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'''''Summary''': In the 1993 interview between Joe Satriani and Allan Holdsworth, they discuss their musical influences, techniques, and approaches to playing the guitar. They highlight the importance of developing a unique musical voice and continuously evolving their playing styles. The interview emphasizes the significance of serving the composition and expressing oneself through music rather than adhering to a specific style. They also discuss their passion for music, dedication to constant improvement, and unique approaches to creativity and expression in their playing.'' ''[This summary was written by ChatGPT in 2023 based on the article text below.]'' | |||
Joe Satriani | |||
'''THIS IS AN UPDATED VERSION WITH ADDITIONAL MATERIAL NOT FOUND IN THE FIRST VERSION POSTED HERE. THE SECOND SECTION, CALLED "TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES" WAS ORIGINALLY PRINTED AS A SEPARATE PIECE.''' | |||
==Joe Satriani Meets Allan Holdsworth (Musician special edition 1993)== | |||
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Joe Satriani reminds Allan Holdsworth about loving what you play; Holdsworth warns Satriani about the dangers of becoming a legend | Joe Satriani reminds Allan Holdsworth about loving what you play; Holdsworth warns Satriani about the dangers of becoming a legend | ||
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SATRIANI: How many should I drink before following it up with a Japanese beer? Um...I don't know. I think when I first heard your playing, Allan, I had real simple questions, and as I learned how to play more I realized that any questions I would ask would be infuriatingly stupid, and that the coolest thing would be to actually sit down and just talk to you here, or go out and have a beer, and I would learn a lot more about Allan Holdsworth in the music, rather than saying, “Do you use a wound G?" or "What kind of speaker is in that little box?” Because I'd never go put on that particular string or construct a box, you know? But when you're a young player, you're really concerned about at least catching up, so you will go out and buy Allan Holdsworth strings to see if it has any effect: “Please, God, you know, will it?” [laughs] But after you play a while you realize that's not what it's all about. What it's about is, everyone has their own voice, and the life process is realizing you have to learn about yourself to let it out. The more you let out on your instrument, the more enlarged that voice becomes, the more recognizable it is. And almost to hell with that—the more cool and fun the experience is of playing. Because then your universe is exploding when you're onstage. Very different from playing someone else's music, just doing a gig, making money onstage. When you're doing your own thing, with your own voice, and there are guys onstage with you playing, and they're with your universe there—what an experience. Nothing can beat it. | SATRIANI: How many should I drink before following it up with a Japanese beer? Um...I don't know. I think when I first heard your playing, Allan, I had real simple questions, and as I learned how to play more I realized that any questions I would ask would be infuriatingly stupid, and that the coolest thing would be to actually sit down and just talk to you here, or go out and have a beer, and I would learn a lot more about Allan Holdsworth in the music, rather than saying, “Do you use a wound G?" or "What kind of speaker is in that little box?” Because I'd never go put on that particular string or construct a box, you know? But when you're a young player, you're really concerned about at least catching up, so you will go out and buy Allan Holdsworth strings to see if it has any effect: “Please, God, you know, will it?” [laughs] But after you play a while you realize that's not what it's all about. What it's about is, everyone has their own voice, and the life process is realizing you have to learn about yourself to let it out. The more you let out on your instrument, the more enlarged that voice becomes, the more recognizable it is. And almost to hell with that—the more cool and fun the experience is of playing. Because then your universe is exploding when you're onstage. Very different from playing someone else's music, just doing a gig, making money onstage. When you're doing your own thing, with your own voice, and there are guys onstage with you playing, and they're with your universe there—what an experience. Nothing can beat it. | ||
==OOH-ING AND AHH-ING: SATCH AND HOLDSWORTH EXPERIENCE TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES== | |||
RESNICOFF: One important thing about your playing is that you both emulate the voice: Allan used the breath controller on the SynthAxe to create a contour that wasn't necessarily a guitar or a synthesizer, but just music. And Joe's wah-wah pedal is a voice; you don't hear it as, "Now he's doing his 'White Room'". You hear it as sound unto itself. | |||
SATRIANI: Right, definitely, using it to sort of vocalize, to shape the vowels of the notes, the "words." | |||
HOLDSWORTH: I really hated it when an amplifier would make an "00" sound instead of an "ah." I always liked to be able to move the string a certain way to get it to...you can start the note and then you can make it go to an "ah" sound, more like a reed instrument than an "00." I like an "A" rather than an "0." | |||
SATRIANI: It's true. With some amps that are very good performing amps, maybe a Soldano sometimes, it's so together, so well-built, and when you dial up a certain saturation sound it's always there. A Boogie is like that. But for some songs it's just too good, and you can't get away from that one thing it does. It's like a pickup that's wound too hot: It only gives you one thing, although it's really good at givin' it to you, you know? | |||
HOLDSWORTH: That's why I really dig Boogies, because I've got a few different ones, and they all... like, any amp might be really great, but it'll be one. The thing about Boogies is that one manufacturer makes a lot of different amplifiers that actually have different sounds. I change 'em around and keep using different heads. They all have something, a thread of evidence through them; it's kinda got this Boogie thing, but at the same time they all have a character. | |||
SATRIANI: That Dual Rectifier is a nice head, really nice. | |||
HOLDSWORTH: Yeah, I just got one to try and it's pretty amazing. | |||
SATRIANI: On The Extremist we used this '70s Marshall 100-watt combo, and the thing had a voice like no other. It was clear as a bell: You could have 10 rhythm guitars and it would jump right out. And ultimately you'd call it "thin," as opposed to "thick," like the Dual Rectifier; it didn't have a rumbling low end. Its midrange and high end were so pretty and so perfectly defined—the frequencies complemented each other so well that it just sounded big, it had all this air around it. Even within the course of one song, one melody, you'd find that the verse needs something else: You gotta find another amp that'll go brrmp instead of hhhh. They have a different need, vocally, than the bridge, or the chorus or something like that. I showed up for Not of this Earth without an amp and said, "I just wanna use whatever you got in the closet." My producer John Cuniberti was in control of mikes, and I learned from him. We got into using the AKG CT2A on my amp quite a bit, and just moving it an eighth of an inch, or a couple of centimeters, and I would stand there in the control room and say, "Okay, that sounds pretty good, come on in." [laughs] Sometimes we'd do an entire album through one speaker, just moving the microphone along the grille cloth and drawing little diagrams on it for different songs. Andy Johns' way of operating was to set up a couple of cabinets with speaker wire going into the studio with all the heads, and he put up maybe eight microphones in places where he thinks he's gonna get what he needs: two different Shures in a different place for this and that sound. He'd have his own little controller at the board, and he would just sit there and listen to me play and come up with a blend for every part of every song. He didn't move microphones; he moved combinations of microphones. | |||
HOLDSWORTH: I don't like that approach so much. I've experimented a lot, and certain mikes, I can actually hear the capsule resonance. It might be more tedious, but I prefer the method of using one mike and moving it, just because the phase problems drive me up the wall. It's like taking a graphic and notching something out. Whatever combination of two microphones, they're always gonna add somewhere and subtract somewhere else. If you keep one mike in the same position and move the other, you'll hear it go like eeenkoowaa, you have to keep pushing the phase button to check which is closest. But they're never perfectly in phase. And that can be a good thing: You can use it like a notch filter to pull out certain frequencies or to boost others. | |||
SATRIANI: I do that all the time I'd get a sound we would have to mike and get on tape, and I would be inflexible because the technique would demand a certain amount of gain, or a tiny little scooped-out sound. So we'd say, "Well, everything's great, but every time I play G it goes bcchhh," and he'd put in another mike: you know it's gonna be out-of-phase, so you put it in a way so that when that G comes it doesn't reach the tape because it's been phased out. We've used a problematic situation in our favor. | |||
HOLDSWORTH: And you just find the frequencies you want to get rid of. (chuckles] But it's hard. | |||
SATRIANI: It sure is. Andy has it down. He did the Stones, Led Zeppelin, Van Halen, Free-what an enormous impact he's had. I don't know how he does it, but he records the event. Not all people have the experience or have been put in the position where they need good miking technique. Andy described many important records he had to do where the musicians just didn't sound good, and they would look at him and go, "Well?" He couldn't say, "But you sound horrible..." He would try to say, "If you sound bad, it'll sound bad on tape." When you have to be diplomatic you learn to do things with microphones. I grew up as a guitar player practicing at home and playing onstage-what did I know about mike technique? And the first thing you say is, "I don't sound like that!" And then the engineer sits you down.... [laughs] | |||
A musician learns about playing, and an engineer can go to school or work in studios to learn how to read the dials, but what do you do to gain the technique of creating a musical event? You know, that funny thing that's difficult to describe that makes take one different from take two? | |||
HOLDSWORTH: I wish I knew; that's why I always throw away all my live tapes. [laughter] The worst experience I had was when I first started using distortion, a long time ago. We got the opportunity to go into this studio in Leeds, the town close to where I was born, and the guy in the control room couldn't understand why it had to be loud. I kept saying to him, "It's gotta be this volume for this sound to come out of the amplifier," and he kept saying, "No! You turn it down there, we'll turn it up in here." [laughs] I swear! Now everybody's used to it; they all know about distortion and everything. It's even gone the other way, where they're working on making it easy to record without having to make a lot of noise. | |||
SATRIANI: You know, the first time any guitar player gets to sit down with, or maybe pump a CD through a Fairchild limiter/compressor, they'll start to make connections like, "Wow, that's that sound. That's why it sounds like that." Engineers really should explain to musicians what these things can do, because often the musician hears stuff on record, goes out and gets an amp because they read it in an article or something; they go home, turn it on and it's like, “Ucchh, that's not what's on the record.” And of course, what's on the record is so far removed from what came out of the speakers, it really is; there's a microphone capturing what's coming out, it's going through a cable, through preamps, probably a compressor/limiter so it goes to tape properly, through mastering, and God forbid it's got to get turned into a CD, then of course it's not going to sound like you're standing in front of the amp going braaang. [laughs] | |||
HOLDSWORTH: Yeah, you gotta learn to put it back where it started out, or as close to where you think it started as possible, but that's how musicians learn about using mikes: You remember what you used one day as opposed to another. And some engineers are a real problem, because a lot of engineers that I've worked with have their favorite microphones they want to use on everything and force you to use. So they'll stick a [AKG] 414 in front of the guitar, for example; that's a wonderful microphone, it's just that when I use it, that sound I hear in the control room is not the sound that comes out of the box. And it's difficult, 'cause he's doing his job, and then you get into a war and it just screws up! the whole thing. | |||
SATRIANI: It's true. I've done sessions where I keep my mouth shut because I just can't believe what a massive brick wall I'm up against. And there's nothing you can explain to someone if they don't hear it; you just say, "Okay, I guess my guitar is not gonna be that wonderful liberating experience this time; it's just gonna be a guitar sound.” So if you find those people to work with, they can become your partners in sound design. | |||
HOLDSWORTH: Robert Feist was like that for me, inasmuch as he was the first engineer I'd worked with that was selfless; he actually let me loose on the console, and not too many guys'll let you do that. After a while, of course, when I did that, he understood more what I was looking for, so it was a mutually benefiting thing. Well, perhaps not so much for him as it was for me, but...[laughs] | |||
SATRIANI: Some songs defy good mixing, and other songs can be mixed beautifully three completely different ways, and you still get an interesting song out of it. I've never been able to figure it out. Some songs, no matter what you do, there's something stinky about 'em, or you get another tune where you can leave out certain instruments, whole chunks, and the song still sounds really cool: There's something about the sonic quality of the mix that's exciting or enticing. Boy, that's a whole other ball game, even after you... | |||
HOLDSWORTH: I think that's absolutely true, because sometimes you'll go in and put something up and just kinda barely get it going and it sounds great and you go, "Okay, it's done,” and then there's other things you can do. But usually I've found after mixing and everything, you start juggling with a particular song that you've been having problems with—usually after a while you don't know why. You're still working on it and all of a sudden, for some reason, you don't know what happened, but it sounds okay. Have you ever experienced that one? | |||
SATRIANI: Oh, yeah. And everyone says, "What'd you do?" "I dunno? What'd you do?” [laughs] And you start loading those DAT machines and crossing your fingers, [laughter] before anything goes wrong, you know? | |||
That's really funny. | |||
RESNICOFF: You both like to bypass circuitry, and will mix on different consoles than you record on, if need be. | |||
SATRIANI: I think the history of all my records has been such that there's always some disaster or some ridiculous set of circumstances. | |||
SATRIANI: Oh, yeah. And everyone says, "What'd you do?" "I dunno? What'd you do?” [laughs] And you start loading those DAT machines and crossing your fingers, [laughter] before anything goes wrong, you know? | |||
The last two records, Flying in a Blue Dream and The Extremist, were recorded in so many different places that it was impossible to get 'em all mixed on one board. But yeah, using mike preamps and going directly to the tape recorder, so that if you're in New York for a week recording and then you go to Cleveland for a while and then you're back in L.A. or San Francisco, you're using the same mike preamp and always going into a Studer machine so you don't have to deal with putting on tape the qualities of the different recording consoles in those three or four cities. | |||
Ultimately, if I play something really cool it doesn't even matter about that 10 percent of sonic quality. If it's good stuff, people will generally hear that part of it, if they're receptive to it. I remember that I used to listen to hours and hours of early rock 'n' roll and blues and Charlie Parker recordings done in the bathroom or something; it never crossed my mind that I wouldn't listen to it because it didn't reach some sort of sonic quality level. If I was lucky to get a recording of someone that I liked, I'd listen to it all the time. The sound didn't bother me. So for someone to freak out over the mix not being absolutely perfect or that the guitar tone should have been a little more muted or a little less muted, ultimately you have to say, "Hey, wait a minute-even if we got the tone perfect and the sonics of the record were absolutely wonderful, if they don't like what we're playing, no one will ever listen to it. [laughs]. | |||
Music is performance. You just try to get into it as much as you can, and you try and get as much out of it as you can, 'cause it's part of the same thing. And now, as the equipment improves and the sounds supposedly get better, it all just becomes part of the process of trying to improve it. If you take the two things, the same music, one that sounds good and one that sounds bad, then you'll take the one that sounds good, but ultimately, it is the music. | |||
HOLDSWORTH: But generally, even those old recordings, I think they still were trying really hard, unless we're talking about a bootleg or something. | |||
SATRIANI: It's funny how when you're in the middle of trying to get the best bass tone or something like that, someone'll whisper in your ear, “You know, people have bass and treble controls," [laughs) and it'll kinda remind you about when you were 14, and if only you could go back to your little Walkman or stereo system. And you realize you had the controls all this way and that way, and you'd be putting on records saying, "Oh, this record, man, you gotta go like this," and you put on this other guy's record and “You gotta go like..." | |||
HOLDSWORTH: [laughs] | |||
SATRIANI: And I realize that's what we all do: We totally remaster any record that we buy from the store. We take it home and we go, "Hmmm-gzzzhh," [laughs] and we change it. I know very few people who set their controls straight-up flat and leave it alone; ultimately, it's speakers that already have some sort of weird bias in them, like cars these days, the high end/low end is so hyped, you can forget about the midrange.... | |||
RESNICOFF: Allan, are you still using your speaker box? | |||
HOLDSWORTH: Well, I've used it on everything so far, except when I start this new album, I'm not gonna for the first time because I actually have a room that I can use now. He built an enclosed, soundproofed speaker with built-in microphones, which allows him to record guitar quietly, without amplifiers, and always put a consistent tone on tape... | |||
SATRIANI: Yes. I've seen it. It's the same one? It's been a few years. | |||
HOLDSWORTH: I built a few different size ones. It was the biggest one that I made. The coffin, I used to call it. I didn't have the room to record guitar, we didn't have any soundproofing, and with budgets and everything, I really couldn't afford to keep going to the studio and doing what I wanted to do, so I had to find another way to do it, and it worked really good. I don't think the box is as good as what I can get now, without it, by actually using a room and everything. The only way it worked was at really low volume, and that was a good thing about using a little load box on the amp, because if you drove it too hard, the whole box would resonate, so you had to keep the level really low, and that was the trick in using the coffin. Effects should go on after the sound is made. The way my stuff is set up, you make the sound with the amp you want to use, and then kind of putz with effects after the fact. | |||
SATRIANI: Well, it sounds great on record, so you're doing the right thing, that's for sure. | |||
HOLDSWORTH: It's funny, what you were saying about sound, because you can take guys who use completely different stuff and the sound might be similar. Then you get guys who've got exactly the same stuff and it's completely different. It doesn't come out of the box. People just find what they like, what they want to use, and that's it. | |||
SATRIANI: And it's so touchy. And there's the noise generated from equipment versus what it does to set you free to make the performance happen. Of course, then there's the whole idea of, "Is he the kind of guy that plugs straight into a Marshall or does he depend on his effects?" And it goes right...you know where it peaks? It peaks right up with technique versus feeling: These arguments, I don't know who makes them up. [laughs] | |||
HOLDSWORTH: You know, amps are expensive and everything, and a young guy who's just started goes out and buys an amp 'cause someone else...it might be horrendous. I think a lot of kids worry about that when they see a lot of stuff, especially somebody like me, who has a big train set. But I use things in subtle ways. I'll use four single delay lines to get a chorus when you can just go out and buy one box that does it; I can take four used $100 delay lines and blow any thousand-dollar chorus unit out of the water completely. If another guy had four pieces, he'd be able to get four completely different sounds. I guess people try and get the most from the minimum, but I can't find any new multiprocessor company that can make anything like the sound I want—but, the downside of that is it's four against one rack size, so it ends up being a big box. [laughs] You eventually end up with a lot of stuff, but you're not...I'll always remember one gig we played and this guy came up and asked, “Hey, how come I saw two racks up there and I only heard two sounds all night long?!" I was thinking to myself, “Yeah, but were they okay or not?" | |||
-Matt Resnicoff | |||
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