INTERVIEW: Fear Factory’s Dino Cazares
Fear Factory guitarist Dino Cazares is a pioneer of modern metal guitar technique. His ultra-tight picking, monstrously heavy tone and pioneering use of Ibanez seven and eight string guitars helped to solidify the combination of mechanical precision and brutal riffing that spurred an industrial metal revolution and eventually fed into the development of the djent sound. And Dino’s riffage is in fine form on the band’s new album, The Industrialist [Riot]. The collection is perhaps the most pure representation of the Fear Factory philosophy yet, with Dino handling guitar, bass, and drum programming, and vocalist Burton C. Bell dishing up the kind of anthemic melodies and brutal textures that made albums such as Demanufacture and Obsolete such classics.
“We’ve been getting that a lot,” Cazares says of the Demanufacture/Obsolete comparison. “I think part of that is just because it’s me and Burt! I think it’s the purest you’re going to get of Fear Factory.” The Industrialist marks a departure for Fear Factory in its use of programmed drums in place of a live player such as Raymond Herrera or Gene Hoglan. But the move is not entirely out of character for the band. “When me and Burton started the band in 1990 we were using a drum machine to record our demos” Cazares explains. “Over the years we’ve never been a band that has shied away from technology. We’ve never been a band who hid what we did in the studio. Over the years we’ve used drum machines on certain songs and certain albums, and even though we’ve had live drummers we have edited the drums to be like a machine, and we’ve changed the sounds to machine sounds. So either way it would not have made a difference if we used live drums or not. It would have been the same outcome. Some people are kind of shocked by it, like they didn’t realise that’s part of our schtick. That’s who we are. It’s what we do! Again, even if we had a live drummer it would come out to be the same outcome. And one of the benefits of using a drum program on your Mac laptop is it’s much more cost-effective. And with the way the music industry is going these days, it’s getting really hard to make a solid income because record companies are going down, and the amount of money you would spend in an actual recording studio to record the album, nowadays it’s still pretty expensive. So using a drum program is definitely a much more cost-effective way than hiring somebody to do it.” But Dino remains coy on the exact drum program used on the album. “Oh, I don’t want to promote any kind of drum program that doesn’t give it to us free,” he laughs.
Dino talks new Fear Factory
I just interviewed Fear Factory guitarist Dino Cazares about the band’s kickass new album The Industrialist. The full interview will be on I Heart Guitar when the album is released, but here’s a snippet we’re using on the Seymour Duncan blog. Enjoy!
INTERVIEW: Fear Factory’s Dino Cazares
When Dino Cazares left Fear Factory in 2002, the band carried on without him. It was a messy split and it seemed nobody could ever imagine him returning to the fold. Even less likely was the prospect of Fear Factory carrying on with an entirely new rhythm section, especially given the respect given Raymond Herrera in metal drumming circles. Yet in the spirit of the band’s whole cyber-techno-deconstructionalist ethos, in 2009 Fear Factory tore itself down and built itself back up. This year’s Mechanize is a brutal return to form that sees Dino and vocalist Burton C Bell join forces with Strapping Young Lad rhythm section Gene Hoglan and Byron Stroud. Fear Factory are returning to Australia this month to perform some shows with Metallica, so I started my chat with Dino by asking about Fear Factory’s association with metals’ most high-profile ambassadors.
Have you played with Metallica before?
Yeah, we did about ten shows with them in Europe, and that was earlier this year. They turned out to be really, really cool guys, very down to earth, and they really know how to treat their support bands, y’know? They treated us really well and it’s an honour they asked us to come back.
Did you get a chance to sit down and talk rhythm guitar with James or anything like that?
Yeah! Definitely! I actually let James jam on one of my guitars. He was interested because I have seven and eight string guitars. He was like, ‘Wow, look at this guitar!’ and he started playing it. He would come into our dressing room pretty much every day and shoot the shit. We went out partying with Lars one night, and Robert Trujillio. They took us out to dinner and stuff like that. Really nice guys. You wouldn’t expected them to treat bands like that, but they treat them really well.”
You guys were just out here earlier this year. You seem to be pretty regular visitors, you should rent a shack or something.
Hey, yeah mean, trust me, I wouldn’t mind! But yeah, we’ve definitely been there quite a lot over our career. Australia was one of the first countries that really embraced Fear Factory back in the Demanufacture days, back in early 95, 96, when we did our first Big Day Out. It’s been really successful over there. We love Australia, we love going there – it’s like our second home.
And the reception to Mechanize has been huge.
It’s been very positive. Everywhere we’ve been, all around the world. It feels great. Y’know, I was a little nervous at first because I was first coming back into the band, I wasn’t sure how it was gonna be received, you know what I mean? The typical stuff when you put a record out, you’re a little bit nervous about it, but I was a little bit more nervous because it’s my first time back in so many years. But it’s been great. The response has been really, really good. We’re all stoked.
When you came back to the band, I guess everyone wondered if you would all get along, but I saw you guys all hanging out at the Baked Potato in LA earlier this year when Mike Keneally played a gig with Brendon Small and Gene Hoglan, and I thought ‘Fear Factory are hanging out together for fun – everything’s gonna be alright!’
Yeah! You were there? Yeah, we all hang out, we all go to gigs and support each other. That was a cool little gig that Gene did. Gene’s one of those kinds of drummers that can adapt, and if you remember that was, what, 70s music?
Yeah, it was half a Stevie Wonder album, some Jeff Beck songs, Steely Dan…
Yeah, yeah! That was one of the cool, exciting parts about me coming back to Fear Factory, was actually getting to jam with Gene. The guy is such a very talented musician. A lot of people are like, ‘Oh, he’s a big fat guy,’ but dude, that guy can play! Doesn’t matter how big you are, man, the guy has the heart, the soul and the knowledge! He can play everything. When he came into Fear Factory he was like, ‘What do you want me to play? I can do it all.’ We felt limitless.
I remember when I first heard that you guys were playing together, and it wasn’t announced that you’d be called Fear Factory yet.
Yeah, at that time we were still in a lawsuit and when we played the Big Day Out this year, we could use the name Fear Factory but if we used the name Fear Factory we’d have to give the other Fear Factory some money. So we didn’t use the name at that time. We were called Fear Campaign on that tour. But everybody knew it was Fear Factory!
Let’s switch to guitar talk: what was it like to switch to Ibanez eight strings?
It was very natural. I remember when they first made it: it was 2005 and they made the first prototype. They actually called me and a few other musicians to come down and try it. When I went there and picked it up and started jamming on it, they were like, ‘Wow, you’re the first guy who actually knew what to do with it.’ Well yeah, I’ve been playing seven strings for so long that switching to eight was exciting and fun, and it came natural to me.
Do you have many of them? What are they like?
I have four eight strings. I have two that are the RGA8 – one of them I’ll be bringing with me – and I have two of them that are the regular RG.
How do you tune them?
They’re tuned standard F#, so the first six strings are standard tuning, then the next lower string is B, still standard, and the F# is the low one. I’m one of the lucky guys that gets his guitars custom made, so I get the necks a little thinner. We’re talking millimetres, but millimetres make a big difference. So I can make it a little thinner, I can make it neck-thru. A lot of people don’t have neck-thrus. I can experiment with different types of woods, lighter woods, heavier woods, maple, basswood, bubinga, rosewood, ebony, things like that. And every piece of wood, you’re going to get something different about it. I believe I’ve found what I like, but I love my eight strings. I do have quite a lot of seven strings.
I remember seeing you guys in 99, you had the Ibanez UV777BK Universe with an EMG humbucker in the bridge position.
Yeah, what was that, the Obsolete tour?
Yeah.
Back then when you saw us, they got stolen. All my Universes got stolen. All of them. I didn’t have one left.
Have you ever got anything back?
Nothing. When I first was out of Fear Factory I was a little upset – okay, I was a lot upset – and I got rid of some of my guitars. I made a mistake I sold some of my LA Custom Shop guitars. And there have been a couple of them that you see that collectors keep buying and selling. I was recently in Poland and there was a collector out there who had a couple of my guitars and I tried to get a hold of him to sell them back to me because it’s a bit of sentimental value, but the guy never responded to me. They’re really nice necks. I have double truss rods because when you’re touring, every country’s different and the necks have a tendency to move a little bit. You have to constantly keep adjusting the necks, especially when you go from extreme cold to extreme hot, so I have double truss rods to keep them solid.
How did you initially get into metal? For me it was around 91, I was 13, Megadeth had just released Rust In Peace, Metallica put out the Black Album…
For me it was before that, back in the late 70s, I would say. I was definitely very much influenced by what my older brothers and sisters listened to. Everybody liked something different. I came from a big family, but one of my sisters was more into rock, borderline metal stuff. I first heard AC/DC when I was nine, and I saw them on TV and I was like, ‘Wow, I wanna be like that guy,’ and I was Angus Young. ‘I wanna be that dude,’ y’know what I mean? That first got me into it, then I heard Black Sabbath, and then Judas Priest, and then all of a sudden, in the 80s all the newer-school metal bands came out like the Metallicas and the Slayers and stuff like that, and it just got heavier.
One of the cool things about metal is going back and finding the bands that influenced your favourite bands.
I’m influenced by all of it. I’m influenced by the music, not just the player but the whole sound. I don’t look at what I do just as the guitar, I look at it as the whole. When I’m playing guitar I’m thinking of the drums as well. I’m thinking of a cool melody line that’s going to go along with it. I’m thinking of a cool keyboard sound or some sort of sample, y’know what I mean? I think of it like that. I might start with a guitar but it doesn’t finish with a guitar.
That’s something Fear Factory captures so well – the band’s sound is much more than just the guitar sound.
Well we definitely wear our influences on our sleeves. For Fear Factory, a lot of the stuff that influenced us was the early speed and death metal, grindcore, mixed in with the industrial, stuff like Killing Joke, Godflesh, stuff like that. But me and Burt were also fans of other music that was really big, the alternative stuff, so that’s where a lot of the melodic vocals come from. We decided to put the melodic vocals into our heavy music and we were able to create our own style that other artists could be influenced by, positively.
LINK: Fear Factory
INTERVIEW: City of Fire’s Byron Stroud
Byron Stroud is a legend in the metal bass world. He was the man responsible for holding down the thunderous low end of Strapping Young Lad, as well as SYL offshoot Zimmer’s Hole. When Dino Cazares left Fear Factory and Christian Olde Wolbers switched over to guitar, Byron stepped into the bass slot. Then Christian and drummer Raymond Herrera were out of Fear Factory, Dino was back in, and SYL drummer Gene Hoglan joined, reuniting one of the most iconic rhythm sections in metal. You still keeping up? Well now Byron and Fear Factory singer Burton C Bell have another band on the side, called City of Fire. CoF is more melodic and traditional than FF and far less extreme than SYL, but that’s not to say they aren’t heavy. Their self-titled debut mixes metal and melody to great effect and allows Bryon to explore darker, moodier metal textures than he can in his other jobs.
When one hears of a band fronted by the singer from another popular band, the first thought is ‘I guess that’s something the singer put together.’ Not so with City of Fire – it all started with legendary underground thrash band Caustic Thought. “That was a band I started right out of high school with Ian White and Bob Wagner,” Byron says. “That was a band that Devin Townsend and Jed Simon both played in before we did Strapping Young Lad. I’ve always stayed in touch with the guys and we’d do the odd reunion show here and there. The last one we did a couple of years ago went really well, so we got together and started writing songs and we really liked the direction it was going. We brought in another player, Terry Murray, and once we did some demoing I thought Burton would be into it. Burton and I have a similar taste in music, and when I sent him the demos he freaked out. The only vision we really had was that we didn’t want any song to sound like any other song on the record. We’re happy with the way it turned out.”
The arrangements in City of Fire leave a lot more sonic space for Stroud to move around in. “It definitely gives me an opportunity to try different styles of bass. I do more fingerstyle playing. I started out as a finger player, and it was only when I joined bands like Strapping where I started playing with a pick to keep up with everybody. And when you’re playing finger style it’s one less thing you have to worry about: trying to find a pick!”
I suggest that I can hear a few psychedelic influences creeping into some of the riffs and melodies of City of Fire. “We hear that too in the songs, but it was just natural for us. And the songs we’ve written since we recorded the record are more of the same. We’ve definitely tapped into something we’re really into and feel we can pull off and make sound killer. That’s the great thing about Terry Murray – he’s a producer in Vancouver as well and he reminds me of a lot of things that Devin Townsend does. He has a similar production style that Devin has, so he’s really good at the layering and getting great performances out of people.”
Byron’s bass arsenal includes Fender and ESP instruments. “I have a couple of custom Fenders that I got made a few years ago when I joined Fear Factory. I’ve always been with ESP, then when I joined Fear Factory I started using Christian’s basses and I just loved them. They were a more rounded bass, whereas the ESPs were more cutting. I’m back with ESP now, so I use both. I have some ESP 6-strings and 5-strings, and I still have my trusty Fenders. For amps I was with Ashdown for a while but now I’m back to Ampeg again. I’ll use two separate tones: I’ll have one amp that’s strictly a sub tone – no mids or highs – and I’ll have another amp which is an extreme distortion tone. I can switch that from a distortion to a clean sound but I always keep the sub. But for City of Fire I just went with a basic old 1968 Ampeg SVT through an old 8X10 cabinet, cranked it up and got the classic tone.”
City of Fire’s self-titled debut album is out now in Australia through Stomp, and will be released in the US on Candlelight Records on August 24.
LINKS: City of Fire, City of Fire on Myspace
NEWS: New metal supergroup: Dino, Burton, Hoglan and Stroud?
Wow, I just had to check my watch to make sure it wasn’t still April 1. Just saw this on Blabbermouth:
A brand new project has been formed featuring original FEAR FACTORY members Dino Cazares (guitar) and Burton C. Bell (vocals). The band, which is rumored to also include bassist Byron Stroud (who played on the last two FEAR FACTORY albums in addition to touring and recording with STRAPPING YOUNG LAD and ZIMMERS HOLE) and legendary drummer Gene Hoglan (DETHKLOK, STRAPPING YOUNG LAD, DARK ANGEL, DEATH, TESTAMENT), will play a number of shows this summer as well as record a studio album.
WILTOTWTWT: Fear Factory, Robert Plant & Alison Krauss
So I just realised that if you turn ‘What I Listened To On The Train To Work Today’ into an acronym, it looks like an onomatopoeic interpretation of the sound a finch makes.
Okay, this morning seems to have been one of polar opposites for me. I started my walk to the train station cranking Fear Factory’s ‘Obsolete’ album. When this one came out, I got to interview Raymond from the band (for Curio, the student magazine for the University of Canberra – I was the News & Reviews editor). Allow me to slip into self-indulgent journo mode for a second…
When Fear Factory toured Australia to promote this album in 1999, I was lucky enough to get a backstage pass and a photo pass to shoot the first 3 songs. The band opened with ‘Shock,’ the first track off ‘Obsolete.’ After getting a bunch of shots of the band (including Dino with an Ibanez UV777BK Universe 7-string with a single EMG active humbucker), I turned around to get some pictures of the mad wall of mosh happening behind me. Suddenly I felt ‘a presence’ and I realised singer Burton C Bell was right behind me, getting the crowd to go extra psycho for my photos. So I turn around and we sing the chorus to ‘Shock’ together into his mic. Awesome. Awesome.
Anyway, ‘Obsolete’ is my favourite Fear Factory album. The production is sharp, hi-fi and aggressive, with monstrously tight grooves and direct songwriting. Dino’s guitar tone is clear even when he plays complex chords on tracks like ‘Descent,’ and Burton strikes the perfect balance between his screamy voice and his singing voice. Fear Factory made other great albums before and after ‘Obsolete,’ but this is the one for me.
Anyway, after getting to the train station and stopping at the kiosk for a coffee this morning, I switched over to Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’s ‘Raising Sand,’ which won every single one of the Grammys yesterday, with the exception of the Best Rock Instrumental award which went to Zappa Plays Zappa.
This is a cool, low-key album which reminds me in parts of Page and Plant’s 1998 ‘Walking Into Clarksdale’ album (not only because both albums include the song ‘Please Read The Letter). There’s lots of cool tremolo-drenched guitar playing by T Bone Burnett, and the whole atmosphere is very laid back and real. I would consider this one a bathtub album, or maybe a quiet Sunday afternoon album, sprawled out on the sofa with a sunbeam slowly crossing your bare feet as you read Oliver Sacks’ ’Musicophilia’
By the way, anyone else notice that T Bone Burnett looks a lot like John Hodgeman (Daily Show correspondent and the PC in those “I’m PC” “And I’m a Mac” commercials)?
Hi! I'm Peter Hodgson. I write for Gibson.com, Australian Guitar, Australian Musician, Mixdown Magazine (including my instructional column, 'Unleash Your Inner Rock God,' which has been running since 2007), Blunt, Beat (including their weekly hard rock/metal column Crunch) and The Brag. And I'm Assistant Social Coordinator with Seymour Duncan.
I've been playing guitar since I was 8 years old, and I've been writing for magazines since I was 18. I've also worked as a guitar teacher (up to 50 students a week), a setup tech, a newspaper editor, and I've also dabbled in radio a little bit. I live in Melbourne, Australia, and my hobbies include drinking way too much coffee, and eating way too much Mexican food.
You can check out my guitar playing at Bandcamp or on YouTube, and feel free to email me at iheartguitarblog@gmail.com