“I’M PRETTY LIMITED WHEN IT COMES TO PLAYING SOLOS. BUT I KNOW EXACTLY WHAT I’M DOING WHEN I PLAY A RIFF, WHICH IS CRUCIAL...”
Joe Duplantier is the mastermind who has made Gojira the most exciting metal band of the modern age. A self-taught guitarist who says, “I like to explore the instrument from a slightly different angle”, he tells TG about his new signature model and Gojira-branded plug-in, and discusses the creation of Fortitude – arguably the best metal album of 2021...
No-one writes riffs quite like Joe Duplantier. The Gojira singer/guitarist knows how to inject his music with a sacred potency – and it’s precisely that Midas touch which has propelled the French quartet out of relative obscurity and into being one of the most important metal bands around today.
Few could have gotten away with the audacity of titling one of their tracks The Heaviest Matter Of The Universe, but in Gojira’s case their bold claims were well justified. The tech-death ferocity heard on their early albums, most notably 2005 landmark From Mars To Sirius, made them champions of the underground, and soon after releasing their next album, 2008’s The Way Of All Flesh, they were hand-picked by Metallica as opening act for the World Magnetic Tour. On this year’s seventh album, Fortitude, they’ve continued with the head-caving directness introduced on its predecessor – more inspired by the rhythmic power of Sepultura and Tool than the brutal ferocity of pure death metal – and, once again, with stunning results.
“Groove is everything,” explains Joe, who writes the music with his brother Mario, the band’s drummer, and splits guitar duties with Christian Andreu. “Back in 2000, when we were making our first album, we were working on that side of things a lot. Even on our heaviest grind parts where Mario was blasting the kick, he was trying to create a wave of energy that we could relate and groove to. We would have entire rehearsals based on that. Like ‘Okay, let’s play like robots’ and then play it again but make it groove, just to see the difference. We would A/B riffs to add more soul into the ideas. I find some metal bands are able to fit all the 16th notes in but quite often they forget how to groove. We were thinking about it from day one and I guess it’s paying off now.”
He’s not wrong. The group’s latest effort has been their most commercially successful to date,
charting in the top five across much of Europe – a victory for any heavy metal band, though perhaps especially for one so deeply rooted in the extremes. As Joe says of the machine-gun tremolopicking adopted during Gojira’s early death metal years: “It would give me a headache to write songs like that now. I think that stuff can get a bit silly. But for a bunch of 18 year-old kids, it didn’t feel silly at the time. We had something to express and we were exploring.” But if some of the songs on Fortitude are less frenetic than before, notably Another World and Amazonia, there’s no shortage of power and electricity in this album.
The new music came together at Silver Cord Studios, the facility owned and run by Joe in New York, where he has resided for the past decade. Naturally, his all-new Charvel Pro-mod San Dimas Mahogany, fitted with his signature Dimarzio Fortitude pickups, played a big part in the recordings. More vintage-looking and, dare we say, grown-up than the modern slickness of the black, white or grey instruments he’s been seen with in the past, the natural finish of the 2021 model certainly turned a few heads when it was announced earlier this year.
“Well, I’m a dad now!” he laughs, when we point out his new signature wouldn’t look out of place in the hands of a country musician. “I’m really into that kind of style and humbly borrowed elements from different brands. The body is a Tele shape, and though it’s not exact you’d need a microscope to see the difference, and then the block inlays are something you’d see on a Gibson-style guitar. I love how it came out.”
The instrument being an Indonesian import, rather than American-made, has also kept it relatively affordable, which the Gojira leader is also proud of. He even tells TG he was sent a one-off USA version and ended up preferring the production model used on the album and for recent TV and radio live sessions.
Owning his own studio also meant he had the luxury of being able to “switch guitars and amps for every riff”, building layer upon layer with a revolving cascade of tones and tools. Around ten guitars – mainly Charvels, as well as one Gibson loaded with his Fortitude set – were used for the sessions and fed into the rig.
“This time, we made a point of going organic,” he says. “It was all real amps, microphones, cables and everything... As well as pedals, which hasn’t always been the case in the past. I would often add delays and reverbs during the mix in order to control them exactly how I wanted. I have a collection of Whammys at the studio. I don’t even know which ones belong to me, but one was brand new and the other was an old fart I’d used on other things.”
On the other tracks, however, the guitarist would achieve pitch-shifting via other means. “It’s funny, I’ve been reading some comments about the song Hold On and a lot of people think I’m using a Whammy because the main riff has a high-pitched note,” he laughs. “But I’m actually play an E major kind of chord on the 7th
“THE SYNCHRONICITY BETWEEN BOTH HANDS IS KEY,
ESPECIALLY IN METAL BANDS”
fret with one of the engineers on his knees fiddling with a delay pedal. It was hand-made, just a dude on the floor rather than an automation on Pro-tools or whatever. Sometimes he would f*ck up, so I would have to play it again... A team effort!
“We were using the TC Electronic Flashback, which has a lot of options and sounds fantastic. I use it live, as well as the MXR Carbon Copy because I run two different delays, and I use them both in the studio. I love the MXR because you can play a single note on a fast setting and, because it’s analogue, when you turn the speed slower you get this crazy effect of tempos being mixed. There was a Rat fuzz pedal too, which sounded incredible for the stoner-y parts of The Chant. I also had the KHDK overdrive and an eight-band Mesa/ Boogie EQ pedal which Greg Kubacki from Car Bomb lent me. There was a lot of experimenting – it was fun!”
Of course, not all of his effects are pedal-derived. There are the pick scrapes, squeals and natural harmonics that have coloured and detailed some of his most famous riffs, all tricks he learned in his quest for less conventional and more striking means of noise. This time round he added a beer bottle to that arsenal, to “slide across the strings for super high notes”. It all stems from his self-schooled approach to guitar, he explains, which sees him more focused on the emotional connection he has to every note, rather than shredding in every mode at a million miles an hour. By his own admission, he places less emphasis on theory (“what’s in an A chord?!”) and doesn’t feel the need to go out looking for it.
“I can spend an entire hour just playing one shape,” he smiles. “You need to pay attention to how it resonates with your heart. You can’t force yourself to play things you haven’t properly invested yourself into. I learned by myself and never really had a teacher. I haven’t looked much online for advice, either. I like to explore the instrument from a slightly different angle, I guess. I’m pretty limited when it comes to playing solos, though I’m fascinated by people who can – like Brent Hinds from Mastodon. He blows my mind. Sometimes I don’t really feel like a real guitarist because I never studied scales. I’m more like a kid playing this thing they don’t fully know or understand. That said, I know exactly what I’m doing when I play a riff, which is crucial. You have to be precise. I find it frustrating when I’m at a show and there’s two guitarists playing things slightly differently, making the whole thing blurry.”
As Gojira have been proving on their most recent releases, even simplesounding ideas can be deceptively unique and intricate in their own right. Provided, that is, musicians take enough time to see them through. “You can take the most basic riff in the world and it will still have a thousand different things you can work on,” Joe says. “Are you going to attack a note directly or slide or bend into it? Are you going to be loose with your right hand or go for intense, purposeful down-picking? The synchronicity between both hands is key, especially in metal bands. When you change notes or jump from one string to another, it has to be clean and meaningful. You’ve got to work on it over and over again.
“Nowadays, we all have an expensive camera on our smartphones and people are quick to be impressed by what they do. If they come up with something, they’ll post it on Facebook and Instagram instead of working on it until it’s beautiful to actually listen to. Go deep... That would be my advice! Find all the tiny little details in your riff that can make it grand. How are you going to make it real? How are you going to make it come to life with its own personality?”
And although the new album was recorded using analogue and “organic” gear, Joe teamed up with Neural DSP for the Archetype: Gojira plug-in released at the beginning of this year, joining the likes of Plini, Tosin Abasi and Cory Wong as a signature artist. Having used Marshalls, Mesa/boogies and Peaveys before settling on the EVH amps he’s sworn by for the last decade, he was initially sceptical about a collaboration. But now, two and a half years on from that first meeting, he couldn’t be more proud of what they’ve managed to accomplish together...
“I’d heard of Neural DSP in the past from guitar nerds and I always thought, ‘Yeah, but I have my guitar and my amp, I’m fine!’” he admits. “So it took this plug-in for me to dive in and I loved every minute of it. Here’s what I would tell anyone interested in buying it but feels unsure – it’s very difficult to get the oomph, brightness and body of a real amp in front of you. I’m used to producing heavy music, so I know how hard it is to get that texture out of your speakers. With this plug-in, you get it right off the bat. Producers can work for weeks to find a great tone, but you get it as default, which is mind-blowing.”
As he explains, for a little over £100 you get his entire rig mic’d up and ready to go. To promote the product, he re-recorded 2016 single Silvera against the original bass and drum tracks, with his new Charvel going into direct into his laptop – and, on reflection, feels his digital tones ended up sounding inexplicably bigger. And as well flicking through various Gojira presets, users can customise everything in a few simple clicks, saving precious time for what’s ultimately most important in the long run – the quality of the songs themselves.
As Joe says: “My tech Taylor Bingley sent over my live gear, which they completely dismantled and analysed, copying every single component into data! I didn’t really understand it at the time, I’m not a very techy person. But I was blown away by the first prototype and we carried on fine-tuning the sounds, dialling in the reaction and feel I wanted out of every knob on all the pedals and amps. There are many oceans to explore within it. It would take so much energy and money to do all that stuff with gear in real life. This really opens the doors for creativity.”