You can catch Fareed with his solo project, the Flat Earth Ensemble or with his group Garaj Mahal. We recently had a conversation with Fareed and here's what he had to say...
How has the Moog Guitar expanded your musical palette?
Well, in so many amazing and yet kind of subtle ways. I think the most unusual aspect of the Moog Guitar to wrap your mind around is the availability of sustain. At first glance that seems sort of obvious, but the real problem is not the Moog Guitars’ sustain at all, the problem is that we guitarists tend to spend years training ourselves to play with no sustain. So we have a tendency to take our hands off the guitar when we know that note's gonna end anyway.
And so we've developed a whole playing style built around getting our hand off the guitar when the note is gonna die anyway and kind of hide the fact that the note is dying with vibrato, with bending, with whatever other kinds of techniques, effects pedals, delays…so many things we use to obscure the fact that the note is actually a corpse, as we like to say…the moment you hit it. We've developed this playing style that works around that and all of a sudden with the Moog Guitar, you don't have to do that anymore. And so the only way to truly realize the potential of the instrument is to stop thinking like a guitar player for a minute and start thinking like a musician…what I want to hear, and I can do that now.
There are a lot of little quirky things you can do with this instrument, and a lot of amazing wild things you can do with this instrument. The possibilities are there, you just have to rethink the way you play guitar. So right away, there was the tendency for me to always play a note and then stop and then leave that note, and now over the course of a year, I'm at the point where, not just intellectually but subconsciously and intuitively, I'll play a note and just hang out! And be like, yeah, that's great. Cool, I can play a chord and just hang out. And then manipulate that. And then there's a moment, you're hanging out with a note for awhile, you begin to think “well, what can I do to this note while it's sustaining here for the next twelve minutes?”, and that's yet another layer of palette and color that guitarists don't usually deal with. And the nice thing is you don't have to take a huge pedal board with you. I mean, I don't know how much those pedal boards I see guitar players traveling around with weigh...And y'know, with some of these guys you see like 3 flight cases coming out of the truck.
I remember one of the very first things I did on the Moog Guitar...another guitarist who was really into effects was like “How are you getting that sound man, and how are you getting it to hold like that and those voices, man? What kind of processing is that?” I didn't tell him anything and I said “Well, it's just a guitar and a chord." It definitely changes things. The strange thing is then you go back to a regular guitar and you've conditioned yourself to have certain expectations. I hit a chord and I just sit there. And that's all, and it's like, where'd it go? Where did it go? And then you go ahhh...
...I miss my Moog Guitar...
Yeah, exactly!
At what age did you start playing? And did you play any other instruments?
I started playing piano when I was 8, upright bass when I was 10, and then a guitar when I was around 11 or something. I played all three for a long time. I don't really play piano that much anymore, although I still fiddle around with it whenever I need to, teaching and stuff. I can play a little piano. And I can play a little upright bass still. Mostly walking bass lines from my student improv classes and stuff. I've got the blisters to prove it...
And then guitar, y'know, I was bitten by the bug so I was playing pop and rock music a little bit and into Led Zeppelin and into Thin Lizzy and Foghat when I was a kid in the 70's.
Nice. I love Thin Lizzy, I just bought their box set about a year ago. It’s great!
It's such big guitar playing...
And at the same time I had been listening to classical guitar players…A lot of flamenco music from my mother’s side, and a lot of Indian movie music from my dad's side. And then jazz, of course. So I'm definitely a product of my influences.
It's such a beautiful merging of cultures too, flamenco with Indian music and jazz. I mean, it's all kind of related in a way.
Yeah, it definitely is. So I was playing rock and jazz and then I started studying classical formally. And then over the course of a handful of years, I sort of dove into all the different aspects of the guitar that I could wrap my brain around.
Right, and you're still doing that! It's so great to see (and hear).
The full sustain mode and controlled sustain mode of the Moog Guitar free your right hand for a wider range of expressive techniques. How have you been taking advantage of that?
I think I kind of addressed that in the first question a little. But I can revisit that. Definitely things like playing a chord and moving a voice and doing that over time.
Even two handed technique, though I suppose, just playing a note while you're holding a chord…
I definitely do some of that. Definitely vibrato with the left hand, something that now I can do in minutes, not just seconds. And different kinds of vibrato…you know, tremolo bar. You can do all sorts of things to the pitch while you're holding a note. And then there's sweeping the filters while you're holding a note that gives it some kind of modulation effect, but it's really something that's controlled with your foot. And things like holding notes and then bending it and then holding it again, just like Tenacious D. Hold a note, bend it a little, back and bend it a little more.
It brings out the Tenacious D in us all... You've used the on board Moog filter to take funk guitar playing to a new level. How does having an individual filter for each string contribute to that? Or have you noticed a difference with that?
Well, definitely having the filter creates a very different kind of sound than a wah wah pedal. Much different…It's very cool, kind of like a wah wah pedal for the new millennium. It really sounds different. You just have to hear it. And then of course it's very expressive. There are a lot of ways that you can tune the center point to whatever frequency you want and so you can make it wah or filter in many different places, and that's pretty slick.
And then of course, you have the built in articulated filter aspect of the Moog filter which gives you a sort of, I don't know if you'd call it a touch wah or envelope follower kind of feeling, but it's a lot more under your control. And then it just sounds different, it's just really cool. And so the other thing that's really important here is that you can couple all the stuff with mute mode or sustain mode and one of the other things is that if you want to go for that dry Strat sound, for like a chicken pickin' kind of thing, well you put the filter on, put it in mute mode, and it doesn't get much drier than that. It really sounds like it's got almost a gate on it or something. The note really is sucked away in a way that is rhythmic so you can start to work with the timing of that.
Again, the thing about the Moog Guitar that I think most guitarists don't get is that the Moog Guitar in and of itself will sound just like a regular guitar if you play it just like a regular guitar. And so if someone is interested in the instrument, doesn't radically rethink and isn't willing to rethink the way that they physically play the instrument, you're not going to notice any difference. It's really not about that. Like any Moog instrument, the demand is not on the instrument, the demand is on the player to explore the possibilities of the instrument. And there are so many possibilities. There are so many ways. And it's not even things you can describe like push this button here and set this tone there, it's “Well, when I hit this string and I pull my finger off, it does this, but when I put it in mute mode and play it and hold the chord down, and pull it off just a millisecond after it dies, it gets sucked out by the mute mode. That will create a certain sound. If you pick it really lightly, it'll bubble in a certain way.
There's a million little subtle things that the player has to discover, and that's the beauty of it. What's so amazing is that it does really draw motivation from the player. There are so many ways to play it. And some nights I'll be amazed, I'll be playing it and be going for something and I'll find something totally brand new, all of a sudden I'll be on a new path. And there are so many sounds, there are even times when I've been like “oh, I forgot to do that one today. I was going to do this thing with that, oh but I forgot because I was wrapped up in this other area of the instrument.”
You do some interesting things with the control pedal while using the filter. Can you fill us in on that?
Well yeah, that's where it gets down to it…I mean, I'll play a whole song where I'll just leave the filter pedal on and I'll work with it. And again, a wah wah pedal gives you wah, and that’s about it. You've gotta realize that this gives you wah of a kind, but with a note that will last as long as you want it to.
...and as many colors as you want to be in there too, I mean the moment you move the pedal in one little place, it changes the whole feel and sound of that note.
Exactly. And then you can, of course change that over the course of the life of the note. So, if you imagine a great singer holding a note, and that note will change over the course of the length of that sustained vocal note. Well you can do that on the Moog Guitar as well. In many ways you've almost got the possibilities of creating some kind of talk box kind of sounds but they're not limited by the sustain. You can continue manipulating the envelope and the filtering of the note for ten minutes if you wanted to.
Well, what pickup positions do you find yourself using the most? Is there a preference?
Actually, I use them all quite a bit. I use the piezo quite a bit, it's really crisp and fat for certain funk sounds. Of course its great for the imitation of acoustic guitar, I like to even say hybrid acoustic because it really does do what an acoustic does but in a kind of a hybrid way. The lead pickup is very fat and sustaining. The one in the middle, it's very kind of--not even out of phase but kind of nasal sounding, which is really great for some rhythm parts…Fatty kind of out of phase sound. And the neck position is very warm and jazzy. So there's a lot of variety there. You can do anything you could do with a Strat or a Les Paul with this guitar, though it does lean towards the Strat sound, I would say. Like a fat Strat. Just because of the bridge and the way the bridge comes off the instrument.
I've also played the E1 recently and I thought that was very cool also. What I've found is that since that is an all alder body. I find it to be brighter. And in some ways not as sustaining, in terms of the instrument itself. I actually in some ways prefer it, because I hit the string really hard most of the time. And it's good for me to have a guitar that has a pop to it because then I don't hit the string as hard and it's a brighter sound. Also, since the instrument sustains itself, to have a whole lot of sustain in the instrument is nice, but it's not necessarily that crucial. But to have the pop of the alder is really nice. I kind of think they're two flavors, and they're both really viable.
So between the Moog pickups, the piezo pickups, the Moog filter, you're getting a really wide range of tones from the Moog Guitar. What do you use to amplify?
Because of the fact that I'm on the road, in the jazz world, there's a lot of times where I don't really get a choice in amps. So what I do, is I have a little multi-effects unit that I just use for a little reverb and some delays. Once in a while a phaser, but nothing really major. And distortion, depending on the situation. And what I'll do is I'll send one side to my amp, and I tend to chose a really clean amp, that's just my preference because I also play acoustic guitars.
Sure, and if you want to distort, you use a distortion pedal?
Right, which is in some ways not ideal, but in this day and age, forget about it. So I have a few different pedals which are really nice. But, I'll just send one side to the amp on stage and one side direct to the house, and then mix them together. It's a real nice combination because more of the acoustic and clean sounds direct really gives you some space and some air. And then the amp gives you the mid range and the chunk, and even with the distortion sounds, I find having a little of that direct in there, especially in live situations, for some reason the direct doesn't sound sterile like many directs do. It sounds pretty warm, and obviously I don't use the direct by itself unless I'm playing acoustic guitar, and then the sound man will just pump up—usually it's a blend. So maybe 80% amp and 20% direct for distortion sounds and vice versa for the clean sounds. Y'know maybe 60-40 on the clean sounds. 60 direct, 40 amp. And it really transforms the way you're dealing with—y'know one of the things about guitar amps particularly, which is why I lean away from the guitariest guitar amp like a Marshall or a Boogie. They tend to be punchy. It's great because the idea is that the note punches out and then it sustains, but you've got this great sustain and what you need is sort of a smooth transition between the attack and the sustain aspects of the instrument. And so in many ways a more, shall we say more like a PA system or a keyboard amp is best for that aspect, but obviously guitars don’t necessarily sound that great through a keyboard amp.
So I use a Polytone with an extra cabinet, I have a trace Elliot that’s a hybrid tube and transistor, I often use just a big ol' Fender Twin. The best for me is to be able to have a lot of wattage and a low volume. So if I have two Twins or two Fender Deluxes, I might split that and then send one to the house and one to each amp. And that gets some great guitary tone but with a nice sustain to the end of the note and good clean power to hold the sustain and the high end of the acoustic sounds.
Can you give us a brief history of your musical career to this point? I know it's a loaded question...
I went to North Texas State University on the jazz guitar scholarship, then I transferred to Northwestern to study classical guitar and began playing with Paquito D'Rivera the jazz saxophonist.
I played with Paquito for 10 years and did a whole bunch of records with him.
But, during that time, Sting heard me and was creating a new label, Pangea Records, so he signed me to his label and I did two albums for him and his label and did bits of touring working with him. After that I was on the road for a while with Bob James, Dave Holland, with Devon Jackson, the tenor sax player. I did a bunch of touring with Joe Zawinul and his Zawinul Syndicate for about a year...and a fair amount of touring, was signed to Blue Note Records, did 3 albums with Blue Note; “Opaque”, “Déjà vu”, and “Sacred Addiction”. And then in about 2000, I founded the group Garaj Mahal with Alan Hertz and Kai Eckhardt and Eric Levy, and at the same time was touring with my own group. So, Garaj and my own group the Flat Earth Ensemble have been sort of working for the past 9 or 10 years touring. And that time I have also been working with Zakir Hussain and the group Summit with George Brooks and Steve Smith.
I got commissioned to write a couple of concertos for orchestra and guitar and another one for orchestra and sitar guitar. And all this time I've also been teaching at Northern Illinois University teaching classical and jazz guitar, and that’s the long and short of it!
...and you still teach, right?
I still teach, yeah, and still tour, about 200 dates a year.
Garaj Mahal just won an independent music award a year back and then this year my Flat Earth Ensemble record has been number 1 on the Jazz charts for a couple months.
And what was that Guitar Player thing? I was chosen best world guitarist in Guitar Player Magazine. Oh, I also did a bunch of records with Goran Ivanovic, the Balkan guitarist, and we won the acoustic guitar album of the year in '06 in Acoustic Guitar Magazine or something like that. He's a great composer and a great musician.
Last question...What inspires you about music in this day and age?
Well, to me, I think in general what moves me and inspires me is, I think we're in a golden age of music. I think people who are always saying “Oh, the music world sucks,” I think they're crazy. I think these last, y'know, the mid 50's to now, is a golden age of music and art. There's so much great music out there…so much great playing out there. I think if there's one mission that I have, that is in bringing together the traditions that I have spent so much time studying and bringing to life, classical music to life, classical music traditions, jazz music traditions and bringing those traditions into modern music, Indian music traditions, folk music traditions and keeping them alive through their connections to new music. That's sort of what is my thing.
Like when I'm playing a guitar solo, I'm still thinking how does this relate not only to Hendrix, but how does this relate to Charlie Christian. How does this relate to Mark Montgomery or Pat Martino. When I'm playing acoustic guitar, I'm thinking how does this relate not only to Michael Hedges but how does this relate to Paco de Lucia and Andre Segovia and John Williams, most of the classical world and most of the finger style acoustic guitar world owes huge debt to Hector Villa-Lobos. And so few people are even aware of his music, and yet when you really get into it you're like man, this guy was writing the coolest finger style acoustic guitar music a hundred years before anyone else even thought of it. Those kind of traditions are really important to me, and that's sort of what keeps me always inspired, I'm always working on both new music and old.
You can find out more about Fareed Haque Here.
For more info on the Moog Guitar, Click Here.
...And, to hear one of the first songs ever recorded (by Fareed and Garaj Mahal) on the Moog Guitar, Click Here.
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