The Ultimate Reeves Gabrels Interview

Started by admin, April 01, 2016, 09:07:21 AM

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http://www.guitarmoderne.com/artists/the-ultimate-reeves-gabrels-interview

Bowie Solo Gear

We did Earthling, and were doing electronic stuff. We had played shows with Nine Inch Nails on the Outside tour and I saw they were running two Tascam D88 recorders, one as a spare. They had stereo percussion, background vocal, and pad pairs, as well as a click. Mike is not a synth player—I played those parts with guitar synth. That's why the keyboard sounds you hear from that era often have a guitar voicing. There is one place where I played a Billy Gibbons G-chord with a synth sound. I was running a Roland G-10 and a GR-30 through an early Nord Lead and a Yamaha synth in the studio; we took those sounds off the masters and put them on the D88.

I didn't use the G-30 much live, though I had it on the floor. During that period I was using the Roland VG-8 with the Parker guitar I had on the cover of Guitar Player magazine.


reves and parker

It had a sustainer which solved the Note On/Note Off problem: one of the glitching problems with guitar synthesizers is that when the note dies it goes through the harmonic series, whereas if you use the sustainer on the fundamental, you get the Note On until you stop it.

That guitar didn't produce any analog sound (the humbucker was just to drive the sustainer) except for the transducer pickup, which I ran into an Prescription Electronics Experience Fuzz, into a DI, straight to the house board. That was a great sound if you wanted to go full on industrial.


From 1996 on, I started to think of the PA as my amp, even though I had two 600-watt power amps and four 4x12s on stage. The cabs weren't miked, they were just for monitoring; everything went straight from the VG-8 to the house. I had three VG-8s: A, B, and a spare. I rewrote all their presets. Since I got no help from Roland, I painted them so you couldn't tell what they were.

I switched to Parkers when I started with Bowie's solo stuff, because I knew Ken Parker from when I worked for Fishman in Boston, back when it was a two man operation. I was using the Parker prototypes when I did a record with David Tronzo (we are probably going to do another one after twenty years). Ken would give me a prototype and say, "See if you can break this. Tell me what's wrong with it." A DiMarzio Norton ended up in the neck by mistake; we had meant to put a PAF Pro there but we ended up liking the way the Norton sounded.


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https://www.guitar.com/articles/reeves-gabrels-scary-monsters-and-other-nasty-noises

Here's another example of my e-commerce experience. I'm selling downloads of all my own VG-8 programs that I wrote myself and used on the albums with David - 65 of them for $49, as opposed to Roland's price of $150 for theirs. Some little twit bought them from my site [www.reevesgabrels.com] and now he's selling them on e-bay for $20. Hats off to him for being that inventive, for being that much of a little con man. The irony [Gabrels laughs] is that because I have to process people's credit card information when they buy things from my site, I know where he lives.