not like a new concept by any means, but I just remember it was a really big one for me. I think looking back and reflecting on your question, it's relevant because I don't have a distinction, at least that I'm aware of anymore, going into a musical situation as to like what kind of music this is. At least not in conversation. It's not like you walk into a room and start talking to an artist about their music and ask them questions like well, now do you want to make an R&B record? Do you want to make a funk record? Do you want to make a rap record? That would be kind of a corny conversation I think. I think the conversations we have are more along the lines of like, what do you feel compelled to write about in your life right now? How are you in your own songs? How do you insert yourself into your own music as opposed to just writing from a place where it seems like songs sound like what lyrics should be? You know, like these sort of abstract conversations. I think they're so much more interesting and allow an artist to make a record that is potentially genre-defining.
Yeah. It certainly leaves the door open, and instead of walking down a narrow hallway with a door at the end and a door that just shut behind you, you walk into the universe of possibility I guess.
Yeah. To be honest, maybe it's even gotten to the point where subconsciously I'm wary of anything happening on a record that's genre-defining, you know? Like if something's taking place that feels too country or too R&B, I don't know if that's the way to put it. I guess it's not so much that it's hitting a genre on the nose, but maybe if it sounds like it's sort of cliché, that's the genre that's the most toxic to me, something that feels to me to be cliché.
You're bringing in interesting people to work on records, if it's somebody who's a solo artist, or you're being brought into a project as a player that maybe dumps the thing on its head a little bit. I remember watching this documentary about Lee "Scratch" Perry, and he was doing art collaborations, non-musical collaborations, where these artists created these works that they were obviously very proud of, but the first thing Lee did with one of these paintings was he started tearing it up. He ripped it into strips, and then he threw it down and put paint on it, drew on it, did his thing on it. Of course it was more interesting. The painting was cool before, but now it was really wild. It completely freaked the guy out, and yet there was this great collaboration that had happened, and the end result was more interesting. I immediately turned that to music and what he does to music. My impression is, even having been in the studio with you, I thought that was such a great eye-opening experience for me, having you come into a session not as a quote-"producer", but really lending a lot of really great ideas and direction to things, to the music, that were complementary and maybe uncomfortable for the artist.
Yeah, it's interesting. Some producers actively try to make the artist uncomfortable, because they feel like they get something interesting out of them in that state. I'm not necessarily ever trying to do that. I don't get anything out of making anybody uncomfortable. I find it interesting that that is a tactic. The anecdote about Lee "Scratch" Perry, maybe there's some of that in there. Maybe the wavelength he wants to get people on is one where they're reacting instead of acting. I think there's something to that because I feel like I want to be reacting instead of acting, you know? As a producer or a musician or a collaborator or anything, I'm so much, I have so much more fun when I'm collaborating than I do when I'm bringing something to the table from scratch, like my own records or something like that. They're much more laborious and much more difficult for me than the records that I produce.
Yeah. And I think it takes a lot of sense of one's self and security in one's self to let a collaboration happen. If you're going to bring people into the room who have talents and have a perspective, it may not always be what feels comfortable, but it may be the thing that down the road can be appreciated once you've had some time. I think Shawn Everett would be another guy. If you sent your music for Shawn Everett to mix, it's probably going to come back different than your rough mix.
Yeah. He'd be disappointed in himself if he didn't recognize himself in his work in that mix.
Why bother having him mix it or having somebody come and contribute if you're not going to embrace their contribution, is my point.
Well, there are certain mixers whose art is about getting into the headspace of the artist and glorifying their vision. That is a completely different technique than sort of applying one's own vision, and it's just as noble of a cause I think. It's just all about putting together a team of people that as an artist, you feel compel you to make the best finished product. So like there are times that I remember having this kind of complete vision for a sound or a song or recording or something like that. It was just a race against the clock to not forget what that vision was or that inspiration was to just try to get it out into reality. In other words, you've got this idea for what a record or song can sound like, and then immediately you go to okay, how do I build it? The easiest way is to just if you can, play everything yourself. If you've got a real strong opinion about how you want it to sound and the panning and everything, the easiest way is to just do that yourself. There's a sound to records that are made in that kind of insular way that it's unique and interesting. But I've gone back to some of those records of mine at least, and I've found that while I'm glad that I was able to exercise the vision that I had in its entirety, I'm a little underwhelmed because it doesn't feel like something that's beyond me. I'm now at the moment more interested in creating something or participating in something that is beyond me as an artist and my abilities as an artist. I imagine that that will stay relevant for me as an artist for years to come. You know what I mean?
So you've moved in to Sound City. I've had the opportunity to walk in there and see the place all shined up. It sort of has a new life. Can you just tell me a little bit about how that happened and your relationship with Tony Berg who's in the smaller room there? I love the story of how you guys met.
Well, our history crosses paths with Sound City as well, because the Simon Dawes record was made at Sound City in B, with Tony producing. Sound City was actually the first professional recording studio I'd ever worked in. I think I was 17 or 18 when we made that record. I got the bug man. That was like the beginning of the end of touring for me, making that record. So the years after my time in Simon Dawes, I started to do session work. I became really interested in doing more session work. Primarily I would work out of Tony's backyard, on records he was producing. During that time I think it was maybe the most, I don't know if the right word is prolific, but it was definitely the time where I got to witness what record-making was close up for a variety of different artists and types of records and really honed a craft of playing that was relevant to recording as opposed to live. So in other words, the stuff that worked at a live show and went over well in front of an audience as a guitar player, in front of a microphone, was nowhere near as energetic and successful and just didn't communicate on record. It didn't translate well. That was kind of exciting for me, that challenge, of okay well, how do I do that then? How do I figure that out? And so in February, we started moving in and kind of resuscitating the rooms there, which didn't have anything in them. The only stuff that was still there was the grand piano in A, an upright piano in B, the A800 tape machine is there, the original tape machine, but it's still in disrepair, so we're working on that. Everything else was gone. We sort of repopulated it with instruments and gear, and there's a crazy collection of guitars between Tony and I. The weirdest guitar collection in Los Angeles, undoubtedly. Then a friend of mine Avedis, from Avedis Audio, I knew he'd had this Neve that he had been rebuilding for a little over a decade. It's an 8036 that he had kind of souped up. We worked out a way to get that in A. It's the first time a Neve has been back in A since Dave Grohl bought the console. We had to do a bunch of rewiring, and we had a lot of help from our friends and engineers and producers and stuff, just rebuilding the place to be a functional recording studio. It's been home to the records that Tony and I have worked on and to our community of producers and musicians and friends to use and celebrate. It's been incredible for me as a writer and as a record-maker as well, to have a space that contributes as a collaborator. Earlier we were talking about that idea of working off of something that exists and contributes something. To walk into that building and hear instruments in the live room and to get to listen to music on the big original Augspurger speakers, there's definitely a vibe in that building that contributes to the spirit of creativity. It's undeniable to me and to everybody who has come through the doors in there. It really is an honor to be a part of that history.
Thanks for your time. It's great to chat as always. I'm glad that we could share it and record it for Tape Op listeners.
It's a pleasure, man. I'm a big fan.
