| Article 28215 of alt.guitar:
From: jenkinsa@uamont.edu (Anne Jenkins)
Newsgroups: alt.guitar
Subject: Ty Tabor/Guitar Player article/May 94
Date: 21 Apr 1994 17:16:07 GMT
Organization: University of Arkansas at Monticello
From Guitar Player's May 1994 issue:
"Heavier Than Thou: King's X bare their fangs"
by James Rotondi
For an angelic-looking guy with a soft-spoken Mississippi drawl, Ty
Tabor sure has a taste for high impact. He's an avid Houston Rockets fan, a
trophy-winning motocross rider, and the guitarist for the 13-year-old
progressive thunder trio King's X. Ty's no show-off, but his fluid lead
technique and lush, syncopated rhythm work place him among rock guitar's
compositional elite. And he likes it *loud*.
Though revered by many musicians for their flawlessly crafted mix of
mammoth riffs, soulful jams, and pristine three-part harmonies, King's
X--Tabor, bassist Doug Pinnick, and drummer Jerry Gaskill--have never caught
commercial fire to the extent that many had predicted. Most insiders
expected the band's third album, 1990's _faith hope love_, to deliver the
band to a wider audience; to some extent it did. The hook-heavy "It's Love"
was an MTV favorite, and the band's stage performances, notably at that
year's Gathering of the Tribes tour, cemented their reputation as an
uncommonly strong concert force.
But their eponymous 1992 follow-up lacked both the creative juice
and the business support it needed. The band parted ways with their
longtime manager/co-producer Sam Taylor halfway through a tour and lost
valuable momentum, _King's X_ the album disappeared in the shuffle.
But it's a new year and a new album for King's X. In contrast to
polished and sonically ambitious LPs like _Gretchen Goes to Nebraska_ and
_Out of the Silent Planet_, _Dogman_ presents King's X in all their
unmanicured glory. Produced by Brendan O'Brien of Pearl Jam and Stone
Temple Pilots fame, the new disc finds the 32-year-old Tabor plowing through
12 visceral, pounding cuts that do without aural embellishment. And like
all their records, _Dogman_ is chock-full of spiritually inquisitive lyrics,
proud melodies, soulful singing, and of course, stunning power guitar. We
checked in with Ty before the start of their recent U.S. tour.
GP: The new album is really heavy
Ty: We've always been a lot heavier live than we've ever been on record, so
the idea was to make a record that reflected more accurately what we sound
like live. We never knew exactly how to capture energy and rawness in the
studio, which is what Brendan O'Brien helped us to do. We were almost
scared about it at first. It was so nonchalant and haphazard, we were
wondering if what we were putting down was any good. It was a very
pleasurable experience, the most fun we've ever had making an album, because
it didn't feel like we were recording one. We were almost through tracking
and we were saying things to each other like, "It feels like we aren't
really working at all." Brendan said, "That's the whole idea." We were in
and out before we realized it. No grueling, agonizing hours--just a relaxed
and enjoyable experience.
We recorded live as much as possible, with overdubs here and there
as needed. I basically played in mono. We spent no time getting the
sounds. I'd find a sound I liked, we'd stick a SM-57 in front of the
cabinet, and start recording. A lot of tracks on the record are just one
guitar, but I'd occasionally overdub a second guitar to fill out a part and
get something on left and right channels (see "Dog Gear" after this
article for detailed gear report).
We used so many tracks for guitars on our old albums that I can't
believe we ever got it mixed. It was ridiculous. I used eight different
guitar tracks on some songs just for rhythm! Sometimes a layered track can
really kick the part into the next gear, but for this record it made more
sense to be straight-ahead and simple and let it stand on its own.
GP: What kind of tunings did you use to achieve that subsonic crunch?
Ty: We used a dropped-B tuning on "Shoes," "Black the Sky," and "Don't
Care." I tune the high E, B, G, and D strings to standard pitch, then drop
the E and A strings down to B and F# respectively. There's also a C tuning
that has C and G on the bottom two strings. We used that for "Human
Behavior." Nearly everything else was in dropped-D. [Note: Like Van Halen,
Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Hendrix, King's X "standard" tuning is down a
half-step.]
GP: Even while playing those deep, crunchy figures on the bottom, you don't
sacrifice cool voicings on the top strings.
Ty: I like a wide range of voicings. Alex Lifeson inspired me many years
ago to figure out ways of doing that type of thing, having some kind of
mammoth riff with open strings.
GP: _Dogman_ features a great version of Hendrix's "Manic Depression."
Ty: We'd never done it, and we didn't even know if we could play it. There
are mistakes in it, and we didn't even know how to end it or anything. It
was a joke to us, but it was so fun that we decided, as another bit of
self-indulgence, to stick it on the record. We listened to the Hendrix
album once or twice to get an idea of the structure, but it's a miracle that
we even got through it at all. We used to do that sort of thing all the
time back in the old days when we were playing clubs, barely surviving. We
would stop and ask people what they wanted to hear. We'd have people try to
stump the band, and we'd try anything as long as one of us knew a part of it.
One night somebody might ask for a song, and we'd play it. Then we'd
realize, "Hey, we can add this to the set tomorrow night." By the end of
our club days, probably half of everything we did was learned that way.
GP: Did that chemistry make learning originals that much easier as well?
Ty: No. When we started working seriously on original tunes and decided to
really go for it, to really hone in on what we wanted to do, it became more
grueling and more like work. There were more hours of intense scrutiny.
Once in a while things would come together quickly, but most of the time
they didn't. Our former manager Sam Taylor had a huge part in helping us to
become more disciplined, to actually work on the music like that. We're
very glad that he did, because we were very undisciplined musicians until he
got involved.
We were real happy with all the music that came out on the first
album. When we first started working really hard together, it suprised us,
because we came up with things that none of us had ever imagined. When I go
back and listen to any of our records, which is very rare, it's usually
_Gretchen Goes to Nebraska_. I guess that's sort of a milestone. I don't
feel like I've done guitar parts as creative as the ones that record since
then, to be honest with you. It's a different thing we're doing now, and
I'm very happy with it. It's more straight-ahead, and I enjoy that too.
GP: _Gretchen_ seemed to be the point at which you arrived at your own
"riff aesthetic," if you will, a sensibility that still pervades _Dogman_.
Ty: Oh, good. I sometimes listen to _Dogman_ and think that guitar-wise
the creativeness isn't there. That's not to demean is at all. We were
focusing on songs as opposed to individual parts. The whole intent on this
record was to have some rocking songs, and I'm very happy with them. But it
seems like on each album since _Gretchen_, I've done less creative work on
guitar. The new album has the least creative guitar playing I've ever done.
It's more basic, to the root of the matter, straight-ahead, from-the-gut
playing, but it was appropriate.
GP: Has there been the sense that one of these King's X records is going to
be the "breakthough" album in terms of sales?
Ty: We hear that about every album, to the point where we get numb to it
and don't even listen to that anymore. We didn't do this album our
calculation. This is just another step, another album, and it's where we're
at right now, what we're wanting to do. But we always try to be true to
whatever we feel at the moment. It's been a lot of fun working this stuff
up in rehearsal, too. I can't wait to play it live and see if anybody likes
it. We haven't done a gig since the summer of '92. We've been off,
settling business, changing managament, all kinds of things. So we're a
little nervous about playing again; we've never had this long a layoff. But
during that time off, I started riding motocross seriously again. I even
raced and won a couple of trophies.
GP: Any parallels between motocross and guitar playing?
Ty: There's one real serious parallel, and that's the *trance factor*.
When you're racing, you reach an awareness on the track that supersedes fear
and any of those emotions that you normally have at your ready. You reach
an intense point with your instincts that you're no longer actually thinking
things out. You're just going with the concentrated flow. When you get
into a really great solo, when you're totally lost in it, you forget about
playing. It's very similar, with the exception that screwing up a solo
isn't quite as dangerous as wiping out on a motorcycle.
"Dog Geared"
It's been a period of change for Ty Tabor and King's X, and gear is
no exception. Though he favored Fender Strat Elites for a number of years,
Ty now uses custom-built Zion guitars, which were designed with the Elite as
a benchmark. The Zions were built to Tabor's specifications, which include
a thin, wide neck, a lower fret profile, and a single volume knob that's
tapered to allow him to get good tones at a variety of levels. The bodies
feature a laminated maple top over basswood, while necks are maple with
rosewood fingerboards.
The Zions are loaded with three hand-wound, single-coil, Joe Barden
Strat Deluxe replacement pickups, which Ty describes as "very quiet and very
powerful." Their Resophonic Tremolo Bridges, co-designed by John Mann, have
a rounded back similar to the Strat Elite bridges and a smooth top without
any screws or springs sticking up so Ty can damp strings with the heel of
his right hand. That damping technique is one reason the bridges are
anchored to the body rather than floating. "I grew up with that kind of
bridge," says Tabor, "so I'm able to do more things naturally." Because he
no longer uses a locking nut and hates changing strings, Tabor prefers
Sperzel locking tuners. The Zions also feature push-button on/off switches
for all the pickups, so he can select whatever configuration he desires.
Zion is preparing a limited run of Ty Tabor signature models which Ty will
hand-sign. His strings are GHS Boomers, .009 though .042.
Ty's amp setup has always been shrouded in mystery--he reputedly
used a Lab Series L-5 solid-state amp in conjunction with the Marshalls--but
he claims to have come clean. "I use the Mesa Dual Rectifier 100-watt Solo
head as a preamp with a Mesa 2:90 stereo tube power amp," he says. "I
don't really switch channels, either. I just put it on the heavier channel,
turn everything up wide open with the exception of the master volume, and
cut the presence back slightly." The amp powers three Mesa 4x12 cabs.
Ty's Mesa MIDI Matrix Switcher accesses his rack effects, which
include an Alesis Midiverb for chorusing, an Ibanez DD-2 2-channel delay,
and an old Boss CE-2 chorus pedal. On the floor he has a Dunlop CryBaby wah
and a custom preamp box with the guts of a Strat Elite preamp, but it's
powered *off*. "If I run directly into my system without this box, it has
too sharp an upper-mid and is kind of ugly," says Ty. "So I run into this
box, which damps that one particular frequency perfectly." Ty is a big fan
of the E-Bow (check out the outro solo in "Cigarettes") and enjoyed playing
through a Leslie cabinet on a number of _Dogman_ cuts, including "Pretend."
While busting whoop de whoops for motocross trophies, Ty roughrides
a Honda CR-250. :)
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