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MORE NEWS ITEMS AT BOTTOM OF THIS PAGEFOUR STRING MENTALITY-WARREN ELLIS (BAD SEEDS/DIRTY THREE) Warren Ellis is the Paris-via-Ballarat multi-instrumentalist who’s lent his skills on piano, flute, bouzouki, piano-accordion, viola, mandolin and, of course, violin to the Dirty Three and the Bad Seeds, as well as scoring soundtracks to films. Jenny Valentish coaxes out a few secret techniques WORDS : Jenny Valentish Despite the glut of Parisian antique stores and music shops around him, Warren Ellis is not tempted by posh fiddles. He prefers to scrape away on a Strad copy — ever since his Maggini copy carked it when he smashed it against a mic stand. “Sometimes a cheaper violin sounds better to me,” he admits sheepishly down the line from France. “Or I can hear the difference and then they go: ‘And that’s worth $20,000.’ Oh, okay. That seems to influence how you hear it, I think! Obviously there’s something better about them, but even if I had the money I’ve never been able to justify buying something so outrageously over-priced. It seems like there’s a big gap between an okay violin price-wise and a really good one — it can be anything from $5000 to $100,000 — and what goes on in there is anybody’s guess. It’s all a matter of taste and opinion really. For some people a hard-sounding violin can be really horrible and ungainly, but I find a smooth violin really boring. Someone playing folk violin with a gutteral, nasal sound, I love the sound of that.” Warren has an arsenal of analogue pedals he uses, and theorises that it’s the pedals that aren’t great with the guitar — he names Ibanez, Dod and MXR equalisers — that sound mint with a violin. The Boomerang loop/octave pedal, made in Texas in the ’90s, he uses for both playing and composing. There’s just one drawback. “They allow you to record, but then when you turn it off what you’ve recorded disappears,” he explains, “so unless you choose to record them onto something else afterwards there’s no way of saving what you’ve done. I’ve found it a really useful compositional tool though. It gets you thinking outside of the box. I’ve got about five of them in the hope that one of them will keep going. For touring they’re not very practical because they’re quite fragile and noisy, but I’ve got a few of them — some in London and some over here — to use in the studio.” Warren looks for pedals that will radically change his sound, testing them by turning them up to the max. Equalisers and distortions are firm favourites. “My brother makes pedals. He gets the specs online and then he modifies them based on early models of distortion pedals, the simpler the better. Sometimes he’ll pull resistors out of radios — he has a knack of knowing what things will do and how to change things. If I have a pedal that’s not quite doing something I want, he’ll know how to modify it — if I want it to have a real boost or something. “Some guitar guy explained to me one day why the things that I like work,” he says in some wonder. “He looked at my stuff and said, ‘Oh, that makes sense. They all have MOSFET preamps in them’ — they all had the ability to boost the sound more and not many pedals have them. There was a reason why I had the series of things I had, and I didn’t even know. Warren’s never been a fan of reverb, although he’s used a Danelectro Slapback on occasion. “It just sounds affected to me,” he explains. “Bowing an instrument is very different to plucking it — with bowing you get really soupy and you don’t have much definition, so reverb just muddies it all up. Atmospherics isn’t really what I’m trying to do.” He will, however, put a Colorsound wah to awesome effect, particularly when pairing it with his Fender Mandocaster — essentially an electric mandolin. “It’s pitched like a violin, but I use various tunings on that,” he says. “I also have a tenor guitar, which is somewhere between a guitar and a violin, so that can give me more bassy things. And I have a Poly-Octave Generator and various things that can deepen up the sound if I need to.” A heavier sound than your average electric fiddle is essential, as the Dirty Three have no bass player. This is reflected in Warren’s choice of amplification — “I’ve never been a fan of the Fender Twin sound, as it’s rather unforgiving with a big middle section in there of air. Marshalls have never worked for me either — the heads have always been too gainy. I’ve always gone for a thick, clear sound and then from there messed around with it from pedals.” To this effect, he uses a Music Man 135W head, a Mesa Boogie 100W Mark III combo, or an Ampeg SVT Classic, depending on what size stage he’s playing. His Strad is mic’ed with a Fishman Transducer — a distinct improvement on his old mic’ing methods. But if he’s not keen on the shrill tone of the violin, why didn’t he pick the viola? “That’s a good question,” he laughs. “I don’t know why. Being a violin player, the size of the viola’s a bit intimidating. I bought one about six years ago and I’ve always had one in the studio since we did Ocean Songs (Dirty Three) and The Boatman’s Call (Bad Seeds), which were recorded at around the same time. I started off renting one so that I could do some string arrangements that would give the violin some extra voicings, to try and open up what I was doing a bit more. Even then, it felt rather large and unwieldy, the size of it. I have a hard time playing the viola for long periods of time — I generally try to detune it and play it like some other kind of instrument.” When asked if he’s ever been known to hop on the cello, Warren immediately enthuses: “I love the cello; it’s probably my favourite instrument in the world. I could listen to it forever. I think I’ve had a scratch on one once or twice, but it seems like a very different thing to the violin. The fingering and the size of it, when I was learning violin, particularly classically, when you try other things, going back to the violin feels a bit odd. I might try and pick it up later in life… although I’m 40 now so I’d better make it soon.” Warren’s had a colourful career for someone who never particularly liked the sound of the violin within rock music — with the exception of John Cale. “But in the early ’90s somebody asked if I wanted to come and play a show with them at the Prince Of Wales in Melbourne,” he explains, “and I said sure, and went around and had a play with them. They said it’ll have to be amplified, so I stuck a guitar pickup on it with an elastic band and did the show plugged into the desk. People I knew who came along said, ‘You should get an amplifier, because you’re dependant on the sound the guy’s giving you at the desk.’ So I found an amplifier and then the pedals started around that time as well.” Warren actually started out as a classical player, but found his skills too limited for the genre. “Within that realm it feels like where you can go technically would seem like a never-ending quest,” he muses. “Either you can play things that require a lot of discipline and technique or you don’t, because you don’t have the technical capacity to do them. I certainly know that with the classical I got to a certain point where it was obvious that both my shortcomings as a player and my strengths as a player were becoming apparent. My strengths were probably what allowed me to find another direction, which was writing music and playing my own kind of music. “I had a teacher in Melbourne, the last teacher I had, and he was really great because he took the stronger aspects of my playing and really encouraged me with them, whereas in the past they’d been discouraged. I had a big sound of overly powerful vibrato, and I was always quite rough with my playing, and hard. He moved me towards pieces that were more appropriate to my sound and wanted me to enjoy the playing, which was really important at that point because things were getting really frustrating because I didn’t have the control or technique for some things. It’s a very different world, the classical world, because it’s easy to forget to enjoy yourself.” Warren found solace in folk music, heading off to Ireland and Scotland in the late ’80s to busk in pubs. “I learned bluegrass as a kid because my dad was a country and western guitar player, and that was always something I enjoyed,” he recalls. “It was something I could relate to. But in the classical world, folk was deemed as an inferior kind of music. But I could relate more to AC/DC than Bach at the time — it spoke to me more than what I was trying to play.” Warren did go down the obligatory guitar route as a tacker, but it was with the violin he found his forte. “Four string mentality got into me at a very early age,” he says, “and the other two strings [of a guitar] have always confused me because it’s in fourths and the violin’s in fifths. “I guess it was just what I learned on as a kid in primary school. Ten years later I found I was still playing it. I didn’t have any money to buy anything anyway — it was just my violin, a flute and a piano accordion, the most unrock’n’roll instruments in the world. At some point I figured there were enough people banging away on the guitar, so I might as well try and do something with what I had.” Despite playing unrock’n’roll instruments, Warren wound up in perhaps the most rock’n’roll band Australia has produced. When he joined the Bad Seeds, he found he had to completely change his manner of working. “The Bad Seeds was a big band. Coming from Dirty Three where I’d more or less been able to do whatever I wanted to do — not having any vocals immediately meant there was more space for everyone to feature everything — with the Bad Seeds there was a vocalist and a lot of people playing. It really seemed like what I DIDN’T do was important, but I’d been used to playing all the time, so I had to really have a crash course in it.” So did he find himself playing all over them at first? “No, because as a group they were all really aware of that stuff. There would be certain moments I could do something and then that would be it. They had a real distinctive way of playing, particularly earlier on, the concept of space and openness was something I was really aware of.” By contrast, the Dirty Three focus largely on improvised instrumentals. Warren says there isn’t an invisible plot or narrative in his head, as such. “I’ve never really thought in that way with melodies. We generally tend to be a more emotional thing about it, like how it makes you feel. With each album you do you try and do something different with what you bring to it and what you do with your instrument, so I could make a general, sweeping statement about the albums we’ve done. Generally there’s something engaging emotionally about the lines that you play that, for me, I’m drawn to. I think it’s more of a mood thing that’s being created and then a narrative comes out off that. You get things up-and-running and then when you start making something you’re not really sure what it is. Some time later the penny will drop and you go, ‘Oh, that’s what we’re doing here.’ “It takes some time to settle and that’s the exciting moment when it’s all moving around and trying to take flight. Then it does and you’re able to sit back. The meaning seems to come after, because when you’re in the moment of making stuff you’re not even thinking about what it might mean. You’re hoping you’ve taken enough in to try and get you somewhere. It certainly seems to change with each album you do — you have to find different ways in each time to what you’re doing.” Of course, if you’ve got three people all playing the same song without any discussion of a theme, they might all be viewing that mood or emotion very differently. “Well yeah,” he laughs. “It can be quite scary and amazing when you start talking about where the thrust of the piece might be. I think most people who are involved in something creative are driven from a self-centred point of view, so they probably feel like what they’re doing is the nuts and bolts of the whole thing. I think that’s quite interesting, because music, you need to have that aspect about your approach, but also be a part of the group as well. It’s an unusual situation — you have to be self-centred AND interact with other people and concede certain points. It’s quite a unique set-up really, isn’t it?” Does it lead to arguments? “Sure, it can. In Dirty Three, we generally don’t talk about music — the arguments are about other things. The less discussion we have about it, sometimes the better. With the Bad Seeds, Nick is coming in with material and we’re trying to work out how to play it. It depends on which album. Some we’ve worked on stuff together, or with soundtracks we just go in and try and find something in the studio. I try not to have any one approach to anything I do.” Stories in this Issue ASHTON MUSIC IS SEARCHING FOR AUSTRALIA’S BEST SCHOOL BAND! Ashton Music is giving Australian students the chance to have singing star Jessica Mauboy perform at their school in their ‘School Band All Stars’ competition! |
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