INTERVIEW WITH A MAGNUS

GFR NEWS | TAKE 46

INTERVIEWER: OK so I guess we should start with the status of the new OFFLINE album? How's it going?

MAGNUS: Nope, next question..

[INTERVIEWER LAUGHS]

Did I hit a soft spot?

Can we start with anything else? I been doing six twelve hour days a week on it for months, sometimes seven.. Most of the time I don’t know what day of the week it is.. Occasionally I look at the date and weeks have gone by.. It feels like my life has been on hold for at least the last two years, more.. I’m sure they're the best songs I have written but who knows? What if it's all crap? That’s three years of my life and my entire life savings right there y’know? It’d haunt me if I wasn’t so fucking busy, if I didn’t get home from the studio every day and collapse into a coma until early the next morning.. I barely shower, I wash my teeth and put on the same clothes and ride my bike there and the day dissapears into the night and then I eat something and fall asleep watching Mad Max 1, 2, 3, 4 then 5 then start again or do all the Tarantino films then it just happens again.. Don’t put that in the interview..

[INTERVIEWER NODS BUT DOES NOT ACTUALLY AGREE, SHE LOOKS AT HER NOTES, THINKS FOR A WHILE]

OK, can we talk about the cover art?

No because I haven't started it yet, it’s all in my head and I bought the materials from Eccersleys but I haven't had time to start painting. Everything’s a year behind schedule..

Hmm OK, then tell me how the pre-album single launch went on 11th June?

Ahh yes that was a bit of subterfuge, instead of launching any music that’s the day I launched the physical offline experiment of living without any internet - I cancelled my ISP and mobile data that day and have been living without internet ever since. I need to do some emails and/or update our website around once a week so I go to an internet cafe near me or use the free public ones.

How has that gone? Do you miss it?

I didn’t miss it for a second and have been getting way more songwriting and work and reading and even socialising done, it was a very, very easy transition. The best thing is I have not seen the mainstream news or sports or politics news or finance news for months and that has been a massive happiness boost and way less anxiety. In all honesty I forgot about all that very quickly and just spend more time reading or watching DVDs or doing art.

OK lets discuss the making of the album, I understand you did pretty much everything, what equipment did you use to write the chords and melodies?

I wrote the bulk of the songs and melodies and all the rhythm and lead guitar parts on my electric baritone guitar, a 2013 Ibanez RGB21 I bought brand new many years ago. They are made in Indonesia with an Indonesian hardwood and are considered middle of the road quality for baritones but it was what I could afford* and I really like the look; black and similar to a Kramer metal shredding guitar shape.

*Dickhead wealthy hipster collectors and opportunist sellers have put quality instrument utterly out of reach for us musicians who actually play their instruments – an average pre-80s Les Paul is over 10k now, it’s modern mega-greed fuckery and it applies to all musical equipment everywhere and it is killing quality sound especially for young musicians – another reason to leave the music industry is that it seems to me that everyone except musicians now make any money from music: labels, promoters, ticket-sellers, distributors, venues, bookers, sound engineers and studios can still make some money from the music industry but original musicians can not at all. That is unless they play popular 60s to 90s covers note for note which to me is song theft for profit and a non-starter. Worth noting I am a super judgy Virgo so that is just my take on it, I don't mean offence it just makes me sick and depressed thinking on it..

And while I am raving do people not realise DAWs and digital plugins and computers make you a worse musician and a worse sound engineer? Machine remove the repeative boring tasks and that is what make great thing! A great tennis player does a thousand shots a day, boring and monotonous so they can be brilliant on centre court. IT IS THE SAME WITH MUSOS AND SOUND ENGIEERS! Using analog equipment that takes a lot of time to manually set the EQ and run through each track is how your ears get better, practising scales for hours on end is what make awesome musicians. Using a computer to do those just means you look at videos of cats more and meanwhile you get lazy and worse at your job.

IF YOU WANT TO BE GREAT AT ENGINEERING OR WRITING OR PLAYING MUSIC AVOID COMPUTERS AND MACHINES AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE, THEY JUST MAKE YOU LAZY AND MORONIC, ITS TRUE, LOOK THERE IS NO DECENT MUSIC BEING MADE SINCE DIGITAL PLUGINS BEGAN DOING EVERYTHING FOR US. I SPEAK THE TRUTH AND AM IN THE PROCESS OF GOING BACK TO ANALOG DESKS AND NO DAWS LIKE MANY OVERSEAS ARE DOING. OUTBOARD GEAR CRAPS ALL OVER DIGITAL EVERYONE KNOWS ITS TRUE. REMEMBER KIDS, MACHINES TAKE AWAY THE VERY PRACTICE THAT YOU HAVE TO HAVE TO DO THING AT A HIGHER LEVEL.

Anyway back to the writing of OFFLINE. There is very little choice for baritones especially in Australia and the Hagstroms and the LTDs are very pricey and look awful to me, not my aesthetic. It's not the greatest but I love my Ibanez, it has a 28" neck and came stock with EMG active pickups for the metalheads and I got quickly rid of them - I’m a heavy prog rocker and my favourite sound is a Les Paul and I love doing feedback so I got Real Guitars in Malvern to replace the EMG's with Hot Rods which are a passive dual humbucker pickup like you find on a Gibson. I have had all my guitars, acoustics and amps modded and repaired and serviced at Real Guitars by Brendan and Ian for many years now and they are super old school, fast and have incredible knowledge and attention to detail.

The last album La Bandera was also written on the baritone with the B to B tuning, it’s been great to work in different keys like B minor and F sharp major instead of E, A and D all the time and it’s also a real pain because you have to transpose everything from E down to B and that took a long, long time to understand and get used to, years in fact and then playing a traditional guitar you have to re-transpose back up to E. But it’s worth it for the heavier sound I like. Most grunge and Sabbath the lowest chord is C sharp because they drop the entire guitar a semitone down to D sharp and drop the bottom string down two semitones to C sharp - it's called the drop D tuning. And the new metal guys use 7 string guitars and go all the way down to low G or even F or E sometimes and that is getting close to the highest string a bass guitar. That’s too low for me, I like working in B and have gone back to a normal tuning because the drop D tuning limits you a lot. Having said that two of the songs on OFFLINE have drop D style tuning but on the baritone so they are in drop A and that’s seven semitones below standard E, very heavy and you need the baritone for that or the strings wobble too much.

Also because the baritone is low it cuts into the EQ range of the bass so that becomes an issue because you crank up the guitar that low and you lose the bass in the mix and for me bass is the single most important instrument in rock music and on OFFLINE I have spent a lot of time on the bass. Nearly every hit song the bass line is driving it, consider Pressure by Queen/Bowie or Another Brick In The Wall by Pink Floyd, or literally any Bowie or Floyd song without the bassline.. there is no song. And Bowie and Pink Floyd along with Chet Baker are easily my biggest influences. After that it is Jane’s, Faith No More, King Crimson, Sabbath & Zep and the heavier, more prog influenced modern bands like Tool and Soundgarden. The only new band I like is YOB, a three piece from Portland Oregon.

The rest of the album was written on a vintage Roland electric piano I used to have. I also recently bought a fantastic nylon string acoustic from Fred the singer from I Spit On Your Gravy and creator and artist of the famous Pub comic strip (new episodes of Pub can still be read in the excellent zine Munster Times by the way, a great zine and Matt Munster is a very unique writer). My new songs for the next album are being written a lot on the nylon string without a plectrum and then fleshed out on the Ibanez.

Also it worth noting some of the songs were originally jammed a lot with Adrian and Cav of Guiltfilter at Adrian’s drum studio in 2023-24. The 7 bar repeating bass line from Kids Are Going Offline was written by Cav after we pressured him to write something not in 4/4. After that he wrote some great bass/guitar lines for a song called Safeworld that we played live but won’t be on this album. It’s worth noting that the songs Core, Kids Are Going Offline and Change Of Heart and even Moonlight were played live by Guiltfilter a fair bit in 2024 so will be somewhat familiar to some folks.

OK so the prog side is prominent on this new album? Because La Bandera, aside from the opening song Acronym, was a fairly straight rock album compared to La Calavera and the last Dolls EP.

Totally yeah, this new album has some complex time signatures including 15/8, 10/8 and 7/4, and a few poly rhythms. La Bandera was my first album writing on the baritone and going back to a traditional style tuning and I really wanted to write simpler songs then so as to put the focus on the lyrics. The lyrics on La Bandera are the thing I am most proud of in 37 years of writing lyrics and I consider them easily the best lyrics I had even written, although OFFLINE takes things to a way more subversive place.

The songs on OFFLINE have 2, 3 or more guitars and multiple bass parts and some trumpet, orchestra sounds like cello and trombone and some synth layered with the guitars. It is totally different to previous albums and there are quite a lot of piano and 3-part harmonies too. Radically different for me but all came very natural like and felt right for the song.

Hey do you want to hear a joke I made up?

Sure, go for it.

What music do they play in the Czech Republic?

No idea..

Prague-Rock.

[INTERVIEWER HALF SMILES AND RETURNS TO HER NOTES LOOKING NONPLUSSED WHILE THE INTERVIEWEE LAUGHS HEARTILY, SLAPS HIS THIGH AND NEARLY FALLS OF HIS CHAIR]

And what equipment did you use in the studio?

The first demos of all the songs I recorded in my bedroom studio in Waterloo street in St Kilda, Australia. I then moved to the current GFR studio nearby and for the first time ever was able to do all the composing, recording, tracking and playing myself, a humbling and arduous experience that took around three years. Well I did everything except the drums and trumpet where I hired two amazing young jazz session players.

So for the gear heads I used the following equipment (a lot of which I use live and have owned for many years):

DAW: Pro Tools Studio as always, for both the demos and album.

Preamp/Audio Interface: Focusrite 2i2 for demos and a PreSonus Quantum Thunderbolt 2626 with 8 class A XMAX preamps for the album.

Monitors: 2 x JBL LS28 10” near field powered monitors + 2 x PreSonus ES5.5 monitors. I used a passive Mackie Big Knob for volume and monitor control, they are amazing and allow you to listen in mono too.

Compressor: I used a used LA2A clone made in Chile by Stam Audio: the SA2A+. It is an opto tube compressor and can be heard on almost everything on the album because it has a mix control so you can use a lot or just a bit. All the vocals, guitars and trumpet and snare mics went through this.

Other outboard: I used a US made Aphex Channel channel strip on much of the bass and all the dirty sounding parallel vocal tracks. It has a compressor, phase controls, de-esser, auto gate, 3 band EQ, Big Bottom sub helper for low frequencies and an Aurel Exiter that adds tube distortion to higher frequencies, amazingly strong made and just works on anything.

Demo Mics: a beat up Rode NT1a large condenser and my Shure 58b.

Album mics: A used Rode K2 tube condenser mic, 2 new OPR planK stereo matched small condensers and a new 3u Audio MKVID2 large condenser: all made in Australia, fantastic sounding and affordable. For dynamic mics I had a Shure SM78, SM58b and SM52A and a cheapo Senheiser 606 that was great for drums. All the vocals and trumpet were done on the K2 through the SA2A+ with a second room mic being one of the OPR plank’s running through the Aphex Channel with the Aurel Exiter on. The guitars were mostly the SM57, the 606 and actually the best guitar sound were got on the K2 large condenser sitting a foot away from the centre of the cabinet. For Bass on the Fender Rumble amp I used the MKVID and the SM57 close and the inbuilt XLR DI although I also did a lot of bass directly into the Aphex Channel with the Big Bottom on, a really great sound. For snare I used the SM57 on top and the 606 underneath, the kick I used the SM52A inside and the NT1a a foot or so back. The toms I used the MKVID and the SM58b and for overheads and any room mics the matched OPR planK’s.

Guitars: Ibanez RGB21, an old Les Paul clone and my ¾ size Honer steel string acoustic.

Bass: I played all the bass on a Cort Jazz clone for the demos and a Yamaha EB 5 string for the album.

Piano: I did all the real pianos on an old Kawai ES electric piano with 88 weighted keys and a Roland foot pedal.

Drums: Remo Emperor skins on my just ok Mapex Prodigy 5 piece kit with 18” kick, 10/12/14 toms and 14” snare and 19” Mapex crash ride plus an old Boston Ryde cymbal and stand I had. An amazing young VCA student and local jazz drummer Iliya played the drums on the album, I’ll put his details on the artwork and promos when I can. I composed a lot of the drums myself but once Iliya came in he did a lot of improvising too and the snare and cymbals were his own and very un-rock sounding which I loved.

Trumpet: A fantastic young local trumpeter Reuben did all the trumpets on the album, he plays a standard F tuning trumpet from memory and got almost every part on the first take.

Amps: for guitars I used my Australian made Vadis 60w tube head with 6L6’s and matching 3x12 cab with Australian made Rola speakers, a US made Mesa Boogie RA-100 Royal Atlantic 100w combo with Celestian Vintage 30s and an amazing multi-soak feature to drive the ES34 tubes at lower volumes, and the also a UK made Laney VC30 2x10 with Italian made Voice Of The World speakers. For bass I used a newish Fender Rumble 500. I put the piano through the guitar amps and also direct into the Quantum preamps through the SA2A+ compressor.

Outboard pedals: An Orange Detonator ABY pedal to run guitar through the Mesa and the Laney at the same time for stereo amps, great for feedback and massive chords! A Radial ReAmp pedal for re-amping some DI guitar parts I liked and a DoD Dark Arts Bone Shaker and a BOSS DS1 for distortion. I put an Ibanez mini tremolo pedal for all the solos and also a Mooer Ana mini delay pedal on the feedback parts.

Digital gear: For any synths I used a $20 no name 32 key midi keyboard to trigger midi instruments inside Pro Tools. The virtual instrument I used for synths was a free synth called the MG1 by Cherry Audio and for EQ I used the FabFilter ProQ4. All other plugins are the stock plugins that come with Pro Tools Studio, the Studio Reverb, Real Tape Saturation, Real Tape Delay, Tape Echo spring reverb, SansAmp PS1, Fairchild 606 and the Pro Compressor plugins got the most use. For orchestral instruments like Trombone and Cello I used the amazing and free BBC Orchestra plugin by Spitfire Labs out of London.

Where do you get your instruments and equipment?

The Fender, Vardis and Laney amps and most of second hand equipment for the album I purchased in store at the Music Swop Shop in Carlton, I have been going there for 35 years and was devastated recently by the passing of the shops owner Brendan, a lovely, kind, humble and generous man known to all Melbourne musos.

The Mesa Boogie I found at Guitar Colonel in Hawthorn and Colin from 30mill studio who did La Bandera and She’s My sold me the JBL LS28s at very friendly mates rates – thank you so much Col!

The brilliant Stam Audio SA2A+ tube compressor I found on Reverb, it was up in NT and the drum skins I got from Alejandro at Billy Hydes music store in Nunawading.

For the new equipment like the PreSonus speakers & interface, the Yamaha 5-string bass and all my leads and stands I go to Mannys Music Windsor store, great service and I really like to go into the shop and test equipment rather than buying online, although I did find the Rode K2 and the ABY pedal on Gumtree very well priced too.

OK so can we please talk about the OFFLINE album status now?

[INTERVIEWEE LOOKS VERY PALE AND LIGHTS ANOTHER CIGARETTE WITH PRONOUNCED DTs] Sure yeah OK. The tracking is finally complete and much of the automation and song structures were done along the way. Some mixing needs to be done although I have spent everything on this album going so far beyond schedule and my arthritus and carpel tunnel in both my hands is very bad so I have found a new private procedure to fix them that will be many thousands of dollars so the launch will be anounced very soon once I sort a few things. Stay tuned next week and thanks for listening, hopefully any muso tech heads or engineers will really enjoy the equipment and recording details, adios!

Thanks Magnus!

;)