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A Conversation with Willy Porter (continued)
PM: When you play solo--do you mind talking about gear? Is any of that information proprietary or secret or anything?
WP: No, man.
PM: When I saw you at the Ryman, it seemed like there must be--was there a Hex pickup in play, with different effects applied to different sets of strings or anything crazy like that?
WP: No. I was using some frequency specific compression.
PM: Oh...
WP: Yeah, I was using the Brooks Siren 901 Dynamic EQ. [When I searched this item, up came gear lists for bands like Sonic Youth, Candlebox, Rage Against the Machine...] And the compressor in question is called the DPR-901 II. They call it a dynamic equalizer. It's got four bands, specific bands that you can use as compression. When I'm playing solo, the range of tunings and then the capos present different problems: if the sound engineer were to set the EQ one way, it's not going to work throughout the show. So what I do is--if I hit the top of the guitar I get a kick drum vibe, and I can just grab that frequency very specifically and compress it a little bit without compressing the high end. I can thump but then the high end still rings true.
PM: Wow.
WP: Then if I put a capo on later, up at like the seventh fret, and I'm in standard tuning, well then it's like a study in 4K, like 4,000 cycles is going to rip your face off.
PM: [laughs]
WP: Well, when that jumps out of the guitar, I can grab that band as well, without cutting the low end concurrently. So it's an incredibly flexible device. And I learned about these things by touring with Tori Amos.
PM: Really?
WP: Yeah, because her engineers were using them on her voice all the time.
PM: Come on!
WP: If you listen to her live, man, I mean, she is going from a whisper to a scream to a whisper, she has such incredible range in her voice. And to capture that without having to ride the [volume] fader all night, they were using these compressors to great affect. And I thought, "That's what I need to use on my guitar."
PM: What a cool idea.
WP: Yeah. And it has really opened up the guitar for me. It's made it much easier for me to show up in a context like playing with Jeff Beck, and give two lines to the house engineer and say, "Mix it warm, but generally flat, and don't worry, I won't ever clip your rig." [Meaning, "I won't be so careless as to attack my guitar in any way that will distort the sound or potentially damage your speakers."]
PM: Right.
WP: And they say, "Okay," and you do the sound check, and you're done in ten minutes.
So I've had really great results with that. I'm using that in conjunction with the Pendulum preamp. [Greg Gualtieri's Jersey company making a range of fantastic musical products, check it out at pendulumaudio.com]
PM: Yeah, I'm a Pendulum guy. They're beautiful.
WP: Yeah, they are. They're wonderful pieces. And they're rugged as well, so that's been good.
PM: And other effects?
WP: That's it, man. No effects, just reverb. And I travel with an engineer.
PM: Wow. House reverb, or you bring your own?
WP: No, usually I use the house. I trust the engineer to have sorted the room and figured out what kind of decay times and things are going to work and--
PM: Because I could swear that night at the Ryman that, well, certain sets of strings seemed to have different delay times on them, but I guess I was just hearing compression or something, I don't know what.
WP: Yeah, compression, and maybe just the reflections of the beautiful Ryman.
PM: God, what a room.
WP: Yeah, there are a lot of ghosts floating around in there. I have to say I was sweating bullets before that one, because I'm up in the dressing room, and there are pictures up there of Elvis, and Johnny Cash and June Carter, and all these luminaries on the walls. And so that place really put the fear of God into me.
PM: Yeah, my brother manages Travis Tritt, and Travis--
WP: Oh, cool.
PM: --never chokes. He one of those guys who never, ever chokes.
WP: Yeah.
PM: And he said the only time he ever gets nervous is when he has to sing the Star Spangled Banner or he's playing the Ryman.
[laughter]
WP: I would think being a country singer and playing Nashville would be wicked hard, man.
PM: Yeah.
WP: Just George Jones at the Ryman, end of story.
PM: I thought that night at the Ryman you did a great job with that very scary enterprise of making up a song on the spot from topics you solicit from the audience.
WP: [laughs] Yeah.
PM: [laughs] That takes cajones.
WP: Well, thanks.
PM: I would never do that.
WP: Yeah, it was fun that night. Sometimes it works okay, and other nights you wish you'd never asked.
PM: Yeah, right.
WP: But it's all right.
PM: Do you do that much anymore?
WP: Not so much, no. It's a little bit of kitsch, and it was fun for a minute.
PM: Is it a thing you picked up from folk world?
WP: Yeah, that, and I used to work with this improv comedy troupe. And I would try to improvise all kinds of different sounds and stuff with a pedal array. And they would get subject matter from the audience and then go off on a riff--a comedy riff--as a troupe. And I thought that'd be a great way to construct a tune: ask the audience for suggestions and then improvise a song. And now I've seen Whose Line Is It Anyway? and they've taken that and used it to great effect as well. continue
