TRACKING JACK
HOW WHITE & CO. NAILED THE EXPLOSIVE SOUNDS ON FEAR OF THE DAWN.
STRAIGHT OUT OF the gate — and I do mean a noise gate — on the opening track “Taking it Back,” you are met with a small army of pitch-shifted guitar drones that sounds like someone placed an EBow on a Tomahawk missile. This is followed by a clutch of punchy, fuzz-bomb power chords that almost seem to claw their way through your speakers. (I actually checked mine to make sure they weren’t damaged. They were fine.)
In an age when guitar sounds on many high-profile rock records tend to be buried, overly burnished or just plain boring, Jack White has taken his enviably visceral, sometimes odd sounds to ever more aggressive and idiosyncratic heights. And his playing is simply wicked, at times exploding out of the speakers like a mad cross between Frank Zappa, Tom Morello and Prince. His more lyrical blues playing, like on the closing track, “Shedding My Velvet,” has surely never been stronger. “I’d like to think that Fear of the Dawn is the best guitar playing that I’ve ever done,” White says, hanging out in the Blue Room performance space at Third Man Records in Nashville.
“While mixing it and listening to playback,” he continues, “I felt that I’d done more with guitar on this album than ever. I’ve taken my ideas further. I’ve experimented and taken a lot of risks with both my playing and my tone, and even with the dynamics, from very quiet to very, very loud. You’re also noticing the sort of ‘If we’re going to do it, let’s do it’ attitude me and the engineers had with the mixing process. Which is to say, if this new part comes in, I want it to come in heavy-duty. I don’t want the guitars off in the distance. I want each riff to be louder than the one before it, than the verse before it. So It’s great to hear you say that, because that was definitely something we went after on purpose.”
Tracking the album, on the other hand, meant being ready for happy accidents and sudden flashes of inspiration. “Jack works fast when he’s got creative ideas,” engineer Bill Skibbe reveals. “He’s very immediate. You’re not premeditating a lot of it. There’s not a lot of upfront labor going into scrutinizing what kind of head you’re going to use. If Jack’s got an idea, we plug into this or that amp as quickly as possible, and find the tone that’s best suited to whatever he’s got in his head. From an engineering standpoint, that’s always been my favorite aspect of working with Jack: When it’s time to make it happen, you have to be able to get that sound and tone perfected as quickly as possible.”
In the studio, Skibbe helped set up a semi-circle of amps, including a ’60s-era blackface Fender Vibroverb, a customized vintage RCA tube head and a rare German Echolette B40N head/cab combo. Skibbe, along with fellow engineer Joshua Smith, exploited a raft of vintage mics for the amps, including RCA BK-5B, 77D and 44BX ribbon mics, Coles ribbon mics and large-diaphragm condensers like the Neumann U67, which Skibbe praises for their “nice midrange bite, which is still a little mellower than a U87.”
The mics, generally set in a close-mic position, if slightly off-axis, typically hit either the vintage preamps in White’s 1920s-era RCA mixing desk, or simply passed through a vintage Neve 1073 EQ/ preamp. To add “a little jump to the sound” during mixing, Skibbe and Smith often printed the guitars with a Universal Audio 1176 and/or Fairchild compressor, and stereo panning effects were used to “create movement if a part sounded a little static.”
“A lot of people think in terms of relative volumes when they’re mixing,” says Skibbe, who is also a mastering engineer, “but the idea here was to keep two simple ideas in mind: movement and depth of field. It sounds strange to say, with all the interesting pedals and cool sounds Jack was getting, but actually the overarching idea was really just to keep the sounds as simple as possible, and keep the creative energy in motion.”
“I WANT EACH RIFF TO BE LOUDER THAN THE ONE BEFORE IT”
And the first thing I asked them was, is there any way we can have fewer choices for sounds? I felt I only needed three sounds: one great electric, one great acoustic and then a sound with both together, because that solved a basic issue with how to play songs of mine that had acoustics and electrics either in different sections of the same track, or sometimes doubling the same parts. That came in real handy with the Raconteurs. Before that, I’d have to write acoustic sections with a long enough space at the end so I could switch back to electric.
This custom Jazzmaster electric you’ve got in process here looks pretty cool. Any interesting mods happening on that one?
Oh, yeah. So, Dan Mancini, my brilliant guitar tech and mission man, has been working a lot on this one. A while back, I showed Dan a clip of a guy who had incorporated some sort of synth device into his guitar, and I thought, That’s what I’ve been trying to do for years that I wish we could figure out! I remember speaking to Matt Bellamy of Muse about how he incorporated a Korg Kaoss Pad into his guitar [eventually leading to the Kort Manson MB-1 Matt Bellamy Signature guitar], and I always thought that was a great idea. So Dan and I began talking, and right now he’s in the process of installing the guts of an Electro-Harmonix Pitchfork pedal into the back of this Jazzmaster. The intermittent switch can turn on the harmonies, but I can also use one of the pots to bend the pitch as well, just like with a Whammy Pedal. I think Tom Morello may end up getting jealous of this and have to put it on his guitar, too. I’ll have to send him a clip of it and see what he thinks.
Will that have a similar mix of Filter’Trons and P-90s like the Telecaster?
It will have some of the same features as the Tele, but the pickups will be different. I own this incredible Gibson Fort Knox “Skunk Baxter” Firebird that I played with the Raconteurs, and the mini-humbucker pickups on that, which Jim DeCola designed, are just so impressive. Honestly, it’s almost a shock every time I play it. So Tim Shaw at Fender is working on his own version of that type of mini-humbucker to put into this Jazzmaster.
From your well-documented 1964 JB Hutto Montgomery Ward Airline to your gorgeous Gretsch “Triple Green Machine” to your 1950s Kay Hollowbody to your EVH Wolfgang guitars, you constantly seem to be exploring unusual choices in pursuit of both new sounds and new/old aesthetics. What do you think drives that for you?
I just think it’s cool that there are these moments in your life where you might play through a certain pickup or type of guitar, but maybe it’s at the wrong moment in your life, and somehow you decide, “Nah, that’s not for me.” And then you revisit it 10 years later, and you’re like, “Oh my God, actually this is great. It just has its own kind of appeal.” Now, obviously this kind of experience only happens when you’re really deep into the tone thing. Plenty of people wouldn’t know the difference if you played them five different pickups in a row. They’d probably sound exactly the same to them. But when you’re a guitar player, you can really hear how the differences matter and how they influence your playing and tone.
Still, it’s unusual to meet even experienced players or luthiers as ready to flip the script on conventional guitar design as you are. Or as curious about it as you always seem to be.
Well, I’m really curious right now about this Billy Gibbons Gyrock Signature guitar from Wild Customs that’s just come out. It has this crazy roller device that has three pickups loaded in it that you can rotate to choose which pickup you want. You just spin the drum in there, and you can also pop the pickups out, put different ones in, and it’s very easy to do from the backplate. There’ve been other companies that have tried to do removable pickups and removable pickguards, but it seems like they’ve really figured it out here. Pretty cool to have three choices of bridge pickup on a drum, so you can literally “roll” from lipstick tube to a humbucker. That would be so cool to have. I dunno. I might get jealous and have to try those out.
So, to answer your question, I guess I just always want to know what’s happenin’! [laughs]