Christian Voso
Member
This is the gateway track/drug that really got me into Mr Vai.
imho he hasn't eclipsed it - one of his best!
but I love everything he has done
while reading this interview .......[i coudn't post the link i keep getting a spam error - here is the text]
from geartechrec,com
[CG] I remember buying the issue of Guitar Player magazine that included the Blue Powder flexi-disc. That felt like a moment of arrival for you as a guitar player. Did you realize the impact of that moment at that time?
[Steve] No, because you can never really prepare for those things. It’s easy to go off into realms of fantasy, which I’ve done before. But when things actually start happening, it’s a surprise how it really feels. You just keep on moving. There have been various points in my career that have been “money punches,” so to speak. The first was getting the reputation of performing with Frank. But even then I didn’t really realize it was happening. I knew, from the perspective of being a fan, the kind of mystique that surrounded a Zappa musician. But when it was happening to me, and Frank was crediting me with doing all of these incredible stunt things on the guitar, I didn’t realize, even at that time, that the mystique was building. I was almost ignorant to it. And then, when “The Attitude Song” came out in Guitar Player, that was powerful, I think even more so than “Blue Powder”, because there was just so much bizarre, innovative playing on that. So when that hit, that was probably one of the biggest shifts in people recognizing who I was. And then the film “Crossroads” came out, and that was huge too. And then the David Lee Roth gig.
You know, when I recorded “Blue Powder”, I did it as a product demo for a Carvin amp, and I liked it. It hit all the marks for me, in that it’s a blues kind of song but it doesn’t sound like traditional blues, even my quirky riffs. And it had some really thick, dense kind of chord changes in it, which is something I include as much as when I look for quirky riffs. I try to create melodic and harmonic tapestries that interest me. And “Blue Powder” had all that. There are some chord changes and unexpected kinds of things that aren’t so traditional. And I didn’t realize it, but there were people who were responding to all of that.
So, you go from one room where you record, and then you go into another room and you go to the bathroom, and then you go to another room and you sleep, and then you go into another room and start recording again. Then you put it out, and even when it’s out and all these things are happening you’re still waking up and going to the gym and cooking your breakfast and going to the movies. . . . and you really don’t know what’s going on until you start looking at the press and meeting other people. So it was a surprise, for sure. But then I started thinking, “Well, maybe I really have something here that’s interesting to some people.”
We’re playing “Blue Powder” again in this show. I haven’t played it in a long time, and it’s actually hard to play, because there are so many nuances. I wanted to get it right, which required building patches, because there are many patch changes. . . a whole bank that I use throughout that whole piece. . . . it’s a little bit of a tap dance. But it’s very liberating to play because the melody is so mellifluous.
[CG] Did you find recreating the original Eventide H3000 patches in the Axe-FX to be a pleasure, or a challenge? What was it like to take some of those iconic sounds and create them again?
[Steve] That’s a great question! It was one of the biggest challenges of this tour. When I went back and really dissected Passion and Warfare to build my guitar parts, I realized that the gear I was using back then was relatively new, and what the gear could do was new. The one piece of gear that I used a lot and build the sounds on was the H3000. And that came about from a conversation that I had with them sometime before; they were designing a new harmonizer and reached out to me to see if I had any thoughts. So I told them that all harmonizers up to that point only allowed parallel pitch change, and it would be great to have a harmonizer that had diatonic pitch change. Well, they didn’t know what that was, so I explained that when you’re in a key and you’re playing, the harmonized notes would stay in the key, so they would shift around a little bit in the scale, not just stay exactly parallel. And why only two voices? Why not seven? And why can’t you put effects on each voice if you want?
So these were all pretty different ideas that didn’t exist at the time. And when they made the H3000 it had all of these parameters that I had suggested. And I started using it and building songs like “Ballerina”, and “Alien Water Kiss”. So many of the sounds on the record were from this piece of gear, and I actually still have it. I broke it out and I contemplated bringing my H3000’s on tour. But that would have really been a huge pain, so instead of me going in and taking all those patches and rebuilding them in the Axe-FX, the kind guys at Fractal Audio did it for me! All of my old patches in the H3000 were labeled by song, and the Fractal guys loaded all of that stuff into my Axe-FX so I could put it into the show.
i was surprised to see that Steve doesn't do ALL his own fractal programming
so I am wondering if these patches will ever see the light of day?
i bet not
what do you guys think?
imho he hasn't eclipsed it - one of his best!
but I love everything he has done
while reading this interview .......[i coudn't post the link i keep getting a spam error - here is the text]
from geartechrec,com
[CG] I remember buying the issue of Guitar Player magazine that included the Blue Powder flexi-disc. That felt like a moment of arrival for you as a guitar player. Did you realize the impact of that moment at that time?
[Steve] No, because you can never really prepare for those things. It’s easy to go off into realms of fantasy, which I’ve done before. But when things actually start happening, it’s a surprise how it really feels. You just keep on moving. There have been various points in my career that have been “money punches,” so to speak. The first was getting the reputation of performing with Frank. But even then I didn’t really realize it was happening. I knew, from the perspective of being a fan, the kind of mystique that surrounded a Zappa musician. But when it was happening to me, and Frank was crediting me with doing all of these incredible stunt things on the guitar, I didn’t realize, even at that time, that the mystique was building. I was almost ignorant to it. And then, when “The Attitude Song” came out in Guitar Player, that was powerful, I think even more so than “Blue Powder”, because there was just so much bizarre, innovative playing on that. So when that hit, that was probably one of the biggest shifts in people recognizing who I was. And then the film “Crossroads” came out, and that was huge too. And then the David Lee Roth gig.
You know, when I recorded “Blue Powder”, I did it as a product demo for a Carvin amp, and I liked it. It hit all the marks for me, in that it’s a blues kind of song but it doesn’t sound like traditional blues, even my quirky riffs. And it had some really thick, dense kind of chord changes in it, which is something I include as much as when I look for quirky riffs. I try to create melodic and harmonic tapestries that interest me. And “Blue Powder” had all that. There are some chord changes and unexpected kinds of things that aren’t so traditional. And I didn’t realize it, but there were people who were responding to all of that.
So, you go from one room where you record, and then you go into another room and you go to the bathroom, and then you go to another room and you sleep, and then you go into another room and start recording again. Then you put it out, and even when it’s out and all these things are happening you’re still waking up and going to the gym and cooking your breakfast and going to the movies. . . . and you really don’t know what’s going on until you start looking at the press and meeting other people. So it was a surprise, for sure. But then I started thinking, “Well, maybe I really have something here that’s interesting to some people.”
We’re playing “Blue Powder” again in this show. I haven’t played it in a long time, and it’s actually hard to play, because there are so many nuances. I wanted to get it right, which required building patches, because there are many patch changes. . . a whole bank that I use throughout that whole piece. . . . it’s a little bit of a tap dance. But it’s very liberating to play because the melody is so mellifluous.
[CG] Did you find recreating the original Eventide H3000 patches in the Axe-FX to be a pleasure, or a challenge? What was it like to take some of those iconic sounds and create them again?
[Steve] That’s a great question! It was one of the biggest challenges of this tour. When I went back and really dissected Passion and Warfare to build my guitar parts, I realized that the gear I was using back then was relatively new, and what the gear could do was new. The one piece of gear that I used a lot and build the sounds on was the H3000. And that came about from a conversation that I had with them sometime before; they were designing a new harmonizer and reached out to me to see if I had any thoughts. So I told them that all harmonizers up to that point only allowed parallel pitch change, and it would be great to have a harmonizer that had diatonic pitch change. Well, they didn’t know what that was, so I explained that when you’re in a key and you’re playing, the harmonized notes would stay in the key, so they would shift around a little bit in the scale, not just stay exactly parallel. And why only two voices? Why not seven? And why can’t you put effects on each voice if you want?
So these were all pretty different ideas that didn’t exist at the time. And when they made the H3000 it had all of these parameters that I had suggested. And I started using it and building songs like “Ballerina”, and “Alien Water Kiss”. So many of the sounds on the record were from this piece of gear, and I actually still have it. I broke it out and I contemplated bringing my H3000’s on tour. But that would have really been a huge pain, so instead of me going in and taking all those patches and rebuilding them in the Axe-FX, the kind guys at Fractal Audio did it for me! All of my old patches in the H3000 were labeled by song, and the Fractal guys loaded all of that stuff into my Axe-FX so I could put it into the show.
i was surprised to see that Steve doesn't do ALL his own fractal programming
so I am wondering if these patches will ever see the light of day?
i bet not
what do you guys think?
