Joe Satriani – Strange Beautiful Music

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.

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 "Attack", as mentioned in Strange Beautiful Music: A Musical Memoir.

With “Attack,” the entire track was recorded on my K2000 first, and then the architecture of it and some of the sounds were transferred to the master template in Eric’s Pro Tools session. We’d synched Pro Tools and Logic together on two separate machines. The challenge for us was to see how we could create a guitar sound that could mimic the keyboard sound. We used a Moog Moogerfooger filter pedal for the main effect, then used either the SansAmp, the ’64 Fender Bassman, or the Hafler Triple Giant. It was something that was just an entirely different way of saying, “This is a melody—dig this!” The juxtaposition of the song’s sections is quite unusual in that I’d written this dreamy breakdown piece that was used for the solo. I was thinking that in the middle of a fierce battle, there’s a moment when time seems to stop, or go into slow motion, and the warrior is having a moment of clarity, a moment of spiritual searching of some kind. I wanted that breakdown to suggest some sort of dream state.

Used for the "simulated train whistle" in the outro of "Dreaming Number Eleven", as stated by Satriani in the April 1989 Musician interview "The Devil And Joe Satriani" by Ted Drozdowski. In Strange Beautiful Music: A Musical Memoir (2014), Satriani recounts that it was his first effect pedal.

Musician, April 1989, “The Devil and Joe Satriani” by Ted Drozdowski

MUSICIAN: So the band first played about a year before the live songs on your new EP were recorded in June '88 at the California Theater in San Diego. Where did the title Dreaming #11 come from?

SATRIANI: It was actually the title of a song on my first EP. It was just one of those funny little phrases, like Surfing with the Alien, that pop into my head. I applied the title to a song on that EP that was a strange collection of sounds. It had an Allen wrench on the pick-ups for a kickdrum, slowed-down scratch for a snare, a sped-up tapping on the strings for a closed high-hat sound. I had all these percussion sounds generated just from a guitar plugged directly into the board. And on top of it I had bass, but it was actually a guitar, not even detuned, just playing popping bass. Then I had a rhythm guitar that sounded like an outgrowth of James Brown, but in retrospect it sounds more like what Prince got into with 'Kiss' and 'Sign o' the Times' and 'Alphabet Street' – that sort of dry guitar set-up. And I had this R&B guitar melody over it. The song ended in a simulated train whistle that I did with a Big Muff and a weird technique of pulling strings over other strings and then off the neck. That song was a collection of non sequiturs, and I thought 'The Crush of Love' and the three live songs on the new record didn't really have anything to do with each other. So Dreaming #11 applied.

Strange Beautiful Music: A Musical Memoir (2014)

Chapter 1, pg. 8

My first effects pedal was an Electro-Harmonix Big Muff Pie [sic] fuzz box that I bought through the mail after seeing an advertisement in Circus magazine, and it was the biggest, fattest fuzz ever created. This was the first of many pedals to come.

It was very confusing when I first played with these pedals because I had no idea how to use them, or how to make myself sound like Hendrix! There was no YouTube back then to instantly instruct you how to set things up, or on what sounds you could get out of a new piece of gear—you were pretty much on your own. After starting with the Big Muff, the next thing I got was a Maestro Phaser unit with the three buttons on it, and then the MXR, another phaser unit, and then a wah-wah pedal showed up eventually. I really didn’t have a whole bunch of pedal back then.

Chapter 5, pg. 50

On different moments on that record, I definitely needed distortion, and I think I had my original Big Muff Pi by Electro-Harmonix, which was still working at the time, and DS-1 and OD-1 pedals.

Used for rhythm guitar and bass on Not of This Earth, as stated by producer John Cuniberti in Strange Beautiful Music: A Musical Memoir. Satriani later writes that a unit was acquired for Studio 21 and first used for Is There Love in Space?.

Not of This Earth

John Cuniberti: As far as effects pedals, Joe was primarily playing through his orange Boss DS-1 Distortion pedal and CE-2 Chorus and that was pretty much it. All the echo-delay types of effects—reverbs, chorusing—we did with outboard gear. Typically, I would use a Universal Audio 1176 limiter for rhythm guitars and bass, and a Universal Audio LA-2A limiter for melodies and occasionally solos. Because again, those were limiters you would use for a singer, and since Joe’s phrasing and playing and arranging were that way, I tended to use the same processors as I would if there were people singing. An LA-2A’s not unusual for lead vocals, so of course that’s what I’d use on Joe’s melodies.

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!

Used for lead guitar on Not of This Earth, as stated by producer John Cuniberti in Strange Beautiful Music: A Musical Memoir. Satriani later writes that a unit was acquired for Studio 21 and first used for Is There Love in Space?.

Not of This Earth

John Cuniberti: As far as effects pedals, Joe was primarily playing through his orange Boss DS-1 Distortion pedal and CE-2 Chorus and that was pretty much it. All the echo-delay types of effects—reverbs, chorusing—we did with outboard gear. Typically, I would use a Universal Audio 1176 limiter for rhythm guitars and bass, and a Universal Audio LA-2A limiter for melodies and occasionally solos. Because again, those were limiters you would use for a singer, and since Joe’s phrasing and playing and arranging were that way, I tended to use the same processors as I would if there were people singing. An LA-2A’s not unusual for lead vocals, so of course that’s what I’d use on Joe’s melodies.

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!