Listening To His Creativity
Last modified: 15:27:40 CET on 25 Nov, 2011 |
The Music for the People
Despite the quality of such an album, it would be very difficult to imagine Frusciante unanimous, since he's at the heart of the brotherhood of guitarist. But it's definitely the only thing keeping this often perturbed musician from nodding off. He is an artist, in the true sense of the word. One has the right not to appreciate his music, just as he doesn't force it on people. But you cannot deny that he is unique in his genre and that he is deeply engrossed, if not tortured, by his art.
John Frusciante: I remain convinced that the music industry turns around the ego and it's creativity's biggest enemy. Being successful has no purpose, but to inflate the ego and I've seen it destroy talented musicians one after the other. You need to isolate yourself from that world or it will end up destroying you. For me, music is a living entity. The industry has perverted it so much that it's become lamentable. I dream of the day, probably soon, where we won't need record labels. Over the years, they attained too great of a control on music and the only thing they did was try to apply a formula to force people to only listen to what they had chosen and then forced down the throats of the complacent radio.
Zoom Matos
John Frusciante, not wanting to be associated with those who, without being musicians, are ready to pay a fortune for an instrument that they'll end up putting in a safe, refuses to consider himself a collector. He finds the price of certain vintage guitars to be extremely excessive, admitting that it is his dream to one day own a Gibson Les Paul from the 50s. It's hard to believe that the enormous success of the Red Hots hasn't allowed him to afford even the most expensive Les Paul...
John Frusciante: This is the first time that I'm using the same set-up on one of my solo albums as I did with the Chili Peppers. It's pretty much the same one I've been using since I was 19. Strats and Marshalls are like an extension of my body.
At the moment, he's attached to his three main Fender Stratocasters. His favourite is a 1962 Sunburst three-tone equipped with Seymour Duncan Vintage Strat pick-ups. The second is a 1955 Sunburst. And the third, a Red 1961.
John Frusciante: I think the only exception was that I used an SG for the solo at the end of "Central". But we tried so many different combinations during the mixing that I'm not perfectly sure.
Frusciante, therefore, didn't bring any small treasures out of the cupboard, like a Rickenbacker 365 Delux from the early 60s, a Gibson SG Les Paul Custom Cherry Red 1961, a custom Bartell St. George XK12 (12-chord), a Fender Jaguar 1962 Fiesta Red or a Gretsch White Falcon...
For the ampls, he used two regular Marshalls, a Major and a Jubilee. He also plugged into a Fender Bassman, here and there.
Frusciante doesn't use effects, preferring to rework the sounds of the guitars using modular synthesizer. For distortion, he chose a Turbo Distorsion Boss, a Mosrite Fuzz Rite, a Maestro Fuzz-Tone or a Muff'n Tube Electro-Harmonix. For the reverb and delay, he used a Holy Grail Electro-Harmonix, a Digital Delay AMS, a EMT 250 or a Lexicon Prime Time. His preferred wah remains an Ibanez WH-10. To split the signal, he used a Chorus Ensemble Boss pedal.
Quote on Page 5
"With this album, my main goal was to play the type of music that one can listen to really loud late at night. I was trying to make music that has the same psychedelic effect as the albums I've always listened to, with their sounds that captivate me without my being distracted by other things."
