Session Sages: Nick Raskulinecz, Dave Cobb, and Buddy Miller on Recording Guitars
Three acclaimed guitarist-producers on the tools, techniques, and philosophies that guide their work with heavy-hitters like Rush, Mastodon, Jason Isbell, and Robert Plant.
Playwright and polemicist George Bernard Shaw is the chap who coined the phrase, “He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.” But in the world of recording, guitarists who are also producers and engineers get some of the coolest 6-string sounds being put to actual or virtual tape—both doing and leading the way by example.
Three sterling exemplars are Nick Raskulinecz, Buddy Miller, and Dave Cobb, whose work—which embraces rich-sounding recordings of some of the finest guitar players around, including Dave Grohl, Alex Lifeson, Richard Thompson, Marc Ribot, Jason Isbell, and Scott Holiday—is abundantly audible across the spectrum of rock, metal, Americana, country, bluegrass, and pop.
We recently talked to them about how they record guitars—including, for Miller and Cobb, their own instruments—and gleaned tips on tone, microphone selection and placement, amps and guitars, how to inspire sterling performances, and how to capture good vibrations along the way.
Nick Raskulinecz: Hyperrealism
The point for guitarists, Raskulinecz declares, should not be mastering recording, but mastering their instruments and songwriting and arranging skills. Photo by Rich Tarbell
When we spoke, Raskulinecz—who has been nominated for 16 Grammys and won three—had just completed Korn’s new The Serenity of Suffering. “The challenge was recording an album that sounds fresh with a band that’s already made 11 albums,” he says. “That involved finding new approaches for each guy’s guitar sound, writing great riffs, and working hard on the sounds. Brian [“Head” Welch] and Munky [James “Munky” Shaffer] are both guitar heroes, and we spent a fucking year making the record. We spent a lot of time finding the right amps, cabs, and guitars. For the first time ever, I had them both in the control room with their pedals on the floor, facing each other. We cut every guitar track on every song that way. The three of us went on a guitar journey together.”
For Raskulinecz, whose Rock Falcon Studio is located in Franklin, Tennessee, “every parameter of recording is different for every player. But one thing that’s consistent is about players’ picking hands. A player’s right hand”—for righties, at least—“determines the dynamics, their rhythmic precision, and how chunky or open their sound is. When somebody is really heavy-handed, that affects the front of the amp—how the preamp reacts. It also comes down to tuning, which can go way out if you play hard. The first thing I do before a single take is get heavy-handed players to increase their string gauge. If you play .009s, I take the gauge to .010s. With .010s, it’s up to .011s.”
His go-to microphones are classics: the Shure SM57 and the Neumann U 47. “That’s my combo,” he explains. “These are good, dependable microphones to invest in. My first batch of mics was five SM57s and a Shure condenser mic, and I’ve been using them for 25 years. Sometimes I use a Neumann KM 84 condenser and sometimes a ribbon mic. It’s important to me that I don’t repeat myself session to session, so I mix it up. I even make sure I place amp cabinets in different spots.”
—Nick Raskulinecz
Asked where he typically places his favorite mic combo, Raskulinecz says, “I put both of them on a different speaker, on a different part of the cabinet, and combine the sound. For most of the hard rock and metal stuff I do, it’s pretty close—1 1/2" to 2" off the grille cloth. I often put it right where the dust cover meets the speaker.”
DI recording is a key part of Raskulinecz’s strategy, too, although he says it’s primarily for editing purposes. “I want to see the attack in the waveform—where the pick hits the string—instead of having a waveform that looks like a hot dog bun from beginning to end. And I split the signal so there are no effects—just the natural sound of the guitar. With a lot of effects on, it’s sometimes impossible to hear exactly what’s going on clear enough to edit efficiently. When I’m done editing, the DI recording gets erased, because I don’t want that track to be able to be reamped.”
That said, he’s got at least 200 pedals on hand at Rock Falcon (an Electro-Harmonix Memory Man, MXR Carbon Copy, various wahs, and Fractal Audio’s Axe-Fx are staples), and he is a fan of printing effects as a performance goes down. “If you’re playing a part and you’ve got the sound—and it has an effect on it—that makes you play differently,” Raskulinecz says. “It makes you create around that vibe and sound.” However, he reserves the right to keep tremolo and vibrato out of original performances, often opting to add them in later using plug-ins. “The timing on both of those can affect the mix, and once you put them on with an amp, you’re stuck with it.”
Asked how the famous “staple” modeler factors into his lineup, he explains, “I use the Axe-Fx for overdubs—never the main guitar sound. I love big, powerful amps that you have to turn up about halfway to get them to speak and feel the power and the bottom end, with a big cab,. It’s all about the low end for me. To me, none of the profiling amps have the same low end a real amp does. To get the right bottom, I love old Orange amps, old Marshall plexis, old Hiwatts … They’re undeniable. I’ve heard certain Vox AC30s that sound so beautiful you want to cry because the tone is so pure. That’s the sound I’m looking for.”
The production maven captures the sound from said amps to Pro Tools. “I came from the analog world, but I’m all about moving forward,” he says. “There’s not one thing I miss about tape.”
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At work in his “full-on rock ’n’ roll clubhouse,” Rock Falcon Studio in Franklin, Tennessee, Nick Raskulinecz conducts the Hold Steady’s Steve Selvidge in a soaring, melodic lead (at the 1:50 mark).
If he’s got a band of killer players, Raskulinecz likes to record them performing together live to capture that energy—unless he doesn’t. “It’s 50/50,” he says. “Sometimes the right thing to do is lay down a scratch guitar track, let the drummer play to that, and work from there. Some guitarists don’t want to play the song the 10 to 20 times it’ll take to get the drum take. They want to lay it down once and split, or come into the control room with me to listen. It’s whatever works for the band—nothing written in stone.” Bleed, however, is a no-no, live or not.
“I don’t find anything positive in bleed,” he says. “People talk about how it can be part of the vibe, but it’s just a pain in the ass at the end of the day. When you add EQ to the guitar and it makes the cymbals brighter because they’re in that track, or when you add more bottom to the drums and it brings the guitar up, that’s not good.”
For acoustic guitars, it’s about environment. “It starts with finding a great place in the room,” he relates. “That’s usually a spot that’s not too reflective or too dead—usually a wood floor with a reflective wall. But sometimes the best place to record an acoustic guitar isn’t in the studio. A lot of them sound great in the control room—and then it’s just mic technique. It’s got to be an SM57 or a Neumann M 49, or both. I like to put one where the soundhole meets the fretboard, and the other right above the player’s head, pointing down.”
Asked what his biggest piece of advice is for guitarists wanting to record, Raskulinecz chuckles a little and replies, “Don’t. Find somebody you enjoy recording with and just worry about playing your guitar and what’s coming out of the speakers. Being able to record doesn’t make a musician a better player or songwriter. Once technology takes over your life, you’re cooked. You forget why you’re really doing this, which is the music and the songs.”
Although Buddy Miller’s been working outside of his house in recent years, on the TV show Nashville, his formidable home studio has been the site of acclaimed recordings by Richard Thompson, Solomon Burke, and many others.
Photo by CJ Hicks
Buddy Miller: Audio Vérité
“Give me two amps in the morning with a stereo pedal, and I need less psychedelics in my life, because I can get it all right there,” says Buddy Miller. Add in some tremolo—Miller’s favorite effect—and he’s even deeper into the sonic headspace that’s made him one of the most respected instrumentalists and producers in Americana.Miller’s own signature slash-and-smolder playing can be heard on recordings by Robert Plant, Elvis Costello, Richard Thompson, Lucinda Williams, Emmylou Harris, Solomon Burke, Shawn Colvin, Ralph Stanley, his trio with Marc Ribot and Bill Frisell, Levon Helm, Patty Griffin, Steve Earle, Willie Nelson, his solo albums, and his duet recordings with his wife, Julie. He’s also produced many of those albums, in addition to touring as lead guitarist in Plant’s Band of Joy and with Plant and Alison Krauss, as well as Harris and Williams.
Until recently, Miller’s house—his longtime recording space—was wired for sound, with contact mics and Shure SM57s attached to walls and peeking from ceilings. “That way we could record at any time, so we’d never lose the moment,” he explains. But in recent year’s he’s been spending a lot of days in formal studios, serving as executive music producer for the TV series Nashville.
“In general, I love bleed,” he says. “It’s a big part of getting real band dynamics onto an album. When you listen to a live performance, everything doesn’t sound pristine and isolated. But for television, I had to adapt. We record three to five songs per episode, with up to three iterations of each song—so that’s roughly 15 full-song recordings per episode, with 22 episodes a season. That’s an enormous amount of music and we need to have absolute separation, because we have no idea how the song is going to be used. It could turn out that, ‘Oh, we’re not gonna have drums in this scene after all.’ So I had to learn to be prepared. I’ve tried to find my own way to make it all sound realistic and live. I really want things to sound 3-D. Always.”
When it comes to guitars, that means no DI recording—even for acoustics—and, ideally, tracking guitars in stereo with microphones placed at least a few feet from the amps in order to capture how those amps move air. For his own sound, that requires mating his dual-amp setup with his collection of aluminum-necked Wandre hollowbodies—an Italian brand made in the late ’50s and 1960s that he’s nearly single-handedly turned into collector’s items, thanks to his high-profile onstage performances, including the annual Americana Music Association Honors & Awards show. Miller’s longstanding tenure as bandleader for the Honors & Awards has shortened the amount of steps he’s needed to take to collect over a dozen of those trophies himself. He has won the Instrumentalist of the Year title eight times.
“Years ago, I realized the room plays a big part in the sound,” says Miller. “We don’t listen to music with our heads against the speaker. When I first started playing in studios, I wondered why my guitar never sounded right, and it was because the engineer was putting an SM57 right on the speaker. For a time, I went for distance miking, and now I realize I was longing for a stereophonic sound. Today, I always try to get some room sound with a mic placed in a good-sounding spot, and then I have two mics on the amps, off-axis. With smaller combos, I find it’s easier to capture that stereo spread.”
Miller’s own studio amps are a pair of Swarts: Atomic Space Tones and Atomic Space Tone Pros. (Onstage, it’s the Atomic Space Tones.) Each has a pair of 6V6 tubes. From there, he sculpts their sonic profile with reverb and tremolo. “I really like the sound of two reverbs, because each reverb tank will react differently if you split the signal, so they sound bigger,” he notes.
One of his signatures is the distinctive way he employs tremolo when recording his own guitars or playing live. “I haven’t turned tremolo off in years,” he relates. “One of my favorite sounds is when you have two tremolos working against each other. Onstage, it’s easier to have a dual tremolo pedal, instead of trying to do the math with the dials on the backs of the amps to get a cool sound. When I was touring with Robert Plant, I had two of those amps set up for the stereo spread, and then the tremolos working against each other. And when they spread the amps apart through the big PAs, it made the guitar sound huge. Fulltone makes a great stereo tremolo [the Supa-Trem2] that I default to a lot live. With that, you can get lost in the music forever.”
Miller’s collection of gizmos also includes a Line 6 Helix multi-effector and the company’s DL4 delay modeler, a Strymon El Capistan, a Boss VB-2 Vibrato, an Analog Man King of Tone, and an Xotic RC Booster, all of which help him quickly conjure the variety of tones needed for TV and stage. “I print effects as I go and regret it later,” he jokes. “I commit. If it sounds good, it sounds good—but I don’t pour on the effects. I’ve screwed up enough times to learn that less is more.
“With acoustic guitars, I put on a pair of reference headphones and use a couple of mics and hope for the best,” he continues, chuckling. “I’ll typically put a large-diaphragm mic or a ribbon mic at a short distance from the soundhole, and a small-diaphragm at the 12th or 14th fret.”
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Buddy Miller’s signature use of tremolo, panned in stereo at conflicting settings, blasts through in this performance of “Gone Gone Gone” from The Today Show in 2007, when Miller was touring with Alison Krauss and Robert Plant behind the duo’s Grammy-winning Raising Sand. Of course, he’s playing one of his distinctive Wandre guitars. Marc Ribot and the album’s producer T-Bone Burnett complete the 6-string line-up.
Miller’s microphone selection for amplified tones depends on the sound he’s going for. “I used to favor ribbon mics—Royer to Cascade—and I have a collection of old RCA mics, but if we’re doing something as a small group, and I need it quick and dirty, I put up Sennheiser MD409s or the reissue e609s. I put the 409 close to the cabinet and use a diaphragm or a condenser, like a Telefunken U47, further off to pick up everything. Lately, I’ve also been using Miktek Audio’s stuff. It’s affordable, great sounding, and it’s made right here in Nashville.” Miller explains that he fell for using high-end condenser mics on amps after listening to the results engineer Ed Thacker got on Lucinda Williams’ 1998 classic, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, where he, Steve Earle, Ray Kennedy, Greg Leisz, Gurf Morlix, Bo Ramsey, Johnny Lee Schell, and Charlie Sexton all contributed guitar. The key microphone was the Neumann U 87, a classic that Miktek has emulated with its CV4.
“Honestly, I prefer the new iterations of these mics,” he says. “I have an array of old microphones, but you often run into the problem with cool old mics that, when you put them up, they start crackling or spitting, and it takes the wind out of your sails as you take time to try to figure out the problem. I’d rather put up stuff that works and keep moving.”
The urge to cover ground likely explains his preference for having a band set up and play live in the studio, if possible—a gambit he used when recording Richard Thompson’s 2013 album, Electric, which he cut with the British guitar legend’s trio. “I set up the drums in the control room at my home studio, which is the biggest room, and everybody could see each other through the glass. Richard also sang while he played. He is a bird watcher, and I loved watching him in the middle of an insane guitar solo while he was looking at a bird out the window. I knew that was doing something to his solo and his mind—taking him somewhere else.
“On the other hand, if I’m working on something small, like a new song of mine, I tend to start by myself to get the essentials down and build it up later.”
Although he mostly records on Pro Tools, Miller still owns an MCI 16-track, 2"-tape machine. “It just sounds a little bit more smoothed out and creamier, and there’s something I love about the smell of tape,” he says. But, as Miller found out when cutting tracks for The Majestic Silver Strings, his 2011 collaboration with Marc Ribot and Bill Frisell, there can sometimes be ghosts in analog machines. “We were having a problem with the servo motor card, and it added what sounded like the tiniest bit of vibraphone to the entire record. In retrospect, it was really cool. Now, I wish I could get that servo card unfixed!”
Dave Cobb behind the board at Nashville’s RCA Studio A: “Somebody told me a long time ago that the sound doesn’t happen in the control room.” Photo by Ted Drozdowski
Dave Cobb: Let It Bleed
“Somebody told me a long time ago that the sound doesn’t happen in the control room,” says Dave Cobb. “There’s an era of recording … A Sinatra record sounds so full, lush, and beautiful. Obviously they had the best players, the best studio, and the best microphones of the time. And then the late ’60s happened and everything got really multi-tracked, and then in the ’70s and ’80s albums started sounding smaller because they put everybody and everything in a booth, tracking one piece at a time. You didn’t get interplay, the dynamics of band playing, and that room sound.“I’m super dorky about gear,” he continues. “I need to find out exactly what a musician I admire used to get that sound. But ultimately I know the most important thing is the player’s hands, the guitar, and the amplifier—and the gear in the control room is just there to document that.”
And so the producer-guitarist with a pair of Grammys and two Americana Music Association Awards under his belt—the latter for producing breakthrough albums by Jason Isbell (2013’s Southeastern) and Sturgill Simpson (2014’s Metamodern Sounds in Country Music), the former for Chris Stapleton’s 2015 Traveller and Isbell’s Something More Than Free, from the same year—believes in tracking guitars live on the floor in full-band performances. “I even encourage singers to go for final performances with the band,” he says. “If the guitarist and vocalist are playing together, the guitarist reacts to the dynamics and character of the vocal performance, and their tracks naturally fit together. That way, the album practically mixes itself.”
That’s an unconventional approach for the modern studio, but it’s hard to argue with the results. “We recorded Metamodern in four days,” Cobb relates. “There’s a lot of sonic depth when everyone’s in the room playing together. The guitar is bleeding into the vocal and the drums are bleeding into the guitar. It sounds full only because everyone is together—it is full—you can hear that interplay and interaction.
“I don’t want to make records that don’t have bleed,” he continues. “It sounds more three-dimensional. If it doesn’t have bleed, you have to use artificial reverb and things that make it sound like its goes together. I use Universal Audio’s Ocean Way plug-in—which sounds like you’ve literally recorded in the A or B rooms at Ocean Way—if I’m recording tracks separately, and put them in that plug-in, so they sound recorded together, like a band.
“I also think that if you’ve got to make some compromises, it’s okay. The Beatles are my favorite band, and they had to do a lot of reduction mixes to fit all the tracks they recorded. So maybe by the time they’re close to done you can barely hear the snare drum. I’ve read where they’d sometimes have a roadie just play along later on a snare. Sometimes it’s hip when things like that happen.” Along those lines, Cobb confesses that he was primarily recording on a vintage Studer 8-track machine until recently acquiring a 24-track tape machine, which he runs alongside Pro Tools so each can work as a backup for the other in case of failure.
Cobb’s studio experience began with his band the Tender Idols, in the ’90s, as he watched and took notes on the producers the group worked with. He then got hands-on experience at Tree Sound Studios in Atlanta.
“When I was starting out, I would look at photos of Elvis in the studio, or sessions by the Beatles, or Glyn Johns, who is another one of my heroes, to see where they were placing the mics, what kind of mics they were using … anything that would be useful. We all learn by stealing a bit.”
As a fan of room sounds, Cobb has made his current home base Nashville’s historic RCA Studio A, a big room where Dolly Parton recorded “Jolene” and, on the day we spoke, he was producing guitar-fueled rockers Rival Sons. “I like to have enough space to have two or three different full-band setups at the same time, so if we’re going to switch up the sound of the album, we don’t have to break down and set up gear—just move to the other part of the room where we have another setup,” he explains.
Those setups often include a spot for the producer himself. Taking a cue from Jimmy Miller, another hero who captured Cobb’s heart with his production work on the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street and Sticky Fingers (among others), Cobb likes to play with the artists he’s tracking. “I play mostly acoustic guitar to be a kind of human metronome,” he explains. “That doesn’t mean I have great timing, but if I want a performance to speed up or slow down, I’ll do that. It’s way to influence what’s happening.”
As for how to capture what’s happening, Cobb says, “I live between the RCA 77—I love ribbon mics on guitars—and the Neumann U 67 condenser mic if I want a more direct kind of sound,” he says. The guitars on Metamodern Sounds in Country Music were captured primarily by off-axis RCA 77s in front of small combos. “Those ribbon mics sound like the guitars on old records to me. And I’ve seen pictures where Glyn Johns has the mics three feet away from the amps, so I do that quite often, but I also put mics close on tiny amps to make them sound bigger. I think little amps in general record better, because they’re more controllable and easier to balance out in the overall sound.”
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Want to see Dave Cobb at work? Here he is recording Sturgill Simpson and his band performing “Long White Line” from Metamodern Sounds in Country Music at Nashville’s RCA Studio A. That’s Cobb behind the board, and the band’s set up exactly as Cobb prefers for recording: in a circle, within eyesight of each other, with sounds blending.
On acoustic guitars, Cobb likes Royer R-122s, for newer mics, but favors Beyerdynamic M 160s. “I like those for rejection, mostly,” he says. “It’s a really hypercardioid mic, so you don’t pick up a lot of bleed from what’s behind or beside you. I use them on acoustics in a band all the time.” Positioning depends on the axe. “If a guitar is woolly and boomy, I move the mic toward the 12th fret, and for guitars that have a thinner sound, I aim it at the butt of the guitar, behind the bridge, which makes the sound bigger.”
Although he’s a fan of printing guitar effects as he records bands, Cobb tends to use stompboxes more often on vocals or to conjure sonic surprises from behind the board. “I like reamping vocals back through a guitar amp, and then adding a delay or a distortion pedal on the vocals,” he says. Then he’ll typically use the results to underlay and thicken the vocal performance.
“I understand guitar pedals better than I do rack effects,” he says. “I’d rather use a two-knob pedal and move along than take the time to master a serious piece of outboard gear. There’s an advantage to not thinking. The more you take the technical aspects out of the process, the better.”
While Cobb favors a vintage Tone Bender, a Dunlop Echoplex pedal, and a Caroline Guitar Company Kilobyte Lo-Fi Delay for those adventures, he also just recently assembled his first pedalboard in the nearly two decades since he stopped regular touring in order to play in the house band of the Americana Music Association Honors & Awards program in September. It’s a simple affair: a TC Electronic PolyTune 2, a J. Rockett Archer overdrive, an MXR Phase 90, and the Echoplex stompbox.
Meanwhile, Cobb is a Fender amp fan, with a few particularly treasured examples, including the Alexander Dumble-modified ’60s blackface Deluxe that was used on Southeastern and Metamodern Sounds in Country Music. “It does everything from AC/DC to Nancy Wilson ‘Bang Bang,’” he says. There’s also a Milkman Creamer ready to rip atop a cabinet just past the guitar racks in the studio for the Rival Sons sessions, and Cobb’s own amp du jour is a ’50s tweed Champ with one of his ribbon mics on its front.
His recent 6-string acquisitions include a 1954 Les Paul and a white 1953 Fender Esquire he recently added to his arsenal after pursuing the guitar for eight years. For acoustic guitars, he’s a Martin fan and has a 1940s vintage model along with an old Gibson J-200 for sessions where he wants a bigger sound.
The bottom line on cutting guitars, Cobb says, is that “if you don’t have a good guitar tone, there’s nothing anybody can do about it. Gear won’t matter. Mic placement won’t matter. You can use some effects to cover it up, but you can have the best rig in the world and it’s still going to sound like sea turtles unless you practice your ass off and learn your instrument—and get your core tone in your hands. You could plug Freddie King into an iPhone, and I’ll bet he’d still sound like Freddie King.”
The Spirit Fall trio: drummer Brian Blade (right) and saxophonist Chris Potter (center) joined Patitucci (left) for a single day at The Bunker. “Those guys are scary. It almost puts pressure on me, how good they are, because they get it really fast,” says Patitucci.
Legendary bassist John Patitucci continues to explore the sound of a chord-less trio that balances melodicism with boundless harmonic freedom—and shares lessons he learned from his mentors Chick Corea and Wayne Shorter.
In 1959, Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue and John Coltrane’s Giant Steps—two of the most influential albums in jazz history—were recorded. It’s somewhat poetic that four-time Grammy-winning jazz bass icon John Patitucci was born that same year. In addition to a storied career as a bandleader, Patitucci cemented his legacy through his lengthy association with two giants of jazz: keyboardist Chick Corea, with whom Patitucci enjoyed a 10-year tenure as an original member of his Elektric and Akoustic bands, and saxophonist Wayne Shorter’s quartet, of which he was a core member for 20 years. Patitucci has also worked with a who’s who of jazz elites like Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner, Dizzy Gillespie, and Michael Brecker.
What distinguishes Patitucci is that he is one of the few jazz musicians who simultaneously enjoys a vibrant career as a classical bassist and first-call session bassist. His résumé—which includes recordings with pop icons like Sting and Bon Jovi, and hundreds of film dates—is virtually unparalleled. Patitucci also composes classical music and is frequently commissioned to write music for string quartets and other chamber ensembles. Among his numerous compositions are a piece for 6-string electric bass and string orchestra that was performed with Suono e Oltre, a chamber orchestra in Italy. In short, Patitucci is the very rare jack of all trades who is also exceptional at all.
Freedom without Chords
Patitucci’s latest release, Spirit Fall, is a trio album featuring Patitucci, drummer Brian Blade, and saxophonist Chris Potter. This instrumentation leaves out a traditional chordal instrument, and can be tricky to make sound full, as there is a large harmonic hole in the sonic space. But in the hands of master musicians, this setting offers more room for harmonic exploration and conversational interplay amongst the band members. Patitucci has been exploring this chord-less format since 2009’s Remembrance featuring Blade on drums and Joe Lovano on saxophone.Throughout Spirit Fall the trio employs a variety of textures and colors to make for an engaging listen. “Pole Star” has an open feel with the counterpoint between acoustic bass and sax discreetly implying the underlying progression. “Lipim,” which means hope in Cameroonian, has a lively afrobeat groove and a ridiculous sax solo by Chris Potter. Like many of his solos on Spirt Fall, Potter’s solo on “Lipim” veers through several harmonic detours that would have likely been hampered if a chordal instrument were imposing the harmony. “Spirit Fall” and “Thoughts and Dreams” sees Patitucci using his 6-string electric to explore gorgeously haunting figures. The bass solo on “Spirit Fall” sees Patitucci almost accompanying himself as he alternates between low notes and chords against blistering single-note lines.
Even though Patitucci had the luxury of studio time, Spirit Fall was recorded quickly, with mostly first or second takes, and the occasional third take. The trio was able to record a powerful musical statement in such a short time because they are a working band as opposed to hired guns that might possibly play together for the first time at the session.
John Patitucci's Gear
“I’m just a kid from Brooklyn,” says Patitucci. It was his formative years spent with his older brother (who played guitar) that led him to the bass.
Photo by Dave Stapleton
Guitars
- Yamaha TRBJP2 Signature Model 6-String
- Yamaha Custom Semi-Hollow 6-String
- 1965 Fender P Bass (Used on “Lipim”)
- Gagliano Double Bass
Amps
- Aguilar DB 751 for acoustic bass
- Aguilar Tone Hammer for electric bass
- Aguilar 4x10 cabinet
- Aguilar 1x12 cabinet
- Grace Design FELiX Version 2
- Grace Design m303 DI
Effects
- Line 6 HX Stomp
- Line 6 DL4
Strings and Accessories
- D’Addario Nickel Round Strings (.032-.045-.065-.085-.105-.130)
- Gruvgear Signature Straps
- Pirastro Evah Pirazzi Weich gauge
- Pirastro Perpetual
Prior to the recording, Patitucci sent demos out, and by the time they got to the studio they were ready to commit to tape. They finished the whole record in just one day without any rehearsals. “Not with those guys,” says Patitucci. “Those guys are scary. It almost puts pressure on me, how good they are, because they get it really fast [laughs]. I was hoping that my good takes were theirs too.”
Interestingly enough, while iconic chord-less trio albums by saxophonists like Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, and Joe Henderson played a big role in Patitucci’s musical upbringing, he came to record with that instrumentation almost by accident. “We were going to rehearse for that record [Remembrance], and [pianist] Brad Mehldau, who played on some tracks, couldn’t make the rehearsal,” recalls Patitucci. “So we rehearsed at Lovano’s house and it sounded so good I was almost like, ‘Wow, maybe we should do the record as a trio.’ But I had all this music written that really was for the piano. So I said, ‘Well, maybe someday.’ And then finally we got around to it.”
Spirit Fall was tailored to the sensibilities of Blade and Potter, both of whom Patitucci has played with a lot over the years. “We have a relationship and we have a sound together already because of the way they play. Brian’s sense of dynamics has made it easier for me to get the kind of acoustic bass sound live that I've always wanted to get. It’s not easy to do that if the drummer can’t play those wide dynamics like Brian can,” explains Patitucci. “And Chris has been playing my music for years. He’s just an incredible interpreter of my music, and I love that. I remember using him in the early ’90s. Interestingly enough, around the time I did Imprint, I was using him and I was also using Mark Turner. And it’s funny. I started teaching college [Patitucci was Professor of Jazz Studies at City College of New York and is currently teaching at Berklee College of Music] a lot in 2000, and all my students were trying to sound like those guys.”“As a composer, I wanted to have a chance to have major control over the sound and how we did things, as opposed to a live record.”
As a precursor to Spirit Fall, in 2022 Patitucci had recorded Live in Italy with the same lineup of Blade and Potter. He could have easily just done Spirit Falllive againwith the trio but this time he specifically chose to bring them into the studio. “As a composer, I wanted to have a chance to have major control over the sound and how we did things, as opposed to a live record,” explains Patitucci. “Live records are great, but I wanted to record in the studio with that band so we can get into some new compositions I was writing, and some through-composed things with the 6-string, as well as the acoustic.”
How Chick Helped Turn Four into Six
Patitucci isn’t fond only of the traditional trio sans chordal instrument format. In fact, he’s recorded in just about every context you can imagine. From completely solo bass on Soul of the Bass, to his Electric Guitar Quartet with two guitarists—Adam Rogers and Steve Cardenas on Brooklyn, to guitar trio plus string quartet plus Chris Potter on Line by Line. Patitucci uses each situation as a way to grow musically.When Patitucci first started playing with Corea it was in the trio format, along with drummer Dave Weckl. Corea was a keyboardist who covered a huge sonic range and Patitucci saw this as an opportunity to push the creative envelope. “Chick and I became very close. I had enormous respect and love for him and he taught me a lot. That’s how I really discovered the 6-string, because I felt like I needed it orchestrationally to play in that band,” says Patitucci. “I started playing with Chick and at first I played my 4-string, and it’s a trio, but I have to blow on every song. And he’s got all these synths, and I’m thinking, ‘Man, I need a low string, because he’s playing all these low notes. I want to play the low notes.’ [laughs] I need a 5-string at least. Then I heard Anthony Jackson play the six. He was the pioneer who invented it.”
Spirit Fall is the documentation of a working band exploring new music in the studio. It features all new compositions and an inventive take on “House of Jade,” written by Patitucci’s longtime mentor, Wayne Shorter.
Corea fronted the money for Patitucci’s first 6-string—a Ken Smith—and took some money out of his check every week to pay it off. The transition to the 6-string wasn’t immediate for Patitucci, however. There was actually a big learning curve to the new instrument. To make matters even more daunting, the first big tour was to begin two weeks after Patitucci received the new instrument. Despite all the potential risks, Corea was very encouraging. “Chick was really patient. It was ridiculous. It was so hard. I was just a glutton for punishment,” admits Patitucci. “I just wanted the sound, and I was so naive about what it would be like. When I got the 6-string, it was a couple of weeks before we started going out on major tours and I was clamming. Like I would go down to what I thought was the E string but was now the B string.”
Once he got a handle on it, the 6-string allowed Patitucci to finally maximize the potential of his fluid soloing style. “I wanted to play the 6-string because when the blowing comes around, the C string helps me get over the top as a band,” says Patitucci. “Chick dug the fact that when I was blowing I wanted to sound more like a tenor player.”
“Wayne [Shorter] made me have the courage to play very little and hang a note up in the air.”
Shortly after Patitucci joined his band, Corea convinced GRP Records to sign Patitucci, whose 1987 eponymous first solo album reached number 1 on the Billboard Top Jazz Albums chart. Patitucci reflects, “The two biggest long term influences in terms of mentoring and what they did for my career would have been Chick Corea and then Wayne Shorter.”
The Spirit of Shorter
Patitucci first met Shorter in 1986, during the Chick, Wayne, and Al (Di Meola) tour. A year later Shorter asked Patitucci to record several tracks on his album, Phantom Navigator. This began his association with Shorter and led to Patitucci ultimately joining Shorter’s quartet in 2000.
It’s fitting that the only non-original tune on Spirit Fall is a Shorter tune, “House of Jade.” Shorter’s highly individual approach—particularly the electric stuff he was doing from the Atlantisperiod—shaped a lot of Patitucci’s conception of music. “I was playing electric bass and all the tunes were through-composed, except the blowing was like on one chord. And, you know, that’s challenging, actually,” reveals Patitucci. “And he was creating these incredible things, and he could do it with density or almost nothing, almost like one note. His lyricism and melodicism is so powerful that it really changed me. I was like, ‘Wow, I want to play like that. I want to be able to have a sound that I can be confident enough about to leave a ton of space and be able to just let space happen.’ Like, he got that from Miles.”
Moving to a 6-string bass wasn’t as natural for Patitucci as you might think. “When I got the 6-string, it was a couple of weeks before we started going out on major tours [with Chick Corea] and I was clamming.”
The minimalist approach that Shorter used at times was a stark contrast to some of the over-the-top pyrotechnics Corea’s Elektric Band was known for. “I was always into melodies too, but yes, in Chick’s band there were a lot of changes to play over, and sometimes a lot of fast tempos,” says Patitucci. “It wasn’t only chops, there were a lot of melodies and we played ballads too. I mean, I wanted to do that, but I didn’t have the courage to. Wayne made me have the courage to play very little and hang a note up in the air. With the 6-string, you can really do that. I started to realize that I was really interested in moving people in that way too.”
The Journey of the Kid from Brooklyn
Subliminally, the transition from 4- to 6-string bass might harken back to Patitucci’s childhood in East Flatbush, Brooklyn. He originally picked up the guitar, influenced by his brother Tom who had already been playing. Tom tried to teach him but ultimately the guitar just didn’t connect, and Tom sensed it. “He just said, ‘Why don’t you try the bass?’” recalls Patitucci. “Because we can play together then.” And that’s where it all began.
At 10, Patitucci got his first bass, a short-scale Sears Telstar bass that was hanging on a wall like a decoration down the street at somebody’s house on East 39th Street. “We bought it for 10 bucks and I thought it was great,” reflects Patitucci, who enjoyed rock ’n’ roll and James Jamerson’s playing on Motown Records in his formative years.
When he was 13, Patitucci’s family moved out to the West Coast. Soon after the move, Patitucci started learning the acoustic bass, and by the early ’80s, Patitucci’s career started taking off. In 1996 he moved back to New York, where he continues to break new musical ground.
With a career spanning over four decades and still going strong, Patitucci has achieved the dream that many aspiring musicians long for. What is the secret to his success? “Nobody knows the secret and anybody who tells you they know that is lying,” says Patitucci. “I don't even deserve it. I think that God was really good to me and blessed me. He somehow allowed me to have my dream come true. I look at it now as a 65-year old guy and go, ‘Wow, that was really a long shot.’ [laughs] It’s kind of unbelievable. You know what, I mean? I’m just this kid from Brooklyn, you know?”YouTube It
This trio rendition of the Beatles’ “And I Love Her” showcases John Patitucci’s ability to add chordal textures on his 6-string bass to create a full sound, even without a conventional chordal instrument like guitar or piano.
With authentic stage-class Katana amp sounds, wireless music streaming, and advanced spatial technology, the KATANA:GO is designed to offer a premium sound experience without the need for amps or pedals.
BOSS announces the return of KATANA:GO, an ultra-compact headphone amplifier for daily jams with a guitar or bass. KATANA:GO puts authentic sounds from the stage-class BOSS Katana amp series at the instrument’s output jack, paired with wireless music streaming, sound editing, and learning tools on the user’s smartphone. Advanced spatial technology provides a rich 3D audio experience, while BOSS Tone Exchange offers an infinite sound library to explore any musical style.
Offering all the features of the previous generation in a refreshed external design, KATANA:GO delivers premium sound for everyday playing without the hassle of amps, pedals, and computer interfaces. Users can simply plug it into their instrument, connect earbuds or headphones, call up a memory, and go. Onboard controls provide access to volume, memory selection, and other essential functions, while the built-in screen displays the tuner and current memory. The rechargeable battery offers up to five hours of continuous playing time, and the integrated 1/4-inch plug folds down to create a pocket-size package that’s ready to travel anywhere.
KATANA:GO drives sessions with genuine sounds from the best-selling Katana stage amp series. Guitar mode features 10 unique amp characters, including clean, crunch, the high-gain BOSS Brown type, two acoustic/electric guitar characters, and more. There’s also a dedicated bass mode with Vintage, Modern, and Flat types directly ported from the Katana Bass amplifiers. Each mode includes a massive library of BOSS effects to explore, with deep sound customization available in the companion BOSS Tone Studio app for iOS and Android.
The innovative Stage Feel feature in KATANA:GO provides an immersive audio experience with advanced BOSS spatial technology. Presets allow the user to position the amp sound and backing music in different places in the sound field, giving the impression of playing with a backline on stage or jamming in a room with friends.
The guitar and bass modes in KATANA:GO each feature 30 memories loaded with ready-to-play sounds. BOSS Tone Studio allows the player to tweak preset memories, create sounds from scratch, or import Tone Setting memories created with stage-class Katana guitar and bass amplifiers. The app also provides integrated access to BOSS Tone Exchange, where users can download professionally curated Livesets and share sounds with the global BOSS community.
Pairing KATANA:GO with a smartphone offers a complete mobile solution to supercharge daily practice. Players can jam along with songs from their music library and tap into BOSS Tone Studio’s Session feature to hone skills with YouTube learning content. It’s possible to build song lists, loop sections for focused study, and set timestamps to have KATANA:GO switch memories automatically while playing with YouTube backing tracks.
The versatile KATANA:GO functions as a USB audio interface for music production and online content creation on a computer or mobile device. External control of wah, volume, memory selection, and more are also supported via the optional EV-1-WL Wireless MIDI Expression Pedal and FS-1-WL Wireless Footswitch.
For more information, please visit boss.info.
In our third installment with Santa Cruz Guitar Company founder Richard Hoover, the master luthier shows PG's John Bohlinger how his team of builders assemble and construct guitars like a chef preparing food pairings. Hoover explains that the finer details like binding, headstock size and shape, internal bracing, and adhesives are critical players in shaping an instrument's sound. Finally, Richard explains how SCGC uses every inch of wood for making acoustic guitars or outside ventures like surfboards and art.
We know Horsegirl as a band of musicians, but their friendships will always come before the music. From left to right: Nora Cheng, drummer Gigi Reece, and Penelope Lowenstein.
The Chicago-via-New York trio of best friends reinterpret the best bits of college-rock and ’90s indie on their new record, Phonetics On and On.
Horsegirl guitarists Nora Cheng and Penelope Lowenstein are back in their hometown of Chicago during winter break from New York University, where they share an apartment with drummer Gigi Reece. They’re both in the middle of writing papers. Cheng is working on one about Buckminster Fuller for a city planning class, and Lowenstein is untangling Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann’s short story, “Three Paths to the Lake.”
“It was kind of life-changing, honestly. It changed how I thought about womanhood,” Lowenstein says over the call, laughing a bit at the gravitas of the statement.
But the moment of levity illuminates the fact that big things are happening in their lives. When they released their debut album, 2022’s Versions of Modern Performance, the three members of Horsegirl were still teenagers in high school. Their new, sophomore record, Phonetics On and On, arrives right in the middle of numerous first experiences—their first time living away from home, first loves, first years of their 20s, in university. Horsegirl is going through changes. Lowenstein notes how, through moving to a new city, their friendship has grown, too, into something more familial. They rely on each other more.
“If the friendship was ever taking a toll because of the band, the friendship would come before the band, without any doubt.”–Penelope Lowenstein
“Everyone's cooking together, you take each other to the doctor,” Lowenstein says. “You rely on each other for weird things. I think transitioning from being teenage friends to suddenly working together, touring together, writing together in this really intimate creative relationship, going through sort of an unusual experience together at a young age, and then also starting school together—I just feel like it brings this insane intimacy that we work really hard to maintain. And if the friendship was ever taking a toll because of the band, the friendship would come before the band without any doubt.”
Horsegirl recorded their sophomore LP, Phonetics On and On, at Wilco’s The Loft studio in their hometown, Chicago.
These changes also include subtle and not-so-subtle shifts in their sophisticated and artful guitar-pop. Versions of Modern Performance created a notion of the band as ’90s college-rock torchbearers, with reverb-and-distortion-drenched numbers that recalled Yo La Tengo and the Breeders. Phonetics On and On doesn’t extinguish the flame, but it’s markedly more contemporary, sacrificing none of the catchiness but opting for more space, hypnotic guitar lines, and meditative, repeated phrases. Cheng and Lowenstein credit Welsh art-pop wiz Cate Le Bon’s presence as producer in the studio as essential to the sonic direction.
“On the record, I think we were really interested in Young Marble Giants—super minimal, the percussiveness of the guitar, and how you can do so much with so little.”–Nora Cheng
“We had never really let a fourth person into our writing process,” Cheng says. “I feel like Cate really changed the way we think about how you can compose a song, and built off ideas we were already thinking about, and just created this very comfortable space for experimentation and pushed us. There are so many weird instruments and things that aren't even instruments at [Wilco’s Chicago studio] The Loft. I feel like, definitely on our first record, we were super hesitant to go into territory that wasn't just distorted guitar, bass, and drums.”
Nora Cheng's Gear
Nora Cheng says that letting a fourth person—Welsh artist Cate Le Bon—into the trio’s songwriting changed how they thought about composition.
Photo by Braden Long
Effects
- EarthQuaker Devices Plumes
- Ibanez Tube Screamer
- TC Electronic Polytune
Picks
- Dunlop Tortex .73 mm
Phonetics On and On introduces warm synths (“Julie”), raw-sounding violin (“In Twos”), and gamelan tiles—common in traditional Indonesian music—to Horsegirl’s repertoire, and expands on their already deep quiver of guitar sounds as Cheng and Lowenstein branch into frenetic squonks, warped jangles, and jagged, bare-bones riffs. The result is a collection of songs simultaneously densely textured and spacious.
“I listen to these songs and I feel like it captures the raw, creative energy of being in the studio and being like, ‘Fuck! We just exploded the song. What is about to happen?’” Lowenstein says. “That feeling is something we didn’t have on the first record because we knew exactly what we wanted to capture and it was the songs we had written in my parents’ basement.”
Cheng was first introduced to classical guitar as a kid by her dad, who tried to teach her, and then she was subsequently drawn back to rock by bands like Cage The Elephant and Arcade Fire. Lowenstein started playing at age 6, which covers most of her life memories and comprises a large part of her identity. “It made me feel really powerful as a young girl to know that I was a very proficient guitarist,” she says. The shreddy playing of Television, Pink Floyd’s spacey guitar solos, and Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan were all integral to her as Horsegirl began.
Penelope Lowenstein's Gear
Penelope Lowenstein likes looking back at the versions of herself that made older records.
Photo by Braden Long
Effects
- EarthQuaker Westwood
- EarthQuaker Bellows
- TC Electronic PolyTune
Picks
- Dunlop Tortex 1.0 mm
Recently, the two of them have found themselves influenced by guitarists both related and unrelated to the type of tunes they’re trading in on their new album. Lowenstein got into Brazilian guitar during the pandemic and has recently been “in a Jim O’Rourke, John Fahey zone.”
“There’s something about listening to that music where you realize, about the guitar, that you can just compose an entire orchestra on one instrument,” Lowenstein says. “And hearing what the bass in those guitar parts is doing—as in, the E string—is kind of mind blowing.”
“On the record, I think we were really interested in Young Marble Giants—super minimal, the percussiveness of the guitar, and how you can do so much with so little,” Cheng adds. “And also Lizzy Mercier [Descloux], mostly on the Rosa Yemen records. That guitar playing I feel was very inspiring for the anti-solo,[a technique] which appears on [Phonetics On and On].”This flurry of focused discovery gives the impression that Cheng and Lowenstein’s sensibilities are shifting day-to-day, buoyed by the incredible expansion of creative possibilities that setting one’s life to revolve around music can afford. And, of course, the energy and exponential growth of youth. Horsegirl has already clocked major stylistic shifts in their brief lifespan, and it’s exciting to have such a clear glimpse of evolution in artists who are, likely and hopefully, just beginning a long journey together.
“There’s something about listening to that music where you realize, about the guitar, that you can just compose an entire orchestra on one instrument.”–Penelope Lowenstein
“In your 20s, life moves so fast,” Lowenstein says. “So much changes from the time of recording something to releasing something that even that process is so strange. You recognize yourself, and you also kind of sympathize with yourself. It's a really rewarding way of life, I think, for musicians, and it's cool that we have our teenage years captured like that, too—on and on until we're old women.”
YouTube It
Last summer, Horsegirl gathered at a Chicago studio space to record a sun-soaked set of new and old tunes.