Count Zero : Articles : Stu Hamm Embraces his surroundings (Bassics - 2002)

"When I do a record, I try to make it a whole listening experience," Hamm explains, "a record you can put on from start to finish, that keeps your interest. In the instrumental genre, a lot of people put out records where it's the same instrumentation. The song starts, someone plays the melody, someone plays a solo. After a couple of songs it seems limited dimensionally. I try to balance it with things like 'The Star Spangled Banner' and 'Charlotte's song'; different grooves so that you can enjoy the 60 minutes while the record is on without it being too taxing on the ear, too pretentious, and with a sense of humor."

"Charlotte's song," a melancholy solo written by the "sappy new dad" for his daughter, features one of Hamm's signature basses (a.k.a. "Larry," a short-scale model) strung up as a piccolo. A concept not unfamiliar to Stu, short-scale friendliness and aural versatility were the impetus for developing the Urge bass.

"The original Urge basses came out in like '91," he says. "At that point, I had just come from playing Kubicki's, and those were shorter-scale basses. But when you go to a recording session, you want to have a J and P bass sound. So I ended up having to lug two or three basses to sessions all the time.

"Fender at one point was putting out Kubicki basses, and that's when I met [John Page] and the guys, and we wasnted to combine the best of the old and the best of the new. The Urge bass has got a real good P-bass sound, a real good jazz bass sound. Then again, they have a full 2-octave neck, and it's a bit thinner, a more player-friendly bass. Then it's got the active electronics. Bass, treble, midrange boost - three pickups for tonal variety."

Stu laughs when remembering the initial reaction to his signature line, "And then the bass came out and some people thought, 'A short-scale bass? I can't play that! That's not manly!' So when we decided to do the Urge II, one of the things we did was we tried to make it a full 34" scale bass. (It makes me look skinnier when I play a larger bass.)"

"So it worked perfectly for 'Larry,' which was the original Urge. I strung it up open tuning with piccolo strings for 'Charlotte's Song.' I wrote it for my daughter, played it a lot when she was in the womb, and had a tape played for her in the delivery room. And actually I kind of ripped it off from a Ry Cooder song I heard years ago. It was just a vibe I had been working around for a while."

Juxtaposed to the plaintive solo, "The Memo" bristles with a contemporary urban vibe. It also has its own deep-rooted history, going back to Hamm's previous solo efforts with Relativity. "I originally wrote 'The Memo' way back," he says. "After '91 when The Urge album came out and did pretty well, I was having some really bad wrist problems at the time. So I took some time off after touring for a while, got my wrists together, and when I was ready to go back and do the next solo record was right at a time when Relativity had started selling rap acts. You know, they could put out a record for $5,000 and sell two million and really make money. So why would they care about these instrumental fusion records that they were barely breaking even on?"

"So I called up the guys at Relativity and they said, 'We're moving in another direction, we're not going to do another Stu Hamm record.' Then I was on the road with Joe, and one of the Relativity guys in Boston called me, 'When's the new record coming out?' I said, 'Well, I got dropped from the label.' He said, 'You got dropped from the label? Usually when you get dropped from a label they send me a memo. I didn't even get a memo about this.' So that was the impetus when the song was written."

"The Memo," besides featuring a catchy melody line and solo from Stu on his Urge Us Obi and Mel (built by Todd Krause at the Fender Custom Shop), evolved with the help of Youth Engine's Chris Collins and Greg Forsberg. "When we recorded it, the Youth Engine guys got a good groove going," Hamm explains. "I remember playing the demo for Youth Engine, and it was really smooth jazz - you know, it has to be melodic without being wimpy. So they worked on it and it turned out being one of the best things on the record. And the main bass performance was just one of those days where you go in and, bang, do the whole song in an hour. And then my friend Judah Gold came in and played a kick-ass guitar solo that had the right feel for it."

"It's one of the songs that builds," he continues. "The first verse has no bass, the keyboards come in and then there's bass. And I just wanted it to build up to the solo, have it be a real straight-ahead heavy groove. Syncopated. I think I doubled the bass with a pick on that one. I just wanted to lay down this big, fat, heavy, almost disco-y groove, so when it comes back down for the last verse, it's even more effective."

And Stu's solo? "I went into the solo with very few preconceived notions. I opened myself up to the muses, and tried not to think - just react. I didn't plan the solo out, I just tried to tell a story melodically and I'm real happy with how it came out."

Hamm rented out a San Rafael studio and began writing the Outbound material in January of 2000. ("It was just me and four walls. No phone, no beeper, nothing.") Then in February duty called - in the form of Steve Smith - to record a sequel to 1998's blistering Gambale/Smith/Hamm project Show Me What You Can Do. The Light Beyond was recorded at Smith's home, Neverland Studios, in a briskly-paced ten days. "We all brought in songs, and a couple we co-wrote on the spot," he shrugs. "It was just super-intense. Waking up every day, writing a song and recording it. Super hard work, but a lot of fun."

Not that Outbound wasn't hard work too, but it did give a little more leeway for the new father. "The thing with The Light Beyond was that it was basically ten days," Hamm says. "The main thing about Outbound was that I recorded it right down the road from my house. I'm really adamant about keeping my family life going. When my daughter was born I was Mr. Mom for about six months. So actually when I did The Light Beyond it was the first time I'd been away from her, and I was having serious anxiety attacks. You know, physically missing the baby."

"So the fortunate thing with Outbound was that until the end I didn't really have too hard of a deadline. So I'd go to the studio, and we could work, and if something didn't work we could just say, 'Screw it, let's take the night off I could go back home to my family And then towards the end of it, I did have a deadline because I finished mastering the record the day before rehearsals for Satriani's gig started. And at the end when you have a deadline it kicks you in the butt to make decisions and work a little harder and get it finished."

The work schedule wasn't the only thing that varied. Songwriting and playing approaches also had their differences. And in a funny way, the pace of the trio record actually made for a more tempered playing approach on Outbound. "The Light Beyond was like jazz boot camp," he confesses. "I'm so pleased about my playing on that because on the solos, I didn't just revert back to the same old crap that I usually play, you know. I was in a space where I wouldn't approach a solo with any preconceptions about what I was going to play, and I came up with some really different new stuff. That record is very improvised and spur-of-the-moment. If there were any glaring mistakes in a solo, I'd go and fix it. That was an analog record, we recorded to two-inch tape."

"Whereas Outbound was obviously planned out sonically and organized that the songs were going to flow in a certain way. A really good thing was that I could get my riff-chops out on The Light Beyond but I didn't want Outbound to be a wanking-bass record of super-fast chops, slaps, 'Check out what I can do,' you know? I wanted to create some aural moods and really tell a story, be melodic. I wanted it to be listenable to people, not just bassists."

And strangely enough, listenable bass actually became somewhat of an issue when mixing The Light Beyond. After the intense trio sessions and some more time writing and recording Outbound, Stu went back to check out The Light Beyond mixes and got a bit of a surprise - a very weak bass mix. Stu laughs, "I literally had to take off three days from recording Outbound and make them remix the album and say, 'Turn the bass up!' As far as I'm concerned the bass still isn't loud enough in some spots. Especially behind Frank's solos, I think you should be able to hear my interacting with him. I did the best I could. But that's the difference between doing a solo record and a trio record. Steve Smith knows what he wants, and Frank Gambale knows what he wants, and I know what I want. In trios, sometimes people are just afraid to push the bass up. In Outbound I was the final say for everything, although the guys at Youth Engine gave invaluable input."

And turning up the bass in the mix becomes an even more dicey subject when bringing up arduous live situations. Stu, a vocal advocate for bass players' rights, learned how to cope with the scenario on his gigs with Joe Satriani.

"I have this stupid thing I do when I'm playing with Joe," he sighs, "which is on stage I have these Shure monitors which are always in my ears. On top of that I put on the Browning gun range headphones, so I'm totally isolated. I just came to the realization that I will never know what I sound like on stage, it's really up to the sound man. So I might as well make sure it sounds good to me.

I've got reverb and compression on the drums, and guitar panned left and right, and the bass just panned everywhere. And the bass sounds so good, I can play with a really light touch, like when I'm in the studio. The harder you hit a bass, the less low end you're going to get on it. So it's a bit of a sterile environment, but it just sounds perfect, whether we're playing a large place or a small place. It sounds the same. And also I can bring my amp on stage down to a volume where it won't defeat the PA. So if the sound man decides that he wants to put me in the PA, he's got fall control over it. It's a pleasure to not have to fight for the notes, and just have it sound great. And I feel I play better, and at this point that's what I'm all about."

Stu does get the opportunity to play in smaller venues, even though the Satriani gigs do find some of your larger arenas - where if you've got a particularly oblivious sound man, you might as well not have a bass player at all.

"That's my worst nightmare," Hamm concurs. "I took my wife to see Tori Amos at the Oakland Coliseum. What was the mix? Kick drum that hurt your gut, snare that took your head off, and some piano and vocals. And I swear, the bass player played a fretless, he was slappin and I didn't hear one note from him all night. I think it's horrible, and I have met sound men who mix the bass in there...oh don't get me started. It's criminal. I remember seeing Stanley Clarke and Jeff Beck opening up for Bob Marley in Madison Square Garden. This was like 1978. You're trying to play fast and intricate stuff, and it's Madison Square Garden. By the time it reaches the top row it's going to sound like...who knows what.

It's finding out how to fit in. With some guys, like with Steve Vai, he's got so much low-end on his guitar that the sound man has got to figure out how to layer things. With Joe, I kind of use a more trebly tone, like John Entwistle with The Who - there has to be a frequency space for it. You just can't have everything low end all the time. And in a big spot, with all the delay and reflections, it can be pretty tough to get a good sound."

Sound struggles being what they are, Stu isn't about to complain about his good fortune. "What a fantastic year," he exclaims. "Being able to do two totally different projects; touring the US and Europe with Joe, and now I'm getting to play this totally other kind of music with The Jaguars [a rock band from Mexico]. Man, if I could do this every year, I could afford a house." What a concept. "But just being able to play different kinds of music and express myself, I'm so thankful and lucky. It's just been such a rewarding year, musically I want to keep it up."

Count Zero : Articles : Stu Hamm Embraces his surroundings (Bassics - 2002)