Paul Gilbert reflected on some of the challenges of recording “The Dio Album”, explaining how he went about mimicking the sound of Dio’s voice on the guitar.
Recording a Ronnie James Dio tribute album is all well and good and probably something that most metal aficionados would enjoy doing given the opportunity, but recording an *all-instrumental* Ronnie James Dio tribute album — while also striving to mimic the late and great singer’s voice with guitar alone — is something that only the gloriously unhinged mind of Paul Gilbert could dream up.
Released in April last year, Gilbert’s “The Dio Album” proved that such a feat could be done, and the man himself explained the key to tackling the ambitious task during a recent interview with Jordi Pinyol. One part of it was banking on certain guitar techniques, while the other was choosing the right gear for the occasion, Gilbert explains (transcription via Killer Guitar Rigs):
“One of the main things, technically, was pinch harmonics because we’re trying to imitate the vowel sounds. So with the pick harmonics, you can kind of get it. It might not be quite as full range, but you can definitely get much closer.”
“So I started to play guitars that had shorter necks — or, I should say, less frets. I used an Ibanez Roadstar — it has 21 frets, like a Strat. And since it had fewer frets, I had more room to do the pinch harmonics.”
Another aspect of it was, as Gilbert says, playing “horizontally” rather than “vertically”, i.e. sliding through the notes across the neck:
“So that, and also just playing horizontally. In some of the songs I’ll do the whole melody on just one string because that makes it easier to slide. And you don’t have to use the slide on your finger, you can just use your finger as a slide.”
He added:
“But mentally, it’s challenging because, as guitar players, we’re usually trained to play across the strings. We’ve practiced the scales, and if we want to play the five notes of the pentatonic scale, we’ll keep our hand in one spot and play across the strings, where you don’t get slides that way.”
“But if you learn this scale horizontally, it works so much better. It’s so much easier to be expressive, but you have to know where to put your finger, and it’s not the same. Instead of going [vertically], you’re going [horizontally], and everything’s different, so it’s a mental challenge.”
The pros and cons of being a super-flexible player
Transcending the guitar’s very nature and making it sound like a human voice requires being extremely flexible — which Gilbert most certainly is, even though he tends to downplay that quality by claiming he’s got no “style” of his own. Earlier this year, Gilbert argued that what would have been a signature style was a casualty in his quest to play as cleanly as possible:
“I wanted to prove that I was a good person by being able to play with the level of control a classical musician would have. A suit-wearing, upstanding kind of kind of musician. And I thought if I can do that, without all the electric guitar noise — which I really didn’t mind; I’ve always loved Jimmy Page — but I didn’t want that to be me, because I wanted to make sure that you could put [my playing] under the microscope, and [see that] every note is clean.”
“And so, in a way, that personal mission of mine took away a lot of what would’ve been style… All the little things that come from struggle — [when] you want to get the sound across but you go, ‘Ah, screw it! Let me dive in!’ — I wouldn’t do that. If I couldn’t play it perfectly, I wouldn’t play it. And so, that’s my excuse for not having any style.”
