Universally Speaking
Chord Blimey!
John on how to expand your chord vocabulary...
"For me, books were the best place to learn about chords. If your ear is not accustomed to knowing that right there there's a 6th and a 9th or whatever, you're not gonna just hear it from listening. I was buying tons of chord books a little while back. I learnt a lot from a Charles Mingus book and the book of The Beatles' score: they both used really interesting ones a lot of the time. I had Burt Bacharach books that had great chords. The Fiddler On The Roof and Willie Wonka And The Chocolate Factory books had some incredible chords in them that you would never think of. I was just learning everything I could from books like that.
"The whole thing with chords is that it has to do with one following the next. When I was a teenager I had a book called Chord Chemistry by Ted Green, but it didn't really give you chords in any kind of context. Just a million ways to play a minor 7th. To me any chord book needs to have its counterpart book that uses those kinds of chords. A good book I found is called Grimoire Chord Encyclopaedia. The nice thing about it is that it has a page in the back where it says a chord and tells you what intervals are in that chord. That way when you have your Charles Mingus book or your Charlie Parker book and you read the chords out of that, when you get to one where you don't know what intervals are contained in that chord, you can just look it up. It's so important to see chords in practice. A chord like a flat 9th, I came across it one day in two different songs. It was in Michelle by The Beatles and a Charles Mingus song, and it was used in a similar way in both. The root chord was the key that the song was using and the flat 9th a fifth away from that chord. So I wrote a song that day that used it in the same way.
"One of my favourite things to do with chords is where you play a normal chord but the bass is doing a note other than the chord you're playing. Like an A minor chord with a B in the bass or something. Or in the series of a bunch of chords, if you're playing an A minor chord but E flat is in the bass, not A flat, it really does turn the chord in to something else."
Simple solos?!
John on his approach to soloing on By The Way...
"I think, as a guitar player, when we were recording the record I was thinking very much in terms of being as simple as possible. And I was getting the ideas for my melodies from the way Kraftwerk use melody... the way I hear synthesisers doing melodies more so than guitar players. Michael Rother from the band Neu!, who also made solo records that were really great, his playing was very influential to the way I played on that album. Where every note has its perfect place that it falls and builds on what the last note had started. And you use very few 16th notes. That was my idea for solos. A lot of the times what a guitar hero does is play a group of notes where you hear the feeling created by those notes happening very fast, like Jimmy Page would do. I just didn't want to do that on By The Way. I wanted all my solos to be something you could sing along with."
Hot Bit:
* When recording By The Way, Frusciante listened to one of The Human League's first two albums, Reproduction or Travelogue, every day on the way to the studio.
* Frusciante and Flea's legendary jam sessions under the Three Amoebas moniker seem unlikely to be released. Frusciante has lost the tapes.
* The acoustic sounds you hear on By The Way were performed using a Taylor, as producer Rick Rubin likes them. Frusciante isn't such a fan and prefers Martins
* Frusciante still wants to own a '59 Les Paul, he just can't find the right one
John Frusciante Stylefile
In his two periods as a Red Hot Chili Pepper, New Yorker John Frusciante has covered a bewildering range of musical bases, combining elements of funk, punk, blues and rock with swaggering abandon. John's arrival in 1988 gave theband the extra polish they needed to propel them into the mainstream with their fourth album Mother's Milk. However, it was the nest album, the long and yet never boring BloodSugarSexMagik, where John really excelled, driving the stylistically varied songs with a constantly changing palette of guitar tones and textures. After a difficult period of drug addiction, it's good to see him back in the band, doing what he does best.
