Guided By Voices
GW: But it's all the modular gear?
Frusciante: Usually, yeah. The only time I used an actual rotary Leslie speaker was at the end of "Death of a Martian." When it goes into the outro, you hear the guitar by itself, and then another guitar comes in, doubling the same part. That's actually a Leslie. But usually i'm just crating an electronic version of that with the modular sytem, which gives you much more control over the rhythm and all the other parameters. To my ear, it sounds like a space-age version of how a Leslie would sound.
GW: As I said, very "Telstar." Definitely an early Sixties sci-fi vibe.
Frusciante: Well, Joe Meek was a huge inspiration to me. [British audio wiz Joe Meek produced "Telstar" and designed signal-processing gear, most notably compressors.] Especially on By the Way. He's the reason why that album is compressed the way it is, 'cause I was into him. A lot of sonic experimentation was going on in the Sixties, and I feel that a lot of what I've done on our new album is based on that. Things like tape manipulation - people have stopped doing that because they don't even use tape anymore, but you can get incredible sound that way.
Like on "Stadium Arcadium": there's a guitar that comes in halfway through the first verse. It sounds like a mandolin patch from a Mellotron [tape-based sample-playback keyboard from the Sixties] or something, but it's a guitar. I just slowed the tape down and strummed the guitars really fast. When you bring the tape back up to speed, that's the sound you get. I did that a few times on the album - it's also on "Hard to Concentrate." There is also something that sounds like a harpischord on the end of "Wet Sand," but it's three guitars in harmony playing an arpeggio riff that I wrote. I slowed the tape down, recorded the three parts, and lo and behold, when I sped the tape up it sounded like a harpsichord. A few days later I realized that maybe that's the sound on "Burning of the Midnight Lamp" by Jimi Hendrix. It sounds like a harpsichord, but it could just be a guitar that's sped up.
GW: The panning on Stadium Arcadium is as intense as it is on Electric Ladyland, but the stereo imaging is, nevertheless, incredible.
Frusciante: Well, people have stopped panning sounds hard left and right. In the Sixties, they had to do it because of the way pan pots were when they were first invented: they could only be hard left, hard right or center. And actually you get a purer sound when you're on only one speaker. No matter how good the speaker system, whenever you're sending the same information to two speakers, it's always going to be a little off.
GW: Phase cancellation.
Frusciante: There's always a little bit of phase cancellation, yes. So when you pan something to the center, or any place that isn't hard left or hard right, you're sacrificing a little of the presence of the sound. So I panned a lot of my guitars hard right and hard left. Rick would be scared to do that with a lead vocal, for instance. But listen to the fucking Beatles records! The vocal is all the way to one side, and you've never heard a vocal sound so much like it's right in your living room. They were really doing things right in the Sixties. It's just a matter of us getting up the nerve to do something that awkward and experimental and really rise up to what those people were doing then.
GW: Do you feel like the Sixties were a high point of the art form?
Frusciante: I really do, yeah. But the music I get a lot out of now is very far from that. I don't go looking for songwriters like the Beatles or guitar players like Jimi Hendrix in today's world. They're not around and I'm not looking. If I want to experience that same sense of experimentation, I'll listen to electronic music like Aphex Twin, Finez or Pita - people who are selling, like, 500 copies of an album. Or I'll listen to guitar players like Oren Ambarchi or Raphael Toral, two guys who get all kinds of amazing textures out of guitars. And for backing vocals, I really like Brandy's last record and her record before that. They are so inspiring to me. I love her singing so much - her phrasing, her sense of timing.
