Haken’s Richard Henshall & Charlie Griffiths
RICHARD HENSHALL
“One of my favourite tracks on [new album] Virus is Carousel. In a Tool-like fashion, we wrote this one in drop D tuning, which is always a good excuse to let loose a bit on the guitar. It has a Grohl-inspired intro, some Gojira-tinged riffs in the middle section and some back-to-back solos from Charlie and I, so it generally covers a lot of ground stylistically. When we’re finally able to tour again, I’m also looking forward to playing The Messiah Complex. This one contains some of the most intense riffing on the album and is almost certainly the trickiest song we’ve ever written as a band. It should be fun for the crowd to watch us sweat our way through the finger gymnastics on this one! Another fun one to jam through is Canary Yellow. It features a bunch of guitar-friendly opentriad voicings, and tips the hat to the likes of Radiohead and Elbow. I used my Strandberg Sälen for this one, which really complemented the crunchy tone of the music. In the past, we’ve been known to fuse traditional progressive elements with more modern heavier influences, but it really feels like these two aspects of our sound have become homogenised on Virus. To me, it feels like our most cohesive effort to date, and is an album that fully realises and celebrates the influences that have helped shape us.”
CHARLIE GRIFFITHS
“Our guitar influences range from Brian May to Adam Jones to Robert Fripp to Fredrik Thordendal, so to access as much range as possible we use eight-string guitars, which I think we see from the point of view of a six-string with some extra low notes available. We’re using the instrument to play colourful chord voicings, solos and also super-heavy down-tuned riffs, so, when mixing the album, the first thing is to find a tone that works across the board. For this album, Nolly [Adam Getgood, producer] introduced us to the Friedman BE100 head and that was a revelation. It gave us the Foo Fighters-style crunch we were looking for, as well as super-tight distortion for the low riffing. We used the Maxon OD808 pedal as a boost and to tighten the low end, but other than that, it’s a nice, simple guitar-into-amp affair. This is also the first time we recorded all the rhythm guitar tracks with an Evertune bridge, which made the whole process so much quicker and more enjoyable. Usually for me, tracking is 60 per cent actual playing and 40 per cent tuning and re-playing things because the string went slightly sharp. So when I listen back to Virus, I’m really satisfied with how beautifully in tune everything is; the Evertune was life-changing!”