Guitar Player (May 2000)
Power-Pop Orbit
Tom Dumont launches more hooks for No Doubt’s Return of Saturn
The moment the world got smashed over the head with No Doubt's "Just a Girl" from 1996's Tragic Kingdom, it was widely assumed the band was an overnight sensation. Not exactly. The band formed in 1986, watched their major-label debut album flop in '92, and logged years of recording and performing before its new wave/reggae/ska sound made a blip on the rock and roll radar.
In fact, as Tragic Kingdom was exploding towards number one on the charts, lead singer Gwen Stefani stated on the band's Web site: "Last year, we were hanging by a thread. We were ready to quit and save ourselves from becoming a bunch of losers."
But as unexpected as No Doubt's success was, the reason for the band's stardom is obvious. Once you hear a No Doubt song, the razor-sharp hooks are instantly mainlined to your brain, where they play in a constant loop. Return of Saturn [Interscope], is another hit machine-full of fluid ballads and up-tempo pop songs, with flavors of hip-hop, reggae, ska, and new wave.
Although it has big shoes to fill, Saturn should continue the pop revolution started by the 15-million-selling Tragic Kingdom. And No Doubt guitarist Tom Dumont is happy to share his insights on how the band created the super hooks that finally launched them off the ground.
What axis your approach to tracking on this album?
A lot of the songs were tracked live-bass, drums, guitar, and a scratch vocal. Then I would go in and redo most of my parts. Sometimes it was really easy and straightforward-we'd get a sound in ten minutes-and other times we would spend all day working on a song and it wouldn't come together. Having our producer Glen Ballard and engineer Alain Johannes-who is an amazing guitar player-there to bounce ideas off of was really helpful. They would yell out their approval when I was doing something good, and let me know if I was doing something that wasn't cool. A lot of times, I would completely scrap what we had been rehearsing and make up new parts in the studio.
What would cause you to change a part you had already worked out?
I like the idea of seeing what Gwen and I can create spontaneously On "Ex-Girlfriend," for example, I came up with these weird transitions between the verse and chorus on the spot. Because of that, I could step out of the way of the bass line when I needed to and support the vocal. It's like doing a painting with four other painters and I'm the last one to put my colors on.
Do the parts change again when you play live?
Yeah-recording a song is so different from playing it live. Playing live has always been our strongest point, so it's important that the songs rock. But that doesn't mean duplicating the album. It means tweaking things.
Like what?
Well, on "Magic's in the Makeup" I layered so many guitar parts in the studio that I couldn't do them all live. I can't possibly play both acoustic and electric, or do two counterpoint lines at a certain part of the song-I have to find a way to simplify it all into one part. The same thing happened on our last album -"Don't Speak" had this really lush acoustic guitar, which I could never do live. That song also has a classical-guitar solo, and onstage I would usually play it on an electric with a warm, Santana-style tone. So the song was a little less poppy and it had a little more edge.
Without the benefit of all those studio layers, is it difficult making a guitar part sound powerful live?
Sometimes it's hard, but in a live setting you can definitely make it work without having everything going on. If you have the melodic and emotional content there in one form or another, it will still work for the audience. We do have two other guys play live with us, covering horn parts, keyboards, and percussion. They both sing backup vocals, too, so there's a lot being filled in. I would love to have one more guy onstage to fill up the guitar parts.
Do some songs ever not work?
Sure. We tried to do one of our B-sides on a club tour, and the guitar part was too insane-I couldn't get it to work live. On the record, a noise gate was triggered to open and close by a metronome. As the gate opened, this echoey guitar would come through that was flanged and mixed with a weird, trippy delay. The part sounded like a sequencer, but I couldn't replicate the sound live, and everyone was disappointed. I suppose I could have plugged into a digital delay and triggered a noise gate with our drummers hi-hat, but I’m not super big into using effects live.
Why not?
I feel it's better to have a simple, pure guitar tone. We have horns and keyboards so there is a lot going on, and the subtleties of the guitar can get lost if I get too tricky with effects. I use a wah and a couple of other pedals, but 900 of the time it's just straight electric guitar tones from the amp. I love players who can pull out all the effects and do it really well, like Alex Lifeson and Reeves Gabrels. But for me, it's pretty much just guitar, wah, and amp.
What about effects in the studio?
I have a lot of pedals, but I didn't use many on the album. We got some effects without pedals by using compressors in creative ways. In the verses of "Magic's in the Makeup," for example, there's this little guitar line that is super-duper compressed with a '60s tube compressor. You can hear the note breathing in this really trippy way. We did a similar thing in "Don't Speak." On the verses, we set up the compressor so that the harder I plucked, the quieter the note was which is the reverse of how natural sound works. It forced me to play very gently. As soon as I plucked hard, the compressor would just close down the note and suck it in.
Is there a particular way you set up your amp?
On my Bandmaster I usually set the gain at 6 or 7, and the master at 2 or 3 so there's a bit of grit to the tone. If I dig in and play hard, it breaks up and distorts, and if I back off and play gently it cleans up. I like that middle ground. On my Soldano - which has overdrive for days - have the gain at 3 or 4 and the master volume at 3. That saturated overdrive is really cool, but for the most part, I need something more subtle.
So you get most of your distortion from your amps?
Yeah-almost never from a pedal. I'm one of those purists. If one amp can't do it, I'll find another that can. The Fender Pro Junior is so cool. I can crank it to 8 and it overdrives perfectly The Matchless, the Fender Bandmaster, and the Vox AC30 can do it, too. I've noticed that if you record with too much of that saturated overdrive, it actually makes the guitar tone sound smaller. The best kind of overdrive is like what you hear on an old AC/DC album just an SG plugged into a Marshall head.
How did you record the acoustic intro in "Magic's in the Makeup"?
I played this arpeggiated part once with a standard acoustic guitar, and then I doubled the part with a guitar strung with the octave strings of a 12-string. It's a strange and beautiful sound. It's like playing the part on a 12-string, but something about separating them into different tracks gives all this definition and sparkle to the plucked lines. We did the same thing on "Suspension Without Suspense." Gwen decided to string one of her guitars that way too, because it sounds so pretty
What does Gwen's guitar playing bring to the songwriting process?
She adds a really cool chemistry. She's not as concerned with music theory as I am, so she comes up with progressions I would never write, and I love that.
There aren't many guitar solos on Return of Saturn.
Going into it, I had this philosophy that I was going to try to make an album with no solos on it. I'm into this minimalist thing. It's not that I'm against solos, but I guess because of my heavy metal past, I've been toning down that side of my playing for years. It doesn't always fit stylistically On the last album, there are a couple of solos where I kind of went off. This time I didn't want to go, "Okay time for the guitar solo." I wanted to put in solos where they would really help the song.
How do you compose your solos?
The way I've always done solos is to improvise maybe five takes, and then listen to them and see if 1 can make a composite. I might say, "Man, I love the first bar of the first take, and the fourth bar of the second take. Let's edit them into a single take." Sometimes we would splice a solo together, and then I'd learn it and replay it in one take. But Pro Tools comps work great. It doesn't sound like there's any editing going on. "Magic's in the Makeup" has a composite of two different solos and it's pretty seamless.
How did you record that solo?
It was with the Guild Polara. The high end of that guitar is brilliant, and the low end is full. I played through my Fender Bandmaster head and a Matchless 2x10 cabinet. The solo is kind of like "Freebird"-there's a bit of a cheese element to it, but I think it still works melodically within the song.
How did you record the albums first single, "Ex-Girlfriend"?
That was the last song we wrote for the record, and the process was different from how we tracked the other songs. Most of the record was written on acoustic guitar, sitting in a room with Gwen and a tape recorder. It was really organic. But "Ex-Girlfriend" was different. We wanted to do a reggae-flavored song, and Gwen had a Tricky CD, so we found a song on there that had a cool beat. I recorded the groove into Steinberg Cubase [hard-disk recording software], and replicated the beat using drum samples. That's how Dr. Dre makes records-he goes to old soul or funk records to find grooves. All the drum loops in there are Adrian [Young] playing drums through all kinds of weird guitar stompboxes strung together to create these trippy filter effects. For the acoustic part, Gwen just sang the line to me. I had my acoustic guitar miked with a Shure SM57 routed through an Avalon VT737 tube preamp. I recorded two tracks-one is a harmony to the other.
How did you get that nasty tremolo on `Bathwater"?
I played a hollowbody Guild Starfire III through my Fender Bandmaster with the Matchless cabinet. I cranked the gain to 8, and used the tremolo on the amp. I love that tone. I've listened to a fair amount of Reverend Horton Heat and I was trying to cop that attitude. I just wanted a real gritty, tremoloed, pseudo-rockabilly deal.
Pick a favorite guitar part on the album and tell me how you recorded it.
The song "Marry Me" has a couple of my favorite parts. There's one electric part and one acoustic. The acoustic is an old '40s Harmony It comes out sounding pretty full-bodied on the record, but if you heard the guitar acoustically it sounds kind of nasty and nasal. The acoustic lines were reminiscent of that Lauryn Hill song with Carlos Santana playing guitar ["To Zion" from The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill]. I was trying to get that vibe.
I recorded the electric part at the rehearsal studio when we were making demos. We used [Line 6's] Amp Farm. That plug-in is amazing; it's really frightening. I just sat with the CryBaby set at a static point and improvised rhythms. It was one of those days I didn't feel like being there, so I took off and got a sandwich. I said to the producer. "Just edit together whatever you like out of my part." I came back and he had made this great little loop for the song. I love that I can filter my improvisations through the producer's sensibility and he'll pick out what sounds good to him and make the loop. On one hand, it's a really lazy way to do a guitar part, but it's also a really cool way to collaborate.
How was recording this album different from the Tragic Kingdom sessions?
On the Tragic Kingdom album, we doubled so many guitar parts. It's a very dense record. On this record, I wanted the guitars to be more sparse. If I could get away with one guitar part for the song, I would.
The song `New" contains a signature No Doubt riff, similar to "Just a Girl" from the last album.
That song was recorded before the rest of the record, for the Go soundtrack. I used that Guild Polara, and we rented a Marshall and a Soldano, and the engineer blended the two to get the tone. The part is also doubled by a fat analog synth. The idea was to create something somewhere between Devo and the Cars-an angular, jagged line that percolates along. And there's this weird counterpoint-one line is an F# minor scale, going up F#, G#, A, B, and the alternating part goes down chromatically starting with F#.
What guitar players amaze you?
Greg Brown, who was on the first two Cake albums. We went on tour with them for a little while and he was my hero, because he played this Guild hollowbody through a 2x10 Silvertone amp with no effects. We were playing arenas and amphitheaters and he just plugged in-it was all coming from his fingers. He comes from a country style that's kind of foreign to me. That's why it dazzled me, because I grew up with heavy metal and hard rock. Before Greg, it was Alex Lifeson, Ritchie Blackmore, and Tony Iommi.
How would you advise someone to become a good rhythm player?
You definitely have to lock in your rhythm somewhere between the kick and the snare-the key is to find some kind of synchronization. You also have to listen to what the vocal is doing and support it. There were times on past albums where I played parts that walked all over the bass and vocal, and that's not an effective way to drive a song. I love being aware of what everyone else is doing and finding parts that help lock down the groove. It's all about supporting the song, and I find it's more fun to work with the band.