I really like throwing things in a loop, messing
with them, recording them, chopping them
up in Pro Tools, and sending them back to the
loop. It might well be something like that.
At the beginning of “Sinking Ships,” the
individual notes sound almost like a piano.
I think that’s the guitar into an old Eventide
Harmonizer H3000.
There is some bass that sounds like a Moog
synth. Is it synth or processed guitar?
That’s all guitar. I compressed the shit out of
the baritone, and then filtered it on the desk,
just rolling things off. If it were a plug-in, it
would have been the FabFilter Pro-Q1.
You mentioned playing live with an
orchestra. How does that work?
All the parts for the classical musicians
are composed. You have to write down
everything because having a rehearsal with
a 50-piece orchestra is so expensive. For my
30-minute piece, commissioned by a festival
in the Netherlands, some of the guitar stuff
was written out, but a lot of my parts were
improvised. There is nobody responding, so
the improvisation is limited because there’s
nothing new happening with anyone else.
When I did a lot of flying with a
huge pedalboard, the pedals kept
breaking. I was using Boss RC-20
loopers when I first started building
those big boards, but I didn’t li ke
their headroom and preamps. The
DigiTech looper sounded nice, but
kept breaking. After The Matriarch
and the Wrong Kind of Flowers, I
needed a big reverb sound. I had
the Audio Ease Altiverb convolution
“
reverb plug-in in the studio and
wanted to bring it onstage on the
laptop, so I started to use the laptop
for looping as well.
On the pedalboard, I now have a
Boss tuner into a Fulltone FullDrive
2 that’s always on with a clean setting.
That goes into a Fulltone OCD and
then a Boss OC-3 octave pedal. From
there it goes into the Line 6 Echo
Park delay, the Moog Ring Modulator,
”
- Fletcher Stewart, Tone Report Weekly
How would you notate the sounds you make
so you can repeat them in a composition?
You just have to spell it out in the
beginning—a sign for this and for that—and
make the best of it. I worked with a fantastic
conductor in the Netherlands, who lifted
everything to the next level. He understood
where I wanted to go and would tell me, “You
can’t notate this like this; it will work much
better like this.” And he was right.
Did you learn orchestration when doing
your masters in Norway or before that?
If you can write and read music, you can write
for an orchestra. You just write some stuff and let
them play it. They’re just a bunch of musicians,
and they have to play whatever you write [laughs].
Don’t you at least have to learn the clefs and
the ranges of the individual instruments?
That’s what Google is for [laughs].
Let’s get into your current live rig. You’ve
made some changes in size and gear.
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