Without doubt the most difficult learning outcome I’ve set for myself is LO1.

The main reason for this is that both Matt Bellamy and Tom Morello’s guitar tones are extremely unique and difficult to replicate. Bellamy in particular has used a vast array of different effects, guitars and amplifiers, even in just the band’s first three albums. This makes it difficult to pin down tones to replicate. As mentioned in my post entitled ‘Pickups’, I have found that Bellamy uses both single and dual coil pickups, but uses the latter for most of his guitar tones. Getting the basic guitar tone right should be easy. The pedals and amplifiers may prove more of a challenge.

Matt Bellamy has a penchant for using a fuzz tone that seems to be somewhere between a distortion and a high-gain fuzz. This can be heard in particular on ‘Plug-In Baby’, found below. The introduction to this track features the sound of feedback being shaped by the Z-Vex Fuzz Factory, which at the time of Origin Of Symmetry, was Matt’s main distortion pedal. The pedal itself is actually built into several of his guitars and when performing ‘Plug-In Baby’ live, Matt controls the tone of the fuzz feedback at the beginning of the song from a switch on the guitar. This can be seen in the [Live From Wembley Stadium] video at the bottom of this entry. Replicating the tone of this pedal will be difficult and I actually looked into buying it. It’s well over £150 however, and therefore I’m going to try and mix the sounds of a couple of pedals together to see how close I can get. The main fuzz pedal I’ll use to try and replicate Matt’s tone is the Electro-Harmonix Big Muff Nano, a highly popular fuzz pedal. This will be mixed with the Electro-Harmonix Crayon, an overdrive pedal which is a copy of the JHS model that Matt Bellamy actually owns. Evidence of this can be found in the ‘Equipboard’ link below. Whether he used it during the recording of their first three albums is unclear. The Z-Vex has a tone highly characterised by having huge prominence in the high frequencies, creating a ‘fizzing’ tone. Other options open to me are to distort the amp and use the Big Muff to try to replicate the tone of the Z-Vex by itself. I will experiment with this during recording. Finding the right distortion will be absolutely essential but I believe with the right tone-shaping, I should be able to get at least a close replication.

Other effects Bellamy is known for include the MXR Phase 90, again, built into some of his guitars. This can prominently heard on the middle section of Citizen Erased from Origin of Symmetry. There is a section in one of my tracks where I will attempt to use this effect. As I don’t own a phaser pedal, I will add the effect before the mixing stage in Logic Pro.

The Digitech Whammy (see my post on this pedal for more) an effect that both Bellamy and Morello use prominently. I will also be using this during the recording stage. The Whammy is a pitch-shifting pedal which allows the guitarist to move notes in a way which would be impossible with a regular fretted guitar.

For the recording stage I have even fitted a similar gauge set of strings (heavier on the bottom, lighter on the top) as Bellamy does in order to get the low-frequency prominence that he finds when playing sections like the palm-muted verses of ‘Time is Running Out’

Matt Bellamy’s amplifier choices in their first three albums were all valve amps made my Marshall, Soldano (both seen on image below), and on Absolution, Diezel. These are all high-gain amps however in an interview, Bellamy mentioned that ‘I tend to stick to one channel 90% of the time, which is volume on full, with the gain really low. You get this really attacking, clean sound which I use quite a lot.’ This can be found in the ‘Equipboard’ link below. Bellamy also uses a Vox AC30, a similar amp to one that the university owns, for several clean tones. I intend to try this amp therefore. It seems through his comments that the majority of Matt Bellamy’s guitar sound comes from his pedals, and through listening I believe this is evident.

Tom Morello has also used a Marshall JCM amplifier throughout his career. Evidence of this can be seen in the image at the bottom. Morello also details that he uses a Peavey cabinet, which is what I will be recording the guitar parts through.

As mentioned, Tom Morello also uses a Digitech Whammy, but he also owns a Dunlop Crybaby Wah pedal, another staple of his sound. As I don’t own this pedal, I will try adding it before the mixing stage in Logic. Morello generally uses the distortion from his amp and so on one of the tracks, Antagonise, I will do the same to try and achieve a similar tone.

All in all, getting the guitar sounds right will be the most difficult aspect of this project, but it is something that I am keen to do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9o6Ga3Nad3s

http://www.sonicscoop.com/2016/03/08/get-that-guitar-sound-muse-edition/

http://equipboard.com/pros/matthew-bellamy/#effects-pedals

http://equipboard.com/pros/matthew-bellamy/marshall-jcm-2000-dsl-100-amp

After much study I have come to conclusions about how I want the drums to sound on my EP; similar to those on Muse’s Absolution. This mainly relates to my learning outcome 3. I had originally thought that replicating the drum sound from this album might be too much of a challenge to take on, as they are done so professionally. However with some help from Muse’s Making of Absolution video and a Sound on Sound article with Rich Costey (both found below), I have decided that I am really keen to try and capture the ambience and room sounds of the drums on that particular album.

First, I will link the drums-only, or drums and vocals only tracks that I found which give a really clear look into how the drums sound isolated. While they have some clear differences, the snare drum tone being the biggest, it is easy to tell that Costey had a solid idea of how he wanted the drums to sound on the album. It should also be noted that while there is a lot of room sound, there doesn’t seem to be a lack of solidarity that comes with using a lot of reverb. Costey explains this in an interview with Sound on Sound: “another reason for the tight sound may be that I don’t tend to use much reverb on things like drums when I’m mixing. I pretty much just used whatever ambience was to be found on the room mics.” This piece of information has become crucial to how I intend to record my drums and also prompted me to record them at somewhere with more ambience than the university Multi-Track Studio. Insonic Studios is where I will be recording them which Lee has told me has a room which may be able to replicate the sort of room sounds found on Absolution. I have chosen to try and capture a clean and clear room sound when recording the drums in order to mix them in the same way that Costey did, and therefore capture the natural ambience that he captured and created on Absolution.

In the same article, Costey explains that the band also tried to record outside, in a courtyard with a lot of natural reverb. While they didn’t follow through with this, it shows the level of natural ambience that Costey was trying to find with the drum sound. Another experiment which was taken forward however, was to record the kick drums-based opening of Apocalypse Please in a swimming pool. Drummer Dom Howard was submerged in the pool, with the drums on the edge. An image of this is shown below. Whilst I don’t have the funds or contacts to be able to hire a swimming pool to use, it did make me look at the recording spaces I was considering using to record drums.

In the Sound on Sound article, Costey explained how his idea for the drum sound came about. “I had this idea that I wanted the drums to be intimate and very close, yet with a unique distant ambience. At one point, while we were rehearsing in the smaller Studio B, the band was running through the number with the doors open and I could hear it echoing around the courtyard.”

LO3 is to ‘identify and replicate the use of recording spaces used by Rich Costey on Absolution to create similar sounding reverbs and ambience’ and hopefully by recording and mixing drums in this way my EP will be well on the way to achieving this outcome.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEZKvJXg6PI

http://www.musewiki.org/Rich_Costey:_Recording_Muse%27s_Absolution_(200312_Sound_on_Sound_article)

The ‘Making – Showbiz’ video is a short documentary I watched featuring John Leckie and Muse which gave me some small insights into the recording of Muse’s debut album and John Leckie’s production style. Muse at the time were very inexperienced in a studio environment, hence hiring the much more senior John Leckie as producer. Whilst not a great deal of detailed information was included in the video, I did learn that when recording certain parts, panels were made into rooms surrounding the sound source, all in the same room. I find it interesting that the majority of the album was recorded in the same space, meaning that panels were necessary, as this shows that not a great deal of space is needed in order to record a high-quality production.

Contrary to what I had previously believed and is part of my Learning Outcome 2, there are no conventional synthesizers used on Showbiz. There are guitars, basses, pianos and drums, all with various effects added, but no electronic instruments. The piano used is shown in this video and will help give me an insight into how to shape the piano sound in one of my tracks. As I will be using a software instrument piano, I would class this under LO2, with trying to replicate non-audio sounds used.

The video shows the band in session at RAK studios. In the video, Matt Bellamy, Muse frontman identifies the issue with modern editing techniques, stating that Leckie taught him that those discrepancies are what makes the band sound human. I find this stance from Muse very interesting given the level of detail they go to in terms of editing on their newer material. That said, Showbiz was recorded in 1999, so the technology was nowhere near as powerful as it is today. This was also before Bellamy took an interest in synthesizers.

The pickup is the most important part of the guitar when choosing tone. Many artists’ sounds are built around the use of either single-coil or humbucking pickups and, while both Muse and Rage Against the Machine have very distinctive characteristics in their music, the pickup choice is important.

The guitarists and bassists of the two bands use the following configuration:

• Matt Bellamy, Muse guitarist: Matt uses mainly humbucking pick-ups in the bridge position in his guitar recordings, leading to what many would say is an archetypal lead guitar tone. Humbucking pickups are known for their warmth and their powerful response to distortion. The information presented on pickups can be found in the link at the bottom of this page. As Bellamy used quite a large amount of distortion on the majority of the tracks in Muse’s first three albums, a humbucker made sense and gave Bellamy a tone which was both clear and powerful in the higher frequencies, while filling out the high-mids and mids.
  Matt is known for his custom-built Manson guitars (these can be found in the ‘MuseWiki’ link at the bottom of this entry). While he didn’t have these on Showbiz, they were used on Muse’s following two albums. These guitars were fitted with predominantly a humbucker in the bridge position, and a P90  in the neck position. I think the use of the P90 can obviously be heard in the outro to Micro-Cuts. The guitar tone is not as heavily distorted as others on the album and there are a lot of brighter frequencies in the sound. The tone is more like a drive than an actual distortion, which is generally more suited to single coil and P90 pickups as the noise cancellation by having a dual-coil pickup is not there. This means that single-coils and similar pickups are easier to drive and also more prone to ‘hum’ and feedback. My Fender Stratocaster HSS, which is fitted with both single-coil and humbucking pickups, should be perfect for replicating a variety of sounds from Muse’s first three albums. I intend to display both humbucker and single coil tones on this EP to capture the sounds created by Matt Bellamy with John Leckie and Rich Costey. (LO1)
• Chris Wolstenholme, bassist of Muse: Chris used primarily Pedulla Rapture basses in Origin of Symmetry and Absolution. They can be seen on videos of the Origin of Symmetry tour and also in the Making of Absolution documentry. From the research I’ve done on what pick-up was in Chris’s bass at the time, I believe that it was either a humbucker, or in fact a split coil pickup. The information I found about Pedulla Raptures did not help a great deal as throughout the years they have been fitted with a range of pickups. From tone alone, I am leaning towards the conclusion that the majority of the sounds of Chris’s bass in Origin of Symmetry and Absolution were created by a humbucking pickup in the bridge position. As most of Chris’s basses at the time were fitted with a single pick-up, this means that the bridge (and only) pickup will be slightly further up the guitar than a regular bridge pickup. I will need to take this factor into account when recording bass. I will be using my Overwater Jazz bass, fitted with a humbucking pickup in the bridge position to model sounds created by Chris, John Leckie and Rich Costey (LO4)
• Tom Morello, Rage Against the Machine guitarist: Tom is known for using Fender Telecasters, most commonly with a single coil pickup in the neck and bridge positions. The link to Morello’s ‘Equipboard’ page can be found at the bottom of this entry. Tom’s tone does not change a great deal from Rage’s first album to their last, and in many songs he has a single-coil sound which is extremely distinctive and archetypal of Fender guitars. Whilst Tom is most famous for his blue ‘Arm The Homeless’ guitar, fitted with two EMG humbucking pickups, much of his studio sound comes from the Telecaster. In an interview with Musicians Friend he said of the Telecaster: ‘this is in a song with all the Rage [Against The Machine], Audioslave, Street Sweeper [Social Club], The Nightwatchman songs that are in drop D tuning. Killing in the Name, Freedom, Testify, all those that are in drop D, played and written with the band on this.’ While I’m finding it tricky to know for sure, the sound closely resembles that of a neck pickup, and in the video the pickup is switched to the neck setting. In a live version of Testify, the pickup is also switched as such. Neck pickups are known for their prominance in bass frequencies while creating a slight absence of mid-range frequencies. Again I feel this is obvious in many RATM guitar tones. I will be using the single coil neck pickup of my Fender Stratocaster to try to achieve a Morello-like tone on one of the tracks on my EP. (LO1)
• Tim Commerford: Rage Against the Machine Bassist: Tim has used a combination of the Fender Jazz bass and the Musicman Stingray throughout his career however on their later material the former is primarily used. On Renegades the tone is quite clearly that of a Jazz bass, and most likely the bridge pickup. As I own an Overwater Classic Jazz bass fitted with a single-coil bridge pickup, I should be able to closely replicate sounds created by Commerford on the album.

http://www.dawsons.co.uk/blog/main-electric-guitar-pickup-types

http://www.musewiki.org/Manson_Guitars

http://www.musewiki.org/Bass

http://equipboard.com/pros/tom-morello/fender-american-standard-telecaster-electric-guitar

http://equipboard.com/pros/tim-commerford

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)