Tom Morello on Limiting Yourself

In Blessed Are the Limited I wrote about the power of deliberately reducing your number of creative options, a point I revisited in Blessed Are The Mundane when I noted just how little gear (and coworkers) the Beatles had.

I've found supporting testimony from an unusual source on Graham Cochrane's excellent blog The Recording Revolution - Rage Against The Machine/Audioslave guitarist Tom Morello. 'Unusual' because Tom has a reputation for pushing new boundaries and creating new sounds on the electric guitar. And yet he's been using exactly the same guitar rig for over 20 years! He says

I’ve had the same rig since prior to Rage Against The Machine. It’s the same [amp] head. It’s the same cabinet. The newest piece of gear that I have on my board is a pedal that I got in 1991. There’s a sense of comfort in not worrying about gear anymore, I’m [now] going to worry about trying to get sounds and music out of the gear that I have.

In a Feb 2000 interview with Guitar One Magazine Tom said

In order for me to be able to let my musical imagination run to extremes, I like to have a lot of the variables, like gear, locked down. I like to know it's always going to be that amp [and] those effects pedals. It's always going to be these guitars as the cornerstones of the physical end of the music-making. Because that stuff is locked down in place, it allows me the freedom to explore ... just the thought of all that chaos caused by constantly bringing in new gear makes me nervous. 

Graham comments

We might find that it’s actually the gear... that we truly love. Writing and having songs to play and record simply are the fuel for our gear lust.

Whether 'gear lust' is our real motivation, or simply a giant distraction, it's good to take stock of what we actually need, reduce 'equipment drag' to the bare minimum and get back to writing songs!

Read Graham's full article here

Read more on limiting yourself creatively from Nicholas Tozier, Hugh MacLeod and Paul McGuinness
Check out more 'Be-atletudes'

Under The Influence: Chris Cornell (Soundgarden)

Before I got into songwriting, the Beatles had the biggest impact on me musically. That had to do with how young I was, and getting into their whole catalog at the same time. I had stolen a stack of Beatles vinyl that covered their whole career. Two of the records were those ‘best of’ era compilations — those double record sets where one was red and one was blue.


I listened to it all but I gravitated toward the later stuff. Even though I was 9 years old, and had no way of knowing, it was influential in every way as a songwriter and as a singer. Essentially everyone in that band sang at some point. I didn’t know who was who, or if there even was a primary singer, and that had an impact on me. I’ve always approached singing songs in the studio in terms of what is going to sound the best texturally. I’ve never been too worried about having my own specific style as I have in singing a style that’s appropriate to the song. That’s where my range comes from. I really wanted it to sound a certain way, but wanted it to sound, in a certain sense, like a fictional character who is the narrator singing this song.


And in terms of production, those albums influenced me hugely and it took me years to understand that I was doing things a certain way because I loved the way they sound on Beatles records. Sounds and textures and panning and funny, dramatic mixes — what would normally be an inconsequential part where someone sang, or a triangle or something that would come from nowhere, and be the loudest part and then kind of disappear awkwardly. Because it was the Beatles, you didn’t question it. All of that had a huge effect on me.


It wasn’t like the story that I hear a lot of times, where some kid is sitting in his bedroom and he hears KISS for the first time, picks up a guitar and becomes Slash. I didn’t have that moment. I never thought that I would be capable of doing something like that. I was discovering that music would be important in my life as a listener and as a fan.

Chris Cornell (Soundgarden/Audioslave) interviewed on CLATL.com (via The Grunge Report)