RATT: Warren DeMartini’s Quest To Find The Ultimate Marshall Amp For ‘Invasion Of Your Privacy’

RATT Out of the Cellar producer Beau Hill  – Interview excerpt

This excerpt was taken from the Out of the Cellar full in bloom interview with RATT producer / engineer Beau Hill. Also, make sure to listen to our Invasion of Your Privacy interview @ this location.

You can listen to the interview excerpt via the embedded YouTube clip above or Soundcloud widget below.

EXCERPT DESCRIPTION:
Beau talks about RATT guitarist Warren DeMartini’s quest to find the perfect amp for Invasion of Your Privacy.

You can listen to the entire Out of the Cellar podcast at this location.

Listen to more excerpts from this interview

The segment has also been transcribed below.
_______________________________________________

Beau Hill:  I can tell you one other little anecdote of Invasion of Your Privacy (laughs) and this is actually quite funny.  Warren (DeMartini) was really unhappy that we played Cellar (Out of the Cellar) on one rig.  He was just very incensed by that.  So, while they were on tour for Cellar, Warren and his roadie would go into music stores all across the nation and they would audition Marshall rigs.  So, Warren started purchasing and they’d ship them back and put it in the warehouse….from the whole tour.  When everything was said and done, he had like 25 heads and 20 or 25 4X4 cabinets in the warehouse because he was, ‘by God, we made the money….we’ve done what we had to do….I sacrificed what I needed to sacrifice….and by God, I’m going to get the sound that I want to get.’  I went, ‘ok, great.’ (laughs)  So, when we went to set up to do Invasion,  Warren said, ‘I want two whole days of studio time, just me, myself and my roadie….so that I can get my sound.’  Remember, we now had 25 heads and 25 or 30 different cabinets.  His idea was, come hell or high water, he was going to check every head with every cabinet and come up with this impossibly monstrous and unique sound. So I said, ‘ok, you’re a multi-platinum recording artist, if you want to waste two days of time, ok, let’s do it.’ I have a picture of this somewhere, it was really spectacular. So, we were recording his guitar parts at Rumbo (Recorders) and there was one iso-room that was pretty big. I told the roadie, ‘ok, set it up’…so he set it up four piled on high or three piled on high, I guess and five or six across, Marshall cabinets. And, over in the corner, he had these 25 heads or however many it was….all piled up on top of each other and everything was wired. I said, ‘ok, Warren great, go for it and let me know what you decided for your rig.’ He goes in and closes the door, he’s in the room with the amps right now….turns everything on 10….goes in there and starts wailing away.

(laughs)

Beau:  He’s playing and playing and playing and then he stops and you can hear the (sound of a cable being unplugged)….you know, they’re changing jacks, and his roadie is in there with him….and he plays and plays and plays and plays.  I’m in the control room, I’m like two glass protection areas away from him and I can’t even hear myself think anymore, it’s so loud.  He comes in, after I’d say about 20 or 30 minutes of this….he walks in and says something to the effect of, ‘well, I can’t really tell.’

(laughs)

Beau:  Of course he was totally deaf at that point.  What we wound up doing was….I got his roadie to take the rig that we used on Cellar and I just said, ‘stick it in the mix’…in the pile of amps.  So, he gave me the look and I said, ‘this has just got to be between us, replace one of his heads with the old one and do this again.’  So, he went out and bought 25 amps and we wound up using the first amp, which he hated.

(laughs)

Beau:  Now, all of a sudden, he liked it.  So, we used that for him on Invasion and I don’t know think to this day he knows we did a switcheroo on him.  But you know, sometimes it’s, especially with those guys, I just kind of had to let them think that whatever it was, it was their idea.  I was like, ‘yeah, that’s great, ok.’

full in bloom:  Right.  (laughs)

Beau:  It was a little psychology 101 sometimes with those guys.

full in bloom:  A role of a producer, right?

Beau:  (laughs) Yeah, herding the cats.  You have to know how to do that.