I played the same two Les Paul goldtops that I’ve been using for 20 years, as well as my Rockman front-end stuff through an old Marshall. If you’re a guitarist trying to play a Boston song, sooner or later you’ll get to a point where you’ll hear something happening on the guitar that you can’t do. And that’s because of this beautiful gadget that I built such a long time ago. For all the critical guitar parts, I use a [Rockman] Sustainor Rockmodule. It has an EQ section and a loop-out ahead of the distortion section, and I’ll often put an EQ in front of that for pre-distortion and tone shaping. I tweak the sounds quite a bit, so I never have the same settings on two songs, and I never quite know what I did from song to song.
You’re well known as a supporter of analog gear. What’s your beef with digital?
The instant you digitize a signal, you destroy the phase-angle relationship between the high frequencies and the lows. That’s why you can’t make a decent chorus with a digital delay unit. Phase-angle distortion has been with us since the day 3M introduced their incredibly expensive, 15kHz digital-recording deck. I still remember the famous quote from their marketing department: “There is an introduction of phase-angle distortion, but the human ear can’t hear it.” I find that so hysterical because the human ear can hear things we can’t measure yet. And the ear does use phase-angle information to determine the location sounds originate from, and the space within which you’re standing when you hear those sounds. Simply put, that’s what tells you, “Oh, that sound came from over there.” The end result is that digitized music destroys the spatial characteristics of the music, and the first thing I noticed about it—other than the horrifying distortion of 16-bit digitized reproduction—is that the sound spectrum is really flat.
So you’re not buying into the digital modeling revolution?
It strikes me as very strange that anyone would try to model something that’s very simple to do with analog electronic equipment. The two advantages of digital are that it’s cheap, and it gives you lots of features. As far as sound quality goes, digital is always worse.
How have you viewed the evolution of guitar sounds since the early Boston days?
I haven’t paid that much attention to it. I just want my guitar to sound good.
― Tim Ellison (Tim Ellison), Sunday, 14 August 2005 00:16 (twenty years ago)
― some stockholm cindy talking (Jody Beth Rosen), Sunday, 14 August 2005 01:10 (twenty years ago)
SCHOLZ: That was a combination of an old 100-watt Marshall head and a prototype Power Soak. I never recorded anything without that Power Soak. I built the Power Soak because of the need to bring down the gain, but without losing the saturation of the sound. I also used an Ampeg V4. For speakers, I used standard issue Marshall cabs.
MG: How would you describe your miking techniques?
SCHOLZ: I used whatever was handy. If you dare to mike a Marshall cab, you will never get the mic back in the same place and get the same exact sound twice. If you move the mic even just a few inches, the sound will be utterly different. It won't even sound like the same amplifier. Those 4x12 cabinets yield a lot of phase cancellation, plus the cabinet has unbelievable directionality. I used to have to keep those cabinets pointed anyplace except towards the audience, because one person would hear the sound 10db louder, with a totally different tone, than the person standing five feet away. The best solution was to come up with a sound and then feed it through the PA. Eventually, I stopped using Marshalls and 4x1 2 cabs altogether, because, even though I carried a dozen with me on tour, I couldn't keep two at a time in proper working order-they were too temperamental.
Eventually, I sprang for my own serious AC power supplies, so I could set the voltages exactly. Then I could get a good, repeatable sound, and much better lifespan out of the amps. When I got the Power Soak thing together, I took measurements of voltages and currents in various parts of the head, and then set the resistance of the Power Soak, which is strictly passive resistance. But it was still so cumbersome to use the Marshall stacks, and there was no way to switch sounds as effectively as I needed. Later, I designed more streamlined things that I could change tone easily with.
Back on those old recordings, there were a few times when I was able to get a rhythm sound that I liked, but, most of the time, I was going crazy with equalizers after the track had been recorded. I didn't get that under control until Walk On, when I used the Rockman system combined with Marshalls. I would switch between the two set-ups, and could not tell which one was which. There are little nuances at the beginnings and ends of notes that do sound different, but that's it. I'd have them both cooking, and I'd just pick one or the other, depending on what I was looking for. I'd switch back and forth even for a different chord within the same chorus section. That worked really well, because I finally got some direct sounds out of the Marshall that I was really happy with. I felt I finally got the process together; I didn't have to listen to the track over and over, and listen endlessly to previous tracks and all that. That used to drive me crazy.
― Tim Ellison (Tim Ellison), Sunday, 14 August 2005 05:05 (twenty years ago)
― Tim Ellison (Tim Ellison), Sunday, 14 August 2005 18:08 (twenty years ago)
He also took up figure skating, even requesting rink time during concert tours. Ever the inventor, Scholz even came up with a brand new skating jump that Tara Lipinski might consider - a "Scholz" (jump from the wrong foot, spin, land on the wrong foot). "I saw skaters on TV doing jumps where you zip across the ice and launch into the air off of a sharpened steel blade and somehow come back down going backwards on one foot and live through it," said Scholz to the Boston Globe. "That looked too cool for me not to try, so I did. It's not easy, but you know what? I missed my calling, because I can do it."
― Tim Ellison (Tim Ellison), Sunday, 21 August 2005 05:59 (twenty years ago)
We fucking smoked them - it was unfair. We claim we can beat any rock band in basketball, but we have to be able to use my brother. When we played the Beasties, it was make-it-take-it. So I'd dribble down the court, pass to my brother and he'd make it. Then we'd do it again. The Beasties had Billy Corgan on their team, too.
― 57 7th (calstars), Sunday, 21 August 2005 15:40 (twenty years ago)
― I'm Hi, Jared Fogle (ex machina), Sunday, 21 August 2005 17:04 (twenty years ago)
― A Viking of Some Note (Andrew Thames), Monday, 22 August 2005 05:16 (twenty years ago)
― Sundar (sundar), Monday, 22 August 2005 16:16 (twenty years ago)
― Tim Ellison (Tim Ellison), Monday, 22 August 2005 17:12 (twenty years ago)