Niles Rogers on rec'ing guitars

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A good read on technique and philosophy


From EQ August 2000
By Howard Massey

We may not have much to thank the dreary '70s for - it was, after all, a time that was musically dominated by the polar opposites of disco and punk - but one of the few highlights of the era was the ultra-tight, ultra-polished R&B sound of a band called "Chic." Cofounded by guitarist Nile Rodgers and bassist Bernard Edwards, Chic dominated the charts for several years with a string of carefully crafted songs, including "Le Freak" and "Good Times." Before long, other artists were turning to Rodgers and Edwards for their production, arranging, and songwriting skills, resulting in massive hits such as Sister Sledge's "We Are Family." In 1979, Rodgers brought his magic touch to David Bowie's milestone album Let's Dance, and a few years later, he hit solid gold, producing Madonna's landmark singles "Like A Virgin" and "Material Girl." Work with a diverse crop of artists followed, including Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger, Duran Duran, the B-52s, David Lee Roth, INXS, Grace Jones, Al Jarreau, and the Thompson Twins. Today, Rodgers heads up his own label and production company, as well as Sumthing Distribution, a national record distribution company. One of the most in-demand producers and session players in New York, Rodgers has some truly unique insights on the art of recording.

I'm guessing you've come up with some great techniques for recording guitar, other than the old 57 up against the grille.

[Laughs] You know, the thing is, the SM57 up against the grille is pretty damn good! Or a 421, or all sorts of little things.

I gather in the days of Chic you did a lot of DI guitar.

Yeah, and I still do to this day. Nowadays, technology has come so far, and the quality of outboard gear is so great, that I find myself using something like [Line 6] Amp Farm. Man, that's ridiculous! We can do so much now that we used to have to toil over in the old days, and now I can't really tell the difference, especially spiritually.

But I've done things like put different amplifiers in series up a staircase and place microphones all up and down the staircase to see which sounded best...all sorts of nutty stuff. Taking the sound out of the back of an amplifier that's not supposed to really be miked in the back, just to see what it sounds like. The old Pignose amps sounded so great to us, we were going to cover them in fur and call it Le Pignose and sell it for ten times as much! [Laughs]

The thing is that beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder, and [using] the right tool for the right job is all that I'm into. I remember Stevie Ray Vaughn telling me that he never sounded better than when I recorded him. I would think to myself, well, it's Bob Clearmountain and David Bowie and Nile Rodgers in the Power Station - what a really great day, brother! With a great band and a great song and a great vibe - hey Stevie, I think that had a lot to do with it! Yeah, maybe it sounded better than some of his other stuff, I don't know. But it was a hit, and hits always sounded good.

I don't mean to downplay the technical aspects of it because, yeah, it did sound great and it had a great vibe, but Bob Clearmountain is fabulous. Some of my best records have been done with Bob. I started with Bob - my first record was done with him - and a person knows who you are, and in turn you hook up again and you do something really great, based on your growth and their growth and where you are at that time. And nothing is too wacky - you'll try anything: "Hey, wow, you see those room mics that are up on the ceiling? Let's see what happens when we put them halfway down the room and we put the amps face down or..." You try anything to get the right sound and the right vibe for the record.

It's funny that, as I've gotten older and have done so many different things to make records, I find now that my depth of knowledge is sometimes stifling. You know so much that you go, "Wow, what weird thing do we do now?" Are we doing it for the sake of weirdness or so we can have a cool article in EQ magazine? Or are we doing it because we think it's the right thing to do? After having made hundreds, if not thousands, of records, every now and then I realize how cool the simplest little thing sounds.

So these days to record guitar, you're generally taking the direct signal and then using Amp Farm?

I hate to say it, but that's generally what I'm doing now.

More often than actually re-amping the signal?

Yeah, that's really the deal now. And the thing that I really love about that is, when I take it direct, I really hear the character of the guitar. Then, after I've done a performance that I think is the right performance, I can sit back and say, now let's try different amplifiers. That's an amazing sense of freedom to me. In the old days we used to do some of that - we would record pretty much direct, and then re-amp it, send it out into the room into amps. But I find that, in today's world, some of the other stuff that I'm picking up along the way, I'm not so thrilled about. Just the fact that I'm sending my signal along a journey before it gets back to my ears, there may be things that I don't particularly want. And when I'm fooling around with plug-ins, I find that it's a new set of sympathetic stuff that comes along with each device now. There's some new bull that we have to deal with.

Only now it's a model of sympathetic stuff.

[Laughs] Yeah! But I'm quite impressed with a lot of the gear that I've been using lately. Right now, you've just caught me at a point in time where I'm really discovering the quality of my instruments, pure, without amplifiers. What's great for me is that I can now interpret the music based on it being a very clean sound, which also makes me do more with my hands. Whereas a lot of times, when an amplifier is doing its thing, you play based on what the amp is doing - you can't help it. Say you plug into a stack of Marshalls. You're going to start playing "Foxy Lady" and you start dive bombing, doing an Eddie Van Halen solo or playing "Stairway To Heaven." You know, you can't help it! Me, I'm always playing "Ramble On" or something. But when I'm playing clean, I'll find that more of what I'm doing artistically is here. [Gestures with hands] Then I can amplify that and go, "Wow, go check that out." So that's just a phase I'm in right now.

What's your usual signal path for DIing guitar?

It all depends on the record and on the song and the guitar. I have a million DIs that I've been using from the beginning, but now that I'm recording to hard disk, I use a little Neve sidecar that adds just enough warmth to take the edge off the digital converters.

I still have an old Countryman DI that I love, and it sounds great. I also have a custom-made one from the Power Station that's unbelievable; it sounds like what my Strat sounds like to me.

Do you find that different DI boxes complement different guitars?

Absolutely. And they complement different songs. We pull them all day long and check them out. I come from the school where, even if the band uses one drum kit for the whole record, I want it tuned right for each song. We'll change the heads or tune it differently, all that kind of stuff, in order to create a different vibe. Sometimes we change the beaters - all sorts of stuff. It all depends on how those frequencies are responding to the key of the music, to the pulse of the music. Every record is different, every song is different, every tape is different. If I think about how many times I've recorded a song and it felt fantastic and I ran in and listened to it, only to go, "Ahh, man, the bass drum is detuned, now we've got to do it again." Now, with modern technology, we'll just go, "Forget it - we'll just key another one."

One of the hardest things for people working in project studios is knowing when the record's done; knowing when enough is enough or when they haven't done enough to complete it.

That really is an art in and of itself. I've been very, very fortunate in that, more often than not, I know when a record is done. Even when I get pressure from a record company, if I really feel that it's done in my heart, I won't succumb to the pressure; I'll just say, "No, I think it's done. Why don't you go test it and see what the people think?"

"Like A Virgin" is a case in point. It was very simple, and it really wasn't any more fleshed out than a demo might be, yet you knew it was done.

Well, there was a little bit of a fight there, but we stuck to our guns and ultimately won, and won big time. That Madonna album is a very simple album. You know, it took me a long time before I got to 48 tracks. I was able to do everything on 24 tracks for a long, long, long time, and the records still sounded full. I did the Madonna album in 24-track, and on "Like A Virgin," I didn't even fill it up, so it wasn't like I didn't have enough tracks - I had more than enough for that song. The same thing with "Material Girl." Everything on that album was very sparse. But it doesn't sound like it's not enough - it's done. Same with the Chic records.

I actually miss those types of records, having to figure out how to get all that music on those limited number of tracks and having to do a great performance right now because you won't get a chance to fix it later on. It's got to be brilliant, and it's got to be in the pocket, and it's got to groove. And when one person makes a mistake, you go, "I guess we've got to keep it because the rest of it works - oh, leave it in there." I love the [Bill Haley] record "Rock Around The Clock." The saxophone player goes through the riff before the rest of the band and, to me, it's so clearly a mistake, but they left it because the rest of the record is swinging.

For all the technological advances of the last 20 years, do you think records today sound better than they did 20 years ago?

No, absolutely not. Because for whatever we've gained in technical superiority, it makes us not necessarily work as hard. And unless you're really into the music business, it's hard for people to see it. We could use film as a great example. With all of the technological advances that they've made in the optical world, does the latest Star Wars look better than The 39 Steps? I'm not so sure about that. The fact was that we had to overcome all of those problems that the equipment gave us, and the net benefit of overcoming all of those variables was an artistic statement in and of itself. In the old days, we all used to play together in the same room, and I realize after going back and listening to some of these records, that there was a blend and a vibe going on in that room that, to me, translated into that record.

The old restrictions in technology forced us to do things right. It forced us to have to make decisions. It forced us to spiritually be so in tune with the other people that magic had to happen. It made you step up to the plate, whereas now, when I go to play on someone's record I feel uncomfortably free - and I almost hate that. I can actually play on a record all day long and do ten different solos and take all these different approaches to the rhythm and all this kind of stuff. And then the producer has to look at all this work like a film - they have to go back and edit and figure out which bits they want to use. Whereas in the old days, when a person hired me to work on a record, I had to get it right, right there. You had to play great, you had to be smokin', and there was no way that they could fix it and make it better.

When I played on Michael Jackson's last record, I knew what they were going to do, so I just said, "Hey, Michael, here's like a billion ideas. I'm going to play all this cool shit, and you guys go off and do it." So I didn't have to write it, so to speak. I didn't have to give them the definitive, perfect, guitar part; I gave them lots of definitive, perfect guitar parts, and they decided which ones to use. That's weird to me. Once you're unlimited, you'll never play that same way - you'll just go on and on and on and on. It's like the ultimate jazz person's fantasy: "You mean to tell me I'm going to solo for the rest of my life, and you guys will think it's great?"

Having infinite options also means you don't have the pressure on you, which means that you won't necessarily work as hard as you would if you knew you had just two takes in 20 minutes to get it right.

You can't help it. You see, I grew up in the days of, time is money - as Madonna would say, "Time is money, and the money is mine." And I like that, I love that. You had a limitation of tracks, too. You were lucky if you had two tracks and you could do an alternate take.

You know what people do now when they want me to overdub on a record? They'll send me an album with a mix, and I have like 22 open tracks of guitars I can put down. So now you guys are going to figure out what my part is.

What advice would you give to the reader out there whose goal is to be the next Nile Rodgers?

I really think that my experience is based on my life. That means I come from being in a band, a cooperative collective of individuals that come together to do one thing. And, unfortunately or fortunately, that colors my records. That's the filter through which my musical ideas pass. And I look at the world like that - to me, that's what you've got to do.

That's not to say that other people who aren't from bands - people who are engineers or tech heads or even just solo players - don't make valid and great records and even better records than mine. That's fine - that's a person's opinion - but that's why my records have a sort of organic feel, if you will. Because it's based on a salad - it's based on a meal; it's definitely not based on one thing. You've got to mix it all up together or else it doesn't taste right.

You know, certain people in any band are always better technically than others in the band, so that means that the people who aren't as proficient on their instruments have to support the better technical people. You've got to blanket around them so that the technical people can shine. That's what a band does, and if you have a spectacular drummer, then everybody's got to lay off. And if everybody is super technically proficient, then you get one of those really cool bands that do great stuff. You get an Earth, Wind & Fire, you get a Return To Forever - a band that makes hits but is interesting to the ears technically. So you're saying, get as many different musical experiences under your belt as possible.

That's exactly what I'm saying. The more you know, the greater the palette of colors you have to choose from. You have to study the information and equipment and songs that have come before us, because each one of those is a project in and of itself. When Bowie and I did Let's Dance, we got a pile of records and we sat down and studied them. They were from all different areas of music: We listened to the Pink Panther, and we listened to Cab Calloway; we listened to the Beach Boys, and we listened to the Beatles. We just took licks from all over the place and stuck them in. It wasn't samples - it was ideas, it was licks, it was stuff. We were superimposing all different parts of pop music and culture. David would say obscure things like, "Let's not listen to anything that's been played in the last 20 years; let's act as if the blues had never been invented." [Laughs]

I had never done that before. People had told me stories about them doing that with my records, but I never did that with anyone else's records. Up until Let's Dance, every musical idea came from my memory. I never studied other people's stuff before I made my records. And now that I'm getting ready to make my next crop of records, I think I might try that whole Let's Dance philosophy again - listen to a bunch of different things and see if that inspires me to write riffs and play differently. Sometimes it's good to look back in order to get the inspiration to go forward.

This interview is excerpted from Howard Massey's new book Behind The Glass, soon to be available from Miller-Freeman Books.
 
Great post!
I've always admired their work. I think Nile Rogers and Bernard Edwards where one of the few artists that put out disco songs that where not ,... well, .... you know.... crap.
 
I've always thought of it as "Deep Disco".

It's inspiring that someone so humble, down to earth and creative (and cool) can have such an influence in pop music. "Let's Dance" is a seminal project.
 
I do believe that is word for word out of the book "Behind The Glass"... I just read the chapter on Niles about a week or two ago and that seems almost verbatim.
 
I agree. I'm reading it for a second time so I can make notes of certain things I want to try/do.
 
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