Dweezil Zappa on selling his out-there guitar collection, mixing Hendrix and building an immersive rig

Dweezil Zappa can’t come to the Zoom right now. One of his dogs has just eaten a grape, and this canine emergency requires an urgent DIY veterinary intervention.

Seriously, Zappa must make it puke up the grape before it gets ill, and from experience, it’s is not easy – not when evolution instructs these animals to fill their stomachs 24/7.

As it happens, “not easy” is a recurring theme in Zappa’s career, and over the next few months he’s about to raise the difficulty level again. He needs two minor miracles to make him ready for the Rox(Postrophy) tour before it opens on August 1 at the Celebrity Theater in Phoenix, AZ.

The first miracle is monetary: he has to raise the capital to tour. The costs are astronomical; and, having not been on the road in years, it’s a dead lift. That’s why he’s partnered with ANALOGr to sell an absolute ton of gear online, some of which you might catalog as peripherals (DI boxes, overdrive pedals, odds and sods) and some of it super-collectible – but all of it is useful.

Thomas Scriven founded ANALOGr to facilitate fully authenticated sales of pop-cultural memorabilia. Wes Borland of Limp Bizkit was a client; there’s a Grateful Dead auction coming up. The last of Elvis Presley’s Harleys is going up for sale – the only one that’s not parked up at Graceland.

Scriven expects it to fetch over a million bucks. “We still have the original title for it bearing Elvis’ name,” he says. “It has never been registered out of Elvis’ name.” One owner, low mileage, rock ’n’ roll legend who drove it to church on Sundays.

ANALOGr has seven world records in the auction category for music. Scriven and Zappa are friends, so it’s a no-brainer to tie up together.

“With Dweezil we have what we call an Artist First Collection, where we work directly with the artist to sell their assets and go through this whole authentication program,” says Scriven.

“We put them on camera to tell the story about each item that they’re selling. We provide a safe space for artists to sell their stuff – where the fans know for sure it’s 100 per cent authentic – and to work on making these assets investment-grade.”

Some of the Zappa’s items might even be described as iconic. Take his ‘True Blue’ Jackson Custom Shop Dinky, as featured on the cover of 1988’s My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama; it’s hand-signed by Madonna.

Zappa’s idea was that he’d show her the guitar and she’d be so impressed that she’d hire him to provide session rock guitar – just as Michael Jackson did with Eddie Van Halen. That was the plan, at least; the session invite never arrived.

Nonetheless, Zappa came out of it with just about the coolest Superstrat ever. And Madonna is no fool; she thought it was cool too. “That guitar is a great guitar!” says Zappa – who is officially here now having saved the dog.

“I used it on a lot of things. If someone else has fun with it and it becomes an important thing in their life, it’s worth releasing into the wild and it serves a purpose. I want people to have interesting, fun tools and enjoy it.”

There’s also the matter of his one-of-one PRS, inspired by mandolin design and made by Mr Paul Reed Smith just for Zappa. There’s no other electric guitar like it. Zappa does not necessarily want to it go, but something has to give because he wants to tour.

“I’m trying to create an opportunity of goodwill for people to enjoy cool, fun gear,” he says, “but it’ll help me do what I need to do to play music and play the tour.”

Paying for the bus, getting insurance, hiring and rehearsing the band brings us to the second of Zappa’s minor miracles: being able to perform his father’s material.

“The rehearsal schedule is insane,” says Scriven, “because even Zappa had a hard time playing Zappa. This all an investment back into what Dweezil loves to do; the goal of getting on the road, playing in front of fans, outweighs the pain of losing the stuff.”

And so here at last is Dweezil Zappa, dog saved, ready to drop some financial truth bombs, tell us why this is a great opportunity to get some cool gear – including his Fractal with his exact settings on them – and what else is on his mind as he prepares to celebrate two of Frank Zappa’s most-loved albums, Roxy & Elsewhere and Apostrophe (’).

Is it really necessary to do this, Dweezil? Has touring become that expensive?

“When you finish a tour, you usually have some money left over for the startup costs for the next tour. But I had not worked for four years, so there was no money left over. This is not the biggest tour in the world, but it has roughly $200,000 startup costs.

“People think, ‘Oh, you rehearse and then you go out there and you start making money.’ They don’t realize you don’t make money until the tour is almost finished. It’s over $10,000 a day that you’ve got to be dealing with. It’s quite an undertaking; rather than having to do everything out of pocket, I have to raise some money.”

Musically, this is going to be a heavy lift, too.

“I’ve played my dad’s music for many years and there is always challenges and surprises in it. But we have a new band, a couple of new members; we’re going to mix it up just by virtue of having new energy in the group.

“We’re going to be playing some music that we’ve played before, but not the way we’ve played it before – different arrangements – and there are going to be several new things that we’ve never played before at all. That’s the excitement of doing this.

“It’s what my dad did. He would play songs that could be well-known fan-favorites, but he’d never play them like the record. He’d do something new and different so the audience got to hear something very fresh. That was always very exciting for the band, and also for my dad to have new ideas to infuse into what he was doing at the time.”

Frank Zappa’s discography is like a high-wire act for the imagination. How has that influenced your guitar rig for these shows?

“I haven’t actually built the rig yet! But a lot of the stuff we’re playing is based on material that was recorded or performed in the middle ‘70s. Some of it gets into the ‘80s.

“Guitar tone-wise, my dad had very unique sounds, a lot of specialized midrange stuff, and he sometimes blended sounds with acoustic, or clean electric mixed in. I have specialized instruments.

“Sometimes a guitar will have a piezo pickup if I need an acoustic sound blended in. I’ve been using the Fractal Audio Axe-Fx because I can have multiple different kinds of distortion or fuzz mixed with clean, and then add the effects to taste. That’s the best way for me to recreate his guitar sounds.

“One of the things I want to do is expand my own vocabulary for improvisation and soloing. I’m looking into different kinds of effects that I haven’t really used before – looping and other things – so I can create other textures.

“I’m testing out a bunch of stuff from Chase Bliss. They have all kinds of bizarre delays and looping things, and there are a few other specialized things. In certain solos I might go off into a completely different atmosphere than I would have on previous tours. I’m looking to build a new voice within my own playing and have some places to expand on those ideas.

“But generally I do like to recreate many of the guitar sounds very specifically to what is known from the recorded versions that have been released, so it’s an apples-to-apples comparison.

“I also tend to learn a lot of phrases from my dad’s guitar solos and use them as guideposts. I might start with the way he opened the solo then fill in the blanks until the next road sign, something that is a known phrase.”

Chase Bliss is one of those brands your dad might have loved. We live in a golden age as far as these devices go.

“For sure – there’s lots of cool textures and things that can be done with all kinds of different pedals, and my dad was at the forefront of layered guitar sound.

“He really liked having sounds where you could have one thing happening on the left, and one thing happening on the right, and you could have a clean guitar in the middle that’s just blended in, a DI.

“You could have a fuzz tone on the left, and a slightly distorted tone on the right, and the envelope of the sound would change. You might have a real strong transient on one side, with less gain, but the one that has more gain will swell up so you have this moving sound. He liked to do that kind of stuff.

“I can do that much easier with the Fractal than I could with a bunch of different amps. I’ve had a rig before where it was multiple amps and lots of effects – but because of all of the different connections and cables, it was very complicated.

“The rig would often not work; you’d travel from one place to another, cables would come loose, and you’d spend an hour trying to find out why you couldn’t get a signal. I was just like, ‘I can’t deal with that!’

“So we tried to compartmentalize and have a lot of the stuff being done inside patches in the Fractal. That makes it more repeatable and easier. But I still do use plenty of pedals with the Fractal – multiple fuzz pedals and overdrives, with different delays and things like that.”

You’re selling some Fractal gear. Are your settings still programmed on there?

“Yup! The ones that are for sale do have my presets in them. One of the Fractals, the smaller one, I used that for several European tours and it has a complete setlist of songs.”

Thomas says you’re not that sentimental – but maybe a few of these were hard to let go. You’re selling the Hot Rats replica Les Paul that Gibson’s Jim DeCola made for you. Was that painful?

“That one is a great instrument. I’m more of the mindset that I could pick up any guitar and have that guitar suddenly speak to me. I play that guitar plenty, but I’m not drawn to it to pick it up everyday, so if it could become a tool that other people could enjoy and get some creative use out of – and it helps me get the tour going.”

Do you still have the Ripley guitar?

“The Ripley is the very unique one that Edward Van Halen used to refer to as ‘the Super Pluto Guitar.’ There were three that were made and they all had these extra electronics, and a two-rack-space brain that went with it, and a 12-pin connector between the head and the guitar.

“I had one, Ry Cooder had one, Edward Van Halen had one. They were so specialized that if one of them broke, you had to call one of the three of us to borrow one.

“Ry Cooder had been using the brain that went with my guitar for maybe 12 or 13 years – I finally got it back a year or two. He had it because his stopped working, and Steve Ripley passed away; so nobody knows how to work on these things.”

Incredible. Insane guitar. A very Zappa guitar.

“They do cool stuff! Part of what’s interesting about it is that you can take each individual string and  pan it, so in stereo you could have them pinging left and right.

“I’m doing a lot of stuff in my studio which is multichannel – Dolby Atmos and other immersive formats – so I can take that guitar, play something, and have it pan all the way around my head. That’s a really interesting thing to use it for.

“I’m looking into building a specialized guitar rig that will specifically be for immersive sound. I want to be able to write and perform and create while hearing stuff moving around, and then control it with my feet, having a delay swell or something.

“Besides the tour, that’s another thing that I’m going to be working on, and I.m specifically working with Chase Bliss on certain things that will be for that immersive guitar rig.”

You mentioned Atmos. A while back on The Vinyl Guide Podcast, Janie Hendrix said you were working on Jimi Hendrix Atmos mixes for them. What can you tell us about that?

“Yeah, I did work on the Electric Ladyland record. They were looking to do Atmos; they were looking for studios, and my studio had recently been complete. I’d done the Hendrix tour a few times, so I invited them over to check out stuff.

“But it wasn’t just me working on it – they had Eddie Kramer, who always does things whenever they update something from the Hendrix catalog. He’s the guy who’s twisting the knobs.

“Eddie was in a studio on the East Coast, outside of Toronto, and then we were working in L.A. from my studio. We had to be able to link up between the two studios, send audio in real time so he could hear stuff, and then tell us, ‘Oh, no no. Change it to this.’”

It must have felt like Close Encounters… communicating with sound across this higher plane.

“Me and Chandler Harrod – who works with Eddie as second engineer – we were here in my studio and we were doing all the knob-twisting, and Eddie was saying, ‘No, twist it this way.’

“He was in a room with a similar speaker setup to what I had, and we were able to make it all work. But there are very few studios that could actually manage the technological issue and make that happen.

“I did do a couple of things for them that solved a few problems, because many of the recordings are from a much older period, when you didn’t have multitrack. You’d have to record onto a single track.

“You might have drums, bass and guitars on one track – but then you don’t have access to those individually to pan them. There’s technology now where you can actually separate audio from a stereo or mono track, so I did a lot of that kind of stuff. That gave more flexibility for the mix in Atmos.”

Hendrix in Atmos is a totally different ballgame.

“That is a format he’d have loved. He knew what Atmos could do but he was trying to do it in stereo. The main thing about immersive mixing is it’s best heard in a room on speakers. Most people aren’t going to hear it that way, in a very finely tuned room.

“But the next highly advantageous step is that cars are coming out with Atmos systems. A bunch of cars already have it. Otherwise, most people are going to hear it on headphones, which is not really the same.”

You do a lot of mixing jobs on classic albums. What have you learned about guitar tone from that?

“I recently remixed the Machine Head record by Deep Purple, and I did it in stereo and Atmos, so that was another really cool, fun project. When you get the source material, the individual tracks, and you just wanna hear the guitar, it’s really cool.

“You start to learn what things really work or cut through, what parts of the sound may not be necessary, what you could cut out from the frequency range. That helps me figure out how to create sounds that will work within a recording, and won’t have to be tweaked majorly later on.

“It’s all informing everything I do. The fact that I have this studio and I’ve been doing mixing and doing these projects for the last four years, instead of touring, has really changed my perspective on how I might play and how I might use equipment.”

Guitar players often think linearly about tone, stacking drives and so on. But, like your dad’s work, all this layering becomes three-dimensional – something you can move through.

“It becomes more interesting when you have variations in the sound. A lot of people consider making stereo where it’s the same sound on either side, but slightly delayed, or with a different EQ.

“That’s an okay stereo sound – it’s not as interesting as if you have these layered things that swirl and move. When you get into the Atmos world, you have a lot more ways you can make that stuff come alive.

“You have more speakers, above you and behind you and around you, and so you can change what kind of ambience you want to control. You can have things move in the space to work with what’s emotionally happening in the music.”

Given you’re such a student of Eddie Van Halen’s tone, what advice would you give Joe Satriani for his tour with Sammy Hagar?

“I don’t think he’s concerned about trying to recreate the sound, or even playing note for note. He’s said as much. He’s got his own sound when he plays, and I think he is going to be comfortable continuing with that.

“It’ll be the same range; the songs will feel good – but he’s definitely a different player; a very different technique. So I don’t think he’s going to try anything to be like, ‘I’ve got to match this!’ He’s just going to be himself.”

• Check out Zappa’s auction at AnalogR and his 2024 tour dates.