Paul Gilbert Digs The Dirt
Originally published in Guitar World, December 2010
The shred virtuoso indulges his overdrive addiction on Fuzz Universe.
Paul Gilbert is experiencing an occupational hazard: tinnitus. It’s what happens when you’ve made your living for the past 25 years standing in front of monster amp rigs and playing music at ear-crushing levels. He suffers from a mild buzzing in the ears but is quick to discount the malady. “I can still hear my guitar,” he says, and on Fuzz Universe, his new instrumental record, Gilbert and his Ibanez create a world of sounds no one has ever heard. “It is the universe where all rock players live,” he explains. “We all use distortion, overdrive, gain and saturation. I call it ‘fuzz.’ The first time I heard ‘Mississippi Queen,’ my fuzz addiction was permanent.”
Fuzz Universe is populated by all manner of strange effects coaxed from weird stomp boxes. A company called Majik Box even built the guitarist his own signature overdrive pedal called, appropriately enough, Fuzz Universe. Gilbert’s challenge was not so much to uncover these sonic textures but rather to adapt them to styles ranging from warpspeed single-note picking (“Olympic”) to complex layers of rhythm (“Blowtorch”). “Having distortion, or fuzz, added a lot of harmonic excitement to the sound, but I had to play very accurately, or the string noise would become a mess,” he says. “I had to use my technique to retain the clarity of the notes.”
Gilbert admits Fuzz Universe was not an easy album to write but says it contains “my best vibrato ever, chord changes I’ve never used before, and longer songs than I’ve ever written.” He even ranks the title track as a contender—along with “Scarified” and “Technical Difficulties”—for his best instrumental ever.
“This is the closest I’ve gotten to my ultimate guitar sound,” Gilbert says. “There’s emotional vibrato, chunky rhythms, groovy riffs, face-melting solos, phase-shifted chords and the ability to control the guitar when it’s clean or distorted.”
Get The Pick Newsletter
All the latest guitar news, interviews, lessons, reviews, deals and more, direct to your inbox!
Thank you for reading 5 articles this month**
Join now for unlimited access
US pricing $3.99 per month or $39.00 per year
UK pricing £2.99 per month or £29.00 per year
Europe pricing €3.49 per month or €34.00 per year
*Read 5 free articles per month without a subscription
“Clapton’s manager says, ‘George Harrison wants you to do the tour and play all the slide parts – he doesn’t want to do it’”: When rhythm guitar hero Andy Fairweather Low was recruited by a Beatle to play slide – even though he’d never played slide before
“He turned it up, and it was uncontrollable”: Eddie Van Halen on the time Billy Corgan played through his rig – and why his setup shocked the Smashing Pumpkins frontman