On The Record: Marty Friedman on why guitar is lucky to still be around

Marty Friedman discusses his new album, Drama, and how it differs from his previous solo albums. He mentions that his album Scenes resonated with fans and that he wanted to create a modern and extravagant version of it. He focused on creating a symphonic sound with real orchestral instruments and deep arrangements. The album aims to evoke emotions in listeners, reminiscent of childhood memories or important moments in life. Friedman also shares that soundtrack music often touches him emotionally, particularly when certain melodies are played in different interpretations. He recommends the soundtrack from the movie "Come See the Paradise" by Randy Edelman. Piano plays a significant role on the album, and Friedman explains the challenge of finding the right combination of tones between guitar and piano. He used a mix of his own modern gear and a collection of vintage guitars and amps. Franco Piona, a friend from Italy, helped with the technical work on the record, ensuring the right gear I kind of always had a bad taste in my mouth about vintage gear, but boy, my eyes were really opened on this drummer record because I saw what it was like to be in the hands of someone who maintains vintage gear on a world-class level, and it just really helped me get the best out of what I was trying to play. What's up? This is Marty Friedman. You're watching On the Record with Ultimate Guitar. Hey, Marty. Thanks for taking the time out for joining us on Ultimate Guitar. Let's discuss the new album, Drama, just as far as how it's similar or different to previous solo albums. I had an album called Scenes a long time ago, and for whatever reason, it resonated with a lot of my fans, and probably of all of my albums. The Scenes album is the one that people seem to say, do another one. Do a sequel to it. Do a Scenes part two. I'm not really much for nostalgic things and revisiting the past and doing something I've already done before, but I have kept that in mind, even though some of my other albums have far outsold that particular album. It just seems that, for whatever reason, the most passionate response is to that record, Scenes. I always thought, well, if I was going to do something in that vein, how would I make it new, or how would I make it a much more modern, a much more extravagant, much more epic, for lack of a better word, a better version, so it doesn't sound like I'm rehashing old stuff. So that was always kind of in the back of my mind. I knew that, for one thing, I would want to make it more kind of symphonic with more real orchestral instruments, which I did this time, and less of the synth type of things, and just more real instruments and deeper arrangements, and maybe with a similar sentiment. I mean, the Scenes album is kind of a romantic album. It almost goes into healing territory, you know, as far as music that can heal you. But I think the main thing that I concentrated most on drama is I wanted to tap into this feeling. You know that feeling that you get, like, you don't know why, but sometimes, like, if you're going to an orchestral concert, or any kind of concert, really, and for reasons you just don't know, all of a sudden, like, a tear starts coming down your eyes, or you just get a chill, and you have no idea why. You're just listening to music. Well, that feeling is something that I've been working on, and analyzing, and trying to develop in my own music for forever, to varying levels of achievement. And I think on the drama album, I've done that in spades, so to speak. I've done the most of that, kind of tapping into those emotions that, when the listener hears it, they just don't know why, but they feel something. You know what I mean? And to get into detail about that, I find that the reason why, when you're listening to music, and for some reason, you get a chill, or your spine tingles, or you get goose bumps, or a tear comes out, and you don't know why, I think a lot of that is you're hearing a slight melody, a motif, a little passage that was actually deep inside you from your childhood, or from some other important developmental part of your life, or something that reminds you of an important person in your life, or an important time in your life. And I find that when I go back and dig into those type of things for myself, I can find these little, just little two-second transitions, or little melodies, little patterns that, for whatever reason, they bring up some memory from when I was four years old, or something like that. It's like, how does that work? But I've been really tapping into that a lot on this album, so there should hopefully be a lot of places on the drama record where you're like, I don't know why, but it just feels good. And that's kind of the biggest thing that I've so-called improved since all of my other records. Because I've been trying to do this forever, and I've been doing it to some extent, but this album is less of a heavy metal album, it's really not a heavy metal album at all. So there's more space to dive into those little motifs, and bringing them out into such a way that, when you're listening to it, you have these weird feelings, so to speak. And you mentioned that some of the new album touches you emotionally. I'm curious, are there any other artists or guitarists that also touch you emotionally? It usually happens when I'm hearing soundtrack music. Sometimes soundtrack music does it for me, and I think the reason why it does it for me is because in soundtrack music, they take themes and they play them in different interpretations. So there might be like a certain theme when a certain character comes in, and in one part of the movie, it's kind of slow and somber, and in another part of the movie, it's kind of fitting the mood of whatever that character is doing, so it might be upbeat, it might be scary, it might be intense or something, but it's the same little melody. So by a half hour or 45 minutes or an hour into the movie, they've already trained your mind to connect that little melody or that little motif with that particular character, so you're invested in that. And then at some point in the movie, usually like at a climactic part or a plot twist or something really important, they'll just hit you with that melody in the nicest interpretation possible, so it's kind of like unfair, that advantage that you have with you. You've got a story, and you've got a lot of time to kind of groom the listener into having something invested in a particular melody. So I try to do that myself within these five, six minute pieces of music, but very often I hear these things in soundtrack music and sometimes even in television dramas, more commonly in Japan because I've been here 20 years and watching more Japanese television than American, of course, but sometimes like the really sad dramas will do this for me, and it's usually from, like I said, kind of grooming you with a melody in several different interpretations and then hitting you with like a key modulation, and those are the things that really get me with the same kind of effect. Are there any specific soundtracks that you could mention that you'd be able to recommend? There was an old one that I haven't, you know, of course, West Side Story does that for me in spades. There's a million parts in that, but that's like, that's an aberration. There's really nothing to compare to West Side Story in the world of music, I believe. That's kind of like the lexicon of everything, but there was this movie in the 90s, and I don't know if the movie did very well or not, but it was called Come See the Paradise, and Randy Edelman did the soundtrack, and there was just so many little pieces of music that would come in and out of the story and just the right points and in different keys, different tempos, different combinations of instruments, and I always remembered that I was very impressed by that, and I think when I was recording my True Obsessions album a long time ago, I was trying to channel those motifs. It's kind of, that's where I think maybe my music is a hair different from other, you know, other recording artists. Piano plays a very large part on this album. Was that intentional? Of course, yeah. I just didn't want to be limited to just a band sound, you know, guitar, bass, and drums. So, you know, the combination of piano and guitar can be beautiful. It's something where you really have to choose your tones wisely and listen closely to what you're, what's playing back on the speakers because, you know, an electric guitar, an acoustic piano, those aren't really the most copacetic instrument combinations, especially when you're talking about distorted guitars. So if you take a song like Illumination and you hear the intro, it's just a guitar and a piano. I used a very clean guitar sound but with just enough cajones on the guitar to allow the guitar to sustain in the ways I wanted it to, but when you hear it together with the piano, it doesn't have that harsh sound. Like if you had a normal distorted guitar solo along with just an acoustic piano, that could get kind of grating on your ears after about eight bars or so. So choosing the tones to play with piano was a wonderful challenge, but when you hit on the right combination, it's really fresh because it's not really done very much. It's not really common to play a lot of long guitar solos over a piano and only a piano. So that was something that we spent a lot of time on and I think it came out really nice. What was your guitar setup on the album? I had like a world-class collection of vintage guitars and amps for this. I have a very dear friend in Italy named Franco Piona who, he's got like the most impressive collection of vintage instruments and well-maintained vintage instruments I've ever seen in my entire life and he was so kind to do the tech work on my record. So every single note that I played on guitar went through Franco's filter of deciding which amps and which guitars fit what I was going to play on the song. So of course I had my own modern gear. I had my Jackson Signature model with the EMG pickups and my Engel Infernos and a couple other Engels and stuff like that. I had all that normal stuff that I use for everything, but along with that, I had the most extensive collection of vintage gear that literally I've ever seen in my life. And so the process we did was I'd have the part of the song that I was going to play and then I'd play it. I'd play it once for Franco on whatever gear was up there and Franco would listen to what I'd play and he'd say, yeah, okay, I got it. I think we need this guitar and this amp and this cabinet and this mic. So then him and he and the engineer would go back and they would set it up just like that. Then I would play the part again over the track and then, well, you know what, the guitar is cool, but I think we could use a different cabinet that break up in a different way for this. So go back, change the cabinets. Then I'd play it again. It's like now we're closer, but I think a different guitar will work. Give me a different guitar. I'd play the same thing again. By the time any part got laid to tape, so to speak, we had already gone through so many combinations of everything that really I had completely forgotten what I played on each particular song. But for the most part, there was a lot of very vintage Fenders from like the 50s, the late 50s and 60s, and there were my Jacksons were on there and some of the more aggressive parts and even some of the clean parts. I remember using a Jackson, their new American Virtuoso series on some very clean parts, and everybody was surprised that that sound was coming from a Jackson. And there were some old Gretches on there and there were some more, there were some ancient Fender Tellys in there and a whole lot of gear that I was very unfamiliar with. But Franco had been maintaining for decades, and it was just such a thrill to be able to be in the hands of someone who was so knowledgeable about vintage equipment and how to really apply that knowledge to music. There's a lot of people who know how to wire amps and rewire pickups and intonate guitars, but Franco's approach to teching my album was very, very musical. He would hear me play what I'm going to play and then make his judgments. And sometimes he would even change the strings on the guitar to match what I was playing. He would change the string height and the string gauges even. Left to my own devices, I would play like a normal set of 10s with pretty high action, but occasionally he would say, look, these 11s are going to sound better for this one line on the B string. And okay, great, that's great. And sometimes he would say, let's put some 9s or 8s on this so when you bend the note, you can even bend it crazier. And so he was getting into things like that that I've never really done before. So thanks to him and his advice the whole way, the guitar palette on this record is by far the deepest. And it's really my first delving into vintage instruments, to be honest with you. I've always been kind of of a mindset of, well, I play something old when you can play something new. I've always been that way. New gear has always just been awesome. And every time someone would say, dude, try this guitar. It's like $50,000. It's from like 1961. I'd pick it up and I'm like, it'd be like a dumpster fire. It wouldn't be in tune. It'd be kind of intonations weird, pickups buzzing and noisy. I'm like, I don't know who's paying all this money for this stuff. So I kind of always had a bad taste in my mouth about vintage gear. But boy, my eyes were really opened on this drama record because I saw what it was like to be in the hands of someone who maintains vintage gear on a world-class level. And it just really helped me get the best out of what I was trying to play. Should technique be a tool for expression rather than a goal on its own? If technique is a goal on its own, that's like really, really pitiful. Really, really, there's nothing really else to say about that. I mean, every single person playing music has some amount of technique to get their music done. You know, every single one. So let's put that aside. The only thing that matters is that you are playing the music that you want to represent yourself in. But I know that a lot of people who watch guitar media or read guitar media are at the stage where they're developing their technique. So they're very in tune with, can I play this? Am I able to play that? A lot of the focus is on the ability to do things. And once you develop into a professional musician at some point, or a recording artist, or whatever you wind up being, you start to realize that the only techniques that matter are the ones that allow you to bring the music that's inside of you out. Learn as much as you possibly can from everybody, and develop as much as you can from everybody, and develop as much abilities as you possibly can. But make sure that as you're doing that, you're doing that with the purpose of your own goal, which is, well, various goals. People have various goals. But for the most part, I think people, everyone has some kind of music inside of them. Everyone has like this life force of music inside of them. And if you channel the technique that you learn to support getting that out of you, you're going to reach your goal, as opposed to being a person who's amassed a whole lot of technique. They can play every single thing they've ever been put in front of them, but they don't know what it is that they're trying to say on their instrument. How do you see guitar music changing in the future? Guitar is lucky to be alive this long, to be honest with you. If you look at music history, pop music history, sounds change, vibes change, instrumentation changes, the lead instrument changes, musical structures change. Back in the very old days, like the swing era, big band era, there was a huge instrumental section that happened before a vocal came in. But that song structure went out the window. Back then, the solos were done on clarinets. After that, when R&B and blues started to happen, the saxophone was the main lead instrument for a long time in the doo-wop era of the 50s. Then in the 60s, there was these twanging guitar solos, and then in the 70s, you get distorted guitar solos. Guitar solos had a pretty long life in pop music. Right now, guitars are still, I don't want to say in vogue, but they're still very, very popular, probably because they're just so damn fun to play. If you look at a top 10 in most countries, there's no guitar solos in there. They're not in vogue, but if you get on Instagram or you get on the internet, there's billions of people having fun playing really cool guitar stuff. I think that's just thanks to the fun of the instrument. Have you had a chance to hear Timu play your songs, The Megadeth, and if so, what did you think? I haven't, as a matter of fact, but I'm sure he's doing a great job if he's up there doing it. I was able to meet him when I played with the band at Wacken, and he seemed a very, very cool dude. I wish him tons and tons of success with the band, and it's going to be a big, fun ride for him, I'm sure. How is your relationship currently with Dave Mustaine, and would you like to play with Megadeth again at some point? It's great. We played two wonderful shows in Budokan and at Wacken Open Air. Yeah, he's a bro. I'm the biggest Megadeth fan out there. Great, Marty. I just want to say thank you for taking the time out for chatting today. I appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you very much, Greg. I really appreciate it, and I hope to see you in person really soon.