http://www.guitarplayer.com/article/butch-walker/jan-08/33103
Butch Walker
January 2008
“When I was 19 years old, I was a little shredder guy out of Atlanta who used to go to Yngwie and Paul Gilbert clinics. When I realized I could sing, I started writing songs, and I used the guitar as more of a backbone to the tunes,” says Butch Walker, the guitarist, singer, songwriter, and producer who scored the hit “Freak of the Week” with his band Marvelous 3 in 1998. Since the demise of that band, Walker has released three albums under his own name, including his most recent, The Rise and Fall of Butch Walker and the Let’s-Go-Out-Tonites [Red Ink]. He’s also an in-demand producer, helming projects by Pink, Avril Lavigne, the Donnas, Hot Hot Heat, and others.
For pop-rock music, your records sure have a lot of guitars on them. How do you keep the guitars from obscuring the vocal?
I think a mistake a lot of people make is that they write all the guitar music before they put any vocals on a tune. That’s sort of putting the cart before the horse. Because a melody can cover so much room, you have to put the guitars around it, and that’s hard for guitarists to deal with. You want to base it all on guitar, but you really can’t in pop music. The guitar needs to support the vocal. To me, that doesn’t mean playing less guitar, or discounting the guitar in any way. It just means you’ve got to have a knack for working the guitar in the holes in the melody. It’s a whole new way of looking at the instrument. For example, I like a really midrange-y, present vocal, and that’s exactly where the guitar sits. I think this is why guitarists and vocalists hate each other. Their frequencies are battling each other almost as much as their egos are.
What are some specific tricks for making guitars and pop vocals coexist?
You don’t want too much clutter. Panning and EQ allow more parts to sneak through and let their presence be known. A lot of times, simply panning something hard right or left works great. As for EQ, I find that cutting certain frequencies—rather than boosting others—helps a lot. I filter out a lot of stuff on guitar tracks in order to make them cut through, and to get them out of the way of the vocal. Also, if a tune has a bunch of background harmonies and counter-vocal parts, those elements might have to take the place of some of the guitars you put down.
The guitars on your latest record have a different sound compared to your previous releases.
Definitely. My last record, Letters, had a breezy kind of Jackson Browne vibe, whereas the current one has much more of the pop and glam thing from the ’70s. I like to explore different types of recording and studio techniques. For the Let’s-Go-Out-Tonites album, it was all about tape echo. I have a Roland Space Echo and an Echoplex. They’re dirty old units, but in good condition. I mixed this record through my Neve console, and I put both of those in the auxiliary returns so I could feed whatever tracks I wanted to them. A lot of times, I would put echo on everything for that “Bennie and the Jets”-era Elton John vibe, where the whole song sounds like it’s going through a tape echo because it is.
What was the signal chain for “Hot Girls in Good Moods”?
The guitar was my 1972 Les Paul ’54 reissue with P-100 pickups. That’s just an unbelievable guitar. The amp is one of those little cigarette-pack amps with a fuzz box in front of it going into a Marshall 4×12. The album uses natural ambience a lot, so we miked up the amp in this big load-in room. What makes that guitar part sound big is all the tape echo. That song is a good example of me putting echo on the entire mix.
What about the guitar tones on “Bethamphetamine.”
What makes that intro guitar sound unique is the doubled acoustic. I used a crappy Epiphone 12-string, and, once again, I put tape echo on it. I doubled it, and it ended up being a really big guitar sound with the electric—which I believe was tracked with a fuzz pedal into a Goodsell amp. Those are amps made by this guy out of Atlanta—Richard Goodsell—and they’re amazing, three-knob, class A handwired amps. They’re kind of like an AC30 on crack.
You went for a lot of humbucker tones with Marvelous 3, but this record has more compressed single-coil sounds.
Marvelous 3 was a trio, and because I was the only guitar player, I went for a thicker guitar sound. I felt like our sound eventually became the standard out there, and we got burnt on it. We certainly didn’t invent that sound, but that whole modern rock/ punk pop thing was just everywhere about five years after we made those records, and we got tired of it. I didn’t want to keep plugging a PRS into a Boogie or a Marshall, and having this big wall of humbucker sound—although that’s a great sound. I need change. I need to stay stimulated and inspired, and that took me to different guitars and different amps. Plus I’m getting old. I really enjoy making things a little more classic sounding. I love finding a new amp and a new guitar, or an old amp and an old guitar, and discovering this huge vibe—like a $100 Silvertone that sounds unbelievable if you play it through an AC30. Half the fun of being a producer is constantly finding sounds.
How did you approach getting guitar tones when you produced the Donnas?
That was really cool, because Allison [Robertson, Donnas guitarist] is such a great player. The worst thing is having a guitarist who can’t play. You can put them through the same signal chain as Brian May or Van Halen, and it’s not going to sound good.
Allison has this really aggressive right hand—almost in an Angus Young style—so I was able to run her through a series of cool rigs. We used an old ’60s Gretsch Duo Jet and an old Gibson SG. We also had a Les Paul Jr. and a Les Paul lying around. For amps, we ended up using an old plexi Marshall, and a Fender Bassman, and we rented a bunch of amps that I don’t recall. We got a real classic-sounding record with that gear and her style of playing.
What about for an Avril Lavigne session?
Completely different. An Avril record is definitely more about getting the big, polished pop production, and I pull out all the stops. I’ll use a Les Paul, a PRS hollowbody, and my ES-335—which I use a lot for big rhythm sounds. I run those through an old Bogner Ecstasy, and mic that amp with a Royer R-121 ribbon mic, a Rode NT2 condenser, and a Shure SM87 condenser to get a big, full-spectrum, multi-miked sound. Then, I’ll double it. That would be the rhythm tone. Then, I’ll do a lot of overdubs with little auxiliary parts—little bells-and-whistle parts. It’s fun, because I don’t record that stuff every day. It’s closer to how I made records in the Marv 3 days.
Did it ever work against you that you do so many things? You play guitar, keys, and bass. You also sing, write tunes, and produce bands. Do people in the business ever not know what to do with you?
I might have confused some people before, but that doesn’t bother me anymore. Back when I was super concerned about being on the radio and selling lots of records, I was always worried about what record company people in their cubicles thought about me. But, ultimately, doing all that I do has worked out great. I get to record my own music, and play in front of people who love what I do. Then, I get to come home and produce for a living. I’d say that’s the best job in the world—the best two jobs, in fact.
