Zack Merrick - Growing Pains
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| There are a lot of varied tones on Nothing Personal, what basses did you use? I usually just use the American Standard Jazz bass when we play and I switched it up a lot and used a ’65 in there and we also used some effects. For Hello Brooklyn and Lost In Stereo we used a Big Muff pedal to make it a little dirtier. How about amps? You’ve been a dedicated DB 750 and DB 810 user for years. I actually traded up and have two 810’s now (laughs)! The DB 750 and 2 DB 810’s – that’s my rig! I’ve been with Aguilar for a few years now and I’ll never change. It’s funny because when you work with different companies, you find who actually wants to see you strive and that’s what I like about you guys. It seems like you also have some loops running through many of the tunes. We do, especially on the tracks that we did with Matt Squire. We use samples live which is all the tracks that he throws in there, and there’s so many little bass undertones in there like keyboard loops that go through all the choruses and reverse snare hits that go with the snare hit live. It’s kind of interesting to hear our old stuff live and now with the new tracks live with all the effects going on. It’s still a rock vibe but it’s a little different; a little more professional I guess you could say! We grew up and we became professional (laughs)! How long did it take to record the album? The recording process itself didn’t take that long to nail down. I would say it took about 4 months to get everything written, recorded and mastered. We did a few weeks with Matt Squire for six songs, two days with Butch Walker for two songs and about two weeks for a couple of songs with David Bendeth. I remember being on the road and we’re still listening to mastered tracks for the new record and sending back our thoughts and going back and forth with it. It was a huge process and it was a tedious thing going back and forth with the tracks because we were also traveling. When the band is in writing mode do you send tracks or ideas to each other? We definitely do a lot more of that because I live in California now – whenever I’m off tour! GarageBand is a big thing for us. Some of us have Pro Tools now but I stick with GarageBand because I don’t want to crash my computer! I write songs with a good friend of mine who sends me stuff while I’m on the road. I also write acoustic stuff with another friend who lives in Baltimore. At what point do you come up with your bass parts? Do you have a basic idea of a tune with chords and a melody first? For melodies, it’s pretty much all Alex but for chord changes we all just go in there and since I’m into music theory I’ll say, “let me try the fifth of that” and no one knows what I’m talking about! It’s really by ear; whatever someone thinks sounds good we go along with it. It’s really trial and error. Especially for the kind of music we play it’s not that hard because there’s only eight notes really. We’re not trying to re-invent the wheel but we still want to keep that wheel rolling! How do you do that? Personally, I’m kind of at the point where I’ve grown out of our style of music a long time ago. I’ve been playing bass for ten years now and I’m at the point where I’m downloading old Jackson 5 songs to keep my brain going musically. After this record I spent some time with David Bendeth and some of the guys that he works with who were all Berklee graduates and they would sit me down every once and awhile and would teach me different tricks like how to play in perfect time. They taught me this technique where before you actually play to the song you breathe the song in time. So you breathe in for four bars and then breathe out for four bars. After that you pick up the bass and breathe and play at the same time, which is pretty cool because mentally, it slows everything down and makes you able to hear when you’re playing faster than the click or behind it or not grooving well with the drums. And I think that made me a much better player, just being able to hear that. Do you have any ideas where you would like this to lead you in the future? I want to get into doing session work. David Bendeth gave me the email address for one of the head theory guys at Berklee and told me to contact him since we are doing the Warped tour in Boston. So I’m stoked to have him give me some stuff to take and learn on the road. David Bendeth has helped me a lot as a musician. He’s a musician himself and he wants other people to strive to be a better musician. He always sends me ideas of tunes to learn like Jaco’s version of Donna Lee. Learning things from different genres always helps to push the limits of what you can do on your instrument. Yeah, it’s always good to have a different style you can go to instead of being stuck playing the same kind of music year round. Bendeth said, “Most people in your genre of music hit the wall, and they can’t learn anything else because there is no one better than you to learn from but if you keep practicing and learning all you can, you’ll be all right”. As a parting note, what music are you finding inspiring lately? Let me check my iTunes right now so I don’t forget anything (laughs)! I have a weird mix of things on my computer. Well, Led Zeppelin definitely inspires me to play music. When I listen to their records, I’m pretty sure they didn’t record to a click track at all because there are certain times where things are out of time but the whole band is still together and grooving no matter what. They still sound really good because the band is out of time together. That’s one thing I’ve been noticing about older bands lately is that they can groove together and that is the key – sticking together and holding it down. Thanks Zack for taking the time to talk to us – best of luck with the new album! Check out All Time Low at www.alltimelow.com |