Details
With the follow-up The Sufferer & the Witness poised to sustain Rise Against’s momentum, Principe has continued his own steady improvement as a musician. Previously a busier player, Joe focused on refining his interactions with the other instruments. “I made a conscious effort to let the guitars shine and to keep the rhythm with the drums. I didn’t want to do anything too flashy.” For most of the album’s tracks, Principe extended this no-frills approach to his tone. A pick and a touch of distortion were his building blocks, with a handful of studio rigs allowing him to find the right tone for each song: “I recorded with around five different setups, so we were able to blend whatever we wanted.” However, Principe did allow himself to try something radically different on The Good Left Undone, which features a mellow break led by a layered bass-chord dirge. “Yeah,” he laughs. “That was four tracks of bass using an EBow. I imagined something where there wouldn’t be any attack from the bass—just sound. The engineer, Jason, said, ‘We’ve got to get an EBow.’ So we did.”
Though he took more of a supporting role on Sufferer & the Witness, Joe still added a tasteful selection of his trademark fills and runs. “I did more low-register bass fills this time. Usually I go to the upper octave on a fill, but this time I stayed low.” Principe credits this move to years of playing along with his favorite recordings. “I spent hours and hours sitting next to a boombox, pressing play, rewind, play, rewind, and trying to learn other peoples’ parts.” In addition to training his melodic sensibilities by ’shredding with albums by Rancid and The Descendents, he also sweated along with NOFX and thrash metal bands such as Anthrax to develop his speed and stamina.
Principe is as humble discussing his own playing as he is discussing his influences, and the sincerity of his approach to both shows in his bass lines. “They’re probably not much for anyone else to listen to, but the melodies I play remind me of the Descendents. That influence came out on this album more than any other, which is one thing I’m pretty proud of.”
Read more about this topic: Joe Principe
Famous quotes containing the word details:
“Patience is a most necessary qualification for business; many a man would rather you heard his story than granted his request. One must seem to hear the unreasonable demands of the petulant, unmoved, and the tedious details of the dull, untired. That is the least price that a man must pay for a high station.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“If my sons are to become the kind of men our daughters would be pleased to live among, attention to domestic details is critical. The hostilities that arise over housework...are crushing the daughters of my generation....Change takes time, but men’s continued obliviousness to home responsibilities is causing women everywhere to expire of trivialities.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“Different persons growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants. The anatomical details of twigs and branches will fulfill the elephantine form differently from bush to bush, but the overall outward results are alike.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)