As one half of famed electronica project "Frou Frou" and producer of Seal, BjΓΆrk, and Lamb, among others, Guy Sigsworth has earned his spurs in the music business as a highly creative mind behind the mixing desk and the computer screen. Over the course of the past year, Guy has been teaming up with guitar player and tech wizard Andy Page to work with Alanis Morissette on her forthcoming album, "Flavors of Entanglement".
In contrast to Alanis' previous work, this new album will sound much more electronic, yet without losing sight of its organic quality. In this interview, Guy and Andy give us an exclusive insight into their quest for musical innovation, for which GUITAR RIG and REAKTOR serve as the cornerstones.
Interview: Florian Grote
Which instrument do you turn to when you simply want to sketch out a creative idea you had?
Guy: It might be as lo-fi as a dictaphone by the bed, or as hi-fi as a Protools HD system, or a piano, a guitar, or a piece of software. I've written songs every kind of way. Some of my best ideas come to me when there are no traditional musical instruments available.
Andy: I'm a guitar player, and a lot of my ideas come from that. But there are certain times when you don't want to be pressured by a particular instrument to write a certain way. Sometimes just a new sound can be the catalyst for your music.
Guy: I'd agree with that. I'm a very good keyboard player. Sometimes I trust that, but other times I prefer an instrument I'm not so good at, because there I don't have familiar patterns.
Do you work with Reaktor because it gives you this kind of freedom?
Andy: Working with Reaktor can open up many new possibilities. It gets you thinking from a perspective of just sound, rather than approaching something from a melodic or harmonic angle.
Guy: I love the fact that every day there are 20 new ensembles people have made, and they're giving you them for free. It's all part of this web generosity.
Andy: We mostly use pre-existing Reaktor ensembles and modify them to suit our working methods. There are so many fantastic ones to choose from. But some of them actually do too much for us. There may be a granulator, resonant filter, delay, reverb and 5-band EQ all built into an ensemble. What's unique is the granulator. The other elements are okay but not unique. So we'll strip out the granulator, discard the other bits and have a new ensemble with just that unique element. Learning how to "hot-wire" existing ensembles like that is relatively easy. Unlike with hardware it doesn't involve a soldering iron or the wearing of protective clothing!
Guy: I've always come at music more from the sampler than the synthesizer. That is, I prefer to work with sounds that were embodied physically to start with. They just have some air around them somewhere. Although I love Kraftwerk, I've never wanted to make music as purely electronic as that. Maybe it's because I got a sampler before I got a synth, but the modification and morphing of acoustic or semi-acoustic sources just excites me more. That's why Reaktor is great for me, because I can work on acoustic sources.
Andy: I fell in love with Reaktor in 2001. One of the things that appealed to me the most about it was the fact that you weren't locked in to using the same old methods of synthesis, namely subtractive synthesis. I also think that one of the most exciting applications of Reaktor is the convergance of acoustic sounds with digital manipulation, taking "normal" sound sources like pianos and guitars, and giving them a completely different spin.
Guy: But if you're working with a singer who wants to be understood, you may have to be very subtle with this. That's why, with Alanis, she has to "command" the song. She is the focus. We still play with unusual delays, reverbs, and other treatments, but it's really important that people can hear what she's saying.
Andy: Nevertheless, there is often room for us to experiment with how we present her voice. For example, we use Spektral Delay quite a bit, because we are always looking for new ways of giving parts of a mix a special ambience. We use it on guitars, synths, drums, vocals, etc.
Speaking of guitars: When did you come across Guitar Rig?
Guy: During this album. Since I heard it, I've sold a certain rival product. It just sounds soooo good! The models are really "generous" in their frequency response.
Andy: When we were recording the guitars, our initial plan was to record through a well known hardware guitar box, and to record a DI signal as well, with the intention of re-amping later on.
Guy: But once we heard Guitar Rig...
Andy: ...there just was no looking back! Pretty much all the guitars were recorded with it.
Automation in Protools
Which amp models do you use the most?
Andy: The Vox Box, the Twin, and the Gratifier. But my new favourite is the Hi-Watt model in version 3! It sounds brilliant - especially for those not quite "clean" parts that require just the right amount of dirt.
Guy: We really layer guitars in odd ways. For example, I'm a fan of Holger Czukay - these records where he played the guitar at half speed. I love this "tuned up" sound. Andy did that with electrics and acoustics.
Andy: To achieve this, we do a LOT of automation in Protools. Using Guitar Rig fits perfectly into that way of working - we really celebrate the fact that one can automate as many parameters as you like.
Guy: Live, you'd need six people with their hands on every dial on the amp!
Andy: On one of the tracks, there are sustained chords that happen one per bar. For this, we automated the gain on the Hi-Watt model. So when you hear the initial attack of each chord, the gain is quite low. Then, as the chord sustains, the gain is increased by quite a bit - increasing the distortion, and creating a really nice "swell" in each chord. This kind of thing would have been impossible to do 10 years ago.
Guy: One other element we really got into with this album was dynamics. With Protools, we have absurd control of dynamics, we can shape dynamics in unconventional ways - it's more than just compression. We make sounds swell by 96dB in a 16th note!
Andy: In fact, we don't really use compression to control volume - we use compression for the "sound" of it.
Okay, so it's a lot about detailed editing then?
Guy: Editing is everything!
Andy: Yes! Down to the subatomic level of sound!
Guy: But Alanis has to sound fantastic at all times. If we aren't presenting her as well as we know how, we're not doing our job.
How did you communicate with Alanis about all the editing and sound design you were doing? Was she involved in that at all?
Guy: Alanis comes in and mostly lets us do what we do. She doesn't tell us off very often. We're good boys, after all...
Andy: She was really supportive. I think she wanted to go in a different sonic direction with this album.
Guy: She has a clear sense of the emotional feel of the song. As long as we're true to that, she doesn't mind if we use bizarre sounds to tell the story.
How did the songwriting come along? I would imagine that your work had a big influence on the songs themselves?
Guy: Alanis likes DRAMA in her songs. I wrote all the songs with her, basically one song a day until we had 23 songs. We agreed that we wanted the songs to take you on a journey. Some "geeky" music basically has no surprises after the first four bars. We liked the idea that the instrumentation might suddenly change, or the dynamics, or the chords. And vocally she's so good at drama! She can go from a whisper to a scream.
Andy: Alanis is such a dynamic singer and writer - her dynamic range is huge! That challenged us to make the productions as exciting and as dynamic as possible.
Guy: She's also very much a "take one" singer. She gets the feel right at the start, so don't mess up the early "demo" recordings!
Which guitars did you use for the recording?
Andy: The two main electrics used were my Tasmanian made Rizzolo Guitar and a Fender Jazzmaster, with smatterings of Rickenbacker, Strat and Les Paul. Acoustics used were a Taylor "Big Baby", a K.Yaira "Parlour" guitar, and a Guild dreadnought. Even a very dodgy Hofner bass sounded really good through Guitar Rig. Actually, the bass amp models are just as good! We have been using it on many other instruments as well, like drums and synths.
Did you use hardware effects and guitar amps at all?
Andy: Very little, since we got Guitar Rig.
Guy: We're absolutely not just using Guitar Rig as a budget solution. We want it to do what "real" amps can't. I hope Guitar Rig will make people invent new approaches to the guitar.
That's very interesting! So you take straightforward guitar sounds to do something that's technically impossible with the original model.
Andy: Definitely. You can make a mix so much more exciting and dynamic, just with a bit of automation. And it just sounds so good! Being a programmer and sound designer as well as being a guitar player - it opens up so many exciting possibilities.
How did you go about creating the specific sound for this album?
Guy: There's one song, called "Limbo no More" which I think has a particularly beautiful sound. For this, we layered various guitars so that the result sounds between mandolin, Appalachian Zither and even Indian instruments. But it's actually just guitars! Also, there's a beautiful riff played on a Rickenbacker, with the fingers mic'd up, to add an "ethnic" feel. I've always been inspired by the idea of imaginary ethnic instruments: Instruments that don't really exist, but you imagine them.
Andy: Sometimes, we'd also use the old "varispeed" effect - only in digital form. It is achieved by bouncing a section of the song, pitching it down or up, then playing the part in a different key, and then transposing the result back to the key of the song. The formants get shifted that way.
Guy: Yeah - that helps change the feel.
Andy: A standard acoustic guitar can become something like a mandolin!
Guy: One idea I had for this album was to always make things hybrid. So if it's very full of guitars, let's put a junglist reese synth bass on it, or very electronic drums. I wanted to always counterbalance things.
Andy: Another concept we worked with is a "familiar but new" approach. For some of the drum programming, sometimes we used classic old sounds, like the Oberheim DMX, but processed them in new ways to give them a different spin - often with unusual ambiences from Spektral Delay, Laserbrew, or Springtank.
Guy: I think one thing we've got really good at is making our "weird noises" tell a story. It's easy to make odd, alien noises, but what we want to do is fit them into a song narrative. So maybe you first hear an instrument you recognize, then we manipulate it, but the manipulations still preserve enough of the original that you can tell. It's possible to twist sounds so much that it almost doesn't matter what the source sound is. But that doesn't necessarily "tell a story".
Andy: The trick is to make those sounds sit in the context of a song.
Guy: It's a challenge - and one we love!
Sounds great! Guy and Andy, thank you so much for this interview!
Source:
www.native-instruments.com/index.php?id=sigsworth&L=0 Sooo new song title...'No More Limbo'.
Heavy on the unless.
