2020.08.27 - Rob's School Of Music - Interview with Bumblefoot

Excerpts from Blabbermouth:
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Thal [...] talked about the making of "Chinese Democracy" during an August 2020 interview with Rob's School Of Music. At the time he said: "It's a historic album by a historic band, and I'm grateful that I was given the opportunity to contribute to it and be part of it.

"When I joined the band, we started playing some of the songs live. From there, I got to know six or seven songs. But then, going into the studio, I was hearing a lot of things for the very first time, and you're really on the spot, and you're dealing with music that's already full — it's almost done. There's so much going on. I mean, it's so jam packed. Wherever you turn your ears, there's something going on in those songs — between drums and loops and bass and keys and other keys and percussion and vocals and backing vocals and orchestra and any kind of synth stuff and all the layers of guitars and different guitar players from different periods; there's so much going on.

"So, I remember I would be playing different ideas — for each song, maybe a hundred different ideas — in a day; in, like, 14 hours, working on a song, from start to finish," he continued. "And I would try something that was just kind of nasty, and then something that's a little more tight, something that's technical, something that's with a wah, something with a fretless, something that's melodic, something that just feels almost like industrial [and] robotic or whatever it is — just different vibes. And the hard part to that was there was so much going on musically that you don't wanna step on the toes or clash with anything that's already happening. So you might make a melody, but then realize there's already a melody there in the strings, and at one point in your melody, you might be clashing with something that's happening in the string melody. So it was, like, 'That won't work.' Or you go into a higher range, so you don't clash with it, and then it's, like, 'Oh, wait. There's that synth thing happening there.' Or you go lower, and it's, like, 'Ah, it's kind of getting eaten up by the rhythms and the bass.' So it was a challenge to find the right place. But you've gotta give all credit to Axl and Caram Costanzo that produced the record and made those decisions on which guitar parts they wanted to use, which ones they thought were best, which ones to mute. I would spend all day with Caram. We would play something for Axl — either send him something or whatever it was. And then, after I gave them a lot of choices to choose from, they would choose what they thought fit the song best.

"It was a different way of doing it for me, where usually I was part of the writing process," Ron added. "So I know the song from its infancy, and watching it grow up to adding each part and changing parts, and this part leads to this new part, and, 'Ooh, that melody. You know what? Maybe we should go back and make that chorus, let's make that the verse and [come up with] an even better chorus' — just the way songs grow when you nurture them. I was stepping into a fully formed, pretty much, song and had to come up with stuff."