Stuck in a rut? Wu-Tang may be the answer.
By learning new songs, maintaining your gear, and watching Wu-Tang, you can become a better, more well-rounded musician.
One of the best parts of being a musician is being around other musicians, but that can also be the worst thing about it. If you want proof, consider the glut of musician jokes. My favorite is about how to get a bandmate to the gig on time, which involves lying about the time of the gig. Iām not always punctual, so itās no surprise that by the time you read this, the window for New Yearās resolutions may be closed. So, in the spirit of being behind the band by an entire measure, here are my resolution picks for you to add to the existing pile.
Learn the intro and solo to Dire Straitsā āSultans of Swing.ā
Guitarists and civilians alike revere Mark Knopfler. In a world of dweedley, un-hummable solos, Knopflerās semi-chicken picking is so identifiable that decoding and memorizing this song will be sure to break that faux-Metallica thing youāve been doing since middle school.
Restring all your guitars.
Iām just as tardy as you are when it comes to changing stringsāmaybe worse. Itās really not so hard once youāve done it 15 times in a row, assuming you only have 15 guitars. By then it shouldnāt take you more than 10 minutes each. Just for fun, buy a 10-pack of high E strings and break a few on purpose by over-tightening. This will teach you that itās not going to poke your eye out after all. Life-changing.
Learn to intonate, while youāre at it.
This is another chore whose complexity is exaggerated beyond all reality. Compare an open string note to its octave at the 12th fret. If the octave is sharp, move the saddle away from the nut; if flat, go the other direction. This takes 5 minutes, and anyone who tells you different is a serious underachiever.
Reacquaint yourself with the actual sound of guitar.
This is scary, but you have to face your worst fears. Use the most powerful amp you haveāhopefully 100 watts. Remove all effects pedals from the signal chain and turn the ampās master volume all the way up. Lower the gain until there is zero distortion, and then play to a click track for four days. At your next band rehearsal, use this same setup and try to make it work. This is the equivalent of running with weights or banging your head against a wall because it will feel great when you stop. Donāt cheat by claiming a compressor isnāt really an effect.
Your style of music may not require the use of the major VII#11, but sometimes cool chords can spark new ideas for songs.
Let others take more solos.
Undoubtedly, you are the superior soloist in your circle of friends, but as a role model, you must do your bit to let others shine. This involves backing off on volume and supporting the soloist. Just pretend that youāre only doing what you wish the other players would do for you. Resist the temptation to jump in at all costs. This will go a long way to cementing your place as a benevolent dictator.
Learn to play the drums.
This may be biting off more than you can chew, but if pandemic lockdowns have taught us something, itās that anything is possible. You donāt have to be Neil Peart; just learn rudiments and work on some good beats. This is really important if you are a bassist, but it will really strengthen your rhythm guitar chops, too. You can get a practice pad and sticks for about $25, so even if you bail on improving your timing and newfound appreciation for drummers, itās not the end of the world.
Watch the Wu-Tang Clan documentary, Of Mics and Men.
Itās hard to break out of your own little bubble, but understanding the greater world of music is essential. Even if youāre already a fan, itās good to know how genres evolve and influence other musicians. Bonus points if you watch with a guitar and play along.
Get that amp in the corner fixed.
Once consigned to the hinterlands of your music room, noisy or intermittent amplifiers just get worse. Bite the bullet and bring it to a good amp tech before things really deteriorate. It might just be something simple, and youāll be happy youāve supported a small music-related business too.
Learn some college chords.
This is important for your overall human development. You may have quit medical school, but you can still be a lifetime learner. Your style of music may not require the use of the major 7#11, but sometimes cool chords can spark new ideas for songs. And while youāre trying to get your fingers to obey, you might discover some other interesting chords, too.
I hope you take these resolutions to heart, and that they make you a better, wiser musician. Oh yeah ⦠and try to be on time.Guitarists Lee Kiernan and Mark Bowen shove the envelope on the bandās new album, stomping in sonic mud puddles and mashing electronic music and hip-hop as they abandon their comfort zone.
From the British Invasion of the ā60s to the punks of ā77 to the nascent days of heavy metal and shoegaze, the U.K. music scene has often been the harbinger of whatās next for guitar. To many, Bristol-based post-punk unit Idlesā music represents that next step. Idlesā albums are confrontational, heartfelt, politically outspoken, and donāt sound like anything else. The bandās 2018 release Joy as an Act of Resistance hit the top five in the U.K. charts, enjoyed nearly universal critical acclaim, and earned the group a Mercury Prize nomination.
While many critics focused on Idlesā enigmatic frontman Joe Talbotās poetic lyrics and brash delivery, Joy as an Act of Resistance was full of writhing, rhythmic, anti-rock guitar work that was equal parts clever and recklessāvia guitarists Mark Bowen and Lee Kiernan. (Drummer Jon Beavis and bassist Adam Devonshire complete the band.) It was a blast of fresh air at a time when many popular rock bands had lost their teeth, were boiling their songwriting down to an algorithm, or were wistfully mining the genreās past.
In a small brick room deep in the bowels of La Frette Studiosātucked away just outside of ParisāIdles and producers Nick Launay (Killing Joke, Public Image Ltd, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds) and Adam āAtomā Greenspan (Refused, Anna Calvi) crafted and honed Ultra Mono, the highly anticipated follow up to Joy as an Act of Resistance. Bowen and Kiernan took a decidedly different and novel approach to penning the new albumās 12 songs. The pair began the writing process by defining a sound palette for the album via pedalboards populated with some of the least musical and weirdest stomps theyād each collected. Over-the-top fuzzes, alien-sounding filters, and a boutique glitch box from Belgium all played a major role. The anti-shreddersā effects experiments were the direct starting point for much of Ultra Monoās songs and guitar partsāmany of which Bowen confesses āreally wouldnāt sound like anything without the effects.ā The albumās lead single, āGrounds,ā is a great example of this effects-first approach. Itās an anthem of solidarity for the anti-racism movement, built on the back of a lone repeated note played through a Red Panda Raster delay. The song is an exercise in weaponized simplicity and atonality, yet somehow wildly catchy.
Kiernan and Bowen often use the guitar like synthesists or drummers on Ultra Mono, harnessing the percussive side of the instrument as a trigger and controller for the sounds they coax out of their pedal menageries. Relying on effects-processed rhythmic passages in the same way a producer uses samples gives the albumthe rhythmic bounce and swagger of hip-hop, but presented with the snarling sonics of a rock band playing through high-powered tube amps at full tilt. That trick was further helped along with a dose of post-production magic by producer/engineer Kenny Beats, who added programming and was part of an arduous four-month mixing process.
The result is that Ultra Mono is a whirlwind of hulking fuzz, clanging dissonance, synth-inspired bleeps and bloops, and notes bent so far out of shape that theyād break if they were bones. While thereās an underpinning of dry garage-rock rhythm 6-string that helps propel this effects-laden guitar colossus and provides counterpoint, it all comes together to make something genuinely original. As we enter the probable peak of the effects-pedal renaissance, and at a time when our collective reality is just too absurd for loud rock bands to not have something of substance to say, Ultra Mono is a record deeply representative of the moment.
Despite Ultra Monoās anger and serious subjects, Bowen and Kiernan are affable gear nerds that donāt take themselves too seriously. The pair have even taken advantage of the unexpected downtime Covid-19 has foisted upon us by starting their own phonetically named YouTube series, Genks, which finds the duo exploring the inner workings of Idlesā tunes, their favorite effects, and interviewing notable guitarists that they mutually dig.
Premier Guitar caught up with Idlesā pedal pushers by phone to discuss their effects-based approach to writing Ultra Mono, the exotic and mundane gear used to craft their bandās latest, how Gang of Four, Electric Wizard, French DJs, and Wu-Tang Clan all found their way into the sonic stew, and how seemingly useless sounds can make great music.
Youāve said the guitar tones on Ultra Mono arelike weapons and that the album was written around sounds rather than riffs. That really shows in your playing, which is often primitive and rhythmicālike youāre acting like drummers.
Lee Kiernan: That was a goal. We wanted to have a lot more rhythmic power and work as a team towards that. A lot of the time, songs started with bass and drums, because thatās always the backbone of our music, and weāll push those ideas with guitars to make it bigger. Something we really tried to do on this album that we didnāt do in the past is give each other space and also focus on playing together. Bowen and I play as a unit together a lot on Ultra Monoāoften playing the same thing at the same time to add more emphasis and power to a single idea.
Mark Bowen: When we set out to make this album, there was something about rock sensibilities and production that had too much deference to the guitar and how we felt the guitars should sound. The thing about guitars is, frequency-wise, they can kind of get in the way of everything. What we really wanted to do is have the guitars either play percussively or play to support the bass. Otherwise, the frequency bandwidth of the guitars was narrowed down to allow other things to really pop in the mix. The opposite also happens a lot on the album for an effect, too, where the guitars deliberately take up all the frequency real estate for impact. All of these tracks were really written around the idea of us all supporting one musical part at a time. That concept was key during the writing, so the recording process was really about making sure that each of the instruments had the impact and weight we wanted them to have.
TIDBIT: āThe mix on this album was so much of the trick, and we took four months to mix it,ā says co-guitarist Mark Bowen. āWe wanted that hip-hop edge.ā
Flourishes of atonal guitar are a huge part of Ultra Monoās sound. How much of that noise-making was baked-in from the songwriting process, and what was the overall approach to experimenting with effects and noise-making in the studio?
Kiernan: Most of it. Bowen and I are always on the hunt for new pedals that are weird. When we were writing this album, weād go to random guitar shops and ask them for the weirdest pedals they had. It may sound useless, but it still might touch you somehow. Every now and then, a pedal that does something really weird will kick you into gear. Or sometimes you just need to slam a weird pedal with some fuzz or find the weird noises hiding in it. Weāll both admit weāre not the best guitarists and relying on sound-making is our key and really a major part of what we do.
Bowen: The noise-making had to be thought of from the start. We basically created a sound palette first, and once we created a sound, that sound informed the riffs. The riffs on this one really wouldnāt sound like anything without the effects we used. So there was a lot of time spent tweaking, but it was really important to the overall writing of the album.
Do you have any advice on finding the musically useful ideas hiding in deliberately ugly-sounding effects?
Bowen: I think you hit the nail on the head when you said weāre all playing almost like drummers. If youāve got a sound that you initially feel is musically useless, try using it rhythmically and use it as an adjunct to a snare hit or use it where a high-hat might be in an electronic song. It sounds like nothing else when you replace drum parts with a weird guitar sound. Another big thing is if you get a sound that you think is great, but you canāt necessarily see a traditional musical place for it, building a song around that sound is a big thing for us. If you look at āDankeā and the sound that almost sounds like a piece of metal being whipped in the middle of that, that sound was the starting point for that song.
Kiernan: A lot of what I use is fuzz, and I especially like the ones Death By Audio makes. Theyāre punishing. Their pedals are just brutal and I like to slam fuzzes into different things to get unique sounds. Essentially what I do a lot of the time in this band is find a big noise and then bend the strings to make it sound like something alive and dynamic more than just a blast of noise.