Joe Satriani – Engines of Creation

Listed under Satriani's Fulltone artist page. It was used during the recording of Engines of Creation, as stated by Satriani in this interview. According to Guitar Geek, Satriani also used it in his 2000 rig.

"Satch goes wild with gear and musical experimentation on Engines of Creation. The album's techno edge, sequenced rhythm tracks, and heavily tweaked guitar parts proved challenging in rehearsals. But because of his open-minded approach, and a willingness to let bassist Stu Hamm and drummer Jeff Campitelli re-purpose parts they could pull off live, Satriani has brought the way-out-there sounds back to Earth on his current tour. Here's a brief rundown of what he's using on stage.

Guitar.com: Did you have to bring any special gear with you to re-create sounds off the newest album?

Satriani: We tried. We used things like Moogerfooger pedals and Electro-Harmonix Micro Synths and Bass Micro Synths. You know, Hafler Triple Giant preamps. We used a lot of fun gear on the record. It's very pedal oriented. But I found in rehearsal that this stuff, when you turn it up really loud, it doesn't really hold up, and it doesn't project as much. And I thought, 'You know, I don't want people in the 30th row to be looking at some guy's head while he stares at his feet stepping on pedals all night.' So I said, 'I'm gonna do what I've always done; I'm gonna do what Hendrix proved could be done. I'm gonna make a really trippy record, then go out live with a really loud amp and a couple of pedals, and go for it.' You just make the music new again. You keep it simple.

So I found that I could use a Fulltone Ultimate Octave to replace a lot of the stuff that I used in the studio. And there is still one section in 'Borg Sex' that Eric uses the Electro-Harmonix pedal for, but he's hoping to replace it with the Fulltone pedal. The Fulltone pedal is a more straight-ahead pedal; it sounds exactly the same every night. The Electro-Harmonix are really unique, but they seem to sound different every night. And that can be a problem."

"Satch goes wild with gear and musical experimentation on Engines of Creation. The album's techno edge, sequenced rhythm tracks, and heavily tweaked guitar parts proved challenging in rehearsals. But because of his open-minded approach, and a willingness to let bassist Stu Hamm and drummer Jeff Campitelli re-purpose parts they could pull off live, Satriani has brought the way-out-there sounds back to Earth on his current tour. Here's a brief rundown of what he's using on stage.

Guitar.com: Did you have to bring any special gear with you to re-create sounds off the newest album?

Satriani: We tried. We used things like Moogerfooger pedals and Electro-Harmonix Micro Synths and Bass Micro Synths. You know, Hafler Triple Giant preamps. We used a lot of fun gear on the record. It's very pedal oriented. But I found in rehearsal that this stuff, when you turn it up really loud, it doesn't really hold up, and it doesn't project as much. And I thought, 'You know, I don't want people in the 30th row to be looking at some guy's head while he stares at his feet stepping on pedals all night.' So I said, 'I'm gonna do what I've always done; I'm gonna do what Hendrix proved could be done. I'm gonna make a really trippy record, then go out live with a really loud amp and a couple of pedals, and go for it.' You just make the music new again. You keep it simple.

So I found that I could use a Fulltone Ultimate Octave to replace a lot of the stuff that I used in the studio. And there is still one section in 'Borg Sex' that Eric uses the Electro-Harmonix pedal for, but he's hoping to replace it with the Fulltone pedal. The Fulltone pedal is a more straight-ahead pedal; it sounds exactly the same every night. The Electro-Harmonix are really unique, but they seem to sound different every night. And that can be a problem."

Used on Engines of Creation, as mentioned in this December 11, 2007 Premier Guitar interview.

I would plug my Ibanez JS1000 guitar into various pedals and into a variety of amp heads, then into a Palmer speaker simulator. Then I used a few different mic pres – Neves, V72s, etc. Sometimes we would aim for traditional sounds, other times not. Sometimes a plug-in would do the trick and other times it’s just all the pedals we found on the floor plugged in and turned up!

Interviewer: What pedals did you use on this project [Engines of Creation]?

Satriani: We had much success with the Moogerfooger pedals, the Fulltone Ultimate Octave, a DigiTech Whammy pedal and a preamp called a Hafler Triple Giant.

Interviewer: Were there any in particular that really gave you that electronica feel?

Satriani: The Hafler Triple Giant had the most robotic distortion, totally devoid of warmth and feeling. But, in the context of a song like "Borg Sex," it was perfect!

Used on Engines of Creation, as mentioned in Strange Beautiful Music: A Musical Memoir. A photo of the amp, taken by Satriani himself, is featured.

We had Neve preamps, a GML mic pre, and a ’64 Fender Bassman head that wound up being used 50 percent of the time. My guitar went into an amp, which would then go into a Palmer speaker simulator, and from there into a Neve mic pre, and from there right into Pro Tools. Sometimes we’d use a Hafler Triple Giant, which was a 4-channel guitar preamp. You hear a lot of that on “Borg Sex” in the intensity of the distortion.

"Engines of Creation is a techno record. I wrote the music digitally, which meant using a keyboard instead of an acoustic guitar, and emailed MIDI files to my partner, Eric Caudieux. He used Logic Audio Platinum from Emagic for digital processing and sequencing."

According to this Premier Guitar interview, Satriani used the Sansamp extensively on Engines of Creation.

Do you have a favorite can’t-live-without-it guitar processor that you used on this project?

It was most likely the SansAmp plugin. I still enjoy using the SansAmp designs, both their plugins and rackmount preamps. Eric [Caudieux] and I would use it here and there to spice guitar sounds up a bit. Sometimes, as in “Until We Say Goodbye”, it was the guitar sound!

"Now, with Engines of Creation, Satriani launches a new era of creativity — built with PowerBook and Power Mac computers, keyboards, guitars, and effects."

"Now, with Engines of Creation, Satriani launches a new era of creativity — built with PowerBook and Power Mac computers, keyboards, guitars, and effects."

Used while composing Engines of Creation, as mentioned in Strange Beautiful Music: A Musical Memoir.

Compositionally, each song was built differently. I’d decided to work with a new piece of gear this time around, the Kurzweil K2000, a digital audio workstation (DAW) keyboard with these beautiful sounds in it. I’m not a keyboard player primarily, but whenever the mood struck me, I would turn that keyboard on, push RECORD, and just improvise. The DAW made it so easy and fun, so I started to use the keyboard as a writing tool for some of the songs, especially “Borg Sex,” “Until We Say Goodbye,” “Champagne?,” “Attack,” and “Slow and Easy.” Some of those keyboard performances wound up on the final recordings, too. Once I realized how simple it was, I could email Eric a MIDI file that he could open up and assign almost any sound to it he wanted. I could also send Eric a little audio file to cue him to the kind of sounds I was looking for.

Used on Engines of Creation, as stated by producer Eric Caudieux in Strange Beautiful Music: A Musical Memoir.

Throughout the recording of Engines, what we were doing was manipulating in the box all those guitars and whatever sounds we had. That was basically the cleanest path to be able to work with the sounds that Joe was giving me, going DI, or in the case of the amps, we’d go to the load box, into a mic pre, into the computer, and that would give me the cleanest path to basically go either to a synth—the Korg MS-20 or Minimoog—or into the computer to affect it even more with several plug-ins I had to completely change the sound. So that’s why it was so important to have the sound as direct and pure as we could.