Peter Hodgson from I Heart Guitar recently caught up with Joe Satriani for a quick chat about his new album, his distortion box and his new band. Joe Satriani has spent the past five months touring in South America, Europe and other countries. And is about to begin an American tour behind his current CD, “Professor Satchafunkilus and the Musterion of Rock.”
Here's a small snippet:
Peter: Did you have an overall goal for this album?
Joe Satriani: I had a couple that were sort of streaming along each other. I wanted it to be a pretty eclectic mix of music. I wanted some tight arrangements. I wanted some songs to be really open so I could put a lot of improvisation in, and I wanted to try to some serious music and then some music that was very light-hearted, you know? And it’s always a risk when you try to entertain a theme that has many themes – it’s not just a singular theme. But it was something I wanted to do after previewing about 40 of my compositions.
I started to edit it down to about 16. I really started to feel like I didn’t want to let go of some of the improv songs, so I kept ‘Andalusia’ and ‘Asik Vaysel,’ and I wanted to keep the ballads, but I also wanted them to coexist with the songs like ‘Diddle Y A Doo Dat’ and ‘I Just Wanna Rock’ – songs that were very lighthearted. I brought the idea to (producer) John Cuniberti that we would keep the instrumentation spare and we would keep things sounding very heavy and organic, so as you play the record louder it would get better sounding, not worse sounding.
That has a lot to do with dynamics and how you record, and eventually how you master, so it’s something you have to make a decision on very early on. Some of the drums were recorded with just three microphones, and the drumkit was a very old, 30-year-old kit. We kept things very simple, so we could build along that theory that we’d have a warm-sounding record.
To read more of the interview, visit http://iheartguitar.blogspot.com/2008/10/interview-joe-satriani.html
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