Jerry Horton

We’ve done records in the past where we would throw up a bunch of guitar tracks. We would take two or three different amps, get a sound, bounce those down to one track, and then do that over and over—like four or five times. That makes a huge wall of guitar sound, but it’s not really necessary. This time, we wanted space and attack to the guitar sound, and we wanted to have some kind of clarity to the distortion. You can get a really powerful sound with one or two tracks. That’s how they did it in the old days, and that’s all you need, really. We wanted to concentrate more on writing good riffs and playing them well.

Our bass player Tobin wrote that riff. He plays guitar, too, and he writes a lot. He likes that kind of odd, chromatic, and sometimes dissonant stuff. Jacoby [Shaddix, singer] and I heard him playing that in the bus and we said, “Wow! Record that.” So he threw it on Garage Band. If any of us hears something we like, we try to make the other guy record it. I was playing something kind of cool the other day, but I didn’t record it and now I don’t remember it.

We’ll do one pass all the way through and then in the choruses we’ll overdub another guitar. For that song I played a ’67 Les Paul though a modded Marshall JCM800, with a 25-watt greenback cab.

It’s funny you ask that because we had our old front of house guy on tour with us and he asked me, “What effect do you have on that?” I told him there’s no effect. I’m using some pinch harmonics. I put just enough of them in there so it seems like there’s a delay or something on the tone, but there’s not.

Oh yeah. When we moved into the house where we wrote this record, Tobin said we should go see a movie. I said “What? We’re here to write the record. Why would we stop working to go watch a movie?” He said it was okay because it was the U2 3-D movie. He thought it might inspire us. We went to see it and we did get inspired. We wrote “Had Enough” and “March Out of the Darkness” after that, so absolutely that was an influence.

Mick Mars played that solo. While we were in the studio, we knew that we were going on Crue Fest, and that song has this pentatonic bluesy structure and we thought, “Why don’t we get Mick Mars? That’s what he does.” We called him and he said yes. When we were on the road with Motley Crue in Tampa, we popped into a studio and he did it. He didn’t use an amp, he used Eleven, the Digidesign plug-in. He did a bunch of passes and we picked the best sections and put it all together.

For the main heavy stuff, we used the Les Paul and the JCM800. We also had an old Tele, but that thing wouldn’t stay in tune. Actually, the Les Paul wouldn’t really stay in tune either. Marc LaCorte from Schecter lent me his USA-made Schecter PT model and we used that quite a bit. We also had a couple of my Schecter Tempest guitars and a ’69 or ’70 Gibson SG Custom with three pickups.

I use a Marshall JMP-1 preamp and EL34 100/100 power amp. For my heavy tone, I use the OD 1 setting on the JMP-1 with the gain and volume all the way up. I really like that preamp for live work, because we have so many sounds and I don’t like to tap dance. It’s just one button per sound. I run the EL34 power amp to a Marshall cab with Vintage 30s, and I have a Marshall Valvestate 120 power amp that goes to a cab with 75-watt Celestions. I also use a Vox AC30 that goes to a Palmer D.I. box. The Vox is on all the time, set to a semi-clean tone, to give the overall sound some punch. Our sound guy can mix the Vox in as he sees fit. When it comes to clean tones, I like a full sound, so I usually have the guitar in the middle position. I tried using the Vox, but the way I set it, the clean sound isn’t right, so I use the Marshall preamp—that thing sounds great clean. I play Schecter Tempest Customs, and I have a new signature series coming out later this year, based on Schecter’s Solo 6.

Metallica. That was the start of it. Then I got more into metal like Megadeth, Slayer, Sepultura, then industrial and death metal.

I think that probably came from the Beatles. They were the main influence on that. We like the sound and the structure of the pop song. We like melody, and we’re exploring dynamics too. I started playing guitar because of those heavy bands but then kind of moved on.

Apart from Mick Mars, we did a tour in Australia with the Chili Peppers and John Frusciante is sort of otherworldly. He plays with such feel and he really makes his guitar sing. He approaches it in a way that’s different from anybody else.

There are genres that come in and out and there are a few bands from each that stick. We ended up being one of them. We did have that hip-hop influence, but we’ve always been evolving, since before we got signed. So, it was natural for us to move on to something else. We definitely wanted to be a career band, and we knew that if we were going to stick around, we had to change. It was a risk, and some people in the industry viewed our second record as a failure because it didn’t sell the three million that Infest did, but it was a step we had to take. In the long run it paid off because we’re still here. We’ve lost some fans but gained some too. We make music that makes us happy and if you like it, great. If not, that’s cool too.

I don’t know that you have to do anything. As long as there are bands that have great riffs, kids are gonna just keep picking it up. It’s the most popular instrument in the world. I don’t see that diminishing.