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GW: Do you have a lot to do with his tones?
SCHOLZ: No. Except that he uses Rockman equipment. He has his own guitars and sets his own sounds. As the producer on the record, I will add effects to it and so forth. Like in the bolero section of Walk On and in the "I Need Your Love" solo, I added some delayed doubling that's also swept with a real old Rockman chorus. I love Rockman choruses. We don't make them anymore, so this isn't a product plug. But you can't get that kind of chorus out of any digital piece of equipment; it's just physically impossible. Digital equipment causes phase angle changes across the spectrum.
GW: It's inherent in the encoding and decoding.
SCHOLZ: Yeah. You can't do it. So the Rockman chorus is very lush and full, probably because it's analog. Also because it has a huge pre-delay, which is what made it so expensive when it was on the market. So, anyway, we use that for certain things. Naturally I have tons of those sitting in the studio.
GW: What's the source of the transient shimmer that is so much a part of the Boston sound?
SCHOLZ: Dumb luck. Air.
GW: It's a hard thing to pin down. One moment you'll think, "Oh, it's the reverb."
SCHOLZ: No, the reverbs are all old. There's almost no digital processing at all. In fact, the reverb is almost 100 percent an old EMT Gold Plate. The echoes are all those analog Rockman echoes that we used to make a while ago. I just stocked up a bunch of those when they went out of production. 'Cause I love the way they sound. They're very close to tape echoes. In fact when I did Don't Look Back and some of Third Stage, I had a separate tape machine running all the time so I could use real tape echo. I built a little gadget that would rewind the tape when it got near the end of the reel so I could keep going with the echo. So, no, I don't think it's the reverb. I think it's the miking and the processing on the electric instruments as they go to tape in the first place. I do pay really close attention to the high end of the instruments. The dynamics of the high harmonics are the key thing. If they're too "peaky," you end up with a grating sort of sensation, as opposed to that airy sort of feeling. But thank you for noticing.
GW: You don't have much use for digital in general, do you?
SCHOLZ: Well, no. Although I do like it for problem solving. Like if there's a noise or something you have to remove from the recording, or if you need to move a guitar part to some other point in time and there's no other way of accomplishing it, then digital editing can come in handy. But first of all, I don't like the way digital audio sounds. Well, let me qualify that. I thought that the less-expensive digital equipment and the original high-end stuff was all pretty hideous. Nowadays you can get some extremely good-sounding digital things. I don't think even I could tell the difference from analog. But now we're talking about really expensive equipment. And for simple storage of the music itself, I still prefer analog tape because of what it does to the sound. I don't like digital because you get these nasty phase changes when you store sound on most digital equipment. I also don't like the fact that there is no limiting-no tape compression. There is no distortion, except for really horrible distortion. Of course, you can protect yourself from that, but we're talking about things that are a lot of work and take a huge amount of equipment just to do the same thing that a very inexpensive analog tape deck does when you push it hard. You can use that compression and tape saturation to your advantage. I do.
GW: So it's fair to say that analog tape compression is essential to your guitar sound?
SCHOLZ: Absolutely. In fact, I've had to design a special circuit to simulate it when we play live.
GW: So what's the thickest layer on the new album? The maximum number of guitar tracks?
SCHOLZ: Oh, I lose count. I just keep going until I like it. Sometimes it's one guitar playing a part, but not very often. I'm sure there are places where there are six or eight guitars playing the same rhythm part. And there's a million places where there's three guitars playing the same lead line even a pretty quick, intricate lead line. Those get a little tricky. If I have a part that has a really good feel to it and I decide I want to double it, I have to be very careful to have that same exact feel. You can't let the timing stray off by very much, or you lose the notes. Some of them are pretty short. But there are a lot of places where there are three guitars playing a single lead line. And of course, the guitar harmonies usually have two or three parts.
GW: So each part in the harmonized lines will be made up of more than one guitar track?
SCHOLZ: That's right. If I want a really big, full sound I'll put three on. If I want it to sound simple, but also make sure that you can't identify where the guitar is coming from-so you don't concentrate on it-I'll put on two lines and spread them out on different sides. If it's something I really want the listener to pay attention to, I'll just put it there by itself with maybe a little echo or chorusing or something. But obviously there are a lot more of the other. I like the big sound. It's more like Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky when it's really big.
GW: Were you into Brian May?
SCHOLZ: No I wasn't. I mean, I think he did some really neat things. But it's somewhat different. I like brute force. I'd add another guitar playing the same part because I wanted an absolute cement block wall of sound. I wanted it to be overwhelming.
GW: Have your techniques for achieving the Boston "wall of sound" changed much over the years? Or are you still doing a lot of the same things you did on that first album?
SCHOLZ: It's almost identical. There are things about the production of the first album that I didn't like. I always felt the deficiencies in the production of that first album were obvious. If you compare it with the Walk On CD, the sound of Walk On is so much bigger. I would love to go back and remix that first album the way that I'd like. But at the time, it was actually the best I knew how to do. I was still very much in a learning stage.
GW: You had demoed a lot of those songs earlier, right?
SCHOLZ: Oh, sure. I'd been writing those for years. I think "Fourplay" was written in 1969. They'd been around for a long time.
GW: When you double- or triple-track a guitar part, do you eq or process each track differently?
SCHOLZ: No. I use the same sound because I'm looking for the same effect. Technically, it's known as "random phase cancellation." It's so much more complicated than what you can achieve with just chorus. It's what's called an uncorrelated signal. If you do it again with a different sound, you can't duplicate the original signal. So you get some phase cancellation of fundamentals and harmonics that are in your chord or your note. But so much more of it is not the same; every single note is different. When I'm doubling a part that I like, I'll play it many many times, listening to get the best effect on each chord and each note. I experiment with everything from tuning to timing. Tone changes radically from note to note when you're playing guitar. You can make huge adjustments simply by the way you pick the note, without changing anything in the recording.
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