INTERVIEW: PHISH Mike Gordon (Part One) April 18, 1993 - Ann Arbor, Michigan by Brian Feller Brian Feller: OK, let's start with your bass rig. What exactly makes up your sound? Mike Gordon: Well, let's see... I'll go through the signal path. The bass is the first thing, and obviously it's my Paul bass, um, but I'm thinking of getting some other basses. Paul's bass will always be my main bass, until he builds me another one. But, I want to get an handful of spare basses to use first of all if mine breaks, and second, to learn some things about aspects of basses that I like, so Paul can build those aspects into it. So that would be the first thing, the pickups are Merk, made by this guy in Denmark, hand wound for the bass. Actually, Dave King is another bass builder, who makes some cool basses. I played a bass with those pickups from him, and he's the one who went to Denmark and got the pickups for me. Then, from there, it goes to a Sony transmitter. It's an expensive one, it's a UHF transmitter, and has like a hundred channels, digital input attenuation...It's supposed to be almost as good as a cord. BF: And the receiver is in your rack? MG: Yeah, it's in the rack, and those duck-like things are the antennas. There are two of them. Actually, there like $2500 or something, and they have a limited range, whereas you could get a cheaper one that will go further. They go for quality rather than distance. It has a hundred channels and it's stuck on one channel. We're sending it back to Sony. In towns where there's a TV station near there, it's a fucked up situation. BF: Is that the number 120 that can be seen on your rack? MG: Nope, that comes almost next. First there's the effects pedals, which I've been using for a while. There isn't really too much that's more than...there's nothing new as of this year, it's all last year, I think, last fall. Except maybe the transmitter. Anyway, my effects are my Dr. Q, which is an envelope filter, octave divider, flanger and distortion, in that order. The Dr. Q, for some reason, has never really sounded right with this bass, since I had the EMGs in it, which are different pickups. The Dr. Q and the octave divider together sound kind of like a synth bass, I like that sound. Then it goes to that thing with the 120 on it, which is an 80A- MB1, which you can see on the back of any Bass Player magazine, Victor Hooten uses one. It's a preamp that does a lot of other things; crossover, it has two tubes in it. It has the same two tubes as my old preamp, which is still on my rack, which is an Alembic tube preamp. I actually have the...since the new preamp is MIDI, I have a footswitch on the floor, which allows me to call up different patches. 120 is the one I've been using. It's actually a copy of 83, which is a copy of 23, each one gets modified a little bit. I think it's mostly tube with a little bit of solid state, and something around 350 Hz taken out severely, and 120 Hz boosted a little bit. It's got all that programmable in it. What I was going to say about the Alembic is that I still have it wired up as a patch, so when I push a certain number... BF: Right, you were saying something about this in Atlanta, where you could switch to a patch that was strictly your Alembic, and also switch to something completely digital and programmed... MG: The new preamp is actually all analog in the signal path, with just digital controls. So, actually, itUs a similar kind of preamp as the Alembic, except that it sounds different, just like anything would sound different. The difference it that is a little bit more sharp sounding, a little bit more nasal, and clean. Really the only reason the Alembic is in there is because I really have a hard time throwing things out. I've had such good experiences with it that...I never use it. I have it patched up as 122 on the preamp. Ideally, I could do a lot with the MIDI foot switch, and that's what I want to be able to do. Another thing I have in my rack is an LXP-15, Lexicon Digital Multi-Effects unit, and it's so confusing to program. I read the whole manual, and I tried to do some programming, and I can get some sounds if I spend some time programming, but I am not using it now for a stupid reason. I wanted to wire it in as a patch, so I could call it up on the foot switch. But then Paul wouldn't get the signal, because he takes it from the bass. We tried sending the signal to the mains after the preamp, and it didn't work, the sound was too muddy, even when we pushed the button that ...well, it just didn't work. So I'm not using it. What I could do is set it up so that I could...let's say I had two different kinds of sounds that I liked, basic sounds. So one would be 120, and maybe one could be 130, and then within 120, everything to 129 would be a different option within that sound. 121 would be with reverb, or 122 would be the same sound but a little softer, 123 would be the same sound but a little louder, 124 would be a different effect. See, that's the other thing I want to do. I want to make my effects so that I'm not actually sending out to them, I want to have just digital controls so that each effect is only in the signal path that's being used. That should be done at some point. I would have to be able to pick combinations of them, too, which might be confusing...and then I could make it so that, when I call up a certain effect, the EQ on the preamp actually changes, to make the effect sound better. So, I haven't done any of that yet. That would be a good thing to do, because the Dr. Q just sounds bad the way it's EQed. It gives it too much honkeyness or something. BF: It seems like you have used the duck sound a little less lately... MG: Yeah, it's just not right. I copied Edwin from Shockra to get that Dr. Q, and it sounded good with my other basses. With his bass it sounds a lot better, he gets the right sound out of it somehow. Actually, he has a bass built by David King that he uses a lot, a fretless. David King is this guy out in Portland that builds basses. Actually, he had one in Bass Player magazine, the issue before last. I jammed with Edwin once, and Greg Degugliomo, who used to play with Max Creek for a while. The three of us had this jam, and I switched basses with Edwin and played his fretless using the Dr. Q through his rig, and it sounded great. BF: Let's get back to your rig. Are you running in stereo? MG: It's mono actually. What happens is the preamp crosses over at 180, because it won't go any lower. It gives two outputs, and those go into two sides of a Clark Technic EQ, which is a parametric EQ. It's got five bands on the low, five bands on the high, and a low pass and a high pass filter. Each band you can put in or out of the circuit, depending on whether you want to use it or not. What I do with that is very sparingly, it's seldom more than 4db of boost or gain, and usually itUs more like 2db. In the low, I have a boost around 60Hz, and a boost around 120, and 180 taken down, which enhances the crossover curve. On the high end I have even more of the 350 taken out, a little of 1200 boosted and a little bit of something like 7000 boosted. BF: Does this vary with room size? MG: Yeah. The one that varies the most is the mid-bass, which is around 200, in the low end. It's really tricky, because it sounds good to take that frequency out, because it's just the boomy frequency. But once you take out too much, the slap sound is somehow...I guess what it is, is the slap sound and also the middle range of the bass ends up being hollow-sounding. Sometimes if the room sounds good I will actually boost that frequency a little to get more punch out of it. But it's all pretty much left in place. You know, the funny thing about all this shit is that I find that, now I can push two buttons and completely take the EQ out, all the bands out, often it sounds better without any of them in, which is surprising, since what I am doing is so subtle with the controls. But then take them out and the bass just sounds more alive somehow. The same with the effects, too. Everything I take out of the signal path makes it sound better in some way. Anyway, then what happens, since I usually leave it in, each channel from the EQ goes into the Crest 7000s, and then the two 18s are run from one side and the 10s from the other. The 10s are JBLs and the 18s are an EV and a McCauley. I built all the speaker cabinets myself. BF: And where is the cactus picture from? MG: It;s gone, I threw it out. I was sick of it. The crew put it on my amp a long time ago, it's probably from Arizona. Usually people who play through my rig like it; same for the bass, they usually like it. Some people don't I guess, it's not their cup of tea. It's not as punchy as some other bass systems, but I like the tone that it gets. In California, at the Warfield, I had people from Meyer's bring down pretty much the same speaker system that Phil Lesh used to use. Except I guess he doesn't use the processors. Meyer's comes with processors that you're supposed to use with the speakers. So I had that set up next to mine, and I compared the high speakers, which were 15s actually, not really high speakers, but I had it used as that, and I compared the low speakers in the other set. It was pretty interesting, I liked it pretty much as much as mine, maybe not better. It was definitely different, and good quality. That would be another option if I wanted to spend a ton of money. BF: Are there sounds you are looking to incorporate into your current sound? MG: Usually I don't think much in terms of interesting sounds. Although, I think I want to get one of those whammy pedals, I forget what itUs called and who makes it. It's got a whole bunch of different settings. You can play a note and it will raise the pitch when you push the pedal. I might get one of those to fool around with. Usually what I think about is just trying to get the tone cleaner, and punchier, and clearer, like all bass players, I suppose. The other thing is less buzz, I definitely have too much buzz. It's a problem that none of the sound people have been able to figure out yet. It might have something to do with the Crest. Everything in the system adds a little bit of buzz, but it adds up to too much I think. So, to get rid of the noise, to get it to be punchier and cleaner, is the goal. Sometimes the low notes arenUt clear enough on my bass, or through my rack, so I'm just going to experiment with different basses, different preamps, different pickups, different speakers, everything through the signal path, one thing at a time, and see what happens. BF: It seems like rather than moving forward into the digital world, the rest of the band is moving backwards. Page got the new grand, etc. Do they say anything to you about using MIDI? MG: Well, not really. In general, over the years, they've sort of teased me about having too much equipment, and having it sound bad a lot of the time. Then again, generally, I think it's not just me but all bass players that are really into equipment, and often ending up having a bad sound. Sometimes they say I should just take the whole thing and throw it out. You know, put it in a dumpster and start from scratch. Anyway... You know, it's really strange walking over to where Trey is or where anyone else is, except for me, and hearing how different the bass sounds. There's no high end, because my high end speakers are very directional. So if they wanted to hear any clarity in the bass, they would have to put it in their monitors. There's a patch on the monitor board that is just high end of the bass that people use sometimes. BF: I noticed that this tour you've all added new monitors? MG: Yeah, they're Snow Sound monitors, I guess, or they might be EVs actually. I've got two 15s, and Trey's got two 12s, with some horns and stuff. The only thing I donUt like about mine that they're not as discreet, being so big, but they sound pretty good. When I was at the Warfield, the sound I liked the best was...actually I switched to the Yamaha bass, which I have, this cheap Yamaha spare bass with EMGs in it, because my other bass broke. Not to be confused with the other Warfield night, when I was trying a Modulus. Anyway, I decided to crank up all the speakers, so I had all the Meyer's stuff and all of my stuff behind me, and the monitors, the two 15s, so I had a total of ten speakers that the bass was going through. And that sounded pretty good. To finish your question, I might experiment with...actually, if anyone out there has ideas for or knows anything about things that haven't been done before, I would like to know about them. I like to experiment with it, and I'm always interested in mixing technology and music. You know, maybe I'll have a MIDI bass pickup at some point, I don't really think that's the direction I would want to go. I agree with the rest of the band, that a truly synthesized sound isn't really what I would want to go for. But, you never know. The problem in the past has been, with MIDI pickups is that the bass frequency is so low... BF: There's a lag time... MG: Yeah. There are different ways people have gotten around that though recently, and maybe I would think about that, or something totally different, maybe there's a kind of design that no one's done before, with acoustics of the wood or something... BF: How do approach bass playing in the context of Phish, say in a given jam? Do you tend to play off of Fish? MG: Lately Fish and I have been hooking up more, which is a good thing because one thing I didn't like about the band...I should rephrase that. It's just been a struggle for me as a bass player to play with someone whoUs so creative on the drums, and lately it's been really good, especially during sound checks. I was just listening to one on the bus from the Hilton Ballroom in Eugene, Oregon where we...Fish even said, "Lately I've been playing my kick drum with you bass more often," and that kind of thing really makes a difference. So I would say yeah, at any time I like to be sort of grounded with Fish. But, at the same time, I think probably what's unique about us is the way other dynamics happen, where I'll play off Trey for awhile. When we start playing a jam, I don't usually know what's going to happen, I don't have a plan. I might have something that I am thinking about, like "The last time we played this Trey thought it slowed down," so I'm thinking I better try to keep it up to speed. It's best not to think anything like that, as Carlos would say. In fact, sometimes jams are bad just because I'm thinking things like that, or we all are thinking things like that. There will be maybe a couple of things to think about, but generally I don't know what will happen. We've found, because we talk about this a lot, we have jamming practice, where we do free form jams in band practice and then we talk about it afterwards. We generally find there are things that make jams bad and good, but the one thing which is much more important than all others is that we're hooking up with each other. That seems obvious, but it's something that's easy to forget, while you're thinking about all these other things; tempo, and about this and that. The way that we imitate each others' riffs is something that other bands don't do as much. If we're jamming with a jazz band, or I am jamming with a jazz band, I have to catch myself, the tendency is always to do that. Actually, there was some article, I can't remember who it was. Some jazz horn player, maybe it was Miles, or someone. The bass player came up to him and said, "That was a great jam that we had there," and the horn player said, "Yeah, I thought it was great, too. Right up until you started copying that lick." Ever since then that has sort of come up in conversation, like maybe we do it too much and it's just sort of stupid. So for a while we actually stopped doing it, imitating each others' licks. This is something we also practiced in band practice, the listening exercise we called it. We would go in a circle and one person does a lick, and we try to imitate it, to make our ears open to each others' playing, and that sort of thing. It kind of stuck with us and came into our playing. So then we got to a phase where we stopped doing it, and what we found is that we should probably do it. Although it's sort of obvious, I mean it might be in some ways cooler to compliment the others' playing rather than imitating it. It's such a strong effort to hook up, and since hooking up is the most important thing, it ends up being worth doing. Actually, at the last band practice, we did something different from the last session, something different from the freeform jamming and the listening exercise. What that was was one person would play a riff, basically the other people would play a complimentary riff, without imitating it. Just do something that sort of fits in. There was some other way we regimented that, so it would go in a circle, I'm not remembering, but basically that was it. I suppose that is the best thing in a jam, when things like that just start to happen. Maybe we'll start out by imitating, so we're definitely hooked up, and hopefully I'll be solid with Fish, but if Trey's playing a lick and I jump onto it, it usually works out for the better. Also, Fish listens to Trey probably more than anyone else, too, so Fish will be there anyway. And then, we change our licks so that they fit together, rather than not all being the same, and it gets to be this thing that fits together, and hopefully something brand new that's never been done before. If it's cool, maybe later we'll try to turn it into a song, although we haven't done that much, but at least it sounds kind of like a song, because it's a specific motif, rather than just all of us in our own worlds, mocking ourselves jamming, which happens. It doesn't happen much, there was definitely a few years back when it would happen all the time though, when we were jamming, and constantly we would just be mocking our own, it would really be just not-jamming, but seeming like we were jamming, because we're not hooking up. Someone was asking me, when you're about to go on stage, do you get all psyched, and I don't really anticipate anything, I've found. I like to have the kind of Bruce Hampton philosophy, and Buddhist philosophy of just existing and being aware, and that's it. BF: Surrender to the flow... MG: Yeah, that sort of thing. I didn't even realize how much I do that, because I guess I don't really know if a gig's going to be good or bad or medium, and sometimes I am really psyched, and other times, if my personal life isn't going right, then I will be the opposite. Most of the time I just sort of walk on and see what happens, and same with the jams. There's no song that I'm psyched for, really, although that's not true, some songs I like better than others. I don't really like the ones that are the same every time as much as the ones that change. Usually I get psyched about something after it's already started happening, and then I get really psyched about it if I like it. And usually that results from a jam where I've, you know, tried to hook up with someone, and where Fish and I are also latched on in some key way. I think that what I want to do, in terms of that whole topic, is I want to take some jams and really concentrate on hooking up with Page because, since he's the only one not next to me, and his sound is mainly coming from my monitor rather than through the air, it's a little harder for me to hook up with him. And also we discovered at band practice that Page is harder to hook up with because he doesn't do the same thing over and over again, and, you know, hooking up is so much harder than people would think some of the time. You really have to do something over and over again for someone to be hooked on to it. Once you hook up with Page, he's changed to something else, and we talked about that. So I think I want to try to have a jam where Page and I are both sort of reaching out to each other, just to sort of link up that facet of the band. So, when a jam starts, you know, I want it to groove. The worst thing I could be thinking is how could I be a cool bass player. You know, last night, we were playing some jam, and my concentration was drifting, and I actually started thinking about the Bass Player article, and then I started thinking how on the Phish.net they said that Page and I got best musician in the Car Stereo Review thing, and I realized, this is the worst possible thing. Here I am jamming, thinking about...and I was thinking about how they guys in the band said I hope you're not getting big headed these articles, and there I was thinking about these articles and playing, instead of thinking about playing, which is just really bad. So, hooking up, and concentration is the most important thing, and if I can concentrate, then I just think about getting the groove to go, and the flow, and I just do whatever I can do to let that happen. So really, if I am thinking about anything, then it is bad, and if I'm letting it happen, then it's good. BF: Are there plans for reahearsals after this tour, and possibly new material for either summer tour or the new studio album? MG: Yeah. May is going to be time off, which is usually used for personal practice, song writing. June is...what we're going to do is...the next album we're going to try to take a different approach to. We're going to try to have it be mostly songs that we haven't played live yet, which we've never done before, except for a couple songs. BF: Yeah, Trey mentioned this last time Shelly interviewed him, that this is something you have been considering since Rift... MG: Yeah, so that's the idea. In June, I think we are going to have a practice session where we're mostly working on songs for the new album, and also the beginning of September we'll have some practice time, for a little bit before the studio. I guess mainly June will be for that. BF: Do you already have a set time you will be in the studio? MG: Pretty much all fall. Between August and the following May, the only gigs that we're going to do are New Year's. BF: Do you think you'll do a four night run like last year? MG: Yeah, probably. So that's what it will be, we'll be working on new stuff. I don't know how much of it we'll play on the summer tour, because we want to save it for the album. We want to allow it to take form in the studio more than before. BF: You know, some of the criticism I have heard about Rift centers around the argument that it's not representative of Phish, because Phish is a live band. People try to see the studio work in terms of the live setting, which I think is hard to do. MG: See, what we want to do on this next album, I think, is we want it to be less live than Rift, less like our live show. In fact, some people have said the opposite thing. I know what you're saying, it doesn't have the high intensity jams, Maze is the only thing that sort of approaches it. The general energy of the live show, it doesn't have. But, other people have said it sounds like they went off tour and...they were on tour and they took off a couple of days and recorded this and went back on tour, because the songs were so much like how we played them live, in form anyway, and because the sound has sort of a spaciousness to it. So we want to really get it to sound very different from the live thing. If possible, we want to make use of the studio for what it can do sonically. But I think we want to think about sound more, and energy. BF: Do you take your full rigs into the studio? MG: Well, Trey does. In fact Trey took his plus about five different others. You know, Marshall stacks, Fender, everything. For me, it usually sounds better to go direct for bass. I had some other rig that was in the studio already. I don't think we would be able to deal with the buzz problem with my rig, so I just don't think it's usable right now. I am thinking that I should think more about it again, maybe bringing it in. The weird thing is...well, we'll be in a different studio this time when we're recording, so maybe there will be more room. It defintely would have to have its own room. It's a hard thing. I'm the only one who shares a room, with Fish. Page is in his own room, Trey is in his own room. In fact, for Trey, he had guitar amps in four different rooms, I think, with each miced differently, with three mics on each amp at least, to try to get certain sounds. It wasn't to be cool, it was because he was having trouble getting the right sound. Keith Richards said that rock and rool is made to be played in the same room, and maybe we'll try that, I don't know. You know, the other weird thing about bass...there are only certain times when I've been satisfied with my sound on an album. I like my sound on You Enjoy Myself on Junta. BF: Yeah, that one is one of my favorites of the recorded stuff... MG: It was the G & L. And I don't know why, because sometimes I like live tapes, especially lately, I've been liking some of the soundcheck tapes, and tapes we've made at band practice. So why, when there is a million dollars worth of equipment, can't it sound as good as a band practice recorded with a little box? Now I have a new theory, and it's that whenever I go into tape, there's compression being used, with these fancy old tube compressors. And then when it's mixed down there is usually more being used, and I think maybe there is too much compression. That's kind of how it sounds to me, too. It sounds like a sound that, if I were on stage, I wouldn't be able to deal with, because it's too compressed. Actually, that is something in my rig I didn't mention is the DBX compresser, which I use as a limiter, just for the low end, to prevent my amp from flipping. Anyway, even that I can't deal with, it doesn't even kick in. Fish usually...he's got his drum set with about a million mics all over the place. On the last album the mics were all far away from his drum set, there wasn't as much close micing. In fact, there wasn't even a mic on the hi-hat at all, except for certain tunes. And it made it really hard to mix down, to get the hi-hat to sound right. BF: Was Maze one of tunes he used a close mic? That hi-hat intro sounds great... MG: Well, it sounds better that way, because the mic is further away. There's a mic for all the cymbals, or there's about ten mics. You know, one on the other side of the room, one on the same side...and like I said the guitar amp is the same way, mics everywhere. Trey is in the room with his cabinet, so he can get feedback, then there are other cabinets elsewhere for different songs. And the bass direct, and with a couple songs I had high end added, actually, from an SWR cabinet, and maybe a Crown amp, or whatever it was they had in the studio. We will be in a different studio, we'll have a different producer, and we'll try things differently. Part Two >> Transcribed by Derek Atlansky