What is the perfect lineup for a rock band? Power trio enthusiasts will tell you that nothing rocks like the immediacy and stripped down fury of a single guitar, bass, and drums: Cream, Jimi Hendrix, the Police, Green Day,
Nirvana.
Then there are those who swear by the three-piece augmented by a vocalist arrangement: Led Zeppelin, the Who, Van Halen, the Ramones, the Stooges, the Sex Pistols, U2.
But ever since the Beatles appeared on
The Ed Sullivan Show back on February 9, 1964, the image of twin guitars has become etched in our musical consciousness. The quartet—two guitars, bass, and drums—has become the standard. Who could forget John Lennon strumming away on his Rickenbacker while George Harrison plucked out little lead phrases on his Gretsch?
Since then, bands as varied as the Clash, Television, Thin Lizzy,
the Replacements, Foo Fighters, Queens of the Stone Age, and modified quartets with singers like the Yardbirds, Aerosmith, the Rolling Stones, and AC/DC have explored and refined the interplay of dual guitars. The musical exchange between instruments has become so seamless that identifying tags such as lead guitar and rhythm guitar no longer apply.
Here, five players who share guitar duties with a second guitarist, talk about how they figure out who’s going to play what.
Our players: Jesse Hughes (Eagles of Death Metal); Doug Martsch (Built to Spill); Dallas Green (Alexisonfire); Cristiano Migliore (Lacuna Coil); and Zacky Vengeance (Avenged Sevenfold).
Jesse Hughes, Eagles of Death Metal: Normally, if I’m not up to snuff to play the part, David Catching plays it. But I like to play all the glory parts and I don’t want David to be seen or known in any way, shape, or form at all. And ironically and interestingly enough, my ideal band, the vision I had of the perfect band, is the band that I have right now. I always knew David Catching was gonna be the only guy who could ever understand what I was trying to do and get this music.
I never even envisioned bass in the band ever. The first album has no bass, except for on two songs. The first three or four tours we never had a bass player. Yeah, it was the uniqueness of the double-stringing that gave us the bass frequencies. It’s actually the absence of the bass that is a sound. We use the delta blues theory of playing the bass line and the lead line at the same time. It’s the way the delta bluesmen would sing along with themselves with their guitar. And doubling the strings just accidentally gave us this unique phenomenon.
Doug Martsch, Built to Spill: That’s something we try to be really careful with [having two and three guitarists]. It’s fun to try and figure out how to do it without overdoing it. There are songs where not everyone plays. There are a couple songs Brett [Nelson] sits out. There are parts where people sit out for a little bit or whatever.
We spend a lot of time talking about it and figuring out how to make it work. We’re not all noodling around. When we first did it, there was a lot of that. There are a few moments when everyone is just soloing away. There might be a couple of those moments now, but they make sense.
Another thing, though, that I just started thinking about or realizing, is you can’t hear us all unless you’re at the sound booth or something. Most people are hearing one or two of us. We’re spread out across the stage, and our sound guy mixes us in stereo. So I’m in the middle and those guys are mixed over to the side of the PA that they’re playing on. I think wherever you stand in the room, you’re going to get a different experience. Everyone plays rhythm, lead, whatever.
After a while, everyone kind of gets a little sloppy. We might step on each other a little bit. We’ve kind of figured out different tones; everyone has a pretty significant different sort of setup. We all have like a tonal range that we kind of fit in. It’s still totally a work in progress. We’ve got a ways to go before we get it to where it will really be impressive. To get it on that level where everyone realizes the subtle things we’re doing to make ourselves stick together. We’re still in the infancy stage right now.
Dallas Green, Alexisonfire: It’s been really weird since the beginning. Wade [MacNeil] will have a riff, let’s say. I’ll come to practice, he’ll show me the riff, and I’ll play something I’ve been working on. And for some reason, they usually just go together. I remember that first happened to us when we first starting to jam. We were like, “That’s weird.” It just kind of works out all the time. It’s been very easy for us to write together since the beginning. Even though at the beginning, our songs weren’t great.
I’m usually more melody-based, so I’m usually trying to add that extra note and play bigger chords. Wade usually takes over the single-note type stuff, the sort of stuff that accentuates what’s going on because I’m usually singing more. On the songs he sings, I kind of take over that role. So there’s definitely not a lead guitar player. We’re definitely both rhythm guitar players that are able to accentuate each other when we need to. It just works out really well.
Cristiano Migliore, Lacuna Coil: There are parts that I can play better than Maus [Marco Biazzi] can and the other way around. There are parts that he can actually play much better than I can. So it’s usually very easy to decide; sometimes I play the chords, sometimes he does. Since we don’t have a lot of solos, there is no guitar player that is like, “Oh, I am the solo player” or “I’m the rhythm guitar.” We switch parts almost constantly. So it really depends on who can play the part better and who can give it the right feeling and all this kind of stuff. It changes constantly from song to song.
It’s not really like we don’t think that there shouldn’t be solos in our songs. But we only do it when we think that the solo fits to that song. If you take a look at all our previous albums, there are probably only like four or five solos. So it really depends on how the song is and if we have the feeling that it needs a solo. There were songs that we recorded in the past where originally there was supposed to be a solo. But then when you have so many instruments going on—we have two vocals, we have two guitars, bass guitar, keyboard, strings, and everything—sometimes there is really no room for an extra part that contains a solo. We only do it if we have the feeling that the song needs it. We always try to work everything around the song. So if the song actually needs a part where a solo fits very well, then we’re gonna do it. Otherwise, we’re just like, “Okay, well, we’ll do it in some other song.”
Zacky Vengeance, Avenged Sevenfold: Me and Synster [Gates] basically just kind of do whatever feels right. There’ll be days where you’ve been there for so long you get burned out and you just go in there and track whatever the other person doesn’t want to do. The tracking and what we actually play live are two different things. There’s days where I track stuff and I just have to learn it that day in the studio. I knew how it went but when we’d actually be rehearsing or in pre-production, it would be something that I’d never played. Basically it’s just being in the studio and what the producer wants. When it’s time to lay something down, it’s whoever’s closest, whoever’s in the room, or whoever can pull the part off.
When it comes to duels or anything like that, we’ll definitely mix it up. All the more technical stuff is usually left up to him. I do a lot of the more galloping, muting stuff; that’s more my specialty because that’s kinda where I came from with all the punk rock stuff that I always loved writing and stuff. He showed me a lot about lead stuff and I’ve showed him about stuff about a world that he’s not really from. Especially like with the dual guitar stuff, Synster is really, really good when I come up with a riff; he can lay another part on it very fast because he can pick up on that really quick where I can’t so much.
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