Joe Satriani – Black Swans and Wormhole Wizards

"Well, when I'm at home, there are two ways I do it. I've got my Marshall heads that have recording outputs, which are really amazing sounding. The recording out feature on the new Marshall heads is so reliable and it sounds organic. So if I really want the amp head sounds, I'll do that.

But I'll tell you what I started doing about two years ago, is recording DI and using software guitar amplification, primarily because I thought if I put in a performance that's a once-in-a-lifetime performance on this particular song, I'm going to want to keep it. And I don't trust doing it here at home. But if I record it direct, it'll sit there in the session and then when we get to a real studio and we've got the real band recorded with microphones and a big room, we can re-amp that performance, and re-record it. And that's what we did quite a bit for the Black Swans and Wormhole Wizards record. There are quite a few songs that I had recorded using SansAmp or Guitar Rig, but they were all recorded DI. I would monitor those software patches at home, and then when we got to Skywalker, we either used a combination of those software guitar patches, or we would send the DI out into Marshall amps and different speakers and mic them anyway we want based on what we had captured from the band.

(...)

I remember the first time we used a SansAmp, John and I were recording Flying in a Blue Dream, and they had just created one and he was hip to the idea of 'hey let's use SansAmp so we get out of the hassle of trying match guitar parts in different studios,' because we were kind of moving around a lot at the time. One song might get recorded in three places and he was thinking this was going to be insane for Joe's guitar sound unless we can take it with us. And we had done that before, going directly into mic pres or using the Tom Scholz Rockman and we tried every little funny piece of gear, because we were trying to do anything that was the antithesis of mic'ing up a Marshall stack."

"But I'll tell you what I started doing about two years ago, is recording DI and using software guitar amplification, primarily because I thought if I put in a performance that's a once-in-a-lifetime performance on this particular song, I'm going to want to keep it. And I don't trust doing it here at home. But if I record it direct, it'll sit there in the session and then when we get to a real studio and we've got the real band recorded with microphones and a big room, we can re-amp that performance, and re-record it. And that's what we did quite a bit for the Black Swans and Wormhole Wizards record. There are quite a few songs that I had recorded using SansAmp or Guitar Rig, but they were all recorded DI. I would monitor those software patches at home, and then when we got to Skywalker, we either used a combination of those software guitar patches, or we would send the DI out into Marshall amps and different speakers and mic them anyway we want based on what we had captured from the band."

Used in Studio 21 for Is There Love in Space?, Professor Satchifunkilus and the Musterion of Rock and Black Swans and Wormhole Wizards (particularly for the intro of "Littleworth Lane"), as stated in Strange Beautiful Music: A Musical Memoir.

Is There Love in Space?

Before reuniting with John Cuniberti, Matt Bissonette, and Jeff Campitelli to record Is There Love in Space?, I started recording the new songs at Studio 21, my home studio, trying once again to break my own style down and rebuild it into something new. I was deeper into Pro Tools now and having much more success and fun with it. The new record would feature quite a bit of compositional variety, with lyrical-sounding melodies and more angular-sounding solos—and two vocal tracks!

At Studio 21, I was using a Korg Triton DAW keyboard, Universal Audio 1176 and LA-2A compressor/limiters, an Empirical Labs EL8S, old API EQs, the Millennia Media STT-1 mic pre, and Palmer speaker simulators. For guitar amps I had an interesting collection: Soldano, Mesa Boogie, Cornford, Vox, Wells, and several vintage Marshalls. Added to that group was my new Peavey JSX prototype head. Everything just started to sound better!

Professor Satchifunkilus and the Musterion of Rock

I was using an old Marshall SE100 as my main speaker simulator, which meant I was going guitar into amplifier into Marshall SE100 into Pro Tools directly, or through the STT-1 if I wanted to shape it with some EQ or optical compressor. Additionally, the SE100 has some really clever ways of simulating a microphone being right at the cone, at a slight angle, or at a big angle. I like using the 30- and 60-degree angles—off axis, they call it—and it worked pretty well. It really does sound like an amp being miked up by a 57, so that setup worked in my room. As far as guitars, I was using the Ibanez JS1200 and the JS1000 most of the time. What mattered more than the equipment by that point was that another two years had gone by where I continued getting more proficient at recording with Pro Tools in general.

Black Swans and Wormhole Wizards

With “Solitude,” I was thinking about how I often require time to be alone, much as my parents did, and I coupled that with my mother’s absence from her house once she passed. It was so profound, I couldn’t put it into words. I was working on a song called “Heartbeats” at my home studio one afternoon when the inspiration came. I was thinking “Heartbeats” needed some kind of introduction, but instead I started writing a piece that was much bigger. It was a song about my moments of solitude, and the lonely feeling in my mother’s house now that her spirit had moved on. It eventually found a home on the record right before “Littleworth Lane.” I played my JS1000 direct into my STT-1 for that recording.