NAMM Interview: Tobi Morelli
Archspire have their follow-up to the Technical Death Metal sensation Relentless Mutation, in the works – we’ll see if this one also gets picked up by the YouTube bot – and I sat down with guitarist Tobi Morelli for a quick Q&A at NAMM.
Just want to start out by asking, how are your NAMM activities going?
Pretty awesome, also crazy, it’s a lot to take in, I think this is maybe the fourth or fifth time I’ve been here, and it’s always a good time, but there’s just so much going on, it’s hard just to catch our breath, between the gear and running into friends and stuff. It’s been awesome so far!
So just now, you guys were at the Darkglass Electronics booth, you were doing something with Neural DSP, can you tell me about your connection with that brand?
Yeah, Neural DSP, they basically do guitar and bass plugins, and we’re pretty tight friends with one of their artist reps, when they started bringing out these products, he hit us up like, “Hey, would you guys be interested in trying some guitar stuff? We’re taking real amp models, like existing amps, and turning them into guitar plugins, basically”. And we’re like, we’re always looking into new gear and trying new stuff, and making things convenient, so they sent us some stuff to try. There’s this really rad metal amp company called Fortin, I think it’s the guy that used to make Randall amplifiers, he started his own brand. And so, they have these really awesome high-gain metal amps, and they work with Neural DSP and they made these plugin versions. When you open up the interface, it’s like one of their amps, so it’s really user-friendly, all the same knobs, everything. It looks like a real guitar head. And then it has mic placements, so it has a fake cab, and you can move around your mics, it’s pretty in depth stuff, but it’s actually like, if you were in a studio, tweaking a real amplifier with mics and stuff, it’s the same thing, but just from the comfort of your desktop computer. The sound quality, the algorithms are very lifelike, which I’ve never had with any kind of guitar plugin before. And even just dialing stuff in, it’s pretty instant, it doesn’t take long to dial in something that’s playable and awesome to use, whether it’s demos or live stuff, or recordings, or whatever. So they’ve been really awesome with us, and they obviously like the music that we’re playing, which is cool, and we’ve been liking using their products as well. And they just put out a new actual physical thing called the Cortex, which is basically a new amp modeler that, I think it’s going to kind of change the whole amp modeling world, it’s pretty advanced stuff, it’s kind of like the Kemper and X-Effects, so we’re hoping to try one out? If they see this interview, we’d love to try one and use it in our live setup! Because we’re using X-Effects right now and they’re easy to travel with, but they’re kind of heavy and we have to use more than one and I think we could run our whole band off of one of these units that Neural’s putting out, which would save us loads of money on freight costs, and lugging gear around on airplanes and stuff like that, and shipping costs for all of our gear. We have quite a bit of gear that we have to run, so we would love to use their stuff, and we would love to use that pedal, so…if you’re out there, please hook us up!
Hint, hint!
Yeah, hint, hint! But yeah, they’re really great, they’ve been awesome with us, and today we did a performance which was a lot of fun, we played some Archspire material and we had it all running off a laptop into a little interface, and that fed into monitors so people could hear us, and we all had our in-ear system so we played to a track, so we had that going. Everything totally worked just fine and the plugins, they sound great, so it was kind of like using the gear that we already use on tour, but just in a smaller setting at NAMM in the chaos and the bright lights. Kind of weird standing up playing, not at a real show, in a big, bright room with a bunch of people walking around looking at pedals and stuff. *laughs*
They can look at pedals, and then they can turn around and look at Archspire.
Yeah! So yeah, if people wanted to listen to some weird music, they can.
It’s not just weird music with you guys, you’re talking about the next level technology with Neural DSP, but you guys have got some next level technology that you probably didn’t even plan – I heard about that AI bot that used your record, kind of took that over and made a whole track out of it, that is wild!
I’m still blown away by the fact that there’s a computer that can listen to our music and then replicate our music, and I think it’s still running now, I think you can go on YouTube and listen to this thing, the Dadabot, it’s still running our music. And listening to it, it’s like, there’s moments that are super chaotic, and I get it, it’s nonsense, but then you listen for a bit, and then you’ll start hearing riffs, like…I can hear two riffs being put together that are ours, but now they’re starting to sound different. It’s pretty crazy that it’s actually turning it into listenable music, not just like weird noises and…it’s pretty scary. *laughs* You’re like, “Hey, I recognize that riff!” but it’s backwards or mixed with another riff, it’s making its own melodies and stuff, really strange. But it’s cool that it likes our stuff, if robots like our music, then I guess, you know, can’t be all that bad? *laughs*
I mean, people are calling you “Technical Death Metal”, so the robots should like it, right?
Yeah! I mean, if it didn’t spit out anything, I mean, yeah, I’d be a little bummed. We’d have to go back, come up with a new gimmicky name or something, can’t stay tech anymore. If AI likes it, we’re obviously staying tech.
And it’s funny, I feel like it’s ironic with the album Relentless Mutation, because the overall theme of that is this whole thing about a cult taking you over, and then people have concerns about AI taking over, and I just see some kind of ironic connection there.
Yeah, it’s kind of strange how the lyrical content and what’s actually going on are very similar. Weird to step back and actually think about, “Woah, it’s coming to life, oh no”, you know?
What have you done, Tobi?
I mean, I didn’t write — Oli wrote the lyrics so everybody can get mad at him if everything goes apocalyptic, it’s his fault.
*laughs* That’s a pretty far off future to worry about, I think. For right now, we’ve just got a little YouTube bot, so I think we should be safe for now. But just in terms of the more near future, give me an outlook on Archspire.
We are currently working on our next album, our follow-up to Relentless Mutation, and so we’re working really hard at that, and we’re getting pretty excited with the way it’s going, but we want to strive to make it better than the last album, so if we don’t…hopefully it will just be the same? So we don’t, hopefully, piss people off, you know? We’re not going to do anything too weird, but trying to make it heavier, and we want to make it faster, but also more listenable. So we’re hard at work at that. When we get back from NAMM, we’re back to the grind, we also want to do another Tech Trek this year, so we’re working hard at trying to plan that and finalize the lineup and stuff, so that will be in the works, so people can keep an eye on all of our social media for a new Tech Trek this year. And then, studio time. So that’s kind of what we have in the works, if anything else cool tour-wise comes up, I mean, we’ll have it announced. Nothing as of yet, so another tour that we’re going to do, and, new album, so that’s our focus.
Thanks for taking the time to sit down with me today.
Thanks for having me, it was a lot of fun, now it’s back into the chaos. *laughs*
NAMM in a nutshell.
Keep up with Archspire here.