Polyphia’s Tim Henson talks writing riffs without effects: “If I can make it sound good with nothing, then it’ll probably sound cool with everything”
Polyphia’s frontman-of-sorts Tim Henson has said he prefers to write riffs without any effects to start with.
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Instead, the guitarist says that his focus is usually on getting a clean tone and reckons that if he can make it sound good on its own, effects will only elevate the sound.
In an interview with Thomann alongside fellow Polyphia guitarist Scott LePage, Henson is asked about his preferences regarding pick-ups and effects, to which he says: “I like to distribute back to the nothingness because if I can make it sound good with nothing, then it’ll probably sound cool with everything. What I like to do is, like I said, make it sound good with just even a dry tone, just the dry signal. And then, you know, the beauty of plugins.” [transcribed by UltimateGuitar]
Henson then goes on to speak of his love for artifacts and the potential of his Neural DSP archetype: “Shout out to Neural DSP archetype Tim Henson. If you don’t have it, pick it up. You know, you can just cycle through the presets of the thing and hear it like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know it would sound like that with this much gain’. You know, it’s got these cool artifacts when you pitch it in this way.”
He continues: “And so, I’ve definitely learned to love artifacts from anything that makes the guitar sound fucked up. I’m super about it, and especially to blend between it sounding fucked up and going back to it being its nothingness. It kind of gives it a cool morphing of the audio.”
Meanwhile, LePage says he favours bridge pickups due to their harmonics potential. “I like the bridge pickup stuff, anything that is kind of gives me that harmonics, if I could just scrape it like that [scrapes guitar], you can get that sound out of it,” he explains. “I love that. Some reason, I can just relax. I can kind of just be a little more expressive that way, if I can get the harmonics in there, and then you hear notes that you might not think would make sense.”
“Then sometimes you can kind of…I forgot what song I did this with, but there was one song that I think we ended up putting on one of the albums that I remember I hit like a harmonic somewhere that was weird.”
He adds: “I remember thinking to myself, ‘that’s kind of cool. I should put that on a synth somewhere and bring out those notes more’. And it totally just shifted. It gave me a new perspective of hearing the song.”
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