Blake Mills on the 45 Minutes that Led to ‘Look’
If you’ve followed us for any amount of time, you know we’ve long been championing the music of Blake Mills. Simply put, he’s one of the most inspiring guitarists we’ve ever heard and perhaps the closest things millennials will ever have to a guitar hero of their own like Ry Cooder. Over the years, we’ve filmed Mills at our office, invited him to the first Fretboard Summit (he famously got to duet with Bill Frisell there for the first and only time) and even put him on the cover of our 34thissue. The latter article was largely about the making of Heigh Ho, his breakout solo album filled with catchy songs, insane guitar tones and great playing.
In the years since Heigh-Ho, Mills has been busy, to say the least. At 32, he’s already one of the most in-demand producers in Southern California, working alongside artists as diverse as the Alabama Shakes, Sara Watkins, Perfume Genius and John Legend. But, under-the-radar, he’s been busy playing guitar and doing unannounced live gigs in Los Angeles. Mills’ latest solo record Lookis out this week… and it’s nothing like Heigh Ho. Here, Mills tells us about this instrumental album (that more than a few have assumed must be a soundtrack) and the rather unique instruments he employed for it: Roland synth-guitars from the ‘70s and ‘80s.
The Fretboard Journal: This new record is pretty wild.
Blake Mills: Yeah. We did this listening party for it last night for music supervisors. It was the first time I had actually listened to the record all the way through since the mastering session. It was really fun. We listened to it on vinyl at this analog, hi-fi bar. It was interesting to experience how other people too in the record.
Some people were trying to find meaning in it and other people were talking about the visuals and what they were seeing on-screen for the movie… that this was the score to a movie that hadn't been made. I've never heard anything like that in relation to the other records that I've made. It was kind of thrilling.
I'm curious what your experience with it was like? You know me as a musician pretty well. Does it seem like I'm in there as the musician that you understand me to be or does it feel different than that?
FJ: No, I got the link and I quickly played it without reading about the instrumentation. It was definitely you. I also definitely picked up on the soundtrack theme.
The more I played it, the more I thought this is probably the wisest record you could follow up Heigh Ho with. It’s not like people will immediately think, "Oh, the other one had catchier hooks," or, "I like his old guitar tone better."
But I guess I did wonder if you’ve been listening to a lot of ambient or modernist composers. Have you been on a big Steve Reich or Philip Glass binge?
BM: No, I mean there's always stuff like that going on in my life. There's never too much time between listening to Tristan and Isolde or Mahler, but there wasn't any direct correlation between that music and the stuff on Look.
In all honestly, Look is probably a good representation of whatever's going on in subconscious of my musical tastes. I don't know if you would call this through-composed, but the music all came from about a period of 45 minutes of just improvising in drop D on guitar synth.
I was in the studio for about a week, just experimenting with different guitar synths that I had acquired, and learning how to use them and what they could do in a studio context – running certain parts of the synth, like the bottom end of it out to one chain and then the polyphonic section into another and just playing, getting inspired by a sound that was happening and playing off of it.
All of the stuff on Look came from that… under an hour of messing around in D. Then when I went back and listened a few months later, it felt like there were these moments where there was like a melody or a passage that felt kind of interesting and beautiful. It just had an interesting pace to it.
I elaborated on those moments and kind of chopped stuff up so that it would encapsulate a certain idea and added stuff to it. The stuff on the record that has a beat was not music that was [originally] played to a beat. The beat sort of weaves through what had happened.
FJ: Interesting. Was there one particular synth that this was behind this record. Was it the 707?
BM: No, it wasn't the 707. There's a GR-50, GR-300 and a GR-500. Those were the three that I used the most. There's no MIDI on the record. There's no [standard] guitar. It's just guitar synth.
All the overdubs are things that were sort of inherent in the guitar synth stuff, overtones and melodies and chords that were sort of coming through, or feedback from a reverb tank. All that stuff happened live.
Then, we went in and embellished it with different instrumentation. Natalie Mering came in and layered a bunch of really beautiful vocals in certain spots. The whole thing is just supposed to kind of weave in and out of realism. If it's hard to tell what is the guitar synth and what is something else, I think we were sort of successful in our combination of sounds. Hopefully, it all sort of sounds like one world.
FJ: What amp do you use with these synth guitars?
BM: We were doing a lot of stuff DI. In the initial tracking of just guitar synth, the low-end would go into DI. The polyphonic section I believe was being sent to a stage echo and then straight into the board.
I think the only amps that were being used were a pair of Kalamazoos that were mic’d in stereo. That was getting a really high-pitched monophonic, almost resonant LFO (low frequency oscillation) kind of thing that comes in every now and then.
It sounds like transistor radio feedback or something like that. That was something that was actually going out into the room. Then mixing, we took advantage of having the isolated tracks, the different segments of the synth or different ranges of the synth. Sometimes we would re-amp things.
Once we got into Sound City [the famous recording studio space that Mills now co-owns], we were really having fun with re-amping the bottom end through a bass amp, straight to the bottom of the grand piano with the pedal down and just kind of trying to elicit more acoustic sounds and properties from the original audio after the fact …
FJ: What was the initial draw to the synth guitar? A lot of people look at those on shelves and kind of laugh at them. What was it for you that appealed to you about them?
BM: Well, basically I approached it with the same small mindedness. My context was: This is how these have been used, therefore that's what they do. Once I had one in my hands, I realized that it this totally neutral tool and that you can do all kinds of things with it.
It has a mind of its own, if anything. It does sound different in everybody's hands. When I realized that it was much deeper than my notion of it – based on other people that had played them – I got excited about the idea of sequestering myself with them in a studio and seeing what could happen. Going in, I didn't really know what they sounded like. That was really the reason, the discovery, the experimentation.
FJ: How have these synths endured the last 40 years? Do they all need work at this point?
BM: Mine are definitely temperamental. I think a lot of it has to do with the set-up of the guitar. It's kind of frustrating because as detailed as the manual is, it doesn't go into too much detail about troubleshooting.
There’s the GR-500, for example: It has a magnet in the neck pickup position to allow for infinite sustain. There's no way forty years later to know if that magnet is as strong as it's supposed to be. Sometimes notes don't sustain like they're supposed to.
While the tracking of the synth guitar can be really good compared to MIDI-guitar tracking, there's definitely still a ton of misfired notes here and there. I don't know if it's a reliable thing to use live when you've got these long passages and these long sustained notes.
If one of them doesn't hit, it can really disrupt the whole flow… the hierarchy of how you have to play a combination of notes, so that your melody is your intended melody, and then the bottom end note is your intended note for the bass. The two parts of the synth are monophonic.
You can tell the bottom-end part, “I only want you to look at what I'm playing on the low strings… the E string and the A string, for example, and just sustain whatever the last note I play on those is.” But then if you have a two-note voicing, the D and G string, it doesn't really matter when you play that, because that won't go to the bottom-end section.
It will, however, go into the monophonic section, and the monophonic section will choose whatever it deems as the final note to voice with the melody. So you can have a pretty complex chord voicing going where the bottom-end is your root or your inversion, and then you've got your internal cluster of notes and then let's say a melody on the high-E string, the top string.
If you pick it like a broken chord, where you do the internal cluster, then the low note and then the high melody, it really feel like it's three or four different instruments playing, because all that stuff is being sent out to different processing at the same time. So it's fun to see people's faces when they realize that some of the music they're hearing is just one guitar. It's not a bunch of overdubs.
FJ: That sounds insane.
BM: It's way more complicated to try to describe than it is to just show by example, but yeah, it's kind of a brain wave orchestrating a guitar.
FJ: You know you're going to single-handed raise the resale price on all these.
BM: I know. It bums me out. It bums me out, but I get so excited when I pick up an old record and see that they've listed all the equipment on it. It's so cool. I just wish that could live in a vacuum. People are just really hungry for the gear thing, and it's great, but it's sad.
FJ: Let’s talk a bit about Sound City, the famous studio you just purchased.
BM: Being in a place with the history, surrounded by equipment that's out and ready to be used has really re-inspired me to record and experiment and not just make solo records, but these kind of weird side projects and one-offs.
It’s just the spirit of creation. It feels like it's alive in that space, in that building. People walk in and get inspired. And that in turn is something that motivates me and keeps me from feeling like I can't start something from scratch. Having primarily produced records for the last couple of years, it's allowed me to take advantage of the collaborative aspect of record making. That's one of my favorite parts of it. I love that so much.
But if you do that for a really long time, at least if I do that for too long, it starts to make me feel a little wary of starting something on my own… I won't be able to tell if I like it or not. I can immediately identify what I like about somebody else's music, but most of the time, I wouldn't listen to my own records if they weren't mine. I don't want to put something out that I am not a fan of. But I'm excited about this record, Look. I think it's worthy. It's worth its own weight on CD.
