Post by Steve on Oct 9, 2005 18:45:17 GMT 1
I found this really great interview of Bryan and Keith and thought it should be posted:
The Adams Family: Bryan Adams & Keith Scott
Guitarist Magazine (November 1992)
Having spent what seemed like most of last year topping the UK charts Bryan Adams is now a fully fledged megastar. However, at heart he's still a guitar playing singer, and someone who knows a thing or two about Vox AC30s...Interview by Eddie Allen.
I've caught up with Bryan Adams on the Cardiff leg of his hugely popular 'Waking Up The Neighbours' jaunt, and frankly I'm a relieved man. You see, a tour of this magnitude throws up a forest of red tape for the intrepid journo to fight through and you can spend practically a whole day being shuffled from one 'no' man to the next, understandably concerned to protect their baby from unofficial liggers and prowling hacks. However, finally I'm cosily ensconced with the affable Mr. Adams and his excellent lead guitarist (linchpin of the Dudes of Leisure) Keith Scott, and the talk turns to tunes...
Well known as riff-writer extraordinaire and with a seemingly bottomless pit of catchy songs to draw from, Canadian Adams confides that his approach to songwriting and guitar playing is actually based upon a formula.
"I've never actually analyzed this before," he says, "but I suppose I think of the guitar as the medium which makes the voice work, and so my guitar parts are always written around the vocal. I feel that they're an extension of the same thing - the voice and guitar being as one."
Bryan's songs are undeniably guitar-oriented, but it's the sparseness of the instrument in the mix that creates some of the strongest riffs. As Bryan points out, this has a lot to do with the fact that he's doing two jobs...
"The reason that they're sparse is because when I'm singing it's kind of hard to be very rhythmic, so it's the voice first and the guitar parts fitting around that, with the whole thing being locked together by a pretty solid and very basic groove."
Helping to create the solid feel which has become the hallmark of Adams' music is guitarist Keith Scott. One of the trademarks of Keith's solo playing is his double stopping, based, as he says "on an old blues trick." Keith reckons it cuts through better, especially in the tail end of a song, "when all hell's breaking loose and there's infills and everybody is winding up. Single line things tend to get lost a bit there."
Doubling is also the key to the power behind the heavier Adams tracks.
"There are only odd occasions when Keith's and my guitar parts are different," explains Bryan. "Mostly they just double each other. Of course there are lines that Keith does in second verses, melodic lines which build up to the chorus, and then it all apexes at the solo, hopefully."
When pushed for an influence on this 'doubling' approach, Adams has a very simple answer: "AC/DC! Why complicate it? If you get a good riff, double it with another guy playing the same exact thing. Sometimes I drop out for the first verse of songs and let Keith do rhythm and then I come back in for the second verse; it brings the level of intensity right up.
"I know I keep mentioning AC/DC but they're the king of groove guitar bands for me. When you listen to their records they're always a lot slower than you perceive them to be. It's because it locks better at that groove. Listen to the 'Highway To Hell' album; those songs are incredibly well timed. They're the classic example of a band that thinks with one brain, and if you took one component out it wouldn't happen."
Adams' simple philosophy is also applied to the equipment he uses to get that gritty, hard edged sound. Figuring prominently is his rack, which he designed with Pete Cornish.
"I wanted something that was going to be failsafe, something that wouldn't, after two years of touring, collapse on me. All I needed was a chorus pedal and a booster. I designed it pretty much around the idea that it could be used in the studio and on the road. But the technical side of it is only a means to an end, making sure it's a really clean sound, without going into too much extra cabling and everything.
"I wanted a really good box that I could work from, or that someone could work for me - which is what happens nine times out of ten - and then run direct into the amplifier without losing any gain, without gaining any hum and without losing any of the real naturalness of the Fender Strat and the Vox amp."
As Bryan says, his main guitar is a Strat, although in the early days he used a Les Paul...
"The only reason I ever played Les Pauls was because Keith was playing a Strat and I thought we should have a different look, but from about 1985 on I've played Strats. They're all old ones except two that Fender made in the Custom Shop in California.
"I've always thought that an old instrument, particularly a Stratocaster, has an instant vibe. It's got instant character, whereas a new guitar hasn't had the years of beating on it and fiddling with to give it the character. so if you plug in an old Strat it will probably sound more like a Strat should sound. How would you enlarge on that, Keith?"
"Well, there's something about an aged guitar...the tone qualities...every older guitar that I've played seems to have settled down. There's the odd exception where I've picked up a brand new one and it's worked right away. I've had some success with Paul Reed Smith guitars, which you can virtually take out of the box, tune them up and they're ready to go."
But does their agreement about guitars carry over to their individual sounds?
Keith: "I have to change from clean, sort of arpeggiated sounds, right over to solo sounds, which is a little more diverse than what Bryan has to do. Because of that I have a stereo mix on stage and a monitor for my amps, which is basically two 4x12 cabs. It doesn't necessarily mean it's going to work at front of house, so the sound man takes a direct feed, just a regular Marshall, dry, up to the house. As for effects, sometimes there's none at all, depending on the reverberance of the room we're playing. So he has control over what he wants to hear and I have my own mixer on stage. That's basically the way it's split."
By today's standards Keith's rig is fairly simple, but Bryan's is even more basic.
"I have a mic on my Vox AC30 and a direct which goes out into a Hi-Watt head, and that goes into a speaker simulator, which goes to the desk out front."
Why the Hi-Watt?
"Well, I didn't have anywhere else to put it at home!"
"And it hasn't blown up yet," Keith jokes.
"Right, it hasn't blown up. It's one of the first ones and it sounds really good. It's a good rock-sounding amp."
Bryan's enthusiasm for the old Hi-Watt is shared by Keith, who used to use Hi-Watts all the time. "I bought my first one in 1974 and I had it at least ten years. I used it almost exclusively up until...I could afford to buy another one!"
This liking for old gear means that they both spend a lot of time hunting it down, as Bryan explains...
"We've become real flea market junkies for old equipment. I collect old microphones and Keith collects vintage amplifiers. We've really got into the 'Olde Worlde' things. Not necessarily all of them work, but there's a vibe about them. Sometimes they're just aesthetically pleasing things; some of the old Gretsch amplifiers and that kind of thing are kind of cool to look at.
"It all stems from our curiosity about the past and our heroes, particularly guitar players like Ritchie Blackmore and Jimmy Page. Those guys, for me, were and are the archetypical guitar players. I remember spending hours looking at the cover of Deep Purple's 'Machine Head', looking at the little photos and thinking, 'He's playing a Strat and he's standing on a Vox amp; right, that must be the sound.' Those sorts of things inspired me, and the reason those records sound like they do is because they used that equipment. You won't get that sound unless you use the original equipment."
The reliability problems caused by taking old gear on the road adds to the pressure of touring, but Keith thinks they've got round that quite well.
"You have to hire people that know how to work the equipment, who know how to repair things. We've researched who are the right people to fix Marshalls, to fix Voxes and to fix Stratocasters. You can take your guitar to a guitar shop and anyone can re-fret it, but to get it done the way you want it is very, very important. I mean, the wrong guy can ruin a guitar."
WHILE BRYAN AND KEITH are now enjoying the fruits of success, it hasn't always been easy. For instance, even today they both use the same gauge guitar strings because in the old days it was cheaper to buy one gauge in bulk.
"We could never afford things," recalls Bryan. "The reason Keith used his Hi-Watt for years and years was because he couldn't afford to buy another amplifier. And the reason I use heavy gauge strings is because he was using a heavy gauge and we figured it was better and cheaper to buy strings all in one gauge. Besides, if we're changing guitar strings every night, I might as well use the same strings as he does."
And 12s to 50s lasted longer and stayed in tune better," chips in Keith, "so you didn't have to change them as often. I'd heard Joe Walsh and Pete Townshend used them quite heavy, and I rather liked the tone they got, so I slowly built it up until I got up as high as I could be comfortable with, and I've been using that gauge ever since."
Bryan agrees: "I've never been into that sort of high speed guitar playing, and if I was it would have to be something very melodic. for instance, Ritchie Blackmore was a very fast player but it was always based on a blues thing, never on 'how many notes can I get in the scale?' and that was much more appealing. Again, it all comes down to the vocal thing. If you listen to the way the voice comes in in relation to where the chords are, you'll see that the vocal fits exactly in the holes where the guitar isn't playing. Those things are important in songwritng and in guitar playing, I think."
Ask Bryan to elaborate on his playing and he replies, "I'm a professional busker. I've no idea what I'm doing. And if the tape recorder hadn't been rolling with me playing around on guitar, some of the songs would never have happened; I would never have remembered them.
"The more I'm into music and the more I'm into guitar playing, I realize it isn't about how great a guitar player you are; it's about writing songs and it's about fitting guitar and voice together.
"On this last record, and Keith will attest to this, we spent ages recording guitars; we had every guitar available to us and we went all out. We used mostly vintage Strats, Les Pauls, Gretsches, and we would just say, 'We've got to find a guitar solo for this, what do you fancy?' 'Well, let's try the Strat again and play it through the Marshall and the Vox and add the...whatever...sound to it,' and there were all these different combinations of sounds. It would work for one part but the next part needed another sound to it, so maybe we'd use the Paul Reed Smith for the second half of the solo. there were all kinds of things like that, weren't there Keith?"
"Yeah, there are times, because certain guitars don't have a wangy bar, that you get a great solo for most of the song and right at the end you want to maybe slide down and you can't do it, so you'd have to find a guitar that would do that, and then blend it in."
Of course, Bryan Adams' talents are not just confined to singing and playing. The albums also showcase his production skills, although that's something which he would like to change.
"I've produced six albums and I've had enough of producing." he says. "It's too hard. I think after 'Reckless' I knew I wasn't going to do another full production because I was just driving everybody too hard, and becoming very miserable doing it. We did put one more record together with Bob Clearmountain, 'Into The Fire', and that's when I said, 'That's it, I don't really want to be hands-on any more."
"I'd always wanted to work with Mutt Lange; I've actually tried to work with Mutt since 1984, but he was always busy on a project, but he wanted to do it and it was the right time for both of us. He didn't want to produce and I didn't want to produce, so we ended up writing songs and making the record together."
WITH THE STRONG GUITAR emphasis on all Bryan's albums, it's Keith who Bryan credits with getting the sounds. As he says, "Keith's really good at being able to know where to focus in. A lot of time we're just messing with the amp and getting it sounding pretty cool, and then the engineer will whack something on it and away you go."
Keith takes this further: "We were a little limited when we were recording the guitars, limited by the size of the room and the fact that some of the gear wasn't working properly, so obstructive forces were at work and this is where compromise comes in; you're spending all this time when you know it could be alot better."
"That's what the whole thing about the Pete Cornish involvement for me, " continues Bryan, "because I was sick of coming in and plugging into an amp and going, 'Oh, how do you get rid of that bloody hum?' And 'Why is this tube crackling, what's going on"' And so I assembled an entourage of people - Pete Cornish, Dave Peterson, Lance Stadnyk - and I said, 'Right, we want to get this happening.' And we did."
If there's a simpler way of recording guitars, Bryan and Keith haven't found it yet.
"Believe me," says Keith, "if we could plug into a box and get all these sounds, we'd be doing it, but it just doesn't work that way. We have to spend a lot of time learning the limitations of the amplifier versus the guitar we're using, and the microphones and console..."
"And microphone placement is very important," Bryan interjects, "because if you take a speaker, the difference between the centre of the cone and the outside can vary the sound so drastically that an inch can make the difference between a good and a nuts guitar sound.
"This is something we've been doing for years. The engineer would have headphone on while Keith was blasting away: he'd move the mic around until we found the right place, then he'd bolt it in the stand where the speaker's sweet spot was, and there it would stay. From there we'd work on the sound to develop it, maybe even including different amplifiers. Very often, if you isolate a sound it's not that good, but with Keith and me playing the same thing, they combine and one complements the other. I recently spent ten hours mixing this live broadcast that's coming out soon on the BBC, and as soon as I pulled either mine or Keith's amp out of the mix the vibe wasn't quite the same. So the balance of the two is essential.
"In my system you can plug in four or five amps at once, without losing any gain, without gaining any hum; you can put them all on parallel and they will all be in phase. I use Vox AC30's, which are funny amps; I've got four of them and only two sound really good. One of them is amazing but I don't take it on the road with me; I leave it at home.
"If you compare the two AC30s I use on stage, the back-up one sounds like nothing compared with the other. I can't explain it - the parts are exactly the same. It's not the valves. Maybe it's the capacitors. Maybe it's the transformers, because they must have something to do with the sound. Anyway, it's not a bad amp, but the one I've got at home is much better.
"For those boffins who are looking for an old AC30, remember that Vox produced three versions with different frequency biases. If you pull the chassis out, somewhere inside them will be a stamp saying 'Treble' or 'Bass', and the one to look for is 'Treble'. But don't confuse 'Treble' with 'Treble Boost'. 'Treble Boost' are garbage; they're just not worth discussing.
"You know, my life changed when I found the Vox amplifier. I tell you, I've had SoundCitys, which were garbage, Marshall, which I found unreliable and kind of loud, Roland Jazz Chorus 120s - I've used those live with the distortion button turned on - and I had a Music Man amp for a while. And then along came an old battered AC30, which Lance, my guitar tech, gave to me. He said, 'Man, look, this is the amp,' and from that point on I didn't look back.
"I drive them really hard, to the absolute max. But here's another key tip for those Vox users out there: I only use one channel. The reason why a lot of Vox amplifiers blow up is because when you turn the amplifier on all the preamp tubes and power tubes are powered up, if you're only going to use one channel, plug the guitar in that one and take out the valves that you don't use from the other channels, so the amp isn't quite as hot. The channel runs really hot, but the amp doesn't run as hot. Pull everything out - you don't need the tremolo, you don't need the normal channel and all that other garbage. Put it in a box in your guitar case and save it for a rainy day. And that way your amp won't blow up. You see, the Vox is trying to be all things, but in fact it's only really good for one thing at a time."
---------
THE BRYAN ADAMS LIVE show calls for simple staging and a powerful sound, and to make things more intimate for the audience it involves the band disappearing from the main stage to reappear on a small podium set out in the audience. There they play some old rock'n'roll numbers and pull members of the audience up on stage with them, causing nightmares for the security people. But, as Bryan points out, "What do you do, nowadays? I mean, everybody has seen everything. But the idea of making the gig more intimate is something that appeals to me."
Keith goes on: "We've been doing it for three or four months now and the only problem was when somebody tripped running to the B stage, fell down and scraped their elbow!"
A Bryan Adams song is almost guaranteed commercial success, and following the triumph of the record-breaking single (Everything I Do) I Do It For You there must be even more pressure to maintain that tradition.
"Man, I've been worrying about that for fifteen years!" exclaims Bryan. "The album 'Into The Fire", was intentionally written so that the songs would go Top 40. It was a good tour to do and I think we learned a lot from it.
"We recorded the album in my house, in the living room. I don't know if I'd do it again, though. When I'm on tour I normally write little ideas down in my diary and hang on to them until it's writing time. But touring takes up so much time that there's no real time to sit down and work out songs. So now it's touring time and in September I'll be writing, then in October it's back touring again.
"I'm not incredibly prolific," he admits. "I'll maybe write ten songs a year if I'm lucky. I haven't written diddly this year, but maybe I'll have a surge of inspiration and write five in September. But it's hard to write songs. Well actually, it's easy to write songs; it's hard to write good ones."
So which songs is Bryan really proud of?
"On 'Into The Fire", for example, I'm really proud of Keith's playing, especially on Native Son - just a fantastic piece of guitar work. All the solos in the actual song Into The Fire were recorded live; that's the way he works best. Packing You In on 'Waking Up The Neighbours' is another example of where that happened. I was trying to get Mutt to finish up because we were all leaving and had only four or five hours to finish the demo. So I said, 'Let's knock up a quick vocal and let's knock up Keith's guitar,' and he just banged up a solo very quickly and it was great"
Keith subscribes to the theory that it's more luck than judgments. "When you get it like that, it's definitely a fluke, because usually it's laborious."
Still, Keith must be instinctively aware of what his bandleader requires. After all, they've been friends for sixteen years, and professionally involved for eleven of them...
"Keith added a huge thing to the band," enthuses Bryan, "and he'd never recorded on an album before. I remember I was going in to record 'Cuts Like A Knife' and I said, "I'm taking you guys into the studio,' because who I play with on stage, I want them in the studio with me; I like the idea of having one unit."
Keith recalls, "I was pretty green then, I had a lot of things to learn."
"You would never guess it listening to those records now," adds Bryan. "I remember we struggled on one solo on 'Cuts Like A Knife' and we actually spent days and days trying to think up what the solo was going to be. In the end Keith said, 'Just let's play the f***ing solo'! And he played it, the bastard played it! Sometimes the intimidation of other people in a recording studio can be very overwhelming."
Keith on the other hand feels the pressure was more self-inflicted...
"There's always a self-imposed pressure, especially when you're starting out - 'Sh*t, I've got to come through big-time on this' - but you just have to let it happen; if it doesn't happen today it'll happen tomorrow. That's a great philosophy and fortunately we've got the luxury of having a little more time now than we had in the early days.
"Naah, I say rush it!" laughs Bryan; "I'd rather be sitting on a beach any day..."
The Adams Family: Bryan Adams & Keith Scott
Guitarist Magazine (November 1992)
Having spent what seemed like most of last year topping the UK charts Bryan Adams is now a fully fledged megastar. However, at heart he's still a guitar playing singer, and someone who knows a thing or two about Vox AC30s...Interview by Eddie Allen.
I've caught up with Bryan Adams on the Cardiff leg of his hugely popular 'Waking Up The Neighbours' jaunt, and frankly I'm a relieved man. You see, a tour of this magnitude throws up a forest of red tape for the intrepid journo to fight through and you can spend practically a whole day being shuffled from one 'no' man to the next, understandably concerned to protect their baby from unofficial liggers and prowling hacks. However, finally I'm cosily ensconced with the affable Mr. Adams and his excellent lead guitarist (linchpin of the Dudes of Leisure) Keith Scott, and the talk turns to tunes...
Well known as riff-writer extraordinaire and with a seemingly bottomless pit of catchy songs to draw from, Canadian Adams confides that his approach to songwriting and guitar playing is actually based upon a formula.
"I've never actually analyzed this before," he says, "but I suppose I think of the guitar as the medium which makes the voice work, and so my guitar parts are always written around the vocal. I feel that they're an extension of the same thing - the voice and guitar being as one."
Bryan's songs are undeniably guitar-oriented, but it's the sparseness of the instrument in the mix that creates some of the strongest riffs. As Bryan points out, this has a lot to do with the fact that he's doing two jobs...
"The reason that they're sparse is because when I'm singing it's kind of hard to be very rhythmic, so it's the voice first and the guitar parts fitting around that, with the whole thing being locked together by a pretty solid and very basic groove."
Helping to create the solid feel which has become the hallmark of Adams' music is guitarist Keith Scott. One of the trademarks of Keith's solo playing is his double stopping, based, as he says "on an old blues trick." Keith reckons it cuts through better, especially in the tail end of a song, "when all hell's breaking loose and there's infills and everybody is winding up. Single line things tend to get lost a bit there."
Doubling is also the key to the power behind the heavier Adams tracks.
"There are only odd occasions when Keith's and my guitar parts are different," explains Bryan. "Mostly they just double each other. Of course there are lines that Keith does in second verses, melodic lines which build up to the chorus, and then it all apexes at the solo, hopefully."
When pushed for an influence on this 'doubling' approach, Adams has a very simple answer: "AC/DC! Why complicate it? If you get a good riff, double it with another guy playing the same exact thing. Sometimes I drop out for the first verse of songs and let Keith do rhythm and then I come back in for the second verse; it brings the level of intensity right up.
"I know I keep mentioning AC/DC but they're the king of groove guitar bands for me. When you listen to their records they're always a lot slower than you perceive them to be. It's because it locks better at that groove. Listen to the 'Highway To Hell' album; those songs are incredibly well timed. They're the classic example of a band that thinks with one brain, and if you took one component out it wouldn't happen."
Adams' simple philosophy is also applied to the equipment he uses to get that gritty, hard edged sound. Figuring prominently is his rack, which he designed with Pete Cornish.
"I wanted something that was going to be failsafe, something that wouldn't, after two years of touring, collapse on me. All I needed was a chorus pedal and a booster. I designed it pretty much around the idea that it could be used in the studio and on the road. But the technical side of it is only a means to an end, making sure it's a really clean sound, without going into too much extra cabling and everything.
"I wanted a really good box that I could work from, or that someone could work for me - which is what happens nine times out of ten - and then run direct into the amplifier without losing any gain, without gaining any hum and without losing any of the real naturalness of the Fender Strat and the Vox amp."
As Bryan says, his main guitar is a Strat, although in the early days he used a Les Paul...
"The only reason I ever played Les Pauls was because Keith was playing a Strat and I thought we should have a different look, but from about 1985 on I've played Strats. They're all old ones except two that Fender made in the Custom Shop in California.
"I've always thought that an old instrument, particularly a Stratocaster, has an instant vibe. It's got instant character, whereas a new guitar hasn't had the years of beating on it and fiddling with to give it the character. so if you plug in an old Strat it will probably sound more like a Strat should sound. How would you enlarge on that, Keith?"
"Well, there's something about an aged guitar...the tone qualities...every older guitar that I've played seems to have settled down. There's the odd exception where I've picked up a brand new one and it's worked right away. I've had some success with Paul Reed Smith guitars, which you can virtually take out of the box, tune them up and they're ready to go."
But does their agreement about guitars carry over to their individual sounds?
Keith: "I have to change from clean, sort of arpeggiated sounds, right over to solo sounds, which is a little more diverse than what Bryan has to do. Because of that I have a stereo mix on stage and a monitor for my amps, which is basically two 4x12 cabs. It doesn't necessarily mean it's going to work at front of house, so the sound man takes a direct feed, just a regular Marshall, dry, up to the house. As for effects, sometimes there's none at all, depending on the reverberance of the room we're playing. So he has control over what he wants to hear and I have my own mixer on stage. That's basically the way it's split."
By today's standards Keith's rig is fairly simple, but Bryan's is even more basic.
"I have a mic on my Vox AC30 and a direct which goes out into a Hi-Watt head, and that goes into a speaker simulator, which goes to the desk out front."
Why the Hi-Watt?
"Well, I didn't have anywhere else to put it at home!"
"And it hasn't blown up yet," Keith jokes.
"Right, it hasn't blown up. It's one of the first ones and it sounds really good. It's a good rock-sounding amp."
Bryan's enthusiasm for the old Hi-Watt is shared by Keith, who used to use Hi-Watts all the time. "I bought my first one in 1974 and I had it at least ten years. I used it almost exclusively up until...I could afford to buy another one!"
This liking for old gear means that they both spend a lot of time hunting it down, as Bryan explains...
"We've become real flea market junkies for old equipment. I collect old microphones and Keith collects vintage amplifiers. We've really got into the 'Olde Worlde' things. Not necessarily all of them work, but there's a vibe about them. Sometimes they're just aesthetically pleasing things; some of the old Gretsch amplifiers and that kind of thing are kind of cool to look at.
"It all stems from our curiosity about the past and our heroes, particularly guitar players like Ritchie Blackmore and Jimmy Page. Those guys, for me, were and are the archetypical guitar players. I remember spending hours looking at the cover of Deep Purple's 'Machine Head', looking at the little photos and thinking, 'He's playing a Strat and he's standing on a Vox amp; right, that must be the sound.' Those sorts of things inspired me, and the reason those records sound like they do is because they used that equipment. You won't get that sound unless you use the original equipment."
The reliability problems caused by taking old gear on the road adds to the pressure of touring, but Keith thinks they've got round that quite well.
"You have to hire people that know how to work the equipment, who know how to repair things. We've researched who are the right people to fix Marshalls, to fix Voxes and to fix Stratocasters. You can take your guitar to a guitar shop and anyone can re-fret it, but to get it done the way you want it is very, very important. I mean, the wrong guy can ruin a guitar."
WHILE BRYAN AND KEITH are now enjoying the fruits of success, it hasn't always been easy. For instance, even today they both use the same gauge guitar strings because in the old days it was cheaper to buy one gauge in bulk.
"We could never afford things," recalls Bryan. "The reason Keith used his Hi-Watt for years and years was because he couldn't afford to buy another amplifier. And the reason I use heavy gauge strings is because he was using a heavy gauge and we figured it was better and cheaper to buy strings all in one gauge. Besides, if we're changing guitar strings every night, I might as well use the same strings as he does."
And 12s to 50s lasted longer and stayed in tune better," chips in Keith, "so you didn't have to change them as often. I'd heard Joe Walsh and Pete Townshend used them quite heavy, and I rather liked the tone they got, so I slowly built it up until I got up as high as I could be comfortable with, and I've been using that gauge ever since."
Bryan agrees: "I've never been into that sort of high speed guitar playing, and if I was it would have to be something very melodic. for instance, Ritchie Blackmore was a very fast player but it was always based on a blues thing, never on 'how many notes can I get in the scale?' and that was much more appealing. Again, it all comes down to the vocal thing. If you listen to the way the voice comes in in relation to where the chords are, you'll see that the vocal fits exactly in the holes where the guitar isn't playing. Those things are important in songwritng and in guitar playing, I think."
Ask Bryan to elaborate on his playing and he replies, "I'm a professional busker. I've no idea what I'm doing. And if the tape recorder hadn't been rolling with me playing around on guitar, some of the songs would never have happened; I would never have remembered them.
"The more I'm into music and the more I'm into guitar playing, I realize it isn't about how great a guitar player you are; it's about writing songs and it's about fitting guitar and voice together.
"On this last record, and Keith will attest to this, we spent ages recording guitars; we had every guitar available to us and we went all out. We used mostly vintage Strats, Les Pauls, Gretsches, and we would just say, 'We've got to find a guitar solo for this, what do you fancy?' 'Well, let's try the Strat again and play it through the Marshall and the Vox and add the...whatever...sound to it,' and there were all these different combinations of sounds. It would work for one part but the next part needed another sound to it, so maybe we'd use the Paul Reed Smith for the second half of the solo. there were all kinds of things like that, weren't there Keith?"
"Yeah, there are times, because certain guitars don't have a wangy bar, that you get a great solo for most of the song and right at the end you want to maybe slide down and you can't do it, so you'd have to find a guitar that would do that, and then blend it in."
Of course, Bryan Adams' talents are not just confined to singing and playing. The albums also showcase his production skills, although that's something which he would like to change.
"I've produced six albums and I've had enough of producing." he says. "It's too hard. I think after 'Reckless' I knew I wasn't going to do another full production because I was just driving everybody too hard, and becoming very miserable doing it. We did put one more record together with Bob Clearmountain, 'Into The Fire', and that's when I said, 'That's it, I don't really want to be hands-on any more."
"I'd always wanted to work with Mutt Lange; I've actually tried to work with Mutt since 1984, but he was always busy on a project, but he wanted to do it and it was the right time for both of us. He didn't want to produce and I didn't want to produce, so we ended up writing songs and making the record together."
WITH THE STRONG GUITAR emphasis on all Bryan's albums, it's Keith who Bryan credits with getting the sounds. As he says, "Keith's really good at being able to know where to focus in. A lot of time we're just messing with the amp and getting it sounding pretty cool, and then the engineer will whack something on it and away you go."
Keith takes this further: "We were a little limited when we were recording the guitars, limited by the size of the room and the fact that some of the gear wasn't working properly, so obstructive forces were at work and this is where compromise comes in; you're spending all this time when you know it could be alot better."
"That's what the whole thing about the Pete Cornish involvement for me, " continues Bryan, "because I was sick of coming in and plugging into an amp and going, 'Oh, how do you get rid of that bloody hum?' And 'Why is this tube crackling, what's going on"' And so I assembled an entourage of people - Pete Cornish, Dave Peterson, Lance Stadnyk - and I said, 'Right, we want to get this happening.' And we did."
If there's a simpler way of recording guitars, Bryan and Keith haven't found it yet.
"Believe me," says Keith, "if we could plug into a box and get all these sounds, we'd be doing it, but it just doesn't work that way. We have to spend a lot of time learning the limitations of the amplifier versus the guitar we're using, and the microphones and console..."
"And microphone placement is very important," Bryan interjects, "because if you take a speaker, the difference between the centre of the cone and the outside can vary the sound so drastically that an inch can make the difference between a good and a nuts guitar sound.
"This is something we've been doing for years. The engineer would have headphone on while Keith was blasting away: he'd move the mic around until we found the right place, then he'd bolt it in the stand where the speaker's sweet spot was, and there it would stay. From there we'd work on the sound to develop it, maybe even including different amplifiers. Very often, if you isolate a sound it's not that good, but with Keith and me playing the same thing, they combine and one complements the other. I recently spent ten hours mixing this live broadcast that's coming out soon on the BBC, and as soon as I pulled either mine or Keith's amp out of the mix the vibe wasn't quite the same. So the balance of the two is essential.
"In my system you can plug in four or five amps at once, without losing any gain, without gaining any hum; you can put them all on parallel and they will all be in phase. I use Vox AC30's, which are funny amps; I've got four of them and only two sound really good. One of them is amazing but I don't take it on the road with me; I leave it at home.
"If you compare the two AC30s I use on stage, the back-up one sounds like nothing compared with the other. I can't explain it - the parts are exactly the same. It's not the valves. Maybe it's the capacitors. Maybe it's the transformers, because they must have something to do with the sound. Anyway, it's not a bad amp, but the one I've got at home is much better.
"For those boffins who are looking for an old AC30, remember that Vox produced three versions with different frequency biases. If you pull the chassis out, somewhere inside them will be a stamp saying 'Treble' or 'Bass', and the one to look for is 'Treble'. But don't confuse 'Treble' with 'Treble Boost'. 'Treble Boost' are garbage; they're just not worth discussing.
"You know, my life changed when I found the Vox amplifier. I tell you, I've had SoundCitys, which were garbage, Marshall, which I found unreliable and kind of loud, Roland Jazz Chorus 120s - I've used those live with the distortion button turned on - and I had a Music Man amp for a while. And then along came an old battered AC30, which Lance, my guitar tech, gave to me. He said, 'Man, look, this is the amp,' and from that point on I didn't look back.
"I drive them really hard, to the absolute max. But here's another key tip for those Vox users out there: I only use one channel. The reason why a lot of Vox amplifiers blow up is because when you turn the amplifier on all the preamp tubes and power tubes are powered up, if you're only going to use one channel, plug the guitar in that one and take out the valves that you don't use from the other channels, so the amp isn't quite as hot. The channel runs really hot, but the amp doesn't run as hot. Pull everything out - you don't need the tremolo, you don't need the normal channel and all that other garbage. Put it in a box in your guitar case and save it for a rainy day. And that way your amp won't blow up. You see, the Vox is trying to be all things, but in fact it's only really good for one thing at a time."
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THE BRYAN ADAMS LIVE show calls for simple staging and a powerful sound, and to make things more intimate for the audience it involves the band disappearing from the main stage to reappear on a small podium set out in the audience. There they play some old rock'n'roll numbers and pull members of the audience up on stage with them, causing nightmares for the security people. But, as Bryan points out, "What do you do, nowadays? I mean, everybody has seen everything. But the idea of making the gig more intimate is something that appeals to me."
Keith goes on: "We've been doing it for three or four months now and the only problem was when somebody tripped running to the B stage, fell down and scraped their elbow!"
A Bryan Adams song is almost guaranteed commercial success, and following the triumph of the record-breaking single (Everything I Do) I Do It For You there must be even more pressure to maintain that tradition.
"Man, I've been worrying about that for fifteen years!" exclaims Bryan. "The album 'Into The Fire", was intentionally written so that the songs would go Top 40. It was a good tour to do and I think we learned a lot from it.
"We recorded the album in my house, in the living room. I don't know if I'd do it again, though. When I'm on tour I normally write little ideas down in my diary and hang on to them until it's writing time. But touring takes up so much time that there's no real time to sit down and work out songs. So now it's touring time and in September I'll be writing, then in October it's back touring again.
"I'm not incredibly prolific," he admits. "I'll maybe write ten songs a year if I'm lucky. I haven't written diddly this year, but maybe I'll have a surge of inspiration and write five in September. But it's hard to write songs. Well actually, it's easy to write songs; it's hard to write good ones."
So which songs is Bryan really proud of?
"On 'Into The Fire", for example, I'm really proud of Keith's playing, especially on Native Son - just a fantastic piece of guitar work. All the solos in the actual song Into The Fire were recorded live; that's the way he works best. Packing You In on 'Waking Up The Neighbours' is another example of where that happened. I was trying to get Mutt to finish up because we were all leaving and had only four or five hours to finish the demo. So I said, 'Let's knock up a quick vocal and let's knock up Keith's guitar,' and he just banged up a solo very quickly and it was great"
Keith subscribes to the theory that it's more luck than judgments. "When you get it like that, it's definitely a fluke, because usually it's laborious."
Still, Keith must be instinctively aware of what his bandleader requires. After all, they've been friends for sixteen years, and professionally involved for eleven of them...
"Keith added a huge thing to the band," enthuses Bryan, "and he'd never recorded on an album before. I remember I was going in to record 'Cuts Like A Knife' and I said, "I'm taking you guys into the studio,' because who I play with on stage, I want them in the studio with me; I like the idea of having one unit."
Keith recalls, "I was pretty green then, I had a lot of things to learn."
"You would never guess it listening to those records now," adds Bryan. "I remember we struggled on one solo on 'Cuts Like A Knife' and we actually spent days and days trying to think up what the solo was going to be. In the end Keith said, 'Just let's play the f***ing solo'! And he played it, the bastard played it! Sometimes the intimidation of other people in a recording studio can be very overwhelming."
Keith on the other hand feels the pressure was more self-inflicted...
"There's always a self-imposed pressure, especially when you're starting out - 'Sh*t, I've got to come through big-time on this' - but you just have to let it happen; if it doesn't happen today it'll happen tomorrow. That's a great philosophy and fortunately we've got the luxury of having a little more time now than we had in the early days.
"Naah, I say rush it!" laughs Bryan; "I'd rather be sitting on a beach any day..."