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'

Blessed Are The Mundane

Be regular and orderly in your life ... so that you may be violent and original in your work. 

 - Gustave Flaubert

As well as being singletasking, prolific, co-writers, with a fine crop of facial hair, the Beatles were such successful songwriters because they were creatures of habit.

Consider how consistent, even boring, they were in their careers as recording artists. They maintained not only the same line up, but had one manager, one record label and the same two roadies for the entire seven years.

The vast majority of their 211 songs were rehearsed, cut and mixed at EMI studios, Abbey Road under the watchful eye of one producer, George Martin.

And tools of the trade? It's only a slight generalisation* to say Lennon & McCartney recorded most of the songs with 2 basses, 3 electrics and 2 acoustics. Harrison, the biggest gearhead, seemed to average one new guitar per album which still adds up to less instruments than many pros take on tour today. The band shared, swopped and repainted guitars throughout their career. Ringo had five successive kits that were all essentially the same, until he went crazy and added an extra tom tom for Let It Be.

This frugality is mind boggling when compared with Slash's collection of 100 guitars (and rising) and Mike Portnoy's purple, siamese and albino monster kits.

Even the number of wives and houses was far less than the average rock star quota!

It's A Drag Man
All this resulted in a minimum of creative drag when it came to making music. Every new band member takes time to settle in. New producers and studios need time to get comfortable with. Even a new instrument takes time to get used to. And all that time could be better spent writing and recording.

Consider Abbey Road studios. In many ways it was a inhospitable grey place, characterised by harsh lighting, locked fridges and rough toilet paper. But whether George Martin and the team needed a harpsichord or a recording of a blackbird they knew where to find it. They didn't need to stop to figure out how to patch the reverb through the desk. In fact because everyone knew exactly how it all worked they had the ability to devise ways to make things not work properly, inventing ADT, flanging, close miking and the like.

The Beatles were products of their time and that means they had less choices available to them than we do today (as I've written about before). But that just means we need to pay more attention to this.

Don't Let It Be 

Let's look at Let It Be as a case study. It's universally believed to be The Beatles lowest ebb. What was going on? Lennon was going through a divorce. The band were deadlocked over whether Lee Eastman or Allen Klein should represent them. So how did they approach recording a new album?

They decide to film a 'making of' documentary. This involved them rehearsing on a film studio soundstage. Union rules meant they had work normal 'office hours' rather than the night shift they'd become used to, surrounded by a strange film crew rather than the normal handful of insiders. Glyn Johns was giving the job of capturing the album on tape at Apple's 'state of the art' 72 track studio which hadn't even been finished (and proved unusable when it was).

The result was a disaster. The follow up, Abbey Road was a return to form, because in part, it was a return to the usual people, place and methods too.

Balance

It's so tempting to start moving the furniture when you want to create something fresh and it feels like the more change the better. But the Beatles were able to evolve musically at such a phenomenal rate because they left so many other things untouched.

Think about it like this. Your kitchen is a workspace. You like to know where everything is and have everything you use regularly to hand. That's why it drives you (and me) nuts when they keep rearranging the shelves at the supermarket. There are times when we need to rearrange or decorate the kitchen. But they are the days when you order take out Pizza.

Is the point 'never sack the drummer, buy a new guitar or move house?'. No. It's that every change is a withdrawal from the 'bank of creative headspace' and it makes sense to maintain a healthy balance. So if you just fired half the band maybe you shouldn't record your next album in another country on that brand new digital format this time around.

In general aim for as little excitement as possible in your working methods. Your creative process should appear utterly boring to anyone else (unless they are interested in 'creative processes'). If you're doing anything sexier than drinking lots of coffee while you play the same 3 notes over and over again, I'd say you're doing it wrong. 

Blessed are they who can change what they do, because they rarely change how they do it.


*If you'd like my research to be a little more accurate you could always buy me a copy of Beatles Gear by Andy Babiuk or (thanks Roberta!) any other book on my Amazon wish list! 

Nicholas Tozier On Limitations

In Blessed are the Limited I said that a key to the Beatles productivity was that they had far less options than even your average independant musician circa 2011. Songwriter/blogger Nicholas Tozier agrees -

Constraints lead to creativity. Restrictions often lead to ideas—they force us to stretch, to grow, to improvise, to tap new resources and to work around the limitations. I think as much about new, interesting constraints as I do about new song ideas. I love throwing a wrench in my own gears, defying my usual creative habits. A new kind of process leads to a new kind of song.

Listen to Nicholas Tozier: How the Haiku can Improve Your Songwriting or read the transcription.

Hugh MacLeod And Paul McGuinness On Limiting Yourself

The Beatles were incredibly prolific because they were severely limited by the technological options at their disposal. Here are two more witnesses on the advantages of limiting yourself

Hugh MacLeod (Artist)

The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props. There's no correlation between creativity and equipment ownership. None. Zilch. Nada.

Actually, as the artist gets more into his thing, and as he gets more successful, his number of tools tends to go down. He knows what works for him. Expending mental energy on stuff wastes time. He's a man on a mission. He's got a deadline. He's got some rich client breathing down his neck. The last thing he wants is to spend 3 weeks learning how to use a router drill if he doesn't need to.

How To Be CREATIVE (Free eBook Download)

Paul McGuinness (U2 Manager)

[The ‘Pop’ album] was the first time I started to think that the technology was getting out of control. When people are trying to choose between mix 26 and mix 27…the sheer range of possibilities [creates] a form of paralysis.

(U2 by U2 p.270)

Related Post: Blessed Are The Limited

Blessed Are The Limited

This post comes hot on the heels of watching It Might Get Loud. An 'OK' film rather than a great one, it’s chief effect was to make me realise what a great band Led Zeppelin were. So I dug out a load of Zep to listen to, the chief effect of which was to make me realise what a great band The Beatles were.

Back to the film.

Seeing Jack White make an electric guitar out of a few bits of wood and a coke bottle threw into sharper relief the Edge’s struggle to find the right setting for ‘Pride’ on a pedal board with more effects than the entire Abbey Road studio (circa 1970) and more processing power than Mission Control, Houston (circa 2010).

Right there I got an insight into why the Beatles were able to produce so much, so quickly, and so consistently whereas U2 (and most of their contemporaries) produce so little.

Don’t underestimate the power of limiting your choices.

When you have only 4 tracks, a few instruments, and some reverb you quickly exhaust all the possibilities and you are faced with doing yet another take or just saying ‘let’s move onto the next song.’ Even at their most technically advanced the Beatles had less to play with than I do on the garage band-equipped Mac I’m typing this post on.

I’m convinced that one of the (many) reasons for the Beatles greatness was that they wrote and recorded so many songs. The more you do something, the better you become. Duh!

But here's my point -

The Beatles productivity was inversely proportionate to the number of gadgets they had to dick around with. Spending 2 hours deciding how much decay to put on the guitar echo and 2 days soundchecking a drum kit might mean you take 2 years to record an album. And 2 years in the studio will often need 3 or 4 years on the road to recoup the advance.

Comparisons can be misleading, I know. Bono takes time out to save the world whereas The Beatles practically lived in the studio.

Nevertheless -

In 7 years...

The Beatles recorded over 12 albums worth of material.

U2 recorded 5 albums. (And in the last 7 years they've only recorded 2).

I think there's a lesson to learn.

Do you need to limit your options?

Scratch that. Why don't you try limiting yourself, whether you think you need to or not?

Take a hard look at the following areas.

Time (both recording and mixing).

Number of tracks.

Places to record.

Number of people involved.

Instruments/gadgets/hardware used.

Related posts: Tom Morello on Limiting Yourself
Hugh MacLeod And Paul McGuinness On Limiting Yourself

Lessons from U2's coffee table