Throughout Muse’s career, and in particular in Showbiz and Origin of Symmetry, they have always managed to take the fact that they only have three official members very well, creating huge, stadium-filling tracks, with often only guitar, bass, drums, vocals and backing vocals. Much of Muse’s material features pianos or synthesizers, however in their early material it is clear to see that they respected their limitations and chose not to overproduce tracks to the point where they would not be able to perform them live. It is not always as simple as creating huge sounding guitars, basses and drums however, with several clever techniques being used to make one guitar line, for example, fill out a track. The guitar solo from Hysteria (at the bottom of this entry) is a good example of this. Though not a solo where there are obviously two guitars playing, there are. One playing the main melody of the solo and the second harmonising. This, while retaining their minimal feel, adds to the tracks harmonically and in terms of space. The guitar part does not therefore sound wrong when played live, meaning that the band don’t have need for a second guitarist. Tracks like Plug-In Baby, Showbiz, Muscle Museum, Micro Cuts, and Hyper Music all contain only guitar, bass and drums instrumentally, with only very small amounts of synthesizer used (or none at all). On the other hand, the guitar is often substituted for a piano or organ. See Feeling Good, Space Dementia, Sunburn and Megalomania. This allowed them in their early years to sound exactly as they do on the album live, as very few pieces are missing. This lead to a reputation which they still hold as one of the greatest live bands of all time.
On Muse’s big sound, Rich Costey, producer on ‘Absolution’ said in an interview with Sound on Sound; “Because they’re only a three-piece, Chris’s bass tone is engineered from the ground up to go from the low lows of the bass through the bottom end of the guitar. And Matthew, by extension, because he switches quite frequently to the piano, doesn’t necessarily feel like he has to carry the brunt of things with his guitar. What you have is three people trying to sound like 10, and they’ve got it down pretty good, so that their instruments sonically tend to overlap one another, and the way they play off each other tends to overlap more than it does with a lot of other bands. Often you hear bass players who tend to double the guitar roots very low and function as a mere guitar support, but that isn’t the case with Muse.’
Of course, several tracks in their first two albums, and even more so on Absolution, their third, heavily utilise synthesizers, as both the lead instruments of the track (Bliss) or simply as another instrument to add depth (Citizen Erased). Whilst it may appear on the face of it like there isn’t much going on instrumentally, the tracks that are used have been recorded and mixed in such a way as to dominate the piece of music, re-imagining the role of the bass guitar in many ways. See my post on Chris Wolstenholme’s bass sound for further information, but in my opinion the main reason Muse are so successful as a three-piece outfit is the incredibly effective use of bass guitar in their music. While many artists simply use it as a rhythm instrument, or to play the root notes of the guitar to add that lower octave, Muse use bass in the absence of a second guitar, with the frequencies being spread across a huge range, with multiple timbres. This is partly why they sound so huge with a limited amount of instrumentation.
Another reason for this is the recording and mixing of Matt Bellamy’s guitar. While it is quite clearly supposed to sound like one guitar, there are often three or four different guitar recordings playing at the same time, to build up the tone and presence of the single guitar. As mentioned, the guitar is also recorded several times to create harmonies in places. Take New Born (there is a link at the bottom of this entry) as an example. When the lead guitar part comes in at 1:23, it is clearly one guitar, through one amp. But as the bass and drums join, another layer is added to the guitar, a noticeably cleaner tone that is far more prominent in the higher frequencies. When this tone comes in it completely dominates the one used to introduce the riff, thus layering the sound, with the added bonus of Muse’s incredibly prominent bass tone. The cleaner guitar is also panned further over to the left than the fuzzier counterpart, creating a wider stereo field. This is another technique used by the band to make a small selection of instruments sound as big as it possibly can.
For these reasons I have set my fifth learning outcome to be ‘
- Mix a track(s) to sound full and complete with a minimal selection of instruments, like the work of Costey on Renegades and Leckie on Showbiz and Origin of Symmetry. (LO5)
I intend to use some of the techniques I’ve discussed in this post, which will join up with the points about the bass tone of Chris Wolstenholme and the guitar tone of Tom Morello in creating dynamic and powerful tracks, using only instruments I feel are essential to the tracks. I will use these techniques to create space and dynamic range, rather than use of many instruments. The instruments used will primarily be guitars, basses, drums, and synthesizers, with some small input from pianos and organs.
My original music, being primarily inspired by Muse and Rage Against the Machine, was written with these instruments in mind, and therefore there should be no problems implementing these techniques into it.
http://www.musewiki.org/Rich_Costey:_Recording_Muse%27s_Absolution_(200312_Sound_on_Sound_article)