Citation:
As you described, there are many different atmospheres, and it sounds like there were different setups for each song. What were you using to achieve the sounds?
As far as guitars and gear, on all my solo recordings in the past, I never used the same rig that I use in the Chili Peppers. In the Chili Peppers, I always have a Marshall Major, Marshall Jubilee, and my old Fender Stratocasters. My main Strat is a sunburst '62, my second favorite is a sunburst '57 (Ed. Note: appointments suggest the Strat is actually a '55), and my third is a red '61. It's interesting, the relationship between the tone when you play an electric guitar acoustically and when you play through an amp. There's definitely a correlation between how it sounds acoustically and how it sounds through the amp. That's my fattest-sounding guitar, acoustically and plugged in. It's so much about the way it vibrates when you play different notes. On that guitar, there are certain frets where you hear a reverb-like sound. It has to do with the springs in the back, but it's interesting how some guitars have certain hot spots on them and certain places feel like they vibrate more than others. It's all stuff that gives it personality. I like working and playing around things like that. It gives you a path to travel instead of just having the full option and nowhere to go. It's like having unlimited freedom, but not knowing what to do with it.
So, guitars on this album were one of those three Strats and, on acoustic parts, an all-mahogany Martin. For amps, I was using both the Major and the Jubilee. I used a Fender Bassman on a few things, too. In the last few years I got deeply into what I can do with a Marshall and a Strat, as far as feedback, tone, and things like wah pedals. Because I'm into synthesizers, I started approaching the tools in the basic setup of a guitar with distortion, wah, whammy bar and amplification. I started really looking at those parameters, much like the knobs on a synthesizer. They're just ways to produce different sounds. For this one, I wanted to use the same gear I use in the Chili Peppers because that is the part of me that I've put the most time into developing.
The main stuff for guitar sounds was that rig, and I was treating it with a modular synthesizer. So the recordings usually had nothing more than a wah pedal, distortion and fuzz. I use the Boss Turbo Distortion pretty regularly, and an Electro-Harmonix English Muff'n tube fuzz, which has really extreme EQ and a big, thick, meaty sound. I used it on the solo for Enough Of Me. I turn the EQ up, but leave my guitar tone knobs down and use either the middle or neck pickup so the initial source sound is really dark and kind of plain. If you blast the tone controls on the effect, you get a really thick, beautiful sound that reminds me of an exaggerated Eric Clapton tone in Cream, where you have this really smooth fuzz. For that solo, I was jumping from low to high notes rather than following a linear train of thought. I was kind of thinking in two ways at once by alternately playing very low notes with high notes, where the octave was displaced by a couple of octaves, and it worked really well.
I also used the Mosrite Fuzzrite a lot, and a Maestro Fuzz-Tone, which is a funny one. It's got a cord that goes to the guitar, and there's only an output top the amp. The E-H Holy Grail reverb is a pretty normal thing for me, and the Ibanez WH-10 is my standard wah since BloodSugarSexMagik. I don't think there's a better wah. When we were making Stadium Arcadium, there was so much wah I figured I'd use a variety of pedals and there wasn't one that came close to the Ibanez. There are a couple of Crybabys that are cool, but for me, they weren't as good, because I use a lot of feedback. I want something that when I put it in one position, one note is going to feed back, and when I put it in another position, another note is going to feed back. You just have more variation with the Ibanez because there's a wider frequency range. Another pedal is a Boss Chorus Ensemble, which I use to split the signal in my rig.
And, early digital reverb units like the EMT 250, AMS and Lexicon Prime Time were definitely a big part of the guitar sound. A lot of atmosphere was created by using those reverbs and putting them through the modular synthesizer, then doing weird things like tripping them out on the mixing board. I really like the combination of using early digital reverbs with analog synths, analog synth modules and analog EQs. I think it's a magical combination.
