Pro Techniques from Corrado Rustici

By Randy Alberts

	Corrado Rustici

Picture Velata, an olive-lush Mediterranean island under a sky of infinite cobalt embrace. Soaring high above the sea and his Pro Tools studio on the wings of a kite is Corrado Rustici, producer, virtuoso guitarist, and record label co-owner. He can hardly wait to land and record a bridge he just figured out in the middle of his biggest judo air tail grab ever.

A storyboard for the next Myst? The latest Tony Hawk video game? Velata may exist only as a QuickTime VR movie on his website, but everything after "cobalt embrace" is real for this engaging Italian-American.

"The thing that inspired me to get into the music industry, and through that transcendence, was music itself," says Rustici in the legendary hallway of The Plant Recording Studios in Sausalito, California. Soon he'll be on the Bay flying a 12-meter power kite while strapped to a snowboard-sized kiteboard where, unlike his improv approach in the studio, Rustici must adhere to an oft-repeated technique to keep from crashing and drowning. "If I have any recording technique or style at all in the studio, it's what I call push and pull production. It gives me the kind of roller coaster emotional experience I want instead of sonically always filling the middle ground of a song. I guess that's an approach, but my approach changes with every session."

Over the past 25 years, Rustici has worked with everyone from Aretha Franklin, Herbie Hancock, Elton John, and Miles Davis to Whitney Houston and Zakir Hussein as a session player, and produced for the likes of Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and three of Italy's favorite sons: Luciano Pavarotti, Zucchero Fornaciari, and Francesco De Gregori. Rustici's body of work spans 70 albums that have sold over 40 million units. He's a household name most everywhere on the planet, yet somehow he's remained largely unknown here in the States. Unless you pay attention to liner notes or, like the author, remember PFM (Premiata Forneria Marconi), you might have completely missed this talented musician/producer's bylines.

Italian Visions of the Emerald Beyond
Born in Naples, child prodigy guitarist Rustici graduated from art school and then, like his older brother, joined a prog rock band in the early '70s. A move to England then netted a chance meeting with his guitar hero John McLaughlin and with Narada Michael Walden of Mahavishnu Orchestra that forever changed his life, resulting in an invitation to San Francisco to work with Narada. Seventy album credits later, including the largest-selling album in Italy to date (Zucchero's Oro Incenso e Birra), Rustici's conscious moves toward working with largely unknown artists these days couldn't have him soaring any higher.

"I knew I wouldn't make as much money developing new artists I believe in and working only on projects close to my heart," continues Rustici, who two years ago co-founded the independent Flood Records with manager Pier Forlani and Arnie Frager, long-time owner of The Plant. Rustici released The Heartist, a solo CD of his own work, but his passion lately has been developing and producing Italian star Elisa, the band Mistonocivo, and the debut album of HoR, a new band with a NIN-meets-Portishead-meets-Alanis sound.

"I know I'm doing the right thing production-wise if I'm uncomfortable and nervous," he says. "I like my results with Pro Tools to be unexpected because that expands me into doing things differently every time. Don't get used to one way of approaching a Pro Tools session, or anything else in your life for that matter; just embrace the good stressful process of creativity. It seems to me that a big chunk of the musical community is mainly concerned with developing skills that can be used effectively in the 'craft of entertainment.' It's becoming a rare event to find and hear work that reflects the commitment of aspiring trans-modern musicians fully devoted to the manifestation of the art of music."

"I've been bored with guitar sounds and my own performance for a long time now," admits Rustici. "Face it: After Jimi Hendrix's sound and the Beatles' recording techniques, the guitar sound hasn't evolved much at all. I want to make a guitar not sound like a guitar yet still have the facility to access that very unique phrasing of the instrument. I'm producing a single for EMI France now that's just my acoustic guitar recorded into Pro Tools, and I've chopped it up like crazy. It's something that you can't possibly play but it's very effective! If you hear the hook in that song, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. I've really been getting into using Pro Tools to chop performances up and to create entirely new parts you can't — seemingly, at first — actually repeat live."

Pro Technique 1 —
Pushing Beat Detective for good effect
Beat Detective is a Rustici family favorite when it comes to drastically altering guitars, vocals, and other sounds. Far more than a tool of rhythm, he uses it as an alternate time compression and stretching tool. For instance, he'll often take a cymbal crash or any other piece of musical information out of a loop and chop it down to 1/16th of a bar, then time stretch that back out to a full bar in Beat Detective. With this extreme use, Rustici likes the artifact-laden sound he gets when cutting a full cymbal crash down to size and then overstretching it back out a notch or three.

"I'll then grab sections of that stretched cymbal and put it at various points in a song and occasionally reverse it for added effect," explains Rustici. "I think I do a lot of my time compression much faster in Beat Detective, whether it's over-stretched or not. I love the artifacts of compressing and stretching things I've taken to the edge of too far and beyond."

Pro Technique 2 —
Stretching, chopping, and pasting to taste
Using the same one-bar cymbal crash chopped down to a 1/16th note as a starting point in this example, Rustici explains how to use Digidesign's Time Expander plug-in to mangle and repeat small chunks of sound throughout a song for good effect. First, copy and paste the 1/16th-note cymbal crash start to another track, then open Time Expander and stretch the short sample out to one bar in length.

"It depends on the quality of the loop, of course, but then I'll typically chop that stretched-out 1/16th with Pro Tools and add those pieces of sound to various places in the song where I want to accent something. The cymbal crash can then be cut into any time segments you like, such as 1/8ths, 1/4 notes, or anything that makes sense for your song then you can paste those various segments throughout the song. The timbre will be similar but slightly changing, depending on how you manipulate your sample. Then maybe I'll have a break where everything drops out and this little sound is soloed for one-half beat before the arrangement drops back in. Of course, this is not limited to percussive, or what I call bottom-up, pieces of musical information. In fact, I have had my most rewarding results working with melodic/harmonic, or top-down, tracks."

Rustici concludes by describing his push-and-pull production style as a delicate balancing act between ambient, minimalist, non-tempo based sounds (pull, as in pulling one into the sonic landscape) and the more obvious, repetitive and non-challengingly familiar "push" of pop music. "The mind is an incredible synthesizer, but the key trigger for its vision/envelope is the human imagination. Just open yourself up to what can happen using Pro Tools in this way."

www.corradorustici.com
www.sugarmusic.com/smelisaengpage.ist
www.mistonocivo.com
www.zucchero.it
www.kiteboard.com