Red Hot Soloing
“Sometimes it’s nice writing songs on an electric guitar that’s not plugged in and just singing really softly. A lot of the time I do that too. But that ends up usually being weird because then you’ve gotta totally relearn how to sing sometimes when you wrote it really soft. Sometimes you wanna be able to sing something in full voice that’s too high for you to sing in full voice, things like that. So for me, usually, it’s a better idea just to write it on acoustic guitar and be singing it the way I’m gonna sing it in the end, as I’m writing it.”
There’s certainly a lot of acoustic guitar on Shadows Collide With People – it’s one of the primary colours of the music, even in the rockier tracks. Any reason for that?
“It was just part of my concept for the sound of the album,” explains Frusciante. “Where in a section when I could easily get a distorted electric guitar, I’d rather play an acoustic guitar and hear the drums even clearer because the acoustic doesn’t take as much space away from the drums. Just let the drums carry the power of the music rather than feel like I have to reinstate it with the guitar.”
One of the most important factors that appears to drive Frusciante as a musician in his constant quest for self-improvement. “In that period of time, the period of writing By The Way, I was really into learning about chords, developing my understanding of chord theory. I was getting a clearer idea of how to use chords that had more than just a root, a third and a fifth – y‘know, getting into using ninths and 11ths and 13ths an things like that. The acoustic guitar was a much better way to study this than electric guitar because there are so many more harmonics on an acoustic guitar.
“When I practice electric, I don’t plug it in or anything, so when you practice chords on an electric that’s not plugged in, you don’t really hear that much. Whereas on acoustic, its like playing piano or something, ou hear the richness of the tone. That’s important for really understanding the power of what it is to add a ninth or to add a seventh or to add an 11th.”
On Shadows Collide With People, Frusciante also plays a lot of keyboards, something he says actually helped him with his guitar-playing.
“In particular, I was practising a lot,” he says. “I recommend to any guitar player that to see the way chords work on piano is really good for your head. Because on the guitar, things are arranged in a funny way and on piano it’s laid out much more simply. To be able to visualise what’s taking place when you just play a root, then a third, then a fifth, then a seventh, then an 11th, it’s good. On guitar you can’t do anything like that. That’s a chord you just can’t play, because you don’t have enough fingers and the guitar just isn’t laid out that way.”
Additionally, in the course of his continual search for new and interesting variations, Frusciante began bulk-buying chord book by the likes of Burt Bacharach, Elton John and The Beatles, alongside some other, let’s say, more unusual choices – such as the musical scores for Charlie And The Chocolate Factory and Fiddler On The Roof.
“All these things had really interesting chords,” the guitarist stresses, “and I would see the way that people were stringing them together. Especially in pop music back in the sixties and seventies, those songs that Burt Bacharach or The Carpenters wrote, they were always putting the unusual notes in the bass and stuff. That was what I was really into at the time I was writing all these songs.”
