material. It’s part of the scene over here,
so it didn’t feel that strange to do it with
my own vocals.
Are all the instrumental sounds on
Amputation created with guitar?
Yeah, except for the bass drum sound—
which is a bass drum. I tried making the
sound with guitar, but I had a bass drum
sample I really liked, so I used that.
When you are bowing, do you find that
the arch of your 335’s top helps keep
the bow from hitting the body?
It can help. It is a properly set up 335,
where the bridge is correctly arched,
which is a big plus. Bowing guitar is
actually pretty stupid. It is really hard
and it doesn’t really sound that good. As
you say, the body gets in the way, the
strings get dead, and you get resin in the
pickups. I never clean them.
How did you record the guitars?
I used mostly my two Hiwatt Custom 50
combos and recorded them with AudioTechnica AT4081 ribbon mics.
Do those mics handle the sound
pressure levels you put out?
To a certain extent. I’ve had them repaired
twice. I’m not sure if it was my fault or if
it was just transportation damage. I have
the guitar running through a stereo DI,
because most of my sounds are stereo.
On your previous solo record, The
Matriarch and the Wrong Kind of
Flowers, you used huge sounds recorded
in a mausoleum with a natural 20-second
reverb. On this record it seemed like a lot
of the distorted sounds were a distortion
pedal or a fuzz going direct into a board,
rather than from an amp.
The bowed guitar was recorded in the
same mausoleum. Apart from that, a lot
of that distortion comes from pushing my
studio mixers, because they compress when
you start pushing the preamps. I have two
mixers that I do tricks with, running them
back and forth. Those distortion sounds
are either transistors or tubes being pushed.
I experiment a lot with that because it
adds a different sort of compression. Tape
114 PREMIER GUITAR SEPTEMBER 2016
STIAN WESTERHUS’ GEAR
GUITARS
compression can be too soft sometimes.
It’s like putting too much butter on your
toast—sometimes you want hardcore
cheddar [laughs]. I had to mix the two
instrumental tracks inside Pro Tools and
do some of the work digitally, because
the analog gear was just too slow for the
transients, and it wasn’t as snappy as in
the digital domain. I tried to blend those
two worlds together and push the digital
domain as much as the analog. It is much
easier to make stuff “larger than life” with
analog, but you lose the snappiness and
low bass that you get with digital. It was
interesting trying to merge that digital
hardness into the analog domain and vice
versa. I spend a lot of nights doing that.
What guitars did you use on the record?
I used my Gibson 1970 ES-335, except
for an Ibanez baritone on one track. I
modified it with two mini humbuckers.
On “Kings Never Sleep,” one sound
seems like changing the pitch of an
analog or tape delay while the signal is
going through it.
• 1970 Gibson ES-335
• Ibanez MMM1 Mike Mushok
Signature Baritone
AMPS
• 2 Hiwatt Custom 50 combos
• 2 Ampeg SVT bass amps
with 4x10 cabinets
EFFECTS
• Boss tuner
• Moog MF-102 Ring Modulator
• Fulltone FullDrive 2
• Fulltone OCD
• Boss OC-3 Super Octave
• Line 6 Echo Park delay
• Eventide H9 Harmonizer
• Eventide TimeFactor
• Laptop with Ableton Live, Altiverb
• MOTU audio interface
• Rupert Neve DIs
• Roland FC-200 MIDI foot controller
• iPad running Lemur controller app
STRINGS & PICKS
• D’Addario EXL110 (.010–.046)
• D’Addario EXL157 (.014–.068)
• Dunlop Stubby 3 mm
Top: Photo by Ulf Cronenberg
Westerhus
explains his
versatile signal
chain with
this drawing.
It contains an
iPad and laptop,
his pedalboard,
a MIDI
footswitcher,
and four
a l ers
premierguitar.com