Guided By Voices
GW: So you were working on 24-track analog?
Frusciante: Yes. We had one 24-track machine for the basic tracks, another 24-track for overdubs, which were mostly guitars, and a third 24-track for the vocals. There was a lot of tape manipulation of the guitar tracks as well - varispeeding the tape to put the guitars in different octabes, or flipping the tape over for backward effects. For example, on the solo for "Stadium Arcadium," I flipped the tape over and processed the guitar through an old EMT 250 digital reverb that was then run through a high pass filter from my modular rig. So it's backward reverb, filtered. I did three different passes of that, listening to the track backward and opening up the high-pass filter on the reverb. Then I flipped the tape over and took the best bits of the three passes - did a comp, basically - and then erased what I didn't need. I did the same thing at the very end of "Come On Girl," where Anthony comes in singing and there's a guitar that answers him. The filtered reverb sound turns into the real guitar sound. If you tail it right, that's the sound it produces, as if sounds are coming out of thin air.
GW: Perhaps the ultimate example of that kind of thing is the solo section in "Turn It Again." It really raises the bar for guitar solos.
Frusciante: Thanks. That solo basically goes in five sections, with different harmony guitars coming in and out. Some were sped up on the tape, some were slowed down, some were re-amped for more distortion... We were using 71 channels on the board to mix that one. I mixed it myself. It wouldn't have made sense to anyone but me because there were so many guitars. I would just memorize where I wanted a particular part to come in. The board was automated, so I could deal with one track at a time. It was just two hours of sitting there mixing the thing.
GW: Did you use conventional guitar effects at all?
Frusciante: Yes, but not as extensively as the modular gear. I did use the new POG [Polyphonic Octave Generator] from Electro-Harmonix, which is what's making the guitar sound just like an organ on "She Looks to Me" and "Snow." I used the new Electro-Harmonix English Muff'n, too, which is a really cool tube-driven distortion box. And, of course, I always use a Big Muff and a Boss distortion pedal [usually a DS-2, but sometimes a DS-1] and my Ibanez WH-10 wah.
GW: Some sounds on the album have a very early Sixties "Telstar" kind of quality ["Telstar" was a 1962 instrumental hit by the Tornados that featured a Clavioline, a tube-driven electric organ designed in the late Forties]. For instance, the sound that sets up the second verse in "Stadium Arcadium" - it sounds like an old reed organ or maybe a Vox guitar organ.
Frusciante: That's a piano going through a modular synthesize, probably a high-pass filter with the gain being altered by an LFO.
GW: There's a lot of that kind of fast modulation on the album.
Frusciante: Yeah, that's one of my favorite patches. I did it to the vocals, my guitar...
GW: Other things sound like you used a Uni-Vibe pedal.
Frusciante: Well, that patch does remind me of something like a rotary speaker [which the Uni-Vibe was designed to emulate].
