STATIC-X Frontman Talks Solo Album In New Interview

Alison Richter of GuitarWorld.com recently conducted an interview with STATIC-X frontman Wayne Static about his upcoming solo album, "Pighammer". A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

GuitarWorld.com: When and where did you record this album?

Wayne: About a year and a half ago, we sold our house and moved out to the desert by Joshua Tree. There's a little studio here called Giant Rock Studio and we pretty much lived there for an entire year. I wrote and recorded at the same time, so it was a much different process. In the past I'd write a song, make demos, give the demos to the band, get together with the band, do a month of rehearsals and everyone changed things and added their own parts. Then we'd go to another studio and try to recreate some kind of excitement that I had when I wrote the songs, which I think gets lost by the end of that process. This time, I was recording while I was writing, so there's a lot of excitement captured in the recordings. I played everything on the record, and my wife [Tera Wray] did the female vocal bits here and there. I produced and I had an engineer, Jack Keener, helping me out. I've known him for a few years, but this was the first time we worked together. It's good to have somebody there to work the machinery and turn the knobs, because sometimes it's a lot to do by yourself and you get more caught up in turning knobs than performing.

GuitarWorld.com: Did you miss interacting and collaborating with a band?

Wayne: No, not really. I've always written by myself. I've never been in a situation where the whole band sat in a room and wrote a song. I don't work that way. I always write by myself, and it was really very comfortable and very rewarding to not have to compromise.

GuitarWorld.com: Did any of the songs change gears during the tracking process?

Wayne: I'm always working on multiple songs at a time. There's usually a couple of songs on the record that come together relatively fast, a day or two, but most of the songs are a process over many months where I'll work on a song until I get bored with it, set it aside and move on to something else. Some of the songs I never come back to. After months, if I still come back to it and get excited, then I know it's good.

GuitarWorld.com: What is your preferred method for tracking vocals?

Wayne: I did it the same way I recorded all my demos for STATIC-X to present to the band. I start with a drum loop, add some keyboards and guitars and build it up from there. It's just a natural way of doing things for me. It's the way I've always done it, and the vocal usually comes last. I usually have rhythmic ideas during the whole process, but I generally don't write lyrics until the very end and then record that. There is no editing on this. I didn't record on a computer. I recorded 24 tracks, so everything is what it is. It's all live performances, obviously punched in here and there, but I didn't do any editing. I don't like to do any editing on guitars. I think the more editing you do, it just takes away from the feel of the performance. That's the way I recorded vocals, even when we did record on Pro Tools. I never really liked the whole computer-editing thing. It just takes all the soul out of it.

GuitarWorld.com: Did you double a lot of the parts?

Wayne: I figured out over the years what works for me. I double all my vocals. It gives it balls. I've been doing that for so long that it's really easy for me to double and have things pretty tight. Guitars, I do main left and right and then double things up on choruses at times.

Read the entire interview from GuitarWorld.com.